C. S. Lewis Blog

Far, Far Out and Further In: The Postmodern Narnia

2009-02-08T19:32:00.000-08:00

by Rupert Loydell
Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book is that very postmodern thing, a book about books, a personal account of how she first read, then abandoned C.S. Lewis’ Narnia tales, before recently returning to reconsider her reaction now to the books she once loved, and attempt to engage and deconstruct them as an adult. It is a story or group of stories about personal space, about the whole notion of reading and the imagination, about imaginative life, private space, and how langauge can be used to create worlds.

It is also a discussion of allegory, allusion and myth. It is not an academic book – indeed at times I longed for more citation and referencing, some deeper thought and consideration of her themes, more context and less opinion – but it is an entertaining and enjoyable read that at times reminded me of Alberto Manguel’s writing about books. [This is high praise by the way.]

Miller first visited Narnia as a child, and like many other children (myself included) loved the series and reread them many times. But when a friend revealed to her that they were rooted in Lewis’ Christian faith and were an allegory, the magic went out of the work; indeed, Miller actively rejected them, feeling tricked and used. Only recently did she pick them up again, to write a magazine article about her favourite childhood books. That article is where the idea for this book originated.

Although she still remains unhappy with the way christanity underpins and informs Narnia, and particularly criticises and dismisses The Last Battle, Miller is now able to discuss these elements in terms of myth, and engage with Narnia despite the Christianity within it. She convincingly argues that Christianity is just one story in the mix that Lewis draws on, a mix which includes mythical creatures such as fauns, Father Christmas, witches and talking animals, thus enabling her to not prioritise or highlight the Christian content, although it is clear that a childhood resentment still lingers.

It is quite a strange idea to me to try and read Narnia without the supporting framework of christian belief. Miller clearly points out that it is Lewis’ very sincere and traditional belief that holds the stories together, in contrast to, for example, the over-contrived and elaborately detailed world systems that Tolkien devised for Middle Earth. Elsewhere, of course, Lewis was writing fluent and intelligent books of apologetics, and the satirical Screwtape Letters. He also appears to have been parochial, xenophobic if not actually racist, sexist towards women, a heavy drinker and smoker, and opposed to social change.

One can of course say that none of this matters. Indeed, when I am in the mood, I too am prone to saying let the art/book/music stand for itself. Certainly, the work itself is the place to start, but it is clear we cannot take away or ignore any context we are given, and if we wish to fully understand or are really interested in something, we will find out more about the circumstances of its making, and its relationship to the time and place of its making.

You’d think this was fairly straightforward, yes? We can easily find biographical detail out about an author of Lewis’ stature, can easily imagine a tweedy Englishman [although Lewis was actually Irish] who liked his ale and inhabited a fuggy, smoke-filled room in the academic city of Oxford. We know about his faith, his books, his correspondence, and we could perhaps suggest that what I have called racism and sexism were merely the norms of the time, acknowledging that the English are renowned for disliking and feeling superior to those they deem “foreigners”, despite being a race descended from a variety of invaders!

But for how long do we allow “the norms of the time” to be forgivable? Is it okay for Miller to state, as she does, that the White Witch his an erotic character, with hints of the dominatrix in her, or that the dark-skinned foreigners in Narnia’s neighbouring countries are cliché and racist? Or is she out of order? And if we do allow that, where does it get us? In England we have seen the gollywogs removed from Enid Blyton’s Noddy books, many titles changed, and gaps left in the reprints of early Rupert Bear annuals where racist terms which were acceptable at the time used to be. Is this censorship? Or a way of acknowledging and making amends for what has been offensive in the past? Do values somehow leak into a reader so that we end up with a new generation of society with the same negative traits? Or do children initally read stories as simply stories with little concern for more than plot, setting and character? Miller was certainly caught up in Narnia at this kind of level, indeed was naively unaware of the Christian element and has actively continued to reject that element of the books.

Which, of course, raises other questions: Was Lewis writing to convince or convert readers? When does storytelling become polemic? Or coercion? Evangelism? Is it fair to try and co-erce young children into religious faith? To persuade them to believe? Was Lewis deliberately trying to make an allegory or just use the imaginary and religious world he knew to make a new world with?

It’s these kind of questions that fascinate any 21st century reader. This doesn’t mean I never gain pleasure from reading a story, nor that I only read literary fiction or criticial or academic texts, but it does mean these kind of questions are never very far from one’s thoughts.

By nature I’m conservative [small ‘c’, I hasten to add]. Like Lewis I don’t like change, I like beer and conversation, and also like being on my own reading [and in my case listening to music]. But I’ve had to face the fact that things change, not only in the real, physical world, but in educational, academic, social and other areas. Little remains secure or fixed, guaranteed for ever or – and I hesitate here – true. There are too many things changing, and too many versions of all the stories in the world.

To us now it seems obvious that slaves would tell a different story to that told by a slave trader of the time, but for centuries only the traders got to tell their version of things, and slavery was considered acceptable. The history of the subject was only told by those who owned or sold slaves. It’s not that far a jump from the slave’s and slave trader’s differing stories to the notion that if several of us have a meeting and then tell other people about it, there will be several different accounts of what went on at that meeting. Just as there are four gospels, four different versions of Jesus’ life, in the New Testament.

If we add to that the idea that we are all prone to being who we are because of upbringing, race, gender and sexuality, and that these, and other factors, influence how and what we think about the world, then we are left with a large number of things to consider when we approach a book, author or record.

Until recently these ideas were bundled together and labelled Postmodernism, an -ism that proposed everything is in flux with no definitive version possible, and rejoiced in plurality and possibility. It saw the removal of what it called metanarratives, the underlying stories that many societies have previously relied on, and suggested that other societies and faiths should be respected. It placed an emphasis on experience and context, and on how human beings use language to tell each other – indeed, in philosophical terms, construct – the world around them.

While the majorioty of people would see tolerance for difference as a positive, there are of course those who are too scared or belligerent to accept that. The rise of the religious right, and the wars that the West have waged against those who “threaten” its failing capitalist systems show this. There has also been much argument between scientists and the arts & humanities, much of it semantic, about notions of truth and reality. One of the scariest books I’ve recently read is Why Truth Matters, which really does read as a rallying call for conservatism. It and books like Can We Be Sure About Anything? want a return to meek and mild acceptance of what science offers, the reinstatement of a cultural hierarchy, preferably with science at the top. They think facts is facts and that’s the end of it, and don’t wan’t to discuss the fact that science also changes as it progresses.

What do I mean by that? Well, the current “truth” of science, which I’m sure most of us accept, is tentative and open to change and revision. I totally accept that scientists have tested hypotheses and theories, concepts and such, to the best of their skill and ability, and that current medical, engineering and other practices are based on this. But several hundred years ago people thought the earth was flat and the sky a golfish bowl over us with stars painted on, that the sun orbited the earth. There is plenty of stuff out there waiting to be discovered or deduced, and much of it will mean we have to revise what has gone before, including what is currently percieved as “fact."

Ironically, just as some christians have started to actually tackle postmodernist ideas in theological and socio-theological terms, academia has pretty much decided that postmodernism is really a continuation of modernism, and the -ism is slowly being removed from the syllabus, leaving postmodernist ideas and thought to be studied as something that happened in the late 20th century.

Books such as John D. Caputo’s What Would Jesus Deconstruct? and James K.A. Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? are tentative mainstream Christian steps into a theoretical area already well explored by the likes of Don Cupitt, Richard Holloway and Mark C. Taylor. Whereas Cupitt et al almost abandon Christian faith altogether, and see belief as a useful tool in modern society, Caputo and Smith tiptoe in and try to use a sanitized form of deconstruction to reinforce evangelical ideas and conservative Christianity, mostly using a pretty basic form of contextualisation and inter-textuality on a God-given literal text.

They do little to address the whole notion of God’s Truth within a world that no longer has a time or place for truth, less to address the notion of the supernatural or spiritual within a materialistic and disbelieving society, and fail to ask whose version of events is Christianity based on once we move away from the childish belief of God-given text, and consider issues of revelation, translation, cultural context, and even narrative and other variation and discrepancy.

Perhaps we need to return to earlier theologians and apologists who have argued that God is ultimately unknowable, at best partially knowable or describable? We need to learn to use myth, allegory, parable and storytelling as others, including Christ himself, have before. Faith is not straightforward nor prescriptive, it takes place within a complex mesh of society, culture and place. We cannot impose our beliefs on others as individuals or nations; it is the legalism and pettiness of Lewis’ last judgement scenes that make The Last Battle such a disappointing finale to the Narnia Chronicles for Laura Miller and many others.

Miller might be surprised to hear me suggest that her book is a model nonacademic book in the way it reflects upon and engages with her subject. She opens up all sorts of ideas, intelligently linking them back to the subject at the heart of her study. Even in her continuing rejection of Christianity she opens up the opposite possibility for those who are otherwise disposed. Neither Lewis nor Miller are theologians, but despite themselves, they both have much to say to 21st century christians adrift in our ever-changing, restless world.

Books Mentioned
Can We Be Sure About Anything? Science, Faith and Postmodernism, ed. Denis Alexander (Apollos/IVP, 2005)
Why Truth Matters, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom (Continuum, 2006)
What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church, John D. Caputo (Baker Academic, 2007)
The Magician’s Book. A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, Laura Miller (Little, Brown & Co, 2008)
Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church, James K.A. Smith (Baker Academic, 2006)

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Rupert Loydell is Senior Lecturer in English with Creative Writing at University College Falmouth, the editor of Stride magazine, and the author of several poetry books, including the recent An Experiment in Navigation (Shearsman, 2008).

Jack the Counselor

2009-01-27T07:23:00.000-08:00

by Bruce L. Edwards
Ask any ten avid readers of C. S. Lewis to describe his vocation and I suspect 9 out of 10 will use one of the following terms: Christian apologist, fantasy/sf writer, children's author, literary critic, Oxford don—a handful, maybe even "poet." Few, I reckon, would think to refer to Jack, as he invited friends to call him, as "counselor."

And yet "counselor," I would aver, for those who know Lewis's biography and just about any portion of his rather voluminous correspondence, is a keenly apt designation. And it is one that I would suggest deserves to be ranked as high as any item on the above list in describing the role Jack played in the lives of the people he touched.
Want some proof?

A recent book of judiciously selected letters by C. S. Lewis, Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis (HarperCollins, 2008), amply illustrates Lewis's compassion and theological agility in addressing the myriad spiritual needs and eternal concerns of his many correspondents.
This superbly edited volume by the venerable Narnian encyclopedist, Paul Ford, reflects on page after page how profoundly Lewis shared his brilliant Christian mind through a counseling ministry conducted entirely through correspondence, the recipients, most of whom, he never met in person.

Drawn from real life circumstances, the questions posed to Jack and his answers to them transcend the time and place in which they are situated, while their charm resonates all the more because of their historical grounding.

These letters reveal the so-called "private" Jack, well outside the scholastic setting and the public forums he inhabited and dominated. Here one witnesses not only candid glimpses of how he lived his own “normal Christian life,” but also how he spoke to others who were new to it, running from it, or simply challenged by it.

What Yours, Jack does most effectively is cull poignant, unexpurgated letters from the 1920s through the 1960s that demonstrate Lewis’s unusual care for and sensitivity to his readers. His unguarded answers reflect his customary theologically astute and uncompromising orthodoxy, and the same wit, same human empathy, and same spiritual depth and breadth found in his apologetics and fiction.

Here, in a letter or a postcard, Jack reluctantly (for he considered himself an amateur) but perceptively (because he could not help but draw from his prodigious submersion in the Bible and Christian history) offers spiritual direction and nurture as warmly and graciously to strangers as he does to friends.

His audience, a vast majority of them Americans, and among those Americans, disproportionate numbers of them women, wrote to Jack repeatedly over several decades sharing their perpelxities, their cares, their longings.

While Jack seems never to have been exasperated by individual correspondents—he sometimes is found complaining to brother Warnie and a handful of confidants that the sheer workload of answering each post was a burden he’d wished not to have to carry. A brief sampler of Jack’s winsome prose follows.

In his letters, Jack is forthright, and, sometimes, surprisingly disclosive; to a correspondent experiencing a spiritual awakening in the midst of other turmoil, Jack evinces some uneasiness with being her “confessor”:

You may say you want to confess your sins to God only. The trouble is that in fact you have confessed a good many of them to me!. ...And quite frankly I am not sure it is fitting for a man who is not protected and supported by the special status of a priest or a doctor to be told too many of his neighbor’s secrets—unless, of course, there is some desperate need. (1941; p. 82)

To a wife and mother struggling with grief, he writes compellingly,

I think what you say about grief being better than estrangement is very true. I am sorry you should have had this grief. ...I also have become much acquainted with grief now through the death of my great friend Charles Williams. ...I find all that talk about ‘feeling he is closer to us than before’ isn’t just talk. It’s just what it does feel like—I can’t put it into words. One seems at moments to be living in a new world. Lots, lots of pain but not a particle of depression or resentment. (1945; p. 112)

Jack could also be blunt, especially on a philosophical topic on which he had a settled position; to a former student, a missionary to India who intimated he was becoming “disillusioned” with apologetic method, Lewis confessed:

I still think the argument from design the weakest possible ground for Theism, and what may be called the argument from un-design the strongest for Atheism. (1946; p. 118)

But more typical is his foundational empathy with spiritual wayfarers; to a correspondent trying to handle her sense of “spiritual dryness,” Lewis admonished:

You are quite right (though not in the way you meant) when you say I needn’t ‘work up” sympathy with you. No, I needn’t. I have had enough experiences of the crises of family life, the terrors, despondencies, hopes deferred, and weariness. The trouble is that things go on so long, isn’t it? And one gets so tired of trying. . . . Take it hour by hour. Don’t add the past and the future to the present load more than you can help. God bless you all. (1952; p. 191).

Who is the Jack Lewis who is revealed here? A sensitive and kind man, observant, attentive, careful to sound neither omniscient nor above it all, identifying with people in their sorrows, doubts, sense of directionlessness. He honors the everydayness of faith, not as lofty intellectual enterprise, but as a daily surrender of the flesh to spirit, the temporal to the eternal.

Lewis treasures (and endears himself to) his correspondents by the simple gift of taking them seriously, and by providing not rote answers but deeply felt, reflective counsel out his own crucible of faith, all tethered to Christian tradition and a marvelous grasp of Scripture.

Unfailingly generous, and ever humble without sounding pious, Jack the counselor serves as both priest and prophet, comforter and evangelist, friend and brother.

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Bruce L. Edwards is Professor of English and Africana Studies, and Associate Vice Provost for Academic Technology at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, where has he been a faculty member and administrator since 1981. He has served as a C. S. Lewis Foundation Fellow at the Kilns in Oxford, England; a Fulbright Fellow in Nairobi, Kenya (1999-2000); a Bradley Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC (1989-90); and as the S. W. Brooks Memorial Professor of Literature at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (1988). Bruce and his wife, Joan, live in the mighty metropolis of Bowling Green, Ohio, and have four grown children, ranging in age from 24 to 34.

His C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy (4 volume encyclopedia) was published by Praeger Press in 2007. Bruce’s other books on Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia include: Not a Tame Lion (2005) and Further Up and Further In: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), A Rhetoric of Reading: C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy (1988) and The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer (1988). He has since 1995 maintained a popular web site on the life and works of C. S. Lewis at www.cslewisblog.com.

A Look at Lewis’s Poetry

2009-01-18T21:12:00.000-08:00

by Michael Ward
C.S. Lewis’s poetry is probably the least well-known part of his output. It is also probably the least liked part. People complain that Lewis had a tin ear as a poet. He didn’t give us verse that sings. It’s too full of knots. So they say.

I disagree. Or rather, I agree that it has many knots, but I think the knots are interesting, even beautiful. In my view, Lewis’s poetry contains some of his best work and ought to be more widely appreciated.

There is a great deal that could be said about both the form and the content of Lewis’s verse, but I want to focus on neither the form nor the content. Rather, let us look at the way that form and content are often inextricably bound to each other. What Lewis says is interdependent with how he says it.

There are many poems where we can see this interdependence between form and content, but in this brief article there is space to study only one example. It’s called ‘Le Roi S’Amuse’ (‘The King Amuses Himself’), a poem about God creating the universe.

Here, Lewis imagines God as Jove, drawing on the medieval convention of disguising Christianity under pagan forms. ‘Paganism,’ Lewis wrote in one of his academic books, ‘is the religion of poetry, through which the author can express, at any moment, just so much or so little of his real religion as his art requires.’

One particular thing about this poem that needs to be recognised, if we are to enjoy it fully, is the way Lewis ingeniously plays with complex sound effects.

He said that he was ‘interested in phonetic patterns: consonances, assonances, internal or inbedded rhymes, and all that.’ It’s quite easy to read ‘Le Roi S’Amuse’ – and indeed many of Lewis’s similarly structured poems - without recognising the careful way in which he chooses words so that they subtly chime with one another. But the chiming and the subtlety of that chiming are part of the total effect that he is aiming to achieve.

Here, then, is ‘Le Roi S’Amuse’:

Jove gazed
On woven mazes
Of patterned movement as the atoms whirled.
His glance turned
Into dancing, burning
Colour-gods who rushed upon that sullen world,
Waking, re-making, exalting it anew –
Silver and purple, shrill-voiced yellow, turgid crimson, and virgin blue.

Jove stared
On overbearing
And aching splendour of the naked rocks.
Where his gaze smote,
Hazily floated
To mount like thistledown in countless flocks,
Fruit-loving, root-loving gods, cool and green
Of feathery grasses, heather and orchard, pollen'd lily, the olive and the bean.

Jove laughed.
Like cloven-shafted
Lightning, his laughter into brightness broke.
From every dint
Where the severed splinters
Had scattered a Sylvan or a Satyr woke;
Ounces came pouncing, dragon-people flew,
There was spirited stallion, squirrel unrespectful, clanging raven and kangaroo.

Jove sighed.
The hoving tide of
Ocean trembled at the motion of his breath.
The sigh turned
Into white, eternal,
Radiant Aphrodite unafraid of death;
A fragrance, a vagrant unrest on earth she flung,
There was favouring and fondling and bravery and building
and chuckling music and suckling of the young.

Jove thought.
He strove and wrought at
A thousand clarities; from his brows sprang
With earnest mien
Stern Athene;
The cold armour on her shoulders rang.
Our sires at the fires of her lucid eyes began
To speak in symbols, to seek out causes, to name the creatures; they became Man.

World and Man
Unfurled their banner –
It was gay Behemoth on a sable field.
Fresh-robed
In flesh, the ennobled
Spirits carousing in their myriads reeled;
There was frolic and holiday. Jove laughed to see
The abyss empeopled, his bliss imparted, the throng that was his and no longer he.

The content of the poem is obvious: God creates a teeming, vivid, colourful universe, lovingly purposed at every level, from atoms whirling in minuscule patterns all the way up to rational spirits ‘carousing’ before their creator.

But what is the form of the poem? We can’t examine every stanza, but since every stanza is built to the same scheme we need look at just one. Let’s look at the last one.

The stanza has eight lines. The end-rhymes are A, A, B, C, C, B, D, D. ‘Man’ rhymes with the ‘ban-’ of ‘banner’; ‘field’ rhymes three lines later with ‘reeled’; the ‘robe-’ of ‘robed’ rhymes with the ‘ennob-’ of ‘ennobled’; and ‘see’ rhymes with ‘he’.

So far so (relatively) simple! But if we then pay attention to the internal rhymes, we see that the scheme Lewis has set himself is in fact far more complicated. The full scheme for each stanza is actually: A, B, A, B, C, C, D, E, F, E, F, G, G, D, H, H, I, J, J, K, K, I.

This, as far as I know, is the knottiest rhyme scheme that Lewis ever attempted. I’ve written out the pattern as follows:

Line 1: A, B (‘World’, ‘Man’)
Line 2: A, B (‘Unfurled’, ‘ban-’)
Line 3: C, C, D (‘gay Be-’, ‘sab-’, ‘field’)
Line 4: E, F (‘fresh’, ‘robe-’)
Line 5: E, F (‘flesh’, ‘ennob-’)
Line 6: G, G, D (‘Spir-’, ‘myr-’, ‘reeled’)
Line 7: H, H, I (‘frol-’, ‘hol-’, ‘see’)
Line 8: J, J, K, K, I (‘abyss’, ‘bliss’, ‘throng’, ‘long-’, ‘he’)

That’s nine different rhymes used, in total, 22 times per stanza, - a mind-bogglingly tightly-knit lattice. Well might Lewis write of ‘woven mazes’! The complexity of the form helps convey the complexity of the world being described. Form and content are united.

Lewis was deeply concerned to make form and content inseparable in his verse (see, for example, the letter he wrote to his fellow poet, Ruth Pitter on 24 July 1946). ‘Le Roi S’Amuse’ is a good example of his achieving that aim.

One last thing. I have mentioned how Lewis as an expert in medieval literature uses the medieval convention of figuring God under a pagan name (Jove). That is not the only medieval aspect to this poem. Its complexity is another such feature. ‘Intricacy,’ Lewis wrote, ‘is a mark of the medieval mind.’ Poets such as Chaucer and Dante and Langland love to present us, he said, with ‘something that cannot be taken in at a glance, something that at first looks planless though all is planned. Everything leads to everything else, but by very intricate paths.’

