On Reading C. S. Lewis

When I read C. S. Lewis I am often surprised that evangelicals like him so much, because so much of what he says goes against evangelical conventional wisdom.

I just finished Surprised by Joy, Lewis's autobiography, and my experience with this one was similar to reading other books by him.  Except for the Chronicles of Narnia, I often have have a hard time "getting into" a Lewis book, but when I stick with it the payoff is always tremendous.  At the risk of sounding cheesy, I sometimes finish a Lewis book and have a "where have you been all my life" type of feeling.  I kick myself for taking so long to read it.  So it was with reading Surprised by Joy.  Now that I have read it I have the sense that if I had died before reading it, my life would have been incomplete.  I don't mean that to sound as sappy as it does, but I can't help thinking of it as a truly wonderful experience, similar to reading The Great Divorce.  Mind you, I was bored at times during the first part of the book and kept reading because I was looking for some sermon material, and because it would rude to fail to finish a book by Lewis.  Having slogged through the boring parts brought about a tremendous payoff in the second half of the book.

Over the last few days I have tried to think through what it is about the book that has left me so mesmerized.  Part of it is that Lewis so different, he is the "Christian-other."  So much of what you get from Lewis directly contradicts most of what we are told about how to build a Christian life, but coming from him, it all makes sense.  Here's a few thoughts on what struck me in reading this book and others' by him.

1. The imagination

I am an only child and though I had many good friends, I had a fair amount of alone time as a kid and had a rich imagination.  Our imaginations are driven by our world and mine was driven pretty much by what I saw on TV.  Most of my imaginary life was related to football.  We had this little strip of grass in the front yard where I would go out and play games.  I had every element down.  I would start as the quarterback calling plays to an imaginary huddle, would take the snap from an imaginary center, would drop back to pass and scramble like my hero Fran Tarkenton to avoid the massive imaginary defensive lineman who were coming to break all my bones. I was good and had an uncanny ability to scramble out of the fiercest pass rush.  I would then make a throwing motion with the ball and instantly transmogrify into a receiver who juked the imaginary strong safety so bad that he often tripped and fell and then I would make a diving catch in the end zone.

Of course every play was not a touchdown, sometimes those imaginary defenders did put crushing tackles on me.  But no matter how hard the imaginary hit, I always got up, often limping, and went back to the huddle (to loud ovations from the imaginary stands), ready for the next play.

My across the street neighbors loved watching me and can still tell stories of how I was out there and was the whole team.  They can tell you about seeing me "play hurt" and arguing with imaginary refs over their lousy officiating.  After all, every athlete knows that refs are idiots and made for arguing with. I was Fran Tarkenton, Chuck Foreman, and Ahmad Rashad all in one. And my Vikings won several Super Bowls, unlike a certain reality based team from Minnesota.

But I didn't only imagine myself playing football. Sometimes I was the Six-Million Dollar Boy, only I was better than Steve Austin.  I had more power and speed in my legs than he did and both of my arms were bionic, and I had a bionic eye and ear.  I actually don't know where it came from but I got all of this stuff without suffering a horrific accident. But as the Six-Million Dollar Boy I saved the world on a daily basis and made a sport out of beating bad guys to a pulp.  And let's not forget the babes - all of the world's most beautiful women wanted me.

But as I got older I learned that imagination was a waste of time, something for kids, something to grow out of.  Imagination was to be abandoned in pursuit of more practical stuff, like "learning."  Only children lived in make-believe worlds.

C. S. Lewis never got the memo on that.  He and his brother spent far more time creating imaginary worlds than I ever did, a world called Animal Land and India.  And though he eventually abandoned animal land he didn't abandon it for more rationalistic pursuits, he abandoned it to create a new imaginary world called Narnia. 

And now, looking back, Narnia may have had a greater influence for good and for Christ than any other rationalistic apologetic tome that has been written.  I can't document that, but I also don't doubt it. 

Which leads me to another thought.  My first theology class in seminary was with Richard Pratt and he encouraged us to study theology but also to play with our theology.  I like that.  Why can't we play and have fun with our Bible study, our theology and Christianity in general.  The great thing about being a kid with an imagination is that learning happens in the context of play, and during play you are experimenting with new constructions and new angles and new ways of doing things and you are enjoying yourself when you are doing it.

I think C. S. Lewis would understand Tommy Lee Jones in "The Fugitive" when he said "I'm not having any fun here, you know how I get when I'm not having fun."  In Lewis I find a recovery of imagination and fun.  For him, an active imagination didn't cause him to check out from the real world, it made him far more useful in the real world.

2. Bad influences don't have to be so scary.

When I was young in the faith I was part of a movement which said you should not read the works of non-Christian authors or be influenced by non-Christians.  The reason is that these works would inevitably lead you away from the Christian faith.  Now I see that mindset as so much hogwash - what are we saying about the Christian faith when we say that it is so weak that any resistance will destroy it.

