THE LIFE, RELIGION, AND FICTION OF C. S. LEWIS
REL 390 -Spring 2002
10:00-10:50 a.m. MWF

This course will examine the interconnection between the life and fiction of a twentieth century author. C.S. ("Jack") Lewis was known to many as a Christian apologist whose BBC broadcasts made him an influential advocate of a conservative theology. He also belonged to an informal group of writers who called themselves the "Inklings". Long-term members of the group included his brother, Warren Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Arguably, his fiction provides his greatest contribution, and he considered myth-making an art form. His writings provide metaphors for the exploration of the sacred and profane in themes of God, time, creation, human nature, death, grief, alienation, and self-discovery.

Instructor: Dr. Robert B. Smith, 131 Allyn Hall, 775-2274. The best way to contact me is by E-mail: robert.b.smith@wright.edu. Office hours are by appointment. I have created a website for the purpose of this course, and it can be accessed through my faculty page http://www.wright.edu/~robert.b.smith or here.

Class Procedure: Classes will be devoted to discussions of the readings and supplemented by lectures. While the required readings will be drawn from Lewis’ fiction, excerpts from his others writings and biographies will be included in class presentations. These include: The Four Loves, Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy, and the BBC movie, Shadowlands.

Required Reading List:

The Chronicles of Narnia
The Great Divorce
The Screwtape Letters
Till We Have Faces

March

25M The Early Years: From Boxen to Oxford

27W The Meaning of Joy: A life’s theme

29F Outside the Box: The Power of Myth

April

1M The Inklings and Others

3W Christian Apologetics and the BBC

5F Through the Shadowlands

8M Through the Shadowlands

10W The Screwtape Letters

12F The Screwtape Letters

15M Boxen Revisited: The World through the Wardrobe. (On Stories and Other Essays on
Literature, edited by Walter Hooper.

17W Themes of Narnia: Nature

19F Themes of Narnia: God

22M Themes of Narnia: Humanity

24W Inkling Experience

26F The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

29M Inkling Experience

May

1W The Magician’s Newphew

3F Inkling Experience

6M The Last Battle

8W The Great Divorce

10F The Great Divorce

13M Examination

15W The Four Loves

17F The Four Loves

20M Dymer, The Myth of Psyche, and Till We Have Faces: The thread of redemption

22W Till We Have Faces

24F Till We Have Faces

27M (No Class - Memorial Day)

29W Clouds and Controversy

31F Review

Reason and Imagination

"There is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and he wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on."

Mere Christianity

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things- trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that , in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones."

The Silver Chair

Journal: Class participants are required to keep a journal. The theme is Reason and Imagination (after a Lewis poem). You may write observations and/or reactions to the subject material or explore your own directions in mythopoeia. Three class sessions will be "Inkling Experiences". You should be prepared to share your best journal entries in a small group setting. The group’s purpose will be to help refine your ideas, so that the final product will be presented as a term paper.

The Works of C. S. Lewis

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
A Grief Observed (1961)
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)

CHILDREN'S FICTION
The Horse and His Boy (1954)
The Last Battle (1956)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
The Magician's Nephew (1955)
Prince Caspian (1951)
The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" (1952)
The Silver Chair (1953)

ADULT FICTION
The Great Divorce (1945)
Out of the Silent Planet (1938)
Perelandra (1943)
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)
The Screwtape Letters (1942) [with Screwtape Proposes a Toast (1961)]
That Hideous Strength (1945)
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)

NONFICTION
The Abolition of Man (1943)
The Allegory of Love (1936)
Beyond Personality (1944)
Broadcast Talks (1942)
Christian Behaviour (1943)
The Discarded Image (1964)
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954)
An Experiment in Criticism (1961)
The Four Loves (1960)
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964)
Mere Christianity (1952)
Miracles (1947)
The Problem of Pain (1940)
Reflections on the Psalms (1958)
Studies in Words (1960)

LETTERS
Letters to an American Lady (1967), ed. by Clyde S. Kilby
Letters to Children (1985), ed. by Lyle W. Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead
Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), ed. by Warren H. Lewis
They Stand Together The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 1914-1963 (1979), ed. Hooper

ESSAY COLLECTIONS BY C. S. LEWIS
Christian Reflections (1967), ed. by Walter Hooper
Fern-Seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity (1975), ed. W. Hooper
God in the Dock (1970) [Undeceptions in England] ed. W.Hooper
Of Other Worlds (1966), ed. by W. Hooper
Present Concerns (1986), ed. by W. Hooper
Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)
Selected Literary Essays (1969), ed. by W. Hooper
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966), ed. by Walter Hooper
The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (1980), expanded and edited by W. Hooper
The World's Last Night and Other Essays (1960)

POETRY
Dymer (1926) [originally published under pseudonym Clive Hamilton]
Narrative Poems (1969), ed. by Walter Hooper
Poems (1964), ed. by Walter Hooper
Spirits in Bondage (1919) [originally published under pseudonym Clive Hamilton]

BOOKS EDITED BY C. S. LEWIS
Arthurian Torso (1948)
Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947)
George MacDonald: An Anthology (1946)

Other Resources:

Augustine, Aurelius. On Christian Doctrine, (trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr). New York: Bobbs-Merrill,
1958.

Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1977.

Campbell, Joseph. Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor. Novato, California: New World
Library, 2001.

______________. The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1953.

Jung, Carl. G. Man and His Symbols. New York: Bantam Doubleday, 1964.

Lindskoog, Kathryn. Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress. Chicago:
Cornerstone Press, 1995.

________________. Journey Into Narnia. Pasadena, California: Hope Publishing House, 1998.

________________. Sleuthing C. S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands. Macon, Georgia: Mercer
University Press, 2001.

Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1988.

Starters (Lewis Quotations)

"Of course [healthy] patriotism… is not in the least bit aggressive. It asks only to be let alone. It becomes militant only to protect what it loves. In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination it produces a good attitude toward foreigners. How can I love my home without coming to realize that other men no less rightly love theirs." The Four Loves

"I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than him." The Letters of C. S. Lewis

For my own part I hate and distrust reactions not only in religion but in everything else. Luther surely spoke very good sense when he compared humanity to a drunkard who, after falling off his horse on the right, falls off it the next time on the left… If [the doctrine of the second coming] has recently been exaggerated, we must now take special care not to overlook it; for that is the side on which the drunk man is now most likely to fall off." The World’s Last Night

"A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion." The Weight of Glory

"One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become less than human." God in the Dock

"If the divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God." Reflections on the Psalms

"God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them." The Four Loves

"A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our loves, tastes, habits, etc.) can do the journey on their own." Letters of C. S. Lewis

"I ended my first book with the words no answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You yourself are the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?" Till We Have Faces

"’Welcome, child,’ he said.
‘Aslan," said Lucy, ‘you’re bigger.’
‘That is because you are older, little one,’ answered he.
‘Not because you are?’
‘I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.’"
Prince Caspian

"Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?" Christian Reflections

"I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside." The Problem of Pain

"One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realize your need for God. If everything seems to come simple by signing checks, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God." Mere Christianity

"I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is simply because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous." Reflections on the Psalms

"Perfect love, we know, casteth out fear. But so do several other things- ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity. It is very desirable that we should all advance to that perfection of love in which we shall fear no longer; but it is very undesirable, until we have reached that stage, that we should allow any inferior agent to cast out our fear." The World’s Last Night

"God designed the human machine to run on himself. He himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." Mere Christianity

"The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are." Selected Literary Essays

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in hell choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened." The Great Divorce