Mere Christianity has had a remarkable life story. Most books, even those that make a big splash at the time of publication, eventually fade away like the ripples on a pond. Only a relative few take on lives of their own so that they are generating new ripples even a generation later. Far more rare is a book whose life story tells not only of survival into future generations but even of growing vitality. Such books become classics.
Perhaps it is too early to designate as a classic a book that is only a few generations old. Even so, from the perspective of the early twenty-first century we surely must say that Mere Christianity is one of the “great religious books” of the twentieth century, if for no other reason than the phenomenon of its continuing life. A survey of church leaders by the influential American evangelical magazine Christianity Today in 2000 ranked it first among the “100 books that had a significant effect on Christians this century.”1 Time magazine called Lewis “the hottest theologian of 2005.”2 Since 2001 Mere Christianity has sold well over 3.5 million copies in English alone, far more than in the midcentury years after it was first published. Although it has been translated into at least thirty-six languages and has had an untold impact in many parts of the world, including a sizeable readership in China, its most extraordinary popularity has been in the United States. There and elsewhere, fans of the work include Christians from across almost the whole spectrum of denominations, from Roman Catholic and Orthodox to mainline Protestant to evangelical and Pentecostal.
The lasting and even growing appeal of Mere Christianity is all the more remarkable in that it was not designed to be a book. C. S. Lewis originally presented it as four separate sets of radio broadcasts that he was asked to deliver for the BBC during the grim days of the Second World War. Lewis edited the talks and published them in three little paperbacks. These enjoyed steady sales in both Great Britain and the United States, helped by C. S. Lewis’s popularity as the author of The Screwtape Letters. Then in 1952 he combined the three earlier books under the title Mere Christianity. The title page specified that this was “a revised and amplified edition, with a new introduction.” As a repackaging of earlier works, Mere Christianity came out without fanfare or reviews. From these modest beginnings, the book steadily grew in popularity over the decades.
So the question the present volume seeks to answer is this: what is it about this collection of informal radio talks that accounts for their taking on such a thriving life of their own?
The answer to that fascinating question will inevitably have a number of dimensions. First, one has to know something about the author of the book because an author initially gives a book its life. Second, one has to know something about the circumstances under which the book was written, the author’s purpose in writing it, and its intended audience. Third, one has to consider how it has been received over the years by differing audiences and communities. What factors in their cultural and religious settings contributed to the book’s popularity? What has been its public reception? Who have been its most influential promoters, and how did its influence grow? What have been negative factors and criticisms of the book that point to limitations in its appeal? Finally, taking all these sorts of factors into consideration, what qualities in its character give the book its ongoing “life” or lasting vitality?
Recounting the “life” of a book such as this has some limits. Normally the story of a book after its publication has to do primarily with its public reception. Especially in the case of books that are officially sacred scripture for a particular tradition, the story is largely about differing interpretations or about controversies related to the book. Sometimes a book makes the news if it influences some well-known people, institutions, or major movements. Those matters constitute what might be called the “public life” of a book. Mere Christianity does have something of such a public life, and that will be a major topic in the present “biography” of the book. Yet one must keep in mind how much must remain untold. Once it is published, a book such as this takes on a life of its own. Or it might be more accurate to say that it takes on millions of lives as it intersects with the actual lives of its many readers. There is no adequate way to begin to tell about or even to categorize all of these, because readers’ reactions doubtless have varied from disgust or disinterest to finding their reading of the book the major turning point in their lives. And everything in between. Mere Christianity has been recommended and read—or put aside—by so many people, in so many situations and in so many parts of the world, that it would be impossible even to provide a truly representative sampling of its influences. And then there are untraceable ripple effects from the many whose lives have been changed. One can report types of stories and reactions that have been repeated and seem typical, but these are necessarily impressionistic.
