The following talk was given by Eighth Day Books owner and founder Warren Farha who speaks meaningfully to the import of C.S. Lewis and his work.
“How can we characterize the apologetics of C.S. Lewis? Books have been written on this topic, but I have not read them; I mostly just read Lewis himself. So let me give you a few impressions as to why Lewis was and is such an extraordinarily effective apologist for our times.
I have always been struck by Lewis’s honesty, which is another way of saying his humility. It is an honesty that is clearly not an affectation or a false modesty. It appears to us from his frequent use of his own experience to establish an identification with his listener and reader. It is an honesty that is compellingly winsome and disarming. I could (but won’t) give a dozen examples. Here are a few.
In his Introduction to a later edition of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis makes this disclaimer: “Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years’ study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works. ‘My heart’—I need no other’s— ‘showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly.’” In recounting his movement from atheism to faith, his renewed awareness of serious and culpable moral defect, Lewis describes his inner man: “Really, a young atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side. You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to ‘know of the doctrine.’ All my acts, desires, and thoughts were to be brought into harmony with universal Spirit. For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion” [Surprised by Joy, p. 226].
There is always the sense in Lewis that you are listening to someone who has faced doubt and despair in their most intense form and is willing to relate the truth of the gospel in light of that experience. In a passage of unforgettable power, here Lewis speaks obliquely through the senior tempter Screwtape to his understudy Wormwood: “Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys” [see Screwtape Letters, Chapter 8].
It is this same stark honesty that provides one of the fundamental principles Lewis explicitly sets forth in his essay on—you guessed it—Christian apologetics. He insists repeatedly that those who proclaim the message of the gospel must do so—not because it is “healthy” or “good for society” or conducive to an individual’s peace of mind—but because it is true.
A second aspect of Lewis’s apologetics—one closely related to his honesty—is his ability to communicate with “everyman” —the common person. Here I must become somewhat autobiographical. I first picked up a book by C.S. Lewis when I was a junior in high school—it was Mere Christianity. I am not a scholar by temperament. I am a worker. My lineage descends through merchants on my father’s side, farmers on my mother’s. I was raised lower to middle middle class. Yet, I opened this little paperback book and was immediately entranced, drawn, provoked, convicted, convinced, and changed forever by it. Reading Lewis inevitably educates, lifts the intellect, opens windows not only onto a more mature understanding of bedrock Christian doctrine, but also to a wide range of other concerns—mythological, literary, philosophical. And perhaps the greatest aspect of this exposure to his incredible variety of interests is that the boundaries between them are fluid, if they exist at all (like reality itself). I have spoken with countless others who have had the same experience. Lewis says in his essay on Christian apologetics, “I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning.” Lewis has shown in countless instances his ability to do just that. He has abundantly fulfilled his own definition of what authentic apologetics is all about.
But the most powerful source of Lewis’s success as a Christian apologist is the fact that his apologetics springs from Joy. Lewis understood that Joy lies at the heart of the experience of every man and woman born on the earth, and that it is every man’s and every woman’s most intimate link to God. Joy is immediate, yet infrequent in our experience. It is winsome, yet beautiful to the extent of pain. It is a longing for something that events and phenomena in this world evoke, yet it points to a source other than this world. Lewis’s own words, as usual, are the best way to convey it: “In speaking of this far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name…” [see “The Weight of Glory” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses].
There is no more common link between us than the experience of Joy, and it is this experience that Lewis relies upon more than any other to point to our need to reconnect to God and to His Christ. The experiences that evoke Joy are infinitely varied, but what is common is that they come unbidden, unexpected, and we cannot artificially manufacture them or cause them to be repeated, no matter how we might try. The ultimate apologetic force of this “inconsolable longing” is stated in most concentrated form in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world” [Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 10]. In more expanded form, we find the same message in The Problem of Pain: “There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else…It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work…All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever…The thing you long for summons you away from the self. Even the desire for the thing lives only if you abandon it. This is the ultimate law—the seed dies to live, the bread must be cast upon the waters, he that loses his life will save it.”
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