I just ordered my own copy of English Literature in the 16th Century by C.S. Lewis, but just to whet my appetite and yours, I found these quotes on the Puritans here and copied them for our mutual enjoyment:
The fierce young don, the learned lady, the courtier with intellectual leanings, were likely to be Calvinists. When hard rocks of Predestination outcrop in the flowery of the Arcadia or the Faerie Queen, we are apt to think them anomalous, but we are wrong. The Calvinism is as modish as the shepherds and goddesses (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 43).
To be sure, there are standards by which the early Protestants could be called ‘puritanical’; they held adultery, fornication, and perversion for deadly sins. But then so did the Pope. If that is puritanism, all Christendom was then puritanical together. So far as there was any difference about sexual morality, the Old Religion was the more austere. The exaltation of virginity is a Roman, that of marriage, a Protestant, trait (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 35).
But there is no understanding the period of the Reformation in England until we have grasped the fact that the quarrel between the Puritans and the Papists was not primarily a quarrel between rigorism and indulgence, and that, in so far as it was, the rigorism was on the Roman side. On many questions, and specially in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party; if we may without disrespect so use the name of a great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man, they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries (C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, p. 116).
Relief and buoyancy are the characteristic notes . . . It follows that nearly every association which now clings to the word puritan has to be eliminated when we are thinking of the early Protestants. Whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy, or severe; nor did their enemies bring any such charge against them . . . For More, a Protestant was one ‘dronke of the new must of lewd lightnes of minde and vayne gladness of harte’ . . . Protestantism was not too grim, but too glad, to be true . . . Protestants are not ascetics but sensualists (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 34).
We can hardly help calling them “Puritanism” and “humanism”, but neither word meant the same as it does in modern America. By purity the Elizabethan Puritan meant not chastity but ‘pure’ theology and, still more, ‘pure’ church discipline. That is, he wanted an all-powerful Prebyterian Church, a church stronger than the state, set up in England, on the model of Calvin’s church at Geneva. Knox in Scotland loudly demanded, and at least one English Puritan hinted, that this should be done by armed revolution. Calvin, the great successful doctrinaire who had actually set up the ‘new order’, was the man who had dazzled them all. We must picture these Puritans as the very opposite of those who bear that name today: as young, fierce, progressive intellectuals, very fashionable and up-to-date. They were not teetotallers; bishops, not beer, were their special aversion (C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (On Edmund Spenser), pp. 121-122).
Brian Marr says
Wow, this book is going around these days. Just for the record, Lewis often called this book OHEL for short because he couldn’t bear to comment on a book he hadn’t read and a great deal of the sixteenth century was ‘drab.’ He said writing it was like a young girl marrying an elderly millionaire and it being a very long wait before he died. Therefore, in defense of your Pastoral time, I would recommend this portions:
Introduction (fascinating more on that below), The Close of the Middle Ages in Scotland (cam be skipped, but not tedious), Drab Age Prose-Religious Controversy and Translation (really great for Pastors), and in the chapters on the Golden Age look at the sections on these authors: Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Marlowe and Chapman, Martin Marprelate, and (all rise) Richard Hooker, whose Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity should be on every Pastor’s shelf right by Calvin’s Institutes. I would resist the temptation to look at Spenser. If you must, read The Allegory of Love; here it’s convoluted. If you are interested in finishing the book and being able to say you have read it, try to mix the drab with the golden. Whatever you do, don’t read cover to cover.
Finally, I would like to hear you comment on his description of John Calvin, which is by no means favorable. I know Stokes thinks Lewis misunderstood total depravity and I would enjoy those bits and also, since you just went through Mere Christianity, his bits on faith and works and the Reformation as “metaphysical argument at a fair” cry out for discussion. Also, I am getting a little bugged by the idea that Lewis was unabashedly in love with the Puritans; he wasn’t and his loyalties really lay with the Anglican establishment as a careful reading shows. I’d also like to see what you think of his description of Hooker. Did I mention you should read Hooker?