1945–1954
1945–1954
A Prophet without Honour?: Postwar Tensions and Problems
By 1945, Lewis was famous. In the British academic world, a scholar’s status is calibrated by several measures, including the number and perceived significance of publications. The ultimate mark of distinction for any scholar in the humanities is to be elected a fellow of the British Academy. Lewis achieved this honour in July 1955. Yet in the eyes of his biographers, this important mark of academic acknowledgement has been totally overshadowed by the recognition of a very different audience.
C. S. Lewis—Superstar
On 8 September 1947, Lewis appeared on the front cover of Time magazine, which declared this “best-selling author,” who was also “the most popular lecturer in [Oxford] University,” to be “one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.” Screwtape had taken England and America by storm. (America, it must be recalled, had not heard Lewis’s broadcast talks on the BBC.) The opening paragraph helps capture the tone of the piece: a quirky and slightly weird Oxford academic—“a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice”—unexpectedly hits the big time.[524] Were there more bestsellers on the way? Time cautioned its excited readers that they would just have to wait: “He has no immediate plans for further ‘popular’ books, fantastic or theological.”
The Time article of 1947 can be seen as a tipping point—both signaling Lewis’s arrival on the broader cultural scene, and extending his reach by drawing wider attention to his works. Yet Lewis was ill equipped, organisationally and temperamentally, to deal with his rise to fame that began in 1942. His high profile led to both adulation and invective being poured on him, and his private life—which Lewis had hitherto protected—began to come into the public domain. He became the subject of discussion in British newspapers, which often portrayed him in unrecognisable terms. Tolkien was particularly amused by one media reference to an “Ascetic Mr. Lewis.” This bore no relation to the Lewis he knew. That very morning, Tolkien had told his son that Lewis had “put away three pints in a very short session.” Tolkien had cut down on his own drinking, as it was Lent—a time of self-denial for many Christians. But not, Tolkien grumbled, for Lewis.[525]
Lewis was now inundated with letters from devotees and critics, demanding his immediate and full answers to questions great, trivial, and downright improper. Like a gallant knight of old, Warnie came to his brother’s rescue. From 1943, he typed replies to his brother’s burgeoning correspondence with two fingers on his battered Royal typewriter, often without consulting Lewis about their content. Warnie later estimated that he typed twelve thousand such letters. Warnie also devised an imaginative technique for getting rid of the increasing number of self-important people who demanded to speak to Lewis at home personally by telephone.[526] As Tolkien recalled, Warnie’s method was to “lift the receiver and say ‘Oxford Sewage Disposal Unit,’ and go on repeating it until they went away.”[527] Yet Lewis’s growing fame in the United States had one unexpected consequence of which Warnie thoroughly approved: food parcels, packed with long-forgotten luxuries, now arrived regularly from Lewis’s growing army of wealthy American well-wishers.
The evidence suggests that Lewis’s writings resonated at this time with many American Christians, both ordained and lay, reflecting a changed national cultural mood. Preoccupation with the economic woes of the 1920s and 1930s was passing; however, after America entered the Second World War in December 1941, a new interest in the deeper questions of life arose. God was being talked about again. Religious publishing began to experience a revival. And in the midst of this new openness towards religious questions, a new voice appeared—one that was perceived to be authoritative and interesting, and above all concerned with the religious questions of ordinary people.
The strongly apologetic tone of Lewis’s works was welcomed by those ministering to people wrestling with the big questions raised by the war—such as college and university chaplains. Although Lewis was generally not well regarded by academic theologians in America, the evidence suggests that they nevertheless broadly welcomed the new quality of engagement that he brought to religious issues. Lewis offered provisional answers that could be further developed in the seminaries and universities.
Yet Lewis’s popular fame did cause a certain degree of irritation for some academics. One line in the Time article particularly riled some professional theologians, who baulked at the suggestion that “a man who could talk theology without pulling a long face or being dull was just what a lot of people in war-beleaguered Britain wanted.” The wise kept their counsel, hoping that people would soon forget about Lewis; the foolish let rip with theological broadsides, thereby raising both Lewis’s profile and his appeal.
One such broadside came from the pen of an obscure American Episcopalian theologian, Norman Pittenger (1905–1997). Irritated that Time had incomprehensibly overlooked his own vastly superior claims to be the nation’s top Christian apologist, Pittenger declared that Lewis was a theologically lightweight heretic—a total liability for the kind of intelligent Christianity that he himself so conspicuously represented. America took no notice of such self-promotion, and went back to reading Lewis.
