In recent years, too, many horrors have been witnessed, from the Killing Fields of Cambodia, to the slaughter in Rwanda, to the attacks of September 11th 2001 in New York and Washington D.C., to the grief of Sudan. Does Christianity have any answer to suffering? Consider the following playlet called The Long Silence. It is worth meditating upon:
At the end of time, billions of people were scattered on a great plain before God’s throne.
Most shrank from the brilliant light before them. But some groups near the front talked heatedly—not with cringing shame, but with belligerence.
“Can God judge us? How can He know about suffering?” snapped a pert young brunette. She ripped open a sleeve to reveal a tattoo number from a Nazi Concentration Camp. “We endured terror, beatings, torture, death!”
In another group, a Negro boy lowered his collar. “What about this?” he demanded, showing an ugly rope burn. “Lynched, for no crime but being black!”
In another crowd stood a pregnant schoolgirl with sullen eyes. “Why should I suffer?” she murmured. “It wasn’t my fault.”
Far out across the plain there were hundreds of such groups. Each had a complaint against God for the evil and suffering that He permitted in His world. How lucky God was to live in heaven where all was sweetness and light, where there was no weeping or fear, no hunger or hatred! What did God know of all that man had been forced to endure in this world? “God leads a pretty sheltered life,” they said.
So, each of these groups sent forth their leader, chosen because he had suffered the most—a Jew, a Negro, a person from Hiroshima, a horribly deformed arthritic, a thalidomide child. In the centre of the plain, they consulted with each other. At last, they were ready to present their case. It was rather clever. Before God could be qualified to be their judge, He must endure what they had endured.
Their decision was that God should be sentenced to life on earth—as a man! “Let Him be born a Jew. Let the legitimacy of His birth be doubted. Give Him work so difficult that even His family will think Him out of His mind when He tries to do it. Let Him be betrayed by His closest friends. Let Him face false charges, be tried by a prejudiced jury and convicted by a cowardly judge. Let Him be tortured.
At the last, let Him see what it means to be terribly alone. Then let Him die. Let Him die so that there could be no doubt that He died. Let there be a great host of witnesses to verify it.”
As each leader announced his portion of the sentence, loud murmurs of approval went up from the throng of people assembled.
And when the last one had finished pronouncing sentence, there was a long silence. No one uttered another word. No one moved. For, suddenly, all knew that God had already served His sentence.4
The eleventh of January 1942 found Jack back in London on the BBC, beginning a new weekly series of talks under the title “What Christians Believe.” Each was transmitted on the BBC Home Service from 4.45 to 5.00 p.m. The talks were awesome in logic and content. Justin Phillips, in his insightful book C. S. Lewis at the BBC comments on the four talks. He says that, in just four talks, Lewis had “moved from the arguments against atheism and pantheism and schoolboy religion, to the inescapable reality of God and of good and evil.” He points out that Jack “confronts the listener with the stark choice of coming to terms with who Jesus is—a lunatic, a fiend, or, what He claims, God Himself; and he explains the significance of Christ’s death and our proper response of repentance and faith.”5 A third series of eight talks on Christian behaviour went out on the Forces’ network on Sunday afternoons from 2.50 to 3.00 p.m. between 20 September and 8 November 1942. Jack’s BBC talks were eventually brought together in his book Mere Christianity. “Its success is not just because of Lewis’s unique skill as a communicator,” commented Phillips in 1999, “but because of the person he writes about. Christianity without Christ is just another dogma. “Mere Christianity” with Christ at its heart, remains C. S. Lewis’s most important contribution to contemporary thought.”6
The output from Jack during the war years was a perfect example of Christ’s statement, if anyone drinks of the water He gives, it will become “in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”7 The metaphor is apt. Between 1942 and 1946, the books just flowed and flowed. In 1943 A Preface to Paradise Lost was published. It is now one of the most widely read books on the poem. Milton remained one of Jack’s favourite poets. In his book, Jack identifies with Milton’s emphasis on the virtue of chastity and his opposition to the deadly sin of pride; he emphasises, too, how it is vital to be subservient to God. Jack was showing the relevance of Milton’s epic poem to the modern day. He had first read it when he was only nine years of age.
