The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Having adopted Father Adams as his spiritual director, Lewis began to go regularly for confession to the Cowley Fathers’ motherhouse in Oxford or to the Anglo-Catholic Church of St. Mary Magdalen (known at the time as the “highest church in Oxford”). Although Tolkien gives him no credit for this, Lewis had a strong sense of the unique power and authority of the priest to provide spiritual direction and instruction. To Mary Neylan, his former pupil and friend who regularly poured her troubles into his ear, he expressed doubts about the appropriateness of anyone, other than a priest or doctor, being “told too many of his neighbour’s secrets—unless, of course, there is some desperate need.” Yet Lewis never identified with the Anglo-Catholic movement, which he pillories in the character of Neo-Angular in The Pilgrim’s Regress, and in recommending Father Adams as confessor to Mrs. Neylan, he qualified his praise with a single misgiving: that the holy priest was “much too close to Rome.”

  Nonetheless, Anglo-Catholic influences continued to come his way, one of the most important being his friendship with Sister Penelope Lawson, a nun of the Anglican Community of Saint Mary the Virgin in Wantage, about fifteen miles from Oxford. Sister Penelope first wrote to Lewis in 1939, upon reading Out of the Silent Planet, in which she found “bits … more lovely and more satisfying than anything I have met before.” Lewis thanked her but pointed out that she had placed him on the horns of a dilemma: “Do I become more proud in trying to resist or in frankly revelling in, the pleasure it gives me?” There is no record of her response, but having spent twenty-seven years in a convent, Sister Penelope would have been familiar with the struggle for humility and the many traps set by pride. While never ceasing to laud Lewis’s literary efforts, she seemed to be interested primarily in doing what she could to enhance her new correspondent’s spiritual life. She sent him copies of her books, which he admired for “the avoidance of that curious drabness which characterizes so many ‘little books on religion,’” and, more surprisingly, a photograph of a popular Catholic icon, the Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth venerated by those who believe that it bears the image of the crucified Christ. Lewis’s initial response was guarded, but soon he warmed to the gift, declaring that “it has grown upon me wonderfully … the great value is to make one realize that He was a man, and once even a dead man. There is so much difference between a doctrine and a realisation.” He framed the picture and placed it in his bedroom; Sister Penelope was awakening something within him.

  As their correspondence blossomed, the two exchanged letters on philology, angelology, dogma and doctrine, the nature of Hell, and a hundred other topics. Perhaps because Sister Penelope dwelled in the cool calm cloisters of prayer rather than the stormy trenches of academic dispute, Lewis opened up to her as he had to few others. She became, for some years, his confidante: it was to her that he expressed his worry that in going to confession he was “merely indulging in an orgy of egoism,” a concern assuaged, if not erased, by the event itself: “Well—we have come through the wall of fire and find ourselves (somewhat to our surprise) still alive and even well. The suggestion about an orgy of egoism turns out, like all the enemy propaganda, to have just a grain of truth in it, but I have no doubt that the proper method of dealing with that is to continue the practice, as I intend to do.” To her he bared his heart about household troubles (“things are so bad at home that I’m cancelling several of my R.A.F. engagements”), lectured to the junior sisters of her community for Easter, critiqued her writings, and sent her the manuscript of his new novel, Perelandra. He dedicated the novel to “Some Ladies at Wantage,” which in the Portuguese translation became, to Sister Penelope’s delight, “To some wanton ladies.” Lewis revealed to this writer-nun, who shared a common theological vocabulary, his views on how to persuade readers (through the imagination, especially when dealing with children) and, importantly, on the spiritual foundations of art. As the years passed, the exchange of ideas became more irregular, the letters briefer, but the deep affection between scholar and nun never ceased.

  More tantalizing than Lewis’s Anglo-Catholic affinities, but difficult to assess, is the question of whether he was tempted to become a Roman Catholic. According to Guy Brinkworth, a Jesuit who claimed to have corresponded with Lewis during the 1940s but failed to save the letters, Lewis “time and again asked specifically for prayers that God might give him ‘the light and grace to make the final gesture.’” Brinkworth reports that Lewis went so far as to ask in a postscript to one of his letters for “prayers that the prejudices instilled in me by an Ulster … nurse might be overcome.”

  He did, to some degree, shed those prejudices. His first postconversion book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, was free enough of overt anti-Catholic sentiment to make some readers suspect, misinterpreting the figure of Mother Kirk, that Lewis was defending the claims of Rome. Not in the least, he insisted; The Pilgrim’s Regress was “intended to be a general apologetic allegory for ‘all who profess and call themselves Christians,’” a phrase aptly taken from the Collect “For All Sorts and Conditions of Men” in the Book of Common Prayer. The position he took, in addressing himself to all sorts and conditions of men, was not generic Christianity, but Anglicanism through and through, for he saw the Anglican Church as the custodian of all that was best in historic Christianity. As he put it in The Allegory of Love: “When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft; Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes.” Anglicanism, he believed, avoided both kinds of decadence. As an Anglican, one could be Catholic without idolatry, Protestant without impoverishment, and orthodox where it really mattered, admitting as true “that which has been believed everywhere, always, by everyone” (a formula Lewis liked to cite, from the Commonitory of the fifth-century saint Vincent of Lérins).

