This is a great article that I just read on C.S. Lewis. If you are looking to read up on Lewis, now is the time as Christian History and Biography, as well as Christianity Today Magazine are filled with them.
I have been reading Lewis my whole life, and I am just continually impressed with the breadth and variety of not only his work, but of the man himself.
Here are a couple of snippets from this article that I find fascinating, but that I need time to think through, for I believe they have a lot of implications in various areas of the Christian faith.
The distinction between scientia (knowledge, the makeup of things) and sapientia (wisdom, the significance of things) informed all of Lewis’s writings, especially his fiction…….In “Letters to Malcolm”, he says, “In fact we should never ask of anything ‘Is it real?,’ for everything is real.” We may think our world as a stage set, but it is a real stage set. Because he thought everything was real, Lewis could create imaginary worlds with gusto.
and later…..
In his worlds, missing reality is the prime error. It happens in two ways: either to focus completely on facts and miss significance, or to become self-centered and miss the real beauty of creation.
and later…..
To teach the Chronicles as Christian doctrine is to defeat Lewis’s purpose in writing. Similarly, to demand that the reader respond with the “delighted praise of beauty” is to foster the literary snobbery that Lewis hated.
