Perennial Lewis

As I’ve written about previously, I’ve spent the last 10-12 months rereading the major works of C. S. Lewis by listening to them on audio. That has meant nearly 20 books, split evenly between fiction and nonfiction. I’m on my last one now (I finished my romp through Chesterton earlier this month), which means 2022 will be wide open for my post-podcast listening habits.

In any case, a few final reflections on Lewis. In particular, on Lewis the apologist and why (a) there has not been a genuine successor to his genius or his stature and (b) why he remains so popular as we approach the 60th anniversary of his death.

1. The first answer is simple: they don’t make ’em like they used to. Lewis describes himself as a converted pagan among apostate puritans, and that’s the right way to read him. Even if he weren’t a first-rate stylist and multifaceted writer (novels, children’s stories, science fiction, literary criticism, poetry, memoir, philosophy, ethics, apologetics), his sheer learning sets him apart. Nor did he gain that learning as part of a strategy for something called “outreach” or intellectual evangelism. He came to the faith ready-made, the product of an extraordinary mind molded by an extraordinary education. I wonder sometimes whether there’s even one Anglophone Christian scholar today under 45 years old who does not spend his or her time regularly on the internet, social media, and/or streaming television. The sheer time given to such trifles (I’m looking at myself here) means ipso facto that one could not hope to reach one-tenth of Lewis’s erudition.

2. The next answer is obvious: the disciples of Lewis are not like Lewis, nor do they aspire to be. They do not come from where he came from; they do not share his education; their overlap with his literary and intellectual affections is minimal. Lewis came to Christ by way of myth and romance, epic poetry and the drama of pagan pleasures. These are foreign to Lewis’s foremost admirers, above all American evangelicals. This is a man who was (until the end) a bachelor who loved rich beer, good tobacco, other men, and talk of dragons. Preferably with a shared knowledge of half a dozen languages, ancient and modern. Whereas those who love Lewis most love him for his side hobby (which, granted, we may assume was his calling from God): putting the complexities of the faith into plain language for common people, against powerful cultural trends. None of them, in other words, is going to have a chance of becoming him.

3. But that’s a negative way of putting the matter. So let me say this. Going back over books I first read twenty years ago, now on the far side of a more or less continuous theological education in college and graduate school, I see now more clearly than ever Lewis’s brilliance. He really was a one of one. As I listen to his most popular—by which I mean not his most successful or beloved but his most vulgar or common—speeches and writings, I am consistently struck by how little has changed (at least, between postwar England and contemporary America), but more so by how excellent his answers are to the questions of the time. By and large they need not, because they cannot, be improved upon. There is no Lewis 2.0 because eight times out of ten, if an honest skeptic asks you a question, you should just point him to the essay or book that Lewis already wrote. If it ain’t broke, etc.

4. There are subjects that Lewis did not address or articulate as well as he did others; these remain for others to elaborate or expand upon. He is not, it seems to me, especially trustworthy on politics. His ecclesiology is thin. Though he can be quite good on sex and gender, at other times he is bad, and occasionally he is plain weird. In his time he was on the threshold—knowingly—of a truly post-Christian society. It was already present in the people, but the trappings remained in law, education, and culture. No longer. What does it mean to take up the baton from him? That is, to evangelize a re-paganized West at once post-Christian and anti-Christian yet also somehow formally and thus morally and spiritually Christian (without knowing or acknowledging it)?

That, so far as I can tell, is the question to ask. Not least because it’s the question he’d be asking. I don’t have hope that there will be another like him anytime soon. But God has done stranger things. At any rate, we can give God thanks for doing the altogether strange thing of converting Lewis to Christ. Lord knows Lewis is on the short list of reasons why I am a believer. How many others can say the same?