A giant in the Valiant-for-Truth wars, Lewis published not only works of theology and apologetics, but also science fiction, literary scholarship, and seven books for children, The Chronicles of Narnia. He fitted in all this despite domestic difficulties and a full schedule of lecturing and tutoring, first at Oxford (1925-1954), where he had been an undergraduate, and then at Cambridge as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature from 1954 until his death in 1963.
Since Lewis had been an atheist, converted only in 1931, he understood some of the problems of unbelievers through his own experience. He attributed to this his invitations to lecture, first to the RAF and then to the BBC. But, of course, it was the robustness of his faith and the clarity of his ideas and their expression which made him popular. He was al-ways speaking or writing as a layman to laymen, setting himself in the centre of the Christian faith, so that he has been praised both by the pope and by Billy Graham. In the course of a critical disagreement with T.S. Eliot (Preface to Paradise Lost) he wrote: 'I agree with him about matters of such moment that all literary questions are, in comparison, trivial.'
Two of his books, The Problem of Pain (1940) and Miracles (1947) were aimed at particular problems in theological discussion, then and now. The mystery of how evil can exist if God is good puzzles many people, and Lewis does not claim to have a complete explanation, but he makes helpful suggestions. Miracles takes an orthodox view in response to those who were attempting to empty the Christian gospel of miraculous elements in order to accommodate secular thinking.
Readable righteousness
The Screwtape Letters (1942) involve a fictional treatment of temptation, in the form of a series of letters from Screwtape, an elderly devil in hell's civil service, to his junior, Wormwood, whose work is to tempt a young Christian. C.E.M. Joad, in reviewing the book, said that Mr. Lewis 'possesses the rare gift of being able to make righteousness readable'.
He was also able to make Christian doctrine 'listenable'. His talks for the BBC (1941) were later expanded and published (1952) as Mere Christianity, including not only Broadcast Talks, but also Christian Behaviour and Beyond Personality. Lewis did a great deal to persuade his readers how reasonable Christian belief is. He did not believe that reason could take one all the way to faith, but he did believe that there is nothing unreasonable about that faith. When Freudianism came in like a flood, Lewis pointed out that if Christian belief simply answered the psychological needs of believers, what better foundation did psychoanalysts have? He never put the believer on the defensive.
Lewis was not a pacifist. He joined the army during the First World War, was wounded in the trenches, and recuperated in hospitals in England. During the Second World War, he was a fire watcher. There are references to the war in many of the early essays. Perhaps it was the nearness to death of many of the young servicemen to whom he lectured, but Lewis was always keenly aware of the prospect of heaven or hell, and of the need for conversion. 'What is the good of telling ships how to steer so as to avoid collisions, if, in fact, they're such crazy old tubs that they can't be steered at all?' (Christian Behaviour). His best-known sermon on heaven, 'The Weight of Glory', was preached in St. Mary's, Oxford, in 1941.
Lewis published other books on apologetics: The Pilgrim's Regress (1933); The Abolition of Man (1943); The Great Divorce (1944) - like Screwtape, a fantasy; Reflections on the Psalms (1958); and The Four Loves (1960).
Intensely personal
Besides these reasoned expositions of faith, Lewis also wrote some intensely personal books: Surprised by Joy (1955), his spiritual autobiography; and A Grief Observed (1961) after the death of his wife Joy from cancer. This latter was so personal that he published it under a pseudonym, N.W. Clerk. Some readers found the book so helpful that they actually sent copies to Lewis, hoping it might help him in his own bereavement.
Despite the evidence of all this writing, Lewis was never a solitary man. From about 1930 to 1963, he was the centre of a group of writers and scholars who used to get together once a week in his rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford. Charles Williams and J.R.R. Tolkien were among this fellowship, and they used to read one another's works aloud. They called themselves the Inklings, and this group was an encouragement to all the writers involved.
A sense of sin and the past
Lewis had been interested in science fiction since he was a boy, reading H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Later he decided that other planets would make good sites for 'spiritual adventures', and these became the subjects of his own science fictions. He published Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and The Dark Tower (1977). Suppose on another planet the Fall could have been averted? Even some critics who did not like his orthodoxy liked his books.
Lewis subtitled That Hideous Strength as 'A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups' and described it as a 'tall story about devilry'. The Abolition of Man makes a good introduction to the book, and some knowledge of the Arthurian Legends. Another book which needs prior knowledge of myths is Till we have Faces. This was Lewis' favourite of all his books, but a failure with the public, probably because it assumed a knowledge of the story of Cupid and Psyche. Some recent critical opinion has come round to back Lewis' judgment.
Lewis himself had already marked a decline in a sense of sin among his contemporary audience, and also of any useful sense of the past. He himself thought that the ancient myths sometimes showed a gleam of truth later more fully revealed in Christianity.
Scholarly works
Besides his apologetic and science fiction books, Lewis was also writing scholarly works to do with his profession. He wrote the volume on the 16th century for the Oxford History of English Literature. On a more popular level, he wrote A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) seeking to justify the ways of Milton to modern man. Here he included a section on the 'reasonable' submission of women to their husbands. The Allegory of Love traced the courtly love code from the French troubadours to the Elizabethans, finding in Spenser and Shakespeare support for the idea of Christian marriage. Medieval research has since moved on, but this may be considered a pioneer work.
An Experiment in Criticism (1961) and The Discarded Image took Lewis into the arena of contemporary literary criticism, a minefield, where he rushed in with characteristic vigour, defending both his faith and his view of literature with enthusiasm. The Discarded Image deals with medieval man's way of looking at the world.
The land of Narnia
All this - his apologetics, his theological fantasies, his science fiction, and his scholarship, and I have not even mentioned the seven Chronicles of Narnia, beloved of children from the time they were published (1959-1965). Recently, the BBC has been dramatising them in their Sunday afternoon children's slot, and they have claimed new enthusiasts.
Lewis defended the fairy-tale as more realistic in content than ego-flattering school stories for the child. 'Fairyland arouses a longing for he knows not what' and gives him 'the dim sense of something beyond his reach' (Hooper, p.399). 'I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I think the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings' (Hooper, p.400). Lewis went on to say that by stripping away their Sunday School associations, he could get past that initial barrier.
A student told me that as a child she had loved the Narnia books without ever knowing they had any meaning except as good stories. Later, when she became a Christian, she saw them in a different light, and even thought they might have contributed to her conversion. During the war, Lewis took many young evacuees into his home, and enjoyed having them. Perhaps they contributed to the realistic dialogue in his children's books.
Young or old, many of us owe a debt to Lewis which we can never repay. This centenary should give us an opportunity to look back in thanksgiving. In 1996, Walter Hooper, who had been Lewis' last secretary, published C.S. Lewis, a Companion and Guide, a labour of love indeed. The book includes a biography, and a summary and discussions of each of his books, a careful work of scholarship easily available in a paperback from Fount, an imprint of Harper and Collins.
Mary Burke
Cambridge
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