Of Stylemongers and Split Infinitives

Just as those preachers who are least fastidious about Greek are often those who are most proficient in Greek (Moises Silva once remarked, "In my own preaching in the past twenty-five years, explicit references to Greek and Hebrew have become less and less frequent."), so those writers least fastidious about certain rules of grammar are often those most knowledgeable of grammar. After all, the man who wrote the following passage could think in Greek by the age of fifteen.

"Having said that the unliterary reader attends to the words too little to make anything like a full use of them, I must notice that there is another sort of reader who attends to them far too much and in the wrong way. I am thinking of what I call Stylemongers. On taking up a book, these people concentrate on what they call its 'style' or its 'English'. They judge this neither by its sound nor by its power to communicate but by its conformity to certain arbitrary rules. Their reading is a perpetual witch hunt for Americanisms, Gallicisms, split infinitives, and sentences that end with a preposition. They do not inquire whether the Americanism or the Gallicism in question increases or impoverishes the expressiveness of our language. It is nothing to them that the best English speakers and writers have been ending sentences with prepositions for over a thousand years. They are full of arbitrary dislikes for particular words. One is 'a word they have always hated'; another 'always makes them think of so-and-so'. This is too common, and that too rare. Such people are of all men least qualified to have an opinion about a style at all; for the only two tests that are really relevant...are the two they never apply. They judge the instrument by anything rather its power to do the thing it was made for; treat language as something that 'is' but does not 'mean'; criticise the lens after looking at it instead of through it."  

-C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism 

Aslan Will Not Always Be Scolding

“I have come," said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him.” And in less time than it takes to breath Jill forgot about the dead king and remembered only how she had made Eustace fall over the cliff, and how she had helped to muff nearly all the signs, and about all the snappings and quarrelings. And she wanted to say, "I'm sorry," but she could not speak. Then the Lion drew them toward him with his eyes, and bent down and touched their pale faces with his tongue, and said:

"Think of that no more. I will not always be scolding..."

C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

"He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger forever."

Psalm 103:9

How to Live in the Age of Nuclear War

With Iran and North Korea making constant noise, Lewis's words here are as timely as ever.

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.” 

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors— anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

--C. S. Lewis, "On Living in an Atomic Age," in Present Concerns 

Cussing, Crassness, and Lack of Love

With all the hubbub in the past decade over the crassness of some popular preachers, C.S. Lewis's counsel can provide a balanced corrective for young Christians.

“Some of the language which chaste women in Shakespeare’s day would have been used in the 19th century only by a woman completely abandoned. When people break the rule of propriety current in their own time and place, if they do so in order to excite lust in themselves or others, then they offending against chastity. But if they break it through ignorance or carelessness they are guilty only of bad manners. When, as often happens, they break it defiantly in order to shock or embarrass others, they are not necessarily being unchaste, but they are being uncharitable: for it is uncharitable to take pleasure in making other people uncomfortable.”

--C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

I would, however, add one qualification to Lewis's statement (a qualification I think he would agree with): it is not always unloving to make people uncomfortable. When people are 'at ease in Zion,' comfortable in their idolatry or their legalism, sometimes the most loving thing we can do is to shock them out of their stupor. But our goal must always be for them to be saved, not for us to look cool. When Isaiah informed the Israelites that their righteous deeds were like a filthy menstrual cloth ("a bloody tampon," as one preacher aptly paraphrased it), I doubt he was trying to contextualize to the younger generation.

The best sermon I have ever heard that deals with this issue is Ryan Fullerton's sermon on Galatians 5:12, a text in which the Apostle Paul wishes aloud that false teachers would emasculate themselves. Fullerton is pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Louisville, KY, and was formerly Chris and Tiffany Davis's pastor. The sermon, titled "Harsh, Sarcastic, and Crass for the Sake of the Gospel," can be heard or downloaded here: http://www.ibclouisville.org/old/sermon/06-27-2009/harsh-sarcastic-and-crass-sake-gospel

Reading Literature to the Glory of God

“This seems to me the most fundamental difference between the Christian and the unbeliever in their approach to literature. But I think there is another. The Christian will take literature a little less serious than the cultured Pagan: he will feel less uneasy with a purely hedonistic standard for at least many kinds of work. The unbeliever is always apt to make a kind of religion of his aesthetic experiences; he feels especially irresponsible, perhaps, but he braces his strength to receive responsibilities of another kind which seem to the Christian quite illusory. He has to be ‘creative’; he has to obey a mystical law called his artistic conscience; and he commonly wishes to maintain his superiority to the great mass of mankind who turn to books for mere recreation. But the Christian knows from the outset that the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production and preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world: and as for superiority, he knows that the vulgar, since they include most the poor, probably include most of his superiors. He has no objection to comedies that merely amuse and tales that merely refresh; for he thinks like Thomas Aquinas…We can play, as we can eat, to the glory of God.”

-C.S. Lewis, “Christianity and Literature” (195-196)

Life is Cheap in Norway: C.S. Lewis on the Sentence of Anders Breivik

John Piper has a helpful article dealing with Norway's sentence of a man who killed 77 people to only 21 years in prison.

http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/life-is-cheap-in-norway-c-s-lewis-on-the-sentence-of-anders-breivik

Men are from Venus, Women are from Mars (At Least When their Husbands are Being Insulted)

So I was reading Joseph Ellis's Founding Brothers, a book about America's founding fathers, and came across a section which reminded me of something C.S. Lewis said about the difference between husbands and wives. The first excerpt is from Founding Brothers, and deals with John and Abigail Adams. The second is from our old buddy Clive. Quite humorous, in my opinion. (By the way, in regard to the title of the post, Mars was the Greek god of war.)

“Although we will never know for sure, there is considerable evidence that Abigail played a decisive role in persuading Adams to support passage of those four pieces of legislation known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These infamous statutes, unquestionably the biggest blunder of his presidency, were designed to deport or disenfranchise foreign-born residents, mostly Frenchmen, who were disposed to support the Republican Party, and to make it a crime to publish ‘any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against eh government of the United States. Adams went to his grave claiming that these laws never enjoyed his support…and that he had signed them grudgingly and reluctantly.

All this was true enough, but sign them he did, despite his own reservations and against the advice of moderate Federalists like John Marshall. (Even Hamilton, who eventually went along, too, was at best lukewarm and fearful of the precedent set by the Sedition Act). Abigail, on the other hand, felt no compunctions…Her love for her husband, and her protective sense of as chief guardian of his presidency, pushed her beyond any doubts…

Ultimately, of course, Adams himself must bear the responsibility for signing into law the blatantly partisan legislation that has subsequently haunted his historic reputation. But if, as he forever insisted, the Alien and Sedition Acts never enjoyed his enthusiastic support, Abigail’s unequivocal endorsement of the legislation almost surely tilted the decision toward the affirmative. To put it somewhat differently, if she had been opposed, it is difficult to imagine Adams taking the action he did. It is the one instance in when the commingling of their convictions and the very intimacy of their partnership led him astray.”

Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers

“The relations of the family to the outer world—what might be called its foreign policy—must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. Naturally, and in a sense, rightly, their claims override, for her, all other claims. She is the special trustee of their interests. The function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers is not given its head. He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of his wife.  If anyone doubts this, let me ask a simple question. If your dog has bitten the child next door, or if your child has hurt the dog next door, which would you sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress? Or, if you are a married woman, let me ask you this question. Much as you admire your husband, would you not say that his chief failing is his tendency not to stick up for his rights and yours against the neighbours as vigorously as you would like? A bit of an Appeaser?”

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Joseph Ellis

C.S. Lewis

Who Can Forgive Sins But God Alone?

“We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toes and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin.

-C.S. Lewis 

Something that C.S. Lewis and Charles Darwin Agreed On

This excerpt is an excerpt within an excerpt. The author is James Sire, and he quotes both Charles Darwin and C.S. Lewis.

For naturalism nothing exists outside the system itself. There is no God...there is only the cosmos, and humans are the only conscious beings. But they are latecomers.They 'arose,' but how far? Can they trust their mind, their reason?

Charles Darwin himself once said, 'The horrid doubt always rises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?' In other words, if my brain is no more than that of a superior monkey, I cannot even be sure that my own theory of my own origin is to be trusted. 

Here is a curious case: If Darwin's naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility, let alone proving it. Confidence in logic is ruled out. Darwin's own theory of origins must therefore be accepted by an act of faith. One must hold that a brain, a device that came to be through natural selection and chance-sponsored mutations, can actually know a proposition or a set of propositions to be true.

C.S. Lewis puts the case this way:

'If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us--like the color of our hair. If Naturalism is true, we have no reason to trust our convictions that Nature is uniform.'"

--James Sire, The Universe Next Door

C.S. Lewis

James Sire

Charles Darwin

 

 

 

Beneath the Surface of "Ordinary" Homes

"You have no idea how many instances of domestic nastiness come before me in my mail: how deceptive the smooth surface of life is! The only 'ordinary' homes seem to be the ones we don't know much about, just as the only blue mountains are those 10 miles away."

-C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady 

Mission to Read All of C.S. Lewis

If it appears that this blog is turning into a C.S. Lewis fest, here's why.

Having already read a good number of Lewis's books, and having noticed that he can make almost any subject interesting, the thought occurred to me: "What if I were to set a goal of reading all of C.S. Lewis's published writings?" After all, I've often thought of choosing some author and reading his or her entire corpus. Several reasons suggested Lewis as a good candidate for this goal:

(1) I already have a fairly good start on him (it's not as though I'd be starting from scratch).
(2) He's extremely readable (it's not as though I'd be reading John Owen for 40 years).
(3) His entire corpus is manageable (it's not as though he wrote 50 massive volumes like Spurgeon or Luther or Augustine).
(4) He would provide variety: his work is a unique mixture of theology (admittedly not always the best), fiction (almost always the best), and literary criticism.
(5) Since I can read Narnia and the Space Trilogy out loud to my kids, I'll be able to kill two birds with one stone with several of the volumes. :-)

So there it is. Sounds like a good idea. I'm young yet. I think I'll do it.

I've got a list of his published works, and the toughest part will be the three big volumes of personal letters, although I could argue that those shouldn't count since they weren't written for publication anyway.

I close with an excerpt from the man himself.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But the on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development: When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-C.S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children" 

C.S. Lewis: Children Are Never Deceived by Fairy-Tales

"Those who wish to be deceived always demand in what they read at least a superficial or apparent realism of content...[Without] at least some degree of realism in content...no deception will occur at all. No one can deceive you unless he makes you believe he is telling the truth. The unblushingly romantic has far less power to deceive than the apparently realistic. Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature that never deceives at all. Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines. None of is deceived by The Odyssey, the Kalevala, Beowulf, or Malory. The real danger lurks in sober-faced novels where all appears to be very probable but all is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious 'comment on life.'" 

--C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961 A.D.)

Narnia: National Security, Small Government, with a Little Environmental Regulation

"These two Kings and two Queens governed Narnia well, and long and happy was their reign. At first much of their time was spent seeking out the remnants of the White Witch's army and destroying them, and indeed for a long time there would be news of evil things lurking in the wilder parts of the forest--a haunting here and a killing there, a glimpse of a werewolf one month and a rumor of a hag the next. But in the end all that foul brood was stamped out. And they made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being unnecessarily cut down, and liberated young dwarves and young satyrs from being sent to school, and generally stopped busybodies and interferers and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live."

-C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

 

Aslan, Nature, and Uncle Andrew the Atheist

“We must now go back a bit and explain what the whole scene has looked like from Uncle Andrew’s point of view. It had not made at all the same impression on him as on the Cabby and the children. For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing, and on what sort of person you are.

Ever since the animals had first appeared, Uncle Andrew had been shrinking further and further back into the thicket. He watched them very hard of course; but he wasn’t really interested in seeing what they were doing, only in seeing whether they were going to make a rush at him. Like the Witch, he was dreadfully practical. He simply didn’t notice that Aslan was choosing one pair out of every kind of beasts. All he saw, or thought he saw, was a lot of dangerous wild animals walking vaguely about. And he kept on wondering why the other animals didn’t run away from the big Lion.  

When the great moment came and the Beasts spoke, he missed the whole point; for a rather interesting reason. When the Lion had first begun singing, long ago when it was still quite dark, he had realized that the noise was a song. And he had disliked the song very much. It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel. Then, when the sun rose and he saw that it was a lion (“only a lion,” as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make believe that it wasn’t singing and never had been singing—only roaring as any lion in a zoo might in our own world. ‘Of course it can’t really have been singing,’ he thought, ‘I must have imagined it. I've been letting my nerves get out of order. Who ever heard of a lion singing?’ And the longer and more beautiful the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew (1955 A.D.)

 

Worshiping the God of Corn and Oil and Wine

"The thought at the back of all this negative spirituality is really one that is forbidden to Christians. They, of all men, must not conceive spiritual joy and worth as things that need to be rescued or tenderly protected from time and place and matter and the senses. Their God is the God or corn and oil and wine. He is the glad Creator. He has become himself incarnate. The sacraments have been instituted...After that we cannot really be in doubt of his intention. To shrink back from all that can be called Nature into negative spirituality is as if we ran away from horses instead of learning to ride. There is in our present pilgrim condition plenty of room (more room than most of us like) for abstinence and renunciation and mortifying our natural desires. But behind all asceticism the thought should be, 'Who will trust of with the true wealth if we cannot be trusted even with the wealth that perishes?' Who will trust me with a spiritual body if I cannot control even an earthly body? These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies are given to schoolboys. We must learn to manage: not that we may someday be free of horses altogether, but that someday we may rise bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world-shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King's stables. Not that the gallop would be of any value unless it were a gallop with the King; but how else--since he has retained his own charger--should we accompany him?"

-C.S. Lewis, Miracles (1947 A.D.) 

C.S. Lewis- The Lie that Says "I'm as Good as You"

"You are to use the word (democracy) purely as an incantation...It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political idea that all men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word Democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading...of all human feelings. You can get him to practice, not only without shame, but with a positive glow of self approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.

The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I'm as good as you. 

The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the center of his life a good, solid resounding lie. I don't mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist-measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I'm as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain.

The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.

And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food. 'Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I- it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-dah affectation. Here's a fellow who says he doesn't like hot dogs- thinks himself too good for them no doubt...If they were the right sort of chaps they'd be like me. They've no business to be different. It's undemocratic...'

Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labor more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic. I am credibly informed that young humans now somethimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their Being like Folks; that people who really wish to be (and are offered the grace which would enable them to be) honest, chaste, or temperate, refuse it. To accept might make them Different, might offend against the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness impair their integration with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals." 

--C.S. Lewis, "Screwtape Proposes a Toast"

How Did C.S. Lewis View War?

See Andy Naselli's link.

http://andynaselli.com/lewis-war#more-6776

There Are No Ordinary People

From one of the best essays I've ever read.

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare…There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”

--C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”  http://www.verber.com/mark/xian/weight-of-glory.pdf

God is a Hedonist at Heart, Wormwood!

Another great excerpt from C.S. Lewis' classic The Screwtape Letters. Here's my advice: if you don't have this book, borrow it (I will loan it to you). If you can't borrow it, buy it. If you don't have the money, sell your best shirt and buy it. It's that good. Just in case you don't know the plot, I wouldn't want you to misconstrue the following excerpt, so here's the basic idea: Wormwood is a young demon who has been assigned to tempt a certain human being. Screwtape, an older, more experienced demon, is Wormwood's uncle and superior officer. The book consists of letters from Screwtape to Wormwood instructing him in the art of tempting. Full of insights about sin and fallen human nature! In this excerpt, Screwtape is bemoaning God's kind generosity toward the human race.

"He's a hedonist at heart, Wormwood. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a facade. Or only like the foam on the seashore. Out at sea, out in his sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at his right hand are 'pleasures for evermore'...He's vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled his world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without his minding in the least- sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it's of any use to us." 

--C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters.

A Quieter and More Lasting Kind of Interest

“People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on ‘being in love’ forever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change—not realizing that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last. The sort of thrill a boy has at the first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the RAF and is really learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some delightful place dies away when you really go to live there. Does this mean it would be better not to learn to fly and not to live in the beautiful place? By no means. In both cases, if you go through with it, the dying away of their first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest. What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction. The man who has learned to fly and becomes a good pilot will suddenly discover music; the man who has settled down to live in the beauty spot will discover gardening.” 
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity