The Lasting Vitality of Mere Christianity

CHAPTER EIGHT

C. S. Lewis was acutely aware of changing reading tastes and so had expected his works soon to go out of style. Even in the decades after his death, when his books instead grew in popularity, critics were predicting that the world was changing too fast for such appeal to long continue. Lyle Dorsett, who directed the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College from 1983 to 1990, observed that during his time there an “endless throng of editors, critics, and scholars came through the doors predicting the end of Lewis’s ability to speak to a new generation.”1 Since then, even though Lewis’s popularity has not waned, such prophets can occasionally still be found who say that Lewis will not be able to communicate to upcoming postmodern generations.² Perhaps someday such predictions will prove true. But for now the question regarding Mere Christianity is this: Why has it not faded in the way almost every other nonfiction book of the 1940s and 1950s has?

Over the past several decades a host of commentators have offered answers to this question regarding the genius and the ongoing appeal of Lewis in Mere Christianity. It would be impossible to begin to summarize all of these. What follows is a distillation of the most compelling insights that represent a consensus of opinion.

1. Lewis looks for timeless truths as opposed to the culturally bound

Almost every sympathetic analyst of Lewis’s apologetics has made this point in one way or another. Lewis’s ability to direct his audiences toward the realities conveyed in the perennial Christian message is a manifestation of one of the most fundamental traits of his outlook: his conviction that ideas that have stood the test of time are more likely to be reliable than the latest fashionable views of one’s own day.

This trait, in turn, developed from Lewis’s own deeply felt experiences. As a young man he had been so enthralled by modern thought that he had become a deeply disillusioned atheist. Then, during years of searching, he came to recognize the passing and ephemeral character of modern dogmas. During his quest for truth as a young man at Oxford in the 1920s, he took to heart his friend Owen Barfield’s observations regarding “chronological snobbery.” Many of the most heralded “advances” in modern thought, he came to see, would appear to later generations to be quaintly naïve. As he explained in a later essay, he rejected the “Great Myth” that had captivated him in his younger days. That was the modern myth that regarded history as basically an evolutionary progression from earlier, more primitive times of relative ignorance toward the triumph of modern scientifically based illumination.3

As a literary scholar with immense learning about human thought and imagination from other eras, Lewis was eminently positioned to be a guide in sorting out the perennial from the time-bound. His works of literary criticism are exemplary in explaining how the assumptions of earlier ages differed from his own. Each time and place has characteristic insights from which we may learn but also blind spots and misleading mythologies. So, for instance, in Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1952), his contribution to The Oxford History of English Literature, he titled his introductory chapter “The New Learning and the New Ignorance,” a title he might have assigned to twentieth-century thought as well.

Lewis offered one of his most memorable expositions of the value of the wisdom of the past in gaining a proper perspective of modern times in a lay sermon, “Learning in Wartime,” that he preached in Oxford in September 1939. Britain and France had just declared war on Germany, and students were asking why they should study the ancients at a time when there were so many urgent present needs. Lewis’s answer was that, rather than being impractical, learning from great writers of other eras was one of the needs of the hour. Especially in times of crisis, people need perspective from the past in order to recognize that “much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.” One “who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”4

Lewis’s literary excursions into many other times and places made him especially alert to the larger intellectual trends of the day that characterized contemporary culture, especially the reliance on scientific models. In his critiques of such outlooks he typically tried to acknowledge their practical accomplishments while questioning their unproven assumptions and claims to revolutionize understandings of the basic human condition. For instance, in Christian Behaviour he distinguished between the useful techniques of Freudian psychoanalysis and the naïvete of Freud as an amateur philosopher. Lewis often made a similar distinction between true science that produced much valuable knowledge and naïve naturalistic philosophies of scientism built around the unproven assumption that the scientific study of nature produces the highest form of knowledge. In Lewis’s trilogy of interplanetary novels, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945), the villains are pseudoscientists who have delusional visions of remaking the universe by using science to subdue nature. In Screwtape, the senior devil likewise promotes scientism. Screwtape warns his protégé, Wormwood, to keep his “patient” away from “real sciences” but to perhaps permit him to dabble in economics or sociology. “But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him the general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is ‘the results of modern investigation.’”5

Lewis’s preferences for timeless truths as opposed to the latest insights is a primary feature explaining the lasting vitality of Mere Christianity. In the mid-twentieth century academics and other sophisticates who prided themselves on being up to date might dismiss Lewis’s viewpoints as antiquated. For instance, he had to suffer the scorn of some of his Oxford colleagues. Yet today it is twentieth-century philosophies and confident predications of a world guided by scientific understandings that seem quaint and sadly out of style. Most of contemporary thought is still based on naturalistic premises, but it is also riddled with the contradictions among modernist hopes and postmodern subversions of those hopes. And mid-twentieth century expert scientific advice for guiding one’s life often looks naïve. Lewis’s critiques of modernity and his warnings against being captivated by the spirit of the age or by its popular partisanships appear, in contrast, as prophetic. At least a fair number of readers find them so. And to the extent that Lewis succeeded in his quest to present perennial Christian truths, these have proved as compelling in our times as in his own.

