SIMUL: The Journal of St. Paul Lutheran Seminary, Vol. 4, Issue 3 (Spring 2025)

SIMUL

Spring2025

Lutherans on C.S. Lewis

TheJournalofSt.PaulLutheranSeminary

SIMUListhejournalofSt.Paul LutheranSeminary.

ISSN:3066-6996

CoverPhoto:“C. S. Lewis,” image by Arthur Strong, 1947, National Portrait Gallery, London.

Disclaimer:

The viewsexpressedinthe articlesreflectthe author(s) opinionsand arenotnecessarilythe viewsofthe publisherand editor.SIMULcannotguaranteeand acceptsnoliabilityforany lossor damageofanykind causedby the errorsandfor theaccuracy ofclaims made by the authors.Allrightsreservedand nothingcan be partiallyor inwholebe reprintedor reproduced withoutwrittenconsentfrom theeditor.

SIMUL

Volume 4, Issue 3, Spring 2025

Lutherans on C.S. Lewis

EDITOR

Rev. Dr. DennisR. Di Mauro dennisdimauro@yahoo.com

ADMINSTRATOR

Rev. JonJensen jjensen@semlc.org

AdministrativeAddress: St. Paul LutheranSeminary P.O.Box251 Midland,GA 31820

ACADEMICDEAN

Rev. Julie Smith jjensen@semlc.org

Academics/StudentAffairsAddress: St. Paul LutheranSeminary P.O.Box112 Springfield,MN 56087

BOARDOFDIRECTORS

Chair:CharlesHunsaker

Rev. GregBrandvold

Rev. JonJensen

Rev. Dr. MarkMenacher

Rev. Michael Hanson

Rev. Julie Smith

Rev. Culynn Curtis

Rev. Dr. ErwinSpruth

Rev. Dr. JamesCavanah

Rev. Jeff Teeples

Rev. Judy Mattson

TEACHINGFACULTY

Rev. Dr. MarneyFritts

Rev. Dr. DennisDiMauro

Rev. Julie Smith

Rev. VirgilThompson

Rev. Dr. Keith Less

Rev. BradHales

Rev. Dr. ErwinSpruth

Rev. Steven King

Rev. Dr. OrreyMcFarland

Rev. HoracioCastillo(Intl)

Rev. AmandaOlsonde Castillo(Intl)

Rev. Dr. Roy HarrisvilleIII

Rev. Dr. HenryCorcoran

Rev. Dr. MarkMenacher

Rev. RandyFreund

EDITOR’S NOTE

Welcome to our fifteenth issue of SIMUL, the journal of St. Paul Lutheran Seminary. This edition is a fun one: a deep dive into Lutheran perspectives on the beloved Christian author and apologist, C. S. Lewis. And who knew that there were so many Lutheran Lewis enthusiasts out there?

In this volume, Gene Veith explains how Lewis, an Anglican no less, surprisingly led him to Lutheranism. Amy Lakeman focuses on one of Lewis’ works from his Ransom trilogy entitled Perelandra. How are the floating islands on this fictional planet an apt illustration for the Christian life? And Hank Corcoran explores how Lewis provides our students not just facts and figures, but also “virtue and enterprise,” the viscera they need to make them courageous apostles of Christ.

This edition is a fun one: a deep dive into Lutheran perspectives on the beloved Christian author and apologist, C.S. Lewis.

But that’s not all! Sarah Hinlicky Wilson reviews the “delightful” things Lewis has provided us, like the theological insight of The Four Loves and his recognition of the excesses found in biblical critical scholarship. But she also takes a hard look at the “doubtful” in his works, like his support for the doctrine of purgatory and his stereotypical views on women.

Brett Jenkins continues this exploration of Lewis’s contributions with a beautiful ode that outlines the most influential events of his short life. And I conclude this issue with

a review of his final novel, Till We Have Faces.

What’s Ahead?

Upcoming Issue - Our Summer 2025 issue will feature the lectures from our St. Paul’s Lutheran Seminary convocation held May 12-14 at the aptly named St. Paul Lutheran Church in Salisbury, North Carolina. The topic of that convocation was “The Office of the Ministry.”

SPLS now offers the Th.D. – We are excited to announce that St. Paul Lutheran Seminary is partnering with Kairos University in Sioux Falls, SD to establish an accredited Doctorate in Theology (Th.D.). The Th.D. is a research degree, preparing candidates for deep theological reflection, discussion, writing, leadership in the church and service towards the community. The goal of the program is to develop leaders in the Lutheran church who are qualified to teach in institutions across the globe, to engage in theological and biblical research to further the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and to respond with faithfulness to any calling within the church. Those who are accepted into and complete the program will receive all instruction from SPLS professors and will receive an accredited (ATS) degree from Kairos University.

The general area of study of the Th.D. program is in systematic theology. Specializations offered within the degree include, but are not limited to: Reformation studies, evangelical homiletics, and law and gospel dialectics. The sub-disciplines within the areas of specialization are dependent upon the interest of the student provided they have a qualified and approved mentor. Other general areas of study, such as biblical

studies, will be forthcoming. For the full description of the program, go to https://semlc.org/academic-programs/ If you are interested in supporting our effort to produce faithful teachers of Christ’s church, contact Jon Jensen jjensen@semlc.org. All prospective student inquiries can be directed to Dr. Marney Fritts mfritts@semlc.org.

Giving - Please consider making a generous contribution to St. Paul Lutheran Seminary at: https://semlc.org/support-st-paul-lutheran-seminary/.

I hope you enjoy this issue of SIMUL! If you have any questions about the journal or about St. Paul Lutheran Seminary, please shoot me an email at dennisdimauro@yahoo.com

HOW C. S. LEWIS HELPED LEAD ME TO LUTHERANISM

Gene Edward Veith

When I was a teenager, I was big fan of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. One of the blurbs on the back of my Ballantine edition of the trilogy expressed how the fantasy novels made me feel: “here are beauties that pierce like swords or burn like cold iron.” We lived in a small town in Oklahoma, but occasionally my parents would drive us all to Tulsa, the big city, and when we did, we would go to a bookstore. Randomly browsing the shelves on one visit, I saw a name that I recognized: C. S. Lewis. He was the one who wrote the line about beauties that pierce like swords and burn like cold iron!1 I opened the book and saw that it was dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien! I had to buy that book, so, using the money I earned from my job at the Dairy Queen, I bought Screwtape Letters. After reading Lewis’s preface, I remember marveling, “He really believes in the devil!” I found the novel itself, with its combination of satirical humor and ironic spiritual counsel, entrancing. I was raised in a mainline liberal Protestant denomination and had never heard anything like this. “Here is someone,” I thought, “who takes all of that old stuff in

Christianity seriously.”

Mere Christianity

I had to read more. I next bought Mere Christianity. This one blew me away. My church had no creeds and let us believe whatever we wanted, though I was aware of Jesus and the Bible. But Lewis was showing me actual theology. When I got to the part in the book about the Incarnation, I was thunderstruck. Jesus is God? God became a human being! I had never even heard that before. This struck me as beyond wonderful, giving me a completely different way of thinking about God— not as an abstraction looking down on us from up above, but as a real person who came down from heaven to become one of us.

I was so stimulated by what I was learning from Lewis about the Incarnation that I wanted to talk to one of our ministers about it. I shared my excitement with a youth minister, fresh out of seminary. “Well,” he told me, “we don’t really stress that anymore.”

Deflated, I began to look elsewhere. Lewis said that he was simply writing about “mere Christianity,” the beliefs common to all Christians from all denominations. But I found mere Christianity hard to find. I saw traces in my Baptist friends, but they didn’t have much theology. I could see some of it in the Catholic church, but it was the 1960s and the services I visited and the priests I talked to were caught up in post-Vatican II

How the Anglican Lewis Led Me to Luther

I kept reading Lewis and then the books that he read that were instrumental in his coming to faith. I learned more and more, but books alone are no substitute for a church.

I went off to college, got married, went to grad school. Having exhausted my C. S. Lewis-inspired reading list, I finally read the Bible, which had a big impact. We started hanging out with campus evangelicals, though we still attended that same mainline Protestant church.

I wrote my dissertation about the 17th century Christian poet George Herbert, focusing on how he was influenced by the Reformation. This had me reading the Anglican Reformers, Puritans, Calvin, and my personal favorite Luther.

My first academic job took us back to small town Oklahoma. My wife and I resolved to find a church that believed in the Bible and in the Gospel, so we started church-shopping. We visited a Lutheran congregation, where we were overwhelmed with the liturgy—“It’s like stepping back into the Middle Ages,” my wife said, which for us was a good thing—and I was amazed to see that the church still taught what I had been studying in my dissertation. We took the adult instruction class and became Lutherans. Since then, I have been going deeper and deeper into the Lutheran tradition, which I have found unutterably satisfying. Though many factors and life experiences brought us to Lutheranism, I credit C. S. Lewis with starting me on my way. Lewis was not a Lutheran. Anglicans,

even conservative ones like Lewis, are characterized by doctrinal latitude, their main point of unity being liturgical worship according to the Book of Common Prayer. I can now see clearly where Lewis falls short according to Lutheran confessional standards. And yet, Lewis is often helpful to a Lutheran perspective anyway.

For example, Lewis is weak on the Atonement. He writes,

“The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. . . . Theories about Christ’s death are not Christianity: they are explanations about how it works. Christians would not all agree as to how important these theories are. My own church—the Church of England does not lay down any one of them as the right one. The Church of Rome goes a bit further. But I think they will all agree that the thing itself is infinitely more important than any explanations that theologians have produced.”2

True enough, perhaps, but we Lutherans would agree that the “theory” is quite important. Nevertheless, it was Lewis who made me grasp the doctrine of the Substitutionary Atonement. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan substitutes himself for the rotten sinner Edmund, whom we

readers have been made to despise, dying in his place in order to save him.3 I still remember the exhilaration I felt when I read that, seeing myself in Edmund and realizing what it meant for the Incarnate Son of God to die for me.

Lewis on the Biblical Critics

Lewis was weak on the Bible. He did not believe in the inerrancy of Scripture.4 And yet, he wrote one of the most devastating critiques of the historical-critical approach to the Bible in his essay “Fern Seeds and Elephants,”5 in which he writes:

“The undermining of the old orthodoxy has been mainly the work of divines engaged in New Testament criticism. The authority of experts in that discipline is the authority in deference to whom we are asked to give up a huge mass of beliefs shared in common by the early Church, the Fathers, the Middle Ages, the reformers, and even the nineteenth century. I want to explain what it is that makes me skeptical about this authority. . . . First then, whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgment, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading. . . .I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage. . .Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or

successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative.. . . [Second], all theology of the liberal type involves at some point—and often involves throughout—the claim that the real behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by His followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars. . . .The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of those advantages, is in my opinion preposterous. . . .

Thirdly, I find in these theologians a constant use of the principle that the miraculous does not occur.”

Finally, after supporting these objections, Lewis calls out the sheer speculation that characterizes so much of modern Bible scholarship, pointing out that he knows from first-hand experience that the critics who have confidently reconstructed the origins and sources of his writings have all been wrong! So how can we trust the source critics who are working with texts written nearly two thousand years ago?

Purgatory

There are other areas in which Lewis fell short of Lutheran orthodoxy. For example, Lewis believed in purgatory.

There are other areas in which Lewis fell short of Lutheran orthodoxy. For example, Lewis believed in purgatory.

While admitting that the Reformers were right to cast doubt on “’the Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory’ as that Romish doctrine had then become,” he writes,

“Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, ‘It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into joy’? Should we not reply, ‘With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.’”6

Well, purgatory was never described like a bracing shower, but as centuries of torment. The “Romish doctrine” from Dante through today has always been that God requires temporal punishment even for sins that have been forgiven. And yet, strangely, this punishment can be cancelled, not by the atonement of Christ but by indulgences, prayers for the dead, and the intercession of the saints. Here Lewis is making up his own belief. If he is not being Protestant, he is not being Catholic either.

