Poesy v. Theology

My guess is that C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, might be among his least read works, viewed perhaps as a mere mole hill next to such vast mountains like The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. But reading that book recently, what with prayer on our minds around here, I was quite amazed by its content. Here, for instance, is a brief quote which quite startled me by its truth and originality. It concerns biblical interpretation:

I suggest two rules for exegetics: 1) Never take the images literally. 2) When the purport of the images—what they say to our fear and hope and will and affections—seems to conflict with the theological abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time. For our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modeling of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture—the light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or slag-heaps. Hence what they now call “demythologizing” Christianity can easily be “re-mythologising” it—and substituting a poorer mythology for a richer.

  [From Chapter X, p. 52, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., edition, 1964]

Ah! the hierarchies of experience, where the poetic rises above the intellectual. But at those heights the general fades and becomes personal—which is where real understanding germinates.