We have [the feeling] that the story we are reading is only a small part of a titanic drama, and that what we see here on stage begins and ends out in vistas infinitely larger than the size of the stage that we can see….[C.S.] Lewis’ fiction, we might say, reaches all the way to heaven and hell.
–Thomas Howard, “Terror and Sublimity for Everyman: C.S. Lewis’ Literary Achievement,” The Journal of Faith and Thought (Spring 1985), p. 3.
An apt and astute observation by Thomas Howard. But then what else would you expect from someone like C. S. Lewis, who not only had a wonderfully sanctified imagination, but was a devout sacramentalist as well? Unfortunately, that is a side of Lewis that many evangelicals often miss.
By that I mean, of course, that for C. S. Lewis, as for any good sacramentalist Christian (Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, or Orthodox), it’s not just the chief riturals of the church that we view sacramentally as true means of grace that display the interconnectedness of the visible and the invisible, the realms of heaven and earth; no we view all of life sacramentally.
Howard himself has written eloquently about this in books such as his marvelous sacramental theology for laypeople, “Splendor in the Ordinary.” But I especially love his magisterial essay on the sacramental life in the volume of essays edited by Robert Webber and Donald Bloesh and entitled “The Orthodox Evangelicals” (released not long after the Chicago Call of 1977, in which Howard was a prime mover). And I suspect that whole sacramentalist worldview s one of the chief things that led him to convert from evangelical low-church Protestantism to Roman Catholicism (he’s a Wheaton College grad and the brother of Elizabeth Elliott, brother-in-law of the famous missionary martyr Jim Elliott).
David Handy+
Looks like a fascinating article. Is it online anywhere?
Ross
This is quite opposite from the world view of Marx, Freud, Darwin and KJS.