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"I trust no one will call me a mystic—a name, in its strict theological sense, too high, and in its popular sense (I hope) too vague, to describe me; but it appears to me that all sorts of objects, animate and inanimate, natural and artificial … seem (I hardly know how to say it) to have been prepared from all eternity for their precise place in the symphony of things."
Into the Region of |
So wrote C.S. Lewis in The Personal Heresy (1939). His trust that no one would call him a mystic has turned out to be poorly founded. Two men who knew him well, Dom Bede Griffiths and George Sayer, have failed him on that score, the former observing that "there is no doubt that he had a profound kind of mystical intuition," the latter commenting that The Pilgrim's Regress scales "mystical heights." And several Lewis critics have come to similar conclusions: Michael Christensen remarks upon his "mystical tendencies"; Robert Houston Smith notes that Lewis found "a place for mysticism in his thought"; Leanne Payne goes so far as to claim that Lewis was "an outstanding Christian mystic."
A web-footed, feathered creature which waddles and quacks is ordinarily known as a duck. A writer whose friends and critics describe as a mystic and who himself confessed to having intuitions which fell somewhere between the strict and the popular uses of the term "mystical," would ordinarily be known as a mystic. Why, then, do we not immediately think of Lewis as such?
There are at least four reasons why Lewis has not generally been categorized as a mystic. The first is that his humility and privacy-loving reticence caused him to understate what was an important aspect of his spirituality. For instance, at the end of The Four Loves he touches upon that love which lies at "the true centre of all human and angelic life." He then adds, cryptically, "God knows, not I, whether I have ever tasted this love. Perhaps I have only imagined the tasting." But it sounds as though, perhaps, he really had tasted, in mystical ecstasy, that love which moves the sun and the other stars. However, he writes that he "dare not proceed" and that, to learn more about this highest of all loves, we must go to his "betters." Knowing that he possessed an unusually powerful imagination and believing that practical obedience was the experimentum crucis of Christian maturity, Lewis was inclined to downplay elements in his religious life which, in other people, might have loomed much larger.
Second, Lewis had theological uncertainties about the nature of mystical experiences arising from "the similarity between Christian and non Christian mysticism" (as he wrote in a letter to Griffiths). He did not conclude from this observation that mysticism is "un-Christian in the sense of being incompatible with Christianity: but I am inclined to think that it is not specifically Christian—that it is simply one of those neutral things which the Spirit utilises in a given man when it happens to be there." He was also struck "by the absence of much mysticism from the New Testament."
Third, Lewis' canniness as a writer meant that he would not make into an object of contemplative consciousness what could only be "enjoyed" as an all-encompassing experience. To write about mysticism is not the same as writing mystically. Payne is one of the few Lewis critics to be alert to this point. She writes: "Lewis has said much more about the Holy Spirit, and from a higher perspective—though his terminology of the Third Person … is marvelously implicit—than many who write explicitly about Him." In other words, Lewis' apprehensions of participation in the Divine Life are not necessarily labeled as such by him in his works. Often, particularly in his fiction and poetry, but even (albeit to a lesser extent) in his apologetics, he writes so that his readers may taste the fruit of his mystical insights without consciously "knowing" it. To "know" the mystical way (savoir) is not the same as to "know" it (connaître), and it is the latter kind of knowledge which Lewis considered most pertinent in living the spiritual life and which his writings so often exemplify. Remarkably, his interest in "the wordless and thoughtless knowledge of the mystic," as he put it in a letter to Cecil Harwood, pre-dated his Christian conversion by several years.
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