Reflections on C.S. Lewis

It is hard to be original regarding a Christian icon about whom so much has already been written and said...but here are some thoughts straight from my heart.

Like a vast host of readers, I became acquainted with "Jack" Lewis (as he is known by his intimate friends and relatives, never really liking his given name "Clive Staples") through his children's stories about an enchanted land called Narnia. Captivated by his on-our-level author's voice that never talked either down to children or over our heads, Lewis convinced me that those snow-covered woodlands, far-flung Lone Islands, forbidding deserts, battle plain, stone table and lofty Cair Paravel were all actual places, that badgers and bears and mice and squirrels...as well as a particularly dangerous and good Lion...could actually talk and interact with very human children who magically happened into Aslan's realm along with their sense of wonder, their childish and adult-ish foibles, and all their untapped and untaught potential. How is that for a run-on sentence?

Narnia and its unforgettable, inimitable characters was only my delightful baptism into the sphere of Jack Lewis's genius. Because of his great learning and his great heart, he obviously longed to share with others the beautiful and poignant insights God had given him about his Christian faith. Lewis did so with an unaffected warmth and honesty that is still winning him friends fifty years after his entrance into glory.

Peter Kreeft wrote a very clever book a few decades ago called Between Heaven and Hell that supposes a meeting in the afterlife anteroom between Lewis, John F. Kennedy, and Aldous Huxley, three men of very divergent beliefs who all died within hours of one another in 1963. In this book, Lewis is the proponent of his own "mere Christianity" while the other two awaiting their eternal destinies speak out in favor of humanism and pantheism, respectively. I like to think that this little book captures something of the wit and friendly urgency of Lewis that he infuses into all of his writing.

Time and space would fail me in elaborating on all of Lewis's books that have influenced my own life and my own writing. His Space Trilogy is a particular favorite of mine, as it is aimed more at an adult audience and succeeds in reviving what, for so many oldsters, is a hibernating capacity for fanciful imagining. His approach to science fiction addresses so many moral and sociological dangers that other sci-fi writers tend to gloss over due to their secularistic mindset. I am doing my best, hopefully, in imitating Lewis's approach in my own futuristic efforts.

Actually, the third book in his trilogy, That Hideous Strength, is a fictional treatment of his philosophical piece entitled The Abolition of Man, another of my favorites. He wrote this book, apparently, in response to a new English textbook that had been introduced in the public schools in the UK. The purported approach of the text's authors was to "debunk" the genuineness of all expressions of value in the writing examples they included in their book. Their thesis was that any expression such as "that is an awesome waterfall," rather than saying something real about the waterfall itself (which is in reality merely lots and lots of water falling over a cliff), is actually describing the writer's own subjective feelings and nothing more. Lewis answers this thesis with a masterful and cautionary counterargument that we all must be taught to assign values to everything we experience in the world around us. Values that truly reflect the worth of the realities they describe. He then goes on to foretell the fate of a humanity that insists on subjectifying all value, namely, the loss of all that makes us human.

And what else can I say...about the haunting, hilarious, holy pages scorched by the fiery pen of the senior demon Uncle Screwtape? about the heartrending journey from hell to the outskirts of heaven in The Great Divorce?  about the book Lewis wrote about the nature of the Four Loves? his treatise on miracles...on death and disease...his magnum opus Mere Christianity?

All I can do is praise our God for saving the soul of a young atheist and gifting him with the ability to reason, imagine, believe, and thankfully, to write.

Suffice it to say, fifty year later, Jack's inklings live on. My advice to all...immerse yourselves in them.