December 09, 2005, 10:08 a.m.
Our Need for Such a Guide
C. S. Lewis for the ages.

By Eugene McGovern

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is excerpted from Remembering C.S. Lewis, edited by James T. Como, published by Ignatius Press.

Twenty-five years ago a good number of people were already saying that C. S. Lewis was the most effective apologist for Christianity in this century. The passage of time often has a way of making such judgments seem hasty, but this one could be made today with more confidence than ever. Enough new readers discover Lewis to keep very nearly all his large output in print and his sales at about two million copies per year.

or example, began reading Lewis shortly before he died. The impression he made was immediate and profound, and it has proved to be lasting. I am one of those who were fascinated by Screwtape, were soon pestering people with quotations from The Problem of Pain, and then were pressing Perelandra on those who would still patiently hear about the author we had found. Chad Walsh said it very well: "It was as though I had discovered a new ingredient in my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual diet that I had unconsciously desired but had not previously found." I have gone on to become one of those readers to whom Lewis's publishers are grateful: readers who have read very little Milton but have read A Preface to Paradise Lost; whose knowledge of English literature in the sixteenth century, whether including or excluding drama, is limited to Lewis's Oxford History volume; and who will die without having read Spenser, though they have read The Allegory of Love.

Lewis Meet-Ups

There are thousands upon thousands of readers around the world whose responses to Lewis have been the same as mine, and it is not surprising that many of us have come together in groups devoted to discussion of his work. The oldest of these is the New York C. S. Lewis Society, founded by those of us who responded to a brief note placed by Henry Noel in National Review in September 1969. Then a New Yorker and now living in France, Henry Noel provided most of the energy behind the society during the first eighteen months of its existence. The society has grown steadily over the years and now has members in almost all the states and in well over a dozen countries overseas. We have been fortunate to have had the cooperation and encouragement of those who knew or who wrote about Lewis. Our most memorable meetings have been those addressed by Owen Barfield and Walter Hooper, occasions for which some members traveled several hundred miles. Paul Holmer, Christopher Derrick, Thomas Howard, and Jane Douglass have also been among the guest speakers at the meetings....

What might Lewis have had to say about this society? I am sure he would have tried to dissuade us and would have urged us to study instead Scripture, Malory, Hooker, Augustine, Vergil, Dante, Aquinas, and Milton. But after we insisted that it was to be his works we would be studying, I think he would be relieved to know that the society receives no support from any source other than its membership, and that its Bulletin accepts no advertising and stubbornly ignores inflation by maintaining the price of $7.00 per year that was set in 1970. And I suspect that he would be wryly amused to learn that the details of business are handled for the society by a committee titled the Eldila and that for several years the monthly meetings were held at the Rudolf SteinerSchool.

More importantly, we like to think that Lewis would be gratified that the society exhibits certain characteristics that I mention only with some diffidence and hesitation: diffidence because they are delicate and subtle things; hesitation because they could be easily damaged. There is in the society a sense of community all too rare in most of our lives and an acknowledgment that an interest in Lewis goes far toward establishing a friendship. There is, further, an example of Lewis's Principle of Inattention: we find that, by coming together quite matter-of-factly to discuss an author in whom we share an interest, we are led to the discovery that we are in agreement on the fundamental things. That is the kind of discovery that can best be made indirectly — by inferences, jokes, off hand remarks, allusions, by what appear to be digressions from the topic under discussion — and that will often elude the frontal approach in which we attempt to make all presuppositions explicit. It is the kind of discovery we make about one another not by giving formal statements of our beliefs but by responding to such passages as, "No one is told any story but his own", "My name also is Ransom", and "Sometimes it is hard not to say 'God forgive God.'. . . But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him."

