Restoring Beauty

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C.S. Lewis

Louis Markos

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780830857456
• eBook ISBN: 9780830859382
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

More and more in our modern and postmodern culture the twin concepts of beauty and truth have been separated both from each other and from their individual connection to the divine source of Beauty and Truth. Even as our public schools move further and further away from their connection to the universal moral code, the world of art (both high and low) embraces an aesthetic that privileges ugliness over beauty, nihilism over form, and radical self-expression over the pursuit of higher truth. As both an effective apologist for truth-based education and as a sub-creator of his own beauty-enhancing fiction, C.S. Lewis is the ideal guide for those who would seek to restore truth and beauty to their proper place and role in our modern world. Sections one and two analyze Lewis' eleven novels, showing how Lewis counters the growing cult of the ugly and helps restore a clearer understanding of the nature of good and evil. Sections three and four turn to Lewis' non-fiction works to assess what advice Lewis can give educators at all levels who would steer their students away from chronological snobbery and values-free education toward a true re-engagement with the past. The book concludes with a commentary on Screwtape Letters that exposes what Satan's main temptation tactics have been since the 1960s and a detailed bibliographical essay of books by and about Lewis.

PART I

RESTORING BEAUTY

CHAPTER 1:

FRACTURED FAIRY TALES AND THE CULT OF THE UGLY

In a review of the animated film Shrek, published in the July/August 2001 issue of Books & Culture, Eric Metaxas offers a brave and insightful critique that is undergirded by an essential element of the Christian worldview that is too often overlooked today: namely, that the good, the true, and the beautiful not only exist, but also are interrelated. The film, which offers a clever deconstructive parody both of fairy tales and of Disney, concerns an antisocial ogre (Shrek) whose swamp is suddenly overrun by fairy-tale characters who have been displaced by a tyrannical king (Farquaad). In return for ridding his swamp of these unwanted guests, Shrek agrees to rescue a princess (Fiona) and hand her over to Farquaad. The audience cheers on Shrek as he frees Fiona from her castle-prison, only to discover that there is a hitch. The beautiful Fiona is further imprisoned by a spell that causes her to transform into an ogre every night. Luckily, as in all fairy tales, there is a way out of her internal prison: when she kisses her true love, the spell will be broken. As one would expect, the film slowly builds up to the climactic moment when Shrek and Fiona (now in the guise of an ogre) kiss. In a parody of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Fiona floats magically upward, beams of light shooting out from her limbs. She then glides gracefully back to earth where we expect her to be transformed, once and for all, into the beautiful princess. No such luck. Instead, she remains an ogre and, we are assured, will continue to remain an ogre for the rest of her life. The spell has been broken; she has become what she truly is.

“What is going on?” asks Metaxas.

Are beauty and nobility and innocence such medieval concepts that fairytales themselves cannot portray them positively? Must not only Shrek remain ugly, but Fiona become forever so? Shall the Ugly Duckling accept himself, and all swans turn into Ugly Ducklings, lest feelings get hurt? … Does Shrek really mean to say that fairy tale virtues don’t exist, or are relative, or meaningless? It reminds me of gray communists screaming that God does not exist and that all human beings need is bread and vodka and cement housing. Did anyone ever believe that?

The old fairy tales aver the opposite; that what everyone knows in his heart to be true is true, that there are such things as goodness and beauty and truth—and even though in this life they are often obscured or hidden altogether, a time will come when the truth will be revealed, when dragons will be slain and bewitched captives will be set free forever.

Amid the great popular and critical praise that Shrek received (the sequel to the film proved an even greater success at the box office), Metaxas’s voice offers a needed counterpoint. To most modern viewers (whether they be cynical, sensitive, or politically correct), the transformation of Fiona into an ogre is “no big deal.” Many would even hail it as teaching children the “valuable” egalitarian lesson that external beauty is unimportant, an elitist, “bourgeois” hang-up that needlessly divides and engenders low self-esteem in girls who can’t make the grade. Those who would make such a claim are, of course, well known to us. They are the ones who have systematically eliminated beauty contests from high schools and colleges across the country on the grounds that they discriminate against girls who are less physically attractive (odd that such people rarely, if ever, carry out this reasoning to its logical outcome: the elimination of high school and college football teams on the grounds that they discriminate against boys who are less physically strong). They are the ones who would outlaw black and white in favor of the colorless, lowest-common-denominator world of Metaxas’s “gray communists.”

Serendipitously, I had the opportunity to test Metaxas’s critique in the real world. My two children (Alex and Stacey) saw Shrek in the theater when they were seven and six years old. They didn’t say much about the film at the time, but when, a year later, one of my students let me borrow his DVD copy of Shrek, and I put it in my machine to watch with the kids, they both made it clear that they did not want to see it again. Six months later when Shrek 2 hit the cineplex and their grandparents offered to take them to see it, they both agreed that they’d rather see something else. This time I asked them why they did not want to see it. Alex and Stacey (who have been raised on equal doses of Bible stories, Greek mythology, and fairy tales) gave me the following reply: “We didn’t like the ending of Shrek; the princess is supposed to become beautiful at the end, not ugly.” I had never discussed Metaxas’s critique of the film with my kids. Their response was direct, innocent, and unbiased.

