{"id":897,"date":"2014-05-05T14:48:38","date_gmt":"2014-05-05T18:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cslewis.org\/journal\/?p=897"},"modified":"2014-05-05T16:47:19","modified_gmt":"2014-05-05T20:47:19","slug":"his-fugitive-voice-after-fifty-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cslewis.org\/journal\/his-fugitive-voice-after-fifty-years\/","title":{"rendered":"His Fugitive Voice: After Fifty Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

Five decades beyond C. S. Lewis\u2019s death on that fateful November 22, 1963, the fashion in some precincts is to describe the man as \u201cquirky,\u201d\u00a0 as though the folds, edges and concealments of his character and of his mind are only lately evident, or that owing to some set of cryptic psycho-tics he was, really, some tweedy eccentric.\u00a0 This revisionism is unfortunate, and not because he didn\u2019t have his quirks.\u00a0 He did.\u00a0 In the late thirties, for example, he contrived \u2013 for a chuckle, and as a joke on Oxford University, no less \u2013 to have his friend Adam Fox, who was barely a poet,\u00a0 elected Professor of Poetry.\u00a0 Very few of Lewis\u2019s colleagues thought it was funny.\u00a0 Later in life, when his old dog Mr. Papworth would not eat standing still or<\/i> if anyone were watching, the by-now-famous man could be seen twice a day walking down his lane tossing dog food over his shoulder as the dog followed along gobbling it up.\u00a0 Those were quirks, and there were some others, too, like his ability to quote any page from memory if someone gave him a few lines from the page \u2013 and yet (as we see in the manuscript of The Screwtape Letters<\/i>) not confidently spell \u2018rivet\u2019; or the co-existence of his irrational fear (not as bad as his brother Warnie\u2019s) that he might run out of money \u2013 that, along with an enormous personal generosity, giving out-of-pocket to any vagabond who came his way (\u201cI don\u2019t care if he\u2019s going to drink it up, Tollers [Tolkien]; that\u2019s exactly what I was going to do with it\u201d) and<\/i> continuously out of his bank account \u2013\u00a0 to the tune of nearly seventy per cent of his income.\u00a0 But all of this is standard fare for readers who have looked into the life. [1]<\/a><\/p>\n

In that light, I will not be offering anything brand new \u2013 no code-breaking or any chronological novelties.\u00a0 After all Dr. Johnson is right: people need to be reminded more often than instructed. \u00a0Nor will I argue my own hobby horses, that Lewis\u2019s life falls into nine semi-neat stages, or was dramatically changed by five pivotal deaths (although I will touch upon three of those).\u00a0 In fact, I will hardly argue at all \u2013 hardly.\u00a0 Instead I will attempt a portrait of the Lewis who is unnoticed in plain sight, whom I have pondered for some time, and whose nature is useful in its ability to help us understand the master, his work, and the relationship between the two.\u00a0 I realize that my fondness for my themes \u2013 resistance <\/i>and escape<\/i>: I fundamentally share the impulse behind both \u2013 may have distorted my view. \u00a0For its tendency to make us see its manifestation everywhere we look, Lewis himself has warned us against just such enthusiasm.[2]<\/a> I hope such distortion is not the case here: we shall see.<\/p>\n

I have called the current tendency unfortunate, though not because its claims are false.\u00a0 It is unfortunate because it is a simplistic reduction, and it is especially unfortunate because the really useful revision would go much farther.\u00a0 Here is the Lewis whom I see: no mere eccentric but, intellectually and temperamentally and radically so, a proto-anarchist (<\/i>very ironically), a not-so-undercover counter-cultural resistance fighter, and especially a rebel whose final cause was escape<\/i> \u2013 first against and from a sorrowful childhood; then from social convention, University rules, and paternal oversight and overreach; thereafter from many settled assumptions of his own profession; then grandly, persistently, from his Zeitgetist <\/i>generally, including even from some friends; and finally from Zeit<\/i> itself.\u00a0 Moreover, and along the way as he aged, he sought to flee, not only from guilt but from his own gifts.\u00a0 In short, this fugitive motif was the bass riff that ran under all the rich and varied fugues of his life and work and that knits them of-a-piece, finally making of him a towering, multi-faceted figure \u2013 and a Christian apologist straight from Galilee.\u00a0 I begin with . . . reminders.<\/p>\n

Just as his many geniuses give his widely varied works their distinctive qualities, for him to have traveled so<\/i> many literary roads is itself astonishing.\u00a0 Consider . . . . He was a published (if minor) poet of great metrical and narrative skill; a philosopher (that is, academically trained as such, whose first University appointment included philosophy, and whose admonitory Abolition of Man<\/i>, for example, is proving frighteningly prescient); a first-person novelist the equal of Nabokov in technical proficiency and psychological depth; a writer of speculative fiction dense with ideas and of fantasy (Narnia<\/i>) with some peers but no betters; a religious thinker whose sermons and essays have settled much epistemological hash, undone many a strawman, and clarified opaque doctrine; a fearsome public debater and engaged public figure; a vital social presence; a Christian apologist who wrote and roved and broadcast and who still invites attack as well as aspirants to be the \u201cnext C. S. Lewis\u201d; and an assiduous book reviewer and unrelenting letter-writer.\u00a0 In short, we know him \u2013 through his several voices \u2013 as much more than the reliable and supple apologist, the semi-avuncular adviser, and the compelling fabulist and romancer.\u00a0 Such are his works and his work.<\/p>\n

