My latest: on faithful fathers, in CT

Just in time for Father’s Day, I’m in Christianity Today writing about faithful fathers—especially mine. To kick things off, I riff on this remark by C. S. Lewis about George MacDonald:

We have learned from Freud and others about those distortions in character and errors in thought which result from a man’s early conflicts with his father. Far the most important thing we can know about George MacDonald is that his whole life illustrates the opposite process. An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central.

Click here to read the rest. Happy Father’s Day!

Second naivete

Probably the most important element of C. S. Lewis’s conversion, at least in his telling of it, was that for a definite period of time between atheism and Christian faith he lived as a theist without any expectation of reward or afterlife. He knew from experience that one could believe in God, relate to God, obey the will of God just because; that is, just because God is God and one is not. Afterward, believing in the promises of Christ came with a certain sweetness but also a certain lightness or liberty: he did not feel compelled to believe, the way “God” and “pie in the sky” are conflated for so many people, but free to believe. The freedom lay in the gut-level knowledge that grace was grace, neither earned nor automatic.

I feel similarly about historical events reported in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. For a definite period of time it was not important to me whether this or that discrete happening in Scripture “really” occurred, or occurred in the precise way reported, or occurred at the time and place reported. Perhaps Job or Daniel or Esther were pious fictions; perhaps the Israelites came out of Egypt but in some far less magnificent manner; perhaps David’s many origin stories were folk tales “rightly” remembered and surely worth retelling but not exactly what we would today judge to be “historically accurate.”

My faith was not threatened by these possibilities; it still is not. I am not and never have been any kind of strict inerrantist. If it turns out that, like a nineteenth-century painting of a days-long battle, stories in Scripture are not historical in the way we use that term or measure reportage today, the sum total of my response remains a shrug of the shoulders. If you tell me that Acts and Galatians’ chronologies are finally irreconcilable, I will do well if I suppress my yawn.

As I said, though, for a period of time this was my default setting: “The following ‘historical’ passage I am about to read from the canon may or may not be ‘historical’ at all.” A giant if invisible question mark floated above the text whenever I read, heard, or taught the Bible. Let’s say this ran for about a decade, from 18 to 28 years old, roughly my undergraduate, Master’s, and beginning doctoral years.

Then a funny thing happened. The default setting slowly shifted, mostly without my knowing it. I saw firsthand how the historical-critical sausage is made. I digested a good deal of it for myself. And I came to see that the confidence with which its assured results were delivered was entirely unearned.

Lowered confidence—from dogmatic pronouncements to measured statements of relative probability based on the available evidence (often minimal to begin with)—does not mean biblical criticism should be ignored, much less that it’s all wrong. But what it does mean, or at least has meant for me, is that it need not be treated with submission, docility, deference, or fear. The study of Scripture, whether secular or spiritual, is a humanistic enterprise. It involves interpretation, wisdom, good judgment, good humor, humility, and dispassionate assessment. Very nearly every one of the questions it poses admits of numerous good-faith answers, just as very nearly every one of its considered conclusions admits of good-faith disputation. It is healthy when it tolerates and nurtures dissent, unhealthy when majority positions calcify into dogmas that define the well-policed borders of “serious” scholarship. The one thing to hang your hat on in this field is that something “everybody knows” today will be contested, qualified, replaced, or surpassed in the next generation.

With the following result: The question mark has, for me, dissolved into thin air. I now read the Pastorals as Saint Paul’s without a troubled scholarly conscience; I read Acts as penned in the early 60s by Saint Luke; I read Daniel and Esther and Ruth as historical characters; the same goes for the patriarchs and Moses and Aaron and Miriam and Joshua. It all happened, just as the text says it did. Not because I’m ignorant of research that suggests otherwise; not because I’m a fundamentalist who needs it to be so, lest my faith’s house of cards tumble to the ground. No, it’s because I know what it’s like to be a Christian who supposed otherwise, whose faith was as untroubled then as it is now. I’ve weighed the evidence and found it, for the most part, wanting. Wanting, that is, in terms of compelling my and all others’ uncritical obedience to purported academic consensus. (Reports of consensus being always greatly exaggerated in any case.) I could be wrong. But I’m not worried about it.

Most of all, I couldn’t care less what some expert in the field thinks about my so-called naivete. If he wags his finger at me and cites the latest peer-reviewed journal, I’ll just roll my eyes. This time I won’t be able to stifle the yawn his pronouncements so dearly deserve.

If Lewis wrote today

Off the top of my head, the following things accurately describe C. S. Lewis when he was writing Christian apologetics:

• Avid tobacco smoker.

• Avid beer drinker.

• Oxbridge don.

• Scholar of medieval literature.

• Devotee of pagan literature.

• Lover of pagan myth.

• Poet and advocate of poetry (secular and religious).

• Novelist and advocate of fiction (secular and religious).

• Husband to a divorcee.

• Believer in evolution.

• Believer in a cosmos billions of years old.

• Confirmed member of the Church of England.

• Believer in the necessity and efficacy of the sacraments.

• Believer in the authority of church tradition.

• Believer in the ordination of priests.

• Witness and/or godfather to numerous infant baptisms.

• Participant in the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer.

• Confessor of the creed.

• A writer who refers readily and without apology or embarrassment to saints, mystics, and “the blessed sacrament.”

In other words, Lewis was not much of an American evangelical—that is, not a primitivist, not a teetotaler, not a literal reader of Genesis 1–11, not a strict inerrantist, not a Young Earth Creationist, not a Zwinglian on the Supper, not hesitant about sacred tradition, not anti-creedal, not anti-paedobaptism, not anti-establishmentarian, not anti-sacramental, not congregationalist, not anti-evolution, not squeamish about pagan or secular culture, not allergic to “catholic” language about the saints or sacraments or liturgy.

To be clear, Lewis was not a closet Roman Catholic either. And I may be stretching or misremembering on one or two bullet points. Regardless, the point isn’t that Lewis was Roman rather than (American) evangelical. It’s that he was Anglican, with all that that identity meant and entailed in the early to mid–twentieth century.

Others have drawn attention to similar features of Lewis’s life, thought, and work. Mark Noll reminded me of this in his recent piece for Ad Fontes on Lewis’s initial reception in America. But here’s the question it raised for me.

If there were a similar author today, would American evangelicals feel about him the way they feel (now) about Lewis? Would they blurb his books and invite him to conferences? Would they push him into pulpits and put his works in the hands of young people? Would they move heaven and earth to publish him in their flagship journals and magazines? Would they feel that he represented them, giving eloquent voice to their life and faith as believers?

What I don’t mean is: Could someone like this get a hearing today? Clearly there are plenty of Anglican (and not a few old-school Presbyterian) authors and speakers who fit the bill and don’t seem to have trouble getting published or finding venues. I would argue that many of them code “moderate” or occasionally “left of center” to normie evangelicals, but even still: they exist.

No, what I mean is: No one that I can think of who meets most/all of these descriptions would be received across the board—by charismatics, by non-denom-ers, by Baptists, by Reformed, by conservatives, by hardliners, by squishy nonpartisan types—as “our guy,” as “one of us,” as fundamentally non-threatening and unqualifiedly lauded. I just can’t see it. Whether it’s the “catholic” language and doctrine, or the personal life, or the evolution stuff, or the scriptural issues, or the elite status—one or another item would prove one too many.

Now. At first glance there’s an obvious rebuff here: N. T. Wright. Is Wright’s popularity an exception that proves the rule, then? Or just a debunking of the rule altogether?

I think it’s the former, for at least four reasons.

First, because Wright very famously has from the beginning been a point of serious dispute among Reformed pastors, seminaries, institutions, and theologians in America. Second, because Wright’s writing is so much less “cultural” (for lack of a better term) than Lewis’s and so much more biblical: quite literally translating, commenting on, and interpreting the Bible. Third, because Wright isn’t exactly known for his tobacco and alcohol habits, much less for asking parson after parson to perform a wedding—as Lewis did—in contravention of the laws of the Church of England.

And fourth, because it seems to me that evangelicals’ relationship to Wright is less affective and more transactional than it is with Lewis. They want (above all) the imprimatur of the Oxbridge New Testament scholar and his confidence in the reliability and truth of the Scriptures; they don’t want (on the whole) their kids to become “high church” and start baptizing babies, reciting the creed, grabbing a pint, and believing in evolution. (Not to mention—as American evangelicals who have gone Anglican are known to do—adoring the Eucharist, submitting to bishops, calling priests “Father,” or asking saints for intercession.)

I don’t mean the foregoing as some sort of knockdown argument. There are other, smaller exceptions one could point to. And Lewis is Lewis; he’s a one of one. There are historical and social and political and generational reasons why Living Lewis in 2024 wouldn’t fly with American evangelicals the way Dead Lewis does. I get it.

It’s just a thought I had. And it gets at something that irks me, even if I can’t quite put a finger on it. A gesture or a feeling. I wonder whether it resonates with others.

That’s what a blog’s for, no? Floating half-formed intuitions into the world…

Aping the Inklings

Who are the most-quoted, oft-cited authors in popular (American Protestant) Christian writing from the last half century?

