Till We Have Faces: C.S. Lewis on the Veiling of Higher Education
by Philip J. Hohle
This paper was originally presented at the annual meeting of the Religious Communication Association, Nov. 14, 2014, in Orlando, FL.
Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis is best known as a writer of children’s novels. Today however, Lewis is receiving some exceptional attention from beyond circles that focus on children’s literature. This observation is supported by the fact that at least two accredited universities within 30 miles of my home offer entire courses solely on Lewis’s life and his writings—one private and the other a public institution. If you were to scan the catalog of most any institution of higher learning, you are likely to discover few personalities from history, arts, or sciences honored with such attention.1 Seldom will a rigorous course in higher education approach an academic discipline or subject from the viewpoint of a single human being. Perhaps the appearance of courses centered on Lewis is significant in this regard. He infused an unmistakable deep current of philosophy through every work, with multiple branches of meaning diverging and converging, at once both deeply profound and simply entertaining. As a result of his mastery of direct and indirect communication, readers from multiple aptitudes and experiences are able to appreciate his work.
Of particular note among his imaginative works is Till We Have Faces, a recasting of the mythical tale of Cupid and Psyche. Using a metaphor found running throughout this story, this essay will reveal Lewis’ perspectives on education while highlighting the implications for higher education in the 21st century. Drawing from his life history, his apologetics on the subject, and from within his other imaginative works we will discover Lewis’ proposition that modern education has become faceless.
REVIEW OF SCHOLARLY WORK
Lewis’ perspectives on education have generated a considerable body of commentary in the scholarly literature. Of special note is Irrigating Deserts, Joel Heck’s thorough assessment of Lewis’ corpus on this subject; the title taken from a line in The Abolition of Man. In three parts, Heck catalogs Lewis’ comments on education in his non-fiction work, his experiences as a student, and his work as a professional educator at Oxford and Cambridge. Heck also provides links to situations and characters within Lewis’ imaginative work that serve as an indirect commentary on education. These references provide reciprocal support for Lewis’ more direct opinions on education in his non-imaginative works. Heck was also successful in gathering memoirs from a number of Lewis’ former students. These enrich our understanding of Lewis’ Oxford years as an educator.
There are general biographical sources that help confirm and advance the assertions within this essay. Armandi Nicholi’s The Question of God and Alan Jacob’s The Narnian are both helpful in providing insight to the historical events Lewis himself leaves vague or incomplete in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy.
More specifically, Peter Kreeft authored six separate essays based on The Abolition of Man that provide deeper insights on education for today. Oskar Gruenwald’s essay, “Renewing the Liberal Arts: C. S. Lewis’ Essential Christianity,” as well as Gilbert Meilaender’s “C. S. Lewis on Moral Education,” serve to strengthen an appreciation of Lewis’ commitment to a liberal education. While not a direct work on Lewis, The Oxford Tutorial provides insight into the personal, face-to-face instruction Lewis both provided as a professor and enjoyed as a student. Students and tutors within today’s Oxford University community wrote the essays in this collection.
THE METAPHOR FOR EDUCATION IN TILL WE HAVE FACES
While it can be taken as a simple creative recasting of the Greco-Roman myth, one can sense the commentary on modern culture inside Lewis’ Till We Have Faces. Orual, the narrator of the story, is caught in a dual battle for identity. First, she literally veils her face in order to hide her ugliness, an act of self-loathing that distances herself from her family and others who would love her. In this sense, she becomes faceless and dehumanized. The second battle of identity involves Orual’s anger at the gods for not showing their faces—for not revealing themselves to her in a tangible communion on a stage where she can contend and negotiate on an equitable basis; where she might clearly understand what they demand of her. Even when the gods do indeed allow her a precious glimpse of their existence, she refuses to accept it and so chooses to stay veiled in her self-righteous anger and disbelief. She turns to education for clarity, as a way to see through the veil, but at best the royal system of education fails to reveal the transcendent truth about the gods.
The question of facelessness confronts Orual as it confronts us: Can a misguided education veil our identity and disguise our humanity? Will such education veil us so completely that we will no longer be able to see God for who he is? Do we busy our lives by filling ourselves with knowledge but never find the Answer, much less even learn the Question?
While Lewis’ tale is not about schooling per se, it is like many of his other imaginative works in the sense that it provides a glimpse of Lewis’ attitude toward the true aims of modern educational philosophy. In this story, much of what represents the folly of modern academia is represented in the character Fox. This man is a Greek slave hired to provide quality schooling for the king’s daughters. On the surface, one might expect a classical education from a Greek tutor—especially since the tale is set in a pre-industrialized world—but Lewis creates a character that is more sophist than Socratic. Instead of providing enlightenment, this teacher’s perspectives on knowledge only help veil Orual’s face.
