C. S. Lewis, Apostle to the Skeptics

by CHAD WALSH

1

C. S. LEWIS is now in the thirteenth year of his oneman campaign to convert the world to Christianity. The fact that Lewis is systematically waging a private war against the religious skepticism of the English-reading world seems to have escaped the attention of most professional critics. In their reviews of his best-known book, The Screwtape Letters, they preferred to dwell on his “keen social satire” and “brilliant irony” —on everything, in fact, except the purpose of the book.

Lewis’s other books have been handled by the critics in much the same fashion — but on page 8 or 9 of the book reviews, rather than on page 1. The typical reviewer states, with the peculiar tone of embarrassment which the mention of religion produces in reviewers, that such-and-such a book by C. S. Lewis is about Christianity, and that of course many readers will differ with his beliefs, or feel disinclined to go all the way with him. But, the critic goes on to say, the book has much to recommend it: an urbane style, a happy knack of choosing the right analogy, a delightful sense of fantasy — and so on for three paragraphs of critical analysis.

It is easy to feel condescending toward Lewis. He happens to be a not untypical Oxford don, a fellow of Magdalen College, and he lectures on medieval English literature. The only picture of him ever reproduced in American magazines shows a man in his late forties, with a receding hair line and scholarly circles under his eyes.

The myth makers, ever eager to provide humaninterest material, have invented further details to complete the picture of the harmless and mildly eccentric Oxford scholar. A particularly persistent legend has it that Lewis is so shy in the presence of women that he frequently locks himself in his room when they appear at the college. “ The pleasant story about my locking myself in my room when a woman invades the college precincts is — I regret to say - pure bosh,” Lewis wrote me when I called the tradition to his attention. “For one thing women are wandering through ‘the college precincts’ the whole blessed day. For another, having taken female pupils of all ages, shapes, sizes, and complexions for about 20 years, I am a bit tougher than the story makes out. If I ever have fled from a female visitor it was not because she was a woman but because she was a bore, or because she was the fifteenth visitor on a busy day.”

The flesh-and-blood Lewis, famous for his lectures on Chaucer and fond of gardening, amuses himself tramping about the countryside with three or four old friends, putting up at small pubs, and enjoying the pleasure of a pipe while talking “nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics” until an advanced hour.

Students of heredity would find him an interesting case study. His maternal grandmother came of a line that goes back to the first Norman invaders; from her side of the family one might derive the aristocratic grace of his style and the unfailing courtesy with which he presents his ideas. His paternal grandfather was pure Welsh, the son of a small farmer. Here might lie the explanation of his evangelical streak and the courage that he showed during World War II when he did what few chaplains would dare attempt — delivered lectures on elementary theology at RAF bases in England.

Now that Lewis’s Number Nine and Number Ten are on the bookstands, the general campaign is becoming clear, and it seems a good time to see what the man is up to.

2

LEWIS writes as a layman to laymen. He avoids the pulpit phrases that forewarn the reader of most books on Christianity. He expresses himself with true Oxford urbanity. He has a sense of humor. (Since the death of G. K. Chesterton it has been generally assumed that no Christian apologist ever laughs.) Finally, he has not confined himself to the straightforward, frontal attack. He has more than one weapon in his armory.

His books fall into three or four rather sharply differentiated groups. The Screwtape Letters, of course, stand by themselves. They are the correspondence of His Infernal Excellency Screwtape to his young demon assistant Wormwood on the Earth. Wormwood’s mission is to undermine the faith of a recent convert to Christianity. (Lewis turned from Christianity in his teens, and was reconverted in his late twenties and early thirties.) Screwtape bestows a great wealth of shrewd advice on the inexperienced tempter.

The book seems calculated to accomplish two things. First of all, Lewis uses the wisdom of Hell to discredit philosophic materialism. Screwtape’s knowing advice in the very first letter takes for granted that modern thought is based not on reason but emotion. “Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head,” he writes. “He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical,’ ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary,’ ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless.’ Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.”