Distinction of Law and Gospel

Nevertheless, Lewis’s writing also includes elements that are usually associated only with Lutherans. In Mere Christianity, he elegantly applies the distinction between Law and Gospel. After writing extensively about the objective reality of the moral law, in his Book I: “Right and Wrong as a

Clue to the Meaning of the Universe,” Lewis ends that section with a chapter entitled “We Have Cause to be Uneasy.”

“Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power— it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor. When you have realized that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. . . .They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God.”7

It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.

Having first set up his readers with the reality of the Law and shown that they have not kept it, Lewis then moves into Book II: “What Christians Believe.”

Lewis Held to Many Tenets of Lutheran Theology

Unlike most Protestants but like all Lutherans, Lewis has a high view of the Sacraments. I remember being caught short in my pre-Lutheran days when I read, “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”8 Here is Luther’s neighbor-centered ethic, but I didn’t realize that. What struck me is that “the Blessed Sacrament. . .is the holiest object presented to your senses.” I wondered, how can that be? Now that I am a Lutheran, I know. As Lewis said,

“I do not know and can’t imagine what the disciples understood Our Lord to mean when, His body still unbroken and His blood unshed, He handed them the bread and wine, saying they were His body and blood. . . .Yet I find no difficulty in believing that the veil between the worlds, nowhere else (for me) so opaque to the intellect, is nowhere else so thin and permeable to divine operation. Here a hand from the hidden country touches not only my soul but my body.”9

Lewis also understands vocation in Luther’s sense, not just as a “job,” much less as a “work ethic,” but as a sphere in which God has placed us for service. “A sacred calling is not limited to ecclesiastical functions. The man who is weeding a field of turnips is also serving God,” he wrote. ““The great thing is to be found at one’s post as a child of God.”10

Lewis also expresses the Lutheran theology of worship as having to do with the reception of God’s gifts:

“It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men. . . Even in Judaism the essence of the sacrifice was not really that men gave bulls and goats to God, but that by their so doing God gave Himself to men; in the central act of our own worship of course this is far clearer—there it is manifestly, even physically, God who gives and we who receive.”11

Lewis never, as far as I have been able to find, has published a bad word about Luther. He praises Luther’s “geniality,” especially over against his nemesis Thomas More, who usually gets the better press:

“When we turn from the religious works of More to Luther’s Table Talk we are at once struck by the geniality of the latter. If Luther is right, we have waked from nightmare into sunshine: if he is wrong, we have entered into a fools’ paradise. The burden of his charge against the Catholics is that they have needlessly tormented us with scruples.”12

It’s All about the Gospel

As a literary historian, his primary occupation, Lewis sets the record straight about the Reformation, dispelling the misconceptions about the Reformers and the “Puritans.”

“Whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy, or severe; nor did their enemies bring any such charge against them,” he writes. “Luther, [More] said, had made converts precisely

Sir Thomas More

because ‘he spiced al the poison’ with ‘libertee’ (ibid. III. vii). Protestantism was not too grim, but too glad, to be true.” The Catholic side was all about Law; the Reformers, especially the early ones such as Luther, were all about the Gospel:

“In the mind of a Tyndale or Luther, as in the mind of St. Paul himself, this theology was by no means an intellectual construction made in the interests of speculative thought. It springs directly out of a highly specialized religious experience. . . .The man who has passed through it feels like one who has waked from nightmare into ecstasy. Like an accepted lover, he feels that he has done nothing, and never could have done anything, to deserve such astonishing happiness. . . . All the initiative has been on God’s side; all has been free, unbounded grace. And all will continue to be free, unbounded grace. His own puny and ridiculous efforts would be as helpless to retain the joy as they would have been to achieve it in the first place. Fortunately they need not. Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned. ‘Works’ have no ‘merit,’ though of course faith, inevitably, even unconsciously, flows out into works of love at once. He is not saved because he does works of love; he does works of love because he is saved. It is faith alone that has saved him: faith bestowed by sheer gift. From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motivescratchings, all the Protestant doctrines originally sprang.”13

Conclusion

Though C. S. Lewis was not a Lutheran, he was very instrumental in making a Lutheran of me. Though confessional Lutheranism is not “ecumenical,” as he tried to be, in confessional Lutheranism I finally found “mere Christianity,” a theology that embraces the whole scope and range of Christianity, being sacramental and liturgical like the Catholics, while also being Biblical and evangelical like the Protestants. Only a rigorous theology can hold such poles together. Lewis nourished a yearning in me for what I have found in Lutheran spirituality: Truths “that pierce like swords” and “burn like cold iron.”

Though C. S. Lewis was not a Lutheran, he was very instrumental in making a Lutheran of me.

Gene Edward Veith is a retired English professor and college administrator, most recently at Patrick Henry College and Concordia University Wisconsin. He has written or edited 30 books, including The Spirituality of the Cross, God at Work, and Embracing Your Lutheran Identity. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. He and his wife live in St. Louis.

Endnotes:

1The line is from Lewis’s review of Lord of the Rings collected in On Stories and Other Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 84.

2C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 57.

3C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 146-160.

4See, for example, C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958), 109-119.

5Collected in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harper Collins, 1981), 191208.

6C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 108-109.

7Lewis, Mere Christianity, 38-39.

8C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965), 15.

9Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 103.

10Lewis, “Cross-Examination,” in God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 264, 266.

11Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 93.

12“Donne and Love Poetry,” in C. S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harper Collins, 1961), pp. 116-117.

13C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 33-34.

INTO THE WAVE: PERELANDRA’S FLOATING LANDS IN LUTHERAN

PERSPECTIVE

Amy Lakeman

Lutheran theology is a theology of lived tensions law and gospel, sinner and saint. It’s a theology of relationship, prioritizing trust in God over reliance on our own faculties. And it’s a theology that, frankly, really annoyed my peers in a 2020 humanities seminar. The course explored great Western writers’ understandings of the question “How should we live?” Its participants were people of goodwill and strong intellect. Happily, Luther’s “Concerning Christian Liberty” had a place on the syllabus. I eagerly anticipated the discussion.

To my surprise, its opening salvos emphasized participants’ dissatisfaction with the text. Sure, Christians are free “lords of all things” and also “servant[s] of all and subject to all.”1 “But what,” one student questioned, “do I do with that?” For her, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, with its daily checkboxes for thirteen virtues in a “Plan for Attaining Moral

Perfection,”2 had stronger appeal. I encounter discomfort with Luther among secular political theorists, as well. His emphasis on man’s standing before God and the accompanying relational anthropology, as well as his complex positions vis-àvis reason and scholasticism, can present challenges.3 Luther didn’t sit down to write systematic philosophy. He wrote of God’s dealings with us, rather than of what our ethical resources can achieve.

Enter Perelandra. The second installment in Lewis’s science fiction trilogy— with its studied translation of medieval thought and its triumphant imagination of unfallen Man’s kingly capacities can appear to be a “strange bedfellow” for Lutheran thought. Although Perelandra might not seem like the most “Lutheran” of Lewis’s works, its emphases on lived tension and Christ’s redemptive work, made clear in Lewis’s choice of setting for his Eden-esque drama, provides much for Lutherans to love.

In this article, I will review themes Lewis sought to incorporate into Perelandra from medieval and ancient thought, highlighting how these themes frame Lewis’s elaboration of Perelandra’s setting—the famed floating islands of Venus. I will then explore how this setting and the core conflict born of it speak to Lutheran thought. The Perelandrian characters’ relationships to “fixed land,” along with protagonist Ransom’s role in setting right those relationships, underscore how God’s grace in Christ frees contemporary Lutherans to dwell in living, balanced trust.

Dancing in Deep Heaven: Perelandra in Intellectual Context

Perelandra recounts the second voyage into space of Dr. Elwin Ransom, a middle-age academic living in 1940s England. Having been kidnapped and taken to Mars in the trilogy’s first novel, Ransom is now willingly transported to Venus by “eldila” —angels, in the trilogy’s language. When he arrives, he meets one of the planet’s two rational inhabitants: the Green Lady, the unfallen Mother of that world.

As the novel unfolds, Ransom discovers his task. He must help the Lady resist the temptations of the Evil One, who has entered the planet via the possession of Ransom’s former kidnapper, Dr. Weston. The novel recounts the luscious beauty Ransom finds in Perelandra, the Green Lady’s paradisal innocence and splendor, and the gripping battle of temptation and persuasion between Ransom and the demonic forces seeking Perelandra’s fall.

While it imaginatively probes what might have occurred in our own earthly Paradise, Lewis’s repackaging of Eve’s temptation isn’t only an exercise in understanding our Mother. The Ransom Trilogy grew from a wager between Lewis and fellow Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien, who felt that “there was too little of what they liked” in stories.4 Lewis sought to craft a mythology within science fiction that would bring medieval thinking to modern imaginations.5 This effort fit into a broader project across all Lewis’s fiction, as he aimed to serve as a “modern Boethius,” translating medieval thought for the modern reader.6

Throughout Perelandra, references to antiquity and

medievalism abound. Terrestrial myths come to life in unfallen Venus. Ransom’s first impressions of Perelandra evoke the Hesperides’ garden of Greek mythology.7 This is not accidental; the Hesperides’ role as apple guarders points to the novel’s broader theme, a temptation tale influenced by Milton’s Paradise Lost. 8 Lewis’s well-documented literary and imaginative fascination with Aphrodite also expresses itself richly in Perelandra. 9 Throughout Ransom’s experience, Venus bears all the characteristics of the goddess of love and of the “third heaven” of medieval cosmology: it is fertile, sensuous, watery, maternal, luscious, and inexpressibly beautiful.

The Ransom Trilogy also displays Lewis’s Platonism, with each book closely tied to one part of the Platonic soul.10 Perelandra deals with the “belly,” or the appetitive part of the soul. For Plato, the appetitive soul pertains to bodily aspects of human life, “that with which it loves, hungers, thirsts, and feels the flutter and titillation of other desires.”11 Thus in Perelandra, Lewis works to explore what unfallen human appetite might look like. He depicts a fully-embodied life, bursting with movement from one uncorrupted and gratified desire to the next, from pleasure to pleasure.

Their Only Shape is Inconstant: Floating Lands as More than Setting

What has all this to do with Lutheranism? For most Lutheran laypeople, Luther is understood as a theologian first

focused on sin and what God does about it. Through the Law, we see our utter brokenness before the Father. The Green Lady’s perfection, amidst the staggering abundance of Perelandra, seems unfamiliar ground for nurturing the seeds of Lutheran understanding.

Moreover, the extent to which Luther fits within the Christian Platonist tradition and the nature of his contributions to medieval scholasticism have been matters of complex academic debate.12 Of course, the Lutheran tradition does speak to these questions, but to my mind, the critical touchpoint between Perelandra and Lutheran thought comes not in these debates, but rather in the novel’s setting. The medievalism Lewis worked into the Perelandrian landscape is essentially important in grasping the full import of this setting, and it is from the setting and the characters’ relationship to it that Lutherans have most to learn.

When Ransom first enters Perelandra, through a spectacle of colors and motion, he realizes he is floating on the waves of a green ocean under a heraldic golden sky. He has been “born” into the waters of Venus;13 there is no land in sight. With time he becomes weary of swimming, but on the edge of fear, he grasps the fringe of a floating mat of aquatic plants, tightly woven as turf and able to support him. He then finds the floating island full of paradisal fruit. Ransom has no need for concern over where he will rest or what he will eat while on Venus. In this unfallen world, his appetite can wander from good to good, taking whatever meets his hand.

