Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: Hansen Lectureship Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Credo Book Award Winner – Natural Theology Three Essays on C. S. Lewis and Romanticism Many readers have heard C. S. Lewis's logical arguments for the Christian faith. Yet throughout his wide-ranging study and writing, Lewis often began with experience, intuition, and religious feeling rather than dogmatic assertions. The most profound questions of Lewis's own life, argues theologian and literary critic Jeffrey Barbeau, can be seen in his quest to understand the relationship between personal experience and the truth about the world around him. In a series of three essays, Barbeau explores the influence of nineteenth-century Romanticism on the writings of C. S. Lewis. Barbeau demonstrates Lewis's indebtedness to Romantic notions of imagination and subjectivity, opens new contexts for understanding ideas about memory and personal identity in his autobiographical writings, and explores beliefs about nature and Christian sacraments throughout his writings on Christian faith. This theological and literary investigation reveals Lewis as a profoundly modern thinker and illuminates his ongoing relevance to contemporary debates about theology and culture. Drawing on extensive reading of the marginalia in the personal library of C. S. Lewis held by the Marion E. Wade Center, Barbeau offers a fresh understanding of the influence of modern theology and Romantic poetry, especially Wordsworth and Coleridge, on many of Lewis's most beloved works. Essays and responses include: - C. S. Lewis and the "Romantic Heresy," with response from professor Sarah Borden, - C. S. Lewis and the Anxiety of Memory, with response from professor Matthew Lundin, and - C. S. Lewis and the Sacramental Imagination, with response from professor Keith L. Johnson. Based on the annual lecture series hosted at Wheaton College's Marion E. Wade Center, volumes in the Hansen Lectureship Series reflect on the imaginative work and lasting influence of seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 262
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
In memory of
ROGER LUNDIN
Scholar, teacher, friend
Contents
PrefaceG. Walter Hansen
I WAS DELIGHTED BY DR. JEFFREY BARBEAU’S “C. S. Lewis and the Romantic Imagination” lectures in 2023. His words evoked vivid images, emotionally charged memories: listening to romantic poetry fifty-six years ago, walking around Walden Pond last week. When Dr. Barbeau began the first lecture with the date autumn 1967, he reawakened the longing I felt in 1967 when I sat in Dr. Clyde Kilby’s Romantic Literature class at Wheaton College, drinking from the deep wells of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Now here I was, fifty-six years later, in Dr. Barbeau’s “C. S. Lewis and the Romantic Imagination” “class,” feeling again the power of imagination, the wonder of beauty in nature, and the mystery of divine presence in sacraments.
Dr. Barbeau’s extensive reading of the marginalia in the personal library of C. S. Lewis held by the Marion E. Wade Center gives us a fresh understanding of the influence of the Romantic poets on Lewis. Barbeau showed us a poem Lewis wrote on a page at the back of his own copy of The Shorter Poems of William Wordsworth (1917), inspired by his beloved mentor. He helps us to see how often Lewis followed the legacy of Romanticism by beginning with subjectivity of the interior life. Yet Lewis argues from personal experience to the universality of objective values. Lewis’s “Romantic argument,” the way he builds universal, objective moral law (the Tao) from subjective feelings, runs through The Abolition of Man.
Another memory from my college experience in 1967 came to my mind when Barbeau said that “the most profound and pressing questions” of Lewis’s own life can be seen in his quest to understand the relationship between subjective, personal experience and the knowledge of objective reality. At the same time I took Kilby’s class, I was happily lost in Dr. Art Holmes’s Epistemology class—and asking the very same questions. I’m still asking those questions. Barbeau took me a quantum leap forward in my pilgrimage to know the Way, the Truth, and the Life in the wonder and mystery that I find in both nature and the sacraments of divine worship.
Lecture two resonated deeply, this time especially with my wife, Darlene. Like Sarah Congdon, she keeps a journal. Unlike Sarah, Darlene’s journal is not in the archive of a college library. She does not self-censor her morning pages. She shreds some of them. Then the shreds become painted prayers in her painting of flowers growing out of golden bowls, blooming as answers from heaven.