Lewis, then, was famous by the time the Second World War ended in the summer of 1945. If the simple philosophy of life propounded by modern celebrity culture has any validity, Lewis at that point should have been a happy and fulfilled person. Yet Lewis’s personal history for the next nine years tells a quite different story. Fame may have raised Lewis’s profile, but in the first place, this just made him a more obvious target for those who disliked his religious beliefs. And in the second, many of his academic colleagues came to believe that he had sold out to popular culture to secure that fame. He had sold his academic birthright for a populist pottage. Though he does not appear to have realised this shift, Lewis was about to enter into a period of rejection, misfortune, and personal struggle.
The Darker Side of Fame
The Second World War finally ended in Europe on 8 May 1945. Tolkien felt that things had been looking up for a while. “The Bird”—as he referred to the Eagle and Child—was now “gloriously empty,” the beer “improved,” and the landlord “wreathed in welcoming smiles.” Their Tuesday meetings were once more a “feast of reason and flow of soul.”[528] The first meeting of the Inklings after the ending of the war in Europe was scheduled for Tuesday, 15 May at the Eagle and Child.
Charles Williams would not be attending. He had been taken ill the previous week, and was recuperating in the Radcliffe Infirmary, only a few moments’ walk north of the Eagle and Child. Lewis decided to visit Williams on the way to the first postwar Inklings gathering, so that he could convey his friend’s best wishes to the group. Nothing could have prepared him for what happened next. To his shock, he was told that Williams had just died.
Although all the Inklings were stunned by this unexpected news, Lewis was by far the most affected. Williams had become his literary and spiritual lodestar throughout the period of the war, displacing Tolkien in his affections. A small volume of essays that the Inklings had planned as a tribute to Williams now became his memorial instead. It was a crushing personal blow for Lewis.
Others, however, soon put this sad event behind them. Tolkien’s bibulous delight that the war had ended was soon enhanced further by the news that he had been elected to one of Oxford’s two Merton Professorships of English in 1945. He had long dreamed to establish himself in one of these chairs, and Lewis in the other. One goal had now been achieved; the second soon seemed within their reach. There was no doubt in Tolkien’s mind that Lewis needed a professorship, for the sake of his sanity.
Why so? Once the war was ended, student numbers at Oxford University began to rise. Although this was good news for the university as a whole, bringing much-needed financial revitalization to an institution that had been under-resourced during the war years, it placed the college tutorial systems under considerable strain. Lewis’s personal workload increased substantially, leaving him less and less time for reading and writing. If Lewis became an Oxford professor, he would not have to give tutorials to undergraduates. Although he would be required to give lectures at undergraduate level for the faculty and undertake graduate supervision, these demands were modest in comparison with the crippling postwar tutorial workload that Lewis was beginning to experience. A promotion would be good news for Lewis.
Then the window of opportunity opened. In 1947, David Nichol Smith retired from the second Merton Chair of English. Lewis had expectations of filling the position, and Tolkien was clear that it ought to be his. As one of the electors to the chair, Tolkien was well placed to support Lewis’s election. But Tolkien seems to have been unaware of the hostility that had been building up towards Lewis at Oxford. As he pressed Lewis’s case, Tolkien was taken aback by the “extraordinary animosity”[529] directed against Lewis within the Faculty of English. His recent populist writings and negative attitude towards higher degrees were seen as potential liabilities for the faculty. Tolkien totally failed to persuade his fellow electors Helen Darbishire, H. W. Garrod, and C. H. Wilkinson to take Lewis seriously as a candidate. In the end, the second Merton Chair went to F. P. Wilson, a solid if slightly dull Shakespearean scholar, whose virtues included not being C. S. Lewis.
But more bad news was to come. In 1948, Oxford’s Goldsmith’s Chair of English Literature, linked to a fellowship at New College, fell vacant. In the end, it was offered to the noted literary biographer Lord David Cecil. Lewis was passed over.
The next rejection took place in 1951, as Oxford University prepared to elect a new Professor of Poetry. The ballot paper had only two names. They were confusingly similar, and voting errors were a real possibility. Lewis’s single opponent was Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972), later to become the British poet laureate. (A third candidate dropped out, to allow the anti–C. S. Lewis faction a clear run.) In the end, C. D. Lewis won the ballot by 194 votes to 173. Once more, Lewis faced rejection.
There were, however, consolations in the midst of this bleakness. On 17 March 1948, the Council of the Royal Society of Literature unanimously voted to elect Lewis as a fellow of the Society.[530] Yet Lewis had no doubt that he was regarded by many of his academic colleagues with suspicion or derision. He seemed to be a prophet without honour in his own city and university.
