Books in Brief: C. S. Lewis: a critical essay

C. S. Lewis: a critical essay, by Peter Kreeft (Eerdmans, 95¢). This is one of the 48-page pamphlets in Professor Roderick Jellema’s series on Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective. To say it is unsuccessful would be wrong: Professor Kreeft does in fact have some valuable things to say and the job of compressing even an introduction to Lewis’ Christianity into 48 pages is a modern labor of Hercules. On the other hand, to say that the pamphlet is successful would be tendentious: apart from minor errors of fact, there are three major difficulties Professor Kreeft seems to go out of his way to invite. One is that he insists on comparing Lewis to Kierkegaard, a subject of some interest for a full-length study, but perhaps a trifle out of place in a brief introduction to Lewis’ thought—surely if a comparison with an historical figure had to be made, Dr. Johnson (“I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any man”) would be more to the point. The second, much more important and much more annoying, is that Professor Kreeft is bent on determining whether Lewis was a conservative, an endeavor almost as useful as determining whether Sir Winston Churchill was a neo-Impressionist, and probably somewhat more misleading. The third, a lesser but certainly unnecessary difficulty, is Professor Kreeft’s claim that the Narnian cosmos is “astonishingly underivative.” To praise any of Lewis’ fiction as “astonishingly underivative” is to play Humpty Dumpty’s game of words, inasmuch as the single most pervasive characteristic of all his fiction is that it derived from the vision of those who have gone before, being the work of an omnivorous and retentive reader, whose Narnian books owe a yet uncounted debt to the imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien. Lest I end this on too carping a note, however, it should be said that Professor Kreeft has essayed an impossible task with good humor and no mean insight into the kernel of Lewis’ theology, a fair eye for quotation, considerable bravery and, best of all, an obvious love for his subject.

JL

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J. C. Lobdell

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C. S. Lewis: a critical essay, by Peter Kreeft (Eerdmans, 95¢). This is one of the 48-page pamphlets in Professor Roderick Jellema’s series on Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective. To say it is unsuccessful would be wrong: Professor Kreeft does in fact have some valuable things to say and the job of compressing even an introduction to Lewis’ Christianity into 48 pages is a modern labor of Hercules. On the other hand, to say that the pamphlet is successful would be tendentious: apart from minor errors of fact, there are three major difficulties Professor Kreeft seems to go out of his way to invite. One is that he insists on comparing Lewis to Kierkegaard, a subject of some interest for a full-length study, but perhaps a trifle out of place in a brief introduction to Lewis’ thought—surely if a comparison with an historical figure had to be made, Dr. Johnson (“I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any man”) would be more to the point. The second, much more important and much more annoying, is that Professor Kreeft is bent on determining whether Lewis was a conservative, an endeavor almost as useful as determining whether Sir Winston Churchill was a neo-Impressionist, and probably somewhat more misleading. The third, a lesser but certainly unnecessary difficulty, is Professor Kreeft’s claim that the Narnian cosmos is “astonishingly underivative.” To praise any of Lewis’ fiction as “astonishingly underivative” is to play Humpty Dumpty’s game of words, inasmuch as the single most pervasive characteristic of all his fiction is that it derived from the vision of those who have gone before, being the work of an omnivorous and retentive reader, whose Narnian books owe a yet uncounted debt to the imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien. Lest I end this on too carping a note, however, it should be said that Professor Kreeft has essayed an impossible task with good humor and no mean insight into the kernel of Lewis’ theology, a fair eye for quotation, considerable bravery and, best of all, an obvious love for his subject.