THE CONSORTIUM
A Journal of Classical Christian Education
THE CONSORTIUM
A Journal of Classical Christian Education
Promoting classical education and fostering human flourishing for generations to come.
Volume 3, Issue 2
The Consortium: A Journal of Classical Christian Education Volume 3, Issue 2.
Copyright © 2024 by Roman Roads Press
Published by Roman Roads Press in collaboration with Kepler Education and The Consortium of Classical Educators
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Editorial Advisory Board:
- Dr. Scott Postma, Editor in Chief
- Dr. Robert M. Woods, Senior Contributing Editor - Dr. Gregory Soderberg, Contributing Editor
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ISBN: 978-1-963505-13-9
Version 1.0.0 December 2024
Book Review
Alistair E. McGrath’s Deep Magic, Dragons and Talking Mice:
How Reading C.S. Lewis Can Change Your Life by Dr.
Karla M. Memmott
Loving What Lewis Loved How Lewis Led Me to Translate the Divine Comedy
Excerpt from Deeper Heaven: A Reader’s Guide to C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy
Chapter 1: Mapping the Universe—The Medieval Cosmos by Christiana
Hale
THE CONSORTIUM
A Journal of Classical Christian Education
Introduction
The Inklings and Classical Christian Education: An Example of Christian Humanism
by Dr. Scott Postma
In an era when Western culture has regrettably gone adrift, unmoored by the gale forces of secularism and all of its sub- isms (i.e., Darwinism, Marxism, naturalism, materialism, nihilism, and relativism), The Consortium Journal is committed to the crucial task of recovering a Christian humanism: an intellectual tradition grounded in Christian theology and the shared classical ideas—like the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty—that have shaped Western civilization for the better. Besides the good and needful work of teaching itself, we see no better way of pursuing this goal than by curating humane letters for the burgeoning Classical Christian Education movement. This sixth issue (Winter 2024) is our latest contribution to the corpus.
In this issue, we explore the Christian humanism of some of the Inklings, specifically C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. Those familiar with this journal are themselves likely involved in or familiar with Classical Christian Education but may wonder what the Inklings have to do with this important educational movement. We benefit to be reminded that our goal is not merely a return to old pedagogical methods but a reclamation of a pedagogy whose ultimate purpose is the formation of the whole person
whereby one is equipped to live justly, wisely, and virtuously in a fallen world. It is an approach to education that presupposes a Creator as the first cause and ultimate source of all truth. This means that it is not enough that a student’s educational experience puts him in possession of a plethora of facts but it must also endow him with a certain kind of knowledge, the ability to apprehend and appreciate the meaning of those facts so he can order his life and work toward ultimate things and thereby flourish as a human being.
This philosophy of education aligns with the Christian humanism espoused by the previously mentioned writers and thinkers who made up the Inklings, and who each, in his own way, integrated his Christian faith with a commitment to the classical traditions of thought and literature. Their writings are an invitation to rediscover the value of engaging with the greatest works of the Western tradition, works that are as relevant today as they were when first written.
The Inklings were not so much a formal intellectual movement, but a group of friends that met regularly for more than seventeen years to read their works aloud to one another and to discuss and critique their unpublished manuscripts. The original founder was actually an undergraduate student named Tangye Lean who founded the group in the mid-1930s for the purpose previously mentioned. Aware of the typical Oxford literary clubs’ tendency toward impermanence, Lean arranged the club to include both students and dons. And given C. S. Lewis was Lean’s tutor at the time, he asked for his participation and J. R. R. Tolkien was also included. When Lean left Oxford, “the club soon died, and its name was then transferred (by C. S. L.) to the undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered about C. S. L., and met in his rooms in Magdalen.”1 In his letters, Tolkien explains that giv-
1 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien , ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 388.
en Lewis’s penchant for “hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism,” the Inklings would have come into being whether the original club had ever organized or not. Tolkien further explains that the name Inkling was “a ‘jest’, because it was a pleasantly ingenious pun in its way, suggesting people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas plus those who dabble in ink.” The Inkling’s routine was to gather on Thursday evenings, “sometime after dinner, usually around 9:00 pm… 10:30 pm was as late as anyone could decently arrive… When half a dozen members had arrived, Warren Lewis (C. S. Lewis’s brother who went by the nickname, Warny) would produce a pot of very strong tea, the men would light their pipes, and C. S. Lewis would say, ‘Well, has nobody got anything to read to us?’ Then out would come a manuscript, and we would settle down to sit in judgment upon it.” 2
The world in which the Inklings wrote was marked by a growing detachment from the spiritual and moral vision that had long underpinned old Western culture. In a post-World War II era that saw the rise of materialism, existentialism, and relativism, writers like those who made up the Inklings pushed back against these trends by advocating for a vision of humanity that was both grounded in faith and informed by reason. For these Christian humanists, literature was not a means of escapism in the modern sense of the understanding, but a means of revealing deeper truths about God, humanity, and the world, often against a new and fantastical backdrop. The task of the Christian writer, they believed, was to re-enchant a disenchanted world, to present truth through stories that spoke to the deepest longings and moral struggles of the human condition.
2 J. R. R. Tolkien in Diana Pavlac Glyer, The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008), 17.
At the heart of this Christian humanistic vision is the belief that the liberal arts, the humanities, fantasy literature, and the study of the classical tradition are not merely academic exercises but vital aspects of a life well-lived. Christian humanism, far from being an antiquated idea, offers a robust framework for engaging with the world that can still guide and inspire us today. The Inklings drew deeply from the well of learning that is today called Classical Christian Education, with its emphasis on the integration of faith and reason, the nurturing of the virtues, its emphasis on wisdom and eloquence, and its engagement in the "Great Conversation" of Western civilization.
This 2024 Winter issue of The Consortium invites us to explore the connections between Christian humanism, the Inklings, and Classical Christian Education. In a time when the need for a robust counter-narrative to secular ideologies has never been greater, the works of the Inklings offer us valuable insights into recovering a vision of human flourishing that is rooted in the same Christian humanism that informs the Classical Christian Education movement.
As we reflect on the writings presented in this issue, I trust we will be challenged to ask how we in our own generation might reclaim an integrated, virtuous education that shapes individuals capable of speaking truth to power and engage with the world in a way that reflects the wisdom of the ages. And with that hope, and on behalf of the review committee, I now present to you Volume 3, Issue 2, of The Consortium: A Journal of Classical Christian Education.
By God’s Grace and for His Glory,
Dr. Scott Postma Editor in Chief
Winter 2024
The Mind of a Reader
A Trinitarian Framework for Reading and Teaching Literature
by Annie Crawford
Commenting on “Honors students in English at a university” C. S. Lewis says, “Here, plainly, are young people drenched, dizzied, and bedeviled by criticism to a point at which primary literary experience is no longer possible. This state of affairs seems to me a far greater threat to our culture than any of those from which the Vigilantes would protect us.”1 If Lewis is correct, it would seem that the ability to love Homer has an inverse relationship to the development literary theory. The more we analyze literature from the outside, the less we seem able to experience it from the inside. For Lewis, this fundamental illiteracy is an existential crisis because, in the words of Renaissance writer Philip Sydney, the poets are the fathers of civilization. They teach us to see truth and inspire us to do good through the beauty of their art; thus, to lose poetic literacy is to lose civilization. However, we cannot simply cast off theory and plunge ourselves into the raw experience of literature. We inevitably encounter a poem or story within a set of biases, expecta-
1 C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 128–9.
tions, and methodologies. In Reading After Theory, Valentine Cunningham insists that “Reading always comes after theory. We all, as readers, trial behind theory, theory of some kind of another.” 2 We never encounter the world from a theoretically or philosophically neutral position. We are always operating under certain assumptions about reality, humanity, and what literature is and how it works. Therefore, without a coherent and truthful philosophy of literature, we will be lost as readers, poets, and teachers. Just as the chemist needs an accurate understanding of what chemicals are and how they work, so authors and readers must have at least an implicit understanding of what literary language is and how it works.
Thus, our problem is not that modernism has brought us theory, for beginning with the Psalmist, Plato, and Aristotle, the West’s magnificent literary tradition has grown out of the fertile loam of good theory. Our problem is that modernism has brought us so much bad theory. Over the past few centuries, a classical Logocentric understanding of language has been replaced by explicitly anti-logos theories. We no longer know how to cultivate “primary literary experience” because we no longer believe in the Divine Word that can ground language and breathe real meaning into our poems and stories.
Toward a Trinitarian Approach to Reading
However, the tide of modernism seems to have reached its natural limit, and a current of renewal is rising out of the fragmentation left behind. Many scholars are returning to older, pre-modern modes of understanding rooted in the belief of the Divine Logos, in Whom all things live and have
2 Valentine Cunningham, Reading After Theory , Blackwell Manifestos (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 3.
their being, in Whom all things hold together. Literary theory is ripe for a return to the Logos -centric integration of knowledge, a unified vision of the world that can again ground the pursuit of wisdom and virtue.
In her seminal book, The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers looks to the Trinity as the organizing principle for her theory of creative activity. In this paper, I will argue that Sayer’s trinitarian theory of artistic creation implies a robust, Logocentric theory of creative reading as well. Understanding this trinitarian structure enables us to see where isolated literary approaches break down and how they can be drawn together to form a cohesive, dynamic, practicable approach to reading and teaching literature.
The Creative Trinity
The fundamental questions that dominate modern literary theory concern meaning and the relationship between the text and Truth: What is the source of meaning? Does the meaning come from the life or intent of the author? Does the meaning of a text reside only in the actual text itself, regardless of what the author meant to say? Is the meaning created by the activity of the reader? Or is meaning constructed by the socio-political context or discourse community of the author, text, and/or reader?
The various theoretical approaches to literature tend to focus primarily on one of three sources of meaning: the author and his or her cultural context, the text itself, or on the reader and the subjective meaning that he or she brings to the text. However, if we suspend our modern analytical instinct to differentiate and rather look for a possible synthesis, we see a trinitarian structure clearly emerge from this fundamental question. Literature draws from all three of these essential
and inseparable sources of meaning: author, text, and reader. These are the three necessary sources of meaning that work together to create the one unified, living and whole work of art; the three sources cannot be separated without breaking what literature is.
In other words, literature exists within a trinitarian structure that mirrors the way in which God communicates himself to us. The Father, the Author of being and truth, begets an Idea and originates its meaning; the Son is the Word, the Embodiment of the originating Idea and the incarnate image of the Father’s thought; and the Spirit is the Power actively present in both the creation and the perceiving human mind, illuminating what the Father and the Son have created. This is the trinitarian structure Dorothy Sayers outlines in her book, The Mind of the Maker. Sayers argues that because we are made in the image of the creative Triune God, human creativity mirrors the communication of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Sayers sees God the Father, who is the mysterious and unseen origin of all being, as analogical to the mysterious and unformed ‘Idea’ that rouses an author to creative activity. Just as the heavenly Father is inaccessible to us except through the incarnate image of the Son, so the human author’s Idea for her creative work is also inaccessible to the artist except through self-awareness in the creative, embodying Activity. We all know this experience; we are struck by an unformed idea which rouses us to say or do or make something, but we only know what that originating Idea is as we say or do or make it. It is only in the act of incarnation itself that the thought or Idea is truly revealed. We see this truth when an author will fuss and search until they find the right phrase that fits some unseen, mysterious Idea that is guiding their creative work. If that originating Idea were not there, we would have no way to judge whether or not a word or phrase or paint stroke was ‘just right’ for the thing we are trying to
create. Something, some ideal Idea, is judging our work as we create, and the Idea that inspires our creative work is analogous to the divine, hidden Father originating and directing the Son’s creative process in the world.
Secondly, what Sayers calls the Energy corresponds analogically to the divine Son, whom St. John calls the Logos. Sayers believes that “The Energy itself is an easier concept to grasp, because it is the thing of which the writer is conscious and which the reader can see when it is manifest in material form. It is dynamic—the sum and process of all the activity which brings the book into temporal and spatial existence… It includes, though it is not confined to, the manifestation of the book in material form.”3 In other words, the Energy is the expression of the Idea in both the creative activity and the embodied thing, just as Jesus Christ is both divine creative energy and embodied man. In Colossians, St. Paul proclaims clearly that by Christ “all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.”4 Paul affirms Christ the Logos as the active Energy that created the world and then also immediately proceeds to affirm that Christ Himself has entered into and become part of that created, embodied world: “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.”5 Christ is the Son who both creates and embodies the will or Idea of the Father; this Energy is “Distinct from the idea itself… [yet] essentially identical with the Idea—‘consubstantial with the Father.’”6
3 Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), 40.
4 Col. 1:16–17
5 Col. 2:9
6 Sayers, Mind , 40. Please note that while Sayers proposes the terms ‘Energy’ and ‘Activity’ to analogically identify the Second Person of the Creative Trinity, I will use the term ‘Embodiment’ in my own analysis. I find the term ‘Embodiment’ to be more helpful because it denotes both creative activity and the created thing, both the energy of manifesting the Idea and the thing manifested.
