Michael Ward , Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis . Michael Ward. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+347. The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis . Edited by Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xx+328.
2012; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 110; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/667958
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeMichael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis. Michael Ward. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+347. Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis. Michael Ward. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+347. The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis. Edited by Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xx+328.Charles RossCharles RossPurdue University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe thesis of Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia is that Lewis used images of the planets to order his Narnia chronicles and give them each what might be called a “Christological” flavor. Lewis’s leading character, Aslan the lion, does not directly mirror the Jesus of the annunciation, nativity, boyhood, and ascension as told in the Gospels. Rather, he incorporates various aspects that medieval lore associated with the seven planets, not unlike the way Hamlet describes his father: “the front of Jove himself, / An eye like Mars, to threaten and command, / A station like the herald Mercury / New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill, / A combination and a form indeed, / Where every god did seem to set his seal” (Hamlet 3.4.55–60, quoted in Ward, Planet Narnia, 239). Thus Ward argues that Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) is a Jovial king. There is a Martian commander in Prince Caspian (1951). Solar Light (“I am the light of the world” [ John 8:12]) characterizes The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (1952). The moon reflects the sun as the Son the Father in The Silver Chair (1953). Mercury is related to speech (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” [ John 1:1]) in The Horse and His Boy (1954). God as life combines with imagery of Venus in The Magician’s Nephew (1955), and cold, old Saturn represents God’s mystery in The Last Battle (1956).Lewis never told anyone, including his brother or Tolkien, about the planetary imagery, and Ward begins his book by sketching Lewis’s secretive or at least highly compartmentalized way of life to try to explain why. He ends the book by giving a personal account of his discovery, which involved teaching the Narnia books to undergraduates for ten years, working at Lewis’s home, the Kilns, writing a dissertation on Christ in Lewis’s work, thinking over what Lewis says about wordless prayer in Letters to Malcolm (1964), conversing about Lewis with a Russian Orthodox ascetic, and then reading chapter 5 of Lewis’s Discarded Image (1964). He read Lewis’s poem “The Planets,” then connected the passing of winter with Jupiter.A Spenserian reading Planet Narnia will probably be reminded of Alistair Fowler’s Spenser and the Numbers of Time (London: Routledge, 1964), which assigns a planet (and sometimes a myth) to the seven books of The Faerie Queene. But there are differences. For Fowler, book 1 is solar, the second book is lunar, the third belongs to Venus, the fourth book on friendship comes under the sign of Mercury, Jupiter reigns over the fifth book, Venus comes around again for book 6, and Saturn presides in the concluding Mutability Cantos. Mars is not represented. Fowler also works out the number symbolism of each book: monads, duads, triads, quaternions, and so forth. In a passage that should be added to Ward’s list of Lewis’s secrecies, Fowler mentions “the fruitful scepticism of the late C. S. Lewis, than whom no better teacher nor more stimulating disputant could well be imagined” (xii) when he gave him the the first section of his book, on number symbolism, which Fowler had published separately in the Journal of the Warburg Institute in 1963. If Lewis knew that Fowler was also arguing for a planetary ordering to the books of The Faerie Queene, he did not say anything to him about it. Such reticence would fit the pattern of Lewis’s habitual secrecy.But one may argue that Lewis had another basis for holding back, one that sheds light on any attempt to make sense of the man. It may be that Lewis was too tactful or polite to say anything to his former pupil. Fowler’s pattern does not match the one Lewis used. But it is also possible, and it is implicit in the detective work that went into Planet Narnia, that there are multiple possible meanings and colorations for each of the planets. Ward is nothing