A Mind That Grasped Both Heaven and Hell
By JOSEPH LOCONTE
WASHINGTON November 22, 2003
Forty years ago today, as the world mourned the assassination of an American
president, the passing of the 20th century's most influential Christian writer
was hardly noticed: Clive Staples Lewis, professor of English literature at
Oxford and Cambridge, died on Nov. 22, 1963. In his ability to nurture the
faithful, as well as seduce the skeptic, C. S. Lewis had no peer.
Lewis was an atheist for much of his adult
life, an experience that may have helped immunize him from the religious clich้,
the reluctance to ask hard questions, the self-righteousness of the zealot. "Mr.
Lewis possesses the rare gift," according to an early reviewer, "of being able
to make righteousness readable." Lewis was not a theologian, but he expressed
even the most difficult religious concepts with bracing clarity. He was not a
preacher, yet his essays and novels pierce the heart with their nobility and
tenderness.
The lessons found within his writings
continue to resonate today. In fact, it's hard to imagine a time when the need
for sane thinking about religion was more momentous. Cite an act of terror, from
the sniper shootings in Washington to the bombings in Baghdad and Istanbul, and
faith is close at hand. Many are now tempted to equate piety with venality or
worse and it's here that Lewis may have the most to teach us.
Born in 1898, Lewis reached maturity in
the 1930's, when Europe was being convulsed by the rise of new tyrannies:
communism in Russia and fascism in Spain, Italy and Germany. At the same time,
trends in psychology and theology were discrediting Christian doctrines of sin
and repentance. The "root causes" of international disorder were said to be
social and political arrangements, like runaway capitalism or the flawed Treaty
of Versailles. But Lewis, like his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, knew the trouble lay
deeper, and marshaled his literary imagination to explore it.
In a
harrowing scene from his science fiction novel "Perelandra," the protagonist,
Prof. Elwin Ransom, battles a mad scientist horribly disfigured by his lust for
power. Lewis writes: "What was before him appeared no longer a creature of
corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an
instrument." The Christians, Lewis argued, were right: the mystery of evil was
rooted in the tragedy of human nature. Pride, and the poisoned conscience it
created, functioned as the engine of the world's woes. Unchallenged, it led to a
"ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self, which is
the mark of Hell."
Many modern liberals dismiss Lewis's
concept of the diabolical as a "medieval" superstition. Yet many religious
conservatives seem to make evil the brainchild of God himself. For them, all
individual and social sin including the terror of Sept. 11 is the perfect
will of a Divine Judge (as the Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed at the time). Lewis
disagreed: Evil is always man's doing, yet it is never his destiny. The power of
choice makes evil possible, but it's also "the only thing that makes possible
any love or goodness or joy worth having."
While Oxford agnostics howled, Lewis gave
BBC talks on theology that were a national sensation. Even his beloved
children's stories, "The Chronicles of Narnia," ring with biblical themes of sin
and redemption. No one did more to make "the repellent doctrines" of
Christianity plausible to modern ears.
Nevertheless, Lewis acknowledged that
religion easily becomes a device to exploit others sometimes, as in the case
of sexually abusive priests, at the very steps of the altar. The pretense of
piety, he said, has left a record of violence that should shame every honest
believer. "Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst," he wrote in
"Reflections on the Psalms."
Yet, unlike the cynic, Lewis refused to
blame the faith itself for the shortcomings of the church. Instead, his writings
offer bright glimpses into the moral beauty of divine goodness, what Lewis
called "the weight of glory." It is this vision of the Holy, he observed, that
has produced many of the masterpieces of art and music. This same vision
motivates the faithful to risk everything to relieve the world's suffering:
caring for plague victims, defending the rights of children, guiding slaves to
freedom, breaching war zones to feed the poor.
"If you read history, you will find that
the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought
most of the next," he wrote in "Mere Christianity," one of his best-known works.
"It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that
they have become so ineffective in this." In an era when God himself seems to be
on trial, that's a timely message for the half-hearted pilgrim as well as the
devoted doubter. Probably just what C. S. Lewis had in mind.
Joseph Loconte, religion fellow at the
Heritage Foundation, is editor of the forthcoming "The End of Illusions:
America's Churches and Hitler's Gathering Storm, 1938-41.''
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