{"id":485,"date":"2015-03-08T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-08T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mrmushava.wordpress.com\/2015\/03\/08\/think-like-a-saint-write-like-a-genius\/"},"modified":"2026-10-26T08:41:44","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T08:41:44","slug":"think-like-a-saint-write-like-a-genius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=485","title":{"rendered":"Think Like a Saint, Write Like a Genius"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Add caption<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
Book: C. S. Lewis – A Life<\/span><\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
Author: Alister McGrath<\/span><\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers (2013)<\/span><\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
ISBN: 978-1-4143-3935-1<\/span><\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
It was an age of disbelief.\u00a0 Religion was in the bull\u2019s eye of secularist missiles.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
A war of record proportions was dismantling the old order. Values which had held good for centuries were not spared.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
God was on trial. The intellectual jury was invoking its clauses to renounce the claims of faith on the 20th century.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
At that time, an unlikely advocate rose above the sound of charging armies of the Second World War and the dissenting arguments of the Modernist Movement to \u201cjustify the works of God to men.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
He was Clive Staple Lewis.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
C.S Lewis crossed the floor from atheism to become the foremost Christian intellectual of his time.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Lewis had been steeped in atheism. His first published work, “Spirits in Bondage,\u201d was a smack of this influence.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
So was a self-absorbed lifestyle which would stamp remorse on much of his post-conversion life.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
In later years, his work would assume a Christian tenor. One by turns overt and subliminal.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cMere Christianity,\u201d a compendium of his wartime BBC broadcast talks, is to this day one of the most eloquent toolkits of apologetics.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Aside the popular circulation of his punchlines, Lewis remains extensively profiled, well past his generation.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Alister McGrath\u2019s \u201cC. S. Lewis \u2013 A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet\u201d is the latest notable full-length reconstruction of the prolific writer and Oxford don.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
The biography was published in 2013, on the golden jubilee of Lewis\u2019s death.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
But considering the sheer volume of what has already been published on Lewis, the question \u201cWhy another biography?\u201d is fair enough.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
McGrath anticipates the question.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cThis biography of Lewis is not another rehearsal of the vast army of facts and figures concerning his life, but an attempt to understand its deeper themes and concerns and assess its significance,\u201d says McGrath.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cThis is not a work of synopsis but of analysis,\u201d McGrath explains.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
McGrath is meticulous with detail. But as the variegated pixels merge, the essential Lewis becomes more pronounced.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
For McGrath, Lewis is something of an eccentric. One detached from academic trends of his time and \u201cdisplaced from the centre of things.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Lewis was regarded as an outsider by his Oxford peers for his \u201copenly Christian views and his unscholarly habit of writing popular works of fiction and apologetics.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Clearly out of touch with convention, Lewis famously labelled himself a \u201cdinosaur\u201d in his inaugural Cambridge lecture.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
But a lot elicits regret from Lewis\u2019s early years.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
The young Lewis is exactly the character to who whom we can be unreservedly attached.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
McGrath details Lewis\u2019s contempt for his father, bar whose indiscretions, is, by contrast concerned and endearing.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
An intimate relationship with a much older Mrs Moore and self-confessed atheism, apparently burnt his bridge to the older Lewis.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
His absence from his father\u2019s sickbed, describing him as someone for whom he had no affection, smacked of betrayal to the neighbourhood and visited life-long remorse on him after the latter\u2019s death.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Lewis attempt to process this episode by dealing with it in \u201cSurprised by Joy.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
