“Well, I feel better now.”
–When the verse you don’t understand is skipped by your favorite commentary.
Before opening my mouth I always ask “Is what I’m about to say edifying?”
To which my brain answers, “One way to find out.”
“The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to human beings” (Psalm 115:16). This jibes with my theodicy.
“[T]he presence of gender disparity is not always evidence of bias.”
— Graham Drope, “Who’s Afraid of Ludwig Wittgenstein? Explaining the Lack of Women in Philosophy”
“It is obvious that all marriages are imprudent marriages; just as all births are imprudent births. If prudence is your main concern, or if (in other words) you are a coward, it is certainly better not to be married; and even better not to be born.”
— G.K. Chesterton
Morsels from C.S. Lewis’ _Perelandra_
#- “But now it seems that good is not the same in all worlds; that Maleldil has forbidden in one what He allows in another“ (Tinidril).
- “…the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations…”
- “Ransom felt himself more and more in the presence of a monomaniac.”
- “The fatal touch of invited grandeur, of enjoyed pathos—the assumption, however slight, of a rôle—seemed a hateful vulgarity“ ( of Tinidril under the influence of the Un-man).
- “Not for the first time he found himself questioning Divine Justice. He could not understand why Maleldil should remain absent when the Enemy was there in person.”
- “He writhed and ground his teeth, but could not help seeing. Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set bounds to it?
- “Then came blessed relief. He suddenly realised that he did not know what he could do. He almost laughed with joy. All this horror had been premature. No definite task was before him. All that was being demanded of him was a general and preliminary resolution to oppose the Enemy in any mode which circumstances might show to be desirable: in fact—and he flew back to the comforting words as a child flies back to its mother’s arms—‘to do his best’—or rather, to go on doing his best, for he had really been doing it all along. ‘What bug-bears we make of things unnecessarily!’ he murmured, settling himself in a slightly more comfortable position. A mild floor of what appeared to him to be cheerful and rational piety rose and engulfed him” (of Ransom contemplating his mission against the Unman).
- “‘Other things, other blessings, other glories,’” he murmured. “‘But never that. Never in all worlds, that. God can make good use of all that happens. But the loss is real.’”
- “The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. As a boy with an axe rejoices on finding a tree, or a boy with a box of coloured chalks rejoices on finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in the perfect congruity between his emotion and its object“ (of Ransom against the Unman).
- “I know now what they say in your world about justice. And perhaps they say well, for in that world things always fall below justice. But Maleldil always goes above it. All is gift. I am Oyarsa not by His gift alone but by our foster mother’s, not by hers alone but by yours, not by yours alone but my wife’s—nay, in some sort, by gift of the very beasts and birds. Through many hands, enriched with many different kinds of love and labour, the gift comes to me. It is the Law. The best fruits are plucked for each by some hand that is not his own” (Tor).
— C.S. Lewis, of Ransom against the Un-man • Perelandra
No comment on the above. I just like them.
“At least,” he added in a louder voice, “this forbidding is no hardship in such a world as yours“ (Ransom).
I am struck that the more one sees the goodness that surrounds us, the less the rules about the same world in which that goodness resides seems hard. The more we see life as a gift, the less likely to we are to complain about what we ought to avoid. Why would I engage in some pleasure that harms myself or others when there are ample pleasures I can engage in that do neither?
“That also is a strange thing to say,” replied the Lady. “Who thought of its being hard? The beasts would not think it hard if I told them to walk on their heads. It would become their delight to walk on their heads. I am His beast, and all His biddings are joys.”
There is, of course, danger in the Divine Command Theory of ethics, for sure. But given the touchstone of the crucified Jesus, this is an excellent perspective.
“You ask me to believe that you have been living here with that woman under these conditions in a state of sexless innocence?“ (Weston)
I think of our society’s obsession with sex.
“That would be a strange thing—to think about what will never happen” (Tinidril).
Why bother even thinking about that which will not happen? It is how I wish to approach everything I have decided against doing.
She had no notion of how to glance rapidly from one face to another or two disentangle two remarks at once. Sometimes she listened wholly to Ransom, sometimes wholly to the other, but never to both.
Me!
[D]eep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?
This is how I view temptation.
“I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is by doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His well, but not only because they are His will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which his bidding is the only reason? When we spoke last you said that if you told the beasts to walk on their heads, they would delight to do so. So I know that you understand well what I am saying“ (Ransom).
A fine stab at making sense of the command not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
He picked one and broke it in two. The flesh was dryish and bread-like, something of the same kind as a banana. It turned out to be good to eat. It did not give the orgiastic and almost alarming pleasure of the gourds, but rather the specific pleasure of plain food—the delight of munching and being nourished, a “Sober certainty of waking bliss.” A man, or at least a man like Ransom, felt he ought to say grace over it; and so he present did. The gourds would have required rather an oratorio or a mystical meditation.”
