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LOREN WILKINSON

In the poem to Clyde Kilby that stands as an epigraph to this collection of his writings, Luci Shaw—one of many writers and scholars who received early encouragement from Dr. Kilby—uses two metaphors to describe the kind of experience this remarkable scholar and teacher provided for many of his students. The first is of a doorkeeper, an allusion to the imaginative entrance to the world C. S. Lewis created in The Chronicles of Narnia.

Then you swung open for us all

the wardrobe door,

pushed us farther up and farther in.

The second picture is of the man as a deep well, returning with his wife, Martha, after a summer in England, bringing

three score

years and ten worth of wisdom, under

your arm—letters and Lewis-lore—

your mind a well of wonder.

As we prepared this book and its companion volume, The Arts and the Christian Imagination: Essays on Art, Literature, and Aesthetics, which includes Kilby’s writings on these topics, we invited many of his former students to write of his influence on them. Many of them responded with similar language. Mark Noll also sees Kilby as a doorkeeper. For a whole generation of American evangelicals, says Noll, “Kilby opened a wardrobe onto a land of wonder where the Lion stalked.” Tom Howard continues the metaphor in describing the effect of taking Kilby’s class in Romantic poetry: “He threw open the shutters. . . . He pointed to the things that troubled the very marrow in one’s bones, but for which one never had the vocabulary to summon into visibility.”

In the dedication of his first book, Christ the Tiger, Howard uses the language of seeing: “For Dr. Kilby, who took my arm and said, ‘Look.’” Leanne Payne continues the metaphor. Speaking of the blindness resulting from a common kind of reductive modern analysis, Payne says, “He came against this blindness in all of his courses, and his bright students, heavy into analysis and sorely introspective, dropped their blinders, looked up, and began to see.” The poet Jeanne Murray Walker uses a different picture: “I praise him for being a liberator.” Dick Taylor, a historian with the Illinois State Historical Society, sums up Kilby’s effect on him in a seminar in life writing: “I can’t remember a thing he taught me about writing biography, but my experience in that class changed my life forever.”

As this small sampling of comments makes plain, Clyde S. Kilby was, for many students, an extraordinary teacher. It is with that fact, rather than with his early, long, and effective championing of writers like Lewis and Tolkien, that I must begin in introducing this collection of his writings on those makers of “modern mythology” (as he called it). Kilby’s greatness was not simply the result of his influence from, or defense of, Lewis, Tolkien, and friends; rather he turned to them (and turned many others to them) because they expressed a truth about God and creation that he had already come to know.

That truth—which kept filling and refilling that “well of wonder” which was Dr. Kilby’s life—was the fact that the whole of created reality is the miraculous gift of a loving, personal, and ever-present Creator. And this was not just a propositional truth intellectually known: it was lived, experienced, and shared. Often it was experienced—and expressed—through the apparently trivial or insignificant. Several of his former students, for example, mention Dr. Kilby’s love for the dandelion, and Marilee Melvin recalls his bringing a drooping dandelion to class and asking, “in a voice filled with awe, how many of you believe that the Lord God made this dandelion for our pleasure on this day.”

Now it is not easy for a college student of any generation, let alone a sober faculty colleague, to take seriously someone who publicly shares his awe over a dandelion; there were many who were themselves mystified by the life-changing effect Dr. Kilby had on people. Since I, too, am one of those whose life was changed by the man, I want to try to express something of the mystery of how and why that change was effected.

The dandelion incident calls to mind G. K. Chesterton’s words in Orthodoxy (one of the many books that I read first through Dr. Kilby’s recommendation).

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.¹

Almost every recollection of Kilby mentions something of this quite unselfconscious, childlike delight in creaturely being. Chesterton traces that childlike delight in the commonplace back to its divine source, and all of the writers whose works, letters, and manuscripts Kilby was to assemble in what became the “Wade Collection” express something of that joyful wonder at the gift of Being. Writers like George MacDonald, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien helped Kilby understand and express that awareness of Being as a divine gift—but he responded to the vision in them because it was first in him. Their springs flowed from the same source.

This connection between wonder at the world, on the one hand, and trying to be a faithful Christian, on the other, was one that evangelical Christians like myself, growing up in mid-twentieth-century America, desperately needed to make. My own initial encounter with Kilby was in registration week at Wheaton in September 1961. Still somewhat groggy from a three-day bus trip across the continent (I had never been east of Oregon before), I recall a genial little man (speaking, I realize now, in his capacity as chairman of the English department) telling a group of us assembled for a freshman writing exemption test, “You’ve already been selected; now we’re going to select you some more.” But it was not till the next fall, when I took Kilby’s Romantic poetry class, that my world began to change—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a deep wound in my world began to heal.

I had, sometime in high school, already fallen in love with the Romantic poets, especially Keats and Shelley. The intensity of their response to the beauty of the world articulated something I too had felt deeply. I grew up on a forested farm along an Oregon river, had hiked and climbed the Cascade Mountains, and was deeply homesick for that wild landscape (about as different from the plains and suburbs of northern Illinois as can be imagined). But I had no place, in my understanding of what it meant to be a Christian, to put this intensity of my response to creation. I had chosen Wheaton almost by accident—mainly because it was Jim Elliot’s school, and I assumed that being a missionary like him, preferably a martyr, was the only way to follow Christ in a world doomed to damnation anyhow. I was an anthropology major (as a preparation for being a missionary), and the Romantic poetry course was a luxury I felt a bit guilty about.

We read Wordsworth early in the course. “Tintern Abbey,” in Kilby’s hands, bowled me over. To begin with, it seemed to describe my own solitary, unreflective boyhood.

. . . The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love.

But it also seemed to describe what I was feeling now, far removed from those places.

. . . I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity. . . .

. . . And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

It would have been easy enough for this experience to degenerate into a kind of pantheism. What Kilby managed to convey, however—not usually by explanation or analysis, but mainly by simply reading the poems and stammering his appreciation of them—was that the sort of experience Wordsworth was describing could be fully appreciated and comprehended best within the circle of Christian faith, a circle that grew steadily bigger for me as the course progressed.

The door Kilby opened for me in that fall semester course in the Romantic poets allowed creation itself, and the full range of human feelings, to pour through, and by Christmas a door back into the world had been flung open. It has taken a lifetime to work out some of the implications of that Christian Romanticism. But the door was opened then.

A year later, with my new fiancée, Mary Ruth Kantzer, we joined a crowd of other students who climbed one evening a week the stairs of the house on Washington Street to read and discuss the works of Lewis, MacDonald, Tolkien, and Williams in the Kilbys’ crowded living room. In that setting I began to explore the resources that enabled me later to begin to connect “Romantic” experience with Christian faith. The two of us learned another lesson there, helped along by Martha’s incomparable cherry cheesecake: that the best learning is apt to happen not in a classroom but in a home, helped along by food and drink. The hospitality we began to learn from the Kilbys has enriched our own teaching for more than fifty years.

I have lingered on my own experience of Kilby’s teaching because I think it illustrates in one particular instance (the one I know best) the sort of door-opening that Kilby accomplished—directly, for generations of students at Wheaton, and indirectly, for the wider public of his work on behalf of Lewis, Tolkien, and the others of the “seven” that formed the focus of the Wade Collection (now known as the Marion E. Wade Center). Clyde Kilby was fundamentally a teacher, but what he had to teach was not a collection of facts; rather, he taught an awed, thankful, and joyful stance toward creation and Creator. From the time he first came to Wheaton—as assistant dean of men and professor of English, in 1935—he was able to embrace the bigness of vision that the Christian liberal arts college embodied, and that is well expressed in words from Jonathan Blanchard, Wheaton’s first president and the subject of a biography by Kilby, Minority of One: “Every truth is religious because all truth belongs to God.”

But Blanchard wrote those words early in the nineteenth century, when evangelical Christianity was still in a place of power, and the perfectibility of society still seemed a possible end to the great American Christian experiment. But—as many have documented—by the early decades of the twentieth century this robust Christianity had been marginalized, and Christian faith became defensive. All intensities of feeling were suspect, except the intensity of need to turn people back from the wrath to come. Though Wheaton College never completely gave in to that withdrawal from engagement with the world and the life of the mind, the culture that supported it had increasingly withdrawn to a small, closed room, characterized by a premillennial eschatology that tended to devalue both creation and culture, a gospel that preached the good news of salvation from, but with no sense of salvation for, and personal piety that stressed relationship between the soul and God—but not how to appreciate the sanctity of the world around. So Mark Noll, long a history professor at Wheaton—and a former student of Dr. Kilby—was able to write with some lament of “the scandal of the evangelical mind,” the scandal being that it doesn’t have much of a mind.

But it was not just the life of the mind to which we had closed the door: we were also walled up in a Christianity that had little room for intensities of feeling, especially toward the created world. It was that door—the door opening on beauty, and what it implied about ourselves and our God—that Kilby opened for many of us. And he didn’t just open the doors. He put us in the hands of a whole set of wise, holy, and imaginative guides. Kilby knew a great deal already of the country he helped us to explore, and one of the marks of his own saintliness is the eagerness with which he stepped aside and let these guides lead us on out through the door he had opened.

Here Luci Shaw’s other metaphor is apt. Kilby didn’t just open a door; he opened a floodgate, and what poured out was a stream of truth that was gloriously refreshing because it flowed not from “evangelical” or “Protestant” or even “Christian” sources, but from a wonder at creation itself, which is the source of all true myth. The writers for whom Kilby became a channel were certainly Christian, but what they gave us enlarged our understanding of what “Christian” meant: they helped us understand what water meant, along with the whole torrent of created reality that flows everywhere. Lewis’s great mentor, George MacDonald, put it beautifully: “There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen; it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier.”² Water must be understood as water before it can be understood as “the water of life,” and these great mythmakers enabled us to understand both. I recall a chapel talk Kilby delivered based on Jesus’s words from the cross, in which he spoke of the immense and gracious irony that caused the maker of water to cry, “I thirst.” Such a recognition helped make Kilby such an effective conduit for the work of these writers whose imaginations has deepened our understanding of both Christianity and creation. The essays that follow, taken from lectures, reviews, interviews, and scholarly articles, provide a good, deep drink from Kilby’s “well of wonder.”

1G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1936), 60.

2George MacDonald: An Anthology, ed. C. S. Lewis (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 81.