Study CS Lewis and the Inklings in Oxford -- Summer 2013

Few educational opportunities will prove as rewarding or memorable as studying CS Lewis and the Inklings in their natural environment in Oxford.  You and your friends will get to walk in the footsteps of Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, Sayers and others.  You'll visit their colleges, meet some of their surviving friends, and visit the places they frequented, worshiped, and lived, as well their final resting places.

If you'd like to learn more, please email me at michael.bauman@hillsdale.edu   I will be happy to answer any and all questions you might have about travel, academics, housing, logistics, etc.

The main course (on Lewis and the Inklings) runs from May 28-June 23 and is worth three college credit hours.  Those hours normally transfer as either an English or a Religion/Theology course, whichever you select. The credit hours come from Oxford itself.  But if for some reason you need American-based accreditation, they can come from University of the Pacific.  The same holds true for your tutorial, if you elect to take one.  It is 3 hours credit and reflects the nature of the course you select -- politics, history, sociology, etc.  Because Oxford is home to scholars with a wide variety of skills, we can accommodate tutorials from a very diverse set of academic disciplines if you let us know your interests soon enough.

Because the summer school organizers want you to have the experience of living in Oxford itself, and not be holed up in a dorm room, they try place you in apartments around the city center.  For example, students often are housed in apartments on a street called Venneit Close, which is right along the Thames walkway.  Or you might be housed in a historic multi-story brick home in old North Oxford, or in apartments in the trendy Jericho area.

Your classes are normally held either in the OSAP offices, in the St. Mary the Virgin church library, in New College, or in Trinity College.  The location varies day by day so that you can get inside more Oxford buildings during the weeks you are on site.  Your tutorial, should you take one, is normally held in your tutor's office at whatever Oxford college he or she serves.  Your formal meal, with academic gowns, is in the New College dining hall near the end of your summer term.  In addition to the lectures by me and by my wife, we will have guest lecturers from Oxford itself.  Rev. Walter Hooper, Lewis’ personal secretary, and Rev. Michael Ward, who has written the fine book Planet Narnia, have lectured for us in the past.  So also has Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to run the mile in under 4 minutes.

The program cost ($6550) covers six hours credit (including the optional tutorial), lodging for three weeks (plus a free fourth week in your rooms after the course is over, if you’d like to stay on), all the field trips (to places like Windsor Castle, Stratford upon Avon, London, and Cambridge), and the formal dinner in New College.  It does not cover your daily meals, your travel, or your daily expenses.  In other words, you get half a semester’s credit, four weeks in Oxford, several field trips, and membership in New College and the Bodleian library for $6550, tutorial included.  Without the tutorial, your cost will be $6250.

If you wish to apply, simply let me know your intentions, and have your official transcripts sent to me:

Dr. Michael Bauman
Hillsdale College
Hillsdale, MI 49242

The Right Word (2)

         Here and there in The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis seems to long wistfully for that future moment when all names return to their rightful owners.

         To call things by their rightful names is the privilege (and the distinguishing mark) of wisdom.  Lamentably, ours is not an age of wisdom, and that is nowhere more obvious than in the fact that we call the slow-motion barbarization, which is the main focus of our schools, “education.”  It is anything but.

         To understand that fact is not something you’d likely learn in most schools, at whatever level, from the pre-kindergarten to the post-graduate, because our schools themselves are the foremost advocates of barbarism in our entire culture, except perhaps Hollywood.

         To the degree that sloppy language makes sloppy thought possible, our verbal confusions engender confusions of countless sorts and results, none of which is exemplary.  Nearly all labels, normally useful things, are frayed at the edges and, for that reason, serve as impediments to wisdom, not as its support.  This degeneration of language is not accidental, not at all.

         It is the intentional purpose of leftist word warriors who would rather master others by means of language than simply to master language itself.  That’s why they want to police your speech.  They know that when the power of words is small, the power of thought is small.  So they set about outlawing your language.  That way you will have fewer words by which to conceive, articulate, or defend your ideas and worldview, which they hope to make, literally, impossible.

