Post #4027140

2026-07-23 04:47 UTC

Was it questionable for Dante to have done that? Possibly but he had a much much much better excuse: his enforced exile from Florence which also broke up his family and forced his sons into exile as well, on pain of death, once they came of age. The political betrayals at work are also foul and abhorrent so it's honestly little wonder that Dante's bitterness is stitched into his Inferno. But this brings me to a point about that sort of #Christian, the Jack Lewis sort: they are very bad with context. When they see an evil thing in letters they want to take it "literally" and out of context. Hence Christians have read The Divine Comedy (skipping two thirds, probably thinking them "boring") and decided that sure, revenge fantasies weren't just fine, they were sacred poetry. (cont'd)

Replies (1)

@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-23 04:54

So The Pilgrim's Regress contains dreary stereotypes of all the academic disciplines which Clive Staples Lewis regarded as corruption and subversion of his prim desiccated academic culture. If you read George Orwell's Such, Such Were The Joys you'll get a taste of how absurd and rigid and limited the much-vaunted "British public-school education" (i.e. costly and violently abusive boarding schools) was in preparing British professionals for their jobs. There's truth in all the jokes about colonial Brits imagining they'd learned all about administering conquered foreign peoples by memorizing a bit of De Bello Gallico. Lewis upheld THAT dismal intellectual culture and it shows. Oh holy heck does Lewis let all his bigotries hang out...in children's books. (cont'd)

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