C.S.Lewis: an 'anonymous Orthodox'?
By Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia
From a talk given to the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society on 29 November 1994, Published in Sobornost, new series 17.2 (1995) , 9-27
'Good sense, good manners, and good Christianity'
In his interesting article on C.S. Lewis and the Orthodox Church, 'Under the Russian cross', Dr Andrew Walker recalls a dinner party in London at which a senior Greek bishop from Constantinople described Lewis as an 'anonymous Orthodox'.1 Was the Greek bishop right? Certainly, as Andrew Walker observes, Lewis has an enthusiastic following among Orthodox Christians. There are Orthodox bookshops which stock virtually no works by any non-Orthodox author, with one striking exception - C.S. Lewis. I can also think of Orthodox clergy, strictly traditionalist in their outlook, who use Mere Christianity as their main text-book when instructing catechumens.
 |
| C.S.Lewis in his study c. 1958 (Geoffrey Bles, publishers of Letters of C.S.Lewis (1966)) |
Yet how close in fact was C.S. Lewis to the Christian East? What was his opinion of the Orthodox Church? I wish that I had asked him that second question when I went up to Oxford in the autumn of 1952, as an undergraduate of Magdalen College. My rooms were in the New Buildings, where Lewis also lived, and I saw him practically every day, most commonly each morning before breakfast when both of us were in the habit of taking a walk in the college grounds. We wished each other 'good morning' as we passed, but our mutual acquaintance never advanced beyond that. I was already keenly interested in the Orthodox Church, as well as being a firm admirer of Lewis's writings. But I was far too shy to engage him in conversation, while on his side he was not the kind of don to take the initiative in speaking to a junior member of the college who was not one of his pupils. Doubtless, had I accosted him, he would have been affable enough; but alas! I never posed my question, and so I can only guess at the possible answer. So near and yet so far.
Lewis's direct contacts with the Orthodox Church seem to have been limited. Certainly he had attended the Divine Liturgy at least once, as is clear from a letter written in 1956. This evidently describes his own personal experience. What impressed him about Orthodox worship was its freedom and flexibility:
My model here is the behaviour of the congregation at a 'Russian Orthodox' service, where some sit, some lie on their faces, some stand, some kneel, some walk about, and no one takes the slightest notice of what anyone else is doing. That is good sense, good manners, and good Christianity. 'Mind one's own business' is a good rule in religion as in other things.2
In Letters to Malcolm, published posthumously in 1964, Lewis refers in closely similar terms to what is presumably the same occasion (even though he now describes the service as 'Greek Orthodox' rather than 'Russian Orthodox'):
What pleased me most about a Greek Orthodox mass I once attended was that there seemed to be no prescribed behaviour for the congregation. Some stood, some knelt, some sat, some walked; one crawled about the floor like a caterpillar. And the beauty of it was that nobody took the slightest notice of what anyone else was doing. I wish we Anglicans would follow their example. One meets people who are perturbed because someone in the next pew does, or does not, cross himself. They oughtn't even to have seen, let alone censured. 'Who art thou that judgest Another's servant?'3
I wish that all Orthodox in Britain were as tolerant as Lewis suggests. Sad to say, in some parishes they are closely observant - and, indeed, censorious - of the way in which their fellow-worshippers behave. Since Lewis's original letter dates from 1956, before his visit to Greece with his wife Joy in April 1960, it seems probable that the Liturgy which he attended was in., Oxford, at the Russian Orthodox chapel in Marston Street; but there is no way of being sure about this.
Lewis's impressions of the Orthodox Church during his Greek journey in 1960 are unexpectedly positive. Writing to Chad Walsh soon after his return, he speaks of the pre-Christian roots of Orthodox popular piety:
I had some ado to prevent Joy (and myself) from relapsing into Paganism in Attica! At Dapne [Daphni] it was hard not to pray to Apollo the Healer. But somehow one didn't feel it wd have been very wrong - wd have only been addressing Christ sub specie Apollinis. We witnessed a beautiful Christian village ceremony in Rhodes and hardly felt a discrepancy. Greek priests impress one very favourable [sic] at sight - much more so than most Protestant or R.C. clergy. And the peasants all refuse tips.4
Sadly it has once more to be confessed that Lewis idealises us Orthodox. Whatever may be said of 'the peasants', the Greek parish clergy - so far from refusing tips for the performance of church rites - will often expect and demand them!
