A Compass for Deep Heaven - A Review
There is version of academic work that focuses mainly on how the author handles secondary works. This leads to the sort of reviews that argue that, though the focus of a book or essay was a particular author, if someone didn’t specifically reference another author’s book or essay that they have somehow failed as a scholar. Worse would be if someone did read the approved sources and still managed to come to a different reading of the original source.
Such petty narrowmindedness exists within many different guilds of scholarship. It is a reflection of scholarship for the sake of prestige rather than for its own sake.
There are, of course, important essays and books that should be dealt with as appropriate. It would be tiresome to begin always in the same place, so that every new work had to pretend like nothing had every previously been written or said. Good scholarship often builds on previous work. But if an essay deals meaningfully with the text or topic in question, counting footnotes and checking the bibliography to measure quality is tacky.
A recent volume by a group of undergraduates was a refreshing glimpse into what thoughtful scholarship can look like, when one does not get lost in the weeds of secondary literature. In A Compass for Deep Heaven, a collection of honors students from Azusa Pacific University demonstrates thoughtful exploration of a topic without cluttering the notes with excessive commentary about the commentary.
The volume offers an accessible introduction to C. S. Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy, which is often referred to as the Space Trilogy. For many, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, remain unexplored territory in the literature of Lewis. They get neglected in favor of Narnia, Mere Christianity, and some of his more popular collections of essays. These three volumes, however, offer impressive illustrations of Lewis’ ideas and are an imaginative rebuttal to the illnesses of modernity. Due to the number of cultural allusions, the references to other works of science fiction, and the strangeness of the third volume, the Space Trilogy is often only slightly less neglected than Lewis’ scholarly work.
Part of the pleasure of reading A Compass for Deep Heaven is that the authors keep their focus on the work under consideration. They use sources to amplify their arguments and bring readers deeper into Lewis’ work. Really, the only signs that they authors are undergraduates is the lack of terminal degrees in their biographies, a note about the volume being published by their university initially, and the fact that the authors were less concerned with padding the notes than making their point.
This is a good book. May more books with this tone increase. And, more significantly, may books like this draw more people into the work of C. S. Lewis.
NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume with no expectation of a positive review.
The way we talk about humans also has moral implications, which are more significant than how we treat our pets. In his 2011 book, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith explores how language changes culture and leads to the justification of extreme violence against others, especially when they become perceived as less than human.