If I Had Lunch with C. S. Lewis: Exploring the Ideas of C. S. Lewis on the Meaning of Life

by Alister E. McGrath

Lewis is a rare example of someone who had to think about life’s great questions because they were forced on him by his own experiences. Lewis is no armchair philosopher. His ideas were forged in the heat of suffering and despair.

They wanted to learn from Lewis, not learn about him. Lewis was a big name, a role model.

That’s the spirit in which this book was conceived and written.

To use a distinction that Lewis teased out in Mere Christianity, there’s a big difference between just existing and really living.

Deep down within all of us is a longing to work out what life is all about and what we’re meant to be doing.

those who cope best are those who can see beneath the surface of an apparently random and pointless world and grasp the deeper structure of reality.

For a start, it was imaginatively uninteresting.

Human desire, the deep and bittersweet longing for something that will satisfy us, points beyond finite objects and finite persons (who seem able to fulfill this desire yet eventually prove incapable of doing so). Our sense of desire points through these objects, and points persons towards their real goal and fulfillment in God.

G. K. Chesterton made the point that a reliable theory allows us to see things properly: “We put on the theory, like a magic hat, and history becomes translucent like a house of glass.”[16]

In the same way, Chesterton argued, Christianity validates itself by its ability to make sense of our observations of the world.

Meaning matters.

Lewis, however, might suggest that we talk about something more fundamental—friendship. Lewis was no solitary genius, who lived and worked in isolation. He needed friends to support and encourage him.

Friends matter.

Second, love is analyzed in a curiously detached, almost clinical manner.

In marked contrast, A Grief Observed (1961) represents one of the finest accounts of the emotional firestorm unleashed by bereavement.

Yet friendship is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

It is clear that the rupture in Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship was due primarily to Tolkien. To an outsider, Tolkien may seem to have been somewhat oversensitive, overreacting to developments which were not malicious or sinister. Yet perhaps this reminds us that friendships cannot be taken for granted. They require investment and maintenance if they are to flourish.

They were critical friends—that is to say, they trusted one another and their judgements, and had earned the right to comment on one another’s works.

At its heart, the enterprise of criticism was about taking something that was good and making it even better.

Lewis rightly points out that this desire to be part of the “Inner Ring” is not really about friendship at all. It is about our own insecurity and yearning to matter.

It’s hard to rule out these possibilities. But it’s much more likely that Lewis saw the writing of Narnia as a creative project that would be fun to write, presenting him with a way to examine how a good story might explore theological ideas.

Lewis realised that “stories of this kind” could “steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood.”[49]

What if stories could have opened up the wonder and joy of a faith

Lewis wanted us to understand that we live in a world that is shaped by stories—by narratives, which tell us who we are, and what really matters. But which story can we trust?

By embracing the story of Aslan as central to her story, she has gained a new sense of identity and purpose.

But the power of the narrative brings home the Christian themes that Lewis believed could not be described as effectively through a series of well-intentioned theological lectures.

Yet the important thing about this passage is not just the answer Lewis gives, but the way in which he gives it.

The order of analysis in The Silver Chair parallels Lewis’s own conversion story.

A God that is reduced to what reason can cope with is not a God that can be worshipped.

Christianity is about the way we behave, not just the way we think.

Lewis realised that it isn’t enough to tell people to be “good.” They need someone to show them what goodness looks like. A role model is worth a thousand words! It’s much better to tell a story which shows us how someone acted nobly than to read a textbook about the abstract idea of nobility.

Good does not triumph unless good people rise to the challenges around them.

Who Reepicheep is determines what Reepicheep does.

Through the Narnia series, Lewis shows these truths to us instead of telling us about them.

It was a brilliant move. It provided Lewis with a platform that forced him to translate his ideas into “uneducated language.”

First, he would insist that we discover how ordinary people speak: “We must learn the language of our audience.”[66] And how are we do this? “You have to find out by experience.”

As Lewis put it, we need to “translate every bit of [our] Theology into the vernacular.”[67]

But it is essential.

As Lewis’s Oxford colleague Austin Farrer perceptively remarked, Lewis makes us “think we are listening to an argument,” when in reality “we are presented with a vision, and it is the vision that carries conviction.”[68] This vision appeals to the human longing for truth, beauty, and goodness.

Perhaps one of the lessons that we can learn from Lewis is that apologetics is at its best when it makes people wish that Christianity is true—by showing them its power to excite the imagination, to make sense of things, and to bring stability, security, and meaning to life.

To demonstrate the reasonableness of faith does not mean proving every article of Christian belief. Rather, it means showing that there are good grounds that these beliefs are trustworthy and reliable.

Lewis’s tale of the sun and the lamp is not so much a logical argument as a new way of seeing things.

—but is just plain wrong.