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Dating the Undated Poems in Don King’s Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition
No full textDon W. King made a monumental contribution to Lewis studies when he released his Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition. Prior to this volume, Lewis’s poetry was scattered among at least four books and much remained unpublished. King gathered all of Lewis’s poetry, apart from a few poetic fragments, into a single volume. Since the book’s publication in 2015, a handful of additional Lewis poems have been discovered. Nevertheless, the fact that the vast majority of Lewis’s poetry now exists in a single volume remains a huge step forward in Lewis scholarship and our ability to appreciate Lewis as poet. King’s approach was to publish the poems in chronological order, assigning dates based on a variety of factors including year of publication and the appearance of poems in dated letters. In some instances, King had to offer his best scholarly guess, giving “circa” dates to the poems, and in the case of forty-seven poems, King was able to provide no date at all. These poems he placed in a section at the back of the Critical Edition
Re-dating an Inklings Photograph
No full textPerhaps the most delightful and helpful introductory biography of C. S. Lewis is Walter Hooper’s Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography. Published in 1982, it was the first book I reviewed for an academic journal as a freshly minted PhD graduate. The lavish presence of photographs takes the reader into the world of Lewis from his earliest childhood until his death in 1963. Hooper probably knew more about Lewis and his works than any other person, but even Hooper had to make educated guesses from time to time, which very rarely proved wrong
C. S. Lewis’s Lost French Doctorate
No full textBefore the American Narnia films, C. S. Lewis was virtually unknown in France. Even today, his fame is nowhere near the level it has reached in the English-speaking world, be it in academia, among Christians, or in popular culture. The number of French doctoral theses or books on Lewis is extremely small. As for the French translations of his books, many of them are now out of print. However, this was not always the case. Lewis has never been as well-known in France as in Britain or America, but during his lifetime he achieved a certain fame in secular universities, in Christian intellectual circles and, to a lesser extent, among readers of science fiction and fantasy. In academia, he was respected as a specialist in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
Beatitudes for This World
No full textBlessed are those who unfairly labor; they shall allocate the fruits
David Baggett, Gary R. Habermas and Jerry L. Walls, eds., C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty, 3rd ed.
No full textA review of David Baggett, Gary R. Habermas and Jerry L. Walls, eds. C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty, 3rd ed. (Houston, TX: High Bridge Books, 2024). 543 pages. $25.99. ISBN 9781962802116
Aaron Blair, A Joyful Outpost: Exploring the Household Economy of the Beavers from The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe
No full textA review of Aaron Blair, A Joyful Outpost: Exploring the Household Economy of the Beavers from The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe (Independently published, 2023). 125 pages. $12.99. ISBN 9798869938367
Markus K. Paul, C. S. Lewis on Literature: An Introduction to His Literary Criticism, Literary History, Literary Theory
No full textA review of Marcus K. Paul, C. S. Lewis on Literature: An Introduction to His Literary Criticism, Literary History, Literary Theory (Hamden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2024). 204 pages. $20.00. ISBN 9781935688556
What Does Nature Mean in the Abolition of Man? or, the Participatory Ontology behind the Sublime Waterfall
No full textIf Lewis’s Abolition of Man is simply an argument for objective moral value, or what we have called “the natural law,” then why begin with waterfalls that demand of us certain kinds of aesthetic judgment,[1] and end by saying that technocrats who take Nature in their own hands to control others with it have stepped outside of something larger than moral law, viz. the Tao, the Real itself, and thereby lost their very humanity?[2]
What, that is, is Nature in the Abolition? Certainly, it is not nature as construed in philosophical naturalism after Jane Austen, after the advent of the machine age[3]: nature “simple,” merely biological, detached from any posited transcendent realities. No, it is premodern nature – the nature shared by world religions (as Lewis demonstrates[4]): nature interpenetrated by, and carrying sacramentally, all of the Real—metaphysical as well as physical.
In other words, Lewis had through his study of Plato—and his reading of medieval writers whose cosmos was “tingling with anthropomorphic life,” “a festival, not a machine”[5]—picked up the premodern Western understanding of the world as pointing to God not by analogy or allegory, but by symbol or sacrament—by actually participating in the Reality of that higher Real.[6]
He had picked up what Hans Boersma and Andrew Davison have recently taught us to call “participatory ontology”: the participation of all of Creation, including humanity, in God himself. And he did so (1) in a consistent Christian way, (2) at a crucial modern moment, when the separation of nature and supernature had become a matter for intense discussion, and (3) in harmony and in parallel with such fellow Christian humanists as the Catholic nouvelle theologians (or ressourcement theologians). This paper will excavate numbers 2 and 3 here, examining the Abolition in the context of postwar Christian humanist participatory ontology.
[1] “The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than others.”
[2] “It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void.”
[3] The dividing line Lewis posited between premodern and modern, in his address “De Descriptione Temporum.”
[4] “In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta—that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality.”
[5] Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 4.
[6] As he explained in the Allegory of Love
Teaching The Abolition of Man
No full textThe authors also hope that this article will help readers better understand The Abolition of Man and raise the level of interest in teaching this important book in schools, churches, and in many other venues and that many will find here helpful practical ideas for such teaching