CHAPTER 9
1942–1945
International Fame: The Mere Christian
Lewis soared to national fame through his wartime broadcast talks, which made him one of the most recognised voices in Great Britain. Yet even while Lewis was writing his radio scripts, he was already working on another idea—one that would eventually win him international fame. The inspiration seems to have come to him during an especially dull sermon at Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, in July 1940:
Before the service was over—one cd. wish these things came more seasonably—I was struck by an idea for a book wh. I think might be both useful and entertaining. It wd. be called As One Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first “patient.”477
He wrote with enthusiasm to his brother—who was now back in England, having been safely evacuated from Dunkirk—about the idea, savouring the points he reckoned he could make. The “elderly retired devil” would be called “Screwtape.”
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
As Lewis later recalled, he “had never written anything more easily.”478 The thirty-one “Screwtape Letters”—one for each day of the month—began to appear in a weekly church magazine called The Guardian (not to be confused with the major British newspaper of the same name) on 2 May 1941.
The letters portray Hell as a bureaucracy (possibly the kind of thing that Lewis felt Oxford University was in danger of becoming). It seemed entirely natural to Lewis to depict the diabolical in terms of “the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” Lewis took great pleasure in working out the kind of advice that the shrewd Screwtape might give to the novice Wormwood about how to keep his “patient” safely out of the Enemy’s hands. The letters are packed with witty observations (particularly about wartime conditions), occasionally cruel caricatures of certain kinds of people Lewis clearly disliked, and a developing sense of religious wisdom about how to cope with life’s mysteries and enigmas.
How much are we to read into Screwtape? Does Lewis express feelings about the increasingly despotic Mrs. Moore in this work—feelings he would never have dared to express openly? For example, one of Wormwood’s “patients” is an elderly lady who is described as “a positive terror to hostesses and servants.” One of her many weaknesses is “the gluttony of Delicacy.” Whatever is offered to her never seems to be quite to her taste. Her requests may be very modest; yet they are never met, and she is never satisfied. “All she wants is a cup of tea properly made, or an egg properly boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted.”479 Yet neither maid nor family ever seems able to get it right. Something is always wrong, always lacking—and retribution on those who fail her is never far away. We know that Lewis was increasingly concerned about Mrs. Moore’s fussiness and fixations around this time. Might we see these concerns reflected here?
One of Lewis’s distinctive emphases is that literature allows us to see things in a new way. The Screwtape Letters can be seen as offering a new way of seeing traditional, sound spiritual advice, by re-presenting it within a highly original framework. Where more pedestrian preachers would encourage their congregations not to rely on their experience, Lewis inverts this perspective. Screwtape tells his apprentice to get to work on his patient’s experiences, and make him feel that Christianity “can’t really be true.” It is the perspective Lewis adopts, not the advice given, that is so innovative. Both Lewis’s spiritual wisdom and the novel manner of its presentation secured a grateful and enthusiastic readership for Screwtape.
Ashley Sampson noticed the letters in The Guardian, and drew them to the attention of the publisher Geoffrey Bles, who offered to publish the collected letters in the form of a book. The Screwtape Letters was published in February 1942. Dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien, it became a wartime bestseller. (Tolkien, by the way, did not appreciate this dedication of such a lightweight work to him, particularly when he later learned that Lewis “was never very fond of it.”480)
Screwtape consolidated Lewis’s reputation as a popular Christian theologian—someone who was able to communicate the themes of the Christian faith in an intelligent and accessible way. In July 1943, Oliver Chase Quick (1885–1944), Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, wrote to William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, expressing his view that Lewis deserved to be awarded an Oxford doctorate of divinity—the highest degree Oxford could offer—in recognition of the importance of his theological writings. Quick remarked that Lewis, along with Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957), was one of the few British writers who then seemed able to “put across to ordinary people a reasonably orthodox form of Christianity.”481 This correspondence between Oxford University’s most senior theologian and the Church of England’s most senior cleric is an important testimony to Lewis’s high esteem in influential British academic and ecclesiastical circles.
When Screwtape was published in the United States a year later, Lewis was propelled to an international fame for which he was ill prepared. Here was an urbane, witty, imaginative, and thoroughly orthodox book that was—as one American reviewer put it—a “spectacular and satisfactory nova in the bleak sky.” America wanted to find out more about this new star in their religious heavens. His earlier books were quickly brought out in American editions. The BBC’s New York office contacted Broadcasting House in London, suggesting devoting more American airtime to Lewis, noting the “considerable interest” resulting from his “new approach to religious subjects.”482
Perhaps it is not surprising that the first serious academic studies of Lewis were written by American scholars. The first PhD thesis to study Lewis’s work was completed in 1948 by Edgar W. Boss, a student at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Chicago. A year later, Chad Walsh’s pioneering study C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics was published in New York.
