The Life and Writings of CS Lewis
Paulo F. Ribeiro, MBA, PhD
Calvin College
Engineering Department
Caledonia Christian Reformed Church
March 16, AD
Caledonia, MI
The joy of the Lord is our strength.
Neh. 8:10
The Apologist's Evening Prayer
From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and needle's eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.
Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly
concrete Person.
Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold,
adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its wine. In it God shows himself to us. That He
answers prayers is a corollary—not necessarily the most important one. What He does is learned from what He is.”
30 Years
Dec 17, 1977
3
Introductory Words
Good Morning. Thanks for the opportunity
Presentation: Brazilian Style – Audience Participation (Encouraged):
Talking Points - - - -
Why Lewis:
The most important Christian writer of the 20th century.
A man who has had, and is having, a profound impact on our world.
Lewis wrote about many different subjects with a truly integrated Christian
Perspective (theology, politics, education, English literature, children’s stories,
science fiction, etc.):
The Pubs went silent.
Politics: crime, obscenity, capital punishment, conscription, communism, fascism, socialism, war, vivisection, the welfare state, the atomic
bomb, tyranny,
"The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" has had had on theories of punishment. The prevailing idea was that prisoners were sick people
who needed therapy--and that included all the techniques that modern psychology and technology could bring to bear to achieve behavioral
modification. Sentences were open-ended, and the prisoner was not released until he was "cured.“
Lewis objected strenuously. Prisoners, he said, need to be punished, not "cured" in that sense. The sentence must be fixed, so that the
prisoner knows at least the approximate date of his release. Treating the prisoner as a patient robs him of his dignity and constitutes an
unwarranted assault on his personality and character.
Introductory Words
I discovered C.S. Lewis when in college (1974). Since then I have read and re-read
almost everything he wrote. He has had a tremendous influence on me in several
ways (just ask my wife). She says: “too much!”
-He has helped to overcome make modern ills, among them chronological
snobbery and the temptation to be relevant, original.
-He has helped me to think more objectively by his rigorous, precise, penetrating
logic, vivid, lively, and playful imagination.
-He has helped me to have a better sense of the real world.
-He shows my insensitivity and inability to enjoy God's daily gifts.
- Possibly one of the most gifted English writers of last century.
-He always points me to the ultimate source of Joy: Christ.
-His theology may not be perfect, but the practice was exemplary.
Among the books I have read and enjoyed with much profit are: Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, The Problem of
Pain, The Abolition of Man, Miracles, Pilgrim's Regress, Poems, Letters to an American Lady, Letters of C.S. Lewis, The
Narnia books, Out of the Silent Planet, That Hideous Strength, Experiment in Criticism, God in the Dock, The Four
Loves, The Weight of Glory, and everything else.
Introductory Words - Chronology
Childhood in Belfast
Search for Joy
Boarding Schools: Campbell, Cherbourg and Malvern
WT Kirkpatrick
Oxford
War
Return to Oxford
Conversion
Inklings
Tutor and Lecturer
World War II and the Emergence of the Apologist
The Royal Air Force
Domestic Life at the Kilns
Charles Williams and the Inklings
Writings – Writings – and Narnia
Discovered by America
Joy Gresham – And A Grief Observed
Cambridge
Final Days
Introductory
Observations
• Fascination with Lewis
started in 1974
(University in Brazil)
• Started with Theological
writings – then my wife
and children brought
me into Narnia
• Spent Four years in
England & read
everything Lewis wrote
which consolidated my
appreciation
• Became a CS Lewis
freak (according to my
children)
8
The Author:
•
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•
•
•
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•
•
CS Lewis
Born in Belfast in 1898.
Educated in England (prep school – Oxford University)
Army in 1917, saw front-line combat
Returned to Oxford, graduated in 1922 and became a fellow
of Magdalen college in 1925.
An atheist in his boyhood - converted to Christianity in 1931.
Wartime religious talks on the BBC, plus some other
theological books brought him fame (+Narnia)
Was part of the Oxford literary circle (the Inklings) whose
members also included J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams.
In 1957 he married Joy Davidman Gresham, an American
with whom he had corresponded with. Joy was suffering
from cancer at the time of their marriage – she died in 1960.
Died on November the 22nd 1963 - same day that John F.
Kennedy was assassinated.
