The following is a talk I gave on C. S. Lewis & The Arts in 2005 . . .
In his attitude as a Christian toward the arts, literature and culture, C. S. Lewis maintained a position somewhere between the Anabaptist separatist approach to culture and the Calvinist transformation approach. Lewis seems to fit within the "Christ above Culture" approach articulated by H. Richard Niebuhr in his classic work Christ and Culture. Angus Menuge summarizes this position as follows:
According to this view what is needed is not blank affirmation or rejection of culture for Christ but a synthesis of Christ and culture. It is pointed out that culture cannot be all bad because it is founded on the nature created good by God, and that although nature and culture are fallen, they are still subject to God. The view emphasizes that good works are carried out in culture, yet are only made possible by grace, so that the kingdom of grace impinges on the kingdom of the world from above. Only through grace can we love our neighbor, yet only in culture can we act on that love.
On this view, "We cannot say ?Either Christ or culture,' because we are dealing with God in both cases," yet we must not say "Both Christ and culture,' as though there were no great distinction between, them." For in His promises, Christ goes beyond culture, drawing us to the Father in heaven, but in His commands He directs us to act in culture . . .
With that summary in mind, let us examine what Lewis had to say about the Arts.
Relationship of Christianity to the Arts
In Mere Christianity Lewis writes that Christianity "was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal."
Furthermore, Lewis writes that the arts are not merely to be subsumed by the Church as such. "Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists-not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time."
So, what is art, from Lewis's perspective? Art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations of the business of heaven: the soul's never-completed attempt to communicate its unique vision to other people.
And what is the purpose of art? Lewis generally sees a very humble role for the arts in society. In writing to his friend, Dom Bede Griffiths in 1940 Lewis says,
I do most thoroughly agree with what you say about Art and Literature. To my mind they can only be healthy when they are either (a) admittedly aiming at nothing but innocent recreation or (b) definitely the handmaids of religious or at least moral truth. Dante is alright and Pickwick is alright. But the great serious irreligious art-art for art's sake-is all balderdash; and incidentally never exists when art is really flourishing. In fact one can say of Art as an author I recently read said of love (sexual love I mean), ?It ceases to be a devil when it ceases to be a god'. Isn't that well put? So many things-nay every real thing-is good if only it will be humble and ordinate.
So art itself, to Lewis's mind, is good, so long as it remains humble and ordinate. In other words, art must take its proper, or ordinate position, under God.
God is the Great Artist
Lewis believes that God is the great Artist with a capital "A". And we, as human beings, are his great art-work. In The Problem of Pain Lewis writes:
We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the ?intolerable compliment.' Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life-the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child-he will take endless trouble-and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.
Humans as Sub-Creators
If God is the great artist, then according to Lewis and his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, human beings are created by God to be sub-creators. John Wain, a member of the Inklings, a group of literary-minded friends who gathered around C. S. Lewis, once recorded the following remarks by Lewis:
Since the Creator has seen fit to build a universe and set it in motion, it is the duty of the human artist to create as lavishly as possible in his turn. The romancer, who invents a whole world, is worshiping God more effectively than the mere realist who analyses that which lies about him.
Lewis's view of God as the master artist with human beings as sub-artists has profound implications for Lewis's understanding of what we normally call "artistic creation." Lewis avouches that creation as applied to human authorship is a misleading term. Human authors only re-arrange elements God has provided. There is not a vestige of real creativity in human beings. Lewis invites us to try and imagine a new primary color, a third sex, a fourth dimension, or even a monster that does not consist of bits of existing animals stuck together. What happens when we try to imagine thus? Nothing happens because, strictly speaking, human beings create nothing. An author's work never means to others quite what he intended, because the author is only re-combining elements made by God and already containing his meanings. Because of those divine meanings in the author's materials it is impossible that the author should ever know the whole meaning of any of his own works. In fact, the meaning he never intended may be the best and truest meaning. Writing a book, Lewis insists, is much less like creation than it is like planting a garden or begetting a child. In all three cases human beings are only entering as one cause into a causal stream which works in its own way.
