The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  15

  MIRACLES

  Some people believe in God because they believe in miracles; other people believe in miracles because they believe in God. Lewis was the latter sort. Miracles made sense to him only after he had embraced a God who transcends the natural order. Once he became a Christian, however, he began to notice that believer and nonbeliever alike say very odd things about miracles, as if there are only two positions one can take, credulity or skepticism. In 1942, in the first of two talks on the subject for an Evensong “Voices of the Laity” series at the London church of Saint Jude-on-the-Hill, Lewis proposed a third possibility: a rational belief in miracles supported by careful philosophical inquiry.

  The following year, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote to him wondering why there weren’t any books about miracles that could help her fend off the objections of an atheist correspondent: “Has Physics sold the pass? Or is it merely that everybody is thinking in terms of Sociology and international Ethics? Please tell me what to do with this relic of the Darwinian age who is wasting my time, sapping my energies, and destroying my soul.” Lewis answered immediately with a copy of his first “Voices of the Laity” talk, and he assured Sayers that a book on the subject was in the works. He completed it in May 1945 and published it under the title of Miracles: A Preliminary Study two years later, by which time he had also produced the essay “Meditation in a Toolshed” and addressed Magdalen College (“De Futilitate”) and the Socratic Club (“Is Theology Poetry?” and “A Christian Reply to Professor Price”) on the same theme.

  Lewis’s intent in writing Miracles was not to justify indiscriminate belief in spiritual prodigies, for which a healthy skepticism can often be the better part of piety, but to defend miracles against the naturalist who automatically and hence unphilosophically rules claims of the miraculous out of court. The locus classicus for the naturalistic view that he wished to combat is the essay “Of Miracles” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. A miracle, according to Hume, is “a violation of the laws of nature,” and we can never possess evidence for such a violation strong enough to outweigh our “firm and unalterable experience” of nature’s regularity.

  But a miracle need not be seen as a violation of nature’s laws, Lewis points out; indeed, that is not how Christian philosophers have traditionally understood the matter. Rather, a miracle interrupts or invades the system of nature, without disrupting its fundamental laws. The naturalist thinks he knows in advance that such an invasion can never occur, because nature is “the whole show.” But for the supernaturalist—that is, for anyone who admits a reality beyond the system of nature—the portcullis is open. On a supernaturalist account, miracles might occur. Whether they really do is a matter for further investigation.

  Odd as it may seem at first glance, Lewis sets out to justify this supernaturalist account by an appeal, not to revelation or religious experience, but to reason alone. To the naturalist, he observes, logical thinking is a useful behavior evolved, like all behaviors, under the influence of irrational causes; as such, Lewis argues, it has no purchase on objective truth. Nothing can shield naturalism itself from being explained naturalistically, so that, judged by its own criteria, naturalism self-destructs. This, at least, is the way Lewis put it in the third chapter of the original 1947 edition of Miracles on “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist”:

  … no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such things as proofs—which is nonsense.

  It was a Chestertonian move. In Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton had similarly observed that “evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself”; more aphoristically: “the sceptics, like bees, give their one sting and die.” Lewis thought that by focusing on logical inference rather than on thought or consciousness in general, he had made the case more compelling. Barfield, for one, disagreed; in a note he inserted in his copy of Miracles (and may or may not have sent to Lewis), he expressed his doubt that a reasoning process that, as Lewis put it, “has grown up gradually since my birth and is interrupted for several hours each night” could secure our access to the supernatural. Supersensible cognition (of the sort Steiner experienced) is where one should look for evidence of the supernatural.

  Lewis’s view faced its most formidable criticism on February 2, 1948, at a Monday evening meeting of the Socratic Club, when G.E.M. (Elizabeth) Anscombe, a Catholic convert, student of Wittgenstein, and arguably the most brilliant moral philosopher of her generation, read a paper to the Socratic Club pointing out, as a fatal flaw in Lewis’s argument, his conflation of irrational with nonrational factors in belief-formation, and arguing that reasoning, considered as a process or event, can be described naturalistically without prejudice to a judgment of rational validity:

  Whether [a man’s] conclusions are rational or irrational is settled by considering the chain of reasoning that he gives and whether his conclusions follow from it. When we are giving a causal account of this thought, e.g. an account of the physiological processes which issue in the utterance of his reasoning, we are not considering his utterances from the point of view of evidence, reasoning, valid argument, truth, at all; we are considering them merely as events. Just because that is how we are considering them, our description has in itself no bearing on the question of “valid,” “invalid,” “rational,” “irrational,” and so on.

  Anscombe noted other ambiguities as well, and Lewis conceded some of them: “veridical” might have expressed his meaning better than “valid,” and “cause” should have been distinguished from “ground.” The minutes of the meeting concluded that “in general it appeared that Mr Lewis would have to turn his argument into a rigorous analytic one, if his notion were to stand the test of all the questions put to him.”

