Louis Markos has written a great deal about C. S. Lewis and the books that Lewis loved - the classics. He and I discuss the connections and how we can all benefit from reading more of Lewis and the books that pointed him to “The True Myth.”

Resources:

• • C.S. Lewis for Beginners by Louis Markos (2022).
  • From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics by Louis Markos (2007)

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Louis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and today, my conversation partner is Louis Markos. Louis, welcome to Questions That Matter.

Thanks, Randy. It's good to be on.

Louis Markos, for those of you who may not be familiar, is a professor at Houston Christian University. He's written 25 books, which I think is more than I've read. No, that's not true. But he's written quite a bit about C.S. Lewis, quite a bit about the Christian life, quite a bit about classic literature and classic approaches to education and how that can shape our discipleship. So I've been looking forward to this for quite a while. I loved your course that you put together for the Great Courses on the life and writings of C.S. Lewis. We'll put all sorts of links in the show notes, but I certainly hope that our listeners know about those Great Courses because, my goodness, what a great wealth there is there. But Louis, you're a professor at Houston Christian University. Why don't we start with a commercial? Tell us a little bit about HCU.

Well, until about six months ago, it was called Houston Baptist University, or HBU, and we've changed our name. We've not changed anything else about ourselves. In some ways, it's more accurate. We are nondenominational at heart. It is Baptist, but really mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis, is where our heart is. Robert Sloan is our president, he used to be the president of Baylor, and we're hoping to just cast a little bit of a wider net. I’m happy to say that we've not only stayed orthodox in terms of theology, Randy, we have stayed orthodox in terms of sexuality, marriage, the body, all that sort of stuff, and we've even put that on our website. I don't know if we'll be struck down by lightning. Well, the bad kind of lightning. But we've tried to maintain that. What is unique, though, about HCU and what drew me there is, although it is a Christian school, and everybody that works there, teach or administration, has to sign a nondenominational statement of faith, our students come from every background. That includes as much as ten percent Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish students, atheists, agnostics, Christians of every variety. And so I like it because it is a place where I can help disciple believers, but it's also a mission field. And because we live in Houston, we are maybe, if not surely, the most diverse school in the country.  Not just, as you think, black, white, Hispanic, but everybody, like from all over Asia, from all over Latin America, from Egypt, from the Philippines, Vietnam, India, Pakistan. The whole world is here. And so it is… Yeah, I’m sure, Randy, you're used to people talking about revelation and the idea of the multi-ethnic church. We are the multi-ethnic school, drawing together all the nations. And I've been teaching there 32 years. Can you believe it?

Oh, that's really wonderful! I've thought about that, because I knew that about the school. It's a Christian university, and yet you have an evangelistic opportunity there. How wonderful! That’s really, really great! Well, let's shift to… I want to tell our listeners. I want to talk to Louis about a very, very new book he's written, C.S. Lewis for Beginners, and then an older book that was written several years ago about the classics and why Christians should read the classics. But let's start with the Lewis book. So it's really fun. I like this book. It's an intro book to C.S. Lewis, C.S. Lewis for Beginners. It's got cartoons in it, or pictures. I enjoyed that, but tell us what you were hoping for for that book.

It's a really wonderful book. I try to balance, Randy, between just writing books out of my own head and praying I can find a publisher. And sometimes, when publishers approach me, I try to do it as long as I feel like it's within my wheelhouse, and this is a whole big publishing company called For Beginners. And they've published everything: Plato for Beginners, Postmodernism for Beginners, everything you could possibly think of. And they approached me directly to do C.S. Lewis, and by the way, I followed up with Tolkien for Beginners, so I've got two books with them.

Oh, great!

And their concept is it's for beginners, but I go pretty deep. I've got about 40,000 words in there. So it is very substantial. But it's called “for beginners” because it's richly illustrated, and it is a kind of comic book illustration. And they're not only helpful and illustrated, they’re often very funny and very witty at the same time. And I write my words, about 40,000 words, and then the illustrator comes in and makes pictures. Now, I knew it was going to be illustrated, Randy, so I made sure that almost everything I said was pithy. Short paragraphs, things like that. I tried to visualize it. And oftentimes, he came up with stuff that was in my head, and I suggested other things which he did, so it was a lot of fun. But it gave me a chance to give a sort of primer on C.S. Lewis that had some depth.

