C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  All these great landmarks in Lewis’s emotional development were now sixteen years in the past, and there had intervened the strange, and for Lewis unlooked-for, period of his public popularity as a Christian apologist. The confrontation with Elizabeth Anscombe was to have no effect whatsoever on Lewis’s popularity with the Christian public; but it had a profound effect on his career as a writer. It was the greatest single factor which drove him into the form of literature for which he is today most popular: children’s stories.

  It happened in this way. In 1947, he published a book called Miracles, which is his most carefully thought and judiciously written theological work. It is a book which implores to be taken seriously, much more than, say, Mere Christianity. It is not, like that earlier book, a casual collection of broadcast talks. It is an attempt to return to the matter which had interested him ever since, as an undergraduate at Univ, he had considered doing a further degree and writing a thesis on Bertrand Russell. In the simplest possible terms, the question for Lewis was whether this universe, discernible by sense perceptions, is all that there is, or whether there is another world, another universe, a supernatural order into which our universe fits or is concealed; another universe which, if we could but tune into it, would make sense of our own. Lewis felt it was essential to choose between whether you believed that there was a Total System – that everything we do, think or experience must be explicable in terms of the physical universe we inhabit – or that there was an argument, as philosophers from Plato to Hegel had been interested to explore, which suggested that in many of our judgements we step outside this closed system of thought and value and bring to bear upon it values which actually come from Somewhere Else.

  Before attempting to prove that the miraculous is a perfectly possible thing to happen, and that the greatest miracle of all – the Incarnation – did happen, Lewis meditated in Chapter Three of Miracles on this more fundamental question – Is thought itself a supernatural act? ‘Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true. It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight.’ By ‘real insight’ Lewis appears to mean one which can be justified or explained outside itself. But he is never quite content in his argumentative writings to be a philosopher; the police-court solicitor will out. By the end of a very short chapter, Lewis has reached the conclusion that only Supernaturalists have any claim to know – or indeed be interested in – the truth. ‘Unless the Naturalists* put forward Naturalism as a true theory we have of course no dispute with them. You can argue with a man who says, “Rice is unwholesome,” but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, “Rice is unwholesome but I’m not saying this is true.”’ In other words, those whom he calls Naturalists have no universe of value or truth outside themselves. If this world is all there is, and we are just a collection of atoms, without souls, how can we trust our ‘minds’ to tell us anything hard, substantial, true?

  Any dispassionate reader can at once see many flaws in Lewis’s arguments here. For a start, if his distinction between Naturalists and Supernaturalists held good it would have to be demonstrable that the Supernaturalists had some specific means of acquiring their superior knowledge and of explaining it to the Naturalists. Much more seriously, there is no need whatsoever to posit a dualistic theory such as Lewis’s in order to ‘prove’ the existence of God. Theism was not a matter to which Ludwig Wittgenstein was prepared to devote thought. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereon one must be silent.’ Nearly all the philosophers of his generation took as their starting-point the opening sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: ‘The world is everything that is the case.’ Like all Wittgenstein’s gnomic sayings, this is open to many interpretations and much reflection, but it must include the sense that for rational conversations to take place there must be an agreed set of terms, acceptable to both speakers. But Lewis failed to see this in Chapter Three of Miracles, and the arguments he proceeds to construct about the existence of God actually depend on a non-Christian, dualistic concept of the world in which Spirit and Matter are separate, and religious truth – this is the ultimate conclusion of such gnostic argument – only available to initiates.

  Elizabeth Anscombe read Miracles when it came out, and chose to reply to Lewis’s argument in Chapter Three when she was invited to read a paper at the Socratic Club in early 1948. The resulting debate instantaneously became legend. Anscombe was a match for Lewis not only in mind but also in personality. She shared his taste for fisticuffs, for brutality as well as finesse in argument. She is, as countless stories about her attest, deeply exhibitionistic. Like Lewis, she is a massive physical type. She was quite equal to the bullying and the exploitation of the audience to which Lewis resorted when he was boxed into a corner. She could employ analogous techniques herself. That evening at the Socratic Club was the first in the Society’s history that Lewis was thoroughly trounced in argument. Because Anscombe was herself a Christian (a Catholic convert), the pious audience could not have the satisfaction of feeling that Lewis was a defender of the faith against the infidel. He was merely shown up as a man who had not come to terms with the way that philosophers since Wittgenstein thought.

  As a result of his encounter at the Socratic Club, Lewis wrote a completely new Chapter Three to Miracles for subsequent editions, dropping a considerable part of his argument, building a new case, and changing the name of the chapter from ‘The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist’ to ‘The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism’. In his willingness not just to revise his thinking but to recast it in writing he demonstrated a virtue rare among academics. But there is evidence – discounted by Anscombe herself – that if he found the debate intellectually stimulating he also found it emotionally depleting. He told George Sayer that ‘his argument for the existence of God had been demolished’.7 A few days after the debate, dining with a group of male cronies, he was in a state of near-despair. Dyson said, ‘Very well – now [he had] lost everything and come to the foot of the Cross.’

