This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Nevertheless, there was a longer version lurking behind it (which didn't fit within the WSJ word count). So I'm posting it now (and, incidentally, it's a short summary of my new book on Lewis.)
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| CSL memorial in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey |
C. S. Lewis was born and died in November (116 and 51 years
ago, respectively). Despite his long tenure as an Oxford and Cambridge scholar
of Medieval and Renaissance literature—for which he could justifiable be
remembered as one of the great lights of English academics—he remains best
known as a popular spokesperson for Christianity, with a fourth major film
poised for production from his landmark fantasy series, The Chronicles of
Narnia. His bestselling books (with millions of copies sold) defend Christian belief
by answering questions that a doubting public might be struggling with. As
Anthony Burgess once commented in the Times Book Review, “Lewis is the ideal
persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a
Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way.” Thus, for many, the
patron saint of intellectual doubters is Clive Staples Lewis and November is the
Month of St. Clive.
This brings me to a concern. Many might conclude that Lewis represented the
Christian Answer Man, and more importantly, that these responses to struggles
and doubts came effortlessly to his pen. However fluidly ideas emerge from his
writings, I don’t believe resolving crises was painless for Lewis. Instead, in
reading him for 35 years, I’ve learned each of those responses came through
crises and pain. That is what makes him continually compelling.
Debra
Winger, who played Lewis’s wife, Joy Davidman, in the film Shadowlands, when asked
to evaluate C. S. Lewis, replied:
He may make difficult questions accessible. I don’t think he makes answers ‘easy.’ I
don’t think he answers questions. He discusses them.
Lewis doesn’t ultimately give us answers—he invites our response.
And
so his readers learn to engage their questions, grasp Lewis’s resolutions and
ponder their own answers. That’s why I think his words have spoken to—and
continue to resonate with—millions of readers.
The
crises that Lewis faced were substantial—his beloved mother’s death when at age
nine, being sent within several weeks to a series of boarding schools which he detested,
fighting and being wounded in World War I, living through the Great Depression
and World II, caring for his alcoholic brother and for Janie Moore (the mother
of a friend who died in WWI) who slipped into dementia toward the end of her
life, and finally, experiencing the death of his wife, Joy. For these reasons
alone, Lewis had to work through the crisis of suffering and death.
And
how did he work through those crises? His stepson Douglas Gresham records
about Lewis’s response to the death of his wife,
He did what he always did
under extreme stress. He sat down at his desk, and looking into himself and
carefully observing what was happening deep in his mind where we keep our
inmost secrets, he picked up his pen and an old exercise book and began to
write.
So
write he did. He wrote about the crises he faced with atheism, with the
Christian faith, and those he faced simply as a human being. The first category
I will summarize briefly. The middle—especially his crisis with the Bible—might
be the most surprising.
Lewis
tells us that he became an atheist around fourteen, but that his prickly, cynical
unbelief wasn’t entirely satisfied because he sought something beyond this
world. He called this Joy, “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more
desirable than any other satisfaction.” Joy led him to conclude that nothing in
this world could satisfy.
If I find in
myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,the
most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
He looked beyond this world and in his
early thirties (recounted with pardonable overstatement) became “the most
dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” The point here is that Lewis
did not emerge from the womb as a man absent of doubt who glided gradually and effortlessly
into prominence as a leading spokesperson for Christian orthodoxy. He struggled,
and that struggle and resolution animate his writing.
The
middle set of crises easily deconstruct the misunderstanding of St. Clive as patron
saint of easy answers to puzzles about Christianity.
As
he pondered conversion, Lewis had to grapple with his love of myth, which he
spoke of as “at its best, a real unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on
human imagination.” How could he believe in the Bible in light of all the other
myths he treasured?
As
a literary scholar, he how to read a book and prized what books bring. “There
is nothing in literature,” Lewis determined in his famous academic study, The Allegory of Love, “which does not,
in some degree, percolate into life.” He read the Good Book full of narratives,
meaningful stories. He believed the Bible “carries” the word of God and that
derives its authority from the one Word of God, Jesus Christ. He was by no
means a fundamentalist, who believed every word from Scripture contained
literal truth or that the Bible equals the Word of God. Instead, Lewis interpreted
the Bible as a literary text, which is certainly not the same as taking the
text literally.
Finally,
Lewis also took on crises that no human being can avoid—suffering, death, and
what I call “the crisis of feeling.” The latter is that problem we face when
emotions don’t lead us to contentment. Put another way, if life is supposed to
feel good, what happens when it doesn’t? Feelings—particularly the emotional
rush of life—remain for many the final arbiter of truth and decision-making.
And
yet Lewis found his own wisdom hard to take when his wife, Joy, died. The pain
was excruciating and left him feeling “concussed.” Not only had he lost someone
he cherished, but he saw his own life replayed—Joy had two young sons whom she
was leaving behind at almost the same age as Lewis and his brother at their
mother’s death. His anguish disturbed easy answers, and his searing honesty remains
the most arresting feature of A Grief Observed, the book he wrote just after Joy’s
death:
Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God.
The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.
Yet as
the book progressed, he resolved that even God himself does not respond to
every inquiry:
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a
rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like
a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not
in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’
Lewis himself did not receive every answer he longed for. And that, in the end,
brought a resolution that transcended his understanding.
So,
if indeed November is the Month of St. Clive, and if Lewis has become a somewhat
universal symbol of Christianity, let us not conclude that the best life can be
discovered through the uncomplicated resolution of all crises, nor the easy
answer to every problem. Instead, let Lewis model for us an engagement with crises
and a life that lies beyond easy answers.
After
my Master of Divinity at Princeton, I received a fellowship and a grant for a
year’s study in Heidelberg and Tübingen, Germany—with renowned minds like
Jürgen Moltmann and Hans Kung, and especially the then up-and-coming light,
Michael Welker. Welker guided my inquiry into the concept of the world (and how
it relates to God) by guiding me toward the thought the mathematician and
philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. (Incidentally, Whitehead’s intricate and complex
theory language—though putatively English—proved to be often more difficult
than learning German.) It was a glorious year. Studying under the shadow of the
Heidelberg Castle with this brilliant scholar and his double PhDs (one in
philosophy, one in theology) constitutes, in my book, inspiration. 
Graduate Theological Union (GTU), where theology and science represented the
best game in town (or at least on GTU’s Holy Hill). I began to set Whitehead’s
thought in conversation with the theology of Karl Barth, that is, to compare a
scientist with a theologian. I remember encountering my two mentors there, Ted
Peters and Bob Russell. (This eventually became my book, God and the World.) In experiencing Bob in the classroom—lecturing,
for example, on the relation of quantum theory to divine action—I encountered
someone brilliant in three fields: theology, science, and philosophy (which are
themselves really each sets of disciplines). There I observed Bob doing the
work he loves so well: bringing together this sometimes messy, and often
electrifying, combination 
of theology and science with his characteristic wit,
brilliance, and profound kindness. Ted, my dissertation advisor (or Doktorvater, as he and the Germans would
call it), could as easily unveil the insights of genetics, Trinitarian
theology, and the mythology of the Egyptian god Ra. Both Ted and Bob fully convinced
me, as a student of theology, of the imperative to take in the importance of
science. Actually, they also made the bridging of theology and science both enjoyable
and compelling.