So after a biography, I go through all of his major books. And I start with a little bit of trivia about the books, then I give a synopsis, and then I choose important themes that I still think resonate today. So you're getting his fiction, you’re getting his nonfiction, you’re getting his apologetics, you’re getting his literary criticism. It gave me a way to get to the core of Lewis and define connections. And I did one other thing: Lewis was also a very, very prolific essayist. He's what we call a man of letters or a public intellectual. And so, at the end of every chapter which is about a book, I've got a little section where I say, “Here are some essays that you can read that have some of the same themes.”

Yes.

So I'm hoping it will help folks that don't know where to begin with the essays. They can pick and choose. So that was a lot of fun. And, again, it'll whet your appetite, but even if you're a big Lewis fan, you'll learn new things, I promise.

Oh! And I will certainly say that, because I think I'm a big Lewis fan, I know I am, but just reading parts of that book, C.S. Lewis for Beginners, it’s like, “Oh, okay. That's how that….” And I love the ties you make. So you've read this book. Here, read this essay, and yeah. I think it's a great service. Well, let me push a little bit deeper because sometimes I think, if Lewis heard us talking so much about Lewis, I think after a certain point, he'd be kind of disturbed. It's like, “Wait a minute. You're focusing on me. I want you to focus on the Lord. I want you to focus on the reason I wrote those books, not just me.” So let me—if I can ask you a very personal question. You’ve delved into Lewis on an academic level. You’re teaching about him. You’re reading him. How has all of that shaped your own spiritual growth, your own discipleship?

It's an interesting story, Randy, because I grew up… all four of my grandparents were born in Greece and immigrated to America almost a hundred years ago now. And so I grew up in the Greek Orthodox Church. I came to know Christ in the Orthodox Church. Later on, God moved me into the evangelical world. And yet, when I was young, our priest, who referred to himself as a born-again Christian, that was big in the seventies, he gave us, when we graduated levels of Sunday school, a copy of Mere Christianity and Screwtape Letters. And so I read them very young. And I noticed, many years later, when I went back and reread them again and again, how much they had influenced the way I think about Christianity, the way I make connections. Let me just give you a couple of examples that have just changed my mind and the way I focus on things:

In Mere Christianity, Lewis says something that I think all Christians struggle with. We all know, Randy, that we're supposed to love the sinner but hate the sin. But isn't that impossible? How can anybody possibly love the sinner and hate the sin? And then Lewis said—in his signature simplicity and profundity, he said, “We all know how to love the sinner and hate the sin, because we all do it every single day to ourselves,” right? When I do something that's kind of nasty or peevish or mean spirited, I hate what I've done, but I continue to love myself. In fact, the very reason I hate what I've done is because I know that I'm capable of more than that. I'm like, “That’s not the kind of person I am. Why did I say that thing? That was so mean!” So we all know how to do it. We just need to extend it to other people.

And Lewis taught me another thing, closely related, also in Mere Christianity. We should judge a person not by their raw material, but by what they do with that raw material. Now that doesn't mean we're… we're still guilty. We have original sin. But when we say, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” when we’re told this, how do we do that? Okay. Look, even though I'm very conservative, one group of people that I never lampoon or make fun of are the people that were dodge drafters during the Vietnam War. Now, I'm very conservative. I don't agree with what they did. But I say to myself, “How do I know what I would have done if I was in their position?” That doesn't mean I call black white and I call white black. But I learned to see from that person's point of view, and we need to… we give them grace. We don't say that sin is not sin. Sin is still sin, but we can find grace. And when the Bible tells us to love our enemy, it doesn't mean have warm, fuzzy feelings towards your enemy. It means treat your enemy as if you love them. And then you may end up learning to love them.