In April 1943 came Perelandra, a powerful space novel influenced by the question, “What would have happened if Adam had scolded or chastised Eve and interceded with God on her behalf?” The book is about carrying out what God intends.
In February 1943, Jack gave the Riddell Memorial Lectures at Durham University, lectures entitled “The Abolition of Man: Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools.” It was a formidable defence of such traditional values as duty, kindness, justice, mercy, and love. It was also a cutting-edge attack on any science that rejected traditional values. Jack was warning that man’s conquest of nature could lead to the actual abolition of the human race. As human cloning already comes ever nearer, Jack’s warnings are even more relevant in the twenty-first century. The thought of genetics in the wrong hands is horrendous. Of course, Christ taught that in the end, if it were not for His coming intervention, the human race would be wiped out.8
In 1945 That Hideous Strength appeared, a book which had been completed in 1943. Here Jack rises to bring a frontal attack on scientific materialism. That Hideous Strength presents shades of the Tower of Babel,9 called in the book, “The National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments.”10 The book is about an elitist inner circle taking charge and seeking to bring about what they think is good for others, involving sterilisation of the unfit, selective breeding, liquidation of backward races, pre-natal education, vivisection, biochemical conditioning of the brain, and the eventual elimination of organic life.
In 1943, at the suggestion of the American writer Dorothy L. Sayers, Jack started writing a book on the subject of miracles, which was published in 1947. What is particularly intriguing in this work is its attack on the long and corrosive arguments of David Hume on the authenticity of the Christian faith. Hume’s influence in undermining Christianity in Britain has already been traced in this biography; but it is important to point out that Jack Lewis, in his days as an atheist, was deeply influenced by Hume’s Essay on Miracles (1748). In Chapter 14 of Miracles: A Preliminary Study, dealing with the Incarnation, Jack went for Hume’s arguments with a passion. He argues that every other miracle prepares for the Incarnation, exhibits it, and results from it. Hume argued that the more often a thing has been known to happen, the more probable it is that it should happen again; the less often, the less probable. He argued that we should judge the probability of miracles by our “innate sense of the fitness of things.” So, by Hume’s standards, since the Incarnation has happened only once, it is infinitely improbable. So should we dismiss it? Jack lifts his pen, but it becomes an unsheathed sword in the defence of the great story of redemption. He argues that the history of the earth has happened only once; does that make it improbable? Does the Incarnation meet the standards of our “innate sense of the fitness of things”? Jack asks that if someone brings along a newly discovered part of a novel or a symphony, the best way to work out its authenticity would be to see if it fits into the whole, if it illuminates all the other parts and pulls them together. Its own comprehensibility is far less important than its ability to illuminate and integrate the rest.
As he read Jack’s defence of the Incarnation, this biographer felt a shiver of wonder in his mind and heart. It is, in truth, exceptionally beautiful writing. Here, Jack
points out that all our righteousness is filthy rags. Here, he expounds the vicarious nature of Christ’s Incarnation, the sinless Man suffering for the sinful. And he highlights Christ’s mind-boggling stoop in order to lift us up. Jack goes on in his book to show that the Baby of Bethlehem grew to meet, fight, and beat the King of Death. He expounds the truth of the authenticity of the Resurrection, and points to the true wealth that lies ahead in the New Creation. He likens it to swapping the ponies given to us in childhood for greater mounts, even now perhaps snorting and pawing in the king’s stables, expecting us. A. C. Scupholme put it perfectly when he said of the author of Miracles, “the rare combination of the gifts of poet, philosopher, and theologian is quite irresistible.”11
Slowly, ever so slowly, the Second World War was coming to an end. The lights were beginning to come on again in Oxford, and an increasing number of windows were being unblackened. By April 1945, the Allies were in Berlin. Hitler, deep in his bunker, shot himself on the afternoon of April thirtieth. The Austrian boy who had earned a few shillings painting picture postcards had gone on to cause the death of some thirty million people in Europe. On 7 May, in a small red schoolhouse in Rheims, the Germans signed the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender. The drabness and privation of five years of war gave way to scenes of unrestrained joy across Britain, including the streets of Oxford.
