Stepping in briefly: it was a puzzling story for me too, and I’m not sure I agree with it, but it seems like people blame God all the time (or at least question his nature, ie. “How could a loving and just God let this happen?”) when loved ones die. It’s a human reaction. Whether it was justified or not is anybody’s guess…
I don’t find it puzzling. People often go out of their way to blame others for their troubles. God, relatives, politicians, foreigners, sometimes even random strangers: people blame them all. The logic is equally absent is most cases; God simply happens to be the last in the line - the last and most distant blame target. But none of that blame-throwing is a good idea, nor is it healthy.
The definition of God offered to these people included the traits of being all-knowing, all-caring, etc. It isn’t like it is wishful thinking that bad things should happened, but rather that the god offered to them by their priests was one who was not possible in a world in which bad things happen to good people.
P.S. If you state that this comes from a immature understanding of God’s nature, I will scream. Then, when I am done screaming, I will point out that you have no more support for your being right about god’s nature than they have.
Whoa, Scott, calm down for a second. Please notice I was making an observation about human nature, not offering my own opinion on such a view.
For Susan, who’s experienced horror first-hand–going to the station and identifying her siblings’ dead bodies–and who’s experienced the goodness of Aslan/God in her adventures, it would be a profound crisis of the soul for her, and she would probably question her faith, like many do in the wake of tragedy.
Was C.S Lewis’ A Grief Observed written before or after the last book in the Chronicles?
AFAIK, A Grief Observed is written after his beloved wife died, and Lewis himself went through a period of doubt and anger towards God, perhaps much like Susan. The Last Battle was written in 1951 while Grief was written in 1961, so I guess C.S Lewis’ wife died after the Last Battle is written.
Prior to his wife’s death, I think Lewis never suffered any hurt such that it brought him to question God’s love and grace, hence perhaps his rather dismissive treatment of Susan’s grief. It seems that Lewis’ attitude towards grief and suffering in general change after his wife’s death.
I would love to contrast what C.S Lewis think of pain and suffering both before and after his wife’s death, but that would require reading both The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed.
It’s a truism, but it’s a point Lewis makes time and again in his writings, that a particular pain or loss always seems much harder to bear than pain or loss in the abstract. I think he saw it as one of the functions of time (the healer) to restore the equilibrium and enable people to see things in perspective.
Notwithstanding this, by the time he wrote The Problem of Pain, when he was 40/41, he’d suffered a fair bit. Interestingly, he writes in a letter just before the war that perhaps his life had become too successful, too easy. He never I feel took such things for granted, as many people today tend to do. He saw ephemeral success and fame and the impostors, or the fakes, while today it’s common to think of them as “god-given” rights in our increasingly secular age.
…as the impostors, or the fakes…
Susan’s denial of Aslan/Narnia has nothing to do with her family’s demise. The denial was set in motion before the crash. Whether it brings her closer to Faith or drives her further away is totally open at the end of TLB.
Re Lewis never suffering Faith-challenging loss before Joy’s death- au contraire. If it had not been for his mother’s death in his childhood, he might have never lost his family’s formal C’tian faith, but also may have never strengthened it to become the thoughtful outspoken C’tian we now know.
However, a post-GRIEF short story on Susan after the Crash from Lewis’s pen would have been wonderful!
Btw- to make a pseudo-Biblical analogy for Susan’s loss of faith. Let’s say that a few years after the Resurrection, Mary Magdalene got majorly distracted from her
faith in Jesus- whether that distraction wealth or sex or whatever- to the point that she regarded her witness of the Risen Christ as a delusion. Add to that seeing her friends among the Disciples/Apostles horribly executed for their Faith.
Then, she’s arrested as a Christian ring-leader, tries to deny that she has any present involvement in the movement, and now must choose her present disbelief or once more reassess her past experiences of JC.
Hmmm- if I get time I might tackle writing that myself!
Scott makes the case – to think that blaming god for your troubles is the same as blaming your parents is patently absurd. the Christian god is supposedly all-knowing and all-powerful, and he was so at the creation. Ergo, every iota of suffering you’ve experienced happened with god’s permission – more, it happened as an act of his will. Because at the moment of creation, and before, he knew that by creating the universe you would feel this pain, and he decided to make you feel it. The analogy of god as the parent who lets you burn yourself once lightly so you’ll know to fear fire makes me sick – because if god is really as powerful as you people claim he is, he can make you fear the fire without letting you burn yourself. And anyway, having your whole family die in a train accident – how the hell does that lead you to fear the fire?
–Cliffy
Cliffy, have you read up much on predestination? The alternative viewpoint to what you postulate is that every decision you or anyone else makes is indeed meaningful - and that God’s extra-temporal perspective does not mean that you were foreordained to do everything you ever did in your life.
The trouble with attributing beliefs and claims to us people is that you have to be a little careful of what you say. I posted recently, in another thread somewhere, a few words on the subject of omnipotence. It doesn’t imply the ability on God’s part to perpetrate the logically absurd - such as giving you free will to think whatever you choose to, and yet override it as He pleases with implanted thoughts.
We can discuss the particulars of the death of the Pevensies in greater detail if you wish. But at the time when she heard about it, Susan was perfectly at liberty to recollect that she had seen Aslan himself slain and risen again; that (if she was still part of the circle at the time of the events of the Silver Chair) she had heard of him do likewise for Caspian; that it was perfectly reasonable to assume that her family were in the safest hands imaginable, and there was nothing to fear. And she also had the choice to scream defiance at the God she had repudiated, and act accordingly.
It’s interesting that Neil Gaiman should, in effect, take Susan’s part for the latter attitude, since he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett a book which touches upon exactly why an omnipotent being should not intervene miraculously to bail humans, individually or collectively, from the messes they choose to land themselves in.
Buckets and buckets, although rather many years ago.
Nothing I’ve ever read splittling hairs between “eternal” and “sempiternal” has ever had any success in excusing god (were he to exist) from the problem of evil. No matter the effort made by theologians, the fact remains that god knew of your suffering when he planned to create the universe, and he chose to let you suffer nonehteless.
The comment was directed to someone other than you. If I mischaracterized him, he should say so. If you don’t believe that way, then fine; I wasn’t talking about you. But there certainly are people who do believe that way. And I think their beliefs do not make any sense.
You’re right, of course, that Susan does have proof of revivification in a way that none of us in the real world do.
–Cliffy
And that’s the legacy of theology. 1000+ years of striving. Endless man hours. And litterally nothing of any demonstrable progress on big questions to show for it. We’re no farther along with resolving or even gaining any widespread lasting agreement on any of these questions than when we began. And mostly just a lot of burned heretics to show for it. Oops.
Again, I really hope the movies are better than the books, and in this case, I can definately see how they could be. Reading the books, I never knew their underlying Christian message, but I have to agree with PZ Myers: despite it being the opposite of Lewis’ intention, when I found out about their Christian message, all the things that had rubbed me wrong about the books made me less interested in and sympathetic to Christianity, not more. I like to think that I disliked Narnia for the same reasons that Tolkien did (the heavy-handness, the self-aware lecturing), and that many of these flaws are the sort that movie scripting can correct if done creatively.
You’ve kind of gotten off topic, but the situation is not quite as you describe it. First, it has been around 3500 years of striving by theologians in three religions. Some are satisfied with the answers given in Job, Augustine’s Confessions, and other works. Some, including Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers, have decided that such a god did not exist, or was no more than the mechanics of the universe. I don’t think any were burned, however. That was pretty much reserved for Rennaissance witches. (For example, the Christian Roman empire banished heretics from the Empire.)
Ah Apos, I think you’re not seeing it right. First of, Theology is a first-order study; it has had a number of good effects (and I could argue so), but these tend to be third-order effects. In other words, Christian scholars create, support, and justify a theological argument. This begins to spread through the upper and/or lower classes. Men and women explicitly drawing on this tradition then create a social movement out of it. The social movement then changes society. Examples include Locke’s writings on natural rights, and the antislavery societies of the 18th and 19th enturies. Both drew on explicitly Christian traditions and theology, going back to the so-called Dark Ages.
But even if that were not so, Theology is, like Archaeology, a black box to outsiders, studied mostly for its own sake. Very few people know anything of importance about either, mores the pity. In the end neither may have much of an effect on an individual’s life, mores the pity.
I’m talking in terms of actual knowledge, solving problems or answering questions. Name me a single theological question on which we have better answers today than we had, say, 3000 years ago. You cite Job or Augustine, but devasting critiques (and counter-critiques, and so on until we all get bored) have been raised to both of those that prevent them from bein satisfying or certain answers that could be termed knowledge. And that’s the way of things with theology: its just endless arguing with no resolution in sight, adn has been for thousands of years.
If some people enjoyed this or that as a diversion or interesting to think about in its own right, that’s great, but that’s not what I was talking about. Theologians’ primarily reason for doing theology isn’t just to amuse people or because their ideas, like ANY ideas (wrong or right, funny or serious) would have cultural byproducts. It’s to get answers to big questions and issues in the religion. Not only do we not have definitive answers, but we’ve yet to even develop a criteria by which we could judge which answers are right and which are wrong. Except, of course, the occasional foray into brute force.
I shouldn’t single out theology only: philosophy has sort of the same problem on its hands.
But yeah, this is a hijack: I didn’t mean it to be any more than an offhand response to Cliffy.
The joke at Oxford was that theologians were the guys answering questions no one was even asking.
As for those seeking entrance to St Edmund’s Hall (a college best known for its sporting rather than academic output), rumour had it that if you caught the rugby ball they threw you as you entered the interview room, you were accepted, and if you passed it back, you got a scholarship.
I really think people just for thigns to complain about. I mean, I love how these books have never caught slack until they are begining made into film. I got an opportunity to see the movie and it was amazing. And that’s it…no need to bring all this other ridiculous “hidden meaning” into it. Gimme a break.
I’m surprised, reading this thread, at the discussion about Susan and whether she was unjustly treated in TLB. In particular I’m surprised that 'Dopers think that her downfall was because she was interested in make-up and “playing the adult”.
The whole Narnia series is filled with metaphor and allegory. When I first read it, it never even occurred to me that the stated reasons for Susan’s downfall were not metaphor.
Quite simply, I always saw it that Susan was no longer a friend of Narnia because she was no longer a Christian. All the talk about lipstick and nylons and so forth was simply a metaphorical way of saying so. She became more interested in the material world than the spiritual one, lost faith, and no longer belonged.
…
That notwithstanding … Aslan said it himself: “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen.” There is hope for her.
You’re wrong about that – people have been arguing about Susan’s fate since the books were published.
–Cliffy
Perhaps, but I’m talking about the bigger argument here, not just about susan’s fate. I just get tired of hearing about how up in arms people are about this entire movie and its religious allegory. I’m partial since I enjoyed the movie I know. But everyone is entitled to my opinion. 