“A Challenge to C. S. Lewis”
By Peter Milward
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
138 pp.; $29.50
Lewis once wrote to a Roman Catholic critic of his, “One of the most important differences between us is our estimate of the importance of the differences.” He might have said the same thing had he read Peter Milward’s new book, which argues that Lewis’s Irish Protestant sensibility distorted his work as a cultural historian and literary critic. Milward presents his critique in 15 brief, alphabetically ordered essays with broad headings such as Allegory, Historicism, The Reformation, Shakespeare, and Words.
Partly because of the book’s curious organization, its central thesis emerges only gradually and is not fully articulated until the final chapter. There Milward argues that Lewis’s recurring insistence that literary texts be studied primarily as literature–not as philosophy, biography, or history–is a distortion of vision resulting from Lewis’s Irish Protestant background. Milward charges that Lewis’s academic work is tainted throughout by his Reformation allegiances, as shown by his neglecting the importance of Mary in the medieval world-picture and his downplaying the cultural disruptions in England caused by the break with Rome. Milward also claims Lewis’s concern about critics’ reading too much philosophy into literature reveals a distrust of secular culture inherited from Luther and Calvin.
Milward’s critique is thoughtful, but too cursory and impressionistic. Lewis’s adult faith was far removed from what he called the “dry husks of religion” of his Ulster boyhood. And the targets of Lewis’s literary barbs were not fellow Christians of any denomination, but rather secular intellectuals seeking to establish a Religion of Culture. Sometimes Milward simply misreads Lewis, as when he speaks of his “horror of Darwinian evolution,” comparing Lewis to Samuel Wilberforce debating Thomas Huxley. Other times Milward extrapolates Lewis’s whole view on a subject from a sentence or two, apparently unaware of more ample discussions elsewhere in the Lewis canon. In places, what Milward calls disagreement seems more like disappointment, a frustration that Lewis did not share his own opinions, such as an aversion to eating meat or an enthusiasm for Teilhard de Chardin.
Milward met Lewis when he was a student at Oxford in the early 1950s, and the two exchanged letters for some time thereafter. This may account for the uneven tone of the book, from a preface that all but apologizes for finding fault with Lewis to passages on the Reformation where diagnosis gives way to diatribe.
Lewis was famous for his commitment, however imperfect, to be a “mere Christian.” Would that his critics had succeeded so well.
–David C. Downing
“Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress”
By Kathryn Lindskoog
Cornerstone Press
165 pp.; $9.95, paper
“Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy”
By David C. Downing
University of Massachusetts Press
186 pp.; $13.95, paper
It has become increasingly difficult to say anything fresh about C. S. Lewis. Thirty-odd years after his death, there is no shortage of published paraphrases, recollections, handbooks, and indices to Lewis’s theological and personal legacy. Nevertheless, it is relatively rare to encounter works that skillfully elucidate Lewis’s fiction and apologetics in the wider context of his life and times. Thankfully, the two books reviewed here–along with Doris T. Myers’s recent work, “C. S. Lewis in Context”–prove the exception, weaving together incisive literary explications of major Lewis volumes with uncommon biocritical insight.
Kathryn Lindskoog has written a perspicacious and winsome guide to one of Lewis’s most underappreciated works, the quasi-autobiographical “Pilgrim’s Regress.” Lewis’s first postconversion theological work, it tracks, a la John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the protagonist’s journey in search of the Landlord, that is, God, whom he has both longed for and feared in ignorance for most of his life. Lewis decorated his allegorical terrain with clever, sometimes esoteric allusions and references to contemporaries and prevailing philosophies, some of which are likely to stump even his most well-read admirers. Finding the Landlord is a welcome companion volume, helping casual readers and serious scholars alike rediscover and understand more fully this early Lewis work–both in its own milieu and in the light of his more mature, later explorations of joy in “Surprised by Joy” and “Till We Have Faces.” Lindskoog also includes three useful appendices, the most impressive of which is her sprightly annotated bibliography of other Lewis works and selected secondary sources that explore further the biographical and theological contours of “Regress.”
David Downing’s “Planets in Peril” is a singular work that sets a high standard for Lewis scholars wishing to illuminate rather than obscure or trivialize their subject. With an economy and precision of words atypical in scholarly publishing, Downing patiently sets forth compelling expositions of each volume of Lewis’s space trilogy, providing needed perspective on their composition history and formative influences, their critical reception, and their ongoing popularity. Of considerable value is Downing’s sensible treatment of issues raised by recent critics of the trilogy regarding Lewis’s use of violence, his antagonism toward science, and, most significantly, his alleged sexism. In each case, Downing frankly addresses the textual evidence without diminishing Lewis’s achievement or explaining away weaknesses in his line of sight.
–Bruce L. Edwards
“Either/Or: The Gospel or Neopaganism”
Edited by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jensen
Eerdmans
125 pp.; $10, paper
This brief but important volume consists of seven addresses given at a 1993 conference held by the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology in Northfield, Minnesota. Its title, taken from the conference theme, borrows from an early work of Soren Kierkegaard, whose prophetic critique of the European church evermore suggests itself to American Protestants.
The editors–cofounders of the center and coeditors of the thoughtful theological journal “Pro Ecclesia”–are forthright in stating the trajectory of the addresses. Unashamedly partisan, they acknowledge the deadly cultural context in which evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Christians are to contend. At stake in this conflict are the triune identity of God, the exclusiveness of the Christian faith, the unity of the holy apostolic church, the nature of the church’s ministry, and the great commission of our Lord to disciple the nations. Where these marks of historic Christianity have not been outrightly denied, they are increasingly diluted by the plethora of cultural “isms”–the spirits of the age–that inhabit American society. It is against these various betrayals that the addresses are directed.
