#the flippancy of the first answer vs. the care and weight of the second

[zishuge]

The Spirealm 致命游戏 (2024) | Eps. 8 + 39

[nimblermortal]

Right, time for a Lewis theology liveblog masterpost

Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more - food, games, work, fun, open air.

The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job; but something has evaded us. - STOP TREATING WOMEN AS THINGS.

This section on Christian charity seems blindingly obvious to me; but then, I remember it being a bit of a marvel once. (The idea is a sort of ‘fake it til you make it’ about liking people; that if you dislike someone, and do them a good turn, you trick yourself into liking them better; and that it’s important to do this for everyone.)

And secondly, we might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbor as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself? Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. - I, for one, consider ‘wanting myself to improve’ to be a fundamental part of loving myself; but there’s also the aspect of loving my teenage self, with all her faults and bigotry and idiocies, with a deep and overweening fondness; and by extrapolation, I must feel the same about myself. But that doesn’t preclude noting my own flaws and trying to make them better; and I think that just so, though this is not the point Lewis is making, you love the people around you while valuing the flaws that make you wince. Or flinch. And there’s an aspect of this that I do not, in fact, want to get into on tumblr; on the preceding page in fact. But nyah-hah, mortals, you don’t know what book I’m reading, much less what page I’m on.

I’m going to have to make a photo post or two, because I don’t want to transcribe all of this.

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(As Screwtape to Wormwood) 

They are animals and whatever their bodies do affects their souls... Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment. - He’s also talking about praying for charity vs manufacturing charitable feelings for themselves, praying for courage vs feeling brave, praying for forgiveness vs trying to feel forgiven; I do not entirely follow here, but I think it may have to do with feeling for oneself vs the ‘on behalf of others’ that started the prayer. Or maybe just saying you have to focus on God for the prayer, which seems silly to me, especially given the entire section toward the beginning on what prayer is.

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. - He goes on, but I don’t care to just now.

Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to this fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble,” and almost immediately pride - pride at his own humility - will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of the attempt - and so on, through as many stages as you please. But don’t try this too long, for fear you awake his sense of humor and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed.

By this virtue, as by all others, our Enemy wants to turn the man’s attention away from himself to Him, and to the man’s neighbors... You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Huility. Let him think of it, not as self-forgetfulness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character... By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools.

Joy... is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.

Fun... promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.

A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help toward a man’s damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke.

[Flippancy] is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it. - At first I was going to say that he’s quite wrong here, and then I thought a second longer and decided against it, and noted that it rather strongly resembles my observation that being critical of something is a very easy way to feel clever and witty and powerful; it’s extremely easy to look cool by degrading something. Oscar Wilde was clever, but largely because he made fun of things. It’s actually something to avoid. Unless discussing Texas or Florida.

Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognizes as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.

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What they are always thinking of is the mark which the action leaves on that tiny central self which no one sees in this life but which each of us will have to endure - or enjoy - forever... Each [in his anger] has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. - This has been scientifically proven, actually; for anger and depression, at least. Each time you succumb, it carves deeper, clearer channels in your brain for those neurons to fire down the next time, and so each successive rage or depressive episode can be longer and worse than the last.

Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. - Ordinarily I would hate this; the assumption that men are bad in particular. It implies we should despise them, in both senses of the word. But when you say Christ does it, it does not mean he thinks less of people, but that he accepts this is a fact, and that every motion you make in the other direction is a delight and a thing to be proud of. Of course, Lewis is going in a different direction - saying you have to continually recognize that people are bad. I assume so that you yourself can find ways to improve; for what’s the point of saying ‘broken’ if the corollary is not ‘how do I fix it?’

We must distinguish between two degrees and kinds of work - the one wholly good and necessary to the animal side of the animal rationale, the other a punitive deterioration of the former due to the Fall.

Laziness means more work in the long run... The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing.

A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden - that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.

Interjection: Lewis does, occasionally, reveal himself as a misogynist and a homophobe, and says things like ‘if a man does not work, he does not eat’, and he will keep saying things about other faiths that are along the lines of ‘Christianity is like mathematics. There is one right answer, but there are some wrong answers that are more right than others.’ He also keeps saying that you have to take all of Christianity, that the weight of two thousand years outweighs any little arguments you can come up with, you can’t pick and choose, etc; and all of these are things that I cannot agree with, but he will keep bringing up that last bit.

Oh, and he says things like For some people, perhaps especially for Englishmen and Russians, what we call ‘the love of nature’ is a permanent and serious sentiment. On the other hand, the rest of that section, describing how one loves nature, is another thing I find blindingly obvious - the need to exist in nature and feel oneself dissolve into the flow of it. Not that he goes that far.

There is indeed a peculiar charm, both in Friendship and in Eros, about those moments when Appreciative love lies, as it were, curled up asleep, and the mere ease and ordinariness of the relationship (free as solitude, yet neither is alone) wraps us round. No need to talk. No need to make love. No needs at all except perhaps to stir the fire.