This prickly hostility towards Lewis, occasionally degenerating to an irrational hatred, was also evident within his own college. A. N. Wilson, in researching his 1990 biography of Lewis, recalled discussing him with an old man who had been a fellow of Magdalen around this time. Lewis, the former don declared, was “the most evil man he had ever met.” Wilson naturally wanted to know the basis of this bizarre geriatric judgement. Lewis’s degeneracy, it turned out, was that he believed in God, and used his “cleverness to corrupt the young.” As Wilson rightly remarked, precisely that same charge had once been levelled against Socrates.[531]
While this ludicrous attitude is easily dismissed, even though it is still often repeated, the academic hostility towards Lewis within Oxford at this time was not totally irrational or vindictive. The winds of change were blowing, and Lewis was coming to be seen as a potential problem rather than a resource for the future of the Oxford Faculty of English. Graduate students were beginning to flock to Oxford, often to study for a BLitt (Bachelor of Letters) in English literature, bringing much-needed income to both individual colleges and the university. These students needed supervision—a task for which Lewis had no enthusiasm. He was regularly heard to remark that Oxford knew three kinds of literacy: the literate, the illiterate, and the B.Litterate—and that his personal sympathies lay entirely with the first two. As the Oxford Faculty of English began to reestablish its teaching and research programmes after the war, Lewis’s negative attitude towards higher degrees and research was increasingly seen as unhelpful, and out of touch with the changing educational situation.
Dementia and Alcoholism: Lewis’s “Mother” and Brother
Lewis’s problems were not limited to his professional work; they extended to his personal life. Although the gloom of wartime economies and shortages gradually lifted, life was not easy for Lewis at The Kilns. His letters of the late 1940s show a concern about Mrs. Moore’s health, and broad hints that things were becoming difficult within the household. Maureen had long since left home, leaving Lewis to deal with a fraught situation. Maids now had to be employed to keep the household running smoothly, and their relationships with Mrs. Moore (and each other) were often fractious. Lewis found it hard to cope. When the University of St. Andrews in Scotland awarded Lewis an honorary degree in July 1946, he gloomily remarked that he would much have preferred to receive a “case of Scotch whiskey.”[532]
That suggestion would have delighted Lewis’s brother, Warnie. At this time, Warnie was fighting what we now know to have been a losing battle with alcohol addiction. While on holiday in Ireland in the summer of 1947, Warnie engaged in binge drinking of such ferocity that he was taken unconscious to a hospital in Drogheda before he finally dried out and was allowed to go home. Sadly, this pattern was now to be repeated, its unpredictability making it all the more difficult to cope with.
The Kilns had become a dysfunctional household. Lewis’s domestic life revolved around an increasingly irritable and confused Mrs. Moore, now showing the classic symptoms of dementia, and his increasingly irritated and alcoholic brother. It was hardly a happy environment, made worse by postwar austerity measures, including the continued rationing of many everyday items. In 1947, Lewis wrote to a colleague to apologise for having difficulty attending meetings: his time was “almost fully” and “unpredictably” taken up with his “duties as a nurse and a domestic servant.”[533] His challenges, he remarked, were both material and psychological. Life at The Kilns was becoming unbearable, with Lewis acting as caregiver regularly for his “mother” and occasionally for his brother. It was all too much.
Maureen had noticed the pressure that the Lewis brothers were under in caring for her aging mother and her decrepit dog, Bruce, and did what she could to relieve them. She and her husband moved into The Kilns and allowed Lewis and Warnie to live in their house in Malvern for two weeks. It was, however, only a temporary respite. In April 1949, Lewis apologised to Owen Barfield for his tardiness in replying to letters; he was trying to cope with “Dog’s stools and human vomits.”[534]
On 13 June 1949, Lewis was hospitalised with symptoms of exhaustion, later diagnosed as a streptococcus infection requiring injections of penicillin every three hours. He was finally allowed to go home on 23 June. Warnie was outraged that his brother was so exhausted by the needs of Mrs. Moore, and demanded that she allow Lewis time to recover. Gratefully, Lewis planned to spend a month in Ireland to rest and recharge his batteries in the company of Arthur Greeves. Yet before he could go, Warnie succumbed to another extended bout of alcohol overdose. (Anxious to protect his brother’s dignity, Lewis described his brother’s problem as “nervous insomnia,” only revealing its true nature—“Drink”—to his confidant Arthur Greeves.)[535] In the end, Lewis was left with no option but to cancel his proposed trip to Ireland, and look after Mrs. Moore on his own.
