Letters
to Malcolm
and the Trouble with Narnia:
C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their 1949 crisis
Eric Seddon
I
|
N the
early spring of 1949, C.S. Lewis read part of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, still in manuscript, to
J.R.R. Tolkien. Expecting enthusiasm from his longtime friend and colleague, he
received instead what would remain Tolkien’s permanent dismissal of the work.
The assessment was blunt and unequivocal: Tolkien deemed the book almost
worthless—a carelessly written jumble of unrelated mythologies. He simply
detested it (Sayer 312, 313). Although
shaken by this terse and unexpected verdict, Lewis later sought the opinion of
Roger Lancelyn Green, whose encouragement lead to the ultimate decision to
finish the book (Green & Hooper, 241). It went on to become one of Lewis’s
best sellers. The first of what eventually became The Chronicles of Narnia, it has been continuously in print ever
since. Now half a century from its first publication, the place of The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe seems increasingly remarkable. Like The Lord of the Rings it remains
embraced and even celebrated by a society steadily annexed by secular values.
Its success both in book sales and, more recently, at the box office have even
resulted in the somewhat bizarre spectacle of secular critics writing polemical
tracts attempting to marginalize, if not deny, the Christian elements of the
plot.[1] Thus Narnia’s success has remained somewhat
oddly stunning—the greatest testimony to its place in literature being this steady
endurance in the public imagination, despite the societal shifts since its
first publication.
It can therefore seem, at least superficially, that Tolkien’s opinion
was not simply wrong, but ridiculously wrong. If ever there was any problem
with Narnia, the sales history of the
work would indicate that it was entirely Tolkien’s. This, in fact, has
functioned as the underlying assumption of much subsequent scholarly opinion.
Moreover, the crisis of 1949[2] has been
identified as a contributing factor to the waning of the two men’s friendship,
with Tolkien considered primarily to blame. Professional jealousy, artistic
narrowness, and even personal complexity as a man are supposed to have
conspired against his appreciation of Narnia.
He has been portrayed as envious of Lewis’s writing speed, annoyed by his
popular success, and offended by Lewis’s appropriation of his own ideas and
mythic histories. Finally, it has been suggested that there was a disagreement
regarding the nature and rigors of mythopoeic writing between the two—that
Tolkien slaved over every detail of a long gestating masterwork, while
Lewis churned
out commercially successful books which might have been deemed less scrupulous
in craft (Carpenter Tolkien 201,
Sayer 313). Yet despite some compelling aspects of these theories, they seem
unconvincing when considered in the broader context of their friendship and
careers.
In his 1988 analysis of the Narnia crisis, Joe R. Christopher presents a
closely reasoned argument against many of the assumptions surrounding Tolkien’s
supposed annoyance at both Lewis’s writing speed and the borrowing of his own
mythopoeic ideas. Christopher pays particular attention to the intellectual
provenance of the theories, tracing many of them back to Humphrey Carpenter’s
interpretations of Tolkien’s feelings. He concludes that “four or five motives
which Carpenter attributes to Tolkien probably should be taken more as
Carpenter’s interpretations than as Tolkien’s reasons [for rejecting Narnia].”
(Christopher Part I 39). The present paper offers no quarrel with this
conclusion, but rather adds the following argument: If Tolkien had been truly
disturbed by his friend’s prodigious output, a simple chronological listing of
Lewis’s works begs the question as to why he would draw the line in 1949. The
fact is that, in the late 1930s and ’40s, Lewis produced books at what can only
be described as an astonishing rate, among them Out of the Silent Planet (1938), The Problem of Pain (1940), A
Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), The
Screwtape Letters (1942), Perelandra (1943),
That Hideous Strength (1945), The
Great Divorce (1946), and Miracles (1947). After all of these, it
seems unreasonable to suggest that Tolkien should have gotten upset at the
speed of a relatively short children’s book.
Christopher’s argument also established that Tolkien’s dislike of Narnia
had multiple stages; that his first negative reaction was against what he
perceived as Lewis’s ‘distorted’ or ‘sentimentalized’ mythology in the opening
chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe, while the second stage encompassed the Narnia series in general, on the basis of it being too allegorical
(Green & Hooper 240-41, Christopher Part I 42, 45). As we shall see, this
allegorical difficulty is of great importance, not only in terms of genre but
in terms of the meaning of Narnia—meaning which would not likely have been lost
on Tolkien. These important issues granted, the present argument diverges from
J.R. Christopher’s ultimate opinion that it was an irreconcilable difference of
mythopoeic theory that separated the two (Christopher Part II 22-23). For the
theory that Narnia’s eclectic
mythologies somehow irrevocably offended Tolkien fails to explain the full
force and endurance of his negative reaction. Even when considering, as
Christopher does, the relative difference between the two men’s handling of
mythologies—Lewis’s eclectic and classical, Tolkien’s dominantly
self-consistent and Nordic—the puzzle remains. For had Tolkien been so easily
agitated by mythological eclecticism, Lewis’s Space Trilogy would undoubtedly have provoked a similar reaction.
Drawing from Plato, Arthurian Legend, direct parallels to Christian theology,
and a multitude of stylistic and philosophical sources (including William
Morris, David Lindsay, Milton, Charles Williams and even Tolkien himself), it
was every bit as much a jumble as Narnia.
But one needn’t stop there. From his very first book of fiction (The Pilgrim’s Regress) onward, the
magpie tendency is both apparent and constant in Lewis’s development as a
writer—so much so that it must be considered an essential aspect of his style. Narnia represents no radical departure.
And, significantly, in none of Lewis’s earlier books of fiction was this
eclecticism objected to by Tolkien.
Indeed, it is generally overlooked that Lewis’s method stood in such
stark contrast to Tolkien’s that neither man could have missed it. For Tolkien
went beyond avoiding the invocation of Christianity in his own mythologies—he
even avoided parallels that might strike too closely (Tolkien Letters 144, Bossert 72-73). Yet despite
this radical difference of approach, Lewis’s Perelandra, which overtly shadows the Fall of Man from the book of
Genesis, remained Tolkien’s favorite of the trilogy.[3] What
better proof of methodological tolerance could be hoped for?
