How Lewis’s Paths to Christ Shaped His Life and Ministry
We begin with an accolade from Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College:
Once upon a dreary era, when the world of . . . specialization had nearly made obsolete all universal geniuses, romantic poets, Platonic idealists, rhetorical craftsmen, and even orthodox Christians, there appeared a man (almost as if from another world, one of the worlds of his own fiction: was he a man or something more like elf or Angel?) who was all of these things as amateur, as well as probably the world’s foremost authority in his professional province, Medieval and Renaissance English literature. Before his death in 1963 he found time to produce some first-quality works of literary history, literary criticism, theology, philosophy, autobiography, biblical studies, historical philology, fantasy, science fiction, letters, poems, sermons, formal and informal essays, a historical novel, a spiritual diary, religious allegory, short stories, and children’s novels. Clive Staples Lewis was not a man: he was a world.1
Those are the kinds of accolades you read again and again. Which means there must have been something extraordinary about the man. Indeed, there was.
Speaking personally, ever since I began to take him and his Reformed counterpart, Jonathan Edwards, seriously in my early twenties, I have never been the same. I don’t see myself as an imitator of Lewis and Edwards. The kind of Joy that Lewis and Edwards spoke of cannot be imitated. It’s a gift. You don’t make it happen. And both these men are intellectual giants in the land. I don’t have their intellectual ability. In their ability to see and think and feel, they are almost without peer. Their capacities to see and feel the freshness and wonder of things was childlike, and their capacities to describe it and understand it and defend it was massively manly.
Ruth Pitter was a poet and close friend of Lewis, and described it so well. She said,
His whole life was oriented and motivated by an almost uniquely-persisting child’s sense of glory and of nightmare. The adult events were received into a medium still as pliable as wax, wide open to the glory, and equally vulnerable, with a man’s strength to feel it all, and a great scholar’s and writer’s skills to express and to interpret.2
So I can’t imitate Lewis, but I can listen. And I have been listening for decades, and what I have heard and seen echoes almost everywhere in my life and work. His influence is simply enormous.
CHILDHOOD, SCHOOLING, AND BECOMING THE VOICE
The focus of this chapter is not mainly on Lewis’s biographical details, but we do need an outhne of his life to see what kind of life gave birth to his ideas. So here is a short summary of his life—the hard facts, you might say. Lewis loved hard facts. The kind you want under your house when the rains come down and the floods come up.
Lewis was born in 1898 in Belfast, Ireland. His mother died when he was nine years old, and his father never remarried. Between the death of his mother in August 1908 and the fall of 1914, Lewis attended four different boarding schools. Then for two and a half years, he studied with William Kirkpatrick, whom he called “the Great Knock.” And there his emerging atheism was confirmed, and his reasoning powers were refined in an extraordinary way. Lewis said, “If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity that man was Kirk.”3 He described himself later as a seventeen-year-old rationalist.
But just as his rationalism was at its peak, he stumbled onto George MacDonald’s fantasy novel Phantastes. “That night,” he said, “my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized.”4 Something had broken in—a “new quality,” a “bright shadow,” he called it.5 The romantic impulse of his childhood was again awake. Only now it seemed real, and holy (though he would not have called it that yet).
At eighteen, he took his place at Oxford University, but before he could begin his studies he entered the army, and in February 1918 was wounded in France and returned to England to recover. He resumed his studies at Oxford in January 1919, and over the next six years took three First Class Honors in classics, humanities, and English literature. He became a teaching Fellow in October 1925, at the age of twenty-six.
Six years later in 1931, he professed faith in Jesus Christ and was settled in the conviction that Christianity is true. Within ten years, he had become the “voice of faith” for the nation of England during the Second World War, and his broadcast talks in 1941–1942 “achieved classic status.”6
LEWIS IN FULL FLOWER
He was now in the full flower of his creative and apologetic productivity. In his prime, he was probably the world’s leading authority on Medieval English literature, and according to one of his adversaries, “the best read man of his generation.”7 But he was vastly more. Books of many kinds were rolling out: Pilgrim’s Regress, The Allegory of Love, The Screwtape Letters, and Perelandra. Then in 1950, he began the Chronicles of Narnia. All these titles were of different genres and showed the amazing versatility of Lewis as a writer and thinker and imaginative visionary.
He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1947. Then, after thirty years at Oxford, he took a professorship in Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge in 1955. The next year, at the age of fifty-seven, he married Joy Davidman. And just short of their fourth anniversary, she died of cancer. Three and a half years later—two weeks short of his sixty-fifth birthday, on November 22, 1963—Lewis followed her in death.
Lewis as an author is more popular today than at any time during his life. The Chronicles of Narnia alone have gone on to sell over one hundred million copies in forty languages.8 One of the reasons for this appeal, I will argue, is that Lewis is a “romantic rationalist” to an exceptionally high and healthy degree. His poetic effort and his rational effort combined in a kind of writing and speaking that was exceptionally illuminating on almost everything he touched.
LEWIS’S DEFECTIVE VIEWS
Before I unfold what that means, it’s important to confess that, for all the accolades, Lewis is not exemplary in all his views. Some readers may see quickly the common denominator between George Herbert and George Whitefield, on the one hand, and C. S. Lewis, on the other—namely, the conviction and demonstration that poetic effort is a path to seeing more truth and more beauty. That is what we have seen in the experience of Herbert and Whitefield. Now Lewis says, it is often the case that highly imaginative stories “are ‘near the mark’ in the sense that they communicate more Reality to us.”9 Ironically, then, the effort to describe reality in creative and wondrous language often takes us deeper into that reality. If you see this common denominator, the inclusion of Herbert and Whitefield and Lewis in one volume will make sense.