         So here’s the upshot:  Clarify your words as soon as possible, and thereby enable yourself to clarify your thoughts.  For clarity of thought there is no suitable mental substitute.  Do it or else suffer the burdens of foolishness and verbal tyranny.  That is the choice reality gives you.  Ideas have consequences.  Bad ideas have bad ones.  It’s that straight forward.

         But our culture wouldn’t recognize a bad idea even if it jumped up and bit us in the eye.  After all, we elected Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – twice.  Both made the country noticeably worse and got rewarded for doing so with a second term.  You do know, don’t you, that idiots elect idiots?  Both in the delivery room and at the polling place, we reproduce after our own kind.

Praying for the Dead

         In light of what I’ve read in C. S. Lewis and other writers, I see two ways of praying for the dead.

         (1) Because God’s character is so deeply wonderful and inexhaustible, a human creature might spend forever getting to know God better and never exhaust the Subject.  No matter how far you pursue that quest, you will never run out of more God to know, to love, to reflect, to contemplate, or to serve.   The more you pursue it and reflect it, the better you yourself will become.

         If Heaven is dynamic, not static, and if knowing God better is a path that goes on forever, then growth in Heaven is both possible and desirable.  And if growth in heaven is possible, then pray for your departed friends the same way you prayed for them while they were here:  Pray for their growth and sanctification, the very means by which their joy might be full.  Your, and their, capacity for joy is commensurate with your, and their, capacity for holiness, for Christlikeness.  The more you are like Him, the holier you are.  The holier you are, the more joy you can absorb and experience.

         In short, even if your friends or family members live there rather than here, they still live, and there is no good reason not to pray for the living.  While their salvation might be settled, and the sin that beset them be put away, that does not mean they are incapable of growing in God.  It means that now nothing hinders their progress, and that your prayers might have even greater effect now than ever they did.

         So pray.

         (2) Everyone knows what happened on September 11, 2001 in New York.  Two jetliners, hijacked by terrorists, slammed into the World Trade Center, bringing down the twin towers and killing thousands of those inside.  We all know it.

         We do not know the eternal destiny of the souls who died that day.  We do not know if, as their fate that morning slowly dawned on them in the minutes between when the first plane hit and the second tower fell, they sought God and his forgiveness and thereby found rest for their souls.  We do not know if, in the final moments of earthly life, they did the right thing and found peace with God, turning to Him for their soul’s deliverance.  Because we do not know, we can today, years after the fact, pray ardently to God for their salvation, and God, Who can hear then the prayers we pray now, might grant that ardent prayer even before it is prayed.  God is not bound like we are to the temporal sequence.  He can hear and grant our prayers before they are made, even before we are made.  Indeed, our prayers are heard and granted even before the foundations of the world itself are laid.

         But we cannot pray against knowledge, against the truth.  We cannot, for example, pray that the planes are not hijacked or that they do not hit the towers.  We cannot pray that the persons trapped inside do not die.  We already know the answer:  They were and they did.  We already know the truth about such things, and the Spirit of Truth Himself, Who teaches us what we ought to pray, will not lead us to pray against the truth.  Such a prayer might be well intentioned, but it does not come from God.  Because we do not know the spiritual condition of those involved, we can interceded for them and, in light of that intercession, God might hear our prayer beforehand and grant our request years in advance of it being asked. 

         So pray.

         Pray for those who live here; pray for those who used to live here, but now live elsewhere.  Praying for the dead is really praying for the living, and praying for the living makes perfectly good sense.

On Not Writing About C.S. Lewis

My college apologetics teacher, Gordon Saunders, once told us that he intended to write an article about not writing about C. S. Lewis.  But being true to his principles, and being committed to coherence and consistency, he declined to write it.

         I will do it for him.

         The first and best reason not to write about C. S. Lewis is because he is almost always more clear and more insightful than his would-be expositors.  Lewis is a model of clarity and concision.  He is both more perspicuous and more brief than those who mediate his thought.  When you compare their work to his, the effect is like trying to illuminate the sun with a flashlight.  We see his interpreters better by his light than we see him by theirs.  No doubt they have seen this phenomenon at work in others.  How they think they themselves managed to avoid that fate is never articulated.