Well, maybe not totally unbiased. As Christian parents, my wife and I have always tried to steer our kids away from movies and cartoons that emphasize ugliness and revel in all the more unseemly aspects of the human body. That is not to say that we have insulated them (they saw all three Lord of the Rings films when they came out and all the Harry Potter films to date), but we have sought to instill in them the rudiments of aesthetic discernment. Just as there is a distinction between good vs. evil violence (The Lord of the Rings) and the senseless, dehumanizing slaughter that runs rampant in slasher and serial killer films (none of which I would let my kids see, even in edited form), so there is a distinction between movies and TV shows that portray ugliness as a thing to be transformed, redeemed, or endured for a higher purpose and those that simply offer us ugliness as an end in itself, that hold it up to our noses that we might inhale deeply and accept its universality and its triumph. Even so, in the heady climes of high culture, there is a world of difference between music that contains dissonant sounds within a greater package of beauty and music that surrenders itself totally to atonal cacophony.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer has pointed out (The Cost of Discipleship, chapter 6), it is not blessed in and of itself to mourn or be persecuted; such things are only blessed if they are done for the sake of the Lord and carry with them their own internal promise of that wondrous joy that ever comes in the morning. Yes, we must embrace ugliness, hatred, and lies in the sense that they are part of the fabric of our fallen world and our fallen selves; but when we embrace them, we should do so neither realistically nor pragmatically, but eschatologically: with a view to the good end that is to come, with what Tolkien dubbed (in “On Fairy Stories”) the “eucatastrophe.” In this post-Freudian world in which we live, we have put the phobias and neuroses at the center and pushed “normalcy” out to the margin. More and more, we are doing the same for ugliness: enshrining it at the heart of our culture, while beauty is left to atrophy and decay.

In chapter 7 of The Sacred Romance, Brent Curtis and John Eldredge cut to the core of the problem:

Every woman is in some way searching for or running from her beauty and every man is looking for or avoiding his strength. Why? In some deep place within, we remember what we were made to be, we carry with us the memory of gods, image-bearers walking in the Garden. So why do we flee our essence? As hard as it may be for us to see our sin, it is far harder still for us to remember our glory. The pain of the memory of our former glory is so excruciating, we would rather stay in the pigsty than return to our true home.

As paradoxical as it may seem, we are often more afraid of beauty than of ugliness. The latter hides, conceals, distorts; the former uncovers, reveals, clarifies. Whatever exactly he meant by it, John Keats was right when he wrote that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” He might have added that beauty is goodness, goodness beauty. The truth about us is that we were made both good and beautiful but that we have lost our original beauty and goodness. But the story does not end there. We will be restored someday to our original princess beauty; ugliness was not our ultimate origin, nor will it be our final destination (though it took the redemptive “ugliness” of the cross to bridge the gap between our arche and our eschaton, our beginning and our end). I believe, along with Curtis and Eldredge, that we all possess within ourselves an antenatal memory of Eden and of our perfection in Eden. It is a memory that we cannot wholly shake off, though many try frantically to do so. The fear of success is often a stronger, more intimidating thing than the fear of failure. Better to kill the dream ourselves than risk having it blow up in our faces. Ugliness (like lies and evil) makes no demands on us; rather, it invites us to sink slowly and peacefully into the mire. The good, the true, and the beautiful are all action words that call us to take a quick glance backward and then trudge on with hope toward the distant land that is our true home.

“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country,” writes C. S. Lewis in his finest sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” “… I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence.” Lewis might have added a fourth name, Fairy Tales, or he might, more simply, have grouped all four names under the single category of Beauty. In saying this, I am not putting words into Lewis’s mouth. Of all the writers of the twentieth century (that era when ugliness truly came in to its own), Lewis was perhaps the greatest apologist for beauty. He saw all too well the modern aversion to beauty (though the word has traditionally stood at the center of literary theory, modern and postmodern theorists have all but ignored it), and he understood that the cause of that aversion is finally less aesthetic than it is psychological: a rather desperate defense mechanism to protect our jaded, agnostic age from that terrible Beauty that dwells together with Goodness and Truth in the heart of the Creator and of the creation he made. Understanding further that when beauty is deconstructed, goodness and truth inevitably follow in its wake, Lewis set himself the dual task of restoring (or rehabilitating, to use a favorite word of Lewis’s) the reputation of beauty in his nonfiction and embodying (nay, incarnating) its presence in his fiction.

Indeed, the entire impetus for Lewis’s fiction may be found in a passage from “The Weight of Glory” in which he discusses the exact nature of that heavenly beauty which we spend all our lives yearning for:

We want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves—that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell such lovely falsehoods.