Is there an "explanation" for the continued interest in Lewis's work and for the existence of such a thing as the New York C. S. Lewis Society? If a sociologist were to write a monograph with the title "Literary Enthusiasm among the Nonliterary: Etiology and Symptomatology in Admirers of C. S. Lewis", might there be someone, somewhere, who would be interested in reading it? Perhaps, but any such explanation would be one obtained by looking at the phenomenon and so could not be as revealing as one obtained by looking along it. And it is by looking along the continued interest in Lewis that I will try to provide some reasons why so many of us have reported that we owe far more to Lewis than we do to any teacher or to any other author whom we have ever known.

Behind the Attraction

The first thing to be said about the source of Lewis's appeal is that he is a very fine writer. His scholarship, his storytelling, and his apologetics have all been highly praised for the technical skill of their execution. Even those readers who have no sympathy with the content of his work have been ready to say that Lewis's meaning is always clear — all too clear for some of them, it seems. His writing is, moreover, witty and provocative: the reader is forced into either agreement or disagreement. His dialectical skills are impressive, and he is as expert in advancing his own view as he is willing to be fair to the opposition. Finally, there is a subtle quality by which Lewis unobtrusively flatters his reader with unspoken encouragement: he allows us to feel, at least for the time we are reading him, that The Faerie Queene is just what we would like to read next or that Teutonic myths are an important part of our intellectual landscapes.

But there has to be more to Lewis's extraordinary appeal than technical skill, however polished. After all, there are a good number of faultless stylists, some of them, though not enough, writing from the same Christian standpoint as Lewis's. What is his special appeal?

A second source of Lewis's appeal is the simple reassurance that his readers obtain from knowing that a distinguished career in secular learning was comfortably combined with steadfast belief in orthodox Christianity. Lewis is a noteworthy example of the fact that an intelligent modern man can find Christian doctrine thoroughly credible, and such knowledge is useful when we are dealing with certain intellectual bullies. But quite a number of other authors provide examples of that fact, and few of them have won the following that Lewis has. So what was, and is, special about Lewis?

A third source lies in Lewis's ability to dissect various enthusiasms and follies of the twentieth century, and he not only did his share of this valuable work but also went on to the next job: the one that Newman pointed to in his remark, "False ideas may be refuted indeed by argument, but by true ideas alone are they expelled." Walter Hooper has described Lewis's work in this area as follows:

Lewis's genuine and enduring value — that which continues to endear him to a growing number of readers — lies in his ability not only to do combat but to cleanse: to provide for the mind an authentic vision of the Faith which purges and replaces error, uncertainty and especially the presumptuousness of those who, as Lewis says . . . "claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight."

Lewis insisted, of course, that the ideas that he enabled his readers to appreciate as they never had before were in no sense new, that they were very old and were not original with him. His readers knew this, and they knew that many other authors were trying to do the same thing. So why were Lewis's efforts so successful while other authors' are now forgotten?

There's Something About Lewis

These are some of the reasons Lewis continues to exert the influence he does. But I am not sure that, even taken together, they provide a satisfactory explanation for that influence. I am not sure they answer the questions, "Why are his readers so fervent?" "Why do they, learned or not, read and reread his books?" I would prefer to formulate the answer as follows: Lewis convinces his readers that he is the most reliable guide they have found on the subjects that matter most. Does God exist? Is there a spiritual reality that transcends the material world accessible to our senses? If so, what is our place in that spiritual reality? Other than scientific reasoning, is there any intellectually legitimate means of obtaining knowledge of the world we inhabit? Is moral reasoning only an expression of taste or opinion? What are we to make of Christ? There are no surprises in this list, and there are no surprises in the answers Lewis gave. His answers are the ones that have been given by thousands of expositors of Christianity since Saint Paul.

The surprise comes from the responses his readers had, and have, to Lewis's conventional responses to these familiar questions. Great numbers of his readers have been stunned and awed and grateful to read Lewis's presentation of the beliefs they (many of them) had encountered in hundreds of sermons and classrooms and books. They find that he has encountered their difficulties and dealt with them, that he has anticipated their objections and has articulated them better than they could. It is not too much to say that (as has been said of Dr. Johnson) he convinces his readers that however far they go he has been there before them and they are meeting him on his way back, back from having addressed these subjects that matter most and having thought them through to the end, to "the absolute ruddy end."