There were unquestionably moments of joy in this dark period in Lewis’s life. Yet even his joy at reading the finally completed text of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in October was tempered by his knowledge that the two men now rarely met. Few can miss the pathos in Lewis’s letters to his old friend: “I miss you very much.”[536] Though the two men lived and worked in the same city and university, they were no longer close. Lewis found at least some degree of intellectual consolation elsewhere, as is evident from the flurry of correspondence with the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers around this time. Yet the tectonic plates of Lewis’s life were shifting. Old friendships were withering, and with them the intellectual stimulation and support they had once brought.
Throughout this troubled period, Mrs. Moore was becoming increasingly confused and disturbed, and eventually declined to the point that she had to be admitted to a nursing home. After she had fallen out of bed three times on 29 April 1950, the decision was made to admit her to Restholme, a specialist nursing home at 230 Woodstock Road, Oxford. Lewis, who visited her every day, was plunged into a new anxiety. The nursing fees were £500 per year. How could he afford this? What would happen when he retired and no longer had a college income on which to rely?
In the end, the issue was settled by an influenza pandemic which broke out in the northern English port city of Liverpool late in December 1950. It spread rapidly, and reached its peak in mid-January 1951. Official figures indicate that the death rate was about 40 percent greater than that of the 1918–1919 flu pandemic, which had caused Britain such misery during its recovery from the Great War. At its height, on 12 January 1951, the pandemic claimed the life of Mrs. Moore at the age of seventy-nine. She was laid to rest at Holy Trinity churchyard on 15 January, in the same grave as her old friend Alice Hamilton Moore, who had been buried there on 6 November 1939. (The parish burial records indicate that Alice Moore had lived at The Kilns before her death, suggesting that she had been part of the household around that time.) Warnie was unable to attend her funeral, being himself a victim of the same flu that had carried her off.
Hostility towards Lewis at Oxford
Meanwhile, Lewis’s personal difficulties were compounded by persistent institutional hostility and rejection within Oxford University. A small part—but only a small part—of this hostility represented the predictable prejudice of those few who believed Christianity was a sign of mental illness or moral depravity. The real roots of the problem were Lewis’s popular acclaim and his seeming disregard for the norms of traditional academic scholarship. His popular works, it was suggested, distracted him from academic research and writing, placing him on the margins of academic culture, rather than at its centre. Lewis, it was pointed out by his critics, had not published anything of academic seriousness and weight since A Preface to “Paradise Lost” in 1942. Lewis would need to remedy this deficit as a matter of urgency if he was to regain his academic credibility.
Lewis was painfully aware of such criticisms, which were not without merit. Indeed, it is difficult not to read Lewis’s correspondence of the postwar period without sensing unease, uncertainty, and unhappiness over his situation. Lewis had signed a contract in 1935 with Oxford University Press for a volume on sixteenth-century English literature, and was feeling under some pressure to complete it. Yet his home situation was so chaotic that he simply could not find the time to read the vast number of primary sources needed to produce this book. By the middle of 1949, he was exhausted and physically incapable of the intense concentration that the reading and writing for this landmark book would take. Popular books were less demanding, and flowed easily from Lewis’s pen. But this one was different.
Nothing could be done while Mrs. Moore remained alive and required Lewis’s constant ministrations. After her death in January 1951, Lewis was able to secure a year’s sabbatical leave from his teaching responsibilities at Magdalen College to allow him to work flat out on this project during the academic year 1951–1952. By September 1951, Lewis felt able to inform his Italian correspondent Don Giovanni Calabria (1873–1954) of his change in health. Iam valeo—“I am now better.”[537] His spirits would have further been lifted by a letter from the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, offering to recommend him for a C. B. E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire, one level below a knighthood) in the 1952 King’s New Year’s Honours List. Lewis declined;[538] it was, however, clearly a boost for his morale.
He began work with a vengeance on his new project on English literature. Helen Gardner recalled regularly seeing Lewis hard at work in Duke Humfrey’s Library, working his way resolutely through the Bodleian Library’s holdings of the writers of this bygone age. Never one to trust secondary sources, Lewis devoured the originals, spitting out what was useless and digesting what was valuable.
If Lewis’s academic reputation had been flagging, it was more than amply restored with the publication of this seven-hundred-page work in September 1954. His election as a fellow of the British Academy the following year was directly related to this massive piece of scholarship. But it was too late to change the way he was seen at Oxford. Perceptions had crystallised. Lewis was seen as a spent force by many in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Other problems pressed in on him. The regular Thursday evening meetings of the Inklings continued after the war, often enlivened by the arrival of food parcels from Lewis’s American admirers. Lewis insisted on sharing this bounty with his friends, all of whom were suffering from food shortages caused by the postwar austerity measures. Yet all was not well with the Inklings. Tensions rose between members. Tempers flared. Enthusiasm waned. Numbers fell. Finally, on 27 October 1949, Warnie’s diary recorded the end of those meetings: “Nobody came.” Although members of the group would continue to socialise at the Eagle and Child on Tuesdays, the Inklings had come to an end as a serious literary discussion group.