The man behind those is himself engaging.\u00a0 We have come to know the unsettled boy who (unlike his brother at the very same schools) simply could not fit in; the brilliant student and legendary scholar, lecturer and demanding tutor at Oxford; the animal-lover and that bountiful alms-giver who opened his home to evacuees during World War Two and tutored the needful among of them; the intrepid walker and talker; the constant imbiber of tea with a fondness for alcohol and tobacco; the prodigious reader and writer; the Famous Man and so that dutiful correspondent; and the valued friend whose conversation, joyfully dogged encouragement, and sheer presence was of great delight.\u00a0 His lifelong friend Owen Barfield has reminded us that he was, as much as anything else, \u201ca very funny man\u201d;\u00a0 and his pupil, friend and sometime-Inkling John Wain has described him as \u201call the time delightfully aware of [his] identity and out to get, and to give, as much fun as possible with it.\u201d\u00a0 Nor can we forget the devoted brother and, finally, husband; and of course the prayerful, reverent and humble Christian who, though unrelenting in the practice of his apologetic vocation and quite conscious of his popularity and effectiveness, would never assert beyond his knowledge nor abuse his influence.<\/p>\n

All of this has made of Lewis (or a version of him, officially we might say) someone overlooked, or under-estimated, by even the most astute literary critics and journalists; that is, a top-shelf literary figure.\u00a0 Regard:\u00a0 1\/ As a prose stylist his gifts of wit, analogy, imagery, epigrammatic economy, rhythmical dexterity, and rhetorical adroitness should place him in any canon worthy of study by anyone who pretends to know \u2013 let alone to teach \u2013 the literature of English speaking peoples.\u00a0 2\/ His many voices have produced a trenchant body of work that includes hallmarks of its many types, remains relevant, and invites commentary.\u00a0 3\/ His personal influence upon very many millions of people is deep, significant and abiding.\u00a0 And\u00a0 4\/ his personality and life continue to arouse interest.<\/p>\n

Well, that, of course, and, having been reminded of the official man, we might ask, Why this continuing interest?\u00a0\u00a0 The reason, I believe, is that he was a man with a private and social life marked, not by quirks or eccentricities, but by what we students of his life and work must regard as anomalies.\u00a0 That is, he was what so many of his readers do not expect and therefore have overlooked.\u00a0 Personally as well as professionally, <\/i>at least among men, he was very much his own man<\/i>.\u00a0 It is this independence \u2013 in the tweedy, conventional, and conventionally Anglican Oxford don who had barely traveled and whose circles were few and small \u2013 that often confuses even the people who do notice its ubiquity in his life and work.<\/p>\n

Even though it should startle or confuse no one: from the beginning \u2013 we must begin with a childhood which, though lovely at its start, would be roiled soon enough \u2013 from that beginning he was his own boy, too.\u00a0 He wanted company on his terms or, better yet, to be left alone, even though he knew, eventually, that God would not comply.\u00a0 As a very young child he named himself \u2013 Jacksie (after a slain pet dog), and Jack he would remain.\u00a0 He was a smart aleck, answering, when queried about his self-professed prejudice against the French, that if he knew why he was prejudiced then it wouldn\u2019t be a prejudice, \u201cwould it!\u201d\u00a0 More than anything he treasured his time in The Little End Room of his family\u2019s huge house, away from his overbearing father, reading and writing his stories of dressed and talking animals.\u00a0 That became the redoubt of his one-boy resistance movement.<\/p>\n

Then, three months before his tenth birthday, his mother, Flora, died: \u201ca continent sinking like Atlantis.\u201d\u00a0 Now, the literature on the effects of early parental loss is dispositive.[3]<\/a>\u00a0 It tells us that mourning may be delayed (e.g. until we see a version it in The Magician\u2019s Nephew<\/i>, more than forty years after the fact); school phobias will likely ensue; the pre-adolescent child (especially a boy who has lost a mother) will delay long-term romantic love (Lewis wouldn\u2019t find \u201cthe romance that passed [him] by in [his] teens\u201d until his fifties, when he married Joy Davidman Gresham); nightmares are frequent (in Lewis\u2019s case about spiders); and conversions are common, including conversions away<\/i> from religious faith.\u00a0 By the time of his Confirmation this grandchild of clergymen and child of serious and observant Christians \u2013 it was not, as he would claim, a nominally Christian household \u2013 was both signing himself \u201cphilomasix\u201d (an adolescent sexual reference: \u201clover of the whip\u201d) in letters to his first friend Arthur Greeves and calling himself a \u201cblaspheming atheist.\u201d\u00a0 (Blaspheming he certainly was: an atheist he was not, in spite of what he said: we must<\/i> handle with care assertions that great people make about themselves.)\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps this stage of his flight was owing to typical teenage foolishness, not to the sorrowful boyhood from which any sane youngster would flee, but he would say that it took him as long to gain inhibitions as it took his contemporaries to lose them.<\/p>\n

This time he is right.\u00a0 The survivor of early parental loss may search for a relationship analogous to the one lost, abetting the delay Lewis remarks upon.\u00a0 Practically stepping out of the textbook, he would set up a household with his slain army buddy\u2019s mother, Janie King Moore \u2013 a mother-surrogate whom he would refer to as his own mother and who would, in the twenties when Lewis was that \u201cblaspheming atheist,\u201d become his lover.\u00a0 Of course the whole m\u00e9nage was rebellious, not just against Christian and conventional morality, but against conventional immorality<\/i> as well \u2013 and against those University regulations that required college residency.\u00a0 Worst of all, it was contrary to the sorry tale he was fobbing off on his father (who was Lewis\u2019s sole support: his diary from the twenties reveals that his trousers were so worn he thought them on the verge of indecency, and he could afford only one razor blade).<\/p>\n

Mrs. Moore was some twenty-five years older than Lewis, and he would care for her until her death in January of 1951.\u00a0 The erotic aspect of this liaison would lead to a haunting guilt lasting at least until his early fifties (more about that anon).\u00a0 Even when not erotic, though, his relationship with Mrs. Moore was the first concrete example of the Weiberherrschaft<\/i> to which he was disposed.[4]<\/a>\u00a0 He had fled from one little end room in search of another, where being \u201cleft alone\u201d took the form of a self-indentured servitude to a woman, putative atheism, and lies.\u00a0 Well: no one promised that the route back home from behind enemy lines would be direct, or easy.<\/p>\n

