Why Are We Still Talking About C. S. Lewis?

The surprising relevance of a man who died in 1963

Why are we still talking about C. S. Lewis, 63 years after his death? There were plenty of Christian leaders, theologians, and writers who were well known in his day yet their legacy has been nothing like that of Lewis. What is it about Lewis that has given him such longevity ensuring that his books still sell by the truckload today?

One reason is because Lewis developed an approach to sharing the Christian faith that is very, very unusual—in that he figured out how to address three very different types of audience: owls, elephants, and dragons.

Perhaps that was a little cryptic, so what do I mean by those three animal archetypes? By owls I mean people whose primary objection or stumbling block to the gospel is intellectual. By elephants, I refer to those whose primary objection or stumbling block is a heart, emotional, or existential issue. Finally, by dragons, we are talking of people who have no time for an argument but for whom an appeal to their imaginations can bear fruit.

Throughout his three decades of Christian work, Lewis’s apologetics¹ and his public theology continually had these three dimensions to it: he addressed people’s minds, hearts, and imaginations. This three-dimensional aspect makes Lewis highly unusual, or at least very rare, in his and indeed in any period since.

In this essay, based on a talk I gave in Belfast for the C. S. Lewis Institute, we are going to explore what we can learn from C. S. Lewis. But before that, it can be helpful to consider the soil in which Lewis’s three-dimensional approach first grew.

THE MAKING OF A THREE-DIMENSIONAL APOLOGIST

C. S. Lewis’s three-dimensional approach to explaining the Christian faith is deeply rooted in his own story. Born in 1898 in Belfast to an austere religious family, as a boy Lewis would dutifully say his prayers and go to church, but he never had any real interest in God. Nevertheless, his was a happy childhood, with Lewis drawn from an early age to the love of nature and of reading.

But when he was ten years ”old, tragically Lewis’s idyllic childhood was shattered forever when his beloved mother died suddenly of cancer. Lewis’s view of God now took a turn for the worse; he had prayed unceasingly for his mother and yet she had died. Lewis wrote later that:

The trouble with God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong.²

There then followed an unhappy schooling, as his grieving father packed Lewis and his brother Warnie off to a succession of horrible boarding schools. Throughout his teens, Lewis grew into a committed atheist, considering the religion of his childhood to have been “an illness of long standing”.

This atheism was reinforced by Lewis’s experiences in World War I, which left deep emotional scars and reinforced his atheistic views, especially about how evil disproved the existence of a good, powerful God. His best friend, Paddy Moore, was killed and then Lewis himself was invalided out of the army when a shell exploded next to him, blowing his sergeant to bits and wounding Lewis. In all of the horror of war, however, Lewis proudly boasted:

I never sank so low as to pray.³

So Lewis’s atheism began with issues of the heart—the existential crises of bereavement, loneliness, war, and violence. But there was also an intellectual aspect to his atheism. Much of this can be traced to the time when, aged 16, Lewis was taught by a private tutor, William Kirkpatrick, who had been his father’s old headmaster. Known as the ‘Great Knock’, Kirkpatrick was a staunch rationalist and atheist and he helped Lewis add reasons and arguments to his more experiential doubts about God.

In 1916, Lewis wrote to his close friend Arthur Greeves, stating that “I believe in no God” and asking:

Why would any intelligent person want to believe in a bogey who is prepared to torture me for ever and ever?”⁴

So Lewis’s atheism was founded on both reason and emotion, mind and heart. But when God began to draw Lewis back, it was through the third dimension, the imagination, that God initially spoke.

This journey began when Lewis discovered Christian writers, especially G. K. Chesterton, who started to make sense to him—and then there was something else. Lewis slowly began to realise, with horror at first, that all that he held dear made no sense if atheism was true. Lewis wanted to believe in goodness, in beauty, in meaning, things that he found woven deeply into the literature he loved. But if atheism was true, then the universe was ultimately empty, cold, and bereft of meaning.

So Lewis began a slow journey through a succession of worldviews, beginning by moving from atheism to idealism, from idealism to pantheism and then realising that, as he put it, ‘the least objectionable theory’ was to postulate some kind of God.⁵ The problem was, though, that the God who began to break into Lewis’ world wasn’t passive but was active and questing, banging on the door. Lewis later wrote:

Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God’. To me, as I was then, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.⁶

A few months later, the chase was over:

In the Trinity term I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.⁷

Although Lewis now believed in God, he was not yet a Christian, for he had no idea how Jesus fitted into the scheme of things. It was his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, a deeply committed Catholic, who helped him work most of this out.

So all three dimensions—mind, heart, and imagination—had played a role in Lewis’s descent into atheism and his eventual reconversion. Which meant when Lewis found his calling as a Christian apologist, a moment we can trace to the invitation from the BBC in 1941 to prepare a series of radio talks on Christianity, Lewis instinctively knew the importance of using all three dimensions.

As Lewis’s writing career developed, those dimensions then played themselves out across the different styles of books he wrote. Consider works like Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, written primarily in ‘mind mode’. Then there are books like The Screwtape Letters and A Grief Observed, which work more in ‘heart mode’. Finally, there is Lewis’s fiction, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Cosmic Trilogy, which Lewis wrote very much in the third register, the dimension of the imagination.

LEARNING FROM C. S. LEWIS

So what can we learn from Lewis’s three-dimensional approach? For those of us who are Christians, how can he help us engage our friends in conversations about Jesus? And for those of us who are seekers or spiritually curious, what did Lewis say in these three areas that might help us explore the Christian faith?

OWLS: THE MIND

Thinking about the type of person I have termed an ‘owl’, the kind of person for whom rational arguments and intellectual reasons are important, it goes without saying that Lewis could use this type of argument well. Think, for example, of his Argument from Reason—in which he argued that if our thoughts are just the results of blind, irrational forces, we can’t trust them to give us truth reliably.

Or, more accessibly, think of the argument in Mere Christianity that’s often known simply as the moral argument. Reflecting on his atheist days, Lewis observes:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.⁸

Or more formally:

1. If there is no God, objective morals, values and duties do not exist (all we have is human preference)

2. Objective morals, values and duties exist (anyone who had lived, like Lewis had, through the brutality of trench warfare had no time for the idea that hatred of war was just a mere preference).

3. Therefore, God exists. The conclusion follows naturally from the premises. Now at this point, some atheists might protest and say things like “You don’t need God to be good”. To which Lewis would gently but firmly respond: that is not the argument. Rather the argument is that if God does not exist, good and evil don’t exist either.

ELEPHANTS: THE HEART

I love a good argument, as I’m a philosopher by training. But for some people, their primary barrier to the gospel was never intellectual in the first place (as it wasn’t for C. S. Lewis). Even shown a powerful argument in which every step is watertight, they may still look at it and say “meh”. What is going on here?

In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers the metaphor of a rider and an elephant to help explain how we make many of our judgements. We like to think we are making judgements by using careful reason, but really much of the time they’re instinctive. The Rider of Reason is sitting on top of the Elephant of Intuition—and whilst the rider can attempt to steer the elephant, much of the time the elephant will charge wherever it sees fit.

This is why it can sometimes be hard talking to people who hold a very different view to our own: we may think that our arguments are the bee’s knees, but our friend refuses even to consider them. The problem, Haidt would say, is that you’re appealing to the rider. Listen to Haidt’s advice—he’s talking in this example about moral discussions, but the same applies to conversations about faith:

When does the elephant listen to reason? The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favour, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs. When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges. But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. The elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants.⁹

For Christians, this is a reminder from a secular psychologist, of the words of the New Testament in 1 Peter 3:15:

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.

If we engage people with gentleness and respect, then they are far more likely to be drawn toward us, rather than veer away from us. I’m reminded, too, of Matthew 5, where Jesus talked about Christians being the “salt of the earth”. In the ancient world, before we’d discovered refrigerators and before fast-food restaurants had worked out how to make food out of plastic, salt had a vital role as a preservative. But in order to work that way, it had to be in contact with the thing it was supposed to preserve. And the same is true when it comes to Christianity. In their everyday lives, Christians need to be mixing with those we want to influence. If we’re so busy at church, for example, that we can’t do that, maybe we need to rethink some priorities.

But as well as our availability, when it comes to persuading people, our character and our manner are also important when we’re engaging with questions of the heart. The seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal memorably put it like this:

Make [Christianity] attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is.¹⁰

What Pascal is saying is that if you’re a Christian, you want to think about the manner in which you communicate and the story you tell, the picture you paint of what it looks like if Christianity is true. In other words, we can use Elephant Friendly Language, appeals that engage the heart as well as the mind.

This was also an approach that C. S. Lewis was familiar with. In his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis reflects on many experiences he had when he was young—in poetry, or in nature, or in beauty—that caused a yearning in him for something deeper. As he reflected on those experiences, Lewis realised they were aspects of the same thing:

An unsatisfied desire which is more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy.¹¹

When he became a Christian, in part through pursuing this theme and where it led, Lewis developed an argument around this idea; it has come to be known as the Argument from Desire and we could set it out this way:¹²

1. Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.

2. There exists in us a desire which nothing in time, or on earth, no creature can satisfy.

3. Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth, and creatures which can satisfy it.

The sceptic might grumble “well, we don’t always get what we want” but this is not the point. If I am hungry, I may not get food; perhaps it’s midnight, the refrigerator is empty, and all the stores are closed. Nevertheless, my being hungry surely proves that food exists. Lewis put it like this:

A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. We feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. 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.¹³

This idea of deep desires within us for something more than this world is fairly universal across music, art and literature. For example, the French existentialist and atheist Jean-Paul Sartre famously remarked: “There comes a time when one asks, even of Shakespeare, even of Beethoven, ‘Is that all there is?’”

DRAGONS: THE IMAGINATION

We’ve thought about owls: people for whom arguments are very significant. And we’ve considered elephants: those who will more likely move when we appeal to the heart. But there’s another type of person—one who is suspicious of such approaches and ready to resist them. Lewis was aware of them and wrote this:

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.¹⁴

Lewis is playing with the idea that stories can do things that arguments—or even appeals to the heart and emotions—can’t do. Indeed, what happens if you try an appeal to the heart but the person simply doesn’t feel it? The answer is to try an approach via the imagination.

This is one reason why Lewis pivoted to writing stories, books like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Cosmic Trilogy. It’s also why (despite disavowing allegory) Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is so powerful as a pointer to the gospel. Look at the way it explores themes like evil and the corruption of the heart, of sacrifice and redemption, and of rescue and salvation all through the lens of a story. Indeed, as Tolkien himself acknowledged in a letter to a friend:

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously at first, but consciously in the revision … the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.¹⁵

Indeed, I think it’s possible to take any story and look for gospel connections—not least because as Tolkien argues in his famous essay On Fairy-Stories, there is a sense in which all stories are in some ways an echo of the ‘one true story’. So if Christians can learn to begin with the stories our friends are watching and reading and gently ask “have you ever wondered what’s going on in this story?”, fascinating things can happen.¹⁶

Another way to do this is with your testimony—the story of how you became a Christian (and why you remain one); or, if you’re a spiritually curious seeker, the story of your journey so far can intrigue and engage people. These things are powerful because they’re a story, a narrative; and humans are wired to find stories compelling.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

We’ve been exploring why C. S. Lewis was so influential: because, like very few Christian writers or thinkers since, he was so powerfully able to appeal to the mind, to the heart, and to the imagination.

And by the way, those three approaches don’t need to be separate; sometimes it’s a case of combining them over time with the same person—a bit like Lewis himself came to faith through arguments, through emotion, and through the imagination, as friends shared the good news of Jesus in those ways with him and he put the pieces together.

I’m reminded, too, of what Lewis said:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.¹⁷

In other words, if Christianity is true, then that truth sheds light on everything. On arguments and philosophy; on the heart, emotion, and existential longings; and on our imaginations, the way we’re wired for story and narrative and to instinctively search for direction and purpose to the universe and to life.

Just like a toolkit needs more than just a hammer, so our conversational toolkit needs a variety of tools and Lewis has modelled for us three powerful ones: appeals to the heart, the mind, and the imagination.

So for those of us who are Christians, let us thank the Lord for C. S. Lewis and then, with those tools in our toolbox, head out and engage those the Lord brings across our paths: whether they be owls, elephants, or dragons!

While for those of you who are still exploring the road to faith, let me encourage you to take a fresh (or even a first) look at C. S. Lewis. Get hold of a copy of Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy, The Chronicles of Narnia, or The Cosmic Trilogy. As you read them, I trust that your mind, imagination, and heart may be stirred up, as you catch a glimpse, through their pages, of something good, beautiful, and true.

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1. Apologetics is the branch of Christian theology concerned with persuasion; helping people see the reasons why they might consider Christianity to be good, compelling, and true.

2. Walter Hooper, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905 - 1931, Vol. 1 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) p. 555.

3. Cited in David C. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002) p. 11.

4. Hooper, Letters, p. 235.

5. Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013) p.138.

6. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: HarperCollins, 2012 [1955]) p.227.

7. Ibid., 229.

8. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Glasgow: Collins, 1990) p. 39.

9. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Penguin, 2013) p.79.

10. Pascal, Penseés, III.187.

11. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, p. 17.

12. [12] I have taken this formulation of the argument from Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1994) p. 78.

13. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 113.

14. C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (Orlando, FL: Harvest, 1994 [1966]) p. 37.

15. Cited in Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 172.

16. For more on this, see Daniel Strange, Plugged In: Connecting Your Faith With What You Watch, Read, and Play (Epsom, UK: The Good Book Company, 2019).

17. C. S. Lewis, ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ in C. S. Lewis, ed., The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperOne, 1980 [1949]) 116-140, citing p.140.