Reflections on the dialog... |
I think Lewis intended this book not only as a treatise on prayer but also as a dialogue with his contemporary theologians on the issues of the day.
In particular Letters to Malcolm addresses Alec Vidler’s Soundings and Bishop of Woolwich John Robinson’s Honest to God.
I began making notes in the margin of my
book. Then I decided to create a cheat sheet to share with SEASONS. I worked
through the first six chapters. Then I found that someone else had already done
so. Wasted effort? No! I have decided that I might want to read Pascal. I discovered a woman novelist, Rose Macauley, to see if I want to read; since she's 20th Century it may be a long well before she climbs to the top of the book stack. Simone Wiel looks very interesting.
This link is to a chapter-by-chapter
listing of notes by Arend Smildes which I think the reader will find helpful.
The notes I made before I decided not to
reinvent the wheel follow:
Chapter
1 (sets the scene. This
is a “Socratic dialogue”)
“Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?”
“The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.”
“Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.”
“Nothing beautiful without struggle.”
Chapter
2
“If God were our one and only desire we would not be so easily upset when our opinions do not find outside acceptance.”
“Wherever you go, there you are.”
“A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.”
“As long as you live, you will be subject to change, whether you will it or not - now glad, now sorrowful; now pleased, now displeased; now devout, now undevout; now vigorous, now slothful; now gloomy, now merry. But a wise man who is well taught in spiritual labor stands unshaken in all such things, and heeds little what he feels, or from what side the wind of instability blows.”
“Jesus has now many lovers of the heavenly kingdom but few bearers of His cross.”
“Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or endeavoring something for the public good.”
“The Lord bestows his blessings there, where he finds the vessels empty.”
“It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.”
“At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.”
“Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.”
“It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.”
p. 11 Blaise
Pascal 1628 -1662 French Augustinian
Catholic (Jansenism)
“On 23
November 1654, between 10:30 and 12:30 at night, Pascal had an intense religious
vision and immediately recorded the experience in a brief note to himself which
began: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the
philosophers and the scholars..." and concluded by quoting Psalm 119:16:
"I will not forget thy word. Amen." He carried this note sewn into his
coat. A servant discovered it only by chance after his death. After this
experience he began writing the
Lettres Provinciales and the Pensees. Quotes from Pensees:
“The heart has its reasons which reason
knows not.”“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
“There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”
“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadow for those who don't.”
“The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.”
“Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
Chapter
3
p. 14 “Manichchaeian”
used figuratively as a synonym for “dualist” and suggests, somewhat disparagingly,
that this world view simplistically reduces the world to a struggle between
Good and Evil. Originally a major Gnostic religion founded by Iranian/Persian
Mani, 216 – 276 A.D., Lewis refers not
to the original but to the Histoire
Critique de Manichee by Isaac de Beausobre, 1659 – 1738. French
Protestant explores
the history of heresy and orthodoxy, concludes
“God… eternally active and creative”
p. 15 John A.T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich 1919 – 1983 English Anglican Liberal author of Honest to God (1963),
Robinson attempted to reconcile the disparate theologies of Tillich and Bonhoeffer. For more information see this article by N. T. Wright: http://ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Doubts_About_Doubt.htm
Quotes:"For it is in making himself nothing, in his utter self-surrender to others in love, that [Jesus] discloses and lays bare the Ground of man's being as Love".
"For assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love".
“…the sacrament which forms the heart of Christian worship is… the assertion of ‘the “beyond” in the midst of our life’, the holy in the common. The Holy Communion is the point at which the common, the communal, becomes the carrier of the unconditional, as the Christ makes himself known in the breaking and sharing of bread.”
Chapter 4
p. 21 Martin
Buber 1878 – 1965 Austrian
Isarali Jew Zionist author of Ich und Du (I and Thou) “dialogical community… dialogical relationships” Quotes:
“All journeys have secret
destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
“When two people relate to each other
authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”“The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.”
“Solitude is the place of purification.”
“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.”
Chapter 5
p. 28 Juvenal
127 A.D Roman poet “bread and
circuses”
“enormous prayers which heaven in
vengeance grants”
p. 29 Alexander
Vidler 1899 – 1991 English Anglican priest, publisher, “new”
theology editor of Theology to which C.S. Lewis contributed, scholor of F.D. Marice
edited Soundings, collection of essays
on Christian theology and the sciences. Quote:"We are all sure that there is a way ahead, else we should not have taken up our pens. We have been less disconcerted by our differences than surprised by our concurrencies."
F. D. Maurice 1805 – 1872 English Christian socialist,
Proponet of women’s education, Unitarian
family, ordained Anglican, deprived of Cambridge professorships for “unsound
theology” Quotes:"The Bible," we are told sometimes, "gives us such a beautiful picture of what we should be." Nonsense! It gives us no picture at all. It reveals to us a fact: it tells us what we really are; it says, This is the form in which God created you, to which He has restored you; this is the work which the Eternal Son, the God of Truth and Love, is continually carrying on within you.
“The desire for unity has haunted me all my life through; I have never been able to substitute any desire for that, or to accept any of the different schemes for satisfaction of that men have desired.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906 – 1945 German Lutheran anti-Nazi
Christianity in a secular world. Quotes:
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
“A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol.”
“We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.”
“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.....We must not.....assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God.”
“To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”
“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”
“True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”
“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
“It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms. ”
And another resource for reading C. S.
Lewis:
http://www.cslewis.org/resources/studyguides/Study%20Guide%20-%20Letters%20to%20Malcolm.pdf