Capturing Audiences
C. S. Lewis and the Craft of Communication by Steven Beebe
In 2002, while on sabbatical in Oxford, Steven Beebe, an internationally recognized communication educator and former president of the National Communication Association, discovered a partial and unpublished manuscript that C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien had collaborated on, titled Language and Human Nature. Beebe dug into it, and the more he dug, the more he realized that while Lewis never referred to himself as an expert in communication, he should be considered such and that a book making such a claim was justified.
C. S. Lewis and the Craft of Communication not only positions Lewis as a master communicator but also suggests that his integration of rhetoric and poetics predates that of one of the greatest rhetoricians of the twentieth century, Kenneth Burke. Lewis once confessed to his father that he was a born rhetorician. He wrote to him as a young man saying, “I love to ride like a cork on the ocean of eloquence.” Later, Lewis would declare in The Discarded Image, “There is no antithesis, indeed no distinction, between Rhetoric and Poetry.”
How is rhetoric related to poetry? The Trivium expresses rhetoric as the application of language toward persuasion, logic as the study of correct thinking, and grammar as the mechanics of language. While poetry is an elevated study of grammar, it shares rhetoric’s attempt to apply language toward certain ends by evoking aesthetic sensibilities. Lewis’s apologetic stance occupied itself with both sense (logic) and sensibility (poetics).
HI TEA
The English custom of taking tea in the late afternoon inspired Beebe to use the acrostic “HI TEA” to express five elements Lewis saw as necessary to effective communication. Effective communicators are Holistic, Intentional, Transpositional, Evocative, and Audience-centered.
Holistic: This means communicators must convey their ideas to the whole person—to the ear as well as to the eye, to reason as well as to the imagination. As the quintessential Reasoning Romantic, Lewis believed reason was the organ of truth, while the imagination was the organ of meaning. Beebe writes, “By holistically combining reasoning and imagination at the same time, often in the same sentence, Lewis is able to augment the power of language to both inform and inspire, persuade and evoke beauty, and appeal simultaneously to the head and the heart.”
Intentional: This refers to communicators’ knowledge of what they are doing, of both what they are saying and how they are saying it. Lewis once said in an interview that writing was like a “lust” or scratching an itch. Messages come as a result of a strong impulse, and when they come, one must get them out. It is no coincidence that after his conversion Lewis became remarkably prolific and remained so for thirty years until his death in 1963.
A student once wrote Lewis asking his advice about writing and how to go about it. Lewis wrote back:
Turn off the radio. . . . Read all the books you can. . . . Write about what interests you. . . . Take great pains to be clear. . . . Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. . . . Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm.
Transpositional: Beebe explains this principle as a “communication process of going from a higher, richer medium to a lower medium.” The principle concerns itself with using the most appropriate comparison, communicating for the “mind’s eye,” and creating well-crafted visual metaphors.
In his book Heavenly Participation, Hans Boersma calls Lewis that “great Christian Platonist” who, with other Christian Platonists, acknowledged that it is the “eternal world of forms that gives meaning and significance to created things.” Lewis insisted that all human language was dependent upon the use of metaphors, that if there is not a kind of psycho-physical parallelism in the universe between language and reality, then all our thinking is nonsensical.
Evocative: This refers to a communicator’s employment of the most apt metaphor or his way of weaving a story that allows for audience “buy-in.” For Lewis, myths did not just express truth, but were a kind of truth in disguised form. If an audience swallowed the mythical story, it would also swallow the truth contained in the story. One should never conceive of himself as bringing beauty and wisdom into existence out of nothing because truth and beauty are always already there for the getting.
The task of the communicator is to uncork the meaning of a story, to discover it with the audience, without showing his hand too much. Lewis says in his essay “Historicism” that if people become too analytical, a story may lose its magic: you can most easily see a face in the moon when you look at it with the naked eye; as soon as you put a telescope to it, the face vanishes.
Audience-centered: Lewis follows Aristotle’s dictum that we must not only know our subject and ourselves when communicating, but we must know our audience as well. Lewis spent a great deal of time crafting his messages so that the millworker, farmer, and soldier could lay hold upon its meaning. He gave his first BBC talk, “The Christian Faith As I See It—by a Layman,” in a Royal Air Force mess hall, and it has been reported that as soon as his voice began to fill the hall, with the following words, everyone froze.
Everyone has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say. They say things like this: “How’d you like it if anyone did the same thing to you?” “That’s my seat, I was there first.” “Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm.”
These talks were captivating. The radio audience in England jumped from half-a-million listeners during the opening broadcast to almost two million the following week. The talks would later be put into book form under the title Mere Christianity.
Breaking the Spell
Whether writing essays or fiction, Lewis worked off the assumption that language derived its power to move us because, like all earthly things, it was connected to something greater than itself. In the words of Rudolph Steiner, “everything around us is bewitched spiritual truth, and that man attains truth when he breaks the spell.”
Beebe’s book can serve as a practical guide for any Christian communicator, but it perhaps can find its greatest use as a resource for ministers. In his book Why Johnny Can’t Preach, T. David Gordon laments the dearth of good preaching. There are a number of reasons for awful preaching, but Gordon recognizes the sad fact that many ministers simply do not possess a rhetorical-poetic sense. In short, they lack imagination.
In his book Faith, Hope, and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination, Malcolm Guite says that we should not privilege reason over the imagination. These two ways of knowing are mutually enfolded and depend on one another.
Like the hex that came upon King Théoden through the guile of Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, the secular forces of our age have cast a spell over twenty-first-century minds, muffling the imagination, especially as regards the supernatural. One of the great legacies of Lewis—and there are many—is that this master communicator shows us how to lift the staff to break the spell.
Arthur W. Hunt III is a former professor of public speaking at the University of Tennesse at Martin. He is now preparing to transition to ministry-related service and lives in the greater Memphis area.
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