C. S. Lewis – A Life

by Alister McGrath

  Lewis here criticises those who argue that all statements of value (such as “this waterfall is pretty”)509 are merely subjective statements about the speaker’s feelings, rather than objective statements concerning their object. Lewis argues that certain objects and actions merit positive or negative reactions—in other words, that a waterfall can be objectively pretty, just as someone’s actions can be objectively good or evil. He argues there is a set of objective values (which he terms “the Tao”)510 that are common to all cultures, with only minor variations. Although The Abolition of Man is now considered a difficult book, its arguments remain highly significant.511

  In 1944, Lewis was invited to deliver the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge. In inviting him on behalf of the college council, George Macaulay Trevelyan, the master of Trinity College, expressed particular appreciation of Lewis’s earlier works—especially The Allegory of Love.512 These prestigious lectures, which Lewis delivered in May 1944, would become the basis of his classic volume in the Oxford History of English Literature series—which Lewis playfully abbreviated to his friends as “O HEL”—on English literature in the sixteenth century (excluding drama).

  Finally, we must note The Great Divorce, a highly imaginative book which Lewis composed in 1944. Tolkien described this book as “a new moral allegory or ‘vision’ based on the medieval fancy of the Refrigerium, by which the lost souls have an occasional holiday in Paradise.”513 Lewis has been much criticised by Catholic theologians for his obviously faulty analysis of medieval theology at this point.514 Indeed, The Great Divorce is clearly best regarded as a “supposal”: if the inhabitants of hell were to visit heaven, what would happen?

  Lewis initially titled this work Who Goes Home? but was happily persuaded to alter the title. The work is chiefly remarkable on account of its use of an innovative imaginative framework, similar in some ways to The Screwtape Letters, to explore a series of very traditional questions—such as the limits of human free will and the problem of pride.

  Perhaps the most important feature of this work, however, is Lewis’s demonstration—by art of narrative rather than by force of argument—that people easily become trapped in a way of thinking from which they cannot break free. Those in hell, on exploring heaven, turn out to be so comfortable with their distorted view of reality that they choose not to embrace truth on encountering it. Lewis deploys familiar cultural stereotypes of his day—such as the career artist who is obsessed with the avant-garde, or the theologically liberal bishop infatuated with his intellectual fame—to challenge the lazy and unevidenced Enlightenment assumption that humans recognise and accept truth when they see it. Human nature, Lewis suggests, is rather more complex than this trite, superficial rationalism allows.

  Although Lewis’s writings of the wartime period tend to employ evidence-based reasoning, which defends or explores fundamental Christian ideas, we also find a highly significant theme beginning to emerge—the capacity of imaginative narrative to embody and communicate truth. This idea is integral to understanding Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. To comprehend the importance of this point, let us consider a series of three works to appear during the period of 1938–1945, generally known as the Space Trilogy, but which are more accurately designated the Ransom Trilogy.

  The Shift to Fiction: The Ransom Trilogy

  Mere Christianity represents a highly important strand of the approach to apologetics that Lewis developed during the Second World War. In effect, Lewis argues that the “map” of reality offered by the Christian faith corresponds well to what is actually observed and experienced. Books of this type—including The Problem of Pain and the later Miracles (1947)—make a fundamental appeal to reason. Although Lewis is far too canny a thinker to believe that he can “prove” the existence of God—like Dante, he knows that reason has “short wings”—he nevertheless holds that the fundamental reasonableness of the Christian faith can be shown by argument and reflection.

  Yet Lewis appears to have realised that argument was only one of a number of ways of engaging cultural anxieties about the Christian faith, or challenging its alternatives. From about 1937, Lewis seems to have appreciated that the imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul. Having initially merely enjoyed reading works of fantasy—such as the novels of George MacDonald—Lewis began to realise how fiction might allow the intellectual and imaginative appeal of worldviews to be explored. Might he try his hand at writing such works himself?

  As a child, Lewis read voraciously and widely, pillaging the amply stocked bookshelves of Little Lea to pass away the time. And so he came across writers such as Jules Verne (1828–1905) and H. G. Wells (1866–1946), whose novels spoke of travel in space and time, and explored how science was changing our understanding of the world. “The idea of other planets exercised upon me then a peculiar, heady attraction, which was quite different from any other of my literary interests.”515

  Such childhood memories were given a new sense of urgency and direction around 1935, when Lewis read David Lindsay’s novel A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). Although Lindsay’s book is poorly written, its imaginative appeal more than adequately compensates for its stylistic deficiencies. Lewis began to realise that the best forms of science fiction can be thought of as “simply an imaginative impulse as old as the human race working under the special conditions of our own time.”516 If they are done well—and Lewis is quite clear that this is often not the case—then they expand our mental and imaginative horizons. “They give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.”517 For Lewis, writing the right kind of science fiction was thus a soul-expanding business, something that could potentially be compared to the best poetry of the past.

