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Clive Staples Lewis (1898 - 1963). Credit John Chillingworth / Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty
The Guardian isn’t exactly renowned for covering the latest news about white, straight, relatively conservative, profoundly Christian men who died more than half-a-century ago. But it made an exception fairly recently in the case of CS Lewis, and for a story that wasn’t even especially important.
A few letters, it was reported, had been found from the Belfast-born author to a US scientist, discussing the tragic early death of the American’s son, and recalling the passing of Lewis’s wife. “You tell a most moving story. I too have lost what I most loved. Indeed unless we die young ourselves, we mostly do”, wrote Lewis. “We must die before them or see them die before us. And when we wish – and how agonizingly we do, o how perpetually! – it is entirely for ourselves, for our sakes not theirs.”
It was nothing that Lewis hadn’t in essence said before, but it showed yet again how in this age when we fetishise the blackening of whited sepulchers, Lewis seems to escape the purge. He was convinced that within five years of his death he would be forgotten, but since 1963 – he died on the same day as President Kennedy and Aldous Huxley – his influence has instead grown exponentially. His books sell in enormous numbers, films are made of them, and there has even been a play and then a movie, Shadowlands, about his late-life romance.
Lewis, author of the Narnia stories, Miracles, Till We have Faces, Surprised by Joy and so many other implicit and direct defences of Christianity has, up to now at least, largely escaped character attack because there’s just not very much ammunition for the usual assassins to exploit. Some of the female characters in his fiction are hardly champions of liberation, and he was a relatively typical product of his era, but little if anything stands out as a cause for concern. Not, of course, that this always matters to those who cancel therefore they are.
I’m not sure if it’s still there, but some years ago there was a poignant if seldom noticed symbol in The Kilns in Oxford, the long time home of Lewis. It was the outline of a mezuzah: the small container attached to the doorposts of Jewish homes, containing parchment on which is written the Shema. It was there because one of Lewis’s two stepsons had asked to adopt the birth faith of his late mother, Joy Davidman. Lewis, the world-renowned champion of Christianity, had asked Jewish friends how he could best accommodate the boy.
It was a gently noble gesture, and that decency, or goodness if you like, is particularly significant at Easter as Christians, inevitably, face the now standard taunts not only from social media atheists but from television cynics who really should have better and braver things to do.
Lewis was most prominent between the mid 1930s and early 60s and as such inhabited a dramatically different age — good Lord, the BBC couldn’t get enough of him! But a snobbish disdain for faith had already emerged, particularly in the universities where he taught. He addressed this in his 1952 book Mere Christianity, based on a series of highly popular radio broadcasts.
“There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of Heaven ridiculous by saying they do not want to spend eternity playing harps. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the Scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a mere symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”
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SubscribeI was not a Christian before I read Mere Christianity, nor one afterwards, but CS Lewis’ discussions of the nature of pride in particular were an eye-opener to my twenty-something self and I would wholeheartedly recommend that book to anyone of any faith. It is many years ago that I read it and it remains the most intelligent discussion of Christianity that I have encountered.
To my mind, Lewis represents the end of a bygone era that included the likes of Tolkien, Muggeridge, Whitehouse and Vaughan Williams. Cultural Christians, even if not card carrying pew fillers , so beloved of the likes of Runcie or Welby
Lewis is a curates egg, so brilliant insight and some lazy old fogey posturings. Personal taste and your own spiritual readiness or timings tend to fix you in regard of where you stand. And that is the mark of an intellectual titan , like Lewis.
Like Orwell, you end up having to reckon with Lewis and his brilliant wife at some stage, if you want to make sense of early 21st C ” English Christianity”. The world chose the broad road with JFK, but the day he died was the same one as Lewis.
G-ds megaphone to a dead and dying world, you might say!
I still think, after many years, and perhaps even more so in the light of recent history, that the third book in his SF trilogy, That Hideous Strength, remains the most powerful and perceptive criticism of modernism and materialism in 20th century fiction. You don’t have to be a Christian or even a religious person to get it, although it helps. He pulled no punches and took no prisoners. He made you think.
I’ll comment by way of a question. A question that was the cause of heresy the beginning of the Christian Era. The divinity of Christ. Discuss!
We have been, for 2,000 years 😂 thé case remains open, although for what it’s worth, I think he was a human being, who realised he had a Father, as we all do (or Mother, obviously)
Last year the mother of a friend of mine was put to death with lethal doses of morphine and propofol, similar to what death row inmates are administered, in a Montreal hospital. This was in violation of her express wish, conveyed in writing, that she continue to receive care if she went into a coma. The hospital believed that death was inevitable anyway, which her family members dispute. She was one of the victims of our Liberal government’s new assisted dying legislation. The CBC, as is its wont, wrote an erroneous report on the case, which stated her treatment plan was changed by the hospital rather than that she was put to death. My friend tried to get Michael Coren to write something about this outrage, but the great man declined, in a response taken up in large part by an ad for one of his books. I was curious what was so important that he had not time to write about the killing of a Coptic Christian immigrant from Egypt put to death in her adopted country against her will and the wishes of her husband and children. I guess this was it.
CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy remains, for me, one of the most poignant, imaginative and disturbing of any fiction I’ve read. First off, the sense of colour and atmosphere is astoundingly vivid, almost lucid-like as in a dream. The second book has that odd Roger Dean-like landscape of floating islands in oceans, much like that strange little creepy island in the Life of Pi, you know, the one where you need to shelter in the trees at night because the vegetation turns acid. That Hideous Strength, the third book, is totally different from the other two and warrants much more of a heavier read. It’s very dark but odd again. Talking animals, dangerous wells haunted by Merlin and black-stocking-clad vicious Nazi women.