NARNIA BUSINESS

And in Wheaton, Illinois, on the campus of Wheaton College, another evangelical school, there is another wardrobe — another real wardrobe that inspired the famous beginning of the seven volumes of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

These dueling wardrobes inevitably bring one thing to mind, and it is perhaps unfortunate — for an evangelical culture traditionally scornful of Roman Catholic cults of saints — that it is those Italian churches bickering for centuries over which houses the real bones of St. Luke. Among evangelicals in America, memorabilia of C. S. Lewis has begun to proliferate like relics of the early Church.

And if it’s odd that America’s Protestant evangelicals should start to form at least the external features of an old-fashioned Catholic sort of saint’s cult, it’s even odder that they would choose this Oxford don: The nonsmoking, teetotaling, low-church Americans treasuring the relics of a pipe-smoking, beer-loving, high-church Englishman.

But treasure him, they do — and not just evangelicals, but serious and religiously conservative Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and mainline Protestants of all stripes. Lewis popularized the use of “mere Christianity” (a phrase coined not by Lewis but by the seventeenth-century Puritan, Richard Baxter) to describe basic orthodoxy, the positive faith held by all traditional Christians, whatever their church or sect. And for all mere Christians, C. S. Lewis has become the author of the twentieth century, by a wide margin the bestselling religious writer in England and America. Thirty-five years after his death in 1963, every word he published is still in print. In anticipation of this year’s centenary of his birth, dozens of studies of his work have been published and innumerable conferences and seminars have been scheduled.

Lewis himself would have been befuddled by his notoriety. In the early 1950s — after delivering the series of phenomenally successful BBC radio broadcasts later published as Mere Christianity, and after having his portrait on the cover of Time magazine — he wrote to a friend, “I am going to be (if I live long enough) one of those men who was a famous writer in his forties and dies unknown.”

But since his popularity shows little sign of fading, it’s worth asking how to account for his enduring fame and how good a thing that fame is. It is not enough to conclude that Lewis is deserving of admiration, as indeed he is. The Lewisians’ veneration of their hero often fails to do justice either to Lewis’s legacy or to the intellectual health of Christianity in the Anglo- American world.

Born in Belfast, Clive Staples Lewis — his friends and family called him ” Jack” — was reared as an Ulster Protestant and came to England for the first time as a schoolboy. He hated school (like many British intellectuals, he found the public-school system barbaric) and could thrive only once his father placed him in the hands of a tutor. This memorable character, a Scots Presbyterian turned atheist, prepared Lewis well for Oxford but also confirmed the young man in his conviction that religion was something to leave behind. After serving in World War I, Lewis returned to Oxford to take first-class degrees in philosophy and English.

Starting out his career as a tutor, Lewis gradually established himself as a formidable scholar of medieval and renaissance literature; equally gradually, he began to lose his philosophical bearings. In his 1955 autobiography Surprised by Joy, he recounts with great verve and wit the collapse of his atheism and his subsequent reluctant conversion — first, in 1929, to theism and then, two years later, to full-fledged Christianity. The latter was accomplished under the gentle tutelage of two friends, Hugo Dyson and Lewis’s fellow Oxford don J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis, Dyson, and Tolkien would, some years later, become key members of an amorphous group called “the Inklings,” who met regularly to drink, smoke, and celebrate poetry.

In the midst of all this, Lewis was living a very odd private life. He shared a house with a woman named Mrs. Moore (the mother of a dead friend of Lewis’s), her daughter, and, eventually, Lewis’s own brother Warnie, a career military officer. Ever since the Lewis cult began, there has been speculation about his relation to Mrs. Moore. In any event, Lewis’s domestic responsibilities, coupled with his burdens as a popular tutor and lecturer, should have made it impossible for him to get any substantial writing done.

Thanks, however, to astonishing fluency and stubborn discipline, the works poured out: an allegorical autobiography, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1933); a profound study of medieval poetry, The Allegory of Love (1936); a series of science-fiction novels, beginning with Out of the Silent Planet in 1938; and the steady stream of Christian apologetics that would ultimately make him famous, starting with The Problem of Pain in 1940.

These works would also help to make him much-loathed among the English faculty at Oxford. The books were written for a general audience, and Lewis made things worse by becoming, during World War II, immensely popular with his radio addresses on the Christian faith. So too his characteristic bluffness and heartiness — charming to his friends and most of his students – – were no more appealing to many of his colleagues than his Christianity. The result was that Lewis could never get elected to a professorship at Oxford, even though he was by far the most distinguished candidate. When Cambridge asked him to stand for a chair in medieval and renaissance literature, he accepted in 1955.

