c. s. lewis deserves much of the credit for me being a kind of okay person. also i think that if i hadn’t read him my posts would be even worse
i’m especially grateful for his two books on temptation, hell, & devilry, the screwtape letters & the great divorce which i have talked about before
now that i’ve potentially made my non christian readers mad by talking about heaven & hell i feel i owe it to my christian readers to potentially make them mad by saying that i’m not christian. sorry everybody
anyway. both books are well worth reading in full, i cannot possibly do them justice in this post & i don’t plan to. but i’m very grateful to them for talking about damnation—which had always seemed so confusing and arbitrary when people talked about it, not that they talked about it much, because it also seemed so confusing and arbitrary and uncomfortable to them too—in a way that made sense and seemed acceptable to me
this is a huge oversimplification but basically it seems that he thinks that
a person’s actions change them1
specifically, a person’s actions change that person in a way that has a certain momentum? the action doesn’t just get added to their list of actions that will eventually be computed into a “how good or bad is this person” score, it’s more like the action turns them & pushes them, newtonian metaphor
people have an eternal existence, so the momentum of their action has the potential to push them really far in one direction or another
there are certain things you cannot do & also be happy
some people will not give those things up
this kind of eternal momentum of choosing unhappiness is damnation
the great divorce has a single (indescribably creepy) scene where you see someone definitively damned. he’s not a spectacularly evil guy, like a murderer or something (you meet a saved murderer earlier in the book actually). he’s just a normal suburban husband who is manipulative. specifically, his habit in life was to manipulate people by feeling bad, holding people hostage to their own healthy pity for him. & he would rather give up happiness than give up people feeling sorry for him. that is damnation
that might sound really obvious. but i felt it was worth saying bc i have been noticing that a lot of people act as if people’s actions don’t change them, but rather reveal them? maybe i could talk about this more some time.
I Now you made me go and want to read CS Lewis!
I credit Victor Hugo for at least a part of whatever small amount of desirable qualities I may possess, so you're not alone in that :)
I agree on being changed by one's actions, and I'd be really curious to hear you elaborate. It probably shows that I haven't read Lewis, but the best discussion of this that I've ever read in fiction was in a Harry Potter fanfiction called Blood Magic. The idea there was that certain spells would have the effect of opening the caster's soul to that casting. So certain healing spells would make the caster less able to do harm. Conversely, the Cruciatus curse would make the caster slightly more inclined towards sadism with each casting. I've always found that a very good metaphor of a thing that's pretty hard to describe, but I haven't found much discussion of it elsewhere. So I'm looking forward to your post about it, if you decide to make one!
fuck banger. again. I'd never thought of it that way and I've read both of those books.
"this kind of eternal momentum of choosing unhappiness is damnation"