Unbelief and the Arts

One result of unbelief has been to elevate the Arts — to put Artists on the level vacated by saints and prophets, and therefore to relegate their public to the humble position of disciples. We are afraid now to dismiss any artist as a mere eccentric, lest we should be ’stoning a prophet’. This encourages the artist — and of course Freud and Jung aggravate the encouragement — to pour out whatever is inside him with a total disregard of the needs or capacity of any audience. (He ought, on my view, to regard their needs and capacity as part of his material no less than the properties of stone, pain, or words). And this links up with the general contemporary tendency to look at everything from the producer’s rather than the ‘consumer’s’ angle.

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“Letter to John Beversluis, 12 April 1962,” in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. III, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004), 1333.