It had been almost a year since The Screwtape Letters appeared as instalments in The Guardian, and Lewis was pressed to give the paper something else. He sent them a short piece on ‘Miracles’ which was published in The Guardian of 2 October 1942. Not long afterwards, on 26 November, Lewis was invited to preach at the Church of St Jude on the Hill, London. His sermon there was a longer version of ‘Miracles’ and appeared in their parish magazine, St Jude’s Gazette, No. 73, pre-dating October 1942. He probably didn’t realize it at the time, but this piece was a miniature version of what was to be one of his most important and philosophical books, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947). Lewis was still pondering the question why Christians are divided between those who accept ‘real supernaturalism’ and those who don’t. In his sermon at St Jude’s he put his finger on the problem:
I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles. Whatever experiences we may have, we shall not regard them as miraculous if we already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural.57
‘What a series of rediscoveries life is,’ Jack wrote to Arthur on 10 December 1942. ‘All the things which one used to regard as simply the nonsense grown-ups talk have one by one come true – draughts, rheumatism, Christianity.’58 Happily, Lewis made one of his most delightful literary discoveries before Christmas. His fellow Inkling, Fr Gervase Mathew, gave him a copy of E.R. Eddison’s heroic romance, The Worm Ouroboros (1922).* On 16 November 1942 Lewis thanked the author in mock-heroic English, praising The Worm Ouroboros as ‘the most noble and joyous book I have read these ten years’, which book outweighed ‘all the clam jamfrey and whymperings of the rakehellie auctours in these latter daies, as the Eliots, Poundes, Lawrences, Audens, and the like’.59 Eddison, a retired civil servant living in Marlborough, was delighted to find such a distinguished admirer, and he responded by sending Lewis a copy of his second romance, Mistress of Mistresses (1935).
As splendid as he found parts of Mistress of Mistresses, Lewis could not forbear complaining to Eddison in his letter of 19 December of the author’s ‘hyper-uranian whores and transcendental trulls’. A good-natured debate followed. Eddison suggested that Lewis must be a misogynist, to which Lewis playfully retorted in a letter of 29 December that
it is a thing openlie manifest to all but disard [idiots] and verie goosecaps that feminitee is to itself an imperfection, being placed by the Pythagoreans in the sinister column with matter and mortalitie. Of which we see dailie ensample in that men do gladlie withdraw into their own societie and when they would be either merrie or grave stint not to shutte the dore upon Love herself, whereas we see no woman … but will not of good will escape from her sisters and seeke to the conversation of men, as liking by instincte of Nature so to receyve the perfection she lacketh.60
The friendship between the two men ripened as a result of their verbal fencing and Eddison was deeply honoured when Lewis gave him a dinner-party in Magdalen on 17 February 1943 at which he met Tolkien, Charles Williams and Warnie.
Although Lewis’s attitude was to alter somewhat after his marriage, Owen Barfield said in a meeting of the New York C.S. Lewis Society, that Lewis could properly be called a misogynist on at least the ‘theoretical level’, though decidedly not so in his personal relations with individual women.61 Mr Barfield’s point was that Lewis knew men and women as men and women, not as ‘classes’ or something equally vague. Lewis probably spent part of Christmas 1942 writing the third of his planetary novels, That Hideous Strength. One of the charges he brought against his character Mark Studdock, a sociologist, in the novel is that he ‘had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman”. He preferred to write about “vocational groups”, “elements”, “classes”, and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.’62
Mark’s wife, Jane, another academic, is equally mystical about political constructs. ‘Though she was theoretically an extreme democrat, no social class save her own had yet become a reality to her in any place except the printed page.’63 When Jane comes into contact with Dr Ransom he finds her so worried about ‘equality’ in marriage that he has to remind her that ‘Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food.’64 Ransom eventually discovers that Jane is ‘offended by the masculine itself’. ‘The male,’ he warns her, ‘you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.’65
It may have been the creation of the Studdocks that led Lewis to devote much thought to the distinction between ‘legal fiction’ and reality. In brief, he believed that no two people are equal in the sense of being the same. On the other hand, he thought a certain amount of ‘legal fiction’ – a pretended, political ‘equality’ – is necessary to keep us from hurting one another. ‘I am a democrat’, he said in his essay on ‘Equality’, ‘because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason … I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people … Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows.’66 And he said elsewhere:
Do not misunderstand me. I am not in the least belittling the value of this egalitarian fiction, which is our only defence against one another’s cruelty. I should view with the strongest disapproval any proposal to abolish manhood suffrage, or the Married Women’s Property Act. But the function of equality is purely protective. It is medicine, not food. By treating human persons (in judicious defiance of the observed facts) as if they were all the same kind of thing, we avoid innumerable evils. But it is not on this that we were made to live. It is idle to say that men are of equal value. If value is taken in a worldly sense – if we mean that all men are equally useful or beautiful or good or entertaining – then it is nonsense. If it means that all are of equal value as immortal souls, then I think it conceals a dangerous error. The infinite value of each human soul is not a Christian doctrine. God did not die for man because of some value He perceived in him. The value of each human soul considered simply in itself, out of relation to God, is simply zero … He loved us not because we were lovable, but because He is Love … If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.67
Lewis continued to debate the issue because he believed people had a dangerously mistaken notion of democracy. They mistook legal fiction for reality, and reality for fiction. To Lewis a serious step in this direction was taken in 1944 when the Bishop of Hong Kong, R.O. Hall, ordained the first woman to the Anglican priesthood. By 1948 the Church of England was under pressure to follow suit. Lewis believed a woman should address the issue, and on 13 July 1948 he wrote to Dorothy L. Sayers:
News has only just reached me of a movement (starting, I believe, from Chinese Anglicans) to demand that women should be allowed Priests’ Orders. I am guessing that, like me, you disapprove something that would cut us off so sharply from all the rest of Christendom, and which would be the very triumph of what they call ‘practical’ and ‘enlightened’ principles over the far deeper need that the Priest at the Altar must represent the Bridegroom to whom we are all, in a sense, feminine. Well, if you do – really I think you’ll have to give tongue.