An important corollary to Lewis’s concentration on the perennial as opposed to the culturally bound is that Lewis avoids tying his presentation to controversial political or social issues of his day.6 That was partly dictated by the constraints involved in addressing nationwide radio audiences during wartime. But it also reflected Lewis’s disposition. He had little interest in politics and seldom read the newspapers. He was concerned, rather, with deeper cultural trends such as the philosophical movements he addressed in The Abolition of Man. Those trends did involve the practical matter of what was being taught in the schools. Such issues fit with his concerns related to preparation for evangelism. If some of the modern ideas took over the whole culture, that would further stultify people’s natural moral sensibilities. Yet when it came to Mere Christianity, which involved evangelism as well as pre-evangelism, Lewis was careful to stay away from sociopolitical issues.

Lewis was quite explicit in avoiding the political temptation so prominent among Christians of his day and since. Screwtape recommends that Wormwood suggest that his patient’s political views are part of his religion. “Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part.” The final step is to have “the patient see his Christianity as valuable chiefly for the excellent arguments it provides for his party’s positions.”⁷ Accordingly, Lewis himself was careful to avoid the snare of tying Christianity to partisan politics that has so often diverted people from the essence of the faith, especially in eras of participatory democracy.

Lewis has sometimes been criticized for making the Gospel too individualistic.8 He was, nonetheless, clear about his priorities. If perennial Christianity was true, one’s eternal relationship to God was the overwhelmingly preeminent question. As Lewis said in “Learning in Wartime,” “Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself.” Humans must recognize that they are on a pilgrimage toward “a permanent city satisfying the soul” and should not expect to build a Heaven on earth. So “a man may have to die for his country, but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, belongs emphatically to God: himself.”⁹

When Lewis does include a chapter titled “Social Morality” in Christian Behaviour, he says explicitly that Christianity has no particular current political agenda. “It could not. It is meant for all men at all times and a particular programme which suited one place or time would not suit another.” He then goes on to outline some characteristics of what an ideal Christian society might look like and is careful to point out that it would seem leftist in economic policy but reactionary in expectations for family life and personal behavior, so that it would not come close to any current party agenda. Moreover, he points out that there is little point in talking about a Christian society until “most of us really want it,” and that is not going to happen “until we become fully Christian.”10 One cannot embrace the first principle of Christian social morality, “love your neighbor as yourself,” until one first learns to love and obey God. So social and political questions drive us back to the prior question of our personal relationship with God.¹¹

2. He uses common human nature as the point of contact with his audiences

Lewis’s lifelong search for timeless truths led him not only to core Christian doctrines but also to an ability to reach wide audiences. How was he able to achieve his common touch? One might think that, as a prototypical university don who spent most of his days buried in books, he would be poorly prepared to communicate with ordinary people. But for Lewis almost the opposite seems to have been the case. His study of literature was integral to his search for common human nature, which was revealed in many guises in differing times and places. So, as he suggested in his sermon “Learning in Wartime,” Lewis was like a traveler who had lived in many places. One of the practical implications of that was that his learning shaped his sense of what he had in common with ordinary people who shared in perennial human experience. As Malcolm Muggeridge commented, “As a pilgrim, Lewis is Bunyan’s man, rather than Thomas Aquinas’s.” Muggeridge’s point is that Lewis was concerned with Everyman more than with the intellectual’s high theorizing. He was a great admirer of Samuel Johnson and shared Johnson’s zeal to find the common sense of the race.12

Because it is rare to hear of scholars, especially since the era of academic specialization, whose deep academic studies enhance their abilities to communicate with ordinary people, Lewis’s resistance to modern trends is worthy of comment. The study of literature as an academic discipline was relatively new in Lewis’s day, but even then he could see that the trends toward professionalization were leading toward the dominance of critical theory over appreciation of the literature itself. Lewis was deeply suspicious of theory. So he disdained “the type of critic for whom all the great names in English literature … are as so many lampposts for a dog.”¹³ Quasi-scientific literary theories, like the giant in The Pilgrim’s Regress, aspired to “see through” things in a sense of explaining them away. Lewis, in contrast, aspired rather to “see through” the eyes of others. His own works of literary criticism focus on alerting readers to what they might enjoy. As the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement put it regarding Lewis’s monumental English Literature in the Seventeenth Century, Excluding Drama (1952), “Mr. Lewis … knows how to make his learning felt.”¹⁴ Readers of Mere Christianity have often remarked on this same quality.

