It is commonly supposed that Lewis came to prominence as a speaker on Christianity because of his immense popularity as the author of The Screwtape Letters. The truth is that the most important of his speaking engagements began a little further back. The Problem of Pain had been finding some grateful and influential admirers, one of whom was the Director of Religious Broadcasting for the BBC, Dr James W. Welch.* He wrote to Lewis on 7 February 1941 saying:
Dear Mr Lewis,
I address you by name because, although we have never met, you cannot be a stranger after allowing me – and many others – to know some of your thought and convictions which have been expressed in your book The Problem of Pain. I should like to take this opportunity of saying how grateful I am to you personally for the help this book has given me.
I write to ask whether you would be willing to help us in our work of religious broadcasting. The microphone is a limiting, and often irritating, instrument, but the quality of thinking and depth of conviction which I find in your book ought surely to be shared with a great many other people; and for any talk we can be sure of a fairly intelligent audience of more than a million. Two ideas strike me:
(1) You might be willing to speak about the Christian, or lack of Christian, assumptions underlying modern literature …
(2) A series of talks on something like ‘The Christian Faith As I See It – by A Layman’: I am sure there is need of a positive restatement of Christian doctrine in lay language. But there may be other subjects on which you would rather speak.1
Lewis had no interest whatsoever in the radio as such, a harsh contraption the sound of which he cringed at every time he heard it booming from Paxford’s bungalow. He cared even less for travelling up to London for, sharing his father’s provincialism to some extent, he regarded a trip to London in very much the same way another man might look upon a voyage to the moon. Nevertheless, the invitation interested him, for he had long regarded England as part of that vast ‘post-Christian’ world in need of a special missionary technique – one which must take into account the fact that many people were under the impression that they had rejected Christianity when, in truth, they had never had it. Could someone, he wondered, trouble the conscience of those who feel no guilt and then ‘translate’ the Gospel into language they could understand? On 10 February 1941 Lewis accepted Dr Welch’s invitation:
Dear Mr Welch,
Thanks for your kind remarks about my book. I would like to give a series of talks as you suggest, but it would have to be in the vacation. Modern literature would not suit me. I think what I mainly want to talk about is the Law of Nature, or objective right and wrong. It seems to me that the New Testament, by preaching repentance and forgiveness, always assumes an audience who already believe in the Law of Nature and know they have disobeyed it. In modern England we cannot at present assume this, and therefore most apologetic begins a stage too far on. The first step is to create, or recover, the sense of guilt. Hence if I give a series of talks I should mention Christianity only at the end, and would prefer not to unmask my battery till then. Some title like ‘The Art of being Shocked’ or ‘These Humans’ would suit me. Let me know what you think of this and how many talks and at what dates (roughly) you would like.2
Lewis next heard from Eric Fenn, who joined the BBC in 1939 as assistant head of religious broadcasting.* Fenn was a Presbyterian, and he and Lewis were to get on extremely well. He wrote to Lewis on 14 February saying: ‘I wonder whether you would care to consider a series of four Wednesday evening talks (7.40–8.00 p.m.) in August, or alternatively, September?’3
Lewis invited Fenn to lunch at Magdalen College shortly afterwards, and they arranged for a microphone rehearsal. It was the first time Lewis had heard a recording of his voice, and when he wrote to Arthur Greeves on 25 May 1941, he said: ‘I was unprepared for the total unfamiliarity of the voice; not a trace, not a hint, of anything one could identify with oneself – one couldn’t possibly guess who it was.’4
The talks that Lewis had now to prepare were not the first of what he called his ‘war-work’. Sometime near the beginning of the war the Dean of St Paul’s, the Very Reverend Walter Robert Matthews (1881–1973), wrote to the Reverend Maurice Edwards,† who was Chaplain-in-Chief of the Royal Air Force, saying he had a lectureship in his patronage which, in the unusual circumstances of the war, he could make into a sort of travelling lectureship. The Dean went on to suggest that, as C.S. Lewis was at a loose end at Magdalen, perhaps the Chaplain-in-Chief could make use of him. Early in the winter of 1941 the Chaplain-in-Chief wrote to Lewis asking if he would accept invitations to speak to members of the RAF. Shortly afterwards he and his assistant, the Reverend Charles Gilmore,‡ went to Oxford to call on him. ‘I well remember’, said Charles Gilmore, ‘going up to Oxford one winter’s day with Maurice Edwards and spending an evening in C.S. Lewis’s rooms to discuss details. Lewis was diffident of himself but keen to try. I remember that he mentioned that the whole project might well be aborted because the call-up age would reach him the following year. We fixed up details of expenses to be paid by the public purse, and the lectureship could provide his fees.’5
Besides the fact that Lewis was still carrying in his body some shrapnel from the First World War, the Government decided that he was far too valuable as a teacher to go back into service. The Chaplain-in-Chief may have known this and, shortly after the meeting in Oxford, he informed his chaplains of the Royal Air Force that Lewis would be available at weekends to speak on the Christian faith.
Before Lewis visited any of the many air force stations in England, he accepted an even more unusual request. At the prompting of Sister Penelope, the Mother Superior of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage invited him to come over and speak to the junior Sisters. ‘I will come,’ Lewis wrote to Sister Penelope on 10 April 1941, ‘though the Protestant in me has just a little suspicion of an oubliette or a chained skeleton … the doors do open outwards as well, I trust.’6 He travelled over on Monday, 20 April, and spoke to the Sisters on ‘The Gospel in our Generation’, and he was the first layman in the history of the convent to stay in their gate house. Unfortunately, the lectures he gave have not survived, but one nun remembered him saying that ‘whereas Zacchaeus “could not see Jesus for the press”,7 we today often cannot see Him for the Press with a capital P!’8
Lewis remembered with far less pleasure an occasion on which he spoke to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and was piqued to observe a burly female sergeant who sat and knitted throughout his lecture.
Meanwhile, invitations were pouring in from the Royal Air Force. There is no complete record of all the air force stations Lewis visited, but we learn from a letter to Sister Penelope of 15 May 1941 that he had given his first talks the month before to the Royal Air Force at Abingdon. Although Sister Penelope did not talk on the BBC, she had been asked to write some scripts for others to read over the air. Lewis wrote:
We ought to meet about B.B.C. talks if nothing else. I’m giving four in August. Mine are praeparatio evangelica rather than evangelium, an attempt to convince people that there is a moral law, that we disobey it, and that the existence of a Lawgiver is at least very probable and also (unless you add the Christian doctrine of the Atonement) imparts despair rather than comfort … I’ve given some talks to the R.A.F. at Abingdon already and as far as I can judge they were a complete failure. I await instructions from the Chaplain in Chief about the Vacation … One must take comfort in remembering that God used an ass to convert the prophet.9
The talks Lewis gave to the Royal Air Force have also not survived, but he told us what he found his audiences to be like in his essay on ‘Difficulties in Presenting the Christian Faith to Modern Unbelievers’, reprinted as ‘God in the Dock’:
The greatest barrier I have met is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin. This has struck me more forcibly when I spoke to the RAF than when I spoke to students … The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers whether Jews, Metuentes or Pagans, a sense of guilt … Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy. The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock.10
On Sunday, 8 June 1941, Lewis preached what has since become his best-known sermon, ‘The Weight of Glory’, at St Mary the Virgin, to one of the largest congregations assembled there in modern times. If this is not the most sublime piece of prose to come from his pen it must be very close to it. Paxford had been asked to drive ‘Mr Jack’ to St Mary’s, and this was the first time he had seen his master in the pulpit. He remembered the church being so packed that students could only find room perched in the windows and standing along the walls. When Walter Hooper asked what the sermon was like, he said: ‘Gor blimey! Mr Jack didn’t half give it to ’em!’ Lewis began:
If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.11
Lewis considered the mere hankering for immortality a despicable reason for turning to Christ. He believed that, until a certain spiritual level had been reached, the promise of immortality operates as a bribe that inflames the very self-regard which it is the business of Christianity to cut down and uproot. On the other hand, for those who begin with a vision of God and who try to obey him, Heaven turns out to be the consummation of their earthly discipleship.
‘In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now,’ Lewis continued, ‘I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you – the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence.’12 ‘Do you think I am trying to weave a spell?’ asked the future Chronicler of Narnia. ‘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 which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.’13
Having thrown out hint after hint about the joys of the redeemed soul’s union with God, Lewis concluded with a picture of redeemed Man which redefines our idea of what Man is. Those whose beliefs had been silently but surely conforming to materialism were knocked flat by a perspective of mankind that illuminates the Gospel and everything Lewis was to write hereafter:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours, as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendours … Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat – the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.14
It was, however, the talks on the BBC that have proved to be one of the most successful works Lewis ever undertook. Almost as soon as he became a Christian he found that many of his co-religionists were far more interested in talking about differences between Christians than what they had in common. Lewis seems to have made up his mind almost at once not to be drawn into what he saw as fruitless controversy. When his former pupil, Dom Bede Griffiths, a convert to Catholicism who was to become a Benedictine monk in 1936, tried to correspond about the differences between their churches, Lewis would not be drawn. He replied on 3 August 1934: ‘When all is said (and truly said) about the divisions of Christendom, there remains, by God’s mercy, an enormous common ground. It is only abstaining from one tree in the whole garden.’15
It was about this time that Lewis came across the works of the Puritan divine Richard Baxter (1615–91), best known for his book, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650). However, it was in Baxter’s Church-history of the Government of Bishops (1680) that Lewis found a view of the faith that perfectly expressed what he believed should be his priority, and which was to become characteristic of his religious writings. In a preliminary chapter to the book Lewis came across this passage:
You know not of what Party I am of, nor what to call me; I am sorrier for you in this than for my self; if you know not, I will tell you, I am a CHRISTIAN, a MERE CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian Religion and Church hath been visible: But must you know of what Sect or Party I am of? I am against all Sects and dividing Parties: But if any will call Mere Christian by the name of a Party, because they take up with mere Christianity, Creed, and Scripture, and will not be of any dividing or contentious Sect, I am of that Party which is so against Parties: If the name CHRISTIAN be not enough, call me a CATHOLIC CHRISTIAN; not as that word signifieth an hereticating majority of Bishops, but as it signifieth one that hath no Religion, but that which by Christ and the Apostles was left to the Catholic Church, or the body of Jesus Christ on Earth.16
Lewis used the expression ‘Mere Christianity’ for the first time in his introduction to Sister Penelope’s translation of St Athanasius’s Incarnation of the Word of God (1944). In that introduction, reprinted as ‘On the Reading of Old Books’,17 Lewis cautioned that ‘If any man is tempted to think … that “Christianity” is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages “mere Christianity” turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible.’18 In the preface to the four series of his BBC broadcasts, Mere Christianity, Lewis made it clear that he was ‘not writing to expound something I could call “my religion”, but to expound “mere” Christianity, which is what it is and was what it was long before I was born and whether I like it or not’.19
Knowing exactly what he wanted to say, Lewis had no trouble writing his radio scripts. The only hitch he encountered was gauging his material so that every talk was neither more nor less than fifteen minutes long. This was wartime; all scripts had to be passed for security by the official Censor and rigidly adhered to. No silence was permitted lest the British traitor Lord Haw Haw fill the gap with propaganda radioed from Germany. Even those seemingly spontaneous insertions Lewis made at the beginning of some talks had to be passed by the Censor. If they had not been accepted, they would have been taken off the air immediately by the monitor in the ‘Listening Room’.
In his first series of broadcasts Lewis was highly prophetic. Long before it was evident to those who made it their main business to heed current trends, he saw ‘the poison of subjectivism’ taking grip. People were talking about ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’ – instead of Truth. That is why, as he said to Mr Welch, his preferred choice of topics was ‘the Law of Nature, or objective right and wrong’. Although Lewis rarely used it, the term for objective right and wrong is ‘Natural Law’, and beginning with his first broadcasts, he made it one of his key ideas. As he would have known, the classic definition of Natural Law is found in St Thomas Aquinas: ‘The natural law is nothing other than the light of understanding placed in us by God; through it we know what we must do and what we must avoid. God has given this light or law at the creation.’20 The chief New Testament text on Natural Law comes from St Paul, who affirms that ‘When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.’21 In the light of what happened in the last decades of the twentieth century, it would be hard to imagine how Lewis could have chosen a more relevant topic for his first series than Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe?
Lewis journeyed up to London every Wednesday evening during the month of August 1941 and spoke over the air from 7.45 to 8 p.m. His first four talks, given on August 6, 13, 20 and 27, were originally entitled ‘Common Decency’, ‘Scientific Law and Moral Law’, ‘Materialism or Religion?’ and ‘What Can We Do About It?’ Although Lewis made some small alterations to them before they were published in Broadcast Talks (1942), and altered them a bit more before they appeared in Mere Christianity (1952), the talks as published are nevertheless very close to what Lewis’s audience heard over the air; it is the published versions that are quoted here. At this time people who listened to the radio preferred that programmes be given ‘live’. ‘It always drops the temperature in the audience’, Fenn wrote to Lewis on 8 February 1944, ‘when they hear that it is a recording.’22 While the BBC Archive Centre has preserved typed copies of Lewis’s talks, gramophone recordings were made only of three of his last series of talks in 1944.