Lewis’s own practice of intricate patterning is a major aspect of his poetry, - and, indeed, of his fiction too. It reflects not only his knowledge and love of medieval literature but also his belief that the real universe is a fantastically complex work of divine artistry. Every single thing in the cosmos, Lewis believed, has been made both for its own sake and for the sake of every other thing. The independent purposes of each creature cannot be untied from their interdependent purposes. In Letters to Malcolm, his book on prayer, Lewis writes this about God’s creation: ‘The great work of art was made for the sake of all it does and is, down to the curve of every wave and the flight of every insect.’

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Dr. Michael Ward is a minister in the Church of England and the author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2008). He is the co-editor of Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why it Matters What Christians Believe (SPCK/Hendrickson, 2007) and of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis. His website is www.planetnarnia.com

Visit Michael's website at www.planetnarnia.com.

The Original Hybrids: C. S. Lewis on Being Human

2009-01-12T07:08:00.000-08:00

by Sarah Arthur
I learned a fancy new phrase in my theology class at seminary last year: theological anthropology, or the Christian doctrine of human nature. What is a human being? How is a human being different from God? How are we different from other creatures?

These are the questions that a doctrine of theological anthropology seeks to answer. And it’s not merely theoretical. Throughout Christian history, believers have insisted that a robust understanding of human nature provides the individual Christian with a healthy self-understanding and care for others.

C. S. Lewis was no exception. His fiction echoes with classical theological anthropology, much of which shaped my own self-understanding as a young person struggling to make my way in a culture that devalues and degrades our humanness. Two examples stand out. The first is the notion of human “hybrids”—made of body and spirit—who experience peaks and troughs in the spiritual life, as illustrated in The Screwtape Letters. The second is the notion of human dignity and shame as illustrated at the end of Prince Caspian. This article will consider each example in turn.

The first illustration comes from Lewis’s satire The Screwtape Letters. (For the uninitiated, the book comprises of letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood, offering advice on how to tempt the human in his charge.) Early in the book, Wormwood’s human “patient” becomes a Christian but then begins to lose his initial spiritual excitement. Wormwood sees this as a positive development, but Screwtape isn’t so sure. Hasn’t Wormwood heard of the “law of Undulation”?

To explain what he means, Screwtape defines human beings as amphibians: half spirit, half animal. They are the original hybrids. The spiritual side of them is drawn to eternal things, able to fix on an eternal object. But the material side of them is bound in time and thus subject to changes, to gradual deterioration. So the closest thing they can come to a steady course is what Screwtape calls the “law of Undulation,” or the repeated peaks and troughs in life. At one point (such as the “patient’s” conversion) a person is at a spiritual and physical peak, full of energy and enthusiasm; and at another point he sinks into a trough of dullness in mind and body, feeling distant from God and disinterested in most everything.

The non-self-reflective human might be tempted, in the troughs, to try to work himself back up to a peak; or, conversely, to begin thinking that the peak was a bit excessive in the first place. This is the demonic “advantage” to a trough. But Screwtape warns that, because God does not want to override human freedom, God allows for the troughs—indeed, specializes in the troughs—because it is in the times of dryness that humans recognize their need for God and seek God of their own volition. God would prefer to have us voluntarily close by, even if we are miserable in the meantime. (But of course, Screwtape can’t understand why God desires us; Screwtape simply can’t believe it’s because of love. God must have some ulterior motive!)

Lewis’s notion of “the law of Undulation” was a watershed to me as a teenage reader, wrestling with ups and downs as any teenager does. Once I became aware of my hybrid nature—half material, half spiritual—I could better tune in to the troughs and peaks in my emotional and physical energy. When my enthusiasm for life was low, I was encouraged to remember that it is not a permanent state of affairs. Indeed, a trough just may be when God is trying to get my attention. Likewise when I am at a peak, I can remember not to cling to that spiritual high too tightly, but to thank God for having joy in life for the time being.

The second example of a robust theological anthropology in Lewis’s writings is the notion of human dignity and shame as illustrated in the closing chapters of Prince Caspian, the second book Lewis published in his acclaimed children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia. As the story winds down, Aslan offers the defeated Telmarines the opportunity of a new life in the world from which they came. He describes their ancestry as that of pirates in our world who accidentally ended up in Narnia generations ago. Prince Caspian is a descendant of those same pirates—a point Aslan makes sure the prince acknowledges. Caspian does, but not with pride: he says, “I was wishing that I came of a more honorouable lineage.” At this point Aslan makes a statement of theological anthropology that the readers are meant to hear and claim as well. “You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” said Aslan. “And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth. Be content.” But what does this mean?

Lewis is alluding to the biblical notion that human beings are creatures of tremendous dignity and worth, descended from the first humans made in the image of God (Genesis 1:24-26). Those humans walked with God and were made caretakers of all creation—they were, as the psalmist says, not much lower than the angels (see Psalm 8). In addition, God became incarnate in the form of a human through Jesus Christ, an act that caught up all of humanity into the divine life (see Mere Christianity, Book IV). It is this knowledge, Lewis says, that should raise the head of the lowest beggar.

But as descendants of Adam and Eve, humans also inherit their shame. Our ancestors broke God’s law by eating fruit from the forbidden tree (Genesis 3), and the guilt of their trespass is handed down from generation to generation through our spiritual DNA, you might say, only to be cleared by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We can never escape from that heritage except through faith in Christ, in whom we are “new creations” (see 2 Corinthians 5:17). It is this knowledge that should bring humility to the highest person of prestige and power.

Lewis’s notion of human dignity and shame at the end of Prince Caspian was both an encouragement and a caution to me as a young reader—and can be to other readers as well. As to encouragement, there are many people who long to grow in their spiritual journey but feel held back by their troubled family history. They may think they can never overcome their painful heritage and become the people God has called them to be. Lewis’s theological anthropology in Prince Caspian can encourage them to claim their true heritage as Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, descendants of the Lord and Lady of creation, who are made in God’s image. As to caution, others may unwittingly fall into the sin of spiritual pride, thinking they are on a level above the sinning populace. To be reminded of their shameful spiritual ancestry—which they share with everyone else—could be an important corrective toward proper spiritual humility.

In these illustrations, Lewis offers a theological anthropology that profoundly shaped my self-understanding as a young person, both by encouraging me to recognize my hybrid-ness (and not take my spiritual troughs too seriously) and by presenting a nuanced picture of my human heritage as daughter of Adam and Eve. It also gave me a robust understanding of the fallen yet beloved and redeemable human creatures around me. So, what might change in the hearts and actions of today’s young people if they encountered Lewis’s theological anthropology in a similar way?

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Sarah Arthur is a consultant to the Northern Michigan C. S. Lewis Festival (www.cslewisfestival.org) and the author of numerous youth resources, including The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry (Upper Room Books, 2007). She is presently completing graduate studies at Duke Divinity School in Durham, NC. She can be reached at www.saraharthur.com.

NOTE: Later in the book, Screwtape speaks similarly of the humans’ horror of the Same Old Thing: they like change because they are materially bound in time, but they also like permanence, because there are spiritually bound in eternity. So again, the only way they can moderate between change and permanence is through what Screwtape calls rhythm, or the repeating patterns in the broader seasons and cycles of life.

The Personal Heresy

2009-01-05T06:53:00.001-08:00

by Joel Heck
Now reprinted, The Personal Heresy by C. S. Lewis is a necessity. I have read the book seven times this year in the process of preparing for the re-release. The book was first published in 1939, reprinted in 1965, but then it became one of the few Lewis books to go out of print. The August 7, 2008 release of the book by Concordia University Press culminated a two-year process.

A History of The Personal Heresy
In 1924, Lewis addressed the Martlets, an undergraduate Oxford literary society, arguing that the personal life of author James Stephens, a popular Irish author, had little to do with understanding his works. Again in 1930 Lewis addressed the Martlets, this time as an Oxford don, developing his position more fully. In that same year, E.M.W. Tillyard published his major work on John Milton, in which he wrote, “All poetry is about the poet’s state of mind.” To understand Paradise Lost correctly, he stated, one must read it as an “expression of Milton’s personality.”

The first three essays of The Personal Heresy were originally published in the journal Essays and Studies, a periodical of the English Association, in 1934, 1935, and 1936. The first essay was written as a challenge, open to anyone, and the challenge was subsequently taken up by Tillyard, who wrote the response that became chapter two of The Personal Heresy. The exchange continued from there. After the first three essays were complete, three additional untitled essays were added, along with a concluding note by Lewis and a collaboratively written preface by both authors. All of these together comprise The Personal Heresy.

The controversy concluded with a lively debate at Magdalen College, Oxford, on Feb. 7, 1939, the same year the book was originally published. Of this debate, former student of Lewis John Lawlor wrote, “There was a memorable occasion when in the Hall at Magdalen, Dr. Tillyard met him to round off in debate the controversy begun with the publication of Lewis’s indictment of ‘The Personal Heresy.’ I am afraid there was no debate. Lewis made rings round Tillyard; in, out, up, down, around back again—like some piratical Plymouth bark against a high-built galleon of Spain.”

Some of Lewis’s letters provide us with additional perspective on this controversy, showing Lewis to be aware of the potential for a negative view of him, but also showing Lewis to be congenial towards Tillyard himself. Lewis seems to discuss his first essay in a letter of April 5, 1935, to Paul More, stating that he might be pushing Mr. More if he sent him a copy of his essay.

In a letter to Joan Bennett, February 1937, Lewis jokingly refers to this controversy by calling himself a “professional controversialist and itinerant prize-fighter.” Interestingly, there seemed to be no acrimony between the two men, for Lewis wrote about joining Tillyard in contributing chapters for a Festschrift to Sir Herbert Grierson, and on Jan. 25, 1938, Lewis wrote to Frank P. Wilson about meeting Tillyard in London and the two of them lunching together there. There is evidence that, shortly after the publication of The Personal Heresy, Lewis considered the heresy over.

On July 23, 1939, about two months after the publication of the book, Lewis wrote to Owen Barfield, “I quite agree that the Personal Heresy is not important—now! But it was rapidly becoming so. I was just in the nick of time . . . .” But if the personal heresy had disappeared by that time, I’m afraid that it has come back in our day which has drunk so deeply of “the poison of subjectivism.”

The Significance of The Personal Heresy
On Sept. 12, 1940, Jack wrote to Eliza Marian Butler, a University of Manchester professor at the time, stating that the kernel of The Personal Heresy was “Don’t attribute superhuman qualities to poetry unless you really believe in a superhuman subject to support them.” There is a Christian sub-text to Lewis’s position: poetry can do great things only if there is a great God.

Lewis’s position in The Personal Heresy reflects his conviction that objective values are resident in people, places, events, and things, rejecting the relativistic mindset of that age and subsequent ages. It shares with The Abolition of Man (1943) a concern for the undermining of objective value. That is why, throughout The Personal Heresy, Lewis consistently defends the position that literature is about the objects or people or events out there and not about thoughts and feelings inside the writer.

Lewis’s position was further developed in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) and reached its culmination in his 1961 work, An Experiment in Criticism. In that work Lewis wrote,

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

I believe that Lewis has here anticipated the modern approach to literature known as Reader Response as well as the post-modern deconstruction movement, where a text means not what it means, but whatever meaning the reader ascribes to it.

Another lesson from The Personal Heresy is for the pride of the poet, and everyone else’s pride, to be held in check, but, correspondingly, to be able to say with Ethel Waters, “God don’t make no junk.” Lewis both challenges the elitism of some poets and elevates the cause of the common man.

One other note: In his introduction, Bruce Edwards says that reading this book is like taking a tutorial with Lewis (xi). If you ever wished you could have had Lewis for a teacher, you can . . . by reading this book.

A Concluding Thought
With the availability of The Personal Heresy, one can now more easily come to appreciate a piece of writing that both connects to other positions Lewis took and also gives a prime example of this great literary scholar writing within his field. The book is available from Concordia University Press, 11400 Concordia University Drive, Austin, Texas 78726.

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Since 1998, Rev. Dr. Joel D. Heck has served Concordia University at Austin as Professor of Theology. He teaches courses in Old Testament, New Testament, Reformation history, and the life and writings of C. S. Lewis. Read more about Dr. Heck.

Notes

(1) Christian Herald, Vol. LXXXI, April 1958.

(2) Christopher N. L. Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge. Vol. IV: 1870–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 488.

(3) Patrick Moore, “Sir Fred Hoyle,” Dictionary of National Biography, consulted Jan. 11, 2005, 2-3. Patrick Moore, “Hoyle, Sir Fred (1915–2001)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Jan 2005 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/76123, accessed 11 Jan 2005].

(4) New Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. b. 90, p. 63.

(5) C.E.M. Joad, The Recovery of Belief, 32.

(6) C. S. Lewis, “The Seeing Eye,” in Christian Reflections, 171.

A Skeptic's Appreciation of Narnia

2008-12-15T07:21:00.000-08:00

by David J. Theroux
Numerous articles are currently appearing on the new book by Salon.com's book critic Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia. In the book, Ms. Miller recounts her childhood love for C. S. Lewis’s 7-volume book series, The Chronciles of Narnia, only to turn away from them as a non-Christian young adult, and later to return to them with skeptical admiration.

Along the way, she has come to appreciate Lewis's immense accomplishment in the Narniad, but largely believes that this relates solely to Lewis's use of pre-Christian legends and symbols and that the Christian imagery was inappropriate and a "betrayal" (a view she incidentally does not hold for Philip Pullman's bluntly anti-Christian Dark Materials trilogy). Her error lies in failing to appreciate Lewis's (and J.R.R. Tolkien's, Charles Williams's and G.K. Chesterton's) deeper point that all truly good literature, including ancient legend, reflects shadowings of Christian truths.

For Lewis, the difference between standard myth and Christianity is not that the former is more authentic myth, but that Christianity is most authentically what Tolkien called "true myth," in which the truths embedded in those legends, which although untrue have inspired and thrilled generations for millennia, became all too real in the true story of Jesus Christ.

Indeed, it was this insight by Lewis that was a major factor in his conversion in becoming a Christian. Although having much to be admired, Ms. Miller's book really is a reflection of her own biases and limitations as a agnostic/modernist journalist, and she would do well to dig deeper into Lewis's own scholarly writings on this matter, as well as Michael Ward's superb book, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (Oxford University Press). In so doing, she (as with both Philip Pullman and Tolkien himself) misinterprets numerous aspects of the Narniad stories, predictably based on her ignorance both of the classic literature Lewis was drawing upon and the "Medieval model" Ward reveals is at the heart of the books. Lewis's Narniad has been so extremely popular because of its profoundly effective and sophisticated integration of enduring truths of the yearning of all mankind for what Lewis rightly called "Joy," which leads us on a path directly to Christianity. Here are other examples:

"A Return to Narnia: Adored in Childhood, Reconsidered in Adulthood and Finally Embraced," by Meghan Cox Gurdon (Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2006)

"The Magician's Book: Actual Smart Things About C.S. Lewis (and J.R.R. Tolkien)," by Lev Grossman (Time, December 1, 2008)

"A Spy In the House of Narnia," by Rebecca Traister (Salon.com, December 7, 2008)

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David J. Theroux is the founder and president of The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.; founder and president of the C. S. Lewis Society of California; and publisher of The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy. You can contact him at dtheroux@independent.org.

Discovering Narnia

2008-12-02T21:59:00.000-08:00

by James Como
“It is as absurd to argue men, as it is to torture them, into believing”
– Cardinal Newman

There once was a little boy who believed that most animals could speak but chose not to and that hovering above him was a cozy world presided over by a panda-like king whose favorite toy was the moon and whose greatest joy was to share it, especially with the boy as he lay in bed in the dark. He could not explain these beliefs and didn’t care to. His imagination had spoken. On the other hand he was not irrational.

For example, his father, in response to the son’s unrelenting pleas, told the story of Jack and the beanstalk over and over. Finally the boy asked what had happened to Jack and his mother after the giant fell. “Well,” said the father, “that giant made a very big hole. So after they dug him out, the mother and Jack made the hole into a swimming pool and built a motel around it. They lived happily ever after.”

The boy spent long hours trying to figure out where that motel might be and also planning a visit once he had. After all, he had already been to a motel or two and so his imagination, not entirely untethered to reality, had been informed by both reason and experience. In short, though he was persistent in his beliefs he was not unduly credulous. Even his Russian grandmother learned this.

Truly she seemed on too-intimate terms with enchanted forests, children both hungry and lost, and witches who prey upon such children; she was convincing. But he did not for a nanosecond buy a gingerbread house large enough to live in – he had never seen or known of one and it made no sense. He loved his grandmother’s telling of “Hansel and Gretel” (there would be none better) only slightly less than he loved his grandmother, which was boundlessly, but he did not for an instant believe it.
Moreover, just as his doubt did not swoon at personal persuasiveness, neither did it whither at authority as such. Even though his high school geometry teacher had told the class that no proof for the trisection of an angle did, or could, exist, he worked hard and long to devise just such a proof: the impossibility seemed both unimaginative and unreasonable. Finally, when he satisfied himself that she was right he told her so – but to this day he remains vexed by that impossibility, and wonders. ...Then, as a young graduate student, he read The Chronicles of Narnia. Needless to say he has believed them (for nearly forty years) ever since.

The question is, how – as an adult – could I? Given the nature of the believer in question, there are some likely explanations: prolonged juvenalism (a kind of fixed sentimental affection coupled with a too-lively imagination), a not unrelated stubbornness (the Trisection Syndrome), rationality-cum-rationalizing (i.e. wish-fulfillment), and an anarchic streak (fairy tales by their nature are subversive). As motives for belief none of these is entirely false. Yet even in combination they do not come close to accounting for my actual assent, as opposed to a predisposition to assent. Rather, I believe The Chronicles because I regard them as true, the only reason (as C. S. Lewis has said) to believe anything.

Synopsis
 The Chronicles are fairy tales, satisfying certain formal requirements of such tales; and as the great Chesterton pointed out fairy tales have the appeal of ancient common sense and warm milk – both hard to resist. However, they are also firstrate fairy tale literature, with basic appeals identified pivotally by the late critic Wayne Booth: intellectual (the arousal and satisfaction of curiosity), qualitative (the completion of a pattern), and practical (the fate of favored characters). These, in the context of Lewis’s own discussion from his An Experiment in Criticism of “realism of presentation” and of the delight of formal variety (as though the reader were being led in a dance by a master) take us a long way toward accounting for the engagement – a big step towards belief - achieved by The Chronicles.

Discovering how The Chronicles work is a bit trickier than describing what they are. They can be read as both theogony – the beginning of the gods – and as theophany – the appearance of gods: Aslan and the children serve both functions from the point-of-view of native Narnia creatures. That is, The Chronicles function as Narnian sacred scripture, a type of book with which we are very familiar. We learn that The Chronicles point, both to the real Narnia revealed at the very end of The Last Battle and to our world, which with its own sacred scripture also points – in our case, to heaven. Thus, even though we may not believe that Narnia exists, we do believe in it (just so Kenneth Grahame reminds us that we believe in dragons but not in pterodactyls).

So we have engaging, first-rate, fairy tale literature pointing us towards a particular end. And if that end is compelling enough, then we are ready to believe. In Narnia, that end is no less than holiness: the sea of mystery (as Rudolph Otto in his Idea of the Holy taught Lewis and the rest of us), the enchantment it causes, and the awe, wonder, and fear it inspires. But how do we know that the pointing is towards the holy? We know because we desire. In The Chronicles we experience Lewis’s “Joy”: at the creation of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew, when Aslan is first merely mentioned in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Lucy bids Aslan farewell near the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Puddleglum saves the day in the Underworld of The Silver Chair, at the very end of Narnia in The Last Battle, and... and so on.

It is that very same desire that Plato, Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Traherne, even the actor Alec Guinness, and so many others mean by thirsting for the Divine. And, as Lewis reminds us, where there is appetite there must be fitting satisfaction, even if there and then rather than here and now. In other words, I don’t desire to believe; rather, I believe because I desire.

Meaning is connectedness; connectedness to some Ultimate Object is ultimately meaningful. By occasioning Joy, Narnia is a sort of switchboard, connecting to our world just as ours does to the next. Narnia mediates and teaches us that mediation is the real thing, and reliable. That’s why Narnia break our hearts – always a sign of truth – and, in doing so, provides a Hope – as does so much of Lewis’s work: the great legacy to each of us, really – that never evanesces: “the conviction of things unseen.”

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James Como is a professor of rhetoric and public communication at York College of the City University of New York. He is author of the new book Why I Believe in Narnia

Running Down Heaven and Hell

2008-11-24T06:25:00.000-08:00

by Wayne Martindale
C.S. Lewis by profession was an Oxford don for 30 years and then another six at Cambridge. He was born in Ireland and from those boarding school days until the end of his life he lived in England. He is a man who is sometimes accused of having led a sheltered life, but he is a man who knew pain. Given his Ulster upbringing he knew what dissension and war were like. It’s one of the reasons I think he was so strong on church unity because he saw that strife in the area where he grew up.

