This biography of Lewis
certainly never strays into a hagiography. This is certainly a critical work,
but one wonders whether this criticism does not arise primarily from the author’s
concurrent loss of religious faith and contempt for those who are, perhaps, merely Christian. As such, it seems a
work of limited value; the value it does contain seems primarily in the author’s
ability to notice and chronicle the impacts particular works of literature and
particular friendships had on Lewis and how these influences can be recognized
in his various works.
Particularly annoying – and here
one can detect the methods of modern biblical criticism and redaction – is the
author’s insistence that, while Lewis remained a mystery to those who knew him
best, with the benefit of distance and the ability to sift through Lewis’
papers and his associates’ memories, he will unravel this mystery for his
readers. He will demonstrate the psychological influences that led Lewis to
become the man he was and to believe what he believed. This leads the author to
critique Lewis’ autobiographical works for omitting so much that the author
thinks is essential to Lewis’ development, ignoring Lewis’ own caveat that, Surprised by Joy for example, is only
the story of his conversion rather than a more or less in-depth or comprehensive
account of his life. The author insists again and again that Lewis’ childhood
tragedies and struggles were something he was “compelled to repeat or work
out[.]”
Several times throughout the
biography, the author takes issue with Lewis’ dislike and lack of interest in
modern literature and modern philosophy. He seems not to realize, or not to
consider important, that few people outside those that write such works either
read or enjoy them. He fails also adequately to take into consideration Lewis’
concept of Joy (that is, for a
longing unfulfilled by anything on earth, teaching that we were made for
something more) or Lewis’ commitment – demonstrated by his talks to the English
military during WWII and his BBC broadcasts – to defending the faith of the
everyman Christian. The author seems to reduce Lewis’ desire for Joy merely to a lack of fulfillment,
nurture, and peace in his childhood.
Lewis is also critiqued for his
reading habits. “The curious thing is that Lewis… had read almost no works of
biblical scholarship. The revolution in New Testament scholarship which had
come about during the hundred years before he wrote The Problem of Pain appears to have passed him by.” And for good
reason! What nonsense it all is really. The author seems not to understand that
for the man whose conversion depended upon seeing Christianity as a myth that “happened
to be true,” such silly quibbles about authorship and textual dating could (and
should) hold no interest. He writes, “Lewis was fully aware of the fact that
there was a purely intellectual snobbery abroad in England at that time, more
powerful to any genuine intellectual stumbling-block to faith.” He
simultaneously accuses Lewis of cheerfully abandoning “the depth and range of
his historical imagination in favor of a style of rhetoric which seems more
reminiscent of the Belfast police courts.” But isn’t such a style precisely the
antidote required by “purely intellectual snobbery”? “What is so troubling is
that the Discarded Image Lewis is
there beside the bullying rhetorician and we do not know which of them is going
to speak next.” Precisely, Lewis understood and despised modern intellectual
conceits; sometimes people simply have to be bullied or shamed out of them.
Better to enter life shamed than to enter into hell with one’s pride intact.
Like many works that set out to
debunk the errors of previous works, Wilson’s suffers from an unnecessarily
antagonistic and contradictory tone. He desires to praise Lewis the literary
critic and Oxford don, but to denigrate and destroy the Lewis popularly admired
by his readers – not only the “American” Lewis who is a non-smoking,
teetotaling evangelical, but also the Lewis so profoundly interested in giving
a popular defense of the faith. Such an attitude is both regrettable and
profoundly uninteresting; it is, perhaps, the most serious failure of this
biography.
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| A.N. Wilson |