A word about my point of view is in order. I am a great admirer of Lewis and share much of his perspective, but I am not among those who were shaped by Mere Christianity at an early age. I have, however, known many impressive Christians whose lives have been changed by this book. I also have been aware of the book’s reputation and ongoing popularity. So it seemed a natural candidate for this series. And I thought it would be fascinating to study Lewis, as it has indeed proven to be. Although I write for a university press with high standards of scholarship in mind, I do not see this as a detached academic exercise. As will become apparent from the stories of conflicting appraisals, there is no neutral place to stand in assessing the traits and the impact of a book of this sort. How one depicts the life of such a presentation of the Christian faith will depend largely on where one stands in relation to the sort of faith presented. My stance on that matter is highly sympathetic, even though not uncritical. I am careful to include negative assessments, some of which I share. Yet, as a fellow traveler with Lewis, my overall stance is one of fascination with trying to understand the ongoing vitality of the book—all the more so in light of its imperfections. I think readers from all sorts of points of view can learn from my admittedly sympathetic yet critical exposition. One of my guiding principles has been to write a book about Mere Christianity that people who themselves have admired the book can enjoy and from which they can learn.
Lewis’s own life has been recounted many times. Readers who are familiar with it may want to skip to chapter 1. Here are the highlights necessary for the present story. Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1898. His parents were from the well-to-do professional classes of Protestants on the island bitterly divided by religious factions and on its way to separation in 1922 into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. C. S. Lewis’s mother, Flora Hamilton Lewis, was the daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman, and his father, Albert James Lewis, was a police court solicitor. The comfortable and secure life enjoyed by Jack, as he became known, and his two-years-older brother, Warnie, was irreparably shattered with the death of their mother from cancer in 1908. The devastated Albert Lewis made matters worse by almost immediately sending his sons off to what became a series of boarding schools. The first of these, Wynyard, in England, was an educational disaster but also was the place where the young Jack began for a time to take with great seriousness the tenets and practices of the Anglican faith in which he had been formally reared. A few years later, when he was between twelve and fourteen and his education was beginning in earnest at an English preparatory school, Malvern College, his faith dissipated into a sea of relativism. First he became intrigued by a multitude of faiths and spiritual outlooks. Then he came to wonder, “In the midst of a thousand such religions stood our own, the thousand and first, labeled True. But on what grounds could I believe this exception?”3 The culminating step in his pre-university training and in his pilgrimage to confirmed atheism came under the guidance of his rigorous private tutor, William Thompson Kirkpatrick, whom he referred to affectionately in his autobiography as “The Great Knock.” Kirkpatrick, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian clergyman, had lost his own faith. He advocated the fashionable dismissal of all religions as cultural adaptations, a position most famously represented in Sir James George Frazer’s turn-of-the-century classic study of comparative religions, The Golden Bough. Kirkpatrick taught Lewis never to say anything for which he could not offer good reasons.
Lewis moved to Oxford in 1917 to prepare for classical studies there, but he had also enlisted in the military. Upon completing officer training in Oxford he was sent to France late that year to serve in the deadly trenches of the Great War as a second lieutenant. After several months at the front, he had the good fortune to be wounded just seriously enough to be sent back to England to convalesce. He resumed his Oxford studies early in 1919 and proved to be an outstanding student. By 1923 he had received firsts, or the highest honors, in classical languages, classical philosophy and literature, and English language and literature. Academic jobs were scarce, but in 1924–25 he taught philosophy as a replacement for his former tutor, who was on leave. Then in 1925 he was elected as a fellow, or a don, at Magdalen College, Oxford. Lewis’s highest ambition in these early years was to be a poet, and under a pseudonym, Clive Hamilton, he published two books of poetry.
In the meantime, Lewis entered into an unusual domestic arrangement that was both a product of the war and perhaps an expression of freedom from conventionality that was common among the disillusioned young intellectuals and artists of his postwar generation. In the months of preparation for military service, Lewis formed a close friendship with another officer trainee, Paddy Moore. He also became good friends with Moore’s mother, Janie, also known as Minto. Mrs. Moore was separated from her husband and in 1917 was forty-five and had a daughter, Maureen, who was then eleven. The eighteen-year-old Lewis visited with the Moores both before and after Paddy left for the front, and he already was expressing considerable affection for Mrs. Moore at that time. Apparently Lewis also made an agreement with Paddy that should one of them die, the other would take care of his dead friend’s surviving parent. Paddy did die in the war. And shortly after Lewis arrived back at Oxford at the beginning of 1919, Mrs. Moore and her daughter moved there also to be close to him. Soon Lewis moved in with them, and he continued to live with and take care of Minto until her death in 1951.
No one knows exactly what their early relationship involved, but the preponderance of opinion now inclines toward believing that it was not entirely platonic. That supposition, at least, fits all the known facts. Like Lewis’s own mother, Minto was the daughter of a clergyman from Northern Ireland, but unlike Flora Lewis and like the young Jack Lewis, she had lost her faith. So neither Minto nor Jack would have felt restrained by religious principle from a sexual relationship. Lewis later remarked (as an aside in The Problem of Pain), “I was as nearly without a moral conscience as a boy could be…. Of chastity, truthfulness, and self-sacrifice I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music.”4 Whatever may or may not have been involved, the living arrangements helped put a deep strain on Lewis’s relationship with his Victorian father, who was supporting him financially through his student years. Later, when Lewis converted to Christianity, Minto resented it deeply and remained adamantly anti-Christian. Whatever Lewis’s relationship with Mrs. Moore during these postconversion years, Lewis remained dedicated to taking care of her. He also did not seem to entertain a romantic relationship with any other woman so long as she lived.
The centerpiece of Lewis’s biography that is most closely related to the story of Mere Christianity is the account of his own conversion. Throughout his presentations of the faith, he mentions what he used to think when he was an atheist and then offers considerations that led him to reject that view. As someone who himself had looked at Christianity from the outside and then had been drawn in and enthralled by it, he offers insights drawn from his own pilgrimage from skepticism to commitment. One of the factors that gives authenticity to his presentation is that he is asking others to join him on a journey he has already taken. Lewis himself describes this trek of discovery in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and many fine biographers have filled in the details.
Lewis was exactly of that generation of young intellectuals who grew up when the Victorian world was still largely intact, found themselves confronted with the skepticism of modernity, and then were rudely thrust into the excruciating horrors of World War I. Lewis says little in Surprised by Joy about the impact of his war experience. But the reality was that of five friends who were with him at officer training school, he was the only one to survive. He later remarked in a letter that the war haunted his dreams for years.5 While he was at the front, he wrote some bitterly disillusioned poetry:
Come let us curse our Master ere we die,
For all hopes in endless ruins lie,
The good is dead. Let us curse God most high.6
After the war, through the 1920s, Lewis struggled to counter the despair inherent in this disillusionment. One thing he shared with many postwar thinkers was a sense that this essentially meaningless war had exploded the nineteenth-century myth of modern progress based on scientific advance. That outlook had provided the rational basis for undermining his faith, but he then found himself deeply dissatisfied with the universe emptied of meaning which that outlook implied. He describes himself as always having been on a quest for “Joy” and as having pangs of desire for some distant beauty. He pursued this quest in his wide study of literature including ancient, classical, Norse, and modern works, as well as in what became his academic specialty: medieval and Renaissance English writers. In the course of his search, a discovery that he said “baptized” his imagination was the magical world of Phantastes, by the nineteenth-century maverick Christian writer George MacDonald.
One of Lewis’s most illuminating breakthroughs came when his Oxford friend Owen Barfield convinced him of the folly of “chronological snobbery.” Lewis defined chronological snobbery as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” That insight helped Lewis overcome his naïve acceptance of the latest naturalistic scientific pronouncements that led intellectual snobs such as he had been to dismiss beliefs in spiritual realities as merely “romantic” or “medieval.” He saw, rather, that “our own age is also ‘a period,’ and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions.”7 That insight helped him get beyond the shallow modern scientifically based rationalism that had stood as a roadblock to his encountering the spiritual as real.
