Book Review: “Into the Region of Awe”

Title: Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C. S. Lewis

Author: David Downing

As David Downing notes at the end of the book, “Though Lewis was clearly well versed in the tradition of Christian mysticism, he never wrote about it at any length. He referred to mysticism dozens of times in his books and letters, and knew contemporary scholarship on the subject. But he never set down his thoughts on mysticism in a separate essay or book chapter, leaving only tantalizing hints scattered throughout his writings.”* As a consequence, if one wants to know what Lewis thought about mysticism, one must sift through his literature and letters with a fine-tooth comb looking for embedded hints. This Downing does, in my opinion, thoroughly and compellingly.

The title alone may be iconoclastic for those who picture Lewis as the ultimate rational defender of the faith. But in the eyes of some, Lewis could be classified as a mystic. At the very least, his thoughts were heavily influenced by those in the Christian tradition known as “mystics”. But if Lewis was a “mystic,” then we might call him a “rational mystic” (my term, not Downing’s). And that is what makes this book so thought provoking: it helps correct one narrow view of mysticism common today—the view which associates mystical encounter with anti-intellectualism and/or moral laxity. Downing shows that for most of the Christian mystics who influenced Lewis, their mystical leanings subverted neither their intellect nor their conscience. (Names such as St. Paul, Augustine, Bernard Clairvaux–author of the hymn, Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee–and Aquinas could be adduced here.) Lewis affirmed neither the salvific universalism of some of the ancient Christian mystics, nor the religiously syncronistic views of the Huxleyian Perennialists, nor the impersonal pantheistic ideas of the Eastern mystics. This ought to give pause to those who may carry a prima facie skepticism against Downing’s book–a negativism spilled over from a dully  justified skepticism of the types of mysticism often pursued today in both Christian and non-Christian circles.

With that said, I feel I can say little else without devoting myself to an entire essay on the subject. For mysticism seems to be one of those subjects about which one cannot even ask the most simple question without delving into a multitude of very complicated issues. Suffice it to say that while Lewis seems to have drawn great help from the insights and writings of Christian mystics, he did not do so uncritically: “The true religion gives value to its own mysticism; mysticism does not validate the religion in which it happens to occur.”**

One of the strongest assets of the book is that it consistently places Lewis’s thoughts in the broader historical and theological context of past scholars. The book is physically small, and it contains only 170 pages, but there is no fluff. Bearing testimony to this is the bibliography lying quietly at the back of the book which holds over 80 resources on mystics and mysticism. And this does not include primary and secondary sources on C. S. Lewis specifically. The intellectual richness of Downing’s book, however, is never flashy. Rather than footnotes, he uses a less cluttered system of documenting quotes and other references using endnotes which reference key words in the text. This makes the insertion of quotations and references clean and sometimes subtle (in a good way).

In sum, Downing has down a superb job of collecting and connecting all the references in Lewis’s writing relating to mysticism, and done so while preserving the complexities and intricacies of the man. Lewis was not a traditional type of mystic (if there is such a thing), but he learned from them and has some to teach us about real communion with God. Into the Region of Awe facilitates that teaching.

*Pg. 163

** Pg. 146. Lewis quote taken from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer.