lalaith - it’s Turin’s sickly sister, isn’t it?
I was brainwashed as a child too. I can’t quote you a Bible verse or anything, but supposedly people who go to heaven don’t mourn their relatives who don’t make it because “He will wipe their tears away.”
There’s a pat answer for everything, doncha know. 
That was a pretty fair attempt at a pat answer yourself, Dung Beetle. :dubious: On the assumption that those who don’t go to Heaven have chosen of their own free will not to go, how would you have it?
Susan can either choose to accept salvation, or not. If she accepts it, no further problems. If she rejects it, those who knew her have two options: be happy without her, or be unhappy. If the latter, then Susan, by her own selfish choice, gets to mar the joy of others for an indefinite term, possibly for ever. Is this fair?
As mentioned above, there is an episode in The Great Divorce that addresses this. The narrator, in a peculiar kind of vestibule-of-Heaven setting, gets to witness a meeting between one of the Saved, a woman who was plainly some kind of “angel of the slums”, and the ghost of her former sweetheart who has yet to choose his fate. She died before him, and he is so obsessed with the idea that she must have been pining away in Heaven without him that he shuts his ears to her entreaties to enter into joy for himself. He focusses plaintively on the fact that she no longer needs him and blinds himself to the plain knowledge that all her needs are met, as will his be, in full and unstinting measure, to the extent that what they feebly imagined as “need” in their mortal life is utterly blotted out. Putting it plainly, he would sooner have her in Hell with him than accept the blissful and joyous fact of his own irrelevance to someone else’s happiness, and enter Heaven with her.
After the ghost has dwindled away to nothing, the narrator and his guide, who is based on George MacDonald (with whom, unfortunately, I’m quite unacquainted), discuss the case. The narrator is quite as sympathetic as you might think, but his guide, who is wise, draws his attention to the unwelcome facts. There are those on Earth who will ruthlessly use the pity of others to get their own way; like the little boy who has been chastised and goes to sit in the attic and feel sorry for himself until one of his sisters comes to comfort him, not because he deserves it but because she cannot bear to think of him sitting there crying alone in the dark. Pity is a noble emotion and it may spur great acts of charity, but it must not be allowed to be used as a weapon; it has been perverted innumerable times in human history. And grand as it sounds to say that you will accept no salvation which leaves even one soul out in the cold, MacDonald says, “watch that sophistry, or you’ll make a Dog in the Manger the tyrant of the universe.”
Quite true, Malacandra! lalaith had said that she enjoyed the books, but that part disturbed her. I just wanted to let her know that the Pevensies weren’t really being heartless, at least according to the doctrine I was brought up with.
The Great Divorce sounds interesting; I haven’t read that one yet.
Sorry, I’ll go brush up on my reading-for-comprehension! I thoroughly recommend TGD, it’s an interesting read, though it’s a slim volume. From the presentation you could view it as endorsing the doctrine of a post-death salvation, but the MacDonald figure expressly says that it is not to be taken that way, nor indeed as a literal picture of the hereafter.
I could run on more about it, but I’ll restrain myself for now.
LOL I’ve never heard it put that way before. It is.
The New Yorker, current issue (double issue Dec 26 '05 / Jan 2 '06) contains a good Philip Pullman interview. He addresses some of what he said previously about C.S. Lewis / Narnia and Tolkein / LOTR, reiterating some, clarifying some, finding a few nice things to say about Lewis and Narnia… good interview.
Perhaps “sickly” is the wrong word, but she is the one who died young, owing to an ill wind that blew nobody any good - one of Morgoth’s acts of petty spite. The name means “Laughter” if I remember right. She was the sister of Turin and Nienor, the youngest child of Hurin. Or so I think. I read Unfinished Tales only four months ago and that expands on the Narn i Hin Hurin at some length.
to AHunter3 - Thanks for the heads-up re the New Yorker article. I’m more interested in what he has to say about Tolkien than Lewis. I still don’t feel his original comments/criticism were justified or made sense, but have not had time to add my two cents to the discussion in this thread. Suffice it to say, I think Tolkien said much about the human condition - whether what he said was “new”, I don’t know, and I don’t know whether that’s important. I do know he said it in a new (and beautiful) way.
She was almost all that – she was Hurin’s middle child who died before Nienor was born. (You don’t want to ask me a Middle-earth genealogy question. I think I put about a thousand hours of research and computer work into making the most beautiful illustrated genealogies for some of the characters. {I got frustrated one day by the incomplete ones done by Tolkien and in The Guide to Middle-earth. Frustration led to obsession. Course, that obsession did lead to a beautiful work of art even if very few other people ever get to see it.})
And her name does mean “laughter.” One of the reasons I liked it enough to pick it as my screen name. That and she is very much a blank page so it’s not like I’m calling myself Luthien thinking I’m the most beautiful woman to ever walk the earth.
I’ve tried reading some of these. But Christopher Tolkien’s approach of “I’m going to publish everything my dad so much as sneezed on” is too much for me. I’ll stick with the fictional works Tolkien had published and, of course, The Simarillion.
AHunter3 – Pity it’s not online. I’ll have to see if the library carries the New Yorker. Anything really interesting you can quote?