The other purpose of The Screwtape Letters is to encourage the wavering Christian by showing him that his uncertainties are nothing unique, and in all likelihood are planted in his mind by agents of Our Father Below.

Three of Lewis’s books — hardly thicker than tracts — are based on the series of talks he has given over the BBC during the last few years. All three are straightforward arguments for Christianity or elucidations of Christian teachings.

The first of these little books, The Case for Christianity, begins by demonstrating the existence of a universal sense of Right and Wrong. Instead of proceeding from one abstract proposition to another, Lewis brings out his point by showing human nature in action. “Every one has heard people quarrelling,” he says in his opening sentence, and then quotes the typical remarks people make: ‘“That’s my seat, I was there first’ — ‘Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’ — ‘Why should you shove in first?”’ Each participant in the quarrel is appealing to some standard of conduct. In anticipation of the inevitable rejoinder that Right and Wrong don’t exist or are purely subjective, Lewis shows with keen psychological insight how the very person who advances such an objection is certain, once he lets down his guard, to talk or act as if Right and Wrong were realities.

Having thus established the idea that Right and Wrong do exist, independently of our digestion and environment, and that there must be some Ultimate behind it all, Lewis devotes the second half of the book to “What Christians Believe”: a treatise of 26 pages in which he summarizes and defends the basic concepts of Christianity without any attempt to simplify them for popular consumption.

In the next book of the broadcast series, Christian Behaviour, Lewis assumes the truth of the Christian faith, and plunges without further ado into a statement of its ethical principles. “Morality . . . seems to be concerned with three things,” he states in the first chapter. “Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonizing the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for. . . .” Having thus broken with the popular concept of morality, which restricts the term to type one (the “social” and “anti-social” school of thought), he is ready to elaborate his theme, which he does with a directness almost unique among modern books on Christian ethics.

He makes no attempt to “reinterpret” Christian morality to make it palatable, nor does he try to translate the traditional nomenclature into the language of psychology. He boldly employs words like chastity and sin, which today can scarcely be used in undergraduate circles or among the sophisticated without provoking ridicule. And he tells the emancipated citizens of the twentieth century: “There is no getting away from it: the old Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’” In the chapter on marriage he comes out uncompromisingly for the rule of no divorce as far as Christians are concerned, and — with even greater daring — says that wives should obey their husbands.

The most theological of the three volumes, and at the same time the one most devotional in tone, is Beyond Personality. The concept of the Trinity is explained by familiar analogies. “In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.”

All three Persons of the Trinity are seen in action as an ordinary Christian kneels down to say his prayers. “He is trying to get into 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.” The last half of the book is devoted to showing that Christianity does not aim merely at developing “nice people”: the goal is “new men” — new because a different and higher kind of life has been brought into being in them by their utter surrender to Christ.

Still more theological is a treatise of some 145 pages, The Problem of Pain. Of all Lewis’s books, it has received the most attention from professional theologians. It deals mainly with Original Sin, Heaven, and Hell. Like his radio talks, it is marked by a stubborn refusal to sweeten Christianity by playing down its less alluring doctrines.

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SO FAR I have spoken of Lewis’s use of satire and outright exposition to win converts. We come now to another group of books, in which the approach is much more subtle and indirect. The interplanetary novels (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) seem at first glance mere “scientifiction&38221;; the religious implications come out bit by bit as the reader follows the adventures of the hero, Ransom, who is also the unifying link in the trilogy.

In Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom — a Cambridge philologist who bears a suspicious resemblance to Lewis - is kidnaped by Devine, a gold prospector, and Weston, a half-mad scientist who wants to extend humanity and its misory to the utmost bounds of the universe. His captors load him into their space-ship and take him to Mars, meaning to turn him over to the creatures there as a human sacrifice, in order to win their good will and coöperation.