— C.S. Lewis • Perelandra
I laughed out loud at the last line.
“Absolutes don’t make us unloving, it’s which absolutes we believe in.”
— Sam Chan
I lift this quotation with the same thing in mind that Mr. Chan does: that love be the absolute absolute.
“Do you feel quite happy out it?” said I, for a sort of horror was beginning once more to creep over me.
“If you mean, Does my reason accept the view that he will (accidents apart) deliver me safe on the surface of Perelandra?—the answer is Yes,” said Ransom. “If you mean, Do my nerves and my imagination respond to this view?—I’m afraid the answer is No. One can believe in anesthetics and yet feel in a panic when they actually put the mask over your face. I think I feel as a man who believes in the future life when he is taken out to face a firing party. Perhaps it’s good practice.”
— C.S. Lewis • Perelandra
“Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity—like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.”
— C.S. Lewis • Perelandra •
[edit, 1/23/26: Clearly, this sentiment predates the advent of music streaming services. In the past year I have heard the same symphony twice in one day on multiple days. And I didn’t even need to ask.]
“Sleep came like a fruit which falls into the hand almost before you have touched the stem.”
— C.S. Lewis • Perelandra
My marginalia from Out of the Silent Planet (1938) by C.S. Lewis
…was the fact that we had only one kind of hnau: they thought this must have far-reaching effects in the narrowing of sympathies and even of thought.
“Your thought must be at the mercy of your blood,” said the old sorn. “For you cannot compare it with thought that floats on a different blood.”
That was C.S. Lewis preaching on the virtues of diversity well before any around here was doing it.
“Be silent,” said the voice of Oyarsa. “You, thick one, have told me nothing of yourself, so I will tell it to you. In your own world you have attained great wisdom concerning bodies, and by this you have been able to make a ship that can cross the heaven; but in all other things you have the mind of an animal.”
It sometimes seems parts of our society are in the same state as Weston. And it sometimes seems I am, too. May I be fully alive in thought and morals and healthy relationships.
What is Christianity? “A Jesus-looking God raising up a Jesus-looking people to change the world in a Jesus kind of way.” At least, that’s the fetchingly simple way Greg Boyd put it in a podcast episode released back in late November.
“God speaks to us. Our answers are our prayers.”
— Eugene Peterson
Let it be true that my prayers are always answers to God’s speaking. But when I first read the quotation, which I found in a Krista Tippett interview, I read it as: “The answers we seek from God are the prayers we pray,” as if He is the one providing the food for prayer.
“We cannot be too careful about the words we use. We start out using them, and they end up using us.”
– Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places
Instead of God taking responsibility for creating, what would happen if we view God as taking responsibility for being created? That is, in Christ, God the human being fulfills humanity’s responsibility before God to present itself humbly, obedient and trusting in the face of all the vicissitudes inherent in that nature, and fulfills human nature’s calling and purpose. In this case Jesus’ death fulfills created nature, loving and trusting God within the constraints of created finitude. Christ, the God-Man, represents creation to God, takes responsibility for being creatED (not for creatING), unites creation to God, and in so doing reconciles the world to God, not God to the world.
— Tom Belt, “God takes responsibility for sin – or not.”
Now there’s a thought.
“I no longer spend most of my time with college professors like myself. I’ve traded in the PhDs for Kristi and my friends at Highland.”
“The dark paradox, then, is this: the more we seek to alleviate our loneliness through digital connectivity, the more lonely we will feel. Along the way, we will forsake solitude as a matter of course. Curiously, it may not even be loneliness as a desire for companionship that the design of social media fosters in us. Rather, it is a counterfeit longing that is generated: for stimulation rather than companionship. In the end, we will be left with the most profound loneliness: perpetually feeling a need for connection that we cannot satisfy and finding that we have not even our own company. To recap: no abiding sense of companionship, no solitude, no place for thought.”
— Michael Sacasas, “Solitude and Loneliness”
“I’m not Atlas, on any conceivable level.”
— Tom Belt, in a pithy, poetic expression of our dependency of God and others
“Next time, before you proclaim that ‘we never talk about X’—remember this only unveils how small your ‘we’ is.
“Now I know only in part; then I will know fully”—and in the meantime, it drives me my ignorance drives me crazy.
“God loved us while we were yet monsters.”
“Sexual puritanism is an attempt to safeguard possessions more valuable than pleasure. The good that it does outweighs the evil, the English knew this. They were seriously repressed, largely because repression prevented them from carelessly throwing away those things—chastity, marriage and the family—which slip so easily from the grasp of people whose natural tendency is to keep each other at a distance.”
— Roger Scruton, “English Character” in England: an Elegy
“Being incarnate was an embarrassment, a design-fault that God may have intended in the Italians but surely not in the English.”
— Roger Scruton, on the supposedly English “quiet suspicion of sensuality”
“I often think our broken church/social structures reflect our homes. Families teach us that even when are different and disagree, we are one.”