His mother died when he was nine of cancer. He was wounded at age 19 in the First World War. His father died when Lewis was 30, right before his flood of books began coming out for which we know him best today. And later in life his wife died of cancer. He was not immune to the vicissitudes of life that we all face.

He was a man of a great deal of character too. I picked a couple of things just to characterize him. One thing I love about C.S. Lewis is his attitude toward giving. He had a very compassionate heart. Many of you may know already that the royalties from his books he donated to charity. He says this on giving,

Giving to the poor is an essential part of Christian morality. I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I’m afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, and amusement, is up to the standard common of those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little.

If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things that we’d like to do but cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.

On a humorous vein he writes, “Another things that annoys me is when people say, ‘Why did you give that man money? He’ll probably go and drink it.’ My reply is, ‘But if I kept it, I should have probably drunk it.’”
He was a man of prayer. He was a man of great humility. A quote from a man who knew him from undergraduate days, Owen Barfield, says,

What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life, he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except for a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals. ...Self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own weakness and shortcomings and nothing more. Anything beyond that he sharply suspected, both in himself and in others, as a symptom of spiritual megalomania. At best, there was so much else, in letters and in life, that he found much more interesting than himself.

Let me first indicate some of the books that are key sources on heaven and hell. I will be referencing several things from The Quotable Lewis, a book that collects little scraps from a lot of different places. But the most important books by Lewis on the subject are The Great Divorce, two chapters, “Heaven” and “Hell” in The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, Paralandra, That Hideous Strength, and maybe Mere Christianity.

So too, there is a theme that runs through about everything he wrote. You can even catch some of it in his literary criticism. That theme is desire. If you’ve read Surprised By Joy, you know that it is this thing that he calls joy – this hunger that is never satisfied by anything on this earth – that led him to believe that that satisfaction must be in another world, in heaven. This drew him and drew him until almost age 30 when he converted to theism as “the most reluctant convert in all of England,” he says. Three years later, he converted to Christianity itself. He found what that desire was directed towards.

As Lewis says in places like The Weight of Glory, “all our desires are for heaven.” And that theme is all over his work, and I enjoy reading Lewis so much because he awakens that desire in me.

Our problem with heaven and hell, according to Lewis, is that we have too low a view of sin. We do not fear hell and its judgment. And we have too weak a desire for heaven.

In 1940, Lewis preached the sermon, "The Weight of Glory," to a standing room only crowd at St. Mary the Virgin Church which is the Oxford University church. I think page for page this is the best stuff Lewis ever wrote and here are the best lines. He says,

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter. It is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load or weight or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it. And the backs of the proud will be broken.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses to remember that the dullest and the most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature, which if you saw it now you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you meet if it all only in a nightmare.

All day long we are helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all our friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal.

Lewis lived out those words. He did a lot of things which he felt was his duty to pastors, particularly in correspondence, going and giving talks to the Royal Airforce – such things, when he’d rather stayed at home and done some reading and writing.

Let’s focus on some of Lewis’ ideas of hell for a few minutes. A recent poll in US News and World Report showed that a huge majority of people – close to 80 percent – believe in heaven, but only 50 percent of Americans believe in hell. I’ve read some statistics for Britain – 25 percent believe in hell. In Australia, it’s 15 percent. Among Americans, 70 percent expect to go to heaven; only 5 percent think they’re headed for hell; another 25 percent are not willing to make a call.

Lewis himself did not believe in hell for many, many years. After age 9, when his mother died of cancer after he prayed for her healing, he had no use for God. From that point on he moved steadily toward atheism. He became a studied atheist – a materialist. He did not believe in the supernatural at all. Lewis says in those day that he was an annihilationist. He believed that when you die the body disappears; that’s all there is to it – end of subject. Lewis says,

The horror of the Christian universe is that it had no door marked exit. ...If its picture was true, no sort of treaty with reality could ever be possible. There was no region even in the innermost death of one’s soul – nay there, least of all – where one could surround with a barbed wire fence and guard with a sign, “No Admittance.” And that was what I wanted – some area however small – of which I could say to all other beings, “This is my business and mine only.”

This is the same Lewis who came to say later on, “There is no neutral ground in the universe; every split second of time and every square centimeter of space is claimed by God and counter-claimed by Satan.”

As Lewis reminds us, it is Jesus from whom we learn the most about hell. He expended more words talking about hell than any other subject did. The doctrine is dominical: it comes from Jesus’ lips.

When Lewis comes to write about hell like the book, The Great Divorce, he opens in hell for a very good reason, and that is that it’s the default for all of us. Unless we do something deliberate, hell is where we’re bound.

I have no trouble agreeing with that when I think what it is that I have to discipline myself to do. I don’t have to discipline myself to not do evil. I don’t have to really try one day to do something wrong. All I have to do to sin is not try and, instead, do what comes naturally. We use the word discipline for things that our nature doesn’t want to do, but we know in our hearts we should do.

It’s not easy these days to think about God’s wrath and judgment. We prefer to think about his mercy. Lewis is clear on it even in places like The Chronicles of Narnia. Remember that great passage where the children are sitting around Mr. and Mrs. Beaver’s table and the kids are just finding out about Aslyan? Susan asks about Aslyan.

“Is he quite safe? I shall feel quite nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will deary, and make no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver. “If there’s anyone who can appear before Aslyan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then, he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“He’s not safe, but he’s good.”

Lewis finds the key idea for The Great Divorce in an ancient concept of basically a holiday from hell where the souls are let out for awhile and have a bit of an escape. The story opens in hell but it is not a scene of fire and brimstone. Lewis presents hell as a place that’s empty, cold, gray, and foggy.

The people that we meet are in a line waiting for a bus going to take them on their holiday to heaven. Then they have the option on going on to deep heaven or returning to hell. All of them return to hell with one exception, for the same reason they went there in the first place. Lewis’ key theme is that hell and heaven are both choices. We get what we choose.

I think for Americans – individualistic, got to have a car society – having to take a bus and stand in line for it is a pretty good image of hell. We don’t like to wait. And for the British who love the outdoors and love to walk and garden, an endless British winter is not a bad metaphor for hell.

In The Great Divorce, we don’t make it into deep hell or deep heaven. It’s always on the outskirts of these two places. He sets it up so he can say if you decide to go on into heaven, that would be a precinct of heaven all along, and if you choose not to go to heaven, your time on these outskirts would be part of hell all along.

The reason hell is empty is that people get what they want in hell. In Dante’s view, in Lewis’ view, you become the sin you choose. That’s what constitutes hell. People don’t get along. If you want a new house all you have to do is wish a new one and – boom – it materializes. And so, they are constantly arguing with each other, constantly wishing a new house, so hell is constantly expanding.

The nearest of the old reprobates, turns out to be Napoleon. In the conversation in the bus queue, someone talks about going to visit him. It took 15,000 years to get to where Napoleon was; when they go there, they watched him for a year and all they saw was a man going up and back, up and back, pacing and saying over and over again, “It was Nay’s fault; it was Josephine’s fault.”

This flies in the face of George Bernard Shaw’s famous quip that all the colorful bully people are going to be in hell – that that’s where all the good fellowship is going to be.

Eventually, these people get on the bus and they take a ride – a celestial transport – up to the outskirts of heaven. Later when the narrator meets George MacDonald, his guide, and the narrator asks why these people don’t return to the gray world and tell them, MacDonald explains that only the greatest can become small enough to go down into hell.

MacDonald points out a little crack in the earth and says that he doesn’t know if that was the one, but that the bus came up through something like that crack in the soil, “and if this butterfly in heaven was to swallow all of hell, it would make no more difference to him than swallowing an atom.”

Lewis’ point is that hell is the drying up of human potential and heaven is the fulfillment of human potential. That is manifested in the people who come up from hell, in order to be the same size as the folks they meet from heaven, have to be expanded; they are like ghosts. When they meet people from heaven, those people are solid. Grass goes through the feet of the people from hell. They can’t even bend the grass in heaven! They bounce along the top because it’s real and they’re not.
Whenever the series of people in The Great Divorce come from hell and make it up to heaven, they are met by someone from heaven who they knew on earth. The people from heaven urge those from hell to come on in, to get rid of themselves. The first person that gets off the bus takes one look around, screams, “It gives me the pip” (British for “It freaks me out”), and gets back on the bus.

The next one off meets someone he knew on earth who had been a murderer, and says with surprise, “What are you doing here? Didn’t you murder Jack?” He says, “Yes, I did, but all that is behind us now. I’ve been forgiven and you can be too.” “No,” he responds. “If they’re going to allow the likes of you in here then I’m not going to come. All I want is my rights, you see, my rights. I’m not going to accept any of your bleeding charity.”

From the first set of travelers, it may be worth pointing out the poet that returns to hell with the “poor me” attitude. Lewis saw himself in this poet. Everything was everyone else’s fault. No one appreciated his work. In the end, he shows them all up – his parents, girlfriend, and society – by throwing himself under a train. He winds up in hell.

Lewis wanted to be a poet, but he got over his sense of pride. “From the age of sixteen onwards, I had one single ambition,” Lewis writes to a friend, “to succeed as a writer, from which I have never wavered, and which prosecution I spent every ounce I could, on which I really and deliberately staked my whole contentment.”

At the end of The Great Divorce, after the narrator sees people turning back to hell, MacDonald gives this explanation –

The whole difficulty of understanding hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly nothing. But you’ll have had experiences. It begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself, still distinct from it, perhaps criticizing it, and yourself in a dark hour might will that mood, embrace it.

You can repent and come out of it again, but there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then, there will be no you left to criticize the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.

(Recall the dwarfs in Narnia who refuse to come out into the sunshine and see the beauty that is there and hear Aslyan’s growl as a machine. They are cynics all the way.)

Milton has Satan in Paradise Lost, say, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.” And he laments, “Which way I fly am hell myself am hell.” That’s the idea.

As to heaven, remember that in The Screwtape Letters, God is the creator of pleasure. Screwtape laments, “Out of all the centuries… we have never been able to invent a single pleasure. They’re all God’s. All we can do is encourage someone to take it at the wrong time, at the wrong place, and the wrong degree to pervert what God has created good.”

This is good to be reminded of – do you like the taste of cherries on earth? Do you like the smell of grass after a fresh rain? Do you enjoy a cool breeze on a warm day? These are all God’s inventions. If you like earth, you’re going to love heaven.

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Wayne Martindale is a professor of English at Wheaton College. He is co-editor of The Quotable Lewis and author of Beyond the Shadowlands: C.S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell. This presentation was adapted from a discussion given by Dr. Martindale through The Matthew's House Project.

Parables for Pilgrims

2008-11-14T09:12:00.001-08:00

Adapted from C.S. Lewis by David C. Downing
From the Chronicles of Narnia alone, C. S. Lewis has gained an enduring reputation as a master story teller. But Lewis’s lively imagination and his knack for story-telling are no less evident in his non-fiction works—lectures, essays, even in his personal correspondence. From his Christian meditations to his weighty tomes of literary scholarship, Lewis often provided memorable metaphors or stories to illustrate his key points. Sometimes his analogies consist of only a sentence or two; others run to a full paragraph, unfolding into mini-parables for the reader to ponder.

Many of Lewis’s most unforgettable narrative gems are tucked away in his less familiar essays or in hefty volumes of letters that might be overlooked by casual readers. In order that these might be more widely known, I hope I might be allowed to take a few of Lewis’s casual metaphors and amplify on them a bit, so that each story or illustration can stand alone, without the need for extensive commentary about context. My source for each parable is cited, though ideas have been paraphrased and details added to help each story stand more fully on its own.

An Obedience Lesson
The dog eagerly scampered down the sidewalk, followed by his master holding his leash. The dog sniffed all the way around a sign-post, then tried to continue on ahead, not realizing he’d looped his leash around the post. His master gently pulled back on the leash, trying to get his dog to retrace his steps and get the leash unsnarled. The dog strained forward with all its might, wanting to move on ahead and not understanding why he was being asked to halt.

Now this was a dutiful dog, and he soon realized he must submit his will to his master, even though it made no sense to him. If the dog had any theological training, he might have even labeled his desire to go forward as a “sin,” and to yield himself to the inscrutable will of his master. The owner, if he knew how, might wish to expose this as false dogma, to explain that he too wanted to continue moving forward. He might add that he had to deny his dog’s will to pull forward on the leash in order to grant him his true wish, to resume their walk together.

Faith in the Face of Peril
Two travelers came to a rickety bridge over a deep, rocky ravine. The first man thought about the goodness of God and convinced himself that the bridge would hold up till they had crossed over safely. He called this assurance Faith.

The second man looked at the bridge and thought to himself, It might hold up and it might not. But whether my life ends today or at some other time, whether here or somewhere else, I am always in God’s hands.

The two men started across. The bridge did give way and neither man survived. The first man’s faith was unfulfilled; the second man’s was not.

The Overwhelming Invisible
“Science is constantly pushing back the frontiers of knowledge,” explained the skeptic. “Our telescopes are gazing at the outer reaches of the universe. Our microscopes are laying bare the very structure and shape of individual atoms. Our physicists and mathematicians can carry us back to the first fraction of a second after the creation of the cosmos. And yet in all this, we have found not a trace of God.”

I know exactly what you mean,” replied the teacher. He took down a thick volume of collected plays and poems and plopped it on the table. “You know, I’ve read every work in this bulky collection a dozen times. I’ve met unforgettable characters like King Lear, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet. I’ve explored the heights of nobility to which humans can reach and witnessed the depths of their depravity. I’ve laughed at witty dialogues, wept at stirring orations, and read poetry so beautiful it creates a certain flutter in my breast. But in all this I’ve never discovered a trace of this fellow Shakespeare everyone is talking about.”

The End as the Beginning
The man of faith could see his own death on the near horizon. He faced it calmly, feeling he had done his best with the time given to him. As he came closer to the end, though, it seemed to him the usual ways of looking at death stated the case backwards.

For one thing, he didn't feel that he was facing a great and final sleep. Rather it seemed to him in those last days that his whole life was a dreamy doze. He was looking forward to finally waking up. He could almost hear a cock crowing, welcoming him to a new morning.

He had been to many funerals before and seen bodies laid into the ground. But in his weakened body, he felt like a sprout already planted in the ground. His spirit yearned to expand and stretch upward, to break out of the dark earth into the light and air of eternity.

1. An Obedience Lesson (Based on Collected Letters of CSL, Vol 2, 122)
2. Faith in the Face of Peril (Based on Collected Letters of CSL, Vol 3, 448.)
3. The Overwhelming Invisible (Based on an illustration in “The Seeing Eye” in Christian Reflections, pp. 167-168.)
4. The End as the Beginning (Based on Collected Letters of CSL, Vol 3, 1434.)

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Downing has written four books on C. S. Lewis. He currently serves as a consulting editor for Christian Scholars Review, Christianity and Literature, and Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review. His most recent book is A South Divided: Portraits of Dissent in the Confederacy (Cumberland Press, 2007). His college website may be found at http://users.etown.edu/d/downindc/)

C.S. Lewis Meets Pop Culture

2008-10-25T06:27:00.000-07:00

by Robert Velarde
C.S. Lewis thought reading the daily newspaper was a waste of time, did not watch television, reluctantly agreed to radio appearances, and only rarely went out to the movies. So what can Lewis teach us about popular culture? Although it doesn't initially appear that we can learn much from him on this topic, he has much to offer.

Popular culture today is a mixture of a variety of mediums, with the emphasis on film, television, and music as the dominant forms. As I have stated elsewhere, film and television are the "new literature," meaning that interest in them has largely displaced books.

Lewis's 1961 work An Experiment in Criticism presents his mature views on literature. The "experiment" in the book is to examine how readers treat literature, rather than to evaluate the quality of a particular work of literature on the basis of traditional literary criticism of his day.

As Lewis explained it, "Literary criticism is traditionally employed in judging books ... I want to find out what sort of picture we shall get by reversing the process. Let us make our distinction between readers or types of reading the basis, and our distinction between books the corollary. Let us try to discover how far it might be plausible to define a good book as a book which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read in another."

But what has this to do with popular culture? One thing that can be done, as an experiment itself, is to apply some of the insights Lewis offers in An Experiment in Criticism to contemporary popular culture. How is pop culture used? Why do those who like it appreciate it? Are there distinctions between careful and careless viewing of film and television? Do we search for the profound and insightful in pop culture?

Lewis would press us to develop reasons for our beliefs and attitudes about pop culture. There has to more than, "Ugh! I didn't like it," or "Wow! That was great." We need to move beyond emotive utterances and instead move toward intellectual assessment.

In An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis wrote about differences between "using" and "receiving" in relation to literature. "Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way," wrote Lewis. Applying this approach to popular culture does not mean we ignore discernment or analysis, but that we delay criticisms and judgments of pop culture until we have sought to understand what we have seen or heard or read.

Does popular culture have anything of real value to offer? That depends on the pop culture in question. While it is unlikely that we will glean anything of lasting value from a vacuous reality television program, we may gain powerful insights into a moral dilemma from a well-crafted dramatic film or television program.

In reference to literature, Lewis wrote, "What then is the good of – what is even the defence for – occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feeling which we should try to avoid having in our own person? Or of fixing our inner eye earnestly on things that could never exist ... The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves ... We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own ..."

Our own eyes, Lewis went on to say, are not enough. We desire to "see through those of others ... in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself ... I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."

Popular culture can also help us "seek an enlargement of our being." We can "see with other eyes," even if we disagree with what we see.

But can pop culture help us grow in the manner that Lewis believed great literature could? Some would quickly say no, but isn't this going too fast? Given that film and television are the dominant mediums of pop culture, it would be to our advantage to seek to understand their expressions as best we can rather than simply dismissing them out of hand.

Would C.S. Lewis watch The Office? Would he spot any profound insights in it or in E.R., Heroes or Lost? It's highly unlikely that he would watch, but if he did, applying some of his own ideas in An Experiment in Criticism, he might just find that there is more to popular culture than meets the eye.

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Robert Velarde is an author, editor, and philosopher. His books include Conversations with C.S. Lewis (InterVarsity Press, 2008), The Heart of Narnia (NavPress, 2008), and Inside The Screwtape Letters (Baker Books, forthcoming). Robert is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society, the Evangelical Philosophical Society, the Society of Christian Philosophers, and the International Society of Christian Apologetics. A classically trained pianist and composer, Robert has written music for flute and piano inspired by scenes from the Chronicles of Narnia. He studied philosophy of religion at Denver Seminary and is pursuing graduate studies in philosophy at Southern Evangelical Seminary. His blog, "A Reasonable Imagination," is at robertvelarde.blogspot.com.

Lewis On Death

2008-10-15T18:22:00.001-07:00

by Robin Baker
American culture (and Western culture generally) has a difficult time dealing with death and the dying. We often do not know how to interact with those who are terminally ill. In a culture that is all about this life, consuming goods and living life to its fullest, death is the ultimate enemy. It is the voice we hear, but we wish to silence in our culture because its reality testifies that our efforts to stay young and to submerse ourselves in the pursuit of material wealth will end in a pine box or an urn. That is not good news.

A surprising aspect of C.S. Lewis’ children’s stories to me is the fact that he chose to deal with death openly and frankly. Children’s books that talk about death? Perhaps because of his own very personal experience of the death of his mother while he was a child, Lewis had to struggle with the meaning of death at an early age. In the stories of the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis recognized and illustrated the basic truth of Christianity; in a fallen world, there is no “real” life without death. Aslan, the great Lion, rescues all of Narnia and defeats the White Witch, not in battle, but through his sacrificial death at the Stone Table. Aslan willingly gives up his life for one who has betrayed the community and, in so doing, frees Narnia from the power of death. For Lewis, death does not represent the end but more of a passage or a door to something else. Indeed, in the Last Battle even Jewel understands that death is the way into Aslan’s country and the stable door becomes the entry point.

One of the most beautiful passages in all of Lewis’ works regarding death appears in The Silver Chair. King Caspian dies and all of Narnia mourns. Even Aslan mourns.

Then Aslan stopped, and the children looked into the stream. And there, on the golden gravel of the bed on the stream, lay King Caspian, dead, with the water flowing over him like liquid glass. His long white beard swayed in it like water-weed. And all three stood and wept. Even the Lion wept: great Lion-tears, each tear more precious than the Earth would be if it was a single solid diamond.

Death is painful for all, even for the great Lion. But it is not final. Aslan asks Eustace to drive a thorn into his paw, and the Lion allows a drop of his blood to fall into the stream.

At that same moment the doleful music stopped. And the dead King began to be changed. His white beard turned to gray, and from gray to yellow, and got shorter and vanished altogether; and his sunken cheeks grew round and fresh, and the wrinkles were smoothed, and his eyes opened, and his eyes and lips both laughed, and suddenly he leaped and stood before them – a very young man.

Caspian is alive. It is clear from the story that he is no longer “at home” in Narnia, but he is alive and well in Aslan’s country. Of course you know that in Aslan’s stories there are many worlds, and one may pass from one to another, but it is the experience of death that transports one to live in Aslan’s country. Death is mysterious; it is a real experience that ushers one into new relationships and into a new place. In a funny way, Lewis conveys that it is only in death, both in the form of Aslan’s death and even our own, that we have hope that the pain and suffering of this world is transitory.

