In this idea originated the plan of the lyrical ballads in which
it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to per-
sons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so
as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a
semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of
imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the mo-
ment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the
other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the
charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling
analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind’s atten-
tion from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveli-
ness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible
treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear
not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.13
We can see both these “endeavours,” as Coleridge calls them, at work in Lewis’s best writing. Certainly he procures for his “characters supernatural or at least romantic” just that transference and bodying forth of our “inward nature” that Coleridge was aiming for—whether the icy White Witch or the golden goodness of Aslan, whether the numinous eldila of the Ransom Trilogy or the beautifully embodied figures of Psyche and Orual in Till We Have Faces. But in some ways it is the Wordsworthian, more than the Coleridgean, side of his achievement that makes Lewis such an effective imaginative apologist: his power to “excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural” by
“awakening the mind’s attention” and “directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.” It has often been remarked that it is easier to portray evil than to portray goodness, but many people have noted that Lewis is an exception. The sheer goodness of his “good” characters (chiefly Aslan, of course), the sense of “solid joys and lasting treasure” (to quote Newton’s famous hymn) that he evokes in “The Weight of Glory”14 and sustains so beautifully throughout The Great Divorce—these are hard things to achieve as a writer. Michael Ward has drawn attention to the extraordinary imaginative skill and intertextual layering with which Lewis built up what he (Lewis) called the “kappa element” in his evocation of the “Donegal-ity,” or unique quiddity, of rich particularity and “inexhaustible wonder” of each of the seven Chronicles.15 This power of re-enchantment, of removing the “film of familiarity” and “awakening the mind’s attention” is something Lewis was striving for in his writing. He makes this clear in his important 13. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 2, 6–7.
14. Cf. Walmsley (ed.), C. S. Lewis Essay Collection, 96–106.
15. Cf. Ward, Planet Narnia.
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part one—symposium
essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children.” In this essay Lewis makes a distinction between the kind of “fantasy” writing that is mere ego-pleasing and this-worldly wish-fulfillment—of which he says: “Its fulfilment on the level of imagination is in very truth compensatory: we run to it from the disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to the real world undivinely discontented. For it is all flattery to the ego”16—and, by contrast, the kind of imaginative writing, “imaginative” in the Coleridgean sense, that he is aiming for. Of this he says:
It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing
for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach
and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a
new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods be-
cause he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all
real woods a little enchanted.17
At its best, this is what Lewis’s writing continually achieves, this re-enchantment upon return. We return from the Narnian woods to find all our real woods “a little enchanted.” Indeed he makes this aim explicit, some would say a little too explicit, at the end of The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
when Edmund and Lucy are told by Aslan that they cannot return to Narnia:
“You are too old, children,” said Aslan, “and you must begin to
come close to your own world now.”
“It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?”
“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.
“Are—are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.
“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. This
was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by
knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”18
Lewis may be in danger of making things too explicit here and breaking his own spell. A better emblem of the real imaginative enchantment he achieves, particularly through the art of story-telling itself, is the little episode in the same book where Lucy finds in the magician’s Big Book a spell “for the refreshment of the spirit:”
The pictures were fewer here but very beautiful. And what Lucy
found herself reading was more like a story than a spell. It went
16. Walmsley (ed.), C. S. Lewis Essay Collection, 102.
17. Ibid., 103.
18. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 222.
guite—telling the truth through imaginative fiction 23
on for three pages and before she had read to the bottom of the
page she had forgotten that she was reading at all. She was living in the story as if it were real, and all the pictures were real too.
When she had got to the third page and come to the end, she
said, “That is the loveliest story I’ve ever read or ever shall read in my whole life.”19
It is part of the magic that Lucy cannot turn the pages of the book backwards and repeat the experience or even remember the story, but when she meets Aslan at the end of this episode she asks:
“Shall I ever be able to read that story again; the one I couldn’t remember? Will you tell it to me, Aslan? Oh do, do, do.”
“Indeed, yes, I will tell it to you for years and years”20
Here Lewis offers the enchantment of imaginative story as both a bridge between reason and imagination and also an emblem of heaven itself.
