repoman

<a href="http://members.aol.com/thompsonja/quote1f.htm" target="_blank">http://members.aol.com/thompsonja/quote1f.htm</a>

After reading the quote below (are you guys gonna splice it to hell?) I think that it makes clear that Lewis was just as emotionally suggestable as all of us can be.
My guess is tha Lewis was a big fan of all sorts of myths and that they gave him very strong emotional release an mental stimulation. However, being a classic intellectual he had an internal tension that came from his BS detector that kept christianity from being totally real to him. So Tolkien appealed to Lewis' emotions and desire for creativity and purpose and sidestepped the issue of objectionable chrisian concepts.

Tolkien was basically like a pastor who says "That which was once myth has been made real." This was an incredibly powerful tool on one like Lewis. I want to know if you guys out there think that this would've given Lewis a major temporary mental and emotional boost, due to the collapse/surrender of his cognitive dissonance (CD). With the winds blowing he must've had the feeling of being truly alive and unconflicted.

However, in my opinion there are other ways to rid yourself of CD about religious concepts and contradictions. You can tell yourself none of it is real, or you can become a fundamentalist and ignore the contradictions or finally you can fully accept the contradictions and sell yourself out mentally.


My feeling is that CD is bad for mental health, so you need to *quickly* decide how you will seriously reduce it with respect to religion. Shit or get off the pot! Perhaps others will think my way of looking at belief is selfobsessed, but since I mentally don't believe religion then if I have to winkingly accept religious concepts to blow off emotional steam, no harm no foul. Accept what you need to accept emotionally, so that your rational thinking can improve by freeing yourself from the drag of the cognitive dissonance pingpong game in your head. Christ does this make sense to anyone else? Calling Amos!


Isn't it ironic that one who tried to be so logical and reductive about christianity was lead into it like an initiate to a mystery cult? But, I guess that his personality, rather than method of conversion dictated how he would proselytize.



Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis by George Sayer ---

"But it was difficult for Jack to see the point of becoming a full, communication member of a church. Although he accepted God, the historicity of the Gospels, and probably Jesus as the Son of God, he felt uneasy about other Christian concepts. He had no understanding of the sacramental system and could not see the relevance of concepts similar to those found in pagan mythologies--for instance, the ideas of sacrifice, propitiation, the shedding of blood, communion, and redemption. What changed his thinking more then anything else was conversation he had on September 19, 1931, with J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, his guests at dinner that evening at Magdalen College. After the port had been drunk, they strolled around Addison's Walk and talked about myths. Jack said that he loved reading and thinking about myths, but that he could not regard them as being at all true. Tolkien's view was radically different. He said that myths originate in God, that they preserve something of God's truth, although often in a distorted form. Furthermore, he said that, in presenting a myth, in writing stories full of mythical creatures, one may be doing God's work. As Tolkien talked, a mysterious rush of wind came through the trees that Jack felt to be a message from the deity, although his reason told him not to be carried away. Tolkien went on to explain that the Christian story was a myth invented by a God who was real, a God whose dying could transform those who believed in him. If Jack wanted to find the relevance of His story to his own life, he must plunge in. He must appreciate the myth in the same spirit of imaginative understanding that he would bring to, say, a Wagnerian opera. It was not until three o'clock in the morning that Tolkien went home to his wife. Dyson continued talking with Jack, striding up and down the arcades of New buildings. His main point was that Christianity works for the believer. The believer is put at peace and freed from his sins. He receives help in overcoming his faults and can become a new person."

ManM

You seem to be assuming that every single understanding of Christianity leads to cognitive dissonance.

HelenM

This is an interesting post...

I got the impression from CS Lewis's autobiography that he loved myth going back years before his 'conversion to Christianity' actually took place.

What probably happened that evening was that Tolkein gave CS Lewis permission to attribute what he loved in myth to the God of Christianity.

Maybe it doesn't come across so much if you only read CS's apologetic non-fiction works, but I think if you read all of his stuff and about his life he comes across as very much a romantic as well as an intellectual.

But - of course we want to justify rationally what draws us emotionally, as far as possible .

I mean, who wants to think of themselves as irrational or overwhelmingly-emotionally-driven? I think it's particularly uncool to be that way for a man - no offense, that's just my observation. Maybe I'm wrong...

Anyway CS has been criticized by purist 'fundies' because in his kids series a Tash [evil spirit] worshipper gets to heaven on the basis that his goodness and kindness counted as towards God.