This was also an era of religious conversions of prominent British literary figures. G. K. Chesterton converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism in 1922. Graham Greene gave up agnosticism for Catholicism in 1926. So did Evelyn Waugh in 1930. The American expatriate T. S. Eliot converted to Anglicanism in 1927. Of these, Chesterton most directly influenced Lewis. Lewis read The Everlasting Man not long after it came out in 1925 and “for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense.”8 Chesterton provided a model for Lewis as an engaging apologist, a novelist, a good-humored stylist, and a learned critic of modern assumptions. Probably reflecting his Northern Irish Protestant heritage, Lewis seems never to have been attracted to the Roman Catholic Church. Yet on his journey toward Christian faith, sophisticated literary Catholics played a pivotal role. By far the most important influence was his friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. The two met in 1926, found they had much in common in their interests in language and ancient mythologies, and soon became close friends, often sitting up late to discuss common interests.
All these factors converged toward leading Lewis step by step toward Christian belief. His own literary studies played a role. As a specialist in early English literature, he spent much of his time reading and analyzing great Christian writers. He compared these with acclaimed skeptical writers such as Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, George Bernard Shaw, or H. G. Wells, with whom he should have sympathized, but they “all seemed a little thin.”9 One important step was an incident in his college room early in 1926, when “the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew” remarked that the Gospels looked surprisingly reliable as historical records and that it almost seemed as though what they said about the Dying God was something that “had really happened once.”10 On a totally different front, Lewis admired Plato and for a time was much attracted to modern idealist philosophy, which offered an alternative to the growing materialism of the age. Yet all this still left him with a sense that there was something more. Then everything began to fall into place. Lewis remarks in a famous passage from Surprised by Joy that “amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God.’ To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.”11 He also described his experience “as if I were a man of snow beginning to melt,” an image he used again most effectively in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where the snow melting marked the breaking of the witch’s spell and signaled the return of the lion Aslan.12
The first step in the process, probably in the spring of 1930,13 involved Lewis’s coming to accept theism and beginning to attend Christian services at his college and at the local Anglican parish. Yet, like many modern Christians of the time, he did not believe in the divinity of Christ and the doctrines of salvation that flowed from it. The second step took place as the direct result of a late-night conversation on September 19, 1931, with Tolkien and another Christian academic friend, Hugh Dyson. The three dined at Magdalen College and then took a stroll around Addison’s Walk, a picturesque streamside path on the college grounds, discussing the nature of myth. They moved to Lewis’s rooms, where the topic turned to Christianity in a conversation that went until 3:00 a.m. Tolkien was instrumental in convincing Lewis that Christianity could be a “true myth.” Lewis’s conversion to theism had been largely on rational grounds. Myths went further in speaking to humans’ deepest longings. As a broadly Christian theist, Lewis had admired Jesus as a great teacher and example. Soon after his conversation with Tolkien and Dyson, he found himself believing in the stupendous life-reorienting reality that Jesus Christ was God incarnate. As he explained in a letter to his lifelong friend and confidant, Arthur Greeves, “The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”14
Lewis very soon took up the task of attempting to share with others his journey of discovery. During the fall of 1932 he wrote his first prose book, The Pilgrim’s Regress. Presented as a modern version of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, it is sometimes an obscure allegory of his intellectual travels and seems written for other intellectuals. Lewis’s pilgrim, John, sets out to find a distant island representing the human desire for “Joy.” On the way, John is captured by a giant called “The Spirit of the Age,” who, like modern science, claims to see through everything to its true essence. John is rescued by Reason. He meets “Mother Kirk,” who represents traditional Christianity, or what he later calls “mere Christianity,” and offers the only way over the great canyon between him and his desired destination. He attempts the long way around and meets representations of all sorts of the false hopes offered by ancient and modern philosophies, such as humanism, Enlightenment, nihilism, idealism, modern art, and modernized religion. Reason helps lead him back to Mother Kirk, who leads him to the island of his dream. On his return journey, or “regress,” John understands how different everything looks and how inadequate are the once-tempting philosophies now that he has seen “the real shape of the world we live in” and the true human condition “on a knife-edge between Heaven and Hell.”15
During the 1930s, Lewis’s principal activities continued to be those of an Oxford don. They involved a great deal of tutoring of students in medieval and early English literature. Lewis also became one of the most popular lecturers at the university. And in 1935 he published his first academic book, The Allegory of Love, a study of ideals of courtly love in medieval literature.
One of the most significant developments for Lewis in the 1930s was the expansion of his friendship with Tolkien into an informal literary group that eventually became known as “The Inklings.” This was a group of friends who met each Thursday evening in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College to discuss each other’s work. In addition to Lewis and Tolkien, the fellowship included Hugo Dyson, Nevill Coghill, Dr. R. E. Harvard, Owen Barfield (when he was in town), Warnie Lewis, and others. During World War II, when Oxford University Press had moved to Oxford, the novelist Charles Williams became a member especially valued by Lewis. Sometimes on Tuesday mornings the group met less formally for beer and talk at The Eagle and Child, a local pub. Tolkien read chapters of what became The Lord of the Rings to this group.
Lewis tried out his works on these friends. By the later 1930s he was looking for more popular ways to present the Christian message. One way he did so was by writing a space-travel novel, Out of the Silent Planet (1938). In it he shows how earth and especially the false hopes of scientism look from the perspective of a planet, Malacandra, ruled by creatures still in harmony with the music of the spheres. Earth, in contrast, is the “silent planet” because it is ruled by an intelligence, Satan, who has rebelled against God and hence is out of harmony with the good and the beautiful. Lewis represents the reigning human spirit in the character of the scientist Weston, who is obsessed with using technical power to rule the universe but is thereby blinded from understanding the higher intelligence and the moral beauty of the supposedly “primitive” creatures he encounters on Malacandra.
Then, in the summer of 1939, at the request of a publisher of a series of books for Christian laypeople, Lewis embarked on his first straightforward defense of basic orthodox Christianity, The Problem of Pain. “Not many years ago, when I was an atheist,” he began in its first sentence. He then explained why he, like so many who had come of age around the time of the Great War, had come to believe that this vast universe, as described by modern science and populated with creatures capable of such great evil, must be empty of meaning. “Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.” Yet he had come to realize that the common experiences of humanity pointed to a universe in which the historical events at the center of Christianity provided a compelling account that had the ring of truth. In arguments that anticipated many of those of Mere Christianity, he went on to explain how the possibility of pain was compatible with an omnipotent God who created a universe with creatures who were genuinely free to resist God’s love. Christian teachings regarding the fall of humans, the possibly redemptive uses of pain, the promise of Heaven, and even the threat of Hell all fit with human experience, common sense, and a sense of justice.16
Lewis’s domestic situation had also been evolving. His brother, Warnie, who had had his own conversion experience in 1930, aided in the purchase of a substantial house, The Kilns, near Oxford, which had a very attractive garden, pond, and woods. Mrs. Moore was the legal owner of the property, but the Lewis brothers had rights to live there for life. In 1932 Warnie retired from the army and moved in permanently. He was a great asset in his brother’s work, aiding him in matters such as correspondence, but also suffered from serious bouts with alcoholism. Minto’s daughter, Maureen, who studied and then taught music at a local school, remained in the household until she was married in 1940.
Then, on September 1, 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland, and two days later England and France declared war on Germany. Warnie, a career officer, was immediately called to active service. Many schoolchildren were also immediately evacuated from London in expectation of German air raids. Mrs. Moore opened their home to four girls, the first of numbers of such children who would be staying there during the war years. Jack Lewis, who would not pass age forty until November, also feared being called up. During the rest of 1939 and into early 1940, there was an ominous lull. Then in April Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark, and in May he marched through the Low Countries toward Paris. The allied French and British armies were helpless to stop the onslaught. If it had not been apparent previously, the very survival of an independent Great Britain was at stake. Lewis would not be called up, but in these trying times he would find ways to serve on other fronts.