"Heresy" by Catherine Nixey

Christians claim theirs is the true faith but “In the beginning there was not ... one single Christian message.” (Introduction). The form of Christianity we have inherited persecuted all other forms out of existence. The word 'heresy' means choice and the pagan philosophers believed that it was good to choose, rationally, who and how one would worship. But "within the first century of the birth of this new religion, ‘choice’ for Christians had become no longer a praiseworthy attribute but a ‘poison’.” (Introduction)

In this scholarly but always entertaining book, Nixey continues what she had started in her best-seller The Darkening Age which chronicled the violent persecution of the pagans unleashed as soon as Christianity became the officially endorsed religion of the Roman Empire. Now she shows how most of the manifold versions of Christianity which existed in those first few centuries were branded heretical and had their exponents criminalised and killed and their books burned. Nevertheless, some vestiges of them survived. The ox and the ass of the nativity scene only appear in a banned gospel. 

On the journey, we learn about alternative sons of god, born of a mortal virgin woman who healed the sick and even raised the dead, such as Apollonius of Tyana.

We learn that the three 'wise men' should properly be translated as magicians and that Jesus could be seen as a magician too: “In Greek and Roman texts, wands had long been associated with magicians: Circe held a wand when she transformed Odysseus’s men into pigs; Mercury held a wand when he led the dead back to life. ... In early Christian art, Jesus holds a wand when he is performing miracles. In one fifth-century wooden panel, he holds one when he is changing water into wine and when he performs the miracle to multiply loaves; in a third-century image from the catacombs, he holds one when he raises Lazarus from the two ... While the sign of the cross is almost entirely absent from early Western Christian art, wands are widely seen.” (Ch 4)

We learn that our image of Jesus is one of many originals: “In the early years and centuries of this religion ... Sometimes he appears as a bearded old man, at others as a beardless young one; in some images he is shown bare-chested and as macho as a Greek god, while at other times he is depicted as far more sexually ambiguous" (Ch 6)

Our images of Hell are not found in the canonical gospels but in pagan authors and non-canonical writings such as the Apocalypse of Peter  and the Apocalypse of Paul (Ch 7)

We are told that all these non-canonical versions (not 'apocryphal' because they were rarely hidden and were often the most popular accounts) should not be regarded as not important because they can be unbelievable: "that is to miss the point. Such texts matter not because they are believable - but because they were believed and read by Christians for centuries. It is understandable that some Christian historians may have wished to ignore them - but it is intellectually indefensible to do so. Do so and you are not writing history, but theology with dates.” (109)

This is an immensely readable and important book. 

Selected quotes:

• “Most people do not require being a flogged with leaden weights to abandon their ideas; for most, the fear that they might lose their job, or that they might merely lose a friend, is enough to make them change their beliefs - or at least stop talking about them." (Introduction)
• “Things first become unwritable, then unsayable and finally unthinkable.” (Introduction)
• “A great deal of all ancient religion was a little more than healthcare with a halo.” (Ch 2)
• “For all the brilliance of Greek and Roman medicine, doctors nonetheless struggled to identify the difference between the seemingly obvious conditions of ‘being dead’ and ‘being alive’.” (Ch 2)
• “There were spells in the Greek magical papyri that offered a far larger menu than Jesus managed ... not only loaves and fishes but side orders too.” (Ch 4)
• “A Roman gladiator had better odds of surviving a fight than an emperor did of enjoying a peaceful conclusion to his reign.” (Ch 12))
• "Bishops had been consolidating their power for centuries ... Bishops started to command that everything in a church must go through them: baptism without a bishop did not, or so bishops argued, count; Eucharist without a bishop did not count either. Prayers, bishops argued, worked better with a bishop present.” (Ch 15)
• “It was perfectly clear to numerous ancient observers that religions were less separate entities, virgin-born and pristine, than variations on a theme ... The names were different perhaps, but the deities were fundamentally the same.” (Ch 16)
• “It was a common complaint that the church persecuted less from a love of righteousness than from a love of real estate.” (Ch 18)
• “Books are not being burned maybe to bring about controlled today: they are being burned for posterity; they are being burned to control the memory of the future.” (Ch 19)
• “The past is not merely today in togas; it is far odder and more eccentric than we often expect.” (Ch 19)

May 2025; 279 pages

Published by Picador in 2004

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Angels" by Peter Stanford

Stanford traces the origins of our modern idea of angels, from their origin in Zoroastrian and Egyptian religion, through their developments in the Old Testament and, subsequently, in Christian and Moslem thought, and later through the Kabbalah, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Despite the thoroughness of the survey, my interest hardly ever waned, and the book ended up strewn with marker-stickers. A fascinating study of a bizarre aspect of mainstream religious thought.

