Jamie joins me to discuss and review the book The Question of God: CS Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Etc. The compares two radically different paradigms on how to deal with life’s big questions. The work is a summation of a class taught at Harvard Medical Class dealing with ethics and psychology. Part 2 will be available for paid subscribers to my work. Moved to Tues. night due to lost power cord. LIVE in 10 mins!!
1 thought on “Sigmund Freud VS. C.S. Lewis: God, Life & Love – Jay / Jamie (Half)”
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Dear Jay and Jamie: Thanks for your talk tonight; excellent exposition and summary of the book “The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud…” etc.– Author, of course, is Dr. Armand Nicholi (rather famous). Here is except from Introduction to SVS edition of St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, published by SVS Press (1982 edition) — by C.S. Lewis — on the general unity of Christianity despite the many divisions and sects: … “That unity any of us can find by going out of his own age. It is not enough, but it is more than you had thought till then. Once you are well soaked in it, if you then venture to speak, you will have an amusing experience. You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan, a Pantheist when you are quoting Aquinas, and so forth. For you have now got on to the great level viaduct which crosses the ages and which looks so high from the valleys, so low from the mountains….”
I have read, I think, everything that Lewis ever published, and just about everything written about him. I do not recall him or any of his biographers mentioning Orthodoxy, pro or contra. There are two speculative books, if I recall aright, about C. S. Lewis and Rome: 1) C S Lewis and the Church of Rome, by Christopher Derrick, and 2) C S Lewis and the Catholic Church by Joseph Pearce. To my mind he was closer to the Orthodox Church than to Rome (Vatican). Had he lived longer (through the period of “Vatican Two”), I can safely say he would never have become Catholic. He remained a “mere Christian.” He died the same day JFK was assassinated, so news of his passing in the obit columns the next day was eclipsed by the two inch inch high bold headline caps about JFK and the events at Dallas. A week later, a then-famous professor (whether at Oxford or Cambridge, I cannot recall; he was rather well-known then, but his name eludes me now) — an atheist, of course, like the great majority at Oxford and Cambridge, said to his class, smugly, “He will not be missed; he will not be missed.”
As for Freud, he was a fraud and a charlatan. See Frederick Crews and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. The chief question is how anyone in his right mind could have taken seriously a word he said or wrote. Basically it was _Kaffeeklatsch_ psychobabble, but rather well written, so it was attractive to the literate “intellectualoids.”
Have a blessed Great Lenten Fast.