by repectabiggle » January 26th, 2008, 3:25 pm
And has anyone there (or here?) read the book? I have, and I don't think there's any chance for dismissing Dr Ward after having read the book.
Most of the comments in that thread betray a woeful ignorance of Lewis's writings and thought, and the only reasoned objector has all her objections answered thoroughly in Ward's book.
I suspect most of the opposition will come from those who don't really understand that Lewis was a Medieval at heart (not just a Medievalist) and who get nervous about things like planetary influence and the like. Not all opposition will come from that lot, but if/when Dr Ward's thesis becomes commonplace, I suspect the evangelicals who have barely been able to palate the magic in Lewis's books for some time now will drop him quickly. The rest of the opposition will come (if objecitons to date indicate anything) from those who think Dr Ward is accusing Lewis of being obscure or something of that sort (note the reference to TS Elliot [sic] over at the Dancing Lawn thread), not imaging that Lewis could write at several levels at once, since he was, again, a Medieval at heart.
And perhaps that's the real line in the sand: on the one side those who know Lewis as he was and who love the old world, and those who want Lewis as a sort of modernist apologist who also wrote pretty straight-forward fairy tales.
Carol: Existing ideas? I know that there have been one or two folks who almost stumbled on this before (Dr. Ward notes them in his book), and I know that Dr. Ward himself was mentioned in a Christianity Today article a couple or three years ago (which article engendered some discussion here, did it not?), but I'm not aware that anybody has put forward Dr. Ward's thesis or anything like it before.