9
The Author: (Jack)
• Clear thinking and writing – Captivating.
• Came from the outside
• He has helped me to overcome chronological snobbery, postmodernism, etc. His writings: precise, penetrating logic, vivid,
lively, and playful imagination.
• Taught the English language to sing
– (Kreeft: “What Christian ever made Latin dance as
Augustine did? What Christian ever taught English to sing as
Lewis did? Their words are like diamonds, full of light yet full
of heaviness; full of grace and truth.”)
• I found the perfect marriage: Brazilian Music & Lewis’s English
• He always points to the ultimate source: Christ.
• His theology was not perfect, but his practice was exemplary
10
(almost Reformed)
The Author: (Jack)
•Premature reader and writer (from a
bookish family)
•In Surprised by Joy Lewis tells of his
first stories of dressed animals”
•He was between 7 & 9 years old when
he wrote a full history of Animal-Land,
complete with map and colorful
illustrations (Boxen)
•Boxen, however, did not have much to
do with Narnia, except for the
anthropomorphic beasts, it had the
tiniest hint of wonder.
•Suffered from an undefinable desire
(romantic longing)
11
"The Christians are right; it is Pride that has
been the chief cause of misery in every nation
and every family since the world began. Other
vices may sometimes bring people together; you
may find good fellowship and jokes and
friendliness among drunken people or unchaste
people. But Pride always means enmity - it is
enmity. And not only enmity between man and
man, but enmity to God.“
Mere Christianity
Introductory Words
I relate to C.S. Lewis' story in Surprised by Joy in many
respects: the experiences of the painful, melancholy, yet
"joyful" yearnings (he calls sehnsucht).
Although the scenery was very different: tropical
ocean, samba, soccer … “there is no sin on the south
side of the equator,”
I still suffered from the stabs of joy… there was an
immediate connection.
Several years later I found myself not far away from the
land of Narnia (PhD at University of Manchester 19821985).
I became a “freak” (according to my children): house,
cars, everything-Lewis-Narnia ….
Is this an American thing?
Then I am glad to be an American.
“At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side
of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning,
but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with
the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament
are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some
day, God willing, we shall get in.”
The Weight of Glory
Feeling Intellect
(Mind, Heart, Emotions, Will)
Beyond reason – into vision, joy, love
Traits and Virtues
•Clarity
•Veracity
•Charity
•Humility
•Joy
•Militant Intellect
•Brilliance
•Reasonableness
•Struggle with Loss
Owen Barfield when describing Lewis's writing
style and attractiveness:
" . . . somehow what he
thought about everything was
secretly present in what he said
about anything."
His Main Battle Grounds
1 – Needs of the West: Theology in Popular Language, Allegory,
Fiction, and Children’s Story.
3 – The Devil: Screwtape Letters
4 – Fighting Moral Subjectivism: (MC, Abolition of Man, Poison of Subjectivism)
5 – Longing for Joy: Surprised by Joy and The Weight of Glory
6 – Selling Hell: That Hideous Strength, Great Divorce
7 – The Problem of Pain
8 – Theological Modernism
9 – Love
10 – Building Bridges (Past and Future)
Love + Suffering + Joy = Power released by splitting the atom of the Trinity in the cup Christ drank
on Calvary
Themes and Passionate Topics
Joy - As a rationale for heavens
The Validity of Reason - Reason as participation in the divine Logos
The Objectivity of the Natural Law
The Epistemological Reliability of the Imagination - Especially when realized in the
forms of metaphor, symbolism, and myth, to establish meaning, the antecedent of truth.
The Solidity of the Supernatural World and Its Imminence
The Law of Undulation - Which reminds us that states of feeling come and go and are not the essence of religious
devotion.
The Law of Inattention - Which tells us to appreciate the essence of things and of looking away from the self.
Chronological Snobbery - As the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the
assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.
Look At and Along Everything by Contemplation and Enjoyment
Obedience is Our Main Job
Bulverism - The idea that an argument can be refuted simply by virtue of attributing motive to the person who has made it.
The Inner Ring Syndrome - The temptation to compromise ourselves, from small things like joke-telling to big
things like political corruption, in order to be accepted by power-brokers.
