The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis

With book sales exceeding 200 million copies, a billion-dollar film industry, and a bookshelf of critical, philosophical, and popular works, C.S. Lewis is at once the beloved author of The Chronicles of Narnia and a leading twentieth-century English-speaking Christian public intellectual. Given the sheer diversity of Lewis's writing, what holds all this together? What is the beating heart of Lewis' work? Among C.S. Lewis scholars, there is near-unanimous agreement with British philosopher Owen Barfield's claim that, "what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything." In The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis, Brenton D. G. Dickieson argues that what Lewis reveals throughout his writings is a cross-shaped, or cruciform, spirituality. As an instinctive and integrative writer of spiritual theology, Lewis believed that "death is at the root of the whole matter"--that God's self-surrender in Christ through death on a cross and subsequent resurrection is the normative pattern for a healthy spiritual life. This death-and-resurrection pattern unites Lewis's Christian thought and produces a hopeful and evocative spirituality that is embedded in his poetry and prose. By reconsidering him as a spiritual theologian, Dickieson uncovers a six-point "Logic of Cruciformity" in Lewis's apologetics that is embedded in narrative form throughout his other works. The shape of the cross is the shape of Lewis's spiritual theology. With the "upsidedownedness" of childlike wonder, Lewis reveals what Dickieson calls a "Theology of the Small," filled with "sacred paradoxes" and offering a hopeful, transformative invitation to spiritual life.