A C.S. Lewis & Inklings Resource Blog

Literary Time Travel: C. S. Lewis’s Day Job

Bruce — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:45:56 +0000

by Dr. Bruce L. Edwards

C. S. Lewis had a day job. It is strange to think of it that way, for most of us perhaps imagine the prolific Lewis investing countless hours at his desk crafting whimsical children’s fantasies or creating formidable arguments to advance “mere Christianity.” In fact, he was a renowned scholar of medieval and renaissance literature—first at Oxford, then later at Cambridge—for almost 30 years. How illustrious and gifted was he? Enough to shock his profession by inaugurating rather than climaxing his career with a magnum opus entitled The Allegory of Love.

This work skillfully and effortlessly transported modern readers into the medieval worldview, helping them see what chivalry and the courtly tradition of love looked like from the inside out, demolishing the clichés that had built up around this historical period. It exemplified and forecast all of the salutary traits of his literary scholarship (and later apologetics and fiction) that would astonish colleagues and endear him to his students. Here on abundant display, just as in the Chronicles of Narnia or The Problem of Pain or Miracles, are his incisive wit, rhetorical eloquence, perspicaciousness of coverage, and, most importantly, his respect for the past.

Kenneth Tynan, a former pupil of Lewis’s, captured it well:

“The great thing about him as a teacher of literature was that he could take you into the medieval mind and the mind of a classical writer. He could make you Understand that classicism and medievalism were really vivid and alive—that it was not the business of literature to be ‘rel evant to us, but our business to be ‘relevant’ to it. It was not a matter of dead books covered in dust on our shelves. He could make you see the world through the eyes of a medieval poet as no other teacher could do. You felt that you had been inside Chaucer’s mind after talking to him.”

Oddly enough, given this sterling reputation as a learned and enthusiastic expositor of medieval and renaissance literature, C. S. Lewis rejected the term “literary critic.” At its worst, this implied for him a set of tasks that enshrined what his friend Owen Barfield called “chronological snobbery”— a scholarly disdain for the past and our ability to recover or understand rightly the works and worldviews of antiquity. Besides, many in the collegiate world declared, the past— even if it were possible to recover it faithfully—would invariably be wrong about everything.

Lewis was not so defeatist and skeptical about the past, though he knew as well as anyone that it was hard work to wade into history and write confidently and accurately about its texts and personages. The term “literary historian” best fits him, since it calls attention to the primary motivation that characterized Lewis as a reader and lover of literature: to show the past to be alive and influential for the present—and the future. His own scholarly approach, expressed in a letter to a colleague, Kathleen Raine, only two weeks before his death, was to display in every project “plenty of fact, reasoning as brief and clear as English sunshine, and no personal comment at all.”

To read, he declared in his last and most visceral work of literary scholarship, An Experiment in Criticism, is not to “aggrandize the self,” but rather to transcend it, leaving behind one’s prejudices and preconceptions and breaking through the provincialism of one’s own times. To read and to research with this goal forced the scholar to recognize that “in coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are.”

Searching for the “facts as they are,” putting aside the self, and letting the past come forward to challenge the present—these sentiments were not only integral to Lewis’s most enduring scholarly works, they were also of one piece with his Christian worldview. It is this same respect for history that brought him to the enriching concept of “mere Christianity.”

He argued in his essay “On the Reading of Old Books” that in the company of our ancient and medieval brothers and sisters we find unity amidst the divisions in Christendom—that only by going outside of our own age can we discover the truth that “measured against the ages ‘mere Christianity’ turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self- consistent, and inexhaustible.”

From his lively survey English Literature in the Sixteenth Century to his examination of medieval cosmology in The Discarded Image, Lewis’s literary histories show his desire to reach backward into time to guide and to guard the present, thus equipping readers to see the past with fresher and less biased eyes. The scholarship that results from such conviction is the report of an intrepid explorer who has experienced what it is to look through others’ eyes, to think as they thought, and to behave as they behaved within their cultural period.

As he explains in his 1939 meditation on scholarship, “Learning in War-Time,”

“Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past.… A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”

First published in Christian History, Issue 88, 2005.

Why Isn’t There a “Jewish Narnia”? — On the Nature of Fantasy & S/F

Bruce — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:24:55 +0000

Here is the provocative title of a stimulating essay by Dr. Michael Weingrad: “Why There is no Jewish Narnia.”

Professor Weingrad, whose article appears in the Spring, 2010 issue of the Jewish Review, directs the Jewish Studies program at Portland State University. (His book, American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States, will be published this fall by Syracuse University Press.)

In this compelling and erudite essay, Professor Weingrad takes notice of two recent works of imaginative fiction that both illustrate and problematize his dramatic question (The Magicians, Lev Grossman, Viking, 416 pp., $26.95; Ha-Mayim she-bein ha-olamot (trans. The Water Between the Worlds) by Hagar Yanai, Keter, 313 pp., 88 NIS; available only in Hebrew).

In contextualizing these works, he demonstrates his appreciation for the mythical worlds created by Tolkien and Lewis, while at the same time revealing his perceptive grasp of how one’s exposure to world literature and its unique genres affects both different reading cultures and the writers they produce so variously.

For instance, he believes,

“We should begin by acknowledging that the conventional trappings of fantasy, with their feudal atmosphere and rootedness in rural Europe, are not especially welcoming to Jews, who were too often at the wrong end of the medieval sword. Ever since the Crusades, Jews have had good reasons to cast doubt upon the romance of knighthood, and this is an obstacle in a genre that takes medieval chivalry as its imaginative ideal.”

