The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis
Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward, editors
CUP £18.99
(978-0-521-71114-2)
Church Times Bookshop £17.10
DOES C. S. Lewis deserve this accolade? Yes, because, although
perhaps not a genius, he combined qualities usually found
separately - wide learning, masterly exposition, and imaginative
power - that throw new light on the familiar and the obscure.
There seems to be no shared view; each contributor is allowed
his or her own territory. There are no weak efforts, but special
praise might be accorded to Joseph P. Cassidy, T. A. Shippey, and
Jerry L. Walls.
That some aspects are ignored testifies to the variety of
Lewis's talents and attainments. We would welcome an essay on the
letter-writer, the Socratic Club, the influence of Chesterton, and
a fuller account of the influence of Charles Williams and the
Inklings. A fuller and more probing study of A Grief
Observed would be welcome: it is a crux in his work that is
unparalleled in any comparable Christian writer.
A casual reader might not realise that Lewis was a natural
rebel, a ruthless critic of his father, bitter about his
schooldays, and crediting public schools with the power to ruin the
country unless they were at once abolished.
His hostility to nearly all modern literature is amusingly shown
in his comments on T. S. Eliot, whom he treats as a reckless young
experimenter. No one unfamiliar with Eliot's work would guess that
he was a decade older than Lewis, steeped in Latin and Greek, and
especially in Dante, a believer in literary tradition, and a
Christian believer when Lewis was still agnostic. I would welcome,
too, an analysis of Lewis's enduring popularity in America.
This is a distinction he shares with his friend Tolkien. In
their fictional writings, however, they were at opposite poles.
Tolkien's is a coherent world without religion; Lewis, perhaps
injudiciously, mixes magic classical mythology and Christianity in
an amalgam that lacks internal logic.
It is natural that a volume such as this should be positive; yet
it is right that we should remember his weaknesses. He could be
wildly over-confident, and he could be unscrupulous in argument. I
once heard him give a talk on Parisian existentialism, of which he
knew nothing, as Fr Frederick Copleston demonstrated.
In 1953, a meeting of the English faculty at Oxford was poised
to undertake a long overdue reform: to include the Victorians in
the undergraduate syllabus. Lewis, whose real motive may have been
to preserve the undergraduate study of Old English, roused
incredulous gasps when he said: "The Victorian age is the
classic age of English Literature, greater even than the 17th
century. That is why we should not allow undergraduates to study
it." This counter-attack delayed the inevitable for several years.
Lewis already knew that his work in Oxford was ending with his
appointment to a Cambridge chair.
But he was the best lecturer I ever heard; he helped - and still
helps - thousands to a deeper imaginative grasp of their religion,
and he was admirably contemptuous of the Zeitgeist. What he said in
the 1940s retains validity, while rivals, notably Stalinism and
logical positivism, have been assigned to the dustheap of
history.
A. O. J. Cockshut is a Fellow of Hertford College,
Oxford.