Journalist William Griffin' bountiful book tells the world nothing new about C.S. Lewis. Nor does it mean to. Rather, it retells a story already known. Nearly all the materials used in the book have been published before. But this is fitting, in a way, for Lewis himself, in all his bountiful writings, told the world nothing new either. Nor did he mean to. "Our Lord never tried to be original," he wrote. And neither did Lewis. Yet (like his Lord) what he said is never stale but always fresh, awake, aware, alive, alert, often alarming. He was our century's most powerful and popular defender of the most powerful and popular foundation stone of western civilization, Christianity.
Asked the secret of his originality, he once replied, only half tongue-in-cheek, "What I do is to recall, as well as I can, what my mother used to say on the subject, eke it out with a few similar thoughts of my own, and so produce what would have been strict orthodoxy in about 1900. And this seems to them outrageously avant-garde stuff." Like Thoreau, he prided himself on not reading newspapers. He called himself a "dinosaur" and mercilessly satirized "chronological snobbery" toward the past. He had few good things to say about any major twentieth-century writer. Yet, he is read with enormous affection and loyalty by a wide and diversified audience today, twenty-four years after his death - in fact, more of his books are sold today than those of any other Christian writer in history!
Griffin's book is subtitled "A Dramatic Life." This refers only to the narrative style - writing biography as if it were episodic fiction - but not to the content. For Lewis' life was quite devoid of what most people would call drama. His favorite occupations were reading, conversation, and walking. He had a small circle of close friends and a large circle of visitors and correspondents, but they did not include any of the rich and famous. He never left Britain except to fight briefly in the trenches in France in World War I and, much later, to vacation in Greece with his dying wife. He confessed, "I love monotony." To the mentality of the modern intellectual establishment, he was an intellectual backwater. Yet, I think that when the history of our century is told truly, as it will in Heaven, he will stand out as one of His Majesty's front-line warriors.
Five of his chief intellectual interests are indicated by the subtitle of his early work, The Pilgrim's Regress, and they are all "regressive," or unfashionable: "An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism." Yet, each of the five is a source of his strength.
1)Allegory was a favorite literary form for Lewis, both to write about, as he did in The Allegory of Love, and to write in, as he did in The Pilgrim's Regress. But it is probably the most scorned and unfashionable of forms today. Yet, the allegorical set of Lewis' mind goes a long way to account for its force. For him, things are signs not just things. Like Chesterton, he constantly thought in analogies and images. He does not have the dog-like mentality of our century. A dog will sniff your finger when you point to its food. Lewis habitually rose above dogged finger-sniffing into the realm of sign, of significance.
2)Most of Lewis' essays were in the genre of apologetics, giving reason to the faith. This is an enterprise that most liberal theologians ignore or despise as "triumphalistic,"
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