The reality of God's creation and originality was so woven into the warp and woof of Lewis's everyday thinking that he consistently denied any originality for his own books. Consequently, Lewis made the following points about originality:
First of all, "Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."
And secondly, "Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it."1
Lewis traces these thoughts about originality back to the New Testament itself. In an essay entitled Christianity and Literature Lewis says:
In the New testament the art of life itself is an art of imitation: can we, believing this, believe that literature, which must derive from real life, is to aim at being ?creative', ?original', and ?spontaneous'. ?Originality' in the New Testament is quite plainly the prerogative of God alone; even within the triune being of God it seems to be confined to the Father. The duty and happiness of every other being is placed in being derivative, in reflecting like a mirror.
This is the most fundamental difference, Lewis says, between the Christian and the non-Christian in their approach to literature, and, we might also say, in their approach to art. But there is another difference. The Christian will take literature (and therefore art) a little less seriously than the cultured non-Christian. The Christian artist will feel less uneasy with a purely hedonistic standard for at least many kinds of work. The unbeliever is always apt to make a kind of religion of his aesthetic experiences. But the Christian knows from the outset that the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world. The Christian artist, unlike the Pagan artist, will tend to look at the receivers of his artwork as his superiors, rather than his inferiors. Furthermore, the Christian artist has no objection to comedies that merely amuse and tales that merely refresh, for he will realize, like Thomas Aquinas, that we can play, as we can eat, to the glory of God.
Modern vs. Ancient Art
So what did Lewis think about modern art? As you might imagine, Lewis was very skeptical of its value. In his own field of literature Lewis did not care at all for the work of fellow poet T. S. Eliot. Lewis once wrote in a letter to a friend,
Yes, I'm sick of our Abracadabrist poets. What gives the show away is that their professed admirers give quite contradictory interpretations of the same poem - I'm prepared to believe that an unintelligible picture is really a very good horse if all its admirers tell me so; but when one says it's a horse, and the next that it's a ship, and the third that it's an orange, and the fourth that it's Mt. Everest, I give it up.
So, intelligibility was one difference Lewis saw between modern artists and older ones. A second difference Lewis could discern was regarding the artist's approach to his or her work. Lewis says,
All the great poets, painters, and musicians of old could produce great work ?to order'. One who could not would have seemed as great a humbug as a captain who could navigate or a farmer who could farm only when the fit took him.14
A third difference Lewis saw between the modern and the ancient artist was in regard to the relationship between artist and audience. He says,
Until quite recently-until the latter part of the last century-it was taken for granted that the business of the artist was to delight and instruct his public. There were, of course, different publics; the street-songs and the oratorios were not addressed to the same audience (though I think a good many people liked both). And an artist might lead his public on to appreciate finer things than they had wanted at first; but he could do this only by being, from the first, if not merely entertaining, yet entertaining, and if not completely intelligible, yet very largely intelligible. All this has changed. In the highest aesthetic circles one now hears nothing about the artist's duty to us. It is all about our duty to him. He owes us nothing; we owe him ?recognition,' even though he has never paid the slightest attention to our tastes, interests, or habits. If we don't give it to him, our name is mud. In this shop, the customer is always wrong.
A fiourth difference between Lewis sees between much modern art and a more ancient variety is in the quality of the work:
Many modern novels, poems, and pictures, which we are brow-beaten into ?appreciating,' are not good work because they are not work at all. They are mere puddles of spilled sensibility or reflection. When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing taste, interests, and capacity of his audience. These, no less than the language, the marble, or the paint, are part of his raw material; to be used, tamed, sublimated, not ignored nor defied. Haughty indifference to them is not genius nor integrity; it is laziness and incompetence. You have not learned your job. Hence, real honest-to-God work, so far as the arts are concerned, now appears chiefly in low-brow art; in the film, the detective story, the children's story. These are often sound structures; seasoned wood, accurately dovetailed, the stresses all calculated; skill and labour successfully used to do what is intended. Do not misunderstand. The high-brow productions may, of course, reveal a finer sensibility and profounder thought. But a puddle is not a work, whatever rich wines or oils or medicines have gone into it.
