The professor, the Christian, and the storyteller

POOR OLD C. S. LEWIS. There is something sad about his condition: to have become, 42 years after his death, a pawn in America's culture wars.

A native of Belfast, by profession a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford, he was an atheist in his youth but converted to Christianity at age 32. A few years later he discovered that he had a pronounced gift for explaining that Christianity to outsiders. Books like ''The Problem of Pain'' (1939) and ''The Screwtape Letters'' (1941) led to an invitation, during World War II, to give radio talks for the BBC; these talks, expanded into a 1943 book called ''Mere Christianity,'' made him famous enough that he showed up on the cover of Time magazine in 1947.

But none of this celebrity could have prepared him for being taken up by Hollywood. With the release of the new movie ''The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe'' (based on the first of Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven novels for children) there's perhaps more discussion of Lewis than ever-and perhaps too much talk about the Christian aspects of his fictional world.

To many churches, the movie presents itself as an irresistible ''evangelistic tool.'' (If you're at a loss to understand how that might work, check out the dozens of Narnia-focused sermons at sermoncentral.com; if ''Christ: the Overcoming Lion'' doesn't appeal to you, then perhaps ''Ten Tasty Tidbits about Turkish Delight'' will.) But some other folks-remembering the role supposedly played by evangelicals in the 2004 presidential election-think that the last thing we need is a greater role for religion in American public life, and are ready to punish Lewis for the crimes of his admirers, or at least to instruct those admirers. Thus Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker uses an essay on Lewis (in which, I must admit, he dismisses my own biography of Lewis) to explain why religious people like fantasy writing: ''because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship.'' (Thanks for clearing that up.)

Such controversy is unfortunate, not least because the debates hide from us some of the truly remarkable features of the Narnia books. After all, there's a long history of children's stories with deep Christian implications: George MacDonald's ''The Princess and the Goblin,'' Oscar Wilde's marvelous tale ''The Selfish Giant,'' Madeline L'Engle's ''A Wrinkle in Time'' and its sequels. But none of those other books draw upon vast knowledge of the intellectual history of the Middle Ages, memories of fighting on the Western Front, and their authors' deepest personal griefs in order to make stories for children.

It is often forgotten today that Lewis was a truly innovative scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature. In part this is Lewis's own fault: After all, he didn't have to accept the BBC's offer to become a radio celebrity, nor did he have to take time away from scholarship to write fiction and popular defenses of the Christian faith. (His Oxford colleagues found these decisions hard to forgive.) But the American medievalist Norman Cantor has shown that Lewis's first scholarly book, ''The Allegory of Love'' (1936), was a ''bold, original, seminal'' book that ''rocked the...world of medieval studies.''

Though ''The Allegory of Love'' dealt mainly with the ''courtly love'' tradition in medieval poetry-offering a subtle reading of how its frank endorsement of adultery related to its embrace of Christianity-in Lewis's Oxford lectures and in many essays he put that tradition in the context of other ideas. No one had studied more thoroughly than Lewis the enormously complex account of the structure and inhabitants of the whole universe that Lewis called the ''Medieval Model.'' And Lewis was able to show how these intellectual traditions interacted with an older, more primitive world of the Beowulf-like warrior. ''No one in the English-speaking world,'' writes Cantor, ''had up to then the learning, insight, and courage to attempt such a sophisticated definition of high medieval culture.''

The same range and ambition characterizes Lewis's biggest book, the history of Renaissance English literature (now called ''Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century'') that he spent 15 years laboring over. What could have been a dry-as-dust chronicle instead becomes a wonderfully dynamic and even funny book. He skewers the much-celebrated ''Renaissance humanists'' for their puritanical hostility to literature and the arts. He delights in neglected writers, and freely admits that some of the more famous figures of the period are total bores.

Most impressively, though, he begins the book with an overview of the whole intellectual culture of the period, beginning with a bravura passage about astrology, science, and magic. If we moderns see astrology and magic as similar activities, the scholars of the 16th century knew better, he argued: Astrology teaches us that none of our circumstances are within our control, magic that all of them are. Many astrologers of the time were Calvinists; the magicians by contrast reveled in ''dreams of power''-for them, magic was simply a technology.

Indeed, Lewis argued in one of his most striking passages, magic in the 16th century was virtually indistinguishable from science (then in its infancy). Sir Francis Bacon, that great father of the scientific method, was not a magician himself, but thought that the aspirations of magicians were ''noble.'' Magicians and scientists alike looked around them and saw a world that was lamentably out of their control. Thus, ''the serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one [magic] was sickly and died, the other [science] was strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse.'' And that impulse was power.