Yet Lewis’s academic reputation at Oxford was not well served in this way. He had unwisely declared himself to be a “Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford” on the book’s title page. There was much grumbling and sniping in Magdalen’s Senior Common Room about the devaluation of the academic currency by such a rampantly populist book. Lewis won the hearts and minds of many through this book; yet he also alienated many whose support he might need if he were to secure an Oxford chair in the future.
Mere Christianity (1952)
Although Lewis had published a lightly edited version of his broadcast talks during the war, he was not entirely happy with them. These appeared as three separate pamphlets: The Case for Christianity (1942), Christian Behaviour (1943), and Beyond Personality (1944). It seemed to him that they needed to be given still greater clarity of expression and focus. They were seen by readers as being independent works, rather than the stages of an interconnected argument. Furthermore, the text of one set of talks was omitted altogether. Lewis gradually came to see how he could create a single book that developed a coherent case for Christianity, linking the material he had developed for his four sets of broadcast talks. Mere Christianity—the final version of these wartime talks—is now regarded as one of Lewis’s most significant Christian writings. Although published in 1952, the work is clearly an edited version of his wartime material, making discussion of its themes appropriate at this point in our narrative.
Lewis is often—and rightly—criticised for coming up with some strange titles for his works. His 1956 masterpiece Till We Have Faces, for example, was originally titled Bareface. Yet Lewis chose a brilliant title for his synthesis of his four sets of broadcast talks. He avoided any reference to their origin, and chose to focus instead on their subject matter. The title Mere Christianity intrigued its readers. So what did Lewis mean by this title? And why did he choose it?
Lewis found the phrase in the writings of Richard Baxter (1615–1691), a Puritan writer whom Lewis had encountered in the course of his wide reading in English literature. Writing in 1944, Lewis argued that the best remedy against the theological errors encountered in recently published books “is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (‘mere Christianity’ as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.”483
So what did Baxter mean by this curious phrase? Living through a period of tumultuous religious controversy and violence during the seventeeth century—including the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I—Baxter came to the conclusion that theological or religious labels distorted and damaged the Christian faith. In his late work Church History of the Government of Bishops and Their Councils (1681), Baxter protested against the divisiveness of religious controversy. He believed in “meer Christianity, Creed, and Scripture.”484 He wished to be known as a “meer Christian,” equating “meer Christianity” with “Catholick Christianity,” in the sense of a universal vision of the Christian faith, untainted by controversies and theological partisanship.
It is not clear how Lewis came to discover this phrase from Baxter; I have not encountered any other reference to this work of Baxter’s in Lewis’s writings from before the Second World War. Nevertheless, it clearly expresses Lewis’s own vision of a basic Christian orthodoxy, shorn of any denominational agendas or interest in ecclesiastical tribalism. It is what Lewis believed the Church of England to represent at its best—not a narrowly denominational “Anglicanism” (a notion for which Lewis had little sympathy), but the historic orthodox Christian faith as it found expression in England (for which Lewis had great admiration). As Lewis rightly pointed out, Richard Hooker (1554–1600)—often regarded as one of the best apologists for the Church of England—“had never heard of a religion called Anglicanism.”485
Lewis had no difficulty in accepting and respecting the existence of individual Christian denominations, including his own Church of England; he insisted, however, that each of these was to be seen as distinct embodiments or manifestations of something more fundamental—“mere Christianity.” This “mere Christianity” is an ideal, which requires denominational embodiment if it is to work. He illustrated this idea with an analogy that has stood the test of time remarkably well:
[Mere Christianity is] like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.486
This analogy enables us to appreciate the essential point that Lewis wished to make: that there is a notional, transdenominational form of Christianity, which is to be cherished and used as the basis of Christian apologetics; yet the business of becoming or being a Christian requires commitment to a specific form of this basic Christianity. “Mere Christianity” might take primacy over individual denominations; yet those denominations are essential to the business of Christian living. Lewis was not advocating “mere Christianity” as the only authentic form of Christianity. His argument was rather that it underlies and nourishes all those forms.
It is this “mere Christianity” that Lewis wished to explain and defend in this work of apologetics. In his 1945 lecture “Christian Apologetics,” Lewis had emphasised that the task of apologists was not to defend the denomination to which they belonged, nor their own specific theological perspective, but the Christian faith itself. Indeed, it is Lewis’s explicit commitment to this form of Christianity that has made him a figure of such universal appeal within the global Christian community.
Lewis presents himself to his readers simply as a “mere Christian,” whom they can adapt to their own denominational agendas and concerns, or can defend and proclaim as a gateway into their own specific “room,” in which there are “fires and chairs and meals.” Lewis is an apologist for Christianity; he would have been appalled to be cited as an apologist for “Anglicanism”—partly because he disliked denominational squabbles, but chiefly because he did not believe in the conceptual extension of the “Church of England” into a global notion of “Anglicanism.”
Lewis’s works—especially Mere Christianity—generally show little inclination to become involved in denominational squabbles about baptism, bishops, or the Bible. For Lewis, such debates must never be allowed to trump or overshadow the big picture—the grand Christian vision of reality, which transcends denominational differences. It is the breadth and depth of his vision of Christianity that achieved such resonance with Catholics and Protestants alike in North America.
There is evidence that Lewis’s interest in this kind of approach developed during the early 1940s. In September 1942, while visiting Newquay in Cornwall, Lewis purchased a copy of W. R. Inge’s study of Protestantism. One phrase in that book—heavily underlined in Lewis’s copy—clearly attracted his attention: “the scaffolding of a simple and genuinely Christian faith.”487 This phrase encapsulates the essence of Lewis’s notion of “mere Christianity.”
Yet Lewis was not alone at this time in wanting to defend a form of Christianity that avoided the fussiness and pedanticism of denominationalism. In 1941, Dorothy L. Sayers—like Lewis, a lay Anglican—set out a similar vision. In the end, this foundered, having become mired in the complexities of denominational politics.488 Lewis, however, succeeded by ignoring them, speaking directly to ordinary Christians over the heads of denominational leaders. And ordinary Christians listened to him, as they listened to no other.
So how did Lewis go about defending this “mere Christianity”? His apologetic strategy in Mere Christianity is complex, perhaps reflecting the fact that four quite distinct sets of talks have been merged into a single book. What is particularly striking is that Mere Christianity does not start out with any Christian presuppositions at all. Lewis does not even list some Christian doctrines that cause people problems, and then try to defend them. He begins from human experience, and shows how everything seems to fit around core ideas, such as the idea of a divine Lawgiver, which can then be connected with the Christian faith.
Mere Christianity does not set out to provide deductive arguments for the existence of God. As Austin Farrer perceptively remarked of The Problem of Pain, Lewis makes us “think we are listening to an argument,” when in reality “we are presented with a vision; and it is the vision that carries conviction.”489 This vision appeals to the human longing for truth, beauty, and goodness. Lewis’s achievement is to show that what we observe and experience “fits in” with the idea of God. His approach is inferential, not deductive.
For Lewis, Christianity is the “big picture” which weaves together the strands of experience and observation into a compelling pattern. The first part of Mere Christianity is entitled “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.” It is important to note this carefully chosen term clue. Lewis is noting that the world is emblazoned with such “clues,” none of which individually proves anything, but which taken together give a cumulative case for believing in God. These “clues” are the threads that make up the great pattern of the universe.
Mere Christianity opens—as did the original broadcast talks—with an invitation to reflect on two people having an argument. Any attempt to determine who is right and who is wrong depends, Lewis argues, on recognition of a norm—of some standard which both parties to a dispute recognise as binding and authoritative. In a series of argumentative moves, Lewis first contends that we are all aware of something “higher” than us—an objective norm to which people appeal, and which they expect others to observe; a “real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.”490
If there is a God, this would provide a firmer foundation for the deep human instinct and intuition that objective moral values exist, and a defence of morality against more irresponsible statements of ethical relativism. God, for Lewis, is made known through our deep moral and aesthetic intuitions:
If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves.491
Although everyone knows about this law, everyone still fails to live up to it. Lewis thus suggests that “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” consists in our knowledge of a moral law, and an awareness of our failure to observe it.492 This awareness ought to “arouse our suspicions” that there “is a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong.”493 Lewis suggests that this points to an ordering mind governing the universe.
The second line of argument concerns our experience of longing. It is an approach that Lewis had earlier developed in his university sermon “The Weight of Glory,” preached at Oxford on 8 June 1941. Lewis reworked this argument for the purposes of his broadcast talks, making it much easier to understand. The argument can be summarised like this. We all long for something, only to find our hopes dashed and frustrated when we actually achieve or attain it. “There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.”494 So how is this common human experience to be interpreted?
