by Michael Ward
Secondly, it means that Lewis makes extensive use of verbal illustrations or analogies, to enable us to see things in a new way. Lewis’s famous apologetic for the doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity suggests that our difficulties arise primarily because we fail to see it properly. If we see it another way—as, for example, an inhabitant of a two-dimensional world might try to grasp and describe the structure of a three-dimensional reality—then we begin to grasp its intrinsic rationality. Lewis’s apologetic often takes the form of a visual invitation: “Try seeing it this way!” The rationality of the Trinity needs to be shown, not proved—and it is shown by allowing us to see it in the right way.
Perhaps this helps us appreciate the special appeal of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, which present a way of seeing things, embodied within stories, which turns out to be rationally plausible and imaginatively attractive.
Lewis’s Oxford colleague Austin Farrer suggested that Lewis’s apologetic approach might initially look like an argument, but on closer inspection, 8. Dante, Paradiso XXXIII, 55–56.
9. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 105.
mcgrath—telling the truth through rational argument 7
it turned out to be an encouragement to see things in a new way, and thus grasp the rationality of faith. Lewis, Farrer suggested, makes us “think we are listening to an argument,” when in reality “we are presented with a vision, and it is the vision that carries conviction.”10
For example, consider Lewis’s imaginative visualization of a theological truth—the entrapment of the human soul through sin in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” Lewis’s opening line in this book is seen by many as one of its most memorable features: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” Eustace Scrubb is portrayed as a thoroughly unsympathetic character, whom Lewis develops as an example of selfishness. It’s difficult to like him to begin with, and it’s just as difficult to feel sorry for him when he changes into a dragon as a result of his “greedy, dragonish thoughts.”11
The thoroughly obnoxious Eustace encounters some enchanted gold.
He believes this will make him the master of all! But instead, it masters him.
Lewis loved old Norse mythology, and borrowed the Norse story about the greedy giant Fáfnir, who turned himself into a dragon to protect his ill-won gain. So Eustace becomes a dragon. Now having become a dragon, how does Eustace stop being one? Lewis presents Eustace’s initial transformation into a dragon and his subsequent “undragoning” as a double transformation that reveals both Eustace’s selfish, fallen nature and the transforming power of divine grace.
The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” provides a brilliant description of Eustace realizing, to his horror, that he has become a dragon. He doesn’t like this at all, and he frantically tries to scratch off his dragon’s skin. Yet each layer he removes merely reveals yet another layer of scales beneath it. He simply cannot break free from his prison. He is trapped.
But salvation lies to hand. Aslan appears, and tears away at the dragon flesh with his claws. And when the scales are finally removed, Aslan plunges the raw and bleeding Eustace into a well from which he emerges purified and renewed, with his humanity restored. The storyline is dramatic, realistic, and shocking. But the power of the narrative brings home the Christian themes that Lewis believed could not be described as effectively through a series of well-intentioned theological lectures. And while Lewis drew his dragon imagery from Norse mythology, the story of the “undragoning”
draws on the rich ideas and imagery of the New Testament.
So what are we to learn from this powerful and shocking story, so
realistically depicted? As the startlingly raw imagery of Aslan tearing at 10. Farrer, “The Christian Apologist,” in Light on C. S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb, 37.
11. For the narrative, see Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 91–92.
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Eustace’s flesh makes clear, Eustace has been trapped by forces over which he has no control. The one who would be master has instead been mastered.
The dragon is a symbol, not so much of sin itself, as of the power of sin to entrap, captivate, and imprison. It can only be broken and mastered by the redeemer. Aslan is the one who heals and renews Eustace, restoring him to what he was intended to be.
The immersion in the water of the well is immediately familiar, picking up on the New Testament’s language about baptism as dying to self and rising to Christ (Rom 6). (The omission of this aspect of the “undragoning”
of Eustace in the recent movie version of The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
was one of the more irritating and unnecessary of its many weaknesses.) Eustace is then tossed into the well by Aslan, and emerges renewed and restored.
You see my point. Lewis takes a classic theological doctrine, and transposes it into a narrative—a narrative that is embraced imaginatively, and not simply rationally understood. He breathes new life into a traditional doctrine by inviting us to see it. We are shown what sin is all about, not merely told about it.
Although some have tried to force Lewis into a purely rationalist way of thinking, this does not do him justice. Lewis does not try to prove the existence of God on a priori grounds. Instead, Lewis invites us to see how what we observe in the world around us and experience within us “fits” the Christian way of seeing things. Lewis often articulates this way of “seeing things” in terms of a “myth”—that is to say, a story about reality that both invites its “imaginative embrace,” and communicates a conceptual framework, by which other things are to be seen.12 The imagination embraces the narrative; reason consequently reflects on its contents.
