THE GLASS

THE GLASS

NUMBER 11 WINTER 1998

Editorial 2

‘Mercie, mercie to crye and crye again’: repentance and resolution in Anne Lock’s Meditation of a Penitent Sinner Jill Seal 3

Escape to Wallaby Wood: C S Lewis’s Depictions of Conversion Michael Ward 16

Old Western Man for Our Times: C S Lewis’s Literary Criticism Stephen Logan 33

From Pillar to Post: A Response to David Tomlinson’s The Post- Evangelical Kevin Mills 50

Reviews 58

Notes on Contributors 62

News and Notes 63

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Editorial

Even those who have done courses in 16th century English literature may not be familiar with the name of Anne Lock, yet she is the poetic creator of a remarkable sonnet cycle based on Psalm 51, the psalm of Davidic repentance. Anne Lock was in fact a pioneer of the sonnet form, and her opus, presented in this issue by Jill Seal − whose research may also be fairly described as pioneering − is the earliest known sonnet sequence in English. In a year of remembering C S Lewis (born 29 November 1898, died 22 November 1963, the day that John Kennedy was killed), Michael Ward has circumspectly considered how far Lewis can be regarded as an evangelist. Stephen Logan’s Romantic re-discovery of Lewis takes him on his own terms as a spokesman of a classic, Christian tradition, at odds with the strategies and postures that characterise contemporary academic debate. Contributions to The Glass do not necessarily reflect an a priori position, and may sometimes go over into zones adjacent to those of the Biblical and literary canons. At a meeting of the LSG in 1997 Kevin Mills, operating from non-evangelical territory, subjected David Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical to a rigorous, indeed damaging, critique, using all the latest tools. David Tomlinson, it should be said, was present, and there was a certain amount of discussion, not all of it conclusive. Debate however, is a major part of what the LSG is about. The Glass needs readers who are also contributors of the occasional paper or article. Essays can appear in The Glass before or after their publication elsewhere, so for example you might submit a piece that you afterwards develop at greater length; or just in order to fly a kite. Reviews are a versatile form, useful for sharing information and opinion. We can try, but not guarantee, to obtain review copies of newly published books for the reviewer, and the length of reviews is flexible. Please write or email suggestions, requests or, best of all, offers.

Roger Kojecký

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‘Mercie, mercie to crye and crye again’: repentance and resolution in Anne Lock’s Meditation of a Penitent Sinner.1

Jill Seal

Anne Lock was the daughter of Stephen Vaughan, a Merchant Adventurer based in London and Antwerp who worked on behalf of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII. She was married three times; to Henry Lock, a London merchant, then on his death to Edward Dering, a prominent and outspoken young preacher who died of tuberculosis, and finally to Richard Prowse, an Exeter draper, M.P. and mayor. She was a close friend of John Knox and on his prompting travelled to Calvin’s city-state of Geneva during the reign of Mary, staying there until Elizabeth’s accession. She published two works of translation. The first, published in 1560, is entitled Sermons, upon the songe that Ezechias made, after he had bene sicke, and afflicted by the hand of God. . . . This was four sermons by John Calvin. Following these is the sonnet sequence A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, written in manner of a paraphrase upon the 51. Psalme of David.2 The other translation, published 30 years later, was Of the markes of the children of God, and of their comforts in afflictions; it is a translation of a treatise by Jean Taffin, pastor of a French-speaking congregation in Antwerp. There is also a poem at the back of this volume, The necessity and benefit of affliction. Lock also wrote a four-line Latin epigram as part of a manuscript dedicated to the Earl of Leicester in 1573. It is the Meditation of a Penitent Sinner which I am discussing here. A disclaimer appears on the page previous to the sonnets in the book, after Lock’s translation of the sermons.

I have added this meditation folowyng unto the end of this boke, not as parcell of maister Calvines worke, but for that it well agreeth with the same argument, and was delivered me by my frend with whom I knew I might be so bolde to use & publishe it as pleased me.3

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It is not a proven fact that Lock did write these sonnets. What she says here (if we assume that she is speaking and not the publisher) is that her friend wrote them – and some scholars have suggested Knox, who sent her some prose works of his.4 However, I have found no other poetry that Knox wrote, and this sequence is not an amateur attempt. The rhyme and rhythms are never forced, and although the vocabulary is fairly simple (or ‘plain’) and uses simple poetical devices such as repetition, it is rhetorically effective. This same regularity of rhythm and plain diction is found in Lock’s 1590 poem ‘The necessity and benefit of affliction’, which is not a great poem by any means but for purposes of comparison proves my point. I would say that either the publisher, John Day, added the paragraph, or Lock wished to conceal her authorship of the poem – not an uncommon practice. The poem A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner comprises twenty- six sonnets in sequence. The first five form the preface and the following twenty-one each expand on one verse of Psalm 51 (except for verses one and four which both combine two Hebrew couplets; Lock actually uses each couplet as the starting point for a sonnet5). As far as I know this is the earliest extant sonnet sequence in English. It is exciting because it is so different from what is usually seen as the primary and mainstream use of the sonnet, poetry based on Petrarch and his neoplatonic imitators. Even in France, where Marot, the father of the French sonnet, was writing metrical psalms for court and congregation, and Du Bellay was using the sonnet sequence for more reflective, moral, and religious purposes, there is not this direct combination of sonnet with psalm. And Psalm 51 is the central psalm in the penitential group, the psalm of David’s repentance after his adultery with Bathsheba. For a late medieval and Renaissance audience, this psalm could sum up or signify the whole book. A woodcut portraying David and Bathsheba could just as well appear in a Bible as one of David on his knees in prayer.6 Numerologically, and thematically, Psalm 51 was (and still is) a central psalm in the psalter. The psalms were described by Athanasius as the epitome of the Bible, and also as a mirror of humanity, moving us to reform and supplying the model for that reform. They have a quality of ‘universal intimacy’, making them ideal patterns for public, liturgical as well as private, devotional prayer and praise. The penitential psalms are particularly suited to this use in the context

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of conversion or re-commitment. The Latin word ‘convertere’ means to turn, to return, or to change. In this it is linked to the word ‘repent’ which has a similar meaning of a reversal of direction, or transformation. In a religious context, conversion is usually seen as a single experience marking the beginning of a spiritual journey. Repentance can also be seen in this way: ‘Repent and be baptised’ is Peter’s reply to the plea ‘what must we do to be saved?’7. Thus, like baptism, the initial turning from the old life to the new is an unrepeatable action. However, ‘conversio’, the Latin noun, signifies a revolution or cycle. The conversion process must continue throughout life. There is a cycle of repentance and forgiveness which is also a means of growth and progress. Cassiodorus, the sixth-century monk who initially extracted the penitential psalms from the psalter, stated that they were for use by penitents, although Psalm 51 is the most straightforward in seeking pardon for sins. These seven psalms proved very popular and became an obvious focus for translation and meditation. Within the monastic daily office, they found a place with the litany after prime. This practice was introduced to the secular clergy during the twelfth century. Sometimes they were given for recitation as penance by priests in confession. They were an essential part of the Books of Hours increasingly used as aids to personal devotion in the fifteenth century. Meditation on the penitential psalms, then, was an acceptable method of spiritual progress and a suitable literary subject.8 Roland Greene’s Post-Petrarchism9 distinguishes two modes of utterance in the main tradition of the Western lyric sequence: ‘fictive’ and ‘ritual’. The fictive mode, he argues, has been the most widely used, understood and discussed. In this mode the author creates a secondary world, a ‘hypothetical context’ with elements of character and plot. Readers in the fictive mode are ‘respectful observers’. In the ritual mode, in contrast, the readers are ‘assimilators’, active participants in a text which has a performative function10. Greene applies the ritual mode to sixteenth-century psalm versifiers, arguing that their ‘commitment to the performative element in their work has provoked a critical consensus to deny them to be poets altogether’11. Greene classifies Lock’s poem as being in one sense ‘ritual’, but also as ‘fiction in realisation’12. This seems a neat way of expressing the function of meditation in literature; neither fully liturgical and therefore communal, nor totally unique and therefore fictive, excluding

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participation. He describes the Meditation as the starting point of a tradition of Puritan long poems, expressing Puritan theology in ‘the literary representation of experience’, an experience based on the doctrine of election. What this doctrine does, according to Greene, is to force a synchronic rather than a diachronic understanding of experience, particularly religious experience. It conflates time. Instead of a linear progression, the sequence is described as ‘the continual return of a single lyric, a loop that re- enacts the closed, self-confirming circle of Christian history’. These ‘ritual structures of return tend to bring into question the possibility of human individuality’, creating instead an ‘exemplary model’ for all to follow, clone-wise13. He does, however, allow for a looping progress through the sequence, and also admits the literary value of the variatio made possible by the alternative understanding (or denial) of narrative time. I will relate this to Lock’s sonnet sequence a little later. To say that Lock is the precipitator of a tradition of Puritan long poems may be true in some sense, despite the fact that her translations of Calvin did not have wide-ranging influence,14 but it is obvious that she is not the first meditator on the psalms and she is drawing on a much older tradition of meditation and commentary which was furthered by women writers such as Eleanor Hull in a previous age and more recently by Catherine Parr in the cause of reform. Lock, in Professor Felch’s words, combines ‘traditional Christian rhetoric and ardent protestantism’.15 I believe she made a deliberate link with the earlier works of Parr, one of which is entitled as follows:

Prayers or meditacions, wherin the mind is stirred paciently to suffre all afflictions here, to sette at naught the vaine prosperitee of this worlde, and alwaie to long for the everlastyng felicitee: collected out of certayne holy works . . .

– actually collected out of Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. Interestingly, Parr omits God’s side of the conversation between the Christian and Christ. This has a number of effects. One is to remove the distance between the reader and the speaker, since from a dialogue the text has become a monologue, using the direct and intimate voice of the first person. But as well as creating intimacy, Parr has removed the specific situation, giving the speaker an anonymity and thus a universality. She has created a

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voice similar to that of the psalms. Prayers or Meditations was published in 1545, and was very popular, running to 15 editions. The other work by Catherine Parr, published in 1547, was more controversial; it explicitly advocated the new religion, and only ran to three editions. It is entitled:

The Lamentacion of a synner, made by the moste vertuous Lady quene Caterine; bewailyng the ignoraunce of her blind life . . . put in print at the instant desire of the right gracious lady Caterine duchesse of Suffolke . . .

Anne Lock’s translation of Calvin’s sermons is dedicated to this duchess of Suffolk, a known patroness of religious radicals who had been a close friend of Catherine Parr and went into exile during the reign of Mary. The Meditation of a Penitent Sinner seems to combine elements of both of Parr’s titles. As Parr had done in Praiers or Meditations, Lock removes the specific historical situation of Psalm 51 and creates a Christian everyman – or more correctly everyperson. The historical sin which produced this psalm, peculiar to a man in a position of authority, is not specified, and neither is the gender of the speaker at any point. We could contrast this approach with Wyatt’s interpretation of the penitential psalms, where a specific narrative context is created for David’s penitent utterances. Lock’s persona is not located in time or space although she is obviously within the context of the Christian faith. She could almost be the exemplary model, as mentioned by Greene, for the crisis of repentance. I am taking the position, then, that Lock’s poem is a literary meditation – an elaborative expansion of Psalm 51 which also dramatically explores a crisis point in the cycle of conversion. I would now like to examine the methods she employs to represent this crisis. Again, I would say that she is using a mixture of traditional and specifically Calvinist ideas in her meditation. Psalm 51 itself is particularly suited to Calvinist beliefs, as I shall demonstrate. The poem starts with a preface ‘expressing the passioned mind of the sinner’. The first two sonnets of this preface are as follows:

The hainous gylt of my forsaken ghost So threates, alas, unto my febled sprite Deserved death, and (that me grevethmost) Still stand so fixt before my daseld sight The lothesome filthe of my disteined life, The mighty wrath of myne offended Lorde, My Lord whos wrath is sharper than the knife, And deper woundes than dobleedged sworde,

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That, as the dimmed and fordulled eyen Full fraught with teares & more & more opprest With growing streames of the distilled bryne Sent from the fornace of a grefefull brest, Can not enjoy the comfort of the light, Nor finde the waye wherein to walke aright:

So I blinde wretch, whome Gods enflamed ire with pearcing stroke hath throwne unto the ground, Amidde my sinnes still groveling in the myre, Finde not the way that other oft have found, Whome cherefull glimse of gods abounding grace Hath oft releved and oft with shyning light Hath brought to joy out of the ugglye place, Where I in darke of everlasting night Bewayle my woefull and unhappy case, And fret my dyeng soule with gnawing paine. Yet blinde, alas, I groape about for grace, While blinde for grace I groape about in vaine, My fainting breath I gather up and straine, Mercie, mercie to crye and crye againe.

In this amazing piece of poetry, Lock does express the passioned mind of the sinner – she creates the effect of being ‘lost’ and ‘blind’ not only through the intensely physical imagery but also in the syntax which twists and turns until it seems to form an insoluble knot from which the speaker strains to escape. The last couplet in the preface, sonnet 5, ‘Thus tost with panges and passions of despeir, / Thus crave I mercy with repentant chere’, seems to set the limits of the paraphrase itself; it is all about craving God’s mercy or grace against all hope. The same verb is used in the last line of the sequence proper – ’Assure my soul, I crave it not in vaine.’ (sonnet 21). Greene’s assessment of the sixteenth-century religious lyric sequence as one lyric repeating itself would seem to hold true for the Meditation. Each sonnet pleads for mercy in a different way, with the possible exception of sonnet 18. (The last four sonnets do push towards a resolution, as I will discuss shortly.) Greene’s description of the Meditation as doctrine in realisation is also very apt. In sonnets 1, 6 and 15 of the main sequence, Mercy and Justice are explicitly set against each other in a paradoxical fashion.

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But God of mercy let me come to thee, not for justice, that justly am accused, which self word justice so amaseth me that scarce I dare thy mercy sound again. (sonnet 1)

The oppositions in God’s character are expressed in a chiastic structure in these four lines. In attempting to resolve and unite the opposing forces, Lock pleads that she be found guilty and pardoned:

That damning me to depth of during woe Just in thy judgement shouldest thou be found; And from deserved flames releving me Just in thy mercy maiest thou also be. (sonnet 6)

She asks to be the ‘exemplary model’ which Greene considers part of the ritual structure of the religious lyric sequence.

Have mercy Lord; in me example make of law and mercy, for thy mercies sake. (sonnet 15)

The Calvinist doctrine of man’s total depravity and inability to act is shown in sonnets 13 and 17. Despair is described as a ‘crampe’ (sonnet 17) preventing the sinner from communicating with God. Strangely, the Petrarchan situation – professed inability to speak addressed to the beloved – is simply following the biblical text – ‘open thou my lippes’. The desire to pray is more than a desire to address God. ‘Lord, open thou my lippes to shew my case’ (sonnet 17); that is, to present an effective plea for mercy. This effective prayer is possible only when inspired by God through the Holy Spirit:

The stay that when despeir assaileth me, In faintest hope yet moveth me to pray, To pray for mercy, and to pray to thee. (sonnet 13)

God is seen as the instigator of all prayer: ‘I can not pray without thy movyng ayde’ (sonnet 17). Lock goes further than this:

Lord, make me pray, & graunt when I have praide, Lord loose my lippes, I may expresse my mone, (sonnet 17)

The reference is to Romans 8, that great text of the Reformation, verse 26 – ‘the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know

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what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.’ This level of utterance is ecstatic rather than mediated in speech, which ‘doth faile to utter’ her smart (sonnet 17). It is never actually achieved; only desired. Meditation on scripture was expected to bring the self to a conviction of sin, and Lock’s meditation involves intense self- examination which is surprisingly physical in nature. Sonnets 3 and 9 ask God to wash or cleanse her ten times between them, describing her condition as ‘foule’, ‘lothesome’, uggly’, ‘leprous’ and ‘defiled’ in sonnet 3, and again as ‘defyled’ and ‘foule’ in sonnet 9. In sonnet 5, the heart is ripped open and its contents spread out before God:

My cruell conscience with sharpned knife Doth splat my ripped hert, and layes abrode The lothesome secretes of my filthy life, And spredes them forth before the face of God.

The whole meditation is highly sensory; sight, hearing, taste and touch are all evoked. Sensory meditation, derived from the exercise of composition of place, has a female literary tradition with exponents such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. However, it is precisely the loss of spiritual sensory faculties that Lock is depicting. In the first sonnets of the preface, the sinner is blinded by her own sin (‘The lothesome filthe of my disteined life’); by implication, it is her eyes which are fraught and oppressed with tears and cannot enjoy the comfort of the light; and finally she is blinded by God’s enflamed ire, which has also thrown her to the ground in a scene reminiscent of Paul’s Damascus road experience. Kel Morin points out that these tears fail to fulfil a ‘cleansing or purging function’ as they would perhaps have been expected to, and in fact ‘exacerbate the problem’.16 However, the reference to Paul’s situation must identify the speaker with his conversion experience, thus creating implicitly the hope of salvation. In sonnet 10, she is increasingly deaf to God’s mercy, the ‘gentle voice’ of which is drowned out by the ‘dredfull threates and thonders of the law’. She asks God therefore to ‘pearce’ her ears. I have already mentioned her loss of speech depicted in sonnets 13 and 17. Sonnets 12 and 14 show her loss of feeling and physical strength.

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My feble faith with heavy lode opprest Staggring doth scarcely creepe a reeling pace, And fallen it is to faint to rise againe. (sonnet 12)

The tast, ...... the signes that dyd assure My felyng ghost . . . Are fled from me, and wretched I endure Senslesse of grace the absense of thy sprite. (sonnet 14)

And in sonnet 19 she fears her loss of appetite will lead to death.

My trobled sprite doth drede like him to be, In whome tastlesse languor with lingring paine Hath febled so the starved appetite, That foode to late is offred all in vaine, To holde in fainting corps the fleing sprite.

Paradoxically, the ability to feel her sins has been bestowed on her by God :

This hidden knowledge have I learnd of thee, To fele my sinnes, and howe my sinnes do flowe With such excesse, that with unfained hert, Dreding to drowne, my Lorde, lo howe I flee, (sonnet 8)

– but it is the feeling of her sins which overwhelms her and prevents her from receiving the gift of grace, the cure for the disease she is suffering. Despair, the consequence of her awareness of sin, is personified in the poem, as is her conscience. Personification of human traits carries on from traditions such as the morality play and could prefigure works like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Spenser, in his Fairy Queen, Book I canto ix, also personifies Despair, who reduces Redcross to a similar state of mind to that of our sinner:

trembling horror did his conscience daunt, And hellish anguish did his soul assaile (stanza 49)

The sight whereof so throughly him dismaid, That nought but death before his eyes he saw, And ever burning wrath before him laid, By righteous sentence of th’Almighties law. (stanza 50)

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Despair is a useful figure in the Protestant tradition as the enemy, the opponent of faith. Faith is what it attacks, and faith is precisely what is required to attack it, and to move beyond repentance to assurance. The function of Despair and Conscience in the Meditation is usually one of disclosure: Despair in particular could be described as prosecuting the sinner in a legal context, being given a speaking part in sonnet 3 of the preface:

In vaine thou brayest forth thy bootlesse noyse To him for mercy, O refused wight, That heares not the forsaken sinners voice. Thy reprobate and foreordeined sprite, For damned vessell of his heavie wrath, (As selfe witnes of thy beknowyng hart, And secrete gilt of thine owne conscience saith) Of his swete promises can claime no part: But thee, caytif, deserved curse doeth draw To hell, by justice, for offended law.

Despair discloses her sin and shame, taking the Satanic role of accuser, using all the correct theological jargon to construct his argument, with the intention of taking her focus from God’s grace to her own situation and making it seem an impossible case (which of course it is, purely in terms of the law). And our sinner does not have a Una to present the truth of God’s grace; she is alone. In sonnet 5 of the main sequence, as I have already mentioned, her Conscience performs open heart surgery:

My cruel conscience with sharpned knife Doth splat my ripped heart . . .

The word ‘splat’ is actually a culinary term; it is what you do to a fish, slicing it down the middle and separating it out. This exposure of her ‘lothesome secrets’ forces the sinner in sonnet 7 to throw herself on the mercy of God, recognising ‘I am but sinne, and sinfull ought to dye’, confessing the full extent of original sin so that ‘by disclosing of my sinne, my shame, / And nede of helpe’ God can himself disclose the full extent of his mercy. Disclosure of sin (confession) is thus a positive thing in this context. In fact, Despair prevents this positive disclosure in sonnet 17 (as I have already discussed). The sinner desires her mouth to be opened so that she

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may ‘Thy mercies praise, and holy name display’ (sonnet 17). This proclamation of God’s goodness is a key element of the faith which fights off despair. In sonnets 15 and 16, she has declared that she will ‘preach the justice of thy law’ and ‘spred thy prayse for all the world to know’. But immediately her voice, the instrument she has been bargaining with, fails, as she is overcome by despair. She is brought back to pleading with God on the basis of his mercy alone. Again, the tensions between knowing you can do nothing on your own (which would be a godly attitude) and falling into despair (which would be sinful) and on the other side praising God for his merciful nature and attributes, thus building your faith in him (godly) and praising God in order to have assurance of faith (sinful) are unresolved; the speaker swings between them. In restricting the poem to the voice of the sinner (with the exception of Despair’s speech), in excluding the voice of God as Parr did, Lock inevitably limits the extent to which a resolution of the conversion crisis could be reached. The same situation is present in the psalm on which she meditates; the experiences of grace and gratitude are projected but not realised within the text. Nevertheless the psalm does reach a definite conclusion, whereas Lock’s poem undermines her conclusion. In the final four sonnets of the sequence Lock has been working towards a basis for faith that she can be forgiven. She points to the death of Christ as an atoning sacrifice; she offers herself as a sacrifice more pleasing to God than external sacrifice; then her prayers become bolder and move outwards as she asks that God will build his church. At this point she is declaring what will happen:

Thou shalt receave the pleasing sacrifice, The brute shall of thy praised name resoune . . . And round about then shall thy people crye: We praise thee, God our God: thou onely art The God of might, of mercie, and of grace. (sonnet 21)

This should be the high point of faith on which the psalm ends, but instead Lock returns to sum up the main themes in the psalm and ends with the uncertain line ‘Assure my soule, I crave it not in vaine.’ And these words ‘in vaine’ are what echo in us. Lock’s sonnet sequence demonstrates a clear grasp of early

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Calvinist theology in its doctrine and terms relating to the conversion process. At the same time it uses a medieval technique of meditation on the penitential psalms as a vehicle for repentance. Unlike the religious sonnet sequences in the 1590s, there is no before and after, the hundred sonnets of meditation, humiliation and prayer followed by the hundred of comfort, joy and thanksgiving, for example, produced by her son Henry Lok.17 As a result her sequence is not a closed circle, as Greene would have it, but is open to completion only through communion with God.

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1 This article is a revised version of a paper given at the LSG conference in November 1996 and is incorporated into my PhD thesis Psalms, Sonnets, and Spiritual Songs: Some Traditions and Innovations in English Religious Poetry, c. 1560-1611 (University of Nottingham, 1997). 2 Published by John Day. There are only two extant original copies of the Sermons, one in the British Library and one in the Folger Shakespeare Library. A modern edition is imminent, The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock, ed. Susan Felch, n.p., Renaissance English Texts Society, forthcoming. 3 Calvin, Sermons sig. [Aa i]. The text I use is my own edition (included in my PhD thesis; see note 1), a transcription from the British Library copy with standardised u/v, i/j, vv/w and long s. 4 Most notably Patrick Collinson, ‘The Role of Women in the English Reformation Illustrated by the Life and Friendships of Anne Locke’ in Godly People: Essays in English Protestantism and Puritanism, ed. Patrick Collinson, London, Hambledon Press, 1982, p. 286. 5 It is doubtful that Lock knew Hebrew, but she did have access to many learned biblical scholars, from her childhood tutor Mr Cob to Jean Calvin himself. 6 See for example the initial woodcut to the Psalms in The Byble in Englyshe . . . London, Edward Whitchurch, 1541, sig. AA ii. 7 Acts 2:37-38. 8 For example, Richard Maidstone and Thomas Brampton in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries both take the text of the penitential psalms as a starting point for poetry, expanding a verse at a time. Richard Maidstone, Richard Maidstone's Penitential Psalms, ed. Valerie Edden, Heidelberg, Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1990; Thomas Brampton, A Paraphrase on the Seven Penitential Psalms, ed. W. H. Black, in Early English Poetry . . . Vol. 7, London, Percy Society, 1843. William Whittingham uses the same technique for his version of Psalm 51 in the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, The Whole Booke of Psalmes . . .

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London, John Day, 1562. 9 Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism, Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence, Princeton, Princeton U. P., 1991. 10 Greene, p. 10. 11 Greene, p. 16. 12 Greene, p. 122. 13 Greene, pp. 129-30. 14 Her son Henry Lok was a prolific sonneteer (see note 17). 15 Susan Felch, ‘Curing the Soul: Anne Lock's Authorial Medicine’ (unpublished) p. 26. 16 Kel Morin, ‘”Thus crave I mercy”: The Preface of Anne Locke’, Other Voices, Other Views (forthcoming) p. 12. From a draft copy of the article given by the author. 17 Published in 1593 as Sundrie christian passions . . . and in 1597 as part of Ecclesiastes . . . Printed in Henry Lok, Poems . . . 1593-97, ed. A. B. Grosart, 1871; rpt. New York, AMS Press, 1970.

15 Escape to Wallaby Wood: Lewis’s Depictions of Conversion THE GLASS

Michael Ward

C.S. Lewis never invited unbelievers to come to Jesus. He was a very successful evangelist.

In case those two sentences seem bewilderingly contradictory, it might be worth considering other pairs of statements. Such as: ‘Einstein failed his entrance exam to the Federal Polytechnic. He was a very successful physicist.’ Or again: ‘Gandhi never fought against the British. He successfully ejected them from India.’ Life is not as simple as we think. Lewis explicitly rejects the ‘Come to Jesus’ school of evangelism in at least three places. In ‘God in the Dock’ he observes how he lacks the gift for making such a ‘simple, emotional appeal’ and how he had therefore better not attempt it.1 In ‘Modern Man and his Categories of Thought’ he makes the closely related point that the limitations of his own gifts have caused him always to avoid a ‘pneumatic’ approach.2 And in an interview with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association he confesses that bringing about an encounter between his readers and Jesus Christ is ‘not my language’, though it is the purpose he has in view.3 In the first two of these three disavowals, Lewis is referring primarily to his evangelistic technique in public meetings, but I think they are applicable to his written works too, an application which the third statement bears out. They are strange admissions from a man who described most of his own books as ‘evangelistic’.4 Is he embarrassed? Is he being precious about ‘my language’? If an encounter between his readers and Jesus Christ is the purpose he has in view, why does he not honestly say so? It is not like Lewis to be mealy-mouthed. This talk has three aims. First, to ask why Lewis wanted to attract people to Christ without using the words ‘Come to Jesus’. Second, to see how he thought this could be done. Third, to look at where he put his theories into practice.

Why First, why? And we can start by giving three quick reasons which need not be elaborated upon: the spiritual, the psychological, and the theological. Lewis himself frankly admits that there is a spiritual reason for his reluctance to make a direct appeal to the heart: is not his ‘gift’. Presumably, he knew this either by intuition or painful personal experience, and we must be prepared to take his word for it. Psychologically, we know, he disliked emotionalism.5 And theologically, he was wary of ‘Jesus worship’.6 There is also a practical reason. The hortatory style of evangelism is like

16 THE GLASS water off a duck’s back to people who do not recognise either a need or a desire to come to Jesus. Why should they come? They’re quite comfortable as they are. As Lewis wrote to his friend and former pupil, Alan Griffiths in1939:

The purpose of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. They cannot sound otherwise to those who have not had the relevant experience: that is why there is no real teaching of such truths possible and every generation starts from scratch.

No doubt Lewis had in mind, when he spoke of ancient and simple truths, such truths as ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’, ‘He who loses his life for my sake will find it’, ‘My yoke is easy and my burden light’. To a Christian readership – that is, to a readership with the relevant experience – these truths are pregnant with meaning. But to a readership of unbelievers they are ‘barren platitudes’. To exhort the non-Christian to come to Jesus on the basis of these platitudes is to add irritation to ignorance, to utter ‘abracadabra’ over hocus-pocus. Somehow the evangelist must reveal to or remind his audience of the experiences that will transform ‘hocus-pocus’ back into hoc est corpus.7 Finally, there are three political reasons. First, the words ‘Come to Jesus’, by suggesting that the speaker is with, or alongside, or a spokesman for the Son of God, play into a suspicious readership’s hands. Of course, Lewis believed that Christians were, in a sense, spokesmen for Christ, but he was also aware of the tendency of ‘moderns’ to assume that Christianity is recommended not because it is true, but merely because the speaker happens to like it, or perhaps has a financial interest (however indirect) in disseminating it. It is therefore wise to maintain some sort of objective distance between evangelist and evangel. Second, the ‘Come to Jesus’ mantra runs the risk of sounding like, ‘Reject Jesus and you reject me’ (which is bad theology) or, alternatively, ‘Become a Christian, become my friend’ (which is bad psychology). Such an approach makes a disinterested response more difficult. And so, rather than asking non-Christians to ‘Come to Jesus’, Lewis preferred urging them (when he urged at all) to ‘Look for Christ’.8 He keeps his own Christian persona off-stage almost entirely; if he talks in the first person it is his pre-Christian self that he brings forward. Never does he give the impression that he wants the reader to copy his practice of Christianity (unlike St.

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Paul); but he quite often calls up his own ‘search’ for Christ. I put ‘search’ in inverted commas, because Lewis was well aware that the real search was not his for God, but God’s for him. And this is the third political reason for steering clear of a ‘Come to Jesus’ formula (and even of a ‘Look for Christ’ formula). If the unbeliever gets the impression that the evangelist is chiefly concerned about getting a response he is likely to have a skewed understanding of the faith. Although Lewis is quite clear that a response to Christ is necessary, and although he has little time for developed Calvinism, he is keen to keep in mind the fact that man’s response to God is not of central importance. In ‘The Weight of Glory’ he reports how ‘I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important. Indeed, how we think of Him is of no importance except in so far as it is related to how He thinks of us.’ Elsewhere he points out the comic elements of ‘the fly sitting deciding what it is going to make of the elephant’.9 And, in the third Narnia Chronicle, Eustace asks Edmund, ‘Do you know Aslan?’, to which Edmund replies, ‘Well – he knows me.’ The chief end of man is not to love God, but to be loved by God. So the mainspring of evangelism should not be the importunate cry of ‘Come to Jesus’ but the generous, revelatory impulse of ‘Jesus has come to you’. Therefore it is politic generally to avoid the language of religious initiation, and still more the language of doctrinal formulations or credal statements or theological abstractions. Christ’s own Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection comprise ‘a language more adequate’ than any other.10 That is the good news, the gospel, the evangel. Evangel-ism is merely the process of retelling that story or translating that language. On the day of Pentecost, it was only after his hearers had been ‘cut to the heart’ that Peter instructed them to ‘repent and be baptised’. His evangelism consisted not in their response, but in his preceding sermon, which centres exclusively on the acts of a distinctly trinitarian God.

How If the task of the evangelist is to retell the story of God in Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit, to do so one must imitate that story’s language. (This is our first how.) It is a story written in the language of descent and then of utter descent and then of ascent to

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a place higher than the starting-point. (For a biblical example, see the second chapter of the Epistle to the Philippians.) The beautiful passage about God’s great dive into humanity in Chapter xiv of Miracles is Lewis’s most explicit rewording of Christ’s life, death and new life; the architectonics of The Silver Chair perhaps his most implicit. Any talk about conversion must somehow be couched in terms which reflect this divine pattern, the missing chapter of the human story, the forgotten movement of the universal symphony, which makes sense of all the rest. Christ, the audible word of the inaudible God, has provided the syllables which echo in all second births. The pattern of his sacrifice is the template to which all accounts of conversion must be cut. Like the Israelites swooping down upon the Philistines in the wake of David’s victory over Goliath, Christians re-enact in their conversions Christ’s own eternal victory over sin and death. ‘If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.’ There must be, at the barest minimum, this basic shape to all presentations of the gospel: down, down further, up, up higher than before. It is no accident that the Spare Room where the Wardrobe stands in the first Narnia tale is reached by ‘three steps down and five steps up’; nor that Jane can find Ransom’s rooms in That Hideous Strength only ‘by descending to a landing and ascending again’. In the same way that Christ’s descent and re-ascent only really mean something because they actually happened to a particular man at a particular time in a particular place, so the language used to describe it (and therefore to encourage or invite imitations) must deal in particularities and not in airy abstractions. (This is our second how.) As Lewis wrote to his brother in 1932: ‘Religion and poetry are about the only languages . . . which . . . still have something to say. Compare “Our Father which art in Heaven” with “The supreme being transcends time and space”. The first goes to pieces if you begin to apply the literal meaning to it. How can anything but a sexual animal really be a father? How can it be in the sky? The second falls into no such traps. On the other hand, the first really means something, really represents a concrete experience in the minds of those who use it: the second is mere dextrous playing with counters. . . .’ And we now come to our third how. Lewis attracts his readers to Christ by retelling the Great Story in concrete terms, and in comprehensible concrete terms. Not any old concrete terms. To tell a non-Christian that he must be ‘washed in the Blood of the Lamb’ is

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a concrete expression (and therefore better than an abstract equivalent, ‘Be purified in the essential life-fluid of innocence’), but it will not mean much to him. One must find terms into which the Great Story may be translated so that the non- Christian reader can get an inkling of what the evangelist means. Of course much of the meaning will remain latent to the unbeliever (as indeed it will to the evangelist who will always speak wiselier than he knows), but insofar as any elements of God’s truth are conveyed and understood, the unbeliever will necessarily be moved and will return imaginatively to God as Christ returned bodily to the Father; it is then that the Holy Spirit descends.11 This presupposes in the writer a wide knowledge of concrete terms and a lively appreciation of every aspect of life, which is just what we find in Lewis. He believed that, whether a writer acknowledged it or not, composition was merely the process of ‘re-combining elements made by [God] and already containing His meanings’.12 Therefore it behoves the Christian writer to get to know ‘things’ as intimately as possible, the more effectively to mirror the story of Christ’s life and death. Or rather I should say ‘Christ’s death and life’, for it is His passing over from death to life which is the centre of the story of ‘the wonderful works of God’. The mysterious silence of Holy Saturday, the hinge which somehow opens the Crucifixion into the Resurrection, is the part of the story which most needs re- telling. Lewis approaches this mystery from numerous angles, trying and trying again to find an insightful way of interpreting it. Even when he is writing non-fiction, his work abounds with similes, metaphors and analogies which create imaginatively the grounds for the appropriate emotion. A brief survey of Mere Christianity supplies the following list: becoming a Christian (passing over from death to life) is like joining a campaign of sabotage, like falling at someone’s feet or putting yourself in someone’s hands, like taking on board fuel or food, like laying down your rebel arms and surrendering, saying sorry, laying yourself open, turning full speed astern; it is like killing part of yourself, like learning to walk or to write, like buying God a present with his own money; it is like a drowning man clutching at a rescuer’s hand, like a tin soldier or a statue becoming alive, like waking after a long sleep, like getting close to someone or becoming infected, like dressing up or pretending or playing; it is like emerging from the womb or hatching from an egg; it is like a

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compass needle swinging to north, or a cottage being knocked into a palace, or a field being ploughed and re-sown, or a horse turning into a Pegasus, or a greenhouse roof becoming bright in the sunlight; it is like coming round from anaesthetic, like coming in out of the wind, like going home. Rather than saying, ‘Come to Jesus’, Lewis is saying, ‘This is what it is like to come to Jesus. If you’re not attracted or interested or assisted by this way of putting it, here are a dozen other ways of considering the same thing.’ The man who wrote A Preface to Paradise Lost was ready to write any number of prefaces to paradise regained. For Lewis was not at all prescriptive when he talked about the spiritual life. (This is our final how.) The fact of Christ’s saving death and resurrection was far more important for him than any theory about how it should be appropriated to individuals. If, for instance, one is looking for a place where Lewis explicitly uses the terms of the formula ‘salvation by grace through faith alone’, one will find it neither in his apologetics nor in his fiction, but in the introduction to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Hard and fast theories of the Atonement were, to him, distracting and potentially divisive. And theories of conversion were pointless, because God brings people to Himself in a startling variety of ways, some of which Lewis particularly disliked. Hence his free use of imagery from all areas of human life and his impatience with those ‘high-minded’ Christians, like Norman Pittenger, who objected to his indiscriminate and ‘vulgar’ analogies. With Dickens, Lewis would have opined: ‘That every man who seeks heaven must be born again in the good thoughts of his Maker, I sincerely believe; that it is expedient for every hound to say so in a certain snuffling form of words, to which he attaches no good meaning, I do not believe.’13 We have now reached the point where we can summarise Lewis’s evangelistic method in his depictions of conversion. By encoding the Great Story in concrete terms comprehensible to the reader and containing no prescriptive theological ‘spin’, Lewis aims to give the non-Christian imaginative experience of the ‘ancient and simple truths’ which are so relevant to spiritual life, but which cannot be taught directly. The rest of this paper will look at those books where this method seems most in evidence – and two of them will not be by Lewis.

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Where Lewis’s method was not simply a tactic to attract unbelievers; it was the very means by which he interpreted Christianity to himself. He talks about his personal path to faith by means of similar analogies and pictures to those we find in Mere Christianity. Lewis’s own ‘coming to Jesus’ is described in Surprised by Joy using such pictures as a soldier unbuckling his protective armour, a snowman beginning to melt, a man being arrested or a fox being hounded, of check and then checkmate in a game of chess. And when the climactic moment comes, Lewis conveys it with customary skill.

I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. . . . They have spoiled Whipsnade since then. Wallaby Wood, with the birds singing overhead and the bluebells underfoot and the wallabies hopping all round one, was almost Eden come again.

The expression of emotion (suitably concreted with talk of birdsong and bluebells and wallabies) comes in the second paragraph, after the conversion itself. Like rain that comes after thunder, like the mountain-top experience that came to Wordsworth after he had crossed the Alps, Lewis’s feeling of spiritual fulfilment is described after the fact, and is introduced with a distinctly downbeat sentence. Head and heart, but in that logical order. Many readers find Surprised by Joy a difficult book. It is true that it contains a lot of close argument, a lot of dense and intense reflection, and, apart from the instances of poetry mentioned above, comparatively few examples of ‘leavening’. Lewis himself acknowledges that the book may well be ‘suffocatingly subjective’.14 But there may be another reason why Surprised by Joy is unsatisfactory. As Lewis himself admits elsewhere, ‘The story which gives us the experience most like the experiences of living is not necessarily the story whose events are most like those in a biography or a newspaper.’15 If we include autobiography under biography and assume that Lewis is talking as much of his own writings as of literature in general, then this may well explain why Surprised by Joy is quite hard-going, and why the allegorisation of his conversion story in The Pilgrim’s Regress is so much more enjoyable, for it gives much more effectively (because more concretely) the experience of living through a conversion.

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We do not have time to examine the book in detail, but it may be worth taking a brief glance at what I regard as the crucial part of the story, when John finally glimpses the object of his desire.

What the others saw I do not know: but John saw the Island. And the morning wind, blowing off-shore from it, brought the sweet smell of its orchards to them, but rarefied and made faint with the thinness and purity of early air, and mixed with a little sharpness of the sea. But for John, because so many thousands looked at it with him, the pain and the longing were changed and all unlike what they had been of old: for humility was mixed with their wildness, and the sweetness came not with pride and with the lonely dreams of poets nor with the glamour of a secret, but with the homespun truth of folk-tales, and with the sadness of graves and freshness as of earth in the morning. There was fear in it also, and hope: and it began to seem well to him that the Island should be different from his desires, and so different that, if he had known it, he would not have sought it.16

Note how Lewis is continually fluctuating between the bane and the blessing, between condolence and congratulation, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.17 He mentions the sharpness of the sea, but also the sweet smell of the orchards; he mentions the sadness of graves, but also the freshness as of earth in the mornings; without any mediating image he brings in fear and hope; and then the poles of the experience seem almost to merge in the final crush-note: ‘If he had known it, he would not have sought it.’ There is no question but that he has been deceived. True. But thanks be to God for deception! For how could John ever have desired such holiness in his natural state? The apparent disaster is really a testimony to the spirit of incarnate grace which is humble enough to woo John even under the mask of ‘the little brown girls’, the objects of the lust in which his pilgrimage originated, the paltry tale in which snatches of the Great Story could unwittingly be heard. And not only does grace give John unmerited reward, it excites in him the capacity for enjoying it. In all of Lewis’s works there is not another sentence which so perfectly encapsulates both the loss and the more than compensatory gain of regeneration. The Pilgrim’s Regress is the first book he wrote following his conversion, when the poignancy of the transition was perhaps most keenly upon him, and he hit the jackpot first time.

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The Pilgrim’s Regress, of course, is modelled to a certain extent upon John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a book which has ‘astonished the world’, according to Lewis. It is interesting to note that Lewis did not think particularly highly of the conversion moment in that story, when the pilgrim, Christian, standing at the foot of a Cross, loses the burden from his back and it rolls downhill into the mouth of a sepulchre. He thought much more highly of the scene in the Valley of Humiliation, which he said ‘is the most beautiful thing in Bunyan and can be the most beautiful thing in life if a man takes it quite rightly’.18 (And it’s with this line in mind that I like to view the very final scene of Richard Attenborough’s Shadowlands where Anthony Hopkins walks down the Golden Valley in Herefordshire.) As we read the Progress, Lewis contends, we ought to be discovering that humility is like that green valley, not that the green valley ‘represents’ humility. ‘That way, moving always into the book, not out of it, from the concept to the image, enriches the concept. And that is what allegory is for.’19 It is typical of Lewis to value not the fictional moment when Christian comes to Jesus, but the moment in the book which he feels is most like the process of coming to Jesus, and he reworks it on the last page of That Hideous Strength when Jane walks through the warm garden, over the wet lawn, ‘descending the ladder of humility’, down to the lodge where her husband waits; and Orual in Till We Have Faces journeys through a ‘warm green valley’ in search of a hot spring beyond Essur, and finds a priest in the woods who tells her all she ever did. Ironically, seven years before his own conversion, Lewis had made use of Bunyan’s unburdening episode in his poem ‘Joy’: ‘Like Christian when his burden dropt behind / I was set free’.20 Before he had acquired the relevant experience he treated as important the ‘official’ conversion moment in Bunyan, a moment which puts all the Crucifixion side of the story in Christ’s experience, and none of it in the pilgrim’s.21 After his own regeneration, Lewis sees that, from the literary point of view, the going down into a green valley is a much more efficient way of portraying salvation, because it gets in both the Crucifixion and the Resurrection elements, almost simultaneously – there is descent, but descent into greenness and fertility, which symbolise ascent. Like John’s vision of the island, Christian’s passage through the valley conveys powerfully ‘the old bittersweet of first falling in love’.22 It is this ‘bittersweet’ that, for Lewis, is the essence of the conversion experience. It is the ‘turn’, the Tolkienian eucatastrophe, the moment in the fairy tale when Beauty kisses the Beast as if it 24 THE GLASS

were a man, and miraculously it turns into a man. It is that split second when emigration becomes immigration, when one crosses the border and, for a brief moment, stands with a foot in each camp, death and life, shadow and sunshine. Such a view of conversion springs from the realisation that the Crucifixion, the judicial murder of God (in Dorothy Sayers’ memorable phrase), is both the most heinous act in the history of the world and the salvation of that world. The spearing of Christ’s side, like the splitting of the rock in the desert, is at one and the same moment the shattering of perfection and the means by which perfection impregnates the imperfect. Like Sydney Carton’s sacrifice in A Tale of Two Cities, it signifies ‘the best of times and the worst of times’. Like Rilian’s oath in The Silver Chair, it is what the three rescuers most want to hear and what they have sworn never to obey. The Lizard Man’s face ‘shone with tears, but it may have been only the liquid love and brightness (one cannot distinguish them in that country) which flowed from him.’ The remaking of Jane’s soul ‘went on amidst a kind of splendour or sorrow or both, whereof she could not tell whether it was in the moulding hands or in the kneaded lump.’ As well as liking Bunyan’s bittersweet valley, Lewis was a great admirer of the following passage in George MacDonald’s Lilith. He quotes from it as an epigraph to the climactic Book Nine of The Pilgrim’s Regress and it is the last passage he selected for his anthology of MacDonald which he published in 1946. It is worth quoting in full:

‘Lilith,’ said Mara, ‘you will not sleep, if you lie there a thousand years, until you have opened your hand and yielded that which is not yours to give or to withhold.’ ‘I cannot,’ she answered. ‘I would if I could, for I am weary, and the shadows of death are gathering about me.’ ‘They will gather and gather, but they cannot infold you while yet your hand remains unopened. You may think you are dead, but it will be only a dream; you may think you have come awake, but it will still be only a dream. Open your hand, and you will sleep indeed – then wake indeed.’ ‘I am trying hard, but the fingers have grown together and into the palm.’ ‘I pray you, put forth the strength of your will. For the love of life, draw together your forces and break its bonds!’ The princess turned her eyes upon Eve, beseechingly. ‘There was a sword I once saw in your husband’s hands,’ she murmured.

