C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner
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C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner
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C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner
Edited by
Michael Ward
and
Peter S. Williams
L
The Lutterworth Press
The Lutterworth Press
P.O. Box 60
Cambridge
CB1 2NT
United Kingdom
www.lutterworth.com
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ISBN: 978 0 7188 9485 6
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A record is available from the British Library
First published by The Lutterworth Press, 2017
Copyright © Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2016
Published by arrangement
with Cascade Books
Poems by CS Lewis © copyright by CS Lewis Pte Ltd.
Reproduced with permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this edition may be reproduced, stored electronically or in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without prior written permission from the
Publisher (permissions@lutterworth.com).
Contents
Foreword—Vernon White | vii
Preface—Peter S. Williams | xi
Introduction—Michael Ward | xv
Part One—Symposium at St. Margaret’s, Westminster
1. Alister McGrath—Telling the Truth through Rational Argument | 3
2. Malcolm Guite—Telling the Truth through Imaginative Fiction | 15
3. Panel Discussion—What Can Twenty-First Century Apologetics Learn from C. S. Lewis? | 25
Part Two—Memorial Service at Westminster Abbey
4. Order of Service—including the Address by Rowan Williams | 53
Part Three—Reflections on the Westminster Commemorations
5. Paul Mealor—Reflections on Composing Love’s As Warm As Tears | 85
6. Acton Bell—Mystery Worshipper: Westminster Abbey | 89
7. Jeanette Sears—C. S. Lewis’s Memorial Service | 96
8. Holly Ordway—Stonecrop: Lewis Takes His Place in Poets’ Corner | 99
9. Sarah Clarkson—The Best Tale Lewis Ever Told | 102
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Part Four—Cambridge Conference
10. Rowan Williams—Rhetoric, Doctrine, and the Ethics of Language: C. S. Lewis on Paradise Lost | 111
11. Ad Putter—C. S. Lewis on Allegory | 125
12. Helen Cooper—C. S. Lewis as Medievalist | 139
13. Malcolm Guite— The Abolition of Man: From Literary Criticism to Prophetic Resistance | 152
14. Stephen Logan—The Soul of C. S. Lewis | 166
15. Stephen Prickett—“It Makes No Difference”: Lewis’s Criticism, Fiction and Theology | 186
Part Five—Oxford Addresses
16. William Lane Craig—God and the Platonic Host | 201
17. Walter Hooper—Remembering C. S. Lewis | 217
Recommended Resources | 229
Bibliography | 235
Foreword
There was never any real doubt that C. S. Lewis would be widely remembered and honoured on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. Far from indicating that his influence is waning, the passage of time has shown it to be increasing. Why is this? This collection of lectures, essays, talks, reflections, and dialogues about Lewis helps provide an answer. As a literary critic, a Christian apologist, and a creative writer, Lewis had an unerring instinct for the heart of matters that will continue to matter: the matter of language and reality; the matter of God; the matter of the meaning of life itself. Moreover, his arrows somehow hit the centre of their targets convincingly without compromising their complexity; he managed focus without being one-dimensional. His celebrated distillation of theology and religion into “mere”
Christianity is characteristic. He regularly treated important and complex issues by translating them into a memorable essence, but without reductionism or crass dumbing down. This might sound like a merely rhetorical device. It was not. Lewis believed wholly and sincerely in the substance of what he was trying to communicate, not just the form of it. Small wonder his thought continues to inspire, and to be honoured. Aspects of it may date: the heart and spirit of it never will.
But was it also inevitable that Lewis should be honoured specifically in Westminster Abbey? Clearly not. All sorts of contingencies are at play here. The Abbey is a place for British national remembrance of many kinds: it honours statesmen and social reformers, monarchs and military leaders, scientists and secret service heroes, engineers and explorers, not just literary and religious figures. So there is no space for every possible candidate. Deci-sions will depend on a variety of judgements and priorities.
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Yet in the end Lewis’s place amongst all these others now seems utterly obvious, entirely right. The oft-quoted final words of one of his essays, used as the inscription on his memorial stone, are an elegant expression of why this is so: “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. ”1 In other words, a robust and authentic Christian faith is not an exclusive vision. It is an all-embracing one. Lewis’s vision was never narrowly ecclesiastical but of a God who is truly God precisely because God is of the whole world, not just of the church or of religion. As such he surely sits well with all that social, scientific, political, artistic effort represented in those other Abbey memorials.
To be sure, Lewis had sharp words and warnings to offer about the way in which this “worldly” human effort is sometimes interpreted in a reduc-tionist or self-referential way (not least in his warnings about scientism).
