In my most recent post, I put forth the proposition that C.S. Lewis had powers of comprehension that exceeded those of any other person in history.
That is a bold claim, one for which there can be no incontestable proof. But, once again, my task is not to prove C.S. Lewis is had the greatest powers of comprehension, but to build a case sufficiently strong that my readers might agree the premise is plausible.
We are in the section that deals with “Comprehension.” I believe this is the most single important factor of all in validating Lewis’ credentials as “most erudite person ever.” Lewis’ language skills and peerless talent for discerning the author’s meaning are more important than any other factor; perhaps even overshadowing his legendary “perfect recall” which I shall soon address. For this is where Lewis is most differentiated from other candidates. But there are other aspects of his powers of comprehension that warrant consideration. Those I begin to address now.
This post and two to follow may be on factors less consequential than language and context, but they are important. As I survey the grand scope erudition, I believe I need to consider ALL factors—larger and lesser alike—because when taken together they add up to a compelling case; one which I hope many readers will agree is “plausible”, perhaps with some rising to the level of “probable.”
By any measure, Lewis a capacity for “comprehension” unlike any other person that I know of, and probably anyone in history. His crystal-clear intellectual lens enabled him to capture an image of the author’s meaning with far greater “resolution”, and with far greater “granularity”, and with richer colors than anyone ever read the same books.
“I read as a native texts you must read as foreigners.”
Thus sayeth C.S. Lewis.
I believe C.S. Lewis had the greatest powers of comprehension of any reader in history. But the fact that he could read nine ancient and medieval languages coupled with uncommonly rich contextual awareness, is not the only reason for my claim. There are three other reasons.
First, C.S. Lewis had a profound “philosophy of learning”, not just how we acquire and filter knowledge but also what constitutes “good reading.” He knew what works best and what doesn’t work. To that end, he relentlessly attacked bogus theories of literary criticism, such as those espoused by E.M.W. Tillyard and I.A. Richards.
Second, Lewis had deep insights into twenty or more philosophical fallacies that enabled him to extract meaning from text wholly unencumbered by the distortion of epistemological errors.
Third, C.S. Lewis was a central member of the greatest literary collaborative group in history: the Inklings. No group in history understood original meaning better than the Inklings. Here is yet another brash claim, though I suspect Diana Glyer and the Zaleskis would concur.
Why do these lesser factors matter? Why don’t I skip ahead to “Retention”, make my closing argument and be done? Because effective reading means more than just discerning the author’s intended meaning. There are philosophical and literary fallacies that can contaminate meaning. To amass literary learning, these fallacies must be understood and avoided.
How can distortion be a problem you may wonder? Didn’t Lewis advise us to read the original work by the original author in the original language? Yes, he did. But he didn’t say “ONLY read the original works by the original author”. Lewis often sought commentary by other authors and academics who might provide a different perspective on a given work. First do primary research, then supplement as needed with secondary research.
Case in point, as I investigated the enormous reading that Lewis did for what would later become English Literature from the Sixteenth Century I looked closely at the bibliography. There were listings of works Lewis read by 152 authors who wrote during the 16th century. This is “primary research”. Lewis also listed as many as 800 additional reference books that used to augment his own thoughts. This is “secondary research.” In every case, these reference works were researched and written by some third-party individual who brought his own philosophies and philosophical fallacies to his work.
Reading well is not only extracting the truth of the author’s intended meaning, but also discerning and discarding error. C.S. Lewis was incomparably well-equipped to do both.
C.S. Lewis and The Personal Heresy
One could say that C.S. Lewis “had a thing” for truth. This is relevant to the process of reading literature. To that end, Lewis worked to debunk heretical ways of reading that impede comprehension. For example:
- He vigorously opposed a literary fallacy he called “The Personal Heresy”, an idea epitomized in E.M.W Tillyard’s Milton published in 1930.
- He rigorously attacked the “New Literary Criticism” that I.A. Richards put forth in his 1924 book, Principles of Literary Criticism.
E.M.W. Tillyard was a renowned Milton scholar on the faculty of Cambridge University, where Lewis would one day serve as Professor. Tillyard’s father had been major of Cambridge. In a way, Tillyard was just as much an iconic fixture in Cambridge as the gargoyles were in Oxford. And to Lewis, his ideas were just as scary.
Lewis first formal attack was launched in a 1939 book he co-authored with Tillyard, entitled The Personal Heresy: A Controversy. This book preceded Lewis’ seminal work against subjectivism, The Abolition of Man (1943). Both works reflect his conviction that objective values are resident in people, places, events, things (and writings), thus rejecting the relativistic mindset of his era.
Lewis’ conception of the “personal heresy” first surfaced in a presentation he made to The Martlets, an undergraduate Oxford literary group, in 1924. Even then, Lewis considered this literary fallacy to be debilitating not only to criticism but also to reading.
In this book Lewis debated with E.M.W. Tillyard. He was an early advocate of the “personal heresy”—a theory that poetry is first and foremost the “expression of the poet’s personality.” Lewis summarily rejected this theory that would have the reader learning more about the poet than the poem itself.
“All poetry is about the poet’s state of mind.”