For convenience, we will use here the titles Lewis gave this first series of talks in Mere Christianity, which are: ‘The Law of Human Nature’, ‘The Reality of the Law’, ‘What Lies Behind the Law’ and ‘We Have Cause to be Uneasy’.
In ‘The Law of Human Nature’, given on 6 August, Lewis distinguished between the ‘Law of Nature’ and the ‘Laws of Nature’, such as gravitation. He pointed out that if you leave a body unsupported in the air it ‘has no more choice about falling than a stone has’,23 while ‘a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it’.24 He concluded by saying, ‘First … human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.’25
Almost before Lewis had finished this first talk his listeners began bombarding him with questions, and they were to continue to pour in. So that Lewis could answer them, the BBC persuaded him to give a fifth talk on 3 September 1941 answering ‘Listeners’ Objections’. Lewis was later to make this talk on ‘Objections’ Chapter 2 of Mere Christianity, so it is appropriate to mention it at this point. He began, ‘Some people wrote to me saying, “Isn’t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed just like our other instincts?”’ He went on to point out that you may feel an instinct to help a man in danger as well as an instinct to run away. The feeling that you ought to help, which judges the two instincts, is separate from them. ‘We are not acting from instinct’, he said, ‘when we set about making an instinct stronger than it is.’26 This third thing is the Moral Law. From there he went on to challenge what today would be called pluralism and which maintains that one morality is as good as another. ‘If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other,’ said Lewis, ‘there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality … The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other.’27
In ‘The Reality of the Law’, his second talk, Lewis contrasts the Laws of Nature with those of Human Nature, and the conclusion is reached that ‘There is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behaviour … a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us.’28 In the third talk on ‘What Lies Behind the Law’, given on 20 August, he argues that while science works by experiments and watches how things behave, the power that made the universe ‘would not be one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them … 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.’29 In the fourth talk, given on 27 August, ‘We Have Cause to be Uneasy’, Lewis finds that the evidence we have of Somebody behind the universe is the universe itself and the Moral Law, which ‘is more like a mind than it is like anything else’.30 In conclusion, ‘It is after you have realized that there is a Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself in the wrong with that Power – it is after all this … that Christianity begins to talk.’31
Lewis had hitherto counted on at least a fortnight’s holiday in the summer when he could get over to Ireland for a rest. The summer of 1941 was so heavily booked with RAF appointments that there was not time even for a weekend jaunt with Warnie. Besides this, his broadcasts had proved so successful that the BBC pressed him to give another series after Christmas. Lewis, who believed that delays made for more work, acted like a shot and had them written by the time term began in October.
Though weary to the bone and much in need of a holiday, Lewis saw more of Britain during the summer than he had at any other time. He wrote to Arthur Greeves on 23 December:
All through the Vacation I was going round lecturing to the R.A.F. – away for 2 or 3 days at a time and then home for 2 or 3 days. I had never realized how tiring perpetual travelling is (specially in crowded trains). One felt all the time as if one had just played a game of football – aching all over. None the less I had some interesting times and saw some beautiful country. Perthshire, and all the country between Aberystwyth and Shrewsbury, and Cumberland, are what chiefly stuck in my mind. It also gave me the chance in many places to see and smell the sea and hear the sound of gulls again, which otherwise I would have been pining for.32
When the United States came into the war at the end of 1941 a good many American chaplains were posted with their men to various Royal Air Force stations throughout Britain. Lewis had met few Americans (this was rapidly to change once The Screwtape Letters became a best-seller in the United States in 1943); as, however, both countries were united in a common cause, he was as pleased to accept their invitations as he was those of his own people and he soon came to know many as friends. What he was not prepared for was the unashamed lionization that some Americans offer famous men. One American chaplain, anxious to provide his men with a distinguished speaker, went up to Oxford and called on Lewis at Magdalen. Although Lewis was giving a tutorial at the time, he broke off to come to the door. Would he, the chaplain asked, come and speak to his men? Yes, of course, said Lewis, and made a note of the appointment in his diary. Unaware that Lewis was so modest, the chaplain went on to say, ‘With a name like yours – well, we are bound to draw a crowd!’ Lewis winced, struck through the appointment and closed the door without uttering another word.
The best overall summary of Lewis’s impact as a lecturer with the Royal Air Force comes from Charles Gilmore, the Commandant of the Chaplains’ School, who was to see Lewis often during the war. In a letter to the authors of 4 November 1972, he said:
Lewis was a distinct success in the Royal Air Force but, as I should judge, within a limited sphere. The larger stations contained a sufficient number of men (and women) both interested in what he had to say and capable of appreciating it. Thus Halton, Cranwell, Hereford, Locking provided him with audiences not so different in intellectual capacity from those which filled the Examination Schools in the High, but at the average station he would speak to an audience of a dozen or so – perhaps none the worse for that …
Lewis came to lecture at the Royal Air Force Chaplains’ School in its early days at Magdalene College, Cambridge (1944). This is the College where ten years later he was to hold a professorial Fellowship. I well remember his first lecture to the chaplains on a refresher course. Some had returned from the field, others were nightly seeing off crews who did not return; many were shaken in the concept of their calling, others were finding it for the first time. Action at levels heroic and very raw seemed all-important; theology had been evacuated to safe reception areas, and Nicea was the mythological capital of cloud-cuckoo land. ‘To be young was very heaven.’33 To such a crowd came Clive Staples Lewis, choosing to speak on ‘Linguistic Analysis of Pauline Soteriology’! He began diffidently and seemed even to be searching for words. A few people shifted uneasily, a future bishop surreptitiously filled in a clue in The Times crossword. Then, quietly, Lewis struck fire with some intolerable phrase about redemption and everyone came alive. The rest of the morning was not really long enough to cover the subject in discussion. I recollected then that Lewis too had been a soldier and knew his audience.
Gilmore enjoyed as well the playful side of this giant intellectual and recalls one occasion on which Lewis stayed overnight at Magdalene. The next morning, said Gilmore,
We were both to catch a train to Town and, having an hour to spare, we strolled to the Fellows’ Garden on a beautiful summer morning. For some reason I had my brief-case with me, and after ten minutes placed it carefully on a garden seat where it would be in sight wherever we walked. I remarked that I was putting it down tenderly because it contained a full bottle of whisky, a rare treasure in those days. He remarked gravely, ‘I don’t think that to be a very safe remark. We are alone in this garden, I am bigger than you, and the inference is appalling!’ … I often saw him after that. We used to walk to the railway station from the College when we had to return to Oxford. He would bid me study again Chesterton’s Everlasting Man; would anxiously ask if the chaplains had really got it into their heads that the ancients had not got every whit as good brains as we had … He certainly made his mark on the Chaplains save on those who themselves made no mark on anyone.