Finally, let us return to the dilemma set out in the poem “Reason” and to the way it finally came to be resolved so fruitfully both in Lewis’s actual conversion and in his subsequent writing. Lewis famously said, “For me reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.”21
We cannot have one without the other and in order to make them work together we must respect their differences. Lewis never published “Reason” in his lifetime, but had he been consulted towards the end of his life he might have wanted, from the perspective of those later works that appeal both to reason and imagination, to have challenged his own phrase “ever report the same” in that poem:
Who make imagination’s dim exploring touch
Ever report the same as intellectual sight?
In one sense this phrase sets a false goal and betrays a failure of imagination, if it implies that the “reports” given to us by reason on the one hand and imagination on the other should be so exactly “the same” that each could be translated without loss into the other’s terms. But if we mean by “report the same” not “bring back word for word the same report” but rather “report, in different ways and from different terrains, the same single reality, bring back news in different languages from the same far country,” then indeed we will 19. Ibid., 144.
20. Ibid., 147.
21. Cf. “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare,” in Lewis, Rehabilitations and other Essays, 157.
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part one—symposium
be asking for something that Lewis’s mature writing delivers to us in great and generative abundance.
And it is that generative abundance, that generosity of spirit, that lav-ish provision of infinitely suggestive image and metaphor, of stories that are mythopoeic, not allegories themselves, but as Lewis said of Tolkien’s work, constantly suggestive of incipient allegory, that is his great legacy to us: stories and poetry that not only kindle the imagination for Christ, but constitute in themselves an open door, an invitation to new and yet more generative works of imagination.
I would like to conclude these remarks on Lewis and imagination, not in literary critical, nor even in theological mode, but with imagination and poetry. So I shall try to give scholarship the kiss of life with a verse, and sum up what I have to say in a sonnet:
C. S. Lewis
From “beer and Beowulf ” to the seven heavens,
Whose music you conduct from sphere to sphere,
You are our portal to those hidden havens
Whence we return to bless our being here.
Scribe of the Kingdom, keeper of the door
Which opens on to all we might have lost,
Ward of a word-hoard in the deep heart’s core,
Telling the tale of Love from first to last.
Generous, capacious, open, free,
Your wardrobe-mind has furnished us with worlds
Through which to travel, whence we learn to see
Along the beam, and hear at last the heralds
Sounding their summons, through the stars that sing,
Whose call at sunrise brings us to our King.
3
Panel Discussion
What Can Twenty-First Century Apologetics
Learn from C. S. Lewis?
The day-long Symposium in St. Margaret’s Church ended with a Panel Discussion. It was introduced on behalf of the Westminster Abbey Institute by Canon Andrew Tremlett, chaired by Dr. Michael Ward, and closed by the Dean of Westminster, the Very Revd. Dr. John Hall. On the panel were William Lane Craig, Michael Ramsden, Jeanette Sears, Peter S. Williams, and Judith Wolfe. What follows is an edited transcript of the evening’s proceedings.1
TREMLETT: On our panel tonight I am pleased to welcome:
Professor William Lane Craig, Research Professor of Phi-
losophy at Talbot School of Theology, California, the author
of many books including Divine Foreknowledge and Human
Freedom, and God, Time and Eternity.
Michael Ramsden, Director of the Oxford Centre for Chris-
tian Apologetics and Honorary Fellow of Wycliffe Hall,
Oxford.
1. A video of this discussion is available on-line: https://youtu.be/jgnbr-68Vws.
25
26
part one—symposium
The Reverend Dr. Jeanette Sears, writer and speaker, who
did her PhD at Manchester and post-doc at Harvard. She’s
the author of A Murder in Michaelmas, Pig’s Progress, and has a special interest in the Inklings and Dorothy L. Sayers.
Peter S. Williams is philosopher-in-residence at the Damaris
Trust and a writer and Christian apologist. He’s the author
of C. S. Lewis vs. the New Atheists and A Sceptic’s Guide to Atheism.
Last but not least, Dr. Judith Wolfe, Fellow of St. John’s Col-
lege, Oxford; co-editor of C. S. Lewis and The Church: Es-
says in Honour of Walter Hooper and General Editor of the
Journal of Inklings Studies.
Please, would you welcome our panel? [Applause]
WARD:
Before we come to the questions, I’m going to ask each of
the panellists to make a very brief opening statement about
what they regard as especially valuable or interesting about
Lewis’s work in Christian apologetics and what we might
learn from his legacy today. First, Bill Craig.
