When interviewed about The Waterboys’ hit single, ‘The Whole of the Moon’, Mike Scott, the group's lead singer-songwriter, explained that ‘“The Whole of the Moon” is about someone like C.S. Lewis, who seemed to see so much and explore issues much more deeply than most people’. Scott read The Chronicles of Narnia when he was 8, as well as Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength by the age of 12. Lewis's influence on his songwriting is made evident by numerous references to these books in songs such as ‘Savage Earth Heart’, ‘Universal Hall’, and ‘Further Up, Further In’. Scott says that Lucy's entering Narnia through the wardrobe introduced him to ‘the notion of finding other worlds, other realities’. For Lewis, this was because there existed a higher reality than this world, ‘that of the spirit,’ being a Christian and a Platonist (but not a Gnostic). In addition, Scott and Lewis were both inspired by George MacDonald, W.B. Yeats, James Stephens, and the island of Ireland (where they each spent significant portions of their lives). Nevertheless, Scott has criticised the Christian dogma in Lewis's writing, saying that ‘the Christian framework of much of his work renders it frustrating to a non-Christian like me’. For Lewis, Christianity is where religion reached its true maturity, where the hints of Paganism were fulfilled, but for Scott, all religions point to the ‘Millennial Truth’, claiming that everyone is or can become God, with Jesus Christ being the foremost example.
This article will explore C.S. Lewis's via positiva and T.S. Eliot's via negativa principally as it is reflected in the authors’ creative works. The first half will treat Eliot and the consistent presence of apophaticism in his poetry – which the article will frame as Eliot's pursuit both of a pure poetic speech and of pure spirit; it will trace this quality in his poetry from his early work, including ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, all the way through to Four Quartets. The second half will treat the consistent presence of cataphaticism in Lewis's creative work, focussing, most especially, on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Last Battle and The Great Divorce. This part will simultaneously contrast the creative writings of Lewis just mentioned with those of Eliot, and – introducing several relevant Lewis-Eliot dichotomies (for example, continuity versus discontinuity; enlargement versus annihilation; the goodness or not of ordinary things – endeavours to show how Lewis's vision of ‘cosmic summer’, as we see it unfold in his Narnia tales, differs meaningfully from Eliot's vision of ‘unimaginable/ Zero summer’ in Four Quartets.
Scholars are often confounded by Charles Williams’ novel Shadows of Ecstasy, which takes influence from Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu series to offer a supervillain so charismatic that he may be more antihero than villain. Exploring Rohmer's work and his place in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction shows how Williams builds on Rohmer while adding new concepts to the supervillains of Edwardian thrillers. While the result is curious, Williams cuts to the heart of genre debates that continue in crime fiction, and his treatment shows that Jared Lobdell was correct when he argues that Williams was an insightful crime fiction reader and writer. As supervillains have become freshly relevant in crime fiction, Shadows of Ecstasy proves to be a curiously prescient work that prompts useful questions today.
