L24: Terminology

My life has been pretty submersed in C.S. Lewis since late 2009 and joy is a constant theme, especially when you read the highly formalist Christian literature about Narnia I've been reading lately. It's not really terrible, well, I guess most of you don't assume formalist is a pejorative like I do. The biggest issue is really the assumption that formalism is Christian and the Christian approach to a text is formalist. That's modernist arrogance though, and it's rampant in the American church, has been for some time, and continues to cripple us. Literature is probably the least of most of our worries. But it's pretty central to mine, and I couldn't help it if it wasn't.

Most ironically, Lewis' work is steeped in the "ahead of its time" post-modern. All the references to the "numinous," the very nature of unattainable joy in the Earthly realm that drives all of his work (most of all, his own autobiography), and the importance of story over dogma all point to post-modernity. I don't know if it's because he didn't have to mindset to do it or not, but if he could have reduced the centrality of ideas in his thinking, he'd have been the first Christian post-modernist. Indeed, most of his work was a critique on modernist approaches to the faith.

Of course, I opened this talking about literary criticism, and that's where things fall apart. Lewis himself was an almost perfectly formalist critic, and it's unfortunate. It allows for all of those who write about him to fall into his school of thought and, in doing so, to get trapped in it when approaching his writings on faith. I don't think he would have liked it that way. I can't agree with his approach to literature, but he would be the first to tell you that he wrote his criticism about stories and poems, not faith, so approaching his work on faith the same way he approached The Faerie Queen is an unfortunate reversal of what he would have ever wanted. Ironic enough as that is, doing what the author wouldn't have wanted points to non-formalist approaches, and taking the formalist approach would be what he wouldn't want.

It's all a circle, and I'm probably the only one who will ever read this that would ever care about it.

But I miss college sometimes.

-Zack

"We can be redeemed, oh, all of us"
-David Crowder