Lewis enjoyed a fairly close personal friendship with an Orthodox couple, Nicolas and Militza Zernov. Nicolas came to Oxford in 1947 as Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Culture. It is not clear when he and Lewis first met, but the Zernovs used in later years to display with pride a photograph of 'Jack' (as they called him), seated somewhat precariously on a strangely low chair in their sitting-room. Some time before Nicolas's arrival at Oxford, during the war years, Lewis read a paper to the Oxford branch of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius: entitled 'Membership', this was printed in the Fellowship journal Sobornost.5 Lewis also read a paper at the centre founded by the Zernovs in Oxford, the House of St Gregory and St Macrina, on a date which remains uncertain; but it cannot have been earlier than 1959, the year when the house was opened. This paper, which has the intriguing title Ά Toy, an Icon, and a Work of Art', has apparently never been published, and perhaps it has now been lost.6 Nicolas on his side spoke to the Socratic Club at Oxford (under Lewis's presidency) in Michaelmas term 1952, on the theme 'Solovyev and his Idea of Good and Evil'; his fellow-speaker on the same evening was another Russian Orthodox, Evgeny Lampert.
The Zernovs were both present at Lewis's funeral on 26 November 1963. Militza prepared a cross of white flowers, but on arrival at the church door she was told that there were to be no flowers in church. In the end she was allowed to place the cross in front of the coffin, and then, as the body was lowered into the ground in the graveyard outside the church, her cross was put on top of the coffin. 'Who would have thought it?' writes Andrew Walker. 'Jack Lewis was buried under a Russian cross of white flowers, beneath an English November sky.'8
C.S. Lewis and the Greek Fathers
That, so far as I can discover, is all there is to be said about Lewis's personal contacts with Eastern Orthodoxy, and it has to be admitted that it does not amount to very much. Turning now from Lewis's life to his writings, can it be claimed that there is evidence here of any direct influence from Orthodox theology? As we read his works, scarcely anywhere do we find explicit references to the Orthodox Church. This, however, is in no way surprising; for his writings also contain very few references to the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian or any other Churches. When discussing Christian doctrine, he has virtually nothing to say about the specific characteristics of the different Christian denominations. This was a conscious and deliberate omission. In his apologetic works he intentionally avoided inter-Church polemics, concentrating always on the shared inheritance which united Christians to one another. As he put it, his concern was to expound 'the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times [...] what Baxter calls "mere" Christianity'.9 Lewis did not have an 'ecclesiastical' mind-set, and he was simply not interested in 'churchmanship' or in the institutional aspects of religion.
Even though, for the reason just indicated, allusions to the Orthodox Church are lacking in Lewis's writings, was he none the less influenced by Orthodox sources? I cannot recall quotations from modern Orthodox theologians in, for example, such books as The Problem of Pain or Miracles; but of course in the 1940s not many Orthodox works were available in English. Did he at least make use of the Greek Fathers, who occupy such a central place in Orthodox theology? Occasionally he appeals in general terms to the patristic tradition, as when he states: 'We are to defend Christianity itself - the faith preached by the Apostles, attested by the Martyrs, embodied in the Creeds, expounded by the Fathers'.10 But in fact references to the Fathers are very sparse in his writings, and when he does cite them it is usually the Latin Fathers to whom he appeals, most notably St Augustine.11
To judge from Lewis's autobiography Surprised by Joy, the Fathers seem to have played no part at all in his intellectual formation or in his conversion, although Augustine is mentioned twice in passing.12 A Greek patristic work, the writings of pseudo-Dionysius, is discussed at some length in The Discarded Image,13 but the reason for this is the cardinal importance of the Dionysian corpus for the medieval Latin West. In Miracles there are three isolated references to patristic authors, all on a single page, but significantly two of them are derived at second-hand from modern Western writers.14 When Lewis wrote an introduction to the English translation of St Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word of God, made by Sister Penelope, CSMV,15 this was not because he was especially interested in Athanasius, but because the translator was his personal friend; and less than a quarter of the introduction is devoted to Athanasius himself. It has been suggested that the 'deep magic' of Narnia invoked by the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is based on the 'ransom' theory of the atonement, found in St Gregory of Nyssa.16 But the parallels with Gregory are not in fact particularly close; Augustine is at least as probable a source, and Lewis may well have derived his knowledge of the 'ransom' theory from books by modern writers.
