This is taken from Jokim Schnoebbe’s blog, he is also known as the Author Jacob Schriftman. I first met Jokim a few years back in South Africa and we traveled together for a teaching tour in the far east. We also lived together here in Sweden for a few months where we both were involved in a course with YWAM. He is a talented speaker,artist,teacher,author,father,husband and fotball player (and a few other things). I warmly recommend his work.You can read more about him on his site schriftman.net and purchase his books on Amazon as Jacob Schriftman or as Jokim Schnoebbe. I will share a few of his blog entries here from time to time, Enjoy!
British writer and literary critic C.S. Lewis was a Christian who did not overly protect his faith. His reading habits especially exemplify this. Unlike some Christians, he did not only read Christian literature but almost anything. He especially liked imaginative literature and approached it unlike many other Christians.
The narrow-minded Christian, if he reads imaginative literature at all, values it only for telling him truths about life—not truths, however, which he does not yet know, but only confirmations of his preconceived ideas. Those are the only ideas his faith-based narrow-mindedness will permit.
This leads him, of course, to limit his appreciation of authors to those who confirm his own views.
The result is (as C.S. Lewis points out in An Experiment in Criticism) that he “attributes to his chosen author what he believes to be wisdom; and the sort of thing that seems wise to him will obviously be determined by his own caliber. If he is a fool he will find and admire foolishness; if he is a mediocrity, platitude, in all his favourties. At best he is a profound thinker himself, and what he acclaims as his author’s philosophy might in itself be good, but in reality be merely his own. In that case he is like the long succession of preachers who have based edifying and eloquent sermons on some straining of their texts. The sermons, though bad exegesis, were often good homiletics in their own right.”
C.S. Lewis goes on to say that such limitation closes the way to one of the principal effects that good reading has on us: to admit us to experiences other than our own. In reading there should be some free play, some willingness to suspend disbelief (or belief) or even repugnance while we read the good expression of what, in general, we might think bad. We should not limit our appreciation of authors to those who confirm our own views.
Otherwise we are like a person who wraps a present and then gives it to himself. The present might or might not be good in itself, but the fact is that he did not receive anything which he did not already own. He did not get a present at all. People who only read books to confirm their preconceived ideas wrap up their own ideas in the words of the author, but in actual fact do not receive anything from the author. (According to Lewis, such people also spoil lighter works by always foisting a serious “philosophy” on them. They misrepresent them as being really far more serious than they are.)
People who are thus unable to find admittance to the experiences and views of the author, have what C.S. Lewis calls a “problem of belief.” If they read books like Harry Potter at all (which they usually do not), they quickly voice their disagreement with certain ethical implications or their concern that the books incite dangerous magical practices (they also frequently voice their disagreement even when they have not read the books). Or they point out that God is totally left out of the picture.
Aside from the question whether such qualms are justified, C.S. Lewis would reply that in good reading there ought to be no “problem of belief.” “A true lover of literature should be in one way like an honest examiner, who is prepared to give the highest marks to the telling, felicitous and well-documented exposition of views he dissents from or even abominates.” Says Lewis, “I read Lucretius and Dante at a time when (by and large) I agreed with Lucretius. I have read them since I came (by and large) to agree with Dante. I cannot find that this has much altered my experience, or at all altered my evaluation, of either.”
C.S. Lewis is thus the very embodiment of the open-minded Christian, of someone who did not base his faith on faith alone and who was not afraid to expose his faith to scrutiny. He therefore provides quite an accurate picture of how an open-minded Christian views narrow-minded Christians. An example of this is Lewis’s warning against what he termed the “Vigilant school of criticism.”
To them (and I am afraid most narrow-minded Christians are among them) criticism is a form of social and ethical hygiene. They see all clear thinking, all sense of reality, and all fineness of living, threatened on every side by propaganda, part of which is the printed word. Against this the Vigilant school are our watchdogs. Vigilants find everywhere attitudes which are a matter of life and death to accept or resist, and therefore do not allow themselves the liberty of “free play.” Nothing is for them a matter of taste. There is for them no specifically literary good.
A work, or a single passage, cannot for them be good in any sense unless it reveals attitudes which are essential elements in the good life.
In contrast to the Vigilant school, C.S. Lewis maintained that one of the prime achievements in every good fiction has nothing to do with truth or philosophy or a Weltanschauung (worldview) at all. This is especially true of Lewis’s favorite kind of fiction: fantasy. The primary value he saw in reading fantasy was not that he could learn truths about life but that through it he could be more than himself. He wanted to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with his own.
Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, was not enough. He wanted to see what others had invented. He would therefore (I think) have delighted to enter into the beliefs of, let’s say, Philip Pullman, even though as a Christian he would have thought certain aspects of them untrue.
His defense for doing this, for occupying his heart with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which he tried to avoid having in his own person, was that in reading them he became a thousand men and yet remained himself. He saw with a myriad eyes, but it was still he who saw. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, he transcended himself; and was never more himself than when he did. “The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison,” he wrote.
It is needless to say that in this way C.S. Lewis learned much more from his reading than people who look in every book for truths about life, only to find on every page their own faces staring at them.
This, however, does not mean that C.S. Lewis thought that imaginative literature can have no positive or negative effects on the reader beyond this experience of self-transcendence. Consider, for instance, the words he put into the mouth of the demon Screwtape:
“The Enemy’s [that is, God’s] demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy. Ever since our Father’s [that is, the devil’s] first great victory, we have rendered the former very difficult to them. The latter, for the last few centuries, we have been closing up as a way of escape. We have done this through the poets and novelists by persuading the humans that a curious, and usually shortlived, experience which they call ‘being in love’ is the only respectable ground for marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this experience permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding. This idea is our parody of an idea that came from the Enemy.”
Here the “poets and novelists” are pictured as the instruments of evil for establishing a detrimental idea of love in people’s minds. Lewis even wrote a whole book on the topic. In his scholarly work The Allegory of Love, he traces the rise of the idealization of sexual love as expressed in literature, beginning in eleventh-century France.
Lewis maintains that during this time love (in the sense of “being in love”) was set up as a sort of god. Every act became virtuous if it was done for “love’s sake”; and in a society where marriage was purely utilitarian, this meant that adultery was one of the main things to be idealized along with the feeling of love.
This development, as seen in The Screwtape Letters, was far from being merely of literary interest to Lewis. He thought that the erotic tradition in the literature of modern Europe still influences us today. We are in fact so familiar with it that we mistake it for something natural and universal and therefore do not inquire into its origins.
Many people today take it for granted that the “great Eros,” as Lewis called it in another book, “extenuates—almost sanctions—almost sanctifies—any actions it leads to. When lovers say of some act that we might blame, ‘Love made us do it,’ notice the tone. A man saying, ‘I did it because I was frightened,’ or ‘I did it because I was angry,’ speaks quite differently. He is putting forward an excuse for what he feels to require excusing. But the lovers are seldom doing quite that. The confession can be almost a boast. In extreme cases what their words really express is a demure yet unshakable allegiance to the god of love.”
And this allegiance, which Lewis considered extremely harmful, has been greatly promulgated—perhaps even initiated—by “poets and novelists.”
So yes, imaginative literature can have negative effects on people. But those effects are no automatism. C.S. Lewis believed that one can also read and delight in the good expression of untrue or even “abominable” ideas without being negatively affected by them.
Otherwise he would have hardly spent the majority of his life reading and teaching on books with which he profoundly disagreed. He himself had read all the books he wrote about in The Allegory of Love, and obviously they did not set up the “idol of love” in his own heart.
If anything, they sharpened his senses against it (as the above quote from The Screwtape Letters exemplifies). Thus it is difficult to imagine C.S. Lewis joining the chorus of Christians who warn others that by reading Harry Potter or His Dark Materials they automatically “contaminate” themselves.
If asked whether these books can have negative effects on the reader, C.S. Lewis would perhaps have answered in the affirmative, but he himself might very well have read them; and they would not have threatened him in his beliefs.
Related posts:
4 Responses to “The open-minded Christian”