But some readers will realize that Lewis was not the kind of historic, Reformed evangelical Christian that Herbert and Whitefield were. Doctrinally his differences from them, and from me, are significant. We would do him a disservice not to take this into account.
Scripture, Reformation, Catholicism
For example, Lewis doesn’t believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. He claims Jesus predicted his second coming within one generation and calls this prediction an “error.”10 He treats the Reformation as an unnecessary intramural fracas and thinks it could have been avoided. He calls aspects of it farcical.11 He steadfastly refused in public or in letters to explain why he was not a Roman Catholic but remained in the Church of England.
Salvation without Knowing Christ?
He makes room for at least some people to be saved through imperfect representations of Christ in other religions. After visiting Greece with his dying wife, he wrote, “At Daphne it was hard not to pray to Apollo the Healer. But somehow one didn’t feel it would have been very wrong—would only have been addressing Christ sub specie Apollinis.”12 In this way of talking about possibly praying to Christ through Apollo, he is suggesting something similar to the counsel he gave a mother who feared her son loved Aslan more than Jesus:
Laurence can’t really love Aslan more than Jesus, even if he feels that’s what he’s doing. For the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply the things Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus: and perhaps loving him more than he ever did before.13
The most familiar instance of suggesting people can be saved without knowing Jesus is the entrance of Emeth into heaven at the end of The Last Battle. Emeth is the Hebrew word for “faithful” or “true” and represents a sincere seeker in a religion that does not know Aslan, at least not by his real name.14
The most sweeping statement of this view that some are saved without knowing Christ is found in his answer to a Mrs. Johnson who wrote to him and asked, “What happens to Jews who are still waiting for the Messiah?” Lewis answers:
I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god, or to a very imperfectly conceived true God, is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him. For He is (dimly) present in the good side of the inferior teachers they follow. In the parable of the Sheep & Goats (Matt. XXV. 31 and following) those who are saved do not seem to know that they have served Christ. But of course our anxiety about unbelievers is most usefully employed when it leads us not to speculation but to earnest prayer for them and the attempt to be in our own lives such good advertisements for Christianity as will make it attractive.15
Free Will and Atonement
On another point, Lewis’s case for free will as a way to explain why there is suffering in the world seems to run counter to biblical texts on the sovereignty of God.16 But we must be careful here because he did not give us a systematic statement of his views, and they do not all point toward a traditional view of free will as ultimate self-determination.17
Finally, I should mention that Lewis speaks of the atonement with reverence, but he puts little significance on any of the explanations for how it actually saves sinners. To a Roman Catholic, he wrote in 1941,
Yes—I think I gave the impression of going further than I intended in saying that all theories of the atonement were “to be rejected if we don’t find them helpful.” What I meant was “need not be used”—a very different thing. Is there, on your view, any real difference here: that the Divinity of Our Lord has to be believed whether you find it helpful or a “scandal” (otherwise you are not a Christian at all) but the Anselmic theory of Atonement is not in that position. Would you admit that a man was a Christian (and could be a member of your church) who said “I believe that Christ’s death redeemed man from sin, but I can make nothing of the theories as to how!” You see, what I wanted to do in these talks was simply to give what is common to us all, and I’ve been trying to get a nihil obstat from friends in various communions. . . . It therefore doesn’t much matter how you think of my own theory, because it is advanced only as my own.18
These are some of the examples of how Lewis is out of step with Whitefield and Herbert doctrinally. Lewis rarely shows his exegesis. He doesn’t deal explicitly with many texts. He is not an expositor. His value is not in his biblical exegesis. It lies elsewhere. And in this chapter, we will see some of what that is.
THE IRONY OF STRENGTHENING MY DOCTRINAL POSITIONS
If you wonder whether Lewis has had a weakening effect on my commitment to the doctrines where we disagree, the answer is: just the opposite. There was something at the core of his work—his mind—that had the ironic effect on me of awakening lively affections and firm convictions that he himself would not have shared.
There was something about the way he read Scripture that made my own embrace of inerrancy tighter, not looser. There was something about the way he spoke of grace and God’s power that made me value the particularities of the Reformation more, not less. There was something about the way he portrayed the wonders of the incarnation that made me more suspicious of his own inclusivism (salvation in other religions), not less. There was something about the way he spoke of doctrine as the necessary roadmap that leads to reality,19 and the way he esteemed truth and reason and precision of thought, that made me cherish more, not less, the historic articulations of the biblical explanations of how the work of Christ saves sinners—the so-called theories of the atonement.
LIFE CALLING: DISPLAY AND DEFEND “MERE CHRISTIANITY”
It may be that others have been drawn away by Lewis from these kinds of convictions and experiences. I doubt that more people, on the whole, have been weakened in true biblical commitments than have been strengthened by reading Lewis. Nevertheless, I am sure it happens. Some, for example, who have taken the road to Roman Catholicism away from evangelicalism, say Lewis has played a part in that pilgrimage. He devoted his whole Christian life to defending and adorning what he called “mere Christianity”—“the Christian religion as understood ubique et ab omnibus [everywhere by everyone].”
To a layman, it seems obvious that what unites the Evangelical and the Anglo-Catholic against the “Liberal” or “Modernist” is something very clear and momentous, namely, the fact that both are thoroughgoing supernaturalists, who believe in the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, and the Four Last Things [death, judgment, heaven, hell]. This unites them not only with one another, but with the Christian religion as understood ubique et ab omnibus [everywhere by everyone].
