C.S. Lewis would disagree with what I have been doing on this site. My readings, he would argue, turn literature into philosophy and religion. I am using Shakespeare, not receiving him. For that reason, I will continue to mull over Lewis’s argument. I know that he and I disagree. I do not know precisely what I would say to him.
An Experiment in Criticism ends with a thrilling description of why Lewis loves literature.
But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad 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.
Lewis draws attention to the fact that this transcendent experience resembles worship. In fact, this passage recalls the conclusion of his book Mere Christianity.
Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
The similarity between the passages gives me pause. Literature offers readers the chief advantage of getting beyond ourselves. Christianity takes this advantage to its logical conclusion.
So, I wouldn’t make a statement to Lewis. Instead, I would ask two questions.
- Is the Bible literature? (Lewis conspicuously leaves scripture out of his experiment.)
- Should we subordinate our reading of literature to our reading of the Bible? That is, is there a limit to our receiving literature?
Experiments in Criticism 