Defender of the Faith

When Clive Staples Lewis died of a heart attack a few days before his 65th birthday last week, the London obituaries generously summed up the impressive achievements of an impressive scholar. He had been a witty, well-attended lecturer at Oxford, a brilliant professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge; his studies of Spenser and Milton were already critical classics. Oxbridge will remember him for that; to the rest of the Christian world, C. S. Lewis was 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.

Clarity & Style. From the day of Hooker and Jewel, the Church of England has always been blessed with divines who could write of their faith with clarity, balance, style and, sometimes, with humor as well. Lewis -- a layman who never took orders or a seminary course -- had all these qualities in full measure. Born in Belfast and baptized into Anglicanism's Church of Ireland, Lewis tossed off the remnants of his childhood faith at prep school, professed no belief at all through World War I and Oxford. No sudden illumination brought him back to the church; it was, he claimed, sheer logic that drove him step by step from atheism to taking Anglican communion again in 1930. "I'm not in the least the religious type," he wrote after his conversion. "I want to be let alone to feel I'm my own master; but since the facts seemed to be just the opposite, I had to give in."

Lewis was very much a private man who was most at home arguing metaphysics with a handful of friends over tea, tobacco and public-house ale. But his faith was a public one, and he asserted it in BBC broadcasts and in most of his more than 30 books. None earned him greater fame than a series of letters he wrote for the Manchester Guardian in 1941, cast in the form of instructions from a bureaucratic demon in hell's "Lowerarchy" to a junior devil engaged in corrupting a human soul. A witty Baedeker of modern sin, The Screwtape Letters became an immediate bestseller--and a minor masterpiece of modern religious prose.

Foursquare Christianity. Equally appalled by High-Church ritualism and Low-Church doctrinal muddling, Lewis preached an oldfashioned, foursquare Christianity that shied away from neither the hard demands of the church's sexual morality nor from the curiously "unscientific" creatures who populate the Bible. He once wrote: "I find it easier to believe in a myth of gods and demons than in one of hypostatised abstract nouns." His was, in a way, a simple faith; he wrote about it with great sophistication, although more with an amateur's love than a professor's learning. "All I'm doing," he once told a BBC audience, "is to get people to face the facts--to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer." It was a moderate goal, but immoderately achieved: few 20th century men better understood the questions, or put the facts so well.

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