Tag: C.S. Lewis

The Joy of C.S. Lewis

kevingdrendel7 Comments

cslewisThe death of C.S. Lewis was eclipsed by the death of John F. Kennedy on the same date in history. Ironically, Aldous Huxley also died on that date in 1963. Unlike the overshadowing at his death, the life of C.S. (Jack) Lewis and the legacy of his writing and thinking endures. He is perhaps better known today than even during his life.

I have always been enamored of C.S. Lewis. He became a Christian in the secular environment of academic pursuit at Oxford. I became a believer in college in the same type of environment, though hardly of the same high academic and intellectual standard. His autobiographical book, “Surprised by Joy,” stands as a favorite book for me, and one which has become a waypost in my own life. It can be a tough read, not only for the enormous detail of classic and philosophical references, but for the somewhat self-indulgent inward looking preoccupation of the author – but, after all, it is an autobiography.

For me, the importance is not in what he did, but in his journey of thought. Lewis was an uncompromising thinker who diligently, methodically, and with integrity and brutal honesty, journeyed from childish religiosity, past the death of his mother, where the emptiness of religion without connection to the Living God is found to be wholly wanting. From there he careened to the opposite shore, finding comfort in the grim, cold world of materialism, exactly for the reason that no Cosmic Interferer dwells there to bother a fiercely independent soul.

Lewis was nothing if not driven to seek ultimate truth through the enormous volume of reading material that he devoured with relish. He traveled the path of logic and truth, tested by personal experience, through the various stages of his journey, which he described as a search for “Joy”. Lewis read the classics in the actual Latin and Greek and went from genre to genre and era to era tracing the breadcrumbs of literary history left by the greatest of the great writers. Through the cold air of atheistic materialism in his early twenties broke the warm sunlight of Christian thought from writers like G.K. Chesterton along with the fluorescence of the occult. From the unlikely combination of these sources, the possibility of the miraculous and magic pierced the hard shell of purely rational and materialistic thought. It was not long thereafter that Lewis abandoned the barren ground of atheism for the swampy soil of agnosticism.

Lewis says that he was tempted by the occult, but he was also fearful of it, like a person who does illicit drugs but has enough sense to know the line not to cross. He rejected that path even before finding his Destination in the same way he rejected physical lusts and other temptations. He found them ultimately to be counterfeit, substitutes for the real Joy of which he had gotten glimpses at different points in his life. This Joy became his measure for what he sought. He described it variously, but perhaps best, as a longing that in the longing was the most fulfilling of experiences one could know. It was for Lewis an inner compass pointing true North.

The new atheist has no prior claim to the ground Lewis Lewis already traversed with his academic mentors who were firmly and rigorously entrenched in rationalistic, materialistic thought. Peering through the prism of the greatest thinkers from every age, he found it ultimately one dimensional. Lewis trusted the “inner man”, the individual conscience and personal experience, guided as it were through the various veins of thought, testing each one in turn for dependability, harmony with the amalgam of ideas sifted through many ages and many thinkers and, not the least, as reflected through the natural world itself. Of this last strainer of thought, Lewis would echo the writer of Romans (1:20):

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made….”

From the abandonment of atheism for the more plausible, but uncertain, reality that there lies behind the veneer of this material world a Source of that Joy that became his fixed pursuit, Lewis journeyed into the realm of belief again, much the wiser and.

He does not spend a great deal of time describing his examination of the gamut of religions before landing on the steps to the House of the God of Abraham, leaving the impression that his pace from atheist to agnostic to Christian accelerated along the way, as if he found the guideposts clearly marked and the compass firmly fixed as he emerged.

Lewis does not spare himself in the chronicle of this journey. In fact, he is almost surgical, in the most intimate way, in his analysis of the various stages of his thought life, not holding back any information, however self-deprecating. In this way, Lewis demonstrates well the wisdom he gained along path: that the worst of the attitudes, and the furthest from God – the Source of Joy – is human pride.

His conversion is almost anticlimactic. He simply gives in one day to the only proposition left at the end of this long journey. Like the Psalmist who said, “Where can I go from your presence? Where can I flee from your spirit?” (Psalm 139:7), Lewis had nowhere else to go; the trail led to one Place only and only one: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

Though some claim that Lewis never had a true conversion (and how would they know?), the rest of his life from this submission to God at the age of 31 bespeaks a man who came to rest solidly and squarely on the foundation of the Bible, the cornerstone of which is Jesus Christ. It became his defining Truth, the Compass for all future thought, and the filter through which the body of his written work clearly flows. That he wrote of fantastical creatures and magic and used imagery that is often accused of being occultist is a product of his enormous memory bank of all the great writings in history. He conjured up these things, like the classic and romantic writers – Milton and others, Christian or not – who borrowed from the same historic library of great writings.

These images are allegories, and Lewis was a master of allegory. For Lewis, the myths of all ages reflected truth, like shadows dancing on walls from the bright sunlight through prison bars, but the sunlight is Christ. 

Of the fact that he brought all these images into submission to God, I have no doubt. This was the world Lewis knew, and this world of knowledge he used as a prism to show in radiant color the truth and the light of the Gospel – Jesus Christ, and him crucified, dead, buried and resurrected, the hope and salvation of all mankind to as many as will believe, offering grace for sin, life for death, having made the way for men to be made right and to have fellowship as sons and daughters with God the Father – the Source all Joy.

What Lewis learned early, and what led him on his journey, was not to settle for a false joy, which is merely a shadow of the real Thing. What he discovered is that the real Thing is not the joy, itself. The Joy he experienced resulted from close encounters with the Living God – catching glimpses of the Creator of heaven and earth – who reveals himself to the man who searches, who opens the door to the man who knocks, and who is found by the humble and submitted heart. The real Joy is found in God Himself. Joy, the experience, is only the shadow; God is the Source.

