C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) is one of the most influential and celebrated Christian writers and thinkers in modern times. He is also perhaps one of the unlikeliest. An Oxford intellectual steeped in ancient and medieval literature, a belligerent atheist and anti-Christian, a product of a progressive era’s smug assurance that God was superfluous at best, Lewis’s conversion and dedication to the cause of Christ is a fascinating and instructive story. Alan Jacobs tells the tale engagingly and provocatively in The Narnian (HarperOne, 2005).
Jacobs’s purposes deviate somewhat from other Lewis biographers. He seeks to understand Lewis’s inner life, his search for joy and meaning, the types of stories he loved that played a key role in his extraordinary metamorphosis. The subtitle, The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis, is instructive. Jacobs makes clear that a big part of Lewis’s genius and contribution to the way many Christians see the world today was his ability to imagine what most overlook.
A characteristic Lewis argument about the nature of reality: A man’s physical hunger does not prove that he will get bread; he might die of starvation. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that man repairs his body by eating, and he lives in a world where food exists. Relatedly, humanity’s desires argue for the existence of something to meet those cravings. Why would we crave love, or beauty, or myth if those things didn’t point to something at the heart of reality? Or, as his friend J.R.R. Tolkien put it, “Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream?” If materialist philosophers were right, if everything is explainable as a series of naturalistic random steps, what planted in humans a longing for Joy itself? Why do we lament the world and its disappointments and injustices, if we have no basis for expecting better? Where does our concept of justice even come from? If we were honest with ourselves, we’d admit that in a purely materialistic world the concepts of justice and love and joy are meaningless.
The Narnia books have had extraordinary reach, especially considering that they were somewhat short children’s books whose author did not have children and was little exposed to them. If you haven’t read them, you should consider doing so, no matter your age. The books are chock full of Christian themes and Lewis’s theological views. But he did not start with an apologetic intent. He composed a story largely from the characters and images that had bounced in his head for many years, and out of the storytelling flowed deep theology. One could say that his friend Tolkien did something similar with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien’s writing, however, was far more nuanced. He disliked the Narnia books because he thought them too much of a blunt instrument. For his part, Lewis adored Lord of the Rings.
The development of Narnia’s Aslan, the Christ-like figure, is telling. The story had been percolating in Lewis’s mind for some time before Aslan appeared. But the great Lion did turn up in the author’s imagination, and once he did, Lewis followed where he led. Here’s how he put it in retrospect:
“At first I have very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it…I don’t know where the Lion came from or why He came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after Him.”
Jacobs explores in depth the fascinating story of the role imagination played in Lewis’s conversion and subsequent writing, especially in the Narnia tales.
The influence and range or Lewis’s writing is staggering. Jacob’s biography gives inside looks at an extraordinary mind shaped by the gospel. Essays, science fiction, enchanting children’s stories, capacious overviews of medieval literature, laying bare his agony after his wife’s death, compelling apologetics, fictional musing of heaven, hell, and demonic conversations – C.S. Lewis took it all on. It’s safe to say that no other contemporary Christian thinker is more quoted on Sunday mornings, in books or articles, in talks of all kinds, than C.S. Lewis. Partly that is surely due to his skill at putting complex topics into accessible, engaging language that results in compelling arguments. A case in point is his influential and justly famous Mere Christianity.
That book originated as a series of BBC radio talks given during World War 2. The head of the BBC religion department thought that there would be a need in Britain, in the dark and uncertain early days of the war, for a series of broadcasts that explored ultimate answers to life’s mysteries. Lewis was chosen to give the talks due to a series of chance circumstances. The (mostly) live broadcasts would make him famous.
Lewis’s theological convictions cannot of course be reduced to a single idea, but many of his most-quoted thoughts relate to his anti-materialist position that there is infinitely more to the universe than meets the eye. The record of human literature and philosophy, the whole of experience, was a persistent pointer to an irrepressible, otherworldly Joy.
Per Jacobs, “Perhaps the greatest resource on which he draws—and it is a mighty one—is, simply, delight. He calls us to take note of what gives us pleasure, for, though our pleasures can indeed lead us astray, they are in their proper form great gifts from God.”
Perhaps more than most, Lewis could take great pleasure in God-given delights of this world. He dearly loved his friends, once declaring that the sound that gave him the most joy was “adult male laughter.” He savored his pipe and his books. To those who would criticize such enthusiasms as not suitable for a Christian, he would say, “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”
Lewis wanted us to know that a modern person could greatly enjoy reading books that were hundreds of years old. They were written by people different from us, but not that different. And if we happen to enjoy them, we are more likely to absorb their ancient wisdom.
C.S. (he preferred to be called ‘Jack’) Lewis’s childhood, indeed entire life, was profoundly shaped by the death of his mother when he was ten. It was a devastating loss. Jack later concluded that his sense of security, of things being settled, was now lost forever. He and his brother, Warnie, each had difficult a relationship with their father. Warnie and Jack retreated on the many rainy Irish days of their youth to the playroom, where their fertile imaginations created new worlds full of adventures. Some of the characters and events in the Narnia stories were born in that playroom.
Jacobs sees Lewis’s writings as ways to resist the disenchantment of the world, that is, disenchantment with the mystery and beauty that pointed to something infinitely above and beyond us. But in his great sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis explains that modern society had been enchanted by something else entirely, something entirely sinister. He said:
“And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.”
Who cast this spell? He blamed educators and others with “the control of language.” “Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice” that tells us that true Joy lies beyond this world.
In the intervening years since Lewis offered this diagnosis, Western culture has only become more secular and materialistic (meaning the rejection of the possibility of truth beyond what is tangible and observable here and now). One wonders what brilliant observations and arguments a man of Lewis’s gifts and convictions would employ in today’s cultural moment.
His was the life of the mind and imagination. He was a foremost expert of human culture across the millennia. He saw that human literature had always had certain themes and frames, at least until the modern secular project had attempted to “control the language.” His deep integrity led him to saving faith. He could not live without taking his observations about the universe to their logical conclusion. For a time, he believed that approach inexorably led to atheism. To his great credit, he came to critique his own motives and consistency. Famously, he thought that the reality of suffering in the world (he had experienced his share) meant that God could not be loving and all-powerful. Why wouldn’t a just and loving God intervene to reduce his creation’s suffering? But then Lewis had a new thought: Where had he got the ideas of justice, love, fairness, evil and all the rest? If the universe was random, there would be no reason humanity would even wrestle with such concepts. The universe would be just there, cold, uncaring, remote, random. Of course, atheists often say they believe that that is exactly what reality is like. But Lewis would say that none of them live that way. Everyone believes some things should not be done to them by others, out of a vague sense of “fairness” or “justice.” Lewis would say that virtually all human culture is premised on this sense, to one degree or another. He came to understand that the belief in love, justice, and all the rest of our common framework had to originate from outside us. Much of his storytelling is motivated by pondering how that idea plays out in our world.
C.S. Lewis had the courage and integrity to attempt to look at the world objectively and imaginatively. He could see repetitive themes in ancient and medieval literature. One such theme was the shape of great heroic stories, where some champion outsider came to save the day, at great cost, often the cost of his life. It was Tolkien, also an expert on ancient literature and a Christian, who prompted Lewis to consider that this was no random coincidence. Perhaps, Tolkien suggested, the stories as myth were pointing to the great story. Hadn’t Christ, the ultimate champion, had voluntary left paradise to suffer and die to save humanity from the pit of despair, to make Joy possible? It was the question that soon led Lewis to convert to Christianity.
It was a complete conversion. Jacobs observes that his writing changed dramatically almost overnight. This man of imagination could now see that the Joy and meaning he’d longed for were no mere neurotic, ephemeral whispers. For him, belief in Christ opened his eyes to ultimate reality:
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
If we were built to know and enjoy God, everything was changed. Suffering and evil remained, but they could be redeemed in unimaginably wonderful ways. The fleeting pleasure of this world were just hints of the real thing waiting for those in Christ. Here’s how he inimitably expressed it in The Weight of Glory:
“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it…
For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy.
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in.”
The Narnian will give almost any reader a richer perspective on C.S. Lewis. It’s a story of a man with exquisite gifts who faithfully used them to advance the gospel of Christ with adoration and wonder. And if my experience is typical, many who read this book will be motivated to pick up Lewis’s works, whether for the first or thousandth time.