What did Lewis have to say on salvation by grace? In the 'tome' English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, he opined:
"On the Protestant view one could not, and by God’s mercy, expiate one’s sins. Like an accepted lover, he feels that he has done nothing, and never could have done anything to deserve such astonishing happiness. All the initiative has been on God’s side, all has been free, unbounded grace. His own puny and ridiculous efforts would be as helpless to retain the joy as they would have been to achieve it in the first place. Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned, "Works" have no "merit," though of course faith, inevitably, even unconsciously, flows out into works of love at once. He is not saved because he does works of love; he does works of love because he is saved. It is faith alone that has saved him; faith bestowed by sheer gift."
Charles Williams - A minor Inkling?
He never tried, like Dante or Byron, to effect the course of history. He observed, he loved, he prayed, he laughed and talked, and, above all, he wrote: a stream of poems, plays, novels, biographies, reviews, essays; a body of work which still astonishes the reader with its variety and vitality.
Moreover, nothing is quite what it seems: each piece evokes something other than itself; his imagination delighted in unexpected connections -- and he found connections everywhere. A review of a detective novel for a newspaper will contain a sentence that opens on to a huge theological vista; an essay on literary criticism will lead one into a complex piece of psychological analysis; a footnote in a biography will encapsulate an entire historical era; a piece of theological speculation will reveal itself to be intimately concerned with the hidden pains of everyday loss and disappointment.
Throughout the immense variety of genre the unique vision remains constant; the 'voice' of Williams is unmistakable.
(Charles Williams - A celebration, Introduction by Brian Horne. Gracewing, 1995)
Moreover, nothing is quite what it seems: each piece evokes something other than itself; his imagination delighted in unexpected connections -- and he found connections everywhere. A review of a detective novel for a newspaper will contain a sentence that opens on to a huge theological vista; an essay on literary criticism will lead one into a complex piece of psychological analysis; a footnote in a biography will encapsulate an entire historical era; a piece of theological speculation will reveal itself to be intimately concerned with the hidden pains of everyday loss and disappointment.
Throughout the immense variety of genre the unique vision remains constant; the 'voice' of Williams is unmistakable.
(Charles Williams - A celebration, Introduction by Brian Horne. Gracewing, 1995)
C.S. Lewis on delight, lust and temptation
(from Lewis circa 1930 )
I got such a sudden intense feeling of delight that IT (ie God) sort of stopped me in my walk and spun me round. Indeed the sweetness was so great, and seemed so to affect the whole body as well as the mind, that it gave me pause -- it was so very like sex.
One knows what a psychoanalyst would say -- it is sublimated lust, a kind of defeated masturbation which fancy give one to compensate for external chastity. Yet after all, why should that be the right way of looking at it? If he can say that IT is sublimated sex, why is it not open to me to say that sex is undeveloped IT? -- As Plato would have said. And if as Plato thought, the material world is a copy or mirror of the spiritual then the central feature of the material life (=sex), must be a copy of something in the Spirit: and when you get a faint glimpse of the latter, of course you find it like the former: an Original is like its copy: a man is like his portrait.
Just to give you the other side of the picture (I shall not often tell you these things) -- I have 'fallen' since you left after a long period of quite untroubled peace in that respect. Serves me right, for I was beginning to fancy that I had really escaped, if not for good, at any rate for an indefinite time. The interesting thing was that on both occasions the temptation arose quite suddenly, and carried me by storm I don't mean to disclaim responsibility on this account: but I feel grateful that the enemy has been driven to resort to stratagems (not by me, but by God) whereas he used to walk boldly up to me for a frontal attack in the face of all my guns. I hope I don't delude myself in thinking that this is an improvement.
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I got such a sudden intense feeling of delight that IT (ie God) sort of stopped me in my walk and spun me round. Indeed the sweetness was so great, and seemed so to affect the whole body as well as the mind, that it gave me pause -- it was so very like sex.
One knows what a psychoanalyst would say -- it is sublimated lust, a kind of defeated masturbation which fancy give one to compensate for external chastity. Yet after all, why should that be the right way of looking at it? If he can say that IT is sublimated sex, why is it not open to me to say that sex is undeveloped IT? -- As Plato would have said. And if as Plato thought, the material world is a copy or mirror of the spiritual then the central feature of the material life (=sex), must be a copy of something in the Spirit: and when you get a faint glimpse of the latter, of course you find it like the former: an Original is like its copy: a man is like his portrait.
Just to give you the other side of the picture (I shall not often tell you these things) -- I have 'fallen'
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