Coal

MacBook Attack!

Jun 8, 13:38 Literature

I just bought a myself a MacBook and am back online. It’s been about half a year since my last computer went missing, and now I get to see what I’ve missed in the Wide World of Webs. After a quick perusal I conclude this consists of:

About 25 pages of prozac and viagra spam on Coal, and several million homemade videos on Youtube.

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Summer impairs my reading faculty. The heat accumulates like vegetable matter in my brain, but I’ve snuck a couple of good reads in through the undergrowth anyway.

Mere Christianity is one of the heavily referenced ‘must-reads’ of thinking and unthinking Christianity alike. Most of my friends are surprised when I admit my ignorance of its contents. I was never in any hurry to read it, partly because it’s so popular, partly because of false impressions I’ve accumulated over the years – these may have been my fault, may have been the fault of it’s advocates, I’m not sure.

I’m finally reading it, and of course, enjoying it thoroughly. There are the obvious reasons for this: Lewis’ great respect for institutional religion, his insistence that talking about what is common to Christianity in no way pre-empts the need to go further along a particular path in searching for the truth (to choose a denomination, as it were, rather than limit Christianity to it’s Lowest Common Denominator, as if that were all that mattered), his 3 part discussion of the structure and functioning or morality, and return to the 7 virtues as a format for breaking down the demands of personal morality.

But the bubbles in the beer, for me, is Lewis as linguist’s adept use of language underlying every argument, and in the direct linguistic points he scores on appropriate occasions through the book.

Apologetics are often highly readable but linguistically coy, ignorant (in keeping with our culture), or lacking in precision. Lewis is readable, and terribly precise. One might contrast him with his literary and apologetic predecessor, G.K. Chesteron, who was precise, and readable, but not always clear (for the average reader, at any rate), partly because although he was linguistically precise, he was always shifting gears without warning: changing his apologetic audience or target from chapter to chapter, indulging his opponent’s philosophical views and their merits on one page before making an about face to show how deficient they are once you step outside of their fabricated borders, and so on. Unlike Chesterton, Lewis is the penultimate guide. Chesterton dares his reader to keep up with him. Lewis takes him by the hand and guides him along, step by step. Both have their place, but I now understand why Lewis is often recommended to young or new Christians, while Chesterton usually gets the more obscure, literary types.

I think a small study group that looked at books like Mere Christianity would be a riot. We could start with that, then move on to things like Chesterton’s Heretics/Orthodoxy, Bonhoeffor’s Cost of Discipleship, perhaps with a more advanced read, like Alistair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, thrown into the mix from time to time. If anyone’s interested, let me know. I might just get something started.