On the Misuse of C.S. Lewis

Lewis, pictured with concubine.

The popularity of C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis among Protestants and modern Catholics rarely extends beyond his writings of apologetics and children’s stories. Sometimes his science fiction—or “scientifiction,” as he called it—gets some attention, but his body of work was quite varied and vast, branching into multiple intellectual fields.

I was recently re-reading the beginning of Lewis’s allegorical memoirs The Pilgrim’s Regress, and observing how oddly opaque so much of its content would be to most readers. Much of it was confounding to me, as well, and I had to rely on the occasional notations of online glosses. Professor Lewis was a well-read and well-rounded man, and not just in the Chestertonian sense. In his youth he wrote narrative poetry that was dense with allegory, and his fascination with medieval poetic tropes would find interesting expression in later fiction. He was learned in multiple languages, though perhaps not with as much enthusiasm as his friend John Tolkien. He wrote treatises on medieval and renaissance poetry that still stand up to academic standards. His apologetics work was, all things considered, more of a hobby or unfortunate necessity than a heartfelt vocation.

Of all his works of Protestant apologetics, Mere Christianity probably remains the most accessible and effective. Some of his other religious books like Miracles and The Problem of Pain are too philosophically abstract for modern readers, and his essays in God in the Dock and The Weight of Glory are not structured enough, even though these remain heavily quoted when people find a passage that catches their attention. Some of his religious books are outright ignored by Evangelicals, such as his Reflections on the Psalms, where he called the imprecatory psalms a “festering, gloating, undisguised” collection of wicked hatred. Try aligning that bit of anti-Hebraic rhetoric with Sola Scriptura!

It is a real pity that Catholic writers so often have to rely on Lewis to explain their observations on the Christian religion in a more literary manner. We see this frequently in the engagement of Catholic apologists with the larger culture. The orthodox apologists of old were not literary types, and reading their work today is often quite painful. Even the seminal apologetical work of St. Francis de Sales is bombastic in a way that is tied to the problems of the day, and it does not translate well into modern times. Lewis attempted, at his best, a rhetoric that would outlast his own time, although it must be admitted that many of his essays are too enmeshed with mid-20th century concerns to be universal. World War II, for instance, no longer exists in the popular mind as the imminent threat of London bombings and wartime efforts, but rather as a perpetual stream of aesthetically grimy big-budget films.

Lewis was not a Christian apologist, but a Protestant apologist with pseudo-Catholic and quasi-Patristic leanings. At times he sounds almost Catholic, but then shocks the reader into remembering his Anglican loyalties. His learned rhetoric fools many Catholics into considering him a mostly orthodox commentator. “He was so close to the true Faith,” they say, “surely he was saved in the end.” Impossible to say for sure, but the evidence is not far from damning.

If apologists want to sound as good as Lewis in the public square, they will need to imitate his education, not the surface of his rhetoric. They must read widely, study languages, understand classical logic, and immerse themselves in western history. They must stop watching so many television shows, reading so much Protestant literature, and being so tied to modern thought (religious or secular) by chronological snobbery. And you can thank Prof. Lewis for that last, colorful term. Stop writing poor imitations of The Screwtape Letters, and see how your own education leads you.

"It all began with a picture..."

Descent into Paganism

(source)

The collapse of the Roman Empire was considered by early doctors to be one of the precursors of the end times, usually paired with the preaching of the Gospel to the whole world. The recent catechism mentions only the eventual conversion of the Hebrew people to Christ as a prerequisite for the Final Judgment, for whatever that’s worth. The destruction of Rome as an eschatological sign has been reinterpreted variously throughout the Christian age, especially after the Empire had long vanished into disuse. Dr. Christopher Malloy observes how John Henry Newman approached the paradox that the fall of Rome must yet be future if it is to be a sure sign of the Antichrist’s coming:

Newman notes that whereas in some respects Rome has fallen, in other respects Rome has not fallen. Rome is not simply the old Empire. Rome is, perhaps the rule of law, European civilization, etc. These are still with us. So long as we do not seriously embrace the denial of the Principle of Non-contradiction. So long as we still retain key fragments of the natural law. But these things are crashing down around us.

Imperial Rome then becomes interpreted as the best of pagan philosophy and statesmanship, the legacy of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Caesar. When the Christian religion loses its influence, the world begins to fall back upon the best of paganism, or Classicism. But when the Classical world begins to lose its luster, the world will begin (it is also claimed) to fall back into the darkness of pre-classical paganism, the darkness of polytheism, the worship of demons, outright idolatry, and various vicious rites.

