Both as a Christian and as a writer C.S. Lewis provokes divided opinions and perhaps never more so than in two accounts of his conversion to Christianity, The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933) and Surprised by Joy (1955). My focus in this essay will be not so much with the theological destination of these narratives (although I touch on this occasionally), but rather with two subsidiary themes. One is the manner of the description of the journey - Lewis's rhetoric. The other is that Romantic longing which drives the journey and which provokes hermeneutical and interpretative questions that remain important for our understanding of Romanticism and its place in the religious quest. Conversion to Christianity for Lewis, in both The Pilgrim's Regress and Surprised by Joy, seems largely an intellectual process and an individual one at that. But more important than any intellectual conclusions that he comes to is Lewis's persistent exploration of the theme of 'joy' lying at the heart of both these works, emanating from that 'private' Romanticism which he was to speak of (in the Regress) as being located in 'a particular recurrent experience which dominated my childhood and adolescence and which I hastily called 'Romantic' because inanimate nature and marvellous literature were among the things that evoked it'.

Almost from its beginning the Bible deals in conflict and is soaked in blood. The enmity foretold between Eve and the serpent (Genesis 3:15) is translated by John Milton to the cosmic battle between the “Son of God Most High,” the fruit of Mary's womb, and the Serpent who can expect only “mortal pain.” Though traces remain in the Hebrew Bible of mythological stories of primeval warfare between the gods and the cosmic battle between good and evil, these are generally subsumed under the conditions of the Holy War in which Yahweh, the Lord of Hosts, fights for and at the head of his people against their enemies. Such imagery is later translated to the war of the Christian Church against the world, the flesh, and the devil under the banner of Christ. Blake, in “The Everlasting Gospel” (1818), has Jesus seize the “Spiritual Prey” and thus “he bound Old Satan in his Chain.”

The great song of Moses in Exodus 15:1-21 (with the briefer song of Miriam to accompany dances of victory) follows the defeat of Pharaoh's army in the Red Sea and, with its parallels in the Psalms, celebrates the triumph of God as warrior-king.

LITERATURE AND FILM

Literature

The outbreak of the Great War in 1914 marked the effective end of the nineteenth century, and with it the age of the great religious novel in Europe and its reflection on the shifting experience of Christianity after the Enlightenment and in the age of industrialisation, not least as the churches expanded globally with the growth of the colonial powers. The terrible years of the war destabilised and eroded theology and belief, and if the young English poet Wilfred Owen had already lapsed from his Christian faith even by 1913, his experiences at the front provoked a rage against the faith and a despair, later to be finely caught in Benjamin Britten’s setting of his poetry to music in the War requiem (1961), that was to herald the new century. At the same time the anxious literature of avant-garde modernism, with its attack on realism and mimesis, emerged in sceptical protest against the ‘totalizing religious and political frame-works of the nineteenth century’. Stephen, in James Joyce’s Stephen hero (1904-6) is told by a priest that his essay on ‘Art and life’ ‘represents the sum of modern unrest and modern freethinking’. Twenty years later, E. M. Forster in A passage to India (1924) allows only a minor role for the European missionaries in Chandrapore, India, and their ‘poor, chattering Christianity’.

INTRODUCTION

Most restoration ecologists have concerned themselves with the re-establishment of desirable plants and animals but generally overlook the resource base upon which the animal and plant communities are maintained, the soils. Reconstructing the soils is difficult because a soil comprises both organic and inorganic components that have weathered in situ for a very long time. As such, despite the best efforts, soils that have been reconstructed always contain early-successional characteristics (see Marrs, this volume). In most situations, the plants that colonise early-successional sites and are capable of surviving on these soils are not those that are considered desirable for restoration ‘success’. Restoration managers are primarily responsible for placing late seral vegetation into early seral soils.

Existing at the interface of plant and soil are soil organisms: the most diverse group of organisms at any site. Current estimates using molecular diversity measurements suggest that there are from 4000 to 40,000 distinct genetic populations of soil organisms per gram of soil, of which only less than 5% potentially may be cultured (e.g. Collins et al., 1995; Allen et al., in press)! No accurate estimates of soil organism richness across a landscape exist but it certainly is in the thousands to millions. These organisms change with successional time (many form highly specific associations with a limited number of plant species) in addition to their activities being altered due to discontinuous resource inputs (in the form of organic matter) and soil structural and compositional changes.

The twentieth century has seen a growing fascination with the Bible 'as literature', with an accompanying persistent sense of theological unease, apart from the obvious recognition that it is a collection of literary' texts having, in common with other literature, narratives, poems, epistles and so on. In 1935 T. S. Eliot suggested that when the Bible is discussed as 'literature' then its 'literary' influence is at an end, for it is far more than that. For T. R. Henn more recently, however, the phrase 'the Bible as literature' suggests a manner of approach to the reading of Scripture, and therefore also a means of assessment, one lightened of theology. As C. S. Lewis earlier wrote of the Authorized Version, 'it is very generally implied that those who have rejected its theological pretensions nevertheless continue to enjoy it as a treasurehouse of English prose'.