When Orual becomes queen, Fox becomes one of her two chief advisors; the other is Bardia, but neither can help her see through the increasing darkness of her veil. Ironically, the warrior Bardia is revealed to have too little courage to encounter the supernatural. He tells Orual, “‘The less Bardia meddles with the gods, the less they’ll meddle with Bardia’” (Till We Have Faces 135). Fox on the other hand represents those who have climbed the ivory tower of education and see no gods at all from the pinnacle. In a rare moment of clarity, Orual inquires of Fox about the possibility of a supernatural world undetected by human senses. In this moment she honestly considers the possibility of real souls living in an actual heaven. Lewis provides Fox’s rationalized answer: “He ran his hands through his hair with an old, familiar gesture of teacher’s dismay. ‘Child,’ he said, ‘you make me believe that, after all these years, you have never even begun to understand what the word soul means.’” By this, the Fox avoids consideration of “‘things behind our back. Things too far away.’” Yet even the Fox admits to a weak longing for the transcendent: “‘I wish I could believe it’” (142). Still he cannot, because he is taught and teaches that one can only trust what can be sensed and observed in the material world. His assures himself, solely finding “comfort in words coming out of his own mouth” (86). He cannot help lift Orual’s veil, since he played a role in fixing it in the first place.
Like Orual, today’s university students are in a battle for identity on these same two fronts. The first front is finding their identity on campuses that are operated more like a factory than a school; where each part is assembled to specifications determined by utility. The other front is a materialist education emptied of transcendent knowledge; where God is veiled and only rational thought is sovereign.
FACES AND PLACES: LEWIS ON HIS EDUCATIONAL JOURNEY
Drawing as a primary source from Lewis’ autobiography Surprised by Joy, I will note a number of moments and players in his life story that help provide us insight into his worldview on education, demonstrating how Lewis’ own education was at times faceless in both dimensions mentioned before.
Lewis wrote that he lost transcendent joy in his life as a boy—an “unsatisfied desire, which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction” (Surprised by Joy 18). He would not recover it until well after his formal education had ended. For much of his elementary schooling, Lewis was imprisoned in an environment unsuitable to the needs of his emerging intelligence. Thus, his intellectual growth was developed largely in spite of his formal education. At times he experienced masterful instruction, but more often than not, he was denied a sense of scholarly self-identity as a result of his stunted school experiences.
Lewis compared his experience at The Wynard School to that of a concentration camp, consistently calling the boarding school Belsen throughout his autobiography (24, et. al.). Lewis saw the irony in such a place, where the dwindling student body was subjected to rigid discipline in their studies, yet he felt he was never really challenged academically. “The only stimulating element in the teaching consisted of a few well-used canes (25). . . . The curious thing is that despite all this cruelty, we did surprising little work” (27). Lewis mentions no real academic interaction with the schoolmaster he called Oldie (Robert Capron).2 “Supervision was slack and very little assistance was given” (28). Paradoxically, it was in this context that he developed a personal life of prayer and “learned to live by hope” (36). It is important to note that while Lewis’ first exposure to formal education was not necessarily a godless experience, at best it resulted in only a vague sense of a faceless god.
His next stop was a school near home, Campbell College, where he stayed for just one half term due to health reasons. It is perhaps unfortunate, because Campbell did at least provide one good mentor, Octie (James Adams McNeil), who helped him appreciate the transcendent poetry of Matthew Arnold. Nevertheless, it was here where he first came to experience the bullying which almost derailed his education, though it was more evident in later years at another school. “[While] no serious share of it came my way, and there was no trace of the rigid hierarchy which governs a modern English school; every boy held just the place which his fists and mother wit could win for him” (Surprised by Joy 51). Campbell represented the typical educational environment where the complexities of social life become more important than the academic offerings. Lewis often mentions the inner ring as a social network that is exclusive. Of course he was outside this ring, but later we will see how important his membership in such a group was to his development; an inner ring that provided strong social cohesion and support.
Following Campbell, Lewis was back in England in the town of Malvern, which he calls Wyvern (not to be confused with Wynard).3 Here, Lewis was enrolled, first at the preparatory school Cherbourg House (he called Chartes) and later Malvern College where his brother Warnie had been sent before him. Here another irony: while this is the place he felt his education began, it was also the place where he ceased to believe in God. This dichotomy haunted Lewis until he reclaimed Christianity much later in life. As we will see in his later work, Lewis came to realize that an education was incomplete without encountering the face of the One who authored truth.