The two adventurers have completely misjudged the Martians, however. When Ransom escapes from his companions and comes to know the inhabitants of the planet at first hand, he finds that their way of life is so peaceful that the adjective “bent " is their nearest equivalent for “evil.” There are three species of rational beings, all living in great harmony together, under the benign stewardship of Oyarsa, a sort of archangel who is visible to earthly eyes only as a faint column of light. Less important spiritual beings called eldila swarm about, and take a benevolent interest in the life of the Martians. Everyone worships Maleldil, who is none other than the Christian God, and one of the first acts of the Martians is to instruct Ransom in the rudiments of true religion.

Oyarsa, perceiving the evil designs of Devine and Weston, orders them to return to the Earth, and Ransom decides to accompany them. At home once more, Ransom’s adventures are not over. In Perelandra, he is summoned to Venus by the eldila, who provide him with supernatural means of transportation. Having arrived on the planet, he finds that his mission is to thwart the Devil, who, in the person of Weston, is trying to lure the Eve of the new paradise into disobeying Maleldil. Ransom sets to work to prevent a duplication of the Fall of the terrestrial Adam and Eve.

The greater part of the book is devoted to the struggle of the two earth-men, as they match words and wits amid the sensuous beauty of the landscape. Ransom finally wins, but only after he turns from words and uses his fists in mortal combat. The new paradise will not share the sad history of the earthly paradise.

As Ransom prepares to return to the Earth, he has a long conversation with the Adam of Venus, and learns that exciting events may be expected on the Earth in a few years. For countless centuries the Earth has been in the grip of the Devil and his assistants, but there are signs that the final struggle is approaching; the Earth may be delivered from evil, and contact re-established between it and the uncorrupted planets.

Armageddon comes in That Hideous Strength. The Devil, with his shrewd understanding of popular psychology, has led his earthly allies to organize the N.I.C.E. (the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), which then tries to gain control of England under the pretext of carrying forward the banner of science and progress. Assorted spirits of darkness, called macrobes (not microbes) speak through the guillotined head of a murderer and direct the operations of the N.I.C.E. The forces of light are led by Ransom, who maintains contact with the eldila. The outcome of the struggle is finally decided by Merlin, who comes back to activity after fifteen hundred years of suspended animation and puts his magic arts at Ransom’s disposal. The schemes of Satan are brought to nought amid the roaring of wild beasts, the crash of earthquakes, and other apocalyptic events.

In other books where Lewis has used the indirect approach, he has revived older literary forms. His first religious book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, is an allegory. Its style is comparatively heavy, and its humor lacks the grace and sparkle of the later writings, but it ranks high as a spiritual autobiography. John of Puritan in goes through the various stages of skepticism, dabbles in all the current literary and artistic movements, and at last recognizes that the vision of the ideal which haunts him can become an attained reality only in Christianity.

An even more striking use of an ancient literary form is provided by The Great Divorce - a dreamvision. Lewis is at his best in the style of the book: a flowing simplicity and inevitability of phrasing, perfectly matching the depths of feeling. Take, for example, the beginning of the Preface, which also expresses the theme of the vision: —

Blake wrote the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant. But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable “either-or”; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error. You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind.

A busload of ghosts from Hell arrive at the borders of Heaven, and they are given the opportunity to remain permanently. Most of them decline the offer, because they are unwilling to make a clear-cut break with their pet sins. The greater number are afflicted with some form of pride or self-centeredness which is more precious to them than all the joys of Heaven. There is the modernist bishop, who reverently bows when he mentions the name of Jesus, but who spent his life on Earth (and is still spending his life in Hell) watering down Jesus to the level of a pitiful human failure; he would rather live in Hell than lose the proud illusion of being an original and courageous thinker. An artist who can think only of artistic movements and his reputation decides on the return trip, as does a woman who insists on dominating her son even after death.

