In the works of C.S. Lewis, find Christian truth in fantasy

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Before his conversion to Christianity, C.S. Lewis was stopped by a railway bookseller while preparing to board a train. He purchased a copy of George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women, a book that ended up changing his life. This book, Lewis claims in Surprised by Joy (HarperOne), baptized his imagination. It began the process of preparing him for the story of the gospel.

It was MacDonald who showed Lewis a new way of reaching people: not through apologetics or theology but through imagination. Although this transition took a while to come to fruition, reading Phantastes made Lewis seek to do for others what he claimed MacDonald had done for him.

Even before his conversion Lewis was drawn toward storytelling and imagination. In his autobiography Lewis describes how as an atheist he believed that all the things he loved most—Norse myths and legends, Celtic myths, fairy stories—were lies: beautiful lies to be sure, but lies nevertheless. The things he believed most true, meanwhile—that the world is built on materialistic and atheistic principles—left him empty.

Read the rest at U.S. Catholic Magazine.

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