Of course, I know that little of what I have conveyed above is new to anyone who might read this website. The death of the great Lion and the transformational nature of the sacrifice of the one (Christ in real terms) provides all with hope. One of the reasons I like Lewis so much is because he struggles with his own theological commitments. Later we all know that Lewis marries Joy Davidman, and soon after their marriage she is diagnosed with cancer. Although she goes into remission for a short period, their time together was very short. In his brief book, A Grief Observed, I met a Lewis who was at least different from the author of the Narnia stories. It is one thing to write about death and express in abstract terms one’s own commitments. It is quite another thing to come to grips with the untimely death of one that you love more than any other. In this work, Lewis cries out at the beginning of his journal that God has shut the door on him; He offers no comfort nor explanation for the death of his Joy! How can a loving God be so cruel?

A Grief Observed was one of the first Lewis’ books I read, and I found it comforting – comforting because the author found himself struggling with the very truths he had expressed elsewhere. Like Lewis, I struggle with the notion of death, and there are times I just want to ask God, “Why?” Lewis does it for me. It was in the death of his beloved wife that his theology of Christ’s sacrifice and his hope for the future became real. It was in her death that he began to struggle with her loss and not knowing what Aslan’s country really looks like. He wanted to be there, to walk in Aslan’s country with her.

Yesterday, I was on a tour of Woodlawn Plantation just outside of Alexandria, Virginia, and the tour guide noted that many of the children born to women in that era died in child birth. Very few mothers had all their children live into adulthood. For most of human history, death has been a consistent presence in every household through every generation. Death was part of life. It is only for our world that death is so distant and remote. We hold it at bay in hopes that it may not come. It will come. Lewis provides me with hope in the midst of pain. Hope that this life is only one experience. Hope that there is more to life than material wealth and existence. Hope that we will see those we love who have gone before us. Hope that, in Christ, death has been conquered, and through that door that the real story begins. In the words of The Last Battle:

And as he spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was on the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.

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Robin E. Baker is president of George Fox University in Newberg, OR. His research has focused on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, 19th-century American political/quantitative history, and the history of the southern United States. Baker has taught classes at George Fox as professor of history. He also speaks frequently on the integration of faith and learning in the Christian university and he has a special interest in the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien

Screwtape On Idolatry

2008-10-09T20:11:00.000-07:00

by Louis Markos
Though written during World War II, C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters has lost none of its social relevance or power to convict. Consider this passage from Letter VII, in which senior devil Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood on whether it would be better to make his “patient”—the young man whom he is tempting—into a patriot or a pacifist.

“Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the ‘Cause,’ in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war effort or of pacifism.”

Screwtape, it seems, has done little to change his tactics between the War against Fascism and the War on Terror. I fear that there are many believers (and congregations) today who may begin by adopting their position for or against the Iraq War on the basis of their Christian convictions, but who end by bending their Christian convictions to fit their partisan beliefs. That is to say, rather than allowing their patriotism/pacifism to flow naturally out of their individual (or corporate) relationship with

Christ, they find ever-ingenious—and often disingenuous—ways to “baptize” their previous political commitments.

The same slippery slope from Christian-inspired activism to Christian-validated idolatry can even occur in areas that are more specifically ecclesiastical in focus. Many congregations across the nation have sought to transform themselves from a single-ethnic, monochromatic body of believers into a multiethnic church that intentionally promotes diversity among its pastoral staff and parishioners. The desire to open one’s doors to Christ-followers of all races and ethnicities is certainly a worthy one, one that finds a biblical basis in Acts and several of Paul’s epistles and that has the potential to bring revival to churches and cities across the country.

But a subtle danger threatens the congregation that would be overly intentional in its intention to institutionalize racial and ethnic diversity. If the church allows its multiethnic mission to define its central and sole identity, it will be tempted to mute, ignore, or even revise aspects of the Bible, orthodox theology, and/or sacred tradition that do not support and promote that identity. It will be tempted as well to judge other congregations (and individuals) not by their adherence to the gospel message but by how they measure up against the diversity yardstick.

If such a congregation continues to slide down the slippery slope toward idolatry, it may discover, too late, that it has ceased to be a multiethnic CHURCH, and has morphed into a MULTIETHNIC church. Ethnic diversity will no longer be one of the fruits of the Great Commission; rather, Christianity will have been reduced to one more helpful ally in the building of an egalitarian, multiethnic utopia.

I use the multiethnic church as my example, not because I think the ideals that undergird it are bad ones, but because they are so praiseworthy. But then, to paraphrase a line from Lewis, brass is more often mistaken for gold than clay is. To the modern American mind, nurtured since birth to believe that equality and inclusivism are absolute virtues on par with faith, hope, and love, it is easy to so conflate the promise of ethnic diversity with that of the gospel message that the latter comes to serve the former, rather than vice versa.

During my undergraduate years, I happened upon a tract by Melody Green, “Abortion: Attitudes for Action,” that I have never forgotten. Though Melody was and still is strongly committed to saving the unborn, her stronger and foundational commitment to Christ impelled her to add this advice to her tract: “Christians working for pro-life must be pro-Jesus first. He must be our focus. We must be careful not to allow ourselves to be consumed by a cause, rather than consumed by Jesus.

Giving even a godly cause priority above our personal relationship with God will grieve Him. Jesus must be our foundation—otherwise we may see our own eternal life sacrificed on the altar of worthy causes” (lastdaysministries.org/articles/abortion).
Let us give the last word not to Screwtape but to the disciple whom Jesus loved: “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).

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Louis Markos has been a Professor of English at Houston Baptist University since 1991; he is the author of The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis, Lewis Agonistes, and From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics (IVP, 2007).

C. S. Lewis and a Sense of Place

2008-09-28T19:44:00.000-07:00

by Will Vaus
The first time I visited England I was ten years old. My parents let me walk around London by myself armed with nothing more than a map, layered clothing appropriate to the sometimes damp and foggy weather, and good walking shoes. I still remember staring through the gates of Buckingham Palace and thinking, “This looks like something out of a C. S. Lewis book.” My fourth grade public school teacher had read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to our class two years prior.

The years went on and I kept reading Lewis, inspired in part by my youth pastor who was a real fan. After my first year in college I decided to return to the British Isles to, among other agenda items, visit the places where C. S. Lewis lived, wrote, taught and worshiped. I carried with me across the pond paperback copies of many of the Lewis books I had not yet read. I studied Miracles while lying on the grass beside the Cherwell River in Oxford. I delighted in Till We Have Faces while sitting on the open deck of the ferry crossing the Irish Sea on a brilliant sunny day. Mere Christianity solidified my intellectual acceptance of the Christian faith while reading in a postage-stamp-size hotel room in Lewis’s beloved Donegal.

That trip in 1982 also saw my first visit to The Kilns, Lewis’s Oxfordshire home for over thirty years. There was a bit of difficulty finding the house at first. I asked around Oxford for the location of Lewis’s home. “C. S. who?” was generally the response I received. (The estimation of C. S. Lewis has gone up, even in the eyes of Oxford in the last thirty years. It would be hard to find anyone in Oxford today who does not know who Lewis was or even where he lived.) Aided by a map and photographs from Kilby and Gilbert’s C. S. Lewis: Images of His World I eventually found Kiln Lane, Lewis Close and then The Kilns itself. With a large camera strung around my neck, I walked right up to what turned out to be the side door of The Kilns, rang the doorbell and waited. I was soon greeted by a professorial-looking gentleman by the name of Mr. Thirsk. I introduced myself as an American fan of C. S. Lewis.

“I wondered if I might see the house.” I offered tentatively.

Mr. Thirsk responded with typical English courtesy and decorum, “Yes, you may walk around the outside of the house and take as many photographs as you like.”

Of course I had been hoping that Mr. Thirsk would invite me in for a cup of tea. As it was my American youthful brashness was rewarded with far more than it deserved. I did walk round the outside of the ramshackle brick house taking quite a number of photographs. From what I could spy through the curtained windows The Kilns in 1982 was still, in the words of former occupant Joy Davidman Gresham, “a house held up by books”. In addition to the house I ventured to see the pond in which Lewis would often take a swim in good weather.

From The Kilns it was on to Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, and a visit to the Lewis brothers’ grave. A sense of longing crept over me that evening upon my return to the center of Oxford as the sun set beyond Magdalen Tower. How I wished I could have lived in my parents’ generation and met the great man himself. As it was, I had been born in the same year that Lewis died. I would have to content myself with simply seeing the places where he had enjoyed and sometimes endured his earthly sojourn.

Fast-forward fifteen years. I was now married with children, living in South Carolina, the pastor of a church. One day one of my parishioners, knowing my love of C. S. Lewis, came to me and said, “Did you know that Douglas Gresham, the step-son of C. S. Lewis, spoke at a Michael Card concert here in town last week?”

“No. I had no idea. If I had known I would have been there!”

Around the same time another friend introduced me to the intrigue of the Internet. Soon I had my own e-mail address and was exploring the wonders of the web. One of the first web sites I stumbled upon was “Into the Wardrobe” and on the home page I immediately spied a message from Douglas Gresham along with an e-mail address. On the spur of the moment I decided to write to the man and ask him some questions about Lewis. That first e-mail led to a long correspondence and a friendship that has now lasted for twelve years. I immediately began planning a C. S. Lewis Tour of England which took place in the summer of 1997. Doug was our tour guide around Oxford for three days. This time I got to see the inside of The Kilns! Of course countless other Lewis fans can now enjoy a tour of The Kilns thanks to the efforts of the present owners, The C. S. Lewis Foundation of Redlands, Calif.

Friendship with Doug eventually led my family and me to spend the better part of a year living and working with the Greshams at Rathvinden House in Ireland. While living on the Emerald Isle we took advantage of the opportunity to see the Lewis sites around Belfast. On one occasion I even had the blessing of exploring Lewis’s childhood home, Little Lea, that house of the “long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.”

Living with the Greshams occasionally brought bits of Lewis’s writing alive for me in a whole new way. For example, there was the sunny summer day when Merrie Gresham first asked us to pick currants in her garden. As we were picking currants Lewis’s words from Surprised by Joy suddenly flooded my mind,

As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery.

“So this is a currant bush!” I thought to myself as I went on picking.

On another day, this one rather wet and blustery, Merrie talked about hanging up laundry to dry in the airing cupboard.

“What is an airing cupboard?” I asked.

“Well, it’s right here—this cupboard with the water heater.” Merrie responded.

Now I was able to picture what Lewis had in mind when he wrote in one of his letters,

I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptations. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience etc. don’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be v. muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and the clean clothes in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the v. sign of His presence. . . .

Of course one can enjoy reading Lewis perfectly well without ever having set foot in Ireland or England. However, having that sense of place helps the reader to picture what Lewis is saying even more effectively. Though Lewis’s classic writing style often seems timeless, Lewis himself was a man of a particular time and a particular place. Stepping into the places of Lewis’s life brings his world alive, just as, in a greater way, visiting Israel brings alive the world of Jesus, or visiting the Mediterranean paints in Technicolor the missionary journeys of the Apostle Paul.

My wife and I hope and plan to make that journey again into the world of C. S. Lewis in the summer of 2009 as we lead a C. S. Lewis Tour of Ireland and England for as many people as wish to join us. To learn more about it you may visit my web site www.willvaus.com/c__s__lewis_tour or e-mail me, will@willvaus.com, for more information.

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Will Vaus is the author of Mere Theology: A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis (InterVarsity Press, 2004) and The Professor of Narnia: The C. S. Lewis Story (Believe Books, 2008).

How C. S. Lewis Expands Our View of God

2008-09-20T18:15:00.000-07:00

An Interview with Peter J. Schakel by Zach Kincaid
Peter Schakel's new book, Is Your Lord Large Enough? How C. S. Lewis Expands Our View of God (InterVarsity Press, 2008), is about image. "We can know people only through mental images," he says in the opening pages. Is this more true about a God who we haven't seen than our neighbor who we see everyday?

We have far less "data" about God and this creates more space to imagine him - to meditate on who he is and why he loves and what he does all day. How important is it, then, that we find guides to reflect aright on God and all his attributes - that provide a vision that expands God's size in ways that keep hooks back in the few things we do know about God (including the Scripture)?

C. S. Lewis does this. He takes what we know and builds on it. In the end, the landscape looks more vibrant and larger than our individualized, nationalized, materialized images of the divine could ever be.

I recently sent Peter Schakel a few questions along these lines (and others) and he obliged to answer.

ZK: The title of the book is a question . . . so let’s start there. Is your Lord large enough?

PJS: God is infinitely great, but my image of God, my conception of God, isn’t – and can’t be. The unifying thread running through this book is the importance of mental images in our Christian lives, and thus of the imagination, through which we form those images. In our finite humanness, we cannot comprehend God’s immensity, cannot take in God’s greatness. What we do is to form an image in our minds encompassing as much of God’s greatness as we can handle – and that image is inevitably too small.

ZK: So why do we shrink God, or . . . why do we need Lewis to help us make him more expansive?

PJS: Usually we don’t try to shrink God – it’s just impossible not to. What we need are reminders that we are prone to do it. We fall back on the same old images, the conceptions we’ve become accustomed to, and they begin to solidify. Lewis says in A Grief Observed that the images turn into idols, so that in effect we’re worshipping a god made of our own images instead of the true God. Our familiar images let us keep God in a box and give us a sense of control – we can manage this Lord, this “tame” version of God. Therefore we need reminders not to let ourselves rest content with small images of God. Just saying “God is great!” isn’t enough. We need to be jolted, surprised, and challenged, occasionally, to move us out of our comfort zones. Those jolts can come in many ways, in many forms – Lewis isn’t essential for it. In my own life Lewis’s writings have been particularly helpful, as for example Aslan’s wonderful words to Lucy in Prince Caspian, “Every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

ZK: I recently went to a Bible study, of all places, and heard arguments that really deadened the reality of miracle - so much so that the virgin birth and the literal resurrection were on the table. You talk about miracle and the idea of God invading time and space. Don’t these demand imaginative thinking? Or maybe another way of saying it, doesn’t faith need imagination to survive this rational, reason-hungry culture that sticks its thumb out every time it needs a ride?

PJS: Yes, Lewis regarded imagination as crucial. I believe that except for salvation, imagination was the most important issue in Lewis’s thought and life. It’s important not just as an approach to literature and the other arts. It is at the heart of his approach to Christianity as well. Faith needs imagination, because imagination enables sight. In three stories – Prince Caspian, The Last Battle, and Till We Have Faces – Lewis reverses the old adage “Seeing is believing.” In Lewis’s thinking, it must be “Believing is seeing.” Those who believe are able to see, to see the effects of God invading time and space, to see the miraculous occurring in our world; those who do not believe cannot see. The revelation of God, both in the Bible and in Christianity generally, demands a response from the whole person, Lewis says; it “cannot be grasped by the intellect alone” (Reflections on the Psalms, chap. 11). Lewis fosters the role of imagination as a holistic response to God’s revelation—enabling people to “see” more clearly, enhancing their vision and way of visioning what the Christian life can and should be.

ZK: You mention in your chapter on the importance of church what Lewis might be saying in terms of a universal church and the local church. Can you expound on this? Did Lewis really spend a ton of time thinking about church and its placement as sanctuary or other traditional views?

PJS: Well, he certainly gave a fair amount of space to local churches in The Screwtape Letters. When he talks about “neighhbours sing[ing] out of tune, or hav[ing] boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes” (letter 2), I have to believe he had had such thoughts about local churches at one time or another. He definitely had mixed feelings about church attendance. There is a part of him that dislikes local churches. As he writes to a correspondent, “I share to the full – no words can say how strongly I share – that distaste for everything communal and collective which you describe in your husband. I really believe I would have come to Christianity much less reluctantly if it had not involved the Church.” But he believes he must attend church: “It is holy and commanded” (31 December 1953). “We must go to church. . . . For the Church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ in which all members however different . . . must share the common life” (7 December 1950). I think that precisely because going to church was for Lewis a burden and duty rather than a pleasure, he gave a lot of thought to the local church and reasons why he ought to participate in its life despite his reluctance.

ZK: Insecurities with Lewis seem fairly distant compared to many of the insecurities that most of the world feels. Lewis had a home, job, and a satisfying career. Certainly the death of his mother and the death of Joy were heartbreaking and faith jerking episodes, no doubt. But it appears that the security that Lewis hunts and the security that your chapter suggests is an educated one - a bookish security - that may be construed as setting boundaries itself in order to mark out the limits one might go. Most of the world is looking for food to eat and shelter that doesn’t turn violent. Do you have thoughts on this packaged security?

PJS: You’re right, of course, that Lewis didn’t experience the actual insecurity of living on the street and not knowing where his next meal would come from. But that doesn’t mean his experiencing of insecurity was only bookish. In Lewis’s childhood, his father inculcated in him the belief that the family was constantly on the verge of financial ruin (Surprised by Joy, ch. 2). The fact that they were not close to being on the street does not matter to a child as much as the feeling. While he was a student at Oxford, providing a home for Janie Moore and her daughter on his student allowance from his father, they were near poverty – changing flats frequently to find something less expensive, tutoring to earn extra money. Again, even though they never ended up on the street or going hungry doesn’t mean he didn’t have a personal awareness of the kind of actual insecurity that much of the world has to endure. Lewis’s discussion of security sounds bookish because he was a well-educated writer and someone who didn’t like talking about his private life. If he had been a person who was comfortable with writing autobiographically, his discussion of insecurity might have sounded quite different.

ZK: I’ve always enjoyed the passage from A Grief Observed about the door not being locked but a silence that we so often misunderstand. Can you explain further about not understanding and instead trusting. This seems to dovetail with Lewis’s concepts of mystery and myth even as it touches down into our lives in a more direct way.

PJS: God does not always reveal God’s self to us fully and clearly (that’s part of the reason our images of God can never be large enough). That very lack of complete revelation makes trust necessary. Bishop Kallistos Ware writes that, in common with the Orthodox tradition, Lewis “was acutely conscious of the hiddenness of God, of the inexhaustible mystery of the Divine” (in The Pilgrim’s Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness, ed. David Mills, p. 58). Lewis talks about God’s “hiddenness” for example in Letters to Malcolm, letter 8, and Ware calls this “the leitmotif” of Till We Have Faces. Thus in Till We Have Faces Orual complains that the gods do not show themselves, do not give signs, and speak only in riddles; eventually she learns that she herself is closing her eyes to evidences of divine presence, ignoring the signs sent by the gods. Myth is the perfect way to deal with the hidden divinity, because myth itself both hides and reveals. Lewis’s stories can teach us the need for trust, and how to trust, if we open our eyes to what the myths are revealing to us.

ZK: Your chapter “Room for Doubt” brings to mind Tumnus’ uncertainty of Lucy’s home being “Spare Oom.” I like to think of it as a room that may lead to a deeper faith, a larger magic, that is. Why is this feared? Is it because doubts may lead to no faith? The Church seems to think this way at times. Why does Lewis seem to embrace doubt? It seems to be more than his personal experience. Maybe the invocation to curiosity?

PJS: Maybe it’s a result of a tendency to use “doubt” as a contrast to “faith” and “belief.” They are not in fact opposites. We can believe and still have doubts. To doubt and question can be evidences of a living, active, honest faith (or search for faith), in contrast to a passive or non-growing faith. Lewis believed in intellectual honesty and rigorous critical thought in all sectors of life, including religion, even if they lead one to reject Christianity, as he did for over a decade; he came back to Christianity after he found answers to the questions he raised about it. It seems clear that his faith, when he returned to it, was stronger and deeper than it would have been without going through that questioning process. Lewis held that there is not only room for questions and doubts in an individual Christian’s life, but a need for them if growth is to occur. I like the way George MacDonald puts it: “A man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest” (Lewis, ed., George MacDonald: An Anthology, no. 152).

ZK: Let’s talk death. Is it not the punishment for sin? Certainly the sting is deadened with the suffering of Jesus, as he harkens the Psalmist, but death is still the end of what we know and the beginning of what we don’t know. It seems that we often spiritualize death so that it makes sense - souls without the tie to gravity - but Lewis, if we take The Great Divorce as an example, is really calling for something concrete - more real than the present shadows. Paul takes this tack as well. On our good days we might say this, but most of the time we are scared silly. No? How do we build a robust confidence about the solidity of the heavens?

PJS: Lewis believed that “we were not made for [death]; we know how it crept into our destiny as an intruder” (God in the Dock, 150). It is punishment for sin, but at the same time it is the path to a realm in which there is no sin or death. Death, Lewis says, is the passageway to the true home we have been longing for all our lives. It is “an important part” of the process of our perfection (Mere Christianity, bk. 4, chap.10). You’re right about our tendency to spiritualize death. It seems to me that one way to fight that tendency, and to rebuild confidence in the solidity of heaven, is by the images through which we try to conceptualize heaven. And Lewis provides very good help here, in The Great Divorce, yes, but also in The Last Battle. It offers an amazingly “solid” heaven, where colors are more vibrant than in our world, and tastes are exquisite. “It was a deeper country [than the old Narnia]: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.” The images are so vivid and that “world” is so desirable that most readers say with Jewel the Unicorn, “I have come home at last! . . . I belong here.”

