From Glory to Glory
From Glory to Glory
An Interview with Michael Ward by Sarah Collister
On Walking in the Way of C.S. Lewis
The dust kicks up under our feet and rises into the mid-summer evening haze as we, the members of the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society, walk through the gardens of Magdalen College after Evensong in the college Chapel. This is not a normal gathering of the Society, but the start of the 40th anniversary festivities. Faculty Advisor of the Society Michael Ward leads us along Addison’s Walk, a circular riverside path in the college grounds where Lewis had a life-changing conversation with two friends that led to his Christian conversion. We stop half way round and he reads aloud the poem “What the Bird Said Early in the Year,” on a commemorative plaque erected in 1998, the centenary of Lewis’s birth. (It was Ward’s idea to put it there.) His voice slows with emphasis at the last four lines:
This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.
Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart.
Alas, the gates behind Dr. Ward do not open to invite us in. We turn to one another with quiet murmurings in the evening sunshine, make our way round to the entrance again and head up the road to The Magdalen Arms for further celebrations.
*
Michael Ward first encountered C.S. Lewis when he was a little boy. On Sunday mornings, he and his two older brothers would pile into his parents’ bed and listen to his mother read the Narnia Chronicles aloud. He realizes this was a gift: “The stories were read to me before I could read them for myself.” Any child who has known that delight, and the way it can shape one’s future passions or interests, can begin to understand Ward’s unique vocation as scholar, teacher, priest, and Christian apologist. Over the course of his career, Ward was first an Anglican clergyman, from 2004-2012, and is now, since 2018, assisting as a Roman Catholic priest at a parish in Oxford. In addition to his position in Oxford University’s Faculty of Theology and Religion, he is a professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Hillsdale College in Michigan. To list his many roles seems dizzying. How does one man wear all these hats?
On a perfect summer afternoon we meet for an interview in the Thames-side courtyard of The Head of the River pub. Ward is wearing a real hat, a weather-beaten Panama, that he sets on the table between us as he shifts his seat into the shade of a tree. As we shield our beverages from the beating sun, I turn to the question of his vocations. Ward vividly recalls the moment when he brought the same question before God:
From a fairly early age, I’ve been aware that I have two interests, two strengths: English and theology. Around the age of 15 or 16, I remember distinctly sitting in church, praying about my future. The question on my mind was: ‘Do I go the English route or the theology route? It seemed to be like a bifurcation on the road. And I got a fairly clear word from the Lord: ‘Both! You’re not going to have to choose. You’ll be able to ride two horses abreast, somehow.’ And that has proved to be the case.
Ever since he received his undergraduate degree from Oxford, Ward has been a steward of C.S. Lewis’s legacy. He has been a continual presence at the Oxford Lewis Society, written on Lewis’s theology, philosophy, and novels, and even had the privilege of unveiling his memorial plaque in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. Lesser scholars may find it strange to live in another scholar’s shadow. “He’s a giant and I’m a Pygmy in comparison!” Ward laughingly exclaims at one point in our conversation. And yet he has known considerable scholarly success, publishing six books on a range of topics that include Heresies and How to Avoid Them, The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, and most recently a critical exploration of Lewis’s Abolition of Man titled After Humanity. In his scholarship, Ward eschews an approach to literature that focuses exclusively on his own personal and emotional response: “I find that a bit self-obsessed and introverted: ‘Oh look at my bleeding heart, look at my sensitive soul!’” He opts instead for a union of literature and theology, as Lewis often did in his own works. Swirling his sweating glass of white wine in the heat, Ward continues:
A more theological approach to English literature brings it out of that slightly self-suffocating immersion in one’s own precious soul. It also works the other way around. A more literary and imaginative approach to theology stops it being dry and desiccated and excessively intellectual. It makes it live a bit and gives it purchase on one’s desires and artistic interests. Imaginative theology and theological imagination—the borderline between English and theology is where I’m most comfortable: that’s the sweet spot I like to inhabit.