Lewis’s goal in studying literature was to learn from and to enjoy sharing the experiences of people from many times and places. In reflecting on his approach in An Experiment in Criticism, published in 1961, he wrote in his concluding paragraph: “My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of man, is not enough, I will see what others have invented…. In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself…. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”15

Mere Christianity ends on a similar note. Lewis says that as long as you are bothering about finding how Christ might improve your own personality, you will never find him. “The very first step,” he writes, “is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.” That might sound strange, but Lewis points out that it is a common principle in all sorts of everyday matters: “Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making.” That same “principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.” And so he concludes in his final sentences: “Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look to Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”16

At the same time that Lewis was alert to common human traits, he was also alert to how these traits related to ordinary people he encountered every day. That aspect of his common touch suggests that he cultivated a similar approach to those whom he saw around him—whether the hired help at home, the staff at the university, shopkeepers, barkeepers, parishioners at the church, soldiers he met on the train or on RAF visits—as he did to persons from the past, to try to see through their eyes. Lewis had an extraordinary imagination, as is evidenced in his ability to create a reality seen through children’s eyes in Narnia. He seems to have nurtured similar sensibilities toward people unlike himself. That he would do so must have grown out of a conviction that he stated so eloquently in his 1940 sermon “The Weight of Glory”: “There are no ordinary people.” The same attitude is apparent in his willingness to answer thousands of letters, despite finding that a hugely disruptive chore.

A counterpart to taking seriously all sorts of people in trying to understand human nature was that Lewis looked within himself to understand the human condition and its deepest problems. That sensibility contributed to the intangible qualities of authenticity and personal integrity that come through in Mere Christianity. Biographical treatments of Lewis show that almost all the issues he raises are those that he had wrestled with on his own journey. The Screwtape Letters reveal his personal knowledge of the obstacles to the faith. A revealing example of how seriously he took his own admonitions is that in the fall of 1940 he began the daunting practice of making formal confessions to an Anglican priest. According to Owen Barfield’s estimate, Lewis took moral self-reflection so seriously that “self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own weaknesses and shortcomings and nothing more.”17

Another bit of evidence both of integrity and of taking ordinary people seriously was that, as mentioned earlier, Lewis donated to charities most of the income he received from his books and lectures. Lewis’s letters to the BBC often contain instructions on where to send his fees. Eventually such informal arrangements became a problem, and Lewis engaged Barfield, who had studied law and become a solicitor in London, to manage his affairs. Barfield testifies that he “gave two-thirds of his income away altogether and would have bound himself to give the whole of it away if I had let him.”¹⁸ Such qualities would, of course, be only indirectly perceived by his early audiences but have contributed to his lasting reputation. Yet from the beginning what many people perceived was an authentic voice of one who knew what he was talking about yet was often self-effacing rather than posing as an expert.

Taking ordinary people seriously as not so ordinary is related to Lewis’s recognition, which he often emphasized, that to be an effective apologist he had to be a “translator.” Translation was one way of reducing the distances among people and finding a common ground. In order to speak to average unbelieving English people such as one might expect to find in the pubs, one had, like the missionary to Africa, to learn a new language. More broadly, the speaker had to take into account that traditional Christian language had no clear meaning to most of one’s audience. That was a problem for churches as well. So Lewis recommended that every examination in theology “ought to include a passage from some standard theological work for translation into the vernacular.”19 As he recommended to a correspondent, “It only involves first writing down in ordinary theological college English exactly what you want to say and then translating,” much as though you were turning it into Greek prose.²⁰ Or, as he put it on another occasion: “Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test.”²¹

When Lewis took the assignment to speak on the radio to virtually every sort of person in England, he recognized that, going beyond just finding common linguistic ground, he would have to find his point of contact with his audience in common human experience. One advantage of being a student of literary history who had observed human nature in many times and places was that Lewis had a particularly acute understanding of the peculiarities of how twentieth-century British people thought. Particularly important, he recognized that in the modern world one of the great obstacles to the Christian message was that the culture encouraged people to think they were already good as they were. So Lewis attempted to counter that modern conceit by first appealing to almost universal human convictions regarding fair play and justice and the instinctive belief that there really is a right and a wrong. Once they recognized that such beliefs implied an objective moral law, he might be able to lead them to recognize that that made the existence of a lawgiver probable. Hence, if they themselves sometimes violated that law, the violation might be an actual wrong with serious consequences. So Lewis recognized that he could not start with an explicitly Christian challenge but rather must begin with cultivating a sense of guilt that would be a necessary first step toward seeking a cure.

Lewis’s belief that modern people could be brought to recognize an objective right and wrong was grounded in part in his wide study of other cultures through the ages. During the same era that Lewis was doing his broadcasts he was working on a series of lectures, delivered early in 1943 and then published as The Abolition of Man. In these Lewis criticized modern British schools for teaching, in effect, that all aesthetic and moral judgments were essentially subjective. He argued, to the contrary, that there were objective moral standards, and one bit of evidence was that similar basic moral precepts could be found in every culture. Despite cultural differences in applications of these standards, there was remarkable agreement in first principles. Lewis provided an appendix in which he illustrated that these moral premises, which he called the Tao (or the Way), could be found in Greek, Roman, Chinese, Babylonian, ancient Egyptian, and Old Norse writings. Throughout history humans have recognized basic moral principles of general and special beneficence, duties to parents, children, ancestors, elders, and posterity, the law of justice, the law of good faith and veracity, the law of mercy, and the law of magnanimity. Lewis only alluded to these commonalities in his broadcasts, but in the final version of Mere Christianity he added several sentences summarizing the argument and referring readers to the appendix of The Abolition of Man.22