Mere Christianity: Relic or Relevant?

2008-09-06T18:17:00.000-07:00

by Robert Velarde

Published in 1952, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis began its life as a series of radio talks first aired between 1941 and 1944 on the BBC. The book covers a lot of ground ranging from a moral argument for the existence of God to Christian ethics to theology and more.

But are ideas that appeared almost seven decades ago still relevant today? Is Mere Christianity a strange relic or does it retain contemporary relevance? In some respects Lewis would question this line of inquiry, as it implies that something that is old is, by default, no longer relevant. "Chronological snobbery" is the term Lewis used to refer to the flawed concept that newer ideas are supposedly always better than old ones.

Still, when Lewis first gave the radio talks that would become Mere Christianity, he intended them for a specific audience at a specific time in history, immersed in a particular cultural set of circumstances. In short, Lewis intended his talks for laypeople of 1940s England during a time of war. Does Mere Christianity, then, still apply to modern readers?

As the talks progressed, Lewis moved beyond apologetics - the defense of the Christian faith - and into other areas of timeless relevance. These areas include ethics, philosophy of religion, and Christian theology.

As an expert in medieval and Renaissance literature, Lewis admitted he did not have the necessary credentials to tackle such topics as a professional clergyman or in a professorial capacity. But he did have the background as an atheist turned Christian to expound on the topics as a layperson (albeit a witty, well-read, intelligent layperson).

As a result, Mere Christianity does not read like a dense academic tome, thank goodness, but as a series of friendly conversations about issues of timeless interest and significance. This alone makes the book anything but irrelevant.

If the history of ideas has taught us anything it is the fact that human beings have faced and continue to face the same sorts of questions and issues no matter what century they happen to live in. So when Lewis begins Book I of Mere Christianity, "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe," with an example of people arguing, using it to make a point about moral behavior and ethical standards, it resonates with contemporary readers because we can all relate to his illustration.

When Lewis later takes on "The Rival Conceptions of God," we relate to the options because they are still around today. Pantheism, atheism, and theism, in fact, have all been around for thousands of years. One need only turn to recent best selling books to find all three major worldviews present on the shelves of modern bookstores.

As Lewis presents an outline of the rudiments of Christianity, he discusses guilt, atonement, and redemption - issues of supreme importance that are still discussed and debated today. Despite technological progress and other advancements in society, the human condition has not changed. If we are fallen beings in need of redemption that can only come by Christ, then Mere Christianity remains not only relevant but of ultimate and eternal significance.

Ethics, morality, right and wrong, vice and virtue. When Lewis explores these topics in Mere Christianity he is again appealing to matters that are universal to human beings. Why is it that we behave the way we do? Does morality have its source in the human or the divine? How, then, should we live our lives? If evil exists, how do we know it is evil? If God exists, how would we know it and what could we do about it?

Far from being irrelevant or a relic of museum-like curiosity, Mere Christianity is a work of enduring relevance because it addresses universal human issues. Whether we agree with all the conclusions in the book or not, it remains a succinct and clever presentation of "mere" Christianity as Lewis saw it.

When Lewis was fist contacted by the BBC about giving the talks, it was suggested to him that he discuss modern literature. Fortunately for us, Lewis rejected this topic, instead opting for another suggestion made by the BBC - "a series of talks on something like 'The Christian Faith as I See It - by a Layman.'"

Mere Christianity endures, in part, because human beings and all our musings about God, morality, and religion, have not changed. But the book also endures because of the wit, wisdom, and graciousness of C.S. Lewis, a "mere" Christian willing to make a lasting difference in his world, not for his sake, but for Christ's sake.

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Robert Velarde is an author, editor, and philosopher. His books include Conversations with C.S. Lewis (InterVarsity Press, 2008), The Heart of Narnia (NavPress, 2008), and Inside The Screwtape Letters (Baker Books, forthcoming). Robert is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society, the Evangelical Philosophical Society, the Society of Christian Philosophers, and the International Society of Christian Apologetics. A classically trained pianist and composer, Robert has written music for flute and piano inspired by scenes from the Chronicles of Narnia. He studied philosophy of religion at Denver Seminary and is pursuing graduate studies in philosophy at Southern Evangelical Seminary. His blog, "A Reasonable Imagination," is at robertvelarde.blogspot.com.

“Taking Up” Scripture: Reflections on the Psalms

2008-09-06T17:19:00.000-07:00

by Christopher Assenza
Many Christians can undoubtedly remember their discomfort upon first encountering invective language in the Psalms, their incredulity at the occasional self-righteousness of the Psalmists, or a general sense of confused wonderment at the Old Testament and how it is interpreted by the Church.

Despite the wide range of reasonable explanations available to them, some Christians nevertheless often wonder how the apparent short-comings they perceive in the Old Testament can be reconciled with their deeply held belief that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. C.S. Lewis, everyman that he was, experienced the same difficulties and decided to write down his thoughts in an engaging little book called Reflections on the Psalms. Although not everyone will agree with his approach, which he is careful to note should not be taken as informed scholarship (Note 1 below), Lewis's response to these difficulties is characteristically honest, intelligent, accessible, and, in many ways, comforting.

Lewis almost certainly recognized the risk of writing an analytical study of the Bible. The Book of Psalms, in particular, is one of the most celebrated and well known books in the Old Testament and a fixture in the liturgical practices of nearly all Christians. The danger of misinterpretation, misuse, or injury is therefore, in some sense, higher for Reflections on the Psalms than for most of his other popular religious works. This risk, however, is not a deterrent for Lewis, who does not shy away from offering pointed criticism of the Psalms.

In the chapter on cursings, for example, he uses words like “diabolical,” “terrible,” and “contemptible” to describe passages from Psalms 109 and 143 that valorize vengeance, infanticide, and other cruelties (20-1). Most readers who object to this description, however, would be hard-pressed to refute it. Those who do not object and are troubled by its accuracy are likely tempted, as Lewis initially is, to “leave them [the cursing Psalms] alone” (22). Yet, Lewis deftly argues that we cannot deny the malice of these curses, nor can we justify or agree with them because they are in the Bible; instead, we can learn from them about our own inclinations towards hatred, the moral effect our actions can have on others, the distinguishing moral character of the Jewish people that allowed them to experience the temptation to hate (i.e. “they took right and wrong more seriously”), and God's righteous intolerance for sin (20-33).

Why, however, might some object to this reading and others not? The answer is bound up in how Christians understand and relate to the Bible. The “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,” a doctrinal statement by an assembly of Protestants written in 1978, describes the Bible as “infallible” and “inerrant,” the latter of which means “the quality of being free from all falsehood or mistake and so safeguards the truth that Holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church says much the same thing: “the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.” Both of these documents speak at length about the central, undeniable authority and importance of Scripture in the Christian life, revealing precisely why criticism of the Bible may be threatening to some. (Note 2 & 3 below) Lewis's assertion that the Old Testament sometimes displays “[n]aïvety, error, contradiction, even... wickedness” quickly dispels any notion that he might have believed the entire Bible to be inerrant in a doctrinal sense, but throughout all of his writing Lewis does affirm the Bible's divine inspiration, its importance, and its authority (111).

Lewis's view of Scripture, specifically the Old Testament, rests on many of the core ideas that span his writing, most important of which is his understanding of myth and its role in Christian revelation. (Note 4 below) Too large a topic to address in detail here, it is enough to say that Lewis saw in the old pagan myths a divinely inspired foreshadowing or anticipation of Truth that is actualized by and through Christ's historical experience on Earth. Lewis applies this same basic principle to the writings of the Old Testament. It is “no difficulty” for him to accept “that the account of Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical,” because he accepts a positive view of derivation that is highly creative, additive, and directed by God (110):

Thus something originally merely natural—the kind of myth that is found among most nations—will have been raised by God above itself, qualified by Him and compelled by Him to serve purposes which of itself it would not have served. Generalising this, I take it that the whole Old Testament consists of the same sort of material as any other literature—chronicle (some of it obviously pretty accurate), poems, moral and political diatribes, romances, and what not; but all taken into the service of God's word. ... The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message. (111)

Lewis shows that this practice of divine “up-grading” is a recurring theme in God's interaction with mankind, manifest most significantly in the Incarnation, when “human life becomes the vehicle of Divine Life” (116). In the same way the “Old Testament is a literature thus 'taken up,' made the vehicle of what is more than human” (117). Understood in this context, the “shadows” of the cursings, when “taken up,” reveal “something more about the light” than any systematic explanation of morality could, confirming, rather than refuting, the divine purpose at work behind the Scriptures (114).

Although Lewis was not a strict inerrantist, his views on Scripture have far more in common with traditional, orthodox beliefs than with any modern, liberal notions that deny the Bible's sacredness, divine inspiration, or authority. If nothing else, he uniformly affirms that the spiritual Truth conveyed by the Bible is without error. In Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis proves this conviction by presenting a way of reading Scripture that accepts the human aspects of its authorship without diluting its inherently divine nature and purpose.

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Christopher Assenza is a software engineer by trade and a graduate student in English literature at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Penn.

Notes
1: The book begins with: “This is not a work of scholarship. I am no Hebraist, no higher critic, no ancient historian, no archaeologist. I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself” (1). These disclaimers are difficult to accept from a man of such prodigious learning and for a book that is as incisive as it is pleasing to read. I am certainly not the first to make this observation; indeed, it seems that nearly everyone who reads the book and writes about it makes this same observation. I suspect our expectations of Lewis have something to do with the fact that we are surprised and even a little suspicious of such a modest claim. The introduction of the book, however, is sincere and given without irony. A book can be scholarly without being formal scholarship. Donald T. Williams writes that, for Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms was “an unambitious little work” that he wrote only a few years after finishing a work of formal scholarship: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama for The Oxford History of English Literature series (Williams 238). Readers who try to engage Reflections on the Psalms as authoritative theological scholarship, rather than as a work by which we can simply “compare notes” with Lewis, do so unfairly (2).

2: Protestants and Roman Catholics are in greater agreement about Biblical interpretation than many realize. Protestants rely on personal communion with the Holy Spirit and historical interpretations upheld by the broader fellowship of Christians. Catholics rely on the authority of the Church through the Magisterium, which is itself comprised of church leaders who rely on the Holy Spirit and historically established interpretations as well. The difference between the two groups, broadly defined, is paradoxically a question of ecclesiology: Protestant sola scriptura versus the Catholic Magesterium, the Individual versus the Body Corporate. And so while Protestants and Catholics often find two vastly divergent meanings in the Scriptural text, ironically, they both work under what are essentially corresponding interpretative strategies.

3: See Section III, Item C in the Chicago Statement and Article 107 from the Catholic Catechism. This very brief summary falls far short of properly expressing the many nuances of Biblical inerrancy as held by various Christian denominations. Both the Chicago Statement and the Catholic Catechism are replete with details about their respective positions on the matter. Those interested in studying them further will find the documents reproduced in full online.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Chicago_Statement_on_Biblical_Inerrancy
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc/index.htm
http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html

4: For Lewis, myth is a literary genre with distinct characteristics that he details at length in chapter five of An Experiment in Criticism. Describing something as a myth or mythical does not therefore imply that it is untrue; indeed, it is not a truth claim at all.

References

Taking a cue from Lewis, I should note that this essay is introductory at best and is not a work of formal scholarship. I am, however, indebted to the works listed below and recommend them to anyone interested in further exploring this subject.

Bratcher, Dennis. "C. S. Lewis on Inerrancy, Inspiration, and Historicity of Scripture." The Voice.

Duriez, Colin. “Bible.” The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia: A Complete Guide to His Life, Thought, and Writings. Wheaton: Crossway. 2000.

Edwards, Michael L. and Bruce L. Edwards. “'Everyman's Tutor': C.S. Lewis on Reading and Criticism.” C.S. Lewis: Life, Works and Legacy. Vol. 4. Ed. Bruce L. Edwards. Westport: Praeger, 2007. 163-194.

Lewis, C.S. An Experiment in Criticism. 1961. Cambridge: UK: Cambridge U P, 1992.

---. Reflections on the Psalms. San Diego: Harcourt, 1958.

Martindale, Wayne and Jerry Root, eds. The Quotable Lewis. Wheaton: Tyndale. 1989.

Williams, Donald T. “An Apologist's Evening Prayer: Reflecting on C.S. Lewis's Reflection on the Psalms.” C.S. Lewis: Life, Works and Legacy. Vol. 3. Ed. Bruce L. Edwards. Westport: Praeger, 2007. 237-256.

Is Mere Christianity Hard or Easy?

2008-08-19T10:04:00.001-07:00

by Andrew P. Cuneo
The title for this blog was originally proposed as “Is Christianity Hard or Easy?” – a question which I still think worthwhile and rich. Nevertheless, I am going to take a slight detour from the original idea and first ask a separate question which will probably depress seasoned, older, readers of C. S. Lewis.

My slight variation is to ask about the book itself, the book which stands in the vanguard of Lewis’s apologetics, Mere Christianity, and to weigh the observation which so many of my students have supplied: is this book simply too hard for today’s reader? For the amazing thing (to my mind) is that a book once considered – and vilified – as a work of popular apologetics has come to be seen as exceedingly intellectual. The young minds of today’s universities find the book too argumentative, too predicated upon logic, and so one must ask about the book as well as the Christian belief proposed: is it too hard?

For full disclosure, I will note that it is not only students at my former university, Hillsdale College, who prompted the question. Whether I tutored students from Calvin College, Wheaton College, Williams College, Boston College – choose what you like – the unexpected feedback was that as admirable as Mere Christianity is, it might be pitched too high for today’s audience. A successful apologetic today needs a different approach. What such student feedback offers, perhaps, is a widespread reading of our culture’s intellectual temperature. It is cool to explicit logic. Under the excuse of post-modernism, today’s generation has a default position of mutual logical tolerance based on a deeper logic of some key principles. Arguments are commonly assessed as ‘working’ for the individual. More important to the contemporary student, something which is almost an arch-principle for them, is not to cause offense – and this puts rational argument in a bad position as it puts teachers on eggshells.

Most of us who teach suppose this is simply an unreflective prelogical state. The position becomes more peculiar, though, when students who are quite bright will happily maintain contradictions, even when pointed out. A syllogistic proof, a tight argument, an extended discourse, for whatever reason, simply doesn’t seem to move most students. Alas, too often they fail to perceive the argument in the first place. Once they do, they often find argument as a species too immaterial or hopelessly abstract. On the other hand and to their credit, a contemporary student is much more likely to be moved by personal narrative or an emotional appeal: by passion (reasoned or not), enthusiasm, and sincerity of purpose. What this means for their assessment of Lewis’s apologetics is then clear: too hard, too logical. Books like Mere Christianity, for them, take some wading and books like The Abolition of Man and Miracles are about beyond the pale for all but senior-year students. Such is the feedback from my approximately ten years of teaching and tutoring.

I gladly admit that my sample size of the American student is finite; many teachers may have seen much more rationally-mature responses to Mere Christianity. Still, the so-called scandal of the evangelical mind does not seem to be limited solely to evangelicals. There is something about the temperament of the soul of the young that makes our age distinct from Lewis’s. I am here reminded of Chesterton’s observation that a cultural loss of faith makes that culture fall back upon reason, and a loss of reason makes it fall back upon emotion; and emotion, as Lewis points out so well in Abolition, is extremely easy to manipulate when it is a prime determinant in decision-making. One has to be thankful, then, that so many of Lewis’s non-apologetic works employ emotional and imaginative power to sway a generation and culture that does still eagerly enjoy narrative, story, art, and advertisement.

If Lewis’s own apologetics appear scandalously hard today, there were commensurate difficulties in Lewis’s own day, if of a different order. The content of Lewis’s apologetics was not considered so hard as the context. By noting, for instance, the date of the broadcast talks, one sees at the outset C. S. Lewis’s astonishing ecumenism. The very idea of “mere Christianity” in the 1940’s was daring. The decay of Christian belief in Europe during the twentieth century should not overshadow the fact that leading Christian figures like Dorothy Sayers, T.S. Eliot, and Christopher Dawson were comparatively cutting-edge in their ecumenism. Tensions between Christian denominations were much sharper then than now and it is hard to reconstruct a period in one’s imagination where ecumenical prayer was suspect and liberal (a word one rarely applies to Lewis). The accounts of this period where the Catholic Dawson was critiqued for praying the Our Father with Protestants, where Catholic student societies in Oxford physically guarded against non-Catholics entering, and most English Protestants never stepped into a Catholic Church, can remind us that “mere Christianity” was not necessarily a given in 1940. Again, to refer to my modified title, mere Christianity was hard, not easy, even as an approach.

The very existence of the Inklings was a species of what Lewis would so gracefully espouse in its merely Christian constituency. The Catholic Tolkien and Dr. Havard mixed with the Anglo-Catholic Charles Williams, Nevill Coghill, and Hugo Dyson, while the centrist Anglicans like the Lewis brothers maintained friendships with, uh oh, Anthroposophists. It really is a motley bunch, and by contemporary standards, notably open. The comment by Hugo Dyson in 1946 that he would drop the Inklings if one more Papist joined the group, however, tells of a not-uncommon antipathy towards ecumenism. Furthermore, while much ink has been printed about Lewis’s abiding Ulster Protestant tendencies (e.g in his refusal to discuss denominational issues with Dom Bede Griffiths or J.R.R. Tolkien), the other side of the story is how open he was to the intellectual community of non-Anglicans. He deserves more credit for that even now.

Thus, for different reasons, “mere Christianity” was not easy then or now. One final point to make about the difficulties of mere Christianity is helpfully corroborated by the late Justin Phillips in his engaging book C.S. Lewis and the BBC. Most readers of Lewis by now have heard of the way in which the radio broadcast talks became one of, if not the, most successful work of apologetics for the past century. The success story, though, often skips the remarkable switch of genres from radio to print. We take radio for granted, but Phillips points out that radio programming was relatively newfangled at the outset of World War II. Only with the eclipse of TV, cinema, theatre, and print during the War (all for different reasons) could radio take the center-stage in national communication. But precisely because it was national, it was for the common man. If one reads the letters of Dorothy Sayers in the 1930’s, one finds some tart words about the cultural value of the BBC; an Oxford don much less an Oxford woman possessed serious reservations about the popular medium of radio; it was, as Sayer’s put it, “the spiritual home of the not-quite-first-rate” (The Letters of Dorothy Sayers, Vol. II).

So, when one asks whether the actual choice for Lewis to speak about mere Christianity on the somewhat déclassé BBC was hard or easy, we know the answer. It was, in the eyes of many of his peers, a sell-out of true academic integrity and an unforgivable condescension. It was also another conscious step by Lewis in the direction that would handicap his academic career at Oxford. We know well about Lewis’s work lecturing in every spare vacation day to soldiers and pilots preparing to die, about his incorporating listener’s objections into his final published book, about the rigid parameters of radio broadcasts under a radio Censor, and about the man who would audaciously address “Clues to the Meaning of the Universe” (for a start) in 10-15 minutes segments. All in all, the making and delivery of Mere Christianity was far from easy, but it was necessary. If one were to return to the original question as to whether Christianity itself was hard or easy, much the same answer applies. By analogy, this is what makes the student responses to such a powerful book a problem that needs solving. Many, many readers find Mere Christianity too hard. Precisely what makes the renewed case for the Christian faith in rational, imaginative, or emotional terms today is a subject wide open for discussion; that discussion too, is necessary – at least before the next generation comes along.

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Dr. Andrew Cuneo is presently a M.Div. candidate at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York, where he lives with his wife and three daughters. He completed his doctorate on C.S. Lewis at Merton College, Oxford, has taught English Literature at Hillsdale College for six years, and is currently training for ordained ministry in the Orthodox Church.

Lewis and Stonehenge

2008-08-14T20:44:00.000-07:00

by Will Vaus

Clyde Kilby, in C. S. Lewis: Images of His World, stated that C. S. Lewis was “fascinated by the ancient monument of Stonehenge, near Amesbury, Wiltshire”. Of course, countless people have been intrigued by Stonehenge because it is a 5000 year old mystery. What was the original purpose of this circular enclosure of “hanging stones”? Was it used for human sacrifice? Some have speculated that Lewis based his Stone Table, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, on Stonehenge.

However, that speculation is unlikely to be true. Far more likely is the thought that Lewis derived the idea for the Narnian Stone Table from the Dolmens of his native Ireland. And archaeological experts on Stonehenge have found no evidence of human or animal sacrifice there. So what was the purpose of Stonehenge: place of worship, astrological calendar? No one knows for certain.

Lewis attempted his own fanciful guess when he wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves on 29 November 1916. Lewis spun this tale for Greeves:

No the Meagre One was not born with a squint: but long, long, long ago, so long ago that Stonehenge had a roof and walls & was a new built temple, he killed a spider. The good people of his day, outraged at this barbarity, stuck a dagger thro his nerve centre which paralyzed him without making him unconscious, seated him on the altar at St. Henge’s temple & locked him up with the spiders son. The latter began to spin a solid mass of cobwebs from the Opposite corner. Very very slowly through countless years the web grew while the poor Meagre One—who couldn’t die—developed a squint from watching it get nearer. At last after countless ages Stonehenge disappeared under an enormous mass of web & remained thus till one day Merlin hapenned to set a match to it and so discover what was inside: hence the myth of Merlin’s having ‘built’ St. Henge’s. To this day if you go there at sunrise & run round it 7 times, looking over your shoulder you can see again the wretched prisoner trying to struggle as the horrid sticky strands close round him. Cheap excursion trains are run for those who wish to try it.

On one occasion I came close to trying Lewis’s suggestion. Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s step-son, had sent me on an overnight trip from Ireland to England to fetch a van-load of books for him. I was driving down a deserted highway, not too far from Stonehenge, in the darkness of a very early summer morning. I was tempted to take a detour, just to see St. Henge’s, as Lewis calls it, by the eerie light of the moon with no one else around. However, I decided against it. The thought of it all seemed just a bit too spooky.

So far as we know, C. S. Lewis visited Stonehenge only once. The year was 1925, just one month prior to being elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Lewis traveled with his brother Warren, by motorcycle and sidecar through Wiltshire, April 6-8. Warren took a photograph on April 8, 1925 showing his brother Jack actually seated on one of the stones of Stonehenge.

Jack wrote to his father Albert later that same month recounting the excursion. He mentions that he and Warren stopped at Stonehenge and that it was “a very fine morning and intensely quiet except for a battery practicing over the next ridge.” Jack remarked further about “how merciful it would be if we could sometimes foresee the future: how it would have carried me through many a long working night in the trenches if I could have seen myself ‘seven years on’ smoking my pipe in the oldest place in the old, safe, comfortable English fields where guns fire only at targets.”

What stands out to me from this letter is that Jack spends more time offering his reflections on Salisbury Cathedral than he does recounting his feelings about his one and only visit to Stonehenge. Here stands the atheist C. S. Lewis, four years prior to his conversion to theism, six years prior to his return to Christian faith, and he is more fascinated by a cathedral, than he is captivated by one of the greatest monuments of paganism. Granted, Lewis comments only on Salisbury Cathedral as an architectural feat, his reason has not yet led him, to make the leap of faith which he would later describe John as making in The Pilgrim’s Regress. However, the sensitive reader can already detect the fact that Lewis’s imagination has been baptized. Read what Lewis himself writes to his father in April 1925,

The trip was delightful. I was pleased to revisit Salisbury and see it more thoroughly. I well remember my former visit. ‘It was a Sunday’ and NOT very early in the morning, as you doubtless recollect, when we stopped for a few minutes in Uncle Hamilton’s headlong career and heard morning prayer going on in the Cathedral. At that time I did not agree with you and cared for it less than Wells or Winchester.

This time as we came into sight of Salisbury, where, on those big rolling downs that spire can be seen from fifteen miles away, I began to have my doubts. Later, when we had had tea and strolled into the Close I decided that it was very good in its own way but not in my favourite way. But when we came out again and saw it by moonlight after supper, I was completely conquered. It was a perfect spring night with the moon nearly full, and not a breath of wind stirring nor a sound from the streets. The half light enhanced its size, and the sharp masses of shadow falling in three great patches from the three main faces of one side emphasized the extraordinary simplicity in which it differs so from say, Wells. . . .

Salisbury . . . is the idea of a master mind, struck out at once for ever. . . . The more one looks the more it satisfies. What impressed me most . . . was the force of Mind: the thousands of tons of masonry held in place by an idea, a religion: buttress, window, acres of carving, the very lifeblood of men’s work, all piled up there and gloriously USELESS from the side of the base utility for which alone we build now. It really is typical of a change—the medieval town where the shops and houses huddle at the foot of the cathedral, and the modern city where the churches huddle between the sky scraping offices and the appalling ‘stores’.

Is there any question what Lewis preferred, even in 1925, the medieval town or the modern city? Ancient stones set up in a circle pointing inward or thousands of tons of masonry directing our gaze upward? Lewis’s visit to Stonehenge and Salisbury in the year of his election to Magdalen College makes one thing clear, while it would be a few more years before his reason was surrendered to Christ, his imagination had already crossed the frontier into the kingdom.

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Will Vaus is the author of Mere Theology: A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis (InterVarsity Press, 2004) and The Professor of Narnia: The C. S. Lewis Story (Believe Books, 2008).

The Hard Knock at the Door of Christianity

2008-08-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

by Harvey Solganick

While reforming my faith, accepting Christ, against the “hard knock” of agnosticism, humanism, and atheism, I noticed a perilous, parallel philosophical journey taken by C.S. Lewis in response to his own battle with his Christian walk. Lewis constantly retained an admiring endearment to his teacher, W. T. Kirkpatrick, or as Lewis calls him, “The Great Knock.”

Like Lewis, I also admired my atheistic and agnostic philosophers and teachers during my higher education, for their logical rationality and their pervasive intellect.

Like Lewis, I also read such atheistic thinkers like Bertrand Russell (A Free Man’s Worship; Why I am not a Christian), Paul Kurtz (A Humanist Manifesto), Kai Nelson (Ethics without God), Sigmund Freud (The Future of an Illusion), Karl Marx (Das Kapitel), Friedrich Nietzche (Human, All too Human), and B.F. Skinner (Beyond Freedom and Dignity). I even attended a debate at The University of Texas, Austin, between atheist Madeline O’Hare and a Unitarian minister. I was influenced by my philosophy professors, Dr. Robert Solomon’s existential humanism and Richard M. Owsley’s existential phenomenology (I called him, “The Wise Owl of Minerva”).

In my literary background, I studied postmodern deconstruction with Dr. Victor Vitanza at The University of Texas at Arlington. From my journey of past darkness into the present light of Jesus Christ, I realize now that these educational experiences and personal encounters made me stronger in defending the Christian faith.

The development of an apologetic against agnosticism and atheism is the purpose of this study, based upon the friendship relationship between W.T. Kirkpatrick and C.S. Lewis. A.N. Wilson, in C.S. Lewis: A Biography, calls W.T. Kirkpatrick, “a valued teacher and friend” to Lewis (171). C.S. Lewis calls W.T. Kirkpatrick, “a hard, satirical atheist who taught me to think” (Miracles 69). Baylor University professor, Robert C. Wood, captures this philosophical method of Lewis: “From his early tutelage under the atheist rationalist, W.T. Kirkpatrick, Lewis had learned to relish dialectic, the cut and thrust of intellectual repartee”(“Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Values” Renascence).

In Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes, “My debt to him [Kirkpatrick] is very great, my reverence to this day undiminished” (148). In their personal, Platonic relationship, Lewis writes, “Here was a man who thought not about you but about what you said” (Surprised by Joy 137). In Surprised by Joy, reflecting Kirkpatrick’s influence, Lewis writes, “I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world” (115).

Another inspirational author, G.K. Chesterton, also influenced C.S. Lewis’ agnostic journey: "The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man" (Everlasting Man).

From this model of a Platonic, intellectual relationship between friends, an apologetic, based upon relational, fideist, evidential, presuppositional, and cumulative approaches, will be established for defending the Christian faith against agnosticism and atheism experienced by C.S. Lewis in his life and works.

The outcome demonstrates even God can work in mysterious ways through atheism in order to strengthen the Christian faith, so, as Jesus reminds us, “Listen! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and have dinner with him, and he with Me” (Revelation 3:20). Otherwise, the consequences of not believing are detrimental: “Then you will stand outside and knock on the door, saying, 'Lord, open up for us!' He will answer you, 'I don't know you or where you're from'” (Luke 13:25).

C.S. Lewis wavered in his Christian faith several times, hardening his heart and mind toward God. As a child, the death of his mother affected him severely. Again, as a young adult, Lewis buried God in the battlefield, waging his own battle for and against God. Lewis himself said, “The early loss of my mother, great unhappiness at school, and the shadow of the last war and presently the experience of it, had given me a very pessimistic view of existence. My atheism was based on it” (The Question of God: School Days. PBS).

Finally, as an older man, Lewis was stricken by the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, and reconstituted his faith in God after a period of confusing despair. However, all these psycho-biographical and psycho-historical experiences also made Lewis into a stronger man of faith. As a child, he “put away childish things;” as a young adult, he dedicated himself on the battlefield to the “glory of God;” and as an older, mature Christian, after “many trials and tribulations,” he was drawn closer (what Lewis calls sehnsucht) to God through his “mere Christianity.” Thus, all the road before him, his journey, was not only a personal growth in Christianity, but also an apologetic model for defending the faith against agnosticism and atheism, for himself, but also for others.

First, a definition of some terms would help the reader grasp Lewis’ spiritual struggle. According to Anthony C. Thiselton, in A Concise Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion, “Atheism denotes the denial of the existence of God, to be distinguished from Agnosticism, the belief that to know whether or not God exists is impossible”(18). Although many proclaim Lewis as an atheist at times in his life, I believe, from a Protestant perspective, he maintained his faith and matured in his Christianity. However, periods of agnosticism haunted him. It is my contention that Lewis never lost his faith, but grew stronger through his tests and trials of his faith. His faith was shaken emotionally based upon a fideist apologetic belief in God, but he never believed in a purely evidentialist claim for God’s existence, and ultimately, never gives up his classical, rational apologetic approach for understanding his faith.

At least five distinct approaches to apologetics have guided most seekers:

1) The Classical Method/ Presuppositional method utilizes deductive logic and philosophical rationalism for constructive argumentation, examining and disclosing premises and presuppositions. Thus, reason justifies faith.

2) Evidentialist Apologetics emphasizes empirical evidence, verification with science, archeology, factual history, etc.

3) Reformed Apologetics offers a regenerative spirit, based upon biblical standards, theological doctrines of predestination, Christianity versus false science.

4) Fideist Apologetics calls us to obey the Truth of a personal theology, with faith beyond science, revelation beyond history, based upon inspiration and experience.

5) Cumulative Case Method insists all methods are utilized to achieve the Truth, including classical arguments: theism; personal experience and moral behavior (Fideist); the role of the Holy Spirit in revealed truth (Reformed); evidence for beliefs (Evidentialism) .

Lewis, as a “reluctant convert,” probably became a cumulative case apologist, searching for the existence of God in his life. At times, Lewis would even turn to mysticism as a phase for his agnostic inquiry, but this phase could not last for the master apologist. According to David C. Downing, “Ultimately, the contemporary trend in world mysticism must be found wanting, both for its logical inconsistencies and for its empty promise of gnōsis without kenōsis, the gaining of knowledge without the losing of self” (Mysticism in C.S. Lewis, 148). Ultimately, Lewis gains both the knowledge of being a Christian and the losing of the old creature, becoming the new creature in Christ.

How exactly did W.T. Kirpatrick’s atheism influence Lewis? Why did atheists, like Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Russell, reject God eventually, while Lewis accepted the Lord? For example, Sigmund Freud was interested in God’s existence before he wrote Future of an Illusion, and he asked his best friend, Oskar Pfister, a Lutheran minister, who this God, Jesus, was. Pfister did not want to discuss Jesus with Freud, but was more concerned with psychological programs in the Church. The difference in Lewis was his intellectual approach combined with his personal relationships.

Friendship models, like W.T. Kirkpatrick and Owen Barfield, influenced his intrigue with atheism, while other models, like G.K. Chesterton and J.R. Tolkien, inspired his Christianity. For example, Owen Barfield attempted to derive a philosophy based upon anthropos or human nature alone (The Case for Anthroposophy. The Barfield Reader 151). Let us examine the life and teaching style of W.T. Kirpatrick as it influenced C.S. Lewis.

William T. Kirkpatrick (1848-1921), a retired headmaster of Lurgan College, Northern Ireland, served as Lewis’s tutor during the years 1914-1917. He was a friend of Lewis’ father, Albert Lewis, who had himself been tutored by Kirkpatrick from 1877-1879. When Jack Lewis went to boarding school, he failed miserably, and returned to individualized tutoring, living with Kirkpatrick. Oddly enough, as predestined knowledge by a Presbyterian, Kirkpatrick told Lewis’ father, “You may make a writer or a scholar out of him, but you’ll not make anything else” (Surprised by Joy 183).

Kirkpatrick used the Socratic method of teaching, making Lewis think through every experience: “If Jack would look outdoors and comment that it was a nice day, Kirkpatrick would vigorously call out “Stop!” and require Jack to define a nice day and explain his reasons for labeling this particular day a nice one”(Reader’s Encyclopedia 229). This logical positivist approach, applying philosophy and linguistics, allowed Lewis to enter into a dialectical dialogue with his teacher, whom he called a “purely logical entity,” “a Rationalist of the old, high and dry, nineteenth-century type” (Surprised by Joy 139), a style Lewis utilized, as well as wrote about himself in Surprised by Joy; as the skeptical, rationalistic MacPhee in That Hideous Strength; and as Professor Kirke claims, “What are these schools teaching nowadays!” in The Chronicles of Narnia. Professor Kirke in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, is perhaps patterned after Kirkpatrick (Sammons, Guide through Narnia 89).

Like Lewis, Kirkpatrick was an eccentric, who wore his best clothes gardening on Sundays than for weekday gardening, rebelling against his strict, traditional Presbyterian upbringing. Kirkpatrick not only insisted that Lewis learn French, German, Italian, Greek, and Latin on his own, but would read original literary selections in the original language, such as Medea and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Thus, Kirkpatrick framed Lewis’ whole career and interests as a medieval scholar, linguist, and rational philosopher. Even though he admired the intellectual abilities of Kirkpatrick, the atheistic worldview served as a foil, a dialectical counterargument, for Lewis as he struggled with his own faith: “From him [Kirkpatrick] I learned something about the honor of the intellect and the shame of voluntary inconsistency” (Surprised by Joy 173).

Lewis wrote a letter to Owen Barfield (January 18, 1927) about his battle for God:

I was thinking about imagination and intellect and the unholy muddle I am in about them at present: undigested scraps of anthroposophy and psychoanalysis jostling with orthodox idealism over a background of good old Kirkian rationalism. Lord what a mess! And all the time (with me) there’s the danger of falling back into most childish superstitions, or of running into dogmatic materialism to escape them. (Diary C.S. Lewis xi)

This dogmatic materialism or atheism was identified with the “Kirkian rationalism” of W.T. Kirkpatrick, and his “childish superstitions” concerned his belief in magic, mysticism, and pseudo-mythology. For C.S. Lewis, Christianity won the battle over atheistic materialism, mysticism, and magic since Christianity was the “real” myth, based on reality after he demythologized all his other beliefs. Lewis had developed an apologetic against atheism.

What should a Lewis apologetic against atheism look like? Several apologists have offered formal apologetic arguments against atheism. If we apply what C.S. Lewis learned from W.T. Kirkpatrick in his own journey against agnosticism and atheism, we can apply the following precepts:

- “He never attacked religion in my presence” (Surprised by Joy 140).

- “Here was a man who thought not about you but about what you said” (Surprised by Joy 137).

- “My debt to him is very great, my reverence to this day undiminished” (Surprised by Joy 148).

- “He was a hard, satirical atheist and the man who taught me to think” (Miracles 69).

Thus, an apologetic against the atheist should consist of the following principles:

1. Never attack the atheist’s ideas, but demonstrate the atheist has a religion also since “a-theism means a humanist stand against God. (Only a fool says in his heart there is no God (Ps.1:4).)

2. Never attack the personality of the atheist, but be ready to interpret and analyze what the atheist is saying or claiming. (Love the sinner, but hate the sin.)

3. Have reverence for the atheist who is one of God’s children, but does not yet know the Father. Be willing to learn from the atheist his or her experiences and problems as a human being. (Even while you were still a sinner, Christ died for you.)

4. Let the Holy Spirit soften the heart and ears of the hardened atheist. You can plant the mustard seed in order to let the atheist think about God.

By all means, do not grow weary and give up defending the faith. As an atheist, Kirkpatrick was described by a student as one whose “pistol never missed fire; but he gave you the impression that, if it did, you would be knocked down by the butt-end” (Collected Letters I-3). The Lewis family loved W.T. Kirkpatrick, in spite of his atheistic humanism, even until his death on March 22, 1921 (Collected Letters I-1005). In conclusion, the biblical principle of apologetics still is the best classical definition of how to do Lewisian apologetics when respectfully encountering a “hard knock” from the atheist:

Do not fear what they fear or be disturbed, but set apart the Messiah as Lord in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. However, do this with gentleness and respect, keeping your conscience clear, so that when you are accused, those who denounce your Christian life will be put to shame. (1 Peter 3:14-16)

It is a shame that W.T. Kirkpatrick was such an influence on C.S. Lewis by his teaching style and intellectual abilities, but the “hard knock,” Kirk, never answered the knock at the door, opening his heart, mind, and soul to the Lord: “'Lord, open up for us!' He will answer you, 'I don't know you or where you're from'” (Luke 13:25).
Instead, Kirkpatrick was influenced by the depressed philosophies of Bertrand Russell’s Free Man’s Worship and of Schopenhauer’s World as Will. However, we do know the faith of C.S. Lewis and from whence he came -- out of the darkened despair of the shadowlands of atheism, into the light of the Lord.

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Harvey E. Solganick, Ph.D. in Humanities, Philosophy, and Rhetoric, The University of Texas at Arlington, currently is a professor of Humanities at The College at Southwestern, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is author of Our Holy God and the Sinfulness of Man and a member of the C.S. Lewis and Inkling Society.

Works Cited
- Baier, Kurt. Problems of Life and Death: A Humanist Perspective. Prometheus Books, 1997.

- Barfield, Owen. The Case for Anthroposophy. The Barfield Reader. Ed. G.B. Tennyson. Wesleyan University Press, 1999. 151-152.

- Barratt, David. Narnia: C.S. Lewis and His World. Kregel, 2005.

- Chesterton, G.K. Everlasting Man. Ignatius, 2000.

- Coren, Michael. The Man who created Narnia: The Story of C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids: Eerdman, 1994.

- Cowan, Steven B., Ed. Five Views on Apologetics. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000

- Craig, William Lane and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. God: a Debate between a Christian and an Atheist. Oxford UP, 2004.

- Downing, David C. Mysticism in C.S. Lewis: Into the Region of Awe. Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005.

- Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Norton, 1989.

- Geisler, Norman L. and Frank Turek. I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be an Atheist. Wheaton: Crossway, 2004.

- Goffar, Janine, ed. The C.S. Lewis Index: a Comprehensive Guide to Lewis’s Writings and Ideas. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1995.

- Hinton, Marvin D. and Bruce L. Edwards. “William T. Kirkpatrick.” The C.S. Lewis Reader’s Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998. 229.

- Holman Christian Standard Bible. Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2004.

- Hooper, Walter, Ed. Foreword by Owen Barfield. All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922-1927. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1991. xi.

- Kurtz, Paul. A Humanist Manifesto One and Two. Prometheus, 1973.

- Lewis, C. S. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol.1: Family Letters, 1905-1931. Harper Collins, 2004.

- Lewis, C.S. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol.2. Harper Collins, 2004.
Lewis, C.S. Miracles: How God intervenes in Nature and Human Affairs. New York: Macmillan, 1940.

- Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy. Harvest Books, 1966.

- Marx, Karl. Das Kapital. Gateway, 1999.

- Nelson, Kai. Ethics Without God. Prometheus, 1990.

- Nietzche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Cambridge UP, 1996.

- Nicholi, Armand. The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life. New York: Free Press, 2002.

- Russell, Bertrand. A Free Man’s Worship. Mosher, 1927.

- Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not a Christian. Touchstone, 1967.

- Sammons, Martha. Guide through Narnia. Harold Shaw Publications, 1979.

- Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1994.

- Schultz, Jeffrey D. and John G. West. Eds. The C.S. Lewis Reader’s Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998.

- Skinner, B.F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Hackett, 2002.

- Solganick, Harvey. Theories, Translations, and Truths: Freud’s Search for the Soul. Dissertation. Arlington, TX: The Unversity of Texas, 1998.

- Stone, Elaine Murray. The Question of God: School Days. PBS documentary. 2005. (4 November 2005).

- Thiselton, Anthony C. A Concise Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Books, 2002.

- Wilson, A.N. C.S. Lewis: A Biography. Norton, 2002.

- Wood, Robert C. “Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.” (15 October 2005) published in Renascence.

Dispelling Myths about C. S. Lewis

2008-07-30T07:22:00.000-07:00

by Jerry Root

C. S. Lewis once wrote an essay titled, The Funeral of a Great Myth, in it he eulogizes the religion of evolutionism. In the same spirit, I have often thought it would be good to bury a host of myths about C. S. Lewis as well.

As to Lewis myths, it is my contention that authors, working under the strain of a publishing deadlines, sometimes produce shoddy research and make some unfortunate claims. Surely these things could only be the result of the pressure of deadlines; nobody would ever intentionally write something without checking the facts first. Would they?

Once a myth comes to print, others content themselves to citing the these secondary works without checking the facts for themselves. The errors proliferate. Do it three times, and the general public considers it an established fact. Right? So it is with C. S. Lewis lore, there are a constellation of myths that seem to prevail. This is a brief attempt to set one such myth aright.

