Silly Adventure Stories

Dear Phyllida,

Thanks for your most interesting cards. How do you get the gold so good? Whenever I tried to use it, however golden it looked on the shell, it always looked only like rough brown on the paper. Is it that you have some trick with the brush that I never learned, or that gold paint is better now than when I was a boy! [...]

I'm not quite sure what you meant about "silly adventure stories without my point". If they are silly, then having a point won't save them. But if they are good in themselves, and if by a "point" you mean some truth about the real world which which one can take out of the story, I'm not sure that I agree. At least, I think that looking for a "point" in that sense may prevent one sometimes from getting the real effect of the story in itself - like listening too hard for the words in singing which isn't meant to be listened to that way (like an anthem in a chorus). I'm not at all sure about all this, mind you: only thinking as I go along.

We have two American boys in the house at present, aged 8 and 6 1/2. Very nice. They seem to use much longer words than English boys of that age would: not showing off, but just because they don't seem to know the short words. But they haven't as good table manners as English boys of the same sort would. [...]

yours,
C.S. Lewis

Letters to Children (letter of Dec 18 1953)

C.S. Lewis by Owen Barfield (In Verse)

[Owen Barfield]

A year after Lewis' death, one of the lesser members (to many) of the Inklings,

Owen Barfield, memorialised his friend in the following:

You came to him: when will you come to me?
He knows what matters from what matters not.
I hurry to and fro and seem to be.
New tasks, new faces . . . (tiny sir, so hot?
As though there were a future for success?
He knows what matters from what matters not).
I catch sight of your unaverted face
Between two eager places . . . thus the day
Is punctuated by the silences
With which you answer every time I say:--
You came to him; when will you come to me?
O time! O night! O sun's recurring ray!
I shall forget again, as I'd forgot,
Before I crossed the Campus yesterday:--
He knows what matters now, what matters not.

Charles Williams in "Looking for the King" (II)

"What is this Holy Grail we hear so much about?" asked Williams, pacing back and forth so rapidly that Tom could hear keys or coins clinking in his pocket. "Is the Grail the holy chalice used by Jesus on the night of the Last Supper? Is it a cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught drops of Christ's blood as he was stretched out on the cross?" Again, Williams peered into individual faces, speaking to over a hundred people, but giving each one the impression he was talking just to him. "Or perhaps you favor the Loomis school: the Grail is a bit of 'faded mythology', a Celtic cauldron of plenty that somehow got lugged into Arthurian lore?"

Williams paced back and forth some more, throwing his hands into the air, as if to say, who can answer all these imponderable questions? Then he plunged in again: "There is no shortage of texts on the subject. Let's start with Chretien de Troyes: Percival, or the Story of the Grail, written sometime in the 1180s. This is the first known account of the Grail. The young knight Percival sits at banquet at the castle Carbonek and sees an eerie procession—a young man carrying a bleeding lance, two boys with gold candelabra, then finally a fair maid with a jeweled grail, a platter bearing the wafer of the Holy Mass. Percival doesn't ask what it all means and thereby brings a curse upon himself and on the land." Williams surveyed the crowd again, as if waiting for someone to stand and explain all this to him. The room was silent as a church at midnight, so Williams went on, listing all the famous medieval texts and their retellings of the Grail legend, noting how their dates clustered around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

"So much for the literary versions", he continued. "But what is this Grail really"? What lies behind the texts? Some describe it as a cup or bowl, some as a stone, some as a platter. The word grail, by the way, comes from the Latin gradalis, more like a shallow dish, or a paten, than a chalice." After another strategic pause, Williams exclaimed, almost in a shout, "How extraordinary! Here we have what some would call the holiest relic in Christendom, and no one seems to know what it looks like."

Pacing some more, as if trying to work off an excess of agitation and intellectual energy, Williams went back to the lectern and leaned on it heavily...