Dr. Barbeau shows how the autobiographical books of C. S. Lewis draw on the same rich legacy of life writing that inspired the Methodist piety found in The Journal of Sarah Eliza Congdon. A marginal note in Lewis’s personal copy of John Wesley’s Journal indicates he finished reading Wesley’s journal soon after the death of his wife, Joy. Lewis followed the Methodist tradition of journaling that shaped Romantic England—journaling as a way of tracking the interior work of the Spirit. In turn, his conversion narrative, Surprised by Joy, and the story of his mourning, A Grief Observed, were shaped by the personal narrative poems of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Even though Lewis feared that his life story, Surprised by Joy, was “suffocatingly subjective,”1 he charged ahead to tell of his own interior journey from atheism to Christian faith. Barbeau shows us that Lewis alludes to Romanticism not only in the title, a line taken from a poem by Wordsworth, but also by writing “in the same spirit as Wordsworth’s The Prelude” in his own personal narrative.
In lecture three, Barbeau begins with the fascinating story of the origin and making of Lewis’s wardrobe, now standing in the Marion E. Wade Center. Barbeau then leads us to consider the role of the symbol in Romanticism as a way of understanding Lewis’s view of nature, imagination, and the numinous experience of God. Barbeau’s reference to a marginal note by Lewis captured my attention: “I wonder are Melville, Emerson, Nietzche [sic], Carlyle & few other in Nineteenth Century rumblings of the great collapse wh. came in our own?” Emerson!? I am surprised by this mention of Emerson. I see Ralph Waldo Emerson’s name ubiquitously displayed where I live near Concord, Massachusetts. He’s the “sage of Concord,” renowned for his wisdom and love of nature. When I take our out-of-town guests for a walk around Walden Pond, we sit in the replica of Thoreau’s cabin and stand with other pilgrims at the sacred spot where Thoreau built his cabin on Emerson’s land. I give them a copy of Walden Pond as well as Emerson’s Nature Poems. And I tell my friends about the transcendentalists of Concord and what their words have to offer us today.
Why did Lewis say that Emerson was a rumbling of the great collapse? As I listened to Barbeau speak about Lewis’s response to the Romantic legacy of nature worship, I kept thinking of Emerson, also an heir of the Romantic legacy. My imagination gave me a “vision in a dream” of Lewis and Emerson walking around Walden Pond. They stand in silence absorbing the beauty of the sunlight, clouds, and forest reflected in the pond. Emerson recounts his pilgrimage in August 1833 to visit Wordsworth and Coleridge in England. He reports in detail his conversation with Coleridge at Highgate, London, and Wordsworth at his home on Rydal Mount.2 Lewis speaks of reading and rereading Wordsworth’s The Prelude with increasing pleasure and understanding.
In my imagined conversation, Emerson tells Lewis that nature leads him to see that “all the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”3
Lewis responds,
Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. I do not see how the “fear” of God could have ever meant to me anything but the lowest prudential efforts to be safe, if I had never seen certain ominous ravines and unapproachable crags. And if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the “love of God” would never, so far as I can see, have existed.4
As I walk close and listen, I begin to understand why Lewis said that Emerson was a rumbling of a great collapse. In Emerson’s rumbling of a great collapse, heaven collapsed into nature, nature collapsed into his spirit. Nature became his God; Emerson became God and Emerson lost God.5 As Lewis advises us, “We must make a détour—leave the hills and woods and go back to our studies, to church, to our Bibles, to our knees. Otherwise the love of nature is beginning to turn into a nature religion. And then, even if it does not lead us to the Dark Gods, it will lead us to a great deal of nonsense.”6 I’d like to walk with Dr. Barbeau around Walden Pond and listen to him imagine a conversation between Lewis and Emerson.
I love the way Barbeau closes lecture three by teaching us with lines of Wordsworth that “nature and imagination draw us into love.”
From love, for here
Do we begin and end, all grandeur comes,
All truth and beauty, from pervading love,
That gone, we are as dust.7
In Surprised by Joy and The Four Loves, Lewis appeals to human and divine love as the way of knowing truth and beauty. In fact, I think the final lines of Wordsworth’s The Prelude describe the Romantics: Wordsworth, Lewis, and Barbeau:
Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason and by truth: what we have loved
Others will love; and we may teach them how—8
Thank you, Jeff, for teaching us, in the good company of the Romantics, what you love, and for teaching us how to love with imagination.
