Mere Christianity does not set out to provide deductive arguments for the existence of God. As Austin Farrer perceptively remarked of The Problem of Pain, Lewis makes us “think we are listening to an argument,” when in reality “we are presented with a vision; and it is the vision that carries conviction.”489 This vision appeals to the human longing for truth, beauty, and goodness. Lewis’s achievement is to show that what we observe and experience “fits in” with the idea of God. His approach is inferential, not deductive.
For Lewis, Christianity is the “big picture” which weaves together the strands of experience and observation into a compelling pattern. The first part of Mere Christianity is entitled “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.” It is important to note this carefully chosen term clue. Lewis is noting that the world is emblazoned with such “clues,” none of which individually proves anything, but which taken together give a cumulative case for believing in God. These “clues” are the threads that make up the great pattern of the universe.
Mere Christianity opens—as did the original broadcast talks—with an invitation to reflect on two people having an argument. Any attempt to determine who is right and who is wrong depends, Lewis argues, on recognition of a norm—of some standard which both parties to a dispute recognise as binding and authoritative. In a series of argumentative moves, Lewis first contends that we are all aware of something “higher” than us—an objective norm to which people appeal, and which they expect others to observe; a “real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.”490
If there is a God, this would provide a firmer foundation for the deep human instinct and intuition that objective moral values exist, and a defence of morality against more irresponsible statements of ethical relativism. God, for Lewis, is made known through our deep moral and aesthetic intuitions:
If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves.491
Although everyone knows about this law, everyone still fails to live up to it. Lewis thus suggests that “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” consists in our knowledge of a moral law, and an awareness of our failure to observe it.492 This awareness ought to “arouse our suspicions” that there “is a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong.”493 Lewis suggests that this points to an ordering mind governing the universe.
The second line of argument concerns our experience of longing. It is an approach that Lewis had earlier developed in his university sermon “The Weight of Glory,” preached at Oxford on 8 June 1941. Lewis reworked this argument for the purposes of his broadcast talks, making it much easier to understand. The argument can be summarised like this. We all long for something, only to find our hopes dashed and frustrated when we actually achieve or attain it. “There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.”494 So how is this common human experience to be interpreted?
Lewis initially notes two possibilities that he clearly regards as inadequate: to assume that this frustration arises from looking in the wrong places, or to conclude that further searching will only result in repeated disappointment, so that there is no point in bothering to try and find something better than the world. Yet there is, Lewis argues, a third approach—to recognise that these earthly longings are “only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage” of our true homeland.495
Lewis then develops an “argument from desire,” suggesting that every natural desire has a corresponding object, and is satisfied only when this is attained or experienced. This natural desire for transcendent fulfillment cannot be met through anything in the present world, leading to the suggestion that it could be satisfied beyond the present world, in a world towards which the present order of things points.
Lewis argues that the Christian faith interprets this longing as a clue to the true goal of human nature. God is the ultimate end of the human soul, the only source of human happiness and joy. Just as physical hunger points to a real human need which can be met through food, so this spiritual hunger corresponds to a real need which can be met through God. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”496 Most people, Lewis argues, are aware of a deep sense of longing within them, which cannot be satisfied by anything transient or created. Like right and wrong, this sense of longing is thus a “clue” to the meaning of the universe.
This might seem to suggest that Lewis is portraying Christianity in terms of “rules” or “laws,” losing sight of such central Christian themes as a love for God or personal transformation. This is not the case. As Lewis pointed out in his study of Milton’s Paradise Lost, an understanding of virtue is shaped by a vision of reality. We must never think that Milton “was inculcating a rule when in fact he was enamoured of a perfection.”497 For Lewis, a love of God leads to behavioural adaptation, in the light of (and in response to) the greater vision of God that is grasped and enacted through faith.
In his arguments from both morality and desire, Lewis appeals to the capacity of Christianity to “fit in” what we observe and experience. This approach is integral to Lewis’s method of apologetics, precisely because Lewis himself found it so persuasive and helpful a tool for making sense of things. The Christian faith provides a map that is found to “fit in” well with what we observe around us and experience within us.
For Lewis, the kind of “sense-making” offered by the Christian vision of reality is about discerning a resonance between the theory and the way the world seems to be. This is one of the reasons why Lewis was so impressed by the Christian view of history as set out in G. K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man (1925): it seemed to make sense of what actually happened. Though Lewis used surprisingly few musical analogies in his published writings, his approach could be described as enabling the believer to hear the harmonics of the cosmos, and realise that it fits together aesthetically—even if there are a few logical loose ends that still need to be tied up.
