The Anglicanism of CS Lewis

Okay, we're going to start by reading this quote from a philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer.

And the reason is because he beautifully explains the sort of project of beauty that runs through C.S. Lewis's writings and that we're going to see picked up by Anglican writers before Lewis.

Hans-Georg Gadamer says the following, quote, In the case of the symbol, on the other hand, and for our experience of the symbolic in general, the particular presents itself as a fragment of being that promises to complete and make whole whatever corresponds to it.

Or indeed, the symbol is that other fragment that has always been sought in order to complete and make whole our own fragmentary life.

The meaning of art in this sense does not seem to be tied to special social conditions, as was the meaning given to art in the later bourgeoisie religion of culture.

On the contrary, the experience of the beautiful, and particularly the beautiful in art, is the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things, wherever it may be found.

Now, I start there because it's important to understand how Lewis is going to appropriate this idea that beauty invokes the whole holy order of the way things are supposed to be.

And I really quite love that idea.

If you think about your experiences of the beautiful, you're holding your beloved in your arms.

You are looking at the Grand Canyon.

There is a moment in your heart that gets stirred, which says, I wish things could be like this forever.

Beauty has this peculiar characteristic of stirring in our hearts this sense of longing for the way things ought to be.

Jonathan Edwards in The Nature of True Virtue talks about how beauty is consent of being to being such that the whole reality of being, the whole order of creaturely being is ennobled, is made better on account of the beautiful.

If you see a mother laughing with her baby, you think to yourself that reality is better off because it contains a mother laughing with her baby.

Beauty has this characteristic of invoking the way things ought to be.

It suggests an order to reality that we long for, that we wish we could inhabit, which is why in part it leads what Lewis talks about in Surprised by Joy as the stab of joy in its absence.

Beauty and the beautiful then suggests the way all of reality ought to be.

Lewis is going to take this idea and apply it in Anglican fashion to the Trinity and the Incarnation.C.S. Lewis in his essay The Grand Miracle found in his book On Miracles writes the following about the peculiarity, the central role that the incarnation has in all of history.

He says the following, quote, "Let us suppose we possess parts of a novel or a symphony.

Someone now brings us a newly discovered piece of manuscript and says, 'This is the missing part of the work.

This is the chapter on which the whole plot of the novel really turned.

This is the main theme of the symphony.' Our business would be to see whether the new passage, if admitted to the central pa- place which dis- uh which the discoverers claimed for it, did actually illuminate all the parts we had already seen and pull them together.

Nor should we be likely to go very far wrong.

The new passage, if spurious, however attractive it looked at first glance, would become harder and harder to reconcile with the rest of the work the longer we consider the matter.

But if it were genuine, then at every fresh hearing of the music or every fresh reading of the book, we should find it settling down, making itself more at home and eliciting significance from all sorts of details in the whole work which we had hitherto neglected.