But he never retreated from full-blooded endorsement of the world per se, and everything in it, both natural and human. And that is because, for Lewis, its concrete reality (and value) is inseparable from the even more concrete reality of God as its ultimate source. As he wrote elsewhere: “it will be agreed that, however they came there, concrete, individual, determinate things do now exist: things like flamingos, German generals, lovers, sandwiches, pineapples, comets and kangaroos, . . . a torrent of opaque actualities . . . God is precisely the source of this torrent.”2 It was a vision that Lewis pursued not only in explicit apologetic but also in his fictional narratives, which celebrated the wider world of nature; in his science fiction, which encompassed the whole cosmos; in his repeated recognition of all people of good faith and character (whether or not Christian); and in his willingness to broadcast this “mere” Christianity to the whole nation in time of war. So it is that the memorial’s setting in Westminster Abbey is indeed so fitting.
For the Abbey too, founded as the Monarch’s church to serve nation and wider world, is bound to this vision—one that relates God to that wider world, not just to religious or ecclesiastical life.
It is also fitting because of the transcendent frame of the vision. As a full-blooded theist, a
nd (in some respects) a Platonist, Lewis equally affirmed another world, not just this one. There is no contradiction here.
The crude caricatures of both Christianity and Platonism, which chide them for downgrading this world by their belief in another, are just that—
crude caricatures. It is because of the transcendent source and goal of this world, not in spite of it, that the world matters as much as it does. This vital 1. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” Paper read to the Oxford Socratic Club in 1944.
Reprinted in C. S. Lewis. Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley Walmsley.
2. Lewis, Miracles, 90, emphasis mine.
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connection between this world and another appears throughout Lewis’s writing like Blake’s golden thread, woven within it all. It is the same thread that gives “joy”—as he writes about it in Surprised by Joy and “The Weight of Glory”—both its poignant pull and its elusiveness. It appears most memorably in The Great Divorce and in The Last Battle; it becomes gossamer thin in A Grief Observed; but it is never entirely broken. So too in the Abbey. There too transcendence is embodied inescapably in its Gothic architecture, and gestured daily through its liturgies; there too it can be stretched and strained by the many memorials to bitter experience; but there too, like the paschal candle in its most sombre vigils, it is never finally extinguished.
There are other places where Lewis is actively honoured. Most notably there is Oxford, the provenance of several contributions to this collection, where the University’s C. S. Lewis Society has been in continuous existence since 1982.3 There is Cambridge, where students will benefit from a scholarship supported by proceeds from the memorial service.4 Likewise there is the work on Lewis carried out by a number of distinguished U.S. institutions.5 So, when over six hundred people came to a day’s symposium at the Abbey, and many more joined us to dedicate the memorial itself, we were adding to a worldwide tribute that already had great momentum—and all of which is similarly fitting.
None of this, of course, is to idolize either the man or his work. He was of his time and is open to critique like anyone else. But it is to show how much of his work also transcends his time and richly deserves to. Our sincere hope now is simply that this collection of essays, and the memorial itself, will help make this happen, even more.
Canon Vernon White6
3. E.g., see C. S. Lewis and His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C. S.
Lewis Society, ed. Roger White, Judith Wolfe, and Brendan Wolfe.
4. Enquiries about donating to the C. S. Lewis Scholarship Fund should be sent to database@alumni.cam.ac.uk.
5. E.g., The Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois; The Center for the Study of C. S. Lewis and Friends at Taylor University, Indiana; The Department of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, Texas; The C. S. Lewis Foundation, Redlands, California; The C. S. Lewis Institute, Springfield, Virginia.
6. The Revd. Professor Vernon White is Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey and Visiting Professor of Theology at King’s College London. He is the author of Atone-ment and Incarnation: An Essay in Universalism and Particularity (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Life Beyond Death: Threads of Hope in Faith, Life and Theology (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2006).
Preface
Looking through the cloakroom window I saw, looming over the
quad, Elizabeth Tower—the clock tower that houses the bell known as
“Big Ben.” I was privileged to be staying overnight in the guest quarters of Westminster Abbey’s Deanery, having played a role earlier that day in the Abbey Institute’s Symposium at St. Margaret’s Church, celebrating the legacy of C. S. Lewis as a Christian apologist.
Alister McGrath and Malcolm Guite gave scintillating presentations on the intellectual and imaginative aspects of Lewis’s apologetics, after which Michael Ward chaired a series of mini-presentations (from William Lane Craig, Michael Ramsden, Jeanette Sears, Judith Wolfe, and myself) and a panel discussion about what contemporary Christian apologetics can learn from Lewis.
