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C.S. Lewis Apostle to the Sceptics by Walter Hooper
All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY publishers to the holy see
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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Early Days . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Schools and Loss of Faith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Oxford and the War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Tolkien and Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 The Christian Apologist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 A Chapter of Surprises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
All rights reserved. First published 2014 by The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 40-46 Harleyford Road London SE11 5AY Tel: 020 7640 0042 Fax: 020 7640 0046. Š 2014 The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society.
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ISBN 978 1 78469 002 1
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C.S. Lewis with the author, c. 1963.
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Introduction “You think too highly of my work,” C.S. Lewis often said during the brief time in 1963 when I was privileged to be his secretary. I loved his books, but it was weeks before I realised that Lewis had no ‘opinion’ of his own writings. Someone overhearing us laughing about Puddleglum the Marshwiggle in The Silver Chair would never guess that one of us invented that Narnian Marshwiggle. Sometimes his self-forgetfulness was so complete it took my breath away. On day Lewis asked if I had a favourite poem, and could I quote it? Thinking he would recognise it, I quoted the whole of ‘Scazons’ - one of the poems in Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress. He listened very carefully, and when I finished he asked if I’d make him a copy. “But it is your poem!” I explained. “Is it?” he said. “Well, it’s not half bad is it?” After that I realised that Lewis could be the very person Screwtape was describing when he warns the young tempter, Wormwood, that the “Enemy” - i.e. God - “wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be
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if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents - or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.” (Letter 14) As I’ve explained in this booklet, The Screwtape Letters was one of the first theological works Lewis published. It appeared in weekly instalments, at the same time the ‘Mere Christianity’ talks were being broadcast. Lewis had the publishers of the Letters and the BBC send the fees for both works to a list of widows and orphans he provided. Lewis had his old friend Owen Barfield, a solicitor, set up a charitable trust - which they called ‘The Agape’ - into which two-thirds of Lewis’s total income would go. All the gifts from the Agape were given anonymously. I learned of the Agape through my correspondence with Owen Barfield, and from him I discovered that, while Lewis discontinued the charity during the years he was married to Joy Davidman (1957-1960), it was resumed after she died. When I realised the extent of his generosity - two thirds of his total income! - and knowing what a plain, almost threadbare, life Lewis lived, I was stunned that he was so extremely generous. “Jack!” I said, “Why give away so much?” The simplicity of his answer left me speechless. “God was so good in having me,” he said, “that the least I could do was give away most of what I made in His name.”
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This was something he knew he ought to do, for as he said in Mere Christianity, “If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.” (Bk. III, ch. 3) On the other hand, when Joy was in danger of dying, he gave up the Agape temporarily in order to help her. But when Lewis didn’t need to think about money, he turned his attention to the many things he delighted in: tea, a pint of beer with his fellow Inklings, books and, more than anything, writing. I think writing gave him more pleasure than anything. A bottle of ink, some nibs for his pen, a stack of paper - and plenty of tea! - that gave him great contentment. One time I asked how he managed to write with such ease. He said the thing he most enjoyed about writing was that it did two things at once. This he illustrated by saying, “I don’t know what I mean till I see what I’ve said.” In other words, writing and thinking were a single process. But there was more to his writing than the pleasure it gave him. When I met Professor Tolkien shortly after Lewis died, he realised I didn’t understand what I’d heard about Lewis being unpopular with some of his colleagues at Magdalen College, and he explained it to me. “In Oxford,” he said, “you are forgiven for writing only two kinds of books. You may write books on your own subject whatever that is, literature or science or history. And you may write detective stories because all dons at some time get the ’flu, and they have to have something to
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read in bed. But what you are not forgiven for is writing popular works, such as Jack did on theology, and especially if they win international success, as his did. Now here’s what I want you to understand - Jack was driven to write his theological books by his conscience!” Gnawing away at Jack during his last months were worries about his brother. Warnie was the older brother, but Jack had been forced to retire because he had an infected kidney and prostate gland - which couldn’t be operated on because his heart was too weak. His health didn’t interest him at all, but he was worried about what his brother would live on when he died. This led to a kindly argument between us. One day he expressed his worries about what Warnie would live on when he (Jack) died, and this because he was sure that upon his own death his books would stop selling. “No!” I exclaimed. “What d’you mean, ‘no?’” he said. “This happens to nearly all authors. After they die their books sell for a while, and then trail off to nothing.” “But not yours!” I said. “Why not?” he asked. “Because they are too good - and your readers are not that stupid.” Well, time has shown that - I won! I blush when I think how ignorant I was about what usually happens to an author’s books. On the other hand, if that is what might have happened to Lewis’s books, I wanted to stop it. After his death Warnie invited me to edit his brother’s writings, and this has occupied me for the last fifty
