Since writing the essay C.S. Lewis is morally
incoherent I have finished rereading the entire Narnia series. I
could go on at length about how the writing deteriorates as Lewis’s
imaginative impulse is more and more smothered by the clanking and
wheezing of his allegory machine, but Adam Gopnik makes the point
better than I could in Prisoner
of Narnia.
Gopnik is particularly spot-on when he describes Lewis’s enthusiasts:
Praise a good writer too single-mindedly for too obviously ideological
reasons for too long, and pretty soon you have him all to
yourself. The same thing has happened to G. K. Chesterton: the
enthusiasts are so busy chortling and snickering as their man throws
another right hook at the rationalist that they don’t notice that the
rationalist isn’t actually down on the canvas; he and his friends
have long since left the building.
I could be the rationalist in this analogy. I admire the
Screwtape Letters as a marvellous piece of writing,
probably the most effective single Christian apologetic of the 20th
century, but as an argument it completely fails to affect me; Lewis
treats as deep mysteries issues that I think are obvious, and glides
over or ignores entirely the questions I find most interesting.
I’ve met a number of Christians who are convinced his arguments
should affect me, though, and seem genuinely puzzled when
they don’t. The brutal truth is that Lewis was a primitive thinker, a
fabulist who substituted spiritual/emotional passion for philosophical
analysis and never clearly understood that he wasn’t achieving the
latter.
Here again, Gopnik is both sympathetic and mercilessly exact:
His works are a record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell
of his own invention and staring through the barred windows at the
stars beyond. That the door was open all the time, and that he held
the key in his pocket, was something he discovered only at the end.
Gopnik never unpacks this analogy, but its elements are plain. The
cage was Lewis’s Christian religiosity; the key was the pagan
enthusiasm and wonder of his childhood; and the end was that last
portion of his life during which he wrote Til We Have
Faces, a re-paganized mythological examination of all the
questions that most obsessed him. No part of his journey ever took
place at the level of philosophy; it was all fable, all spirit-quest,
all psychodrama occasionally dressed up in the language of intellectual
argument but never really at home there.
Gopnik drops the ball only once:
A bright and sensitive British boy turned by public-school sadism into
a warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert. It sounds like the usual
story. What was special about Lewis was that, throughout it all, he
kept an inner life.
Gopnik’s description of “the usual story” is more awfully truthful
than most Americans can know; I actually went to a British day school
in the 1960s (it happened to be located outside Rome, but that’s a
detail) and the decaying end of the same tradition that had warped
Lewis fifty years before was still quite unpleasant enough. But
Gopnik is wrong in thinking Lewis was exceptional for maintaining an
inner life; most public-school boys did, even if only as a form of
escape. No; what was exceptional about Lewis came later, when he
converted to Christianity in 1931 for reasons that were desperately
wrong from any Christian point of view.
Here again, Gopnik is clear-eyed:
This was a new turn in the history of religious conversion. Where for
millennia the cutting edge of faith had been the difference between
pagan myth and Christian revelation, Lewis was drawn in by the
likeness of the Christian revelation to pagan myth. Even
Victorian conversions came, in the classic Augustinian manner, out of
an overwhelming sense of sin. Cardinal Manning agonized over eating
too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep
himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace Christianity because
he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it
would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s own
bakery.
The mythological arc of Lewis’s work, the arc that ends with
Til We Have Faces, makes it clear that this account is
correct. And from a pagan point of view (certainly a neopagan one
like mine) cozying up to a god because that will keep the cake coming
is eminently reasonable. The pagan bargain between god and human is
an exchange of value, adoration given for power returned. But within
an Augustinian Christian point of view this is horribly backwards:
conversion is supposed to be all about submission to the will of God
and what I have elsewhere described as installing a sin/guilt/thoughtcrime
monitor in one’s own head. There is no evidence that Lewis
ever did this; he doesn’t seem, for example, to have suffered the
pangs of conscience one might have expected from a Christian
enthusiast over committing adultery.
Thus, for all his enthusiasm, Lewis was a poor Christian, and an
uneven (and ultimately unsuccessful) evangelist. J.R.R. Tolkien, who had
been reponsible for Lewis’s conversion, understood this and was much
bothered by it. When Gopnik reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury
was offended by Lewis’s “vulgar, bullying” religiosity there is no reason
at all for us to doubt that, either.
As regards the quality of Lewis’s writing, it was his Christianity
that damaged him, not his pagan instincts. As Gopnik writes:
Lewis is always trying to stuff the marvellous back into the
allegorical—his conscience as a writer lets him see
that the marvellous should be there for its own marvellous sake, just
as imaginative myth, but his Christian duty insists that the
marvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with
belief. He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or,
at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just
what it’s supposed to say.
This describes with laser-beam precision what’s wrong with the
Narnia books. It’s already a serious problem in The Lion, the
Witch, and the Wardrobe and it gets worse as the series
progresses. By The Last Battle all that’s left of
whatever narrative coherence Narnia originally possessed is a series
of gorgeous imagistic set pieces. Lewis tries so obsessively to pump
these full of allegorical meaning that, paradoxically, they lose all
meaning. The clanking of the allegory machine is just too
audible.
Even children pick up on this; I did, though when I first read the
books I didn’t understand what I was feeling. As Gopnik puts it:
The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known,
diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly
religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least
successfully, allegorized.
I could dispute some of the pronouncements with which Gopnik
finishes his essay; not being a neopagan himself, he crams pagan
mysticism into an implicitly dualist framework, and thus understands it
less well than he thinks he does. But when he writes
Fairy stories are not rich because they are true, and they lose none
of their light because someone lit the candle.
he is dead on target. Tolkien understood this; Lewis never did. That’s
why, at fifty years’ remove, it is Lewis who stands in Tolkien’s shadow
as a fantasist and not the other way around.