The point of view from which this agreement seems less important than their divisions, or than the gulf which separates both from any non-miraculous version of Christianity, is to me unintelligible. Perhaps the trouble is that as supernaturalists, whether “Low” or “High” Church, thus taken together, they lack a name. May I suggest “Deep Church”; or, if that fails in humility, Baxter’s “mere Christians”?20
Or, as he says in The Problem of Pain, “I have believed myself to be restating ancient and orthodox doctrines. . . . I have tried to assume nothing that is not professed by all baptized and communicating Christians.”21 He believed that when one looks at Christianity across the centuries it has an astounding unity which has great apologetic power.
I myself was first led into reading the Christian Classics, almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies. Some, such as Hooker, Herbert, Traherne, Taylor and Bunyan, I read because they are themselves great English writers; others such as Boethius, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Dante because they were “influences.” . . . They are, you will note, a mixed bag, representative of many Churches, climates and ages. And that brings me to yet another reason for reading them. The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to think—as one might be tempted who read only contemporaries—that “Christianity” is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages “mere Christianity” turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self consistent, and inexhaustible . . .—so unmistakably the same; recognizable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life. . . .
I know, for I saw it; and well our enemies know it. That unity any of us can find by going out of his own age. . . . You have now got on to the great level viaduct which crosses the ages and which looks so high from the valleys, so low from the mountains, so narrow compared to the swamps, and so broad compared to the sheep tracks.22
WHAT “MERE CHRISTIANITY” DID NOT MEAN
This means that Lewis rarely tried to distance himself from Roman Catholicism or any other part of Christendom. He rarely spoke about any debates within Christianity itself.23 But it would be a mistake to take Lewis’s focus on “mere Christianity” as a belief that Christian denominations are unnecessary, or that they do not have a valuable place. This is important to see for two reasons. First, some have used his emphasis on “mere Christianity” to discount the theological distinctions among denominations, which Lewis did not do. Second, seeing what he really thought about denominations shows how supremely important doctrinal truth is for him.
In the introduction to Mere Christianity, he writes,
I hope no reader will suppose that “mere” Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable. It is true that some people may have to wait in the hall for a considerable time. . . .
You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling. In plain language, the question should never be: “Do I like that kind of service?” but “Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this?”
When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors, and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.24
Unlike so many ecumenical enthusiasts in his day and ours, Lewis elevated truth to the decisive point: “Above all you must be asking which door is the true one.” As you consider which room to live in, ask, above all, “Are these doctrines true?” As your conscience witnesses to that truth, go through that door.
RADICALLY DIFFERENT FROM LIBERALISM
In spite of all Lewis’s aberrations from the understanding of salvation that I hold so dear, there was a radical difference between him and most modern liberal theology and postmodern slipperiness. The way he deals with Joy and with absolute truth puts him in another world—a world where I am totally at home, a world where I find both my heart and my mind awakened and made more alive and perceptive and responsive and earnest and hopeful and amazed and passionate for the glory of God. It’s this combination of experiencing the stab of God-shaped Joy and defending objective, absolute truth, because of the absolute reality of God, that sets Lewis apart as a rare and wonderful “dinosaur” in the modern world.25 To my knowledge, there is simply no one else who puts these two things together the way Lewis does.
MY THESIS IN THIS CHAPTER
My thesis in this chapter is that Lewis’s romanticism and his rationalism were the paths on which he came to Christ, and they are the paths on which he lived his life and did his work. They shaped him into a teacher and writer with extraordinary gifts for logic and likening—and evangelism. What I mean by “likening,” as we will see, is almost identical with what I have called poetic effort or dramatic effort in the previous chapters. Lewis discovered that joy and reason, longing and logic, pointed beyond this world, and thus to the deeper meaning of this world. And he found that this effect of longing and logic (romanticism and rationalism) called forth a kind of language—a poetic effort, an imaginative use of likening—that illumined the reality of what is by describing it in a way that it is not. Thus he spent his life pointing people, even in his rigorous prose, beyond the world to the meaning of the world, Jesus Christ.
1. LEWIS THE ROMANTIC
So we will look first at his romanticism and then at his rationality and how they conspired together to lead him to Christ. Then we will see how this path led him to see language as a vehicle of this romanticism and rationalism, and how this led him to be one of the most effective Christian evangelists in the twentieth century. Along with George Herbert and George Whitefield, Lewis demonstrated that the effort to speak and write creatively, imaginatively—which I have called poetic effort—was a way of seeing and showing truth and beauty—ultimately the truth and beauty of God in Christ.
Removing an Old Confusion
In August 1932, Lewis sat down and wrote his first novel in fourteen days, less than a year after professing faith in Christ.26 The Pilgrim’s Regress is a two-hundred-page allegory of his own pilgrimage to faith in Christ. The subtitle goes like this: “An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism.” So he is defending being a romantic, a rationalist, and a Christian.
But ten years later, when the third edition of the book appeared, he added a ten-page preface to apologize for obscurity and to explain what he means by being a romantic. He said, “The cause for obscurity was the (unintentionally) ‘private’ meaning I then gave to the word ‘Romanticism.’”27 The word, as he used it, he said, described “the experience which is central in this book.”
