What Would Jack Do?
December 02, 2004
It may be that Joseph Pearce’s book, C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church is designed to provoke, but S. M. Hutchens, reviewing it for Books & Culture didn’t really review it at all. Hutchens rather refutes Pearce but without telling readers much of anything about what Pearce actually says. Most of the review is Hutchens’ own spiritual biography of Lewis.
As far as Lewis’s Ulster bias goes, that really is a fact. Hutchens doesn’t discount it, but he seems to downplay it. Lewis did exhibit it–and as an extreme and ingrained bigotry that could come out in a seemingly senseless, deeply cutting fashion against a friend as good as Tolkien, even though this seems utterly out of character for Lewis, not to mention irrational and downright unChristian. Such is the nature of hereditary, tribal prejudices. People are given them and rarely shake them. I suspect it was also imperative for Lewis the aspiring poet and scholar to compensate for his Irishness in Oxford and to fit in over the years by sticking with the established church and by emphasizing his Ulster identity (Irish but Protestant and Anglophilic). Absent these constraints, it is much easier to imagine a Catholic Lewis.
As for Hutchens’ extended arguments of an ecclesiological nature, they are very poor. Hutchens says: “It is impossible, after all, from a purely Catholic point of view, to see non-Catholic Christianity as anything but systemically flawed…” This is not a correct, or correctly nuanced, theological position. It may be correct as a habitual attitude and prejudice among many catholics. That is different.
The core of Hutchens’ argument rests on the assumption (again, no reference to a real theological position articulated by the Church) or implication that the Catholic Church presents itself as “The One, True, Church that comprehends heaven and earth, presenting itself as offering in the here and now, especially to disappointed seekers after certitude, … supernal finalities…”
That’s a low blow at the end–the implication that converts and others are “disappointed” and in search of “certitude.” The connotations of weak-mindedness are clear. But Hutchens adds that the perfection, certitude and finality is stuff that “the Catholic Church” only “appears to offer her children.” Why are we dealing with appearances? What does the church say, what has it said? Hutchens will not say.
In the end, the whole argument about Lewis is silly. He is yet again an imaginary proxy for the ideal learned evangelical and perhaps for Pearce, an almost ideal Catholic. What Would Jack Do? This, of course, is code for “what should we (orthodox, thinking Protestants) do–or at least strongly consider doing?” Instead of imagining the ideas of a dead man, heed to words of a living fiction: as an Anglican today I imagine I would probably face the political realities, my prejudicial constraints, and my spiritual limitations. I suspect that, rather than clutching to the cold comfort of accepting a church of rampant apostasy as an ascesis, I would help lead an internal reform to boot out the apostates, or else I’d make foot bail. Contra Hutchens, the apt analogy for mainline Protestants uncomfortable with the prevailing apostasy is not Leah and Rachel, it is Lot taking his chances in Sodom.
Related, Significant Reading:
Eric Voegelin on The Church and Humanity:
This is What Would Jack Do? in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Christus Pantolerator | Next: Further tNP CE Activity | TrackBack (1) | Comments (0)
Trackback Pings:
TrackBack URL for this entry:
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference What Would Jack Do?:
» I’m too principled for this church, too principled for this church, so principled it hurts from The Japery
Another Pantagruelist stirring the pot! And at the outset I must vouch for Prof. Hochschild’s character of restraint. For over a year now I have been urging, nay, begging, the good Professor to allow me to stand as middle man… [Read More]
Tracked on January 17, 2006 05:47 PM