         The second reason why we generally ought not write about Lewis is that the scope of his wisdom and of his corpus is too wide for most scholars to master and to therefore to tie together.  To mediate Lewis’s expansive contribution requires of us something like what it required of Lewis: impressive skill in (1) Medieval and Renaissance language and literature, in both its Continental and its British embodiments; (2) the history of western philosophy from the ancient Greeks onward; (3) the history of western theology from the ancient Jews onward; (4) the history of science fiction; (5) the history of literary criticism from the ancient Greeks onward; (6) the history of the novel, both Continental and British; (7) Norse (and Icelandic) language and literature; and (8) the history of western spirituality.  The list is shockingly partial.  Lewis also was a practicing novelist, a poet, a critic, and a professor.  His explainers, on the whole, are not.  When they try to tie his though together for readers even more narrowly adept than they are, his interpreters are out of their depth in so many fields all at once

         I know of only a few notable exceptions.  Here I name both Donald T. Williams and Michael Ward.  Williams can write fine books and articles about Lewis and Co. simply because he lives in the world they used to inhabit.  He too is a dinosaur of sorts, a survivor from another age, born out of time.  He too is a poet, a philosopher, a storyteller, a critic, a theologian, a teacher and, above all, a reader.  Ward succeeds because he is not simply a synthesizer but has a point to argue.  He has a thesis to prove, and he proves it.  He writes more than mere summary or comment.  He makes an argument, a case.  He drives you back to Lewis himself in order to find out if Ward is correct. (He is.)  Most of Lewis’ modern interpreters drive you away from Lewis; they hinder encounters between you and him, although nothing is normally further from their intention.

         And then of course, there is Walter Hooper – indefatigable, insightful, and generous, a living encyclopedia of Lewisiana.  If Hooper had done nothing else his entire professional life but edit the three enormous volumes of Lewis’ letters, his contribution would tower.  If you have a question about Lewis, any question, go first to Hooper to see if he has written on it.

         But for the special few exceptions, I think Gordon Saunders was quite right.  In most cases, if you can avoid writing about Lewis, you should.

         I now think the same holds true for writing about John Milton and Ronald Reagan.    

C. S. Lewis vs. T. S. Eliot (part 2)

In chapter 2 of his acute little book A Preface to Paradise Lost, a chapter entitled “Is Criticism Possible?”  C. S. Lewis schools T. S. Eliot on the logical failures, indeed impossibility, of literary criticism as understood on Eliot’s terms.

As is so often the case, one cannot improve upon Lewis’s own articulations, so I repeat his argument here in his words:

“Mr. Eliot says bluntly and frankly that the best contemporary practicing poets are the ‘only jury of judgement’ whose verdict on his own view of Paradise Lost he will accept.  And Mr. Eliot is here simply rendering explicit a notion that has become increasingly prevalent for about a hundred years – the notion that poets are the best judges of poetry. . .

Let us consider what would follow if we took Mr. Eliot’s views seriously.  The first result is that I, not being one of the best contemporary poets, cannot judge Mr. Eliot’s criticism at all.  What then shall I do?  Shall I go to the best contemporary poets, who can, and ask them whether Mr. Eliot is right?  But in order to go to them, I must first know who they are.  And this, by hypothesis, I cannot find out; the same lack of poethood which renders my critical opinions on Milton worthless renders my opinions on Mr. Pound or Mr. Auden equally worthless.  Shall I then go to Mr. Eliot and ask him to tell me who the best contemporary poets are?  But this, again, will be useless.  I personally may think Mr. Eliot a poet – in fact, I do – but then, as he has explained to me, my thoughts on such a point are worthless.  I cannot find out whether Mr. Eliot is a poet or not; and until I have found out I cannot know whether his testimony to the poethood of Mr. Pound or Mr. Auden is valid.  Poets become on this view an unrecognizable society (an Invisible Church), and their mutual criticism goes on within a closed circle which no outsider can possibly break into at any point.