David C. Downing
Looking for the King (Chapter 3)
Ignatius Press 2010

Charles Williams from "Looking for the King" (I)

"Tom crossed the quad, following others through a large wooden door and into a narrow passageway that led to the Divinity School. Emerging from the dark corridor in to the lecture hall, Tom instantly changed his mind about the Bodleian. Entering the Divinity School room was like moving from darkness to light, from confinement to liberation, from all that weighs down the spirit to all that makes it soar. The whole room was suffused with an amber glow, the afternoon sun warming the cream-colored walls, which seemed to radiate a light all their own.

The whole interior commanded Tom to look up. The floor was unadorned flagstone covered with rows of wooden chairs. But the lofty arched windows with delicate tracery carried his eyes upward toward the ceiling, where he saw rows of ornately carved pendants, hanging like lanterns, each one radiating fan-shaped curves, like shafts of light chiseled in stone. The plain stone floor and the portable chairs, crouching humbly under that magnificent vaulted ceiling, seemed to suggest that all the richness and gladness of life comes not from the plane on which we live and walk but from higher planes of intellect, imagination, learning, and faith.

The chairs in the lecture hall began filling quickly, even as Tom was admiring the room. He had wondered what sort of audience a publisher's editor would attract, and he soon had his answer. He found a seat near the center, about five rows back, before every seat was taken as the clock neared three. There were a few men who looked like dons scattered around the room, but most of the listeners were about Tom's age, with more women in the crowd than he had seen in any one place since arriving at Oxford.

Precisely at three o'clock, Mr. Charles Williams stepped briskly to the lectern. He was a tall man in his fifties with wavy hair, wearing a black gown and gold-rimmed spectacles. Tom was not accustomed to lecturers wearing academic gowns, so his first sight of Williams made him think of a priest or wizard. Williams briefly surveyed his listeners and smiled. The furrows on his cheeks ran all the way down to his jaw, giving the impression that someone had placed his mouth in parentheses. Tom heard someone in the row behind him whisper the word ugly, but that was not quite accurate. There was a look of energetic intelligence in Williams' face, the owlish eyes and simian jaw giving a sense of endearing homeliness, not mere coarseness.

Williams set down his notes and hardly glanced at them again for the next hour. "Did any of you buy a newspaper this morning?" he began. There was a hint of Cockney in his voice, an accent that certainly wouldn't impress the person who had whispered the word ugly. Abandoning the lectern, Williams paced back and forth in front of the room, looking into individual faces for the answer to his question. Several nodded that they had, and Williams smiled to see his hypothesis confirmed. "You offered a coin and received a newspaper in return. A mutually satisfactory transaction. That is the life of the city. Exchange." Williams paced briskly back toward the lectern and continued: "And thus you took one step closer to the Holy Grail." Pausing to let this comment have its effect, Williams came out toward his listeners again and asked, "Did any of you hold a door open for someone today? Did you help someone who'd dropped an armful of books?" Seeing a few nods in the audience, Williams smiled again and continued: "Giving your effort, your labor, for someone else, perhaps a stranger—courtesy, yes. But also substitution. Another step in your quest for the Grail."

David C. Downing
Looking for the King (Chapter 3)
Ignatius Press 2010

To Charles Williams

Your death blows a strange bugle call, friend, and all is hard
To see plainly or record truly. The new light imposes change,
Re-adjusts all a life-landscape as it thrusts down its probe from the sky,
To create shadows, to reveal waters, to erect hills and deepen glens.
The slant alters. I can't see the old contours. It's a larger world
Than I once thought it. I wince, caught in the bleak air that blows on
the ridge.
Is it the first sting of the great winter, the world-waning? Or the cold of
spring?

A hard question and worth talking a whole night on.
But with whom? Of whom now can I ask guidance? With what friend concerning your death
Is it worth while to exchange thoughts unless—oh unless it were you?

CS Lewis
Poems (Bles 1964)

Under the Mercy

The grave of Charles Williams in Holywell Cemetery (also known as St. Cross Churchyard), Oxford is marked by a stone bearing his name and the terse description: Poet, followed by the words, Under the Mercy.