Many things were changing in Lewis’s life at this time. Mrs. Moore died in 1951. (“And so ends,” his brother wrote in his diary, “the mysterious self- imposed slavery in which J. has lived for at least thirty years.”) Lewis had stopped writing works of apologetics, for reasons still debated, but had begun a new project: the Narnia stories that would give him perhaps his greatest fame. And he had met Joy Davidson, who in 1956 became his wife.

The story of their marriage, in its external terms at least, is told in the film Shadowlands. (Most of the complaints about Shadowlands concern Anthony Hopkins’s false portrayal of Lewis as a dour, buttoned-up, somber man and the film’s downplaying of Lewis’s Christian faith. These are valid complaints. But there is also a vocal minority of Lewisians who argue that the film’s assertion of a sexual relation between Jack and Joy is unwarranted.

The four years of marriage to Joy were the most dramatic and emotionally potent of Lewis’s life, so perhaps it is not surprising that after her death in 1960 his health began to decline. He died in November 1963, but his death did not receive the attention it might have, for on that same day John E Kennedy was shot in Dallas.

The fact that Lewis was British provides the first clue to his enduring popularity, since Britishness confers for many Americans an immediate air of culture and sophistication. And that air is increased immeasurably by Lewis’s status as an Oxford and Cambridge don.

But if Americans tend to fawn over certified European cultural sophistication, they also dislike what they perceive to be pretension, and here too Lewis fits the bill. Though ideologically he differed greatly from George Orwell, he had Orwell’s forcefulness of style — the same relish for slicing through obfuscation, the same let-us-clear-our-minds-of-cant bluntness. Perhaps the most famous example comes in Mere Christianity, when Lewis responds to the notion that Jesus was a “great moral teacher”:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

This prose style grows out of a peculiarly English tradition of “plain common sense” that can be enormously appealing. And the mastery with which Orwell and Lewis employ it is almost sufficient in itself to explain the passion with which each man is admired.

But the style also helps to explain something otherwise paradoxical about Lewis’s popularity. Living in an age that despises moralism, Lewis was a moralist to his bones — perhaps the greatest since Samuel Johnson. His Screwtape Letters — a set of counsels to an apprentice demon from his satanic master — is a masterpiece of literary moralism. But the candid humility he displayed in even his most polemical writings disarms the usual reaction against such writing. By making it clear that he stood under the same judgment, Lewis almost always managed not to appear contemptuous or superior.

He wrote clearly, confidently, and unpretentiously because he understood himself to be speaking for a tradition far greater than he. Though Lewis was by 1940 well acquainted with suffering, he began The Problem of Pain by disavowing any deep personal knowledge of pain and fortitude. (Even this disavowal, however, did not prevent Charles Williams from making the deadpan comment that the displeasure God displays in the Book of Job is directed less against Job than his comforters — “the sort of people who write books on the Problem of Pain.”)

Those who enjoy the direct unpretentiousness of his style also tend to be pleased that Lewis was not a professional theologian. Indeed, he frequently insisted on his status as an amateur, and though he was deeply learned in the history of Christian theology, the fact that he was not by profession a theologian helped him doubly: It made his style all the more appropriate and enabled him to recognize which disputes are too recondite for readers with limited theological knowledge. Moreover, Lewis was an Anglican and therefore free to be claimed with almost equal plausibility by people of either Protestant or Catholic sensibility.

This peculiar combination of virtues may have been what led Lewis’s publisher to splash across the covers of his paperbacks: “The Most Original Christian Writer of Our Century.” It is a singularly inapt phrase. In his first volume of Christian apologetics, he wrote, “I have believed myself to be re-stating ancient and orthodox doctrines. If any parts of the book are ‘original,’ in the sense of being novel or unorthodox, they are so against my will and as a result of my ignorance.”

One truly unique thing about Lewis is the facility with which he assimilated influences — and that facility is what gave him both his successes and his failures. The first two volumes of his science-fiction trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, were written under the strong influence of David Lindsay’s 1920 fantasy A Voyage to Arcturus. But the third volume, That Hideous Strength, is wrenchingly different in style and plot — for Lewis had fallen under the spell of Charles Williams’s “spiritual thrillers” and saw no difficulty in immediately adopting Williams’s peculiar idiom.

Similarly, in his polemical writings, Lewis sometimes sounds more like G. K. Chesterton than even Chesterton ever sounded. The facility in mimicry had its scholarly uses too. Having noted that we read older English authors in their own archaic English but translate their continental counterparts into modern English — a practice that makes the foreign writers sound “more like us” — Lewis proceeded, in his 1954 history of sixteenth-century literature, to translate every passage into renaissance English.

