A Response to C. S. Lewis's lecture "The Inner Ring"

A coworker named Greg asked me to respond to C. S. Lewis's lecture "The Inner Ring." I've touched on this lecture before in "Blue Longing or Yellow Laziness." Nevertheless, that post is only about private revelation. There is more to say. Pattern 83, Opening a Closed Circle, might also play an oblique role.

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Hi, Greg,

Thank you for asking me about C. S. Lewis's lecture "The Inner Ring." It is a memorable essay. I read it years ago and have never forgotten it. It is so frank about this negative and pervasive habit running through human society and into the heart. We are so governed by a desire to be included and by the avoidance of alienation. One wonders what the world--and we--would be like were it free of it.

The power of the inner ring so affects ethics and politics that I almost want to respond with a kind of highly abbreviated Republic or Utopia. But nation building is not on my mind. Instead, I wonder how Lewis's inner ring affects us in our relationship to God and in the realm of spiritual practice? And here there are three ways that I see working our human cravenness for the inner ring.

The first involves one of Christianity’s ancient enemies, Gnosticism. Gnosticism needs an inner ring. It promises salvation for anyone who enters its inner ring. Simply do this or that and one obtains the secret, the inner knowledge, one arrives or, in classical Gnosticim, one ascends beyond the flesh into the true realms of mind and spirit. This impulse is the religious impulse of the natural human being. It is idolatry’s lure.

The second involves private interpretations of scripture or revelations from God. To my mind, these play at a Christian variant of Gnosticism. God speaks especially to me. I am the recipient of private revelation. Or, applied to scripture, God made this scripture mean this particular thing to me. This is caricatured in the flop and drop joke about a man who opens his Bible and reads, “Judas went and hanged himself,” and, randomly opening his Bible again, reads “Go and do likewise.” More broadly, though, I think of the rising popularity of lectio divina.

There are various descriptions of lectio divina, but the generality is the same: one reads scripture slowly in a meditative and prayerful frame of mind, asking the Holy Spirit to speak through the text. The idea is that one reads the text and is open to words jumping out, phrases that want repeating, tugs at the heart. These, it is said, are the Spirit. One concentrates on these. Some say the reason for concentration is to simply remain in the presence of God. Others say the point is to gently bring such Spirit-highlighted phrases or words to bear on one's life. This second option is what disturbs me.[1]

This kind of lectio divina, which looks for personal meaning in the texts, is a ring-writing practice. It is absolutely singular and individual from beginning to end. One desires a particular subjectivity unique and private and apart. Read another way: one takes a public, common text inspired by the Spirit through the church in the particulars of historical culture, personality, and context, and one makes it a Great Book of the Self, ignoring the entire tradition of reading, ignoring all historical context, and going so far as to ask the Spirit to treat the grammar and syntax of the words differently and to gurgle private unction like a hidden spring into the well of your mind, a second method of inspiration very different from the first. Such is a mysticism of the worst kind.

The third thing that comes to my mind is the false use of judgment by the churches to create “pure” spaces—perhaps this is one under the label of eschewing sin or particular sins. “My church does not accept people who sin in way x. But we do readily encourage people who routinely commit sins y and z. People who sin in way x will experience private judgment and public/pulpit condemnation. People who sin in forms y and z will be overlooked, excused, or made officers and put in charge of committes.”

Lewis expands on this point as follows--note my italics:

And you will always find them hard to enter, for a reason you very well know. You yourself, once you are in, want to make it hard for the next entrant, just as those who are already in made it hard for you. Naturally. In any wholesome group of people which holds together for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can’t in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.

I have been thinking about this for a number of years—the breezy way that we assume the work of the church largely as one of judgment, of line drawing, of forming circles of ins and outs. Lewis plainly says that this judgment-as-people-define-it exists for the sake of exclusion. I don’t think this is the work of the church—exclusion. But I do wonder how we can understand the Great Commission apart from excluding tendencies. Once I baptize a man or disciple a woman, aren’t they automatically forming an inner ring? I believe that the answer is a hard won no. By this I mean that one would think the answer is yes, but in typical God fashion, the church is asked to buck our natural tendency, break all circle making, and remain together despite real differences akin to the way Paul’s strong and weak or James’s rich and poor are commanded to ignore such differences and partake of a common eucharistic meal.[2]

The triune God scandalously eschews an inner ring. Of all that exists, surely the Godhead would be right to keep its own fellowship, its own perichoretic dance of pure bliss. But it does not. God has opened the circle for love's sake. God is on mission. And so, the gospel message is freely spread to everything. Whoever wants can hear the word preached. Whoever wants can take up or Google scripture at any time and, in the phrasing of this week’s collect, “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” Gnosticism has no place here. And there is no private interpretation of scripture: one interprets as a member of the community as it is spread across the ages in time and space. There is no private revelation, for, as Jesus said in the parable, “they have Moses and the prophets. They should listen to them.”