THE KEN AND JEAN HANSEN LECTURESHIP
I was motivated to set up a lectureship in honor of my parents, Ken and Jean Hansen, at the Wade Center primarily because they loved Marion E. Wade. My father began working for Mr. Wade in 1946, the year I was born. He launched my father’s career and mentored him in business. Often when I look at the picture of Marion Wade in the Wade Center, I give thanks to God for his beneficial influence in my family and in my life.
After Darlene and I were married in December 1967, the middle of my senior year at Wheaton College, we invited Marion and Lil Wade for dinner in our apartment. I wanted Darlene to get to know the best storyteller I’ve ever heard.
When Marion Wade passed through death into the Lord’s presence on November 28, 1973, his last words to my father were, “Remember Joshua, Ken.” As Joshua was the one who followed Moses to lead God’s people, my father was the one who followed Marion Wade to lead the ServiceMaster Company.
After members of Marion Wade’s family and friends at ServiceMaster set up a memorial fund in honor of Marion Wade at Wheaton College, my parents initiated the renaming of Clyde Kilby’s collection of papers and books from the seven British authors—C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield—as the Marion E. Wade Collection.
I was also motivated to name this lectureship after my parents because they loved the literature of these seven authors, whose papers are now collected at the Wade Center.
While I was still in college, my father and mother took an evening course on Lewis and Tolkien with Dr. Kilby. The class was limited to nine students so that they could meet in Dr. Kilby’s living room. Dr. Kilby’s wife, Martha, served tea and cookies.
My parents were avid readers, collectors, and promoters of the books of the seven Wade authors, even hosting a book club in their living room led by Dr. Kilby. When they moved to Santa Barbara in 1977, they named their home Rivendell, after the beautiful house of the elf Lord Elrond, whose home served as a welcome haven to weary travelers as well as a cultural center for Middle-earth history and lore. Family and friends who stayed in their home know that their home fulfilled Tolkien’s description of Rivendell:
And so at last they all came to the Last Homely House, and found its doors flung wide. . . . [The] house was perfect whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. . . . Their clothes were mended as well as their bruises, their tempers and their hopes. . . . Their plans were improved with the best advice.9
Our family treasures many memories of our times at Rivendell, highlighted by storytelling. Our conversations often drew from images of the stories of Lewis, Tolkien, and the other authors. We had our own code language: “That was a terrible Bridge of Khazad-dûm experience.” “That meeting felt like the Council of Elrond.”
One cold February, Clyde and Martha Kilby escaped the deep freeze of Wheaton to thaw out and recover for two weeks at my parents’ Rivendell home in Santa Barbara. As a thank-you note, Clyde Kilby dedicated his book Images of Salvation in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis to my parents. When my parents set up our family foundation in 1985, they named the foundation Rivendell Stewards’ Trust.
In many ways, they lived in and lived out the stories of the seven authors. It seemed fitting and proper, therefore, to name this lectureship in honor of Ken and Jean Hansen.
ESCAPE FOR PRISONERS
The purpose of the Hansen Lectureship is to provide a way of escape for prisoners. J. R. R. Tolkien writes about the positive role of escape in literature:
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers of Escape are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic.10
Note that Tolkien is not talking about escapism or an avoidance of reality but rather the idea of escape as a means of providing a new view of reality, the true, transcendent reality that is often screened from our view in this fallen world. He adds:
Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this [derogatory] way the [literary] critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.11
I am not proposing that these lectures give us a way to escape from our responsibilities or ignore the needs of the world around us but rather that we explore the stories of the seven authors to escape from a distorted view of reality, from a sense of hopelessness, and to awaken us to the true hope of what God desires for us and promises to do for us.
C. S. Lewis offers a similar vision for the possibility that such literature could open our eyes to a new reality:
We want to escape the illusions of perspective. . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. . . .
The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. . . .
In reading great literature I become a thousand men yet remain myself. . . . Here as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.12
The purpose of the Hansen Lectureship is to explore the great literature of the seven Wade authors so that we can escape from the prison of our self-centeredness and narrow, parochial perspective in order to see with other eyes, feel with other hearts, and be equipped for practical deeds in real life.
As a result, we will learn new ways to experience and extend the fulfillment of our Lord’s mission: “to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free” (Lk 4:18 NIV).
