I am an actor.
Since 1998, I have been performing solo versions of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters.
I usually get hired to perform these works by evangelical institutions: churches and schools. I am happy to perform for these audiences. However, my original intent was never to “preach to the choir.” I selected those works because my original intent was to perform for a secular audience, who, I thought, needed those stories the most. Lewis was a skeptic writing for skeptics, and no Christian author has, I think, more handily earned the trust of the agnostic reader.
My mom got me my first copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when I was in second grade, around the time I was preparing for my First Communion. I avidly read the rest of The Chronicles of Narnia.
If someone had told me then that Aslan was an allegory for Jesus, I would have been surprised. My experience of Aslan was that a kid could play with him. You could chase him around and bury your arms in the fur of his mane. Hugging Aslan would easily be as good as hugging your mom or dad. The Jesus I learned about in Catholic school was not one you wanted to hug. You’d get blood on you. That Jesus looked at me with soulful, hurt eyes. He pointed at his many wounds, and said, “You did this to me.” The specter of hell lurked behind that Jesus. Without Lewis and (later) Tolkien, the religion of my youth would have been a grim, joyless, confounding thing.
Lewis and Tolkien kept God alive to me throughout my spiritual formation and beyond. The way they did so can, I think, be allegorically understood through the story of a math teacher I once heard of. This teacher would start her students with a simple problem that everyone could solve. Then she’d slowly introduce them to harder, more complex iterations of the same sort of problem. If a student was confused or doubtful, the teacher would point back to the previous, simple problems. She’d say, “See how the problems are alike? It’s the same baby in a different dress.”
Lewis and Tolkien, with their original and sophisticated myths, dressed up the baby of the Gospel in a different dress. In the transfer, they stripped the Gospel of the many alienating associations that church teachers had, intentionally or not, tacked onto the material.
As I grew older, I met more and more people who were hostile to Christianity. And I noticed their reflexive rejection of anything that smacked of Scripture or liturgy. As Shakespeare observed, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” and skeptics learn when young that sophists can easily quote Scripture out of context to con and cow people. And any language that sounds like it might come from a missal or sermon reminds one quickly of the bloodless and interminable droning of church and Sunday school, which seem to have nothing to do with the dynamism, terror, and adventure of events like the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Resurrection. Many of our religion teachers are (of necessity) volunteers; few are paid well, and almost none are trained theologians. By the time we are thirteen, we have had a great deal of bad instruction – some of it merely dull, some of it downright heretical, and much of it nonsensical. Small wonder that people fall away from Christianity.
Lewis and Tolkien pulled an end-run around these negative associations, and reignited the imagination of generations of readers to the excitement and honesty of a real relationship with a living God.
In the many years that I’ve performed my adaptations of Lewis’s work, The Great Divorce, in particular, has been well-received by even the most cynical secular audiences. One of the virtues of Lewis’s work is that it illustrates how much of Christian wisdom can be understood by the light of mere reason and is just good psychology and philosophy. As regards the higher mysteries, Lewis (especially in his later writings) does not pretend to understand them fully, but merely points in their direction, up into the heights of the mountains.
In my performances, I always hoped (vainly) to hear conversion stories from audience members. I never did. But after one performance of The Great Divorce, an audience member told me that while her mother – a hardened atheist – was not converted by the performance, she was now open to the discussion of subjects which had been a closed book for her for decades. That audience member called the performance a “sod-breaker” for her mom. I’ll take it.
I was in my thirties before I learned that Tolkien was a devout Catholic. It was only then that I realized the gifts he had given me over the years, without my ever knowing. Subconsciously, I had absorbed through his work vivid and lively illustrations of the Suffering Servant; of Incarnation and Resurrection; of the bewilderment and inevitability of sin and error; of the light of truth and love coming to us through layers of darkness in a fallen world. He shows us, again and again, our desperate need for a mercy and succor that comes from outside of this world. He shows us that this divine aid often comes to us transcendently through our fellow mortals; and, very often, we have done little to deserve it. Tolkien’s work is replete with examples of God working in mysterious ways. He showed me the rigor of faith, the stabbing light of hope in darkness, and the might of love against overwhelming opposition. Perhaps most importantly, he showed me (in the hobbits) the holiness of innocence and simplicity.
My understanding is that the Inklings wrote the books that they would have liked to read. What they wrote was the best mythology they could devise – a mythology that attested to the transcendent reality they found behind the curtain of phenomena.
Of course, the Inklings’ understanding of myth was very specific and sophisticated. Myth, to them, was not falsehood or fantasy, or even allegory, but a way of talking about otherwise inarticulable reality. In Miracles, Lewis says that myth is a “real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.” In The Allegory of Love, he says myth reaches after “some transcendental reality which the forms of discursive thought cannot contain.”
The writings of the Inklings convinced me that myth is the very best way to address the mysteries of the Invisible. Even in their own writings, it is when they (especially Lewis) write in more concrete terms that they are less persuasive. Apologetic works like Miracles are far less persuasive, to me at least, than Till We Have Faces, where Lewis writes: “the gods … dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places.” He might have been paraphrasing his “master,” George MacDonald, who wrote:
If I am told that I am not definite – that something more definite is needed, I say your definiteness is one that God does not care about, for he has given no such system as you desire. … He is not, I grant you, for the kind of definiteness you would have, which is to reduce the infinite within the bounds of a legal document; but for life, for the joy of deliverance, for the glory of real creation, for the partaking of the divine nature, for the gaining of a faith that shall remove mountains, and for deliverance from all the crushing commonplaces of would-be teachers of religion, who present us with a God so poor and small that to believe in him is an insult to him who created the human heart.[i]
Anthony Lawton has acted in Philadelphia for twenty-nine years. Favorite roles include George in Of Mice and Men (Walnut); Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet (Arden); and Feste in Twelfth Night (PSF). In 2015, Lawton wrote The Light Princess, which garnered eight Barrymore nominations, winning two. Film: Silver Linings Playbook, Unbreakable, Invincible; TV: Hack, Cold Case. He performs solo productions of The Devil and Billy Markham, The Great Divorce, and The Screwtape Letters. For more information on these shows, go to: www.anthonylawtonactor.com.
[i] Rolland Hein, George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2014), 362-363.