C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  Lewis, for his part, had his own private world which he did not share with the Inklings. There was the whole, and very important, world of his friendship with animals. A large part of his pleasure derived from walking holidays, when he could put Oxford, college politics and the routines of work behind him. There were many such tours in the pre-war years, often taken with Barfield, sometimes with Warnie, sometimes both. Between 2 January and 6 January 1939, for example, the brothers walked forty-two miles in the Welsh Marches (i.e. borders – from the Old English mean), and rounded them off with a stay in Great Malvern. The trip awakened many boyhood memories, and Warnie remarked that they might do worse than spend their declining years there. Jack readily agreed. It was a peculiar exchange to take place between men in full vigour, aged forty and forty-four respectively. It is as though they could not wait to sink into a dotage spent in permanent contemplation of their childhood. The in-between bits – what some call life – seemed by such standards to be so much waste of time, which they could not be done with fast enough. To beguile some of the time in Malvern, they went to the cinema. The Lewis brothers were not great cinema-goers, and there were few films in the 1930s which they viewed with enjoyment. Noel Coward’s Cavalcade, for example, though Jack could see its merit, struck him as fundamentally cheap, ‘a mere brutal assault on one’s emotions, using material which one can’t help feeling intensely. It appeals entirely to that part of you which lives in the throat and chest, leaving the spirit untouched.’ A film which apparently did touch the spirit was King Kong, though we do not know whether Jack found it quite as exciting as Warnie did: ‘There were astounding represen-tations of the various prehistoric monsters,’ Warnie confided breathlessly to his diary. ‘How they were done I cannot imagine … ’

  For their third cinematic adventure of the decade (unless one counts the showing of George V’s funeral), they booked tickets at the cinema in Great Malvern to see Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It turned out to be ‘first rate … It was well worth going to if only for the scene of the spring cleaning of the dwarfs’ house. We came out into a lovely night: the effect of the quiet town, in the moonlight, with the snowclad hills behind is one that I shan’t soon forget,’ wrote Warnie. It was an evening of blissful happiness for Jack’s brother, a return to boyhood, those beloved ‘Malvern days when it was just the two of us against the P’daytabird’.11 This was the last walking holiday the two brothers were ever to take together.

  Warnie, though he was by all accounts a most delightful and courteous companion, was a clear case of arrested development. Emotionally, he was imprisoned in his boyhood, the only difference being that the whiskey bottle was substituted for cream buns and lemon pop as the greatest imaginable treat. With Jack, however, things were less simple; we come once more to Barfield’s worry that there was something affected about the younger brother’s attitudes and poses. Certainly, there is no inherent virtue in having read all the latest books, nor in following intellectual fads and trends. But if, as William Empson (no ally) believed, Lewis was ‘the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read’, there is something a little disappointing in such a man rejoicing in the limitations of his sympathy. On one level, it is quite a good joke in the decade of Brecht’s Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan to be relishing the washing-up scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; in the decade of Sartre’s La Nausée and (as far as English publication was concerned) Joyce’s Ulysses, to be whooping with delight at the reprint of Adventures of Tom Pippin by Roland Quiz.12 Where this is born of genuine enthusiasm, well and good. But Lewis’s friends sensed, from this period onwards, something which had begun half as a tease hardening into an attitude. David Cecil, an omnivorous and generous-hearted reader, was almost always unable to persuade Lewis to like books written by ‘moderns’. Although Lewis had read Kafka and Virginia Woolf, the virtues of Proust or D. H. Lawrence or T. S. Eliot were virtues he delighted in being unable to see. One starts to sense this position calcifying into something more like the outlook of a crusty old gentleman in a club.

  Among colleagues who were less polite than David Cecil, or in a more intellectually stimulating domestic setting, Lewis would not have been able to get away with this not unmannered conservatism. It would have been pointed out to him that, whatever his personal tastes, he ought, as a teacher of literature, to have been aware of the developments which had taken place in the history of taste since the death of Captain Marryat. As it was, Lewis could continue, rather smugly and self-indulgently, to pursue his own tastes and harden his own prejudices.

  One sees the sort of lifestyle he pursued at this date in a letter to Arthur Greeves of Easter 1937:

  ‘We have had rather an unfortunate spring. First of all a maid got flu’ just before she was leaving and had to be kept on as a patient for several weeks. Then I got flu’. Then as I was getting better Paxford (that is our indispensable fac-totum [sic] … ) got flu’. Then I had a grand week end doing as much as I could of his work and the maid’s until I got flu’ again … Then Warnie got flu’ and was rather bad. However we have come through it all and seem pretty cheery now.13

  In such a manner Lewis, with what must have been an element of gleeful self-consciousness, shut himself off from one essential ingredient of the academic life – that is to say, from the rational disagreement of his peers. He was, from now on, to live the rest of his intellectual life among ‘cronies’, or people who liked to talk of domestic trivia. On the rare occasions when he dared to confront his intellectual equals in public debate, he did not always come off well.

  One could argue that this does not ‘matter’. But it is hard to ignore the fact that it was at this period, when a carapace of intellectual laziness was hardening upon him, that he chose to enter the area in which he was to become so famous, that of religious apologetics.

  Ashley Sampson was the owner of a small London publishing house, which ran a series called ‘Christian Challenge’. Knowing of Lewis’s philosophical training and Christian sympathy, and admiring his two published prose works, he asked if Lewis would be prepared to undertake a 40,000-word contribution to the series. The subject proposed was The Problem of Pain. As Lewis tells us in the preface to the published version of this book, his initial reaction was to wish for anonymity, ‘since if I were to say what I really thought about pain, I should be forced to make statements of such apparent fortitude that they would become ridiculous if anyone knew who made them*. Sampson, however, insisted that Lewis should put his name to anything which was written, and in the course of 1939 he set to work. The book was finished and completed the following year. It is a book which vigorously displays, from its opening paragraphs, all Lewis’s strengths and weaknesses as a religious apologist.

  Most disconcerting, to those who love The Discarded Image, is the apparent cheerfulness with which he abandons the depth and range of his historical imagination in favour of a style of rhetoric which seems more reminiscent of the Belfast police courts. What is so troubling is that the Discarded Image Lewis is there beside the bullying rhetorician, and we do not know which of them is going to speak next. ‘Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without Chloroform.’ That is The Discarded Image self, usefully prodding our imaginations into seeing things from a proper perspective. And this self, in the introductory chapter, is surely right to suggest that moral sense and a sense of the numinous do not come naturally – as some anthropological dismissals of religion might suggest – from some crude pre-scientific attempt to explain the universe. The universe, viewed in those pre-chloroform days, was dark and painful and horrible, and wherever else the human race derived its image of a loving, moral creator, it was not from a simple contemplation of nature. But then comes a statement about Christ which seems to emanate not from a rational clever man trying to help us to understand things more clearly, but from a rhetorical trickster who is not thi
nking at all.

  There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be one with the something which is at once the awful haunter of Nature and the giver of the moral law. The claim is so shocking – a paradox and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly – that only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way. If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable, then you must submit to the second.14

  Since a version of this argument was repeated in his broadcast talks and made a linchpin of Lewis’s defence of Christianity, it may be profitable to lay down our books for five minutes as he urged us to do when thinking of a world without chloroform and meditate on what he has laid before us.

  Let us keep our meditation simple by discounting various facts which do not seem to have crossed Lewis’s mind at this point: the fact, for example, that most of Christ’s Jewish contemporaries did not believe in His divinity or join the newly founded Christian Church or sect. Did Lewis therefore suppose that they were all very stupid, or damnably wicked? Neither alternative is particularly probable or palatable.

  Let us concentrate rather on the last sentence of the paragraph quoted and work our way back through the foregoing non sequiturs. ‘If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable … ’

  The Discarded Image is a book which was written by a man with an unusual sensitivity to the differences between past and present. The men and women of the past saw the same physical universe that we did, but their way of seeing it was quite different; their way of describing it in written form more different still. This does not mean that the old books can provide us with no concrete evidence from the past, but it does mean that old books must be read with delicacy; with a sense that if we go blundering into them, assuming that they mean what we mean by words like sky, earth, history or nature we shall get everything wrong. If we read the book in their way – whether we are reading Dante, or Chaucer, or Isadore of Seville – we will get something from it. The more we soak up their way of looking at things, their method of understanding, the more we shall get. Read it in our way and we shall merely be, as Lewis says in the preface to The Discarded Image, like ‘travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English tourists, enjoy all they see for its “quaintness” and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards mean to the natives’.15 As an apologist, he seems totally blind to the fact that the New Testament is just such a collection of old books, which require, if we are to understand them aright, patience and a willingness to listen to scholars who have meditated for a long time on the nature of the (often quite puzzling and contradictory) material which they contain.

