Review: C. S. Lewis in America
Journal
of Inklings Studies, Vol. 14 No. 2 (October 2024),
244-249.
Online from
Edinburgh University Press
DOI: 10.3366/ink.2024.0242
Mark
A. Noll, C.S. Lewis in America: Readings and Receptions,
1935-1947. IVP Academic, Downers Grove, Ill. 2023. 156 pp. ISBN 978‑1‑5140‑0700‑6.
This book by a noted historian of American
Christianity and graduate of Wheaton College contains the edited and slightly
expanded text of three lectures delivered as the Wade Center’s Hansen Lectures
for 2022, each followed by a response from a different scholar. It also
contains a reprint of one fine early example of American Lewis criticism. The
lectures themselves were an enlarged version of an essay published in 2021.
It is neither the first nor the most detailed or
wide-ranging book about the reception of C. S. Lewis published to date,
nor even about his reception in the USA. Noted predecessors are Alan Snyder’s America
Discovers C. S. Lewis: His Profound Impact (2016), George Marsden’s C. S.
Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography (2016) and Stephanie Derrick’s The
Fame of C. S. Lewis: A Controversialist’s Reception in Britain and
America (2018, based on a 2013 PhD). However, in a sub-field of Lewis
studies that is not notoriously crowded yet, and given the abundance of
relevant material, Noll’s particular focus results in a contribution which
readers interested in all (or most) of Lewis’s work will find worth adding to
the rest.
Thus the reprinted thirteen-page essay at the end
is an ‘Introduction to C. S. Lewis’ by Charles A. Brady, a professor of
English, published in 1944 in the Roman Catholic magazine America – an
essay which earned Brady a letter of praise and thanks from Lewis for having
‘really read and understood all my books’.1 Readers who have also read Derrick’s
work, including its more comprehensive PhD version, may note that Brady is
never mentioned there. In fact Brady’s text provides a striking
counter-indication for Derrick’s suggestion that Americans were slow to develop
informed ideas about Lewis. However, while Noll’s work adds much to the picture
presented in earlier reception histories, it also raises doubts as to whether
this isn’t a book about America rather than about Lewis, or whether the two
intents are successfully combined.
The time period covered by this study runs from
the first public reaction to Lewis’s works in America, in a December 1935
review, till the appearance of his face on the cover of Time magazine
almost twelve years later. Earlier American reviews are in fact available, even
disregarding the two early volumes of Lewis’s /244/ poetry that appeared under
the name Clive Hamilton, but they concern British editions, and in any case
Noll makes no pretention to completeness. The years 1935–1947, he submits,
‘mark a distinct period for showing what American critical reactions to Lewis
reveal about Americans’ (3). Three broad categories of American responses to
Lewis are distinguished: Roman Catholic, Mainstream & Secular, and
Protestant, serving as the consecutive topics for the three lectures and
chapters. They also roughly represent the chronology of Lewis’s first rise to
prominence in American consciousness and society. A further tripartite division
is introduced through a list of U.S. publications of Lewis’s books in
1935–1947, putting each work under one of three headings: Literary Scholarship,
Imaginative Writing, and Christian Exposition (5).2 The three categories of readers are
characterized partly by their exposure to, or preference for, each or all of
the three genres of his works.
While some scraps of personal histories emerge in
the course of the book, Noll has avoided repeating the work already done in
that field by Alan Snyder. Responses to Lewis are here examined primarily for
the light they shed on the state and development (including some later
developments) of each of the three constituencies of Lewis readers, and of
American society generally. In offering a diligently researched historical
tableau, Noll has aimed to gain a clearer view of ‘the enduring qualities that
have kept these works alive for so many readers in so many places’, so as to be
finally able to offer suggestions as to ‘how the approaches Lewis modeled
decades ago might assist believers in addressing the public today’ (6).