During the following decades \u2013 from young adulthood and beyond, even after his conversion \u2013 his closest friends intuited an unfinished, subcutaneous layer in Lewis. The philosopher Owen Barfield, his dear \u201csecond friend \u201cand solicitor, would describe some of his work as \u201cpastiche\u201d and thought his post-conversion life marked prominently by \u201cvoulu<\/i>\u201d;\u00a0 his devoted brother \u2013 his dearest friend \u2013 said of his conversion that it was not a conversion as much as a recovery from \u201ca long mental illness.\u201d\u00a0 In the opinion of some who would know, he was a wonderful friend but given to new, unbounded enthusiasms even at the cost of compromising old friendships. Will we ever adequately understand l\u2019affair<\/i> Davidman or Lewis\u2019s secrecy surrounding that marriage?\u00a0 I think it likely that we have the same Weiberherrschaft <\/b><\/i>here that we saw in the case of Janie King Moore \u2013 though his marriage did (I think) turn into a genuine love affair.\u00a0 And there was the Ulsterman who had a strain of anti-Catholic bigotry but who once was suspected of having \u201cpoped,\u201d in part because of certain Catholic practices and beliefs (e.g. frequent auricular confession and taking of the Eucharist, prayers for the dead, belief in Purgatory), the publication in America of Pilgrim\u2019s Regress<\/i> being by Sheed and Ward, a leading Catholic house, and because of his early popularity among Catholics.\u00a0 In the event, the possibility of his \u2013 or Warnie\u2019s \u2013 crossing the Tiber horrified him.\u00a0 These were neither quirks nor eccentricities but signs of a severe independence, pockmarked by a self-professed bigotry.<\/p>\n

As his own man, the mature public Lewis \u2013 as scholar, critic, and what these days we call a public intellectual \u2013 this<\/i> Lewis would have assumed himself so situated as to indulge his rebel spirit and thus to resist his Zeitgeist<\/i>, and not at all under cover but defiantly.\u00a0 His first book as a Christian was the militant allegory Pilgrim\u2019s Regress <\/i>(1933). <\/i>\u00a0Written in two weeks, it subverts most of the tides of his time (fascism, communism, Freudianism, materialism, spiritualism) and features, of all heroes, an escaping<\/i> pilgrim who instead of pro<\/i>gressing actually regresses<\/i>: a thrown gauntlet if ever there was one.\u00a0 And \u2013 of course \u2013 there was more to come.\u00a0 For example, in \u201cThe Dangers of National Repentance\u201d (1940) he is admonitory: \u201cYou can indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practicing contrition\u201d \u2013 as contrarian then as it is now.\u00a0 By then he had already converted to Christianity \u2013 again, let us remember \u2013 against<\/i> the stylish Oxford tide, and would defend it against all comers at meetings of the famous Socratic Club.\u00a0 And who else but Lewis \u2013 Eliot?\u00a0 John Dewey?\u00a0 Chesterton? \u2013 would write, in<\/i> 1933 yet<\/i>, the following?\u00a0 By the way, this too swam against the tide:<\/p>\n

Nothing can fully excuse the iniquity of Hitler\u2019s persecution of the Jews. . . . Did you see that he said \u2018The Jews have made no contribution to . . . culture and in crushing them I am doing the work of the Lord\u2019?\u00a0 Now [Lewis continues] as the whole idea of \u2018the will of the Lord\u2019 is precisely what the world owes to the Jews, the blaspheming tyrant has . . . in a single sentence . . . shown that he is as contemptible for his stupidity as he is detestable for his cruelty.<\/p>\n

Or consider this, from \u201cReligion and Rocketry\u201d (1958), than which there is no more astute, trenchant, or profoundly Christian critique of the impact of Christian evangelizing upon the heathen:\u00a0 \u201cThe missionary\u2019s holy desire to save souls has not always been kept quite distinct from the arrogant desire, the busybody\u2019s itch, to (as he calls it) \u2018civilize\u2019 the (as he calls them) \u2018natives.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 In the late and largely neglected \u201cThe Seeing Eye\u201d (1963), published first in America as \u201cOnward, Christian Spaceman,\u201d he expands upon the theme, contemplating the possibility of humanity meeting an alien rational species:<\/p>\n

I observe how the white man has hitherto treated the black, and how, even among civilized men, the stronger have treated the weaker. . . . I do not doubt that the same story will be repeated. We shall enslave, deceive, exploit or exterminate.<\/p>\n

(An aside: I suspect that this opinion was prominent among the reasons that caused him to turn down the offer of a CBE from the great Churchill, an avid imperialist.[5]<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Even as this untamed lion forged his escape through the spirit of the age he relished the resistance fighter\u2019s stance, famously referring to himself, in his 1954 Cambridge University inaugural lecture, as a dinosaur, and he was.\u00a0 He had tackled Eliot\u2019s mega-influential snobbishness and modernism (he could not look at the night sky and see \u201ca patient etherized upon a table\u201d) and would do the same with\u00a0 F. R. Leavis\u2019s in \u201cHigh and Low Brows\u201d and with his defenses of\u00a0 the infra dig Walter Scott, Rudyard Kipling, William Morris and George MacDonald.\u00a0 No one was safe: in our school-ridden Age of Methodology he eschewed all schools.\u00a0 Moreover, here and there (especially in book reviews) he would toss off epochal and contrarian ideas \u2013 the Renaissance never happened, Aristotle\u2019s Poetics<\/i> is a ruinous book, tragedy<\/i> is a \u201cphantom concept\u201d \u2013 and not bother to elaborate upon, let alone to defend, them.\u00a0 In his dispositive Oxford History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century<\/i> he designates a five-decade period of that literature \u201cDrab\u201d and claimed \u2013 could C. S. Lewis be this<\/i> tone-deaf? \u2013 that the word is merely descriptive of the normative style of the period, not at all judgmental.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

