A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby

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СКАЧАТЬ . . I have learned

      To look on nature, not as in the hour

      Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

      The still, sad music of humanity. . . .

      . . . And I have felt

      A presence that disturbs me with the joy

      Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

      Of something far more deeply interfused,

      Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

      And the round ocean and the living air,

      And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

      A motion and a spirit, that impels

      All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

      And rolls through all things.

      It would have been easy enough for this experience to degenerate into a kind of pantheism. What Kilby managed to convey, however—not usually by explanation or analysis, but mainly by simply reading the poems and stammering his appreciation of them—was that the sort of experience Wordsworth was describing could be fully appreciated and comprehended best within the circle of Christian faith, a circle that grew steadily bigger for me as the course progressed.

      The door Kilby opened for me in that fall semester course in the Romantic poets allowed creation itself, and the full range of human feelings, to pour through, and by Christmas a door back into the world had been flung open. It has taken a lifetime to work out some of the implications of that Christian Romanticism. But the door was opened then.

      A year later, with my new fiancée, Mary Ruth Kantzer, we joined a crowd of other students who climbed one evening a week the stairs of the house on Washington Street to read and discuss the works of Lewis, MacDonald, Tolkien, and Williams in the Kilbys’ crowded living room. In that setting I began to explore the resources that enabled me later to begin to connect “Romantic” experience with Christian faith. The two of us learned another lesson there, helped along by Martha’s incomparable cherry cheesecake: that the best learning is apt to happen not in a classroom but in a home, helped along by food and drink. The hospitality we began to learn from the Kilbys has enriched our own teaching for more than fifty years.

      I have lingered on my own experience of Kilby’s teaching because I think it illustrates in one particular instance (the one I know best) the sort of door-opening that Kilby accomplished—directly, for generations of students at Wheaton, and indirectly, for the wider public of his work on behalf of Lewis, Tolkien, and the others of the “seven” that formed the focus of the Wade Collection (now known as the Marion E. Wade Center). Clyde Kilby was fundamentally a teacher, but what he had to teach was not a collection of facts; rather, he taught an awed, thankful, and joyful stance toward creation and Creator. From the time he first came to Wheaton—as assistant dean of men and professor of English, in 1935—he was able to embrace the bigness of vision that the Christian liberal arts college embodied, and that is well expressed in words from Jonathan Blanchard, Wheaton’s first president and the subject of a biography by Kilby, Minority of One: “Every truth is religious because all truth belongs to God.”

      But Blanchard wrote those words early in the nineteenth century, when evangelical Christianity was still in a place of power, and the perfectibility of society still seemed a possible end to the great American Christian experiment. But—as many have documented—by the early decades of the twentieth century this robust Christianity had been marginalized, and Christian faith became defensive. All intensities of feeling were suspect, except the intensity of need to turn people back from the wrath to come. Though Wheaton College never completely gave in to that withdrawal from engagement with the world and the life of the mind, the culture that supported it had increasingly withdrawn to a small, closed room, characterized by a premillennial eschatology that tended to devalue both creation and culture, a gospel that preached the good news of salvation from, but with no sense of salvation for, and personal piety that stressed relationship between the soul and God—but not how to appreciate the sanctity of the world around. So Mark Noll, long a history professor at Wheaton—and a former student of Dr. Kilby—was able to write with some lament of “the scandal of the evangelical mind,” the scandal being that it doesn’t have much of a mind.

      But it was not just the life of the mind to which we had closed the door: we were also walled up in a Christianity that had little room for intensities of feeling, especially toward the created world. It was that door—the door opening on beauty, and what it implied about ourselves and our God—that Kilby opened for many of us. And he didn’t just open the doors. He put us in the hands of a whole set of wise, holy, and imaginative guides. Kilby knew a great deal already of the country he helped us to explore, and one of the marks of his own saintliness is the eagerness with which he stepped aside and let these guides lead us on out through the door he had opened.

Here Luci Shaw’s other metaphor is apt. Kilby didn’t just open a door; he opened a floodgate, and what poured out was a stream of truth that was gloriously refreshing because it flowed not from “evangelical” or “Protestant” or even “Christian” sources, but from a wonder at creation itself, which is the source of all true myth. The writers for whom Kilby became a channel were certainly Christian, but what they gave us enlarged our understanding of what “Christian” meant: they helped us understand what water meant, along with the whole torrent of created reality that flows everywhere. Lewis’s great mentor, George MacDonald, put it beautifully: “There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen; it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier.”² Water must be understood as water before it can be understood as “the water of life,” and these great mythmakers enabled us to understand both. I recall a chapel talk Kilby delivered based on Jesus’s words from the cross, in which he spoke of the immense and gracious irony that caused the maker of water to cry, “I thirst.” Such a recognition helped make Kilby such an effective conduit for the work of these writers whose imaginations has deepened our understanding of both Christianity and creation. The essays that follow, taken from lectures, reviews, interviews, and scholarly articles, provide a good, deep drink from Kilby’s “well of wonder.”

      1G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1936), 60.

      2George MacDonald: An Anthology, ed. C. S. Lewis (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 81.

      SECTION 1

      C. S. LEWIS ON THEOLOGY AND THE WITNESS OF LITERATURE

       Chapter 1

      LOGIC AND FANTASY: THE WORLD OF C. S. LEWIS

      Here, in an article first published in Christian Action, January 1969, Kilby presents a brief survey of Lewis’s life and work, chronicling the beloved writer’s life from childhood to his death in 1963. He stresses the importance of his early education, particularly in the discipline of logic, received under the tutelage of the formidable W. T. Kirkpatrick. Kilby’s insistence on the powerful combination of logic СКАЧАТЬ