E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten
Reihe: Hansen Series
Barbeau The Last Romantic
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-5140-1052-5
Verlag: IVP Academic
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
C. S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology
E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten
Reihe: Hansen Series
ISBN: 978-1-5140-1052-5
Verlag: IVP Academic
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Jeffrey W. Barbeau (PhD, Marquette University) is professor of theology at Wheaton College. A theologian, literary critic, and historian, he is the author of numerous monographs, anthologies, and edited books, including The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion, The Spirit of Methodism: From the Wesleys to a Global Communion, and Religion in Romantic England: An Anthology of Primary Sources.
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Introduction
I THOUGHT FOR A LONG TIME that C. S. Lewis was something of a rationalist. The air of confidence implicit in titles on notoriously knotty subjects such as pain and miracles. The simplistic analysis of Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord. The tendency among some to use his works as a foil against an encroaching liberalism, always available with a pithy quote to settle a troublesome controversy.
All this left me a bit uneasy. But what if Lewis wasn’t like that caricature at all? As I explain in this book, I had good reason for my apprehension, but it was only after I came back to Lewis’s works—after years steeped in modern theology and British Romantic literature, just as Lewis was himself—that I figured out why.
I must admit that I’m still surprised by my journey. One of my earliest encounters with Lewis’s writing came when I was only around ten or eleven years old. Someone had given me the Chronicles of Narnia as a gift, so I began reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Soon, I found myself caught in a bind, for I intuited a likeness between Aslan and Jesus. Did this book promote a kind of idolatry? Would I risk spiritual confusion if I continued to read? With no one to guide me, I sold the multivolume series in a garage sale not long after. I still remember the woman who purchased the set asking, “Are you sure you really want to part with these?”
Years later, I rediscovered Lewis as an undergraduate. I devoured his nonfiction prose. Lewis provided a sustenance that I desperately needed in my earliest theological studies. I was a student of historical theology but eager to understand Christianity also in its practical aspect—not as a philosophy or a set of dogmatic formulas but as a way of life. For my senior project, I decided against the typical pattern of biblical and systematic approaches in favor of a study of Lewis that considered theology from a literary perspective. At the defense, one of my faculty readers suggested that my work would be stronger with greater attention to the Bible, but he didn’t understand what I was seeking.
Subsequently, I pursued English literature as a graduate student. I was now in the thrall of literary theory; this was a time of exploration, weighing the latest trends in deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and a host of new approaches to literature that opened possibilities I had seldom, if ever, encountered before. I still loved Lewis but largely left him behind, scratching my head at his seeming intractability to the dynamic interpretative questions facing readers in a poststructuralist age.
After further work in theology and religious studies, I began teaching as a university professor. Lewis became something of a prop in my repertoire—an easy reference for students wary or uncertain about a difficult idea. One quip from Lewis and their minds were instantaneously put at ease. Though I often relied on him implicitly, I had forgotten that I had been nursed by Lewis’s ideas in my earliest theological formation.
Only when I was invited to prepare a series of lectures for the Marion E. Wade Center did I begin to remember that many of my own best insights stemmed from Lewis’s writings. (In 2023 I delivered these lectures, titled “C. S. Lewis and the Romantic Imagination,” as part of the Ken and Jean Hansen Lectureship series. This book is based on those addresses.) The ebullient directors of the Wade, David and Crystal Downing, had asked me to consider the relationship between C. S. Lewis and British Romanticism, a topic to which I have devoted much of my professional career. I had spent more than two decades thinking about the relationship between Romantic literature and its religious context in Britain but never imagined I’d find more than a series of interesting observations on several beloved poems or a few barbed comments on the alleged irreligion of these authors.
I could not have been more wrong.
In my first foray into the subject, I taught a class on C. S. Lewis and modern theology. I blanched when, on our first evening together, I learned that many of my most eager students appeared to know Lewis’s works better than I did! I owe much to them, for while some already had a thoroughgoing grasp of the major plot points, characters, and themes, they cheerfully pressed on through our rigorous schedule, as we paired each new book with major theologians for discussion throughout the semester. We read through the bulk of Lewis’s works together, and I found myself rereading almost every book we studied multiple times as I sought a greater grasp of Lewis in his intellectual context.
Next, I threw myself into the archives of the Wade. I began by reading what others had said about Lewis and Romanticism. The results were mixed and not especially promising. I already had an inkling of what I wanted to say about Lewis, but I worried that he could sometimes mention a name or idea with little or no indication of his purpose. I still required the sorts of connections that I knew from experience only time spent in an archive can produce.
What I discovered was nothing short of a revelation. At first, I was dismayed that Lewis’s personal library often lacked the sort of expansive marginalia that I have come to cherish in some other writers I’ve written about. Over time, however, I came to recognize in Lewis’s careful notations and markings an untold key to his own reading habits. More than once as I sat in the quiet of the Wade, I found myself nearly shouting out loud, “I’ve found it!” in response to a new link or association.
My admiration for Lewis expanded in the process. Before, I’d regarded him as something of a theological dilettante—a view I’ve come to recognize as the product of his own rather slippery rhetoric—ever warning readers that he is little more than an amateur. Now, for the first time, I could demonstrate his careful reading habits with concrete evidence. Lewis read the Greats at Oxford and continued to study the history of philosophy, theology, and literature throughout his life, demonstrating in unpublished marginalia a command of modern thought that I had little appreciation for in reading his popular works alone.
Often, I would find in Lewis’s library a correction or comment that cross-referenced a single sentence—one that I might easily overlook, sometimes hundreds of pages apart—in which an author had contradicted some earlier assertion. Elsewhere, Lewis would track with a dense philosophical treatise in summary paraphrases at the top or bottom of the page, indicating his attentiveness to the volume at hand. I could almost picture him sitting in a chair with this very book before him!
There are hundreds—nay, thousands—of such books in the Wade archive. To be sure, I did not examine marginalia in every volume of Lewis’s personal library in preparing my lectures, but I did work painstakingly through an extraordinary range of his library in works related to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century literature, as well as many of his theological and philosophical tomes from these and other periods. As a result, I came to see that Lewis was not only familiar with the questions of his own age but also reflecting and even responding to many of the same issues in his most well-known prose.
Three pivotal ideas emerged through this meticulous, systematic process. First, Lewis often approached some of the most challenging questions of Christian thought through the lens of the personal. Far from offering readers dogmatic assertions about faith, Lewis often begins with experience, intuition, and religious feeling. This certainly reflects both the British Romantic movement, which I found him citing at every turn, and the spirit of his own times. In the first chapter, I take up this idea, showing that Lewis not only relies on the British Romantics far more than many might expect (given his scholarly reputation in medieval and Renaissance literature), but he also writes with an awareness of the legacy of modern philosophy and the so-called subjective turn that shaped much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Second, Lewis enjoyed an uneasy relationship with spiritual autobiography and what scholars today call, more broadly, “life writing.” While he complained that his own efforts in the genre were “suffocatingly subjective,” Lewis appeals to the great tradition of conversion narratives and other forms of autobiographical writing to introduce Christian thought to a wide audience. In this, Lewis reflects many of his Anglican forebears, including the Methodists John and Charles Wesley, as well as the life writings of British Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth. In fact, as I explain in the second chapter, just as Lewis was deliberating theism (and Christianity) as a viable option for his own life, he was also reading deeply in the philosophical theology of Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Third, I was struck repeatedly while reading Lewis’s works just how often he discusses the natural world. His fiction often shows an acute interest in the description of landscapes, and in nonfiction works he makes reference to a love for nature that, at the very least, raises decidedly modern questions about how an appreciation for beauty relates to our knowledge of God. In such a light, as I show in the third chapter, Lewis’s repetition of British Romantic ideas of imagination, visionary dream states, and symbols stands out as major features in his works. Indeed, by bringing Lewis into conversation with the British Romantics, the theological motivation behind his commitment to...
