Truth is a Myth
What postmodernism is all about.
Ever since I wrote my article “St. Augustine, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Formal Indication,” which feels unusually long ago now, I’ve been increasingly incorporating elements of postmodern theology into my writings, indicating my affinity for these ideas and my belief in their sufficiency for what is still my traditional, neo-medievalist vision. Yet, I haven’t taken the time to properly elucidate what postmodernism is about. Even with my foray into “Augustinian incarnational semiotics,” that was meant to break down a particular avenue of postmodern thinking I was chewing on, and not to give a proper introduction to postmodernism. There was a lot in that article being presumed.
The closest I’ve gotten to doing this was in a Note I posted last May:
True postmodernism is, put as simply as one can, “subjective realism.” Not “subjective nihilism,” that nothing can truly be known by subjects, nor “subjective relativism,” that all is independently known relative to subjects. Rather, again, “realism,” that all is really known by means of subjects, never “objectively,” but this does imply the intersubjective, as well, that subjects may experience each other. This is especially so when one adopts the “logic of incarnation” to frame their subjective realism, which is to say one opens the space for authentic intersubjectivity. (Derridean “logic of determination” renders all intersubjectivity inauthentic.)
This Note condensed the reading I’d done on postmodernism, almost entirely from the pen of James K.A. Smith: The Fall of Interpretation, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, Who’s Afraid of Relativism?, and Smith’s introductory chapter to Neal DeRoo’s The Logic of Incarnation, “The Logic of Incarnation: Towards a Catholic Postmodernism.”1 The understanding of the world, and of postmodernism in particular, adduced from these readings was nothing short of spectacular. Learning about postmodernism for me has been an intellectual revolution akin to only one other point in my journey in life, which would’ve been my interaction with the work of Dr. Michael Heiser, whose shadow is cast over the first few articles on this blog just as much as Smith’s now is. I emerged from a position of ignorance, colored by the remarks of such people as Jordan Peterson about “postmodern neo-Marxism” and the like, to understanding that there was no substantial engagement with the school of thought outside of itself (which is likely what led to its degeneration into Leftism), but that it represented a profoundly premodern, Christian way of looking at the world.2 Even James Smith, who though being (more recently) something of/somehow a “post-liberal liberal,” writes in Who’s Afraid of Relativism? of “how to be a conservative relativist.”3 So, my goal with my articles has not been just to employ postmodernism, but to make use of its tenets to elucidate and illuminate the foundations of our hieropolitical vision.
So, let me sit down and properly explicate what postmodernism is about. The short summary I gave in that Note, which encapsulates postmodernism in the term “subjective realism,” is an acceptable starting point. My understanding has certainly developed since, but it still communicates important details. All we are talking about when we speak of “the postmodern condition” is that the reality of subjectivity has begun to be appreciated again, philosophically, over and against the objectivist logic of the post-Enlightenment, modern, world. All reality is perceived through subjects, and all subjects are in constant engagement with other subjects, hence intersubjectivity. Subjects are irreducible and have a dignity in their subjectivity, hence the postmodern concern with alterity. Subjects aren’t things “out there” to be seized upon, but are phenomena that we come upon and must experience within our own interiority. We must bring others and their subjectivity into our own, hence intersubjectivity, not interobjectivity. An example of this that I gave a friend once is how your mother, who is a subject, will always subjectively construe you in a way that you can never objectively comprehend,4 hence you will always be “her little boy,” whereas you will see your own subjectivity from your own perspective, which is as someone who is matured. Yet, your mother’s subjectivity is needed, because it nonetheless adds something to your own, it’s an example of Heidegger’s being-with, or Smith’s authentic intersubjectivity, which doesn’t totalize the Other but inhabits the Other’s subjectivity, embracing it by letting it remain othered.5
Moreover, subjective realism is not a philosophy that says “things aren’t real,” or some rehash of the Kantian noumena/phenomena dichotomy. There’s a passage in Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Relativism that endeavors to clear this up, though it’s long. I’ll share it now and break it down after:
Rorty tries to debunk a key misconception here: realist critics confuse having a theory of reference and granting a kind of ontological weight to things. That is, they think that having a theory of reference is the necessary condition for affirming that there are extra-paradigm “things.” So they assume that if one rejects representation and correspondence, one is giving up on the metaphysical furniture of the universe. But those, like Dewey and James, who reject the “correspondence theory of truth,” have “no sympathy” with an “inference from [A] ‘one cannot give a theory-independent description of a thing’ to the supposed conclusion that [B] ‘there are no theory-independent things’” (279). So giving up on a theory of reference rooted in representationalism does not mean that the so-called anti-realist “will lack a story to tell about the causal effects upon our ancestors of the objects spoken of by the present theory” (282). Recognizing the social and communal conditions of knowledge—that our knowledge is relative to our social context—does not entail that everything is just “made up.” Consider an example from science, which is often taken to be the arbiter of “objective truth” par excellence. If past theories of, say, phlogiston didn’t refer to some “thing” phlogiston, then doesn’t it follow that no present theory refers to any such “thing” (PM, 285)? But Rorty again cautions about overstating the implications of his pragmatist (or holistic) account: “Now in one obvious sense we know perfectly well—prior to any theory—that they have been referring to the same things. They were all trying to cope with the same universe, and they referred to it”—and no revolution in paradigms would “put us out of touch with either the world or our ancestors” (286, emphasis added). Indeed, he’s very explicit about this, citing Donald Davidson: “In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth—quite the contrary. . . . We do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false” (PM, 310). Pragmatism rejects representation and correspondence; it doesn’t reject the “antics” of things.6