In his counter-cultural rebelliousness he took few prisoners of any sort, allowing no unexamined assumptions, literary, religious or otherwise, and pricking the balloons of jargon wantonly.\u00a0 Even in the sermon \u201cMembership,\u201d pronouncedly not lit. crit., he could not help himself, writing of the psychological concept du jour<\/i>,\u00a0 \u201cI mean the pestilent notion (one sees it in literary criticism) that each of us starts with a treasure called \u2018Personality\u2019 locked up inside him, and that to expand and express this . . . is the main end of life.\u201d\u00a0 Elsewhere he would remind us that \u201cfeelings\u201d \u2013 our treasured<\/i> feelings!<\/i> \u2013 \u201ccome and go, but mostly they go.\u201d\u00a0 (Imagine, for a moment, him telling this, say, to Dr. Phil or Oprah.)\u00a0\u00a0 And just in case you thought he was<\/i> a tame Christian<\/i> lion (as he told us his Aslan was not), he would oppose anti-obscenity and -sodomy laws, avow that it was better for people to live in sin rather than violate their marital vows, and opine that a truly Christian society would surely be a socialist one.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

Here Lewis\u2019s treatment of culture per se<\/i> \u2013 his radical, that is, his uprooting, of its claims \u2013 enters our portrait. \u00a0The concept now seems to have achieved hegemony and demands for itself exactly the diffidence that Lewis could never afford it.\u00a0 Note this . . . cheekiness . . . of his manner of nearly trivializing (is that too strong a word?) an existential threat to Western Culture in\u00a0 \u201cLearning in Wartime,\u201d preached at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin on December 22, 1939:<\/p>\n

The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. . . . Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow under of something infinitely more important than itself. . . . I reject at once an idea . . . that cultural activities are in their own right spiritual and meritorious.<\/p>\n

As we shall see, two years later Uncle Screwtape would confirm this very perspective to the pathetic Wormwood.\u00a0 Maybe more to the point is \u201cChristianity and Literature\u201d (also 1939).\u00a0 There Lewis argues that a striking contrast exists between the basic principles of modern literary criticism and those of the New Testament: \u2018creative\u2019, \u2018spontaneous\u2019, and \u2018freedom\u2019 rule the former; whereas \u2018convention\u2019, \u2018rules\u2019, and \u2018discipleship\u2019 inform the latter: not an argument against culture per se<\/i>, but certainly the sort of skepticism that broke, and breaks, ranks.\u00a0 And in \u201cChristianity and Culture\u201d (1940) Lewis goes farther still in his questioning of the uses of culture.\u00a0\u00a0 He finds that the strictly natural level of creation, including culture, \u201cis held on sufferance\u201d within a Christian, supernatural, perspective, and that the New Testament is \u201cdecidedly cold to culture,\u201d warning, as it does, against any kind of superiority.\u00a0 He reminds us of Newman\u2019s thinking that \u201cculture does not produce Christians but it may produce Christian gentlemen,\u201d and warns us that \u201cgood taste\u201d is not a spiritual value, and that culture-sellers (like Lewis himself, he says) may include Christians, though mostly as an antidote!\u00a0 And finally there is \u201cOn Living in an Atomic Age\u2019 (1948).\u00a0 Such an age, Lewis tells us, is no different than \u201can age of Viking raids, plague, or death-by-auto accident.\u201d\u00a0 He says, \u201csuch threats may break our bodies (microbes can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.\u201d\u00a0 After all, everything \u2013 including all civilizations \u2013 will end in oblivion, and their durations will have been infinitesimal compared to the \u201coceans of dead time\u201d both before and after.\u00a0 He ends with a characteristic, and unsparing, reversal:<\/p>\n

We must resolutely train ourselves that survival of man on this<\/p>\n

earth . . . must be only by honorable and merciful means. . . .<\/p>\n

Those who care for something else more than civilization are the<\/p>\n

only people by whom civilization is likely to be preserved.[8]<\/a><\/p>\n

I trust that Lewis has made my point, which is simply this:\u00a0 his long and unrelenting resistance yields a commanding perspective that is not only not<\/i> cultural, not only not<\/i> trans-cultural, not only not merely<\/i> counter-cultural, but almost anti<\/i>-cultural; in a word it is supra<\/i>-cultural \u2013 and in being that seems quite orthodox if you share the perspective. \u00a0That is, from beyond the culture \u2013 beyond that combination of language, literature, the visual arts, customs, mores, and unexamined assumptions of all kinds that make up a culture \u2013 or from above it, he helps us see our fetishizing of culture as a sort of insanity, and culture itself an idol<\/i>.\u00a0 Has his Great Divorce ever been greater? \u00a0Surely Lewis\u2019s sharp-shooter\u2019s application of the phrase \u201cenemy-occupied territory\u201d to Western culture must come to mind.\u00a0 Of course, from inside the culture, it is Lewis who must seem crazy: if not quite as febrile as\u00a0 Jeremiah out there in the wilderness, surely close enough?\u00a0 And so his genius \u2013 the application of his transcending individuality \u2013 is to present us with a choice:\u00a0 in or out?\u00a0 We, with Lewis, might escape, leaving the Zeitgeist<\/i> behind.<\/p>\n

Enter here two of the most widely-read and influential works of Christian apologetics in the language, the nearly-contemporaneous Screwtape Letters<\/i> and Mere Christianity<\/i>: the first a masterpiece of satire and psychological insight, the second a marvel of concision and direct address, both intensely counter-cultural.\u00a0 Consider this, from Uncle Screwtape\u2019s fifth letter: \u201c. . . the European humans have started another of their wars. . . .\u00a0 Of course a war is entertaining. . . . But what permanent<\/i> [my emphasis] good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below?\u201d\u00a0 Or this, from the fifteenth letter: \u201cThe humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity.\u00a0 He therefore . . . wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. . . . Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the present. . . . far better to make them live in the future [which is] of all things, the thing least like eternity.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, having undone the Zeitgeist<\/i>, Lewis here opens a salient that is the point of the spear (so to speak) by taking on Zeit <\/i>itself.\u00a0 And in its stance against culture and against time, Mere Christianity<\/i> is no different.\u00a0 Near the end, in his chapter \u201cNice People or New Men,\u201d Lewis asks, \u201cWhat will all that chatter and hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anaesthetic fog which we call \u2018nature\u2019 or \u2018the real world\u2019 [or \u2018culture\u2019] fades away and the Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?\u201d\u00a0 It can be no wonder that Lewis referred to time as that \u201cgaping wound.\u201d\u00a0 Any attentive and willing reader of The Chronicles of Narnia<\/i> certainly understands: that wardrobe door opens, first to another timeline, space, nature and culture but finally to timelessness.\u00a0 And Ransom, too, in his second adventure understands: is there a greater escape from our time and culture than his trip to unfallen Perelandra?<\/p>\n

