by Michael Ward
When Lewis’s legacy is considered, people often wonder who the next Lewis will be. Young Christians are encouraged to pursue rigorous training in reason and apologetics, or aim for the best kind of literary education at a prestigious university. These are fine pursuits for those who hope to emulate Lewis’s genius at cultural engagement and imaginative apologetics. But if we really want to raise up another Lewis or two, I think we have to start with our own hearts and follow the advice of Lewis himself:
Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, submit with every fibre of your being and you will find eternal life. Look for Christ and you will get Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. Look for yourself and you will get only hatred, loneliness, despair, and ruin.7
Those words pounded down the aisles and echoed in the arches of Westminster Abbey on the day of the memorial service. They came to us in 4. “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” Gerard Manley Hopkins.
5. Lewis, The Weight of Glory.
6. Simon Barrington-Ward, “What I Learnt from C. S. Lewis,” address to the Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society, 21st February 2012.
7. Lewis, Beyond Personality.
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Lewis’s own recorded voice, and they opened the service with a challenge.
Everything that followed—the tributes and songs, the prayers and readings honouring his life—was framed by his own ringing description of what he thought it meant to die well, and thus live well. He confronted each of us present at the service with an invitation: to join the best story that has ever been told; to live the one true myth of Christ.
Lewis once said that “you could never find a book long enough”8 to suit his taste. Like Lucy in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” who found the best tale ever told within the house of a great magician and wished she could read it forever, Lewis himself hungered from childhood to get inside the great myths that he loved. And the great, joyous fact of his existence was that he actually did. In his love of Christ, Lewis entered the one true myth of the world. He got right inside the best story ever told and his life became a living image of its beauty. And he calls to us, through the stories he left behind, to join him.
“Further up and further in!”9 said Aslan . . . said Lewis. Shall we follow?
8. Lewis, Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper, 9.
9. Lewis, The Last Battle.
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Rhetoric, Doctrine, and the
Ethics of Language
C. S. Lewis on Paradise Lost
Rowan Williams 1
A Preface to Paradise Lost 2 has been described as “Lewis at his very best”3: “Here is evidence of a mind abundantly stocked with reading which the author has enjoyed—effortlessly, intelligently, and selflessly enjoyed—
and he wishes to communicate this enjoyment to us.”4 Generations of readers would echo A. N. Wilson’s judgement; this is a book of wide-ranging learning but, most strikingly, of relaxed and confident exposition, conversational exposition as Wilson says, and commonsensical but by no means conventional judgement. It has worn well as an introduction to aspects of Milton (I can recall reading it with delight as a schoolboy in the late sixties, and younger readers still find it both accessible and illuminating); but it also serves as an introduction to some of Lewis’s own favourite themes as critic and as moralist. In this brief introduction to the book, I hope to suggest some of those ways in which it helps us read Lewis as well as Milton. We shall look at what Lewis has to say about rhetoric, at his distinctive typol-1. Dr. Rowan Williams (Lord Williams of Oystermouth) is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He served as Archbishop of Canterbury (2002–12) and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford (1986–91). He is the author of numerous books, including Faith in the Public Square (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) and The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia (Oxford University Press, 2013).
2. Oxford University Press 1942, reprinted in paperback 1960.
3. Wilson, C. S. Lewis. A Biography, 171.
4. Ibid.
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ogy of epic narrative, and finally, briefly, at the moral analysis offered of the characters of Milton’s poem. A great deal more could be and needs to be said about the direct and generously acknowledged influence on Lewis of Charles Williams’s writing and lecturing on Milton,5 and about the extent to which the Preface is shaped by Lewis’s concern to push back at Eliot’s verdicts on Milton (his references to Eliot are a masterpiece of respectful hostility); and since 1940 there has been no shortage of studies of Milton’s theology, so that Lewis’s sparring in the Preface with the work of Denis Saurat reflects a situation long since past.6 But I believe it is worth simply looking at the frontier country between criticism and theology as it emerges in Lewis’s book, with an eye to seeing how the Preface can show us connections within Lewis’s own thought; and that is the purpose of this short exploration.
Rhetoric
The Preface could be read as in large part a defence of the very idea of rhetoric. Chapters 7 and 8 of the book examine the style of epic in general, arguing forcefully that the last thing this genre needs is sustained originality. The point of the language used in this kind of composition is to evoke “stock”
responses—by which Lewis means not what happen to be demographically prevailing attitudes but the deep continuities of cultural intelligence. With a typical zest for paradox, he maintains that “stock” responses have to be learned; they are “a delicate balance of trained habits, laboriously acquired and easily lost, on the maintenance of which depend both our virtues and our pleasures and even, perhaps, the survival of our species.”7 We need to be educated in appropriate response to our environment; it is a massive error to think that we have truthful or reliable instincts that will save us from disaster, and the science of rhetoric, in its proper context, is a necessary part of this educative process. Yes, it “manipulates,” it seeks to produce results in action, and because of this function it is inevitably selective. Yet selectivity is vital to seeing certain things truthfully (“Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all”8). Poetry may not have as its primary purpose the moving of souls to action, but it is unintelligible if 5. Lewis refers specially to Williams’s introduction to the 1940 World’s Classics edition of The Poetical Works of Milton, but frequently alludes in his letters to the impact on himself and others of Williams’s Oxford lectures on the poet.