At the same time, he acknowledges the imaginative allure of Narnia and Middle-Earth, both of which he read to his children:

“Tolkien and Lewis loomed large in my childhood and, as I read them to my own children, I wonder what they ought to mean to us as Jews. . . . Indeed, one wonders why, amidst all the initiatives to solve the crisis in Jewish continuity, no one has yet proposed commissioning a Jewish fantasy series that might plumb the theological depths like Lewis or at least thrill Jewish preteens with tales of Potterish derring-do. Granted, popularity is rarely cooked to order and religious allegory sometimes backfires (a mother once wrote Lewis that her nine year old son had guiltily confessed to loving Aslan the lion more than Jesus).

But still, what non-electronic phenomenon has held the attention of more children (and not a few adults) during the last ten years, than Rowling’s tales of Hogwarts? And, as Tom Shippey has shown in Tolkien: Author of the Century, the Lord of the Rings trilogy consistently tops readers’ polls of their most beloved books. Why the apparent aversion to producing such well-received books by the People of the Book?”

I am particularly struck by his generalizations about the “Christian and Jewish imaginations”:

“To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion. If the former is individualistic, magical, and salvationist, the latter is collective, technical, and this-worldly. Judaism’s divine drama is connected with a specific people in a specific place within a specific history. Its halakhic core is not, I think, convincingly represented in fantasy allegory. In its rabbinic elaboration, even the messianic idea is shorn of its mythic and apocalyptic potential. Whereas fantasy grows naturally out of Christian soil, Judaism’s more adamant separation from myth and magic render classic elements of the fantasy genre undeveloped or suspect in the Jewish imaginative tradition.”

His thesis that “the messianic idea is shorn of its mythic and apocalyptic potential” when a particularist drama rather than a universal meta-narrative is at work is quite intriguing. In some ways, I find he is simply annotating Tolkien’s concept of the “eucatastrophe” (my paraphrase: the “tragedy with a happy ending”). If Professor Weingrad is right, then it helps explain somewhat why there continues to be a thirst even in a post-Christian secular culture for supernaturalist heroes and preternatural villains who enact or reenact an ancient tale deeply embedded in our souls. The conclusion seems to be that westerners tend to prefer imaginative works that convey their heroes’ exploits through what Lewis identified as “realism of presentation,” rather than by “realism of content.”

This is certainly the case in Lewis’s science fiction; “scienti-fact” is of little or no concern—as many have pointed out, we do not know how Ransom’s space transport works because he is ultimately on a mythic, not science fiction, journey. The source of oxygen and kind of propulsion that brings him to Malacandra is beside the point. (This trilogy is thus “science-fantasy,” rather than science fiction.) “The romance of knighthood,” as Professor Weingrad calls it, drives Ransom’s quest; science fiction’s specificity to time and place and commitment to scientific verisimilitude blunts the power of romance’s universalist intent.

The rest of Professor Weingrad’s article thus proceeds to document the reasons why then certain kinds of mythopoeia, as exemplified in Tolkien and Lewis, and Ursula LeGuin, may be typically absent from Jewish imaginative fiction, though finding some promise of the genesis of a tradition unfolding in the two authors he is reviewing. So I urge you to read his very compelling contextualization of how these theological issues silhouette these two contemporary writers.

But I suggest, as well, that his persuasive insights into the presence/absence of certain thematic worldview elements in a given work strike me as actually very Lewisian—and help inform the reasons why (to this reader) so much “Christian” science fiction and fantasy writing, post-Inklings, seems so stilted, derivative, lacking Sehnsucht. They have a non-organic, prosthetic aesthetic at work; something borrowed, nothing new.

It is as if a set of well-meaning cooks stumbled upon a supremely satisfying recipe, yet thinking that if they cut up the words naming its ingredients and proportions and threw them in the pot, a rich and delicious soup would emerge. But, Lewis reminds—”it all begins with an image,” not a sermon.

From War of the Worlds to Star Trek and beyond, science fiction is hardly ever predictive, but always extrapolative: outside-in; what would the world be like if certain trends and tendencies continue unabated, and what kind of man or woman would it make of us?

By contrast, fantasy strikes me as neither predictive, nor extrapolative; rather, it is inside-out. What would the world be like if certain ancient truths, eternal virtues, rumors of angels re-emerged and compelled our allegiance; what kind of man or woman would it make of us? What if? and Why not? Two different cascading sets of questions, genres, denouements lurk behind them. Myth and Science answer them differently.

The popular alien invasion story, however, in some ways combines both sets of questions–ancient or superior civilizations and modern Terran sensibilities clash, and the very nature of humanity, its destiny before either a crowded or silent universe, form the ultimate apocalyptic questions. And James Cameron’s Pandora, like Lewis’s Malacandra and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, permits entry points that help us entertain such questions.

The task of evoking an ancient era or reinserting an older mythology into a contemporary conversation is a daunting task. Ask any historian. But inventing an era that never was or “streaming” (to use an anachronism from the internet age) the birth and maturation of a new mythology that mirrors, while not slavishly duplicating, the old—these are far more challenging still.

Few have been as good at this as Professors Tolkien and Lewis, and we are most blessed that in their turns at bat, they sought to provide the “escape” and “recovery” that would enlighten the quotidian world we inhabit. If this is not the best of all possible worlds, is it then the best of all possible ways to the best of all possible worlds?

Fantasy and science fiction were born to grapple with this challenge, albeit outside the precincts of sacred writing. We can thank Professor Weingrad for reminding us of its strong expression in the Inklings tradition.

And we can thank God that He continues to inspire some of us to walk in their steps.

Join me at Concordia: “’Inside Language’: C. S. Lewis and The Bible in the 21st Century”

Bruce — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:44:55 +0000

For any of my Texas readers, let me invite you to join me at Concordia University, Austin, TX, April 15, 2010, 11:30 AM, for their Annual C. S. Lewis lecture.

I will speaking on the topic, “‘Inside Language’: C. S. Lewis and The Bible in the 21st Century,” hosted by Concordia Professor and C. S. Lewis scholar, Dr. Joel Heck.