To add another puzzling fact, Roger Lancelyn Green also felt The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to
be cluttered—specifically, he disliked the insertion of Father Christmas into
the plot. Yet unlike Tolkien, he was able to give his approval to the book as a
whole (Green & Hooper 241). The question becomes why Tolkien should have
had any more problem with the overall plot than Green. As Perelandra had shadowed the Fall and gained Tolkien’s praise,
couldn’t The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe shadow the Redemption to the same applause? These deeper questions
seem never to have been breached by Tolkien and Lewis—between them a door had
been locked on the trouble with Narnia, never to be reopened. And here the
story would appear to end, if not for two important factors taken together.
First, the substantial theological differences between an Anglican like Lewis
and a Roman Catholic like Tolkien, and second, a later book of Lewis’s,
mentioned in a letter of Tolkien’s some fifteen years after that fateful day in
1949.
˜ ™
On 11 November, 1964, almost a year after C.S. Lewis’s death, Tolkien
composed a letter to David Kolb, a Jesuit, wherein he wrote:
It is sad that ‘Narnia’ and all that part of C.S.L.’s work should remain
outside the range of my sympathy, as much of my work was outside his. Also, I
personally found Letters to Malcolm a
distressing and in parts horrifying work. I began a commentary on it, but if
finished it would not be publishable. (Tolkien, Letters 352)
The
abandoned commentary referred to has yet to be released publicly, though it is obviously a document of great
interest to any discussion of the relationship between Lewis and Tolkien, and
would likely shed light onto the eventual dulling of their friendship. Yet even
without direct access to the full text, the above letter provides a significant
key to the door locked shut in 1949. The first sentence is of the utmost
importance, for it demonstrates Tolkien’s sadness by what he calls a “lack of
sympathy” with Narnia. There is no
bitterness, no chafing over his friend’s speedy writing skills or commercial
success (he was experiencing his own by that point), but neither is there any
change of opinion. Instead, one senses a note of resignation and is left
wondering what vast territory might be covered under the nebulous word
“sympathy.” The next sentence provides us with some important direction to
solving the problem, for the context links his disapproval of Narnia to Lewis’s last completed book, Letters to Malcolm. A careful reading of
both texts, with the crisis of 1949 kept in mind, yields some remarkable
results, for Letters to Malcolm demonstrates
the differences between the two men in the greatest relief. As such it acts as a clarifying lens through
which to view Tolkien’s experience of Narnia.
It is therefore with the later work that we begin in earnest.
Letters
to Malcolm is unique in Lewis’s output; so much that it may be rightly
considered his last theological will and testament. It is the work of an older
man—one who had chosen to shy away from the public debates of his middle age
only to find that the nostalgia for battle remained. But nostalgia is
selective: it seeks to relive only the more pleasant emotions associated with
former trials, while avoiding the realities of actual hardship or suffering.
Thus, while in Malcolm Lewis would
reinvent a verbal battle reminiscent of his middle age, this one would be
different. Being nostalgic, the constructed debate would be entirely safe. To
accomplish this he would dictate the topics, inventing his own, less
intelligent sparring partner, named Malcolm, as his foil. By casting him as an old
friend in no danger of falling out with him (a sort of theological Watson to
his own Holmes), Lewis could set the limits of the debate entirely himself. And
as both the prosecution and the defense, able to fictionalize both parties’
reactions to the argument posed, Lewis would have complete control. The end
result is remarkable: such is the magic of fiction that this most relaxed,
conversational, and open-ended book, in style and appearance, is actually
Lewis’s most sectarian and antagonistic in substance—a fact that would not have
been lost on Tolkien or any other reflective Catholic of his generation.
In this carefully balanced literary structure, which is a monologue cast
as one side of a dialogue, we find Lewis’s most overtly Anglican work. It is filled
with theological barbs—most of them aimed at Roman Catholicism. As such it
provides us with the very clearest contrast between his and Tolkien’s beliefs.
To read the book from the Roman Catholic perspective of Tolkien, it is not
difficult to glean what aspects of it might have distressed and even horrified
him. When investigated, they shed light on Tolkien’s permanent rejection of Narnia, but before delving fully into
these, it is important to show just how much of a break Letters to Malcolm was from Lewis’s usual style.
As a lay theologian and writer of
apologetics, Lewis’s general approach was to focus only on those doctrines that
most Christians of his day held in common. He referred to this as ‘Mere’
Christianity, which operated not on the principle that such a discussion could
function, in itself, as a religion, but that it would lead a person into one of the various denominations.
‘Mere’ Christianity was therefore explained by Lewis as being a sort of hallway
in God’s mansion—he allegorized the various denominations as the rooms
themselves, suggesting that the hallway was no place for a soul to rest, but
rather a passageway toward a more substantial goal (Lewis Mere Christianity 11.) The approach of discussing only what he felt
common to all Christian perspectives was maintained by Lewis not only in
public, but privately, with only very few exceptions. The testimony of those
who knew him are firm on this point. For example, when his friend Alan
Griffiths (Dom Bede Griffiths after converting to Roman Catholicism) wanted to
debate the differences between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic
Church, Lewis refused to engage. Griffiths was confused, as they had always
argued theological matters openly—indeed, argument had aided each others’ conversions
from atheism. Yet Lewis was unequivocal: he would neither debate nor speak on
the subject (Hooper Collected Letters
Vol. II 135). This is fairly typical of Lewis’s treatment of the subject
(though, to be honest, there are some exceptions to be found in the Collected Letters—usually in regards to
the differences between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism). In terms of his
working theory, however, Lewis summed up his position most succinctly in
“Christian Reunion: An Anglican speaks to Roman Catholics” thus:
My only function as a Christian writer is to preach ‘mere Christianity’
not ad clerum but ad populum. Any success that has been
given me has, I believe, been due to my strict observance of those limits. By
attempting to do otherwise I should only add one more recruit (and a very
ill-qualified recruit) to the ranks of controversialists. After that I should
be no more use to anyone (396)
Letters to Malcolm, C.S. Lewis’s last completed book, stands
in marked contrast to this approach—especially when attacking Roman
Catholicism. As with almost everything in Malcolm,
though, the attack is veiled with fictional protests and managed almost
entirely obliquely. An excellent example is found in an early clarification
about devotions to the saints, wherein he writes:
Apparently I have been myself guilty of introducing another red herring
by mentioning devotions to saints. I didn’t in the least want to go off into a
discussion on that subject. There is clearly a theological defence for it; if
you can ask the prayers of the living, why should you not ask for the prayers
of the dead. There is clearly also a great danger. In some popular practice we
see it leading off into an infinitely silly picture of Heaven as an earthly
court where applicants will be wise to pull the right wires, discover the best
“channels,” and attach themselves to the most influential pressure groups. But
I have nothing to do with all of this. I am not thinking of adopting the
practice myself; and who am I to judge to practices of others? I only hope
there’ll be no scheme for canonisations in the Church of England. (Malcolm 15)
Had this been an actual correspondence, the first two sentences of the
above paragraph might be accepted at face value. Yet the reflective reader will
recognize that Letters to Malcolm is
not a real dialogue, but a fictional construction. Thus, while Lewis the character is reticent about
discussing the issue of devotions, it is in fact the very topic Lewis the author wishes to address (otherwise
he simply would have constructed the fictional correspondence in a different
manner, avoiding the topic altogether). This technique of protesting the
direction of the discussion just before or after offering an anti-Catholic
opinion is one which Lewis maintains throughout the book.
