No 20th century thinker impacted me more than C.S. Lewis. In this I’m not alone! In a recent interview with Dean Nelson at Point Loma Nazarene University, NewYork Times columnist David Brooks said he received some 500 books when folks realized he was interested in Christianity. Probably 300 of them, he said, were Mere Christianity, by Lewis! When I was in high school one of my aunts, Edith Lantz, suggested I read Lewis, and subsequently he became a vital part of my life. I frequently assigned Mere Christianity to classes I taught and I occasionally offered a reading seminar on Lewis. Then I published two books on aspects of his thought—C.S. Lewis and the Bright Shadow of Holiness and C.S. Lewis Explores Vice and Virtue. In the former I noted that when Christianity Today listed the “Movers and Shapers of Modern Evangelicalism” it said Lewis was the author whose “books indisputably affected American evangelicals during this period more than . . . . any of the other authors mentioned.” In a column entitled “The Oxford Prophet,” Charles Colson called Lewis is “a true prophet for our postmodern age.” He deserved that label, Colson said, because he was so deeply immersed in history that he could incisively critique “the narrow confines of the world-view of his own age.” He thought and wrote from within what he called “the great body of Christian thought down the ages.” Lewis never claimed to be more than a “lay theologian.” but he sought to clearly explain traditional Christian beliefs, and his thoroughly grounded faith informed virtually all he wrote. His was a thoroughly converted mind!
Lewis stood within the Natural Law tradition, as was clearly evident in the first section of Mere Christianity, entitled “On Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe” (originally a brief book consisting of 15 minute lectures he gave on BBC in 1941), The fact that we make moral judgments points to the fact that God exists and requires righteous living. So it’s revealing that C. S. Lewis, lecturing at the University of London, labeled himself a “middle-aged moralist,” testifying to the fact that his writings show a sustained concern for righteousness. He thought he was called to remind us of “the primeval moral platitudes” we so routinely ignore. He always wanted to uphold the philosophia perennis—the perennial philosophy shaped by Greek philosophers (Plato and Aristotle), medieval theologians (Augustine and Thomas Aquinas), and Anglicans (Richard Hooker and Samuel Johnson). These men blended moral realism, natural law, divine law, and the ethics of virtue into the central ethical tradition of Western civilization. As his discerning contemporary Malcolm Muggeridge said, Lewis embodied integrity—a goodness “in his innermost being. His teaching and his writing were his opus dei.”
Lewis feared that Western civilization was collapsing, so he sought to do battle for truth and justice, preserving the culture forged in Europe’s centuries-long struggle with barbarism. In 1954 he moved from Oxford to Cambridge University, which had created a Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature for him. Giving his inaugural Lecture (De Descriptione Temporum) he spoke from within what he called the “Old Western order” that significantly differed from modernity. He was, in fact, something of a “live dinosaur” or ancient Athenian who could bear witness to distant eras. In fact, he said, “ Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you somewhat as that Athenian might stand. I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners.” But he could prove to be a useful “specimen,” providing insight into what the “old Western men” believed. Thus, he said, “use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.” That Old Western order clearly distinguished good from evil. The modern world contained millions of people who were not more evil than folks in the past, but they increasingly refused to differentiate right from wrong, granting everyone the “right” to do what they please. It just feels right to do so. In the past, thinking, not feeling, set moral standards. The “new morality” that would burst on the scene in the 1960s was a self-satisfying, feel-good morality. To Lewis: “Out of this apparently innocent idea comes the disease that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values, that a community can choose its ‘ideology’ as men choose their clothes.”
