Retelling the Gospel as a Fairy Tale: C. S. Lewis
by: Bruce Edwards - Nov 1, 2005 - comment
It is somewhat taken for granted today that Christians may write gripping, challenging, even best selling fiction, including entries in the once scorned genres of fantasy, science fiction, and fairy tales. But once upon a time, few Christians were actively engaged in writing for a popular or wide audience outside their communities of faith. Fewer still were able to integrate faith and worldview effectively in imaginative prose. The most illustrious twentieth century pioneer in this frontier of faith, hands down, is C. S. Lewis, creator of The Chronicles of Narnia.
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 29, 1898, Lewis served admirably in World War 1, earned formidable academic credentials at Oxford University, became a world renowned teacher and prolific literary historian and critic at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and led an amazingly productive career as a Christian apologist, memoirist, essayist, poet, and fantasist. His late in life, star crossed marriage to American poet, Joy Davidman Gresham, was a cause celebre and the subject of a popular teleplay, stage play, and Hollywood movie, each entitled Shadowlands. He died quietly yet auspiciously on November 23, 1963, the day after U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
If we know anything about who Lewis was before his conversion to Christ, we would know that he represents absolutely the least likely person slated to accept the gospel as truth, let alone become one of its greatest champions. But if we know anything about the Person to whom he surrendered in faith, nothing should surprise us, except, as Lewis put it in his spiritual autobiography, joy itself. In that volume, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, 1955), Lewis charts the story of his conversion, and we learn directly from this narrative the following, solemn, singular fact just a few chapters in: “C. S. Lewis, grand defender of Christianity, lost his faith when he was 9 years old in a profound and principled way.” How’s that as a good start for a would be Christian fantasist or famous defender of the faith?
In this, his most personal and disclosive work, Lewis recounts how his mother Flora’s illness and eventual death broke the tranquility and sanctity of the Lewis household when he was only nine and spends the rest of its pages documenting the sometimes melancholy but ultimately salutary search ostensibly for the lost security he had taken for granted during the peace and settledness of his early childhood.
Before his mother’s passing, Lewis explains that he had had an idyllic youth, a life filled with three glorious things: books, imaginative play with brother Warren (whom he called “Warnie”), and an ephemeral but fulfilling taste of joy, the latter intimately connected to the first two. As he suggests, “My father’s house was filled with books. . . . I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tile. Also, of endless books. . . . Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves”.
Throughout his young life, whether immersed in fiction like E. Nesbit’s The Amulet or Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit or in poetry like Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf, the precocious Lewis was alert to something more than just mundane plot details or poetic imagery—an intangible, numinous feeling pointing him beyond the natural and into the eternal. Myth and fairy tale ruled his imagination and mediated this subtle but real transcendent touch. And imaginative play? His deep friendship with his brother Warnie, whose penchant for creating miniature playsets, like the toy garden he invented for their mutual pleasure, gave Lewis his first glimpse of a certain elusive feeling which he as a child associated with autumn. These were intimations of immortality, “‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.”
The joy Lewis fleetingly possessed ended abruptly with his mother’s death, which set in motion years of doubt, sadness, and, worst of all, alienation between Lewis and his father. It strained and stained the image of his father in him, mocking the notion of a benevolent heavenly Father. Lewis had prayed fervently for his mother to be healed, and when she was not, he was embittered toward God. More shockingly, Lewis had sought earnestly for his father to embrace him, to comfort him and brother Warnie in their profound grief, but instead he withdrew, violently, from his fatherhood over the boys, and with him took all of their hope and exhausted all of their faith. What love was left for the boys was spent on their common plight and their uncommon brotherhood.
From our temporal point of view, Lewis endured a tortured youth and survived a tumultuous adolescence. However, by heaven’s logic, that Lewis underwent this trauma is the greatest gift he could have received, for it sent him on his lifelong pursuit of the Author of joy. This is not something the budding young fantasy writer and Christian apologist could wish for, nor would we think it healthy that he would. But it points out something about God that Lewis convincingly conveys in creating the great lion king, Aslan, in the first tale of the Narnian series: “He is not safe, but he is good.”
As his literary career evolved, Lewis wrote well received works of science fiction, wise and sprightly volumes of Christian apologetics, and many learned tomes on medieval and renaissance literature, but his heart was always centered in myth and fairy tale. His greatest triumph and most enduring works were destined to be his Narnian tales, for they both redeem his lifelong struggles and recapture the true end of his search for joy.
The emphasis in Lewis’s fiction (and nonfiction) is always “seeing with the heart,” of apprehending images and tracing metaphors that instill faith and inspire journeys into the never never land of the Spirit. For the heart reveals our true character, and, ultimately, where our treasure is. And the perfect genre for hosting such stories and themes is the fairy tale. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, now famous as the creator of Middle Earth, both lived and taught at Oxford University from the mid 1920s through the early 1950s and, once acquainted, became fast friends. Over time the two medieval and Renaissance literature professors spent a lot of time together talking about mythology and storytelling -particularly the art of the fairy tale.
They learned they both had grown up devouring and inventing tales of fantastic adventure, and they realized that neither had ever met anyone quite like the other. Both “Jack” Lewis (as he was called by friends) and “Toilers’ (as Tolkien was called by Jack) had more in common with each other than with any other friend or colleague they had ever known. In fact, one could say that they shared deep convictions about almost everything—except Christianity.
When the two first met in 1926, Lewis had finally grown into an agnostic on the search, jettisoning his now waning adolescent atheism with vigor and curiosity; Tolkien was a stalwart Christian believer, raised as a devout Catholic, unshy about sharing his faith. If Lewis’s conversion to Christ comes at the end of an arduous imaginative and intellectual journey, Tolkien is central to its climax. In a 1931 letter to childhood friend Arthur Greeves, Lewis credits Tolkien (and mutual friend Hugo Dyson) with helping him see that his love of myth and fairy tale had simultaneously blinded him to, yet pre¬pared him for, the final acknowledgment that the Gospels tell the authentic, eyewitness story of a “true myth.”
Considering the role myth and fairy tale played in their mutual growth as thinkers and scholars, as well as believers, Lewis and Tolkien both regarded the fairy tale as perfectly suited as a vehicle for expressing eternal truth. It provided for Lewis in particular the perfect “canvas” on which to paint the “pictures in his head” that in words became the Narnian tales.
The world of Narnia is inherently a spiritual world, a world informed by C.S. Lewis’s Christian convictions and wise understanding of our fallen planet. He deftly uses the conventions of the fairy tale to depict for us a winsome and whimsical landscape that stirs our heart and directs our soul, mind, and strength toward heaven.
To inhabit that world, we must be poised to receive, not use, this grand story. In so doing, we come to see that first and foremost, Narnia, like Middle Earth, is a world “you cannot anticipate . . . before you go there, . . . and cannot forget . . . once you have gone.” Narnia is not an allegory requiring a one for one parallel with personages and events in the Gospels, but a “supposal” as Lewis reckoned it. What if the Son of God were incarnate in a world like Narnia -what would happen? How would the tale unfold, and how would we receive him this time? This is indeed the perfect rationale for retelling the Gospels as fairy tales.
Adapted from Further Up & Further In, Broadman & Holman, 2005. Visit http://www.broadmanholman.com/cslewis to learn more about this book as well as other new books about C.S. Lewis and the world of Narnia.
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