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C.S. Lewis: Luminous Sage
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12189 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1987 |
4,488 Words |
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Michael Aeschliman
Michael Aeschliman is the author of The Restitution of Man:
C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism (Eerdmans
Publishing). |
"The intellectual baggage of artists today, regardless of nationality, is more or less the same everywhere," Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz writes. "All are 'children of the age' and, consciously or unconsciously, all pay homage to the nihilistic canon of the day." For an anatomy of, and antidote to, this pervasive and profound nihilism in art and life, there is no one better than C.S. Lewis, and perhaps this is one reason for his extraordinary popularity, which spans the world of children and adults, scholars and the unlettered. Large numbers of people who might not even understand an esoteric-seeming word such as 'nihilism' nevertheless experience the phenomenon that it denotes, the strange and pervasive "disease" of modern life, its anxiety and "weightlessness," its relativism, frequent meaninglessness, and recurrent horror, both personal and historical. In Lewis they find something beyond it.
Not only a scholar - though one of the greatest of our century - Lewis was also an artist, one with astonishing insight into the origin, nature, and meaning of that nihilism and sense of absurdity so characteristic of most modern art, whether visual, as in Beuys, Bacon, and Warhol, or literary, as in Beckett and Plath; and not of modern art only, but also of modern thought generally, from Monod through Skinner, and of much modern social life, from the organized tyrannical horrors of communist "scientific socialism" and militaristic autocracies, to the disorganized, fitful but intense rapacity and egotistical nihilism of our own free societies.
Lewis as Educator
Lewis brought a unique combination of talents to bear in his career as writer and sage, in his illumination of current confusions and in his prescription of a remedy. He was a writer of eloquence and felicity, whether in nonfiction analytical or apologetic writing or in narrative and fictional modes. He wore his learning lightly and focused it in prose with an enormous density of meaning and extraordinary clarity. Thus, his classic The Abolition of Man contains in less than 100 pages a profound introduction not only to philosophy, religion, and ethics, but also to literary criticism and educational theory. Of this volume, Secretary of Education William Bennett recently wrote, "If I could only assign one essay on education, this would be it."
Lewis is still a great educator in many ways, as millions of children and parents attest from their reading of the Narnia Chronicles, and as students of literature attest from his books and essays on literature, which,
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