Minnesota Caucus | #NeverTrump

Here is what I plan to say tonight at the Minnesota Republican Caucus, if given the opportunity:

I have been actively involved in every Republican presidential campaign since 1972. I am a conservative in the tradition of Robert A. Taft, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. By God’s grace, I also “built a great business.”

It is from the context of these longstanding life experiences that I say:

1. Donald Trump is not a Republican.
2. Donald Trump is not a Conservative.
3. Donald Trump is not qualified by virtue of his business experience nor by his personal character to be President of the United States.
4. Donald Trump appears to have no ideology but himself.

Tonight, I will cast my vote for Senator Marco Rubio of Florida because he is a Republican, a Conservative, qualified by virtue of experience and character to be President and, in my opinion, most likely to win against Hillary Clinton.

In six previous presidential elections, I have faithfully closed ranks behind a nominee for whom I did not vote originally. If Senator Rubio does not prevail in his bid, I will gladly get behind Senator Ted Cruz, Governor John Kasich, or Dr. Ben Carson.

#NeverTrump

In my view, the nomination of Donald Trump has only two outcomes, neither of which are good. Either we will see the Republican Party demolished in the Fall election, or the emergence of a new kind of American leader with obvious totalitarian inclinations so dangerous that we may rue the day that we ever heard his name.

Richard A. Segal Jr.

 

 

Minnesota Caucus | #NeverTrump

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, by C. S. Lewis

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.” – C. S. Lewis

Well, the 50th anniversary year of the passing of C. S. Lewis has come and gone and, notwithstanding the best of intentions and a most diligent effort, I was unable to complete the task of reading the Lewis canon in toto in 12 months. There was clearly more bitten off than masticated. I’ll now continue reading until I’m done, though not on a fixed schedule. Twenty-four volumes of Lewis, delicious though they were, leave me wanting for an expanded palate.

At this writing, I’m all boxed up and preparing to move to a new city and a new job. My books are in off-site storage. It’s as if all my friends are in jail. My copy of Surprised by Joy, with all its markings, is among the incarcerated. I could wait the month to retrieve it, then make a posting, but for the sake of moving on — and to spur on my fellow correspondents — I shall proceed to offer a few thoughts without the usual excerpts.

Surprised by Joy wasn’t entirely what I expected. For some reason, notwithstanding a subtitle that clearly establishes the book as about Lewis’ early life, I presumed it was a more expansive memoir including his time with Tolkien, Barfield, Williams and the other Inklings. Barfield appears, but this isn’t the story of that phase. I also presumed that it would introduce the “surprise” of Joy Davidman. It didn’t. Much of that reflection will, I assume, come later in A Grief Observed.

But it is a well-told tale of Lewis’ childhood, education and military service, although the latter is conveyed with humility and measurement. It is a rich picture of British school life, both grammar school and university. Here we also meet William Thompson Kirkpatrick, “The Great Knock,” Lewis’ tutor who played such an influential role in shaping his objectivity.

Most all it is the story of the creation of a romantic rationalist, of a man who travels from a faith formed in and by family, to the formation of an “open” mind, to infatuation with Norse myth, to a benign atheism — assuming, of course, there is any such thing — to a regenerated heart and a spirit-filled Christian faith of which he will become one of the greatest apologists.

As my own theology has grown more Reformed, even Calvin”ish”, in the last 20 years, I have stated, perhaps too boldly, that “No one can be reasoned into the Christian faith,” believing the work of regeneration is one done by God alone, independent of human autonomy or works. This, I still believe. But reading Surprised by Joy leaves me believing that God can surely use reasonable persons’ capacities to melt the casings of their hardened hearts, as it surely seems He did with Lewis, as it were, when He brought him to faith “kicking and screaming.”

Surprised by Joy is an intentionally personal account, but seemingly no less personal than anything else I’ve read by Lewis. His uniquely avuncular style is a hallmark. The reader can feel equally at home with Lewis whether he’s teaching on Medieval literature, spinning yarns of trolls and dryads, envisioning life on other planets, recounting a schoolyard scuffle or defending Christian orthodoxy. He is close to the reader.

I’ll read more Lewis. I’ll write more in the year ahead, Lord willing, but just not at the same pace.

Pater Familias

Oxford History of English Literature, Edited by F. P. Wilson and Bonamy Dobrée: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, by C. S. Lewis

Spenser’s Faerie Queen

“Somehow or other during the latter part of the sixteenth century Englishmen learned to write.” – C. S. Lewis

If I weren’t such a stubborn man, I would have quickly laid aside this volume of Lewis. It is more than a bit recherché for the average reader; frankly, for more than most better than average readers. Lewis remarked of one of the more than 50 sixteenth century authors, and I paraphrase, that his was a folio than might get cracked open only once in a century. I know I’m not likely to come back this book in my lifetime. I may be surprised. But I understand fully why so many Lewis scholars refer to this unit of the canon as, “O HEL.” They’re not uttering an acronym.

But stubborn I am, and my resolve to read all of Lewis will not be deterred even by 600 pages of literary esoterica and criticism of those long-dead poets and prosaicists who sought to advance the English language from medieval grunts and growls by seasoning it with rediscovery of classic ancient languages and texts, most about whom I’ve never even heard. As difficult a book this was for me to read, I marveled at the meticulous scholarship of Lewis. In preparing this book he read everything published in English in the sixteenth century, except dramatic works —everything — much of it in cumbersome Middle English, much of it presented in calligraphy rather than typography, and a great deal of it featuring entirely new vocabulary and pretentious “ink horn” words cobbled together from English vulgarity and classical Latin diction. He considered 36 pages of background bibliography in addition to the complete, existing works of 50 authors. “If he could that,” I said to myself, “I can bugger on.”

Much of this book features technical jargon of poetry and literary criticism of which I’ve retained only the most gossamer thin of grammar school memories. Here’s just one example of the wading from Lewis’ criticism of the verse of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey:

“The vices of that meter are two. The medial break in the alexandrine, though it may do well enough in French, quickly becomes intolerable in a language with such a tyrannous stress-accent as ours: the line struts. The fourteener has a much pleasanter movement, but a totally different one; the line dances a jig. Hence in a couplet made of two such yoke-fellows we seem to be labouring up a a steep hill in bottom gear for the first line, and then running down the other side of the hill, out of control for the second.”

Much of “OH HEL,” is this kind of “HEL,” but thankfully, not all of it.

The Lewis wit just can’t avoid assigning itself to authors and work he finds less than commendable. Of the prose writer Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners, he writes:

“We know that he left at his death a library of eighty books. He was probably omnivorous, and his taste was excellent as long as he did not think about it. To the present day one meets men, great readers, who write admirably until the fatal moment when they remember they are writing.”

Or of the Christian reformer, Dean Colet, of whom he observed, “A cloistered perfectionist, who happens to be also a rhetorician, often says, not exactly what he means, but more than he understands.” Or more generously of the poet, George Turberville, “…Turberville is best when he is content to keep closest to this humble kind of art. The beer is indeed very small, but even the smallest beer if better than the grocer’s port.”

