C. S. Lewis Ten Years Later

A decade has passed since the death of C. S. Lewis, one of the great literary scholars of our century and its ablest apologist for the Christian faith. In an age when fashions change overnight, and when (as Stephen Spender has said) a poet can be “modern” for no longer than a decade, we need to remember something Lewis says in the first page of what is, to my mind, his greatest scholarly book, The Allegory of Love: “Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through a station: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.” Heritage, continuity, hierarchy—these are unifying themes in all Lewis’s writing as literary critic or philosopher (he always disavowed the role of theologian).

Some sixteen years before Lewis published the words quoted, T. S. Eliot had written:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.… What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.… Some one has said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know [“Tradition and Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot: Selected Essays, Harcourt, 1932, p. 4].

C. S. Lewis has become that which we know. Few literary scholars, even the best, do more than add facts to our body of knowledge. Lewis has altered our sensibility, the way we think about things; he has given us words and phrases by which we grasp vital ideas; he has given us a pattern of feeling within which we better comprehend artistic and Christian truths. He is one of those rare writers who leave us different from what we were before we read him. His extraordinary learning, integrity, taste, artistry, and sensibility combine, one instinctively feels, to authenticate his vision. Familiar topics—the Middle Ages, Milton, courtly love, humanism, platonism, the Fall, Hell, Heaven—are suddenly revitalized and (above all) inter-related, touched, and made moving by his intense but always disciplined feeling.

So far I have referred chiefly to his professional career as a scholar and teacher of literature. By most who will read these words, however, he is best loved as a writer on Christian themes, or as the creator of brilliantly imaginative novels of another world. In all three areas his reputation has since his death suffered no decline (as often happens when a reputation is importantly related to a personality). A quick glance at a standard annual bibliography, that of the Publications of the Modern Language Association, shows that the number of scholarly articles and books about him and his work has steadily increased over the years—two in 1965, six in 1966, seven in 1967, eleven in 1968, eight in 1969, twenty in 1970, and twenty-one in 1971. The esteem in which he is increasingly held by the secular professional world is important, for he was the unremitting defender in that world of an unpopular and to some an anti-intellectual position, that of conservative Christian faith.

One of Lewis’s major contributions as a literary historian and scholar was to show that the great watershed in Western sensibility came not with the Renaissance, as is still often popularly preached, but with the Romantic movement. To the non-specialist, this may sound undramatic; but the intellectual and aesthetic implications are immense, and not only regarding the way literary history is viewed. In showing that the basic alteration in man’s view of himself in modern history (that is, since A.D. 500) is the eighteenth-century shift from a God-centered universe of order, hierarchy, purpose, and “dance and harmony” to a man-centered (that is, a self-centered) cosmology of the psyche, Lewis has provided a frame within which we can better understand the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and more fully accept the validity of Scripture’s warning that to worship the creature rather than the Creator is to bring disarray to all aspects of human existence.

Lewis also illuminates one’s understanding of “modern literature,” notably the nature of the romantic hero as rebel. He no more denies or diminishes the spine-tingling excitement of a Byron’s Manfred or a Joyce’s Dedalus than he denies the beauty and grandeur of Satan in Paradise Lost. But he shows that underlying the deification of man or angel is unreason, or nonsense, and inextricable involvement in the “Satanic predicament,” where “original” becomes merely “opposite,” and “creativity” “imitation.” He demonstrates that while pity and terror are properly generated by the cosmic rebel, there is, too, perfect propriety in laughter at his pretensions of grandeur, an element of humor that causes him “that sitteth in the heaven to laugh.” He who puffs himself up as a god must accept laughter as his meed, for to the right-minded such ineffable hubris is funny. Lewis has pinpointed the absurdity in the essay “God in the Dock”: “The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock.”

