The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Whether in war or in peace, questions of religious commitment are always urgent. It is always on “this day” (Deuteronomy 30:15) that we are offered the choice of good or evil, life or death. Lewis’s argumentative mind tended to run to such dichotomies in any case, so it seemed natural to set forth the options for belief in pairs of opposites: atheism and theism, pantheism and monotheism, dualism and its Christian alternative. Dualism appealed for its vigor, but Christianity proved the better “fighting religion,” contending for the good world God made against the evils that are parasitic on that good.

  In the third talk, Lewis restated in plain language the standard free- will theodicy: that it was a greater good for God to have created a world in which his intelligent creatures (angels and men) were free to choose between good and evil than it would have been for God to create a race of automatons, hardwired to choose good. That free creatures might decide to choose evil was the risk God took in creating us—and when they did choose badly, and creation was marred, God determined to rescue us from the ruin, first by giving us an innate knowledge of right and wrong; second, by sending the human race, in the form of myths and cults, “good dreams” of a dying-and-rising god; third, by electing the children of Israel and spending “several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was,” and finally by visiting his sorry planet in the person of a Jewish man who said “the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.” At this point, Lewis resumed the aut Deus, aut malus homo argument, converting the dilemma (God or bad man) into a trilemma: lunatic, liar, or Lord:

  I’m trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really silly thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That’s the one thing we mustn’t say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said wouldn’t be a great moral teacher. He’d either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he’s a poached egg—or else he’d be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But don’t let us come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He hasn’t left that open to us. He didn’t intend to.

  Such stark oppositions are often recipes for disaster, and one wonders that Lewis, who prized logic, brought this one to the table. Other views of Jesus may be—and have been—offered: that he was sane on the whole but mistaken on this one point, that he was misled by his handlers into a false understanding of his identity and mission, that he was a mystic who spoke in allegorical code. There is also the possibility that Jesus did not actually claim divinity but was a prophet divinized by his followers after death.

  This last objection was one Lewis did not bother to consider. In his youth, he had been a great proponent of “higher criticism,” writing knowingly to Arthur about a “Hebrew philosopher Yeshua” who became the object of a mystery cult after his death. But for the mature Lewis, higher criticism had no traction; some years later he wrote, “as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends.” Not artistic enough for mythology, yet filled with small details—like Jesus scribbling in the dust—that only the modern realistic novel would think to include. The so-called “historical Jesus” has proven to be an elusive figure, each version supplanting its predecessor; but the Jesus of the Gospels gives every indication of being conscious of his divinity, forgiving sins, casting out demons, uttering “I AM” sayings that echo the tetragrammaton (YHWH), and promising to return as judge at the end of time.

  In the original broadcast, though not in the published versions, Lewis anticipated the historicist objection: “Of course you can take the line of saying He didn’t say these things, but his followers invented them. But that’s only shifting the difficulty. They were Jews, too: the last people who would invent such a thing, the people who had never said anything of the sort about Moses or Elijah. That theory only saddles you with twelve inexplicable lunatics instead of one.” It was just as well that he removed this passage, for it would not withstand a deep study of Christian beginnings in the Jewish and Mediterranean world. Lewis’s impression of Judaism rested largely on his reading of the Old Testament, viewed through the lens of a general philosophical monotheism; but it was not unusual for Jewish thinkers during the Second Temple period, in which Christianity took shape, to dream of quasi-divine, or angelomorphic, prophets and saints. Moreover, that God sometimes chose to become manifest to his people, whether in the still, small voice or as an overwhelming angelic presence, was a fundamentally Jewish belief. The Incarnation was a new idea, but not an alien one; as Lewis himself notes, the Jews were being prepared from the moment of their election for just such a saving invasion of history.

  Lack of historical nuance is understandable in a fifteen-minute popular radio talk; the question remains of whether Lewis’s trilemma succeeds on logical grounds. No doubt, if Jesus had been lying about his identity—and on the strength of that lie inducing his closest friends to follow him to the gallows—it was the act of a moral monster. But what of the “lunatic—on a level with the man who says he’s a poached egg”? Lewis’s flippancy here grates modern sensibilities (and sounds strange coming from a man who had witnessed two genuine mental breakdowns); it helps to know that the poached egg madman is a stock figure, a sort of urban legend, that dates back at least to the turn of the century. “Wants a Slice of Toast,” a typical example of this trope, was the headline of a human-interest piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer of November 26, 1900, reprinted verbatim in English-language papers as far as New Zealand. Arnold Bennett speaks of the poor fellow in 1908, Chesterton mentions him prominently in Orthodoxy (also 1908) as well as in several subsequent publications, and Bertrand Russell refers to him in 1945, in the context of a critique of David Hume in A History of Western Philosophy.

  The key point, about which Lewis is deadly serious, is that anyone so massively mistaken about his identity cannot be trusted as a font of moral teachings. Yet it is at least conceivable that Jesus could have been deluded without being fundamentally unsound. Millions outside the Christian fold admire Jesus for his wisdom, courage, compassion, and self-sacrifice, while thinking he was mistaken about his identity. Millions within the Christian fold (and other major world religions) have a comparable opinion of the Dalai Lama, considering him mistaken in his belief that he is the reincarnation of the previous thirteen Dalai Lamas and ultimately of the celestial bodhisattva Chenrezig (Avalokiteśvara), but admiring him nonetheless as a moral teacher and public leader.

  Lewis’s aut Deus, aut malus homo argument is not without its virtues, however. For those wavering on the threshold of belief in the divinity of Christ, it has at least a suggestive force. Nowhere does the New Testament propose that the truth of the Incarnation is logically self-evident or patently obvious; rather, we are told that the signs of God’s presence will be recognized by those graced with the eyes to see them. If the argument succeeds, it does so by evoking the experience, so characteristic of the Gospels, of being confronted with the question “Who do you say that I am?” A personal decision is called for; the matter is too urgent and a lifetime too fleeting to wait for all the evidence to come in.

  In the fourth talk of the series, Lewis wrestled with various models of the Atonement, noting that orthodox Christianity has countenanced more than one way of understanding how it is that Christ, by dying, has achieved reconciliation between God and human beings. Lewis’s preference is for a substitutionary model—think of Aslan dying in Edmund’s place—but the key point for him is that “in Christ, a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us” by means of
baptism, communion, and assent to the faith of the apostles.

  Two more radio series would follow. One, on the practical aspects of morality, which had to be cut down to ten-minute segments, Lewis published in 1943 under the title Christian Behaviour. His focus was on the virtues as distinguished from abstract “ideals” and political or therapeutic programs. He analyzed the master sin of pride and corrected common misunderstandings of its antidote, humility; and he tackled contested questions of sexual morality, setting forth without hectoring the basic Christian understanding of ordered and disordered sexual practices and affections. In a final series, published in weekly installments in The Listener, and in 1944, with additional chapters, as the book Beyond Personality, Lewis offered “first steps in the doctrine of the Trinity,” concluding with an account of what it means to share in the life of the Triune God. Now that he had moved beyond the argumentative preambles and into the heart of his Christ-centered vision of man, Lewis could soar. One might think another Augustine was speaking:

  Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

  Thus he completed his final assignment for the BBC—to “take some of the more abstruse theological doctrines and show what sort of difference they make, both to thought and to conduct,” as Eric Fenn had proposed. Listeners who wrote to the BBC registered strong reactions: “They obviously either regard you as ‘the cat’s whiskers,’” Eric Fenn said, “or as beneath contempt.”

  Most of the reviewers were of the cat’s whiskers persuasion. All three volumes, Broadcast Talks, Christian Behaviour, and Beyond Personality received glowing reports in such periodicals as The Times Literary Supplement, The Tablet, Time and Tide, and The Clergy Review. An October 1944 review of Beyond Personality in The Times Literary Supplement is representative: “Mr. Lewis has a quite unique power of making theology an attractive, exciting and (one might almost say) an uproariously fascinating quest.” In the July 22, 1945, issue of The New York Times, P. W. Wilson, a British journalist and Liberal MP, had this to say of Beyond Personality: “With the BBC for his pulpit … Mr. Lewis, the layman of Oxford, continues to be the major apostle of Christian faith for the man in the street…”; Wilson also accurately predicts how future critics would react to Lewis’s apostleship: “There will be those who will say of him what was said of a certain Bishop Magee—that he made religion so simple that he must be wrong…” On the other hand, George Orwell, who was ardently anti-Catholic and uneasy about Anglicanism, thought Beyond Personality a typical example of “the silly-clever religious book,” in the tradition of R. H. Benson, G. K. Chesterton, and Ronald Knox, “which goes on the principle not of threatening the unbeliever with Hell, but of showing him up as an illogical ass, incapable of clear thought and unaware that everything he says has been said and refuted before.” He found Lewis’s language insufferably patronizing with its “homey little asides like ‘you know’ and ‘mind you,’ or Edwardian slang like ‘awfully,’ ‘jolly well,’ ‘specially’ for ‘especially,’ ‘awful cheek’ and so forth. The idea, of course, is to persuade the suspicious reader, or listener, that one can be a Christian and a ‘jolly good chap’ at the same time.” In Orwell’s opinion, Lewis’s “chummy little wireless talks” succeeded because of their reactionary implications. “They are not really so unpolitical as they are meant to look.”

  The Club Is Long Overdue

  During the 1940s, as John Wain reports in his memoirs, Lewis was at the height of his fame: “People whose lives had been torn apart by war and suffering, who needed something to cling to, devoured his series of popular theological books, tuned into his broadcasts, flocked at every opportunity to hear him speak.” If the BBC talks constituted Lewis’s electronic bully pulpit, other venues supplied him with a live audience. He was in demand as a preacher (a role Tolkien considered highly inappropriate for a layman), and he was invited on a few occasions to occupy Oxford’s most visible pulpit: the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin.