He said of John Studley’s poetry that, “He uses more often than his fellows that diction which, whether ‘low’ in his own day or not, cannot now be read without a smile — ‘frostyface,’ ‘topsy turvy,’ and ‘Stygian puddle glum.” This latter diction no doubt inspired Lewis’ later naming of a certain notable Marsh-wiggle who lived near the River Shribble, in the Marshlands of Narnia.

Much of sixteenth century English literature was odious to Lewis. He divides verse and prose into periods “Drab” and “Golden,” not to compare good to bad, rather just predictable to innovative. He writes at the end of a chapter on “Drab Age Verse,”:

“It is not clear that our poetry would be much the poorer if he (Henry VIII) had beheaded every writer mentioned in this chapter.”

The student with a greater working knowledge of the literature and writers of this epoch would undoubtedly find this book a trove of treasure. The students with more limited knowledge, like yours truly, must be satisfied in Lewis’ commentary on those authors and historic figures with whom they are familiar, and they will find here much to satisfy.

This was the era of More, Cranmer and Tyndale, of Knox and the early Puritans. Here we also find Hakluyt, the English explorer whose accounts of his navigations represent some of the earliest documentaries of American history. It was also in this century that the martyrologist, John Foxe, composed his gruesome anthology of the tortures and murders of so many saints.

It wasn’t until I read of Thomas More here that I understood that Utopia was never intended to be a serious treatise, rather more like Gulliver, or that More’s Dialogue was, in Lewis’s estimation, “…great Platonic dialogue; perhaps the best specimen of its form ever produced in English.”

He says of Tyndale’s Bible:

“The Authorized Version, in fact, haunts our prose not as Mr. Eliot haunts modern poetry or as Macaulay used to haunt journalists, but much more as Homer haunts the prose of Plato; that is, as something set apart, like plums in a cake or lace in a frock, not like wine mixing in water.”

And of Cranmer’s Prayer Book and “sobriety” as the reverse side of the Drab Age, he writes:

“In the Prayer Book that earnest age, not itself rich in either passion or in beauty, I matched in a most fruitful opposition with overwhelming material and with originals all but over-ripe in their artistry. It arrests them, binds them in strong syllables, strengthens them even by limitations, as they in return erect and transfigure it. Out of that conflict the perfection springs. There are of course many good, and different, ways both of writing prose and of praying. Its temper may seem cold to those reared in other traditions but no one will deny that it is strong. It offers little and concedes little to merely natural feelings: even religious feelings it will not heighten till it has first observed them; but at its greatest it shines with a white light hardly surpassed outside the pages of the New Testament itself.”

But the centerpiece of this work is dedicated to the sixteenth century’s true literary giants, Sir Philip Sidney, and The Faerie Queen‘s Edmund Spenser, poets whose work Lewis believed deserved extraordinary attention for the innocent, once-born condition of the writing. He credits Spenser with being the progenitor of the highly individual narrative technique.

“The opening (‘A gentle knight was pricking in the playne’) seems to us the most ordinary thing in the world. We have seen a hundred novels begun in the same way; ‘Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great armchair by the bedside,’ or ‘It was early on a fine summer’s day near the end of the eighteenth century when a young man of genteel appearance,’ &c. This method — the immediate presentation of the figure already in action —was not, however, the method of Spenser’s predecessors and contemporaries.”

Think of that, to be the writer who originated such a foundational technique of storytelling, and think of the scholar who could recognize such a writer as its innovator. Lewis truly makes Spenser the hero of this anthology. One can see how influential Spenser was to Lewis’ own storytelling of faeries and other eldritch characters and circumstances. Indeed, Lewis here places Spenser in the English Pantheon:

“…there is no dispute about his greatness. He never, while that culture lasted, suffered any eclipse comparable to that which Donne suffered in the eighteenth century, or Pope in the nineteenth. There are only minor fluctuations in his fame…Within the older English tradition he is only less secure and central than Shakespeare and Milton.”

High praise, indeed.

I can’t imagine anyone picking up this book for pleasure unless he or she is an avid student of English Literature, the historical period or, as in my case, Lewis himself. For me it was edifying and challenging if not necessarily pleasurable — a daunting read. I felt as if I had undertaken an ascent of an high mountain for which I was most inadequately provisioned. At times I simply dragged my feet and legs over the next switchback to find a level place to catch my breath and then soldier on. Most of the flora, fauna and animal life were foreign to me, but occasionally I would happen upon a species familiar, but exotic. At last, I reached the summit, weary and winded, but satisfied in the accomplishment.

Don’t run out and acquire this volume unless you’re really into the subject matter or, if like me, you’re a stubborn old fool who obsessively completes one’s projects.

Pater Familias

The Circle, by Dave Eggers

“You know what I think, Mae? I think you think that sitting at your desk, frowning and smiling somehow makes you think you’re actually living some fascinating life. You comment on things, and that substitutes for doing them. You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that’s the same as going there. I mean, what would happen if you actually went? Your CircleJerk ratings or whatever-the-@!?& would drop below an acceptable level. Mae, do you realize how incredibly boring you’ve become?” – Mercer to Mae, The Circle, by Dave Eggers

In one of the oldest and best-read books of all time, The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan, the protagonist, Christian, makes a stop at a never-ending fair held in a town called Vanity, which is meant to represent man’s sinful attachment to worldly things. One hundred and seventy years later, William Makepeace Thackeray published Vanity Fair: a Novel Without a Hero, satirizing 19th-century British life. Vanity Fair became for American authors like Stephen Crane, later Upton Sinclair and more recently Tom Wolfe, a model of the novel as an instrument of sweeping sociological observation.

It was Dennis K. Burnham’s pre-release review of Dave Eggers’, The Circle, for the Wall Street Journal, in which he compared this new work to that of Sinclair’s, The Jungle, that prompted this otherwise reticent fiction reader to “One-Click” the title. The comparison was provocatively rich. Could it be that someone has written a book revealing the dark and ugly underbelly of our own economic age, reminiscent of Sinclair’s expose of the early Industrial Revolution’s amnesia of human dignity? The answer is, “Yes, someone has.” Dave Eggers has delivered not only a chilling view of our current cultural obsessions with connectivity, social media, analytics and transparency, but takes his rightful place among the pantheon of Thackeray, Crane, Sinclair, Wolfe and others. The Circle is probably the best and most important book I have read this year.

No need to sound a “Spoiler Alert.” I am mindful that The Circle is a story that needs be saved for your consideration and enjoyment of the telling. I shall only tease and exhort.

The Circle is an hypothetical Bay Area enterprise representing a fusion of so many Silicon Valley companies engaged in search, e-commerce, social media, wearable technology, Big Data and their pop culturally associated good works of global sustainability, organic foods, bully eradication, rescue of polar bears and the advocacy of “good” government. It portrays a young, new-hire, Mae Holland, in a community of contemporary chic-ness seemingly infinite in all directions. Who wouldn’t want to work at The Circle, or enjoy the many standard of living elevating offerings flowing from it? Eggers suggests we might at least take pause.

