Further Up and Further In'

Christianity, for C. S. Lewis, encompassed all of life; no part of his writing lacks its solid base. This holds true for his fiction as well as for his apologetic work and literary criticism. Some of his most striking images about Christianity are seen in his fiction. No evangelical who wants to grasp the exciting strength, beauty, and blessing of Lewis’s apprehension of Christianity, which has opened the doors of faith for so many, should ignore the Narnia chronicles, the space trilogy, or Till We Have Faces, Lewis’s one novel. Although he never began a story or poem with a didactic purpose in mind (see Of Other Worlds for several essays about his aesthetic process—his stories began with a mental image asking for form), none of his fiction is devoid of Christian theology. This telling commitment to Christianity has disturbed many secular—and even not-so-secular—critics, particularly in reference to Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Lewis deals specifically with man’s longing for God, the sin-created gulf separating God and man, and the problem of evil, which often causes man to reject the idea of God’s existence (and which was the basis for Lewis’s atheism before his conversion). But he never forgets the believer’s hope of Heaven.

Lewis’s imagination provided the tool with which he captured the meaning behind the truth. He wrote in the essay “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare” (Selected Literary Essays), “For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.” He uses both organs in all his writing; in his apologetics, reason is the primary tool, while in his fiction imagination comes first, though his writing style never fails to satisfy reason. Through his use of rhythm, geographic detail, vowel music, and onomatopoeia we become partakers of Lewis’s sehnsucht, the term he used to describe the desire for God and Heaven that he thought was part of every person. Such a longing led Lewis to search for Christ. And he puts that longing into his fiction to lead others to begin the search. Sehnsucht, for Lewis, can only be filled by God, and is similar to the desire described by Blaise Pascal as a cross-shaped hole in the heart of man.

In Till We Have Faces, a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, the poignant longing for the Creator God is the essential theme. The ugly queen Orual of Glome is jealous of Psyche, who can see the gods because she believes them. Orual reads to the gods her indictment of cruelty and evil against them. In doing so she finds a truth deeper than desired, yet paradoxically the very thing she has longed for:

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

Lewis in this short passage deals not only with the longing for God but also with the gulf separating man from God, and with the impotence of man to stand before God face to face at the Last Judgment. As Luther said, God is both hidden and revealed. Orual knew of the gods, knew they did not come to man openly, and through her complaint suddenly realized the reason. Reading Till We Have Faces, the Christian sees with seering clarity how small and weak and sinful we are next to the Creator. We have no faces, no permanent identity as He does.

At the end of the novel Lewis explains to his non-Christian readers why frustration and anxiety come to those who refuse the solution of salvation, as Orual throughout her life refused it. “I ended my first book,” she says, “with the words no answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.” Before the face of God Orual has no questions (and notice that she now speaks of “Lord” and “you,” and not “they”); finite human words and human reason cannot endure when faced with the infinite, omniscient Creator. Orual now understands, as the reader must if he is not to misunderstand the novel, that the approach to the Lord is through himself and not through human reason.

By using his imagination, then, Lewis is able to express in a short passage what it takes him pages to discuss in an apologetic work. He puts flesh and blood on the skeleton of abstract reasoning so that his readers can feel and hear and taste what Christianity means. Lewis’s comment on the business of a creative artist is fulfilled in his Christian artistry:

By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secret evoking powerful association, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim “how mysterious!” or “loathsome” or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you’ll have no need to tell me how I should react to the flavour (Studies in Words).

The seven Narnia tales written for children and adults explore, among other things, the joy-filled life Christ promises (without ignoring the suffering we must endure) and the glory of Heaven for those who persevere. The reader, like the Pevensie children, enters Narnia through imagination (one critic calls Narnia a metaphor for imagination). In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the most imaginative child stumbles into Narnia first; the least imaginative not only disbelieves but turns traitor. Once all four children are in Narnia and hear the name “Aslan” (though they don’t yet know who He is), Lucy, Peter, and Susan long to meet Him, while traitor Edmund is filled with loathing. In the final volume, The Last Battle, we learn that Susan has become too “grown up” for Narnia and so fails to find salvation. Lewis in repeating the phrase “further in” emphasizes the need of total commitment to Christianity through, in this case, the imagination. The significance of the phrase, however, is not fully realized until The Last Battle.

As old Narnia dies, those who find salvation through faith in Christ enter the Narnia within Narnia, the real land of which Narnia was only a shadow, to become the real people the lion Aslan, son of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea, intended them to become. The cry of “further up and further in” reverberates with the joy of fresh mornings and new births and is reminiscent of the biblical promise that faithful servants will enter into their joy. Lewis believed Heaven to be so deep and broad that only by going further up and further in could we reach God’s high throne (see The Great Divorce, for example). The real Narnia seems larger than the old one. A faun explains that “the further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside.” Once we get into the reality of Heaven we discover how small our apprehension of it was.

