It’s a venerable tradition in scholarly circles for authors to follow up a “mid-level” book written for the general population with a companion volume covering the same topic in a more specialized way for the scholarly guild. The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis is such a companion volume to Alister McGrath’s recent biography, C. S. Lewis: A Life (see Louis Markos’s review here). It’s also customary for academicians to call the follow-up volume a “more scholarly” and therefore better book than the general one, as I’ve already heard The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis labeled. I’ve never shared this bias. This volume isn’t more scholarly than the biography; it’s just more specialized in its topics and more minute in its focus. McGrath, professor of theology, ministry, and education and head of the Center for Theology, Religion, and Culture at King’s College in London, confirms this at the end of the “Introduction” when he speaks of the book as “more detailed engagements with aspects of Lewis’s thought.”
Everything McGrath writes is copiously investigated, which always leaves me wondering how he finds the time to research and write as much as he does. In terms of research, this is yet another mind-boggling volume. (The pages of notes compose more than 20 percent of the book.) We all need images of greatness in our lives, including people who do what we ourselves do—only better and on a grander scale. McGrath’s books serve that purpose for me.
The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis is a collection of eight original, free-standing essays. We can infer that the topics covered sparked McGrath’s scholarly interest as he composed the biography of Lewis. The book is thus a collection of separate essays rather than a single coherent volume. Topics covered include what kind of autobiography—and how accurate—Surprised by Joy is; the philosophic climate of Oxford University during the 1920s and its influence on Lewis’s thinking; Lewis’s evolving understanding of myth and its role in his conversion; the pervasiveness of sight as a metaphor in the Lewis canon; an exploration of Lewis’s “argument from desire;” Lewis’s apologetic method; Lewis’s Anglicanism; and the question of whether Lewis should be considered a theologian.
Three Strands
I experienced this work as a triad of books, with three strands intertwined in all of the essays. First, the title immediately led me to expect (without adequate warrant, I later perceived) that the book would primarily place Lewis in the cultural and intellectual contexts that influenced him and that explain the shape and content of this thinking. McGrath does this abundantly as the various topics allow. But on many topics the best we can do is demonstrate congruence between Lewis’s thinking and the intellectual world he inhabited, without proof that he was actually influenced by the intellectual crosscurrents. In my own field of literary theory, I know of no better brief introduction to the heart of mid-20th-century formalist criticism than Lewis’s essay “The Language of Religion,” but I cannot prove Lewis was influenced by the “New Criticism” theorists who established that school of criticism. McGrath wisely doesn’t overstate the case for various likely influences; he simply shows the congruence and lets it go at that.
The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis
Alister E. McGrath
Second, as I continued to read the book, I looked again at the title. It claims to explore Lewis’s intellectual world and doesn’t promise to be a study of contexts. McGrath thus devotes equal space to exploring Lewis’s as they exist in themselves and not necessarily in terms of surrounding cultural influence. The genius of this aspect of the book is McGrath’s analytic skill in laying out the precise nature of Lewis’s ideas. McGrath is an ideal travel guide through the terrain of Lewis’s ideas, and any attentive reader will leave this book having a clear grasp of those ideas as anatomized by McGrath.
Third, McGrath remains a historian and biographer as he writes on the chosen topics. A firm chronological principle underlies each of the explorations. For some topics (such as the philosophic climate of Oxford in the 1920s and the subject of myth) this produces a story of Lewis’s evolving thinking. In their own way, these chapters yield a biography of Lewis, an impression reinforced by the five-page “Brief Biography of C. S. Lewis” that opens the book. For other topics (such as Anglicanism and the definition of theologian) we receive a history of the topic itself (including recent trends) rather than changes in Lewis.
Fireside Chat
McGrath’s style in pursuing an idea to its logical conclusion is something that I’ve always experienced as distinctly British and that I first encountered in Mere Christianity. It involves exploring the nuances of an idea and resembles turning a prism in the light. I’ve always relished a certain rigor in this process that, conducted in a conversational manner, makes me feel I’ve experienced a fireside chat with the author.
Each essay in The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis illustrates that style, but I’ll choose the final one as my illustration. The question raised is whether Lewis ranks as a theologian, and the initial conclusion is that he’s an amateur theologian. This, however, means he wasn’t a professional theologian in the German mode that long dominated the theological guild. But wait a minute: British Christianity has never been characterized by the methods of systematic theology. Encouraged by the possibility that Lewis may, indeed, be a theologian, McGrath explores what kind of theologian he was—namely, a translator of theology for the general public. Additionally, there’s been a revision of thinking about what constitutes the role of theologian, and as the chapter ends McGrath concludes not only that Lewis is, indeed, a theologian, but also that courses will soon appear on his theology. In fact, McGrath himself admits he’s tempted to develop such a course.
As the preceding paragraph hints, another winsome quality of this book is that, while ostensibly about Lewis, McGrath often gives primers on the topics at hand. For example, the discussion of Lewis’s Anglicanism taught me a lot about Anglicanism and the ways in which Lewis is increasingly claimed as a champion by conservative Anglicans worldwide.
McGrath’s essays provide a model that can be applied to many subjects by scholars in numerous disciplines. Once the paradigm had been placed before me, I began envisioning various literary applications: the congruence between Lewis’s literary theory and 20th-century formalist criticism, 19th-century Romantics’ thinking about the nature of literature, and Lewis’s enigmatic stances toward archetypal criticism and allegory.
The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis makes a wonderful companion to McGrath’s biography of Lewis. However, as I have implied, it’s a completely satisfying and engaging book all by itself.
