The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis. By Alister E. McGrath (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), pp
xiii+191.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) is most famous for his Narnia stories. But at the time of his death he was also
regarded as a leading Christian apologist in the Anglo-American world, through his wartime
broadcasts for the BBC and books such as Mere Christianity (1952) and his autobiographical
Surprised by Joy (1955). However his reputation took a nosedive during the swinging sixties. This was
largely, according to McGrath, because of rising secularism and philosophical movements like logical
positivism. By the 1980s however Lewis had resurged: his Narnia books became enormously popular,
logical positivism was shoved aside by newer fashions, and there was a religious revival in America.
He was the right man at the right time. McGrath contends this was because he had a knack,
amounting almost to genius, for putting Christian essentials into accessible language using his
remarkable literary talents and insights into a broad western cultural tradition, “offering an
imaginative and rhetorical rendering of some core themes of the Christian faith that were superbly
adapted to the cultural geography of his own age”. This set of richly scholarly essays explores in
detail these themes. McGrath’s acclaimed biography C. S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant
Prophet (2013) was not the place for extended analysis of many aspects of Lewis’s worldview. Here
we have a more sustained intellectual engagement. The aim is “to set Lewis in the greater context of
the western literary and theological tradition, exploring how he appropriated and modified its
narratives, ideas, and images”.
How does Lewis’s use of myth and metaphors of light, sun and sight locate him within both classical
and contemporary debate on these themes? Why should Surprised by Joy be used with caution as a
source? Did he have a covert agenda in writing it? How did the now neglected philosophical
movement “Oxford Realism” impact upon the impressionable Lewis during his early years at Oxford
after his personal trauma during World War 1? How does this influence illuminate his concepts of
idealism and realism, as well as his complex transition to theism and later conversion to Christianity?
How did Lewis’s restatement of the traditional “argument from desire” lead him to “a rich and
complex way of exploring and affirming the rationality and existential appeal of the Christian faith”?
How innovative was Lewis’s approach to apologetics? What was his relationship to Anglicanism? Can
he be regarded as a theologian? McGrath give deeply thoughtful and quite revisionist answers to
these questions.
I found particularly interesting the penetrating section on myth. Spurred on by his fellow Inkling
Tolkien, Lewis came to see that Greek and Nordic myths were not incompatible with Christianity.
They were anticipations of the full truth, the grand narrative or “big picture” that was offered by
Christian faith. As Lewis said, we should expect to find “in the imagination of great Pagan teachers
and myth-makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole
cosmic story - the theme of incarnation, death and rebirth”.
Indeed humanity’s sense of supra-rational reality, the subject of poetry, Romantic literature,
Idealistic philosophy, yearnings, imaginings, questings for meaning, sense of awe and the eternal, all
these were but tastes of Divine reality. Dry theology and logically ordered statements of Christian
belief were inadequate expressions of the vibrancy of true religion, best told “in the form of
imaginative narrative transposition of the Christian story”. Theology needed to be
“remythologized”. It was his ability to do this that was the key to Lewis’s popular success. McGrath
contextualises all this with copious (even over-copious) referencing to classical and modern
literature and scholarship. In a shortish chapter he mentions Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria,
Plato, Keats, Schlegel, Wagner, Yeats, Joyce, Bohr and Heisenberg, Bultman, Habermas and Bruce
Lincoln, to cite a few.
Paul Crook