Needless to say, the issue discussed in the above passage would have
struck Tolkien immediately. As a man who prayed the Rosary, and who recited the
Confiteor[4] as a
part of the Mass, Lewis’s arrow would have hit its mark. As Tolkien was to
relate in “The Ulsterior Motive,” Lewis held strong opinions, contrary to his
own, regarding devotions to the saints:
We were coming down the steps of Magdalen Hall […] long ago in the days
of our unclouded association, before there was anything, as it seemed, that
must be withheld or passed over in silence. I said that I had a special
devotion to St John. Lewis stiffened, his head went back, and he said in the
brusque harsh tones which I was later to hear him use again when dismissing
something he disapproved of: “I can’t imagine any two persons more dissimilar.”
We stumped along the cloisters, and I followed feeling like a shabby little
Catholic caught by the eye of an “Evangelical clergyman of good family” taking
holy water at the door of a church. A door had slammed. (Carpenter, Inklings 51-52)
Taken together, this and the quoted passage from Letters to Malcolm highlight an important difference between the
two men—what might be generalized as
Lewis’s subjectivism in spiritual matters, conflicting with Tolkien’s
objectivism. Thus Lewis, in a perfectly typical, Anglican manner, states that
devotions to the saints are optional, depending upon the opinion of the
individual—the final arbiter on the matter being a Protestant, relativistic
conception of the Self.[5] Tolkien
would not have shared this belief, instead understanding such devotions to be
an absolute good[6]—the
final arbiter on theological matters being not the Self alone, but the greater
Christian community of the ages working in conjunction with personal consent—a
typically Catholic understanding. The implications of this difference between
them was perhaps more radical than either of them realized at the time of their
closest friendship.
Some
fifteen pages later in Malcolm there
is a passage that any English Catholic of Tolkien’s generation would have taken
personally. After obliquely and positively referencing what appears to be
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s notions of a Christianity without religion (Malcolm 29) Lewis turns his argument
against John Henry Newman, the most important convert from Anglicanism to
Catholicism of the 19th century, writing:
Newman makes my blood run cold when he says in one of the Parochial and Plain Sermons that heaven
is like a church because, in both, “one single sovereign subject—religion—is
brought before us. […] He has substituted religion
for God […]. [E]ven in this present life there is danger in the very concept of
religion. (30)
Though hardly
original to the 20th century, the idea of a “religionless”
Christianity had gathered considerable steam by the time of Lewis’s publication
of Malcolm in the 1960s, largely due
to the academic respectability it had gained through the theology of Bonhoeffer
and Karl Barth. In this particular letter, Lewis flirts with the concept, at least
to the degree that he is willing to set up a tentative dichotomy between
“religion” and “faith.” These days, the subtlety of such a distinction is less
obvious: While earlier generations would generally have considered the
proposition of a Christianity without religion to be ludicrous, now it is often
uncritically assumed to be one among many options. Indeed, the popularity of
this theology has steadily increased to the present decade, as evidenced by a
rebuttal as current as that of Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, presented in 2003’s Truth and Tolerance (Ratzinger 50). This
can make it difficult to understand what the passage would have meant to a man
of Tolkien’s day and age. In fact, he would certainly have condemned both the
idea of “religionless” Christianity and Lewis’s treatment of John Henry
Newman—an attack that Tolkien would probably have taken hard, for more than one
reason.
First, Newman is shown solely in
a deliberately negative light. Lewis could have chosen any number of passages
from Newman’s works to demonstrate how the Cardinal understood religion to be
the most comprehensive means by which humans encounter God (as distinct and antithetical to the notion of
religion replacing God), but he did
not. Likewise, it is likely that Lewis could have found better examples of
misguided religion than to selectively quote Newman. Why then, did he excerpt
this text? The answer is most likely the same as one finds today: that many
Anglicans still consider John Henry Newman a theological threat. His writings
are not neutral; they tend to cut to the historical roots of the Anglican
Reformation and subsequent theology. Because of this, they have remained fresh,
reading like a critique not only of the 19th century Church of
England, but of 20th and 21st century Anglicanism as
well.[7] That
Newman continues to generate a certain amount of Anglican rebuttal is evidenced
by a recent biography of Frank M. Turner’s, which was written for the purpose
of discouraging the canonization of Newman.[8] Given context, then, Lewis’s attack is no
unique, solitary instance, but part of a broader, more sustained tradition of
Anglican antipathy towards the famous convert.
Second, while Newman’s importance to English Catholicism is difficult to
exaggerate, he probably meant more to J.R.R. Tolkien than to most. Having been
raised by Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan, a priest of the Birmingham Oratory founded
by Newman in 1849, Tolkien’s link was quite personal. Fr. Morgan, who took
responsibility for Tolkien after his mother’s death, had even served under
Newman (Carpenter Tolkien 26). To
Tolkien, then, this letter might have seemed more than a moment of
Catholic-baiting—it could have had a distinctly personal bite to it.
From this point on, Letters to
Malcolm continues in what must have felt like an onslaught against many of
the things Tolkien held sacred. Lewis exhibits a contempt for
“ready-made-prayers” as he calls them, showing deference to only the Lord’s
Prayer and extemporaneous verbal prayer. In letter twelve, he even speculates that
those who “say their prayers” (i.e. repeating prayers learned in childhood)
might be calling the irreligious part
of their lives the religious part.
Recitation of the Rosary, which Tolkien practiced, is thus obliquely dismissed.