If little from this period endears Lewis to the reader, then his intellectual determination does.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
His undergraduate studies had been interrupted when he volunteered to fight in the trenches during the Great War.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
He resumed to distinction, even winning a prestigious essay competition before graduation.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cLord of the Rings\u201d author J.R.R Tolkien, who was a friend and fellow Oxford lecturer, argued Lewis home to the Christian faith.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Earlier, though, the study of literature had been functioning as an agency of belief for Lewis.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
McGrath makes reference to the Christian Rennaisance of 20th century literature which conscripted such forceful writers as G.K Chesterton, Graham Greene, T.S Eliot and Evelyn Waugh.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Waugh\u2019s conversion immediately made it to the front pages of leading newspapers, chiefly on the news value of its being unusual or rather unexpected.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
The Christian Renaissance had a distinguished line of predecessors including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Johnson, George Herbert and John Donne and no mean league of philosophical exponents.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
But the 20th century was not an age of faith hence the bafflement.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
One editorial questioned how Waugh, the celebrity young author of \u201cVile Bodies,\u201d known to be a passionate adherent to the ultra-modern could have embraced Christianity, then and now the b\u00eate noire of modernism.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Lewis\u2019s own conversion did not elicit the glare of cameras. By then he was only an obscure poet, under the nom de plume Clive Hamilton, so far as the creative industry was concerned.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
The Christian outlook was to be the basis of his later critical reception and commercial success.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
McGrath observes that Lewis fits into the broader pattern of the conversion of \u201cliterary scholars and writers through and because of their literary interests.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
The study of literature drew Lewis to the rational and imaginative power of Christianity and what began as an intellectual and aesthetic pursuit led to his affirmation of the divinity and lordship of Jesus Christ.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cA young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere,\u201d observed Lewis.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Lewis\u2019s examination of the classics showed writing grounded in the Christian tradition to more resilient and persuasive in its \u201ctreaty with reality.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
For Greene modernists such as E.M Forster and Virginia Woolf\u2019s characters carried no sense of reality and \u201cwandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Detached from religious sense, their work carried no passionate commitment to the real world since it lacked the requisite foundation of the deeper order of things as grounded in the nature and design of an intelligent first cause.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Waugh too felt that an author could only ignore God at the expense of the reality and depth of his work. \u201cYou can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
The capacity of the Christian faith to make sense of the world in general and human nature in particular provided a lens by which a distorted world could be brought into sharper focus, hence a comprehensive understanding.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cSimilar concerns seem to have played a role in catalysing Lewis\u2019s growing interest in the Christian faith,\u201d notes McGrath.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Lewis, whose literary guide is still the best-selling of Cambridge Guides, had such misgivings about the modernists, playwright G.B Shaw and his science fiction counterpart H.G Wells.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
For Lewis they \u201cseemed a little thin\u201d had \u201cno depth in them\u201d and were \u201ctoo simple,\u201d being inadequate in their representation of the \u201croughness and density of life.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
His reading of the spiritual poets Herbert and the much earlier Traherne (1636\u20131674) did not persuade him to believe in God but led him to the observation that such a belief offered a rich and robust vision of human life, hence challenging him to a further pursuit.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Modernism, with its secularist tendencies, might be said to the cultural variant of naturalism.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Both movements were taking a heavy toll on faith during Lewis\u2019s time, as they are now, albeit in overestimated proportion.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