Acknowledgments
I EXTEND MY APPRECIATION to all who have contributed to the formation and publication of this book. Above all, I owe a great debt to Walter and Darlene Hansen, who have established their lectureship in honor of Walter’s parents, Ken and Jean Hansen; I hope to take up their kind invitation to walk Walden Pond alongside them soon! David Downing and Crystal Downing, former co-directors of the Wade, cannot be praised highly enough for their enthusiastic insight and encouragement; since they first came to Wheaton, I have enjoyed watching them flourish in their work and look forward to seeing the fruit of their labor in the years to come. At the Wade, I also benefited from the wisdom and kindness of Marjorie Mead, Laura Stanifer, Jill Walker, Melissa Doogan, and Hope Grant; Marj and Laura have proven especially supportive colleagues throughout this process, with Laura providing exemplary assistance at every stage. The work of the entire staff has so inspired me that I share the riches of the Wade to all who will listen. All materials from the Marion E. Wade Center appear by permission (“Wade”). I am grateful for the support of Heidi Truty, who assembled the index. The team at InterVarsity Press, including Jon Boyd, Rebecca Carhart, and Ellen Hsu, has been a pleasure to work with. Thanks to David Stiver, Lisa Benner, Cyprian Consiglio, and the Bede Griffiths Trust for their support of my inquiries and request for permissions related to Bede Griffiths. My thanks to Rachel Churchill and the C. S. Lewis Company LTD for permission to print selections from C. S. Lewis.
I am humbled by the thoughtful remarks of my three respondents—Sarah Borden, Matthew Lundin, and Keith Johnson—for each has provided me a great deal to reflect on in my reading of Lewis and modernity more generally; I have offered a few brief comments on their responses in my conclusion. Archival and library support at Wheaton College was provided by Katherine Graber, Emily Banas, and Bob Shuster. Sarah Stanley first introduced me to The Journal of Sarah Congdon, which has maintained a foothold in my mind ever since. I also owe a debt to Aaron Hill for first sharing with me, many years ago, the Faculty Bulletin articles I refer to in the first chapter—all is gift, indeed. Special thanks to Sam Ashton, who engaged in initial archival research at my request and first drew my attention to the possibility of unpublished poems by Lewis in the Wordsworth volume. In addition to two separate classes of students, who each challenged me to think carefully about C. S. Lewis and his times, other colleagues at Wheaton and elsewhere have provided helpful insight and support along the way, including Murray Evans, Richard Gibson, Kristen Page, James Beitler, Tim Larsen, Simon Saleem, David Lauber, Norbert Feinendegen, and Mark Noll. Several members of my family were able to attend the lectures in person; seeing their faces in the crowd buoyed my spirits. Other family members were unable to attend but listened carefully to recordings, asked questions, and provided supportive feedback. To these and all those who heard the lectures, offered warm greetings, or wrote to me afterwards, I thank you very much for your kind interest.
Finally, I have dedicated this book to the memory of Roger Lundin (1949–2015). Years ago, I had the immense pleasure of co-teaching a course on transatlantic Romanticism with him that will long remain one of the most memorable teaching experiences of my career. Roger’s dynamism as a lecturer, pastoral care as a mentor, and openhanded friendship have contributed to my life no less than his exemplary model of scholarship in the field of theology and literature.
Introduction
I THOUGHT FOR A LONG TIME that C. S. Lewis was something of a rationalist. The air of confidence implicit in titles on notoriously knotty subjects such as pain and miracles. The simplistic analysis of Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord. The tendency among some to use his works as a foil against an encroaching liberalism, always available with a pithy quote to settle a troublesome controversy.
All this left me a bit uneasy. But what if Lewis wasn’t like that caricature at all? As I explain in this book, I had good reason for my apprehension, but it was only after I came back to Lewis’s works—after years steeped in modern theology and British Romantic literature, just as Lewis was himself—that I figured out why.
I must admit that I’m still surprised by my journey. One of my earliest encounters with Lewis’s writing came when I was only around ten or eleven years old. Someone had given me the Chronicles of Narnia as a gift, so I began reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Soon, I found myself caught in a bind, for I intuited a likeness between Aslan and Jesus. Did this book promote a kind of idolatry? Would I risk spiritual confusion if I continued to read? With no one to guide me, I sold the multivolume series in a garage sale not long after. I still remember the woman who purchased the set asking, “Are you sure you really want to part with these?”