Lewis initially notes two possibilities that he clearly regards as inadequate: to assume that this frustration arises from looking in the wrong places, or to conclude that further searching will only result in repeated disappointment, so that there is no point in bothering to try and find something better than the world. Yet there is, Lewis argues, a third approach—to recognise that these earthly longings are “only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage” of our true homeland.495
Lewis then develops an “argument from desire,” suggesting that every natural desire has a corresponding object, and is satisfied only when this is attained or experienced. This natural desire for transcendent fulfillment cannot be met through anything in the present world, leading to the suggestion that it could be satisfied beyond the present world, in a world towards which the present order of things points.
Lewis argues that the Christian faith interprets this longing as a clue to the true goal of human nature. God is the ultimate end of the human soul, the only source of human happiness and joy. Just as physical hunger points to a real human need which can be met through food, so this spiritual hunger corresponds to a real need which can be met through God. “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.”496 Most people, Lewis argues, are aware of a deep sense of longing within them, which cannot be satisfied by anything transient or created. Like right and wrong, this sense of longing is thus a “clue” to the meaning of the universe.
This might seem to suggest that Lewis is portraying Christianity in terms of “rules” or “laws,” losing sight of such central Christian themes as a love for God or personal transformation. This is not the case. As Lewis pointed out in his study of Milton’s Paradise Lost, an understanding of virtue is shaped by a vision of reality. We must never think that Milton “was inculcating a rule when in fact he was enamoured of a perfection.”497 For Lewis, a love of God leads to behavioural adaptation, in the light of (and in response to) the greater vision of God that is grasped and enacted through faith.
In his arguments from both morality and desire, Lewis appeals to the capacity of Christianity to “fit in” what we observe and experience. This approach is integral to Lewis’s method of apologetics, precisely because Lewis himself found it so persuasive and helpful a tool for making sense of things. The Christian faith provides a map that is found to “fit in” well with what we observe around us and experience within us.
For Lewis, the kind of “sense-making” offered by the Christian vision of reality is about discerning a resonance between the theory and the way the world seems to be. This is one of the reasons why Lewis was so impressed by the Christian view of history as set out in G. K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man (1925): it seemed to make sense of what actually happened. Though Lewis used surprisingly few musical analogies in his published writings, his approach could be described as enabling the believer to hear the harmonics of the cosmos, and realise that it fits together aesthetically—even if there are a few logical loose ends that still need to be tied up.
Lewis often emphasised that his own conversion was essentially “intellectual” or “philosophical,” stressing the capacity of Christianity to make rational and imaginative sense of reality. We find perhaps the fullest and most satisfactory statement of this “sense-making” approach at the end of his 1945 essay “Is Theology Poetry?” Here Lewis affirms God as both an evidenced and an evidencing explanation, using the analogy of the sun illuminating the landscape of reality. After noting the ability of Christian theology to “fit in” science, art, morality, and non-Christian religions, he declares, in a concluding statement, “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.”498
It is easy to criticise Mere Christianity on account of its simple ideas, which clearly need to be fleshed out and given a more rigorous philosophical and theological foundation. Yet Lewis wrote for multiple audiences, and it is quite clear whom Lewis envisaged here as his audience. Mere Christianity is a popular, not an academic, book, which is not directed towards a readership of academic theologians or philosophers. It is simply unfair to expect Lewis to engage here with detailed philosophical debates, when these would clearly turn his brisk, highly readable book into a quagmire of fine philosophical distinctions. Mere Christianity is an informal handshake to begin a more formal acquaintance and conversation. There is much more that needs to be said.
Yet there are many points in Mere Christianity at which Lewis is open to legitimate criticism, and it is important to note some of them. The most obvious concern is Lewis’s notion of the “trilemma,” which he deploys in his defence of the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. For Lewis, the notion that God was fully disclosed in Christ was of landmark significance. As he wrote to Arthur Greeves—a critic of this view—in 1944:
The doctrine of Christ’s divinity seems to me not something stuck on which you can unstick but something that peeps out at every point so that you’d have to unravel the whole web to get rid of it. . . . And if you take away the Godhead of Christ, what is Xtianity all about? How can the death of one man have this effect for all men which is proclaimed throughout the New Testament?499
Yet many feel that Lewis’s defence of this doctrine in Mere Christianity lacks the vibrancy and conviction that are found elsewhere in his writings. The so-called “trilemma” is proposed by Lewis as a way of eliminating false trails in making sense of Jesus of Nazareth. Where is he to be located on a conceptual map? After reviewing some of the issues, Lewis reduces the field to three possibilities: a lunatic, a diabolical figure, or the Son of God.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.500
It’s a weak argument. Lewis offered a considerably longer discussion of this point in the original broadcast talks, which he pruned down drastically as he revised it for publication. The original form included discussion of other options, and was much less trenchant than the abbreviated discussion in Mere Christianity. Many Christian theologians might argue that Lewis here failed to account for the concerns of more recent New Testament critical scholarship, and that his simplified argument could easily backfire under the light of a more critical reading of the Gospels.