if not a genius at teasing out recondite associations for each presiding planet of each volume, using a variety of sources. As an ordained Anglican priest, Ward is also an expert at identifying and applying Christian doctrine to the novels’ plots and themes. He writes lucid prose, his organization is effective, and he is doubtless a future prospect for archbishop of Canterbury.But it is important to remember that Ward is describing works of art. The Narnia novels may mirror religious truth, but they are not truth itself. Indeed, much of Lewis’s fiction is about what Christianity might be like in another world, and the Narnia books are no exception. And much of his thought is attractive because Lewis admits the inadequacy of language. There is an anecdote somewhere by a former student who was persuaded by Lewis’s enthusiasm to read Lydgate and was frankly disappointed. I myself reread Lydgate’s Temple of Glass (1477) after reading Planet Narnia. The verse and the dream were as drab as ever, but I certainly was able to appreciate how important the moonshine at the end of the poem was in Lewis’s imagination. One can now begin to understand the joy Lewis derived from George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), an enthusiasm not shared by many.Neither Planet Narnia nor The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis spend much time considering what is often fodder in Lewis studies, the death of his mother when he was nine years old and his relationship with the mother of a friend who was killed in World War I, whom he lived with and cared for until her death and about whom few of his acquaintances had any knowledge. Nor is there much use of Lewis’s character and personal life, about which we have learned a great deal from his diaries, the autobiographical Surprised by Joy (1955), letters, and reminiscences written by former students, colleagues, and acquaintances. There is nothing on homosexuality or the Oxford historian A. L. Rowse, who knew Lewis and complains that Lewis “unaccountably skips over” the leap he made from “belief in a God-inspired universe” to Christianity and its “illusions unnecessary to reasonable belief” (“The Personality of C. S. Lewis,” in Glimpses of the Great [Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985], 208). What characterizes and connects the books is not so much discussion of Lewis’s personality or religion itself but the cognitive aspects of Lewis’s thought. There is less gossip and more insight into Lewis’s writings.Robert MacSwain’s introduction says that it was a desire for comprehensiveness that led to the volume’s publication in the Cambridge Companions to Religion series rather than in the literary series. Indeed, with a few exceptions, such as the essays by Mark Edwards (“Classicist”) and T. A. Shippey (“The Ransom Trilogy”), which are two of the best, neither book makes much of an effort to discuss the relationship between the literature Lewis read and his own writing. No one appears to have reconsidered Lewis’s oeuvre after a rereading of, for example, Sidney’s Arcadia, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or Thomas More’s Latin prose works, let alone the three sources Lewis considered necessary for a student of medieval literature to know: Virgil, Ovid, and the Bible. This volume is not the place to read about the perfect world of Oxford in 1920s that Evelyn Waugh describes in Brideshead Revisited (1945). No one mentions Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicist reading of Lewis reading Spenser’s garden of Adonis (Renaissance Self-Fashioning [University of Chicago Press, 1980], 170–71), although Stephen Logan distinguishes Lewis’s version of literary theory, which was “the practice of reflecting philosophically on the nature and function of literature” (29), from what is meant by modern “Theory”—that is, gender, race, sexual orientation, the institutions where literature is studied, or “how we form a sense of what a literary text means” (30).The editors instead chose, in addition to literary scholars, a number of seasoned scholars whose work in religious studies generally falls outside the purview of a literary scholar. Their essays are most useful when they offer a concise summary of their earlier books and articles on Lewis’s religious thought. For example, Gilbert Meilander’s essay “On Moral Knowledge” helpfully encapsulates his earlier work on Christian ethics (e.g., The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C. S. Lewis [1978]) and focuses on Lewis’s Abolition of Man (1943). Kevin J. Vanhoozer’s chapter “On Scripture” distinguishes looking “at” from looking “along” scripture, an idea found in Lewis’s essay “Meditation in a Toolshed” (1945), which Michael Ward also refers to at length in Planet Narnia, using it