Under the Mercy is a phrase that appears frequently in his writings, as it did in his conversation. He liked to refer to the Divinity by Its Attributes: the Mercy, the Protection, the Omnipotence. In his personal life he seemed always to be clinging to the faith that, balanced as he was upon the knife-edge of his Christian allegiance in the world of myth and magic that his passion-inflamed imagination had conjured up, he would find at last, in death if by no other route, the stillness of the Love of God. It was his wife, Michal, in one of those sudden flashes of crystal-clear insight of which she was not infrequently capable, who chose the inscription on the stone. Nothing could have been more appropriate.

Lois Lang-Sims: "Letters to Lalange – The Letters of Charles Williams to Lois Lang-Sims", page 16

Looking for the King - A Review

A classic tale of how not to amalgamate two books. The first a thriller set in 1940s England, visiting some of the key Authurian sites searching for a lost relic. The second… and no doubt the reason for the sub-title ‘An Inklings Novel’… introduces us to Lewis, Tolkien and Williams. I enjoyed the second book, although all the time I kept asking myself why it was part of the first.

The ‘Inklings’ passages are interesting, and the Williams’ lecture (described at length and drawing closely from Lewis description of Charles Williams’ famous Divinity School lecture, really captures the spirit of that ‘difficult’ writer (I write as a long-term member of the Charles Williams Society). BUT, in a novel?

As I started to read I really wanted to be impressed and enthralled by this book. David Downing is obviously a gifted scholar, especially in Inklings studies. But as another reviewer has put it, “If we wanted presentations of the Inklings, there are biographies and letters, and Warnie Lewis’ diary in which he very vividly describes his friends.” I know, several of Warnie’s books are in my personal ‘Inklings’ library.

Certainly ‘Looking for the King’ is a nice concept, and blends supposed historical fact with some nice geographical and cultural background into a story that draws the reader along. But the ‘Inklings’ passages seem somehow to intrude on the thrust of the plot. All in all, I think it was a good try, but it just fell too short of the mark for me, maybe another 100 pages would have allowed the author to really do his interesting concept justice.

There are some questions about the language that I have written about in my ‘first view’ below in this weblog, and the ‘villains’ turn out to be rather weak and hardly terrifying either.

One question that really bothered me: how did Tom and Laura manage to get the petrol coupons to travel just so far on a motorcycle and sidecar. In early 1940s England, immersed as it was in a draconian rationing regime, how did visiting Americans manage quite to travel quite so easily?

A final point. Any plot that turns on the dreams of the one of the protagonists has simply got to be risible. The dénouement was unsatisfactory and left me wishing Downing had found a way to play the plot line out into a farther reaching story with more at stake.

Did I enjoy it? The Williams passages, yes. The rest, well I have read worse.

‘Looking for the King’ is published in the United States by Ignatius Press, San Francisco.

'Looking for the King' - first thoughts

Ignatius Press is based in California, David C. Downing is an English professor in Pennsylvania, and the English used in ‘Looking for the King’ certainly betrays the book’s origins. To an English, Oxford University Alumni (i.e. me), the language used throughout the book is very much ‘American English’. We simply do not talk (or write) like that. Page after page was spoiled for me by language that simply will not do in the pages of a novel set in 1940 war-time England.

It is unlikely however that its intended American readership would not even notice the incongruities… but for an international market, the book needs rewriting.

Some examples? We do not ‘write’ people, we write to them... a ‘sedan’ would not be seen outside Blackwells, a car might... Blackwells is not a ‘bookstore’ it is a bookshop... we do not have a ‘clerk’ at a shop’s till, we have a shop assistant. I could go on and on and on. I laughed at the scene in the Eagle and Child where JRRT’s waistcoat is described as a 'vest', and again later where Tom tore his 'pants'. Without doubt Tollers, Charles and most particularly Jack Lewis, would have roared with laughter. Why? Vest and pants are shall we say, are more intimate parts of the male apparel outside North America.

