Mediating Illusions:Three Studies of Narnia James Como (bio) Past Watchful Dragons, by Walter Hooper. New York: Macmillan, 1979. A Guide through Narnia, by Martha C. Sammons. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1979. Reading with the Heart: The Way into Narnia, by Peter Schakel. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1979. The past few years have seen the publication of a rash of books on C. S. Lewis. But whether favorable to him or not—and often from publishers of religious evangelicalism—the shabby has outweighed the substantial. The popularizer has been popularized (Clyde S. Kilby, Images of Salvation in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis [Harold Shaw, 1978]); Lewis's thought sterilely reformulated (Gilbert Meilander, The Taste for the Other [Eerdmans, 1978]); or his Christian substance ridden nearly unto death (Leanne Payne, Real Presence [Cornerstone Books, 1979]). The complaint, for example, is not that Payne's book, or others like it, lacks a useful stance; one might well "marvel at the Holy Spirit's use of Lewis's talents." Rather, the weakness is in the narrowness of the author's context: the presumption, not only of premises shared across-the-board with the reader, but of a temperament supposedly common to all reasonable people. Note the number of undefended and perhaps unexamined assumptions in this astonishingly broad and categorical (yet casually posited) judgment: "As the Church, principally through St. Thomas Aquinas, came to accept the Aristotelian epistemology and incorporate it into its theology, the Judeo-Christian understanding of the deep heart (the unconscious mind and its way of knowing) simply dropped from sight." In a brief excursion outside of her narrow context, Payne might have come upon the exploration of the deep heart in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1954) by Jacques Maritain, the great Thomist. In opposing the modern [End Page 163] attempt to combine good and evil, Lewis is joined—according to Payne—only by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (this in a footnote); she does not tell us on what grounds, say, Chesterton is excluded from that company even though Lewis himself certainly includes him. Similarly, her reductionist dismissals of Blake, Jung, and B. F. Skinner (all in footnotes) cannot be taken seriously; to paraphrase Lewis, a small company of like-thinking people—in the absence of disinterested and rational opposition—can sneak by almost anything. The Chronicles of Narnia have been particularly harassed, for the "allegorizers"—equivocating, narrow, and not disinterested—have had the field largely to themselves. When not simply psychologizing (ordinarily as a means of attack on Lewis's Christian premises), these interpreters have produced little more than enthusiastic cartographies (Kathryn A. Lindskoog, The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land [Eerdmans, 1973]) and even a "study kit." In short, much current work on Lewis, posturing as scholarship, consists of diatribe, pedantic analyses, or cheerleading formulas. This unhealthy condition is also unnecessary. The stages through which work on C. S. Lewis has evolved over the past thirty years are readily discernible, and anyone coming to the field now will find a rich and fertile soil. From the first book on Lewis's apologetics—Chad Walsh's C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (Macmillan, 1949)—to the best book (and one of the shortest) of all-Paul Holmer's C. S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought (Harper & Row, 1976)—sensible responses have provided a fund of sound judgment. Furthermore, over ten new books by Lewis himself have been published since his death in 1963. Those who have "received" rather than "used" (to adopt: the distinction Lewis makes in An Experiment in Criticism) the primary world of discourse, who have declined the imposition upon it of some extraneous purpose, methodology, or theory, have enriched the genuine substance of scholarship. In particular, the following books have recovered much of the ground; they are serious, at times profoundly insightful, and highly authoritative: most of Light on C. S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965); Green and Hooper's C. S. Lewis: A Biography (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); James [End Page 164] Higgins's Beyond Words: Mystical Fancy in Children's Literature (Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1970); Lionel Adey...
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Dec 13, 1990
Catherine Locatelli 
Open Access
