Between the time The Great Divorce was serialized in The Guardian and its appearance in book form, Lewis met an enemy and lost a friend. Charles Williams had long been amused by Lewis’s dislike of T.S. Eliot and the hauling over the coals Lewis had given Eliot in A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’. Eager to see what would happen if he got his two friends together, Williams arranged for them to meet over tea at the Mitre Hotel in Oxford. Fr Gervase Mathew was among those invited to witness this historic occasion. Though Lewis can hardly be said to have been a vain man regarding his physical appearance – he once told Walter Hooper how much easier he would find life when his hair fell out – he was anything but amused by Eliot’s opening remark: ‘Mr Lewis, you are a much older man than you appear in photographs!’ Whatever possessed Eliot to say such a thing no one knows. Lewis stood facing him with the poker face he sometimes assumed. Having botched it the first time, Eliot tried again. ‘I must tell you, Mr Lewis,’ he said, ‘that I consider A Preface to “Paradise Lost” your best book.’ This being the very book in which he had been attacked, Lewis could not believe Eliot meant him any good will. After that the conversation dwindled to small-talk and, according to Fr Mathew, a very bad time was had by all except Charles Williams, who is said to have enjoyed himself hugely.
There is a small reminder of this disastrous tea-party in one of Lewis’s notebooks. ‘Mr Eliot’, he scribbled, ‘has asked me not to write about his literary criticism. Very well. I obey.’ Beyond that, he seems to have put Eliot out of his mind until they met years later under more congenial circumstances.
However unpleasant that meeting might have been, few events were to be so devastating for Lewis as the sudden and unexpected death of Charles Williams on 15 May. It was an event Lewis faced with characteristic courage. Writing to Sister Penelope on 28 May, Lewis said, ‘You will have heard of the death of my dearest friend, Charles Williams, and, no doubt, prayed for him. For me too, it has been, and is, a great loss. But not at all a dejecting one. It has greatly increased my faith. Death has done nothing to my idea of him, but he has done – oh, I can’t say what – to my idea of death. It has made the next world much more real and palpable.’
Among the numerous salutes Lewis offered Williams’s memory was a course of University lectures on Williams’s Arthurian poems which he gave during Michaelmas Term 1945, and which were later published as Arthurian Torso (1948). Sometime before this, Lewis, Warnie, Owen Barfield, J.R.R. Tolkien, Fr Gervase Mathew and Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a collection of essays which they planned to offer Williams on his return to London after the war. As Lewis said in the Preface to their Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ‘Death forestalled us; we now offer as a memorial what had been devised as a greeting.’38
It had been several years since Lewis wrote the essay on ‘Miracles’ published in The Guardian of 2 October 1942, and now his mind was returning to that ingredient of the faith that so clearly needed defending. Looking back, it seems inevitable that he should have written a book on miracles. They had proved one of the chief reasons why he found Christianity unacceptable when he was an atheist, and they formed a substantial part of the groundwork of his faith after he converted. A belief in the miraculous is, of course, assumed in all his theological works up until this time, but it may have been Dorothy L. Sayers who provoked him into writing a full-length book on the subject. In a letter to Lewis of 13 May 1943 she complained that ‘there aren’t any up-to-date books about Miracles. People have stopped arguing about them. Why? Has Physics sold the pass? or is it merely that everyone is thinking in terms of Sociology and international Ethics?’39 She was no doubt delighted when Lewis replied on 17 May, ‘I’m starting a book on Miracles.’ A few months later, 24 September 1943, Lewis wrote to Sister Penelope saying, ‘I’ve written about 6 chapters of the book on Miracles.’
