C.S. Lewis rose to public prominence during the Second World War as a Christian apologist. He attained transatlantic fame in the same capacity in the immediate postwar years with the publication of his BBC radio lectures as Mere Christianity. In some sense, though, this legacy is rather ironic. Certainly it was a reluctant role on Lewis’s part.

He most valued the power of story to move the soul

As Alister McGrath wrote in his recent biography, Lewis engaged publically in Christian apologetics “largely because of the silence or unintelligibility of those he believed were better placed” to do so.

Lewis himself had not come to faith through apologies for Christianity’s reasonableness. In both his professional life and private spirituality he most valued the power of story to move the soul. In fact, it is that quality which imbued his works of apologetics with their enduring appeal. McGrath writes of his rise to international fame that “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 … Lewis enabled 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”.

This literary, imaginative and moral quality is seen in one of the more original and compelling claims made in Mere Christianity: the “argument from desire”. Lewis points to a consistent pattern in nature, asserting that “creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. 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. Men 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”. The implication here, in McGrath’s words, is that “God is the ultimate end of the human soul, the only source of human happiness and joy”. 

The witch begins to dim the imaginations of her victims

This argument transposes into a moral and logical form the fundamental conviction and idea that drove Lewis toward faith — an idea that was, for him, distinctly literary. In his succinct but powerful essay “Myth became fact”, Lewis obliquely summarises the discussions with J.R.R. Tolkien that had earlier persuaded him in his conversion to Christ. Lewis somewhat provocatively claims that “to be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and myth [of the gospel] with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths; one is hardly more necessary than the other. A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed upon it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it”.

This, then, is for Lewis the deepest natural desire of the human soul: the great yearning of individuals and civilizations for an epic hero to deliver from evil and rescue from the grave. This notion of the spiritually nourishing myth and his argument from natural desire — the idea that an ordered world points the soul painstakingly up toward a true happiness as yet seen dimly if at all — silently invokes Plato’s allegory of the cave. 

A few years ago, during a time of informal fellowship with several men in my church, a friend asked us all: “why are you still Christians?” The question really was what had kept us from losing faith whilst many childhood peers had done so. In response, I instinctively reached to the bookshelf behind me for the passage of The Silver Chair in which Lewis so-powerfully fictionalised Socrates’s famous parable.

Here the Marshwiggle Puddleglum and human children Jill Pole and Eustace Scrubb reach the denouement of their quest to find Narnia’s lost prince, Rilian. Once they release the prince from his long-enchanted bondage within a sorceress’s subterranean palace, the witch discovers them and attempts to re-cast the spell that has bound Rilian. With intoxicating incense and stupefying music, she begins to dim the imaginations of her victims. She tells them that her dark cave is the real world, the only one they have ever known and could possibly desire. This spell is all-but complete and the victory lost when the obstinate, noble Marshwiggle snuffs out her enchanting flame and defies her words with a monologue that is, in effect, Lewis’s personal confession of faith: 

“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things — trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

So, a toast to C.S. Lewis — a man whose life and works have helped meet the deepest, truest need of many human souls: true knowledge and worship of the living God.