Book Review
Readers & Believers
Inklings of Reality: Essays Toward a Christian Philosophy of Letters
by Donald T. Williams
Lantern Hollow Press, 2012
(364 pages, $14.99, paperback)
reviewed by Louis Markos
Donald Williams does not mince words. After reminding us that every culture "has had a mode of speech that is more rhythmical, more formal, more suggestive, more intense . . . than the normal ones it uses for everyday discourse," he hits us with a true zinger: "There is only one society on record in which it [poetry] is considered unmanly, in which its more artistic forms are practiced only by an isolated elite who write, only for each other, texts which would be utterly incomprehensible to the general public. And that is our own, though only in the last century."
Williams is a man on a mission, and his mission is a noble one. He is convinced, and he goes a long way toward convincing his readers, that poetry need not be marginalized, but can (and should) play a vital role in the way believers interact with God, their neighbor, and the world. By means of a whirlwind tour of key English-speaking poets, theologians, historians, and critics, Inklings of Reality constructs a distinctly Christian aesthetics that puts meaningful, focused reading of the Bible and the classics at the center of a wide-awake Christian life.
Literature as Divine Gift
That and something more. An ordained minister in the Evangelical Free Church as well as an English professor at Toccoa Falls College, Williams takes special pains to convince his fellow Evangelicals that we cannot fully love God with our hearts and minds if we do not seek, through reading, to achieve "biblical consciousness" and "wholeness of vision." We gain the former by learning to read "the world through words, with the Word of Scripture in the central, controlling place." We gain the latter by breaking down the artificial, Enlightenment split between head and heart, intellectual and aesthetic, secular and sacred.
The absence of one or both in the Evangelical community accounts not only for the general lack of Evangelical interest in the arts (none of the major systematic theology books, Williams perceptively notes, has a section on Christianity and the arts), but also for the fact that Evangelicalism has yet to create a great poet, artist, or composer. Evangelicals, bemoans Williams, "have had great zeal, large movements, grand organizations, royal battles; but no Bach, no Spenser, no Milton, not even a Tolkien or a C. S. Lewis."
In order to remedy this missing element among Bible-believing, Word-respecting Christians, Williams invites his readers to review with him "the story of Christians thinking consciously as Christians about the nature and significance of literary art." Along the way, literature (especially poetry) emerges as a divine gift that (1) affords a shared experience with writers who lived in a different time and place, (2) provides a powerful lens for bringing the mystery of life into focus, and (3) instills "a passion for truth for its own sake."
"But," the Evangelical replies with frustration, "can't we learn all these things from the Bible?" Well, technically speaking, yes, but that is not the whole story. Ironically, writes Williams, "the Bible cannot have its full effect in people who read only the Bible." He confesses that he himself could not grasp the fullness of the Scriptures until he fell in love with poetry and then returned, fresh and rejuvenated, to the Word—until, that is, he learned to use the Bible as a touchstone for testing secular truth rather than as a bushel for hiding the lesser (but still real) light of non-biblical literature, history, and philosophy.
Creatures Impelled to Create
Although Williams offers a number of different arguments to defend and develop his aesthetic Christian vision, they are all grounded finally in the imago Dei: in the fact that we were made in the image of a creator God and are therefore creatures impelled to create. Williams locates this uniquely Christian, firmly biblical apology for the arts in Sir Philip Sidney's "The Defense of Poetry," and then traces its 400-year development until it culminates in J. R. R. Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories."
Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
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