Listening to Lewis
One of my goals for 2021 was to listen to fewer podcasts and more audiobooks—a double good, that. One of my strategies was to find novels and nonfiction on the shorter side, to gain some momentum and feel like I was making it through actual books rather than slogging through interminable chapters. One successful tack I happened upon was listening to classic shorter works of Christian thought I’d first read in my teens, specifically authors like Chesterton and Lewis. Of the latter’s books, I’ve “reread,” i.e. listened to, The Great Divorce, The Abolition of Man, The Problem of Pain, Reflections on the Psalms, Letters to Malcolm, The Weight of Glory, and Miracles.
I read most of these books in early high school. That means it’s been 20 years since I’ve opened their pages (though I’ve reread some of them since then, like The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters). During that interim I spent 13 years earning multiple degrees in biblical, religious, and theological studies, and am now in my fifth year teaching theology to undergraduates, in between publishing my first and second books. In other words, though one never “arrives” in the realm of theology, unlike my 16-year old self, I do know one or two things about the topic now. I have, as the kids say, done the reading.
What have I made of Lewis on this side of that span, then? Before answering that question I have to address another matter. That matter is Lewis’s own stature, within the theological academy and without. There is nothing—and I do mean nothing—more plebeian, rustic, and déclassé in American scholarly theological writing, at least writing that aspires to be taken seriously, than quoting C. S. Lewis (in general, much less as an authority). The reasons for this scorn are numerous. Chief among them is Lewis’s ubiquity in American evangelicalism. It’s guilt by association. One doesn’t want to give aid and comfort to them, much less cite one of their treasured masters. But not only that. Often as not, the scholar in question was himself influenced by Lewis at some crucial point in his spiritual and intellectual journey. But now he has put away such childish things; this scholar is a man. And real men don’t quote C. S. Lewis.
You might think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not, at least in many cases. There is an element of spiritual patricide, of self-conscious graduation or expulsion or liberation from the sort of class—economic, cultural, or religious—that would think Lewis was a Serious Thinker on a par with the true leading lights of the twentieth century. And since Lewis was not and never claimed to be a formal, or formally trained, theologian or philosopher, he can justly be ignored or looked down upon as, at best, the ladder one kicks away after climbing up it; or, at worst, a second-rate apologist of the unwashed evangelical masses.
To which I say: what a bunch of bunk. Listening to Lewis these last six months has brought home to me just how silly all those patronizing caricatures of him are. His reputation among the masses is more than earned. His role as an intellectual “friend,” in Stanley Hauerwas’s words, to many a searching teenager and undergraduate, is wholly justified. I’m not going to sing all his praises—for his prose, his economy of thought, his vast erudition, his wit, his bracing moral gaze—nor overlook his shortcomings—on gender, for example, though sometimes he is prescient and insightful, other times he is a man of his time or just plain weird. No, what I want to point out is that Lewis was a “real,” that is to say a bona fide or unqualified, Christian philosopher thinker, an asterisk-free theologian in the classical mold.
Listening to stray paragraphs and casual asides in Lewis’s writing from the 1940s, one realizes that his lack of formal training protected him from every manner of silly fad then dominant in “up to date” theological scholarship. That doesn’t mean he would have had nothing to learn from, say, the late Barth. (I often wonder what Barth would have made of The Screwtape Letters, and what Lewis would have made of CD IV/1.) It just means that sometimes expertise cramps the mind instead of opening it up. Reading broadly in patristic, medieval, reformation, and early modern divines is not all one needs to do to become a theologian, or to think theologically; but it’s not far from the kingdom, either.
One finds in Lewis, for example, a systematically clear and precise presentation of the intrinsic importance and interrelatedness of an extensive array of doctrines: creation ex nihilo, the transcendence and sovereignty of God, the non-being of evil, the non-competitiveness of divine and human agency, the truth of human freedom and moral responsibility, the moral and noetic effects of sin, the status of creation as good but fallen and redeemed in Christ, and the attendant consequences for human knowledge and relation to the divine. One of the things I never realized I gleaned from Lewis before I ever read so-called “real” theology was his devastating critique of every form of scientism. He inoculates his readers against it. So often ruinous to young faith, scientism is seen, with Lewis’s help, for the philosophical sham it is. He is able to do this because he has intuited the scope and rationale of basic Christian doctrine at a deep level and, with the aid of his powers of imaginative but lucid description, reproduced it in prose that hides the enormous learning behind it and is therefore accessible to the average reader. But the latter operation does not attenuate the former fact. Indeed, combining the two is a far more demanding and impressive task than mastering a field but, as a result, being capable of speaking only in one dialect: namely, the dialect of the technical scholar.
I’m well aware that Lewis needs no defense from me. For half a century there has been a veritable publishing industry devoted to extolling his virtues, including his philosophical and theological skills. And there is a laudable freedom from anxiety in true devotees of Lewis: Why should they care whether he receives his due in the halls of power and influence? All true. And a good lesson for this status-anxious holder of an Ivy League doctorate. All the same, it was a happy realization for this lifelong student of Lewis’s to realize no shine came off his works. They’re radiant as ever.