Christendom rose in the world like a high tide, and just as it seemed like it would flood the earth in its entirety, it began to recede, leaving the landscape reshaped but with some old landmarks still intact. It is reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson’s nostalgic reflection on the failure of the sexual revolution of the ’60s: “With the right kind of eyes you can almost see the High Water Mark, that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

The reversal of Christian influence does not and probably can not directly mirror the rise of that influence. As the cultural West especially sheds its Christian past piece by piece, it does not exactly take up the pre-Christian world as it was. The Renaissance was pitched as a return to the “Golden Age of Greece and Rome,” but it was that only superficially. The bulk of political movements in recent centuries have occurred rather under the banner of Progress, and any political returns to paganism have been largely unintentional. People wish to be thought of as forward-thinking rather than championing any past golden age.

The rise of Neo-Paganism in America and Europe also bears little resemblance to the pagan religions as they existed before Christian conversion. The creation of temples to Odin and Thor come with the disclaimer that these gods are only archetypes of the collective human subconscious. Similarly, practicing Satanists disclaim any belief in the Devil as a real person or entity, preferring to describe him as as symbol of mankind’s darker urges. These polytheists and demon worshippers are still too cowardly to sacrifice oxen and doves to their gods.

But the state of Roman pagan religion was much the same just before the influence of the Church took hold. The Stoics held sway with the intelligentsia, and they argued that the Olympian gods were only real in the sense that they embodied aspects of the singular, unknowable deity. They were practical deists while allowing polytheism for the masses, just as the American Founding Fathers were deists masquerading as Protestant Christians. The Neo-Pagans of today are atheists using polytheism as a masque for the Collective Subconscious.

Will the widespread revival of unfeigned Odin-worship, Jupiter-worship, and Satan-worship ever occur? There are pockets of sincere polytheism here and there, but masqueraded atheism still holds sway for the majority of so-called pagans and witches (as it does for many so-called Christians). My suspicion is that sincere paganism will in fact rise as people go through the mere motions of idolatrous religion, but begin to see actual results. The devils who posed as gods in ages past will be allowed to work wonders for their new worshippers, and the revival of paganism will open the pits of true demonic darkness.

When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, “Would that she were.” For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin. (C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock)

Laocoön and his sons being slain by the gods for prophesying truth.

Do We Need Full-Time Apologists?

Every so often I peruse the New Advent website for the latest from the neo-conservative Catholic clique. Between the Fr. Longenecker and Fr. Zuhl posts, and the “Everything in the Vatican is Fine” stories, one occasionally finds a new article from the retired president of Catholic Answers, Karl Keating. Most recently, he has been writing about why Fundamentalist Protestants should be okay with sacramentals, and how they hypocritically use them even while denying this.

It all seems rather overbearingly redundant. Keating has written so many of the same types of books and articles against Fundamentalists that I’m surprised the CA blog editors haven’t just republished his old work. In spite of his international travels and hiking expeditions—all publicized on Facebook—he seems to be bored enough to scribble out more tracts against dying heretical sects. It feels obsessive, much like the fact that he took the time in his later years to write a 366-page complaint against a fellow who used too much soy sauce with his meal.

All of which brings me to my major question: Should people be treating apologetics as a full-time job? I am not questioning the necessity of apologetics nor the need of learned people to be taking significant amounts of time engaging intellectually with attacks against the Faith, but the decision of laymen to devote much or most of their time to such engagements appears to be a recent phenomenon. Ever since the creation of the Catholic Evidence Guild in 1918, their peculiar method of public interaction with anti-Catholic rhetoric has been the norm in apologetics circles.

The work of apologetics used to be shouldered by men who lived primarily other avocations. They engaged in apologetics as necessary, but not as a full-time career, whether that be in the form of public speakers in Hyde Park, radio broadcasters, or bloggers. Many of the best apologists were not just apologists—Augustine was a bishop, Thomas Aquinas a monk and philosopher, Blaise Pascal a mathematician and inventor, G.K. Chesterton a journalist and novelist, Ronald Knox a priest and schoolmaster, Peter Kreeft a university professor, and so on. Even C.S. Lewis, the best Protestant apologist of recent memory, was chiefly a scholar, professor, poet, and novelist.

The greatest apologists were men who lived lives of broad interest and learning, who made their livings in other ways, much as how St. Paul paid for his own expenses by tentmaking. The men who focus all their intellect and livelihood on the defense of the Faith are apt to end up with middling obsessions. One needs only to look at current figures like E. Michael Jones, Michael Voris, Mark Shea, Karl Keating, and a thousand full-time bloggers to see the proof of this. I always worry when a Catholic blogger announces he has decided to devote all his time to defending the Church against atheists/neo-Catholics/Democrats/rad-trads/Fundamentalists/Choose-Your-Poison; within five years I expect him to be foaming at the mouth with a tiny readership, yelling in an unseemly way at his chosen target.

Go outside. Read a novel. Plant a garden. Visit Europe. Go fishing. Write a poem. Play a video game. Find something else to occupy your time in between your job and your intermittent apologetical engagements. Chesterton could not have written Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man without losing his sense of humor had he not spent his leisure time drinking wine, wandering the streets of London, and smoking good cigars. Full-time apologists end up either as obsessed extremists or as religious businessmen, which is what usually happens in the Protestant world (as with Francis Schaeffer, Norman Geisler, Lee Strobel, and Hank Hanegraaff). When apologists start selling tickets to “Learn Your Faith” sea cruises, simony has found its foothold.

The Ennui of Evangelicals

Being born and raised in the largest American religious group, I spent many years watching my fellow Evangelical Protestants go through cycles of wild extremist belief, desperate attempts at holding on to their previous emotional faith, and termination either in outright apostasy, or bored church-hopping.

There’s a kind of anti-rational fideism eating away at the foundations of Evangelicalism. In spite of the ability and willingness of young Evangelicals to engage in debates at excruciating length, their spirituality relies almost entire on emotionalism. They operate on the logical extension of Fr. Luther’s redefinition of the virtue of faith as trust rather than humble belief. If the individual “Christian” no longer feels trust in their Heavenly Father, it must indicate a loss of faith—or worse, indicate that he never possessed faith in the first place.

The interaction of Evangelicals with the larger, secular culture is laced with an urgent need to be perceived as relevant. They instinctively understand the paucity of their own internal culture, and gravitate towards any things that hold the slightest promise of filling their own voids. They obsess about Hollywood movies, C.S. Lewis (hardly an Evangelical, himself), glorified road trips with missionary pretenses, popular musical trends, and even Thomas Aquinas. Worse, they obsess about convincing themselves that sin doesn’t matter.

But of course sin matters. It’s the most terrible thing in creation. It’s a horrible nothingness that tears away the only parts of us capable of communion with God. The Evangelical-Protestant insistence that sin is “already forgiven” or “placed at the Cross” is impious nonsense, a legal fiction that inflames the existing cognitive dissonance of religionists who already believe that “real Christians” simply will not sin. Or at least not seriously. Just a little. Maybe. Probably. Maybe.

At their happiest, Evangelicals are zealously troublesome in flooding Catholic message boards, insisting that they flee the great Whore of Babylon. At their saddest, they leave the drywall interiors of their churches for the caffeinated opium dens of abortion-loving Starbucks.

St. Jude describes the mental state of Evangelicals thoughtful enough to be aware that something is wrong: “Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own confusion; wandering stars, to whom the storm of darkness is reserved.” The movement is so symbiotic with America that it can only exist in other countries that have been Americanized to some degree; and the more America is in turmoil, the more Evangelicals find themselves on the opposite sides of a similar divide.

They have no lasting poetry, no sculpture, no memorable novels, no architecture, no music that isn’t a cheap imitation or childish emoting. When an Evangelical wishes to learn how to integrate faith and the arts, he inevitably falls back on Catholic examples, and then spends hours explaining to his friends why reading Flannery O’Connor doesn’t necessarily make one a dirty papist.

So why does the Catholic Church seem hell-bent on imitating our Evangelical neighbors? Do we American Catholics really hate our pre-Vatican II urban ghetto culture so much that we are willing to trade it in for anything else? We are no longer preaching from the upper room in Jerusalem, proclaiming the New Covenant to all the world in every tongue with power and truth, as on that first Pentecost. We are more concerned with listening than telling.

At some point we despaired. We despaired of our own culture, our own ecclesiastical society, and our traditions. We didn’t despair in the darkest of times, after the Church had been rocked by a continual beating tide of scandals, but in good times of peace. We tired of promulgating the evangel throughout the world and our communities. Our own evangelical spirit grew cold, and once we stopped spreading it to the heathen and heretic, we stopped believing it, ourselves.

We are not even accused of being drunk on “new wine,” any longer. The American Catholic is desperate to be like his neighbor, to fit in and be accepted as just another flavor of so-called Christianity, to be both in and of the world. We are so alienated from our own roots that Flannery O’Connor is as obscure to the modern Catholic as to the Protestant.

The evangelical ennui is ours.

Summer, by Jules Breton