Don Williams’ Blog

Don August 16th, 2010

In a discussion group I belong to there was a thread on what C. S. Lewis said about despair.  I was despairing of making any sense of it until I realized what was wrong: people were using words carelessly.

We must distinguish despair in general as used loosely and having to do with feelings of anguish and hopelessness, from Despair used as a technical term for the particular sin of rejecting God’s grace because you refuse to believe that He could fogive you. It is the second sense of the word that is found in Screwtape. In that sense, despair is indeed paradoxically a sin of pride, in that you are essentially saying your sin is greater than God’s grace. As Ruby pointed out, we can have–and biblical characters had–all kinds of negative and hopeless feelings without committing the sin. And while those feelings are no doubt often a contributing factor, one can commit the sin without having any of the accompanying emotions. They are just two different things. The first (the feelings) is something that happens to us and which we must bear as we can. The second (the sin) is an act of the will. You can have both together or either one without the other.
Much confusion will result if we use the word “despair” without distinguishing.

I can’t help but think of Puddleglum in this context. No doubt many outward observers would think he was tempted by Despair. But when he stomped the Witch’s fire, he was as far from that particular type of giving up as one could be. And that would be a pretty good definition of the sin of Despair in the technical sense: not feeling discouraged or having a pessimistic personality, but giving up: giving up on God and His grace.

Let me be as despairing as Puddleglum!

From the Falls of Henneth Annun,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD
Prof. of English, Toccoa Falls College
Editor, The Lamp-Post
Web Site: http://doulomen. tripod.com
Blog: www.journalofformalpoetry.com
E-Mail: dtw@tfc.edu

“To think well is to serve God in the interior court.”
– Thomas Traherne

• Inklings , Theology
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Don July 15th, 2010

“I’m back.” Sam’s statement to Rosie is the way The Lord of the Rings ends. Of course, one can never say these words in this life except provisionally. There is a sense in which finite mortals cannot step in the same river twice. The Hobbiton and the Bag End to which Sam returned was not the same Hobbiton and Bag End without Frodo in them, and so we move on from the supposed ending to the Appendices and the Lost Tales and learn that eventually even Sam sailed into the West.

Nevertheless, the phrase does have a kind of truth for a while–a day, a year, an age of men. I am “back” from Mythcon, the annual meeting of the Mythopoeic Society, in Dallas this year from July 9-12. But one never returns the same.

How to describe a Mythcon to those who have never been? Imagine a serious academic conference with world class papers and panels on C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, the other Inklings, and fantasy literature in general breaking out in the midst of a Renaissance Festival, with an Inklings meeting, a fan convention, a film festival, a Society for Creative Anachronism meeting, a theology/apologetics conference, a spiritual retreat, and an insane asylum all going on concurrently–and you will have just an inkling (ahem) of the weirdest and most satisfying convocation of Inklings devotees on the planet. Picture this astounding conglomeration as a seamless whole in which each part enriches all the others and you will have an even better idea. But you will have to attend to really understand. Warning: Mythcon is highly addictive. Like the infamous potato chip, you cannot do just one.

This year I did a paper on Lewis’s view of truth. It was part II of “A Tryst with the Transcendentals: C. S. Lewis on Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.” Part I, Beauty, was last year. Beauty came first because for Lewis it was beauty, received as sensucht, that led Lewis to truth. But it was to truth that he thought he had arrived. In an age of Post-Modernism and Post-Foundationalism, the very concept of truth finds itself subject to deconstruction. Lewis held to the old “correspondence theory” of truth, but did so in a way that withstands contemporary assaults better than many traditional formulations because he sought to integrate Reason and Imagination in ways not typical of earlier philosophy. Essays like “Bluspels and Flalansferes” provide a framework for understanding Lewis’s statements on the nature of truth. They make possible a view of truth that is neither relativist nor reductive, but rather profoundly humane. Or so I tried to argue.

I also participated in a panel discussion of the influence of a writer’s religion on his work. Some were so opposed to “preaching” in literature that they seemed to imply an author’s faith should have no influence at all; they had a problem with passages like the one in Narnia when Aslan tells the children that they had met Him there so that they could learn to know Him in their own world. I maintained that an author writes out of his total personality, which includes his faith (or lack of it), and that this should not be shocking. Some Christian “writers” have palmed off on their readers sermons disguised as stories, and this is a problem, not with their content but with their craft. But abusus non tollit usum. The question is not whether Aslan should be allowed to say such a thing but rather whether the Narnia books present him consistently as a Lion who would and could say that kind of thing with credibility. Christians should appreciate a novel like Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha because it lets them see the world through Buddhist eyes, and does it more effectively than any hundred treatises on comparative religion could ever hope to do. This understanding is a good thing, irrespective of whether it leads to conversion. Why shouldn’t non-Christians appreciate a work like Narnia in the same way? If they are afraid of being converted, let them be honest about that rather than blaming the work for daring to reflect its authors’ world view! For all works inevitably do.

My former student Brian Melton, a military historian, attended his first Mythcon and was absolutely enchanted. He also gave an excellent paper on War in Narnia, which was very well received. I was gratified to see him taking his place among the great Inklings scholars. Look for his name in the future!

And so I am back–but not the same. The other papers were almost all stimulating and enlightening. But what makes me feel that my own–not just understanding, but life–has been deepened is the level of integration between seriousness and fun, reason and imagination, intellect and heart, represented by the whole experience which is a Mythcon. The Inklings hold that kind or wholeness before us more effectively than any other group of writers, and their influence is not just celebrated but incarnated by the Mythies (as they call themselves) who gather around their works every year. I am blessed to be a part of it.

From Mr. Tumnus’ Library,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD
Prof. of English, Toccoa Falls College
Editor, The Lamp-Post
Web Site: http://doulomen.tripod.com/
Blog: www.journalofformalpoetry.com

• Apologetics , Art/Aesthetics , Inklings
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Don June 16th, 2010

I have an acquaintance who has been marveling over the fact that she knows people who just can’t seem to get into C. S. Lewis’s classic Mere Christianity.  That wouldn’t be so astonishing in itself.  But they complain that this masterpiece of winsomeness and clarity is wordy and confusing!  What can be going on here?

I can empathize with this lady’s mystification at her friends’ inability to follow Lewis, but I have run into the phenomenon too many times to be surprised by it any more.  Because some of the people whom I’ve encountered with this disability have been my students, I have had an opportunity to study the syndrome up close in some detail.  It is not due to any lack of clarity or failure to be engaging on Lewis’s part.  The real culprit for many postmodern readers is their inability to follow a linear argument–any linear argument.  Often in Lewis, in other words, the ability to “get” the paragraph you are in depends on your having gotten the one that preceded it.  Many people today have such short attention spans that they can only deal with soundbytes and get frustrated by anyone who expects them to put two and two together to arrive at four, however plainly he maps out the path for them.  Or, worse, they have actually been taught to be suspicious of discursive Reason as something that has nothing to do with reality and which can only lead them astray.

Lewis’s linearity is a virtue, not a fault, and I stoutly maintain that we should not respond to the abysmal failure of our educational system to teach critical thinking (or even foster the conditions that make it possible) by dumbing down the Faith (or its most winsome representative).  That would be to falsify and misrepresent it, and therefore to lose the very reason why we should be caring whether people can follow it in the first place.  For some (if they have the patience for it, or an ornery professor who won’t let them out of it), Lewis can be a bridge out of the soundbyte solipsism they naturally inhabit into the larger world of rationality.  For some; not all.  That even Lewis cannot reach many is the greatest indictment of our so-called education system I can think of.  Remember that Mere Christianity was written for uneducated British laymen of the 1940’s.  They got it because they had not had their ability to think destroyed like “educated” modern Americans have.

It’s all in Lewis!  It’s all in Lewis!  What DO they teach them in those schools?

From Mr. Tumnus’ Library,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD
Prof. of English, Toccoa Falls College
Editor, The Lamp-Post
Web Site:  http://doulomen.tripod.com
Blog:  www.journalofformalpoetry.com
E-Mail:  dtw@tfc.edu

P.S.  I leave for Africa tomorrow.  Your prayers for the mission would be appreciated. — DW

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Don October 10th, 2009

This review was published in Trinity Journal NS 26:2 (Fall 2005): 352-3.

Mark Eddy Smith.  Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of The Lord of the Rings.  Downers Grove:  InterVarsity Pr., 2002. 141 pages, $12.00, pbk.; Matthew Dickerson.  Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings.  Grand Rapids:  Brazos Pr., 2003. 234 pages, $15.00, pbk.

            Evangelical Christian publishers, always looking for ways to exploit current cultural phenomena, are currently falling over themselves to spew out books related to two recent movies:  Mel Gibson’s cinematic passion play and Peter Jackson’s version of Tolkien’s LOTR.  The two books on Tolkien reviewed here show that the people who write for them bear a striking resemblance to a certain little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead.  When they are good they are very, very good, and when they are bad . . . well, you know.  (Disclaimer:  I am one of these disreputable writers, with a book on the treatment of the human condition in various Inklings-related authors coming out from Broadman & Holman in February, 2006.  You will have to wait until then to determine which of the two modes of curly-headed urchin behavior I will exhibit.)

            I chose these two books to represent two poles you will find in Evangelical writers on Tolkien and Lewis:  the evangelistically pragmatic and the evangelically profound.  The one kind can cause even their Evangelical cohorts to roll their eyes, and the other can help even people who do not share their Christian faith to read Tolkien with better understanding and greater sympathy.

            Smith represents the first group.  At least his title is not inaccurate.  One gets the impression that he is not so much interested in LOTR as he is in the spiritual themes he can find there.  LOTR is basically a convenient excuse to do Sunday-School lessons.  Fortunately there are no serious misinterpretations of Tolkien generated in the process, but the exercise of making explicit the various moral platitudes that are embodied by his vision, while not illegitimate in itself, stays on the surface of the story and runs the risk of trivializing those very moral lessons.  Those who buy Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues will be hiring a (very ordinary) personal coach to help them with exercises they could do more profitably on their own.

            Dickerson represents the second group.  Virtue was of course important to Tolkien; but Following Gandalf will in the long run teach you much more about virtue than its rival discussed above, because it wants to understand the story and the issues it raises.  Dickerson begins by wrestling with one of the common criticisms we hear from Tolkien’s detractors:  that LOTR glorifies war and violence.  So he carefully looks at the battles, at how they are described, at how the heroes respond to them and participate in them and feel about it afterward. 

In the process of his careful reading of these passages, Dickerson not only shatters the criticism but notices a significant pattern.  Gandalf, Frodo, Elrond, Aragorn, Faramir, and Galadriel all chose what looks like certain military defeat rather than submit to various moral defeats that appear to be the path to victory.  They do this even when the military defeat they are apparently accepting is total and devastating.  Saruman, Boromir, and Denethor enact the opposite choices.  The grand irony, indeed the eucatastrophe, is that this very preference of military defeat to moral defeat, no matter what the cost, turns out to be the key to ultimate victory.  Yet the people making these choices do not know in advance that it will be so; that is not the reason for their choice.  All they have at best is what Gandalf ruefully admits to be “a fool’s hope.”  Why do they make these choices?  How does one make such choices?  How are they rooted in Tolkien’s biblical world view?  Such are the questions to which this study is naturally led.

Wrestling with such questions as they are raised and answered by details of plot and texture of passage, Dickerson shows a profound understanding of what literature is and therefore of how it should be studied.  He is too accepting of the movie’s dilutions of Tolkien’s themes and bends over a little bit too far backward to avoid calling LOTR a “Christian myth” simpliciter, perhaps.  But this book’s virtues far outweigh its flaws.  Those who share Tolkien’s Christian commitment will have added reasons to appreciate this study, but any one who wants to understand Tolkien’s work better will read it profitably.  I hope somebody says that about my book when it comes out!

Note:  “my book” is Mere Humanity: G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien on the Human Condition (Nashville: Broadman, 2006).

 Reviewed by Donald T. Williams, Toccoa Falls College       

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Don September 25th, 2009

REVIEW:  “REVENGE OF THE SITH” 

[This review was originally published as “Film: Strider’s Screening Room, Star Wars Episode III” (review), Mythprint 42:6 (June 2005): 4-5.]

“Star Wars Episode III” is indeed much better than I or II; and that is what makes it much worse.

            In explaining my paradoxical judgment, I forebear to nit pick.  I will not ask why Jedi can apparently use their light sabers to deflect an infinite number of blaster bolts coming at them from every conceivable direction until order 66 is given, whereupon it suddenly becomes relatively easy for clone warriors to pick them off.  I will not ask how, if Padme dies right after childbirth, Leia can remember her mother as “beautiful and sad.”  (The conversation when Luke asks her about her memories in its own context always seemed to me to be about her real mother, not her adoptive one, because Luke is trying to establish some connection with his own, whom he now knows to be the same person).  I will not ask why, since the first Death Star is already well under way by the end of Episode III, and an entire galaxy of slave labor is available, it is only just being finished twenty years later at the time of Episode IV.  All this I omit, being studious of brevity and disposed to charity.

            O.K., then, on to the good part.  The first two movies did an inadequate job of building up Anakin’s nobility so that his fall could be from a sufficient height.  He was a cute kid and a bratty teenager, but when was he really noble?  But the first half of Episode III significantly ameliorated that problem.  We see a more mature Anakin with a better relationship to Obi Wan, who insists on saving Obi Wan during the rescue of Palpatine, and who is feeling a real loyalty to the Jedi order for the first time just as that loyalty is coming into conflict with the lies he has been fed by Palpatine.  I think we do see the Jedi he could have become, just in time for that destiny to be sacrificed on the altar of his misguided but natural and understandable ”attachment” to Padme.  This irony heightens the sense of tragedy, as does the horrible irony that the death he turns aside from the path to prevent is caused by that very turning aside from the path to prevent it.  That is an irony worthy of Oedipus.  At that moment the film rises to the archetypal and made me want to forget all the inconsistencies and plot-holes and grant that it had achieved in spite of them a grandeur rivaling that of the original trilogy.

            But  . . .  it all came crashing down into an incoherent mess because of one horrible, intolerable, and inexcusable line.  When Obi Wan confronts the newly fallen Anakin, he is convinced that the fall is real when he hears Anakin declaring that if Obi Wan is not with him, he is his enemy.  Obi Wan’s response is, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”  Well, I guess we see where that places Lewis and Tolkien’s Christianity, or any other traditional view that takes certain verities as unchangeable and non-negotiable! 