Jack was deeply grateful for having been spared; yet victory in war was followed by a time of great personal grief. On 10 May, his friend Charles Williams was suddenly seized with pain. He underwent operation at the Radcliff Infirmary. On 15 May, Jack went to the Infirmary to see his friend, taking with him a book he wished to lend him, only to be told when he got there that Williams had died. Jack went immediately to a meeting of The Inklings, taking place a few minutes away from the Infirmary, and told the others of the sad news. He later spoke of how the very streets looked different, and how he had some difficulty in making his friends understand what had happened. There is no question that, during the war years, Charles Williams was Jack’s closest friend. He had discussed all his books with Jack, and had been a great encouragement to him. In turn, Jack recognised Williams’s poetic gift. He was intrigued with the fact that Williams’s face, generally considered ugly, became like the face of an angel when he spoke, and Jack loved his open spirit. Later in life, when faced with problems, Jack would muse on “what Charles Williams would have done.” It was a lasting measure of what Jack thought of him.
Jack now set his mind and heart back in his work at Oxford, turning away from constant pleadings from the BBC to broadcast. The BBC did everything in its power to get him back to the microphone, but only with limited success. He had moved on, and after his three sets of wartime talks he did no other theological series. His choice was a wise one, because books last longer than broadcasts. Marshall McCluan, the futurist, once wrote that the written word is obsolete. The only problem is that he had to write a book to say so, and fifteen in all to prove it! Millions of us have lived to be glad that C. S. Lewis chose to concentrate on books rather than on the microphone.
Jack’s unique work as a broadcaster, though, did not go unrecognised in academia. On 28 June 1946, Jack travelled by rail with Warren into Fife in Scotland to the ancient University of St. Andrews, where he was made a Doctor of Divinity. At the degree ceremony Jack’s promoter, Professor D. M. Bailley, the Dean of the Faculty of Divinity, said these words:
With his pen and with his voice on the radio Mr. Lewis has succeeded in capturing the attention of many who will not readily listen to professional theologians, and has taught them many lessons concerning the deep things of God. For such an achievement, which could only be compassed by a rare combination of literary fancy and religious insight, every Faculty of Divinity must be grateful. In recent years Mr. Lewis has arranged a new kind of marriage between theological reflection and poetic imagination, and this fruitful union is now producing works which are difficult to classify in any literary genre: it can only be said in respectful admiration that he pursues “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” It is not very frequently that the University confers its Doctorate of Divinity upon a lay theologian, but it may well be proud to give this acknowledgement to the work of C. S. Lewis.12
The new Doctor of Divinity was about to surprise the world by turning to communicate with a very different audience. He was about to begin his most influential work, because through the mind of a child the world is reached.
Chapter Fifteen
STRANGE AND SOLEMN PERFUME
Light changes constantly in the Mournes as clouds bowl their shadows over the rough hillsides and the solid white farmhouses in rushy valleys. Pass in the morning and the fresh whitewash is almost too bright to look at; a minute later everything can be in cold shadow. Hours later it certainly will be. Further up, above the cornfield line, above the sheep-cropped grass you can sit in perfect solitude on a dry-stone wall warmed in the sun. A slight wind sings through the stone tracery, a grasshopper cheeps, a lark spirals, a hawk hunts. Listen harder, for a stream trickles.1
So writes Ian Hill about Mourne Country in County Down. At the foothills of the Mourne Mountains lies the former estate of the Earls of Roden. It is called Tollymore Forest Park, and it is truly one of the most delightful places in Ireland.