It would, of course, be a mistake to suggest that Lewis applied himself only to theological questions. His incisiveness is displayed in his writings on secular subjects as well and appeals to many who do not, in the end, agree with his theological positions. I suspect that Jacques Barzun spoke for many when he recommended God in the Dock with the remark:

One need not be a believer in Lewis's church to profit from his candor and powers of reasoning on common predicaments. One of his most telling pieces is on National Repentance.

Apply its teaching to any of the fashionable emotions and see how many survive. Then, the mind cleared of easy sophistication, start afresh to find out what you think with your whole being about the subjects he proposes to uncluttered mother wit.

The Art of It

This uncluttered mother wit is very useful in establishing what can be called a grammar for deciding what things are important or a prolegomenon to the selection of things that are worth paying attention to. Our lives are short, and every day we devote our time to some things and ignore the rest. The choice is very important, and we cannot afford to let anyone do our selecting for us — certainly not those in the news media, whose business it is to purvey a steady stream of material whose only claim on our attention is that it is the news; newspapers and television are the last places we should expect to find an admission that the subjects that most deserve our attention are what they always were.

In the face of endless discussions of politics, for example, it is at least a great timesaver to bear in mind Lewis's remark:

A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion: to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind — if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else — then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.

When we are dazzled by intellectual fashions, it is sobering to remember Lewis's depiction (worthy of Rambler Johnson) of the Artistic Soul who turns away from the Gates of Paradise because he has heard news of something more important:

Do you mean those damned Neo-Regionalists have won after all? I must be off at once. Damn it all, one has one's duty to the future of Art. I must go back to my friends. I must write an article. There must be a manifesto. We must start a periodical. . . .

Such examples of Lewis's trenchant advice on just what subjects are important could be multiplied to a great number, and they constitute a valuable antidote for neophilia — that modern disease that Lewis called chronological snobbery. (Maritain's word for it was chronolatry.)

The Cult of Lewis?

There is more, much more, to Lewis's appeal than I have mentioned. I have said nothing of his unequaled descriptions of Joy, of his superb Great Dance on a world that would not need a Redemption, of his breathtaking End of Narnia and the Beginning of the Real Story, or of his ability to stifle a raft of excited essays with a single phrase ("Christianity and Spelling Reform"), or of that prodigality exhibited in his telling the story of Ramandu as a part of a single episode, though it would serve a more frugal writer as the basis for an epic, and that appeal will allow Lewis to almost murmur, in a scholarly book, that "all except the best men would rather be called wicked than vulgar" as though this profound observation were a familiar commonplace.

There remains an aspect of the enthusiasm for this most reliable guide that should be mentioned: it often extends to a strong desire to learn about Lewis himself, to read about the kind of man he was, preferably from people who knew him. The New York C. S. Lewis Society does what it can to foster this interest. To an outsider, even a sympathetic one, there is perhaps something disquieting and even embarrassing about this interest in Lewis the man. Admiration for Lewis's literature, his criticism, or his apologetics are all readily understandable, but can we say the same about the interest in Lewis himself ? Can the enthusiasm, once it gives a large place to Lewis himself, avoid becoming narrow, precious, sticky, and cultish?

