To make things even worse, Tolkien and Lewis faced a significant challenge over the English curriculum at Oxford in the late 1940s. For Tolkien and Lewis, there was no need to study any English literature after 1832. Yet with the austerity of the war years behind them, the Faculty of English reopened the debate. It was becoming increasingly clear that the Victorian Age had produced a massive and significant literature. Why should Oxford students not engage with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, or William Makepeace Thackeray? Or with Charles Dickens or George Eliot? Younger dons began to press the case for curriculum reform, with Helen Gardner playing a significant role as advocate for change. It became clear that the future direction of the faculty was likely to be one with which Lewis would not feel comfortable.
Yet some biographers have argued that the most significant issue Lewis had to face around this time was a challenge to his intellectual authority, issued by a rising young philosophical star, Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001). This story also needs to be told, and its implications explored.
Elizabeth Anscombe and the Socratic Club
In 1893, the Oxford Pastorate was founded by a group of evangelicals within the Church of England, with the intention of allowing Oxford undergraduates exposure to a more lively and intellectually engaging form of the Christian faith than was usually encountered in compulsory college chapel. From 1921, the Pastorate came to be based at St. Aldate’s Church, just south of Oxford city centre, close to the heart of the university. Although the Oxford Pastorate was originally both pastoral and evangelistic in its orientation, its leadership increasingly became aware of the importance of apologetic issues. How could Christians engage positively as well as critically with the major intellectual issues of the day? How could Christian students find intellectual engagement and reassurance, rather than bland spiritual platitudes?
In 1941, Stella Aldwinckle (1907–1989), the Pastorate’s chaplain for women students, decided the time had come to establish a student forum for the discussion of these issues. She came to this conclusion after a conversation with Monica Ruth Shorten (1923–1993), a student of zoology of Somerville College, who complained that churches and religious societies “just take the real difficulties as solved—things like the existence of God, the divinity of Christ and so on.” Yet people clearly needed help to understand and defend these beliefs, which could not simply be assumed as true in Oxford’s rigorously critical intellectual environment. Shorten—who went on to become an authority on the British grey squirrel—clearly saw the need for an apologetic ministry among Oxford’s students.
After hosting a series of discussions for agnostics and atheists at Somerville College, Aldwinckle decided to establish such a forum across the university as a whole. The Socratic Club was founded as an Oxford University student society. Under the rules of the university, a student club or society requires a “Senior Member”—a don who would take responsibility for the organisation. Aldwinckle initially thought that the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, a former scholar of Somerville College, might be appropriate. However, Sayers lived in London, and could not be counted on to attend regularly.540 An Oxford academic was clearly called for. But who should it be?
In a stroke of genius, Aldwinckle bypassed all the safe choices (such as college chaplains) and went straight to the man she regarded as the rising star of apologetics at Oxford—C. S. Lewis. By the time the society met for the first time in January 1942, Lewis had soared to national fame. The Socratic Club rapidly became one of the most important university societies for discussion of issues relating to the Christian faith. It met on Monday evenings during full term. Lewis, usually present, was rarely the main attraction, on average speaking only once a term. Yet his presence was formidable. The list of speakers sparkled with Oxford philosophical luminaries. Though the club was explicitly Christian in orientation, it was generous in its range of speakers. Evidence and argument were the tools of its trade. As Lewis himself put it in the first edition of the Socratic Digest:
It was the Christians who constructed the arena and issued the challenge. . . . 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.541
An interesting aspect of the Socratic Club has passed unnoticed. Its members were primarily women. Perhaps this reflects the personal influence of Aldwinckle, or its original links with Somerville College. The membership list for Michaelmas Term 1944 records 164 members, of whom 109 were from Oxford’s five all-women colleges: Lady Margaret Hall (20), St. Anne’s (19), St. Hilda’s (18), St. Hugh’s (39), and Somerville (13).542
Given Lewis’s prominent role in the club, it was natural that visiting speakers would engage with his ideas, and provoke debate with him. So when Lewis published Miracles: A Preliminary Study in 1947, it was to be expected that the themes of this book would be up for discussion and debate. The most important of these was Lewis’s assertion that naturalism is self-refuting. The basic lines of this argument are laid out in the third chapter of Miracles, titled “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist.” On 2 February 1948, a young Catholic philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, called Lewis to task over his critique of naturalism.
So what form did Lewis’s critique of naturalism take? Lewis’s argument is foreshadowed in earlier works, and can be summed up in a sentence from his 1941 essay “Evil and God”: “If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it?”543 In response to those who asserted that Christian beliefs—such as belief in God—are simply the result of environmental factors or evolutionary pressures, Lewis insisted that such approaches ended up invalidating the thought processes on which they ultimately depended. Those who represent all human thought as an accident of the environment are simply subverting all their own thoughts—including the belief that thought is determined by the environment.
Lewis’s line of thought is both suggestive and creative, and resonates with concerns expressed by “naturalist” thinkers of his day—such as J. B. S. Haldane, with whom Lewis crossed swords on several occasions. Haldane, a materialist, found himself discomfited by the following line of thought:
If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.544
Haldane here anticipates the argument that Lewis would use against this position. In Miracles, Lewis points out that if naturalism is the result of rational reflection, then the validity of that process of thought has to be assumed in order to reach this conclusion. Or, to put this another way, if all events are determined by “irrational causes,” as Lewis holds naturalism to assume, then rational thought must itself be recognised as a product of such irrational causes—which contradicts the core assumptions of the process of reasoning which is involved in reaching this naturalist position. “No thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.”545
There are some important lines of thought in this analysis. Yet a critical reader of this chapter of Miracles might (not unreasonably) draw the conclusion that it has been written in some haste. There are signs of logical shortcuts, perhaps because Lewis was so familiar with his argument that he assumed he had made it sufficiently clear to his readers. He hadn’t. If Elizabeth Anscombe had not pulled Lewis up over these weaknesses, someone else would have.
The problem did not lie with Lewis’s rejection of naturalism. Anscombe made it clear from the outset in her presentation of February 1948 that she agreed with Lewis that naturalism is untenable. Yet she did not regard his specific argument, as set out in the first edition of Miracles, as being suf
ficiently rigorous to justify this conclusion. Her main concern related to Lewis’s insistence that naturalism was “irrational.”546 Anscombe made the entirely fair point—which will probably cross the mind of any informed reader of Lewis’s original chapter—that not all natural causes are “irrational.” Anscombe rightly pointed out that many (probably most) natural causes can legitimately be described simply as “non-rational.” If rational thought is produced by natural “non-rational” causes, there is no need to doubt its “validity” for that reason—unless those causes can be shown to predispose it to false or unreasonable beliefs.
It was an uncomfortable encounter for Lewis. Yet it was clear that this chapter did require revision—not because the conclusion was wrong, but because the arguments used in reaching that conclusion were not as robust as they ought to have been. Lewis rose to Anscombe’s criticism, as if she were a kind of philosophical Inkling, and rewrote his argument in the light of her criticisms. The revised version of this chapter, first published in 1960, was retitled “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.” Apart from its first six paragraphs, the chapter was rewritten to take Anscombe’s points into account. It is much stronger intellectually, and is to be seen as Lewis’s definitive statement on this important theme.
The real significance of this slightly bruising encounter with Anscombe concerns its interpretation for the future direction of Lewis’s writing projects. Some of Lewis’s biographers, primarily A. N. Wilson, have seen this incident as signalling, perhaps even causing, a major shift in Lewis’s outlook. Having been defeated in argument, they contend, Lewis lost confidence in the rational basis of his faith, and abandoned his role as a leading apologist. They claim that his shift to writing fictional works—such as the Chronicles of Narnia—reflects a growing realisation that rational argument cannot support the Christian faith.
However, the substantial body of written evidence concerning this exchange points to a quite different conclusion. A chastised Lewis recognised the weakness of one specific argument he had deployed (a little hastily, it must be said), and worked to improve it. Lewis was an academic writer, and academic books are tested against the criticisms and concerns of colleagues until the arguments and evidence are presented in the best possible way. Lewis was already used to giving and receiving literary criticism in this way, both through the Inklings and through personal discussions with colleagues such as Tolkien.
Anscombe would have seen herself as an agent of intellectual refinement, not contradiction, for Lewis’s general position, with which she clearly felt sympathy. Lewis appears to have been taken aback at having the weakness of his argument demonstrated so publicly, and expressed unease about the incident to some of his closer friends. Yet Lewis’s embarrassment concerned the somewhat public nature of this refinement, not the intellectual process itself. The positive and beneficial outcome of Anscombe’s intervention is clearly evident in the revised version of Lewis’s argument.
There is no evidence of Lewis retreating into some kind of nonrational fideism or reason-free fantasy as a result of this encounter. Lewis’s subsequent writings continue to show a strong sense of the rational coherency of the Christian faith, and of the importance of apologetics in the contemporary cultural context. Later papers—such as “Is Theism Important?” (1952) and “On Obstinacy in Belief” (1955)—clearly show a continued recognition of the importance of reasoned argument in apologetics. Furthermore, when Lewis published Mere Christianity in 1952, he did not significantly modify the rational approach to apologetics he had developed in the broadcast talks of the 1940s, despite having the opportunity to do so.
Nor can Anscombe’s critique be seen as constituting a “tipping point,” leading Lewis to abandon rational argument in favour of imaginative and narrative approaches to apologetics. It must be recalled that Lewis had, by the time of this debate, written three substantial works of what might reasonably be called “imaginative narrative apologetics”—namely, the Ransom Trilogy (see pages 233–238). Lewis was thus already persuaded of the importance of the use of narrative and the appeal to the imagination in apologetics. As Lewis once remarked, the Ransom Trilogy, like Narnia, had its origins in images rather than ideas.
