A Pilgrim in Narnia

I was in a room on campus this week with English literature scholars from different disciplines. One of them tried to find words for C.S. Lewis‘ relationship with “politics.” “Lewis wasn’t political…” he began, and then added after a pause, “in that sense.” My colleague did not need to define what “that sense” was. Lewis was always making social commentary and had his own values and perspectives. Still, any self-critical reader today will have trouble making Lewis lay comfortably alongside any single political platform. It would be a challenge even for Procrustes, with his cunning engineering mind, to fit the sheets for any partisan bed prepared for Lewis.

Not that people don’t try. I have heard that an advocacy group has provided arguments for their men’s movement with Lewis’ essay, The Abolition of Man–about how we can lose our humanity unless we think critically about education and technology. Now, I find The Abolition of Man to be a challenging text. Still, can any reader not know that Lewis is talking about the social species Man–humankind, homo sapiens, children of Adam and Eve, you get the idea–and not whatever masculine, muscular, rugged vision of maleness they are inviting local men to envision.

It’s not that I mind men moving. I am one–a man, that is–and I move from time to time. What I struggle with is the eradicated space between that activist’s keyboard and Lewis’ lectern, as if Lewis’ ideas came from the printed book or computer screen. It’s the literary version of the school child who answers the question “Where does milk come from?” with the obvious answer, “The Store!” As readers, we can sometimes forget the space-time dislocation–though Lewis never ceased challenging readers to recognize that other-when and other-where authors used words differently and had different worldviews. We must learn to appreciate those minds to understand the text. Still, I have trouble believing that any philanthropic cause would twist the text’s meaning to their purposes–or that, if it is ignorant leadership, such a movement would move very far. Certainly, I am misinformed.

Still, it happens in less obvious ways. There is some cringe-worthy commentary on Lewis and the creation-evolution debate that twists him into unrecognizable works of geometric lawn art. Usually, though, social appropriators chop Lewis up into little bits. This annoyed him. Thus, when Kathryn Lindskoog shared her criticism of his work with Lewis, he commended her for realizing:

“… the connection, or even the unity, of all the books–scholarly, fantastic, theological–and make me appear a single author not a man who impersonates half a dozen authors, which is what I seem to most” (Oct 29, 1957 letter to Kathryn Stillwell).

One of the reasons it was refreshing to have this local literary conversation was because Lewis was treated as an integrated whole. They never even thought, it seems, to treat Lewis the Apologist in isolation from Lewis the Fantasist or Literary Historian. Even more importantly, Lewis’ theology, morality, cultural criticism, artistic expresses, and habits of the mind were all treated together with his literature.

Since then, I have been thinking about the consistent, artistic critique Lewis makes of culture–including that social-political commentary that is hard to streamline in party terms. Lewis crumbles the foundation of what “everyone” knows–whether common sense, academic trends, or political inner circle wisdom–and then redesigns the architecture of thought from the ground up. He does not always do it perfectly, but this two-step movement of intellectual renovation attracts me.

As this was on my mind, I started reading Lewis’s essay in Selected Literary Essays on Joseph Addison (1672-1719). an Enlightenment-era public intellectual. Addison co-founded The Spector magazine, a public-facing philosophical and literary daily that aimed “to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality” (see here). Rather than a vague “Lewis wasn’t political in that sense” approach, in this essay, Lewis brings the Whig-Tory battle of the 18th-century English political scene to the front of the discussion. Today’s left/right-liberal/conservative binary only helps a little in understanding the divide, depending on your view of the monarchy in British law. Addison was a Whig, and Lewis contrasted him to popular Tory writers Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift (the other Swift, not Taylor).

Lewis is primarily interested in the rhetoric that era writers used in public debates. Addison’s party won the social-political long game, Lewis argues, because while Tories are railing at their enemies–often hilariously or satirically–Addison is reshaping the public image of his enemies into amiable old men who are fading with ancient days into the past. The contrast of approaches is intriguing:

“A satiric portrait by Pope or Swift is like a thunderclap; the Addisonian method is more like the slow operations of ordinary nature, loosening stones, blunting outlines, modifying a whole landscape with ‘silent overgrowings’ so that the change can never quite be reversed again. Whatever his intentions, his reasonableness and amiability (both cheerful ‘habits’ of the mind) are stronger in the end than the Tory spleen. To rail is the sad privilege of the loser” (“Addison,” Selected Literary Essays).

“To rail is the sad privilege of the loser.” A punchy line for today’s cage-match social discourse no less than 18th-century Tory-Whiggery or Lewis’ WWII England when the essay was written.

Still, we must admit that as writers, Swift and Pope have outlasted Addison–at least in the popular reach of modern classics. What kind of legacy do we want: literary or social?

Lewis would say that is a historical accident, in this case, for vehement opprobrium reveals subterranean desperation:

“When authors rail too much (we may allow them to rail a little) against public taste, do they perhaps betray some insufficiency?” (“Prudery and Philology,” Present Concerns)

Lewis occasionally railed too much–such as in a Curmudgeonly Christmas essay when he was under tremendous personal pressure. A careful reading of The Last Battle, for example, shows that when characters descend to verbal insults, unfettered vitriol, ill-drawn caricatures, tribal protectionism, or noisy reproach, they are characters who either have limited vision or are actively trying to blind others. Literature that betrays the “accent of the angry belle-lettrist railing” (“Addison,” Selected Literary Essays) is not a good look for the thinking writer.

Thus, I am going to take Lewis’ comment on “railing” at others as a prophetic critique. I won’t be silent to social injustice, theological insipidity, or dishonest scholarship. However, increasingly, I want to live in the Internet of Awesome rather than the Digital Dungeons of Christian Twitter, TikTok battles, or YouTube polemic. I will not spot every troll lurking in the Instagram comments, but at least I can try.

And, who knows? I, too, may have misjudged the shape of Lewis’ waiting bed in the spare room.