In advance of a more rigorous discussion below, it is important here to note the high regard Lewis gave at least two of his mentors during this period: Tubbs (the nickname for Arthur Clement Allen)4 at Cherbourg and Smewgy (nickname of Henry Wakelyn Smith) at Malvern College. These two provided Lewis with the scholarly attention he longed for, and as a result, his potential as a literary scholar began to blossom. Little is known about the true academic nature of these relationships, but Lewis himself describes Tubbs as a “clever and patient teacher” (Surprised by Joy 58). This implies that he taught with imagination and compassion. Tubbs singled out Lewis for a scholarship to Malvern, which suggests a degree of personal recognition if not personal attention. Also at Cherbourg was the master called Pogo (the nickname for Percy Gerald Kelsal Harris),5 a teacher with a more negative influence on impressionable young men. Even though Lewis himself does not blame all his youthful vices on Pogo’s impact, he does admit that he began “to make myself into a fop, cad, and a snob” (68) at Cherbourg.
It is also worthwhile to note that Lewis largely attributed his final departure from Christianity during this period to the influence of the matron of this school—a person influential by not by virtue of her scholarly expertise but from her close contact with the students. Miss C. (the nickname for Miss G. E. Cowie)6 was experimenting with all manner of spiritualism and Lewis took note. “Little by little, unconsciously, unintentionally, she loosened the whole framework, blunted all the sharp edges, of my belief” (60). From Lewis’ description one can surmise that his descending unbelief was influenced more from personal face-to-face interactions than from reading of non-Christian works of literature. In comparison to his return to Christianity much later, his regress was no robust intellectual exercise. He wrote, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading” (191). Nicholi proposed it was a lack of knowledge that fueled Lewis’ disbelief (93), a veiling so to speak. Instead of academic rigor, his well-meaning mentors simply blurred the face of God. They covered it with all matter of false idols that served to further remove him from the transcendent joy for which he longed. Nicholi further suggested that Lewis’ choice to become an atheist might have stemmed from his problems with authority (50) and his desire to be left alone (46)—certainly a plausible idea when one considers the strain of his social life during his school years. While the Malvern experience gave him a new face in education, it served to veil the face of God in the process. Meanwhile, the bullying continued and some of these more dismal educational experiences will show up often in Lewis’ fictional work.
By far, the greatest academic mentor for Lewis was the Great Knock or Kirk (nicknames for William T. Kirkpatrick)7 who taught both his father and his older brother Warnie. He nominates Kirk (along with Smewgy) the most important influence (Surprised by Joy 148), devoting an entire chapter to this man in his autobiography. Lewis left Malvern and moved in with Kirk, where he received a tutored education—one that foreshadowed his own career as an educator. In this setting, the young Lewis received the individualize care that helped him develop into a candidate for Oxford. Kirk gave him both personal attention and room to breath, a combination that finally began to solidify his identity. Kirk imprinted his own sharp intellect upon Lewis, which served him well in his calling as a writer and professor. From the description of their interactions in the pages of Surprised by Joy, one can see that he cared for Lewis’ mind (134, 137) and got to know him well enough to recognize his vocational gifts (183). The Kirk-Lewis relationship serves as a great model for a healthy education where the master does not fill, but draws out the knowledge from the student. Yet even Lewis noted in retrospect, that his exposure to great literature only inflamed his longing for the transcendent, which would remain unfulfilled during the this era since did Kirk himself no longer believed in God.
The final phase of Lewis’ formal education began when he was admitted to Oxford University at Magdalene College (two separate applications). The Oxford University method of education is rare in that the student is required to conduct significant independent research and reading, and is held accountable via private or semi-private tutoring sessions with a professor. Conversely, lectures are widely considered to be optional or supplemental to the tutoring (see Palfreyman). It is not hard to see how the time spent with Kirk prepared Lewis for this next level of education as he quickly distinguished himself as a student at Oxford, excelling in every degree he pursued.
After obtaining his degrees, Lewis spent the rest of his life as a tutor and lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge. Through personal correspondence, Heck contacted several of these formers students and asked them to provide their impressions of Lewis as a tutor. Heck compiles the picture of a Lewis tutorial: “After reading the essay, there would be a pause, then Lewis would critique the essay, following the pattern that W. T. Kirkpatrick has instilled in him, challenging the use of inexact words or phrases or the undergraduate’s interpretation of the previous week’s readings” (133). Lewis tried to shield his personal life from scrutiny, so it should not be surprising that his tutorials had a cordial, yet formal tone. “Sometimes, though rarely, friendly conversation would be included in on of Lewis’s tutorials, but never to the detriment of the tutorial itself” (Heck 134). In spite of this personal distance, he served as an engaging and willing coach for hundreds of university students over his career. If not a warm, personal relationship, Heck saw in the recollection of Lewis’ students a dominating sense of awe and respect, “The students who came to learn, who came to be challenged and to grow, with some notable exceptions, soon discovered flowers blooming in the deserts of their minds” (Heck 131). Former student Charles Arnold-Baker wrote about Lewis: “Intellectually arrogant he certainly was not—he was actually tolerant—but he would not accept the weak and insipid undergraduate who thought that the world owed him a degree” (quoted in Heck 129). Student A. E. F. Davis described his manner as a tutor: “He was above all, a gentlemanly and jovial man of learning, exact in factual accuracy but ready for any form of argument” (quoted in Heck 132).