Verbicide - the Killing of Words by Inflation, Imprecision, or Equivocal Use of Partisan Purpose
Joy
Pleasure
Truth
Vocation
Friends
Virtues
Meaning
Enjoyment
Contentment
Reason
Faithfulness
Sex
Obedience
Books
Self
Forgetfulness
Prayer
Pain
Duty
Humilit
y
Law
Love
Courage
Vision
Adoration
Sacrific
e
Beauty
Goodness
Desire
Eternal
Imagination
Honesty
Joy
Pleasure
Truth
Vocation
Friends
Virtues
Meaning
Enjoyment
Contentment
Reason
Faithfulness
Sex
Obedience
Books
Self
Forgetfulness
Prayer
Pain
Duty
Humilit
y
Law
Love
Courage
Vision
Adoration
Sacrific
e
Beauty
Goodness
Desire
Eternal
Imagination
Honesty
Interesting facts about Lewis:
Accent: Oxford with an Irish tinge
Voice 1 Voice 2 Voice 3
Number of books sold …
Breath of subjects …. (*)
1947 Time Magazine article
Declined honors from Winston Churchill
Adored In America (all over the world, we are working in Brazil …)
Sharing Time???
(*) APOLOGETICS, EDUCATION , CHILDREN’S STORIES, ETHICS, PHILOSOPHY,
POLITICS,
FRIENDS, LONGING, "MERE CHRISTIANITY“, MODERNISM AND SECULARISM, MYTH AND
IMAGINATION, SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY
The Many Sides of Lewis:
Lewis, the distinguished Oxford literary scholar and critic;
Lewis, the highly acclaimed author of science fiction and children's literature;
Lewis, the popular writer and broadcaster of Christian apologetics, the Knight
of Orthodox Christianity (Champion of Mere Christianity);
Lewis, the soldier and faithful friend (from Arthur Grieves to Tolkien)
Lewis, the masterful teacher and tutor;
Lewis, the private man and with family problems (Father, Warren, Mrs. Moore)
Lewis, the romantic yet rationalist (Baptized imagination)
Lewis, the thoroughly converted man (The Pilgrim’s Regress)
Lewis, surprised by marriage (the “Joy” of his life)
Lewis, the aggressive debater and humble/gentle man
Lewis’s Appeal
Invitation to meditation
Natural point of contact: longing for meaning
Avoidance of the technical jargon of the theologians.
Allow me to illustrate the power of the apologetics of longing with a testimony.
A few years ago I introduced CS Lewis to an engineer in Virginia who was going through
an existential crisis. I presented him a copy of Mere Christianity.
…. After several months after reacting against some of the statements he came to me and
said, I am in the hall, Paulo ….
In another case, I presented a copy of the same book to a Brazilian Professor (nominal
catholic) ….
Two months later, he could not control his excitement … he told me that he had introduced
Lewis to another friend who was seriously looking for some spiritual answers.
Interdenominational Appeal
Almost Reformed
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not
only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.”
"Whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy, or severe;
nor did their enemies bring any such charge against them. On
the contrary .... Calvinism was not too grim, but too glad, to be
true.
Interdenominational Appeal
Lewis on Calvinists and Puritans
“It sprang from the refusal to allow the Roman distinction between
the life of religion and the life of the world. Calvin's picture of the
Christian was less hostile to pleasure, but then Calvin demanded that
every man should be made to live the fully Christian life.”
“This will at least serve to eliminate the absurd idea that Elizabethan
Calvinists were somehow grotesque, elderly people, standing outside
the main forward current of life. In their own day they were, of
course, the very latest thing. Unless we can imagine the freshness,
the audacity and the fashionableness of Calvinism, we shall get out
whole picture wrong. It was a creed of progressives, even
revolutionaries."
Surprised by Joy:
Lewis calls "the shape of my early life."
Summary
Less an autobiography more an account of his religious ups and downs
from childhood
From an almost lack of religion in his early experience ...
Of his hectic efforts in boarding school to create a satisfying spiritual
realization
Of his retreat into atheism ..
The long and painful return through nature, spiritualism and philosophy to
Theism and finally to Christianity.
The Development of a Tough And Holistic Christian Mind
•Father, Albert James Lewis, was a lawyer and mother, Flora Augusta
Hamilton Lewis, a descendent of clergymen, lawyers, and sailors.
•Father - sentiment and passion
•Mother irony, coolness and the capacity for happiness.