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‘I fled when I saw it. I heard him who bore it say it would divide whatever was not one and indivisible.’ ‘I have the sword,’ said Adam. ‘The angel gave it me when he left the gate.’ ‘Bring it, Adam,’ pleaded Lilith, ‘and cut me off this hand that I may sleep.’ ‘I will,’ he answered.23

The thing Lilith most wants is only obtainable if she submits to the thing she wants least, the pain of losing her hand. And Adam’s agreement to hurt her is said with the same solemnity – indeed, with the same words – as a marriage vow. It is an image which Lewis felt was terrible but true. As he wrote in his address, ‘Membership’: ‘Some tendencies in each natural man may have to be simply rejected. Our Lord speaks of eyes being plucked out and hands lopped off – a frankly Procrustean method of adaptation.’24 The undragoning of Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is his most obvious reworking of MacDonald’s passage. Eustace sheds his own skin three times, but each time finds himself still trapped. Only when he lies back to be undressed by the Lion does he feel a claw go deep enough into his heart to rip off the thick, dark, knobbly hide. Orual’s dream in which she falls through three versions of the Pillar Room, has certain affinities with the Lilith passage too, but, as with most aspects of Till We Have Faces, is not easily susceptible of brief analysis or of parallel-drawing. But the best example of the Procrustean method of coming to Jesus is the killing of the lizard in The Great Divorce. In the case of Edmund Pevensie, there is apparently no plucking out of eyes or chopping off of hands. Indeed, Edmund’s whole conversion is something of a non-event. He goes off for a talk with Aslan, comes back to his brother and sisters, says sorry, they say ‘That’s all right’, and it’s over. Lewis makes no attempt to get inside Edmund’s experience either from the point of view of authorial narration (as he does with Shasta) or by means of first person recounting (as he does with Eustace). Edmund’s betrayal and rescue are the mainsprings of the plot of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, but his own personal delivery is surprisingly sparsely treated. I think there are three main reasons for this. The first is that the book already abounds with redemption motifs; to provide an in- depth account of Edmund’s redemption might over-egg the pudding. Most obviously, of course, we have the death of Aslan and

26 THE GLASS his return to life – it is he who is put on the bed of Procrustes: his whiskers are plucked out and his mane chopped off so that Edmund may be saved; before that there is the coming of summer after the long-lasting winter of the White Witch; there is the defeat of the Witch in the battle and the revivifying of the stone statues at her castle; finally, there is the coronation of the four children at Cair Paravel. Over-arching all, there is the fact of the Pevensies’ journey through the back of the wardrobe, which I believe is itself a very carefully conceived symbol of spiritual awakening.25 To parade Edmund’s individual salvation on top of all these varying types of redemption might be to risk ‘wearisomely explicit pietism’.26 Like a virtuoso violinist, Lewis knows when to ‘open up’ and when to ‘cover’ his top notes. Edmund’s story is a case of con brio ma non troppo. The second reason is that, although technically speaking Edmund’s betrayal and rescue are the two main events of the plot, yet it is the means of the rescue which is thematically of the greatest importance. Aslan’s death and resurrection are, within the world of Narnia, the central story, to which all other stories must defer and from which all other stories gain their significance. Furthermore, although Aslan apparently dies only for Edmund, it is conceded in later books that he died for the whole of Narnia, for if Edmund had been lost, the prophecy about the four thrones could not have been fulfilled and the White Witch would have ruled forever. It is therefore the story of Aslan that must dominate. Edmund’s salvation is commensurate with that of an Old Testament character: he was saved before the Christ of his world had died. Logically, the importance of Christ’s death and resurrection is more easily understood this way. Edmund needed rescuing; therefore Aslan rescued him. Cause and effect. As Lewis knew from personal experience, it is hard for a non-Christian to see how ‘the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now’.27 By making Edmund an inhabitant of ‘the old dispensation’, Lewis avoids these difficulties. And the third reason for the absence of detailed analysis of Edmund’s salvation may be that Lewis wanted a carte blanche on which his readers could write their own story. One of the mottoes of the Narnia Chronicles is, ‘No one is ever told any story but his own’, a rewording of John 21 verses 21-22, and by keeping Edmund’s story ‘hollow’ Lewis practises what he preaches. This is uncharacteristic! As we have seen, Lewis usually gives us details, sometimes intimate details, of his characters’ destinies, whether for 27 THE GLASS good or ill. Here, in his most famous book, he shows a rare reticence, so that what passes between Edmund and Aslan remains a secret. Susan and Lucy also display a fine sensitivity when discussing it:

‘Does he know,’ whispered Lucy to Susan, ‘what Aslan did for him? Does he know what the arrangement with the Witch really was?’ ‘Hush! No. Of course not,’ said Susan. ‘Oughtn’t he to be told?’ said Lucy. ‘Oh, surely not,’ said Susan. ‘It would be too awful for him. Think how you’d feel if you were he.’ ‘All the same I think he ought to know,’ said Lucy. But at that moment they were interrupted.

Of course, Susan has no idea what Edmund has actually been told, nor does Lucy; but between them they show the right mix of hesitation and resolution in deciding to let their brother know ‘what the arrangement really was’. It provides a neat summary of Lewis’s own approach to evangelism.

Conclusion What are we to make of Lewis’s evangelistic technique in his fiction and in the ‘poetic’ passages of his other writings? I imagine that the methods outlined here will be thought suspect by certain Christians who, with the apostle Peter, will want to say, ‘We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Lewis’s ‘Great Story in miniature’ style of evangelism will seem to them to be so indirect and encrypted as to be almost useless. Other kinds of Christian would prefer to say that, since all things were made for and through Christ, and hold together in him, it is fair to assume that all things speak of him, including things like stories and the things that go into stories. As Lewis was fond of remarking, the highest does not stand without the lowest and it is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. In the Old Testament, Christ is typified by a boat, a ladder, a goat, by Jonah the disobedient fish-food, by David the murderous adulterer. In the New, St. Paul preaches Christ by quoting pagan poets and by becoming all things to all men that he might ‘by all means save some’. Lewis is an heir to this tradition. Indeed, in the passage detailing Emeth’s salvation in The Last Battle, Lewis might as well be writing a commentary on Paul’s sermon in

28 THE GLASS the Areopagus. Emeth is a character who is very literally saved by ‘an unknown God’. With St. Paul and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Lewis would want to say ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out like shining from shook foil’.28 All ‘Little Stories’ have something in them of the ‘Great Story’. Those who would forbid such a method would seem to circumscribe God’s freedom of action and deny his name of ‘All in All’, aligning themselves with Swinburne’s ‘pale Galilean’ whose breath makes the world grow grey.29 And yet – and yet – life is not as simple as we think. When all is said and done, stories are only stories. Lewis knew of this danger. Indeed, this is one of the messages he gets out of his favourite MacDonald passage. Lilith’s dream that she has woken, only to find that she is still asleep, ‘has a terrible meaning, specially for imaginative people. We read of spiritual efforts, and our imagination makes us believe that, because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them. I am appalled to see how much of the change which I thought I had undergone lately was only imaginary. The real work seems still to be done. It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself – to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed, and then to find yourself still in bed.’30 If this is a special danger for imaginative people, it is a huge risk for religious imaginative people, people who may have been brought up on C.S. Lewis. The imitation of Christ can so easily be corrupted into parrot-learning which ‘any child, given a certain kind of religious education, will soon learn’.31 But to discover and know things about God in real living experience is to enter into a new realm. To know God, however dimly, and to be known by God – these things are far more important than reading evangelistic stories, more important even than reading Bible stories. What, after all, are stories? ‘Only words, words, to be led out to battle against other words.’ Since God himself is the Word, what other utterance could suffice? Let us finish with Lewis’s own essay ‘On Stories’, written in honour of his friend, the Christian writer, Charles Williams:

If the author’s plot is only a net, and usually an imperfect one, a net of time and event for catching what is not really a process at all, is life much more? . . . In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something

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that is not successive. Whether in real life there is any doctor who can teach us how to do it, so that at last either the meshes will become fine enough to hold the bird, or we be so changed that we can throw our nets away and follow the bird to its own country, is not a question for this essay. But I think it is sometimes done – or very, very nearly done – in stories. I believe the effort to be well worth making.32

That is the conclusion. We can be almost certain that ‘the Great Story in miniature’ evangelistic method is a good one. But not entirely certain, for, with Richard Hooker, Lewis’s sixteenth century soul-mate, the father of Anglicanism and Lewis’s favourite theologian, we know that certainty resides only in Heaven, the bird’s own country. The bird, undoubtedly, is an albatross – a concrete symbol of Christ to Lewis in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader no less than to Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. For though he might fight shy of saying ‘Come to Jesus’, that is what Lewis means here (and throughout his works). That is what James and John did once they had thrown away their nets.

An expanded version of this essay appears in Lightbearer in the Shadowlands: The Evangelistic Vision of C.S. Lewis, edited by Angus Menuge, published in the States by Crossway, 1997.

Bibliography Hopkins, G.M. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose, London, Penguin, 1988. Lewis, C.S. Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper, Glasgow, Fount, 1980 Christian Reunion, ed. Walter Hooper, Glasgow, Fount, 1990 Fern-seed and Elephants, ed. Walter Hooper, Glasgow, Fount, 1982. God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper, Glasgow, Fount, 1982. Letters, ed. Walter Hooper, London, Fount, 1988. Mere Christianity, Glasgow, Fount, 1990. Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper, London, Fount, 1984. The Pilgrim’s Regress, Glasgow, Fount, 1980. Poems, ed. Walter Hooper, London, Fount, 1994. Prayer: Letters to Malcolm. Glasgow, Fount, 1983. Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper, London, Fount, 1986. Screwtape Proposes a Toast and other pieces, Glasgow, Fount, 1981. Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper, Cambridge, C.U.P, 1980 Surprised by Joy, Glasgow, Fount, 1982. That Hideous Strength, London, Pan, 1983. They Stand Together, ed. Walter Hooper, London, Collins, 1979. Timeless At Heart, ed. Walter Hooper, Glasgow: Fount, 1987. The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’, Glasgow, Fontana Lions, 1981. 30 THE GLASS

MacDonald, George. George MacDonald: An Anthology, ed. C.S. Lewis, London, Fount, 1983 Pope, Norris. Dickens and Charity, London, Macmillan, 1978. Swinburne, A.C. Swinburne’s Collected Poetical Works, Vol. I, London, Heinemann, 1927. Ward, Michael. ‘Through the Wardrobe: A Famous Image Explored’, Seven, An Anglo-American Literary Review, Wheaton College, llinois, 1998. ______

1 Lewis, ‘God in the Dock’, God in the Dock, p. 101. 2 Lewis, ‘Modern Man and his Categories of Thought’, Present Concerns, p. 66. 3 Lewis, ‘Cross Examination’, Christian Reunion, p. 86. 4 Lewis, ‘Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger’, Timeless at Heart, p. 115. 5 Lewis, Surprised by Joy, p. 9. 6 Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, p. 86. Lewis considered ‘Jesus worship’ to be ‘a religion which has its value; but not, in isolation, the religion Jesus taught.’ 7 ‘Hocus-pocus’ possibly originated as a parody of the words of consecration in the Mass, Hoc est corpus. 8 Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 189. 9 Lewis, ‘What are we to make of Jesus Christ?’, God in the Dock, p. 79. 10 Lewis, They Stand Together, p. 428. 11 This sentence should not be read in isolation from my conclusion. 12 Lewis, Letters, p. 371. 13 Pope, Dickens and Charity, p. 22. 14 Lewis, Surprised by Joy, p. 7. 15 Lewis, ‘Hedonics’, Present Concerns, p. 55. 16 Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, p. 218. 17 In a letter of 29 February 1952 Lewis sends to a recent convert both his ‘condolences and congratulations. For whatever people who have never undergone an adult conversion may say, it is a process not without its distresses. Indeed they are the very sign that it is a true initiation.’ See Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. W.H. Lewis, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966. 18 Lewis, Letters, p. 415. 19 Lewis, ‘The Vision of John Bunyan’, Selected Literary Essays, p. 149. 20 Lewis, ‘Joy’, Poems, p. 243. 21 Bunyan does not suggest that Christian experienced any pain in letting go of his burden. Compare Lewis’s account in The Pilgrim’s Regress where we are told that John’s clothes ‘were so stuck to him that they came away with pain and a little skin came with them’ (Regress, pp. 214-215). John obviously undergoes some fraction of crucifixion in the moment of losing his sins. 22 Lewis, They Stand Together, p. 430. 23 George MacDonald, op. cit., pp. 148-149.

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24 Lewis, ‘Membership’, Fern-seed and Elephants, p. 23. 25 Ward, op. cit. 26 Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, p. 34. 27 Lewis, They Stand Together, p. 427. 28 Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’, Poems and Prose, p. 27. 29 Swinburne, ‘Hymn to Proserpine’, Swinburne’s Collected Poetical Works, p. 69. 30 Lewis, They Stand Together, p. 361. 31 Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 125. 32 Lewis, ‘On Stories’, Of This and Other Worlds, p. 45.

