{"id":2697,"date":"2020-12-30T18:19:32","date_gmt":"2020-12-30T18:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=2697"},"modified":"2021-03-31T15:08:24","modified_gmt":"2021-03-31T15:08:24","slug":"on-the-meaning-of-c-s-lewiss-amateurism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2020\/12\/30\/on-the-meaning-of-c-s-lewiss-amateurism\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Meaning of C.S. Lewis\u2019s Amateurism"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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On the Meaning of C.S. Lewis\u2019s Amateurism<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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C.S. Lewis was a professor and a scholar. He was not a theologian\u2014at least, not professionally.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By Charlie Clark
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“Any advanced or technical theology of Grace was quite beyond my scope. Naturally that does not mean that I thought the subject unimportant. The other question, about the limits of faith and superstition, is also important. But my own mind is v. far from clear on it. I think you must seek counsel (if it is a practical problem for you) from a real theologian, not from an amateur like me. I am sorry to disappoint you: but it is better to refuse than to mislead.” \u2014Letter to Mrs. Halmbacher (28 November 1950), Letters of C.S. Lewis<\/em><\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

To affirm that every human practice has an economy is to say nothing about the moral valence of that economy. Excellence, morality, even humanity itself, may depend on defying economic gravity rather than conforming to it. The priceless perfume must be poured out, wasted upon the ground. Nevertheless, sub sole<\/em>, every human practice has an economy.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Resources are limited; time yet more so. Here is the root of the separation between amateurs and professionals in every practice. The division of labor is a concession to the gravity of scarcity. In a world without want, there would be no professionals. The most skilled practitioner would always be an amateur, driven by their love of the practice, with no regard for any extrinsic reward. In a world without want, without limits, without gravity, these amateurs might attain even greater skill than our professionals.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Professionalism is a kind of hypertrophy. One develops a narrow set of skills, refines a technique, sacrifices breadth\u2014of ability, experience, mind\u2014for depth. Efficiency in producing a particular good, service, effect, becomes paramount. On a societal level (again, sub sole<\/em>), the existence of such hypertrophies is necessary, even benign. As a few members grow ever more adapt in a practice, the quality of their production ever higher, other members\u2014perhaps most members\u2014stop engaging in the practice altogether, creating space for new practices and new professionals to emerge.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Alongside the humming machine of professional producers and unskilled consumers, the amateur is an anomaly, an atavism even. There is something prelapsarian in a practice pursued for love alone. The amateur retrieves the goods of the practice from the market of usus<\/em> and returns them to the garden of fructus<\/em>. Yet this very resistance to economic logic plays a vital economic role.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Professionals inevitably form guilds, and up to a point, this may even be salutary. Up to a point, the health of a practice is enhanced by the economic security of the practitioners. However, the tendency of the guild is to become either corrupt (as professionals allow the extrinsic rewards of their practice to outweigh the goods internal to it) or self-referential (as guild members become obsessed with ever more elaborate techniques, byzantine sub-specializations, intramural status competition). The amateur, as an outsider, can provide a check on the guild: redirecting the profession towards its original purpose by either competing with the professionals or simply preserving an uncorrupt tradition of the practice.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Lewis saw how a society could come to rely inordinately on professionals and their expertise, to the detriment of both the society\u2014weakened by the excessive fragmentation of knowledge and isolation of the individual\u2014and the professionals themselves, increasingly reduced to mere technicians.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Throughout the theological writings of C.S. Lewis, as in the mere fact of his practicing theology as an amateur, there is a critique\u2014not of professionalism\u2014but of rampant, one might say \u201ctotal,\u201d professionalization. Lewis saw how a society could come to rely inordinately on professionals and their expertise, to the detriment of both the society\u2014weakened by the excessive fragmentation of knowledge and isolation of the individual\u2014and the professionals themselves, increasingly reduced to mere technicians. This comes through in his defense of liberal education. In \u201cOur English Syllabus,\u201d he writes,<\/p>

That is why education seems to me so important: it actualizes that potentiality for leisure, if you like for amateurishness, which is man’s prerogative. You have noticed, I hope, that man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals. They have no leisure and do not desire it. When the cow has finished eating she chews the cud; when she has finished chewing she sleeps; when she has finished sleeping she eats again. She is a machine for turning grass into calves and milk\u2014in other words, for producing more cows. The lion cannot stop hunting, nor the beaver building dams, nor the bee making honey. When God made the beasts dumb He saved the world from infinite boredom, for if they could speak they would all of them, all day, talk nothing but shop.<\/p>