The importance of this book is in the powerful way with which the author runs a straight line from The Circle to a future likely to evolve from the fully scaled commercialization of today’s like-and-be-liked algorithmic enterprises. I suppose some and, worrisomely, many readers will be left to decide whether they regard Egger’s view as dystopian or utopian. One isn’t left, however, with the feeling that the author himself is very much conflicted.

Were we either at or in The Circle, we’d be made to feel guilty for having read this book, not just because of its less than latent Luddite screed, but also for its hard cover.

“Denise tapped at her tablet. ‘Okay, I’m doing a search now of your name for visual documentation of any of these trips you’ve taken. I’m not finding anything.’

‘Oh, I’ve never brought a camera.’

‘But how do you identify all these birds?’

‘I have this little guide. It’s just a thing my ex-boyfriend gave me. It’s a little foldable guide to local wildlife.’

‘So it’s just a pamphlet or something?’

‘Yeah, I mean, it’s waterproof and —’

Josiah exhaled loudly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mae said.

Josiah rolled his eyes, ‘No, I mean! this is a tangent! but my problem with paper is that all communication dies with it. It holds no possibility of continuity. You look at your paper brochure, and that’s where it ends. It ends with you. Like you’re the only one that matters.'”

“Like you’re the only one that matters.” Right. What Eggers does so well in this book is construct a magnificent paradox revealing how runaway narcissism can ultimately end up transforming and regarding itself into sublime, albeit faux, altruism, with all the associated deconstruction and language policing that enables such along the way.

Consider another of the several benevolent scoldings Mae receives from The Circle’s elite after she should dare to make a late night solo kayak trip to a deserted island in the bay for an hour of solitude and reflection:

“‘I’d never been to this island. Very few people have. and once I got to the island, I climbed to the top, and the view from the peak was incredible.I saw the golden lights of the city, and the black foothills toward the Pacific, and even a shooting star.’

‘A shooting star! Lucky you.’

‘I was very lucky.’

‘But you didn’t take a picture.’

‘No.’

‘Not any video?’

‘No.’

‘So there’s no record of any of this.’

‘No. Not outside my own memory.”

There were audible groans from the audience. Bailey turned to the audience, shaking his head, indulging them…’Do you think they [e.g., the homebound or disabled] have a right to see things like you saw?'”

Finally, after this extended publicly pastoral teaching moment, Mae comes to her senses and proclaims:

“‘It was just selfish, Eamon. It was selfish and nothing more. The same way a child doesn’t want to share her favorite toy. I understand that secrecy is part of, well, an aberrant behavior system. It comes from a bad place, not a place of light and generosity. And when you deprive your friends, or someone like your son Gunner, of experiences like I had, you’re basically stealing from them. You’re depriving them of something they have a right to. Knowledge is a basic human right. Equal access to all possible human experiences is a basic human right.'”

Can anyone be expected to say anything other than, “Amen”? The walls at The Circle are lined with placards championing such truth.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED MUST BE KNOWN

PRIVACY IS THEFT

SECRETS ARE LIES

SHARING IS CARING

But take heart, what a better world is in the making. The Circle’s Eamon Bailey tells us so:

“‘I truly believe that if we have no path but the right path, the best path, then that would present a kind of ultimate and all-encompassing relief. We don’t have to be tempted by darkness anymore. Forgive me for putting it in moral terms. That’s the Midwestern church-goer in me. But I’m a believer in the perfectibility of human beings. I think we can be better. I think we can be perfect or near to it. And when we become our best selves, the possibilities are endless. We can solve any problem. We can cure any disease, end hunger, everything, because we won’t be dragged down by all our weaknesses, our petty secrets, our hoarding of information and knowledge. We will finally realize our potential.”

I was very recently in the company of a journalist who has is a distinguished, long-standing observer of Silicon Valley. (He shall remain nameless, but at The Circle, they would have known his identity as soon as I keyed in this comment, if not before.) He told me that the ascendancy there of what he calls an “algorithmic fascism” is as palpable as he’s ever known it — an I.Q. elite giddy with confidence in its own ability to remake the world. He opined that it is a zeal quite different from the American free enterprise exceptionalism and spirt of invention that built “The Valley.” It is a new calculus of perfectionism unleashed.

Oh, we have certainly met the likes of Eamon Bailey, before. We met him as the dark-eyed, mustachioed, presiding brother of Orwell’s “Oceania.” We knew him as “His Fordship Mustafa Mond” in Huxley’s courageous world. We saw him in our own recent reading as Dr. Augustus Frost, Deputy Director of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiment (N.I.C.E), in C. S. Lewis’, That Hideous Strength. Alas, we’ve also known the likes of Mae Holland, such as Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, who become transformed into monstrous creatures. What we haven’t met, perhaps until now, is ourselves amiably Googling, “liking”, Tweeting and Instagramming our ways out of personhood.

Again, the essential provocation of The Circle are the many times during which you come to places at which you say to yourself, “OMG, of course this is obviously where this will lead!” I used such acronymic language then and recall it now without fear at all of taking the Name in vain.

Foiling Mae’s passion for The Circle is a former lover, Mercer, a fattened frumpy bourgeois boy who’d just as soon stay off the grid. As you might expect he becomes Eggers’ voice of reason. He may well be Eggers’ own voice.

“If things continue this way, there will be two societies — or at least I hope there will be two —the one you’re helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk will live, willfully, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else.”

Mercer further warns:

“We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day. You people are creating a world of ever-present daylight, an I think it will burn us all alive. There will be no time to reflect, to sleep, to cool.”

So, I complete this review, borrow a shared image from Google, post it with WordPress then Tweet it to my 1400 followers. I wonder — am I still outside The Circle, or too well and dangerously drawn into it?

Pater Familias

The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis

“All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of The Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” – The Last Battle

My year began with a resolution to read the entire corpus of C. S. Lewis’ writing as sort of a memorial tribute to him during this 50th year since his passing. The record thus far exposed in this family readers blog will find me faithful to my purpose, if not to my intended pace. As 2013 turns to its final quarter, I find myself only halfway through the Lewis canon, but right here in the middle is the work for which he is most recognized, the seven books which together comprise The Chronicles of Narnia.

It is with a bit of embarrassment that I confess at age 56 that this was my first journey through the wardrobe. I’m not sure why this is the case. I was a most prodigious reader as a child, with a well-worn library card. I don’t recall even being aware of the Narnia series as a child, or even of Lewis for that matter. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was copyrighted in 1950, seven years before my birth, and The Last Battle in 1956, just the year prior. Me thinks some public librarian or reading teacher will answer for this when the last door is opened. I became familiar with Lewis in my 20’s, and dabbled in a few of the apologetic works. Narnia always seemed, well, too much frivolity and child’s play.

