XPost: alt.books.cs-lewis
From: bree@bree.com
In haste...
Thanks for clarifying. It sounds like my guess was closer than Dan's -- I
was guessing you meant all the Christians back to 30 AD, instead of just
those who could have read MC.
On 7 Oct 2005 17:34:42 GMT, Siwel Naph wrote:
>Siwel Naph wrote:
>
>[cut]
>
>To clarify the idea of an imaginary Mere Christian world:
>
>There has been an unbroken line of "Mere Christians" from Christ's time
>to our own. Some of those MCs have accepted persecution, cruel and
>unusual punishment for heresy, homosexuality etc, "Kinder, Kirche,
>Kueche" as women's God-given role, and so on, others have vehemently
>rejected them. So MC worlds could be filled with St Pauls or C.S. Lewises
>or medieval Catholics or Southern Baptists or Quakers or gay liberation
>theologians or... They could also be filled with any *mixture* of those
>different kinds of MC. The only condition of the world is that everyone
>who inhabits it is a (sincere) MC.
>
>Some of these possible MC worlds would be very interesting (in the
>Chinese curse sense -- imagine 100,000 St Pauls/medieval Catholics
>"dialoguing" with 100,000 gay liberation theologians). So this is what
>I'm interested in:
>
>Why is MC silent on what are (to me) very important things like
>persecution of other Christians, cruel laws, freedom of conscience, etc
>but eloquent on (to me) very-but-less important things like doctrine?
Lewis said (in OHEL iirc) "Things need to be treated at length, not in so
far as they are great, but in so far as they are complicated."
In MIRACLES "But this is a book about miracles, not a book about
everything."
In DISCARDED IMAGE perhaps, re why Boethius (supposedly a Christian) didn't
talk about religion in THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY. "But didn't you read
my title? I was writing about philosophy, not about religion." ( IE, not
getting off topic. :-)
>Why is MC silent on what are (to me) very important things like
>persecution of other Christians, cruel laws, freedom of conscience, etc
>but eloquent on (to me) very-but-less important things like doctrine?
How could he talk about persecution in MC, when obviously many Christians
have done it, and many now oppose it? He was talking about things
Christians have AGREED on (through the ages), not about things they have
disagreed on.
>I can understand it if correct doctrine is essential to ensure people get
>to heaven, as some MCs have believed. But that isn't part of MC: Lewis
>himself didn't accept that.
But he wasn't pushing his personal opinions on disputed topics. He was
talking about the undisputed topics.
>Mere Buddhism too would throw up contradictions, but I don't think
>they're as glaring,
I expect you're right -- which might be a fault of Christianity, but not of
Lewis, who is being honest and not trying to explain away those faults.
>and some Mere X's would be uniformly bad.
Probably so would some Mere Buddhist worlds. I don't see much point in
looking at fringe cases far out on the end of any of the curves,
Christianity's or Buddhism's or X's.
Now that's clear, it could be fun to settle down to a comparison of MC and
'Mere Buddhism'. But first catch your 'Mere Buddhism'?
For starts ... Buddhism began in India among Hindus, as a sort of short cut
or alternative way to get off the round of reincarnation (or at least get
rid of the pain of it). Hinduism has overall been pretty tolerant.
Missionaries spread Bh south to Sri Lanka, north to Nepal and Tibet, east
to China and Japan (with some time lag I suppose).
So we'd need to look at what sort of cultural 'material' they were
spreading through, for one thing. Each culture is going to keep some of
its own 'baggage' of tolerance or intolerance or whatever. (See MC about
'material', cruel or neurotic people not becoming normal but just a little
better than they were.) So look at whether they became more or less
tolerant (or whatever) after being converted than they were before.
Of course that brings new questions:
If Christianity is what it claims to be (direct line to the One
Omnipotent Truth), why isn't its performance record clearly better than
that of the heathens, in spite of the less promising material?
Why did God choose the less promising material in the first place?
Etc.
One flaw I see in Lewis's popular writings overall: he occasionally
mentions the Far East, eg quoting Confucious in the Appendix to THE
ABOLITION OF MAN. But when he settles down to compare the Jews and 'the
Pagans' (as in PILGRIM'S REGRESS) he usually seems to be talking about a
rather a close neighborhood of Pagans, not extending very far from the
Mediterranean and the North Sea. The mentions I've seen of Hinduism and
Buddhism in MC and the other popular books seem very shallow. (I haven't
read his correspondence.)
One caveat: Hinduism and Buddhism have their own different divisions. Some
of them in practice seem not much different than some of Christianity:
"Have faith in the name of Krishna/Amitabha Buddha and He will take you to
the Pure Land he has prepared for you, wiping out your sins by His grace."
Those get translated (badly, and handed out in airports.) The really
high-brow stuff gets translated too (in lots of big words, with lots of
footnotes, and sold in expensive hardback limited editions). The
middle-brow stuff -- for the sort of audience Lewis wrote MC for -- doesn't
get translated at all, darn it. If you find any, let me know. :-)
Bree
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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