Things were unquestionably complicated by the growing estrangement between Tolkien and Lewis, which Tolkien put down in no small part to the influence of Charles Williams during the period of the war. Tolkien felt—not without reason—that he had been displaced by Williams in Lewis’s affections. It was, in Tolkien’s view, a lamentable development, which he deeply regretted. But it had happened. And it would get worse. Tolkien was irritated by what seemed to him to be Lewis’s unacknowledged borrowing of Tolkien’s mythological ideas at points in his science fiction trilogy. In 1948, Tolkien wrote Lewis a long letter, clearly in response to a significant falling out between them over a literary issue.[539] Yet despite the cooling in their friendship, Tolkien continued to do all he could to help Lewis secure academic preferment at Oxford. For Tolkien, this was a simple matter of justice.
To make things even worse, Tolkien and Lewis faced a significant challenge over the English curriculum at Oxford in the late 1940s. For Tolkien and Lewis, there was no need to study any English literature after 1832. Yet with the austerity of the war years behind them, the Faculty of English reopened the debate. It was becoming increasingly clear that the Victorian Age had produced a massive and significant literature. Why should Oxford students not engage with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, or William Makepeace Thackeray? Or with Charles Dickens or George Eliot? Younger dons began to press the case for curriculum reform, with Helen Gardner playing a significant role as advocate for change. It became clear that the future direction of the faculty was likely to be one with which Lewis would not feel comfortable.
Yet some biographers have argued that the most significant issue Lewis had to face around this time was a challenge to his intellectual authority, issued by a rising young philosophical star, Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001). This story also needs to be told, and its implications explored.
Elizabeth Anscombe and the Socratic Club
In 1893, the Oxford Pastorate was founded by a group of evangelicals within the Church of England, with the intention of allowing Oxford undergraduates exposure to a more lively and intellectually engaging form of the Christian faith than was usually encountered in compulsory college chapel. From 1921, the Pastorate came to be based at St. Aldate’s Church, just south of Oxford city centre, close to the heart of the university. Although the Oxford Pastorate was originally both pastoral and evangelistic in its orientation, its leadership increasingly became aware of the importance of apologetic issues. How could Christians engage positively as well as critically with the major intellectual issues of the day? How could Christian students find intellectual engagement and reassurance, rather than bland spiritual platitudes?
In 1941, Stella Aldwinckle (1907–1989), the Pastorate’s chaplain for women students, decided the time had come to establish a student forum for the discussion of these issues. She came to this conclusion after a conversation with Monica Ruth Shorten (1923–1993), a student of zoology of Somerville College, who complained that churches and religious societies “just take the real difficulties as solved—things like the existence of God, the divinity of Christ and so on.” Yet people clearly needed help to understand and defend these beliefs, which could not simply be assumed as true in Oxford’s rigorously critical intellectual environment. Shorten—who went on to become an authority on the British grey squirrel—clearly saw the need for an apologetic ministry among Oxford’s students.
After hosting a series of discussions for agnostics and atheists at Somerville College, Aldwinckle decided to establish such a forum across the university as a whole. The Socratic Club was founded as an Oxford University student society. Under the rules of the university, a student club or society requires a “Senior Member”—a don who would take responsibility for the organisation. Aldwinckle initially thought that the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, a former scholar of Somerville College, might be appropriate. However, Sayers lived in London, and could not be counted on to attend regularly.[540] An Oxford academic was clearly called for. But who should it be?
In a stroke of genius, Aldwinckle bypassed all the safe choices (such as college chaplains) and went straight to the man she regarded as the rising star of apologetics at Oxford—C. S. Lewis. By the time the society met for the first time in January 1942, Lewis had soared to national fame. The Socratic Club rapidly became one of the most important university societies for discussion of issues relating to the Christian faith. It met on Monday evenings during full term. Lewis, usually present, was rarely the main attraction, on average speaking only once a term. Yet his presence was formidable. The list of speakers sparkled with Oxford philosophical luminaries. Though the club was explicitly Christian in orientation, it was generous in its range of speakers. Evidence and argument were the tools of its trade. As Lewis himself put it in the first edition of the Socratic Digest:
It was the Christians who constructed the arena and issued the challenge. . . . We never claimed to be impartial. But argument is. It has a life of its own. No man can tell where it will go. We expose ourselves, and the weakest of our party, to your fire no less than you are exposed to ours.[541]
An interesting aspect of the Socratic Club has passed unnoticed. Its members were primarily women. Perhaps this reflects the personal influence of Aldwinckle, or its original links with Somerville College. The membership list for Michaelmas Term 1944 records 164 members, of whom 109 were from Oxford’s five all-women colleges: Lady Margaret Hall (20), St. Anne’s (19), St. Hilda’s (18), St. Hugh’s (39), and Somerville (13).[542]
Given Lewis’s prominent role in the club, it was natural that visiting speakers would engage with his ideas, and provoke debate with him. So when Lewis published Miracles: A Preliminary Study in 1947, it was to be expected that the themes of this book would be up for discussion and debate. The most important of these was Lewis’s assertion that naturalism is self-refuting. The basic lines of this argument are laid out in the third chapter of Miracles, titled “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist.” On 2 February 1948, a young Catholic philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, called Lewis to task over his critique of naturalism.