Thus sayeth E.M.W. Tillyard.
This emerging school of thought on literary criticism was utterly inimical to Lewis’ understanding of the poetic art. To respond, Lewis engaged in a lively but gentlemanly debate with Tillyard that was later published as The Personal Heresy: A Controversy.
In the rolling debate (an exchange of essays), Lewis took exception to Tillyard’s belief that we should not be concerned with what Paradise Lost is about, but the true state of Milton’s mind when he wrote it. By contrast, Lewis believed the reader should read not to appraise an author’s worth, but to seek “an enlargement of our being”.
In his rebuttal, Lewis proposed that the successful poet encourages a reader to see what the poet sees, and not the poet himself. Lewis believed the reader should approach the poet—not by studying the poet, but by participating in his consciousness. What mattered was not the poet but the poem. The poet enables us to see things we otherwise might not see.
In The Personal Heresy Lewis wrote such eloquent lines as this:
“I look with his eyes, not at him. He, for the moment, will be precisely what I do not see; for you can see any eyes rather than the pair you see with, and if you want to examine your own glasses you must take them off your own nose. The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him.”
And this:
“To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn round to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles.”
If one reads to garner wisdom and truth, one must know the right way to read literature. At this, Lewis was a Master. It is an additional factor in his matchless erudition.
This position against relativism in reading was with Lewis early on, and continued in essay form for many years, culminating in one of his final books, An Experiment in Criticism, published in 1961.
I.A. Richard and “the New Criticism”
In the 1920s, another Cambridge Professor, I.A. Richards, introduced “the New Criticism,” a movement in literary theory which emphasized the “close reading” of a text, especially poetry. “Close reading” is the analysis of multiple meanings present in a text, and the effects such disparate meanings have on the reader.
The technique of “close reading” emerged in the work of I. A. Richards, but also his student William Empson, and the poet T.S. Eliot, all of whom sought to replace an “impressionistic” view of literature (then dominant) with what Richards called a “Practical Criticism”.
The analogy of “close reading” a great poem by John Milton is not unlike “close viewing” a great painting by the pointillism artist, Georges Seurat. If viewed from a distance, the meaning of Seurat’s “impressionistic” art can be received. But if viewed from only a few inches from the surface of the painting, one can see individual dots which comprise the art, but no meaning. And so, too, it is with Paradise Lost.
Some of the principles of “close reading” seem harmless, perhaps even useful. But, just as E.M.W. Tillyard had done, Richards was putting the focus not on the author’s writing, but on the author.
Here was yet another climate of opinion that Lewis abhorred and rejected as heresy. Richards was a formidable nemesis. He was a charismatic teacher, a polymath, a literary critic, and a poet. He was also an atheist and a communist. His following at Cambridge was fervent and huge crowds attended his lectures on “Practical Criticism”. This was pretty much the way it was for Lewis’ lectures in Oxford.
When Richards visited Oxford’s Magdalen College in the late 1920s or early ’30s he was placed in Lewis’s hands. His reception was a tad chilly—if we can trust Richards’s own account reported many years later to a biographer. Apparently, Lewis forgot to reserve lodgings for his distinguished guest, so he placed Richards in R. G. Collingwood’s vacant rooms. When Richards retired for the evening, he remarked to Lewis that he brought nothing to read, and asked Lewis if he might provide something to pass the time. A few minutes later Lewis returned with his own annotated copy of Richards’ famous work, Principles of Literary Criticism, saying, “Here’s something that should put you to sleep.”
Richards spent a restless night after reading Lewis’ detailed critical marginalia. Later he said: “Had I read his notes first, I would have written a different book.”
Lewis and An Experiment in Criticism
An Experiment in Criticism is a book by C. S. Lewis written in 1961, twenty-one years after The Personal Heresy. It is a treatise on how best to read literature. In it, Lewis established five basic principles of good reading:
- Do not “use” the writing, “receive it.”
- Do not “scrutinize” the book or poem; first “surrender” to it.
- Do not “seek confirmation” of your own positions and beliefs; seek instead new insights.
- Do not attempt to participate vicariously by projecting yourself into the story; immerse yourself in the author’s protagonist or other characters.
- Do not be so preoccupied with discerning the author’s point of view and biases that you do not experience the story’s meaning; reflect upon the ideas conveyed.
There are many insightful reflections by Lewis to reflect upon when reading this profound book. This includes the following:
“In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.”
“I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
“We must use our eyes. We must look, and go on looking till we have certainly seen exactly what is there.”
“The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.”
According to C.S. Lewis, we should want to see with other eyes. We should want to imagine with other imaginations. We should want to feel with other hearts. We are to experience literature first, and only then contemplate it.
For Lewis, Richards’s work was not made more appealing by his charmless prose style, laced as it is with insufferable arrogance. Worse yet, despite his position as one of the founding fathers of the Cambridge English School in the early 1920s, Richards was skeptical of the value of English as a distinct discipline.
C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot started off on the wrong foot but became mutually respectful friends later in life. With his heretical positions on literary criticism and the dubious value of the English discipline, such a rapprochement would have been unlikely between C.S. Lewis and I.A. Richards.
Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19
Erudition Series Index
