C.S. Lewis Today – A Short Reflection By The Archbishop Of Armagh
It perhaps seems strange that in these past weeks there has been far more attention paid to the fiftieth anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis than was ever paid to him at the time of his death. Part of the reason was of course that he died on the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the world found this more of far greater concern and interest. But it is also true that in 1963, Lewis’s writings (other than his academic work) seemed rather ‘dated’ to his contemporaries, whereas today, fifty years on, we are able to understand that much of what he wrote (for all that the style of writing may seem of a different age) is truly of abiding worth and value. His Chronicles of Narnia books, made into films, have also brought him to into the range of a younger generation who would never have heard of him otherwise.
Clive Staples Lewis – Belfast born, English educated and Oxford academic (other than for the final few years of his life when he moved to Cambridge University as a professor) – is, for me, one of the finest defenders of the Christian faith for our times. As he himself describes it, Lewis was an extremely reluctant convert in his early thirties to Christianity from a deep–seated atheism, but from then on he was a tough–minded and convincing champion of the Christian faith. He wrote prolifically and over a wide range of subjects, and it would be utterly impossible to do justice to even a fraction of his writings in the span of a short article, but there a couple of his books I would want to mention as still deeply influential for my own spiritual life.
The Screwtape Letters, one of Lewis’s most celebrated books, is a clever satirical novel written by a senior devil, Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, giving cynical advice on how to entice a particular convert to Christianity – ‘The Patient’ as he is called – away from his faith. It is extremely hard–hitting in its reversal of the theology we normally read, and reminds us that the devil will make far more inroads among Christians by the temptations posed by laziness and carelessness than by the more obvious lures we may associate with evil. Lewis also cleverly brings us face to face with the unpleasant reality that Christian communities may themselves be breeding grounds for the subtle trickeries of genuine evil.
Of a far more personal nature are his series of reflections written (originally under a pseudonym) on the death of his wife Joy Davidman, A Grief Observed. Lewis can often appear detached and intellectual in his treatment of the Christian faith but in this work, he shows us that he had a vulnerable and emotional side to his nature that makes him far more ‘human’, and hence enables us to read his earlier books in a very different light. In A Grief Observed, we are brought to realise that for Lewis, Christianity is not simply a hypothesis, even a wonderful and convincing hypothesis, but a way of life that can stand firm even amidst the greatest challenges to faith.
It is of course easy to pick holes in Lewis’s theology, and to point out (among other things) that his picture of Jesus Christ entirely neglects to take account of the Jewish context of Christ’s life on earth. For all that, he presents a case for Christianity as utterly reasonable and, in our present time, as religious faith itself is often presented in the public square as mere infantile wish–fulfilment, we need the rigour and common sense presented by a C. S. Lewis to defend the faith. He truly believed that to live a Christian life does not make life on earth less attractive, intelligible or fulfilling but rather the reverse. To leave him with one of his most famous quotations, ‘Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither.’
(The above reflection first appeared in the Belfast Newsletter on Thursday 28 November 2013).