  For a 1960 edition of Miracles, Lewis made revisions with Anscombe’s criticisms in mind, changing the title of his third chapter from “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist” to “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism,” substituting “non-rational” for many occurrences of “irrational,” and clarifying the cause-effect/ground-consequent distinction. Anscombe remained unconvinced by Lewis’s arguments but noted that “the fact that Lewis rewrote that chapter, and rewrote it so that it now has these qualities, shows his honesty and seriousness.”

  As of this writing, the jury is still out on the soundness of Lewis’s “argument from reason,” as it is now called, even in its improved 1960 form, but it has its notable defenders, among them the philosopher Alvin Plantinga. While Lewis failed to consider naturalism in all its varieties, he successfully refuted naturalism of the most virulent kind—eliminative materialism. In place of this crude and unsatisfying worldview, Miracles paints a portrait of the harmony between mind and reality, and between faith and reason, that should encourage scientists and believers alike: “The rightful demand that all reality should be consistent and systematic does not therefore exclude miracles … By definition, miracles must of course interrupt the usual course of Nature; but if they are real they must, in the very act of so doing, assert all the more the unity and self-consistency of total reality at some deeper level…” This sense of a deep harmony achieved by the sovereignty of reason over nature and of God over all was what Lewis wanted most to convey, and Anscombe’s valid criticisms do not diminish this insight.

  Nonetheless, he was bruised by the debate. Derek Brewer, his student at the time, remembered Lewis speaking
of the event “with real horror”: “His imagery was all of the fog of war, the retreat of infantry thrown back under heavy attack.” Brewer also recalled hearing Dyson say, with sympathy, that Lewis “had lost everything and was come to the foot of the Cross.” Some biographers, missing the hyperbole in these descriptions, have advanced the view that Lewis was so devastated by the Anscombe affair that he abandoned apologetics and retreated into children’s fantasy. This belief has gained traction in recent years, but there are good reasons to reject it. For one thing, it does not match Anscombe’s impression. “My own recollection,” she wrote later, “is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis’ rethinking and rewriting showed he thought were accurate. I am inclined to construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of his friends—who seem not to have been interested in the actual arguments or the subject-matter—as an interesting example of the phenomenon called ‘projection.’” For another, it overlooks Lewis’s enjoyment of a good fight. When Stella Aldwinckle asked him to nominate speakers for the 1951 Socratic Club season, Anscombe was his first choice: “The lady is quite right to refute what she thinks bad theistic arguments, but does this not almost oblige her as a Christian to find good ones in their place: having obliterated me as an Apologist ought she not to succeed me?”

  The truth is, as we saw in chapter 13, Lewis had been worrying for many years about the baleful effects of apologetics upon the apologist. In The Great Divorce, completed by the summer of 1944, nearly four years before the Anscombe debate, the Teacher (George MacDonald) warns Lewis about Christians so caught up in proving God’s existence that they ignore the living God. “It is,” MacDonald says, “the subtlest of all the snares.” Lewis picked up the theme again in an address to Anglican clergy in 1945, telling his audience that “nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist.” The problem, as he saw it, was that a successful debater for Christ, aware of the flaws in his arguments, may come to see what he has defended as “spectral” and “unreal.” The only hope, Lewis said, is for the believer to turn “from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself.”

  A few remarks in Lewis’s letters might seem to support the picture of a demoralized Lewis abandoning the intellectual defense of Christianity, but they need not be so construed. Thus, in a letter to the BBC declining to participate in a series of broadcast dialogues on the evidences for Christianity, Lewis begged off by saying that “like the old fangless snake in The Jungle Book, I’ve largely lost my dialectical power.” Fatigue, the tedium that such a project would promise for anyone who has already performed in that circus, polite humor, and the wisdom of late middle age more than account for the self-deprecation. In a similar spirit, he declined an invitation to write for the American evangelical magazine Christianity Today: “My thought and talent (such as they are) now flow in different, though I think not less Christian, channels, and I do not think I am at all likely to write more directly theological pieces. The last work of that sort which I attempted had to be abandoned. If I am now good for anything it is for catching the reader unawares—thro’ fiction and symbol. I have done what I could in the way of frontal attacks, but I now feel quite sure those days are over.” The abandoned work to which he refers here is not Miracles, but a projected book of private prayers for the use of the laity. As any experienced writer knows, abandoning books when they fail to gel is no defeat but a crucial part of the creative process.

  Lewis still had a great deal of theological and philosophical writing ahead of him. Though 1948 marked the end of his most productive period in Christian apologetics, he continued to publish polemical and meditative essays expounding and defending Christian doctrine from different angles, many of which appeared in collections like The World’s Last Night, Christian Reflections, and Undeceptions (God in the Dock in the United States). In books still to come, such as The Four Loves and Letters to Malcolm, the Christian apologist is alive and well; and in Surprised by Joy he would present, under the guise of autobiography, a winning articulation of the case for theism. Miracles was a capstone, not a swan song, as Lewis himself suggested in a whimsical note to the poet and Arthurian scholar William L. Kinter in 1953: “It’s fun laying out all my books as a cathedral. Personally I’d make Miracles and the other ‘treatises’ the cathedral school: my children’s stories are the real side-chapels, each with its own little altar.” What went on in the side-chapels—The Chronicles of Narnia—will be explored in the next chapter.

