C. S. Lewis

The Weekly Wrap: September 6-12

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The Weekly Wrap: September 6-12

September 11 Twenty-Five Years Later

It was a day I remembered in minute detail. I was in Cleveland for the funeral of a friend. Driving up the evening before, I stayed with friends who I would see later that day. I was meeting another friend for coffee around 9 am that morning. Like so many others throughout the country, I remarked how clear the azure blue sky was that morning. On my drive to the coffee shop, I was listening to NPR when the reports came, first of one plane strike, then another, then the Pentagon.

There was a TV on at the coffee shop, and we sat riveted as the tragedy unfolded. Images I will never be able to unsee. When I could, I called my wife, as did so many around the country. At the funeral, I remarked to the friends I’d stayed with how much our world had changed in the few hours since I’d seen them.

I remember the tremendous sense of unity we experienced for a short time. And how it seemed so quickly to unravel and has continued to do so down to the present.

If we are basically good, as so many believe, why are we so cussedly fractious? While not as immediate as the 9/11 attacks, we face threats far more ominous. A massive surveillance society, which we can trace, at least in parts to those attacks. The existential threat of a planet becoming increasingly uninhabitable. And this week, the news from AI developers that AI could have the capability in the next few years to exterminate humanity. Yet we go along blithely banning books and specifying what teachers cannot say. Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

I’d love to see us unite to meet the existential threats facing us. But the experience of our response to a deadly global pandemic doesn’t encourage me. Which leaves me hoping for the Deus ex machina of ancient theatre. Or the second coming of Jesus. Personally, I’m coming to believe that if God doesn’t save us, we’re toast.

Five Articles Worth Reading

We often think of evil in personal rather than systemic terms. Jennifer Szalai reviews a new book by philosopher Susan Neiman that argues the contrary in “This Philosopher Thinks It’s Time We Call Out Evil in Our World.”

Another of those big issues, indeed the final one, is death. Emma Cline’s new book Switzy explores the last days of a former executive with Alzheimer’s who has arranged his death in a right-to-die country. Hillary Kelly reviews the book in “The Novel That Looks Death in the Eye.”

I have always considered That Hideous Strength the most prescient of the fiction of C. S. Lewis. Annie Crawford discusses what we learn about living as people of faith and hope in our chaotic tech world in “From Babel to Belonging: C. S. Lewis’s Fairy-Tale Cure for the Modern Machine.”

Then, on a different “note,” Alan Jacobs writes about the distinctive interpretations of Bach by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould in “Hearing Gould.” The one thing I missed in this article was any discussion of Gould’s vocalizations, certainly one of the most distinctive things you hear on his recordings.

Finally, Odyssey has awakened interest in Homer’s works, the other of which is Iliad. Open Culture has images of one of the best manuscripts of Iliad that you can magnify in “One of the Best Preserved Ancient Manuscripts of The Iliad Is Now Digitized: See the “Bankes Homer” Manuscript in High Resolution (Circa 150 C.E.).” The only hitch? You need to be able to read Greek.

Quote of the Week

This quote by James McBride, born on September 11, 1957, speaks to my comments above.

“The things that hold us together are much stronger than the things that drive us apart.”

Sadly, I think we are often lacking the sense to see the things that hold us together.

Miscellaneous Musings

I often have books I am looking for when I visit our “big box” retail store. I’ve found it frustrating that often books are not arranged in any order that I can discern. But it has given me the chance to get to know some very helpful booksellers! Although on a recent visit, it turned out that a recently published work advertised in an email was not in stock! No wonder I couldn’t find it.

I’m delighted with the boom of new indie bookstores around Central Ohio. And this listing is already out of date. Last week, The Whispering Page opened in Worthington, Ohio, just down the street from Celestielle Books. I understand readers can pick up a “passport” for all of these stores at any of them. I love it!

