C. S. Lewis and Friends

Faith and the Power of Imagination

David Hein, David Brown, David Hein

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780281062249
• eBook ISBN: 9780281066001
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

C. S. Lewis is one of the best loved and most engaging Christian writers of recent times, and he continues to be a powerful defender of the faith. It is in his imaginative fiction that his genius finds its fullest expression and makes its most lasting theological contribution. Famously, Lewis had friends - who, like him, employed powerfully creative imaginations to explore the profundities of Christian thought and their struggles with their faith.

1

C. S. Lewis: Reason, imagination and knowledge

PETER J. SCHAKEL

In May 1962, Margaret E. Rose of the School Broadcasting Department, British Broadcasting Corporation, wrote to C. S. Lewis: ‘We are doing a series for Sixth Forms in the Autumn of 1962 called “Knowledge, Imagination and Truth” in which we hope to demonstrate the separate functions and the interplay of “reason” and “imagination” as means of knowledge. I . . . wonder whether you would be interested in doing the two talks on J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”.’¹ Lewis replied: ‘Many thanks . . . but I am afraid I must refuse. I am making a slow recovery from a serious illness, and have been warned by my doctor that in future I must refrain from all avoidable exertion.’² Readers of Lewis must wish that he had been able to complete this task and indeed must wonder what he would have written. Speculation on what Lewis’s two talks would have said lies outside the scope of this essay, but I will attempt to indicate the lines of thought along which he would have worked.

What he would have said in 1962 about reason and imagination was not what he would have said in the 1920s. His basic presuppositions changed, and so did his understanding of reason and imagination and of the interplay between them. To understand the lines of thought along which he would have worked in the talks for Margaret Rose, we must begin by tracing those developments – beginning with imagination – which he said were important for him since his childhood.

When Lewis was six, seven and eight, he ‘was living almost entirely in [his] imagination’, he writes in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy: ‘imagination of one sort or another played the dominant part’ in those early years.³ He goes on in that chapter to distinguish four different uses of the term ‘imagination’. He does not mention one that is usually given as the initial definition: ‘forming mental images of things not actually present’.⁴ The first one he does mention is imagination as reverie, daydream or fantasies of wish-fulfilment, that is, forming mental images of oneself as one wishes to be, at least for that moment. Lewis says he often indulged in wish-fulfilment fantasies, picturing himself cutting a fine figure (p. 15). This imaginative notion of himself presumably led him later to aspire to ‘knuttery’, wearing flashy clothes and plastering his hair with oil (p. 67).

Second is imagination as ‘invention’, or what classical rhetorical theory called ‘discovery’, the finding out or selection of topics to be treated or arguments to be used. This use of the term is closer than fantasizing to what Lewis thought of as imagination and is more important. Invention involves the making up – or discovery (such making up is not always conscious and deliberate) – of characters and plot in telling a story or of metaphors used in poetry or prose (p. 15).⁵ Lewis began employing invention in childhood, as he wrote the Animal-Land stories which he describes at considerable length in Surprised by Joy, chiefly in chapters 1 and 5. It became very significant to him later as he wrote narrative poetry and prose fiction.

Lewis’s interest focuses not on these three common uses of the term but on two less common (he might say higher) uses. First is ‘poetic imagination’, which he calls in 1955 ‘the highest sense of all’ (p. 16), having an importance he says he already recognized in childhood. Lewis distinguishes between invention and poetic imagination when he says that his Animal-Land stories were training him to be ‘a novelist; not a poet’ (p. 15). The organic and intuitive power needed to write poetry (and myth) rises to a higher level than invention. It relies on ‘inspiration’ or ‘genius’. It is the mental, but not intellectual, faculty that puts things into surprising and meaningful relationships to form unified wholes. The best poetry operates at a level beyond images. Ideally it is beyond words and in this sense is akin to music, the highest art form, which, without words, can be ‘a sort of madness’ in the strength of its effects.⁶ Poetry uses metaphor or myth to lift a work (whether in prose or verse) beyond events or ideas, to make it ‘profound and suggestive’, to enable it to evoke extraordinary affective power and impact.⁷ When Lewis says that he was living ‘almost entirely in [his] imagination’ (p. 15), he means that he was spending much of his time reading works of poetic and mythic imagination and being caught up in the powerful impressions created by them.

The final kind of imagination described in Surprised by Joy is Romantic imagination, the experience which in The Pilgrim’s Regress Lewis calls Romanticism and in his autobiography he calls Joy. It is an experience of an acute, even painful, but desired, longing for the renewal of an experience of transcendent bliss. It occurs as the memory of an earlier moment involving bliss or beauty is triggered by a current experience of bliss or beauty. Lewis’s first such experience occurred early in his life, as the sight of a flowering currant bush on a summer day joined with the memory of the first beauty Lewis ever knew, a toy garden his brother created in the lid of a biscuit tin. Such experiences, evoked by scenes of nature, music and poetry, became a foundational aspect of his life. He longed deeply, but could not determine what he was longing for, often mistaking intermediate objects for the ultimate object. ‘By the imaginative life’, he says when he describes the renewal of this experience in his teens after a long absence, ‘I here mean only my life as concerned with Joy’; later he refers to ‘the imaginative longing for Joy, or rather the longing which was Joy’ (pp. 78–9, 175).

Joy is ultimately a longing for unity, though unity with what may be unclear. It is imaginative in that it is often set in motion by literature or music, which are products of the imagination. It involves being transported beyond the physical and emotional to a rapturous state that could take place only in the imagination at an inspired level. And it usually depends on memory, as the image of a remembered experience triggers a longing not for the past but for something of which a past experience is a symbol. Imagination in this sense is of crucial importance in Lewis’s life as one of the reasons for his return to Christianity, as he came to the realization that the ultimate object of his longings was God, to be in the presence of God; but that understanding did not come until his early thirties. Surprised by Joy is in large part a celebration of the Romantic imagination, in its deepest and broadest sense.

At the same time that he was living in the imagination, he was developing his ability to reason. Presumably his ability to think logically went back to his home life. His father was a lawyer, ‘fond of oratory’, with ‘great quickness of mind’, and his mother was a ‘promising mathematician’ (p. 4). Lewis must have heard logical reasoning illustrated regularly as he listened to adult conversations in his home. Beyond that, his first schoolmaster, Robert Capron, bad as he was personally and pedagogically, taught geometry well and ‘forced us to reason . . . I have been the better for those geometry lessons all my life’ (p. 29). Critical thinking was a factor in his decision to reject the Christian faith in his early teens: he could not continue to accept what he was being taught: that a thousand non-Christian religions were sheer illusion, all except ‘our own, the thousand and first, [which was] labelled True’ (p. 63).

Lewis’s ability and inclination to think analytically were greatly strengthened by the two years he spent being tutored by W. T. Kirkpatrick, ‘a “Rationalist” of the old, high and dry nineteenth-century type’, a man who came close to being a purely logical entity (pp. 139, 135). By encountering and engaging with Kirkpatrick’s ruthless dialectic, Lewis’s reason was honed and became razor sharp. As Lewis says, ‘I loved ratiocination . . . [and] became a not contemptible sparring partner’ (p. 137). Reason and logic exerted a strong influence on all aspects of Lewis’s life from then on.

Lewis describes his mind in his late teens as torn between imagination and reason: ‘The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism”. Nearly all I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless’ (p. 170). He was torn partly because he could not, at this point, resolve their conflicting claims to truth and knowledge. When he returned to Oxford after service in the First World War, he still felt divided, devoting his academic pursuits to reading philosophy (reason), while using his spare time to write poetry (imagination).

This dividedness is the subject of one of Lewis’s most intriguing poems, ‘Reason’: 16 lines, undated and not published during his life. In it Lewis contrasts the cool clarity and strength of reason (symbolized by Athene, the ‘maid’ of the poem) with the warm darkness and creativity of the imagination (Demeter, the earth-mother, in the poem). The poem concludes:

Oh who will reconcile in me both maid and mother,

Who make in me a concord of the depth and height?

Who make imagination’s dim exploring touch

Ever report the same as intellectual sight?

Then could I truly say, and not deceive,

Then wholly say, that I BELIEVE.⁸

Reason is clear and pure and stable; there is nothing indulgent or lax or compromising about her. The imagery used for it in the poem is celestial, which implies that it can be sinned against, not just in the sense that one human being can wrong another but also in the sense of a violation of divine expectations. By contrast, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword by David Brown
• Introduction: Faith, reason and imagination
• 1 C. S. Lewis: Reason, imagination and knowledge
• 2 Austin Farrer: The sacramental imagination
• 3 Dorothy L. Sayers: War and redemption
• 4 Charles Williams: Words, images and (the) Incarnation
• 5 Rose Macaulay: A voice from the edge
• 6 J. R. R. Tolkien: His sorrowful vision of joy
• Bibliography
• Search terms