by Joshua Shaw

In the previous two posts we began to look at the polemic against pagan literature in Eusebius and but briefly at one aspect of Lewis’s own (somewhat frightening) re-imagination of that pagan world in Till We Have Faces. Eusebius wanted to destroy the great poetry of the world’s pagan past (Homer and Hesiod especially). Lewis apparently did not. Ironically, it is Lewis’s re-envisioning of paganism which enables us to feel the force of patristic arguments about burning pagan books. This is how I have framed the connection; is there justification for this view in Lewis’s own words?

Matthew Gaetano has shown already the way in which Lewis explained on a theological level the kind of enterprise he undertook in writing Till We Have Faces, evincing, as it does, some of those “good dreams” God granted to pagan authors before the coming of Christ. There (in TWHF) the jealous, clinging love of Orual and defiance igorance of divine revelation is counterpointed by the holiness and sacrifice of Psyche. Here in this post we will look at his professional examination (as author and critic) of the same basic activity: wide, deep, and sympathetic reading and, by extension, writing.

Getting out to Get in

Lewis makes a forcible argument in An Experiment in Criticism for receptive reading. This means reading that relishes every word and syllable of a work, that takes in and does not use, that patiently waits upon, or works to draw out, the full image of the author’s making. Whether a work of art demands (and often receives) this kind of reading and re-reading, he says, is a better judgement of its worth than some critic’s appraisal of the work’s “goodness” or “badness.” Do many people carefully read and re-read and find with each new reading fresh traces of artful design? If so, it is a good book; for a good book describes in detail the object of its study and begs our close attention.

But what about books written by those beyond our class or sect or denomination or race or religion? Lewis argues for the reading of every kind of good book from whatever culture or background: the materialist Lucretius or the Christian Dante can both be read and appreciated by a Christian or an materialistic atheist. But why should we?

What then is the good of—what is even the defense for—occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? … The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself. … To acquiesce in this particularity on the sensuous level … would be lunacy. … We are not content to be Leibnitzian monads. We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors. One of the things we feel after reading a great work is ‘I have got out’. Or from another point of view, ‘I have got in.’

An Experiment In Criticism. Canto Classics repr. 1961, 137-8.

And further,

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself when I do. (140-141)

Lewis thus argues for wide and deep reading of all good works of literature for the sake of widening and deepening, and even to a certain extent transcending, the human experience. I argued elsewhere, applying a similar principle to dialogue between Protestants and Catholics, that such reading has the further benefit of exercising our “organs of fancy”: our faculty for discerning good and bad, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. An intellectual life in an echo-chamber condemns these organs to decay by disuse.

Intellectual Generosity Under Hostile Conditions

Yet if we pause to look back at Eusebius we must acknowledge that sometimes the wound is too fresh. It is a truism that “that which has ceased to be formidable becomes capable of calm analysis.” When your mother or sister or brother or father were tortured and fed to the lions in the last persecution, who can blame you for wanting to burn the books of those who did it? This is especially intelligible when the perpetrators at times received inspiration from these works (a great example of this is the use of the mythical exemplars in the devising of torture–see the Roman poet Martial’s Book of Spectacles, where mythology becomes a playbook for Colosseum torture ). So, some empathy is in order. Thankfully Christianity as a whole decided it worthwhile to keep the old books rather than burn them. (Even if Lucretius only just survived through the re-discovery of two manuscripts: admittedly the preservation of pagan and especially materialist works of literature was not high on the priority list. This is the standard introduction to Greek and Latin textual transmission).

Yet we should not content ourselves with saying that literature enlarges our being and practices our moral reasoning. It can even be a part of our sanctification.

This brings us to a higher point than Lewis was making. Applying this sort of receptive reading to philosophy and history as well as literature, we may say that the self-denial involved in generously and patiently reading the works of those with whom we on principle disagree savors of Christ’s command to “turn the other cheek.” Is the act of self-mortification (making the self die) here involved not of a similar character? Are we not, in an act of love, surrendering our sense of control in order to understand the other? Perhaps we are in the same moment offering ourselves to be beaten.

The right kind of reading can thus bring us to the right kind of dialogue and become not only enriching and strengthening but even spiritually commendable. Books stand in for authors: if we cannot give them the treatment called for in Matthew 5—when we are alone and at rest and the authors are removed from our sight—how can we, to give St. John’s language a different turn (I John 4:20), hope to love our neighbor whom we do see? A generous and receptive reading of an Author is not so different from the patient and self-sacrificial love for the Other.