This geography has more than bodily significance. The Green Lady knows no need for stability or security, because

her entire environment is an abundant gift. Her life is constantly in motion, in a state of complete reliance on what God will bring. “[T]hat is the nature of the floating islands of Perelandra… their only shape is the inconstant shape of the water beneath them.”14

As Ransom’s situation unfolds, he learns that Perelandra does have “fixed” as well as floating lands. There is a firm stone island like those of our own world in the midst of the Perelandrian sea. But God (called Maleldil in the language of Perelandra) has forbidden the Lady from staying on the Fixed Land overnight. The Fixed Lands of Perelandra are Eden’s Tree, and the central desire of the evil spirit possessing Weston is subtly to persuade the Lady to disobey this prohibition. Evil beckons her to grasp at the stability of the fixed land, disobeying Maleldil’s voice and shattering the bliss of Venusian paradise.

With this central conflict, the full import of Perelandra’s setting is made evident. Lewis claimed that the floating islands were not initially intended as a teaching device. Rather, they came to him as a mental picture before he conceived of the novel’s plot.15 Around this image, he wrote a myth to bring his reader to enjoy certain truths. However, if the islands weren’t initially intended to teach, Lewis’s genius in uniting threads of medieval thought nevertheless imbues them with great meaning.

The Green Lady knows no need for stability or security, because her entire environment is an abundant gift. Her life is constantly in motion, in a state of complete reliance on what God will bring.

In Dante’s Paradiso, the sensuousness of those in the sphere of Venus 16 suggests the seeds of abundant, lavish receiving. With Plato’s appetitive soul, we see desire’s impulse

to go beyond what it receives. From Milton’s Paradise Lost, we gain the structure of the temptation story. And in Venus herself, born on the seafoam, we see how the “mental picture” of floating islands became the perfect device for bringing these themes together, giving the setting an essential role in the novel. The floating lands of Venus, in their abundance and provision, are the perfect environment for walking with trust, hand in hand with Maleldil.17 The fixed lands, though they provide an opportunity for obedience, also beckon the Lady to walk out of trust and into self-reliance.

To Desire the Fixed: Living Tensions in Lutheran Life and Thought

Here we see our own relationship to the floating and fixed lands. In Christian thought and life, temptations to cling to control—represented by the “Fixed Land”—continually arise. “The reason for not yet living on the Fixed Land is now so plain,” exclaims the Lady when she finally understands. “How could I wish to live there except because it was Fixed? And why should I desire the Fixed except to make sure—to be able on one day to command where I should be the next and what should happen to me? It was to reject the wave to draw my hands out of Maleldil’s, to say to Him, ‘Not thus, but thus’ to put in our own power what times should roll towards us…”18

For the Lady in her unfallen innocence, the Fixed Land represents possibility the potential to obey or disobey. Among fallen humans, however, seeking the “fixed land” of control, stability, and certainty is a way of life. Our worries

over finances, ambitions, and self-presentation betray this fact. For my fellow scholars in the humanities seminar, control looked like self-improvement, contributing something concrete toward their own ethical good standing. For many Lutherans, the error can come on the other side—we cling to our “good theology” as fixed land, turning the knowledge that we’re not “hung up on our own works” into a matter of prideful security.

Theologically, our proclivity toward fixed land can also look like rejection of challenging questions in favor of straightforward answers that feel more “solid.” Rejection of neat categories and intellectual certainty are the very qualities in Luther that can confuse academic audiences. Biermann writes, “Christian theology, especially when practiced with a Lutheran emphasis, is consummately about dualities. Dualities are deeply embedded in faithful Christian confession.… [T]his penchant for dialectical truths that must be held in tension…is not some sectarian peculiarity or willful trait. It is simply the inevitable byproduct of a preoccupation with God’s word incarnate in Christ and revealed in scripture…”19 As Lutherans, we attest to tensions in our thinking and our living: we deal with those around us as “at once saints and sinners.” We proclaim Christ fully human and fully divine. We point to God’s work in the temporal and spiritual kingdoms. We wrestle with the “now and not yet” of eschatology.

We cling to our “good theology” as fixed land, turning the knowledge that we’re not “hung up on our own works” into a matter of prideful security.

Perelandra, in its unfallen state, offers a contrast to our

experience. Ransom often finds that two truths that would sit uncomfortably together in our world are fully expressed with ease in the Green Lady and her Perelandrian environment.20 Of the Lady’s wisdom and innocence, Ransom finds “Opposites met in her and were fused in a fashion for which we have no images... The alert, inner silence which looked out from those eyes overawed him; yet at any moment she might laugh like a child…”21

We are fallen, and struggle to grasp God’s fullness. Guided by the Spirit, we work to hold scriptural truths in lived tension, but too often trust is swamped by confusion. The enticement of “fixed land” draws us toward one pole or the other of the tightly-bound dualities that frame our faith life. “[T]he failure to preserve critical tensions in theology without succumbing to a mutually exclusive polarity or binary opposition is the culprit behind almost all errant teaching,” and thus also to blame for problems in Christian lives, Biermann concludes.22 We seek the safety of the “fixed”—in our lives, in our thoughts, in our salvation. But as the Lady rightly asks, having chosen the fixed land, how can we climb “back into love and trust again?”

“I too am Called Ransom”: Redeeming Relationship with the Fixed Lands

As the Green Lady’s temptation toward the fixed land persists, Ransom finds himself repeatedly thinking, “This can’t go on.” Satan’s onslaught, through the shell of Weston, seems more and more irresistible with time. Surely the Lady’s innocence will shatter.

One night, in the course of a prayerful monologue that constitutes some of Lewis’s most chillingly beautiful and intellectually honest writing, Ransom learns the full import of his role on Perelandra. Ransom is not meant simply to spar intellectually with the Tempter. In Perelandra, our embodied natures are on full display: Ransom experiences all the pleasures of the “belly,”23 he argues against Weston’s worship of “the Life Force” solely for its spiritual qualities,24 and his role in the central conflict will be bodily, as well. Since the Tempter’s foothold on Perelandra is through Weston’s body, Ransom must fight and slay this body to bring the temptation to an end.

When faced with the realization of his full task, Ransom initially recoils. First, he sees the idea of relieving the Lady’s temptation by external means, through brute force, as a sort of cop-out. His logic doesn’t hold up for long in light of the Incarnation. Then, he sees the idea of himself as Maleldil’s bodily representative on Venus as self-aggrandizing “megalomania.” But this argument falls flat, as well. Christ’s work as our earthly ransom on the cross has made us His representatives; Maleldil reminds the protagonist that He, too, is “called Ransom,” and through Ransom he will now work.

The physical conflict tests to the full the courageous spirit Ransom developed on Mars.25 In his sacrificial efforts to help the Green Lady, Ransom is clearly a Christ-figure. Near the novel’s conclusion, Ransom spends three days in the depths of the earth —in an emphatically “fixed” setting that has

In his sacrificial efforts to help the Green Lady, Ransom is clearly a Christ-figure.

hallmarks of Dante’s Inferno. 26 Before the end, he will both receive a wound to the heel that never fully heals and crush the head of the Tempter.27 Ransom acts as Maleldil’s representative, and by Maleldil’s hand working through Ransom, Perelandra’s innocence remains unshattered.

After the battle, Ransom participates in the coronation of the Green Lady and the King. Having resisted temptation, they ascend to the throne of Perelandra to rule. Significantly, the coronation occurs on the Fixed Land, no longer forbidden. Ransom’s actions have permitted the Lady to retain her innocence. The Fixed Lands are no more under a prohibition; right relationship is secured, and the ground is now firmly paved with trust.

Receive and Be Glad: Perelandra as a Spur to Lutheran Evangelism

The triumphant grace of Maleldil, working through his representative, resounds through the core drama of Perelandra. With the story’s details in mind, its distinctive relevance for Lutheran thinking and life becomes clear. The relational nature of our walk with God, full of tensions in our own “now-but-not-yet” world, is underscored by its fluid setting. The ascent to the fixed ground of a fully restored relationship with God, which we on the “silent planet” glimpse, but still await in eager expectation, is made plain in Lewis’s imaginative world of innocence retained. While Lewis may not have set out to teach with his floating lands, the truths they convey, drawn from the rich background of his medieval

thinking, certainly make them didactic in character.

With this teaching comes the novel’s spur to evangelism, as well. Like Ransom, Lutherans recognize that we have all become “little Christs” since the Incarnation. “[A]s our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other...”28

Like

Ransom, Lutherans recognize that we have all become “little Christs” since the Incarnation.

One way Perelandra equips us to do so is by pointing our neighbor to the heights of perfection we have lost. “[L]ife on what Lewis called our ‘silent planet’ is one cut off… we enjoy only the most remote inklings of…divine goodness.”29 Instead, for postmodern people, life’s quest for control alternates between hedonism and self-justification. On one hand, our neighbor ignores larger questions about divine goodness in a quest to keep pleasure at his beck and call. Alternatively, his distraction is punctuated by frenzied self-help, attempts at moral improvement that would make my peers in the humanities seminar proud. It can be hard to find opportunities to preach the Gospel when those around us are unaware of their brokenness.

Helpfully, the holiness and splendor of Perelandra’s King and Queen draw an unbearable contrast with our fallen state, for both Ransom and for the reader. Lewis famously wrote, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a

holiday at the sea.”

30 Lewis’s examination of the unfallen life helps us see our own fallenness more clearly. This, in turn, allows the Law to work, so that we can ultimately point our neighbor to the splendor that awaits him in Christ. When the King and Queen are crowned, a new birth occurs on the morning star.31 As Lutheran Christians, we await such a birth on our own planet. Perelandra offers meaningful support in our waiting: it richly awakens our imaginations with medieval thought, encourages us to embrace lived tensions in its undulating setting, and reminds us of what a gloriously restored relationship will be, as the humble Dr. Ransom points us to the true Morning Star.32

Dr. Amy Lakeman is a wife, mother, and part-time scholar. She received her PhD in Government from Harvard University. She is a long-time Lewisphile and a member of Trinity Lutheran Church (LCMS) in Springfield, Illinois.

Endnotes:

1Martin Luther, Concerning Christian Liberty, produced by Elizabeth T. Knuth and David Widger (Project Gutenberg, 2013), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1911/1911-h/1911-h.htm.

2Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Frank Woodworth Pine and produced by Turgut Dincer and Brian Sogard (Project Gutenberg, 2022), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm.

3Jennifer Hockenbery Dragseth, ed., The Devil’s Whore: Reason and Philosophy in the Lutheran Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2011); For a brief summary on this topic, see Robert Stern and Volker Leppin, “Martin Luther,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (Spring 2025 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2025/entries/luther, especially sections 3-4.

4Martha C. Sammons, A Guide Through C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy (Westchester, IL: Cornerstone Books, 1980), 16.

5In doing so, Lewis sought to claim the science fiction genre for Christianity. Tolkien’s task was to craft a time travel tale that served the same function, and Numenor grew from this project.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Numenor, edited by Brian Sibley (New York: William Morrow, 2022), xxi; See also James D. Lopp, III, “The Fissure Within the Spiritual Geography of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra,” in Inklings Forever, Volume IV: A Collection of Essays Presented at The Fourth Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C.S. Lewis & Friends (Upland, IN: Taylor University, 2004).

6I use “medieval” broadly and include works of ancient thought, in parallel to Lewis’s understanding that these authors were all “in league” and part of the “Long Middle Ages.” See Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press [Kindle Edition]), 11.

7C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Scribner, 2003 [1972]), 40. All subsequent references in this article to Perelandra come from this edition; The Hesperides were the “Daughters of the Evenings” in Greek Mythology, who guarded a tree of golden apples. Lewis also associates this myth with Venus in The Magician’s Nephew, his Venusian Chronicle of Narnia. Michael Ward, Planet Narnia (Oxford: Oxford University Press [Kindle Edition], 2008), 165.

8Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (San Francisco: Harper, 1996), 221.

9Ward, Planet Narnia, 164.

10Hayden Head, “Triad within Triad: The Tripartite Soul as a Structural Design in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy” in C.S. Lewis and the Inklings: Reflections on Faith, Imagination and Modern Technology, edited by Jason Fisher, Mark R. Hall, Salwa Khoddam (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015); Rhys Laverty, “A Taste of Paradise: Naming, Restraining, and Embracing Pleasure on Perelandra,” in Life on the Silent Planet, edited by Rhys Laverty (Landrum, SC: Davenant Press, 2024).

11Plato, The Republic, section 439(d), as cited in Head, “Triad within Triad,” 67.

12See, for example, the debates outlined in Ilmari Karimies, Martin Luther's Understanding of Faith and Reality (1513-1521): The Influence of Augustinian Platonism and Illumination in Luther's Thought (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022), and Gifford A. Grobien “What is the Natural Law?” in Natural Law: A Lutheran Reappraisal, edited by Robert C. Baker and Roland Cap Ehlke (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2011), 32-33; I note that Lewis’s Platonism exceeds that of Luther, especially in his adoption of Christian Platonists’ influence in his angelology and certain other aspects of his theology. James Bryson, “‘It’s all in Plato’: Platonism, Cambridge Platonism, and C.S. Lewis,” Journal of Inklings Studies 11:1 (2021), 7.

13Christiana Hale, “Enjoyment and Contemplation: The Green Lady, Self-Knowledge, and Growth in Maturity,” in Life on the Silent Planet, edited by Rhys Laverty (Landrum, SC: Davenant Press, 2024), 82.

14Lewis, Perelandra, 36.

15Hooper, C.S. Lewis, 220; The image may have been influenced by the wandering lands of Spenser’s Fairie Queen. Paul R. Rovang “A Spenserian Returns to Earth: ‘The Faerie Queene’ in ‘That Hideous Strength,’” Mythlore 34:2 (2016), 38.

16Ward, Planet Narnia, 166.

17Dante is a potential source of inspiration for the floating lands in multiple ways. See also Laverty, “A Taste of Paradise,” 144.

18Perelandra, 179.

19Joel Biermann, Wholly Citizens (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), xiii.

20These themes also arise in the repeat dualities that the reader encounters, including in Lewis’s approach to gender later in the novel, or the way that natural/supernatural or myth/fact intersect in an unfallen world.

21Lewis, Perelandra, 56.

22Biermann, Wholly Citizens, xv.

23Head, “Triad within Triad,” 67.

24Lewis, Perelandra, 78; see also Lewis’s note at the end of Ch. 4 of Mere Christianity for a nonfiction iteration of this argument.

25Head, “Triad within Triad,” 67.

26Sammons, A Guide, 93.

27Gen. 3:15, English Standard Version Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016). Though Lewis clearly intends Ransom as a Christ-figure, he also addresses the distinction between salvation as “prevention” in the case of Perelandra and salvation as “repair” in the case of our own world. See Lewis, Perelandra, 103-104, and 122-123. See also note 3 in Laverty, “A Taste of Paradise,” 124. I thank Rev. Aaron Mueller for highlighting this distinction and for his thoughtful comments on this piece.

28Luther, Concerning Christian Liberty, par. 79.

29Bryson, “It’s all in Plato,” 7.

30C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2001 [1949]), 26.

31Ward, Planet Narnia, 169.

32Rev. 22:16, English Standard Version Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016).

MEN WITHOUT CHESTS

Henry Corcoran

C.S. Lewis once referred to graduates of Britain’s secondary schools as “men without chests,” envisioning nearly disembodied figures with enormous, overstuffed heads. The schools produced well-informed scholars, young people with brains bursting with facts and concepts, theories and data about history and literature, mathematics and science, yet profoundly underdeveloped in “virtue and enterprise,” or as the Greeks thought, in their viscera, their abdomens, their chests.

In measuring the contributions that he offered to the world, Clive Staples Lewis was a man with a chest. The works he produced bubbled out of a world-class intellect and a heart transformed by the Word of God and the Holy Sacraments, a life of faith and prayer, service and sacrifice. He balanced staggering left-brained intellectual vigor with just as astounding right-brained creative imagination. He wrote colorful adventure stories and penned lyrical poems, then stretching to the other half of his brain, he wooed readers through the rugged and wild deserts of philosophy, blazing pathways of the Spirit with carefully constructed arguments and counter arguments - logical and theological.

As a scholar and a creative, his passion to serve others through his vocations finds expression in his advice to university students during wartime. He counsels:

“[The learned life] has indirect values which are especially important today. If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now, not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground, would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”1

Not just advice offered, he walked his talk. Yes, a man with a chest.

How Lewis Discipled My Imagination

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

Rather than write an abstract eulogy for a great man, I want to share with you my personal gains as a devoted and grateful reader of both Lewis’ stories and essays. Each type of literature touched my life differently. Please turn with me first to his imaginative projects, his stories.

I owe so much to C.S. Lewis’ storytelling - mostly gratitude. Lewis discipled my imagination. He offered balance for my

spiritual growth. College and then seminary in orthodox Lutheran circles gave me the genuine and necessary and yet incomplete gifts of seminal understandings of biblical and Lutheran confessional theology. The result was a sketchy awareness of doctrinal development through the Christian era, and an uneven collection of largely unformed skills and ideas for doing pastoral work.

When I first donned my pastoral “dog-collar” (a term Lewis himself used), looking at my seminary days in the rear-mirror, I was a “man without a chest,” a man with an imagination largely unfurnished and habits of virtue underdeveloped, but with wellworn pathways for rational and theological thinking. I had a big head but an emaciated body. I needed help. Through his stories, C.S. Lewis offered healing, the balance I needed. God used him to help me grow a modest chest.

Lewis' stories, starting with the adventures of Pevensie children and then in the unfolding saga of other children in their interactions with Aslan,2 opened the eyes of my heart to see how spiritual truth can be told in tales, that adventure stories can reveal what a living faith might say and do.

When the last Narnian battle concluded, Lewis then took me by hand on a journey from the insubstantial illusions of hell to the weightiness of heaven,3 bridging the great divorce of those realms, a journey along which together we caught glimpses of the wrestlings of various shadow characters, as eternal Joy called them, to turn from the things they love – one his good deeds, another great learning, yet another the fear of being taken in, pride for one, pleasure for another, art for the artist, and even for one, her vocation as mother - to turn to the One who loves

them, the greater Love, the Lamb that was slain and now lives, the central Character of the Story.

With Lewis as companion, watching their struggles, I found my love of things temporal, like my educational achievements, my knowledge of theology and philosophy, my pride, various pleasures and even my vocation itself, all my idols, through the daily drowning of the old Hank (after all he is a strong swimmer), these idols had to be pried from my clinging fingers and offered to God, so that I might learn to love the One eternal and living Christ first and foremost.

All the Bible stories I collected in Sunday school and at VBS, and then the narratives that I devoured in my faithful Bible-in-a-year lectionary plan began a transposition from mostly leftbrained data – facts about character names, geographic settings, and even plot developments in the Bible - into an inhabitable story-world complete with three-dimensional characters and detailed descriptions. I met characters and events in Lewis' fictional writing that echo biblical characters and events.

With new eyes, I saw Eve in the throes of temptation through the lens of the Lady of Perelandra’s travails with evil.4 I was delighted to watch animals being birthed from the new-born ground in the Narnian story of creation maybe like the Spirit witnessed on the sixth day of creation. With fresh eyes, I gazed in wonder at the substitutionary atoning sacrifice of our Lord Jesus viewed through the sights and sounds, the smells and textures of Aslan’s death on the Stone Table.5 Yes, I even perceived with

Aslan

greater clarity the birth pangs of our own apocalyptic end times through the tribulations of the remnant of Narnians fighting their final battle.6

Praise be to God for C.S. Lewis and his imaginative echoes of Bible stories. Like a paint-by-the-numbers canvas that slowly takes on color, depth, and appeal, so those stories from scripture took on vivid emotional colors. Intriguing insights into its characters’ motives and actions bubbled up in my heart's mind. Thanks be to God for using Lewis to bring needed color and texture to my reading of biblical narratives. If you have not yet read Lewis, plunge into The Chronicles of Narnia - they will delight you. Wade into the heavenlies trilogy7 - they will form and inform you. And then immerse yourself in The Great Divorce - it will encourage your daily drowning of the old Adam and the springing forth of the new life you have in Christ, as it does me.8

Prince Caspian

Rather than conclude with this invitation to read the fiction of Lewis by offering broad generalities, please allow me a brief and specific example of Lewis' influence in my life. In Prince Caspian, 9 Lewis tells the story of a difficult duty, a story that blazed a trail in my heart. Lucy and her three siblings had been summoned to Narnia to help Prince Caspian claim his rightful place as the king of Narnia.

With a new companion, the dwarf Trumpkin, they journeyed from the ruins of Cair Paravel, the ancient royal castle, to join forces with the old Narnians, a cohort of supporters of the Prince – including talking animals, dwarves, centaurs and even a giant at

Aslan’s How, his place of sacrifice. However, the reinforcements became confused by the transformations of landscape that time had carved into the geography of the land and were impaired in their trek. At this point, Lucy, the youngest of the reinforcements, sees Aslan. The joy of reunion with the beloved Lion takes a challenging turn, because he tells her that they have taken the wrong path and must now follow him. Lucy soon discovers that only she can see the great Lion. She must follow Aslan, even as all the rest of her unseeing companions. resist and complain, protest and oppose.

I can relate. I too have been called to follow Jesus when I could faintly see Him and when some of my fellow travelers see him not. In learning about contemplative spirituality, and now guiding others through Ignatius’ Exercises, I find myself at odds with those scholars who, in their attempts to pigeonhole Jesus inside their own theological matrix have lost sight of the living Christ.

Yet, I do see Him. Consider the vast stretches of biblical narratives in the scriptures. Because narrative is a genre requiring imagination, the reader must bring to the storytelling her best efforts to recreate the sights and sounds, the textures and tastes, the customs and conditions, the culture and context of the story. The Author, the Lamb that was slain, intends that we imagine. Lewis guides us into such involvement. Biblical tales took place in real time and in real places. To refuse to see through the eyes of imagination, to close one’s ears to the guttural Hebrew voices, to withdraw fingers from touching the lamb’s skin and the tongue from tasting wine once water, is

Lucy

to refuse the invitation of the Creator to engage with His creation. Stories call us into experience. Textual clues add color and interest, drawing the reader into the various characters’ internal worlds of experience. This kind of imaginative involvement etches deeper lessons into our lives than would be possible through the didactic recounting of laws and principles, of simuls and solas (as important as they are).

Like Lucy, I am often tempted to-go-along-to-get-along. But Lewis’ tale of Lucy’s courage supplies to me the paradigm of fortitude I need to pursue my Lord against the opposition of critics. Imaginatively trying on her dilemma helps me to persist when the trail becomes boulder-strewn, mountainous, and daunting. C.S. Lewis invites us into adventure stories that require the ‘chests’ of the characters involved. By entering their internal worlds, and tasting their successes and failures, we too have the opportunity to better see our challenges and allow the Spirit to nurture the necessary virtues in our chests.

For me, reading C.S. Lewis’ fiction led to further feeding, this time the mostly left-brained feasting at the smorgasbord of his apologetic and ethical essays, his academic discussions of literature and storytelling, and his forays into theology, especially speculative theology. Sadly, because of space limitations, we cannot now turn in detail to Lewis’ contributions to Christian dogmatics and practice, narrative theology and literary analysis of the scriptures, or his winsome witness and apropos apologetics. Rather, we will briefly examine a glaring theological error and then turn to the richness of his famous sermon, The Weight of Glory.

Errors in Mere Christianity

I am deeply grateful for Lewis' fiction. However, my praise for his nonfiction is far more measured. We Lutherans abhor the blending of philosophy and theology. We pluck up and root out the pestilential weeds of logic and rational argument when they encroach upon the lush gardens of biblical theology. Lewis, a genuine Anglican and a consummate logician, was unfortunately not as suspicious of Aristotle nor as enamored of paradox as our own Luther, occasionally cultivating the thorns and thistles of reason rather than the fruit of the Spirit: the refreshing and lifeimparting truth. In Mere Christianity, Lewis neglects biblical truth in favor of his own reasoned ideas:

“The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter… Theories about Christ’s death are not Christianity: they are explanations of how it works. Christians would not all agree as to how important those theories are.10

Yet, we Lutherans are among those who think the explanations of how Christ’s atonement works to be important, in fact, centrally important. Lewis continues:

Yet, we Lutherans are among those who think the explanations of how Christ’s atonement works to be important, in fact, centrally important.

“The [explanation of how Christ’s sacrifice works] most people have heard is the one I mentioned before - the one

about our being let off because Christ has volunteered to bear a punishment instead of us. On the face of it that is a very silly theory. If God was prepared to let us off, why on earth did he not do so? And what possible point could there be in punishing an innocent person instead? None at all that I can see, if you are thinking of punishment in the policecourt sense. On the other hand, if you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying it on behalf of someone who has not. Or if you take ‘paying the penalty,’ not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense of ‘standing the racket’ or ‘footing the bill,’ then, of course it is a matter of common experience that, when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out which usually falls on a kind friend (my emphasis).”11

While we can rejoice that Lewis declares that Christ’s death ‘puts us right with God and gives us a fresh start,’ it is unfortunate that his reason muddies the proclamation. The ‘if God’ statement shifts his conversation from the grace of God to an evaluation of the reasonableness of God’s action in Christ, not unlike Eve’s unfortunate rethinking of God’s edict about the forbidden fruit. Having read many of his non-fiction works,12 this example stands alone as a compromise of biblical theology.

The Weight of Glory

This brief survey of his literature concludes with The Weight of Glory, Lewis’ sermon on 2nd Corinthians 4:17. The

sermon begins with a carefully constructed invitation to transfer his hearers’ attention on temporal experience to eternal glories. Listen in as the magician weaves his spell:

“If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolic relation to what will truly satisfy. In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness, I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that settled the matter.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the

beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune that we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Do you think I'm trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.”13

Conclusion

Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.

As we began our essay with Lewis’ critique of British secondary education, we conclude with Lewis contra the worldly philosophy foundational to all levels of learning. Why? Because by turning hearts away from the divine realities, by deafening ears to the still, small voice of God, by limiting knowledge to only

empirically verifiable truths, philosophy of that sort reduces humans. It shrinks us. It flattens us into two-dimensional characters.

To the crowd assembled for Evensong at Oxford University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Lewis deployed every weapon in his arsenal to break the hold of worldly philosophy – impeccable logic, a winsome appeal to their inherent longing for God, a piling up of images – “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune that we have not heard, news from a country we have not yet visited,” all in an appealing conversational tone. Why? To awaken us to our calling, to arouse us to listen to our shy, persistent, inner voice – the Lamb's voice.

In this little essay, which, in a small way, imitates Lewis’s anthology, I have sought to convince you to grow a chest and a head, to live a more courageous life, to engage the scriptures with your whole mind, but mostly to read Lewis’ works: his adventure stories and his thought-provoking non-fiction. Perhaps through them you will hear the whispers of the Spirit, news from a country you have not yet visited; I know I have.

Rev. Dr. Henry A. Corcoran, retired from full-time ministry in 2022.

Endnotes:

1C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperOne, 1976), 58.

2The Chronicles of Narnia by Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950; Prince Caspian, 1951; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952; The Silver Chair, 1953; The Horse and His Boy, 1954; The Magician’s Nephew, 1955; The Last Battle, 1956).

3C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 1945.

4C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, 1943.

5C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950.

6C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, 1956.

7C. S. Lewis, aka “The Space Trilogy:” Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; Perelandra, 1943; That Hideous Strength, 1945.

8These are the most accessible of Lewis’ fiction. See also Screwtape Letters, 1942; Till We Have Faces, 1956; The Pilgrim’s Regress, 1933; and The Dark Tower, 1977.

9C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian, 1951.

10C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952, 54.

11Ibid., 56.

12These include literary analyses (On Stories, 1982; Selected Literary Essays, 1969; An Experiment in Criticism, 1967; The Discarded Image, 1964), book-length apologetical works (The Problem of Pain, 1962; Miracles, 1947; Mere Christianity, 1952; A Grief Observed, 1963; Surprised by Joy, 1955), collections on ethics, apologetics and theology (God in the Dock, 1970; Fern-seed and Elephants, 1975; The Weight of Glory, 1976; Christian Reflections, 1967).

13Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 29-31.

A LUTHERAN REFLECTION ON C.S. LEWIS

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

C. S. Lewis, it seems, is more popular than ever. New Christians, old Christians, and little Christians all turn to his whimsical writings that invite and allure before disclosing their true depths. It’s probably impossible to overstate Lewis’s evangelistic reach.

And yet, one unintended consequence of becoming a theologian is starting to have some doubts about the loves of one’s youth, theological loves no less. At times I have had some qualms about Lewis not in the usual ways, with the generic and uninsightful critiques of his male or British or Christian chauvinism, but in his deeper analyses of the Christian faith, like how he more or less dismisses “justification by faith” in Mere Christianity.

Still, I continue to love and admire Lewis’s calm and accessible accounts of Christianity, his fair dealings with other religions, and the way his storyteller’s instincts bring the faith so vividly to life. It’s worth sorting out what in his writing has left me uneasy, uncertain, and unconvinced, in order to appreciate and acclaim more boldly the beauty of his work and witness.

The Delightful

The most basic question Lewis scholarship asks is: how on earth did a reclusive scholar of Renaissance literature, who got married late in life to an unlikely candidate and fathered no children of his own, become one of the most famous children’s book authors of all time? As if that weren’t enough, how did he go on to have a second fame as the most beloved Christian apologist of the anglophone world, iconic as the ultimate convert from atheism, despite his total lack of formal theological education or training in any kind of pastoral work? And apparently he is even still respected in his own scholarly field and among poets, though I won’t even attempt to tackle those parts of his work here.1

Regarding his first fame—as a children’s book author— the best answer can be found in the recent groundbreaking study Planet Narnia: it’s a must-read for those who wish to understand Lewis’s imagination.2 Here I’ll venture some thoughts of my own on his second fame, as a theologian and apologist.

For one thing, Lewis was possessed of a rare constellation of theological solidity, spiritual wisdom, a knack for storytelling, and a quick wit. One of these virtues is rare enough; for all four to line up in one mind is well-nigh miraculous. Take, for instance, The Four Loves (in my estimation, the most successful and insightful of his strictly theological works; oh, that Lutherans would forever set aside their copies of Anders Nygren’s well-meant but dreadfully confused Agape

The Four Loves

and Eros and feast on Lewis instead!). His theological purpose is to give meaning and clarity to love— the fulfilling of the law, the more excellent way, what God is (I John 4:8) while pointing out the necessary differences between divine and creaturely loves. His spiritual purpose is to help believers purify (or submit for purification) their own assorted loves, that they might be more faithful disciples of their loving Lord. He accomplishes these two ends in part by telling tiny stories that remove the matter from the realm of abstract theory and set it squarely in real life. Affection he illustrates thus: “The child will love a crusty old gardener who has hardly ever taken notice of it and shrink from the visitor who is making every attempt to win its regard.”3 On the surprising dislike of Friendship for generosity and gratitude: “It was a distraction, an anomaly. It was a horrible waste of the time, always too short, that we had together. Perhaps we had only a couple of hours in which to talk and, God bless us, twenty minutes of it has had to be devoted to affairs.”4 Of misdirected Eros: “Even if the two lovers are mature and experienced people who know that broken hearts heal in the end and can clearly foresee that, if they once steeled themselves to go through the present agony of parting, they would almost certainly be happier ten years hence than marriage is at all likely to make them—even then, they would not part.”5 And all this Lewis does with such beautiful, clever, and cut-to-the-quick language that it’s impossible to resist the urge to assemble a pastiche of favorite quotes: “Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God.” “Affection can love the unattractive: God and His saints love the unlovable.” “When natural things look most divine, the demoniac is just around the corner.”6 The

fourfold combination of orthodoxy, wisdom, storytelling, and style turns up again and again in Lewis’s apologetic works, from his terribly underrated Reflections on the Psalms to Mere Christianity to the ever-imitated Screwtape Letters.

Lewis’s orthodoxy is no archival thing. Though he had to overcome an early-adulthood disdain for the medieval and ancient, a kind of chronological chauvinism, the conversion to the past did not entail for him a luddite rejection of the present. You can hardly find a crisper deconstruction of materialist rationalism—it was Lewis who cured me of an unrecognized, unchosen, culturally absorbed positivism but right alongside of that you’ll find a calm acceptance of the science of evolution, the enormous age and size of the universe, and the eventual heat death of the universe. His targets were illegitimate philosophical or theological extensions of such scientific undertakings, which he saw to be as unfaithful to science as they were to the gospel.

It was Lewis who cured me of an unrecognized, unchosen, culturally absorbed positivism.

Likewise, his sharp remarks on the excesses of the historicalcritical study of the Bible, stemming from his own field of expertise in literary criticism, may expose that Bultmann didn’t really grasp what a myth is or burst the bubble of complex hypotheses of authorship and redaction but they don’t amount to a doctrine of inerrancy or a denial of the human, historical reality of the Holy Scripture. He has a wonderful horse sense about the Bible (perhaps because it charmed him so much less than other ancient narratives), bemused at the sort of person who “after swallowing the camel of the Resurrection strains at

such gnats as the feeding of the multitudes.”7 His definition of miracles as local intensifications of what God does anyway, everywhere, and ultimately can hardly be improved upon.

Another commendable quality in Lewis—and one that, sadly, seems to characterize his adoring fans considerably less often—is his graciousness toward other Christians and indeed toward other religions. I had never thought of Lewis as particularly ecumenical, but after plowing through more than a thousand pages of his writings I can see the ecumenism everywhere; more than that, a real grief over the division of the church. Lewis’s preface to Mere Christianity observes, regarding the reception of his work:

Hostility has come more from borderline people whether within the Church of England or without it: men not exactly obedient to any communion. This I find curiously consoling. It is at her centre, where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine. And this suggests that at the centre of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.8

Despite this sentiment, and the book’s title, Lewis is well aware that there is no such thing, really, as “mere Christianity”: it is a hallway, not a habitation.9 He acknowledges the essential artificiality of the construct, though I think he did not fully recognize how Anglican his own version of mere Christianity was. It is indeed tempting to believe that there is a plain, unadorned Christianity from which the churches branched out into all sorts

of more or less faithful, more or less colorful varieties, but it is the colorful and occasionally questionable branches that are the real thing, not the theoretical distillation. Lewis knew that. Still, the fiction allowed him to speak outside the boundaries of his own communion, and that is a gift all too rarely granted and cultivated.

Fiction allowed him to speak outside the boundaries of his own communion, and that is a gift all too rarely granted and cultivated.

Akin to this is Lewis’s appreciation, within limits, of other religions, which also came as a surprise to me.10 What actually destroyed his frail childhood faith was the assertion that all other religions of all other times and places were entirely and absolutely wrong, but by some remarkable stroke of luck his version of Christianity just happened to be entirely and absolutely right. The odds—and the undercurrent of British imperialism—talked him out of belief. It was the common features of the gospel with other religions, especially pagan mythologies, that finally gave him reason to take it seriously. I don’t know of any other theologian (at least since the Cappadocians) who has taken ancient paganism as seriously and loves it as passionately as Lewis did, engaging it without fear and allowing it to enrich and enliven his own Christian imagination.

In the same vein, Lewis goes to great lengths to argue that Jesus was not at all an innovative moral teacher but rightly shares the same basic views as Lao-Tzu and Buddha and the other great religious figures, as seen especially in The Abolition of Man. I think Jesus was more innovative than Lewis suggests, but his point is that Christianity is not threatened by its moral

nearness to other religions, and equally that morality is not the point of Christianity. “If we did all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told us, we should get on a great deal better than we do. And so what? We never have followed the advice of the great teachers. Why are we likely to begin now? Why are we more likely to follow Christ than any of the others?”11 What sets the Christian faith apart is a historical rather than mythological testimony to the dying and rising God, and that this God does not merely teach but saves by sending a new Spirit.

At the same time, Lewis places no blame on those outside who have not come to believe—he is much harder on those within (cf. I Corinthians 5:12, “For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?”). At one point he notes the need for a “full confession by Christendom of Christendom’s specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. Large areas of ‘the World’ will not hear us till we have publicly disowned much of our past. Why should they? We have shouted the name of Christ and enacted the service of Moloch.”12

And finally, after a steady diet of Lewis, I cannot but be impressed by his humility. I don’t think it was a literary trope: his frequent pleas for patience, indulgence, and correction strike me as genuine. He regularly (and optimistically) asks the clergy to set him straight. He openly admits that there are parts of Christian teaching that he dislikes, would prefer to avoid, cannot really understand, and even finds rather repulsive. Coming to love the Bible was a struggle for him. He makes no secret of his own inability to live by the moral code that his faith tells him to teach. Even Surprised by Joy ends on a note of failure, not triumph.

Throughout his corpus he commends not his faith but the faith, that solid and joyous thing outside himself. Apologetics for him was never nailing an enemy but sharing bread with other hungry souls.

The Doubtful

As is probably the case with all of us, there is a slender but unbreakable thread binding Lewis’s strengths to his weaknesses; they are materially caught up in each other. What I find troubling in Lewis is wrapped up tightly with what I admire, and disentangling the two is a tricky task.

Take the question of the life to come. Lewis rehabilitates and recalibrates the whole notion of heaven. His vision is not the least bit saccharine; it is strong medicine. However distorted the hope of heaven may have become, however complicit in allowing Christians to neglect the needs and traumas of this earth, it is not a dispensable belief. For Lewis, heaven is intimately connected to the perception of joy that haunted him from his earliest days. And heaven is the fulfillment of personhood, the telos of our individuality that does not separate us from one another but gathers us all into the one body of Christ: “There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs,’ all different, will still be too few to express Him fully… How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.”13

For Lewis...heaven is the fulfillment of personhood, the telos of our individuality that does not separate us from one another but gathers us all into the one body of Christ.

But with this comes a doubtful item, a source of obvious trouble to Lewis’s Lutheran fans: his vision requires some variation on the theme of purgatory. As Lewis was not particularly inclined to Roman Catholicism (to the great annoyance of his friend J. R. R. Tolkien), his attachment to purgatory doesn’t stem from the medieval notions of punishment, penance, or payment. It seems rather to be the logical outcome of his view of full personhood. He can’t fathom a “flipping the switch” transition from this life to the next effected by death, simply washing all the sin out of us without the hard struggle of character building. You see this in his description of repentance: it’s “not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like.”14 We spend our whole lives working our way back to Him (or fleeing from Him), and in the afterlife that process will, he logically infers, continue. He illustrates the inference in The Great Divorce and there proposes the theory (which he rightly predicts will frustrate both Catholics and Protestants) that, in retrospect, earthly life will turn out to be the beginning of either hell or heaven for us.15 Purgatory as a step in the essential conformation of the character to Christ or in defiance of Christ fits in neatly with Lewis’s larger project of making salvation and damnation intelligible to a contemporary audience, which is most vivid in his The Problem of Pain, a book far more about these questions than about pain in itself.

His depiction of purgatory is not one to be dismissed lightly or with tired confessional polemics. His acute literary instincts were, I suspect, distrustful of a deus ex machina at the end of our own lives that might retroactively render every hard choice, every

painful sacrifice, every moral victory basically meaningless. His doctrine of purgatory is one of many places where, in reality, he is struggling with the interaction of divine and human agency. “[Y]ou will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”16

When he attempts to tackle the question directly and analytically, Lewis is not at his best. He flip-flops between exhortations to personal responsibility and acknowledgements that somehow any good done is God’s doing and not our own. Of course, Lewis is hardly the first theologian to be defeated by this topic. Even St. Paul struggled between the sin at large in his flesh (Romans 7:20) and the Christ who now lives in him (Galatians 2:20), and where that left his own particular person remains a mystery.

When he attempts to tackle the question [of purgatory] directly and analytically, Lewis is not at his best. He flip-flops between exhortations to personal responsibility and acknowledgements that somehow any good done is God’s doing and not our own.

But if it was indeed his literary instincts that made Lewis resort to purgatory, it is fitting that when he attempted to illumine divine-human agency in fictional form he succeeded much better. For instance, in That Hideous Strength, Ransom gives a disturbing account of submission to God that Jane finds rather hard to swallow, but then the real thing happens.

A boundary had been crossed. She had come into a world, or into a Person, or into the presence of a Person. Something expectant, patient, inexorable, met her with no

veil or protection between. In the closeness of that contact she perceived at once that the Director’s words had been entirely misleading. This demand which now pressed upon her was not, even by analogy, like any other demand… In this height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called me dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in a space without air. The name me was the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected, a being that did not yet fully exist but which was demanded.17

Her husband Mark, meanwhile, only begins to fathom the possibility of God once he has suffered a demonic attack luring him deeper into the horrors of the n.i.c.e., which causes him to cry out for help. It is being commanded by the repulsive Dr. Frost to trample a melodramatic crucifix that makes Mark wonder, for the first time in his life, whether there might not be something to Christianity after all. Jane’s and Mark’s stories are not ritualized conversion accounts of choices made by “their own free will,” nor are they due to unambiguous, factual epiphanies of the divine. Their stories are as complex and messy as real life. You don’t come to understand a tapestry better by pulling out all the threads and sorting them into different piles; the same applies to the interweaving of God’s will with our own.

We can, then, accept Lewis’s spiritual wisdom concerning human character in the Christian life and ponder the mysterious interactions of the divine will with our human one— without resorting to purgatory. For the real difficulty here, I believe, is Lewis’s understanding of the divine character.

This is due to a subtle but serious faultline within “mere Christianity.” Lewis evidently aligns himself with the Neoplatonic stream of the Christian tradition as illustrated in Professor Kirke’s happy discovery at the end of The Last Battle that it all was, indeed, in Plato after all. Lewis depicts an upward trajectory to God. He grasps grace enough to recognize that God must do the drawing—the beatific vision is not a reward for those who work hard enough to find Him— yet the essential image is of God distant, great, and centripetal. We must be changed from our flimsy immortality into His likeness before we can have real dealings with Him. “God can show Himself as He really is only to real men.”18

Such is the point of his gorgeous, lyrical, mystical Till We Have Faces. Orual cannot perceive God’s ways because she has clung to herself and her “bareface” ways, while the beautiful Psyche allows herself to be raptured into divinity and “brightface” adoration. There is extraordinary wisdom in this book, but is it Christian wisdom? It captures our longing for a glimpse of God and our furious impotence before God’s hiddenness. But we as readers cannot love Psyche as Orual does; we actually love Orual, because her grief is ours. Her dealings with the gods demand an incarnation. But right here is where Lewis falls short. Neither in his theology nor in his fiction do I see much evidence that Lewis has internalized Jesus’ own words in John 14:9, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Neoplatonic Christianity likes the idea of an

Neither in his theology nor in his fiction do I see much evidence that Lewis has internalized Jesus’ own words in John 14:9, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

incarnation in principle but can’t see through all its consequences: namely, that the Son of God really is God. We have beheld Him (John 1:14). Assuredly we do not see Him yet in His undimmed glory, but that does not mean that we haven’t really seen Him at all, or that what we have seen is not quite yet fully God. I suspect this lack is why Lewis seems perpetually perplexed by the resurrection of the body; Neoplatonism is much more comfortable with the immortality of the soul.

Lewis’s purgatorial logic, fictionally expressed in Till We Have Faces, is that we must be deified before we are willing or able to encounter God face to face. Take this passage from Letters to Malcolm:

Our souls demand purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, “It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy”? Should we not reply, “With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.” “It may hurt, you know” “Even so, sir.”19

Such a logic simply has not come to terms with the ministry of mercy of the Son of God among His people Israel and assorted Gentiles. In those cases, there was no preparation, no scrubbing up for the royal audience, no prerequisite transformation. If anything, quite the contrary: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick… For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12–13). The gospel’s logic is

that only in meeting God face to face, at His initiative, amidst our own filth, in spite of all our resistance and sin, can we take even the first and tiniest step toward the restoration of the divine image within us. It isn’t God’s distant but inexorable pull that does it, but rather God’s proactive, invasive sending of His only Son and their Spirit.20 Lewis is right that there will be growth in character, even a progressive purgation of sin from our lives (and who knows? maybe even in heaven): but not apart, never apart, from the holy presence of God. According to the Christian faith, holiness is distinguished by its willingness to keep unholy company. That is what it means for the Son of Man to be true God.

So much for purgatory. Readers of this journal will not be surprised that my other strong doubt about Lewis is his take on gender. A few caveats are in order. One is that he isn’t nearly as bad as his cultured despisers make him out to be. For someone relatively deprived of the company of women most of his life—his mother died when he was very young and his father never remarried, he attended boys’ schools, he fought in World War I, he made his living as a scholar at a time when women’s higher education was only just beginning—he is evenhanded and respectful. It’s clear that his late-inlife marriage to Joy Davidman upended many of his lingering prejudices regarding the female sex.21 A nice indication of this is the line in A Grief Observed: “…I once praised her for her ‘masculine virtues.’ But she soon put a stop to that by asking how I’d like to be praised for my feminine ones. It was a good riposte, dear.”22 And I have never understood the

Joy Davidman

accusation that Susan’s defection from Narnia in The Last Battle implies Lewis’s denunciation of female sexuality (her beauty and marriageability are emphasized in The Horse and His Boy, after all!); it’s an immature and materialistic adulthood that he’s criticizing.

In fact, when Lewis deals with actual individual women, he does quite well, and the intuitive balance he strikes in his storytelling is far better than his theory. Lucy is the real human hero of the Narnia stories, not Peter the High King, and her cognomen is “the Valiant,” a huge improvement over the schlocky princess diet that the corporate imagination feeds girls on today. Orual in Till We Have Faces is a far more fit sovereign than her violent, drunken father. One might be inclined to take umbrage that Jane in That Hideous Strength is a sham scholar whose real destiny is to give birth to a future Pendragon. But if we weigh her against her husband Mark, she still comes out ahead: he is even more of a sham scholar with no prospects by the end of the story, he allows himself to be manipulated and exploited by the n.i.c.e., and it turns out they only wanted him anyway because of his wife’s visionary gift. (And if we pick up the clues from Lewis’s autobiographical writings, it’s clear that Jane is Lewis’s alter ego in the story, not Mark or any other man.) The most highly qualified professional in Ransom’s band is Grace Ironwood, an unmarried doctor. The earthly image of fecund Venus is Mrs. Dimble, a plump and barren old woman, and Lewis has the good graces to allow her to dismiss Ransom’s theory of marriage as the musings of “a man, after all, and an unmarried man at that”23 in other words, Lewis himself. Dealing with “real” people rather than a theory of them, Lewis shows a

wonderfully complex range.