In its daring, its urgency, and its compelling expression, such an array invites wonder.\u00a0 How much more wonder, then, must we feel over Lewis\u2019s ambiguous \u2013 nearly hostile \u2013 stance towards his own rhetorical gifts?\u00a0 I\u2019ve suggested that he would flee from these as he did from those other regnant claimants upon him \u2013 his boyhood, convention of varying sorts, the Spirit of the Age, and time itself.\u00a0 He found the Classical lineaments and post-Classical emphases of rhetoric (the \u201cQueen of the Arts,\u201d let us remember) entirely uncongenial, even disturbing.\u00a0 His notebooks offer virtually no use of rhetoric<\/i> that is not derogatory; and in his literary history he writes, \u201crhetoric is the greatest barrier between us and our ancestors.\u00a0 If the Middle Ages had erred in their devotion to that art, the renascentia<\/i>, <\/i>far from curing, confirmed the error.\u201d \u00a0Acknowledging that they praised \u201cbeauties\u201d at best opaque to us, he\u00a0 asserts, \u201cthis change of taste makes an invisible wall between us and them.\u00a0 Probably all our literary histories, certainly that on which I am engaged<\/i>, are vitiated by our lack of sympathy on this point [emphasis added].\u201d \u00a0(I note that his copy of Aristotle\u2019s Rhetoric is utterly unannotated, rare among Lewis\u2019s books.\u00a0 It seems he may as well not have read it.)<\/p>\n

Withal he was as troubled by his own susceptibility to the practice of rhetoric as he was impatient with the art behind it.\u00a0 \u201cI don’t know if I\u2019m weaker than other people, but it is a positive revelation to me how while the speech lasts<\/i> it is impossible not to waver just a little,\u201d he wrote, after hearing a speech by Hitler (the night before he conceived the idea for The Screwtape Letters<\/i>). \u00a0Even more telling is the conversation between Augray the sorn<\/i> and Ransom in chapter six of Out of the Silent Planet<\/i>.\u00a0 There Augray chides the hrossa <\/i>for their inflated love of beautiful words.\u00a0 You see, the hrossa<\/i> sent Ransom by an excessively long and dangerous route.\u00a0 \u201cIt is just like a hross<\/i>,\u201d Augray laments.\u00a0 \u201cIf you died on the harandra<\/i> they would have made a poem . . . and all this would seem to them just as good as if they had used a little forethought.\u201d\u00a0 But perhaps most telling with respect to his distrust of rhetoric are the instances when he brings his own fictional talk to a halt.\u00a0 During the debate on Perelandra, the wrong side has the better argument; Ransom \u201cwins\u201d only because he acts non-rhetorically \u2013 by punching the Un-man in his mouth. \u00a0The only passenger on The Great Divorce <\/i>bus to Heaven who stays is the one who stops rhetorizing and exclaims, \u201cDamn and blast you!\u00a0 Go on can\u2019t you?\u00a0 Get it over,\u201d and presently shuts up.\u00a0 In The Silver Chair<\/i> Puddleglum\u2019s affirmation follows his determining action<\/i>:\u00a0 With his naked webbed-foot he stamps on the fire that is complicit in the witch\u2019s verbal<\/i> spell.\u00a0 And at the end of Till<\/i> We Have Faces <\/i>the queen writes, of what had been her lucid and, at least Part One of it, rather convincing complaint (in fact a rhetorically formal Greek apologia<\/i>) \u201conly words, words; to be led out to battle with other words.\u201d<\/p>\n

His old, ambivalent view of the art is intimately tied to his equally ambivalent view of one\u2019s self and the Christian demand that it be transcended.\u00a0 In the private venue of lyric poetry this alarm surfaces explicitly in \u201cAs the Ruin Falls\u201d:<\/p>\n

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.<\/p>\n

I never had a selfless thought since I was born.<\/p>\n

I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:<\/p>\n

I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.<\/p>\n

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek<\/p>\n

I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:<\/p>\n

I talk of love \u2013 a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek \u2013<\/p>\n

But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.<\/p>\n

And what he finds particularly discomfiting is not only the effect of rhetoric upon his credulity but its hold upon his self, for that hold symptomizes an inability to let go of his old, needful theatrical ego. Listen to this cri de coeur<\/i>, written late and also unpublished in his lifetime:<\/p>\n

From all my lame defeats and oh! much more<\/p>\n

From all the victories that I seemed to score;<\/p>\n

From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf<\/p>\n

At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;<\/p>\n

From all my proofs of Thy divinity,<\/p>\n

Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.<\/p>\n

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .<\/p>\n

Lord of the narrow gate and the needle\u2019s eye,<\/p>\n

Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.<\/p>\n

I find such rejection of one\u2019s own gifts and the voice it gives rise to profoundly, almost intolerably, heartbreaking.\u00a0 Yet, the more deeply we look into Lewis the more personally unsettled \u2013 really, the more imprisoned \u2013 he seems, especially in the late forties and very early fifties.\u00a0 Surely this period was Lewis\u2019s Dark Night of the Soul, the first of three quick steps that take him into his fifties.<\/p>\n