As another reviewer has succinctly put it, but in a different context: "I wish someone had challenged the author to do at least one more rewrite on the manuscript, to improve everything. I have no problem with the plot outline, but the author doesn't deliver on it."

I hope that "Looking for the King" reaches a wide audience, not the least as its portrayal of Charles Williams (in particular) is excellent. But is that what the book is actually seeks to achieve?

But read Sheldon Vanauken’s “A Severe Mercy” – albeit not a novel – if you really want to be introduced to the ‘real’ C.S. Lewis, and be immersed in the Oxford of 60 years ago.

I'll seek to comment on the plot in my next posting...

Looking for the King

It is 1940, and American Tom McCord, a 23-year-old aspiring doctoral candidate, is in England researching the historical evidence for the legendary King Arthur. There he meets perky and intuitive Laura Hartman, a fellow American staying with her aunt in Oxford, and the two of them team up for an even more ambitious and dangerous quest.

Aided by the Inklings - that illustrious circle of scholars and writers made famous by its two most prolific members, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien - Tom and Laura begin to suspect that the fabled Spear of Destiny, the lance that pierced the side of Christ on the cross, is hidden somewhere in England.

Tom discovers that Laura has been having mysterious dreams, which seem to be related to the subject of his research, and, though doubtful of her visions, he hires her as an assistant. Heeding the insights and advice of the Inklings, while becoming aware of being shadowed by powerful and secretive foes who would claim the spear as their own, Tom and Laura end up on a thrilling treasure hunt that crisscrosses the English countryside and leads beyond a search for the elusive relics of Camelot into the depths of the human heart and soul.

Looking for the King

(David C Downing) Ignatius Press (2010)

(from the Amazon.com review)

In future postings I will post both extracts and my own review of the novel.

'What the Bird Said Early in the Year'

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you.
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick! – the gates are drawn apart.

Did the ‘powers that be’ in Magdalen College at the time of the memorial stone, not know the original – and to many eyes – superior version of the poem? Seems very odd to this Oxford University Alumni, particularly the clumsy final line when line 10 of the original is so much more satisfying?

There has, of course, been much controversy over the years since the stone was unveiled, but no answers.

An Addison's controversy?

The monument described below by Rev. Dr. Michael Ward might make "What the Bird Said Early in the Year" Lewis's most famous poem. Mr. Ward did not mention the fact that this 12-line version of Lewis's 14-line poem was never published until after Lewis's death. Lewis titled his original poem "Chanson D'Aventure" and published it in The Oxford Magazine on 10 February 1938:

Chanson D'Adventure

I heard in Addison's Walk a bird sing clear
'This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

'Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.

'This year time's nature will no more defeat you,
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

'This summer will not lead you round and back
To autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.

'Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
The gates of good adventure swing apart.

'This time, this time, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.'

I said, 'This might prove truer than a bird can know;
And yet your singing will not make it so.'

(Next post... the poem recorded on the monument)

Why is Addison's Walk so famous?

Just before 3 am on the Sunday morning of the 20th September, 1931 J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and another friend, Hugo Dyson, took a stroll along the Cherwell in the grounds of Magdalen College. All the previous evening the three of them had been discussing their lifelong fascination with myths. It was sad, Lewis declared, to think that classic tales of courage, beauty, sacrifice and virtue are all untrue and ultimately worthless.

Tolkien stopped his sceptical friend cold by forcefully arguing: No, they are not lies. Myths contain great spiritual truths.

This is how Lewis remembered it two days later in his letter to Arthur Greeves:

He (Dyson) stayed the night with me in College -I sleeping in in order to be able to talk far into the night as one cd… Tolkien came too, and did not leave till 3 in the morning: and after seeing him out by the little postern on Magdalen bridge Dyson and I found still more to say to one another, strolling up and down the cloister of New Building, so that we did not get to bed till 4, It was really a memorable talk. We began (in Addison's walk just after dinner) on metaphor and myth --interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would. We continued (in my room) on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot: then discussed the difference between love and friendship - then finally drifted back to poetry and books.