Adding insult to injury, though, was Lewis’s labeling of such practices as
childish. Tolkien might well have wondered what had happened to the Lewis he
had known from previous decades, the colleague who had joined him in fighting
the very same perceptions of mythopoeic literature—that it was a thing to be
abandoned when adulthood set in.[9]
This speculation aside, Lewis goes on to disparage the legitimacy of
both mysticism and mental prayer, singling out the spiritual exercises of St
Ignatius of Loyola as particularly unnecessary (Malcolm 63, 64, 84).[10] While doing so, his passing comments of
respect for the saint seem uncomfortably disingenuous, as his entire reason for
bringing Ignatius into the conversation seems to have been for the purpose of
dismissing the legitimacy of his spiritual exercises. Astonishingly, for Lewis
of all people, the meditations are dismissed on the basis of the difference
between Ignatius’s day and age and that of the mid-20th century.
This too might have legitimately struck Tolkien as somewhat duplicitous, for
Lewis had made opposition to chronological snobbery[11] a
central tenet of his apologetics. The critique of Ignatian exercises seems to
skate dangerously close to this very fallacy, and gratuitously so.
Continuing through Malcolm, we
find Lewis becoming more explicitly anti-Catholic when dismissing crucifixes
and even contemplation of the crucifixion, saying that in doing so
Compunction, compassion, gratitude—all the fruitful emotions—are
strangled. Sheer physical horror leaves no room for them. Nightmare. Even so,
the image ought to be periodically faced. But no one could live with it. (85)
The long history of Protestant Iconoclasm and rejection of the crucifix
is well known and need not be retraced here—what is striking is that Lewis
takes it a step further, suggesting that even meditation on Christ’s passion
ought to be curtailed and, for the most part, avoided. Significantly, it is
also in this letter that Lewis sets the stage for what must have truly provoked
Tolkien to use the word “horrified” when describing the book; for here Lewis
writes that “our whole distinction between ‘things’ and ‘qualities,’
‘substances’ and ‘attitudes,’ has no application to Him.” Despite the seemingly
random choice of terms, Lewis is driving at something specific when mentioning
the word “substances”: it is a direct reference to the Eucharistic theology of
St Thomas Aquinas. Specifically, he is quarreling with Question 75, Articles 3
and 5 of the Summa Theologica,
wherein Aquinas writes:
The substance of the bread or wine,
after the consecration, remains neither under the sacramental species, nor
elsewhere; yet it does not follow that it is annihilated; for it is changed
into the body of Christ […]. [emphasis added]. (Q75, Art 3, Reply Obj. 1)
It is evident to sense that the
accidents of the bread and wine remain after the consecration….There is no
deception in the sacrament; for the accidents which are discerned by the senses
are truly present. But the intellect, whose proper object is substance […] is preserved by faith from
deception [emphasis added]. (Q75, Art 5)
(Aquinas 2443, 2444)
This, in turn, sets the stage for
Lewis’s explicit disavowal of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation (that
at the consecration of the Mass, the accidents of the appearance of bread and
wine remain, while their substance is changed to the corporeal Body and Blood
of Christ):
I find “substance” (in Aristotle’s sense), when stripped of its own
accidents and endowed with the accidents of some other substance, an object I
cannot think. My efforts to do so produces mere nursery-thinking […]. (Malcolm
102)
Once again the argument is made without full reference to what Lewis was
opposing, which is very specifically the Catholic understanding of the
Eucharist; and once again the charge of childishness is leveled, obliquely, at
Catholicism. For Tolkien, the condescension would have been palpable.
In the next letter (number twenty) Lewis discusses his understanding of
Purgatory, making clear that he is not talking about “Romish” doctrine, which
he says the Reformers were correct to oppose (Malcolm 108). Finally, in letter number twenty-two, after what must
have seemed a thorough assault on his Catholic faith, Tolkien would read
Lewis’s discussion of the Resurrection of the Body. This concluding letter is of great
importance. Perhaps more than any other segment of Lewis’s writings, public or
private, it sheds light on the incompatibility of Narnia with Roman Catholic
theology, while tying together many of Lewis’s less orthodox opinions. As such,
it is worth quoting at length:
About the resurrection of the body. I agree with you that the old
picture of the soul re-assuming the corpse—perhaps blown to bits or long since
usefully dissipated through nature –is absurd. […] We are not, in this
doctrine, concerned with matter as such at all; with waves and atoms and all
that. What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in
this life matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of
sensations. […] At present we tend to think of the soul as somehow “inside” the
body. But the glorified body of the resurrection as I conceive it—the sensuous
life raised from death—will be inside the soul. […] “But this,” you protest,
“is no resurrection of the body. You
give the dead a sort of dream world and dream bodies. They are not real.”
Surely neither less nor more real than those you have always known? You know
better than I that the “real world” of our present experience (coloured,
resonant, soft or hard, cool or warm, all corseted by perspective) has no place
in the world described by physics or even by physiology. Matter enters our
experience only by becoming sensation (when we perceive it) or conception (when
we understand it). That is, by becoming soul. That element in the soul which it
becomes will, in my view, be raised and glorified; the hills and valleys of
Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor
as a substitute to the genuine article, but as a flower to the root, or the
diamond to the coal. It will be eternally true that they originated with
matter; let us therefore bless matter. But in entering our soul as alone it can
enter—that is, by being perceived and known—matter has turned into soul (like
Undines who acquired a soul by marriage with a mortal). (Malcolm 121-123)
All of this is impossible to reconcile to Catholic theology and
doctrine. Direct opposition to these opinions is to be found many places,
including the entry on “General Resurrection” from Volume XII of the Catholic Encyclopedia (1911), which
Tolkien might very well have read, and which, as a devout Catholic, is most
likely to have expressed his beliefs:
Resurrection is the rising again from the dead, the resumption of life.
The Fourth Lateran Council teaches that all men, whether elect or reprobate,
"will rise again with their own
bodies which they now bear about with them." [Emphasis added]…. [T]he
heretical contention of Hymeneus and Philitus that the Scriptures denote by
resurrection not the return to life of the body, but the rising of the soul
from the death of sin to the life of grace, must be excluded. […] Among the
opponents of the Resurrection we naturally find first those who denied the
immortality of the soul; secondly, all those who, like Plato, regarded the body
as the prison of the soul and death as an escape from the bondage of matter;
thirdly the sects of the Gnostics and Manichaeans who looked upon all matter as
evil; fourthly, the followers of these latter sects the Priscillianists, the
Cathari, and the Albigenses; fifthly, the Rationalists, Materialists, and
Pantheists of later times. (Maas)[12]
Thus Lewis’s views on bodily
resurrection seem to fit more comfortably with Hymeneus and Philitus, while
hinting at (or hedging closer to) the Gnostic and Manichaean notion of matter
as evil, than with Catholic theology. It should be noted that Lewis’s position
never went so far as open Gnosticism, in that he certainly never declared
matter to be exactly evil. But just as importantly, Lewis’s praise of matter in
Malcolm is entirely dependant upon
its ultimately becoming something else. In other words, Lewis does not present
matter as being inherently good (as Catholicism maintains); rather, he
considers its goodness as ultimately contingent
upon its potential for being transformed into something non-material. Thus Lewis’s theology is something of a
semi-Gnosticism; perhaps containing some hidden reservations about the goodness
of the body, or even the material universe.
