Being a critique of an 80-year-old essay by C.S. Lewis,

                                           Still spot on but way out of touch

 

 

 

 

  “Christianity and Culture” is the title of an essay by C.S. Lewis originally published in some now obscure journal in 1940, close to 80 years ago.  I've never seen the original but I stumbled across the article about 50 years ago in a hardback compilation of old essays of his, Christian Reflections, 1967, which I still have.

Recently I reread the essay.  My first reaction this time is the same as at my first reading about a half a century ago – to shake my head in wonder.  Few essayists of any sort, Christian or otherwise, have ever written as precisely, succinctly yet elegantly, as politely yet convincingly, as Lewis.

My second is to sigh -- what a period piece!   Lewis essays the place of culture in Christianity, without undertaking the then current but now quaint definitions of either culture or Christianity. To modern minds, even many Christian minds, the subject is not remotely relevant either to contemporary Christianity or current culture of any kind, boring and out of touch; pedantic and punctilious and out of touch, out of touch and narrow-minded and blinkered, embarrassingly slavishly scriptural, un-liberated, Victorian, stuffy if not offensive, out of touch; good only for dust and cobwebs, and passing sneers.  Even when he wrote the article  – in WWII the most horrific war yet fought, while bombs were falling all around --  the subject, so irenic, was, I should think, out of place.

Though 89 years old, I find it more engrossing and more relevant than it ever was.   So touched by it that I am moved to present a review and old-time critique, though not with Lewis’s stately style, of Lewis’s essay, my disagreements and all, if I can find any.

This review encompasses much more than his article did.   After reviewing his original question and his answer that so frankly reflected the old-time religious perspective, I must review the monumental change in our worldview, the drastic change, since he wrote so long ago.  We live in a different world than Lewis did.

 

I identify with Lewis.  Besides being an increasingly aroused conservative Christian like Lewis, I was born to culture (in my case art, though detoured into medicine) and therefore automatically inducted into the Universal Federation of Culture, like it or not.  I’m not completely sure I like it.

An academic, literary and cultural icon, the archetypal Oxford and Cambridge don, Lewis made the cover of TIME magazine in 1947.  Even so, at the time he wasn’t as famous as Ernest Hemingway, a contemporary, and who now remembers Hemingway?  But Lewis, like Hemingway dead for more than 50 years, is now more widely known than ever, Lewis fan clubs popping up all over the planet and the web, probably because of his fantasies like The Hideous Strength, Out of The Silent Planet, and Perelandra, and of course Narnia, recently made into video games and movies that have grossed over 1.5 billion dollars.  If Christian essays were all Lewis ever wrote, he probably would have vanished from the scene sooner than Hemingway and his bullfights.  But for me, if fantasies were all he wrote, I wouldn’t be bothering to write this.   I’m no fan of fantasies, even those said to be parabolically Christian.  (A little personal idiosyncrasy, there, and our first point of disagreement.)  It’s Lewis’s no-bones-about-it Christian essays I shall always remember, and reread, and cherish.

Though always a lay member of the congregation and not a professional theologian, he was, I think, a more effective champion and expositor of essential Christianity, certainly for the likes of me, than Paul Tillich, Rick Warren, or either of the Robertsons,” Pat “700 Club,” or Phil “Duck Commander.”  His only equal, I submit, is St. Paul.

Obligatorily atheist when he donned academic gown, he was remarkably and famously converted to Christianity, and he was not one whit embarrassed about it – extraordinary on both counts!  I find the manner by which he was converted even more extraordinary than the fact of his conversion.  It was hardly the usual way, or place.  It happened, of all places, in the Gothic halls of a university not a cathedral, not a sawdust trail, or even via uTube.   That the Messiah should come from such an unlikely place as Nazareth was in His day, suspect.  Likewise it could be asked, can any good Christian thing come out of Oxford, where atheist Richard Dawkins now famously resides?

As he tells in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he was converted through intellect and reason and, especially, literature (he was a professor of English and Medieval literature), that is to say culture, of all things!   Being of analogous to, but lesser mentality than, Lewis, I have been moved to follow the path he followed.  However, backlit clouds would be first on my list.