The third part of the creative process in Sayers’s trinitarian scheme is analogous to the Holy Spirit; it is the illuminating Power that brings the text alive to both the author himself and to the reader. The Holy Spirit is the Power which conceives in us, as He did in Mary, the divine life, the Logos of meaning. Sayers argues that “from the reader’s point of view [the Power] is the book. By it, they perceive the book, both as a process in time and as an eternal whole.” 7 It is by the illuminating Power of the divine spirit that the reader both perceives the meaning of the work and reacts to it personally and dynamically. It is the Power of the Spirit that illuminates the intellect, the nous, to bring the meaning alive within the soul. Together these three aspects—Idea, Embodiment, and Power—form the whole creative process just as the three holy Persons form the whole Creative Triune God. Sayers insists that the three cannot be wholly separated or exist without the other. She explains that,
[T]hese three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without the other. If you were to ask a writer which is ‘the real book’—his Idea of it, his Activity in writing it, or its return to himself in Power, he would be at a loss to tell you, because these things are essentially inseparable. Each of them is the complete book separately; yet in the complete book all of them exist together. He can by an act of the intellect, ‘distinguish the persons’ but he cannot by any means ‘divide the substance.’ How could he? He cannot know the Idea except by the Power interpreting his own Activity to him; he knows the Activity only as it reveals the Idea in Power; he knows the Power only as the revelation of the Idea in the Activity. All he can say is that these three are equally and eternally present in his own act of creation, and at every moment of it, whether or not the act ever becomes manifest in the
7 Sayers, Mind , 41.
form of a written and printed book. These things are not confined to the material manifestation: they exist in—they are—the creative mind itself. 8
This last point is important: whether or not you write that book, the time you spent thinking about it, incarnating the idea in your mind, still creatively participated in this triune structure, just as the Divine Son existed eternally with the Father before the creation of the world or the incarnation. Accordingly, whether or not it results in a physical manifestation, all our thinking reflects the trinitarian structure of Being in whose image we are made.9 We are all stamped indelibly by this trinitarian pattern; it is our mode of being.
The Interpretive Trinity
Therefore, because the trinitarian structure of creativity is in the human mind itself, it operates in both author and reader. Reading is also a creative Energy wherein the reader actively searches for the Idea coming through the Embodiment of the text which the reader experiences as Power as a dynamic, living meaning.10 Consider, are you not right now actively working to understand this paper? Does not reading Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky require of you, the reader, real creative energy? A totally passive reader will not understand what his eyes pass over. Unless the reader’s mind is actively engaged in the Energy of bringing the printed words to life, the text will have no meaning for the reader.
8 Sayers, Mind , 41.
9 Augustine develops this in his idea of the psychological Trinity which includes memory, understanding, and will.
10 This is why the Socratic teacher is a midwife, working to help the reader birth the meaning of the text within the student’s soul.
The hidden Idea of the author is the ultimate source of the meaning, yet it is inaccessible to us except through the Embodiment of the text. While the author experienced the Energy in the writing of the text, the reader experiences the Energy in the reading of the text. The writer does the work of offering meaningful connections between Creation and Text while the reader does the work of perceiving meaningful connections between Creation and Text. Both processes are incarnational and both require a creative Energy that connects Idea to Embodiment. Thus, both writing and reading are creative, meaning making activities—two different ports of entry into the one unified act of communion through artful language.
To summarize the triune structure inherent in the reader’s activity, consider this paraphrase of the creative process with reference to the reader:
These three are one: the Energy of reading—which is to search out and perceive the Idea embodied in the text— and the Power or experience of the living truth manifested by the Energy—each equally in itself the whole work of reading, whereof none can exist without the other. If you were to ask a reader which is ‘the real book’—the author’s Idea of it, the reader’s Activity in reading it, or the reader’s experience of its Power, he would be at a loss to tell you, because all these things are essentially inseparable.
This trinitarian structure is fundamental to all communication. The threefold mode of communication existing between author : text : reader is analogical to and grounded in the mode of threefold mode of communication existing between creator : creation : creature.
If we are properly catechized in a Christian worldview, we should be prepared to see trinitarian structure not only in writing and reading but everywhere. In The Discarded Image, C.
S. Lewis explains that this “principle of the triad”11 was ubiquitous throughout medieval thought. In addition to the trinitarian theology articulated by Augustine, Medieval poets and philosophers reflected on the triadic principle articulated in Plato’s Timaeus. Plato believed “it is impossible that two things only should be joined together without a third. There must be some bond in between both to bring them together.”12 According to Lewis, the Medieval Christian understood that “God does not meet man. They can encounter one another only indirectly; there must be some wire, some medium, some introducer, some bridge—a third thing of some sort—in between them.”13 As Sayers explains, “The trinitarian structure which can be shown to exist in the mind of man and in all his works is, in fact, the integral structure of the universe, and corresponds, not by pictorial imagery but by a necessary uniformity of substance, with the nature of God, in Whom all that is exists.”14 Sayers appeals to Augustine for support and provides her own translation of a passage from On the Trinity :
A trinitarian structure of being is not a thing incomprehensible or unfamiliar to you; you know of many such within the created universe. The trinity of sight, for example: the form seen, the act of vision, and the mental attention which correlates the two. These three, though separable in theory, are inseparably present whenever you use your sight. Again, every thought is an inseparable trinity of memory, understanding, and will. This is a fact of which you are quite aware; it is not the concept of a trinity-in-unity that in itself presents any insuperable difficulty to the human imagination.15
11 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 43.
12 Plato, Timaeus, 31.b–c.
13 Lewis, Discarded Image , 44.
14 Sayers, Mind , xiii.
15 Sayers, Mind , 36. Translated passage is from Augustine, On the Trinity , 1.1.
If we have not seen the trinitarian structure of reality and literature before, perhaps it is because we have been un-catechized by secular culture, or it may be that we are like fish that have failed to notice the water. Perhaps we did not notice the trinitarian structure of reality before because we have never experienced anything but trinitarian relationship.
Trinitarian Structure of Literary Theory
If we accept with Sayers that the Trinity constitutes “the integral structure of the universe,” then we will expect to see a trinitarian pattern not just in the process of writing or reading itself, but as an organizing principle for drawing together the various modes and insights comprising the landscape of literary theory. The classical literary tradition, embraced and articulated by Christians up into the modern era, can be explained as developing according to the structure of trinitarian procession.
Literary theory begins (more or less) with Plato and the expulsion of the poets from his ideal city. Plato’s fear of art emanates from his ontology which locates truth and being in the realm of the ideal forms. Art is essentially mimetic, concrete, and particular, yet for Plato mimesis moves us further and further away from Reality, away from the Good, the True, and the Beautiful which are reached through abstract contemplation of the universal, not through embodiment in the concrete and particular. For Plato, art is a poor copy of a copy and therefore greatly diminished in being. In terms of a trinitarian literary theory, a Platonic critic would be so enamored with the ideal Idea in the mind of God the Father that he would lament the loss of perfection caused by any artistic embodiment of it. Plato, ironically a great poet in his own
The Mind of a Reader
way, begins the explicit development of literary theory by resisting the possibility of truly embodying the Divine Idea in an artistic text.
Classical literary criticism moves forward with Aristotle, who critiqued Plato’s theory by insisting that the ideal forms are only known within their material manifestation. For Aristotle, it is in fact material participation that reveals the invisible, immaterial forms to us at all. We only know the ideal form of a chair through our experience of physical chairs; we are only able to rise to contemplation of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful through our experience of it in embodied friendship, dialectic, and art. Rather than hiding or obscuring the Divine, incarnation is the very means of its revelation.
Thus, Aristotle affirms the truth-bearing role of Embodiment. Moreover, for Aristotle and the classical theorists he inspired, art can be a corrective to the corruption of life, able to redemptively show the world as it ought to be. For Aristotle, mimesis or imitation is not a diminishment of being, but a way of renewing it within the world. Accordingly, classical theorists emphasize the importance of proper mimetic form in art, for it is the sacred duty of art to truthfully embody the Divine ideals. By emphasizing the priority of Embodiment, Aristotle provided philosophical categories well suited to the Christian exaltation of the incarnate Son of God who alone fully reveals the Father to men.
Jesus himself influenced Christian literary theory through his use of parables and typology. As Louis Markos explains, “When Jesus reworks and redefines the meaning of Passover at the Last Supper, He engages in a supreme act of typology.”16 Building on the example of Jesus, St. Paul argues for the capacity of types and symbols to embody spiritual truths through his archetypal interpretations of the Old Testament
16 Louis Markos, From Plato to Post-modernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author (Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 1999), 111.
stories. In Romans 5:14, Paul explains that Adam was a type of the One to come, the New Adam of Christ who would establish the new redeemed body of man. Classical literary theory, with its emphasis on the meaning of form, developed out of this fusion between Athens and Jerusalem and centers around the power of incarnation to establish the truth bearing capacity of mimesis, symbol, and word.
After determining the truth-bearing capacity of art, Aristotle and Roman theorists after him also turned their attention to the reader, or the audience as in the case of drama and oral recitation. For the classicist, art does not exist for its own sake, but to serve a higher purpose: the edification of man. Horace explicitly argues that poetry exists to instruct and delight.17 Stories and parables and poetry are given not for their own sake but that we might learn to love the Goodness, Truth, and Beauty that our stories embody.
The reader’s response to this embodied truth is the final movement that creates the triadic whole of artistic communication: Idea, Embodiment, and Power. With this latent trinitarian structure, the classical Christian literary tradition led the development of poetry and art from Augustine, through Dante, and up to Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry. Only in the modern era did this classical synthesis begin to break down and become replaced by various modern critical theories.18
17 Horace, “The Art of Poetry,” trans. D. A. Russell in Classical Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 106.
18 Note, Northrop Frye’s archetypal criticism continues this classical tradition in the modern era, along with the recovery work of Lewis, O’Connor, and others. Archetypal criticism with its emphasis on analogical modes of understanding will prove central in the future development of a trinitarian theory of literature. This work remains to be done in future essays.
Trinitarian Heresies in Traditional Theory
Christian heresies evolve when theologians emphasize one person of the Trinity over another. This is the essence of all ideologies, to extract a single truth out of its proper relationship to other truths—to inflame one idea out of proportion to its counterbalancing principles. Wedded together, the three aspects of literary creation—the Idea, the Embodiment, and the Power—form a coherent, dynamic, and holistic literary approach. However, used separately, they fall into what Sayers calls Literary Heresy. Creative and interpretive problems arise when proper balance of its triune dynamic is disturbed. In her chapter titled, “Scalene Trinities,” Sayers says that “The co-equality of the Divine Trinity is represented… as an equilateral triangle, but the trinity of the writer is seldom anything but scalene—and is sometimes of quite fantastic irregularity.”19 In other words, in the Divine Trinity, the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is perfectly balanced, but in the life of human artists, we rarely achieve such balance.
Sayers invites her reader to “profitably amuse ourselves by distinguishing those writers who are respectively father-ridden, son-ridden, and ghost-ridden.” 20 She argues that some authors obsess over an Idea but are so disorderly or ineffective in their Energy they are rarely able to Embody it. Sayers calls these the father-ridden artists—Gnostics who are inspired by the divine yet unable to properly embody it. Other authors are son-ridden; they are so enamored with the sensuous loveliness of the Embodiment, of the language itself, that they lose the ruling Idea. Sayers calls this heresy
19 Sayers, Mind , 149.
20 Sayers, Mind , 151.
artistic Arianism—“all technique and no vision.” 21 Thirdly, a ghost-ridden writer, according to Sayers, “conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing the discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea. Such a man may write with the tears streaming down his cheeks, and yet produce nothing but turgid rhetoric, flat insipidity, or the absurdities of an Amanda Ros.” 22
Likewise, the various literary theories through which a reader engages a text may also be scalene, over-emphasizing one aspect of the creative trinity over another. Theologically speaking, readers with a Platonic temperament are father-ridden, longing to unite the soul with the Ideal Forms apart from the messiness of Embodiment. Flannery O’Connor frequently expressed frustration with Platonic readers who wanted to extract the theme of her stories from the stories themselves. She observed that “People have the habit of saying, ‘What is the theme of your story?’… And when they’ve got a statement like that, they go off happy and feel it is no longer necessary to read the story.” 23 Sayers agrees with O’Connor. In Mind of the Maker she writes, “To persist in asking, as so many of us do, ‘What did you mean by the book?’ is to invite bafflement: the book itself is what the writer means. It is hopeless to expect… that we can ever be made directly aware of the Idea—the writer himself is not aware of it except through the Energy and all he can communicate to us is the Energy made manifest in Power.” 24 Here we see the aesthetic implications of the distinctly Christian outrage against Gnosticism. St. John insists that the one who denies the incarnation of God
21 Sayers, Mind , 171.
22 Sayers, Mind , 154.
23 Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970), 73.
24 Sayers, Mind , 57.
in the Son Jesus Christ is the antichrist. 25 So for the Christian literary critic, to treat the work of art itself as expendable, as extraneous to the real point of creative activity, is to become the anti-poet, the anti-artist.
Ironically, the modern rejection of God has led to a proliferation of Gnostic, father-ridden heresies. Marxist, Freudian, New Historical, and Historical-Biographical theories are all inclined toward father-ridden approaches to literature, for these seek a reductive meaning hidden behind the text itself. However, these modern heresies assume that the meaning of the text comes not from a hidden Divine Idea but from the hidden material context of the author. For the modernist, ultimate reality is not Divine order but material chaos, and thus all meaningful discourse is constructed psychologically or socially and projected onto the physical world. Therefore, modern critical theories are what Northrop Frye calls centrifugal; they look for meaning by moving down and away from a transcendence center into an irreconcilable plurality of material, historical, and individual sources. Having rejected a unifying Logos, modern literary approaches tend to explain away any transcendent meaning in a text, reducing the author to a mouthpiece for his historical context or intersectional identity.