The names that come to my mind are Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien, Guinness, Chambers, Schaeffer, Henry, Graham, Kuyper, Piper, Keller, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Brueggemann, Stott, Packer, Machen, Niebuhr, Hauerwas. Also (from philosophy) MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, James K. A. Smith. For more academic types, you’ll see Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Hauerwas. For Reformed folks, you’ll see Piper and Keller, Kuyper and Schaeffer. For biblical scholars, you’ll see Packer and Stott and Brueggemann. For Catholic-friendly or philosophical sorts, you’ll see Chesterton or Tolkien, MacIntyre or Taylor.

I’m sure I’m missing some big names; I’m pretty ignorant about true-blue evangelical (much less bona fide fundie) writers and sub-worlds. And I’m not even thinking about American Catholicism. But with those qualifiers in place, I’d say this sampling of names is not unrepresentative.

I’m also, by the way, thinking about my “four tiers” of Christian writing outlined in another post. Not professional (level 3) or scholarly (level 4), but universal (level 1) or popular (level 2) writing. What types of names populate those books? The list above includes some big hitters.

That’s all by way of preface. Here’s what I want to say—granting that it’s a point that’s been made many times by others. I’m also, it should be clear, addressing the following to myself as a writer above all. Here it is, in any case:

Popular American Christian writing would benefit from taking a break from constantly quoting, self-consciously imitating, rhetorically centering, or otherwise “drafting” off these figures.

Why? Here’s a few reasons.

First, it generates an unintended homogeneity in both style and perspective. When everyone’s trying to ape the Inklings, even the most successful attempts are all doing the same thing as everyone else. The result is repetition and redundancy. My eyes start rolling back into my head the moment I see that line or that excerpt quoted for the umpteenth time. We all know it! Let’s call a ten-year moratorium on putting it in print. Deal?

Second, it ensures a certain derivative character to popular Christian writing. Whereas, for example, Lewis and Chesterton and Barth and Niebuhr had their own domains of learning in which they were masters, and on which they drew to write for the masses, Christian writers whose primary “domain” is Lewis, Chesterton & co. never end up going to the (or a) source; all their learning is far downstream from the classics (not to mention unpopular or unheard-of texts) that directly informed the more immediate sources they’re consulting.

Put it this way: Evangelicals are to the Inklings as J. J. Abrams is to George Lucas. Lucas, whatever other faults he may have had, was creating an epic cinematic myth based on Akira Kurosawa, Joseph Campbell, and countless other (“high” and “low”) bits of source material. Abrams and his “remake as sequel” ilk don’t play in the big boy sandbox, creating something newly great out of old great things. They play in the tiny sandbox Lucas and others already created. That’s why it feels like cosplay, or fan fiction. They’re not riffing on ancient myths and classic archetypes. They’re rearranging toys in Lucas’s brain.

At their worst, that’s what evangelical and other Protestant writers do when they make the Inklings (or similar popular modern classics) their north star.

This is a problem, third, because the evangelicals in question mistake the popularity of the Inklings as a sensibility or strategy that can be emulated rather than the unique result of who the Inklings were, when and where they lived, and what they knew. Maybe we should set the rule: If you are an Oxbridge don or Ivy League prof, and if you are a polymath who has read every book written in Greek or Latin or German or Old English published before the birth of Luther, and if you are a world-class writer of poetry, fiction, and apologetics, then you may consider the Inklings’ path as one fit for walking. Otherwise, stay in your lane.

Now, I trust it is obvious I’m being facetious. As I said earlier, I’m talking to myself before I’m thinking of anyone else—I’ve quoted most of these figures in print, and I have books for a Tier 2 audience coming out next year that cite Barth, Hauerwas, Lewis, and Bonhoeffer! Nor do I mean to suggest that a Christian writer has to be as brilliant as these geniuses to write at all. In that case, none of us should be writing. Finally, there do continue to be scholars and writers (few and far between though they be) who have useful and illuminating things to say about the actual Inklings—Alan Jacobs comes to mind—not to mention the other authors in my list above.

All I mean to say is this. On one hand, the way to imitate these masters is by doing what they did in one’s own context and realm of knowledge, not by becoming masters of them and making them the sun around which one’s mental planet orbits. On the other hand, if you want your writing to be original, creative, distinctive, stylish, thoughtful, and punchy—if you want it not only to be good but to stand out from the crowd—then the number one thing to do is not make these guys the beating heart of your writing. Doing that will render your work invisible, since such writing is a dime a dozen, and has been for three generations.

What then should your writing be like? Who or what should it “draft” off of? That’s for you to discover.

Young Christians (not) reading, 2

I received some really useful feedback in response to my previous post about the reading habits, such as they are, of high school and college Christians today. By way of reminder, the group I’m thinking about consists of (a) Christians who are (b) spiritually committed and (c) intellectually serious (d) between the ages of 15 and 25. In other words, in terms of GPA or intelligence or aptitude or career prospects, the top 5-10% Christian students in high school and college. Future professionals, even elites, who are likely to pursue graduate degrees in top-100 schools followed by jobs in law, medicine, journalism, the arts, academia, and politics. What are they reading right now—if anything?

(I trust my qualifiers and modifiers ensure in advance that I’m not equating spiritual maturity with intellectual aptitude, on one hand, or intellectual aptitude with careerist elitism, on the other.)

Here are some responses I received as well as a bunch of further reflections on my part.

1. One comment across the board: None of these kids are reading anything, whether they are cream of the crop or nothing of the kind. And they’re certainly not reading bona fide theology or intellectually demanding spiritual writing. All of them, including the smartest and most ambitious, are online, all the time, full stop. What “content” they get is found there: podcasts, videos, bloggers, and influencers, plus pastors with a “brand” and an extensive online presence (which, these days, amount to the same thing). To be fair, some of these online sources aren’t half bad. Some are substantive. Some have expertise or credentials or wide learning (if, often, of the autodidact sort). But to whatever extent any of these kids are acquiring knowledge, it’s not literate knowledge. It’s mediated by the internet, not by books.

2. If someone in this age range is reading a living Christian author, then I was right to think of John Mark Comer. A few more names mentioned: David Platt, Francis Chan, Dane Ortlund, Timothy Keller. I also had The Gospel Coalition mentioned as a group of authors read by some of these folks. In terms of dead authors, in addition to what I called “the usual suspects” (Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, et al), I also heard Eugene Peterson, Dallas Willard, and Henri Nouwen. Which makes sense, since all of them have passed in recent memory, and professors as well as youth pastors would be likely to recommend their work. (I’m going to go ahead and assume John Piper is among those names, too, though he is still with us.)

3. An addendum: Some young believers are reading books, but the books they’re reading are mostly fiction. Typically YA fare; sometimes older stuff, like Tolkien or Jane Austen; occasionally scattered past or present highbrow fiction like Donna Tartt or Cormac McCarthy or Susanna Clarke. But still, not a lot of fiction reading overall, and the majority is page-turning lowbrow stuff, with occasional English-major nerdballs (hello) opting for the top-rack vintage.

4. A second addendum: It isn’t clear to me how to count or to contextualize kids who are home-schooled or taught in classical Christian academies. What percentage of the total student population are they? And what percentage of this small sub-population is being taught Homer and Virgil and Saint Augustine and Calvin and so on? Or, if we’re thinking of living authors, which if any of them are they reading? I simply have no idea what the answer is to any of these questions. Nor do I know what the difference is between such students being assigned these texts and their actual personal reading habits outside of class.

5. Back to the brief list of living authors above: Comer, Platt, Chan, Ortlund, Keller, et al. The question arises: Are young Christians who report these names in fact reading their books? Or are they “digesting” their message via sermons, podcasts, and video recordings available on the internet? The same goes for megachurch pastors with an online audience, like Jonathan Pokluda, who preaches outside of Waco; or Andy Stanley in Atlanta, or Matt Chandler in Dallas. There’s a lot of daylight between reading an author’s books and knowing the basic gist of a public figure.

6. To be even more granular: If a young Christian says that she has read Comer’s latest book, what is likeliest? That she used her eyes to scan a codex whose pages she turned with her hands? or that she read it on an e-reader/tablet? or that she listened to the audio version? After all, Comer—like other popular nonfiction authors today—reads his books himself for the audio edition. And since he’s a preacher for a living, it’s very effective, not to mention personalizing; which is part of the appeal for so many young people today.

7. In a word, is it true to say that even the readers among young believers today are often not “reading” in the classical manner many of us presuppose? So that, whether it’s a podcast or a TikTok or an IG Reel or a YouTube channel or a “book,” the manner of reception/intake/ingestion is more or less the same? So that “reading” names not an alternative mode of acquiring knowledge or engaging a source but simply a difference in type of source? In which case, it seems to me, young people formed in this way will not, would not, think of “books” as different in kind from other social media that make for their daily digital diet, but merely a difference in degree. Books being one point on a spectrum that includes pods, videos, and the like.

8. So much for technologies of knowledge production and consumption. Another question: What counts as a “serious” Christian author? That was part of my original question, recall. Not just intellectually serious young Christian readers, but serious Christian books by serious Christian authors. Not fluff. Not spiritual candy bars. Not the ghost-written memoirs of influencers. Not, in short, the “inspirational” shelf at Barnes & Noble. If one-half of the presenting question of the original post concerned a certain type of young Christian reader, the other half concerns a certain type of Christian author. Here’s what I have in mind, at least. The author doesn’t have to meet a credentials requirement; doesn’t have to have a doctorate. Nor does he have to write in an academic, jargon-laden, or impenetrable style. That would defeat the point. To be popular, you have to be readable. And “being popular” can’t be a defeater here, or else no one, however rich or good in substance, could ever sell books: they’d be disqualified by their own success.

