Preface
When Eraclius, the successor to Augustine as bishop of Hippo in AD 400, said of his awe-inspiring predecessor, “The swan is silent,” he compared his own voice to Augustine’s as a chirping cricket. He was not referring mainly to the beauty of Augustine’s eloquence but to the beauty and power and fullness of his ideas.
But when I say of George Herbert and George Whitefield and C. S. Lewis that these swans are not silent, I have in mind precisely the way their eloquence and their ideas relate to each other. The aim of this volume of The Swans Are Not Silent is to probe the interrelationship between seeing beauty and saying it beautifully.
GEORGE HERBERT, PASTOR-POET
George Herbert died in 1633 just short of his fortieth birthday. Late in that short life, he became an Anglican country pastor. He wrote a book called The Country Parson. But, he is known today because of his peerless combination of poetic craftsmanship and profound Christian faith. If any swan should be considered when pondering the relationship between seeing the beauty of Christ and saying it with unparalleled technical, artistic skill, it is George Herbert. He is “arguably the most skillful and important British devotional lyricist of [the seventeenth century] or any other time.”1
GEORGE WHITEFIELD, PREACHER-DRAMATIST
George Whitefield was an English Christian evangelist who lived from 1714 to 1770. He crossed the Atlantic thirteen times and is buried, not in his homeland, but in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Along with John Wesley in England, Howell Harris in Wales, and Jonathan Edwards in America—but more international than any of them—Whitefield was a primary catalyst of the First Great Awakening.
The preaching pace he set for thirty years was almost superhuman. Sober estimates are that he spoke about one thousand times every year for thirty years. That included at least eighteen thousand sermons and twelve thousand talks and exhortations.2 But it is not the pace that concerns us in this book, but the power—specifically the connections between the power of his biblical perception, the power of his natural eloquence, and the power of his spiritual effectiveness.
Jonathan Edwards’s wife Sarah said that Whitefield was a “born orator.”3 Benjamin Franklin, who rejected Whitefield’s entire theology, said, “Every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turned, and well-placed, that without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse.”4 So people have asked, “Was, then, Whitefield’s effectiveness only natural rather than spiritual and eternal?” J. C. Ryle certainly did not think so: “I believe that the direct good which he did to immortal souls was enormous. I will go further—I believe it is incalculable.”5
George Whitefield was not a poet in the strict sense the way George Herbert was. But his preaching craft, with all its verbal and emotional and physical dimensions, was such a work of art that Benjamin Franklin said that listening was “a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music.”6 Therefore, Whitefield provides us with a second historical seedbed for our question about the relationship between seeing beauty and saying beautifully.
C. S. LEWIS, SCHOLAR-NOVELIST
C. S. Lewis is the third focus of our study. Peter Kreeft stands in awe of Lewis and says, “Clive Staples Lewis was not a man: he was a world.”7 Lewis lived from 1898 to 1963 and spent his working life as a professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Oxford and Cambridge. But he is known most widely as the author of the children’s books (which adults love) The Chronicles of Narnia, some of which have been made into movies.8
Lewis wanted to be a great poet. But he admits at age fifty-six that his poetry met “with little success.”9 Nevertheless, he says,
The imaginative man in me is . . . continuously operative. . . . It was he . . . who led me to embody my religious belief in symbolical . . . forms, ranging from Screwtape to a kind of theologized sciencefiction. And it was of course he who has brought me, in the last few years, to write the series of Narnian stories for children.10
This “imaginative man” who wanted to be a great poet remained a real poet in all his prose. Alister McGrath expressed it well when he said that much of Lewis’s power was
His ability to write prose tinged with a poetic vision, its carefully crafted phrases lingering in the memory because they have captivated the imagination. The qualities we associate with good poetry . . . [abound] in Lewis’s prose.11
Lewis had the eyes and the pen of a poet. Of all the people I have ever read, Lewis—like Jonathan Edwards, but for different reasons—sees beauty and wonder in what he looks at, and awakens my mind to do the same. He saw beauty, and what he saw, he said beautifully. The combination has given him lasting power. He is the most widely read twentieth-century apologist today. He is more popular and influential now than he ever was in his lifetime.
THREE ANGLICANS AND THEIR POETIC EFFORT
This is a book about the interrelationship between seeing beauty and saying it beautifully—and the impact that the effort has on our lives. It is rooted in the life and work of three Anglican Christians—a pastor-poet, a preacher-dramatist, and a scholar-novelist. All of them, in their own ways, made sustained poetic effort in what they spoke and wrote. This book is about that effort and how it relates to seeing beauty and awakening others to see it—especially the beauty of Jesus Christ.
1 “George Herbert,” Poetry Foundation, accessed February 21, 2014, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/george-herbert.
2 Michael A. G. Haykin, ed., The Revived Puritan: The Spirituality of George Whitefield (Dundas, Ontario: Joshua, 2000), 32–33. Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-Century Revival, (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1970), 2:522.
3 Haykin, Revived Puritan, 35–37.
4 Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 204.
5 J. C. Ryle, Select Sermons of George Whitefield with an Account of his Life (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1958), 28.
6 Stout, Divine Dramatist, 204.
7 Peter Kreeft, C. S. Lewis: A Critical Essay (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1969), 4.
8 Most recently, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005), Prince Caspian (2008), and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010).
9 Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950–1963, vol. 3 (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007), 517.
10 Ibid.
11 Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis–A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2013), 108.