to explain the cognitive power of the Narnia books to create enjoyment even though millions of readers have been ignorant of the structuring principle he has discovered. Joseph P. Cassidy compares Lewis’s Screwtape Letters (1942) and Letters to Malcolm with St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (1522–24). In an exception to the rule that the essays in The Cambridge Companion avoid ad hominem arguments, Cassidy concludes that Lewis often complained in his writings about the “irksome work” of doing our “fundamental duty” this side of heaven, in contrast to Ignatius, for whom duty was motivated by “gratitude” and “loving desire” that “compel the will” (144).There can be little doubt that Lewis’s books such as A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942) have taught Christianity to many literary scholars who otherwise would have been lost discussing religion in Milton or any other author. Literary scholars will be interested in reading how professional theologians judge Lewis’s ideas. Most of the religiously oriented essays use Lewis’s scattered, often hard-to-find, or overlooked essays to bring additional clarity to his thought and fiction. The best approach, as in Paul S. Fiddes’s “On Theology,” is not to slavishly track a single book but to summarize Lewis’s thought and then tell us what is in accord or not with Christian tradition. In general there are a lot of minor disagreements and tsk-tskings but overall approval. For example, Caroline J. Simon’s essay “On Love” starts with Lewis’s Four Loves (1960), which like Mere Christianity (1952) was based on a series of radio broadcasts. Like several other essays in this volume, “On Love” advances a key word, in this case “distortion,” to show how Lewis expresses “evil” in the Augustinian sense of the absence of good. Her conclusion that “Christ’s sacrificial love…redeems our loves’ distortions” (157) may seem a bit of a logical leap to readers looking to learn something about how Christians view, in this case, the sacrifice.Michael Ward’s essay “On Suffering” corrects the Shadowlands (1993) version of Lewis’s life, where it is only through the loss of his wife in the 1950s that Lewis learned that loss is part of love. Ward, instead, looks at what Lewis learned about suffering from the time of World War I to his conversion in 1931. The essay is a tour de force of detail and command of Lewis scholarship. Even before he converted, the biblical passage Lewis most often quoted was “Why hast Thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). Reading Bertrand Russell, Lewis decided that it was logical nonsense to curse God for the death of the good (204). A conversation (while on Addison’s walk in Oxford) made him see the biblical story of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection as “a language more adequate” (206) for the pattern of dying and reviving than he found in stories about Balder, Adonis, or Bacchus, because Christianity connected suffering and sacrifice. Then it was from George MacDonald that Lewis learned to die so he could wake (206).Lewis has never been recognized as much of a poet. His envy of T. S. Eliot is plain enough, but his own poems tend toward the development of ideas (sort of like the poems of Kenneth Burke) rather than keenly observed images. Lewis himself said that real religious verse is generally about the fear that God is not listening (review of David Cecil’s Oxford Book of Religious Verse [1939], Review of English Studies 17 [1941]: 95–102), and Ward turns to a set of poems called “Five Sonnets” to show a “lived, Christian response to suffering” (211). These are in Collected Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount, 1994), and were not published in Lewis’s lifetime. In general one wants keep in mind the evidentiary value of unpublished work and the effect on Lewis scholarship of Hooper’s pervasive editorial practices. But Lewis’s poetry will be harder to dismiss after the reappraisal begun by Malcolm Guite in the chapter “Poet.” Lewis had an astonishing range, including a Lancelot and a poem along the lines of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Guite argues for Lewis’s ecological consciousness, and anyone who reads the many descriptions of landscapes in his letters would have to agree that Lewis was an environmentalist. Lewis deplored our “tragic alienation from nature,” reprimanding Simon Barrington-Ward for deprecating the flat Cambridge landscape (C. S. Lewis Remembered, ed. Harry Lee Poe and Rebecca Whitten Poe [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006], 22).Given the moral and ethical slant of the Cambridge Companion essays, I was hoping that someone would take on the first pages of Lewis’s Mere Christianity, where Lewis claims that because people so often use the