Tolkien would undoubtedly have recognized this as incompatible with his
own understanding and that of the Catholic Church: “[Man] is obliged to regard
his body as good and to hold it in honor since God created it and will raise it
up on the last day” (Catechism 93).
(Note that Catholic theology stresses the goodness of the body in relation to
God’s having created it—not as contingent upon what the body will become after
death.)
To guard against theological challenges, however, Lewis once again
employs the now familiar device of shading his opinions with a disowning
comment of qualification. As he did earlier in discussion of devotions to the
saints (“But I have nothing to do with all this” [15]) and Eucharistic doctrine
(“All this is autobiography, not theology” [105]) so he does here by concluding
with “Guesses, of course, only guesses. If they are not true, something better
will be” (124). The casual atmosphere of spontaneous, private conversation is
maintained throughout. It is worth reiterating, however, that these weren’t
spontaneous comments, nor were they private. They were well crafted and
deliberately public. Significantly, the qualifications of the Lewis character, which add substantially to
the atmosphere of humility and speculatory ambiance of the book, take place
most prominently after attacks on Roman Catholic theology and doctrine.
If Lewis’s goal was to attack Catholicism while making counter attack
seem intolerant and unreasonable, his construction of Letters to Malcolm was rather ingenious. For, superficially, it
seems like real correspondence; undoubtedly the result of Lewis’s many years as
a prolific writer of letters. Control of the material is deft: it appears at
times that Lewis is actually being pushed, against his will, to comment on
these controversial matters. Because of this, any negative response from a
Catholic (or anyone else, for that matter) would likely seem an ad hominem attack on Lewis the author, rather then as a response to
Lewis the character. Thus, by a
synthetic literary context, Lewis insured that all criticisms would appear as
both intolerant and unreasonable. In any rebuttal, such as perhaps that
contained in ‘The Ulsterior Motive’, Tolkien would have found himself in a
difficult situation. Because he disagreed, and must surely have seen the bias
of the book, any written response would likely have seemed both merciless and
bitter. Hence at least one reason his attempted essay was “not publishable”
despite the fact that, in the book, Lewis had attacked the most central aspects
of his faith.
In recent years, there has been growing speculation on the part of many
Roman Catholic converts as to why C.S. Lewis never converted himself. The
present Church of England can seem far from the theology Lewis propagated in
the 1940s—so much so that many commentators believe his apologetics, while
maintaining influence in other denominations, ultimately lost the debate in his
own. Joseph Pearce’s relatively recent C.S.
Lewis and the Catholic Church repeats, at times quite vehemently, the
theory that Lewis all but “crossed the Tiber” theologically. With particular
zeal, he develops the implications of Tolkien’s ‘Ulsterian’ title, going so far
as to say that Lewis’s sole reason for remaining in the Church of England can
be laid at the feet of a bigoted Ulster Protestant upbringing. After working
himself into a bit of a frenzy, Pearce somewhat wildly asserts that “Lewis
kowtowed before the traditions of his family and its prejudices, no longer
believing what they believed, but unwilling or unable to make the break from them”
(Pearce, Lewis 147). As we have already seen in the above analysis
of Letters to Malcolm, such a
position, besides being uncharitable, is completely erroneous. To write of a
C.S. Lewis who had arrived at theological agreement with Roman Catholicism, or
even something closely resembling orthodox theology, is, frankly, to write
fiction. And perhaps the most contentious place to point this out is in the Chronicles of Narnia. Because they are
so popular with the general public, both Catholic and Protestant critics are
often too eager to claim them as completely orthodox statements in literary
form. But this is not precisely true, and one does well to clearly separate the
deliberately non-controversial C.S. Lewis of the BBC Broadcasts (whose desire
was to present only those doctrines all Christians agreed upon, as best he
could) with the writer of fiction, the content of which is much more revealing
of his personal beliefs. As Bede Griffiths wrote: “The figure of Aslan tells us
more of how Lewis understood the nature of God than anything else he wrote”
(qtd. in Sayer 319). Thus, Tolkien’s
rejection of Narnia was more than a
literary disagreement—it was a rejection of Lewis’s deepest feelings about God.
As such, Tolkien’s objections beg an analysis of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the light of Lewis’s
theology as stated in Letters to Malcolm.
In doing so, we uncover both a decidedly less-than-orthodox Narnia and much more charitable Tolkien
than most critics have previously portrayed.
It is telling that though
Tolkien spent hours studying Letters to
Malcolm, he refused to write an obituary for Lewis or to contribute to a
memorial volume (Carpenter, Tolkien
241). That a year later he mentioned the book simultaneously with Narnia is
instructive, for it is in the character of Aslan that Lewis’s unorthodox
approach to matter, the body, and the resurrection of the body, explicitly
stated in Malcolm, are most
implicitly demonstrated. As in Letters to
Malcolm, any implication of Eucharistic theology in Narnia is at best
unorthodox, at worst something which would have repelled Tolkien, even had he
not been able to pinpoint exactly why in 1949.
Thus, once the intricate theological analysis of Malcolm has been accomplished, the reasons for Tolkien’s rejections
of Narnia become quite easy to determine, and remarkably straightforward to
discuss. In other words, though it might be time consuming to find the key to a
door that has been locked for several decades, once that key is found, the door
opens quickly.