We see the first stage, this darkness, most clearly in his Latin letters to Don Giovanni Calabria, more intimate, even, than those to Arthur Greeves as an adolescent. On January 14, 1949, he confesses to being troubled in his home life and to suffering from accidia<\/i>, lukewarmness almost to the point of despair.\u00a0 He allows that he may never write another book worth reading \u2013 and expresses gratitude for that, since his popularity has given rise to pride. Better that he fall silent.\u00a0 This is happening as Mrs. Moore\u2019s mental health is worsening, along with her moods and her character, and before she is hospitalized.\u00a0 On January 12, 1950, he writes to his friend Sister Penelope, \u201cPray for me; I am suffering incessant temptations to uncharitable thoughts at present; one of those black moods in which nearly all one\u2019s friends seem to be selfish or even false.\u201d\u00a0 Then, no fewer than three years later (December 26, 1951), he reveals that only recently (eight months earlier, on St. Mark\u2019s day, April 25th<\/sup>) <\/b>does he finally come to believe that his sins have been forgiven.\u00a0 And note: this is four years<\/i> after<\/i> having written an essay on forgiveness (not published during his lifetime) in which he asserts that it is itself grievously sinful not to accept forgiveness if one has repented and done penance.\u00a0 As Lewis\u2019s conversion occurred shortly after the death of his father, this great relief comes to him only after the death of Mrs. Moore.<\/p>\n

Thus begins the second, very brief, step.\u00a0 What remission the unencumbered fugitive must have felt, foreshadowed twenty years earlier but now the real thing.\u00a0 For just here we see that change in Lewis\u2019s work (sowed earlier and ripening gradually) that some have so securely, and so implausibly, attributed to a presumed defeat by Elizabeth Anscombe at the Socratic Club (and not-so-by-the-way: he never stopped making the argument that she supposedly refuted, that naturalism is self-refuting).\u00a0 After a harrowing descent, followed by a transitional remission, we have fruition.[9]<\/a>\u00a0 His work now becomes more eschatological, and before our very eyes blossoms into the third step.<\/p>\n

Of course, the first formal expression of Lewis\u2019s vision of longing, hope, and heaven comes in 1941, in his magnificent sermon \u201cThe Weight of Glory,\u201d[10]<\/a> the full flowering of his apologetic signature.\u00a0 Not much later (1944) in \u201cIs Theology Poetry?\u201d he famously tells us, \u201cI believe in Christianity the way I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.\u201d[11]<\/a> But it is, I believe, in the early fifties that we see the irruption of what I think of as Lewis\u2019s full-blown eschatological stage, the Oil of Gladness pouring Himself forth into the now fully-receptive soul, beckoning him, not away from boyhood, social and professional convention, the Zeitgeist<\/i>, and the like \u2013 that <\/i>he had achieved \u2013 but from our \u201cgaping wound\u201d itself and towards the only Geist<\/i> who counts.\u00a0 \u201cThe World\u2019s Last Night\u201d appears in 1951, debunking the myth of evolutionary progress, arguing (again) that naturalism is self-refuting, and\u00a0 reminding us that we must \u201cdress our souls not for the electric lights of the present world but for the daylight of the next.\u00a0 The good dress is the one that will face that light.\u00a0 For that light will last longer.\u201d\u00a0 Of course, Narnia, too, is pouring out.\u00a0 And most notably, at the very end of the last book he saw through the press, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer<\/i>, Lewis suggests much more of that \u201ceverything else\u201d he had referred to \u201cThe Weight of Glory,\u201d certainly much more than most of us routinely see:<\/p>\n

Then the new earth and sky, the same yet not the same as these, will rise in us as we have risen in Christ.\u00a0 And once again, after who knows what aeons of the silence and the dark, the birds will sing and the water flow, and lights and shadows move across the hills. . . . Guesses of course, only guesses.\u00a0 If they are not true, something better will be.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s as though he were training a telescope on Eternity, bringing us closer and closer as he leaves space-time and its cultures and mores and assumptions and sorrows behind.\u00a0 He shows us the Only Real Thing: then and there, not here and now.\u00a0 It is why he could say, and mean, \u201canything not eternal is eternally out of date.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, while showing us how to follow his joy-filled escape route to hope thence to Heaven, he also turns his telescope around to show us the small world we would be leaving.\u00a0 He had done this in Screwtape<\/i>, of course, and in The Last Battle<\/i>.\u00a0 More complexly he did it in his great masterwork Till We Have Faces<\/i>.\u00a0 Orual learned the lesson that Lewis also teaches in \u201cThe World\u2019s Last Night\u201d: \u201c. . . a man should \u2018sit loose\u2019 to his own individual life, should remember how short, precarious, temporary, and provisional a thing it is; should never give all his heart to anything which will end when his life ends. . . . the whole life of humanity in this world is also precarious, temporary, and provisional.\u201d\u00a0 However, my own favorite look back upon our small snare-of-a-world comes (again) from that minor masterpiece \u201cThe Seeing Eye.\u201d\u00a0 Avoiding Christ, Lewis tells us, has become very easy in our time: \u201cavoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track.\u00a0 Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances.\u00a0 Keep the radio on.\u00a0 Live in a crowd.\u00a0 Use plenty of sedation . . . You\u2019ll find advertisements helpful: especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.\u201d<\/p>\n

So as the fifties progressed, Lewis became more and more withdrawn from the life he had led:\u00a0 from some of his friends, from Oxford, from bachelorhood, and from the sorts of things he had been writing.\u00a0 He became less of a controversialist (though his book-reviewing remained crisp and severe) and more meditative (as in \u201cThe Apologist\u2019s Evening Prayer\u201d).\u00a0 Even in his professional work his old militancy was mitigated.\u00a0 Take An Experiment in Criticism <\/i>(1961).\u00a0 For its premonitory (reader-oriented) thinking, this anti-high brow (i.e. anti-Leavis) corrective should be a touchstone.\u00a0 But who ever heard of a book of literary theory that<\/i> short, that<\/i> readable?\u00a0 Consider its stirring peroration:<\/p>\n

My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others.\u00a0 Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough.\u00a0 I will see what others have invented. . . . I regret that the brutes cannot write books.\u00a0 Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee. . . . Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. . . . as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.<\/p>\n