I’ve finally waded into George Marsden’s magisterial biography of Jonathan Edwards, perhaps America’s most brilliant theologian. It was the winner of the 2003 Bancroft Prize. So you can see it has taken me awhile to get around to it. A great, but long read.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

Tuesday: Tracey Rowland, Introducing Coimmunio Theology

Wednesday: Jacqulyne Horbrook, How to Be a Christian Influencer

Thursday: Mitali Perkins, Doing Something New

Friday: Terry Pratchett, Eric

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for September 6-12.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

Review: The Way of Dante

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Cover image of "The Way of Dante" by Richard Hughes Gibson

The Way of Dante

The Way of Dante (Hansen Lectureship Series), Richard Hughes Gibson, afterword by Nicole Mazzarella. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514013380) 2025.

Summary: Lectures exploring how C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams read Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

This book is not a work of literary criticism of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. At least not directly. Rather, it is a study of how three literary friends interacted over their mutual love for Dante. In this book, Richard Hughes Gibson retraces the conversations, correspondence, and scholarship of C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams about Dante. And that fits the purpose of the Hansen Lectureship Series of the Marion E. Wade Center, at which these lectures were first given. The Center houses a collection of the papers of these three authors as well as those of J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, and Owen Barfield. Each year, the Hansen Lectureship features scholars highlighting some aspect of the thought and work of these writers.

Hughes introduces this study by describing what he found in his study of the papers. What he found was “a cohort of Dante readers whose invocation of Dante–public and private, conspicuous and covert–comprise a network of allusions, quotations, and citations” (p. xxiv, italics in the original). Each picked up on different things–Sayers his narrative and humor, Lewis, his cosmology and the language he used to describe it, and Williams, the portrayal of romantic love and Dante’s use of allegory.

Hughes then gives a prehistory of each author’s encounter with Dante. This is followed by a brief summary of the genesis of how the three came together around their shared love of Dante. It can be summarized in the six subtitles of the chapter:

  1. Williams reads Lewis (or the Allegory of Love affair)
  2. Lewis reads Williams and recommends his book (The Figure of Beatrice)
  3. Sayers reads Williams (and then Dante)
  4. Williams reads Sayers (reading and rendering Dante)
  5. Lewis reads Sayers’ Dante criticism and translation
  6. Sayers reads Lewis (and writes him and Williams into her translation)

Besides the fact that these people did a lot of reading, it was particularly illuminating to learn of the role Williams played in encouraging Sayers to read Dante, and then his (and Lewis’s) warm response to her critical essays and translation of Inferno. He even agreed to write an Introduction to her work. However, Williams died in 1944, unable to fulfill that commitment. Hughes then follows their interactions through the three parts of The Divine Comedy.

Firstly, with Hell, we see the perception of all three that this is more than political commentary. Rather, it is a serious reflection on evil in all its forms. Secondly, Hughes focuses on how all three saw in Purgatory an ascent of increasing love. Finally, in Paradiso, we see the three wrestle with the nature of glory in the encounter with Beatrice. Hughes spends two chapters on this in “The Problem of Glory” and “The Patterns of Glory.” In between the chapters on Hell and Purgatory, Hughes inserts a lengthy chapter on allegory. In this case, the three understood allegory and symbol in different ways and Hughes teases out the nuances of difference between them.

The work left me regretting that I never got beyond Inferno in my reading of Dante. It also underscored what a rich experience might be found in reading (and re-reading) Dante with “a cohort of readers.” However, even if we are unable to do so, we are able to listen in on the discussions of these three Dante readers. Hughes work of mining their papers reveals another facet of our indebtedness to these three beyond the considerable gift of their published works. They also shined a spotlight on one of the greatest works of literature and its abiding significance.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Between Interpretation and Imagination

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Cover image of "Between Interpretation and Imagination" by Leslie Baynes

Between Interpretation and Imagination

Between Interpretation and Imagination, Leslie Baynes. Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (ISBN: 9780802874009) 2025.

Summary: C.S. Lewis as Bible interpreter, vis a vis biblical criticism, the trilemma argument, and Narnia.

I am among those shaped profoundly by the works of C. S. Lewis. Mere Christianity spoke to me of the reasonableness of Christian belief as a young believer in conversation with skeptical friends. Over the years, I often used his “Liar, Lunatic or Lord” argument, also referred to as “the trilemma.” And like many, his works of fiction opened up to me the reality of a Christian imagination.

Yet like all human beings, C.S. Lewis was fallible. He discovered this painfully when bested in debate by Elizabeth Anscombe, discussing the problem of pain. Leslie Baynes, who is associate professor of New Testament and Second Temple Judaism at Missouri State University has steeped herself deeply in the work of Lewis as a scholar in residence at the Kilns as well as in New Testament scholarship. She combines these two foci to examine and critique Lewis’s engagement with scripture. On one hand, she will find numerous flaws in Lewis’s engagement with biblical scholarship. On the other hand, she will take us deep into the world of Narnia and how Lewis’s scripture-saturated imagination shows up in these stories.

The first part of the book considers what Lewis read about scripture and how this influenced him. James Moffatt shaped his ideas about the harmony of the gospels, including the very different gospel of John. Charles Gore more than anyone shaped his doctrine of scripture with his emphasis on the incarnation, how not all scripture is divine in the same way, how the Old Testament prepares the way for Christ and how Jesus, not scripture is the word of God.

The second part of the book addresses specific case studies and controversies. Lewis identified with neither the fundamentalists or the modernists. He did not, unlike the fundamentalists, consider scripture inerrant, even though he shared other common ground with them. If anything, he was more scathing in criticism toward modernists. And it is here that Baynes most strongly criticizes him as a scholar. She highlights his essay “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism.” She notes errors of Lewis in citations, and believes he fundamentally misread Bultmann. Rather, she thinks Lewis and Bultmann may have had more in common than Lewis thought.

Then, she comes to Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” argument. She observes how Lewis invents statements by Jesus found nowhere in the canonical text. Basically, she contends that Lewis’s assertion that Jesus taught that he was God overstates the case. Only in his trial does he unambiguously say this (although it may be argued that other statements infer, if not state his identity as God). She observes that the argument as Lewis states it collapses with the knowledgeable.

The third part has a very different tone. Here, Baynes takes each of the Narnia stories and explores how they reflect Lewis’s biblical imagination. She finds biblical allusions others have missed. For example, she concludes her chapter on The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” with a chart of ten allusions to the Gospel of John and the corresponding plot element in the story. Many of the allusions are subtle, and Baynes concludes, as have others that Lewis does so to steal past watchful dragons.

Baynes concludes that Lewis’s errors were those of a theological amateur. She wishes he were alive because “he loved a healthy intellectual brawl.” She thinks there was a lot Lewis got right, including his rejection of biblical inerrancy combined with his life of loving obedience.

Baynes close reading of Lewis points up legitimate flaws in his scholarship, something academics do for each other in the service of truth. For any of us engaged in apologetic work, her critique of Lewis’s framing of the trilemma points the way to making a stronger argument. What I had wished for was more balance in affirming the strengths of Lewis’s critique against the modernists, particularly the subjective character of their judgments. On the other hand, she offered an extremely helpful “readers guide” to the Chronicles that made me want to read them again. This is Lewis scholarship that breaks new ground and reminds me of the legacy of riches he left us.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Reading Life

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Cover image of "The Reading Life" by .C.S. Lewis.

The Reading Life, C. S. Lewis. Harper One (ISBN: 9780062849977) 2019.

Summary: Essays and brief readings from his books, essay collections, and letters on the joys of reading.

It was a serendipitous find while looking for something else. This is not a “lost” book of C.S. Lewis but a recent compilation of writing by C, S. Lewis drawn from his various books as well as his correspondence. And all of this is on our lives as readers. What’s not to like for a C.S. Lewis fan and bibliophile, right?

Some of the material was familiar, for example his “The Case for Reading Old Books” in which he advocates we read one old book for every new one we read (or at least for every three. Or there is the biographical piece from Surprised by Joy on “Growing Up Amidst a Sea of Books.” But there are a number of pieces I either haven’t read or don’t remember (I don’t have Lewis’s eidetic memory).

The first part of the book contains his longer essays, though only one, on “The Achievements of J.R.R.Tolkien,” is longer than ten pages. “Why We Read, ” from An Experiment in Criticism, serves as a good introduction to the whole collection. Lewis makes the point that “[w]e want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.” This is followed by “How to Know if You are a True Reader.” He offers five criteria, and I qualified. I suspect many drawn to this book qualify as well, or are on their way! There are wonderful discussions about children’s literature (the best being not just for children) fairy tales (as less deceptive than “realistic’ stories), and the marvellous.

One of the most important for our day is his discussion of “How to Murder Words.” We do so through inflation, verbiage, and speaking less descriptively and more evaluatively. We are “more anxious to express approval and disapproval of things than to describe them” Yet how can we judge a thing without knowing what it is? The following essay on “Saving Words from the Eulogistic Abyss” carries on this theme. The danger in our careless and imprecise use of words is that “[m]en do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”

As rich as was the first part, the short readings in the latter part of the book were an absolute find. Excerpted mostly from letters, I’d never seen most of this. For example, Lewis offers this pithy observation in a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves: “If only one had time to read a little more: we either get shallow & broad or narrow and deep.” Like many of us, Lewis loved not only reading but also “Talking About Books.” He encourages reading for enjoyment, especially for children, denounces literary snobs, and says “all sensible people skip freely” that which is of no use to them.

Then there are the readings offering opinions of various writers. He praises Dante but excoriates Alexandre Dumas. He speaks of the utter importance of Plato and Aristotle, opines on Shakespeare and Tolstoy. And he has nothing but good to say about Jane Austen (in contrast to Henry James). He boasts: “I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice on and off all my life and it doesn’t wear out a bit.”

I’ve only offered a sampler of the riches to be found in this slim volume. It is a gift to have so many of Lewis’s thoughts on reading in one place. I’ll leave you with his concluding comment on “Good Reading”:

A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling.

C. S. Lewis in America

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C. S. Lewis in America, Mark A. Noll with Karen J. Johnson, Kirk D. Farney, and Amy E. Black. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023.

Summary: An analysis of how C. S. Lewis’s works were received in the United States, considering Catholic, secular, and Protestant/evangelical critics evaluating his work between 1935 and 1947.

Even before the widespread interest in C.S. Lewis due to the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis was being read in both religious and secular circles in the United States from the mid-1930’s and through the 1940’s. In this latest in the Hansen Lectureship Series at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, American historian Mark A. Noll offers three lectures that analyzed the critical reception and growing interest in Lewis’s works of scholarship, fiction, and theology. Successively, he explores the reception Lewis received among Catholics, in the secular and mainstream media, and among both mainline Protestants and evangelicals, who were late but eventually enthusiastic adopters.

It came as a delightful surprise that Catholics in the U.S. were among his earliest and most appreciative readers. In part, Noll believes that Lewis was a fresh, yet for the most part, orthodox voice that offered a friendly path out of a certain stagnant isolation, reflecting the undercurrent of change developing in the church. Responses ranged from the early and effusive praise of The Pilgrim’s Regress by Fr. Conway, CSP in Catholic World to Philip Donnelly’s criticism of Lewis’s account of “adoptive sonship” in Beyond Personality (later part of Mere Christianity). Other critics had concerns about his doctrine of the church and his ideas about natural law put forth in The Abolition of Man. The high watermark of criticism came from Charles Brady of Canisius College, who read everything Lewis wrote, understood him as well as anyone in this era, and wrote two glowing essays for America that are reprinted at the end of this work.

With regard to secular critics, Noll considers in succession Lewis’s scholarly and imaginative works, and finally his works of Christian exposition. Lewis drew general praise for both The Allegory of Love and for his Preface to Paradise Lost. A number affirmed his argument against E. M. W. Tillyard in The Personal Heresy that in criticism of a poet’s work, the focus should be on the subject matter of the poem and not the poet. Regarding the imaginative works, Noll describes the public as responding “ecstatically.” Noll highlight’s W.H. Auden’s review of The Great Divorce in The Saturday Review combining general praise with fine-grained critique. The widest range of critical opinion was reserved for his works of Christian exposition, from the long-searching response of Charles Hartshorne to a review in the New York Herald Tribune from a young Beloit College professor, Chad Walsh, who would quickly become know as a leading exponent of his work.