In his opening series of broadcasts Lewis made a point of saying that he was not yet presenting any explicitly Christian teaching but rather was appealing to what everyone might understand on their own. “We are not taking anything from the Bible or the Churches,” he said, “we are trying to see what we can find out about this Somebody [behind the moral law] on our own steam.”²³ He was looking together with his listeners at what they could find out “on our own steam.” In twentieth-century England, Lewis recognized that although many people had been exposed to some Christian teaching, often it was only enough to inoculate them against taking it seriously. So he needed to find common ground in the sorts of moral judgments everyone already engaged in.

Much of Lewis’s work, especially his fiction, was built around this theme of helping people to recognize that there were moral realities that their own self-centeredness as well as many modern outlooks encouraged them to deny. In The Screwtape Letters he exposed the subtle ways in which people rationalize their failures and guilt. The three interplanetary science-fiction novels illustrated how modern scientific ideals and illusions could blind people from recognizing elementary moral realities. And in each of the Narnia tales at least one of the characters is confronted with his or her own guilt. In The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” for instance, Eustace, who is a know-it-all little prig, perhaps modeled on Lewis himself as a schoolboy, is acting so beastly that he gets turned into a literal dragon. But then “he realized that he was a monster cut off from the whole human race. An appalling loneliness came over him. He began to see the others had not really been fiends at all. He began to wonder if he himself had been such a nice person as he always supposed.”24

From his own experience and his studies of human nature, Lewis knew that fostering some sort of self-recognition such as Eustace’s was a necessary first step in preparation for direct evangelization.

3. Lewis sees reason in the context of experience, affections, and imagination

In order to foster such self-recognition among his audience, Lewis realized that he had to appeal to experience, affections, and imagination and not just to reason. As Michael Ward noted in response to John Beversluis, Lewis made a distinction between imagination as “the organ of meaning” and reason as “the natural organ of truth.”25 So, in his view, reason cannot operate independent of the imagination that shapes meaning. Lewis does, of course, use his formidable rational powers but also acknowledges that fully rational people might assess the evidence of Christianity differently.²⁶ So he recognizes that the best reasoning has to be set in contexts that excite the affections or the deepest loves, desires, fears, and hopes that make up the whole experience of a person.

Commentators on Lewis and Mere Christianity have long noticed this feature of his work and described it in a variety of ways. One of the earliest was Austin Farrer, a leading Anglican theologian of the day and a friend of Lewis at Oxford, who commented that “we think we are listening to an argument; in fact, we are presented with a vision; and it is the vision that carries conviction.” Mere Christianity, Farrer maintained, was not so much a work of apologetics as a display of the moral force of Christianity.²⁷

The Yale theologian Paul L. Holmer provided a classic sustained analysis of a similar point, observing that few have combined such a “plea for objectivity with a portrayal with the riches of human subjectivity.” Rather than battering his audience with a host of hypotheses and arguments so that they are rendered helpless to decide, Lewis approaches them as active moral agents who are engaged in relationships: “It is as if the argument does not begin to gather its force until the reader has realized something about himself.”28

J. I. Packer, one of the most revered of British evangelical theologians, ties these qualities, as have many others, to Lewis’s combination of imagination and rationality. “The best teachers,” writes Packer, “are always those in whom imagination and logical control combine, so that you receive wisdom from their flights of fancy as well as a human heartbeat from their logical analyses and arguments.” Packer goes on to remark, “Because Lewis’s mind was so highly developed in both directions, it can truly be said of him that all of his arguments (including his literary criticism) are illustrations, in the sense that they throw light directly on realities of life and action, while all his illustrations (including the fiction and fantasies) are arguments, in the sense that they throw light directly on realities of truth and fact.”²⁹

The essential biographical background for understanding Lewis’s combination of appeals both to reason and to the imagination is that his early atheism had been grounded in an overestimation of the powers of reason alone. He later described his most influential and beloved teacher, W. T. Kirkpatrick, or “The Great Knock,” as almost “a purely logical entity.” Kirkpatrick was also a materialist and an atheist who would not allow for opinions that could not be demonstrated, and he was totally dedicated to the pursuit of rational truth within those bounds. Lewis discovered that once he had adopted such thoroughgoing rationalism he was left with a sharply divided self: “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.” He came to see that reason such as Kirkpatrick’s, which was grounded on the prior assumption of materialism, was a “shallow rationalism.”30 But without abandoning his commitment to rigorous rationality, he sought to reconcile that with the rest of his experience, including his imagination, moral sensibilities, and deepest desires. Traditional Christianity, he eventually discovered, satisfied all these aspects of his experience better than any of the alternatives.

Alister McGrath, himself a popular apologist and also a biographer of Lewis, offers a close analysis of the role reason plays in Lewis’s apologetic method. As Mc-Grath and others have observed, Lewis uses reason not to try to prove the truth of Christianity but rather to clear away objections and to help him show others that, as he himself discovered, its account of things best fits the whole of their experience. So, for instance, in his chapter “Hope” in Christian Behaviour, he argues that the deepest desires and longings that we all have but are never wholly fulfilled in this life are indications that this life is not all there is: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”³¹ Such experiences of desire or longing had been immensely important to Lewis himself in his search for something beyond materialism. Yet the argument is not presented as a proof. Rather, it is “the most probable explanation.” Lewis first sketched two other sorts of explanation and then presented the Christian view (“‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction of those desires exists’”) as best fitting the whole of our experience. McGrath observes that Lewis’s approach is similar to what is today in the philosophy of science called “inference to the best explanation” or looking for the “big picture” that makes the best sense of all our observations.32 Lewis himself captures the concept in one of his compelling images: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”³³

In Miracles, a more formal apologetic work, Lewis used the analogy that we might possess parts of a novel or a symphony. If someone claimed that a newly discovered manuscript would provide the link on which the whole plot turned or reveal the main theme of the symphony, “Our business would be to see whether the passage, if admitted to the central place which the discoverer claims for it, did actually illuminate all the parts we had already seen and ‘pull them together.’”³⁴ As this analogy suggests, reason would play a prominent and essential role in the process. Yet ultimately what would decide the issue would be a host of considerations that would be intuitive and experiential.

Lewis was deeply aware that modern people were living in a disenchanted universe and that part of what he needed to do was to broaden their sensibilities. In the modern world, shaped in such large measure by the standards of modern science and technology, many “sensible” people limit their vision to material things that can be measured and managed through instrumental reason. Whereas at one time people had instinctively recognized that everyday reality was packed with personality and meaning, modern culture had taught them to be blind and deaf to all the wonders of reality that surrounded them, including spiritual realities. One of Lewis’s memorable depictions of this trait is in the character of Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, the story of the origins of Narnia. Even though Uncle Andrew fancies himself as a magician, he in fact makes thoroughly modern scientific assumptions and is both self-centered and “dreadfully practical.” He has no interest in the magical world beyond how he can use it for his own profit. So when Aslan begins to sing a beautiful song, he convinces himself that he is hearing a roar, because “Who ever heard of a lion singing.” Unlike the other characters, Uncle Andrew cannot hear Aslan or the other animals speak because he knows that it is impossible for them to do so.35

In a famous passage from his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis elicits our deepest sense of beauty, longing, and desire and then asks:

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness that has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.36

In weaving his various spells to break the blinding enchantment of modern disenchantment, Lewis does not in the least denigrate the role of reason. Rather, he uses all his rational powers to expand his audience’s abilities to recognize other dimensions of reality beyond those known by instrumental reason alone.

Lewis, then, did not hold a naïve view that people could be led to the faith simply through rational arguments. He trusted in reason and believed that people through the ages shared some common sensibilities and reasoning abilities. Yet he also saw that human reasoning takes place in the context of prior dispositions and assumptions that may block us from recognizing the truth. Lewis was confident that under the right circumstances people could be brought to see that Christianity is fully rational in the sense of providing the best explanation of things, that it is the clue to the puzzle that makes everything else fall into place. Nonetheless, the case for Christianity is not like a mathematical or philosophical proof that all rational people can be compelled to recognize. Rather than a simple set of arguments or just “evidence that demands a verdict,” Mere Christianity rests on an appeal to the experience of the whole person.

Interpreters have recognized this relationship of reason to imagination in describing Lewis’s rhetorical strategies. Lewis realized that neither rational appeals by themselves nor emotional appeals by themselves were likely to persuade.37 James Como, in helpful observations on Lewis’s apologetic rhetoric, shows how he typically frames arguments by defining terms, laying out (often dichotomous) alternatives, identifying with the reasonableness of the objections of his audience, and presenting the rational superiority of the Christian alternative while at the same time making that alternative imaginatively and emotionally appealing. In Mere Christianity he typically allows some of the steps in what might be a more formal argument to be implied but brings his readers to recognize this same combination of both a best explanation and something that resonates emotionally with their own experiences and desires. Como illustrates the power of this strategy with the testimony of the actress Debra Winger, who co-starred in the movie Shadowlands. Winger, although not a Christian herself, had studied Lewis very carefully. In response to a question as to whether, as the film suggests, Lewis was someone who gave “easy” answers to “difficult” questions, Winger replied, “He may make difficult questions accessible. I don’t think he makes the answers ‘easy.’” She added, “He’s in that school of discourse where his statements are not like books that are written by experts.” Rather, she offered, “He’s saying ‘think about this.’” As Como summarizes his point, “Lewis’s rhetoric is inseparable from his voice, both reasonable and rhapsodic, doubly inviting.”38

4. He is a poet at heart, using metaphor and the art of meaning in a universe that is alive

Lewis’s views on the interrelationship of reason and the imagination are closely connected to his effective use of images, metaphors, and analogies. This feature is related to his artistry in fiction. It also reflects his sensibilities as someone whose first ambition was to be a poet. In his work as a popular apologist he employs a succession of simple comparisons and metaphors both to clarify the meanings of his rational arguments and to excite the affections or experiential sensibilities of his readers. These devices also allow him to communicate to wide audiences not only in England of the 1940s but across both time and cultures.