In her reply of 19 July Miss Sayers agreed that the ordination of women would ‘erect a new and totally unnecessary barrier between us and the rest of Catholic Christendom’, but she could find no ‘theological reason’ against it:
If I were cornered and asked point-blank whether Christ Himself is the representative of male humanity or all humanity, I should be obliged to an
swer ‘of all humanity’ … It would be a pity to fly in the face of all the Apostolic Church, especially just now when we are at last seeing some prospect of understanding with the Eastern Church – and so on … The most I find I can do is to keep silence in any place where the daughters of the Philistines might overhear me.68
In the end Time and Tide persuaded Lewis to give tongue, and his article, ‘Priestesses in the Church?’,* was published on 14 August 1948, in time to be read by bishops from the entire Anglican communion meeting in London at the Lambeth Conference. ‘To take such a revolutionary step at the present moment,’ Lewis urged, ‘to cut ourselves off from the Christian past and so widen the divisions between ourselves and other Churches by establishing an order of priestesses in our midst, would be an almost wanton degree of imprudence. And the Church of England herself would be torn in shreds by the operation.’69 He went on:
We begin to feel that what really divides us from our opponents is a difference between the meaning which they and we give to the word ‘priest’. … To us a priest is primarily a representative, a double representative, who represents us to God and God to us. Our very eyes teach us this in church. Sometimes the priest turns his back on us and faces the East – he speaks to God for us: sometimes he faces us and speaks to us for God.70
Therefore, ‘only one wearing the masculine uniform can … represent the Lord to the Church’.71 Lewis goes on to argue that, while no one objects to a woman speaking to God on our behalf, she cannot speak on behalf of God to us:
Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins by saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to ‘Our Mother which art in Heaven’ as to ‘Our Father’. Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does. Now it is surely the case that if all these supposals were ever carried into effect we should be embarked on a different religion.72
Bishop Hall’s ordination of the Chinese woman was condemned by the Lambeth Conference of 1948. Eventually, however, politics won. The Episcopal Church in the United States began ordaining women in 1974, and the Church of England began the same practice in 1994.
We must now catch up with Lewis’s BBC broadcasts. On 11 June 1943 Eric Fenn wrote to ask if Lewis had given further thought to a series of ‘more theological talks’.73 Lewis wanted to complete his apology for Christianity, and on 16 June he agreed to give a fourth series of seven talks to be delivered in the spring of 1944. The scripts were completed and delivered to Fenn on 22 December. Fenn wrote that same day to say, ‘I like them immensely, and think that, as usual, you have achieved a quite astonishing degree of clarity in a very difficult subject.’ However, he went on to tell Lewis that this time he had made the mistake of working ‘to a 10-minute script, and not a 15-minute’ one.74 ‘I could kick myself for not having used my 15 minutes to the full,’ Lewis replied on 27 December 1943.75
Lewis was invited to extend the talks to fifteen minutes each and he posted them to Fenn on 5 January 1944. The next news from Fenn was disconcerting. The BBC had to reschedule the talks for 10.20 at night. ‘Who the devil’, said Lewis in his reply of 10 February, ‘is going to listen to anything at 10.20? … I can’t spend any Tuesday nights in town, as a talk at 10.20 means catching the midnight train and getting to bed about 3 o’clock. Well, I’ll give three under those conditions. The rest you’ll have to record … If you know the address of a reliable firm of assassins, nose-slitters, garotters and poisoners, I should be grateful to have it.’76 In the end, the talks were broadcast on consecutive Tuesday evenings at 10.15 p.m. between 22 February and 4 April 1944.