Here’s what all that means: postmodernism isn’t about saying “every thing is fake,” it’s about saying, “Every thing is interpreted.” When “[Derrida] claims that there is nothing outside the text, this isn’t simply because ‘Jean-Jacques’ life, or the existence of Mama or Thérèse themselves is not of prime interest to us” and it’s not meant either that “we can just choose to act as if Mama doesn’t exist and play with the text without caring about what it really refers to.”7 Instead, what Derrida or any other postmodernist is saying is that subjects are only known through mediacy, that is, interpretation (broadly), and there is no grasping of the Other so that the entirety of their being is subsumed into oneself. The problem that postmodernism detects in the post-Enlightenment notion of “knowledge” is “that it always already designates comprehension, such that the relation between knower and known is one of totalization wherein the ‘object,’ as objectified, is deprived of its alterity [otherness]” which is completely false.8 No thing is ever understood in se, but rather it’s mediated between subjects, and an “objective” knowledge is beyond any man to attain. Insofar as post-Enlightenment Rationalism affirms the contrary, it’s errant and false.
Postmodern thought doesn’t say that “Mama” is false, but rather that “Mama” is a thing that must be coped with, we need to interpret what “Mama” is, not whether “Mama” exists.9 Whereas Kant and Descartes fashioned a radical fissure between our interior mind and the external world, postmodernists aren’t even responding to this but operating on another level: what we engage with on a daily basis is “the world,” but we must still interpret it given our subjective experience of it. When we are seeing our mothers, a tree, a dog, whatever, we are seeing those things, but we are always-already interpreting them, given by the very names we place upon them which come rife with interpretive baggage, which is a lesson from Wittgenstein that Smith draws out.10 Our words do touch the world, but it’s a world that has horizons far beyond our own.
It is that Enlightenment-spawned Rationalist Zeitgeist which is responsible for the stuffy, mechanistic world that Modernity produced. Smith glibly pins the start of the postmodern condition to 3:32 PM on July 15, 1972, which was when the Pruitt-Igoe housing development, designed by Le Corbusier, the “greatest” of the modernist architects, was demolished.11 This jungle of mathematically precise, mechanically sophisticated concrete high-rises was supposed to represent High Modernism, but, in time, becoming a dilapidated and tarnished mess, it instead represented Late Modernity. The failure of Pruitt-Igoe represented to many the failure of Modernity, despite all its high promises and Faustian triumphs. We’ve dealt with this mentality as recently as the 2010s, manifest in the “New Atheists,” but back from the late-1700s on the victories of Science were increasingly interpreted as beating back the incorrigible enemy of Superstition (Religion), and represented “maturity,” and with each succeeding discovery established more and more its superiority over the “Old Ways,” based on “fact.” When the atom was discovered there arose the attitude that the holy Scientists had at long last discovered what made Creation “tick.” However, all they really did was shine light on another darkened corner of the world, and that is by no means synonymous with truth or understanding. After all, what does it mean for the world to be constructed atomically? All the physicists accomplished was begging the question. They neglected that atomism had been known since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, their findings simply being a higher-fidelity reinvention of the wheel, and despite this prior invention two millennia of human existence thenceforth never ceased to contemplate the “myth-woven and elf-patterned” mystery of the cosmos.12
Take it this way: imagine you were dropped in a house you’ve never seen or been in before. However you’re currently visualizing it, only one half of this house is illuminated. Taking a close look, you are asked to explain the story, affections, members, hobbies, and other personal details of the family that lives here. You wouldn’t be capable of doing that, because you must know (not intellectually/propositionally, but participatively and experientially) the life of the family. Even if the other half of the house was illumined that still wouldn’t tell you what you’d need to know. All that you could demonstrate is knowledge of the components: there are six paintings, sixteen framed photos, a China cabinet, a long oak dining table, floral patterns on the window curtains, etc. No, neither is there a Holmesian deduction to draw here, because what tells you if that China cabinet is loved, used, a burdensome heirloom, or about to be sold? What tells you if those photos are of a loving family, or a family about to be divorced? Do you even know if the family is still alive? This mere knowledge of components tells you nothing. Rather, what we are in search for is the meaning of things, not just how they are quantitatively laid out, but how they are qualitatively lived out (to put it one way). What we are in search of, and what postmodernism taps back into, is the mythicality of things.
