A distant, glorious echo: Tolkien and typology

In his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien boldy declares his dislike of allegory and notes that, whatever critics and readers have suggested, the novel is most certainly not an allegory. Nonetheless, Christian readers have insisted on finding parallels to Christian theology throughout his works, to the extent that they commonly consider various characters—Gandalf in particular—to be explicitly Christ-figures.

The Tower of Orthanc, illustrated by Alan Lee

Given Tolkien’s adamant rejection of any sort of allegorical reading of his text, we surely cannot admit of an accidental allegory; such a thing would not make sense. More, when we hold The Lord of the Rings up against works that are explicitly allegorical—C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, for example—we note that there is a real and even profound difference between the two in character and tone. We should therefore grant that Tolkien is not to be argued with here and move on.¹

Still, Christian ideas keep popping up in his works: the death and resurrection of Gandalf, the unambiguously demonic evil that the heroes oppose in its various incarnations of Sauron or the Balrog, the king returning to claim his throne after a long stewardship, the long-awaited marriage of that triumphant king to a radiant bride, and so forth. While these do not have the sorts of explicit allegorical turns that characterize, for example, Lewis’ explicit identification of Aslan with Jesus, clearly there is something going on here. What is more, Tolkien himself would freely admit it.

The answer is simple enough. What many readers have mistaken for allegory is typology instead. Continue reading →

Digg Digg

Why C.S. Lewis is Wrong on Marriage

You won’t find a more apt example of an excerpt that is contradictory to an author’s broader writings than this bit from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity:

Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is quite the different question-how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christian and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.

This argument provoked a strong response from Lewis’ friend and fellow Inkling, J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien drafted a response to Lewis sometime in 1943 but never sent it. After Tolkien died, the letter was found folded up inside his copy of Lewis’ “Christian Behavior.” (Which, of course, would be republished as part of Mere Christianity.) The bold parts are my emphasis.

Mere Christianity (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My dear L.,

I have been reading your booklet ‘Christian Behavior.” I have never felt happy about your view of Christian “policy” with regard to divorce. …

[Y]ou observe that you are really committed (with the Christian Church as a whole) to the view that Christian marriage - monogamous, permanent, rigidly “faithful” – is in fact the truth about sexual behavior for all humanity: this is the only road of total health (including sex in its proper place) for all men and women. That it is dissonant with men’s present sex-psychology does not disprove this, as you see: “I think it is the instinct that has gone wrong,” you say. Indeed if this were not so, it would be an intolerable injustice to impose permanent monogamy even on Christians. If Christian marriage were in the last analysis “unnatural” (of the same type as say the prohibition of flesh-meat in certain monastic rules) it could only be imposed on a special “chastity-order” of the Church, not on the universal Church. No item of compulsory Christian morals is valid only for Christians…. I do not think you can possibly support your “policy,” by this argument, for by it you are giving away the very foundation of Christian marriage. The foundation is that this is the correct way of “running the human machine.” Your argument reduces it merely to a way of (perhaps?) getting an extra mileage out of a few selected machines.*

The horror of the Christians with whom you disagree (the great majority of all practicing Christians) at legal divorce is in the ultimate analysis precisely that: horror at seeing good machines ruined by misuse. I could that, if you ever get a chance of alterations, you would make the point clear. Toleration of divorce – if a Christian does tolerate it – is toleration of a human abuse, which it requires special local and temporary circumstances to justify (as does the toleration of usury) – if indeed either divorce or genuine usury should be tolerated at all, as a matter of expedient policy.

Under your limitations of space you have not, of course, had opportunity to elaborate your “policy” – toleration of abuse…. A Christian of your view is, as we have seen, committed to the belief that all people who practice “divorce” – certainly divorce as it is now legalized – are misusing the human machine (whatever philosophical defense they may put up), as certainly as men who get drunk (doubtless with a philosophic defense also). They are injuring themselves, other people, and society, by their behavior. And wrong behavior (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always: it never stops at being “not very good,” “second best” – it either reforms, or goes on to third-rate, bad, abominable.

