Thought for the Day, 1 December 2005

Anne Atkins

Asked once whom I would most like to meet from the past, I realised what I was most look-ing forward to in the future: a jug of beer, roaring fire and chinwag with CS Lewis. Odd, because I hate real beer - but presumably in Heaven that'll be corrected along with my other faults.

There are so many Lewis fans, the box office can hardly fail. I've never met a child that didn't love The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (nor an adult who hasn't read it). But this is only this tip of his iceberg. His satire made him popular, his science fiction was well received, his broadcasts are still revered, his literary criticism remains an authority on courtly love, his essays sell as well today as ever, he wrote poetry derivative of Anglo-Saxon, and every Sunday in some pulpit in the country his pithy theological insights are read out as the most incisive.

And yet when I was interviewed recently in Oxford about my faith, I was warned: Don't mention CS Lewis! Why? He's still hated here, apparently.

How does he still inspire such passion after so long? I can think of plenty of dead writers who don't do much for me, as I'm sure can you. But we don't spend time and energy discrediting them; we just leave them on the shelf. Of course, other academics in the forties were not invited onto the radio, or so successful in the bookshops - and such professional jealousy seems to live on: the Narnia books are "poisonous, ghastly, priggish and half-witted" according to one writer I'd never heard of; and the biographer who recently smeared Lewis with sexual allegations without a scrap of evidence hasn't his faith or fame.

But this can't explain every antagonistic posthumous obsession with Lewis. Philip Pullman accuses him of sexism (though Lucy is his first hero); racism (though his ultimate villain was excessively white); even damnation of one character - though Lewis left her alive and well, and himself pointed out, "The books don't tell us what happened to Susan". This is not normal (or even accurate) literary comment. In fact, Pullman considers Lewis "wicked beyond the reach of literary criticism", thinking "death... better than life".

What can explain such virulent antipathy? Lewis would not have been surprised or dis-couraged. Blessed are you, his Master said, when men revile you in my name. Of Mere Christianity, the BBC described to Lewis "the sharp division you produce in your audience: they either regard you as the cat's whiskers, or as beneath contempt."

"The two views you report," he replied, "aren't very illuminating about me perhaps. About my subject matter it is an old story, isn't it? They love or hate."

We are, said St Paul, the fragrance of life to those who are saved; but to those who are perishing, we smell of death.