C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner
Page 5
So what can be learned from Lewis’s approach? Perhaps I could men-
tion two points in bringing this lecture to a close.
First, Lewis helps us see that apologetics need not take the form of a slightly dull deductive argument, but can be understood and presented as an invitation to step into the Christian way of seeing things, and explore how things look when seen from its standpoint. “Try seeing things this way!” If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into sharpest focus?
And second, we need to realize that Lewis’s explicit appeal to reason involves an implicit appeal to the imagination. Perhaps this helps us understand why Lewis appeals to both modern and postmodern people. I see no historical evidence that compels me to argue that Lewis deliberately set out to do this, constructing a mediating position between two very different cultural moods. The evidence suggests that he saw things this way naturally, and never formalized it in terms of a synthesis of these two very different modalities of thought. Lewis rather gives us a synoptikon that transcends the great divide between modernity and postmodernity, affirming the strengths of each, and subtly accommodating their weaknesses.
Yes, Lewis affirms the rationality of the universe—but does so without plunging us into an imaginatively drab world of cold logic and dreary argumentation. Yes, Lewis affirms the power of images and narratives to captivate our imagination—but does so without giving up on the primacy of truth. As the churches face an increasingly complex cultural context in which they must preach and minister, Lewis offers insights and approaches that are potentially enriching—and, I venture to suggest, culturally plausible and intellectually persuasive.
In the end, Lewis tells the truth by showing the truth. He offers us an intellectually capacious and imaginatively compelling vision of the Christian faith, perhaps best summed up in his lapidary statement at the end of his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” Using a powerful visual image, Lewis invites
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us to see God as both the ground of the rationality of the world, and the one who enables us to grasp that rationality.
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.22
This beautifully crafted sentence is a fitting memorial both to Lewis himself and his rich understanding of faith. How appropriate that it adorns the memorial to be unveiled in this Abbey tomorrow!
I must end. Let me do so by noting a parallel between Lewis and the great Genevan reformer John Calvin. Neither Lewis nor Calvin had any children, though both were stepfathers to children from their wives’ earlier marriages. When Calvin was mocked by his critics for being childless, he offered an intriguing rebuttal. Anyone, he declared, who read his books and came to share his way of thinking was his child. And when seen that way, Calvin turned out to have rather a large family! I think the same is true of Lewis. Many of us find that our ways of thinking have come to be deeply shaped by Lewis; to put it another way, we share something of his intellectual DNA. Those of us gathered here today at Westminster are Lewis’s children, meeting for a family celebration. Not one of us here today is a physical descendent of Lewis, but we are all linked to him through our imagination and reason. I think we all share in the delight of this family occasion, made possible both by the generosity and discernment of this great institution, Westminster Abbey, and by the genius and talent of C. S. Lewis himself. May both flourish in the next fifty years!
22. Lewis, Essay Collection, 21.
2
Telling the Truth through
Imaginative Fiction
C. S. Lewis on the Reconciliation
of Athene and Demeter
Malcolm Guite 1
In the foregoing essay in this volume, Alister McGrath explored the various ways in which C. S. Lewis appeals to reason in his apologetics, though he has pointed out that this appeal to reason and to what he calls “reasonableness” is, in fact, constantly interwoven with an appeal to imagination, a series of invitations to look at things in a new way, to imagine how a world might look if Christianity were the case. I agree with Dr. McGrath that in Lewis’s mature work appeals to reason and imagination are complementary, balanced, and mutually enfolded. However, in this essay2 I want briefly to distinguish from this interwoven thread the imaginative strand and to look specifically at the role imagination played both in Lewis’s own praeparatio evangelica and in his subsequent apologetic writing, taking apologetics in its broadest sense to include both his fiction and his poetry.
1. The Revd. Dr. Malcolm Guite is Chaplain of Girton College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination (Ashgate, 2010) and of “Poet” in The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 2010). As a poet himself, he is the author of Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year (Canterbury Press, 2012), and The Singing Bowl (Canterbury Press, 2013). He maintains a web presence at www.malcolmguite.wordpress.com.
2. A video of Dr. Guite’s lecture is available online: https://youtu.be/lOxbeQLFX2k.
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If we are to understand the special role played by imagination in
Lewis’s writing post-conversion, then it is essential to understand the very different way in which he configured the relations between reason and imagination before his conversion. What Lewis in fact experienced with deepening distress throughout the twenties was a profound divorce or bifurcation between what his reason told him, what he felt he could know and affirm philosophically, on the one hand, and the deepest intuitions or apprehensions of his imagination, on the other. As he puts it very starkly in Surprised by Joy:
The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast.