What I meant by “Romanticism” . . . and what I would still be taken to mean on the title page of this book—was . . . a particular recurrent experience which dominated my childhood and adolescence and which I hastily called “Romantic” because inanimate nature and marvelous literature were among the things that evoked it.28
Romanticism and Stabs of Joy
When we examine his description of the experience he refers to, it turns out to be identical with what ten years later in his autobiography he calls Joy.29
The experience [of romanticism] is one of intense longing. It is distinguished from other longings by two things. In the first place, though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight. . . . This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth.30
There is a peculiar mystery about the object of this Desire. Inexperienced people (and inattention leaves some inexperienced all their lives) suppose, when they feel it, that they know what they are desiring. [Some past event, some perilous ocean, some erotic suggestion, some beautiful meadow, some distant planet, some great achievement, some quest or great knowledge, etc.]
But every one of these impressions is wrong. The sole merit I claim for this book is that it is written by one who has proved them all to be wrong. There is no room for vanity in the claim I know them to be wrong not by intelligence but by experience. . . . For I have myself been deluded by every one of these false answers in turn, and have contemplated each of them earnestly enough to discover the cheat.31
If a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out of last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal existence.32
A Lived Ontological Proof
Lewis called this experience a kind of lived ontological proof of God—or at least of something beyond the created world. “The dialectic of Desire,” he said, “faithfully followed, would . . . force you not to propound, but to live through, a sort of ontological proof.”33
Later when he wrote Mere Christianity, he would state it most famously: “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.”34
From Atheism to Christ
So the essence of his romanticism is Lewis’s experience of the world that repeatedly awakened in him a sense that there is always more than this created world—something other, something beyond the natural world. At first, he thought the stabbing desire and longing was what he really wanted. But his conversion to theism and then to Christ would clear the air and show him what all the longing had been for. God overcame Lewis’s atheism in the spring term of 1929. He was thirty years old.
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him Whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. . . . Who can duly adore that love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?35
That was not the end of the struggle. It was two years later, on October 1, 1931, that he wrote to his friend Arthur, “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity.”36 The great story really is true. God really sent his Son. He really died for our sins. We really can have forgiveness and eternal life in the presence of the One to whom all the Joy was pointing.
The Meaning of Joy: Made for God
Lewis looked back on all his experiences of Joy differently now. Now he knew why the desire was inconsolable and yet pleasant. It was a desire for God. It was evidence that he was made for God.
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. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of the tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.37
All his life, he said, “an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of [my] consciousness.”38 “The sweetest thing of all my life has been the longing . . . to find the place where all the beauty came from.”39 But when Lewis was born again to see the glory of God in Christ, he never said again that he didn’t know where the beauty came from. Now he knew where all the Joy was pointing. On the last page of his autobiography, he explains the difference in his experience of Joy now and before.
I believe . . . that the old stab, the old bittersweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life whatever. But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer. While that other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods the sight of the signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, “Look!” The whole party gathers round and stares. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold. “We would be at Jerusalem.”40
No Less Romantic Joy as a Christian
So Lewis stopped turning Joy into an idol when he found, by grace, that it was “a pointer to something other and outer,” namely, to God. Clyde Kilby gave the highest estimation of this theme in Lewis:
[For Lewis, Joy is] a desire which no natural happiness can ever satisfy, the lifelong pointer toward heaven . . . which gave us such delight and yet are the meager signs of the true rapture He has in heaven for redeemed souls. . . . The culmination of Sehnsucht [longing, Joy] in the rhapsodic joy of heaven is, for me at least the strongest single element in Lewis. In one way or other it hovers over nearly every one of his books and suggests to me that Lewis’s apocalyptic vision is perhaps more real than that of anyone since St. John on Patmos.41
This “other and outer” had been wonderful even before he knew that what he was longing for was God. And now that he was a Christian, the piercing longing did not go away just because he knew who it was: “That the old stab, the old bittersweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life.”
The Central Story of Every Life
Alan Jacobs says, “Nothing was closer to the core of his being than this experience.”42 And Lewis himself says, “In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else.”43 When you read his repeated descriptions of this experience of romanticism or Joy in Surprised by Joy and Pilgrim’s Regress and The Problem of Pain and The Weight of Glory, you realize Lewis doesn’t see this as a quirk of his personality but as a trait of humanness. All of us are romantics in this sense. Devin Brown says Lewis’s “use of the inclusive you in these passages . . . makes it clear that Lewis believes this is a longing we have all felt. . . . You might say this is the central story of everyone’s life.”44
For example, in The Problem of Pain, Lewis makes the case that even people who think they have never desired heaven don’t see things clearly.
There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven, but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else . . . tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if . . . there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, “here at last is the thing I was made for.”45
So Lewis saw in his own experience of romanticism the universally human experience. We are all romantics. All of us experience from time to time—some more than others, and some more intensely than others—a longing this world cannot satisfy, a sense that there must be more.
2. LEWIS THE RATIONALIST
We turn now to Lewis’s rationalism. And, as with the term romanticism, I mean something different from some of its common philosophical uses. All I mean is his profound devotion to being rational—to the principle that there is true rationality and that it is rooted in absolute reason, God’s reason.
A Lover of the Law of Noncontradiction
Remember that the subtitle of The Pilgrim’s Regress is An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism. We’ve seen what he meant by romanticism. Now what did he mean by reason, and what was his defense of its use?
The simplest way to get at the heart of Lewis’s rationality is to say he believed in the law of noncontradiction, and he believed that where this law was abandoned, not only was truth imperiled, but romanticism and Joy were imperiled as well. The law of noncontradiction is simply that contradictory statements cannot both be true at the same time and in the same way.
Lewis saw logic as a real expression of ultimate reality. The laws of logic are not human conventions created differently from culture to culture. They are rooted in the way God is. And these laws of logic make true knowledge of reality possible. “I conclude,” he writes, “then that logic is a real insight into the way in which real things have to exist. In other words, the laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time.”46
Logic as a Parallel Path to God
This commitment to the basic laws of logic, or rationality, led Lewis on the philosophical path to the same Christ that he had found on the path of romanticism or Joy. He put it like this: “This lived dialectic [of my romanticism], and the merely argued dialectic of my philosophical progress, seem to have converged on one goal,”47 namely, the reality of theism and Christianity and Christ as the Savior of the world.
On the romantic path, Lewis was led again and again to look beyond nature for ultimate reality—finally to God in Christ—because his desires could not be explained as a product of this world. Now how did that same thing happen by the use of his reason?
He looked at the philosophical, scientific cosmology emerging in the modern world and found it self-contradictory.
If I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole (that excludes a rational, personal God), then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test.48
In other words, modern people construct a worldview that treats their thoughts as equivalent to wind in the trees. And then they call these thoughts true. Lewis said that’s a contradiction. Atheistic man uses his mind to create a worldview that nullifies the use of his mind.
This is what Lewis meant by the title of his book The Abolition of Man. If there is no God as the foundation of logic (like the law of non-contradiction) and the foundation of value judgments (like justice and beauty), then man is abolished. His mind is no more than the rusthng of leaves, and his value judgments are no more than ripples on a pond.
The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao [the absoluteness of first principles—and ultimately against God] is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.49
Lewis compares atheistic cosmology to dreaming and Christian theology to being awake. When you are awake you can explain wakefulness and dreaming. But when you are dreaming, you don’t have the capacity to explain wakefulness. Similarly:
Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.50
The Path to Closure with Christ
Here’s how he describes the way these thoughts brought him on the path of reason to see Christianity as true:
On these grounds and others like them one is driven to think that whatever else may be true, the popular scientific cosmology at any rate is certainly not. . . . Something like philosophical idealism or Theism must, at the very worst, be less untrue than that. And idealism turned out, when you took it seriously, to be disguised Theism. And once you accepted Theism you could not ignore the claims of Christ. And when you examine them it appeared to be that you could adopt no middle position. Either he was a lunatic or God. And he was not a lunatic.51
Truth and Joy, Logic and Longing—Two Paths, One Goal
So we have seen that both Lewis’s romanticism and his rationalism brought him to Christ. His lifelong, recurrent experience of the inbreaking of a longing he could not explain by this world led beyond the world to God and finally to Christ. And his lifelong experience of reason and logic led him to see that truth and beauty and justice and science would have no validity at all if there were no transcendent God in whom they were all rooted.
Indeed, the most precious experience of his life—the longing for God and the finding—would all be empty nothingness if there were no absolute truth and no valid rationality for knowing it.
When Lewis saw the historical Christ and the eternal, objective, absolutely real God as the object of his inconsolable longing (his Joy), he knew that if truth goes, if objective reality goes, if the possibility of knowing goes, if reason goes, then Joy becomes the mirage he feared all his life it might be. Christianity was the end of his quest precisely because it is true. Christ is real. God is real. Truth is real. Here’s the way he describes the connection between truth and Joy.
There was no doubt that Joy was a desire . . . but a desire is turned not to itself but to its object. . . . The form of the desired is in the desire. It is the object which makes the desire harsh or sweet, coarse or choice, “high” or “low.” It is the object that makes the desire itself desirable or hateful. I perceived (and this was a wonder of wonders) that just as I had been wrong in supposing that I really desired the Garden of the Hesperides, so also I have been equally wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all.52
No Truth, No Joy
Here is the crucial link between truth and Joy. “Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring.” So we see what is at stake. The entire modern world—and even more so the postmodern world—was moving away from this conviction. Liberal theology, and postmodern cynics who scorn propositions, have gone with the flow of unbelief—subjectivism and relativism. Lewis stood against it with all his might.53
Subjectivism and relativism means “the abolition of man.” In the end, it means the destruction of civilization.54 But long before that, it means the destruction of Joy, because, as Lewis had learned when he became a Christian, an attack on the objective reality of God is an attack on Joy. “Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring.” All the value lay in God. Without God, the event in my mind called Joy is utterly trivial.
So for Lewis, the experience of Joy and truth, longing and logic, romanticism and rationalism, had conspired to lead him to Christ. And now these two paths would together preserve and deepen his experience of Christ, and would unleash a life of likening—of poetic effort—that would make him one of the most illuminating Christian writers of the twentieth century.
3. LEWIS THE MASTER LIKENER
Therefore, Lewis came to Christ as his Lord and God along the path of romanticism, or inconsolable longing, on the one hand, and the path of rationalism, or logic, on the other hand. Both of these experiences demanded of him that he own the reality of something beyond this material world, something other, something more than this world. Both paths finally converged on Jesus Christ as the Creator, and Redeemer, and supreme fulfillment of all our longings, and the ground of all our reasoning.
Both romanticism and rationalism—longing and logic—led him out of this world to find the meaning and validity of this world. This world could not satisfy his deepest desires. And this world could not give validity to his plainest logic. Desires found full and lasting satisfaction and the truth claims of reason found legitimacy in God, not in this world.
Longing and Logic as the Key to Likening
This double experience of romanticism and rationalism, leading finally to God, gave Lewis a key to the power of language to reveal the deeper meaning of the world, namely, the key of likening. What I mean by the key of likening is this: Likening some aspect of reality to what it is not can reveal more of what it is.