My first consideration was whether to blog my reflections as I concluded each book individually or as one omnibus reflection on all The Chronicles, my decision obviously being now here reflected. The second consideration was which camp I would join in the controversy over reading order. Lewis originally wrote them in an order that included two retrospectives, The Horse and his Boy, and The Magician’s Nephew. When Harper Collins took over publication of the series in 1994, they ordered them chronologically in “Narnia time,” leading with The Magician’s Nephew and placing The Horse and His Boy third in the series. Purists scoffed. Harper cited a 1957 letter from Lewis to a fan as indicative of his personal preference in the matter. Purists claimed the innocent offenses of either typical Lewisian congeniality or senility on the part of the aging author.

I’ll side with purists. Having just read the books all at one time, it seems perfectly clear that Lewis wanted to encourage the delight of retrospective — the flight into history, if even the fantastic. Could the thrill of discovering how and why a modern lamppost was the first thing Lucy discerned the other side of the wardrobe been had any other way, or even of how the wardrobe itself first came to be? I think not. Throughout all of his writing, Lewis champions the reading of “old books.” Should it surprise any of us that he created some “old books” even among these new chronicles? So, I commend the original order: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy, The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle.

Now, what to say of these chronicles?

Whole books have been written interpreting The Chronicles, exposing the many ways in which Lewis embedded biblical truths, classical allusions and the faeirie and eldritch natures of medieval Europe, the focus of his scholarly life. I shall attempt no such review, nor venture into anything resembling literary criticism. Instead, I shall offer a few over-arching observations, then share several passages that tasted to me like sweet Turkish Delights.

I’m sorry I didn’t read them as a child.

I was un-churched until age 23. Had I been exposed to Narnia at an early age, I might I have recognized Aslan’s roar earlier and saved myself much grief, and God much offense. I’ll now read them as a grandparent, not only for my grandchildren, but again for my own joy.

I’m glad to have eventually read them as a mature believer.

While I may not have previously read The Chronicles of Narnia, I have read The Bible regularly for 30 years. Had I read them as a child, I would have come to Scripture reminded of Narnia, rather than the other way around. I smiled often during this reading of the deft ways in which Lewis smuggled Christian theology into these stories. It is incorrect to consider them allegory. Our real world is part of these stories, a place where Aslan is simply known by another name. Yet, as I moved through the kaleyards and caverns, across the plains and Great Eastern Ocean, and over the mountain tops of Narnia, Calormen, Archenland, I found myself smiling with admiration over the many ways Lewis ladled the greatest story ever told over his own story told. It was like having the run of the toppings table at a ice cream parlor – sweet, rich, colorful, fun and satisfying.

Aslan and The Holy Spirit

Few would dispute that Aslan, the lion, appears throughout as a Christ-figure. Early in the journey there is a passion, an humiliation, an execution and a redemption. In the end Aslan returns to gather His own, to separate sheep from goats, and to herald in a new creation.

For me, Aslan was a powerfully stated depiction of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, the person of God intervening during this present Middle Kingdom between the Resurrection and Apocalypse. I don’t know that I’ve read anything that better portrays the way I have personally sensed the Risen Christ at work in my own life — always within earshot, always rightly responsive, interceding with both wisdom, timeliness and love. The way Aslan growls at the very consideration of disobedience is exactly how I sense the admonishing, protective cover of the Holy Spirit. I do not, like a dualist, have a contentious demon and angel perched on each shoulder. I have a mighty living Savior always lovingly guiding me in the right way.

I endured some minor surgery recently, since finishing these books — nothing life threatening, just inconvenient and briefly painful in recovery. There was a window of time during that first night home at which, if my recovery wasn’t hastened, I’d need go to an emergency room and endure another round of physicians jostling now bruised, wounded and sensitive members. I prayed. I prayed in the name of Jesus to be sufficiently restored that additional procedures might not be necessary. I was restored, almost immediately. I do not recount these events here to proselytize. I have believed in the efficacy of prayer for many years. What struck me about my own prayer, this time, was that it had a new character of faith, more childlike. I think having read The Chronicles of Narnia has caused me to appreciate better the personhood of God. That I have met Aslan has caused me to know Christ more personally, more genuinely.

Lest this become a treatise, let me simply offer a few excerpts that I found particularly delicious.

Election

Though Lewis was reasonably militant in his rejection of the absolute sovereignty of God as suggested by Calvinists, I thought this exchange between Jill and the Lion in The Silver Chair more than just a trifle Reformed in its theology:

“‘Speak your thought, Human Child,’ said the Lion.

‘I was wondering — I mean — could there be some mistake? Because nobody called me and Scrubb, you know. It was we who asked to come here. Scrubb said we were to call to — to Somebody — it was a name I wouldn’t know — and perhaps the Somebody would let us in. And we did, and then we found the door open.’

‘You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,’ said the Lion.

The Way He Works

I love the way Lewis writes of how Aslan intercedes in people’s lives. In The Horse and His Boy, Aslan’s makes it clear that we are not only living out our own story, but we are also part of someone else’s story and, “…no one is told (by Aslan) any story but their own.”

His “ways” are further elucidated when, in The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, Aslan remonstrates Lucy for using her gifted magic to spy on a schoolmate:

“I don’t think I’d ever be able to forget what I heard her say.’

‘No, you won’t.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Lucy. ‘Have I spoiled everything? Do you mean we would have gone on being friends if it hadn’t been for this — and been really great friends—all our lives perhaps — and now we never shall.’

‘Child, said Aslan, ‘did I not explain to you once before that no one is ever told what would have happened?

Or in The Silver Chair as Jill, Scrubb and Puddleglum swing on the horns of dilemma as they consider whether or not to free Caspian from his bondage to the chair:

“‘Oh, if only we knew!’ said Jill.

‘I think we do know,’ said Puddleglum.

‘Do you mean you think everything will come right if we do untie him?” said Scrubb.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Puddleglum. ‘You see, Aslan didn’t tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do.'”

So are the ways of Christ. One recalls Cowper, “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform. He plants His footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm.”

Heaven and Hell

Lewis just won’t give up on the idea that we might have a chance to get right with God on the other side of mortality. As we considered in our review of The Great Divorce, Lewis views on Heaven and Hell are unorthodox at best, heretical at worst. He inserts his unconventional view here again in The Last Battle when, just as we enter the New Narnia, we encounter Emeth, a Tash-worshipping Calormene, to whom Aslan has said, “…Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me.”

How we wish Aslan might have instead spoken those words through the fenestration separating Old Narnia from new, as Emeth, like the Thief in the Cross, acquired passage to Paradise. Instead, Lewis let’s him pass through first. It’s inarguably unbiblical, but arguably in keeping with the character of Aslan, the Christ-figure. I shall chalk it off to the hopefulness of generous optimist who always saw stories with happy endings.

