Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Alan Jacobs . November 25, 2005

Read more of Kim Lawton's interview with Professor Alan Jacobs, author of THE NARNIAN: THE LIFE AND IMAGINATION OF C. S. LEWIS:

Q: Describe C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity. He talked about it in very intellectual terms, in some ways, and yet it permeated so much of his writings.

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A: Well, it was an intellectual conversion, I think. That's the most interesting thing about it in some respects, because he was not emotionally attracted to Christian belief. It was not something that he wanted. In fact, he fought very hard against it. He says in his autobiography that on the night when he got on his knees and admitted that God was God, he says, "I was perhaps at that time the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England." So he was not emotionally attracted to Christianity or religious belief. He often said that all he wanted was to be left alone, and if there is a God in the world you are by definition not left alone. So it was a very long and slow intellectual process. It was one which involved his first coming to belief that there was some sort of creator, some sort of deity, maybe not even a personal God. But later on, as he thought about it and developed his ideas, he decided that it probably was a personal God, and then after that, some years after that, he came to the belief that it was indeed the God of the Bible, the Christian God, that he believed in. But it was a very long process. When he was converted to Christianity he was very thoroughly converted to Christianity, and his Christian faith was at the heart of who he was for the rest of his life.

Q: And to what extent was it at the heart of everything he wrote from then on?

A: I think it was at the heart of everything he wrote, but not in a conventional way or not in a usual way. He had lots of letters in his lifetime, for instance, about the Narnia books. People would write to him, and they would say, "Well, now, how did you decide which Christian doctrines to put into THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE?" or "How did you decide what element of Christian teaching you wanted to have in THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW?" And he would always say, "That's not how I wrote it. I didn't write any of the Narnia books in that way. I didn't sit down with some plan to have an evangelistic message or a doctrinal message. Instead I was just writing a story and I was trying to tell the story in the most vivid and interesting way that I could." And at one point, in one of the little essays that he wrote about the making of the Narnia books, he says that when you are a Christian, or if you're not a Christian, whatever you happen to be, whatever you happen to believe, if you sit down to tell your story, whatever that story happens to be, who you are will emerge from the story. He says at one point something to this effect: that whatever roots that you have struck in the course of your life, you are going to draw from that in the story that you are writing. And so his books naturally became Christian in character and Christian in some of their content, because that was who he was as a person. When he began THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, he had no idea there was going to be a lion in it, and he certainly had no idea that the lion was going to be a savior. That was something that came to him as he was writing the story. It was never part of a plan. It was never part of an attempt to produce an evangelistic message or a Christian message. It was just the kind of story that he told because that was the kind of person that he was.

Q: Is that startling to people who think that he indeed did set out to tell the Christian story?

A: I think it's very startling, because I think what most people think of when they think of Christian writing is writing that has a very clear didactic purpose, that you want to evangelize, that you want to preach the gospel, you want to teach somebody something about the Christian faith. Perhaps that's a natural assumption, and Lewis never denies that there are lots of people who write that way, but he said, "I could never write that way," and there's a really interesting comment that he makes in a preface to one of his scholarly books. He's talking about "Paradise Lost," Milton's great poem, and he says that when you look at these old books -- that's a term he used all the time for these writers from the Middle Ages on through the Renaissance and even into the 18th century in some cases -- he says, when you look at these old books, what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted. And what he means by that is, we think these people are trying to teach us something, that they set out to teach us something. But in fact, what they were doing was expressing their own delight and their own enchantment at the thought of certain Christian teachings and certain truths of the Christian faith. And that adoration or that enchantment, that delight, comes out as a kind of instruction. It ends up being instructive, but there was never a plan to instruct. Rather, the plan was simply to express a deep affection for and a deep attraction to something about the Christian faith. And that's the way Lewis himself wrote.

Q: To what extent was Narnia this place of enchantment for Lewis?

