C.S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner (2016)Michael Ward & Peter S Williams (eds), by Brian Hebblethwaite

MICHAEL WARD & PETER S WILLIAMS (eds), C. S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner (Cascade Books 2016, 246 pp)

It is good to have this most unusual book, not least because it contains all six papers delivered at our Magdalene Conference on ‘C S Lewis as Critic’ on Saturday 23rd November 2013, the day after the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis’s death, when a memorial stone had been dedicated to him in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. But the main purpose of the book is to give us the full text of that Memorial Service together with the two papers and the panel discussion from the Symposium at St Margaret’s Westminster held the previous day and various more or less informal reflections by participants in the Westminster Commemorations. Finally we are given two very different addresses from Oxford, where a celebration was held on the Saturday evening. The book thus contains two of the three presentations on Lewis given by the Master in the space of thirty-six hours, his address at the Abbey service and his paper at our Magdalene Conference (after which he travelled to Oxford to speak again at the Magdalen celebration)!

Enthusiasts for Lewis’s Narnia tales and for his popular books of Christian apologetics may well be surprised to find the Westminster celebrations accompanied here by a set of scholarly and partly critical conference papers. But if one thing becomes clear and convincing from this book it is that Lewis’s imaginative, literary work, in both story-telling and in critical scholarship, not to mention poetry, is as central to his Christian apologetics as his rational defence of both belief in God and Christianity. The two Westminster Symposium speakers, Alister McGrath on ‘Telling the Truth through Rational Argument’ and Malcolm Guite on ‘Telling the Truth through Imaginative Fiction’, show very well how complementary appeals to reason and appeals to imagination were for Lewis. Famously, for Lewis, myth and story are vehicles for truth. More than one speaker, including the Master, give particular praise to his late novel, Till We Have Faces, in this connection. Incidentally, this novel finds a central place in Douglas Hedley’s recent book, The Iconic Imagination, where Lewis is given positively Coleridgean significance.

The Westminster celebrations were not the place for more critical remarks about Lewis, such as we heard at the Magdalene Conference, but just as for Helen Cooper Lewis’s literary criticism evokes both admiration and frustration, so too do his Christian apologetics and imaginative story telling. Lewis’s understanding of Christianity was far from faultless. He never came to appreciate biblical criticism and, as Richard Harries pointed out in his 1987 book, C. S. Lewis: the Man and

his God, his theology was in places over-simple and indeed questionable. This is true of his treatment of the devil in The Screwtape Letters (admirable though these letters are on human self-deception) and of substitutionary sacrifice in the Narnia stories. Moving and inspiring as the tale of Aslan’s death and resurrection undoubtedly is, we are bound to question the White Witch’s requirement for a death. And where The Last Battle is concerned, while the passage portraying the children’s post-mortem journey up towards heaven read at the Abbey Service by Lewis’s stepson and extolled by the Master in his address is indeed beautiful beyond words, one cannot forget the earlier moment at the door, where the creatures who looked at Aslan with fear and hatred swerved to his left and ‘disappeared into his huge black shadow’. ‘The children never saw them again’.

Unsurprisingly there is no mention in this book of Lewis’s notorious encounter with Elizabeth Anscombe at the Socratic Club in 1948, where Lewis’s claim for the logical incoherence of a purely naturalistic philosophy was allegedly demolished by Anscombe. (Lewis had earlier put forward this claim in his book, Miracles.) In fact Lewis’s argument was far from being demolished. As William Lane Craig (whose Oxford contribution towards the end of this book will surely mystify all Lewis fans!) points out in the Westminster panel discussion, Lewis’s anti-naturalism argument has been powerfully restated by Alvin Plantinga in his Warranted Christian Belief. Indeed it had earlier been refashioned by John Lucas and also used by Michael Dummett, who ironically observed that Anscombe herself had deployed a version of it in her Cambridge inaugural lecture! It is true that, after the Socratic Club confrontation, Lewis did tend to refrain from philosophical apologetics, concentrating rather on imaginative literature and the kind of Christian apologetics celebrated by McGrath in the Westminster Symposium. But, commenting on the Socratic Club encounter, Basil Mitchell, Lewis’s successor as Chairman of the Socratic Club, suggested that what put Lewis off philosophical apologetics was not his argument’s alleged demolition but rather the feeling that he did not possess the kind of philosophical training necessary for arguing with people like Anscombe – this despite the fact that he had got a first in Greats and taught philosophy for a year before moving over to English.

We should not regret Lewis’s move into the world of literature and fiction. His Christian apologetics was at its most powerful, as McGrath and Guite show, in the combination and complementarity of reason and imagination in his storytelling both for children and for adults. He still wanted to show that the Christian story made better sense of human experience than any other view. The sentence inscribed round his stone in Poets’ Corner expresses this succinctly: ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else’. But increasingly this view was communicated through myths and stories. Newcomers to Lewis now are best directed to works like the Narnia tales, the science fiction trilogy and Till We Have Faces.