My talk is a meditation on what it means for Jack to say:

“It is Christ himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.” —C. S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis (8 November 1952), p. 247.

Lewis is one of those “good teachers,” whose commitment to apostolic doctrine and submersion in Christian tradition spared him from the twin excesses of fundamentalism and liberalism in his times, and continue to guard us from stumbling into them in our own. Jack, like Tolkien, “had been ‘inside language,’” understanding the complex relationships among word, image, metaphor, and myth, and how, as creatures made in God’s image, we are enjoined to make meaning: inside and outside of Scripture. The Bible’s purpose in our century and throughout those millennia preceding it is to “bring us to Him.”

One of my goals is to try to elucidate Lewis’s “reception and use” of Scripture, and how he can guide us in the wise reading of its authority and central purpose in our lives in the 21st Century.

My talk is built upon research and reflection I did as one of several collaborators on The C.S. Lewis Bible, to be published this November by Harper One. According to Harper’s marketing materials, “this NRSV Bible provides readings comprised of selections from Lewis’s celebrated spiritual classics, a collection that includes Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, A Grief Observed, The Weight of Glory and The Abolition of Man, as well as letters, poetry, and Lewis’s less-familiar works.

“Each reading, paired alongside relevant passages in the Bible, offers C.S. Lewis as a companion to a reader’s daily meditation of scripture. As people engage in their devotional Bible reading, they will also gain insight from his writings and spiritual journey as they invite Lewis into their spiritual discipline. The notes contain over 600 selections from C.S. Lewis for contemplation and devotional reading.”

It includes an introductory preface by Dr. Jerry Root of Wheaton College, Illinois.

A Way into Till We Have Faces

Bruce — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:43:50 +0000

Tlll We Have Faces––heavily motivated by Lewis’s longtime interest in the cupid/psyche myth, but now influenced by and filtered through his courtship and marriage to Joy Davidman and mature Christian faith, and interwoven with several complementary writing projects of the roughly same period (Surprised by Joy; The Four Loves; An Experiment in Criticism)––represents a nuanced spiritual conversion story vaguely autobiographical but also comprising the singular narrative of every journey from bondage to freedom, from cavelight to sunshine, both painful and telling, demanding and piercing. It is daring, experimental, and unlike anything before or after it in Lewis’s published work.

Lewis intends its world, like Narnia’s, to stand on its own, offering no convenient Wardrobe entry point, demanding of its reader the patient, slow, respectful invasion by which he or she willingly becomes incarnate, submerged in a strange and forbidding new world where all the usual modern and familiar Lewisian signposts are absent; where one must learn page by page, monologue by soliloquy, what is happening, to whom, and what the “culture” of Glome is like, much in the fashion of Lewis’s famous, “Meditation in a Toolshed” essay (found in God in the Dock).

In this manner, the reader experiences firsthand the incremental and gestalt-like appearance of truth, wisdom, and, eventually, revelation. But only by dying to self. “Die before you die,” is the central, most important recognition in the work. Lewis forces the reader to accept this principle even to get to the work’s last pages. Thus, TWHF demands––and rewards––multiple readings. “For him who eyes to see and ears to hear,” that is the motive and the message.

The Four Loves’ treatment of “devouring love” must be seen as a crucial backdrop (not to mention the path to Sehnsucht in Surprised by Joy), noting both the fact of its composition in roughly the same period but also their commonalities of theme. This too is a characteristic of Lewis: to produce “duets,” to have a prose version of fictional text to accompany each other in time (e.g., think of Problem of Pain and Great Divorce with Screwtape; Preface to Paradise Lost and Perelandra; Abolition of Man with That Hideous Strength; Miracles and The Chronicles of Narnia).

Taylor Univ. Announces 7th Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on CSL & Friends

Bruce — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:20:54 +0000

Seventh Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C. S. Lewis & Friends
June 3-6, 2010

Keynote speakers include:

Joseph Pearce: “Unlocking the Christianity of The Lord of the Rings”

Robert Trexler: “The Illustrations of At the Back of the North Wind: From Pre-Raphaelite to the Present”

Peter Schakel: “Hidden Images of Christ in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis”

Devin Brown:”What to Look for in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader”

To submit paper proposals, contact Thom Satterlee, Colloquium Chair, by email at thsatterlee@taylor.edu or by post at Thom Satterlee / Department of English / Taylor University / Upland, IN 46989.

For info on Call for papers, use this link.

For registration information, use this link.

For any other information, contact: Laura Constantine at (765) 998-4690

C. S. Lewis and Time Travel Narrative

Bruce — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:11:00 +0000

I recently posted this series of questions to my Linked-In group, “C. S. Lewis Readers and Scholars Association,” and thought I might share it with earnest readers of this blog for their reflections and insights:

C. S. Lewis and Time Travel Science-Fiction — is there a Christian view of time travel that permits its orthodox “reception and use”?

In view of the latest Star Trek movie’s new time travel thread: I ask this distinguished group, “What are the theological implications of time travel themes? And is there a feasible Biblically-honoring version, or are all time-travel conceptualizations inherently and implicitly anti-omniscient-monotheism, and anti-trinitarian in particular?”

