I have to confess something. I’ve never been a big fan of C.S. Lewis. I’ve read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I’m familiar with some of his imaginative literature that I’ve not read, and I understand the role he has played in the lives of many Christians who have been inspired to a deeper faith by his writing. I never finished the Narnia series. The few times I’ve read some of his apologetic work I was unimpressed. A few weeks ago I finished a really good book by Benjamin Lipscomb, The Women are Up to Something. Lipscomb’s book tells a captivating story of the interwoven lives of four women philosophers who posed a challenge to the “Oxford School” of ethics in the mid-20th century: Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foote, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley. In his book Lipscomb recounts the public debate that Anscombe, herself a devout Catholic, had with C.S. Lewis that focused on Lewis’s Christian apologetics. Even though Anscombe shared many of Lewis’s Christian beliefs, she regarded his arguments as slapdash and intellectually lazy. By all accounts she won the debate handily. My understanding is that Lewis stopped debating after the public run-in with Anscombe.
Having confessed my feelings about Lewis, the last several days has made me want to reconsider my dismissal of his work. Over the last week our group has journeyed to several sites connected to Lewis. Last Friday our group journeyed to The Kilns, the home in Headington that Lewis lived in with his brother, Warnie, for much of their adult life. I was quite surprised by the modesty of the house, and I thoroughly enjoyed the stories shared by the tour guide, a doctoral student who is living at the house, which now functions as both a museum and a home for visiting scholars. There is clearly a reverence for the man in this place.
After visiting The Kilns, we took a short walk to the Holy Trinity Church in Headington, Lewis’s home church in Oxford and the graveyard where he and his brother are buried. I found out after the fact that Lewis was inspired to write The Screwtape Letters during an especially boring sermon at this church (or at least that is the story–how true that is, we may wonder).
On Friday I walked with our students to Magdalen College (pronounced “Maw-da-len”), where Lewis was a professor of English literature. It was a real treat for us to get to walk around the college. The highlight for me was definitely the deer park. The college maintains a park on site that has its own deer herd. The very idea of being able to read, write, conduct tutorials, and take leisurely rambles on Addison’s Walk to collect ones thoughts seems to me the sort of life that most academics would dream of. The C.S. Lewis sites were inspiring enough to awaken in me a sense that I’ve dismissed him too quickly. Maybe I need to give him more space in my own reading.
This evening (Monday, 10/17) Tara and I enjoyed a two-mile ramble to The Trout, a 17th century pub in Wolvercote that sits on the banks of the Thames. Stephen Shewmaker, ACU’s study abroad director, sent me a meal voucher that gave us one free meal with our dinner. The food was fabulous, and the walk up the Thames and back through Port Meadow as the sun was setting was dreamlike. It epitomized one of the things I was looking forward to in coming to Oxford without our kids–enjoying the company of my wife on a quiet evening as we walk among the horses, cows, and geese feasting in the meadow.
Don’t get me wrong. We still miss our kids. For now, our adopted kids will have to do…
Return home…
The end of this blog may or may not have made me tear up a little…
Vic, I bought the Narnia books as a middle-schooler, and never finished them. My church friends often spoke of Mere Christianity when I was a young adult, but I never took the time to read it. Then, while in my doctoral program, at an especially poignant time, a close friend of mine handed me a gift and said, “From talking to you these years, I think you would really get a lot out of this.” It was Lewis’s /God in the Dock/, a collection of nonfiction, theology-based essays that truly “reached” me. I found his arguments sound, his thinking disciplined, and his motivation consistent. From there, I began reading all the rest, and I’ve never looked back. I even finished all the Chronicles. 🙂