The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with Nineteenth-Century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men. The time was ripe.

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From the novel That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis

They gave me nothing in the world to love but Psyche and then took her from me. But that was not enough. They then brought me to her at such a place and time that it hung on my word whether she should continue in bliss or be cast out into misery. They would not tell me whether she was the bride of a god, or mad, or a brute’s or villain’s spoil. They would give no clear sign, though I begged for it. I had to guess. And because I guessed wrong they punished me—what’s worse, punished me through her. And even that was not enough; they have now sent out a lying story in which I was given no riddle to guess, but knew and saw that she was the god’s bride, and of my own will destroyed her, and that for jealousy. As if I were another Redival. I say the gods deal very unrightly with us. For they will neither (which would be best of all) go away and leave us to live our own short days to ourselves, nor will they show themselves openly and tell us what they would have us do. For that too would be endurable. But to hint and hover, to draw near us in dreams and oracles, or in a waking vision that vanishes as soon as seen, to be dead silent when we question them and then glide back and whisper (words which we cannot understand) in our ears when we most wish to be free of them, and to show to one what they hide from another; what is all this but cat-and-mouse play, blindman’s bluff, and mere jugglery? Why must holy places be dark places?

I say, therefore, that there is no creature (toad, scorpion, or serpent) so noxious to man as the gods…. Let them answer my charge if they can.

Orual, sounding like Ivan Karamazov (the most sympathetic, utterly righteous, utterly honest and well-motivated atheist in literature), in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces 

My own experience in reading the Gospels was at one stage even more depressing than yours. Everyone told me that there I should find a figure whom I couldn’t help loving. Well, I could! They told me I would find moral perfection — but one sees so very little of Him in ordinary situations that I couldn’t make much of that either. Indeed some of His behavior seemed to me open to criticism, e.g. accepting an invitation to dine with a Pharisee and then loading him with torrents of abuse.

Now the truth is, I think, that the sweetly-attractive-human-Jesus is a product of 19th century scepticism, produced by people who were ceasing to believe in His divinity but wanted to keep as much Christianity as they could. It is not what an unbeliever coming to the records with an open mind will (at first) find there. The first thing you really find is that we are simply not invited, so to speak, to pass any moral judgement on Him, however favourable: it is only too clear that He is going to do whatever judging there is: it is we who are being judged, sometimes tenderly, sometimes with stunning severity, but always de haut en bas [‘from high to low’]. (Have you noticed that you can hardly free your imagination to picture Him as shorter than yourself?) The first real work of the Gospels on a fresh reader is, and ought to be, to raise v. acutely the question, ‘Who — or What — is This?’ For there is a good deal in the character which, unless He really is what He says He is — is not lovable nor even tolerable. If He is, then of course it’s another matter: nor will it then be surprising if much remains puzzling to the end. For if there is anything in Christianity we are now approaching something which will never be fully comprehensible.

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C. S. Lewis, in a letter to his brother Warnie, dated 21 March 1940, in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume II. See my next post to read the beginning of the same letter.

Douthat says the news on the continuation of the Narnia movie franchise is good and, perhaps, not bad.

That Dawn Treader may get better treatment than Prince Caspian is devoutly to be wished. As Douthat writes: “But this [Prince Caspian] achievement comes with a price—namely, the evisceration of Lewis’s major theme. If The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a story about rebirth and renewal—Aslan resurrected, and spring cracking the ice of an enchanted winter—then Prince Caspian is fundamentally a story about re-enchantment, and the glorious return of the supernatural forces that the Telmarines have repressed. Little of this survives in Adamson’s adaptation; it’s been pruned away to make room for battles and arguments and longing glances and one-liners. The book’s climax, in which the trees and rivers come to life and a wild pagan rout overruns the sterile secularism of Telmarine society, is reduced to a brief battlefield intervention that rips off not one but two scenes in Lord of the Rings. Aslan, too, is reduced to a walk-on role, sweeping in once the body count has climbed and the CGI budget been exhausted to roar a halt to the proceedings. He murmurs about faith, in the voice of Liam Neeson, but he feels less a Christ figure than a strikingly flimsy plot device: Leo ex machina.”