C S Lewis Archives - James E Hartley

C. S. Lewis’ The Seeing Eye is a posthumous collection of otherwise not collected essays.

As always with such things, it is hard to review. If you step back and ask, “What unifies these essays?,” the honest answer is “Well, Lewis never put them in a collection of essays he made during his lifetime.” Not much of a hook there.

So, who buys a book like this? Presumably people who just can’t enough of Lewis. Should you read it? Yep—if you have read everything else he wrote and just can’t get enough of Lewis.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a bad book at all. There are some interesting essays in here; indeed, I didn’t detest any of the essays.

Lewis writes well; he is an easy person to read, which is presumably a part of his appeal. It is conversational writing, and not simply because many of his essays were originally talks he gave. It is one of those depressing facts of life that far too many people giving talks cannot manage a conversational style even when giving a talk. So, I found the book easy and thoughtful reading. Perfect for while having that second and third cup of coffee in the morning.

But, and here is the problem with the book, the best of this book is already embedded in The Abolition of Man. Indeed, parts of the book could have been labeled, “First drafts of material which will later be included in another book.” There are other essays which read like precursors to Lewis’ book on the Psalms. So, if you have read the other Lewis books and come to this one, do you learn anything new? Sort of. It is interesting to see familiar material presented in a new way.

Every now and then there is an interesting turn of phrase that stands out. (“Some people make allowances for local and temporary conditions in the speeches of Our Lord on a scale which really implies that God chose the time and place of the Incarnation very injudiciously.” “It may even be the duty of some Christians to be culture-sellers.”)

The good thing about reading a book like this is not really the book itself, but the idle speculation to which a book like this leads you. Halfway through that third cup of coffee, you finish an essay, stare out the window and start mulling.

For Example: What Exactly is Progress?

Lewis is hard on the Apostles of Progress, the charlatans who talk about Societal Evolution as if evolution always improves matters. But set aside Lewis’ specific target for a second, and wonder: suppose we wanted society to progress. What change would constitute progress?

The first instinct is to say that progress would be fixing things I don’t like about the society. But, that is a rather amusing answer. Does Society progress when it becomes more to my liking? That is rather egocentric of me. I am confusing “I like these things” with “A Society progresses when it has more of the things I like and it regresses when it has fewer of the things I like.” When did I become the standard for progress?

So, if we become a little less egocentric and say society progresses when it has more of the things people like me like, then it doesn’t sound quite so silly, but it still sounds weird. So, we modify it to say society progresses when it has more of the things Enlightened People like, which is a circular argument saying the same thing.

So, to get progress, we have to have something more abstract. Society progresses when it has more Liberty or Equality or Fraternity? Take the second one. As society becomes more equal, it makes progress on being more equal. Tautologically true. But “society progresses when it becomes more equal” just begs the question. Why is more equality progress? What enthroned equality as the progressive endpoint? Or Liberty? Or Fraternity? And again, we are back to the idea that society progresses when people like me like the society more.

In the absence of something outside myself establishing the goal, I am not sure what Progress means.

Does theism get around the problem? Does Society progress when God likes it more? That gets us into all sorts of theological problems. Is God’s goal for this society to improve until it hits an eschatological end? Does Society progress when it gets more like Heaven and regress when it gets less like Heaven?

If the world ends in fire and condemnation, which the New Testament seems to suggest it does, is it progress to get closer or further away from condemnation? There seem to be a slide here from the idea of progress as found in Pilgrim’s Progress and the idea of a society progressing by…what? What are the rules to measure the progress of a society?

The very term “progress” implies a goal which society is either moving toward or not. Without a stated goal, it is a meaningless term. Calling someone “progressive” sure sounds like a compliment, but surely it matters to what end they are progressing. When you frame it that way, you realize that every act of progress toward one goal is simultaneously an act of regress from the opposite goal. There is no such thing as progress in the abstract. We spend too much time talking about progress and not enough time establishing what the goal is to which the progress is occurring.

And that is where I get stuck. As soon as you try to articulate the goal toward which a society is progressing when people talk about “societal progress” it gets rather messy. I suspect if the goals were stated more clearly, it would be less attractive to talk about progress. I suspect that the very idea of “progress” is just a mask for some very muddled thinking.

I’ve been puzzling over this for a while now, which is of course the sign of a good book. At best, Lewis only hints at any of this. I have no idea if he would even recognize these ruminations as related to the essays he wrote. Then again, I am certain Lewis would not really mind about the topic as long as he knew his essays set my mind wandering.

Let’s start by getting this out of the way: The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky is a Great Book (you also knew that).

Not only is it Great, it is perhaps the Greatest Novel Ever Written. I think its only competitors for that status are Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch. Maybe War and Peace.

After reading it 4 or 5 times, I still find it brilliant from beginning to end, gripping, thoughtful, and amazingly fun to read. Everything you could possibly want in a novel. If you have never read it, do so. You won’t regret it. Get the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. (Unless you can read Russian, in which case get the original.)

So, what does one write about the Greatest Novel Ever Written? The problem here is not a paucity of things to say, but a surfeit of topics. Pick a page and start your mind wandering—it will go interesting places.

So, let’s take the very end:

“Well, and now let’s end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don’t be disturbed that we will be eating pancakes. It’s an ancient, eternal thing, and there is good in that, too,” laughed Alyosha. “Well, let’s go! And we go like this now, hand in hand.”
“And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya cried once more ecstatically, and once more all the boys joined in his exclamation.

Eating pancakes. At the end of a novel exploring the deepest philosophical matters which have occupied the mind of man, the eternal, ancient questions, they head off to eat pancakes at a memorial dinner. Pancakes. Simple, basic pancakes.

I was thinking about those pancakes when I read an essay by C.S. Lewis: “Christianity and Literature” (reprinted in The Seeing Eye). The essay itself is a bit of a mess—Lewis is trying to figure out how Christianity and Literature connect, and his answers are tentative and terribly unsatisfying. But he made the following observation toward the end which startled me with its relationship to those pancakes I had been pondering.

The Christian will take literature a little less seriously than the cultured Pagan: he will feel less uneasy with a purely hedonistic standard for at least many kinds of works.

Lewis’ reasoning leading to this conclusion is a bit wobbly. (“The unbeliever is always apt to make a kind of religion of his aesthetic experience” while the Christian knows his aesthetic experiences are not as important as the salvation of mankind, so things like literature are smaller and thus easier to simply enjoy. Like I said, wobbly.)

But, set Lewis’ reasoning aside and just think about the premise: how seriously should we take literature?

An aside before getting back to Dostoevsky. I teach courses using Great Books at Mount Holyoke whenever I can figure out a way to sneak one into the curriculum. To say these courses are not popular with my colleagues in the Humanities would be an understatement. Their (my colleagues) principal complaint: here is an economist (insert tone of disgust) talking about…Literature or History or Philosophy. What could I possibly know about…Literature? Surely I don’t know enough Theory (said in hushed reverent tones) to be competent in discussing Literature.

To which complaints, I invariably laugh and point out that Shakespeare was Great long before Derrida showed up to tell us how to take apart Shakespeare and find a nothing but a mirror for the obsession of the day of the 21^stcentury academic. Surely, we can all just read Shakespeare and, you know, enjoy him. Surely enjoyment is part of the point of Great Books. My colleagues in the Humanities find me utterly incomprehensible when I say things like this.

Lewis again: “It thus may come about that Christian views on literature will strike the world as shallow and flippant.” There is no doubt that “shallow and flippant” is exactly how my colleagues in the Humanities see my views on teaching Great Books.

The serendipitous shock I had on reading Lewis’ essay: this was exactly why I thought that pancake passage is so fascinating.

Fyodor! You just wrote The Greatest Novel Ever and you end by having your hero wander off to have pancakes with some kids?? After all the talk of Life and God and Meaning, you end your novel with pancakes?

Which is, of course, exactly how I read Great Books—they are Great, Amazing, Worth Reading, Deep, Profound, Insightful, Etc., Etc., Etc.—but after setting them down, I go on with my life. I don’t read Great Books Seriously; I read them for pleasure, including the pleasure of thinking thoughts I have never before thought and ruminating on unanswerable questions and learning new things. And all that Learning is Important, Very Important, not because it is Serious, but because it is Joyful.

That is exactly what I try to teach whenever I am teaching a course or giving a lecture (or, come to think of it, writing a blog post): this book is Awesome because reading it will bring you Joy.

It is a message far too few teachers seem to understand. I cannot think of anything more dreary that taking a positively amazing novel like The Brothers Karamazov and dissecting it according to the Dictates of Theory. Give me the genuine human reaction to a book every time, give me the sense of rapturous joy or utter disgust with the argument, the parts that make you weep or cry, the shocks and twists, the parts that caused you to stop and just stare into space for half an hour—tell me about these things.

And as we talk about those things we will learn something worth learning. And then we will go eat pancakes and enjoy a pleasant conversation over a meal. An ancient and eternal practice there. To remember the dead, the past, and simultaneously take joy in the present.

Hurrah for Karamazov! If this book has ever been taught and the students did not scream that at the end, then the teacher should be immediately removed from the classroom as a positive danger to mankind. Hurrah for Karamazov! Read The Brothers Karamazov and eat pancakes. That is about as good a recipe for the Good Life, the Life Worth Living, as I can imagine. Hurrah for Karamazov!

Tag: C S Lewis

C.S. Lewis and Progress

Finding Joy in Great Books