Chapter 15: The Lewis Phenomenon
The Lewis Phenomenon
Towards the end of his life, Lewis remarked to Walter Hooper that he expected to be forgotten within five years of his death. That was the judgement of many in the 1960s, who saw Lewis as hopelessly wedded to the cultural outlook of an earlier generation. Cometh the hour, cometh the man—yet Lewis’s hour now seemed to lie in the past. The “High Sixties” (1960–1973) witnessed rapid cultural change, as a rising younger generation sought to distance themselves from the culture and values of their parents.[749] And Lewis was on the wrong side of that watershed.
The 1960s: A Fading Star
In 1965, Chad Walsh (1914–1991), the American literary scholar who published the first book on Lewis in 1949, declared that Lewis’s influence was now “on the wane in America.”[750] Lewis’s rise to fame in the United States was linked with the wartime revival of interest in religious questions, which persisted until late in the 1950s—but then began to fade. During the 1960s, religious interest and concern switched from theoretical questions to practical issues. Lewis seemed “much too theoretical and abstract” to the younger generation. He had little to say in the face of the great debates of that age—the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and the “death of God.”
Lewis was beached, as the tide that had brought him to prominence receded in the 1960s. This was the wisdom of that turbulent age. In its obituary for Lewis, Time magazine declared him to be “one of the church’s minor prophets,” a defender of the faith who “with fashionable urbanity justified an unfashionable orthodoxy against the heresies of his time.”[751] But the tone of the obituary was that of marking his passing, not anticipating his resurrection. Lewis would be remembered as “an impressive scholar”—by those who looked backwards.
15.1 Lewis at home at The Kilns in 1960. This is one of the best-known images of the later Lewis. It depicts him sitting at his desk, complete with the materials he used when writing—on the left, a large cup of tea, a bottle of Quink ink, an ashtray, and a box of matches; on the right, a pipe, a tin of tobacco, and a second box of matches.
So what lay ahead? Walsh was rightly cautious here, warning it was not possible to determine what Lewis’s future standing in America might be. Walsh’s own hunch was that Lewis’s more “straightforward books”—such as Mere Christianity—would dwindle in their appeal. After all, such works of “religious journalism” appealed primarily to their own day and age. Walsh, himself a literary scholar, suggested that Lewis’s “more imaginative books”—such as his “superb series of seven Narnia novels for children”—might live on, and “become a permanent part of the literary and religious heritage.” Yet that would lie in the future, if it were to happen at all. For the moment, Lewis was entering a period of “relative obscurity.”[752]
Lewis had indeed few champions in North America during the 1960s. Lewis was then read and advocated chiefly by Episcopalians—such as Chad Walsh and Walter Hooper—even though there were signs of an emerging interest on the part of some influential Catholics. Evangelicals—a growing religious constituency in the United States during the 1960s—clearly regarded him with suspicion, in that he violated both their social norms and their religious concerns. Theologically, evangelicals had little in common with Lewis, who offered a literary explanation of the observed centrality of the Bible to the Christian faith, not a theological defence of its right to occupy that place. Apart from a loose connection with the Oxford Pastorate through the Socratic Club, Lewis did not associate with British evangelicals, even in Oxford or Cambridge. In the year of Lewis’s death, Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981), one of the most influential British evangelical preachers of that time, pronounced him to be unsound on a number of issues, chiefly relating to the doctrine of salvation.[753]
Lewis seemed a total outsider to American evangelicals in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when most within the movement regarded even watching movies as spiritually dangerous. What evangelical would want to be associated with someone who smoked heavily, drank copious quantities of beer, and held views on the Bible, the Atonement, and purgatory which were out of place in the evangelical community of that age? While some evangelicals warmed to Lewis’s apologetic writings in the 1960s, most regarded him with distrust.
It would be unfair to suggest that Lewis was written off by 1970. Perhaps a more reliable judgement would be that the surging tide that had once swept Lewis to public attention now withdrew, seemingly leaving him washed up and beached. Lewis was not discredited; he was simply sidelined. The rebirth of interest in religious questions between 1942 and 1957, which originally brought Lewis to prominence, was replaced by a new cultural mood that was inclined to reject religion as an outdated habit of thought and practice and was anxious to break free from any lingering influence of the past. The great sociological predictions of the 1960s envisaged religion as losing its intellectual and social traction. A secular age lay ahead.