Yet the main problem is that this argument does not work apologetically. It may well make sense to some Christian readers, who already know why they have come to this conclusion, and are glad to have Lewis reinforce their position. Yet the inner logic of this argument clearly presupposes a Christian framework of reasoning. It would not necessarily make sense to Lewis’s intended audience of nonbelievers, who might—to give one obvious example—suggest the alternative possibility that Jesus was a well-loved religious leader and martyr whose followers later came to see him as divine. The option that Jesus was someone who was not mad or bad, but was nevertheless wrong about his identity, needs to be considered as a serious alternative. Lewis, normally so good at anticipating objections and meeting them carefully, seems to have misjudged his audience at this point. The whole section cries out for expansion, and more careful qualification.
Another problem concerns the “datedness” of the material in Lewis’s broadcast talks, much of which is incorporated unchanged in Mere Christianity. Lewis’s analogies, turns of phrase, envisaged concerns, and manner of engaging his audience are all located in a vanished world—to be precise, a southern English middle-class culture during the Second World War. Yet it is not unfair to point out that the modern reader’s difficulties often reflect Lewis’s success as a communicator in the 1940s. By embedding his “translation” of the Christian faith so well in this one specific world, now passed, Lewis has to some degree implicitly forfeited the ability to achieve a comparable degree of success with other worlds, present or future.
Yet the aspect of Mere Christianity perhaps most difficult for twenty-first-century readers is Lewis’s code of social and personal ethics, particularly his assumptions about women. These are deeply embedded in the bedrock of a social order that has long since disappeared. Even when seen in the light of those standards, some of Lewis’s statements seem somewhat peculiar. Consider, for example, the following ill-judged remarks.
What makes a pretty girl spread misery wherever she goes by collecting admirers? Certainly not her sexual instinct: that kind of girl is quite often sexually frigid.501
I recall a conversation with a colleague about these two sentences some years ago. We had a copy of Mere Christianity open at the appropriate page. “Why did he write that?” I asked, pointing to the first sentence. “How could he know that?” he replied, pointing to the final part of the second.
Lewis’s assumption that his readers will agree with—or at least acknowledge the merits of—his views on such matters as marriage and sexual ethics may well have been justified in Britain during the 1940s and early 1950s. Yet the massive changes in social attitudes following the upheavals of the 1960s now make Lewis seem very dated to secular readers. If Mere Christianity is indeed a work of apologetics, intended to communicate the Christian faith to those outside the churches, it must be recognised that Lewis’s social and moral assumptions now pose a significant barrier to the book’s intended readership. This is not necessarily a criticism of Lewis as a writer, or of Mere Christianity as a book. It is simply an observation of the implications of rapid social change for the later reception of Lewis’s ideas as they are expressed in this work.
Conservative though Lewis’s views on marriage were, they seemed to be hopelessly liberal to Tolkien. Lewis drew a sharp distinction between “Christian marriage” and a “state marriage,” holding that only the former made a demand for total commitment.502 (It was a distinction that Lewis would later invoke when marrying Joy Davidman in a civil marriage at Oxford’s Register Office in April 1956.) For Tolkien, this amounted to a betrayal of any Christian notion of marriage. He penned a scathing critique of Lewis at some point in 1943, but never sent it.503 Yet the reader is left in no doubt that a wide gulf was opening between Tolkien and Lewis. Personal distance was being supplemented by a disagreement on a matter of deep personal importance for Tolkien.
Other Wartime Projects
By the time Mere Christianity was published in 1952, Lewis had established a significant following in Great Britain—and a growing reputation in the United States—as an apologist. His success in this field overshadowed his other significant achievements of the wartime era. Three lecture series are of particular importance: the Ballard Matthews Lectures in Bangor, Wales; the Riddell Memorial Lectures at the University of Durham; and the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge. Each merits brief comment.