Years later, I rediscovered Lewis as an undergraduate. I devoured his nonfiction prose. Lewis provided a sustenance that I desperately needed in my earliest theological studies. I was a student of historical theology but eager to understand Christianity also in its practical aspect—not as a philosophy or a set of dogmatic formulas but as a way of life. For my senior project, I decided against the typical pattern of biblical and systematic approaches in favor of a study of Lewis that considered theology from a literary perspective. At the defense, one of my faculty readers suggested that my work would be stronger with greater attention to the Bible, but he didn’t understand what I was seeking.
Subsequently, I pursued English literature as a graduate student. I was now in the thrall of literary theory; this was a time of exploration, weighing the latest trends in deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and a host of new approaches to literature that opened possibilities I had seldom, if ever, encountered before. I still loved Lewis but largely left him behind, scratching my head at his seeming intractability to the dynamic interpretative questions facing readers in a poststructuralist age.
After further work in theology and religious studies, I began teaching as a university professor. Lewis became something of a prop in my repertoire—an easy reference for students wary or uncertain about a difficult idea. One quip from Lewis and their minds were instantaneously put at ease. Though I often relied on him implicitly, I had forgotten that I had been nursed by Lewis’s ideas in my earliest theological formation.
Only when I was invited to prepare a series of lectures for the Marion E. Wade Center did I begin to remember that many of my own best insights stemmed from Lewis’s writings. (In 2023 I delivered these lectures, titled “C. S. Lewis and the Romantic Imagination,” as part of the Ken and Jean Hansen Lectureship series. This book is based on those addresses.) The ebullient directors of the Wade, David and Crystal Downing, had asked me to consider the relationship between C. S. Lewis and British Romanticism, a topic to which I have devoted much of my professional career. I had spent more than two decades thinking about the relationship between Romantic literature and its religious context in Britain but never imagined I’d find more than a series of interesting observations on several beloved poems or a few barbed comments on the alleged irreligion of these authors.
I could not have been more wrong.
In my first foray into the subject, I taught a class on C. S. Lewis and modern theology. I blanched when, on our first evening together, I learned that many of my most eager students appeared to know Lewis’s works better than I did! I owe much to them, for while some already had a thoroughgoing grasp of the major plot points, characters, and themes, they cheerfully pressed on through our rigorous schedule, as we paired each new book with major theologians for discussion throughout the semester. We read through the bulk of Lewis’s works together, and I found myself rereading almost every book we studied multiple times as I sought a greater grasp of Lewis in his intellectual context.
Next, I threw myself into the archives of the Wade. I began by reading what others had said about Lewis and Romanticism. The results were mixed and not especially promising. I already had an inkling of what I wanted to say about Lewis, but I worried that he could sometimes mention a name or idea with little or no indication of his purpose. I still required the sorts of connections that I knew from experience only time spent in an archive can produce.
What I discovered was nothing short of a revelation. At first, I was dismayed that Lewis’s personal library often lacked the sort of expansive marginalia that I have come to cherish in some other writers I’ve written about. Over time, however, I came to recognize in Lewis’s careful notations and markings an untold key to his own reading habits. More than once as I sat in the quiet of the Wade, I found myself nearly shouting out loud, “I’ve found it!” in response to a new link or association.
My admiration for Lewis expanded in the process. Before, I’d regarded him as something of a theological dilettante—a view I’ve come to recognize as the product of his own rather slippery rhetoric—ever warning readers that he is little more than an amateur. Now, for the first time, I could demonstrate his careful reading habits with concrete evidence. Lewis read the Greats at Oxford and continued to study the history of philosophy, theology, and literature throughout his life, demonstrating in unpublished marginalia a command of modern thought that I had little appreciation for in reading his popular works alone.
Often, I would find in Lewis’s library a correction or comment that cross-referenced a single sentence—one that I might easily overlook, sometimes hundreds of pages apart—in which an author had contradicted some earlier assertion. Elsewhere, Lewis would track with a dense philosophical treatise in summary paraphrases at the top or bottom of the page, indicating his attentiveness to the volume at hand. I could almost picture him sitting in a chair with this very book before him!