All this leads me to agree with the conclusion reached by Lewis's friend and pupil Dom Bede Griffiths (to whom Lewis dedicated Surprised by Joy):
It is remarkable also that Lewis showed very little interest in the Fathers of the Church. With his wide classical culture one would have expected him to be naturally attracted to the Greek and Latin Fathers, but apart from mention of St. Augustine's Confessions I don't remember his ever referring to one of the Fathers.17
With a few exceptions Lewis's sources are Western, not Eastern; and they are medieval and modern rather than patristic. His mentors, apart from Plato, Augustine and Boethius, are such writers as Dante, Hooker, Spenser, Milton, Samuel Johnson, George Macdonald, Yeats (at one stage in Lewis's life), G.K. Chesterton, and - last but not least - Charles Williams. It is a mixed bag, Roman Catholic, Anglican and Protestant, but there is no Eastern Orthodox in the list. As Andrew Walker rightly says, 'Lewis was a thoroughly Western man.'18
Non-liturgical yet apophatic
That, however, is not the whole story. Even though C.S. Lewis's personal contacts with the Orthodox Church were not extensive, and even though his writings contain little that is taken immediately from the Christian East, yet at the same time his thinking is often profoundly in harmony with the Orthodox standpoint. Starting from Western premises, he reaches conclusions that an Orthodox Christian can wholeheartedly endorse. The fact that the similarities are not due to any direct influence makes them all the more impressive. For evidence of Lewis's implicit Orthodoxy, I shall appeal mainly to his imaginative rather than to his apologetic works; for it is primarily in the imaginative writings that his theological vision can be found expressed with the greatest depth and originality.
First of all, however, I cannot avoid mentioning a feature in Lewis's outlook which, in the eyes of at any rate an Orthodox Christian, appears as a shortcoming. In 1962, a year before his death, Lewis wrote to Bede Griffiths, Ί cannot take an interest in liturgiology'. Commenting on this, Bede Griffiths says that, towards the end of his life, 'Lewis was [...] to acquire a deep reverence for and understanding of the mystery of the Eucharist', but an appreciation 'of the Church as a worshipping community and of cult as something "sacred", a reflection on earth of a heavenly reality, remained hidden from him'.19 The Orthodox approach to the Christian faith, on the other hand, is fundamentally liturgical. Theology is above all else an articulation of the Church's self-awareness as a worshipping community, an ordered and coherent expression of the experience of 'heaven on earth' which is revealed in the Divine Liturgy. Here Lewis's theological approach, in its neglect of the liturgical dimension, does indeed set him apart from the Orthodox tradition.
This point of divergence, however, is more than counterbalanced by four significant points of convergence between Lewis and Orthodoxy. In the first place, in common with the Orthodox tradition, Lewis is acutely conscious of the hiddenness of God, of the inexhaustible mystery of the Divine. It is true that much of his apologetic writing, with its seemingly over-confident appeal to reason and to universal moral law, suggests a theological stance that is affirmative rather than negative: in Andrew Walker's words, 'his cast of mind [...] was clearly of a more cataphatic mould than the apophatic die of the Eastern Church'.20 But there is also an apophatic side to Lewis, which comes to the fore particularly in his imaginative writing. Despite his appeal to reason, he accepts that human language and the concepts used in discursive argumentation can never adequately express the transcendent truth. He realises that the rational discourse of philosophical theology can do no more than hint at the unsayable. Often, so he recognises, we come closest to the divine realm through the use of poetry, myth and symbol; and that is why Lewis himself expresses many of his deepest theological insights through the medium of imaginative writing and of fantasy.
Lewis's apophaticism comes out unmistakably in the book which he wrote at the end of his life, and which constitutes in a sense his 'last will and testament': Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. In our relationship with God, he insists in this work, 'we are approaching - well I won't say "the Wholly Other", for I suspect that is meaningless, but the Unimaginably and Insupportably Other. We ought to be - sometimes I hope one is -simultaneously aware of closest proximity and infinite distance'. The fact of this 'infinite distance' means that every visual image, and still more every abstract concept, has to be negated: 'Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou.' If our images should not be taken literally, far less should our theological abstractions. 'All creatures, from the angel to the atom, are other than God; with an otherness to which there is no parallel: incommensurable. The very word "to be" cannot be applied to Him and to them in exactly the same sense.' Because of this incommensurability between God and creation, 'He must constantly work as the iconoclast. Every idea of Him we form, He must in mercy shatter'.21
All of this, and especially the last notion of God as the iconoclast, recalls St Gregory of Nyssa's point of view in The Life of Moses. Every religious concept, if taken literally, becomes an 'idol of God', states Gregory; when Moses is told in the Ten Commandments to destroy all graven images and idols (Exodus 20:4), the ordinance is to be given a symbolical interpretation.22
Lewis's apophaticism leads him to adopt an existential rather than a strictly rational understanding of religious belief. Despite his appeal to reason in his apologetic writings, in the last resort he agrees with the dictum of his friend Charles Williams that no one can possibly do more than decide what to believe. Belief, that is to say, consists not so much in being convinced by arguments as in making a choice; and, by the same token, if a person chooses not to believe, no amount of logical argument will force him into belief.
