by Michael Ward
And the indignation was very strong indeed. Hough ascribed it not to the content of the lecture—on scholarly or critical grounds, it was indeed hard to fault—but simply to the fact of Lewis’s Christianity, even though (as always in both his teaching and his academic publications) he made no requirement that his audience, or scholars of the medieval more broadly, should share it, just that they should accept its historical validity. The lecture, Hough says, was met with an anti-theological rancour that was itself
“of theological intensity.”15 The idea that Christianity might in some way be historically defining—those three periods Lewis described as shaping Western cultural history—was anathema within the studied stance of atheism in the Cambridge English Faculty of the 1950s, as too was his insistence on re-habilitating the medieval, of defining the humanist Renaissance in medieval terms. Much of that debate over period division has gone on unbroken ever since, and Lewis’s belief in their historical continuity is still receiving only cautious and intermittent consent. The rebranding of “the Renaissance”—its etymology indicating the rebirth of the classics—as the “early modern,” the precursor of our own modern world, has largely taken place since Lewis’s time, but it is one aspect of that skewing of history. Current scholars of the post-medieval, like the Renaissance humanists themselves, want to mark 13. Ibid., 21.
14. Hough, “Old Western Man,” reprinted in Watson, Critical Essays on C. S. Lewis, 235–45 (237).
15. Ibid., 242.
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themselves out as different from the medieval. Lewis, by contrast, took as his point of departure that “the barrier between the [ages of the medieval and the Renaissance] was greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was not largely a figment of Humanist propaganda”16—humanist propaganda, because a major element of how the humanists sold and promoted themselves in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was to proclaim their difference from what had gone before by denigrating it, belittling it, emphasising the differences and ignoring the far greater continuities, in ways that still dominated thinking in the 1950s as in the 1550s, and indeed now. As a result, any term for the pre-humanist age—what we call the medieval, though the word had not yet been invented in the sixteenth century—became a term of abuse, and that is indeed still the commonest popular usage of “medieval”: it’s an insult. And Christianity, furthermore, was as much decried by some in the 1950s Cambridge English Faculty as Roman Catholicism had been in the Protestant England of the 1580s. Humanism was good; but it was humanism in its modern meaning, with its associations of agnosticism or atheism.
Lewis by contrast never hesitated to point out, rightly, how deeply religious the original humanists were. It was not for nothing that Thomas More, the brightest light of English humanism, became a martyr for his faith.
That inaugural lecture picked up an argument Lewis had been mak-
ing just a few months earlier, in the introduction to his most substantial single work of criticism, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. This is a work that it is almost impossible to mention without attaching the epithet “magisterial” to it. It formed volume three of Oxford University Press’s series the Oxford History of English Literature, commonly abbreviated as OHEL—or “Oh hell,” as Lewis increasingly called it as his years of labour on it increased. It had been commissioned from him in 1938; his work for it became the basis for a series of lectures he gave at Trinity College Cambridge in 1944, and it was finally published, with the subtitle “The Completion of the Clark Lectures,” in 1954, just before his arrival at Magdalene. Both the length of time it had taken him, and its magisterialness, derived from the fact that he had set out to read every work of literature he talked about, and he talked about a great many that most of us have not even heard of. The Introduction to the book was subtitled “New Learning and New Ignorance,” its argument being that the humanist so-called new learning was one aspect of that humanist propaganda attacking the Middle Ages (that is, it was not nearly as new they claimed); and it was a reminder too that some of that new learning was extraordinarily wrong-headed. The Middle Ages used the supernatural to animate their perception 16. Lewis, De Descriptione, 3.
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of the universe, and to liven up stories. Some of the greatest intellects of the Renaissance went further, to treat the supernatural as apprehensible magic that could be deployed, actually practised, in ways that take “early modern”
thought heading off in utterly the wrong direction as a precursor of our modern world. Lewis’s arguments about the strength of the “old learning”
have moreover been confirmed increasingly by more recent scholarship, even in the field of science. A wonderful book by James Hannam, God’s Philosophers,17 demonstrates with something of Lewis’s own clarity and brilliance that early modern scientists—“natural philosophers,” as they called themselves—did not just rediscover some of what was known in the Middle Ages, but actively drew on it to enable their own advances, in cosmology and optics and mathematics.
Unsurprisingly, that heading of “new ignorance” to the first page of the Oxford History volume invited (and received) attack—deliberately invited on Lewis’s part, one suspects: he was a man who loved a good argument, and if a polemic about the new ignorance could stir things up, so much the better. So before he ever gave his inaugural lecture, that introduction had already infuriated those who believed that civilization had gone into abeyance between the classics and the humanists, though Lewis, as that introduction also demonstrated, knew far more about both the classics and the humanists than the great majority—maybe all?—of his detractors. So if the lecture offended those who held that any reference to Christianity as being significant amounted to a dereliction of rational thought, the Oxford History volume attacked their own credentials, by showing the hollowness of their claims that to be working in a humanist tradition was self-evidently superior to the medieval.
It is a row that seems increasingly irrelevant now. We live at a moment in critical theory when New Historicism, the argument—the belief—that all literature reflects the specific political circumstances of the moment at which it was written, and that it is all about power, is giving way to a “religious turn,”
the recognition that you can’t get any decent historical grasp on literature if you don’t take the writers’ own religious beliefs seriously. So we are at last beginning to catch up with Lewis—though again, it must be stressed that that process is entirely different from requiring belief. Lewis’s first book, indeed, and the one that established his critical reputation, The Allegory of Love of 1936, had its roots in his reading before his conversion to Christianity and is much more evidently secular in focus; but it shows just the same ability as his later books to think himself inside literary forms that at first glance 17. The U.S. edition was published in 2011 by Regnery Press under the title The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution.
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seem deeply alien. It was a book that transformed many people’s perception of medieval literature: it showed us how to read it, how to appreciate it even in what seemed its most difficult manifestation, allegory. The trouble with allegory was—to an extent still is—that readers now assume that they are not going to like it before they have even looked at any; but as Lewis pointed out in his Experiment in Criticism, if you start with that assumption, you will always find it fulfilled. Lewis insisted on reading with imaginative empathy and understanding, and showed how it should be done. Jack Bennett, Lewis’s successor in the Chair at Cambridge, who devoted his own inaugural lecture largely to Lewis’s achievements, described The Allegory of Love as the work that “stimulated our mental thirst for the Middle Ages.”18 He entitled his lecture “The Humane Medievalist,” in an attempt to heal the breach Lewis seemed to have made between scholars of the Middl
e Ages and of the Renaissance, by writing his predecessor into both camps.
The Allegory of Love made Lewis recognised as a giant of learning, as the scholar who deserved the commission to write the Oxford History volume, and indeed in due course as the right person for the appointment to the new Chair at Cambridge. It also established his independence of any of the current critical traditions. For all his knowledge of Old English and Latin and Greek and French and Italian, and therefore of his inside knowledge of philology, he stood well apart from the linguistic tradition on which the Oxford English school had been founded, and by which it still operated.
That was a tradition of Germanic philology; and one might have expected that Lewis would have been deeply committed to its principles, fascinated as he was by language. He was most fascinated, however, by the concepts that words represented—by changes of meaning rather than changes of morphology. His Studies in Words of 1960 set out to show those changes of meaning as individual words moved across languages and cultures and time periods: words such as wit, sad, free, sense, simple, conscience, and conscious. And if that interest in the historical depth behind words was different from the philological model prevailing at Oxford, it also carried a different emphasis from Cambridge’s flagship movement of practical criticism, the close reading of texts. He had still less interest in Cambridge’s attachment to modernism, and indeed the new professorship was established partly with the intention of counteracting that, so that the holder could provide more historical and scholarly depth to the department. Lewis’s distrust of the modern therefore set him apart from many of his colleagues, as it set him apart from much contemporary literature. He notoriously disliked modern poetry of the T. S. Eliot variety; and certainly his own attempts 18. Bennett, The Humane Medievalist, 65.
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at poetry, which rhymed and scanned beautifully, but did rather little else, could hardly have been more different from Eliot’s.
So, as a medievalist, Lewis pursued a path very different from the dominant ethos at either Oxford or Cambridge. He also sought his own independent middle way between the painstaking textual recovery of the past developed by the Early English Text Society, with its primary interest in the historical development of the forms of English, and the enthusiasm for the Middle Ages such as fired the medievalizing novels of Sir Walter Scott and the poetry and art of William Morris. He did however share with them, as Jack Bennett noted, an insistence on the past “as a value.”19 He thus came to establish both a movement and a style of his own. He had both the advantage and the drawbacks of writing in an age when literary criticism was designed to be read by anyone who loved literature, rather as much serious history can be read now, and that meant outside the universities as well as inside. The literature studied in the Oxford English course stopped in the early nineteenth century, since it was taken for granted that everyone was brought up knowing the literature written after that without there being any need to study it. There was a strong view, when the question of having an English course at Oxford at all was under discussion in the 1890s, that there was no place for English as an academic subject; the most its opponents granted was that it might be useful for women undergraduates who did not have an adequate classical training, and for second-and third-rate male candidates for the classics course such as might want to go into school teaching, as if such people were lower forms of intellectual life. It was an age too when editions not just of Shakespeare but of Chaucer and Spenser were commonly bought by anyone of reasonable education. Lewis’s career made a strong contribution to raising the academic profile of English, demonstrat-ing how it was not enough just to pick up such an edition and read it with untrained, and therefore only partial, enjoyment: for a full understanding, you needed guidance too. Although most of his published academic work derives from his university lectures, they can be read by a much wider audience, in a way that little modern criticism can be, and by people who have very little specialist or scholarly knowledge. They are written, that is, so as to give their readers a sense of what such knowledge might reveal to them.