As I’ve said, Lewis and Chesterton are the gold standard. Other names that come to mind from the twentieth century (beyond Bonhoeffer, Nouwen, Peterson, and Willard) include Karl Barth, Dorothy Sayers, Francis Schaeffer, Os Guinness, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Madeleine L’Engle, John Stott, J. I. Packer, Robert Farrar Capon, Frederick Buechner, Wendell Berry, Stanley Hauerwas, and Marilynne Robinson. That’s a very short list; it could be doubled or tripled quickly. As it stands, what do the names on it have in common?

Here’s how I’d put it. Each author’s writing draws from a rich, clear, and deep reservoir of knowledge and wisdom, a reservoir that funds their work but does not overwhelm it. Put differently, what a normie reader encounters is the tip of the iceberg. If that’s all she can handle, so be it. But to anyone in the know, it’s as clear as day that there’s a mountain of ice beneath the surface.

Furthermore, one of the consistent effects of reading any of these authors is not only sticking with them but moving beyond them into the vast tradition that so evidently informs their writing. This could be the Thomistic tradition, or the patristic, or the Homeric, or the Antiochene, or the Kantian, or the Reformed, or whatever—but what the author offers the reader is so beautiful that the reader wants more of whatever it is. And so she moves from Piper to Edwards to Calvin to Augustine in the course of weeks, months, and years. From there, who knows what will be next?

That is the kind of book, the sort of author, I have in mind. My original interlocutor was asking about such work in the present tense. Who fits the bill? And who are young people reading? I’m willing to say that Keller fits the bill. Comer does too, in my judgment, though that is a status he graduated into with his last two books. His earlier work was far too primitivist-evangelical, far too dismissive of tradition, to qualify. But to his credit, he has clearly read himself into the tradition and now invites his readers to do the same.

I can certainly name others, like Tish Harrison Warren, who are doing the work and who are selling books. But are they having a widespread discernible influence across a vast slice of 15-25-year olds today? It’s probably too early to tell.

9. Let me think about my own trajectory for a moment. Here are authors whose books I read cover-to-cover across three different age ranges:

• 15-18: Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Tolkien

• 18-22: Lee Camp, Douglas John Hall, Richard Foster, Nouwen, John Howard Yoder, Hauerwas, Berry, Walter Brueggemann, N. T. Wright, Ben Witherington

• 22-25: William Cavanaugh, Terry Eagleton, Robert Bellah, Augustine, Charles Taylor, Barth, Robert Jenson, John Webster, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer, Kathryn Tanner

These aren’t all the authors I was reading at these ages, but rather the kinds of names I was introduced to that made an impact on me—so much so that I remember, in most cases, the first book I read by each, and when and where I was, and what my first impression of them was.

I’m sure I’m leaving off some important names. But the list is representative. I was a precocious, brainy young Christian who loved talking about God and reading the Bible, and these were the authors that youth ministers, mentors, and professors put in my hands. Not a bad list! Pretty much all living authors, or from the previous century, so not a lot of historical or cultural diversity on offer. But substantive, provocative, stimulating, and accessible nonetheless. The kinds of authors who might change your life. The kind who might convert you, or de-convert you. Who might shadow you for years to come.

And so, once again, the question is: Is the 2023 version of me (a) reading at all and, if so, (b) which authors, living or dead, is he reading? which is he being poked and prodded by? which stimulated and provoked by? Inquiring minds want to know!

10. This exercise has made me take a second look at my own teaching. Which authors do I assign? If you are a student who enrolls in my class, who will you read? A rough summary off the top of my head:

• Dead: Barth, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint Athanasius, Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Saint Augustine, Saint Oscar Romero, Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Paul VI, Henri Nouwen, James Cone, Gerhard Lohfink, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• Alive: Tish Harrison Warren, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Joseph White, N. T. Wright, Beth Felker Jones, Martin Mosebach, Tara Isabella Burton, Ross Douthat, Andy Crouch, Andrew Davison, Andrew Wilson, Peter Leithart, Jemar Tisby, Victor Lee Austin, Michael Banner, James Mumford

Those are just authors of books I’ve assigned (and do assign). The list would be far larger if I included authors of chapters and articles and online essays. In any case, I’m pretty happy with this list, granting that I teach upper-level gen-ed elective courses to undergraduate students who have never taken theology before.

11. What lessons do I draw from all of the above? First, that people like me have a lot of power and influence and therefore enormous responsibility toward the young people who enter our classrooms. I cannot control whether my students fall in love with the books I assign them. But if I choose wisely, I make it far more likely that they might fall in love. That might in turn set off a chain reaction of reading and learning that lasts a lifetime.

12. Second lesson: Don’t assign “textbooks.” That is, don’t assign purely academic or fake authors. Don’t assign books dumbed down for teenagers. Avoid books that do not look like any sane person would ever cozy up with them in a comfy chair and read leisurely for a whole afternoon. Instead, assign books whose authors are known for befriending their readers. Assign authors who have fanatical followings. Assign authors who have the power to convert readers to their cause. Assign poets and rhetors and masters of the word. Assign stylish writing. Assign passionate writing, writing with stakes. Assign texts with teeth. Don’t be surprised when they bite students. That’s the point.

13. Third, the express aim of Christian liberal arts education and certainly of every humanities class within such institutions ought to be for students to learn to read, thence to learn to love to read, thence to learn to desire to be (that is, to become) a lifelong reader. Every assignment should be measured by whether it conduces to this end. If it does not, it should be scrapped.

14. It follows, fourth, that professors should shy away from assigning online content, whether that be links, videos, podcasts, or even texts on e-readers. That’s not quite an outright ban, but it is a strong nudge against the inclination. Give your students books: physical books they can hold in their hands. Reading a book is an activity different from scrolling a website, watching a video, or listening to a podcast. Young people already know how to do those things. They do not know how to sit still for ninety minutes without a screen in sight, in utter silence, and turn pages, lost in a book, for pure pleasure or simple edification. They have to be taught how to do that. And it takes time. What better time than college?

15. All this applies twice-over for seminaries. What is a pastor who cannot read? The principal job of a pastor, alongside administering the sacraments, is to teach and preach God’s word, which means to interpret the scriptures for God’s people. You cannot interpret without reading, which means you cannot teach and preach without being able to read. Are we raising a generation of illiterate ministers? Is the time already upon us? Are our seminaries aiding and abetting this process, or actively opposing and redirecting it?

16. If professors have some measure of influence, youth pastors (in person) and pastors with a public platform (online) have much greater influence. What we need, then, is for pastors to see it as part of their job description to find ways to encourage and induce literacy in the young people at their churches and, further, to suggest authors and books that are more than candy bars and happy meals, spiritually speaking. For this to happen—allow me to repeat myself—pastors must themselves be readers. They must be voracious bookworms who understand that their vocation necessarily and essentially entails wide and deep and sustained reading. Their churches (above all their elders and vestries and bishops) must understand this, too. If you walk into a pastor’s office and he is reading, he is doing his job. If you never see him reading, something’s amiss. The same is true, by the way, if you do see him reading, but he’s only ever reading a book written in the last five years.

17. Returning to the academy, what happens in the classroom is not all that happens on a college campus. Much, perhaps most, learning happens elsewhere. To be sure, it happens in library stacks and dorm rooms and coffee shops and Bible studies. But it also happens at Christian study centers. The importance of these cannot be overstated. Their presence on public and non-religious campuses is a refuge and a haven for young believers. They can’t be only that, however. They have to be the kind of place that fosters learning, reflection, discussion, and—yes—reading. Reading groups on the church fathers, or the magisterial reformers, or the Lutheran scholastics, or the ecumenical councils: these should be the bread and butter of Christian study centers. Hubs of vibrant intellectual life woven into and inseparable from the spiritual.

18. I’ll go one step further (borrowing the tongue-in-cheek suggestion from a friend): What we need is Christian study centers on Christian college campuses. Sad to say, far too many Christian universities today have bought into credentialing, gate-keeping, and careerism. They do not exist to further the Christian vision of the liberal arts. They exist to stay alive by selling students a product that will in turn secure them a job. None of these things is bad in themselves—enduring institutions, diplomas, gainful employment—but they are not the reason why Christian higher education exists. The presence of Christian study centers on Christian campuses would signal a commitment to the telos of such institutions by carving out space for the kinds of activity that students and professors are, lamentably, sometimes kept from devoting themselves to within the classroom itself. Perhaps this could be done explicitly on some campuses, whereas on others you would have to do it on the sly. Either way, it’s a worthy endeavor.

19. Let me close on two notes, one negative and one positive. The negative: As I have written about before, we have entered a time of double literacy loss in the church. Christians, especially the young, are at once biblically illiterate and literally illiterate. They do not read or know the Bible, and this is of a piece with their larger habits, for they do not read anything much at all. That is a fact. It would be foolish to deny it and naive to pretend it will change in some seismic shift in the span of a few years.

The period in which we find ourselves, then, is a sort of return to premodern times: Granting a kind of minimal mass literacy, in terms of widespread active reading habits, there is now (or will soon be) a very small minority of readers—and everyone else. What will this mean for the church? For daily spirituality and personal devotion? For catechesis, Sunday school, and preaching? For lay and voluntary leaders in the church? For ordained ministers themselves? We shall see.

