C. S. Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church. C. S. Lewis

I should mean ‘as Shakespeare is outside The Tempest’; i.e., its scenes and persons do not exhaust his being. We have always thought of God as being not only ‘in’ and ‘above’, but also ‘below’ us: as the depth of ground. We can imaginatively speak of ‘Father in Heaven’ yet also of the everlasting arms that are ‘beneath’. We do not understand why the Bishop is so anxious to canonise the one image and forbid the other. We admit his freedom to use which he prefers. We claim our freedom to use both.

      His view of Jesus as a ‘window’ seems wholly orthodox (‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ [John 14:9]). Perhaps the real novelty is in the Bishop’s doctrine about God. But we can’t be certain, for here he is very obscure. He draws a sharp distinction between asking ‘Does God exist as a person?’ and asking whether ultimate reality is personal. But surely he who says yes to the second question has said yes to the first? Any entity describable without gross abuse of language as God must be ultimate reality, and if ultimate reality is personal, then God is personal. Does the Bishop mean that something which is not ‘a person’ could yet be ‘personal’? Even this could be managed if ‘not a person’ were taken to mean ‘a person and more’–as is provided for by the doctrine of the Trinity. But the Bishop does not mention this.

      Thus, though sometimes puzzled, I am not shocked by his article. His heart, though perhaps in some danger of bigotry, is in the right place. If he has failed to communicate why the things he is saying move him so deeply as they obviously do, this may be primarily a literary failure. If I were briefed to defend his position I should say ‘The image of the Earth-Mother gets in something which that of the Sky-Father leaves out. Religions of the Earth-Mother have hitherto been spiritually inferior to those of the Sky-Father, but, perhaps, it is now time to readmit some of their elements.’ I shouldn’t believe it very strongly, but some sort of case could be made out.

[PART 2] ASPECTS OF FAITH

       [10] CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE

      This collection of three articles was Lewis’s part in a series of five papers first published in Theology, Volumes XL and XLI (March—December 1940), and later in Christian Reflections (1998). The other writers were S.L. Bethell and E.F. Carritt (‘Replies to Mr Lewis’), and George Every (‘In Defence of Criticism’).

      If the heavenly life is not grown up in you, it signifies nothing what you have chosen in the stead of it, or why you have chosen it.

      William Law

      I

      At an early age I came to believe that the life of culture (that is, of intellectual and aesthetic activity) was very good for its own sake, or even that it was good for man. After my conversion, which occurred in my later twenties, I continued to hold this belief without consciously asking how it could be reconciled with my new belief that the end of human life was salvation in Christ and the glorifying of God. I was awakened from this confused state of mind by finding that the friends of culture seemed to me to be exaggerating. In my reaction against what seemed exaggerated I was driven to the other extreme, and began, in my own mind, to belittle the claims of culture. As soon as I did this I was faced with the question, ‘If it is a thing of so little value, how are you justified in spending so much of your life on it?’

      The present inordinate esteem of culture by the cultured began, I think, with Matthew Arnold–at least if I am right in supposing that he first popularised the use of the English word spiritual in the sense of German geistlich. This was nothing less than the identification of levels of life hitherto usually distinguished. After Arnold came the vogue of Croce, in whose philosophy the aesthetic and logical activities were made autonomous forms of ‘the spirit’ co-ordinate with the ethical. There followed the poetics of Dr I.A. Richards. This great atheist critic found in a good poetical taste the means of attaining psychological adjustments which improved a man’s power of effective and satisfactory living all round, while bad taste resulted in a corresponding loss. Since this theory of value was a purely psychological one, this amounted to giving poetry a kind of soteriological function; it held the keys of the only heaven that Dr Richards believed in. His work (which I respect profoundly) was continued, though not always in directions that he accepted, by the editors of Scrutiny,¹ who believe in ‘a necessary relationship between the quality of the individual’s response to art and his general fitness for humane living’. Finally, as might have been expected, a somewhat similar view was expressed by a Christian writer: in fact by Brother Every in Theology for March 1939. In an article entitled ‘The Necessity of Scrutiny’ Brother Every inquired what Mr Eliot’s admirers were to think of a Church where those who seemed to be theologically equipped preferred Housman, Mr Charles Morgan, and Miss Sayers, to Lawrence, Joyce and Mr E.M. Forster; he spoke (I think with sympathy) of the ‘sensitive questioning individual’ who is puzzled at finding the same judgements made by Christians as by ‘other conventional people’; and he talked of ‘testing’ theological students as regards their power to evaluate a new piece of writing on a secular subject.

      As soon as I read this there was the devil to pay. I was not sure that I understood–I am still not sure that I understand–Brother Every’s position. But I felt that some readers might easily get the notion that ‘sensitivity’ or good taste were among the notes of the true Church, or that coarse, unimaginative people were less likely to be saved than refined and poetic people. In the heat of the moment I rushed to the opposite extreme. I felt, with some spiritual pride, that I had been saved in the nick of time from being ‘sensitive’. The ‘sentimentality and cheapness’ of much Christian hymnody had been a strong point in my own resistance to conversion. Now I felt almost thankful for the bad hymns.² It was good that we should have to lay down our precious refinement at the very doorstep of the church; good that we should be cured at the outset of our inveterate confusion between psyche and pneuma, nature and supernature.

      A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility. Brother Every will not suspect me of being still in the condition I describe, nor of still attributing to him the preposterous beliefs I have just suggested. But there remains, none the less, a real problem which his article forced upon me in its most acute form. No one, presumably, is really maintaining that a fine taste in the arts is a condition of salvation. Yet the glory of God, and, as our only means to glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life. What, then, is the value of culture? It is, of course, no new question; but as a living question it was new to me.

      I naturally turned first to the New Testament. Here I found, in the first place, a demand that whatever is most highly valued on the natural level is to be held, as it were, merely on sufferance, and to be abandoned without mercy the moment it conflicts with the service of God. The organs of sense (Matthew 5:29) and of virility (Matthew 19:12) may have to be sacrificed. And I took it that the least these words could mean was that a life, by natural standards, crippled and thwarted was not only no bar to salvation, but might easily be one of its conditions. The text about hating father and mother (Luke 14:26) and our Lord’s apparent belittling even of His own natural relation to the Blessed Virgin (Matthew 12:48) were even more discouraging. I took it for granted that anyone in his senses would hold it better to be a good son than a good critic, and that whatever was said of natural affection was implied a fortiori of culture. The worst of all was Philippians 3:8, where something obviously more relevant to spiritual life than culture can be– ‘blameless’ conformity to the Jewish Law–was described as ‘muck’.

      In the second place I found a number of emphatic warnings against every kind of superiority. We were told to become as children (Matthew 18:3), not to be called Rabbi (Matthew 23:8), to dread reputation (Luke 6:26). We were reminded that few of the