He always said his series was not meant to be a strict allegory of Christianity.

Even so, I think it's very interesting that he has the good person going to heaven anyway despite worshipping the wrong god.

Also he believed purgatory was a possibility, I read somewhere.

So, in certain ways - his views do not appear to have been as clearly defined as many conservative Christians today.

love
Helen

Gurdur

Eh, oddly I think Helen SL's answer is more or less right.

BTW, C.S.Lewis, despite his bad limitations as a philosophical manqué certainly did explicitly try dealing with CD; see his books A Grief Observed and Surprised By Joy.

David Bowden

Lewis' conversion experience fascinates me. As I recall from reading The Letters of C. S. Lewis, he seems by 1931 to have thought that the Christian myth was somehow a 'true myth' - one that actually happened somehow. But he doesn't seem to have been completely convinced intellectually, even a month after the Tolkien/Dyson chat.

Here's the reference, and a short quote:

18 October 1931, letter to Arthur Greeves - "Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth.... [true] in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties.... Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened..." (The italics around "nearly" are from the text, not added by me.)

If Lewis was "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England" in 1929, then he was apparently still pretty reluctant to commit wholeheartedly to it during his walk with Tolkien and Dyson in Sept 1931 and in his Oct 1931 letter to Greeves.

It would seem that Lewis was indeed a man of intense, if closely guarded passions, and quite impressionable, especially in his religious views. (Tolkien makes mention of this in his own Letters.)

But it still mystifies me the way he makes the jump from understanding how Christianity originated the way other myths do, when he was younger, to believing that it was somehow the 'true' myth, when he grew older. In a 1916 letter to Greeves he had stated, "Often, too, great men were regarded as gods after their death - such as Heracles and Odin: thus after the death of a Hebrew philosopher Yeshua (whose name we have corrupted into Jesus) he became regarded as a god, a cult sprang up... one mythology among many, but the one that we happened to have been brought up in..."

It seems to me that at some point Lewis just snapped, maybe discovered that he really wanted whatever it was that his culture's dominant religion promised, and happened to find what seemed to him adequate justification for believing, by interpreting Christianity mythologically. I'd love to know if he had any seriously skeptical colleagues who questioned him on the matter of his conversion, and how he might have explained it to them.

-Wanderer

[ April 02, 2002: Message edited by: wide-eyed wanderer ]</p>

HelenM

Wanderer

If it fascinates you I assume you've read Surprised by Joy.

I always think of C.S. Lewis when I'm on Headington hill - my Dad lives in Headington so when I visit him and go into the city of Oxford that's the way we go . I grew up in the countryside not far from Oxford - not in Headington. Then we would approach Oxford from the side where C.S. Lewis's first Oxford experience was - where the train station is, where he got off and walked the wrong way - out of Oxford instead of into it .

Are you in Illinois too, then? Or 'from' Illinois?

love
Helen

David Bowden

Yes! As you mentioned above, his more romantic/emotional side comes through more clearly in autobiography than in, say, The Abolition of Man. There is a lot that I can relate to in his books, having been a Christian with both theological and (relatively tame) mystical leanings, but I understand religious experiences quite differently now, as an unbeliever. But Lewis' conversion itself still boggles the mind - mine, at least. Though perhaps my de-conversion would boggle his mind, so we're even.

I'm positively envious. When I was in college preparing for the ministry, I plotted with a friend of mine to visit England between semesters, tromp around what's left of Lewis' and Tolkien's Oxford, find some English countryside (and a good pub!) and revel in it awhile, and just absorb some real Anglo culture. That never panned out, but it's still a goal of mine to take a good long vacation there.

Both. I was born in IL, and lived in several states growing up, and returned a few years ago.

Are you a native UKer, then, Helen? If so, what brought you to Illinois? (Please don't say "soybeans"... )

-Wanderer

[ April 02, 2002: Message edited by: wide-eyed wanderer ]</p>

HelenM

David Bowden

...But Lewis' conversion itself still boggles the mind - mine, at least. Though perhaps my de-conversion would boggle his mind, so we're even.
Oh, yeah; this did get off-topic, didn't it?

Lewis' "emotional suggestibility" and Tolkien's appeal to it as a way around Lewis' intellectual reservations? I would basically agree with Repoman on this point, although Lewis obviously didn't neglect to rationalize his change in beliefs, and I doubt that Tolkien consciously plotted to avoid the intellectual reservations - though he was apparently unable to answer them to Lewis' satisfaction.

