C.S. Lewis Goes Marching On

The apostle of "Mere Christianity "converts a new generation

The road to England's Whipsnade Zoo is hardly the Road to Damascus, but it was dramatic enough for a brilliant Oxford don who traveled it one September day in 1931. As he later described his adventure: "When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion."

No blinding light or voice from heaven for Clive Staples Lewis; but his conversion on that picnic excursion had some of the impact of St. Paul's. The ruddy-faced writer's works were to lure innumerable souls into the precincts of belief. Fourteen years after his death at 64, this Pascal of the Space Age is the only author in English whose Christian writings combine intellectual stature with bestseller status.

Besides his eleven overtly religious books, C.S. Lewis ("Jack" to his friends) insinuated Christian themes into a variety of other works. Those included a widely read space fantasy trilogy and seven immensely successful children's stories known as The Chronicles of Narnia. As an expert on medieval and Renaissance English at Oxford and Cambridge he also produced standard works on Spenser, Milton, and 16th century prose and poetry.

Oxford University denied Lewis a professorship because his popular writings were deemed unseemly--as, indeed, was his outspoken Christianity. (He moved to a chair at Cambridge late in his career.) But Lewis has survived Oxford's judgment handsomely. Sales of Lewis' works in Britain and the U.S. have increased sixfold since his death, and this year readers in both countries will take home more than 2 million Lewis volumes. Says Lady Priscilla Collins, one of Lewis' publishers in Britain: "The trend is up and up and up."

In May, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich released a fantasy, The Dark Tower, that Lewis never finished. Macmillan of New York has recycled selections from other works into The Joyful Christian, a new volume out this week. In yet another new book, A Severe Mercy (Harper & Row), a memoir by Sheldon Vanauken, professor of history and English at Virginia's Lynchburg College, Lewis appears as a ministering angel in tweed jacket. Like so many other unbelievers, Vanauken and his wife Jean dipped into Lewis upon urgings of Christian friends, began devouring all the Lewis books they could find, and wound up, to their surprise, as converts. Then Jean died of a liver ailment, and Vanauken plunged into despair. It was an astringent letter from Lewis that enabled Vanauken to make some sense out of her death--and his life. Longtime Bachelor Lewis later suffered similar tragedy when he married a woman he knew was dying of cancer.

Like Vanauken, Lewis started out an atheist--one reason his approach to religion appeals to outsiders. After years of struggle he "admitted that God was God" and knelt to pray one night, "perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." At that point, two years before the Whipsnade Zoo outing, he was a theist but not yet a Christian. Prodded by friends, including a fellow Oxford don, Author (Lord of the Rings) J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis subsequently decided that the Christ story is a myth like other great myths, but with the "tremendous difference that it really happened."

Once convinced that in Jesus Christ "myth became fact," Lewis turned to convincing others. Two of his books as amateur theologian put many professionals to shame: The Problem of Pain (1940), an explanation of how a benevolent God can permit evil to exist; and Miracles (1947), a case for the plausibility of the supernatural. In The Screwtape Letters (1942), his witty little classic, Lewis has a veteran devil advise on how to ensnare souls for "Our Father below." Small sins were often best. Quoth Screwtape: "Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one."

The most popular Lewis book of the 1970s is Mere Christianity (1952), the work of straightforward evangelism that snatched White House Felon Charles Colson out of Screwtape's dominion. This highly original statement of wholly unoriginal doctrine was first f prepared as a series of talks "on the BBC. Lewis, whose |s prose comes clad in the crisp white linen of logic, starts from mankind's inherent sense of right and wrong. Think about this, Lewis says: men feel wet when they fall into water; fish do not. If men feel "wet"--alien--in a world where evil abounds, he reasons, an unseen kingdom of Tightness must exist, and that means God. From there Lewis proceeds to explain evil via the Fall of Man and to offer Christ as the solution. In one passage Lewis rejects the "foolish" idea that Jesus was just a "great moral teacher." No, he says, this was One who claimed to forgive sins and declared that he would judge the world. "Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman."

Lewis, an Anglican, has always had a following among Roman Catholics. But the major Lewis shrine exists at a collection on British Christian writers (including Tolkien and Dorothy Sayers) at Wheaton College in Illinois, a staunchly Evangelical Protestant school. In Curator Clyde S. Kilby's vault are many unpublished Lewis treasures: boyhood writings, diaries and 1,000 of his letters, including lifelong correspondence with Arthur Greeves, a friend from his Belfast youth.

The Greeves letters are being edited by Walter Hooper, a U.S. Episcopal priest who lives in Oxford as literary executor of the Lewis estate. Hooper has an explanation for Lewis' growing popularity. He thinks the West is moving away from materialism and liberalism and needs "a coherent, universal faith, something permanent in a world of seeming chaos." No one better fits that need than C.S. Lewis, who once said, "All that is not eternal is eternally out of date." -

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