I value Norbert Feinendegen’s essay on Lewis’s epistemology for three reasons: 1. because he takes up and advances a conversation which has gone practically no where since 19882; 2. because he shows just how critical Alexander’s distinction between “Enjoyment” and “Contemplation” was to Lewis’s epistemology; and 3. because this essay truly adds to our understanding of Lewis’s theory of knowledge.
The “Great War” letters have been a critical difficulty for years, first of all because Lionel Adey’s treatments of the letters have favored Barfield’s position to the point of misunderstanding if not out right bias against Lewis3. And while Stephen Thorson’s critique of Adey has helped correct some of the errors in his reading, little more has been done, probably, because of two further difficulties: the letters have remained largely unpublished and therefore hard to access4, and they are difficult to understand—to tackle the “Great War” letters is, quite simply, a daunting task.
Thankfully, Feinendengen has taken up the “Great War” letters again in an ingenious way: he focuses on one issue in the letters, one that teaches us something of the letters themselves but then moves us beyond them in that the concept on which he focuses, Alexander’s distinction between “Enjoyment” and “Contemplation,” remains significant in Lewis’s writing throughout his life. And so I am indebted to Feinendengen for his critique of Owen Barfield’s misunderstanding of Lewis’s epistemology, for his excellent footnotes which correct not only Adey but even mistakes in Thorson’s thinking, for his detailed explanation of Alexander’s concept, for his pointing out just how significant the concept remains throughout the Lewis corpus, and for the clarity with which he writes about such difficult content.
Feinendengen’s first help is his clarity. Consider, for example, his crystallization of one of the more difficult concepts midway through his essay: “…there are not two distinct activities called ‘enjoyment’ and ‘contemplation’, but only one act of experience which is the relation between the two elements ‘enjoyed act of mind’ and ‘contemplated object’…” (Feinendengen, “Contemplating” 35). Feinendengen does an equally good job of summarizing key points out of Lewis’s own writings on the topic, especially Surprised by Joy and “Meditation in a Toolshed” ( Feinendengen, “Contemplating” 32).
Feinendengen’s best insights are chiefly two. First is that the enjoyment/contemplation distinction which Lewis discovered in Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity is one Lewis understands and Barfield does not. Lewis gets the distinction and applies Alexander to his thinking. Barfield changes the meaning of Alexander’s words to signify something very different. And Lionel Adey and Stephen Thorson, the only two critics to have written extensively on the “Great War,” have misunderstood Lewis’s use of the terms, Thorson thinking about Lewis the way Barfield did, Adey misunderstanding Lewis and Barfield both!5
The second great insight in the essay is implicit in Feinendengen’s claim that Lewis’s use of Alexander’s distinction is constant (Feinendengen, “Contemplating” 29) and ubiquitous (44-45). The significance of this insight is in its providing a first proof of for larger idea: Though less apparent in the essay, Feinendengen’s belief that Lewis’s epistemology was far more consistent than critics have made it out to be is a central thesis of his dissertation, now book, Denk-Weg zu Christus: C. S. Lewis als kritischer Denker der Moderrne6, which was published in the summer of 2006 (unfortunately, at this point, only in German). Feinendengen argues that Lewis was
wholly consistent in the application of his methods of thinking…
This thesis is also meant to contradict those authors who maintain that Lewis’s thinking underwent a dramatic change at the end of the 1940’s (mainly due to the criticism of his “argument from reason” by Elizabeth Anscombe early in 1948). A close analysis of the philosophical statements Lewis gave after the Anscombe-debate does not reveal any significant signs of change in his later thinking. (Feinendengen, “Thesis,” par. 5-6)7
I took up this issue in my own dissertation on Lewis’s epistemology and found enough evidence to suggest that Feinendengen is not far off the mark. The question of Lewis’s epistemological consistency (at least post-conversion) is not one with which Lewis criticism is done.