As it turned out, Lewis recorded his second talk (‘The Three-Personal God’), his sixth (‘Nice People or New Men’) and seventh (‘The New Men’) on to gramophone discs. Unfortunately, the only one of these recordings to survive is the last. The series was published as Beyond Personality: The Christian Idea of God on 9 October 1944. Like the other series, this one too was enlarged when it became part of Mere Christianity. One of the most popular of these talks was the second, on ‘The Three-Personal God’, in which Lewis gives the following illustration of how the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – operates in the life of a Christian:
An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get in 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. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying – the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on – the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.77
Beyond Personality was highly praised by the critics. The reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement put his finger on how Lewis’s adult conversion affected his writing: ‘Those who have inherited Christianity may write about it with truth and learning, but they can scarcely write with the excitement which men like Maritain and C.S. Lewis show, to whom the Christian faith is the unlooked-for discovery of the pearl of great price.’78 ‘Most of us’, said H.L.C. Heywood in Theology, ‘know quite a lot of people who ought to read this book.’79 Of particular interest was a ‘Listener Research’ poll taken by the BBC about the second talk in Lewis’s last series. ‘The single most important fact’, wrote Fenn on 23 March 1944, ‘is the sharp division you produced in your audience. They obviously either regard you as “the cat’s whiskers” or as beneath contempt, which is interesting, and ought, I feel, to teach us something, but I can’t think what.’80 But Lewis, remembering that even the Son of God was killed by those he came to save, was in no doubt what the report meant. In his reply to Fenn of 25 March he said: ‘Thanks for the suitable Lenten reading … The two reviews you report (Cat’s Whiskers and Beneath Contempt) aren’t very illuminating about me perhaps; about my subject matter, it is an old story, isn’t it? They love, or hate.’81
Lewis was not unaware of the discordant voices. The BBC sent him a copy of George Orwell’s article in The Tribune of 27 October 1944. The broadcasts, he said, ‘are not really so unpolished as they are meant to look. Indeed, they are an outflanking movement in the big counter-attack against the Left which Lord Elton, A.P. Herbert, G.M. Young, Alfred Noyes and various others have been conducting for two years past.’ In the issue of The Tribune for 17 November 1944 a reviewer calling himself ‘Francophil’ complained: ‘I wholly share William Empson’s sentiments about one regrettable deterioration of C.S. Lewis’s literary work since he took to writing religious propaganda for the B.B.C. … his “religious soundness” … is said to appeal to the Prime Minister’s Patronage Secretary.’
Because of the insistent clamour for more broadcasts, not only in England but in America and various countries of the Commonwealth, the BBC urged Lewis to return to the air. He replied that for the moment he had said all he had to say and was, therefore, unavailable for more broadcasts during the ‘foreseeable future’. He chose instead to publish Broadcast Talks, Christian Behaviour and Beyond Personality together, with additions, as Mere Christianity (1952) – the word ‘mere’ denoting ‘essential’.
Orwell and the others were wrong in supposing Lewis to have been politically ambitious. On the other hand, Churchill’s Patronage Secretary did have his eyes on Lewis. In preparing the New Year’s Honours List, Churchill offered Lewis the order of the Commander of the British Empir
e. Lewis replied to the Secretary on 3 December 1951:
I feel greatly obliged to the Prime Minister, and so far as my personal feelings are concerned this honour would be highly agreeable. There are always however knaves who say, and fools who believe, that my religious writings are all covert anti-Leftist propaganda, and my appearance in the Honours List would of course strengthen their hands. It is therefore better that I should not appear there. I am sure the Prime Minister will understand my reasons, and that my gratitude is and will be none the less cordial.82
It is not perhaps outlandish to claim that what Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Karl Rayner did for specialists in their works of ‘systematic theology’, Lewis did for laymen – whatever their creed – in Mere Christianity. In it he provides as clear a statement of catholic Christianity, the beliefs ‘common to nearly all Christians at all times’, as has yet been written. If you could take only one of Lewis’s books to a desert island, this is probably the one to choose. Mere Christianity is one of the works that caused Lewis to be celebrated as one of the most ‘original’ exponents of the Christian faith in the twentieth century. But the interesting thing, which cannot be too heavily emphasized in any study of the man or his works, is that though the settings of some of his books are strange and wonderful, his greatest claim to ‘originality’ rests in his total espousal of what Screwtape mockingly denounced as the ‘Same Old Thing’83 and Richard Baxter called ‘mere Christianity’. Believing, as he did, that ‘all that is not eternal is eternally out of date’,84 Lewis never hedged, reinterpreted or in any way diluted the ‘faith which was once for all delivered to the saints’.85 However modern or unusual the dress of his apologetics, Lewis was a thoroughgoing supernaturalist who appealed to the reason as well as the imagination in explaining the Incarnation, Christ’s effectual sacrifice, the Resurrection, the Trinity, Heaven and Hell and the eternal seriousness of Christian decision.
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