Initially, and for more than half of the covered
period, Roman Catholic reviewers of Lewis’s works in America far surpassed any
others in ‘breadth of treatment or depth of appreciation’ (10). Catholics
welcomed them ‘for their literary brio, academic depth, imaginative creativity,
and forthright Christianity’ (25) and for their ‘defense of objective truth and
especially his depiction of humankind’s innate moral consciousness’ (28). One
early and remarkably perceptive Catholic response was Thomas Merton’s review of
The Personal Heresy in July 1939, three months after Oxford University
Press published Lewis’s controversy with fellow literary scholar
E. M. W. Tillyard simultaneously in Britain and the U.S.A. Relatively
critical responses to Lewis tended to come from the clergy rather than the
laity, and often concerned the downplaying of ecclesiastical differences by
Lewis and his Catholic admirers. In this way the Catholic response to Lewis
evinced tensions which ‘can be viewed as testifying to subterranean changes
underway’ (37). /245/
The final section of this chapter highlights an
interesting incident regarding a detail in Charles Brady’s reprinted 1944 text.
Discussing Lewis’s first science-fiction novel, Brady interprets the encounter
between Ransom and the hrossa on Mars as ‘an
allegory of racial fear and repugnance and its sublimation into deep affection through
the very recognition of the fact of difference’. Whether or not this is a
peculiarly American take, Lewis in his letter to Brady accepted it as a happy
instance of a book suggesting ‘more than the author intended’ (34). Noll does
not note (as Snyder might have done) that Lewis, writing just a few months
later to another American correspondent regarding the same book, asserted that
‘What I meant’ by a certain passage on the interplanetary meeting of rational
species was a repudiation of ‘Racialism’.3
Might this mean Lewis had made Brady’s insight literally his own? However that
may be, the Response following Noll’s first lecture/chapter is devoted to
interracialism in 20th-century American Catholicism. Karen Johnson’s expert
contribution on that subject is interesting but, at eighteen pages with hardly
a word about Lewis, readers may feel this is more than they had bargained for.
Lewis’s reception in secular and mainstream media
(chapter 2) yields a rather different sort of revelation about Americans. Here
we learn not so much about subterranean tremors presaging later developments as
about a stark contrast with present conditions. Differences between then and
now are noted in unmistakable tones of lament over a vanished ‘American
environment that still made room for at least some aspects of that traditional
[Western Christian] culture’ (58). The implication seems to be that there is no
longer room today for any aspect of that culture in America, or at least in
mainstream and secular America. W. H. Auden’s enthusiastic 1946 review of The
Great Divorce, a theological fantasy, was ‘particularly discerning’ as
compared with the rest, but it ‘spoke for almost all treatments in the nation’s
mainstream press’ (65). The ‘Christian themes Lewis advanced had nothing to do
with political polemics’ (68). The Saturday Review of Literature that
carried Leonard Bacon’s review of Perelandra in April 1944 had an image
of Lewis on the front cover three and a half years before the Lewis-featuring Time
cover.
When Lewis’s works of straightforward Christian
exposition reached secular and mainstream America, ‘positive responses still
outnumber[ed] the negative’ (70). Some critics were in fundamental opposition
to Lewis’s quest for ‘a single truth about humankind and the world’ (78)
but others were not, even as they rejected his conclusions. Noll suggests that
the latter sort ‘pointed backward’, but adds almost immediately that ‘for much
of the reading public to our day, straightforward competing claims about the
truth have remained very important, as indicated by the ongoing popularity
of Lewis’s book /246/ Mere Christianity’ (79). While important issues
are raised here, they plainly call for fuller treatment. Noll proposes to leave
an assessment of Lewis’s philosophical position on naturalism to the
professionals (78), but this policy is probably untenable if a definitive history
of Lewis’s reception is ever to be written. As Green and Hooper wrote long ago,
Lewis’s early philosophical training ‘was not wasted’ and ‘gave weight to his
later theological writings, and it is particularly apparent in such a work as The
Abolition of Man’.4 More recently, Samuel Joeckel in The
Lewis Phenomenon: Christianity and the Public Sphere (2014), proposed his
concept of the ‘public intellectual’ and idea of a ‘public sphere’ that
declined after the 1950s, explaining both the Lewis phenomenon and why it will
never be repeated. In a 2010 article prefiguring the book Joeckel implicitly
invited Noll to bring this view to bear on the case of Lewis:
Might Lewis’s popularity in America owe something to
his identity as public intellectual, since American Christianity, as Mark Noll
[in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) …] observe[s], has
historically tended to be populist in nature?5
Regrettably, Joeckel’s solidly argued
contribution to the issue at hand has been neglected both by Noll and by
Derrick (although in her 2018 book she did briefly mention Joeckel). The
ten-page Response to this chapter offers some compensation, giving an account
of the careers of two deeply learned and hugely popular American radio
preachers of the 1930s and 1940s: ‘If C. S. Lewis was the “most
challenging writer on religious themes” of the generation, [Fulton] Sheen and
[Walter] Maier were arguably the most challenging speakers on religious
themes of that generation’ (86).
Among American Protestants, positive responses
‘across the board’ of mainline denominations reflect ‘a substantial center’
still largely unmarred by later ‘fragmentation and liberalization among
American mainline Protestants’ (102); but ‘the surprise is how late and how
cautiously the evangelicals who would soon stand at the head of the line among
Lewis’s admirers responded to his works’ (96). One interesting instance of
strong but cautious early sympathy for Lewis from this sub-constituency is the
case of Rev. Henry Welbon. At the time he wrote a review of The Pilgrim’s
Regress and sent it to Lewis and got a reply, in 1936, he was involved in a
conservative Presbyterian secession centred on
Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. While Welbon guessed /247/
Lewis was a Catholic, he wouldn’t write him off. In fact the ‘Westminster
Presbyterians […] were the only evangelical Protestants in the 1940s to engage
with Lewis at any depth’ (113). Some of these critics’ chief doubts about
Lewis’s theological soundness concerned precisely the points that were dearest
to Catholic hearts. In all, it remained a far cry from the later
‘overwhelmingly dominant’ evangelical story of ‘appreciation for what Lewis did
well, rather than worries about the exact shape of his theology or about his
lack of evangelical credentials’ (120). Hence Noll’s question, ‘how and why did
the evangelical landscape shift between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s?’
(114). The issue clearly concerns more than the rise of C. S. Lewis to
stellar status among evangelicals, but is not unrelated: ‘The few who responded
positively to Lewis were themselves harbingers of a new day’ (119). In fact,
Lewis played ‘a pivotal role […] for individuals and groups deliberately
turning aside from fundamentalism to embrace what they regarded as a fuller,
more satisfying, and more authentically evangelical Christian faith’ – a
process resulting in the rise of a ‘neo-evangelical generation’ (121). Given
the temporal limit set to the book, it is only logical that this account
includes little more than a few small signs that ‘change was in the air’ (120).
But readers are left wondering if it was logical
to set that limit at 1947 in the first place when the idea was to ‘mark a
distinct period’. While interesting as far as it goes, the book does not give a
strong reason for stopping where it does if it was meant to tell a specifically
American story of Lewis reception. The 1947 Time cover provides a
fitting conclusion for chapter 2, but not necessarily for the book. As noted
above, Noll never claims to be exhaustive even regarding the period dealt with,
and like a good historian more than once warns against over-interpreting the
material brought together here. Perhaps we do best to accept that a more
ambitious project might have been unfeasible for practical reasons, that it is
better to have something than to have nothing, and that (as Lewis famously
argued) every historical demarcation line has its pros and its cons.
This last chapter – to which the five-page
Response adds little – is concluded by a concise analysis, first of ‘the
qualities that made Lewis a phenomenon in America’ in those early days, and
then of ‘circumstances that have changed since the 1940s’ so as to ‘affect the
credible presentation of orthodox Christian faith in our own day’. The
resulting outlook is less than promising, though not entirely pessimistic. Noll
notes that ‘appreciation among multitudes on the ground who value what Lewis
exemplified does not translate up into a coherent force reframing general
attitudes in the public sphere’ – the essential problem being that ‘the public
sphere of the 1940s no longer exists and that the number of insistent voices
demanding public attention has become so loud, so unforgiving, and so
clamorous’ (127). The book ends, somewhat surprisingly, /248/ with a short
meditation on Lewis’s 1942 poem ‘The Apologist’s Evening Prayer’.
Noll has offered a valuable account of Lewis’s
early reception in America that is, though brief, as rich in facts and
quotations as it is thought-provoking. And his very audible lament for the loss
of ‘a substantial center’ in American Christianity and society easily wins this
reviewer’s sympathy from across the Atlantic. As for credible presentations of
Christianity, it may be added that, just possibly, at least one feature of the
American scene is perhaps more conspicuous when seen from afar than up-close.
It is the secularization of Christianity in addition to that of society at
large. To Europeans hearing of a God Bless the U.S.A. Bible peddled by a
presidential candidate, it isn’t as if there is no longer room in the United
States for any aspect of traditional Christian culture. The secularizing rot
appears to go deeper than that. Lewis, who tended to see 19th-century Britain
as already post-Christian, had things to say about ‘the decline of religion’.6
But we can receive his wisdom without the roundabout route of reception
history.
Indeed, a more fundamental doubt is in place as
to the precise merit of Noll’s approach to his subject. Noticing what American
responses to Lewis reveal about Americans is probably unavoidable for the
historian, just as, say, Belgian responses to Lewis will reveal things about
Belgians. But, even if Lewis has a greater name in America than in Belgium, it
is not self-evident that Lewisian reception history is a particularly fruitful
approach to national history. If we want to learn about Americans, it may be
just as useful to study the reception of authors we are not otherwise
interested in, or whose fame has faded, or who never achieved fame. Also, the
national perspective calls for at least a handful of different national
perspectives for comparison so as to make sure that this or that ‘revelation’
in one country isn’t broadly similar in others, modifying their value in terms
of national self-knowledge. It is in fact worth asking whether it is a good
idea to put the reception history of any author (or composer, or artist, or
such) at the service of any essentially different inquiry, or to attempt a
structural combination of the two. The question gets urgent if the resulting
revelations about Americans are in fact often geared to providing a tendentious
contrast with the present day. The past is a foreign country. This means it is
not Brobdingnag or Lilliput, fictions designed to shed a critical light on
conditions at home. /249/
More specifically it might be asked what purpose
is served by the threefold division both of Lewis’s writings and of his
American readership. This initial move leaves the reader with the Macdonald
Anthology classified as ‘Literary Scholarship’, The Abolition of Man
as ‘Christian Exposition’ and, more plausibly but still unhelpfully, The
Pilgrim’s Regress as ‘Imaginative Writing’ (5); and with Chad Walsh as
(mainly) representing ‘Secular and Mainstream Media’ although his commitment to
Lewis sprang up and grew in step with his commitment to Christianity and
ordination in the Episcopal Church. Why not rather follow the chronological
line of Lewis’s American publications and responses to them and give pride of
place to the patterns and connections, if any, that were noted by the readers?
Is it because the preconceived threefold divisions make a shorter route to
useful lessons for today? Perhaps they do, but the difficulties of combining
this program with the historian’s actual business have hardly been solved in
this book. Perhaps they are usually insoluble. If the past holds lessons for
today, we will not learn them unless the past is given maximum freedom to speak
its mind. While a sequel to Noll’s work is very welcome, whoever will undertake
it is therefore best advised to adopt a more strictly historical approach – and
take care to profit from the work of predecessors.
Arend
Smilde
Notes
1.^ C. S. Lewis, The
Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume II: Books Broadcasts, and the War
1931–1949, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004),
629.
2.^ The list is,
strangely, a slightly defective version of a more accurate one found online in
the handout for
Noll’s original first lecture.
3.^ C. S. Lewis, The
Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume II, 699.
4.^ Roger L. Green and
Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: HarperCollins,
1974/2002), p. 83 in original 1974 edition; 76 in revised 2002 edition.
5.^ Samuel Joeckel, ‘C. S. Lewis, Public Intellectual’, Sehnsucht
Vol. 4 (2010), 43–66, last paragraph.
6.^ See Lewis’s 1946 short
essay ‘The Decline of Religion’, in God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 218–223; also, for example, a passage on ‘the
unchristening’ of ‘the West’ (9–10) in Lewis’s 1954 Cambridge inaugural lecture
‘De descriptione temporum’
in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969), 1–14.