Dec. 1-4, 2005
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Lewis, don’t talk damned nonsense
Why his style almost saved the books his faith almost wrecked
By Jonathan York
Daily Texan Staff
At Shiloh Road Church of Christ in Tyler, Texas, the men who led singing flapped their big arms to indicate the tempo, but to my pre-kindergarten eyes, they were pretending to fly. The low ceiling above the baptistery shone with reflected light during services, and I was sure that was the power of God glimmering up there.
I remember other things: praying, to my parents’ horror, “Thank you for our sins” before knowing what the noun meant to them, thinking the foreheads of the baldish elders were made of plastic, reasoning that, since God was everywhere, he must also inhabit the space between my pillowcase and pillow.
My editor thinks that growing up under those delusions qualifies me to evaluate C.S. Lewis. Having never been a Christian, he says, he can’t communicate Lewis’s significance.
I disagree. Because I thought for too long that my debt to Lewis had something to do with God. When I could have discovered Woolf or Joyce or Faulkner or even Salinger, it was he I plunged into, reading “Mere Christianity” (1952) to form defenses for my own beliefs, using “The Screwtape Letters” (1942) and “Surprised by Joy” (1955) to keep my mind from the Devil’s grip as I entered Worldly Public High School, opening “The Chronicles of Narnia” (1950-56) and “The Pilgrim’s Regress” (1933) and, finally, “Till We Have Faces” (1956) for reassurance that my eternal home was worth the wait.
For such practical reasons, the fundamentalists adore Lewis. Now a film adaptation of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” is opening in these United “no-gay-marriage” States. And if you doubt that his literary merit gets drowned in his conservative religious appeal, observe where Barnes & Noble shelves his fiction. (It’s not under Fiction.)
But one should adore Lewis for his style, not his faith. The prose is plain, lucid, glowing. While Woolf called a 1925 book of her essays “The Common Reader,” Lewis writes for that reader, leaving no suspicion that the words are simplified to condescension and losing neither rhythm nor poetry nor wit. He was the rare writer of fantasy who believed in magic and wonder but kept the plot tidy. Most of his books are good rather than excellent; the skill at work in them is excellent.
The chief fault in his work is the same that led me to read him excessively as a fundamentalist teenager — he takes the moral impulse too far. In an introduction to his collection of excerpts from fantasy writer George MacDonald, Lewis attacks “that prosaic moralism which confines goodness to the region of Law and Duty, which never lets us feel in our face the sweet air blowing from the ‘land of righteousness.’”
Perhaps he knew that moralism affects his own work more than it does the work of his literary godfather, MacDonald, and more than it does the work of his Catholic friend Tolkien. Both of these men lead the reader to a world that resembles dreams more than religion.
Either a mythic dualism is at work (“The Lord of the Rings,” 1954-55) or people and places change their character too often for any one meaning to hold (“Phantastes,” 1858).
Lewis’s “Chronicles” sometimes attain that strength of fantasy. A lot of religion is mixed up in them, though, and they are not religious art in the sense of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” the art of religious expression. Rather, they’re explanatory: The Christ-lion Aslan dies as a sacrifice in Edmund’s place. Shift and Puzzle make a false lion and mislead the other animals with it. Eustace, full of greed, turns into a dragon; when he discovers kindness, he’s a boy again. Everyone gets bad for bad or good for good; every action is a moral action. Even “Till We Have Faces,” his best fantasy, retains this plodding sense of proportion.
While dogmatism weakens his fiction, Lewis’s stature (to American readers) as an apologist overshadows his scholarship. That’s not a shame merely because he was a renowned professor who wrote with brilliance of Medieval poetry (“The Allegory of Love”, 1936; “A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost,’” 1942; “The Discarded Image,” 1964); it also leads to an undeserved reputation for poor thinking. His defenses of Christianity are sometimes tenuous, speculative and missing essential points.
Most of these are laid out in “Mere Christianity.” Lewis the apologist is at his best in the opening chapters, where he argues for natural law, and later, where he explains concepts such as the Eucharist, distinguishes moral goodness from Christian goodness and discusses the spiritual significance of dirty jokes.
But his blind spots are massive. Confronted with pantheism, he writes, the Christian will reply, “Don’t talk damned nonsense.” If he applied that clarity to his own creeds, his jaw might drop at some of the assertions in his later chapters.
Why, in his view, will resurrected Christians retain their bodies’ distinguishing genitalia? Because conquerors do not lose their swords — they merely sheath them. Why is the apostle Paul right in saying women should not teach or even speak in church? Because men are rational; women, emotional. (Trust only those with swords.)
The book’s famous central assertion presents more problems. While Jesus taught great moral lessons, Lewis writes, he also said he was God. So either he was lying about his divinity, or he had delusions, or he was telling the truth. Jesus’s moral philosophy was too well-developed to conceal an evil motive, so the first possibility fades. And nothing in his behavior or character suggests insanity. Lewis concludes: He was God.
Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker points out that Lewis illustrates this argument in the “Chronicles” through Lucy, who is first to discover the world of Narnia and must convince her siblings of its veracity. To create his dilemma, Lewis assumes that Jesus’ words and actions were recorded accurately. But he doesn’t say why we should believe that. He never considers, in detail, such reasons for doubt as the true anonymity of three of the gospels and the partial anonymity of the fourth, their differing takes on the resurrection, and the slight corroboration available from non-Christian sources. Not to mention the inconsistency between a New Testament God of love and an Old Testament God of massacres.
I didn’t consider the objections when I read “Mere Christianity,” because I wished to be convinced of what I already believed. What I meant to learn from Lewis was faith. What I learned was clear writing. That lesson remains after my conversion from Lewisian morality, which occurred while I was lost in the thickets of his opinions, and I found Keats. The poet evokes a reverence for the bright and living that Lewis chases but cannot catch. Their material is the same — romance, in the old sense. But Keats cares too much for moths and flowers and death and leaves and goddesses and dusk and snow and life and fainting knights to ask the way to heaven.