*
Ward’s life journey has paralleled Lewis’s in more ways than one. Both studied at Oxford and held posts at Cambridge afterward, Lewis as a professor of Medieval and Renaissance English from 1955-1963, and Ward as a chaplain of Cambridge’s oldest college, Peterhouse, from 2004-2007. Ward lived at The Kilns, Lewis’s Oxford home for three years, occupying the late professor’s former bedroom and study. In a way, Lewis was even present at Ward’s Doctoral Thesis defense, or viva voce, which took place in the rooms at Cambridge’s Magdalene College, where Lewis himself lived and taught toward the end of his life. Ward recounts the scene: “I had my viva under a portrait of C.S. Lewis in the very study where he worked.” The painting hung there on the wall “like an umpire,” Ward claimed, overseeing the examiners and their pupil.
If Lewis had any part in umpiring Ward’s life from beyond the grave, he’s allowed him to continue to play the game. After enumerating the many similarities between their respective lives, Michael Ward pauses to reflect with a wry smile: “It’s getting to be a bit weird how much I’m following in his footsteps.” And though C.S. Lewis’s works are beloved by American Evangelicals, Ward feels he’s well positioned to write on Lewis’s work as an insider: “I have the advantage of knowing Oxford and Cambridge from within. I was raised Anglican, so I know that from within. I’m also British; I know that from within! And having English and theology as my two main subjects, I’m well positioned to get at some of Lewis’s literary and theological thinking.” He says this frankly, without any hint of pride.
*
Humility is one of Ward’s most apparent virtues. As he reflects on his role writing on and stewarding Lewis’s legacy, he recalls a moment when one afternoon he sat casually listening to a BBC radio dramatisation of The Silver Chair at The Kilns. As the tale wafted over the radio waves, he was struck by the realisation that he was sitting in the very room where Lewis had written the Narnia Chronicles. After several decades, Lewis’s words had completed their orbit and found a way home to the place where they first saw the light of day, and Ward was present to enjoy the circle being made complete.
He’s no stranger to these “coincidental” patterns in life that lead one to be keenly aware of one’s particular place in the grand scheme of things. As he researched his PhD thesis on Lewis at the University of St. Andrews, Ward noticed another pattern, this one to do with the relationship between the seven Chronicles of Narnia and the seven heavens of the medieval cosmos: “Lewis regarded the seven heavens as ‘spiritual symbols of permanent value’ and wrote about them extensively in his academic work, in his poetry, and in the Space Trilogy novels.” Ward posits that Lewis intended each book in the Narniad to embody and express one of these seven spiritual symbols, so that Jupiter—and its various influences and attributes, such as kingship and the passing of winter —provides the key to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Mars informs Prince Caspian; Sol (or the Sun) irradiates The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader;” Luna (the Moon) illumines The Silver Chair; Mercury articulates The Horse and his Boy; Venus gives life to The Magician’s Nephew; Saturn grounds The Last Battle. It was this discovery which revolutionized his doctoral dissertation and which led to his best-selling book Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press). This in turn became the subject of a BBC television documentary, The Narnia Code.
But such theories of the universe were debunked long before Lewis’s time—so how could he, a good scholar, rely on “bad” science, astrology, to inform his literary creations? Ward identifies a sort of religious observance at play in Lewis’s thought: “He considered Psalm 19 the greatest poem in the psalter: ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God.’ Stars can be considered scientifically, but once astronomers have told us what these celestial objects are made of and how much they weigh and how far away they are and how fast they move, is there nothing else to say? What about asking why they were made? Who made them, if anyone? Who might they have been made for, and why? Those questions are outside the remit of science. Such questions take us into the realm of the humanities, the arts, and ultimately religion.” Ward uncovered Lewis’s classicism and his love—as a medieval scholar— for myth hidden beneath the surface.
At several points in Planet Narnia, Ward refers to Lewis’s love for the poetry of Dante and, in particular, the final words of The Divine Comedy: “L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle—The love that moves the sun and the other stars.” This love and gratitude for Lewis’s life and legacy come through as Ward interprets the hand of Providence in his own life. He has dedicated his scholarship and his entire academic career to the study of C.S. Lewis. The initial love he had for Narnia as a little boy has set these other events irrevocably in motion.
*
As the sun finally frees us from its heat and begins to set behind Folly Bridge, Ward glances to the river, where the many boats have begun to turn homeward. Their reflections dance in each other’s wakes. He continues pensively: “Every door I’ve pushed on has opened in front of me: I’ve been amazingly blessed with all sorts of good things. Glory upon glory, blessing upon blessing, grace upon grace.”
Sarah Collister
Writer & Classical Educator
Find Michael Ward’s Work Here