C.S. Lewis: Apologetics and the poetic imagination

Abstract

This article argues that for Lewis the interplay between Reason and Imagination is crucial. His own conversion to Christianity involved a profound reconciliation of these two faculties which he had previously experienced in tension and opposition. Consequently the imaginative element in his subsequent writing, literary and apologetic as well as his fiction, is an essential part of the message itself, of the truth he is trying to articulate. It places Lewis in a Coleridgean tradition and suggests that his approach is, if anything, more relevant now, and generative of new and helpful approaches to apologetics, than it was when he pioneered it.