Just about everyone who has reflected on the lasting strengths of Mere Christianity has noticed its excellence in the use of analogy and metaphor. Michael Ward relates that to Lewis’s larger rhetorical strategy of enhancing his rational arguments with analogies that both clarify understanding and add vivid emotional force. Specifically, Ward argues that Lewis avoids the more simply emotive “come-to-Jesus” technique of popular evangelism but rather tells his audience, “This is what it is like to come to Jesus.” To illustrate, Ward offers a “brief survey” drawn from Mere Christianity:

Becoming a Christian (passing from death to life) is like joining in a campaign of sabotage, like falling at someone’s feet or putting yourself in someone’s hands, like taking on board fuel or food, like laying down your rebel arms and surrendering, saying sorry, laying yourself open, turning full speed astern; it is like killing part of yourself, like learning to walk or to write, like buying God a present with his own money; it is like a drowning man clutching at a rescuer’s hand, like a tin soldier or a statue becoming alive, like waking after a long sleep, like getting close to someone or becoming infected, like dressing up or pretending or playing; it is like emerging from the womb or hatching from an egg; it is like a compass needle swinging to north, or a cottage being made into a palace, or a field being plowed and resown, or a horse turning into a Pegasus, or a greenhouse roof becoming bright in the sunlight; it is like coming around from anesthetic, like coming in out of the wind, like going home.39

Mickey Maudlin, the executive editor for religion at HarperOne, who has overseen the publication of Lewis’s works, after offering a similar list of analogies drawn from both Lewis’s fiction and his apologetics, emphasizes that in both Lewis is asking you to take an imaginative journey in which you are asked to choose sides. So in Mere Christianity readers are not just learning about Christianity or about how to become a better person. Rather, they are being led to see that the narratives of their own lives are set in the midst of a much larger real-life cosmic drama that tells of a loving but dangerous God who is inviting them to be remade.40

Chad Walsh, Lewis’s first major American promoter, in reflecting on the key role of the analogies “in the seductive power of Mere Christianity,” suggested that we might “say that they are little poems interspersed in the prose text bringing to full life the ideas that otherwise would smack of the scholar’s study.” Walsh continues: “Their poetic quality does not make them literally ‘true’ but it makes them clear and appealing, and helps the reader imagine things that might just possibly be true, no matter how contrary they are to his daily common sense.”⁴¹

Lewis’s use of metaphors to engage the imagination was not just a clever skill or strategy but rather reflected his fundamental views of communication and reality itself. “All our truth, or all but a few fragments,” he maintains, “is won by metaphor.” So, as Michael Ward explains, “We don’t grasp the meaning of a word or concept until we have a clear image to connect it with.”⁴² Moreover, these metaphors point toward realities that are “a kind of psycho-physical parallelism (or more) in the universe.”⁴³ Scientific language, Lewis acknowledges, provides a very useful way of speaking about some things. But most of our meaningful experience is not susceptible to such precise technical analysis. “The very essence of our life as conscious beings,” he explains, “all day and every day, consists of something which cannot be communicated except by hint, similes, metaphors, and the use of those emotions (themselves not very important) which are pointers to it.” These imaginative understandings are not simply about our emotions but about apprehending things in their relationships beyond us. “We are not really concerned with the emotions: the emotions are our concern about something else.” So a mother who is worried about her son in the army would not be truly cured by a drug that relieved her anxiety; her overwhelming concern is not her anxiety but rather the safety of her son. “Similarly it is no use offering me a drug which will give me over again the feelings I had on first hearing the overture to The Magic Flute. The feelings by themselves—the flutter in the diaphragm—are of very mediocre interest to me. What gave them their value was the thing they were about. So in our Christian experience.”44

In a vein similar to his concern over the modern disenchantment of reality, Lewis worried that modern people were losing their imaginative sensibilities. “Evolution may not have ceased,” he speculated, “and in evolution a species may lose old powers as well as acquire—possibly in order to acquire—new ones.” Modern people, he observed, were being taught to believe that imagination is “only the presence of mental images” and that emotions are about themselves “as distinct from the things they are about.”⁴⁵ Near the beginning of The Abolition of Man he offered a striking example of what he has in mind when he cites modern schoolbook writers who assert that a poetic statement that a waterfall is “sublime” reflects merely the feelings of the speaker rather than the actual quality of the waterfall.46

In Lewis’s view, the universe is not dead, as evolved moderns would have it, and is not experienced only through the meanings we arbitrarily impose on it. Rather, it is animate and personal. Ultimately it is related to its Creator and through the Creator to us. Everything is related to everything else. As his close friend Owen Barfield remarked, “Somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.”⁴⁷ So the meanings of all higher things and most of all divine things are best apprehended by metaphor and analogy that point to actual and ultimately personal interrelationships.