This is a recurrent theme in the Narnia books. 'How are we to know that you're a friend?' says Edmund to Ramandu's daughter in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; and she replies, 'You can't know. [...] You can only believe - or not'.23 Out of wilful stupidity, Uncle Andrew in The Magician's Nephew convinces himself that Aslan's song is nothing but a series of roars, and even Aslan himself cannot persuade the old man to think otherwise: 'He has made himself unable to hear my voice'.24 It is the same with the dwarfs in The Last Battle. When they pass through the door into Aslan's new country, all that they find is a dark and smelly stable; to them the flowers are dung, and the splendid feast that Aslan provides is nothing but hay, old turnips and dirty water. They cannot see because they will not see. As Aslan remarks, 'Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out'.25 The apophatic standpoint of C.S. Lewis is particularly apparent in what is for me by far the most moving of all his books: the 'myth retold' which he entitled Till We Have Faces. This was Lewis's favourite among his imaginative writings, and it is mine too. The elusive nature of religious belief is emphasised in the incident when Orual cannot see Psyche's palace (except for a brief and tantalising moment). 'It's no use, Maia,' says Psyche to Orual. Ί see it and you don't. Who's to judge between us?'26 The leitmotif of the whole work is the hiddenness of the Divine. That is exactly Orual's complaint: why does the god not show his face? She pleads for a sign, and none is given:
Then I did a thing which I think few have done. I spoke to the gods; myself, alone, in such words as came to me, not in a temple, without a sacrifice. I stretched myself face downward on the floor and called upon them with my whole heart. I took back every word I had said against them. I promised anything they might ask of me, if only they would send me a sign. They gave me none.[...] I was left utterly to myself.27
The gods set us riddles, Orual protests, but they give us no answers: 'Why must holy places be dark places?'28
Yet Till We Have Faces does not conclude on this despairingly negative note. What the gods offer, as Orual discovers at the end of the story, is not a verbal answer expressed in logically articulated sentences, but a personal encounter - not, it is true, a personal encounter in the form of an open vision, but an encounter none the less sufficiently direct to carry total conviction. Ί ended my first book with the words No answer,' says Orual. 'I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. Before your face questions die away.'29 This calls to mind a text which Lewis almost certainly had never read, the Gnostic Chapters of the desert Father Evagrius of Pontus (d. 399). Asked what is the nature of the 'naked' intellect, Evagrius replies: 'To this question there is at the present moment no answer; but at the end there will not even be a question'.30
All of this indicates how close Lewis is to the apophatic approach of the Christian East. His Aslan is a profoundly apophatic lion. 'But who is Aslan?' asks Eustace. 'Do you know him?' Edmund can do no more than reply, 'Well - he knows me'.31 As Lucy is told, first by Mr Beaver and then by the Magician, Aslan is not a 'safe' or 'tame' lion.32 He is never under the control of our human will or of our human logic: he remains always 'the Unimaginably and Insupportably Other', who is yet uniquely close to us.
Where is the Trinity in Narnia?
The first point of convergence that we have been exploring - the apophatic dimension - concerns the basic approach and method to be employed in all theology, the spirit permeating religious enquiry as a whole. Turning now to three more specific areas of Christian doctrine - the Incarnation and the Trinity; the sacramental character of creation; and the vocation of the human person - let us try to discover how far there is also a convergence here between Lewis and the standpoint of Orthodoxy.
When the young Derwas Chitty was a theological student at Cuddesdon in the mid-1920s, he was asked by a visiting Russian layman what were the most important things that the English needed to learn from the Russian Orthodox. Without hesitation Derwas replied: Ά revitalised belief in the dogmas of the Trinity and of the Incarnation'. Initially the Russian was somewhat disappointed - he was hoping for something more 'practical' -but he later agreed that Derwas was perfectly right.33 Seventy years later, most Orthodox would certainly endorse Fr Chitty's order of priorities. At a time when large numbers of Christians find it impossible to believe any longer in Christ's godhead, and when all too many of them see the doctrine of the Trinity as an unnecessary complication, Orthodox Christianity insists on adopting a 'maximalist' position: Christ is fully and completely divine, and at the same time fully and completely human; and God is irreducibly both one and three.
