1.1 Vocation

C.S. Lewis’s tutor, William T. Kirkpatrick, fondly known as “The Great Knock,” wrote to Albert Lewis about his son’s prospects: “You may make a writer or a scholar of him, but you’ll not make anything else. You may make up your mind to that” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 183). Kirkpatrick was right on both counts: Lewis became both a writer and a scholar. His initial ambition was to be a poet, and his first publications were a collection of poems, Spirits in Bondage, first published in 1919 (Reference LewisLewis 2015: 73–123), and a lyrical poem, Dymer, published in 1926 (Reference Lewis2015: 145–218). Lewis would write poetry for the rest of his life, although his ambition to be a great poet would fade.

Lewis’s scholarship reflected his studies at Oxford, initially in Classical Languages and Literature, together with Philosophy and Ancient History, and to increase his job prospects, English Literature. Lewis’s work in philosophy is apparent in The Abolition of Man, Miracles, and essays like “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.” His literary scholarship is evidenced in works such as The Allegory of Love, English Literature in the 16^th Century Excluding Drama, Studies in Words, and The Discarded Image.

Lewis’s fiction includes his children’s stories (The Chronicles of Narnia, in seven books), a science fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength), a reinterpretation of the myth of Cupid and Psyche (Till We Have Faces), as well as satire (Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce).

Among Lewis’s apologetic writings is The Problem of Pain, the work that caught the attention of J.W. Welch (Reference HooperHooper 1996: 303), