Clive Staples Lewis

[Prester]

Добрый день, с Новым Годом, разрешите представиться Mr. Prester.
У вас очень приятный литературный уголок, надеюсь моя компания вам не помешает.

Недавно смотрел экранизацию Льюиса про страну Нарнию, очень понравилось. Чудесная экранизация. Советую посмотреть.

Историческая справка:

Lewis Clive Stapes (1898-1963), English literary scholar who thought at Oxford University from 1925 to 1954 and then held a chair of English at Cambridge until 1963. His works include science fiction, and he became celebrated for his books of popular Christian apologetics, including The Screwtape Letters (1942), and his series of fantasies for children about the imaginary country of ‘Narnia’.

[acid]

Добро пожаловать.
Будем рады читать Вас!

[Prester]

Благодарю Вас за теплый прием.

[Arth-Gwyr]

A mne dubljazh ne ponravilsja

[Reckon_]

Недавно смотрел экранизацию Льюиса про страну Нарнию, очень понравилось. Чудесная экранизация. Советую посмотреть.

Может - в раздел кинематографа? Фильмы обсуждаются там.

Lewis Clive Stapes (1898-1963), English literary scholar who thought at Oxford University from 1925 to 1954 and then held a chair of English at Cambridge until 1963. His works include science fiction, and he became celebrated for his books of popular Christian apologetics, including The Screwtape Letters (1942), and his series of fantasies for children about the imaginary country of ‘Narnia’.

Само произведение уже обсуждалось здесь.

[Prester]

Спасибо за ссылку, но в этом трейде я акцентирую на персоне самого Льюиса и его творчестве нежели на конкретном произведении; простите что не высказался более внятно, фильм это просто частный наглядный пример. Поэтому трейд и наименован его именем, а не названием конкретного его произведения, как в случае приведенной вами ссылки. Но кончено спасибо за ссылку, было интересно ознакомится с мнением завсегдатых литературного уголка о стране Нарния и ее обитателях.

[Prester]

Lewis, C.S.


b. Nov. 29, 1898, Belfast, Ire. [now in Northern Ireland]
d. Nov. 22, 1963, Oxford, Oxfordshire, Eng.

in full CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS, British scholar, novelist, and author of about 40 books, most of them on Christian apologetics, the most widely known being The Screwtape Letters. He also achieved fame with a trilogy of science-fiction novels and with the Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven children's books that have become classics of fantasy literature. During World War I, Lewis fought in France with the Somerset Light Infantry and was wounded in 1917. The following year he went to University College, Oxford, where he achieved an outstanding record as a classical scholar. From 1925 to 1954 he was a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford, and from 1954 to 1963 he was professor of medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge.
Lewis lapsed into atheism in his teens but experienced a reconversion to Christianity in 1931. His first work to attract attention was The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933). In 1936 came the critical and characteristic Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, considered by many to be his finest scholarly work. The first of his science fiction novels (a genre then scarcely known), Out of the Silent Planet (1938), was followed by the equally remarkable fictions Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945). These three books, which form one of the best of all science fiction trilogies, centre on an English linguist named Ransom who voyages to Mars and Venus and becomes involved in a cosmic struggle betwen good and evil in the solar system.
Lewis' The Problem of Pain (1940) brought him wide recognition as a lay expositor of Christian apologetics, but it was far exceeded by the fictional best-selling Screwtape Letters (1942). This satire consists of 31 letters in which an elderly, experienced devil named Screwtape instructs his junior, Wormwood, in the subtle art of tempting a young Christian convert. Lewis' first story for children was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), the first of seven tales about the kingdom of Narnia. The Narnia books are exciting, often humorous, inventive, and, in the final scenes of The Last Battle (1956), deeply moving. Notable among Lewis' other books are a volume of autobiography, Surprised by Joy; The Shape of My Early Life (1955), and a novel based on the story of Psyche and Cupid, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956).