The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”

It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semiarticulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision - it is then that Friendship if born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.

All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends. In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? - Or at least, “Do you care about the same truth?” The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer. - This strikes me as very Marauders, frankly. And I think it may solve the Problem of Peter Pettigrew.

The Friends will still be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared, and less easily defined; still hunters, but of some immaterial quarry; still collaborating, but in some work the world does not, or not yet, take account of; still traveling companions, but on a different kind of journey. Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead.

We are under no obligation at all to sing our love duets in the throbbing, world-without-end, heartbreaking manner of Tristan and Isolde; let us often sing like Papageno and Papagena instead.

Divine Gift-love in the man enables him to love what is not naturally lovable: lepers, criminals, enemies, morons, the sulky, the superior, and the sneering.

By a high paradox, God enables men to have a Gift-love toward Himself. There is, of course, a sense in which no one can give to God anything which is not already His; and if it is already His, what have you given? ...He has nevertheless made [it] ours in such a way that we can freely offer it back to Him.

---some discussion of sex in this section---

The sexual act, when lawful - which means chiefly when consistent with good faith and charity - bleh, etc. This is an interesting phrase which, I think, might contradict Lewis in other places; I’m interested to see. I’m also... well, now I think about how Lewis has defined charity earlier, that makes sense as well. I think the ‘good faith’ is meant as it initially appears, and so precludes e.g. rape; the ‘charity’ has to do with previous paragraphs about how charity is wrapped up in love of mankind, oneself, one’s neighbor, and generally feeling that love for everyone around you. I think I did put something about that above. And so it pulls in earlier commentary about Eros and how it is tied up in a bit I did not transcribe about falling in love - A man in this state really hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself. He is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned. If you ask him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, “To go on thinking of her.” So this sort of emotional attachment to the act. And now I /have/ to go and finish the sentence that started this, because I’ve no intention of condemning one night stands &c - it ends can, like all other merely natural acts... be done to the glory of God, and will then be holy. I am not sure what ‘done to the glory of God’ means, but it may have to do with the discussions of love, and divine/Gift-love, and turned outward rather than inward...

The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasures of eating. It means that you must not try to isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again. - But then, we do have wine tastings. And coffee tastings. And, if Brooklyn 99 is to be believed, which it probably is not, pizza tastings.

---End discussion of sex---

[All Churches] regard divorce as something like cutting up a living body, as a kind of surgical operation. Some of them think the operation is so violent that it cannot be done at all; others admit it as a desperate remedy in extreme cases. They are all agreed that it is more like having both your legs cut off than it is like dissolving a business partnership or even deserting a regiment. - which makes it sound like an occasionally necessary medical procedure, which I like; and draws some really nice parallels to abortion, which... frankly seem appropriate.

I much approve of merrymaking. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs. - Oooh, he’s cranky. (This section is titled ‘Christmas and Xmas’, but seems to be developing into a diatribe on commercialism, and the prose is much more emotional than the preceding two hundred pages.)

I did not find the frontline trenches or the C.C.S. more full of hatred, selfishness, rebellion, and dishonesty than any other place...My memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years...I’m not a pacifist. If it’s got to be, it’s got to be. But the flesh is weak and selfish and I think death would be much better than to live through another war. Thank God He has not allowed my faith to be greatly tempted by the present horror. I do not doubt that whatever misery He permits will be for our ultimate good unless by rebellious will we convert it to evil. But I get no further than Gethsemane*; and am daily thankful that that scene of all others in our Lord’s life did not go unrecorded.

*where Jesus prayed while his disciples slept, the night before he got crucified. If I recall my childhood lessons correctly, it’s where Jesus did a bit of a ‘Do I have to, it will hurt’ about the whole business.

Almost the whole of Christian theology could perhaps be deduced from the two facts (a) That men make course jokes, and (b) That they feel the dead to be uncanny. - A funny statement, but presented honestly; he means that we find our own animality either objectionable or funny and that we expect to be a weird chimera, in the Fullmetal Alchemist sense, of spirit and matter, which is not weird to any being that is wholly one or the other, but as a centaur stuck in between, we find the idea of being either wholly spirit (a ghost) or matter (a corpse) to be uncanny and objectionable.

Huh. Now he is saying that the Bible rejoices about the prospect of judgment because judaically we sit as plaintiffs in this court, and in the modern school of thought we fear it because we are in the defendant’s seat. We are the small man with a watertight case who, if he can just get into the court, will have everything granted to him; and Judgment is to put us in that court.

My favorite imagine on [the matter of Purgatory] comes from the dentist’s chair. I hope that when the tooth of life is drawn and I am coming round, a voice will say ‘Rinse your mouth out with this.’ This will be a Purgatory.