Last updated on November 28, 2020
Today, (Sunday, November 29th, 2020) is the first day of the Advent season.
According to the Anglican Calendar (and probably other liturgical Christian calendars) today is also a day to remember the birth and life of Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963), better known as C.S. Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia and many other books.
Lewis was an Oxford don and a literary scholar. A convert from atheism to Christianity in 1931, Lewis went on to become one of the most influential (if not the most influential) Christian apologists of the last century. His works have become foundational texts in modern Christian intellectual life and culture in the West, and, I suspect, throughout the world. His facility for using allegory, metaphor, poetry, and prose to think through the difficult questions of Christianity has few parallels. If you’re someone who doubts Christianity’s coherence or want to dig in to the deeper implications of what it teaches, I can’t recommend him highly enough.
If you’ve never read him before, I recommend starting with Mere Christianity. In what was originally a radio broadcast to the British people during WWII, Lewis connects common intuitions of everyday experience to the teachings of Christianity. I first read Mere Christianity fourteen years ago during a Semester in Europe program through Lee University. We would later journey to his home outside Oxford University on that trip as well.
The Chronicles of Narnia, of course, are also essential reading for anyone interested in Lewis. But it’s a shame that so many people overlook his Space Trilogy, which includes Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. The last volume can stand on its own and is a brilliant illustration of his influential book on natural law (among other things), The Abolition of Man.
I must also mention his book, The Screwtape Letters. The book is a series of letters from a “senior demon” to a “rookie demon,” with instructions about how to subvert the influence of the Holy Spirt and tempt human beings away from truth, peace, and love. The correspondence is so insightful and so compelling, one wonders if Lewis had actually overheard the conversation. It also shows Lewis’ deep roots in classic literature and his astonishing grasp of Augustine and Aquinas (even if he never mentions them by name). The same could be said about the peculiar book, The Great Divorce, which explores good and evil, heaven and hell, and the profound importance of our every day choices.
I could read, write, and talk about C.S. Lewis forever. He is by far my favorite modern author, though he draws extensively on St. Augustine, who is my favorite author outside the Bible (to the extent that identifying a “favorite” has any meaning. Ha!)
There are many ways to learn more about C.S. Lewis, including the website C.S. Lewis.com, or check out the C.S. Lewis Foundation’s list of links to C.S. Lewis societies and resources.
I’ll conclude with some quotes from his sermon “The Weight of Glory” delivered 8 June, 1941 (found in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (HarperOne, 1980)).
I would argue that this is one of his best and has had a significant impact on me. The following are some representative passages:
“If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who want to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” (26)
“The books of the music in which we though the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tine we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.” (30-31)
“If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling and repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know.” (34)
“I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important. Indeed, how we think of Him is of no importance except insofar as it is related to how He thinks of us. It is written that we shall ‘stand before’ Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God…to be a real ingredient in divine happiness…to be loved by God, not merely pitied but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son – it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But it is.” (38-39)
“It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you say it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, it at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the aw and the circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” (45-46)
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