When BBC wanted a Christian voice to balance the proponents of incredulity on air, Lewis, who had by then written \u201cThe Problem of Pain,\u201d his first successful work, became a fitting candidate for his intellectual flair, ability to pitch his work into the language of the audience, as he said, and non-denominational outlook.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cIf there was a controlling power outside the universe it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe no more than an architect \u2013 no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or a staircase or a fireplace in that house,\u201d Lewis was to be heard arguing on BBC.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cThe only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way,\u201d said Lewis in the broadcasts later compiled into \u201cMere Christianity.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
That power was active in Lewis. McGrath\u2019s tome is fitting homage to the man who though like a saint and wrote like a genius.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Add caption Book: C. S. Lewis – A Life Author: Alister McGrath Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers (2013) ISBN: 978-1-4143-3935-1 It was an age of disbelief.\u00a0 Religion was in the bull\u2019s eye of secularist missiles. A war of record proportions was dismantling the old order. Values which had held good for centuries were not spared. God was on trial. The intellectual jury was invoking its clauses to renounce the claims of faith on the 20th century. At that time, an unlikely advocate rose above the sound of charging armies of the Second World War and the dissenting arguments of the Modernist Movement to \u201cjustify the works of God to men.\u201d He was Clive Staple Lewis. C.S Lewis crossed the floor from atheism to become the foremost Christian intellectual of his time. Lewis had been steeped in atheism. His first published work, “Spirits in Bondage,\u201d was a smack of this influence. So was a self-absorbed lifestyle which would stamp remorse on much of his post-conversion life. In later years, his work would assume a Christian tenor. One by turns overt and subliminal. \u201cMere Christianity,\u201d a compendium of his wartime BBC broadcast talks, is to this day one of the most eloquent toolkits of apologetics. Aside the popular circulation of his punchlines, Lewis remains extensively profiled, well past his generation. Alister McGrath\u2019s \u201cC. S. Lewis \u2013 A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet\u201d is the latest notable full-length reconstruction of the prolific writer and Oxford don. The biography was published in 2013, on the golden jubilee of Lewis\u2019s death. But considering the sheer volume of what has already been published on Lewis, the question \u201cWhy another biography?\u201d is fair enough. McGrath anticipates the question. \u201cThis biography of Lewis is not another rehearsal of the vast army of facts and figures concerning his life, but an attempt to understand its deeper themes and concerns and assess its significance,\u201d says McGrath. \u201cThis is not a work of synopsis but of analysis,\u201d McGrath explains. McGrath is meticulous with detail. But as the variegated pixels merge, the essential Lewis becomes more pronounced. For McGrath, Lewis is something of an eccentric. One detached from academic trends of his time and \u201cdisplaced from the centre of things.\u201d Lewis was regarded as an outsider by his Oxford peers for his \u201copenly Christian views and his unscholarly habit of writing popular works of fiction and apologetics.\u201d Clearly out of touch with convention, Lewis famously labelled himself a \u201cdinosaur\u201d in his inaugural Cambridge lecture. But a lot elicits regret from Lewis\u2019s early years. The young Lewis is exactly the character to who whom we can be unreservedly attached. McGrath details Lewis\u2019s contempt for his father, bar whose indiscretions, is, by contrast concerned and endearing. An intimate relationship with a much older Mrs Moore and self-confessed atheism, apparently burnt his bridge to the older Lewis. His absence from his father\u2019s sickbed, describing him as someone for whom he had no affection, smacked of betrayal to the neighbourhood and visited life-long remorse on him after the latter\u2019s death. Lewis attempt to process this episode by dealing with it in \u201cSurprised by Joy.\u201d If little from this period endears Lewis to the reader, then his intellectual determination does. His undergraduate studies had been interrupted when he volunteered to fight in the trenches during the Great War. He resumed to distinction, even winning a prestigious essay competition before graduation. \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d author J.R.R Tolkien, who was a friend and fellow Oxford lecturer, argued Lewis home to the Christian faith. Earlier, though, the study of literature had been functioning as an agency of belief for Lewis. McGrath makes reference to the Christian Rennaisance of 20th century literature which conscripted such forceful writers as G.K Chesterton, Graham Greene, T.S Eliot and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh\u2019s conversion immediately made it to the front pages of leading newspapers, chiefly on the news value of its being unusual or rather unexpected. The Christian Renaissance had a distinguished line of predecessors including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Johnson, George Herbert and John Donne and no mean league of philosophical exponents. But the 20th century was not an age of faith hence the bafflement. One editorial questioned how Waugh, the celebrity young author of \u201cVile Bodies,\u201d known to be a passionate adherent to the ultra-modern could have embraced Christianity, then and now the b\u00eate noire of modernism. Lewis\u2019s own conversion did not elicit the glare of cameras. By then he was only an obscure poet, under the nom de plume Clive Hamilton, so far as the creative industry was concerned. The Christian outlook was to be the basis of his later critical reception and commercial success. McGrath observes that Lewis fits into the broader pattern of the conversion of \u201cliterary scholars and writers through and because of their literary interests.