  So why did Lewis get so excited about this narrative form? To understand his concerns, and appreciate the solution that he found, we need to understand more about the British cultural world of the late 1920s and early 1930s—above all, the rise of what we might now call “scientism” as a worldview. At this time, this view was advocated openly in the writings of J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), a disillusioned Marxist who transferred his crusading temperament and enthusiasm to advocating the merits of science as a cure for all of humanity’s ills. Lewis was no critic of science; he was, however, worried about exaggerated accounts of its benefits and naive ideas concerning its application. Lewis was anxious that the triumphs of science might have run ahead of necessary ethical developments that could provide the knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue that science needed.

  Yet Lewis was perhaps more concerned about the implicit advocation of such views in the science fiction novels of H. G. Wells, which used fictional narratives to argue that science is both prophet and saviour of humanity, telling us what is true and saving us from the human predicament. For Wells, science is a secularised religion. Such ideas remain deeply embedded in Western culture, although they are now associated with other voices. But Lewis encountered them through Wells. And if Wells used science fiction to advocate such views, why not use science fiction to argue against him? Lewis regarded “interplanetary ideas” as a new and exciting mythology, but was concerned that it was becoming dominated by a “desperately immoral outlook.” Could the genre be redeemed? Might it become a vehicle for a profoundly moral view of the universe? Might it even become the medium for a theistic apologetic?

  In December 1938, Lewis expressed his growing realisation that the forms of science fiction hitherto used to promote various forms of atheism and materialism could equally well be used to critique these viewpoints and advocate an alternative.518 Why not use the same medium to advocate a quite different “mythology”? (Lewis here means by mythology something like a “metanarrative” or “worldview.”) We see this technique put into action in Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945). The quality of these is somewhat uneven, with the third being particularly difficult in places. Yet the main thing to appreciat
e is not so much their plots and points, but the medium through which these are expressed—stories, which captivate the imagination and open the mind to an alternative way of thinking.

  It is impossible to summarise the rich imaginative gambits and intellectual finesse that are so characteristic of this trilogy. What really needs to be appreciated is that a story is being told which subverts the more contestable themes of the “scientism” of Lewis’s day. To illustrate this, we shall consider one of the themes that Lewis explicitly engages—the form of social Darwinism advocated by Haldane in his essay “Eugenics and Social Reform.”519 Like many progressives in the 1920s and 1930s, Haldane advocated the optimization of the human gene pool by preventing certain types of people from breeding. This socially illiberal attitude was seen as being rigorously grounded in the best science, with the best possible motivation—to ensure the survival of the human race. But at what cost, Lewis wondered?

  Bertrand Russell followed Haldane in his Marriage and Morals (1929), advocating the compulsory sterilization of the mentally deficient. Russell advocated that the state should be empowered to forcibly sterilise all those regarded as “mentally deficient” by appropriate experts, and that this measure should be introduced despite the drawbacks to which it might be liable. He suggested that reducing the number of “idiots, imbeciles and feeble-minded” people would be of sufficient benefit to society to outweigh any dangers of its misuse.

  These views are rarely encountered today, partly because they have become tainted by their subsequent association with Nazi eugenic theories, and partly because they are seen as incompatible with liberal democratic ideals. Yet they were widely held among the British and American intellectual elites in the period between the two world wars. Three World Eugenics Conferences (London 1912, New York 1921, New York 1932) argued for “birth selection” (as opposed to “birth control”), and for the genetic elimination of those who were deemed unfit.520

  Lewis felt that these views had to be challenged. One element of Lewis’s response was That Hideous Strength. Though Lewis was often conservative in his views, this work shows him to have been a prophetic voice, offering a radical challenge to the accepted social wisdom of his own generation.

  In That Hideous Strength, Lewis introduces us to the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE), a hypermodern institution dedicated to the improvement of the human condition through scientific advance—for example, through forced sterilization of the unfit, the liquidation of backward races, and research by means of vivisection. Lewis has little difficulty in exposing the moral bankruptcy of this institute, and the deeply dysfunctional vision of the future of humanity it embodies. The conclusion of the work includes a dramatic scene in which all the caged animals intended for vivisection are set free.

  As readers of the chapter on “Animal Pain” in The Problem of Pain will appreciate, Lewis—unlike Haldane—was an opponent of vivisection. George R. Farnum, President of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, noted the importance of Lewis’s comments, and invited him to write an essay on this theme. Lewis’s essay “Vivisection” (1947) remains one of the most intellectually significant critiques of vivisection, and has not received the attention it deserves.521 It makes clear that Lewis’s outspoken opposition to vivisection was not grounded on sentimentality, but upon a rigorous theological foundation. If we are brutal towards animals, we are just as likely to be brutal to our fellow humans—especially those we regard as inferior to us:

  The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements. In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level.522

  Lewis’s views on this matter lost him many friends at Oxford and elsewhere, as vivisection was then widely regarded as morally justified by its outcomes. Animal pain was the price paid for human progress. However, for Lewis there was a deep theological question here, which naturalism ignored. We “ought to prove ourselves better than the beasts precisely by the fact of acknowledging duties to them which they do not acknowledge to us.”523 As we shall see, such attitudes towards animals find their classic expression in the Chronicles of Narnia.