A Logocentric literary reading should always be centripetal, moving us further up and further into the experience of the transcendent Idea embodied in the artwork itself. Biography or history or political philosophy are helpful pursuits, but they must not be disguised as nor substituted for literary reading. Jane Austen wrote Emma that her reader might experience the goodness and beauty of its meaning—its logos. Austen is not inviting you to a Freudian analysis of her own life, nor to reduce Emma to the socio-economic dynamics of Regency England. Rather Austen wanted her art to draw the reader into higher levels of eternal meaning and aesthetic ex-
25 1 John 2:22
perience. Of course, art inevitably draws meaning from both the author and the reader’s personal, historical, and social life but in order to help us transcend it. Through the particulars of her poem or story, the author seeks to show us something universal, and that universal Idea is only present to us in the story itself. The father-ridden heretic treats the work of art as secondary, as subordinate to the real practical or political or theological point behind the art.
Readers can be son-ridden as well. Classicists, Neoclassicists, and New Critics can be so obsessed with the forms of literature that they lose sight of the transcendent Idea the art is meant to embody as well as the personal transformation it is meant to inspire. Having lost its vital connection with the transcendent source and purpose of art, this kind of criticism ironically leads to a loss of creativity. For example, because his works did not follow the proper Aristotelian unities, Neoclassical critics pushed Shakespeare’s works into a long literary exile. This insistence on overly strict forms also caused poetry to stagnate in the eighteenth century, leading to the later reaction of Romanticism. Although the New Critical theory of the twentieth century revitalized our interest in form, it tended to be less interested in “the correspondence between the world of the literary imagination and the world of lived reality” and “much more interested in matters of technique for their own sake.” 26 As a result, New Critics lost the power to integrate knowledge and to speak across disciplines and thus inevitably contributed to the fragmentation of modern understanding. Overly concerned with isolating meaning in the text itself, son-ridden New Critical theory is now largely dismissed within the academy.
26 Leland Ryken, “Formalist and Archetypal Criticism” in Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Appraisal , ed. Clarence Walhout and Leland Ryken (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1991), 17.
Structuralism also suffers from a Son-ridden weakness. This modernist theory seeks to show how meaning is constructed through the forms of language itself. Structuralists do not believe in a real, transcendent meaning outside an evolved web of language; for the Structuralist, meaning emerges through the development of language within a discourse community. Structuralism attempts to center meaning in language itself, but only provisionally. A web of interrelated meaning cannot ultimately hold together without something transcendent to anchor it. Thus, Structuralism soon yielded to the inexorable power of Derrida’s deconstructionism, for without the Divine Logos to ground meaning through an outside reference, “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” 27
Thirdly, we see various ghost-ridden theories in Romantics obsessed with experiencing the power of poetry and Reader-Response critics who focus primarily on the reader’s personal experience of the text, regardless of the author’s intent and in authority over the objective meaning present in the text itself. While the greater Romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats held the creative trinity together fairly well, lesser poets and the common Victorian reader fell into artistic sentimentality and moralism, losing sight of transcendence and quality of form in favor of easy emotional arousal. Popular among the religious, ghost-ridden moral criticism asks only how the text impacts the reader’s morality and behavior. For the Ghost-ridden reader, the value of the text is determined only by the sentiment and behavior it appears to promote, whether or not that behavior is encouraged through aesthetically well-crafted forms and ideas. Largely ignoring the artistic integrity of the text itself, ghost-ridden theories ironically tend toward the promotion of bad art in the name of a good cause.
27 William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming."
Reader-Response theory focuses on how the reader creates the meaning of the text. This theory brought about “The Death of the Author” movement, which considers the Idea driving the creative activity of the author as inaccessible and therefore irrelevant. For the Reader-Response theorist, the meaning of a text is constructed by the reader’s imagination working on the dialectic created between the text and the reader’s own life. According to Stanley Fish, foremost theorist in this school, readers do not interpret poems; they create them. Reader-Response theory often becomes relativistic because it is often only thinly attached to the meaning of the text itself unless combined with other literary approaches. In hermeneutical terms, this Ghost-Ridden theory lacks good exegesis and is therefore haunted by rampant eisegesis.
A Practicable Trinitarian Literary Theory
While each of the various literary theories offer important insights, these diverse approaches to literature become confusing and, in theological terms, heretical when considered in isolation. For just as the three persons of the Trinity cannot be separated, so neither can the three aspects of artistic communication be separated. Author, Text, and Reader—only as a relational whole do they form the work of literature. Therefore, any adequate approach to literary reading and effective classroom pedagogy must embrace the trinitarian ground of being and the whole of the artistic or literary process.
First and foremost, a trinitarian approach to literature will be Text-centered. As all creation and history is Christ-centered, so our approach to literature must also be centered around the Incarnate Word itself. In Colossians 1,
The Mind of a Reader
Paul proclaims that Christ “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created… he is before all things, and in him all things hold together… He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” 28 The Incarnation is the primary locus of meaning for us, and as the Father is inaccessible to us except through the Son, so the Idea of the story is inaccessible to us except through the story itself. At the center of our literary reading and teaching must be what Lewis calls “the all-important conjunction” of “Reader Meets Text.” 29 We must be careful to keep our literary activity centered in the poem or story itself.
Of course, when taking a Text-centered approach to literary criticism, we are still looking for the unifying Idea present in the text. As the Son exists to reveal the Father, so the proper discussion of the text must involve the discussion of the Idea. However, we cannot hope to get at the Father apart from the Son nor the meaning of the story apart from the incarnate details of the text. The Christian critic and reader will search for the meaning of a story or poem through the work of art, always careful not to move away from the formal Embodiment itself.
In practice, the teaching of literature easily moves away from the cultivation of “primary literary experience” because reading well can be almost as difficult as writing well—which is why neither are very often achieved. Just as it takes great energy and virtue to write a good text, it takes great energy and virtue to read a text well. It is much easier to criticize Milton for being a misogynist than it is to learn from Milton. The former requires us only to indulge our own myopic vices while the latter requires extended attention and humility. Too
28 Col. 1:15–18
29 Lewis, Experiment, 128–9.
often we evade the hard mentally, emotionally, and spiritually demanding work of digging into a great story or poem, and we fail to experience what it has to offer. We must work hard as readers and teachers to stay incarnationally centered in our encounter with the text.
Second, a trinitarian approach to literature will properly prepare readers to receive the Idea incarnated in the text. Students rarely have the background knowledge they need to read Homer or Dante well. A teacher or textual introduction should address what the reader needs to know about the author’s life or historical context so they can understand the embodied forms present in the text itself. To understand the Iliad , we must learn something about ancient Greek culture or we won’t understand the metaphors and images in the text. However, in preparing the reader for the text, the critic must be careful not to replace or preempt a direct experience with the text but rather work to facilitate it. For Lewis, good criticism should “[fix] our attention on the act of reading… If literary scholarship and criticism are regarded as activities ancillary to literature, then their sole function is to multiply, prolong, and safeguard experiences of good reading.”30 The work of the literary critic and the literature teacher is to create and empower good readers. Background preparation should be minimal so it does not overshadow a direct encounter with the story itself, for the measure of critical or pedagogical success is the creation of readers who understand and enjoy Homer’s Iliad or Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” for what it truly is.
Third and finally, a trinitarian theory of literature will encourage attention to the Power of the poem or story. The text is not an end in and of itself. As Christ came to draw us up into the divine life, so art does not exist for its own sake but to draw us up into higher levels of life and meaning. Our response to the text in Power matters; it is the fulfillment and
30 Lewis, Experiment, 128–9.
consummation of the whole creative activity, and we must take time to develop our personal response as readers, critics, and educators. It is important to consider how the reader’s own experience resonates with and expands the meaning of the story. In good reading, the author’s Idea has been transformed into the reader’s Idea, reflective of the originary Idea but refracted, expanded, and developed through the experience and perspective of the reader. When a truthful Idea is Embodied well and then read well with Power, true communication unfolds through the work of art, cultivating a communion of persons along the way. As Lewis’s mentor, George MacDonald, explains, “the echoes of the word of truth gather volume and richness from every soul that re-echoes it to brother and sister souls.”31 We need to take time to delight and wonder and explore the way that meaning grows when the Logos is received with Power by a diversity of readers.
Conclusion
Because we all have the mind of the Maker, both the work of the author and the work of the reader is creative and trinitarian in nature. Understanding this trinitarian structure enables us to see where isolated literary theories break down and how they can be drawn together to form a coherent, dynamic, practicable approach to literature. A trinitarian literary theory will draw the best elements from each literary theory and unite them into an Embodiment-centered, Idea-focused, Power-sensitive approach that helps readers move further up and further into the divine source of meaning through the transcendent power of incarnational art.
31 George MacDonald, “The Imagination: Its Function and Culture” in An Unexpected Journal: George MacDonald 3, no. 4 (Winter 2020), 3–56.
This trinitarian approach offers a much-needed practical and accessible way to teach literature to young and old alike. Literature is the common art of all men made in the image of Christ who is the Word. We all tell stories; we all need stories; yet, as moderns we often no longer know how stories work or what they are for. Christian scholars need to recover and offer a coherent and accessible theory of literature that can revive meaningful literacy within the public. This is a huge task, but a trinitarian framework has the power to join unity and diversity—to root theory and practice in real, stable, and expressible knowledge that still accounts for a diversity of theories, perspectives, and individual experiences. As Augustine encouraged us, “A trinitarian structure of being is not a thing incomprehensible or unfamiliar to you; you know of many such within the created universe.”32 This profound yet simple model is intuitive. As the fractal pattern informing all creation and emerging at every level of being and communication, the trinitarian framework can unify and enrich our understanding of story and of ourselves.
Annie Crawford is a cultural apologist and classical educator holding a Masters of Arts in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Christian University. She teaches apologetics and Great Books courses for Vine Classical Community where she serves as Vice President and Head of Vine Classical Hall.
32 Sayers, Mind , 36. Translated passage is from Augustine, On the Trinity , 1.1.
The Inklings and Classical Education
Proceedings from 2024’s Ciceronian Society Conference
The Ciceronian Society is a group of Christian scholars and public intellectuals committed to replacing our culture’s dominant “liturgy” of “fear, contempt, rage, rootlessness, and despair” with one of “courage, affection, rootedness, peace, faith, and hope.”33 Temporarily dormant during the COVID-19 pandemic, it resumed its annual conference in 2022 and attracts more participants and members each year. At the 2023 conference, held at Belmont Abbey College, four scholars associated with Faulkner University’s doctoral program in the humanities convened a panel on the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien. Its success led two of the panelists to “reup” for a panel titled “The Inklings and Classical Education” at the 2024 conference, which was held at the end of February at the Hope Center in Plano, Texas. Once again, the four panelists were all associated with Faulkner’s Ph.D. program in humanities. Taken as a group, they represent several decades of experience in the world of classical education. What follows are lightly edited transcripts of the proceedings of that plenary session from the 2024 conference. Some of the presentations were adapted from doctoral dissertations. Others were new compositions written specifically for the conference. Hopefully, they will be helpful to Con-
33 Cf. “Welcome to the Ciceronian Society,” https://ciceroniansociety.org,
sortium readers interested in thinking about ways to incorporate the ideas and writings of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield into their programs of classical education.
The Ascent of the Imagination
Charles Williams in the Classical Christian Classroom
by Dr. Sean C. Hadley
Well, she wasn’t past learning, thank God. If it had all got to be redone, it should be redone.
- Damaris Tighe, The Place of the Lion 1 Introduction
When I elected to study Charles Williams in the classical classroom, the project emanated from a selfish place. Having over a decade of classroom experience and a handful of years in the administrative world as well, I’ve spent countless hours on why Classical Christian schools should be engaging the Inklings. I’ve tried to convince parents, faculty, board members, and students that reading the Inklings alongside their classical studies will not only enhance their education but will also aim them towards a right telos, recognizing that the successes of the Inklings stem in many ways from their own studies in the Classical tradition. And over the
1 Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion (Grand Rapids, MI: Williams B Eerdmans, 1976), 168.
course of my teaching career, I’ve learned a few things. For instance, it is sometimes easier to convince students that The Lord of the Rings is worth reading than it is to convince parents to read Narnia aloud at home. At other times it is easier to get students to read The Abolition of Man than it is to have them read Barfield’s Poetic Diction . And it is always nigh impossible to persuade anyone to voluntarily read Charles Williams. There are a couple of reasons why this last bit is true, some of which will be explored below. Still, my conviction remains that Williams ought to be taught in the classical classroom, and I would like to suggest that a couple of examples from two novels show how the fiction of Charles Williams embodies the trajectory of a classically trained imagination: The Place of the Lion (1931) and All Hallows’ Eve (1945). These novels serve as helpful guides for the classical student, leading them to deeper understanding of complex concepts by enfleshing those ideas in the forest of great fiction.