Narnia was not Lewis’s escape route from a failed rational apologetic; it was one of several strands to his approach, held together by his celebrated reconciliation of reason and imagination in the Christian vision of reality. Sadly, A. N. Wilson does not offer any compelling evidence for his suggestion that “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe grew out of Lewis’s experience of being stung back into childhood by his defeat at the hands of Elizabeth Anscombe at the Socratic Club,”547 or his amusing, but ultimately unevidenced, suggestion that Lewis based the White Witch of Narnia on Anscombe. The timing of Lewis’s weaving together of the rich imaginative threads of Narnia, like the images in Spenser’s Faerie Land, may conceivably owe something to Anscombe—but that is about as far as it goes. Lewis was writing about Narnia before Anscombe’s 1948 presentation.
Anyway, it was not a “defeat”; it was a critical evaluation of a sound argument that had been imperfectly stated, leading to its improved presentation in 1960. The Oxford philosopher J. R. Lucas presented Lewis’s arguments again in a rerun of the debate with Anscombe at a meeting of the Socratic Club in the late 1960s. His assessment of the original debate remains important:
Miss Anscombe’s argument was based on a distinction between reasons and causes, which had been drawn by Wittgenstein, and was thought to be important by Wittgensteinians. It was a distinction unknown to, and unknowable by, Lewis at the time he was writing Miracles, and dubiously relevant to his thesis.548
Lucas had no doubt about what Lewis’s problems were back in 1948, and why he succeeded against her in the later replay:
Miss Anscombe was a bully, and Lewis a gentleman, which inhibited him from treating her as she had treated him. But I had come across her in previous encounters, and had no inhibitions. So the contest was determined by the actual cogency of the arguments adduced. That is to say, I won.
10.1 A rare moment of peace. Lewis and his brother, Warnie, on holiday at Annagassan, County Louth, Ireland, in the summer of 1949. Vera Henry, Mrs. Moore’s goddaughter, owned a holiday home in the area, where Lewis and Warnie vacationed from time to time.
Lewis’s Doubts about His Role as an Apologist
While it is important to avoid exaggerations about the impact of Anscombe on Lewis in his later Oxford years, there are clear indications that she played a part in causing Lewis to rethink his role as an apologist around this time. Basil Mitchell, later Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Oxford, was a professional philosopher who succeeded Lewis as president of the Socratic Club after Lewis’s move to Cambridge. Mitchell took the view that Lewis came to believe that he was not sufficiently informed about contemporary philosophical debates—Anscombe was an expert on Wittgenstein—and decided this was now best left to the experts. He would focus on what he knew best.
Lewis’s wartime role as an apologist can be seen as a response to the needs of that era. Three straws in the wind suggest that Lewis wished to move away from a frontline apologetic role after the war. First, Lewis clearly found this draining. This point is made explicitly in his 1945 lecture “Christian Apologetics,” in which he remarks that “nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.”549 A decade later, after his move to Cambridge, Lewis again commented that apologetics is “very wearing.”550 Did Lewis see apologetics as an important episode in his career, rather than as its goal and zenith? His correspondence certainly suggests this. In fact, there are indications that he believed his writing lacked its former energy and vitality.
Lewis expresses these fears with particular clarity and force in his Latin correspondence with Don Giovanni Calabria, a remarkable Italian priest who was canonised by John Paul II o
n 18 April 1999. An Italian translation of The Screwtape Letters had appeared in 1947, and generated considerable interest.551 Calabria read this book and wrote an appreciative note to its author. Not knowing English, he wrote to Lewis in Latin. They exchanged letters in Latin from 1947 until Calabria’s death in December 1954.552 In a letter of January 1949, Lewis reveals his growing despair about his ability to write, which seemed to be in a state of collapse: “I feel that my enthusiasm for writing, and whatever flair I once possessed, have decreased.”553 Perhaps believing that the use of Latin allowed him to express himself more frankly than he might have dared if the correspondence had been in English, Lewis even went so far as to suggest that it might actually be good for him if he lost his skills as a writer: it would put an end to any vain ambitions or quests for glory. In June 1949, Lewis suffered a breakdown in his health, and was hospitalised. Four months later, his mood was still darker. It was not until late 1951 that Lewis began to regain something of his confidence and motivation. Yet the death of Walter Adams, his confessor, in May 1952, clearly caused him further distress, robbing him of a wise critic and friend.
Another reason Lewis may have backed away from his role as an apologist was an acute awareness that he had failed as an apologist towards those who were closest to him—Arthur Greeves and Mrs. Moore. Mrs. Moore remained hostile towards Christianity throughout her later life, and Greeves moved away from his somewhat austere Ulster Protestantism to an equally austere Unitarianism. And even Warnie regarded The Problem of Pain as apologetically unconvincing. How could Lewis maintain a profile as a public apologist with any integrity in the light of such private failures?
C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 27