There is that nebulous between-place where a critic sits when he has finished his dissertation and neither wants to look at it again nor abandon it to a mere shelf in a few libraries among the other seldom read dissertations. As I sit in that place, trying to envision what a publishable version of a book on Lewis’s epistemological thinking would look like, I find in Feinendengen’s essay not merely ideas, but additions to a conversation that has been going on at least since Peter Schakel wrote about reason and imagination in C.S. Lewis.8
Included in that conversation is what I call the “Holy Grail” of Lewis epistemology because it is a topic with which numerous critics have been concerned9: did Lewis believe in imaginative truth? I was first drawn to the “Great War” letters because they address this issue. In the letters, Lewis denies the existence of imaginative truth, but, when he converted to Christianity, his epistemology changed. Walter Hooper ends his own exploration (in which he describes Lewis as having struggled to “find a clear connection between imagination and truth” [Hooper 569]) by turning to two secondary sources (Hooper 572-74): Owen Barfield in his book Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis10 eventually concludes a reluctance on Lewis’s part to develop a complete theory of imagination (and by implication a conclusion on the connection between imagination and truth), while Peter Schakel’s Reason and Imagination11 suggests at least the possibility of Lewis’s coming to terms with the place of imagination in the expression of truth. Lewis’s own emphasis on imagination and the importance of myth certainly seems to suggest this conclusion; however, even in his later writings12, Lewis is reluctant to say that imagination is a truth bearing faculty. Feinendengen points to a connection between Alexander’s dichotomy and Lewis’s terms “Using” and “Receiving” in An Experiment in Criticism (Feinendengen, “Contemplating” 45), and this distinction connects directly to the question of imaginative truth via Lewis’s reluctance to turn literature into didactic propaganda13. At any rate, we’re left with a question that is yet to be sufficiently answered. I think there are reasons to say that Lewis believed in imaginative truth but only in the most qualified of senses. That, however, is for another discussion.
There is an issue even more significant to the continued pursuit of understanding Lewis’s epistemological thinking.14 This issue relates directly to Feinendengen’s emphasis on the “Enjoyment”/“Contemplation” distinction. I think he’s dead on in noting this importance, and, though I have come to similar conclusions through a different tack, I find in this emphasis additional proof towards the centrality of a tripartite approach to understanding Lewis’s epistemological thinking, one that emphasizes Lewis’s views on “Fact/Reality” as well as “Reason” and “Imagination” (and as far as I can tell only one other critic has seen this15). While the discussion on Lewis’s epistemology was set into categories by Schakel’s Reason and Imagination approach to Lewis’s thinking, we can probably blame Lewis himself for the approach in that he so often centered issues of knowing in these two modes of thought, starting, especially with his poem on the subject, “Reason” (Lewis, Poems 81) in which he seems to make “Knowing” an issue of dichotomy. But the concept of “Enjoyment” brings a third element into this mix: that knowing which comes by direct experiences.
My own take on the issue began with a single sentence in Perelandra in which the protagonist, Ransom, realizes that the “triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact” (Lewis, Perelandra 143-44) might not exist outside a fallen world. In trying to understand what Lewis meant by this enigmatic statement I came to what eventually ballooned into a comprehensive study of Lewis’s epistemological thinking. But rather than focusing on Reason and Imagination, I began with the concepts of Fact, Truth and Myth, turning eventually to the correspondences between Reason and Truth and Imagination and Myth.
This exploration included several new insights: that some apparent inconsistencies in Lewis’s thinking actually result from his hierarchical conception of reality; that is, what Lewis had to say about truth, for example, depended on what plane of reality (i.e. heaven or earth) he was speaking of; that Lewis’s theory of meaning is far more important than has yet been critically noted; that Barfield’s concept of “Concrete Thought” is prominent in Lewis’s thinking, especially regarding his theory of myth; that Lewis’s thoughts about metaphor, symbol and allegory are important to his epistemology, not just his literary theory; and what was, for me, the biggest surprise—that Lewis seemed less concerned with knowing truth than he was with knowing reality. His theory of the “Real” has yet to be sufficiently measured in published Lewis criticism. Nor has the consistency of his thought.
Numerous critics have argued that there are fundamental changes in Lewis’s epistemological thinking, especially due to his debate with Elizabeth Anscombe in 1948. I explored this issue in my dissertation, but Feinendegen made it a central tenant to his dissertation that Lewis “held a consistent, uniform position from which he wrote all his manifold books and essays” (Feinendengen, “Thesis,” par. 5). While this claim may be somewhat excessive16, certainly a chief value in Feinendengen’s “Contemplating” essay is that it hints strongly at a more consistent approach to epistemology by Lewis than many critics currently perceive. It acts as a first taste of potential proofs to come. In relation to this and many other issues surrounding Lewis’s epistemological thinking, there are questions that still need answering.
1A response to Norbert Feinendegen’s essay, “Contemplating
C.S. Lewis’s Epistemology: Reflections on C.S. Lewis’s Argument with
Owen Barfield about the Distinction between Enjoyment and Contemplation During
the ‘Great War’” which appeared in Volume 24 of Seven (2008):
29-52. return to text
2In Stephen Thorson’s “‘Knowledge’ in C. S.
Lewis’s Post-Conversion Thought: His Epistemological Method.” Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review 9
(1988): 91-116. return to text
3For Adey on “The Great War” see “The Barfield–Lewis ‘Great
War.’” CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 6 (August 1975): 10-14, and C. S.