word “ought,” we know there are moral standards, and we know that we fall short of them (originally part of The Case for Christianity in 1943, the section appears titled as “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe,” in Mere Christianity [1952; New York: HarperCollins, 1980], 3–8). The editors found no philosopher of language who might have discussed the linguistic aspect of Lewis’s argument or set it in the context of modern philosophy after, say, Wittgenstein, perhaps because, as Victor Reppert has noted, “Lewis did not develop a detailed response to logical positivism, or to Wittgenstein’s philosophy, or to other current developments, and so one could say with Austin Farrer that he ‘dropped out of the game’” (C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003], 20). John Beversluis, who otherwise criticizes Lewis’s mode of argument, has nothing particular to say on the issue of right and wrong (C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, rev. ed. [Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007], 72). In The Cambridge Companion Charles Taliaferro approaches the issue by citing Michael Ruse as saying that the word “ought” gives “the illusion of objectivity” (117 n. 20, referring to Ruse’s Taking Darwin Seriously [Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998], 253). Taliaferro’s essay “On Naturalism” summarizes his own sustained scholarship on Lewis’s ideas about separating nature from out thinking about nature. Again, the issue of cognition predominates.In 1940 Lewis read a paper at Oxford against pacifism. Stanley Hauerwas, in his chapter “On Violence,” nonetheless argues Lewis should have been a pacifist, and his essay was worth including as an indication of the wider circles in which Lewis is studied. Similarly, the inclusion of an essay by John Fleming reminds us where to turn for arguments that Lewis’s history was weak in The Allegory of Love (1936), a complaint often made about Lewis’s work. But let us be clear: we need to be as skeptical about Lewis’s history of the rise of romantic love as we are of Stephen Greenblatt’s thesis that self-fashioning was characteristic of the English Renaissance. These are best considered as organizational tropes, while The Allegory of Love and Renaissance Self-Fashioning remain two of the most important books in medieval and Renaissance studies.Lewis also ruffled many feathers when he refused to endorse the ordination of women as Anglican priests on the grounds that it was not biblically warranted. Several of Lewis’s letters refer disparagingly to women, and he had a satirical vein (surprisingly sharp and not the subject of any essay) that shows up in his portrait of the marriage of Jane and Mark Studdock in That Hideous Strength (1945). As Shippey comments, “Lewis’s views on the nature of Christian marriage are probably unacceptable to almost everyone” despite his presentation of a “feminine heroic” (248). Ann Loades’s essay “On Gender” touches on these difficult topics. She too corrects Lewis’s history, giving a brief history of the ordination of women, but ends by suggesting the possibility that by “masculinity” (meaning not “biology” but rather the deeper sense conveyed by “masculine”) Lewis meant that deep self-sacrifice and forgiveness, that alternative to violence, which he understood in Christ (170).Designed to be comprehensive, The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis includes chapters on the rest of Lewis’s fiction. David Jasper tantalizingly refers to the “tightly drawn allegories of historical figures such as Spinoza, Hegel, Kant, Marx and Freud” (226) in Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) and the rhetorical effectiveness of Surprised by Joy. Jerry L. Walls avoids the personal heresy issue by refusing to relate the lizard of lust that is successfully killed in The Great Divorce (1945) to Lewis’s own suppressed sexual needs (256); he also explains the difficult imagery of that book, where people feel pain while walking on the grass of heaven, as an indication that people prefer other things to joy. Peter J. Schakel summarizes his previous work on the novel that was Lewis’s favorite among his own novels, Till We Have Faces (1956), showing how Orvual’s loves “turn possessive and destructive” (286). Alan Jacobs was assigned the task of writing a chapter on the Chronicles of Narnia in the wake of the book by Michael Ward, whose arguments he usefully condenses.Millions of readers know about Lewis because of Narnia, and others through Mere Christianity or The Screwtape Letters, but these are not keys to the man or his thought, just parts of the phenomenon. I myself got to know Lewis mainly from his literary criticism, his major works of apologetics, his brother’s selection of letters published in 1966, and