C. S. Lewis
Page 33
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 Atha
nasius’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 h
ad 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.