Lewis’s “Great War” with Owen Barfield. Victoria, BC: Victoria
UP, 1978. For the best response to date see Stephen Thorson’s “Knowing
and Being in C. S. Lewis’s ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield.” CSL:
The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 15 (November 1983): 1-8, and
see the essay in Seven mentioned in note #2. return to text
4Fortunately Lewis’s “Great War” letters to Barfield
were recently printed in C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters, Vol. 3 (Harper Collins,
2006. 1596-1646) for which inclusion we can thank Walter Hooper who adds to our
understanding of the letters with his own introduction. return to text
5See Feinendengen’s note 24, page 48 of “Contemplating” for
his correctives. return to text
6In English: The Road of Reasoning to Christ: C. S. Lewis as Modern
Times Critic and Critical Thinker. return to text
7Norbert Feinendengen sent the document quoted here to me as an email
attachment on 20 April 2008. It was simply titled, “Thesis of the Study” and
is a summary of key points from Feinendengen’s dissertation written for
me in English to facilitate our correspondence on Lewis’s epistemology. return to text
8In “Seeing and Knowing: The Epistemology of C. S. Lewis’s
Till We Have Faces.” Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review 4 (1983):
84-97, and Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984. return to text
9See, for example, Schakel: Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis:
A Study of Till We Have Faces. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984: 123-24, 138-39;
Corbin Scott Carnell: “Imagination.” The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia.
Eds. Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West Jr. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998: 214-15;
David L. Neuhouser: “Higher Dimensions: C. S. Lewis and Mathematics.” Seven:
An Anglo-American Literary Review 13 (1996): 45-64; Martha Sammons: “A
Far Off Country”: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s Fantasy Fiction. New York:
University Press of America, 2000: 266; Mineko Honda: The Imaginative World of
C. S. Lewis: A Way to Participate in Reality. New York: University Press of America,
2000: 6; Jerry Camery-Hoggatt: “God in the Plot: Storytelling and the Many-Sided
Truth of the Christian Faith.” Christian Scholars Review 35 (2006): 451-470;
and, especially, Walter Hooper: C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide. San Francisco:
Harper Collins, 1996: 568-574. return to text
10Wesleyan UP, 1989. See the essay entitled “Lewis, Truth, and
Imagination.” return to text
11Bibliographic information cited in note #9. return to text
12For example: “For a God who can be ignorant is less baffling
than a God who falsely professes ignorance. The answer of theologians is that the God-Man was
omniscient as God, and ignorant as Man. This, no doubt, is true, though it cannot
be imagined. Nor indeed can the unconsciousness of Christ in sleep be imagined,
nor the twilight of reason in his infancy; still less his merely organic life
in his mother’s womb. But the physical sciences, no less than theology, propose for our belief
much that cannot be imagined” (“World’s” 99). return to text
13Lewis: “To value them chiefly for reflections which they may
suggest to us or morals we may draw from them, is a flagrant instance of ‘using’ [texts
for our own purposes] instead of ‘receiving’” [ them for what
they are] (Experiment 82-83). return to text
14I specifically use the term “epistemological thinking” as
opposed to “epistemology” because of a recommendation from Peter
Schakel who kindly served as one of my dissertation readers and who helped me
see that a complete synthesis of Lewis’s epistemology would be somewhat
artificial since Lewis never synthesized it himself. return to text
15Jerry Camery-Hoggatt. Bibliographic information cited in note #9. return to text
16See, for example, the inconsistency between what Lewis says about
myth in the early 30’s in Pilgrim’s Regress: “…it is
mythology. It is but truth, not fact: an image, not the very real” (169),
and what he says about myth in the mid 40’s in “Myth Became Fact”: “What
flows into you from myth is not truth but reality…it is not, like truth,
abstract…” (66). return to text
Feinendegen, Norbert. “Contemplating C.S. Lewis’s Epistemology: Reflections on C. S. Lewis’s Argument with Owen Barfield about the Distinction between Enjoyment and Contemplation During the ‘Great War.’” Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review, 24 (2008): 29-52.
—. “Thesis of the Study.” Email attachment to the author. 20
April 2008. Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide. San Francisco: Harper Collins,
1996.
Lewis, C. S. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961. “Canto Edition” 1992.
—. “Myth Became Fact.” World Dominion 22 (September-October 1944): 267-70. Rpt. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Ed. Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970. 63-67.
—. Perelandra. New York: Macmillan, 1944. Macmillan Paperbacks Edition, 1965.
—. The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism. 1933. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981.
—. Poems. Ed. Walter Hooper. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1992.
—. “The World’s Last Night.” The World’s Last Night and Other Essays. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1987. 93-113. (Rpt. of “Christian Hope–Its Meaning for Today.” Religion in Life 21 [Winter 1952-53]: 20-32).