Not long after delivering the BBC talks that became Mere Christianity Lewis was invited (in 1943) to give a lecture series at the University of Durham that would be titled, when published, The Abolition of Man. It was praised by noted theologians, including Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI who noted its “keen accuracy”) and Hans Urs von Balthasar, who found its “taut brilliance” admirable. It would be ranked among the 10 most influential non-fiction books of the 20th century by the National Review. Having repeatedly re-read it, I consider it one of his most profound works, probably his best purely philosophical treatise, explaining much about the contemporary world. In his first lecture, “Men Without Chests,” Lewis analyzed a textbook widely used in England’s elementary schools. It cited a well-known passage in Coleridge wherein two tourists responded differently to a waterfall; one called it “sublime” and the other found it “pretty.” The textbook’s authors declared: “When the man said This 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.” Truth, to the extent there is truth, is purely subjective, found within the mind rather than the external world. Then the authors added: “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.” But Lewis insisted: “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt. The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same. The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions.”
Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas all agreed: a rightly educated person learns to see what’s good or true or beautiful in what we perceive. In the moral life, Lewis said, there is what the Chinese call the Tao. “It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’ The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’. This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao.’” These great ethical traditions share a commitment to “objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” They have been variously called the Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes. They were set forth by some “wise men of old” whose main concern was “to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.” It’s the Tao, and it’s “not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world.” The architects of these traditions believed in the propagation of received wisdom, whereas the modern educators—the “innovators” in Lewis’s view—engaged in propaganda that produces “Men without Chests.” Sadly, Lewis concluded: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
Embracing this modern philosophy of education would, in the long run, destroy society. Without objective values widely acknowledged and followed there would be the cascading chaos of everyone doing whatever feels good. And indeed, within 30 years young folks—the ‘60s generation—spoke for the counterculture by declaring “if it feels good do it!” It’s not what’s good that I want—it’s what I want that’s good! Such persons would be promoting, Lewis predicted in his third lecture, “The Abolition of Man.” Without adhering to the Tao, people would differ in their views of what is truly “good,” and inevitably those with power would tell others what to do. In our increasingly technological world (a world Lewis disliked in many ways) the machines empower their developers. As we impose our wills on Nature, and “if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized,” the result will be “the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.” Tragically: “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won.”
Writing these lectures Lewis could not have foreseen the success of today’s transgender advocates. Men not only claim to be women but are supported by powerful cultural institutions in so doing! They have repudiated the very notion of human nature! But Lewis asserted: “Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own `natural’ impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.” And though dictators and totalitarian regimes illustrate this quite clearly Lewis warned that: “many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values are to be `debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it.”
Only a recovery of the Tao, only a restoration of traditional values, can save us from tyranny and destruction. As of now the folks Lewis feared are in control of our world, creating the chaos portrayed in his dystopian novel, That Hideous Strength.
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In The Problem of Pain C.S. Lewis set forth persuasive philosophical answers to human suffering. But when his wife Joy died he had to deal with it in a deeply personal way. He recorded his struggles in some notebooks that were later published as A Grief Observed (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, c. 1961, 1996). His words helped me deal with my own grief; I have re-read the book many times and recommended it to others, for it more accurately describes what I’ve felt than anything I’ve read or can say. In his “Introduction” to the book, Lewis’s step-son, Douglas Gresham, notes: “This book is a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane. It tells of the agony and the emptiness of a grief such as few of us have to bear, for the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm the fortress” (p. xxvi). Pious rhetoric fails in such moments, and Jesus’ words on the Cross—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me”—sound more truthful than “God is good, all the time”!
“Meanwhile, where is God?” Lewis wondered. “This is one of the most disquieting symptoms” (p. 5). If he’d hoped God would emotionally embrace and comfort him, such was not the case. “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand” (p. 25). “What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. [referring to Joy] and I offered and all the false hopes we had” (p. 30). “Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’ In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable” (p. 24). Perhaps, Lewis thought, “If H. ‘is not,’ then she never was. I mistook clouds of atoms for a person” (p. 28). But he could never confuse mind with molecular motion, agreeing with a great neuroscientist, John Eccles, who said: “We are spiritual beings with souls in a spiritual world, as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world” (p. 29).
An unexpected consequence of his suffering, Lewis noted, is “the laziness of grief” (p. 5). Indeed: “Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable” (p. 28). “And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till now I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness” (p. 33). “The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away, but what will follow?” he wonders. “Just this apathy, this dead flatness? . . . . Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?” (p. 36). It’s enervating. There’s a strange ennui, a disinterest in doing anything beyond necessary daily tasks.