Undergirding contemporary religious expression is what cultural critic Harold Bloom has described as the gnostic core of American religiosity. The hallmark of this new gnosticism, in the view of the editors, is religious experience that is divorced from dogma–indeed, from truth itself. This obsessive and radically individualized notion of spiritual freedom stands as a blatant contradiction to historic Christian orthodoxy. In response, each of the essays represents an attempt to counter the gnostic or neopagan cultural Zeitgeist in a fresh and penetrating way, examining the foundational premises of competing world-views and theological pluralism while considering the ethical fallout of pluralism’s ascendance. They scrutinize the corrosive tentativeness of false religious tolerance coupled with the church’s therapeutic captivity. And they chart the moral markers necessary for civil society.
Although the religious context being addressed in this volume is mainline Protestantism, there is much that commends itself to Christian churches of all types. Protestant evangelicalism, for example, has shown itself prone toward two tendencies. On the one hand, evangelical pietism that divorces itself from the catholic element of the Christian tradition breaks up under the weight of cultural metamorphosis. On the other hand, a Christian apologetic that, in Carl Braaten’s words, seeks to accommodate and console every new form of cultural apostasy mirrors a church that has lost its identity–and its relevance.
The church, if it is to be faithful, cannot be all things to all people, as James Crumley concludes. Rather, the church is incarnational, a grace-filled gift–it is no less than the embodiment of Christ on earth. For that reason, the church by its very constitution is the instrument whereby that which is finite offers to culture that which is infinite. Only in this way can the church recapture the eschatological power of the gospel–a gospel that our culture so desperately needs.
–J. Daryl Charles
“The Content of America’s Character: Recovering Civic Virtue”
Edited by Don E. Eberly
Madison Books
368 pp.; $24.95
Character is back. After decades of toxic television, family breakdown, and values clarification in our schools, politicians, parents, and even intellectuals have finally begun to recognize that we can no longer take character for granted in America. Judging from the recent establishment of groups like the Character Education Partnership and the success of Bill Bennett’s “Book of Virtues,” a groundswell of interest in character development and moral education is sweeping the country.
“The Content of America’s Character” offers a good overview of the roots of the crisis as well as a helpful sampling of the theoretical and practical issues involved in cultivating character. This volume makes clear–particularly in excellent contributions by Christina Hoff Sommers and James Q. Wilson–that the origins of our current crisis in character may be found, partially, in a turn toward self-expression in the 1960s and 1970s. As higher rates of secondary education encouraged an attitude of skepticism toward authority, and as affluence enabled a hedonistic adolescent culture, Wilson argues, people felt free to “do their own thing.” At about the same time, according to Sommers, schools jettisoned moral education in favor of a “values clarification” approach that reduced moral authority to a matter of personal preference. The result, as Don Eberly notes: the virtues binding people to family, community, and God withered.
What is the remedy? With the exception of one essay, this volume suggests that society as a whole and schools in particular should encourage those values that all Americans agree upon–values such as honesty, commitment, and compassion. The contributors rightly argue that these values will be internalized in schools, homes, and playing fields that combine concern for others with a healthy degree of discipline. (Randolph Feezell, in particular, offers some excellent ruminations on the possible but not necessary connections between sports and character development.) Many contributors also emphasize that storytelling is vital to moral education, spurring the will to embrace the good via the imagination.
A half-century ago, with the Protestant capital of the nation not yet spent, one could issue an appeal for nonsectarian moral education by invoking common virtues of fidelity, responsibility, and respect and by telling fables and fairy tales. But this is an age when, for instance, almost half of all marriages end in divorce. Words like fidelity have lost their power. Only a drama greater than the American dream will draw Americans from their televisions, careers, and suburban security to the hard work of self-denial that character and the common good depend upon. Regrettably, one won’t find much about the drama that began at Pentecost in this book.
–W. Bradford Wilcox
“The Christian Philosopher”
By Cotton Mather
Edited by Winton U. Solberg
University of Illinois Press
488 pp.; $49.95
In 1721, Cotton Mather, the last of the great New England Puritans, published “The Christian Philosopher”–one of the most ambitious works of a fanatically productive lifetime. (Mather probably published more individual books than all of New England’s ministers before him. His output totaled 388 separate titles, and at his death in 1728 he left several gargantuan and many small manuscripts unpublished.) The reissue of this book with the careful editing of Winton Solberg, emeritus professor of history at the University of Illinois, is a boon to scholars, but its appearance is unexpectedly timely as well.
Mather’s purpose in “The Christian Philosopher” was to range widely through the phenomena of nature in order to demonstrate the goodness, power, and wisdom of God. His opinions are firmly fixed in the conventions of the pre-Darwinian era of natural theology, when great exertions were undertaken to demonstrate–against unbelief and as a support for belief–that the natural world pointed to the all-powerful Creator of the Bible. Mather’s effort is of special importance because it was by far the most ambitious work of its kind produced to that time in America; because it illustrates how thoroughly thinking in North America was tied to the deliberations of Europe (much of Mather’s work is extracts and commentary from European sources); and because it laid the groundwork for later American labors in natural theology–especially from Jonathan Edwards, who succeeded in drawing closer links between his basic theological convictions and his attitudes toward nature than did Mather.
The book’s modern relevance is to show both possibilities and limits for this kind of natural theology. What is more obvious now than when Mather wrote is that the data of science do not explain themselves. Mather’s efforts to tease out the mysteries of nature illustrate both reasoning that endures over time and reasoning that has become embarrassingly trivial. For such historical and contemporary insights, readers owe a great debt to Solberg, whose introductions, notes, and explanations wonderfully illuminate the parts of Mather’s text that would otherwise be a puzzlement to modern readers.
–Mark Noll
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 34
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