But as for that theory: Lewis’s basic idea is that God is masculine and creation is feminine, and the pattern is reproduced all the way up and down the great chain of being, including but not restricted to biological sex. Here he keeps company with a great number of twentiethcentury theologians who, suddenly and finally realizing that female human beings are not simply inferior or incapable, scrambled to make sense of gender distinctions in the church in a more attractive light by appeal to the divine nature.24 This was, actually, an innovation. Patristic theologians knew enough to steer clear of aligning creaturely males with the divine, perhaps because they still had living experience of pagan religions. The maleness of Jesus or Fatherhood of God were never arguments in the early church in favor of, for example, a male-only priesthood. It was either the intellectual and emotional incapacity of women, or the social taboo against their playing any public role, that did it. There has been precious little interest in masculinity and femininity as such for most of Christian history. However, in his (in)famous essay “Priestesses in the Church?”—the first word chosen for its alarm factor—Lewis argues that a church with priestesses wouldn’t be much like the church at all anymore. The church is, evidently, an exercise in representation, with the priest standing in alternately for us and for God: note here again the distance of God from His creatures

Lewis’s basic idea is that God is masculine and creation is feminine, and the pattern is reproduced all the way up and down the great chain of being, including but not restricted to biological sex.

on earth. Lewis reasons that, since God is ultimately masculine and we are feminine to Him (men too), we could have a priest in the guise of a woman who addresses God on behalf of all of us feminine creatures, but the same woman could not address us on behalf of the masculine God—her very body would invalidate it. “Only one wearing the masculine uniform can (provisionally, and till the Parousia) represent the Lord to the Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him. We men may often make very bad priests. That is because we are insufficiently masculine. It is not cure to call in those who are not masculine at all.”25

Notice that this is not even an appeal to the few verses of Scripture that restrict women’s authority in the church: it’s a highly dubious theory of gender that sidesteps the Scripture altogether, which itself has no problem with Deborah the judge speaking for God, or Huldah the prophet, or King Lemuel’s oracular mother, or Junia the apostle, or Priscilla the teacher. The closest kin you’ll find in the Bible to such notions of gender as religiously significant are Baal and Asherah! The Lord, for His part, stringently warns against depicting Him as either male or female (Deuteronomy 4:16), despite the convention of masculine pronouns for the divine.

I’ve already noted that Lewis’s weaknesses are bound up with his strengths. So it is here, too. For it is precisely his open, imaginative embrace of pagan mythology that led him down the wrong path. As the aforementioned Planet Narnia demonstrates beyond any shadow of a doubt, Lewis had a lifelong fascination with astrology not the superstitious or predictive part of it, but the worldview it represented. It was his antidote to the vast realms of empty space, born of a longing for an integrated

cosmos where the planets were friends and all was one beautiful whole. In ancient and medieval cosmology, each planet had a god our planets are of course still named after them as well as a metal, a set of characteristics, even plants and animals associated with them. It was from this rich well that Lewis drew the imagery for the Chronicles of Narnia, each book capturing the ambience of a planet and its god. The same astrological imagery informs the Space Trilogy, though in a less systematic way.

But the imagery of ancient myths traces wellworn and stereotypical orbits. Of the seven planets (which include the sun and moon) in this system, five are male and two are female. The two females neatly illustrate how the world has nearly always chosen to see women: as either mothers (Venus) or virgins (the moon). The female moon also happens to be the only one of the planets that shares the earth’s orb, thus the only one entangled in the sin of the human race; all the male planets are safely beyond contamination. The male planets are not defined by sexual qualities: the sun is vision and generosity, Mercury is language, Mars is war, Saturn is death and decay, and even Jupiter is festal pomp and splendor—which despite the lack of obvious sexual reference is so inherently masculine and glorious that, as noted in That Hideous Strength, humans have often mistaken this god for God Almighty.

Of the seven planets (which include the sun and moon) in this system, five are male and two are female. The two females neatly illustrate how the world has nearly always chosen to see women: as either mothers (Venus) or virgins (the moon).

Planet Narnia made it clear to me that this mythological

mapping of the masculine and feminine is what undergirds Lewis’s assertions about men and women in the church, and to a degree also in marriage and therefore why it had always sat uneasily with me. It is not a biblical account of gender (insofar as such a thing could even be supposed to exist). The Scripture depicts good men and bad men, good women and bad women. It often contrasts persons of the same sex, militating against an essential quality inhering in gender: think of Cain vs. Abel, Mary vs. Martha, Saul vs. David, Orpah vs. Ruth, even Aquila and Priscilla vs. Ananias and Sapphira. Christians looking for a compelling account of gender, faithful to the gospel and attuned to the movement of history, will do better to look beyond Lewis for help.

One final note of concern. It may not be a just one; there is something rather disagreeable about criticizing someone’s work for what is not found there instead of engaging what is. But the fact is that I find very little of the cross in Lewis’s work. Yes, of course, Aslan dies for Edmund’s sake: but when it’s done, it’s done, and there are no scars on his paws, and it plays no material role in the rest of Narnia’s history except to put Aslan beyond the reach of death. Lewis’s evocations of divine glory here and elsewhere give no indication that the risen and ascended Son of God still bears the wounds in his hands and side. Mark in That Hideous Strength discovers a third category beyond the Normal and the Diseased, beyond the Straight and the Crooked, which is Jesus on the cross: but the insight is carried no further. Salvation is restorative, but reality is not altered by God’s willing assumption of death into himself. It is a truism, perhaps, that Anglicanism places the incarnation at the center of the gospel

while Lutheranism places the crucifixion there, and so perhaps my discomfort is an expression of my relative location. Certainly, I don’t want to play the incarnation and crucifixion off one another. But I suspect that Lewis’s inability to accept the full consequences of the incarnation is a result of his gentle avoidance of the cross. Lewis inspires me in many ways: but he does not show me how God’s cross can be taken up in aesthetics and even into the very fabric of reality.

And yet—after all these criticisms—I must confess that there is almost no novel I have loved better than That Hideous Strength. And there are no books I was more eager to read to my own son than the Chronicles of Narnia. And I have never turned to Lewis without being rewarded, even if the reward was a riprousing argument. I doubt very much I could have come to a deeper understanding of many aspects of the Christian faith without Lewis as teacher, friend, and sparring partner. My criticisms are not meant to scare anyone off from taking adventuresome leaps outside the usual domains of Christian thought; quite the contrary. Lewis may have been more of a literary scholar than a theologian, but he wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting a theologian if he hadn’t been a literary scholar. Most truth is found by swimming through error. We should count ourselves lucky if our orthodoxies were even half as instructive as Lewis’s mistakes.

(This article, now slightly modified, was originally printed in the Summer 2014 edition of Lutheran Forum)

Rev. Dr. Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is a Lutheran pastor, serving most

recently at Tokyo Lutheran Church in Japan. Author of hundreds of articles and a dozen books, she traverses freely between theology, exegesis, fiction, and poetry. She co-hosts the podcast “Queen of the Sciences: Conversations between a Theologian and Her Dad,” writes the e-newsletter “Theology & a Recipe,” and shares original stories on her Substack, “Sarah Hinlicky Wilson Stories.”

Endnotes:

1See, for example, The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, eds. Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Michael Ward, “How Lewis Lit the Way to Better Apologetics: Why the path to reasonable faith begins with story and imagination,” Christianity Today 57/9 (November 2013): 36ff.

2Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

3C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Fontana, 1970), 35.

4Ibid., 66.

5Ibid., 98–99.

6Ibid., 9, 38, and 95, respectively.

7C. S. Lewis, “Fern-Seed and Elephants,” in Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley Walmsley (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 243. Collectors looking to get the maximum number of Lewis’s theological essays in a minimum number of books will want this volume; unfortunately, it is out of print and correspondingly expensive.

8C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 9.

9Ibid., 11–12.

10On the limits, see my article “Salvaging C. S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy for Mission and Cultural Awareness,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 38/3 (2014): 126–9.

11Lewis, Mere Christianity, 137.

12Lewis, The Four Loves, 32.

13Lewis, Mere Christianity, 190, 191.

14Ibid., 60.

15C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, in The Best of C. S. Lewis: Five Best Books in One Volume (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977), 154.

16C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Collier, 1962), 111.

17C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 318–19.

18Lewis, Mere Christianity, 144.

19C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Mariner, 2012), 108–9.

20The credit for this insight goes to Andrew L. Wilson, who first pointed out the weak Christology of such Neoplatonic accounts of salvation while we were reading Dorothy Sayers’s translation of

Dante’s Divine Comedy together.

21Ann Loades, “C. S. Lewis on Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, 160–73.

22C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 48.

23Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 168.

24I have documented that process in Eastern Orthodoxy in my book Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2013). Much of the logic that applies there applies to Lewis as well.

25Lewis, “Priestesses in the Church?” in Essay Collection, 402.

JACK’S SAGA: FOR C. S. LEWIS

Brett Jenkins

For those unfamiliar with the biography of C. S. Lewis, there are a few things it is helpful to know about him before reading the following poem. As a boy, he and his brother Warnie were obsessed with the Teutonic (Viking) myths. He attributed much of his intellectual acumen to his tutelage under a ferociously atheistic classics pedagogue whom he referred to as "the Kirk," and after matriculating at college, he entered the military service of England in World War I, being at one point left for dead on the battlefield. A key piece of his intellectual conversion happened during a late-night walk with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, and his memoir of his emotional struggles following the death of his wife Joy was his only (initially) pseudonymously published work, entitled A Grief Observed. Those familiar with Lewis’ work will recognize themes, concepts, and phrases from his published corpus.

The gleaming of the midnight sun Charms well the misty dreams of youth And makes them take the shapes of tales That gesture toward a noble truth That draws a young boy’s yearning heart;

Here Siegfried stands to face with awe, His courage screwed to sticking point, Fafnir’s slavering, toothy maw.

The boy’s heart cheers, his soul elates, Imagining the magic sword

In his own hand, implores the fates

For courage to redeem the hoard.

Beowulf, Brunnehilde, and such

Both warm and form his spring-time pomp;

In spite of staid and sheltered youth, A soldier’s bred midst boyhood romp.

So, Wotan’s twilight setting sun

Accompanied by Valk’rie song

Illumines all his boyhood dance; His steps are light, his shadow long.

+ + +

Still, adolescence must supplant

The tender fronds of childhood free, While drawing from its golden form

The life-blood for the future tree.

So, on to other tales he went,

To foreign lands with ancient tongues,

The Kirk, a Virgil now to guide

Amidst the noble pagan songs.

The sun seemed high upon his brow

As on from strength to strength he went; He did not sense as knowledge grew

The ways in which his soul was rent.

+ + +

Wotan and Brunnehilde

Then boyhood unto manhood waxed

And on to battle he was called

To learn the cost of Siegfried’s deed, The truth of tales that once enthralled. Thus bowed and bloodied he returned To take the scholars’ gentler garb

And now to limp where once he danced, Outraged by fortune’s vicious barb.

As autumn sun shone down upon The labors of his manhood’s all,

This dance he felt to be no pomp… His eyes grew dim, his shadow small.

+ + +

For all that he believed was true

Left cold his heart and dry his soul, While all he recked to be but myth Would whisper, “joy,” and make him whole.

‘Til in a late-night walk with friends

Who clearer saw and gently led, Was Virgil changed for Beatrice

And myth ‘come fact rose from the dead.

Yeah, lo, in that ascendant sun

He found that truth and peace had kissed, And, driving Wotan from the vail, Made clear what was obscured by mist.

Imagination now baptized, He saw again, but saw anew, And in the light of rising Son

His steps grew bold, his shadow grew.

