A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby
England to a satanic reign. Also popular with both children and adults are Lewis’s seven Narnia stories, which recount the adventures of youngsters who escape into another and wonderful world and are protected by Aslan the great Lion (Christ). One critic has said that these books marked “the greatest addition to the imperishable deposit of children’s literature since the Jungle Books.”
Doctrinally, Lewis accepted the Nicene, Athanasian, and Apostles’ Creeds. He was never-failing in his opposition to theological “modernism.” Some of his most biting satire is employed against it in both his fictional and his expository works. It is as ridiculous, he declared, to believe that the earth is flat as to believe in the watered-down popular theology of modern England. In The Screwtape Letters a major employment of hell itself is to encourage theologians to create a new historical Jesus in each generation. He repeatedly insists that, contrary to many modern theologians, it was less St. Paul than Christ who taught the terrors of hell and other “fierce” doctrines rather than sweetness and vapid love. Lewis hated the depiction of Christ in feminine modes. In the Narnian stories Aslan is always pictured as more than a tame lion. Lewis believed that God is not to be bargained with but to be obeyed. Christ is Deity himself, the Creator, coexistent with the Father, yet also his only-begotten Son, the penalty of the law, Prince of the universe, the “Eternal Fact, Father of all facthood,” the Everlasting and Supreme Reality, perfect God and perfect man, the best of all moral teachers but not merely that.
Though Lewis denies the doctrine of total depravity (one wonders whether he understood its full theological implications) on the grounds that man has the idea of good and that if he were totally depraved he should not know it, this denial does not preclude Lewis from representing man everywhere as a horror to God and a miserable offender. Some people, he says, suppose that the Incarnation implies a special merit in humanity: actually it implies “just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity” because “no creature that deserved Redemption would need to be redeemed. . . . Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for.”
The most vivid picture of what it means to be saved—and Lewis does not hesitate to use this word—is the transformation of Eustace from a dragon back into a person in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace tells how he remembered that a dragon might he able to cast its skin like a snake and began to work on himself. At first the scales alone came off; but as he went deeper, his whole skin started to peel off and finally was able to step right out of it altogether. Eustace then started to wash himself, but when he put his foot into the nearby pool of water he saw that it was as hard and rough and scaly as it had been before. So he began again to scratch and finally peeled off another entire dragon skin. But once again he found under it another. At this point Aslan appeared and said, “You will have to let me undress you.” Though Eustace was deathly afraid of Aslan’s claws, he lay down before him. His fears were justified, for the very first tear made by Aslan was so deep he felt it had gone clear down to his heart. When the skin was at last off, Eustice discovered it was “ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been.” Afterward Aslan bathed and dressed him in new clothes, the symbolism of which is clear enough.
Lewis assures his readers that he believes the Bible to carry the authority of God, and he insists that we must “go back to our Bibles,” even to the very words. The biblical account, says he, often turns out to be more accurate than our lengthy theological interpretations of it. It is all right to leave the words of the Bible for a moment to make some point clear, but you must always return. “Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him.” Lewis believed that some great catastrophe was ahead for man and that the Second Coming may be the next great event in history.
Certain themes run all through Lewis’s books, whether expository or fictional. One is that every living being is destined for everlasting life and that every moment of life is a preparation for that condition. Like Albert Camus, Lewis believed death to be the most significant fact in the interpretation of life: yet, unlike Camus, he was convinced that man is primarily made for eternity. With Socrates, he held that true wisdom is the “practice of death.” Another theme in Lewis is that God is the creator, transformer, and ultimate possessor of common things; that God is the inventor of matter, of sex, of eating and drinking, and of pleasures. Lewis also teaches all through his books that the only way Christians can attain full happiness is to obey God implicitly. “It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”
But perhaps the most persistent theme in Lewis is that of man’s longing for Joy. He calls this longing “the inconsolable secret” that inhabits the soul of every man, a desire that no natural happiness can ever satisfy. It is a lifelong pointer toward heaven, a nostalgia to cross empty spaces and be joined to the true reality from which we now feel cut off. The culmination of this longing in the rhapsodic joy of heaven is, for me at least, the strongest single element in Lewis. In one way or another, it hovers over nearly every one of his books and suggests that Lewis’s apocalyptic vision is perhaps more real than that of anyone since St. John on Patmos.
Until a short time before his death Lewis was the distinguished occupant of the chair of medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University. He was one of the best literary critics of our time and an expert in philology. Notable among his scholarly writings is The Allegory of Love, which has been called “the best book of literary history written by an Englishman in this century.” At the same time he was a Christian of no uncertain stamp. He managed the difficult feat of successfully integrating his scholarship with his religion. If we add to these things the gifts of a lively imagination, a vigorous and witty mind, and a brilliance of language, we can discover why his books have sold widely and why his readers are steadily on the increase.
Chapter 5
HIS FATE AMONG THEOLOGICAL CRITICS
In 1958 Norman Pittenger, a liberal Anglican theologian, published a severe criticism of C. S. Lewis both as a theologian and as a “Defender of the Faith,” in “A Critique of C. S. Lewis” (Christian Century 75 [1958]). Dr. Kilby wrote this spirited defense, which was published later that year in Christianity Today in December 1958.
Though I am no theologian I venture to disagree with most of W. Norman Pittenger’s recent criticisms of the writings of C. S. Lewis. Dr. Pittenger concedes that Lewis writes charmingly and provocatively in some of his books, particularly those of a fictional character, but he does not believe that Lewis’s writings have much theological value. My own judgment is that Lewis has done more to clear the theological atmosphere of our time and to create a deep interest in Christian things than many theologians together. Lewis’s avoidance of theological jargon (I use the word in no derogatory sense) is a studied avoidance and should not be taken as ignorance. It seems to me that such an assumption of ignorance is the basis of Dr. Pittenger’s wrong critique of Lewis. But to some of the particulars.
THE SENSE OF DECENCY
Dr. Pittenger says that Lewis is crude, even vulgar. As examples, he violates our sense of decency by attempting to explain the Trinity by the figure of a cube which is “six squares while remaining one cube,” and by saying that Christ was either what he claimed to be—the Son of God—or else a madman. I believe that one of Lewis’s greatest contributions to orthodox Christianity is his demonstration that a sanctified imagination is a legitimate tool for any Christian apologist. If Dr. Pittenger thinks a cube may not be used to illustrate the Trinity, what can he say of Jesus’s own invariable use of things close at hand to illustrate holy things—vines, and fig trees, lamps, and bushel baskets, and even vultures? Or what can he say of Paul’s allusions to sounding brass and tinkling cymbals or the resurrection of Christ as the firstfruits? Or of St. Augustine’s historic analogies in De Trinitate, confessedly inadequate but nonetheless helpful for pedagogical purposes? In his Weight of Glory Lewis says, “Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.”