Abstract
The little books of religious instruction or edification – so numerous, so well-intentioned, so ill-written, so infinitely dull – will, I suppose, continue to cumber the shelves of our bookshops and our pious homes even in wartime. We must therefore be specially grateful for a little book which may be called admirable without reserve. Mr Lewis has done a very difficult thing superlatively well. He has compressed into no more than 160 pages of large clear print enough good theology, good psychology, good moral and ascetical teaching, good apologetic, and good Christian sense to fit out at least four little books, each one of which would make most of its little rivals superfluous. For apologetic, read his brief, excellent discourses upon ‘reality’ (Chapters 1 and 30), divine foreknowledge and human prayer (Chapter 27), change and permanence (Chapter 25), and his ‘asides’ upon a superstitious materialism or ‘Puritan’ as a term of abuse; above all, enjoy the delicate skill with which on many pages he punctures the pretentiousness of the highbrow in slavery to current clichés and intellectual fashions. For psychology, consider his analyses of unselfishness, of hatred, of physical fear; study in particular his diagnosis of domestic frictions and irritabilities (Chapter 3) and his thoughts (Chapters 8 and 9) upon marriage and ‘being in love’.
It is upon a sound psychology and a knowledge of the ‘classics’ of the spiritual life that his own more technically ‘ascetic’ doctrine is based. Instructed and ‘practising’ readers will welcome fresh light upon familiar truths (this is a book to which, for once, the word ‘brilliant’ may be applied, not politely but exactly), for his discussions of false spirituality, for example, or of dryness and distractions in prayer, or of humility, or of the religion of feeling, would serve as serious commentaries upon well-known pages of The Spiritual Combat or The Hidden Life of the Soul. To the man who has hitherto kept ascetic literature at arm’s length they may open a window upon new horizons, for there is happily some chance that he may read them – some chance, that is, that a sufficient number of the ordinary book-buying public will perceive delightedly the quality, if not of the author’s thought, at least of his wit and his handling of the English tongue, and make the book a best-seller.
It was Gilbert Chesterton, I think, who taught an earlier generation that Luther’s opinion (quoted by our author on his first page) that ‘the best way to drive out the devil … is to jeer and flout him’ is gloriously true. For many years that inspired franc-tireur, sharp-shooting from behind the hedges of an invaded Christendom, made laughter the most formidable weapon of all in the defence of its homesteads. Certain ‘progressive’ circles have never quite forgiven him for being far quicker, far cleverer, and far more amusing when preaching Christian orthodoxy than they can ever contrive to be when gibing at it. A formidable weapon, but one which not many writers in any generation are qualified to wield. The primary and essential qualification for its wielder is that he should fully, and even fiercely, believe the Gospel – knowing it, loving it, desiring to live by it. Only the man whose loyalty is rooted far below the surface breezes – the passing doubts of mood or vogue – can happily make jokes about his creed; can ‘jeer and flout’ carelessly, genially, at his self-confident ease. And, further, he must have the story-teller’s gift and pen to allure even a reluctant reader to go reading on. More than half of Chesterton’s persuasive power lay in his skill to make us sure that the story of man’s salvation was lit with all the colours of a great romantic drama – a story rapid like a schoolboy’s ‘thriller’, full of danger and urgency and critical choices.
Mr Lewis has a very different manner and method from the Chestertonian; his laughter is more subtle and demure, and his ironic tradition is rather that of Swift and Butler – a measure of his excellence being that one can set the three names side by side without absurdity. But we see in him many marks of the Jester-Apologist of true brand. He points epigrams for the pricking of bladders or the uncovering of shams with easy expertness; he knows his theology (it is professed students who will best appreciate his reflections upon natural pleasures, the delusion of human ‘ownership’, the ‘historical Jesus’), and his whole book is a picture in strong bright colours of the human soul as the centre of a cosmic conflict – terrible, dramatic, eternally significant.
It is impossible not to hope that he will give us other (even ‘little’) books as tonic and enlightening as this one. Meanwhile he has temporarily solved two recurrent problems – what to read to retreatants at mealtimes (if reading there must be), and what to give the intelligentsia for Easter or Christmas presents.
Cambridge
Originally published in Theology 44 (263): 306–7 <https://doi.org/10.1177/0040571X4204426313>.