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Surprised by Lewis
A surprising voice in support of this kind of culture-questioning paganism is that of C. S. Lewis. In all the praise of Lewis's superlative value as a Christian apologist, not much is said about his cautious defense of paganism. The old pagan world is implicit in nearly all of his fiction—from the thinly disguised (but wonderfully baptized) Norse and Celtic world of Narnia, to the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche in Till We Have Faces, to the Greek-god-like oyarsu in the Space Trilogy.

But Lewis is even more explicit in his affirmation of paganism as a way that opens people to the true God. In Surprised by Joy, the story of his conversion, Lewis wrote: "Sometimes I can almost think I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself."

His most explicit approval of paganism is in the early, allegorical account of his conversion, Pilgrim's Regress. In that story, John, the main character, seeks an island in the east—he is really seeking God, but doesn't know it yet—and he encounters a hermit in a cave, who speaks with the voice of history. The hermit explains that all the people in that country are estranged from God (the Landlord), but that the Landlord keeps getting messages through about himself. Often they come in pictures—what we might call mythology. He makes a distinction between "the shepherd people" who had "the rules" (the Jews with the revealed Law) and "the pagans" who had the pictures (mythology):

The truth is that a Shepherd is only half a man, and a Pagan is only half a man, so that neither people was well without the other, nor could either be healed until the Landlord's Son came into the country . …

What Lewis suggests is that authentic paganism—a response, however confused, to the rich and inarticulate mystery of creation—is part of the basic humanity which ought to flourish and be healed in the new life of the gospel. As he puts it even more vividly in the same section of Pilgrim's Regress:

as often as men become Pagans again, the Landlord again sends them pictures and stirs up sweet desire and so leads them back to Mother Kirk [the Christian church] even as he led the actual Pagans long ago. There is, indeed, no other way. … That is the definition of a Pagan—a man so travelling that if all goes well he arrives at Mother Kirk's chair and is carried over this gorge . …

The same pattern is implicit in Scripture on those few occasions when Paul addresses mainly pagan audiences. At Lystra, for example, Barnabas and he are mistaken for Zeus and Hermes. And though he begs them to forsake as "worthless things" the bulls, wreaths, and sacrifice of their ritual, he continues by declaring that the very goodness of creation to which their worship is a response is a gift of the one true God

who made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them. … He has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy. (Acts 14:15, 17, NIV)

Paul repeats the same theme in the more sophisticated Athens, going so far to identify the "unknown god" of an altar with "the God who made the world and everything in it … who gives all men life and breath," who "is not far from each of us" and in whom, Paul says (quoting with approval a pagan poet), "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:24-28). Paul's strategy is first of all to affirm the divine gift and goodness of the cycles of creation—crops, sun, rain, and the joy of being alive; and then to agree that the source of all that good should be worshiped, not the gods of human invention, but the God who is revealed in Jesus: "what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you."

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November 15 1999, Vol. 43, No. 13