Review: Enduring Divine Absence
L'Absinthe, Edgar Degas (1876) While reading Joseph Minich's recent Enduring Divine Absence , I was reminded of C.S. Lewis' first Screwtape Letter. In it, the demon Screwtape recalls a mini-crisis when the atheist "patient" he tempts considers Christianity. The danger passes as soon as the atheist walks out his front door: Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere lo...