While he was writing the book Warnie accompanied him on another jaunt to the north. This time they went to the University of St Andrews in Scotland where Jack was to be made a Doctor of Divinity. When they arrived there on Thursday, 27 June 1946, they went at once to explore the coastline. ‘All along the high watermark of the beach’, Warnie recorded in his diary that day, ‘ran a line of rather blackguardly-looking crows whom Jack supposed to have been ordered sea air by their doctors.’40 At the degree ceremony on 28 June, Lewis’s promoter, Professor D.M. Bailley, Dean of the Faculty of Divinity, said of him:
With his pen and with his voice on the radio Mr Lewis has succeeded in capturing the attention of many who will not readily listen to professional theologians, and has taught them many lessons concerning the deep things of God … In recent years Mr Lewis has arranged a new kind of marriage between theological reflection and poetic imagination, and this fruitful union is now producing works which are difficult to classify in any literary genre.41
Immediately after the ceremony the Bishop of St Andrews, the Rt Rev. James Lumsden Barkway (1878–1968), invited Lewis home for refreshments. Lewis told Walter Hooper some years later that as they were about to go in the bishop turned to him and said, ‘Well, Lewis, what about a mouthful of –’ (Lewis imagined a large glass of whisky) ‘– prayer,’ said the bishop. The mouthful of prayer was, however, followed by several mouthfuls of whisky and Lewis began to feel at ease in his stiff shirt and graduation robes.
Further praise awaited Lewis in England, but Eric Fenn had put his finger on it – as Lewis’s fame spread there were those who thought him ‘the cat’s whiskers’ and others who regarded him as ‘beneath contempt’. Shortages were greater now than during the war, the expected Utopia had not arrived, and there was great disillusionment. One of those who had been observing all this and understood how Lewis fitted into it was Ashley Sampson.
In October 1946 the Church of England Newspaper began a series of interviews called ‘An Anglican Portrait Gallery’, and Sampson was chosen to interview Lewis for the first portrait. The interview, entitled ‘The Crusading Intellect’, begins:
There can be no doubt that Dr. Lewis is a phenomenon. His ‘arrival’ among the intellectual stars at a moment when Europe had plunged into a Second World War was rather like a fairy-tale. For everything had combined to provide his opposite. The civilized world was perhaps nearer to despair than it has ever been. The hopes and promises – not to say the prayers – of mankind seemed to have gone for nothing. A vast and paralysing shadow was creeping over us from which there seemed no sure deliverance; and the prophets of Utopia were becoming the prophets of doom. One thing alone was certain – the fact that nothing, not even tomorrow, was certain. Our hopes had been changed to bitterness and men were asking themselves what God was doing when C.S. Lewis (a lay don of literary reputation who had once been a rather cynical atheist) preached a sermon* in the University Church that set all Oxford, and later all England, talking. He had no anodyne to offer and made none of those startling assertions about a world that had changed overnight and was to usher in the great Utopia when the clash of arms had ceased – he seemed to be neither a pacifist nor a crusader against Nazism – neither did he foreshadow a long or a short war. No, he preached from an Old Testament text a sermon about God and the Devil – about ultimate judgement and the individual – about war in high places and the Christian’s part as a crusader in a battle that cannot cease as long as we draw breath: and of his readiness to die at a word from God in the shadow or in the sun.42
Sampson continues that Lewis’s personality trickles through his books and his letters, and that ‘glowing’ is the word he would use to capture Lewis in a single word:
He will pass lightly from subject to subject – always genial and profoundly sympathetic. I have known him discuss ghosts, English drama, the Russian novel, Dante, psychoanalysis, and bottled milk, in a single hour … Thus C.S. Lewis – the man whose theological vision has burst so strangely and with such a wonderful allurement, on our war-torn world.
The sermon that he preached in St Mary’s then and all that he has said and written since, spoken on the radio, or sub
mitted to the colder light of print, are variations of the same theme – that theology is not just one study among many, but that all studies (history, literature, mathematics, and geography) are branches of theology. The Middle Ages knew this – likewise the world of the Reformation; but Europe lost that vision when the Age of Reason made man the measure of all things. Now she no longer harnesses her wagon to the stars – but to a bomb which sometimes looks like exploding at any moment. Dr Lewis has endeavoured to recall us to that former state without detracting one iota from all that has been constructive in scientific discovery and philosophical thought during the intervening years.43
There were great expectations for Lewis’s long-awaited Miracles: A Preliminary Study, which was published by Geoffrey Bles: The Centenary Press on 12 May 1947. Lewis had worked very hard on the book, a closely reasoned philosophical defence of the supernatural and of the miracles of the Old and New Testaments in particular.