Even though Lewis found his calling as a university don, his own education was far from complete. Lewis finalized his search for knowledge by revisiting the claims of Christianity. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis took great care in mapping out the road of both his spiritual and his intellectual development, often showing them to be parallel in their development if not actually related. The eventual unveiling happened in spite of the climate at Oxford where the “intellectual ‘New Look’. . . [decided that] there was to be no more pessimism, no more self-pity, no flirtations with any idea of the supernatural, no romantic delusions” (201). Nevertheless, it was here where Lewis re-embraced Christianity in the final evolution of his educational journey. It was also at this turn on his spiritual path—and in this climate—that he found his identity as a writer. In The Narnian, Jacobs describes what followed Lewis’ conversion as a “burst of fluency” (156).
Lewis at times seemed uncomfortable with the influence of the collective, at worst seeing a life in community the same as living as a worker ant in a busy anthill (Surprised by Joy 8-9). Oddly, it was the inner ring of a close group of friends that brought him to this final stage. It was on long lunches in pubs and extended walks with friends like Hugo Dyson, Owen Barfield, and J. R. R. Tolkien that he began reconsidering the exclusive truths of Christianity. Lewis implies that these discussions among writers, teachers, and thinkers were among the most rigorous intellectual exercises of his education. In spite of the formal side of his education that sought to veil this truth, it was through this intense mentoring that he was enabled to see God for who He is. Lewis was both surprised and inspired by the return of transcendent joy.
EDUCATION IN LEWIS’ NON-FICTIONAL WORK
The popularity of the Chronicles of Narnia stories and even the current films based on the same suggests that many fans of Lewis may know only of his indirect communication found in his imaginative works. Nevertheless, Lewis also mastered the use of direct communication in his non-fiction works. Perhaps the best known of these is Mere Christianity, a work of Christian apologetics that is valued by even secular readers in what Steven Beebe describes as the “oral quality” of his prose (31). Even his theological treatises are directly accessible to the average layperson. Much of his other works of non-fiction also have this conversational tone, reminiscent of his most engaging fictional work.
Lewis made a direct attack on 20th century educational philosophy in the essay titled The Abolition of Man. Within the pages of this short book, Lewis confronted educational methods and curricula that put aside what is considered mere sentimentality in order to make room for the practical, the scientific, and the rational. Lewis knew the arguments well from his own decades-long intellectual cage match where he exhausted all the logical arguments he could muster in order to reject the existence of a divine absolute. Within the pages of this essay Lewis uses the Chinese term Tao to describe this universal, objective truth. He was orthodox in asserting that such truths are beyond social construction. As Meilaender put it, the difference is that humans “have not decided what morality requires; we have discovered it” (25). Kreeft, in a commentary on Abolition, defined the Tao as “the doctrine of the existence and nature of objective values, universal and unchangeable moral truths. Knowing the ‘way’ made our ancestors human” (137). Where Lewis and Kreeft are more oblique, Heck directly ties the Tao to Christianity, “The Bible contains the primary record of this objective truth or objective morality, though it appears elsewhere as well, but not in as complete and pure a form” (36).
Responding to the modern ideas he saw creeping into the prevailing cultural consciousness through education, Lewis makes the case in Abolition that the demise of the human race will follow when all that is considered true is defined solely by subjective human experience. He described the demise as a de-evolution where we return to a state not unlike that of apes—beings who are incapable of transcendent thought, a theme personified by Shift, the clever ape in The Last Battle. Lewis wrote in the Abolition of Man,
The final stage [of this battle] is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. (37)
Even in his day, Lewis saw this modernistic ideology thinly concealed behind new educational philosophies promoted by people who he called Conditioners, who among those are teachers, administrators, policy-makers, and professors already fully vested within this faceless philosophy. In effect, they practice what Kreeft calls cultural reproduction (137), which serves to perpetuate the downward spiral. By means of their chronological snobbery,8 these Conditioners seek to erase pre-modern thought from the educational agenda, leaving it soulless and ignoble. “[In] this reductive process, the human being becomes an artifact, to be shaped and reshaped” (Meilaender 25). These miscalculations are rooted in the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. “The intelligentsia assumed that progress was also occurring in every other field. Few believed that a new idea might actually cause regression rather than progression” (Heck 26). To use the metaphor, they have turned away from the face of God and bestow upon the face of their students the veil of this mistake. Kreeft laid out the argument:
Prescientific ancients often made the mistake of trying to know the cosmos by intuition, myth, poetry, and mysticism instead of science. We moderns usually make the far deadlier error of trying to understand the self by science. They personalized the universe; we depersonalize the self. They thought even matter was spirit; we think even spirit is matter. They thought even things were persons; we think even persons are things. They worshipped the earth as the body of a god; we call psychology a science. Which mistake is more stupid and deadly? (152-153)
More recently, there have been developments that may add to the veil of education and intensify the battle: Institutions in all parts of the western world are in the midst of a funding revolution. A recent Pew Center report noted that over half of Americans no longer believe college education to be worth the cost (Is College Worth It?). Simply put, parents as well as bureaucrats in institutions that fund education, are beginning to demand a precise accounting of the benefits of this rather expensive four-year camp we call college. This accounting is increasingly based on how capable or incapable students are in landing high paying jobs as a direct result of their degrees. In their quest to supply trained human resources for the workforce, the United States Congress recently began reevaluating student aid with a utilitarian attempt to tie it more closely to the track record of the universities in supplying trained hires.