+ + +

Beatrice

The Word of God within his grasp, Like Malbung from his childhood dream, He then set out the würm to slay Within the halls of academe.

For he knew that within his guild

The dragon, unbeknownst, crept nigh, And what the native Christian missed, Apostate pagan might descry.

For having drunk an ocean’s draught

Of much of mankind’s finest words, He learned to sift the wheat from chaff And know the Dark One’s hidden swords.

‘Gainst Reich and pallid curate’s cant,

‘Gainst Biblicist and Sophist fay,

‘Gainst imbecile and philosoph

With words and Word he fought his way. With rigorous analogy

He parried and he thrust away With careful metaphor he struck And sought for Lord to win the day. Thus, as he fought, his stature grew From nursery to hallowed hall; Though he had long-since ceased to care, His name was known to one and all.

So, when with grief the Enemy

Assailed his heart and struck it true, His wound observed, he knelt to pray, And as he did, his shadow grew.

+ + +

Until he left it far behind

For he had heard his Master’s call; He knew that further up and in Was better than Valhalla’s hall. For shadows only rightly dwell Within the storied shadowlands Where flesh and spirit wrestle on With piercing words and bloodied hands. So, with his shadow we contend Though we critique, we cannot tell Who rather we would wrestle with, Like Jacob limping at Bethel. While he in some mid-summer pomp Has joined the dance to angels’ song Toward which we look while we confess His step is light… his shadow long.

Rev. Brett Jenkins is a pastor of the NALC with degrees from The Pennsylvania State University and the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg and is completing his D.Min. at the Institute of Lutheran Theology. He is the husband of Dr. Lisa D. Jenkins, the father of Iain and Elizabeth, and the pastor of Holy Cross Evangelical Lutheran Church in Nazareth, PA. When not pastoring, he enjoys building guitars, making music, and writing poetry.

Valhalla

BOOK REVIEWS

Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. New York: HarperOne, 2012 [1956].

One of the most common reactions I have seen in my ministry is my members’ almost universal tendency to blame God when tragedy strikes. When a bad diagnosis is received or a cherished loved one dies, we almost instinctively ask, “God, why me? Why are you persecuting me?” But sadly, we hear no answer to this question. In our travail, we receive little word from this seemingly heartless God — the one who is supposed to love us with an unfathomable love.

This crisis of faith is beautiful explored in Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis’s final novel, dedicated to his wife, and likely co-contributor, Joy Davidson.1 Of the novels he wrote, this one is reported to be his favorite. Tolkien also admired the work highly.2 Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche written by Lucius Apuleius Platonicus in his second century novel, Metamorphoses.

The beginning of the original story involves three princesses, Psyche and her two sisters. Psyche (Soul), the most beautiful of the three, is worshipped by the people as a goddess at the expense of the true goddess, Venus. Seeking revenge, Venus commands her son, Cupid, to shoot her with love arrows to arouse her passions for common scoundrels. But Cupid, struck by one of his own arrows, falls in love with

her himself. He then carries her off to his palace and forbids her from ever seeing his face as a sign of their love. Soon, her two jealous sisters come to visit, and they convince Psyche that the love-struck Cupid is hiding his face because he is, in fact, a hideous serpent. They convince her to take a look at his face while he is sleeping and then stab him in his sleep. However, when she makes her approach, she accidentally pours hot oil from her lantern onto Cupid’s shoulder, awakening him. Realizing her treachery, Cupid vanishes, seemingly forever.

In this version, Lewis concentrates on one sister named Orual, the future queen of the fictional realm of Glome, who raises her half-sister Psyche after her mother dies in childbirth. Because of her beauty and grace, the people offer Psyche as a perfect sacrifice to placate the gods and deliver Glome from a devastating epidemic. Days later, Orual, who was prohibited from attending the sacrifice, assumes that Psyche has been killed by the gods, so she goes to the sacrifice site hoping to bury her sister. But arriving there, Orual finds her sister very much alive, claiming to be married to a god who won’t show his face, and living in a beautiful palace which Orual cannot see. Returning home, Orual confers with her materialistic Stoic teacher/philosopher, known as the Fox, who convinces her that Psyche has been abducted by a common wretch for his own nefarious purposes. Emboldened, Orual returns to the site and threatens to kill Psyche and herself if Psyche refuses to gaze upon her god/husband’s face. Put in a corner, Psyche complies, and as in the original story, is discovered and abandoned by her lover, seemingly forever.

Through this retelling, Lewis is able to more deeply explore

issues of faith, sin, and sacrifice from a Christian perspective. There are many facets to explore, but I want to concentrate on two of them.

The first is how we see God, a recurring theme throughout the novel. Lewis’ fascination with this topic is revealed when Orual first visits Psyche. Psyche shows her around her mystical palace, but Orual sees only the forest. But as she is leaving, Orual goes down to a riverbank for a drink which “steadie[s] her mind.” Then she looks up and there it is, “wall within wall, pillar and arch and architrave, acres of it, a labyrinthine beauty” (140). But then, a moment later, it all vanishes. Isn’t this an apt description of the Christian life? When we drink the water of faith, we can, at times, see into God’s world. When those experiences happen to me, I actually write them down in detail in what I call my “miracle journal.” Because if I don’t, those moments, moments in which we can actually see into the metaphysical realm, will simply vanish forever.

Isn’t this an apt description of the Christian life? When we drink the water of faith, we can, at times, see into God’s world.

In another scene, Orual asks the Fox, “You don’t think—not possibly—not as a mere hundredth chance—there might be things that are real though we can’t see them?” (161). The Stoic Fox dismisses this notion, but Orual knows better. Pondering this later in the book, she says, “For all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and if things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth” (316).

The second topic Lewis explores is whether God is, in fact, on our side. Does he love us and want the best for us? Because in times of tragedy it appears he is our enemy, or is simply remaining silent ― but is this true? In the beginning of the book, Orual is convinced that the gods are against her: she is born ugly while her sisters are beautiful, she lives under the control of a despotic and abusive father, and worst of all, the gods have separated her from beloved Psyche, presumably forever. We often feel the same. In our own tragedies we think, ”Won’t God just help me and tell me what to do? Is He even listening to my prayers? Perhaps Christine Norvell best expresses this frustration with God. She writes, “Here, as believers, we understand Orual’s conundrum. Don’t we share the same moments in our relationship with God, moments of doubt, moments of fleeting conviction, moments where we long for a direct instruction from God himself? ‘Just speak to me,’ we think in frustration.”3

This topic is brilliantly highlighted in a vision Orual experiences at the end of the book. In that dream, she makes her case against the gods in front of a sea of those who have gone before her. But in doing so she reveals her own sin – the sin of thinking that Psyche was her possession rather than God’s. She screams, “She was mine. Mine. Do you know what the word means? Mine! You’re thieves, seducers” (333). Orual later writes, “Mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being married to the divine nature…..and [while we are doing it] we[‘ll] sa[y it’s because we love]…her” (347). You see, Orual has finally comes to grips with who she is – a sinner standing before the gods. This single realization has given her a face before them. This idea is explored further in the final pages of the book. Orual asks “How can they [the gods] meet us face to face till we have faces?” (335).

And then, after having finally admitted her sin and understood who she is, she sacrifices herself, throwing herself down into the crowd of witnesses, only to be caught by her old teacher, the Fox. A doubter no longer, he immediately confesses his sin of teaching her to doubt the gods’ influence over human events. It’s confession time for Orual as well, as she admits her sin of selfishly keeping the Fox at the royal court when he desperately wanted to return to his native Greece.

Orual: “Are the gods not just?”

Fox: “Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? But come and see.”

But after the confessions comes the grace. In this riveting novel, Lewis is revealing to us that Jesus isn’t out to “get us,” or even punish us as we deserve, no, the truth is that can’t wait to shower us with his superabundant love and forgiveness. Fox: “We must go to your true judges now. I will bring you there.”

Orual: My judges?”

Fox: “Why yes, child, the gods have been accused by you. Now it’s their turn.”

Orual: “I cannot hope for mercy.”

Fox: “Infinite hopes and fears may both be yours. Be sure that, whatever else you get, you will not get justice.”

Orual: “Are the gods not just?”

Fox: “Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? But come and see” (338).

Rev. Dr. Dennis R. Di Mauro is the pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Warrenton, VA (NALC) and is the editor of SIMUL.

Endnotes:

1Trevin Wax, “How Joy Davidman Altered My View of C. S. Lewis,” The Gospel Coalition, May 22, 2018, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/joy-davidman-shifted-view-c-s-lewis/

2Stephen Beard, Review of Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold A Reading Companion by Christine Norvell, Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, volume 18, issue 1 (2024): 205.

3Christine L. Norvell, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold A Reading Companion, Second Edition (Tulsa, OK: Thy Lyre Publishing, 2020), 59.

Image Credits

(Pages 1, 3, 83) ”C.S. Lewis,” photograph by Arthur Strong, 1947, bromide print on Ilford paper, National Portrait Gallery, London, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw56774/CS-Lewis

(Page 8) “Mere Christianity (C.S Lewis book) 1st edition cover,” by http://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=8679266887, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126634183

(Page 10) “A 1760 printing of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer,” printed by John Baskerville by Church of England,” Public Domain, https://archive.org/stream/bookofcommonpray00chur_4#page/n6/mode/1up, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45814503

(Page 16) “Portrait of Sir Thomas More,” by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1527, oil on canvas, Frick Collection, New York, Google Art Project, Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hans_Holbein,_the_Younger_-_Sir_Thomas_More__Google_Art_Project.jpg

(Page 21) “Perelandra (C.S Lewis book) 1st edition cover,” Fair Use, Wikimedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CSLewis_Perelandra.jpg

(Page 23) “Paradise Lost,” London: 1667, by John Milton (1608-1674), Houghton Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34944104

(Page 38) “Aslan the Lion (Narnia),” by Maurice Harron, 2016, CS Lewis Square, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 27 February 2023, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

(Page 40) “Lucy Pevensie,” in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Walden Media, 2008, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16239732

(Page 43) “The Weight of Glory cover,” first edition, Eerdmans, 1965, http://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=7182360363, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37291599

(Page 49) “The Four Loves cover,” Geoffrey Bles Publishing, 1960, http://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=757193201., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8783003

(Page 61) “Joy Davidman,” by The Book Haven, Cynthia Haven's blog for the written wordhttp://bookhaven.stanford.edu/tag/joy-davidman/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34645750

(Page 71) “Wotan Takes Leave of Brunhild” (1892) by Konrad Dielitz (1845 - 1933) from Ebenezer Cobham Brewer’s A Revised American Edition of the Readers’ Handbook, vol. IV, facing page 52, digitized version from University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5158958

(Page 72) “Beata Beatrix” (c. 1864-1870) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swedish National Museum, http://www.nationalmuseum.se/sv/Om-Nationalmuseum/For-press-ochmedia1/Pressbilder1/Prerafaeliterna/Dante-Gabriel-Rossetti-iBeata-Beatrixi/ [dead link], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6078047

(Page 74) “Walhalla” (1896) by Max Brückner (1836-1919), in a scenic backdrop for Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, Fair Use, https://web.archive.org/web/20150123030733/http://www.nordischemythologie.de/html/gallery/pages/s213-4.htm, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Walhalla_(1896)_by_Max_Br%C3%BCckner.jpg

(Page 75) “Till We Have Faces (C.S Lewis book) 1st edition cover,” Fair Use, http://www.altair.co.uk/lwscstwhf.JPG

“Fox: “We must go to your true judges now. I will bring you there.” Orual: “My judges?” Fox: “Why yes, child, the gods have been accused by you. Now it’s their turn.” Orual: “I cannot hope for mercy.” Fox: “Infinite hopes and fears may both be yours. Be sure that, whatever else you get, you will not get justice.” Orual: “Are the gods not just?” Fox: “Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? But come and see.”