Lewis’s romantic imagination sparkled at the thought and hope of Heaven; he lived and wrote with it always in mind. What we know on earth, what we imagine Heaven to mean, is so much smaller than its reality. Lewis gives readers, therefore, a brief glimpse of both the smallness and the God-given greatness of the organ of imagination. It whets our senses and our intellects for fulfillment possible only in the beauty and glory of our Saviour and Lord. For Lewis, imagination provided a way to apprehend, if only in a stab of joy that pierced like pain, the abundant life God promises. And imagination brought to him what he brings to others through his fiction: comprehension of the totality and eternity of a life lived through, in, and for Christ. Lewis knew that the end of this earthly life for Christians is merely the beginning—but that is expressed best at the end of The Last Battle:

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 only 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 for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Betwixt And Between

Both “the frailty of man” and the “perpetual mercy of God” (from the collect for the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, Book of Common Prayer) were very evident at the sixty-fourth General Convention of the Episcopal Church. Deputies and bishops with a Janus-like approach faced two directions simultaneously—liberal and conservative. The deputies in a conservative move rejected the ordination of women but approved new marriage canons that seem to lessen the sacredness of marriage. The bishops in record time elected conservative John M. Allin to the office of presiding bishop but approved for trial use a new rite that declares baptism to be “full initiation” into the church and removes the necessity for confirmation, traditionally one of the church’s sacraments.

Theological ambivalance and in some cases ignorance created confusion at the meeting in Louisville. Appeals to emotion rather than biblical principles dominated the discussions on women and divorce. Disagreement over the theological importance and meaning of confirmation (and therefore, just who is and who is not an Episcopalian—and ultimately just who is and who is not a Christian) caused many hours of debate in the House of Bishops (see News, page 65). Here clearly is a church that needs to choose a theology before it can make final decisions on such issues. In the case of women’s ordination, at least—and we hope this is an indication of renewed interest in theology—the new presiding bishop plans to appoint a committee to study the theology of the priesthood, something the retiring presiding bishop, John E. Hines, thought unnecessary. We hope that such interest will find the church reaffirming a strong orthodox position.

The theological instability now being experienced by the Episcopal Church may be due at least in part to a strong, healthy, and growing group of vocal evangelicals (see News, page 64). And Bishop Allin seems to be one of those contributing to a break with the liberal past. His election and the attitudes expressed by many bishops and deputies suggest that the church may be making a turn toward greater biblical fidelity. We pray in the words of the collect for the sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, “O Lord, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

The Message To The President

President Nixon’s troubles need to be understood in the context of the country’s position as a democracy, not a monarchy. In Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe the Lord Chancellor says: “The Law is the true embodiment of everything that is excellent … and I, my Lords, embody the law.” In a democracy with three co-equal branches of government, things are not quite so obvious. There is always some tension about who has the final word. The framers of the American constitution established a system of checks and balances, and the voting public becomes the final arbiter. Late last month the public spoke and the President got the message.

Archibald Cox, Elliott Richardson, and William Ruckleshaus lost their jobs because, in essence, they refused to obey a presidential decision. They are to be commended for the way they responded to the challenge of conscience. The President exercised a legal right when he fired Cox and accepted the resignations of the other two. But the exercise of his legal right proved to be a political disaster. The response of the American people was thunderous, predominantly against the President. Soon he announced an abrupt reversal: the White House tapes would be made available to Judge Sirica for review.

Until certain ethical questions have been resolved to the satisfaction of the American people, the President can hardly expect to regain their confidence. One question has to do with the dismissal of Cox, the special prosecutor. Was he fired simply because he refused to obey a presidential directive, or was it because he was getting close to the heart of the Watergate tragedy? Was he readying or coming close to discovering some evidence that would damage the President irreparably?

A second ethical problem concerns access to White House papers. Denial of this would keep the lid on a seething situation. A full investigation cannot be pressed if the needed data are not available to the investigators.

The President has been maneuvered into a corner, and mostly by his own decisions, so that he can no longer plead his case on the basis of confidentiality, separation of powers, and the like. The American people are unwilling to settle the matter on such a basis. They are saying loudly that their confidence in the President has been so shaken that nothing less than full disclosure will satisfy them. The President himself has charged the acting attorney general to “continue with full vigor the investigations and prosecutions that had been entrusted to the Watergate Special Prosecution Force.” Anything less than this will be regarded as a coverup and considered intolerable. The President has been deeply wounded by the actions of many of his own personally selected assistants, most recently by the forced resignation of his vice-president. He is in no bargaining position.

Although after the firing of Cox the clamor for impeachment rang loud, the evidence seemed insufficient. It remained to be demonstrated that the President was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” If he is innocent, full disclosure can do him no harm.