The last Christian marriage I attended was held under your system: the bridal pair were “married” twice. They married one another before the Church’s witness (a priest), using one set of formulas, and making a vow of lifelong fidelity (and the woman of obedience); they then married again before the State’s witness… using another set of formulas and making no vow of fidelity or obedience. I felt it was an abominable proceeding – and also ridiculous, since the first set of formulas and vows included the latter as the lesser. In fact it was only not ridiculous on the assumption that the State was in fact saying by implication: I do not recognize the existence of your church; you may have taken certain vows in your meeting place but they are just foolishness, private taboos, a burden you take on yourself: a limited and impermanent contract is all that is really necessary for citizens. In other words this “sharp division” is a piece of propaganda, a counter-homily delivered to young Christians fresh from the solemn words of the Christian minister.

Tolkien understood the stakes. The debate strikes at the heart of what it means to confess that the Christian faith is “true.” As Tolkien wrote, no article of Christian morality is intended exclusively for Christians. Rather, the faith teaches us that submitting to the laws of our creator is the surest way to live reconciled lives with his creation. This is what we ought to mean when we say Christianity is true. We don’t simply mean that it provides factually accurate information about the world or that it offers an authentic path to spiritual fulfillment for those who choose to follow it. We mean that Christianity gives an accurate accounting of the world in its fullness and that it instructs us in how we ought to relate to the world. Continue reading →

Day One from Oxford: A View from The Kilns

When I first named “Mere Orthodoxy,” I started from a very simple question: which writers had lived and written in such a way that I wanted to emulate?

The answer was as immediate as the question was simple: Chesterton and Lewis, Lewis and Chesterton. Their most famous book titles played nicely together, and Mere-O was born.

The two titans of twentieth century Christianity (insert your own joke about Chesterton’s girth here) have played very different roles in my Christian life. I remember being on camping trips as a young boy and pleading for the next chapter of The Horse and His Boy and even then remember feeling too keen a fondness for Puddleglum. In high school, I read all the Lewis our little church library had–and then some. I understood little, but I suspect it was from him that I gained my vague distaste for the sort of loose relativism that my youth pastor preferred.

I met Chesterton much later, but my affection was instantly more arduous. It was a particularly hard time for me when I first picked up Orthodoxy, and the effect was…powerful. I know I didn’t see his argument there–I don’t much remember caring. All I remember is that those sentences, those incredibly witty sentences, kept me swaying between pondering and laughing to the point of seasickness. Also, it was fashionable to love Lewis as an undergraduate, which is why I preferred Gilbert. He was less read, and more quotable, and so I took him as my point of reference.

But still, it’s impossible to downplay Lewis’ effect on me.

Sometimes when young folks read a lot of old books, they wake up one day and think that C.S. Lewis wasn’t really all that insightful. ”It’s all in Plato,” the Professor in the Chronicles says. And there’s a temptation for us to think that all of Lewis is there, or in Augustine or Dante. But try writing at his level and with his clarity and the awe returns, with a vengeance, and makes a mockery of the hubris that ever dared doubt Lewis’ ultimately unquestionable brilliance. To synthesize several strands of Western Christian thought and then package the whole into a children’s book series? Unless your name is Tolkien, you ought to be astonished.

Which is why I feel like you need to know that I am living in C.S. Lewis’s house. Like, The Kilns. The place where he did the bulk of his writing. The place where he spent time walking and thinking and smoking his pipe. For the next nine months, at least, we’ll be here. And maybe, if they’ll have us, for longer.

The house is currently owned by the C.S. Lewis Foundation in California, and if you go through the proper channels you can come enjoy a tour. I haven’t been on one yet, but I’m assured they are splendid. And having met some of the folks around, I’m already persuaded. The Foundation is one worth supporting and I’m grateful for their willingness to allow my wife and I in to the place (not everyone would be so bold!).

