C.S. Lewis and his critics

I love the site http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/cslewisand.htm, because it gives a number of criticisms of C.S. Lewis from the fundamentalist perspective, and clarifies why his appeal is broader than fundamentalism.

First of all, a lovely personal criticism, which shows how mealy mouthed these people are. I love the combined criticism - the smoking, drinking and disbelief that the bible is inerrant! I'd hate to meat the writer of this socially!

Clive Staples Lewis was anything but a classic evangelical, socially or theologically. He smoked cigarettes and a pipe, and he regularly visited pubs to drink beer with friends.Though he shared basic Christian beliefs with evangelicals, he didn't subscribe to biblical inerrancy or penal substitution.

Lewis view of Hell also comes in for criticism, because he didn't subscribe to the everlasting punishment and torment sadist idea of hell: "He taught that hell is a state of mind: "And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind--is, in the end, Hell" (Lewis, The Great Divorce, p. 65). ".

More personal criticism, which doesn't mention that Lewis stayed with Mrs Moore until her death, coping with her long deterioration with Alzheimer's disease until she died, and that she ended an embittered jealous old woman, but he still kept faith with her (and his friends wondered at why he put up with her abuse from time to time).

Lewis lived for 30 years with Janie Moore, a woman 25 years his senior to whom he was not married. The relationship with the married woman began when Lewis was still a student at Oxford. Moore was separated from her husband. Lewis confessed to his brother Arthur that he was in love with Mrs. Moore, the mother of one of his friends who was killed in World War I. The relationship was definitely sexual in nature.

More personal abuse follows on Lewis' drinking habits, that it was excessive. These people should get a life!:

In the book A Severe Mercy by Sheldon VanAuken, a personal letter is reproduced on page 191 in which Lewis suggests to VanAuken that upon his next visit to England that the two of them "must have some good, long talks together and perhaps we shall both get high." We have no way to know exactly what this means, but we do know that Lewis drank beer, wine, and whiskey on a daily basis.

And Lewis also did not condemn non-Christians to hell, as the writer of this article would evidently like:

Lewis claimed that followers of pagan religions can be saved without personal faith in Jesus Christ: "But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. ... There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people in other religions who are being led by God's secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. For example a Buddhist of good will may be led to concentrate more and more on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to leave in the background (though he might still say he believed) the Buddhist teaching on certain points. Many of the good Pagans long before Christ's birth may have been in this position" (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco edition, 2001, pp. 64, 208, 209).

And when we come to Lewis description of Christian practices, the writer is beside himself, throwing out accusations of "rank heresy"!

In Mere Christianity, Lewis claims that the Christ-life is spread to men through baptism, belief, and the Lord's Supper. This is a false gospel of faith plus works. He says, "There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names--Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord's Supper. .. I am not saying anything about which of these things is the most essential. My Methodist friend would like me to say more about belief and less (in proportion) about the other two. But I am not going into that" (Mere Christianity, p. 61). [Note that he includes the Catholic Mass in his list of the various names by which holy communion are known, failing to acknowledge to his readers that the Mass is an entirely different thing than the simple Lord's Supper of the New Testament.]

And horror of horrors, he was friends with those nasty Papists!

Some of Lewis's closest friends were Roman Catholics. J.R. Tolkien of Lord of the Rings fame is one example. Tolkien and Lewis were very close and spent countless hours together. Lewis credited Tolkien with having a large role in his "conversion." Lewis was also heavily influenced by the Roman Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton....Lewis carried on a warm correspondence in Latin with Catholic priest Don Giovanni Calabria of Italy over their shared "concern for the reunification of the Christian churches" (The Narnian, Alan Jacobs, pp. 249, 250). Calabria was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1988.

As for the Narnia books, there is a whole lot of invective from this person. They are too pagan for his liking:

Christ's parables did not contain a mixture of truth and paganism, but Lewis's stories unblushingly intertwine a few vague biblical themes with pagan mythology: nymphs, fauns (part man and part goat), dwarfs, centaurs (part man and part horse), Dryads (tree-women), and Naiads (well-women). All of these creatures are depicted as serving Aslan. Lewis presents the deeply heretical idea of good magic. He calls Aslan's power "Deep Magic" and Aslan's father's power as "Emperor's Magic." He introduces the vile pagan god Bacchus and his orgies as a desirable thing that was part of Narnia's past before the White Witch worked her spell. He presents the myth of "Father Christmas" as if it were innocent and wholesome.

The article finishes as follows:

Friends, I would urge you in the strongest way to beware of C.S. Lewis and of the deluded evangelical world that glorifies him.

I would say, thank heavens C.S. Lewis was not one of those strange fundamentalist teetotallers like the author of this article!