In a case of special pleading, Tolkien seems to have frankly admitted the mythological nature of the gospel story, but asserted that nevertheless this one myth was true... (ramble, ramble... )

Interestingly, Lewis later says (in Christian Reflections, I think) that the gospels are unlike any other myth he's read. In Surprised by Joy, he says that the gospels 'had not the mythical taste'). This seems different from his 1916 understanding, and different from his understanding right at the time of his conversion event itself, if his letters convey his real sentiments.

So I think that Lewis continued to rationalize his belief over the course of his Christian life, fine-tuning his reasoning but perhaps forgetting what he really was thinking 'in the moment.'

I lack adequate understanding of "Cognitive Dissonance" to diagnose it in Lewis pre-conversion; my dictionary defines it as "psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously." If Lewis qualified, it would seem to me that he resolved any conflicts ultimately by throwing himself wholly into the arms of the god he came to believe in.

Was his conversion genuine? Yes, of course. Was belief justified? Lewis came to think so, but it came gradually; he had to "work out" the intellectual dimension of his faith. I suspect his leap of faith was as legitimate as conversion to Islam or any other mature religion (from the subjective POV of the convert; I don't believe in what Islam or other religions seek or claim to have found). I have only a literary sliver of Lewis, not the whole, living man before me to analyze - so I remain boggled and fascinated by his experience, which contradicts my own.

I did serve in a larger church, as associate pastor. My de-conversion came gradually; about four years ago I had a crisis of faith that resulted in a lot of praying by myself and by/with others, and also prolonged reflection on my whole education, existence and experience. I went back and examined carefully what I'd long taken for granted: Christianity's origins, comparative religion, logic. Incidentally it was my lifelong love of mythology that made it increasingly apparent to me how much mythic material is in the Bible.

I've remarked somewhere that what happened to me was in many ways a reverse-Lewis. But I took to heart Simone Weil's comments: "Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms." While my experience ultimately has been different from Weil's and Lewis', I began with the assumption that all truth was God's truth, that myth could point the way to truth, and that truth was knowable to anyone who made the effort at knowing it.

Around a year ago, though, I got to the point where I knew I had to admit that I really didn't believe Christianity was true, didn't believe in the resurrection as historical fact, etc - and I decided it would be the most honest thing to go on from that point as a self-confessed unbeliever, rather than play mental gymnastics around the creeds. Whether this was what Eckhart meant when he talked about taking leave of God for God's sake, or just the natural course of events - all I know is that the answer to my prayers and my studies and my reflections was: Christianity is not the vessel of truth it is advertised as being.

Lewis' own journey fascinates me because in so many ways we are nearly twin brothers under the skin, and yet we ended up on different sides of the faith issue. (And darnit, this is starting to sound like the autobiographical post I never wrote for the atheist testimony thread... )

The sense of the 'numinous,' the "enormous bliss" that Lewis experienced - I had that as a Christian and I continue to enjoy it and wonder at it, but I do not believe in any personal agency behind it, behind reality, and no Paraclete is necessary to intercede between me and the joy, the rightness of things. (If there is such a thing, then God's apparently reconciled with me despite my views on Christianity!) Really, though, I don't think it's necessary to have a god to explain the deep joys, or to satisfy and absorb the intense feelings that we experience. Some things are just wonderful, natural, and overwhelming.

I don't know if all that makes me the most religious atheist on these boards or the most loopy - guess that's for the reader to decide.

I plotted with a friend of mine to visit England...
LOL - mmm..hmmmm....

I'm glad to hear that there are still places worth visiting outside London; an internet friend of mine lives in Congleton, near Liverpool. Says it's an ugly industrial region. I was getting a bit worried that Tolkien's worst fears had been realized, and that the whole country had been swallowed up by mechanization.

Are you a native UKer, then, Helen?...
Small world: my aunt lived in England for a few years, married an Englishman... but they settled in California. And when I was still in the ministry, I expected to do my own PhD work in England. I think that's 20th grade and beyond, btw...

Still way off-topic, but hopefully the Lewis/Tolkien stuff redeems this post.

-Wanderer

[ edited for clarification. ]

[ April 03, 2002: Message edited by: wide-eyed wanderer ]</p>

HelenM