RELIGION: Reluctant Converts.

HAD someone told Clive Staples Lewis in 1918 that eighty years thence the English-speaking world would be celebrating the centenary of his birth, he might just have been sufficiently full of himself to believe it. Where utter incredulity would have set in is if his informant had told him how he would become world-famous: as a Christian apologist, the Apostle to the Post-Christians.

The story has been told many times, first and best in Lewis's own memoir, Surprised by Joy: As a young man he was a devoted atheist. But through his reading, through his friendships, and above all through a piercing sense of joy that drew him toward something he could not fathom, he was led, "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England," to submit himself to God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Gradually his intellectual assent warmed into love, and he was moved to share the good news, in prose and verse, fiction and non-fiction.

Becoming one of the world's best-known and best-loved Christians is not the only way in which Jack Lewis's life failed to go according to plan. His dream was to become a major poet. In fact, he wrote verse all his life, technically superb but virtually unnoticed in the circles where poetic reputations are made. In his next ambition, to become a professional philosopher, he fared even worse. None of the Oxford colleges offered him a position, and so he was obliged to teach English literature instead. The final twist was Oxford's never offering him a professorship (a much rarer position than in this country). It remained for Oxford's rival, Cambridge, to make him Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature in 1955, evoking his glorious introductory lecture, "De Descriptione Temporum."

During his Oxford years, Lewis produced the scholarly works The Allegory of Love (about the development of the courtly-love tradition in medieval Europe) and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Out of fashion in the modern academy, both of these works are well worth the time of serious readers. But Lewis also-to the disdain of many of his academic colleagues-produced fiction, all of it with a Christian intent, sometimes overt, often hidden. He would say of The Chronicles of Narnia, "My purpose was to slip this tale [of Our Lord's death and resurrection] past the watchful dragons" of the reader's self-consciousness. And he produced straightforward little books with titles like Miracles, The Problem of Pain, and The Abolition of Man (this last about the mid twentieth century's turning away from an understanding of the good life that had been embraced by most civilized societies).

Lengthier explorations of Lewis's life and work will appear in two books out this fall from Spence Publishing: C. S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections, by John Lawlor, and Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis, by James Como; last year saw the publication of the magisterial C. S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide, by Walter Hooper.

For the moment, however, I would like to offer myself as an exhibit, in much the same way (if incommensurables may be thus compared) as Lewis offered himself in "De Descriptione." Lewis was a specimen of Old Western Man. I am a specimen of Modern Post-Christian, now converted. As Lewis points out, a post-Christian is not a pagan:

It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are "relapsing into Paganism." . . . What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity "by the same door as in she went" and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan . . . The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.

I first ran into C. S. Lewis when I was an undergraduate at the University of Southern California. In researching some long-since-forgotten topic, I came across his Experiment in Criticism and found it captivating.

Then in 1969 I came to NR as the summer editorial assistant. My last week there, a letter came in from one Henry Noel wondering if fellow readers had any interest in forming a C. S. Lewis Society. The letter was duly printed in "Notes & Asides," and a couple of years later, having returned to NR, I answered a letter from a tough-minded New England lady named Hope Kirkpatrick, who identified herself as "Secretary, New York C. S. Lewis Society." She invited me to a meeting; I enjoyed the company and became a member.

But I still avoided Lewis's explicitly religious works, concentrating instead on the literary side of his output, including what to my mind is his truly great novel, Till We Have Faces. This work has as its theme pride, forgiveness, and redemption, but in form it is a modern novel and hence (for I had been brought up on Forster and Conrad and Ford Madox Ford) accessible to me-able to slip past my watchful dragons.

My problem was very different from the young Lewis's. He did not want God to exist, God Who, as Lewis once put it, was "prepared to torture me forever and ever if I should fail in coming up to an almost impossible ideal." I did want Him to exist, but feared that I was coming to accept as real a brilliant fiction. Of course, if I had dared to plunge into the Gospels I would have seen that that view of Jesus Christ is unsustainable. No one writing a fiction would have written it that way, with a central character at once so solid and so elusive. A breakthrough on this front came not thanks to any theologian or apologist but to the actor Alec McCowen: admiring his other work I went to his public readings of the Gospel According to St. Mark and was astonished by the urgency and down-to-earthness of the story.

And so I muddled along, accepting with greater frequency friends' invitations to join them at Mass, until gradually I realized that as I joined in saying the Creed I was assenting to more and more of it. But by that time I had absorbed enough (not least from Lewis) to know that giving assent was not sufficient; there had to be a sacramental ratification of the assent, and that meant finding a parish. It was Holy Week 1995 at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Manhattan that I finally surrendered.

And so it was less as a guide along the road than as a seal of acceptance that, as I walked across town to my office from St. Mary's, having arranged to receive the sacrament of Holy Baptism, I popped into the Logos bookstore and picked up Reflections on the Psalms. I read it twice through that summer. Next came The Four Loves. I'm glad I hadn't read them earlier. I might have found a passage like this excessive:

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing-or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God-the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up.

But of course I was wrong about those books' being less a guide than a seal. The baptismal font was in one sense a destination, but it was more importantly a gateway to the next stage of the journey into God's love. And once I was able to read Lewis against the background of Scripture-in which virtually everyone in Western society would have been raised until a couple of generations ago-I found that he helps connect it to our own day. And that role, which the twenty-year-old Lewis would never have predicted for himself, is the principal one that the self-styled dinosaur of "De Descriptione" had come to embrace as his own.