Predictably, there is much agreement between what C S Lewis and what the Bible say about the soul. What they share is a deep indifference to contemporary ideas of the self as somehow all-important. The soul, for Lewis and for many Biblical writers is a deep organizing and animating principle in a human being, breathed into it (on a Christian understanding) by God. It gives life, not just in the sense of a mere capacity for experiencing the world, but in the sense of a capacity for experiencing it fruitfully, or as we might say, creatively.
Since Modernism, though, it might be said we’ve become intolerant of talk of the word ‘soul’, as indeed of the word ‘heart’: we are all supposed to prefer the Higgs boson. This is apparent from current interpretations of words that begin with the prefix psyche (Greek for pertaining to the soul) like ‘psychology’ or ‘psychoanalysis’. When asked for a definition of either of these, people commonly say that they are to do with the mind. The mind notice, not the soul. The mind unseats the soul in a despiritualising age. And, it might further be said, the ego, an individual’s sense of themselves, rather than the soul, is likely to become the chief object of our spiritual attentions.
Lewis was wary about psychoanalysis all his life, though less so later. One reason for that was, no doubt, defensive. But another may have been that he feared the displacement of the soul—the means by which the individual is most intimately connected to God—by the narrowly self-interested ego.
However, what we will discuss in this course is Lewis’s sustained attention to something deeper than his conscious awareness of himself, deeper than his ego. His ego, indeed, seems persistently to have frustrated his attempts to recognize the language of his soul. Since to have one’s soul occluded by one’s self or ego is a common predicament, the struggle in Lewis to listen to his soul is one of the characteristics of his work which modern readers are likely to find appealing.
In this course we will look at a range of the interests, concerns and tendencies that together compose the deep tonal character of Lewis’s work. Each class will focus on a topic from which we will work outwards into the detail of relevant passages from the whole of Lewis’s output. In each case, a single text will serve as a point of reference for our investigations.
