John Sandeman interviewed Scott Stephens the Online Editor of Religion and Ethics for the ABC. 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of C. S. Lewis, a prolific Christian author. Biblesociety.org.au is keen to highlight events marking the CS Lewis anniversary.  Scott will be speaking on C. S. Lewis on May 6 at the start of a C. S. Lewis week at the University of Western Australia.

What is it about C.S. Lewis that attracts attention 50 years after his death?

One of the really fascinating things for me—not just about C. S. Lewis—but to the entire generation to which he belonged, is that C.S. Lewis and many others lived in a time where there seemed to be a real theological, philosophical and also cultural stagnation.

There were various forms of art, various forms of belief and also forms of culture and politics that seemed to be on the decline. In many respects Christianity [at that time] wasn’t up to the task of eliciting renewal, repentance, conviction—a re-awakening of the moral and religious imagination.

It is interesting that at the very point that so many theologians, and theologically inclined philosophers as well, really fell down on their task, it fell to C. S. Lewis (and we also can think of Tolkien, and before them George Bernanos in France, T. S. Eliot and G. K. Chesterton) to keep alive the possibilities of what it meant to live as Christians today.

Many people will look back at Lewis and Chesterton and see them as giants, although you describe their time as one of moral devastation. Do we have giants today? Should we be searching for giants today?

That for me is THE question. And that is why we need people like C. S. Lewis now more than ever. If I can answer your question in a bit of a roundabout way: If you think about the sort of poets and novelists we had in the first half of the twentieth century right up to the post-war period—thinking of the UK and USA especially—there were novelists like Flannery O’Connor who said that one of the great problems facing the church today is that there was no longer any point of connection between what the church was trying to say and the culture which had become completely desensitised about what true evil looks like or what possibilities of good might be.

It came to these really ferocious novelists, and poets, artists of the imagination to reawaken something of that fervour, that realisation that all isn’t well in this period.

It is fascinating to me that these various artists struggled with how to convey the Christian message in new embracing ways: ways that would almost shock people to their senses, ways that would make people look at their Christian faith in a different way.

Many people over the last two decades in particular—and I have to say, John, not just religiously inclined people either: literary critics and public intellectuals like James Wood and Paul Eli—have noticed what happened to God in the novel, what happened to those artistic forms that we used to so massively rely on.

Even when it was in these horribly compromised conditions like [the work of] John Updike or Graham Greene, there was still a deep religious sensibility that flowed through their novels. What happened? How did we forget God from our artistic forms?

There does seem to be a sense that we have lost something aesthetically. We have lost something in terms of our imaginations. We have lost certain imaginative capabilities. But at the same time we also don’t have the artists that we used to have to foster them.

While we are living through this very difficult cultural period I think it is all the more important for us to hold on to the example of people like [US Southern writer] Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton. These people are more important now than ever because it seems to me they are sowing the seeds of a possible future.

So is it the task of the Christian to search out, or to wait for the next Flannery O’Connor?

The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it very well, I think. He said fatalism or undue optimism is a betrayal of the Christian duty. We can’t sit back and wait and hope everything is going to turn out fine. But at the same time there has to be this deep underlying sense that through its own vast moments of cultural and political devastation, of persecution and the equally horrifying results of cultural indifference somehow the church has always gotten through.

That is the proper tension it seems to me. On the one hand, I have a very high sense of the importance of Christian ministry. And at the same time has there ever been a more important period for ferociously faithful Christian lay-people and artistic professionals and novelists who will try to keep alive—and even resurrect—some of these older possibilities that were there with people like C. S. Lewis.

The short answer to your question is both. There obviously has to be an attempt to diagnose our cultural moment accurately, and then to try to look across the body of Christ to see where are those gifts that God has given us.

If we in fact believe that God has given us everything we need to be faithful in our time, where are those gifts? And how can we best nurture them? And at the same time it has to be nourished by an underlying sense that the church has been through worse periods than it is now and somehow God has still brought it through.

Do you think that somewhere out there, there is a new C. S. Lewis? Or are there times in history where that sort of voice is quiet and we just live in a different time?

Easily two or three times a day I’ll ask myself precisely that question! Believe it or not the closest thing that we have, leaving C. S. Lewis aside, to someone like Flannery O’Connor who can feel along the edges of the worst most destructive aspects of our sex-obsessed culture is the French novelist Michel Houellebecq.

The closest thing we have to someone like Graham Green or G. K. Chesterton would be Marilyn Robinson [US novelist, author of Gilead].

We have sorts of equivalences. We have the sort of people who are trying to feel their way along the edges of the cell in which we find ourselves culturally.

But as soon as I start talking like that, I realise we don’t have anything like what C. S. Lewis brought to the cultural situation. We don’t his deep and longing and loving nourishment of the imaginative space of childhood. We don’t have anything like the capacity to imagine different political possibilities like he did in some of his more bracing political engagements. Neither do we have this deep, loving nourishment of language. The ways in which new possibilities of loving, of friendship of living—the ways in which these are nourished precisely by the way in which we speak.

There was something unique, profound and God-given, and something almost universal, about C. S. Lewis. Part of the Christian belief in the great crowd of witnesses is that those who are past are not simply past but they live with us still. I think we need to continue to nourish that memory and to be thankful for it.

And at the same time pray that God gives us the courage to recognise those same gifts among us.

Details of Scott Stephens’ talk in Perth:

Monday May 6
“The missing middle: how we lost our sense of The Good
and our sense of God along with it”
1pm at Simmonds Lecture Theatre, University of Western Australia

and repeated

Monday May 6
5:30 for 6:00pm at University Club at University of Western Australia (off Hackett Drive)

A second lecture by Perth Minister (and C. S. Lewis enthusiast) Rory Shiner:
Thursday 9 May
“The Possibility of Conversion in an Age of Skepticism:
C. S. Lewis’s path from Atheism to Christianity”
Lecture Theatre at UWA at 6pm