(children’s stories, 1950–56)
When C. S. Lewis gave a copy of the rough draft of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to the wife of one of his good friends, he asked her for any helpful advice she might have to give. She liked the book, she said, but she was worried that children might take the story too literally and might get themselves trapped in a wardrobe. Lewis took her concerns seriously and provided no less than five warnings about this danger in the text of the finished book. But even with all those warnings, Lewis learned from a fan letter about one young reader who was caught by his mother with an axe in his hand, busily chopping the back out of the wardrobe in his parents’ room!
Narnia has this kind of profound effect on its readers. They want it to be real. One of my friends, now in her fifties, has actually read The Chronicles of Narnia every year since she was a child. Narnia is like a second home to her.
These stories, Lewis tells us, started with images he saw in his imagination.
All my seven Narnia books began with seeing pictures in my head. . . . The Lion began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was 16. Then one day, when I was about 40, I said to myself, “Let’s try and make a story about it.”1
But it was only when Lewis envisioned Aslan, the mighty lion who serves as a Christ-figure in the books, that the stories really took flight.
Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams about lions about that time. Apart from that, 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.2
On initial examination, The Chronicles of Narnia may seem like simple children’s tales, with talking animals, witches, and young boys and girls discovering their inner strength and courage. They are that, but they are also much more. In the midst of these stories the reader is always aware that something magical, something supernatural, might just break through at any moment. One can feel the breath of the great lion Aslan rustling through these pages as the story of Lucy, Peter, Susan, and Edmund echoes that of the grand story of redemption.
In speaking of his Narnia tales, Lewis wondered if, by stripping the Christian doctrines of their stained glass and Sunday school associations, he could “steal past the watchful dragons” of religiosity and dogmatism. So the Narnia books are constructed to prepare children for understanding the meaning of the Christian story later, when they are old enough to embrace it, while at the same time resonating with the childlike heart in each of us.
Many Christians tend to think of Lewis primarily as an intellectual communicator. They value the way his writing makes Christianity reasonable and sensible. And Lewis was truly very good at this kind of communication. He used rational argument very effectively and he knew how to appeal to our common sense with intriguing illustrations. But Lewis also knew that there was another deeper and more mysterious level on which humans needed to be addressed, so he remythologized the gospel, creating new stories that could communicate the truths of the “old, old story.” By communicating in this way he could reach all people: the educated and the ignorant, the adult and the child, the scholar and the chimney sweep.
One of Lewis’s great gifts was to be able to effectively embody the gospel in story, in myth, in analogy, and in allegory so that we might see the truth with fresh eyes. He does this again and again throughout his writings. He gives flesh to our theological abstractions, and by dressing them in new garb he makes them palatable and strikingly fresh, so that readers don’t feel they are being spoon-fed theology as though it were some kind of medicine. And perhaps this allows readers to really hear such truths for the first time.
Lewis had the ability in his writing to capture those transcendent moments that can occur when we come face-to-face with something bigger than ourselves, the hint of a realm beyond our ordinary lives. Through the doorway of his prose we step from our world into another territory, a realm suffused with a holy mystery. In Lewis’s best moments his reader receives a sense of God breaking into the story—not the tame and tidy God of our creeds but the God of mystery and majesty and holiness.
C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1898 and grew up with his brother, Warren, in a seemingly idyllic world filled with books. But that all vanished when his mother died of cancer and he was sent to England for schooling. In short order he lost his belief in God and became a professing atheist. Part of his education was conducted via a private tutorship with William Kirkpatrick, his father’s former tutor, who taught Lewis to be a rigorous thinker and confirmed him in his religious skepticism. In 1916, armed with his estimable intellectual gifts, which had been finely honed by Kirkpatrick, Lewis accepted a scholarship to University College, Oxford, though his academic life was temporarily interrupted by the First World War, when he was seriously injured. After convalescence he was able to return to his studies and then begin an academic career that would stretch throughout his life, first at Oxford then later at Cambridge.
Lewis had grown up in a churchgoing family but found that his formal religious experience as a young man seemed superficial compared to the powerful Romantic feelings he drew from nature, literature, and mythology. By age fifteen he had become an atheist who described himself as “very angry with God for not existing.”
Two great writers of the previous generation, George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton, had an enormous influence upon Lewis, as reading their work initiated his slow journey toward faith. While waiting for a train on a frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station he needed something to read, so he purchased a copy of MacDonald’s Phantastes, a book he devoured with great joy and later described as having “baptized” his imagination. In MacDonald he found some of the mythic qualities he so valued in Romantic literature, but here they were rooted in MacDonald’s Christian convictions. Reading Phantastes was, for Lewis, not only a literary experience but a spiritual one as well. He sensed a certain quality that drew him toward the book, though at the time he could not articulate precisely what it was. Reflecting later, he wrote, “I did not know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow . . . I do now. It was holiness.”3
The glimpses of holiness Lewis saw in MacDonald were complemented by his discovery of the joyous rationality of Chesterton, the engaging author of novels, short stories, poetry, theological musings, and essays on issues of the day. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (a history of the human race written in response to H. G. Wells’s wildly popular and antireligious The Outline of History) was particularly helpful to Lewis. If MacDonald had moved Lewis’s imagination toward faith, the effect of Chesterton was to cause him to begin to question the rational basis of his skepticism and unbelief.
Lewis found himself caught between a love for all things magical and mythological and a philosophic position that reduced existence to chance and ultimate meaninglessness. These two tendencies could exist in tension within him for only so long. Through the intellectual thrust and parry of frequent religious debates with Christian friends such as Owen Barfield and J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis moved toward theism. The theistic position began to make much more sense out of reality as he experienced it, and drew together the poles of reason and imagination. But he did not want to mindlessly assent to some sort of wish fulfillment for consolation, so his journey to faith was a drawn-out intellectual and spiritual struggle within himself. He later said that he was brought to Christianity like a prodigal, “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape.”4
But he could not escape the conclusion to which he was coming—that there was a God.
You must picture me alone in that room . . . night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted for even a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.5
Two years later Lewis moved from theism to a full embrace of Christianity. His road to faith had been a long and arduous path, taking him through many of the central philosophical systems of the twentieth century, but he emerged as a man thoroughly convinced and willing to use his intellectual and literary gifts to convince others of what he had come to embrace as the truth.
What followed from Lewis’s pen was a collection of books that are still widely read, influential, and respected as unusually creative and reasonable expressions of orthodox Christianity. These included Mere Christianity (1952), based upon his wartime radio talks on morality and faith, The Screwtape Letters (1942), with its profound grasp of the psychology of evil and temptation, The Abolition of Man (1943), which warned of the dangers of relativism and subjectivism in modern thought, and The Problem of Pain (1940), his meditations on a perennial theological puzzle: the nature of suffering and evil.
In addition to these more apologetic works, Lewis penned an autobiography (Surprised by Joy, 1955), science fiction (The Space Trilogy, 1938–45), children’s fantasy (The Chronicles of Narnia, 1950–56), theological parables (The Great Divorce, 1945), literary criticism, and the mythically and psychologically rich novel Till We Have Faces (1956).
During his lifetime Lewis became recognized as Britain’s foremost defender of Christian faith and values, largely due to his combining a witty and winsome writing style with a rigorous and passionate rationality. For those who were used to only hearing the Christian message expressed with earnest emotional appeal and fiery rhetoric, Lewis was a bracing and persuasive voice of reason. And those who were accustomed to religious writing that was contentious, boring, and ponderous found that Lewis wrote with humor, respect for those with whom he disagreed, and an engaging aura of common sense. He showed little interest in participating in the theological battles that various denominations waged against each other and strove instead to communicate a vision of “mere” Christianity based on the essentials. And he did this all with a creative flourish.
Through both fiction and nonfiction, Lewis was an effective proponent of traditional Christianity. He believed in the truth of the orthodox creeds, and he made these truths come alive for his readers. He managed to communicate with a combination of rationality, imagination, and a sense of the mysterious, holy otherness of God as few writers before or since have managed.