I recommend Surprised by Joy to anyone who likes C.S. Lewis or would like to follow his journey. Here is another take on this underrated classic by Dr. Bruce L. Edwards, English professor at Bowling Green: http://personal.bgsu.edu/~edwards/surprised.html; and for a collection of thoughts and essays on C.S. Lewis: http://personal.bgsu.edu/~edwards/lewisr.html.

The Sufficiency of Proof and Human Longing

kevingdrendel1 Comment

I have seen videos, books, and social media posts claiming that “no one can remain an atheist” after viewing this, or reading that, or considering something else. As with any hype, the assertion is simply not true. Claims of indisputable truth will always fall short. This has never been more true, perhaps, than now in the Internet age.

Even so, people watched Jesus perform miracles in their presence, and they did not believe. What proof is there today that could be more indisputable than the miracles Jesus performed face to face with people?

We are quick to dismiss the miracles 2000 years later. We are not as ignorant or as gullible as people in the 1st Century. We question what people saw; we question the authenticity of the accounts; we question when they were written; we question the motives of the writers; we question whether the person, Jesus of Nazareth, ever lived at all; and we question whether miracles are even possible. The basis for skepticism seems much more compelling today than it might have been at the time of Jesus.

To be sure, there are plenty of reasons to believe that such a man lived, that he claimed to be the Messiah and that he died by crucifixion. Even some non believers accept the historical accounts. There is good proof of the historical accounts, as far as historical accounts go.

There is also good reason to believe that Jesus was who he claimed to be. A very small group of people claiming to be eye witnesses of his life and resurrection from the dead literally changed the world. The gospel that Jesus preached has spread throughout the known world. People today claim spiritual experience with that same God Jesus described, including miracles, speaking in tongues (described in the Book of Acts) and other things. No doubt there are charlatans too.

Richard Dawkins explains spiritual experience as “hallucinations”. Some people are certainly delusional, but that is small segment of society. You can visit them in mental institutions. You know who they are; they are “not quite right”; they are divorced from obvious reality. Hallucinations do not explain the believer who has had an encounter with God.

On the other hand, it could be said of a materialist like Richard Dawkins that he clings to intellect. He demands proof of the infinite that a finite being cannot get ones hands around. Does it make sense for one person, as small in the universe as a single human being, to cling to finite intellect as the total explanation of reality? Even the entire population of people and all of mankind together are utterly infinitesimal in the vast universe that we know, not even considering the rest that we do not know. It seems quite foolish to think that all of reality, as vast as we know it to be, can be measured by our own finite understanding.

Further, those who reject faith and spirituality outright reject any basis to understand it. C. S. Lewis, in his autobiographical account, spoke of the rationalism that he had come to embrace, as a young man that “it might be grim and deadly but at least it was free from the Christian God.” Reflecting back, he recounts that he had rejected a God and spirituality that he did not understand and did not see accurately.

There are some religious people who have not employed the intellect God has given them. On the other end of the spectrum are people who have put everything in the intellectual basket. Both extremes seem clearly prone to error. We are intellectual beings; but we are also spiritual beings. The very fact that people have had spiritual experiences and have innately believed in something Other than the material world and our own finiteness since the beginning of recorded history suggests the reality of such an Other.

If reality were limited to things we can measure and know with our minds, how would we even have the sense that there is something else? If this life is all there is, and therefore all we can know, why do our “minds” wander so easily to imaginings of something else?

Many great writers and great writings in history reveal an occupation with longings and musings of life after death, immortality and other worldliness; it is one of the more prevalent themes of great works of art, even if sometimes reflected from the point of skepticism. The fact that people have had such conceptions suggest some strain of reality to them. How could we conceive of something that is utterly unreal?

An accurate view of the mechanics of the world in which we live comes into greater focus with each discovery. Those discoveries have debunked and called into question many uninformed beliefs, superstitions and mythologies, but they do not rule out God the Creator, the Supreme Mover. In fact, the complex yet intricate order of the world suggests a great intelligence behind it.

The collective intellectual knowledge of people has grown and been refined over thousands of years, from fire to quantum physics. Many people point to the Old Testament as “proof” that the claims in the Bible are unreliable and based on crude and inconsistent principles. The same people would not say of science that our understanding of the material world should be dismissed merely because our scientific forefathers were inaccurate in their understanding 4000 years ago.  Does it seem credible that man has grown so much in scientific understanding, but not in spiritual understanding? The Bible purports to reflect a history of God’s revelation to people and the growth of people in that revelation over a long period of time.

Intellect, a finite intelligence, alone does not provide an accurate or complete understanding of human life, let alone “reality” or even the material world. The longing in the human soul for something greater, something beyond, something not quite attained is sufficient proof for me that there exists something greater, beyond and ultimately attainable and “knowable”.

Just as questions about the material world point to facts that are not yet known , so the longing that is the collective experience of human kind suggests  an Object of that longing that is not yet completely known.

I doubt there is any proof that will convince every person of the existence of a God so great that He is beyond the known, expansive universe that we cannot see to the end (or the beginning). I suspect the unconvinced are driven by motivations and inclinations we cannot see, like the Pharisees in whose presence Jesus performed miracles in His time. God and miracles do not, did not, fit into the worldview, preconceived notions and the investment of personal energy into those things. As with C. S. Lewis, who found relief in materialism from the wrong notions of God he rejected as a child, materialism today provides similar relief from whatever boogeymen gods a person has rejected.

To those who have witnessed the miracles, who have embraced a God who reveals Himself to people, who have experienced the Other, the object of human longing, if only through a glass darkly, the glimpses are sufficient proof.

Thinking on a Rock Cliff (Fraley) - Copy