To anyone familiar with Tolkien and Lewis's sensibilities, that's hardly surprising.

Indeed, it would be impossible to imagine Tolkien — who famously disliked Lewis's own Narnia stories, a sentiment contrasting greatly with Lewis' enormous esteem for Tolkien's Middle-earth — being anything but appalled by Disney's silly dwarfs, with their slapstick humor, nursery-moniker names, and singsong musical numbers.

Nor is it particularly surprising that Lewis similarly derided Disney's dwarves as "vulgar" (though he appreciated other aspects of the film).

In the words of a Tolkien scholar quoted in the Atlas Obscura post, "I think it grated on them that he was commercializing something that they considered almost sacrosanct."

(Aside: That post starts with the incredibly ignorant claim, propounded with astonishingly misplaced confidence, that "It's no secret that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were legendary frenemies.")

Thinking about this recently, though, it occurred to me that a contemporary and peer of Lewis and Tolkien's, though not of their circle, would likely have had a very different view, had he lived a few years longer: G.K. Chesterton (who died in 1936, two years before Snow White was released).

Unlike Tolkien and Lewis — Oxbridge dons and literary elites — Chesterton was a populist who attended but did not graduate from public university (University College London), and whose work was entirely popular in nature.

Chesterton was a great defender of popular and even "vulgar" culture — the very change leveled by Lewis and Tolkien against Snow White. Take the following utterly typically Chestertonian sentiment, from All Things Considered:

I believe firmly in the value of all vulgar notions, especially of vulgar jokes. When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea. Continue reading

• Deacon Steven D. Greydanus is film critic for the National Catholic Register, creator of Decent Films, and a permanent deacon in the Archdiocese of Newark.

First, he says we must really want to grow in this virtue. He notes how a famous Christian—when looking back at his life—realized that his prayer for chastity was really saying something like: "Oh Lord, make me chaste. But please don't do it just yet."

Of course, his reference here is to the great St. Augustine. Indeed, every saint has a past and every sinner a future. It's good to know about saints who struggled, since that can give us confidence that we, too, can overcome.

Second, Lewis notes that many never set out on this great battle for chastity because they assume from the outset that it's impossible to attain. This assumption deters us from really giving our all in this fight. We go in half-heartedly, accepting defeat before we even begin.

But as Lewis points out—with a great many things—we often surprise ourselves with what we can do when our backs are against the wall: "People quite often do what seemed impossible before they did it. It is wonderful what you can do when you have to."

We recognize the merits of not giving up in so many other areas (e.g., sports or school), but for some reason we assume that the moral and spiritual life should not call forth this same kind of effort. What would happen if we went after chastity and holiness with the same intensity and vigor as we hit the weight room or the track?

Thirdly, Lewis counsels that we must ask for God's help. Here Lewis is exceptionally insightful and strikes a chord in the spiritual tradition: we often wish that God would heal our vices and instantly empower us with heroic virtue; but perhaps if he did, we would fall into the even greater sin of pride.

"Very often," Lewis writes, "what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again." This process teaches us to depend upon God in a radical way—and this is the great secret to sanctity; indeed, this is the meaning of the first beatitude "Blessed are the poor in spirit."

The poor in spirit are humble and recognize their need for grace; in this way, they become soft clay, allowing God to work more fully in their lives. Continue reading

Sources

• Bible Study for Catholics, article by Dr Andrew Swafford, Associate Professor of Theology at Benedictine College, who lives in Atchison, Kansas.
• Image: quotefancy

Many answers might be given, from the obvious fact that they are stories well told, to the suggestion that they call us back to a lost childhood. But perhaps there is something deeper going on here.

To understand the deep appeal of Narnia, we need first to appreciate the place of stories in helping us to make sense of reality, and our own place within it.

The Chronicles of Narnia resonate strongly with the basic human intuition that our own story is part of something greater and grander - something which, once we have grasped it, allows us to see our situation in a new and more meaningful way. A veil is lifted; a door is opened; a curtain is drawn aside; we are enabled to enter a new realm.

Our own story is now seen to be part of a much bigger story, which both helps us understand how we fit into a greater scheme of things, and discover the difference we can make.

Like his Oxford friend J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis was deeply aware of the imaginative power of "myths" - stories told to make sense of who we are, where we find ourselves, what has gone wrong with things, and what can be done about it.

A "myth," as Lewis uses the term, is not a false story told to deceive, but a story that on the one hand resonates with the deepest structures of reality, and on the other has an ability to connect up with the human imagination. Continue reading

Sources

• Alister McGrath, Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, in ABC Religion and Ethics.
• Image: Dan-Dare

She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her academic work focuses on imagination in apologetics, with special attention to the writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams; she teaches courses on apologetics, medieval culture and philosophy, and modern and post-modern culture.

Dr. Ordway's book Not God's Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms(Ignatius Press, 2014) describes her journey from atheism to Christianity, and her subsequent entrance into the Catholic Church.

She recently corresponded with Catholic World Report, discussing her life and beliefs as an atheist, her journey toward Christianity, the mistakes made by many Christians in conversing with atheists, and the main reasons why she became Catholic.

CWR: Early in Not God's Type, you state that as a young atheist, you thought that the "decisive argument against faith was that I could not believe, no matter how much I might want to." What sort of understanding of "faith" did you have at that time? How might you respond now to an atheist who expresses a similar notion?

Dr. Ordway: I had the faulty (but common!) idea that faith meant blind faith: that is, believing something without evidence or even contrary to the evidence. Unfortunately, this is a misunderstanding that is propagated by many Christians. As an apologist, I've heard Christians say that they don'twant to know about evidence for the Resurrection or for the existence of God, because that will "diminish their faith." It's no wonder that many atheists conclude that ‘faith' is a synonym for ‘ignorance'.

If having faith really did mean believing something without any grounding for that belief, I would never have been able to do it. I couldn't then, and I can't now: it's simply not possible. It would be wishful thinking or self-deception. Continue reading

Source and Image:

• The Catholic World Report

Has he secured his place because he was a poet? He certainly had early aspirations in that direction. Born in Belfast, he hoped to become an "Irish voice" in poetry, with W B Yeats as his model. Yet little came of this aspiration. His first slender volume of verse, Spirits in Bondage (1919), was published under the pseudonym "Clive Hamilton" (Hamilton was his mother's maiden name). Many of these poems were written while he served as a junior officer in the trenches of northern France during the First World War.

The early poems remain a powerful witness to Lewis's early atheism, railing against an absent and uncaring God who failed to halt the slaughter the author saw around him. But he never achieved recognition as a "war poet", like Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, who are also commemorated in Poets' Corner. Indeed, not only did he fail to secure recognition for his war poetry, he was not acclaimed as a poet of any kind, as the lack of interest in his second volume of verse - Dymer (1926) - made painfully clear.

He went on to secure his reputation, rather, as a literary critic at Oxford and Cambridge, offering important assessments of the poetry of others, especially Edmund Spenser and John Milton. He excelled at this task. His work on Milton drew attention to an aspect of his poetry that had been neglected - how it sounded to its readers. Lewis became acutely sensitive to the rhythm of the English language, whether poetry or prose. He never used a typewriter, explaining that the clattering of its keys destroyed his "sense of rhythm". For Lewis, a fountain pen enabled its user to be attuned to the melody of language.

In the end, the poetic vision that Lewis never quite managed to actualise in his verse was found instead in his prose.

Full Story: The Telegraph

Alister McGrath is Professor of Theology, Ministry and Education at King's College London. His 'C S Lewis: A Life' will be published by Hodder in April 2013