But even within the circle it is no better.  Mr. Eliot is ready to accept the verdict of the best contemporary poets on his criticism.  But how does he recognize them as poets?  Clearly because he is a poet himself; for if he is not, his opinion is worthless.  At the basis of his whole critical edifice, then, lies the judgement ‘I am a poet.’  But this is a critical judgement.  It therefore follows that when Mr. Eliot asks himself ‘Am I a poet?’ he has to assume the answer ‘I am’; before he can find the answer ‘I am’; for the answer, being a piece of criticism, is valuable only if he is a poet.  He is thus compelled to beg the question before he can get started.  Similarly Mr. Auden and Mr. Pound must beg the question before they can get started.  But since no man of high intellectual honour can base his thought on an exposed petitio the real result is that no such man can criticize poetry at all, neither his own nor that of his neighbor.  The republic of letters resolves itself into an aggregate of uncomunicating and unwindowed monads; each has unawares crowned himself Pope and King of Pointand . . .

For who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to say whether we were being well governed?”

Lewis’s case against Eliot here is part of a larger complaint one ought to raise against the way too many persons, often modernists and post-modernists, use language.  They seem to forget that sloppy language makes sloppy thought possible.  They seem to forget that if you pause to find the right word, and do not go on until you have found the right word, then you will know better not only what you do think but what you should think.

Eliot, in my view, is notoriously imprecise with language, and therefore with thought, both in his poetry and his prose.  Such imprecision leaves readers in a hellish and palpable darkness, much like Milton described, from which there seems no way out.  That is why Lewis could say in “De descriptione temporum,” his inaugural address at Cambridge, that even though Mr. Eliot’s little poem, “Cooking Egg” had been before the world for nearly forty years, and even though scholars from around the world might amass to study and discuss it, “there is not the slightest agreement among them as to what, in any sense of the word, it means.”

Perhaps you think that I am insulting Eliot by concluding that the logical and interpretive confusion resident in his own mind (exposed here by Lewis) and in those of his readers (exposed by the nearly global confusion of his interpreters) is the result of hasty and careless thought resulting from ill-chosen language.  Perhaps I do, but not as much as do his camp followers, who otherwise must think that his and their confusion are what happens after he has reasoned and spoken well.
I do not know if Eliot ever read Lewis' criticism or if it had any impact upon him if he did.  But I do know that Eliot changed his mind about Milton and then re-wrote and re-published his famous essay on him.  I also know that the second version was as wrong as the first.

C. S. Lewis vs. T. S. Eliot: Why the Eliotolatry Ought to Stop (1)

Here begins the first in a series of installments meant to lay out C. S. Lewis’ voluminous and multi-faceted case against T. S. Eliot and the malignant Eliotolatry let loose by, of all folks, American conservatives who, ostensibly at least, contend for the worthy and permanent things in Western culture and who ought to know better.

This excerpt comes from a letter by Lewis to Paul Elmer More dated May 23, 1935 from Oxford.  The text is drawn from Walter Hooper’s magisterial edition of The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis (vol. 2, pp. 163-4.)  I follow it with a few explanatory notes and a synopsis of Lewis’ complaints, keyed to citations I have enclosed in brackets in the text. 

“There may be many reasons why you do not share my dislike of Eliot, but I hardly know why you should be surprised at it.  On p. 154 of the article on Joyce [1] you yourself refer to him as a ‘great genius expending itself on the propagation of irresponsibility’.  To me the great genius is not apparent:  The other thing is.  Surely it is natural that I should regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil.  He is the very spearhead of that attack on peras [i. e. proper limitations] which you deplore. [2] His constant profession of humanism and his claim to be a ‘classicist’ [3] may not be consciously insincere, but they are erroneous.  The plea that his poems of distinction are all satiric, are intended as awful warnings, is the common plea of all these literary traitors to humanity. [4] So Juvenal, Wycherley, Byron, excuse their pornography:  so Eliot himself excuses Joyce.  His intention only God knows.  I must be content to judge his work by its fruits, and I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading the Waste Land, but that most men are by it infected with chaos.

The opposite plea rests on a very elementary confusion between poetry that represents disintegration and disintegrated poetry.  The Inferno is not infernal poetry:  the Waste Land is.  His criticism tells the same tale.  He says he is a classicist, but this sympathy with depraved poets, (Marlowe, Jonson, Webster) is apparent:  but he shows no real love of any disciplined, and magnanimous writer save Dante.  Of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton, Racine, he has nothing to say. [5] Assuredly he is one of the enemy:  and all the more dangerous because he is sometimes disguised as a friend. [6]

And this offence is aggravated by attendant circumstances, such as his arrogance.  And (you will forgive me) it is further aggravated for an Englishmen by the recollection that Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war – obtained, I have my wonders how, a job in the Bank of England – and became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the invasion carried out by his natural friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds and hoc genus omne, the Parisian riff-raff of denationalized Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound.”

