Remembering CS Lewis

Remembering CS Lewis

29th November 1898 - 22nd November 1963

Fifty years ago, on 22nd November 1963, three very different men died. John F. Kennedy – the young president of the United States was assassinated in Dallas. On the same day, in California, the writer Aldous Huxley died after a long illness. Meanwhile, in Oxford, CS Lewis collapsed and died at his home, The Kilns. Of course the deaths of both Lewis and Huxley were overshadowed by the terrible events in Dallas, but the legacy of Lewis in particular seems to have grown and grown in the intervening half century. Tomorrow, 22nd November 2013, his name will be given a place among the giants of English literature in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

CS Lewis’s stories and books have had a profound influence on many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of Christian leaders, pastors and writers. I first came across CS Lewis when I was at primary school and I borrowed a copy of Prince Caspian from the school library. Immediately I was transported from a wartime train station to a strange and wondrous land peopled by dwarves, centaurs, talking animals, evil kings and idealistic young princes. Since then I have read through the Chronicles of Narnia at least three times (to myself and to my boys) and have never grown tired of them.

The Narnia stories have their critics, of course. Famously Lewis's great friend JRR Tolkien was unimpressed by much of the Narnian world. But as a bridge between the simpler fairy tales and the more complex world of, say, Middle Earth, they were invaluable to me. More than that, I saw in Narnia the importance of gospel virtues such as faith, courage, love and sacrifice played out in simple yet beautiful ways.

At grammar school we had to read Out of the Silent Planet, one of Lewis’s three science fiction books. I remember clearly seeing how Lewis skilfully suggested Christian ways of thinking in his story of human beings discovering life on Mars. In my own personal marking of the 50th anniversary of Lewis's death I am endeavouring to read the trilogy again.

When I was at university I read Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters – two books that every thinking Christian really should read. The first helped me to see that not only did Christian faith make sense, it helped to make sense of the rest of the world. The second helped me to understand that there is an enemy, who longs to bring Christians down, that he is subtle and vindictive but that he is defeated in Christ. Both of these books, among his other explicitly Christian writings, are works I refer to again and again and again. Lewis has a wonderful ability in his Christian writing to sum up in a sentence or two an idea that it would take others a paragraph or perhaps an entire sermon to communicate.

Some of Lewis’s ideas about Christian faith were not always what many evangelical Christians might regard as orthodox and many of his more philosophical works require serious concentration but the kernel of his writing is so clear and challenging that it remains influential today across many branches of the Christian Church. Indeed, some would say that many of the things Lewis wrote about in the 1940s and 1950s are only really being seen in our society today. Much of what he wrote was certainly prophetic in nature.

On the 22nd November 2013 there will be many commemorations of JFK’s assassination. There is even a new film coming out about that day in Dallas. There will, once again, be relatively little coverage of the anniversary of Lewis’s death. But I will remember it because this Belfast born, slightly eccentric Oxbridge academic has influenced my life and thought in a way that no politician, however young and idealistic, ever will. On 22nd November 2013 I, along with many others, will want to give thanks to God for the life and work of CS Lewis.