In An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis suggests that the evaluative criticism popular at the time he was writing was less important than this kind of cultural contextualization. He was also, however, keen to make his listeners or readers want to go and read the works he is talking about; or if he does not want you to do that, he tells you why not. This happened not just in his 19. Bennet, The Humane Medievalist, 58.
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lectures, but in the Oxford History volume too, starting with the notorious division he makes of sixteenth-century literature into the Drab and the Golden—a division that blighted the study of earlier Tudor literature for years. To take a sentence completely at random: “If we sit down to read Rainoldus for a whole morning we shall be disappointed.” So we are let off reading Rainoldus—a writer whom I doubt if many of us knew existed. But Lewis has read him for us, and sums him up in a handful of sentences. He is just as good, however, or even better, at conveying enthusiasm, as he does in some of the very best passages in the volume in the early chapters on Scottish and English literature at the close of the Middle Ages.
Reading Lewis’s academic writings can nonetheless often be a deeply frustrating experience, on account of his reluctance to give references. He stirs your interest, but then does not tell you where you can pursue the ideas further. That makes sense in terms of orally delivered lectures, but rather less so in their published forms. The Oxford History did have a lengthy bibliography—largely compiled, as is noted in the Preface, by other people; but it is impossible to use as a source for further scholarship other than in the most general way. Any desire to look up the original sources he uses or cites, for instance, especially the sources of his quotations from Latin, is made effectively impossible by his translation of them into a very good pastiche of sixteenth-century English. He even changes the spelling conventions, such as the interchangeability of the letters u and v, so that it is impossible to tell if what you are looking at is a contemporary translation (as it sometimes is) or Lewis’s own. In the preface, he says that he does it “not simply for the fun of it but to guard the reader from a false impression”—presumably, a false impression of modernity; but it is also an effective way to guard his own territory. He does translate longer passages of Latin, but he always leaves single phrases or sentences untranslated, on the assumption that his readers will understand them. And indeed many of them would; but it is still a reminder of just how he envisaged those readers (male, educated at the expensive independent schools), and of how much cultural and educational climates have changed since his time.
A complaint that is increasingly heard now about Lewis’s criticism is that it is not scholarly. He did not use the best available editions, and he will on occasion throw out misleading remarks without thinking them through.
Again, that may have made for better lectures, and indeed for a livelier reading experience, but it can still be damaging; and even his most considered ideas were sometimes wrong. Perhaps the most notorious example would be the Allegory of Love, which does not so much expound the concept of
“courtly love” as almost single-handedly invent it. His account includes the patently untrue remark that one of its defining characteristics was adultery:
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a remark that set medieval literary studies on the wrong path for two or three generations, and we have still not quite got over it.
One reason why we perhaps see some things more clearly now than
he did was that we are much more cynical than he was—more cynical than I think people were in the Middle Ages, indeed, but Lewis had a sense of the ideal so strong as almost to exclude irony. One aspect of that ideal is mirrored in his comparison of himself to that ancient Athenian, with its assumption that the ancient Athenian in question would be a free white
male: a woman or a slave or an outsider would have a very different impression indeed of what life in Athens meant, but Lewis still lived in an age when women or slaves or outsiders barely impinged on his vision of the intellectual life. The critical movement of New Historicism is very poor at dealing with the transhistorical, but Lewis’s concern for the larger picture could exclude any more time-specific nuance. Gender studies too have opened our eyes to whole areas that Lewis did not see. Reading any of Lewis’s works now results in a mixture of admiration for his learning, genuine enlightenment, and a good deal of frustration. The frustration, however, is offset by his having much larger critical purposes than our own more limited scholarly aims: he wanted to make people, and especially students, better readers, by way of inculcating that sense of transhistorical value. His vision of the ideal has, I believe, more historical force behind it than our own reluctance to credit the good in anything. He stressed not only what a writer said, the “logos”
or what we might call the discourse element of a text, but also the quality of literature as something made, the Greek “poiema,” the created beauty that modern criticism all too often overlooks, along with the beauty of the Old Western cosmos apprehensible above all through Greek and Latin. Perhaps the New Ignorance of which he accused the humanists is as nothing compared with our own.
13
The Abolition of Man
From Literary Criticism
to Prophetic Resistance
Malcolm Guite 1
What are we to make of The Abolition of Man? In a letter of 1955, twelve years after its publication, Lewis said of this little volume, “it is almost my favourite among my books but in general has been almost totally ignored by the public.”2 I would like to tease out why it might have been a favourite, why it was “almost totally ignored” at the time, and, most importantly, why it might be of particular relevance to us now.
