C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  Lewis enjoyed few things more than the rough and tumble of what he described as ‘rational opposition’. Despite the seriousness of the issues at stake, blows were given and received with good humour on both sides. The first speaker one evening was a relativist, who is said to have ended his talk with the assertion: ‘The world does not exist, England does not exist, and I am confident that I do not exist!’ When Lewis was asked to reply, he stood and said, ‘How am I to talk to a man who’s not there?’

  On 15 November 1948 the Socratic Club had as their guest speaker the celebrated biologist Professor J.B.S. Haldane (1892–1964), whose views Lewis had frequently attacked in print. An enormous audience had gathered in the Taylorian Institute that night to hear Lewis make mincemeat of this most famous of his enemies. Professor Haldane may have feared a public defeat by Lewis. Whatever his reason, no one ever found out what would have happened. As the secretary recorded in the Socratic minute book: ‘The speaker unfortunately had to leave early and ended with an impressive running panegyric of atheism of which the last word was perfectly timed to coincide with his exit.’

  The Socratic was the most flourishing and influential society in Oxford during Lewis’s years as president. Among its many good effects, it succeeded in making Christianity both vital and interesting to scores upon scores of undergraduates and dons who otherwise might never have heard either the Faith or atheism discussed rationally. If a history of the Socratic Club ever comes to be written, it must include not only the names of Lewis and Stella Aldwinckle, but those of the many who played a part in making it one of the toughest arenas in the academic world for the discussion of religion and philosophy.*

  Shortly after those first broadcasts on Right and Wrong in which Lewis defended the existence of an objective moral or natural law, a number of papers were read to the Socratic which caused Lewis to realize how seriously its objectivity was being questioned. Consequently, when the University of Durham invited him to give the annual 1943 Riddell Memorial Lectures, the intention of which is to explore the relation between religion and contemporary thought, he chose to vindicate Natural Law from the charges brought against it.

  Besides an immense amount of reading in philosophers and educationalists from Plato to the present, Lewis spent many hours in the Bodleian poring over the mammoth Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. On 8 February 1943 he read a paper to the Socratic Club which anticipated the lectures he was to give at Durham. It is entitled ‘If We Have Christ’s Ethics Does the Rest of the Christian Faith Matter?’ and according to the secretary’s minutes, Lewis maintained that ‘Christian moral principles’ are not different from ‘moral principles’, and that the real problem is how to obey them: ‘To ask whether the rest of the Christian Faith matters when we have Christ’s ethics presupposes a world of unfallen men with no need for redemption. “The rest of the Christian Faith” is the means of carrying out, instead of merely being able to discourse on, the ethics we already know.’9

  Jack and Warnie decided to make the trip to Durham together, and they set off on 22 February, arriving there on the 24th. Having imagined Durham to be an ugly colliery-cum-manufacturing town, Warnie recorded in his diary that ‘its exquisite beauty came upon us with an impact I shall long remember’.10 From Durham they journeyed a few miles further north to Newcastle upon Tyne where the three Riddell Memorial Lectures were given on the evenings of 24, 25 and 26 February. They were published by Oxford University Press on 6 January 1943 as The Abolition of Man. It was not Lewis’s purpose here to show the relation between Christianity and morality, as he had in the Socratic paper, but to demonstrate that there is such a thing as Natural Law or, as he calls it in the lectures, the ‘Tao’ (the Way), which most men in all ages have discovered and which has been passed down like the independent testimony of a single civilization.

  In the opening lecture, ‘Men without Chests’, Lewis uses as a springboard, from which he launches his attack on those who explain away objective morality, two elementary textbooks intended for pupils in the upper forms of schools. Both books had only recently been published and, as Lewis had no wish to pillory the authors, he concealed their titles under obviously fictitious names. So many years having passed, it is not perhaps unfair to reveal that the book Lewis refers to as by one ‘Orbilius’ is E.G. Biaggini’s The Reading and Writing of English (1936). The book referred to as the Green Book by ‘Gaius’ and ‘Titius’ is The Control of Language (1940) by Alec King and Martin Ketley.

  The last two authors, in particular, appear to take it for granted that all values are subjective and trivial, and that all sentences containing a predicate of value (such as ‘This waterfall is sublime’) are merely statements about the emotional state of the speaker. By so doing, says Lewis, they destroy man’s chest – the seat of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments, and the indispensable ‘liaison officer’ between man’s head (the seat of reason) and his belly (the seat of instinct). ‘In a sort of ghastly simplicity’, says Lewis, ‘we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.’11

  He goes on in Chapter 2, ‘The Way’, to argue that the principles of the Tao are unprovable because they are as basic and obvious as axioms are to the world of theory: ‘From propositions about fact alone, no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved.’12 With the word ‘ought’ the Tao reappears through the side door and we are back where we started.

  In answer to those innovators who suggest that instinct should be the basis of morality, Lewis returns to the theme mentioned in Book I of Mere Christianity. If instinct should be the basis of morality, it is necessary to ask – which instinct? ‘Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey “people”. People say different things: so do instincts … Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest.’13

  Lewis continues that ‘Only people educated in a particular way have ever had the idea “posterity” before their minds at all … No parents who were guided by this instinct would dream for a moment of setting up the claims of their hypothetical descendants against those of the baby actually crowing and kicking in the room.’14 Again, which instinct should the innovator follow? It becomes apparent that ‘neither in any operation with factual propositions nor in any appeal to instinct’ can the innovator find the basis for a system of values.15

  Lewis brilliantly anticipates the fashionable humanists of the twenty-first century in their appeal to ‘ideologies’. No, insists the humanist, Natural Law does not exist. What we have instead are individual ‘ideologies’ which have nothing to do with one another. But Lewis was there long before they were. His ideas about the connection between Natural Law and ‘ideologies’ are one of his most important contributions to the debate. Just as there is only one Natural Law, despite there being a number of major religions, so there is only one Natural Law despite a supposed multiplicity of ‘ideologies’. Lewis insisted that the Tao or Natural Law or traditional morality is not one among a series of value judgements or ‘ideologies’. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The modern innovator, said Lewis, selects that bit of traditional morality he happens to like, isolates it from all the rest, and erects it into an unum necessarium. It becomes a kind of god unto itself. While the subjectivists say they have rejected Natural Law, this is not what has happened. What the subjectivists call their ‘ideologies’ are, Lewis insists, ‘fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation’.16

  The last chapter of The Abolition of Man begins with a consideration of what is meant by ‘Man’s conquest of Nature’. Lewis believed that such a ‘conquest’ h
ad not been without its benefits to man, and here he considers three examples – the aeroplane, the radio and the contraceptive. Regarding the first two, he believes man to be ‘as much the patient or subject as the possessor’.17 Contraception, on the other hand, is a much more serious matter because of the

  paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for his own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.18

  The picture usually painted of Man’s future is that of ‘a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power’.19 In reality, however, what any one age really attains by eugenics, scientific education – and now cloning – is ‘the power to make its descendants what it pleases’ because ‘all men who live after it are the patients of that power’.20

  The new ‘Conditioners’, as Lewis calls them, will probably see themselves as ‘servants and guardians of humanity’21 who believe they have a duty to do it ‘good’. Will they so condition the rest of us that we go on having ‘the old idea of duty and the old reactions’ to it?22 If ‘duty’ itself is on trial, how can duty help them to decide? They can’t make Natural Law – one of the things compared – the standard of comparison.

  Lewis thought some would ask why he supposed the ‘Conditioners’ to be ‘bad men’. But ‘good’ and ‘bad’ to the Conditioners are words without content. It is from them that the content of these words is to be derived. But do we not all want more or less the same things out of life? It is false, says Lewis, to say that we do. What motive will the Conditioners have in trying to give us what we want? Duty? The preservation of the species? These things come from the Tao, which cannot be valid for the Conditioner. They are not men at all, says Lewis: ‘Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.’23

  ‘It is a real triumph,’ Owen Barfield wrote to Lewis on 22 January 1944. ‘There may be a piece of contemporary writing in which precision of thought, liveliness of expression and depth of meaning unite with the same felicity, but I have not come across it.’ The book was not, of course, an instant success like The Screwtape Letters, but over the years – as the threatened ‘abolition’ seems more and more likely – it has become one of the most admired of all Lewis’s works.

  Not long after Lewis and Warnie returned from Durham, Lewis was working on not only That Hideous Strength, but another book as well, The Great Divorce. The germ of it had been maturing in his mind for some years. After his conversion in 1931 Lewis bought the Whole Works of the seventeenth-century divine, Jeremy Taylor. In Taylor’s sermon on ‘Christ’s Advent to Judgement’ he came across the idea of the Refrigerium. ‘The Church of Rome amongst other strange opinions,’ said Taylor,

  hath inserted this one into her public offices; that the perishing souls in hell may have sometimes remission and refreshment, like the fits of an intermitting fever: for so it is in the Roman missal printed at Paris, 1626, in the mass for the dead; Ut quia de ejus vitae qualitate diffidimus, etsi plenam veniam anima ipsius obtinere non potest, saltem vel inter ipsa tormenta quae forsan partitur, refrigerium de abundantia miserationum tuarum sentiat [And since we are unsure about the character of his life, even if his soul is unable to obtain full remission, let him at least feel some relief, through the abundance of thy great mercies, among whatever crushing sufferings he endures].24

  In the same sermon Taylor mentions another source of the Refrigerium – the fourth-century Latin poet and hymn-writer, Prudentius Aurelius Clemens. In his ‘Hymn for the Lighting of the Lamp’, found in his Liber Cathemerinon, he says: ‘Often below the Styx holidays from their punishments are kept, even by the guilty spirits. Hell grows feeble with mitigated torments and the shadowy nation, free from fires, exults in the leisure of its prison; the rivers cease to burn with their usual sulphur.’

  Father Jerome Bertram of the Oxford Oratory, who translated the Latin about the Refrigerium above, has said:

  The actual word refrigerium is Scriptural, occurring in the Vulgate six times, most notably in Psalm 65:12, eduxisti nos in refrigerium, ‘thou has brought us out to a place of rest’. The meaning is consistently rest or repose after the heat and turmoil of life, hence it is appropriately used in the Mass lucum refrigerii, lucis et pacis, ‘a place of rest, light and peace’ for the faithful departed … Lewis cites Jeremy Taylor who claims to have found the idea of repose from Hell in an early seventeenth-century Parisian Missal which has not been traced. However, a feature of early gallican missals was a Mass for one whose soul was in doubt, Missa pro cuius anima dubitatur, for which various formulae are cited. This Mass found its way into Italian missals in the late fifteenth century, but was eliminated in the 1570 reform of the Roman Missal.25

  The idea took hold and in his diary of 16 April 1933 Warnie said: ‘Jack has an idea for a religious work based on the opinion of some of the Fathers that while punishment for the damned is eternal, it is intermittent: he proposes to do a sort of infernal day excursion to Paradise.’26

  The relation between God, divine justice and Hell had been in Lewis’s mind since 1931 when he expressed some of these thoughts in the poems ‘Divine Justice’ and ‘Nearly They Stood’.27 Those poems appeared in The Pilgrim’s Regress, which contains a chapter entitled ‘The Black Hole’ in which John’s guide says: ‘Evil is fissiparous and could never in a thousand eternities find any way to arrest its own reproduction. If it could, it would be no longer evil: for Form and Limit belong to the good. The walls of the black hole are the tourniquet on the wound through which the lost soul else would bleed to a death she never reached. It is the Landlord’s last service to those who will let him do nothing better for them.’28

  We know that The Great Divorce was read to the Inklings as it was being written. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s letter to his son Christopher of 13 April 1944 he said of the Inklings meeting that evening: ‘The best entertainment proved to be the chapter of Major Lewis’ projected book – on … the court of Louis XIV29 … I did not think so well of the concluding chapter of C.S.L.’s new moral allegory or “vision”, based on the medieval fancy of the Refrigerium, by which lost souls have an occasional holiday in Paradise.’30 Jack and Warnie were to read parts of their two books in tandem for many weeks, and The Great Divorce was probably finished in the summer of 1944. The title Lewis originally chose for his ‘moral allegory’ was Who Goes Home? – a cry shouted by the policeman on duty through the corridors of the House of Commons after it has concluded its sitting and is about to close its doors. However, when he discovered that several authors had already used this as a title, he altered it to The Great Divorce: A Dream. The book came out in fifteen instalments in The Guardian – the paper in which The Screwtape Letters had appeared – between 10 November 1944 and 14 April 1945, after which it was published by Geoffrey Bles on 14 January 1946.

  Although it cannot, of course, compare in scope and plenitude with Dante’s great poem, the book can certainly be said to be Lewis’s Divine Comedy and the parallels between the two works are numerous. As the title suggests, the story is told in the form of a dream, and opens with the narrator (Lewis) walking through the dismal, wet streets of Hell – a description perhaps inspired by his reading of Valdemar Thisted’s Letters from Hell, which he came across when he was a pupil of Mr Kirkpatrick. From Hell, Lewis and a number of quarrelsome people are conveyed by a celestial omnibus to the outskirts of Heaven where each is invited to remain permanently.

  Against the diamond-hard reality of Heaven, the damn
ed appear as ‘man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air’.31 Each ghost is met by one of the ‘Solid People’ who is there to conduct him to the Celestial City. ‘Some were naked, some robed. But the naked ones did not seem less adorned, and the robes did not disguise in those who wore them the massive grandeur of muscle and the radiant smoothness of flesh.’32 Lewis himself is, appropriately, met by George MacDonald who, Virgil-like, acts as his guide. With one exception, all the ghosts prefer to return to Hell – thus actualizing the terrible truth MacDonald points out, which is that ‘There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done”, and those to whom God says in the end, “Thy will be done”. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.’33

  Dante had several heretical popes in Hell, and Lewis has an apostate Anglican bishop. The episcopal ghost, though once a believer, has become so wedded to the passing fashions of liberal theology that he prefers to return to Hell and continue searching for that God who is ‘the spirit of sweetness and light and tolerance’.34

  Though The Great Divorce is undoubtedly a maturer and more serious work than Screwtape, most readers prefer the charm and wit of the latter. Anticipating that he would be accused of a lack of compassion, Lewis asks his guide if the loss of one soul does not give the lie to all the joy of those who are saved. To this MacDonald replies,

  Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye’ll make a Dog in the Manger the tyrant of the universe.35

  The book received very mixed reviews. A.C. Deane complained in The Spectator that ‘Even when he insists on the truths Mr Lewis wishes to enforce – the inexorable working of the moral law – it should never be without reserve, without tenderness, without consciousness of infinite love and supernatural redemption behind that law. It is hard to find any such feeling in these glittering yet distasteful pages.’36 The reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement, on the other hand, predicted that ‘The Great Divorce will be read to the end, with steady interest and mounting excitement, by those who have already some sense of the nature of transcendent reality. Those who find themselves in agreement with the arguments put up by the Ghosts for not being saved will be unlikely to finish the book.’37