It has regularly been said that the Chronicles
of Narnia are not allegorical; that they are fairy stories, and therefore
are to be read and judged as depictions of a separate world, completely
consistent by their own intrinsic laws. Lewis himself described the theory
behind Aslan in the following manner:
If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant
Despair [from Bunyan] represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In
reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question,
“What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He
chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?” This is not allegory
at all. (Letters of C.S. Lewis 475)
The character of Aslan, then, is not intended allegorically.[13] Yet
from a Christian perspective, if Aslan remains non-allegorical throughout,
several problems arise, one of the clearest coming in Chapter XII of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,
when Peter must kill the Wolf Captain, Fenris Ulf, to save his sisters. The lines given to Aslan
here are particularly embarrassing if he is considered to be a ‘real,’ rather
than allegorical, representation of Christ. First, when Aslan raises a paw to
hold the others back, so that Peter may do the deed, Aslan shouts “Back! Let
the Prince earn his spurs!” Then, the bloody act accomplished, Aslan points out
to Peter that he has neglected to clean his sword. After Peter completes this
grim ablution, Aslan says, ceremoniously, “Rise up, Sir Peter Fenris-Bane. And
whatever happens, never forget to wipe your sword” (Lewis LW&W 126-129).
From a Catholic perspective, this is an impossible sequence of
quotations, regardless of context. To suggest that they bear any similarity to
the words of Christ must strike anyone as bizarre who is familiar with the
Gospels, especially if there is an open claim that Aslan is not supposed to be
an allegorical representation but an ‘historical’ (albeit fictional)
representation of Christ. Its position in the book is likewise bothersome, in
that it almost parallels (though not precisely) the confrontation between St.
Peter and Malchus in the garden of Gethsemene. But there, Christ tells Peter to
sheath his sword, and after healing Malchus, rebukes the apostle with “Put your
sword into its scabbard. Shall I not drink the cup that the Father gave me?”
(John 18:10-11). Lewis’s moment therefore seems all but inexplicable if Aslan
is supposed to actually be Christ, rather than a mere representation of Him in
psychological allegory.
One possible explanation for this moment is to suggest that here Lewis
falls into a trap consciously avoided by Tolkien throughout his writings—that
he makes God subject to his own imagination (Bossert 72). In the process,
Christ becomes unidentifiable. Whether this was the case or not, this moment
would put a writer like Tolkien, with such acute understanding of mythopoeic
theory, in a difficult imaginative situation. For him to accept this moment
theologically, Aslan must be read allegorically, yet to do so was antithetical
to Lewis’s intent and to their common mythopoeic goal. Furthermore, this
necessity to read more allegorically is not an isolated occurrence in the book,
nor is it confined to Aslan as a character—it is endemic to the plot itself.
This is exacerbated by Lewis’s treatment, or rather neglect, of Eucharist
parallels in The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe.
For a Catholic like Tolkien, any
notion of a Passion narrative without the Last Supper and the institution of
the Eucharist becomes maimed—crippled by significant theological problems. And
if, as in Lewis’s stated mythopoeic goal, Aslan was intended to accomplish in
Narnia what he did on Earth, it would follow that the Last Supper would be as
important to parallel as the Crucifixion. Yet in Narnia, while the sacrifice of
Aslan is presented, there is no parallel to the Last Supper, nor anything
resembling the institution of the Eucharist. Also of great significance is that
although Lewis shadows the Gospel accounts of the women following Christ to
Golgotha (by having the girls follow Aslan to the Stone Table) there is little
during Aslan’s passion to suggest a similarity to Christ. Most strikingly,
there is no imploring of God the Father to forgive those who are putting Aslan
to death, as Christ did when He called out from the cross “Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 24:34). Instead, the evil creatures are presented as
mere enemies: unredeemable, there are no prayers offered for them. Later in the
book they are simply and unreflectively killed in battle before the Pevensies
take their thrones in Cair Paravel. It is imperative to note that unless this
battle is taken allegorically, there is simply no parallel for it in Christian
theology.
The absence of Eucharistic theology is particularly evident near the
very end of The Lion, The Witch and the
Wardrobe, when Aslan slips quietly away and Mr. Beaver says wistfully:
He’ll be coming and going […]. One day you’ll see him and another you
won’t. He doesn’t like being tied down—and of course he has other countries to
attend to. It’s quite all right. He’ll often drop in. Only you mustn’t press
him. He’s wild you know. Not like a tame
lion. (Lewis LW& W 180)
Whether he
would have been able to articulate why it bothered him, this moment would
undoubtedly have struck Tolkien as being inaccurate as to the character of
Christ and the reality he experienced as a Catholic. For him to agree with it
in a mythopoeic sense, Tolkien would have had to forget Christ’s telling the
apostles “Behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Matt.
28:20). This would have been impossible, for Tolkien would have understood this
quote in reference to the Blessed Sacrament, which he cherished as the focus of
his life and faith.[14] As he
put it in a letter to his son Michael:
I fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament from the beginning—and by the
mercy of God never have fallen out again […]. Not for me the Hound of Heaven,
but the never-ceasing silent appeal of the Tabernacle, and the sense of
starving hunger. (Tolkien Letters
340)
The notion of a Christ who comes and goes, sometimes disappearing from
life, and leaving no religion or sacraments through which to encounter Him, was
therefore quite foreign and repugnant to Tolkien. By contrast, it was a growing
part of Lewis’s theological understanding, as evidenced above in the discussion
of Malcolm. Lewis, simply put, did
not share Tolkien’s Catholic understanding of the Eucharist—his exposition of
Eucharistic doctrine is tenuous in his writings, becoming specific only in Malcolm, where he clearly rejects
Catholic Eucharistic doctrine.
As a result, Lewis’s Narnia would
have repelled Tolkien for both its implications about the character of Christ
and its lack of what Tolkien felt to be the most important thing in life—the
Blessed Sacrament. The seemingly arbitrary coming and going of Lewis’s Aslan
represents, in a non-allegorical sense, either a Christ not willing to do for
Narnia what he did for this universe, or an implied denial of the continued
presence of Christ in the Eucharist here. Admittedly, we have again the
potential problem of the blurring border between myth as sub-creation and allegory
as psychological projection—what Lewis might have been attempting to
express in this moment is the relatively cyclical sensation of feeling God’s
presence. If this is so, the quotation from Mr. Beaver could be understood as
an allegorized representation of the fluctuation between what is called
“spiritual dryness” and an active feeling of the presence of God. As stated
non-allegorically, however, the moment remains incongruent with scripture,
Catholic Eucharistic doctrine and Tolkien’s deeply felt personal experience.
The problem is exacerbated in that Lewis seemed unaware of the potentially
blurred genres. Whatever else might be true, he certainly did not delineate
these things: if one seeks to make Narnia compatible with orthodox theology,
one never knows what is intended to be more allegorical and what is intended to
be more mythic. To harmonize the two would necessitate a shifting line
throughout the book.