•Lewis description of his father not very positive.
•Lewis's mother died before he was ten, but she had already started him in
French and Latin.
Surprised By Joy
•Lewis and his brother (three years older) were left alone
in a large house and spent endless hours in their
respective imaginative worlds of Animal-Land and India
•Lewis learned Sehnsucht (sen-zart), - longing from
looking out of the nursery windows, but there were not
genuine religious experiences.
•The house was rich in books and the brothers read widely. They lived almost
in their imagination.
•One day the young Lewis stood beside a currant bush in flower there
suddenly and mysteriously arose in him "as if from a depth not of years but
centuries" the memory of an earlier happy morning. Though it happened in an
instant of time, he felt that "in a certain sense everything else that had ever
happened tome was insignificant in comparison.“
•It was the beginning of his search for joy.
Surprised by Joy
•At ten, Lewis was sent to school in hated
England. Under the tutelage of Oldie, who
flogged his boys with and without excuse but
taught them to think logically.
•At twelve, he went to Campbell College, not far from the Lewis home in
Ireland, but his stay was cut short by illness which gave him happy weeks on
his own.
•From 13 to 15 he was back in England at a small prep school he calls
Charters. Here at last he began to love the English countryside, but here he
also lost his faith, and his simplicity.
•Other things which led him to atheism were the occultism imparted to him by
a matron at the school, a natural pessimism, and particularly the reading of
H.G. Wells, and Sir Robert Ball.
•At fifteen he won the classic scholarship to "Wyvern" College, located in the
same English town as Charters.
Arthur Greeves
Surprised by Joy
•Though Lewis's brother had attended Wyvern and liked it, he
himself concluded that this school, like most other such college
in England, produced not the understanding and fraternal man
described in its catalogue but rather a "bitter, truculent,
skeptical, debunking, and cynical intelligentsia" dominated by
social struggle and priggishness.
•One of the few valuable assets of Wyvern was Smewgy, a hard but
courteous teacher and taught his boys to be scholars without being pedants.
•In religion Lewis at this time suffered the conflict, as he says, of maintaining
that God did not exist and being angry with him for not existing.
•Lewis prepared for university entrance under the tutorship of a tall, lean
shabbily dressed but ruthlessly dialectical man named W.T. Kirkpatrick
in Surrey. He found this the happiest period of his life.
•He read abundantly in literature of all sorts, including much of Homer
and other Greek authors in the original. His atheism was strengthened.
“In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not
know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes
to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
. . . God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous. “
Surprised by Joy
Surprised by Joy
•With Barfield in particular he debated violently and
learned much. It was he who destroyed forever in
Lewis the easy belief in "chronological snobbery,"
•He also convinced Lewis that abstract thought can
give indisputable truth and is therefore a different sort
of from experience of the senses.
•Finally Lewis was forced to conclude that logic itself
participated in a cosmic Logos. He also became
convinced of a cosmic Absolute but did not assume it
would ever get personal.
•Lewis was twenty-three when he finishes Greats and, because he could find no
position, decided to remain for a fourth year at Oxford.
•Almost immediately he was drawn to a brilliant young man named Nevil Coghill
and was shocked to discover him a Christian and thoroughgoing supernaturalist.
Surprised by Joy
Magdalene College
•At the same time it dawned on him that
all the authors on whom he could really
feed (Macdonald, Chesterton, Dr.
Johnson, Spencer, Milton) saw things
through Christian eyes.
•Even the most religious of the Pagans
(Plato, Virgil...) had some of the same
quality. They had roughness and density
of life.
He still thought Christianity only a myth, a good philosophical framework on
which to hang Absolute Idealism.
•He became a temporary lecturer for a year and was then elected a Fellow of
Magdalene College in 1925, when he was 26 years old.
•Christians now began to appear all around him - men like Dyson, Tolkien ..
•He re-read Euripides' Hippolytus and Joy returned to his heart.
Surprised by Joy
•Lewis thought that nobody could be safe from God if this man
were not.
•There followed a time in which all the strands steadily platted
themselves into an invincible whole in which Lewis's inner
being. It seemed to him that God was surely after him as a cat
searching for a mouse.
Tolkien
•You must picture me, he says, alone in that room in
Magdalene, night after night, feeling whenever mind lifted
even for a second from work, the steady, unrelenting approach
of Him whom I earnestly desire not to meet. That which I
greatly feared had at last come upon me.
•It was in the Trinity Term of 1929 that he capitulated. As he
knelt down in prayer and admitted that God was God, he felt
himself the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
Williams
Surprised by Joy
This walk in the grounds
of Magdalen College was
the site of a long
conversation between
Tolkien, C.S.Lewis and
Hugo Dyson, after which
C.S.Lewis became
converted to Christianity.
That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of
1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps,
that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then
see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which
will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home
on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high
gates to prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting
his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?
Mere Christianity
Book I - Right and Wrong as a Clue to the
Meaning of the Universe
An Engineering Perspective
A Flow-Chart Approach
Mere Christianity
End of the
Story
Do you believe
in the existence
of a Moral Law?
No
Yes
What Kind:
A Force
(Power)?
An inconsistent Power
End of the
Story
No
Yes
No
A God ?
No
A Force/Power is a sort of a
tame and convenient God .
Is there anything
or anyone
behind the Moral
Law?
End of the
Story
Are you tricking
me with a
religious talk?
Yes
No
We are trying to find
truth and the meaning of
the universe.
Yes
Are you
interested?
No
End of the
Story
Yes
Mere Christianity
How can we find out more about the
thing behind the moral law and
the meaning of the universe?
Looking into the
The Universe He Made
He is
a great artist
But you cannot know
a man by looking at
the house he built.
Looking inside ourselves,
where He wrote the moral
laws
He is
quite merciless.
The universe is
a very dangerous place.
End of the
Story
The Moral Law ells you to do the
straight thing and it does not seem to
care how painful, or dangerous, or
difficult it is to do.
The Moral Law does not give us any
grounds for thinking that God is “good”
in the sense of being soft and nice..
The Moral Law is as hard as nails.
If God is like the Moral Law, then
HE IS NOT SOFT.
No
Do you want
to proceed?
at your own
risk?
End of the
Story
Yes
End of the
Story
Mere Christianity
Is He an Impersonal
Absolute
Goodness ?
No
Is He a Personal
absolute
Goodness ?
If the universe is not governed by an
absolute goodness, then all our efforts
are in the long run hopeless.
Yes
Absolute Goodness is either the great safety
or the great danger - according to the way
you react to it.
God is the only comfort and supreme terror
No exceptions, or
allowances
permitted.
End of the
Story
No
End of the
Story
Yes
Have you broken
the Moral Law?
Do you think you need
Forgiveness?
Yes
Yes
Do you want to
find out more
about God
No
End of the
Story
Christianity tells how the demands of the Moral Law,
which we cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how
God Himself becomes man to save man from the
disapproval of God.
Beginning of Chapter 1 of the Great Story ...
Which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better
than the one before.
Into Narnia
Into Narnia and its Makings
•Fairy Tales – Tolkien’s
influence (the Gospels
contain a story of a kind
which embraces all the
essence of fairy-stories:
Marvels, beauty, mythical,
symbolic, allegorical, etc.)
•JRR Tolkien (-) and Roger
Lancelyn Green (+)
Reactions
•A Series Which Almost
Never Was
40
The Makings of Narnia
•Lewis: Not very familiar with
children (Letters to Children)
•What is it: Allegory, Fantasy,
Fairy Tales, Myth ?
•Jack: Defended Fairy Tales:
Fantastic Creations –
Mythological Figures & Father
Christmas
•How it all
Begun
(16 years old)
41
The Makings of Narnia
Why Fairy-Tales?
“Hence a man who admits that dwarfs and giants and
talking beasts and witches are still dear to him in his
fifty-third year is now less likely to be praised for his
perennial youth than scorned and pitied for arrested
development. If I spend some little time defending
myself against these charges, this is not so much
because it matters greatly whether I am scorned and
pitied as because the defense is germane to my
whole view of the fairy tale and even of literature in
general.”
42
The Makings of Narnia
For in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible
figures, we find the immemorial comforters and
protectors, the radiant ones; and the terrible
figures are not merely terrible, but sublime. It
would be nice if no little boy in bed, hearing, or
thinking he hears, a sound, were ever at all
frightened. But if he is going to be frightened, I
think it better that he should think of giants and
dragons than merely of burglars. And I think St
George, or any bright champion in armor, is a
better comfort than the idea of the police.”