Selected quotes:

“My mother had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis just before she found she was pregnant with me. By the time I could walk, she couldn't.” (Prelude)
“Both Homer and Hesiod also refer to daimons, lesser deities, somewhere between humans and the gods, who act as benign guiding spirits, and sometimes have wings or winged sandals, though often they cannot be seen at all.” (Ch 1)
“one of the things that united them [the sages of the Axial Age] was impatience with the doctrinal codes, rules, prescriptions and carefully plotted hierarchies that we nowadays tend to associate with organised religion.” (Ch 1) 
“The bodhisattvas of Buddhism , guides to meaningful spiritual life, mythical, awesome in power, radiance and wisdom, but simultaneously as ordinary as your next-door neighbour.” (Ch 1)
“Later, what were purported to be relics of the Archangel Michael ... became popular. Since officially angels did not have tangible bodies, it was in purely theological terms a strange outbreak of piety.” (Ch 7)

May 2022; 305 pages

Also by Peter Stanford and recommended by this blog:

• Judas

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"From the Holy Mountain" by William Dalrymple

 In the mid 1990s, Dalrymple sets off from Mount Athos, the autonomous theocratic collection of monasteries in Greece, to follow the route of John Moschos a Byzantine monk who, in 587, travelled through the Byzantine empire, through Anatolia and the Syrian-Lebanese-Palestinian coast into Egypt.

The modern journey, set before the more recent Syrian civil war, chronicles the plight of the Eastern Christians of a variety of persuasions (including Armenians, Maronites and Copts), a community with roots dating back to the Apostles, who are persecuted by the more recently introduced inhabitants of the various lands: the increasingly Islamist Turks, the non-Maronite communities following Lebanon's civil war, the Israeli government and the West Bank settlers, and the increasingly Islamist Egyptians. The complaint throughout is of neglect from governments and persecution from religious terrorists leading to mass emigration and dwindling communities facing extinction.

Clearly things have changed. Dalrymple's Lebanon is newly recovering from civil war, Syria, the country in which Dalrymple finds most harmony, has fallen in war and anarchy, in Egypt Mubarak has been toppled. Yet one suspects that the beleaguered communities, many of them making the point that they were inhabiting their villages before the arrival of the Ottomans, or the Moslems, or the Jews, are probably still persecuted. If they still exist.

He repeatedly makes the point that there was (usually) more tolerance in the past. In the monastery of Mar Gabriel, in Tur Abdin, a 1600-year-old Syriac monastery in Turkey close to its border with Syria, he witnesses Christians worshipping prostrate, as Moslems do now: "exactly the form of worship described by Moschos in The Spiritual Meadow ... the Muslims appear to have derived their techniques of worship from existing Christian practice." (2)

It is rather depressing. But the sadness is offset by some wonderful descriptions, some bizarre characters (especially many of the monks encountered) and by incisive observations. 

Many, many memorable moments:

• Descriptions:
• "I ate breakfast in a vast Viennese ballroom with a sprung wooden floor and dadoes dripping with recently applied gilt. The lift is a giant baroque birdcage, entered through a rainforest of potted palms." (2)
• "The yellow glow of the sulphurous streetlights silhouettes the city's skyline" (2)
• "When you think of the French Romanesque ... you are left with an impression of teeming life: biting beasts entwined around capitals; tympana crowded with the Twenty-Four Elders of the Apocalypse busily fiddling on their viols; angels blowing the Last Trump; the dead resurrecting, emerging like uncurling crustaceans from their sarcophagi." (3)
• "A cortege of elderly priests conducted the service, accompanied by a string of echoing laments of almost unearthly beauty, sinuous alleluias which floated with the gentle indecision of falling feathers down arpeggios of dying cadences before losing themselves in a soft black hole of basso profundo." (3)