If someone wishes to practice lectio divina, let them first do the hard work of exegesis. Let them practice lectio scriptura. Let them struggle with grammar, syntax, culture, idiom, and all that goes under the names hermeneutics and historiography. Let them do that and then, by all means, lectio divina as you will.

The multiplicity of [Scripture’s] senses [into literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical readings] does not produce equivocation or any other kind of multiplicity, seeing that these senses are not multiplied because one word signifies several things, but because the things signified by the words can be themselves types of other things. . . . All the senses [of scripture] are founded on one — the literal — from which alone can any argument be drawn. . . . Nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense.” (Summa Theologiæ, 1a, q1, a10, emphasis mine)

Having done the work, one is working in the context of the interpreting community. (I still don't trust lectio divina because of its desire to get around the Spirit's initial method of inspiration and adopt something much more akin to the way pagans seek messages from the gods, but at least the worst sins of lectio divina are kept in check by its better educated elder brother.)

So then, struggling against the human tendency to close rings at every point of difference, Christians hold the doors open. By means of humility, they exclude no one. Lewis’s almost maudlin phrase (to modern ears) is “if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like.” Today, we hear a phrase like that and think this is exactly what jocks, white supremacists, and shady members of mob families do. But Lewis meant simply being open to like and to befriend any person regardless of what ring they are or aren’t in. The church is commanded to be open like this. It is commanded and allowed in this manner to be and become a gathering of friends, a community, a family.

Allow me to now proffer a hypothesis and say, What if only God can do the judging? Isn't it so that God's manner of judging is radically other than what we expect. With the scripture, we see that it is different and surprising. And with scripture, may it even be offensive? I hypothesize and say that God is judging the world in the work of the church, but connotatively. That is, in a manner that is not well understood by the church, probably misunderstood by the church, and is wholly outside of its ability. Indeed, doesn't scripture forbid people from assuming they can definitely say who is out and who is in? (Can we always judge rightly even about ourselves?) Perhaps the church is busy with hospitality and the Spirit is busy with the work of judging--whatever that is. I do not think human beings can well define that word. As J. R. R. Tolkien's Gandalf says to Frodo in the dark of Moria, "Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends."

Moving on then, Lewis’s last paragraph suggests the human craving for inclusion in inner rings derives from a deep longing for the gospel--being included in God's inner ring. If you are always trying to satisfy your own desires for inclusion (“them as asks shan’t have”), you’ll forever be disappointed. But, he says, if one asks after Jesus’s command to “ask the Father,” then one is put on a new road which “lies quite in another direction.” And then Lewis talks about Alice’s house. Alice steps through a mirror in her house into the reflected “her house” which exists in Wonderland. This is exactly the sort of thing that Lucy, Edmond, and Eustace discover in the painting of a Narnian ship that comes to life in Eustace’s house and sucks them all into Narnia in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. What one is looking for is already there, but one has to have eyes to see it. One has to step through a looking glass into a place that looks the same but is in another world entirely.

Thus, the whole lecture is contained in Jesus’s teaching that in the Kingdom the last shall be first and the first, last. By giving up one’s self-striving to be first, and by embracing the humility of last, one finds a community of friends and steps through the mirror into the Narnia that calls, always calls, from the center of every human heart.

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1. The use of a text to quiet the mind so that one can be silent, reverent, and attentive to the encompassing presence of God is one of the deepest chambers of Christian meditative practice. All lectio divina--even this type--is governed by lectio scriptura; Buddhist and other practices of emptying the mind of illusions in an effort to find enlightenment is not what this is. The silence of Christian contemplation is obedient to scriptures such as "Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth" (Ps. 46.10) and "The LORD is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him." (Hbk 2.20). The Habakkuk text is especially helpful as it contrasts this silence with the dead silence of the idols in verses 18 and 19.

2. In the post "Some Changes Affected By Sacramental Theology," I raise the question of whether the inclusion of a proper sacramental theology in one's ecclesiology doesn't serve a deeply irenic purpose as a bay leaf blunts bitterness in a stew. Note also this (unverified) quotation from Jaques Ellul: "The Christian's first act of non-violence is that he refrains from asking others to live as if they were Christians."