Month: February 2009

The phrase “paradigm shift” is utterly overused and has lost most of it’s force. There really is such a thing though. What does it look like?

Both C.S. Lewis and Tolkien were greatly influenced by Owen Barfield’s thoughts on the “abstract” and “literal” with regards to mythology. (This would take along time to explain here.) It appeared in a book he wrote called Poetic Diction, though other people had been developing the idea as well.

Not long after the book’s publication, Lewis reported to Barfield: ‘You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said a propos of something quite different that your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook and that he hwas always just going to say something in a lecture when your conception stopped him in time. “It’s one of those things,” he said “that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.”

So it was that by 1931 Lewis had come to understand that mythology has an important position in the history of thinking. It was a realisation that helped him across his last philosophical hurdle [to accepting Christianity].

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.42

That’s the phrase I like the most: “It’s one of those things that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.”

This is exactly what I felt after reading Rene Girard. There are just some silly ideas about history and sociology that you can never say again with a straight face.

Experiences change people’s minds all the time. For example, spending a year serving among the impoverished in a foreign country will change your perception of the poor. I’ve never done this myself, but it seems like it would. Being married for 10 years changes your thinking about a lot of things, but it’s rather gradual.

Most people’s conversions to Christianity are a gradual combination of many things, even if part of it could be described in this way.

The change I’m talking about here is much faster. It comes from maybe just 1 hour of reading an incredible, special piece of reasoning. How do you describe that?

I think rather than opening your mouth, to tell everyone about your exciting new discovery, it humbles and closes your mouth, at least for a time. There are some things you can just never say again.

I love this story about how C.S. Lewis’s desire to be a good teacher prevented him from resting in a generic theism. It helped to “force” him rationally into something, which was eventually Christianity.

As long ago as 1920, his study of philosphy had led him ‘to postulate some sort of God as the least objectionable theory’, though he added, ‘of course we KNOW nothing’. The notion of an ultimate truth made sense to him because, as he remarked in 1924 when commenting on Bertrand Russell’s free-thinking idealism, ‘our ideas are after all a natural product’, and there must be some objective standard, some ultimate fact to explain them.

On the other hand, ‘God’ still seemed a crude and nursery-like word, and for several years Lewis used other terms to describe his notion of fundamental truth. During this time he was, like most othose who studied philosophy at Oxford in the early nineteen-twenties, still accepting the work of Hegel and his disciples, and as a result he chose Hegelian expressions such as ‘the Absolute Mind’ or just ‘the Absolute’.

But when he spent the year 1924-5 teaching Philosphy at University College he discovered that this “watered Hegelianism’ was inadequate for tutorial purposes. The notion of an unspecified Abolute simply could not be made clear to his pupils. So he resorted to referring to fundamental truth as ‘the Spirit’, distinguishing this (though not really explaining how) from ‘the God of popular religion’, and emphasising that there was no possibility of being in a personal relationship with this Spirit…

It was finally in 1929 that he first knelt and prayed to this God.

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.41

[J.R.R. Tolkien’s] roots were buried deep in early literature, and the major names in twentieth-century writing meant little or nothing to him He read very little modern fiction, and took no serious notice of it.

Lewis read much more wiedely than Tolkien among modern writers [T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, W.H. Auden, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, and on and on…]

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.158

Tolkien knew what he liked and he studied it to the max. Lewis explored everything.

It’s the classic specialist versus jack (and incidentally “Jack” in this case!) situation.

It’s the fox and the hedgehog yet again.

C.S. Lewis became known initially for his Romantic scholarship and literary criticism. Then he became famous throughout the Christian world for his theology writings. Then he turned around and became one of the greatest author’s of children’s fiction.

It’s easy to see that why some of his Oxford colleges resented him. It’s the same reason people were pissed of at Leonard Bernstien for being a master pianist, AND a master composer, AND a master orchestra conductor.

Tolkien, on the other hand, was a hedgehog. He did one thing really well and paid little attention to any other discipline. He knew old English and norse languages inside and out. He labored since his teen years on his great mythology of Middle Earth. The Lord of the Rings was his masterpiece, 12 years in the making. Lewis wrote three of his Narnia books in one year.

I think though, that after 60 years, it is clear that Tolkien’s legacy is greater. That’s what you get for being the hedgehog.

C.S. Lewis and nearly all the rest of his Christian friends liked to drink a lot of beer. With the publishing of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis, who had been previously only known in small literature circles quickly became well known in churches across Britain and especially America. He started to get a lot of fan mail. Along with these came letters criticizing him for daring to follow Jesus AND still drink beer. The horror! He replied:

“I strongly object to the tyrannic and unstripctureal insolence of anything that calls itself a CHurch and makes teetotalism a condition of membership. Apart from the more serious objection (that Our Lord Himself turned water into wine and made wine the medium of the only rite He imposed on all His followers), it is so provincial (what I believe you people call ‘small town’).’

-from the Letters of C.S. Lewis, p. 262 (Inklings p.185)

My dream, my favorite way to spend a day is to hang out in a nice cafe all day reading good books at sipping fine espresso.

I grab fleeting hours of this arrangement when I can throughout a regular week, usually in the early hours of the morning.

It was with much delight that I spent the whole of today (work was cancelled due to Presiden’t Day) in such a state. Marvelous! I read much of the biography on the Inklings (which was quite interesting) and will be posting my notes here over the next couple of days. This one here is fitting for today:

[After the war] the company made plans to celebrate peace. ‘The Inklings have already agreed’, Tolkien told his son Christopher, ‘that their victory celebration, if they are spared to have one, will be to take a whole inn in the countryside for at least a week, and spend it entirely in beer and talk, without reference to any clock!’