All this was topped off by a sumptuous evening meal hosted by the
Dean, Dr. John Hall. (Upon seeing the amount of chocolate involved in des-sert, Michael Ramsden quipped that everyone at Westminster Abbey “must really love Jesus, because after we eat this we’ll all be meeting him sooner!”) The following day, Friday 22nd November 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis’s death, I sat in a choir stall of the Abbey for a service that saw the dedication of a permanent memorial to Lewis in Poets’ Corner (Michael Ward gives more detail about these Westminster commemorations in his interview with Lancia Smith).
It was William Lane Craig who asked if anyone had thought about
publishing a book commemorating Lewis on the fiftieth anniversary of his death? We had not, but agreement was quickly secured from various quarters that this was a good idea and I found myself appointed to try getting xi
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such a project off the ground. Michael Ward kindly volunteered to share editorial duties and we approached Wipf & Stock, who promptly said yes.
It became clear that the thing to do was to collect together a written record not only of the Abbey Institute’s Symposium, but also of the memorial service, along with some personal reflections upon it from the blogosphere, and to round out the collection with the presentations made at two other events held in November 2013 in honour of C. S. Lewis, at the universities where he worked—namely Oxford and Cambridge.
On Saturday 23rd November 2013, Magdalene College Cambridge held
a conference on “Lewis as Critic,” marking his professional career in the field of English Literature. The complete proceedings from that conference are reproduced here, in the order that the lectures were delivered on the day.
On the evening of that same day, Magdalen College Oxford held a celebratory event and dinner. The speakers on that occasion included Rowan Williams (who had travelled across from the Cambridge conference in order to make his third presentation on Lewis in the space of thirty-six hours!) and Alister McGrath, following on from his appearance at the Abbey Symposium.
Since Lord Williams and Professor McGrath are already well represented in these pages, we decided not to include their contributions to the Magdalen event. However, we are glad to include that of Walter Hooper, Lewis’s editor and biographer. We also include a Lewis-tinged lecture given that same week by William Lane Craig at the Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society.
Altogether, these different contributions present a detailed picture of the way Lewis was commemorated in the United Kingdom on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. Their generic variety—interview, address, panel discussion, homily, article, lecture, personal memoir, poetry—aptly reflects the breadth of Lewis’s own output. The numerous fields of expertise represented by our contributors—theology, pastoralia, apologetics, literary criticism, literary history, philosophy, psychology, biography, journalism, music, creative writing—reflects not only the broad sweep of his own interests but also the extraordinarily wide reach of his legacy. Editors of collected volumes like this one often try to impose uniformity on disparate perspectives in order to “theme-atize” their materials. We make no such attempt, but rather consider it a virtue that what follows is so very various. The diversity and colourfulness of these pages deliberately mirrors that of Lewis’s own life and work, for as the inscription on his memorial bears witness, he did not just believe in “Christianity” but also in “everything else.”
Michael Ward and I would like to take this opportunity to thank: all our contributors for agreeing to participate in this collection; everyone at the Westminster Abbey Institute, especially its Director Claire Foster-Gilbert and Canon Vernon White; the Dean of Westminster, the Very Revd.
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Dr. John Hall, for granting permission to reproduce the Order of Service; Professor Steven A. Beebe for granting permission to reproduce
the photograph of C. S. Lewis in the Order of Service; Simone Fryer-Bovair, organiser of the Cambridge Conference, for allowing us to put its proceedings in permanent published form; Essential Secretary Ltd. and Peter Byrom for help in getting a transcription of the Symposium’s panel discussion; Robin Parry and his colleagues at Wipf & Stock; and everyone else who generously gave their support in various ways during the process of putting this volume together.
Peter S. Williams1
1. Peter S. Williams is Assistant Professor in Worldviews and Communication at Gimlekollen School of Journalism and Communication, NLA University, Norway. He is the author of A Faithful Guide to Philosophy (Paternoster, 2013) and C. S. Lewis vs. the New Atheists (Paternoster, 2013). He maintains a web presence at www.peterswilliams.
com.
Introduction
Interview with
Michael Ward1
Michael Ward introduces the Westminster Abbey commemorations in an interview with Lancia E. Smith, who is a long-time supporter of The C. S.
Lewis Foundation, the charitable organization that owns The Kilns, Lewis’s former home in Oxford.
Lancia, a professional photographer, hosts a popular blog entitled “Cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful” at lanciaesmith.com. In early 2013 she interviewed Michael Ward about the forthcoming commemorative events in Westminster. The following is an edited version of their exchanges: 22nd November 2013 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of
C. S. Lewis’s death. To honour his extraordinary contri-
bution to the world of literature, Westminster Abbey will
be unveiling a permanent memorial to Lewis in Poets’
Corner and hosting a Symposium in recognition of his
1. Dr. Michael Ward is Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, and Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, Texas. He is the author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2008), co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and presenter of the BBC television documentary, The Narnia Code. He maintains a web presence at www.michaelward.net.