C.S. Lewis (part I)

A pilgrim passionate about the true God

Author: Fr Massimo Cardamone

Hearing the name of Clive Staples Lewis, many will ask themselves bewildered: “Who is this?”. If they are told that he is the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, a fantastic literary saga transformed into a film, they would exclaim: “Ah, ok!”, always asking themselves: “What does this have to do with a Christian training periodical?”. If you have the patience to read, the questions and perplexities will be answered.

In The ways of the Pilgrim, Lewis describes his intellectual and spiritual itinerary, in these terms: «From an intellectual viewpoint my personal progress started from “popular realism”, to philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from pantheism to theism; and from theism to Christianity». His “return” to Christianity – as he intended his conversion – began during the First World War with the discovery of Chesterton’s work, continued with the knowledge in 1926 of Tolkien, author of the “Lord of Rings”, and reached maturation in 1929. In Surprised by Joy, the autobiography written after the conversion, he states: «During the Trinity quarter of 1929 I surrendered, I admitted that God was God and I knelt down to pray: that night, I was perhaps the most desperate and reluctant convert in England. Then, I did not notice what is so clear and glaring today: the humanity with which God is ready to welcome a convert even under these conditions. At least, the prodigal son had returned home with his own feet.”

At the time when Lewis lived and worked, a systematic and deleterious action was perpetrated from within Christianity aimed at diminishing the Christian faith. And so, after having fought Christianity for years, Lewis had to “surrender” to the evidence of the evangelical “facts”, and without any embarrassment – indeed, quite the opposite – he declared frankly that “Christianity is, if false, of no importance and, if true, of infinite importance. But it cannot be little important anyway”, warning his interlocutors that “he who marries the spirit of the time will soon find himself a widower”.

On the basis of such a belief in faith, he opposed the unsubstantial Christ preached by modernist and liberal theologians, who had deeply undermined faith in the divinity of Christ, denying it and throwing scandal among the simple faithful. In the book Christianity as it is, a collection of conferences held on the radio, he translated the heart of the Christian faith into simple language, without denying, but rather affirming, even the smallest fragment of Gospel Truth. In the conference “Excuse me, what is your God?” he states: “I am here trying to prevent that whoever says the truly absurd thing that is often said about Jesus: “I am ready to accept Jesus as a great teacher of morality, but I do not accept his claim to be God.” This is the thing we must not say. A man who had been a simple man and who had said the things Jesus said would not have been a great teacher of morality. […] He didn’t mean to be it”.

Then, here is the first teaching that Lewis offers: trusting God and his Word, believing in the divinity of the Son, in the truth of the Incarnation, in the Crucifixion and in the Resurrection.