I think the answer to this question is easy. First, I think most admirers of Lewis have found that their reading and their interests are widened and expanded, rather than narrowed and confined, by reading Lewis. He is simply the wrong author for someone who wants an uneventful mental life. He is the wrong author also for those who like to have their thinking done for them; such readers might be surprised by the firm dissents from some of Lewis's views that are rather commonly made at meetings of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. Second, and more important, an interest in Lewis the man seems to be a perfectly natural and normal outgrowth of an appreciation of Lewis the writer. (Many readers who were stunned by Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or his second inaugural address have gone on to learn much about Lincoln; they are not foolish for having done so.) What can be more natural than wanting to know what we can of the man who seems to have dreamed our dreams before us? A nonchalant lack of interest would be an odd response to an opportunity to learn about an author who seems to be at once so profoundly like ourselves and yet so different from anyone we have ever met.

Those who are in a position to tell us about Lewis have been generous and informative in doing so, providing us with much that we are glad to know, much that enhances and deepens the knowledge we gain from Lewis's own writings. An example is an observation once made by Lewis's lifelong friend Owen Barfield, who recorded, "for the sheer pleasure of it", his conviction that in his long years of friendship with Lewis,

I never recall a single remark, a single word or silence, a single look, the lightest flicker of an eyelid or hemi-demisemitone of alteration in the pitch of his voice, which would go to suggest that he felt his opinion entitled to more respect than that of old friends he was talking with because, unlike theirs, it had won the ear of tens or hundreds of thousands wherever the English language is spoken and in a good many places where it is not.

This remark is worth pondering for what it tells us of the man who wrote so powerfully on the Great Sin; and we can wonder, with Mr. Barfield, of how many famous and not-so-famous persons it could be said.

Third, and most important of all, we need to know something of Lewis's life for the help such knowledge will give us in living as Christians in a world that is increasingly ignorant of, and uninterested in, Christianity. It is possible to exaggerate the uniqueness of our situation. We humans like to dramatize our positions and to imagine that we live at a hinge of history. Perhaps it is better to say that we are somewhere on a path that began at the top of a hill at a time when our civilization was called Christendom and are headed down and away from that toward something else. If there are doubters, let them compare the sources of rhetorical power that were used as recently as the nineteenth century, by the abolitionists, with those used by advocates of social change today. On the one hand we have talk of immortal souls for whom Christ died and whose debasement would merit God's vengeance, and on the other we have . . . what? Or let the doubters imagine what a novelty it would be for a public figure to defend the hundreds of billions we spend on the health, education, and welfare of the citizenry by explaining that the citizens are worth such expense because they are destined for everlasting life, because they are, in Lewis's words, "possible gods and goddesses . . . immortal horrors or everlasting splendours", and because "nations, cultures, arts, civilization — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat."

There are many, including many Christians, who are convinced that Christianity must accommodate itself to the modern world and that such accommodation will have a salutary effect. Lewis was too prescient, too stable, too sane, to be so deluded. More than fifty years ago, while Christians who should have known better were often engaged in shameful sectarian bickering, he offered mere Christianity as a vast common ground that they could share and from which they could survey the gulf that separated them from most of the modern world. That gulf has widened perceptibly since then, and there is reason to believe the passage Lewis gave to his fictional Dr. Dimble: "The universe . . . is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point. . . . Good is always getting better, and bad is always getting worse; the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. . . . Everything is getting more itself and more different from everything else all the time." Perhaps the hot/cold cleavage of either/or will force itself in the form of Augustine's dilemma: Christ was God, or he was a lunatic. In the past it was possible to demur, to talk around the problem, to refuse the dilemma and claim that Christ was only one of the best of the many moral teachers who have appeared in history. In the near future, I suspect, it will become increasingly common for those who believe that he was not God to urge upon us the logical alternative.

So problems and issues of the kind Lewis addressed will not grow fewer. What we can get from learning about Lewis the man is not simply his advice on how to regard the changes that will continue to occur in the world. His help in judging which changes are to be welcomed and defended, which are to be resisted and attacked, and which are to be ignored can be obtained from his books. But by learning about the man himself we find that, for this most reliable guide on the subjects that matter most, the center remained unchanged; he really did believe what he wrote, and he practiced what he preached. Our need for such a guide will not diminish in the years ahead.

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