Comments by "Phil Theo" (@pattube) on "My 10 Favorite Science Fiction Books (2024 Update)" video.

  1. Speaking of Lewis's pedantry: 1. As his best, Lewis has a visionary and even beatific style that exemplifies his doctrine of sehnsucht. This is on display in Perelandra and the final chapters of the Voyage. But the flipside of this coin is that the style flattens when he leaves the silver sea and floating islands behind. In That Hideous Strength, there are moments, such as the entry to Brangdon Wood and the Descent of the Gods, when the old magic returns, but Lewis, unlike Eliot, lacks a knack for finding the sacred in the mundane. 2. There was, with Lewis, the ubiquitous risk of naked ideas streaking through the story. His first, semi-autobiographical, entry into the fantasy genre (Pilgrim’s Regress) suffers from this disproportion, as does the final installment of the Space Trilogy (That Hideous Strength). Although a literary failure, the Pilgrim’s Regress is useful as an exposition of his Platonic spirituality. It resurfaces in The Last Battle. But Platonism is the subterranean stream that runs under his mythopoetic art and outlook generally. 3. There are also times when Lewis cultivates an expectation on which he cannot deliver. In the climactic chapters of Perelandra, the elida treat the reader to the accumulated wisdom of the ages. The only problem is that Lewis is no angel, and must therefore feign a pompous, eonian profundity. Less would be more. But whatever its flaws, Perelandra is a work of creative imagination that sticks in the reader’s mind. 4. Like Bunyan, only worse, Lewis doesn’t trust the reader to draw the right conclusions. It may again be owing to his Platonism, with its primacy of the idea, that Lewis feels the need to turn the narrator into an editorial voice. Or maybe it’s carryover of his classroom lectures. Or maybe it’s just a lack of skill. But whatever the reason, this is an artistic flaw. A skillful narrator does not so much speak to the reader as speak through the character, and plot, and setting. Even this has to be handled with some delicacy, lest the character become a walking, talking treatise or dummy for the narrative ventriloquist. Such speeches must be "in character" with the character. In addition, the reader should not only hear what the character says, but see what he sees. In Dante, the main character describes the journey, like a tour guide. And, in Dante, the scenes are symbolic. These are all oblique ways of making a point without stepping outside the story, which destroys the illusion. 5. Lewis was in part an allegorist because this was a way of presenting the faith to those for whom the traditional coinage was worn smooth. Whatever the theological propriety of this exercise, its principle utility is to a culture in a transitional phase. But we are now at a terminal stage where the challenge is not so much with those for whom the Christian story is overly-familiar, but unfamiliar. What is mainly needed, therefore, is not an allegory of the faith, but straightforward evangelism and apologetics. 6. Although Lewis apparently believed in the basic biographical facts of Christ, including the miraculous stuff, yet his Platonic outlook is such that what seems to matter most are not the historical particulars, but the universal truths, and as long as a given story exemplifies these general and perennial themes, one story is pretty much as good as another— be it literal or allegorical, factual or fictitious. 7. This can be seen in his rejection of justification by faith for an essentially Greek Orthodox soteriology. Since theosis is a Neoplatonic construct, it dovetails with his philosophical bias. This can also be seen in his embrace of Purgatory. And this goes back to an old divide. Is the plight of man primarily moral or noetic? Is it owing to guilt or ignorance? Lewis sides with eastern philosophy and theology. In that case, salvation is a matter of revelation rather than redemption, of enlightenment and right ideas rather than a historic fall and redemptive deed. What matters is not a wrong righted, but a falsehood corrected; not the unique, unrepeatable, and vicarious event, but the universal, accessible and instantiable idea. 8. Still another aspect of Lewis’s platonism is his evident distaste for the sensual side of life. Sex doesn’t exist in a Lewis novel. Every birth is a virgin birth. This prim attitude is especially irritating when he puts the reader on a tropical island with a Botticellian beauty and then proceeds to admonish the reader against entertaining any untoward feelings. Of course, Perelandra was written before he met Joy Davidman, and one wonders if married life knocked some of the starch out of his collar. This marks a major step back from Dante and Racine. Dante, as an Italian male, and one, moreover, tutored in the troubadour tradition, handles women with exquisite tact, as does Racine—a Frenchman and heir of the chivalric ideal. This is something distinctive to the Christian vision of the sexes. You don’t get it in Gilgamesh or the Ramayana or Arabian literature or the Classics or Lady Murasaki. 9. In yet another Platonic turn, Lewis’ own sympathies seem closer to annihilationism than universalism, by pressing the privative theory of evil. However, the privative character of evil is ethical rather than metaphysical. Evil is the negation, not of being, but of well-being. And whatever the entailments of such a theory, our doctrine of the afterlife must take is cue from revelation rather than speculative metaphysics. Steve Hays
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