Among this blessed band of poets and storytellers, Lewis deserves a high place of honor. He may perhaps deserve the highest place of honor, for he spoke up for beauty when it was neither fashionable nor “politically correct” to do so. Throughout history, there have been many cultures that have allowed homosexual behavior; however, until a decade or so ago, no society (Christian, pagan, or otherwise) would have ever dreamed of legitimizing gay marriage. In the same way, though history is rife with eras in which ugliness and brutality came to the fore, only in the latter half of the twentieth century has beauty itself come under attack in the worlds of both high culture and low culture. One hopes that the barbarians who overran Rome could have, with a little aesthetic training, been taught to appreciate the beauty of Roman art and architecture; our modern and postmodern cultural vandals cannot excuse their barbarism on the grounds of ignorance. Their rejection of beauty (and the truth, goodness, harmony, order, and, yes, hierarchy that go with it) is carried out in an educated, self-conscious way.

Even so is it the case for much of what passes for teen culture in the twenty-first century. I came of age in what was surely the most pathetic decade of the twentieth century, the ’70s, and we boys back then dressed in a way that today appears ludicrously and laughably ugly. But (and that but makes all the difference) we thought that we looked good. We wanted to look our best, to be Adonises in polyester. Today, more and more young people (and not-so-young people) dress themselves ugly, not out of ignorance (as did we in the ’70s), but because they have embraced an entire culture and ethos of ugliness (one that takes in dress, music, art, language, etc.). This Cult of the Ugly (like the sociopolitical movement for gay marriage) is a totally new thing, the perverse fruit of the twisted tree of modernism. And yet, as crazy as it may seem, many today consider these two fruits to be self-evident “givens” that should be accepted as the right and logical upshot of modern progress, the kinds of things that our ancestors would have eagerly embraced if they had only known better.

Against this growing tide of ugliness, we who believe in beauty (and especially we who believe in beauty because we worship a God who is the source and embodiment of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness) can hold up joyously (and defiantly) the fiction of C. S. Lewis. Here we can rest assured that no good and true princess will end up ugly in the end and that order, harmony, and balance will prevail. Here, the swans (to refer back to Metaxas) will not have to become ugly one and all so that the feelings of the Ugly Duckling will not be hurt. Heaven, as Lewis presents it in The Great Divorce (that wonderful work which, along with The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Screwtape Letters, dwells in the generic no man’s land between fiction and nonfiction), is a place of pure beauty and joy. Nothing may infect or spoil or diminish that joy. The saints who live there in glory unblemished will be finally free from “the demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy.” No one there will applaud the ending of Shrek as teaching a vital egalitarian lesson, for no one there will be fooled by the lie that the only way to lift up humanity is to drag everyone down to the same level. They will blissfully transcend that manipulation that disguises itself as pity and that makes its appeal in the name of sensitivity and fairness. In short, they “will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world’s garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses.”

Both passages quoted above are taken from chapter 13 of The Great Divorce, and, though they embody Lewis’s own beliefs, they are put in the mouth of one of the great fairy-tale writers of the nineteenth century, George MacDonald. Indeed, in between the two quoted passages, Lewis has MacDonald express a truth that not only carries rich theological overtones but also lies at the very heart of all true fairy tales. The truth (all but forgotten in our day and age) is that there can be only two possible eschatons: “Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.” Shrek opts for the latter and allows ugliness to win the day. But the great fiction of C. S. Lewis (The Space Trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia, Till We Have Faces) presents us with a different incantation, one that we ignore at our peril.

CHAPTER 2:

THE SPACE TRILOGY I:

THE BEAUTY OF HIERARCHY

Unlike the seven Chronicles of Narnia, which share a similar tone and structure, the three novels that make up The Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) vary wildly in their generic categories. The first (published in 1938) reads like a fast-paced sci-fi fantasy in the manner of H. G. Wells or Isaac Asimov. The second (1943), much slower and more ponderous than the first, offers a Miltonic theodicy, a reworking of Paradise Lost in which Eve does not give in to temptation. The third (1945), which is as long as the first two books combined, invites its readers into a very different world that blends spiritual warfare with the more homely conventions of the realistic, domestic novel. And yet, despite their differences, all three novels center around a struggle between good and evil in which the protagonists grow slowly toward the good, the true, and the beautiful while the antagonists move increasingly away from all goodness, all truth, all beauty.

The fantastical plot of Out of the Silent Planet concerns a philologist named Ransom, who is kidnapped and taken by spaceship to Malacandra (Mars). Upon arriving on Mars, he breaks free of his abductors and hides out with one of the three species of rational creatures that dwell on Malacandra: the Hrossa. The Hrossa are an intelligent, beaverlike race of warriors who lack all the trappings of industrialization but who possess the Homeric virtues of honor and courage. At first, Ransom, who is very much a product of the modern world, looks down on the Hross...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Restoring Beauty
• Part II: The Good Guys And The Bad Guys
• Part III: Men Without Chests
• Part IV: Aslan In The Academy
• Epilogue: Know Thy Enemy
• About the Author