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C.S. Lewis and the hound of heaven

Greg Clarke

C.S.Lewis is most famous for his children’s fantasy series, the Chronicles of Narnia, but by the time he had written them, he had already spent forty years becoming one of the last century’s most prolific letter-writers.

  That the man Yeshua or Jesus did actually exist, is as certain as that the Buddha did actually exist: Tacitus mentions his execution in the Annals. But all the other tomfoolery about virgin birth, magic healing, apparitions and so forth is on exactly the same footing as any other mythology. (VI, p.234).  

No, it’s not a quote from Richard Dawkins’s latest assault on religion, but one from the popular Christian writer, C.S.Lewis. Lewis is most famous as author of the Narnia Chronicles, from which the newly released film, Prince Caspian, is drawn. But the recently completed three-volume collection of his correspondence, from 1905 to 1963 (the year of his death) will cause a reassessment of his contribution to 20th century letters.

The quotation above is by Lewis in a letter to his friend—in fact, his first and best childhood friend—Arthur Greeves, back in 1916, a long while before he even considered becoming a Christian himself. Greeves and Lewis connected over a shared love of Norse mythology, but the record of their correspondence is a precious guide to Lewis’s celebrated spiritual journey towards admitting that God is God and becoming ‘the most reluctant convert in all England’ as he described himself.
  Lewis received a stunning number of letters daily [and] read them and answered them seriously and courteously
  
 

Lewis received a stunning number of letters daily—perhaps akin to the number of emails we each receive now. Lewis, unlike most of us, read them and answered them seriously and courteously. Whether it was a reader’s complaint that a character in The Screwtape Letters could not have seen Bus 73 from where he was standing in London (VIII, p.1562) to comments on the comic reading habits of children (VIII, p.1178)—Lewis thought adults were hypocrites about this—he penned a genuine reply.

I can’t pretend to have read it all – there are thousands of letters amounting to 3900 pages here, but I’ve read parts of all three volumes and scoured volume one, reading it with a particular eye to his discussion of Christianity. Lewis’s early letters are filled with literary reflections, advice and queries about moral and behavioural questions, and deeply serious yet light-hearted discussions with such famous figures as science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, fellow novelists J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, and poet T.S. Eliot.

However, the most extensive discussion of Christianity takes place with his childhood friend, Arthur Greeves. Their friendship has long been studied, and it is an intense and delightful one. Greeves was not much like Lewis—he was a bit muddled-headed, a painter but not an intellectual—and yet Lewis admired him as much as anyone for his humility, his appreciation of a garden as much as a book, and his warm, accepting demeanour. He seems to have been the perfect foil for Lewis’s ferocious rationalism and hyper-active conscience.

Lewis can hurl his objections to religion at the patient Greeves without risking their friendship, as seen in one of the first letters between them to explore Christian ideas:

  [S]trange as it may appear I am quite content to live without beleiving (sic) in a bogey who is prepared to torture me forever and ever if I should fail in coming up to an almost impossible ideal…

As to the immortality of the soul, though it is a fascinating theme for day-dreaming, I neither beleive nor disbeleive (sic): I simply don’t know anything at all, there is no evidence either way. (VI, p.235).		  

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