Perhaps because I have been teaching a nine week class on C.S. Lewis and an introduction to Christian Apologetics this fall, I am particularly mindful of his influence. It is after all his feast day today! So let’s hear from you in terms of how C.S. Lewis has impacted your life in whatever way you choose to share it. Please remember that the more specific you are (what age were you, which Lewi’s book it was, etc.) the more the rest of us can enjoy it–KSH.
Monday Morning Open Thread–How has your Life Been Touched By C.S. Lewis?
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When I was eight years old, the town librarian handed me two books and said, “I think you will like these.” One was [i]A Wrinkle in Time[/i] by Madeleine L’Engle and the other was Lewis’ [i]Out of the Silent Planet[/i]. I encountered in both of them what St. Jack said he encountered the first time he read a book by George MacDonald: a kind of holiness of mind and imagination.
As time went on, I read the rest of the “Space Trilogy,” the Narnian Chronicles, [i]Mere Christianity[/i], all the essay collections and everything else that St. Jack ever wrote (even the [i]Dark Tower[/i] fragment). My three favorites are [i]The Silver Chair, Pilgrim’s Regress[/i] and [i]’Til We Have Faces[/i].
His writings enkindled in me his own passionate love of Truth, Who is also the Beloved. His love for Truth led me to understand the heart of Anglicanism. When I was considering becoming an Anglican, it was Lewis I thought about most.
I believe he was a genuine prophet for our times. His description of the bishop in [i]Screwtape[/i] says it all.
St. Jack, pray for us and for our Church.
My grandmother gave me the Naria set over several birthdays and Christmases, but it was Mere Christianity which I read when I was 13/14 that made the biggest impact. His logic to me was unassailable and his writing so clear, how could I not believe?
When I was in high school I attended a very conservative, nearly fundamentalist, church. Somehow I got a copy of Mere Christianity into my hands that I read as I transitioned into college. It was the first time that it occurred to me that the Christian faith was deeply rational, and that the Christian call included a call to loving God with our minds – that is, engaging in the intellectual exploration and explanation of the faith.
No doubt this led rather directly to my increased reading in the Great Tradition – from Luther, to Wesley, to the Fathers, and my move back towards a more liturgical, sacramental, and catholic way of being Christian.
Then one day I read The Great Divorce. Wow.
C.S. Lewis has touched my imagination like no other. Something J.I. Packer said in an article below on one of my favourite passages of all time – I couldn’t count how many times I have used it in a funeral sermon – expresses the impact his writing has had on me.
[blockquote]”And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen to them after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them—we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
The knockout quality of such writing is more than words can express.[/blockquote]
Absolutely foundational impact in making the murkiest theological concepts and the Gospel itself transparent and compelling to both the mind and the heart. Lewis is my favorite author in both fiction and apologetics.
At a time when I was basically unchurched (and had been for about 10 years) but starting to feel the need for “something,” a wise vicar suggested that I read “The Space Trilogy.” Wow. By the end of Perelandra (and weekly conversations with the vicar) I had found my way back to the church.
I recognise N.I.C.E. when I see them.
I long for that far country and that weight of glory.
I recognize nostalgia as that longing for heaven.
Pain is more bearable.
I can “imagineer” heaven and not feel weird.
Thank you C.S. Lewis.
Shortly after law school in the mid-70’s a reading of the ABOLITION OF MAN woke me from my subjective morality slumber. The recent debate over embryonic stem cell research has unfortunately shown Lewis to be prescient about our “conditioners”. I dare say that thirty-five years ago no one, but the mad scientist, could have imagined that in our lifetime we would be manufacturing human beings in order to harvest their body parts.
I confess to ambivalence here. As a child, The Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island, and The Once and Future King sang to me in a way that Lewis never did. There are magnificent passages in Narnia (my Lord, can Lewis write), but, as a whole, it did not/does not grab my imagination. Mere Christianity and Miracles really took hold of me as a senior in high school, but, I kept on reading theology (in my case, Calvin and Augustine) and it all started to appear pretty thin. The Great Divorce is wonderful; Screwtape Letters, honestly, not so sure. I came back to Lewis ten years or so ago when I read A. N. Wilson’s biography. I now have a deeper appreciation for Lewis as a reader and a critic — An Experiment in Criticism and ‘Til We Have Faces are the two remaining works by Lewis I have promised myself I will read. Much as before, I fell in and then out of love with The Abolition of Man. A great defense of natural law ethics, that, on re-reading, does start to wear as kind of cranky and small. Lewis is a wonderful and deeply admired companion, but not one of the great lights.
