Aasof’s Reflections

I essentially use Facebook as a repository for my WordPress account, having had my fingers slightly burned by the demise of a previous social media site. Last week I was looking at some previous postings on C.S. Lewis that I was going to make reference to and found that some of the url links were ‘lost’, which is a common feature of social media. I replaced or deleted the links and next week intend to revisit C.S. Lewis with a posting titled ‘Screwtape Revisited’. most, if not all, of my C.S. Lewis reprises refer to Screwtape. Not long after I started seeing with my ex colleague for a ‘pie and a pint’, he remarked that any theist must lack intellect to believe such nonsense. I would not say that C.S Lewis and his ‘Inkling Friends’ lacked intellect.

The Inklings were an informal group of writers that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and they met in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, in the 1930s and ’40s. The name ‘Inklings’ is now used worldwide and those writers amongst you may be interested in the following:

The Inklings were a gathering of friends — all of them British, male, and Christian, most of them teachers at or otherwise affiliated with Oxford University, many of them creative writers and lovers of imaginative literature — who met usually on Thursday evenings in C.S. Lewis’s college rooms in Oxford during the 1930s and 1940s for readings and criticism of their own work, and for general conversation. “Properly speaking,” wrote W.H. Lewis, one of their number, the Inklings “was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. A Beginner’s Bibliography of the Inklings

Before I refer to next week’s posts, perhaps I should say something about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien. Tolkien was a devout catholic and probably introduced Lewis to theism.

Many fans are aware that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were close friends who had a great deal in common. Tolkien helped return Lewis to the Christianity of his youth, whereas Lewis encouraged Tolkien to expand his fictional writing; both taught at Oxford and were members of the same literary group, both were interested in literature, myth, and language, and both wrote fictional books which propagated basic Christian themes and principles.  C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Argued Over Christian Theology

These are extracts from next week’s posts:

1. The Screwtape Letters, written by C. S. Lewis, purport to be the correspondence from a senior assistant named Screwtape, who is working on behalf of ‘Our Father Below’, to his nephew and subordinate Wormwood.
2. First separately published by C.S. Lewis some 50 years ago as ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast‘ (pdf), it was written some 15 years after the Screwtape Letters.
3. Based on the writings of C.S. Lewis, part of its intent was to show that contemporary thinking and criticisms  on society are rarely the outcome of original thought.
4. In this I expressed my diffuse dissatisfactions as a belief that, ‘the world is going to hell in a handcart‘.
5. On the whole, the frame of reference for the definition of the role of the university rarely goes beyond this aspect of economic competitiveness.