By Mark Krause
The Right House
What Lewis is so darn good at, is translating his knowledge of old books, and in particular the deeper, ancient truths of the Christian faith, into literary tidbits that the non philosophically inclined can grasp ahold of. I find this most of all in his great work the "Chronicles of Narnia." For instance, if one cares to notice, his view of the atonement in the first book is very reflective of the so called "ransom theory," found in the Fathers. It doesn't line up nicely at all with the innovative (that word is not a compliment when I use it about theology generally) substitionary or penal substition views of the atonement as articulated respectively by Anselm and the reformers.
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For St. Maximus, it is necessary to tame all the passions and put them in subjection to our reason so that the whole person can be saved, because his anthropology was such that it did not merely place sole importance on the reason, but the complete unified human being. Christ saves all of us by uniting all of human nature to himself, and we must participate in that by taming the passions to bring them in subjection to Christ. Our passions are not evil because human nature is inherently good. Sure we inherit a corruption, but this is simply a dissordering of the inherently good components that make up human nature. Evil, or sin is in the use. Sin is personal not natural. We cannot attribute evil to any passion, but merely evil in our indulging that passion outside of its proper context, which is ultimately subjection to Christ.
Now to tie this in with Lewis, we must go to the scene in "Prince Caspian," the second Narnia book, where we see Bacchus dancing in Aslan's camp with the nymphs and the children. Now, when many people read this in the story they were horrified because of the horrorble obscentiy of Bacchic worship in ancient Greece. However, Lewis was really, I would argue, trying to show the same truth as Maximus. Bacchus is not inerently evil, because, as I mentioned, sin is in the use. Sin is personal, not natural. What we see here is the affirmation of the inherent goodness of Bacchus when he is put in subjection to Aslan, the Christ figure. So we see that Lewis seems to again be placing a complex theological truth, in an easier to swallow literary dose. This is Lewis' genius. (more)