from children's literature

The creation of worlds

Finally there is a trio of masters, each the architect of a complete secondary world. The vast Middle Earth trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), by the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English language scholar J.R.R. Tolkien, was not written with children in mind. But they have made it their own. It reworks many of the motives of traditional romance and fantasy, including the Quest, but is essentially a structure, conceivably but not inevitably allegorical, of sheer invention on a staggering scale. It is also a sociocultural phenomenon, selling 3,000,000 copies in nine languages and functioning, for a certain class of American teenagers, as a semisacred cult object.
Tolkien's fellow scholar, C.S. Lewis, created his own otherworld of Narnia. It is more derivative than Tolkien's (he owes something, for example, to Nesbit), more clearly Christian-allegorical, more carefully adapted to the tastes of children. Though uneven, the seven volumes of the cycle, published through the years 1950 to 1956, are exciting, often humorous, inventive, and, in the final scenes of The Last Battle, deeply moving.
The third of these classic secondary worlds is in a sense not a creation of fantasy. The four volumes (1952-61) about the Borrowers, with their brief pendant, Poor Stainless (1971), ask the reader to accept only a single impossibility, that in a quiet country house, under the grandfather clock, live the tiny Clock family: Pod, Homily, and their daughter Arrietty. All that follows from this premise is logical, precisely pictured, and carries absolute conviction. Many critics believe that this miniature world so lovingly, so patiently fashioned by Mary Norton will last as long as those located at the bottom of the rabbit hole and through the looking glass.

Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

[Prester]

"The true religion gives value to its own mysticism; mysticism does not validate the religion in which it happens to occur". — Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer,” chapter 12, paragraph 8, page 65
Daily Quote by C.S. Lewis
© C.S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Quote used by permission



http://www.cslewis.org/

[Prester]

C. S. Lewis
20th-Century Christian Knight

(NOTE: 325 new links and a photograph added on 11 January 2006, and all inactive links removed, + several new categories created)

http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ26.HTM

Рекомендую очень хороший линк.

[Prester]

http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

C.S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?" The Weight of Glory and other Addresses (New York: Harper Collins publishers, 1980), p. 140.

[Prester]

C. S. Lewis Quotes (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/c_s_lewis.html)

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
C. S. Lewis

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
C. S. Lewis

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
C. S. Lewis

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
C. S. Lewis

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
C. S. Lewis

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C. S. Lewis

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
C. S. Lewis

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
C. S. Lewis

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
C. S. Lewis

Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers "Please will you do the job for me."
C. S. Lewis

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
C. S. Lewis

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
C. S. Lewis

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
C. S. Lewis

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C. S. Lewis

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!"
C. S. Lewis

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
C. S. Lewis

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
C. S. Lewis

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
C. S. Lewis

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
C. S. Lewis

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
C. S. Lewis

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
C. S. Lewis

I sometimes wander whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
C. S. Lewis

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
C. S. Lewis

If we could know which of us, darling, would be the first to go, who would be first to breast the swelling tide and step alone upon the other side - if we could know!
C. S. Lewis

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
C. S. Lewis

If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a "wandering to find home," why should we not look forward to the arrival?
C. S. Lewis

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
C. S. Lewis

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
C. S. Lewis

It is hard to have patience with people who say "There is no death" or "Death doesn't matter." There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
C. S. Lewis

It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
C. S. Lewis

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
C. S. Lewis

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
C. S. Lewis

Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
C. S. Lewis

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
C. S. Lewis

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
C. S. Lewis

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
C. S. Lewis

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
C. S. Lewis

Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
C. S. Lewis

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C. S. Lewis

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
C. S. Lewis

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
C. S. Lewis

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
C. S. Lewis

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
C. S. Lewis

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
C. S. Lewis

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
C. S. Lewis

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
C. S. Lewis

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
C. S. Lewis

The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.
C. S. Lewis

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
C. S. Lewis

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
C. S. Lewis

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
C. S. Lewis

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."
C. S. Lewis

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
C. S. Lewis

Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.
C. S. Lewis

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
C. S. Lewis

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
C. S. Lewis

We are what we believe we are.
C. S. Lewis

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
C. S. Lewis

What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
C. S. Lewis

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
C. S. Lewis

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
C. S. Lewis

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
C. S. Lewis

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
C. S. Lewis

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
C. S. Lewis

[Prester]

