From Law and Liberty:
When C. S. Lewis was first profiled by Time Magazine in 1947, he became nationally renowned as a global leader in Christian apologetics, and his subsequently published Chronicles of Narnia books became an international sensation. A large majority of Lewis’s personal correspondence and fan mail for the duration of his life ended up coming from the US. This even came full circle in Lewis’s private life when he married Joy Davidman, a former American communist turned Christian poet. Davidman was a fan who had opened up a correspondence with him after reading The Screwtape Letters.
To this day, Americans remain among Lewis’s most dedicated readers. Among them are the fine folks at the Marion Wade Center at Wheaton College, which has become a global center in academic studies of the collective works of Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, and other leading mid-century Christian figures like Dorothy Sayers, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. The Wade Center has the honor of guarding many of the most valuable treasures of Lewis’s earthly life, including the majority of his private book collection and personal papers, as well as Lewis’s childhood wardrobe.
In early 2022, emeritus Professor Mark A. Noll delivered the Wade Center’s prestigious annual Ken and Jean Hansen Lecture Series—delivering three lectures called C. S. Lewis and America: Lessons for Today from the Early American Reception of C. S. Lewis’s Books, exploring the period before 1947 when C. S. Lewis was still an intellectual oddity and not a celebrity. These lectures have since been condensed and edited into the book C. S. Lewis In America: Readings and Reception, 1937–1947.
Professor Noll’s book, being adapted from lectures, is quite brisk and fascinating, neatly divided into three chapters that explore the ways Catholic, Protestant, and secular audiences respectively received and grappled with Lewis’s ideas for the first time.
Lewis’s first major publication as an apologist was The Pilgrim’s Regress, which was released to American audiences in October 1935. In the 12 years that followed, 17 of his books would make their way across the Atlantic Ocean, including The Problem of Pain, The Allegory Of Love, Preface to Paradise Lost, The Space Trilogy, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, Miracles, Abolition of Man, and the early shorter multi-volume editions of what would become Mere Christianity.
As Noll argues, the reception of Lewis’s books can only be fully understood when we grapple with the state of American Christianity at the time of their publications. The faith at the time was already severely divided and dying. The pre-Vatican II Catholic Church in America was struggling as a religion mostly composed of culturally adhering immigrants, with limited intellectual ambitions among the laity and clergy. Conversely, Protestantism was at the height of the Modernist-Fundamentalist schisms that would come to devastate the mainline denominations and foster the expansion of non-denominational evangelicalism.
This was an era dominated by pervasive national crises—first the Depression, then World War II, and then uncertainties after the war about charting a national course as the world’s dominant superpower. These same years also witnessed a critical cultural transition—from a past in which Christian values could be more or less taken for granted by wide swaths of the American people to a future in which those values became increasingly contested.
Lewis’s emergence marked a needed shot in the arm for American Christians at the time, providing clarity, orthodox thinking, imagination, courage, and humor at a time when all of these things were in short supply. However, the initial decade before becoming famous was a time in which his work was primarily being examined by academics and book reviewers—despite the runaway success of early bestseller The Screwtape Letters in February 1943. (Read more.)
From the Acton Institute:
I have hesitated for a long time before writing about gender from a Lewisian perspective. It is perilous to bring a past thinker into discussion of a contemporary issue. As Lewis himself knew, these topics are best approached through the imagination. Rather than this essay, it would be more effective to write a poem or a song or a story about gender and the Christian imagination. That, after all, is what Lewis did.
But elucidating an imaginative vision, as Michael Ward does for Lewis’ thought in Planet Narnia, can be helpful. For many of us, the landscape of the Christian imagination is so far away that we need guides to point even to the trailhead. I hope here to point the way to that trailhead, where Lewis himself is waiting to lead us into the foothills of a realm in which physical realities, like our bodies, are signs revealing the nature of God.
In Lewis’ imagination, there is no such thing as an “abstract idea.” In Planet Narnia, Michael Ward writes that Lewis believed that “to prefer abstractions is not to be more rational; it is simply to be less fully human.” An idea must have an associated “sign,” a body or a word or a relation, something we apprehend through our senses. We know reality through these signs, which come through our senses into our imaginations and shape how we live. (Read more.)
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