6. For a very good recent essay with ample reference to the literature, cf. Myers, Milton’s Theology of Freedom.
7. Lewis, Preface, 56–57.
8. Ibid., 53.
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it has no element of seeking to change readers’ minds—otherwise it would be written for the delectation of the writer, and “Himself is the very audience before which a man postures most and on whom he practises the most elaborate deception.”9
Here as elsewhere, what Lewis has in the sights of his artillery is the notion that sincerity or transparency is a naturally available and unequivocal good in human dealings. He is a writer deeply preoccupied with truthful-ness, and, as this last quoted comment shows, has a ruthless eye for self-deception, especially the deceptions we commit by telling ourselves they are
“natural.” To be truthful, let alone “sincere,” is a matter of protracted learning and constant self-challenge. It requires a moral culture. It is no accident that the chapter following his defence of epic rhetoric deconstructs the idea of an “unchanging human heart,” a repository of culturally unmediated, “innocent” and timeless perceptions or moral insights, available to any sensible person’s introspection. And in this rather neglected aspect of his critical work, Lewis is in fact a good deal ahead of his t
ime, refusing any suggestion that there are language-free or culture-free levels of the imagination that are not always already entangled with a culturally-shaped intelligence. But what makes him something other than a postmodernist denier of the hors-texte is, of course, that he believes there are culturally mediated perspectives that correspond to what is not at our disposal, what is abidingly the case in a moral universe—so that there is such a thing as corrupt or erroneous speech/culture, and it is simply and objectively bad for us. If there are no such perspectives, rhetoric is solely about power (as Plato fully understood); there is nothing but contestation, and rhetorical “manipulation” becomes entirely to do with who is to be master (to borrow the prescient phrase of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty).
Epic is a publicly significant kind of narration, so Lewis argues in his opening chapters; and this means that there are some stories we corporately need to hear over and over. If this is so, such stories must be clothed with appropriate ritual, with “solemnity” (and Lewis is excellent on what this word does and does not mean10), and this in turn entails finding the correct “register” for public speech, since this will secure the right kind of hearing, absorb-ing, sensing, seeing, and, ultimately, acting. And to recognize this is to begin to be liberated from the autocracy of a self constantly seeking transparency to its own limpid interiority. If the Preface is a defence of rhetoric, it is also a not-too-covert polemic against a cult of sincerity that effectively leaves us with the 9. Ibid., 54.
10. “Easter is solempne, Good Friday is not. The Solempne is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for pomp” (ibid., 17).
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dangerous fiction that our ideal audience is, indeed, ourselves—when we have been told by Lewis in no uncertain terms just how corrupting this particular audience is. In this sense, to defend rhetoric and to attack simplistic ideas of sincerity is no more and no less than to defend the inescapably linguistic character of human identity itself: we do not talk primarily to ourselves, and it is tempting to think that Lewis would have grasped something of what Witt-genstein’s critique of “private language” was about.
But, as some of Lewis’s own colleagues and friends insisted, this is not without its problems. Owen Barfield, in a tantalisingly brief introduction to a commemorative collection of essays by Lewis’s friends, recalls his impa-tience with Lewis’s unembarrassed fluency in pastiche; and he also records his impression in regard to a poem of Lewis’s that “it left me with the impression, not of ‘I say this,’ but of ‘This is the sort of thing a man might say.’”
Lewis’s initial response was that he was not sure of the difference.11 Barfield grants that in fact the distinction is not at all so obvious, but persists in worrying at the underlying question: does Lewis actually think there is a proper place for spontaneity or personal authenticity, in word or act? Granted that everything is at some level a “performance,” do we not need ways of distinguishing between performances that are authentic and inauthentic, as in fact we do when we think about stage performances? To bring it back to the Preface, is Lewis’s strong reaction against sentimental individualism being pushed too hard, so that we begin to lose the criteria by which we might judge between good and bad performance—in the sense that a performance may be the act of someone seeking transparency to her basic convictions and direction, or of someone whose aim is purely and simply control for its own sake? How do we express and recognize an ethic of self-surrender in the act of performance? And once this has been formulated as a question, we have to think about the ambiguities of the way the will is involved in performance; as Barfield says, the element of the voulu in Lewis’s public persona, the deliberate adoption of a style and position self-consciously in opposition to the fashionable, leaves a nagging concern, which might be formulated as a concern about the conscious concealment of a self not at peace with itself, or still uneasily in search of a language not defensive or evasive. As Barfield makes plain, this is emphatically not to accuse Lewis of
“insincerity” but to identify a serious question to which the answer is not at all clear—a question about the very nature of the “personal,” and a question as to whether Lewis’s consistent and bracing repudiation of the self as an object of interest can be the whole story.
