by Joshua Shaw

Matthew Gaetano, in a previous post, has touched on C. S. Lewis’s idea of the “good dreams” of pagans which were fulfilled in the Gospel. This post treats another Cambridge scholar writing and thinking in the same vein as Lewis.

Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901) was an extraordinary New Testament scholar who brought the text of the New Testament into a new era. (He served in a sense as advisor and editor to his Cambridge pupil J. F. A. Hort who did in fact a lion’s share of the work on their New Testament in Greek).  Westcott’s commentaries on The Epistle to the Hebrews, the Gospel and Epistles of John are still (or ought to be) necessary reading for anyone wanting to deal with these texts on a scholarly level. The one on John’s Gospel, in particular, was called by F.F. Bruce “immortal.”

In future posts we will have a chance to look in more depth at the Cambridge Trio (Westcott, Hort, and Lightfoot) and especially the ways in which they strove to uphold orthodoxy and traditional views without isolating themselves from the outside world. We will also see how groundless the assertions are of those who hail them as harbingers of higher criticism and all its woes, bringing the plague of Germany to England – nothing could have been farther from their intentions. More importantly, neither the results nor the methods of their work justifies such a claim. As a pledge of the proof to come, the reader may read the prefaces to one of Westcott’s important contributions to the biblical scholarship of his day: the history of the biblical Canon. (The historian Henry Chadwick called it (pp. 10ff.) the most important of its kind up to the day of his lecture – 1960, that is, nearly a century after first written).

Signal marks of their scholarship (and life, so far as it can be now observed) were reverence, a living faith, and deep study, not doubt and iconoclasm (and certainly not a pedantic exaggeration of the importance of textual criticism). Ironically, both fundamentalists and liberal scholars have colluded in spinning a narrative which serves their purposes, each by turns. (Note the use by these fundamentalists of Adolf von Harnack!). We hope to look at these claims separately in future posts.

Chadwick, a translator of Augustine, Clement, and Origen, and great early Church historian, said of Westcott in particular, “Perhaps there is no figure in the history of Victorian Cambridge of whom it is more true to say that he being dead yet speaketh.” A popular quotation on the backs of C. S. Lewis’s volumes speaks of a dinosaur who still speaks to us where we are. Their similarities, it turns out, may not be superficial or accidental.

Christian Platonists Hang Together?

Christian Platonism is a theme we hope to pursue at TRF (see here) – it has occurred to many that both of the Church’s greatest theologians from the first four centuries were inspired by Platonism: namely, Origen and Augustine. This inspiration, to varying degrees, was widespread in many authors of the time (Justin Martyr, Clement, Eusebius, Basil, Athanasius, and the Gregorys in the East; Ambrose especially in the West). Through later authors like Pseudo-Dionysius and, much later, the Renaissance Platonists, and still later the Cambridge Platonists, Platonism maintains its relevance. In times not long past men like B. F. Westcott and C. S. Lewis carried this powerful tradition forward. It has been pointed out time and again that this “influence” (odious word!) and even allegiance does not, by itself, “invalidate” the theology of these men. Ideas do not flow into (influere) us as inert sops. Perhaps instead of the unhelpful “influence” we should speak of a “relationship” – a relationship, even a reverent relationship, which we can now interrogate and learn from.

Links in the Tradition

I was first tipped off by a likely connection between Westcott’s exegesis of Hebrews 2:18 and Lewis’s coverage of the same question in Mere Christianity – namely, how could Christ be truly “tempted in all points as we were tempted,” remain sinless, and still have full sympathy (συμπαθεία) with our plight? There are multiple points of resonance between the following quotations.

… Sympathy with the sinner in his trial does not depend on the experience of sin but on the experience of the strength of the temptation to sin which only the sinless can know in its full intensity. He who falls yields before the last strain. … Sin indeed dulls sympathy by obscuring the idea of evil.

Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, 60 – 61 (here).

This formulation seems to sound in Lewis’s famous quote from Mere Christianity.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. … A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.

We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.

Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book III.11 (Faith)

Coincidence?

Now for the connection alluded to in the title: here is a quotation from Westcott’s treatment of the Apostle’s Creed, The Historic Faith, which touches briefly on the relationship of Plato to Christianity.

This thought of a life eternal, underlying, so to speak, the fleeting phenomena of sense, is characteristic of Christianity; it is included in the fact of the Incarnation, and it meets our present distress and disharmony with a message of hope…

Man is made to seek for the rest which [the Communion of Saints] provides. Most of those who hear me will remember the magnificent myth in the Phaedrus, in which Plato seeks to explain the origin of the highest forces in our earthly being. On stated days human souls, he says, follow in the train of the gods, and rising above the world gaze on the eternal and the absolute. It is only by strenuous and painful endeavour that they can gain for a brief space the vision, which is the appointed food of diviner natures. Then they fall to earth, and their bodily life corresponds with the range and clearness of the celestial impressions which they retain. So they recognize about them during their early sojourn the images of higher things, and again strive upwards.

For us the revelation of Christ has made this dream a truth.

The Historic Faith, 270-271 (here).

Again, take a second look at Matthew’s previous post.

On similar lines Westcott called Plato’s sigh for a divine word at Phaedo 85 B (θεῖος λόγος), on whose certain authority we might cross the turbulent seas of life, a “sublime prayer” answered by the Gospel (here). Prayers answered and dreams fulfilled by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

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It is probably enough simply to say that both are Christian Platonists and be done with it. (We may explore Lewis’s Platonism in another post.) Perhaps then there is nothing further to note, but Lewis did – and this is a fact largely unknown – serve four years on the council of the Westcott house, and did – this is more well known – also deliver a lecture there. I would oppose the opinion of some who suppose that because Lewis takes a polemic tone in this lecture that he is opposed to the house in general (why would he have served on the board?) or Westcott in particular[i]. If Lewis did in fact have a hostile audience to his message at the Westcott house, it is because the Westcott house had abandoned the principles of their master, who spent his life in opposition to the so-called Tübingen School of scholarship, of whom Rudolf Bultmann was an intellectual heir. Indeed, “A theology which denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia” is as much like Westcott’s theology as black is like white (second paragraph here).

This much at least can be said for now: Lewis’s jab at Bultmann about his ignorance of anything beyond the New Testament would have fallen embarrassingly flat against Westcott, whose knowledge of Greek and Latin literature almost certainly surpassed Lewis’s own (see here, here and for general marks of his astonishing erudition the essays here). If Lewis really intended an assault against Westcott – all I can say is, awkward.

But whatever else Lewis was, he was rarely charged of indolence and scant reading: I would therefore suggest that if he indeed had any covert motivation for serving on the above-named council, or for giving this lecture, it was to remind them the height from which they had fallen and to revive the noble tradition of a reverent and faithful “Christian Platonism.”

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[i] here 93 n. 13. The very notion of Westcott’s “broad liberal tradition” is patent nonsense to anyone who has read at least 20 pages of Westcott’s own writings.