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years. This would have been impossible without the encouragement and good will of the Inklings, notably Warnie, Owen Barfield, Professor Tolkien and many others. I wish they had been alive in 1984 when I learned that Pope John Paul II wanted to talk with me about Lewis. It was arranged that I would have a private audience with the Holy Father on 14th November 1984. I had known for years that the Pope had used The Screwtape Letters with his students as far back as 1950. Then in 1978, the year he became Pope, he mentioned Lewis’s The Four Loves in one of his Wednesday audiences. The Four Loves are Affection, Friendship, Eros and Agape. When I met the Pope after the General Audience he began by asking, “Do you still love your old friend, C.S. Lewis?” “Yes, Holy Father,” I said, “Both Affection and Friendship.” “You knew I liked The Four Loves!” he said. I replied that many people knew it, and from our conversation I learned that the Pope knew most of Lewis’s theological works, including Mere Christianity. Then came his questions about what Lewis was like, and it was clear he really wanted to know what inspired this remarkable man to become a champion of the Christian Faith. At the end, I hoped the Pope, having heard me on C.S. Lewis, would say what he thought of him. He did: he said with great firmness: “C.S. Lewis knew what his apostolate was” - a long pause - “and he did it!”
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The Christian Apologist The Screwtape Letters It was out of this formidable ordeal that Lewis produced his best work. The Catholic Inklings never seemed to have quarrelled with Lewis over his theology. Tolkien, especially, would remember those years when Lewis tried with all his might to keep God at bay, but became a believer solely because he knew Christianity to be true. Jack made his position clear when, writing to Dom Bede Griffiths OSB on 14th April 1934, he told him: “When all is said (and truly said) about the divisions of Christendom, there remains, by God’s mercy, an enormous common ground.”70 In another place he speaks of that “common ground” or “Mere Christianity,” which name he took from a passage in Richard Baxter’s Church-history of the Government of Bishops (1650). “Measured against the ages,” he insisted, “‘mere Christianity’ turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible…the great level viaduct which crosses the ages.”71 Writing to Warnie on 20th July 1940 Jack mentioned listening to Hitler over the radio, and finding that, “Statements which I know to be untrue all but convince me
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…if only the man says them unflinchingly.”72 Still thinking of Hitler’s persuasiveness the next morning after Church he told Warnie that “Before the service was over…I was struck by an idea for a book which I think might be both useful and entertaining. It would be called As one Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first ‘patient.’ The idea would be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view.”73 As to his belief about devils, he said: “I believe in angels and I believe that some of these, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God and, as a corollary, to us. These we may call devils. They do not differ in nature from good angels, but their nature is depraved. Devil is the opposite of angel only as Bad Man is the opposite of Good Man. Satan, the leader of dictator of devils, is the opposite not of God but of Michael.”74 The purpose of The Screwtape Letters is to show how the life of man looks from the viewpoint of hell, and to throw light on heaven from this unusual perspective. Screwtape, the elderly retired devil, when instructing the young tempter, Wormwood, can’t avoid complimenting the “Enemy” (God). In Letter 8 he tells Wormwood: “To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of man is about His love for men, and His service
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being perfect freedom, is not…mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself - creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His… “Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”75 In Letter 15 the subject is Time. Because human beings live in time, but are destined for eternity, the Enemy “wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present.” Hell, on the other hand, wants man to “live in the Future” because it is “the thing least like eternity…the most completely temporal part of time.” The Enemy wants men to think of the Future too “just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow.” Hell wants “a man hagridden by the Future…a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now; but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.”76 The philosopher C.E.M. Joad spoke for
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many when he said in a review of The Screwtape Letters “Mr Lewis possesses the rare gift of being able to make righteousness readable.”77 Mere Christianity Before The Screwtape Letters were published, the Director of the BBC’s Religious Broadcasting Department, in a letter of 7th February 1941, thanked Lewis for the help he’d been given by The Problem of Pain. He went on to ask if he’d give a series of talks over BBC Radio on the Christian Faith. “I’m sure,” he said, “there is a need of a positive restatement of Christian doctrines in lay language.”78 Lewis was free to choose a subject, and he was prophetic in seeing that what already militated against belief was what Pope Benedict XVI called the ‘Dictatorship of Relativism’. His series of four radio broadcasts, given in 1941, were on Natural Law and called ‘Right and Wrong’. Lewis’s training in Philosophy is evident in these brilliantly clear talks. Those talks form Book I of Mere Christianity, and in Chapter 1 on ‘The Law of Human Nature’ Lewis said: “Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining ‘It’s not fair’ before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties don’t matter; but