Some have made the unfortunate claim that Lewis sought to focus on fiction only after an embarrassing encounter in a debate with the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe at the Oxford Socratic Club, February 2nd, 1948.

This falsehood comes from sources one would expect to be more reliable; people like: Humphrey Carpenter in The Inklings; Lewis’s friend George Sayer in his biography Jack; and A. N. Wilson in C. S. Lewis: A Biography.

In his biography of Lewis, Sayer observes that, “the debate had been a humiliating experience, but perhaps it was ultimately good for him. In the past he had been far too proud of his logical ability. Now, he was humbled.” Later, Sayer reports, “‘I can never write another book of that sort,’ [Lewis] said to me of Miracles. And he never did.”

Carpenter writes, “Lewis had learnt his lesson: for after this he wrote no further books of Christian Apologetics for ten years.” The apologetic book Carpenter has in mind is Reflections on the Psalms - “it was notably quieter in tone and did not attempt any further intellectual proofs of theism or Christianity.”

Wilson, in his biography of Lewis, uncritically, repeats the error and intimates no less than five times that it was the Anscombe debate that brought an end to Lewis’s life as an apologist.

Those who make this claim say that Lewis lost the debate because he lacked sufficient philosophical depth, relative to contemporary discussions in philosophy, and therefore could no longer be taken seriously as a Christian apologist. His methods were limited and archaic, critics assert. Furthermore, some have suggested that Lewis's interest in fiction following this debate signaled a kind of retreat to ground where arguments could be neither pressed nor challenged. In point of fact, the evidence suggests that the Anscombe debate had a lesser effect on Lewis's work as an apologist than has been supposed.

Anscombe’s own recollection is very different than what has been reported. She published the paper she read at the Oxford Socratic Club in her own Collected Papers. It is a matter of public record and anyone wanting to know the truth of the matter can read her paper and also her recollections of the meeting. It is not the intent of this blog entry to develop the intricacies of the Anscombe-Lewis debate; I am simply concerned to argue that whatever the content of the debate or Lewis’s response to Anscombe, there is not sufficient grounds to claim that the debate signaled either the end of Lewis’s apologetic work, or a retreat to fiction. Even so, a brief summary of the issues involved might be helpful for the reader.

Lewis writes in the first edition of Miracles, that, “We may in fact state it as a rule that no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes” (p. 27).

Anscombe, a Christian, also had her doubts about the Naturalist’s assumptions; nevertheless, she questioned the strength of Lewis’s argument at this point. She summarizes her own position, “I do not think that there is sufficiently good reason for maintaining the ‘Naturalist’ hypothesis about human behaviour and thought. But someone who does maintain it cannot be refuted as you [Lewis] try to refute him, by saying it is inconsistent to maintain it and to believe that human reasoning is valid and that human reasoning sometimes produces human opinion.”

Lewis concedes the point, and later writes in response to Anscombe, “I admit that valid was a bad word for what I meant; veridical (or verific or veriferous) would have been better.” Lewis made adjustments to the chapter thirteen years later in the second edition published in 1960 as a Fontana Paperback. The delay hardly supports the idea that Lewis was deeply concerned about the matter. Also, the fact that he worked on a later edition of Miracles does not support the idea that he thought his contribution to Christian apologetics was complete.

Anscombe indicates that she was not fully satisfied with the changes, but she believed them an improvement over his earlier edition and thought they were signs of Lewis’s “honesty and seriousness.” It is also useful to note that after the debate with Anscombe, Lewis stayed on as President of the Socratic Club for several years engaging in proclamational apologetics in a rigorous academic environment. He did not resign his presidency until he left to take a professorial chair at Cambridge University.

Further investigation will reveal fault in the claim that Lewis did no more serious work in Christian apologetics after the debate. Anyone able to count and also consider publication dates of his essays and books will discover evidence contrary to the claims of Carpenter, Sayer, and Wilson. Lewis actually published no fewer than thirty-four essays in Christian apologetics after the debate. The 1960 book The World’s Last Night, a collection of published essays which Lewis himself gathered from various periodicals. Every essay in the book (seven in all) was written after the Anscombe debate. It represents a book of Christian apologetics, intentionally made available by Lewis, and discrediting the suggestion that the debate signaled the end of his apologetic endeavors. Two books of essays in apologetics were gathered and edited by Walter Hooper after Lewis’s death. A survey of the dates when the individual essays were published is also revealing. In God in the Dock, twenty-nine of the essays were published before the debate, while twenty of the essays were published afterwards.

The title essay in God in the Dock, written shortly after the debate, was originally titled, "Difficulties in Presenting the Christian Faith to Modern Unbelievers", and first appeared in Lumen Vitae, Vol. III. September 1948, pp. 421-426. In this essay, Lewis is instructing others on the fine points of engaging in apologetic work with unbelievers, and it is hardly the kind of thing one would expect from someone devastated in debate and questioning his suitability as an apologist. In Christian Reflections, fourteen essays are included; of these, seven were originally published after the Anscombe debate.

All told, from these three collections, nearly fifty percent of the essays in Christian apologetics came after February 2nd, 1948. It seems that the Anscombe debate could hardly be grounds for proving that Lewis's interest in fiction was increased by his failure as an apologist. If this analysis is correct, what might his reasons have been for writing fiction? That another question for another article.

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Jerry was born and raised in Southern California. He grew up in a Christian family but did not become a Christian until his freshman year at Whittier College. He was deeply influenced by the ministries of Campus Crusade for Christ and Granada Heights Friends Church in La Mirada, California. Jerry's sister Kathy introduced him to the writings of C. S. Lewis while he was still an undergraduate. Upon graduation from college he selected Lewis as an author who would take him to other authors and has made of him a life study. The concept that graduation from college is "Commencement" has meant that only a foundation for learning is established through formal education after which one commences his/her liberal arts education.

He pastored three different churches over twenty-three years. Nineteen of those years were invested in student ministry, and for four years he served as a senior pastor. While pastoring he taught courses in Philosophy and on C. S. Lewis for ten years at the College of Du Page in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. He has served on the Adjunct Faculty at Biola University since 1991, teaching courses on Lewis. He has been teaching at Wheaton College since 1996.

Jerry has lectured or preached in 14 countries: Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, England, France, Ireland, Mexico, Romania, Slovakia, Sudan, Switzerland, Uganda, Ukraine. He has also lectured or preached in 19 States: California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin. Jerry has traveled to 31 countries and 3 continents.

Notes

- CARPENTER, Humphrey. 1979. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, pp. 216-7
- SAYER, Jack, pp. 186-7;
- WILSON, Biography, pp. 211, 213, 214-5, 218, 220, 225.
- SAYER, Jack, p. 187.
- CARPENTER, Inklings, p. 217.
- WILSON, Biography, pp. 214-215, 218, 220, 225, 236.
- ANSCOMBE, G. E. M. 1981. The Collected Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Volume Two. Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. See the Introduction. pp. ix-x. Also see Chapter 21, "A Reply to Mr. C. S. Lewis’s Argument that 'Naturalism' is Self-Refuting", where the paper Anscombe presented to the Socratic Club is reproduced.
- Anscombe, The Collected Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe. Vol. II. p. 231.
- Ibid. p. 231.
- Ibid. p. x. For a fair treatment of the matter, attention should be given to Christopher Mitchell’s article on the Anscombe-Lewis debate in Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review. Vol. 14, 1997.

Good News for Toy Soldiers

2008-07-18T04:54:00.000-07:00

by Sarah Arthur

I recently completed my first year of graduate theological studies at a major university. Before classes began, I figured I would need to say goodbye to C. S. Lewis as a literary voice in my life, considering his rather dubious reputation among academics. Everyone in the academy darts for cover when an intelligent man broadcasts his Christian beliefs, right? And meanwhile, you never know which theologian is feeling cranky about Lewis’s war ethic, for instance, or his spin on female clergy. So I entered divinity school assuming I would hear little about Lewis for the next several years.

Right away I plunged into my first semester in Church History. We began by studying the Patristics—the early church fathers of the second through fifth centuries. We read primary sources, from Justin Martyr to Cyril of Alexandria, and tracked the many councils and disputes over the nature of God and Christ (e.g., How could one God be three persons? Was Jesus divine? And no, we were not assigned The DaVinci Code).

Anyway, partway through our readings, we came upon a fourth-century church father named Athanasius. He was one of the key opponents against the heresy that Jesus was merely created, not fully divine. Athanasius’ treatise “On the Incarnation of the Word” argued that the Son—known in the Gospel of John as “the Word”—was not created: he was co-eternal with the Father, and therefore fully divine. Gripping material, I assure you.

Nicaea couldn’t seem further from Narnia, right?

Wrong. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the introduction to our assigned translation was written by none other than C. S. Lewis!(1)

This shouldn’t have surprised me, actually. Lewis received a first in “Greats” (that is, in classics, or ancient studies) at Oxford, along with firsts in philosophy and literature. So he no doubt studied the early church fathers, despite his atheist leanings, during his university years. Then, when he converted to Christianity, it most likely seemed natural to return to some of those writings as he tried to make sense of his new-found faith. Indeed, in Lewis’s introduction to Athanasius, he recommends that we read an old book for every new book on our shelves. For Lewis, those who went before us fought a good fight—and meanwhile we today might avoid teetering on the brink of heresy if we listened more closely to the ancients.

He said a great deal more besides. But what struck me wasn’t so much the content of the introduction, nor that Lewis had shown up unexpectedly within my first month of divinity school. It was a startling assertion on the part of Athanasius, tucked away at the end of his treatise, which went something like: “God became man so that men might become God.” Wait: did he mean that? Or rather, what did he mean by that? This was a spin on salvation that I had never wrestled with before. It wasn’t the usual televangelist line about Christ satisfying some debt we owe God by dying on the cross in our place. Indeed, it had to do with the very fact that God became human in the first place, and what effect that had on the rest of us. Smack in the middle of Church History class, I had stumbled upon the “deeper magic” of the early church’s understanding of salvation—and the more I explored it, the more I realized I had heard it before. From C. S. Lewis.

But let’s back up and unpack what Athanasius was saying. For starters, he agreed with the ancient Greek philosophers who believed that the material world was corrupt. He also generally agreed that the Divine (God) was both transcendent (outside the material world) and the highest principle of good. But he wouldn’t follow the heretical logic which concluded that God could not have created the material world, much less become human, without being sullied and corrupted in the process. The heretics believed that only a created being—a superb being, but created nonetheless—could have made the world, taken on human flesh, and died a human death. Otherwise the divine nature would’ve been corrupted forever. Hence the claim that Jesus was not divine, though he was a pretty nice guy. The heretics, bless their hearts, were trying to preserve God’s divine goodness.

But let’s back up even further. Goodness, as the ancients saw it, is more concrete than a vague sort of righteousness. It indicates soundness or wholeness; fullness; perfection, like a ripe piece of fruit. The opposite of good, in this sense, is rottenness, corruption. When a piece of fruit is going bad, it slowly disintegrates. Its ultimate end is decomposition, or a kind of “death.” And meanwhile, contact with rotten fruit can start the disintegration process in sound fruit—never the reverse. Metaphorically speaking, this is what the Greeks thought would happen if the perfectly good “fruit” of the divine nature came in contact with the rotten sinfulness of human nature: the rot would begin to corrupt the good. But Athanasius insisted that they had it all wrong.

For Athanasius, not only does the good fruit, upon coming in contact with the rotten, maintain its essential goodness, but it reverses the disintegration of the rotten fruit too. It infuses its goodness into the rest. It makes the rotten fruit sound and perfect again, as it was intended to be from the beginning. Instead of one bad apple rotting the whole barrel (as with Adam in 1 Corinthians 15:20-23), one good apple restores the whole barrel once and for all.

If you’re hearing echoes of Lewis’s “Obstinate Toy Soldiers” from Mere Christianity, you’ve got it. We were the toy soldiers, made of tin. But along came one who was made of real flesh. He showed us what we were meant to be—“for the first time we saw a real man.” Even more, he started the real-making process in the rest of us, since we are not merely individuals, but part of a larger family connected to all the other toy soldiers:

Consequently, when Christ becomes man it is not really as if you could become one particular tin soldier. It is as if something which is always affecting the whole human mass begins, at one point, to affect that whole human mass in a new way. From that point the effect spreads to all mankind. It makes a difference to people who lived before Christ as well as to people who lived after him. It makes a difference to people who have never heard of Him. It is like dropping into a glass of water one drop of something which gives a new taste or a new colour to the whole lot.

Earlier Lewis uses this metaphor: “He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life he has—by what I call ‘good infection.’” So, whatever Christ has, it’s contagious.

Herein lies the “deeper magic” of the church’s understanding of salvation. The Son wasn’t dragged into our depths and thus unable to save us; rather, he volunteered to enter our depths in order to lift us up into his heights. Through his incarnation, death, and resurrection, the Son draws us up into participation in the divine life.(2)

As Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, “The son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.” Indeed, the very divine goodness that the heretics thought would render the incarnation impossible is the very thing that makes it possible for our salvation. This doesn’t discount the role of the cross (there must be a Stone Table in Narnia, after all). Nor does it discount the role each of us plays in appropriating that salvation. But, as Lewis says, “Humanity is already ‘saved’ in principle.”

Contest this theory if you will. If you don’t like it, choose another than works better for you, as Lewis wisely advised. But I say it was a happy discovery in my first semester of divinity school. Hardworking little toy soldier that I was, it was good news to hear that no one’s salvation depended on me and my slick theological explanations. Besides, I had found myself in a Lewis-Friendly Zone. (Although one professor snipped, “Lewis? Just a Platonist!”)

Meanwhile, my graduate studies with Lewis aren’t over. There’s a class this fall entitled “Learning Theology with C. S. Lewis.”

I’m already signed up.

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Sarah Arthur is a consultant to the Northern Michigan C. S. Lewis Festival (www.cslewisfestival.org) and the author of numerous youth resources, including The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry (Upper Room Books, 2007). She is presently completing graduate studies at Duke Divinity School in Durham, NC. She can be reached at www.saraharthur.com.

NOTES:(1) On the Incarnation: De Incarnatione Verbi Dei. St. Vladimir’s Press, revised edition 1996. For more on how Lewis came to write the introduction to that particular translation, see Dan Hamilton’s blog post: “Why Read Old Books: History and Its Relevance.” Incidentally, I had read Lewis’s introduction before entering Church History class, but as a stand-alone essay entitled “On the Reading of Old Books.” Somehow I had missed its connection to Athanasius (or, more likely, before taking the class I thought, “Atha-who?”).

(2) Yes, this is a radical claim that essentially deifies humanity. In the Eastern Orthodox Church it is known as thēosis, or divinization, and is a major theological thread running through the history of Eastern Christian thought. (See Norman Russell’s The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford, 2004.) Lewis never calls it by those terms, however—at least, not in Mere Christianity.

“What should they teach at these schools?” Lewis on Education and Imagination

2008-07-12T06:41:00.000-07:00

by Marisa White

I love to investigate the tables Barnes and Noble has set up for local schools’ summer reading. A few weeks ago, I was pleased to find The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on several of their displays. I started thinking, and I feel certain that seeing his book there would bring a great sense of joy into C. S. Lewis’s heart, not merely because people are still reading his stories, but, more profoundly, because of Lewis’s strong convictions about the role of imaginative literature in education.

Many times we consider imagination as something apart from reality, something we use to escape from the stark world around us; but for Lewis, and for people who see a spiritual world that illuminates the material, imagination can be a means of fostering belief in the spiritual aspect of reality. Dragons, unicorns, and elves do not really exist, but if children grow up believing in such magical beings, then it can become much easier for their adult selves to trust in the existence of a supernatural God. For Lewis and, he hoped, for many of his readers, imagination should play an integral role in the educational process.

Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man, is subtitled “Reflections on Education with Special References to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools.” (No wonder we usually hear it called just The Abolition of Man!) This short volume contains many of Lewis’s thoughts on the nature of imagination and the function he believes it should serve in the classroom. The main focus of The Abolition of Man is Lewis’s argument for the existence and importance of an objective, universal truth. He calls this truth the “Tao” and equates it with “Natural Law” (43). He also describes it as “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false” (18), and he believes that ignoring the Tao will result in a distorted understanding of all things, since the Tao defines and underlies reality itself. With that said, I don’t want to get too far off track in explaining Lewis’s fascinating concept of the Tao, since the discussion at hand deals with education and imagination. What, then, does the Tao have to do with education? And where does imagination fit into this picture?

Lewis posits that both the nourishment and the destruction of humanity’s relationship with the Tao can begin in the educational system. According to Lewis, an education truly serving its purpose must provide students with insight into the nature of the Tao. He declares: “The practical result of education [that rejects the Tao] must be the destruction of the society which accepts it” (27). If there is no objective reality to inform the pursuit of knowledge, then students will have no basis in which to ground their value judgments. For Lewis, the ability to judge right from wrong is something that must be addressed in education. We know Lewis, as a Christian, must have based his value judgments in the faith he professed, but in The Abolition of Man Lewis speaks as a philosopher, seeking to appeal to a wide audience of Christians and non-Christians alike. This philosopher-Lewis asserts that “if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason [the Tao] as having absolute validity” (49). In other words, if we are to deem any one thing as “good” or “bad,” then we must have an absolute reality on which to base these estimations of value. Lewis sees education as the means of instilling the right ideas of “good” and “bad” into the minds of human beings and as the way to teach people how to “like and dislike what [they] ought” (16).

According to Lewis, an education that properly helps students to “like and dislike what [they] ought” must recognize the importance of imagination. He says: “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibilities of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head” (14). Lewis thinks an overly rationalistic kind of instruction, in which the formation of “hearts” and “sentiments” is neglected, fails to fulfill the purpose of education. It fails to treat students as human beings: body and soul, mind and heart, material and spiritual. For Lewis, reality is comprised of both spiritual and material sides, and to disregard either side is to have a faulty perception of reality. An education that includes the consideration of imaginative literature helps students to recognize the spiritual side of reality. Imagination awakens us to the dragons and unicorns in our own lives and encourages us to look deeper into the supernatural part of our being.

I can’t help thinking it was for this reason – for the sake of encouraging this ultimate belief in the spiritual – that the academic, intellectual Lewis, who was reportedly not particularly fond of interacting with kids, spent so much of his time and energy writing stories for children. We see the relationship between imagination and spiritual reality come to life in the Narnia Chronicles. When the Pevensie children grow older, they are told by Aslan that they will not be returning to Narnia but will have to come to know him in their own world. In this sense, Narnia was a preparation for something that was to come, something that would take the children away from Narnia for a time, but ultimately bring them back home to it. The journeys to Narnia are an educational right of passage for the Pevensies that parallel their journeys from youth to maturity. When her sister and brothers initially disbelieve Lucy’s experience in the land of the wardrobe, the wise Professor Kirk (who has firsthand knowledge of Narnia’s existence) wonders, “I wonder what they do teach them at these schools?” (54). The professor, like Lewis, knows that education should not prevent children from believing in the existence of something beyond the everyday, material world of earthly experience.

So what would Professor Kirk say about our schools today? What would Lewis think about how we are doing things in the contemporary classroom? As I said, I’m sure he would be pleased to see his Narnia books on summer reading lists along with other imaginative works such as The Wizard of Oz, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Hobbit. But surely he would also have some reservations about the way we are running classrooms today. I wonder how he would feel about the emphasis placed on standardized testing in our schools and in college application processes. I think he might worry about the literature departments starving for money at some universities, while sports, science, and technology-related programs are living like kings. I don’t mean to say that Lewis saw the study of literature as more important than science or mathematics – on the contrary, I think he appreciated the beauty of scientific and mathematical truths. What he did not want was for the scientific disciplines to be over-emphasized at the expense of the imaginative ones, since he saw imagination as essential for the development of each human person.

In reflecting on Lewis’s pertinence for our contemporary environment, especially considering the recent film adaptations of the Narnia Chronicles, I think it is important to expand our thoughts on education into the realm of our present “entertainment” industry. In today’s world, where standardized tests seem to mean more than standard writing skills and professional athletes make more money than professional educators, it is the entertainment industry that has taken over a big chunk of imaginative education. Popular culture is even studied in the classroom these days, as I have seen in my experience as a teaching assistant in charge of a required writing class for freshmen college students. Teachers are encouraged to use film, TV, advertising, and other aspects of pop culture as pedagogical tools in the classroom. Now, my first reaction to this trend was to wonder if we haven’t started inserting too much imagination into education. I mean, aren’t kids already watching way too much TV and playing way too many video games? Haven’t some kids gotten so confused about the difference between reality and fantasy that we’ve seen horrible results like school shootings and bombings? Where do we draw the line between an imagination that helps us to understand true reality and one that prompts us to create a false, harmful reality?

Lewis would, without a doubt, point us back to the Tao. He would tell us that it isn’t too much imagination that is destructive, but too little adherence to the objective truths that define reality. These truths must be incorporated into education, or chaos can result. “Without the aid of trained emotions,” says Lewis in The Abolition of Man, “the intellect is powerless against the animal organism” (24). For Lewis, the role of imagination in the educational world is that act of training the emotions.

