Having celebrated the “mere genius” of C.S. Lewis, the wise man will want to spend more time in his presence and will invite others to do likewise. He is, for those who know him, the best of friends and the wisest of guides.
C.
S. Lewis was no mere Christian, nor was he a “mere genius”. If, however, he could write a masterful book of Christian apologetics entitled “mere Christianity”, it is not a matter of mere impertinence to speak of his masterful brilliance as mere genius. In Lewis’s case his genius was inextricably interwoven with his Christianity. Nothing he wrote before his conversion has stood the test of time; almost everything written afterwards has become a classic of either Christian literature or Christian apologetics.
Having become a Christian towards the end of 1931 following a “long night talk” with his friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson on September 19th of that year, he finally found his authentic voice and the rational means to express it. This was evident in The Pilgrim’s Regress, published in 1933, a quasi-autobiographical account of his intellectual journey from a puritanical “Christian” childhood, via a regression into atheism, towards the union of faith and reason to be found in submission to “Mother Kirk”. Told in the form of a formal allegory in which the key ideas of modernity are represented as personified abstractions, we learn how the monstrous Spirit of the Age is vanquished by a beautiful woman, clad in shining armour, whose name is Reason and whose two younger sisters are Theology and Philosophy. Thus, in his first major work, we see the irresistible union of intellectual rigour, rhetorical brilliance and literary flair which would characterize all that followed.
Lewis would write two further autobiographical works, both of which differed radically in form from The Pilgrim’s Regress and from each other. Surprised by Joy, published in 1955, parallels The Pilgrim’s Regress, in the sense that it maps out the shape of Lewis’s early life and formative years, but it does so in conventional prosaic non-fictional form. A Grief Observed, which was initially published under a pseudonym in 1961, is a brutally honest account of Lewis’ experience of agonizing bereavement following the death of his wife from cancer. As the grief-stricken soul of the bereaved moves from angst-riven anger to spiritual healing, the reader grimaces in empathy and sympathy as Lewis exposes raw nerve after raw nerve in a candid scream of desolation teetering on the brink of despair. The peace, when it finally comes, is as the promise of dawn and resurrection after a hellish nightmare. It is no wonder that many who find themselves in the throes of similar bereavement have found A Grief Observed a powerfully consoling gift of grace; nor is it any wonder that it should have inspired Shadowlands, the dramatization of Lewis’s love for his wife Joy and his struggles following her early death.
If Lewis’s three autobiographical works enable us to understand Lewis on a deeper level, his multifarious works of Christian apologetics help us to understand the rational foundations of Christianity on a much deeper level. He is unrivalled in the ability with which he is able to make abstract theological and philosophical concepts readily accessible to the ordinary man on the street or the run-of-the-mill Christian in the pew. Nobody does popular apologetics better. In works such as Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain and Miracles he regains the high ground of reason from the popular agnosticism and populist atheism which had laid siege to it and made claim to it. Routing his enemies with rhetorical brilliance in the service of rational argument, he hoists the flag of fides et ratio on the immovable pinnacle of the Rock of Realism.
Ultimately, however, and irrespective of his achievement as an apologist, the “mere genius” of C. S. Lewis is to be found in his inestimable and indomitable status as a storyteller. In The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters be plumbs the depths of the human psyche as few other writers have ever done, discovering in those depths the suggestive and seductive presence of the soul’s self-deceptive and diabolical adversary. Few have understood the nature of evil better than Lewis and fewer still have managed to weave such understanding so well into the form of fictional narrative. This is also made manifest in his trilogy of science fiction novels, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, if indeed we can describe these theological thrillers as belonging to a genre as humdrum and earthbound philosophically as is most science fiction.
Lewis’s final fictional work, Till We Have Faces, was considered by Lewis himself to be his finest. Literarily speaking it is indubitably the most subtle and refined in terms of the way in which the allegorical dimension is subsumed within the story. In this nuanced and innovative retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, we find Lewis to be both coy and elusive. Lewis the teacher is nowhere to be seen, or at least he is concealed masterfully behind a mask, and Lewis the preacher is seemingly banished altogether. For this reason, many have failed to fully understand Lewis’s purpose in writing it. At root, as is finally revealed at the story’s climactic moment, Till We Have Faces shows that pride is always prejudiced. It blinds us to what is really there because we refuse to see what we don’t want to acknowledge. We need to remove the masks of self-deceit we are wearing before we can face the naked truth with our naked faces.
Last but indubitably not least are the Chronicles of Narnia in which Lewis elevates the children’s story to heights of goodness, truth and beauty which have seldom, if ever, been equaled, either before or since. The real test of greatness in a children’s story is whether it can be read and re-read on multiple occasions while keeping its freshness. A further test, and the greatest test of all, is whether it can be read and re-read by children of all ages, retaining not only its freshness but enabling the grown-up reader to retain or regain the childlikeness which is necessary to pass through the doors of a wardrobe or the eye of a needle into the kingdom of heaven. Lewis, in each of the seven wonders of world literature which constitute the Chronicles of Narnia, invites us to go further up and further in. Only a fool blinded by cynicism would not accept such an invitation.
Having celebrated the “mere genius” of C.S. Lewis, the wise man will want to spend more time in his presence and will invite others to do likewise. He is, for those who know him, the best of friends and the wisest of guides.
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