It’s a dream, really, to write at a blog named in part for Lewis’s most famous books to have the chance to live where he lived. I know that sort of brilliance doesn’t quite rub off as easily as I might hope, but still, it’s humbling to be in the shadow of a man whose success with the written word has touched so many lives. If I were a better writer, I might be able to find words for how grateful I am. If I was Lewis, I mean, I would find those words.

I am going to be posting photos throughout our time at Oxford and at The Kilns on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, for those who are interested in following along. And for everyone else, well, normal blogging returns…soon.

C.S. Lewis and the Church: A Review (Part 2)

Editor’s note: We pleased to publish this review (in two parts–read the first part here) by friend of Mere-O Dr. Thomas Ward.

In the profoundest essay of the collection, “C.S. Lewis and the Eschatalogical Church,” Judith Wolfe amplifies the thesis that it is in Lewis’s portrayals of heaven that we come closest to his ecclesiology. The Church, she writes, “just like the individual person, is for Lewis primarily a heavenly or eschatalogical reality, and only secondarily an earthly one (p.109).” The individual is primarily an eschatalogical reality because human life here below is marked by longing for something existing outside of spatiotemporal reality and only in achieving the object of this desire are we complete or truly ourselves. The Church is therefore eschatalogical because the Church is simply “the community of the saved (p.109).”

We do not know just what we will be (other than that we will be whole) so we don’t know just what the Church will be. But we do know that we were made in the image of God and that the fulfillment of our individuality will consist at least in part of a restoration (and/or perfection) of this image. This gives direction to our efforts here below: our part is to cooperate with God’s work in us, “to become clear mirrors in which [the image of God,] when God looks at them, can find reflection (p.108).”

In Mere Christianity Lewis extended the mirror metaphor to include not just the relationship between an individual and God, but between individuals: “Men are mirrors … of Christ to other men.” Reflecting on this, and also on Lewis’s chapter on philia in The Four Loves, Wolfe extends the mirror image even further: “Humans know themselves not by reflecting on themselves, but by being reflected by others (p.114).”

Wolfe finds “the most sustained visualization” of this idea in That Hideous Strength, when the Ladies of St. Anne’s don their ceremonial robes and admire one another. They do not need a looking glass, as Jane remembers the Director’s words, that we are “mirrors enough to see another.” Wolfe then makes the following bold inference:

If we see ourselves most accurately in the mirror of another’s loving face, then it is because our deepest identity is being loved—there is no ‘I’ apart from that ‘I’ as loved by God, and there is no accurate view of that ‘I’ apart from the ‘I’ that is loved (p.115).

That there is no accurate view of the ‘I’ apart from the ‘I’ that is loved seems to be both correct and what Lewis thinks. But Wolfe goes too far, I think, in her claim that there is no ‘I’ apart from the ‘I’ as loved, and I don’t see any reason to attribute it to Lewis. Relata are prior to relations, in the sense that there must be things before there can be relations between things. Love might bring me into being, but the relation God’s-loving-me cannot obtain until He who is Love has made me. Continue reading →

C.S. Lewis and the Church: A Review (Part 1)

Editor’s note: We pleased to publish this review (in two parts–look for the second tomorrow!) by friend of Mere-O Dr. Thomas Ward.

C.S. Lewis and the Church: Essays in Honor of Walter Hooper

Edited by Judith Wolfe and Brendan N. Wolfe

London and New York: T&T Clark International, 2011

208 pages, hardcover

$110.00

C.S. Lewis scholars and enthusiasts are indebted to Judith and Brendan N. Wolfe for editing (and contributing to) this fascinating collection of essays on Lewis on the Church. The quality of the contributions is, on the whole, unsurprisingly excellent, given the impressive list of contributors.