Portraits of Great Christians

http://www.intouch.org/myintouch/mighty/portraits/cs_lewis_159765.html


C. S. Lewis

God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.
Very few people touch their world as C. S. Lewis did. Over fifty books have been published to his credit including: Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, Christian Behavior, The Great Divorce, and Surprised By Joy. Annual book sales remain over two million - half of which comes from The Chronicles of Narnia written for children.
However, Lewis's greatest achievement was not in an academic sense, but in the university of life. In a time when modern western civilization was entering the "post-Christian" era, Lewis dared to challenge the minds behind modernism and liberal theology.
Author David Barratt says Lewis's finest achievement was the ability "to bring old truth and give it new relevancy and vitality in a secular age, and to challenge the new complacencies . . . ." Orthodox Christianity was on the retreat at the time of Lewis's conversion - undermined by other liberal theology and scientific and secular skepticism.
"At his death, the Christian Church in the United Kingdom, and even more so in the United States, was entering renewal, with Christians emerging from their ghetto with new confidence and hope. Lewis's impact must be acknowledged in this."
While he was an intellectual scholar and philosopher, Lewis saw himself as "a layman's layman who knew very little." Friends say he never lost sight that the majority of his audience consisted of ordinary people, not philosophical scholars.
Born in Belfast, Ireland in 1898, Clive Staples Lewis was one of two sons of Albert and Flora Lewis. His mother died when he was ten. His father, feeling the weight of her death, placed Lewis in a boarding school where he joined his older brother, Warren. Both boys endured horrendous conditions at the school where the headmaster was prone to fits of rage. Lewis writes, "If the school had not died, and if I had been left there two years more, it would probably have sealed my fate as a scholar for good." Ironically, it was there he began to pray and read his Bible. After the school closed, Lewis entered Malvern Cherbourg School in England and later Malvern College. Once again the negative effects of Malvern were great. And after asking to be removed from the school, Lewis was placed under the instructional care of W. T. Kirkpatrick, whom Lewis called "a hard satirical atheist."
Kirkpatrick saw strong potential in Lewis and informed Albert Lewis that his son could be a writer or a scholar "but you'll not make anything else of him." Realizing Kirkpatrick's assessment was true, Lewis applied for and received a scholarship to University College, the oldest of the Oxford colleges.
Memories from Lewis's childhood reveal a deep desire for joy. As a child he imagined places where joy existed freely and eternally. As an adult he read the romantic poets, Plato, and Norse Germanic mythologies in hopes of finding a sense of lasting joy. "I doubt whether anyone who has tasted [joy] would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world," wrote Lewis.
In 1917 he enlisted in the service but was allowed to remain at Oxford until he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and assigned to frontline action. After being wounded and discharged, Lewis resumed his studies where he graduated at the top of his class. With no philosophy teaching posts available, Lewis entered a fourth year at Oxford College where he met a Christian student named Nevill Coghill, a man whose perspective helped to change the way Lewis viewed life.
Of Coghill, Lewis said, "[He was] clearly the most intelligent and best informed man in the class. . . . These disturbing factors (Christianity) in Coghill ranged themselves with a wider disturbance which was now threatening my whole earlier outlook. All the books were beginning to turn against me."
Lewis began reading the works of Christian authors. He particularly admired George Macdonald, a Scottish Christian writer. In his writings, Lewis found a quality of holiness he had not seen before. The works of John Milton, especially Paradise Lost, intrigued him as did the close friendship he shared with J. R. R. Tolkien who wrote The Lord Of The Rings.
In 1925, Lewis received an English fellowship at Magdalen College at Oxford. Lewis's classes were filled to capacity, so much so that a larger lecture hall had to be found. Meanwhile, his search for God accelerated. In a letter to a close friend, Lewis spoke of "a long satisfying talk" with two Christian friends in which he stated, "I learned a lot." He had moved from Idealism, no idea of a personal God, to Pantheism, an impersonal God in everything, and then to Theism, the existence of God. "In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed . . . . The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation." Lewis's final step to Christianity came when he accepted the incarnation of Jesus Christ as fact. "I was now approaching the source from which those arrows of Joy had been shot at me ever since childhood. . . . No slightest hint was vouchsafed me that there ever had been or ever would be any connection between God and Joy. If anything, it was the reverse. I had hoped that the heart of reality might be of such a kind that we can best symbolize it as a place; instead, I found it to be a Person." Eternal joy was at last a reality for C. S. Lewis.

[Prester]

Но у Льюиса есть и идеологические противники, было бы несправедливо говоря о творчестве Льюиса не представить и другую сторону. Причем весьма интересную.

