C.S. Lewis: "I was not born to be free. I was born to adore and to obey." Was he anti-Liberty? UnAmerican?

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Bartolome_Casas said:
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Um. … well, considering he was a citizen of Great Britain. . . not a U.S. citizen. . .

Did you examine his quote in context? Do you know that the One He was born to adore and obey wasn’t the Queen of England or the country of Britain, but the Lord of All?
 
CS Lewis was never Catholic unforunatly… Although he represents what some Catholics should strive to be…

CS Lewis was British LOL…

Why would he be anti-American or anti-liberty? Your not a closeted Evangelical are you LOL? 😛
 
C.S. Lewis anti-liberty? :ehh: No, he was not. He was a big supporter of democracy. But he also recognized the truth that we were made fundamentally for obedience and adoration towards God, not for liberty. He got the balance about right.
 
I don’t think C.S. Lewis was “anti-liberty” or “unamerican.” I think he was faithful, or at least trying to be. Context is so important.
 
Un-American? Hardly: his wife was born and raised in America, so I really doubt he had any hostility toward the U.S. of A. Methinks the OP might be somewhat overly patriotic.
 
THE secret that so many reject without proper examination is the fact that if we submit to God’s Will - to adore and obey God, then we shall experience a freedom far beyond we could construct for ourselves in this world and in the next.

Regardless of our circumstance in this life there is great freedom in knowing we are honorable and God fearing.
 
Bartolome_Casas said:
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Well, Lewis certainly didn’t hold American views of liberty. Which is a good thing, in my opinion:p.

However, here’s the context for this quote: it’s not from any of Lewis’s writings but was attributed to him by his friend A. C. Harwood, as reported in *C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, *edited by James Como. Harwood, like several of Lewis’s friends, was an anthroposophist. Lewis’s main disagreement (as a Christian) with his anthroposophist friends was that he didn’t think they believed in a personal Creator God–their conception of God is fairly abstract, and they have a complex metaphysics which I don’t understand very well in spite of having studied it off and on for several years now, but which identifies the divine very closely with the human imagination. (I mostly know the version of anthroposophy taught by Lewis’s other friend Owen Barfield, which was deeply influenced by Romantics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge.)

In anthroposophy, the human consciousness is evolving toward a condition of freedom in which the divine will be entirely incarnated in us, so that we spontaneously will and know what is good and don’t need external authority. (They believe that the life of Jesus was the decisive moment in this story, by the way.)

Barfield became an Anglican in the 1940s, but he seems to have done so mostly to please his wife, who was a devout and orthodox Anglican and didn’t approve of his anthroposophy. In an interview with the American evangelical Lyle Dorset (available in transcript and cassette form at the Wade Center at Wheaton College near Chicago), Barfield expresses a good deal of uncertainty as to just what the point of worship is. Anthroposophists see the worship of a personal Father figure standing “outside” yourself" as a sign of an immature spirituality.

This is almost certainly what Lewis was talking about in the quote in question.

Edwin
 
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