God's Storyteller
The curious life and prodigious influence of C. S. Lewis, the man behind The Chronicles of Narnia
Above all, though, it was probably Lewis's commitment to finding "joy" --a state he had fleetingly experienced at various times in his life, sometimes when coming upon powerful lines of poetry--that brought him the final distance to faith. To Lewis, joy was different from pleasure or happiness, being, in his words, "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." Pursuit of joy was the deep constant of his life up until 1929, when he realized that all his strivings were vain efforts to find its real source, which he had until then resisted with all of his intellectual and emotional resources. But then the man who wanted "to call my soul my own" could no longer: "You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet." And the night he finally submitted, Lewis felt himself to be "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."
Full conversion to orthodox Christianity came two years later, in 1931, when Lewis formally re-entered the Anglican Communion. This act of self-submission would, perhaps paradoxically, free Lewis to become more fully himself, unleashing an even more prolific author than he had been to date. It was as though everything he did now came together, his works of literary history and criticism informing his Christian apologetics (and vice versa), and his faith and scholarship informing his ventures into fiction.
Edification. Seeing his mission as bringing the Christian message to the post-Christian world, he worked hard to popularize that teaching in accessible literary forms, including a space fantasy trilogy and the enormously influential Screwtape Letters , a work purporting to be the correspondence between the head devil, Uncle Screwtape, and his nephew, Wormwood, about the latter's progress with his human "patient." Subtlety had its perils, Lewis learned, as when an irate cleric canceled his subscription to the religious periodical in which the Screwtape Letters was first serialized. But for the most part, those imaginative forays--like the later Narnia books--were hugely successful as works of popular edification.
And renown led to greater demands for his popularizing skills. During World War II, for instance, the BBC invited Lewis to deliver a series of broadcasts that, in later book form, became one of his most popular works of apologetics, Mere Christianity. In it, he made the case for a set of orthodox beliefs that he argued transcended the different doctrinal emphases of the various Christian sects. This Christianity was intended to be anything but easy. It required full acceptance of the most scandalous claim of the Gospels: "You must make your choice," Lewis wrote. "Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman. . . . But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher." Lewis was uncompromising in rejecting what he called "Christianity-and-water."
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