Mythopoea: The Language of an Alien Race |
C. S. Lewis belongs to a class of complicated personalities who later became the "poster children" of causes they never embraced. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is another example of such a person. He is alternately the martyr of neo-orthodoxy or the radical political activist. In point of fact, like Jack Lewis, he was himself. That may seem a trite thing, but it is a rarity that a religious community will allow anyone to just be. When battle-lines are drawn between ideologies, each side grabs for voices of authority. Each compiles a team-list as if its winner takes all. It is an ancient sport. Calvin was not a Calvinist. Luther was not a Lutheran, and, I suppose, Plato took liberties with the ghost of Socrates. I am not a disciple of C.S. Lewis. In my opinion, his "theological" work is rather time-dated, and not particularly apropos to the historical/cultural disciplines which color my own background studies. As a storyteller, I prefer J.R.R. Tolkien, another of the famous Inklings. Nevertheless, I often find myself reaching for metaphors out of Narnia or The Great Divorce when I am trying to get someone (usually someone very dogmatic) to feel that a particular argument might be viewed from another perspective. This is my debt to Lewis, that he was articulate in an alien language, mythopoea. He was a myth-maker. It may seem ironic to speak of myth-making when so much of contemporary theology has been focused on demythologization. In the early years of my theological study, the world was still hotly debating the work of Rudolph Bultmann. From the point of view of his critics, he had the brass to suggest that the Gospel was a myth which had lost its power. This flew in the face of those for whom theology was viewed as a form of philosophy enlightened by revelation. In the firestorm that was Jesus Christ and Mythology, Bultmann was asked about the discipline of preaching. If the Gospel is all myth, with no verifiable basis in history, what does the Christian community use as its kerygma, its proclamation? The answer was simple, you proclaim the myth. Needless to say, those who could not grasp the essence of the debate, felt no relief from the answer. I recall sitting in a contemporary theology class in college. The professor was Dr. Jack Rogers, who had received his degree at the Free University of Amsterdam under Berkouwer. He observed casually that there had been widespread discussion in European circles about bringing Bultmann before an ecclesiastical court to answer for heresy, but the issue was always dropped. "If you scratch Bultmann," they would say, "you will hit Luther." I suppose it is true, as it would be true to say, "If you scratched Luther, you would hit Augustine." The struggle to find the meaning beyond the words is more ancient than our list of those who did the struggling. Carl Jung would call the images archetypal or perhaps "archaic remnants". J.R.R. Tolkien argued that the human endeavor of using mythopoeic language to express truth about God meant that to understand, humans must become mythopathic. If you scratch C.S. Lewis, who do you hit? Certainly, as with Luther and Calvin, you hit Augustine. In The Abolition of Man, his critique on the direction of educational philosophy, he quotes Augustine as saying that the purpose of education is to discover the ordo amoris, the appropriate love of all things. You also touch the Northern mythologies which brought him his first experiences of joy. You touch his mentors, Chesterton and MacDonald, and you touch his contemporaries "Tollers" (Tolkien), Owen Barfield, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson, Arthur Greeves, his brother Warnie, and his wife Joy Davidman. Some of these were fellow members of the Inklings and before that the Kolbitars. I give you this list of confederates, not to confuse, but to finally get to my point. For a man who did not work very hard at being liked ("You dont have to be liked to be respected," hed say), he did have life-long loyal friendships which helped him shape his thoughts. The story of his years at Oxford is full of back-biting, academic politics of a sort that could not possibly exist on the campus where I teach. Yet, along with the games of musical chairs, there was also a pursuit for learning, and their perfection of their arts. Now, finally, to my thesis. Notwithstanding, the friendships, the tutors, and the late-night rounds of port, whisky, and beer at the Bird and Baby, Jack Lewis life experiences and writings embodies a fascinating mixture of enterprise. He was a moralist and apologist, a distinguished literary critic, and a writer (both of imaginative fiction and poetry). His close friend and fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield noted: In all three of these capacities he evinced a strong and warm feeling for myth; one might better say a firm intuition of the substantial reality of myth. There were, in fact, two Lewises There was the "bonny fighter" of the Socratic Club; there was almost mythopoeic Lewis the author of Till We Have Faces, the planetary novels, the Narnia series, and many of the poems.(Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis, p.85)