Although the scope of his learning and the variety of his scholarly competence appear in almost every page he ever wrote, they are perhaps most impressively concentrated and permanently on display in two enduring works: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century and The Allegory of Love, the latter dealing in masterly fashion with that intricate, richly symbolic, and closely woven tapestry of medieval literary art, where only the most erudite dare speak to other scholars. Central to Lewis’s success in the tough, often brutally competitive, secular world of literary scholarship was his ability to fight on equal intellectual terms with anyone. He scorned the tendency of some to substitute Christian piety for intellectual rigor, and to claim immunity from standards of art and higher learning on the grounds of their orthodoxy. In an address to a group at Oxford on the topic “Christianity and Literature,” he began by questioning whether such a subject permitted any discussion:

I knew, of course, that Christian story and sentiment were among the things on which literature could be written, and, conversely, that literature was one of the ways in which Christian sentiment could be expressed and Christian story told; but there seemed nothing more to be said of Christianity in this connection than of any of the hundred and one things that men make books about.… Of Christian Literature, then, in the sense of “work aiming at literary value and written by Christians for Christians,” you see that I have really nothing to say and believe that nothing can be said [Christian Reflections, Eerdmans, 1967, p. 1].

His (Pauline) principle was quite clear: The Christian is to do all to the glory of God, and his own duty and calling were within the realm of scholarship, as a professor of literature. Before he was converted, he says, he had assumed that becoming a Christian necessarily meant that one must change his work. He learned otherwise, and did the job in which he found himself.

In philosophy (again remembering his diffidence about claiming the role of theologian), a field in which he was trained and in which he began his academic career, Lewis’s contributions are equally varied, and no two Lewis admirers will agree on a selection. To my mind, however, a major, if not the chief, service he performed was to demonstrate that the Christian faith need fear no intellectual assault. This was coupled with demonstrations of the futility of science when applied outside its proper, restricted area; and of the rational deficiencies of materialism, naturalism, and romantic sentimentalism as sufficient means by which to understand ourselves and the cosmos. (An excellent example is in his paper “The Funeral of the Great Myth,” in Christian Reflections.) Trained in the debating arenas of Oxford and Cambridge, where, in cuts and parries with the finest verbal swordsmen of the world, the dueler whose blade slips on the form of a Greek verb or on an infelicitous use of a Latin quotation is quickly bled, Lewis was a feared and respected warrior. No one fights regularly and often in those fields unwounded, and Lewis bore his share of scars. But in combat such as this, he was the kind of champion that comes along only once in a century. No zeal for the faith, no passion of love for God, no personal purity of conduct, however such things may be the cause of heavenly rewards, could (humanly speaking) break through the ring of steel that Lewis, usually alone, faced. He had to meet his antagonists on their own terms. His erudition, his learning, his reputation had to match or exceed theirs, and nothing less than innate intellectual brilliance and a lifetime of disciplined study could have prepared him. True it is, of course, that the Holy Spirit may, if he wills, confound the counsels of the worldly wise by the words of the simple; but it must have rejoiced the hearts of the angels to see one of the King’s knights bring to the dust the proud crests of some of his Satanic Majesty’s finest chivalry—on his own, as it were. Lewis once said:

If all the world were Christian it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now—not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground—would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past.… The learned life then is, for some, a duty [“Learning in War-Time,” The Weight of Glory, Macmillan, 1949, p. 50].

More generally appreciated by the mass of his readers than his mastery of the art of philosophical discourse and debate is his writing on the Christian experience—how it feels, or can feel, to be a Christian. He always tested his thought on his pulses, and a quality of deep feeling lurks behind almost every dispassionate, impeccable sentence. He never forgets that the Christian life is one of powerful emotion (as the Bible makes abundantly clear), and one does not readily think of anyone (save possibly Jeremy Taylor) who can so quicken the heartbeat and make taut the normally flaccid nerves by suggesting what is now a reality, and what is in store, for the Christian. Here it is not only the power and variety of his own emotions, but also the astonishing creativity of his imagination that infuses his words.

This brings us to the last of the basic kinds of his work that require brief retrospective notice, his novels. In our age of “science fiction,” major writers of fantastic stories about other worlds display two basic techniques. The one makes the most of technological elaboration; the other strives to imagine and actualize new modes of basic sensibility. Lewis is of the second sort, and has no equal in his ability to “dislocate” us (a term someone used in speaking of Walter De La Mare) from reality, as we know it, and to convince our minds and senses of another kind of existence, one distinguished from our own not merely by diminished or exaggerated dimensions but by newly created ones. This is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do.

