C. S. Lewis As The Christian Parthenon: Enough, Already, of The Lovely Ruin

You Don't Know Jack, if you think Lewis wouldn't have gone ballistic over the C.S. Lewis Bible: C.S. Lewis, one of the most brilliant apologetic minds of all time, whose corpus has received more Botox than an entire Academy Awards ceremony. It isn't the remembrance of him that's disgusting: it's the preservation-to-caricature.Douglas Gresham, the step-son of C.S. Lewis, has committed himself to two egregious excesses recently.

One is his Introduction to The C.S. Lewis Bible,  which Introduction is rightly pilloried in the podcast of Books and Culture as "oleaginous."  Any right-thinking friend of Lewis should have steered clear of this project (which, quite incidentally, does not include the Apocrypha).

The other is the bewilderingly badly-scripted Walden film Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which trainwreck Gresham oversees as Executive Producer.

The movie is wonderfully photographed and exceptionally well-designed.   Some of the performances are really quite good: Georgie Henley's Lucy conveys the natural joy and spiritual simplicity of Lewis's creation, and Will Poulter's Eustace Scrubb is surprisingly convincing as a bratty War Era child of dull intellectuals, given his cartoonish lines.

The lines are really the problem in this movie, as well as the producer's misguided attempt to load the thing down with moralistic platitudes while still making the story a "better" movie. 

But what's striking in The Dawn Treader (and we saw premonitions of this in a previous film, Prince Caspian) is that the producers don't trust the story.

Lewis wrote the book as an adventure story, with the major quest being simply to find seven lost nobles and to reach the end of the world.  The filmmakers shoehorn in a plot involving a demon-green mist that ties together the characters' vicissitudes, emerging whenever characters are tempted to be less than their best selves.

This is damaging at two levels, one moral and the other artistic.  Lewis's triumph in The Dawn Treader was pointing out that human beings need no external stimulus to be selfish, self-centered, childish, greedy, and proud.... "dragonish," in the book's unforgettable idiom.  Here, an evil external force, a sort of misty devil, shows up to coerce and tempt.  

This is a strange change for Gresham to accede to: he's a deeply intelligent man when it comes to morality and behavior, and surely he understood the power of the book's art is in how the characters grow up, how they become themselves through struggling with childishness within themselves, that is a part of themselves and at odds with the heroes they can become.

To be fair, the film tries to pin all this down as "testing," and each character faces a temptation suited to his individual weaknesses.  But I think, all things considered, it's a bad, transparent decision taken merely so there can be a boss-battle at the end of the film against a freakish supernatural evil.  Give the kids their climax.

Wasted effort: the story was fine on its own, and there were plenty of beautifully written and wise scenes (the interchange between Governor Gumpas and Caspian is one) excised in the service of this plastic good-versus-evil formula.

So the book wasn't "cinematic" according to the usual formula.  So what?  Film it.  It's good art.  But the script of the book is in agonies of reinvention.

All of this points to something a little disturbing in C.S. Lewis's legacy.

His work and his mind have been fetishized and debased at the same time.

It's an old story, but no less distressing for that.

In the Introduction to the C.S. Lewis Bible, Gresham remarks that the world is poorer because Lewis didn't write more.

That's a silly thing to have written.Good cast, with real fake lion.

Lewis made the most of an extraordinary life and mind.  At Wheaton you can visit The Wade Collection and read his papers and even see his wardrobe.  (When I was a student at Wheaton, a wry sign notified visitors that the library was not responsible for individuals or items lost in the wardrobe.)  It's difficult to imagine what Gresham thinks Lewis would have said or ought to have said that he did not, but it seems like criticizing the 1960's for not having lasted until the 1990's.

But many of the gaps in his thinking (they are few, but often serious, especially in his apologetics) are showing up over the years as our understanding changes: this must happen.  It's the bargain we make when we make a difference for our time.  We are committed to our time.  Even Jesus did that.  If it's true (as Psalm 22 has it) that a generation yet unborn will reflect on the transcendent goodness of this moment, it's not a guarantee any of us receive.

But it would have been asking too much of Lewis to speak both to post-War England and America as well as to post-Internet England and America.

I'm not even sure one can do that.

But regardless, I'm very sure one can only milk so much out of Jack Lewis's legacy, and the more one tries to wring out the last drop, the more caricatured, ghostly, and put upon he seems.

The idol-worship that is Lewis studies continues to turn out the most monstrous distortion of him, one that inhibits and clouds rather than clarifies his ongoing contribution to peoples' thinking about God.  And I cannot think that the editors of The Lewis Bible aren't lost in their hero-worship as they make him an authoritative gloss on the Bible, or vice versa.

Some ruins must be admired, studied, learned from, and not lived in.

If Lewis's faith was right, he has a life of his own.

Comments

[Sandra]

I can't speak to the movie, since I won't watch them, but the recent mania in the evangelical (perhaps more broadly?) Christian world for all things Lewis is a manifestation of the idea you raised recently about asking big questions and wanting definitive answers. Lewis asked a LOT of Really Big Questions and found sufficient answers for himself. Many of the rest of us find ourselves asking questions, too, but being unwilling to risk not finding definitive answers. I think a lot of the Lewis popularity now is due to the fact that he seems to have answers that are suitable to the evangelical mind. Nothing that might take us too far from our comfort zone but far enough that we feel as though we've had Deep Thoughts. When we do that, though, when we take Lewis' work as answers, we miss that he really only asked bigger questions. As I commented before, the best answers only lead to bigger questions.

I think the Lewis-worship is a way to pacify the incipient questions that must develop among anyone who thinks about Christianity before those questions become too deeply disconcerting.