A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby

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СКАЧАТЬ remarked that Lewis’s strength lies in the fact that “all his arguments are pictures, and all his pictures are arguments.”

      If you continue to love Jesus, nothing much can go wrong with you, and I hope you may always do so.” That remark may sound like a fond old grandmother’s, but it was written to a little girl by one of the most brilliant men of our time. The man was Clive Staples Lewis, distinguished professor at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and author of more than forty books. It was written less than a month before his death on November 22, 1963, the same afternoon President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

      C. S. Lewis did not easily come to so simple and straightforward a faith. Born in Ireland, he learned simple goodness from his first nursemaid; but afterward, through the influence of a well-meaning but wrongheaded school matron, he turned atheist. His father was a successful but eccentric Irish solicitor, and his mother was a cheerful and wise woman who early started her son off in the study of French and Latin. But neither parent was noteworthy for the sort of deep faith that eventually was to characterize their son.

      Nor had the parents two other deep strains that came to mark their son’s outlook. The first was a romantic strain of longing for an indefinable but intense thing called joy. The second was just the opposite—a mind trained razor-sharp in logic. In the course of time the British Guardian said that following the train of an argument by Lewis was “like watching a master chess player who makes a seemingly trivial and unimportant move which ten minutes later turns out to be a stroke of genius.” The New York Times spoke of one of his books as possessing “a brevity comparable to St. Paul’s” and an argument “distilled to the unanswerable.”

      The romantic strain in Lewis was associated with the green Castlereagh Hills, which Lewis and his brother Warren could see from their nursery window, and with a toy garden of moss, twigs, and arid flowers made by Warren on the lid of a can. Later this tendency came to include a profound love of Norse legend, the “Ring” cycle of Richard Wagner’s operas, and the entire world of Norse mythology. The logician strain is best seen in Lewis the lecturer and biblical apologist. For instance, at the beginning of his book The Problem of Pain he makes out a better, or at least a more succinct, case for atheism than Bertrand Russell ever did, and then he proceeds to demolish that case. But it should be said that nearly always the romantic and the logical are combined both in his books and in his whole way of thought.

      The big house to which his family moved when he was seven years old helped to shape Lewis’s love of solitude. It was a place of “long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.” There on long rainy afternoons he and his brother read among the hundreds of books with which every room downstairs was filled. Clive began early to write stories of animals, including chivalrous mice, and finally set out to do a full, fanciful history of Animal-land complete with maps and drawings.

      This happy childhood experience was cruelly broken by the death of his mother when he was ten years old. Her illness marked the first real religious experience he had. He prayed that she would be healed. But at this time he thought of God as a magician who would heal his mother’s cancer and then go away.

      Afterward he was taught a more substantial notion of God in the English boarding school to which, dressed in uncomfortable shoes, bowler hat, and tight, unyielding shoes, he was sent by his father. At first he fervently hated both England and the bad food, cold beds, and horrid sanitation of the school. He described his teacher, called Oldie by the boys, as likely to come in after breakfast and, looking over the little group, say, “Oh, there you are, Rees, you horrid boy. If I’m not too tired I shall give you a good drubbing this afternoon.” Yet here he did find people talking about Christianity as though they believed it, and the little boy struggled, yet unsuccessfully, to gain a realization of God. The best thing about his school life was the anticipation of the holidays—the trip home to Ireland and the long days full of play, good reading, cycling, and solitude.

      Later in other English schools he learned a love of that country’s beautiful landscape and the raw and brutal tyranny of older boys over younger ones, of rampant homosexuality, of a brash and silly sophistication in ideas, clothes, and women. In short, he learned a system of education calculated, as he put it, to make genuinely uneducated prigs and highbrows. For the rest of his life he never missed an opportunity to satirize this sort of school system as one calculated to fill the country with “a bitter, truculent, skeptical, debunking and cynical intelligentsia” rather than to make good citizens.

In these days Lewis, as college students often do, was living in many different worlds. His private world was still that of “Northerness” and joy. At the same time he was now an atheist and was trying to incorporate his ideas around that pole of conviction. “I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.”¹

      Increasingly sick of college life, Lewis persuaded his father to let him prepare for the university under the tutelage of W. T. Kirkpatrick in Surrey. Almost from the minute he first met this man Lewis’s intellectual life underwent a sharp change. The tall, shabbily dressed man with Franz Joseph whiskers met the boy at the railway station, took his hand in an iron grip, and as they walked away promptly pounced upon Lewis for a passing remark about the unexpected “wildness” of the Surrey landscape. “Stop!” he shouted at the fifteen-year-old boy. “What do you mean by wildness and what ground had you for not expecting it?” After further questions, he asked, “Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?”

      This was the beginning of a training in logical thought the like of which had not often occurred before. The “Old Knock,” as he was called, was the very personification of reason and trained his increasingly adept student in the practice of a relentlessly logical handling of ideas. Finally the time came when the pupil could stand up to the master. Lewis found that Kirkpatrick was an atheist and was glad to have his own atheism bolstered by that of his tutor, but the time came when the Old Knock’s ubiquitous logic actually put Lewis on the road to God.

      Lewis tells how on the first school day the Old Knock sat down with his pupil and without a word of introduction read aloud in Greek the first twenty lines or so of Homer’s Iliad and translated with very few explanations about a hundred lines. He told his understudy to dig in, and it was not long until Lewis was beginning to think in Greek. And so it was with Latin and other languages. Years later Lewis looked back at this time as one of the happiest periods of his life.

      His childhood love of nature was continued in the intimate landscape of Surrey with its dingles, copses, and little valleys and with quiet saunters under great trees. He had a happiness that seemed of another world.

      By the age of sixteen he had already begun to feel a deep-seated antipathy to the shallow “getting and spending” that occupied people’s lives, to ideas of collectivism, of modern education, of inflated desires caused by false advertising, of slanted news, of built-in obsolescence in manufacturing, and of the whole scheme of “getting ahead” in the world. Even more he began to be alarmed about modern movements such as logical positivism, Freudianism, relativism, scientism, sexual frankness that resulted only in more and worse sexual deviation, “modernism,” in religion and the contradictory idea of inevitable improvement from natural causes, and the increasing feeling of hopelessness in society. He felt that even democracy itself was taking the impossible road of trying to make men equal rather than providing a way for men clearly unequal to live together in peace.

      Lewis had hardly passed his examinations for admission to Oxford when he was called into the war then raging. He enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Somerset light infantry, and on his nineteenth birthday he found himself in the frontline trenches of France. Five months later, in April 1918, he was wounded in battle and sent back to London for recuperation. But even СКАЧАТЬ