For instance, do all time-travel premises presumptively indulge the human fantasy of self-aggrandizing re-insertions of oneself in alternate histories to avoid divine justice and undermine divine sovereignty with impunity?
Do such narratives necessarily presume time-travelers are thereby equipped with noetic advantages (past, present, or future) that are, in fact, serpentine in origin (i.e., isn’t that what the original FALL is about anyway?—gaining and presuming to use forbidden knowledge for which we are not suited or ready for?)
Is “traveling” in time tantamount to necromancy, i.e., seeking states of being and ill-begotten short-cuts to maturity ["godhood"] that cannot be attained through abstract knowledge alone, hence a gnostic error?
Is the time-delimited nature of human life (“time’s entropic nature”) the fatal flaw in ever conceiving of a bonafide Christian S/F universe that could feature a reputable, theologically-defensible version of time travel? Is the Son of God ever (e.g., his possible theophany in the fiery furnace) depicted as a “time traveller”?
Nothing in CSL’s Space Trilogy itself seems directly to embrace or challenge or upset the extant “space-time continuum” per se as many, if not most secular “time machine” stories do. Ransom may have one foot in eternity, but he is also constrained by time. Aslan goes to and fro in Narnia as he pleases, transverses multiple worlds, but when the Pevensies return from their first adventure, it’s like nothing much has changed in Terra’s years.
So is there a useful difference between “normal time-travel” and inter-dimensional travel, i.e., BETWEEN worlds/dimensions, that only incidentally affects or deflects time within just one of those worlds/dimensions?

Dear readers: I am interested in your reflective musings! – Bruce

C S Lewis College announced

Bruce — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 19:51:21 +0000

The C. S. Lewis Foundation announced today (Dec. 16, 2009) the plans for the founding of C S Lewis College near Amherst, MA. The details from their press release:

Property purchased by Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. from Northfield Mount Hermon School will become the home of a new college to be established by the C.S. Lewis Foundation, the organizations announced Wednesday.

Hobby Lobby, a privately held national retail chain of more than 400 arts and crafts stores, purchased property in Northfield, Mass., from the Northfield Mount Hermon School (NMH).The property will become home of C.S. Lewis College, a college of great books and visual and performing arts.

The announcement was made on the Northfield campus by representatives from the three organizations. NMH, a boarding school with 630 students from around the country and the world, consolidated its program onto its nearby Mount Hermon campus in 2005 and has been seeking a new owner for the Northfield campus. As owner of the Northfield property, Hobby Lobby will invest more than $5 million in operations and capital improvement projects in support of the creation of the College.
For information on the transaction and the new College, visit www.cslewiscollege.org.

“This is a win for the C.S. Lewis Foundation, a win for the Northfield Mount Hermon School and a win for Hobby Lobby,” said Steven Green, president of Hobby Lobby. “Our three organizations all care deeply about education and establishing a worthwhile mission on the historic Northfield campus. We also share a vision of preserving and honoring the legacy of D.L. Moody.”

Green said Hobby Lobby has worked with NMH and the C.S. Lewis Foundation to ensure that alumni can continue to visit the Northfield campus.

The C.S. Lewis Foundation has been considering several locations throughout the United States for the College. Foundation officials plan to open the College in 2012, pending appropriate approvals and accreditations.

“Today, as never before, young people are seeking an education that fully prepares them to understand and engage contemporary culture in a meaningful and creative way,” said Dr. Stan Mattson, founder and president of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. “The scenic and historic Northfield campus is an ideal setting for such a journey. We have already begun our work with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in hopes of opening C.S. Lewis College for students in the fall of 2012.”

The College is projected to enroll 400 students and employ a faculty of 40 and a staff of 45. Within five to seven years of opening, the annual budget of the college is expected to exceed $20 million.

“This news is wonderful for our organizations and also for the Town of Northfield and the local economy,” said Thomas K. Sturtevant, Northfield Mount Hermon head of school. “As a well-established center for academic and community development, NMH is excited to welcome new neighbors whose mission will attract international scholars and active members of the local community. We are also extremely pleased that Hobby Lobby plans to take great care of the campus and its buildings, which have important historic value and are rooted in the hearts of so many of our alumni.”

About Northfield Mount Hermon School: NMH is a coeducational boarding school of 630 students in grades 9–12 and a postgraduate year. The school, founded by Christian evangelist and educator D.L. Moody in 1879, engages the intellect, compassion and talents of its students, empowering them to act with humanity and purpose. At the NMH campus in Mount Hermon, Mass., 90 faculty members teach 200 major and 20 Advanced Placement courses. NMH students live and learn on more than 1,600 acres in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.nmhschool.org.

About Hobby Lobby Stores Inc.: Based in Oklahoma City, Hobby Lobby and its affiliates, including Mardel and Hemispheres, employ more than 18,000 across the nation. Hobby Lobby was founded by David Green in 1972. The company has grown from one 300 square-foot store to more than 430 locations in 35 states. The company’s revenue in 2008 was $1.8 billion. Hobby Lobby carries no long-term debt, is open only 66 hours per week and is closed on Sundays. For more information, visit www.hobbylobby.com.

About the C.S. Lewis Foundation: Inspired by the life and legacy of C.S. Lewis, the C.S. Lewis Foundation is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing the renewal of Christian thought and creative expression throughout the world of learning and the culture at large. Since its founding in 1986, the C.S. Lewis Foundation has pursued its mission through several initiatives including regional conferences and retreats conducted throughout the U.S., the C.S. Lewis Faculty Forum, and the C.S. Lewis Summer Institute, convened triennially in the Cities and Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, England. The Foundation also owns and has restored C.S. Lewis’s beloved Oxford home, “The Kilns,” which it operates as a Study Centre for visiting resident scholars. As a culminating objective of its mission, the Foundation has long envisioned establishing C.S. Lewis College

More details can be found here: http://www.cslewiscollege.org/index.html.

Jack Lewis: This is Your Life–Happy 111th Birthday!

Bruce — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:01:08 +0000

My annual birthday tribute to Jack.

On the Occasion of the 111th Anniversary of C. S. Lewis’s Birth
(November 29, 1898-November 22, 1963)

Dr. Bruce L. Edwards
Professor of English and Africana Studies
Bowling Green State University

Renowned author and critic C. S. “Jack” Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland 111 years ago today.

(NOTE: If you want to read more about his life, please, please, start with his own Surprised by Joy, and read it in tandem with the adventures of faith and doubt that his characters like Edmund, Lucy, and Digory experience in Narnia, and Orual in Till We Have Faces; this is a far better way to get acquainted with Jack than most standard biographical treatments.)

Lewis, who died auspiciously on the day President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, November 22, 1963, will be remembered by some as a distinguished Oxford and Cambridge literary historian, especially notable for inaugurating rather than climaxing his scholarly career with a magnum opus.

This work, The Allegory of Love (1936), established Lewis as a formidable critical talent whose scholarship on medieval and renaissance literature would set the standards and the terms of debate in scholarly circles on both sides of the Atlantic for decades to come. And in numerous publications over the next 25 years, Lewis would prove himself to be both prolific and profound in his understanding of the literary foundations of Western civilization.

But it is not this “scholarly Lewis” whose life and work will be primarily commemorated this weekend, estimable though his academic achievements may be. Rather it is the “other Lewis”-the risk-taking writer of supernaturalist science-fiction and fantasy, the winsome Chronicler of Narnia, and the last century’s most popular and influential Christian apologist—whom the vast majority of his readers adore, and whose religious canon and eventful spiritual biography will be given honor.

Lewis is memorialized first and foremost for his vocation as a orthodox Christian apologist in a time of militant irreligion and preferred New Age mysticism, and this is one of literary history’s great ironies.

And it is a story worth exploring, especially in view of Lewis’s recent notoriety stemming from the 1993 movie Shadowlands, which featured Anthony Hopkins as the venerable scholar in the “true story” of his improbable romance with New York poet and Jewish convert to Christianity, Joy Davidman Gresham, played by Debra Winger.

Many Lewis admirers found director Sir Richard Attenborough’s Lewis an unrecognizable distortion and his relationship with Joy Gresham overly compressed and inexplicably absent of the spiritual fervor which brought them together.

Who was the real C. S. Lewis and why should we remember him?

A bitter and confirmed atheist after his mother’s death when he was nine, a WWI veteran who while in the trenches of France jotted a poem decrying the “ancient hope” of a “just God that cares for earthly pain” as merely a “dream,” a self-described “prig” prepared to enter into postwar Oxford society as one more pretentious don promoting a lifestyle without inhibitions, Lewis is among the more unlikely converts among the literati of his time.

In his superb spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1956), Lewis recounts the circumstances that eventually led to his coming to faith: here are no Damascus Road dramas, but instead a series of ruminations about crucial books and providential friendships which led him out of unbelief onto a principled agnosticism, and from there to a benign theism and, eventually, to orthodox, trinitarian Christianity.

Before his return to faith, Lewis would experiment with various “Northern” mythologies, explore the world of the occult, sample Eastern mysticism, and embrace philosophical idealism-all stopping points on his way to accepting the concept of a compassionate, incarnate deity proclaimed by Christianity.

The steady ascension of his mind and heart–both his reason and imagination–toward the renewal of his pre-adolescent faith is depicted by Lewis as the propitious encounter with two religious authors, and three key individuals, each of whom Lewis cites as a critical influence animating these gradual changes.

The first of these was George MacDonald, the nineteenth-century Scot Presbyterian minister and novelist, whose works, Phantastes and Lillith, Lewis read at age nineteen; these, Lewis declared, had “baptized” his imagination, preparing him for a preternatural world beyond the strictly materialist one he had grown so tired of.

Another author of influence was G. K. Chesterton, popular and London journalist and sprightly Christian apologist in his own right. His work, The Everlasting Man, a portrait of Christ and of his impact on culture, presented Lewis with a “Christian theory of history.”

(Lewis could thus say: “In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. . . . God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”)

Apart from his voluminous reading–and Lewis may reign as the original “multiculturalist” for the inclusive and perspicacious scope of his reading–three persons stand out as particular provocateurs, the first being the “Great Knock,” William Kirkpatrick, Lewis’s tutor before entering Oxford.

“Kirk,” as Lewis called him, taught Lewis a form of rigorous inquiry that sought objective truth through the relentless probing of an opponent’s positions and definitions, a fierce and, in Kirkpatrick’s hands, exaggerated version of Socratic dialogue. (It is clear that the Professor Digory Kirke of the Narnian tales is intended as a tribute to Lewis’s beloved mentor.)

No less important to Lewis was his encounter and subsequent friendship with Owen Barfield, whom he met at Oxford in 1916. A keen dialectician himself, Barfield’s chief contribution to Lewis’s journey of faith, was his demolishing of Lewis’s “chronological snobbery,” the “uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”

Liberated from the notion that the past was invariably wrong and that the present always the barometer of truth, Lewis was able to embrace the possibility that the ancient Christian narrative could have validity even in the twentieth century.

The final “blow” against Lewis’ youthful atheism came in his frequent companionship with devout Catholic, J. R. R. Tolkien, himself later to become extremely popular as the creator of Middle Earth, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

It was Tolkien who led Lewis to the conclusion that while Christianity may itself comprise a mythology of sorts–it is, in fact, “the true myth, myth become fact” and the one in which Lewis could put his full confidence, heart, mind, and soul.

The post-conversion Lewis, circa 1931, began thus a dual career: on the one hand maintaining his scholarly poise and productivity, astonishing colleagues with both his erudition and his prolific publication rate; and, on the other hand, slowly and quietly building a reputation as a modern day Aquinas or Newman, a “translator” and “popularizer” of Christian doctrine for a skeptical and credulous age.

After creating the first of what would become a trilogy of “interplanetary romances,” Out of the Silent Planet (1938), using the genre of science fiction to “steal past watchful dragons” to promulgate his Christian views, Lewis published his first purely apologetical work in 1941, The Problem of Pain.