Who would have expected any such ideas to turn up in stories for children? Yet they do, in ''The Magician's Nephew''-the 1955 story now marketed as the first in the series because of its recounting of the creation of Narnia, though it was the last of the chronicles to be finished and the sixth to be published. Uncle Andrew (the magician of the title) practices magic, to be sure, but he acts and talks more like a scientist: He even uses guinea pigs. He identifies himself with those who ''possess hidden wisdom'' and are therefore ''freed from common rules.'' (''Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny.'') He considers himself free to employ even unwilling human beings in what he calls his ''experiments.'' A curious mixture of the utilitarian, the utopian dreamer, and the ruthless exploiter-always self-justified by his belief that he is a kind of ''superman''-he is, in other words, just what a Renaissance magician might have been like.

Lewis's love of what he called ''old books'' infiltrates the whole Narnia series. As a Lewis scholar named Michael Ward has recently argued, Lewis gave to each of the books the attributes associated with one of the heavenly bodies that were known and contemplated in the Middle Ages, from ''The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe'' (Jupiter) to ''The Last Battle'' (Saturn). And when he incorporates elements of pagan mythology (centaurs, fauns, Bacchus, and Silenus) and popular culture (Father Christmas) into the stories, along with clear echoes of Christian beliefs and practices, he is strictly following the example of one of his heroes, the 16th-century writer Sir Philip Sidney, author of the vast pastoral romance ''Arcadia.'' ''Theoretically we are all pagans in Arcadia,'' he writes of Sidney's world. ''Nevertheless, Christian theology is always breaking in.'' Remind you of anything?

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For some modern readers, of course, the way Christian theology breaks into the Narnia stories is just the problem-especially since it does so in ways that look a lot like the allegories that Lewis studied. Even Lewis's friend and colleague J.R.R. Tolkien, who ''cordially disliked'' allegory, despised the Narnia books precisely because of their mixing-up of very different worlds. (Note that Christianity is never so much as hinted at in ''The Lord of the Rings,'' though Tolkien considered it a thoroughly Christian book.)

Those who dislike Christianity itself can be far more harsh: Thus the English novelist Philip Hensher chastised Lewis a few years ago because his books ''corrupt the minds of the young with allegory,'' and suggested (only half-jokingly, I think) that parents should give their children ''Last Exit to Brooklyn'' to read rather than a Narnia tale. But like it or not, Lewis's reliance on the ideas, and the literary forms, of our distant ancestors is central to the world of Narnia. And the freedom with which he employs these long-forgotten ''old books'' makes the Narnia tales like no others.

This, however, is not the only highly unusual feature of Narnia-or the only respect in which Lewis brought his own quite ''adult'' experiences and interests to the writing of children's stories. Thanks in part to publicity for the forthcoming film, it's becoming better known how Lewis incorporated the chaos and brutality of his own horrific experiences as a soldier in World War I into his descriptions of battles in ''The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe'' and ''The Last Battle.'' But he also drew on other dark memories: for instance, of his mother's death, which happened when he was 9. When we meet Digory Kirke-the title character of ''The Magician's Nephew''-he is weeping because his mother is dying: ''Well, you know how it feels when you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before. That was how Digory felt.''

And it seems to me that even the loneliness and spiritual struggles that the middle-aged Lewis was going through as he wrote the Narnia books-he was quite miserable during that period of his life-are represented in them. In ''The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe'' he writes with obvious sympathetic knowledge of the grief Lucy and Susan share after the death of the great lion Aslan: ''I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been-if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you-you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.'' The emotional nakedness of such scenes was almost unheard of in children's stories of that time.

Philip Pullman, whose ''His Dark Materials'' trilogy is undergoing its own development for film, has condemned the Narnia books for racism, misogyny, and ''dishonesty.'' Misogyny I don't see; the most admirable character in the stories is a girl, and in general the girls come off better than the boys. Racism is more plausible: The Calormenes, those ''swarthy'' enemies of Narnia in their turned-up silk slippers, may have originated in a long-standing European fear of the Ottoman Turks, but they seem caricatured to us today. (And as long as the Western world lives in fear of Islamic militants, such images are not likely to make it into future Narnia movies.)

But dishonesty? Pullman bases this charge on Lewis's picture, in ''The Last Battle,'' of a heavenly Narnia, a blessed life after death. But surely it cannot be dishonest to write a story expressing what you actually believe, and Lewis believed in heaven. In fact, the Narnia books are noteworthy for their honesty-that is, their open and direct treatment of all that Lewis hoped, feared, or longed for. He never talks down to children; he never calculates his story on the basis of what they might be expected to understand. He brings his whole self to the stories, even his memories of a brutal war and his work among the ''old books'' of Oxford's Bodleian Library.

Such honesty and open-heartedness-and such skill in storytelling-ensure that the Narnia books will continue to be read long after Hollywood has used and forgotten them, and long after America's culture wars have changed beyond all recognition.

Alan Jacobs, a professor of literature at Wheaton College, is the author of ''The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis,'' recently published by HarperSanFrancisco.