Lewis agreed to give a second series of five talks, lasting fifteen minutes each. These talks, to be called What Christians Believe, were scheduled to be broadcast from 4.45 p.m. to 5 p.m. on 11 and 18 January and 1, 8, and 15 February 1942. After reading the scripts Eric Fenn wrote to Lewis on 5 December to say, ‘They are quite first class – indeed I don’t know when I have read anything in the same class at all. There is a clarity and inexorableness about them, which made me positively gasp!’34
What Lewis was attempting in his broadcasts on What Christians Believe was a small-scale elucidation of Christian theology: to explain as clearly and concisely as he could what Christianity is. So as to avoid saying anything that was peculiar to himself or unacceptable to the main body of Christendom, he sent the scripts to four clergymen of the Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Catholic churches asking them for their criticism. The Anglican critic was almost certainly Dr Austin Farrer, the distinguished theologian who was then Chaplain and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. The Methodist reader was the Reverend Joseph Dowell, at that time a chaplain in the Royal Air Force. The Presbyterian was Eric Fenn and the Catholic was Dom Bede Griffiths, Lewis’s former pupil, by this time a Benedictine monk at Prinknash priory in Gloucester.
Mr Dowell thought Lewis had not said enough about faith, but years later, recalling hearing the talks over the air, he said in a letter of 2 December 1968: ‘They were magnificent, unforgettable. Nobody, before or since, has made such “impact” in straight talks of this kind. His own words to me – “I had to go like a bull at a gate” – were apt enough in that he felt he had to crash the barriers in order to get into a common field of thought and communication.’35
Dom Bede’s letters to Lewis are now lost, but we get some idea of the complexity of the problems involved if we look at Lewis’s letter to Dom Bede of 21 December 1941. It is about the meaning of the Atonement, which Lewis was to discuss in the talk on ‘The Perfect Penitent’:
About the scripts – I think I gave the impression of going further than I intended in saying that all theories of the Atonement were ‘to be rejected if we don’t find them helpful’. What I meant was ‘need not be used’ – a very different thing. Is there, on your view, a real difference here: that the Divinity of Our Lord has to be believed whether you find it a help or a ‘scandal’ (otherwise you’re not a Christian at all) but the Anselmic theory of Atonement is not in that position. Would you admit that a man was a Christian (and could be a member of your church) who said, ‘I believe that Christ’s death redeemed man from sin, but I can make nothing of any of the theories as to how’? … I think I could get something you and your friends would pass, but not without making the talk either longer or shorter: but I’m on the Procrustes’ bed of neither more nor less than 15 minutes.36
The clarity of Lewis’s thought, his ability to encapsulate a great many facts into a few words, is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in these broadcasts. The second talk, entitled ‘The Invasion’, ends with this synopsis of the faith: ‘Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.’37
The most famous example of Lewis’s inexorable logic and his ability to distil profound truth in a few words almost anyone can understand, concerns one of the longest-running heresies of all time. It is Arianism – after Arius, who died in the fourth century – which states that Jesus was not God by nature, but only a creature. Such a heresy appeals to the modern mind, which wants a manageable, democratic God. It is an issue that has taxed the mind of theologians for nearly two thousand years. Picking up from St Augustine the argument that Christ was ‘either God or a good man’, Lewis said in his chapter on ‘The Shocking Alternative’:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. 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. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.38
C.S. Lewis was now before the notice of Everyman. Hardly a week had passed since the second series of broadcasts before the BBC asked Lewis to write a third series for the autumn. This time they hoped he would give eight talks to be broadcast on Sunday afternoons from 20 September to 8 November 1942. By the end of summer 1942 The Problem of Pain was in its eighth impression and The Screwtape Letters in its sixth. Broadcast Talks, which combined the BBC series on Right and Wrong and What Christians Believe, was published on 31 July 1942 to very high praise. ‘We have never read arguments better marshalled and handled so that they can be remembered, or any book more useful to the Christian,’ said the Catholic weekly, The Tablet.39 Martin Tindal, writing in Time and Tide, said: ‘Mr C.S. Lewis has made the kind of public return to the ancient faith which infuriates other intellectuals. If only these undeniably intelligent laymen had kept quiet about their change of direction, they might have been endurable. But they have not kept quiet.’40 ‘The author shows himself a master in the rare act of conveying profound truths in simple and compelling language,’ said G.D. Smith in the distinguished Clergy Review.41
Lewis’s popularity with the Royal Air Force continued to grow and the BBC had soon contracted him to write the third series of broadcasts. Much as he wanted to get over to Ireland for a holiday, his sympathy for those fighting overseas made him all the more anxious to pull his own weight at home. The first two series of broadcasts had resulted in Lewis receiving an enormous number of letters, and he had developed a system that was to continue all his life, that of answering letters by return of post if at all possible.
Warnie, having retired from the Army in 1932, wanted to make his own contribution to the war effort and he acquired a small two-berth cruiser which he named the Bosphorus – after a similar boat in the Boxen stories.42 He kept it moored at Salter’s Boatyard at Folly Bridge. When Jack wrote to Arthur on 25 May 1941 he explained that ‘Warnie has not been recalled to the Army I’m glad to say and is living in his motor boat a few miles away as part of the Upper Thames Patrol. He’s painted the boat battleship-grey and bought a blue peaked cap so as to emphasize the fact that he’s now part of the navy! Dear Warnie – he’s one of the simplest souls I know in a way: certainly one of the best at getting simple pleasure.’43 Paxford’s responsibilities had increased because they were now keeping rabbits at The Kilns, and Mrs Moore was suffering from arthritis and varicose veins.
Lewis sent Eric Fenn the scripts of his third series – to be called Christian Behaviour – on 29 July, and he was in Cornwall addressing the Royal Air Force when Fenn wrote to him there on 15 September to say that Lewis had obviously misunderstood him. This time the talks were to be not fifteen minutes each, but ten! Exhausted, Lewis carried out a blitz on the scripts, bringing them down to ten minutes in length.
Lewis went up to London every Sunday afternoon between 20 September and 18 November to deliver the talks on Christian Behaviour over the air from 2.50 to 3 p.m. ‘They really were, as usual, admirable,’ Fenn wrote to Lewis on 10 November, ‘and I have had very appreciative comments from people outside the Corporation about them: and to have risen to the level of a cause célèbre in the columns of the “Free Thinker”, to say nothing of the “Daily Mirror” must give you particular satisfaction.’44 As might be expected, the chapter that caused a sensation was the one entitled ‘Sexual Morality’. This chapter had been ‘leaked’ to the Daily Mirror, which infringed copyright by publishing it on 13 October under the title ‘This was a Very Frank Talk – Which We Think Everyone Should Read’. Perhaps the joke rebounded on the Mirror because those who took the paper did read it.
