Devastating Analysis

The Theological "Shockers" of Dr. C. S. Lewis

By J. C. Reid

THE name of C. S. Lewis is possibly best known to the general public as the author of that wise and witty book, The Screwtape Letters. To others perhaps, he may be mainly associated with other works, including The Problem of Pain, The Case for Christianity, Beyond Personality, and Miracles, which, with telling down-to-earth illustrations, crisp reasoning and a solid Christian basis, present the eternal truths of Christianity to the ordinary man.
 But such books do not represent the whole of Dr. Lewis's achievement. A Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, he is one of the most brilliant English scholars of our day. His study of the mediaeval romance, The Allegory of Love, is perhaps the most remarkable contribution made to this subject in our time. In other books, such as his Preface to "Paradise Lost" and The Personal Heresy (written with Professor E. M. W. Tillyard), he has made invaluable additions to contemporary literary criticism.
 There are thus two C. S. Lewises, although they are not quite separate personalities, for, while rich scholarship underlines his apologetics, his Christian outlook is incorporated into his approach to literary analysis. He is a militant and devout "High Church" Anglican, whose religious writings have had always the main aim of expounding the reasonableness of Christianity to the secularized man in the street, of combatting modern materialism and especially logical positivism, and of showing, against the charges of the modern pagan, the cultural and spiritually ennobling effects of Christianity.

 PERSONAL INFLUENCE

 Dr. Lewis's personal influence has been very great, especially on the younger generation of university students, and can be regarded as one of the most important of those factors which have led to a Christian revival in English literature of recent years. As is perhaps to be expected with a man of such influence, enemies, usually from the ranks of the university positivists, have not been slow to invent slanders about him, to play down his scholarly achievements or to suggest that his work as a scholar has suffered badly since he "got religion" (as if it mattered, even if it were true!). I have heard such stories myself, but the source from which they come and the continued high level of Dr. Lewis's critical work confute such characteristic propaganda.
 Since C. S. Lewis accepts the Anglo-Catholic arguments for "continuity" and believes in the full Catholicity of the Church of England, there is naturally a good deal in his apologetic works which the Catholic cannot accept. Here and there, indeed, he goes astray on matters of theology. Yet, on the whole, the Catholic reader must admire his zeal, his erudition and his valiant assertion of Christian values. Few of us can read his books without being inspired and without having some light thrown on things spiritual.
 There is, it appears to me, considerable impress of Belloc and Chesterton on Dr. Lewis's more popular writing, in its vigour, its paradoxical clarity, its capacity for relating contemporary life to dogma. I hope I will not be misunderstood when I say that I believe that the voluminous mantle of G. K. Chesterton has fallen on C. S. Lewis rather than on any living Catholic writer. I know of no Catholic writer today who has the same power of giving new and vivid expression to the truths of religion and at other times of wrapping them up in such a fascinating web of imagination, paradox and allegory.

 OLD LEGENDS

 One of the characteristics C. S. Lewis shares with other Anglo-Catholic writers, such as Charles Williams and Dorothy L. Sayers, as well as with his friend, the Catholic philologist, Dr. J. R. R. Tolkien, is a deep interest in mediaeval cosmology, allegory and science. Charles Williams, in his Taliessin Through Logres and in his other poems on the Arthurian theme, explored the allegorical and mythical quality of these old legends, and himself studied magic and witchcraft. In his fascinating novels, such as All Hallows' Eve and War in Heaven, Charles Williams used mediaeval magic and Christian beliefs in a modern setting, in a way which only those who know mediaeval literature at first hand can fully appreciate. To Williams, an unpretentious and serious scholar, who died a couple of years ago, Dr. Lewis owes a debt which he freely acknowledges, and which shows out most fully in his remarkable trilogy of novels. Both of these men have written what may be called "spiritual shockers." They have sought for a contemporary popular literary form in which to embody the permanent truths of Christianity, in the same way as did the mediaeval romance. Just as Graham Greene has taken over the modern thriller and used this form to explore the soul of contemporary man and give concrete expression to theological concepts, so Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis have adapted the "ghost-story," the adventure story and the scientific romance to their own purposes.
 I am inclined to feel that in the works of Williams and Lewis, the emphasis on the Arthurian legends, on mediaeval magic and on the traditional folklore and myths of Britain is a part of their Anglicanism, in that it creates a kind of Christian myth which is national in origin and quality. However that may be, these brilliant men employ a rare imagination to create strange and fascinating worlds.

