Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2008 Sacramental Unity in the Writing of C.S. Lewis: Romanticism, Imagination, and Truth in the Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength Marisa White Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES SACRAMENTAL UNITY IN THE WRITING OF C.S. LEWIS: ROMANTICISM, IMAGINATION, AND TRUTH IN THE ABOLITION OF MAN AND THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH By MARISA WHITE A Thesis submitted to the Department of English In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring 2008 The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Marisa White defended on March 26, 2008. ________________________________ Eric Walker Professor Directing Thesis ________________________________ John Fenstermaker Committee Member ________________________________ Kristie Fleckenstein Committee Member ______________________________ Ralph Berry English Department Chair The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii For my mom, dad, and brother – the best imaginable family. And also for Vanessa Anderson and Joannie Watson, who never cease to inspire and encourage me. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………v INTRODUCTION………………..……………………………………………………………….1 1. AN IMAGINATIVE JOURNEY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEWIS’S IMAGINATION AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO COLERIDGE’S IDEAS......................…...4 2. IMAGINATION, TRUTH, AND THE ROLE OF EDUCATION IN THE ABOLITION OF MAN……………………………………………………………………......18 3. IMAGINATION, TRUTH, AND THE PATH TO CHRISTIANITY IN THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH……………………………………………………………….……...29 4. THE MARRIAGE OF CHRISTIANITY AND ROMANTICISM: SACRAMENTAL UNITY AND LEWIS’S CONVERGENCE OF IMAGINATION AND TRUTH……….….50 ENDNOTES……………………………………………………………………………..………61 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………..……………64 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH……………………………………………….……………………67 iv ABSTRACT This thesis analyzes C.S. Lewis’s concepts of imagination and truth, focusing mainly on his ideas as expressed in The Abolition of Man (1944) and That Hideous Strength (1945). I argue that these works demonstrate an essential connection between imagination and truth and that this connection reveals the fundamentally sacramental nature of Lewis’s imagination. Ultimately, I claim that this sacramental quality exhibits a unique fusion of romanticism and Christianity. Romanticism is relevant because of the importance of imagination to the movement of British romanticism in general and, in particular, to Coleridge’s work. Examining convergences and divergences between Lewis’s concept of imagination and Coleridge’s serves to elucidate the point I make about Lewis’s sacramental imagination and its ability to bring together the romantic primacy of imagination and the Christian veneration of truth. I begin to address these topics by tracing the development of Lewis’s concept of imagination and paralleling it with his conversion to Christianity as he describes it in Surprised by Joy (1955). I then compare these developing concepts with Coleridge’s theory of imagination. Moving on to incorporate the idea of truth, I enter into analysis of The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, explaining Lewis’s concept of truth and his argument that a proper education should include forming the imagination in a way that will enable it to illuminate this truth. Finally, I enter into specific discussion of the sacramental nature of Lewis’s imagination and show how it fuses Christianity with romanticism. v INTRODUCTION Considerable scholarly attention has been given to the relationship between C.S. Lewis and romanticism. Lewis is often proclaimed to be a unique advocate for the potential of unity of romanticism and reason, especially in works such as The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), The Allegory of Love (1936), and Surprised by Joy (1955). Much of the analysis of Lewis’s romanticism surrounds his idea of imagination, in particular as it is evidenced in the agreements and disagreements between Lewis and his friend and fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield. In Lewis’s conversion story, Surprised by Joy, he refers to a “Great War” he and Barfield fought during the 1920s over their differing opinions on the nature of imagination. Barfield, a notable scholar of romanticism, and particularly of Coleridge, saw imagination as a means of conveying truth, whereas Lewis’s beliefs about the imagination at that time rejected any connection between imagination and objective truth. However, Lewis’s thoughts on this matter changed over time, as he progressed further and further into his conversion to Christianity. Restricting contemplation of Lewis’s theories of imagination to his “war” with Barfield results in an incomplete comprehension of these theories, since Lewis’s concept of imagination was never a static one: his ideas and expressions of imagination continued to grow and unfold before, during, and after his conversion. Lewis’s sense of imagination parallels his personal understanding of life itself, and the ongoing nuances of this understanding can be traced in both his fictional and non- fictional writings. As Lewis came to a new understanding of truth as defined by Christianity, he came to a different and, in his estimation, a fuller definition of the imagination: he came to see myth as an invaluable and distinctly human avenue of understanding truth. His realization of the compatibility between imagination and truth, in fact, brought about the final stage in his embrace of Christianity. Lewis attributes his 1929 transformation from atheist to theist partly to his reading of The Everlasting Man, a book published in 1925 in which Roman Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton emphasizes the intrinsic correlation between mythology and Christianity. This 1 book introduced Lewis to the idea of Christianity as the “true myth” and played a crucial role in his conversion. He relates in Surprised by Joy: “Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense” (223). As Lewis continues with his version of the story, he states that he became ultimately convinced of the truth of Christianity after a long, late-night conversation with his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson in1931. It was after this conversation, in which the three men discussed the issue of Christianity as the “true myth,” that Lewis finally accepted the faith he would spend the rest of his life defending. A vast amount of criticism deals with the issue of Lewis’s Christian imagination, above all as it is expressed in the Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56), but an aspect of Lewis’s concept of imagination that warrants further investigation is the compatibility with and, in fact, the necessity of imagination to the post-conversion Lewis’s idea of absolute truth. In his group of philosophical essays published in 1944 as The Abolition of Man, Lewis deals specifically with the existence and importance of an absolute truth, which he calls the “Tao” and describes as “the doctrine of objective value” (18) and “Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Reason or the First Platitudes” (43); he expounds upon this idea of the Tao in the third and final book of his Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, which was published in 1945. Both That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man, in their revelations of Lewis’s concept of truth, also strongly emphasize and exemplify the need for imagination in what Lewis sees as proper perception of this truth. In his preface to That Hideous Strength, written in 1943, Lewis describes the novel as “a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man” (Strength 7). The goal of this thesis is to analyze Lewis’s ideas of imagination as they relate to the “serious point” made in The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength and, furthermore, to posit that a study of this relationship reveals a central aspect of the Christian Lewis’s conception of reality: the convergence of romanticism and Christianity, and the sacramental vision of reality that reflects this convergence. These issues will be addressed in four chapters. In the first chapter, I will flesh out some of the similarities and differences between Lewis and romantic discourse on the imagination. Due to the limited scope of this thesis, I will focus mainly on the romanticism of Coleridge and his concepts of primary and secondary imagination, also using Barfield to elucidate these ideas. The next chapter of this thesis will contain, first, an analysis of 2 Lewis’s considerations of absolute truth in The Abolition of Man and, second, a reading of that book in light of the previously established relationship between Lewis and Coleridgean romanticism. I will, among other things, address these questions: Which aspects of Lewis’s thoughts on the nature of reality are compatible with Coleridge’s? Which aspects are divergent? I will use the two theories of imagination to explain the roots of these compatibilities and divergences. In the third chapter of this thesis, I will examine Lewis’s own use of myth to convey his message of objective truth in That Hideous Strength, seeking to further our understanding of both what Lewis calls the Tao and the importance of imagination. Finally, I will synthesize my discoveries in the previous chapters in order to examine the worldview that results from Lewis’s communion of absolute truth and imagination, a worldview which I call “sacramental.” 3 CHAPTER ONE AN IMAGINATIVE JOURNEY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEWIS’S IMAGINATION AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO COLERIDGE’S IDEAS Imaginative does not mean imaginary. -G. K. Chesterton,The Everlasting Man The concept of “imagination” is pivotal to an understanding of C.S. Lewis’s life and writings; this concept is also critical to a consideration of British romantic thought in general and to Coleridge’s work in particular. While Coleridge’s actual definition of the term “imagination” can be traced specifically in several passages of his work, Lewis’s is more elusive: he refers to the concept frequently but does not highlight an established definition. Surprised by Joy contains, perhaps, the most complete treatment of Lewis’s thoughts on the imagination, since it traces their development through the years of his pre-conversion life. This chapter maps and analyzes the development of Lewis’s concept of imagination in order to propound a definition that attends to his post-conversion views, in the time of his composing The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, but which also encompasses the evolution of that definition throughout its previous stages. This entire explanation will, in fact, contain three separate definitions from various stages of Lewis’s development. First comes the definition Lewis uses while reflecting back upon his life in Surprised by Joy to explain how imagination worked in his conversion; next, the one he explains in Surprised by Joy as the definition he would have given during his atheistic stage; and, finally, the meaning implied by the Christian Lewis’s attitude towards imagination as a means of shedding light upon the truths of his chosen faith. Furthermore, this chapter then reviews Coleridge’s definition of the imagination, based mainly on his famous distinction between its “primary” and “secondary” modes in the Biographia Literaria, and employs Owen Barfield’s interpretations to bring Coleridge’s ideas into explicit contact with Lewis’s. These specific definitions will serve to pinpoint the areas in which Lewis and Coleridge 4