Immediately we must address the misconstrual of “mythical” as cosignificative with “false.” This is something that emerged slowly, only really taking shape in the modern era. “Mythology” is the term that entered the English language first, the familiar Greek suffix having a meaning more akin to “anthology,” as in a collection, rather than study, of myths, in particular classical mythology. The mythology being that of the pagans, and the diachronic development of the word being primarily shepherded by European Christian scribes, the term of necessity took on some notion of falsity, or of generic moral fable without strict historical elements, for how could a devoted servant of the Living God ever ascribe any sort of legitimacy or reality to the objects of the heathens’ devotion, which “are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs be borne, because they cannot go” (Jer. 10:5)?13 Given that, we then begin to see the emergence of the notion of “myth” bearing the meaning of “false.” By the 1800s this was quite cemented, and it’s almost universal today. Almost, however, and not because of the incomplete conversion of academicians, but because of an unfolding deconversion, that is, because of a certain rise in a new narrative concerning myths, returning to a more classical and more holistic understanding not just of such literature but also of human knowledge in general, which I relate to the postmodern moment of our times.
Because of the postmodern connection I see to mythicality, I must address the chronology of postmodernism referenced above by positing an alternate date. The revolution in mythology is more integral to understanding postmodernism than Of Grammatology, and the catalyst for this came late in the night of September 20, 1931. On this date, the esteemed professors of English literature and novelists C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, joined by the Shakespearean scholar Hugo Dyson, were engaged in a very long and in-depth conversation, moseying along the picturesque Addison’s Walk on the Oxford campus.14 In this conversation15 the three men made exhaustive use of each other’s minds, and in particular Tolkien and Dyson, devout Christians as they were, were tasked with making sense of and for Lewis all his present spiritual turmoils, which had thrashed him through phases of Spiritualism, atheism, magick, skepticism, and others.16 The core of the conversation, insofar as it pertained to Lewis’ hesitation toward the Christian faith,17 revolved around Lewis’ incredulity toward the Christian concept of sacrifice and redemption. Dyson and Tolkien both being proficient in literature, especially classical mythology, which they shared with Lewis, they endeavored to demonstrate to him the significance and legitimacy of said concept by laying out where they themselves appeared in those pagan tales, which Lewis still enjoyed and found thematically palatable nonetheless.
As an attempt to defend his lingering incredulity Lewis remarked, “But myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.”18 At once the wizened professor and companion retorted with the most perceptive comment of the modern era:
No, they are not. You call a tree a tree, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a “tree” until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only becoming a “sub-creator” and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic “progress” leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.
In saying this Tolkien presented for Lewis, and by extension a wild and earthy stream of Christendom, a most profound truth about reality. As Lewis shortly after explained it, “You mean to say, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened?”19
The way I’d parse all this is to say that whereas many people have come to take “truth” to simply be a sequential reckoning of empirically observed datums, “being true” to have a banal correspondence to that sequence, and “knowing truth” to have the simple capacity of memorizing and repeating (a) sequence(s), truth properly understood is instead couched in the framework of a very ancient, very hierophantic understanding of the world, focused on participation and experience. Instead of truth being “that” the Sun rises, truth is why the Sun rises; instead of something “being true” meaning it accords with statistical data, being true means to accord with the story in which you are situated; instead of “knowing truth” being a mnemonic or academic concern, knowing truth is to partake of the truth, for you to abide in it and it to abide in you.