Lewis never appeared to censor his reading.  He read pretty much anything and everything he could.  Some of his favorite writings were from Norse mythology.  Of course he was very familiar with the Roman pantheon of gods.  And yet, far from leading him away from Christianity, these things led him back to Christianity. Consider this:

By reducing the world to the material reality which one can experience with one’s senses, man has turned the world into a vacuum in which men spend their time, as T.S. Eliot would say, "dodging [their] emptiness." [2] Surprisingly enough, it was pagan mythological literature, permeated as it was with the intuitive belief in the supernatural, which set Lewis searching for God. He became a theist and his conversion to Christ followed later. Pagan literature–Greek myths, the sagas and eddas of Norse mythology and the epics of classical antiquity–acted upon him as a preparatio evangelica. His imagination and his sensibility were "baptised" [3] first, which proved to be a pre-requisite for the conversion of his heart. The material reality around him was the same but his gaze had been converted.

I'm not advocating that we all of the sudden run out and by a bunch of pagan literature.  For one, as one who has limited time to read, there are better and more important things I can be reading.  The reason I am pointing this out is to say that much of the stuff that scares the daylights out of us today didn't scare Lewis.

Sometimes Christians are more pagan than they realize in that they act as if certain things have a talismanic quality, where the thing in itself carries the power it represents.  For example, consider the word "s-e-x."  Some Christians don't want to say that word around children because the very mention of the word contains a power to cause them to go act on their immoral urges.  So it is with pagan literature, some assume that to read this stuff will cause us to become pagans, hence the Harry Potter bruhaha.  This is a magical way of thinking that is not rooted in Christian faith.

I think Lewis understood Paul says in I Corinthians 8:4

We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one (NIV).

Paul said that idols aren't scary and really don't have power.  But there is away that idols can gain power over us - I Corinthians 8:7-8:

But not everyone knows this. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.

In other words, that food could gain power in the life of a person if they thought of it as having been sacrificed to an idol.  Idols have no power in and of themselves, they have the power we ascribe to them.

So Lewis could take the myths for what they were - "myths."  And yet, he could see the longing behind the myths and rather than drawing him away from Christianity they carried him toward Christianity.

Similarly, Lewis went through an atheistic stage.  He was well versed in all of the standard atheistic literature and arguments.  He felt the full force of the best atheistic arguments and in the end found them wanting.  After his conversion I don't see that he went on a crusade warning against the dangers of atheism, because I don't think he found atheism very dangerous.  In fact, he takes many playful jibes at atheism which leads me to think that he found atheism not so much disturbing as it was funny.  He wasn't threatened by it all.

He also was not afraid to respect intelligent atheists.  He has nothing but affection for William T. Kirkpatrick, the instructor he affectionately called "the Great Knock"  The Great Knock was an atheist but he taught Lewis how to think and his teaching was useful to Lewis in his Christian life.

What I find in Lewis is a confident faith which is not threatened by other religions or anti-religion. This is a refreshing alternative to fear-driven faith.  One of my children has insightfully picked up on this.  This child has heard all of the reasons they are supposed to avoid this, stay away from that and don't go there because all of those things will turn you away from the faith.  Yet the arguments have failed to register.  On more than one occasion this child has said to me "dad, Christians are all driven by fear."  The arguments don't register, the fear behind them does.

Lewis tells us that Christians don't need to fear the bogeyman. 

3. Friendship and plausibility structures rule the day. 

If you haven't heard of the concept of "plausibility structures" I'd encourage you to do some looking into it, as I find it an important and helpful concept in understanding persuasion.  I wrote a bit about plausibility structures here, and will borrow Os Guiness's definition:   

"the degree to which a belief (or disbelief) seems convincing is directly related to its "plausibility structure" - that is, the group or community which provides the social and psychological support for the beleif. If the support's structure is strong, it is easy to believe; if the support's structure is weak, it is difficult to believe. The question of whether the group's belief is actually true or not may never become an issue."

I had read a good deal about Lewis's conversion before, but in reading Surprised by Joy I was struck by the role that plausibility structures played in it.  Lewis was a committed atheist, but chinks in the armor came when several friends and others he respected either embraced the Christian faith or leaned in it's direction.  These things perplexed Lewis, but it also seems that these friends and respected colleagues paved the way for him to (re)consider the Christian faith.

After being known for the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis seems best known for his apologetics, arguments in support of Christianity.  And those were certainly there in the process of his conversion.  But I haven't seen much on the role of his friends in his conversion (and would appreciate finding out if any of you can point to some) nor a discussion of plausibility structures and his conversion.  But it seems clear that Lewis valued friendship highly, and this played a role in the development of his faith.

One of the things that leaves me in a bit of a quandary here is the issue of how to apply this in the world.  One of the great benefits of being a Christian is the friendships we have in the body of Christ.  They are so close and so important that believers are called a new family, and there is a real sense in which we are closer to our Christian family than we are to our biological family. It is reasonable to assume that for Christians, there best friends will be Christians. Yet, and here comes the quandary, for Lewis it was while he was outside the faith that the friendship of those in the faith seemed most influential. Which demonstrates the need for those in the faith to develop close friendships with those outside of the faith.

We spend much time, effort, ink and bits and bytes on engaging those outside the faith with our arguments. But if Guiness is right about plausibility structures and if I am reading the example of Lewis correctly, then we need to spend a good deal of time learning how to be the best friends of those outside the faith.

So, all in all, to read Lewis is not to learn from him, but to experience him.  I hope this whets your appetite for reading him more.