The cultural mood of the High Sixties was well captured by Tom Wolfe in his 1987 essay “The Great Relearning.” Everything was to be swept aside, so that culture could be reconstructed by an “unprecedented start from zero.”[754] Other religious and literary prophets arose in America and Europe, and Lewis fell by the wayside. Lewis was a distinctly religious voice in a coming secular age, and more important, he advocated taking the past seriously, when most wanted to abandon it altogether as an embarrassing liability.
On the literary front, the impact of Lewis’s imaginative writings—including the Narnia series—was overshadowed by the astonishing success of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which achieved cult status during the 1960s, especially once cheap paperback editions began to appear in the United States. Tolkien waxed as Lewis waned. The intricate structure and deep backstory of The Lord of the Rings pointed to a sophistication and profundity that seemed lacking in Narnia.
Tolkien’s epic narrative of the pathology of power chimed in with the anxieties of that age concerning nuclear holocausts. Though conceived long before the advent of the atom bomb, Tolkien’s “one ring to rule them all” seemed a powerful image of the lure of a weapon of supreme destructive force, and the power it conveyed on its apparent masters—who were, in reality, its slaves. Much to Tolkien’s surprise, he now found himself idolised by exactly the sort of students he would have once thrown out of his Oxford lectures.
Rediscovery: The New Interest in Lewis
Yet Lewis bounced back. It is relatively straightforward to account for Lewis’s rise to fame, first in the dark wartime period of the early 1940s, and then again as Narnia wove its imaginative magic throughout the 1950s. But that does not explain the resurgence of interest in Lewis a generation later. Many popular writers of the 1940s and 1950s simply sank without a trace. For example, consider the five American top fiction bestsellers of 1947:
All of these books can still be purchased today, generally from specialist, secondhand dealers. But despite their initial blaze of glory, they have all faded. Why is Lewis different?
We can map out some possible lines of exploration that at least help us understand—even if they do not really “explain” in the stronger sense of the term—the resurgence of interest in Lewis. It is relatively easy to identify some pieces of the jigsaw; the problem is that we do not fully understand how they fit into a bigger picture.
First, collections of previously unpublished or inaccessible material by Lewis began to appear. These were largely the result of the dedicated editorial work of Walter Hooper, who had acted as a private secretary to Lewis in the summer of 1963, and subsequently served as Lewis’s literary executor after the death of Cecil Harwood in 1975. Hooper had consulted with Lewis during his lifetime on developing a complete bibliography of his works. When this was first published in 1965, it ran to 282 items, not including letters.[756]
In the early 1970s, the leading British publisher William Collins & Sons bought the rights to Lewis’s publications, and established the Fount imprint to give them a distinct identity within the company. Over the next decade, Hooper brought out a steady trickle of collected essays with Collins—such as Screwtape Proposes a Toast (1965); Of This and Other Worlds (1966); Christian Reflections (1967); Fern-Seed and Elephants (1975); and God in the Dock (1979).[757] These new collections expanded the horizons of those who already knew Lewis, while introducing him to others. Hooper insisted that the publication of any new collection of Lewis’s material should be matched by the reprint of two of his earlier works, thus ensuring that his less popular works—such as The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Abolition of Man—remained in print.[758]
Most recently, and possibly most significantly, Hooper edited the 3,500 pages of Lewis’s correspondence (2000–2006), allowing Lewis’s intellectual, social, and spiritual trajectory to be tracked in detail. These letters, essential to Lewis scholarship, form the narrative backbone of this biography.
Second, a series of significant societies were formed in the United States, dedicated to preserving Lewis’s memory and legacy. The first of these was the New York C. S. Lewis Society, founded in 1969. Others soon followed, creating associations through which devotees of Lewis could gather to discuss his work. Those who were enthused about Lewis in the 1940s and 1950s sought to pass that enthusiasm on to others in the 1970s. In 1974, the Marion E. Wade Center, dedicated to the life and works of Lewis and his circle, was established at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, building on an earlier collection of material brought together by Clyde S. Kilby (1902–1986), a former professor of English at Wheaton College. Lewis’s homeland was somewhat slow to follow suit: the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society was established as late as 1982. The institutionalisation of the Lewis legacy had begun. Networks were established that facilitated the intergenerational transmission of his legacy.
Third, well-written biographies began to appear from the pens of those close to Lewis, allowing their readers to grasp what he was like. The first was C. S. Lewis: A Biography (1974), written jointly by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper. Green (1918–1987), a former student of Lewis’s at Oxford, had gone on to write children’s books himself, and had authored important biographies of British children’s writers—most notably, his studies of J. M. Barrie (1960) and Lewis Carroll (1960). Hooper and Green’s biography was followed by Jack (1988) by George Sayer, another close friend. These remain landmarks in Lewis studies. Though inevitably lacking critical distance, both of these biographies revealed details of Lewis’s personal life which portrayed him as a human being and gave added depth to a reading of some of his works.
Finally, we might note how the great surge of interest in Tolkien in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s indirectly benefitted Lewis. As it became increasingly clear that Tolkien was not a solitary Oxford writer, but was linked with the group now generally known as the Inklings, attention was paid once more to the most prominent member of that group—C. S. Lewis. The always large number of American graduate students studying at Oxford began to explore the haunts of Tolkien and Lewis, the students taking both their memories and their enthusiasm home with them. (With this trend in mind, tourist maps of Oxford now show the precise location of the Eagle and Child.)
Lewis has always been appreciated more in the United States than in England, despite never once setting foot stateside. This is partly due to the intellectual and cultural prestige of Oxford University in American eyes. Lewis is one of the elite group of bestselling children’s authors who were also Oxford dons—including Lewis Carroll and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis’s Cambridge period tends to be glossed over by many American commentators, who often refer to him simply as an “Oxford don.”
Yet Lewis now rides high in America only partly for cultural reasons; there is a significant religious element to his appeal. Lewis is trusted and respected by many American Christians, who treat him as their theological and spiritual mentor. Engaging both heart and mind, Lewis opened up the intellectual and imaginative depths of the Christian faith like nobody else. As Lewis himself pointed out in his broadcast talks during the Second World War, he was simply an educated layman, who spoke directly and accessibly to ordinary Christians over the heads of their clergy. Lewis proved ideally attuned to the pedagogical needs and abilities of laypeople, irrespective of their denomination, who wanted to explore their faith further.
Irrespective of their denomination. We must linger over this crucial point. During the 1960s, the first signs began to emerge of an erosion of denominationalism in American Protestantism. Protestant Christians began to define themselves primarily as Christians, and secondarily by denomination, reflecting an increasingly loose commitment to a denomination as a marker of religious identity.[759] A Presbyterian might become a Methodist upon moving to a new town or state, if the local Methodist church offered better child care or preaching. A church’s denomination came to be seen as of lesser importance than the quality of its preaching and pastoral care. Seminaries began to drop denominationally specific titles. Thus the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia became Virginia Theological Seminary. Lewis’s notion of “mere Christianity” spoke powerfully into this trend, with Lewis achieving a high degree of acceptance across denominations precisely because he avoided advocating any specific form of Christianity. Lewis’s Mere Christianity became the manifesto for a form of Christianity that exulted in essentials, regarding other matters as secondary.
American Catholics began to read Lewis in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). This landmark council, convened by Pope John XXIII (1881–1963), aimed to reconnect Catholicism with other Christian churches, and encourage a deeper engagement with contemporary culture. Before this, Catholics tended to regard the works of other Christian writers as being of questionable orthodoxy and utility. The council opened the way for Catholics to read and respect non-Catholic authors—such as Lewis. Lewis now gained a growing Catholic readership both as a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and as an admirer of G. K. Chesterton, neither of whose Catholic credentials could be questioned. Leading American Catholics, such as Cardinal Avery Dulles (1918–2008) and Peter Kreeft (1937– ), began to champion Lewis as a “mere Christian” whom Catholics could take seriously. Many who converted to Catholicism in the last two decades have cited Lewis as an important influence, despite Lewis’s original Ulster Protestant cultural roots.[760]
Yet there is another point, too easily overlooked, which is of especial importance for American Catholics today. “Mere Christianity” avoids more than “denominational imperialism”; it also avoids the abuses of power and privilege that too easily arise when denominations and their leaders see their own preservation as taking priority over the well-being of the Christian faith itself. Lewis represents a lay form of Christianity which has no special place for clergy or ecclesiastical institutions. My conversations with American Catholics suggest that many of them, increasingly disenchanted with the failings of their bishops and dioceses, find in Lewis a voice that allows them to reclaim their faith without having also to affirm the institutions they believe to have tarnished that faith in recent years. Will Lewis become the voice of those who are demanding reform and renewal of overclericalised churches?
