A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby

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СКАЧАТЬ books. Though his ideas are profound, his words are as simple as can be. One American who visited Lewis summarized him well. “You find yourself using his ideas and forgetting that they are his. His mind seems a colossal picture-making machine, and each picture reduces a great and terrible theological abstraction to the clarity of a Gospel parable. He moves in on you, and possesses the stray ends of your imagination, not by the color and fire of his intellectual pyrotechnics, as his enemies assert, but rather by the simple reality of his service to your spirit.” Like the greatest writers, he knew how to take simple things and make them illustrate profound things.

      He was anything but a solemn, long-faced saint. In fact, he once said, “I’m not the religious type.” He once went to address a congregation wearing a lounge coat, slacks, and tennis shoes. He had little use for hymns and hated organ music. He usually attended the early service in his little parish church in order to have a minimum of music and sermon. He so ardently loved the outdoors that on one particularly beautiful day he stood outside and dictated to his secretary through the open window. He loved sitting with friends and swapping jokes. It was his “unsaintly” attitude, together with his unanswerable logic, that made him, as Chad Walsh says, the apostle to the skeptics. One of them said, “His books exposed the shallowness of our atheist prejudices; his vision illumined the Mystery which lay behind the appearances of daily life.”

      In a BBC address, Lewis said, “All I’m doing is to get people to face the facts—to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer.”

      C. E. M. Joad, professor of philosophy at the University of London, said of Lewis, “He had the rare gift of being able to make righteousness readable.” Like St. Augustine, Lewis was deeply convinced that no man will ever find rest until he rests in God, indeed that a man will never really be a man until he recognizes God’s rights to him. The only real face is the face turned in contrition and gratitude to God.

      Perhaps his greatest fear had to do with the ease and subtlety with which even a man’s best acts become tinged with selfishness. Though always perhaps a bit more decent than the average man, Lewis says that when he examined himself before God about the time of his conversion, he found within what appalled him, “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.” He saw the necessity for a Christian to commit himself anew every morning to God and really to live the life commanded. “Nothing you have not given away will ever be yours,” he said. Also, “Until you have given yourself up to Him you will never have any real self.” He believed that God calls Christians to perfection and that the whole of life is a preparation for even further training in the next until God fulfills quite literally his promise of perfection.

      What Lewis genuinely believed in and attempted to practice was a life of holiness. He saw true holiness not as a dull and negative sort of thing but as something irresistible, and he believed that if even 10 percent of Christians had holiness the world speedily would be converted. One close friend said that he saw in Lewis what he had never seen in any other man—“In Lewis the natural and the supernatural seemed to be one, to flow one into the other.” Lewis did not have many enemies, but some of those he had simply could not understand a man, and especially a man as lively as he, seriously intent on holiness.

      The wide range of interest in Lewis is suggested by two letters I happened to receive in the same mail. One was from a Boston wool merchant who said, “I am frank to admit no Christian writer has made the contribution to my own faith and my ability to defend the Christian position that Lewis has.” He said he had given away many of Lewis’s books to people in spiritual need.

      The other letter was from a teacher in New Jersey who was reading Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to her third-graders. She had come to the point where the lion Aslan allowed himself to be killed by his enemies to save a bad boy’s life. “The attitude of the room,” said this teacher, “was worship, holiness. The rare impression of that moment will never leave me. When I had finished the chapter about Aslan’s death the room was in stunned disbelief. Aslan dead! And then a child who had read further said, ‘Don’t give up—something wonderful is going to happen.’ It crept through the room and sighs issued. The little people had caught glimpses of the very real, the miracle of spiritual understanding.”

      During the last eight years of his life Lewis moved from Oxford to Cambridge, but he never gave up his beloved house four miles east of Oxford. During this period, when he was fifty-eight, he married Helen Joy Gresham and had a little more than three blissful years before his wife died of cancer. His own physical troubles steadily increased, and on July 15, 1963, about three months before his actual death, he went into a coma during which he had such a glimpse of the glory ahead that he was disappointed to awaken on earth. Afterward he wrote a friend that he thought Lazarus was really the first martyr because of being brought back and having his “dying to do again.” No one can read Lewis’s numerous accounts of the glories and joys of heaven without anticipating the abundant entrance this great and good man had into that realm. He was buried in the churchyard of his small parish church a half mile from his home.

      One of the world’s greatest scholars in his chosen field and great-minded in all his thoughts, he was nevertheless a man who rejoiced in the simple things of earth and who from the heart believed that God was alive and really meant what he had said to men.

      1C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956), 115.

      2Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 228.

      3C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (The Macmillan Company, 1953).

      4C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (The Macmillan Company, 1952), 169–70.

      5C. S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 89–90.

       Chapter 2

      MY FIRST (AND ONLY) VISIT WITH MR. LEWIS

      Kilby met C. S. Lewis only once, in the summer of 1953. Of the several accounts of that meeting, this one, published later that year in Kodon, the Wheaton College literary magazine, is the freshest.

      At noon on July first, I went by appointment to the office of C. S. Lewis in Magdalen College, Oxford. Thinking that Mrs. Kilby would enjoy the visit with me, I had inquired earlier at the college gate whether there was anything to the report that Mr. Lewis disliked women and had been told that there was “some truth in it.” Consequently, she went shopping and I climbed the stairs to his office alone. When I knocked, he immediately answered and invited me in, coming around his desk to greet me warmly at the door.

      He is about fifty-four years old and of average height. He has a pleasant, almost jolly face, full though not fat, with a double chin. He has a high forehead and thinning hair. Actually, he is a much better looking man than the published picture of him. He was dressed well, though in ordinary clothes. His office is large, with used but comfortable furniture.

      He invited me to sit down on a sofa, and he remained in his working chair. He was busy on the bibliography of his history of sixteenth-century literature, one volume of the Oxford Dictionary of English Literature. He spoke of the making of a bibliography as just plain labor and laughed about the СКАЧАТЬ