My own initial foray into Williams came about because of a note I found when reading about C. S. Lewis. In 1931, Lewis wrote to Williams after The Place of the Lion hit shelves that it had been “one of the major literary events of my life, comparable to my first discovery of George McDonald, G. K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris,” thus setting Williams on a path to join the Inklings who were already established at Oxford. 2 That’s no small compliment. But Lewis didn’t just enjoy the novel; he wrote that it saved him from a horrible academic fate. In fact, his letter is worth quoting at length:
There are layers and layers—first the pleasure that any good fantasy gives me: then, what is rarely (tho’ not so very rarely) combined with this, the pleasure of a real philosophical and theological stimulus: thirdly, characters:
2 Philip and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 238.
fourthly, what I neither expected nor desired, substantial edification. I mean the latter with perfect seriousness. I know Damaris very well: in fact I was in course of becoming Damaris (but you have pulled me up). That pterodactyl… I know all about him: and wanting not Peace, but (faugh!) ‘peace for my work’. Not only is your diagnosis good: but the very way in which you force one to look at the matter is itself the beginning of a cure. Honestly, I didn’t think there was anyone now alive in England who could do it. 3
Key terms surface in rereading the passage: edification, seriousness, becoming, diagnosis. Lewis does not mean with this letter that he merely liked Williams’s novel; what he is describing is the effect of the novel, namely, the effect of conviction. In reading the story of Damaris Tighe, Lewis saw reflections of his own failures as a fallen man, and he had to confront these shortcomings to repent. The Place of the Lion, as well as Williams’s other novels, accomplishes this without falling into a mundane didacticism, but through its method of leading the imagination into a kind of apprehension. Of course, Williams’s fiction is often described as “not for everyone” with Tolkien as the exemplar here since he found Williams’ novels both “distasteful” and “ridiculous.”4 To be fair to Tolkien though, he said similar things about Lewis’s Narnia stories, specifically referring to the Narnia mythology as something that “really won’t do” because of its mixing and mingling. 5 So, to the claim that Williams may not be for everyone, I rejoinder that there is a difference between catering to preferences and pursuing good health.
3 C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, Volume II: Books, Broadcasts and War 1931–1949, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 198.
4 Zaleski, The Fellowship , 269.
5 Zaleski, The Fellowship , 269.
Of course, Williams may be the least popular of the Inklings because he is also seen as the most “problematic.” To hear some Inklings scholars, the private sins of Williams make him questionable for study and take up an enormous amount of focus (and many of the same fret over Lewis’s private life and Tolkien’s marriage, things that are interesting but matter not at all for understanding their fiction). This argument does not spend much time on such ad hominem claims, and furthermore such an argument should not govern a Classical Christian school’s educational choices. For those to whom biography is essential, a casual perusal of Sorina Higgins’s blog “The Oddest Inkling” or a deep read of the biography written by the Zaleskis will make the reader familiar with the contours of the concern. If readers have managed to come to Williams without such baggage, they should consider themselves thrice-blessed.
Why Williams?
Putting biographical studies aside, the far more interesting set of questions begin with a practical one: “what kind of fiction does the Classical Christian student need ?” Recognizing that the world outside the classroom is not creating a forest of transcendence that needs to be trimmed back but instead bombarding Classical Christian students of sustenance, this present age needs stories where “there is no frontier between the material and spiritual world.”6 In this way, Williams’s novels accomplish what Lewis describes as “irrigating deserts.” 7 Students at Classical Christian schools read Plato,
6 T. S. Eliot, “Introduction,” in Charles Williams’s All Hallows’ Eve (Grand Rapids, MI: Williams B. Eerdmans, 1989), xiii.
7 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 38.
The Ascent of the Imagination
Aristotle, Solomon, and other sages from the Ancient world. They study Boethius, Pascal, Alexis de Tocqueville, all of which is right and good. Having taught these very books for many years, one of the richest experiences is when a student discovers a philosophical and intellectual concept embedded in some work of the imagination. Students discuss love in Platonic terms and then read Till We Have Faces only to understand it wholly anew. They read Plutarch’s Lives and then come face-to-face with Caesar in Shakespeare. Such moments are necessary and even baked into the formula that governs most Classical Christian schools. As Chris Butynskyi writes in his book on the Inklings: “Imaginative literature allowed for… the potential for insight into the apparently incomprehensible.” 8 This is one of the strengths of the Inklings as a group, and of Williams’s fiction specifically.
Since this space does not permit a lengthy treatment of Williams’s prose, some summative thoughts will have to suffice. His novels blend realism with the fantastic, and here you might think Chesterton's love of the ordinary as a sign of the extraordinary. His novels confront the reader with real sins, but in manageable ways, never overwhelming the senses nor shying away from the dangers of sin. His novels push back on reductionistic models of the world, rejecting the immanent frame approach to reality while anchoring the fantastic in flesh and blood, in love and sorrow. Williams’s prose is high but accessible, something comparable to the style of Jane Austen. His literary allusions are easy to spot for readers on even a first read, but they will also pique the curious as they realize there are certainly things that they missed. In other words, his novels demand re-reading. And this is a key criterion for worthwhile literature.
8 Christopher Butynskyi, The Inklings, the Victorians, and the Moderns: Reconciling Tradition in the Modern Age (Lanham, MD: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2020), 69.
Key Themes
Given this kind of broad overview, what are some of the themes which would enhance the pedagogy of classical education? Perhaps the most important of them, Williams always creates characters who are strong men and strong women, strong because of their obedience to the divine. This same value manifests in the fiction of Lewis and Tolkien as well, as ordinary characters are swept up into divine dramas wherein obedience becomes a crucial point. Think Samwise’s obstinate commitment to Frodo because of Gandalf’s instructions, or of Ransom’s surreal journey into the heart of Venus in obedience to the Eldila. What sets Williams apart in this specific aspect is his insistence on setting his stories in the ordinary, such as the English countryside or in the recognizable city streets of London, rather than merely using such settings as a basis for something else. For instance, All Hallow’s Eve is set in the city of London, but there is perpetually the sense that there is another city of greater worth. The story opens on a bridge, which turns out to be not at all a normal thing as the characters are revealed to be dead and lost in a world in-between this and the next. It is filled with shops and front doors and train stations, the kinds of things one expects in the City of Man but not so much the City of God. Williams is not merely playing with soulishness nor with the idea of purgatory; he is trying to envision the process of grief and forgiveness through the imaginative lens. When Richard, the husband of the deceased Lester, reflects upon her absence, he wonders,
“Darling, did I neglect you?” It was no ordinary neglect that he meant; of that he certainly had not been guilty— and of this other perhaps she had been just as guilty as he… he thought how many chances he had missed of de -
lighting in her entire veracity instead of excusing, protesting, and denying. The glowing splendor of her beauty rose, and it was a beauty charged with knowledge. It was that, among much else that he has neglected.9
Such intimate revelations are characteristic of Williams and his novels. There are many such moments in All Hallow’s Eve, with the intimacy of young love, the bitterness of old regrets, and the general sense that we are always figuring something out just a moment too late in this life all combining to create a sense that these friends need each other in more ways than they understand. Much of Lester’s journey is towards understanding how she could have been better to her husband, just as Richard’s journey is of much the same stuff. But mixed in is the recognition that “if souls exist, sins may” and what that means to the people whom we have treated less than ideally.10
Of course, this is beyond the kind of emotional landscape that teenagers face, but that is precisely why it is helpful. Juniors in the Rhetoric stage do not read On the Consolation of Philosophy because they want to know how to persevere through persecution, but the text forms them in the right way all the same. In a similar fashion, Williams’ novels prepare students, forming them so that they recognize the proper way to love others. And simultaneously providing characters worth emulating, if for no other reason than the fact that these characters repent when wrong. Like Lewis did when reading The Place of the Lion, students will find it easy to see oneself in the actors on Williams’s stage. The female characters he writes are feminine, intelligent, and brave. But they are given to cravenness in their weaker moments, things which might be prevalent among women but are also present in men. His male characters are
9 Charles Williams, All Hallows’ Eve (Grand Rapids, MI: Williams B. Eerdmans, 1989), 46–47.
10 Williams, All Hallows’ Eve , 144.
masculine and concerned, listening to the women in their life and drawing strength from them. Yet they are easily seduced by lust and power, particularly if they do not seem to understand the divinely inspired complement of the feminine. And again, some this might be gender specific in manifestation, but it is undoubtedly universal in generalities. His novels tend to hang upon some eligible bachelor, some independent woman, or some young married couple, to realize that they have misunderstood the purpose of love in this world and its necessary function on the redemptive path before them. As noted earlier, Lewis had been chastised somewhat by the character of Damaris Tighe. Though she is not the heroine of The Place of the Lion, it is her conversion to faith that drives the story. The audience finds her drafting a dissertation called Pythagorean Influences on Abelard but failing to understand the true import of her work. And in a fashion that breaks the heart of devoted teachers everywhere, it is consistently revealed that for her Abelard is an historical fact rather than a person with an eternal soul. It is merely “subject matter” and has nothing “to do with one’s real life except insofar as one can publish books and journal articles about it and win a reputation.”11
The teacher may find comfort realizing that things weren’t so different in 1933, but the student might also see in Damaris a touch of themselves, working on a senior thesis they care little about or translating a section of Virgil that is nothing more than a task to be performed.
Damaris is courted by the character met at the book’s opening, Anthony, who will be the ultimate hero of the novel. But early on their relationship sets the tone of the struggle between the Forms and Moral Action, a kind of compromise between Plato and Aristotle: “Anthony was always wanting to talk of themselves, which meant whether she loved him,
11 Thomas Howard, The Novels of Charles Williams (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1991), 161–162.
The Ascent of the
and in what way, and how much, whereas Damaris, who disliked other people’s personal affairs preferred to talk about scholarship or abstract principles.”12 The classical student is undoubtedly tempted towards a pride of the intellect, much like Damaris is throughout the novel. The Place of the Lion, in addition to provocative images of the Platonic Forms, challenges the Damarises of the world to recognize that Heloise is more than “a side-incident of Abelard’s real career,” to see that our intellectual efforts are towards the end of some communal, relational good rather than the prestige of putting out one more book or winning one more essay contest.13 The themes that Williams explores, the stories where he embodies the abstractions of philosophy, create lasting effects upon the imagination. And teachers, parents, and students should all take that seriously.
The Tripartite Method
One of the tenets of Classical Christian education is the recognition that studies ought to be integrated. Schools approach this in different fashions, but many private schools, co-ops, and homeschool groups adopt some form of the three eras cycle, focusing on the Classical world, the Medieval world, and some attempt to discuss the Modern world. To that end I thought it would be worthwhile to speculate on some ways that Williams can actually work within this approach and even enhance it for students. The Place of the Lion serves as a marvelous addition to the study of the classical world, especially when paired with a study of Plato. Whether studied chronologically or through some other approach,
12 Williams, Place of the Lion , 22.
13 Williams, Place of the Lion , 23.
the Forms come to life in the rural English countryside begs for further discussion. How does Damaris Tighe’s flight from the pterodactyl of her rotting intellect fit with Plato’s own conception of knowing the good? And how does Paul’s admonition to renew the mind set a course correction for those tempted into treating the mind as merely a means to an end? All Hallow’s Eve could work well in perhaps any of the three eras, but it best complements discussions of the changes in modern attempts to wrestle with Augustine’s two cities: the city of God and the city of Man. Simon the Clerk’s desire to overpower humanity has echoes of Lewis’s controllers from The Abolition of Man . Given Williams’s own penchant for references, place this novel alongside a study of Hitler or the tumult that was World War II Europe and students are likely to see the threat of such a man in a different light. What’s more, they are likely to marvel that something like a faithful husband and wife, though separated by death, might play a role in the defeat of someone monstrous.
Conclusion
It isn’t necessarily hard to get classical schools to read the Inklings. But C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien often bear the weight of that category in a curriculum. Schools host feast days and festivals centered around The Hobbit or put on adaptations of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But Williams remains a rarity in the classroom. Perhaps this is due to the lack of easy access through nice, sturdy paperback editions. Another reason is undoubtedly the difficulty that Williams’s novels present in terms of their imagery. As T. S. Eliot described, “Williams invented his own forms—or to say that no form, if he had obeyed all its conventional laws,
The Ascent of the Imagination
could have been satisfactory for what he wanted to say.”14 Add to that the way in which his material often crosses the line between the sacred and the profane, Williams appears as a set of contradictions that might confuse even the stoutest mind. Despite this, Williams’s novels present a unique opportunity in the classical classroom, inviting students to imagine the implications of the abstract philosophical and theological notions that they are taught. But even if Williams is too weird for most, even if his use of the metaphysical throws people off, readers should not be reluctant to continue their own classical education by picking up The Place of the Lion. If nothing else, it ought to be a roaring good time.
Sean C. Hadley graduated from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (MDiv, 2017) and Faulkner University's Great Books program (PhD, 2023). He has taught in the classical classroom for fifteen years and is currently the Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Classical Education Research Lab at the University of Arkansas.
14 Eliot, “Introduction,” xiii.
C. S. Lewis in the Classical Classroom
Deepening Appreciation for Reality
by Dr. Josh Herring Introduction
In one sense, I don’t think the topic of my talk requires defense; in a room with this audience, I feel safe assuming that we know C. S. Lewis, and teach him as required in our curricula. I first came to know Lewis through my mother; after I read my first sentence, she presented me with a box set of the seven Chronicles of Narnia . Ever since, I’ve reread those volumes at least once every two years. In college, I discovered the Ransom trilogy. As an early teacher, I found Lewis’s essays helpful. His essay “On Chivalry” became the lens through which I taught Roger Lancelyn Green’s King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Before I taught Paradise Lost, I picked up a copy of Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost. Early in our dating, the woman who became my wife and I read Lewis’s The Four Loves together. Her willingness to read Lewis was a sign that she was the right woman for me. I love Lewis, and find him of inestimable value for classical education. In case my initial assumption is wrong, permit me to offer two
reasons why, of all the authors who could be included on a classical school’s reading lists, Lewis deserves a spot.1
First, Lewis is a conduit of the great tradition. When he took a new academic post at Cambridge, Lewis called himself a dinosaur. Already, the habits of deep and wide reading were fading away; as a man of the old traditions of scholarship, Lewis was committed to reading almost everything. And, as his friend Owen Barfield once quipped, “Everything Lewis thought is in everything Lewis wrote.” When students read Lewis, they are reading a modern author who has been shaped by the very tradition classical education seeks to pass on. In that sense, Lewis is an exemplar for the classical teacher.
