How to Beat the Beaten Path

Wheaton College once turned down Clyde Kilby’s application for a teaching position because he didn’t have a Ph.D. That was in 1935. Three years later, after he finished his dissertation on Horace Walpole at New York University, he tried again. This time Wheaton hired him. Since that time Kilby has become an institution of his own, due not only to his verve as a teacher but also to his pioneering work on C. S. Lewis and friends. He talked with assistant editor Cheryl Forbes about some of his favorite topics, which can be summed up in a word-imagination. The following is an edited version of the conversation.

Question. Do evangelicals still fear the arts?

Answer. Yes. I like to tell the story of Jonathan Blanchard, the first president of Wheaton College, who thought novels were nothing but lies. Before I retired I taught nothing but novels. I’ve seen lives changed by them. Off and on over the years I’ve copied a sentence or two from the final exams of my students. Any preacher would be tickled to death to get the effect from a year’s preaching that I see in one semester course—in three months.

Q. Summarize your view of imagination.

A. I can say it best negatively. There’s one verse repeated several times in the Old Testament, that is, every imagination in the heart of man is evil. I think evangelicals get a bit of Scripture like that in their heads and that’s what they go on. I don’t think you can do anything that’s worth a dime without imagination. The same is true with nature, another one of my favorite themes. Take the New Testament verse on nature waiting with groaning for the final redemption. We squeeze that verse dry and end up all wet in our thinking about nature. I tell my kids they must learn to use their eyes and ears, to gaze at nature and respond to it. It’s as if we go through life with our senses turned off, because we somehow think they’re evil. Of course, everybody has a problem in really seeing nature. But evangelicals should be more concerned than other people to correct it. The same is true with imagination. I don’t think you can go to the mission field, for example, without having imagined it. Imagination provides the willingness and possibility to get on the other side of the fence. Some people think it’s a sin to get in another person’s shoes. But for so much missionary work that’s what you’ve got to do—have real love and real sympathy, and imagination helps do it. I agree with Shelley when he said that imagination is the organ of moral truth. I taught the romantic period for many years and used to quote those things to my students. Matthew Arnold, too, has some great things to say about imagination and morality.

Q. Does teaching romantic literature naturally lead into the fantasy-writing Oxford Christians?

A. Yes. Lewis called himself a romantic. Nineteenth-century romanticism provides a base for the twentieth-century fantasy writers, even though some of them taught medieval literature.

Q. Let’s get back to the question of nature.

A. What I was trying to get at was that Christians of all people ought to have senses wide awake to what God has put here. The senses aren’t intrinsically evil, but are a powerful gift from God, and as with anything powerful liable to improper as well as proper use. Unfortunately Christians are often the last ones to really study nature. We’re the ones who ought to lead the way. I think we have this problem because we’re too busy taking care of God. We’re afraid of doing some hurt to him. We want to put him in our pockets and protect him. God doesn’t need that kind of protection. The end result is that all we tell people is no, no, no. That’s particularly dangerous with young people. Kids love people who give them ideas and make them think. But the powers that be, boards of trustees or church elders, sometimes squelch things. It just seems to me that evangelicals want to play it safe too often.

Q. You have manuscript papers of seven writers here in the Wade Collection—C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, Owen Barfield, George MacDonald, and G. K. Chesterton. How did you get interested in them?

A. I began to read Lewis about thirty years ago. Over the years I have read and reread him with increased appreciation. He always excites me. When you read a book by Lewis you have the feeling that you’ve got a hold of something almost bottomless. You can never reach the end of its meaning; the more you read, the more you find. It’s a quality shared by all great writers, and Lewis has it in abundance.

I got acquainted with Tolkien almost accidentally in 1964, and then in 1966 went over and spent the summer with him. Incidentally, that summer is the basis of my small book, Tolkien and the Silmarillion (Harold Shaw Publishers). I knew Mrs. Williams and her son quite well, but had never heard of her husband, Charles, until relatively recently, say fifteen years ago. Lewis led me to MacDonald and maybe to Williams; I don’t remember. Because I got acquainted with Lewis I began to meet some of his friends and colleagues. In 1964 I met Owen Barfield and we’ve been friends ever since. I never had any personal contact with Dorothy L. Sayers, and I must confess that I haven’t read as much of her as I should. We put her in our list eleven-and-a-half years ago when we started this thing. Barbara Reynolds, who is working on a biography of Sayers, has been doing research here at the Wade Collection for that book. Nearly forty years ago I read a bit of Chesterton. Orthodoxy greatly changed my thinking, as did The Everlasting Man.

