Spiritual Sunday
I write today about a fascinating talk I heard in our church’s Adult Forum this past Sunday. Dr. Rob MacSwain, editor of The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, talked about Lewis’s special contribution to our understanding of God and Christianity.
MacSwain, who teaches “Theology of Ethics” at Sewanee’s School of Theology, opened on a slightly defensive note. While Anglicans/ Episcopalians have made important contributions in Biblical Studies, church history, and liturgy, he noted that they tend to be weak on theology. In this, they stand in marked contrast to other denominations, such as Presbyterians or Baptists. For the most part, he said, Anglicans tend to follow the early church’s lead on such matters as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Creation.
They are particularly uninterested in systematic theology and in the currently fashionable analytic theology, which is suspicious of metaphor and ambiguity as it strives for the clearest account possible of God and religion.
MacSwain then reversed course and said that Anglicans have indeed made important contributions to theology, only they have occurred within literature rather than in disciplines devoted to studying religion.
Among the Anglican writers who have added to our understanding of God are many of those I have cited in this forum over the years: Edmund Spencer, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Keble, R. S. Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, Lewis, Malcolm Guite, and Rowan Williams. To this list I would add Gerard Manley Hopkins who, although he became Catholic, had his roots in Anglicanism.
Literature, with its heavy use of metaphor and allusion and its openness to multiple interpretations, clashes with traditional theology, which prefers to be clear and logical. Literature revels in buried meanings and in what is unconscious as well as what is conscious. This may not give us a straightforward understanding of God, but MacSwain believes (as do I) that it provides a deeper one.
As I listened to MacSwain, I thought of one English writer who, while not Anglican, pushed against those who believe that metaphor hinders us in our search for God. In his defensive introduction to Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan argues that stories, rather than being falsehoods, actually get us closer to God’s truth. It is a defense also employed by Sir Philip Sidney in Defense of Poesie, which was directed at the Puritanical claim that poetry is “the mother of lies.” Many readers came to a profound understanding of their faith by reading the adventures of Christian with his burden of sin as he strives to reach the Celestial City.
So that we could see a traditional theological argument, MacSwain quoted the excerpt from Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians that we had just heard in the church service. Note its “if this, then this” structure:
Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ–whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.
Most of the Bible does not read like this, however, as it employs a wide range of genres. For that matter, much of Letter to the Corinthians reads more like poetry than theology, including the famous passage beginning, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1-13). For the most part, we don’t read the Bible as a work of systematic theology.
Turning to Lewis, McSwain said that he rebelled against his Anglican training as an adolescent, and from ages 13-32 he was a declared atheist. Increasingly, however, he found his atheism intolerable because he couldn’t reconcile it with his imagination and his deep love for poetry. He therefore came to believe that the Incarnation, which brought God and humans together, was a joining of reason and imagination. Jesus’s birth, death, and resurrection is a myth that is also true.
Put another way, atheism is reasonable but barren because it finds myth to be false. Lewis believed God’s manifestation in the world heals the rift between the intellect, which is the organ of truth, and the imagination, which is the organ of meaning. Through the imagination, we can taste and see Christian truths that defy logic.
Lewis’s rediscovery of his faith unleashed his creativity, and poetry, philosophy, science-fiction, fantasy and other genres poured forth. All of these works sought to show that reason and the Christian imagination are compatible. Because not any one genre can do everything, multiple genres were needed. As I noted, the Bible operates similarly, moving between, say the narratives of Genesis, the poetry of Psalms and Song of Solomon, the proverb structure of Ecclesiastes, the parables of Jesus, and so forth.
MacSwain noted that Lewis’s creativity makes him very difficult to categorize. His literary theology, if we can call it that, is too literary for religious types and too religious for literary types. Some also object that Lewis never studied theology and was never ordained.
It’s not a problem for me, however, as it confirms my belief that literature provides us with a special way of knowing the world—and in matters spiritual, what is beyond the world. As I mulled over the talk, I moved from British to American authors, not all of them Episcopalian, who also use literature to communicate Christian concepts. There are Madeleine L’Engle and Mary Oliver (Episcopalian), Emily Dickinson (raised Presbyterian), Ralph Waldo Emerson (Unitarian), Terry Tempest Williams (Mormon), and Lucille Clifton (raised Baptist), although some of these poets are more comfortable in their faiths than others. And then there are the Negro spirituals, which function as a kind of liberation theology.
I won’t be so imperialistic as to claim that literature handles spiritual matters better than systematic theology, but it makes a vital contribution. As with genres, we need multiple approaches.
