Horror season; Lewis on modern theology; Abel’s accident

My favorite U.S. season begins tomorrow. A few leaves have turned color, and it’s been raining more. I had to mow our front lawn in the rain.

We’ve brought out our horrific mermaid decoration (“mer-skeleton,” Samuel calls it); and I’m reading stories by M. R. James, e.g. “The Mezzotint.”

(Someone’s GIF of that story.)

I used to reserve the spooky reading for October, but this year I’m continuing it all season long.

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One author who loathed horror stories – as a matter of personal taste, not (as far as I can tell) of principle – was C. S. Lewis.

(See The Pilgrim’s Regress’s afterword – or its foreword, depending on the edition.)

The group is reading short essays by Lewis.

These were his words to a cohort of Anglican seminarians:

A theology which denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia – which either denies the miraculous altogether or, more strangely, after swallowing the camel of the Resurrection strains at such gnats as the feeding of the multitudes – if offered to the uneducated man can produce only one or other of two effects. It will make him a Roman Catholic or an atheist.

(“Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” a.k.a. “Fern-Seed and Elephants.”)

I like that.

And later:

All theology of the liberal type involves at some point – and often involves throughout – the claim that the real behavior and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars. Now long before I became interested in theology I had met this kind of theory elsewhere. The tradition of Jowett still dominated the study of ancient philosophy when I was reading Greats. One was brought up to believe that the real meaning of Plato had been misunderstood by Aristotle and wildly travestied by the neo-Platonists, only to be recovered by the moderns. When recovered, it turned out (most fortunately) that Plato had really all along been an English Hegelian, rather like T. H. Green. I have met it a third time in my own professional studies; every week a clever undergraduate, every quarter a dull American don, discovers for the first time what some Shakespearean play really meant.

This too is delightful, perhaps excessively so. I wish I could cackle uninhibitedly at the undergraduates and dull U.S. dons; but I’m afraid that there’s still sorting to be done: for every Aristotle who got Plato right, and (especially) for every Plato who got Socrates right, there was another near-contemporary of theirs who didn’t. And for every Simon Peter, there was a Simon Magus. Also, why think that “what some Shakespearean play really meant” was just one thing? The text may be richer than that. (Of course, supposing that more than one meaning may be true, if a new one is discovered, the old one need not always be invalidated; so, insofar as the moderns do try to invalidate the ancients to advance their own interpretations, Lewis is justified in distrusting them.)

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Abel fell off a bed and got a black eye; now it’s black and blue and green. I once fainted in my bathroom and acquired a black eye. My students asked if I’d been barfighting, and I assured them I had; it was quite a thrill for ten seconds, and then I told the truth.