  Seen from a purely academic perspective this hyperbole makes no sense. All that had happened, humiliating as it had been at the time, was that Lewis had been shown to have no competence to debate with a professional philosopher on her own terms. An exactly analogous situation would have arisen if a member of the English Faculty had challenged him to conduct a debate about James Joyce, of whom he knew next to nothing. Indeed, very similar evidences of Lewis’s breezy refusal to follow what was going on outside his own imaginative world and his own range of old-fashioned reading tastes were apparent even at the Kilns dinner table. (‘Last night at dinner I mentioned Tito’s volte face in Yugoslavia where there is a state fostered return to Christianity. I thought J very stupid about the whole affair and we had talked for a minute or two before I found out that he was under the impression that Tito was the King of Greece.’)8

  What had happened at the Socratic Club was no mere intellectual brawl, however. It awakened all sorts of deeply seated fears in Lewis, not least his fear of women. Once the bullying hero of the hour had been cut down to size, he became a child, a little boy who was being degraded and shaken by a figure who, in his imagination, took on witch-like dimensions. He felt that he was arguing so coherently for the existence of that Other World because he had been there himself. And now here was a grown-up who was not convinced by his explanations of those inner adventures beyond the discernible surface of things. It was all a little like what had happened to his mother when, as a child in Rome, she had believed she saw a statue moving, and none of the grown-ups had credited her tale. Ever since his mother had died, Lewis had been in search of her, and the journey which had begun when he first read George MacDonald’s Pbantastes, and which had continued through his discovery of great Christian literature and wise Christian friends, now chillingly felt as if perhaps it had been a game of make-believe. Unless, unless … Unless, that is, Tolkien and Dyson had been right during their great conversation in Addison’
s Walk in 1931; unless make-believe was really another way of talking about the reality of things; unless the brutal and cerebral way in which grown-ups tried to come to conclusions about the world was not the only way; unless he could explore the way of Pbantastes – in which another world opens up to the Dreamer through a piece of bedroom furniture. The seeds of the first Narnia story were dawning in his mind. Lewis never attempted to write another work of Christian apologetics after Miracles. Even though this book, and the argumentative works which precede it – The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity – remain so vastly popular in the Christian world, and continue to sell in Christian bookshops, he came to feel that their method and manner were spurious. There must be another way ‘further up and further in’.

  Meanwhile, the routines of teaching, literary composition and domestic drudgery continued. Life at The Kilns had not been easy since the departure of June Flewett, whose career as an actress – she took the name of Jill Raymond – began to blossom. A succession of domestics were engaged. Chief of them was a woman called Vera Henry whom Minto ‘took against’, and there were two others (who took it in turns) called Queenie and Flora. Minto being ‘poorly’ – it often took the form of crazy conspiracy theories about the maids – only exacerbated Warnie’s tendency to have one of his ‘turns’. When both recovered their senses, it was to open their eyes upon the bleak world of Mr Attlee’s Britain – a Labour government, food shortages, austerity, and, as Jack called the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps, ‘the nursery governess of England’.9 To Jack, the rewards of worldly success-such as being offered a Doctorate of Divinity by St Andrews University – were small consolation. ‘A case of Scotch whisky might have been a kinder compliment,’ he remarked.10

  The excessive discomfort of rationing and the threatened increase in taxes united the household against the Labour Party, and this led to a certain diminution of Paxford’s status in Mrs Moore’s eyes. ‘You should hear Warnie’s views on the said Government,’ Minto told June, ‘and his Pessimism. The latter I fear we all share. Paxford (with whom we all keep well away on politics) says in 20 years every one will talk of the wonderful things it has done! By that time I don’t think they’ll have much of Britain or her possessions left.’11

  Both brothers were large men, and in spite of their perpetual smoking they had big appetites. This meant that they watched the schemes for food rationing with eagle eyes. ‘A staggering blow in the papers this morning,’ Warnie recorded in November 1947.

  Potatoes are put ‘on rations’ on a scale of 3lbs per week for the bourgeois. And so the last ‘filler’ food disappears from the diet, and the days of real hunger come upon us. It’s extraordinary how one is conditioned by a secure past: even now I can’t grasp the fact that I, WHL, will go to bed hungry and get up hungry; these, I say, are things that happen to nations one reads about in the papers, not to me.12

  Jack felt the strain of this too. The post-war years were ones of intense unhappiness for him. In spite of now having a younger colleague, J. A. W. Bennett (a former pupil, the one he threatened with a sword for not liking Sobrab and Rustum), to help with the teaching of Old and Middle English, he felt overworked. The various maids and ‘helps’ at The Kilns were not much use. As he had said to Sister Penelope on a slightly earlier occasion, ‘There is never a time when all three women are in a good temper. When A is in B is out; and when C has just got over her resentment at B’s last rage and is ready to forgive, B is just ripe for her next and so on.’ But saddest of all, a sadness which put affairs of the Government and Magdalen and The Kilns in the shade, was the fact that there was now a cooling between Lewis and his closest friends, especially Tolkien.