So how does this approach to the reasonableness of faith work out in practice? Let’s consider Lewis’s celebrated “argument from desire,” exploring both its rational structure and its apologetic appeal.
The starting point for Lewis’s approach is an experience—a longing for something undefined and possibly undefinable, that is as insatiable as it is elusive. Lewis sets out versions of this argument at several points in his writings, including the Chronicles of Narnia. The most important statements of the argument, however, are the following:
1. The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), written shortly after his conversion to Christianity, in which Lewis sets out an allegorical account of his own conversion, focusing on the theme of desire.
12. For a detailed discussion, see McGrath, “A Gleam of Divine Truth: The Concept of Myth in Lewis’s Thought,” in The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis, 55–82.
mcgrath—telling the truth through rational argument 9
2. The university sermon “The Weight of Glory,” preached in Oxford in June 1941, and subsequently published as an article in the journal Theology. This is the most elegant statement of the argument, which is here framed primarily in terms of the human quest for beauty.
3. The talk “Hope,” given during the third series of Broadcast Talks for the British Broadcasting Corporation during the Second World War,
and subsequently reproduced as a chapter in Mere Christianity. This is generally considered to be Lewis’s most influential statement of the argument.
4. The autobiographical work Surprised by Joy, in which the theme of
“Joy” plays a significant role in arousing Lewis’s openness towards God.
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis described his childhood experiences of intense longing (which he names “Joy”) for something unknown and elusive, trig-gered off by such things as the fragrance of a flowering currant bush in the garden of his childhood home in Belfast, or reading Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem in the style of the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér. Lewis’s epiphany of “Joy” bathed his everyday world of experience with beauty and wonder. But what did it mean—if it meant anything at all? What way of seeing it might help him to make sense of it? How was he to interpret it?
While an atheist, Lewis dismissed such
experiences as illusory. Yet he became increasingly dissatisfied with such simplistic reductive explanations.
His growing familiarity with what he termed the “Christian mythology”—
Lewis here uses the term “myth” in the sense of a “narrated worldview”—led him to appreciate that these experiences could easily and naturally be accommodated within its explanatory framework. What if God were an active questing personal agent, as Christianity affirmed to be the case? If so, God could easily be understood as the “source from which those arrows of Joy had been shot at me ever since childhood.”
In the 1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis develops this theme further by exploring the human quest for beauty. Lewis argues that this is really a search for the source of that beauty, which is mediated through the things of this world, but not contained within them. “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them: it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.”13 Without a Christian way of seeing things, this longing remains “uncertain of its object.” Its true goal remains to be identified and attained.
13. Lewis, Essay Collection, 98.
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Christianity, Lewis declares, gives us the intellectual framework that both interprets the experience, and leads us to its true goal. In his own way, Lewis reworks the point so famously made by T. S. Eliot in The Dry Salvages: We had the experience but missed the meaning.
And approach to the meaning restores the experience.
In Mere Christianity, Lewis sets out this approach in a somewhat different way, while still appealing to the elusiveness of our experiences of “Joy.”
The experiences he had in mind are shared across the human spectrum, often expressed in quotidian language as a sense of there being “something there.” The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for example, spoke of “a nostalgic yearning, bordering at times on unendurably poignant sorrow,” which he experienced in “the dreams of my heart and in the reveries of my soul.”14 Bertrand Russell, one of the most articulate and influential British atheist writers of the twentieth century, put a similar thought into words as follows:
The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain . . . a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite—the beatific vision, God—I do
not find it, I do not think it is to be found—but the love of it is my life . . . it is the actual spring of life within me.15
Russell’s daughter, Katharine Tait, recalled that he was contemptuous of organized religion, dismissing its ideas mainly because he disliked those who held them. Yet Tait took the view that her father’s life was really an un-acknowledged, perhaps disguised, search for God. “Somewhere at the back of my father’s mind, at the bottom of his heart, in the depths of his soul, there was an empty space that had once been filled by God, and he never found anything else to put in it.” Russell was now haunted by a “ghost-like feeling of not belonging in this world.”16
These are the kinds of experience to which Lewis appeals—a sense of hovering on the brink of discovering something of immense significance, linked with a sense of sorrow and frustration when what seemed to be so close tantalizingly disappears. Like smoke, it cannot be grasped. As Lewis puts it: “There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, 14. Dostoyevsky, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” in A Disgraceful Affair, 172.
15. Letter to Colette O’Niel, 21 October 1916; in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years 1914–1970, 85.