• Observations:
• "As the Byzantine writer Cecaumenus put it: 'Houseparties are a mistake, for guests merely criticise your housekeeping and attempt to seduce your wife." (1)
• "What has most moved past generations can today sometimes only be tentatively glimpsed with the eye of faith." (2)
• "Those who are content to live in sin do not suffer from the temptations of the Devil so badly as those who try to live with God." (4)
• "Just as it is impossible to see your face in troubled water, so also the soul ... It is like two lovers. If they want to discuss their love they want to be alone." (4)
• "Being a hermit was like being a fire. At first it smokes and your eyes water, but ... after the smoke disperses, the light and the heat comes." (4)
• "I am the policeman of my soul. Demons are like criminals. Both are very stupid. Both are damned." (5)
• Others
• "Three years ago, in the middle of winter, some raiders turned up in motorboats ... They had Sten guns and were assisted by an ex-novice who had been thrown out by the Abbot." (1)
• "The hotel has a policy of naming its bedrooms after distinguished guests, which has unconsciously acted as a graph of its dramatic post-war decline: from before the war you cab choose to sleep in Ataturk, Mata Hari or King Zog of Albania; after it there is nothing more exciting on offer than Julio Iglesias." (2)
• "Relics were holes in the curtain wall separating the human from the divine." (2)
• "Gregory the Great always used to recommend making the sign of the cross over a lettuce in case you swallowed a demon that happened to be perched on its leaves." (2)
• "The dust from his clothes was more powerful than roasted crocodile, camel dung, or Bithnyian cheese mixed with wax - apparently the usual contents of a Byzantine doctor's medicine chest." (2)
• "Theodore, the seventh Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Byzantine from Tarsus who had studied at Antioch and visited Edessa; his surviving Biblical commentaries, written in England, show the extent to which he brought the teaching of the School of Antioch and an awareness of Syriac literature to the far shores of Anglo-Saxon Kent." (2)
• "You don't understand the police here. You think they are like the English policemen we see on the television, the fat man with the blue hat, the little stick in his hand and the old bicycle." (2)
• "It was from the Nestorian school of Nisibis - via Morrish Cordoba - that many of the works of Aristotle and Plato eventually reached the new universities of medieval Europe." (30
• "Yezidis ... and iraqi sect ... they're devil-propitiators ... They call Lucifer 'Malik Yawus', the Peacock Angel, and offer sacrifices to keep him happy. They believe Lucifer, the Devil, has been forgiven by God and reinstated as Chief Angel, supervising the day-to-day running of the world's affairs ... they get on with the Nestorians ... very well ... Some people believe that the Yezidis were originally a sort of strange Gnostic offshoot of the Nestorian church." (3)
• "The Fount of Knowledge [by John Damascene] contains an extremely precise and detailed critique of Islam, which, intriguingly, John regards as a form of Christian heresy closely related to Arianism (after all, like Islam, Arianism denied the divinity of Christ)." (5)
• "Sounding sincere in one's appreciation of the monks' culinary abilities was a task that needed advanced acting skills." (5)
• "In all the Byzantine sites excavated in Palestine and Jordan only two lavatories have ever been discovered, and one of those was located directly over a monastic kitchen." (5)
• "It was the custom in [early CE] Egypt to bury those who could afford it in mummy cases onto which were bound superb encaustic (hot wax) portraits of the disease ... the oldest icons in existence are to be found in St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai ... they are painted in the same encaustic technique." (6)
• "There are an extraordinary number of otherwise inexplicable similarities between the Celtic and Coptic Churches which were shared by no other  Western Chruches. In both, the bishops wore crowns rather than miters and held T-shaped Tau crosses rather than crooks or croziers. In both the handbell played a very prominent part in ritual." (6)
• "Since the Second World War it has rained only once in Kharga, for ten minutes, in the winter of 1959." (6)

A wise and beautifully written travelogue.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

I have also read the following books by William Dalrymple:

• In Xanadu
• City of Djinns

"The Problem of Pain" by C S Lewis

In Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, the hero Yossarian gets angry at the thought of a God who has created a world in which there is pain: "Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who found it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when he robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain? ... Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead? Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't he?”

In this book C S Lewis attempts to show why pain is not only necessary but good, from a theological point of view. He argues that God uses pain to shake us out of our complacency. When we are happy and content, we tend not to think of God. But when we are suffering, we seek God as a comfort. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” (Ch 6)

Fundamentally CSL believes that the ultimate human happiness lies in submission to God. He uses the analogy of a man with a pet dog: “The association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the man’s sake: he tames the dog primarily that he may love it, not that it may love him, and that it may serve him, not that he may serve it ...man interferes with the dog ... In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man’s love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem ... to cast grave doubts on the ‘goodness’ of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog ... would have no such doubts.” (Ch 3)

Another analogy, often used in Christianity, is of God as father. But CSL's ideal father is fundamnetally authoritarian: “Love between father and son ... means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make his son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be.” (Ch 3)

Pain is therefore the way God whips us into obedience, using the pretext that it is good for us in the long run. This sounds like a classic justification for tyranny. 