Lewis often wondered at the mysterious one-flesh nature of Christian marriage. Male and female are, by nature, somewhat at odds. “Marriage heals this. Jointly the two become fully human. ‘In the image of God created he them.’ Thus, by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes. And then one or other dies” (p. 49). There is a literal truth to this conjugal union that one realizes when the bond is broken and part of you departs. So: “There’s a limit to the ‘one flesh.’ You can’t really share someone else’s weakness, or fear or pain” (p. 13). Only Joy had to suffer the interminable treatments. Only she knew the inescapable depression of unanswered prayers and failed procedures. “I had my miseries,” he said, “not hers; she had hers, not mine. The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine. We were setting out on different roads” (p. 13). Different roads: hers to Glory; his through Gethsemane.
“If, as I can’t help suspecting,” Lewis says, “the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ by the loved one while she is here. Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves through the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love” (p. 50). How helpful this is! To imagine that separation is but another step in the dance of love—a process divesting one of self-absorption while focusing (primarily through grief) upon the lover—is worth pondering. Lewis also wondered about the sanctifying aspects Joy’s suffering, when “month by month and week by week you broke her body on the wheel while she wore it” (p. 42). “The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness” (43). He then compared God to a loving surgeon who insists on operating, at considerable pain to the patient, in order to ultimately heal. Nothing is more helpful (if hard to accept) than this: God wills our good—our holiness—and certain processes, sickness and death included, contribute to this good.
Implicit in the well-intended but usually unwelcome “how are you doing?” inquiries is the assumption that you must soon “get over” the loss of your loved one. As Lewis notes, “the words are ambiguous. To say a patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg cut off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get his strength back and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it” (p. 52). Lewis then notes the various things one continues to do while constantly sensing the loss of the limb. “All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again” (p. 53). What powerful analogies Lewis employs! Many of us describe the loss of a spouse as an amputation. But only Lewis has the skill to flesh out the comparison so as to enable one to see this. “I shall never be biped again.” How lamentably true.
In time, Lewis sensed how rightly remembering his wife pointed him to God. He had no “good” pictures of Joy, but at times he thought of her as a sword, because of her sharp mind. At other times he compared her to a lush, nurturing garden. “Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful” (p. 63). Ultimately: “All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead” (p. 66). Lewis interrogated himself, wondering if he loved Joy more than God or craved to see her more than Him hereafter. He knew he must prefer God above all in order to attain his final end. So he asked: “Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us” (p. 68). He then noted that “Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her cancer by never seeing her again, I’d have arranged to never see her again. I’d have had to. Any decent person would” (p. 69). That’s because, if the Gospel is true, Joy was alive and well, as never before, and he must rest content with the knowledge that her being is ever sustained by the “One in whom we live and move and have our being.”
Describing one of his sudden awakenings to his late wife’s persisting presence, Lewis said: “It’s the quality of last night’s experience—not what it proves but what it was—that makes it worth putting down. It was incredibly unemotional. Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own, not ‘soul’ as we tend to think of soul. . . . . Not at all like a rapturous reunion of lovers. . . . . Not that there was any ‘message’—just intelligence and attention. No sense of joy or sorrow. No love even in our ordinary sense. No un-love. I had never in any mood imagined the dead as being so—well, so business-like. Yet there was an extreme and cheerful intimacy. An intimacy that had not passed through the senses at all” (p. 73). “Wherever it came from, “Lewis continued, “it has made a sort of spring cleaning in my mind. The dead could be like this; sheer intellects” (p. 74). He found he didn’t need emotional comfort. “The intimacy was complete—sharply bracing and restorative too—without it” (p. 74). Rather than being the nebulous, ethereal spirits portrayed in New Age materials, the departed are: “Above all, solid. Utterly reliable. Firm. There is no nonsense about the dead” (p. 75). Indeed! How good it is to imagine our departed loved ones as the substantial figures portrayed in Lewis’s incomparable The Great Divorce.
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