Once converted, Lewis saw Christianity as Christ Himself had proclaimed it, as recorded in the gospels and presaged by the Old Testament, as rediscovered by the Reformation.  Though a philosopher, he rejected many of the 4th century neoPlatonic metaphysical makeovers and later patristic accretions.  And though a scholar, he spurned most of the then-emerging untethered hermeneutics and Germanic über alles higher criticism.  For Lewis it was Sola scriptura. Now it’s “so long and farewell” to scripture, hello talking points, hello again neoplatonism.

Even more axiomatically, and archaically, and startlingly, culture to that former generation meant only the noble and the beautiful.  Therefore, culture was the arts (for Lewis, literature; for me painting), of necessity classical because classicism equates arts with beauty.   What is now labeled “art” and masterfully rendered, and extolled for “honesty” or “truth,” as Hollywood and Hemingway always claim, Lewis and his generation would find abhorrent.  To them, if it was not beautiful, well proportioned, uplifting, it unquestionably was not culture, -- it was ugliness, degradation.  It’s reversed now and not a pretty sight.

I can appreciate the peculiar dilemma Lewis himself faced way back then.  Culture having always been his life and his profession, he was now a fresh convert and zealous to follow God as only new converts are.  So he might, ruefully perhaps, see culture as an unwelcome evil threat to him personally, as alluring, deceptive, and threatening as the glowing apple to Eve or golden idols to the Israelites.  Indeed culture, like mammon, could vie with God for loyalty, overtake Him, even displace Him.  A cultured man, like a rich man, is less likely to enter the Kingdom than a camel to go through the eye of a needle.   God requires His followers to surrender everything, especially their very souls, everything once held dear, to Him, whereupon God has promised to return those thing things He himself had created into the Man, back purified and made more pleasurable than before, plus new delights not previously imagined.  Genuinely willing to, the professor's unique cross was being required to abandon what had led him to God in the first place -- culture.  He could have seen it that way.  That was not – I’m not making this up – an uncommon belief in those days.  That’s how we seventh-day Adventists thought in my childhood and youth, which, by the way, was coincident with Lewis’s prime.

On the other hand, as the lion of the academic and authoring literary culturati, Lewis could have insisted that Culture is the very Jacob’s ladder to heaven, the prime gift of the spirit, the angel bearing us mortals to the Kingdom with celestial fanfare.  On his back on high scaffolds painting his frescoes on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo ascended to heaven as surely as Elijah was taken up by the whirlwind.   That is to say, culture is righteousness as well as good taste.  After all, it was through culture that Lewis was converted.

Confronted by both culture and Christ, a lesser professor would almost inevitably go dreamy about both and thus genuinely incorporate neither into his soul.  In fact, he was hardly the romantic about either.  He was neither the 19th century poet of the sublime standing in a frock coat on a cliff gazing into the sunset, nor a mystic on a yoga mat, nor a Moses hoisting high the Tables of Stone amidst thunder and lightening.  In writing his essay he was as level-headed as an engineer.  Astonishingly, Lewis was as truly open-minded and analytic as an agnostic claims to be.

To me Lewis seems by and large negative.  I suspect that is because his bygone era celebrated Christianity and culture as a union made in heaven.  But Lewis, truly born again with heavenly eyes that see, saw earthly dangers.

 

Sounding less the cultural aesthete and more the puritan cleric, Lewis takes note of, perhaps with some resignation, the Old Testament’s preoccupation with excoriating Philistine culture in which the scripture sees no art in contrast to our archaeologists who spend their lives digging for it and our museums that collect, prize, and exhibit it.  Having so ardently loved ancient Norse culture, Lewis could have felt personally stung by the scripture's eschewing ancient near eastern culture.  As to the New Testament, it "seemed, if not hostile, yet unmistakably cold to culture.”

Lewis’s definition of Christianity and culture, and negative adjudication thereof, are crystal clear and was familiar back then.  Now, foreign.    So let him take over and do the talking.  Only he can make what seems to us so odd so clear.  Quoting him: “Culture is a storehouse of the finest sub-Christian values.  They will save no man.” “Cultural activities do not in themselves improve our spiritual condition.”  “Is culture even harmless?  It certainly can be harmful and often is."

