Evangelising Theism

The topic is going to eventually be that CS Lewis's fiction evangelises for monotheism, and even for simple theism farm more than it evangelises for Christianity in specific.  But I will wander about the meadow telling you how I got here first.

********* 

Where have my Jews gone? They made up a good percentage of my friends at work and before that in school, plus a smattering in town activities and businesses I went to. But I'm not at work, I don't go to town functions, and the volunteer work I do doesn't seem to attract them. A lot of my going out is for church-related functions. I am just noticing it now because of Jews coming back into my life: a recent high school reunion, my new friend Rivka on one of my zoom calls, and a childhood friend I tracked down. You don't know what you've got till it's gone...*

One of the reasons it's important is it's a way of mentally checking your work. For the twenty years of my blog it is an automatic exercise to think What are the women in my generation going to think of that idea?  Will they have a counter? What would a bright, decent Millennial make of that phrasing? I wonder what my grandfather would have thought? Does that sound insulting to people who chose that profession? Until recently, that included "Would Frank or David or Esther challenge that?" especially on religious questions. I keep a lot of religious groups in mind when I write, anticipating both what their intellectual and their emotional reaction might be. It goes by pretty quickly at this point.  It's well-worn territory.

It came to mind because I quoted CS Lewis to one friend and realised I had no idea what her familiarity with him is.  Two things I saw: Even though my motto is "The solution to everything is to read more CS Lewis," I had never given or even recommended one of his books to a Jewish friend; however, I would quote him to them or put quotes in an online context where I knew many Jews would be reading, because in isolation, there was nothing that would offend.  It would be a general spiritual understanding as applicable to Jews as to Christians.

That was a fun puzzle. Noticing such things and asking "Well, why do I do that?" is something I find fascinating, not frightening. I have learned that most others find it intimidating. I mentally ran through the list of the scores of books by Lewis. I remembered also the series on Pints With Jack of Lewis fans who were outside our usual boundaries: an Eastern Orthodox priest relating his fondness for Lewis's writing; a Benedictine monk; an atheist who had a whole site devoted to atheists who loved Lewis; a Jew who who likewise had a site of other Jewish fans of Jack; a Mormon, a Bahai, a spiritualist - which is ironic since Lewis had such cutting things to say about them, having dabbled in the occult himself as a young man.

I remembered also that the serious Humanist and Effective Altruist Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten wrote admiringly and knowledgeably about GK Chesterton, and detailed his intense examination of Lewis's case for Christianity and said "He almost convinced me." Lewis's popularity outside of Western Christian circles has been hiding in plain sight. Tolkien, we knew. Even though LOTR is deeply Catholic, that is disguised, almost subterranean. But Lewis seemed more overt. 

What follows took only a few minutes.  It is not something I have been mulling for weeks or months, nor is what follows. Yet once the lock has been picked, the contents of the room are easy to see.

*******

Here we go then. People outside of Christian circles have likely heard of Lewis in either of two ways: his fiction or his literary work. For the latter, it is mostly late collegiate or even graduate students who are most familiar with "An Introduction to Paradise Lost," "An Experiment in Criticism," Vol 5 of the Oxford History of English Literature,**  The Discarded Image, "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem," and many others. His secular audience seldom sees that much of his advantage here is not only that he believes and understands the theology, but that he is Medieval and Renaissance in spirit himself, and thus a native of these lands, seeing no boundary between them. It is worth noting that he was one of, if not the authority on that period in his and his influence lasts even until now, while most of the others have vanished beneath the waves.

The general audience knows him more from his fiction, especially the Narnia Chronicles or their movies. The biggest specifically Christian hurdle is from The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe, the first and most famous of the series in which death and resurrection are central to the plot, and that alone may keep Jews or the generally unsympathetic from exploring further. In the rest of the series, the position of Aslan as the second person of the Trinity is more backgrounded. It is there in full color of orthodoxy, but it it is explanatory and descriptive, central to the full understanding but not the plot.  I learned this from the atheist guest on the podcast who noted that the stories are simply good stories in the Western Tradition, and he would skim the Jesus-ness to keep riding the story. (Which Lewis would consider a victory.) Last Battle owes a good deal to Daniel and other prophets, not just the Revelation to John.  It was the Israelites who were first informed that the whole of creation is coming to an end some day and reoriented their thinking around that. Everyone else on the planet remained in seasonal or circular time. The Jews made the cycles helical. Dawn Treader has acres of Christian symbolism in it, but even most Christians miss that. The Horse and His Boy owes much to Joseph in Egypt; The Magician's Nephew is a reworking of Adam and the Fall; The Silver Chair is the OT histories in mythic form. 

In the Ransom Trilogy it is the unfallen nature of Mars versus fallen Earth, the Silent Planet, followed by Perelandra's fall hanging in the balance. The last book is about the origins of good and evil power. It is deeply Christian, but not to the exclusion of Judaism. Similarly, Screwtape has some starkly Christian declarations, but contextualised to 20th C Anglican England.  It could be recast in Israel without much trouble.  The Great Divorce uses imagined Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory which are not central to Jewish theology, but the spiritual battles are all monotheistic: will you surrender to God or not? Till We Have Faces uses polytheistic, almost animist elements to tell its Christian lessons, and as in Tolkien, no Jesus appears.

I thought I would spend time on his philosophical works, in which his Christian belief is not directly present, except by intuition, but I think I will leave those alone. The Abolition of Man, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and even The Pilgrim's Regress make the case for monotheism and specifically Judaism long before Christianity is even mentioned. This reflects his own long conversion, from teenage atheism to indeterminate theism by 1929, to monotheism in 1930 and only at the end of 1931 “When we [Warnie and Jack] set out [by motorcycle to the Whipsnade Zoo] I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”  But however widely applicable they could be, they are mostly read only by Christians these days. One would think that Mere Christianity would be more overt, but here again he is very methodical, pointing out to the reader at the end of a chapter that we have only dismantled materialism thus far, and said nothing about any religion...then we have only established a somethingism here...then we have eliminated dualism and weakened polytheism...and well along in the text before we are left with a God of some definite Personality, not a life-force or a repeated cycle... It is Jewish long before it is Christian.

Most Western Jews are already used to living in a world where their POV is an influence but not a controlling one.  They seem to navigate around that and understand the culture anyway.  Lewis, for all his Christ-specific theology, can travel on the road with them much longer than Shakespeare, Voltaire, and nearly every 19th and 20th C intellectual.

I never saw it. 

Enjoy. Reading more CS Lewis is the solution to everything.

I will cross post this on Substack 

 

*  I went on medication for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in the 1980s, yet did not notice that one of the things that stopped was my automatic imagining of spoonerisms (which fortunately, I did not say aloud).  Only when I stopped the medication a few years later did I notice I was again reflexively thinking "keys and parrots" for "peas and carrots" or looking at the Market Basket sign and thinking Barket Masket. Every damn time.

** This took twenty years.  He referred to it by pronouncing its initials, OHEL.