So what form did Lewis’s critique of naturalism take? Lewis’s argument is foreshadowed in earlier works, and can be summed up in a sentence from his 1941 essay “Evil and God”: “If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it?”[543] In response to those who asserted that Christian beliefs—such as belief in God—are simply the result of environmental factors or evolutionary pressures, Lewis insisted that such approaches ended up invalidating the thought processes on which they ultimately depended. Those who represent all human thought as an accident of the environment are simply subverting all their own thoughts—including the belief that thought is determined by the environment.
Lewis’s line of thought is both suggestive and creative, and resonates with concerns expressed by “naturalist” thinkers of his day—such as J. B. S. Haldane, with whom Lewis crossed swords on several occasions. Haldane, a materialist, found himself discomfited by the following line of thought:
If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.[544]
Haldane here anticipates the argument that Lewis would use against this position. In Miracles, Lewis points out that if naturalism is the result of rational reflection, then the validity of that process of thought has to be assumed in order to reach this conclusion. Or, to put this another way, if all events are determined by “irrational causes,” as Lewis holds naturalism to assume, then rational thought must itself be recognised as a product of such irrational causes—which contradicts the core assumptions of the process of reasoning which is involved in reaching this naturalist position. “No thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.”[545]
There are some important lines of thought in this analysis. Yet a critical reader of this chapter of Miracles might (not unreasonably) draw the conclusion that it has been written in some haste. There are signs of logical shortcuts, perhaps because Lewis was so familiar with his argument that he assumed he had made it sufficiently clear to his readers. He hadn’t. If Elizabeth Anscombe had not pulled Lewis up over these weaknesses, someone else would have.
The problem did not lie with Lewis’s rejection of naturalism. Anscombe made it clear from the outset in her presentation of February 1948 that she agreed with Lewis that naturalism is untenable. Yet she did not regard his specific argument, as set out in the first edition of Miracles, as being sufficiently rigorous to justify this conclusion. Her main concern related to Lewis’s insistence that naturalism was “irrational.”[546] Anscombe made the entirely fair point—which will probably cross the mind of any informed reader of Lewis’s original chapter—that not all natural causes are “irrational.” Anscombe rightly pointed out that many (probably most) natural causes can legitimately be described simply as “non-rational.” If rational thought is produced by natural “non-rational” causes, there is no need to doubt its “validity” for that reason—unless those causes can be shown to predispose it to false or unreasonable beliefs.
It was an uncomfortable encounter for Lewis. Yet it was clear that this chapter did require revision—not because the conclusion was wrong, but because the arguments used in reaching that conclusion were not as robust as they ought to have been. Lewis rose to Anscombe’s criticism, as if she were a kind of philosophical Inkling, and rewrote his argument in the light of her criticisms. The revised version of this chapter, first published in 1960, was retitled “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.” Apart from its first six paragraphs, the chapter was rewritten to take Anscombe’s points into account. It is much stronger intellectually, and is to be seen as Lewis’s definitive statement on this important theme.
The real significance of this slightly bruising encounter with Anscombe concerns its interpretation for the future direction of Lewis’s writing projects. Some of Lewis’s biographers, primarily A. N. Wilson, have seen this incident as signalling, perhaps even causing, a major shift in Lewis’s outlook. Having been defeated in argument, they contend, Lewis lost confidence in the rational basis of his faith, and abandoned his role as a leading apologist. They claim that his shift to writing fictional works—such as the Chronicles of Narnia—reflects a growing realisation that rational argument cannot support the Christian faith.
However, the substantial body of written evidence concerning this exchange points to a quite different conclusion. A chastised Lewis recognised the weakness of one specific argument he had deployed (a little hastily, it must be said), and worked to improve it. Lewis was an academic writer, and academic books are tested against the criticisms and concerns of colleagues until the arguments and evidence are presented in the best possible way. Lewis was already used to giving and receiving literary criticism in this way, both through the Inklings and through personal discussions with colleagues such as Tolkien.
