Knowing that many of the undergraduates might go to war – as he had – before they completed their studies in Oxford, he set himself to answer the peculiarly relevant question, ‘What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing?’3 Lewis, typically, went straight to the heart of the matter – pointing out that, since we are all going to die sometime, as we live perpetually on the edge of a precipice, war creates no absolutely new situation but only ‘aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it’.4 That being so, and as neither conversion nor war obliterates our intellectual and aesthetic activities, we would be foolish to allow fear to cause us to substitute a worse cultural life for a better. (It is interesting to compare Lewis’s idea of culture with that which Hitler was busy inaugurating in Germany.)
Lewis went on to say that, whereas a man might have to die for his country, no man should, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. Religion, on the other hand, though it cannot occupy the whole of life in the sense of excluding all our natural activities, must, in another sense, occupy the whole of life – the solution to this paradox being that whatever we do must be done to the glory of God. ‘The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman’, Lewis insisted, ‘become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly “as to the Lord”.’5
Ashley Sampson was, during the 1920s, the owner of a small London publishing firm, the Centenary Press. Shortly before the war, another publisher, Geoffrey Bles,* who had opened a firm in 1923 and who achieved success through his publication of a translation of Vicki Baum’s novel Grand Hotel in 1930, bought up the Centenary Press and its owner. Though he was working for Bles now, Sampson – who can truly be called the ‘discoverer’ of C.S. Lewis – was keenly interested in theology and, having been greatly impressed by The Pilgrim’s Regress, invited Lewis to contribute a book on pain to his ‘Christian Challenge’ series. This series of popular theological books, which came out during the war under the imprint of both the Centenary Press and Geoffrey Bles Ltd, contained many valuable titles: Canon Roger Lloyd’s The Mastery of Evil (1941), Father Gerald Vann’s The Heart of Man (1944), Charles Williams’s The Forgiveness of Sins (1942), and The Resurrection of Christ (1945) by Professor A.M. Ramsey (later Archbishop of Canterbury).
Lewis began writing The Problem of Pain during the summer of 1939, and when the Inklings met on 8 November 1939 at the Eastgate Hotel to dine, the fare consisted of a section from Tolkien’s ‘new Hobbit’, a nativity play by Charles Williams, and a chapter from Lewis’s Problem. The latter was still being written and read aloud when Lewis and Tolkien (the only two Inklings on this occasion) met in Tolkien’s rooms in Pembroke College on Thursday, 30 November. In a letter to his brother written a few days afterwards (3 December) Lewis described his observations on the supposedly close connection between theories about pain and actual pain: ‘If you are writing a book about pain and then get some actual pain, as I did in my ribs, it does not either, as the cynic would expect, blow the doctrine to bits, or, as a Christian would hope, turn it into practice, but remains quite unconnected and irrelevant, just as any other bit of actual life does when you are reading or writing.’6
After The Problem of Pain had obtained the nihil obstat of the Inklings – to whom it is dedicated – the manuscript went off to Ashley Sampson in the spring of 1940 and it was published on 18 October of the same year. Though it has often been listed in catalogues as a medical handbook (much to Lewis’s amusement), its success was immediate and continuing; it has never gone out of print.
Except for hints dropped in The Pilgrim’s Regress, the public had no idea what Lewis’s religious ‘stance’ would be. In the Church of England there is a jingle about the three kinds of Anglican churchmanship: ‘Broad and hazy, low and lazy, high and crazy.’ Which would fit Lewis? He surprised everyone. Like the Pilgrim in The Pilgrim’s Regress, he bypassed all kinds of churchmanship and made straight for the Main Road of Classical Christianity; or, as he called it elsewhere, that ‘great level viaduct which crosses the ages’.7 In a letter to Sister Penelope of 8 November 1939 he said, ‘To me the real distinction is not between high and low but between religion with real supernaturalism and salvationism on the one hand and all watered-down and modernist versions on the other.’8 A few years later he made his position clearer still. ‘I am’, he said, ‘a dogmatic Christian untinged with Modernist reservations and committed to supernaturalism in its full rigour.’9
The ‘problem’ of pain is roughly this: ‘If God is good, why does he allow so much suffering in the world?’ Lewis knew that most readers had never read a serious discussion of theology before and might never read another, so he used a technique not totally unlike that of Billy Graham in taking full advantage of his one opportunity to get everything in. He spends the first half of his book discussing the nature of God, free will, human wickedness and the Fall of man, with such freshness, clarity and dispelling of petty, traditional prejudices that, had only those chapters been printed, many readers might have been able to attempt an answer to the ‘problem’ for themselves. In Chapter 6 on ‘Human Pain’ Lewis points out the benevolence of God in giving men the ‘enormous permission to torture their fellows’.10 Lewis’s purpose is not only to justify free will but to show the good and remedial effects of pain: ‘God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.’11 (Interestingly, the Dutch translation of the book is entitled Gods Megafoon.)
