In the July edition of Ultimatum magazine, I was pleased (but not "happy" at all) to see a really "hot" note about the stagnation of the worldwide level of literacy in the past 20 years.

My teachers heart beats faster when I read the author paraphrasing a famous Paul’s sentence, to point out a fact that, although evident enough, may just therefore not be seen by great part of todays´ Christians: "How should they read, if there is nobody to teach them? And how should they teach if they are not sent?".

The implications of this alert are certainly extensive. Therefore, if our desire is to help somebody to read in fact, it may be necessary to offer him more than just a "fast-course", like those we had in Brazil (MOBRAL), which are strictly interested in functional levels of reading. In order to read, in fact it’s necessary to know and to interpret or to translate the contempt into his reality, with all implicit transcendental, timeless and transcultural truths. Thus, to read the Bible, for example, means to read history, poetry, science, geography, geometry, mathematics; in other words, it means to read the world.

More than that: the true reader knows not only how to read the Bible, but also to get interested for other authors, who may have read the Bible by themselves, and learned to perform the same transcendental, timeless and transcultural style to write. This is the case, for example, of the British scholar C.S. Lewis, whose centenary we are commemorating this year, with important events happening all over the world (for more details see http://www.cslewis100.com or make a simple research and find out what a vast extension of interests this still author awakes all over the world).

As author of a thesis on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by myself, the first Brazilian workmanship on the famous series of fairy-tales with deep Christian meanings (The Chronicles of Narnia, recently reedited for the Publishing company Martins Fontes) I was the first interested in participating of two weeks of intensive studies, promoted in Oxford and Cambridge, by the C. S. Lewis Foundation, an entity which is dedicated to missions and evangelization in the academic world.

Besides the honorable achievement to congregate people of international recognition under academics, as much as in the Christian world - such as the Rev. Earl Palmer, George Sayer, Thomas T. Howard, Peter Kreeft and Dr. Dallas the Willard, among others (the tapes can all together, or separately be ordered from the Foundation at http://www.cslewisfoundation.org), the excellent team of the C. S. Lewis Foundation counts with important associated collaborators, such as Douglas Gresham, Lewis´s stepson, among others. And, in my opinion, the most impressive fact of all the meeting dues to C.S. Lewis Foundation had succeeded to translate into practice one of its greatest tasks (inspired by Lewis, of course), to congregate people of the whole world (more than 800) and from all kinds of denominations, focusing common subjects and basic topics of Mere Christianity.

As a kind of introduction Rev. J. Stanley Mattson, president of the C.S. Lewis Foundation, spoke about the vision of this organization, which main goals are:

The reconstruction of " persona ", the identity and academic spirit among Christian and none Christian scholars. If we do not achieve a healing of our memories and a clear and cleared up vision of what we want to achieve, we will starve both intellectually and culturally, and also spiritually. This battle is not original from our age, but it lasts for a long time being still actual and locked up.

The organization of triennial meetings and to be engaged in the maintenance of the house where Lewis lived most of its life in Oxford (The Kilns), which was recently restored by a team of volunteers, and where they are intending to establish a center of studies for Christian Scholars of the whole world and all denominations.

The organization of round tables in universities and faculties, discussing subjects of interest for Christian academics, attracting Christians that are infiltrated in those institutions out of their hiding places and stimulating them to fulfill their evangelistic mission in these days. The great problem lies not in universities, but the Church itself does not understand their intellectual members but deals with them in a prejudiced or distrustful way.

The establishment of The C. S. Lewis College, an open university to all the branches of the politics, forms of artistic expression, etc. (as the body of Christ is diverse in itself and has to be revealed as it is) thought to be organized based on Lewis´ ideas and the curriculum of The Great Books.

The tripod of the C.S. Lewis Foundation may thus be summarized in Evangelism, Discipleship and Education, aiming the fulfillment of the cultural mandate of the Church.

After each one of the sections of lectures, regarding most current subjects as: "On Lewis and the Pursuit of Truth", "On Lewis and the Pursuit of Joy"; "The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship"; "Living Truth in a Dying World: The Message of C.S. Lewis, "Jesus and Socrates: On Word and Silence", etc. with round- tables of specialists about Christians and Arts, there was always a plenary session for testimonies and questions of the public. In these occasions, many participants expressed their doubts and yearnings pursuing relative essential truths to faith, but they also mentioned the authentic love felt in the air and which filled all the meeting.

During the afternoon, the participants were offered optional work-shops, focusing interest subjects such as: "An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of C.S. Lewis", "The Problem of Pain: Lewis and the Cost of Discipleship", "C.S. Lewis and Freud", "’The Inklings’and Others Who Influenced Lewis", "The Christian and the Contemporary University ", "The Chronicles of Narnia"; "Reason and imagination in the writings of C.S. Lewis", "The Science Symposium ", "Christian Apologetics and Communication", theater, reading, writing and poetry workshops, and others. It was even hard to choose among such interesting and current topics.