The Lewis of Mere Christianity ceased to exist on February 2, 1948. The date (some 15 years before his death) is marked by a meeting of the Oxford Socratic Club (he was the first President of the organization when it was founded in 1942). On that day, Lewis debated Elizabeth Anscombe (who later became a professor of philosophy at Cambridge). He offered one of his "proofs" for the existence of God, and Professor Anscombe provided the counter argument. Lewis obviously saw the shadow of things to come. He felt bested in the debate and vowed never to write another theological book again. He kept his word. In reporting this, his friend and biographer, George Sayer, added that no one else thought the evening one-sided, including Elizabeth Anscombe (Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis, pp. 307,308). The event made Lewis aware that the world had changed. The Hegelian dialectic of his youth had been eclipsed by logical positivism, and linguistic analysis was looming on the horizon. Having said this, it is important to note that his best book (in his own opinion) was yet to be written. It was not theology, it was not literary criticism. It was a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. He entitled his book Bareface, but Geoffrey Bles, his publisher objected to the name thinking that it might be mistaken for a Western (Sayer, p. 384). After much thought, it was renamed Till We Have Faces. It is my belief that the second Lewis has made a greater contribution to theology than the first. I use the terms first and second, not with respect to chronology, but in deference to the fact that his greatest work was among his last. I say this because I suspect that the second Lewis came to life in 1908, the year his mother died, and his brother, Warnie, went to England for the beginning of his formal education. It is here that I do that which I accused others of doing in the first part of this paper. I need to line up my authorities. ( Actually, I dont need them for myself, but academics demand them.) Joseph Campbell has described, in anthropological terms, the phenomena surrounding the creation of a myth-maker, though the proper term is shaman. Listen to this conversation between Campbell and Bill Moyers: Campbell: The shamans. The shaman is the person, male or female, who in his late childhood or yearly youth has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward. Its a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up, and the shaman falls into it. This shaman experience has been described many, many times. It occurs all the way from Siberia right through the Americas down to Tierra del Fuego. Moyers: And ecstasy is a part of it. Campbell: It is. Now this may seem a stretch, from Tierra del Fuego to Oxford, but when you are traversing the earth, its on the way. The experience of humanity that Campbell has documented, if part of the human psyche, continues in the modern, capitalist world even if not recognized or valued. The proposition that the shaman experience embodies ecstasy fits with Lewis description of his lifes quest, only he describes it as joy. Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing (Surprised by Joy, p. 72). As reported in his autobiography, the pursuit of joy becomes the self-avowed quest of Lewis life. His description of the term is complex and idiosyncratic. He calls it a technical term and distinguishes it from happiness and pleasure. As if invoking double-talk, he notes that it could "equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief" (Joy, 18). He cannot with certainty associate it with his mothers death, but it is associated with childhood, with waking up crying in the middle of the night and realizing that there was no one to come. Whatever the cause, Lewis became a wanderer caught between the poles of reason and imagination. At times there appeared to be two Lewises, but the one who emerged from the wardrobe spoke the language of mythopoea. As a part of theologys debate over demythologization, Paul Tillich made this observation of Bultmanns methodology: religious language is and always must be mythological I have often stated that he should not speak of demythologization but of deliteralization, which means not taking the symbols as literal expressions of events in time and space. (Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Protestant Theology, p. 228) What excites me about the study of Lewis fiction is that it is perhaps an unrecognized attempt at deliteralization. The literary adventure became a new, non-literal vocabulary for theological meaning. He and Tolkien consciously set out to create myths to embody what they considered eternal principles. Tollers set it before Lewis as a challenge: "We shall have to write books of the sort ourselves. Supposing you write a thriller thats a time-journey-- you have such a strong sense of time-- and I will write one thats a space-journey" (Sayer, 254). To quote Sayer, "Tolkien wrote the first part of a story called "The Lost Road" and Jack wrote Out of the Silent Planet. Lewis and Tolkien shared the belief that Story (especially mythopoeic) can give nourishment without abstract meaning (The Inklings, 223). Beneath the literary effort of this enterprise is their belief that there is only one myth, that the archetype of the human mind is the inborn desire for communion with the eternal. The practical application of such a concept is revealed in a letter that Lewis wrote to Chad Walsh. Jack and Joy Lewis took an eleven-day holiday to Greece at Easter in 1960. Later, he wrote to Walsh about being awed by the ruins in Mycenae. "I had some ado to prevent Joy (and myself) from lapsing into paganism in Attica! At Delphi it was hard not to pray to Apollo the Healer. But somehow one didnt feel it would have been very wrong- it would only have been addressing Christ sub specie Appolonis" (23 May 1960). This is hardly literal, and hardly orthodox. Lewis was not captive to the idolatry of language, but a writer who saw metaphor as an attempt to express meaning beyond the words. He sought fluency in the language of an alien race, mythopoea. His feelings of disassociation from the society around him created the hunger, the yearning for the healing of the wound of individuality. As he wrote to a friend, "Oh for the people who speak ones own language" (The Inklings, 22). Robert B. Smith
Barfield, Owen. Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979. Lewis, Clive Staples. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961 ________________. Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. London: Harcourt Brace, 1955. ________________. The Abolition of Man. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1974 Sayer, George. Jack: A life of C.S. Lewis. Wheaton, Ill: Crossway Books, 1994. Tillich, Paul. Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Protestant Theology. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. |