[1] About a month earlier, More had sent Lewis a copy of an article from the American Review that More had written on James Joyce.

[2] By breaking down the standards of art while at the same time professing to uphold them, Eliot, one of “the literary traitors,” was undermining the permanent things in literature.  For example, Eliot’s own poetry simply and intentionally defied understanding, as Lewis argued in “De Descriptione Temporum,” his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, wherein he points out that Eliot’s little poem “Cooking Egg,” had, at that time, been before the world for more than thirty years and no one, not even the experts, had the slightest idea what it meant.  Eliot’s poetry was not just new, Lewis said then, but “new in a new way.”  Unlike earlier new styles of poetry (poetry by Donne or Wordsworth, for example, poetry that could be understood if you knew the basis on which the poet wrote it), Eliot’s new poetry fully mocked decoding.  It was not simply about disintegration; it was disintegrated and disintegrative, as Lewis says below.  Contra MacLeish, to Lewis a poem must not simply be but mean.  And meaning here with Eliot was quite shut out, and not by accident.

[3] In his praise for Dryden at the expense of Shelley, Eliot claimed that Dryden was a classical poet, to which Lewis replied in “Shelley, Dryden and Mr Eliot” that “The days are or ought to be long past in which any well-informed critic could take the couplet poets of our ‘Augustan’ school at their own valuation as ‘classical’ writers.”  After explaining a bit about the Augustans, Lewis writes, “Of the school in general, then, we may say that it’s a good unclassical school. But when we turn to Dryden, we must, I think, say a good deal more than this” (italics added).   That Eliot could make such a gross mistake regarding either the Augustans or classicism struck Lewis as evidence that Eliot was not a well-informed critic, was no classicist, and was probably a poser.  About this I shall say more in future installments.

[4] Those who undermine literature often defend themselves on the ground that they are really literature’s friends, and that they are but writing satirically.  That is, when they write chaotically, they say they are simply showing the adverse effects of chaos, not that they have imbibed it.  For them, the medium is the message.  Not to Lewis.  For him, the message is the message.  One could write about the Inferno, as Lewis says below that Dante did, without writing infernal poetry.  You could write about Hell without being hellacious.  In short, Lewis subscribed to the common criticism levied against Eliot that he had the disease he claimed to rail against.

[5] When Eliot did turn to say something about Milton, he got it badly wrong, so much so that Eliot himself had to retract his views.  But even that retraction was shockingly defective and inadequate.  Eliot and his ilk were so badly mistaken about Milton that Lewis devoted an entire chapter of his Preface to Paradise Lost to exposing the incoherence of Eliot’s criticisms and its fatally flawed premises.  The result is a masterful exercise in logic chopping that dismantles Eliot’s self-congratulatory methods stick by stick.  I shall say more about this in future installments.

[6] To Lewis, Eliot posed as a friend of literature and the permanent things, a pose that fooled the uninitiated, the under-informed, and the unwary.  To Lewis, Eliot was a sheep in wolve’s clothing, one to whom the sheep foolishly looked for guidance and protection.  They seemed not no notice the company the wolf keeps -- predators and underminers like Gertrude Stein, a lesbian poet who compared Francisco Franco to George Washington and who said Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace prize; and like Ezra Pound, the anti-Semitic, fascist, anti-American traitor.  To Lewis, if it walks alike a wolf, talks like a wolf, and keeps the company of wolves, it’s a wolf.  The chief difference between Eliot and his wolf pack was that he was more subtle and more adept at insinuating himself into the camp of culture’s great protectors than his friends were.  Just as Karl Barth sounded the alarm in Germany about the churches' complicity with Hitler and colossal evil, Lewis was sounding it in England about Eliot's axis of friends and colleagues.