43
The Makings of Narnia
Are These Books for Children or Adults?
• "No book is really worth reading at the age of
ten which is not equally worth reading at the
age of fifty. The only imaginative works we
ought to grow out of are those which it would
have been better not to have read at all."
• “The boy does not despise real woods because
he has read of enchanted woods: the reading
makes all real woods a little more enchanted."
The child reading the fairy tale is delighted
simply in desiring, while the child reading a
"realistic" story may establish the success of its
hero as a standard for himself and, when he
cannot have the same success, may suffer
bitter disappointment.”
44
Is It Right to Mix Theology and FairyTales? (Personal)
The
Makings
of Narnia
• “I thought I saw how stories of this
kind could steal past a certain
inhibition which had paralyzed much of
my own religion in childhood. Why did
one find so hard to feel as one told one
ought to feel about God or about the
sufferings of Christ? I thought the
chief reason was that one was told one
ought to. An obligation to feel can
freeze feelings … But supposing that
by casting all these things into an
imaginary world, stripping them of
their stained-glass and Sunday School
associations, one could make them for
the first time appear in their real
potency? Could one not steal past
these watchful dragons?” I thought
one could.”
45
The Makings
of Narnia
• Relation to our world
– Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve
• The British humor
– Is Man a Myth
– Tea Parties
– “Huge Jug of Beer for Mr. Beaver”
• The Idea of Aslan
– Lewis’s Greatest Religious Achievement
– Analogies: symbol of power, lion, king in an animal
world
• LWW Fall 1950 – Cautious Reviews – The Future
– The New Movie is Creating Controversies
– Philip Pullman, Charles McGrath (New York Times)
• Pre-Baptism of Imagination.
46
The Makings The Dedication of the LWW:
of NarniaMy Dear Lucy,
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had
not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a
result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by
the time it is printed and bound you will be older still.
But some day you will be old enough to start reading
fairy tales again. You can then take it down from
some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think
of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old
to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be
Your affectionate Godfather,
C.S. Lewis
The Irony: Lewis did not live long after all and Lucy – a young
ballet dancer, musician and teacher was struck with
paralysis and unable to reach any upper shelves at all. Her
long winter came early in life.
But when Aslan shakes his mane, we shall have
spring again.
47
Prince
Caspian
The Magic
Never Ends
• The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located
will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came
through them, and what came through them was longing. These things
- the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what
we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn
into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are
not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not
found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we
49
have never yet visited . . . .
Final Days
In the Shadowlands and Beyond
“There was one candle on the coffin as it
was carried out into the churchyard. It
seemed not only appropriate but also a
symbol of the man and his integrity and
absoluteness and his faith that the flame
burned so steadily, even in an open air, and
seemed so bright, even in the bright sun.”
Peter Bailey at Lewis’s funeral
In Summary
It is the way Lewis thoroughly integrated his Christian faith into his scholarly
work that leaves the largest legacy and which has impressed me and blessed me
most.
Lewis taught me... how to long for God and seek true joy.
How to integrate a Christian worldview with my vocation, my family life, and my
inner self.
If you go to Lewis for ultimate answers you will be disappointed. In all his
writings, Lewis always pointed to Christ.
The impact of Lewis on my life has been great. He has challenged me to grow in
my faith so that I’m not afraid to engage spiritually and intellectually with a world
hostile to God. But above all he has taught me that the power of the imagination is
one of the greatest tool we have to bridge the gap into the secular mind. My
tropical-Latin-culture- mind found in Lewis a way to conciliate samba, soccer,
engineering, theology, joy … which is consistent with a Reformed worldview.
“You’ll never get to the bottom of him.” JRR Tolkien
“And the elderly lady in my adult education class on
the Chronicles of Narnia who answered my
question about what had attracted each of the
students to the Narnia books and to a course on
them by saying that they had saved her sanity and
her daughter's soul. When she was "sweet sixteen"
her daughter had said to her, "Mother, I hate you
and this whole family. I especially hate your God.
I never want to see you again," left for California,
and became a drug addict and a prostitute. Her
mother said, "I knew she would come back to us
and to God because I had read her the Chronicles
of Narnia when she was ten, and she had loved
them. And she did.”
Peter Kreeft
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