True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  If you look at Mere Christianity, Miracles or The Problem of Pain in Britain now, you find a mismatch between their chosen tools and the present-day audience. In the first place, though argument of some kind is intrinsic to apologetics, their argument is intensely, well, argumentative: knotty, up-front, in-your-face dialectics, expli­citly foregrounding the sequence of the ideas. Lewis’s favourite connectives are a teacherly ‘See it this way’, or ‘Think of it this way’, or even ‘Now look here’, none of which play well in a society that has taken the ‘expressive turn’ and which consequently values the authenticity of emotion over the appearance of logic. (Some of Lewis’s logic now looks distinctly unconvincing as logic, too: more verbal procedure than rigorous thinking.) Then there is the problem of voice, which ‘Now look here’ already suggests. Lewis’s literal speaking voice from the era of the radio talks is preserved in only one archived sample, the BBC having recycled almost all their steel disc recordings during the war, but he is metaphorically audible in every paragraph, and to a modern ear he comes across as painfully clipped and posh, his RP eloquence having been recategorised in the meantime as something class-discredited and authority-stained. Again, it probably supports his greater apologetic reputation in America that there his voice seems to come from somewhere off the social map altogether, rather than from a privileged and disreputable spot on it.

  The irony is that these alienating qualities of his manner turn out to represent Lewis’s rather brilliant solution, for his historical moment, to a problem that remains uncannily fresh. They follow from a diagnosis of what apologetics must do which has not dated at all. When the BBC first approached him with a request for ‘a positive restatement of Christian doctrine in lay language’, he said he thought that would be to begin ‘a stage too far on’. ‘It seems to me that the New Testament, by preaching repentance and forgiveness, always assumes an audience who already believe in the law of nature, and know that they have disobeyed it.’ Unless people saw that Christianity represented an escape from an intelligible trap, a comfort for an intelligible sorrow, forgiveness for an intelligible guilt, there would be no reason for them to pay any attention to ‘doctrine’. Apologetics had to begin earlier, with a recognisable account of what was wrong. He could reckon on far more knowledge in the reader than a present-day apologist, but the emotional ground to be covered remained the same.

  Hence the ruefully cheerful insistence in Mere Christianity that a fallible chap was speaking to other fallible chaps; hence the acuity of its passing portraits of fear, spite, self-deception and other everyday sins. Hence the decision – rather strange to encounter, now – to introduce the Devil before either God or Christ, and to offer his hearers the metaphor of a world under enemy occupation. As they listened to their radios in streets of ruined houses, hearing the nightly bombers overhead, knowing that half of humankind lay that moment in tyrannical darkness, it must have seemed a plausible cosmic picture too. You can quarrel with the theology, and yet applaud the appeal that is being made to experience.

  And he understood that voice was crucial. As Theo Hobson wrote recently in the TLS, ‘Effective defenders of Christianity must sound like ordinary citizens . . . Is this so hard? Yes. For they must also convey the awkward seriousness and strangeness of faith, its otherness.’ It’s true now, and it was true then. An uncanny doubleness of register was required: ordinariness, with a possibility of transfiguration.

  Lewis’s bluff broadcast voice (and its textual equivalent) solved the ordinariness part of the problem, for in 1941 it was easy to tell that this was a senior-common-room voice off-duty, gone down the pub and talking to its friends from within a set of shared reference points that included military service (in the Great War), family life, the pleasures of a pint and a joke. Meanwhile the transfiguration was supplied by Lewis’s extraordinarily sensuous late-Romantic prose, which could be slipped into his ordinary sentences unaffectedly because it was genuinely the natural expression of his sensibility. He had genuinely been led into faith through the beauty of word and story, and he understood it himself through intensely vivid word-pictures that worked for him as apertures opening onto the far country of which faith was the news. As Farrar said in his funeral sermon for Lewis, his mind was at least as pictorial as it was argumentative. Which was both a power and a danger. It was quite easy for Lewis to make some subordinate point of opinion, some secondary metaphor of his own devising, so vivid that it seemed for the reader to shine with as much importance as far more central points of the creed.