Has any literature student here, or anywhere, ever read any criticism or theory as appealing and as moving as that?\u00a0 Maybe in Foucault, or Derrida, or Leavis?\u00a0 Lewis\u00a0 made it look just too easy, too understandable, too uncomplicated<\/i>: it couldn\u2019t be serious.\u00a0 He certainly did not toss it off, but it is leavened, authentic, and resplendent, without the pastiche Barfield saw in Lewis\u2019s contribution to The Personal Heresy <\/i>some thirty years earlier.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

We might say that, like another fugitive, his heroine of The Queen of Drum<\/i>, Lewis is finally making it to Elfland.\u00a0 But we can go back farther than that poem.\u00a0 His earliest hero, Dymer, was escaping too, and was killed for the rebellion he caused in the Perfect City \u2013 but not before he lay with the perfect bride and begot a monster who, after killing his father, became a god dwelling in \u201cwhite lands long-lost Saturnian years.\u201d\u00a0 In fact Lewis, I believe, wrote four autobiographical works in addition to Surprised by Joy<\/i>: Dymer<\/i>, The Pilgrim\u2019s Regress<\/i>, Till We Have Faces,<\/i> and A Grief Observed<\/i>, but the first of these was Dymer<\/i>.\u00a0 It is he, the eponymous fugitive-hero, who lived in Lewis to the very end.<\/p>\n

So there we have my rendering of Lewis the fugitive and voice.\u00a0 But what of Lewis himself, the radical subversive who would say that the only people who condemn escape are jailers?\u00a0 Alas, by now we must wonder if the personae<\/i> of such a figure are at all reliable avatars of\u00a0 the actual person.\u00a0 Any great writer\u2019s reputation is complicated, tenuous, and somehow false: a dicey matter even for the writer.\u00a0 Ann Rigney, making some sense of a reputation in The Peculiar Legacies of Walter Scott<\/i>, tells us that to have legs a reputation requires \u201cproductive remembering\u201d: that is, portability, remediation (or non-print versions of the work), and diffusion. For Lewis it would prove a long, hard haul.\u00a0 Over the past seventy-five years or so Lewis\u2019s simmered, then boiled to the rim, then simmered again, then boiled again, though not so high as it did the first boil, then, some fifty years ago, went cold, only to resume a slow, then a very quick, boil.<\/p>\n

Any number of events were influential: studies of Lewis dating from the late forties, then a blossoming of scholarship dating from the sixties onwards (thanks to the diligence of Clyde Kilby at Wheaton College and what is now the Wade Center), ever more Lewis works (thanks to the unrelenting editorial devotion of Walter Hooper), the founding of Lewis societies (here the New York C. S. Lewis Society was pivotal), the translation of Lewis\u2019s life and work into non-print media (not only the early TV movies, the biopic, and the blockbuster movie, but the unlikely: The Question of God<\/i> on PBS, and Freud\u2019s Last Session<\/i>, Off-Broadway), the lamentable merchandising of Lewis-related products and pseudo-Lewis books, and the many internet conversations replete with a social network of sites and blogs.\u00a0 In short, the reputation, or some aspect of it, seems to have boiled over.\u00a0 Now Lewis gets thoughtful and approving print attention beyond Narnia<\/i>, every now and then his name being dropped quite casually as an intellectual touchstone to be reckoned with.\u00a0 In short, he has achieved diffusion, or at least a version of him has, and from that there is no escaping \u2013 at least for the foreseeable future.\u00a0 But who knows?<\/p>\n

More than fifty years ago there was this, largely unnoticed in Lewis commentary.\u00a0 You will, I believe, find it surprising, I mean beyond that it appeared in the first place. In May of 1959 \u201cChristian Spaceman \u2013 C. S. Lewis,\u201d by the influential critic and book-reviewer Edmund Fuller, appeared in the high-brow, culturally eclectic hard-cover magazine Horizon<\/i>, an event, for its length and analytical richness, but also for its prophetic insights.\u00a0 For example, in introducing Americans to the Deep Space (Ransom) Trilogy, Fuller makes the following, tangential, observation, so utterly surprising to us more than fifty years later:<\/p>\n

I rate high among Lewis\u2019s accomplishments a work gener-<\/p>\n

ally less well known, as yet, than the trilogy [this is 1959,<\/p>\n

remember], but for which I predict a growing reputation<\/p>\n

and a long life. This is the series of seven books for children<\/p>\n

which compose The Chronicles of Narnia<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

He then gives a wonderfully inviting, yet concise, summary and interpretation of the Chronicles.\u00a0 But he ends his essay with an appreciation: \u201cI am grateful to Lewis for some of my richest experiences of mind and heart,\u201d leaving us with choice imagery from Deep Heaven and writing, \u201cam I to say these are not real?\u00a0 I count them among the great symbolic visions of ultimate reality which reveal to us that we are more \u2013 and are part of more \u2013 than the data of our senses can record.\u201d\u00a0 In our Narnia-saturated habitation, we see that Dr. Johnson is<\/i> right: we need to be reminded more often than instructed.<\/p>\n

Here, then, are two final reminders of Johnsonian wisdom.\u00a0 Twenty years ago Christopher Hewetson, the vicar of what for three decades had been C. S. Lewis\u2019s church in Headington Quarry, Oxford, seemed to sum up the English attitude towards the great man perfectly. \u00a0He told his congregation that, yes, perhaps the time had come to improve their \u201cconnection with C.S. Lewis.\u201d\u00a0 After all, Mr. Hewetson continued, \u201cwhen I came here three and a half years ago . . . [t]here was a certain \u2018yes but\u2019.\u00a0 I found it difficult to get a well-known preacher to preach at the dedication of the Narnia window.\u00a0 Since then his rating has increased<\/i>.\u00a0 [my emphasis] . . . He was a very committed Christian. . . . We must be proud of our connection with him. . . .\u201d\u00a0 But this good man was wrong.\u00a0 By the time of his condescension, Lewis had already been the most famous Christian apologist writing in English for most of the century, his voice among the most recognizable on the BBC during the war, his picture on the cover of Time <\/i>magazine, his books selling in the millions.\u00a0 Now The Cambridge University Press is bringing back five Lewis titles that have been out of print (including The Allegory of Love<\/i>, originally from the Oxford University Press), and there is a statue of Lewis in Westminster Abbey.<\/p>\n