Finally, what of all these characters: fauns, centaurs, mugglewumps, dwarfs, dryads, talking beavers and animals of all taxonomies, witches and what not. I listened to a “Great Courses” series recently in which Dr. Louis Markos related that of all of Lewis’ characters, the one in which Lewis himself took most delight was Reepicheep, the chivalrous mouse who figures prominently in several of the adventures. I concur in his favoritism. Consider this selection from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, as Caspian and his crew weigh the risk of sailing on into the unknown:

“‘Do we go into this? asked Caspian at length.

‘Not by my advice,’ said Drinian.

‘The Captain’s right,’ said several sailors.

‘I almost think he is,’ said Edmund.

Lucy and Eustace didn’t speak but they felt very glad inside at the turn things seemed to be taking. But all at once the clear voice of Reepicheep broke in upon the silence.

‘And why not? he said. ‘Will someone explain to me why not.’

No one was anxious to explain, so Reepicheep continued:

‘If I were addressing peasants or slaves,’ he said, ‘I might suppose that this suggestion proceeded from cowardice. But I hope it will never be told in Narnia that a company of noble and royal persons in flower of their age turned tail because they were afraid of the dark.’

‘But what manner of use would it be plowing through that blackness?” asked Drinian.

‘Use?’ replied Reepicheep. ‘Use, Captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be of no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honor and adventure. And here is a great an adventure as ever I heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honors.”

Even in 1960’s, when as a wee lad I patronized the local library, children’s literature had begun to take a turn away from the classics of storytelling toward indoctrination in secular public policy agendas. In my day as a child these things seemed benign enough: buckle your seat belt, don’t be a litterbug, the exclusivity of my ability to prevent a forest fire, etc. In the ensuing four decades the stories have become even more ardent in their advocacy of an humanist, materialist, even atheist, politically correct course: what whales to save, which politicians to fawn over in song, how many carbons to eradicate, which gender to mate. This is all a pity and a great danger.

I think The Chronicles of Narnia ought to be read aloud by parents to every second or third grader, and then rediscovered personally by every sixth or seventh grader, while innocence remains in bloom.

I want a world of more Reepicheeps.

Pater Familias

“The Weight of Glory” and Other Addresses, by C. S. Lewis

“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” – C.S. Lewis

The Weight of Glory, a collection of nine addresses delivered by Lewis on a variety of topics, was originally published in London in 1949, under the title Transposition, featuring another of the addresses. Walter Hooper, who served briefly as Lewis’ amanuensis prior to his death and as his literary trustee since, writes in a preface to this edition that Transposition was “…one of the most ravishing pieces of prose Lewis ever wrote.” I’m left embarrassed and intimidated as, of all of the selections in this collection, Transposition is the only one I could not grasp. What a pity for me to be left un-ravished by this, Lewis’ allegedly most enrapturing offering.

The re-titled collection, drawing its title from another of the nine addresses, which of course draws its title from the Apostle’s description in 2 Corinthians 4:17 of that for which “slight momentary afflictions” are preparing us, is an eclectic curation of Lewisiana. Some of these addresses bear the sublime approachability of the Broadcast Talks, others the engaging erudition of the Cambridge don, and a couple of them a bit of navel gazing. Still, one can’t tire of Lewis, though I presently test this maxim by reading little else.

The address after which the collection is titled, The Weight of Glory, could easily be tucked into the portfolio of commentary that has become Mere Christianity. It is familiar, succinct and isolates a thread that is essential Christian thinking. I can see why another of my intellectual and spiritual mentors, John Piper, finds such delight in Lewis — because here Lewis finds such delight in God. Lewis confronts, head on, the idea that the faithfully lived Christian life is so self-sacrificial as to rob it of the enjoyment of earthly pleasure.

“I submit this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. we are far too easily pleased.”

R. C. Sproul Jr., speaking recently of the gods of contemporary relativists, referred to “Tomeism,” perhaps better read as “To me” -ism, meaning that many, indeed most, people today construct their own gods, e.g., “God to me is [fill in the blank]”. In today’s democratized culture of hyper-individualism there may actually be more totems and idols than on that day when graven images were banned on Mt. Sinai. The idea that what we think of God might be more important than what God thinks of us, to Lewis was both laughable and horrifying.

“I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important. Indeed, how we think of Him is of no importance except insofar as it related to how He thinks of us.”

He continues in this address to emphasize that the Apostle promised that those who love God should not expect that they will know Him, but rather that they will be known by Him. Conversely, the most frightening and appalling words in Scripture are those in which God suggests that it might be said, “I never knew you.”

“We can be left utterly and absolutely outside — repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored.”

In Learning in War-Time, the teacher serves his students by having them appreciate the margin available for learning, even during tumultuous times and with distracting events on the periphery. He of course was then calming the nerves of students distracted by the air raid sirens of WWII, but this address could as easily be an help to the attention deficit disordered of our own day. Consider:

“The second enemy is frustration — the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of learning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical…Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment ‘as to The Lord.’ it is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

The address in this collection that affected me the most was the one entitled, The Inner Ring. I have never heard any previous reference made to this piece, but regard it as one of the most thoughtful and important of all that I’ve read of Lewis. In essence, he writes of the danger involved of needing to be “in the loop,” or the inner ring as he calls it. I was affected, indeed convicted, because I have lived so much of my life jockeying to be in that ring, and have only of late appreciated the deleterious consequences of such longterm behavior on my personal relationships and Christian witness. Though of such sin I may be chief, I am not alone. Isn’t the spur underlying so much peripatetic social media communications today really less about constructive human connection and more about insuring that no ring near our lives be without reserved seating for us? Better it seems we risk crashing our vehicle in negligence than to leave even a moment for a proximate circle to be left without imprint of our own text message, posting, etc., etc.

“Of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things…The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion; if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.”

To focus simply on one’s work and the good company of craftspersons with whom you undertake it, eschewing the need to be “in the loop,” you will contribute to that which causes “perhaps half of the happiness in the world.” Friendship will occur. You will break the grip of the need to be in the circle and enjoy something the Inner Ringer can never have. In address entitled, Membership, Lewis writes “…caucus has replaced friendship.” What might he have made of with world Facebook in which we compile hundreds of “friends” on a device interface and otherwise move about lonely?

The last set of switchbacks on the climb up this mountain of C. S. Lewis’ work, Miracles, Arthurian Torso and The Weight of Glory were steep, narrow and precipitous; an intellectual workout. Now, at long last, there stands before me a land about which I’ve heard so much from others, but a land I’m embarrassed to say I have never visited on my own.

Having reached this summit, I look out before me and there is Narnia. Pardon me, but I have wardrobe through which I need to crawl.

Pater Familias
S.D.G.

Arthurian Torso, by Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis

“I begin then by considering these ‘Arthuriana’ as a book of wisdom — a book that makes consciousness. If I say that in this respect it seems to me unequalled in modern imaginative literature, I am not merely recording the fact that many of Williams’ doctrines appear to me to be true. I mean rather that he has re-stated to my imagination the very questions to which the doctrines are answers.” – C. S. Lewis

The full and proper title of this work under review is Arthurian Torso: Containing the Posthumous Fragment of “The Figure of Arthur” by Charles Williams and a Commentary on the Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams by C. S. Williams. It’s not an easy book to come upon, and my copy recently purchased put a big dent in my book allowance.

Charles Williams was a first-half of the 20th century British poet, novelist, theologian and literary critic who was Lewis’ friend and one of the so-called “Inklings,” the informal circle of literary friends that included Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield and others that gathered weekly during term at Magdalen College to hear what they were writing. In his preface to this posthumous publication of Williams’ unfinished work, The Figure of Arthur, Lewis captures something of a session of “The Inklings.”

“The two first chapters had been read aloud by the author to Professor Tolkien and myself. It may help the reader to imagine the scene; or at least it is to me both great pleasure and great pain to recall. Picture to yourself, then an upstairs sitting-room with windows looking north into the ‘grove’ of Magdalen College on a sunshiny Monday Morning in vacation about ten o’clock. The Professor and I, both on the chesterfield, lit our pipes and stretched out our legs. Williams in the arm-chair opposite to us threw his cigarette into the grate, took up a pile of the extremely small, loose sheets on which he habitually wrote — they came, I think, from a twopenny pad for memoranda, and began as follows: —”

And so when we then “hear” what Lewis and Tolkien themselves heard, a presentation of Charles Williams’ brilliant, albeit unfinished, history and consideration of the King Arthur legend.

Williams was chiefly known as a novelist, a creator of what T. S. Eliot wrote were some of the best “supernatural thrillers,” exploring the nexuses of material and immaterial power. But Lewis was profoundly influenced by Williams exceedingly dense poetry unfolding the Arthurian legend, including Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944), the imprints of which can be clearly discerned in Lewis’ third installation of his “Space Trilogy,” That Hideous Strength.

The legend of King Arthur is one of the oldest stories told by English-speaking people. It tells of a late 5th and early 6th century British leader who defended the island nation from Anglo-Saxon invaders. Much of the Arthur legend is of dubious historicity, but it is a story first recorded in De Excidio by monk in the 6th century and told continuously to the present day. Williams clearly and ably charts the evolution of the legend and its many rich characters: Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Morgan le Fay, Gawaine, Merlin and others through fourteen centuries of cultural, political and religious adaptation. My own appreciation of the legend is limited to a few Hollywood productions and Jack Whyte’s excellent Skystone series of contemporary novels. Williams motivates me, however, to want to linger now in such classical presentations as Geoffey of Monmouth’s 12th century Historia Regum Brittaniae and, of course, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, published in 1485.

It is impossible to appreciate Lewis’ commentary of Williams’ Arthurian poetry without reading the poetry itself, which I have not. But one can, again, in reading Lewis’s commentary at the end of Arthurian Torso, get a flavor of Lewis at work in his “day job” as a teacher of Medieval and Renaissance literature.

Williams and Lewis saw in the Arthurian legend the revelation of two Britains, the work-a-day world of farmers and shopkeepers, and then the Britain of Logres, or what many call Camelot, the Britain of so many extraordinary way-workers with words: Milton, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Dr. Johnson, &c., &c., &c.

Arthurian Torso is a technical book of literary criticism and no pleasure cruise save for those readers who take pleasure in such fare. The Williams fragment will be readable and interesting to those who have an interest in King Arthur. The Lewis commentary is only truly valuable to those capable of daring the density of Williams’ poetry.

Pater Familias
SDG

Miracles: How God Intervenes In Nature and Human Affairs, by C. S. Lewis

Jesus raises Lazarus from the tomb

“Everythingism is congenial to our minds because it is the natural philosophy of a totalitarian, mass-producing, conscripted age. That is why we must be perpetually on our guard against it.” — C. S. Lewis

About the sixth grade of school I began encountering math problems expressed as narrative, a reasonable enough instrument of pedagogy inasmuch as such narratives simulate the circumstances in which the student will ultimately apply mathematics. I didn’t care for these so-called word problems, and still don’t. I tense up when I encounter a story line that reads like:

“You’ve taken four tests in your class and made an 89, 92, 78, and 83. The final is worth two test grades. What do you need to make on the final to make an A in the class for the semester?”

It makes me nervous even now to transcribe it.

For the first time in my in my journey through the C. S. Lewis canon, the don seemed shed his amiable avuncularity and otherwise appear at the chalkboard to scratch out syllogisms and formulae, creating the kind of high-pitched screeches that cause one’s skin to crawl and neighborhood dogs be summoned. I confess I found this book by Lewis the most difficult to follow of those I have thus far considered.

My sense in reading Miracles: How God Intervenes in Nature and Human Affairs was that here Lewis formed a polemical battle line with the physicists and metaphysicians of his day, perhaps even of his own academic neighborhood. As I read, I felt at times as if he might be somewhat over his ski tips, not because I knew any better, but supposing that experts in the fields into which he was wandering might actually know better. The first quarter of this small book seemed a different Lewis, not the layperson helping a fellow layperson comprehend great truths, rather the stuffy sensei trying to hold his own among comparably stuffy peers. That said, perhaps it was just me who was incapable of skiing such slopes.

I might have put the book down were I not so stubbornly committed to reading all of Lewis’ work, and had I not made my way to “Chapter V” where the chalk suddenly stopped screeching and my favorite uncle returned to his pipe and chair.

“Some people regard logical thinking as the deadest and driest of our activities and may therefore be repelled by the privileged position I gave it in the last chapter. But logical thinking — Reasoning — had to be the pivot point of the argument because, of all the claims which the human mind puts forward, the claim of Reasoning I be valid is the only one which the Naturalist cannot deny without (philosophically speaking) cutting his own throat.”

While his writing here is not as easily digestible as the other apologetics previously considered, Lewis still cuts to the quick. He sets a created cosmos up against the materialistic notion of a self-initiated, self-contained and self-perpetuating one, and demonstrates how such a naturalistic, all-is-one world simply cannot stand. He writes, memorably:

“Miracles in fact do not break the laws of nature.”

In reading Miracles, we are able to see clearly that that which we call New Age theology is, in fact, age old. It’s much easier and more comfortable to approach the “Why am I here?” question by jumping off the point that “we’re all one”, i.e., part of one, big, interconnected Gaia or, less theologically, just floating about randomly in some self-initiated, self-sustaining glob of particulants. Lewis writes:

“Pantheism is congenial to our minds not because it is the final stage in a slow process of enlightenment, but because it is almost as old as we are…So far from being the final religious refinement, Pantheism is in fact the permanent natural bent of the human mind; the permanent ordinary level below which man sometimes sinks, under the influence of priestcraft and superstition, but above which his own unaided efforts can never raise him for very long…It is it the attitude into which the human mind automatically falls when left to itself.”

Throughout this book, Lewis places Nature aside Super Nature, demonstrating that once we can reasonably reject the fallacious assumption of a self-initiated, self-sustaining system of existence, then what we call the miraculous may actually be regarded as entirely explainable, even expected. When Nature is treated as its own Prime Mover, rather than as the intentional work of a Creator, it loses its luster. It becomes just stuff winding down. A Christian view of Nature is, on the other hand, full of both wonder and hope.

