A Preface to Paradise Lost: Being the Ballard Matthews Lectures Delivered at University College, North Wales, 1941 by C.S. Lewis
I read Paradise Lost for the first time a little while ago and enjoyed it in the same way I enjoy the yarns told about the Greek gods, so I thought I'd do a little background reading to see what I had missed. For reasons now obscure to me (the kindle edition was cheap? I liked the Narnia tales when I was of an age to do so?) I turned to C.S. Lewis, a writer who in his religiosity was sure to be uncongenial to me.
In these lectures his thinking is indeed uncongenial to me, but not in a way that raised my hackles and made me want to refute it. It is simply that he is arguing from premises foreign to me about things that have little connection to the world in which I live. Too many of the things he focuses on seem like disputes about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a discussion that might be interesting if angels were, you know, real. But of course some of these things were real for Milton and his contemporaries, so perhaps they do need to be addressed. But still . . . .
For me the most useful part of the book was the general discussion of epic poetry in the early lectures. He felt, in 1941, that epic poetry had fallen so far out of fashion that such background information on the form was necessary. Epic poetry remains unfashionable, and his explanation of the form remains intelligent and helpful.
Finally, when did the habit of referring to scholars and poets who come up in the course of your argument as, for example, "Mr. Williams, Mr. Pound, and Mr. Eliot die out? I've noticed that when I find myself doing that in my own writing, I'm always being snarky—"If Mr. ***** sincerely believes that . . . "—and elide the honorifics.
(I found Tobias Gregory's piece in a recent LRB to be at least as illuminating as Lewis's lectures.)
Mr. Lewis "is arguing from premises foreign to me about things that have little connection to the world in which I live." I know what you mean. I picked up his "A Grief Observed" at a used-book sale. My reaction: "It’s bracing and helpful to read this account of the excruciating pain of the loss of a dearly loved one. However, it is mostly a struggle to find a place in the author’s Christian beliefs (i.e. a wise God; an afterlife; a purpose to life, etc.) for the tragedy, and to revise and clarify those beliefs in the face of it. The brutal honesty and logic brought to bear on this task makes clear that, whatever benefits religion might have, it sure can add an awkward and sad complexity to life… and death."
ReplyDeleteI'd like to thank Mr. Julian for his thoughtful and intelligent response to what I wrote. I've always felt grateful that I'm neither spiritual not religious. Life is so much more pleasant without that baggage.
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DeleteAmen to that.
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