Читать книгу The Neglected C. S. Lewis - Mark Neal - Страница 9

There are a number of benefits to the reader for undergoing the rigor these works demand. First of all, you’ll gain a greater understanding of C. S. Lewis as a person. We believe that you can’t claim to know him if you don’t know these neglected works. Part of understanding any author is to understand his body of work, his preoccupations, the books he read, and so forth. Many of the works Lewis writes about were vitally important not only to his profession, but to his spiritual growth. Reading literature was a way of life.

A second benefit is that these books will lead you to other authors of which you were perhaps unaware. Lewis opens doors for us and bids us enter. If we let them, these works and the books and authors to which they lead will constitute an education in itself. For example, when one first picks up A Preface to Paradise Lost, one realizes that the book won’t make sense unless Milton’s poem is read in conjunction with it. Lewis opens this door for readers to become acquainted with Milton and one of the greatest epic poems in the English language. Similarly, his essays on Sir Walter Scott or Jane Austen can help illuminate something of Scott’s or Austen’s preoccupations and inform the reading of those authors’ novels.

A third benefit is that these neglected works contain the development of many of Lewis’s most important ideas. These ideas can frequently be found in his mainstream books, including his fiction. But they were often first formulated in his literary criticism. For example, we believe that you can’t really know The Chronicles of Narnia or the Ransom trilogy if you haven’t read The Discarded Image, Lewis’s opus on the medieval cosmology and worldview. Doing so will enrich and deepen your understanding of those books. Similarly, reading Studies in Words prepares you for better understanding portions of That Hideous Strength. And Lewis is good at this. He creates imaginative maps of the past that enable us to imaginatively inhabit other times. He calls this inhabiting the historical imagination. He writes that we must become, for example, an eighteenth-century Londoner while reading Samuel Johnson, or an Achaean chief while reading Homer.¹ Only then will we be able to judge historical works as they were written. This keeps us from misreading, from projecting our own worldview onto a work, and not reading it the way the author intended.

Thus, another reason we should not neglect these works is that they help us avoid what Lewis termed “chronological snobbery” or the valuing of one age over another. Each age tends to devalue previous ages as shortsighted, or perhaps, as backward. But valuing all ages enables us to see our own age more clearly and to better interpret it. No conception of the future will be feasible without an understanding of the past, and a proper use of the historical imagination allows just that.

It strikes us that our current age views itself in many ways as the apotheosis of the historical continuum. The past is devalued as a means to informing the future. But it was Isaac Newton who said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Lewis writes to encourage this same sort of respect for, and accurate judgment of, the past. He writes that these things keep the palliative “clean sea breeze of the centuries” blowing through our minds against the characteristic blindness of the twenty-first century.²

Yet another benefit of reading Lewis’s neglected works is that they widen our vision. Lewis writes that we read old literature because it can “re-admit us to bygone modes of thought and enable us to imagine what they felt like, to see the world through our ancestors’ eyes.”³ Why is this important? Lewis writes in An Experiment in Criticism that we live in a narrow prison of self. We need others’ eyes in order to apprehend reality and expand our understanding—this means not only the voices of the present, but those of the past as well. In opening doors to other historical times and works, Lewis is giving us these eyes. This kind of vision allows us to engage our current cultural situations more effectively and enriches our own understanding and perception of the world.

We need to be awake to our current situation so we can best be prepared as Christians to confront culture ethically rather than retreat from it, and so we don’t get lulled back to sleep by the siren song of culture. In speaking of our ability to be perceptive, Lewis notes,

[Y]ou 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.⁴

Waking up is crucial to our spiritual and moral education. The study of the literature of the past keeps us sharp, develops virtue, and keeps our faith from suffering from the same soporific, lulling effect. The open doors Lewis invites us to go through can help keep us sharp and awake and imaginatively engaged.

These neglected works open onto new vistas, new modes of thought and understanding that enable us to see the world, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, that is “charged with the grandeur of God.” Lewis writes that “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”⁵ Lewis sensed this richness and this deep delight in God’s revelation of beauty in every sphere of life. For him, this delight was most often found in literature. Thus, as he throws wide the doors of his own pleasure in words, language, and the imaginative creation of past centuries, we can better see the world that is crowded with God. As Eric Liddell of the popular film Chariots of Fire said, “God made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.” We might similarly say of Lewis that God made him an astute critic of literature, and in that exercise he reveled in God’s pleasure. It is clear from many of Lewis’s writings that he keenly felt this unique pleasure given to him by great literature. These works are a passing on of that pleasure that we might likewise partake in it.

Finally, Lewis writes that most of his books are evangelistic: “What we want is not more little books about Christianity,” he writes, “but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.”⁶ Similarly, G. K. Chesterton wrote that he didn’t become a Christian because one or two things proved it to be true; he became a Christian because everything seemed to point to its truth. Lewis is often quoted along these lines when he wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”⁷ He saw, and the readers of this book should see, that faith can be strengthened by a widening of the Christian worldview.

Thus, Lewis provides a model of faith integration. In a secular age we tend to compartmentalize our lives, including our faith. We don’t understand how to integrate faith with the rest of what we do. Lewis serves as a model of how to integrate faith into all facets of life. He also challenges secularists to attempt a similar integration by means of whatever worldview they happen to be endorsing at any given time. In books like The Discarded Image he shows that ideologies and worldviews come and go, but the Christian worldview has withstood 2,000 years of distractions and opponents and continues to flourish. It was Lewis’s contention that throughout the ages, the truth of Christianity was able to make sense of the greatest amount of material.