  No one who saw Lewis ascend the pulpit of St. Mary the Virgin could fail to recall the storied image of John Henry Newman climbing the same elegant, narrow staircase. The similarities were not lost on the press; The Daily Telegraph called Lewis “Modern Oxford’s Newman.” Like Newman in his Anglican period, Lewis treated the sermon as a literary art, and, like Newman, he applied that art to inciting the desire for personal holiness, though Lewis would often insist that, not being a priest, he felt called upon to compare notes rather than to instruct. His sermons are really hybrids, part lecture, part homily, graced with an evangelical fervor and a philosophical economy not found in his longer, more teacherly books.

  Two of these sermons—“The Weight of Glory,” preached to a packed congregation at St. Mary the Virgin during Solemn Evensong on June 8, 1941, and “Transposition,” preached to a Congregationalist chapel at Mansfield College on the Feast of Pentecost 1944—are among the best of Lewis’s religious writings and recapitulate or anticipate nearly all his grand themes: the unquenchable desire that tells us we are made for heaven, the error of mistaking proximate for ultimate goods, the complementarity of rational freedom and trust in authority, the solemn merriment that characterizes Christian life, and the realization that “there are no ordinary people”—we are all immortals whose mortal pilgrimage will end either in the beatific or the “miserific” vision. During his Mansfield College sermon, which united under the theme of “transposition” the Incarnation, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the descent of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection of the dead, and our faltering human efforts to conceive this inconceivable splendor, Lewis suddenly found himself overcome with emotion. The choir had to sing a hymn while he collected himself before he could resume speaking.

  There was another forum, however, in which Lewis could engage in cheerful, manly, sunlit combat with adversaries of the faith. In late 1941, Stella Aldwinckle, chaplain to women students at Oxford, posted a notice at Somerville College, one of the first women’s colleges at Oxford, inviting “all atheists, agnostics, and those who are disillusioned about religion or think they are” to meet with her in the Junior Common Room to address their concerns. From this initial gathering sprang the Socratic Club, a university-wide organization dedicated to promoting Christianity through weekly discussions—more realistically, debates—between believers and skeptics. Aldwinckle, who was reading The Problem of Pain at the time, wrote Lewis inviting him to serve as faculty sponsor and first president. He jumped at the offer, declaring that “this club is long overdue!” How could he not? The Socratic Club joined in perfect union two of his great loves: Christian witness and intellectual battle. “Those who founded it do not for one moment pretend to be neutral,” Lewis wrote in the club digest. “It was the Christians who constructed the arena and issued the challenge.” Nonetheless, he believed that the rules insured a fair fight: “We never claimed to be impartial. But argument is. It has a life of its own. No man can tell where it will go. We expose ourselves, and the weakest of our party, to your fire no less than you are exposed to ours.” It was, moreover, a fight whose weapons were those of unfettered rational dialectics: “Here a man could get the case for Christianity without all the paraphernalia of pietism and the case against it without the irrelevant sansculottisme of our common anti-God weeklies.” Usually two speakers—one Christian, one atheist—addressed a single topic (when atheists proved in short supply, as sometimes happened, Christians with differing views filled the bill). Questions and comments from the audience followed the presen
tations. Meetings were held every Monday during term, from 8:15 to 10:30 pm.

  As president, Lewis opened most of the sessions, and he served also as principal speaker or respondent over two dozen times, on topics ranging from the matter-of-fact “Christianity and Aesthetics” to the evocative “Is Theology Poetry?” (not exactly, Lewis decided; better poetry can be found outside theology’s precincts, where it does not have to contend with historical facts, yet theology includes poetry much as waking includes dreams). Lewis also brought in other Inklings to speak. Dr. Havard addressed the very first gathering, on January 26, 1942, delivering a paper with the ungainly title of “Won’t Mankind Outgrow Christianity in the Face of the Advance of Science and of Modern Ideologies?” Havard’s answer was a resounding sed contra, declaring that Christianity will endure while our confidence in science and modern ideologies will fade.

  Other speakers included C.E.M. Joad (“On Being Reviewed by Christians”—a joust with Lewis that attracted an overflow crowd), Charles Williams (“Are There Any Valid Objections to Free Love?” Answer: yes, if free love means licentiousness; no, if it means love informed by faithfulness and guided by will), Fr. Gervase Mathew, Colin Hardie, and para-Inklings like Dorothy L. Sayers (who so admired the Socratic Club that she attempted, without success, to open a London counterpart) and the Anglican theologian Austin Farrer, a friend of both Tolkien and Lewis. Still, it was Lewis’s show. To John Wain, the club was “a kind of prize-ring in which various champions appeared to try conclusions with Lewis, who week after week put on a knock-down-and-drag-out performance that really was impressive. Our time has produced no better debater … I can remember packed meetings in stifling college common-rooms where the atmosphere was positively gladiatorial.” Farrer seconds Wain on the skill of the president’s mental fisticuffs: