Alister McGrath: C. S. Lewis - A Life (2013)

  1. CHILDHOOD: C. S. Lewis (1898-1963); author, apologist, professor; struggle to maintain academic credibility in light of popular success; reluctant: only spoke out because those who should have were silent/unintelligent; eccentric: displaced from center (eg relationship with Mrs. Moore), operating from margins; Irish (but consciously rejecting patriotism); no gift in maths; home filled with books (none forbidden); image of door significant; quest for Joy; father’s emotional neglect after death of mother
  2. EDUCATION: hatred for England; aversion to English schools; athleticism: devalued intellectual achievements; became atheist; natural clumsiness; problem with arrogance
  3. WAR: end of Great War; guilt for surviving while others died; boarding school more unpleasant than war (possible reason: couldn’t handle the trauma - “treaty with reality”); interest in sadomasochism; close relationship with cadet Paddy Moore -> and his 45-year old mother, Mrs. Moore (same age as his mother when she died); pact to look after deceased’s remaining parent; tries to conceal relationship from father; father failed to say farewell to Lewis before being deployed -> relationship completely ruptured; went to war at age 19; spun cocoon around himself to protect his thoughts from the horrors of reality; books: links to the past, balm for the present; both reading & writing; wounded by German shell -> return to England; closest friend (Arthur Greeves) came out as homosexual to him -> explore boundaries of intimacy, affection within male relationships (The Four Loves); Mrs. Moore: fusion of caring mother & exciting lover
  4. OXFORD: classical languages & literature: “immersion in the civilization and thought of the ancient world”; gateway to wisdom (not just accumulation of knowledge) to ensure England’s survival & prosperity; habitual liar to his father; chronological snobbery: “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited”; good results but no job; frustrated poet obliged to teach philosophy to earn a living; fellowship at Magdalen College
  5. MAGDALEN: richest college; greetings at the admission: “I wish you joy”; fellows encouraged to share meals to develop corporate identity; lots of alcohol; harsh & demanding tutor -> mellowed later; father died without the company of his sons; buy house together with brother and Mrs Moore; friendship with Tolkien; Kolbítar (coal-biters): Norsemen who refused to join the hunt/battle and enjoy the fire at home instead; needed someone to overcome perfectionism (Leaf by Niggle -> self-parody);
  6. CHRISTIANITY: celebrity author (Waugh) became Catholic; Lewis unknown until 1940 (The Problem of Pain); conversion of literary scholars because of their literary interest (without God author cannot give characters reality and depth, modernist writers too thin, too simple); Pascal: no point in persuasion, enough to make people wish it was true -> rich vision of the world, mind will follow intuitions; search for unifying vision of reality; moves to faith in God -> chessboard analogy, no individual importance but cumulative weight; not deduction but crystallization; “It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.” (Henri Poincaré); God of the philosophers vs God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Pascal); sign of belief in God: attendance at chapel; result of theistic conversion: break with narcissistic introspection -> stopped writing a diary from 1927; actual conversion might have happened in 1930 (not in 1929 as Lewis himself thought); Tolkien helped to pass from believing in God to believing in Christ (Christianity = true myth, here myth is not fairy tale but story that conveys fundamental things, and tell us about the deeper structure of things, offers fragments of truth but not fully); Tolkien helped Lewis to reconnect worlds of reason and imagination; Lewis not reliable with dates; public confession on the same day as his brother Warnie (Christmas Day, 1931); Christianity: resolved intellectual/imaginative riddles, gave deeper order on chaotic world grounded in God’s nature, brought motivation and theoretical underpinning of his own literary creations; not a typical conversion
  7. LITERATURE: stability; Warnie typed family letters (11 volume) <-> Lewis didn’t (natural clumsiness & mechanical sounds took away creativity); tutoring: critical questioning (Socratic method), not to waste time, impatience with lazy students; his job: not to impart knowledge but enable him to develop skills to uncover knowledge himself; never imposed Christianity on the argument; untidy: sign of indifference to external matters -> love of deeper matters; very good memory; he could explain complex ideas because he had explained them to himself first; read a lot and remembered them <-> neglected reading daily newspapers -> ignorant of current matters; lectures: informative & inspiring, without notes; attracted crowds; no time for questions; appreciation for ideas of past, no “chronological snobbery”; quest for deeper view of reality (philosophia perennial): “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date”; The Pilgrim’s Regress: relationship between reason & imagination (North vs South); “argument from desire” (~ Pascal’s God shaped void in human soul or chair awaiting guest -> nature makes nothing in vain -> the One who sits on the chair must exist); desire for the island -> in reality desire for the Landlord; Christian faith allows us to see things as they really are; Inklings: group of friends with shared interest; no formal membership; focus on Christianity and literature; no female members (Lewis: masculine friendships essentially different than feminine friendships -> this might have been deliberate); Tolkien did not read well -> university lectures poorly attended; two keys figures: Lewis & Tolkien; risk of becoming an inner ring; literature: reading of old books gives critical distance from your own time; sooner or later the present will become past; analogy: English tourist abroad (acts like tourist or seeing the country through the eyes of the inhabitants) -> reading literature helps see things differently, makes us open to change; debate: poetry is objective vs subjective; poet: not someone to look at but someone to look through;
  8. WARTIME APOLOGIST: WWII; many changes; Lewis: literary midwife to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; Tolkien delighted by details but overwhelmed by broad narrative, became trapped in his own complex world, unable to complete it because of his anxieties about coherence and consistency; The Problem of Pain (1940): first book on apologetics; fear of popularity (“orgy of egoism”); spiritual guidance from Father Walter Adams (emphasis on “three patiences”: with God, with neighbor, with self); BBC wartime broadcast talks: “voice of faith”; looking for layman; learning the language of the audience; “I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test ot having really understood one’s own meaning.”;
  9. INTERNATIONAL FAME: The Screwtape Letters: possible reference to increasingly despotic Mrs. Moore; international fame but alienated himself from academic circles (book title page declared himself to be fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford); Mere Christianity: edited version of wartime talks; phrase from Richard Baxter; grand Christian vision of reality which transcends denominational differences; Dorothy L. Sayers (also lay Anglican): similar vision (at first); Lewis’ approach: inferential, not deductive; builds on human experience: moral law & longing -> argument from desire: every natural desire has a corresponding object; “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”); “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.”; trilemma: Christ is either lunatic, diabolical figure or Son of God -> weak argument, presupposes citizen l Christian framework (alternative: Jesus wasn’t mad or bad but nevertheless he was wrong about his identity); social & moral assumptions (eg about sex & marriage) make it very outdated to unbelievers after the rapid changes in the 1960s; difference between Christian & state marriage -> too liberal to Tolkien -> widening gulf; Ransom Trilogy: cultural background: science = prophet & savior of humanity; science fiction used to promote atheism & materialism -> could also be used to critique these; opposed to vivisection based on theological grounds (if cruelty to animals is justified, cruelty to humans - especially inferior ones - are also justified);
  10. POSTWAR TENSIONS: front cover of Time magazine (1947); Lewis ill equipped (organizationally & temperamentally) to deal with popularity; private life began to come into public; many letters from fans & critics demanding answers from him; irritation from professional theologians; fame made him more obvious target for those who disliked his religious beliefs; academic colleagues believed he sold out to popular culture to became famous (sold his academic birthright for a populist pottage) -> period of rejection, misfortune, personal struggle (9 years); Charles Williams (literary & spiritual guide) died; series of academic rejections; prophet without honor in his own city & university; students needed supervision <-> Lewis didn’t like it; Mrs Moore battling with dementia, Warnie with alcohol -> dysfunctional household; no longer close with Tolkien (despite living and working in the same city); Mrs Moore died in influenza pandemic; hostility at Oxford: Lewis’ popular works distracted him from academic research -> pressure to publish -> exhaustion; Inklings came to an end; intellectual authority challenged by rising young philosophical star, Elizabeth Anscombe who challenged his argument against naturalism (not all natural causes are irrational but simply non-rational) -> some suggest this was a tipping point in Lewis abandoning rational argument and turn to fictional work (but this is not warranted); role of apologist: tiring; despair about ability to write; breakdown in health; failed as apologist to people close to him (Mrs Moore); moved away from frontal apologetics to fiction -> Narnia