A: Well, I think that's exactly why he created it; he created this world. It was a time in his life where he was very much in need of a restoration of spirit and a restoration of soul. He was struggling terribly during the late 1940s, and he was struggling terribly in part because he was so phenomenally successful as a teacher of Christianity, as a popularizer of Christianity. His books were selling very, very well. He was in great demand as a lecturer. He had recently started something called the Socratic Club at Oxford, which would meet on a regular basis and debate questions about Christianity. And it was always expected by the Christians at Oxford that Lewis would show up and help to win all the arguments and to defend [against] the unbelievers in debate. And there was an enormous amount of pressure on him. In fact, he says at one point when he was addressing a group of people about doing evangelism or doing apologetics, bringing the Christian faith to people who do not know it or do not believe in it, he says that one of the great dangers is to be successful. He says, "No Christian doctrine ever seems so unbelievable to me as the one that I have just successfully defended in argument." The more successful he was in winning those arguments, the more he would walk away from those arguments feeling, if that's all Christianity amounts to is something that's a debate point, an argument that I can win, is it really true? Is it really real? And I think his own faith was under challenge. His own faith was suffering because he was always out there as a warrior contending for the faith. And I think what he needed was something restorative; what he needed was something that could enchant his own spirit. And I think he wrote the Narnia books not primarily for children -- though he did dedicate the books to children, he did want children to read them -- he wrote them for himself. He wanted to create a world in which he could live or revive his own sense of enchantment, his own sense of delight. First and foremost, I think that the Narnia books were almost like a self-medication for Lewis, an attempt to give himself a world, a place where he could have his soul restored.

Q: And how did Narnia do that?

A: Well, it did that by creating for him a world in which marvelous things could happen and, I think, marvelous things could happen when least expected. Maybe the most important thing about THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, at least the way that the story brings us into Narnia, is that it does so through such a simple and such an unexpected and such a mundane way. There's no magical figure which appears to tap the children on the head with a wand to transport them into another land. There's no tornado as there is in THE WIZARD OF OZ, but instead there is just an old wardrobe full of old coats. But behind those old coats there is another world, and I think what Lewis is trying to get at is the possibility of finding the enchanted, finding the delightful in the midst of the everyday and the humdrum.

Q: You write in your book about how Lewis said that Aslan, the lion, really pulled the story along for him. What did he mean?

Q: When he began the story he did not have any idea that a lion was going to turn up in it. He began the story because he had an image in his head which had been in his head since he was a teenager, and it was of a faun, this little satyrlike figure with animal legs and hooves and horns going through a snowy woods and carrying a wrapped-up parcel under his arm. And for some reason, that image had been in Lewis's mind since he was a teenager. He had never been able to forget it, but it was not until he was about 40 years old that he decided he was going to try to make a story out of it. And he began that story but then soon put it aside, came back to it a couple of times, and it wasn't until the late 1940s, at a time when he was deeply, deeply miserable, that he finally decided that yes, he was going to tell that story and tell it all the way until the end -- whatever the end might be, because he had no idea, as he was plunging into that story, how that faun got there, what the parcel was under his arm, what was going to happen to him. So he began telling the story, and he began bringing the Pevensie children into it. And somewhere along the line, this lion emerged. Eventually a lion found his way into the story. Lewis said later on that he had been having lots of dreams about lions at about that time, and somehow he decided to bring one in. I don't think afterward he ever knew how he decided it. I don't think he knew when he decided it. It was just at a certain point that this figure Aslan showed up. Later, only after Aslan had come into the story did he discover that Aslan was going to be the central figure in Narnia and indeed would appear in all of the stories in one way or another.

Q: To what extent is Aslan a metaphor or symbol of Jesus?

A: I think it's important to say that Aslan is not a metaphor or a symbol of Jesus. He is Jesus. He is, in the way Lewis had constructed this story, Jesus Christ, who is in Christian teaching the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God, and he is the savior of this world. And as it turns out, he is also the savior of Narnia, but not in the same form. He does not appear in human likeness, in human form, but rather in the form of this great lion. But he's the same person. Lewis was very insistent that it wasn't an allegory of Christianity, it's just if God had to come and save people in this world, then perhaps in some other world that he made, some other world populated with sentient beings, with people who can make moral choices, then perhaps people made the wrong moral choices. Perhaps those people fell into sin and wickedness and they became subject to evil and death, and as a result they needed salvation as well. And so in the same way that God chose to save people in this world, he chose to save people in Narnia. It's just that the Son of God appears in the form of a lion rather than in human form. That's the only difference. So it's not an allegory. It's, instead, telling the same story in two different worlds.

Q: How explicit is that? Can a lot of people come to this work, enjoy it, and miss that dimension completely?

A: I think people do. I've read many comments by authors remembering when they read the Narnia books as children and saying, "Oh, gosh, I had no idea. I did not realize what was going on there." I think even J. K. Rowling has said she read the books and did not have a particular recognition of their Christian character. It seems hard to miss, once you do see it, and it is hard to miss if you know the Christian story very well.

