He was a bonny fighter … I was occasionally called upon to stop a gap in the earlier programmes … I went in fear and trembling, certain to be caught out in debate and to let down the side. But there Lewis would be, snuffing the imminent battle and saying “Aha!” at the sound of the trumpet. My anxieties rolled away. Whatever ineptitude I might commit, he would maintain the cause; and nobody could put Lewis down.
It may be, as Wain suggests, that many club members were “simple-minded undergraduates” eager to hear Christianity defended “in a straightforward, manly way, by somebody who wasn’t a parson and didn’t resemble the Soapy-Sam chaplains of their schooldays.” Lewis fulfilled this role admirably. But he also attracted to the club many of the smartest and most learned skeptics of the time—A. J. Ayer, Antony Flew, Gilbert Ryle, J.B.S. Haldane—and the debates that ensued often brought out the best on both sides. Under Lewis’s aegis and that of Aldwinckle (who served as chairman and moderated many meetings), the Socratic Club was the most thrilling undergraduate club at Oxford. In its apologetic aim, its take-no-prisoners ambience, and its sparkling high seriousness, it was for some years a lively stepchild of the Inklings.
Lewis also seized what occasions he could to take his arguments afield. A noteworthy opportunity arose in February 1943, when he delivered the Riddell Memorial Lectures at King’s College, Newcastle, then part of the University of Durham. Warnie, who had returned to Oxford in May 1940 to serve in the Home Guard, accompanied him. The voyage up north was a welcome one for both brothers: in January, Lewis had been lamenting to Arthur, “Minto is laid up with one of her terrible varicose ulcers, but W. and I are alright. But it’s a weary world, isn’t it?” For Warnie, it was a blissful interlude, “a little oasis in the dreariness” of war and of strife at the Kilns (“that horrid house,” he called it), the domestic clashes directly traceable, he believed, to Mrs. Moore’s grasping, bullying ways. He spent as much time as possible away from her presence, usually sequestered in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen, where he continued his study of the Sun King and acted as Lewis’s secretary, typing on his portable Royal his brother’s scrawled correspondence—which had ballooned to spectacular proportions thanks to the BBC lectures—sometimes adding a sentence or two of his own and now and then signing letters in his brother’s name.
The Riddell Lectures were established in memory of Sir John Walter Buchanan-Riddell, the 11th Baronet of Riddell, who had been high sheriff of Northumberland and active in Christian and academic causes; their subject was to be some facet of the relation between religious thought and modernity. For Lewis, it was a chance to defend, against relativizing trends in education, philosophy, and literary criticism, the reality of the universal moral code inherent in all human beings. What surprised many readers, when the three lectures (“Men Without Chests,” “The Way,” and “The Abolition of Man”) appeared in book form near the end of 1943 as The Abolition of Man, was how friendly the great Christian apologist was toward other religions, at least when he contrasted them to modern Philistinism. He chooses a non-Western term, Tao, to emphasize the universality of moral reasoning. He begins with an epigram from Confucius’s Analects and concludes with an appendix citing illustrations from a vast array of cultures, including Norse, Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, American Indian, and Hindu. Many of these come from Hastings’s great twelve-volume Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, which he pored through in preparation for the lectures.
This wideness of outlook did not, however, as some might have wished, signal a relaxation of his belief in Christianity as the sole final repository of universal truth; instead, it buttressed his argument that the moral law, precisely because it is natural, flourishes wherever it finds soil to grow. He had grown more favorable toward paganism, which seemed, in some of its forms, to adumbrate Christian ideas of immortality, and more distant from Hinduism, which once he had considered to be the only serious alternative to Christianity. But both were tainted: “I am inclined to think,” he told Bede Griffiths a few years after the Riddell Lectures, “that Paganism is the primitive revealed truth corrupted by devils and that Hinduism is neither of divine nor diabolical origin but profoundly and hopelessly natural.” The gold in these religions lay in their adherence to the Tao, to universal axioms of goodness and justice. The teachings vary here and there, as God’s truth is more fully realized in one culture, less in another, but the spirit of the Tao is everywhere the same and everywhere indispensable: “In the Tao … we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and common reason of humanity, alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation varies, into ever new beauties and dignities of application.”