Worthy as the Wolfes’ work is, we are far more indebted to Walter Hooper, the man most responsible for preserving Lewis’s legacy over the 49 years since Jack passed out of the shadowlands. In his capacities first as Lewis’s personal secretary and then as his literary executor and editor of essay collections and the Collected Letters, no Lewis scholar is more deserving of a festschrift than Hooper; it is meet and right that he now has one. But, as Andrew Cuneo’s introductory essay persuasively argues, Hooper ought to be remembered not only as a scholar of Lewis but also as his dear friend.

When I was a student at Oxford and Head Resident at the Kilns, I had the pleasure to speak with Hooper about C.S. Lewis several times. I was struck by his generosity, kindness, and joy, and came away with a deep admiration for him. While the Lewis enthusiast in me is glad for the publication of this book, the Hooper admirer in me is glad that it is dedicated to his honor.

In thinking about Lewis and the Church, it is easy for non-theologians like myself to conflate two distinct kinds of questions. The first is whether Lewis’s theology and spirituality align him more or less closely with the theology and spirituality of this or that Christian church. The second is, what is Lewis’s ecclesiology? From this question derive questions like the following: what does he think the Church is, where does he think it is located, what is its job, what is the relationship between the Church and all the churches? and so on. When people ask, “Was Lewis a (crypto-) Catholic/Evangelical/Orthodox/Calvinist/Etc.?” they will usually have the first kind of question in mind. It’s worth asking this sort of question, but in as broad and generous a thinker as Lewis was the data are bound to yield conflicting results, as indeed they have. More fruitful approaches to this first sort of question are found in this book, for instance in the essays by James Como, Ian Ker, Kallistos Ware, Christopher Mitchell, and Philip Ryken, which proceed by way of comparison and contrast rather than by checklist.

However, the second kind of question is, to my mind, where the action really lies. For profitable answers here, look especially to the essays by Michael Ward and Judith Wolfe, along with Brendan N. Wolfe’s essay on Lewis’s ecumenism. The concurrence of Ward and Wolfe is striking: for Lewis, really and truly the Church exists only in heaven, and the churches here are at best training grounds for heaven, helping us through their negative example as much as their positive.

As exhilarating as Lewis’s picture of perfect communion is at the close of The Last Battle, the end of Perelandra, and The Great Divorce, Lewis’s picture of the earthly churches is starkly pessimistic. Lewis’s best portrayal of Christian community life here below, St. Anne’s in That Hideous Strength, meets not in a church but a house, and has not a pastor or priest but a Director.

In the following I offer brief descriptions of most of the essays, and delve a little more deeply into a few. The selection of these lucky few follows my own interests and should not be viewed as a slight to the others. The editors divide the essays into three parts, which is reflected in my use of subheadings.

Continue reading →

The (Mis)Use of C.S. Lewis by Christian Libertarians

As the idea of gay marriage has become increasingly acceptable in American culture and as the legal institutions have begun to accommodate it, it has become increasingly popular among evangelical Christians to argue for a complete separation of Church and State on the issue of marriage. In a surprising twist, the patron saint of their position is none other than C.S. Lewis, who writes in Mere Christianity:

There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.

There are, of course, questions to be asked about Lewis’s inclusion of marriage in a book entitled Mere Christianity.
More importantly, those Christian libertarians who critique Christian (political) conservatives’ rejection of politically sanctioned homosexual marriage push Lewis’s words beyond their natural and (I would argue) intended meaning. In context, Lewis is writing specifically about the question of divorce. To this extent, they are write about Lewis’s distinction between the Church and the state’s approach to marriage.

But the state’s allowance of divorce in some cases does not necessarily entail the state’s approval of homosexual marriage. The questions of state sanctioned divorce and state sanctioned homosexual marriage are as distinct as Christian and secular marriages. Lewis’s words prove nothing for the Christian libertarian on the question of homosexual marriage other than that there is a distinction between Christian and secular marriage, a distinction which no Christian conservative would argue against (and which is in line with the broader tradition of the Church).

(HT: Scott Overpeck, whose use of Lewis prompted this post)

(Update: another silly spelling error fixed. Many apologies!)

Culture, politics, and religion for those who love words.

Posts Tagged → CS Lewis