Q. Do you think we’re in danger of overvaluing writers like Lewis and Tolkien?

A. No. We still undervalue them. Young people don’t, but then they’re not scared of them. Most young people take to fantasy writers like ducks to water. Older people are still leery of them, but young people get older, and the thing is shifting. As far as I know we now get no objections to what we teach at Wheaton. Twenty or thirty years ago that wasn’t the case; we got complaints about studying some modern British writers like D. H. Lawrence. I occasionally hear about conservative evangelical schools—not just colleges—who get complaints from parents on certain required reading. I heard of one grade school teacher at a Christian school who used the Narnia books in her class. A few parents went to the principal with the complaint that they didn’t want their children reading about witches. I’ve known students who were saved by reading the Narnia chronicles.

Q. How did the Wade Collection get started?

A. It began in a very small way in February, 1965. We had only a few books then. I gave the letters I had from Lewis—that might have been the first gift. CHRISTIANITY TODAY gave us a letter it received from Lewis. And we had some other manuscripts and papers. The class of 1966 had $2600 to spend for a school gift. They wanted to give the money to the Lewis collection, which it was then called. But there was one cynic on the committee who wondered how we could ever get any manuscripts out of England. Every committee needs one of those, if only to spur the others ahead. When I was in England in 1964 I had met a man who, it later turned out, had ten sonnets by Charles Williams, one per page. I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. That was the first opportunity to get some manuscripts. I wrote him a long letter leading up to the main point, which was, “by the way, I don’t suppose you want to sell these sonnets. I have no idea what things are worth, but I’d make a guess at $75.” Then I added a postscript, and said, “I’ll just enclose my check, and you can tear it up if you think I’m insulting you.” He wrote back and said we could have the sonnets. So the next time the gift committee met the cynic was squelched. That was the first Williams purchase. We went along very slowly. We had no budget money from the college for the first five years. We’d get gifts now and then, like the money from that class. We had a volunteer librarian, and since I was teaching full time, I worked on the collection as a volunteer, too. The subsequent development is full of miracles, one on top of the other. A London publisher asked me to write a book about it, but I just couldn’t write it down, though I’ve kept a lot of records. And I kept diaries when I was in England. But there are too many people still living whom I couldn’t mention, and too many other complications, particularly with the Williams family. Recently we purchased 8,000 pages of Dorothy L. Sayers manuscripts—for $50,000. When this collection began we never dreamed that we’d have that kind of money.

Q. How many manuscript pages do you have?

A. We must have over 20,000 pages. We’re planning a catalogue of what we’ve got. It won’t be completely detailed with a full description of each manuscript. We’re planning to send it to as many libraries as we can and possibly to heads of English departments. We’ve always got some scholar or critic working in the collection. Nearly every book or study that comes out now on any of our writers mentions the collection. During one six-month period we had 864 visitors from thirty-two states and thirteen foreign countries.

Q. Why hasn’t Lewis produced a group of Lewisite followers the way other people like Francis Schaeffer or Bill Gothard have? Lewis hasn’t become a guru.

A. Lewis was very broad-minded, a non-program type of person. Other leaders have a kind of fixed program—and I’m not saying anything against that. But they have something specific they want to get across, some major point on which all their thinking hangs. Lewis was truly a liberal-minded individual—in all areas, that is, except for modern society. He opposed nearly everything modern. And I must say I find myself agreeing with him more and more.

Q. Describe Lewis.

A. Well, he smoked and drank a lot, which might upset some people. I think he was a saint deep down inside. He described himself as looking like a farmer. He had a loud, booming voice, a hearty laugh, and a red face. He could walk twenty-five miles during the day with a knapsack on his back.

Q. Is the “American Lady” of the letters still alive?

A. No. She died four years ago. Her name was Mary Willis Shelburne. To my knowledge her name’s never been published before. We kept it quiet at her request when I edited Letters to an American Lady. She lived in Washington, D. C., in fact. When she died she was nearly blind. I’ve got a huge stack of her correspondence. Eerdmans could never have published all the letters I had. And many of them were pretty repetitious. She had some favorite themes that recur over and over again. She was quite a troubled woman. Lewis understood her, though he’d never met her. He felt that nothing he said would do her any good, yet he thought God wanted him to write her. He always answered people who wrote to him about spiritual matters.