Philip Pullman


Philip Pullman CBE (born October 19, 1946), is a British writer, educated at Exeter College, Oxford, who is the best-selling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy of fantasy novels and a number of other books, purportedly for children, but attracting increasing attention by adult readers. His Dark Materials consisted of Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the US), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Pullman was awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours list in 2004.
The first volume of that trilogy, Northern Lights, won the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction in the UK in 1995. The Amber Spyglass, the last volume, was awarded both 2001 Whitbread Prize for best children's book and the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in January 2002, the first children's book to receive that award. The trilogy won popular acclaim in late 2003, taking third place in the BBC's Big Read poll.
Like the Harry Potter books, the His Dark Materials books have been at the heart of controversy, especially with certain Christian groups. It is claimed by some that he actively pursues an anti-Christian agenda. Proponents of this view point to the critical articles he wrote regarding C. S. Lewis' series The Chronicles of Narnia (which Pullman denounces as propaganda), and the usually negative portrayal of the "Church" in His Dark Materials.
The two series resemble each other in many ways. Both feature children facing adult moral choices, talking animals, religious allegories, parallel worlds, and the fate of those worlds hanging in the balance. The first published Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe starts with a young girl hiding in a wardrobe, as does the first Dark Materials book, Northern Lights.
Indeed, some have seen the His Dark Materials series as a direct rebuttal of C. S. Lewis's Christianity-inspired series. Pullman has criticised in particular Lewis's use of a fictional cure for cancer in one of the Narnia books, which Pullman claimed would raise false hopes in children who were themselves, or who had friends or family members who were, seriously ill. He has also criticised the way Lewis excludes the character Susan from the final heaven scenes in The Last Battle, saying that she is rejected for her growing worldliness and her rejection of Narnia. Lewis devotees argue that Pullman has read far too much into this; indeed, Lewis made no such statement about Susan's final destiny, and never excluded the possibility of her rejoining her friends in heaven later.
However, Pullman has also found support from more liberal groups, most notably Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. These groups and individuals point out that Pullman's attacks are focused on the constraints of dogmatism and the use of religion to oppress, not Christianity itself. Dr. Williams has gone so far as to propose that His Dark Materials be taught as part of religious education in schools.
In 2005 Pullman was announced as joint winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for children's literature.
He is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.
In addition to writing, Pullman also began teaching Master level courses in English at his alma mater, Exeter College, Oxford, in 2004.

[Prester]

His Dark Materials



His Dark Materials is a trilogy of novels by the fantasy fiction author Philip Pullman, comprising Northern Lights (released as The Golden Compass in the United States), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. The trilogy has also been published as a single-volume omnibus in the UK, titled simply "His Dark Materials".
Although ostensibly for children, the novels were written to be equally compelling for adults, albeit on a different level. It initially begins in Northern Lights as a typical fantasy tale, but much of the trilogy develops allegorical layers of meaning. Pullman introduces ideas throughout the trilogy which have a broader scope than those of a typical fantasy novel, dealing with such fields as metaphysics, quantum physics and philosophy, especially religious philosophy. Pullman himself describes the target audience range as young adult, and some say that the books are too intellectual or mature in content for most children, as they feature complex themes and deal heavily in Biblical symbolism.

[Prester]

А вот весьма интересный человек который хотел ввести DarkMaterialsкак книжку для чтения для детей в Английских школах.

Rowan Williams

Archbishop of Canterbury

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Pullman

However, Pullman has also found support from more liberal groups, most notably Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. These groups and individuals point out that Pullman's attacks are focused on the constraints of dogmatism and the use of religion to oppress, not Christianity itself. Dr. Williams has gone so far as to propose that His Dark Materials be taught as part of religious education in schools.

He (Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury) courted controversy in August 2002 when he was inducted into the Gorsedd of Bards, a pseudo-ancient Welsh honorary order which involves "druidic" ceremonies but which is not explicitly religious. In March 2004, in a speech at Downing Street and in an article published in The Guardian, he praised Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials, which was described by the Association of Christian Teachers as "shameless blasphemy" and by the Catholic Herald as "fit for the bonfire". Williams' view was that the proper Christian response to Pullman's novel was an intelligent critique that recognised the book's considerable literary merits, rather than a simple condemnation.