The only ghost with the courage to surrender his vice and stay in Heaven is a man guilty of lust — a quiet confirmation of the traditional Christian hierarchy of sins, which considers the sins of the flesh as less deadly than the sin of pride. The book displays as keen an understanding of human foibles as did The Screwtape Letters, and is probably Lewis’s most mature, as well as his most beautiful, work.

4

DR. Bernard Iddings Bell, in an article entitled “What About Church Unity?” in the January Atlantic, divided modern Christians into two classes: the believers in historic Christianity, and the neoChristians. The latter characteristically regard Christ as a great moral leader and a good man but nothing more; and their view of human nature usually excludes the concept of Original Sin.

Lewis belongs very decidedly to the first class. In The Case for Christianity he writes: —

. . . atheism is too simple. And I’ll tell you another view that is also too simple. It’s the view I call Christianity-and-water, the view that just says there’s a good God in Heaven and everything is all right — leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption. Both these are boys’ philosophies.

Elsewhere in the same book be says, speaking of the divinity of Jesus: —

I’m trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really silly 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’s the one thing we mustn’t say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn’t be a great moral teacher. He’d either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he’s a poached egg — or else he’d 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.

The doctrine of Original Sin occupies a prominent position in Lewis’s theology. Man, he admits, retains memories of original innocence, but his tendency is naturally toward evil. In The Pilgrim’s Regress the fact of Original Sin is symbolized by a vast canyon called Peccatum Adae — a canyon so steep and wide that the pilgrim can reach the other side only by the supernatural aid of Mother Kirk. The Problem of Pain leans toward an almost fundamentalist literalness in its interpretation of the story of the Fall: —

We do not know how many of these creatures [men] God made, nor how long they continued in the Paradisal state. But sooner or later they fell. Someone or something whispered that they could become as gods — that they could cease directing their lives to their Creator. . . . They wanted, as we say, to “call their souls their own”. . . . We have no idea in what particular act, or series of acts, the self-contradictory, impossible wish found expression. For all I can see, it might have concerned the literal eating of a fruit, but the question is of no consequence.

Lewis believes in a real Fall, and he also believes in a real Heaven and Hell. Hell, in particular, seems to have caused him philosophic (or perhaps emotional) difficulties. His books reveal a certain wavering in the way he looks at it. “There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay within my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of Our Lord’s own words,” he says in The Problem of Pain. The angel guide in The Pilgrim’s Regress pictures Hell as God’s last mercy to lost souls which will accept no other favor: a means of halting what would otherwise be the endless propagation of evil — “a tourniquet on the wound through which the lost soul else would bleed to a death she never reached.”

The Problem of Pain grapples directly, if reluctantly, with the idea of retribution. Lewis depicts a man who has led a completely self-centered, but also completely successful, life, and asks: “Can you really desire that such a man, remaining what he is (and he must be able to do that if he has free will) should be confirmed forever in his present happiness — should continue, for all eternity, to be perfectly convinced that the laugh is on his side?” Lewis then goes on to say that he has described the theory of retribution first because it is the most repellent form of the doctrine of Hell, but that any Christian is at liberty to regard Hell not as a sentence imposed on an evil man but as “the mere fact of being what he is . . . to live wholly in the self and to make the best of what he finds there. And what he finds there is Hell.” It is this latter view which is developed with remarkable poignancy in The Great Divorce.

Hell is more than a swearword to Lewis, and so is the Devil. The Screwtape Letters imaginatively depict the hierarchy of Hell, with its lord the Devil and its vast bureaucracy of demons, some of whom are sent to the Earth to tempt individual persons or launch intellectual and emotional trends favorable to the purposes of Hell. The Case for Christianity describes the Earth as “enemy-occupied territory,” and Lewis adds: —

I know someone will ask me, “Do you really mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the devil — hoofs and horns and all ?” Well, what the time of day has to do with it I don’t know. And I’m not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer is, “Yes, I do.”

It is clear, then, that Lewis, no matter how novel his methods of presentation, has set out to win over the public to a highly orthodox brand of Christianity. His ten books might be looked upon as a serialized commentary on the Apostles Creed.