There’s no escaping this. “Myth” is superior and antecedent to what so many people have long taken to mean “truth,” which is to be more accurately called “knowledge of components.” Thus, taking this conversation as the true spawn point of the postmodern condition seems more apposite to me for it was at this moment when a group of gentlemen (in the birthplace of industrial modernity no less) came to the realization that the world was not a sequential arrangement of component parts, but a grand and invigorating story that swept up the souls, bodies, and imaginations of every human being into it. Tolkien and Lewis’ own mindspaces, brought to global fame in their enduring myths of Narnia and Middle-Earth, has enraptured the minds of many more people than postmodernism, academically reserved as it is, has been able to.20
Therefore, in our post-modern world we are bidden to recognize that rather than our scientists having discovered “the thing” itself, they have merely discovered more subjects, more signs that signify things, but without being the thing itself. Such an immediate knowledge of things is impossible, ontologically and epistemologically, and this has never not been the case. As Smith explains:
We are in-der-Welt-sein, as embodied, historical, situated beings. We are here (Da) now, and such is a condition for my knowing anything. We cannot step outside of our own skin or transcend our finitude. Hans-Georg Gadamer carried on this work in his philosophical hermeneutics, insisting that we cannot know apart from bias, despite all of the Enlightenment protests to the contrary. In fact, this Enlightenment critique of prejudice is itself a prejudice and must be owned up as such. … But as Heidegger’s own work demonstrates, theory is not free from prejudice, from “extra-philosophical” influences—a point which has been demonstrated in a number of arenas since Heidegger. Thomas Kuhn, for instance, pointed to the paradigms or frameworks of belief which direct the sciences. Of special interest here is that throughout his landmark study, Kuhn uses the language of faith to describe the relationship between paradigms and science… Research in this century has demonstrated that philosophy (and all theory) is conditioned by previous commitments which not only provide starting points (as in the Gilsonian tradition), but make philosophy possible. … Perhaps what theorists in this century have not yet appreciated is the religious nature of these commitments. … That which is believed is not argued to but argued from. “If I have exhausted the justifications,” Wittgenstein commented, “I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say, ‘this is simply what I do.’”21
The scientific pursuit to illuminate all of Creation does nothing but progressively “exhaust the justifications,” actually backing its rationalistic commitments into a corner ultimately. This has been experientially proven insofar as the most scientifically adept historical and “civilizational” era witnessed by mankind to date has also proven to be the most meaningless. In their inability to find proper truth in the atom, and their inability to admit the limits of their reason, scientists have done all they can to keep striking at the bedrock, pontificating from on high about how it’s God that is the delusion, rather than their insistence on absolute reason and objectivity.
Here’s how Smith explains it, following from Derrida. Derrida remarks in his book Of Spirit, a commentary on Heidegger, that
Language is already there, in advance at the moment at which any question can arise about it. In this it exceeds the question. This advance is, before any contract, a sort of promise of originary allegiance to which we must have in some sense already acquiesced, already said yes, given a pledge, whatever may be the negativity or problematicity of the discourse which may follow.22
Which is to say that any attempt to even begin to contemplate the nature of a subject, of something other to one’s own subjectivity, requires trust in the efficacy and legitimacy of language. What really grounds our trust in the very words we speak? We may proclaim with confidence any sort of fact, but what establishes the factuality of our proclamation? Liars and con artists both make us quite familiar with how our trust in language may be usurped by evacuating words of the content we ordinarily trust them to have. So, as Smith explains, “Questioning—the heart and soul of suspicion—does not have the last word, precisely because it does not have the first word, because it is itself grounded in trusting a promise (OS 130).”23 We may be skeptics all we want, but we fundamentally have something prior to our skepticism that we can only trust (have faith) in. “All words are made up” is a punchline from a scene in a famous contemporary movie, and it’s true, but why do we trust in words if, as we commonly believe, “made up” means “false”? The answer is that, despite this inescapable and fundamental mystery, what we know beyond this mystery is the lived experience that our “originary allegiance” is sufficient for the trains to arrive when they’re meant to, to trust people for what they say, to expect things to occur when the calendars indicate so. So, per Derrida, we always-already trust the promise that language makes: that it can and does convey meaning to an Other, and vice versa, somehow. In truth, postmodernism isn’t about the world not having meaning but having so much meaning it can’t possibly be captured all at once. We find ourselves always-already “thrown” (geworfen) into the world, submerged by all that the world is, and there is no up or down, like in outer space—there is no “absolutely certain Archimedean point on which to build all knowledge.”24 What we must do is in-habit this world, and find out the meaning present within it, but never comprehensively.