On the evening of Monday, 1 December 1941, Lewis delivered the first of his three Ballard Lectures on the themes of Milton’s Paradise Lost at the University College of North Wales, on a hillside overlooking the Welsh coastal town of Bangor. He saw these three lectures, given over three successive evenings, as a “preliminary canter” to a more substantial book.504 This larger (although still comparatively brief) work appeared in October 1942 from Oxford University Press, titled A Preface to “Paradise Lost,” dedicated to Charles Williams. It remains a classic study, and still features prominently on reading lists for Milton’s masterpiece.
Lewis clearly positions this book as an introduction to Paradise Lost (first published in 1667) for those who would otherwise find it forbidding, unapproachable, or simply incomprehensible. The first half of the book deals with general questions, before addressing specific themes in the work. The first question, Lewis declares, is to determine what sort of work this is: “The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used.”505 For Lewis, Paradise Lost is an epic poem, which demands that we read it as such.
Yet Lewis’s real concern soon becomes clear. Although focussed on Milton’s classic work, Lewis engages a question that is of universal significance: Is there an “Unchanging Human Heart” beneath Milton’s classic and all other works of literature? Lewis makes it clear that he wishes to challenge the idea that:
. . . if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from [Sir Philip] Sidney his code of honour, from Lucretius his Epicurean philosophy, and from all who have it their religion, we shall find the Unchanging Human Heart, and on this we are to concentrate.506
This means, Lewis argues, that the reader of a literary work tries to eliminate its specifics, “twisting” the work into a shape the poet never intended.
Lewis argues that this is unacceptable. It detaches a text from its historical and cultural roots; it gives a “false prominence” to elements of the text which are seen to offer “universal truth”; and it dismisses as irrelevant those portions of the text which are not seen to speak to our own day. Instead, Lewis argues, we must allow the text to interrogate and expand our experience. Rather than trying to get rid of a medieval knight’s suit of armour so that he becomes just like us, we should try to find out what it is like to wear that armour. We should set out to explore what it would be like to adopt the beliefs of Lucretius or Virgil. Literature is meant to help us see the world through other spectacles, to offer alternative ways of understanding things. As we shall see, this theme becomes prominent in the Chronicles of Narnia.
Two years after giving the Ballard Matthews Lectures, Lewis delivered the Riddell Memorial Lectures at the Newcastle upon Tyne campus of the University of Durham on three consecutive evenings, 24–26 February 1943.507 These remarkable lectures were published as The Abolition of Man in 1943 by Oxford University Press. Lewis here argues that contemporary moral reflection has been undermined by a radical subjectivity—a trend he discerns within contemporary school textbooks. In response to this development, Lewis calls for a renewal of the moral tradition based on “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”508
Lewis here criticises those who argue that all statements of value (such as “this waterfall is pretty”)509 are merely subjective statements about the speaker’s feelings, rather than objective statements concerning their object. Lewis argues that certain objects and actions merit positive or negative reactions—in other words, that a waterfall can be objectively pretty, just as someone’s actions can be objectively good or evil. He argues there is a set of objective values (which he terms “the Tao”)510 that are common to all cultures, with only minor variations. Although The Abolition of Man is now considered a difficult book, its arguments remain highly significant.511
In 1944, Lewis was invited to deliver the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge. In inviting him on behalf of the college council, George Macaulay Trevelyan, the master of Trinity College, expressed particular appreciation of Lewis’s earlier works—especially The Allegory of Love.512 These prestigious lectures, which Lewis delivered in May 1944, would become the basis of his classic volume in the Oxford History of English Literature series—which Lewis playfully abbreviated to his friends as “O HEL”—on English literature in the sixteenth century (excluding drama).
Finally, we must note The Great Divorce, a highly imaginative book which Lewis composed in 1944. Tolkien described this book as “a new moral allegory or ‘vision’ based on the medieval fancy of the Refrigerium, by which the lost souls have an occasional holiday in Paradise.”513 Lewis has been much criticised by Catholic theologians for his obviously faulty analysis of medieval theology at this point.514 Indeed, The Great Divorce is clearly best regarded as a “supposal”: if the inhabitants of hell were to visit heaven, what would happen?
Lewis initially titled this work Who Goes Home? but was happily persuaded to alter the title. The work is chiefly remarkable on account of its use of an innovative imaginative framework, similar in some ways to The Screwtape Letters, to explore a series of very traditional questions—such as the limits of human free will and the problem of pride.
Perhaps the most important feature of this work, however, is Lewis’s demonstration—by art of narrative rather than by force of argument—that people easily become trapped in a way of thinking from which they cannot break free. Those in hell, on exploring heaven, turn out to be so comfortable with their distorted view of reality that they choose not to embrace truth on encountering it. Lewis deploys familiar cultural stereotypes of his day—such as the career artist who is obsessed with the avant-garde, or the theologically liberal bishop infatuated with his intellectual fame—to challenge the lazy and unevidenced Enlightenment assumption that humans recognise and accept truth when they see it. Human nature, Lewis suggests, is rather more complex than this trite, superficial rationalism allows.
Although Lewis’s writings of the wartime period tend to employ evidence-based reasoning, which defends or explores fundamental Christian ideas, we also find a highly significant theme beginning to emerge—the capacity of imaginative narrative to embody and communicate truth. This idea is integral to understanding Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. To comprehend the importance of this point, let us consider a series of three works to appear during the period of 1938–1945, generally known as the Space Trilogy, but which are more accurately designated the Ransom Trilogy.
The Shift to Fiction: The Ransom Trilogy
Mere Christianity represents a highly important strand of the approach to apologetics that Lewis developed during the Second World War. In effect, Lewis argues that the “map” of reality offered by the Christian faith corresponds well to what is actually observed and experienced. Books of this type—including The Problem of Pain and the later Miracles (1947)—make a fundamental appeal to reason. Although Lewis is far too canny a thinker to believe that he can “prove” the existence of God—like Dante, he knows that reason has “short wings”—he nevertheless holds that the fundamental reasonableness of the Christian faith can be shown by argument and reflection.
Yet Lewis appears to have realised that argument was only one of a number of ways of engaging cultural anxieties about the Christian faith, or challenging its alternatives. From about 1937, Lewis seems to have appreciated that the imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul. Having initially merely enjoyed reading works of fantasy—such as the novels of George MacDonald—Lewis began to realise how fiction might allow the intellectual and imaginative appeal of worldviews to be explored. Might he try his hand at writing such works himself?
As a child, Lewis read voraciously and widely, pillaging the amply stocked bookshelves of Little Lea to pass away the time. And so he came across writers such as Jules Verne (1828–1905) and H. G. Wells (1866–1946), whose novels spoke of travel in space and time, and explored how science was changing our understanding of the world. “The idea of other planets exercised upon me then a peculiar, heady attraction, which was quite different from any other of my literary interests.”515
Such childhood memories were given a new sense of urgency and direction around 1935, when Lewis read David Lindsay’s novel A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). Although Lindsay’s book is poorly written, its imaginative appeal more than adequately compensates for its stylistic deficiencies. Lewis began to realise that the best forms of science fiction can be thought of as “simply an imaginative impulse as old as the human race working under the special conditions of our own time.”516 If they are done well—and Lewis is quite clear that this is often not the case—then they expand our mental and imaginative horizons. “They give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.”517 For Lewis, writing the right kind of science fiction was thus a soul-expanding business, something that could potentially be compared to the best poetry of the past.
So why did Lewis get so excited about this narrative form? To understand his concerns, and appreciate the solution that he found, we need to understand more about the British cultural world of the late 1920s and early 1930s—above all, the rise of what we might now call “scientism” as a worldview. At this time, this view was advocated openly in the writings of J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), a disillusioned Marxist who transferred his crusading temperament and enthusiasm to advocating the merits of science as a cure for all of humanity’s ills. Lewis was no critic of science; he was, however, worried about exaggerated accounts of its benefits and naive ideas concerning its application. Lewis was anxious that the triumphs of science might have run ahead of necessary ethical developments that could provide the knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue that science needed.
Yet Lewis was perhaps more concerned about the implicit advocation of such views in the science fiction novels of H. G. Wells, which used fictional narratives to argue that science is both prophet and saviour of humanity, telling us what is true and saving us from the human predicament. For Wells, science is a secularised religion. Such ideas remain deeply embedded in Western culture, although they are now associated with other voices. But Lewis encountered them through Wells. And if Wells used science fiction to advocate such views, why not use science fiction to argue against him? Lewis regarded “interplanetary ideas” as a new and exciting mythology, but was concerned that it was becoming dominated by a “desperately immoral outlook.” Could the genre be redeemed? Might it become a vehicle for a profoundly moral view of the universe? Might it even become the medium for a theistic apologetic?
In December 1938, Lewis expressed his growing realisation that the forms of science fiction hitherto used to promote various forms of atheism and materialism could equally well be used to critique these viewpoints and advocate an alternative.518 Why not use the same medium to advocate a quite different “mythology”? (Lewis here means by mythology something like a “metanarrative” or “worldview.”) We see this technique put into action in Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945). The quality of these is somewhat uneven, with the third being particularly difficult in places. Yet the main thing to appreciate is not so much their plots and points, but the medium through which these are expressed—stories, which captivate the imagination and open the mind to an alternative way of thinking.