So that's just like a sort of constellation of some of the things Lewis talks about in Mere Christianity, mostly book three. And it's that kind of stuff that, throughout my life, it's helped to give me a framework for looking at myself, for understanding other people, for living in Christ, right? And of course the other great thing is one of the reasons Lewis is the greatest apologist in the twentieth century is nobody has ever balanced reason and imagination with such grace and power.

Oh, yeah!

And so Lewis helped me to see that I love the Lord my God with all my mind, but with all my heart and with all my imagination as well, that Christ is Lord over all of that. And I've gotta stop being…. Again, especially Baptists, I’m Baptist. So often, we trust the reason, but we're suspicious of imagination. Well, both of those things are made by God, and they can be used for good or they can be used for evil. But we have to be careful in the way we're too dismissive of imagination.

Are you interested in learning more about our triune God? The C.S. Lewis Institute award-winning website has some excellent resources that can help you with that. So go to www.cslewisinstitute.org—sorry for all those letters—and type in triune God in the search bar. You'll find articles there by Tom Schwanda, Kevin Vanhooser, Andy Bannister, Stephen Eyre, and others that can help you deepen your understanding of our great and magnificent triune God.

Good. Yeah. You know, as you're talking, I'm thinking…. There was just this really, really humble honesty that Lewis had about himself, and I think it's because he didn't become a Christian until later in life, and so he had all those years of things to regret and to feel bad about once he became a Christian and yet to marvel that he was forgiven of all of that, so it was almost like a playfulness or a laughing at himself a little bit.

Louis, I want to talk about a different book that you've written. It's called From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics. And, I mean, there's a million more things we could talk about C.S. Lewis, but this is a unique twist that I haven't seen too many places. My guess is that some of our listeners heard the word pagan, and they may have started breaking out in hives. And so tell us what in the world you mean by this book? Why should Christians read the pagan classics?

Well, let me make the bridge from C.S. Lewis to my book, and the bridge is by way… I've got like a trilogy of books that deal with this topic: From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics, from Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith, but the third one is called The Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes, and it's that phrase, “the myth made fact” that is the important one. So let me step back. We already mentioned that Lewis was an atheist for about half his life. He became a believer at age 32. He died at age 64. But Lewis’s story is a little bit unique. Unlike Chuck Colson or Lee Strobel or Josh McDowell, who went fairly directly from atheism to Christianity, Lewis had a two-step conversion.

First, at the age of 30, he became a theist, a believer in one god, but it took him another maybe year and a half before he came to believe that Jesus was the Son of God. And what was holding him back—Lewis talks about it a little bit in Surprised by Joy and other places. What was holding him back is that Lewis, like myself, was an English professor and also, like myself, a great lover of mythology, not just Greco-Roman but Egyptian, Norse, everything. Lewis was a big fan of a book called The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer. He was the kind of person that we call a comparative anthropologist or a comparative mythologist. He looked at all the myths and stories and legends of the world and tried to make connections between them. A very, very interesting book. He was not a believer. Kind of like Joseph Campbell. A lot of people know him. But he saw certain archetypes, and in this book, again, it's called The Golden Bough, he looks at an archetype called the corn god or the corn king. And this is a story that pops up all over the ancient world of this sort of god or demigod who comes to earth and then dies a violent death and then returns. It's not a literal resurrection. It's a seasonal myth, of life, death, and rebirth. So the Greeks called him Osiris or Bacchus, and the Egyptians called him Adonis, and the Babylonians called him Tammuz, and, you know, Mithras and Baldr. There's all these gods. And Lewis basically believed that Jesus was just another one of these mythic archetypes, these corn kings, right? And one day though, when he was 32, he was walking on the grounds of Magdalen College Oxford. It's called Addison's Walk, and he was taking a night walk with his good friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, a believing Catholic who wrote, of course, The Lord of the Rings, and he was challenging C.S. Lewis. And he said, “Lewis—or Jack was his nickname—did you ever think maybe the reason that Jesus sounds like a myth is that He’s the myth that became fact, or the myth that came true?” Within a week, Lewis had become a believer. It revolutionized him. It's revolutionized me.

Look, Randy, I don't know if this has bothered you: I'm sure it has. Are you telling me that, until Jesus was born, God ignored 99 percent of the human population and only cared about the Jews? Well, only to the Jews did He speak directly, what we call special revelation, the prophets, the Bible, the ten commandments, only to the Jews did God speak directly. But to the rest of humanity, he spoke by what's called general revelation. He speaks through creation. He speaks through our conscience. He speaks through reason. And Lewis says He speaks through the good dreams of the pagans.

By the word… when I say pagan, I don't mean a UT frat boy, okay? I'm not talking about wine, women, and song. Pagan just means the pre-Christian Greeks and Romans. Literally, the word pagan means hillbilly, people that lived out in the countryside is what it means literally. And so by pagans, I just mean those pre-Christian writers who seem to have touched on things that are true, people like Homer and Virgil. Sophocles and Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, even Ovid with all of his crazy stories. These are people that are touching on true things. And I believe… not only in the Western world. I believe that anywhere in the world, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear and you are in prayer, you will find intimations of the gospel in every culture. Because, Randy, Jesus was not only the Jewish Messiah. He didn't just fulfill the old testament law and prophets. He fulfilled what I like to call the highest dreams of the pagans.

Jesus is the Savior of the world. He is the Jewish Messiah, but He’s also the savior of the world. And you know what? If Jesus came and died and rose again, all of that happened, and it had parallels in Isaiah and Psalms. But if that sequence of events meant nothing to the Gentiles, if there was no connection whatsoever to any of the Gentile yearnings or desires or grope rings, then it would seem like a foreign god had invaded the world. But in fact, Jesus is the desire of the nations, fulfilled all of it. And so much of my academic life, my speaking, all of that sort of stuff is looking—and of course, I know Greco-Roman the best. So it's scouring the ancient world looking for these traces, these fingers that are pointing forward. And you know what? I studied the Greco-Roman, not just because I'm a man of the West, but you know what? Jesus was born in the fullness of times, right? God chose to be born in the midst of a Greco-Roman… I really should say Greco-Roman, near East world.

And so we should particularly be able to find things there that will apply. And so Plato to Christ, I looked at four things: The Iliad, The Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and about a dozen or so Greek tragedies. And in those things, I not only analyze them in and of themselves, but in them, I found intimations that did not reach their fulfillment until Jesus and the New Testament. That’s kind of it in a nutshell.

I'm very excited to tell you about a new resource we’re working on at the C.S. Lewis Institute. It's going to be a series of relatively short articles that answer challenging questions to the Christian faith, so less than a thousand words, which is like the front and back of one piece of paper, maybe even less than that. Of questions like, “Why does a good God allow evil and suffering?” and, “Isn’t Jesus just like all the other religious people?” and, “Aren’t all religions the same?” and the questions that people are likely to ask us if we get into some really good, deep conversations with them. And it's going to be a growing resource. There'll be a new topic and piece of paper, basically, for you to read and share with nonbelievers. So check it out. If it's not already, it will be at cslewisinstitute.org/resources-category/challengingquestions. Or, if that's just crazy, go to cslewisinstitute.org and search for questions. I sure hope that'll help. Thanks.

This is fascinating to me and challenging. And I'm sure you're not…. I mean, the scriptures alone are inspired and authoritative. You're not saying those other things are authoritative. But just the idea that, as part of God's general revelation, He wove in these stories to point people to the gospel, is really a powerful thought. And I have to admit… no, confess, for a long time, I didn't read fiction, and I didn't really like stories because I thought it's not scripture. It's not the highest priority. But I'm a recovering Pharisee, and I'm growing in my appreciation of the power of story and how those things do point, sometimes in a very disturbing way, to show us how deep our sin is, sometimes in really, really beautiful ways of people can model goodness and holiness in really beautiful ways. So I love this idea. So give us a little bit of a primer of where do we start as far as these Pagan classics? Now you just mentioned some. Is that where we'd start? Do we start with Homer?

