Naria has brought the daggers out in New York.

Perhaps afraid urban liberals might take a bit too deep a look into Lewis, and most particularly his odious Christian apologetics, The New Yorker tells its sheltered readers everything they need to know about the man.

And that is (a) not much, and (b) lies.

I hate to use the word "lies"; it sounds too strong, too over the top. And so sadly overused by certain partisans. But what do you do when you're living in a society in which the meda are this shameless?

He also took up with a much older married woman, with whom he had a long affair that may have had a sadomasochistic tinge.

According to witnesses, the woman in question was a widow, not married. And she was 25 years's Lewis's senior. And there was nothing at all suspicious about the situation. The New Yorker also does not tell its audience that she was the mother of Lewis's best friend during the great war, Paddy Moore, and that each had sworn a solemn vow to take care of the other's surviving relatives -- Moore, Lewis's father, and Lewis, Paddy's mom -- should the other be killed.

Paddy was killed. Lewis kept his promise.

To most of us, this would seem quite a reasonable explanation. And would seem in line with what those who knew him at the time reported. Coupled with the fact that Lewis had been deeply hurt by the loss of his own mother at age 10, it probably did Lewis good to have a surrogate mother to care for. But people will see the world through their own eyes, no doubt.

(As Lewis wasn't even a believer at the time, I don't think any of his fans would scandalized even if the charge did have substance.)

Next, here's a fragment of author Adam Gopnik's redaction of Lewis's conversion:

All existence, Tolkien insisted on that night ramble, was intrinsically mythical; the stars were the fires of gods if you chose to see them that way, just as the world was the stories you made up from it. If you were drawn to myth at all, as Lewis was, then you ought to accept the Christian myth just as you accepted the lovely Northern ones. By the end of the walk, Lewis was, or was about to become, a churchgoer.

As depicted by the author, Lewis doesn't convert to Christianity but Anglicanism. He doesn't have a life-changing conversion, he simply becomes a "churchgoer." (Perhaps an earlier state was mere "non-churchgoing", rather than passionate atheism?)

Gopnik continues in this vein, chastising Lewis for a narrow-mindedness Gopnik imputes:

It is perfectly possible, after all, to have a rich romantic and imaginative view of existence—to believe that the world is not exhausted by our physical descriptions of it, that the stories we make up about the world are an important part of the life of that world—without becoming an Anglican.

First, the depiction of Lewis as primarily "an Anglican" seems grossly ignorant. Lewis is primarily known for his defense of "Mere Christianity" -- producing an apologetic of the same name -- a phrase by which Lewis meant the essential parts of Christianity which all denominations shared. In his writings, Lewis clearly depicts himself as first a Christian, and second, an Anglican. It is telling that Gopnik needs to reduce Lewis's conversion experience to nothing more than adopting the habit of visiting the local parish.

Regarding the other point, Lewis was deeply imaginative before his conversion, as even Gopnik admits! Lewis never argues that you can't have an "imaginative view of existence" outside of Christianity -- just that in it, he found Myth and Fact joined in a more perfect union than he'd found elsewhere.

Converted to faith as the means of joy, however, Lewis never stops to ask very hard why this faith rather than some other.

"Having drawn his conclusions in advance, Gopnik never actually stops to read Lewis's works to see if anything he imagines about Lewis must be true..."

Before his conversion, Lewis was an atheist, with strong pagan sympathies and a deep interest in Hinduism. His apologetic works are almost entirely his account of his struggle with question of whether "this faith" is truer than any other.

For example, as a test, I opened my copy of Lewis's God in the Dock at random. This is what my eyes first fell upon:

In a religion like Buddhism, if you took away the miracles attributed to Gautama Buddha in some very late sources, there would be no loss; in fact, the religion would get on much better without them because in that case the miracles largely contradict the teaching. Or even in a religion like Mohammedanism [the term for "Islam" in Lewis's time] nothing essential would be altered if you took away the miracles... But you cannot do that with the Christian story because the Christian story is precisely the story one one grand miracle [God's incarnation, death, and resurrection].

(I'd say Lewis was dead on: American Buddhism was indeed stripped of it's miraculous elements, and is doing better in their absense. And the same is true of Islam, where there miraculous aspects of the faith are currently downplayed to potential Western converts: "Although the Koran explicitly denies that Muhammad performed any miracles, his followers soon credited him with many miraculous feats. Muslims, however, have always attributed their religion to God alone and repudiate any suggestion of the prophet's divinity.")

One may or may not agree with each of Lewis's arguments on the subject of comparative religion, but to argue Lewis never even asked such questions is collossal dishonesty -- a bit like admonishing Martha Stewart for never having dabbled in the kitchen! (Or the stock market!)

Undaunted by these deficiencies, Gopnik continues:

His favorite argument for the truth of Christianity is that either Jesus had to be crazy to say the things he did or what he said must be true, and since he doesn’t sound like someone who is crazy, he must be right.

Gopnik can't even get his subject's most famous argument right! (No wonder New York elites are so clueless about the rest of the world.)