What of C.S. Lewis? In a work such as Mere Christianity he is entirely uncompromising on both points. Concerning Christ's Incarnation, he writes: 'He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.'34 In Mere Christianity he devotes a major section to the doctrine of the Trinity, a section appropriately entitled 'Beyond Personality'. In particular he emphasises the trinitarian depth of Christian prayer: when we pray we are 'caught up' and 'actually drawn into' what Lewis calls 'the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being'.35 This is exactly the sort of language that a Christian in the Orthodox tradition would employ (although he or she might not choose the term 'enemy-occupied', which reflects the wartime situation in which Lewis was writing). Indeed, the main reason why Lewis is so popular in Orthodox circles today is precisely his firm and clear defence of the two doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity.
While, however, there can be no doubt about the centrality of these two doctrines in Lewis's apologetic works, how far is this also the case with his imaginative writings? Certainly these writings are strongly Christocentric, and this is true especially of the Narnia books. But how effectively is the doctrine of the Trinity woven into his tales of imagination and fantasy? Here I share the reservations of Dr Paul Fiddes in his perceptive essay, 'C.S. Lewis the Myth-Maker'.36
In Out of the Silent Planet, the first volume of his science fiction trilogy, Lewis speaks about Maleldil the Young who 'lives with the Old One';37 but the 'Old One' Himself remains a remote and shadowy figure, scarcely ever mentioned, while there is no reference at all to the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is in fact mentioned once in passing at the end of Perelandra (Voyage to Venus), when it is said that, while in the land of Lur, Tor the King has learnt 'new things about Maleldil and about His Father and the Third One'.38 This is, so far as I can remember, the sole trinitarian allusion at any point in Perelandra; nothing further is said about Maleldil's Father, while the designation of the Holy Spirit as 'the Third One' remains curiously imprecise. How far, I wonder, did Lewis in fact have a developed doctrine of the Spirit? The conclusion of Dr Fiddes seems inescapable: 'During the course of these science fiction novels, the only dimension of divinity actually encountered is Maleldil, who is "the one God"; this is a virtual modalism, and hints at nothing of participation in the three-fold life of God.'39
The same problem arises in the Narnia books. Their perspective is christomonist rather than trinitarian; attention is concentrated almost exclusively on the Christ-figure of Aslan. Admittedly, he is styled 'the son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-sea',40 but this 'great Emperor' plays no part in the stories; and once more we cannot avoid asking, 'Where is the Holy Spirit?' It might be answered that we are not to expect too much from what are fairy-tales and works of fantasy, not exhaustive manuals of Christian doctrine. But since the Christian 'myth' is specifically and
distinctively trinitarian, we have a right to expect this threefoldness to be reflected more dynamically in the 'myths retold' which Lewis offers to his readers old and young.
There is, however, one definitely trinitarian moment in the Narnia books, and this comes during the incident of the 'unwelcome Fellow Traveller' in The Horse and His Boy. Shasta questions the mysterious companion, invisible in the mist, who walks beside him through the mountain pass:
'Who are you?' asked Shasta.
'Myself,' said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again 'Myself,' loud and clear and gay: and then the third time 'Myself,' whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it.41
Lewis explains in one of his letters that these three replies are intended to 'suggest the Trinity'.42 What a pity that there are not more 'suggestions' of this kind elsewhere in his imaginative writings!
Before we leave the subject of the Incarnation, let us note an omission which Orthodox Christians find disappointing. Alike in his apologetic and in his imaginative writings, Lewis ignores the Blessed Virgin Mary. He accepted the doctrine of Christ's virgin birth, just as he accepted all the other doctrines affirmed in the creed, but otherwise he has little to say about the Mother of God. In Mere Christianity he states in self-defence that he does not wish to venture into such 'highly controversial regions',43 but has limited himself to what all mainstream Christians hold in common. Christians of the Orthodox tradition, however, for whom devotion to the Holy Virgin is not an optional extra but an integral part of their daily religious life, are bound to regret his silence at this point.
