C.S. Lewis on 2001: A Space Odyssey

Here’s Michael Leary with a few thoughts on how C.S. Lewis helps us understand 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The best extant commentary on 2001: A Space Odyssey from an intentionally theological perspective hails from the conclusion of C.S. Lewis’ essay “Is Theology Poetry” in the seldom read Weight of Glory collection. The essay is just a reprint of a lecture given at Oxford in 1944 (no doubt in a mahogany cased room with crumpled carpets smelling of rain and tea), a full 25 years before Kubrick’s 2001. I am not the biggest fan of Lewis’ science fiction literature, finding it somewhat too overt in its allegorical self-awareness to match the sheer readability of L’Engle, Chesterton, or other “Christian” sci-fi provocateurs, but apparently his grasp of how science fiction relates to theology (and specifically Lewis’ conception of theology as mythmaking) was well developed…