C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner

by Michael Ward

  judgment of Truth.

  And I think that when he became a Christian later on,

  he saw this organ of truth not only as Reason but also as

  Revelation and so an adherence to revealed doctrine was

  always something that he held on to as a means of disci-

  plining his imagination and keeping it in its bounds, just as

  Coleridge, of course, does when he frets about his “wayward

  imagination” in the Eolian Harp, for example, and then goes back to doctrine as reining it in.

  WARD:

  Thank you, Judith. Anybody else?

  RAMSDEN:

  Dr. Guite—it’s funny we’re all up here: we’ve got people in the audience who know more about this than we do; who’ve

  forgotten more about this than we ever learned in the first place!—Dr. Guite addressed this question specifically in

  his lecture, I think, very, very well. So, I’m going to refer

  you back to that recording and claim that I had all of those

  thoughts in my head before he presented them so eloquently

  this afternoon. [ Laughter]

  WARD:

  Let’s move on to our third question, from Jenny Peterson,

  which rather picks up on the point that Jeanette was just

  making about the importance of what we look at. The ques-

  tion asks: “Lewis wrote and broadcast before the current era

  with its cultural dominance of visual media in film and tele-

  vision. In what ways might these new visual media inhibit

  or enhance Christian apologetics?”

  CRAIG:

  I can say something about the way in which it can enhance

  the reach of Christian apologetics. I think that YouTube is

  an incredible tool for apologetics and world evangelisation,

  because through the internet these materials get into all

  sorts of contexts where persons would never read a book or

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  37

  have access to library materials. And I have found that mak-

  ing a YouTube archive of talks, debates, interviews, panels

  of this sort, will reach thousands, sometimes hundreds of

  thousands of people through YouTube.

  So we, as Christian apologists, need to be very aggres-

  sive and pro-active in using YouTube and the internet to

  disseminate these materials.

  RAMSDEN:

  I have to admit I’ve been very sceptical about the new media,

  you know, fuelled by the comment that YouTube, Twitter,

  and Facebook were going to merge into a new URL: You-

  Twit-Face-dot-com. [ Laughter] I think maybe that’s coming

  from seeing the irresponsible use of it.

  And it’s quite interesting, I guess, if you look at Lewis’s

  life: he became a voice to the nation through his broadcast

  talks during the Second World War when actually there

  were no competing media, which is why he became such a

  household name. And he did so responsibly, without a glib

  apologetic, but speaking in a situation where hundreds of

  thousands of people were dying and the cost was very high,

  which I think gave a reality to what he did.

  Then I think, sadly, maybe a lot of irresponsible and

  sensationalist voices came into the media and I think a lot

  of Christians sort of recoiled from that slightly, thinking, “I

  don’t want to be tarred with that brush.” Maybe there was a

  bit of a vacuum left.

  I have a feeling if he were here, he might well say,

  “Look, nobody knew much about radio back then. It was

  quite a new medium for this kind of thing, and you should

  fully engage with it.” I think that’s what he would he would

  say. I mean, you may have a better insight than . . .

  WARD:

  No, I’m sure you’re right. I mean, Lewis was one of the first

  “media dons” wasn’t he? He and his Magdalen colleague,

  A. J. P. Taylor, they were a new breed, and yes, it was a very

  modern medium—the wireless, I mean. Not the radio, the

  wireless. [ Laughter] What do we mean by “wireless” now?

  Something quite different!

  WILLIAMS:

  A word as well about Christian use of media in the less overt

  way: I mean, Bill’s talking about the sort of overt Christian

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  part one—symposium

  apologetics and the way in which you can communicate that

  into different situations through YouTube and so on. But I

  think that our engagement with, say, Christian film-writers

  and film-makers and so on, especially, can take a leaf out of

  Lewis’s book of “supposals”; of doing things not in the sort

  of direct “here’s a gospel presentation with an altar-call at

  the end” kind of way, but in that way of teasing the imagi-

  nation with the little “spears of sunlight” that Malcolm was

  talking about earlier today, to get people thinking in terms

  of the big, the deep, spiritual, moral issues of “life, the uni-

  verse, and everything.”

  To get people thinking about Christ, first you have

  to get them to think. Getting people thinking about

  life, the universe, and everything, opening up those

  issues, that in itself is a really positive part of the engage-

  ment that I think Christians are called to in today’s media.

  SEARS:

  And of course we’re not just wanting people to think, we’re

  wanting them to love. If we’re going to be Christians in the

  new media, the irony is that we want to portray God’s love

  and loving relationships, in visual and written media, for

  people who perhaps only look at that in order for them to

  then leave it and actually be involved in real relationships with God, with other people in the church, and so on . . .

  WILLIAMS:

  . . . following in Lewis’s footsteps by giving media portrayals

  of goodness that are interesting and captivating.

  SEARS: Yes.

  WARD:

  This, er, what was it? You-Twit-Face-dot-com? [ Laughter]

  This new media phenomenon which results to a large extent

  in globalisation, with national boundaries now meaning

  much less than they did, touches upon our next question

  from Rod Miller: “Is Lewis really growing mainstream in

  Britain besides the Poets’ Corner Memorial, and, if so, is

  there a particular aspect of his writing or thinking that is

  fuelling the growth? In a related point, why is Lewis more

  popular in the U.S. than in the U.K?”

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  39

  We have one American and four Brits on the panel. I

  don’t know, Bill, if you would like to touch on the popularity

  in the U.S?

  CRAIG:

  I think Alister McGrath is probably right when he says in his

  biography of Lewis that what happened in the United States

  is that Lewis connected with southern American evangelical

  Christianity.

  Since about 1948, in the United States, with Billy Gra-

  ham, Carl F. H. Henry, Harold Arkingate, and so forth, evan-

  gelicalism was born and has come to displace the old mainline

  Protestant denominations in the United States as the most

  culturally significant expression of Christianity. Evangelicals

  connected with C. S. Lewis and, r
ightly or wrongly, they saw

  him as one of them, in a sense, and I think that has fuelled his

  enormous popularity in the United States.

  Lewis’s Mere Christianity transcends denominational

  boundaries as well and makes him appealing. I understand

  from discussions with some of my colleagues that Lewis is

  tremendously popular in the Mormon Church and that a

  good many Mormon people are moving away from tradition-

  al LDS doctrine, which thinks of God as a physical humanoid

  being on a planet in outer space, to a more classical theism

  of God as a transcendent creator of the universe. So, Lewis

  has had an incredible influence even within so unexpected a

  denomination or confession as the Mormon Church.

  WOLFE:

  I think there are two points to make about the British recep-

  tion of Lewis. One is that now that he’s been dead for fifty

  years he’s moved from a very annoying or almost threaten-

  ing contemporary to a classic writer, whom one can appreci-

  ate from a distance, almost as a primary source, so to say,

  about which one can debate and so forth. So there’s a certain

  distance and classical status that allows people to talk about

  him in new ways.

  But the second point I think is that, as you said, it’s not

  so much that more people are reading him, but rather that

  it’s become more suitable for polite society to talk about it.

  I think that people have been reading him in their

  closets, and academics in particular have been reading him

  in their closets all this time, but now that people like Rowan

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  part one—symposium

  Williams or Alister McGrath and some others have stepped

  up and engaged with him publicly and on a rigorous level,

  it’s suddenly possible to talk about him, as I say, in polite

  society.

  To look slightly further afield, it’s also interesting to

  note that in countries like Germany, for example, where

  there is a strong division—and speaking now as a theolo-

  gian—in countries like Germany where there is a strong

  division between Lutherans or Protestants and Catholics,

  it seems to be mainly the Catholic academics who are en-

  gaging with Lewis and doing so in a more lively way than

  the Lutherans, because for the Catholics he is a champion

  of a natural theology, an approach to God as in some way

  continuous with human reason. Whereas the Protestant

  theologians, who are very strongly emphasising a theology

  of the cross, of dis continuity between God and the world, are quite wary of him. So there’s a much stronger confessional divide, I think, at least among theologians, in those

  countries than here.

  WARD: Jeanette?

  SEARS:

  I’m tempted to agree with Lewis now being a classic and so

  having a different status and that making a big effect. I’m

  tempted to say that people become popular when someone

  can make money out of them and it’s certainly the case with

  the films now. We all know that the films of the Narnia

  Chronicles came on the back of the Tolkien films in many

  respects, and obviously huge amounts of money were be-

  ing made out of those—and of course, they’re very filmic

  stories—so that makes a lot of sense.

  But probably the writer who has been the main Chris-

  tian novelist recently in this country has been G. P. Taylor,

  who has written Christian novels and originally got a huge

  amount of money for them. But as soon, he says, as soon as

  he started to be called “the next C. S. Lewis,” he was dropped

  like a hot brick by the media. So, it’s a two-edged sword

  really.

  WARD:

  Thank you. In addition to the written questions that have

  been submitted, I’ve asked two people in the audience to ask

  panel discussion

  41

  a question, and I’ve asked them because they each represent

  a very significant Lewis institution in the United States.