'A very thin place'
What of the theology of creation? How far is there a correspondence here between Lewis and the Orthodox Church? In one of her addresses Evelyn Underhill recalls the words of a Scottish gardener who, on meeting someone newly returned from the island of Iona, remarked, 'Ah! Iona is a very thin place.' When asked what he meant, he answered, 'There's very little between Iona and the Lord'.44 This is also the Orthodox approach to the realm of nature. Creation is seen as a sacrament of the divine presence; the cosmos is a vast and all-embracing Burning Bush, permeated with the fire of God's eternal glory. Such is the master-theme that dominates the writings
of St Maximus the Confessor: within each created thing the Creator Logos has implanted an indwelling logos or uncreated inner principle, which holds that thing in being and makes it to be distinctively what it is, while at the same time drawing it upwards towards God. St Gregory Palamas looked on the universe from the same point of view: for those with eyes of faith to see, all created things are alive with the dynamic presence of God's uncreated energies.
Lewis thinks in a closely similar fashion. For him also the world is 'a very thin place'. One of the themes in the Narnia stories is exactly the manner in which the 'other world' - the world of Narnia - impinges upon the world of our daily experience. In unexpected ways, unnoticed by the great majority of those who pass by, a familiar object or place may serve as a means of access into the other world: perhaps the entrance will be through a wardrobe in a disused room at the top of an old house, or else -as in Prince Caspian - through a cave high up on a mountain: 'It was one of the magical places of the world, one of the chinks or chasms between that world and this.'45 Like Charles Williams, Lewis is fascinated by the interaction of other worlds with our own, by the interpenetration between the natural and the supranatural, between earth and heaven, and equally between earth and hell.
Lewis, in common with Orthodoxy, sees nature in strongly sacramental terms. He was attracted to the teaching of the seventeenth-century Cambridge platonist Henry More, who - in a manner that recalls Maximus the Confessor - looked on reason, logos, as a vital and energising principle active throughout the universe. In this connection Lewis recalls with a certain nostalgia the period in the distant past when trees and plants, springs and rivers, were all regarded as living beings. Underlying this seemingly outdated mythology, so Lewis believes, there is to be discerned an all-important truth: that nature is not dead matter but living energy, vibrant with the immanence of God. As he puts it in his preface to D.E. Harding's book The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth:
The process whereby man has come to know the universe is from one point of view extremely complicated; from another it is alarmingly simple. We observe a single one-way progression. At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself....46
In his imaginative writing Lewis seeks to reverse this 'one-way progression' and to reaffirm the personal, sacramental, 'elf-patterned' character of the world. The talking animals and talking trees of Narnia are much more than an idle conceit to amuse young children; they have a theological purpose, and this purpose brings Lewis close to the Orthodox tradition. Although he never refers to Maximus or Palamas, he is one with them in his vision of the created order.
'Never did He utter one word twice'
How far, finally, does Lewis's 'image of man'47 concur with the Orthodox understanding of what it is to be a human person?
Let me begin by expressing a personal reservation about his books; but I am conscious that many Orthodox - and many admirers of Lewis - will not agree with me here. I have always felt uneasy about the amount of physical violence that occurs in his imaginative works. Now Lewis is indeed no pacifist, and he offers a carefully reasoned defence of his position.48 Over this matter he is of course in agreement with the mainstream Christian tradition, both Western and Eastern, at any rate since the conversion of the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century. That, however, is not my present difficulty. What troubles me is the undue emphasis (as I see it) that is placed in his writings upon brute force, upon ferocious fighting and bloodshed.
The element of violence is particularly evident in the savage denouement of That Hideous Strength, which among all Lewis's imaginative writings is the one that appeals to me the least. But even in Perelandra -which, along with Till We Have Faces, is my favourite in the Lewis canon - it seems to me a blemish that the subtle three-cornered discussion between the Lady, Ransom and Weston the 'Un-Man' eventually degenerates into a crude physical combat between Ransom and Weston: into punching, biting and mangling. Doubtless Lewis would reply that evil has to be combated on a physical as well as an intellectual level; but is that a sufficient answer? It is true that the 'heroic' era envisaged in the Narnia books makes it inevitable that there should be a large amount of fighting. But is there not something little short of sadistic about the way in which Aslan claws open Aravis's back in The Horse and His Boy!
Let us turn to more positive themes. In Lewis's depiction of the human vocation there are at least four points that appeal particularly to an Orthodox reader. First, he underlines the uniqueness of each human person: as the eldil says in Perelandra at the beginning of the Great Dance, 'Never did He make two things the same; never did He utter one word twice'.49 In his book George Macdonald: An Anthology, Lewis quotes several passages from Macdonald's Unspoken Sermons, in which this uniqueness is linked in particular with the giving of the new name written on the 'white stone' (Rev. 2:17): '
The name is one 'which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it'. Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. He is to God a peculiar being, made after his own fashion, and that of no one else. Hence he can worship God as no man else can worship Him.
For each, God has a different response. With every man He has a secret -the secret of a new name.50
Secondly, and closely linked with this first point, there is the significance that Lewis attaches to the face. This at once calls to my mind the use of the word prosopon by contemporary Orthodox theologians such as Christos Yannaras or Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamos:51 the Greek term for the person, prosopon, has precisely the literal sense of 'face', 'countenance' (or more exactly, 'facing towards': that is pros, 'towards' and ōps, 'face'). To be a person, that is to say, is to 'face' another, to 'look towards' and to enter into relationship with the other; there is no true personhood without relationship.
The meaning of the face is the central theme in that most fascinating and enigmatic of all Lewis's works, Till We Have Faces. Orual's chief argument when she confronts Psyche in the mountain valley is that Psyche's lover does not reveal his face: 'What sort of god would he be who dares not show his face? [...] Nothing that's beautiful hides its face.'52 At a later point in the story, Orual herself (who is far from beautiful) veils her own face, with the result that people come to imagine that she has no face at all.53 The statue of the dark goddess Ungit has no face;54 likewise the statue of Psyche in the little forest temple has a scarf wrapped round it so that the face is concealed.55 The importance of the face is also apparent in the final conclusion of the story. Ί saw well', says Orual, 'why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer.[...] How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?'56 That is to say, there cannot be a relationship between two subjects unless there is a face, a sense of identity, on both sides; and so we cannot begin to understand the Divine until we have in some measure confronted and come to terms with our own inwardness, with the complexities and darkness in ourselves.
Lewis's convergence with Orthodox anthropology extends beyond these two issues of our personal uniqueness and the meaning of the face to two further points, both of fundamental significance for Orthodoxy. In the third place, in the understanding of the Christian East salvation involves nothing less than theosis, 'deification' or 'divinisation': we humans are called to be 'partakers of the divine nature' (2 Peter 1:4), to share by grace - in a direct and unmediated manner - in the transforming life and glory of God. Such is likewise Lewis's understanding of salvation: 'Century by century God has guided nature up to the point of producing creatures which can (if they will) be taken right out of nature, turned into "gods".'57 Lewis would have come across the idea of theosis in the work of St Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word of God, to which he wrote an introduction; as St Athanasius says of Christ the Logos, 'He became man that we might be made god'.58
Fourthly and finally, many of the Greek Fathers - most notably St Irenaeus, St Gregory of Nyssa, and St Maximus the Confessor - envisage eternal life (in so far as it can be envisaged at all) in terms of epektasis, of infinite progress and unending advance. The perfection and blessedness of heaven is not static but dynamic, not fixed but inexhaustibly creative. As St Gregory of Nyssa states in a fine paradox, the very essence of perfection consists in the fact that we never become totally perfect, but unceasingly press onwards 'from glory to glory' (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Such is exactly the picture of eternal life that Lewis presents at the end of The Last Battle, in the chapter 'Farther Up and Farther In':
...world within world, Narnia within Narnia [...] like an onion: except that as you go in and in, each circle is larger than the last.59
Lewis implies that, to this sequence of ever-enlarging onion skins, there is no ultimate limit. Our continuing exploration 'farther up and farther in' extends uninterrupted into the 'ages of ages':
And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.60
Whenever I read that passage, my heart is 'strangely warmed'.
Again and again we have found that C.S. Lewis articulates a vision of Christian truth which a member of the Orthodox Church can wholeheartedly endorse. His starting-point may be that of a Western Christian, but repeatedly his conclusions are Orthodox, with a large as well as a small 'o'. His apophatic sense of God's hiddenness, his teaching on Christ and the Trinity, his understanding of creation and of personhood, are all expressed in terms that appeal to Orthodox Christendom. Surely he has indeed a strong claim to be considered an 'anonymous Orthodox'.
Notes:
1. Andrew Walker, 'Under the Russian Cross: a research note on C.S. Lewis and the Eastern Orthodox Church', in Andrew Walker and James Patrick, A Christian for Alt Christians: Essays in Honour of C.S. Lewis (London 1990), p. 64. To this article I am much indebted.
2. Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. W. H. Lewis and Walter Hooper (London 1988), p. 454.
3. Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer (London 1964), pp. 19-20; quoted in Walker, 'Under the Russian Cross', p. 66.
4. Letters of C.S. Lewis, pp. 488-9.
5. Sobornost,~NS 31 (June 1945), pp. 4-9; several times reprinted, for example in C.S. Lewis, Fern-Seed and Elephants and other essays on Christianity (London 1977), pp. 11-25.
6. Walker, 'Under the Russian Cross', pp. 65-6.
7. Walter Hooper, Oxford's Bonny Fighter', in James T. Como, ed., C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences (London 1980), p. 184. Dr Lampert also spoke to the Socratic Club in Hilary Term 1945 (ibid., p. 177). In both places his name is misspelt by Hooper as 'Lambert'.
8. Walker, 'Under the Russian Cross', pp. 66-67.
9. Mere Christianity (London 1977), p. 6.
10. 'Christian Apologetics', in C.S. Lewis, Timeless at Heart: Essays in Theology (London 1987), p. 14.
11. Augustine is discussed on pp. 64-6 of The Allegory of Love (London 1936), and cited in The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge 1964), on pp. 49, 50, 107n., 121n., and 175.
12. Surprised by Joy (London 1955), pp. 7, 217.
13. The Discarded Image, pp. 70-5.
14. Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London 1947), p. 92.
15. Reprinted under the title 'On the Reading of Old Books', in C.S. Lewis, First and Second Things: Essays on Theology and Ethics (London 1985), pp. 25-33; cf. Walker, 'Under the Russian Cross', p. 64.
16. Walker, 'Under the Russian Cross', p. 64.
17. Alan Bede Griffiths, 'The Adventure of Faith', in Como, C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, p. 21.
18. Walker, 'Under the Russian Cross', p. 63.
19. Como, C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, p. 20.
20. Walker, 'Under the Russian Cross', p. 64.
21. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, pp. 23, 34, 98-9, 109.
22. The Life of Moses ii, 165: tr. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, Gregory of Nyssa (New York 1978), p. 96.
23. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London 1952), pp. 182-3.
24. The Magician's Nephew (London 1955), p. 168.
25. The Last Battle (London 1956), p. 150.
26. Till We Have Fades (London 1956), p. 136.
27. Ibid., p. 159; cf.'p. 168.
28. Ibid., p. 259.
29. Ibid., p. 319.
30. Kephalaia gnostika Hi, 70.
31. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, p. 104.
32. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London 1950), p. 77; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, p. 149.
33. Eastern Churches Review 6:1 (1974), p. 9.
34. Mere Christianity, p. 53.
35. Ibid., p. 139.
36. Paul S. Fiddes, 'C.S. Lewis the Myth-Maker' in Walker and Patrick, A Christian for All Christians, pp. 132-55.
37. Out of the Silent Planet (London 1938), p. 77.
38. Perelandra (London 1943), p. 241.
39. 'C.S. Lewis the Myth-Maker', pp. 142-3.
40. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, p. 77.
41. The Horse and His Boy (London 1954), p. 147.
42. Letters of C.S. Lewis, p. 486.
43. Mere Christianity, p. 7.
44. Lucy Menzies, ed., Collected Papers of Evelyn Underhill (London 1946), p. 196.
45. Prince Caspian (London 1951), p. 190.
46. C.S. Lewis, 'The Empty Universe', in Present Concerns (London 1986), p. 81.
47. I take this phrase from the excellent book of William Luther White, The Image of Man in C.S. Lewis (London 1970). After a quarter of a century, this still remains one of the best studies written about Lewis.
48. C.S. Lewis, 'Why I am not a Pacifist', in Timeless at Heart, pp. 48-65.
49. Perelandra, p. 246.
50. George Macdonald: An Anthology (London 1946), p. 28.
51. See Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality (New York 1984), pp. 20-2; John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York 1985), pp. 27-49.
52. Till We Have Faces, p. 168.
53. Ibid., p. 237.
54. Ibid., p. 281.
55. Ibid., p. 250.
56. Ibid., p. 305.
57. Mere Christianity, p. 185. Lewis has in mind Psalm 82 [81]:6, cited in John 10:34: Ί said, "You are gods'".
58. On the Incarnation 54.
59. The Last Battle, p. 181.
60. Ibid., pp. 183-4.
+ + +
Source: Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia. “C. S. Lewis: An ‘Anonymous Orthodox’?” Sobornost (incorporating Eastern Churches Review), new series 17.2 (1995) , 9-27.