It is impossible to summarise the rich imaginative gambits and intellectual finesse that are so characteristic of this trilogy. What really needs to be appreciated is that a story is being told which subverts the more contestable themes of the “scientism” of Lewis’s day. To illustrate this, we shall consider one of the themes that Lewis explicitly engages—the form of social Darwinism advocated by Haldane in his essay “Eugenics and Social Reform.”519 Like many progressives in the 1920s and 1930s, Haldane advocated the optimization of the human gene pool by preventing certain types of people from breeding. This socially illiberal attitude was seen as being rigorously grounded in the best science, with the best possible motivation—to ensure the survival of the human race. But at what cost, Lewis wondered?
Bertrand Russell followed Haldane in his Marriage and Morals (1929), advocating the compulsory sterilization of the mentally deficient. Russell advocated that the state should be empowered to forcibly sterilise all those regarded as “mentally deficient” by appropriate experts, and that this measure should be introduced despite the drawbacks to which it might be liable. He suggested that reducing the number of “idiots, imbeciles and feeble-minded” people would be of sufficient benefit to society to outweigh any dangers of its misuse.
These views are rarely encountered today, partly because they have become tainted by their subsequent association with Nazi eugenic theories, and partly because they are seen as incompatible with liberal democratic ideals. Yet they were widely held among the British and American intellectual elites in the period between the two world wars. Three World Eugenics Conferences (London 1912, New York 1921, New York 1932) argued for “birth selection” (as opposed to “birth control”), and for the genetic elimination of those who were deemed unfit.520
Lewis felt that these views had to be challenged. One element of Lewis’s response was That Hideous Strength. Though Lewis was often conservative in his views, this work shows him to have been a prophetic voice, offering a radical challenge to the accepted social wisdom of his own generation.
In That Hideous Strength, Lewis introduces us to the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE), a hypermodern institution dedicated to the improvement of the human condition through scientific advance—for example, through forced sterilization of the unfit, the liquidation of backward races, and research by means of vivisection. Lewis has little difficulty in exposing the moral bankruptcy of this institute, and the deeply dysfunctional vision of the future of humanity it embodies. The conclusion of the work includes a dramatic scene in which all the caged animals intended for vivisection are set free.
As readers of the chapter on “Animal Pain” in The Problem of Pain will appreciate, Lewis—unlike Haldane—was an opponent of vivisection. George R. Farnum, President of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, noted the importance of Lewis’s comments, and invited him to write an essay on this theme. Lewis’s essay “Vivisection” (1947) remains one of the most intellectually significant critiques of vivisection, and has not received the attention it deserves.521 It makes clear that Lewis’s outspoken opposition to vivisection was not grounded on sentimentality, but upon a rigorous theological foundation. If we are brutal towards animals, we are just as likely to be brutal to our fellow humans—especially those we regard as inferior to us:
The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements. In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level.522
Lewis’s views on this matter lost him many friends at Oxford and elsewhere, as vivisection was then widely regarded as morally justified by its outcomes. Animal pain was the price paid for human progress. However, for Lewis there was a deep theological question here, which naturalism ignored. We “ought to prove ourselves better than the beasts precisely by the fact of acknowledging duties to them which they do not acknowledge to us.”523 As we shall see, such attitudes towards animals find their classic expression in the Chronicles of Narnia.
There is far more to the Ransom Trilogy than this brief account can hope to convey—especially its lyrical description of strange worlds, its development of imaginatively engaging scenarios, and its exploration of theologically fertile themes, such as the fate of the beautiful, newly created, and unfallen world of Perelandra. Yet in the end, it is the medium as much as the substance that really matters. Lewis demonstrates that stories can be told which subvert some established truths of the day, and expose them as shadows and smoke. The grand retreat of the British cultural elite from eugenics after the Second World War indicates that ideas and values that were once fashionable can be abandoned within a generation. The extent to which Lewis himself undermined them remains to be clarified. But the potential of his approach was clear.
The period of 1938–1945 saw Lewis emerge from the cloistered obscurity of academia to become a major religious, cultural, and literary figure. Without ceasing to publish works of academic merit, such as his Preface to “Paradise Lost,” he had established himself as a public intellectual who commanded the media, and was on the road to international celebrity. What could go wrong?
Sadly, the answer soon became clear. Rather a lot could go wrong. And it did.