Post #4027141

2026-07-23 04:43 UTC

Soapy Sam from Rumpole of the Bailey never openly refers to Jack Lewis that I recall but one can be entirely certain that his entire personality and way of dealing with people was largely programmed by reading C. S. Lewis constantly and digging into the mountains of subsidiary material, for Lewis is obscenely oversold and overmarketed. Anyway that first book from #CSLewis is called The Pilgrim's Regress, it's loosely based on John Bunyan's allegory The Pilgrim's Progress (which I've not finished but seems a far sounder work than anything of Lewis's) but it begins Lewis's discreditable habit of mining his own acquaintances for material. It's like he read Dante and decided the most important thing about The Divine Comedy was the Inferno, and the most important thing about the Inferno was Dante's rubbishing the Italian leaders he knew and despised. (cont'd)

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@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-23 04:47

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)

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