C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  The best overall summary of Lewis’s impact as a lecturer with the Royal Air Force comes from Charles Gilmore, the Commandant of the Chaplains’ School, who was to see Lewis often during the war. In a letter to the authors of 4 November 1972, he said:

  Lewis was a distinct success in the Royal Air Force but, as I should judge, within a limited sphere. The larger stations contained a sufficient number of men (and women) both interested in what he had to say and capable of appreciating it. Thus Halton, Cranwell, Hereford, Locking provided him with audiences not so different in intellectual capacity from those which filled the Examination Schools in the High, but at the average station he would speak to an audience of a dozen or so – perhaps none the worse for that …

  Lewis came to lecture at the Royal Air Force Chaplains’ School in its early days at Magdalene College, Cambridge (1944). This is the College where ten years later he was to hold a professorial Fellowship. I well remember his first lecture to the chaplains on a refresher course. Some had returned from the field, others were nightly seeing off crews who did not return; many were shaken in the concept of their calling, others were finding it for the first time. Action at levels heroic and very raw seemed all-important; theology had been evacuated to safe reception areas, and Nicea was the mythological capital of cloud-cuckoo land. ‘To be young was very heaven.’33 To such a crowd came Clive Staples Lewis, choosing to speak on ‘Linguistic Analysis of Pauline Soteriology’! He began diffidently and seemed even to be searching for words. A few people shifted uneasily, a future bishop surreptitiously filled in a clue in The Times crossword. Then, quietly, Lewis struck fire with some intolerable phrase about redemption and everyone came alive. The rest of the morning was not really long enough to cover the subject in discussion. I recollected then that Lewis too had been a soldier and knew his audience.

  Gilmore enjoyed as well the playful side of this giant intellectual and recalls one occasion on which Lewis stayed overnight at Magdalene. The next morning, said Gilmore,

  We were both to catch a train to Town and, having an hour to spare, we strolled to the Fellows’ Garden on a beautiful summer morning. For some reason I had my brief-case with me, and after ten minutes placed it carefully on a garden seat where it would be in sight wherever we walked. I remarked that I was putting it down tenderly because it contained a full bottle of whisky, a rare treasure in those days. He remarked gravely, ‘I don’t think that to be a very safe remark. We are alone in this garden, I am bigger than you, and the inference is appalling!’ … I often saw him after that. We used to walk to the railway station from the College when we had to return to Oxford. He would bid me study again Chesterton’s Everlasting Man; would anxiously ask if the chaplains had really got it into their heads that the ancients had not got every whit as good brains as we had … He certainly made his mark on the Chaplains save on those who themselves made no mark on anyone.

  Lewis agreed to give a second series of five talks, lasting fifteen minutes each. These talks, to be called What Christians Believe, were scheduled to be broadcast from 4.45 p.m. to 5 p.m. on 11 and 18 January and 1, 8, and 15 February 1942. After reading the scripts Eric Fenn wrote to Lewis on 5 December to say, ‘They are quite first class – indeed I don’t know when I have read anything in the same class at all. There is a clarity and inexorableness about them, which made me positively gasp!’34

  What Lewis was attempting in his broadcasts on What Christians Believe was a small-scale elucidation of Christian theology: to explain as clearly and concisely as he could what Christianity is. So as to avoid saying anything that was peculiar to himself or unacceptable to the main body of Christendom, he sent the scripts to four clergymen of the Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Catholic churches asking them for their criticism. The Anglican critic was almost certainly Dr Austin Farrer, the distinguished theologian who was then Chaplain and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. The Methodist reader was the Reverend Joseph Dowell, at that time a chaplain in the Royal Air Force. The Presbyterian was Eric Fenn and the Catholic was Dom Bede Griffiths, Lewis’s former pupil, by this time a Benedictine monk at Prinknash priory in Gloucester.

  Mr Dowell thought Lewis had not said enough about faith, but years later, recalling hearing the talks over the air, he said in a letter of 2 December 1968: ‘They were magnificent, unforgettable. Nobody, before or since, has made such “impact” in straight talks of this kind. His own words to me – “I had to go like a bull at a gate” – were apt enough in that he felt he had to crash the barriers in order to get into a common field of thought and communication.’35

  Dom Bede’s letters to Lewis are now lost, but we get some idea of the complexity of the problems involved if we look at Lewis’s letter to Dom Bede of 21 December 1941. It is about the meaning of the Atonement, which Lewis was to discuss in the talk on ‘The Perfect Penitent’:

  About the scripts – I think I gave the impression of going further than I intended in saying that all theories of the Atonement were ‘to be rejected if we don’t find them helpful’. What I meant was ‘need not be used’ – a very different thing. Is there, on your view, a real difference here: that the Divinity of Our Lord has to be believed whether you find it a help or a ‘scandal’ (otherwise you’re not a Christian at all) but the Anselmic theory of Atonement is not in that position. Would you admit that a man was a Christian (and could be a member of your church) who said, ‘I believe that Christ’s death redeemed man from sin, but I can make nothing of any of the theories as to how’? … I think I could get something you and your friends would pass, but not without making the talk either longer or shorter: but I’m on the Procrustes’ bed of neither more nor less than 15 minutes.36

  The clarity of Lewis’s thought, his ability to encapsulate a great many facts into a few words, is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in these broadcasts. The second talk, entitled ‘The Invasion’, ends with this synopsis of the faith: ‘Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.’37

  The most famous example of Lewis’s inexorable logic and his ability to distil profound truth in a few words almost anyone can understand, concerns one of the longest-running heresies of all time. It is Arianism – after Arius, who died in the fourth century – which states that Jesus was not God by nature, but only a creature. Such a heresy appeals to the modern mind, which wants a manageable, democratic God. It is an issue that has taxed the mind of theologians for nearly two thousand years. Picking up from St Augustine the argument that Christ was ‘either God or a good man’, Lewis said in his chapter on ‘The Shocking Alternative’:

  I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. 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. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.38

  C.S. Lewis was now before the notice of Everyman. Hardly a week had passed since the second series of broadcasts before the BBC asked Lewis to write a third series for the autumn. This time they hoped he would give eight talks to be broadcast on Sunday afternoons from 20 September to 8 November 1942. By the end of summer 1942 The Problem of Pain was in its eighth impression and The Screwtape Letters in its sixth. Broadcast Talks, which combined the BBC series on Right and Wrong and What Christians Believe, was published on 31 July 19
42 to very high praise. ‘We have never read arguments better marshalled and handled so that they can be remembered, or any book more useful to the Christian,’ said the Catholic weekly, The Tablet.39 Martin Tindal, writing in Time and Tide, said: ‘Mr C.S. Lewis has made the kind of public return to the ancient faith which infuriates other intellectuals. If only these undeniably intelligent laymen had kept quiet about their change of direction, they might have been endurable. But they have not kept quiet.’40 ‘The author shows himself a master in the rare act of conveying profound truths in simple and compelling language,’ said G.D. Smith in the distinguished Clergy Review.41

  Lewis’s popularity with the Royal Air Force continued to grow and the BBC had soon contracted him to write the third series of broadcasts. Much as he wanted to get over to Ireland for a holiday, his sympathy for those fighting overseas made him all the more anxious to pull his own weight at home. The first two series of broadcasts had resulted in Lewis receiving an enormous number of letters, and he had developed a system that was to continue all his life, that of answering letters by return of post if at all possible.

  Warnie, having retired from the Army in 1932, wanted to make his own contribution to the war effort and he acquired a small two-berth cruiser which he named the Bosphorus – after a similar boat in the Boxen stories.42 He kept it moored at Salter’s Boatyard at Folly Bridge. When Jack wrote to Arthur on 25 May 1941 he explained that ‘Warnie has not been recalled to the Army I’m glad to say and is living in his motor boat a few miles away as part of the Upper Thames Patrol. He’s painted the boat battleship-grey and bought a blue peaked cap so as to emphasize the fact that he’s now part of the navy! Dear Warnie – he’s one of the simplest souls I know in a way: certainly one of the best at getting simple pleasure.’43 Paxford’s responsibilities had increased because they were now keeping rabbits at The Kilns, and Mrs Moore was suffering from arthritis and varicose veins.

  Lewis sent Eric Fenn the scripts of his third series – to be called Christian Behaviour – on 29 July, and he was in Cornwall addressing the Royal Air Force when Fenn wrote to him there on 15 September to say that Lewis had obviously misunderstood him. This time the talks were to be not fifteen minutes each, but ten! Exhausted, Lewis carried out a blitz on the scripts, bringing them down to ten minutes in length.

  Lewis went up to London every Sunday afternoon between 20 September and 18 November to deliver the talks on Christian Behaviour over the air from 2.50 to 3 p.m. ‘They really were, as usual, admirable,’ Fenn wrote to Lewis on 10 November, ‘and I have had very appreciative comments from people outside the Corporation about them: and to have risen to the level of a cause célèbre in the columns of the “Free Thinker”, to say nothing of the “Daily Mirror” must give you particular satisfaction.’44 As might be expected, the chapter that caused a sensation was the one entitled ‘Sexual Morality’. This chapter had been ‘leaked’ to the Daily Mirror, which infringed copyright by publishing it on 13 October under the title ‘This was a Very Frank Talk – Which We Think Everyone Should Read’. Perhaps the joke rebounded on the Mirror because those who took the paper did read it.

