The Green Witch and the Great Debate: Freeing Narnia from the Spell of the Lewis-Anscombe Legend
Oceans of ink have been spilled about C.S. Lewis over the past sixty or so years, and quite frankly a good deal of it is sheer nonsense. A prime example of this is the claim that The Chronicles of Narnia represents a retreat from his previous career as a Christian apologist. According to this widely accepted account, Lewis abruptly abandoned Christian apologetics after suffering a humiliating defeat in a 1948 debate with Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. At the time of the debate, Anscombe was in her late twenties and relatively unknown. Indeed, her critique of Lewis was her first purely philosophical publication.1 She went on to become one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century, and was appointed to the chair at Cambridge previously held by Ludwig Wittgenstein, under whom she had studied and whose works she had translated.
The legendary debate with Anscombe took place at a meeting of the Oxford Socratic Club2 on February 2nd, 1948. In his book Miracles, published the year before, Lewis argued that naturalism—the claim that only physical reality exists—is irrational and self-defeating. Anscombe sharply criticized the argument, claiming that it was confused and based on the ambiguous use of key terms. According to the “Anscombe legend,” Lewis not only admitted that Anscombe got the better of the exchange, but recognized that his argument was wrong. Further, as a result of the exchange, Lewis gave up on Christian apologetics. According to Humphrey Carpenter, one of the purveyors of the Anscombe legend, “Though [Lewis] continued to believe in the importance of Reason in relation to his Christian faith, he had perhaps realized the truth of Charles Williams’s maxim, ‘No one can possibly do more than decide what to believe.’”3
The biographer A.N. Wilson brings The Chronicles of Narnia into the legend by suggesting that Lewis abandoned the “adult” approach of coming to faith through rational argument, in favor of a non-rational, fideist (purely faith-based) approach through children’s stories. In the Chronicles, he suggests, the emphasis is on trusting faith and firm conviction, not on rational evidence. There, the great virtue is the willingness to believe, even in the teeth of a mountain of counter-evidence, if called upon to do so. Religious truth is acquired through the imagination of the child, and not through intellectual analysis, as Lewis had previously supposed.
According to Wilson, this radical shift by Lewis was mainly due to his debate with Anscombe. Before this encounter, he had been something of an intellectual bully who had become a hero to many because of his debating prowess and his cleverness in defending the Christian faith. But Anscombe reduced him to a child by “cutting the bullying hero down to size.”4 This, Wilson argues, “was the greatest single factor which drove [Lewis] into the form of literature for which he is today most popular: children’s stories.”5 Reduced to a child himself, Lewis reverted to writing stories that would reflect what he had become.
Furthermore, Wilson adds a particularly colorful twist to his theory when he suggests that the Green Witch of The Silver Chair, who attempts to persuade the children that Narnia does not exist, was inspired by Anscombe.6 In short, Narnia was Lewis’s own escape hatch when reality, as forced upon him by the sober philosophical dialogue of the Anscombe exchange, proved too difficult for him to handle.
Now it should be pointed out that Wilson appears to be a writer hostile to Lewis’s own Christian beliefs.7 But sometimes we also find Christians making a good deal of the Anscombe legend.8 These Christians, I suspect, are much more attracted to Lewis the myth-maker than they are to Lewis the Christian apologist who appeals to reason. Consequently, they are happy to contend that Lewis came to realize, after the encounter with Anscombe, that rational apologetics was not as effective as Lewis had claimed in his earlier writings. But is Lewis the author of Narnia really a radically different person from Lewis the Christian apologist?
Separating Fact from Fiction
If we look at the public record of what happened in the Lewis-Anscombe debate, we find the following. Lewis had argued in Miracles that any argument for naturalism is “self-refuting,” that is, saws off the very plank on which it stands. For naturalism implies that all causes are irrational physical causes. But if that is so, then the thought “naturalism is true” is itself the result of irrational physical causes. But we have no reason to trust any belief that results entirely from irrational physical causes. Thus any argument for naturalism undercuts itself, because if naturalism is true, there could never be any reason to believe that it is true.
Anscombe objected that Lewis confuses irrational causes with non-rational causes, and fails to distinguish “reasons” from “causes.” An argument is valid, she pointed out, when the conclusion follows logically from the premises. Why a person was led to assert the argument is irrelevant to its logical validity or strength. Even crazy or drunk people sometimes assert good arguments.