Chapter 1 repeats what Lewis had said about ‘Miracles’ in the Guardian essay of 2 October 1942. ‘Many people think one can decide whether a miracle occurred in the past by examining the evidence “according to the ordinary rules of historical inquiry”. But the ordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whether miracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are. For if they are impossible, then no amount of historical evidence will convince us.’44 Lewis defines miracle as ‘an interference with Nature by supernatural powers’,45 and those who believe that something other than Nature exists as Supernaturalists. He goes on to use the reductio ad absurdum argument as a means of attacking Naturalists. Believing, as they claim to do, that Nature means absolutely ‘everything’ or ‘the whole show’,46 all of which came about by blind working of chance, it must therefore follow that even their thoughts must also be the working of chance and the accidental by-products of atoms moving in their brains. That being so, why, Lewis asks, should the Naturalist believe that one thought is more ‘valid’ than another, so that it should give a correct account of all the others?
Having established the validity of thought, Lewis proceeds to get rid of several red herrings, one of which is the notion that St Joseph was such an ignoramus as not to know where babies come from:
No doubt the modern gynaecologist knows several things about birth and begetting which St Joseph did not know. But those things do not concern the main point – that a virgin birth is contrary to the course of nature. And St Joseph obviously knew that … If there ever were men who did not know the laws of nature at all, they would have no idea of a miracle and feel no particular interest in one if it were performed before them. Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary.47
Miracles, he goes on to show, do not break the laws of Nature but are instances of something being ‘fed into’ Nature by the very One who created her. Not only that, miracles help us know what the story of the world is about. The Incarnation, for instance, ‘far from denying what we already know of reality, writes the comment which makes that crabbed text plain: or rather, proves itself to be the text on which Nature was only the commentary. In science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.’48
Miracles, while it has the common touch, is a much tougher book than Mere Christianity and was written for a more educated audience. As expected, it was joyfully received by all those of the orthodox persuasion. C.E. Raven, writing in The Spectator, said, ‘Probably none of his books so clearly reveals his own religious outlook or gives him so congenial a scope. There are in it passages of great beauty like the description of the Incarnation … there are also passages in which he almost reminds us of the gaiety and vigour of G.K. Chesterton.’49 A.C. Supholme, the reviewer for Theology, remarked that: ‘One of Pascal’s contemporaries quaintly says that the author of the Provincial Letters vexed the Jesuits by writing theology which even women could read. Dr Lewis performs a similar service for English theology. He makes it readable. The rather rare combination of the gifts of poet, philosopher and theologian is quite irresistible.’50
At the same time, the book afforded reviewers a delightful field day: for the publication of Lewis’s philosophic defence of miracles coincided almost exactly with Rise of Christianity (1947) by the Bishop of Birmingham, Ernest William Barnes (1872–1953) who tried his best to explain away the miraculous. The free-thinking Bishop Barnes was probably the model for the episcopal ghost in The Great Divorce.
While Lewis’s praises were being sung by most readers of Miracles, Miss G.E.M. Anscombe,* a Research Fellow of Somerville College, was preparing an attack. It came on 2 February 1948 when she read at the Socratic Club a ‘Reply to Mr C.S. Lewis’s Argument that “Naturalism” is Self-Refuting’ – a criticism of Chapter 3 of Miracles.51 The actual debate between Lewis and Miss Anscombe has been obscured by a few silly interpretations from those who, never having bothered to find out what the argument is about, have portrayed it as a battle between a Misogynist Lewis and a Feminist Anscombe. The proponents of this interpretation are Bulverists.
