A Contratimes Replay: The Death of C. S. Lewis Remembered

From the Contratimes archives, 2005:

Today I give thanks, though not in a holiday sense. I will wait two days for that fine American celebration. Instead, I give thanks for a man who died 42 years ago today, in England, his death overshadowed by the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Odd that this man, along with Kennedy and the great humanist Aldous Huxley, would have died within hours of each other.

I am talking of C. S. Lewis. No other person of letters, I believe, has had a more profound impact on my life, even if I admit that there are other writers and thinkers I prefer. For it was Lewis who set me on my way, speaking to both heart and mind; emboldening me to live a life where faith and reason, where mysticism and intelligence, are not exclusive one to another, but two sides of one glorious and mysterious coin. In him I met Christ the thinker, the poet; the creator. In him I met the Christian imagination with all its possibilities: Narnia, Ungit, Perelandra, the pantheon, and even Middle Earth. Hobbits came to life for me, largely because of Lewis' love and support of his best friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, and both men's unwavering devotion to the ancient creeds of Christendom.

And in the wake which Lewis left in my life, I fell on St. Francis and St. Thomas, George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, E. C. Bentley, Owen Barfield, Sheldon Vanauken, Thomas Howard, Peter Kreeft, Grady Spires (an unpublished elvish genius), T. S. Eliot (whose work Lewis abhorred), Charles Williams, Malcolm Muggeridge, Madelyn L'Engle, and even Annie Dillard. Though there might not be a causal chain between these writers' works and Lewis, there is indeed a causal chain between Lewis and my reading them, for he inspired me to be a thinking Christian, and I am all the better for that chain, and for that inspiration. And had not Lewis' books found their way into my life, I doubt that I would know of John Donne, Thomas Traherne, George Herbert, or even William Butler Yeats. And I am not afraid to say that I might even be dead now without the influence of Lewis' testimony.

This is neither idolatry, nor is it gratuitous beatification. Lewis is my mentor. He has, along with Christ, preached to me in prison; he has descended into hell and handed me a tiny silken thread, the very thread he found in the dark and venomous mines described in MacDonald's "The Princess and the Goblin." I hold that thread now, standing, as I so often do, in the deep and chilly dark.

Early this morning I was reading Peter L. Berger's A Rumor of Angels, a famous little book written by the lauded sociologist from Boston University. In his examination of the death of the supernatural in modern society, and the apparent death of God, Berger shared this anecdote:

A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, "So that the rumor of God may not disappear completely." [emphasis added]

Lewis could have been that priest, for surely he worked in the slums of so many forsaken and forsakeable ideas. Lord knows he worked in mine. And in small homage to him, I do the same, here and elsewhere, trying to keep rumors alive.

Contratimes

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.