Cosmic Summer or Unimaginable Zero Summer: The Clash of Cataphatic and Apophatic Visions in the Creative Works of C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot

This article will explore C.S. Lewis's via positiva and T.S. Eliot's via negativa principally as it is reflected in the authors’ creative works. The first half will treat Eliot and the consistent presence of apophaticism in his poetry – which the article will frame as Eliot's pursuit both of a pure poetic speech and of pure spirit; it will trace this quality in his poetry from his early work, including ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, all the way through to Four Quartets. The second half will treat the consistent presence of cataphaticism in Lewis's creative work, focussing, most especially, on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Last Battle and The Great Divorce. This part will simultaneously contrast the creative writings of Lewis just mentioned with those of Eliot, and – introducing several relevant Lewis-Eliot dichotomies (for example, continuity versus discontinuity; enlargement versus annihilation; the goodness or not of ordinary things – endeavours to show how Lewis's vision of ‘cosmic summer’, as we see it unfold in his Narnia tales, differs meaningfully from Eliot's vision of ‘unimaginable/ Zero summer’ in Four Quartets.