By Karen Long
Religion News Service
At a desperate moment in the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as the lion’s tortured, lifeless body lies on a stone table, the writer pauses over the stricken child characters, Lucy and Susan.
Then C.S. Lewis turns to the reader directly:
“I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been—if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you—you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.”
Something in that passage—its directness, its knowingness, its complete lack of irony and its kind regard—conveys why both the books and their author still matter to millions of readers.
Now this children’s story from the pen of a childless, middle-aged Oxford don, whose characters say “By crikers” and “Bless me,” is the fodder for a $200 million film that opened last month. Narnia has entered the maw of Disney, and a whole cast of stakeholders—book lovers, Lewis despisers, evangelical Christians, Lewis acolytes, academics and cultural commentators—are twitching with dread and expectation.
The new movie arrives at a culturally pregnant moment. Detractors are hoping it tanks. Some believers are praying that the bliss Lewis found in Christianity—he was the last century’s most famous convert from atheist to Anglican—begets a new come-to-Jesus momentum.
Both outcomes are unlikely, but anxiety about the place of religion in public life has fired up the chattering classes.
No less an institution than the Times of London describes the movie as a referendum on Christianity, while “C.S. Lewis Superstar” blazes across the cover of the current issue of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today. Meanwhile, the New Yorker derides Lewis as a fellow who took “a controversial incident in Jewish history as the pivot point of all existence, and a still more controversial one in British royal history as the pivot point of your daily practice.”
Pity the man baptized Clive Stapes Lewis, who, like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, was a tweedy, pipe-smoking Oxford professor, literary critic and lover of old myths. (Tolkien hated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, considered it patched together from scraps, while The Hobbit was published because an enthusiastic Lewis pestered his friend to bring it to fruition.)
More than a half-century later, with The Lord of the Rings pressed into cinematic form, it is Lewis’s turn. But unlike Middle Earth, the Narnia that Lewis drenched with Christian themes has propelled its creator smack into the culture wars, circa 2005.
At least that’s the opinion of Alan Jacobs, author of the new book, The Narnian.
“Disney is marketing separately to the Harry Potter people and to the Christians who love C.S. Lewis,” said Jacobs, a professor at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill. “This arrives on the heels of the contention over The Passion of the Christ, the worry around the role of evangelicals in the last presidential election and the furor over intelligent design. It makes it hard to talk about Lewis.”
The divisions are so pitched that the movie soundtrack comes in two versions: rock-tinged music for the secularist and Christian-influenced tunes for the believer.
HarperCollins, which owns 170 different titles from and about the titan of British letters, expects Mere Christianity to ring up more than a million sales since 2001. And the seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia, available in 35 languages, should surpass the 90 million mark by year’s end.
Behind the commercial whirl are the spiritual and intellectual ones. Philip Pullman, an arch anti-Narnian, has called the chronicles loathsome and their emphasis on an eternal life in Narnia to be a form of death-dealing. Yet Pullman, creator of the compelling children’s Dark Materials trilogy, begins his story with a girl in a wardrobe.
Likewise, elements of Lewis are evident in the work of J.K. Rowling, who has acknowledged the influence, and Neil Gaiman, who has satirized him brutally.
Lewis has amounted to something of a thorn in intellectual history for decades now—partly because his contributions were formidable in two fields often at odds: literary scholarship and Christian apologetics.
In 1944, just as Lewis was becoming famous in America, Macmillan Publishing asked the author for an autobiographical sketch. The professor responded that he had no interest in the “rot about ‘self-expression.’ ” But Lewis finally gave in, tossing off a paragraph that he assumed Macmillan would edit:
“I gave up Christianity at about fourteen. Came back to it when getting on for thirty. An almost purely philosophical conversion. I didn’t want to. I’m not the religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I’m my own master; but since the facts seemed to be the opposite I had to give in. My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs—or else sitting up till the small hours in someone’s college rooms talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes. There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter.”
The nature of that conversion, at the elbow of Tolkien and another friend during a long walk in 1931, is important to Doris Donnelly, theology professor at John Carroll University.
“For him, conversion was a struggle,” she said. “That carries a note of authenticity for me. He wasn’t knocked from his horse; he wasn’t visited by angels. His conversion happened slowly, thoughtfully, and carried forward throughout his life.”
Lewis’s relation to evangelicals remains uneasy. His years were well-marinated in drink and tobacco, and his ecstatic, late-life marriage to a divorced American was accomplished in defiance of the Anglican bishop of Oxford.
Still, no less a fiery fundamentalist than Bob Jones—who once described Billy Graham as a limb of Satan—met Lewis and pronounced him a Christian.
Nearer the concerns of everyday life, however, are the many thousands of bereaved readers comforted by Lewis’s beautiful book A Grief Observed, written in the wake of his wife’s cancer death, just four years after their marriage. Joan Didion, no devotee of the Christian afterlife, refers to it in her own The Year of Magical Thinking.
Arguments about the uneven Narnia books—whether they were imperialistic, racist or sexist—showcase the preoccupations of the times. For the long haul, folk as diverse as Mormon theologians and John Updike will continue to claim Lewis as their own.