Surprised by Joy, which I found a useful guide to certain parts of Irish society. I recognized that Perelandra (1943) was a fictional version of the ideas in A Preface to “Paradise Lost” but had no fond memory of the rest of the Ransom trilogy (something Shippey’s essay has corrected). Having translated Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and Statius’s Thebaid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), essentially on Lewis’s recommendation, I decided a few years ago to find out more about the man who seems to have organized a good portion of my life. I read through the three-volume Collected Letters (2000–2006) and then tackled the Narnia novels, which I had avoided on the grounds that a guy from New Jersey (me) does not read stories about English kids wearing short pants. There are some who still cannot abide Narnia, but I was rather charmed and remained so after rereading them recently for our English department’s C. S. Lewis reading group over the last two years. I like how Lewis’s plots usually focus on a moral decision and its consequences. I am rather sorry Lewis is a cult figure, because I think his Christianity is not coterminous with “Christianity.” He thought for himself and published on religion only when he had thought through an issue to his own satisfaction.Judith Wolfe’s essay “On Power” comes closest to my own view of Lewis. Many people who are not aware of how liberal Lewis could be object to what they see as Lewis’s monarchical and old-fashioned attitudes. Wolfe’s chapter starts with the objections of Polly Toynbee to Narnia’s hierarchy of power, which includes too many obedient inferiors and superior whites (“Narnia Represents Everything That Is Most Hateful about Religion,” Guardian, December 5, 2005). Philip Pullman, too, detests “the supernaturalism, the reactionary sneering, the misogyny, the racism, and the sheer dishonesty” of Lewis’s “narrative method” (“The Dark Side of Narnia,” Guardian, October 1, 1998). Wolfe counters that Lewis “has a strong distaste for racism of any kind” and that the portrayal of the Calormenes in The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle “is a literary Orientalism suitable to the romance genre in which Lewis is writing, rather than a political or anthropological view” (179). She discusses Lewis’s literary patriotism as a love of home distinct from “patriotism as a prosaic belief in the absolute superiority of one’s nation” (179), and she properly cites “Religion and Rocketry” (1958) on Lewis’s view of the appalling behavior of Westerners toward indigenous peoples (180). It was his belief that people in power are fallen, not divine. To understand Lewis’s religious thought and the imagery he uses in his fiction, one must distinguish the affinity, but not identity, between political hierarchy and the model he uses in literary criticism. Lewis himself in “Christianity and Literature,” in Rehabilitations and Other Essays (Oxford University Press, 1939), had trouble distinguishing his theological vision of hierarchy from “natural law ethics” or “particular political structures,” and so, Wolfe argues, he turned to fiction rather than essays (183). When he makes Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy kings and queens, it is not a political comment about the Pevensies’ rule of Narnia, just the choice of a writer who preferred his heroes not be millionaires or athletes.No doubt there is more to say, just as there are quibbles to make. Edwards says Lewis did not take up Homer’s Odyssey “as frequently” as he did English favorites or read it with the “passion” that he read ancient Norse (60), but his copy of The Odyssey in the rare book collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, shows that in fact Lewis read it, in Greek no less, more often than any other book: “At Bookham, 1916”; “The Twenty-Eighth of August 1919”; “Re-read, March 10th 1943”; “Re-read March 27th 1947”; “Aug. 12th 1952 (at Golden Arrow)”; “April 4th 1954”; Aug. 29th 1956”; “4 Oct. 1961” (the dates refer to when he finished a complete reading).Finally, there must be a better way to cite Lewis’s minor essays than by reference to Lesley Walmsley’s out-of-print Essay Collection (London: HarperCollins, 2000); I would recommend giving information about the original place of publication in the future. These dates would sort out the chronology of Lewis’s thought. That chronology is important for scholars and readers who study him. For the general public in one hundred or two hundred years, Lewis may well be the twentieth century’s great man of letters. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 110, Number 2November 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/667958 Views: 1630Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
Referência(s)