It is clear that Lewis’s writings have now found a new audience far beyond his original admirers. He has come to be seen as a trustworthy, intelligent, and above all accessible representative of a theologically and culturally attractive vision of the Christian faith. The fact that Lewis was an outsider to the United States worked to his advantage, in that it allowed him to be seen as a unifying figure, rising above local American denominational disputes and debates. Lewis has become that rarest of phenomena—a modern Christian writer regarded with respect and affection by Christians of all traditions.
Lewis and American Evangelicals
A growing number of those Americans who profited from reading Lewis in the 1970s were evangelicals. A generation after his death, Lewis has become a cultural and religious icon for the movement. Some have now even spoken of Lewis as the “patron saint” of American evangelicalism. So how did a movement that initially regarded Lewis with intense suspicion come eventually to embrace him, and then to enthrone him? To understand the somewhat unexpected rise of Lewis’s influence within the American evangelical constituency, we need to reflect on the changing face of American evangelicalism since 1945.
During the 1920s, American evangelicalism was shaped by the rise of fundamentalism, which led to evangelicals developing a significant degree of cultural disengagement and isolationism. The mood within the movement began to change in the late 1940s, partly through the influence of writers such as Billy Graham (1918– ) and Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003), who strongly advocated engagement with mainstream American culture. This “new evangelicalism,” initially a minority trend, grew apace, taking its lead from individuals such as Graham, publications such as Christianity Today, and institutions such as Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.[761] This new form of American evangelicalism was a strongly populist movement, capturing the hearts and wills of many. But many noted that it had yet to engage the mind, or see the importance of connecting with the intellectual subculture.
As American evangelicals sought refreshment of the mind as well as the soul, they found what they lacked in British writers—above all, from within the Church of England. During the 1950s and 1960s, the leading British evangelical John R. W. Stott (1921–2011) developed an intellectually rigorous approach to evangelicalism, which was warmly received in the United States. Stott’s approach itself may have lacked populist appeal, but it was strong on rational reflection on faith. Stott became a hero for American evangelicals who wanted to love God with all their minds. His Basic Christianity (1958) was a masterpiece of reasoned argument, setting out to demonstrate the “intellectual respectability” of Christian faith.
Then evangelicals started reading Lewis. It is difficult to date this development with any precision, but anecdotal evidence suggests it dates from the mid-1970s. Hints of an evangelical recognition of Lewis’s wisdom can, however, be seen much earlier, particularly on the part of its leaders. Though few knew of it, both John Stott and Billy Graham sought Lewis’s counsel as they prepared for Graham’s mission to the University of Cambridge in 1955.[762] In that same year, Carl F. H. Henry had invited Lewis to write some apologetic pieces for the flagship evangelical journal Christianity Today.[763]
Evangelical leaders who came to faith from a secular background in the 1970s often cited Lewis’s Mere Christianity as a core influence in their conversion—such as Charles “Chuck” Wendell Colson (1931–2012), the special adviser to President Richard Nixon, who became implicated in the Watergate scandal and rose to prominence within evangelical circles after his conversion in 1973. Evangelical writers now began to cite Lewis in their works, especially his Mere Christianity, encouraging their readers to value this important author and explore him further.
As evangelicalism intensified its commitment to cultural engagement, the importance of apologetics became increasingly clear. Lewis was rapidly recognised by evangelicals as a master of that art. John Stott’s apologetic approach in Basic Christianity relied on its readers already knowing something about the Bible, and being willing to have biblical passages explained to them. Lewis made few such demands in Mere Christianity, basing his apologetic approach on general principles, fine observation, and an appeal to shared human experience.
Evangelical student organisations, such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, now began to make Lewis’s works part of their staple diet, valuing both their accessibility and their rhetorical power. Those in the know forgave Lewis for not being an evangelical; most evangelicals, however, simply saw Lewis as one of their own. After all, had he not been converted from atheism? That, for many, was enough to allow Lewis to be seen as a “born-again” Christian.
As American evangelicals read Lewis, they encountered a vision of the Christian faith that they found to be intellectually robust, imaginatively compelling, and ethically fertile. Those who initially valued Lewis for his rational defence of the Christian faith now found themselves appreciating his appeal to the imagination and emotions. Lewis’s multilayered conception of Christianity enabled evangelicals to realise that they could enrich their faith without diluting it, and engage secular culture in ways other than through reasoned argument.
Yet Lewis’s growing acceptance within evangelicalism reflects more than his winsome and accessible presentation of the Christian faith. A major cultural transition made Lewis even more attractive and significant. Nobody really knows when modernity finally lost out to postmodernity in the United States—or why. Some argue it happened in the 1960s; others in the 1980s. Yet there is no doubt about the outcome of this cultural shift. Intuitive modes of reflection, shaped by images and stories, have trumped logical argument, based solely on reason.