  To an American Episcopalian who was feeling attracted to Catholicism, Lewis spelled out his position, identifying as authentically Catholic “the vast mass of doctrine wh. I find agreed on by Scripture, the Fathers, the Middle Ages, modern R.C.’s, modern Protestants” but rejecting the Roman Church “where it differs from this universal tradition” (e.g., with regard to Mary, the papacy, and the metaphysics of transubstantiation) as constituting “as much a provincial or local variation from the central, ancient tradition as any particular Protestant sect is.” David Soper recalled Lewis saying in an interview not long before his death that “the difficulty with joining the Roman Church was that you were, so to speak, ‘buying a pig in a poke’; you could not possibly know at what hours something new would be added, as essential for salvation, to the worship of Christ as God and Saviour.” As a communicant of the Church of England, Lewis believed one could live the full ecclesial and sacramental life, receive Christ fully present in the Eucharist, pray for the dead, go to confession, and submit to the teaching authority of bishops without having to accept newly minted dogmas like the Immaculate Conception.

  There was also spiritual benefit in staying at one’s post: as a member of the national church one could be ordinary and unpretentious, worship with one’s neighbors in the local parish (whether high church or low—Lewis’s parish in Headington was a mix), and leave the fine points of ecclesiology to experts. “There is no mystery about my own position,” Lewis wrote in his introduction to Mere Christianity; “I am a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially ‘high,’ nor especially ‘low,’ nor especially anything else.” All the evidence confirms that this is exactly what he was, and without any prolonged anxiety as to whether he should become more Catholic or even Roman Catholic. Now that Britain was at war, and all the goods of civilization under siege, it was comforting and a matter of pride to be able to speak, as he repeatedly did, of “my church, the Church of England.” As a literary scholar and writer, moreover, Lewis felt he could be imaginatively Catholic, like Spenser, without any thought of submitting to Rome. Wasn’t that the whole fun of reading and writing allegory? Allegory often looks
Catholic, for Catholicism abounds in symbols and images; but the presence of Catholic imagery is no proof of a longing for Roman collars. Quite the contrary, Lewis says: “only a bungler, like Deguileville, would introduce a monastery into his poem if he were really writing about monasticism.” Perhaps Lewis protested too much; but it was a constant vexation that people either suspected him of Popish leanings or demanded to know why he was not yet a confirmed Roman Catholic. At Oxford there were rumors that he was not only a closet Catholic but a secret Jesuit—but the many Catholics among Lewis’s friends (Tolkien, Hardie, Havard, Griffiths, Fr. Gervase Mathew, Dundas-Grant) and pupils (George Sayer, Christopher Derrick) knew better. “Jack, most of your friends seem to be Catholic. Why don’t you join us?” Havard would ask, but to no avail.

  13

  MERE CHRISTIANS

  Sales of The Pilgrim’s Regress had fallen short of expectations, but the book had caught the eye of the Christian publisher Ashley Sampson, who invited Lewis just before the war to contribute a volume on suffering for the “Christian Challenge” series he was editing for the Centenary Press. This would be the real beginning of Lewis’s career as a Christian evangelist. He submitted The Problem of Pain under his favorite pseudonym, Nat Whilk (from nát-hwilc, “I know not who,” used in Old English as the indefinite pronoun, e.g., “someone”), but at the publisher’s insistence the book appeared in 1940 under his own name. He dedicated it to the Inklings, to whom he had read chapters as they emerged from his pen; the notes Havard had been reading to Inklings meetings on mental and physical pain appeared as an appendix. While writing the book, Lewis was treating himself with Veganin (paracetamol, codeine, and caffeine) for the sharp pain of a rib injured when he slipped in the bath. Yet The Problem of Pain—in contrast to The Pilgrim’s Regress—has little that could be called autobiographical. It is refreshingly objective. As he said to Warnie, “If you are writing a book about pain and then get some actual pain as I did from my rib, it does not either, as the cynic wd. expect, blow the doctrine to bits, nor, as a Christian wd. hope, turn into practice, but remains quite unconnected and irrelevant, just as any other bit of actual life does when you are reading or writing.”

  The Problem of Pain sets the tone for almost all of Lewis’s evangelizing volumes: it is short, conversational, commonsensical, witty, and bristling with logic that usually hits its mark, while sometimes going wildly astray. Lewis displays his trademark style in the first sentence, making the chattiest of remarks about the most profound of subjects: “Not many years ago when I was an atheist, if anyone had asked me, ‘Why do you not believe in God?’ my reply would have run something like this:…” His answer, in a nutshell, is death, matter, meaninglessness, pain. “The creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die … all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter.” If we come to believe in God, as Lewis did, the problem of pain remains; unknotting it is the purpose of his book.