CSL is aware of this: “These Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration.” (Ch 3)

On the whole this is not the sort of God one would choose, if one had a choice. 

But presumably to a man like CSL, an Oxbridge don, cocooned in multiple privileges, this is the perfect God because he is the perfect excuse for authority, the authority of the master over the slave, the man over the dog, the father over the child, the husband over the wife, the boss over the worker. Pain and suffering can be justified because it props up the status quo. The only true sin is rebellion.

It wouldn't be so bad if I could feel that CSL's arguments were unanswerable. After all, he was regarded as an expert in three fields: theology, fiction, and mediaeval literature. So it is shocking to discover how clumsy his arguments are.

He has a habit of introducing hypotheses as if they were fact. For example, he states: “Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator” (Ch 6) This statement is unevidenced. But he never makes clear that it is an assumption that could be challenged. He then bases his arguments upon this statement. But there are alternatives! You could instead say: ‘The proper good of a creature is to fulfil its potential’. This would lead to radically different conclusions. Such a use of unacknowledged hypotheses suggests either that he is insufficiently imaginative to conceive of alternative points of view, or that he is using rhetoric in place of reason.

He also enjoys offering dichotomies. This is another rhetorical technique which allows a propagandist to bolster a weak argument. For example, he describes Jesus and says “only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way.” (Ch 1) Which is an absurd statement. There are lots and lots of middle ways. Jesus might have been sincere but mistaken, for example. He is deliberately narrowing down the reader's choices to two alternatives so that by demolishing one, you are forced to accept the other. And notice how the work of demolition is packaged into the choice by his description 'unusually abominable'. 

In another example he says that our experience of the Numinous (eg dread as opposed to fear) can be explained in only two ways: “either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function ... or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural.” (Ch 1). Of course this is not the only choice. And again, he blackens the path he dislikes, with the adjective 'mere' and the qualifier 'nothing objective and serving no biological function'. (I would argue that dreams are natural but potentially numinous and that dread and wonder could easily have a biological function, as does curiosity.)

There are some thought-provoking moments:

• I liked his limitation of omnipotence to "all that is intrinsically possible” but not to intrinsic impossibilities such as self-contradictory concepts: “All things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities.” (Ch 2)
• “Our prehistoric ancestors made all the useful discoveries, except that of chloroform, which have ever been made. To them we owe language, the family, clothing, the use of fire, the domestication of animals, the wheel, the ship, poetry and agriculture.” (Ch 5) I'm not sure I agree, however.
• Adam and Eve “wanted ... to ‘call their souls their own’. But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe where they could say to God, ‘This is our business, not yours’. But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives.” (Ch 5) Accept your subservience. Do not rebel.
• “We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.” (Ch 6)
• “The terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. ... Let him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over - I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed.” (Ch 6) 
  
• “If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it.” (Ch 8)
• “The intrinsic evil of the animal world lies in the fact that animals, or some animals, live by destroying each other.” (Ch 9) He is saying that animals are fundamentally evil because some of them are predators.
• “If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the  Church Triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note." (Ch 10)

But overall I was appalled at the attitudes revealed in this book and even more shocked at the lack of academic rigour in the arguments. At least it was short.

February 2021; 123 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

CS Lewis was also the author of these books reviewed in this blog:

His science fiction trilogy

• Out of the Silent Planet
• Perelandra
• That Hideous Strength

Theology:

• The Great Divorce
• God in the Dock
• The Problem of Pain

Literary criticism:

• The Discarded Image

Autobiography:

• Surprised by Joy

Of course he wrote the Narnia children's books as well.

"God in the Dock" by C S Lewis

A set of thirteen sermons and essays by  CS Lewis in which he explains his position on a variety of tenets of the Christian faith, including whether the church should allow 'priestesses' (no) and whether a man has the right to happiness (no).