On Sunday he came out here for lunch and Maureen and Minto and I (and Tykes) all motored him (Dyson –taught English at Reading University) to Reading - a very delightful drive with some lovely villages, and the autumn colours are here now.

I am so glad you have really enjoyed a Morris again. I had the same feeling about it as you, in a way, with this proviso - that I don't think Morris was conscious of the meaning either here or in any of his works, except ‘Love is Enough’ where the flame actually breaks through the smoke so to speak. I feel more and more that Morris has taught me things he did not understand himself. These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy, - this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality ~ these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris's world that desire cannot be satisfied.

The Macdonald conception of death - or, to speak more correctly, St Paul's - is really the answer to Morris: but I don't think I should have understood it without going through Morris. He is an unwilling witness to the truth. He shows you just how far you can go without knowing God, and that is far enough to force you… to go further.

(Lewis’ letter to Greeves dated Sept 22nd 1931)

A note on Addison's Walk

Addison's Walk (originally called Water Walk) is a picturesque footpath around a small island in the River Cherwell in the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford, England. There are good views of Magdalen Tower and Magdalen Bridge from along the walk.

The Walk is named after Joseph Addison (1672–1719), a Fellow of the College from 1698 to 1711, who enjoyed walking there and wrote articles in The Spectator about landscape gardening. The path most likely dates from the 16th century, although the name "Addison's Walk" has only been in use since the 19th century. Addison's Walk originally finished at Dover Pier, an old Civil War gun position on the River Cherwell. It was made into a circular walk in the 19th century.

The Lewis Stone

'Magdalen College Chapel was packed to overflowing for a special Evensong on May 13th 1998, prior to the unveiling of the Lewis stone in Addison's Walk. The Magdalen Choir sang as an introit 'Veni Sancte Spiritus', the opening music of Richard Attenborough's 'Shadowlands'. (The composer, George Fenton, happened, by a fortunate coincidence, to be present to hear it. He was at Magdalen to supervise the Choir's recording of some new music for his most recent soundtrack.) During the service, lessons were read by Lewis's godson, Laurence Harwood, and by Lady Freud, who was an evacuee at The Kilns during the war. The Dean of Divinity, the Revd. Dr. Michael Piret, in his prayers quoted from Lewis's works and gave thanks for Lewis's life. He also prayed for peace in Lewis's native Northern Ireland. (Dr Piret is a former President of the Oxford Lewis Society.) After the service was over, the congregation adjourned to Addison's Walk, which was looking especially beautiful in the evening sunlight, - though only a few weeks previously it had been completely under water in the April floods.

The commemorative tablet is a circle of Westmorland green slate about three feet in diameter, designed by stonemason Alec Peever, and erected a stone's throw from Lewis's rooms in the New Building. Michael Ward, the Centenary Secretary of the Oxford Lewis Society, welcomed everyone and spoke for a few minutes about the place Addison's Walk held in Lewis's life and about the poem, 'What the Bird Said Early in the Year', which has been inscribed on the tablet.

The President of Magdalen, Mr Anthony Smith, then unveiled the stone, and Walter Hooper, Lewis's biographer, recited the poem to the gathering. Among the eighty or so invited guests were former pupils of Lewis such as Francis Warner (now a don at St Peter's College, Oxford) and Martin Moynihan (editor of Lewis's Latin letters). A drinks reception in the President's Lodgings brought the evening's events to their conclusion.'

Michael Ward (Now best knwn as the author of 'Planet Narnia')

The Father Christmas letters

Every December an envelope bearing a stamp from the North Pole would arrive for J.R.R.Tolkien’s children. Inside would be a letter in strange spidery handwriting and a beautiful coloured drawing or some sketches. The letters were from Father Christmas.