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.199

Many, many thanks to my sweet wife.

Photo credit

Several biographer’s and critics claim that C.S. Lewis’s very best book was Till We Have Faces.

He himself throught so, preferring it even to his earlier favourite, Perelandra. Ironically it had a poorer reception than any other story he had written.

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.245

Beethoven was in a similar situation. His seventh symphony was very popular, but his eighth was not so warmly received. When asked why that was, he replied, “Because it’s better!”

Posturing

Because of endless pride
Reborn with endless error,
Each hour I look aside
Upon my secret mirror
Trying all postures there
To make my image fair.

-C.S. Lewis, Poems, p.89 (Inklings p.244)

One always finds it a bit refreshing when they observe some of their own failings in one they admire or consider accomplished. It makes our hero’s seem more human and also stirs in us the thought that maybe we could do something great and noteworthy too someday, despite our failings. That was my feelings when reading this passage about Charles Williams, prolific author and lose friend of C.S. Lewis:

He [Williams] was writing fast now, partly in office hours at the Press. War in Heaven [his first published novel] actually brought him some modest royalties, and the prospect of making money by writing encouraged him to continue in the same vein. Not that he had any absurd dream of riches, but there was a constant stream of household bills to be settled. His salary at the Press was not unreasobably low, but he was bat at managing money – he was always buying cups of coffee and glasses of sherry and meals for his friends – and in any case his memories of financial anxiety in his childhood left him in a contant state of worry about his bank-balance. So he went on writing novels specifically for the purpose of making money, and indeed he believed strongly that this was an excellent motive. He declared that it was the stimulus of potential poverty that had produced so many great writers from the ranks of the financially unstable lower middle classes. “I saw Shakespeare”, he wrote in a poem,

In a Tube station on the Central London:
He was smoking a pipe:
He had Sax Rohmer’s best novel under his arm
(In a cheap edition)
And the Evening News.
He was reading in the half-detached way one does.
He had just come away from an office
And the notes for The Merchant
Were in his pocket,
Beginning (it was the first line he thought of)
“Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins”,
But his chief wish was to be earning more money.

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.95

Lately, I’ve seen James Joyce’s name come up as one of those must-read authors. The recent documentary video I watched on Ireland declared him THE master of the English language. If that is so, how come I have barely heard his writing mentioned by any of the well-read friends and bloggers I know? Perhaps this introductory passage to Finnegans Wake from critic John Bishop provides some insight:

There is no agreement as to what Finnegans Wake is about, whether or not it is “about” anything, or even whether it is, in any ordinary sense of the word, “readable.”

It’s admirers see in it a comprehensive summa of twentieth-centruy culture and letters; its detractors, an arrogant compilation of arcane materials eccentrically patched together for the amusement of a literary elite.

Ah, so it’s either an amazing piece of brilliance or and pile of crap. I decided to hit up the library and investigate. I was stunned to find the better part of an entire shelf, at least 100+ volumes of literary criticism on Finnegans Wake. They had titles like:

• Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary (302 pages)
• Lexicon of German in Finnegans Wake
• Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
• Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake
• Scandinavian Elements of Finnegans Wake
• Scribbledehobble: The Ur-workbook for Finnegans Wake
• The Riddles of Finnegans Wake
• Alchemy and Finnegans Wake
• On the void of to be: Incoherence and trope in Finnegans Wake
• Mummeries of Resurrection: The Cycle of Osiris in Finnegans Wake
• Writing [Music] through Finnegans Wake (by John Cage!)

Ye gads. It appears this book is a deep well for English grad students looking for a thesis topic.

I’m reading a biography/history right now on the Inklings (C.S. Lewis, Tokien, and Charles Williams primarily). I decided to hit the index to see if my literary heros had anything to say about Joyce:

Lewis read much more widely than Tolkien among modern writers and disliked much of what he saw…Predictably, he disliked D.H. Lawrence’s novels for their attitude to sex; he dismissed such writers as James Joyce as “steam of consciousness’, and categorised Virginia Woolf as one of ‘the clevers’. E.M. Forster was almost the only serious novelist of the period whose work he admired.

Humphry Carpenter, The Inklings, p.158

Note that’s “steam” not “stream” in the quote above.

Well, I’m still quite curious. I’m sure I’ll get around to Joyce eventually, but the fact that Lewis didn’t think him worth the time has effectively moved him farther down the list…

The poem that Charles Hodgin’s (of Podictionary fame) quoted the other day is appropriate.

Take Heart, Illiterates
by Justin Richardson

For years a secret shame destroyed my peace,
I’d not read Eliot, Auden or MacNeice.
But then I had a thought that brought me hope,
Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.

It seems every Christian tradition has tried to claim C.S. Lewis as their own, even the Catholics. His apologetics Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters were some of the primary literature recommended in my baptist upbringing. He was respected by the charismatics. The reformed quote from him all the time, even though he was nowhere near being reformed.

In short, nearly everyone loves Lewis, and seems to give him a pass whenever he says something that might not jive with their own theology or tradition. “Mere Christianity” (the concept, not just the book) has been a significant unifying force throughout Christendom in the past 50 years.

I believe part of the reason for his success was his intentionally fresh approach. This describes it well:

He [Lewis] was in fact not a theologian in any true sense of the word, bfor he did not set about an investigation of doctrine, but rather made hinmself an apologist, a defender of the faith in its full orthodoxy. He was largely ignorant of the work of modern theologians, and was proud of this ignorance, because he thought it helped him to avoid taking sides in any faction fights. ‘A great deal of my utility’, he wrote in 1963, ‘has depended on my having kept out of all dog-fights between professing schools of Christian thought’

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.175