(On the plane last night I touched up the first few paragraphs of my new book on C. S. Lewis. The manuscript's about to be sent off to the editor. So let me know what you think.)
A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere—“Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,” as Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems.” God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
In an introduction that I can still remember reading for the
first time (because it so well captures his voice), C. S. Lewis tells us that
his Reflections on the Psalms is “not
a work of scholarship. I am no Hebraist, no higher critic, no ancient
historian, no archaeologist.”[1]
Lewis was always clear—and here wanted clearly to delineate his work from other
commentaries on the Psalter.
Similarly, I want
to be clear: I am not writing a biography of Lewis. Instead of answering who he
was, I will take up a version of the question of why Lewis is still so popular,
selling more books today than when he died in 1963. Here’s my answer: Lewis’s voice still resonates because his
crises and their resolution in his writings meet our crises and help us to resolve
them. In short form: Lewis’s crises
meet our crises. I begin then by telling the story of Lewis’s life through
the troubles and complexities that shaped him. I will then pursue his thoughts
through his writings—which is what he’s best known for—and the way his books,
articles, and published addresses offer us access to his wisdom. I do this
because Lewis’s crises formed his writing and give it the power that resonates
for his readers.
Crises
are, as Webster’s puts it, “an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs
whose outcome will make a difference for better or worse.”[2]
Either positive or negative, they always carry with them momentous change. I
will describe C. S Lewis’ life’s storyline around six main crises, each that
define a decade (more or less) of his sixty-five years. Using the language of
film and television, these crises become “plot points,” which represent significant events within a plot where the action digs
in and pivots toward another direction. These are points around which the plot
revolves. They can be an event, an item, or the discovery of a character or
motive. In this case, the “plot” at hand is the life of Clive Staples Lewis. His plot points are the times in which the story of
his life altered dramatically, where he confronted crises and sought to resolve
them