  Lewis’s claim that ‘the records’ give us a stark choice about Christ – either he was a ‘raving lunatic’ or else ‘He was, and is, precisely what He said’ – is startling, to say the least. To what ‘records’ is he referring? Different books of the New Testament have different ways of describing the indescribable, that is, the nature of Christ, and the first three centuries of Christendom are a history of ceaseless dispute among the most learned doctors of the Church as to what this nature was, and how it was made manifest during the period of the Incarnation. This is not to deny the truth of orthodox Christian belief. It is to point out that there is nowhere in existence a set of ‘records’ which could prove that Christ was either a lunatic or ‘precisely what He said’ He was. The Epistles of St Paul and the Apocalyptic Book of Revelation contain many high and mystical expressions of belief about Christ but they cannot be described as ‘records’ of the kind which would compel rational belief. If they were, the world would simply be divided into a majority of believing Christians and a small handful of people who were either too stupid or too wicked to accept something which was obvious and clear-cut. But the nature and being of Christ are not made obvious and clear-cut even in the pages of the New Testament. Even if we accept only the four gospels as ‘the records’ for the purposes of Lewis’s argument, we have to see that they present a differing picture. The Fourth Gospel, for example, does not lie when it puts into the mouth of Christ words, and whole patterns of speech, which we do not find on His lips in the first three gospels. But it does, by this convention, proclaim itself to be a book of a special kind, one designed to proclaim what the faithful believe about Christ, not necessarily a book which is straight narrative history in the modern mode. The first three gospels contain no reference to Christ’s having made any such great discourses as fill chapters 13-16 of St John, and since it seems unlikely that the author of the Gospel took notes during the utterance of this sublime discourse, we have to assume them to be a literary creation. Not a lie, but a creation of what the author believed to be more true than verbatim records.

  It follows that behind every statement we make about the historical Jesus there has to be a tacit qualification: ‘We are told this by such-and-such an evangelist, writing in a particular literary mode, for a particular audience, in a particular place at a particular period of history.’ You cannot, in isolation from church doctrine, and in isolation from the plain facts of literary history, say that Jesus said this thing or that thing. If you do, you find yourself faced with unedifying alternatives such as those which Lewis proposes. All we have is what the Gospels say that He said. Precisely what these differing accounts mean by such phrases as ‘Son of Man’, or even ‘Son of God’, cannot be translated into our own modern thought processes without some Discarded Image-style readjustments of sympathy. And besides that, we discover in the various Gospels quite differing accounts of the earthly Christ’s reticence about Himself. The famous ‘secrecy’ of the Messiah in St Mark’s Gospel, for instance (‘See thou say nothing to any man’), does not really fit into either of Lewis’s categories of raving lunatic or self-proclaimed Divinity.

  The curious thing is that Lewis, though so very widely read in other areas, had read almost no works of biblical scholarship. The revolution in New Testament scholarship which had come about during the hundred years before he wrote The Problem of Pain appears to have passed him by. Perhaps in one sense it does not matter that he ignored the sometimes vandalistic assaults on the gospel texts by Form-critics and Redaction-critics; just as it could be seen not to matter that the school of philosophy in which he was reared had been rendered more or less obsolete by the man who – in the year that Lewis was writing The Problem of Pain – had become a professor of philosophy at Cambridge: Ludwig Wittgenstein. What is so odd, though, is that Lewis was tempted to argue the faith, to analyse and defend it in a manner at once so roughshod and so cerebral when it had come to him by quite other means. The philosophy of Wittgenstein did not destroy the faith – it destroyed certain methods of nineteenth-century Idealist argument. The new biblical critics did not destroy the faith: they merely forced on intelligent people the distinction between history and church doctrine. Neither philosophy nor textual criticism, however, had led Lewis to the faith. He had been led to it by his experience of the numinous, and by the exercise of his imagination. Above all, he had been led to it by the discovery that story, myth, could not only carry truth, but also be truth. Surely the corollary of his great ‘mythopoeia’ discussion with Dyson and Tolkien was that the story of Christ was much more important than any doctrine which a fallible or fallen human mind could extract from it? Trying to define, or speaking as if it were possible to define, ‘precisely what He meant’ by saying who He was, was a sort of profanity.

  Yet of course it was not meant profanely. The Problem of Pain was written with the best of intentions. Lewis felt that he must put all his talents to the service of God. This led him to suppose that his capacity to argue a case was a talent which, quite as much as his imagination and his literary taste, must be consecrated. And in the context of the time, there was a sort of heroism in this. Lewis was fully aware of th
e fact that there was a purely irrational intellectual snobbery abroad in England at that time, more powerful than any genuine intellectual stumbling-block to faith. When one sees that it was this snobbery which he set out to attack, it is possible to understand why he set about the delicate problem of pain in so breezy a fashion. Similarly, when one reads the dedication of The Problem of Pain – ‘to the Inklings’ –one understands some of its short-cuts, as well as some of its more peculiar turns of phrase (e.g. of the Incarnation – ‘It has the master touch – the rough, male taste of reality.’). This was a book which began life as chapters to be read aloud to like-minded male friends. It was brief, pithy and, like everything Lewis wrote in prose, hugely readable. None of that small band of men who sat round smoking and drinking their beer or whisky could have had any idea, as they heard Jack vigorously defending the doctrine of hell in nine pages, that the publication of these religious speculations, pieced together at a busy time between giving lectures and examining, was to change his destiny forever. They would certainly have been completely astonished to learn, as would the author, that The Problem of Pain would become a great commercial success. By the time it came out, in any case, all their lives had been irrevocably altered by the progress of world events.