C. S. Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church. C. S. Lewis

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       [10] CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE

      This collection of three articles was Lewis’s part in a series of five papers first published in Theology, Volumes XL and XLI (March—December 1940), and later in Christian Reflections (1998). The other writers were S.L. Bethell and E.F. Carritt (‘Replies to Mr Lewis’), and George Every (‘In Defence of Criticism’).

      If the heavenly life is not grown up in you, it signifies nothing what you have chosen in the stead of it, or why you have chosen it.

      William Law

      I

      At an early age I came to believe that the life of culture (that is, of intellectual and aesthetic activity) was very good for its own sake, or even that it was good for man. After my conversion, which occurred in my later twenties, I continued to hold this belief without consciously asking how it could be reconciled with my new belief that the end of human life was salvation in Christ and the glorifying of God. I was awakened from this confused state of mind by finding that the friends of culture seemed to me to be exaggerating. In my reaction against what seemed exaggerated I was driven to the other extreme, and began, in my own mind, to belittle the claims of culture. As soon as I did this I was faced with the question, ‘If it is a thing of so little value, how are you justified in spending so much of your life on it?’

      The present inordinate esteem of culture by the cultured began, I think, with Matthew Arnold–at least if I am right in supposing that he first popularised the use of the English word spiritual in the sense of German geistlich. This was nothing less than the identification of levels of life hitherto usually distinguished. After Arnold came the vogue of Croce, in whose philosophy the aesthetic and logical activities were made autonomous forms of ‘the spirit’ co-ordinate with the ethical. There followed the poetics of Dr I.A. Richards. This great atheist critic found in a good poetical taste the means of attaining psychological adjustments which improved a man’s power of effective and satisfactory living all round, while bad taste resulted in a corresponding loss. Since this theory of value was a purely psychological one, this amounted to giving poetry a kind of soteriological function; it held the keys of the only heaven that Dr Richards believed in. His work (which I respect profoundly) was continued, though not always in directions that he accepted, by the editors of Scrutiny,¹ who believe in ‘a necessary relationship between the quality of the individual’s response to art and his general fitness for humane living’. Finally, as might have been expected, a somewhat similar view was expressed by a Christian writer: in fact by Brother Every in Theology for March 1939. In an article entitled ‘The Necessity of Scrutiny’ Brother Every inquired what Mr Eliot’s admirers were to think of a Church where those who seemed to be theologically equipped preferred Housman, Mr Charles Morgan, and Miss Sayers, to Lawrence, Joyce and Mr E.M. Forster; he spoke (I think with sympathy) of the ‘sensitive questioning individual’ who is puzzled at finding the same judgements made by Christians as by ‘other conventional people’; and he talked of ‘testing’ theological students as regards their power to evaluate a new piece of writing on a secular subject.

      As soon as I read this there was the devil to pay. I was not sure that I understood–I am still not sure that I understand–Brother Every’s position. But I felt that some readers might easily get the notion that ‘sensitivity’ or good taste were among the notes of the true Church, or that coarse, unimaginative people were less likely to be saved than refined and poetic people. In the heat of the moment I rushed to the opposite extreme. I felt, with some spiritual pride, that I had been saved in the nick of time from being ‘sensitive’. The ‘sentimentality and cheapness’ of much Christian hymnody had been a strong point in my own resistance to conversion. Now I felt almost thankful for the bad hymns.² It was good that we should have to lay down our precious refinement at the very doorstep of the church; good that we should be cured at the outset of our inveterate confusion between psyche and pneuma, nature and supernature.

      A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility. Brother Every will not suspect me of being still in the condition I describe, nor of still attributing to him the preposterous beliefs I have just suggested. But there remains, none the less, a real problem which his article forced upon me in its most acute form. No one, presumably, is really maintaining that a fine taste in the arts is a condition of salvation. Yet the glory of God, and, as our only means to glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life. What, then, is the value of culture? It is, of course, no new question; but as a living question it was new to me.

      I naturally turned first to the New Testament. Here I found, in the first place, a demand that whatever is most highly valued on the natural level is to be held, as it were, merely on sufferance, and to be abandoned without mercy the moment it conflicts with the service of God. The organs of sense (Matthew 5:29) and of virility (Matthew 19:12) may have to be sacrificed. And I took it that the least these words could mean was that a life, by natural standards, crippled and thwarted was not only no bar to salvation, but might easily be one of its conditions. The text about hating father and mother (Luke 14:26) and our Lord’s apparent belittling even of His own natural relation to the Blessed Virgin (Matthew 12:48) were even more discouraging. I took it for granted that anyone in his senses would hold it better to be a good son than a good critic, and that whatever was said of natural affection was implied a fortiori of culture. The worst of all was Philippians 3:8, where something obviously more relevant to spiritual life than culture can be– ‘blameless’ conformity to the Jewish Law–was described as ‘muck’.

      In the second place I found a number of emphatic warnings against every kind of superiority. We were told to become as children (Matthew 18:3), not to be called Rabbi (Matthew 23:8), to dread reputation (Luke 6:26). We were reminded that few of the

      Against all this I found some passages that could be interpreted in a sense more favourable to culture. I argued that secular learning might be embodied in the Magi; that the Talents in the parable might conceivably include ‘talents’ in the modern sense of the word; that the miracle at Cana in Galilee by sanctifying an innocent, sensuous pleasure³ could be taken to sanctify at least a recreational use of culture– mere ‘entertainment’; and that aesthetic enjoyment of nature was certainly hallowed by our Lord’s praise of the lilies. At least some use of science was implied in St Paul’s demand that we should perceive the Invisible through the visible (Romans 1:20). But I was more than doubtful whether his exhortation, ‘Be not children in mind’ (1 Corinthians 14:20), and his boast of ‘wisdom’ among the initiate, referred to anything that we should recognise as secular culture.

      On the whole, the New Testament seemed, if not hostile, yet unmistakably cold to culture. I think we can still believe culture to be innocent after we have read the New Testament; I cannot see that we are encouraged to think it important.

      It might be important none the less, for Hooker has finally answered the contention that Scripture must contain everything important or even everything necessary. Remembering this, I continued my researches. If my selection of authorities seems arbitary, that is due not to a bias but to my ignorance. I used such authors as I happened to know.

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