C. S. Lewis and the Search for a Second Edition

Readers of this blog will be interested to know that John Beversluis will be producing a second edition of his controversial book C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, wihch should appear next spring. But this time instead of the Christian Eerdmans press it will be published by Prometheus Books. In it he is going to take on some of the challenges posed by his critics and by more recent philosophical Lewis scholarship. He will, of course be defending the view that Lewis-style apologetics doesn't work.

Beversluis is generally thought of as the consummate Lewis-basher, and as such his original book, published in 1985, was called "despicable" and culpably wrong by one reviewer, while another credited him with picking Lewis's arguments apart like a cooked chicken. In some passages you get the impression that Beversluis thinks Lewis either dishonest or just not very bright, since some of his arguments, at least as Beversluis portrays them, could be refuted by a freshman student who had just passed Introduction to Logic. But in other passages you get a sense that he considers Lewis to be deeply honest and intellectually perceptive. You have to have a substantial share of intellectual and moral virtue to be the grieving hero of A Grief Observed protrayed in Beversluis's book. It is tempting to think that the positive portraits of Lewis found in the book are just so much patronizing, but I don't think so. Beversluis was also honest enough, in a subsequent review of A. N. Wilson, to object fiercely to Wilson's psychoanalyzing and to attack the view, favorably described in his book, that Lewis gave up on apologetics after his enounter with Anscombe. I am looking forward to seeing just how the positive and negative images of Lewis are balanced in the new edition.

Of course I'm going to have lot of disagreements with what he comes up with in the second edition. If you are somebody who thinks that Lewis just gets everything right and you can't see how anybody could resist Lewis's overwhelmingly powerful apologetics, then Beversluis is a good antidote, since he shows you how Lewis sounds to people on "the other side of the aisle." Critical exchange is how we progress in this discipline of ours. I think progress has been slow on getting dialogue going on the merits of Lewis's work in our discipline of philosophy, partly because of the enthusiasm of some of Lewis followers and the hostile-to-metaphsysics atmosphere in philosophy after the WWII. But this is beginning to turn around.