Peter Costello
C.S. Lewis C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography
by George M. Marsden
(Princeton University Press, £16.95)
This little book, which appears in a series entitled “Lives of Great Religious Books”, is a marvellous read. Most of the time when we think about books we think of them in connection with their authors, but books are like children, often wayward children.
They grow up, leave home and begin to live lives of their own, apart from their authors; often quite surprising lives, as this ‘biography” of C. S. Lewis’s most famous book Mere Christianity suggests.
The book did not in fact begin as a book, but as a series of radio talks which Lewis gave for the BBC during WWII. To fully appreciate the impact of the series, we have to realise fully the role of radio at that time.
From Churchill’s important broadcasts, through the varied output from J. B. Priestly to The Brains Trust, radio was then both more serious and more entertaining than it has now become. It played a vital role in keeping up wartime morale across the UK (and even in ‘Emergency Ireland’), with huge audience figures being registered.
The voice of the BBC became for many the voice of truth, and not only in the news.
Thus at a time when the Allies seemed to be battling against the neo-paganism of Nazi Germany, Lewis as an apostle of Christianity, could be heard as setting out the essential truth of what it was the British culture rested on, and derived from.
There many voices speaking for other points of view on the BBC, but Lewis’s impact was undeniable. It was not just a matter of the broadcasts, but also of the pamphlets drawn from them, and eventually the book itself across not just Britain and Ireland but also North America.
We have to recall that Lewis was not an uncontroversial figure. He was professionally a university authority of medieval literature. The thought of such a person emerging as a popular theologian annoyed many people in both the academic and the clerical worlds. He addressed himself to the ordinary reader, as he so often did in his in his academic and creative writing. The very idea of “a popular theologian” was enough to irritate some.
The book itself was finally published in 1950 – by Geoffrey Bless, a firm later absorbed into the much larger and commercially aware company of William Collins. It was published eventually as a mass market paperback, as was the equally popular Lewis work, The Screwtape Letters.
Movement
As such they began to be widely read. Certainly I can recall Mere Christianity being commended to us in my Jesuit school. The book was taken up by the evangelical movement both among Anglicans and beyond, though Lewis himself found that style of Christianity not entirely to his own more cloistered taste. Certainly many people were affected for the good by the book.
This is a short book, though closely written. There are perhaps limitations to the exploration of the book’s own biography. We cannot be fully aware of what its affect has been on those who do not speak about it. It often exerted its influence in a quiet way.
Wilde remarked that the “truth is rarely pure and never simple”. Initially this biography may seem a little reductionist in its detail. But as part of a series with many titles dealing not just with aspects of Christianity, but the other major religions, it will certainly introduce a new readership to the full range of the remarkable writings of C. S. Lewis; and that must be a good thing.
What was composed in times of terror two generations ago, will still give reassurance and comfort to many in these new times of terror too.