\u201d The study of literature drew Lewis to the rational and imaginative power of Christianity and what began as an intellectual and aesthetic pursuit led to his affirmation of the divinity and lordship of Jesus Christ. \u201cA young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere,\u201d observed Lewis. Lewis\u2019s examination of the classics showed writing grounded in the Christian tradition to more resilient and persuasive in its \u201ctreaty with reality.\u201d For Greene modernists such as E.M Forster and Virginia Woolf\u2019s characters carried no sense of reality and \u201cwandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin.\u201d Detached from religious sense, their work carried no passionate commitment to the real world since it lacked the requisite foundation of the deeper order of things as grounded in the nature and design of an intelligent first cause. Waugh too felt that an author could only ignore God at the expense of the reality and depth of his work. \u201cYou can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions.\u201d The capacity of the Christian faith to make sense of the world in general and human nature in particular provided a lens by which<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nThink Like a Saint, Write Like a Genius | Blockspace<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=485\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Think Like a Saint, Write Like a Genius | Blockspace\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Add caption Book: C. S. Lewis – A Life Author: Alister McGrath Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers (2013) ISBN: 978-1-4143-3935-1 It was an age of disbelief.\u00a0 Religion was in the bull\u2019s eye of secularist missiles. A war of record proportions was dismantling the old order. Values which had held good for centuries were not spared. God was on trial. The intellectual jury was invoking its clauses to renounce the claims of faith on the 20th century. At that time, an unlikely advocate rose above the sound of charging armies of the Second World War and the dissenting arguments of the Modernist Movement to \u201cjustify the works of God to men.\u201d He was Clive Staple Lewis. C.S Lewis crossed the floor from atheism to become the foremost Christian intellectual of his time. Lewis had been steeped in atheism. His first published work, “Spirits in Bondage,\u201d was a smack of this influence. So was a self-absorbed lifestyle which would stamp remorse on much of his post-conversion life. In later years, his work would assume a Christian tenor. One by turns overt and subliminal. \u201cMere Christianity,\u201d a compendium of his wartime BBC broadcast talks, is to this day one of the most eloquent toolkits of apologetics. Aside the popular circulation of his punchlines, Lewis remains extensively profiled, well past his generation. Alister McGrath\u2019s \u201cC. S. Lewis \u2013 A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet\u201d is the latest notable full-length reconstruction of the prolific writer and Oxford don. The biography was published in 2013, on the golden jubilee of Lewis\u2019s death. But considering the sheer volume of what has already been published on Lewis, the question \u201cWhy another biography?\u201d is fair enough. McGrath anticipates the question. \u201cThis biography of Lewis is not another rehearsal of the vast army of facts and figures concerning his life, but an attempt to understand its deeper themes and concerns and assess its significance,\u201d says McGrath. \u201cThis is not a work of synopsis but of analysis,\u201d McGrath explains. McGrath is meticulous with detail. But as the variegated pixels merge, the essential Lewis becomes more pronounced. For McGrath, Lewis is something of an eccentric. One detached from academic trends of his time and \u201cdisplaced from the centre of things.\u201d Lewis was regarded as an outsider by his Oxford peers for his \u201copenly Christian views and his unscholarly habit of writing popular works of fiction and apologetics.\u201d Clearly out of touch with convention, Lewis famously labelled himself a \u201cdinosaur\u201d in his inaugural Cambridge lecture. But a lot elicits regret from Lewis\u2019s early years. The young Lewis is exactly the character to who whom we can be unreservedly attached. McGrath details Lewis\u2019s contempt for his father, bar whose indiscretions, is, by contrast concerned and endearing. An intimate relationship with a much older Mrs Moore and self-confessed atheism, apparently burnt his bridge to the older Lewis. His absence from his father\u2019s sickbed, describing him as someone for whom he had no affection, smacked of betrayal to the neighbourhood and visited life-long remorse on him after the latter\u2019s death. Lewis attempt to process this episode by dealing with it in \u201cSurprised by Joy.\u201d If little from this period endears Lewis to the reader, then his intellectual determination does. His undergraduate studies had been interrupted when he volunteered to fight in the trenches during the Great War. He resumed to distinction, even winning a prestigious essay competition before graduation. \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d author J.R.R Tolkien, who was a friend and fellow Oxford lecturer, argued Lewis home to the Christian faith. Earlier, though, the study of literature had been functioning as an agency of belief for Lewis. McGrath makes reference to the Christian Rennaisance of 20th century literature which conscripted such forceful writers as G.K Chesterton, Graham Greene, T.S Eliot and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh\u2019s conversion immediately made it to the front pages of leading newspapers, chiefly on the news value of its being unusual or rather unexpected. The Christian Renaissance had a distinguished line of predecessors including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Johnson, George Herbert and John Donne and no mean league of philosophical exponents. But the 20th century was not an age of faith hence the bafflement. One editorial questioned how Waugh, the celebrity young author of \u201cVile Bodies,\u201d known to be a passionate adherent to the ultra-modern could have embraced Christianity, then and now the b\u00eate noire of modernism. Lewis\u2019s own conversion did not elicit the glare of cameras. By then he was only an obscure poet, under the nom de plume Clive Hamilton, so far as the creative industry was concerned. The Christian outlook was to be the basis of his later critical reception and commercial success. McGrath observes that Lewis fits into the broader pattern of the conversion of \u201cliterary scholars and writers through and because of their literary interests.\u201d The study of literature drew Lewis to the rational and imaginative power of Christianity and what began as an intellectual and aesthetic pursuit led to his affirmation of the divinity and lordship of Jesus Christ. \u201cA young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere,\u201d observed Lewis. Lewis\u2019s examination of the classics showed writing grounded in the Christian tradition to more resilient and persuasive in its \u201ctreaty with reality.\u201d For Greene modernists such as E.M Forster and Virginia Woolf\u2019s characters carried no sense of reality and \u201cwandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin.\u201d Detached from religious sense, their work carried no passionate commitment to the real world since it lacked the requisite foundation of the deeper order of things as grounded in the nature and design of an intelligent first cause. Waugh too felt that an author could only ignore God at the expense of the reality and depth of his work. \u201cYou can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions.\u201d The capacity of the Christian faith to make sense of the world in general and human nature in particular provided a lens by which\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=485\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Blockspace\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-03-08T09:00:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-10-26T08:41:44+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/files.tyndale.com\/thpdata\/images--covers\/500%20h\/978-1-4143-3935-1.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"hardsouth\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"hardsouth\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blockspaceballads.com\\\/?p=485#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blockspaceballads.com\\\/?p=485\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"hardsouth\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blockspaceballads.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/a336a678f28eacb341ce63c6b84b17d0\"},\"headline\":\"Think Like a Saint, Write Like a 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\/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Think Like a Saint, Write Like a Genius | Blockspace","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=485","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Think Like a Saint, Write Like a Genius | Blockspace","og_description":"Add caption Book: C. S. Lewis – A Life Author: Alister McGrath Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers (2013) ISBN: 978-1-4143-3935-1 It was an age of disbelief.\u00a0 Religion was in the bull\u2019s eye of secularist missiles. A war of record proportions was dismantling the old order. Values which had held good for centuries were not spared. God was on trial. The intellectual jury was invoking its clauses to renounce the claims of faith on the 20th century. At that time, an unlikely advocate rose above the sound of charging armies of the Second World War and the dissenting arguments of the Modernist Movement to \u201cjustify the works of God to men.\u201d He was Clive Staple Lewis. C.S Lewis crossed the floor from atheism to become the foremost Christian intellectual of his time. Lewis had been steeped in atheism. His first published work, “Spirits in Bondage,\u201d was a smack of this influence. So was a self-absorbed lifestyle which would stamp remorse on much of his post-conversion life. In later years, his work would assume a Christian tenor. One by turns overt and subliminal. \u201cMere Christianity,\u201d a compendium of his wartime BBC broadcast talks, is to this day one of the most eloquent toolkits of apologetics. Aside the popular circulation of his punchlines, Lewis remains extensively profiled, well past his generation. Alister McGrath\u2019s \u201cC. S. Lewis \u2013 A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet\u201d is the latest notable full-length reconstruction of the prolific writer and Oxford don. The biography was published in 2013, on the golden jubilee of Lewis\u2019s death. But considering the sheer volume of what has already been published on Lewis, the question \u201cWhy another biography?\u201d is fair enough. McGrath anticipates the question. \u201cThis biography of Lewis is not another rehearsal of the vast army of facts and figures concerning his life, but an attempt to understand its deeper themes and concerns and assess its significance,\u201d says McGrath. \u201cThis is not a work of synopsis but of analysis,\u201d McGrath explains. McGrath is meticulous with detail. But as the variegated pixels merge, the essential Lewis becomes more pronounced. For McGrath, Lewis is something of an eccentric. One detached from academic trends of his time and \u201cdisplaced from the centre of things.\u201d Lewis was regarded as an outsider by his Oxford peers for his \u201copenly Christian views and his unscholarly habit of writing popular works of fiction and apologetics.\u201d Clearly out of touch with convention, Lewis famously labelled himself a \u201cdinosaur\u201d in his inaugural Cambridge lecture. But a lot elicits regret from Lewis\u2019s early years. The young Lewis is exactly the character to who whom we can be unreservedly attached. McGrath details Lewis\u2019s contempt for his father, bar whose indiscretions, is, by contrast concerned and endearing. An intimate relationship with a much older Mrs Moore and self-confessed atheism, apparently burnt his bridge to the older Lewis. His absence from his father\u2019s sickbed, describing him as someone for whom he had no affection, smacked of betrayal to the neighbourhood and visited life-long remorse on him after the latter\u2019s death. Lewis attempt to process this episode by dealing with it in \u201cSurprised by Joy.\u201d If little from this period endears Lewis to the reader, then his intellectual determination does. His undergraduate studies had been interrupted when he volunteered to fight in the trenches during the Great War. He resumed to distinction, even winning a prestigious essay competition before graduation. \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d author J.R.R Tolkien, who was a friend and fellow Oxford lecturer, argued Lewis home to the Christian faith. Earlier, though, the study of literature had been functioning as an agency of belief for Lewis. McGrath makes reference to the Christian Rennaisance of 20th century literature which conscripted such forceful writers as G.K Chesterton, Graham Greene, T.S Eliot and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh\u2019s conversion immediately made it to the front pages of leading newspapers, chiefly on the news value of its being unusual or rather unexpected. The Christian Renaissance had a distinguished line of predecessors including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Johnson, George Herbert and John Donne and no mean league of philosophical exponents. But the 20th century was not an age of faith hence the bafflement. One editorial questioned how Waugh, the celebrity young author of \u201cVile Bodies,\u201d known to be a passionate adherent to the ultra-modern could have embraced Christianity, then and now the b\u00eate noire of modernism. Lewis\u2019s own conversion did not elicit the glare of cameras. By then he was only an obscure poet, under the nom de plume Clive Hamilton, so far as the creative industry was concerned. The Christian outlook was to be the basis of his later critical reception and commercial success. McGrath observes that Lewis fits into the broader pattern of the conversion of \u201cliterary scholars and writers through and because of their literary interests.\u201d The study of literature drew Lewis to the rational and imaginative power of Christianity and what began as an intellectual and aesthetic pursuit led to his affirmation of the divinity and lordship of Jesus Christ. \u201cA young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere,\u201d observed Lewis. Lewis\u2019s examination of the classics showed writing grounded in the Christian tradition to more resilient and persuasive in its \u201ctreaty with reality.\u201d For Greene modernists such as E.M Forster and Virginia Woolf\u2019s characters carried no sense of reality and \u201cwandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin.\u201d Detached from religious sense, their work carried no passionate commitment to the real world since it lacked the requisite foundation of the deeper order of things as grounded in the nature and design of an intelligent first cause. Waugh too felt that an author could only ignore God at the expense of the reality and depth of his work. \u201cYou can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions.\u201d The capacity of the Christian faith to make sense of the world in general and human nature in particular provided a lens by which","og_url":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=485","og_site_name":"Blockspace","article_published_time":"2015-03-08T09:00:00+00:00","article_modified_time":"2026-10-26T08:41:44+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/files.tyndale.com\/thpdata\/images--covers\/500%20h\/978-1-4143-3935-1.jpg","type":"","width":"","height":""}],"author":"hardsouth","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"hardsouth","Est. reading time":"7 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