Q. Do you see an upsurge in liberal arts education?

A. No, just the opposite. Some years ago we had over 150 literature majors, then we dropped way off. Now we’re on a slow upswing again. I talked with the head of an English department at a secular university of 3,000 and she said they graduate only six or seven literature majors a year. That’s a definite trend as far as I can tell. I think it favors the Christian college, actually. Christian colleges are still willing to study English, they’re willing to study history, and music, and philosophy. Secular schools are getting more and more involved in vocational rather than liberal arts education. Some years ago we had secretarial science and home economics majors. Both died because students weren’t enrolling in the programs. Now I don’t have anything against those fields, but I don’t think that a private liberal arts college is the place to teach them. We’ve had to fight against an increasing number of majors. Everybody wants to do a little more and spread out a little thinner. The word has gotten around that it’s tough to find a job these days with just a liberal arts degree. That’s one of the most foolish things I’ve ever heard. You can learn to become almost anything there is to become in very short order if you’ve got any sense. We’ve got a mania around here for psychology and sociology, for example—and the thrust is vocational. Students aren’t taught to read the philosophy of psychology, or the writings of the founders of the field. Instead they’re taught to get ready to use psychology on people. We can run this thing into the ground.

Q. Why don’t more evangelical liberal arts colleges produce first rank literary or historical scholars?

A. I think Christian schools get mud-bound and lead our students without much imagination. We tend to steer them into what we call the active professions, like medicine or law. And then a lot of them go out to serve on the mission field.

The trouble with teaching at an evangelical school is that it’s hard to find time to publish. I’m opposed to the publish or perish syndrome that still exists in secular universities. It’s carried out badly. On the other hand, Christian colleges ought to encourage its professors to publish. A good teacher should always have plenty of ideas for articles and books, simply because they know the primary and secondary material so well. A teacher’s bound to run across gaps in knowledge or problems in understanding that he’d like to clear up with an article or two. Publishing ought to be a perfectly natural outgrowth of teaching. Wheaton gives too little attention to publishing.

In the final analysis I think the whole thing revolves around the word imagination. Anything you do requires some imagination, but when you get into the arts you’ve got to use imagination in a primary way. Charles Huttar put together a festschrift for me and called it Imagination and the Spirit. That was a perfect title. I’ve devoted my whole life to those two things, and the relation between them. Evangelicals don’t think about how imagination and the spirit relate. They’re so intent on preaching, knowing Bible lessons, and applying Christianity that I think they frequently lead people away from the truth. So far as I can judge they do more harm than good. I’ve been an advocate all these years for listening to what the spirit tells us about imagination.

Q. Is there a move among young people to accept the arts, or to consider the arts as the place to spend their lives, say as novelists or musicians or painters?

A. I always have to divide things up between Wheaton and other places, since I know Wheaton so well. I find quite a willingness to accept the arts, though we sometimes have trouble getting Kodon, the campus arts magazine, published. I think we’ve got a long way to go, though, before evangelicals can say they really accept the arts. You get pockets and times and seasons when the arts seem to interest more Christians, but then it wanes again. Right now I see a movement toward the arts. It’s nothing to shout about, but it’s steady. People are particularly interested in poetry right now.

As for students choosing careers in the arts, I’ve always encouraged that. But we still haven’t produced a first-rate artist. We’re getting closer to having good evangelical novelists. Poetry is steadily improving.

The quality of our students has also improved steadily over the years. And we’ve enlarged our vision. But we’re so eager to keep the faith that we’re still too timid when anything seems slightly off the beaten track. I hate cliches and I hate the beaten path. You keep to the straight and narrow path, but you also keep your eyes open. You look ahead or around you, and see this way and that. Most evangelicals don’t do that. They don’t know how. And our churches certainly aren’t telling us how. After so many years of attending fine evangelical churches, most of us know what a preacher will say before he speaks. I’d like to leave church with just one new idea each time. That’s vital for us all.

Paul D. Steeves is assistant professor of history and director of Russian studies at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. He has the Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and specializes in modern Russian history.

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