11. Light on C. S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb, x–xi.
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So to read the Preface as an apology for rhetoric opens up a number of larger questions in the reading of Lewis. It underscores the importance for him of challenging the self-evident good of “sincere” or “original” poetic language if this is simply an attempt to circumvent the absolute givenness of culture and so of cultural formation and so of the need for rhetoric. It raises the issue of the metaphysical or theological assumption behind all Lewis’s criticism—and much of his broader social comment on linguistic degradation12—that speech should aim to nurture appropriate response (“stock” response) to the world, that, in other words, there are morally proper and morally improper ways of seeing phenomena, or to put it still more strongly, natural and unnatural responses. This conviction is—as we have seen—completely separate from an argument that such “natural” response can be deduced from a majority vote at any given moment, though it does make appeal (as Lewis spells out in works like The Abolition of Man) to some sort of very diffuse cross-cultural consensus. And the consideration of rhetoric also, ultimately, prompts questions about the very nature of the speaking self, as we shall see further in the third section of this essay. But not the least interesting feature of the Preface is that, in its tracing of the evolution of the epic form, it suggests how the register of narrative itself carries a kind of moral charge. How we tell significant stories shows what we think of the universe we inhabit; and teasing out the different styles of epic narrative can clarify aspects of a developing ethical awareness as well as a developing sense of history— of an ordering of events and epochs. It is out of these basic considerations about the place of rhetoric that Lewis’s typology of epic emerges.
Epic
The Preface begins with a consideration of what Milton himself thought about epic. Lewis is admirably clear about the need to settle what exactly Milton thought he was doing before attempting any judgement on Paradise Lost, and he refers to Milton’s own subdivisions of epic style in his Preface to Book II of his Reason of Church Government: 13 Lewis (rightly, I think) concludes that Milton is working with a broad division into “classic” and
“romantic” types of epic—those working with a “single action,” everything focused on one episode and set of relations, and those which deal serially 12. See, for example, the essay on “The Death of Words,” published in The Spectator in September 1944; C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Walmsley, 447–49.
13. Lewis, Preface, 3–8.
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with many adventures, in Spenserian or Italianate style. Milton’s awareness of these diverse options is itself, Lewis argues, a measure of Milton’s stature as a writer, conscious of the tension between possible styles, all of which appeal to him and all of which he is capable of handling. But once we recognize his choices, we understand more precisely what he thinks he is doing in Paradise Lost; and it is clear that he has turned his back on the “Spenserian” mode in order to write something more closely approaching a unified, durchkomponi-ert work. This does not mean a commitment to brevity, as is plain from Milton’s—and Lewis’s—discussion; it is rather a commitment to a poem that has one setting, one cast of characters, even one decisive episode. In this sense, Homer and Virgil exhibit a unity lacking in Spenser or Tasso.
But Lewis proposes a further refinement of typology, distinguishing between “primary” and “secondary” epic.14 It is not an evaluative distinction, privileging the primitive over the more sophisticated (Lewis would obviously have
no truck with romantic primitivism, for all the reasons implied in our earlier discussion); what it points to is more a distinction in both subject matter and moral tenor. Primary epic—the Iliad, Beowulf—does not deal with events or even personalities that are intrinsically significant, with “great”
subjects: in the mentality of a Heroic Age, “No one event is really very much more important than another.”15 This may sound counter-intuitive: surely the whole point of early epic is to celebrate exceptional events or deeds?
But Lewis persuasively turns this around. Primary epic does indeed narrate acts of outstanding heroism, or strength, or cruelty; but they are events that change nothing in the climate of the world in which they are set. The famous standard Homeric epithets for persons and features of the natural world (“rosy-fingered dawn” and so on) have the effect of repeatedly drawing us back to the sense of a background that never alters; just as the poignant simile in Odyssey VIII.523 ff. referring to a woman’s laments over a dying husband killed in battle tell us that this is inexorably and unalterably the kind of world this is. All action is in a sense futile, yet there is nothing else for human beings to do but enact the immutable script of violence. The emotional force of such poems comes from the tension between the felt intensity of suffering and triumph here and now and the steady background both of the natural world and the pointless flux of conflict. Lewis quotes Goethe’s chilling characterization of the Iliad—that its message is that “on this earth we must enact Hell.”16 A few years later, he might have referred to Simone Weil’s great essay on the Iliad as a poem of “force,” spelling out the “gravitational”
14. Ibid., chapters 3–7.
15. Ibid., 30.
16. Ibid., 31.
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