At Centenary, C.S. Lewis Provokes Catcalls, Acclaim

OXFORD, England —  Walter Hooper sits on a bench in the dark-wood recesses of the Eagle and Child pub like a man seated on a church pew. The lights are dim in this 17th century tavern where writers C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and fellow “Inklings” used to do their literary wrangling in the 1940s. Although it is nearly lunchtime, the room is hushed as a chapel.

Hooper is an American-born Lewis apostle who has labored for the last 35 years as biographer and editor of the author’s posthumously published works. “Lewis was good at explaining things you thought were obvious,” he whispers. “He was able to convince you of the truth.”

Not all Lewis admirers see the truth as he did, but his books have become enormously popular among Christian evangelicals and secular parents alike, and the 100th anniversary of his birth this Sunday is being celebrated with a host of activities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company is putting on an adaptation of Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” and the Royal Mail has printed a stamp commemorating the classic, a children’s allegory of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. On the commercial front, London’s biggest toy store, Hamleys, is throwing a 100th birthday party in honor of Lewis, while New York publishing house Harper-Collins has brought out an oversized centenary edition of the “Chronicles of Narnia,” which includes “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and six other books on the mythical land of Narnia.

Even Oxford University, which has always held its former don of English literature at arm’s distance, found itself host to an international conference in his name this summer. The Oxford University C.S. Lewis Society is holding a series of lectures on the author, although his nonacademic books are deemed too “modern” to receive much attention from the English lit department--a judgment that Lewis the scholar of medieval literature would have shared.

What the atheist turned Christian author might have considered the greatest honor to his legacy came from an even more unlikely quarter--the Domino’s Pizza chain. Billionaire founder Tom Monaghan announced after reading Lewis’ treatise on pride in “Mere Christianity” that he would sell the fast-food empire, donate proceeds to charitable causes and dedicate himself to good deeds.

Contentious Debate Spills Out of Academia

But along with the public accolades, some of the contentious debate surrounding Lewis, his literature and popular theology has spilled out of academic circles and into the mainstream press. Writing in the London daily newspaper the Guardian, children’s author Philip Pullman bemoaned all of the centenary hoopla and said: “The interesting question is why. What is there in this tweedy medievalist that attracts such devoted (and growing) attention?”

Acknowledging that Lewis had a way with words, Pullman went on to accuse him of misogyny, racism and excessive violence in the Narnia books, which he called “one of the most ugly and poisonous things I’ve ever read.”

Moreover, he charged that Lewis--subject of the 1993 Richard Attenborough film “Shadowlands” and of several warring biographies--is becoming as big a myth as the mythological characters in the stories he wrote.

“I haven’t the slightest doubt that the man will be sainted in due course: The legend is too potent,” Pullman wrote.

Lewis devotees would deny that they have elevated the author to such heights, but they do seem to have spawned a Lewis cult, particularly among his U.S. followers.

The American magazine Christianity Today hailed Lewis in its September issue as “the Aquinas, the Augustine and the Aesop of contemporary evangelicalism.” His writing table, chair and childhood wardrobe are on display at Wheaton College in Illinois. And in Southern California, at St. Luke’s Church in Monrovia, Lewis’ image is etched into an 8-foot-high stained-glass window.

Hundreds of C.S. Lewis foundations, societies and Internet Web sites have sprung up in the United States. American pilgrims make up the majority of visitors to Lewis’ Oxford residence of more than 30 years, the Kilns, which has been bought and restored by Americans.

On a windy fall afternoon, Nancy Bevilacqua of Gettysburg, Pa., arrived at the red-brick house in the suburbs of Oxford with her husband. A counselor and Roman Catholic student of theology, Bevilacqua said the couple had spent a wedding anniversary visiting Wheaton and the wardrobe thought to have inspired the entrance to Narnia. They wanted to see the Kilns on Lewis’ centenary.

“It’s kind of like a shrine. . . . Why do people go to Lourdes?” Bevilacqua asked cheerfully, referring to the French town whose shrine to the Virgin Mary draws thousands of pilgrims a day.

Such comments would have brought a shudder to the man known as “Jack” among friends, according to Lewis’ stepson, Douglas Gresham, a Christian lay minister in Ireland.

“I don’t think Jack would want to be remembered as anyone who did [anything] other than call remembrance to Jesus Christ. The whole point is to worship Christ, not C.S. Lewis,” Gresham said.

But even Hooper, the editor and literary advisor to Lewis’ estate, compares the author to Pope John Paul II--or rather, compares the pope to Lewis.

During a public meeting at the Vatican in 1984, Hooper and the pontiff briefly discussed Lewis. “When Lewis died, I felt I would never see his likes again,” Hooper said. “But I told the pope, ‘I feel like he’s continued in you. You’re more like him than anyone.’ ”

Born and raised in the Northern Ireland city of Belfast--which just unveiled a centenary sculpture of a man entering the wardrobe to Narnia--Lewis and his brother, Warren, made up stories together.

Lewis’ mother died when he was 9, and he was shipped off to boarding school in England, eventually making his way to Oxford, where he shone as a student, became a teacher and eventually adopted a deceased friend’s mother, Janie Moore, as a surrogate parent.

He wrestled with questions of morality and religion, but was a nonbeliever until one September night in 1931 when, during hours of deep conversation along a beech-lined walk of Oxford’s Magdalen College, Lewis’ friends Tolkien and Henry Dyson convinced him otherwise. Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, made him understand that “the story of Christ is simply a true myth,” Lewis wrote.

His conversion and religious radio broadcasts on the BBC during World War II were something of an embarrassment to the Oxford establishment, which never gave him a full professorship. Cambridge University did.

After Moore’s death, Lewis married the love of his life, Joy Gresham, who died soon afterward. Lewis wrote dozens of works of literary criticism, theology, poetry and fiction before he died in 1963--a diverse body of work that cannot be neatly categorized.

“He wouldn’t be taken seriously by the theology or philosophy faculties of Oxford because he wasn’t a theologian or a philosopher,” said Michael Ward, a student of Lewis’ work who lives at the Kilns. “In a sense, he is let down by his very versatility. It is difficult for one interest group to take hold of him.”

Lewis’ life has been chronicled in great detail by biographers who heatedly disagree on issues that would seem arcane to outsiders but are important to Lewis’ religious followers: Was his relationship with Moore incestuous? Did he have sexual relations with Gresham before they wed?

In the introduction to the British edition of his biography “Jack,” author George Sayer highlights the controversy over Lewis’ relationship with Gresham:

“What is really serious is that the Lewis of A.N. Wilson’s best-selling biography is unjustly accused of actions that are utterly destructive of his good faith and credibility as an honest man and a trustworthy Christian teacher.”

Some Readers Just Want to Enjoy ‘Narnia’

Religious devotees of Lewis embrace Sayer’s book, while secular students and admirers turn to Wilson for a more critical look. Still other Lewis readers couldn’t care less about the man or his theology, and simply want to enjoy the Narnia books.

“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” is the emotional and romantic story of four children who walk through a wardrobe stuffed with fur coats into the snow-covered forest of Narnia, a wonderful world of talking animals, centaurs and Father Christmas. Here, good and evil do battle in the form of Aslan the lion and the White Witch. Aslan is killed by the witch but rises again to save Narnia.

While critics such as Pullman see racial slurs and attacks on women, children react to the magic.

In Oxford, Hooper receives about 1,000 letters a year, many of them from children. One that arrived recently from a young boy in New Hampshire said: “Dear Mr. Lewis, I’m sorry you died. I just want you to know how much I loved Aslan.”