“Some of the principal values," Lewis proceeds to assert, "actually implicit in European literature…to wit, (a) bloodshed as the exercise of honor, (b) sexual love, the more illicit the more romantic, (c) material prosperity, (d) pantheistic contemplation of nature, (e)…the remote or the (imagined) supernatural, (f) liberation of impulses ... are not …those of Christianity.”  And that was Shakespeare, not pop poets and rappers, the old Professor was referring to.   Making his living from culture, he was not reticent to whack it when deserved.

As an academician should, Lewis quotes authorities, notably Newman, for, says Lewis deferentially, “No one ever insisted so eloquently as Newman on the beauty of culture for its own sake, and no one ever so sternly resisted the temptation to confuse it with things spiritual.” Cultivation of intellect or manners is “for this world,” not the next; between it and “genuine religion” there is a “radical difference.”  Culture makes “not the Christian…but the gentleman,” not infrequently two different people entirely.  Culture “looks like virtue only at a distance.”   Newman “will not for an instant allow that culture makes men better… Culture… has [no] tendency to make us pleasing to our Maker….In some instances the cultural and the spiritual value of an activity may even be in inverse ratio.”

Lewis perceived that classical culture of his day while exalting beauty glossed over unwholesomeness.   In our day it  isn't.  It's in your face, worse yet award-winning.  Which is where our church, once suspicious of any culture, likes it.  Still a little timid about it in public, at church we include "classic" movies in our culture and hold "classical" movie festivals for the education of previously movie-challanged members.

As to holding culture as an end in itself, that was a problem with the Israelites who "worship the work of their own hands,” the exquisite art “their own fingers have made” (Isa 2:8, 9).   Isaiah adds, “Do not forgive them.”  I would commend unto religionists who venture into culture Christ’s prayer (paraphrased) for his apostles: “I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world’s culture, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.” John 17:15.   Boast only that "your names are in the books of heaven."

God is encountered less wondrously through a Te Deum, and certainly far less wondrously if at all through church rock, than a prayer.  God is less likely to be recognized in the most expensive, most massive, most elaborate marble gothic-baroque-rococo cathedral a pope Julius ever commissioned, among the most exquisitely sculpted saints and murals by the hand of Michelangelo, and resplendent shafts of light from banks of stained glass windows, and flying buttresses, than in the sanctified child.   However groomed His endearingly forked beard or gilded the halo circumscribing His head as seen in medieval altarpieces, or faintly coy His grin on a modern poster on the wall of a youth Crossroads Cafe, Christ is less transcendently portrayed on canvas or a Photoshopped printout than on a holy heart.  Painting portraits is my main craving, but I’d hesitate to paint Him.  Personally I believe that rather than guiding the soul to Christ, icons distract.

Lewis speaking again:  Although culture can have “a distinct part to play in bringing certain souls” – notably Lewis himself – “to Christ.  [But] there is a shorter, and safer, way which has always been followed by most,… devotion to the person of Christ.”  “The thing to which, on my view, culture must be subordinated, is … the conscious direction of all will and desire to a transcendental Person in whom I believe all values to reside.”

Well said, those warnings.  I applaud and shout amen.  But to postmillenial kids some four generations later, even SDA church kids used to being appeased by church culture updated to the latest Hollywood rhythms, Lewis is outrageous.

 

I must assume that doctor Lewis, having warned against the potential for evil in culture, would then be the first to see and delight in the blessings of culture if culture is not an end in itself and if very broadly and crucially defined as beauty, idealized as pure beauty that elevates, ennobles, inspires and does not gloss over violence, infidelity, lying, and the rest.  Realistically, as earlier Adventists recognized but now do not, those two ifs eliminate movies of all eras, much opera (unless you can't understand what's being sung) and novels leaving select music and painting.  To the present audience, that's just way too boring.  But thus carefully defined, culture is to be received with gratitude like any other blessing created for us by God for our pleasure, for the faculty of appreciation itself was created by God, and He saw that it was good.

