Lewis Speaks of This

I Can't Stand It Anymore, and I'm Very Sorry

Some of you guys are doing your best to ruin Clive Staples Lewis for future generations and it stops today.

Don’t give me that look of dramatically shocked piety, either. You know exactly what I mean.

It started out with the quotes. We all have our favorites, and there’s no real harm in that. The man’s life of thought produced a densely forested landscape of works begging to be commonplaced into oblivion. But you’re not quoting Lewis in detail. In fact, more and more of you aren’t quoting Lewis at all, but rather Pseudolewis of the Internet Age. And even when you stumble on the authentic article, it’s all so tiresome. One of the same rotating mini-canon of blandly inoffensive platitudes perfectly calculated to elicit sighs of chaste spiritual rapture from choruses of Your Moms and Your Aunts everywhere. That’s right, Patricia, you truly were meant for another world; That’s probably why your husband can’t stand you in this one.

But what do I know. I’m just a (not so) young man armed with the seething conviction that only I have fully grasped What Lewis Speaks Of.

And I am absolutely fed up watching the closest thing this Low Church Calvary Chapel Kid will ever have to a patron saint turned into a cartoon character by the collective will of legions of theater children, Bookish Types, and antiquarian softboys. I’ve begun to suspect that there is an actual spiritual campaign afoot to defang one of the greatest minds of the 20th or any century. I can only conclude that some of you people so fear the immense and cosmic truths embedded in the man’s work that you would prefer to reduce him to a bastardized Precious Moments Professor than confront him as he lived. Maybe that’s why there’s a distinct lack of Lewisiana floating around this genteel place dealing with his many less-reputable interests, like pagan literature, nicotine, Guinness, port wine, older women…and that list doesn’t even deal with his pre-conversion tastes. What’s wrong, Patricia? Not gonna restack a piquant quote from the Oxford Don on the manifold pleasures of *checks notes* peeing in a tavern after a long walk?

Ok, I need to calm down. That stuff is just aesthetics, after all. And despite how I sound right now, I’m not (only) on a mission to remind us all that C.S. Lewis wasn’t a modern-day Baptist Sunday School teacher. The deeper problem seems to be this:

C.S. Lewis was a weird man who loved Jesus passionately, and I think we’re all starting to lose the plot.

I’m afraid that Lewis the Icon is separating so far from Lewis the Man that we are in danger of creating a cargo cult where the least important elements of his life are turned into a costume for us to wear, totally neglecting the central engine that drove everything he did. When are we going to see past the Oxfordian cozy-maxxing and the romanticized Academia and recognize that Lewis himself threw most of that away to publicly embarrass himself in the name of Jesus, over and over again?

I guess it’s up to me, then. I alone can save the most well-read man of the 20th century, a unique achiever across multiple disciplines, the standard bearer of modern Christendom for better or worse, from this fate. And, for your sins, you’re going to have to watch me. You may not like it, but you’re going to at the very least confront the man as he was, to his students, friends, lovers and family. Or as much as my amateur biographic abilities will allow, anyway.

Am I qualified? Don’t make me laugh. Of course not! I mean sure, I’ve spent my life reading obsessively anything the man wrote. And I’m on a longterm campaign to assemble and tackle the Lewis Canon, a self-curated collection of all the works he discussed reading. However, I could never possibly finish this gargantuan task and have truly barely started. I have zero formalized study that applies to this subject. I’ve got more to learn than most of the real scholars on Lewis have forgotten. In fact, most of the material on this Substack will basically be me learning in public.

Will any of this stop me from opining on the man and his myths? Well, it isn’t stopping some of you.

To momentarily break this ironic schtick - Lewis’ life, his work, and his thought have been too important, to me and the rest of the Church, to watch him go out like this. I owe him too much. I’m not going to let you do this to the man who preserved my faith in my teenage years, who convinced generations that Christianity was “at least something important,”¹ who stood athwart the tides of modernism and prophesied a future beyond the philosophical acid bath of post-modernism. Whether they realize it or no, the theologians and philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st century are all in conversation with Lewis. If he had his due, we would discuss him in the same sentence as The Greats, by any definition, in literature and scholarship.

And you lot are busy doing your best to label him as a children’s author. If I didn’t know better, I would smell conspiracy.

It ends today. I’m going to get to the bottom of it, I’m going to read more of and about Lewis than any of you, and you’re all coming with me. I’m going to counter the barrage of Faux-Lewis Kitsch with an answering barrage of Jack As He Was. His letters, his books (all of them), the memories of his colleagues and enemies, his life and times...I’m going to mine it all. You won’t be able to scroll without the genuine article springing to life if I’ve done my job.

CSL’s home, complete with the great man’s brother, is [now a] show piece for any American who happens to visit Oxford…. And what is the worst is it that this situation is going to continue for the rest of my life…. I suppose that on my death bed—or at any rate the day before I die—I shall have some verbose American standing over me and lecturing on some little observed significance of J’s work.

~ Warren Lewis, diary entry August 1, 1967, four years after his brother’s death.

(In the original, followed by a string of expletives here deleted to preserve your aunt’s sensitivities).

Rest easy, Major Lewis. Another Verbose American is on watch.

I actually believe it’s my calling to impress on you the depth of your error before we, as a generation of Christian culture, lose touch with this great man forever. I hope you’re ready. We’re going to do it up right, with a podcast where I yell at people while they complete remedial Lewis reading, and essays where I wax pedantic about deep lore. I’m going to dig up the oddest bits of ephemera from his deepest archives and remind us all just how blessed we were that such a man lived and loved God with all his strange, wonderful, broken heart and mind. And whatever else I can come up with in my ongoing quest to make Lewis alive again in the minds and hearts of the Church. We’re going to punch straight through the trite and overplayed Lewis is So Over to a glorious and weird Lewis is So Back. And quotes. I’m going to be posting a lot of quotes.

Because, whatever you’re talking about, Lewis Speaks of This.

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1. It’s from a Time Magazine review of Mere Christianity or something, I don’t know do your own homework.