But let those of us who are believers bracket for a moment our personal disappointment and offense as Christians, and think of the line only as it functions in the context of Lucas’s mythology.  I wearily ask if you do not smell something fishy, not about the content of Obi Wan’s statement (which is bad enough), but its form.  It is an absolute statement!  Only a Sith deals in absolutes.  Therefore, if Obi Wan’s statement is true, then he, having just dealt in an absolute, is a Sith Lord too.  And if that is the case–and logically it follows inexorably–then what is the fight about?  What is the difference between the Light and Dark sides of the Force? 

A moment in the original series foreshadows this fall into shallow relativism.  Luke thinks he has been deceived about his father, whom Obi Wan had claimed to be dead—“from a certain point of view.”  Luke finds this rationalization incredible.  “You’re going to have to realize,” Obi Wan responds, “that a lot of the truths we hold depend greatly upon our point of view.”  Oh, really?  Then how do we respond to Anakin saying, “From my point of view, you’re evil”? 

Our ability to perceive truth depends on our point of view, of course.  It may powerfully influence what truths we are able or willing to accept.  But truth itself does not and cannot depend on our point of view.  If it does, Anakin’s “point of view” is simply unassailable and no basis is left for distinguishing between the Light and Dark Sides of the Force or for claiming that the choice between them is anything more than an arbitrary personal preference.  If only the Sith deal in absolutes, the whole Star Wars ethos collapses into nonsense so nonsensical that Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith” becomes simply impossible.  And the worst part is that it taints the whole mythos, three episodes of which I loved.  

Star Wars is more than just “escapist entertainment.”  It connects with some very basic and universal truths that our technological age tends to forget, and they, rather than great special effects, are why we care about it.  Many of them are consistent with the world view we get in Lewis and Tolkien, though in Lucas’s world they lack its biblical basis.  Self sacrifice in a good cause is noble and powerful (Obi Wan in Episode IV; cf. Gandalf at Moria, Frodo).  Choices have consequences, and you cannot use evil for good and get away with it (Yoda and the clones, Anakin wanting to use the Dark Side to save Padme; cf. Saruman, Denethor).  There is something inside us more powerful than technology (though Lucas’s new-age mysticism is vastly inferior to the Christian doctrine of the imago Dei as an explanation of what it is).  Little people, even flawed people, can make a big difference for good (Ewoks, an obscure, whiny orphan from the back side of a desert planet, a ne’er do well smuggler; cf. hobbits).  Evil is real and does great damage, but no one is beyond redemption (Vader in Episode VI; cf. Boromir, almost Gollum).  These truths are profound and important–and that is why I wish Lucas had worked a little harder to get his secondary creation right, rather than creating a mishmash of truth, error, and contradiction that is sometimes so flimsy that I can’t keep on believing in it even as fiction.  He should have paid less attention to Joseph Campbell and a little more to Tolkien’s “Essay on Fairie Stories.”  In other words, Star Wars could have been almost another Lord of the Rings, a work (the book supremely, the movies a little less so) that has all the same virtues (and more) without the same flaws.

            So then, you see why I say that “’Star Wars Episode III’ is indeed much better than I or II; and that is what makes it much worse.”  Because it does at times rise to the mythic power of the original trilogy, the message that “Only a Sith deals in absolutes,” that, in other words, anyone who believes in absolute truth is evil, will be disseminated far and wide, and disseminated effectively to an audience with whom it will powerfully resonate.  Logic has little power with a generation that has been taught to “trust its feelings.”  But my message to them is this paraphrase of one of Obi Wan’s better moments:  “Be mindful of your thoughts, Master Lucas; they betray you.”

 Reviewed by Donald T. WilliamsToccoa Falls College

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Don September 15th, 2009

One challenge to the argument from desire (see the post of 9/14/09) is people who deny having any unsatisfiable desires. One person I read admitted that certain desires of his had never been satisfied perfectly, but maintained that they could be in theory, or that the satisfactions he could find in this life were good enough. How does one respond to this line? It’s rather like trying to convince the dwarfs in The Last Battle that they aren’t in a stable!

One conclusion might be that the argument from desire just doesn’t work with a certain type of person. Some of us are just too emotionally undeveloped–or jaded–to be susceptible to it. But I would suggest that we make a mistake by taking such people’s statements at face value. Solomon tells us that “God has set eternity in their hearts.” Either Scripture is wrong or the denial of transcendant desire is a smokescreen, a defense mechanism to protect dwarfish atheists from reality.

A person who is still human is not in fact satisfied by the temporal and physical, however hard he tries to convince himself that he is. But you probably can’t argue him out of his position. You can only try to arouse the desire, to fan it to the point where he cannot ignore it any more. And the best way to do that might be to talk about the foretastes of fulfillment we have already been granted in Christ, or just to live a life of transcendant openness to Joy before him.

If you can get him to read Thomas Traherne’s Five Centuries of Meditations, it wouldn’t hurt. “Things unknown have a secret influence on the soul, and like the center of the earth unseen violently attract it. We love we know not what, and therefore everything allures us. . . . Do you not feel yourself drawn by the expectation of some Great Thing? . . . You never enjoy the world aright till you see how a [grain of] sand exhibiteth the wisdom and power of God. . . . You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars. . . . Infinite wants satisfied produce infinite joys. . . . You must want like a God that you may be satisfied like God. Were you not made in his image?”

Lewis learned the argument from desire from Augustine’s Trinity-shaped vacuum and his heart that was “restless until it rest in Thee,” as developed by  writers like Traherne and MacDonald. It will have a certain logical cogency–which Victor Reppert well analyzes (http://dangerouside a.blogspot. com/2006/ 09/bayesian- argument- from-desire. html)
–to those in whom Desire has been sufficiently aroused. The best service those earlier writers–and Lewis himself–may do us is to fan that flame. In it, let us burn.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don September 8th, 2009

LIGHT ON SHADOWLANDS 

This review was published in The Lamp-Post 29:2 (Sum. 2005, pub. June, 2007): 18-20.

            One of the most significant movies of 1993 was “Shadowlands,” the story of the marriage of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman.  It is a wholesome family movie and a rich experience, with excellent performances by Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger as “Jack” Lewis and Joy.  Any new interest it stirs in Lewis and his writings will be all to the good; but viewers should remember that they are watching, not history, but historical drama.  They are not the same thing, and in this movie especially it is important to be aware of the difference.

            Historical drama always distorts history in the interest of simplicity and theme.  Characters are conflated and time is compressed (“Turning the accomplishment of years / Into an hourglass,” as Shakespeare put it) to make the presentation accessible to the audience.  This is unavoidable and is to be expected as part of the genre.  In “Shadowlands,” for example, Douglas Gresham’s brother David disappears altogether, and events that took place over eight years are compressed into what appears to be only one or two, as the ten-year-old Douglas who meets Lewis at the beginning appears to be the same age at the time of his mother’s death instead of being a young man in his teens.  None of this should bother us.  The real problem comes in the simplifications of the story for the sake of the movie’s theme, for they conspire to create a serious distortion of the man that C. S. Lewis actually was.

            “Shadowlands” is the story of a stuffy, self-assured, emotionally sheltered ivory-tower British intellectual who is “humanized” by his relationship with the brash young American divorcee who storms into his life.  It begins with Lewis lecturing church ladies groups on the meaning of pain, “God’s megaphone” to reach a deaf world, and ends with a chastened man who “no longer has any answers” after experiencing the pain of loss himself.  Some reviewers I have read show no knowledge that the movie depicts people who actually lived.  So far as that portrait of Lewis goes, they are ironically right.

            This false impression of Lewis is created, not merely by simplifications, but by blatant historical inaccuracies as well.  The ivory tower in which the early Lewis is sheltered is created partly by omission.  We never see the avid hiker who enjoyed nature with gusto (a figure prominent in Lewis’s diary) until after the marriage.  Joy accuses Lewis of being surrounded by intellectual inferiors so that he “never loses” the debates he relishes.  Yet the friends who were his intellectual peers—people like J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Dorothy L. Sayers—are conspicuous by their absence in the film.  Lewis did not always see eye to eye with these friends (who were much more important parts of his life than the colleagues portrayed).  His long friendship with the anthroposophist Barfield was jokingly referred to by them as “the great war.”  But there are plain falsehoods as well as omissions.  When the movie-Lewis takes Joy to see the Mayday celebration at the Magdalen Tower, he admits to her that he had never been before; he just never saw the point.  But the real Lewis had been—on May 1, 1926, according to his diary—and apparently enjoyed it.

            The most serious distortion of history comes at the end of the film, when a chastened Lewis seems to repudiate faith in general and the now seemingly glib pronouncements of The Problem of Pain in particular, saying that he no longer has answers—only life.  It is as if the scriptwriters had read only the first half of A Grief Observed, which records Lewis’s real struggles in accepting Joy’s death from cancer, and not finished the book.  Some distortion of history is inevitable in the transition from the real world to the stage or screen, but this distortion is inexcusable, for it reverses the real meaning of everything that happened.

A Grief Observed ends not with the repudiation of The Problem of Pain but with a reaffirmation of its content that adds to it the depth of a faith that has now been severely tested.  Here’s how the book ends:  “She said, not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’  She smiled, but not at me.  Poi si tornio all’ eternal fonatana (‘So she turned to the eternal fountain’).”  The last words are a quotation from Dante’s Paradiso, the moment when Beatrice turns from the task of helping Dante to the vision of God back to re-absorption in the contemplation of that vision herself.  Such was Lewis’s final conclusion about the meaning of his wife’s death.  Joy’s last words were, “I am at peace with God.”  The real Lewis died that way too, on the day President Kennedy was shot.

I am glad that I have seen “Shadowlands,” and I recommend that you see it too.  It contains some of the truth about the Lewises’ relationship; it wonderfully helps us to visualize the setting and the culture in context of which these things occurred; and the portrait of Lewis’s brother, Warren, is delightfully true to life, judging from Warren’s own published journals.  But we must see it, not as reality, but as an often distorted interpretation of reality. 

For the reality, the following are indispensable.  Primary sources:  C. S. Kilby, ed., Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren H. Lewis (Ballantine, 1982); C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Macmillan, 1940—source of the early lectures in the movie); C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (Seabury, 1961); Warren H. Lewis, ed., The Letters of C. S. Lewis (Harcourt Brace, 1966); Douglas Gresham, Lenten Lands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis (MacMillan, 1988); and Walter Hooper, ed., All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-27 (Harcourt Brace, 1991).  Secondary sources:  Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (Harcourt Brace, 1974); George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (Crossway, 1994)—but not A. N. Wilson’s biography, exploded as tendentious fiction by eyewitness Douglas Gresham.

Let us hope that the movie-renting public will be intrigued enough to discover the real Lewis, who, in Aslan’s Country now as he did in life before, probably finds all this attention a source of great amusement.

  Donald T. Williams, PhD, is Editor of The Lamp-Post and Professor of English and Director of the School of Arts and Sciences at Toccoa Falls College in the hills of NE Georgia  His most recent books include Mere Humanity: G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien on the Human Condition (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2006), Credo: Meditations on the Nicene Creed (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2007), and The Devil’s Dictionary of the Christian Faith (Chalice, 2008).

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Don August 5th, 2009

I am probably the last person in America to see the new Harry Potter movie.  I don’t have that much to say about “Half Blood Prince: The Movie.”   I suspect that anyone who had not read the books would find it disjointed and hard to follow.  But that is just one more reason to read the books!  But it did remind me of what I have to say about the books, so I copy here my review of the whole (written) series:

HARRY POTTER AND THE MEANING OF IT ALL   This review appears online at the website of Modern Reformation magazine.  The URL is:

 http://www.modernreformation.org/default.php?page=articledisplay&var1=ArtRead&var2=596&var3=main&var4=Home

   Now that the Harry Potter series has finally been completed, we can look back on the whole Potter legendarium and draw some conclusions. Despite the hysterical rants of some Christians, the books are not occultic.  None of J. K. Rowling’s magicians, not even the dark ones, has an attendant spirit or anything like that.  Their “magic” is simply an alternative set of natural laws to which Muggles do not have access. Nor are the books an advertisement for Wicca.  There is no neopaganism in the Potter universe, no worship of the Goddess or of Nature. Real-life Wiccans and other New-Age “witches” are nothing like J. K. Rowling’s magicians, which are a loose compendium of folklore, literary precedent, and her own imagination.  What religion does intrude into the story is Christian as far as it can be identified.  Biblical quotations are part of the plot of Book VII and are treated as expressing universal truths; Harry puts the sign of the cross over Dobby’s grave.

Rowling did make a tactical blunder for Christian readers in using the word witch as if it were morally neutral, in contrast to writers like C. S. Lewis, in whose Narnia books witches, reflecting biblical usage of the word, are always on the wrong side. It is curious that the word wizard (though not warlock) can be used neutrally much more easily than witch.  For a warlock is simply a male witch. In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Gandalf (good) and Saruman (evil) are both called wizards, but you could only call one of them a warlock and get away with it.  Less sensitive to these connotations, Rowling erects unnecessary barriers for Christian readers who remember the way the word witch is used in Scripture (though some Christians object even to Lewis and Tolkien). But this lack of semantic sensitivity is more a reflection of increasing theological illiteracy in Western society as a whole than it is of nefarious intent by Rowling.  It is certainly something to be criticized in the books, and biblical reality about real witchcraft is something to be taught to Christian children and contrasted with the diction of the Potter world; but the unfortunate nomenclature is hardly a justification for rejecting the series outright.              

In reaction to those who want to burn J. K. Rowling as a witch (after all, she probably weighs the same as a duck!), we have people trying to read the Potter books as Christian works. I think these folks are over-reaching a bit, but they have more of a leg to stand on than the witch-hunters do. There are indeed themes in the books which reflect Christian teachings, but they fall short of the clear and powerful representation of the Gospel or of the full Christian world view that one finds in Narnia or Middle Earth.