It was probably to be expected that there would be those who ridicule Lewis for his treatment of pain. Who are you to talk about pain? etc. We should remember what was said in Chapter 4 about the distinction Lewis found in Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity between ‘enjoyment’ and ‘contemplation’: you ‘enjoy’ the act of thinking and ‘contemplate’ whatever it is you are thinking about. The two activities, as Lewis said, are distinct and incompatible. ‘I am not arguing,’ he said, ‘that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made “perfect through suffering” is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design.’12
By the time he got to the chapter on ‘Hell’, Lewis had placed God’s goodness beyond attack and, then, having pictured a really bad man, he asked: ‘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? … Even mercy can hardly wish to such a man his eternal, contented continuance in such ghastly illusion.’13 ‘In the long run,’ he concluded, ‘the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: “What are you asking God to do?” To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But he has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what he does.’14
In the chapter on ‘Animal Pain’, which Lewis admitted is pure speculation (‘God has given us data which enable us, in some degree, to understand our own suffering: He has given us no such data about beasts’),15 he traced the sufferings of animals to the Fall of man and suggested that as man is to be understood only in his relation to God, the beasts are to be understood only in their relation to man and, through man, to God. ‘The tame animal’, he said, ‘is therefore … the only “natural” animal – the only one we can see occupying the place it was made to occupy, and it is on the tame animal that we must base all our doctrine of beasts.’16
Finally, in his last chapter on ‘Heaven’, Lewis brought in the dearest theme of all his writings, the romantic yearning after a transcendent joy which lifts the thesis of his book once and for all to a level at which everything is seen in its full significance.
While it
would be difficult to find liberal Christians who would accept those beliefs Lewis held in a literal Satan, a literal Fall of man, and the traditional doctrine of original sin, they are all accepted by the Catholic Church and most Protestant evangelicals. However, the chapter which has attracted most attention is that on ‘Animal Pain’.17 Some of the most pointed criticism of this chapter came from Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), who was also Mrs Stuart Moore. This Anglican mystic complained in a letter to Lewis of 13 January 1941 that she found the belief that the tame animal is the only natural animal ‘an intolerable doctrine of a frightful exaggeration of what is involved in the primacy of man’. She went on to ask:
Is the cow which we have turned into a milk machine or the hen we have turned into an egg machine really nearer the mind of God than its wild ancestors? … You surely can’t mean that, or think that the robin redbreast in a cage doesn’t put heaven in a rage but is regarded as an excellent arrangement … If we ever get a sideways glimpse of the animal-in-itself, the animal existing for God’s glory and pleasure and lit by His light (and what a lovely experience that is!) we don’t owe it to the Pekinese, the Persian cat or the Canary, but to some wild free creature living in completeness of adjustment to nature a life that is utterly independent of man. And this, thank heaven, is the situation of all but the handful of creatures we have enslaved. Of course I agree that animals too are involved in the Fall and await redemption and transfiguration … And man is no doubt offered the chance of being the mediator of that redemption. But not by taming, surely? Rather by loving and reverencing the creatures enough to leave them free. When my cat goes off on her own occasions I’m sure she goes with God – but I don’t feel so sure of her theological position when she is sitting on the best chair before the drawing-room fire. Perhaps what it all comes to is this, that I feel your concept of God would be improved by just a touch of wildness.18
Lewis replied on 16 January 1941:
The robin in a cage and the over-fed Peke are both, to me, instances of the abuse of man’s authority, tho’ in different ways. I never denied that the abuse was common: that is why we have to make laws (and ought to make a good many more) for the protection of animals. I do know what you mean by the sudden ravishing glimpse of animal life in itself, its wildness – to meet a squirrel in a wood or even a hedgehog in the garden makes me happy. But that is because it is, being partly exempt from the Fall, a symbol and reminder of the unfallen world we long for. That wildness would not be lost by the kind of dominion Adam had. It would be nicer, not less nice, if that squirrel would come and make friends with me at my whistle – still more if he would obey me when I told him not to kill the red squirrel in the next tree. I don’t envisage the taming of all beasts as involving domestication of all – only perhaps the dog and a few others. In a Paradisal state if you wanted a horse to ride you would walk up to the newest herd and ask for volunteers – and the one you chose would be regarded as the lucky one.19
Miss Underhill would probably have delighted in the wildness of the animals in Lewis’s Narnian stories, which are far more like the real thing than anything in Walt Disney’s films. When one of the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe asks if Aslan, the lion-king of Narnia, is ‘safe’ she is answered, ‘Safe? Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.’20 And, lest one get the impression from The Problem of Pain that Lewis himself treated his own pets – which did not include Pekinese, Persian cats, or canaries – with exaggerated and cloying affection, Walter Hooper noticed during the months he lived in The Kilns what a pleasant relationship the people and the animals enjoyed. Lewis and the others did for the cats (Tom and Snip) and dog (Ricky, a boxer pup) what was expected of them. Otherwise they left them to a very carefree, live-and-let-live existence. Hooper was particularly touched by Lewis’s intervention on behalf of ‘Old Tom’, a much-loved cat who had been a great mouser in his day, but had now lost all his teeth. Lewis’s housekeeper, Mrs Maude Miller, suggested that the time had come for Tom to be ‘put down’. Lewis would not hear of it. ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘Tom has worked hard. He’s a pensioner now.’ Thereafter he had Mrs Miller cook fish several times a week for Tom. It was deboned and prepared specially for this much-loved old cat. Once when Hooper and Lewis were walking down the private lane of The Kilns they met Tom. As they passed, Lewis lifted his hat. ‘He’s a pensioner,’ he reminded Walter.
Years before, Lewis would have stopped to savour the success of a new book, but, once delivered of the manuscript of The Problem of Pain, his attention switched to new enthusiasms and ideas. Since Charles Williams’s arrival in Oxford Lewis had been trying to persuade the University to invite him to lecture on English Literature. On 29 January 1940 Williams began a term of weekly lectures on ‘Milton’ in the fabulously vaulted Divinity School of the Bodleian. Lewis was there of course and immensely pleased with his friend’s success. He was even more pleased with Williams’s second lecture, on 5 February 1940. This was probably the most celebrated lecture Williams gave in Oxford, and Lewis wrote to Warnie about it on 11 February:
On Monday C.W. lectured nominally on Comus but really on Chastity. Simply as criticism it was superb – because here was a man who really started from the same point of view as Milton and really cared with every fibre of his being about ‘the sage and serious doctrine of virginity’ which it would never occur to the ordinary modern critic to take seriously. But it was more important still as a sermon. It was a beautiful sight to see a whole roomful of modern young men and women sitting in that absolute silence which can not be faked, very puzzled, but spell-bound: perhaps with something of the same feeling which a lecture on unchastity might have evoked in their grandparents – the forbidden subject broached at last. He forced them to lap it up and I think many, by the end, liked the taste more than they expected to. It was ‘borne in upon me’ that that beautiful carved room had probably not witnessed anything so important since some of the great medieval or Reformation lectures. I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded to do: teaching Wisdom. And what a wonderful power there is in the direct appeal which disregards the temporary climate of opinion – I wonder is it the case that the man who has the audacity to get up in any corrupt society and squarely preach justice or valour or the like always wins?21
Writing to Warnie on 3 March 1940 about the next meeting of the Inklings, Lewis said: ‘Dyson … was in his usual form and, on being told of Williams’s Milton lectures on “the sage and serious doctrine of virginity”, replied “The fellow’s becoming a common chastitute.”’22
Charles Williams’s Milton lectures have not survived, but the essence of them is found in the preface Williams wrote for the World’s Classics edition of Milton’s poems.23 As mentioned in Chapter 7, in December 1941 Lewis gave a series of lectures at the University College of North Wales which was later published as A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1942). It is impossible to imagine what that book would have been like without Williams’s lectures and his preface. Lewis said in dedicating A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ to Williams:
To think of my own lecture is to think of those other lectures at Oxford in which you partly anticipated, partly confirmed, and most of all clarified and matured, what I had been thinking about Milton … It gives me a sense of security to remember that, far from loving your work because you are my friend, I first sought your friendship because I loved your books. But for that, I should find it difficult to believe that your short Preface to Milton is what it seems to be – the recovery of a true critical tradition after more than a hundred years of laborious misunderstanding. The ease with which the thing was done would have seemed inconsistent with the weight that had to be lifted. As things are, I feel entitled to trust my own eyes. Apparently, the door of the prison was really unlocked all the time; but it was only you who thought of trying the handle. Now we can all come out.24
During the period that Williams was lecturing on Milton, Warnie Lewis, who was
given the rank of major on 27 January, was lying ill in a French hospital. He had been there for several months, and the world was erupting around him. On 7 April British forces set out to mine Norwegian territorial waters in an effort to protect the country from Germany. In the last days of April 1940, while British and foreign troops prepared to withdraw from their footholds in Norway, Hitler ordered the German army to be ready to launch an offensive against France and Britain.
At daybreak on 10 May the German forces began their advance into Belgium and Holland. As the British and French troops advanced towards them, 2,500 German aircraft destroyed most of their planes. Immediately after this 16,000 German airborne troops parachuted into Rotterdam, Leiden, and The Hague.
That afternoon Winston Churchill became both Minister of Defence and the new Prime Minister. On 13 May, as the German forces conquered the Low Countries, and moved towards France, Churchill told the House of Commons, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, promising to ‘wage war … with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us … against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime’.25
German forces continued to advance across France, while the British Army waited for a planned French counter-attack from the south. On the evening of 24 May General Halder sent General Rundstedt permission to attack Dunkirk. Rundstedt, however, turned down the opportunity, preferring to allow his army to halt to regather strength and await reinforcements. Contrary to expectations, and while stating his intention to ‘annihilate the French, English and Belgian forces which are surrounded in Flanders’, Hitler did not overrule him.26 The British Government began planning the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk. On 26 May Hitler realized the grievous error he had made in approving the ‘halt’ order of 24 May. That afternoon he ordered a thrust by armoured groups and infantry divisions in the direction of Dunkirk.
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