Q: Can you fully understand the work without it?

A: I think you can understand what's going on. You can understand that Edmund has created an enormous amount of trouble for himself and for other people, that Edmund has sinned. He has done things that he knew were wrong even when he did them, and he is now about to pay the price for that. His own life is in danger because of what he has done. And then someone who is not to blame, someone who is in fact completely blameless, decides to intercede and to suffer the penalty of death on Edmund's behalf. He is the sacrificial victim who chooses to be the sacrificial victim. He is the one who, through this sacrifice, enables something far greater to happen than just the rescue of Edmund. That's a powerful story even if you don't understand exactly what it refers to. Even if you don't understand the Christian story, you can still see the great power and how moving and how touching it is that this little boy would be rescued from a terrible situation in which he created so much more havoc and so much more misery than he could ever have imagined, and yet he is responsible. He knows he is responsible, but what's offered to him is this miraculous deliverance by someone who is willing to pay the price for him.

Q: What place do THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA have within C. S. Lewis's entire and so diverse body of work?

A: He didn't spend a lot of time working on them. There was a period of about four or five years when he was constantly working on at least one of them. But he was working on other things as well. He was working on scholarly books; he was doing all sorts of other things. And so if you look at the overall career of C. S. Lewis, the Narnia books don't take up a lot of time, and they don't take up all that many words, comparatively speaking, given all the stuff that he wrote. He wrote an astonishing amount during the period he was working on the Narnia books. So you might think that it's a very small part of his work, and in one sense it is, but in another sense it is not. As I was working on my biography of Lewis, one of the things that I came to believe very strongly was that you actually see more of who he was, what he believed in and cared about, in the Narnia books than you do in anything else. You get a lot of Lewis in all of his writings. He was a very intensely personal writer, and he had the courage and the style to write in a very winsome and personal way, even in his scholarly books. He could intrude little personal anecdotes into very deeply scholarly works, which was something very unusual at the time -- still not common, but almost unheard of at the time. And he had that kind of ease and grace in his writing that made him a very attractive writer, whatever the topic he happened to be writing about. I started to get the idea that everything that he believed, cared about, [that was of] vital importance to him somehow or another found its way into the Narnia books, and I was amazed by how much material that wouldn't seem to belong in a children's book at all would nevertheless find its way into the Narnia books.

Q: Lewis is so loved by such a wide range of people across the Christian spectrum.

A: I think that has a lot to do with his style of writing. He has a very winsome style. He has a way of almost confidentially speaking to people. He doesn't talk down to people even though he has enormous learning. He has a way of talking to you as though you are the only person that he's writing to. He almost seems to put his arm around your shoulders and say, "I'm sure you'll understand this. You'll get the point I'm trying to make here," and the confidence with which he addresses his readers inspires confidence in return. He writes about the Christian faith not just as though it were true, but that it's a wonderful thing that it's true. He really does have that sense of delight in Christian teaching, and that seems like a strange thing because not too many find Christian teaching intrinsically enchanting or delightful, but he really did. He thought that it was wonderful, and there is a kind of joy in the way that he writes about the Christian faith. He writes about heaven more than most Christian writers, more than almost any [other] Christian writer, because he believes that the reward of heaven is something that Jesus promised to his disciples. He wasn't hesitant about saying, "I have gone to prepare a place for you," and Lewis delighted in thinking about what that place might be. He made Christianity seem reasonable to people, yes, but more than that, he made it seem attractive. And I think that's really the key.

Q: Many Christians, evangelicals in particular, have used his works as evangelism tools.

A: That's right, and I think to this day nothing gets used more as an evangelistic tool, or no writing gets used more as an evangelistic tool, than the writings of Lewis, especially MERE CHRISTIANITY. It's become sort of the one-size-fits-all apologetic work. If you don't know what else to give somebody, then give them a copy of MERE CHRISTIANITY. But it's not effective for everyone. A former teacher of mine told me he had actually lost his faith after reading MERE CHRISTIANITY. He found Lewis intolerable for some reason, and since everyone told him "Lewis is the great apologist; he's the one who will win you over to Christianity," this guy figured, "Well, if I don't like C. S. Lewis, then I guess I don't like Christianity." So it's not for everyone.

Q: What do you think of all the projects so many evangelicals are launching around the Narnia film as an evangelistic tool?