But we had not only studies and lectures, we also had social activities such as the last activity of each day, the Bag End Café, organized in the same spirit as the meetings of the Inklings, where we discussed the main topics of the day, or declaimed poetry, read stories, etc.; as well as cultural activities, such as a visit to The Kilns, which is now in the competent hands of the Foundation, and Lewis´ tomb; the presentation of theater groups, dance and music, with subjects related to Lewis, etc; and also leisure activities, as suppers special night of folklore dance, etc.

In summary, as the reader may see, we had two intensively cultural weeks, with much reflection, learning and human relations, which originated many new ideas for further meetings, focusing the arts, for example, and for our next meeting in 2001.

Such abundance of ideas and love certainly requires more than a simple ability to be literate: it has to be properly digested. As we said before, it is not enough to teach to decipher any text, even more, if they are so full of meaning as C. S. Lewis´. It will always be necessary to make translations, in all kinds of languages, which requires a correct methodology, which may still be something to be elaborated, even more, considering the specific and especial Brazilian reader. This is at least the route, which we intend to follow from here into the future.

As Lewis said in The Weight of Glory the problem with humankind lies not in pursuing too much pleasures, but in being too easily pleased, to content ourselves with too little...

This was the subject detached by Rev. Ben Patterson, whose first message of the conference, was based on Daniel 3:25, which was directly related to the headings of the conference itself "Loose in Fire ".

Daniel and his friends had denied serving a strange god and deserved to risk their own bodies, based on their vision of a specific mission. And God honored them, protecting them against any damage, with his living, real and concrete presence in the middle of them. And all three friends were literally in the focus of all attentions: they were walking in the middle of the flames.

To clarify what that means, what in fact happens when a human being decides to trust all its infantile impotence into the hands of God, Lewis always applies pictures: we are such as broken cups, he said, with no natural or human possibility to retain any liquid, much less the living water which is Christ.

We need his concrete presence in the middle of the flames of our life, which is the only force capable to congregate all broken pieces of our corrupted existence, for the spiritual reset and cure through faith. And once initiated in this process of cure, there will be no height, nor depth that could separate us from the love of Christ, who exceeds all measures.

That’s absolutely not to be understood in a figurative form. No, the process of mature is literally and concretely speaking, the one great miracle of authentic Christian life.

But how may that come to be manifested? What happens once Christ appears and starts to reconstruct the pieces of our human face, which seems quite needy now, but which a long time ago had been created for the glory?

We start to become more and more similar to that image. We grow up in the same proportion as Christ grows in us, as Lewis illustrates so well in one of the meeting of Aslan with the children, which exclaimed: " Aslan, you are bigger " and the lion answered: "That is because you are older, my dear".

The process of spiritual mature then does not mean to become greater or to stop being childish (for the opposite), but to let us become more and more full of life. And to be more alive is to reflect more and more the image and similarity of Christ: the more we drink him, the bigger he will grow in front of our eyes. When your are hungry and thirsty of Christ, you are not easily content, for the opposite, you start always to long for more, but not for less than the whole reality.

In another lecture, Dr. Thomas Howard, author of several books, including a biography of Lewis, mentioned that, as a Christian academic and scholar, Lewis did not defend books in itself (reading them may be good or bad: they do save nobody) but mostly the minds that are behind those texts. If they are good, they must reflect the character of the author, through a visible style, that is humble, rich in pictures and capacity of synthesis.

As apologist, Lewis is the great critic of the modern spirit and its trend of unhumanize the man. In contrast to what some critics think, this trend is far of being exceeded nowadays.

Finally, as an author of fiction and poetry, although we cannot consider him such an original genius as Tolkien, its characters are extremely illustrative of a deeper psychology, that is not based on complicated theories, but in common sense, in the world of human values. Perhaps the purest example of that is given by Urual, the central character of Till we have Faces the sister of Psiqué, who tells its version of the myth of Oedipus, presenting heir complaint against the gods.

Another sample of Lewis´ genius in portraying characters is Aslan himself (the lion of the Chronicles of Narnia), that intends to be no original figure, but only a reminder, in imaginative form, that is a means to revive the readers memory to the deepest and most permanent meanings of life that are so evident, that they tend to pass unobserved or forgotten nowadays.

In the following day, we heard Dr. Dallas Willard speaking about "Truth in the fire: Lewis ' devotion in the Contemporary Setting ", remembering with what devotion Lewis searched for truth, in a totally unarrogant, humble and opened way. He said that our behavior in front of the truth keeps great relation with our vision-of the cosmos. The great merit of Lewis was his attempt to establish links within our believes and our daily behavior.