This book, which tries to reconcile the concept of an all-powerful and good god with the presence of evil and suffering in the universe he created, drew the attention of James Welch, head of Religious Broadcasting for the BBC, who would inadvertently launch Lewis on the road to becoming a religious celebrity.

Welch was so impressed with Lewis’ compelling argumentation and fresh analogies in explaining the essentials of the Christian faith, he persuaded Lewis to commit to a series of radio broadcasts that would commence late in the summer of 1941.

Lewis made his debut at 7:45 PM, Wednesday, August 6, 1941. Later in the evening, air raid sirens will blare all over Britain, preparing citizens for what may be yet another bombing attack from Germany.

That night a most unlikely new radio personality was to be born, speaking on the topic: “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.” Lewis, with no particular experience in broadcasting nor in speaking to such a diverse, indiscriminate audience, was called upon to rally a fearful nation beset by war to courage and to hope.

Lewis was such an immediate sensation–hundreds of letters, pro and con, pouring in from all quarters of the United Kingdom–the BBC invited Lewis to extend his original commitment first to eight, then to twelve, and, finally, to twenty-six broadcasts over two years.

These talks became the foundation for the book eventually published as Mere Christianity (1952), the most widely read (and purchased) work of Christian apologetics of the last fifty years—and now available all over the world “rediscovered” by the Chinese, the Koreans, the Indians, and a whole host of other people groups.

It is a volume that continues to be credited for countless conversions and “re-conversions” by the likes of such disparate people as Nixon “hatchet man,” Charles Colson and former Domino Pizza magnate, Tom Monaghan.

Lewis’s reputation as a witty, articulate proponent of Christianity continued with The Screwtape Letters (1942), an “interception” of a senior devil’s correspondence with a junior devil fighting with “the Enemy,” Christ, over the soul of an unsuspecting believer.

Lewis’s most notable critically and commercially successful set of Christian texts, however, is certainly his seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, which he published in single volumes from 1950-56. These popular children’s fantasies began with the 1950 volume, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a tale centered around Aslan the mighty lion, a Christ-figure who creates and rules the land of Narnia, populated by talking beasts and featuring the improbable adventures of four undaunted British schoolchildren who stumble into Narnia through a clothes closet.

In canvassing his public career, it is thus no exaggeration to say that C. S. Lewis–”Jack” to his friends and family–is the most widely read Christian apologist of the 20th and now the 21st Century, his works devoured by evangelicals, mainstream Protestants, devout Catholics, and Orthodox believers alike. And many non-Christians.

His Chronicles of Narnia sell in the millions annually, the movies creating more and more readers, and all of Lewis’ works, included the more obscure, early literary critical works, remain in print–perhaps the true measure of his continuing impact.

How is one to explain this phenomenon?

For one thing, the dour, retiring Lewis depicted in Shadowlands, inexperienced with women and children, perpetually solemn and given to excessive brooding about suffering and God’s penchant for using pain to “rouse a deaf world” to action, could never have attracted the following the real Lewis has, let alone the attention of as vivacious and intellectually potent a woman as Joy Davidman Gresham.

According to the Attenborough script, Lewis met Joy–and finally his life blossomed. Embracing her exuberance and American brusquery, Lewis comes out of his shell, suppresses his doubts, inherits a family, and enters into an idyllic though short-lived marriage stopped cold by Joy’s bout with and eventual death from bone cancer.

At the end of Shadowlands, Lewis is seen skulking about, grasping for straws of faith, questioning the existence of heaven, and rebuking those who remind him of his former Christian confidence. True to life? Hardly.

As one who has spent the greater part of his professional career studying the life, works, and times of Lewis, and who has been serving as the head advisor to a documentary project on Lewis in production for PBS, I can say, unequivocally, the Lewis of Shadowlands–even conceding generous poetic license–never existed.

The “historical” C. S. Lewis known to friends, students, colleagues, publishers, and correspondents–and as revealed in his own works–was a gregarious, ebullient, even impish sort of fellow who loved talk, conversation, “performing”; he was, in his day, the most popular lecturer in Oxford, one whose presentations were always standing room only.

Jack loved to meet with friends Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield–a group labeled quaintly “the Inklings”– at a favorite local pub to read aloud from their works in progress, downing a Guinness or two or more along the way and entertaining anyone who strayed in their path.

Far from being an austere or humorless conservative, Lewis practiced and affirmed a robust, cheerful, and decidedly intellectual brand of Christianity informed by his own encyclopedic reading of time and culture and filtered through his Irish literary upbringing.

The Lewis who eventually does meet Joy Davidman Gresham in 1952 has behind him two years of intimate correspondence with her, the knowledge that she has great familiarity with his own story and theology, and a profound respect for her own creativity and scholarly prowess.

While there is no question that Joy’s sudden presence in his life in some sense “revives” Jack’s literary career, the personal transformation he experiences is much more subtle than that Shadowlands depicts.

It is one more accurately seen as quiet renewal more than as radical shift in temperament; by all accounts, some of them begrudging, the couple made a formidable duo, soulmates at last together, united by faith, hope, and love.

The movie does well cover the cruelty of their relationship’s brevity: Joy is diagnosed with cancer, rallies, and then succumbs. Jack takes Joy’s death hard–as would any husband. He wrestles openly with God–admirably and candidly told in his own memoir, A Grief Observed–explores his loss, but then returns, chastened yet emboldened, to his faith.

Who was the real Lewis and why does he remain so influential?

Owen Barfield’s description is apt: “Somehow what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.” Lewis’s life was, in other words, thoroughly integrated; a man whose presuppositions about life, faith, and reality, his reason and imagination, were all surrendered to God, this spiritual integration manifested itself in all that he wrote or said.