On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the
other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I
believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I
thought grim and meaningless.3
Of course, this account of his dilemma was written post-conversion and many years after the period in his life that Lewis is describing. However, we have a much more contemporary document, a poem in which
Lewis explores these same issues whilst they were still in suspension, still unresolved. The poem was published posthumously in Walter Hooper’s edited collection The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis and titled (by Hooper, not by Lewis) “Reason.” But if Alister McGrath is right, as I think he is, first in dating this poem as early as 1925 and second in revising the date of Lewis’s conversion to Theism to 1930,4 then what we have in “Reason” is a poem, written about five years before he became even a Theist (let alone a Christian), in which Lewis lays out the fundamental dilemma, the deep gulf over which any effective Christian apologetics would have to throw a bridge or, to use a metaphor closer to Lewis’s poem, the estranged powers of the soul which Christianity would have to reconcile. It seems to me that in this poem Lewis is identifying not simply a private dilemma, but is feeling deeply within himself a profound disjunction that was general to Western post-war culture and indeed more broadly, post-Enlightenment culture. For this reason it is worth examining the poem in some detail.5
The poem offers an extended metaphor of the soul as an inner Athens divided between the two goddesses, Athene, who represents Reason, and Demeter, who represents the Imagination:
3. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 161.
4. For McGrath’s datings, and his own account of Lewis’s integration of reason and imagination, see McGrath, C. S. Lewis. A Life, 135–59.
5. For a fuller examination of this poem in the wider context of Lewis’s poetry, see Guite, “Poet,” The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, 294–308.
guite—telling the truth through imaginative fiction 17
Reason
; Set on the soul’s acropolis the reason stands
A virgin arm’d, commercing with celestial light,
And he who sins against her has defiled his own
Virginity: no cleansing makes his garment white;
So clear is reason. But how dark, imagining,
Warm, dark, obscure and infinite, daughter of Night:
Dark is her brow, the beauty of her eyes with sleep
Is loaded, and her pains are long, and her delight.
Tempt not Athene. Wound not in her fertile pains
Demeter, nor rebel against her mother-right.
Oh who will reconcile in me both maid and mother,
Who make in me a concord of the depth and height?
Who make imagination’s dim exploring touch
Ever report the same as intellectual sight?
Then could I truly say and not deceive,
Then wholly say that I BELIEVE.6
So it opens with a vision of Athene:
Set on the soul’s acropolis the reason stands
A virgin arm’d, commercing with celestial light,
And he who sins against her has defiled his own
Virginity: no cleansing makes his garment white;
So clear is reason.
This opening makes it clear that any truth, however inconvenient,
must be known and faced for what it is; there must be no flight from Reason, no refusal of fact. But on the other hand, imagination must also have a place, and the truths to which it bears witness, however apparently contrary to the truths made available by reason, must also be taken seriously. As Lewis goes on to say:
But how dark, imagining,
Warm, dark, obscure and infinite, daughter of Night . . .
Tempt not Athene. Wound not in her fertile pains
Demeter . . .
Then at the turn or “volta” of this extended sixteen-line sonnet Lewis asks the vital question:
Oh who will reconcile in me both maid and mother,
Who make in me a concord of the depth and height?
Who make imagination’s dim exploring touch
6. Walter Hooper (ed.), The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis, 65.
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Ever report the same as intellectual sight?
Then could I truly say and not deceive,
Then wholly say that I BELIEVE.7
There are a number of remarkable things going on here, from the sense of inner space, of height and depth in the psyche itself, to the bodying forth of the soul’s distinct powers of reason and imagination in the form of the two goddesses, Athene and Demeter. This is no glib classical allusion in the eighteenth-century manner, but a symbolic re-imagination of the inner self in which more than personal, perhaps more than human, powers are at work, and it is highly significant that at this point both these powers are figured as feminine. Lewis is sometimes caricatured as a bluff, masculine, conservative, probably misogynistic, bachelor don, yet here he is expressing his inner life by saying, in effect, “My problem is that I can’t get my inner goddesses together!”
After exploring many paired contrasts—light and dark, armour and
pain, standing and sleeping, virginity and fertility—the poem ends with a plea, which subtly summons the echoes of its own answer:
Oh who will reconcile in me both maid and mother,
Who make a concord of the depth and height?
From the later perspective of Lewis’s conversion we can see that these lines point and give new significance to the paradox of incarnation, which is at the heart of the integrative faith that Lewis would later embrace. For it is, of course, the Christian figure of Mary who reconciles “both maid and mother.” In and through her “Yes” to God, the archetypal assent of all faith, Christ the reconciler comes into the world, the one who not only reconciles man to God, and time to eternity, but is also in himself the concord of all depth and height, inner and outer. Furthermore Lewis’s image of the depth and height seems to carry an echo of Paul’s language in Ephesians: that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to
comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and
depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth
knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.8
These are of course anticipatory echoes: the poem as it stands witnesses to an impasse and points to a hoped for “concord,” which has not yet arrived.
Indeed this poem is itself an example of the way in which imagination can embody glimpses of a potential truth that has not yet become actual to 7. Ibid., 95.
8. Eph 3:17–19.
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our reason, the “sacred power of self-intuition” to which Coleridge, who as we shall see is a very important figure for Lewis, points so presciently in Biographia Literaria:
They and only they can acquire the philosophic imagination,
the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can
interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-
sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only,
who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels
the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum
for antennae yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them.9
The way Lewis found out of this personal impasse was at once spiritual, theological, and literary, and it brings us to the heart of both his Christian belief and his literary practice. For Lewis, Christ did indeed reconcile the broken parts and the severed dimensions of our divided being; the height and depth, outer and inner, reason and imagination.
This is why I don’t think Hooper’s suggested title of “Reason” does justice to this poem. Indeed I think it skews the way we read it, though equally to title it “Imagination” would do the same. The poem is not about exalting one of these faculties over the other, but rather about reconciling them. A better title for this poem might simply be “Who?” The real question posed by the poem is: Who is the reconciler? Reading the poem now it is easy for us to see that the answer is Christ. On the one hand, the story of his death and resurrection summons up the deepest imaginative and mythic response, but, on the other, the story of his incarnation brings imaginative myth and rational history together. For Christianity is, as Lewis came to believe, “myth made fact.” As we have seen, the language of the poem, with its echo of Ephesians, points to a profound and integrative theology of incarnation and yet (assuming a 1925 date for its composition is correct) it was not until another five years had passed that Lewis was able fully to answer the question posed and whose answer is anticipated in this poem.
This is a clear example of the process of imaginative anticipation of truths to which reason has not yet attained, which Lewis describes more generally in Surprised by Joy by saying: “my imagination was in a certain sense baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer.”10 And it is not surprising, therefore, that appeals to imagination are not simply a decorative extra, a sweetening of the doctrinal pill in Lewis’s apologetic writing, but are 9. Engell and Bate (eds.), Biographia Literaria, 241–42.
10. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 171.
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woven essentially into the fabric of what he says. “The truth of imagination,”
as Keats called it, is part of the message.
At this point it is worth asking what Lewis himself meant by imagination, in what tradition is he standing when he speaks of it? Fortunately, we have a poem addressed to fellow-poet Roy Campbell and almost totally overlooked by Lewis scholars in which he sets out exactly what tradition he stands in, and it is the tradition of philosophical romanticism, in which Coleridge plays a central role:
In England the romantic stream flows . . .
. . . from Scott; from Coleridge too.
. . . Newman in that ruinous master saw
One who restored our faculty for awe,
Who re-discovered the soul’s depth and height,
Who pricked with needles of the eternal light
An England at that time half numbed to death
With Paley’s, Bentham’s, Malthus’ wintry breath.11
Indeed, in this poem we can see the key images of depth and height and even anticipate, if we wish, the glorious power of an imaginative Christ-figure who frees Narnia, “half-numbed to death” from a White Witch’s “wintry breath.” Though Lewis would have read Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria as a matter of course, he was fortunate in having as a close friend and “wisest and best of my unofficial teachers,”12 Owen Barfield, for whom Coleridge’s understanding of imagination was essential for a complete renewal of the way we see the world. In this poem “To Roy Campbell” Lewis has already set out the kind of thing imaginative apologetics might be called on to do: to “restore our faculty of awe,” to “help the soul re-discover its depth and height” and, in Lewis’s telling and beautiful phrase, to “prick with needles of eternal light” a benumbed contemporary culture. But, perhaps the most helpful mapping of the terrain Lewis was to body forth and explore in books like the Ransom Trilogy and the Chronicles of Narnia and Till We Have Faces is to be found in the programme Wordsworth and Coleridge set themselves at the beginning of the Romantic movement, as it was later recalled by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria:
11. Lewis, Poems, 80. By citing Scott, and then Coleridge as read by Newman, Lewis is appealing to a particular understanding of imagination within a religious frame. For a fuller account of this tradition see Coulson, Religion and Imagination and Avis, God and the Creative Imagination. For my own discussion of the importance of this tradition see Faith, Hope and Poetry, 4–9.
12. Lewis, dedication of The Allegory of Love. First published Oxford 1936, 1953 ed.
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