“To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her. Come out, look back, and then you will see…this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas: this immoderate deluge if atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, fleas, grass, tornadoes and toads, How could you have ever thought this was the ultimate reality? How could you have ever thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself? Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as scientists tell us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creature, this ogress, this hoyden, this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch. But the theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed…and that will be a merry meeting.”

Lewis here establishes a logical framework for the plausibility of miracles essential to appreciating that ultimate truth and purpose depend on a grand miracle: God became Man. He writes, “Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this.” The One, entirely separate from a “one” of which so many claim we are are “all”, will recover and redeem His creation, especially those He created in His own image who finally give up their rebellion and stand in greater awe of Him than of those things which He has created.

“Or one may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into cold and black water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay, then up again, back to color and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in he hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover.”

God took such a dive. He plunged into a humble manger, suffocated on a cross and walked out of a closed tomb clutching redeemed humanity and nature in his hand. He made the dive for you and me. Can you acknowledge Him as creation’s author and yourself as of eternal worth to Him, or are you just so much flotsam and jetsam decaying in a soup of entropy?

Pater Familias
S.D.G

C.S. Lewis, A Life by ALISTER MCGRATH

 

[We are] a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardner’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming.  (p. 360)

Many years ago when I was in the seeking phase of my faith journey, the pastor of the church I had recently begun to attend suggested I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  As is true for so many who read this work, my world was turned upside down.  Lewis illustrated logical arguments so vividly. Finally, someone presented the gospel in a way that my rational mind could more fully embrace. Contrary to the bent of my higher education, Lewis proved it was possible to believe and still be a critically thinking, educated person.  Within a few months, with the help of a few other wonderful Christians, the Spirit moved in my heart to confirm the Truth my mind had been seeking. I gave my life to Christ and will be forever grateful to C.S. Lewis.

Since that time, I have read every biography about him of which I am aware.  I have enjoyed them all.  Alister McGrath’s volume is certainly the highest level of scholarship and is the best biography with regard to understanding Lewis as revealed in his writing.

Lewis was a fascinating figure of imagination and intellect. His childhood in Ireland was blanketed with a melancholy shadow cast by the death of his mother when he was very young, and the resulting “exile” to boarding schools which, for the most part, he detested. He became a bit of a loner, spending much time reading all kinds of literature, particularly enjoying fantasy. His most influential teacher was a personal tutor by the name of William Thompson Kirkpatrick, whom Lewis (and his brother Warnie),  affectionately referred to as the “Great Knock.”  McGrath says of Kirkpatrick:

Kirkpatrick was a remarkable man, and must be given credit for much of Lewis’s intellectual development, particularly fostering a highly critical approach to ideas and sources. (p. 40)

Lewis himself summarized his learning this way:

Smewgy (a nickname for another teacher) taught me Grammar and Rhetoric, and Kirk taught me Dialectic.” (p.41)

Interestingly, as indebted to Kirkpatrick as Lewis was for helping him to learn how to use words and develop arguments (as well as teaching him classic languages and German and Italian), Kirkpatrick was also one of the teachers who’s rationalism facilitated Lewis’s early departure from childhood faith and increased his commitment to atheism.

McGrath spends comparatively little time on Lewis’s childhood, but he does a good job of laying the foundation for understanding why certain themes arose in Lewis’s later writing.  Lewis’s vast imagination and reading in fantasy fuels such works as the Space Trilogy and Narnia series. His deep commitment to scholarship enabled him to be a respected writer of poetry as well as literary criticism in serious academic texts such as English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. And, of course, his mastery of presenting complex ideas in a simple, easy to understand way, helped him become one who many regard as the most influential apologist of the Christian faith in the twentieth century. To this final point, about the preparation for the talks that eventually became Mere Christianity, Lewis said,

You must translate every bit of your Theology into the vernacular.  This is very troublesome, and it means you can say very little in a half an hour, but it is essential.  It is also of the greatest service to your own thought.  I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning. (p. 208)

It is clear throughout this biography that McGrath has been very diligent about his scholarship. The conclusions he draws and the inferences he makes are largely from letters to and from Lewis, documents from the various institutions with which he had associations, and the writings themselves.  McGrath meticulously cross-references to the point that on a couple of occasions he was able to show where Lewis himself had been confused about a date or place. This was even true about the dates of some of the events leading up to Lewis’ conversion, to which McGrath pays particular attention.

McGrath was very good in recreating the academic climate at Oxford in which Lewis struggled to be accepted.  We think of him today as an Oxford Don, but the truth is, he never received a professorship there, and they did not like his Christianity or his commercial popularity. Of course there was the friendship with Tolkien and the others in the Inklings which was most fertile ground for developing his ideas about the faith and about writing in general. McGrath did an excellent job describing the intellects and evolution of the Inklings as well as the influence of this group on Lewis and his influence on them.  But though the institution of Oxford did not share the affection of the Inklings for Lewis, he was by all accounts an outstanding teacher who’s lectures, unlike many professor’s, were always filled to overflowing. In contrast to Oxford, Cambridge, where Lewis taught in his later years, seemed to value Lewis’s extraordinary gifts much more highly.

I really enjoyed how McGrath showed the ways Lewis’s personal history and interests influenced his writing. While McGrath naturally had to draw some conclusions, he brought surprisingly little bias to his subject.  It is clear he has immense respect for Lewis–even fondness–but he was very objective in portraying Lewis’s idiosyncrasies and weaknesses, as well as his strengths, all of which can be felt in the content and style of his works.  The result was a clearer picture of the real man through this work.

McGrath really shines in presenting the context and analysis of Lewis’ major works of writing, including Mere Christianity (which, of course, along with The Screwtape Letters skyrocketed Lewis to international fame), and his section on the Narnia series. The two chapters on Narnia are superb. McGrath gives his observations about the origins of Narnia and illuminates the major themes in the series, showing not just the Christian themes, but also the Medieval symbolism, the influence of Plato and the likely reasons for telling the story with animals.

I was especially grateful that the strongest impression was ultimately of the power of the faith of C.S. Lewis and the impact of his writings as a result.  This is Lewis’ true legacy and McGrath is faithful to it.  One of the reasons so many can identify with Lewis is that he struggled with coming to belief, and when really hard losses happened in his life, he struggled with maintaining faith. This hits home for most of us. Lewis does not come across simply as a theologian, but as a human being working to interpret the faith through real life experiences. Though he struggled long to come to faith, once illuminated by the truth, Lewis’ sharp mind gave him the ability to articulate it with clarity and imagination as well as charm and winsomeness that resonates in the minds of ordinary people. What a magnificent legacy.

This biography is very much worth your time.

Grandy

 

 

George MacDonald: An Anthology, by C. S. Lewis

“To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it — just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that said about His person, or babbled about His work.” – George MacDonald

What are we to do with George McDonald?