I think so. I mean, the most accessible of them is certainly The Odyssey. The Iliad is a little bit more difficult, but The Odyssey is much more accessible. And what do we have in The Odyssey? We have the story of someone trying to come home and reestablish order in his homeland that has fallen apart, right? And what's fascinating about The Odyssey is you could argue that Odysseus coming home to Ithaca is a conflation, obviously not purposely so, a conflation of the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ. Because, like the first coming of Christ, when Odysseus comes home, the goddess Athena disguises him as a beggar. And so he comes to his own, but his own do not know him. His own think that he is a humble beggar, and they ridicule him. At one point, two of these suitors, the bad guys, throw stools at him, right? I mean, he is humiliated in his own home and rejected, and yet he bears with the disgrace so that he may bring salvation to Ithaca.

But he's also like the second coming of Christ because, when Christ comes again, that will be the last judgment. And, at the end of the… well, really book 22 of The Odyssey, then Odysseus brings judgment day, and the suitors are killed. And there is literally a sifting of the sheep and the goats. While he is disguised as a beggar, Homer tells us, he is literally testing or sifting the suitors to see if there are any that are good or bad. And yet all of them are going to be destroyed, but there must be this… The Bible seems to suggest that one of the reasons that the end of the world is being delayed is because God wants to make sure everyone has a chance, right? He does not want for any to perish. And so many people take very literally the verse that says, “The gospel will be preached to all the world, and then the end will come.” And those people that are really into missions talk about how we're pretty close—not to reaching every single human being, but to reaching every people group the way that is defined. And many people that are committed to that see that this is an extension of the Great Commission, Matthew 28, to bring the gospel, so that all can hear, that every people group, and there are those great Wycliffe Bible Translators. That's the Baptist version of a saint, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, Randy, and they are trying to bring the gospel into the heart language of every people group. So that's a pretty amazing thing that they're doing. So, again, that's the premise. Odysseus is a very flawed hero, in terms of what he does and stuff like that. But in him, we see the yearning, the groping, the desire of the nations, reaching out, and we can follow his story, and we can learn a great deal of even moral and ethical choices about how to live properly and things like that.

A lot of times, we can be…. It’s almost like a good sermon on the Old Testament is going to describe it by itself. Then it's going to show how it's fulfilled in the New Testament. And then it's going to give us—what do we call that? The application, right? A good preacher is going to say, “How can we apply this to our own moral ethical behavior, living as a Christian? And so, we do that. And many ancients did that, anyway. It's really funny, Randy, because there were a lot of higher pagans who did not believe all the pagan stories in Homer, yet recognized there was such truth in Homer that they looked for an allegorical truth, a seed of meaning. Now I hate to say this, but there are a lot of liberal theologians who try to treat the Bible that way. “Oh, it's all a bunch of stories. We can only learn good life from it.” And no. In that sense, the Bible is the inspired, inerrant word of God. It's not like mythology. But in mythology, it is okay to look, as Rudolf Bultmann said, it's okay to look for the kernel of truth.

God forbid we treat the Bible like that, but when we read the pagan classics and the myths upon which they are based, it can open our eyes and be just like…. I’ve got to pause here to tell you a story, because what you shared there about your reticence to fiction is a story that I tell in Myth Made Fact.  Many years ago, there was an elderly radio evangelist—he’s since passed on—in Florida, who was telling people, “Don’t read C.S. Lewis.” Well, my parents happened to live near Tampa, Florida, so I got a chance to meet with him and talk to him. And as I discovered—I expected this—he had actually not read anything by C.S. Lewis. He'd just read an article online that said C.S. Lewis was a heretic. That didn't surprise me in the least. What did surprise me is, I said, “Now, Sir. Tell me. What have you read by C.S. Lewis? Have you read The Chronicles of Narnia?” And he responded—and this was a strong man of God who led many people to Christ. He said, “Ever since I became a believer forty years ago, I have not read a single work of fiction.” Randy, he didn't even read the Left Behind series, which is probably a good thing. But he didn't read any fiction. Okay. I was a lot younger than him, so I didn't want to be a whippersnapper. If I wanted to, I would have said, “You do realize that all the parables are short stories? They're all fictional. There wasn't literally a man with two sons, right? They’re stories Jesus invents.” But the bigger point—and this was the revelation I had when I got home. If you asked that man, “Why don't you read fiction?” He would say, “Because I'm a Christian,” but I believe the real reason he didn't read fiction, the reason he didn't know, is that he was a modernist without knowing it.

