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As bombs fell on London almost nightly from the autumn of 1940 through the summer of 1941, the lives of ordinary people were altered beyond recognition. A reclusive Oxford lecturer found himself speaking, not about Renaissance literature to a roomful of students but about Christian doctrine into a BBC microphone. A writer of popular fiction found herself exploring not the intricacies of the whodunit but the mysteries of suffering and grace. An erudite poet and literary critic found himself patrolling the dark streets and piecing together images of fire and redemption. C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot became something they had not been before the war: bearers of a terrible, yet triumphant, message that people could not expect to be spared from pain and suffering, but they would be re- deemed through pain and suffering.The Lion in the Waste Land initially explores the personal dynamic between these three writers and their misgivings about taking on the role of Christian apologist. Brown goes on to examine the congruency in their depictions of the nature of Christ, of conversion, and of angelic beings; and she highlights the similarity in their views of war and suffering, their portrayals of life as a pilgrimage to heaven, and their arguments for the value of walking in the "old paths" described in Scripture. Eliot depicted the world as a treacherous Waste Land where spiritual quests are fraught with disappointment and danger. Sayers recognized that the message of redemption through Christ is a thing of terror. Lewis's Narnia books depicted the nature of Christ through the lion Aslan, who is good but not safe. Brown contends that the works of these three authors also offer hope in the midst of adversity, because they recognize that although redemption is a fearsome thing-like the image of a lion-it is also glorious.

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Publié par	The Kent State University Press
Date de parution	18 septembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781631013072
Langue	English

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The Lion in the Waste Land
The Lion in the Waste Land
Fearsome Redemption in the Work of C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot

Janice Brown
The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
© 2018 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-60635-338-7
Manufactured in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
22 21 20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1
To Phyllis, my mother, who taught me to love books, excellence, and God
Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
1 A Meeting of Minds
2 Prophets in the Wilderness: Imagination versus Apologetics
3 Christ: The Unsafe Savior
4 Choosing to Be the Chosen of God
5 Angelic Interference
6 Fiery Trials: World War II and Redemptive Suffering
7 The Journey to Joy: Life as a Pilgrimage to Heaven
8 Ask for the Old Paths: Redeeming the Time
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface

T. S. Eliot believed that no poet or artist “has his complete meaning alone” and that in order to truly appreciate a writer, we must set him among other writers “for contrast and comparison” (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” 15). This book places side by side the central ideas of three writers: C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot. I hope to reinforce the impact Lewis has had, and draw attention to the strong Christian witness in the work of Sayers and Eliot. The significance of Dorothy L. Sayers has been largely overlooked in recent decades, while T. S. Eliot is regarded by many as an esoteric poet who has little relevance to Christian thought. I hope this book will help correct the tendency to undervalue Sayers and misconstrue Eliot’s central concerns.
The Christian message is a message of redemption that offers hope in every age and in every culture. The bleakness and spiritual destitution of modern culture is depicted in T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land . This poem, published in 1922, was hailed as an expression of the disillusionment of the era. It continued to be regarded by many as a work that accurately depicted a world devoid of all that was wholesome and life-giving, a world without the hope of redemption. The ensuing decades, the middle decades of the twentieth century, were dark with the memories of World War I, the new horrors of World War II, and the bitter residue of failed idealism. One of the apparent failures was the Christian Church, an institution that had provided stability and hope to earlier generations. Yet, surprisingly, during these same dark decades—the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s—Christianity reemerged as a source of hope, partly because of C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot.
The doctrine of redemption through Christ does not offer a cheap and easy solution to the complexity and anguish of life. The gospel, Dorothy L. Sayers declared, is “a thing of terror,” and Christ, “the Lion of the Tribe of Judah,” is aptly represented by the lion Aslan in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books as good, but not safe. The process of salvation is fraught with danger and pain, but the Christian message, illuminated through the work of C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot, still offers hope to those wandering in the Waste Land. Although the offer of redemption is a fearsome thing, like the image of a lion, it is also glorious.
Acknowledgments

In writing this book I am indebted to my Grove City College students, whose love of Lewis, Sayers, and Eliot inspired me to explore the works of these writers more deeply. I am particularly grateful to two former students, James Witmer and Emily Jefferis, whose appreciative and thoughtful responses to the original draft of my first chapters encouraged me to go on writing. Dr. Jerry Root (of Wheaton College) played a key role in determining my initial conception by suggesting that I use historian Adrian Hastings’s linking of Lewis, Sayers, and Eliot as my starting point.
I received much support and scholarly help from friends, particularly the Right Reverend Donald Harvey (St. John’s, Newfoundland), Dr. Michael Ward (Oxford, England), and Dr. James Dixon (Grove City, Pennsylvania).
My daughter, Stephanie Miller, and my brother, Dr. Carl Hudson, gave generously of their time to proofread much of the manuscript, and made insightful suggestions. Above all, I am immensely grateful for the patient and tireless assistance of my husband, Cliff, who supported and advised me at every stage, reading and rereading, questioning and affirming. The book could not have been written without him.
Author’s Note

Unless otherwise indicated, the quotations from the Bible are from the King James Version—the version commonly used by Lewis, Sayers, and Eliot. For Lewis’s poetry, I have consulted two different collections: Poems: C. S. Lewis , edited by Walter Hooper and first published in 1964 (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), and The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition , edited by Don W. King (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2015). In quoting Lewis’s poetry, however, I have used the versions given in the former work, because the collection edited by Hooper includes the previously published versions of Lewis’s verse, while that edited by King reproduces, in some instances, earlier, unpublished versions less familiar to readers. In referencing certain of Sayers’s plays— The Zeal of Thy House, The Devil to Pay, He That Should Come , and The Just Vengeance —I have cited the collection in which they occur, Four Sacred Plays . Quotations from Eliot’s journalism come from variously named phases of the critical journal he edited: The Criterion: A Quarterly Review (1922–25 and 1928–39); The New Criterion: A Quarterly Review (1926–27); and The Monthly Criterion: A Literary Review (1927–28). For most of the quotations from Eliot’s poems and plays, I have used The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1971). For several poems and one play ( The Confidential Clerk ) that were published later than 1950, I have used other sources. Because none of these Eliot sources give line numbers for the poems and plays, I have indicated the location of quoted passages by giving page numbers.
1
A Meeting of Minds

The image of traversing a Waste Land 1 —a sterile, death-ridden landscape—appears most notably in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur , a composite work written in the late 1400s. Malory recounts the myths of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table who, in their quest to find the Holy Grail, journey through a region blighted by “pestilence” in which all vegetation is “withered and [will] not grow again” and all water has become “empty of fish”—a region called “the Waste Lands” (Malory 410). The Waste Land image reappeared in T. S. Eliot’s iconic poem of 1922, in which the landscape is littered with “stony rubbish,” “broken images,” “withered stumps of time,” “bones” of the dead, “exhausted wells,” “tumbled graves,” and “falling towers.” The scene is peopled by haunting figures: shadows “striding behind you,” a “hanged man,” abused and demeaned women, a drowned sailor, and a mysterious “gliding…, hooded” figure ( The Waste Land 37–55). The Waste Land depicts a world that is falling apart and lives that are blighted. Blending a variety of poetic forms, the poem is a collage of bits and pieces: scraps of conversation, fragments of scenes, and disparate images. Startling and contrasting impressions bombard the reader. The poem appeals to the senses and emotions, requiring the reader to respond to constantly shifting scenes and a bewildering array of vague characters that crowd in and then drop away again. The diverging and converging fragments that make up The Waste Land spoke for a whole culture in crisis in the early 1920s, and the poem was viewed both as an eloquent expression of the dismay that underlay modern consciousness and as the ultimate example of a modernist poem. Although written almost a century ago in a time of great anxiety, The Waste Land continues to speak powerfully to later generations. Writing of The Waste Land in 1994, Jewell Spears Brooker remarked that the crisis it addressed was an ongoing one (233). “We still,” Brooker observes, “live with the possibility that contemporary people will … literally annihilate themselves and their civilization” (233–34). The bleakness and uncertainty of the 1920s, and of the ensuing decades of the mid-twentieth century, 2 are paralleled by the bleakness and uncertainty of our own age.
From the late nineteenth century, the visibility and influence of the Church had declined steadily, yet during World War II there was an unexpected “re-appropriation of Christian faith as ‘the key to the meaning of life’ ”—a reappropriation that British historian Adrian Hastings attributes to the “Anglican lay literary and theological writers C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, [and] Dorothy L. Sayers” (388). Hastings connects this revival of Christian faith with the harsh realities of World War II, which prompted much “moral fumbling” but also “simple, almost crusade-like heroism” and a widespread return to rudimentary values. The work of Lewis, Eliot, and Sayers was, Hastings observes, surprisingly “of the same sort.” Through the literary output of these three writers during the 1940s, he argues, the “popular religious apologetic of modern Britain was … being composed almost at a stroke!” (389). Though they occupied very different niches, all three writers were well-known public figures by the early 1940s. Eliot, luminous among the cultural elite, had by 1925 become widely recognized as a leading poet and critic and was regarded as the quintessential representative of modernism. Sayers, more closely connected with popular culture, be