20. I am biased, obviously, in favor of literacy and habits of reading. I want my students to be readers. I want pastors to be readers. I want more, not less, reading; and better, not worse, reading. But not everyone is meant to be a reader. Not everyone should major in English. Not everyone’s evenings are best spent with Proust in the French and a glass of wine. God forgive me for implying so, if I have.

Here’s the upshot. If young people (and, as they age, all people) are going to learn about the Christian faith through means other than reading, and for the time being those means will largely be mediated by the internet, then what we need is (a) high-quality content (b) accessible to normies (c) funded by a reservoir of knowledge rooted in the great tradition, together with (d) ease of access and widespread knowledge of how to get it. We need, in other words, networks of writers, pastors, teachers, scholars, speakers, podcasters, and others who have resources, audiences, support, technology, and platforms by which and through which to communicate the gospel, build up God’s people, and educate the faithful in ways the latter can access and understand, with content we would call “meat,” not “milk.”

I know one such endeavor. There are others. I don’t want to give up on literacy. I never will. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Time and past time to get moving on these projects. I’m entirely in favor of them, so long as we do not see them as a substitute but instead as a supplement to the habits of reading they thereby encourage rather than block. What we need, though, is the right people, adequately resourced, finding the young, hungry and seeking Christ and open to learning as they are. If this is the way to reach them, and it can be done well, count me in.

Well-adjusted

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960):

Medicine labors to restore “natural” structure or “normal” function. But greed, egoism, self-deception, and self-pity are not abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal any man from whom these failings were wholly absent? “Natural,” if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. We have only seen one such Man. And he was not at all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be “well adjusted” to your world if it says “you have a devil” and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.

Stanley Hauerwas, “Being with the Wounded: Pastoral Care Within the Life of the Church” (2019):

I have little sympathy for clergy who think their ministry of pastoral care to be the expression of a more general stance identified as a helping profession. Admittedly those who so understand their ministry may often manifest pious pretensions necessary to justify their self-proclaimed identity as someone who responds to a crisis “pastorally,” but I do not think such piety is sufficient to justify describing what they do as a church practice.

There is the problem, moreover, when the ministry becomes just another helping profession, and those who occupy that office discover they have no protection from those they are supposed to help. People think they can ask those who identify as “helpers” to do anything because those committed to be a “helper” do not work for a living. As a result, it does not take long before those in the ministry who identify as “helpers” soon discover they feel like they have been nibbled to death by ducks. A little bite here and a little bite there, and before they know it they have lost an arm. Hence, those that started out wanting to be “of help” often end up violently disliking those they are allegedly helping.

Insofar as the ministry is understood as a helping profession, it is difficult to avoid an alienation between those who help and those that need help. One of the great gifts of being in the ministry is the permission it gives to be present to people in crisis when they are often at their most vulnerable point in their life. They are often appreciative that you are present during the crisis, but after the crisis is over they prefer that you be kept at a distance. They excommunicate those who have been present during the crisis because they fear those that have seen them when they were so vulnerable. That they do so makes the up building of the community difficult, to say the least. . . .

I think we get some idea of the character of contemporary understandings of pastoral care by attending to the account that Alasdair MacIntyre provides in After Virtue of the main characters that have authority in modernity ― that is, the rich aesthete, the manager and the therapist. Each, in their own way, is an expression of a culture of emotivism which is based on the presumption that, insofar as our lives makes sense, they do so only by the imposition of our arbitrary wilfulness. Such wilfulness is required because it is assumed that our lives have no end other than what we can create and impose by the sheer force of our arbitrary desires. As a consequence, it becomes impossible to avoid the reality that all our interactions are manipulative.

In such a context, the task of the therapist, as MacIntyre puts it, is to “transform neurotic symptoms into directed energy, maladjusted individuals into well-adjusted ones.” The therapist must do so, moreover, assuming that there is no normative framework other than respect for their clients' autonomy that can shape their interactions.

To be a moral agent in such a culture entails that we can never be fully present in our actions because if we are to be free we must always be able to stand back from our actions, as if someone other than ourselves did what was done. Such a perspective is the only way to avoid being determined by particularistic narratives that would constrain our choices. The therapist cannot avoid reflecting these conditions because the therapist cannot assume a narrative that can help us make sense of the moral incoherence of our lives. Thus MacIntyre's claim, in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, that any challenge to these modern habits of thought faces the difficulty of only being able to think about our lives in terms that exclude those concepts needed for any radical critique.

What MacIntyre helps us see is how the eclectic character of the various psychological theories that so often inform pastoral care reflects liberal political theory and practice. That many people in advanced industrial societies suffer from a sense that they are alone because no one — including themselves — understand who they are is expected result of living in a time when freedom is assumed to be found in having a unimpeded choice. . . .

The account of the development of pastoral care I have just given does not do justice to the complexity of much of the work done under the headings of “pastoral care” and “pastoral theology.” I am not apologizing because I think, as Stephen Pattison has argued, that the pastoral care movement, particularly in America, has ignored the theological tradition that makes the care given through the church Christian. It is not at all clear that Christians are called to be mature or well-adjusted, but it is surely the case that the care Christians give one another ― and particularly the care that is thought to be the province of those that occupy the pastoral office ― will and should depend on being an expression of the fundamental convictions that make Christians Christian.

Four loves follow-up

Consider the following portrait, all of whose modifiers are meant descriptively rather than critically or even pejoratively:

A man in his 20s or 30s who is godless, friendless, fatherless, childless, sexless, unmarried, and unpartnered, and who has no active relationship with a sibling, cousin, aunt, uncle, or grandparent. We will assume he is not motherless—everyone has (had) a mother—but we might also add that he lacks a healthy relationship with her or that he lives far away from her.

This, in extreme form, is the picture of loveless life I described in the last post, using the fourfold love popularized by C. S. Lewis: kinship, eros, friendship, and agape.

Here’s my question. In human history, apart from extreme crises brought about by natural disaster or famine or war or plague, has there even been a generation as full of such men (or women) as the present generation? The phenomenon is far from limited to “the West.” It includes Russia, Japan, and China, among others. Young people without meaningful relationships of any kind, anywhere on the grid of the four loves. They lack entirely the love of a god, the love of a spouse, the love of a child, the love of a friend, even the love of a parent.

On one hand, it seems I can’t go a day without reading a new story about this phenomenon; it’s on my mind this week because I just finished Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. Yet, on the other hand, the crisis we are facing seems so massive, so epochal, so devastating, so unprecedented, so complex, that in truth we can’t talk about it enough. We need to be shouting the problem aloud from the rooftops like a crazy end-times street preacher.

But what is to be done? That’s the question that haunts me. Whatever the answers, we should be laboring with all that we have to find them. The stakes are as high as they get.

Four loves loss

More than sixty year ago C. S. Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves. Ever since, his framework has proven a reliable and popular paradigm for thinking about different aspects or modes of love. The terms he uses are storge, eros, philia, and agape; we might loosely translate these as kinship, romance, friendship, and self-giving to and for the other. They denote the love that obtains between members of a family, between spouses in a marriage, between close friends, and between humans and God. (This last category is my own gloss; agape is, for Lewis and for the Christian tradition, the love God displays in Christ and thus the exemplary cause of both our love for him and our love for others.)

A thought occurred to me about these four loves, and I wonder if anyone else has written about it.

Our society is awash in loneliness, apathy, despair, and even sexlessness. The youngest generations (“Gen Z” and Millennials) are marrying later or not at all, and (thus) having fewer children or none at all. Divorce is rampant. Kin networks are declining in both quantity and quality, and what remains is fraying at the seams. Regular attendance of church (or synagogue, or mosque) reached historically low numbers before Covid; the pandemic has supercharged these trends beyond recognition. Even friendship, the last dependable and universal form of love, has seen drastic reductions, especially for men. I heard one sociologist, a middle-aged woman, remark recently that our young men are beset by “the three P’s: pot, porn, and PlayStation.” You can’t open an internet browser without stumbling upon the latest news report, study finding, or op-ed column on opioids, deaths of despair, hollowed-out factory towns, fatherless children, lethargic boys, screen-addled kids, housebound teens, risk-averse young adults, social awkwardness, and all the other symptoms of a sad, isolated, and unloved generation. They are like a car alarm ringing through the night. Eventually you get used to it and go back to sleep.

I don’t have anything especially insightful to say about any of this. But I found that, as Lewis’s book came to mind in conjunction with these trends, his framework suggested itself as a useful analytical grid. Perhaps one way to judge whether an individual is flourishing today is whether she can point confidently to the presence of all four loves in her life. A dense and supportive familial network of parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles; a spouse and children of her own; concentric circles of friends who know her well, whom she sees regularly in a variety of settings, and on whom she can rely; a church to she belongs and where she consistently worships and enjoys the presence of the God who created her and continues to sustain her, day by day.

In a sense it’s all too obvious: this description simply transposes into the vernacular the native grammar of the sociologist. We’ve been “bowling alone”—not to mention working alone, dating alone, praying alone—for some decades now; this is nothing new.

Granted! At least for me, though, using the four loves is a helpful way to identify the different ways in which certain loves are present or absent in one’s own life or in the lives of others. I can think off hand of any number of folks who can only count one or two or three of the four loves in their lives. Most of the twentysomethings I know who aren’t uber-churchgoers (as some of my students are—glory be) lack agape, storge, and eros; all they have are friends, and even then, those friends are good for little more than happy hour drinks after work or a concert or club on the weekend. In other words, they barely amount to friends at all.