Now, for the first time, [the government] has decided to judge colleges not by their inputs and processes but by what actually happens to their students after graduation. And if student outcomes aren’t good enough—if they can’t pay back their loans on time or can’t get a good job that provides a decent salary—then colleges won’t have access to massive amounts of taxpayer support. (Carey)
As a result, universities are scrambling to justify their tuition fees (and their existence) by applying new functional standards that would seem foreign to anyone but progressive-modernist administrators. Increasingly, the Conditioners of government funding and accreditation limit the imagination and innovation of educators who would aspire to reverse this demise. In this demoralizing climate, universities are compelled to put aside the esoteric to make room for the practical. Sadly it would seem in many halls of government, a liberal-arts education is no longer considered an end in itself. Even in those institutions that advertise a liberal arts education, it is often reduced to a structured checklist. Peter Schakel was wary of the published liberal arts core: “[After four years] when all the boxes have been checked, voila! You have a liberal arts education. Or maybe not” (515).
Public funding of a university education may be more of a 21st century issue, but the important firewall between higher education and vocational training was recognized even by Victorian writers like John Henry Newman and John Stuart Mill, who proposed in 1867 that “Education makes a man a more intelligent shoemaker, if that be his occupation, but not by teaching him how to make shoes” (388). In his time, Lewis was yet another eloquent champion in this ongoing battle to protect a liberal arts education—metaphorically, to restore the faces to education. Lewis’ crusade originated from within education as a prominent don at Oxford and Cambridge, thus his words bear special weight as we add them to today’s continuing debates on these issues.
In our day, universities are faced with an increased emphasis on vocational education and measurable outputs. As a result of external pressures and the veiled vision inside the institution, higher education is in danger of devolving into something less than higher. More like an assembly line with a quota than a university, higher education is becoming for the student a faceless experience.
EDUCATION IN LEWIS’ IMAGINATIVE WORKS
Readers may also find that Lewis had much to say about the battle over education in his fictional works. Michael Ward demonstrated that Lewis took great care to hide treasures of implication inside his works, “hidden meaning[s] deliberately woven” (5), demonstrating a command over both direct and indirect modes of communication. While I will not attempt to prove that Lewis crafted Till We Have Faces to serve primarily as a treatise on education, the application of the metaphor is powerful and supports Lewis’ other comments on education, especially those found in his other imaginative works.
The Chronicles of Narnia series involves school-aged children on adventures, so it was inevitable that Lewis would add some misguided attempts at schooling to those plots. In the first of the series, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, the professor is clearly modeled after the Great Kirk of Lewis’ own schooling, When questioning the children on their journey to Narnia, the professor is dismayed that logic is not being taught in the schools (45). Yet he, in the end, admits to his own belief in Narnia, which is far from logical (185).
Lewis’ commentaries on education become much more pointed in Prince Caspian. Three moments relate well to our metaphor. In the story, a cruel despot rules Narnia. Lewis depicts two school classrooms in this land: In the first, Miss Prizzle teaches a reconstructed history of Narnia to her students, an unmistakable poke at the critical spirit of modern times (193-194). In such a classroom, history is twisted in a way that supports the ideology of the teacher and the governing authority. In effect, nothing from the past is accepted unless it is first baptized in this Zeitgeist. In his sermon “Learning in War-Time,” Lewis proposes that, “A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune form the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age” (58-59). Infected as such, the students in Prince Caspian are studying history from a teacher unwilling to stray beyond the comforts of her own time. Reminiscent of Orual, she refuses to look upon the Lion Aslan when he appears outside the classroom, doubting the perception of the only student who chooses to look out the window. The rest are like the students in many modern classrooms, pupils who are conditioned, veiled, and frozen by a teacher’s own shortsightedness.