Finally, we are pleased to observe that despite the unhappy circumstances of Robert H. Bork’s elevation to the acting attorney generalship, it is good for the sake of diversity to see him at the cabinet level. When President Nixon said in his 1968 campaign that what this country needed was a new attorney general, who would have thought he would give us one with a beard.

The small group of travelers gathered at Traitor’s Halt. A mixed company—Sir Ambrose Touch, Fat Lady Feel, Professor Howling, Doctor Dort, dear Mrs. Pollybore, and a few others. As they started their journey, “Will Walton the watercress man, … pointed northward. Repellent there/A storm was brewing, but we started out/In carpet-slippers by candlelight/Through Wastewood in the wane of the year,/Past Torture Tower and Twisting Ovens.…” They were on a pilgrimage to the Good Place. “We talked very little;/Thunder thudded; on the thirteenth day/Our diseased guide deserted with all/The milk chocolate.” As their fears increased, they came to a place of gibbets, where a jawbone putted—the Place of a Skull. There was no way to the Good Place except through Calvary. This would never do. So: “My hands in my pockets,/Whistling ruefully I wandered back/By Maiden Moor and Mockbeggar Lane/To Nettlenaze where nightingales sang/Of my own evil.” The words of Quant, in W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, next to Eliot’s The Waste Land, the most important long English poem in the twentieth century.

Jester and thunderer, maker of lace and beater of anvils, cynic and lover, mocker and prophet, weaver of garlands for the undeserving and of nooses for the unwary—what a fellow of jest this was, how excellent in fancy! His mind was carved with a million facets. Even when it was still, myriad beams darted from it; when it moved, the intricacy was dazzling. But beneath the sound and color was a rigorous discipline, an intended purpose, a calculating intelligence that often concealed its passion with jest, and its humor with solemnity. Part of the game was to keep his distance from his poems, never simply to unveil his heart, always to fascinate with complexity, subtlety, irony, and functional ambiguity. His verse often gives the pleasure of a conundrum or a word game, and, as has often been noted, an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary was a minimum item of equipment for his reader.

This intellectualism, impersonalism, and objectivism was in part the product of Auden’s basic temperament: he was (like Eliot) a classicist. Not for him the barbaric yawp of personal emotion, but the intricately contrived utterance of universals, aimed not at the general reading public but at a “fit audience, though few.”

For the right reader, how exquisite an exercise in compression are these lines that say more about Platonic idealism than many books: “This lunar beauty/Has no history/Is complete and early;/If beauty later/Bear and feature/It had a lover/And is another.” And how unappealing to the devotees of Bob Dylan—or Dylan Thomas, for that matter.

At sixteen, Auden, both of whose grandfathers were Anglican clergymen, decided with the ineffable confidence of adolescence that there was nothing valid in the Christian faith. “I decided it was all nonsense,” he recently told an interviewer. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he and a few likeminded fellow students discovered Marx and Freud. They also discovered the Spanish Civil War—the Viet Nam of the thirties—and published a book, Poems About the Spanish Civil War, which helped fasten the name “Pink Decade” on their youthful period. From the first their intellectual distance and disdain was noted. “The well-brought up young men discovered that people work in factories and mines,” wrote Allen Tate in 1937. “They wrote poems calling them Comrades from a distance,” he said, and Roy Campbell gave the group the derisive name “Mac-spaunday,” for MacNiece, Spender, Auden, and Day-Lewis. But, as Auden said recently, “One read Marx and one read Freud, but that didn’t make one a Marxist or a Freudian.”

Sometime in the late thirties Auden rediscovered his Christian faith, and thereafter partook regularly of the High Church Anglican sacraments. (He did not, however, give up his homosexual practices.) His pastor in New York has recently said that Auden showed up regularly for 8 A.M. mass—sometimes wearing carpet slippers. But if any hoped that the poet of complexity, involution, irony, and jest would turn into a preacher, they were disappointed.

On the other hand, those who delight in poetry for its own sake (and Auden always insisted that poetry is fun) and enjoy seeing the most elaborate artistic verbal sophistication put to the service of Christian experience take as much pleasure from his later poetry as did the medieval monks in tracing the intricacies of the capital letters in a sacred manuscript. He knew that piety is not foreign to gaiety or clever articulateness. The master juggler of villanelles, sestinas, sonnets, and oratories subdued his flamboyance somewhat in his later years, but the brilliance continued to delight until the moment he laid down his pen.

One cannot quote fairly from his poems, for they are all of a piece, and fragments chipped from them give little sense of their true shape; but a few lines from “After Christmas” give something of the flavor, at least of his simpler verse:

To those who have seen

The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.

The innocent children who whispered so excitedly

Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be

Grew up when it opened.…

The happy morning is over,

The night of agony still to come; the time is noon;

When the Spirit must practise his scales of rejoicing

Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure

A silence that is neither for nor against her faith

That God’s Will will be done, that, in spite of her prayers,

God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

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