#8, “my subjective morality slumber” — shades of Immanuel Kant! Are you full of awe at the starry heavens above and the moral law within?
Ah, C.S.Lewis. I first read Mere Christianity, then Screwtape Letters, back in the 70’s, when in grad school. Passages from both helped me counter arguments from agnostic/atheistic friends there, who in their self-important 20s, snickered at any belief in God. I hope, with whatever they have since experienced in life, that they have learned that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, with the translation of “fear” as “awe”… He is indeed awesome!
It was C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” that, in a roundabout way, helped my wife and I to make up our mind to pull our son from a private church school and place him in a public school. I won’t say the denomination of the school, but all Harry Potter books were banned because of “witchcraft” and “satanism”. The final straw came when one of the wealthy parents decided that a certain C.S. Lewis book must also be banned, because it had witches and witchcraft in it. Yes, one of the greatest Christian allegory tales, written by the one of the Christian writers of the 20th century, was banned.
J., I am in the awe of the moral law without( in the nature of things) and the fact that it is knowable. It’s odd that you refer to a book with the title of ABOLITION OF MAN as being small?
The Narnia books were the second set of books that I ever loved (Oz was the first.) After my parents read them to me, I read them myself I don’t know how many times. I don’t remember at what point I realized that it was all about Christianity, but at the time I don’t think it made me love the books any more or less.
I encountered the apologetics later — early to mid-teens, I think; and again it was my parents who introduced me to Mere Christianity. I enjoyed it, liked engaging in mental debate with the book, but I wasn’t really converted by it. At that time I was edging from childhood belief into agnosticism.
But later — much later; I was in my early 30s — it was Lewis who brought me back to the church. Specifically it was The Abolition of Man, which I’d read before but, for some reason, read again. I’d been maintaining that it was possible to build a rational value system entirely from first principles, but Lewis made me see that it doesn’t work — you have to have some source of values by which to judge which values to choose, and ultimately there are only two options: either all values are essentially arbitrary, or some values actually exist extrinsically to oneself, in the same way that gravity or photons exist. And if the latter… well, there were more steps, but it eventually led me to God, and so back to church.
I don’t agree with Lewis on everything. His argument against women priests, for instance, I think is logically unsound. But of all Christian writers, he was the first to move me and I still delight in reading his works.
More than any other, Lewis showed me that orthodoxy was not a prison but an adventure. I first read him in my first year of seminary, believe it or not. Back then I was lost in the land of the reappraiser non-logic. I don’t know exactly how he did it, but he opened a door that changed me… well, him and the Fathers… But it was reading “The Great Divorce” in my Anglican theology and history class that made me believe in the necessity of the resurrection and in the existence of heaven and hell. And reading Narnia warmed my heart in a way that made it possible for the Gospel to sink in. In a very real way, I owe Lewis my faith.
Here’s the blog entry I wrote about him today:
http://www.comforterchurch.org/about/blog/cs-lewis
As a ten-year-old, in a family of Jewish Communists(ethnically very Jewish, but not religious in any way), I borrowed The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe from the library and devoured it. I still remember rushing excitedly into the kitchen and telling my mother: “Mum, Aslan’s Jesus!” My mother’s tepid response didn’t discourage me from reading the rest of the series.
Two years later, in my first year at secondary school, I saw The Screwtape Letters on the school library shelf and, hoping it might be another Narnia book, borrowed it. It wasn’t, of course, a Narnia book, but it turned my life upside down and resulted in my becoming a Christian.
One summer in childhood I was hunting in the public library for books to read and, since I liked fairy tales and enchantment, was drawn to a book entitled [i] The Silver Chair [/i]. Thenceforward I read almost everything by Lewis I could get my hands on; he remains my first and greatest teacher in the Christian faith (I’m re-reading [i] That Hideous Strength [/i] right now for the umpteenth time).