Lewis often emphasised that his own conversion was essentially “intellectual” or “philosophical,” stressing the capacity of Christianity to make rational and imaginative sense of reality. We find perhaps the fullest and most satisfactory statement of this “sense-making” approach at the end of his 1945 essay “Is Theology Poetry?” Here Lewis affirms God as both an evidenced and an evidencing explanation, using the analogy of the sun illuminating the landscape of reality. After noting the ability of Christian theology to “fit in” science, art, morality, and non-Christian religions, he declares, in a concluding statement, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.”498
It is easy to criticise Mere Christianity on account of its simple ideas, which clearly need to be fleshed out and given a more rigorous philosophical and theological foundation. Yet Lewis wrote for multiple audiences, and it is quite clear whom Lewis envisaged here as his audience. Mere Christianity is a popular, not an academic, book, which is not directed towards a readership of academic theologians or philosophers. It is simply unfair to expect Lewis to engage here with detailed philosophical debates, when these would clearly turn his brisk, highly readable book into a quagmire of fine philosophical distinctions. Mere Christianity is an informal handshake to begin a more formal acquaintance and conversation. There is much more that needs to be said.
Yet there are many points in Mere Christianity at which Lewis is open to legitimate criti
cism, and it is important to note some of them. The most obvious concern is Lewis’s notion of the “trilemma,” which he deploys in his defence of the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. For Lewis, the notion that God was fully disclosed in Christ was of landmark significance. As he wrote to Arthur Greeves—a critic of this view—in 1944:
The doctrine of Christ’s divinity seems to me not something stuck on which you can unstick but something that peeps out at every point so that you’d have to unravel the whole web to get rid of it. . . . And if you take away the Godhead of Christ, what is Xtianity all about? How can the death of one man have this effect for all men which is proclaimed throughout the New Testament?499
Yet many feel that Lewis’s defence of this doctrine in Mere Christianity lacks the vibrancy and conviction that are found elsewhere in his writings. The so-called “trilemma” is proposed by Lewis as a way of eliminating false trails in making sense of Jesus of Nazareth. Where is he to be located on a conceptual map? After reviewing some of the issues, Lewis reduces the field to three possibilities: a lunatic, a diabolical figure, or the Son of God.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would 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.500
It’s a weak argument. Lewis offered a considerably longer discussion of this point in the original broadcast talks, which he pruned down drastically as he revised it for publication. The original form included discussion of other options, and was much less trenchant than the abbreviated discussion in Mere Christianity. Many Christian theologians might argue that Lewis here failed to account for the concerns of more recent New Testament critical scholarship, and that his simplified argument could easily backfire under the light of a more critical reading of the Gospels.
Yet the main problem is that this argument does not work apologetically. It may well make sense to some Christian readers, who already know why they have come to this conclusion, and are glad to have Lewis reinforce their position. Yet the inner logic of this argument clearly presupposes a Christian framework of reasoning. It would not necessarily make sense to Lewis’s intended audience of nonbelievers, who might—to give one obvious example—suggest the alternative possibility that Jesus was a well-loved religious leader and martyr whose followers later came to see him as divine. The option that Jesus was someone who was not mad or bad, but was nevertheless wrong about his identity, needs to be considered as a serious alternative. Lewis, normally so good at anticipating objections and meeting them carefully, seems to have misjudged his audience at this point. The whole section cries out for expansion, and more careful qualification.
Another problem concerns the “datedness” of the material in Lewis’s broadcast talks, much of which is incorporated unchanged in Mere Christianity. Lewis’s analogies, turns of phrase, envisaged concerns, and manner of engaging his audience are all located in a vanished world—to be precise, a southern English middle-class culture during the Second World War. Yet it is not unfair to point out that the modern reader’s difficulties often reflect Lewis’s success as a communicator in the 1940s. By embedding his “translation” of the Christian faith so well in this one specific world, now passed, Lewis has to some degree implicitly forfeited the ability to achieve a comparable degree of success with other worlds, present or future.
Yet the aspect of Mere Christianity perhaps most difficult for twenty-first-century readers is Lewis’s code of social and personal ethics, particularly his assumptions about women. These are deeply embedded in the bedrock of a social order that has long since disappeared. Even when seen in the light of those standards, some of Lewis’s statements seem somewhat peculiar. Consider, for example, the following ill-judged remarks.
What makes a pretty girl spread misery wherever she goes by collecting admirers? Certainly not her sexual instinct: that kind of girl is quite often sexually frigid.501
I recall a conversation with a colleague about these two sentences some years ago. We had a copy of Mere Christianity open at the appropriate page. “Why did he write that?” I asked, pointing to the first sentence. “How could he know that?” he replied, pointing to the final part of the second.
Lewis’s assumption that his readers will agree with—or at least acknowledge the merits of—his views on such matters as marriage and sexual ethics may well have been justified in Britain during the 1940s and early 1950s. Yet the massive changes in social attitudes following the upheavals of the 1960s now make Lewis seem very dated to secular readers. If Mere Christianity is indeed a work of apologetics, intended to communicate the Christian faith to those outside the churches, it must be recognised that Lewis’s social and moral assumptions now pose a significant barrier to the book’s intended readership. This is not necessarily a criticism of Lewis as a writer, or of Mere Christianity as a book. It is simply an observation of the implications of rapid social change for the later reception of Lewis’s ideas as they are expressed in this work.
Conservative though Lewis’s views on marriage were, they seemed to be hopelessly liberal to Tolkien. Lewis drew a sharp distinction between “Christian marriage” and a “state marriage,” holding that only the former made a demand for total commitment.502 (It was a distinction that Lewis would later invoke when marrying Joy Davidman in a civil marriage at Oxford’s Register Office in April 1956.) For Tolkien, this amounted to a betrayal of any Christian notion of marriage. He penned a scathing critique of Lewis at some point in 1943, but never sent it.503 Yet the reader is left in no doubt that a wide gulf was opening between Tolkien and Lewis. Personal distance was being supplemented by a disagreement on a matter of deep personal importance for Tolkien.
Other Wartime Projects
By the time Mere Christianity was published in 1952, Lewis had established a significant following in Great Britain—and a growing reputation in the United States—as an apologist. His success in this field overshadowed his other significant achievements of the wartime era. Three lecture series are of particular importance: the Ballard Matthews Lectures in Bangor, Wales; the Riddell Memorial Lectures at the University of Durham; and the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge. Each merits brief comment.
On the evening of Monday, 1 December 1941, Lewis delivered the first of his three Ballard Lectures on the themes of Milton’s Paradise Lost at the University College of North Wales, on a hillside overlooking the Welsh coastal town of Bangor. He saw these three lectures, given over three successive evenings, as a “preliminary canter” to a more substantial book.504 This larger (although still comparatively brief) work appeared in October 1942 from Oxford University Press, titled A Preface to “Paradise Lost,” dedicated to Charles Williams. It remains a classic study, and still features prominently on reading lists for Milton’s masterpiece.
Lewis clearly positions this book as an introduction to Paradise Lost (first published in 1667) for those who would otherwise find it forbidding, unapproachable, or simply incomprehensible. The first half of the book deals with general questions, before addressing specific themes in the work. The first question, Lewis declares, is to determine what sort of work this is: “The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used.”505 For Lewis, Paradise Lost is an epic poem, which demands that we read it as such.
Yet Lewis’s real concern soon becomes clear. Although focussed on Milton’s classic work, Lewis engages a question that is of universal significance: Is there an “Unchanging Human Heart” beneath Milton’s classic and all other works of literature? Lewis makes it clear that he wishes to challenge the idea that:
. . . if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from [Sir Philip] Sidney his code of honour, from Lucretius his Epicurean philosophy, and from all who have it
their religion, we shall find the Unchanging Human Heart, and on this we are to concentrate.506
This means, Lewis argues, that the reader of a literary work tries to eliminate its specifics, “twisting” the work into a shape the poet never intended.
Lewis argues that this is unacceptable. It detaches a text from its historical and cultural roots; it gives a “false prominence” to elements of the text which are seen to offer “universal truth”; and it dismisses as irrelevant those portions of the text which are not seen to speak to our own day. Instead, Lewis argues, we must allow the text to interrogate and expand our experience. Rather than trying to get rid of a medieval knight’s suit of armour so that he becomes just like us, we should try to find out what it is like to wear that armour. We should set out to explore what it would be like to adopt the beliefs of Lucretius or Virgil. Literature is meant to help us see the world through other spectacles, to offer alternative ways of understanding things. As we shall see, this theme becomes prominent in the Chronicles of Narnia.
Two years after giving the Ballard Matthews Lectures, Lewis delivered the Riddell Memorial Lectures at the Newcastle upon Tyne campus of the University of Durham on three consecutive evenings, 24–26 February 1943.507 These remarkable lectures were published as The Abolition of Man in 1943 by Oxford University Press. Lewis here argues that contemporary moral reflection has been undermined by a radical subjectivity—a trend he discerns within contemporary school textbooks. In response to this development, Lewis calls for a renewal of the moral tradition based on “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”508
C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 24