  There is far more to the Ransom Trilogy than this brief account can hope to convey—especially its lyrical description of strange worlds, its development of imaginatively engaging scenarios, and its exploration of theologically fertile themes, such as the fate of the beautiful, newly created, and unfallen world of Perelandra. Yet in the end, it is the medium as much as the substance that really matters. Lewis demonstrates that stories can be told which subvert some established truths of the day, and expose them as shadows and smoke. The grand retreat of the British cultural elite from eugenics after the Second World War indicates that ideas and values that were once fashionable can be abandoned within a generation. The extent to which Lewis himself undermined them remains to be clarified. But the potential of his approach was clear.

  The period of 1938–1945 saw Lewis emerge from the cloistered obscurity of academia to become a major religious, cultural, and literary figure. Without ceasing to publish works of academic merit, such as his Preface to “Paradise Lost,” he had established himself as a public intellectual who commanded the media, and was on the road to international celebrity. What could go wrong?

  Sadly, the answer soon became clear. Rather a lot could go wrong. And it did.

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  1945–1954

  A Prophet without Honour?: Postwar Tensions and Problems

  By 1945, Lewis was famous. In the British academic world, a scholar’s status is calibrated by several measures, including the number and perceived significance of publications. The ultimate mark of distinction for any scholar in the humanities is to be elected a fellow of the British Academy. Lewis achieved this honour in July 1955. Yet in the eyes of his biographers, this important mark of academic acknowledgement has been totally overshadowed by the recognition of a very different audience.

  C. S. Lewis—Superstar

  On 8 September 1947, Lewis appeared on the front cover of Time magazine, which declared this “best-selling author,” who was also “the most popular lecturer in [Oxford] University,” to be “one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.” Screwtape had taken England and America by storm. (America, it must be recalled, had not heard Lewis’s broadcast talks on the BBC.) The opening paragraph helps capture the tone of the piece: a quirky and slightly weird Oxford academic—“a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice”—unexpectedly hits the big time.524 Were there more bestsellers on the way? Time cautioned its excited readers that they would just have to wait: “He has no immediate plans for further ‘popular’ books, fantastic or theological.”

  The Time article of 1947 can be seen as a tipping point—both signaling Lewis’s arrival on the broader cultural scene, and extending his reach by drawing wider attention to his works. Yet Lewis was ill equipped, organisationally and temperamentally, to deal with his rise to fame that began in 1942. His high profile led to both adulation and invective being poured on him, and his private life—which Lewis had hitherto protected—began to come into the public domain. He became the subject of discussion in British newspapers, which often portrayed him in unrecognisable terms. Tolkien was particularly amused by one media reference to an “Ascetic Mr. Lewis.” This bore no relation to the Lewis he knew. That very morning, Tolkien had told his son that Lewis had “put away three pints in a very short session.” Tolkien had cut down on his own drinking, as it was Lent—a time of self-denial for many Christians. But not, Tolkien grumbled, for Lewis.525

  Lewis was now inundated with letters from devotees and critics, demanding his immediate and full answers to questions great, trivial, and downright improper. Like a gallant knight of old, Warnie came
to his brother’s rescue. From 1943, he typed replies to his brother’s burgeoning correspondence with two fingers on his battered Royal typewriter, often without consulting Lewis about their content. Warnie later estimated that he typed twelve thousand such letters. Warnie also devised an imaginative technique for getting rid of the increasing number of self-important people who demanded to speak to Lewis at home personally by telephone.526 As Tolkien recalled, Warnie’s method was to “lift the receiver and say ‘Oxford Sewage Disposal Unit,’ and go on repeating it until they went away.”527 Yet Lewis’s growing fame in the United States had one unexpected consequence of which Warnie thoroughly approved: food parcels, packed with long-forgotten luxuries, now arrived regularly from Lewis’s growing army of wealthy American well-wishers.

  The evidence suggests that Lewis’s writings resonated at this time with many American Christians, both ordained and lay, reflecting a changed national cultural mood. Preoccupation with the economic woes of the 1920s and 1930s was passing; however, after America entered the Second World War in December 1941, a new interest in the deeper questions of life arose. God was being talked about again. Religious publishing began to experience a revival. And in the midst of this new openness towards religious questions, a new voice appeared—one that was perceived to be authoritative and interesting, and above all concerned with the religious questions of ordinary people.

  The strongly apologetic tone of Lewis’s works was welcomed by those ministering to people wrestling with the big questions raised by the war—such as college and university chaplains. Although Lewis was generally not well regarded by academic theologians in America, the evidence suggests that they nevertheless broadly welcomed the new quality of engagement that he brought to religious issues. Lewis offered provisional answers that could be further developed in the seminaries and universities.