  One of the things which distinguished Lewis from what he called ‘Christianity-and-water’ theologians and gave his work an enduring value was his acceptance of ‘Repellent Doctrines’. He mentioned these ‘doctrines’ for the first time in ‘The Weight of Glory’ where he argued that ‘If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know.’45 The fullest treatment of ‘Repellent Doctrines’ comes in Lewis’s essay on ‘Christian Apologetics’:

  Scrupulous care to preserve the Christian message as something distinct from one’s own ideas, has one very good effect upon the apologist himself. It forces him, again and again, to face up to those elements in original Christianity which he personally finds obscure or repulsive. He is saved from the temptation to skip or slur or ignore what he finds disagreeable. And the man who yields to that temptation will, of course, never progress in Christian knowledge … Science progresses because scientists, instead of running away from such troublesome phenomena or hushing them up, are constantly seeking them out. In the same way, there will be progress in Christian knowledge only as long as we accept the challenge of the difficult or repellent doctrines. A ‘liberal’ Christianity which considers itself free to alter the Faith whenever the Faith looks perplexing or repellent must be completely stagnant. Progress is only made into a resisting material.46

  ‘Sexual Morality’ was the first ‘repellent’ element Lewis dealt with in Christian Behaviour; the fourth talk of the series, it was given on 18 October 1942. ‘Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues,’ Lewis said. ‘There is no getting away from it, the Christian rule is, “Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence”.’47 He continued that this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instincts have gone wrong. ‘Being a Christian,’ said Lewis, ‘I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong … This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.’48 There follows one of Lewis’s most delightful and trenchant examples:

  Take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act – that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?49

  The other repellent doctrine that secular humanists continually reinterpret to conform to the Spirit of the Age is, of course, Christian marriage. Lewis did not devote a talk to the subject in the original series, but he included one when revising the talks for publication as Mere Christianity and it is undoubtedly one of the most valuable chapters in the book. He began the chapter on ‘Christian Marriage’ by saying,

  The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism – for that is what the words ‘one flesh’ would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact – just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument. The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together, in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined.50

  Admitting that some churches allow divorce and others do not, Lewis believes ‘the Churches all agree with one another about marriage a great deal more than any of them agrees with the outside world. I mean, they all regard divorce as something like cutting up a living body … What they all disagree with is the modern view that it is a simple readjustment of partners, to be made whenever people feel they are no longer in love with one another, or when either of them falls in love with someone else.’51

  Lewis turned out to be a valuable pastor when, in his books and his correspondence, he warned people about placing too much trust in mere ‘feelings’. He knew of course that many people would believe they ought to leave husband or wife if they ‘fell in love’ with someone else. He admitted that

  What we call ‘being in love’ is a glorious state and, in several ways, good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it subordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality … No one in his senses would deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or col
d self-centredness. But as I said before, ‘the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs’. Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go.52

  Or, as Lewis once said to Walter Hooper, ‘Feelings come and go – but they especially go!’

  On the relationship between husbands and wives, Lewis accepted St Paul’s injunction: ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.’53 This view was almost as unpopular in the 1940s as it is today, and Lewis asked his readers to remember that if two people simply cannot agree, one must have a ‘casting vote’54 if they are to remain united. The headship of women Lewis considered unnatural and no more likely to appeal to women in general than to men in general: ‘Even a woman who wants to be the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of things when she finds it going on next door.’55

  When Lewis was preparing Christian Behaviour for publication on 19 April 1943 he restored the talks to what they had been before he was obliged to shorten them. He also added several new chapters – ‘The “Cardinal Virtues”’, ‘Charity’, and ‘Hope’, as well as the one on ‘Christian Marriage’. Most of the reviews were very laudatory and gave further evidence that Lewis had hit his target. Robert Speaight said in The Tablet:

  Mr Lewis is that rare being, a born broadcaster; born to the manner as well as to the matter. He neither buttonholes you nor bombards you; there is no false intimacy and no false eloquence. He approaches you directly, as a rational person only to be persuaded by reason. He is confident and yet humble in his possession and propagation of truth. He is helped by a speaking voice of great charm and a style of manifest sincerity.56