James Bond & C.S. Lewis

Two novelists of the 1950’s, Ian Fleming and C.S. Lewis, both of whose works soared in sales previous to their deaths in the early sixties, had some interesting similarities. Ian Fleming died in 1964 and C.S. Lewis in 1963. Just a little while earlier, in 1962, Sean Connery played the Ian Fleming character, James Bond, in the highly successful film Dr. No. In it, James Bond combats an evil organization known as SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion). Although the Communist powers are always involved somewhere, this is not Fleming’s imaginative threat to civilization. This is a noteworthy fact, given that while the novels were being written, Communism was the most perceived threat to civilization. It is not as if one couldn’t identify them as a threat in a novel, many journalists and novelists did. But I think the fact that Fleming chose SPECTRE and not the KGB as Bond’s archenemy may hold some of the reason for the success of the novels.

  

In the fifties, we are talking about post-war England, a world where literate men have set down their weapons and returned to office work, walking their dogs, and attending their wives’ tea and cocktail parties. To a greater or lesser extent, attending their parish church was involved. Furthermore, there was something plaguing the man of the fifties and he felt it very deeply. He had fought a war and now he had returned to a different kind of war. It was the war in which the challenge to make money was a daily battle. As a returning veteran said in the 1946 film The Best Years of our Lives, “Last year it was kill Japs, this year it’s make money”. Finding a way to do business better than the other company involves certain challenges and temptations. To get intelligence from the competitor, to extort, terrorize and be vengeful are all temptations which a business man is prone to and it is exactly what SPECTRE is. SPECTRE is a money making organization and not an espionage organization which is spying patriotically.

           

It was in this fifties world that organizations like the Free-Masons, Rotary, Kiwanis Club and veterans associations thrived on the membership of men of war turned men of business. It was this culture in which Playboy magazine was born and became popular. Have you looked at a picture of Hugh Hefner smoking his pipe and compared it with C.S. Lewis smoking his pipe? Ian Fleming was interviewed by Playboy magazine shortly before his death. Needless to say, C.S. Lewis, James Bond and Playboy magazine remain popular half a century later. Yet they had their beginning in a world in which the hardest kind of soul for the Church to reach, the family-man-making-money-while-middle-aged, was trying to find his place in the world again.

             

Let us look more closely. Unlike some spies, James Bond is a gentleman, relatively speaking. Ian Fleming once described James Bond and said, “He’s not a Sidney Riley”. Anyone knowing about the spy Sidney Riley knows that Riley was no gentleman. James Bond is the kind of spy that an Englishman wearing the old-school tie and carrying an umbrella can identify with. When we come to C.S. Lewis, we find a veteran with whom a veteran can identify. Lewis was no saint, struggled with his faith and struggled with lust. We now know him as a saintly writer of Christian devotion and children’s books. Nevertheless, he did not consider himself a saint and married a divorced woman, something an aging bachelor in the fifties was surely tempted to do.

             

When it came to his convictions, C.S. Lewis, like the Englishman of the fifties, was a quietly devout Anglican, so much so that many reading his works are completely unaware of his denomination. It isn’t, of course, that he wasn’t outspoken. But I wonder sometimes if we met him on the street today if we would not wag our fingers in his face. Unlike some contemporaries, like Thomas Merton, who found their faith in their bachelorhood, he didn’t go off to a monastery. Therefore, in the medieval sense of Summum Bonum, he did not seek the highest good and enter the contemplative life. On the Evangelical side of the spectrum, he did not take his anti-atheistic convictions on the road like Billy Graham. He continued to fight, indeed, in one of the most intellectual arenas in Christendom. Yet he did not follow the logical course to the highest good as sometimes visualized within Catholic and Protestant circles. He did, however, follow the course which would lead to his blessedness.

C.S. Lewis sanctified a kind of Anglican gentleman writer, a kind which included Ian Fleming, as well as Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling, both of whom also wrote spy novels. C.B. Moss, the Anglo-Catholic theologian, argued that figures like Kipling and Lord Baden Powell, with their Masonic leanings, represent the worst of English Christianity because of their Pelagian do-good-ism. In their defense, men like Kipling and Powell (who practiced espionage) were patriotic gentlemen and nominally Christian. When I say, “nominal”, I mean Masonic leaning and devoted to basic duty, not given to following the logical course leading to the Summum Bonum, which Moss might well consider true Christianity. What most reading Kipling’s If consider mere Christian gentlemanliness, Moss seems to consider “broad and lazy” English churchmanship. Despite Moss’ objections, Kipling and Powell’s ‘do-good-ism’ is precisely the kind of Christianity which a man returning to his desk in 1946 could see as relevant to his life. It was this kind of basic and practical churchmanship which Lewis was able to tap into and profoundly illuminate in a way not seen, perhaps, since William Wilberforce.

             

To conclude, the kind of man who returned to his desk in 1946 was the kind of man who also espoused this basic patriotic Christianity and might be tempted to read Fleming and Playboy when his wife wasn’t looking. When he watched his best friend spill his blood on the battlefield and woke up with nightmares for the rest of his life, he didn’t think to himself that he did it for Anglo-Catholicism or Methodism or the Southern Baptist Convention any more than he did it for the Labor party or Republican party. He did not sacrifice for the sake of some logically complex and idealistic ‘highest good’. In the end, he did it for the basic good of freedom and ‘Mere Christianity’. He was glad to see as he returned to his desk day after day during the fifties that there were still men fighting against atheism and the worst of unethical business practices. Whether it was James Bond or C.S. Lewis, he identified in these personalities something he himself was – merely heroic.        