Having previously enjoyed Lewis's theological writings, I was very disappointed by this one. When defending the idea of Christianity he doesn't really ever understand the objection that it might be all a made-up myth; often he depends his point of view by presupposing the truth of Christianity. He has a weak argument from ontology when he argues in favour of belief in miracles: "even to think and act in the natural world we have to assume something beyond it” (Miracles)

He seems endlessly sceptical when it comes to historical assertions and endlessly gullible when it comes to scriptural ones: “When the Old Testament says that Sennacherib’s Invasion was stopped by angels, and Herodotus says it was stopped by a lot of mice who came and ate up all the bowstrings of his army, an open-minded man will be on the side of the angels ... there is nothing intrinsically unlikely in the existence of angels ... but mice just don’t do these things.” (Miracles). He accuses science of being dogmatic because it extrapolates observations beyond what has been observed; this is how he refutes the second law of thermodynamics, a refutation needed by him in order to justify the resurrection (surely dogmatism involves asserting things against all other evidence).

He uses the oft-repeated idea that if science cannot explain everything (as it admits) therefore his dogma MUST be true to fill the gap: “It is certainly a possible supposition that behind this mystery some mighty will and life is at work. If so, so any contrast between his acts and the laws of nature is out of the question. It is his act alone that gives the laws any events to apply to.” (The Laws of Nature) It is breathtaking how he can move from identifying a hole to filling it with "out of the question" in consecutive sentences.

• “The laws of nature explain everything except the source of events ... how there came to be space and time and matter at all.” (The Laws of Nature)
• “Either the stream of events had a beginning or it had not. If it had, then we are faced with something like creation.” (The Laws of Nature)

He is clever about reconciling Free Will with the doctrine of an omnipotent God: we have free will because God, in his wisdom, for purposes we cannot understand, permits us to have free will even though he needn't (and presumably even though his omniscience allows him to see where our exercise of freedom will end): “God has made it a rule for Himself that He won't alter people's character by Force ... He has really and truly limited his power. Sometimes we wonder why He has done so, or even wish that He hadn’t. But apparently He thinks it worth doing. He would rather have a world of free beings, with all its risks, than a world of people who did right like machines because they couldn't do anything else.”

In this book he does not tackle the Problem of Evil (how a supposedly omnipotent and good God can allow innocent people to suffer. In some ways, he embraces evil. He tells us that the Christian concept of the Incarnation (God came to earth in the body of a man) "lights up nature’s pattern of death and rebirth; and secondly, her selectiveness; and thirdly, her vicariousness.” (Death and Rebirth) This implies that he approves of 'selectiveness' (which he suggests is the antithesis of democracy, or egalitarianism: “I cannot conceive how one would get through the boredom of a world in which you never met anyone more clever, or more beautiful, or stronger than yourself.”; Death and Rebirth) and 'vicariousness': “one person profiting by the earnings of another person ... is the very centre of Christianity.” (Death and Rebirth). These doctrines may seem fine when you are an Oxford don in the Senior Common Room; they may seem less wonderful if you are poor and suffering. Inequality and capitalism are the way God has made the world.

He can be even more right wing. For me, the essence of being a good citizen is getting along with others and assisting those who are less fortunate than oneself. Not for CSL: “The vital elements of citizenship - loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical principle, splendour, ceremony, continuity.” (Myth Became Fact).

He is a traditionalist in the church: “To cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the divisions between ourselves and other churches by establishing an order of priestesses in our midst, would be an almost wanton degree of imprudence.” (Priestesses in the Church?)

He is dismissive of other religions: "We all know about Adonis, and the stories of the rest of those rather tedious people” although he accepts that non-Christians can live a good life ... if they cannot believe in Christianity. But being good is not that important: “Mere morality is not the end of life.” (Man or Rabbit)

Some wonderful or interesting moments:

• “The interpretation of experience depends on preconceptions.” (Miracles)
• “It is a great step forward to realize ... that even if all external things went right, real happiness would still depend on the character of the people you have to live with.” (The Trouble with X)
• “You also have a fatal flaw in your character. ... It is no good passing this over with some vague, general admission such as ‘Of course I know I have my faults’. It is important to realise that there is some really fatal flaw in you: something which gives the others just that same feeling of despair which their flaws give you. And it is almost certainly something you don't know about ... You say ‘I admit I drank too much last Saturday’; but everyone else knows that you are habitual drunkard.” (The Trouble with X)
• “As the state grows more like a hive or an ant-hill it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters.” (Priestesses in the Church?)
• A right is “a claim guaranteed me by the laws, and correlative to an obligation on someone else's part.” (We have no right to Happiness)

I was very disappointed by this book for two reasons. Firstly, I find the the arguments advanced in favour of Christianity being true unconvincing. Secondly, I think that the version of Christianity outlined by CSL is fundamentally intolerant of other faiths (especially atheism, which he repeatedly confuses with Materialism), authoritarian and inegalitarian.