The book received a warm welcome, especially in religious periodicals. The Hibbert Journal lauded “the fineness of Mr. Lewis’s thought,” while The Churchman called it “a most thought-provoking book.” Barfield, too, liked it greatly. No doubt he especially enjoyed Lewis’s concluding paragraphs, in which this stalwart critic of Anthroposophy speculates on the possibility of a new kind of science faithful to the Tao, allowing that “I hear rumours that Goethe’s approach to nature deserves fuller consideration—that even Dr Steiner may have seen something that orthodox researchers have missed.” Moved by this unexpected concession, Barfield wrote to Lewis in an ecstasy of praise, declaring The Abolition of Man “a real triumph. 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.”
Such praise from friends always gratified Lewis, although he tried not to be swept away on tides of self-approbation. He worried about being egotistical, knowing how thoroughly he had wallowed in amour propre during his youth. He valued friends who supported him without fawning over him, who challenged him to improve as a thinker, artist, and Christian. Barfield, Tolkien, Williams, Sayers, and Sister Penelope fit this description. In particular, he worried that apologetics might be bad for his faith. He could not discuss this sensitive question with Tolkien, but to comrade-in-apologetics Dorothy L. Sayers he confessed that “a doctrine never seems dimmer to me than when I have just successfully defended it.” To Sister Penelope, as usual, he entrusted his misgivings in full, sending her in 1942 his “Apologist’s Evening Hymn”:
From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories I have seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth in Thy behalf,
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who would’st give no sign, deliver me.
Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
Of Thee, the thumb-worn image of Thy head;
From every thought, even from my thoughts of Thee,
Oh thou fair Silence! fall and set me free.
Lord of the straight way and the needle’s eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.
Hell Is Locked on the Inside
Beginning in the spring of 1944, Lewis wrote a little book that would take his evangelizing in a new direction—not exactly theology, not exactly apologetics, not exactly fiction, but an imaginative “supposal” about the journey from this world to the next. He read chapters at Inklings meetings during April and May under the working title “Who Goes Home.” Tolkien’s assessment was lukewarm. In an April 13 airgraph to Christopher in South Africa, he describes a Thursday Inklings meeting with Lewis, Warnie, Williams, and the Useless Quack in attendance, during which he enjoyed “the chapter of Major Lewis’ projected book—on a subject that does not interest me: the court of Louis XIV; but it was most wittily written (as well as learned),” but 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 the lost souls have an occasional holiday in Paradise.” After appearing in The Guardian in weekly installments under the t
itle “Who Goes Home? Or The Grand Divorce,” the book was published as The Great Divorce—an answer to William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, itself a reaction against Swedenborg’s Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell from Things Heard and Seen. Swedenborg’s vision of the afterlife came straight from God, or so he claimed; but Lewis’s vision, like Dante’s, is a conscious literary creation, a moral satire rather than a mystical revelation, and if Swedenborg is an influence, it is only indirectly, through George MacDonald.
The opening scene is quintessentially English: “I seemed to be standing in a busy queue” at twilight, in a “grey town” in the rain. As in The Divine Comedy, the narrator is the same as the author, yet not quite the same, and characters present themselves as the narrator sees them: “a little waspish woman,” “the Short Man,” “the Big Man,” a “Tousle-Headed Poet,” “the Intelligent Man” who talks business in a bowler hat, an Anglican bishop of progressive views. Not so English, but unmistakably human, the people in the queue quarrel, whine, swagger, and worm their way to the top, some cheated out of their place, some leaving in a snit. “Well, this is hardly the sort of society I’m used to as a matter of fact.”
A bus arrives “blazing with golden light, heraldically coloured,” and lifts the passengers above the wet roofs of the grey town through a vast expanse of searing light to a grassy meadow, a variant of the locus amoenus of classical and medieval mythology, a place of pure being and light. “I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before.” Against this saturated landscape, men look like ghosts. Flowers are diamond-hard; grass does not bend beneath one’s feet. Lewis’s dream reveals a heaven that is anything but dreamlike, an ethereal region more materially dense than the earth below. He mentions in a preface that he got this idea from a story in an American science fiction magazine in which a traveler to the past finds “raindrops that would pierce him like bullets and sandwiches that no strength could bite.” The Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson has identified the story as “The Man Who Lived Backwards,” by Charles F. Hall, which appeared in the summer of 1938 in Tales of Wonder, a British science fiction magazine.
Seeing the grass through his own feet, Lewis realizes that he, too, is a phantom. “‘Golly!’ thought I, ‘I’m in for it this time.’” In fact, all the passengers are ghosts: the Tousle-Headed Poet had jumped under a train when society refused to acknowledge his gifts. One by one, the ghosts are met by bright spirits, gloriously naked or resplendently attired, always wonderfully solid. Overhearing their conversations, Lewis realizes that the spirits are assigned to ghosts whom they had known in life, with the aim of helping them to overcome their besetting sins, their self-importance, self-pity, melancholy, lust. Offered the chance to be made fit for heaven, almost all the ghosts make excuses: “Of course I should require some assurances,” the Bishop says. “I should want a guarantee that you are taking me to a place where I shall find a wider sphere of usefulness…” But there are no guarantees; one must be remade, and that can be painful. “I came here to get my rights, see?” says the Big Man, “Not to go snivelling along on charity tied onto your apron-strings.” Almost all hold fast to their sins, decline the offer of remediation and forgiveness, refuse the promised joy as an all-too-easy answer to their problems or an insult to their dignity, and eventually return to the grey town to be consumed by their resentments. A cynic is certain this is all a con game run by a secret cabal, an artist must return to publish manifestos against “those damned Neo-Regionalists” who have eclipsed his fame, a social climber who drove her husband to a nervous breakdown will stay only if she can have further opportunities to improve him. And so on. The easiest sin to cure is lust—in Lewis’s view, far less insidious than envy or pride, and more capable of submitting to the death and resurrection that all natural loves must undergo.
The sound of a Scottish accent and the sight of a resplendent being introduces Lewis to his own guiding spirit: George MacDonald. MacDonald is to Lewis at once Virgil and Beatrice, for it was he who carried Lewis from a bookstall at the Leatherhead Station to the threshold of the New Life. In paying tribute to his mentor, Lewis rehearses the conversion story he would later tell in Surprised by Joy, and fictionalizes MacDonald, who in life was a universalist (believing in the salvation of all), by having him offer a doctrine of hell and a theodicy more compatible with orthodox Christianity. The grey town is the Valley of the Shadow of Death. “To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory.” But for those who, refusing every offer of salvation, are bent on returning to it, it “will have been Hell even from the beginning.” The Valley of the Shadow of Life, where they now dwell, is a precinct of heaven to those who choose to remain. And just as heaven works backward, turning all past suffering into glory, so Hell works backward, turning all past pleasures into ash, so that “at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ Hell, though, is smaller than an atom of the Real World; the damned soul fits in Hell by being “nearly nothing … shrunk, shut up in itself.”
“My Roman Catholic friends would be surprised,” the fictional Lewis remarks, “for to them souls in Purgatory are already saved. And my Protestant friends would like it no better, for they’d say that the tree lies as it falls.’” To which Lewis’s version of MacDonald replies, in the spirit of Mere Christianity, “‘They’re both right, maybe. Do not fash yourself with such questions. Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both. And ye were not brought here to study such curiosities. What concerns you is the nature of the choice itself: and that ye can watch them making.’” The nature of the choice, the ordering and disordering of love, was always what concerned Lewis most, and what he was most skilled at representing. His life with the increasingly irritable Janie Moore gave him firsthand knowledge of the process by which small choices can carry the soul into a small hell of its own making. From the crucible of daily domestic miseries, Lewis emerged as an expert in the deep devices of the human heart.
Paradise Rehabilitated
Lewis was now the foremost Christian apologist in the English-speaking world and firing on all cylinders as a literary scholar and a fantasist. Diverse as his writings were, all touched on one great subject—the Fall of Man, arguably the central theme of English poetry from Spenser, Milton, and Dryden, to Shelley, Coleridge, and Blake. Though Enlightenment thinkers reinterpreted the Fall in secular terms, as the corruption, by social forces, of a human nature originally pure, or as a freely willed rejection of the universal moral law, and though Romantic thinkers succeeded for a brief time in describing the Fall as a glorious Promethean defiance or a necessary stage in the liberation of human consciousness, no English writer of any stature surrendered the idea in favor of unalloyed optimism. One has only to think of Joseph Conrad and William Golding to realize that this fundamental platform of Christian doctrine belongs as much to the English literary mainstream as it did to the Inklings.
It fell to Lewis, in these dark times, to interpret the English literary tradition of the Fall and to defend the doctrine as the compelling truth about “the sort of universe in which we have all along been living.” But interpreting this literary tradition meant, first of all, interpreting John Milton, the poet English modernists love to hate. This was a task Lewis relished, for he had long loved Paradise Lost—perhaps as far back as his ninth year, when he read the epic poem for the first time. Under Kirkpatrick’s tutelage, Lewis devoted many of his blissful hours of ad-lib reading to Milton’s poems, enthusing about his discoveries in letters to Arthur Greeves. Thrilled with his purchase of a fine edition of Paradise Lost, he wrote to him in July 1916, “Don’t you like the Leopard witches? How you will love Milton some day!” A week later, he was more cautious: “I don’t think I should advise Milton: while there are lots of things in him you would love—the descriptions of Hell
and Chaos and Paradise and Adam and Eve and Satan’s flight down through the stars, on the other hand his classical allusions, his rather crooked style of English, and his long speeches, might be tedious.” By March 1917, all such hesitations were gone: “I have finished ‘Paradise Lost’ again, enjoying it even more than before. Really you must read it sometime soon. In Milton is everything you get everywhere else, only better. He is as voluptuous as Keats, as romantic as Morris, as grand as Wagner, as wierd [sic] as Poe, and a better lover of nature than even the Brontës.”
And that was before Lewis became a Christian. Before his conversion, Lewis loved Milton without sharing his convictions, much as the Romantics loved Milton (Blake thought Milton “a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” and Shelley admired the “energy and magnificence” of Milton’s Satan as passionately as he detested the vindictiveness of Milton’s God). It fell to Lewis to rescue Paradise Lost from the Romantics who loved Milton for the wrong reasons as well as from the new generation of poets and critics—notably John Middleton Murry and T. S. Eliot—who disliked Milton for a host of reasons: his indigestible epic style, his repellent portrait of God, his political opinions. To Eliot, writing in 1936, Milton was a major poet but a bad moralist, theologian, psychologist, political philosopher—and man—who exerted a corrupting influence on English language and literature from which it was still struggling to recover. As the redoubtable Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis put it, thanks to T. S. Eliot, “Milton’s dislodgement … was effected with remarkably little fuss.”
Perhaps Milton had been dislodged in the circles Leavis knew, but in Oxford, with the arrival of Charles Williams, things were very different. Williams didn’t just love Milton, he channeled him. His Hilary term 1940 lectures on Milton, as Lewis said in A Preface to Paradise Lost, which he dedicated to Williams, “partly anticipated, partly confirmed, and most of all clarified and matured, what I had long been thinking about Milton,” namely, “that when the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted.” The lectures are not extant, but Williams distilled them in a preface for the 1940 World’s Classics edition of The Poetical Works of Milton, in which he attributes opposition to Milton to ignorance of Christian doctrine, whether it concerns chastity (“that great miracle of the transmutation of the flesh proposed in Comus”) or obedience (“the proper order of the universe in relation to … the law of self-abnegation in love” that is the real theme of Paradise Lost). In just twenty three-by-five-inch pages, Williams achieved, according to Lewis, “the recovery of a true critical tradition after more than a hundred years of laborious misunderstanding.”
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings Page 39