Anscombe would have seen herself as an agent of intellectual refinement, not contradiction, for Lewis’s general position, with which she clearly felt sympathy. Lewis appears to have been taken aback at having the weakness of his argument demonstrated so publicly, and expressed unease about the incident to some of his closer friends. Yet Lewis’s embarrassment concerned the somewhat public nature of this refinement, not the intellectual process itself. The positive and beneficial outcome of Anscombe’s intervention is clearly evident in the revised version of Lewis’s argument.
There is no evidence of Lewis retreating into some kind of nonrational fideism or reason-free fantasy as a result of this encounter. Lewis’s subsequent writings continue to show a strong sense of the rational coherency of the Christian faith, and of the importance of apologetics in the contemporary cultural context. Later papers—such as “Is Theism Important?” (1952) and “On Obstinacy in Belief” (1955)—clearly show a continued recognition of the importance of reasoned argument in apologetics. Furthermore, when Lewis published Mere Christianity in 1952, he did not significantly modify the rational approach to apologetics he had developed in the broadcast talks of the 1940s, despite having the opportunity to do so.
Nor can Anscombe’s critique be seen as constituting a “tipping point,” leading Lewis to abandon rational argument in favour of imaginative and narrative approaches to apologetics. It must be recalled that Lewis had, by the time of this debate, written three substantial works of what might reasonably be called “imaginative narrative apologetics”—namely, the Ransom Trilogy (see pages 233–238). Lewis was thus already persuaded of the importance of the use of narrative and the appeal to the imagination in apologetics. As Lewis once remarked, the Ransom Trilogy, like Narnia, had its origins in images rather than ideas.
Narnia was not Lewis’s escape route from a failed rational apologetic; it was one of several strands to his approach, held together by his celebrated reconciliation of reason and imagination in the Christian vision of reality. Sadly, A. N. Wilson does not offer any compelling evidence for his suggestion that “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe grew out of Lewis’s experience of being stung back into childhood by his defeat at the hands of Elizabeth Anscombe at the Socratic Club,”[547] or his amusing, but ultimately unevidenced, suggestion that Lewis based the White Witch of Narnia on Anscombe. The timing of Lewis’s weaving together of the rich imaginative threads of Narnia, like the images in Spenser’s Faerie Land, may conceivably owe something to Anscombe—but that is about as far as it goes. Lewis was writing about Narnia before Anscombe’s 1948 presentation.
Anyway, it was not a “defeat”; it was a critical evaluation of a sound argument that had been imperfectly stated, leading to its improved presentation in 1960. The Oxford philosopher J. R. Lucas presented Lewis’s arguments again in a rerun of the debate with Anscombe at a meeting of the Socratic Club in the late 1960s. His assessment of the original debate remains important:
Miss Anscombe’s argument was based on a distinction between reasons and causes, which had been drawn by Wittgenstein, and was thought to be important by Wittgensteinians. It was a distinction unknown to, and unknowable by, Lewis at the time he was writing Miracles, and dubiously relevant to his thesis.[548]
Lucas had no doubt about what Lewis’s problems were back in 1948, and why he succeeded against her in the later replay:
Miss Anscombe was a bully, and Lewis a gentleman, which inhibited him from treating her as she had treated him. But I had come across her in previous encounters, and had no inhibitions. So the contest was determined by the actual cogency of the arguments adduced. That is to say, I won.
10.1 A rare moment of peace. Lewis and his brother, Warnie, on holiday at Annagassan, County Louth, Ireland, in the summer of 1949. Vera Henry, Mrs. Moore’s goddaughter, owned a holiday home in the area, where Lewis and Warnie vacationed from time to time.
Lewis’s Doubts about His Role as an Apologist
While it is important to avoid exaggerations about the impact of Anscombe on Lewis in his later Oxford years, there are clear indications that she played a part in causing Lewis to rethink his role as an apologist around this time. Basil Mitchell, later Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Oxford, was a professional philosopher who succeeded Lewis as president of the Socratic Club after Lewis’s move to Cambridge. Mitchell took the view that Lewis came to believe that he was not sufficiently informed about contemporary philosophical debates—Anscombe was an expert on Wittgenstein—and decided this was now best left to the experts. He would focus on what he knew best.