But perhaps the most notable examples of Lewis’s ability to assimilate sources are found in his Chronicles of Narnia. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for instance, the children have come straight out of E. Nesbit’s children’s books, the talking animals straight out of Kenneth Grahame’s, the werewolves straight out of the Gothic tradition, and even Father Christmas makes an unexplained appearance. And this is not to mention the gospel story on which the plot is built. Everything in the cupboard goes into the stew.

Lewis’s literary acquisitiveness exasperated J. R. R. Tolkien, who believed that the responsibility of the fantasy writer is to build a coherent and internally consistent world. For Tolkien, Lewis’s habit of assuming the voices of his favorite writers was both aesthetically and ethically dubious. Nothing infuriated him more than when Lewis used some of Tolkien’s terminology — and used it, by Tolkienian standards, inaccurately. Tolkien often said that he could not have finished The Lord of the Rings without Lewis’s support, but he could not return the admiration, and his open frustration with Lewis’s fiction played a major part in the cooling of their friendship.

But the trait that Tolkien deplored is also a key to Lewis’s success, for it is impossible to find someone left cold by the whole of his work: If not the space trilogy then The Abolition of Man is appealing; if not Reflections on the Psalms then Till We Have Faces. No one who has read much Lewis will be surprised to learn that he was a master of parody. For a writer with Lewis’s evangelistic impulses, it is a wonderful skill to possess.

Though the causes of Lewis’s continuing fame are fairly clear, however, its value to contemporary Christian faith is rather muddied. The work of compiling collections of “What Lewis Said” about any number of subjects is virtually complete now, and such work is surely useful, considering the range of topics on which Lewis had valuable things to say. But it is hard not to suspect that some people consult these compendia in order to avoid the labor of thinking about difficult subjects themselves. More troublesome still is the new genre devoted to “What Lewis Would Say” about problems or issues he did not encounter.

Perhaps those who expend their ingenuity imagining a Lewisian response to post-structuralism or radical feminism would serve the cause of Christianity better by formulating their own responses. To be sure, Lewisians at least show an admirable willingness to consider that someone is wiser than they, but how many mortals deserve this much reverence? There are bracelets and buttons worn by young evangelicals that read “WWJD?” — “What would Jesus do?” To that question the constant query of some Lewisians, “What would Lewis say?,” draws uncomfortably close.

The respect readers feel for the man sometimes falls over into idolatry — and with idolatry comes the need to separate the orthodox from the heterodox, the sheep from the goats. More disturbing than the comic disputes over who owns the True Wardrobe are the quarrels about whether Lewis’s marriage was consummated, with Lewis’s literary executor Walter Hooper the most vigorous promoter of what A. N. Wilson called “The Perpetual Virginity of C. S. Lewis.” And then there are the fragments of stories and poems Hooper has published since Lewis’s death, fragments that other Lewisians find unworthy (sometimes on stylistic, sometimes on moral grounds).

Hooper’s chief antagonist, Kathryn Lindskoog, has devoted hundreds of pages to charges that Hooper is a habitual liar and perhaps even complicit in forgery. There are legitimate questions about the way he has handled Lewis’s literary estate, but Hooper has for the most part maintained a lofty silence. And this silence has maddened his critics — especially Lindskoog, who has moved from questioning Hooper’s motives to questioning those of anyone who doubts her charges.

The whole spectacle is immensely unedifying and becomes more so when people start to note that Hooper is a late convert to Catholicism while Lindskoog writes for evangelical publishers. C. S. Lewis’s abiding concern was to focus on the foundational beliefs that orthodox Christians have always held in common — beliefs that together constitute “mere Christianity.” Lewis contends that “plain, central” Christian faith, when examined closely and historically, “turns out to be no insipid inter-denominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible.”

Perhaps this delightful inexhaustibility is Lewis’s most noteworthy trait. He saw himself as simply the most recent in a long series of writers who have tried over the centuries to restate the essentials of Christian faith for their time. That is why he did not think his books would be read long after his death: He expected new challenges that new generations would have to address in their own way — not by reinventing Christian doctrine, but by creatively applying that same plain, central, inexhaustible Christianity to which he devoted himself.

Many years ago V. S. Naipaul noted a peculiarity of the Indian attitude toward Gandhi: Everywhere in India Gandhi was venerated as a saint, but the social conditions against which he railed remained unchanged. It would be sad if the same fate were to befall Lewis. This is a real temptation, for to read his books is to dwell in an atmosphere of moral and spiritual health that offers dramatic relief from the confusions and frustrations of modern life. But Lewis himself always strove to encounter and interpret the world in which he lived. His admirers should remember that the achievements of the truly great are best honored not by the one who praises their works, but by the one who follows their example.

Alan Jacobs is an associate professor of English at Wheaton College. C. S.