The second connection has to do with the decorum of both classrooms in Prince Caspian, evocative of some of Lewis’ childhood experiences. In the first classroom, the students are forced to wear rigid, stifling uniforms (193), reflective of the norm of the Lewis’ youth. This dig is repeated in The Magician’s Nephew (1). The restrictive, chaffing school uniforms are metaphors for a restricted individuality. Students in such an environment are at risk of becoming identical and faceless. The second classroom in Prince Caspian has a different, yet related problem. In this school, the teacher is more imaginative (she does look out the window to see Aslan), but her students are all like pigs that see almost nothing of the transcendent—they are not interested in what is outside and threaten to report the teacher for wandering beyond the pre-determined limits of education. When they see Aslan’s face, they are too small-minded to embrace what he represents and instead de-evolve back to just being pigs (196). The classroom-sty of these pig boys is certainly a jab at the harsh social environment of the schools in Lewis’ childhood. The social norms restrict the individual student who would be different, veiling a view through the window that might reveal the transcendent.
The third moment in Prince Caspian involves the personal tutor of the prince. Like Orual and her Fox, Caspian has a hired teacher by the name of Dr. Cornelius. In the open, he schools Caspian with a classic liberal arts curriculum.9 In secret, he rebels against the evil king’s command to keep the truth about Narnia’s history from Caspian. These were the very stories for which Caspian’s heart longed. As a child, he heard them from his nursemaid until the king banished her. Cornelius lifts the veil, and Caspian as a result ends up serving Narnia well.
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace is a bratty child who comes from a school with no corporal punishment. Lewis suffered random corporal punishment by cane from Oldie at the Waynard school (Surprised by Joy 25). Yet his experiences at Malvern College showed that when the administration fails to keep discipline, bullying flourishes. Eustace is noted to be the bullying type (2), unrestrained by the lack of (authoritative) corporal punishment that Lewis apparently supported.
In the pages of The Silver Chair, we find Lewis again creating characters who spring from a faceless scholastic background. The character Jill has suffered from an even worse form of bullying at her co-educational school called Experimental House. This was where the administration believed that “boys and girls should be allowed to do what they want” (1) and that the oppressors were considered not bullies, but “interesting psychological cases” (2). We also discover that even references to the Bible are discouraged at this modern school, an attitude that serves to veil the students from Christianity (5). We also read about the use of Christian names in Narnia (169), which the narrator points out are not used at a modern school—literally veiling a student’s true identity. After Eustace and Jill return from Narnia, they expose the lunacy of the head of the Experimental House, who finds her true calling in Parliament thereafter (216), a twist Lewis uses to illustrate the lack of sanity among modern governmental policymakers in education.
Brief references to faceless education are found in The Horse and His Boy. The character Cor reveals Lewis’ attitudes about formal schooling. He is pleased to be going to school, “Even though Education and all sorts of horrible things are going to happen to me” (197). Note the use of the capital in “Education,” reflecting Lewis’ concern for the puffery that has come to veil true learning, and its equality to “horrible things.” In The Magician’s Nephew, Digory’s moral character is attributed to his schooling, but the narrator (Lewis) cracks that such ethical training is no longer a priority in modern schools (159).
Outside the Chronicles of Narnia, perhaps the evil character Weston in Perelandra voices the clearest expression of Lewis’ attitude toward modern education in his imaginative works. He is a scientist turned bad, and Lewis has him voice these words about the modernist purpose in education: “‘The false humanist ideal of knowledge as an end in itself never appealed to me. I always wanted to know in order to achieve utility. . . . When [income and fame] were attained, I began to look farther: to the utility of the human race’” (77). Weston attempts to take traditional religious views and recast them as mere scientific concepts pliable by human thinking. “‘The goal: think of it! Pure spirit: the final vortex of self-thinking, self-originating activity.’” Ransom, the Christian protagonist in the story responds, “‘Is it in any sense at all personal—is it alive?’” Lewis has Weston continue in a “schoolboy’s whisper . . . ‘Anthropomorphism is one of the childish diseases of popular religion’” (79). The scientist Weston veils the truth with his voice of reason. In this sense, Perelandra is a seventeen-chapter battle setting the folly of positivist, atheistic piggery Lewis saw in higher education against the classical, humanistic, and unapologetically Christian education Lewis championed.
The Great Divorce places a busload of people without names in a purgatory of sorts. These ghost-like people struggle with their warped ideas that prevent them from entering heaven. The narrator notices that these candidates had “fixed faces, full not of possibilities but impossibilities . . . all in one way or another, distorted and faded” (17). Lewis portrays the conversations between these nameless ghosts and the spirits of their deceased relatives—people with identities who come to aid their transition. In several cases, it is the most educated ghosts that find even a taste of heaven most unappetizing. One saved spirit named Dick observes how the college education that caused his own (temporary) loss of faith still haunts his nameless friend, known only as the Episcopal Ghost. “‘At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause . . . . When did we put up one moment’s real resistance to the loss of our faith?’” His intellectual ghost friend who had become a liberal theologian responds, “‘The suggestion that I should return at my age to the mere factual inquisitiveness of boyhood strikes me as preposterous. In any case, that question-and-answer conception of thought only applies to matters of fact. . . . I should object very strongly to describing God as a fact’” (37, 41-42). Several of these stranded travelers are found to be captive in the ruins of their faceless, modern education.