  Apologetics, after all, is a literature of the imagination. Its cousins are the memoir, the literary essay, even the travel book. Like the memoir it turns the private tissue of life into convertible coin, like an essay it makes the line of an explanation as concretely felt as it can be, like travel writing it delivers the sensations and incidents of a journey: all to accomplish for a reader on the outside of belief what an insider does not, strictly, need. (Though it’s always a pleasure for a believing reader to see our own half-lit, half-understood experience more perfectly articulated than we could manage ourselves.) The apologist is trying, above all, to convey the body of a truth. For a believer, of course, truth already has a body, in several ways, ‘body’ being the site of one of Christianity’s profound puns. Our truth is a body, the body of the incarnated Lord, and it makes us a body, the body of Christ which is the Church, every time we eat the bread which is also the body of Christ. More routinely, truth also has a body for us as believers in the sense that it is carnally present to us all the time, in bodily habit and bodily movement; in the lived shapes of a life. But if you’re on the outside, this kind of body is exactly what belief has not got. Apologetics is in the business of trying to create for the reader of goodwill a kind of temporary, virtual body for faith; one they can borrow and try out, so that they may have a concrete inkling of what it might be like to assent, long before they do.

  Lewis was superlatively good at this, leaving decades’ worth of readers with the sense of having dwelled, on terms of almost uncanny intimacy, within the sense-world of Lewis’s own faith. But he did it at some cost to himself. To perform this truth, to successfully stage the appearance of truth’s true body, required the apologetic equivalent of the chip of ice in the heart needed for other kinds of imaginative literature. Like Charles Dickens weeping over the death of Jo the crossing sweeper as he wrote Bleak House, and yet noting in the daybook for that day’s work ‘Jo: kill him’, it calls for you to manipulate expertly what at the same time you genuinely feel. Lewis was much too spiritually self-aware not to grow uneasy. ‘I have found’, he told a group of priests in Wales in 1944,

  that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of the Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as the one that I have just defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself; as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar . . .

  It has been a truism about Lewis for a while now – probably since A.N. Wilson’s biography came out – that the turn towards Narnia in his later life was driven by apologetics having, in some way or other, gone wrong for him. The public defeat of his argument in Miracles by Elizabeth Anscombe in 1947 usually figures in the story. But Alan Jacobs has recently argued15 that he may have fled to fiction because apologetics had gone so right for him; because he was feeling, with troubling intensity, the dangerous weight apologetics laid on his imagination. In fiction, even allegorical fiction, the layer of story and the layer of the truth it stands for are further apart. In Narnia, he could let imagination more straightforwardly be the power that makes things up. In Narnia, a lion in a snowy wood could stand for truth, without truth in turn depending on his successful storytelling.

  (2013)

  WHAT CAN SCIENCE FICTION TELL US ABOUT GOD?

  Speaking as a reader of SF who also happens to be a church-going believer – not much, really.

  Part of the
reason for this is cultural. In theory, speculative fiction’s power to reinvent the world is unlimited: every category can be reconfigured, every familiarity subverted, any conceivable strangeness brought within the household of story. In practice – though enough of that power gleams and lingers to keep us reading, and hoping, and periodically being gorgeously surprised – the genre is as shaped by a particular history as any other school of writing, and it’s got, if not walls round the edges, then very definite centres of imaginative gravity. Its roots in Britain are in the ‘scientific romance’ as H.G. Wells invented it. Its roots in the US are in pulp magazine publishing for an audience of engineers and technicians. The two strands had different defaults in terms of mood, with the British branch doing catastrophe and visions of entropic futility, and the American one a lot more chipper and technology-friendly. But both of them come out of the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century cultural buzz around science; out of para-science, scientism, the zone of cultural meaning and implication and metaphor science always seems to be generating, and in which, from then until now, it tends to look a great deal more certain than it does from within the actual practice of science itself that the enterprise is inherently anti-religious. That the way to understand the world is as a contest between faith and science, with SF naturally serving as reason’s excitable little friend. So SF was watermarked from the beginning by the assumption that its cherished values are anti-religious, or at least un-religious, ones. There’s a hint of the South Place Ethical Society, a whisper of the Rationalist Press Association, in the genre’s DNA from the start.