The talent for writing, playing the violin or composing violin concertos, or for painting, is God-granted, to be used and multiplied, and the fruit of it distributed to others, and thus twice blessed.  As Christ's familiar parable proclaims, we are stewards of such talents, and accountable.  Burying our talents is cursed in no pussyfooting terms.

Surely Lewis, the epitome of such a culture, would agree. As a tutor he famously and fearsomely demanded from his students no less than perfection in thought and in writing. Even so beware, he says, “lest excellence in reading and writing are ... elevated into a spiritual value, something meritorious per se, just as other things, excellent and wholesome in themselves, like conjugal love (in the sense of eros) or physical cleanliness, have, at some times and in some circles, been confused with virtue itself or esteemed necessary parts of it.” Meanwhile, ugliness, even depravity, though labeled “art,” is to be abhorred. For such “art” was given us by Hollywood, not God, and the twain shall never meet. Though awarded an appropriately gleaming idol, Hollywood’s chi-chi offal will receive no reward in heaven, only punishment, and, according to some, eternal torment. For me, watching it down here is torment sufficient for eternity. Then Lewis asks if God wants us to fritter our time and energy in becoming ‘better’ or ‘more perfect’ through culture?” His answer is that how we spend our time “is a matter of serious concern. … Every split second is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” “The thing to which, on my view, culture must be subordinated, is … the conscious direction of all will and desire to a transcendental Person in whom I believe all values to reside.” It is “as though God said, you get on with what I have explicitly left as your task – righteousness.”

 

 

Lewis talks about how some cultured Christians contend they “have a duty” to be all things to all people, citing Paul (1 Cor. 9:22), and have been specially commissioned to witness within the worldly cultural community to demonstrate that Christians are not necessarily uncultured philistines, thereby to evoke favor and maybe to convert some.

I'd like to think so.  Not only may a cultured Christian so witness but he is obligated to, out of gratitude to God for the gift of culture, and the gift of being positioned to witness.  Though perhaps not of the same level and direct purpose as Gifts of the Spirit, like prophecy or tongues, the ability to create culture, the talent for writing, playing the violin or composing violin concertos, or for painting is God-granted to be used and multiplied, and the fruit of it distributed to others.  As Christ's familiar parable proclaims, we are stewards of such talents, and accountable.  Burying our talents is cursed in no pussyfooting terms.

But too frequently that argument is, at bottom, nothing but rationalization.  It's essentially the same argument the Israelites used for mingling and exchanging cultures with the supercultured Philistines (capitalized) of their day.   By the way, it's an intriguing irony that the label "philistine" has been reversed and now means uncouth rather than cultured.

I would add that at the same time a cultured Christian is trying to impress cultured unbelievers, ostensibly to win some to God, he could actually be deploying his culture to insulate himself from God.  Having worked very hard at multiplying his talents, studying very hard, cultivating them like orchids, like the parable instructs, he is transformed into a consummately exquisite being.  In no need of divine help, this divinely cultured creature merits, instead, divine gratitude and stars in his crown.  God is lucky to have such a refined creature on His side.  Like the Pharisee of Luke 18:10, he thanks God that he is not like uncouth men.

In any case, In practice, unbelieving cultured people nowadays are rather more likely to dismiss the culture of a Christian as anomalous or worse than to admire it.  Christians aren't entitled to haute culture.  It's not in their league.  Cultural parfenus, is what they are.

Too frequently what's to admire?  Wannabe culture is too often not backed up by sufficient talent and not up to concert standards, downright dreadful.  To nonchristians for whom Christianity  itself is automatically funny, dreadful culture if pursued by a Christian is doubly funny.  Triply funny if flaunted by a Christian without truly attractive Christian character.  If expert culture in a Christian is recognized as attractive, it can also be seen as a travesty if the character and persona of the cultured Christian is ugly, as, alas, it too often is.  Me, if I were worldly and beholding such a hybrid Christian displaying the worst of Christianity and even the best of culture I would be doubly amused, and repelled.

If a person is both a fine Christian and a fine violinist, Louis contends that it should be the Christianity, not the culture, that is more winsome.  To the nonbeliever culture is the end in itself, leading to awards, and that's that; in a Christian, Culture is not the end in itself, nor is the award for virtuosity.  For a Christian pianist being first place winner in the Tchaikovsky award is but an attention-getting device pointing the audience not to the pianist but to Christ, rather like, in my opinion, Intelligent Design is not an end in itself but as a path to God, even if that incurs the wrath of the ACLU.   That it hardly ever is, essentially never is, in no way mitigates the truth of the statement.

