Jacob Moore > Recent Status Updates

"I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough to not despise me as a romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavor to regulate my mind." (20)

Christian science provides a ground for the objectivity of sense perception and for the reality of the truth. It includes the claims of special revelation and reestablishes a place for theology as central in the organism of science, alongside and in service of the other disciplines.

"To Bavinck's Dutch ear, the question of whether a scientist or a theologian speaks with greater authority would make little sense: to him theology IS a science, belongs in the university of sciences, and is practiced by scientists."

When Jane first crossed the dry and dusty world which Mark's mind inhabited she had been like a spring shower; in opening himself to it he had not been mistaken. He has gone wrong only in assuming marriage, by itself, gave him either power or title to appropriate that freshness. As he saw now, one might as well have thought one could buy a sunset by buying the field from which one had seen it.

This kingdom free of care and filled with joy,
crowded with citizens of the Old and New
turned all its love and vision to one goal.
O great delight that glittered for their view,
O threefold light within an only Star,
look on our battering tempest here below! (31.25-30)

Christ did not say to his first brotherhood,
'Go and preach silly tales of all the earth.'
but founded all their preaching on the truth,
And from their cheeks the truth alone blared forth:
only to kindle faith they went to war,
girt with the shield & lance of gospel truth.
Now they go forth to preach with jests galore
and tricksy words--and if people howl,
their caps swell up & they don't ask for more. (29.109-117)

"That is just the question," said the Director, with a smile. "I am not allowed to be too prudent. I am not allowed to use desperate remedies until desperate diseases are really apparent. Otherwise we become just like our enemies -- breaking all the rules whenever we imagine that it might possibly do some vague good for humanity in the remote future."

Deep charity makes us ready servants of
the Wisdom that steers the world -- the charity
that sorts our places here as you observe. (21.70-72)

The kingdom of Heaven suffers violence
from living hope and burning charity
that overcomes the will of the divine.
Not as a man will overcome a man---
the divine wins because it would be won,
and won, it wins with its benignity. (20.94-99)

"Blessed are they whom grace grants so much light
that in their hearts the overhot desires,"
said he, "send up no smoke for taste's delight--
Whose thirst is always what the just requires." (24.151-154)

The weakness of the flesh is a universal experience; sexual temptations are composite; temptation can serve a useful purpose if it leads us to humility; acquaintance with our own weakness teaches us compassion with others; and that we, when we see another human being in truth - weak but with capacity for and will towards the good - see them the way God sees them, that is, with infinite mercy.

"I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart & to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms & like books written in a very strange tongue... Perhaps you will the gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer."

No patriotism is so fierce as that which demands that one's native land be just. "We love Florence so dearly," wrote Dante, "that for the love we bore her we are wrongfully suffering exile." (Endnote on p. 424)

My sins were horrible, but endless grace
has arms of generous goodness thrown so wide
they take in all who tutn to them...

No man so loses, by their curse's power,
eternal love, that love cannot return
so long as hope shows any gren in flower.

(III.121-123 and 133-135)

"That none might be excluded from the means of obtaining felicity... He manifests his perfections in the whole structure of the universe, & daily places himself in our view, that we cannot open our eyes without being compelled to behold him... On each of his works, his glory is graven in characters so bright, so distinct, & so illustrious that none, however dull and illiterate, can plead ignorance as their excuse."

Appeasement! Is that all Christianity has to offer a wounded heart crying out to love and be loved, to know and be known? Must the Christian just wait and burn while fire within spends itself and live coals turn into ashes? Have they no other response to love's passion than resignation, eyes mournfully raised heavenward?

All around this little island at the base
where the waves pound against the mountain's shore,
reeds grow in the soft mud. No other plants
That break out into leaf or strand upright
with stiffened trunk can long survive the place,
but yield to all the battering of the waves. (I.100-105)

You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside & an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say that he had been delivered from the rhetoric of his passions & had emerged into unassailable freedom.
... Predestination & freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many debates he had heard on this subject.

"Don't imagine I've been selected to go to Perelandra because I'm anyone in particular. One never can see, or not till long afterwards, why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity. Certainly, it is never for what the man himself would have regarded as his chief qualifications." (24)

Very intriguing. Biggest learning so far is that Robin Williams' portrayal of Teddy Roosevelt in Night at the Museum is highly implausible if not outright misrepresentation.

I felt sure that the creature was what we call "good," but I wasn't sure whether I liked "goodness" so much as I had supposed. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful?

Susannah Black-Roberts essay is one of the most lovely and challenging things I have read in awhile. I am increasingly blown away by Lewis' brilliance.

"As it turns out, what was wrong with Susan is what was wrong with Jane, and it was the same thing that was wrong with Mark, and it turns out not to have anything to do with sex at all.

"She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown up," says Jill of Susan."

"Vengeance of God! How much should you be feared
by everyone who reads my tale and learns
of what was made so clear before my eyes!
For there I saw great flocks of naked souls
mightily weeping in their misery,
subject, apparently, to different rules...

So the eternal fire descended here,
sparking the sand like fuel beneath the flint,
doubling the sorrows of the damned." (14.16-22; 37-39)

"It is not from works that we are set free by the faith of Christ, but from belief in the works, that is, from foolishly presuming to seek justification through works."

Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian

Lewis shows us that repentance, conversion, & self-gift are in one sense perfectly ordinary, even prosaic -- and yet they participate in the most extraordinary epic adventure we can imagine. Arthur is King in Avalon, and in Edgestow.

"Your art strives to follow, as it may,
Nature - you are the pupil, she the teacher.
So we might say that human industry
Is the grandchild of God. From these two things --
remember the first part of Genesis --
man must derive his life & his advance,
And since the usurer takes a different path,
setting his hope in something else, he sins,
despising Nature and her follower." (11.103-111)

"One can imagine many twenty-first evangelicals regarding contemporary Marks and Janes with enough contempt to be able to write a biting fake satirical news story about them, but not with enough depth and compassion to be able to make them the compelling and believable protagonists in a novel.

Yet it is the Christian imagination of Lewis to make precisely these the key to his imagined future." (205)

Stuck in the mire they say: 'Sullen we were
up in the sweet air gladdened by the sun,
bearing a sluggish smoke within our hearts." (7.121-123)

Luther's concern with the late medieval church was less that it had made salvation too hard (by endless works rather than simple faith) & more that it had made salvation too easy (by thoughtless outward works or transactions rather than heartfelt repentance, being crucified with Christ). The real Gospel of Christ, charged Luther, was both more serious, more frightening, & more liberating.

"...that city of Lucifer crammed with many crowds, and no communion." (414)

A chilling line from Esolen in the endnotes.