The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Despite Lewis’s qualms about the project, the book (which first appeared in weekly installments in The Guardian, beginning May 2, 1941) has freshness, charm, humor, and a certain cockeyed geniality. Screwtape’s inverted values, in which sin is admirable, purity damnable, and God’s love utterly incomprehensible, provide most of the satire; this experienced devil is a master psychologist, delivering during his analysis of human foibles many memorable aphorisms and devilish insights, along the lines of “men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury” and “once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man.” Screwtape’s own worldview is nicely detailed, including his insatiable hunger for human souls, whom he desires not out of some abstract wish to damn but simply in order to eat; his bag of poisonous tricks, designed to lead humans to perdition by taking advantage of the Law of Undulation, our propensity for oscillating between happiness and sorrow, energy and enervation; and the spite and fury bubbling within his breast, ready to erupt at any provocation, most memorably when a German bomb kills Wormwood’s patient before his soul can be claimed for Hell. For all the clever satire, however, the book does, as Lewis feared, begin to smother the reader by the end. It is a one-joke affair, however inventive the variations. The devils’ names—Screwtape, Slumtrimpet, Slubgob, Scabtree, Triptweeze, Toadpipe—and their use of inverted epithets—“Our Father Below” for Satan, “The Enemy” for God—delight and then grow tiresome; so, too, do Lewis’s repeated slaps at favorite targets, including psychoanalysis, proponents of the “Life Force,” and overly spiritualized conceptions of prayer (Coleridge’s “sense of supplication” takes a direct hit). It all comes off as terribly clever but a bit sophomoric. The Screwtape Letters is a good, short book; if it were half as long and half as clever, it might have been twice as good.

  The public, however, roared its approval. The book sold very well upon release and remains one of Lewis’s most popular works. The Manchester Guardian (February 24, 1942), eager to canonize it, declared that it “should become a classic,” while The Times Literary Supplement (February 28, 1942) more temperately warned that “time alone can show whether it is or is not an enduring piece of satirical writing.” Endured it has; whether that makes it a classic, the next century or two will judge.

  Pressed into Service

  If the early deprivations of war disturbed Lewis’s complacency, the Blitz shook him to his core. “It’s like the end of the world,” he wrote to Arthur when Belfast was bombed. The Blitz began on September 7, 1940, when over a thousand Luftwaffe planes attacked London in the first wave of an all-out German effort to destroy the British war industry and sow panic among the civilian population. The British government, after some initial sluggishness, responded by opening the Underground as a massive bomb shelter (more than one hundred thousand people took refuge there every night during the height of the raids), with antiaircraft fire and airborne counterattacks by the RAF, and by establishing special programs to boost public morale. According to Charles Gilmore, who ran the RAF Chaplains’ School at Magdalene College, Cambridge, the Battle of Britain “had had an extraordinary effect on the nation and a quite miraculous effect on the status of the Royal Air Force … For quite a time, the RAF received into its ranks more than its fair share of the cream of the nation.” The dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, hoping to inspire these new recruits, decided to fund an RAF chaplaincy lectureship and suggested that Lewis be given the post. On a rainy day in early 1941, Gilmore and the RAF chaplain in chief arrived at Magdalen College to set about convincing him that he was the right man to lecture airmen throughout the UK about the war effort and their place in it. Addressing raw troops, many of whom had not attended a university, was a new challenge for Lewis; after a bit of reasonable hesitation, he agreed, “promising to soar,” in Gilmore’s words.

  The first lectures took place in Abingdon, right outside Oxford. Lewis thought them a “complete failure” and took solace in remembering “that God used an ass to convert the prophet,” but soon he did soar, providing his listeners, in Gilmore’s words, with “a sterling and direct purpose, where before they had found only the confusion of a whirlpool.” He traveled up and down the nation, on trips that usually lasted two or three days, followed by a short break at home and then another trip. He complained to Arthur Greeves that “I had never realized how tiring perpetual travelling is (specially in crowded trains),” and yet he rejoiced in the beauty of the landscape and, above all, “the chance in many places to see and smell the sea and hear the sound of gulls again, which otherwise I wd. have been pining for.” In Tolkien’s eyes, Lewis had shouldered the task in imitatione Pauli, “as a reparation; now the least of Christians (by special grace) but once an infidel … The acceptance of the RAF mission with its … lonely, cheerless, embarrassed journeys … all this was in its way an imitation of St. Paul.”

  A second and more difficult phase of the lectures opened up when Lewis also agreed to address RAF chaplains—many of whom had been doctors, bankers, journalists, or professional ministers prior to the war—on a regular basis at the RAF Chaplains’ School. Facing a well-educated audience, Lewis chose as the topic for his first presentation “Linguistic Analysis in Pauline Soteriology”—a subject, as he should have realized, of no interest to men just back from battle or about to join the fray. Charles Gilmore, who attended the talk, recalled Lewis as “feeling for words. Clive Staples Lewis feeling for words! He hummed, and the ill-mannered coughed. A future bishop secretly got on with The Times’ crossword.” Thankfully, Lewis sensed his error before it was too late, dropped the philological analysis, “said something about prostitutes and pawnbrokers … and the rest of the morning was full of the clang of steel on steel and the laughter of good fellows, and answers that belonged to life … Jack had done his job.”

  He had indeed, despite his belief that the RAF talks had been a failure. But greater tasks lay at hand. A few months before the first RAF address, he had been approached by James W. Welch, director of religious broadcasting for the BBC, about addressing an even larger audience than British flyboys. Welch, who had read The Problem of Pain and found it personally helpful, proposed that Lewis take up religious broadcasting, allowing him to address “a fairly intelligent audience of more than a million.” With cinemas, theaters, and the nascent BBC Television Service closed as an emergency measure, the BBC Home Service and its companion Overseas Service had to be the supplier of necessary information and equally necessary diversion. The broadcast talk, a short, lively, intimate, single-speaker presentation, was a new form invented to meet both needs; and considerably more than a million at home and at the front could be expected to tune in. Two thirds of them, Welch guessed, would be lapsed Christians, if not outright nonbelievers.

  When Lewis accepted the assignment, Welch put him in the hands of a BBC staff member named Eric Fenn—a Presbyterian, active in the Student Christian Movement, who had served time in Wormwood Scrubs prison for his pacifist stance and who shared Welch’s desire to do something about the appallingly dreary state of religious programming. Fenn coached Lewis in the art of delivering a crisp, fifteen-minute colloquial radio talk, vetted his scripts and passed them on to the censors, worried about the timing (each talk had to fill its precise time slot, to prevent German programming from breaking in), and helped him arrange to have the earnings distributed as charity to various correspondents in need and to the Cowley Fathers.

  Initially, Welch suggested two topics for broadcast: the lack of Christian influence in modern literature, or “The Christian Faith as I See It—by a Layman.” Lewis countered by proposing a series of talks on natural law, or “objective right and wrong”—a reality, he told Welch, that the Bible takes for granted but that is far from obvious to modern minds. He was convinced that “most apologetic begins a stage too far on. The first step is to create, or recover, the sense of guilt. Hence if I give a series of talks I should mention Christianity only at the end, and would prefer not to
unmask my battery till then.” Lewis thought of calling the first series “The Art of Being Shocked”; later on, he came up with “Inside Information.” Neither title satisfied Welch. Eventually, they agreed on “‘RIGHT AND WRONG’: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe?” with the first installment, “Common Decency,” broadcast on August 6, 1941, at 7:45 p.m., immediately following “News in Norwegian.”

  If “The Art of Being Shocked” was what Lewis was after, though, he went about it by an unexpected path, appealing to the intellect rather than the emotions, arguing first for the objective reality of the moral law, then for our chronic failure to obey it, and finally for God as the giver of the law, who alone, by means of the Atonement, is working to repair us. Lewis knew that he would have to make this point in the language of the street, however, and he discovered, with some help from Eric Fenn, that he had a gift for doing so. He began the first evening broadcast:

  Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: “That’s my seat, I was there first”—“Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”—“Why should you shove in first?”—“Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”—“How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”—“Come on, you promised.”

  It was a brilliant move. The instinct to protest against unfairness is universal, and it emerges very early in childhood. The offended party in such a quarrel, Lewis observes, “is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about—and the other man very seldom replies, ‘To hell with your standard.’” In other words, the moral law is a principle of accountability that transcends cultural differences and cannot be reduced to herd instinct. As a principle of accountability, the moral law presupposes freedom—ought implies can. If we fail to live up to the moral law, it can only be because we have freely rejected it; and if we are in the habit of freely rejecting it, we are in serious disarray. Summing up his first fifteen-minute talk, Lewis said, “Well, those are the two points I wanted to make tonight. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can’t really get rid of it. Secondly, that they don’t 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.”

  So far, Lewis had said nothing especially original or specifically Christian; Kant would have smiled. It was no small achievement, however, to have secured so succinct a moral foundation for the Christian reflections to follow. Lewis was proceeding upon the assumption that what had served as praeparatio evangelica (preparation for the Gospel) in his own life might win over his listeners as well. Before he became a Christian, he had been a convinced moral realist. After his conversion, he came to see knowledge of the moral law—called “natural law” or “law of nature” because it is a universal pattern discoverable by reason—as the best introduction to the faith, especially for those outside the Church. As St. Paul said, the natural law is “written on the heart” (Romans 2:14–15) even of Gentiles who have not known divine revelation. Lewis studied the development of this idea in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, undisputed master of natural law theory, whose belief in the fundamental rationality of human beings Lewis wholeheartedly shared, and also in the works of the sixteenth-century Anglican divine Richard Hooker, whose adaptation of scholastic natural law theory laid the foundation for Anglican moral theology.

  Some Protestant thinkers have worried that natural law theory gives too much credit to human reason. But Lewis was convinced that the risk to moral sanity comes from placing too little, not too much, stock in reason. He opposed, with every fiber of his being, subjectivism, relativism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and all views that came, he believed, from despising the objective, essentially commonsense morality of ordinary people. Though our minds are fallen instruments, we remain capable of discerning the difference between right and wrong, and honest self-appraisal suffices to show us what the revealed law makes even more transparent, that we are chronic sinners in need of grace. Far from being the remnant of herd instinct, the introjection of parental scolding, or the self-sufficient discovery of human reason, the moral law is the closest we are likely to get in this life to a vision of the God who made us.

  Wisely, Lewis did not bring God directly into the argument until his fourth talk. Even then, he was nervous about losing his audience. To disarm suspicions, he resorted to a few special rhetorical devices. One was slang: “There’s been a great deal of soft soap talked about God for the last hundred years. That’s not what I am offering. You can cut all that out.” And again: “You may even have thought that I’d played a trick on you—that I’d been carefully wrapping up to look like philosophy what turns out to be one more ‘religious jaw.’” In revising the Broadcast Talks for publication as Mere Christianity, Lewis deleted the contractions, but the slang remained, giving academic theologians and stylistic purists one more reason to turn up their noses. He wooed his vast audience further by deploying, to great effect, the telling analogy and didactic exemplum, often introduced as a “supposal”:

  Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, can’t itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law is, so to speak, the tune we’ve got to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

  These techniques united to create a strong bond between Lewis and his vast audience, and the talks were an instant success. Justin Phillips, a BBC radio journalist and author of C. S. Lewis in a Time of War, quotes an RAF officer recalling an episode in the officers’ mess, in which Lewis’s voice boomed over the radio just as the barman was handing over a drink. “Suddenly everyone just froze listening to this extraordinary voice.” At the end of the fifteen-minute talk, “there was the barman with his arm still up there and the other man still waiting for his drink.” Letters from listeners poured in: “One gets funny letters after broadcasting—some from lunatics who sign themselves ‘Jehovah’ or begin ‘Dear Mr Lewis, I was married at the age of 20 to a man I didn’t love’—but many from serious inquirers whom it was a duty to answer fully. So letter writing has loomed pretty large!”

  What Do Christians Believe?

  Lewis broadcast his second series of talks—“What Christians Believe”—during January and February 1942. He began by presenting his credentials: he had been chosen to give the talks not because of his special expertise, but because, as a layman and converted atheist, he might be better able than some professional theologians to speak to the concerns of ordinary people. His aim was to express, in five fifteen-minute talks, the lineaments of the classical Christian worldview, or, as he would later call it, after the seventeenth-century English Puritan theologian Richard Baxter, “mere Christianity”—mere, that is, in the older sense of the word, meaning pure, unvarnished, and undistorted by sectarian bias. To that end, he sent his scripts to be vetted by four clergy friends: a Catholic (Bede Griffiths), a Methodist (the RAF padre Joseph Dowell), a Presbyterian (Eric Fenn), and an Anglican (possibly Austin Farrer, according to Walter Hooper).

  Lewis’s chief concern was to combat the tendency to reduce the faith, as Enlightenment thinkers were wont to do, to nothing but window dressing on the moral law. It’s only “after you have realized that there i
s a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it’s after all that that Christianity begins to talk.” And what Christianity begins to talk about, Lewis expressed with a favorite analogy: that we are living in “enemy-occupied territory,” in a world under siege. Christianity is “the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you’re really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends: that’s why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us going.” One could hear, amid the groans of liberal theologians who had thought we were done with Devil talk, the echo of Churchill’s BBC addresses to a world overshadowed by “the dark curse of Hitler.” In wartime, Lewis could count on the siege analogy appealing even to the lapsed Christians in his audience.

  The analogy is a powerful one, and perhaps just as effective when encountered in peacetime. Lewis’s point was that we are always overshadowed by a dark curse; it’s just that Hitler brought the curse into plain view. Shortly before the first series of radio talks, Lewis had skirmished with C.E.M. Joad in the pages of The Spectator over whether the problem of evil has a “new urgency” during wartime.

  … what new urgency? Evil may seem more urgent to us than it did to the Victorian philosophers—favoured members of the happiest class in the happiest country in the world at the world’s happiest period. But it is no more urgent for us than for the great majority of monotheists all down the ages. The classic expositions of the doctrine that the world’s miseries are compatible with its creation and guidance by a wholly good Being come from Boethius waiting in prison to be beaten to death and from St Augustine meditating on the sack of Rome. The present state of the world is normal; it was the last century that was the abnormality.