None of this is to deny reason, but to punish it for having not kept to its first estate, and to then set things straight. The faculty of reason is simply the causative faculty behind man’s knowing of components, but it’s a higher faculty, what historic Christian thinking has identified as “the nous,” which imagines the myth-woven and elf-patterned structure that gathers together the components into some-thing. In this sense, everything is mythical. “Is atheism religiously neutral? Is the atheist without faith?” Smith asks, rhetorically.25 Everyone has faith, everyone has an originary allegiance, and everyone is “in-der-Welt-sein, as embodied, historical, situated beings.” No one transcends this condition, which is creational. Therefore, since reason is bounded, and a non-architectonic element of human being, the post-Enlightenment idolization of Reason must be exorcised and repented of, smashed such as the high places were in King Hezekiah’s revival of the Israelite religion (2 Kgs. 18:4).
Thus we can now understand when we turn to Lyotard what he means by “incredulity toward metanarratives.” A metanarrative, as Smith clarifies, is not just a “big story,” and Lyotard’s incredulity is not because of scope but because of legitimation, or, perhaps we should say, arrogance.
Modernity, then, appeals to science to legitimate its claim—and by “science” we simply mean the notion of a universal, autonomous reason. Science, then, is opposed to narrative, which attempts not to prove its claims but rather to proclaim them within a story. But postmodernism, according to Lyotard, has suggested that the emperor of modernity has no clothes! At the heart of the postmodern critique of modernity is an unveiling of the way that science—which is so critical of the “fables” of narrative—is itself grounded in narrative. What modernity did not recognize about itself was the way in which narrative infiltrated science. … In a similar way, Lyotard argues, modern scientific knowledge, when called on (by itself ) to legitimate itself, cannot help but appeal to narrative—this “return of the narrative in the non-narrative” is “inevitable” (PC, 27–28). Like the loquacious Ulysses Everett McGill, modernity and its science can’t stop telling stories (is there a bigger story than On the Origin of Species?)—all the while claiming that they are opposed to such “fables.” Scientists and modern philosophers still tell stories; as Lyotard comments, “the state spends large amounts of money to enable science to pass itself off as epic” (PC, 28). Whenever science attempts to legitimate itself, it is no longer scientific but narrative, appealing to an orienting myth that is not susceptible to scientific legitimation. Modernity’s science demands of itself the impossible: “The language game of science desires its statements to be true but does not have the resources to legitimate their truth on its own” (PC, 28). The appeal to reason as the criterion for what constitutes knowledge is but one more language game among many, shaped by founding beliefs or commitments that determine what constitutes knowledge within the game; reason is grounded in myth. “Metanarratives,” then, is the term Lyotard ascribes to these false appeals to universal, rational, scientific criteria—as though they were divorced from any particular myth or narrative. For the postmodernist, every scientist is a believer.26
This is why, as mentioned earlier, Smith sees postmodernism as the recovery of a premodern, neo-Augustinian way of thinking, for insofar as either of those labels are cosignificative with “the mythical vision of the world known to all humans since the dawn of time,” especially as captured within the experience of medieval Christendom, that’s precisely what postmodernism is. The early modern appraisal of Shakespeare that “all the world’s a stage” is truer than he could’ve imagined, in ways far different than he would’ve imagined.
Hence, what the world is about is the myths by which we live, the particular myths which we inhabit, and the mythopoeia that inspires us. To Christians our faith is the confession and worship of the True Myth, the incarnate, crucified, resurrected, and ascended Living God, then it more than any other human tradition is primed to engage in the art of mythopoeia. Its particular “logic of incarnation” which is at the beating heart of its mythos inspires in us an appreciation for the sacramentality and materiality of the world, and especially for the finitude of the world and our own creatureliness, which are the very reasons why we have this epistemological-ontological constitution that grounds the elements of postmodernism. There is indeed a more metaphysical framing to this, one that I’ve written an essay for, though I’ve struggled to publish it (I might advertise it by publishing it first here on Substack behind a paywall). As Smith puts it elsewhere, “the point is that we know reality storiedly—and that we are wired (created) to navigate our way through the world in this way.”27 Life is a matter of the stories we inhabit, and a reckoning with the stories that others may inhabit. At the sensitive heart of postmodernism is an appreciation and affirmation of this fundamental reality.