  Other Friendships

  Dorothy L. Sayers was not the only woman who might have made a splendid Inkling. Sister Penelope, with her skill in Latin and Greek, her puckish humor, and her outpouring of works on Christian doctrine, each one better than the previous in Lewis’s estimation, perfectly fit the mold. An equally strong case could be made for the poet and painter Ruth Pitter (1897–1992). Pitter came within the orbit of the (future) Inklings as early as 1932, when David Cecil read her poetry collection A Trophy at Arms and dashed off a laudatory letter. “I must tell you how very beautiful I think your poems,” he wrote. “I read them last week in a fit of drab depression brought on by the condition of the world: and I cannot tell you what a ray of light spread out on my horizon to discover that someone cared still to write such firm spontaneous glowing poetry—could feel the essential normal beauties of soul & body, so freshly, so strongly, so unsentimentally.”

  At the time, Pitter was in her late thirties, a friend of Belloc, Orwell, AE, and Orage, struggling to make ends meet by comanaging a company that sold painted furniture. Her poetry was just the sort that Cecil loved, with its precise traditional forms and Christian values (later, L. P. Hartley described her poems as “closely-worked, carved like gems, and immediately intelligible,” and John Wain declared her “a poet of the full singing voice,” of the “high style”—the latter a very Inklingesque compliment). Cecil became a lifelong friend, and thanks in large measure to his support, A Trophy at Arms won the 1937 Hawthornden Prize.

  A few years later, Pitter forged her most important Inklings bond, befriending C. S. Lewis. He had first heard of her early during the war, when Cecil had showed him her poetry. Lewis had been “deeply struck,” Cecil wrote Pitter, “& went off to buy your poems.” The following year, she read The Screwtape Letters and told Cecil that the book had “excited me more than anything has done for a long time.” When she heard Lewis’s BBC broadcasts, excitement turned into something more significant:

  There were air raids at night. The factory was dark and dirty. And I remember thinking—well—I must find somebody or something because like this I cannot go on … sometime afterwards I heard the broadcast talks of C. S. Lewis, and I at once grappled them to my soul, as Shakespeare says … I had to be intellectually satisfied as well as emotionally … and I was satisfied at every point.

  The radio talks worked their magic and “driven to it by the pull of C. S. Lewis and the push of misery,” she formally entered, a few years later, the English Church.

  Thanks to the poet Herbert Palmer, a mutual friend who acted as go-between, Pitter finally met the great evangelizer at his Magdalen digs on the morning of July 17, 1946. “My visit to you has discountenanced all the gypsy’s warnings of people who say ‘never meet your favourite authors,’” she wrote happily to her new friend that evening. He replied a few days later, having just read A Trophy of Arms: “I was prepared for the more definitely mystical poems, but not for this cool, classical style … I meant to send you something of mine but I shan’t. It all sounds like a brass band after yours … Why wasn’t I told you were as good as this?” Five days later he did mail her a handful of his own poems, confessing that he had doubts about their value: “I know (or think) that some of these contain important thought and v. great metrical ingenuity … But are they real poems or do the content and the form remain separable—fitted together only by force?” Pitter assured him that they were indeed real; to a friend she remarked that she hadn’t known that poet
ry (in any language!) could blend such metrical brilliance and deep thought. Lewis was “greatly relieved” by her assessment—he was far more assured of his skill with prose than with poetry—and admitted that “I often lust after a metre as a man might lust after a woman.”

  This satisfying round of congratulations and assurances initiated one of the significant artistic friendships of Lewis’s life. He and Pitter exchanged scores of letters and met dozens of times. He visited her at home in Chelsea, invited her to lectures and debates, and introduced her to other Inklings, including Warnie, Barfield, and Dyson—but never, of course, to an official Inklings meeting, the prohibition against women remaining unbreachable. During their lunches, the two friends discussed faith, fellow writers, what to read, and what to write. Their correspondence flourished. Lewis’s letters, less confessional than those to Sister Penelope, combine banter with serious reflections on a variety of topics, including the fall of the angels, the beauties of nature, and the space romances of David Lindsay. They couldn’t stop talking about poetry: “The important thing is that we put the individual poet firmly in his place,” Lewis said. “He is not the creator, only the mother, of something whose father is the Universe or Time.” He continued to seek Pitter’s advice on his verse, on at least one occasion sending her two versions of a poem (“Two Kinds of Memory”) and asking which she preferred. If she had said neither, he would have agreed, for he still doubted that his poems were “real” and wondered whether her praise came from “kindness and liking for my prose work.” Pitter later saw the legitimacy of Lewis’s qualms; he had the tools of a poet, but his obsession with technique hampered his expression. “Did he ever,” she mused, “catch some floating bit of emotional thistledown & go on from that?”