Lewis Agonistes: How C.S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World [Paperback]

Louis Markos (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2003

The written legacy of C.S. Lewis continues to be a rich mine of Christian thought and perspective. And each work continues to be as relevant today as it was at its original publishing. And now, Lewis scholar Louis Markos has done the community of faith a great service by organizing Lewis’s thoughts on a wide scope of subjects pertaining to modernity and postmodernity—on science and the natural world, the new age movement, philosophy, evil and suffering, the arts, and heaven and hell. Lewis Agonistes will make readers work in the same way that Lewis’s writings made them work, forcing them to rethink and examine ideas—to become participants in the agon (or wrestling match) of the twenty-first century.

Product Details

• Paperback: 174 pages
• Publisher: B&H Books (September 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805427783
• ISBN-13: 978-0805427783
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #371,316 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com) holds a BA in English and History from Colgate University and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He is a Professor of English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, where he teaches courses on British Romantic and Victorian Poetry and Prose, the Classics, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and Film. Dr. Markos holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities and teaches classes on Ancient Greece and Rome for HBU's Honors College. He is the author of six published books (see below) and two lecture series with the Teaching Company (The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis; Plato to Postmodernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author). His A Christian Guide to the Study of Literature and On the Shoulders of Hobbits: What Tolkien can Teach us Today are both due out in 2012. He has also had five dozen articles and reviews published in such journals as Christianity Today, Touchstone, Theology Today, Christian Research Journal, Mythlore, Christian Scholar's Review, Saint Austin Review, American Arts Quarterly, and The City. He is a popular speaker in Houston, and has spoken on such topics as C. S. Lewis, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and Dante in almost 20 states and in Oxford and Rome. He is committed to the concept of the Professor as Public Educator and believes that knowledge must not be walled up in the Academy but must be disseminated to all who have ears to hear. He lives in Houston with his wife, Donna, his son, Alex, and his daughter, Stacey.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Exciting Study in How to Develop a Christian Worldview, April 14, 2004

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Daniel C. Harlow (Grand Rapids, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lewis Agonistes: How C.S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World (Paperback)

This is a splendid, insightful, and beautifully written book--certainly one of the very best treatments of C. S. Lewis now available. Markos makes the intellectual challenge posed by modernity and postmodernity not simply the organizing principle of his study of Lewis but a focus of serious attention in its own right.

Chapter 1 offers an accessible biographical account of Lewis that highlights the key personal and intellectual influences in his life. At less than 30 pages, it is the finest short overview of Lewis's life that I have ever read. Chapter 2 shows how Lewis's thought can assist Christians in critically assessing the worldview of modern philosophy and science, particularly its naturalist assumptions and anti-supernaturalist biases. In the process he gives Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud a run for their money, effectively unpacking Lewis's conviction that there are at four features of human existence that could not have evolved in a purely naturalist or materialist fashion: "joy," morality, rationality, religion. Chapter 3 does the same thing with respect to new-age paganism, in a bracing analysis of the retrieval of the medieval worldview that Lewis achieved in THE DISCARDED IMAGE. Chapter 4 takes up the problem of evil, in an instructive study of THE PROBLEM OF PAIN that focuses on "God's Free-Will Experiment" and in a sensitive treament of Lewis's deeply personal A GRIEF OBSERVED. Chapter 5 confronts the arts and deconstructionism. In a section titled "The Death of Language" Markos gets around to one of the few truly POSTmodern (as opposed to modern) movements covered in the book: the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida. He also deals with the metaphysical status of the arts, in a theological meditation titled "The Aesthetics of the Incarnation" and follows it up with a look at Lewis's imaginative fiction as the work of a "sub-creator." Chapter 6 brings the volume to a close, fittingly enough, with a discussion of heaven and hell that explores "the psychology of sin" that Lewis unfolds in THE GREAT DIVORCE.

In every chapter, Markos gives readers incisive summaries, generous quotations, and thoughtful analyses of the full range of works in the Lewis canon--his apologetic nonfiction (MERE CHRISTIANITY, THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, and MIRACLES), his overtly religious fiction (THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS and THE GREAT DIVORCE), and his imaginative fiction (the CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, the PERELANDRA space trilogy, and TILL WE HAVE FACES).

If there is anything that Markos could do to improve this book, it would be to write a sequel that delves deeper into current developments in science (e.g., recent trends in cosmology and quantum physics; the intelligent design movement; and the theistic evolutionism of scientists who accept and even celebrate evolution from a Christian perspective). In a sequel, Markos might also look more intently at recent developments in philosophy (esp. epistemology), linguistics, and other disciplines. My sense is that even though C. S. Lewis was engaging modernism (Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud), his work has implications for critiquing more recent developments in postmodernism.

What most impresses me about LEWIS AGONISTES is that, although Prof. Markos is obviously a committed evangelical Christian, he writes as a Christian humanist who values science, philosophy, literature, the arts, and other aspects of culture. His ultimate aim is to get believers to engage these disciplines as thinking Christians, on the conviction that all truth is God's truth and that creation (including culture) is fundamentally good but fallen and in need of God's redemption in Jesus Christ. He encourages not a world-denying or other-worldly brand of Christian piety or spirituality but a faith that is committed to God's renewal of THIS world as His creation. Like Lewis, Markos makes Christianity attractive--not only spiritually meaningful but intellectually fulfilling and exciting.

This book would lend itself well to classroom use or small-group study. Its relative brevity (174 pages) and approachable style commend it. In fact, I plan on adopting it as THE collateral text in a course on C. S. Lewis.

Louis has produced a book that is worthy of Lewis, and he deserves the gratitude of thoughtful Christians everywhere.

