C.S. Lewis: Views on "The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name" and What Lewis Actually Criticized the Most

On Votaries, I discuss the great flawed character: Edmund. 

For awhile, I have been kicking around in my head a fan-fiction story in which Edmund, King of Narnia, marries a prince of the merpeople. 

I will likely never write it down or post it since it would offend, oh, everybody--not just the religious right but all the progressive types that would bemoan a heterosexual woman "appropriating" an orientation not her own. Or the idea of a gay Christian man with middle class values.

Or something. I don't know. I don't keep track of dogmatic bullies (The world must be the way I tell it to be because I'm one of the truly saved!) and how they think. 

But contemplating Edmund fan-fiction led me back to C.S. Lewis. In many way, C.S. Lewis was a man of his time. He was also very much himself. He does get used and borrowed by Humanists and LDS folks and Catholics and Evangelists (except for the ones who are bothered by his love for paganism). All is fair in the world of art! 

But it also matters to be accurate. Like Dante, C.S. Lewis considered the physical sins far less problematic and objectionable than the sins of the spirit:

1. He likely considered homosexuality a sin.

2. However, in Mere Christianity, when he states that he is going to address individual sins/temptations and how to cope with each, he states that there are certain sins/temptations about which he isn't going to give advice (in a non-fiction lecture) because he can't speak to them personally. He establishes a line that he rarely crosses. He rarely addresses homosexuality. The advice he is giving is to help individuals in their personal lives, not train individuals in service to a political or, even, theological agenda.

3. One exception: In Surprised by Joy, in his discussion of public schools (what Americans think of as "private schools") and the bullying that went on, Lewis disagrees with condemnations of love affairs that occurred in the schools between the boys, some consummated, some not. To Lewis, those relationships were 

"the only foothold or cranny left for certain good things...the only counterpoise to the social struggle; the one oasis...in the burning desert of competitive ambition. Eros, turned upside down, blackened, distorted, and filthy, still bore the traces of his divinity."

Some readers might be offended by the characterizations of Eros. They should move back in the text to figure out what C.S. Lewis did fully condemn without any exceptions at all. 

4. Lewis reserves his most strident distaste for cliques and the attendant games of superiority played by one person or group trying to do another person or group down--in the name of religion or so-called progress or superior intellect or social prestige: 

"Spiritually speaking, the deadly thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominated by the social struggle: to get on, to arrive, or, having reached the top, to remain there, was the absorbing preoccupation...and from it, at school as in the world, all sorts of meanness flow." 

Lewis correctly includes the intelligentsia as well as the politicians and prigs, the left, the right, all of us, as those in danger of being pulled into this "social struggle."

In sum, Lewis's fictional hells--from Edmund's betrayal of his siblings in icy Narnia to Screwtape's admonishments to his devil nephew--are always about self-aggrandizement at the expense of a generous spirit. 

End of NCIS "Call of Silence" in which

Yost realizes that though the Japanese man

who helped him didn't fight opposite him 

on Iwo Jima, he did at Guadalcanal.

"I want what I want when I want it, even if it means disparaging someone else" captures the worst aspects of the human soul (aspects often exacerbated by social media), not only the worst aspects of the fearful physical self but the worst aspects of the demanding spiritual self. 

Two soldiers who fight earnestly for their sides, then meet and shake hands are less contemptible, if at all, in Lewis's eyes, than two posturing theorists who are sure that "you have so many of the wrong opinions, you won't be allowed in my utopia."

Hence my admonishment to religions: Concentrate on preparing people to love and meet God rather than deciding who deserves to love and meet God.

I could extend the same admonishment to, oh, all of us. Wanting to tell others who/what they are and where they will end up is a human trait. And despite the plethora of life-coaches in our modern world, not a terribly nice one.