One of the things which distinguished Lewis from what he called ‘Christianity-and-water’ theologians and gave his work an enduring value was his acceptance of ‘Repellent Doctrines’. He mentioned these ‘doctrines’ for the first time in ‘The Weight of Glory’ where he argued that ‘If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know.’45 The fullest treatment of ‘Repellent Doctrines’ comes in Lewis’s essay on ‘Christian Apologetics’:
Scrupulous care to preserve the Christian message as something distinct from one’s own ideas, has one very good effect upon the apologist himself. It forces him, again and again, to face up to those elements in original Christianity which he personally finds obscure or repulsive. He is saved from the temptation to skip or slur or ignore what he finds disagreeable. And the man who yields to that temptation will, of course, never progress in Christian knowledge … Science progresses because scientists, instead of running away from such troublesome phenomena or hushing them up, are constantly seeking them out. In the same way, there will be progress in Christian knowledge only as long as we accept the challenge of the difficult or repellent doctrines. A ‘liberal’ Christianity which considers itself free to alter the Faith whenever the Faith looks perplexing or repellent must be completely stagnant. Progress is only made into a resisting material.46
‘Sexual Morality’ was the first ‘repellent’ element Lewis dealt with in Christian Behaviour; the fourth talk of the series, it was given on 18 October 1942. ‘Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues,’ Lewis said. ‘There is no getting away from it, the Christian rule is, “Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence”.’47 He continued that this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instincts have gone wrong. ‘Being a Christian,’ said Lewis, ‘I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong … This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.’48 There follows one of Lewis’s most delightful and trenchant examples:
Take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act – that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?49
The other repellent doctrine that secular humanists continually reinterpret to conform to the Spirit of the Age is, of course, Christian marriage. Lewis did not devote a talk to the subject in the original series, but he included one when revising the talks for publication as Mere Christianity and it is undoubtedly one of the most valuable chapters in the book. He began the chapter on ‘Christian Marriage’ by saying,
The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism – for that is what the words ‘one flesh’ would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact – just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument. The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together, in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined.50
Admitting that some churches allow divorce and others do not, Lewis believes ‘the Churches all agree with one another about marriage a great deal more than any of them agrees with the outside world. I mean, they all regard divorce as something like cutting up a living body … What they all disagree with is the modern view that it is a simple readjustment of partners, to be made whenever people feel they are no longer in love with one another, or when either of them falls in love with someone else.’51
Lewis turned out to be a valuable pastor when, in his books and his correspondence, he warned people about placing too much trust in mere ‘feelings’. He knew of course that many people would believe they ought to leave husband or wife if they ‘fell in love’ with someone else. He admitted that
What we call ‘being in love’ is a glorious state and, in several ways, good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it subordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality … No one in his senses would deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or cold self-centredness. But as I said before, ‘the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs’. Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go.52
Or, as Lewis once said to Walter Hooper, ‘Feelings come and go – but they especially go!’
On the relationship between husbands and wives, Lewis accepted St Paul’s injunction: ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.’53 This view was almost as unpopular in the 1940s as it is today, and Lewis asked his readers to remember that if two people simply cannot agree, one must have a ‘casting vote’54 if they are to remain united. The headship of women Lewis considered unnatural and no more likely to appeal to women in general than to men in general: ‘Even a woman who wants to be the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of things when she finds it going on next door.’55
When Lewis was preparing Christian Behaviour for publication on 19 April 1943 he restored the talks to what they had been before he was obliged to shorten them. He also added several new chapters – ‘The “Cardinal Virtues”’, ‘Charity’, and ‘Hope’, as well as the one on ‘Christian Marriage’. Most of the reviews were very laudatory and gave further evidence that Lewis had hit his target. Robert Speaight said in The Tablet:
Mr Lewis is that rare being, a born broadcaster; born to the manner as well as to the matter. He neither buttonholes you nor bombards you; there is no false intimacy and no false eloquence. He approaches you directly, as a rational person only to be persuaded by reason. He is confident and yet humble in his possession and propagation of truth. He is helped by a speaking voice of great charm and a style of manifest sincerity.56
It had been almost a year since The Screwtape Letters appeared as instalments in The Guardian, and Lewis was pressed to give the paper something else. He sent them a short piece on ‘Miracles’ which was published in The Guardian of 2 October 1942. Not long afterwards, on 26 November, Lewis was invited to preach at the Church of St Jude on the Hill, London. His sermon there was a longer version of ‘Miracles’ and appeared in their parish magazine, St Jude’s Gazette, No. 73, pre-dating October 1942. He probably didn’t realize it at the time, but this piece was a miniature version of what was to be one of his most important and philosophical books, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947). Lewis was still pondering the question why Christians are divided between those who accept ‘real supernaturalism’ and those who don’t. In his sermon at St Jude’s he put his finger on the problem:
I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles. Whatever experiences we may have, we shall not regard them as miraculous if we already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural.57
‘What a series of rediscoveries life is,’ Jack wrote to Arthur on 10 December 1942. ‘All the things which one used to regard as simply the nonsense grown-ups talk have one by one come true – draughts, rheumatism, Christianity.’58 Happily, Lewis made one of his most delightful literary discoveries before Christmas. His fellow Inkling, Fr Gervase Mathew, gave him a copy of E.R. Eddison’s heroic romance, The Worm Ouroboros (1922).* On 16 November 1942 Lewis thanked the author in mock-heroic English, praising The Worm Ouroboros as ‘the most noble and joyous book I have read these ten years’, which book outweighed ‘all the clam jamfrey and whymperings of the rakehellie auctours in these latter daies, as the Eliots, Poundes, Lawrences, Audens, and the like’.59 Eddison, a retired civil servant living in Marlborough, was delighted to find such a distinguished admirer, and he responded by sending Lewis a copy of his second romance, Mistress of Mistresses (1935).
As splendid as he found parts of Mistress of Mistresses, Lewis could not forbear complaining to Eddison in his letter of 19 December of the author’s ‘hyper-uranian whores and transcendental trulls’. A good-natured debate followed. Eddison suggested that Lewis must be a misogynist, to which Lewis playfully retorted in a letter of 29 December that
it is a thing openlie manifest to all but disard [idiots] and verie goosecaps that feminitee is to itself an imperfection, being placed by the Pythagoreans in the sinister column with matter and mortalitie. Of which we see dailie ensample in that men do gladlie withdraw into their own societie and when they would be either merrie or grave stint not to shutte the dore upon Love herself, whereas we see no woman … but will not of good will escape from her sisters and seeke to the conversation of men, as liking by instincte of Nature so to receyve the perfection she lacketh.60
The friendship between the two men ripened as a result of their verbal fencing and Eddison was deeply honoured when Lewis gave him a dinner-party in Magdalen on 17 February 1943 at which he met Tolkien, Charles Williams and Warnie.
Although Lewis’s attitude was to alter somewhat after his marriage, Owen Barfield said in a meeting of the New York C.S. Lewis Society, that Lewis could properly be called a misogynist on at least the ‘theoretical level’, though decidedly not so in his personal relations with individual women.61 Mr Barfield’s point was that Lewis knew men and women as men and women, not as ‘classes’ or something equally vague. Lewis probably spent part of Christmas 1942 writing the third of his planetary novels, That Hideous Strength. One of the charges he brought against his character Mark Studdock, a sociologist, in the novel is that he ‘had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman”. He preferred to write about “vocational groups”, “elements”, “classes”, and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.’62
Mark’s wife, Jane, another academic, is equally mystical about political constructs. ‘Though she was theoretically an extreme democrat, no social class save her own had yet become a reality to her in any place except the printed page.’63 When Jane comes into contact with Dr Ransom he finds her so worried about ‘equality’ in marriage that he has to remind her that ‘Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food.’64 Ransom eventually discovers that Jane is ‘offended by the masculine itself’. ‘The male,’ he warns her, ‘you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.’65
It may have been the creation of the Studdocks that led Lewis to devote much thought to the distinction between ‘legal fiction’ and reality. In brief, he believed that no two people are equal in the sense of being the same. On the other hand, he thought a certain amount of ‘legal fiction’ – a pretended, political ‘equality’ – is necessary to keep us from hurting one another. ‘I am a democrat’, he said in his essay on ‘Equality’, ‘because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason … I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people … Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows.’66 And he said elsewhere:
Do not misunderstand me. I am not in the least belittling the value of this egalitarian fiction, which is our only defence against one another’s cruelty. I should view with the strongest disapproval any proposal to abolish manhood suffrage, or the Married Women’s Property Act. But the function of equality is purely protective. It is medicine, not food. By treating human persons (in judicious defiance of the observed facts) as if they were all the same kind of thing, we avoid innumerable evils. But it is not on this that we were made to live. It is idle to say that men are of equal value. If value is taken in a worldly sense – if we mean that all men are equally useful or beautiful or good or entertaining – then it is nonsense. If it means that all are of equal value as immortal souls, then I think it conceals a dangerous error. The infinite value of each human soul is not a Christian doctrine. God did not die for man because of some value He perceived in him. The value of each human soul considered simply in itself, out of relation to God, is simply zero … He loved us not because we were lovable, but because He is Love … If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.67
Lewis continued to debate the issue because he believed people had a dangerously mistaken notion of democracy. They mistook legal fiction for reality, and reality for fiction. To Lewis a serious step in this direction was taken in 1944 when the Bishop of Hong Kong, R.O. Hall, ordained the first woman to the Anglican priesthood. By 1948 the Church of England was under pressure to follow suit. Lewis believed a woman should address the issue, and on 13 July 1948 he wrote to Dorothy L. Sayers:
News has only just reached me of a movement (starting, I believe, from Chinese Anglicans) to demand that women should be allowed Priests’ Orders. I am guessing that, like me, you disapprove something that would cut us off so sharply from all the rest of Christendom, and which would be the very triumph of what they call ‘practical’ and ‘enlightened’ principles over the far deeper need that the Priest at the Altar must represent the Bridegroom to whom we are all, in a sense, feminine. Well, if you do – really I think you’ll have to give tongue.
In her reply of 19 July Miss Sayers agreed that the ordination of women would ‘erect a new and totally unnecessary barrier between us and the rest of Catholic Christendom’, but she could find no ‘theological reason’ against it:
If I were cornered and asked point-blank whether Christ Himself is the representative of male humanity or all humanity, I should be obliged to answer ‘of all humanity’ … It would be a pity to fly in the face of all the Apostolic Church, especially just now when we are at last seeing some prospect of understanding with the Eastern Church – and so on … The most I find I can do is to keep silence in any place where the daughters of the Philistines might overhear me.68
In the end Time and Tide persuaded Lewis to give tongue, and his article, ‘Priestesses in the Church?’,* was published on 14 August 1948, in time to be read by bishops from the entire Anglican communion meeting in London at the Lambeth Conference. ‘To take such a revolutionary step at the present moment,’ Lewis urged, ‘to cut ourselves off from the Christian past and so widen the divisions between ourselves and other Churches by establishing an order of priestesses in our midst, would be an almost wanton degree of imprudence. And the Church of England herself would be torn in shreds by the operation.’69 He went on:
We begin to feel that what really divides us from our opponents is a difference between the meaning which they and we give to the word ‘priest’. … To us a priest is primarily a representative, a double representative, who represents us to God and God to us. Our very eyes teach us this in church. Sometimes the priest turns his back on us and faces the East – he speaks to God for us: sometimes he faces us and speaks to us for God.70
Therefore, ‘only one wearing the masculine uniform can … represent the Lord to the Church’.71 Lewis goes on to argue that, while no one objects to a woman speaking to God on our behalf, she cannot speak on behalf of God to us:
Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins by saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to ‘Our Mother which art in Heaven’ as to ‘Our Father’. Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does. Now it is surely the case that if all these supposals were ever carried into effect we should be embarked on a different religion.72
Bishop Hall’s ordination of the Chinese woman was condemned by the Lambeth Conference of 1948. Eventually, however, politics won. The Episcopal Church in the United States began ordaining women in 1974, and the Church of England began the same practice in 1994.
We must now catch up with Lewis’s BBC broadcasts. On 11 June 1943 Eric Fenn wrote to ask if Lewis had given further thought to a series of ‘more theological talks’.73 Lewis wanted to complete his apology for Christianity, and on 16 June he agreed to give a fourth series of seven talks to be delivered in the spring of 1944. The scripts were completed and delivered to Fenn on 22 December. Fenn wrote that same day to say, ‘I like them immensely, and think that, as usual, you have achieved a quite astonishing degree of clarity in a very difficult subject.’ However, he went on to tell Lewis that this time he had made the mistake of working ‘to a 10-minute script, and not a 15-minute’ one.74 ‘I could kick myself for not having used my 15 minutes to the full,’ Lewis replied on 27 December 1943.75
Lewis was invited to extend the talks to fifteen minutes each and he posted them to Fenn on 5 January 1944. The next news from Fenn was disconcerting. The BBC had to reschedule the talks for 10.20 at night. ‘Who the devil’, said Lewis in his reply of 10 February, ‘is going to listen to anything at 10.20? … I can’t spend any Tuesday nights in town, as a talk at 10.20 means catching the midnight train and getting to bed about 3 o’clock. Well, I’ll give three under those conditions. The rest you’ll have to record … If you know the address of a reliable firm of assassins, nose-slitters, garotters and poisoners, I should be grateful to have it.’76 In the end, the talks were broadcast on consecutive Tuesday evenings at 10.15 p.m. between 22 February and 4 April 1944.