We've all grown up in a post-enlightenment, modernist world, and we've been almost indoctrinated to believe that on one side is fact and the other's fiction. History/myth, science/this, reason/emotion, logic/intuition, and there's nothing in between. That is not a Christian worldview. That is a modernist, deeply flawed view that is only maybe 300 years old right now, so we need to understand that the Bible is the inspired and inerrant word of God, but it contains a lot of fiction, and if we're going to understand the full meaning of the Gospel, we need to understand all the different genres.

I don't know if you've ever had on your show Leland Ryken. You should have him on because he’s the number one evangelical that writes about the Bible as literature, while believing fully in the Bible. His name is Leland Ryken. His son Philip Ryken is the head of Wheaton or something like that, president of Wheaton. And he's written a lot. And I've written on that, too, but he's kind of the expert on that.

Well, you know, I might have said something similar to that pastor. “I don't read fiction because I'm a Christian,” so I shudder to hear those words come out of my mouth now. I think it's… you're right. It's exactly right. It's very modernist. It is part of that anti-intellectual, fundamentalist strain that is still alive, I'm sorry to say, but once you see that music, art, story, these are all God’s general revelation and good gifts to us, it opens up a world of being able to grow and appreciate the physical life God has given us and the human delights of delicious food and things. I very often come back to Acts 14, where Paul said that to the group of crazy pagans who were bowing down and worshiping Paul and Barnabas.  He said, “God hasn't left Himself without a witness,” and he lists things like food and crops and joy in your hearts. And so I read fiction now, and it brings joy to my heart. And I just love how it allows me to think in expansive ways. I hope that doesn't sound…. Well, if that sounds crazy to our listeners, please keep listening. We'll have other people on. You're right, I should invite Leland Ryken. That would be wonderful! But we need to kind of bring this to a close, Louis. I'm sorry. People might get the idea that you and I could talk for a lot longer.

We could, couldn’t we?

But we’ll save that for another time. Any last things you want to close off with about encouraging people to read the classics or to read more of Lewis, anything along those lines?

I will tell you just… I want to give you hope, right? It’s easy to be pessimistic if you're a good, conservative Christian these days. But one of the things I do the most is speaking for classical Christian schools and classical home schoolers and doing that all over the country. I'm going to be heading out for a few of those pretty soon. It's given me hope because, wherever I go in this country, there are schools where they're training young people in goodness, truth, in beauty, in virtue. They're reading the pagan classics, and it is strengthening their faith. They are true…. There’s even some classical charter schools. That means they're public, but they're really smuggled theology. And my daughter teaches at a school called Founders, and it's called Founders because they're trying to teach the children to read the same books that our Founding Fathers read and created this great nation. So we need to fight for what's called the Great Books. They really do exist, and we need to fight for…. It’s often called the canon. One of the models at my university is, “Bring Athens and Jerusalem together.” Athens is the Greco-Roman, Jerusalem is the Judeo-Christian, and we bring them together so that they can reinforce each other. So, again, it's a great movement, the classical Christian movement, and it gives me a lot of hope that we can take back the country sort of morally and spiritually.

Well. Man, you've given us a ton to think about, so thank you so much for this. We're going to put some links in the show notes of some of Louis’s books. We have some articles on our website at cslewisinstitute.org that I think can reinforce some of this. I believe we've got a couple of articles by Leland Ryken and certainly by Philip Ryken, I'll try to look through that and link to those. Louis, thanks so much for the time. To our listeners, we hope this has been a great encouragement to you, and we hope that all of the work that we do at the C.S. Lewis Institute helps you as you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman