C. S. Lewis on the Value of a Sound Critical Reading of the Bible

In an earlier post, I quoted a passage in which Lewis decries a weakness of much historical-critical scholarship. The historical-critical scholar will ask, in discussing an ancient text, “who influenced the ancient author, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question.’” But the one question she or he never asks is whether the ancient author speaks a truth which challenges a modern certainty.

The point, I think, is this. We live in an age that is convinced of its superiority over all previous. Excepting religious contexts, it remains unusual for ancient texts to be read on the assumption that they might be, beyond matters of which they directly speak, a light onto one’s path.

But they are. And not just the texts found within the pages of the Bible.

This, at least, is the conclusion C. S. Lewis came to by stages in his life. A delightful book by Diana Pavlac Glyer[1] describes the stages well.

The point of departure from which Lewis began is considered by some to encapuslate the height of wisdom beyond which one cannot and should not go. At age eighteen, Lewis described his beliefs to a friend in the following terms:

You ask me my religious views: you know, I think, that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name are merely man’s own invention – Christ as much as Loki. Primitive man found himself surrounded by all sorts of terrible things he didn’t understand – thunder, pestilence, snakes, etc: what more natural than to suppose that these were animated by evil spirits trying to torture him. These he kept off by cringing to them, singing songs and making sacrifices etc. Gradually from being mere nature-spirits these supposed being[s] were elevated into more elaborate ideas, such as the old gods; and when man became more refined he pretended that these spirits were good as well as powerful.[2]

The turning point for Lewis is said to have come when he was thirty-two, during a conversation with two friends, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. But that is only half-true. He arrived by steps to the day in which Christ, as Diana Glyer puts it, became the central fact of his life.

Lewis arrived at the place in which he came to accept Christianity as a “true myth” after having first learned to see truth in pagan myths. This is clear from Lewis’s account of that night in September of 1931 in which he and his two friends talked into the wee hours:

Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . . I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.”[3]

Lewis came to believe that the story of Christ is “a myth working on us in the same way as the others,” but with a difference: this time the myth actually happened.

Ultimately, that is what Lewis had in mind when he alluded to truth contained in ancient texts: truth, both Pagan and Christian, that challenges modern certainties.

Does that mean that Lewis thought the Bible should be read uncritically? Of course not. Here is a letter of Lewis reproduced on Dennis Bratcher’s site:

A Letter from C. S. Lewis to Corbin Carnell, dated April 4, 1953

Dear Mr. Carnell:

I am myself a little uneasy about the question you raise: there seems to be an almost equal objection to the position taken up in my footnote and to its alternative of attributing the same kind and degree of historicity to all books of the Bible. You see, the question about Jonah and the great fish does not turn simply on intrinsic probability. The point is that the whole Book of Jonah has to me the air of being a moral romance, a quite different kind of thing from, say, the account of King David or the New Testament narratives, not pegged, like them, into any historical situation.

In what sense does the Bible "present" the Jonah story "as historical"? Of course it doesn’t say, "This is fiction," but then neither does our Lord say that the Unjust Judge, Good Samaritan, or Prodigal Son are fiction (I would put Esther in the same category as Jonah for the same reason). How does a denial, a doubt, of their historicity lead logically to a similar denial of New Testament miracles? Supposing (as I think is the case), that sound critical reading revealed different kinds of narrative in the Bible, surely it would be illogical to suppose that these different kinds should all be read in the same way?

This is not a "rationalistic approach" to miracles. Where I doubt the historicity of an Old Testament narrative I never do so on the ground that the miraculous as such is incredible. Nor does it deny a unique sort of inspiration: allegory, parable, romance, and lyric might be inspired as well as chronicle. I wish I could direct you to a good book on the subject, but I don’t know one.

With all good wishes, yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

In response to my earlier post and that of Kevin Edgecomb – the first to bring the C. S. Lewis quote from The Screwtape Letters to bear on the issues here discussed –Chris Weimer ably defends the historical critical method over at Thoughts on Antiquity.

But in my view, the historical critical method as defined by Chris no longer dominates modern scholarship. The tendency now is to come to an ancient text and deconstruct it in light of one or modern truths such as feminism, post-colonialism, queer theory, or what have you. On this approach, it is not about getting the ancient text right. It’s about critiquing the ancient text for its ideological deficiencies. The book by Hector Avalos Chris Heard is so helpfully reviewing also seems to be an expression of this tendency.

“If we let our interpretation rule a text,” notes Chris, “then it only mirrors what we have already known.” The hermeneutical circle as we actually experience it always runs this risk. But for many, it is not a risk so much as a guilty pleasure.

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[1] Diana Pavlac Glyer, The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2007).

[2] C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters 1:230-231, cited by Glyer, op. cit., pp. 5-6.

[3] C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters 1:976-977, cited by Glyer, op. cit., p. 7.

Comments

[Chris Weimer]

Call me old-fashioned, but I like the older way of deconstruction. Who wrote it? What were they like? What were they thinking? What were their conditions?

Not why didn't they do this or think that. That too is for a different realm, but has no place in understanding a text. We can't impose modern understandings of Marxism on a text whose context predates Marx by nearly two millennia. It's absurd.

Chris

[Kevin P. Edgecomb]

"I wish I could direct you to a good book on the subject, but I don’t know one."

Goodness, what a scathing commentary on the contemporary state of scholarship in that little sentence.