Second, Lewis believed that reality is meaningful, and his stories invite the reader to discern the meaning that fills existence. Unpacking this claim will occupy the remainder of my talk, and is the reason I wholeheartedly recommend that first the classical teacher read Lewis, and then use his position to help students encounter Lewis. In contrast to our nihilistic age that seeks to deny the substance of reality, classical educators seek to help students see themselves and the world as meaningful; we do that in an era where all of culture proclaims that students must create whatever meaning is to exist. Lewis shows a “still more excellent way.” Rather than creating meaning, Lewis’s stories re-enchant the readers’ imaginations to perceive the meaning-rich nature of reality. He does this through a certain use of allegory.
1 This speech was delivered at the 2024 Ciceronian Society meeting in Dallas, TX on March 1, 2024. It is a condensation of the author’s doctoral research from four dissertation chapters into a fifteen minute speech. If any readers of this manuscript wish to have detailed footnotes or receive the relevant dissertation chapters, please email Josh Herring at Josh.Herring@thalescollege.org.
Argument
I first encountered allegory in a formal sense through Dr. Tony Isola’s tenth grade English class at Stonebridge School in Chesapeake, VA. We read The Pilgrim’s Progress, and I nearly died. Not literally, but I quickly grew disillusioned with allegory. Bunyan applies a 1:1 allegorical method, and it communicates clearly. The reader cannot miss that Mr. Worldy-Wise is going to offer bad advice, that Faithful is a good companion, or that the Slough of Despond is a dangerous trap Christian needs to escape. The meaning is obvious. Bunyan created effective images through his allegory, but such is not the kind of allegory that Lewis employed. Instead, Lewis follows Edmund Spenser in seeing the world itself as resonating with meaning; our journey through life is one of discovering significance. In his scholarly writing, Lewis displays a deep love of Spenser, calling The Faerie Queen a “hymn to life.” From Spenser, Lewis learned a complex approach to allegory that shaped his own fictional writing. If anyone in the audience has read Spenser, they’ve probably read just Book One of The Faerie Queene. Recall Book One with me for a moment, and think about the complexity of the allegory. The story opens with Red Crosse Knight journeying with Una. Red Crosse fails to defeat a monster, and he abandons Una. Red Crosse takes up with Duessa. His eventual repentance results in time in a seminary (where the seeds of right ideas are planted), and his time in the House of Pain eventually leads Red Crosse to right knowledge. After all of this, the reader learns that Red Crosse is Knight George, of Sir George and the Dragon fame. Suddenly the allegory clicks into place: this is a story of a prideful knight who, because of his pride, strays from the one true church (Una) and is seduced by heresy (Duessa). Heresy puts him in thrall to a wicked magician. Repentance and progress in spiritual disciplines
allows the knight to grow in the true faith, which lets him slay the dragon (and save the girl). In contrast to Bunyan’s allegory, Spenserian allegory is a rich application of the concept of higher meaning represented through literary forms. It is this kind of allegory that Lewis evokes in the Ransom Trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia .
Because of his use of Spenserian allegory, Lewis’s stories are far more than age-appropriate quasi-medieval texts to read with middle grade students. They help readers of all ages see reality more clearly. In the remainder of my talk, I want to borrow ideas that are explored more fully in my dissertation. In Chapter Three, I trace Lewis’s theory of gender in Perelandra . There, through a combination of neoPlatonic reasoning and symbolism, Lewis presents masculinity as an outward orientation for the defense and leadership of the home; the feminine is an inward orientation for the creation of conditions conducive to life. Lewis symbolizes these realities through the eyes of Mars and Venus. Venus’s eyes go inward, suggesting depths of life. Mars’s eyes go outward, watching for some ancient enemy just over the horizon. The concepts of masculinity and femininity are ideas that Lewis works into nearly all of his writings. In The Chronicles of Narnia , he provides images of positive and negative masculinity and femininity. In the dissertation, I trace eight principles through The Chronicles of Narnia ; because of time constraints, I will confine myself to five such principles today.
1. Positive masculinity goes outward, leading or protecting.
Peter is the best example of this principle in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe ; as high king, his leadership is demonstrated on the initial hike, in slaying the wolf, and in fighting giants on the northern border. His leadership functions as a right use of authority. Aslan also illustrates this kind of out-
ward movement—he comes from outside Narnia, provides leadership and restoration, and moves on.
2. Positive femininity goes inward, creating the condition for life to flourish.
Mrs. Beaver is the least complicated explanation of this principle: she makes the home; we meet her as she is cooking dinner. She sends Mr. Beaver and the boys outside to fish, while she and the girls prepare dinner. When danger arises, she remembers to pack food. She distributes a bit of whiskey to put everyone to sleep when they are on the march. This principle also gives a way to interpret Father Christmas’s line “battles are ugly when women fight.” Lewis is not asserting some anti-feminist point, but rather pointing to women as the source of life; that from which life proceeds, he implies, ought not deal death lightly. He still gives Lucy a defensive weapon (her dagger), and Susan a distance weapon (her bow), but his most valuable gifts are related to life: Lucy’s healing cordial, and Susan’s magic horn which brings help.
3. Negative masculinity fails to lead or protect, causing harm.
Eustace is my favorite image of negative masculinity; instead of going outward (the whole theme of The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” ) we initially see Eustace trying to go back. Instead of courage, he is marked by cowardice and complaint. He doesn’t have an overt sense of betrayal like Edmund in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but rather a sullen refusal to be what he ought to be. Lewis then inverts this, showing in Eustace not only a picture of ultimate salvation, but the need for Eustace’s manliness to be redeemed as well.
4. Negative femininity creates conditions of death rather than life.
The witches in the Narniad are the consistent image of negative femininity, bringing death rather than life. Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew is the clearest example: her pride leads her to learn and pronounce the Deplorable Word, killing all like except herself. Though she is alive she is so deathlike that Digory and Polly initially mistake her for a wax statue. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, her chief magic connotes death: the white coldness of winter contrasts with the vivid warmth of Spring; she turns living creatures to stone. She is the anti-woman, bringing death where life abounds
5. The complementarity between the genders demonstrates wholeness.
Lewis structures the Narniad around complementary characters: brothers and sisters, Digory and Polly, Eustace and Jill. He uses masculine and feminine architecture to establish contrast: the masculine pointedness of the Witch’s Castle emphasizes her rejection of femininity, while the openness of Cair Paravel is appropriate for a place of joyful governance under right authority. The masculine mountains ringing Aslan’s Country and complemented by the feminine gardens which goes ever “further up and higher in.” Lewis carries these ideas even into the extra-Narnia spaces in his world building: Charn is a place of pure masculinity, which dies. The Wood-Between-the-World is a purely feminine space, lacking any formal rigidity. Narnia is able to sustain life, because it unites the masculine and feminine into generative action sustained by the combination of nature.
Conclusion
Classical education is about forming the souls of students so that they are able to perceive the wholeness of their intellectual inheritance. Lewis is a helpful guide to that inheritance: he points both to the depth of meaning in reality and the wealth of wisdom in the tradition. He communicates these ideas in“living images that move from mind to mind,” to borrow a phrase from Tolkien’s “Mythopoiea.” My first year teaching, I was assigned 7th grade literature. The book list contained both The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. I read those books with my students, and we had great conversations. As time has gone on, I’ve returned to these works again and again. And as my students have gotten older and sharper over the years, the value of Lewis’s stories for forming the moral imagination has only grown. Lewis re-enchants our modern minds, and reminds us that all reality is a gift. It belongs to us to open our hands and receive what is given.
Josh Herring, Ph.D. received a doctorate in the Humanities with a concentration in Literature from Faulkner University in 2023. He also holds a M.Div. from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (2016) and a B.A. in History from Hillsdale College (2011). He taught humanities courses at Thales Academy for eight years and was active in Thales Academy administration for three years as a Dean of Students, Assistant Administrator, and Dean of Classical Education. He enjoys helping Thales College develop a new model of higher education, specifically with attention to shaping future teachers intending to join the classical renewal movement. He and his wife live in Wendell, NC. Dr. Herring is a voracious reader, a regular writer with the Acton Institute, Liberty Fund, and the Federalist. He also hosts The Optimistic Curmudgeon podcast.
Reading Tolkien in the Classical School Classroom
by Dr. Jason Jewell
When asked to participate on this panel, I confess I had to spend some time wondering whether I have any standing to speak on the topic of what is fitting content for a classroom in the classical school. My own thinking has been shaped by five years of moonlighting at an online classical academy, about a decade of homeschooling my children with a classical curriculum, and nine years of directing a graduate program that includes many classical-school teachers and administrators among its students. However, I have never been a teacher or administrator at a brick-and-mortar classical school, so it might seem a bit presumptuous of me to offer thoughts on the subject. But I’ve never let that stop me before, so here we go!
I recognize that there is a case against using the works of J. R. R. Tolkien at all in the classical school on the grounds that his imagination is too medieval. Many eminent scholars of the past century have been very comfortable discarding medieval literature. Think of Mortimer Adler and the editorial board of the Great Books of the Western World series, who leapfrogged more than eight centuries between St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas when compiling their list of essential literature. Or consider Irving Babbitt, who wrote in Literature and the American College that “for the student of En-
glish literature an acquaintance with the Middle Ages before Chaucer is vastly less important than an acquaintance with the classics. The best avenue of approach to the great English poets, for example, is not through Caedmon and Beowulf, as some misguided moderns would have us believe, but through Homer and Virgil.”
(To be fair, Babbitt wrote that passage more than two decades before Tolkien published his landmark essay on Beowulf the year of Babbitt’s death. I like to think that Tolkien might have changed Babbitt’s mind about the merits of studying medieval literature had Babbitt lived another ten or fifteen years.)
It’s relatively easy to make the case to include in the classical classroom works like C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia , with their fauns, dryads, and other characters inspired by classical mythology. Lewis’s imagination was classical, perhaps as much as it was medieval. We can’t say that about Tolkien. But we can still make the case for him on other grounds. Classical Christian schools can point to the Christian character of his imagination and themes such as providence/eucatastrophe in his works. Furthermore, every classical school I’ve encountered assigns fiction that has no direct connection to the classical inheritance. Works such as E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, and C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower fill their reading lists. The same arguments that justify their inclusion will justify including Tolkien’s works in the classical classroom.
I will mention three of Tolkien’s stories that merit consideration for inclusion in classical schools’ curricula. The first of these, The Hobbit, will be no surprise to anyone. An instant classic of children’s literature from its initial publication in 1937, this book is on reading lists for schools of all kinds in the English-speaking world. If its longstanding status as a fixture of the popular imagination isn’t enough to guarantee its inclusion on the grounds of cultural literacy, we can point
to the instructional opportunities it affords to teachers. For example, Tolkien gives us several contrasting styles of poetry (elvish, dwarvish, and even orcish) within the narrative. More importantly, classical schools aiming to teach about virtue and vice have plenty to work with. Bilbo Baggins must learn in successive steps the virtue of courage throughout the story, first by leaving his comfortable home to go on an adventure, then by confronting increasingly dangerous enemies, and finally by standing up to his own friends in an effort to avoid bloodshed. On the flip side, Tolkien makes manifest the dangers of avarice in the narrative, culminating in the dying words of Thorin Oakenshield to Bilbo: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
In 1936, the ten-year-old Rayner Unwin, son of Tolkien’s publisher, wrote a short review of The Hobbit for his father. It concluded with the statement, “This book, with the help of maps, does not need any illustrations it [sic ] is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9.” I first read the story at age six, and my own children have typically made their initial read before age ten. When I was in the fourth grade, my public-school teacher had me read the book aloud to my class. Today, by contrast, schools often assign the book to high school students. Even the classical curriculum my family uses doesn’t have students read it until the eighth grade. Make all the jokes about the decline of schooling that you like, but it seems to me that there’s no good reason to put off the book for that long in a classical school, even if the goal is to have the students learn vocabulary and answer comprehension questions as opposed to just having it read aloud.
The second Tolkien story I think has good potential for the classical classroom is “Leaf by Niggle.” It was first published in the Dublin Review in 1945 and then was republished alongside Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories” in the book Tree and Leaf in 1964. The protagonist, Niggle, is an artist who
wants to finish a giant painting of a tree before he must set off on a “troublesome journey,” but he can never quite get it right. He paints leaves very well but has trouble with the rest of the canvas. The painting distracts him from his neighbors, particularly his nearest neighbor, a man named Parish, but Niggle has a kind heart and helps Parish when called upon, even though he grumbles about it and is taken away from working on his painting. Eventually, a driver appears to take him on his journey before he can finish his work.
Niggle is put on a train, which goes through a dark tunnel. He wakes up in a railway station and is sent to a workhouse, where he is put to all kinds of tedious tasks for what seems like a century or more. At the point of being worn out entirely, he is put on bedrest. While lying still, he hears two voices discussing his case. The first, stern voice recounts his various faults and how he often failed in his obligations before going on the journey. The second voice, authoritative but gentle, points out Niggle’s good qualities and how he sacrificed his own interests to help Parish. Eventually the first voice agrees that Niggle is due for “gentle treatment.”
