Books in Brief: Christian Reflections

CHRISTIAN REFLECTIONS, by C. S. Lewis; edited by Walter Hooper (Eerdmans, $3.95). This collection of essays and addresses, both published and unpublished, ranges from 1939 to 1963, the last quarter-century of Lewis’ life and the period of his greatest productivity. Most of them seem to be preliminary statements of themes which received their fullest expression elsewhere. Of those which do not—_ which are, among Lewis’ works, essentially sui generis—the addresses on petitionary prayer (1953) and on modern theology and Bible criticism (1959) show him at his best—in the first as a scholar, a clerk, seeking an answer from other clerks, in the second as a layman and traditionalist speaking to clerics and modernists. Since it is improbable that enough of his formal writing remains uncollected to provide more than a very skimpy volume, the shape of Lewis’ work should now be clear. He began as a scholar, an imaginative (though not an original) writer, and a teacher, became a Christian in 1929, anda Christian apologist some ten years or so _ later. His imaginative writing he continued __ throughout his life, along with his scholarly work. But it was not until The Abolition of Man (1943) that his concerns as Christian and teacher seemed to come together —a coming together prefigured by his essay on ethics in this collection—and not until the 1950s, a period represented here only by the two addresses already mentioned, that his wit, his love of defending unpopular opinions, his scholarship, his ability as a teacher, his imagination (in the Cole. ridgean sense) and especially the increasing range of his Christian concern, produced the Narnia books, the great inaugural De Descriptione Temporum, the Cambridge lectures, and his meditational books, especially Reflections on the Psalms (also given a preliminary statement here), and A Grief Observed. For the most part, the material collected in this volume does not have the great range of Lewis’ later writing. It is interesting, certainly necessary for the study of Lewis’ thought, valuable, lacking — in full measure the breadth and style of the author’s Cambridge years, but recognizably C. S. Lewis.

JL

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J. C. Lobdell

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CHRISTIAN REFLECTIONS, by C. S. Lewis; edited by Walter Hooper (Eerdmans, $3.95). This collection of essays and addresses, both published and unpublished, ranges from 1939 to 1963, the last quarter-century of Lewis’ life and the period of his greatest productivity. Most of them seem to be preliminary statements of themes which received their fullest expression elsewhere. Of those which do not—_ which are, among Lewis’ works, essentially sui generis—the addresses on petitionary prayer (1953) and on modern theology and Bible criticism (1959) show him at his best—in the first as a scholar, a clerk, seeking an answer from other clerks, in the second as a layman and traditionalist speaking to clerics and modernists. Since it is improbable that enough of his formal writing remains uncollected to provide more than a very skimpy volume, the shape of Lewis’ work should now be clear. He began as a scholar, an imaginative (though not an original) writer, and a teacher, became a Christian in 1929, anda Christian apologist some ten years or so _ later. His imaginative writing he continued __ throughout his life, along with his scholarly work. But it was not until The Abolition of Man (1943) that his concerns as Christian and teacher seemed to come together —a coming together prefigured by his essay on ethics in this collection—and not until the 1950s, a period represented here only by the two addresses already mentioned, that his wit, his love of defending unpopular opinions, his scholarship, his ability as a teacher, his imagination (in the Cole. ridgean sense) and especially the increasing range of his Christian concern, produced the Narnia books, the great inaugural De Descriptione Temporum, the Cambridge lectures, and his meditational books, especially Reflections on the Psalms (also given a preliminary statement here), and A Grief Observed. For the most part, the material collected in this volume does not have the great range of Lewis’ later writing. It is interesting, certainly necessary for the study of Lewis’ thought, valuable, lacking — in full measure the breadth and style of the author’s Cambridge years, but recognizably C. S. Lewis.