F.Q.

[dreamer_easy]

"But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?"
- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952

I only qualify as half a filthy quisling. If I understand correctly, by worshipping gods other than God, I am by definition worshipping the Devil, and any magick I happen to throw about comes from Satan. However, as a Wiccan, I'm beholden not to harm others, under penalty of copping three times as much badness in return, so I only half-qualify.

I'm really only being playful here. The "filthy quislings" remark put me off Lewis forever, but it was only the last straw. To be rigorously fair, Lewis is only saying that people who believe in witches naturally believe they deserve execution, and that if we believed in murderous Devil-worshippers we'd have the same attitude. Probably he didn't realise the ugly connotations of the remark, which suggests the witch-hunters were acting from moral motives rather than greed or bigotry.

Interestingly, Lewis' disbelief in witches is itself offensive to at least some fundamentalists. Also interesting is the date of publication, if Macquarie Uni's catalogue is correct - although to be fair, Lewis made the original broadcasts on which the book is based a decade before McCarthy.

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[ashamel.livejournal.com]

Isn't the whole point of religion that it provides a link to a wider metaphysical 'reality', so that such things are no longer simply (fragile human) opinion?

I don't agree with the stance (not being Christian, for a start), but it certainly seems an internally consistent one.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

To be quite fair to Lewis, he was referring not to any modern pagans or witches, but to the anecdotal, mythical view of witches held by certain people in past centuries. Because those people believed that witches a) worshipped the Devil and b) had supernatural powers which they used to cause serious malicious harm to their neighbours, he was explaining that if we believed there really were people of that sort (call them anything you want -- he says witches, because the people of that day would have), then people of that sort would certainly qualify as traitors to humanity (thus the "quislings") and worthy of capital punishment.

To take his words as though he were speaking about modern people who follow Wicca is, I believe, a misapprehension. If Lewis had even heard of Wicca as such, I should be surprised. He certainly knew about paganism, however, and spoke kindly of it (though he did not believe that paganism was a legitimate end in itself -- he saw it rather as a stepping stone on the path to truth).

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed - I only joked of being half-a-quisling because I worship other gods, rather than because of the tenuous connection between historical witches and Wiccans. (When I encountered Lewis' remark for the first time I was technically an atheist.)

btw, I love that ikon more and more.

[drox.livejournal.com]

Probably he didn't realise the ugly connotations of the remark, which suggests the witch-hunters were acting from moral motives rather than greed or bigotry.

I'm no expert, but I sort of thought that most witch-hunters acted neither from moral motives nor from greed or bigotry, but rather from a kind of mental illness. That mob-mentality that can drive otherwise well-meaning people to do things they'd never dream of doing on their own.

They may have been led/motivated by a greedy or bigoted charismatic individual (or, less likely, by a charismatic individual who really believed that witch-hunts were moral) but I have trouble believing that *that many* people were so bigoted or greedy (or "pious") that they'd participate in such atrocities without some kind of... brainwashing?

It may not excuse their actions, but I have nightmares in which I find myself caught up in just such a mob (not a witch-hunting one, but certainly a terrorist one), doing horrible things that, in the heat of the moment, seemed somehow right and justified.

[barrington.livejournal.com]

You may be interested to read Philip Pullman's take on C. S. Lewis; supposedly (there is some contention over this) the His Dark Materials trilogy (which I can't recommend highly enough, if you haven't read it, but I think that's unlikely) is partly a response to what Pullman perceives as Christian propaganda in the Narnia books (Aslan as Jesus, et al. - it's well covere elsewhere by others).

[infinitarian.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of Lewis' fiction and criticism (and indeed a Christian, albeit a heterodox one) -- but even as a Christian teen I was always suspicious of his apologetics. Mere Christianity, in particular, is riddled with logical holes, and worse still it's perfectly clear that Lewis was too intelligent a person not to be aware of them. MC is written as a tool of evangelism in a very specific cultural context, and obviously for Lewis the importance of saving souls (from what he believed to be eternal torment, let's not forget) took precedence over his intellectual honesty. This is a Bad Thing in an academic, naturally, but I can see where he was coming from.

The "witches" comment in MC is a throwaway, coming in the context of a defence against the charge that the Church hasn't always promoted right behaviour. It's absurdly simplistic, of course, and I don't believe for a moment that Lewis had actually thought it through -- and the implications for real-world "witches" would have been the last thing on his mind. He was writing for people on whose cultural radar the idea that there might be such peoplewouldn't even have featured. Certainly what he says appears to justify the Medieval persecutions, but I believe he would have considered that an irrelevance given that there were "no witches" at the time he was writing. (The Narnia books feature a number of "witches" in villain roles, but they're straightforward fantasy figures, no less than the centaurs or fauns.)

What's more, I would think that if Lewis had had the concepts of modern Wicca patiently explained to him, he would have agreed that people with such beliefs were not "witches" in the sense he meant it at all. As synaesthete7 says, Lewis was very sympathetic to ancient paganism, and although I'm sure he would have considered its modern revival misguided, I can hardly think he would have wanted its proponents burned. Unfortunately the word "witch" covers a pretty wide range of meanings.

I'm not trying to defend what is certainly a very ugly passage from one of my literary heroes -- just suggesting some insight into his probable thought processes.

Phil PH