They told wonderful tales of life at the North Pole: how all the reindeer got loose and scattered presents all over the place; how the accident-prone Polar Bear climbed the North Pole and fell through the roof of Father Christmas’s house into the dining-room; how he broke the Moon into four pieces and made the Man in it fall into the back garden; how there were wars with the troublesome horde of goblins who lived in the caves beneath the house!

Sometimes the Polar Bear would scrawl a note, and sometimes Ilbereth the Elf would write in his elegant flowing script, adding yet more life and humour to the stories. No reader, young or old, can fail to be charmed by the inventiveness and ‘authenticity’ of Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas. Seek out a copy!

Pattern

[Image - Eddie Bairstow]

Some believe the slumber
Of trees is in December
When timber's naked under sky
And squirrel keeps his chamber.

But I believe their fibres
Awake to life and labour
When turbulence comes roaring up
The land in loud October,

And plunders, strips, and sunders
And sends the leaves to wander
And undisguises prickly shapes
Beneath the golden splendour.

Then form returns. In warmer,
Seductive days, disarming
Its firmer will, the wood grew soft
And put forth dreams to murmur.

Into earnest winter
With spirit alert it enters;
The hunter wind and the hound frost
Have quelled the green enchanter.

Poems - C.S. Lewis (1964)

Born to write?

I am sure that some are born to write as trees are born to bear leaves: for these, writing is a necessary mode of their own development. If the impulse to write survives the hope of success, then one is among these. If not, then the impulse was at best only pardonable vanity, and it will certainly disappear when the hope is withdrawn.
C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, The Letters of C.S. Lewis, (28 August 1930)

The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or right the readers will most certainly go into it.
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, "Cross-Examination" (1963)

Returning to work on an interrupted story is not like returning to work on a scholarly article. Fact, however long the scholar has left them untouched in his notebook, will still prove the same conclusions; he has only to start the engine running again. But the story is an organism: it goes on surreptitiously growing or decaying while your back is turned. If it decays, the resumption of work is like trying to coax back to life an almost extinguished fire, or to recapture the confidence of a shy animal which you had only partially tamed at your last visit.
C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, bk III.I (1954)

Mere Theology (II)

While we are on the subject of 'Mere Theology', mention must be made of Will Vaus's book of the same name, but much more intimately involved with Jack Lewis than Alister McGrath's intends to be.

What did C. S. Lewis believe about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, heaven, hell, creation, the Fall, the forgiveness of sins, marriage and divorce, war and peace, the church and sacraments, masculinity and femininity?

Lewis was not a professional theologian, but anyone who has read his writings--whether fiction or nonfiction, essays or correspondence--knows that profoundly Christian convictions permeate them all. The more one reads, the more it becomes clear that Lewis could write with charity and simplicity while preserving theological accuracy because he was well informed and thoroughly grounded in the Christian faith.

Will Vaus has masterfully brought together Lewis's thought from throughout his voluminous writings to provide us a full-orbed look into his beliefs on twenty-five Christian themes. This book gives us not only a comprehensive view of Lewis's theological convictions but also guidance and encouragement for our own spiritual journeys toward the God whom Lewis found so real, personal and present.

Follow the link to Will's website on the left hand side of this page.

Mere Theology

From my post on the 1st December:
"And now the world has changed. Could we imagine a book called "Mere Christianity" having such an impact in 2011? The post-war, church-schooled audience isn't there any more. What would a modern-day Lewis write, and how would he capture the minds of this generation?"

Lewis for today? Society has changed of course, but I would propose Alister McGrath. His latest book 'Mere Theology' is fun:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mcgrath/

But there are many (many) other books from which to choose! His gift is to make complex things 'simple' (a la Lewis) and to gradually lead the reader into more technical areas step-by-step. (i.e. starting with Alister in the wrong place can be disastrous)!