The Lewis framework also helps us to see the feedback loop of love. Kinship, marriage, friendship, and church (again, feel free to substitute some other religious tradition; I admit readily that I am identifying the institution of religious piety with love for God, for it is in institutions that we embody our loves) each and all reinforce the others. And where one love is absent by unchosen fact—as for those who wish they were married, or whose parents are abusive, or who wish they had more or better friends—the other three loves (a) offer support for what is lacking or lost and (b) provide durable structures in which to persevere and, hopefully, to rectify or supplement the absent love in question.

Peter Maurin once remarked that we ought to labor to forge a society “where it is easier to be good.” That is, the laws and norms, institutions and habits of our common life ought to conduce to virtue—honesty, courage, prudence, kindness, justice, piety—rather than vice. We are social creatures, after all. Likewise we ought to make it our collective aim to build a culture where it is easier to discover, to receive, and to share in the four loves. A world in which the four loves “came easier” would be a world worth living in and working for. Unfortunately, we seem to have done the opposite.

Turning back the clock

In the last six weeks I’ve read three different books that all makes disparaging reference to “turning back the clock.” By disparaging I mean that they repudiate the usual use to which the cliché is put. Noticing the shared rhetorical move between these works, spread across about four decades in the first half of the twentieth century, made me wonder how common a trope this is for Christian and especially conservative writers in the last hundred or so years. Do share if you know some other ones.

Here’s the first. From G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World (1910):

There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

Next comes C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1941–44; rev. 1952):

You may have felt you were ready to listen to me as long as you thought I had anything new to say; but if it turns out to be only religion, well, the world has tried that and you cannot put the clock back. If anyone is feeling that way I should like to say three things to him.

First, as to putting the clock back. Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be and if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. We have all seen this when we do arithmetic. When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start over again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

Finally, Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948):

Whoever argues for a restoration of values is sooner or later met with the objection that one cannot return, or as the phrase is likely to be, “you can't turn the clock back.” By thus assuming that we are prisoners of the moment, the objection well reveals the philosophic position of modernism. The believer in truth, on the other hand, is bound to maintain that the things of highest value are not affected by the passage of time; otherwise the very concept of truth becomes impossible. In declaring that we wish to recover lost ideals and values, we are looking toward an ontological realm which is timeless. Only the sheerest relativism insists that passing time renders unattainable one ideal while forcing upon us another. Therefore those that say we can have the integration we wish, and those who say we cannot, differ in their ideas of ultimate reality, for the latter are positing the primacy of time and of matter. And this is the kind of division which prevents us from having one world.

Now the return which the idealists propose is not a voyage backward through time but a return to center, which must be conceived metaphysically or theologically. They are seeking the one which endures and not the many which change and pass, and this search can be only described as looking for the truth. They are making the ancient affirmation that there is a center of things, and they point out that every feature of modern disintegration is a flight from this toward periphery. It is expressible, also, as a movement from unity to individualism. In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them. A recovery of certain viewpoints associated with the past would be a recovery of understanding as such, and this, unless we admit ourselves to be helpless in the movement of a deterministic march, is possible at any time. In brief, one does not require a particular standpoint to comprehend the timeless. Let us remember all the while that the very notion of eternal verities is repugnant to the modern temper.

I imagine there are many, many more where these come from. Anti-modern, conservative, and reactionary writers adore Chesterton, Lewis, and Weaver. Perhaps someone else has already collected the further quotes and riffs they spawned. I’ll be keeping my eye out for more.

Perennial Lewis

As I’ve written about previously, I’ve spent the last 10-12 months rereading the major works of C. S. Lewis by listening to them on audio. That has meant nearly 20 books, split evenly between fiction and nonfiction. I’m on my last one now (I finished my romp through Chesterton earlier this month), which means 2022 will be wide open for my post-podcast listening habits.

In any case, a few final reflections on Lewis. In particular, on Lewis the apologist and why (a) there has not been a genuine successor to his genius or his stature and (b) why he remains so popular as we approach the 60th anniversary of his death.

1. The first answer is simple: they don’t make ’em like they used to. Lewis describes himself as a converted pagan among apostate puritans, and that’s the right way to read him. Even if he weren’t a first-rate stylist and multifaceted writer (novels, children’s stories, science fiction, literary criticism, poetry, memoir, philosophy, ethics, apologetics), his sheer learning sets him apart. Nor did he gain that learning as part of a strategy for something called “outreach” or intellectual evangelism. He came to the faith ready-made, the product of an extraordinary mind molded by an extraordinary education. I wonder sometimes whether there’s even one Anglophone Christian scholar today under 45 years old who does not spend his or her time regularly on the internet, social media, and/or streaming television. The sheer time given to such trifles (I’m looking at myself here) means ipso facto that one could not hope to reach one-tenth of Lewis’s erudition.

2. The next answer is obvious: the disciples of Lewis are not like Lewis, nor do they aspire to be. They do not come from where he came from; they do not share his education; their overlap with his literary and intellectual affections is minimal. Lewis came to Christ by way of myth and romance, epic poetry and the drama of pagan pleasures. These are foreign to Lewis’s foremost admirers, above all American evangelicals. This is a man who was (until the end) a bachelor who loved rich beer, good tobacco, other men, and talk of dragons. Preferably with a shared knowledge of half a dozen languages, ancient and modern. Whereas those who love Lewis most love him for his side hobby (which, granted, we may assume was his calling from God): putting the complexities of the faith into plain language for common people, against powerful cultural trends. None of them, in other words, is going to have a chance of becoming him.

3. But that’s a negative way of putting the matter. So let me say this. Going back over books I first read twenty years ago, now on the far side of a more or less continuous theological education in college and graduate school, I see now more clearly than ever Lewis’s brilliance. He really was a one of one. As I listen to his most popular—by which I mean not his most successful or beloved but his most vulgar or common—speeches and writings, I am consistently struck by how little has changed (at least, between postwar England and contemporary America), but more so by how excellent his answers are to the questions of the time. By and large they need not, because they cannot, be improved upon. There is no Lewis 2.0 because eight times out of ten, if an honest skeptic asks you a question, you should just point him to the essay or book that Lewis already wrote. If it ain’t broke, etc.

4. There are subjects that Lewis did not address or articulate as well as he did others; these remain for others to elaborate or expand upon. He is not, it seems to me, especially trustworthy on politics. His ecclesiology is thin. Though he can be quite good on sex and gender, at other times he is bad, and occasionally he is plain weird. In his time he was on the threshold—knowingly—of a truly post-Christian society. It was already present in the people, but the trappings remained in law, education, and culture. No longer. What does it mean to take up the baton from him? That is, to evangelize a re-paganized West at once post-Christian and anti-Christian yet also somehow formally and thus morally and spiritually Christian (without knowing or acknowledging it)?

That, so far as I can tell, is the question to ask. Not least because it’s the question he’d be asking. I don’t have hope that there will be another like him anytime soon. But God has done stranger things. At any rate, we can give God thanks for doing the altogether strange thing of converting Lewis to Christ. Lord knows Lewis is on the short list of reasons why I am a believer. How many others can say the same?

A sheep among wolves

If, after reading [this book], you now turn to study the historical evidence for yourself, begin with the New Testament and not with the books about it. If you do not know Greek get it in a modern translation. Moffat’s is probably the best: Monsignor Knox is also good. I do not advise the Basic English version. And when you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as a sheep among wolves. Naturalistic assumptions, beggings of the question such as that which I noted on the first page of this book, will meet you on every side—even from the pens of clergymen. This does not mean (as I was once tempted to suspect) that these clergymen are disguised apostates who deliberately exploit the position and the livelihood given them by the Christian Church to undermine Christianity. It comes partly from what we may call a ‘hangover’. We all have Naturalism in our bones and even conversion does not at once work the infection out of our system. Its assumptions rush back upon the mind the moment vigilance is relaxed. And in part the procedure of these scholars arises from the feeling which is greatly to their credit—which indeed is honourable to the point of being Quixotic. They are anxious to allow to the enemy every advantage he can with any show of fairness claim. They thus make it part of their method to eliminate the supernatural wherever it is even remotely possible to do so, to strain natural explanation even to the breaking point before they admit the least suggestion of miracle. Just in the same spirit some examiners tend to overmark any candidate whose opinions and character, as revealed by his work, are revolting to them. We are so afraid of being led into unfairness by our instant dislike of the man that we are liable to overshoot the mark and treat him too kindly. Many modern Christian scholars overshoot the mark for a similar reason.

In using the books of such people you must therefore be continually on guard. You must develop a nose like a bloodhound for those steps in the argument which depend not on historical and linguistic knowledge but on the concealed assumption that miracles are impossible, improbable, or improper. And this means that you must really re-educate yourself: must work hard and consistently to eradicate from your mind the whole type of thought in which we have all been brought up. It is the type of thought which, under various disguises, has been our adversary throughout this book.

—C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947), 267–269

Narnia’s saints

Does Narnia have saints? It occurred to me, as I was listening to The Last Battle this morning, that the function of the children in the stories (minus The Horse and His Boy) is analogous to the function of the saints in devotional and liturgical prayer in catholic traditions. There is no question that Aslan alone is King and Lord, but by his will the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve are sent as ministering servants to the beasts and people of Narnia. Not only that, but more than once they are called. Caspian blows Susan’s horn to call them for help. And while captured and alone, King Tirian bellows aloud—following a prayer addressed directly to Aslan—a prayer to the children of old who once aided Narnia long ago. Indeed this latter petition for the children’s intercession comes after Tirian recalling to mind the old stories he was raised on, having been well versed as a child in a kind of common Narnian hagiography of Peter and Lucy and Digory and Polly and the rest. And more or less the moment he begs their intercession, under Aslan, he is brought to them in our world, and moments later (for him: a week later for them) Jill and Eustace arrive to help.

That description is quite similar to catholic teaching and practice regarding the saints. They are alive with God in heaven (read: another world); they once lived in our world and we tell and retell stories of their words and deeds (read: tales of the fabled children who came to Narnia’s aid in times of great need); they have no power of themselves but by God’s grace hear the petitions of the church militant and intercede for them before the heavenly throne (read: the children being called or summoned to Narnia); and occasionally through their intercession the Lord works some miracle or wonder in answer to a believer’s prayer and as a sign of the saint’s patronage or protection (read: the children appearing in Narnia and defeating the White Witch or coming to Caspian’s aid or sailing to the end of the world or rescuing Prince Rilian from his enchantment). If this account makes the role of the saints, and therefore of the children in Lewis’s stories, akin to that of the angels, that is because it is. At least according to sacred tradition.

I vaguely recall Lewis half-punting the question of the saints’ intercession in his book on prayer, or perhaps in a separate essay. I’ll have to run down the reference, but I believe he affirms the saints’ intercession on principle, but not wanting to be divisive he allows the legitimacy of Protestant worries about superstitious and abuse. In any case, though, I’d be shocked if he were dead-set opposed to the practice. And even if he were, he’s rendered the practice in an intelligible and quite beautiful narrative form in the children of the Chronicles of Narnia.

Angels

A few years back I had one of those serendipitous reading moments when all at once an unexpected theme or subject emerges from disparate and seemingly unrelated texts. The first was the Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis; the second, the Catholic Catechism; the third, On the Orthodox Faith by St. John Damascene. The topic? Angels.

Space Trilogy

Lewis’s work is saturated with the angelic, and the adventures of Ransom in space (and on earth) are no different. Among Lewis’s many gifts, as both a novelist and a theological thinker, is his ability to depict supra-cosmic creaturely life in its necessary ineffable grandeur without becoming either saccharine or anthropomorphic. The angels aren’t like us only somewhat not. They exist on a wholly other level. The image that sticks with me, from one of the first two novels in the Space Trilogy, is Ransom’s impression that, though an angel manifesting to him inside a house is somehow or other present to his senses, the angel nevertheless appears aslant—as though the axis on which he stands were unrelated to the earth’s axis, or any other in this universe.

Angels are also present in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, among other works. My sense is that angels serve two functions in Lewis’s spiritual imagination. First, they represent and embody a rebuttal to a disenchanted, depopulated cosmos. From one angle, it’s a simple assertion: If God exists, then there’s nothing spookier, metaphysically speaking, for there to be other spiritual beings; it’s only natural. From another angle, it’s a powerful rebuttal: If angels exist, then the very notion of a mechanistic cosmos devoid of God and the soul and the moral law is bunk.

Second, Lewis rightly portrays the angelic in its double dimension: not only the good, but also the bad. He writes of demons, in other words. No reader of the Bible could plausibly imagine that whatever created life transcends us is only beautiful and glorious; it also includes the horrific and the wicked. It includes Satan and all his pomp. Lewis thinks that is morally and metaphysically interesting, which it is, and therefore worth writing about in an age like his (and ours), which it was (and is).

Catechism

Around the time I was making my way through the Space Trilogy, I read the following section in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It comes from Part I, Paragraph 5, titled “Heaven and Earth.” It’s part of an exposition of what Christians believe, following the Rule of Faith codified in the creedal narration of biblical teaching. Here’s what it says:

The Scriptural expression “heaven and earth” means all that exists, creation in its entirety. It also indicates the bond, deep within creation, that both unites heaven and earth and distinguishes the one from the other: “the earth” is the world of men, while “heaven” or “the heavens” can designate both the firmament and God’s own “place”—”our Father in heaven” and consequently the “heaven” too which is eschatological glory. Finally, “heaven” refers to the saints and the “place” of the spiritual creatures, the angels, who surround God.

The profession of faith of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) affirms that God “from the beginning of time made at once (simul) out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly, and then (deinde) the human creature, who as it were shares in both orders, being composed of spirit and body.”

I. THE ANGELS

The existence of angels—a truth of faith

The existence of the spiritual, non-corporeal beings that Sacred Scripture usually calls “angels” is a truth of faith. the witness of Scripture is as clear as the unanimity of Tradition.

Who are they?

St. Augustine says: “‘Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are, ‘spirit’, from what they do, ‘angel.’“ With their whole beings the angels are servants and messengers of God. Because they “always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven” they are the “mighty ones who do his word, hearkening to the voice of his word.”

As purely spiritual creatures angels have intelligence and will: they are personal and immortal creatures, surpassing in perfection all visible creatures, as the splendor of their glory bears witness.

Christ “with all his angels”

Christ is the center of the angelic world. They are his angels: “When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him. . . .” They belong to him because they were created through and for him: “for in him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities - all things were created through him and for him.” They belong to him still more because he has made them messengers of his saving plan: “Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to serve, for the sake of those who are to obtain salvation?”

Angels have been present since creation and throughout the history of salvation, announcing this salvation from afar or near and serving the accomplishment of the divine plan: they closed the earthly paradise; protected Lot; saved Hagar and her child; stayed Abraham’s hand; communicated the law by their ministry; led the People of God; announced births and callings; and assisted the prophets, just to cite a few examples. Finally, the angel Gabriel announced the birth of the Precursor and that of Jesus himself.

From the Incarnation to the Ascension, the life of the Word incarnate is surrounded by the adoration and service of angels. When God “brings the firstborn into the world, he says: ‘Let all God’s angels worship him.’” Their song of praise at the birth of Christ has not ceased resounding in the Church’s praise: “Glory to God in the highest!” They protect Jesus in his infancy, serve him in the desert, strengthen him in his agony in the garden, when he could have been saved by them from the hands of his enemies as Israel had been. Again, it is the angels who “evangelize” by proclaiming the Good News of Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection. They will be present at Christ’s return, which they will announce, to serve at his judgement.

The angels in the life of the Church

In the meantime, the whole life of the Church benefits from the mysterious and powerful help of angels.

In her liturgy, the Church joins with the angels to adore the thrice-holy God. She invokes their assistance (in the Roman Canon’s Supplices te rogamus. . . [“Almighty God, we pray that your angel . . .”]; in the funeral liturgy’s In Paradisum deducant te angeli . . . [“May the angels lead you into Paradise . . .”]). Moreover, in the “Cherubic Hymn” of the Byzantine Liturgy, she celebrates the memory of certain angels more particularly (St. Michael, St. Gabriel, St. Raphael, and the guardian angels).

From its beginning to death human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession. “Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life.” Already here on earth the Christian life shares by faith in the blessed company of angels and men united in God.

The claim that the existence of angels is de fide—a revealed truth of the faith incumbent on all Christians to believe—struck me like a thunderbolt. And yet the rehearsal of the witness of Scripture and sacred tradition makes clear the warrant for the assertion. Angels are everywhere in the biblical story. And as St. Luke knew well, they show up at the biggest moments. They are, as the Catechism teaches, Christ’s own angels, the heavenly messengers and soldiers of Israel’s Messiah. And they aid the church on earth in various ways, largely invisible and mysterious, but nevertheless as our guardians and helpers and, ultimately, our fellow servants of the Lord. They join us in worship. Or rather, we join them.

The Damascene

The very same week, perhaps even the same day, that I read that section of the Catechism I read the following from St. John of Damascus; it’s found in Book II, chapter 3 of An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, which was written in the early to mid eighth century:

[God] is Himself the Maker and Creator of the angels: for He brought them out of nothing into being and created them after His own image, an incorporeal race, a sort of spirit or immaterial fire: in the words of the divine David, He makes His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire: and He has described their lightness and the ardor, and heat, and keenness and sharpness with which they hunger for God and serve Him, and how they are borne to the regions above and are quite delivered from all material thought.

An angel, then, is an intelligent essence, in perpetual motion, with free-will, incorporeal, ministering to God, having obtained by grace an immortal nature: and the Creator alone knows the form and limitation of its essence. But all that we can understand is, that it is incorporeal and immaterial. For all that is compared with God Who alone is incomparable, we find to be dense and material. For in reality only the Deity is immaterial and incorporeal.

The angel's nature then is rational, and intelligent, and endowed with free-will, changeable in will, or fickle. For all that is created is changeable, and only that which is uncreated is unchangeable. Also all that is rational is endowed with free-will. As it is, then, rational and intelligent, it is endowed with free-will: and as it is created, it is changeable, having power either to abide or progress in goodness, or to turn towards evil.

It is not susceptible of repentance because it is incorporeal. For it is owing to the weakness of his body that man comes to have repentance.

It is immortal, not by nature but by grace. For all that has had beginning comes also to its natural end. But God alone is eternal, or rather, He is above the Eternal: for He, the Creator of times, is not under the dominion of time, but above time.

They are secondary intelligent lights derived from that first light which is without beginning, for they have the power of illumination; they have no need of tongue or hearing, but without uttering words they communicate to each other their own thoughts and counsels.

Through the Word, therefore, all the angels were created, and through the sanctification by the Holy Spirit were they brought to perfection, sharing each in proportion to his worth and rank in brightness and grace.

They are circumscribed: for when they are in the Heaven they are not on the earth: and when they are sent by God down to the earth they do not remain in the Heaven. They are not hemmed in by walls and doors, and bars and seals, for they are quite unlimited. Unlimited, I repeat, for it is not as they really are that they reveal themselves to the worthy men to whom God wishes them to appear, but in a changed form which the beholders are capable of seeing. For that alone is naturally and strictly unlimited which is uncreated. For every created thing is limited by God Who created it.

Further, apart from their essence they receive the sanctification from the Spirit: through the divine grace they prophesy : they have no need of marriage for they are immortal.

Seeing that they are minds they are in mental places , and are not circumscribed after the fashion of a body. For they have not a bodily form by nature, nor are they extended in three dimensions. But to whatever post they may be assigned, there they are present after the manner of a mind and energize, and cannot be present and energize in various places at the same time.

Whether they are equals in essence or differ from one another we know not. God, their Creator, Who knows all things, alone knows. But they differ from each other in brightness and position, whether it is that their position is dependent on their brightness, or their brightness on their position: and they impart brightness to one another, because they excel one another in rank and nature. And clearly the higher share their brightness and knowledge with the lower.

They are mighty and prompt to fulfill the will of the Deity, and their nature is endowed with such celerity that wherever the Divine glance bids them there they are straightway found. They are the guardians of the divisions of the earth: they are set over nations and regions, allotted to them by their Creator: they govern all our affairs and bring us succor. And the reason surely is because they are set over us by the divine will and command and are ever in the vicinity of God.

With difficulty they are moved to evil, yet they are not absolutely immovable: but now they are altogether immovable, not by nature but by grace and by their nearness to the Only Good.

They behold God according to their capacity, and this is their food.

They are above us for they are incorporeal, and are free of all bodily passion, yet are not passionless: for the Deity alone is passionless.

They take different forms at the bidding of their Master, God, and thus reveal themselves to men and unveil the divine mysteries to them.

They have Heaven for their dwelling-place, and have one duty, to sing God's praise and carry out His divine will.

Moreover, as that most holy, and sacred, and gifted theologian, Dionysius the Areopagite , says, All theology, that is to say, the holy Scripture, has nine different names for the heavenly essences. These essences that divine master in sacred things divides into three groups, each containing three. And the first group, he says, consists of those who are in God's presence and are said to be directly and immediately one with Him, viz., the Seraphim with their six wings, the many-eyed Cherubim and those that sit in the holiest thrones. The second group is that of the Dominions, and the Powers, and the Authorities; and the third, and last, is that of the Rulers and Archangels and Angels.

Some, indeed, like Gregory the Theologian, say that these were before the creation of other things. He thinks that the angelic and heavenly powers were first and that thought was their function. Others, again, hold that they were created after the first heaven was made. But all are agreed that it was before the foundation of man. For myself, I am in harmony with the theologian. For it was fitting that the mental essence should be the first created, and then that which can be perceived, and finally man himself, in whose being both parts are united.

But those who say that the angels are creators of any kind of essence whatever are the mouth of their father, the devil. For since they are created things they are not creators. But He Who creates and provides for and maintains all things is God, Who alone is uncreated and is praised and glorified in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Doesn’t that fill you with awe and delight? St. John’s quotes and references could lead us down further paths: to the Pseudo-Denys and St. Gregory Nazianzen, backward to St. Augustine and forward to St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas, even on to Karl Barth, who has a hefty angelology for a modern theologian.

The point I drew from this exegetical serendipity at the time, and draw now, is rather plain. Prior to reading these texts I had the theoretical knowledge of angels: I could have told you what the theological tradition says about them. But to read these two estimable authorities devote such loving attention to them, in tandem with Lewis’s novelistic rendering, brought home to me at a deeper level—in my heart, in my soul—just how wonderful as well as important the angelic is to the life of the church and the testimony of the gospel. And ever since I’ve noticed my hackles are raised, my antennae buzz, when the over-educated but under-informed among my fellow believers, but primarily among pastors, roll their eyes at ostensibly silly and outdated things like “angels and demons.” (Usually prefaced by that absurd and meaningless modifier, “literal.”) I do my best not to be That Academic who flies in to correct and rebuke. But it gets under my skin. For the condescension is wholly unearned. It’s not as though an archeologist or astronomer discovered the nonexistence of angels in 1927. They are no more subject to empirical investigation than God. Yet true-blue believers in God in the year of our Lord 2021 look down their noses on every other Christian, past and present, themselves excepted as if it were everyone else, and not themselves, who are the naive, the unenlightened. But, again, such haughty know-it-alls didn’t arrive at a considered conclusion about angelic superstition by a process of reasoning. They did so as a function of their class and education; possibly through half-skimming a now-forgotten but once-faddish academic in grad school.

To which I say: Get over yourself. There’s nothing culturally hip about being a Christian who believes all the spooky stuff—God, resurrection, incarnation, miracles, et al—minus angels. You don’t get any societal cache for it, even if it makes you feel set apart from the losers and boobs who read the Bible “literally.” Face it: You’re one of us. You’re among the shabby and disreputable, at whom the well-to-do look down their noses. Embrace it! It’s okay. It’s part of the deal.

You have our blessing. Permission granted. Believe in angels. One day you might even find that you need one.

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.

The great cataract of nonsense

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many place is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune form the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

—C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time”

Aliens

Last month Ezra Klein wrote a refreshing column on the UFO revelations of the last few months (and years).* It was refreshing because it not only carefully distinguished between alien and supernatural but also avoided the silly trope that the existence of alien life would undermine, transform, or even substantially affect the doctrines or practices of major world religions like Christianity. Here’s the money graf:

There is a thick literature on how evidence of alien life would shake the world’s religions, but I think Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, is quite likely right when he suggests that many people would simply say, “of course.” The materialist worldview that positions humanity as an island of intelligence in a potentially empty cosmos — my worldview, in other words — is the aberration. Most people believe, and have always believed, that we share both the Earth and the cosmos with other beings — gods, spirits, angels, ghosts, ancestors. The norm throughout human history has been a crowded universe where other intelligences are interested in our comings and goings, and even shape them. The whole of human civilization is testament to the fact that we can believe we are not alone and still obsess over earthly concerns.

This is exactly right. At least for Christians, while the discovery of alien life would be momentous as a discovery, and while it would certainly raise theological questions, it would not in the least threaten or even disturb faith in the gospel. Whatever exists in the cosmos—indeed, whatever exists outside of time and space that is not God—is a fellow creature, just like us, created by the God of Abraham from nothing, just like us. Read C. S. Lewis or Mary Doria Russell or Michel Faber or any other science fiction author from the last century who has imagined intergalactic missions to meet or learn from or evangelize non-terrestrial rational species. Lewis in particular loved to speculate that Jesus’s comments about “other sheep, not of this fold” in John 10:16 applied not only to gentiles but, potentially, to intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Who knows?

Whatever the answer, the collective response from Christians to the demonstrable existence of alien life will and should comprise four options: doxology; wonder at the mysteries of creation; desire, with appropriate caution and within limits, to learn more about and form some relationship with these fellow creatures; and, for the most part, getting on with the business of life.

Kudos to Klein for seeing that, and cutting through the nonsense.

*In my own mind, there are five possible interpretations of the seemingly physics-defying happenings recorded and witnessed by the pilots (and their flight cameras): (1) human technology; (2) alien technology; (3) natural occurrences; (4) supernatural phenomena; (5) nothing—a trick of the light, a fault of the eyes, a mistake of the video, or some other similar explanation. It seems to me the only frightening option is the first, though perhaps I should be more fearful of the second.

Lewis's other virtue as a novelist

Last week I listed six virtues that make C. S. Lewis's novels, especially the Space Trilogy, so lovable. I forgot one, though: his ability to describe evil—evil persons and evil deeds—without ever making evil the least bit appealing or interesting.

This isn't because there's no evil in Lewis's world; there's plenty. In fact, it's often embodied not just in human beings but in devils, or in humans possessed by demons. The scale of evil in Lewis is cosmic. But it is also minute, even mundane. And that's what makes his depiction of evil so brilliant, so compelling, yet so unattractive. Evil is boring, ugly, deficient, and stupid. It's imbecilic, infantile, a shallow life-sucking self-sabotage of all that is—which is to say, of all that is good, beautiful, and true. It enlivens nothing and parasitically eats from the inside whatever gives it quarter.

Lewis is able to strike this philosophically informed macro/micro balance without glamorizing the good life (under fallen conditions) or idealizing the virtuous individual precisely because the drama of principalities and powers—of angels and demons in Deep Heaven—is played out every day in the ordinary dramas of neighbors and friends, husbands and wives, parents and children. The tiniest act of charity, unnoticed by a soul, even the soul that offers it, is a mighty moment in the triumph of Good over Evil; and yet the quotidian pettinesses of marriages and workplaces and churches are no less occasions for Satan and all his pomp to win a battle in their (ultimately unwinnable) war against the Lord and all his heavenly host.