  How do we reconcile human suffering with divine omnipotence and divine goodness? Mostly by understanding these divine attributes in a more clearheaded, rational way—by grasping, for example, that omnipotence does not mean doing the intrinsically impossible (as an example, Lewis imagines God giving and denying creatures free will at one and the same time): “nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.” As for divine goodness, Lewis argues that precisely because God is perfectly good, he wishes us to share in his own perfect, complete, and eternal goodness. God is love, and our highest bliss is to become creatures who can receive this love. But learning to love perfectly is no easy task; pain and suffering are means by which God effects this miraculous transformation. We may revolt at the prospect, but “whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.” We must see ourselves as we really are, and then die to our old selves through obedience and sacrifice. Pain “gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment”—and we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, bad men. Tribulation is the means of redemption and “cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.” That some people will never reform, actively willing their own damnation, is the reason for hell; but for the rest of us heaven awaits, a place or state of which we now know fleeting hints, echoes, glimpses. Here Lewis is referring to his old standard, Joy, which we know as an unquenchable longing for something beyond—beyond our hopes, beyond our ken—that “is the thing I was made for … the secret signature of each soul.”

  All this is standard orthodox Christianity. The book’s success lies in its ability to present these traditional views with humor, down-to-earth metaphors, and no hint of condescension or pretension; it reads like a well-bred, well-educated, well-spoken friend laying out his views in the corner pub. Moreover, like any skilled barroom orator, Lewis has two or three surprises up his sleeve. Consider his reflections on animal pain. He suggests, inter alia, that animals may suffer less pain than we think, for while all undergo pain as raw sensation, they may lack the consciousness to be “standing above the sensations and organising them into an ‘experience’” (as Lewis suggests in Out of the Silent Planet, they have a sensitive, but not a rational, or hnau, soul); that the animal kingdom may have suffered corruption at the hands of Satan long before the Fall of humankind recounted in the Bible; and that, just as human beings go to heaven through their relationship to God, so animals may go to heaven through their relationship to human beings (and thereby to God). These are radical notions, pleasing neither to those who see animals as automatons nor to those who believe they possess immortal souls. Years later, when the philosopher and controversialist C.E.M. Joad (famous as “The Professor” on the BBC radio show The Brains Trust and a favorite sparring partner of Lewis’s) published a friendly critique in the Jesuit journal The Month, Lewis responded by stressing “how confessedly speculative” his chapter on animal pain had been. How could we presume to know what animals experience or what God has in store for them? Our assurance of God’s goodness is the only real guide; the rest is guesswork.

  Equally provocative is Lewis’s assertion, early in the text, that Jesus’ claim of divinity “is so shocking … 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.” It was the first of many times he would resort to some version of the aut deus, aut malus homo (either God or bad man) argument, a familiar device of nineteenth-century apologetics with forerunners as far back as the church fathers.

  Although largely ignored by the popular press, The Problem of Pain did receive warm reviews in The Times Literary Supplement and in several ecclesiastical journals, including The Church Times, The Guardian, and Blackfriars. Charles Williams, assessing it for Theology, was predictably effusive, declaring that “Mr. Lewis’s … style is what style always is—goodness working on goodness, a lucid and sincere intellect at work on the facts of life or the great statements of other minds.” More unexpected was his remark to Lewis, delivered when the two were discussing Job and recalled by Lewis in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, that Job’s self-righteous comforters were “the sort of people who wrote books on the Problem of Pain.”

  Two or three months after this first venture in Christian apologetics, Lewis dreamed up a book of considerably more popular appeal. The immediate context is significant. The Battle of Britain had just begun, on July 10—that battle between Britain and Germany for air supremacy, on which, as Churchill said in his “Finest Hour” speech, the survival of Christian civilization would depend. Lewis closed a July 16 letter to Bede Griffiths by saying, “Well: we are on the very brink of the abyss now. Perhaps we shan’t be meeting again in this world.” Warnie had been evacuated from Dunkirk and was safely stationed in Cardiff, but Lewis found that his closest friends were showing signs of frayed nerves. On July 14, Churchill had delivered his “War of the
Unknown Warriors” speech: “now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant’s might and enmity can do.” On July 19, Lewis had been listening with Havard to a BBC broadcast of Hitler’s “Last Appeal to Great Britain” address before the Reichstag, a litany of threats and promises beginning and ending with a call “to reason and common sense.” Lewis was intrigued: “I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people,” he told Warnie, “but it is a positive revelation to me how while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little.”

  Two days later, the idea for a “useful and entertaining” book came to him as he was (dutifully, but without much relish) attending Sunday communion service at his parish church, Holy Trinity Headington Quarry—a curious, but upon consideration wonderfully apposite birthplace for what he had in mind. As he told Warnie, “It wd. be called As one Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first ‘patient.’ The idea wd. be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view.”

  The result was The Screwtape Letters, dedicated “To J.R.R. Tolkien,” thirty-one letters from a senior devil named Screwtape to his apprentice, Wormwood, offering him guidance, encouragement, and spleen as he attempts to lead a young Englishman, known as the “patient,” into final damnation. Lewis wrote the book effortlessly but paid a price:

  … though it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The world into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done. It would have smothered my readers if I had prolonged it.