Mere Lewis

Wynyard School, domain of the insane Robert Capron

The Inklings have gone, and the house is quiet.  We had a few nice stories tonight, particularly a Civil War short story from Ronnie in which the dialog was excellent, and it brought on a good discussion.  Rachel read more of “Death’s Goddaughter,” and we sampled another chapter of Lisa’s book.  Washed it down with Monty Python.

On to a bit of Lewis.  Tonight I read through Jack’s arrival at Robert Capron’s Wynyard school, where he went with Warnie after his mother’s death, and his reactions to the very high church they attended while there.  For those unaware, Capron (called “Oldie” in Surprised by Joy) was an insane headmaster who ran a dwindling establishment with a paranoid, iron first.  Lewis later described some of the “punishments” that were inflicted on students for even the slightest perceived breech of the many written and (more often) unwritten rules as tantamount to torture.

In the opening letter (LP III: 140) written on 19? September 1908, Jack seems willing to give the place a fair chance.  Though he does call Capron “eccentric,” he things that he “will be able to get on” with him, and even states that he things he “shall like this place.”

His next letter (LPIII:  147) on 29 September is quite different in tone.  He tells his father about Capron accusing Warnie of breaking a rule that no one had ever heard of (he failed to bring his jam to tea) and Jack almost pleads for them to be allowed to return home early.  “We simply cannot wait in this hole till the end of term.” (emphasis in the original)

Jack’s response to the church they were required to attend is interesting to me, not least because I am, like him, a low churchman who only later was exposed to a high liturgy.  I grew up United Methodist and Baptist, and we now attend an Anglican (Reformed Episcopal) Church that uses the 1928 prayer book and much of the serious liturgy.

In his letter to his father marked 3 October (LP III 149), Jack is wary, disgusted, and indignant at being forced to attend “so frightfully high [a] church that it might as well be Roman Catholic.”  In Walter Hooper’s editorial comments that follow, he excerpts from a small diary Lewis kept at the time where he expressed his feelings in no uncertain terms.  He called it a “kind of church abhorred by respectful Irish Protestants.”  Those around him were “Romish hypocrites and English liars.”

Later, in Surprised by Joy, he remembered it more kindly.  Though he understood that he clearly responded very negatively on the surface, he also credits that church for introducing him first to the real doctrines of Christianity “taught by men who obviously believed them.”  In that sense, that small, church filled with “hypocrites” and “liars” became the original basis of Jack’s faith.  I wonder if any thoughts connected to it crossed his mind years later, as he was being dragged back to faith, kicking and screaming, in Warnie’s sidecar on the way to the Whipsnade Zoo?

More to do tomorrow than I have hours in the day for, so I probably won’t be able to pick this back up until Monday.