It was my grandpa of blessed memory who first introduced me to C. S. Lewis almost 30 years ago. He gave me a copy of Surprised by Joy and told me that if there was someone who understood what being human felt like and how God can fulfill it, it was Lewis. Lewis’ unique insight into the yearning behind all of our desire and the wreck we are prone to make of ourselves has helped many readers to taste and see not only the reasonableness of Christian faith but its real deliciousness.
Jeffrey Barbeau’s The Last Romantic: C. S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology examines the influences that taught Lewis to understand how human subjectivity is encountered and impressed upon by grace. Barbeau shows how the scintillating poignancy of Lewis’ writings emerges from his apprehension of this wondrous happening.
Romanticism is something of a hidden secret in Lewis, like Poe’s purloined letter on the mantelpiece. His spiritual autobiography is Surprised by Joy, after all: the title of a William Wordsworth poem. We tend to discount this due to Lewis’ criticisms of Romantic excess, but we must remember these are specific complaints, not an outright rejection. If one says they oppose Romanticism’s worst traits, they cannot name the story of their conversion a phrase from a Romantic poet without signaling that they still accept some of Romanticism’s tenets!
What is fresh and fascinating about Barbeau’s book are the firsthand inquiries he made into Lewis’ library and effects. The evidence he adduces is not widely known and illuminates the familiar, quotable portions of his writings. Lewis’ books and his marginalia, in particular, show his familiarity with the modern landscape: he “was not only familiar with the questions of his own age but also reflecting and even responding to many of the same issues in his most well-known prose” (16).
Lewis tended to downplay his learning. This lent him a certain approachability, but to the hard-hearted it might make him seem naive. His reading notes, however, demonstrate his facility with philosophy from Spinoza to his time as well as with theology of the same period. Lewis was no holdover from a different era: he was conversant in modernity’s developments and principles and appropriated some, though certainly — thankfully — not all of them.
The German idealist tradition that flowed downstream from Kant informed and inspired the British Romantics such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They found in idealism an appreciation for the imagination that, in some of the more austere forms of Reformed thought, was distrusted and denigrated. Lewis was very aware of how the Romantic impulse could lead author and reader astray, and yet it was his critically tempered appreciation of them that honed his witness into the force it would become.
For someone who has been styled — wrongly — a rationalist, Lewis often rooted his persuasive efforts in common situations and in the interiority all moral subjects experience. He loved Aristotle, certainly, but the pastoral insight with which he writes is sourced first in a deep understanding of the human heart. The propositional and intellectual have their place in his arguments, obviously, but their deep logic begin in things we all know and understand intuitively.
Lewis never made experience or intuition the foundation of what is good and true and beautiful, however. He always drew his audience’s attention to these things’ indefatigable is-ness. They simply were. But unlike the laws of gravity, these things could be acknowledged or not; they could influence us in our loves and our behavior, or they could be ignored or even spurned.
The witness of feeling is a subsidiary witness but a witness nonetheless. And it is one we must not risk excluding from the life of faith. Barbeau notes that some early reception of Lewis criticized him for sounding like Schleiermacher, as both connect feeling to the God who is beyond us. Both recognize the significance of the subject for Christian theology, but the similarities really end there, as Lewis places the subject within the fabric of Christian orthodoxy while Schleiermacher modulates doctrine to the key of the subject.
And this is a crucial difference for receiving Lewis in our subject-saturated time and place. This longstanding issue in my own thought was addressed in a response from Keith Johnson, a theology professor at Wheaton. In it I saw how I have grown both into and beyond a Barthian approach to nature’s sacramental qualities. The fear is that describing the mediating features of the created world as “sacramental” obscures the meaning of a sacrament (147–148). This concern is well-founded, as the human heart ever seeks avenues to God that God has not promised to meet us upon.
What is a sacrament? A sacrament conveys Jesus Christ to the human subject who partakes of the sacrament. Karl Barth would say the same. But the Barth who recognized the need for greater precision regarding the subject of theological discourse also recognized that the world is a conduit for God’s self-disclosure. Better, it can be so, but is not inherently so in every instance of its being. “God may speak to us through Russian Communism, through a flute concerto, through a blossoming shrub, or through a dead dog. We shall do well to listen to him if he really does so” (Church Dogmatics I/1). It is that possibility qualified by the “if” that connects to Lewis, as that conditional is substantiated by God’s Word. And Lewis says exactly that.
Self-deception is a real possibility, because we are fallen and our subjectivity is damaged. A waterfall can convey beauty and peace to one who is struggling with sin and communicate that God is present. But it can also be received wrongly as a blessing upon the bad course one is taking. If you are flagrantly disregarding what God has revealed, a lovely time in nature isn’t God’s seal of approval on your behavior and irreverence.
At its heart, Johnson’s worry is similar to the old critique of idealism but in a theological register. This is a little unfair as he is eager to defend the Christological content of the sacraments, not just to rebut a philosophical position. So it is more but it isn’t any less. Theology draws its life from the gospel but utilizes philosophy to elaborate its premises and conclusions. There cannot but be overlap, then, between Johnson’s complaint and idealism’s worst tendencies.
Idealism, at its worst, gave rise to subjectivism. We are familiar, anymore, with vulgar versions of it we encounter in everyday settings. We have even engaged in it ourselves: “It’s true because I say it is”; “This is so because I feel it.” The German idealist Johann Gottlieb Fichte arguably bit down hard on the hook of divinizing the self when he argued that the world is given its reality by the self-positing I. Yikes.
And yet a difference really is made when our acknowledgment is given or withheld concerning the things of our world. Is there something I owe my neighbor? Is racism real? Are created things avenues towards enjoying God? There are answers to these questions, but I will discount them if I don’t recognize them as legitimate questions or if I don’t recognize these questions as applicable to my neighbor, to my country, to my world and its Creator and, well, me.
Part of why Lewis is so useful for modern Christians is how he recognizes that stressing the objectivity of Israel’s history and of the Incarnation and Resurrection isn’t enough to persuade anyone to reorient their lives. In an important sense it doesn’t matter what’s true. Jesus may be the Christ, whatever that means, but what’s it got to do with me? Lewis sees that a thing’s being true most decisively makes a difference when that truth peels off the dragon hide that has grown around our hard hearts; when it shatters our illusions and instills a hope we could not previously feel or care for. Lewis’ account of subjectivity and the grace that touches it is the shape of Paul’s story and, if we are honest, ours.
And so idealism at its best recognizes and prizes the role of subjectivity in the making of the worlds we inhabit and the reception of truth. This person receives the truth of this situation and another does not, though both are presented with arguments and evidence. One is impressed upon and imprinted by its truth while the other is impenetrable to its overtures in their hostility to it. All of us have spurned logic and wisdom to chase our desires off a cliff at some point; we all know that reason alone is insufficient to take the wheel from our death drive.
The incredible thing is that God faces off against that hostility and softens that stone-cold opposition in his Holy Spirit. Barbeau’s response to Johnson acknowledges the usefulness of his warning against conflating symbol and sacrament and collapsing God into self and world. We must be vigilant against that, he agrees. But the Romantics did help Lewis to see something. His attendance to the overtures of joy and desire and the experience of struggling to be better mark him a careful student of the work of the Holy Spirit (154).
Lewis’ trinitarianism allows him to emphasize first the God who becomes man and then the God who quickens our spiritual senses and appetites without ever confusing our senses or appetites or our creaturely being for God. Let us press the overlap with Schleiermacher and adapt his famous rejoinder about being a Moravian and say that if Lewis is a Romantic then he is a Romantic of a higher order.
Chesterton warned, even before Lewis, that “realism, when it is emptied of romance, becomes utterly unreal.” Should we allow Romanticism’s abuses to rule out right use? Nein! Preoccupation with self has never been easier than it is in the conditions of late modernity, but we cannot simply be inattentive to self for that reason. We are inescapably subjective: we should not seek subjectivity’s extinction but its proper attunement. Let us all aspire to such imaginative and devotional heights as Lewis.