 ORIGINAL NOVELS

 C. S. Lewis's trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength were published a few years ago, and, because of the war, did not attract the attention they merited. Now that they have all been reprinted this year, I strongly recommend them to the attention of Catholic readers. They are among the most fantastic and original of contemporary novels, but they are not "just novels," for they are also powerful allegories of Good and Evil. They might, in fact, have been produced by a committee consisting of Jules Verne, Sir Thomas Malory, Robert Hugh Benson, Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll, with G. K. Chesterton in the chair.
 The first novel, Out of the Silent Planet, takes as its frame-work a typical H. G. Wells plot, quite deliberately, as a large part of its purpose is to explode the philosophy of Scientism for which Wells and the modern popular scientific mind stand. Dr, Lewis cleverly turns the Wellsian formula against Wells himself, as with a different purpose and method Aldous Huxley did in Brave New World. In this novel, Dr. Ransom, an Oxford philologist, who is the central character of all three books, is taken to Mars against his will in a space-machine built by unscrupulous scientists bent only on the extension of the control of earthly science over the planets. Mars proves to be inhabited by superior spirits with semi-angelic intelligence, ruled over, by Oyarsa, a planetary angel or Intelligence, as the mediaevals called them. In conformity with mediaeval cosmology, all the planets are under the care of such beings. The Oyarsa of Earth (Thulcandra), Ransom is told, became "bent" (evil), and after being defeated in the war in heaven, was bound to Earth, which he sought to pervert. "We think," Oyarsa says, "that Maleldil (the Martians' name for God) would not give Thulcandra up utterly to the Bent One, and there are stories among us that He has taken strange courses, and dared terrible things, wrestling with the Bent One in Thulcandra."
 Ransom witnesses a dialectical conflict between the ordered philosophy of the beings of Mars and the crude scientific materialism of the power-mad scientist, Weston. The scientist says to Oyarsa, "Life is greater than any system of morality; her claims are absolute. It is not by tribal taboos and copy-book maxims that she has pursued her relentless march from the amoeba to man and from man to civilization." In Ransom's translation to Oyarsa, Lewis shows up the pompous pretensions and fatuous absurdity of this type of scientific utterance by using one of the favourite devices of the linguistic positivists, a re-writing of philosophical statements in "plain language." "He' says," began Ransom, "that living creatures are stronger than the question whether an act is bent or good—no, that cannot be right—he says it is better to be alive and bent than to be dead—no—he says—he says—I cannot say what he says, Oyarsa, in your language. But he goes on to say that the very good thing is that there shall be many creatures alive. He says that there were many other animals before the first man and the later ones were better than the earlier ones; but he says the animals were not born because of what is said to the young about bent and good actions by their elders. And he says these animals did not feel any pity."

 ASTONISHING HORIZONS

 In Perelandra, an extraordinary book, Lewis ponders over a theme similar to that set forth by Alice Meynell in her poem, Christ in the Universe. This is the concept that, supposing that other planets in our solar system are inhabited by intelligent beings, was the Fall reproduced there, and if so, in what form did God the Son come to redeem them?

