Don Williams’ Blog

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       

• Art/Aesthetics , Inklings
• Comments(0)

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

• Apologetics , Art/Aesthetics , Inklings
• Comments(0)

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

• Apologetics , Inklings
• Comments(0)

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).

• Inklings
• Comments(0)

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. 

• Apologetics , Inklings , Theology
• Comments(0)

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          

• Inklings
• Comments(0)

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

• Inklings
• Comments(0)

Don July 1st, 2009

PRINCE CASPIANA Movie Review 

This review was published in the online version of Modern Reformation, www.modernreformation.org, May-June 2008.

          It was disappointing that the movie version of C. S. Lewis’s second chronicle of Narnia, Prince Caspian, did not stick as close to the story as that of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. There may not have been more scenes made up out of whole cloth and gratuitously inserted, but the ones which were had a greater impact on plot and theme.  A pointless fight involving Peter in the train station and a whole extra battle, the futile attack on Miraz’s castle, were not just there for love of spectacle.  They flow from subtle alterations to Peter’s character that have not so subtle effects on the story’s meaning.

          First, the good parts.  The film is visually stunning, and, more to the point, is a believable recreation of Lewis’s descriptions of Narnian landscapes and creatures.  The soundtrack is gorgeous.  Enough of the original plot survives so that the spiritual message of the book is not entirely lost, though it is unfortunately somewhat diluted, as we shall see.

          Next, some relatively minor irritations (comparatively).  In slow-motion shots of flying arrows or crossbow bolts, the projectiles are not spinning as they should be—which makes the next part even less believable.  Susan as archer and warrior turns into a female version of Legolas from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.  It is one thing to downplay Lewis’s view of traditional gender roles out of fear that they will not go down well with modern audiences; this flatly contradicts it.  Finally, the River God can not destroy the bridge himself! O. K., it is a very impressive bit of special effects, but it has no place in Lewis’s story.  The very existence of the bridge puts the River God in chains until Aslan, through Bacchus, releases him.  One can imagine Lewis shaking his head in disbelief.  Do these people know nothing about the Roman mythology that was one of his sources?

          The most significant change to the story is the degrading of Peter’s character.  Lewis’s Peter fails to follow Aslan when only Lucy can see him, but he does not get into a childish fist fight at the train station, he does not indulge in adolescent male rivalry with Caspian, and he does not say, almost as cynically as Nikabrik, “I think we’ve waited for Aslan long enough!”  High King Peter would never have done or said such things, even at his worst moment. Unlike the boy we see on the screen, Peter Pevensie has been High King of Narnia, and it has changed him forever.  In the book, Peter’s commission is to “hasten into the Mound [Aslan’s Howe] and deal with what you find there.”  In the book, he is part of the solution to that problem; in the movie, he is just as much part of the problem.  The fight in the train station and the gratuitous extra battle at Miraz’s castle are just further outward incarnations of this unfaithfulness (yes, the word must be used) to Lewis’s vision.  

          What is going on here?

          I have heard some say that the theme of faith in Aslan was undercut to the point of being lost altogether.  In fairness, we must say that it is still there; but it was weakened.  It was diluted by the creation of pointless spectacle and a relative neglect of character development (at least, the character development that was actually in the book).  The conversation in which Aslan tells Lucy that she should have followed him even without the others appears, but condensed and in a less prominent place, with the effect that Aslan seems more absent from most of the movie than he is from most of the book.  A good bit of the most spiritually significant dialog disappears altogether, replaced by cute one-liners apparently added for cheap laughs.  I especially missed “You come of the Lord Aslan and the Lady Eve,” said Aslan.   “And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.  Be content.” 

          What was done to Lewis’s Peter has been compared to Peter Jackson’s corruption of Tolkien’s Faramir, and not without reason.  They flow from the very same failure of postmodern imagination, the inability to conceive of real un-ironic heroes, along with the inability to imagine that anyone else can conceive of them either.  Hence the heroes of authors who did not share this failure of imagination have to be recast into terms acceptable to those who suffer from it.  Thus Peter Jackson’s Aragorn has to be more “complicated” than Tolkien’s, his Faramir is unrecognizable, and the movie Peter Pevensie suffers a version of the same fate. 

          This particular failure of moral imagination is very, very sad as a commentary on our culture, and even sadder in those to whom Lewis’s legacy has been so foolishly entrusted.  For Lewis knew better.  He knew with Sir Philip Sidney in The Defense of Poesy that it is precisely at those times when real virtue is hard to believe in that positive literary images of it are most needed.  As Lewis put it, “Since it is likely that [children] will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.”  They will hear of such things much more clearly in the books than in the movies. 

          One can hope that the movies will motivate people to read the books.  This one could have done so while being more faithful to their message and spirit.     

The quotations from Lewis are found on pp. 164 and 233 of Prince Caspian (1951: rpt. N.Y.:  Harper Collins, 1979) and p. 31 of “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in  Of Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper.  (N.Y.:  Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964: 22-34).

  Donald T. Williams, PhD, is Professor of English and Director of the School of Arts and Sciences 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 (Nashville: Broadman, 2006), Credo: Meditations on the Nicene Creed (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2007), and The Devil’s Dictionary of the Christian Faith (St. Louis: Chalice, 2008). 

• Inklings
• Comments(0)

Don June 24th, 2009

This review appeared in Philosophia Christi, 6:2 (2004): 375-77.

Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason.  Downers Grove, Il.:  InterVarsity Press, 2003, 132pp., pbk.

C. S. Lewis’s famous debate with Elizabeth Anscombe at the Oxford Socratic club over the validity of his argument in Miracles for the self-defeating status of naturalism may or may not have produced much clarification of the issues, but it definitely produced a tendentious interpretation of Lewis’s career:  that he was so mortified at being defeated that he gave up rational apologetics from then on.  Never mind that many of the people who were present either thought Lewis had won or that the debate was a draw; never mind the fact that he revised the relevant chapter in a later edition of Miracles to meet Anscombe’s objections and published several subsequent essays on apologetics.  Why let mere facts stand in the way of a good myth?   

Victor Reppert first destroyed the “Anscombe Myth” in “The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues,” Christian Scholar’s Review 19:2 (1989).  It is good to see that discussion brought forward for a new generation of readers.  If Reppert had done nothing else, he would have performed a valuable service here.  It is to be hoped that more people will read his complete review of the evidence in the new book and that this particular bit of arrant nonsense will finally be put to rest.  But Reppert’s goal is much broader:  to bring Lewis’s argument for theism up to date and see how it fares after all these years.  He concludes that the argument from reason is still a good one.

Reppert begins with his review of the Lewis-Anscombe debate and then moves on to a discussion of a healthy approach to apologetics, rejecting fideism (just believe) and “strong rationalism” (Christian truth is so evident that any rational person should accept it) in favor of “critical rationalism” (Christian apologists can show that Christianity is a reasonable option).  I find myself wishing there were a middle position between his “strong rationalism” and “critical rationalism.”  He points out well the problems with strong rationalism of the Josh McDowell type.  But . . . if Christianity is really true, the universe ought in the final analysis to reflect that truth. One doesn’t want to be able to offer nothing more than one reasonable alternative among many.  I feel this problem at the end of the book, where I believe Reppert has earned the right to be at least a bit less tentative than he is.  Naturalists really can’t defend naturalism without cutting off the limb they are wanting to sit on . . . but Reppert is not willing to say that this is irrational?  How self defeating must a position be before we are willing to say so? 

Also, it doesn’t seem to me possible to give a complete account of the issues surrounding apologetic method without dealing with 1 Cor. 2:14.  It would seem that one would have to get past that verse somehow in order to see the amount of irrationality as being as evenly distributed between believers and non-believers as Reppert seems to imply.  Or, to put it more accurately, I should say that irrationality may well be tragically fairly evenly distributed in fact, (I unfortunately think he is right about that), but there should be a difference in theory.  Christians don’t have to be as irrational as they are; non-Christians do.  They have no choice but to be irrational at some point, because they have set themselves against the rational universe that God actually made.  I think this is a pretty important distinction that I wish had come out more clearly.

When Reppert turns to the argument from reason itself, he does a good job of guiding us through the issues.  The argument on p. 68 is especially fine.  “If a materialist says that she believes in materialism because she perceives the reasons for believing it, then I take it she is committed to the existence of reasons,” and therefore has to explain how they can exist in a materialist universe.  It is really the same argument that Socrates used at his defense:  How can you believe in flute playing and not believe in flutes?  How can you believe in divine effects and not believe in the gods?  Reppert has updated it and applied it to the existence of reasons in a useful and persuasive manner.  His refutation on pp. 100-101 of the notion that reason could have been produced by natural selection is also good.  The “inadequacy objection,” which argues that non-scientific explanations do not explain, is one of the biggest hurdles the argument from reason has to face.  Reppert’s question on p. 111 is an excellent response to it:  “Is it more dangerous to the scientific enterprise to suggest that a comprehensive “scientific” account of cognition cannot be correct, or to suggest that truth should not be the goal of our rational deliberations?”    That is a question that we need ask more insistently.