There are hundreds—nay, thousands—of such books in the Wade archive. To be sure, I did not examine marginalia in every volume of Lewis’s personal library in preparing my lectures, but I did work painstakingly through an extraordinary range of his library in works related to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century literature, as well as many of his theological and philosophical tomes from these and other periods. As a result, I came to see that Lewis was not only familiar with the questions of his own age but also reflecting and even responding to many of the same issues in his most well-known prose.
Three pivotal ideas emerged through this meticulous, systematic process. First, Lewis often approached some of the most challenging questions of Christian thought through the lens of the personal. Far from offering readers dogmatic assertions about faith, Lewis often begins with experience, intuition, and religious feeling. This certainly reflects both the British Romantic movement, which I found him citing at every turn, and the spirit of his own times. In the first chapter, I take up this idea, showing that Lewis not only relies on the British Romantics far more than many might expect (given his scholarly reputation in medieval and Renaissance literature), but he also writes with an awareness of the legacy of modern philosophy and the so-called subjective turn that shaped much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Second, Lewis enjoyed an uneasy relationship with spiritual autobiography and what scholars today call, more broadly, “life writing.” While he complained that his own efforts in the genre were “suffocatingly subjective,” Lewis appeals to the great tradition of conversion narratives and other forms of autobiographical writing to introduce Christian thought to a wide audience. In this, Lewis reflects many of his Anglican forebears, including the Methodists John and Charles Wesley, as well as the life writings of British Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth. In fact, as I explain in the second chapter, just as Lewis was deliberating theism (and Christianity) as a viable option for his own life, he was also reading deeply in the philosophical theology of Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Third, I was struck repeatedly while reading Lewis’s works just how often he discusses the natural world. His fiction often shows an acute interest in the description of landscapes, and in nonfiction works he makes reference to a love for nature that, at the very least, raises decidedly modern questions about how an appreciation for beauty relates to our knowledge of God. In such a light, as I show in the third chapter, Lewis’s repetition of British Romantic ideas of imagination, visionary dream states, and symbols stands out as major features in his works. Indeed, by bringing Lewis into conversation with the British Romantics, the theological motivation behind his commitment to narrative—to the transformative power of story itself—begins to make sense.
Notably, my research into Lewis’s personal library uncovered an exciting new find: previously unpublished poetry by C. S. Lewis that he inscribed in the blank pages at the back of his personal copy of The Shorter Poems of William Wordsworth (1917). I have transcribed these poems and included them in the appendix for readers to enjoy, demonstrating in some small way how Lewis’s reading in one of the greatest English poets inspired his own poetics. I am grateful to the C. S. Lewis Company and the directors of the Marion E. Wade Center for their permission to publish these for the first time.
OneC. S. Lewis and the “Romantic Heresy”
THE TRIAL OF C. S. LEWIS
Autumn 1967. Several members of Wheaton College entered a lively debate about art, imagination, and Christianity. Parts of their discussion appeared in at least three outlets: a faculty workshop, the Wheaton Alumni Magazine, and the Faculty Bulletin. Among the contributors to this debate were several prominent faculty members, including philosopher Arthur Holmes, Bible and theology professor Morris Inch, and, initiating the whole discussion, literary critic Clyde S. Kilby.
Only two years earlier, Professor Kilby had successfully petitioned the Wheaton College Library to form a new collection in its holdings. During the prior decade, Kilby had maintained correspondence with the chair of medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge, whose popular reputation as an apologist and author of several works of fiction had brought him international acclaim. With the establishment of a formal library collection, Kilby was well on his way to the formation of what we now know as the Marion E. Wade Center. So few will be surprised that Kilby’s colleagues associated his thoughts about art and imagination with his overseas interlocutor: C. S. Lewis.
Kilby’s remarks, delivered as he looked back on more than thirty years of teaching at the college, appeared in the Faculty Bulletin under the provocative title, “The Aesthetic Poverty of Evangelicalism.” The essay focuses squarely on what he deems a lack of imagination among Christians in matters of faith. An “evangelical skittishness toward imagination” led to impoverished readings of the Bible and a lack of creativity in the arts. Instead of symbols, figures, and parables, preachers offer little more than strange and negative moral statements that diminish the power of narrative to transform lives.
