I am putting them all in one box for my own use, or possibly yours if you want to send it to someone. There is nothing new here, just a repackaging.
1. Undeceptions
2. Undeceptions II - Biographical Notes
5. Undeceptions IV - The Ransom Trilogy and The Great Divorce.
7. Undeceptions VI - Till We Have Faces
8. That Hideous Strength. Not actually part of the series but added in for convenience
9. Self-Deception Anecdote. A later addition.
3 comments:
I admit that the first time I read a commenter observing that Lewis though that colonizing other planets would be an essentially satanic endeavour, I thought that was:
a) an odd prologue to late modern progressive opposition to spreading human 'imperialism' to other worlds and 'destroying' their 'environments', which I couldn't fathom given where Lewis was coming from;
b) nuts;
c) at best, just reflective of an older worldview in which 'space' and 'the heavens' were more literally conflated.
It's still an aspect of Lewis that I cannot really comprehend. But I appreciated very much your giving a context for it in this wider elaboration on Lewis' ideas.
There's a lot about the Star Trekky worldview of our times that I do not like at all, but I guess unlike Lewis I just grew up thinking travelling in space a good thing, technology permitting. I can imagine social and metaphysical problems that might arise, but still can't quite reach the idea that it is a metaphysical or moral evil. Or that humanity, for all I might disdain it, would be a contagion in 'heaven' by travelling in space.
I agree that the mere traveling is unlikely to have any spiritual effect (though I can't be absolutely sure of that). Colonising an unpopulated area I find similar, though I confess that Lewis's thought that our fallenness might be transmissible to another place at least plausible. But contact with other creatures, even if not sentient, does carry the large questions with it. Lewis, writing about Out of the Silent Planet imagines Satan desperate to know the answer whether the redemption of Earth has any effect anywhere else in the universe. It is is perspective that we reject in our age simply because we do not entertain it, not because we have thought it through and asked honestly. For secular terrestrials who believe that such things as fallenness are not possible even here, they will of course scoff that it could extend beyond even a single individual, let alone a solar system. But for those of us who believe there is some sort of Adamness and Eveness and loss of original purpose in our humanity cannot be quite certain what it means elsewhere.
I say this only to raise the question as a serious one, simply because no one is doing so these days.
"I confess that Lewis's thought that our fallenness might be transmissible to another place at least plausible."
This stuff just makes me sad. A view of reality that produces a fealty to a god is just so full of misery. Its your universe, not some super hero's you made up, and you are guilty of no more, than the things you know you screwed up. Your very self is the singularity that spawned this universe, and marvellous beyond any separate being's understanding. The part of your mind that produces thought, is no different than that which maintains the reality you are immersed in. A reality so amazing that any imagining, pales in comparison.
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