God created what is not God. He made not-God the means of revealing and knowing God. And Lewis found the key to what the world really is by being led out of the world to something other than the world, namely, God. He found that this world was most honest and most true when it was pointing beyond itself.
He reasoned like this: if the key to the deepest meaning of this world lies outside this world, then the world will probably be illumined most deeply not simply by describing the world as what it is but by likening the world to what it is not.
Part of what makes Lewis so illuminating on almost everything he touches is his unremitting rational clarity and his pervasive use of likening. Metaphor, analogy, illustration, simile, poetry, story, myth—all of these are ways of likening aspects of reality to what it is not, for the sake of showing more deeply what it is.
The Paradox of Saying What Is Not to Show What Is
At one level, it seems paradoxical to liken something to what it is not in order to show more deeply what it is. But that’s what life had taught Lewis. And he devoted his whole life to exemplifying and defending this truth. He wrote to T. S. Eliot in 1931 to explain an essay he had sent him and said, “The whole [of it], when completed . . . will re-affirm the romantic doctrine of imagination as a truth-bearing faculty, though not quite as the romantics understood it.”55
Lewis had experienced this all his life—the power of verbal images to illumine reality. But when he became a Christian, this deep-seated way of seeing the world was harnessed for the sake of illumining truth in everything he wrote. In 1954, Lewis sent a list of his books to the Milton Society of America and explained what ties them together like this:
The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic. It was he who made me first attempt (with little success) to be a poet. . . . It was he who after my conversion led me to embody my religious belief in symbolical or mythopoeic forms, ranging from Screwtape to a kind of theologised sciencefiction. And it was of course he who has brought me, in the last few years, to write the series of Narnian stories for children.56
IMAGINATION FOR THE SAKE OF REALITY
He tells us in more than one place why he embraced imaginative literature as such a large part of his calling. All these forms of likening have the paradoxical effect of revealing aspects of the real that we often otherwise miss.
In 1940, he wrote in a letter, “Mythologies . . . are products of imagination in the sense that their content is imaginative. The more imaginative ones are ‘near the mark’ in the sense that they communicate more Reality to us.”57 In other words, by likening reality to what it is not, we learn more of what it is.
In his essay “On Stories,” Lewis comments on the ancient myth of Oedipus and says, “It may not be ‘like real life’ in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.”58
Lewis calls Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy a “great romance,”59 and comments in a letter in 1958, “A great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can’t quite place. . . . I’ve never met Ents or Elves—but the feel of it, the sense of a huge past, of lowering danger, of heroic tasks achieved by the most apparently unheroic people, of distance, vastness, strangeness, homeliness (all blended together) is so exactly what living feels like to me.”60
In the preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress, he comments, “All good allegory exists not to hide but to reveal; to make the inner world more palpable by giving it an (imagined) concrete embodiment.”61 And in his poem “Impenitence,” he defends imaginary talking animals by saying that they are
Masks for Man, cartoons, parodies by Nature
Formed to reveal us.62
In other words, heroic myth, penetrating allegory, great romance, and talking animals are “masks . . . formed to reveal.” Again, the paradox of likening—depicting some aspect of reality as what it is not in order to reveal more of what it is.
A Likener Everywhere, Not Just in Poems and Stories
But lest I give the wrong impression that Lewis was a likener only in his poetry and fiction, I need to stress that he was a likener everywhere—in everything he wrote. Myths and allegories and romances and fairy tales are extended metaphors. But thinking and writing metaphorically, imaginatively, and analogically were present everywhere in Lewis’s life and work.
Lewis was a poet and craftsman and image maker in everything he wrote. Alister McGrath observes that what captivated the reader of Lewis’s sermons, essays, and apologetic works, not just his novels, was
his ability to write prose tinged with a poetic vision, its carefully crafted phrases lingering in the memory because they have captivated the imagination. The qualities we associate with good poetry—such as an appreciation of the sound of words, rich and suggestive analogies and images, vivid description, and lyrical sense—are found in Lewis’s prose.63
I think this is exactly right, and it makes him not only refreshing and illuminating to read on almost any topic but also a great model for how to think and write about everything.
Walter Hooper puts it like this:
A sampling of all Lewis’s works will reveal the same man in his poetry as in his clear and sparkling prose. His wonderful imagination is the guiding thread. It is continuously at work. . . . And this is why, I think, his admirers find it so pleasant to be instructed by him in subjects they have hitherto cared so little for. Everything he touched had his kind of magic about it.64
It is indeed pleasant to be instructed by a master likener. Images and analogies and creative illustrations and metaphors and surprising turns of phrase are pleasant. “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver” (Proverbs 25:11). Solomon even uses an image to celebrate the pleasure of images. But my point here has not been the pleasure of likening but its power of illumination, its power to reveal truth.
Lewis’s romanticism and his rationalism—his inconsolable longing and his validity-demanding logic—pointed outside the world for the key to understanding the world. And he found that, if the key to the deepest meaning of this world lies outside this world—in its Maker and Redeemer, Jesus Christ—then the world itself will probably be illumined most deeply not simply by describing the world merely as what it is but by likening the world to what it’s not.
Lewis’s unrelenting commitment to likening—to the use of images and analogies and metaphor and surprising juxtapositions, even in his most logical demonstrations of truth—was not mainly owing to the greater pleasure it can give but to the deeper truth it can reveal. Lewis loved the truth. He loved objective reality. He believed that the truth of this world and the truth of God could be known. He believed that the use of reason was essential in knowing and defending truth. But he also believed that there are depths of truth and dimensions of reality that likening will reveal more deeply than reason.