5

So FAR I have spoken of the strictly theological side of Lewis’s writings. But there is another aspect that is worth looking at, for it suggests the way he applies Christianity to the understanding of the universe.

Lewis is fond of talking about “intellectual climates.” His hero, Ransom, as he travels in the space-ship to Mars, muses on how his thinking has been dominated by “the mythology that follows in the wake of science”: —

He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now — now that the very name “ Space ” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it “dead”; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment . . . he saw now that it was the womb of the worlds . . . No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens . . .

When Ransom arrives on Mars he expects to find super-intelligent and unspeakably fiendish monsters of the sort depicted in most interplanetary fiction, but instead he is received into a world of brotherly love, all the members of which worship the one God.

When Ransom goes to Venus he sees many sights that suggest scenes from classical mythology, and he learns that the strange mixture of beauty and grossness found in all mythologies has an explanation: the whole universe is a vast whispering gallery, and in a distorted way the creators of legends know what exists on other planets.

While the heroine of That Hideous Strength is busy preparing a room for the use of her maid and the maid’s husband (who has just been released from prison) the house is invaded by a troop of merry gnome-like little men wearing red caps and tassels, and a sort of goddess of the marriage bed comes in bearing a torch which makes flowers grow from whatever the flame touches.

The universe of C. S. Lewis is one in which the border line between the natural and the supernatural or legendary is so shadowy as to have little meaning. Truth floats about in the air, so to speak, and various fragments of it are picked up in the form of fables and old wives’ tales.

It is not, however, a universe in which one can sit down comfortably and assume that everything will be all right. Nothing as we know it is permanent; some day Maleldil will return to the Earth, and the Earth and its inhabitants will be transformed in a way we cannot foresee. And meanwhile, anyone may be summoned by the eldila at any time to fight the forces of darkness on distant planets.

If one of Lewis’s. Martians paid the Earth a return visit he would no doubt be puzzled by the contradictory intellectual currents he would observe in Europe and America. He would find, in America at least, that the gospel of Optimism, Gradual Progress, and Science-will-lead-the-way-to-Utopia is still in the ascendancy, despite two world wars and the A-bomb. He would notice, however, that the more advanced thinkers are beginning to have their doubts about inevitable progress. Some believe that a few strong shoves are needed to bring in the scientific Utopia — those are the collectivists and statists of various kinds. Still other thinkers wonder whether the problem may not lie inside each person. Much vague talk of the need for a religion is in the air.

The importance of Lewis lies in this: he is one of the few Christian apologists who can both write simply and at the same time avoid infuriating the more sophisticated readers by a pulpit vocabulary or the Sunday school flavor of piety. His most popular rival is perhaps Dorothy Sayers, who turned aside from detective stories long enough to write her outstanding interpretation of the Trinity, The Mind of the Maker, and who more recently has exerted a considerable influence in England through her cycle of radio dramas, The Man Born to Be King. Lewis bridges the gap between the low-brows and the highbrows. And he is a multiple-threat apologist: if he can’t lead you to the baptismal font by outright argument, he’ll use satire and irony; and if that doesn’t work, he’ll write fables and allegories to catch you off guard.

The uncompromising and dogmatic Christianity that Lewis offers to the public has considerably more appeal than it would have had a few decades ago. It is interesting that Lewis’s reputation has spread largely by word of mouth. One reader “discovers” him, and passes along the tidings to his friends. Disillusionment with the sweet reasonableness of secularism leads men to crave, not the sweet reasonableness of modernist Christianity, but the rockbound certainties of Lewis’s highly traditional faith. And Lewis’s morose suspicions of the worship of science seem less blasphemous today, since scientism is so intimately tied in with the religion of Progress that the two rise and fall together.

If Christianity revives in England and America, the odds are that it may bear strong traces of the Gospel according to C. S. Lewis.