C. S. Lewis

The Argument

C.S. Lewis is the central figure of this site's intellectual tradition — the man who demonstrated more completely than anyone else in the twentieth century that Christian faith and serious literary culture are not merely compatible but mutually illuminating. He was a professional literary scholar, a fantasy novelist, a children's author, a radio broadcaster, and the most effective Christian apologist of his generation, and he inhabited all of these roles simultaneously without compartmentalizing any of them.

His argument for Christianity was not primarily philosophical, though he was a capable philosopher. It was primarily literary and imaginative — the argument from desire, the argument that the longings human beings carry within them point toward a satisfaction that nothing in the natural order can supply. He called this the experience of Joy, and he traced it through his own life from childhood through atheism to conversion with extraordinary precision in Surprised by Joy.

For literary apologetics, Lewis is indispensable because he modeled the practice as well as arguing for it. He read pagan mythology and medieval romance and modern fantasy not as distractions from theological truth but as tributaries leading to it. He understood that imagination is not a lower faculty than reason but a different one, and that some truths can only be carried by story. His own stories — the Space Trilogy, the Chronicles of Narnia, Till We Have Faces — are not illustrations of his theology. They are his theology, in the form that theology requires when argument alone is insufficient.