As it turned out, Lewis recorded his second talk (‘The Three-Personal God’), his sixth (‘Nice People or New Men’) and seventh (‘The New Men’) on to gramophone discs. Unfortunately, the only one of these recordings to survive is the last. The series was published as Beyond Personality: The Christian Idea of God on 9 October 1944. Like the other series, this one too was enlarged when it became part of Mere Christianity. One of the most popular of these talks was the second, on ‘The Three-Personal God’, in which Lewis gives the following illustration of how the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – operates in the life of a Christian:
An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get in touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God – that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying – the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on – the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.77
Beyond Personality was highly praised by the critics. The reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement put his finger on how Lewis’s adult conversion affected his writing: ‘Those who have inherited Christianity may write about it with truth and learning, but they can scarcely write with the excitement which men like Maritain and C.S. Lewis show, to whom the Christian faith is the unlooked-for discovery of the pearl of great price.’78 ‘Most of us’, said H.L.C. Heywood in Theology, ‘know quite a lot of people who ought to read this book.’79 Of particular interest was a ‘Listener Research’ poll taken by the BBC about the second talk in Lewis’s last series. ‘The single most important fact’, wrote Fenn on 23 March 1944, ‘is the sharp division you produced in your audience. They obviously either regard you as “the cat’s whiskers” or as beneath contempt, which is interesting, and ought, I feel, to teach us something, but I can’t think what.’80 But Lewis, remembering that even the Son of God was killed by those he came to save, was in no doubt what the report meant. In his reply to Fenn of 25 March he said: ‘Thanks for the suitable Lenten reading … The two reviews you report (Cat’s Whiskers and Beneath Contempt) aren’t very illuminating about me perhaps; about my subject matter, it is an old story, isn’t it? They love, or hate.’81
Lewis was not unaware of the discordant voices. The BBC sent him a copy of George Orwell’s article in The Tribune of 27 October 1944. The broadcasts, he said, ‘are not really so unpolished as they are meant to look. Indeed, they are an outflanking movement in the big counter-attack against the Left which Lord Elton, A.P. Herbert, G.M. Young, Alfred Noyes and various others have been conducting for two years past.’ In the issue of The Tribune for 17 November 1944 a reviewer calling himself ‘Francophil’ complained: ‘I wholly share William Empson’s sentiments about one regrettable deterioration of C.S. Lewis’s literary work since he took to writing religious propaganda for the B.B.C. … his “religious soundness” … is said to appeal to the Prime Minister’s Patronage Secretary.’
Because of the insistent clamour for more broadcasts, not only in England but in America and various countries of the Commonwealth, the BBC urged Lewis to return to the air. He replied that for the moment he had said all he had to say and was, therefore, unavailable for more broadcasts during the ‘foreseeable future’. He chose instead to publish Broadcast Talks, Christian Behaviour and Beyond Personality together, with additions, as Mere Christianity (1952) – the word ‘mere’ denoting ‘essential’.
Orwell and the others were wrong in supposing Lewis to have been politically ambitious. On the other hand, Churchill’s Patronage Secretary did have his eyes on Lewis. In preparing the New Year’s Honours List, Churchill offered Lewis the order of the Commander of the British Empire. Lewis replied to the Secretary on 3 December 1951:
I feel greatly obliged to the Prime Minister, and so far as my personal feelings are concerned this honour would be highly agreeable. There are always however knaves who say, and fools who believe, that my religious writings are all covert anti-Leftist propaganda, and my appearance in the Honours List would of course strengthen their hands. It is therefore better that I should not appear there. I am sure the Prime Minister will understand my reasons, and that my gratitude is and will be none the less cordial.82
It is not perhaps outlandish to claim that what Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Karl Rayner did for specialists in their works of ‘systematic theology’, Lewis did for laymen – whatever their creed – in Mere Christianity. In it he provides as clear a statement of catholic Christianity, the beliefs ‘common to nearly all Christians at all times’, as has yet been written. If you could take only one of Lewis’s books to a desert island, this is probably the one to choose. Mere Christianity is one of the works that caused Lewis to be celebrated as one of the most ‘original’ exponents of the Christian faith in the twentieth century. But the interesting thing, which cannot be too heavily emphasized in any study of the man or his works, is that though the settings of some of his books are strange and wonderful, his greatest claim to ‘originality’ rests in his total espousal of what Screwtape mockingly denounced as the ‘Same Old Thing’83 and Richard Baxter called ‘mere Christianity’. Believing, as he did, that ‘all that is not eternal is eternally out of date’,84 Lewis never hedged, reinterpreted or in any way diluted the ‘faith which was once for all delivered to the saints’.85 However modern or unusual the dress of his apologetics, Lewis was a thoroughgoing supernaturalist who appealed to the reason as well as the imagination in explaining the Incarnation, Christ’s effectual sacrifice, the Resurrection, the Trinity, Heaven and Hell and the eternal seriousness of Christian decision.
It was while he was halfway through the Mere Christianity talks that Lewis addressed the question: ‘How can an unchanging Gospel survive the continual increase of knowledge?’ How can we pass down the Everlasting Gospel in moulds which it has outgrown? Lewis believed that wherever there is real progress in knowledge, there is some knowledge, some unchanging element, that is never superseded. ‘I claim’, he said, ‘that the positive historical statements made by Christianity have the power, elsewhere found chiefly in formal principles, of receiving, without intrinsic change, the increasing complexity of meaning which increasing knowledge puts into them.’86
* The Reverend James William Welch (1900–67) was educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and was ordained in the Church of England in 1927. He was Curate of St Mary’s, Gateshead, 1926–9, after which he served with the Church Missionary Society at Oleh, Nigeria, 1929–35. He was Principal of St John’s Training College, York, 1935–50, but left to become the BBC’s Director of Religious Broadcasting, 1939–42. He was Prebendary of Neasden in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, 1942–4, after which he was Chaplain to His Majesty King George VI. Welch was Professor of Religious Studies and Vice-Principal of Ibadan University College, Nigeria, 1950–4.
* Eric Fenn (1899–1995) was a pacifist, and as a result of refusing military service in 1917 he was sent to Wormwood Scrubs prison. Following the war he took a degree at Imperial College, London, after which he trained for the Presbyterian ministry at Westminster College, Cambridge. In 1926 he began working with the Student Christian Movement. He joined the BBC in 1939 and he began in 1945 broadcasting a programme entitled ‘Think on These Things’. From 1957 until his retirement in 1968 he was Professor of Christian Doctrine at Selly Oak College, Birmingham.
† The Reverend Maurice Henry Edwards (1886–1961) was educated at Queen’s College, Cambridge, and Leeds Clergy School. He served as a chaplain in the Royal Navy during 1914–18. He became a chaplain in the Royal Air Force in 1918 and after the war he served in Iraq and Egypt. He was Chaplain-in-Chief of the RAF, 1940–4. After this he was Rector of Acton Burnell cum Pitchford from 1948 until his retirement in 1953.
‡ The Reverend Charles James Frederick Gilmore (1908–90) was educated at St John’s College, Oxford, and took his BA in 1931. He spent a year at Wycliffe Hall theological college, Oxford, and was ordained in 1932. He was a curate at Stoke-next-Guildford, 1932–4; Vicar of St Luke, Battersea, 1934–6. In 1936 he became a chaplain with the Royal Air Force, and in 1949 he was promoted to Assistant Chaplain-in-Chief. Gilmore was Warden of the College of Aeronautics, 1950–2, and Adviser to the College, 1968–75. In 1943 he founded and was the first Commandant of the Royal Air Force Chaplains Society and Society of Moral Leadership.
* Eric Rücker Eddison (1882–1945) read Greats at Trinity College, Oxford, taking his BA in 1905. He entered the Board of Trade in 1906, and was private secretary to successive Presidents of the Board, 1915–19. In 1923 he was Secretary to the Imperial Economic Conference. In 1930 Eddison became Deputy Comptroller-General in the Department of Overseas Trade. He retired in 1938 to devote his time to writing. He is the author of three novels loosely linked together as separate parts of a romantic epic: The Worm Ouroboros (1922); Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia (1935); and A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941). At his death Eddison was working on a fourth novel which remained incomplete – The Mezentian Gate (1958). He also published Styrbiorn the Strong (1926) and a scholarly translation, Egils Saga (1930).
* ‘Priestess in the Church?’, originally published as ‘Notes on the Way’ in Tide and Time, Volume XXIX, was reproduced in Undeceptions (1971) and God in the Dock (1998).
1 BBC Written Archives, Caversham Park, Reading.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 TST, p. 489.
5 Letter to Walter Hooper.
6 Letters, p. 358.
7 Luke 19:3.
8 Sister Penelope’s ‘Notes on the Letters’, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/1, fol, 1.
9 Letters, p. 359. Lewis was referring to Numbers 22:28 where Balaam is converted by his ass preaching to him.
10 ‘God in the Dock’, God in the Dock (1979; Fount, 1998), p. 93.
11 Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces, pp. 87–8.
12 Ibid., p. 90.
13 Ibid., p. 91.
14 Ibid., pp. 101–2.
15 Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. C. 47, fol. 4.
16 Richard Baxter, Church-history of the Government of Bishops and their Councils (1680), ‘What History is Credible, and What Not’ [p. xv].
17 See Chapter 4, n. 33.
18 C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, p. 440.
19 Mere Christianity (1952; Fount, 1998), p. vii.
20 Collationes in Decem Praeceptis, 1.
21 Romans 2:14–15.
22 BBC Written Archives.
23 Mere Christianity, bk I, ch. 1, p. 4.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., p. 7.
26 Ibid., ch. 2, p. 9.
27 Ibid., p. 11.
28 Ibid., ch. 3, p. 17.
29 Ibid., ch. 4, p. 20.
30 Ibid., ch. 5, p. 25.
31 Ibid., p. 26.
32 TST, p. 491.
33 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), IX, 108.
34 BBC Written Archives.
35 Letter to Walter Hooper, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/2, fol. 131–2.
36 Letters, pp. 363–4.
37 Mere Christianity, bk II, ch. 2, p. 37.
38 Ibid., ch. 3, p. 43.
39 The Tablet, vol. 180 (18 July 1942), p. 32.
40 Time and Tide, vol. 23 (19 September 1942), p. 744.
41 The Clergy Review, vol. XXII (December 1942), pp. 561–2.
42 ‘Boxen or Scenes from Boxonian City Life’, Boxen, ch. 1, p. 63.
43 TST, p. 489.
44 BBC Written Archives.
45 Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces, p. 93.
46 C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, pp. 148–9.
47 Mere Christianity, bk III, ch. 5, p. 79.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., pp. 79–80.
50 Ibid., bk III, ch. 6, p. 86.
51 Ibid., p. 87.
52 Ibid., pp. 89–90.
53 Ephesians 5:23.
54 Mere Christianity, bk III, ch. 6, p. 93.
55 Ibid.
56 The Tablet, vol. 181 (26 June 1943), p. 308.
57 ‘Miracles’, God in the Dock, p. 1.
58 TST, p. 494.
59 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. Lett. c. 220/2, fol. 28. Both sides of the correspondence between Lewis and Eddison are to be found in the Bodleian Library.
60 Ibid., fol. 39.
61 CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society, vol. 3, No. 7 (May 1972). p. 2.
62 That Hideous Strength, ch. 6, pt 6, pp. 87–8.
63 Ibid., ch. 2, pt 4, p. 45.
64 Ibid., ch. 7, pt 2, p. 157.
65 Ibid., ch. 14, pt 5, p. 350.
66 ‘Equality’, C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, p. 666.
67 ‘Membership’, Fern-seed and Elephants, pp. 9–10.
68 The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, Volume Three, pp. 387–8.
69 ‘Priestesses in the Church?’, God in the Dock, p. 81.
70 Ibid., p. 83.
71 Ibid., p. 86.
72 Ibid., pp. 83–4.
73 BBC Written Archives.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
77 Mere Christianity, bk IV, ch. 2, p. 135.
78 The Times Literary Supplement (21 October 1944), p. 513.
79 Theology, vol. XLVIII (March 1945), p. 68.
80 BBC Written Archives.
81 Ibid.
82 Letters, p. 414.
83 The Screwtape Letters, Letter 25, p. 97.
84 The Four Loves (1960; Fount, 1998), ch. 6, p. 131.
85 Jude 3.
86 ‘Dogma and the Universe’, God in the Dock, p. 27.