Lewis personally suffered the tyranny of professional values. He was passed over three times for a chair at Oxford, in spite of his well-regarded scholarship on medieval literature and unparalleled success as a lecturer. Helen Gardner, who wrote Lewis\u2019s obituary for the British Academy, reported that among the faculty<\/p>

a suspicion has arisen that Lewis was so committed to what he himself called \u2018hot-gospelling\u2019 that he would have had little time for the needs of what had become a very large undergraduate school and for the problems of organization and supervision presented by the rapidly growing numbers of research students in English Literature. In addition, a good many people though that shoemakers should stick to their lasts and disliked the thought of a professor of English Literature winning fame as an amateur theologian\u2026.<\/p>

In Gardner\u2019s explanation of Lewis\u2019s failure to secure a chair, we see at work both the self-concern of the guild (\u201cproblems of organization,\u201d the primacy of research) and a larger culture of \u201cprofessionalization,\u201d a suspicion of amateurism in general: \u201cstick to your lasts,\u201d that is, \u201cstay in your lane.\u201d<\/p>

Lewis himself sometimes uses \u201camateur\u201d as a mild term of abuse. In a letter, he dismisses contemporary literary criticism as a \u201cwelter of amateur psychology, amateur sociology, and expert perversity.\u201d Elsewhere he dismisses another pair of interlocutors as \u201camateur philosophers.\u201d But in context, we see that Lewis only rejects amateurism where it is being passed off as professionalism:<\/p>

In filling their book with [a philosophical position] they have been unjust to the parent or headmaster who buys it and who has got the work of amateur philosophers where he expected the work of professional grammarians. A man would be annoyed if his son returned from the dentist with his teeth untouched and his head crammed with the dentist\u2019s obiter dicta<\/em> on bimetallism or the Baconian theory.<\/p>

Lewis elsewhere acknowledges himself to be an amateur with respect to theology and argues that it enables him to make especially helpful contributions. For example, in his introduction to Reflections on the Psalms<\/em>, Lewis writes,<\/p>

The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago that he has forgotten. He sees the whole subject, by now, in such a different light that he cannot conceive what is really troubling the pupil; he sees a dozen other difficulties which ought to be troubling him but aren’t. In this book, then, I write as one amateur to another, talking about difficulties I have met, or lights I have gained, when reading the Psalms, with the hope that this might at any rate interest, and sometimes even help, other inexpert readers. I am \u201ccomparing notes,\u201d not presuming to instruct.<\/p>

Unfortunately, Lewis\u2019s amateur status has often been overlooked among evangelicals, especially in America. His reception in those circles has too often been of overawe at his Oxford pedigree and scholarly reputation, which is to say his largely irrelevant professional credentials. As Alister McGrath writes in The Intellectual World of C.S. Lewis<\/em>, \u201cLewis has been received <\/em>and accepted <\/em>as a theologian, despite allegedly not <\/em>being a theologian. A large number of intelligent Christians have come to adopt Lewis as their <\/em>theologian.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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A better appreciation of Lewis\u2019s amateurism would recenter the improvement of the laity, their development as amateur theologians, as its goal.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The wrong lesson appears to have been taken from Lewis\u2019s amateur status. Insofar as he has imitators in today\u2019s popular apologists, few of them have comparable professional status behind their popular work. Imagining Lewis to be an expert and for his writing to be that of a \u201creal theologian\u201d has the paradoxical effect of placing the layperson at an even greater distance from theological expertise and limiting the reader\u2019s imagination about his own potential contributions to the field. I thought about this while reading about the founding of the C.S. Lewis Institute in College Park, Maryland, where one of its founders described the institute\u2019s mission as to \u201ccreate not a lot of fans for C.S. Lewis but to have 10,000 like him.\u201d Thousands of amateur theologians of Lewis\u2019s caliber? This has not come to pass.<\/p>

A better appreciation of Lewis\u2019s amateurism would recenter the improvement of the laity, their development as amateur theologians, as its goal. By his example, Lewis shows that the amateur represents what Chesterton called the democratic faith: \u201cthe most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves.\u201d Lewis argues throughout his work that theology is just such a terribly important thing, which makes it completely practical:<\/p>

Theology is practical: especially now. In the old days, when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones\u2014bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas.<\/p>

Affirming the amateur will also reassert the human scale: the excellence that may be achieved by the skilled unprofessional will be seen as sufficient in many more cases than at present in a culture that professionalizes everything from housecleaning to video gaming. \u00a0<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Charlie Clark<\/strong>\u00a0is a writer and retractor<\/a>. He lives in New Hampshire.<\/em><\/p>

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By Charlie Clark. C.S. Lewis was a professor and a scholar. He was not a theologian\u2014at least, not professionally. 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