A: I'm a little concerned about it. It does seem almost irresistible; I understand that. But if Christians become overly focused on making this movie a tool for evangelism, then what they are going to be doing, whether they mean to or not, is to tell all the movie viewers around the country they should go and see THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE because it's good for them, it's like eating your cinematic broccoli, it's healthy, and I don't think that is going to make the movie more attractive. I think if people are directed to go to the movie or encouraged to go to the movie in order to learn some spiritual lesson, then I think that might actually turn them off to the movie. If they become overly focused on what spiritual lessons are supposedly being taught, they might miss a good story. I think it's actually better and healthier, and I think it's in keeping with the way Lewis wrote the Narnia books, for Christians to encourage people to go and see the movie because it's going to be fun, because it's going to be enjoyable, because it's going to be a great story. I'm concerned an approach like that could be counterproductive. Most people don't actually go to the movies in order to learn life lessons. They go to have a good time. If indeed there are roots in the Christian narrative of this story, if the movie really does express something deeply true about the Christian narrative, that will come out. People will recognize that. They will be, I think, encouraged to think what this story means by the movie itself.

Q: Do you have concerns about how this work of literature may fare at the hands of a film company, especially Disney?

A: Well, I think that's a natural concern that people always have whenever a work of literature that they particularly love is getting a Hollywood treatment. People love to debate whether this particular version is faithful or unfaithful. We're on, what, about the dozenth version of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE now, and Jane Austen fans can debate endlessly about which is the best one. Jane Austen is not around to say, "No, I don't like this" or "Yes, I approve of this." In the case of THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, while Lewis himself is not around, his stepson, Douglas Gresham, is. And Doug Gresham, I think, has been very careful to retain approval over screenplays and to insist that the story be handled faithfully.

Q: This film has also prompted a revival of interest in Lewis himself. Is that something you are gratified to see?

A: I like C. S. Lewis. I think he's a good writer. I'm glad to see the revival of interest. We'll see how long it lasts, and we'll see how many of his works are brought into the sphere of public attention as a result of this. We're certainly going to see a lot more sales of the Narnia books, and there's no way to avoid that even if you tried. But the Narnia books are already Lewis's best-selling works. They sell far, far more than anything else that he's written. I'm not so sure how long the coattails are going to be of the Narnia books, so it will be very interesting to see. Obviously the next candidate would be MERE CHRISTIANITY, since that is his most famous book of apologetics. But I'll be very interested to see if this interest filters down to some of his less well-known books, and some of those are his very best books.

Q: Talk a bit about Lewis's relationship with J.R.R. Tolkien.

A: Lewis and Tolkien had an odd relationship. It was for a time exceptionally close. In the late 1920s, when they were both relatively new faculty members at Oxford, they found out that they had a lot in common and, in fact, they worked together to design a course of study for what we would call the English major at Oxford. They were allies. After they were allies, they became very close friends. They had a strange way of bonding together. They studied Old Norse together, which Tolkien knew very well and Lewis was just learning. Once they were done studying Old Norse, everybody else would go home, and Lewis and Tolkien would sit there by the fire and talk, sometimes until 3 or 4 in the morning. So they became very, very close friends. And Tolkien was instrumental, more instrumental than anyone else, in bringing about Lewis's conversion to Christianity. Lewis had already become a kind of a theist. He believed in some sort of God by the time he met Tolkien, but hours and hours, hundreds of hours of conversation with Tolkien really played a larger role than anything else in bringing him to accept the truth of Christianity. And then throughout most of the '30s they remained very, very close. Lewis encouraged Tolkien to try to publish this really strange little book that he had written called THE HOBBIT. Tolkien didn't think anybody would be interested. But Lewis said, "No, they will. You should try to publish it." And, of course, it was published to great success. Tolkien then helped Lewis to get his first novel, OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, published. And so they were immensely supportive of [each other]. But they had disagreements. The fact that Tolkien was Roman Catholic and Lewis was not was sometimes a point of tension between them. Lewis wrote very fluently, very quickly. He published books sometimes without having done much revision. Tolkien was an obsessive reviser. He could not let something go without revising it over and over and over again. So Tolkien was frustrated with Lewis's tendency to write very quickly and publish almost immediately. He felt that Lewis should take more time, be more careful. And so they began to argue with [each other] more. And then, when a man named Charles Williams moved to Oxford, he really supplanted Tolkien as Lewis's best friend. Tolkien liked Williams, but he didn't like him nearly as much as Lewis did, and the Tolkien-Lewis friendship really fell apart at that time. There were several other little tensions that magnified into large tensions, until it got to the point where by the late '40s they were rarely speaking to [each other]. In fact, the only time that they really spoke was when Lewis encouraged Tolkien to finish and then publish THE LORD OF THE RINGS. His support for LORD OF THE RINGS was absolutely invaluable to Tolkien, and Tolkien always acknowledged that. But by the time that Lewis got married to Joy Davidman in the mid-1950s, he did not even tell Tolkien that he was getting married. He knew that Tolkien would not approve, and they really did not have much of a relationship anymore. So it was sad the way that they fell apart from [each other] in the latter years. But even despite that, it was a terrible, terrible blow to Tolkien when Lewis died. He called it "an axe blow near the roots," and in some ways felt that he would never quite get over it. The memory of how close they had been was always sustaining, was always important for Tolkien even though they had drifted quite far apart.