Lewis’s wartime role as an apologist can be seen as a response to the needs of that era. Three straws in the wind suggest that Lewis wished to move away from a frontline apologetic role after the war. First, Lewis clearly found this draining. This point is made explicitly in his 1945 lecture “Christian Apologetics,” in which he remarks that “nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.”[549] A decade later, after his move to Cambridge, Lewis again commented that apologetics is “very wearing.”[550] Did Lewis see apologetics as an important episode in his career, rather than as its goal and zenith? His correspondence certainly suggests this. In fact, there are indications that he believed his writing lacked its former energy and vitality.
Lewis expresses these fears with particular clarity and force in his Latin correspondence with Don Giovanni Calabria, a remarkable Italian priest who was canonised by John Paul II on 18 April 1999. An Italian translation of The Screwtape Letters had appeared in 1947, and generated considerable interest.[551] Calabria read this book and wrote an appreciative note to its author. Not knowing English, he wrote to Lewis in Latin. They exchanged letters in Latin from 1947 until Calabria’s death in December 1954.[552] In a letter of January 1949, Lewis reveals his growing despair about his ability to write, which seemed to be in a state of collapse: “I feel that my enthusiasm for writing, and whatever flair I once possessed, have decreased.”[553] Perhaps believing that the use of Latin allowed him to express himself more frankly than he might have dared if the correspondence had been in English, Lewis even went so far as to suggest that it might actually be good for him if he lost his skills as a writer: it would put an end to any vain ambitions or quests for glory. In June 1949, Lewis suffered a breakdown in his health, and was hospitalised. Four months later, his mood was still darker. It was not until late 1951 that Lewis began to regain something of his confidence and motivation. Yet the death of Walter Adams, his confessor, in May 1952, clearly caused him further distress, robbing him of a wise critic and friend.
Another reason Lewis may have backed away from his role as an apologist was an acute awareness that he had failed as an apologist towards those who were closest to him—Arthur Greeves and Mrs. Moore. Mrs. Moore remained hostile towards Christianity throughout her later life, and Greeves moved away from his somewhat austere Ulster Protestantism to an equally austere Unitarianism. And even Warnie regarded The Problem of Pain as apologetically unconvincing. How could Lewis maintain a profile as a public apologist with any integrity in the light of such private failures?
Finally, and probably related to these two earlier points, there are strong indications in his correspondence that Lewis believed his moment as an apologist had passed, and it was time to make room for younger voices. Two slightly different themes can be discerned: first, Lewis’s feeling that new issues had arisen, which he was not best placed to engage; and second, Lewis’s growing conviction that he had peaked in his abilities as an apologist. Declining Robert Walton’s invitation to take part in a BBC discussion on the evidence for religious faith, Lewis commented that “like the old fangless snake in The Jungle Book, I’ve largely lost my dialectical power.”[554]
There is no doubt that Anscombe helped Lewis to reach this conclusion. On 12 June 1950, Stella Aldwinckle wrote to Lewis in her capacity as secretary of the Socratic Club, reminding him that they needed to plan the programme for Michaelmas Term 1950. Lewis made a list of rising stars as possible speakers: Austin Farrer on the historical value of the New Testament; Basil Mitchell on faith and experience; and Elizabeth Anscombe on “Why I believe in God.” Lewis made it clear that Anscombe was his top pick: “Having obliterated me as an Apologist, ought she not to succeed me?”[555]
Lewis seems to have seen his move to Cambridge in January 1955 as marking a fresh start. It is striking how few of his writings of this later period of his life deal specifically with apologetic themes, if understood in terms of the explicit rational defence of the Christian faith. In a letter of September 1955, declining the invitation of the American evangelical leader Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003) to write some apologetic pieces, Lewis explained that while he had done what he could “in the way of frontal attacks,” he now felt “quite sure” those days were over. He now preferred more indirect approaches to apologetics, such as those which appealed to “fiction and symbol.”[556]
These remarks to Carl Henry—one of the most significant figures in the history of postwar American evangelicalism—are clearly relevant to the creation of Narnia. Many would see this comment about “fiction and symbol” as a reference to his Chronicles of Narnia, which can easily be categorised as works of narrative or imaginative apologetics, representing a move away from the more deductive or inductive argumentative approaches of his wartime broadcast talks. If Anscombe raised doubts in Lewis’s mind about his apologetic approach, these concerned its medium, rather than its content. Lewis might have lost his “dialectical power”; but what about its imaginative counterpart?
We can rightly see Narnia as the imaginative outworking of the core philosophical and theological ideas Lewis had been developing since the mid-1930s, expressed in a narrative rather than a rational manner. The Narnia novels express in the form of a story the same philosophical and theological arguments advanced in Miracles. Fiction becomes the means of allowing readers to see—more than that, to enjoy—the vision of reality Lewis had already set out in his more apologetic works.
We must now tell the story of how Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, and try to understand why they have captivated the imagination of a generation.