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Colin Duriez is a frequent writer and speaker on topic related to C.S. Lewis and his Inkling friends. Duriez is most recently the author of A Field Guide to Narnia. His other books include Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship, Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia, and The J.R.R. Tolkien Handbook. Duriez lives in Leicester, England and was recently in the U.S.

Why do you think the Chronicles of Narnia are Lewis's greatest achievement and will last the longest?

In the Chronicles, you get the presence of Lewis. You get the cast of his mind in a way that's unequalled in any of his other books. Lewis once said that the imaginative man in him was more basic than any other aspect. In the Chronicles, every part of him was brought into play: the depth of his intellect, the depth of his knowledge, the richness of his imagination. They all work organically together and achieved this remarkable series of not one, but seven connected books.

It's folly to predict the future, but being a fool, I'll say that maybe in 150 years it will be the Chronicles of Narnia that are the most remembered of Lewis's work.

In order to write to a post-Christian culture, Lewis used pre-Christian, pagan ideas.

C.S. Lewis's ideas about returning to a paganism before coming to Christian faith still apply today. He recognized that we live in a post-Christian world, and for him that was the most basic category when trying to understand present society. We talk about modernism and now postmodernism, but if Lewis was around I think he'd still be saying that the fact that we're post-Christian is more fundamental.

Contemporary people have no background at all in Christian faith. They need to be brought to paganism to prepare the way to become Christians, which is rather a provocative idea. But it was also part of the way he tried to rehabilitate the old Christian West. The "Old West" is what he called it. He and J.R.R. Tolkien tried to rehabilitate the values and virtues of this vast period, which goes back to the Classical times.

I'm not an expert on that period, but it seems to be a blend of pagan insights that are completed by a Christian understanding. Lots of pagan things are Christianized like Christmas. That seemed to be a strategy in the medieval period and before. Lewis and Tolkien carried on this mentality of fulfilling the insights people have as ordinary human beings into the nature of reality. Lewis and Tolkien had a kind of natural theology where they felt you could have insights into the nature of God's reality independent of scripture.

He uses that to sneak Christian theology into the pagan setting of the Chronicles.

He self consciously sneaks in those Christian insights. One of his books, Till We Have Faces, retells the classical story of Cupid and Psyche. It was a myth which to him had great meaning and power. He retold it in the form of a modern novel. It's set in pre-Christian times, and he explores the insight that it is possible to have within the pagan imagination that prefigure Christian truth.

Lewis's conversion was very much shaped by the arguments of Tolkien that the gospel narratives fulfill the very best of human storytelling and myth. They bring into clarity and sharp focus insights that are found throughout the world, not just in the West but also in the depths of human experience of reality.

[Till We Have Faces] actually has a lot of affinities to Tolkien because The Lord of the Rings has a pre-Christian setting, a Northern European setting. There's a wonderful shift in consciousness in [Orual's] part. I'm beginning to get more and more interested in the way C.S. Lewis tries to change consciousness in the reader, and I think he was deliberately trying to do this. By presenting an alternative world imaginatively, you actually can experience a different kind of consciousness, which gives you a perspective on your own world.

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June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48