Q: Was it ironic that this intellectual bachelor Oxford don would become the author of best-selling children books?

A: Well, it appears that when he first got the idea of writing THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, it was probably 1939 or 1940. At that time, he was living with and caring for an older woman named Mrs. Moore -- everyone calls her Mrs. Moore. She was originally someone with whom he'd had a romantic relationship. Later on she became more like a mother to him, and her daughter Maureen also lived with them in the house. Maureen tells the story of how one day Lewis came down to breakfast and announced that he was going to write a book for children. And Mrs. Moore and Maureen both burst into laughter because they both thought this was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard. Lewis didn't know much about children; he had never been around children; he didn't seem to find them very interesting. How odd that he would decide to write a children's book. And then of course it's all the more odd when you imagine him as a great scholar, someone who would have devoted himself to medieval and Renaissance literature. But what all of this misses is the fact that Lewis deeply, deeply loved children's books. He loved the great stories for children and always had. He says at one point, when he was 10 years old he would read fairy tales but would make sure that no one saw him because it was embarrassing. But he said, "Now that I'm adult, I read them openly. I'm proud of it." And so he always had a delight in fairy tales. For instance, whenever he got the flu, when he had to go to bed when he was ill, the first thing he did was grab a copy of THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, which he must have read three or four times a year. I'm almost sure he knew every word of it by heart. When you think about the fact that he was a bachelor, that he had no children of his own, and he was a great scholar, he wouldn't seem like a very likely candidate for writing a children's book. When you look instead at what he really cared about and the kinds of stories that he really loved, it's not surprising at all.

Q: What did your study about C. S. Lewis mean for you personally? What did you come away with?

A: When I was first asked to write this book, I was a little hesitant, in fact more than a little hesitant, and the primary reason was that Lewis is such a canonical figure, such a revered figure within the Christian world that I do think we can sometimes be obsessed with him or overly deferential toward him. It's as though every time a difficult question comes up, let's run and see what C. S. Lewis has to say about it because he's the authoritative figure. I thought, do we really need to promote that more? But the more I thought about it, the more I decided this was something I did want to do. I wondered what it would be like to keep company with Lewis for an extended period of time. Lewis was my daily companion, and the thing that really surprised me was the depth of affection that I came to have for him over the course of writing the book. I had always admired him. I'd always learned a lot from him, and I continued to learn. I got a deeper understanding of his core ideas, and as I got a deeper understanding of them, I developed more and more respect for them. But I think the strongest experience I had in writing the biography was developing a deep personal affection for him. He really was a good man. He was an extraordinarily good man. And he was not someone who was an extraordinarily good man before his conversion. He really was quite dramatically changed. He really did become more compassionate, more caring. All the rough edges did not disappear; throughout the rest of his life, he could get caught up in a cause and he would be too harsh. People thought of him as bullying sometimes. But student after student after student says, "He was incredibly kind to me. He was incredibly patient. He devoted so much time and energy to me." And he did so without intruding his Christian beliefs into the conversation. Lewis was always very careful not to use his role as a tutor in order to evangelize people. He did not think that was appropriate. He made it businesslike. And yet the compassion with which he treated his pupils brought many of them closer to Christianity, if it did not actually bring about a conversion. I was just taken by how remarkably patient and kind he was -- the years and years that he spent caring for Mrs. Moore when she was infirmed; the time that he spent with friends watching over them, caring for them. He was a really extraordinarily compassionate man.