Finally, Lewis literally uses the voice of the demonic to speak what he believed to be threatening the impressionable student in modern times. In The Screwtape Letters, the master tempter proposes a toast to the best and most brilliant accomplishments that bring damnation to mankind. Inevitably, education is where Lewis allows the demons their considerable success. Screwtape reminds his audience that, “‘the basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils’” and that such is to be considered a true practice of democracy (203). To use our extended metaphor, the demons themselves recognize that making all students alike crushes their identity, a self that would be restored to wholeness in Christianity. “‘To secure the damnation of these little souls, these creatures that have almost ceased to be individual’” (202): a description of the ends and the means of the tempter’s work within education.
LESSONS FROM LEWIS’ EDUCATIONAL JOURNEY
Clearly, there are abundant lessons for university educators in the writings and life experiences of C. S. Lewis. The attempt to untangle philosophy from theology was popular among academics in Lewis’ time as it continues today among institutions of higher education. Notwithstanding, Lewis cites the return of God to his intellectual life as the spark for his sudden explosion of literary output after producing only a meager yield of reviews and articles before. Like those in Narnia who dared to see Aslan outside the window of the classroom, Lewis’ conversion changed his identity. Nicholi also suggests that Lewis’ return to Christianity formed an outward focus, where his atheism produced an inward focus (77). This is not to say that a student is unable to learn or develop an identity while holding to alternative, false, or incomplete religions—or even no religion. But Lewis’ life and works supply a convincing argument for a return of absolute truth (and the Author of such truth) to the curricula of higher education.
From this review, several of Lewis’ key positions on education come to light. First, Lewis believed that one’s education is not complete without wrestling with the issue of God. Such an education helps our young “become men and women who are able to ‘see’ the truths of moral reason. . . . Lacking proper moral education, our freedom to make moral choices will be a freedom to be inhuman” (Meilaender 25). The fit between higher education and religion is natural. “What makes Christian scholarship and literature different, and uniquely ‘Christian,’ is the evaluative point of view of Christian truth, which, in turn, is not sectarian, but universal” (Gruenwald 15).
At Cherbourg, Lewis fell to the temptations of a godless education: “From the tyrannous noon of revelation I passed into the cool evening of Higher Thought, where there was nothing to be obeyed, and nothing to be believed except what was either comforting or exciting” (Surprised by Joy 69).” As Kreeft put it, “The character [i.e., mankind] has forgotten who he is because he has thrown away the script and rejected the playwright” (152). Still, there is hope even for those teachers in institutions limited by a strict separation of church and state. Like the young Lewis, a student may discover a longing for the absolute and supernatural by studying classic mythology. “Sometimes I can almost think that I was sent back to the false gods [e.g., Norse or Greek mythology] there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself” (Surprised by Joy 77).
The second conclusion is that the pressures to emphasize utility and vocational training for graduates will make them faceless. These pressures are already inspiring our institutions of higher education to remove much of the transcendent and sensuous content inherent in a traditional liberal arts education. Lewis saw the need for a counterbalance against the encroaching modernism by presenting content and experiences (even the use of story) that promote the imagination as equal to reason (Heck 27). Lewis wrote, “For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. . . . By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. . . . A hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head” (Abolition of Man 9). An education without imagination is certainly soulless and can only produce “men without chests” (16), or to use our metaphor, students without faces.
The third conclusion drawn from Lewis’s life and works stresses the importance of mentors in education. As both student and don, he demonstrated the profound advantage the individualized tutorial experience has over the faceless variety found in large lecture halls filled with disengaged students. Beyond Oxford and Cambridge, few universities maintain a formal tutorial system, and even Oxford is continually evaluating the practicality of this method for the future (Palfreyman 21ff). Nevertheless, the Oxford academic policy-makers recognize a strong link: the tutorial is seen as uniquely capable of producing students with higher capacities for critical thinking, which is the hallmark of a liberal arts curriculum and the distinctive brand of an Oxford education (22). Such attention has become increasingly rare in today’s mass-production educational climate as students find it hard to find a qualified professor personally willing to oversee their educational progress. Few universities would be able to replicate this quirkily British tutorial practice outside the United Kingdom, but it does not mean that educational mentors are unsuitable for American higher education. Institutions can draw from Lewis’ own experiences by eliminating policies that separate the professor and student—practices that make the educational transaction thin and faceless. Nevertheless, a cultural sea change may be required for this ideal to become a reality. Imagine how today’s administrators would react to this Lewis quote: “The greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects” (Surprised by Joy 112-113).