Niggle is put on another train, which takes him to a park where he finds, in reality, the Tree he had tried to paint for so long. “All the leaves he had ever laboured at were there, as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them; and there were others that had only budded in his mind, and many that might have budded, if he only had time… Some of the most beautiful—and the most characteristic, the most perfect examples of the Niggle style—were seen to have been produced in collaboration with Mr. Parish: there was no other way of putting it.” Niggle sees that the Tree and portions of the forest around the park are still indistinct and need work. He wishes that Parish were there to help and advise him. Sure enough, before long Parish appears, and the two work together to complete the scene. Parish remains to wait for his
wife, who has not yet arrived, but Niggle goes on beyond the borders of that country, led by a shepherd into the mountains.
Tolkien famously wrote that he had a cordial dislike for “allegory in all its forms,” but he evidently got over that dislike before writing this story, which is clearly about a man’s time in purgatory. Classical Catholic schools will obviously find a great deal to mine in this twenty-page story, but other Christian schools can profitably use the tale to discuss the process of sanctification. Even secular classical schools could use it to explore themes of ethical improvement, a sort of Irving Babbitt take on the inner check and self-discipline that leads to virtue. The story also conveys a powerful message about friendship and the benefits of community.
“Farmer Giles of Ham” might be the Tolkien story best suited for the classical school. (Most published editions pair it with the less accessible “Smith of Wootton Major,” which I think can only really be appreciated by adult readers, so I’ll leave it to one side.) “Farmer Giles” is a comic story in which the title character successfully defends his home and village from a giant and a dragon and ultimately becomes a king, mostly by dumb luck. The classical curriculum my family uses assigns it as a read-aloud in the fourth grade, but I think it would work better with older students. Elementary students have no trouble following the story’s sequence of events, but the ironic tone of the narration goes over their heads, and that narration is half the fun. When reading the story to my ten-year-old son recently, I had to pause for laughter many times and then explain to him why. So this is a story more appropriate for high school students or for inclusion in a school year when the historical focus is on the medieval period.
“Farmer Giles” presents a great opportunity for the classical school to explain the role of the Latin language in medieval society. As you may know, Tolkien shares with early modern novelists the convention of presenting himself to readers as a mere editor or translator of a recently discovered
text rather than the text’s author. (For example, The Silmarillion is supposed to have been Bilbo’s recounting of elvish stories he learned and recorded while staying in Rivendell.) On the first page of “Farmer Giles,” Tolkien presents a lengthy Latin title for the story followed by that title’s translation “in the vulgar tongue.”
He then inserts a three-page foreword explaining how the story has only recently been translated from its “very insular Latin” into modern English. The reason for its translation, Tolkien writes, is that, first, it gives a glimpse into life in Britain during the turbulent period between the Roman withdrawal and the rise of Arthur, and, second, it sheds light on the origin of some difficult place-names” in the Thames River valley. He then adds as an afterthought, “Some may find the character and adventures of its hero attractive in themselves.”
Latin then continues to figure into the story at several points. Multiple references are made to “the Book-latin,” in which formal addresses and communications are made throughout the story. For example, once Farmer Giles gains local renown through his exploits, the other villagers begin addressing him as “Master Aegidius,” the Latin rendering of his name. Proclamations and other correspondence coming from the royal court include many Latin titles and phrases. Fortunately, the villagers have an educated parson among them, a man of good sense who translates these communications and gives wise counsel to Giles and others. (Imagine!)
Beyond the presence of Latin, the story has other features that recommend it to the classroom. Its plot vividly portrays the intensely local nature of pre-modern life. Ham lies about 20 miles from the royal capital, which is described as a far-distant place about which the villagers know next to nothing. As a resident of Hobbiton might say of a Bucklander, “folks are queer in those parts.” After gaining a treasure hoard from a dragon, Farmer Giles establishes his own independent kingdom in and around Ham so as not to pay
confiscatory taxes to the king, whose knights he drives away with the dragon’s help. The narrative not only affords teachers opportunity to contrast the modern nation-state and ancient empire with the feudal political order of medieval life, but also gives a sound if humorous portrait of the ruggedly independent character of the English yeoman, who has no more lofty designs in life than to tend his own lands in peace without interference from outsiders.
Finally, the story can work well with older students because it’s extremely funny. Tolkien clearly has a deep affection for rural life, but he does not indulge in Jeffersonian idealization of rural people. The residents of Ham have their petty rivalries and animosities and even a Doomer, Sunny Sam the blacksmith, who was “daily foretelling disasters of every kind.” All this comes out hilariously in both the dialogue and narration. For example, the villagers come out to cheer Giles after he drives off a trespassing giant by shooting it with his blunderbuss. The narrator adds, “But even as they cheered, they took note for their own profit this blunderbuss could really be fired. There had been some debate in the village inns on that point; but now the matter was settled. Farmer Giles had little trouble with trespassers after that.” Likewise, the nobility are portrayed as faintly ridiculous and prone to cowardice. When rumors of a marauding dragon, one of which had not been seen in the kingdom in 100 years, begin to circulate, the royal court is slow to act. Only when public outcry threatens to shame the king does he give formal notification to his knights, “asking for necessary action at their early convenience. He was greatly displeased when their convenience would not be early at all, and was indeed daily postponed.” You can see this is the kind of irony of tone that would go over the heads of young children, but could appeal to older students.
So to sum up, Tolkien’s work is fitting for the classical classroom. The Hobbit belongs in elementary school. “Leaf by
Niggle” and “Farmer Giles of Ham” will give older students humor but also a lot of serious material to chew on. If you haven’t read some of these stories, come back next year after you’ve read them and tell me how you liked them.
Jason Jewell chairs the Department of Humanities at Faulkner University, where he directs degree programs based on the Great Books of Western civilization as well as the Center for Great Books and Human Flourishing. He also serves on the board of Ivy Classical Academy, a Hillsdale-affiliated school opening in August 2024.
Owen Barfield, Poetic Language, and Classical Education
by Dr. Landon Loftin
At a conference like this, writers such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien need no general introduction. But I am guessing that, for at least some of you, Owen Barfield is little more than a familiar name. Unfortunately, time doesn’t permit anything like a general introduction to Barfield’s thought, so I’ll content myself with reflections on two anecdotes from Barfield’s younger years that may be of interest to proponents of classical education. While it is not my intention to argue that Barfield’s books should be assigned in classical classrooms, I hope to inspire interest in Barfield by imparting a sense of how Barfield grew from being a boy who happened to receive a classical education, to being an exemplar of a classically educated man.
The first anecdote is from Barfield’s boyhood. Barfield attended Highgate School in London where he received, in his own words, “the ordinary classical education that public schools provided in those days.”1 As G. B. Tennyson points out, from a more recent perspective, “this would have been a rich and challenging curriculum, heavy in Latin and Greek
1 See Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning. Directed by Ben Levin. Written and produced by G. B. Tennyson and David Lavery (Owen Arts, 1995).
grammar and literature, and now virtually unobtainable.” 2 Of course, Tennyson wrote these words before the revival of classical education that we see today, so we may hope that it is becoming a little more than “virtually unobtainable.” Either way, it was at Highgate that Barfield developed a deep though inarticulate fascination with language, particularly poetic language; and this would set the course of his entire career as a writer.
Barfield later recounted the exact moment at Highgate in which the power of poetic language first took hold of him. He was sitting in a lesson on Latin grammar when the class was asked to translate the following sentence: Cato, octoginta annos natus, excessit e vita . The most obvious, though decidedly prosaic, rendering of this phrase in English is “Cato died at the age of 80,” but the boy sitting next to little Owen commented, with charming innocence, on the beauty of his own translation: “‘Cato, at the age of 80, walked out of life’—that’s rather nice!”3 This remark gave Barfield pause. By that time, he was familiar with the concept of metaphor and had knowingly encountered figures of speech, but, in his words, he had not yet known “that it was possible to enjoy them, to relish them, for their own sake.”4 That moment, he said, marked the beginning of what would grow to be an intense love for language, and especially for poetic language, which continued to develop over the course of his time at Highgate.
Subsequent experiences of this kind, many of them quite powerful, would eventually lead Barfield to distinguish poetic language from prosaic language, not according to whether the diction was cast in verse, but according to its capacity to effect sensitive readers in a particular way; that is, to bring
2 Owen Barfield, A Barfield Reader: Selections from the Writings of Owen Barfield ed. G. B. Tennyson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999) xv.
3 Owen Barfield, The Riddle of the Sphinx: Essays on the Evolution of Consciousness (Oxford: Barfield Press, 2023) 306.
4 Barfield, Riddle of the Sphinx , 306–307.
such an experience as the one just recounted. In Poetic Diction Barfield described this experience memorably as “a felt change of consciousness” because, when it happened, “the world became a profounder and a more meaningful place” and, seeing for a moment through the poet’s eyes, he was, among other things, enabled “to apprehend a larger and fuller world.”5 Not only did Barfield want to renew this experience as often as he could, he also wanted to investigate its nature and causes. As a result of this investigation, he concluded that the felt change of consciousness which marks poetic diction, is found in “[a]lmost any kind of language… that is expressing a consciousness essentially different from our own.”6 This is sometimes found in the diction of great poets whose consciousness, by virtue of their genius, is different from that of their contemporaries. But differences in consciousness are most often and most obviously characteristic of ancient diction. Thus began Barfield’s interest in philology and the historical study of language.
Barfield eventually developed a strong conviction that there is no way to grasp the nature of language ahistorically. Words and their meanings, like units of currency and the values attached to them, are always changing and have to be understood as “cross-sections of an endless process in time.” 7 “The full meaning of words,” he says, “are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames—ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them.” 8 Linguists, therefore, should imitate physicists, who always account for the dimension of time. Barfield’s preferred analogy was to biology, which was, in light of Darwin, fundamentally transformed into a historical science: “It is long,” he wrote, “since
5 Owen, Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973) 48.
6 Barfield, Riddle of the Sphinx , 312.
7 Barfield, Poetic Diction , 61.
8 Barfield, Poetic Diction , 75.
men gave up the notion that the variety of natural species and the secrets of their relation to each other can be understood apart from their history; but many thinkers still seek to confine the science of language… within a sort of network of timeless abstractions.” 9
But Barfield’s philological research was a mere starting point for profound and wide-ranging reflections on many subjects. “It is impossible,” he explains, “to give much attention to words and their meanings, and more especially the history of words and the history of the changes which those meanings have undergone, without… being forced by them to reflect rather intensively on the whole nature of man and of the world in which he lives.”10 Insight into what the history of language can teach us about ourselves and about the world we inhabit led him to develop a theory that he would spend the majority of his life developing: that is, “the evolution of consciousness” or “the history of thinking” as opposed to “the history of thought,” This theory asserts that the study of language reveals a historical process by which the fundamental character of the human mind has changed over time. It is not just what people have thought that has changed, but also the way people think . Barfield explains this in a book called History in English Words : “Until a few years ago—within the memory of men still living—very little use had been made of language itself, that is to say, of the historical forms and meanings of words as interpreters both of the past and of the workings of men’s minds.”11 He goes on to say that “in our language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the lay-
9 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988) 116.
10 Owen Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays (Oxford: Barfield Press, 2013) 338.
11 Owen Barfield, History in English Words (Lindisfarne Press, 2003) 14.
ers of its outer crust.”12 Barfield believed that, just as it is the task of the paleontologist to dig into the earth to gain insight into the history of biological life, it is the task of the philologist to dig into language to gain insight into the history of meaning. We should note, though, that the analogy breaks down: “[T]here is a difference,” Barfield says, “between the record of rocks and the secrets which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us a knowledge of outward, dead things- such as forgotten seas and the bodily shapes of prehistoric animals and primitive men- language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man’s soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.”13 (And teachers at classical schools go around justifying the study of Greek and Latin by saying it will boost standardized test scores!)
Another story about Barfield is worth retelling here, not only because it gives us a model for productive, rigorous disagreement, but also, as we’ll see, because it helped C. S. Lewis learn a lesson that is close to the heart of all classical educators. When Lewis and Barfield met as Oxford undergraduates, Lewis was an atheist, and he regarded any and all claims about the supernatural to be nonsensical. He was therefore “hideously shocked” when he found out that Barfield, his most intelligent friend, had embraced the teachings of Rudolf Steiner and become what’s called an anthroposophist. As a result, he and Lewis entered into a prolonged period of intense argument, which Lewis jokingly called “the Great War” between himself and Barfield.14 This years-long dispute was carried in each other’s homes, on long walking tours through the English countryside, and by letter. Though Lewis went to great lengths to rebuff Barfield’s arguments, he found, in the
12 Barfield, History , 14.
13 Barfield, History , 14.
14 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1956) 206.
end, that he was greatly affected by them. Indeed, many years after their Great War subsided, Lewis said that it was one of the major turning points of his life.15
For a number of reasons, it is difficult to say exactly what the Great War was about. Lewis made it clear that its occasion was Barfield’s acceptance of anthroposophy, but the specific matters of dispute appear to have been an eclectic cluster of Barfield’s newly-formed beliefs about the nature and function of the imagination. If a crux is to be identified, it would be the role that the imagination plays in both perception and knowledge. Barfield (following Steiner) believed that the imagination has an indispensable role to play in both the determination and discernment of truth. Lewis disagreed. For Barfield, the search for truth was at least partially an affair of the imagination; for Lewis it was wholly rational. What’s important here is not the specific content but rather the effect of the debate. Though Barfield and Lewis never reached full agreement, they forced one another to flesh out their respective positions with greater nuance and clarity, and to refine the arguments they used in support of them. Lewis, more than Barfield, was changed by the dispute. In Surprised by Joy, he recalled two important effects that the Great War had on him, both of which are important because (though he didn’t realize it at the time) they both contributed to the breakdown of his intellectual defenses against theism and prepared the way for his eventual acceptance of Christianity. For present purposes, though, we will focus on the first of the two effects.