48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Learn to wrestle...and even how to see freshly., August 26, 2003

By 

Terry Bohannon (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lewis Agonistes: How C.S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World (Paperback)

This book has really helped me understand the overarching meanings of C.S. Lewis' books -- even though that's not the main intention of the book, Louis Markos brings most of Lewis' canon to light.

The book was written to open the eyes of Christians to the movement our post-enlightenment modern and post-modern world has taken. Louis Markos shows us how C.S. Lewis, or Lewis Agonistes (Latin for wrestler), wrestled with the modernist of his time. Louis Markos then uses Lewis to argue with the postmodernists of our time. How, for example, Lewis argued with the materialists, who believe in only what his senses tell him. How Lewis wrestled with the idea that we as a race aren't perfectible (this mindset gave us Hitler, Stalin, and other tyrants who tried to perfect 'man'), and many other issues covering the sciences, the arts, and even issues that deeply touch our lives.

The following is an outline of Louis Markos' book:

Preface

Chapter 1: The Education of Lewis Agonistes

Chapter 2: Wrestling with Science

Chapter 3: Wrestling with the New Age

Chapter 4: Wrestling with Evil and Suffering

Chapter 5: Wrestling with the Arts

Chapter 6: Wrestling with Heaven and Hell

Conclusion

To sum up the effect that this book has had on me, I believe it has opened my eyes to understand the beauty in the medieval worldview, that 'outer space' should really be the heavens because the stars and everything else are vibrant with life. The understanding that the movement of the stars is a kind of cosmic dance perfectly choreographed by our Creator, lifts me up when I gaze at their beauty. This book has opened, or uncovered that part of me that the empirical sciences have tried to hide.

I now see where physics, biology, and mathematics fail us; in showing the true beauty of life in the creation that they can't quantify and reduce to impersonal axioms or models. They think empirically where we should look at things holistically, they look at the part, study that part, and since that's all that they've been looking at, they claim that there is only that part, that the whole doesn't exist. Yet they don't realize that what they've been studying is but a mere fraction of God's creation.

I strongly recommend this book, even if you are not a Christian and only a C.S. Lewis fan.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Scholar's Brilliant Gift, September 3, 2003

By 

Stanley P. Santire (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Lewis Agonistes: How C.S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World (Paperback)

This book will be required reading for any university class on C.S. Lewis. The warm combination by Louis Markos of biographical portrait, intimate analysis of the subject's ideas, and a panoramic sweep of Western Philosophy and Judeo-Christian thought assure this. Destiny holds another rightful place for it outside the classroom as insight into the wisdom of Christianity with deep roots in the Hebrew legacy. It the gift of a brilliant scholar to those with, as he describes in this book, " . . . the heart that yearns for God and the mind that seeks to know him." A small caveat. The author is a friend of mine. I am even mentioned in the credits, a discovery that surprised me when I read the preface just after buying the book. I attribute the honor to discussions I have been privileged to have with Louis Markos, explorations of ideas in which I always find him a warm and wise companion. More to the point, I did not review the manuscript before publication. I knew Markos was working on a book about C.S. Lewis. That is all I knew. We did not discuss it and for this I am thankful. Otherwise, I would have started my reading with some predisposition and less objectivity. Indeed, in our little talks I have always disagreed with Markos on some points. As a consequence, I picked up Lewis Agonistes not knowing what I would find. It is a rare blend of intellect, knowledge and fervor. Before meeting Louis Markos, I never paid much attention to C.S. Lewis. I thought the author of the Chronicles of Narnia and The Screw Tape Letters was just a pioneering science fiction writer who periodically ventured into theology. Then I began those little conversations with Markos. Suddenly I found that C.S. Lewis was a thinker that, much to my loss, I had minimized. Still, he had always been a small part of our conversations ranging from Genesis and Plato to Dante and Nietzsche. This book brings to me the full force of C.S. Lewis genius. As I read Lewis Agonistes I felt like Bilbo Baggins before Gandalf and the Dwarfs dragged him off. Bilbo was so comfortable in his little Hobbit hole. Still, even as he protested against leaving for far off dangers, he heard the call to adventure. Like Bilbo, many of us are comfortable in the ideas to which we are accustomed. Markos is a Gandalf, happily pulling us up to another level of the world, a place that many of us only pretend to know. His enthusiasm draws us to the heights of Christianity with C.S. Lewis as a lively companion. This role of Markos as Gandalf is appropriate. As the book points out, C.S. Lewis and T.R.R. Tolkien were friends, a relationship that enriched the works of both men. Though I have escaped into the sensuousness of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, my mind has long been saturated with scenes of the world drawn from the philosophers of reason and idealism, ancient pagans and modern atheists. This book wrenches me out of my complacency. It opens a vibrant window into a different worldview. With a blend of faith and rigorous analysis, Louis Markos raises C.S. Lewis from the dead. He makes the Christian ideas of Lewis march like soldiers contending against the faithless and the cynic. In the preface Markos cautions us when he writes "There will, therefore, be long passages in this book where Lewis's name is not mentioned." The author points out that in those stretches he will "either be working through an examination of the precise challenges leveled by the modern and post modern reader . . . or constructing an argument of my own that is guided by Lewis's method and approach . . ." Here, though he is my friend, I must disagree with the author. Much of the brilliance in the book he attributes to his hero C.S. Lewis. I am more objective. In the public light of his lectures and the private moments of our conversations, I have found Louis Markos to stand on his own as a great adventurer in ideas. More to the point, in the book I found that the thoughts of a living Markos and a long dead C.S. Lewis blend so intimately that the effort to differentiate one from the other is best traded in by the reader for the experience of bearing witness to soaring visions of God.