  And recently, it’s been reinforced by the polarising effects of America’s culture wars, which have successfully scared many writers into seeing religion as something they must be hostile to, if they wish to be friends to scepticism, generosity, sexual freedom, tolerance, irony, individual autonomy, and even storytelling as such. The sense of needing to pick a side produces gyrations like this, as Ursula Le Guin reviews a Salman Rushdie novel in the Guardian in 2005:

  Science and literary fantasy would seem to be intellectually incompatible, yet both describe the world; the imagination functions actively in both modes, seeking meaning, and wins intellectual consent through strict attention to detail and coherence of thought, whether one is describing a beetle or an enchantress. Religion, which prescribes and proscribes, is irreconcilable with both of them, and since it demands belief, must shun their common ground, imagination.

  I revere Le Guin, but this is silly. It cordons off religion as the one domain of the human imagination which is not allowed to be called ‘imagination’, or to resemble the rest of imagination: it may not have any content except authoritarian commanding and forbidding. (And, meanwhile, the legitimate rest of imagination is stuck with mimicking scientific rigour, as if imaginative rigour didn’t work in rather different ways.)

  It’s silly; but Ursula Le Guin isn’t, and neither are most of the writers who feel obliged to maintain it as a line beyond which their sympathy and their curiosity stop, either in aid of the original American culture-clash, or in support of the strange, pale, out-of-toner photocopy of it which now seems to be overlaid on things over here too. So the effect is not that their work never engages with religion as a deep human pattern of meaning-seeking. It’s that it tends to engage with it only on condition that the religion be an invented one, or at any rate, that it not be recognisable as monotheism. Le Guin herself has written with profound anthropological and poetic understanding about how ritual works, how devotion works, how wonder gets channelled in custom, how brutal and hopeful versions of the same belief can co-exist. But only when looking at the adapted Taoism of Earthsea, the story-religion of The Telling, the slave cults and warrior cults of Four Ways to Forgiveness. Bring back the familiar signifiers of turbans, mitres and yarmulkes, and suddenly we’re in the territory of Sheri S. Tepper’s Grass, where worshipping one God necessarily implies a nasty, closed-minded, patriarchal sham. Or we’re in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which devotes hundreds of pages to how cool medieval monasteries are, and must therefore reassure us at frequent intervals that theism is shtoopid. She was cataloguing the clichés of fantasy, not of SF, but Diana Wynne Jones’s Tough Guide to Fantasyland gets both genres bang to rights when she points out that priests of one male God are almost invariably power-crazed and malignant. If you want to give religion friendly coverage, you go for plural female deities, feisty and sex-positive, or for an attractively gender-balanced triad.

  Which is not to say that SF has never had interesting or mind-expanding things to say about organised religion. Serious Catholics like Gene Wolfe or the late Walter M. Miller brought with them into their SF a believer’s confident readiness to play with what they confidently possessed. The Book of the New Sun is a darkly defamiliarised game with the fundamental Christian story; Miller’s Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman is, even more than his more famous A Canticle for Leibowitz, a song of praise for prayer in a mangled world. Then there’s Kim Stanley Robinson’s intimate imagining of Islamic mysticism in The Years of Rice and Salt – a Buddhist feeling his way into someone else’s nirvana. Or China Miéville demonstrating, in Kraken and Embassytown, that, to a good Marxist, ‘the opium of the people’ can be the beginning of intelligent sympathy, rather than a dismissal. Or, to be a bit provocative, Ken MacLeod, officially a red-hot atheist, whose The Night Sessions, about a Calvinist artificial intelligence, is full of theological wit, and even a delicate regret for the impossibility of belief. A fine and godly discourse, Elder MacLeod, in the post-Presbyterian mode.

