Local Lewis Scholar: “C.S. Lewis Trans Ally”

How a Twitter Dustup offered me the opportunity to Annesplain

Well, I’m sorry to say that, after all, I did go and look at that thread by a scholar (oh how sorely am I tempted to put that word into scare quotes) of the works of C.S. Lewis who took it upon herself to correct a tweet by Josh Daws on the question of how one ought to fight the various battles one faces in life.

Photo by Philip White on Unsplash

Just as an aside, I am limping along in my mind, trying to decide how to address everyone. I increasingly abhor the use of first names, even in my ordinary life, and prefer to address all my friends as Mrs. or Miss. or Mr. or Your Grace or whatever. The trouble is, I don’t know these people. Is the person I’m about to blog about a professor? She calls herself a “C.S. Lewis Scholar.” Should she be Ms.? or Dr.? or what? On the other hand, for a scholar, she expressed herself with such indecent and vulgar condescension, making fun of the name of the person she was tweeting about, that dignifying her with a title of any kind seems de trop. This low-brow genre of “discourse” makes me think I must not fuss myself and should just call each person by their various Twitter handles.

Proceeding, thus, to the matter at hand, @JoshDaws tweeted this:

C.S. Lewis gives you permission to enjoy fighting the culture war. “The idea of the knight—the Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause—is one of the great Christian ideas. War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken. What I cannot understand is this sort of semi-pacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it. It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage—a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness.”

which drew the attention of someone called @KatinOxford who proceeded to tweet all these things (sorry for jumbling them together like this, but I don’t think it really matters as she is talking complete nonsense):

I left some of the posts out because there were so many. I suppose if you were really interested, you could go over to the X Twitter app and click through—here’s the link again if you don’t feel like scrolling up. Even though it is tedious, let’s just recap her points for ourselves, as best we can.

Basically @KatinOxford believes that @JoshDaws has misrepresented C.S. Lewis (who doesn’t even have a proper Twitter handle) for taking a quote about fighting in war and applying it to, as he called it, the “Culture War.” This appears to have triggered @KatinOxford to a tortuous degree, thus the torrent of condescending tweeting. Her takedown of @JoshDaws amounts to the fact that his name, unbearably for her, is Josh, that he used the term “Culture War,” that this term necessarily includes—her term, not mine— “ZE TRANS AGENDA,” that @JoshDaws does not understand that Lewis was talking about forgiveness, and that, most importantly of all, “straight white men” should not be able to use C.S. Lewis quotes to club other people “like Neanderthals.” The thread ends with a Taylor Swift gif, as one might have expected.

All of this, of course, is scintillating, and I bet you’re super glad that I brought it to your attention. If you peer at the thread, you will see that @KatinOxford thinks that C.S. Lewis was not engaged in any kind of culture warrioring, and would, apparently, have been what you might call a “trans ally,” witness lines like “He is not delighting over people committing violence against trans people.” Moreover, @KatinOxford believes that the “the CULTURE WARZ *cue dramatic music*” amount, basically, to taking “enjoyment out of harassing trans people.”

As you know, because I’ve been saying it every day for an entire week, I’ve just re-listened to That Hideous Strength, and so, even though I am not a Lewis Scholar, nor any Scholar at all, but only a mere schmear Substacker with better things to do—like praying and doing laundry—I must simply vent my deep and shallow feelings about this cesspool of academic incompetence. I guess I will number my thoughts, for the sake of logic.

1, it’s so funny that this person is engaged in higher education and tweeting in this way. I think Lewis would think it was hilarious and laugh uproariously over the irony as well as just how dumb and corrupt the whole situation is. In fact, it has not escaped my attention that still, no one has stepped forward to write that FanFic where Lewis rises up, in the Spirit of Merlin, to lay waste to some intellectually bankrupt diploma mill like Harvard or anywhere really, but surely this tweet thread should form the crux of the story. Why Isn’t Anyone Doing This Yet??

2, um, not to AnneSplain too hard, but Mere Christianity is just one of many missiles Lewis lobbed across the bow of his enemies in his persistent participation, perhaps even instigation of, the culture war as we know it now. Having been through an actual war, Lewis understood that people’s minds and hearts were being gripped by despair and by lies, and so he took up his pen and fought and fought and fought to make people see the way things really are. He did this even though it cost him his academic reputation. For an interesting discussion on this point, check out this episode of the PugCast where they talk about how Lewis was ostracized for writing The Screwtape Letters. @JoshDaws isn’t wrong to take what Lewis said in Mere Christianity and apply it more broadly because Lewis himself was doing it all the time. And one of the places he did it with gaiety and wholeheartedness was in That Hideous Strength.

3, which is to say, Lewis would never have been a trans ally, and worse, he would have had no use for someone like @KatinOxford self-identifying as “Fantastic Feministic.” Lewis definitely appreciated women, but how that appreciation showed itself on the page would make most young ladies of today self-immolate in horror, like Frost at the end of That Hideous Strength. For example, I had forgotten the bit at the end where Merlin thinks Jane should be beheaded at once because she, to put it delicately, hadn’t been “open to life.” For those who don’t know what that means, it is that she had been using contraception to prevent getting pregnant. In terms to the shape of the story, and the aesthetic battle Lewis is waging, the contrast between the women at St. Anne’s and the Fairy at Belbury is not meant to make you want, if you are a woman, to chuck it all and be a man. You are supposed to see that the Fairy is grotesque and that Jane has been larping (live-action role playing) her academic career and will be happier as a wife and mother. This doesn’t mean that Jane doesn’t have a mind, but that there are higher and better and nobler tasks she could put her whole self to than dithering over a useless dissertation on Donne that no one will ever read. Lewis couldn’t be more sarcastic, more in contempt of women who sublimate or erase what makes them really women. He has a lot of patience for confusion, I think, but of the person who is willfully mannish, he doesn’t paint a very flattering picture.

4, I do feel like a young woman today, who has never even encountered or imagined the world as it was a few minutes ago, would have a hard time knowing what Lewis is talking about, would miss the sarcasm, the humor, the kindliness, even the desperation of a man in the midst of a battle, trying to save even a few from the overpowering force of the N.I.C.E. To really get a sense of who he was, one might want to wander over to Tolkien, and look at those small Hobbits with their little daggers, and the overpowering sense of futility as the shadow of Mordor falls over the land. And yet, they were sure to win, and so will Lewis, and so will @JoshDaws, and any of us who are able to recognize evil, even when, as some other great man said, it lies close, in the human heart, alongside what is good. Perhaps @KatinOxford will wake up one morning, like Jane, and discover that she is miserable, that she needs a new hat and a mother, that obedience to the will of God and even fussing over how stupidly the man she loves throws his shirt down before he gets into bed is so embarrassingly satisfying. Whenever that happens, when she cracks all these books open with new vision, she will find there a friend who spared no effort to win her soul in the great battle between heaven and hell that can—and will—be won by the good guys.