Reading Lewis

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:13:42 -0700

Last spring I committed to always reading something of Lewis. I've kept that, more or less, over the past many months. I've completed Miracles and The Problem of Pain. It has been great. I've posted on some of my gleanings elsewhere on this site.

I've started Surprised by Joy, which is something of a spiritual autobiography for Lewis, and loved this Milton quote at the head of chapter

Happy, but for so happy ill secure

I've not read anything by Milton--a function of an impoverished education, I'm sure, but I'm reminded how much of Lewis's imagination and thoughtful interaction with all things theological spring from his reading deeply in the ancient classics.

For some, this is part of why they reject Lewis. For me, this is what draws me

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Presupposing Lewis

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 21:39:06 -0800

Miracles

C. S. Lewis

I've decided to read as much Lewis this year as I can.

Not only is he a classicist, and therefore both a student, and a teacher, of the classics, but he brings a wide range of creativity and insight to his theological reflections and life-reflections (not necessarily type-cast theological).

Reading this book, or rereading it, I discovered that Lewis is an able expositor of Presuppositional Apologetics. Before the philosophers run me out of Dodge, keep in mind I'm not making a technical, but a helpful or casual observation.

Here's what I mean: Lewis writes about the possibility of miracles and goes about proving them from something of a rationalist, or even evidentialist approach. I mean, Lewis shows you that miracles are reasonable.

Still, his reasonable appeal stems from his belief that true Reason, true Logic, is back of all that we know and see and experience. Given this, you're either going to presuppose This Logic, or some derivative form or version. Now those are my thoughts, not Lewis's.

He writes ably along these lines, however: "By trusting to argument at all you have assumed the point at issue. All arguments about the validity of thought make a tacit, and illegitimate, exception in favor of the bit of thought you're doing at the moment. It has to be left outside the discussion and simply believed in, in the simple, old-fashioned way. Thus the Freudian proves that all thoughts are due to complexes except the thougths which constitute the proof itself. The Marxist proves that all thoughts result from class-conditioning--except the thought that he's thinking when he says this." (CSL, Miracles, 23)

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Reading Lewis

Presupposing Lewis