17 minute read
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
Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.
Not just advice offered, he walked his talk. Yes, a man with a chest.
How Lewis Discipled My Imagination
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 left-brained 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 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 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 life-imparting truth. In Mere Christianity, Lewis neglects biblical truth in favor of his own reasoned ideas:
Yet, we Lutherans are among those who think the explanations of how Christ’s atonement works to be important, in fact, centrally important."
"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:
"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 police court 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.
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.
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
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:
1. C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperOne, 1976), 58.
2. The 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).
3. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 1945.
4. C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, 1943.
5. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950.
6. C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, 1956.
7. C. S. Lewis, aka “The Space Trilogy:” Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; Perelandra, 1943; That Hideous Strength, 1945.
8. These 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.
9. C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian, 1951.
10. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952, 54.
10. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952, 54.
11. Ibid., 56.
12. These 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).
13. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 29-31.