Study C. S. Lewis in Oxford -- Summer 2012

I am pleased to announce that we now are taking applications for the 2012 Oxford summer school on CS Lewis and the Inklings.

The course runs from May 29-June 24 and is worth five college credit hours.  Those hours normally transfer as either an English or a Religion/Theology course, whichever you select.  In some cases, I have seen colleges divide the credit as 3 hours English and 2 hours Religion — or vice versa. The credit hours come from Oxford.  But if for some reason you need American accreditation, they come from University of the Pacific.  The same holds true for your tutorial, if you elect to take one, except that it is 2 hours and reflects the nature of the course you select -- politics, history, sociology, etc.

Because the summer school organizers want to you have the experience of living in Oxford itself, and not in a dorm room, they put you in apartments around the city centre.  For example, students often are located in apartments on a street called Venneit Close, which is right along the Thames walkway.  Or you might be in beautiful multi-story brick homes in old North Oxford, or in apartments in the trendy Jericho area.

Your classes are normally held either in the OSAP offices, in the St. Mary the Virgin church library, in New College, or in Trinity College.  The location varies day by day so that you can get inside more Oxford buildings.  Your formal meal, with academic gowns, is in New College.  You can see some earlier students in gowns in the pictures provided on the poster.  In addition to the lectures by me and by my wife, we will have guest lecturers from Oxford itself, like Rev. Walter Hooper, Lewis’s personal secretary, and Rev. Michael Ward, who has written the fine book Planet Narnia.

The costs cover 5 hours tuition, lodging for three weeks (plus a free fourth week in your rooms after the course is over, if you’d like to stay on), all the field trips, and the formal dinner in New College.  It does not cover your meals or your travel.  If you want to take an additional tutorial course, it will cost $300 for the two hours of college credit.  In other words, you get half a semester’s credit, four weeks in Oxford, several field trips, and membership in New College and the Bodleian library for about $6200, tutorial included.

If you wish to apply, simply let me know your intentions, and have your official transcripts sent to me at:

Dr. Michael Bauman

Hillsdale College

Hillsdale, MI 49242

Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

2012 Oxford Summer School on CS Lewis and the Inklings

I am pleased to announce that we now are taking applications for the 2012 Oxford summer school on CS Lewis and the Inklings.

The course runs from May 29-June 24 and is worth five college credit hours.  Those hours normally transfer as either an English or a Religion/Theology course, whichever you select.  In some cases, I have seen colleges divide the credit as 3 hours English and 2 hours Religion — or vice versa. The credit hours come from Oxford.  But if for some reason you need American accreditation, they come from University of the Pacific.  The same holds true for your tutorial, if you elect to take one, except that it is 2 hours and reflects the nature of the course you select -- politics, history, sociology, etc.

Because the summer school organizers want to you have the experience of living in Oxford itself, and not in a dorm room, they put you in apartments around the city centre.  For example, students often are located in apartments on a street called Venneit Close, which is right along the Thames walkway.  Or you might be in beautiful multi-story brick homes in old North Oxford, or in apartments in the trendy Jericho area.

         Your classes are normally held either in the OSAP offices, in the St. Mary the Virgin church library, in New College, or in Trinity College.  The location varies day by day so that you can get inside more Oxford buildings.  Your formal meal, with academic gowns, is in New College.  You can see some earlier students in gowns in the pictures provided on the poster.  In addition to the lectures by me and by my wife, we will have guest lecturers from Oxford itself, like Rev. Walter Hooper, Lewis’s personal secretary, and Rev. Michael Ward, who has written the fine book Planet Narnia.

The costs cover 5 hours tuition, lodging for three weeks (plus a free fourth week in your rooms after the course is over, if you’d like to stay on), all the field trips, and the formal dinner in New College.  It does not cover your meals or your travel.  If you want to take an additional tutorial course, it will cost $300 for the two hours of college credit.  In other words, you get half a semester’s credit, four weeks in Oxford, several field trips, and membership in New College and the Bodleian library for about $6200, tutorial included.

If you wish to apply, simply let me know your intentions, and have your official transcripts sent to me at:

Dr. Michael Bauman

Hillsdale College

Hillsdale, MI 49242

Please let me know if you have any additional questions.