Apart from a patronizing review in The Christian Century, Protestants joined their secular counterparts in their warm reception of Lewis. Substantial interest among evangelicals in Lewis first came from conservative Presbyterians in the Westminster seminary circle as well as the first substantive criticism, particularly from a young Edmund Clowney. Wheaton’s Clyde Kilby represented a much more positive response to Lewis as did Wheaton student Elizabeth Howard (Eliot). Kilby’s work led to the donation of Lewis’s letters to Wheaton, forming the core of what would become the Wade Center collection. InterVarsity’s His Magazine also contributed to the growing awareness of Lewis in evangelical circles when it published a lengthy excerpt from The Case For Christianity.

Noll concludes the work in considering Lewis in today’s much more fragmented setting and what might be learned from Lewis’s greater concern for the state of his soul as a writer than the success of his work. The work also includes responses to each lecture. I found most interesting in these Kirk Farney’s discussion of two American contemporaries of Lewis who were also intelligent spokespersons for Christianity: Walter A. Maier of The Lutheran Hour and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen of The Catholic Hour. and the wide interest from people outside the church they enjoyed, as did Lewis. I can’t help wonder if there remains a space for such folk today. I’m thinking for example of the broad impact of the late Timothy Keller and the younger voices like Esau McCaulley and writers like Tish Harrison Warren.

Noll offers an excellent resource (aided by his wife) chronicling the early reviews of Lewis’s work, which I’ve only highlighted here. I’m struck that Catholics were early adopters and evangelicals relative latecomers. I’m impressed with the theological and scholarly sophistication of the writers and the elegant style of reviewers like Brady. How different things are in the BookTok era! This is a great resource for Lewis scholars and fans and a marvelous addition to the Hansen Lectureship series on the seven authors in the Wade Collection.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Year of Our Lord 1943

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The Year of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Summary: Drawing upon the work of five Christian intellectuals who were contemporaries, explores the common case they made for a Christian humanistic influence in education in the post-war world.

By 1943, it was becoming apparent that the Allies would eventually win the war. For the five Christian intellectuals in this book, the crisis had shifted from resistance to authoritarian regimes, living in the shadow of death, and how one persevered in intellectual work in war-time, to what ideas would shape the post-war world. The five intellectuals featured in this book, along with a cameo by Jacques Ellul in the Afterword, were known to one another but tended to operate in separate circles. They were: Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil.

The basic thread of this book was the common advocacy Alan Jacobs sees among these authors for a kind of Christian humanism that would shape education over and against the rising pragmatism and technocracy that prevailed in wartime. Jacob’s method is to follow these thinkers more or less chronologically, leading off with a particular thinker, and then turning to what others were saying, sometimes in response, but often independently.

Negatively, Maritain, Lewis and Weil particularly warned against technocracy. Maritain characterized it as demonic, and Lewis created the memorable N.I.C.E. in That Hideous Strength. Without the moral framework of Christian humanism, you had the “flat-chested” men of The Abolition of Man. Weil called for a society that began with the notion of obligations rather than rights. Eliot and Auden, the older and younger, contributed to a Christian poetics, a vision of vocation, and a vision of Christian culture.

These were formidable thinkers yet one wonders why in the end technocracy and pragmatism prevailed. Jacobs describes a wider circle that several of these participated in called Oldham’s Moot. A more extensive study of this group would be fascinating. Most of those involved were Christian and were concerned with rebuilding the Christian underpinnings of European culture. They met regularly, debated various schemes, but eventually lost energy, especially after the death of German sociologist Karl Mannheim, a Hungarian Jew who was both odd man out and set the intellectual tone.

They illustrate a challenge that faced the five principals of this book as well–translating these ideas into the warp and woof of society–its political, educational, industrial, and civic institutions. Perhaps that is always beyond the capacity of such thinkers, except that they need to capture the attention and imagination of those working in these other realms who have some influence and the creativity to translate these ideas into policy and practice. One wonders if it was a lack of people outside their circles who shared their vision and worked entrepreneurially to foster it that consigned the vision of these thinkers to their books and publications.

Many think we are at another time of crisis, one that calls us first to prayer, and then to the communal work of thinking and refining and implementing anew. Jacobs shows us what these five were able to accomplish and educates a new generation to their work. Who will be the thinkers who engage in the retrieval and refinement of their work for our time? Who will be the actors who combine thought and action in creative ways? And will it be enough to check our slide into decadence and disorder in the year of our Lord 2022? These are the questions posed to me in this work.