Christianity deals with something that goes beyond our small universe and is as mysterious to our limited mind as the Quantum Theory may be (and for the same reason).

In its writings, Lewis always respects the readers rationality and that the habit of deeper reflection is not given, nor easy to be achieved.

For truth is nothing less than "agreement with reality", a kind of understanding which corresponds to things as they really are. In The Abolition of Men, Lewis is radical in affirming that if there is no truth, if human values are relative or subjective all over, then they are complete nonsense, and it would be better to give them up. For truth is not something that exists just in my mind or what seems reasonable to somebody, but the link to reality. That is way truth has to be under constant supervision, test and questioning. In accordance to Hume, if a truth cannot be questioned, it does not pass of lucubration or even illusion.

In the same sense as truth is relation, all its equivalents, such as goodness, beauty, match wit it and are associated to it. Either they are intimacy linked and interdependent, or they do not exist at all. Unhappily, however, we live in a post-modern age, where we feel ridicule to speak about truth, goodness or beauty, in ethic and esthetic senses. Without denigrating the contribution brought by the post-modern ideas, the great risk that it displays is to loose the matches, the links between reality and the conception of Man himself.

This explains great part of the episthemologic crisis of ethical paradigms that we live today.

Although people still know very well, deep in their hearts when they are right or wrong, or which is the decent and worthy behavior, the problem is that they do not know what to make to face the truth and they are not prepared to make proper use of it.

We have to distinguish facts, that are manifestations of any existing beings’ properties; and reality, which is the simultaneous update of a set of linked facts.

And they both have in common the complete independence of our conscience. They simply happen in an unexpected and irreducible way. They are just life. They do not depend upon anyone.

Truth, on the other hand, invites our conscience to get to an agreement. We cannot obviously always be conscientious of all the truths, nor can we deplete them, but we can believe in them and make use of them to behave in accordance with them. And, if we had deceived them or if we suspect them of being deceptive, we may submit our beliefs to the test of reality.

Thus, the truth is nothing more than "matching up " or updating our beliefs.

While the naturalists say that everything that exists can conscientiously be known, authentic Christianity says that we will find real truth just in the fire.

And, if the modern spirit denies both truth and reality, it is denying the possibility of the philosophy itself. For our beliefs are relative, not truth.

In one word, then, there are two great enemies of truth: naturalism, which insists on affirming that truth, reality and ratio are functions of the human mind being and that language is a public institution. They do not believe that reality is created and written from any "outside" mind, but that it is the proper function of the language. Thus the truth is substituted by the power, instead of surrendering to causality; they surrender it the hegemonic force.

Another enemy can be illustrated by the figure of King Midas: everything what he touches turns gold: or either, to look in such a way through everything, that everything becomes transparent, leaving nothing concrete to offers resistance to the eye. Any self produced gold, loses the proper its value and life.

That’s expresses also the popular trend to think that "everything is relative", specially sentiments and values (subjectivism), that truth is the truth of certain minds. The mind constructs the truth and the truth constructs the mind: a completely antirational nonsense. Thus, the important thing is to leave things as they are and to be content with them, declaring the proper existence as nausea, or, on the contrary, to take maximal advantage of it, as long as we are living (Carpe Diem).

For Lewis, to be in the fire is to show actions or behaviors that agree and are coherent with what we believe. This is the biggest purpose of all good education, mainly the Christian education. Unfortunately we live today in an age where education is a private subject reserved to " specialists ". Christianity is often being diminished to one more " way of life ", that little or nothing has to do with fetching divine truth. We often forget that Jesus was the most intelligent man of the whole history. If we want to be reasonable, we have to rescue the bedding in the truth, we have that to come back to the purest and simple logic of the things. We have to come back to judge the world based on logic and not vice versa.

Reason never can legitimize itself, if it wants not to invalidate itself. And, if we decree the death of the ratio, then their wouldn’t least nothing more to guide us, besides our instincts and our frightful and inhuman trend to the abolition of the man.

The lecture was end under a torrent of palms, and, in the nocturnal debate, that had been considered one of the high lights of the conference: a lesson of the purest philosophy translated to laymen.

That is also the sense, based on this small sample of what the conference was (which I certainly will take some months more to systematize) in which I would like to answer to that frightful question that made when I was suggesting the organization of a similar event in Brazil, that would be capable to associate authentic Christianity to the truly academic spirit, about who could conceivably become interested in Lewis in Brazil. This time I may have been a single Brazilian representative, but who knows, until the year 2001 we will have congregated some more Christian educators, that are real Christian Translators.