In 1960, Lewis substantially revised his original argument against naturalism in a new edition of Miracles. There, he acknowledged the importance of the reason-cause distinction but argued that for rational thought to be possible, reasons and causes must ultimately coincide. In other words, for a belief to be justified, it is not enough for the belief to be supported by good reasons. Those reasons must cause the person to hold the belief. And according to naturalism, only non-rational causes, not reasons, can cause beliefs. Thus, the very distinctions on which Anscombe insisted actually reinforce Lewis’s argument that naturalism undercuts itself.
It’s clear that Lewis was initially dispirited by the Anscombe debate. His pupil Derek Brewer remembers Lewis speaking dejectedly of the “fog of war, the retreat of infantry thrown back under heavy attack.”9 Another friend, Hugo Dyson, claims that in the immediate aftermath of the debate Lewis was in a state of near-despair, feeling he had “lost everything and come to the foot of the Cross.”10 It may be that Lewis was more disappointed in his own performance in the debate than he was convinced that Anscombe had shown his argument to be wrong. In fact, in the very issue of the Socratic Digest in which Anscombe’s essay appeared,11 Lewis offers essentially the same counterattack that he published many years later in the new edition of Miracles, showing that his own doubts about his argument were short-lived, if they existed at all.
A Change of Course?
So did Lewis move away from rational apologetics after this incident or repudiate his earlier views? While it is clear that there is a shift in his writing away from books like The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, and Miracles, it is doubtful that the debate with Anscombe had anything to do with it, or that there was any essential change in his views.
First, Lewis was not a philosopher or a Christian apologist by profession. Some people devote their lives to the work of Christian apologetics; William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland are well-known examples. If one of them were to stop writing apologetics, we might need an explanation. Lewis may be recognized in retrospect as the most influential apologist of the last century but that was not his primary vocation. Although he had studied philosophy as an undergraduate, his professional career was as a Professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. He wrote Christian apologetics partly to fill what he thought to be a void in Christian writing in his time, and partly in response to requests by others.12 There is no evidence that he had any major apologetical works planned after Miracles that went unwritten due to the Anscombe exchange.
But this by no means shows that Lewis had lost interest in apologetics or confidence in its value. Although he wrote no overtly apologetical books after Miracles, he wrote several substantive apologetical essays in the years after the famous debate. In “Is Theism Important” (1952), Lewis affirms the importance of theistic arguments, and says, “Nearly everyone I know who has embraced Christianity in adult life has been influenced by what seemed to him to be at least probable arguments for Theism.”13 In “On Obstinacy of Belief” (1955), Lewis defends Christianity against the charge that while scientists apportion their beliefs to the evidence, religious people do not, and are therefore irrational.14 In “Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger” (1958), Lewis defends his Christian apologetics against criticisms from a prominent theologian, hardly what you would expect him to do if he thought his career as an apologist had been misguided.15 The essay “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” (1959) is a stinging assault on modern Biblical scholarship of a skeptical variety, the sort of scholarship that is currently represented by members of the Jesus Seminar.16 If that essay is not a piece of Christian apologetics, then I simply do not know what the term means.
Second, a defender of the Anscombe legend must confront the fact that Lewis revised and expanded the controversial third chapter of Miracles. If the argument against naturalism had been proven wrong, why in the world would Lewis devote more space in his book to the disgraced argument? All one needs to do is to compare the length of the original and the revised chapter and one cannot fail to realize that Lewis considered the revision to be an important project, fully worthy of the serious effort he gave it. One simply does not revise a book and extensively expand an argument one thinks has been proved wrong.
Third, it is a mistake to suppose that if an author writes something that has an emotional appeal to it, rationality has been abandoned. This is to commit what I like to call the Star Trek fallacy. In the first generation of Star Trek, logic is represented by Mr. Spock, who is supposed to be purely rational and therefore free of emotion. Dr. McCoy, on the other hand, represents the emotional side of human nature, who opposes Spock’s emphasis on logic. But surely, one wouldn’t reason at all without some passions at work, perhaps a passion to reason well or to discover the truth. Indeed, as Lewis argues at length in The Abolition of Man, emotional responses can be rational or irrational, and to downplay the emotions as “mere” feelings is to undercut the life of reason, not to uphold it.17
In fact, the Narnia books can themselves be seen as works of broadly Christian apologetics. Lewis’s close friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, was finishing The Lord of the Rings at the same time Lewis was beginning The Chronicles of Narnia. One of his central aims in writing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote, was “the elucidation of truth, and the encouragement of good morals in this real world, by the ancient device of exemplifying them in unfamiliar embodiments.”18 Lewis’s Narnia books are inspired by a similar view of moral fiction. In the Chronicles, through his use of both Christian allegory and imaginatively compelling portrayals of good and evil, Lewis seeks to engage both the emotions and the reason in recognizing the beauty of Christian values and ultimately the truth of the Christian world view.
The Professor’s Trilemma
In Mere Christianity Lewis offers his most famous argument for Christian belief, an argument that has come to be known as Lewis’s Trilemma. The argument centers on how we should regard Jesus’s claims to be God. According to Lewis, the fact that Jesus claimed to be God drastically reduces our options on how to view him. In particular, the idea that Jesus was a great moral teacher who was not God seems to be ruled out by the massive error involved in falsely claiming to be God. Lewis writes:
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and call Him a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.19
I will not here discuss whether or not this argument is a good one. It has, of course, been criticized by some and defended by others. My point now is simply that when the Pevensie children are trying to assess the credibility of Lucy’s claim to have visited another world through the wardrobe, Professor Digory Kirke, the owner of the house, offers a closely similar argument:
”Logic!” said the professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic in these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth. (LWW, Chapter 5, p. 131)
Now this strikes me as a very odd passage for someone who, according to the Anscombe legend, has abandoned rational apologetics in favor of the imagination. Not only is Professor Kirke (who, we eventually find out, has been to Narnia himself) presenting an argument with exactly the same structure as the Trilemma, we find him emphasizing the importance of logic and wondering why they don’t teach it in the schools. The Professor could have used any number of ways of persuading the children to believe Lucy, but what he offers is a logical argument.
Is Anscombe the Green Witch?
Wilson’s attempt to identify the Green Witch from The Silver Chair with Anscombe is surely one of his most fanciful speculations. Lewis himself made some comments about reviewers in his own lifetime who speculated on how his books came to be written:
My impression is that in the whole of my experience not one of the guesses has on any one point been right; that the method shows a record of 100 per cent failure. You would expect that by mere chance they would hit as often as they miss. But it is my impression that they do no such thing. I can’t remember a single hit. But as I have not kept a careful record my mere impression may be mistaken. What I think I can say with certainty is that they are usually wrong.20
On the basis of this experiential claim concerning Lewis’s own contemporary reviewers, I would have to place the probability that the Green Witch has anything to do with the Anscombe incident as pretty close to zero. The fact is, there are not only obvious but massive differences between the Witch and Anscombe that make identifying the two absurd. Besides the fact that she was not an evil, shape-shifting, non-human witch, Anscombe was a Roman Catholic Christian who believed as firmly in Supernaturalism as did Lewis. What she denied was that Lewis had a good argument for Supernaturalism in Miracles. The Witch, by contrast, is trying to get Eustace, Jill, Puddleglum and Rilian to accept Underworld as the only world. Second, while Anscombe strove to make people aware of certain distinctions that she thought undermined Lewis’s case, the Green Witch strums on an instrument in order to place a spell on her captives in order to dull their thinking and make them accept the idea that Overworld doesn’t exist. Finally, the Marsh-wiggle’s reply to the Witch is, after all, an argument for believing in Narnia, not an appeal to blind faith, as can be seen in the chapters by Lovell and Menuge in this volume. Anyone who knows anything about the career of Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe cannot take seriously the possibility that the Witch speaks for her.
Prudence and Faith in The Chronicles
Perhaps we can best exhibit the relationship between The Chronicles of Narnia and Lewis’s apologetics by looking at Lewis’s discussion of the virtues of prudence and faith in Mere Christianity. Lewis, following an old Christian tradition, identifies the Four Cardinal Virtues as Prudence (sometimes called Wisdom), Temperance, Courage, and Justice, to which he adds the Three Holy Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love. He defines Prudence as “practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it,” and reminds us that Christ taught us to be not only “as harmless as doves” but also “as wise as serpents.” He continues:
He wants a child’s heart but a grown-up’s head. . . . The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. . . . It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a second-rate brain. He has room for people with little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. . . . God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.21
Like many passages in Lewis, this one has tremendous contemporary relevance. Many people in the Christian community (and outside of it) have been slack in their intellectual responsibilities, and the results have been disastrous. The mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, and the suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California are grim reminders of what happens when religious people give up on thinking critically and simply follow what a leader says. Or to take less dramatic examples, but ones closer to home, think about how millions of Christians get caught up in spiritual fads like the recent “prayer of Jabez” phenomenon or the sensational eschatology of the Left Behind series. How many people have given money they can hardly afford to television evangelists, only to find out that the money went for air-conditioned dog houses and visits to sleazy motel rooms? The Christian community suffers greatly whenever it is intellectually lazy and careless.
Think carefully about Lewis’s claim that “God wants a child’s heart but a grown-up’s mind.” The great virtue of children, Lewis thinks, is not that they believe blindly, in the teeth of whatever evidence there might be against their cherished beliefs. In fact, Lewis says, “Most children show plenty of ‘prudence’ about doing the things they are really interested in, and think them out quite sensibly.”22 And just as Lewis refuses to insult the intelligence of children in Mere Christianity, he refuses to do so in The Chronicles of Narnia. So not only does he emphasize the virtue of prudence, he tells us that whatever Christians might mean by saying that we ought to be childlike, it has nothing to do with believing contrary to the available evidence.
In his discussion of the virtue of faith in Mere Christianity Lewis explains what faith is, distinguishing it from the fideistic notion that faith is believing contrary to the evidence. He writes, “I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in.” He continues:
Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. . . . That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.23
Given the analysis of faith in this passage, it’s easy to see that the virtue of faith and the virtue of prudence are perfectly compatible. It is the task of apologetics to show that as prudent human beings, we can nevertheless exercise Christian faith. We are not expected to exercise prudence in, say, the purchase of a used car, but exercise faith when it comes to selecting one’s religious beliefs. Rather, prudence and faith fit together like a hand in a glove. Prudence is the virtue of thinking things through; faith is the virtue of acting on what one knows to be true, even in the face of emotional impulses to think otherwise.
An opponent of Christian apologetics, on the other hand, thinks that the faith of the Christian is exercised when the believer accepts beliefs that, if he were exercising the kind of prudence required in other contexts, he would not accept. The life of prudence and the life of faith are at odds for the anti-apologist.
But after the exchange with Anscombe, did Lewis conclude that faith was indeed a matter of steadfastly accepting Christianity, even though the weight of the evidence is against it? The evidence strongly suggests otherwise. Consider this passage in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where Edmund betrays his siblings and justifies his actions by saying that he couldn’t be sure that Aslan was good and the White Witch was bad.
”Because,” [Edmund] said to himself, “all these people who say nasty things about her are her enemies and probably half of it isn’t true. She was jolly nice to me, anyway, much nicer than they are. I expect she is the rightful Queen really. Anyway, she’ll be better than that awful Aslan!” At least, that was the excuse he made up in his own mind for what he was doing. It wasn’t a very good excuse, for deep down inside him he really knew that the White Witch was bad and cruel. (LWW, Chapter 9, pp. 151–52)
Lewis’s point here, obviously, is that Edmund’s mistake lies in “believing” what he really knows not to be true. His action in this case displays neither true faith nor prudence.
For a second example, consider the dwarf Trumpkin in Prince Caspian. Though he is skeptical about the stories of Old Narnia and Aslan, he is nevertheless a virtuous character, while Nikabrik, who accepts the existence of the “supernatural,” is wicked, because he attempts to call up the White Witch to expel the Telmarines. There are, of course, less virtuous skeptics in Narnia; Ginger the Cat and Rishda Tarkaan in The Last Battle are examples. But their lack of virtue is not due to failure to believe contrary to the evidence; rather, their failure has to do with attempting to exploit the beliefs of the Narnians for their own benefit.
Also in Prince Caspian, Lucy’s faith fails, because she has seen Aslan and knows he is there, but nevertheless fails to follow him. At no point in the Chronicles is any character criticized for lack of “faith” in the fideistic sense of failing to believe something that runs counter to the evidence.
It is in The Last Battle that we find the strongest illustration of Lewis’s belief in the consistency of prudence and faith. The story begins when Shift the Ape finds a lion-skin, and persuades Puzzle the donkey to put it on and pretend to be Aslan. Like a modern-day religious charlatan, Shift persuades Puzzle that he is really doing what Aslan wants by pretending to be Aslan, and persuades Puzzle that he really knows best and that, after all, Puzzle isn’t very clever. When Puzzle realizes that he has been duped by the Ape, he says,
”I see now,” said Puzzle, “that I really have been a very bad donkey. I ought never to have listened to Shift. I never thought things like this would begin to happen.”
“If you’d spent less time saying you weren’t clever and more time trying to be as clever as you could—” began Eustace but Jill interrupted him.
“Oh leave poor old Puzzle alone,” she said. “It was all a mistake; wasn’t it, Puzzle dear?” And she kissed him on the nose. (LB, Chapter 8, p. 713)
Now, although Jill is right in saying that it was inappropriate for Eustace to lecture the now-repentant Puzzle about listening to Shift, Eustace is also right in saying that Puzzle should have used the brains he had to exercise prudence and stop listening to the Ape. Merely following a leader and doing what one is told can be really dangerous if what one is told is a lie. An irrational faith, a willingness to exempt claims from rational scrutiny, is not a virtue; it is precisely what gets many of the characters in Narnia into trouble. Animals like Puzzle are as harmless as doves, but if they fail to be as wise as serpents, they end up being bamboozled by the likes of Shift in Narnia, just as many people are taken in by television evangelists in our world.
The view of faith and reason in the Chronicles is exactly the same as that in Mere Christianity. The life of prudence, of forming one’s beliefs intelligently and carefully, taking the evidence into serious consideration, and the life of faith, are perfectly compatible with one another. The two virtues are not opposed to one another. Rather, they are two sides of the same coin. Lewis believed that before he encountered Anscombe, and he believed it afterwards when he wrote The Chronicles of Narnia. To suggest otherwise is to fly in the face of a mountain of contrary evidence. You have to have a lot of “faith” to believe the stories Wilson and others tell about C.S. Lewis. You have to believe them even though your best reasoning tells you the weight of the evidence is against them.
1 See G.E.M. Anscombe, “A Reply to Mr C.S. Lewis’s Argument that ‘Naturalism’ is Self-Refuting,” reprinted in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, Volume 2 of The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 224–231.
2 An undergraduate debating society whose purpose was to discuss issues surrounding Christian faith. Lewis was the first president of the club, a position he held at the time of the debate.
3 Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 217.
4 A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 214.
5 Ibid., p. 211.
6 Ibid., p. 226.
7 It’s worth noting that John Beversluis, one of Lewis’s most severe philosophical critics, judges that Wilson’s views are badly misguided. See his “Surprised by Freud: A Critical Appraisal of A.N. Wilson’s Biography of C.S. Lewis,” Christianity and Literature 41:2 (1992), pp. 191–92.
8 See for instance the article by Cary Stockett, “The Inconsolable Secret, Part II: Lewis’s Apologetics of the Heart,” http://www.christianity.com/partner/Article_Display_Page/0,,PTID307566/CHID562734/CIID1418382,00.html
9 Derek Brewer, “The Tutor: A Portrait,” in James T. Como, ed., C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1992), p. 59.
10 Quoted in Wilson, C.S. Lewis, p. 213.
11 No. 4 (1948), pp. 7–15.
12 Lewis wrote Miracles partly in response to a complaint from Dorothy Sayers that there were no good up-to-date books on the subject. See C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, edited by Walter Hooper (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), pp. 343–44.
13 Lewis, God in the Dock, p. 173.
14 C.S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), pp. 13–30.
15 Lewis, God in the Dock, pp. 177–183.
16 C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), pp. 152–166.
17 C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 13–35.
18 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 194.
19 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), p. 52.
20 Lewis, Christian Reflections, p. 160.
21 Lewis, Mere Christianity, pp. 77–78.
22 Ibid., p. 77.
23 Ibid., pp. 140–41.