The final conclusion is the importance of having small communities of learners who support each other in intellectual exercises outside the formal classroom. Lewis discovered in the Inklings a small groups of like-minded individuals committed to each other in providing extraordinary stimulation, accountability, and encouragement. Visitors to Oxford today can visit the very pubs where Lewis, Tolkien and the other Inklings met and enjoyed each other’s company. In fact, one may encounter remnants of this kind of group in present day Oxford among students and faculty who meet over a pint to tell stories, argue, and laugh. It is hard not to envy these students who still enjoy to a large extent the kind of social educational environment that Lewis found his veil was lifted—a special learning community where he found identity as a student, his voice as a writer, and his soul as a human being.
REMOVING THE VEIL
Unfortunately as a result of so many veils, education no longer is related to learning (Heck 29). Kreeft proposed that “this is the first generation is American history that is less well educated than its parents” (135). Oskar Guenwald saw the liberal arts as “essential Christianity” and frames the consequences of this godless, faceless education in western society: “Liberal democracy is in crisis, since it lacks a transcendent moral guide, and that the renewal of liberal arts education is a key to restoring the ethical foundations of both individual liberty and popular self-government” (1).
Lewis was plain on the implications. “The practical result [of faceless education] must be the destruction of the society that accepts it” (Abolition of Man 17). Together with his direct communication in The Abolition of Man, Lewis’ imaginative works like Till We Have Faces provide both a compelling and imaginative argument to recognize and remove the veils from modern higher education.
Works Cited
Beebe, Steven. News from C.S. Lewis: Communication Studies Chair Discovers Forgotten Manuscript Of 20th Century Literary Legend. Texas State University, 28-31. Web 10 July, 2011. http://www.commstudies.txstate.edu/news.html
Carey, Kevin. What to Think About “Gainful Employment Rules.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 6 June, 2011. Web. 16 July, 2011. http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/what-to-think-about-gainful-employment/35960
Gruenwald, Oskar. “Renewing the Liberal Arts: C. S. Lewis’ Essential Christianity.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 14.1/2 (2002): 1-24. OmniFile Full Text Mega. Web. 25 July 2011.
Heck, Joel. Irrigating Deserts: C. S. Lewis on Education. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2006. Print.
Is College Worth It? College Presidents, Public Assess Value, Quality And Mission Of Higher Education. Pew Research Center Publications, 15 May, 2011. Web. 16, July, 2011. < http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1993/survey-is-college-degree-worth-cost-debt-college-presidents-higher-education-system>
Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Print.
Kreeft, Peter. C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium: Six Essays on the Abolition of Man. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994. Print.
Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: MacMillan, 1950. Print.
—. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Family letters, 1905-1931, Vol. 1. Edited by Walter Hooper. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.
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—. The Horse and His Boy. New York: MacMillan, 1953. Print.
—. The Last Battle. New York: MacMillan, 1953. Print.
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—. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: MacMillan, 1950. Print.
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—. Perelandra. New York: Scribner, 1944. Print.
—. Prince Caspian. New York: MacMillan, 1951. Print.
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Mill, John Stuart. Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical, Vol. 4. Boston: William V. Spencer, 1867. Print.
Nicholi, Armand M. Jr. The question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, And The Meaning Of Life. New York: The Free Press, 2002. Print.
Palfreyman, David, ed. The Oxford Tutorial: ‘Thanks, you taught me how to think.’ 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
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Footnotes
1 Beyond Lewis, only Jane Austen has that honor in my university’s catalog.
2 Lewis purposefully disguised the names of some in his book, perhaps to soften his criticism. We find Oldies’ real name on page 1 of The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Family letters, 1905-1931, edited by Walter Hooper.
3 In keeping with his practice of giving names to places and people in his autobiography, Lewis seems to combine Wynard with Malvern, perhaps in an attempt to show some similarity between the two educational experiences. Oddly enough, there is a Wyvern College in England. It is interesting to note that a wyvern is also the name of a dragon-like mythical creature.
4 Again, Lewis hides the real name of Tubbs. It is only by interpolating comments made in a letter to his father that the connection is made. (See The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper.)
5 Pogo’s name was offered by Hooper (The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) in a footnote on page 19.
6 Again, Hooper provides this detail.
7 Other sources must provide us with his real name. Again, see Hooper.
8 In Surprised by Joy, Lewis himself admitted to holding this perspective before his conversion to Christianity.
9 Lewis gives a delightful list of subjects appropriate for such study in this medieval-like world: Cosmography (geography/geology), Rhetoric, Heraldry (military science), Versification (poetry), History, Law, Physic (medicine), Alchemy (chemistry) and Astronomy (Prince Caspian, 52-53).