  So let’s start with a question from Dr. Stanley Mattson,

  who is President of the Lewis Foundation. The Foundation

  have, over many years, restored Lewis’s home, The Kilns,

  and run many successful Oxbridge conferences. So, Stan,

  what question do you have for the panel?

  MATTSON: Thank you, Michael. I pondered your invitation to ask a

  question and, as I did, I was somewhat surprised with the

  particular question that I came up with, but it is a sincere

  question and it has to do with this: I think one of the things

  that most amazes me about Lewis is simply the extraordi-

  narily prodigious nature of his work: over forty published

  books; thousands of letters, largely written with a pen. With

  a pen, mind you! I don’t know how in the world a human

  being, who was not a professor with a big endowed Chair,

  but who, in fact, was a tutor, working with students one-on-

  one, and all the while so incredibly engaged in life, whether

  with the Inklings, hiking, attending services, or broadcast-

  ing on the BBC, did it. I marvel at it, I really do. The phrase

  that came to me was “incarnational apologetics,” in that his

  life was so invested in every idea, in every person. I wonder

  if you’d comment on that? If you’ve had that experience of

  being overwhelmed, knowing yourself how diligent one has

  to be to write just one book, let alone forty, and yet find such

  time for others. Would one of you like to comment?

  WARD:

  Thank you very much. So I think the question might boil

  down to emulation. How can we possibly consider emu-

  lating someone who’s a giant among men? Is it possible?

  Should we even try?

  SEARS:

  Yes, . . . well: we need to listen to God. We need to be like the

  Green Lady on Perelandra who, before she answers a ques-

  tion she’s quiet and she’s listening to Maleldil and she only

  answers when she knows what Maleldil wants her to say. So

  I’m tempted just to sit here quietly until the Lord shows me

  what to say. [ Laughter] It’s a question of calling, isn’t it? And when God gives a calling, He also empowers you to do what

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  part one—symposium

  He’s asking you do to. And so, thank God that He did call

  Lewis to that work and that He empowered him to do it.

  And we all have different callings. And it’s possible that

  even if we only wrote one book, that might be the thing that converts thousands. We only have to think of the Lord Jesus

  himself who never wrote any of his stories down and . . .

  look at the effect He’s had! [ Laughter]

  WARD: Bill?

  CRAIG:

  John Wesley once distinguished, in an address to his Meth-

  odist ministers, between what he called “innate abilities”

  and “acquired abilities” and, if you don’t have the innate

  abilities that a C. S. Lewis had, you’re not going to be able to

  produce that kind of body of work.

  Nevertheless, there are acquired abilities that we can all

  strive for, and I’m thinking here of things like self-discipline,r />
  time-management, setting of priorities, having a vision for

  writing, if that’s what we feel called to do. And I think that

  these kinds of abilities can be acquired and can help us to be

  surprisingly productive.

  One method that I’ve adopted in my work is what my

  wife Jan and I called the Tortoise Method. In the story of the

  Tortoise and the Hare, the tortoise, just by steady, slow, plod-

  ding, eventually wins the race. And so if you can just write a

  paragraph one morning, or a few pages that day, it’s incred-

  ible how, after the weeks go by, it begins to accumulate. So

  I do think that through these kinds of self-disciplining ac-

  tivities one can maximise whatever innate potentialities the

  Lord has given us so as to try to produce a body of written

  work, for those of us who are called to be writers, that will

  hopefully be read even after we are gone.

  RAMSDEN:

  I’ve had a working relationship with Professor Alister Mc-

  Grath now for fifteen years and when that started I thought,

  “Gosh, every time he writes something I should really buy

  it and read it”—and the dear man’s almost bankrupted me.

  [ Laughter] So, I think some people have a natural writing

  gift. Some people you pray that they wrote slightly less.

  [ Laughter]

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  43

  But I think we as a culture and maybe sometimes even

  as a church, we haven’t always encouraged people in the

  expression of their faith through the arts. Not as an illustra-

  tion of something else, but as a vehicle of communication

  for that something. And I think we’ve paid the price for that

  in some ways. We haven’t recognised the role of the arts

  as the vehicle by which this can happen. You look at Jesus

  Christ, who in many senses was a metaphorical theologian:

  he wasn’t making complex theological points and then illus-

  trating them with simple stories for children. The parables

  he told were the very vehicle by which he was delivering

  his theology. The parables weren’t an “illustration” of some-

  thing else.

  And I think that’s something that the arts are uniquely

  gifted to do. Art becomes the medium and the vehicle by

  which things can be passed on and I think that’s the one part

  of Lewis’s example that we really need to see encouraged,

  so that people can find the theological expression through

  poetry, through novels, through short stories, through plays; to really engage with people out there, through that medium