When I tried to update Lewis’s argument in”Some Propositions for a Theistic Argument,” Bulletin of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, 14:1 (1991): 70-81, I focused on the fact that a naturalistic universe is by definition a deterministic universe.  The laws of physics determine everything because the universe, being uncaused, exists a se and therefore by definition cannot be other than it is.  It seems to me that this fact needs to be stressed, for it provides a simpler way of defeating Anscombe’s objections.  It really doesn’t matter whether chains of reasoning caused by non-rational causes can happen to have been valid or not, unless we are free to choose between them on a non-deterministic basis.  If nobody can help believing what he believes, whether it be rational or irrational, then nobody is in a position to distinguish between warranted and unwarranted truth claims or to urge his own truth claims with any moral force.  Valid chains of reasoning might occur, but nobody–including the naturalist making truth claims for naturalism–would be in a position to benefit from them.  Reppert implies all of this when he talks about the problem of knowing that one is rational, but it seems to me that his case would be strengthened by bringing it out more clearly.

Over all this is a very fine book, one of the few books on Lewis that actually contributes something useful to our knowledge of him and our understanding of the things he talked about.  I hope it will have the success it deserves.

Donald T. Williams

Toccoa Falls College

• Apologetics , Inklings
• Comments(0)

Don June 22nd, 2009

This review was published in Mythprint 43:9 (September 2006): 11-12.

Louis Markos, Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis can Train us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World.  Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2003.  ISBN 080542778-3, pb, xv + 174 pp., $19.99.

From Chad Walsh’s pioneering C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (1949) to Michael Aeschliman’s The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism (1983) to John Beversluis’s C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (1985) to Scott Burson and Jerry Walls’ C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer: Lessons for a New Century from the most Influential Apologists of our Time (1998) to Victor Reppert’s C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (2002), a number of substantial attempts have been made to evaluate C. S. Lewis as a Christian apologist.  In some ways the best of these studies is Lewis Agonistes by Louis Markos, professor of English at Houston Baptist University.  The title means “Lewis the wrestler,” from the Greek agwn (agon), an athletic contest or struggle.  It nicely captures the fact that for Lewis, apologetics was not simply a polite academic hobby, but rather a phase of the battle of light against darkness, a struggle for minds and hearts with the eternal souls of men and women at stake. 

            As a general guide to Lewis’s apologetic work, Lewis Agonistes is clearly the class of the field.  Walsh is dated, Beversluis unsympathetic and tendentious, Aeschliman and Reppert excellent but limited in scope to one issue or argument.  Markos is comprehensive, covering not only the standard nonfiction works (Mere Christianity, Miracles, Problem of Pain, etc.) but also showing how Lewis’s fiction, literary scholarship, and works such as Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed contribute to a holistic approach in which the modern estrangement between Reason and Imagination is overcome.  The book is organized thematically, first covering Lewis’s preparation for his wrestling in both education and life experience and then analyzing his response to five challenges:  science and the modernist paradigm, the new age and neopaganism, evil and suffering, the meaning of art and language, and heaven and hell.  The emphasis is not so much on Lewis’s arguments in themselves (which, however valid, must be constantly updated) as on Lewis as a role model for our own apologetic wrestling.  In the process Markos gets beyond the typical caricature of Lewis as a reactionary to elucidate the wholeness of his approach, which responds to the challenges of modernity “both by means of a reactive defense that takes us back to an older, medieval countervision and a proactive offense that looks ahead to a new synthesis of ancient and modern” (x).

            The general excellence of Markos’s treatment is marred by an occasional yielding to the temptation to psychologize, speculating about the sources of Lewis’s own need to wrestle toward a synthesis of Reason and Imagination.  I also think he misses the point in his attempt to show how Lewis might have responded to Postmodern forms of intellectual nihilism such as Deconstruction.  Markos contrasts “conservative Evangelicals who argue that language is meaningful because it is not slippery” with “liberal theorists who claim that it is slippery and therefore meaningless.”  He finds a middle way in “poetry that cries out on the rooftops that language is more meaningful precisely because it is slippery” (130).  But why use the word “slippery,” which concedes too much, when a more positive description like “rich” would have achieved his purpose equally well?  One can’t resist imagining a Lewisian “Distinguo!” being thundered over a mug of Eagle and Child beer at that point.  For a much better treatment of this question see Bruce Edwards’ outstanding study, A Rhetoric of Reading: C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy (1986).

            These are about the only flaws I can find in a very fine work, except the fact that a book of this much intellectual substance rather demands the bibliography and index which are inexplicably missing at the end.  Markos avoids the endless dreary summarizing and rehashing which makes most secondary works on Lewis a waste of time that would have been better spent re-reading (or reading) Lewis and gives us readable analysis that is profitable to follow even when I think it is wrong.  And it is mostly right.

Reviewed by Donald T. Williams, PhD 

• Apologetics , Inklings
• Comments(0)