  But it’s not much of a haul, as I say. And maybe this is a good thing, because from a believer’s point of view, there’s another reason, fundamental to SF’s modus operandi, why there’d be more loss than gain if SF did try to explore ‘God’. It’s a genre which, famously, does story rather than metaphor. It’s a genre which explores an idea by solidifying it; by running a thought-experiment in narrative. What we mean when we say that SF can (in theory) represent anything – that it’s a kind of Turing Machine of storytelling – is that it can project any idea as an actuality on the story-plane, the screen of imagination. So, yes, it is perfectly possible to write SF in which (for instance) the objects of Christian belief become tangibly, unambiguously there in the story, exactly as present as the rest of the stuff it represents. And it has been done, in C.S. Lewis’s Cosmic trilogy: angels, the Devil, a literal Eden relocated to Venus, even a fantasmagorical glimpse of God himself. But the result is a reduction, not an enhancement. It’s a demotion of a God who (says faith) precedes and exceeds the universe into a being with the same status as an imaginary coffee table, or starship, or character. If you’re a believer, God is not a thought experiment requiring a special sub-creation to be tried out in. He’s an actual, er, actuality, already, embedded in a necessary and true story about guilt, hope and liberty.

  I don’t want C.S. Lewis doing his resourceful best to render Him as a fabulous special effect. Speaking as a Christian, I’d rather be reading about Charlie Stross’s guy from the Laundry who’s waiting for Cthulhu with his shotgun.

  (2011)

  UNEASY IN IRAN

  Last year, visiting Iran to write an article for a travel magazine, I went to see the tomb of the late Ruhollah Musavi of Khomein, expert in the law of contract, practitioner of the erfan school of contemplative prayer, founder of the Islamic Republic. Khomeini’s shrine is surrounded by the acres of parking spaces you find in the West around a Disney attraction. And there I met a giant pulling a small trolley. He was a conscript soldier about 7 feet tall, perhaps a little slow in the head, set to guard the car park. The trolley contained his bedroll. We took his picture, and in return he showed us a little album of colour photos he kept tucked away. Most of them were pictures of the shrine’s gold domes from various angles, at various times of day, but the last one showed the ayatollah sitting on a sofa blessing a little girl in a party frock, his hand resting on her head. Both of them were smiling. I assumed
that this must be a memento of a treasured encounter between Khomeini and a member of the soldier’s family, but no: it was Khomeini with his own granddaughter, and the soldier was carrying it because for him it represented a connection with the sanctity of the man whose grave he was watching over. In short, it was a relic. I had found it hard to recognise it as one because it was a slightly dog-eared print on Kodachrome, rather than an object marked out as holy by its great age, or by a container of precious metal, or by its location in a more obvious sanctuary than the pocket of a khaki jacket.

  Khomeini was not a saint to me. I am not a Shi’ite Muslim, but an Anglican. Between me and the soldier lay the perceptual gulf which follows from the difference between Islamic and Christian histories of the world. For Christians, the possibility of using the power of the state to enforce righteousness is a temptation, and one often succumbed to over 2,000 years, but is always held in tension with the antinomian message of forgiveness at the religion’s core. The structures of law Christians have built have constantly been challenged by their own belief in an ultimate grace greater than law. For Muslims, on the other hand, God and the law fit together exactly. The second is the earthly representation of the first’s perfection. Muslims would find it unimaginable for God to behave as Jesus described Him doing in the parable of the day labourers, capriciously and inequitably giving the same reward to people who have deserved different ones. It is not just a possibility, but a duty, for Muslims to build the community of laws that will be pleasing to God. And so, to the soldier at the shrine, Khomeini was a blessed leader of the struggle for righteousness; while I, on my side of the gulf, did not think that God’s intentions in history were of the kind that could be mirrored by a government, and I certainly could not believe that a good God would have endorsed the revolutionary cruelties of Khomeini’s theocracy, and its intolerance, and its brutally expedient persecution of a British citizen for writing a novel.