Two other works of Smith’s that are noteworthy: Introducing Radical Orthodoxy and The Nicene Option. Other works that are credible surveys of postmodern (theological) thought include S. Toulmin, Cosmopolis; J. Smith and H.I. Venema, The Hermeneutics of Charity; K.J. Vanhoozer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology.
That is, I might say, a reactionary ethos.
Smith, Who’s Afraid of Relativism?, 179, emphasis mine.
A Levinasian statement we will encounter again later:
[T]he ethical problem with “theory,” or simply “knowledge” in the Western tradition (or at least in modernity), is that it always already designates comprehension, such that the relation between knower and known is one of totalization wherein the “object,” as objectified, is deprived of its alterity. (J.K.A. Smith, Speech and Theology, 132.)
You might be able to see, then, what the significance was behind my article on incarnational semiotics. Being embraced yet remaining othered is a dichotomy not entirely unlike becoming fully man yet remaining fully God.
Smith, Who’s Afraid of Relativism?, 87-88. The work of Rorty’s chiefly referred to here, and in the whole of Smith’s chapter on him, is his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
Now, it’s true that some thing may be fabricated, and not truly exist, but more often than not the healthier approach is to say that some thing has been misinterpreted. The former is the approach of gender abolitionists, who believe that gender en toto has been invented by the bourgeoisie (or whatever), whereas the latter is the approach of radical feminists, who believe that femininity has been oppressed through patriarchy to be inauthentic to itself. To employ examples more at home with my general audience, “disenchantment” is excellent—modernism has made us interpret the world in a way so as to be blind to certain things, and re-enchantment is the process of dispelling such a (false) hermeneutic.
Smith, Speech and Theology, 132.
Smith, Who’s Afraid of Relativism?, 92.
Ibid., 39-72.
Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, 19fn5; C. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (4th ed.), 9.
Words from J.R.R. Tolkien’s poem “Mythopoeia.”
Of course this is something I wish to address further in the future.
This is a noteworthy setting for the famous walk, although the conversation and walk took them all around Oxford’s campus, and eventually to Lewis’ private room.
Which Alister McGrath, the Irish historian and Christian intellectual, recounts in his biography of C.S. Lewis: C.S. Lewis -- A Life, 146-51; cf. Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 149-52.
Lewis’ journey to the Christian faith, in addition to McGrath’s biography above, is recounted by Lewis from his own perspective in the book Surprised By Joy.
Lewis’ spiritual journey began as a loss of spirituality in his youth, as (in)famously captured by this statement in a letter to his lifelong friend Arthur Greeves: “I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best” (quoted in David Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert, 57).
Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, 151.
Ibid.
Lewis and Tolkien both had a deep participation in the thinking of the medieval world through their literary scholarship; Tolkien’s Roman Catholic affinities would naturally make St. Augustine familiar to him; even the former’s pre-Christian explorations put him in similar contacts. These are elements that were also present in the making of Derrida, and at that present earlier than in Derrida and present more fully than in Derrida. That postmodern philosophy represents something of a neo-Augustinian resourcement is common within Christian postmodern circles, namely Radical Orthodoxy. See James Smith, “Is deconstruction an Augustinian science? Augustine, Derrida, and Caputo on the commitments of philosophy,” ch. in Religion With/Out Religion, ed. James Olthius, 50-61; idem, On the Road with Saint Augustine, esp. 20-35; John Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty-two Responses to Unasked Questions,” in The Postmodern God, ed. Graham Ward, 265-78. The closest to a full treatment of the idea of Lewis (and Tolkien) representing the headwaters of a true (Smith: persistent) postmodernism is provided in Kyoko Yuasa’s C.S. Lewis and Christian Postmodernism.
Smith, “The Art of Christian Atheism: Faith and Philosophy in Early Heidegger,” Faith and Philosophy 14/1 (1997): 76-77.
Quoted in Smith, The Fall of Interpretation, 193.
Ibid.
C. Gschwandtner, “Postmodern Hermeneutics,” in Handbook of Postconservative Theological Interpretation, 19.
Smith, “The Art of Christian Atheism,” 77.
Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, 65-66, 67-68. Emphases mine.
Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 14n26.