  Various new Inklings had been recruited. A young man from St John’s College whom Lewis had taught during the war, the poet and novelist John Wain, felt that the best of the Thursday evenings ‘were as good as anything I shall live to see’.13 He was intoxicated by the sense of having entered ‘a circle of instigators, almost of incendiaries, meeting to urge one another on in the task of redirecting the whole current of contemporary art and life’.

  But this was not how the Inklings saw themselves. Another new face in the circle after the war was J. R. R. Tolkien’s son Christopher. He felt that the famous Thursdays were never without embarrassment. He developed a profound attachment to and admiration for Lewis which made the cooling between his father and Lewis all the more painful to him. The old ‘cut and thrust’ of conversation was beginning to cause wounds on all sides. Dyson, for example, who had been elected to a Fellowship at Merton after the war and now taught English there, felt a marked antipathy to Tolkien’s writings, so that the readings of The Lord of the Rings – always a high point of the better evenings – were no longer a pleasure. Aware that some of his audience were unappreciative, J. R. R. Tolkien mumbled and read badly. Christopher, who was about to show himself one of the most eloquent lecturers Oxford has ever known, was brilliant at reading aloud, and took over the task. But he could not be sure that his readings would not be interrupted by Dyson, lying on the sofa with his foot in the air and a glass of whisky in his hand, snorting, grunting and exhaling – ‘Oh fuck, not another elf!’ In such an atmosphere, it was not surprising that the Tolkien readings were discontinued.

  Lewis read aloud some of the chapters of his work in progress on English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama; it was to be a volume of the Oxford History of English Literature, inevitably nicknamed OHEL. We do not know which passage particularly annoyed Tolkien père, but it could have been any of the moments where Lewis reflects upon the religion of the period – his provocative use of the word ‘papist’ for ‘Roman Catholic’, his praise of Calvin, his claim that Tyndale was superior to Thomas More as a stylist, or perhaps even his enthusiasm for Spenser, in whose work Tolkien, when in the mood, was capable of nosing out ‘anti-Catholic mythology’.14

  Clearly, Tolkien’s fierce reaction to whichever section it was stunned Lewis. In the early spring of 1948, Tolkien wrote at immense length to his old friend to apologize.

  I write only because I find it easier so to say such things as I really want to say. If they are foolish or seem so, I am not present when they fall flat. (My whispering asides are most often due to sheer pusillanimity, and a fear of being laughed at by the general company.)

  This requires no answer. But as for yourself: rest in peace, as far as I am any ‘critic’ of behaviour. At least you are the fautlest freke that I know. ‘Loudness’ did you say? Nay! That is largely a self-defensive rumour put about by Hugo. If it has any basis (for him) it is but that noise begets noise. We are safe in your presence and presidency from contention, ill will, detraction, or accusations without evidence. Doubtless, as you say, I have as a member of the brotherhood a right to criticize an I please. But I shall not lightly forget my vision of the wounds; and I shall be deterred from rash dispraise, for myself … And let me beg of you to bring out OHEL with no coyness.15

  All this sounds very much as if Tolkien’s harsh judgement of what was to grow into Lewis’s biggest book had reduced its author to visible signs of grief-perhaps to tears. Although the long letter of apology expresses such devotion, and although Tolkien’s admiration, and in a way fondness, for Lewis was never to die, the friendship itself was dying. This letter was a kind of obituary for it, though neither man quite realized that. The strange, and greater than usual, intrusion of archaisms – ‘an I please’, ‘fautlest freke’ and so forth – betrays an agonizing awkwardness.

  Perhaps it was precisely because this period of his life was so difficult that Lewis plunged, with such a depth of concentration, into imaginative composition. Perhaps the feeling that he was estranged from Tolkien inspired Lewis to remember that great conversation – about myth – which could be said to have changed his life. Certainly the disputation with Miss Anscombe, combined with the memory of what Tolkien had said about myth – made Lewis feel that there were other, and better, ways of telling the truth than by mea
ns of argument. As an apologist, in any case, how successful had he been? True, he had the St Andrews DD and a huge mail-bag from American admirers. But to those most close to him, he did not seem to have been a very convincing apologist. He told Warnie that he thought Minto had ‘never come in contact with anything approaching Christianity’,16 an extraordinary confession for the author of The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. Arthur Greeves, his oldest friend, had been a Christian when they began their correspondence all those years ago. Now he had left the Church of Ireland, dallied with the Unitarians, and thought of joining the Baha’i faith. It was a pattern which was to repeat itself throughout life. June Flewett, when she grew older and had been married for some years to Clement Freud, the wit and Member of Parliament, abandoned the practice of Christianity. The figure who, on the page, appears to have persuaded so many of the truth of the gospel was evidently a prophet without honour in his own country.

  One reason for this must be that mere force of argument is never enough to convert another human being to Christianity, any more than mere acceptance of the creeds, as an intellectual proposition, is identical with faith. The whole person, the whole imagination, must be consecrated. This was something which Lewis only learnt through great suffering, and his best art came out of it.