The Bishops' Course of Study

The previous post and comments brought to my remembrance a book I read a number of years ago called "Faith and Freedom: A Study of Theological Education and the Episcopal Theological School." This book was written by George Blackman and published in 1967 (Seabury Press). Most of the book is a detailed history of the foundation of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, MA, which is now known as Episcopal Divinity School because it merged with the Philadelphia Divinity School in the 1970's.

The first chapter, however, details the history of theological education in the earliest days of the Episcopal Church. It is an interesting story, and there are many parallels with the continuing church that came along centuries later.

For at least the first fifteen years after the close of the American Revolution the Episcopal Church was too preoccupied with trying to survive than to worry about training would be clergy. Bishops such as William White were, for the sake of providing a congregation with a minister, willing to make sacrifices in terms of selecting and training candidates.

Like ministers from other traditions, Episcopalian clergy in these days read for orders under the direction of a parson, and using his library. The weakness of this was the same then as perhaps it is today and always will be: the comprehensiveness of the course of reading was limited entirely by the resources of the parson's library and his idiosyncrasies.

As Bishop White believed this to be a shortcoming of his own theological study he made sure that the ordinands he prepared were exposed to a very wide variety of books. But this did not solve all of the problems associated in those days with reading for orders. The other problem was that it was hard for ordinands to make it out to study with their mentors with great frequency. Often they were together just once a month, and when they as much information as possible was jumbled together and crammed down their throats… hardly a systematic way to read and learn theology.

So in 1804 steps were taken to improve the quality of theological education. General Convention proposed that the House of Bishops establish what later came to be called "The Bishops' Course of Study." Bishop White himself is thought to have developed the course, which was basically a reading list that contained sections on apologetics, Scripture, and Church history. Once this course was read, and only then, did the candidate progress to the study of systematic theology ("divinity" as it was then called). Systematics included courses of reading on liturgics, and pastoral theology - including polity and canon law. The list of books in each category is very extensive (and listed in the volume under discussion) and consisted almost entirely of English theologians. Black notes that while the bishop's knew the amount of reading material was too much for most students the purpose of it was to establish an ideal, and perhaps provide some choices of books if a particular one was too difficult.

The notable thing about the list is that even though the books were readily available and still in print none of them were new books. They were what could be described as venerable classics. Many, in fact, had been standard divinity texts for over 50 years. And in the late 1860's General Seminary, Virginia Seminary, and the Episcopal Theological School still required many of these texts to be read. In fact this book list lead to the formation of General Seminary, as the need was seen to have a place where formal instruction in accordance with this curriculum could be given. Eventually, of course, the Bishop's Course of Study was eclipsed by the seminaries it helped create. But for many years it held sway over the Church.

It seems to me that while there are a number of lessons that the continuing church, or any extremely small church or denomination, can be learn from this history. One of the main ones is as follows. With the absence of our own seminaries it would be wise to establish a permanent reading list of classic texts that is meant to supplement a course study taken in a mainline, generic seminary. My diocese has a five book (I think) reading list for men in the discernment process. This is a step in the right direction. But once a person is enrolled in a non-Anglican seminary then what? He should be required to read specific books from a standard book list to supplement his theological education and make up for any gaps. I was given a number of books by my mentor, which was very helpful. I'm sure other clergy do this for men preparing under them as well. This is all good and well, but what there should really be is a comprehensive, standardized diocesan list, as in the early days of the Episcopal Church, that is used by men in seminary as well as those reading for orders. This would help create a standard of learning among the clergy, which would go a long way in building and forming stronger parishes and Christians.

Building an Anglican Library

Recently I was asked how one should go about building a decent library of classical Anglican theology. Here's the first thing I would recommend. Consider purchasing the six volumes of the Church's Teaching Series which was published by the Episcopal Church in the early 1950's.

The books in the series are: The Holy Scriptures (Bible); Chapters in Church History (Church History); The Faith of the Church (Theology); The Worship of the Church (Liturgy); Christian Living (Moral Theology and Social Ethics); and The Episcopal Church and Its Work (Church Polity).

These books are easy to find used or free, dirt cheap, and are themselves are very good resources for the basic faith of the Church as taught before some of the authors, and the Church itself, went off the theological deep end in the 60's and 70's. This, of course, is not to say that they are perfect, or the last word in Anglican theology. But they are indeed very helpful. I often give them to laity who are either new to the Anglican tradition, or wish to learn more about it.

One of the nice things about these books, though, is that they contain extensive, detailed bibliographies, divided by category, reading level, and so on. Most of the books contained in these bibliographies can be easily purchased used online. Others are still in print, or have been reprinted. A decent Anglican theological library can be built for a very affordable price by purchasing the books in the bibliography sections of these volumes.

So I recommend these books as a foundation to build a basic library of Anglican theology that is helpful to both clergy and laity.