While reading Kierkegaard’s dialectics about Christian life gets difficult relatively quickly, it is still worthwhile. The close reading that many texts demand entails rereading, and reading again, perhaps with a view towards a particular literary theory. In the way one might explore a modernist text for its organic unity, one might also trace any number of Kierkegaard’s parabolic writings. There is a particular symmetry in coming back to original questions, to understand their import after gaining a new perspective. But arguments about cohesiveness, about needing to adhere to a singular theme, and that to stray distracts from the paradigm, apply less to C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, which is transcribed from the spoken word, a series of radio addresses given during World War II. I have not heard the recordings – they might shake the faith that we’ve already propped up. Imagine being suspended in the awful wait of war, loved ones abroad, and looking forward to that radio show about belief. That show, and those talks collectively, place Lewis as part, if not as progenitor, of a multi-tendrilled plant, tenuous but perennial, and at times even strident, which grows only because it has found, and continues to find, fertile ground, and appropriate nutrients for sustenance. It requires pruning, and supplication, intercession, and petitioning by one whose garden it grows in.
We stray when we do not return to those original forms, spoken or written, or simply daydreamed in cycles. We intuit that something is awry. We are in wartime now, but it seems to be one of our own design. We maneuver to gain political or economic advantage, or else control the damage we’ve done. If we ever had any good intentions, something went bad; many, many people have been killed or hurt, and will be so, going back and forward in time along an axis, and we wonder how it will ever be assuaged.
There is a war in our homeland. There is an onslaught against our liberty right here, not just to those abroad. The strength of Lewis’ book lies in its philosophical simplicity, and whether I agree with him or not, it has been my pleasure to find respite in this book. I have sought and found this before, in other writers, and I add C. S. Lewis to that list of thinkers who courageously outline a philosophy they know will cut against the grain of what is popular here, now, and in the future. I know that this is a direct appeal to our sensibility, not in his narrative forms which can be found elsewhere, but in the way of posing difficult questions. And this is part of the progression – the refining of questions – and to this Lewis goes a long way towards helping us, like it or not.
The words Lewis uses to portray natural man and his spirit, which he says move towards God, nevertheless must be arbitrary, as are the paradigms used to portray and inadvertently define them. Where Cleanth Brooks might site a lack of paradox in Lewis’ language here, he might find it in Kierkegaard, who elucidates the ironies of Christianity in most of his later works. He may well find it in Lewis’ non-fiction. Apologetics in the guise of the Narnia books, and shades of that in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, and even George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, is fraught with dialectic paradox. Those texts will be much more heavily read due to their story form. A close reading will reveal the philosophical problems that each bears, reflecting the historical context that each writes in, which, we must remember, repeats itself.
Writers have been profoundly influenced by Lewis, as they have been by the literati theorists. Wendell Berry writes poetry and essays which raise at their fundamental center the spectre of spirituality, in a way that warns of any endeavor that lacks it, or doesn’t require it, and the deception and destruction which occur in its absence. Farming, for example, is a spiritual endeavor, and practices which sap the fertility of our land and require artificial chemicals for it to remain viable likely reflect a lack of spiritual rootedness, a reduction of tending the land to a business, not of caretaking, growing the soil, and nurturing the steward in turn. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, deeply involved with the Dissenters in England when the Anglican Church, the Church, was firmly entrenched, encouraged a depoliticizing of religion. Spiritual endeavors cannot be about the acquisition of power, nor glory. That discussion has been taken up by Vernard Eller, and, more eloquently, Jacques Ellul. Coleridge travelled the motherland, speaking in churches and taverns, eviscerating the church’s rhetoric in support of war with France, writing poetry as he went. There may be great similarity in his sensibilities and those of Lewis. Coleridge wrote:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small.
There is a simple truth in learning to love, and Lewis might argue that God propels us towards that, but he gets at why. That is important, regardless of whether or not we write, or care about writers and their body of work, or, truly, whether or not we are Christians.
No comments:
Post a Comment