The second reminder gets it right, looking beyond the personae <\/i>to the man himself.\u00a0 Not too long before Mr. Hewetson made his plea, Peter Bayley, the distinguished scholar who also had been Lewis\u2019s pupil, really did strike the resonant chime about the man he saw buried twenty-five years earlier:<\/p>\n

My last memory is of his funeral on a very cold and frosty but brilliantly sunny morning.\u00a0 There was one candle on the coffin as it was carried out into the churchyard.\u00a0 It seemed . . . a symbol of the man and his integrity and his absoluteness and his faith that the flame burned so steadily, even in the open air, and seemed so bright, even in the bright sun.<\/p>\n

So long his own man, Lewis had labored hard both intellectually and spiritually to give himself away.\u00a0 Toward the end of his life he seems to have succeeded and now, finally, was home, free. \u00a0Though too convivial to be a Jeremiah, this resistance fighter had \u201cfought the good fight, ran the race, and kept the faith,\u201d and \u201cto the ruddy end,\u201d as he might put it.\u00a0 That Little End Room turned out to be no smaller than all Eternity.<\/p>\n

But \u2013 in my rendering, at least \u2013 he has left us that fugitive voice (which I first encountered nearly fifty years ago).\u00a0 It speaks now, making and marking a way out of this \u201cenemy-occupied territory.\u201d\u00a0 For his imaginative effusions remain as radical as nature itself; his reason and reasoning as dependable as the multiplication tables; and his spirit as beckoning, as\u00a0 liberated, and as liberating as the open arms of the Cross at which he worshiped.<\/p>\n

\n

May the God of hope bring you such joy and peace in your faith that the power of the Holy Spirit will remove all bounds to hope.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Rom 15.13 <\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

\n
\n

<\/a>[1]<\/a> A shorter version of this essay was delivered as the opening plenary address at the C. S. Lewis Fiftieth Memorial Celebration of the C. S. Lewis Foundation, the University of San Diego, June 22, 2013, University.\u00a0 A print version of this essay also appears in the November, 2013 issue of CSL: The Bulleting of the New York C. S. Lewis Society<\/i>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[2]<\/a> On October 24, 1960, Lewis answers Alistair Fowler\u2019s praise for Ellrodt\u2019s enthusiasm in his Neo-Platonism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser<\/i>: \u201creading your account of the book I am divided between a great greed to see it and the little haunting fear \u2018is he beginning to see pictures in the fire?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[3]<\/a> See Sol Altschul, ed., Childhood Bereavement and Its Aftermath<\/i>.\u00a0 Emotion and Behavior Monographs: Monograph No. 8.\u00a0 Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, Inc., 1981.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[4]<\/a> That there was an erotic relationship of some kind is now a commonplace in Lewis scholarship, though the evidence is, of course, circumstantial, the most telling of those circumstances being Lewis\u2019s absolute refusal to discuss Mrs. Moore, even in his autobiography \u2013 or even with his brother.\u00a0 Christopher Derrick, Lewis\u2019s pupil and, later, his friend, argues for the presence of Weiberherrschaft<\/i> in Lewis in his C. S. Lewis and the Church of Rome<\/i>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[5]<\/a> Also see Weston\u2019s imperialist manifesto delivered at the end of Out of the Silent Planet<\/i>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[6]<\/a> He seems similarly disingenuous when expressing his frustration at those who believed there was a real Malcolm receiving those letters on prayer.\u00a0 Should I really have known better?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[7]<\/a> Not incidentally, he was a Christian apologist whose conception even of church<\/i> is the theological equivalent of a quantum particle in Heisenberg\u2019s uncertain universe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[8]<\/a> Lewis\u2019s most belligerent anti-cultural statement is \u201cLilies that Fester\u201d (1955), in which he explicitly urges \u201crebellion,\u201d claiming \u201cthere is no time to spare.\u201d\u00a0 Here, though, the attack is not on culture per se<\/i> but on its self-conscious consumption and the harms that result from that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[9]<\/a> Perhaps Joy Gresham, though only after a while and for all her own affliction and the complication of her children, relaxed Lewis, provided a zone not unlike his original redoubt but more capacious, and thus afforded him the comfort and reassurance that would be the conditions for an amplified vision, a Zeit<\/i> flight, so to speak, into his fifties.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[10]<\/a> Strong adumbrations are in Pilgrim\u2019s Regress<\/i> and even in The Problem of Pain <\/i>(1940).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[11]<\/a> Whenever this vision arises, no matter if the mode be narrative, expository, argumentative, or imaginative \u2013 and often these modes tumble forth as though all at once \u2013 his rhetoric tends to move from the possible to the probable, then to the promising, thereafter to the pleasurable, penultimately to desire, and finally to the hope for Heaven.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a>[12]<\/a> A portion of Lewis\u2019s work, especially his professional academic work, does not fit the paradigm I\u2019m sketching here.\u00a0 But the preponderance of it \u2013 including his Experimen<\/i>t \u2013 does. Nevertheless, in light of those \u201cpictures in the fire,\u201d we should remember that portraits, like lives, are not geometry proofs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Five decades beyond C. S. Lewis\u2019s death on that fateful November 22, 1963, the fashion in some precincts is to describe the man as \u201cquirky,\u201d\u00a0 as though the folds, edges and concealments of his character and of his mind are…<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,10,251],"tags":[37,252,253],"class_list":["post-897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c-s-lewis","category-featured","category-rhetoric","tag-cs-lewis","tag-james-como","tag-rhetoric-2"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cslewis.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cslewis.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cslewis.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cslewis.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cslewis.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=897"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.cslewis.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":905,"href":"https:\/\/www.cslewis.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897\/revisions\/905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cslewis.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cslewis.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cslewis.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}