But there is more to it than even this. As a witness to the remorselessly sectarian violence of his native Belfast, Lewis came to care most about what he called “mere Christianity,” that is, the essentials of the faith, that which has been the center of the creeds of the church since the apostles announced it.

It was the gospel freed of denominational idiosyncrasies, the debris of history, and focused on the essential truth of the identity and mission of Jesus of Nazareth. This “mere Christianity” focused not on what divides but on what unites Christians.

It is this Lewis that millions of Christians–and nonChristians alike–celebrate during his birthday.

By all accounts, Lewis was a generous, self-effacing person who gave tirelessly of his time and money to the needy and an indefatigable correspondent to the spiritually curious or wayward; he was also a man devoted to a fault to his students and friends.

Whatever else Lewis was, he was a man of faith willing to pay the price for his public defense of Christianity; deplored by colleagues jealous of his scholarly prowess, shamed by his open association with “popular literature,” and embarrassed by his public defense of Christianity, Lewis was denied a professorship at Oxford at the peak of his literary scholarship.

As Christopher Derrick, a former pupil and longtime friend of Lewis, has judiciously observed, Lewis was a man willing to “challenge the entrenched priesthood of the intelligentsia.” In short, one finds in Lewis an uncommonly sober and articulate skeptic of the modern era, one forthrightly opposed to the “chronological snobbery” of our times that assumes truth is a function of the calendar and that the latest word must be the truest one.

Were I to describe Lewis in a phrase, it would be this: Lewis is a man who knew he lived his life before Pilate. That is to say, I believe Lewis carried out his daily tasks as teacher, citizen, believer as one who knew he was always before a skeptical audience like the New Testament’s Roman interrogator of Jesus, an audience —in or out of the church—that too often masks its fear of knowing the truth behind indifference, or the pretense of being “on the search.”

Such a writer will seem most original and most courageous in a time of doctrinaire relativism and starry-eyed post-postmodernism. While Lewis caricatured himself as a dinosaur, the “last of the Old Western Men,” many celebrating his heritage today would see him instead as a forerunner of what may still be the ascension of principled men and women of faith in an age that derides the pursuit of truth and mocks the desire to see virtue honored.

Thus, one of the greatest things Lewis has to teach us as we inhabit a new millennium is this credo: To know the truth I need not be part of an elite or intelligentsia, I need only to be human: I am human, made in the image of God, and therefore I may know the truth.

Access to truth, to the real world, as opposed to the shadows, is the birthright of all. To resist this dilemma, we must follow Lewis in refusing to divorce our personal faith from our public behavior. We must live the faith in and out of our cloisters. We must not retreat from the public square.

While the privatization of faith is something that Lewis, perhaps the 20th-century’s century’s greatest convert from unbelief, would find it both antithetical to true faith, one doubts that he would cower or cringe at our new century’s challenges to Biblical orthodoxy. Rather, Lewis would see opportunity –opportunity for Christians to serve, as he put it, as both “specimens,” and as antidotes to chaos, that these times provide.

If we agree that Lewis’ life and career exemplify the virtue of rejecting the split between the sacred and the secular, the public and the private that haunts and inhibits so many of us, we can then find courage in sharing his obedience to St. Paul’s admonition to “be not conformed to this age, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:1, 2). Lewis’s legacy points his listeners and his readers, his students and his friends, to a stance that integrates faith and life, vocation and confession.

Such a legacy would certainly surprise but gratify this great man of God. Selah.

Call for Papers: C. S. Lewis, his Friends and Associates: Questions of Identity

Bruce — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:25:36 +0000

Call for Papers

C. S. Lewis, His Friends and Associates: Questions of Identity

2 & 3 June 2011, Lille Catholic University, France.

Although certain aspects of C. S. Lewis’s work have been studied in great detail, others have been comparatively neglected. In this international conference, the first of its kind to be held in France, we hope to look at Lewis’s life and work, and those of his friends and associates, from many different angles.

Questions of identity are essential to the understanding of any writer. The ways authors perceive themselves and who they are, the communities they belong to by birth or choice, inevitably influence their work. The way they present other people, real or fictional, may also be rooted in their own conception of identity.

We are therefore seeking for papers which examine gender and family roles, national, regional, racial or professional identities, membership of a particular church, movement or club, ideological or political attachments, descriptions of oneself (eg. dinosaur, Old Western Man) either with regard to Lewis and those who knew him or in a study of their writings.

Among Lewis’s friends and associates we would include his brother Warnie, his wife Joy, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, T.S. Eliot, Ruth Pitter and Owen Barfield, but would also consider studies of anyone who worked with Lewis or who influenced him. Comparative studies of Lewis and another writer are also possible.

Please send propositions for papers (200 to 300 words) via email to Suzanne Bray (suzanne.bray@icl-lille.fr) by June 15, 2010. Papers may be given in French or English.

Academic Panel: David Downing (Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania), William Gray (University of Chichester), Suzanne Bray (Lille Catholic University).

Jack the Blogger

Bruce — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 03:51:52 +0000

Our continued affection for and the extended appeal of C. S. Lewis more than 45 years after his  death, so near the end of the first decade of the supposedly post-postmodern  21st Century, suggests to me two things about him and his work that  may seem patently obvious.

Except for the fact that so  few people have remarked upon these two things often enough even to  call them obvious. To do so would be rather gauche. So count  me as one who fearlessly risks overstatement (or understatement for that matter) in commenting on the loyalties of Jack’s expanding readership.

Timelessness Versus Mere Relevance

The first thing to be said  is that Jack’s works—all genres and all manner of subject matter—continue  with great aplomb to exude their astonishing impact upon present day readers, certainly in orders of magnitude much greater than he witnessed  or could have imagined even in his own lifetime. And they sell really  well, too! And this is the case even though  we are frequently told that his numerous shortcomings have finally caught  up to him, thereby signaling the coming downturn in his popularity.

What shortcomings?

Well, we are led to believe  that Jack is fussily anachronistic in themes; his metaphors hopelessly  daunting, and dated when they’re not; his supernaturalist faith a stern impediment for the un- or de-churched; his vocabulary well beyond  the reach of the unschooled; or, paradoxically, embarrassingly concrete  and un-theoretical for the academician.

As it happens, none of these  deficits turn out to register as flaws among Jack’s actual readers,  though they certainly may be true of his cultured despisers and detractors.  (One recalls his statement, “We don’t need the critics to enjoy  Chaucer; we need Chaucer to enjoy the critics.” In Jack’s case, there seems to be no need to identify a reason to enjoy them.) Indeed, Jack’s readers, against  the odds or not, have managed to prove true the heartiest of his readerly  exhortations that primary experience of original authors always trumps  any secondary reading activity (“Always better to read Plato than  about him.”)

No, the winsomeness and clarity of Jack’s prose continues to penetrate the fog of “modern thought,”  and finds its home in the hearts and minds of readers and thinkers looking  for something refreshingly different, that dares to be original simply  by refusing to be. Jack’s anachronism is not  a pose but a principle; since “all things not eternal” are “eternally  out of date,” and the surest way to avoid irrelevance is not to be  avant garde, ahead of the trends, but not to worry about it one way  or another, and to take the calendar and the polls out of the equation  right from the start. The questions that arise when confronting the central point of one of Jack’s essays or novels or  sermons is never, “Is this old?” but always, “Is it so?”

Of  course, the truths he foregrounds are neither old nor new; they’re  timeless. For Jack’s words are predicated upon the notion that while  our through-a glass-darkly understandings may grow or wane within a  particular generation or civilization, human nature—our tendencies  and propensities for good or evil, our predicaments and aspirations—are  well documented, and transcend the particular eras in which we find  ourselves situated. And yet, as Jack knew, humanity  as God’s creation is not only always under scrutiny, but also alway s under attack. (This, of course, is the substance of his prophetic 1943  work, The Abolition of Man.)

But there is even more to this stor y of Jack’s ongoing acclaim and warm reception. And this leads me to the second thing that could be but is not obvious about Jack’s  achievement.

Caution: Blogger at Work

Few Christian writers since  Jack have, in fact, found a way to accomplish exactly what he did, which  is only to marshal all that God gave him in prodigious intellect, sparkling  wit, relentless interrogation of reason, and incisive championing of the power of the imagination—and then make the combination acutely  accessible and poignant for the common man and woman. And children  of all ages.

I mean no irreverence, and  certainly no insult, to say that Lewis wrote with what we might call  today “a blogger’s personality”: which is to say, with an immediacy  and topicality and ultimate audience-centeredness that is at once provocative,  bracing, and profound. In his gift for aphorism, his  ingenuity in serving up multiple entry points into a subject, his conversance  with “viral” trends in society, and the disarming subtlety of his  convicting rhetoric, Jack makes a connection with readers that compels  vibrant, sober attention and, more often than not, joyful allegiance. He can  be dismissed (as B. F. Skinner and Richard Dawkins, among others, have  tried), but he cannot be ignored.

There is even a kind of Twitter-like  attention to brevity and concision one must denote: Jack’s asides  are as memorable as most writers’ main texts. He writes for the ear.  He creates images that evoke masterfully what may already have been  stirring in one’s heart, or has been hitherto ungathered in the mind.  He expresses himself in that unique voice that, once known, is always  unmistakably his. He takes challenging concepts (epoch-making and era-breaking)  and renders them sensible, approachable, meaningful for audiences across  the globe.

Of course, by no means am I  suggesting that Lewis would endorse the often exhibitionist technologies  of communication suggested by MySpace, Facebook, or WordPress. No writer  of his time, perhaps, was less interested in the kind of self-aggrandizing  publicity and celebrityhood associated with “normal” self-marketing  and ultra-promotion characteristic of our age.

The important thing for him  to convey was not that certain ideas were “his” in some ego-driven  possessive campaign for attention, but that the ideas he articulated  and promoted belonged to everyone for all time, and were in danger of  being drowned out “by the microphone of his age.” His defense of the public square  included exorcism of the “chronological snobbery” that prevente d earnest seekers from hearing all important News from Home.

Jack believed in what G. K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead,” the ability of  wise men and women of all periods to speak to the present. He thus published—as  prolific a scholar and imaginative writer as he was in the usual outlets—an  amazing number of occasional pieces, “op-eds” as it were, to connect  with readers of all stations and platforms. (Many of these are helpfully  collected by Walter Hooper in volumes like God in the Dock and  Christian Reflections.) These pieces appeared with regularity in the 1940s and 1950s in dozens of newsstand journals and  newspapers and church-sponsored publication on an impressive variety  of popular topics.

All were grounded in the common sense tradition:  Jack speaking plainly and forthrightly out of the deep well of his understanding  of the West’s traditions and Christianity’s core. Let the Oxbridge  elite pontificate upon matters of extreme contemporaneity; Jack, thank  you very much, prefers identifying the eternal in the temporal, and  noticing the everlasting in the mere mortal.

It is the rare writer, and  certainly the rare Christian writer, who is able to capture in sprightly  prose for a diverse, multigenerational and capacious audience the burning  essentials of an issue or topic, inviting the reader along for a willing  conversational journey that will expose them to greater historical vistas  and a vocabulary for expressing the heart’s deepest longings.

And so, in addition to poetry,  myth, fantasy, literary history, memoir, sermon, and essay, we may now  say, with no ironic winking or nudging, that Jack managed to master  one more genre, the art of the blog––long before anyone knew what one  was.

This entry will be published this week at HarperCollins’ C. S. Lewis site: http://booksbycslewis.blogspot.com/