What are the key words of modern criticism?
Creative, with its opposite derivative; spontaneity with its opposite convention; freedom, contrasted with rules.
Great authors are innovators, pioneers, explorers; bad authors bunch in schools and follow models.
Or again, great authors are always “breaking fetters” and “bursting bonds.”
* fetters mean : a chain or shackle for the feet. : something that confines : restraint.
They have personality, they “are themselves.”
I do not know whether we often think out [the implication of such language into a consistent philosophy];
but we certainly have a general picture /of bad work /flowering from conformity and discipleship,
and of good work /bursting out from certain centres of explosive force
– apparently self-originating force – which we call [men of genius].
Now the New Testament has nothing at all to tell us of literature.
I know that there are some //who like to think of Our Lord Himself as a poet and cite the parables /to support their view.
I admit freely that [to believe in the Incarnation at all] is to believe that every mode of human excellence is implicit
in His historical human character; poethood, of course, included.
But if all had been developed, [the limitation of a single human life] would have been transcended
and He would not have been a man;
therefore [all excellences /save the spiritual] remained in varying degrees implicit.
* 전치사로 쓰인 save ; With the exception of; except:
From Christian Reflections
Compiled in The Business of Heaven
Christian Reflections. Copyright © 1967 by The Executors of the Estate of C. S. Lewis.