Into the Wardrobe

To adress the original question of Lewis' involvement with the occult, the last few chapters of his autobiography, "Suprised By Joy," are helpful. These are direct quotes from that work, and all refer to the time before his conversion:

"As soon as I paused on that 'perhaps,' inevitably all the old occultist lore, and all the old excitement which the Matron of Chartres had innocently aroused in me, rose out of the past....Two things hitherto widely seperated in my mind rushed together: the imaginative longing for joy, or rather the longing which was joy, and the ravenous, quasi-prurient desire for the occult, the preternatural as such. And with these there came (less welcome) some stirring of unease, some of the immemorial fear we have all known in the nursery....there is a kind of gravitation in the mind whereby good rushes to good and evil to evil....in a word, you have already had in this story the World and the Flesh; now came the Devil....I came to see that the magical conclusion was just as irrelevant to joy as the erotic conclusion has been." - chapter XI

"Had they (fantasies) not revealed their true nature by luring me...into...the squalid nightmare of magic?" - chapter XIII (note - he later implies that it was not his incorrectly labeled fantasies that were responsible)

"I thought they (his friends recently converted to anthroposophy) were falling under that ravenous, salt lust for the occult" - chapter XIII

It is, thus, reasonable to assume that despite an early interest (and a fearful, tentative interest at that) in the occult, Lewis not only rejected it, but came to regard it as evil and veiwed it with disgust and horror.

As for the accusation that he is new age or beleives in Theosophy, I have but one word - ludicrous. He not only refutes many modern philosophies (quite neatly) in his works, but he also displays a remarkably strong anti-modernist bias in his works. For any doubters, read his book "Miracles," especially the chapter on "Christianity and Religion." I don't think anyone could call him a modernist or a Theosophist after finishing that. And the rest of the book is worth it too.

Wow....that was longer than I had intended. Hope it helps :) .

-Inariae[/u][/i]

Really closed-minded dogmatic people seem to target Lewis--I don't know why, maybe because Lewis is someone who Christians look to for intellectual answers and this ruffles their egos--they want people to look to them for answers! A professor I had at college, one who was very dogmatic and intolerant of other peoples' ideas, once stood in front of a class and said, "Many people consider Lewis a Christian. After studying his works for many years I have come to the conclusion that he was not." He used to refer to him as a "philosopher," by which he meant a philosopher rather than a Christian believer.

I didn't buy it then but now I have gained a enough wisdom to see that the man probably never really studied Lewis at all. He was just playing the "dogma game." Anyone who did not completely agree with him was obviously a heretic.

And so it goes. A friend of mine who attended a really far-out fundamentalist church when he was a graduate student at the University of Kentucky said the pastor there went around saying Lewis wasn't a Christian. Once someone mentioned The Screwtape Letters to him and he said, "That's the book where C. S. Lewis calls God the enemy."

Frustrating examples like this could be multiplied. Best to just let these cranks, kooks, bigots, ignoramuses, go their own way.

But they are annoying.

I'll get back on this when I have a little more time, but I'd have to say that article made some sense given its premises. I'm not surprised a fundamentalist of that stripe would disapprove of Lewis. (The article on Tolkien, where they flat-out admit they haven't read his books, was a little more directly silly, though. Kind of fun to see old Tolkien get the HP treatment, though. :))

Although I must admit I was unaware that Aleister Crowley was an Inkling. That would probably have made their beer-and-reading sessions a little more amusingly unpredictable.