Deeper still are objections that a reflective, mythopoeic Catholic would
feel concerning the nature of Aslan—a subject which touches directly on Lewis’s
unorthodox views concerning both matter and the human body. For, ultimately,
the most insurmountable difficulty with Narnia from the point of view of
Catholic theology is the very nature of Aslan’s body. Simply put, if Aslan is
supposed to be Christ Himself, operating in a parallel universe, then Lewis has
presented Christ with an illusory body, appearing here as human, there as lion.
This is a point so obvious that it can easily be overlooked or dismissed as
silly, but it is nonetheless a deeply significant theological problem for the
books: Catholic theology and doctrine are clear on the subject: Christ is both
fully man and fully God. His body is not arbitrary, nor illusory, but real.
Thus, Lewis’s portrayal of Christ is not Christian but closer to Gnosticism (the
notion that Christ’s body is illusory is related to Docetism, a very old
Gnostic heresy [Arendzen]).
All of this seems consistent, however, with Lewis’s theological
background (heavily dependant as it was on the writings of George MacDonald,
who likewise de-emphasized religious observance, the importance of the human
body, and the sacraments), clearly expressed in the final letter to Malcolm.
According to Lewis, matter was not necessarily permanent, nor was the human
body essential. By extension, it is likely that Lewis saw no reason why Christ
should be ‘limited’ to a human body, as he saw no permanent link between the
physical and the spiritual. Because of this, he personally opted for a type of
Gnostic understanding over orthodox theology. Likewise, the lack of Eucharistic
symbolism in Narnia is best explained by the later context of Letters to Malcolm, wherein Lewis
doesn’t exactly put forward any specific view, save a denial of the corporeal
presence as understood by the Catholic Church. Thus, Lewis once again
postulates a disconnect between the physical, material body of Christ and the
spiritual experience of Him. Such a disconnect would have been inadequate for
Tolkien, so devoted as he was to the Blessed Sacrament. Even if he did not
immediately discern the problem in 1949, he must have felt it: Aslan was simply
not the Christ he knew.
So far, I have been careful to suggest that much of this theological
tension might have been at work in Tolkien without his conscious understanding
or ability to articulate it in the form of a clear objection. But there is
another possibility, one which I consider the most likely solution, and which
would speak volumes about Tolkien’s character as a man if it was true. My
belief is that Tolkien knew very well what the problem was; that upon analyzing
Letters to Malcolm he had discovered
the theological key to untangling many differences between himself and C.S.
Lewis, including the problem with Narnia. This would explain the linking of the
two in his letter to David Kolb in 1964. If so, he would have realized that in
writing an essay response to Malcolm,
he would have to expose the more Gnostic underpinnings of many of Lewis’s
beloved works. He would have to engage in what would seem a posthumous, ad hominem attack, which might in the
end be regarded as nothing more than bitterness, contributing only to the posthumous
dismantling of his friend’s career in many Christians’ eyes. If this was the
case, and Tolkien did in fact unlock the problem with Narnia, then his silence
on the subject was the final and most noble act of charity towards the man who
had been his good friend for so long.
Regardless of these speculations, I think that at the very least it
ought to be acknowledged, at last, that Tolkien’s response on that spring day
in 1949, wherein he told Lewis that The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was unsalvageable, was not likely a
reaction of mere jealousy or bitterness, but in all probability the result of
something more profoundly disturbing, which he later charitably described as a
“lack of sympathy” on his own part. It was unsalvageable because the very
premise of Christ having an illusory body, and the shock waves such a premise
would send through the rest of the theology of the book, was unsalvageable. In all
likelihood, what he had really experienced was the incompatibility of Lewis’s
subjective Anglicanism with his own objective Catholicism. Like the
anti-Catholic sideswipes littered throughout Letters to Malcolm, the heterodoxy of Narnia was something Tolkien
couldn’t accept, not because it seemed too quickly written or because it drew
from so many sources, but because it simply didn’t ring true.
WORKS CITED
Adey, Lionel. C.S. Lewis: Writer,
Dreamer, and Mentor. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.
Arendzen, J.P. “Docetae.” The
Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume V. NY: Robert Appleton Company, 1909. New Advent. Transcribed by Joseph P.
Thomas. <http://newadvent.org/cathen/05070c.htm>
Auden, W.H. Collected Poems.
Edited by Edward Mendelson. NY: Random House. 1976.
Benedict XVI, Pope. Truth and
Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The
Invention of the Human. NY: Riverhead Books, 1998.
Bossert, A.R. “‘Surely You Don’t Disbelieve’: Tolkien and Pius X:
Anti-Modernism in Middle-earth.” Mythlore
95/96 (2006) : 53-76
Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
—. Tolkien: A biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Catechism of the Catholic
Church. Second Edition. Vatican, 2000.
Christopher, Joe R. “J.R.R. Tolkien: Narnian Exile: Part I” Mythlore 55 (Autumn 1988): 37-45.
—. “J.R.R. Tolkien: Narnian Exile: Part II” Mythlore 56 (Winter 1988): 17-23.
Fremantle, Anne, ed. The
Protestant Mystics. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1964
Green, Roger Lancelyn and Walter Hooper. C.S. Lewis: a biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1974.
Lewis, Clive Staples. “Christian Reunion.” C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces. Leslie
Walmsley, ed. London: HarperCollins, 2000. 395-397.
—. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis. Volume II. Ed. Walter Hooper.
HarperSanFrancisco, 2004
—. Letters of C.S. Lewis. Ed.
Walter Hooper. Revised and enlarged edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Co., 1993.
—. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. New York: Harcourt, Brace
& Co., 1964.
—. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Collier Books, 1970
—. Mere Christianity. London:
Macmillan, 1952.
—. “On Juvenile Tastes.” C.S.
Lewis: Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces. Leslie Walmsley, ed.
London: HarperCollins, 2000. 476-478.
—. Surprised by Joy. NY:
Harcourt, Brace & World. 1955.
Maas, A.J. “General Resurrection.” The
Catholic Encyclopedia Volume XII. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. New Advent. Transcribed by Donald J.
Boon. <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12792a.htm>
Newman, John Henry. Apologia Pro
Vita Sua. NY: Norton. 1968.
O'Rourke, Meghan. “The Lion King: C.S. Lewis’ Narnia
isn’t simply a Christian allegory.” Slate.
9 December 2005. <http://www.slate.com/id/2131908>
Pearce, Joseph. C.S. Lewis and the
Catholic Church. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2003.
—. Tolkien: Man and Myth. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998.
Sayer, George. Jack: a life of
C.S. Lewis. London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1997.
Socias, Rev. James, ed. Daily
Roman Missal. Sixth Edition. New York: Scepter Publishers, 2003.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica.
Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Allen, TX: Christian
Classics, 1948.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of
J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Wilson, A. N. C.S. Lewis: a
biography. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990.
[1]
An example of this is to be found in “The Lion King: C.S.
Lewis' Narnia isn't simply a Christian allegory” by Meghan O'Rourke.
[2] J.R. Christopher argues that the reading at
which Tolkien rejected Narnia took place possibly as early as January of 1948.
This speculation is based upon his reading of a letter from Tolkien to Lewis
from 25 January 1948, wherein Tolkien apologizes for having hurt Lewis’s
feelings, as pertaining to Narnia. Though Christopher’s argument is compelling,
the current paper agrees with A.N. Wilson’s reading of the letter in question,
understanding it as referring to a reading of Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Wilson 217). The
designation of this ‘crisis of 1949’ is therefore a reflection of my opting for
a later date for the reading to have taken place. Of course, if Christopher’s
theory is true, the designation could be amended to ‘the crisis of 1948-49’.
Other than this minor point, the difficult chronology of the event is
insignificant to the general discussion of this paper. For a meticulous investigation of the difficulties
of the timeline regarding this event, see Christopher’s “J.R.R. Tolkien:
Narnian Exile” in Mythlores 55-56
(1988).
[3]
Tolkien’s opinions of the individual volumes of Lewis’s Space Trilogy may be gleaned from the comments made on them in his
letters. In a letter to Christopher Tolkien from 31 July 1944, he clearly opts
for Perelandra over Out of the Silent Planet. Likewise, in a
letter drafted on December 1963 to Michael Tolkien, he states that Charles
Williams’s influence upon That Hideous
Strength spoiled the trilogy. (Letters
of Tolkien 89, 342)
[4]
“I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have
sinned through my own fault in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done
and in what I have failed to do; and I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the
angels and saints, and you my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord
our God” (Roman Missal 673).
[5]
Harold Bloom has on occasion referenced the work of J.H. Van den Berg, who has
postulated that the concept of “self” as we know it stems from Luther—and that
it is in Luther that there arises a separation between the “inner man” and the
physical one (Bloom 741).
[6]
A more succinct expression of this goodness could not be found than in the
words of Pope Paul VI: “We believe in the communion of all the faithful of
Christ, those who are pilgrims on earth, the dead who are being purified, and
the blessed in heaven, all together forming one Church; and we believe that in
this communion, the merciful love of God and his saints is always [attentive]
to our prayers” (Catechism of the
Catholic Church 250).
[7]
Some striking examples of this are easily found in his ‘Note A’ to the Apologia, wherein it is difficult to
fathom that they were written so long ago, so directly do they still challenge
Anglican theological premises (Newman 222-223).
[8]
The book is entitled John Henry Newman:
The Challenge to Evangelical Religion. (Yale University Press, 2002). I
attended a lecture given by Prof. Turner at John Carroll University, wherein he
was very clear that this book was intended to curb the enthusiasm of those
encouraging canonization of the Cardinal. Turner, an Episcopalian (and
therefore a member of the American wing of Anglicanism, at least at the time of
this writing), gave a lecture interesting as study in propaganda, in that he
even made suggestive comments that Newman’s real desire for conversion was
merely an excuse for living with young celibate men. In this way, he sought to
capitalize upon anti-Catholic feelings in the wake of the then-current American
sex abuse scandal. Thus, the Anglican tradition of attacking Newman, begun in
his own generation by many, with perhaps Charles Kingsley the best remembered,
has continued through Lewis in the 20th century to Turner in our
own.
[9]
Both Lewis and Tolkien dedicated considerable energy to refuting the notion
that mythopoeic literature was ‘childish’ or that the fact that children enjoy
something is proof of its inferior or immature quality. A brief example of this
from Lewis’s perspective can be found in his essay “On Juvenile Tastes.” It is
somewhat puzzling that a man who had spent so much of his life debunking the
more conceited criticisms of mythopoeic art would fall prey to the very same
behavior regarding religious practices.
[10]
It is somewhat ironic that Lewis is so often referred to as a mystic, and that
his writings are so frequently cited in this regard. For example, Anne
Fremantle’s The Protestant Mystics,
includes excerpts from both Surprised by
Joy and The Screwtape Letters.
Yet, perhaps as an overreaction to his experimentation with the occult as a
young man, Lewis was to disavow mysticism repeatedly throughout his
life—sometimes mildly as in his private letters, but sometimes more
strenuously, as in the cited passage from Letters
to Malcolm. Rather than “mystical,” Lewis’s work is more correctly
characterized as “imaginative,” for this is the realm he cultivated: not the
direct apprehension of the mysterious, but the exercise of intellectual
faculties for the construction of fiction.
[11]
‘Chronological snobbery’ was the term Lewis coined for the belief that, among
other things, one age’s values replace another by simple virtue of its having
come later. He gave Owen Barfield credit for alerting him to it (Surprised by Joy 207).
[12]
The more recent Catechism of the Catholic
Church remains consistent with this exposition, as can be gleaned from the
following:
The Church teaches that every
spiritual soul is created immediately by God […] and also that it is immortal:
it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the
final Resurrection [emphasis added]. (Catechism 93)
[13]
The term “allegory” in this sense seems rather restrictive, but it was the term
chosen by Lewis in the quoted letter and in subsequent discussion of the Chronicles. A full discussion of the
fascinating implications of allegory in Narnia is beyond the scope of the
present article, and anyhow has been dealt with more thoroughly and admirably
by scholars such as J.R. Christopher. The terminology and its consequences here
are only meant in the manner Lewis intended, in as precise a manner as
possible.
[14]
“[The Eucharist] was appropriately instituted at the supper, when Christ
conversed with His disciples for the last time. First of all, because of what
is contained in the sacrament: for Christ is Himself contained in the Eucharist
sacramentally. Consequently, when Christ was going to leave His disciples in
His proper species, He left Himself with them under the sacramental species”
(Q73, Art 5) (Thomas Aquinas 2431).
[This essay was originally published in Mythlore 99/100, Vol 26, Issue 1/2, 2007 Fall/Winter.]
No comments:
Post a Comment