All that to say, the characters and actions and ideas representing evil in Lewis's fiction are recognizably wicked, however great or small that wickedness may be, but never once do you, as the reader, find yourself drawn to the evil (notwithstanding your recognition of what might make it emotionally or psychologically tempting in situ). The evil is all too "real," but insubstantial, vaporous, nothing. Because that's what evil actually is, nothing at all, a lack of goodness and being, of what makes life worth living. Contemporary stories' protagonists, so full of "gritty" "moral grayness," are both unserious and unrealistic by comparison.

Because Lewis understood what so many have forgotten: truly to see evil, in story form, is finally to see right through it.

The virtues of Lewis's Space Trilogy

I've been re-reading Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra this last month (I read That Hideous Strength for the first time last year), and the former especially brought to mind why I love Lewis so much. His novelistic shortcomings are more than apparent in these early works, so in the midst of noticing those, I asked myself: What is it about these books that makes them lovable? What are the virtues that Lewis the novelist brings to bear in them that raise them to more than pleasant diversions?

Here's a short list.

1. Lewis has a knack for making the metaphysical reality that Christians confess to be true inhabitable. He makes it seem like common sense—more, he makes it seem roomy. "This is the real world, refracted through fiction" is the refrain of all his writing, not least Ransom's adventures in space. Or: "It's probably not precisely this, but it's almost certainly very like this—only better and more wondrous."

2. Apart from the beautiful economy of his prose, perhaps Lewis's greatest strength across all the genres in which he wrote is the depth of his moral-spiritual psychology. He knows what makes us tick. Both at our most virtuous and our most vicious (more on the latter in a moment), his description of the motivations, intentions, pressures (petty and glorious), goals, indecisive failures, and temptations of the will is nonpareil. Better, it is utterly recognizable. And all too often it is deeply, shamefully convicting.

3. Lewis holds up a mirror to us—in this case, through the earnest observations of sinless alien species and their angelic rulers—and reveals our undeniable fallenness, both at the individual and at the civilizational level. (In this case, the theme of his fiction is "sin is real, it's inside of all of us, and you know it's true.") His extraterrestrial creatures are constantly dumbfounded by the everyday goings-on of earthlings, and that dumbfoundedness is a cue to the reader: why aren't you similarly bothered or surprised? Our fear of death, our denial of God, our fears of one another, our indefensible mistreatment of our neighbors, the quantity of time and energy we spend on worthless matters ... it is difficult to listen to Ransom's interlocutors without turning on yourself in the somber realization that you're implicated, indicted even, by their speech.

4. Continuing that theme, Lewis has no time for the insipid platitudes of technocratic modernity. The evil men whom Ransom battles are, in the end, hollowed out by the nihilism of cultural-scientific self-preservation, while lacking any guiding principles—not even the well-being of humanity as such—that might garner qualified praise as splendid vices. Knowledge for the sake of power for the sake of perpetuation of knowledge for the sake of power for the sake of ... until kingdom come. Lewis may be guilty of nostalgia at times, but he knows the problems of his day, not at the surface, but at the root; or rather, in the sickness of soul that drives soul-denying men to seek immortality at all costs. The narrative function of beauty in "the heavens" of "space" in the Trilogy drives this home: knowledge without wonder is finally the libido dominandi, now naked yet "clothed" in society's approbation. This is the enemy to be resisted to the end.

5. Lewis's Space Trilogy works also—as so many interplanetary stories do—as an allegory or metaphor for imperialism, and although Lewis was guilty of many of the biases and prejudices of his day, he knew that colonization and domination of other peoples and cultures was an offense against God and the fruit of original sin. Moreover, closer to his literary expertise, he knew the extent to which such domination is often an expression of ignorance and impotence, the exercise of force masking the insecurity of a fearful people. Culturally this expresses itself in a parochialism both of space and of time; Lewis termed the latter "chronological snobbery." Just as the European peoples thought themselves superior to peoples from other continents, so they (and others) thought (and think) themselves superior to people from the past. The two are related and inseparable: when Ransom listens to Oyarsa, part of his instruction consists of unlearning the modern prejudice against "difference," whether found across the sea or across the ages.

6. Finally, Lewis the theologian always emerges in dialogue between (say) his former self, Ransom, and his would-be present self, the unbent creatures of Malacandra or their eldila or Oyarsa himself. I long to read these stories with my children because those dialogues will themselves be occasions for them to hear ancient spiritual truths articulated in the clearest, freshest of ways. How odd: to hear the gospel lucidly spoken by being made strange on the lips of alien beings in a fictional novel. But when we find ourselves loving C. S. Lewis's novels, that's just one of the many reasons why we love them.

C. S. Lewis on the fumie

Meanwhile, in the Objective Room, something like a crisis had developed between Mark and Professor Frost. As soon as they arrived there Mark saw that the table had been drawn back. On the floor lay a large crucifix, almost life size, a work of art in the Spanish tradition, ghastly and realistic. “We have half an hour to pursue our exercises,” said Frost looking at his watch. Then he instructed Mark to trample on it and insult it in other ways.

Now whereas Jane had abandoned Christianity in early childhood, along with her belief in fairies and Santa Claus, Mark had never believed in it at all. At this moment, therefore, it crossed his mind for the very first time that there might conceivably be something in it. Frost who was watching him carefully knew perfectly well that this might be the result of the present experiment. He knew it for the very good reason that his own training by the Macrobes had, at one point, suggested the same odd idea to himself. But he had no choice. Whether he wished it or not this sort of thing was part of the initiation.

“But, look here," said Mark.

“What is it?" said Frost. “Pray be quick. We have only a limited time at our disposal.”

“This,” said Mark, pointing with an undefined reluctance to the horrible white figure on the cross. “This is all surely a pure superstition.”

“Well?”

“Well, if so, what is there objective about stamping on the face? Isn’t is just as subjective to spit on a thing like this as to worship it? I mean—damn it all—if it’s only a bit of wood, why do anything about it?”

“That is superficial. If you had been brought up in a non-Christian society, you would not be asked to do this. Of course, it is a superstition; but it is that particular superstition which has pressed upon our society for a great many centuries. It can be experimentally shown that is still forms a dominant system in the subconscious of many individuals whose conscious thought appears to be wholly liberated. An explicit action in the reverse direction is therefore a necessary step towards complete objectivity. It is not a question for a priori discussion. We find it in practice that it cannot be dispensed with.”

Mark himself was surprised at the emotions he was undergoing. He did not regard the image with anything at all like a religious feeling. Most emphatically it did not belong to that idea of the Straight or Normal or Wholesome which had, for the last few days, been his support against what he now knew of the innermost circle at Belbury. The horrible vigour of its realism was, indeed, in its own way as remote from that Idea as anything else in the room. That was one source of his reluctance. To insult even a carved image of such agony seemed an abominable act. But it was not the only source. With the introduction of this Christian symbol the whole situation had somehow altered. The thing was becoming incalculable. His simple antithesis of the Normal and the Diseased had obviously failed to take something into account. Why was the Crucifix there? Why were more than half of the poison-pictures religious? He had the sense of new parties to the conflict—potential allies and enemies which he had not suspected before. “If I take a step in any direction,” he thought, “I may step over a precipice.” A donkey like determination to plant hoofs and stay still at all costs arose in his mind.

“Pray make haste,” said Frost.

The quiet urgency of the voice, and the fact that he had so often obeyed it before, almost conquered him. He was on the verge of obeying, and getting the whole silly business over, when the defenselessness of the figure deterred him. the feeling was a very illogical one. Not because its hands were nailed and helpless, but because they were only made of wood and therefore even more helpless, because the thing, for all its realism, was inanimate and could not in any way hit back, he paused. The unretaliating face of a doll—one of Myrtle’s dolls—which he had pulled to pieces in boyhood had affected him in the same way and the memory, even now, was tender to the touch.

“What are you waiting for, Mr. Studdock?” said Frost.

Mark was well aware of the rising danger. Obviously, if he disobeyed, his last chance of getting out of Belbury alive might be gone. Even of getting out of this room. The smothering sensation once again attacked him. He was himself, he felt, as helpless as the wooden Christ. As he thought this, he found himself looking at the crucifix in a new way—neither as a piece of wood nor a monument of superstition but as a bit of history. Christianity was nonsense, but one did not doubt that the man had lived and had been executed thus by the Belbury of those days. And that, as he suddenly saw, explained why this image,though not itself an image of the Straight or Normal, was yet in opposition to the crooked Belbury. It was a picture of what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight—what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross.

“Do you intend to go on with the training or not?” said Frost. His eye was on the time. . . .

“Do you not hear what I am saying?” he asked Mark again.

Mark made no reply. He was thinking, and thinking hard because he knew, that if he stopped even for a moment, mere terror of death would take the decision out of his hands. Christianity was a fable. It would be ridiculous to die for a religion one did not believe. This Man himself, on that very cross, had discovered it to be a fable, and had died complaining that the God in whom he trusted had forsaken him—had, in fact, found the universe a cheat. But this raised a question that Mark had never thought of before. Was that the moment at which to turn against the Man? If the universe was a cheat, was that a good reason for joining its side? Supposing the Straight was utterly powerless, always and everywhere certain to be mocked, tortured, and finally killed by the Crooked, what then? Why not go down with the ship? He began to be frightened by the very fact that his fears seemed to have momentarily vanished. They had been a safeguard . . . they had prevented him, all his life, from making mad decisions like that which he was now making as he turned to Frost and said,

“It’s all bloody nonsense, and I’m damned if I do any such thing.”

When he said this he had no idea what might happen next.

—C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, pp. 334-337