CRAIG:
Thank you. Dr. Ward has invited each of us to say three hun-
dred words, or less, about, quote, “those aspects of Lewis’s
apologetic work which we regard as especially valuable and
especially worth learning from.” Here are my 296 words.
[ Laughter]
C. S. Lewis lived through and wrote during the height
of the positivist era in Oxford, the times of A. J. Ayer and
Antony Flew, of verificationism and the alleged meaning-
lessness of religious, ethical, and metaphysical discourse. He
lived to see the crumbling of positivism and the advent of
post-modernism.
I am so grateful that Lewis never succumbed to the
bullying of modernism or the blandishments of post-mod-
ernism. He was consciously and uncompromisingly a pre-
modern man, a dinosaur, as he put it. “I am,” he declared,
“a rationalist.” Reason can apprehend truth, and truth is ob-
jective and knowable. He bucked conventional wisdom by
presenting a variety of arguments for God’s existence. And
panel discussion
27
he rejected the relativity of history, arguing for the historical
veracity of the Gospels’ record of the life of Jesus of Naza-
reth. Lewis was thus a champion of both natural theology
and Christian evidences. As such he modelled for us a well-
rounded Christian apologetic on behalf of what he called
“mere Christianity.”
If I may speak personally, my own approach has been
inspired by Lewis’ model. I have self-consciously focused on
the defence of “mere Christianity,” based upon the twin pil-
lars of God’s existence, as demonstrated by natural theology,
and the resurrection of Jesus, as established by historical-
critical studies of the New Testament.
Finally, on a practical level, Lewis has been a model
to me of the ministry of the published word. I’m struck by
the fact that through the legacy of the works he left behind,
Lewis has reached far more people for Christ since his death
than he ever did during his life. This has motivated me,
personally, to try to produce, in my own small way, a body
of published work, which I hope, in God’s providence, may
outlive me as well.
WARD:
And now, Michael Ramsden.
RAMSDEN:
Well, what I learned from Lewis—I’m now working as a full-
time Christian apologist—was really very simple and was
said so beautifully and so eloquently in the lectures here this
afternoon. And in one sense it was very simple: Truth has a
revelatory function. One of the functions of Truth, it helps
you to see things as they are, rather like if someone comes
what they said and someone turns to you and in a couple
of minutes tells you and sums it up beautifully. On receiv-
ing the explanation you normally respond by saying, “Oh, I
see.” Not just simply that you understand but you now see
something you were unable to see before. And what I found
through Lewis’ writings was this: he helped me to see things
as they were.
We don’t even bother praying for that which we can’t
even imagine to be true and in a world of growing scepti-
cism and the kind of hostility that’s already been referred to,
C. S. Lewis was a master at presenting the truth so as to help
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part one—symposium
us see things as t
hey are: about the person of Christ, about
the world we live in, and about who we are.
And one of the ways he did that as well, which I know
has stuck with me and has influenced my own apologetics
immensely, is his love for language and the importance of
words. It’s hard to read almost any of his apologetic work
and not realise he’s spent a huge amount of time on the de-
fence of words.
I’m sure this has affected me in all kinds of ways. I hap-
pen to own the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary,
which I keep in my study and regularly use. As someone
once said, it’s not the most interesting book to read, but it
does explain every word as you go through [ Laughter], and
it gives you a true sense of what these words mean. Where
might that meaning have changed in my audience and how
might I recover this vocabulary so that people can see the
truth and respond to it?
WARD:
Jeanette Sears.
SEARS:
Thank you. Well, I love Lewis, not just because of who he
was, not just for his writings, but also because of how he
talked about his writings, how he described his methodol-
ogy and gave us pictures of how to do it, which makes us
feel that perhaps we can do it as well, which is really rather
important.
And so, first of all, I love the way he describes his
works of apologetic, his non-fiction, his popular theology,
as “works of translation.” I love the idea of “translation,” that
you’re translating something that can seem quite complicat-
ed or dull or too deep, perhaps. People feel they can’t under-
stand Christian doctrine, the faith as it’s been handed down,
but Lewis translates it for us into words we can understand,
into images, into wonderful stories we actually want to read.
And he said that this was really easy. In one of his let-
ters he says that he wants to start a school of translation, that
it’s a trick that anybody can learn. We all ought to be able to
do it! So I think that’s really encouraging from him that he
wants everyone to do that.