First, Lewis's argument here wasn't about whether Christianity was ultimately true: he just attempted to point out it was dishonest to call the biblical Jesus a "nice guy" or "great teacher" based on the things he said: "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher."

Second, it was posed as tri-lemma, not a mere choice between crazy and "right" -- it was of, course, also an option that Jesus was lying. It's a minor point, but rather telling regarding the pains (or lack thereof) Gopnik must have taken to ensure accuracy towards his subject.

Lewis insists that the Anglican creed isn’t one spiritual path among others but the single cosmic truth that extends from the farthest reach of the universe to the house next door...

Again, Lewis's prime concern was "Mere Christianity", parts of which (of course) he illustrated with citations of his own sect's creed -- which were taken, in turn from the bible itself.

And yes, Lewis did feel Christianity was, in fact, true, and gave a blizzard of reasons, volume upon volume, for his stance. Rather than engage them, Gopnik draws a curtain over them suggests his audience pay no mind: there's nothing back there to see.

Gopnik, his nose ever extending:

He is never troubled by the funny coincidence that this one staggering cosmic truth also happens to be the established religion of his own tribe...

Lewis (one example):

The story of the Incarnation is the story of descent and resurrection.... does not the Christian religion show this pattern of descent and re-ascent because that is part of the nature religions of the world? We have read about it in The Golden Bough. We all know about Adonis, and the story of the rest of those rather tedious people; is it not one more instance of the same thing, 'the dying God?'

Well, yes it is. That is what makes the question subtle. What the anthropological critic of Christianity is always saying is perfectly true. Christ is a figure of that sort. And here comes a curious thing. When I first, after childhood, read the Gospels, I was full of that stuff about that dying God... it was to me a very mysterious, and poetic, and quickening idea; and when I turned to the Gospels never will I forget my disappointment and repulsion at finding hardly anything about it at all....

You had a dying God, Who was the representative of the corn, holding the corn, that is, bread, in his hand, and saying, 'This is My Body', and from my point of view, as I then was, He did not seem to realize what He was saying.... why was it that the only case of the dying God which conceivably might have been historical occurred among a people (and the only people in the Mediterranean world) who had not got any trace of this nature religion, and indeed seemed to know nothing about it? Why was it among them the thing suddenly appears to have happened?

I haven't the enthusiasm to type the rest of it in, but Lewis goes on to discuss the question at significant length. If his answer interests you, read his essay "The Grand Miracle" in God in the Dock.

But the point remains: contrary to Adam Gopnik's fantasy, in which C.S. Lewis never even asks the question, it appears this question initially repelled him from Christianity, and probably informed his atheism, and that C.S. Lewis not only asked it, but documented the many answers to it which had converted him from an atheist to a Christian apologist.

I was also amazed to see, in Gopnik's imaginative version of our universe, Lewis's university -- post-war Oxford -- depicted as a bastion of Christian belief!

Gopnik ends his section on Lewis' theology with this charge:

His Christianity is local, English and Irish and Northern. Even Roman Catholicism remained alien to him...

Reality intrudes again:

When Lewis was working on Mere Christianity, he had Book II vetted by Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian clergymen, to avoid any hint of denominational bias creeping in. In a telling passage in Allegory of Love he recognises the potential flaws in both the Catholic and the Protestant paths.

Gopnik closes this section with his summary of Lewis's apologetic works: "Believing shut Lewis off from writing well about belief." ("Writing well", no doubt, as an antagonist to Lewis's faith would define it. Lewis's books on the subject continue to fly off bookstore shelves at a rate Gopnik -- who is, I might add, a rival children's book author -- could only envy. And perhaps does.)

After these whoppers, the rest of the essay is simply a literary polemic against Lewis: Lewis's fantasy works were ruined by a slavish "duty" to his beliefs:

[Regarding early works:] ... his Christian duty insists that the marvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with belief. He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or, at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just what it’s supposed to say.

[Regarding Naria:] ...though he could encompass his obsessions, he could not entirely surrender to his imagination. The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies.

(I wish I could write works which were so similarly 'ruined' that they were loved by generations of readers and made into movies. Although I haven't yet read Narnia, I'm sure Gopnik must be right: surely the point where Alsan sacrifices himself is one of the most emotionally flat points of the story.)

But hey, nobody knows as much as a New York critic, eh? If only he would have been around to give Lewis this advice -- who knows how much better-loved Lewis's books could have been? ;-)

And, speaking of knowing everything, and nothing at all, here's Gopnik's closing line:

Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol, who has exasperated generations of freethinking parents and delighted generations of worried Anglicans, is, after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son—not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure.

Yeah, what a "weird", un-biblical idea, picturing God or Jesus as a lion!

This is what the LORD says to me: "As a lion growls, a great lion over his prey... so the LORD Almighty will come down to do battle on Mount Zion and on its heights." (Isaiah 31:4)

Then one of the elders said to me, "Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David [i.e. Jesus] has triumphed." (Revelations 5:5)

C.S. Lewis could have learned so much from Gopnik!

As I'm sure New Yorkers will.