C. S. Lewis wrote of MacDonald:

“I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.”

How is it that Lewis who, for the most part, an herald of Christian orthodoxy, could owe such a debt to one of whom both parishioners in his own day and theologians since have regarded as an heretic?

I cannot comment with personal authority on MacDonald’s heresy. I found little in this collection of “fragments” that caused me such alarm; indeed quite the contrary. The Wikipedia entry on MacDonald offers this:

“MacDonald rejected the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement as developed by John Calvin, which argues that Christ has taken the place of sinners and is punished by the wrath of God in their place, believing that in turn it raised serious questions about the character and nature of God. Instead, he taught that Christ had come to save people from their sins, and not from a Divine penalty for their sins. The problem was not the need to appease a wrathful God but the disease of cosmic evil itself. George MacDonald frequently described the Atonement in terms similar to the ‘Christus Victor theory.'”

While MacDonald rejected the Augustinian view of Atonement, his views were aligned with other Early Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Gregory of Nyssa who advanced so-called “ransom theory.” This was the prevailing view of atonement for a thousand years, but of course an heresy against which the Reformers ultimately protested as non-biblical.

My guard was up as I came to this little tribute volume in the Lewis corpus. I came ready to search out that which is false, but otherwise to try my best to see what Lewis saw in MacDonald. It is really not a narrative. Lewis shares a well-composed preface here, but his work here is one of curation. One imagines drawers of index cards on which Lewis had copied his favorite MacDonaldisms, then sorted through them to share with us the best of his collection.

While this anthology is organized with 365 offerings, it reads less like a devotional guide and more like a compendium of familiar quotations. Though many of the excerpts were selected from MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons, I’m struck by how un-saturated they are with scripture — well-seasoned to be sure — but not drenched in the Word as are say so many Puritan meditations, or even those of Oswald Chambers.

Before we get to a sampling of the sampler, a few words about MacDonald. He was a figure of the second half of the 19th century, a Scotsman, who tried his hand at pulpit ministry before being run off for expressing “belief in a future state of probation for heathens” and other offenses against orthodoxy. He was most distinguished as a literary figure; an author of fairye tales, fantasies and novels. “Grandy” read several of MacDonald’s novels some years back and found them “quaint,” embodying a Christian ethos in a throw-back kind of way, but otherwise unexceptional. Apparently her critical faculties are on par with those of Lewis:

“If I were to deal with him as a writer, a man of letters, I should be faced with a difficult critical problem. If we define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly MacDonald has no place in its first rank — perhaps not even in its second…Necessity made MacDonald a novelist, but few of his novels are good and none is very good.”

The MacDonald fairy tales and fantasies are, in Lewis’ opinion, another matter. “It was in this mythopoeic art that MacDonald excelled,” he says. “And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man.” I am moved to want to read MacDonald in these genres, particularly Phantastes, of which Lewis writes,

“It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought — almost unwillingly, for I had looked at the volume on that bookstall and rejected it on a dozen previous occasions — the Everyman edition of “Phantastes” A few hours later I knew I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist-deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity. Now Phantastes was romantic enough in all conscience; but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this difference really was. I was only aware that this new world was strange, it was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it was a dream in which one at least felt strangely vigilant; that the whole book has about it a sort if cool, morning innocence, and also quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize (that is where the Death came in) my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at the time) to my conscience. Their turn came far later…but when the process was complete…I found that I was still with MacDonald and that he had accompanied me all the way…”

Now, on to my curation of Lewis’ curated “fragments” of MacDonald. I must say, had I not been familiar with the hue and cry over Lewis and his heretic mentor, I might have simply delighted in this book, perhaps shaking my head at a few selections. On the whole the collection is wonderful, inspiring, deep, thoughtful and well-composed. Lewis thought MacDonald a better preacher than writer. He wrote, “I know hardly any other writer who seems it be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.” I felt this communion between MacDonald and Christ as I read these “fragments.” At times the writing drew me closer to Christ, as well.

A favorite:

[231] The Full-Grown Christian

He does not take his joy from himself. He feels joy in himself, but it comes to him from others, not from himself — from God first, and from somebody, anybody, everybody next…he could do without knowing himself, but he could not know himself and spare one of the brothers or sisters God has given him…his consciousness of himself is the reflex from those about him, not the result of his own turning in of his regard upon himself. It is not the contemplation of what God had made him, it is the being what God himself is, and what he has made his fellows, that gives him joy.”

Or these that foreshadow Lewis’ own writing:

[131] Deadlock

“Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.”

[203] Hell

“The one principal of hell is — ‘I am my own!”

Then there’s this one that is reasonably Reformed in tone:

[74] The Sacred Present

“The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God’s care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand years — in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Those claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared today are of the duty of today; the moment which coincides with work to be done, is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere till Gof has made it.”

And these which are decidedly not Reformed:

[192] Why Free Will Was Permitted

“One who went to the truth by mere impulse would be a holy animal, not a true man. Relations, truths, duties, are shown to the man away beyond him, that he may choose them and be a child of God, choosing righteousness like Him. Hence the whole sad victorious human tale and glory to be revealed.”

[215] Mean Theologies

“They regard the Father of their spirits as their governor! They yield the idea of…’the glad Creator,’ and put in its stead a miserable, puritanical, martinet of a God, caring not for righteousness but for His rights: not for eternal purities, but the goody properties. The prophets of such a God take all the glow, all the hope, all the color, all the worth, out of life in earth…”

In those, he was wrong.

I suppose if the first six fragments has been of this ilk, I may have closed the book and moved on to Miracles, the next in order, supposing that the project is a Lewis project, not a MacDonald one. But the first six fragments weren’t like these, nor were the second six. I won’t say that Lewis’ anthology is one I’ll return to regularly for inspiration and renewal of my mind, though I suspect I will return here from fime-to-time to grab a fragment I once thought well-expressed.

As a medievalist Lewis would have been familiar with the primitive bathing habits of people living in those calamitous centuries. Most families would bathe but once a week —in the same tub of water. Sometimes, by the time the last family member bathed, the baby, the water was so dark that the child might accidentally be pitched with the wastewater, hence the contemporary admonition that we not “throw the baby out with the bath water.”

In reading MacDonald, I am reminded of reading the Christian mystics: Teresa of Avila, Richard Rolle and St. John of the Cross, or for that matter even Robert Schuller and Norman Vincent Peale. My Bible keeps my wits for me. It instructs me in what to keep and what to throw away. With the Word as my guide and guard, I am able to walk with ancestral Christians, many who plain got it wrong, but who still walked closely with Jesus, abided with Him and He with them, and who left something of their abiding with us that we might yet walk more closely, and with even greater integrity.

I’m mindful of MacDonald’s errancy, but also grateful for his mentorship of C. S. Lewis. Oh, what a debt Christendom owes him for writing that strange romantic fantasy that tweaked not only Lewis’ olympian imagination but, more importantly, battered against the casing of his hardened heart.

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