No rehearsal of Lewis’s accomplishments—and surely not so cursory a one as this—can cast a net over the personality that, as a soul animates a body, gives distinctive vitality to his words. He is one of a rather small company of great writers (Thomas Browne, for example, and Dr. Johnson are among them) whose personalities shine through their lines and become an important part of the reader’s experience. On the surface, in Lewis’s case, this appears strange, for there is no apparent effort to reveal himself—rather the contrary. No quirkiness, no conscious cleverness of imagery, no stylistic pirouettes are permitted to disturb the almost severe exactitude and rational rigor of his style. One senses, instead, a distinctive element of austerity, remoteness, and privacy; but one is moved by the consciousness of powerful emotion under strict control, of deep passion carefully harnessed, and of a dignity that does not suppress feeling so much as dress it in formal robes fit for public view. (One is reminded of the powerful austerity with which Rachmaninoff played his own music in concert.) Whether his company communicated this sense to those who knew him I am not fortunate enough to know; and no matter, for I speak only of the effect of his writing, in which this fact is clear: one cannot read him without intense participation, mind and emotions. To be able thus to fuse in harmonious combination intellectual abstraction and emotional excitement is a rare and precious gift; it is demonstrative, in a fragmented age, of the compatibility of all the parts of our beings, hinting at the joy of physical, psychic, and spiritual unity that will be the heritage of the redeemed.

On the purely aesthetic level, Lewis was quite aware, and wrote, of the mingling of austerity (in the older Latin sense) and intense feeling. He sees it in Milton’s depiction of Adam and Eve (the “Virgin majestie” of Eve), refuting fatuous imaginings of our first parents as simple primitives. He finds it frequently in Shakespeare, reminding us that for Bassanio’s sake Portia wishes herself trebled “twenty times herself, a thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich,” and describes herself, as things are, “the full … sum of nothing,” “an unlesson’d girl.” “It is prettily said,” Lewis adds, “and sincerely said. But I should feel sorry for the common man, such as myself, who was led by this speech into the egregious mistake of walking into Belmont and behaving as though Portia were an unlessoned girl. A man’s forehead reddens to think of it” (A Preface to Paradise Lost). Lewis’s writing gives us something of this same sense—of a man gracious, urbane, and approachable, but always possessed of a sense of hierarchy, decorum, and propriety, making it unthinkable to rush upon him with a hearty slap on the back and the use of his first name—a gruesome experience that the English defer as long as possible by listing only the initials of their given names. I know some who find him “cold,” “arrogant,” and “disdainful”; but such assessments emanate from the kind of sensibility that cannot distinguish between the understated control of emotion in, say, a lyric from the Greek Anthology, and the barbaric yawps of rock music bands screaming of their own emptiness. They have no sense of “the pattern deep hidden in the dance, hidden so deep that shallow spectators cannot see it, [which] alone gives beauty to the wild, free gestures that fill it.… The heavenly frolic arises from an orchestra which is in tune; the rules of courtesy make perfect ease and freedom between those who obey them” (A Preface to Paradise Lost).

As to the more technical aspects of his style, it is apparent that among its features are a precision and felicity of phrase, an intricate but utterly clear syntax, and a rhythmic grace that are the products of both great labor and high literary gifts. He has labored hard to make the anguish of polishing and perfecting his style invisible to the reader. He does not, as Byron was said to do, write “with the careless ease of a noble lord.” Or, to shift to the words of Sheridan, he remembers that one may write with ease to show his breeding, “but easy writing’s vile hard reading.”

In each of at least three major areas, Lewis’s reputation is independently secure: as a literary critic and historian; as a philosopher (and psychologist, really); and as a writer of fiction. In addition, his books for children would assure him of remembrance, were they not overshadowed by the greatness of his other work. One century cannot hope to see again such an assemblage of gifts.

But I keep groping for a better statement of what he really did, knowing that nothing I have said gets to the heart of it. So let him do it, even if tangentially and unintentionally: “In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now,” he says in “The Weight of Glory,” “I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.…”

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