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Old Western Man for Our Times1

Stephen Logan

Lewis as Literary Critic Asked to give an example of Lewis’s best literary criticism, I think I would choose the following passage from A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). It concerns a disagreement about Milton with one of Lewis’s slightly older contemporaries, E. M. W. Tillyard.

‘The great moral which reigns in Milton,’ said Addison, ‘is the most universal and most useful that can be imagined, that Obedience to the will of God makes men happy and that Disobedience makes them miserable.’ Dr. Tillyard amazes me by calling this a ‘rather vague explanation.’. . . Dull, if you will, or platitudinous, or harsh, or jejune: but how vague? . . . How are we to account for the fact that great modern scholars have missed what is so dazzlingly simple? I think we must suppose that the real nature of the Fall and the real moral of the poem involve an idea so uninteresting or so intensely disagreeable to them that they have been under a sort of psychological necessity of passing it over and hushing it up. Milton, they feel, must have meant something more than that!2

Now, if had I quoted this in a seminar, I would rather expect my students to be dumbfounded: not by Lewis’s power of thought, but by my apparent obtuseness. For why should I think that passage a remarkable piece of criticism? Lucid, yes. Terse, sure. Incisive, yes again. But how revealing is it about the poem it purports to discuss? Where’s the detailed and explicit analysis of verbal minutiae which, in the seventy years since I. A. Richards published his book Practical Criticism (1929), we have learned to think of as the literary critic’s distinctive technique? In response to any such complaint, I’d read a later passage which does indeed address the question of style.

As for the style of the poem, I have already noted this peculiar difficulty in meeting the adverse critics, that they blame it for the very qualities which Milton and his lovers regard as virtues. . . . He sets out to enchant us and they complain that the result sounds like an incantation. It reminds us of Aristotle’s question – if water itself sticks

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in a man’s throat, what will you give him to wash it down with? If a man blames port wine for being strong and sweet, or a woman’s arms for being white and smooth and round, or the sun for shining, or sleep because it puts thought away, how can we answer him? Dr. Leavis does not differ from me about the properties of Milton’s epic verse. He describes them very accurately – and understands them better, in my opinion, than Mr. Pearsall Smith. It is not that he and I see different things when we look at Paradise Lost. He sees and hates the very same that I see and love. Hence the disagreement between us tends to escape from the realm of literary criticism. We differ not about the nature of Milton’s poetry, but about the nature of man.3

But again, it might be objected that Lewis has still not supplied here any account of how the poem’s effects are produced by its peculiarities of wording. Partly this is because Lewis believed that detailed analysis of style was not equally appropriate or illuminating for every kind of literature. In a late essay on Spenser he remarks that a typical stanza from The Faerie Queene ‘neither demands nor admits the minute verbal explication in which the most vigorous modern criticism excels.’4 In an earlier essay on the same poet he had declared: ‘Usually we shall look in vain for anything like the phrase- by-phrase deliciousness of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the “gigantic loftiness” of Milton’s epic style, or the point and subtlety and pressure of Donne or the modern poets.’5 Lewis clearly felt that premature engagement in technical analysis could distract from a proper attentiveness to the subject- matter of a work and might, indeed, provide an excuse for ignoring aspects of the subject-matter which the critic happened to find uncongenial. In 1962, when George Watson wrote asking Lewis for his support in effecting a change of syllabus, Lewis replied:

I must stay out of this, for I am not in favour of the change you want to encourage! The Moralists Paper is about the only island left in our vast sea of ‘criticism’…. To me, all criticism that is not based on reading authors as they wished to be read – e.g. reading Hooker, Mill for what they have to say – is chimerical. Those who are not interested in an author’s matter can have nothing of value to say about his style or construction.6

However, if you are still not persuaded that the generality of the passages I have quoted is justified by their philosophical virtues, let me quote a third passage, this time from an essay called ‘Christianity and Literature’, first published in 1939. Having said that he doesn’t think there is a distinctively Christian kind of literature, 34 THE GLASS

Lewis suggests that there is, nonetheless, a Christian approach to literature and that this approach is fundamentally at odds with the values inherent in modern literary criticism.

I found a disquieting contrast between the whole circle of ideas used in modern criticism and certain ideas recurrent in the New Testament. Let me say at once that it is hardly a question of logical contradiction between clearly defined concepts. It is too vague for that. It is more a repugnance of atmospheres, a discordance of notes, an incompatibility of temperaments. What are the key-words of modern criticism? Creative, with its opposite derivative; spontaneity, with its opposite convention; freedom, contrasted with rules. Or again, great authors are always ‘breaking fetters’ and ‘bursting bonds’. They have personality, they ‘are themselves’. I do not know whether we often think out the implication of such language into a consistent philosophy; but we certainly have a general picture of bad work flowing from conformity and discipleship, and of good work bursting out from certain centres of explosive force – apparently self-originating force – which we call men of genius.7

This at least has the virtue of suggesting why most modern students don’t like Lewis’s literary criticism. He uses a terminology which their own studies have estranged them from – indeed he attacks, in the early stages of its inception, the critical terminology, emanating from Cambridge during the era of I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis and William Empson, from which their own terminology, and the assumptions built into it, have (however indirectly) been derived.8 And here I come to my main point. Lewis (not just here, but generally) instigates a healthy scepticism about our own cultural presuppositions, by reminding us of just how recently they have become established as normal. His training (extravagantly unusual nowadays) first as a classicist, then as a philosopher and only then as an English don gives him a historical and philosophical perspective of singular breadth and fullness, such as he praised in Robert Ellrodt,9 recommended as an ideal to less experienced scholars,10 and foresaw that ‘the incubus of research’ would stifle.11 When, in 1954, Lewis was appointed the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature in Cambridge, he delivered an inaugural lecture entitled: ‘De Descriptione Temporum’.12 The gist of the lecture was twofold: first, that describing eras other than your own is extremely difficult because, as structural anthropologists and their acolytes never tire of telling us, the mere language we use

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involves assumptions which may distort our view of the past. The second point, however, is less commonly made. It is that, around the end of the seventeenth century, a process of cultural change began which reached its apogee in the Modernist period (around 1920), and which has had the effect of estranging us from the traditions which had previously informed and unified the past. Because by education, temperament and belief, Lewis found himself more in sympathy with the pre- than with the post-Enlightenment era, he dubbed himself ‘Old Western Man’ and suggested we study him as a late surviving example of a species virtually extinct. My own sympathies are akin to Lewis’s and so I have long been reading him, in the spirit of his own recommendation. It is on this ground that I would assert his central importance for our times. Through him, we can re-imagine the values that unite us with the enormous sweep of our cultural heritage from which the last three centuries (and particularly the last three decades) have conspired to estrange us. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The circumstances in which I recommend Lewis’s literary criticism to students are not much like the ones in which I myself first made the encounter with Lewis that led me to his criticism. By the time I read anything by Lewis which would count as literary criticism, I had read a great deal of other writing by him. And it was my response to this other writing which supplied the context in which I subsequently saw and judged his criticism. This is what happened.

Discovering Lewis I first read C. S. Lewis in 1974. I remember distinctly my first experience of delight in his work – a delight, incidentally, inseparable for me from a sense of his literary personality. I had bought, at the end of my very first visit to Oxford (when getting an undergraduate place there was still a doubtful dream) one of Lewis’s best-known works of Christian apologetic, Mere Christianity (1952)13 and was reading it on the train journey back to London. The sensation of delight occurred when I got to the part where Lewis distinguishes between instinct and the moral sense. He puts the case – which I have been using to illustrate the same distinction in discussions with students ever since – of a man walking along a river bank who hears the cry of someone drowning in the river. The man is torn between two impulses: the impulse to give help and the impulse to preserve his own safety. Lewis then asks us to imagine not what we would do if faced with this dilemma, but which of the two suggested actions – saving our own skins, or trying to save someone

36 THE GLASS else’s – we would most approve of. I suppose that most of us, while fearing we might take the selfish rather than the altruistic course, would prefer to think that we might, nonetheless, manage altruistically to take the plunge. And this, Lewis observes, is because we believe it to be better – more in accordance with our intuitions of what is morally right – to give help than to withhold it in the interests of our own safety or convenience.14 The crucial stage in this simple (some, inevitably, would say ‘simplistic’) hypothesis comes when Lewis points out that, in order to judge one of the possible actions morally superior to the other, we must have appealed to a moral criterion independent of both. We have invoked what Lewis calls the Moral Law, a term used by the majority of seventeenth and eighteenth century English philosophers to denote a concept recognisable in nearly every major philosophical tradition known to the West, from Platonism to Confucianism, from Judaism to Islam. The Moral Law can provisionally be defined as an intuitively apprehended system of principles from which we derive our notions of right and wrong. It is the purpose of one of Lewis’s earlier books, The Abolition of Man (1943), to show that the Moral Law, though of course subjectively apprehended, is in itself objective. It is not the product of social conditioning, since we must appeal to it in order to judge that a thing has been socially conditioned.15 The Moral Law cannot be arrived at by deduction. Deduction is a form of reasoning. Yet it is only on the authority of the Moral Law that we believe we should defer to reason. You cannot use reason to prove that reason is good (or indeed to prove that we should defer to something because it is good). So in order to reason about the Moral Law, we have to accept the principle that reason is good. And the source of this belief is the very Moral Law whose existence we are using it to question.16 But this, for the moment, is a digression. Let me return to my bit of autobiography. Just before the river-bank analogy, there is in Mere Christianity, a secondary one involving a piano, a musician and a score.17 I remember my young self being slightly puzzled at that point. But it didn’t matter. A new light had been lit in my intellectual universe. As I grasped the distinction between an instinct (which is morally neutral) and an intuition (which identifies a norm), I remember beaming with conscious delight. It was, I think, an instance of what Wordsworth calls ‘palpable access of knowledge’. Yet the knowledge was of a special kind which, at the same time that it roused my intellect, quenched a spiritual thirst. It was one of the crucial moments in my intellectual development (such as that is). I 37 THE GLASS had experienced a little epiphany and the railway line to Paddington assumed for me, however humbly, a faint resemblance, if not to the Road to Damascus, then at least to the line between Leatherhead and Bookham.18 I imagine that many, perhaps most, of Lewis’s admirers could report a similar experience. And, if this is so, probably it will have occurred to them, as it did to me, that they have lived through a version of a famous rite of passage in Lewis’s own life. I refer, of course, to his discovery of the writings of George Macdonald. He bought, on a station-bookstall at the age of about sixteen, a copy of Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (1858).19 The experience of reading the book that evening is described in Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955):

In one sense the new country was exactly like the old. I met there all that had already charmed me in Malory, Spenser, Morris, and Yeats. But in another sense all was changed. I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness. For the first time the song of the sirens sounded like the voice of my mother or my nurse. . . . That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptised; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer.20

My awareness of this parallel was the keener when, years later, it dawned, because Lewis’s epiphanic discovery of Macdonald, like my own of Lewis himself, was associated with a railway station. (In Lewis’s first academic book, The Allegory of Love [1936], the thought of moving through stations in one’s life is explicitly compared with train-travel).21 Yet while I admit to having wanted, for a good part of the time that separates my adolescent self from the person I am today to emphasise the similarity between Lewis’s experience and my own, I have belatedly come to recognise the importance of acknowledging the differences. The best way for me to approach these is to ask what exactly my delight in reading Lewis initially consisted of, before going on to examine the bearing of that first, intimately personal, experience on my more professional relation to Lewis, in the field of literary criticism and scholarship. I have said how, as I grasped Lewis’s distinction, in Mere Christianity, between amoral instinct and moral intuition, I beamed with delight. But the delight I experienced was, in a certain sense that will be familiar to readers of Lewis, not pure. For it was conscious of itself. I should like to think that, as I looked up from the page, my

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mind had been completely rapt in admiration for Lewis: for his powers of exposition, his gift for analogy, his elegant lucidity and his sheer intellectual gusto. I might, further, have marvelled at the readiness with which those exceptional talents – which might all too easily have been put to the service of a slyly ravening egotism – had instead been subordinated to a nobler purpose: the purpose of discovering, defining and glorifying an important truth. Well, I believe I did somehow sense this. Surely many of us have felt, at times, that Lewis’s literary manner (which I take to be a symbolic expression of his personality) shines with the intensity of his passion for apprehending truth. But I must in honesty say that in that first intimation of all that Lewis was to mean to me, there was another element – something which I am less happy to acknowledge. Yet if my account of Lewis’s importance to us now is to have any value, it is imperative that I acknowledge and interpret this other element of my response.

Cultural Differences That other element in my initial response to Lewis was, as I have hinted already, self-consciousness. I not only took delight in Lewis’s talents and the noble purpose they served; I took delight also in my ability to take such delight. I was delighted that I should have proved capable of being delighted – capable of being this delighted – by a book. Here then is an aspect of my response to Lewis which differentiates it sharply from Lewis’s response to Macdonald. Certainly Lewis, in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, writes of the conceited pleasure he took in his ability to enjoy culturally prestigious works of art while his fellow-schoolboys were stuck at the level of comics like The Gem and The Magnet.22 But this is a different thing. My self-congratulation was not about liking a better sort of book, but about liking any book at all. I took a self-conscious pleasure in my ability to take any sort of pleasure from a book. My own social background (South Welsh working class) clearly has its part to play in any explanation of this. But a more general cultural phenomenon was at work. In the present state of British (and indeed Anglo-American) culture, literature has been displaced from the central position it occupied during Lewis’s youth by the audio-visual media. Public television broadcasts in Britain began hesitantly just before the second World War, which interrupted them. They were resumed in 1946. By 1949 television broadcasts were accessible, however

39 THE GLASS rarely, to 80% of the British population. This fact occasioned a huge shift in sensibility. But the reading habits of those whose sensibilities had been formed before the 1950s – by which time a majority of British households contained a television – were relatively unaffected. For people like myself, however, born during the 1950s, it was a different story. The reading habits and, more broadly, the imaginative experience of the post-war generations has been powerfully conditioned by the advent of television, which remains an obstinately central fact of their lives, no matter how much they question its predominance. I am prompted to these reflections, you will have seen, by the attempt to determine how Lewis’s most profound literary experience differed, in its general character, from my own. But the habit of asking such questions – of seeing the individual’s experience in the context of a general scheme of values and seeing this scheme of values in relation to current cultural preoccupations and emphases – this habit I learned from Lewis himself. Most modern literary theorists will claim to exercise a comparable form of discrimination. Critics such as Terry Eagleton or Stanley Fish will explain their dissatisfactions with other people’s critical methods by interpreting those methods as the embodiment of values they would think wicked, if the concept of wickedness wasn’t itself part of an allegedly discredited ‘ideology’. What the majority of such critics will generally not comment on is the amazing similarity of the terms and methods which they use in order to express their judgements. Go to a bookshop with a section marked ‘Literary Theory’. Take down half a dozen volumes and look at the indexes. You’ll find the same people cited over and over again: Althusser, Barthes, de Man, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and so on. All of these are in some respects notable writers. But the routine citing of their names, in a clanking, mechanistic terminology which levels the distinctions between them, constitutes a new orthodoxy, every bit as ‘oppressive’ and time-bound as the ancient, humanistic one which modern critical theorists seek to displace. In short, anti- traditionalist critics have failed to direct upon themselves the scrutiny which they use in the attempt to discredit the corporate assumptions of others. This happens, I think, not because the critics are routinely disingenuous, but because – if I may make so bold – they are frequently ignorant of the history of philosophical opinions. They know about those forms of philosophy which are consistent with the critical doctrines they wish to advance, but not about the broad 40 THE GLASS historical context from which those forms of philosophy have emerged. Their critical motives – inevitably conditioned, as in all criticism, by their individual psychopathologies – have dictated their philosophical outlook. And they lack, for the most part, the philosophical training that would enable them to detect the ruse. I lack it myself. But Lewis – from whom I hope I’ve learned something of value on this score – was, by the standards of modern literary scholarship, philosophically learned. One sort of evidence of this is his practice of regarding the present itself as a potential ‘period’, to be studied and assessed like any other – notwithstanding the difficulty that we still happen to be part of it.

