8.3 Broadcasting House, London, around 1950, from which Lewis’s wartime talks were transmitted. The church to the right of the picture is All Souls Church, Langham Place, which rose to fame through the ministry of John Stott (1921–2011).
We can see Lewis’s idea of “mere Christianity” being put into practice—a consensual, nonclerical, transdenominational vision of the Christian faith.471 Yet even at this stage, it was clear that Lewis’s conception of the Christian faith was rather individualist, even solitary. There was little here about the church, the community of faith, or Christianity in relation to society. Lewis depicted Christianity as something that shapes the individual’s way of thinking, and hence, way of behaving. Yet there is little sense of Christianity being embedded in the life of communities. Lewis felt completely at home talking about sin, the natural law, or the Incarnation. But he had little to say about the institution of the church—a point noted with particular concern by some Roman Catholic listeners.472
In these talks, Lewis moved from a tentative exploration of the reasonableness of faith to a more committed statement of “What Christians Believe.” These generated a considerable correspondence from listeners, which Lewis found difficult to manage, not least because so many of his most gushing admirers and trenchant critics alike seemed to expect immediate and enormously detailed personal responses to their letters.
On 13 July 1942, Geoffrey Bles published the first two series of talks with the title Broadcast Talks. Lewis contributed a short preface, which is a shortened form of the introduction to the broadcast talk on 11 January 1942, in which Lewis reintroduces himself to his listeners.
I gave these talks, not because I am anyone in particular, but because I was asked to do so. I think they asked me chiefly for two reasons: firstly, because I am a layman, not a clergyman; and secondly, because I had been a non-Christian for many years. It was thought that both these facts might enable me to understand the difficulties that ordinary people feel about the subject.473
Lewis followed this with a further series of eight talks, this time to be broadcast over the BBC Forces’ Network.474 Thanks to his experience with the RAF, Lewis was by now much more comfortable with pitching his talks at a suitable level for such an audience. Indeed, Lewis spent the week before the first talk speaking at an RAF station in Cornwall. These talks were delivered on the theme of “Christian Behaviour” on eight consecutive Sunday afternoons, from 20 September to 8 November 1942. But there was a problem. Lewis had assumed that each of the eight talks would last fifteen minutes, as in the previous series. After having drafted his talks accordingly, he then discovered that in fact he was only to be allowed ten minutes for each.475 Drastic cuts proved necessary: 1,800 words got pared down to 1,200.
Finally, after frequent requests to broadcast again, Lewis agreed to give a fourth series of seven talks on the BBC Home Service from 22 February to 4 April 1944. On this occasion, Lewis was permitted to prerecord three of the talks, each of which was published two days later in the BBC’s weekly magazine, The Listener. Lewis had pleaded to be allowed to record some talks in advance, since the talks were scheduled for transmission at 10.20 p.m., which would not allow Lewis to get back to Oxford that same evening.
By the end of the series, Lewis was a national celebrity. It was clear that the reactions of listeners varied considerably, from near-adulation to total contempt. But as Lewis pointed out to Fenn, this was a reaction to his subject matter, not him as a speaker. “It is an old story, isn’t it. They love, or hate.”476
Lewis’s four series of broadcast talks would later be reworked into the classic Mere Christianity (1952), which retains much of the structure, content, and tone of the original radio scripts. Mere Christianity is now regarded as Lewis’s finest work of Christian apologetics. In view of its importance, we shall consider it in more detail in the next chapter. But first we must consider another popular work which gained Lewis an even wider readership in Great Britain, and which triumphantly introduced him to a North American audience—the satanic parody known as The Screwtape Letters.
CHAPTER 9
* * *
1942–1945
International Fame: The Mere Christian
Lewis soared to national fame through his wartime broadcast talks, which made him one of the most recognised voices in Great Britain. Yet even while Lewis was writing his radio scripts, he was already working on another idea—one that would eventually win him international fame. The inspiration seems to have come to him during an especially dull sermon at Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, in July 1940:
Before the service was over—one cd. wish these things came more seasonably—I was struck by an idea for a book wh. I think might be both useful and entertaining. It wd. be called As One Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first “patient.”477
He wrote with enthusiasm to his brother—who was now back in England, having been safely evacuated from Dunkirk—about the idea, savouring the points he reckoned he could make. The “elderly retired devil” would be called “Screwtape.”
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
As Lewis later recalled, he “had never written anything more easily.”478 The thirty-one “Screwtape Letters”—one for each day of the month—began to appear in a weekly church magazine called The Guardian (not to be confused with the major British newspaper of the same name) on 2 May 1941.
The letters portray Hell as a bureaucracy (possibly the kind of thing that Lewis felt Oxford University was in danger of becoming). It seemed entirely natural to Lewis to depict the diabolical in terms of “the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” Lewis took great pleasure in working out the kind of advice that the shrewd Screwtape might give to the novice Wormwood about how to keep his “patient” safely out of the Enemy’s hands. The letters are packed with witty observations (particularly about wartime conditions), occasionally cruel caricatures of certain kinds of people Lewis clearly disliked, and a developing sense of religious wisdom about how to cope with life’s mysteries and enigmas.
How much are we to read into Screwtape? Does Lewis express feelings about the increasingly despotic Mrs. Moore in this work—feelings he would never have dared to express openly? For example, one of Wormwood’s “patients” is an elderly lady who is described as “a positive terror to hostesses and servants.” One of her many weaknesses is “the gluttony of Delicacy.” Whatever is offered to her never seems to be quite to her taste. Her requests may be very modest; yet they are never met, and she is never satisfied. “All she wants is a cup of tea properly made, or an egg properly boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted.”479 Yet neither maid nor family ever seems able to get it right. Something is always wrong, always lacking—and retribution on those who fail her is never far away. We know that Lewis was increasingly concerned about Mrs. Moore’s fussiness and fixations around this time. Might we see these concerns reflected here?
One of Lewis’s distinctive emphases is that literature allows us to see things in a new way. The Screwtape Letters can be seen as offering a new way of seeing traditional, sound spiritual advice, by re-presenting it within a highly original framework. Where more pedestrian preachers would encourage their congregations not to rely on their experience, Lewis inverts this perspective. Screwtape tells his apprentice to get to work on his patient’s experiences, and make him feel that Christianity “can’t really be true.” It is the perspective Lewis adopts, not the advice given, that is so innovative. Both Lewis’s spiritual wisdom and the novel manner of its presentation secured a grateful and enthusiastic readership for Screwtape.
Ashley Sampson noticed the letters in The Guardian, and drew them to the attention of the publisher Geoffrey Bles, who offered to publish the collected letters in the form of a book. The Screwtape Letters was published in February 1942. Dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien, it became a wartime bestseller. (Tolkien, by the w
ay, did not appreciate this dedication of such a lightweight work to him, particularly when he later learned that Lewis “was never very fond of it.”480)
Screwtape consolidated Lewis’s reputation as a popular Christian theologian—someone who was able to communicate the themes of the Christian faith in an intelligent and accessible way. In July 1943, Oliver Chase Quick (1885–1944), Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, wrote to William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, expressing his view that Lewis deserved to be awarded an Oxford doctorate of divinity—the highest degree Oxford could offer—in recognition of the importance of his theological writings. Quick remarked that Lewis, along with Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957), was one of the few British writers who then seemed able to “put across to ordinary people a reasonably orthodox form of Christianity.”481 This correspondence between Oxford University’s most senior theologian and the Church of England’s most senior cleric is an important testimony to Lewis’s high esteem in influential British academic and ecclesiastical circles.
When Screwtape was published in the United States a year later, Lewis was propelled to an international fame for which he was ill prepared. Here was an urbane, witty, imaginative, and thoroughly orthodox book that was—as one American reviewer put it—a “spectacular and satisfactory nova in the bleak sky.” America wanted to find out more about this new star in their religious heavens. His earlier books were quickly brought out in American editions. The BBC’s New York office contacted Broadcasting House in London, suggesting devoting more American airtime to Lewis, noting the “considerable interest” resulting from his “new approach to religious subjects.”482
Perhaps it is not surprising that the first serious academic studies of Lewis were written by American scholars. The first PhD thesis to study Lewis’s work was completed in 1948 by Edgar W. Boss, a student at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Chicago. A year later, Chad Walsh’s pioneering study C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics was published in New York.
Yet Lewis’s academic reputation at Oxford was not well served in this way. He had unwisely declared himself to be a “Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford” on the book’s title page. There was much grumbling and sniping in Magdalen’s Senior Common Room about the devaluation of the academic currency by such a rampantly populist book. Lewis won the hearts and minds of many through this book; yet he also alienated many whose support he might need if he were to secure an Oxford chair in the future.
Mere Christianity (1952)
Although Lewis had published a lightly edited version of his broadcast talks during the war, he was not entirely happy with them. These appeared as three separate pamphlets: The Case for Christianity (1942), Christian Behaviour (1943), and Beyond Personality (1944). It seemed to him that they needed to be given still greater clarity of expression and focus. They were seen by readers as being independent works, rather than the stages of an interconnected argument. Furthermore, the text of one set of talks was omitted altogether. Lewis gradually came to see how he could create a single book that developed a coherent case for Christianity, linking the material he had developed for his four sets of broadcast talks. Mere Christianity—the final version of these wartime talks—is now regarded as one of Lewis’s most significant Christian writings. Although published in 1952, the work is clearly an edited version of his wartime material, making discussion of its themes appropriate at this point in our narrative.
Lewis is often—and rightly—criticised for coming up with some strange titles for his works. His 1956 masterpiece Till We Have Faces, for example, was originally titled Bareface. Yet Lewis chose a brilliant title for his synthesis of his four sets of broadcast talks. He avoided any reference to their origin, and chose to focus instead on their subject matter. The title Mere Christianity intrigued its readers. So what did Lewis mean by this title? And why did he choose it?
