Category: Uncategorized

  • DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE

    The Problem of PainC. S. Lewis Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God. THOMAS AQUINAS, Summ. Theol., Ia Q XXV, Art 4 ‘If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures…

  • The Fall of Man (Part 2)

    The Problem of PainC. S. Lewis Judged by his artefacts, or perhaps even by his language, this blessed creature was, no doubt, a savage. All that experience and practice can teach he had still to learn: if he clipped flints, he doubtless chipped them clumsily enough. He may have been utterly incapable of expressing in…

  • The Fall of Man (Part 1)

    The Problem of PainC. S. Lewis To obey is the proper office of a rational soul.Montaigne II, viii The Christian answer to the question proposed in the last chapter is contained in the doctrine of the Fall. According to that doctrine, man is now a horror to God and to himself and a creature ill-adapted…

  • HUMAN WICKEDNESS

    Part 2 C. S. Lewis 6. Perhaps my harping on the word ‘kindness’ has already aroused a protest in some readers’ minds. Are we not really an increasingly cruel age? Perhaps we are: but I think we have become so in the attempt to reduce all virtues to kindness. For Plato rightly taught that virtue…

  • HUMAN WICKEDNESS

    Part 1 C. S. Lewis You can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when you think you are humble enough. LAW, Serious Call, cap. XVI The examples given in the last chapter went to show that love may cause pain to its object, but only on the supposition that that object needs alteration…

  • The Problem of Pain (Part 2)

    C. S. Lewis DIVINE GOODNESS Finally we come to an analogy full of danger, and of much more limited application, which happens, nevertheless, to be the most useful for our special purpose at the moment — I mean, the analogy between God’s love for man and a man’s love for a woman. It is freely…

  • The Problem of Pain (Part 1)

    C. S. Lewis DIVINE GOODNESS Love can forbear, and Love can forgive . . . but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object . . . He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that…

  • Human Pain, Continued

    C. S. Lewis All things which are as they ought to be are conformed unto this second law eternal; and even those things which to this eternal law are not conformable are notwithstanding in some sort ordered by the first eternal law.HOOKER, Laws of Eccles. Pol., I, iii, I In this chapter, I advance six…

  • Screwtape Proposes a Toast

    C. S. Lewis Part 2 The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you. The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid resounding lie. I don’t mean merely that his…

  • Screwtape Proposes A Toast

    C. S. Lewis Part 1 I was often asked or advised to add to the original ‘Screwtape Letters’, but for many years I felt not the least inclination to do it. Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment. The ease came, no doubt, from the fact that the…