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Book: C. S. Lewis – A Life
Author: Alister McGrath
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers (2013)
ISBN: 978-1-4143-3935-1
It was an age of disbelief. Religion was in the bull’s eye of secularist missiles.
A war of record proportions was dismantling the old order. Values which had held good for centuries were not spared.
God was on trial. The intellectual jury was invoking its clauses to renounce the claims of faith on the 20th century.
At that time, an unlikely advocate rose above the sound of charging armies of the Second World War and the dissenting arguments of the Modernist Movement to “justify the works of God to men.”
He was Clive Staple Lewis.
C.S Lewis crossed the floor from atheism to become the foremost Christian intellectual of his time.
Lewis had been steeped in atheism. His first published work, “Spirits in Bondage,” was a smack of this influence.
So was a self-absorbed lifestyle which would stamp remorse on much of his post-conversion life.
In later years, his work would assume a Christian tenor. One by turns overt and subliminal.
“Mere Christianity,” a compendium of his wartime BBC broadcast talks, is to this day one of the most eloquent toolkits of apologetics.
Aside the popular circulation of his punchlines, Lewis remains extensively profiled, well past his generation.
Alister McGrath’s “C. S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet” is the latest notable full-length reconstruction of the prolific writer and Oxford don.
The biography was published in 2013, on the golden jubilee of Lewis’s death.
But considering the sheer volume of what has already been published on Lewis, the question “Why another biography?” is fair enough.
McGrath anticipates the question.
“This biography of Lewis is not another rehearsal of the vast army of facts and figures concerning his life, but an attempt to understand its deeper themes and concerns and assess its significance,” says McGrath.
“This is not a work of synopsis but of analysis,” McGrath explains.
McGrath is meticulous with detail. But as the variegated pixels merge, the essential Lewis becomes more pronounced.
For McGrath, Lewis is something of an eccentric. One detached from academic trends of his time and “displaced from the centre of things.”
Lewis was regarded as an outsider by his Oxford peers for his “openly Christian views and his unscholarly habit of writing popular works of fiction and apologetics.”
Clearly out of touch with convention, Lewis famously labelled himself a “dinosaur” in his inaugural Cambridge lecture.
But a lot elicits regret from Lewis’s early years.
The young Lewis is exactly the character to who whom we can be unreservedly attached.
McGrath details Lewis’s contempt for his father, bar whose indiscretions, is, by contrast concerned and endearing.
An intimate relationship with a much older Mrs Moore and self-confessed atheism, apparently burnt his bridge to the older Lewis.
His absence from his father’s sickbed, describing him as someone for whom he had no affection, smacked of betrayal to the neighbourhood and visited life-long remorse on him after the latter’s death.
Lewis attempt to process this episode by dealing with it in “Surprised by Joy.”
If little from this period endears Lewis to the reader, then his intellectual determination does.
His undergraduate studies had been interrupted when he volunteered to fight in the trenches during the Great War.
He resumed to distinction, even winning a prestigious essay competition before graduation.
“Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R Tolkien, who was a friend and fellow Oxford lecturer, argued Lewis home to the Christian faith.
Earlier, though, the study of literature had been functioning as an agency of belief for Lewis.
McGrath makes reference to the Christian Rennaisance of 20th century literature which conscripted such forceful writers as G.K Chesterton, Graham Greene, T.S Eliot and Evelyn Waugh.
Waugh’s conversion immediately made it to the front pages of leading newspapers, chiefly on the news value of its being unusual or rather unexpected.
The Christian Renaissance had a distinguished line of predecessors including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Johnson, George Herbert and John Donne and no mean league of philosophical exponents.
But the 20th century was not an age of faith hence the bafflement.
One editorial questioned how Waugh, the celebrity young author of “Vile Bodies,” known to be a passionate adherent to the ultra-modern could have embraced Christianity, then and now the bête noire of modernism.
Lewis’s own conversion did not elicit the glare of cameras. By then he was only an obscure poet, under the nom de plume Clive Hamilton, so far as the creative industry was concerned.
The Christian outlook was to be the basis of his later critical reception and commercial success.
McGrath observes that Lewis fits into the broader pattern of the conversion of “literary scholars and writers through and because of their literary interests.”
The study of literature drew Lewis to the rational and imaginative power of Christianity and what began as an intellectual and aesthetic pursuit led to his affirmation of the divinity and lordship of Jesus Christ.
“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere,” observed Lewis.
Lewis’s examination of the classics showed writing grounded in the Christian tradition to more resilient and persuasive in its “treaty with reality.”
For Greene modernists such as E.M Forster and Virginia Woolf’s characters carried no sense of reality and “wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin.”
Detached from religious sense, their work carried no passionate commitment to the real world since it lacked the requisite foundation of the deeper order of things as grounded in the nature and design of an intelligent first cause.
Waugh too felt that an author could only ignore God at the expense of the reality and depth of his work. “You can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions.”
The capacity of the Christian faith to make sense of the world in general and human nature in particular provided a lens by which a distorted world could be brought into sharper focus, hence a comprehensive understanding.
“Similar concerns seem to have played a role in catalysing Lewis’s growing interest in the Christian faith,” notes McGrath.
Lewis, whose literary guide is still the best-selling of Cambridge Guides, had such misgivings about the modernists, playwright G.B Shaw and his science fiction counterpart H.G Wells.
For Lewis they “seemed a little thin” had “no depth in them” and were “too simple,” being inadequate in their representation of the “roughness and density of life.”
His reading of the spiritual poets Herbert and the much earlier Traherne (1636–1674) did not persuade him to believe in God but led him to the observation that such a belief offered a rich and robust vision of human life, hence challenging him to a further pursuit.
Modernism, with its secularist tendencies, might be said to the cultural variant of naturalism.
Both movements were taking a heavy toll on faith during Lewis’s time, as they are now, albeit in overestimated proportion.
When BBC wanted a Christian voice to balance the proponents of incredulity on air, Lewis, who had by then written “The Problem of Pain,” his first successful work, became a fitting candidate for his intellectual flair, ability to pitch his work into the language of the audience, as he said, and non-denominational outlook.
“If there was a controlling power outside the universe it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe no more than an architect – no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or a staircase or a fireplace in that house,” Lewis was to be heard arguing on BBC.
“The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way,” said Lewis in the broadcasts later compiled into “Mere Christianity.”
That power was active in Lewis. McGrath’s tome is fitting homage to the man who though like a saint and wrote like a genius.
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