This was a good talk, not just for the attribution of fake #CSLewis quotes to a guy named “B.S. Lewis”. https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2026/02/06/longdefeat/

Related: The Letters of CS Lewis & JRRT
https://clickhole.com/these-letters-between-c-s-lewis-and-j-r-r-tolkien-she-1825120808/
#tolkien #cslewis #fantasy #bookstodon

This, but for JRRT and CS Lewis themselves. You can cut the sexual tension with a knife, or probably more like blunt scissors since CSL isn't allowed sharp objects after The Incident. When are they gonna just strip down, oil up, and do it, while CS whips JRRT and demands "WHO'S THE SANTA CLAUS NOW?"

https://theonion.com/lord-of-the-rings-reader-cant-believe-how-long-it-taking-sam-and-frodo-to-fuck/
#tolkien #cslewis #fantasy #bookstodon

BookTuber reviewing Classic Fantasy Novels.
https://mithrandirolorin.blogspot.com/2026/02/booktuber-overing-classic-fantasy-novels.html

#Fantasy #UrbanFantasy #GerogeMacDonald #Lilith #Phantastes #PrincessAndTheGoblin #WilliamMorris #JRRTolkien #Tolkien #Tolkeinesque #Inklings #CSLewis #GRRMartin #GRRM #GeorgeRRMartin

The impatient reader may say simply: it's all #fiction, and fiction is simply lies breathed through silver (to borrow that infamous phrase from #CSLewis), and Mary Shelley (and Lovecraft and Stevenson et alii) were merely unusually successful at telling lies that people wanted to believe.

This is the reductionist view of fiction, a commonplace view among persons concerned with money and business and especially with #technology, a culture which is hostile to anything too imaginative or too far removed from "real life". Fiction isn't "real" and therefore there's no point in bothering with these questions of plausibility.

A passage from #CSLewis, The Problem of Pain:

...no factual description of any human environment could include the uncanny and the Numinous or even hint at them. There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given.

I am unconvinced of this. I value my spiritual experiences, my perception of what I think of as the numinous (that which feels spiritually powerful) and yet this bare dichotomy doesn't sit well with me. Suppose some function could be found for numinous feelings, some selective advantage perhaps? Maybe there's some indirect benefit to the human population if some proportion of its members tends to experience awe and astonishment at powerful things.

Ironically, that doublethinkful willingness of Christians to embrace each other in the same breath as disavowing each other is one of the chief reasons, I suspect, why #Christianity came to lean so heavily upon the celebrity of #CSLewis. They needed someone to symbolize an ecumenism among "mere Christians" that does not actually exist in reality.

It's easier for Christians to live with their absurd degree of self-contradiction and internal dissension if they can point at least to some commercial brands that glue them together. "At least we spend money on the same things," different Christians can say. "We both shop at Hobby Lobby. We both buy C. S. Lewis books and watch movies about #Narnia. Surely we are, in a sense, really the brethren in faith that we claim to be."

(cont'd)

And meanwhile, #CSLewis was making himself a political figure in private. He was cultivating friendships with highly politicized U.S. #Christian leaders such as Billy Graham, affecting I suppose to be maintaining their correspondence and friendship solely as "mere Christians".

This has always been a big issue with Christians in my experience...as necessary, they lean into an ecumenical mood of affecting to be "merely Christian", feeling a disinterested sense of fellowship with anyone claiming to be faithful in Jesus Christ, a mood which dissolves in an instant when Christians have some conflict with each other. One can go from "fellow Christian" to "not really a Christian" in an instant, doublethinkfully, in the middle of the same conversation.

(cont'd)

And I for one am tired of getting no better acknowledgement of the moral contradictions at work from #Christians than a continuation of the insincere little dance they do around their own sins. You get it from #CSLewis; you get it from all of them. "Tee-hee! Nobody's perfect! We're all sinners! Forgive me, brother, even as I profit from my own sins."

Christians want moral authority over the entire Earth, in exchange for this song-and-dance. They want to be acclaimed as the moral center of human civilization, and they want governments and societies to be enforcing their moral pronouncements by force. (The more timid Christians are simply content to let the more shameless Christians fuse themselves with fascist politics and Christofascist tyranny.)

(cont'd)

Hence I can very easily believe that Jack Lewis was easily persuaded that he was doing something very important and commendable and necessary to the Lord's purpose for Great Britain when he was allowing himself to be groomed, by multiple #Christian corporate tempters, into "The Apostle to Sceptics".

And there was ever so much money in it. I know that nobody wants to think that kindly and self-effacing old #CSLewis was ever into Christian apologetics because of mere mercenary desire for money, but I point out that he was well-aware (q.v. the appropriate passages of That Hideous Strength) that the humanities were not a place where most people could ever expect to have much money. School was expensive for the student and losing a coveted fellowship could mean ruin.

It's silly, if you ask me, not to assume that Jack Lewis wasn't tempted by the blandishments of The World. He managed to make himself into a celebrity, and then (thanks to the nefarious plans of Walter Hooper and others) into a #Christian folk saint.

(cont'd)

The #CSLewis pose was always a bit fakey, and I feel as though its falsity really ought to be more broadly discussed and critiqued considering some of the places where Lewis was willing to go, publicly. Advertising himself as an expert on #Christian moral superiority during the War? on the BBC? What was he thinking? How could an Oxford professor convince himself that was appropriate?

But here's where the built-in hypocrisy of the English monarchy and its absurdist official religion, its little imitation of Catholicism created for the sole purpose of legitimizing the English monarch's sexual incontinence and his easily wounded pride, was of great service to the professional ambitions of Clive Staples Lewis.

(cont'd)

Needless to say the posthumous cult of #CSLewis made the sentimentality and the nostalgia a millionfold worse, but Jack Lewis was already striking just such a note in his writing, and his mentioning of Ashley Sampson already prompting and prodding Lewis into presenting himself in a certain mould as a #Christian apologeticist—for Lewis was merely the latest in a long strike of sentimentally nostalgic Christian self-publicists, pitching himself to a well-established market—is a reminder that Lewis's literary pose is necessarily a somewhat insincere one.

Clive Staples Lewis was playing G. K. Chesterton's game of presenting a lapse back into stolid, safe, well-protected and well-advertised orthodoxy as if it were an act of personal rebellion, an individual triumph, but this was especially false in Lewis's case. Right from the start, he joined forces with a vast corporate #Christian machine, and accepted their ticket to a mass audience and an extraordinary degree of media celebrity for a modest Oxford academic.

(cont'd)

RE: https://seattle.pink/@mxchara/115979873978875709

Here's another piece from the critique of Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia which seems like it could be aimed at the head of #CSLewis and the literary figure he created for himself:

...Lamb seems to think first of his audience and then to perform suitably in front of it, dressed up as 'Lamb', an automaton which becomes a stereotype—trailing before us his family, his friends, his foibles ('a foolish talent of mine'), until it is obvious that he is not at all guileless. Underneath is a knowing old sheep: one who is shrewd enough always to touch the audience's chord of sentimentality, shamelessly doing so in expressing an irrational love—a weakness, reader, but who without it?—for all that is past. Impossible to count the number of times the emotive use is made of the word old: applied to china, Margate Hoy, benches of the Inner Temple, libraries, plays, and of course friends.

This soppy sentimentality, which can't help but strike a note of emotional falsity, is exactly the mood of Jack Lewis's apologetic and devotional writings. He is presenting himself as a poor lil sinner, so full of imperfections, but trying to do his best in a world whose best days were far in the past.

(cont'd)

Attempting to read the #CSLewis foreword to The Problem of Pain is reminding me of that bilious critical piece about Charles Lamb as an essayist which I remember encountering in grade school. I've dug it up. Permit me to quote:

The essay form is one of the weakliest plants in literature's garden. It promises very little, is powered by a barely creative urge, and pushes up only a few pale sprouts, leaves that are seldom accompanied by anything as positive as a flower. In some ways it is—to change the metaphor—a sort of intellectual tatting for those not strong enough to embark upon a full-scale piece of work. There is Montaigne, of course, and there is Bacon. Neither perhaps, however historically or personally interesting, is quite sufficient to wipe away the stigma left by Johnson's definition of what he too wrote, the essay: "an irregular, ill-digested piece." The essay's dependence on the essayist's personality is rather frightening: it never quite cuts free—as does a work of art—and gradually seems to demand more and more sustenance from the personality. It hovers upon an intimacy which is false; it encourages the essayist to construct a public persona, usually self-deprecatory, whimsical, a lover of litte things, a bit of an oddity but well aware of the literary value of being an oddity. Ultimately it becomes a genteel strip-tease which, while insisting upon its artistic qualities, is aware of being sustained by vulgar human curiosity.

(source: https://archive.org/details/fiftyworksofengl00brop/page/38/mode/2up )

Ashley Sampson. Who is this person?

The Discoverer of C.S. Lewis: Rescuing Ashley Sampson from Oblivion
Author: Arend Smilde
Publication: Journal of Inklings Studies
Volume 15, Issue 2
https://doi.org/10.3366/ink.2025.0269
(definitely NOT available through sci-hub)

Whoever this Sampson person is, they convinced #CSLewis not to write pseudonymously, which would have been more ethical. Permit me to suggest, however, that Sampson wanted the ethical breach—i.e. wanted an Oxford don to be advertising himself as a Christian apologeticist:

Anonymity was rejected as inconsistent with the series; but Mr. Sampson pointed out that I could write a preface explaining that I did not live up to my own principles!

This is a general issue with #Christian writers: they have learned, in my opinion, to make light of their own hypocrisy. "I'm writing as if I'm a moral authority but gosh could I maybe be doing something wrong by claiming such authority? Well none of us is perfect! Tee-hee!"

In bed depressed, there's a podcast going in the background about how Scott Adams went totally off the rails over Donald Trump, and I've got #CSLewis open on my phone, The Problem of Pain. fun times

But I digress, except to say that Jack Lewis proved a paradoxical lifeline out of #Caltech. Not the only lifeline, but finding That Hideous Strength in the "Blacker Hovse" library was like finding a fossil in the wrong stratum (to use Winston Smith's analogy). It was an anomaly, a curiously off note worth some investigation in much the same way that Aleister Crowley or William S. Burroughs might be.

Except neither of those men is accounted the world's greatest authority on Jesus Christ. (Well...all right, I'm sure that Crowley and Burroughs have their fans, but not like the #CSLewis fandom!)

(cont'd)

The U.S. public and "The West" ought to regard #CSLewis as an occultist. I do in fact think that's the best way to regard Lewis: he managed to stumble into becoming one of the most effective mages in history, and he did it all in plain sight. #JKRowling is but the echo of Jack Lewis, the afterthought. Behind her Lewis towers...the British writer who made #magic REAL again.

Clive Staples Lewis brought MAGIC back into the world again! There would have been a time when I would have thanked him and cried huzzah! But now I rush in horror towards the breach, like poor Richardson in The Place of the Lion, not knowing what else to do or how else to stop it except by hurling myself into it, and trusting to...I don't even know. Unicorns, I suppose. Faery dust. Dragons.

(cont'd)