The Rhetoric of Certitude
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The Rhetoric of Certitude

C.S. Lewis's Nonfiction Prose

Gary L. Tandy

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eBook - ePub

The Rhetoric of Certitude

C.S. Lewis's Nonfiction Prose

Gary L. Tandy

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While numerous studies on C. S. Lewis's literary achievements have been published in the past several years, The Rhetoric of Certitude brings much-needed attention to Lewis's nonfiction prose, identifying his unique style and explaining why his writing has remained popular while that of so many of his contemporaries has not. In this thorough examination of Lewis's religious essays and literary criticism, author Gary L. Tandy argues that Lewis's style evolved from a "purposeful rhetorical stance" that unites his nonfiction prose, a style that was informed by his ideas on language, communication, and style, as well as his view of Christianity, and can be most accurately described as a rhetoric of certitude. Tandy begins with Lewis's context, examines his comments to set up his theory of rhetoric and communication, treats Lewis's argumentative approach, places him within a rhetoric of certitude, and suggests his style was similar in both his religious and critical writings. The Rhetoric of Certitude is certain to become a bellwether in the discussion of Lewis's nonfiction prose and will be welcomed by C. S. Lewis scholars and specialists.

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CHAPTER 1

“The Stance of a Last Survivor”

C. S. Lewis and the Modern World
Image
We are to consider what men wrote, and our judgement on it must, of course, attempt to be literary, not theological. This does not mean that we are to confine ourselves rigidly to questions of style. Though we must not judge our authors’ doctrine as doctrine, we must certainly attempt to disengage the spirit and temper of their writings to see what particular insights or insensibilities went with the varying beliefs, what kinds of sentiment and imagination they unwittingly encouraged.
C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama
Many critics have noticed with interest “De Descriptione Temporum,” Lewis’s inaugural lecture as the professor of medieval and Renaissance English literature at the University of Cambridge. This address, delivered in 1954, is remembered primarily for its conclusion, in which Lewis portrays himself as the last dinosaur, a specimen of the Old Western order in modern society. But the lecture contains a great deal more than this memorable metaphor; it sets forth, in a systematic manner, much that is central to Lewis’s thought and work. And the knowledge of these central ideas is essential for anyone wishing to understand Lewis’s rhetorical theory and practice.
Lewis organizes the lecture around the question of where the Great Divide in history should be placed and offers four possibilities: (1) between antiquity and the Dark Ages, (2) between the Dark and the Middle Ages, (3) toward the end of the seventeenth century, and (4) in the early nineteenth century. After disqualifying the first three for various reasons, he states: “It is by these steps that I have come to regard as the greatest of all divisions in the history of the West that which divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen and Scott” (Essays 7). He then goes on to support this claim by considering four areas of thought and human experience in which radical changes appeared in the previous two centuries. First, Lewis notes (he admits this is his weakest point) the changes in the political order. Specifically, he mentions the change from political rulers to political leaders and the use of advertising techniques in government. Second, regarding the arts, Lewis suggests that no prior age produced work that was “in its own time as shatteringly and bewilderingly new as that of the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and Picasso has been in ours” and notes that this novelty applies equally in his area of specialization, poetry. Lewis has in mind here particularly the difficulty of much modern verse: he refers to a recent symposium on T. S. Eliot’s short poem “Cooking Egg” at which several literary scholars could reach no agreement on the poem’s meaning. Third, Lewis puts forth the great religious change, what he calls the “un-christening” (in contrast to the christening of Europe in the first centuries AD). In Jane Austen’s time, he notes, “some kind and degree of religious belief and practice were the norm: now they are the exception.” Earlier in the address, Lewis had noted that for our ancestors, all history could be divided into two periods: the pre-Christian and the Christian. For modern man, history falls into three: the pre-Christian, the Christian, and the post-Christian. Finally, Lewis notes the change that he calls his “trump card”: the birth of machines. This change, Lewis argues, is on the same level as the change “from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy.” He goes on to consider the psychological effects of this change, particularly the “archetypal image” of old machines being superseded by new and better ones, with all its implications for man’s view of human purpose and progress. Thus, Lewis concludes, because of the nature of change in these four areas, the modern period represents the “greatest change in the history of Western Man” (Essays 8–11).
The lecture’s conclusion has already been mentioned. In it, Lewis claims that he belongs not to the modern world so much as to the Old Western order, which had remained fairly constant for over two thousand years until upset by the kinds of catastrophic changes described above. With regard to the literature of this old order, Lewis states: “I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners.” And he concludes: “Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs” (Essays 14).
By the time C. S. Lewis went to Cambridge in 1954, he had already completed his most significant works of literary criticism and apologetics, and he had established a formidable reputation in academic circles as a literary historian and received worldwide acclaim as a lay apologist for Christianity. Thus, his lecture cannot be viewed as announcing a startling new direction in thought. Readers of Lewis’s literary criticism (e.g., The Allegory of Love, A Preface to Paradise Lost) would have already discovered Lewis’s preference for older literature and his conviction that a reader must suspend most of his modern assumptions in order to understand that literature. Rather, the lecture should be seen as a codification and systematic restatement of Lewis’s basic attitudes toward the past and the present. Far from being mere curiosities couched in striking metaphors, the ideas in the lecture pervade Lewis’s work, particularly his nonfiction prose. Furthermore, Lewis’s basic distrust of modernity and preference for older patterns of thought are the threads that run through and unite his large body of prose work. Finally, these central attitudes may be seen as a rhetorical stance that Lewis adopted in his nonfiction prose in order to communicate effectively his religious and literary ideas in the modern world.
Although no one has examined its rhetorical implications, a few critics have seen Lewis’s attitude toward the modern world as central to an understanding of his work. Peter Kreeft has remarked that Lewis’s three main genres—literary criticism, imaginative fiction, and apologetics—all carry the common theme of “a lover’s quarrel with the world of modernity.” He goes on to call this theme “the main source of Lewis’s historical significance,” naming Lewis “the prophet Amos against the modern world” (13). J. A. W. Bennett relates Lewis’s stance in the Cambridge lecture to his personality and beliefs: “The stance of a last survivor always attracted him; it is one of the likings that he shared with William Morris, and it early drew him to the sagas and the doomed Eddaic gods. It comes easily, perhaps too easily, to a traditionalist, especially to one who rejects the view that civilization is bound to increase, easily also to a Christian foreseeing a time when faith shall not be found on the earth” (44). Here Bennett uses two words that go far toward explaining Lewis’s thought. He was indeed both a traditionalist and a Christian, and these elements are important for understanding both his religious and scholarly prose.
Lewis himself would have vehemently rejected any biographical approach to his work; however, there is some evidence that his adoption of the minority/outsider role may have begun early in his life. His biographers record the fourteen-year-old Clive’s unpleasant experiences at Malvern College, noting that not only did the boy’s great intelligence make him different from his classmates but his “temperament . . . resisted all appearances of collectivism and standardization” (Green and Hooper 36–37). It was here that Lewis first encountered what he later called the “Inner Ring”—that socially elite group from which he was excluded.1 Roger Green and Walter Hooper also note that Warren Lewis, Clive’s older brother, who had been happy at Malvern, was somewhat perturbed that his own brother was a social outcast at the same school (36–37). In manhood, though Lewis became an extremely sociable man, his pattern was to move primarily in a small circle of like-minded friends. As Humphrey Carpenter’s work The Inklings demonstrates, this group had all the characteristics of a small band of determined survivors fighting against forces in the outside world. Carpenter notes that the “ideas and interests of the Inklings contrasted sharply with the general intellectual and literary spirit of the nineteen-twenties and thirties” (xiii–xiv). Lewis himself described the attraction such a group held for him in an essay on Rudyard Kipling: “When we forgather with three or four trusted cronies of our own calling, a strong sense of community arises and is enjoyed. . . . We may all be engaged in standing together against the outer world” (“Kipling’s World,” Essays 245). George Bailey has suggested that at Oxford his devotion to a small group may have been as much by necessity as by preference. Bailey notes Lewis’s distance from most of his fellow dons, remarking that he was aware of only two friends of Lewis’s at the university, Tolkien and Dyson, the English don at Merton. The reason, according to Bailey, was that “as popularizer of Christian dogma, Lewis was embarrassing to the academic community” (120). Whatever the reasons, personal or social, it is clear that Lewis demonstrated in his own personality and habits an embattled posture toward the outside world, and that this posture was often shared by a few like-minded associates.
But it is John Wain, British novelist/poet/critic and a personal acquaintance of Lewis’s, who has given the most penetrating analysis thus far of Lewis’s attitude toward the modern age. In a not altogether flattering essay on Lewis—which begins with the observation that “every don is equipped with a persona, a set of public characteristics that in time he finds hard to lay aside even in private”—Wain notes that Lewis grew up in the Edwardian age and his “chief allegiances were to that age.” From 1925, when he became a fellow of Magdalen, Wain continues, “it was easy for him to ignore the modern world” since Oxford has not changed greatly since Edwardian days. “Even before he got his fellowship, he had noticed the 1920’s only to draw away from them in hostile dissent. From about 1914 onward, he disliked modern literature because it reflected modern life” (71). Wain relates this withdrawal from his own age to Lewis’s impersonality in human contacts. Lewis, he says, “deliberately adopted the role of a survival. He was Old Western man, his attitudes dating from before Freud, before modern art or poetry, before the machine even.” Wain notes that “there is an element of disabling unreality about the striking of such an attitude. A man born in 1850 might naturally inhabit an older ‘order’; a man born, as Lewis was, in 1898 could only reconstruct it from boyhood memories and adult reading. Lewis, who was twenty-four in the year that saw the publication of The Waste Land, couldn’t claim to belong to a generation whose taste in poetry, for instance, was formed before Eliot ‘came along’” (72). Wain explains the all-pervading contentiousness of Lewis’s writing by referring to Lewis’s “dinosaur” role: “He was fighting a perpetual rear-guard action in defense of an army that had long since marched away. . . . What Lewis was actually doing, most of the time, was interpreting the past in terms of the Chesterton-Belloc era as he reconstructed that era in his own mind” (72–73).
One need not agree with all of Wain’s underlying assumptions to recognize the significance of his remarks. For example, it is obvious that Wain himself denies the validity of much of Lewis’s thought when he describes Lewis’s army as having “long since marched away.” Lewis would no doubt have replied that if the ideas that G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc had put forth were true in the early twentieth century, then they would be equally valid in the 1940s and 1950s. Still, Wain makes a key discovery when he remarks that Lewis “deliberately adopted the role of a survival.”
It is this deliberate adoption that is crucial to an understanding of the rhetorical qualities of Lewis’s prose. If it is true that the role Lewis characteristically adopts is that of an Old Western thinker in opposition to the modern world, then it is important to note the specific passages in his work that reveal his attitudes toward modern thought, society, religion, and literature, since these form the foundation upon which he based his rhetorical theories and strategies. Lewis’s attitudes toward the modern world will be discussed under the following headings: Reason, chronological snobbery, the model, politics and society, religion, and literary criticism.

REASON

In an essay entitled “The Poison of Subjectivism,” Lewis describes what he sees as a distinctive trait of the modern outlook:
Until modern times no thinker of the first rank ever doubted that our judgements of value were rational judgments or that what they discovered was objective. The modern view is very different. It does not believe that value judgements are really judgements at all. They are sentiments, or complexes, or attitudes, produced in a community by the pressure of its environment and its traditions, and differing from one community to another. To say that a thing is good is merely to express our feeling about it; and our feeling about it is the feeling we have been socially conditioned to have. (Christian Reflections 73)
Lewis gave an extended treatment of modern subjectivity in the Riddell Memorial Lectures, which he delivered at the University of Durham. Published in 1943 as The Abolition of Man, these three lectures are a concise and at times bitingly satiric indictment of modern social, ethical, and scientific thought. The thesis of this work is that there is a sole source of all value judgments, which may be called the Tao, Natural Law, Traditional Morality, or the First Principles of Practical Reason. Because this is the sole system of value, modern man’s effort to refute it and set a new system in its place is futile (Abolition 56). Lewis takes as his point of departure a textbook in English composition written for upper-form schoolchildren. He draws on specific statements from the text to show that the underlying assumptions of the book deny the possibility of objective value judgments. For example, in discussing the story of Coleridge and two tourists at the waterfall, one of whom called the scene “sublime,” and the other “pretty,” the authors note that the assertion “That is sublime” really means “I have sublime feelings” (14). Lewis suggests that such an analysis encourages students to regard all judgments of value with suspicion, emphasizing the subtle way such an attitude could work on the minds of young readers (17).
Lewis goes on to note that until modern times, “all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it” (25). Thus, Coleridge could agree with the observation that the waterfall was sublime because it was more “just” or “appropriate” than the observation that the waterfall was pretty. Lewis quotes several classical writers in support of this view, including Aristotle, who said that the “aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought” (26). By contrast, Lewis notes that moderns tend to regard such “stock responses” with suspicion. In another context, Lewis notes that one of the proper functions of art is to maintain stock responses, and he therefore rejects I. A. Richards’s theory that stock responses in literature are a sign of artistic inferiority (Preface 55–56).
In answer to this “poison of subjectivism,” Lewis offers “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are” (Abolition 29). To the objection that approvals and disapprovals are emotions and as such not subject to logic, Lewis answers that emotional states can be in or out of harmony with Reason. “The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it” (30).
As indicated by The Abolition of Man, Lewis believed that all knowledge depends on the validity of Reason. In his early allegorical work, The Pilgrim’s Regress, it is Reason who frees John from the prison of the Spirit of the Age. In a similar way, Lewis saw his own apologetic works, based on inquiry and reasoned argumentation, as an antidote to the free inquiry spirit of the modern world.
For Lewis, the sacrifice of objective truth had serious implications. First, it precluded rational discussion. All ideas could be attacked, but not on the basis of whether they were right or wrong. Lewis notes that the modern method was to assume without discussion that your opponent was wrong, then to explain “how he became so silly” (“Bulverism,” God in the Dock 273). Lewis saw this vice as so prevalent that he invented a name for it: Bulverism. As a result of Bulverism and the denial of logic, according to Lewis, a “great deal of contemporary thought is, strictly speaking, thought about nothing—all the apparatus of thought busily working in a vacuum” (“Meditations in a Toolshed,” God in the Dock 214). More important, Lewis felt that the gradual change from emphasis on object to emphasis on subject would lead eventually to extremes of behaviorism in which a small number of “Conditioners” controlled the rest of mankind. He refers to this dark future at the end of The Discarded Image and describes his vision in more detail in the final lecture of The Abolition of Man: “The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by prenatal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man” (72). And in another context, Lewis quotes lines from Shelley’s The Cenci, which he felt described accurately the thought and sentiment of twentieth-century man:
’Tis a trick of this same family
To analyse their own and other minds.
Such self-anatomy shall teach the will
Dangerous secrets: for it tempts our powers,
Knowing what must be thought, an...

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