Friday, June 09, 2006

C.S. Lewis on Predestination

"The thing was going to be done. There was going to arrive, in the course of time, a moment at which he would have done it. The future act stood there, fixed and unaltered as if he had already performed it. It was a mere irrelevant detail that it happened to occupy the position we call future instead of that which we call past. The whole struggle was over, and yet there seemed to have been no moment of victory. You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say that he had [been?] delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged into unassailable freedom. Ransom could not, for the life of him, see the difference between these two statements. Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on this subject."

-From Chapter 11, Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis

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