John Stott’s strongly didactic approach to faith in Basic Christianity had many modernist virtues; yet with the rise of postmodernism, its approach increasingly seemed to belong to a previous generation. Basic Christianity was virtually devoid of any appeal to the imagination, or any recognition of the emotional dimensions of faith. As American evangelicals came to realise the importance of narrative and imagination in the life of faith, they turned instead to Lewis as their guide.
Lewis allowed his readers to grasp and benefit from the importance of images and stories for the life of faith, without losing sight of the robustly reasonable nature of the Christian gospel. Where older American evangelicals spent their time taking potshots at postmodernity during the 1980s and early 1990s, the writings of Lewis allowed younger evangelicals to connect with this new cultural mood. Where the Old Guard urged their younger followers to shun this trend, Lewis allowed them to engage it powerfully and persuasively.
In a 1998 article marking the centenary of Lewis’s birth, Christianity Today declared that Lewis had come to be “the Aquinas, the Augustine, and the Aesop of contemporary evangelicalism.”[764] There is no doubt that Lewis has been instrumental in changing the cultural outlook of American evangelicalism. In the 1950s, evangelicalism was suspicious of literature, movies, and the arts.[765] Evangelical admiration for Lewis may have begun with respect for his ideas; it soon developed into a respect for the modes and manners in which Lewis expressed those ideas.
By the mid-1980s, evangelical colleges—such as the flagship Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois—were encouraging evangelicals to engage with literature as a means of enriching their faith, appealing to Lewis as an exemplar. To date, evangelical engagement has focussed primarily on a group of writers clustered around Lewis or historically linked with him—namely, Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams. It remains to be seen where this development will lead; there are, however, now clear signs that evangelicalism has begun to grasp the potential of literature to enrich, communicate, and commend faith.
Since 1985, I have taught at summer schools in Oxford attended by large numbers of young American evangelicals. Lewis has been a topic of conversation throughout that entire period. At the time of writing, there is not the slightest sign of any loss of interest. On the basis of those extended conversations over a quarter of a century, I have come to my own conclusion about why Lewis appeals so powerfully to a rising evangelical generation in the United States: Lewis is seen to enrich and extend faith, without diluting it. In other words, evangelicals tend to see Lewis as a catalyst, who opens up a deeper vision of the Christian faith, engaging the mind, the feelings, and the imagination, without challenging fundamental distinctives. Lewis supplements, without displacing, evangelical basics. While this involves a selective reading of Lewis, this does not seem to cause any fundamental concern. Lewis is grafted on to evangelical essentials, engaging weaknesses without compromising strengths. For many young evangelicals, reading Lewis gives added depth and power to their evangelical commitments.
Yet some fundamentalist Protestant Christians in the United States continue to regard Lewis as a dangerous heretic. The strident tone of such criticisms of Lewis can be judged from the following:
C.S. Lewis was an imposter, who corrupted the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and led multitudes of victims into Hellfire with his doctrines of devils. Lewis used profanities, told lewd stories, and frequently got drunk with his students.[766]
Other fundamentalists argue that the modern evangelical admiration for Lewis is a sign that evangelicalism has lost its way and forfeited its birthright.[767] While this is a minority viewpoint, it is indicative of anxiety on the part of some older evangelicals about the recent directions the movement has taken in America. Yet theology may be of secondary importance here; some would suggest that the real issue is power and influence. Lewis has displaced some who would see themselves as natural authority figures within the American evangelical movement.
Lewis as a Literary Landmark
It is Lewis’s imaginative works, particularly his Chronicles of Narnia, that now attract the greatest following, both in American culture at large and within Christian circles in particular. Chad Walsh’s 1965 intuition about Lewis’s possible future appeal can now be seen to have been justified. Lewis is now regarded as one of the finest authors of fantasy literature, standing alongside—and in most cases well above—J. M. Barrie, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, Neil Gaiman, Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling, Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, and J. R. R. Tolkien.