?Great works' (of art) and ?good works' (of charity) had better also be Good Work. Let choirs sing well or not at all.
A fifth difference Lewis recognizes between much modern art and ancient art is in the very goal or purpose of the artwork:
Until quite modern times - I think, until the time of the Romantics - nobody ever suggested that literature and the arts were an end in themselves. They ?belonged to the ornamental part of life', they provided ?innocent diversion'; or else the ?refined our manners' or ?incited us to virtue' or glorified the gods. The great music had been written for Masses, the great pictures painted to fill up a space on the wall of a noble patron's dining-room or to kindle devotion in a church; the great tragedies were produced either by religious poets in honour of Dionysus or by commercial poets to entertain Londoners on half-holidays.
It was only in the nineteenth century that we became aware of the full dignity of art. We began to ?take it seriously' as the Nazis take mythology seriously. But the result seems to have been a dislocation of the aesthetic life in which little is left for us but high-minded works which fewer and fewer people want to read or hear or see, and ?popular' works of which both those who make them and those who enjoy them are half ashamed. Just like the Nazis, by valuing too highly a real, but subordinate good, we have come near to losing that good itself.
A final difference Lewis notes between ancient and modern art has to do with novelty. Lewis's senior devil Screwtape writes to the junior devil Wormwood that the demand for continual novelty:
is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus by inflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing, we have recently made the Arts, for example, less dangerous to us than, perhaps, they have ever been, ?lowbrow' and ?highbrow' artists alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh, excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride. Finally, the desire for novelty is indispensable if we are to produce Fashions or Vogues.
As you can see, Lewis intensely disliked the fashion of art and literature in his day, primarily because he saw the arts veering away from the helpful purposes for which God created them.
Christianity & Culture
Given Lewis's perspective on the arts in our world today, what was Lewis's understanding of the proper relationship between the Christian and the surrounding culture? In March 1940 Lewis published in the journal Theology an article entitled Christianity and Culture. In that article he makes several perceptive points about the relationship between Christianity and the Arts. Allow me to summarize that essay for you.
Lewis begins by noting that there is no correlation between a person's response to art and their fitness for humane living. A fine taste in poetry or music is not a condition of salvation! To that we can breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Lewis goes on to note how:
"The ?sentimentality and cheapness' of much Christian hymnody had been a strong point in my own resistance to conversion. Now I felt almost thankful for the bad hymns. It was good that we should have to lay down our precious refinement at the very doorstep of the church; good that we should be cured at the outset of our inveterate confusion between psyche and pneuma, nature and supernature."
Art is not the most important thing in life. Lewis notes that the most important thing is: "The glory of God, and, as our only means to glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls." That is the real business of life.
What, then, is the value of culture? Lewis turns first for an answer to the New Testament. There he finds several statements which speak against the value of culture. We are told in the New Testament that whatever is highly valued on a natural level is to be abandoned the moment it conflicts with the service of God. Even blameless conformity to the Jewish law is considered as muck next to Christ, how much more so culture. Furthermore, there are warnings against superiority. We are to become as children; we are not to call one another Rabbi;26 we are to dread reputation. Few that are wise according to the flesh are called to be Christ-followers. A man must become a fool by secular standards before he can attain real wisdom.
However, Lewis also finds some Scripture favorable toward culture. Secular learning is embodied in the Magi, and not condemned. Talents in Jesus' parable might conceivably include talents in the arts. The miracle at Cana, by sanctifying an innocent, sensuous pleasure, could be taken to sanctify a recreational use of culture. Aesthetic enjoyment of nature was hallowed by Jesus' praise of the lilies. Some use of science was implied by St Paul's demand that we should perceive the invisible through the visible.
Lewis concludes his overview of New Testament attitudes toward culture by remarking that, on the whole, the New Testament seems, if not hostile, at least cold toward culture. We may still think culture innocent after reading the New Testament, but we are not encouraged to think it important.
However, Lewis goes on to cite the views of culture presented by other authors outside of Scripture. He cites the Anglican divine, Richard Hooker's statement that Scripture does not necessarily contain everything important or even necessary to life on earth.
Lewis examines the views of other classical authors regarding culture. Aristotle is positive toward culture, whereas Plato only tolerates that culture which conduces either to the intellectual vision of the good or the military efficiency of the commonwealth. Lewis notes that James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence would have fared ill in the Republic! Lewis notes how the Buddha, St. Augustine, Jerome, Thomas a Kempis and the Theologia Germanica were all anti-cultural.
Furthermore, Lewis says we shouldn't suppose that the values of imaginative literature have become more Christian since the time of the Early Church Fathers. Everything is questioned in Hamlet except the duty of revenge. In medieval romance, honor and sexual love are the true values, and in 19th century fiction, sexual love and material prosperity are the highest priorities. In romantic poetry enjoyment of nature is one of the highest goods; this enjoyment of nature in romantic poetry ranges from pantheistic mysticism to innocent sensuousness. Romantic poetry also ranks sehnsucht very high on the list, a longing awakened by the past, the distant and the imagined supernatural. In modern literature the life of liberated instinct is the highest good. Lewis notes that the sub-Christian or anti-Christian values of literature do infect many readers.
On the other side of the argument, St Gregory compares our use of secular culture to the action of the Israelites going down to the Philistines to have their knives sharpened. If we are to convert our heathen neighbors then we must understand their culture. On the Gregorian view, culture is a weapon, but it is a weapon which must be set aside as soon as we safely can.
Milton gives a glorious defense of the freedom to explore all good and evil through the arts, but this is based upon an aristocratic preoccupation with great souls and shows a contemptuous indifference to the mass of humanity.
John Henry Newman insisted on the beauty of culture for its own sake, but sternly resisted the temptation to confuse it with things spiritual. This leaves Lewis still wondering, "How much of one's time may a Christian legitimately spend upon culture, given that it is less than spiritual?"
Lewis came to the point of recognizing that he could no longer give to culture the kind of status he had given it before his conversion. If any constructive case for culture was to be given it would have to be of a humbler sort.
Lewis felt justified in continuing as a literary critic and a teacher of English literature after his conversion to Christianity because scholarly work was a way he could earn his living. On this score Lewis found the New Testament to be very encouraging. Provided that there is a demand for culture, and that culture is not actually deleterious, Lewis concluded that he was justified in making his living by it, especially since he did not feel very fit for any other vocation!
Lewis came to believe that to counter bad culture it is appropriate for appropriately gifted Christians to become "culture-sellers". However, this does not authorize the Christian artist to engage in a "bait and switch" game in which the artist takes money to supply culture and actually uses the opportunity to provide something else-namely homiletics and apologetics. That, to Lewis's mind, is stealing. However, the mere presence of Christians among the culture-sellers will provide an antidote to bad culture.
But is there intrinsic goodness in culture for its own sake? Lewis answers this question by examining what culture has done for him personally. He notes that culture has given him an enormous amount of pleasure. Pleasure in and of itself is good, so long as it is not accepted in a way that violates the moral law. Often, as Newman saw, the enjoyment of culture can be an excellent diversion from guilty pleasure. To the non-Christian the values of honor, romantic love, pantheistic enjoyment of nature and sehnsucht may all serve as a schoolmaster which leads to Christ.
To sum up, Lewis's view of the relationship between Christianity and Culture is this:
That culture is a storehouse of the best (sub-Christian) values. These values are in themselves of the soul, not the spirit. But God created the soul. Its values may be expected, therefore, to contain some reflection or ante-past of the spiritual values. They will save no man. They resemble the regenerate life only as affection resembles charity, or honour resembles virtue, or the moon the sun. But though ?like is not the same', it is better than unlike. Imitation may pass into initiation. For some it is a good beginning. For others it is not; culture is not everyone's road into Jerusalem, and for some it is a road out.
For the non-Christian culture may help to conversion. The cultured person is almost compelled to realize that reality is very odd and that ultimate truth must therefore have the characteristics of strangeness.
What good is culture in the life of the Christian? Lewis says that if all cultural values are dim ectypes of the truth then Christians can still recognize them as such. If we must rest and play, where better to do so than in the suburbs of Jerusalem? It is lawful to rest our eyes in moonlight-especially now that we know it is only sunlight at second hand. Not all people are called to glorify God directly in their vocation, as are ministers of the Gospel. All other Christians must glorify God at second hand, by offering their work to the Lord. Artistic work, if innocent, can be offered to the Lord just as the sweeping of a room can be so offered. The work of a charwoman and the work of a poet become spiritual in the same way-by being offered to the Lord.
Enjoyment of Art
How is art to be enjoyed, according to Lewis. As you might expect, for Lewis "Culture" is irrelevant; what counts is real enjoyment of art. We shouldn't recommend a certain artist or author to another person because his or her work is "cultured" but because it is enjoyable.34
Lewis draws an important distinction between enjoying art because one finds it enjoyable and feigning enjoyment because one's friends approve of a certain kind of art. He says,
A live dog is better than a dead lion. In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,
The child whose love is here, at least doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.35
The Christian Artist
In the autumn of 1939 Lewis preached a sermon in Oxford entitled Learning in War-Time. In that sermon he asks the question: how can we carry on with learning when an all-important war is looming all around us? This, Lewis says, raises an even more serious question: How is it right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology? Lewis says the bottom line is that we do spend time on things other than saving souls. Christianity does not exclude ordinary activities. We are to get on with our jobs. Scripture assumes we go to dinner parties. Jesus attended a wedding and provided miraculous wine.
Under the aegis of His Church, and in the most Christian ages, learning and the arts flourish. The solution of this paradox is, of course, well known to you. ?Whether ye eat or drink or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.' All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest: and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not.
To paraphrase what Lewis says about philosophy and apply it to the arts:
Good art must exist, if for no other reason, because bad art needs to be answered.
Art that Teaches
So then, is it the function of the Christian artist to use his artwork to teach others about Christianity? Possibly, says Lewis, so long as the art and the teaching are both done well. Lewis writes to a friend:
I'm with you on the main issue-that art can teach (and much great art deliberately sets out to do so) without at all ceasing to be art. On the particular case of Wells I would agree with Burke, because in Wells it seems to me that one has first-class pure fantasy (Time Machine, First Men in the Moon) and third-class didacticism; i.e. I object to his novels with a purpose not because they have a purpose but because I think them bad. Just as I object to the preaching passages in Thackeray not because I dislike sermons but because I dislike bad sermons. To me therefore Wells and Thackeray are instances that obscure the issue. It must be fought on books where the doctrine is as good on its own merits as the art-e.g. Bunyan, Chesterton (as you agree), Tolstoi, Charles Williams, Virgil.
Arts in the Church
Finally, we might take a few moments to examine what Lewis believed about the use of the arts in the Church. I think we can get at Lewis's ideas on this subject by looking at what he had to say about liturgy and about music, specifically, as used in church services.
In Letters to Malcolm Lewis asserted that laymen should take what is given them in the liturgy of the Church and make the best of it-quite a humbling perspective coming from one who greatly appreciated the arts. Lewis thought this task of the layman would be easier if the liturgy of the Church of England was always and everywhere the same. He was not in favor of innovations. Novelty can only have an entertainment value. We don't go to church to be entertained but to use the service, to enact it. We are better able to worship and focus on God when we are so familiar with the service that nothing distracts our attention from the Lord. Every novelty prevents this; it focuses our attention on the service, or even on the one leading the service, rather than on God. Lewis claimed that his whole liturgical position boiled down to a plea for permanence and uniformity. He asserted that he would especially appreciate uniformity in the time taken by services. A lengthened service may throw the whole day into hurry and confusion for the layman since he has less control over the hours of his business than the clergy do.
Any tendency to have a passionate preference for one type of service must be regarded simply as a temptation. Lewis regarded a love of religious observances as a merely natural taste. He himself denied being choosy about services. He claimed any form would do for him so long as he was given time to get used to it. He contended that if we can't lay down our liturgical preferences at the door of the Church, along with all other carnal baggage, we should bring them into Church with us to be humbled and modified.
As to the words of the service, Lewis believed that if you have a liturgy in the vernacular then you must have a changing liturgy, because no living language can be timeless. He thought it best if any changes made to the liturgy, however, would be made gradually and almost imperceptibly, with only one obsolete word being changed every century! He made the point that prose needs to be very good in a special way in order to stand up to repeated reading aloud. He felt it would be hard for any modern writer to beat Thomas Cranmer, the original compiler of the English prayer book, as a stylist.
Yet, in favor of diversity, Lewis said that what pleased him about an Orthodox mass he once attended was that there seemed to be no prescribed behavior for the congregation. Some stood, some knelt, some sat, some walked, and one person even crawled around on the floor. The beauty of it was that no one took any notice of what anyone else was doing.
Lewis believed that anything the congregation could do could also properly and profitably be offered to God in public worship, including such things as sacred dance, so long as the congregation could do it well. (One can quickly see how this principle might be applied to the use of other arts in the Church.) Lewis affirmed that the most valuable thing the Psalms did for him was to express that delight in God which made David dance. He thought this spirit was so much better than the merely dutiful church-going and laborious "saying our prayers" to which many Christians in his day were often reduced. He wanted to see the Anglican Church recover the same joy seen in the Psalms, but for the Christian, such joy would need to be compatible with the tragic depth of the cross.
Regarding music and literature, Lewis often wrote about how both books and music conveyed beauty to him. But, he urges, we must not trust in books or in music because the beauty is not in them, it only comes through them, and what comes through them is longing. Lewis was a great lover of music, at least in his youth. He especially enjoyed the music of Wagner, for it communicated joy, sehnsucht, longing to his soul. Certainly Screwtape expressed the opposite of Lewis' view when he said that he detested both music and silence and that he wanted to make the whole universe one noise in the end.
However, Lewis states some caveats regarding the religious importance of music. He writes that we must distinguish between the effect which music has on the musically illiterate, who get only an emotional effect, and the effect that it has on real musical scholars who perceive the structure of the music and get an intellectual satisfaction as well as an emotional one. He asserts that either of these effects is ambivalent from the religious point of view. Both emotional and intellectual satisfaction can be a preparation for or even a medium for meeting God, but these satisfactions can also be a distraction and impediment to meeting God. He goes so far as to suggest that the emotional effect of music may also be a delusion. Some people, feeling certain emotions in church, think they have had a supernatural experience when they have only had a natural one. Genuinely religious emotion is only a servant; no soul is saved by having it or damned by lacking it. The test of music is always the same. We should ask ourselves, "Does this music make me more obedient, more God-centered and neighbor-centered or more self-centered?"
Lewis found hymns to be dead wood in the English Church because he thought that the English couldn't sing well and that the art of poetry had developed for two centuries in a private and subjective direction. Yet, he felt if the hymnody could be improved then it was his duty, as a layman, to submit to it, whether it would suit his preference or not. Lewis often noted how he disliked hymns, but as he grew in his Christian life he saw that these same hymns were being sung with devotion and benefit by saints very different from himself. This, Lewis maintained, helped to peel away his pride and conceit.
Lewis wrote an essay entitled "On Church Music" in which he made the following points: First of all, nothing should be done or sung or said in church which does not either glorify God or edify the people or both. Secondly, church music glorifies God by being excellent in its own kind. In the composition and highly trained execution of sacred music we offer our natural gifts, at their highest, to God. Third, as noted above, Lewis was unconvinced that the physical and emotional exhilaration produced by singing hymns had any religious relevance. He asserted that he would like to have fewer, better and shorter hymns, especially fewer! Fourth, he thought the case for abolishing all church music was strong. (Incidentally, Lewis most regularly attended the service without music at his parish church!) But he recognized that the main sense of Christendom would be against him and others if they tried to abolish all church music. Fifth, the High Brows and the Low Brows each assume far too easily the spiritual value of the music they like. Sixth, Lewis maintained, there are two musical situations on which we can be confident that God's blessing rests. One is where the High Brow priest or organist gives the people the humbler and coarser fare that they want, out of a desire to bring them closer to God. The other is where the Low Brow layman submits humbly and patiently to the music that he cannot fully appreciate, in the belief that this somehow glorifies God. To both these groups, acting in this way, church music becomes a means of grace. Where both the choir and the congregation are on this right road, no insurmountable difficulties will occur. Discrepancies of taste and capacity provide opportunities for charity and humility. What matters most is our intention in offering our praise to God through music.
Lewis believed that our present services are merely attempts at worship. When we attempt to worship God in Church what we are really doing is tuning our instruments for Heaven, where one day we shall praise God perfectly, with total delight.
The Art of Writing
How did Lewis go about the art of writing? Lewis says that in an author's mind there bubbles up, every now and then, the material for a story. For Lewis himself this process invariably began with him seeing pictures in his mind. The bubbling process leads to nothing unless it is accompanied by a form in which to write the story: verse or prose, short story, novel, play, etc. When these two aspects: the content and the form come together then the author's impulse is complete.
However, Lewis says, it is at this point that the human being as a whole, not just the author, must get involved. The author's desire is very much like an itch, and the whole human is the one who must decide if this particular itch will be scratched or not. The human being must ask if the writing of this story will fit in with everything else the writer needs to do or be. Perhaps the whole idea is too frivolous to warrant the time needed to write the story. Perhaps the story would not be edifying to other people. All of these questions must be asked and answered. When the work looks like it will be good all around, not just in a literary sense, then the writing can really begin in earnest.
Lewis goes on to tell us how this whole process applied to the writing of his fairy stories. First of all, he notes that he did not begin by asking himself how he could say something about Christianity to children, then fixing on the fairy story as an instrument. Rather, once again, the whole process began with a picture, in this case with the picture of a faun carrying an umbrella in a snowy wood, a picture which had been in Lewis's mind since he was sixteen. Finally, when he was in his forties he wrote a story about it! At first there wasn't anything Christian about the story.
Next came the form The images he had in his mind: a faun, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion (he was having nightmares about lions around that time), all of these images sorted themselves into events. And it seemed that the form which would work best to tell this story was the fairy tale.
After the content and form came together Lewis says the man in him began to see how these stories might steal past certain inhibitions which had paralyzed his own religion in childhood. Why was it so hard to feel the way you were supposed to feel about Christ? It was because you were told you must feel a certain way about him. But suppose you put a Christ-like figure into an imaginary world. Could the author then make the person behind Christianity appear in his real potency and thus steal past watchful dragons? Lewis felt it could be done.
The Christian bit was the man's motive. But the man could have done nothing if it were not for the bubbling process in the author's imagination. This is how Lewis came to write The Chronicles of Narnia.54
What advice does Lewis the author have for other budding authors about writing? First, he says, you must know what you want to say and then say exactly that.55 There are no right and wrong answers about language as there are in arithmetic. Good English is whatever educated English people speak, and that varies from place to place. Lewis recommends not taking any advice from teachers or textbooks in this regard. What really matters is the following:
(1) Always use language so as to make quite clear what you mean.
(2) Always prefer the plain, direct word to the long vague one.
(3) Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean ?more people died', don't say: ?mortality rose'.
(4) Don't use adjectives which merely tell your reader what you want him or her to feel. Instead of telling the reader a thing is terrible, describe the thing so that the reader will be terrified.
(5) Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say ?infinitely' when you mean ?very'; otherwise you won't have any word left when you want to talk about something that is really infinite!
In an early letter to his life-long friend, Arthur Greeves, Lewis urged him to write something, anything, but at any rate to write. For Lewis, writing was an itch. But it was also a trained habit. It was something he did everyday. Not everything he wrote was worth publishing. But by putting ink to paper every day he eventually came up with a lot that was worth sharing with others.
Conclusion
Finally, Lewis would say to all Christian writers today that we need more books by Christian authors on a wife variety of subjects. Lewis says,
The difficulty we are up against is this. We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy's line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects-with their Christianity latent.
I think we can take Lewis's statement and apply it to the arts in general. We need more sculpture, more painting, more dance, more drama, as well as more literature by Christians. That is, we need more art that is well done to the glory of God, regardless of the immediate subject of the work of art or literature.
