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[tree_and_leaf]

• 21:48 Sigh. It's amazing how much harder work kids are when they've been cooped up in school all day with wet break.... #
• 22:53 Bugger. Lewis wrote "Perelandra" in 1943. No jokes about the relative merits of Police Boxes and coffins as space ships, then. #
• 23:07 @ParrotKnight I suspect not, but I'm not sure how you'd find that out.
  I could set the fic in the war, but that would add complications. #
• 01:08 Seems to be quite a lot of Karl Barth in Williams' devotional. Which is good, as he's good, but it's funny to see him surrounded by mystics #
• 10:29 Clear, bright blue sky, against which the pale stone of the colleges and churches seems to sing out. Autumn loves this city. #
• 10:31 Also, it is Trafalgar Day. Gentlemen, the Queen. And, indeed, a willing foe and searoom! #
• 11:47 Goodness - the boys in blue have managed to recover a friend of mine's stolen laptop. Am impressed! #
• 11:56 Today's prize for Batshit-Insanity goes to the C.14th text reading Alexander the great typologically as prefiguring Christ. #

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Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Karl Barth: even weirder in that CS Lewis loved Williams but hated Karl Barth!

[tree_and_leaf]

Do you recall why Lewis hated Barth? I can't remember reading anything on the subject. The only bit of (vaguely) Inklings-related Barth trivia I can recall is that he was a fan of Peter Wimsey...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

He hated what he regarded as excessive rigorism. In a letter to his brother dated 18 February 1940, he described his disgusted encounter with Barthism in Oxford, describing it as part of "the horrible ferocity and grimness of modern thought.. Barth... seems the right opposite number to Karl Marx. 'Under judgment' is their great expression. They all talk like Covenanters or Old Testament prophets..." (And we are reminded that Lewis was emphatically not in love with the Puritan heritage of his Ulster forebears; an allusion to Covenanters is not meant as a compliment.) "They don't think human reason or conscience of any value at all. They maintain, as steadily as Calvin, that there's no reason why God's dealings should appear just (let alone merciful) to us; and they maintain the doctrine that all our righteousness is filthy rags with a sincerity that is like a blow in the face..." Considering that Lewis was writing or at least conceiving The Screwtape Letters as he wrote this, I am very much mistaken if Father Spike is not meant to be a Barthian. And it is most strking that this is heyday of his huge admiration for Charles Williams.

Incidentally, did you know that, apparently, the "filthy rags" of the original Biblical passage are supposed to be specifically filthy with menstrual blood.?

[tree_and_leaf]

Thanks for that.

Fr Spike - I don't know. The name suggests the primary target of the satire is Anglo-Catholicism, which doesn't necessarily suggest Barth. If I remember correctly, Screwtape talks about him being chiefly characterised by rejecting everything that appealed to his parents, so perhaps Barth would fit in there?

I go back and forwards on Barth. Like Lewis, I have an aversion to that aspect of Calvinism (and for similar reasons, though I'm not from Ulster). But I like this, for instance - which Williams quotes:

The Gospel is not one thing in the midst of other things, to be directly apprehended and comprehended. The Gospel is the World of the Primal Origin of all things, the Word which, since it is ever new, must ever be received with renewed fear and trembling. The Gospel is therefore not an event, nor an experience, nor an emotion—however delicate! Rather, it is the clear and objective perception of what eye hath not seen nor ear heard. Moreover, what it demands of men is more than notice, or understanding, or sympathy. It demands participation, comprehension, co-operation; for it is a communication which presumes faith in the living God, and which creates that which it presumes.

Karl Barth: The Epistle to the Romans.

Come to think of it, the word 'co-operation' might suggest why Williams liked it.

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

"Gentlemen, a bloody war or a sickly season!"

[tree_and_leaf]

"Wives and sweethearts!" (May they never meet....)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, my loathing for Nelson knows no bounds. The man should have been hanged in 1799; he represented everything that was worst about the spirit of reaction.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

A joke, or at least witticism, about Trafalgar Day keeps hovering in the back of my mind, but refuses to come to the forefront.

[tree_and_leaf]

Well, that makes you sound like Jack Aubrey, so I suppose that's an appropriate marker of the day in its own way!

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I confess to having given up part-way through the first book ...

[tree_and_leaf]

That happened to my mother - she was baffled by my devotion for years (as it happened, I started part way through!) Then she listened to HMS Surprise on R4, read the book, and has now become a fan. I think it's one of those series where it's a mistake to start with the first installment.