What I Owe to Jack

November 22, 2013, was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Jr. You may know that C. S. Lewis, the British literary scholar, popular apologist, and writer of fantasy fiction died on the same day, as did Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World. The day was also significant for followers of Lewis because the author was honored with a memorial in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner, his marker now sharing the space with those of writers like Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Dickens, and Austen.

This honor is a welcome one, not just because Lewis deserves it based on the quantity and quality of his writing, but also because it provides validation for what a number of Lewis scholars have been saying and writing for years: Lewis was not simply a "popularizer" of the Christian faith; he was a writer of the first rank who made a significant contribution to modern letters in a variety of genres.

All this has caused me to reflect on and be grateful for the role that Jack, as he was called by his friends, has played in my own life, not only academically but personally. Specifically, three areas come to mind for which I'm particularly grateful.

His Christian Intellectualism

Lewis was the first Christian author I encountered who did not make me feel I needed to check my intellect at the church door. I grew up in a church environment that often felt decidedly anti-intellectual. Certain books and ideas were off-limits, or at least considered dangerous. Occasionally someone would question why we even needed to read books other than the Bible--maybe some commentaries, as long as they were written by members of our group, but that should be sufficient.

In Lewis, I found someone unafraid to tackle any concept or idea, whether it was the validity of religions other than Christianity or the efficacy of petitionary prayer. His willingness to examine and analyze ideas fearlessly convinced me that Christian faith and the life of the mind were not mutually exclusive categories.

His Belief in the Primacy of the Imagination

The first book of Lewis's I ever read was Mere Christianity, and it was life changing, giving me a new and more inclusive vision of spirituality and the church than I had yet encountered. Lewis's apologetic books were so influential for me that when it came time to select a dissertation subject, I chose to focus on his nonfiction works including Miracles, The Problem of Pain, The Four Loves rather than on his fictional works like The Chronicles of Narnia or The Screwtape Letters.

But if you ask me today which Lewis books I treasure most, I'll likely mention his fictional works, especially Narnia, The Space Trilogy, and Till We Have Faces.

What fascinates me about Lewis's fiction is the power and range of his imagination, the way he can create and populate other worlds, bring talking animals to life in a believable way, and illuminate a spiritual concept through a well-crafted metaphor. In fact, what I learned from reading Lewis's fiction I was able to apply to the apologetics. As I realized when studying Mere Christianity years after my first reading of the book, Lewis uses imagination, not only in his fiction, but also in his nonfiction. To give one example, in Mere Christianity, he uses toy soldiers coming to life and a child's dress up game to illustrate theological concepts. As Michael Ward said in a recent article, Lewis believed that imagination precedes reason and that clear thinking is not even possible without the power of imagination.

His Authentic Life

One of the joys of making C. S. Lewis the focus of my modest scholarly agenda over the years has been the opportunity (or the excuse) to read about his life. While Lewis himself described his life as boring, I've always found him to be an engaging human being.

He wasn't perfect, by any means. For example, his attitudes toward women, as Dorothy Sayers noted, were often silly at best and misogynistic at worst. 

But from what I've been able to discern he really tried to lead a life consistent with the principles of the faith as he understood them. He was a generous man, who spent most of the money he made from his books on charity, often on people he knew personally who needed help. He was loyal to his friends. He promised Paddy Moore, his British army buddy, that he would take care of Paddy's mother and sister if anything happened in the war, and he did, caring for Mrs. Moore until the end of her life--often at great sacrifice of his own time and professional responsibilities. He was a loving brother to Warnie, even when he had to make yet another late night trip to the pub to help Warnie home after one of his drinking binges. And in spite of profound differences with Tolkien on how fantasy stories should be written and other issues, the two remained lifelong friends and supporters of each other's writing.

The play and movie Shadowlands have contributed to an overemphasis on the last few years of Jack's life, especially his romance with Joy Davidman Gresham. But I still love the story, and I appreciate that Lewis followed his heart and married the divorced Joy when members of his church and many of his best friends and his brother advised him not to. The romance did Lewis a lot of good including widening his view of women's roles and capabilities and inspiring him to write Till We Have Faces, his personal favorite of all his fiction and one that features a female first person narrator.

Over the years my appreciation for Lewis as an author has not diminished--but it has morphed. The qualities of his thought and writing I value today are different ones than I valued in my twenties. The certainty of his tone and detailed, step-by-step logic are less attractive to me now than his personal tone, his confessions of doubt and spiritual struggle, and his flights of imagination. I've also discovered other authors whose work and thought are more reflective of where I am on my spiritual  journey these days--Frederick Buechner, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, and Mary Oliver, to name a few. Yet, having said that, if you think I'm not extremely grateful for the life and works of C. S. Lewis, then you don't know me--and you don't know Jack.