“Only Supernaturalists Can See Nature”
Unless we see that this world is not ultimate reality but is only like it, we will not see and savor this world for the wonder that it is. Lewis is at his metaphorical best as he explains this with his image-laden prose in this paragraph from Miracles.
The Englishness of English is audible only to those who know some other language as well. In the same way and for the same reason, only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little way from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her [note: pith and pleasure]. Come out, look back, and then you will see . . . this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas: this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes, and toads. How could you ever have thought this was the ultimate reality? How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. . . . The theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. The “vanity” to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence. She will be cured in character: not tamed (Heaven forbid) nor sterilized. We shall still be able to recognize our old enemy, friend, playfellow and foster-mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more, herself. And that will be a merry meeting.65
“Only supernaturalists really see nature.” The only people who can know the terrifying wonder of the world are those who know that the world is not the most wonderful and terrifying reality. The world is a likening. The path of romanticism taught Lewis that the world is a likening—the final satisfaction of our longing is not in this world. The path of rationality taught Lewis that the world is a likening. The final validation of our thinking is not in this world. And since this world is a likening—not the goal of our longing or the ground of our logic—therefore it is revealed for what it most profoundly is by likening.
4. LEWIS THE EVANGELIST
What was Lewis doing in all his works—in all his likening, in all this poetic effort, in all his likening-soaked reasoning? He was pointing. He was unveiling. He was depicting the glory of God in the face of Jesus. He was leading people to Christ. The two paths he knew best were the paths of romanticism and rationalism—longing and logic. So these are the paths on which he guided people to Christ.
The Real Business of Life
One of the things that makes him admirable to me, in spite of all our doctrinal differences, is his crystal-clear, unashamed belief that people are lost without Christ and that every Christian should try to win them, including world-class scholars of Medieval and Renaissance literature. And so unlike many tentative, hidden, vague, approval-craving intellectual Christians, Lewis says outright, “The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.”66 And again: “The glory of God, and, as our only means to glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life.”67
This is what he was doing in all his likening and all his reasoning. And when Norman Pittenger criticized him in 1958 for being simplistic in his portrayal of Christian faith, Lewis responded in a way that shows us what he was doing in all his work:
When I began, Christianity came before the great mass of my unbelieving fellow-countrymen either in the highly emotional form offered by revivalists or in the unintelligible language of highly cultured clergymen. Most men were reached by neither. My task was therefore simply that of a translator—one turning Christian doctrine, or what he believed to be such, into the vernacular, into language that unscholarly people would attend to and could understand. . . . Dr Pittenger would be a more helpful critic if he advised a cure as well as asserting many diseases. How does he himself do such work? What methods, and with what success, does he employ when he is trying to convert the great mass of storekeepers, lawyers, realtors, morticians, policemen and artisans who surround him in his own city?68
Lewis came to Christ on the converging paths of romanticism and rationalism. And as a Christian, he became a master thinker and master likener—a master of poetic effort in story and essay. This is who he was, and this is what he knew. And so this is how he did his evangelism. He bent every romantic effort and every rational effort to help people see what he had seen through his poetic effort—the glory of Jesus Christ, the goal of all his longings, and the solid ground of all his thoughts.
1 Peter Kreeft, C. S. Lewis: A Critical Essay (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1969), 4.
2 Ruth Pitter quoted in Alan Jacobs, The Narnian (New York: HarperOne, 2005), xxii.
3 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1955), 135.
4 Ibid., 181.
5 Ibid., 179.
6 Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis—A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2013), 210.
7 Ibid., 166.
8 Jonathan Luxmoore, “C. S. Lewis ‘Couldn’t Touch Anything without Illuminating It,’” National Catholic Reporter, accessed December 18, 2013, http://www.ncronline.org/news/art-media/cs-lewis-couldnt-touch-anything-without-illuminating-it.
9 Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Books, Broadcasts, and War, 1931–1949, vol. 2 (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007), 445 (emphasis added).
10 C. S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night” in C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley Walmsley (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 45. See also Michael Christensen’s study of Lewis’s view of Scripture, C. S. Lewis on Scripture (Waco, TX: Word, 1979), 91. And the very helpful essay by Philip Ryken, “Inerrancy and the Patron Saint of Evangelicalism: C. S. Lewis on Holy Scripture,” in The Romantic Rationalist: God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C. S. Lewis, ed. John Piper and David Mathis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 39–64.
11 “The process whereby ‘Faith and Works’ became a stock gag in the commercial theater is characteristic of that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation.” C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 37.
12 Lewis to Chad Walsh, 23 May 1960, in Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. W. H. Lewis and Walter Hooper, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), 488.
13 C. S. Lewis to a mother, Letters to Children, ed. Lyle W. Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead (New York: Macmillian, 1985), 57.
14 C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 155–57.
15 Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950–1963, vol. 3 (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007), 245–46. I have written a book which tries to show this is a seriously mistaken understanding of Scripture, Jesus: The Only Way to God: Must You Hear the Gospel to Be Saved? (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010).
16 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 26–88.
