“In honor of the 50th Anniversary of C.S. Lewis’s death”

Jay Lorenzen,
Faculty Commons Staff

[Nov. 19, 2013]~~

As a young professor at Oxford, C.S. Lewis found that his favorite books and his favorite friends were beginning to turn against him.  Schooled in the power of reason, logic and truth, he experienced what he called a “baptism of his imagination.”

He loved George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Spenser and John Milton–all of whom had this kink of being Christians. Yet, the authors who did not suffer from religion—“Shaw, Wells, Mill, Gibbon and Voltaire”— seemed thin to him.  At the time, he concluded that “Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.”

Looking back he described it so:

Such, then, was the state of my imaginative life; over against it stood the life of my intellect. The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism.’ Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless. 

His new-found colleagues at Oxford didn’t help either. Lewis found himself attracted to fellow professors like Owen Barfield, Hugo Tyson, and most of all J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams–all of whom embraced the truth of Christianity.

The suggestion of a friend 

During a late walk around the Magdalen College grounds, Tolkien suggested to young Lewis a different way of interpreting the gospel accounts. Lewis held that the gospel accounts like all these myths were simply “lies told with a silver tongue.” Tolkien countered that perhaps Christ seemed mythic to us because all the great myths of the ancient world found their literal and historic fulfillment in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Myths, far from being lies, were the best ways of expressing truths which would otherwise be inexpressible.

Tolkien’s comments opened a flood gate in Lewis’s thinking—laying the foundation for Lewis’s unique combination of a highly rational, 20th Century brain and an intuitive, myth-loving heart. 

Within two weeks, Lewis confessed himself a full believer in Christ.  Lewis soon wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves, “Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

Stories Make Us See

With Tolkien and the other colleagues and friends (who would become the Inklings), C.S. Lewis embraced his baptized imagination. He discovered with other Inklings that the gospel can be embodied in story, myths, in analogies, and in allegories—-so that we may see it afresh and that it might capture our hearts. The Inklings demonstrate in all their works (i.e. The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Place of the Lion) the power of an imagination captured for the cause of truth.

On November 22nd,  it will be 50 years since the death of C.S. Lewis.  At this anniversary, it might be time to experience afresh a “baptism of the imagination.”

Revisit a beloved one of  The Chronicles of Narnia.  Travel to distant places in his science fiction series (my favorite is Perelandra).  Maybe take a bus trip to the boundary between Heaven and Hell in The Great Divorce.  Or for the bold, explore the ways in which we hid from love and from ourselves in Till We Have Faces.

(c) 2013 Faculty Commons