Just as absolute laws, such as gravity, inform scientific studies, so does the Tao act as the basis for imaginative considerations. Imagination, formed in the way of Lewis’s Tao, and working in conjunction with reason, can help students to perceive the expanses as well as the boundaries of reality, so that they can progress in the knowledge of spiritual and material reality as a whole. So, no, we shouldn’t all encourage our children to skip math class and go see Prince Caspian – but I think Lewis would challenge us to always leave the wardrobe door wide open.

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Marisa White is from Ormond Beach, Florida. She attended Christendom College and received her B.A. in English in the Spring of 2006. Her academic interests lie mainly in the area of 20th Century British Christian literature, especially George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. She finished her M.A. at Florida State University in the Spring of 2008, with a thesis titled, "Sacramental Unity in the Writing of C.S. Lewis: Romanticism, Imagination, and Truth in The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength." Marisa will begin doctoral studies at Catholic University of America in the Fall.

Lewis and the "Pursuit of Happiness"

2008-07-05T22:40:00.000-07:00

by Robin Baker

Quite by accident, I came across a short article by Lewis that he wrote just prior to his death, entitled “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’” (Saturday Evening Post, December 11, 1963). In it, he writes about an emerging issue in culture and even offers thoughts on the American Declaration of Independence. In this short essay, Lewis takes on a growing concept in the West in the mid-20th century that human beings have a “right to sexual happiness.”

In the essay, Lewis conveys that he is having a discussion with a female friend, Clare, who is convinced that men and women, even though they are married, have a basic right to separate from their spouse if they are no longer experiencing sexual fulfillment in the marriage relationship. Clare argues that they have a moral and legal right to separate to seek out sexual fulfillment in another relationship. According to Clare, all people have a right, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, to the “pursuit of happiness.” Men and women are not “bound” by their marriage vows if they cease to experience happiness; they are free to pursue fulfillment elsewhere.

Lewis disagrees with Clare, and he decides to examine the Declaration of Independence to discover what the American Founding Fathers meant when they agreed to accept the wording, “the pursuit of happiness.” Lewis suggests that they obviously did not mean that everyone could pursue happiness by any means available. People are limited by the Law of Nature and the laws that nations agree to sanction. He suggests that the Declaration of Independence was primarily a denial of the political principles that had long governed Europe; “whatever means of pursuing happiness are lawful for any should be lawful for all; that ‘man,’ not men of some particular caste, class, status or religion, should be free to use them.” Thus, according to Lewis, the Declaration of Independence did not guarantee any particular form or ideal of “the pursuit of happiness” but that the law related to that pursuit would be applied to all.

Lewis is most frustrated that some in society argue that we need to treat “sex” just as we treat all other impulses; we must set all our impulses free! Lewis, of course, discovers that this is not really what they mean. He argues that society “bridles” other passions through the law in the interests of community. The wealthy capitalist is limited by the American tax code (at least in theory) in his or her ultimate pursuit of happiness through the acquisition of material possessions. A man or woman is honored by society for bravery if he or she overcomes the “instinct” of self-preservation. Lewis concludes that “if we establish a right to sexual happiness which supersedes all the ordinary rules of behavior, we do so not because of what our passion shows itself to be in experience but because of what it professes to be while we are in the grip of it.”

What I find fascinating about this particular piece by Lewis is that he foresaw the development of a culture that would give priority to the “passions,” or what we might call today, the genetic tendencies of a person to behave in a particular way. As American culture has expanded commitments to the pursuit of individual freedoms over the past 40 years, it has found it increasingly difficult to define new boundaries that are acceptable. Juan Williams, in an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Tragedy of America’s Disappearing Fathers,” noted that “it is now common to meet young people in our big-city schools, foster care homes and juvenile centers who do not know their dads.” In the United States, the out-of-wedlock birth rate is roughly 40 percent. It is a problem that hits whites, African-Americans and Hispanics. We know that the odds for a child’s psychological and financial success increase when there are two parents in the home. Greater freedom for the individual pursuit of “happiness” in the moment does not necessarily translate into the achievement of happiness for a family or a culture over time.

Perhaps it is a conservative notion that one must discipline one’s passions or impulses to achieve “happiness” for the community at large, but it would seem to me to be an appropriate one and one also that the founders of the American experiment accepted. Lewis ends his essay noting that if we do not accept discipline in our pursuit of happiness we “advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche. And then, though our technological skill may help us survive a little longer, our civilization will have died at heart, and will – one dare not even add ‘unfortunately’ – be swept away.”

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Robin E. Baker is president of George Fox University in Newberg, OR. His research has focused on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, 19th-century American political/quantitative history, and the history of the southern United States. Baker has taught classes at George Fox as professor of history. He also speaks frequently on the integration of faith and learning in the Christian university and he has a special interest in the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien

A Cancer in the Universe

2008-06-26T11:32:00.000-07:00

by David Naugle

I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the Universe. Certainly if he goes on his present course much further man can not be trusted with knowledge. - C. S. Lewis, responding to a letter from Arthur C. Clarke

My back was turned completely to the classroom. I sat atop a stool behind the lectern, with trademark white wires fashionably dangling from each ear-bud in route to my iPod. I was also scanning a book, obviously multi-tasking!

Outwardly absorbed in the music and the text before me, I pretended not to notice as about thirty-five students shuffled incrementally into to my introduction to philosophy class on the first day of a new spring semester. Though I knew the lecture hall had filled up, I turned around on my seat and pretended to be surprised by a classroom full of students. I was too electronically pre-occupied to notice!

With a newfound presence of mind, I proceeded with regular, first-day formalities: a cordial welcome, a Scripture reading and prayer (I teach at a Christian university), then the class roll, followed by an overview of the syllabus… only to be interrupted by a planned call and a bogus text message on my cell phone, the advent of both signaled by appropriate electronic sounds. My wife was texting me to remind me about the delinquent electric bill, and a friend phoned me up to talk about Tiger’s miraculous triumph at a PGA event the day before. At least that’s what I told the class, fingers crossed behind my back!

In my effort to stimulate interest and get students’ attention, I was trying to demonstrate how technology affects our lives and impacts our relationships, often without our awareness. They began to catch on to my antics, slowly but surely. At a propitious moment, I passed out a one-page handout on a philosophy of technology with a succinct definition and few themes briefly summarized, as I explained that a chief goal of our class was to move from a state of pre-reflectivity to reflectivity, from unexamined to examined lives! The response, I must say, was gratifying!

Perhaps it’s megalomania, but I think C. S. Lewis would have appreciated this pedagogical gimmick of mine and here’s why: he believed that the most significant line of division in Western history occurred between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the reason was because of the rising prevalence of science and the application of technology to everyday life!

This was a main point Lewis made in his Cambridge Inaugural Lecture titled De Descriptione Temporum (Latin: “A Description of the Times”) when he was installed as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University in 1954. Lewis was suspicious of dividing history into time periods, even though he saw them as useful historical tools. Quoting Cambridge historian G. M. Trevelyan, Lewis declared: “Unlike dates, periods are not facts” (DDT, p. 2). Thus, Lewis disputed with those who wanted to draw the thickest line of demarcation in occidental culture in the seventeenth century “with the general acceptance of Copernicanism, the dominance of Descartes, and (in England) the foundation of the Royal Society” (DDT, p. 6-7). To be sure, science and its technological offspring were making great strides during that transitional century, but had yet to become socially pervasive. Science, Lewis stated, was “like a lion-cub whose gambols delighted its master in private; it had not yet tasted man’s blood” (DDT, p. 7). Up to this point, science dealt mostly with lifeless nature and slung out a few technologies. However, it was not yet the business of humanity because humanity was not yet the business of science (DDT, p. 7, paraphrased). But when human persons became the scientific target — between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — everything changed: “When Watt makes his engine, when Darwin starts monkeying around with the ancestry of Man, and Freud with his soul, and the economists with all that is his, then indeed the lion will have got out of his cage. Its liberated presence in our midst will become one of the most important factors in everyone’s daily life” (DDT, p. 7).

Point well taken! But is this progress?

For Lewis, the answer is depends upon what one means by “progress.” Lewis was no Luddite, to be sure, for he recognized and appreciated that humankind had made significant scientific and technological advances throughout history. At the same time, he was in no way, shape or form convinced that such scientific discoveries and technological innovations entailed the perfection of humanity and the move to a better world. In fact, he saw the amoral, if not immoral, foundations upon which human knowledge and power were advancing as positively dangerous, and potentially, if not actually, idolatrous!

Why did Lewis hold to this outlook? The answer is not hard to fathom. It stemmed from his Christian worldview. This outlook stood in sharp contrast to the Greek perspective on history as a “meaningless flux” or “cyclic reiteration” and had become a “discarded image.” Nevertheless, Christianity, building on the Hebraic notion of history as the revelation of God’s mighty deeds and purposes, “makes world-history in its entirety a single, transcendentally significant story with a well-defined plot pivoted on Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Judgment.”

History for Lewis, ever an Augustinian, was ”a story with a divine plot” (DI, p. 176) that culminated apocalyptically in judgment. Consequently, it was contrary to modern, secular notions of human perfectibility and the creation of an ideal world. As Lewis wrote in The World’s Last Night,

The doctrine of the Second Coming is deeply uncongenial to the whole evolutionary or developmental character of modern thought. We have been taught to think of the world as something that grows slowly toward perfection, something that “progresses” or “evolves.” Christian apocalyptic offers no such hope. It does not even fortell … a gradual decay. It foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from without; an extinguisher popped onto the candle, brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain wrung down on the play — “Halt!” To this deep-seated objection I can only reply that, in my opinion, the modern conception of Progress or Evolution (as popularly imagined) is simply a myth, supported by no evidence whatsoever.

If history, by divine design, was scheduled to end in an apocalyptic manner, then optimistic views of science and technology as the source of unstoppable human progress was a dangerous deception. It gave false psychological hope to people who placed serious faith in an ever-increasing knowledge and in the advent of more effective machines as the solutions to personal and cultural problems.

Again, Lewis was never against science or technology per se; but he was against their idolization. In criticizing science, Lewis realized he was in a lose/lose situation. Nothing he could say or do would ever offset the false impression that he was anti-science or anti-technology. But it was scientism, not science that he opposed. He objected to both the denial and the deification of science, and his task was to seek a golden mean between these two erroneous extremes. Michael D. Aeschliman explains Lewis’s case against scientism and his mediating perspective of “mere science” in these words:

[Scientism is] radical empiricism, materialism, or naturalism — an implicit or explicit rejection of all nonquantifiable realities or truths, including the truths of reason. Its logical terminus is determinism or “epiphenomenalism,” T. H. Huxley’s notion that the brain and mind are fully determined by-products of irrational physical processes…. Lewis knew that science was one of the great products and capacities of the human mind, but he insisted that it was a subset of reason and not simply equivalent to it. Scientific reason, if accurate, was valid, but it was not the only kind of reasoning; noncontradiction, validity, truth, value, meaning, purpose, obligation were necessary presuppositions of the scientific method but not themselves scientific phenomena.

Lewis viewed this excessive valorization of science and its highly prized technological progeny as a “cancer” in the universe. If unchecked by a higher authority and a true, knowable moral vision, this cultural malignancy could prove to be fatal. In Lewis’s mind, the West, in its selfishness, had come to value science and technology too highly. To be sure, science and technology were real goods, but they must be subordinate ones…subordinate to first things.

In an important essay titled “First and Second Things,” written in the midst of World War II, Lewis affirmed, “You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.” For Lewis this raised the logical question: “What things are first?” As he noted, this question is not just a question for philosophical types, but for all people, everywhere. It is the question of the summum bonum or greatest good for human beings.

What, then, has Western civilization been putting first for many years? The answer, Lewis said, is plain to see: itself. “To preserve civilization has been the great aim; the collapse of civilization, the great bugbear. Peace, a high standard of life, hygiene, transport, science and amusement — all these, which are what we usually mean by civilization, have been our ends” (FST, p. 281). Lewis anticipates people saying that it’s natural and necessary to put civilization first, especially since it is in such grave danger. But why is civilization in such grave danger? Because it has been putting itself first! What “if civilization is imperiled,” Lewis asks, “precisely by the fact that we have all made civilization our summum bonum? Perhaps it can’t be preserved in that way. Perhaps civilization will never be safe until we care for something else more that we care for it” (FST, p. 218).

This is a point that’s worth more than a moment’s reflection. Reflection. Oh yes. That’s what I was trying to get my introduction to philosophy students to begin to do when I was intentionally ignoring them on the first day of class with my iPod!

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Dr. David K. Naugle is chair and professor of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University where he has worked for seventeen years in both administrative and academic capacities. He earned a Th.D. in systematic theology, and a Ph.D. in humanities with concentrations in philosophy and English literature.

Dr. Naugle is the author of Worldview: The History of a Concept (Eerdmans 2002), which was selected by Christianity Today magazine as the 2003 book of the year in the theology and ethics.

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Notes

For many of these reflections, I am greatly indebted to Timothy J. Demy’s excellent doctoral dissertation on “Technology, Progress, and the Human Condition in the Life and Thought of C. S. Lewis,” Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island, 2004.

- Quoted in Ryder W. Miller, ed., The War of Ideas between Arthur C. Clarke and C. S. Lewis (New York: iBooks, 2003), p. 40.

- C. S. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1969). Subsequent references to this essay are identified as DDT with the appropriate page numbers in parentheses.

- C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964; reprint, 1967), p. 174. Subsequent references to this essay are identified as DI with the appropriate page numbers in parentheses.

- C. S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1960, reprint 1973), pp. 100-01.

- Michael D. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 364-65. Also see Aeschliman’s “C. S. Lewis on Mere Science,” First Things 86 (October 1998).

- C. S. Lewis, “First and Second Things,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), p. 280. Subsequent references to this essay are identified as FST with the appropriate page numbers in parentheses. In a 1952 letter to a friend, Lewis affirmed this essential principle: “Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things.” See C. S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. and memoir W. H. Lewis (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966; reprint: New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 228.

Why Read Old Books: History and Its Relevance

2008-06-18T05:50:00.000-07:00

by Dan Hamilton

An Introduction is a signpost - pointing not to itself but to the pages that follow. While “On the Reading of Old Books” is usually reprinted (and presented) as a stand-alone essay by Lewis, it is actually the introduction to a book written by someone else:

"The Incarnation of the Word of God: Being the Treatise of St. Athanasius
DE INCARNATIONE VERBI DEI, Newly Translated by a Religious of C.S.M.V. St. Th."

This book appeared in 1944 from Centenary Press/Bles (in England) and later from MacMillan (in the US); it has been reprinted at least twice since then in paperback form.

There is a progression here: to talk intelligently about the Introduction, we should first talk about the book it introduces. But to talk profitably about the book, it is enormously useful to talk first about the friendship behind it. (And one suspects a friendship, because the book is dedicated to Lewis!)

The self-effacing “religious” was actually Ruth Penelope Lawson, who was born in 1890 and had entered the (Anglican) convent of the Community of Saint Mary the Virgin (at Wantage, near Oxford) in 1912. Sister Penelope studied theology and church history, and expressed her practical delight in Greek and Latin by translating numerous works from the early church fathers. She had already written several books of her own by 1939, including Scenes from the Psalms and Leaves from the Trees.

Sister Penelope read and admired Out of the Silent Planet, a book that had appeared in 1938 – written by C. S. Lewis, a don at Magdalene College in neighboring Oxford. Sister Penelope wrote a letter to Lewis in August 1939, and praised his book for (among other things) being thought-provoking, delightful, and scripturally-based. She pronounced it “more lovely and more satisfying than anything I have met before” and inquired if he planned a sequel to the story. She also enclosed a copy of her own recent book, God Persists: A Short Survey of World History in the Light of Christian Faith.

Lewis replied promptly; he admitted enjoying her praise of his book, and also confessed the struggle of trying to enjoy it properly without becoming wrongfully proud. He discussed Westonism, offered kind thanks for her book while singling out some passages for special appreciation, recommended the books of George MacDonald and Charles Williams for her reading, and (almost shyly) asked for her prayers as a man who was a relative newcomer to the Christian faith.

This delightful “omnibus” letter – addressing so many subjects in only a few short pages - sparked a friendship between the two that would last until his death in 1963.

Some forty-four letters from Lewis to Sister Penelope are preserved in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis – twenty-two of them between their initial correspondence and the appearance in print of De Incarnatione, all of which were written under the shadow of the War.

Over those years Lewis wrote to her warmly and widely, and, characteristically, of many things – his first confession, the appearance of angels (bodily or pneumatic only), Sister Penelope’s new books, his own projects, talks to Army officers, their upcoming BBC radio projects, the Shroud of Turin, Shakespeare, the vagaries of publishers, plays for children, the numbing dreads of wartime and the unexpected delights of blackouts ….. all abundant evidence that she enriched his life, and he hers.

In 1941, Lewis entrusted to Sister Penelope the original manuscript of The Screwtape Letters, because he had some apprehension that the only other manuscript copy might come to harm in the German bombings. “I enclose the MS. of Screwtape. If it is not a trouble I shd. like you to keep it safe until the book is printed (in case the one the publisher has got blitzed) – after that it can be made into spills or used to stuff dolls or anything.”

(This was consistent with his disregard for his own manuscripts after they had served their purpose. Lewis would often turn his original and fair-copy pages into scratch paper or “spills” to light the gas fire. One such rescued manuscript page is on display at the Brown Collection at Taylor University.)

Early in 1942 Lewis received and began to read her translation of De Incarnatione. He also spoke at her convent, and dedicated his Perelandra to “Some Ladies at Wantage” – the nuns. (Walter Hooper records the nuns’ amusement at being told that the Portugese edition of Perelandra rendered the dedication “To Some Wanton Ladies.”)

In early 1943, Sister Penelope informed him that her scheduled translation of De Incarnatione had been rejected by the intended publishers. Lewis promptly recommended that she try Bles, his own publisher. This apparently set into motion a successful and happy application, for De Incarnatione appeared in 1944 from Bles/Centenary Press with the Introduction by Lewis.

“St. Athanasius arrived the day before yesterday, looking very well dressed,” Lewis wrote. Apparently he was surprised (and pleased, though mildly worried) to find it dedicated to himself as “teacher and witness” – “It gives me real pleasure to have it dedicated to me, though I wd. have deprecated ‘witness’ if you had given me the opportunity. Apart from the suggestion of martyrdom (!) it carries implications which are rather overwhelming. But I am pleased and grateful all the same.”

This is not the last mention of De Incarnatione in the letters that were preserved, and the friendship continued on.

He continued to write over the years, discussing such topics as the Abominable Snowman, Holst’s Planets, George MacDonald’s poetry, and the impostrous Mrs. Hooker who was passing herself off as the “wife of C. S. Lewis.” He told her of such things as the death of his beloved friend Charles Williams, his ascension to the newly-created Professorship at Cambridge, and his marriage to the dying Joy Davidman. She in turn sent him news of her health and her planned projects – and copies of many of her own published and unpublished works, in which he never failed to find some delight. She also gave him a photograph of the Shroud of Turin – which he treasured, and kept on his bedroom wall for the rest of his life.

He wrote once to tell Sister Penelope that the Queen of Belgium had asked him (through her lady-in-waiting) for a copy of De Incarnatione, knowing that it was out of print and hard to obtain. (He does not say in the letter whether he was able to fulfill that royal request.)

By 1949 Lewis had grown wary of writing additional prefaces for other people’s books; he declined preparing an introduction to Sister Penelope’s The Morning Gift by remarking “I don’t want to write any more prefaces for a good bit: I think my name has come before the public in that way too often and ceases to do much good either to those for whom I write the prefaces or to me.”

(He declined a similar request from Harry Blamires with these words: “For a preface. No. That work begins to be dangerous to me and perhaps to the writer concerned. But I’ll gladly read the MS.”)

Sister Penelope still had the Screwtape manuscript in the 1950s, and inquired what Lewis wanted her to do with it. Lewis cared little for it, and indicated that he would simply dispose of it straightaway if she returned it to him – most of his scribbles ended up in the w.p.b. (waste paper basket) anyway.

Lewis finally told her, “If you can persuade any ‘sucker’ (as the Americans say) to buy the ms. of Screwtape, pray do, and use the money for any pious or charitable object you like.”

She eventually – though reluctantly - arranged for its sale to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and so preserved the only surviving full-length original Lewis book manuscript. The funds from the sale went to refurbish St. Michael’s chapel at the convent.

After the death of Lewis in 1963, Walter Hooper continued to visit and enjoy the company of the good Sister – active and spry and full of good humor and charity until her own death in 1977.

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Dan Hamilton is a writer and technical consultant from Indianapolis, Indiana. He has edited a dozen George MacDonald novels, written the fantasy trilogy Tales of the Forgotten God:, The Beggar King, The Chameleon Lady, and The Everlasting Child. He also has completed two books with his wife, Elizabeth, Should I Home School? and Look Both Ways. He is the co-author with Dr. Ed Brown of In Pursuit of C. S. Lewis, and is on the steering committee of the C. S. Lewis Society based at Taylor University.