  11. NARNIA: not imaginary (false fiction) but imaginative (trying to grasp greater Reality); Lewis didn’t create Narnia, it was kindled by God; no contact with children; wrote very fast (sign of genius vs shallowness); Tolkien: lack of strong & consistent background story (why is Father Christmas in the story?) & worry about Lewis borrowing some of his own ideas without giving due acknowledgement; name: Narni in Umbria (Italy); illustrator: Pauline Baynes (referred by Tolkien, didn’t really like her but turned out to be a great choice); prominent role of animals (<-> vivisection, critique of Darwinism); human dignity demands that humans show respect to animals; not allegory but supposal (trying to see things differently - how would God become incarnate in a world like Narnia?); Lord of the Rings: goal to find & destroy master ring <-> Narnia: find master story that makes sense of all other stories (-> which narrative is true?); every individual story is part of a greater narrative; imaginative retelling of Christian grand narrative;
  12. NARNIA 2: Aslan: evokes awe and wonder; “numinous”: both evoking fear (mysterium tremendum) and attraction (mysterium fascinans); core theme: Aslan is the heart’s desire; theories: secondary to what they represent (eg atonement); origin in medieval drama (ransom theory: Satan has rights over humanity); seven books ~ seven planets; current world: shadowlands; Platonism; tend to privilege male agents (but not compared to 1940s);
  13. CAMBRIDGE: isolated in Oxford; unbearable workload after the war; offer from Cambridge (ideologically hostile to Lewis’ thoughts, e.g. “critical theory”, texts = objects to analyze not to enjoy); Renaissance: never happened, myth constructed by advocates; periods are not like dates: they are retrospective constructions; “In at least some important respects, Lewis is entirely correct. Recent studies of the European Renaissance have shown that its “narrative of identity” was deliberately constructed to emphasise its agenda. Renaissance writers coined the term “the Middle Ages” to denote and to denigrate what they regarded as being a drab and degenerate period between the glories of classical culture and their rebirth and renewal during the Renaissance. Lewis rightly pointed out that history simply could not be allowed to be shaped by such polemical agendas, which sought to minimise the continuity between medieval and Renaissance culture. “The barrier between those two ages has been greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was not largely a figment of Humanist propaganda.”“; topic might indicate personal transformation; moving from apologist against non-Christians to explore faith for believers; wished to be seen as “intellectual dinosaur” ready to challenge the “cultural snobbery” of his day; marriage to Helen Joy Davidman Gresham who came from the US to seduce him; Lewis became “an American divorcée’s sugar daddy”; only civil not church marriage (act of chivalrous generosity); became a Trojan horse; Davidman pressed for her rights; her sudden illness changed Lewis attitude from friendship to love; wanted church marriage but remarrying was not allowed; but still could find a way; lack of transparency; relationship disapproved by Tolkien;
  14. DEATH: Davidman died in cancer; grieving; A Grief Observed: uncensored feelings; published under pseudonym; rarely discussed private emotions; exposing fragility of purely rational faith (<-> cool, logical approach of The Problem of Pain); not testing of God but testing of Lewis; declining health; heart attack, coma; live in fear of tax demands (Internal Revenue heavily taxed revenues from royalties retrospectively); died 1 hour before JFK was shot -> media reports overshadowed his death;
  15. AFTERLIFE: expected to be forgotten within 5 years after his death; outsider to Evangelicals: regarded with suspicion (violated social norms); little association with British evangelicals; not discredited but simply sidelined (new cultural mood rejecting religion); Narnia series overshadowed by success of The Lord of the Rings (“one ring to rule them all” -> powerful image, atom bomb); surprising resurgence of interest (previously unpublished work began to appear, several societies formed to preserve his memory, biographies published, indirect benefit from interest in Tolkien); erosion of denominationalism -> “mere Christianity” spoke powerfully to this trend; outsider in US -> unifying figure; “patron saint” of American evangelicalism; vision of Christian faith: intellectually robust, imaginatively compelling, ethically fertile; cultural transition from modernism to postmodernism made Lewis even more attractive (<-> John Stott’s Basic Christianity lacked any imagination and emotion); enriches & extends faith without diluting it; one of finest authors of fantasy literature; fantasy can be used to champion/subvert secular humanism/Christianity; for Lewis, the only reliable critic of a writer’s value is time; “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about” (Oscar Wilde)