Repentance cannot be thought of as the destruction of one’s current identity. I can correct a lie about myself; I cannot reject who I am. I can expel a poison from my body; I cannot expel my body out of myself. I can cut off what I foolishly thought was my hand; I will find that it is not my hand, but a cancerous growth that had put on airs. In due time the atmosphere of Hell, the real and now-present Hell of confronting who I am without blinders, will digest the unorganized mass of cells and provide nutriment to grow me into a true and rightful shape. I can avoid the pain, dwell in Limbo, refuse the nutriment and prolong the process; or I can grow and reshape myself endlessly to reveal my innermost soul without deceit; either way I cannot destroy myself.
Repentance, rightly understood, cannot be thought of as suicide, but as the acquisition of a right mind and heart; it cannot destroy, but only add. The things that fall away from one’s life after repentance are the things that were already dead; the things that are alive must remain unfailingly.
Forgetting this, what motivation have we to know God, if God does not care to know us, if God did not create us, if He intends to destroy us, if that creation is not a firm fact. What care I for my salvation, if I cease to be myself? What care I for my neighbours salvation, if that salvation is their destruction, to be replaced by an unrelated person? Someone else will be in Heaven, a fine enough saint who enjoys a good Halleluiah from the belly, but not me. Or, someone else will be in Hell, but not me. I cannot recognize myself in the whitewashed hagiographies, nor in the gibbering of the damned. Consider the ostensibly-Catholic ‘letter from a soul in Hell’:
Do not be surprised that I should say this. We all think the same way here. Our will is hardened in evil - in what you call “evil.” Even when we do something “good,” as I do now in opening your eyes about Hell, it is not with any good intention.
-- from http://www.tldm.org/News6/hell2.htm
Consider the change proposed to occur in the damned. Did she think like this, talk like this in life? It is explicitly proposed that she did not. Evil as she was, she could not have been that evil on the Earth even if she tried. Were this letter true, I would accuse God for a murderer.
The torrent of rage from this damned soul, retaining (even in flames!) a cold denial and ingratitude -- a lie spoken by one who does not know who she is. If, in life, she ever was grateful for even a single glass of cold water, she has been destroyed and a demon created in her place and asserted to be her -- a fine repayment from God for that gratitude. Will God command her to speak her lie for eternity? Rescind his word of creation and intend for her to become eternally less than what she is? Do you have God contradict himself? Do you deny the Resurrection? Even human flesh, formed of atoms -- each individually sinless, arranged according to a divine geometry -- can only be disjointed for a season. It can be made to speak a lie, but not forever. The torment of the lie will grow; the limbs will rebel against the perverse spirit animating them; the day will come in which even the humblest electron will disdain to portray a farce.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, rid us of the perverse spirit, and grant us to know ourselves and those around us according to the Holy Spirit; for then we will be ourselves, not according to flesh, not according to geometry, not according to names and birth certificates, but in Truth.
https://cjshayward.com/women/ [the portion about Terry Pratchett]
Basically, he called the witches in The Wee Free Men unnatural, and I am scratching my head trying to figure out what he was referring to. (Hayward seems to think it has something to do with Wicca, which I am not acquainted with beyond the mad imaginings of Unicorn Jelly, which is hardly accurate and does depict some degrees of unnatural vice mixed up with a rarefied sort of Singularitarian morality-tale. I should like to think there is a gulf between Wee Free Men and Unicorn Jelly.)
This is a serious question as I enjoyed the book and did not find the disturbing unnatural vice in it -- either my moral compass is loose, or someone is wrong on the Internet again. Maybe I’m just spoiled from reading Soviet children’s literature in my childhood, which I’m sure is Gnostic and Nestorian and all kinds of other bad.
He also has an article denouncing Seraphim Rose, which has been bound up (with assorted other articles) into a Kindle book entitled “An Orthodox Response to Fr. Seraphim Rose”.
Ironically CJS Hayward and Seraphim Rose seem like birds of a feather to me. They have one frightening disease, indirectness, which means rarely to say “I believe this” or “I can’t believe this” or “I won’t believe this”, but instead “the Church believes this and I may or may not speaking for the Church”.
Other than that, there’s good stuff to be found in both of them.
Wherein Lewis says (my commentary interspersed in brackets) stuff like:
There is no doubt a blessedly ingenuous faith, a child’s or a savage’s faith which finds no difficulty. It accepts without awkward questionings the harps and golden streets and family reunions pictured by hymn writers. Such a faith is deceived, yet in the deepest sense not deceived,
(The most bloody-awkward admission a writer of children’s stories can make is that he doesn’t take seriously the very same picture of reality that he is foisting on children.)
for while it errs in mistaking symbol for fact, yet it apprehends Heaven as joy and plenitude and love. But it is impossible for most of us. And we must not try, by artifice, to make ourselves more naïf than we are.
(... why not?)
A man does not “become as a little child” by aping childhood.
(Now this does point to a fairly deep issue. Namely, the difference between imitation as fakery and imitation as aspiration. It is clear as day that one can, by certain outward actions, fake sainthood without too much effort. Of course, time and hindsight will wash away the coat of varnish, but in the short term the fakery may well convince those who are lacking in discernment. To those who have some degree of discernment, the fakery will come across as obnoxious pharisaism.