Miss Anscombe’s actual argument is specifically about the nature of causality, and it is complex and difficult for anyone not a philosopher to understand. Those who have tried to sensationalize the debate forget that Miss Anscombe was a devout Catholic, who defended Christianity just as stoutly as Lewis. The crucial points of her argument are that (1) a distinction must be made between ‘irrational causes’ and ‘non-rational causes’; (2) it must be made clear what is meant by ‘valid’ reasoning; (3) the Naturalist can be allowed to explain a chain of reasoning as a result of ‘non-rational’ causes – with the meanings of the words valid, invalid, rational and irrational left intact; (4) it is necessary to distinguish between the ‘ground’ and the ‘cause’ of a conclusion.
Lewis believed that Miss Anscombe had misunderstood his arguments. He accepted, however, that he was unclear about a certain point in his paper and he revised Chapter 3 of Miracles, giving it the new title ‘The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism’ for Collins’s Fontana paperback edition of 1960. In America the revised chapter first appeared in the Macmillan (New York) edition of 1978.
The meeting is said to have been the most exciting and dramatic the Socratic Club had ever seen. According to Derek Brewer, who dined with him two days later, Lewis was ‘deeply disturbed’ and described the meeting ‘with real horror’. Some who were at the meeting contend that Lewis lost to Miss Anscombe, others say she came out second best. Even the contestants say different things: Lewis told Walter Hooper in 1963 that he ‘won’; when Hooper met Miss Anscombe for the first time in 1964 she said, ‘I won.’ A good many philosophers disagree with Miss Anscombe’s argument, maintaining that Lewis’s original chapter was philosophically sound and that he did not need to rewrite it. The truth is that both Lewis and Elizabeth Anscombe were much alike. Both put the highest value on Truth, and after their conversions they always did everything in their power to defend it. As a tribute to Miss Anscombe we might look at her comment about the revised chapter of Miracles. In the introduction to her Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, she said that the revised Chapter 3
does correspond more to the actual depth and difficulty of the questions being discussed … The fact that Lewis rewrote that chapter, and rewrote it so that it now has these qualities, shows his honesty and seriousness. The meeting of the Socratic Club at which I read my paper has been described by several of his friends as a horrible and shocking experience which upset him very much. Neither Dr Havard (who had Lewis and me to dinner a few weeks later) nor Professor Jack Bennett remembered any such feelings on Lewis’s part … My own recollection is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis’s rethinking and rewriting showed he thought were accurate. I am inclined to construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of his friends – who seem not to have been interested in the actual arguments or the subject-matter – as an interesting example of the phenomenon called ‘projection�
��.52
For a long time now what Lewis referred to in his poem, ‘The Day with a White Mark’, as ‘The plann’d and unplann’d miseries’53 of life had begun to deepen. By 1947 Mrs Moore had nearly lost the use of her legs and was supervising the running of The Kilns from her bedroom. ‘He’s as good as an extra maid in the house,’54 she said of Lewis – and indeed he must have been, for he was called upon to settle endless disputes between the two resident maids, one of whom was having psychiatric treatment. This meant a great curtailment of his freedom to move about, and especially beyond Oxford. It was on 7 January that Laurence Whistler, as mentioned earlier, invited Lewis to join him and Andrew Young in founding a periodical to be called Portico. ‘I will … attend the meeting if I can,’ Lewis wrote to Whistler on 9 January, ‘but I am so domestically tied (to the bedside of an elderly invalid) that I can never be sure of being able to leave Oxford.’
He made a rare exception after receiving a letter of 8 March 1947 from the Marquess of Salisbury (James Edward Hubert Gascoyne-Cecil, 1961–1947), the Conservative MP, and a speaker on ecclesiastical matters, inviting him to join a group, which included the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, to discuss the future of the Church of England. ‘My mother is old and infirm,’ he replied on 9 March, ‘we have little and uncertain help, and I never know when I can, even for a day, get away from my duties as a nurse and a domestic servant (there are psychological as well as material difficulties in my house). But I will come if I possibly can.’55 Lewis did, however, manage a single meeting of the group, which was held in Lambeth Palace on 26 March 1947. He had to hurry home became Mrs Moore had come down with pneumonia.
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