A number of years ago I was asked to stand in an election
for a position, and, I lost the election. I had received a premonition of this
but I was unprepared for the inner emotional turmoil that ensued. At one point
I said to myself: it’s time to re-read C. S. Lewis’ The Inner Ring.
Writing in multiple formats and genres Lewis had one
message: the truth of Christianity, which truth, in and of itself, is the
everlasting Glory of God. It was his intention that everything that he wrote,
even his scholarly works, would point the reader to this transcendent glory.
God’s glory should be seen shining through us, through our
lives, which means quite simply that the Christian’s holiness is part of the apologetic/evangelism
project which intentionally shapes all of his writings. This interface of
between the Christian’s holiness and the defense of the Gospel emerges with
great force as the Christian faces one of her three great enemies, the World.
Lewis sketched the architecture of this conception in an
address by that in an address titled The
Inner Ring, which was given to King’s College University of London in 1944[1].
Once this architecture is viewed it becomes clear that it forms the infrastructure
structure of a number of his writings, most notably of course the novel That Hideous Strength which he himself labeled
a novel of the inner ring. But the conception of the inner ring also appears in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
where part of Edmond’s temptation is to leave his brother and sisters and join
the secret society of the witch. Recently I suddenly woke up to the fact that I
was reading it again as I re-read Surprised
by Joy.
The moral structure of Surprised
is formed, as I mention above, by his adherence to the classic tripartite
coalition of evil: the world, the flesh and the devil. The world, in Surprised, is what Lewis encountered at
the public school Wyvern College. There he encountered human society in
miniature which might be summed up with the word hierarchy, or, the system of
inner rings, a system there that was structured around certain students called
“Bloods,” of whom he says: “the adored athletes and prefects were an embodiment
of all worldly pomp, power and glory.”[2]
He was tricked into a supposed insult of a “Blood” named Porridge, which
brought him the rebuke: “Who are you? Nobody. Who is Porridge? THE MOST
IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.”[3]
For Lewis this rebuke summed it all up, that is, the school
provided a system where students were expected to aspire to becoming The Most
Important Person There Is, so that every waking moment was to be spent
attempting to adopt the right tone of voice, giving a cheer at games at great volume
while displaying the proper look on ones face, shining the shoes of “Bloods”
with an attitude of servility, in short, doing anything for approval, anything
to ultimately gain admittance. However, these humiliations
were not the real problem, they were the symptoms.
These were symptoms of something
more all-pervasive, something which, in the long run, did most harm to the boys
who succeeded best at school and were happiest there. Spiritually speaking, the
deadly thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominated by the
social struggle; to get on, to arrive, or, having reached the top, to remain
there, was the absorbing preoccupation. . . And from it, at school as in the
world, all sorts of meanness flow. . . .[4]
While Lewis reacted against the system, he does not appear to have
done so by recognizing the corrupt temptation of the inner
ring, but rather because of his fierce desire not to be interfered with, for he simply
wanted to be alone, to be able to read and learn, and little more, a life that
he would later live with Professor Kilpatrick, but which he would eventually
label as “almost entirely selfish.”[5]
But that still lay in his future. At Wyvern he choose not to succumb to the
allure of reaching the top of the social hierarchy by joining an ideal
hierarchy the members of which he did not know, but he knew that somewhere they
existed. Thus, his rejection of the inner ring was not a rejection of the
world, but rather a critique that this display of worldly pomp and power was
hollow. He wanted the real thing. And, knowing himself to be superior to others in the one thing that mattered, intellect and
knowledge, and “good taste” he simply viewed their pretensions with contempt. “. . . Wyvern made me a prig.”[6]
And if “our “taste, then—by a
perilous transition—perhaps “good taste or “the right taste.” For that
transition involves a kind of Fall. The moment good taste knows itself; some of
its goodness is lost. Even then, however, it is not necessary to take the
further downward step of despising the “philistines” who do not share it.
Unfortunately I took it.[7]
So, autobiographically Lewis identified what he considered
to be the two great temptations of the world, namely, to provide us with
identity and status apart of God, or, to resist a particular group by telling
ourselves that we are in fact already “too good for them,” but only to find
that in fact we are merely searching for yet another “inner ring” from which we
hope to milk identity and status.
I believe Lewis’ analysis of “the inner ring” is in truth
the best phenomenological analysis (pure description) of the New Testament
concept of the world that currently exists. We think of the Greek word cosmos in moral passages (such as 1 John
2:15) as meaning the structure and, shall we say, the offerings, of society.
Often we see “the world” as meaning such things as fame and fortune, but Lewis
is driving us more deeply still. He wants us to ask: “what did it take to
become famous? What did it take to have riches? And, how much of my integrity
did I toss in at the toll booth along this broad highway?”
[1] C.
S. Lewis. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Harper, 1949, and on line at
the site of the California C. S. Lewis Society, http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php
[2] C.
S. Lewis. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1955. P. 83
[3] Ibid.
p.91.
[4] Ibid.,
p. 108
[5] Ibid.,
p. 143
[6] Ibid.,
p. 101
[7] Ibid.,
p. 104
No comments:
Post a Comment