It isn't a difficult book to read: each short essay is a few pages and they could be read on their own. He is able to convey his views clearly and concisely. But other books are better.

CS Lewis was also the author of: these books reviewed in this blog:

• His science fiction trilogy
• Out of the Silent Planet
• Perelandra
• That Hideous Strength
• Theology:
• The Great Divorce
• Literary criticism:
• The Discarded Image
• Autobiography:
• Surprised by Joy

Of course he wrote the Narnia children's books as well.

July 2020; 108 pages

"The Great Divorce" by C S Lewis

This is a thought-provoking book on how to be a good Christian written in a very readable and entertaining manner. It is written by the great C S Lewis who also write:

Works of Science Fiction (or as he might have called it scientifiction) which are Christian allegories:

• Out of the Silent Planet
• Perelandra
• That Hideous Strength

The Narnia books for children (which are also Christian allegories):

• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Prince Caspian
• The Magician's Nephew
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
• The Horse and His Boy
• The Silver Chair
• The Last Battle

Mediaeval literary criticism (the day job):

• The Discarded Image

CSL imagines a bus trip from the dreary and lonely town of Hell through the sky into Heaven. And he imagines all the excuses the inhabitants of Hell make either not to get on the bus in the first place or to return to Hell after their journey.

His thesis is that in order to enter and stay in Heaven you have got to relinquish your self-centredness. As he says in the Preface: “You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys”

Some people use excuses not to get on the bus:

• “A moment later two young people ... also left us arm in arm. They were both so trousered, slender, giggly and falsetto that I could be sure of the sex of neither, but it was clear that each for the moment preferred the other to the chance of a place in the bus.”
• Others don’t like the company on the bus.
• Some don’t think there will be room for them.

The newcomers in Heaven are Ghosts. They are greeted by the more substantial Angels who try to persuade them to stay. The Ghosts who can’t be persuaded include:

• Those who insist on their rights and don’t want Charity.
• Those who insist on their own opinions if they feel justified in them. 
• Those who think that their lives would be improved if the Management changed the system: “What would you say if you went to a hotel where the eggs were all bad; and when you complained to the Boss, instead of apologising and changing his dairyman, he just told you that if you tried you’d get to like the bad eggs in time?”
• Those who are too ashamed to be seen in the company of angels.
• Artists who are too in love with Art: “If you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country"
• Mothers who love too fiercely.
• Those who try to make others sorry for them and use this to manipulate others: “Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom by pity.”

The problem is that this means it is very hard to get into Heaven and CSL is worried by this: “If these Solid People were as benevolent as I had heard one of two of them claim to be, they might have done something to help the inhabitants of the Town - something more than meeting them on the plain ... How if this whole trip were allowed the Ghosts merely to mock them?” One answer offered is that “The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.” Another is that the great spirits of the blessed are just too large to squeeze into the narrow and cramped confines of Hell. I'm not sure that either truly address the question.

To enter Heaven CSL says we have to lose our self-centredness:

• “The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’. ... There is always something they prefer to joy ... Achilles’ wrath and Coriolanus’ grandeur, Revenge and Injured Merit and Self-Respect and Tragic Greatness and Proper Pride.”
• “Did ye never know a collector of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them?”
• “No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.” 
• “There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels."
• “The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.”
• “What we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved.” 

Other great aphorisms include:

• “To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.” with the answer “If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for"
• "Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.”
• “Jesus ... was a comparatively young man when he died. He would have outgrown some of his earlier views, you know, if he’d lived. As he might have done, with a little more tact and patience.”
• "Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light.”

But one of the best things about a C S Lewis book are the brilliant descriptions:

• “Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering.”
• “My attention was caught by my fellow passengers ... Now that they were in the light, they were transparent ... They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air.”
• “One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless - heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man.”
• “The bus was full of light. It was cruel light. I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but of impossibilities, some gaunt, some bloated, some glaring with idiotic ferocity, some drowned beyond recovery in dreams; but all, in one way or another, distorted and faded. One had a feeling that they might fall to pieces at any moment if the light grew much stronger. Then - there was a mirror on the end wall of the bus - I caught sight of my own.” 
• “If a corpse already liquid with decay had arisen from the coffin, smeared its gums with lipstick, and attempted a flirtation, the result could not have been more appalling.”

Biographies about C S Lewis reviewed in this blog include:

• C S Lewis: A Biography
• Jack: C S Lewis and his times

November 2018; 118 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God