As I noted earlier, serving God and Culture is as improbable as serving God and Mammon, and if the Culture is successful on a celebrity level and brings in the mammon, not improbable but impossible.  But, as Christ added after having issued his jaw-dropping declaration about  riches and the impossibility of entering the Kingdom, all things are possible with God.   And in the end it is the Christian's very life and lifestyle, not writing style, that is the greater attraction to the disbeliever, whether consummately cultured or crude.

 

Since Lewis's simpler day, the claim of devoting culture to the glory of God while in fact turning it over to Satan, has advanced mightily as an art form in itself.  In my youth the place of reformation and repentance for sins was the chapel or the evangelist tent; now it is the film festival, moving us to repent in sackcloth and ashes and black tie for the sins of social and marital injustice (forget infidelity), homophobia and patriarchy, the only sins now recognized by our emergent cutting edge church culture.  From our pulpit I hear, more often than doctrine, assurances that just about anything that formerly grieved God now gladdens Him if done “as unto God” and brought off with the incantation “to the glory of God.”  That formula strikes me as comparable to how killing a lamb covered all sins for Jews or buying indulgences for medieval peasants.  ”This Bud’s for You, God!”  But in effect Lewis denies this very assertion, resoundingly.  “Our only means of glorifying Him [is] the salvation of human souls, the real business of life.”

“The salvation of human souls [is] the real business of life”?  Still?  That one sentence both crystallizes Lewis and throws him against this generation.  Since Lewis spoke, culture has, like the now outdated Virginia Slims, come a long way.

No longer is culture literature and poetry, painting and sculpture, symphonies and string quartets -- creativity to serve and exalt beauty, at least nominally.   It is movies, screens huge and mini, acting, and none of it pretends to exalt beauty but rather gives awards for best ugliness and degeneration, in the name of art, whatever that is.  It certainly isn't synonymous with beauty as it was in Lewis's simpler day.

No longer is culture, especially the new kind, to be thirsted for, studied, worked at, cultivated like orchids or pearls.  That kind of culture is the last thing in the world to be aspired to.  If you still must, do not admit it, deny it, use the f--- word.  Unless you are Asian.  Somehow Asians still aspire to violin concertos; in some communities Asians are the only ones who do.   It’s still the American dream to bust your butt … for celebrity through gory movies or the fast life, which is de facto culture nowadays.

Now culture is vaporous and thus cannot be grasped much less labored for.  No longer are exhortations to culture inscribed above university library doors.  The Culture Lewis talked of was rare in his day and had to be searched for; now mod culture is as common as tattoos, in fact are tattoos.  The now-culture is already you, part of you like a freckle or your social security number; it’s inborn, like your hair color or gender, which, symbolic of this era, now can be changed with less hassle than Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.  If culture for Lewis was on a plinth like a statue, in a museum, now it’s in the air, like WiFi or smog to be cleared by EPA regulations. Ours is the facebook culture, the botox culture, the app culture; the culture of capitalism, bigotry, tolerance, reform, whatever; the culture of everything but culture.  So glutted with cultures are we that we even have culture wars -- as if we didn't already have enough wars going on.  If once we were cultured, now we are culture.   Culture is in everything; culture embraces even pot, has even gone pantheistic.  Have you heard of the redwood-hugging culture?  God you can hide from, but not culture.  Everything is culture, even religion, which no long must involve God.

I know a zealously progressive Adventist who some years ago shocked me by expressing his embarrassment at every last doctrinal “pillar” of Adventism and systematically dismissed every one of them and wasn't sure about God, but still wished to be called an Adventist only because of  “Adventist culture.”  I well knew we had doctrines, and knew what they were, but didn’t know we even had such a thing as culture, much less constituted one.  But I had just read Lewis's essay and was still thinking of culture as he knew it.