Lewis, whose first aspirations and first publications were as a poet, was so thoroughly imbued with this way of seeing and communicating things that to speak by metaphor and analogy was second nature. As a lifelong student of English literature and of words, he was constantly reflecting on ways of “producing new metaphors and revivifying old.”⁴⁸ So immersed was he in the art of metaphor that it was simply part of the way he thought about things. At the same time he employed his habit of razor-sharp critical reasoning to keep his imagination in bounds. Further, because he was a Christian, those bounds were also shaped by a tradition to which he was deeply committed. Almost like a Mozart of words, Lewis was so thoroughly steeped in a rich tradition, was so much a master of a rational discipline, and so much a lifelong connoisseur of the imagination that he could toss off a series of occasional pieces for broadcast that were not even at first planned to make up a book, and they would turn out to be a compelling set of rhetorical gems.

5. Lewis’s book is about “mere Christianity”

The most conspicuous trait that helps account for the continuing vitality of the book is that it is about “mere Christianity.” As Lewis explained in his preface, he meant to present only “the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.” This “agreed, or common, or central, or ‘mere’ Christianity” was not to be a watered-down or “vague and bloodless” Christianity but “something positive and pungent.” It was ecumenical in the sense of looking for commonalities among Christians of all denominations through the ages. Yet it encouraged readers to affirm the particularities of a specific subtradition but to be generous to those who chose differently.

Though Lewis made clear that he was using “mere” in the older sense of related to an essential or unembellished central core, as a philologist or student of the history of language he must have been aware that many would at first read his title in the far more common modern sense of “merely Christianity.” Lewis himself sometimes used “mere” in this more usual diminishing sense, as in a talk in which he responded to modern sophisticates who claimed theology was “merely poetry.”49 In a book title, the double meaning worked. If one took it to mean “merely Christianity,” the title was suggesting with a touch of irony that there is more to the well-worn doctrines than meets the eye. That was indeed one of Lewis’s goals. There was no real conflict with his more positive definition of the title as referring to the essence of the most widely shared Christian teachings. Either way, many would find themselves encountering something far more momentous than they had anticipated.

Aside from the title itself, the conspicuous nonsectarianism and practical ecumenism in the book itself has to be one of the major sources of its continuing appeal. It would be an overstatement to say that the twenty-first century is a “postdenominational age,” but perhaps it is heading in that direction. At least it is certain that since Lewis’s time denominational loyalties have eroded in many parts of world Christianity. That is especially true for many evangelicals in the United States. Much of American evangelicalism has been shaped by nondenominational parachurch agencies for evangelism, missions, and other forms of outreach. Further, in the past generation, in America and elsewhere, megachurches have often eclipsed older denominations in defining evangelical identity. And people who retain some specific denominational loyalties are more often ready to recognize their commonalties with fellow Christians across institutional lines than they once were. That is also true for many traditionalist Christians who are affiliated with older churches such as the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or worldwide Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, and Baptist Churches and the like. Among all of these, the idea of “mere Christianity” has a wide appeal and provides the basis for a practical ecumenism that encourages recognition that, despite institutional differences, Christians of many sorts share a core of perennial commitments.

Lewis’s resolve to limit his presentation to the essentials of the shared Christianity of the ages was not just a strategy but rather reflected some of his deepest convictions. It was the prize of his quest to rely on timeless truths rather than recent fads. Even in one of his earliest statements about his return to faith, in 1930, he observed that there “are many ways back to the truth,” but “no way, faithfully followed, can lead anywhere, at last, except to the centre.”50 Lewis soon identified that center in a set of core teachings found in many traditions and in many eras. Being an Anglican, part of a tradition known for its mediating spirit, he was in a particularly good place to cultivate such perennial sensibilities. It also helped that some of his best friends, especially J.R.R. Tolkien, who helped lead him to Christianity, were Catholic, even if Lewis himself was not attracted to Rome. He cultivated his faith through friendships in an academic setting where what various Christians had in common was far more important than their differences. So a practical ecumenical spirit based on shared traditionalist teachings was close to the heart of his Christian convictions.

Nourished as Lewis was personally on the life-changing sensibilities of perennial Christianity, he found his singular calling. “Since my conversion,” he wrote in 1950, “it has seemed my particular task to tell the outside world what all Christians believe.”51 Lewis acknowledged that there was a place for precise theological distinctions and arguments about them, but these were out of bounds when explaining Christianity to outsiders or the wavering. So he believed that it should be a firm rule, as he said in the preface to Mere Christianity, that “our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son.” As Patrick T. Ferry has observed, Lewis recognized the danger of churches’ seeming to form an exclusive “inner ring.” So Lewis’s winsomeness as an evangelist is directly related to his having confined his task to inviting everyone to the vestibule and leaving to others all debates about choosing particular rooms.⁵² Paradoxically, one result is that Christians of many very different sorts regard Lewis as though he were one of their own. So, as Mickey Maudlin observes, “No matter what kind of Christian group I am in—whether Catholic, mainline Protestant, evangelical, or even Mormon—they describe Lewis as if he were an ‘insider’ in their circles.”⁵³

Furthermore, as Maudlin also points out, Lewis’s commitment to avoid doctrinal disputes results in an engaging humility in presenting some of the more difficult Christian teachings. Often he will explain a point and then say something like “that is as far as I can go.” Or he will avoid a debate by a telling analogy, as, when dealing with the much-disputed relationship of faith to works in salvation, he remarks, “I have no right to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary.”54

6. Mere Christianity does not offer cheap grace

It is crucial to recognize that “mere Christianity” is not minimal Christianity. It is not comfortable or “safe.” It is not, to use the term that Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined in the same era, “cheap grace.” Rather, readers find that they are being drawn in to an understanding of Christianity that is going to be extraordinarily demanding of them personally. They are being asked to give up their very “self” as a sovereign entity and to experience Christ living in them: “To become new men means losing what we now call ‘ourselves,’” Lewis writes. “Out of our selves, into Christ, we must go.” He continues: “This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing else…. The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs.” We are being made into creatures who can obey the command, “Be ye perfect.” We are to be transformed “from being creatures of God to being Sons of God.” That is possible only if we are “in Christ,” who is the first instance of this new humanity. So there must be “a real giving up of the self.”55

David Meconi, SJ, has offered the clarifying insight that Lewis’s emphasis on becoming “little Christs” is the key to understanding the unifying purpose of Mere Christianity. Employing his many metaphors, such as catching a “good infection” or turning a horse into a winged creature or simply taking seriously the implication of saying that God is “Our Father,” Lewis is vivifying an ancient Christian theme of being remade by being drawn into the life of the Trinity. Pride is “the great sin” because it is the opposite: the belief of self-made persons that they need no dependence on others. And, as Lewis explains, Christian behavior is “more like painting a portrait than like obeying a set of rules.” You must be “seriously trying to be like Christ,” with “the real Son of God … at your side,” and receiving life from him so that you are “beginning to turn the tin soldier [of yourself] into a live man.”⁵⁶

Lewis’s simple but demanding emphasis on giving up one’s old self to have Christ live within is, characteristically, a refreshing way to get to the heart of the matter. The teaching of being “in Christ” has enough evident basis in the Bible and in every church tradition for people readily to recognize that it is authentic—one of those things about which they say: “Of course that’s what it’s all about.” They are likely to see it as both immensely appealing and immensely challenging. Without spelling out the details, it suggests that having Christ dwell within must be a matter of God’s grace but that giving up the sovereignty of the old self will not come without a struggle. Only some readers, of course, will be attracted to that message and its demands. But almost all serious readers will recognize that they have encountered something weighty.

7. The lasting appeal of Mere Christianity is based on the luminosity of the Gospel message itself

In 1939 Lewis published an essay titled “The Personal Heresy in [Literary] Criticism.” He argued that it was wrong to view a poem as about the poet’s state of mind. “The poet is not a man,” he wrote, “who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him.”57

Lewis would have said the same for his work as an apologist. Had it drawn primary attention to himself or been just a reflection of his own peculiar views, it would have had little lasting impact. His own role need not be minimized in saying that. His character, integrity, and sometimes self-effacing authority shine through. And, in the United States especially, the fact that he was a scholar who taught at Oxford and Cambridge carries a lot of weight and is often offered as one explanation of his American popularity. Yet, as Dallas Willard has observed, “He never pulls authority on you.” Rather, he speaks with the authority of someone who himself has discovered something and wants to show it to others.58 So, granting that there is an aura of prestige around Lewis himself, one of the greatest sources of the lasting vitality of his presentations is that he very deliberately points the listener or reader toward an object beyond himself. As others have observed, he does not simply present arguments; rather, he acts more like a friendly companion on a journey. To expand on that image: he is like a companion on a hike who is a learned but companionable naturalist and who points out all sorts of flora or tiny flowers or rock formations that you would have missed on your own. When you see these wonders you are duly impressed with your guide as an intermediary, but, particularly if he leads you around a bend where you encounter the most astonishing mountain peaks set against stunning lakes that you have ever seen, your attention is overwhelmed by the beauty of the objects themselves. You are deeply grateful to your guide, but that is not the essence of your unforgettable encounter with that luminous beauty. So Lewis points his audiences toward seeing Christianity not as a set of abstract teachings but rather as something that can be seen, experienced, and enjoyed as the most beautiful and illuminating of all realities.