Lewis found the phrase in the writings of Richard Baxter (1615–1691), a Puritan writer whom Lewis had encountered in the course of his wide reading in English literature. Writing in 1944, Lewis argued that the best remedy against the theological errors encountered in recently published books “is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (‘mere Christianity’ as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.”483
So what did Baxter mean by this curious phrase? Living through a period of tumultuous religious controversy and violence during the seventeeth century—including the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I—Baxter came to the conclusion that theological or religious labels distorted and damaged the Christian faith. In his late work Church History of the Government of Bishops and Their Councils (1681), Baxter protested against the divisiveness of religious controversy. He believed in “meer Christianity, Creed, and Scripture.”484 He wished to be known as a “meer Christian,” equating “meer Christianity” with “Catholick Christianity,” in the sense of a universal vision of the Christian faith, untainted by controversies and theological partisanship.
It is not clear how Lewis came to discover this phrase from Baxter; I have not encountered any other reference to this work of Baxter’s in Lewis’s writings from before the Second World War. Nevertheless, it clearly expresses Lewis’s own vision of a basic Christian orthodoxy, shorn of any denominational agendas or interest in ecclesiastical tribalism. It is what Lewis believed the Church of England to represent at its best—not a narrowly denominational “Anglicanism” (a notion for which Lewis had little sympathy), but the historic orthodox Christian faith as it found expression in England (for which Lewis had great admiration). As Lewis rightly pointed out, Richard Hooker (1554–1600)—often regarded as one of the best apologists for the Church of England—“had never heard of a religion called Anglicanism.”485
Lewis had no difficulty in accepting and respecting the existence of individual Christian denominations, including his own Church of England; he insisted, however, that each of these was to be seen as distinct embodiments or manifestations of something more fundamental—“mere Christianity.” This “mere Christianity” is an ideal, which requires denominational embodiment if it is to work. He illustrated this idea with an analogy that has stood the test of time remarkably well:
[Mere Christianity is] like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.486
This analogy enables us to appreciate the essential point that Lewis wished to make: that there is a notional, transdenominational form of Christianity, which is to be cherished and used as the basis of Christian apologetics; yet the business of becoming or being a Christian requires commitment to a specific form of this basic Christianity. “Mere Christianity” might take primacy over individual denominations; yet those denominations are essential to the business of Christian living. Lewis was not advocating “mere Christianity” as the only authentic form of Christianity. His argument was rather that it underlies and nourishes all those forms.
It is this “mere Christianity” that Lewis wished to explain and defend in this work of apologetics. In his 1945 lecture “Christian Apologetics,” Lewis had emphasised that the task of apologists was not to defend the denomination to which they belonged, nor their own specific theological perspective, but the Christian faith itself. Indeed, it is Lewis’s explicit commitment to this form of Christianity that has made him a figure of such universal appeal within the global Christian community.
Lewis presents himself to his readers simply as a “mere Christian,” whom they can adapt to their own denominational agendas and concerns, or can defend and proclaim as a gateway into their own specific “room,” in which there are “fires and chairs and meals.” Lewis is an apologist for Christianity; he would have been appalled to be cited as an apologist for “Anglicanism”—partly because he
disliked denominational squabbles, but chiefly because he did not believe in the conceptual extension of the “Church of England” into a global notion of “Anglicanism.”
Lewis’s works—especially Mere Christianity—generally show little inclination to become involved in denominational squabbles about baptism, bishops, or the Bible. For Lewis, such debates must never be allowed to trump or overshadow the big picture—the grand Christian vision of reality, which transcends denominational differences. It is the breadth and depth of his vision of Christianity that achieved such resonance with Catholics and Protestants alike in North America.
There is evidence that Lewis’s interest in this kind of approach developed during the early 1940s. In September 1942, while visiting Newquay in Cornwall, Lewis purchased a copy of W. R. Inge’s study of Protestantism. One phrase in that book—heavily underlined in Lewis’s copy—clearly attracted his attention: “the scaffolding of a simple and genuinely Christian faith.”487 This phrase encapsulates the essence of Lewis’s notion of “mere Christianity.”
Yet Lewis was not alone at this time in wanting to defend a form of Christianity that avoided the fussiness and pedanticism of denominationalism. In 1941, Dorothy L. Sayers—like Lewis, a lay Anglican—set out a similar vision. In the end, this foundered, having become mired in the complexities of denominational politics.488 Lewis, however, succeeded by ignoring them, speaking directly to ordinary Christians over the heads of denominational leaders. And ordinary Christians listened to him, as they listened to no other.
So how did Lewis go about defending this “mere Christianity”? His apologetic strategy in Mere Christianity is complex, perhaps reflecting the fact that four quite distinct sets of talks have been merged into a single book. What is particularly striking is that Mere Christianity does not start out with any Christian presuppositions at all. Lewis does not even list some Christian doctrines that cause people problems, and then try to defend them. He begins from human experience, and shows how everything seems to fit around core ideas, such as the idea of a divine Lawgiver, which can then be connected with the Christian faith.
C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 23