Perhaps Adventism offers the best available case study of the magnitude of the change.  Wary of culture at its beginning, Adventism now – at least the more advanced, intelligent, enlightened educated and most highly cultured wing of it -- throws itself upon the altar of culture as avidly as a rock star groupie throws herself into the maw of The Punk Moloch.  If in Lewis’s day culture was personified by literature and art and opera and orchestras, now it is movies on screens big and tiny.  So it is Hollywood and Burbank, not Jerusalem ancient or heavenly, that inspires us.  Filmmakers have displaced pastors as shepherds.  Our sermons feature movie reviews rather than scripture texts.

Anyway, nowadays Christianity and culture is not moot.  It is the gay "culture" that has established itself as the ideal.  Nowadays community restoration consultants routinely recommend that to bring culture, and therefore prosperity, back to a community, bring in the gays and their culture of interior decorating, film making, drama, and of course hair styling.  If the competition for The Most Attractive Culture is between gays and Christians, Christians have less chance than if back in the Coliseum facing lions.

 

Having lauded Lewis, I shall now assume my role as critic.

As an SDA I do have some differences with his High Church doctrines.  But his essay was not for the purpose of presenting or discussing any particular denominational doctrine.  Therefore this review cannot probe them, or desire to.

To proceed, then, I was surprised that in his preoccupation with the Bible as doctrinal authority, this reigning connoisseur of literary style seemed uncharacteristically oblivious to the Bible as literature.  So may I take over that office, just this once?  No expert, I know what I like, as they say.   I see Isaiah and John and 1 Corinthians 13 as at least as wrenchingly beautifully written as anything Miss Speh, our high school English Lit teacher, ever exuded over.

Also Lewis gave short shrift to culture as affectation, makeup or makeover; habiliment to impress, trappings of status, like tuxedo and cravat, fur coat and designer gown, like the long phylactery-bedecked gown of the Pharisee parading the streets and dispensing alms, pince-nez or a cascading pearl necklace, medals and medallions of the opera-going nouveau riche.

Theologically, if genuine culture, though no sin in itself, can lead to sin, affected culture already is. Affected, ostentatious, skin-deep culture is hypocrisy, the whited sepulcher.  And affectation of both culture and Christianity at the same time is sin compounded, warranting rebuke in the strongest, most politically incorrect of terms, as Christ Himself did.   It is also comical.

Which brings me to the artistic point.  By overlooking affected culture, all those pince-nezes and the cascading pearl necklaces and the book clubs and book signings, and Hollywood culture with its galas and Kim Kardashian’s antics, Lewis forfeited a goldmine of satirical humor that a Charles Dickens could mine for all it’s worth.  And so did Weegee, who mined the parvenu culturati for a fortune in glossy photos recently auctioned by Sotheby’s and snapped up by Saudis.  The most famous Weegee is the one I put at the beginning of this piece.

I can offer a good reason for Lewis's curious omission.  Though Lewis was legendarily jocose and jovial when quaffing and puffing with Professor Tolkien, in print he was sober and solemn, frequently witty, on occasion droll, but never clownish, thus emulating Christ rather than Dave Barry.   His talent for description he exercised and multiplied in his fantasies, or so everyone tells me.  So on second thought, I retract my objection.  Lewis was right to forfeit farce and satire.

I've tried but I cannot long continue my self-assigned role of critic of him.  For he was right all around, I still think.  He was right in saying his own kind of culture is good, one of the greatest gifts God has given us, but can be misused, as it most often is.  In any case, the gift of redemption and of God Himself, is unimaginably greater.  That’s the gist of it.  It’s never been said better than Lewis said it.  He remains in touch, he grapples.  Though with soft-gloved hand he smites.

The title may not be as catchy as the clicks on Drudge Report, but let it stand.  The title is timeless, however outdated.  His essay, his arguments, his very words, his conclusions  are timeless, and it’s time, high time, that we again realize that.

 

Still, I must soberly and solemnly but with a wink, with gloved hand, point out that Lewis did err, once.  In his day keen assessment of an idea or volume of poetry somehow seemed to require puffing a pipe.  King of the campus, he could outpuff them all.  He was dead wrong.  I assume he himself would now agree.

 

 

 

 

 

Written 2014; Revised 2018