However, the religious life consists of people who are certainly not saints, but are lawfully employed in doing their best to imitate such. The imitation of a saint is least concerned with imitating its outward aspects through artifice and most concerned with artificing its inward aspects (thoughts, deeds, motivations) one moment at a time, even if one lacks them as a definite attribute of one’s being. One does not have to bother with being loving if one can simply cut off hateful thoughts and perform loving acts. Human nature being malleable in the Lord, the imitation of sainthood therefore leads eventually to sainthood.
One can certainly perform the same type of trick with childhood, since a simple faith and a healthy and vivid imagination are precisely inward aspects of one’s life. [The obnoxious profession of that simple faith, not so much.] Similarly with manhood, womanhood, craftsmanship, diplomacy, or any other worthwhile state of being.)
Hence our notion of Heaven involves perpetual negations: no food, no drink, no sex, no mirth, no movement, no events, no time, no art.
(At this point the notion of transpositions comes full circle and contradicts itself. Lewis starts the essay by saying that Earthly delights are suitable analogies for the explanation of Heavenly ones, but ends by saying that the analogy is utterly invalid.)
Now, this mess is further expounded on by acclaimed Aristotelian-Thomist windbag Ed Feser here:
Lewis also notes how religious people are prone to mistake the earthly images of Heaven for the real thing, and sometimes feel let down when they are told that this is a mistake. How could Heaven be eternal bliss without eating, drinking, and (my example, not Lewis’s) playing Frisbee with Fido? Deleting such earthly pleasures from our picture of Heaven seems to leave nothing in its place. Heaven comes to seem arid, bleak, and boring. But this is precisely the wrong lesson to draw, comparable to the error the child in the dungeon makes when he is told by his mother that the world outside the dungeon lacks pencil lines.
But wait, there’s more. Feser denies the validity of playing Frisbee with Fido with approximately the same energy as I have been affirming my Puddleglum-nonsense.
However, to my mind this leaves us utterly stuck when we want to talk about Heaven. If there is no literal notion of playing Frisbee with Fido in Heaven, then what actual Heavenly element is Frisbee with Fido an analogy of? Keep in mind that the typical retort to this will be “why do you want there to be a Heavenly analogy of Fido? Isn’t God enough?”
Feser rather oddly compares wanting there to be Fido in Heaven to wanting there to be sex in Heaven; this is rather off the mark, since wanting there to be Fido in Heaven is primarily a desire for Fido’s good rather than one’s own -- in the strict Thomist sense, Fido ought to be allowed to fulfil his natural end. We may observe that the natural ends of Fido involve such things as seeking to preserve his own existence (which fails, as Fido winds up a corpse) and seeking to perpetuate his species (which fails, as the Earth burns to a cinder in the inhospitable fallen universe, and according to Feser no New Fido can walk the New Earth). That Fido is unconscious of his own existential dilemma is no argument for removing the dilemma entirely; a drunkard about to fall off a cliff is likewise utterly unconscious of his impending demise.
On the other hand, wanting there to be sex in Heaven would be motivated in a rather twofold fashion: first, one wants some degree of selfish pleasure (or, at best, affectionate intimacy) and finds it difficult to imagine more intense forms of it than sex; second, one wants there to be reproduction of the human species in Heaven as well as in the sinful Earth, which is a rather more abstract desire that can be fulfilled with some means other than sex.
Of course, it appears we ought not to want anything of Heaven except God. Wanting anything else is spiritual perversion.
This is where religion starts to smuggle the most vulgar utilitarianism in the back door. As Lewis again says:
Against [the loss of all these goods], to be sure, we set one positive: the vision and enjoyment of God. And since this is an infinite good, we hold (rightly) that it outweighs them all.
The use of bracketed “(rightly)” can be taken as a nervous tic that indicates that many people will, in fact, justifiably consider this kind of weighing of incommensurable goods to be nonsensical and pernicious.
That not utilitarian enough for you? Let’s consider what happens when you throw your neighbour into the mix, as suggested by a (presumable) actual Catholic:
Your objection regarding your wife is an emotional difficulty, not a theological difficulty. This is a crude analogy, but it will have to do for the moment: suppose you have a million dollars in your right pocket and a penny in your left. Your left pocket springs a hole and you lose the penny, but the right remains intact and you retain the million. When you get home you notice that you have lost the penny (with an initial sense of panic as you reach into the left pocket) but then sigh with relief as you see that you still have the million. Do you pine away and mourn, weep and lament for the lost penny, or do you experience pleasure that you are still a millionaire and have no sorrow at all about the lost 1 cent-piece?
In that case, CS Lewis’ simple faith containing “harps and golden streets and reunions with family members” is not an overly literal metaphor for the reality -- it is a lie that obstructs the reality. For it is presumptuous to count on any reunions with people whose spiritual lives are utterly beyond one’s control. It is preferable to consider one’s neighbours as coins to be traded and bartered for inferior and superior goods.
Of course, none of these intellectual delineations of a boring or intuitively barbaric Heaven even begin to touch and demolish the Puddleglum argument, which is profoundly anti-intellectual and appeals because it is anti-intellectual. The scholastic Heaven is not richer or more subtle; it is just... boring, and Lewis’ own characters and stories testify against it, let alone Feser’s expansion of the principle. Therefore, the necessary correlate of a scholastic religion is transcendent egotism and a runaway focus on Hell-fire as the primary source of motivation, as cold Reason sucks away any more balanced justification for bothering with the Divine at all.