Lewis said that Barfield’s arguments “made short work of what I have called my chronological snobbery,” by which he meant “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever
15 Lewis, Surprised by Joy , 206.
has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”16 Instead of blithely dismissing an “outdated” idea, Lewis said,
“[y]ou must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.17
This, of course, is the lesson that I referred to above, saying that it is close to the heart of all classical educators and indeed of classical education itself, for the very test of a classical school’s quality is, in my humble opinion, its potential to prevent students from becoming, in Chesterton’s phrase, “merely modern” (or “postmodern,” as the case may be).
People who value the classical approach to education will benefit from reading the work of Owen Barfield, not least because he consistently, through both precept and example, gives profound justifications for each of the distinctive emphases of classical education, which I take to be (1) the study of language and literature (especially of ancient languages for literary purposes), (2) the study of history (especially cultural and intellectual history), and (3) the integration of learning (as opposed to a fragmented and overspecialized approach to “subjects”). Because of this, whether Barfield’s readers find themselves in agreement with his contentions or not, they cannot help but find themselves, as Lewis found himself, gaining a greater respect for our cultural and intellectual predecessors; and this inevitably results in an increased desire
16 Lewis, Surprised by Joy , 207.
17 Lewis, Surprised by Joy , 207.
to preserve and pass on the cultural inheritance for which classical education is designed. ⸭
Landon Loftin has a B.A. in Religion and Philosophy from Southwest Baptist University, an M.A. in Apologetics from Houston Baptist University, and a PhD in Humanities from Faulkner University. His publications include an assortment of peer-reviewed articles on the work of authors such as G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield. He recently co-authored a book called What Barfield Thought: An Introduction to the Writings of Owen Barfield for which he became a co-recipient of the Barfield Literary Estate’s 2023 Award for Excellence .
Book Review
Alistair E McGrath's Deep Magic, Dragons and Talking Mice: How Reading C. S. Lewis Can Change Your Life (London: Hodder, 2015)
by Dr. Karla M. Memmott
Most people, children and adults alike, first encounter C. S. Lewis through his famous fantasy literature The Chronicles of Narnia , more specifically through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. After experiencing Lucy’s friendship, Edmund’s betrayal, Peter’s nobility, and Aslan’s sacrifice, the reader may shout to the children to heed Susan’s misgivings. Nonetheless, the four Pevensies and the reader are thrust back into reality when the children return through the wardrobe. The reader is left asking, “What next?” Children have the benefit of simply launching into the next book of the series. Although adults have the same choice, many may also be haunted by a hint of guilt, thinking that there may be other Lewis books that warrant an investigation as well. An option is to just read at random whichever book pops up first on an Amazon search inquiry. Another option is to ask a friend or colleague. A third option is to take a journey with an experienced C. S. Lewis scholar.
Dr. Alister McGrath’s book Deep Magic, Dragons & Talking Mice: How Reading C. S. Lewis Can Change Your Life fits the bill
for the third reading option. McGrath openly admits that Lewis’ writings have profoundly influenced his personal, professional, and academic development. McGrath’s life’s journey loosely imitated Lewis’. Like Lewis, McGrath was born in Belfast, Ireland. Like Lewis, McGrath embraced atheism throughout his teens and early adult life. Like Lewis, he experienced the emptiness of an atheistic worldview and explored Christianity as an alternative while attending Oxford. Like Lewis, he approached Christianity with a logical and rational inquiry. After his conversion, McGrath plagued friends with questions pondering the rational reasoning of Christianity. In desperation and frustration, they told him to read C. S. Lewis. McGrath followed his friends’ advice. He not only read Lewis, he studied Lewis, and eventually wrote a Lewis biography in 2012, C. S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. McGrath’s Deep Magic, previously published in 2014 under the title If I had lunch with Lewis, serves as an introduction to allow the new Lewis reader to meet Lewis. Although McGrath never met Lewis, his life-long study of Lewis’ writings has transformed Lewis into a literary mentor and friend. McGrath extends the same invitation to new Lewis readers to plunge into the various genres of Lewis’ material, to see the world through Lewis’ perspective, and to ponder the deeper issues of life. McGrath, an Oxford don himself, frames Deep Magic similar to the tutor system of his alma mater wherein McGrath introduces the new student to her tutor. The reader is asked to enter the imaginary office of Lewis, enjoy a cup of tea, ask questions, take notes, and then research by reading the book recommendations.
The course of the conversation varies by chapter. McGrath begins by highlighting Lewis’ perspective on the importance of friendship. He delves into the long-term friendship with Arthur Greeves; the supportive network friendship involving the Inklings; the eventual strained friendship with J. R. R. Tolkien, a fellow Inkling; the committed friendship
with Paddy Moore; the complicated friendship with Mrs. Moore, Paddy’s mother; and the friendship with Joy Davidman, which eventually morphed into marriage later in life. McGrath recommends Lewis’ The Four Loves for a deeper dive into Lewis’ perspective on friendship.
McGrath then moves into literary conversation topics such as Lewis’ focus on the importance of stories and imagination with book recommendations including The Chronicles of Narnia and Till We Have Faces. He highlights the importance of imagination by next recommending Miracles. In similar fashion McGrath walks the reader through topics such as education, learning, suffering, grief, apologetics, and heaven. He translates Lewis’ perspective on the topic, provides literary evidence by way of Lewis’ letters and book, and subtly recommends books for the reader to explore the topic more deeply. Deep Magic also includes an Appendix “For Further Reading.” The Appendix not only recommends books written by C. S. Lewis, but also endorses several Lewis biographies. Additionally, McGrath includes a list of relevant works that influenced his own ongoing research. Interestingly, the second Appendix in Deep Magic is a brief biography of C. S. Lewis. This is a unique approach since the book itself appears to target an audience that is only vaguely acquainted with Lewis. If the reader is not familiar with Lewis, it is highly recommended that the reader begin the book by reading this Appendix first.
Through Deep Magic, Dragons & Talking Mice:
How Reading C. S. Lewis Can Change Your Life, Dr. Alister McGrath provides an informal and conversational introduction to one of the twentieths’s century's most influential Christian apologists. American films such as Shadowlands portrayed C. S. Lewis as a stoic, out-of-touch Oxford academic. However, McGrath reclaims Lewis’ personal style by introducing another generation of readers to the imaginative, impassioned works of C. S. Lewis. McGrath’s own studies reveal the practical topics
of human life, such as education, learning, friendship, and Christianity to which Lewis dedicated numerous articles and books. McGrath not only provides excellent guidance for reading Lewis’ material, he challenges readers to contemplate the issues and allow Lewis’ words to influence their own thinking. Although the book may not provide new information to someone who has spent extensive time with Lewis’ literature, Deep Magic, Dragons & Talking Mice: How Reading C. S. Lewis Can Change Your Life is a reliable and easily readable work that will guide anyone recently introduced to the works of Lewis
Dr. Karla Memmott earned a PhD in Humanities from Faulkner University. She is the Rhetoric Program Coordinator for Legacy Classical Academy and teaches rhetoric at Kepler Education. She lives in Fair Oaks, California where she homeschools her children. She and her husband Kyle are the founders of Acacia Classical Academy, which is a classical Christian home-schooling education experience designed to meet the rising needs of homeschooling families in their area. They enjoy hiking, camping, playing board games, and walking their dog Kona.
Loving What Lewis Loved
How Lewis Led Me to Translate the Divine Comedy1
by Joe Carlson
Ihad just finished Michael Ward’s phenomenal Planet Narnia , and I was hooked. The cosmology of the ancients and medievals was beyond anything I had ever conceived. I had to know more. I was captivated by this foreign way of understanding the universe that C. S. Lewis was steeped in and was eager to discover where that worldview came from. It was clear that Lewis was a tremendous admirer of Dante, as we will see, and that was good enough for me. I had read the Comedy at lightning speed back as an undergrad, but didn't really appreciate what I was reading. (Who really does as a 20 year old?) But Lewis’s delight became my delight, and that delight launched me back into the old medieval poem, with new eyes to appreciate what the early fourteenth century Florentine poet was up to.
Medieval cosmology, or what the modern era has named (in its typical modernistic way) Geocentrism, as a scientific theory is, of course, absolutely bunk. The sun is not a planet, but is the center of our solar system. However, as a literary model, this premodern cosmology is absolutely brilliant, al-
1 Portions of the following are taken from the Preface to my translation of Dante's Inferno, published by Roman Roads Press. Used with permission
lowing for a far richer understanding of the heavens and of our place in them. As both the ancients and medievals conceived it, the universe was a giant sphere, with several smaller spheres within. (Think of a giant Russian nesting doll.) At the very center is the Earth; orbiting the Earth in consecutive spheres are the seven planets: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Beyond Saturn is the sphere of the fixed stars, or constellations (stars remain fixed as the whole field rotates around the other spheres). Finally, there is the crystalline sphere, or primum mobile. This is the outermost sphere of the universe, from man’s perspective. Beyond the primum mobile is the presence of God, or the Empyrean Heaven. Thus from His perspective, the primum mobile is the first sphere, and therefore, in the medieval and Aristotelean understanding, the first sphere that is set into motion by His love. That sphere moves the stars, which in turn move Saturn, all the way down to the Moon. At the center, beholding this cosmic dance, is Earth. Thus, when Dante stepped out of an evening, and looked up into the heavens, he took for granted that he was looking up into life, into harmony, into abundance and, eventually, had he the eyes to see it, into the very throne room of God itself. But he didn’t have the eyes. He was a fallen, sinful man, who lived separated from that joy and vivacity.
Contrary to what moderns might think, the center of the universe was not the most important part. To Dante it meant that he was at that point furthest from God. He was shut out of the cosmic dance by sin. The deepest desire of Medieval Man was to ascend, to go further up and further in, to travel through the spheres, and dwell with God in the Empyrean, in His very presence. That is the literary force of the Medieval worldview that had captured my own imagination, transforming what I had thought of as merely vacuous space, into something living and breathing, something rich in
Loving What Lewis Loved
transcendent meaning, and overwhelming in magnitude and glory. Suddenly, Psalm 19 made sense:
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat.
(Psalm 19:1–6, ESV)
That is how my love affair with Dante began. This Medieval worldview reaches its apotheosis in the Divine Comedy, developed there in more detail, and with more theological richness, than anywhere else. If anyone can re-enchant our modern mechanistic materialism, in which the world is simply one big machine, running like a clock with all its gears in place, it is Dante.
But what was it about Dante that enchanted Lewis so much? In a paper presented to the Oxford Dante Society in the early part of 1940, Lewis makes the argument that “the best poetry is [not] that which contains the fewest elements proper to prose. I think the greatest prose and poetry are least unlike each other, and that Dante has proved it.” 2 What he meant was that poetry is not necessarily in its best and most
2 C. S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 75.
profound state when prosaic elements are wholly absent. In other words, the best poetry, Lewis argues, maintains a certain connection with prose, a connection which allows its readers to easily identify and recognize the meaning of the verse. Praising Dante, he says, “there is so much besides poetry in Dante that anyone but a fool can enjoy him in some way or other, whereas a poem like [John Milton’s] Lycidas is merely poetry and therefore utterly detestable to the rather large class of critics who have a secret dislike of poetry…”3
It is inferred that this “secret dislike of poetry” comes from a weariness with poetry that is both esoteric and highfalutin. The Divine Comedy proves that high poetry does not need to be stuffy, abstruse, obscure, or otherwise annoying. Rather, high poetry can maintain a certain immediacy, excitement, movement, and a real down-to-earthness.
Lewis explains this quality of Dante by noting at least two aspects of his great work. First are Dante’s extended similes: “They are all the kind of similes which a philosopher could use in prose… They are there, in the first place perhaps, because he is writing as the [popularizer] of the best thought of his time.”4 In other words, his similes (which are legion) are plain, normal, understandable, and drawn from common life experiences. They bring our preexisting experiences to the text, allowing us to all the more quickly understand what Dante is trying to describe. Secondly, this union of poetry and prose that creates a more engaging work comes from what Lewis identifies as Dante’s old-fashioned ‘plain sense’: “[Dante] is the most translatable of the poets—not, probably, that he entrusts less wealth than others to the music of the words and the nuance of the phrase but that he entrusts more than others to the ‘plain sense.’”5 What he means is that,
3 Lewis, Studies, 75
4 Lewis, Studies, 75.
5 Lewis, Studies, 76.
Loving What Lewis Loved
while certainly a brilliant technician and craftsman, it is not to the technical aspects that Dante ‘entrusts’ the driving force and weight of his poem. Though those aspects are present (and truly awe-inspiring when seen), the force of the poem is found in the on-the-surface sense of the words. Dante says what he means, and he means what he says. There are certainly layers to peel back and revel in. But they are not necessary to our initial enjoyment of the poem, nor to understanding a significant portion of what Dante is trying to communicate.
It is this sense that makes Dante so “translatable,” a great boon to someone like me who has come to his Medieval Italian only recently, though I have walked with Dante’s pilgrim many times. The very first thing a reader notices in the first line of the first canto of the first canticle is that this is a journey of our life (nostra vita). And Dante continues on throughout the remaining ninety nine canti to demonstrate, in his very language, that commonality. The language, no less than the subject matter, is for everyone. It is an eminently readable poem, even in translation, because every word is derived from nostra vita , from our shared experience of being human. Dante, more than any other poet, gets at the heart of what it means to be a fallen image bearer, living in this world God made, and what it means for us sinners to be found by God, and therefore find our way home. Writing from within that universal experience gives Dante both universal appeal and universal approachability, and in any language. For Lewis, all of this gives the Comedy a feeling of effortlessness:
I think Dant’s poetry, on the whole, the greatest of all the poetry I have read: yet when it is at its highest pitch of excellence, I hardly feel that Dante has very much to do. There is a curious feeling that the great poem is writing itself, or at most; that the tiny figure of the poet is merely giving the gentlest guiding touch, here and there, to ener -
gies which, for the most part, spontaneously group themselves and perform the delicate evolutions which make up the Comedy 6
Only a true master can make a masterpiece appear so masterless. Only the highest poet can make high poetry feel prosaic (in the best sense), while maintaining poetic beauty and splendor. The Roman rhetorician Quintillion somewhere said, “The perfection of art is to conceal art.” Nowhere is this more true than with Dante’s Divine Comedy.
The pilgrim’s journey down the funnel of Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory, and through spheres of Heaven, really is the journey of the soul to God. It is here that the deepest questions of our existence are dealt with and, thankfully, not left unanswered. It is here that we are confronted with what it means to be made in the image of God, how we distort that image, and how that image is restored. Here our relationships are examined, and the way we love one another can be challenged and transformed. Here we have the opportunity to be re-enchanted by the beautiful world God has made, to see everything as a living, breathing, and spoken word, a window through which we can see and love Him.
Lest this be too much about Dante, and not enough about Lewis, I want to close with a few quotations from the end of Lewis’s The Discarded Image, a posthumous collection of his lectures on the Medieval worldview that defined Dante’s world. He begins the Epilogue by admitting,
I have made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old Model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors. Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree. It is possible that some readers have long been itch-
6 Lewis, Studies, 76.
ing to remind me that it had a serious defect; it was not true… I agree. It was not true.7
But Lewis does not allow this to be Modern man’s supreme “gotcha” moment. Of course it wasn’t true. That's not the point. The Medieval Model, scientifically, failed to account for all the facts as we now know them. But so does the Modern Model, with its commitment to strict materialism. The world of Newton and Bacon, now devoid of any spiritual dimension, has become a machine without a ghost, a body without a soul. Cosmological models serve to draw our attention to different aspects of reality. The Modern Model does put the sun in its proper place but, in doing so, has entirely lost sight of the Son. Models not only reflect the state of the universe, but also the state of the model-makers as well. We can learn much about the solar system by consulting a modern book of astronomy. But we learn more about the authors. As Lewis concludes:
No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each succeeds in getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age’s knowledge. Hardly any battery of new facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical. 8
No one, including Lewis himself, is arguing for a return to the Medieval Model. But perhaps there is something in Me -
7 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 ), 216.
8 Lewis, Discarded Image , 222.
dieval Man, a man like Dante, that we can appreciate, even imitate. After all, Lewis himself was a self-described “specimen” 9 of that forgotten world. Shouldn’t loving Lewis lead us to love what he loved? Maybe then our wits would become as sharp as his, our eyes as full with the wonder of the cosmos in which we live.
Joe Carlson (MA Humanities) lives in Moscow, Idaho with his wire and son. He received his BA from New St. Andrews College, and his masters degree from the University of Dallas where is he currently finishing his doctorate. He has managed a chain of coffee shops, published (micro) epic poetry, co-pastored a church, co-founded a university campus ministry, and taught many different kinds of classes over the years. He is an adjunct lecturer at New St. Andrews College and a curriculum developer at Roman Roads Press. He is the author of the Dante Curriculum, which includes an originlal blank verse translation of the Divine Comedy , published by Roman Roads Press.
9 C. S. Lewis, De Descriptione Temporum
Excerpt from Deeper Heaven
A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy
by Christiana Hale
1
Mapping the Universe
The Medieval Cosmos
I hope to persuade the reader not only that this Model of the Universe is a supreme medieval work of art but that it is in a sense the central work, that in which most particular works were embedded, to which they constantly referred, from which they drew a great deal of their strength. (Lewis, The Discarded Image)
Before we turn to the trilogy itself, there are some essential landmarks that we must introduce. Being familiar with these landmarks will not only enhance our enjoyment of the journey through Lewis’s work but will also give much needed coherence and clarity to what otherwise appears murky and disconnected. Lewis was a medieval scholar. That was his day job, so to speak, and he was not only good at it—he loved it. And as with everything else that Lewis loved, elements of the
medieval world are integrated into every part of his writings, both scholarly and otherwise. As Owen Barfield once said, what Lewis thought about everything was contained in what he said about anything.1 So we should not be surprised when we find traces of Lewis’s love for medievalism and the medieval cosmos in particular throughout his other works.
Understanding the layout of the medieval cosmos is like having an insider’s road-map to the Ransom Trilogy and many of Lewis’s other books—a road-map drawn by someone who knows the ins and outs of the city, the little back roads and alleys where all of the interesting shops and charming nooks and crannies are hiding. With this map in hand, we have already taken a large step towards a deeper appreciation of the world of treasures yet to be discovered.
What is a cosmology? The word cosmos comes from the Greek word κόσμος meaning order. We also get our word cosmetology from this word (but don’t confuse the two!). Cosmology is not just a study of the heavens or, as a modern man might call it, outer space. A cosmology is a system into which every aspect of reality is placed. Everything is ordered . And how you order things matters.
Not all cosmologies are created equal. Different ways of arranging things lead to different characteristics and personality quirks. Most of the people that we meet have eyes and ears and noses; they have the same basic features. And yet the arrangement of these features on the face—different nose shapes and eye colors, and so on—means that no one (with a few exceptions) looks exactly the same. People’s faces express their personalities and give them individuality and character. The same can be said of cosmologies. Every cosmology puts together a model of the entire created order, arranging the elements in a particular order. But how those elements are ar -
1 Owen Barfield, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 22.
ranged leads to a multitude of different characteristics. The Copernican Revolution did more than just swap out the earth for the sun on the map of the universe. It marked a definitive worldview shift (or cosmos -view shift) in the minds and imaginations of men and women. The old Ptolemaic map of the cosmos looked very different from the one we know today (as we will see more fully later on) but it also presented a completely different idea about what the world and the universe were like. The Enlightenment, that age of science and reason, led to a materialism that largely stripped the cosmos (particularly that part that used to be called the “heavens”) of its wonder and enchantment. And with the age of space exploration, that enchantment has been almost entirely removed. We are all familiar with the modern view of the universe. Space is dark and empty and cold, punctuated by occasional dead rock or the harsh, uninhabitable planets we have so far observed and discovered. Stars are blazing balls of burning gas. Earth, thus far, is the only haven of life and light in our known universe. If there are any other forms of life out there, they will be (by necessity) barbaric and cruel, even if more technologically advanced and sophisticated.
As we turn to consider the medieval cosmology, we must recognize that understanding the physical architecture of the cosmos is essential to understanding the imaginative and emotional effects of that model on a culture and a people. In other words, physical design has an emotional impact. And so we must understand the physical makeup of the medieval cosmos before we can grasp why it had such a unique emotional impact on the people who embraced it. Lewis frequently emphasized the emotional and imaginative differences between the medieval cosmos and the modern cosmos described above. These differences stem primarily from the physical arrangement of the cosmos, as well as from other unique features of the Medieval Model. The movement away from the Medieval Model that occurred in the wake of
the Copernican revolution had a ripple effect, especially concerning the imagination:
And on our thoughts and emotions (which concern a literary historian more) it [the Copernican model] was destined to have profound effects. By reducing Nature to her mathematical elements it substituted a mechanical for a genial or animistic conception of the universe. 2
In the medieval period, the concept of “space”—a wild, black expanse of darkness and silence—never enterd man’s thought or imagination, let alone his literature. Rather, the medieval man was “like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea.”3 Let us explore this cathedral.
Architecturally, the Medieval Model4 of the cosmos consists of a series of hollow and transparent globes called the spheres. Earth sits at the center surrounded by these spheres, one atop the other, like Russian nesting dolls. There are seven of these spheres (also called the seven heavens) and each sphere is governed by a planet (or “luminous body”) which is fixed within each sphere. The order of the planets, starting from Earth and working outward, is the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Beyond the spheres is the Stellatum, the realm of the “fixed stars” (meaning that the stars do not appear to move across the sky in relation to each other, unlike the planets, whose name comes from the Greek word πλανῆται , “wanderers”). Beyond the Stellatum is the Primum Mobile, which means the “first moveable.” This is the outermost sphere whose spinning in turn sets all of the
2 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 3.
3 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 100
4 For a fuller treatment of the Medieval Model and its literary history and significance see the entirety of Lewis’s The Discarded Image
other spheres in motion. And beyond this is the Empyrean, the caelum ipsum or “very heaven,” the abode of God.
Earth exists in the sublunar world, the world beneath the Moon. (The word sublunar is an important one to keep in mind and we will use it often in this book.) The Moon is the boundary line between the mutable (changeable) earthly realm and the transcendent realm of the Heavens. Beneath the Moon, disease and decay hold sway. 5 The Moon marks the divide between the cold, deathly realm and the realm of light and life. The medievals believed that only the created order beneath the Moon has been affected by the Fall. Everything above the Moon’s sphere is perfect and unfallen, still singing the praises of the Lord as it has since its creation. But while the heavens are full of dancing and the music of the spheres, beneath the Moon, all is silent.
So, how does this architectural structure of the medieval cosmos affect our emotional and imaginative faculties? While the medieval cosmos was “unimaginably large,” it was still bounded by specific dimensions. 6 It was finitely large. And, as Lewis himself notes, this actually served to make our smallness, the smallness of Earth, felt more keenly, because we have something specific to compare it to. While the modern man looks out into space as into an infinite sea of nothingness, the medieval man looked up into the Heavens as one who looks up the side of a skyscraper: massive and towering, but also crafted and shaped.
[…] To look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest—trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The “space” of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or
5 Lewis, Discarded Image , 94.
6 Lewis, Discarded Image , 99.
vague reverie; the spheres of old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony.7
If we can look at the night sky with medieval eyes, adopting a more Ptolemaic understanding of the cosmos, our emotional state will shift. A medieval looking up into the vast expanse of the shimmering heavens would feel small, just like we do, but it would be the smallness and awe that you feel looking up the side of a castle or cathedral, not the shiver of terror we feel when looking into dead, empty “space.”
We begin to see how the shape of the cosmos affects how we look at the world around us, especially as we start to see the Heavens rather than mere “space.” But to truly understand the feelings that were evoked in the medieval men by looking at this sort of cosmos, we must move beyond the architecture and layout. We must bring the whole thing to life. The Medieval Model was more than just a map, more than a two-dimensional pen and ink drawing on paper. The medieval cosmos was whirling, sparkling, dazzling, and teeming with life, music, and dance. We have assembled our instrument—now let’s make it sing. ⸭
Christiana Hale (New Saint Andrews College, BA ’15, MA ’17, MFA ’22) teaches Latin and English to over a hundred energetic junior high and high school students at Logos School in Moscow, ID. She also teaches Persuasive Writing and Medieval Cosmology electives at her alma mater, New Saint Andrews College. When not teaching or writing works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Christiana spends time with her parents and siblings, and enjoys the rolling hills of the Palouse and the deep woods of North Idaho. Sometimes, she even goes stargazing.
7 Lewis, Discarded Image , 99.
N ew R ealease f R om R oma N R oads P R ess
PARADISE LOST & JOHN MILTON
PARADISE REGAINED
Edited by Joe Carlson
with Reader’s Guide
The d a NT e C u RR i C ulum
Inferno & Reader’s Guide
The Dante Lectures
The Dante Curriculum Video Course
Purgatorio & Reader’s Guide
Paradiso & Reader’s Guide
a lso f R om R oma N R oads P R ess
C. S. Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy, better known as “the Space Trilogy,” is a much-neglected and yet critically important part of Lewis’ works. It has captivated and bewildered readers since its publication, and though hundreds of books about Lewis have been written, few seek to navigate the maze that is Lewis’ “space-travel story.” These books are a distillation in novel form of one of Lewis’ favorite subjects, a subject whose melody is woven into almost everything that Lewis ever wrote: the medieval model of the cosmos.
Deeper Heaven is a guide and companion through the magical web of medieval cosmology, ancient myth, and critique of modern philosophies that makes up the oft-maligned “Space Trilogy.” A student and teacher of literature and history herself, Christiana Hale will walk you through the Trilogy one step at a time, with eyes fixed where Lewis himself fixed his: on Deep Heaven and beyond. In the process, many questions will be answered: What does Christ have to do with Jupiter? Why does Lewis care so much about the medieval conception of the heavens? Why should we? And, perhaps the most puzzling question of all: why is Merlin in That Hideous Strength ?
Christiana Hale has done C. S. Lewis’ readers a great service with this very well-written and carefully researched guide to the Ransom Trilogy. It is a thoughtful and helpful study of three novels that are often misunderstood but which, as the years go by, are increasingly showing their value and importance. Warmly recommended.
~ Dr. Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis
