Читать книгу C. S. Lewis and the Craft of Communication - Steven Beebe - Страница 21

The first communication principle describes Lewis’s holistic communication strategies. To be holistic is to be all-encompassing, drawing upon several elements to create an integrated, comprehensive approach to communicating with others. Lewis was a holistic communicator in that his messages appealed to both the eye and the ear; his written messages were not only designed to be read (an appeal to the eye) but also to have an auditory quality (an appeal to the ear), as reflected in his practice of speaking the words aloud as he wrote.

In addition, Lewis was holistic in that he integrated reasoning—the process of using evidence to reach a conclusion, with creative applications of his rich imagination to express his ideas. The nature of his subject matter made his ideas difficult to document with tangible, or observable evidence. Lewis sought to provide evidence for the nature of God, affirm the underlying logic of Christianity, while inviting his readers and listeners to use their own powers of reasoning to reach a conclusion. He constructed arguments either inductively (from specific examples to a general conclusion) or deductively (arguing from a general, ←21 | 22→assumed-to-be-true premise to reach a specific conclusion). Many of his readers appreciate his logical, structured way of clarifying murky or mysterious ideas. Lewis was holistic in that in addition to, and often simultaneously, he would spark the imagination with images, analogies, metaphors, and stories. It was his skilled use of both strategies that made him a holistic communicator.

Besides appealing to the eye and the ear, as well as reason and imagination, Lewis drew upon skills in persuasion (rhetoric), debate (dialectic), and romantic ideals (the poetic) to communicate his ideas and message. His apologetic works were unabashedly persuasive; he used his debating skills to refute the ideas of others in support of his own. He would also use language poetically to appeal to his reader’s and listener’s sense of aesthetics. Chapter 4 uses Lewis’s own words as examples of his holistic communication strategies to look both “at” and “along” what he describes.¹²⁹