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then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong…what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?”79 Lewis was asked to return for a second series, and this one, consisting of five talks, was given in 1942 and called ‘What Christians Believe’. Chapter 2, ‘The Invasion’, begins: “It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I am sitting at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of - all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain - and, of course, you find that what you call ‘seeing a table’ lands you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of…Very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by people who are not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to destroy Christianity. Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a child of six and make that the object of their attack.” Chapter 3, ‘The Shocking Alternative’, contains one of the most famous passages in the book. It concerns the ageold question of whether Jesus was ‘God or a good man’,
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or as Lewis put it, either “a great moral teacher” or “God.” Lewis had read the works of St Thomas More, and the basis of his argument comes from St Thomas’s Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (1534) in which St Thomas said: “For surely, if he were not God, he would be no good man either, since he plainly said he was God,” (Bk 3, Part xiv). Using that as a basis for his argument, Lewis said: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”80 Book III, given in 1942, is entitled ‘Christian Behaviour’ and in Chapter 10 on ‘Hope’ Lewis uses very effectively an ‘Argument from Desire’. He begins: “Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not…a form of escapism or
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wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do…81 “The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. 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. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.’”82 Book IV, given in 1944, is entitled ‘Beyond Personality’ and is the most theological and lucid of the four series of broadcasts. In it he makes it abundantly clear that the Christian faith is the longed-for discovery of the pearl of great price. Chapter 4, ‘Good Infection’, is about the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church, and it contains this
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summary of what it means to be a Christian: “The whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ… If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Spirit will arise in us…Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”83 Chapter 11, the final chapter, is called ‘The New Men’ and it concludes: “Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”84 Lewis made a few changes to the broadcasts before they were gathered together and published as Mere Christianity (1952). In the Preface he said: “Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times…I am not writing to expound
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something I could call ‘my religion’, but to expound ‘mere’ Christianity, which is what it is, and was what it was long before I was born and whether I like it or not.”85 Before Lewis finished the last series he had millions of listeners, and his was the most recognised voice over the BBC after Winston Churchill. The BBC begged him to return to the microphone, but he refused. One reason was that, shortly after the first series the R.A.F.’s Chiefof-Chaplains asked Lewis if he would accept invitations to speak to members of the R.A.F. He proved immensely popular as a lecturer. The Screwtape Letters were published weekly in the Church newspaper, The Guardian, at the same time as the first series of ‘Mere Christianity’ talks were broadcast, and Lewis directed that all the fees from these two works be sent to widows and orphans, a list of whom Lewis sent The Guardian and the BBC. Lewis had his old friend, the solicitor Owen Barfield, set up a charitable trust, the Agape Fund, into which, beginning with these royalties, two-thirds of his income went for the rest of his life. All monies were given anonymously. Shortly before setting up the Agape Fund, Lewis began one of his most Catholic practices: in October 1940 he began going to Confession every two weeks, and he continued using this sacrament for the rest of his life. Mere Christianity has never been out of print. Although it was written with ‘Everyman’ in mind, numerous
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Catholics use it in teaching because Lewis could explain profound subjects in simple and compelling language. The book has led many to convert to Catholicism. Of Other Worlds In Evangelii Gaudium (24th November 2013) Pope Francis says: “Today’s vast and rapid cultural changes demand that we constantly seek ways of expressing unchanging truths in a language which brings out their abiding newness” (41). The Pope goes on to quote Pope St John XXIII who said in his address at the Opening of the Second Vatican Council, “The deposit of the faith, that is, the truths contained in our venerable doctrine, is one thing, and the way in which they are enunciated, while still preserving the same meaning and fulness, is another.”86 That is exactly what Lewis believed. How could one express “unchanging truths” in such a way to bring out their “abiding newness” - always “preserving the same meaning and fulness” as found in the Everlasting Gospel? Lewis attempted to do this in his science fiction novels. With his ‘Cosmic Trilogy’ Lewis had several ideas in mind. Writing to his former pupil Roger Lancelyn Green on 28th December 1938, he said: “I like the whole interplanetary ideas as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) point of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side.”87
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