C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner

by Michael Ward

  where the message is embedded.

  WILLIAMS:

  I’d just like to pick up on that in talking about Lewis’s em-

  brace of the transcendental values of Truth and Goodness

  and Beauty. I think that the church historically here has

  been pretty good on keeping the importance of Truth and

  the Word of God and so on, and of course, Goodness and

  morals and ethics. The church is very big on talking about

  ethics but has, frankly, largely dropped the ball on Beauty.

  But Beauty encompasses the other two and Beauty is

  that which is truly worthy of being admired, and incorpo-

  rates Truth and Goodness, and the widest transcendental

  value is Beauty. I think Lewis should be a prod and a re-

  minder to the Western church to not take our eye off the

  place of Beauty in church, in liturgy, in communication, in

  apologetics.

  WARD:

  Thank you. Judith, do you want to add anything to that?

  WOLFE:

  Well, I completely agree with Peter. I mean, if we look at

  Lewis’s productivity, I think emulating him will become a

  44

  part one—symposium

  very frustrating task, but if we look at the habits of mind and

  of heart that he cultivated then those are something that we

  certainly can emulate: the attentiveness to others that you

  mentioned, Stan, the self-discipline and so forth. And what

  fruits arise from that is not up to us, but we can certainly

  cultivate those habits and see what comes.

  WARD:

  Thank you. One thing that occurs to me is this: Michael

  Ramsden, you’re in charge of the Oxford Centre for Chris-

  tian Apologetics and I teach in an apologetics program for

  Houston Baptist University—we’re trying to train up young

  apologists, but it occurs to me that Lewis never went though

  apologetic training. In fact, he was a bit of a lone wolf. For

  a couple or three years of his most formative period in his

  middle teens, he wasn’t even schooled in the English Public

  School system, but was privately tutored, one-to-one, by

  William Kirkpatrick. He wasn’t part of a school. And I think

  that’s not unimportant in understanding Lewis’s abilities,

  that he was to a certain extent a “Free Thinker”; he wasn’t

  trammelled by expectations and conventions in the same

  way that most of his contemporaries were.

  I read once that, of the top ten patent holders at ICI,

  who hold the greatest number of patents, four out of those

  ten had not received a university education. Which is ex-

  tremely interesting. There can be a way in which we squelch

  originality by over-training people. So it may be that the

  great new apologist who’s going to wow the twenty-first

  century is not even at a school. Who knows?

  The second question from the audience is going to

  come from Dr. Jerry Root. Jerry is a representative of the

  Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois. The Wade Center

  is the primary collection of Lewis’s papers and documents; it

  was established first of all in the 1960s by Professor Clyde S.

  Kilby and it’s now the central place in the world if you want

  to study anything to do with Lewis. Jerry is on its Advisory

  Board. So, Jerry, what is your question?

  ROOT:

  This is picking up on Dr. Mattson’s question. The book C. S.

  Lewis: Defender of the Faith concludes, “Lewis himself was his greatest apology; the apologetic that walked in shoes.”

  Could you comment about his humility, his magnanimity,

  panel discussion

  45

  his willingness to shoulder the weight of his neighbour’s

  glory, and how this lends to his persuasiveness as an apolo-

  gist and as a Christian?

  WARD:

  Who would like to come in on that?

  RAMSDEN: I feel, as the most humble member of the panel, I should comment first. [ Laughter] I think the point you make is a

  very good one. If the gospel is true, it should be seen as well

  as heard and, most of all, seen in the life of the Christian.

  And it’s very interesting that, if we were to say, “Look, close

  your eyes and imagine a thoroughly uncompromised and

  uncompromising Christian” and then we were to say, “What

  figure came to mind?” the answer is probably someone who

  was quite difficult, awkward, hard, thoroughly outspoken,

  maybe. If you look at the book of Galatians, which we know

  to be one of the earliest of all the epistles and the books

  that we have in the New Testament, Paul there has several

  concerns, one of which is, “What is the real gospel? And

  what isn’t the real gospel?” But then he has another concern,

  the apostle Paul, in Galatians, which is, “What is the true

  characteristic of a Christian?” And he tells us how to tell the

  true person who is a Christian from the fake. In Galatians

  5:22 he says there’s a fruit of the spirit, just one fruit, and

  when you taste that fruit, it should taste of love, joy . . . you

  don’t need me to recite it. Some of you know little songs that

  you’ve learned by heart, listing all of those characteristics.

  Now, I find that really interesting. What the apostle

  Paul is saying there is, “Bite me,” but in a very nice way.

  [ Laughter] And he’s saying, “Look, if someone is claiming

  this is true and real in their life, you should be able to taste

  it in their life and what you should taste should be this love

  and this peace and this joy and this gentleness,” and so on.

  If, however, what you taste is murder, envy, lust, strife,

  you have the right to question their claim to have had this

  transforming, life-changing encounter with the person of

  Christ.

  I think that’s one of the reasons why we like people like

  C. S. Lewis. I also have the privilege of working very closely

  with a guy called Professor John Lennox who, you know, if

  you ever heard him speak you feel half way through his talk

  46

  part one—symposium

  that you want to go up onto the platform and give him a

  big hug [ Laughter] because he’s so gentle, and his demean-

  our and his manner of delivery is very attractive. I think it’s

  something that we need to recover and maybe become even

  more challenging at times as Christians ourselves, to say,

  “Well, what does the church look like? What, what does it

  taste like? Does it taste like this?” Because that’s what we’re

  told it should.

  And so let’s not be compromising about that. Let’s be

  thoroughly uncompromising when it comes to things like,

  “Is this fruit? Does it taste like this in our life?” And I think

  the church would be a lot stronger and have a much larger

  platform for its message if we were.

  So I’m sure it was part of how Lewis commended his

  own message—through his own lifestyle and embodied by

  all those letters he wrote. I think it was a general principle,

  wasn’t it? He tried to respond to every letter he got. I mean,

  I struggle responding to my emails! I would love
to know

  what he would’ve made of email! Maybe he would’ve seen

  that as some form of demonic attack. I don’t know. That’s

  how I feel, but . . . [ Laughter] . . . but it just shows how he valued the person. They had taken time to write to him: he

  wanted to write back to them. And he did.

  SEARS:

  Speaking as someone who did actually give John Lennox

  a hug once . . . . [ Laughter] As I get older and lots of my friends are having to care for elderly relatives and as my own

  mother gets older and so on, the word “carer” is starting to

  take on a whole new meaning. I’m starting to see Lewis as

  a carer. He cared for so many people throughout his life,

  obviously, for Mrs. Moore as she got older; for his wife, Joy,

  when she was ill; and for lots of neighbours and relatives

  and, particularly, his brother as well. And for animals, he

  loved animals and he cared about nature.

  And there’s just that caring attitude, that taking re-

  sponsibility for someone who’s got a need. If you’re there,

  you’re the one who looks after that person, despite what it

  means clearing up off the floor, or whatever. Lewis was re-

  ally right there in his caring.

  panel discussion

  47

  WOLFE:

  And I think that one important thing about humility in par-

  ticular is that, for Lewis, humility was not just a spiritual vir-

  tue, it was also an intellectual virtue. It was not something

  that you had to tie yourself in some sort of spiritual knot to

  achieve, making yourself seem worse than you really are or

  anything like that, but rather he emphasises again and again

  in his writings that a good writer is one who makes you not

  look at him but rather makes you see through the lens that

  he is seeing through.

  And this outward movement of the mind and of the

  eyes towards the reality out there and our way of seeing it,

  rather than looking at ourselves, is something that he valued

  very much in literature and in scholarship and, therefore,

  also embodied in his life quite naturally, I think.

  WILLIAMS: The famous aphorism on humility just sprung to mind,

  which is this: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself but

  thinking of yourself less.”

  WARD:

  Bill, do you have anything to add to that?

  CRAIG:

  Well, I think Jerry is right in reminding us that we’ve got

  to walk the walk as well as talk the talk, but I have to say I

  think it’s striking, really, how little of C. S. Lewis’s personal

  life comes through in his works, apart from, say, Surprised

  by Joy.

  He doesn’t put himself forward. He doesn’t tell anec-

  dotes about “I was walking in the quad the other day and

  spoke to this professor” or “a student said this and that to

  me.” Really, you can appreciate his apologetic works without

  knowing anything about Mrs. Moore or his brother or his

  life. So I don’t think it’s true that the effectiveness of his work depends upon “his living it out in his personal life.” I was

  really surprised by a lot of his personal life when I read Mc-

  Grath’s biography of Lewis. His works stand on their own, I

  guess, is what I’m trying to say, independent of life, because

  in most cases the man doesn’t intrude into his books in a

  personal way, which is perhaps a mark of humility itself.

  WARD:

  Yes, I think he deliberately tried to keep himself off stage as

  much as possible and that’s part of what Mere Christianity is

  48

  part one—symposium

  about, isn’t it? Because he’s not wanting to say, “This is my

  religion,” he’s wanting to say “This is the broad central main-

  stream of the Faith to which pretty much every Christian

  could subscribe.”

  “But I, myself,” he says, “am not anyone special. I’m a

  very ordinary layman of the Church of England”—which is

  a vast understatement! [ Laughter]

  But would that we were all that way, in a sense. You see

  what he’s trying to say: that he’s not extraordinarily virtuous;

  he’s just ordinary. He’s neither particularly High nor partic-

  ularly Low nor particularly anything else. He’s not trying to

  convert you to a particular brand of Christianity or, indeed,

  a particular churchmanship within Anglicanism; he’s just

  wanting to give you something beyond all the denomina-

  tions, or within all the denominations.

  We have our last question now, after which I will ask

  Professor Don King to come and read a closing poem. This

  final question comes from A. J. Finch: “What particular

  books or articles of Lewis have impacted the panellists espe-

  cially and should be better known today?”

  CRAIG:

  Wow, we’re all going, “Gosh, where do we begin?” you know!

  WILLIAMS:

  Can I jump in?

  WARD:

  Of course.

  WILLIAMS:

  The Abolition of Man: a very short book, three lectures. The Abolition of Man, I think, is one of those very prophetic

  books about our times; it should be read next to Aldous

  Huxley’s Brave New World for understanding the modern

  world. I like it for its defence of the objectivity of Beauty,

  of Knowledge, but also for not wanting to go into the sort

  of shallow rationalism that we’ve talked about, for seeing

  the way through this modernist/post-modernist dilemma

  that the world has got itself into. The way he resolves

  that and his defence of objective values (which you also

  find in essays like “The Poison of Subjectivism” and “De

  Futilitate”) makes it a particular favourite of mine.

  panel discussion

  49

  WARD:

  There’s an interesting book about The Abolition of Man,

  which is too little known. It’s by Lord Hailsham, sometime

  Lord Chancellor, who thought very highly of The Abolition

  of Man himself, and wrote this little book about it called Values: Collapse or Cure? So you’re right there with Quintin Hogg, Peter! Anybody else want to come in on this?

  WOLFE:

  I think that there are some essays and works of Lewis that

  have gained new popularity through being mined quite a

  lot recently, and I think “De Futilitate” and “The Poison of

  Subjectivism” and so forth belong to those—having been

  worked up by people like Alvin Plantinga in very interesting

  and rigorous ways.

  I think that there are some other essays whose main

  argument or idea hasn’t really been touched upon very

  much at all by academia, and I think that “Transposition,”

  in particular, and “The Funeral of a Great Myth” as well, are

  some of those and I’m waiting to see whether people will

  pick those up and make something of them in the way that

  things like Miracles have been made something of. So those would be some of my recommendations, I suppose.

  WARD:

  Thank you. Jeanette?

  SEARS:

  I would say almost any of his letters, really. I’ve been amazed,

  reading thro
ugh his letters, how I can read them almost like

  Lectio Divina, where it’s like contemplative reading. There is so much of his faith in there, so much good advice, so much

  of God. And he can’t write a dull sentence! It’s fantastic.

  WARD: Michael?

  RAMSDEN: My most surprising Lewis learning experience by far was

  buying a copy of The Screwtape Letters read aloud by John

  Cleese. [ Laughter] I never thought Basil Fawlty would teach me theology [ Laughter]! I tried reading the book and I think I read the first six letters in one day and it was almost too

  rich. I put it down and forgot about it. Then I discovered

  those recordings and I listened to them one per day in my

  car and had to discipline myself to press “stop” and not go

  any further. It was a remarkable experience.

  50

  part one—symposium

  Both hearing them read out, and also just thinking

  and reflecting on how much was packed in there, really

  surprised me. They’re deceptively simple but actually much

  deeper, and I think they open up the whole question of, “Is

  there a spiritual realm to life and does it interact with us?”

  “Is there a battle and struggle that’s going on around us that

  we’re not aware of?” I don’t know if you can get hold of it

  anymore, but try John Cleese reading The Screwtape Letters.

  WARD:

  It’s being read this week, isn’t it, on Radio 4 by Simon Russell

  Beale?

  WOLFE: Really?

  WILLIAMS:

  They should have got Michael McIntyre. [ Laughter]

  WARD:

  There’s also a recording by Andy Serkis. Evidently, lots of

  actors are wanting to take the part.

  Do we have any offerings from this side of the panel?

  CRAIG:

  For me, as I shared in my opening remarks, it hasn’t been so

  much any particular work of Lewis that has been influen-

  tial as it has been his serving as a role model for Christian

  apologetics. As a young student, for me, Francis Schaeffer

  and Edward J. Carnell were more shaping influences on my

  thought and then later Alvin Plantinga; but Lewis as a role

  model, I think, has been important in his defence of Mere

  Christianity and his endorsement of the project of natural theology and Christian evidences in defence of the Christian

  faith . And in that model I follow and try to emulate Lewis.

  WARD:

  Thank you. Answering for myself, I would say one of Lewis’s