Wednesday, April 11 ~ TWHF Chs.6-7

Discuss Chs.4-5

• "Holy places are dark places."  What does Lewis mean here? Can you relate this to a modern experience of your own? Is it ever true?
• How trustworthy is this priest?
• If we consider the ancient view that the gods will curse the land until the "sin" has left via  a scapegoat, is Psyche's beauty and adoration the only injustice that could be causing the curse?  (Don't forget that Ungit is a fertility goddess.)
• Consider the archetypes in Oedipus. Do you see a "blind seer" like Tiresias or a person whose eyes are open, but cannot perceive the truth? What truth is being presented with these archetypes? 

Journal 21: Chapters 6-7

1. Contrast the Fox and the priest.  Consider the following excerpt from "Christian Apologetics" in God in the Dock, p.102-03:

We may salva reverential [without outraging reverence] divide religions, as we do soups, into ‘thick' and ‘clear'.  By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions.  By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions.  Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly.... But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition.  It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord.  The savage convert has to be Clear: I have to be Thick.  That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.

1. How can we relate the story to the idea of "men without chests" form Abolition?
2. Why does Orual perceive Psyche's willingness to be the sacrifice as repudiation of her love? 
3. Consider the thesis from The Four Loves. My paraphrase....Natural loves can "hold" only when infused and transformed by divine love (agape). Left alone and cut off from agape, natural loves seize to be loves at all, but eventually become corrupted into bitterness and eventually a hatred. Can you see a degradation of Orual's storge love?