In the first place, the extent to which Lewis was personally bothered by the debate has been greatly blown out of proportion-especially by Wilson. But did Lewis really have such a mid-career crisis of faith? What actually happened on that night in February 1948? “Shaken and Degraded”?
After all, if Lewis himself rejected his apologetics works, then obviously we shouldn’t take them very seriously. It’s worth exploring this characterization of the Lewis–Anscombe debate. degraded and shaken.” 3 According to Wilson, Lewis not only turned away from apologetics from this time on, but actually rejected his prior apologetics works: “Though and the argumentative works which precede it- The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity-remain so vastly popular in the Christian world, and continue to sell in Christian book shops, came to feel that their method and manner were spurious.” 4 Wilson goes much further, claiming that Lewis was in “a state of near-despair” after the encounter, comparing him to “a little boy who was. Wilson-advance this view. Sayer portrays the debate as a “humiliating experience” in which Lewis recognized his argument had been “demolished,” causing him to realize he was no longer capable of writing apologetics works. Lewis biographies-such as those by George Sayer and A. Lewis scholars have popularized the idea that Lewis had a serious personal crisis after a debate with Elizabeth Anscombe, a Roman Catholic philosopher, at the Oxford Socratic Club on February 2, 1948. Anscombe, it is claimed, so demolished Lewis’s argument regarding naturalism and the possibility of human reason that Lewis abandoned apologetics (a branch of theology devoted to defending Christianity) and turned to children’s literature for the rest of his career.
0 kommentar(er)
