Oxford, 6/16/08

Don June 16th, 2008

Over the weekend some of us went up to Cambridge to check out the other university in Lewis’s life.  After three decades of being denied promotion to full professor at Oxford because of resentment of his Christian testimony and his popularity outside of academia, he was finally offered a professorship of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge and became for the last decade of his career a fellow of Magdalen College, Cambridge.  Lewis still maintained his residence at The Kilns in Oxford and commuted to Cambridge during term–it’s about a three hour drive–coming home on the weekends.  While the Inklings connections to Oxford run longer and deeper–Tolkien, of course, spent his whole career here–one must be grateful to Cambridge for the recognition it gave Lewis at the end of his career, and for occasioning that wonderful inaugural lecture, “De Descriptione Temporum.”

Cambridge is a little younger than Oxford and a little smaller, though it does have colleges such as King’s and St. John’s that can rival anything here in size and ornateness.  Oxford has distinguished itself more in the humanities, Cambridge in the sciences.  Oxford was more Anglican and royalist in sympathy during the Civil War, Cambridge comparatively more Puritan and parliamentarian.  My biggest regret in our visit was that the renowned and magnificent King’s College Chapel was closed.  But we had full access to Magdalen, and so the main reason for my visit was fulfilled.

Cambridge’s Magdalen College is smaller and more intimate in feel than Oxford’s, in which Lewis spent most of his career.  The Pepysian Library, the most familiar building, is Eighteenth Century rather than medieval.  There is no deer park, but a very nice Fellow’s Garden with a smaller and more enclosed version of Addison’s Walk, and a corner or two that put one in mind of Bragdon Wood (though Lewis wrote That Hideous Strength a decade before going there).  The Chapel is smaller and less ornate, but beautiful in its simplicity and very peaceful.  There is a plaque honoring Lewis’s time there in the vestibule.  On the busride back we were treated to one of those long, lingering English summer sunsets, the towering clouds flecked with rose as they turned to gray, begging for a Gainsborough or a Constable to capture their skyscape before they faded into dusk.   

Today (Monday) we returned to class with a focus on The Space Trilogy.  I suggested that it would be most fully appreciated if one saw each of the tree books in a group portrait with its literary siblings. 

For example, Out of the Silent Planet is a journey in many ways like Swift’s Gulliver’s travels.  Just as Gulliver’s embarassment at trying to explain European society and its customs to Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, and Houynyhms is a vehicle for Swift’s satire of his contemporaries, Ransom’s attempts to explain human customs to the Hrossa bring out Lewis’s perspectives on fallen humanity.  (Hross is the Anglo-Saxon word for horse, reminding us obliquely of Gulliver’s last journey.)  It is as important to see the differences as the similarities.  Gulliver’s experiences lead him ironically to adopt the pride of his Houynyhm masters, while Ransom’s is a journey to wisdom and humility.  Realizing the literary connections brings both the parallels and the contrasts into sharp focus.

In like manner, Perelandra belongs with Genesis and Paradise Lost, and That Hideous Strength stretches roots back to Mallory and the Arthurian legend and out to its contemporary dystopias, 1984 and Brave New World.  Lewis sees similar dangers to our society as Huxley and Orwell, but has resources for solutions to them that they lacked.  1984 ends with Winston loving Big Brother in spite of his long career of trying to escape him, but THS ends with Mark rejecting Frost, Wither, and Fairy Hardcastle inspite of his long career of trying to insinuate himself into their society.  Grace is the difference.

The books of the Space Trilogy can also be seen as fictional incarnations of the ideas in Lewis’s non fiction popular apologetics works.  Miracles, “Myth become Fact,” and Problem of Pain show up in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, and Abolition of Man and “The Inner Ring” in That Hideous Strength. 

On another note, THS shows the Christian worldview and its secular reductionist opponent, not just as opposing ideas, but as ideas incarnated in the two opposing communities of St. Anne’s and the N.I.C.E.  The failure of our churches to be contemporary versions of St. Anne’s–their failure to be real communities of faith that offer a viable alternative to secularism as opposed to accomodating themselves to it–might be addressed better if we learned the lessons of this book and planted its seeds in our own communities.  

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

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