17 Lewis’s view is not simple or completely transparent. He could say, “You will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.” Lewis, Problem of Pain, 111. And one wonders if by “free will” Lewis sometimes only means “voluntary,” rather than “having ultimate self-determination.” For example, he writes, “After all, when we are most free, it is only with freedom God has given us; and when our will is most influenced by Grace, it is still our will. And if what our will does is not voluntary, and if ‘voluntary’ does not mean ‘free’, what are we talking about?” W. H. Lewis and Hooper, Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), 246. And perhaps most significantly, after saying that a fallen soul “could still turn back to God,” he adds this footnote: “Theologians will note that I am not here intending to make any contribution to the Pelagian-Augustinian controversy. I mean only that such a return to God was not, even now, an impossibility. Where the initiative lies in any instance of such return is a question on which I am saying nothing.” Lewis, Problem of Pain, 83. See Douglas Wilson, “Undragoned: C. S. Lewis on the Gift of Salvation,” in Piper and Mathis, Romantic Rationalist65–80.
18 W. H. Lewis and Hooper, Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), 197–98. Surely Iain Murray is right to say, “‘Substitution’ is not one ‘theory’ of the atonement, it is the heart of the message. This is not the case with Lewis.” (Personal correspondence to author, October 10, 2009, quoted with permission.) I think Lewis would have regarded the biblical presentations of justification and reconciliation and propitiation and redemption with greater importance and preciousness if he had attended more carefully the particular texts.
19 “For Lewis the doctrines were always absolutely necessary as maps toward one’s true destination—they should never be the goal of the Christian life.” Jacobs, The Narnian, 293.
20 C. S. Lewis, a letter to R. D. Daunton-Fear, February 8, 1952, in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 336.
21 Lewis, Problem of Pain, 10.
22 C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,” in God in the Dock, 203–4.
23 “I think we must admit that the discussion of these disputed points has no tendency at all to bring outsiders into the Christian fold. . . . Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is his only son.” Lewis quoted in Jacobs, The Narnian, 215.
24 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), xi–xii.
25 In “De Descriptione Temporum,” Lewis’s inaugural lecture from the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University in 1954, Lewis says,
26“I myself belong far more to that Old Western order than to yours. I am going to claim that this, which in one way is a disqualification for my task, is yet in another a qualification. The disqualification is obvious. You don’t want to be lectured on Neanderthal Man by a Neanderthaler, still less on dinosaurs by a dinosaur. And yet, is that the whole story? If a live dinosaur dragged its slow length into the laboratory, would we not all look back as we fled? What a chance to know at last how it really moved and looked and smelled and what noises it made! And if the Neanderthaler could talk, then, though his lecturing technique might leave much to be desired, should we not almost certainly learn from him some things about him which the best modern anthropologist could never have told us? He would tell us without knowing he was telling. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, . . . I read as a native text that you must read as foreigners. . . . It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature. And because this is the judgment of a native, I claim that, even if the defense of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.” “Full Text of ‘De Descriptione Temporum,’” Internet Archive, accessed October 10, 2013, http://archive.org/stream/DeDescriptioneTemporum/DeDescriptioneTemporumByC.S.Lewis_djvu.txt.
27 He wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves, October 1, 1931, “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity.” Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters, 1905–1931, vol. 1 (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 974.
28 C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958), 5.
29 Ibid., 7.
30 In Surprised by Joy, 17–18, Lewis said that this Joy is the experience “of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that any one who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is the kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.”
31 Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress, 7.
32 Ibid., 8.
33 Ibid., 10.
34 Ibid.
35 Lewis, Mere Christianity, 106.
36 Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 228–29. See Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis—A Life (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2013), 141–46, for a slight redating of Lewis’s conversion to about a year later.
37 Hooper, Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters, 1905–1931, vol. 1, 974.
38 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1949), 4–5.
39 Lewis, Problem of Pain, 148.
40 Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (New York: Harcourt, 1956), 75.
41 Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 238.
42 Clyde S. Kilby, The Christian World of C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964), 187.
43 Jacobs, The Narnian, 42.
44 Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 17.
45 Devin Brown, A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2013), 5.
46 Lewis, Problem of Pain, 145–46.
47 C. S. Lewis, “De Futilitate” in Walmsley, C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection, 674.
48 Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress, 10.
49 C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” in Walmsley, C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection, 21.
50 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 56.
51 Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” in Walmsley, C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection, 21.
52 Ibid., 20.
53 Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 220.
54 As we have seen, The Abolition of Man is Lewis’s fury at the purveyors of modern subjectivism in textbooks for young people. He gives this example from one such textbook in his own words. The authors of the textbook refer to a story of Coleridge agreeing with a friend that the beauty of a certain waterfall is sublime. The authors comment,“When the man said That is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. . . . Actually . . . he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associate in my mind with the word “Sublime,” or shortly, I have sublime feelings. . . . This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.” Lewis, Abolition of Man, 14.
55 Ibid., 39.
56 Hooper, Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950–1963, vol. 3, 1523 (emphasis added).
57 Ibid., 516–17.
58 Hooper, Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Books, Broadcasts, and War, 1931–1949, vol. 2, 445 (emphasis added).
59 C. S. Lewis, “On Stories,” in Walmsley, C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection, 501.
60 Hooper, Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950–1963, vol. 3, 371.
61 Ibid., 971–72.
62 Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress, 13.
63 C. S. Lewis, “Impenitence,” in Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1964), 2.
64 McGrath, C. S. Lewis—A Life, 108.
65 C. S. Lewis, Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), vi.
66 C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 67–68.
67 C. S. Lewis, “Christianity and Literature,” in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 10.
68 C. S. Lewis, “Christianity and Culture” in Christian Reflections, 14. C. S. Lewis, “Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger,” in God in the Dock, 183.