Review of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis

Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, Cambridge University Press, 2010, xx + 328 pp, £20.99 pb. (£58 hb.), 978 0 521 71114 2 To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, of the making of many books on C. S. Lewis there is no end. 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis’s death, may well see more than usual. Among the most notable of recent years is Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia (OUP, 2008; reviewed in the 2010 issue of The Glass), which has reshaped the landscape of Lewis studies through its thesis that the seven Chronicles of Narnia have structural parallels to the seven planets of medieval cosmology. For this Cambridge Companion, Ward joins up with Robert MacSwain to gather a group of contributors diverse in disciplinary, ecclesiastical, and theological affiliations. As MacSwain comments in the introduction, they wanted ‘to widen the discussion of Lewis’s legacy beyond “the usual suspects”’. The volume consists of twenty-one essays divided into three sections: Part 1 on Lewis as ‘Scholar’ (focusing on his academic writing), Part 2 (the longest) on Lewis the ‘Thinker’ (a series of topical essays interacting with Lewis’s thoughts on subjects such as Scripture, love, and power), and Part 3 on the ‘Writer’ (focusing on Lewis’s fiction and poetry). Though Parts 1 and 3 taken together are longer than Part 2, the volume feels weighted towards Lewis as philosophertheologian rather than as a literary figure. This may be intentional – MacSwain’s introduction expresses a desire for Lewis to be taken seriously within academic theology. However, there is plenty throughout to interest literary scholars and other serious readers of Lewis. This Companion is not a comprehensive ‘C. S. Lewis Encyclopaedia’ (a work which has been written by Colin Duriez), but a collection of perspectives on Lewis from various angles. Nevertheless, reading through the essays, some common threads begin to emerge. These recurrent themes echo the subtitle of Lewis’s first post-conversion publication: The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. Several contributors discuss Lewis’s romantic sensibility, including but not limited to an appreciation of capital ‘R’ Romanticism. David Jasper points out that the bittersweet longing which Lewis calls ‘joy’ is more precisely expressed by the German Sehnsucht, a feeling ‘profoundly expressed in the poetry of Hölderlin in German and Wordsworth in English’. Alan Jacobs quotes a letter which Lewis wrote to the Milton Society of America: ‘The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic.’ Accordingly, several essays take into account evidence of Lewis’s youthful imaginative formation from his pre-conversion writings. Lewis’s rationality is also taken seriously, with the essays in Part 2 placing Lewis’s ideas into dialogue with those of others. Sometimes this is in relation to his own intellectual context (as with Caroline Simon’s skilful analysis of influences on Lewis’s thoughts ‘On love’), and sometimes Lewis is enlisted into more recent discussions (Charles Taliaferro recruits Lewis to debate Daniel Dennett). One occasionally worries that Lewis may be being ventriloquised through categories not his own, but elsewhere it is more clearly demonstrated that strands in Lewis’s thought anticipate contemporary concerns, as with Malcolm Guite’s finding of ‘deep ecology’ in Lewis’s poetry. (Rowan Williams also discusses Lewis’s ecological concerns in The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia (SPCK, 2012).) The introduction tells us that ‘we have deliberately sought out some provocative figures to interact with well-known aspects of Lewis’s thought’. This motivation seems to underlie the assignment of a consideration of Lewis’s thoughts ‘On violence’ to the pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas and his views ‘On gender’ to the feminist theologian Ann Loades. To their credit, although Hauerwas and Loades articulate their disagreements with Lewis’s adherence to just war theory and a hierarchical view of gender relations respectively, both read Lewis’s thought sympathetically within his historical and intellectual context. Moreover, Hauerwas and Loades find resources within Lewis’s work which could furnish theologies of Christian nonviolence and of gender equality. Lewis’s professional academic persona is addressed in Part 1, with appreciative essays on Lewis’s literary scholarship by a medievalist (John V. Fleming), a Romanticist (Stephen Logan), an early modernist (Dennis Danielson), and a classicist (Mark Edwards). Whilst acknowledging some of Lewis’s more dubious moves, such as his relegation of large swathes of sixteenthcentury literature to the ‘Drab Age’, they suggest that Lewis is not given due credit for his role in pioneering perspectives on literary history now commonplace, such as the importance of reading Chaucer in a European context, and emphasising continuities between ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’. The contributors to Part 3 all, to varying degrees, cite Lewis’s literary criticism to shed light on his literary practice. For instance, David Jasper cites Lewis’s interest in Renaissance rhetoric to alert us to hidden designs that Surprised by Joy might have on its readers, and Alan Jacobs suggests that the mixture of genres in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia provides a literary model for the Chronicles of Narnia (which have a relatively low profile outside Jacobs’s chapter). Jacobs is an enthusiastic convert to Ward’s planetary perspective on Narnia, but also proposes that the unifying storyline of the Chronicles concerns ‘disputed sovereignty’. Though there is no inherent contradiction between these accounts, they perhaps need to be more thoroughly integrated. Elsewhere in Part 3, T. A. Shippey traces how the Ransom Trilogy interweaves medieval magic with mid-twentieth century concerns about the relationship between humanity and technology, Jerry Walls interestingly harnesses The Great Divorce as a vehicle for philosophical discussion of the afterlife, and Peter Schakel offers a sensitive reading of how the difficulty of reading Till We Have Faces trains the reader, along with the narrator, in learning to see the hidden God. Every essay in this volume is worth reading, but inevitably not all are equally strong. I found some of the Part 2 chapters a little narrow in scope – for instance, Joseph Cassidy’s reading of Letters to Malcolm and The Screwtape Letters in light of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola is illuminating, but Cassidy perhaps pays insufficient attention to the generic differences between Malcolm and Screwtape, and to how the humour and irony of Screwtape bear on the topic of ‘discernment’. Malcolm Guite’s closing chapter on Lewis as ‘Poet’ is an especially significant contribution to the literary study of Lewis. Guite seeks to rescue Lewis’s poetry from a mediocre reputation by situating it within literary contexts whose prominence has increased since Lewis’s death. Guite reminds us of Lewis’s Irish identity (being born in a British-ruled but not yet partitioned Ireland) and his appreciation of W. B. Yeats. He also argues that, despite Lewis’s early antipathy to the ‘modernist’ poetry of T. S. Eliot, which has contributed to Lewis’s marginalisation in academia as a reactionary conservative, Lewis and Eliot were in fact closer in their thinking than either of them realised. (David Jasper, by contrast, admires Lewis’s scholarship despite describing him as ‘extraordinarily resistant to shifts in twentieth-century culture’.) The contributors to this Cambridge Companion take Lewis seriously enough to argue with him when they disagree. One suspects that Lewis would be more comfortable being afforded this mode of respect than the virtually infallible guru status he holds in some Christian circles. Though the Inklings likewise have attracted their fair share of mythology, it seems that argumentative friends were the sort of companions that Lewis favoured. David Parry