Imagination and the Spirit: Essays in Literature and the Christian Faith (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagination and the Spirit: Essays in Literature and the Christian Faith Ian Campbell (bio) Imagination and the Spirit: Essays in Literature and the Christian Faith presented to Clyde S. Kilby. Edited by Charles Huttar. (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., $9.95). Two personalities overshadow this Festschrift anthology of essays: one is that of an inspiring scholar and teacher at Wheaton College, the other that of a great humane scholar and writer at Oxford, now no longer living. To Clyde Kilby, the teaching of English and the chairmanship of a growing and energetic English department in Illinois have been the major part of his life. Scholar, teacher, inspiring friend, "a faithful servant of the Lord Jesus Christ" (pp. 476-477), Clyde Kilby's influence is obvious throughout the pages of this anthology. Typically, Glenn Sadler (who contributes a perceptive and much-needed essay on "The Fantastic Imagination in George Macdonald") was first introduced to the work of Macdonald, not through lecture or seminar, but through devotional reading prefacing Kilby's class. Kilby's personality is one half of the background to Imagination and the Spirit; the other half is the personality of C. S. Lewis. Kilby was a long-term admirer of Lewis' writing while the Oxford scholar was still alive: "Many evangelical students whom Kilby guided [End Page 240] through the structure of Lewis' thought found the same vivification of the fabric of Christian ideas" (p. 472). His interest in Lewis' work had three important results. One was the meeting between the two men in Oxford, which led to a lively correspondence. The second was a useful interchange of material and unfinished projects, in which the handicap of Lewis' failing health was partly overcome by help from Illinois. The third, and perhaps the most important in the long term, was the continuing work of the establishment in the library of Wheaton College of an archive of C. S. Lewis manuscripts and correspondence. Imagination and the Spirit will certainly contribute to the reader's awareness of a Christian tradition, and the writer's place in a Christian society; yet a sense of the boundaries of the imagination and the capabilities of the human spirit in exploring these boundaries stands behind the scholarship of these pages. Specifically, one may turn to the section on "Inklings and Ancestors," to the essays on Wordsworth and MacDonald, to two important essays by Alice Hadfield and Marjorie Wright on the fiction of Lewis and Williams, and to two equally important but specialized essays on Lewis by Walter Hooper and Corbin Carnell. For too long regarded loosely and at half-acquaintance as a writer of science fiction and the amusing if unintelligible Screwtape Letters, Lewis is revealed in these essays as an important writer of allegory and fantasy. His works yield richly to the scholarly investigation they receive—a true liberation of the imagination as of the spirit. This liberation is perhaps the theme which will most attract those who teach children's literature. The writer's vision of reality is transformed in writing for children into a form of critical meaning: sometimes the meaning may be all but concealed, sometimes re-interpreted in a way which could be described as ". . . a poet's artistic diary of youthful dreams"—Glenn Sadler's description of Macdonald's Phantastes (p. 220). The artistic diary, like all diaries, will select what is recorded, and this makes all the more valuable the biographical insights which we can receive into MacDonald's life and its effect on the world of his art. Professor Sadler combines information on MacDonald's youth, and the influence of Scottish scenery, with an investigation of the debt MacDonald owed to the German romantics—a linking of the "blue hills" of his birthplace and the impossible dreams of the Märchen which emerge transfored in Phantastes, "an imaginative journey into MacDonald's poetic unconsciousness" (p. 222). To perform such a journey, to illuminate the artist's vision, somehow to relate the world of fantasy to the reader's experience, must surely be the responsibility of those who teach "Children's Literature." More material on C. S. Lewis is available in this collection, in a context which...