"C.S.Lewis "George MacDonald. An Antology" (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

will come to feel a queer, awkward charm in their very faults. (But that, of
course, is what happens to us with all favorite authors.) One rare, and all
but unique, merit these novels must be allowed. The "good" characters are
always the best and most convincing. His saints live; his villains are
stagey.
This collection, as I have said, was designed not to revive MacDonald's
literary reputation but to spread his religious teaching. Hence most of my
extracts are taken from the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons. My own debt
to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly
all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has
given them great help-sometimes indispensable help toward the very
acceptance of the Christian faith.
I will attempt no historical or theological classification of
MacDonald's thought, partly because I have not the learning to do so, still
more because I am no great friend to such pigeonholing. One very effective
way of silencing the voice of conscience is to impound in an Ism the teacher
through whom it speaks: the trumpet no longer seriously disturbs our rest
when we have murmured "Thomist," "Barthian," or "Existentialist." And in
Mac-Donald it is always the voice of conscience that speaks. He addresses
the will: the demand for obedience, for "something to be neither more nor
less nor other than done" is incessant. Yet in that very voice of conscience
every other faculty somehow speaks as well-intellect, and imagination, and
humor, and fancy, and all the affections; and no man in modern times was
perhaps more aware of the distinction between Law and Gospel, the inevitable
failure of mere morality. The Divine Sonship is the key-conception which
unites all the different elements of his thought. I dare not say that he is
never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who
seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ
Himself. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere
else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so
intertwined. The title "Inexorable Love" which I have given to several
individual extracts would serve for the whole collection. Inexorability-but
never the inexorability of anything less than love-runs through it like a
refrain; "escape is hopeless"-"agree quickly with your
adversary"-"compulsion waits behind"-"the uttermost farthing will be
exacted." Yet this urgency never becomes shrill. All the sermons are
suffused with a spirit of love and wonder which prevents it from doing so.
MacDonald shows God threatening, but (as Jeremy Taylor says) "He threatens
terrible things if we will not be happy."
In many respects MacDonald's thought has, in a high degree, just those
excellences which his period and his personal history would lead us to
expect least. A romantic, escaping from a drily intellectual theology, might
easily be betrayed into valuing mere emotion and "religious experience" too
highly: but in fact few nineteenth-century writers are more firmly catholic
in relegating feeling to its proper place. (See Numbers 1, 27, 28, 37, 39,
351.) His whole philosophy of Nature (Numbers 52, 67, 150, 151, 184, 185,
187, 188, 189, 285) with its resolute insistence on the concrete, owes
little to the thought of an age which hovered between mechanism and
idealism; he would obviously have been more at home with Professor Whitehead
than with Herbert Spencer or T. H. Green. Number 285 seems to me