16. Tait, My Father Bertrand Russell, 189.
mcgrath—telling the truth through rational argument 11
which just fades away in the reality.”17 So what does this sense of unfulfilled longing mean? To what does it point?
Some, Lewis concedes, might suggest that this frustration arises from looking for its true object in the wrong places; others that, since further searching will only result in repeated disappointment, there is simply no point trying to find something better than the present world.
Yet Lewis suggests that there is a third approach, which recognizes that these earthly longings are “only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage” of our true homeland. Since this overwhelming desire cannot be fulfilled through anything in the present world, this suggests that its ultimate object lies beyond the present world. As he says in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Here, as throughout his apologetic writings, the starting point of Lewis’s approach does not lie with the Bible or the Christian tradition, but with shared human experience and observation. How do we make sense of them? Lewis’s genius as an apologist lay in his ability to show how a “view-point” which was derived from the Bible and the Christian tradition was able to offer a more satisfactory explanation of common human experience than its rivals—especially the atheism he had once himself espoused.
Lewis’s apologetic approach is to identify a common human observa-
tion or experience, and then show how it fits in, naturally and plausibly, within a Christian way of looking at things.18 For Lewis, Christianity provided a “big picture,” an intellectually capacious and imaginatively satisfying way of seeing things. Lewis was always emphatic that nothing can be proved on the basis of observation or experience. Yet while such observations of nature or our own experiences prove nothing, they can suggest certain possibilities, and even intimate what they might mean. That’s what Lewis was trying to express when he wrote:
A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of
nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy.
Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposi-
tion (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will
help to show what it means.19
17. For what follows, see Lewis, Mere Christianity, 135–36.
18. Lewis’s apologetic method is often misunderstood. For a correction of earlier accounts of his approach, see McGrath, “Reason, Experience, and Imagination: Lewis’s Apologetic Method,” in The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis, 129–46.
19. Lewis, The Four Loves, 25.
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That’s what Lewis’s mentor G. K. Chesterton was also getting at when he remarked that “the phenomenon does not prove religion, but religion explains the phenomenon.”20
Lewis’s approach could be framed like this: Christianity holds that the natural order—including our own reasoning—is shaped by the God who created all things. As Augustine of Hippo and Blaise Pascal had argued before him, Lewis affirms that the absence of God causes us to experience longing—a yearning for God, which we misinterpret as a longing for something located within the finite and created order. Conversion is thus partly about a semiotic transformation, in which we realize that something we believed to be pointing to one thing in fact points to something rather different.
We could set Lewis’s argument out more formally as follows. We ex-
perience desires that no experience in this world seems able to satisfy. Yet Christianity tells us that we are made for another world. And when things are seen in this way, this sort of experience is exactly what we would expect.
The appeal is not so much to cold logic, as to intuition and imagination, resting on an imaginative dynamic of discovery. Lewis invites his audience to see their experiences through a set of Christian spectacles, and notice how these bring what might otherwise be fuzzy or blurred into sharp focus.
For Lewis, the ability of the Christian faith to accommodate our experience, naturally and easily, is an indicator of its truth.
As Lewis states this approach from desire, therefore, it is not really an argument at all; it is more about observing and affirming the fit between
a theory and observation. It is like trying on a hat or shirt for size. How well does it fit? How many of our observations of the world can it accommodate, and how persuasively? Lewis’s way of thinking also shows some similarity to a related approach within the natural sciences, now generally known as “inference to the best explanation.”21 This approach recognizes that there are multiple explanations of observations, and suggests how criteria might be identified to determine which such explanation is to be considered as “the best.”
The same approach is found in Lewis’s “argument from morality.” This is sometimes portrayed in ridiculously simplistic terms—for example, “experiencing a sense of moral obligation proves there is a God.” Lewis did not say this, and did not think this. As with the “argument from desire,”
his argument is rather that the common human experience of a sense of moral obligation is easily and naturally accommodated within a Christian framework.
20. Chesterton, “The Return of the Angels,” Daily News.
21. For the importance of such approaches in relation to countering the “New Atheism,” see McGrath, “The Boyle Lecture 2014: New Atheism—New Apologetics.”
mcgrath—telling the truth through rational argument 13
For Lewis, experiences and intuitions—for example, concerning mo-
rality and desire—are meant to “arouse our suspicions” that there is indeed
“Something which is directing the universe.” We come to suspect that our moral experience suggests a “real law which we did not invent, and which we know we ought to obey,” in much the same way as our experience of desire is “a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage” of another place, which is our true homeland. And as we track this suspicion, we begin to realize that it has considerable imaginative and explanatory potential. What was initially a dawning suspicion becomes solidified as a growing conviction that it makes sense of what matters to us naturally and persuasively.