---oOo---

In 2006, the movement now widely, if inaccurately, known as she "new atheism’ exploded on the cultural scene. Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006), Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great (2007) created a media fascination with religion and its discontents. Public interest in the God-question soared. I found myself regularly being called upon to speak and write on these themes, and debate with leading atheists in public: Richard Dawkins in Oxford, Daniel Dennett in London, and Christopher Hitchens in Washington. Although I much prefer seminar rooms to debating chambers, there is no doubt that the issues being contested were a matter of general, not just academic, interest. To my surprise, I found that I had become a public intellectual.

Debate often centred on the rationality of faith, and the coherence of the Christian vision of reality. For the new atheists, Christianity represents an antiquated way of explaining things that can be pensioned off in the modern scientific age. In one of the wonderfully unsubstantiated assertions that make up so much of his case against religion, Christopher Hitchens tells us that, since the invention of the telescope and microscope, religion ‘no longer offers an explanation of anything important’. It's a nice soundbite which, when placed alongside many other equally unsubstantiated soundbites, almost manages to create the semblance of an evidence-based argument. But is it anything more than that?

In his brilliantly argued critique of the new atheism, Terry Eagleton ridicules those who treat religion as a purely explanatory entity, 'Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It's rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster, we can forget about Chekhov.’ Believing that religion Is a 'botched attempt to explain the world' is on the same intellectual level as ‘seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus’.

Eagleton is surely right here. There is far more to Christianity than an attempt to make sense of things. The New Testament is primarily concerned with the transformation of human existence through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The gospel is thus not so much about explanation as about salvation - the transformation of the human situation. Yet while the emphasis of the Christian proclamation may not be on explaining the world, it nevertheless also offers a distinctive way of looking at things which, at least in principle, enables us to see those things in different ways, and thus leads us to act in ways consistent with this. Christianity involves believing that certain things are true, that they may he relied upon, and that they illuminate our perceptions,, decisions and actions.

Alister McGrath
Mere Theology (2010)
(The introduction to the book)

Happy Birthday?

I'm sure you knew it, but November 29th was the anniversary of C. S. Lewis's birth (to call it his "birthday" is surely pushing the bounds of good taste).

112 years is not a significant anniversary, but Lewis is current because of the imminent release of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third Narnia movie, following the deeply disappointing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Prince Caspian, which I avoided in case it was equally dismal. The production company Walden Media bought the rights to Narnia with the stated aim of producing "wholesome" films, which seemed to equate in this case to "po-faced". However new owners Fox have apparently sacked them, so there may be hope for The Dawn Treader.

I loved Narnia as a child, and honestly, I still do. As an adult reader one becomes sensitive to Lewis's rather strong opinions forcing themselves into the narrative, but what right-minded person would not want to live the life of Narnia, to fight for justice and Aslan, and to go to his country when they die? Of course, some people don't, but that is precisely the point. Narnia beautifully illustrates Lewis's genius for conveying profound truths with imagination, clarity, and pure style.

I use the word "genius" intentionally. Lewis had a rare gift. He was a scholar, master wordsmith, and a true-hearted friend. But his genius lay in that ability to communicate his thoughtful faith in a way that seized the imagination of not just his generation, but of successive generations. Not only his children's stories, but almost all his books were deeply influential on the thinking and faith of countless readers.

Lewis so shaped the idea of Christian literature that, for the last 50 years, every Christian writer has wanted to be him. The "Christian" publishing industry has churned out thousands of metaphorical children's adventures, humorous reflections on the Christian life, and worldly-wise apologetics. A few of these have been successful, most have been rubbish. But no-one has really conquered the territory in the way that he did.

And now the world has changed. Could we imagine a book called "Mere Christianity" having such an impact in 2011? The post-war, church-schooled audience isn't there any more. What would a modern-day Lewis write, and how would he capture the minds of this generation?

Re-posted from "Always Hope - Life, faith (and hope) in Cornwall" : http://charliepeer.blogspot.com/