TRTR the Ape of God

[Mark Kohut]

Seems the more popular Lewis, C.S. used the concept and phrase also: From Tertullian
 
Same, footnote, explains Lewis's Latin phrase, Diabolus simius Dei, as a quotation from Tertullian, "the devil is the ape of God." Lewis made the antichrist figure ...

From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 4, 2011 7:31 AM
Subject: TRTR the Ape of God




In an earlier post I alluded to a satirist similar to Gaddis, Wyndham Lewis, whose
most famous book may be The Ape of God.
 
There is an ape in the God-fearing family in The Recognitions. 
 
Seems the concept-phrase was quite popular once, with Tillyard [Elizabethan World-
Picture, orig 1942] writing of Milton's Comus "He is the ape of God, repeating but distorting
the cosmic ecstasies of the theologians" quoting these lines as emblematic:
'But all to please and sate the curious taste" [after a quatrain about God's bounty] 
 
And, mike bailey's recent fave, Chesterton wrote" Magic was the abuse of preternatural powers 
by lower agents whose work was preternatural but not supernatural; it was founded on the profound
maxim of 'diabolus simius Dei; the Devil is the apr of God.....[later] 'the acts of saints and heroes,
are always acts of restora tion.".............................
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