But, in the eternities
 Doubtless we shall compare together,
 hear
 A million alien Gospels, in what guise
 He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre,
 the Bear.
 O, be prepared, my soul!
 To read the inconceivable, to scan
 The million forms of God those stars unroll
 When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

 In the novel, Ransom is transported to Venus, or Perelandra, where, since it is a young planet, the Garden of Paradise still exists. There it is his privilege to witness, and on the side of good, actively to participate in a struggle that parallels the temptation of Eve. The scientist, Weston, possessed by the Devil, becomes like a creeping beast, the Un-man, Satan's instrument of temptation. But this time there is no Fall, but a triumph of good; and Ransom sees the glorious transformation of the first inhabitants of Perelandra. The last scenes in this work reach a remarkable height of imaginative expression. The whole book is productive of infinite speculation; the horizons it reveals are astonishing.
 In the final work of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, Dr. Lewis portrays for us on the earth the struggle he has already shown us on Perelandra, but here, too, the conflict is on a cosmic scale. The book describes the eternal battle between Good and Evil disguised as Good, more specifically between Christian Truth and the angelic powers of Good operating through God's ministers and men of good will on the one hand, and on the other Scientific Truth, misdirected and misapplied, and consciously perverted to serve the ends of Satan.

 SCIENCE WITHOUT RELIGION

 As he has made clear in The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis believes that one of the greatest enemies of God in the modem world is scientific knowledge divorced from religious values. In That Hideous Strength, he imagines the various scientific heresies of today, euthanasia, eugenic breeding, psychological "conditioning" and so forth, lumped together in a totalitarian institute, the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), which, by its alliance with "scientific state-planning" is dominating England. The directors of this Institute are directly acting in concert with the Powers of Darkness, and their attempted subjection of England to a newly evolved species of being is frustrated only by the special knowledge of Ransom in league with— of all people—Merlin, King Arthur's seer, and with the help of the planetary angels of God.

 TERRIBLE STORY

The book is, of course, largely allegorical. Lewis himself calls it "a modern fairy-tale for grownups," and in a preface says, "If you ask why—intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals and planetary angels—I nevertheless begin with such humdrum scenes and persons. I reply that I am following the traditional fairy tale. We do not always notice its method, because cottages, castles, woodcutters and petty kings with which a fairy tale opens have become as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories." To me, That Hideous Strength is a terrible story —terrible because the fantasy does not conceal the serious point of Lewis's argument, because the imaginative situation he depicts, the predominance of the positivistic mind, is so close to spiritual reality to anybody acquainted with modern universities that it must make us tremble for the future of mankind.
Apart from the vast conception of this novel and the incidental satire, wisdom, and spiritual truth, many of the incidental ideas are stimulating; his fancy, for instance, that the pagan gods were man's attempt to depict angelic intelligences sent by God from time to time to earth, and his idea that Merlin was a gifted man, who, living when primitive pagan forces had not yet been wholly banished, stood half-way between Christianity and paganism and drew, crude spiritual powers from dying elemental forces. A great deal of the force of the novel, however, comes from his devastating analysis of a characteristic type of modern academic mind, with its positivism, its contempt for moral considerations, its fiendish "objectivity," which he portrays horribly in Dr. Wither and Professor Frost. He exposes also the tortuous murkiness of university politics, in which "progressive" cliques by propaganda and behind-the-scenes plotting force their ideas on governing bodies, a state of affairs by no means remote from our experience in this part of the world.

 CHESTERTONIAN RING

 Here is a characteristic passage from That Hideous Strength in which the N.I.C.E. scientists expound their views. To my ears, it has the real Chestertonian ring.
 "Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms—sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions."
 "What are you driving at, Professor?" said Gould. "After all, we are organisms ourselves."
 "I grant it. That is the point. In us, organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould—all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. Learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals. . . . Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation."
 "I don't think that would be much fun," said Winter.
 "My friend, you have already separated the Fun, as you call it, from the fertility. The Fun itself begins to pass away!"
 In these three unique books, C. S. Lewis ranges over the whole area of modern scientific and academic thought, scrutinizing its worst tendencies with a merciless eye, contrasting it with Christian concepts of man and his destiny, and embodying the whole in a most striking imaginative pattern, as remote as could be imagined from the pedestrian realism of the "sociological" novels of the 'thirties. These books are not to be judged by the rules which govern the criticism of the ordinary novel. They represent a most unusual use of the most popular form of our day, one which must give great pleasure to all imaginative and thoughtful readers and must perform a great service for the cause of Christianity in a materialist world.

Advocate (Melbourne, Vic. : 1868 - 1954), Thursday 30 June 1949, page 9