The literary convention of fantasy is not restricted to any specific ideology. It can be used to champion—or subvert—secular humanism or Christianity. As a secular humanist, the British writer Philip Pullman loathes Lewis, recently suggesting that he was “tempted to dig him up and throw stones at him.”[768] This will probably strike most people as slightly weird, but it is completely consistent with what one critic has described as the “virulent theological hatred” that Pullman displays towards those he disagrees with.[769]
In fact, far from dismissing Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy implicitly recognises them as representing the definitive statement of the position he wishes to reject. The more Pullman criticises Lewis, the more he affirms Lewis’s cultural significance. In the end, Pullman’s appeal is parasitic, depending precisely upon the cultural impact of Narnia that he wishes to subvert. As recent studies have noted, Pullman offers “a kind of inverted homage to his predecessor, deliberately composing a kind of ‘anti-Narnia,’ a secular humanist alternative to Lewis’s Christian fantasy.”[770]
Literary scholars have pointed out how Pullman draws extensively on Lewis in many respects—for example, his affirmation of the importance of the story, his description of the creative process, his fascination with the mythic dimension of certain literary works, and his “high Romantic view of the imagination.”[771] Lewis’s most strident critic, paradoxically, turns out to be one of the most important witnesses to his present-day influence and importance.
There is no doubt of Lewis’s current status as a literary figure and religious writer. Lewis’s books began to appear on the religion bestseller lists of secular bookstores in the early 1990s, and they have remained there ever since. The 1994 release of the Hollywood version of Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, generated a new interest in Lewis as a human being, leading to increased sales of his works.
By the time of the centenary of his birth—1998—it was obvious that Lewis was not merely back in business; he had reached new heights of influence. The British Royal Mail, for example, issued a set of commemorative postage stamps based on characters from Narnia. In 2011, they followed through with a further release of eight postage stamps featuring magical figures from British literature. Two of these stamps featured characters from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—Aslan and the White Witch.[772]
The production of successful blockbuster movie versions of the Narnia novels, beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 2005, has raised Lewis’s profile still further, giving him a broader and deeper reach than before. The international success of the movies has led to Lewis’s more religious works being freshly translated or republished in languages other than English. In the United States, polls of American Christians show that Mere Christianity is regularly cited as the most influential religious book of the twentieth century, just as polls of ordinary readers continue to affirm the abiding popular affection for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and its canonical status in the children’s literature of the twentieth century.
Conclusion
So how are we to judge Lewis, fifty years after his death? Lewis himself had no doubt about the identity of the judge, or the criterion to be used in such an assessment. For Lewis, the only reliable critic of a writer’s value is time, and the only reliable measure is the enjoyment that results from reading that writer’s works. As Lewis himself remarked, nobody is ultimately able to “suppress” an author who is “obstinately pleasurable.”[773] Lewis has made the most difficult transition an author can hope to make—being read by more people a generation after his death than before it.
What the next generation will make of him remains to be seen. Contrary to the expectations of the 1960s, belief in God has not gone away, and has become resurgent as a factor in personal and public life since about 2000. The recent rise of the so-called “New Atheism” has simply increased public interest in religious questions, creating a new appetite for discussions about God that simplistic and superficial slogans such as “God is a delusion” fail to satisfy. Lewis is thus likely to remain a controversial figure, in that he is now—and will be in the future—widely seized upon as both a champion and a villain in these new debates, pointing once more to his abiding importance. The volume and tone of the criticism of Lewis from fundamentalisms of the left and right is ultimately to be seen as a reflection of his iconic cultural status, rather than a reliable gauge of his personal and literary defects.
Some will doubtless continue to accuse Lewis of writing disguised religious propaganda, crudely and cruelly dressed up as literature. Others will see him as a superb, even visionary, advocate and defender of the rationality of faith, whose powerful appeals to imagination and logic expose the shallowness of naturalism. Some will hold him to defend socially regressive viewpoints, based on the bygone world of England in the 1940s. Others will see him as a prophetic critic of cultural trends that were widely accepted in his time, but are now recognised as destructive, degrading, and damaging. Yet whether you agree with Lewis or not, you cannot ignore his landmark significance. As Oscar Wilde once so shrewdly remarked, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
Most, however, will see Lewis simply as a gifted writer who brought immense pleasure to many and illumination to some—and who, above all, celebrated the classic art of good writing as a way of communicating ideas and expanding minds. For Lewis, the best art hinted at the deeper structures of reality, helping humanity in its perpetual quest for truth and significance.
Let the last word go to a charismatic, young American president, who died shortly after Lewis on 22 November 1963. In a speech given at Amherst College four weeks before his death, John F. Kennedy, honouring the great American poet Robert Frost (1874–1963), paid a handsome tribute to the work of poets and writers. “We must never forget,” he declared, “that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”[774] Lewis, I think, would agree.