Sunday, 3 August 2025

"God": Anderson And Lewis

"God" matters in Poul Anderson's works because:

Pagans and Christians interact in his historical fiction;

St. Corentin converts the last King of Ys from Mithraism to Christianity;

the Dennitzans are Ortho-Christians;

Axor is a Wodenite convert to Jerusalem Catholicism;

Ythrians and Merseians have literally alien concepts of "God."

CS Lewis matters because he was a Christian propagandist and the imaginative author of the Narnia Chronicles and of an sf reply to HG Wells and Olaf Stapledon.

Poul Anderson and James Blish are Wellsian-Stapledonian sf writers and Blish is also post-Lewisian.

So it has made sense for me to reread Lewis' Surprised By Joy and rereading it has clarified my many philosophical disagreements with Lewis. 

7 comments:

S.M. Stirling said...

Ythrians yes -- their God is truly alien. Meresians not so much. There are terrestrial religions that have about that concept of a deity.

Anonymous said...

Kaor, Paul!

Of course you can read any of C.S. Lewis' books that you like, such as SURPRISED BY JOY. But he was not the only writer to compose spiritual autobiographies. Two examples I've thought of being St. Augustine's CONFESSIONS and John Henry Newman's APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA (both of which I read twice).

My point being that these writers wrote about their faith with an at least equal perception and depth of thought as Lewis.

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,

I read Newman's APOLOGIA while I was at school and of course was impressed with it then because it confirmed what I was being told. I have read, thought and enquired more widely ever since.

Paul.

Anonymous said...

Kaor, Paul!

But not the CONFESSIONS of St. Augustine, the classic origin of Christian memoirs?

The closest non-Christian analogy I can think of from Roman times is the MEDITATIONS of Marcus Aurelius.

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,

Well, like many other works, I have not read the CONFESSIONS and would not EXPECT to be converted by it if I did. Of course, we can never know for sure but that applies to every work that we have not read.

Paul.

Anonymous said...

Kaor, Paul!

I was thinking some Christian spiritual autobiographies were more solid and in-depth than Lewis' work.

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,

Maybe so but the philosophical disagreements remain.

Lewis makes perhaps a unique point about what he calls "Joy": an unfulfilled desire that is itself more desirable than any pleasure, satisfaction or happiness and that shines through particular images, memories and nostalgias but is always seen not to be identical with any of them. We can "build the temple to find that the god has flown." Of course Lewis fits Joy into his theistic framework but Joy does exist and, I would think, by its nature, cannot be fitted into any framework.

Paul.