Self-Consciousness and Self-Surrender Lewis’s capacity for regarding the present as a period, and of thereby managing to transcend some of its characteristic prejudices, is evident throughout his work. But this task of cultural self-scrutiny is one that he expressly proposes for himself in such essays as ‘The Poison of Subjectivism’ (1943)23 and ‘Modern Man and His Categories of Thought’ (1946).24 The thinking developed in these essays culminates in Lewis’s own favourite among his forty or so books, namely, The Abolition of Man (1943). The two central propositions of that book are: (1) We are victims of a Post-Enlightenment disintegration of culture: ‘nearly all moralists before the eighteenth century regarded Reason as the organ of morality’;25 and (2) This loss of confidence in the objectivity of reason has ushered in an era of philosophical relativism. Much influential modern thinking is characterized by the view that all value judgements are subjective except of course the one that tells you so. It may seem from this that Lewis would like us to be intensely self-conscious about our own habits of mind and perpetually thinking about how we think. Yet he is very far from advocating self-consciousness. Sometime in 1924, while teaching philosophy at University College, Oxford, Lewis read Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity (1920) and there encountered a distinction, which he subsequently ‘regarded as an indispensable tool of thought,’26 between ‘enjoyment’ and ‘contemplation’. These, as Lewis explains, were technical terms in Alexander’s thought. ‘Enjoying’ an experience means participating fully in the results of attending to its object.

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‘Contemplating’ the same experience means consciously examining those results. The essential point is that these two forms of attention are mutually exclusive. If you analyse the taste of strawberries you are no longer experiencing it. You are experiencing instead the act of analysis. This principle operates to good and to bad effect, depending on whether the experience which ‘contemplation’ (in Alexander’s sense) interrupts is itself good or bad. If you become over-interested in the emotions produced in you by attention to a loved one, you cease attending to the loved one and cease to experience the emotions. Such a preoccupation would eventually destroy or inhibit the love from which it had originally sprung. If, on the other hand, you want to free yourself from a bad emotion, such as resentment, you can at least interrupt it by contemplating the emotion itself and not its cause. Alexander’s distinction is fundamental to Lewis and recurs in many contexts. An early formulation of it in his critical writings is that in The Personal Heresy (1939):

To see things as the poet sees them, I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn round to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles: in fine, as Professor Alexander would say, I must enjoy him and not contemplate him.27

This is not to say that we should not analyse the experience of reading poetry; but only that, if the analysis is to be of any value, it must be preceded by unselfconscious participation in the mode of experience which the poem represents: what T. S. Eliot called ‘surrender’ to the poem. A great deal of recent criticism is vitiated by its failure on this score; and it seems likely that one motive for engaging in premature theorising about literature is the wish to conceal an incapacity for this self-transcending surrender to the literary text. A more general formulation of what Walter Hooper has called the ‘Law of Inattention’28occurs in the essay, ‘Meditation in a Tool Shed’ (1945):

The savage dances in ecstasy at midnight before Nyonga and feels with every muscle that his dance is helping to bring the new green crops and the spring rain and the babies. The anthropologist, observing that savage, records that he is performing a fertility ritual of the type so-and-so. The girl cries over her broken doll and feels that

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she has lost a real friend; the psychologist says that her nascent maternal instinct has been temporarily lavished on a bit of shaped and coloured wax.29

For all his awareness that it might be turned to good ends, it is clear that Lewis regarded such analysis, when habitually turned upon the self, as little better than a disease. And he saw a clear relation between over-reliance on abstract analysis in impersonal matters and the soul-destroying effects of an exacerbated self-consciousness. Substituting the homelier terms ‘looking along’ and ‘looking at’ for Alexander’s ‘enjoyment’ and ‘contemplation’, he observes, a little further on in the same essay:

You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the ‘true’ or ‘valid’ experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you can hardly ask that question without noticing that for the last fifty years or so everyone has been taking the answer for granted. It has been assumed without discussion that if you want the true account of religion you must go, not to religious people, but to anthropologists; that if you want the true account of sexual love you must go, not to lovers, but to psychologists; that if you want to understand some ‘ideology’ (such as medieval chivalry or the nineteenth-century idea of a ‘gentleman’), you must listen not to those who lived inside it, but to sociologists.

We begin to get, here, some idea of what scientists might call the ‘power’ of Alexander’s distinction as a tool of thought: the range of its applications and the value of the insights it yields. Lewis had been very quick off the mark in noticing the use of the term ‘ideology’ as a means of asserting superiority over people participating in an experience of which the commentator was ignorant, incapable or both. Lewis’s examples, moreover, of the modern academic practice of equating sophistication with the ability to catalogue paradigms, give the outline of an intellectual fiasco of which the post- structuralist era has supplied the details. That all-too-familiar ‘despair of any integrated outlook and attitude’ which John Dewey described as ‘the chief intellectual characteristic of the present age’30 is, at least in part, the corollary, complex in its effects, but simple in its origin, of a habitual desultoriness of mind. We have learnt to reflect on our experiences before we’ve fully had them; and, of course, the very act of classifying experiences from the outside, as well as being inaccurate, entails confusion about which experiences it would be most desirable

43 THE GLASS to participate in, were we ever to renounce our role as spectators. Perhaps we might begin to get a glimpse at this point of the weight of philosophical ballast in the traditional language of criticism. Eliot’s insistence on ‘surrendering’ to a poem, Leavis’s on writing about literature ‘from the inside’ and De Quincey’s on the dangers of ‘desultory reading’ are moral, not merely critical, injunctions. And from this in turn we might glimpse the absolute necessity of fostering in ourselves that attentiveness to a writer’s style which would preclude lumping these three and others of similar persuasion together as discredited ‘humanists’. Lewis urges us by example to be attentive to style and to its philosophical implications. But what he chiefly recommends is attention to the concrete objects of our experience. The passage is instinct with revulsion for a habit of mind which, ultimately, destroys the capacity for worship, for thankful, unselfconscious enjoyment (in both senses) of the world and, with it, one of the human predispositions which, from a Christian point of view, brings us closest to God. That Lewis saw certain kinds of self-consciousness as a disease is made very plain in a letter of 30 November 1954 to Walter Hooper:

We should, I believe, distrust states of mind which turn our attention upon ourselves. Even at our sins we should look no longer than is necessary to know and to repent them; and our virtues or progress (if any) are certainly a dangerous object of contemplation. When the sun is vertically above a man he casts no shadow: similarly when we have come to the Divine meridian our spiritual shadow (that is, our consciousness of self) will vanish. One will thus in a sense be almost nothing: a room to be filled by God and our blessed fellow creatures, who in their turn are rooms we help to fill.31

Alexander’s distinction is thus one which informs equally Lewis’s thinking about poetry and about prayer. Consequently, the benefits of reading his literary criticism do not stop at the study door, but extend to the most important areas of our moral and spiritual life. What, then, might Lewis be advising us to do? He makes us aware of the fact that, as a result of our position in cultural history, we will have acquired some deleterious habits of thinking. If this is so, how are we to change for the better? A cursory reading of Lewis, inattentive to the principle that you can’t simultaneously look at and look through your spectacles, might lead us to suppose that we are being incited to permanent self-watchfulness and cultural suspicion. But, while I think it is indeed Lewis’s aim to alert us to the anti-

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traditionalist, anti-supernaturalist – in a word, anti- foundationalist32 – tendencies of post-Enlightenment Western culture; and while he does encourage us to be vigilant about our own susceptibilities, we should not linger so long over the diagnosis as to lessen the possibility of cure. Of all evils, Lewis regarded exacerbated self-consciousness as one of the worst. It was, after all, a pre-condition of pride. This brings us back to what Lewis called the difference of opinion between Leavis and himself about the nature of man. There are many more people now of Leavis’s persuasion than of Lewis’s. But, as I have tried to indicate, this difference on moral questions occurred within a framework of assumptions and beliefs which, until very recently, was accepted throughout the Western world. The present for Lewis was indeed different from ‘the present’ as critics of our own era perceive it. This is partly because Lewis appears to have been impervious to such culturally influential developments as the audio-visual mass-media and he was more knowledgeable about classical and European literature and philosophy than most literary scholars are nowadays. But these differences of outlook are as nothing by comparison with the rift that separates Lewis from such modern literary critics as Stanley Fish, Jerome McGann, Terry Eagleton and Christopher Norris. For a substantial majority of modern academic critics are profoundly at odds with the tradition which unites (among countless others) Sidney, Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot, Leavis and Lewis himself. The institutional consensus against Christianity and classical culture has been for some decades so strong as to seem beyond challenge. And yet it rests, not on a principled examination of beliefs and attitudes common to a great majority of canonical writers, but, for the most part, on inert acquiescence in an academic orthodoxy whose credentials consist in the volume, rather than the quality, of its publications.

Can Old Western Man Survive? For those of us who share C. S. Lewis’s view of what human nature should be, and of what kind of relationship each of us should have to God, to our fellow men and, indeed, to our own selves, his example as a literary critic, writer in general and (simply) as a human being, is now more than ever necessary. To quote another of those aphorisms by Lewis which have produced

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a minor revolution in my own thinking, ‘All that is not eternally true is eternally out of date.’ And thus by implication, when writing is, like Lewis’s, instinct with the quality which we call ‘truth’, it is permanently capable of ministering to that part of our intellectual and spiritual nature which craves a clearer perception of what is true. I gladly pay my tribute to him, again in a phrase of Wordsworth’s, for his special place among those who have acted as ‘the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart / And soul.’ Yet for all the peculiar intimacy of the relation that exists between Lewis and his admirers, personal and cultural differences remain. I don’t think we can expect to recover an appetite for literature as keen and as catholic as Lewis’s own. Leaving aside the more personal characteristics of his background (Ulster Protestant, middle-class, privately educated), the state of culture that Lewis grew up in was, as I have noted, in some important ways unlike the present one in England, and a fortiori in the USA. Few even of the most devoted readers among us could honestly claim, with him, that the summit of earthly delight would be to read literary epics eight hours a day. Television and film have appropriated many of the narrative and expository functions which, in Lewis’s youth, were performed chiefly by literature. But, while it may be to the audio-visual media that we turn, principally, for information about the modern world, and about the values that characterize the modern world, it is to literary texts that we must turn in order ‘to meet the past where alone the past still lives . . . taken out of the narrowness of [our] own age and class into a more public world.’33 And if there is one critic, more or less of our times, who can enlighten us as to the conditions we must observe if we are to take the past, and the literature of the past, on their own terms, that critic is, I submit, C. S. Lewis. He stands outside the institutional consensus against recognizing the crucial influence on our literature of the moral and philosophical traditions implicit both in Christianity and in classical literature. He is thus uniquely able, in our times, to restore to us a sense of that community with the past which it has become one of the distinctive, proud obsessions of our age to spurn. In reading Lewis’s literary criticism, we are also getting the benefits of his thinking about morality and religion. This is in fact the case with any writer. Literary criticism is merely a channel down which the flow of thinking in general has been directed and in which the general quality of thought in a period is manifest. In writers who don’t appreciate this fact, or who try to go against it, 46 THE GLASS the quality of the thought is generally so poor that we find the criticism dull. It repels our best efforts to give it our attention. Hence Lewis’s remark, justifying his failure to study more closely certain liberal theologians of the late 1950s: ‘It is hard to persevere in a close study when you can work up no prima facie confidence in your teachers.’34 Of course our attention can fail because of deficiencies of knowledge; and it is one function of the critic to make these good. But while critics insist on encouraging their readers to analyse the ideological paradigms of experiences – like the experience of enjoying a poem, say – which they themselves haven’t fully had, opportunities for supplying the knowledge needed for receptive reading are being lost. (This has for so long been the case that, in such an important but limited field as prosody, knowledge which was once commonplace has been so far lost that it will take a little renaissance to restore it). But assuming we are in possession of the relevant kinds of knowledge, we find out what the quality of a work of literature is by trying to give it our full and best attention. This is the argument of Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism. But the same applies to works of criticism. If we are reasonably well-informed and well-intentioned and they do not command our attention, we may with reasonable safety ignore them in favour of something which does. Literary criticism was once more widely read than it is now precisely because it was a medium for expressing, however obliquely, a writer’s whole way of experiencing the world. And if that way was wise, reading criticism could be enlightening across the whole range of human experience. People read it because it was, potentially at least, a source of wisdom. University English departments, despite much good work, have for decades now been publishing criticism in which the idea of wisdom is derided, the very possibility of communicating it spurned and the potential for achieving it correspondingly curbed. No matter how many academics may have succeeded in manufacturing a semblance of interest in particular forms of post-structuralist theory, or in the arid sub- philosophical, sub-literary debates which are their more abiding legacy, the literate public is not persuaded that such interests are genuine or fruitful. Those with a genuine appreciation of Lewis’s literary criticism – of the moral and spiritual wisdom which inhere in its more specifically critical virtues – have a duty to try to communicate their experience. Literary criticism, as Lewis recognized, is not all-important; but it is not without importance, if it can help us to experience the world more fully and perhaps a little more wisely. ______

