Book Review

A Ring of Power

C. S. Lewis and His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society
edited by Roger White, Judith Wolfe, and Brendan Wolfe
Oxford University Press, 2015
(288 pages, $29.95, hardcover)

reviewed by Louis Markos

I think it is safe to say that the legacy of C. S. Lewis will endure for centuries. That legacy rests as much on Lewis's sharply honed mind and fertile imagination as it does on his firm but genial commitment to the truths of orthodox Christianity and the person of Jesus Christ. But it rests as well on a third foundation, without which Lewis would not be Lewis.

I speak of his separate and collective friendships with Warren Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Nevill Coghill, and Hugo Dyson. Together, these remarkable men formed the core of the Inklings. Far more than a mutual admiration society, the Inklings was a group whose members challenged each other to pursue both excellence and joy in their respective work. In the midst of an increasingly cynical and secular-humanist academic world, they found, together, the courage to love beauty, seek truth, and practice goodness.

Although the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society, founded in 1982 by Suzanne and Gregory Wolfe with the aid of Walter Hooper, has never claimed to be a new Inklings, it has embodied much of the same spirit of camaraderie and shown much of the same determination to resist the often fierce naturalism and relativism of modern academia. For over three decades, the society has fostered an ongoing conversation, not only on the life and writings of C. S. Lewis, but also on the life and writings of his friends.

What has made, and continues to make, the society unique is that it offers a platform both for scholarship and appreciation. In addition to inviting topnotch Lewis scholars to present papers at its meetings, the society has opened its doors to people from all walks of life who can speak to the personal struggles and triumphs of the Inklings.

In keeping with this dual focus, C. S. Lewis and His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society offers incisive essays on the philosophical, theological, and literary works of Lewis and intimate remembrances of Lewis and his friends. Edited by Roger White, curator of the Inklings Special Collection for the University Libraries; Judith Wolfe, founding general editor of the Journal of Inklings Studies; and Brendan Wolfe, past president of the society, the collection gathers together nineteen carefully chosen transcripts of papers presented across the full length of the society's existence.

Mostly on Lewis

The collection begins, as it should, with an assessment of Lewis the apologist by Alister McGrath, Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford and author of the most recent, and one of the best, biographies of Lewis. McGrath does well to place Lewis's argument by desire (or joy) at the center, both of Lewis's own road to faith and of his most powerful apologetic arguments.

McGrath sums up the heart of Lewis the man and the defender of the faith in a single sentence: "Human desire, the deep and bittersweet longing for something that will satisfy us, points beyond finite objects and finite persons (who seem able to fulfill this desire, yet eventually prove incapable of doing so); it points through these objects and persons towards their real goal and fulfillment in God himself" (9). Lewis was one of the great rational thinkers of the twentieth century, and yet he had the unique gift of taking his readers past the confines of reason into higher realities best perceived by the imagination.

In the longest and most complex of the essays, Stephen Logan, Principal Supervisor in English at Clare College, Cambridge, considers just this aspect of Lewis, but from a fresh perspective. In our post-Enlightenment world, Logan argues, language forces us to speak either in rational terms or in emotional ones; we lack a vocabulary for discussing, or even acknowledging, the overlap between the two. This problem is exacerbated by the use of technical terminology grounded in Greco-Latin roots, but is eased when writers, like Lewis and the great English poets, turn to ordinary language that is grounded both in experience and in England's store of monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon words.

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