Evil in the Potter universe is associated with a Nietzschean drive for power. “There is no good and evil,” says Lord Voldemort in the very first volume, “only power and those without the courage to use it.” It is a rare moment of honesty. Usually the Death Eaters pursue power while rationalizing the moral evils they commit in order to grasp and hold it by appeals to the greater “common good” which sound downright Orwellian. We see the same basic philosophy played out in all the villains, ranging from Voldemort himself, who does not stoop to justifying the imposition of his will, to Percy, who puts a little too much stock in being Prefect and ends up a tool of the Dark Lord until his repentance near the very end. On the other side we have Dumbledore, who turns down the post of Minister of Magic, being more interested in “love, friendship, truth, and loyalty” than in power. There are good insights here into the nature of evil and how it plays itself out in our own society.

The supreme theme of the whole series is one as old at least as Chaucer’s Prioresse: Amor vincit omnia, “Love conquers all.”  It is love, not superior magical power, which conquers Lord Voldemort in the end. The central embodiment of this theme turns out to be, of all people, Severus Snape. Despite all appearances, he has actually been true to Dumbledore, killing him at the end of Book VI by Dumbledore’s own command to prevent the destruction of whatever chance for innocence remains in Draco Malfoy’s soul, and giving Harry the key to understanding everything toward the end of Book VII through the gift of his dying memories. Why? Because he has always been in love with Lily Evans, an unrequited love with the added indignity that she marries his chief rival and tormenter, James Potter, and becomes Harry’s mother. Though Snape is by ancestry and inclination a servant of the Dark Lord, his love for Lily causes him to end up on the side of good in the end–for love is the one thing that Voldemort cannot understand.           

The centrality of love is strengthened by the theme of sacrifice. Lily sacrificing her life to save her son sets in motion the powerful forces that eventually lead to Harry’s triumph and Voldemort’s fall, and the willing self sacrifice of others along the way, including Dumbledore and even Harry himself (who thinks he is giving up his own life to save his friends but actually survives), contributes to the wonderful way in which this theme is worked out.  Snape’s choice is in some ways the most impressive of all.  He allows his whole life to be ruled by sacrificial love for a dead woman who did not requite it in life, knowing all along that he has no hope in this life of any reward for his self-denying acts save love itself. To sacrifice oneself for love is the very opposite of the Nietzschean drive for power which is the essence of evil in the series, and though at first love seems much weaker, it proves stronger in the end.

          The central ideas of the series then resonate powerfully with central doctrines of the Christian faith, and I do not believe Rowling could have developed them as profoundly as she did without being influenced by Christian teaching. But they do not quite rise to a Christian view of the world. For love as it comes from fallen human hearts does not conquer all. Love conquers all only because God is love and because He has sacrificed himself in His Son. The good Potter characters seem to find this all-conquering love by somehow looking within themselves, not by looking up and outward to the Source of it, which is Christ.  One is left with the impression that it could be just love itself, love in the abstract, which conquers all, rather than the scandalously specific Love which comes only from the heart of God in the sacrifice of Christ.  And only the sacrifice of that divine and innocent Victim could provide the propitiation which is necessary to the conquest of the evil which is found at the core of our own hearts.  We as believers follow Christ in taking up our own crosses, in recapitulating his loving sacrifice in our own lives, indeed.  The Hogwarts heroes could be read as exemplars of this truth.  But only as our acts flow from that supreme Act do they participate in its power.  Do Harry’s, Snape’s, and Dumbledore’s?  It is, alas, unclear.  To separate love and sacrifice from their Source, as if they could operate independently of it on their own, is to risk losing them as the Gospel evaporates into a bloodless humanism.  J. K. Rowling’s story never denies this more explicitly Christian view of love, but neither does it demand it.    She comes awfully close to the biblical view, and she communicates much profound truth in falling just short of it. But she does fall short. She could have provided clearer hints and clues to the idea that in order to defeat evil we must look, not to love in the abstract, but outside of ourselves to the Source of love, which is Christ. A great Christian mythmaker like Lewis or Tolkien would have done just that (without making it too obvious).  In the Stone Table of Narnia it is inescapable.  But even in the more subtle Lord of the Rings, especially when clarified by the creation story in The Silmarillion, meaning and victory and hope come ultimately from “beyond the circles of the world.”  For what Rowling has accomplished in the Harry Potter series we should have a profound appreciation, but we should also have an awareness of what is missing–for that is, quite literally, crucial. 

Donald T. Williams, PhD, is Director of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at Toccoa Falls College.  His most recent books include Mere Humanity: G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien on the Human Condition (Broadman, 2006) Credo: Meditations on the Nicene Creed (Chalice Press, 2007), and The Devil’s Dictionary of the Christian Faith (Chalice, 2008).  His website is www.doulomen.tripod.com. 

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Don July 11th, 2009

This review was originally published in Mythprint 42:2 (Feb.,2005): 11.

Colin Duriez, A Field Guide to Narnia.  Downers Grove, Il.:  InterVarsity Press, 2004.  ISBN 0-8308-3207-6, pbk., 240 pp., $13.00.

            This is a book for people with a particularly strong case of the hobbit’s desire “to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions” (FOTR 27).  It appears to be a miscellany of various bits of writing about Narnia that Duriez had in his files, none of which was substantial enough to be a book or original enough to be an article, but which were lumped together under one cover in the fond hope that the result would be more than the sum of its parts.  

            The first of those parts is called “The Creation of Narnia,” though relatively little of it is about any such thing.  It consists of yet another summary of Lewis’s life, made slightly interesting by a series of photographs of Irish landscapes thought by Duriez to be possible inspirations for Narnian geography; a pedestrian treatment of books Lewis had read which might have given him ideas for Narnia; a discussion of the relation of the Chronicles to Christian Orthodoxy and the Christian worldview; and a brief survey of literary features of the books.  There is nothing objectionable here, but neither is there anything particularly helpful.  The Narnia books are pretty clear sailing.  Children read them without any help at all and understand them well.  They don’t need and wouldn’t read such an introduction.  People who have become such enthusiasts for the books that they go from reading them to studying them and discussing them in print are going to want more depth and insight than Duriez provides.

            The next section is entitled “All About The Chronicles of Narnia.”  It gives us completely unnecessary summaries of the stories, an overview of Narnian history and geography, etc.  It contains nothing anyone couldn’t learn with much more pleasure from reading the Narnia books themselves.  Then there is a lame attempt to relate Lewis’s other writings to Narnia, which usually produces one of two reactions:  “Duh!” or “That’s a bit of a stretch.”

            We finally come to the last section, one which does at least provide the hobbit’s pleasure in books filled with things we already know set out squarely.  It is called “The A-Z of Narnia,” and is an encyclopedia of Narnian characters, places, events, institutions, and things, from Adam to Zardeenah.  This part is actually well done in its kind and could well give the hobbit’s pleasure that is the promise of that kind.  Unfortunately, it only covers fifty pages—hence the unfortunate necessity of padding the book with the rest of its contents.  If the hobbit’s desire is strong enough in you that you will gladly buy 240 pages in order to get fifty, then this book is for you.

 Reviewed by Donald T. Williams          

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Don July 4th, 2009

This review was originally published in Trinity Journal 27:1 (Spring 2006): 179-80.

David C. Downing, Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C. S. Lewis.  Downers Grove, Il.: InterVarsity Press, 2005.  297 pp., n.p., h.c.

C. S. Lewis, by his own estimation, was not a mystic.  The forthright admission of this fact is not enough to stop David C. Downing, professor of English at Elizabethtown College and author of two very useful works on Lewis, Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy and The Most Reluctant Convert, from writing an entire book on Lewis and mysticism.   To accomplish this feat, Downing must maintain the thesis that “Despite this disclaimer, Lewis must certainly be one of the most mystical-minded of those who never formally embarked on the mystical way” (33).  Evidence for this claim is found in Lewis’s experiences of “joy” or  “sweet desire,” his “vivid sense of the natural order as an image of the spiritual,” his lifelong habit of reading mystical texts, and the motifs and images related to mysticism that occur in his books.

            All of these aspects of Lewis’s life and work are worth exploring, and Downing’s exploration of them, along with an explanation of mysticism and its history, is not without profit.  But in the process, the concept of mysticism gets stretched to the point that it loses any substantive meaning and becomes almost a synonym for “any form of spirituality or symbolism I happen to like.”

            For example, Downing quotes approvingly Evelyn Underhill’s definition of mysticism as “the direct intuition or experience of God” (18).  It is a most pertinent definition indeed, for Lewis agreed with it:  “a direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or color” (19).  Well, if that is our working definition, then most of Into the Region of Awe is simply beside the point.  One can certainly read lots of books about God, some by people claiming to be mystics, without ever having or claiming to have had a “direct” or “unmediated” experience of Him—whatever that might be—oneself.  One can use lots of symbolic language about God, and find one’s symbolism in Nature, based on the doctrine of Creation, without ever claiming such an experience.  And one can have intense experiences of romantic longing for the Infinite without the confusion between longing for the Transcendent and experience of it ever arising.  In fact, Lewis quite explicitly interprets his own experiences in Surprised by Joy in ways directly inconsistent with mysticism.  They were precisely claimed not to be “direct” experiences of God, or even experiences of God at all, but rather signposts pointing to Him.   

            Downing’s title is unfortunate.  If his material had been presented as a treatment of spirituality in Lewis, it would have value.  Read as such, it is not without value, especially in the rather ironic chapter on Lewis’s critique of mysticism.  But the problem is not just with false advertising in the title, for throughout the book Downing insists on talking muddle-headedly of mysticism and thereby perpetuating endless confusion of the kind we have delineated above—highly ironic in a book purporting to explain to the world a thinker as clear-minded as Lewis was!  He also has an annoying idiosyncratic method of citation—neither in-text nor footnotes—that makes finding out what in Lewis he is quoting an unnecessarily laborious task.  It’s too bad.  Downing is a better critic than this and ought to have written a better book.

 Reviewed by Donald T. Williams

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