C. S. Lewis: the Romantic Rationalist Essay Sample

C.S. Lewis, according to John Piper in his contribution to The Romantic Rationalist, “was probably the world’s leading authority on medieval English Literature” in the twentieth century (The Romantic Rationalist, 23). To many, he is more than just an author, theologian, scholar, or storyteller, though he is certainly all of those. He is a father figure to some for his ability to capture your attention with his words and comfort your soul by sharing his knowledge of the nature of God. C.S. Lewis’ inspiring and thought-provoking works were influenced by his continuously agonizing trials, a constant search for joy in God, and his commitment to the seriousness of truth.

Firstly, Lewis’ poetic writing style and expansive creativity were partly influenced by the suffering he continuously endured. Randy Alcorn, another contributor to The Romantic Rationalist, states that “in World War I, Lewis was hit by shrapnel in three places, [and] one piece so close to his heart that it was never removed. By age nineteen he’d seen countless friends slaughtered in battle. For years, Doug Gresham says, Lewis suffered terrible nightmares about being back in the trenches” (109). Secondly, the other of some of the greatest adversities of Lewis would be that “at the age of fifty-seven, [Lewis] married Joy Davidman. And just short of their fourth anniversary, she died of cancer” (Piper, The Romantic Rationalist, 24). These two trials were even beside when his “mother died when he was nine years old” (Piper, The Romantic Rationalist, 22). Though each of these trials shaped his way of thinking and processing in different ways, they all ultimately prepared him for defending the strong and unwavering convictions and beliefs he had developed through discovering Christ in his suffering.

On the other hand, one of the most significant reasons C.S. Lewis had such a strong, deep, and profound form of writing was due to what he filled his mind with: a constant search for joy. Beginning from even the time of his boyhood, Lewis was always searching for the joy he could not find in this world, and he explained he had out-of-body feelings of “‘Northerness’: a bright shadow…of another world that awakened a yearning both for that world and for the experience of desiring that world” (Vanhoozer 87). He eventually came to the conclusion that “likening,” (illuminating what our current world is not for the sake of bringing out the greatest truths of our world) was one of the greatest forms of discovering who Christ truly was (Piper 32). This contentment, of course, brought him the most joy. Lewis even went as far as to only write fiction and stories for the last books he wrote because of his belief that it was his primary way of “defending the Christian faith” (Louis). Lewis ultimately believed in the fullness, constancy, and consistency of all truth in life. As Piper further explains, “he believed in the law of noncontradiction…that where this law was abandoned, not only was truth imperiled but romanticism and joy were imperiled as well” (The Romantic Rationalist 28). The clarity, boldness, and consistency of all his writings clearly reflect the purpose for which Lewis believed his life to have any purpose: holding fast to the life of Scripture.

Finally, Lewis’ commitment to Christian truth, the only truth, was probably the primary conviction that shaped his exceptionally profound words. For example, on the website Desiring God, John Piper again speaks of the life of Lewis, saying, “his trajectory and his instincts were toward orthodoxy and toward Scripture, and he embraced what the church had always taught. He wasn’t becoming a disillusioned fundamentalist like so many of the wayward teachers today” (“Why Honor C.S. Lewis”). Unlike the rapidly changing world he lived in, Lewis found that he would only fulfill the purpose he was given by living out the truth of the Word of God, which he came to know was the only truth after becoming a Christian. One of my favorite ways Lewis learned to stay truthful throughout all his speech and writing, though, was through keeping other scripture-minded friends close, such as J.R.R Tolkein. How Lewis’ mind was transformed through Tolkein’s words is obvious when reading what one BBC article gives as an example: “Tolkien convinced [C.S. Lewis] that myths were God's way of preparing the ground for the Christian story. The stories of resurrection throughout history were precursors to Jesus's true resurrection: Christianity was the completion of all the mythology before it” (“BBC - Religions”). While Tolkien was even like-minded with Lewis before Lewis converted to Christianity, he was probably Clive’s greatest form of accountability for his worldview and Christian walk as a writer.  

C. S. Lewis, a man most Christians consider a pioneer of the Bible-based works they read, was shaped in his writing by the humanly burdensome trials of his life, his search for joy (predominantly through real-world themes in fiction), and an unwavering commitment to the truth of the Word of God.