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1 The present article formed the basis of a lecture given to the Literary Studies Group in Oxford on 7 November 1998. A longer version of the article is scheduled for publication in a C. S. Lewis Special Issue of Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, edited by Dr. Ed. Block, Dept. of English, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53233. E-mail enquiries may be sent to [email protected]. 2 A Preface to Paradise Lost, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1942, p. 70. 3 A Preface to Paradise Lost, pp. 129-30. 4 Spenser’s Cruel Cupid’ (c. 1963); in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1966, p. 164. 5 ‘Edmund Spenser, 1552-99’, 1954; in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, p. 142. 6 Bodleian MS. Eng. Lett, c. 220/5, f. 49. 7 Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper, London, Collins, 1967, pp. 17-18. The term ‘genius’ has been virtually outlawed in academic literary criticism through the influence of post-structuralist relativism. Post- structuralists have commonly asserted that value-judgements have no basis in the human nature (in which they generally claim to disbelieve) and are merely the expression of institutionally sanctioned cultural preferences. Hence they have naturally been reluctant to concede the existence in some writers of a kind of ability so exceptional as to deserve the name of ‘genius’. The proponents of post-structuralism, in most of its endlessly mutating forms, would also tend to frown on a term which, like ‘genius’, confers a spiritual, or quasi-spiritual, character on abilities which they might prefer to think of as materialistically ‘constructed’. For such reasons, the title of Jonathan Bate’s recent book, The Genius of Shakespeare, (1997) – which might seem straightforward enough to non- academics – is, from an academic point of view, polemical. 8 Scholarly dislike of Lewis is candidly expressed by, for instance, Harold Bloom in his Omens of Millennium, London, Fourth Estate, 1996,, pp.-3. It should be added that when Lewis reviewed an early book of Bloom’s he described it as harder than the Epistle to the Romans. 9 ‘. . .he has that wide and balanced erudition which so many literary specialists lack today’ ‘Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser’, 1961; in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, p. 149 10 See his letter to Sister Madleva of 7 June 1934 about reading classical authors rather than modern commentaries on medieval literature. Letters, rev. Walter Hooper, London, Collins, 1988, p. 310. 11 ‘Interim Report’, (1966); in Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper, London, Collins, 1986, pp. 98-9. 12 Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969, pp. 1-14. 13 First delivered as three sets of radio talks, published separately as Broadcast Talks, 1942; Christian Behaviour, 1943; and Beyond Personality, 1944. 14 Mere Christianity, 1952; rpt. London, Collins, 1955, pp. 20-21 (ch. 2).

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15 Lewis’s rejoinder to the claim that everything is socially conditioned is still not widely enough known. On Radio Four’s ‘Today’ programme for 28 August 1998, a speaker tried to dismiss an appeal to common sense with the claim that ‘common sense is socially constructed’. An appropriate rejoinder might have been to ask the speaker how come his authority for saying this was itself exempt from the conditioning which discredited the appeal to common sense. 16 I am aware that some philosophers regard this kind of argument as naive. However, I am not aware of any place where, in simple and intelligible language, the argument is refuted. 17 Mere Christianity, p. 20. 18 See Surprised by Joy, London, Geoffrey Bles, 1955, pp. 168-71 (ch. xi). 19 The Everyman edition that Lewis refers to was first published in 1915. 20 Surprised by Joy, pp. 169, 171. That ‘not unnaturally’ is an example of Lewis’s characteristic humour, at once robust and psychologically shrewd. It saves his theology from the harshness of the dogmatist: he knows when, and how much, to indulge himself. 21 ‘Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations; being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.’ The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1936, p. 1. 22 Surprised by Joy, ch. vii. Interestingly, Lewis here treats the term ‘High- Brow’ as synonymous with ‘Prig’ (p. 104). 23 In Christian Reflections, pp. 98-109. 24 In Present Concerns, pp. 61-6. 25 The Discarded Image, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1964, p. 158. 26 Surprised by Joy, p. 206 (ch. xiv). 27 Quoted in Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, London, HarperCollins, 1996, p. 578. 28 C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, p. 577. 29 First and Second Things, ed. Walter Hooper, London, Collins, 1985, p. 51. 30 Quoted in Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, 1991; rpt. London, Random House, 1991, p. 401. 31 The Business of Heaven, ed. Walter Hooper, London, Collins, 1984, p. 182. 32 Foundationalism consists in the belief that ‘if nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved’; anti-foundationalism, in its vulgar forms at any rate, refuses to accept any belief – such as that reason exists and should be cultivated – as the necessary basis for further thought. It is thus closely akin to nihilism. 33 ‘Is English Doomed?’ (1944), in Present Concerns, p. 29. 34 ‘Fern Seed and Elephants’ (1959), in Fern Seed and Elephants, ed. Walter Hooper, London, Collins, 1975, p. 106.

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From Pillar To Post A response to Dave Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical1

Kevin Mills

pillar 1c a post supporting a structure; 2 a person regarded as a mainstay or support (pillar of the faith. . .) OED.

Evangelicalism, like every other -ism, has a history. If, to those within its fold(s), it seems to have sprung, Athena-like, fully formed from the mind of God, Church history tells a more earthly story of disaffection, schism and factionalisation throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, as classical learning spread, the influence of the Holy Roman Empire weakened, and the nation state began to emerge. The real-world conditions which underlay the formation of evangelical Christianity must alert us to the delusory nature of any claims to wield a divinely sanctioned doctrinal or hermeneutic mastery. Evangelicalism’s truth- claims, ancient and modern, are relativised by the historical contextualisation which links its emergence with political, economic and cultural change. We cannot pretend that contemporary Christianity is any more insulated from social forces than were its antecedent forms. Dave Tomlinson is certainly right to point out that ‘the idea that we can simply pick up the Bible and read it, devoid of any cultural conditioning is, quite frankly, nonsense: a great gulf lies between the world of the Bible and our own world’.2 This much is modern orthodoxy, at least since Marx, Nietzsche and Freud (Paul Ricoeur’s ‘masters of suspicion’) lodged their disturbing questions against the autonomy of the subject. But the question of culture-specific interpretation is more radical than Tomlinson seems to recognise. It is not confined to the scene of reading, but also operates at the scene of writing: recent work by David Clines has drawn attention to the ideological affinities of the biblical writers.3 In the light of this deeper suspicion, Tomlinson’s assessment of evangelical attitudes to belief seems somewhat conservative. How is this conservatism to be justified in the climate of open questioning which he appears to advocate? By what criterion does the post-evangelical limit

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the doubt of an open mind? Tomlinson’s own text raises the question but does not answer it: ‘an open mind’, he says, ‘thrives on doubts but is not governed by them’.4 Is such a mind fully open? It must, in fact, be closed off at some level, by a will to believe which refuses to doubt access to certain key areas, in order to keep it from predominating over faith. In other words, doubt is restricted by an unseen principle which can only be derived from the will. Is the will, in turn, constrained by an ideology which remains as the residue of the evangelical in its post-? While the culture-specific character of all religious formulations is hardly to be doubted, the relationship between a critical, suspicious and self-questioning Christianity and the so-called ‘postmodern’ cannot be presumed. The metanarrative model of postmodernity upon which Tomlinson explicitly draws is vulnerable to certain strong objections. In order to identify the grand narratives upon which the legitimation of knowledge has depended, one has to adopt a metanarrative stance - to propose a meta-grand-narrative (meta-meta-narrative). This demands that we find an Archimedian point outside human discourse from which to observe the breakdown of knowledge into little narratives. If the postmodern condition really prevails then we have no access to any such non-discursive, non-perspectival site. This aporia of postmodernity is evident in Tomlinson’s own text. Early on he offers a brief history of evangelicalism, from its origins in the Reformation to the charismatic renewal of the 1960s and 70s. This historical perspective is in itself a kind of metanarrative – a big story of development argued according to more or less agreed rules of rational debate. In fact, there can be no narrative history at all for postmodernists, since to impose narrative shape on the unassimilable material of history is to participate in the Enlightenment project of making ordered and intelligible that which is multiform, inchoate and fragmentary. Such material can only be legitimated piecemeal, within small, localised discourses, none of which can be grafted onto any other in the interests of completeness. Furthermore, Tomlinson’s history is fraught with epochal statements which are entirely beyond the scope of any postmodern discourse: ‘the frame of reference in which evangelical tradition was formed has now changed drastically’;5 ‘This is an exciting new era which is dawning, an entirely new interpretative situation’.6 Such assertions are more Hegelian than postmodern. They perpetuate an

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historical metanarrative which sifts, edits and contorts a congeries of multiform historical artefacts, data and discursive material into an intelligible, almost Aristotelian whole. Jean-François Lyotard, one of the foremost thinkers of the postmodern, and the architect (after Nietzshe) of the metanarrative model, has warned against just such epochal gestures: ‘Postmodernity is not a new age, it is the rewriting of some features modernity had tried or pretended to gain. . . But such a rewriting . . . was for a long time active in modernity itself.’7 On this account the postmodern is no more than a reactivating of certain aspects of modernity, and a substantiation of what modernism imagined it had produced. If, at times, Tomlinson sounds straightforwardly Hegelian, at other times his language approximates to what Paul Ricoeur has called a ‘post-Hegelian Kantianism.’ I refer particularly to that thoroughly anti-postmodern passage in which truth is posited as an unreached real:

At this point we only have perspectives on ultimate truth and not ultimate truth itself – the rest is rhetoric. When people assume that if you do not have absolute truth you are floating free, they are making one very serious value judgement: that you are not seeking absolute truth.8

Tomlinson’s formulation raises the profound epistemological question of how we can know that it is absolute truth that we are seeking: How do we know that this goal is not just an effect of our language, that it is not actually posited by our own ‘truth-seeking’ discourse? Putting a certain spin on her Nietzschean heritage, the born-again postmodernist would surely claim that there are only perspectives, that there is no transcendent truth to find. This is precisely what Lyotard describes as the postmodern condition. To look for absolute truth is to place oneself firmly within the age of the so-called grand narratives. For postmodern thinkers, knowledge is now so diverse and specialised, so fragmented and riven by rival accounts of the same phenomena, that there can never again be any transcendent unifying truth. To imagine that there can be is to mistake the truth-effect of language for a supra-linguistic reality – the logos of classical thought or of Joannine Christology. Truth, we are told, is posited by our concepts and (simultaneously) deconstructed by their irreducible metaphoricity. This is not an isolated gesture. On several occasions Tomlinson’s argument presumes the reality of concepts to which its avowed 52 THE GLASS

postmodern epistemology denies it access: ‘eternal terms’,9 ‘real holiness’,10 the ‘original intention’ of Jesus’ words,11 the ‘Genesis account’ of creation,12 ‘eternal truth’.13 Such conceptions might be thought of in Kantian terms as postulates which orient interpretation, but from a postmodern point of view they can only be seen as effects of discourse, lacking real substance; traces of a will to truth within religious language, rather than supra-linguistic realities. Given these reservations, I want to ask if the post-evangelical requires the postmodern. It seems to me that evangelicalism collapses under the weight of its own dogma; that it is intrinscially unstable. What I mean by this is that since evangelicalism stresses the importance of studying the Bible, and sets great store by its commitment to truth, it should, by its own logic, recognise that the most intensive study of its privileged text yields the most profound problems with what it believes to be true – the consistency, coherence and reliability of the Bible. Nietzsche’s observation about the relationship between Christianity and science is also apposite: Christian culture gave rise to the scientific inquiry which eventually served to undermine it:

. . . even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti- metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.14

To commit oneself to the truth is to live beyond the means afforded by ideology. It implies an openness to that which is outside of, or even contrary to, dogma. The evangelical commitment involves redefining truth according to the dictates of a narrowly-defined doctrine, in a way which short-circuits enquiry. But the ideological constraints within which the evangelical reader interpets (correctly characterised by Tomlinson as involving a continual shuttling back and forth between literal and figural readings of the text), militate against the avowed belief in the truth-telling capacity of the Bible read as the Word of God. It is simply inconsistent to claim that one’s knowledge of the truth is based on Scripture alone, while reading Scripture with a preformed notion of the truth which it must tell. We do not need postmodernism to point out such problems. These criticisms are already implicit in the Enlightenment thought which gave rise to the nineteenth-century crisis of faith amongst

53 THE GLASS intellectuals in Christian societies. Ultimately, Tomlinson’s approach to the Bible owes more to nineteenth-century romanticist hermeneutics than it does to any putative postmodernist perspective. In seeking to outline a post-evangelical interpretation of the Word of God, Tomlinson evokes but does not remain within, the deconstructive approach. He characterises deconstruction as a discourse which highlights the provisional nature of our theological metaphors. But the description of metaphor with which he works is a version of Ricoeur’s tension theory, and as such is more or less opposed to the deconstructive account.15 The tension theory recognises within the copula of metaphor both assertion and negation. If I say ‘truth is an arrow’, then I tacitly admit that truth is not actually an arrow. If it were then I would not be making a metaphorical assertion, rather I would be making a tautological statement: ‘an arrow is an arrow.’ So the ‘is’ functions simultaneously as an ‘is not’. All statements which partake of the x is y structure of metaphor operate within this tension. So to say ‘God is love,’ for example, is also to say ‘God is not love.’ This, however, is not a deconstructive approach. The latter would involve pointing to the way in which metaphor continually undermines our claims to truth. We are never able to arrive at dependable concepts which subtend the language in which we discuss them because the metaphoricity of our discourse is intractable: every concept is just another metaphor. Unlike the Ricoeurian hermeneutic, this does not serve to alert us to the provisional nature of our conceptuality, but to the strict non- conceptuality of our language. Following up this non-deconstructive approach might have led Tomlinson to a well-founded, non-postmodern, Ricoeurian interpretation. Had he followed the lead of either Derrida or Ricoeur (at least from The Rule of Metaphor on) he might have avoided the defunct romanticist notion of the symbol as conductor of truth with which he rests his enquiry. He refers, in an eminently pre-deconstructionist manner, to the symbol as that which ‘participates directly in the presence and power of that which it symbolises.’ This notion of presence is precisely the target of the deconstructive approach to language and the text. Linguistic symbolism is altogether obsolete once one acknowledges with Derrida that ‘there is no outside to the text.’ A linguistic symbol, on this account, is a mere trope, a textual figure; it is part of the infinite

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surface without depth, that is the text-in-deconstruction. When he comes to advocate a practical hermeneutics, Tomlinson remains within this romanticist understanding, occasionally sounding more like Schleiermacher than Derrida:

. . . we have spent time thinking about the characters in the parable of the prodigal son. As folk have imaginatively ‘indwelt’ the characters it has been fascinating to see the personal insights which have emerged, and the transforming effects which can follow.16

Ricoeur has effectively dismantled the romantic model of interpretation which was developed by Schleiermacher and Dilthey, and which underlies Tomlinson’s notion of imaginative ‘indwelling’. Ricoeur demonstrates its failure to cope with the distanciation which is a condition of textuality, and is the very possibility of the hermeneutic venture.17 Again, Tomlinson contravenes deconstructive wisdom by working with an essentially oral model of interpretation. Following Karl Barth, his language reflects the pre-deconstructionist view of reading and interpretation as the recovery of God’s presence: the word of God is ‘personal and verbal’;18 ‘God speaks through it in a living and dynamic way’;19 ‘the Bible. . . speaks God’s word’.20 Deconstruction is inter alia the denial of the text’s ability to speak. Speaking implies the presence of the speaker; the text is the mark of the author’s absence. The burden of Derrida’s early work and of much of Ricoeur’s work is the wresting away of texts from this fictional presence. A text is not a veil through which a voice speaks, rather it is the absence of any speaking voice. Meaning, then, must take place as an effect of reading rather than of writing. Meaning is no longer that which authors do, but is that which takes place between a text and a reader. It does not allow access to a world beyond the text, but, in Ricoeur’s formulation, it opens up a world ‘in front of the text.’ There could hardly be any model of reading further removed from postmodern sensibilities than the word-event approach of the so-called ‘New Hermeneutic’. Yet it is precisely this model which Tomlinson avows in the paragraph which closes his chapter on the Bible: ‘To sum up, we can say that it is perfectly legitimate to describe the Bible as God’s word provided we recognise that the “word” is an event mediated by the Bible and not the book itself’.21 This is the line taken by the post-Heideggerian Bultmannians,

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Gerhard Ebeling, Ernst Fuchs, Robert Funk et al, who often stressed the importance of attending to Scripture as a primarily oral phenomenon. Its temporal and cultural distance, the fact that it is always already in translation, that it comes to us edited, copied, and endlessly interpreted, all make the Bible the epitome of textuality. To interpret it as an oral phenomenon is thus to fall prey to the illusion of evangelicalism – that the Book is insulated from the vicissitudes of history, to believe that it has no history. To characterise the reading of the Bible as a ‘word-event’ is to attempt to overcome the irreducible distance between text and author, and to assert the mastery of a contingent, reductive and unprovable presence. Tomlinson has, I believe, correctly diagnosed the rise, not of a new era, but of a discernible movement within the modern Church. Deconstruction and the so-called postmodern condition have, in diverse ways, given rise to certain new theological forms, but post- evangelicalism is not one of them. The latter is perhaps best described as a response to evangelicalism’s failure to appreciate the significance of developments which are modern rather than postmodern – chiefly, the critical spirit of the last century. The evangelical church has also failed to recognise its own cultural specificity and has, consequently, clung to defunct doctrinal positions, mistaking them for items of revealed truth. If post-evangelicalism is to be a fruitful category, then its adherents must direct as much critical attention towards their own cultural environment as towards their ecclesiastical heritage. Tomlinson does point out the need to do this, but neglects to do it himself. It should also be noted that despite his injunction to undertake ‘a critique of the world [we] inhabit’,22 such a critique is not possible if postmodernity correctly diagnoses our cognitive situation. If religious discourse is, as postmodernism would make of it, an hermetically sealed language-game or phrase-regime, then it cannot engage critically (or even uncritically!) with any other aspect of our culture. For this reason, while Tomlinson equates the postmodern with the post-critical, I would be more inclined to follow Christopher Norris’s lead in equating it with the un-critical. To imagine that we can simply welcome postmodernism as offering an interpretative escape from the illusions of evangelical dogma, is to neglect the urgent task of subjecting to scrutiny the illusions of postmodernism. More dangerously, it is to misread the postmodern condition in a way which leaves post-evangelicals no less deluded about their relationship to contemporary thought than

56 THE GLASS are the denizens of unreconstructed evangelicalism. Perhaps I can best summarise my response to The Post-Evangelical by inverting Graham Cray’s back-cover blurb: The term ‘postmodern’ is controversial, but the claim that a post-evangelical sensibility has arisen within the contemporary Church is, I believe, beyond question.

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1 Dave Tomlinson, The Post Evangelical, London, SPCK, 1995 (and Tringle, 1997). This paper was read at the November 1997 meeting of the LSG in Oxford. 2 Ibid., p. 9. 3 David Clines, Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. 4 Loc. cit., p. 58. 5 Ibid., p. 26. 6 Ibid., p. 81. 7 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Rewriting Modernity’, in SubStance no. 54 (1987). 8 Loc. cit., p. 102. 9 Ibid., p. 8. 10 Ibid., p. 56. 11 Ibid., p. 62. 12 Ibid., p. 65. 13 Ibid., p. 139. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufman, New York, Vintage books, 1974, V, 344. 15 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in language, trans R. Czerny with K. McLaughlin and J. Costello, SJ, London, RKP, 1978. See especially ‘Study 3 / Metaphor and the Semantics of Discourse’, pp. 65-100. This approach to metaphor is contrasted with Derridean deconstruction in ‘Study 8 / Metaphor and philosophical discourse’, pp. 257-313. 16 Loc. cit., pp. 119-120. 17 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Fort Worth, Texas Christian University Press, 1976. See especially Chapter 4: ‘Explanation and Understanding’, pp.71-88. 18 Loc. cit., p. 110. 19 Ibid., p. 111. 20 Ibid., p. 112. 21 Ibid., p. 122. 22 Ibid., p. 76.

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Reviews

Evangelicals in Theory Another Riposte to Dave Tomlinson, The Post-Evangelical

On the high seas of culture currents are everything. Even conservatives and evangelicals feel their effects eventually. This book offers its readers, evangelical and otherwise, a chart together with an unlikely navigational instrument in the form of a conceptual meccano outfit. Tomlinson argues that there is no objective basis of truth but, disarmingly, disclaims pluralism and relativism. In a post-everything world, language and concept are historically determined, so as Richard Rorty says, objectivity becomes merely the agreement of every one in the room. Traditionally doctrine was expressed in the current cultural form, now there’s a new endeavour of piecing together serviceable fragments. But the Bible is not to be regarded any longer as a source of architectonic ideas, rather as a resource book, like the one that comes with meccano. You can ignore it altogether if you wish, the main thing being to take part in the cultural construction project. Iconoclasm is no bad thing, and there will be something interesting to be made of the resultant broken images. Take the parables, for example. No need to ponder their enigmatic connections with a transcendent Kingdom. Just select one, alter some of the terms, and discomfit the old guard. A Spring Harvest speaker and a liberal bishop (after the Pharisee and the Publican) pray about the scriptures. ‘Virgin birth,’ muses the bishop, ‘water into wine, physical resurrection. I honestly don’t know whether I can believe these things, Lord. In fact I’m not even sure that I believe that you exist as a personal Being, but I’m going to keep on searching.’ Faith, in the sense of assurance or certainty, is deemed a threat, hence the hitching of the post-evangelical project to the bandwagon of postmodernism. From the discourses of an already passé liberalism we are advised to esteem ‘honest doubt’ as befitting ‘man come of age’. The reader soon notices how the choice of stories serves to privilege the movement of an individual out of evangelical belief. Scott Peck’s model of individual development in The Different Drum, 1990, is represented as describing four stages: self-obsessed, conformist, individualist and integrated. Believers and churchgoers are typically at the second stage, and post-evangelicals at the third, one of scepticism. All this serves a polemic purpose, but subtly displaces the traditional

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model, which happens to be common to religion and science, of discovery, as used by Jesus in his reference to buried treasure. From another example, that of Eric Berne, populariser of the Parent, Adult, Child behaviour model, ‘compliant child’ behaviour is dismissed. The instruction given with some emphasis by Jesus to the effect that his disciples have much to learn from the attitude of children is not considered worth noticing. Indeed the author’s aversion to moral imperatives (the preferred term in this relativistic discourse is ‘guidance’) sets up a contrary to the Christian agendum of obedience. The prohibition of sexual immorality is brushed aside as a ‘taboo’. Jesus’ model of discipleship implying a life of obedience and sacrifice is kept out of sight. The rationalist trope of dynamic doubt is repeatedly commended, but if we are perversely childish enough to consult the scriptures, although we find doubt and anguish, in Job or on the cross, the goal is always a resolution beyond it. Similarly the anthropic mishmash of what’s called the holistic is a feeble shadow of the spiritual world which the Bible represents to its readers. So what are the fragments it might be worth making a play with? Symbolism certainly offers possibilities and, as Sandra Schneiders tells us, can be a ‘vehicle for the presence of some one or something that cannot be encountered in any other way’ – a mystifying formulation that leaves plenty of room for faith. But then faith seals off alternative points of view, so there shouln’t be too much of it. A Barthian concept of the Word is advocated, perhaps as a nostalgic gesture towards former glories, and in the same spirit the Apostles’ Creed is glancingly invoked as a handy cache of symbols for the post-evangelical to dip into. In all this the terminus a quo is not the scriptural word so much as a cultural model located in recent histories of ideas. The author seems to believe that modern approaches to history and the natural sciences make a simple belief in the Bible impossible. Ancient dogma, the creed, personal salvation, are kept within the horizon, not as things believed to be true but as iconic fragments adorning the meccano film set. A Christian identity remains, but the question raised about how a Christian differs from a non-Christian never gets an answer. The key is not retrospection, or the rediscovery of roots, rather the post-evangelical way is ‘positive engagement’ with the surrounding culture. That is where inspiration and nourishment lie. Eschewing the ‘threat from certainty’ the post-evangelical picks up the vigorous currents that provide ‘alternatives’, exulting in the differences from the old forms, and perhaps liberatingly aware that 59 THE GLASS

alternatives are heterodoxies by another name. In adventurous freedom the buccaneer who is and is not ex- Christian keeps his powder dry, though his salt is insipid, for it is more blessed to seek than to find. ‘If we accept that God grants his grace to those who seek, even though they know not what they seek, then the whole situation is far more complex,’ and so on. The ‘crude Christian-non-Christian analysis’ of lost and found, world and Kingdom, true and false, is put behind.

Roger Kojecký

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Putting Faith to Work Faith in the Real World: Making your faith work in everyday life by Bill Hybels, Hodder & Stoughton, new edition 1996. First published in Great Britain in 1993 under the title Christians in the Market Place, 213pp., £7.99 0 340 65634 4.

‘What interest, if any, does God have in the marketplace?’ (Interpret the word marketplace in the widest possible sense, to include any place where we make our daily living.) ‘It is in the workplace that most people (Christians included) spend the majority of their time. . . . How should the Christian view his or her work?’ Bill Hybels sets out an agenda that is becoming increasingly important today, as the ethos of the ‘marketplace’ at large moves gradually away from Christian values. His first step is to see human labour not as a necessary evil but as God’s design. He goes on to explore ‘Christ on the jobsite’ and ‘Modern day prophets’. If you had not thought your workplace was much like ancient Nineveh, you will see the life of the prophet Jonah with new eyes. There is a chapter on ‘Handling Anger’. Because the author puts relationships high on the agenda, much of what he says spills over into home and personal areas. That is no bad thing and helps us to bring the whole of our lives under Christ’s control. The author trained as a businessman and is now a pastor at Willow Creek , Barrington, Illinois. He is thus well equipped to bring together the principles of Scripture with interesting practical examples which ring true and stimulate us to see how those principles might be applied to ourselves. He is honest about some of his own learning experiences, which encourages us if we feel we have not got it right the first time. This book would make a good partner with Mark Greene’s Thank God it’s Monday (Scripture Union).

Patricia Deacon

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Notes on Contributors

Patricia Deacon is UCCF Professional Groups Administrator.

Roger Kojecký’s T S Eliot’s Social Criticism published the findings of previous doctoral work at Oxford. He has reviewed recently in the TLS, THES, Common Knowledge (Dallas, OUP) and the CEN, and an article ‘Knowing Good and Evil: T S Eliot and Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was published in 1998 by ANQ (Washington DC, Heldfref). He is among the contributors to the New Dictionary of National Biography and the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (IVP).

Stephen Logan has completed a critical book, The Estrangement of Wordsworth and a collection of poems, Heartlands. His annotated selection from Wordsworth's poetry is published in the Everyman's Poetry series. He is now at work on an introduction to good reading, Making Sense of Poems and an accompanying anthology of criticism, The Critical Tradition. Dr Logan is Director of Studies in English at St. Edmund's College, Cambridge.

Kevin Mills is Research Fellow in Literature and Theology at Westminster College, Oxford. His first book, Justifying Language: Paul and Contemporary Literary Theory, was published by Macmillan in 1995. A book on the interpretation of the Apocalypse is due in spring 1999. He is currently working on reinterpretations of the Apocalypse in Victorian literature.

Jill Seal’s PhD thesis, completed in 1997 for Nottingham University, was entitled ‘Psalms, Sonnets, and Spiritual Songs: Some Traditions and Innovations in English Religious Poetry, c. 1560-1611’.

Michael Ward, a graduate in English of Oxford University, worked as a research assistant on Walter Hooper's, C.S. Lewis, A Companion and Guide, HarperCollins, 1996 . His services as a freelance C. S. Lewis lecturer have been in demand at various universities, including Oxford, Stanford and Wheaton. His present residence is at Lewis's Oxford home, The Kilns, where he is warden for the C.S. Lewis Foundation.

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News & Notes Members and any others who are interested, are invited to join the email list and so receive occasional information about events and activities, on- and off-line, relating to Christianity and literature. Although we do not yet have the benefit of list server technology, the list can also be used for ideas and news, even discussion. Email the editor if you would like to join. For 1999 another autumn LSG seminar is proposed, with an apocalyptic theme as befits the turn of the millennium. Offers of papers are welcomed. In addition, there may be a large format academic conference on the lines of the one organised in March 1998 by John Schad at the University of Loughborough. You will find LSG information on UCCF’s website (see p. 1), where we shall also be posting advance notice of events. Finally, a word of thanks to John Gillespie, for his work as editor on the first ten issues of The Glass.

Subscriptions An annual subscription to the LSG (currently £14, concessions £7) brings to your door any copy of The Glass published during the course of the year. Alternatively, a single copy of The Glass may be ordered for £5 inclusive of UK postage. In either case, Patricia Deacon ([email protected]) will be glad to help.

Become a Contributor Contributions for The Glass should be sent to The Editor, Roger Kojecký, email [email protected] and 10 Dene Road, Northwood, Middlesex HA6 2AA, or via the UCCF office. Contributions should be submitted in both hard and soft copy, the latter as an email attachment, or on a 3.5” diskette. Preferred software formats are MS Word (versions up to 97) or Rich Text Format (RTF).

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