Here flows the now quiet, now cascading Spinkwee River, and on nearby Foley’s bridge an inscription reads thus:
Here, in full light, the russet plains extend,
There, wrapped in clouds, the bluish hills ascend,
Even the wild heath displays her purple dyes,
And ‘midst the desert, fruitful fields arise.
It is not the only inscription in Tollymore Park. On a standing stone, another inscription bids the traveller to “stop, look around and praise the name of Him who made it all.” I reckon Jack Lewis would have stopped and done just that.
On the other side of the Mournes lies the idyllic Carlingford Lough area. Across the Lough in County Louth are the Cooley Mountains, the area that, according to Walter Hooper, Jack thought most resembled Narnia.2 I have heard Jack’s stepson, Douglas Gresham, say in public that the landscape of Narnia is the landscape of County Down. I do not doubt him, for County Down lay deep in Jack’s consciousness all of his life. So it seems both County Down and County Louth contributed to the creation of Narnia.
Narnia really all began with a picture Jack had been carrying in his head. Since he was sixteen, he had visualised a faun carrying parcels and an umbrella in a snowy forest. In 1939, the little evacuee girl had asked what was inside the wardrobe at The Kilns. One day in 1948, Jack decided to write a story about the faun. The image was followed by another one of a queen on a sledge; and as he continued a lion came bounding into the story. He had recently been dreaming about lions. Jack did not set out to write Christian books for children, using his stories as a Christian allegory. He stated categorically that The Chronicles of Narnia is not an allegory. Basically he was trying to answer a question. He imagined a land like Narnia; and he wondered what would have happened if the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, had come there as a Lion? Jack didn’t know where the Lion came from, or even why he came; but it was the Lion who pulled the whole story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe together, and six more Narnian stories with it.
Jack did not believe that originality lies in the author of a book. He believed that a writer should not conceive of himself as bringing about beauty or wisdom that did not exist before. He believed a writer’s art should embody a reflection of eternal beauty and wisdom. The writer was to be derivative, gaining his or her inspiration from another source and reflecting it as in a mirror. He believed the New Testament teaches that originality is God’s prerogative alone, and that our writing is to be like clean mirrors, filled with the image of a face that is not our own. Changing metaphors, he saw himself as an adjective pointing to a noun.
So, in Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia, we see the two great qualities which Jack found i
n the Lord Jesus: intolerable severity and irresistible tenderness. Mr. Beaver insisted that Aslan was not harmless and was not like a tame lion. His roar once shook all of Narnia, from the lamppost in the West to the shores of the Eastern Sea. When Aslan, the High King of Narnia, stooped towards Shasta, though, there was some “strange and solemn perfume”3 that hung about his mane. That perfume has permeated The Chronicles of Narnia, and millions of children have smelled it. It is truly irresistible. Awe, power, and majesty grip the reader; it is pointing beyond this world of changing shadows to that which is fixed and eternal. The Shadowlands point to a light that is beyond that of the sun, moon, or stars.
Jack wrote five of The Chronicles of Narnia between the summers of 1948 and 1951. During this time, Shadowlands had been living up to its name. Janie Moore had had a stroke in 1944 that left her without the use of her left arm. As her age began to increase, she was often in pain from varicose veins and became quarrelsome, bad tempered, and difficult. Eventually she became senile. Warren’s alcoholism did not help things, and on one particular binge in Ireland in June 1947 he was taken unconscious to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, County Louth. Jack received a telegram telling him of his brother’s condition. He went straight to Ireland and stayed at the White Horse Inn for a week visiting his brother. The head of the Order at the hospital, Mother Mary Martin, who showed Warren great kindness, invited Jack to contribute an essay to a book that the hospital was soon to publish. He wrote an essay entitled “Some Thoughts.” The man who had preached to the students at Oxford in 1939 that we always work on the edge of a precipice was still feeling the reality of what he preached. Drogheda was to become Warren’s home-away-from-home for the rest of his life, and he attended the services at St. Peter’s Church of Ireland in the town.
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