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December
21, 2002, 3:45 p.m. By Gina R. Dalfonzo |
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good deal has been written in recent years about the
deplorable state of the Christian literary world (see also here).
Yet among the formulaic novels, the glut of self-help manuals, and the
diet books (What
Would Jesus Eat?) are some encouraging trends that many critics
tend to overlook. One such trend is the steady popularity of a brilliant
yet highly readable 20th-century Oxford don who, as his friend Chad Walsh
wrote, "called himself a dinosaur but . . . seems to speak to people
where they are."
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Even the most poorly stocked Christian bookstore is likely to carry a few titles by C. S. "Jack" Lewis; the bigger ones often devote several shelves to him. A proliferation of books like Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis; The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life; and Not a Tame Lion: The Spiritual Legacy of C. S. Lewis suggest an almost inexhaustible market for all things Lewis. (They also suggest that the purveyors of the Christian pulp fiction and nonfiction may be underestimating their audience.)
A noteworthy addition to this field is David Downing's The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis's Journey to Faith. (I should mention here that the author's wife, Dr. Crystal Downing, was one of my undergraduate professors.) Downing, an English professor at Elizabethtown College, has taken an unusual and valuable approach to his subject. He examines Lewis's first 30 years, until his conversion to Christianity, thus ending his book at what many current Lewis studies use as their jumping-off point.
Lewis himself covered the same territory in his book Surprised by Joy (1952) in order to "tell how I passed from Atheism to Christianity." However, as Lewis admitted, in this book he concentrated on the events he thought most important to his spiritual development — biographer George Sayer points out that fully a third of the book deals with his six years in boarding school — leaving out quite a lot that might be considered "important by ordinary biographical standards." (One of his friends quipped that the book should have been titled Suppressed by Jack.)
Downing, understandably, is able to provide a much more objective and thorough presentation of Lewis's early years, even though he too focuses on spiritual events. Lewis's pilgrimage to faith was not at all a conventional one, at least for the contemporary reader who tends to see faith primarily as an emotional affair. Not that Lewis was devoid of emotion by any means — one of the strongest motivations for his spiritual explorations was the intense experiences of joy, referred to in the title of his own book, that visited him from childhood onward. Yet it was his probing mind that kept leading him from one philosophy to the next, in search of a worldview that would satisfy him.
Raised as an Irish Protestant, young Jack Lewis abandoned his already weak childhood faith during his years in boarding school, after his mother's death, and embraced atheism and materialism. But as Downing demonstrates, the bold new philosophies that tantalized Lewis's intellect left his imagination hungry. He would write later, "Nearly all that I loved [such as poetry and mythology] I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless."
Downing vividly portrays this conflict as central to Lewis's religious quest, exploring his early writings for clues to his thinking, and tracing connections between them and Lewis's later works. (He finds it telling, for example, that the materialistic seventeen-year-old Lewis tried his hand at a romantic epic, "The Quest of Bleheris" — and put a Christ figure in it, to boot.) When "his mind was not able to rest on pure materialism" — when his imagination would no longer let him believe that matter is all that exists — he went on to embrace dualism, idealism, and then pantheism, trying to understand the relationship of the "reason, revelation and romanticism" that influenced his thinking.
Downing gives a much fuller and more helpful explanation of these philosophies than Lewis himself did in his own book. He also shows how Lewis's gradual acceptance of theism and then Christianity finally resolved the lifelong struggle in his mind, bringing together the various aspects of his thinking as no other philosophy had. He was helped immensely by a conversation with his friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, who believed that Christ's incarnation was the literal fulfillment of the ancient myths that Lewis had always loved, but which he had thought had no relation to reality. "In Christianity, the true myth to which all the others were pointing," Downing writes, "Lewis found a worldview that he could defend as both good and real. It was a faith grounded in history and one that satisfied even his formidable intellect."
Finally, he surrendered his will — which, both Lewis and Downing suggest, may have been at the very root of the problem all along. Lewis's own description of that decision is almost comically brief, considering it serves as the climax of his book: "I was driven to Whipsnade [in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle] one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." By contrast, the same scene is the most moving in Downing's book, as he allows himself to speculate on what might have passed through Lewis's mind as the pieces of a great puzzle began to fall into place for him and he began to comprehend the freedom to be found in surrender.
Opening himself up to God, as many besides Downing have observed (especially Dr. Armand Nicholi in The Question of God), transformed Lewis as a person and as a writer — humbling his pride, teaching him a new respect for and enjoyment of his fellow human beings, and stimulating his creativity to new heights. Walter Hooper, Lewis's secretary for a short time, summed him up as "the most thoroughly converted man I ever met," and Downing adds that he "seems to have been one of those rare souls who could combine goodness and greatness."
This view of Lewis suggests that it is more than just his clear and logical explanations and appealing personality that fascinate his readers. The rigors of his spiritual journey and the fact that he took so much convincing to come to Christianity gave him a more complete understanding of his faith than almost any other twentieth-century writer, as well as a sympathy with the spiritual struggles of others. In explaining Lewis's own struggle and how it shaped him, Downing helps us understand why so many restless searchers can identify with his arguments — and why Christian readers fed up with the shallowness, sentimentality, and glib answers in too many other books will continue to be irresistibly drawn to him.
— Gina R. Dalfonzo is editor of BreakPoint Online and a graduate student at George Mason University.
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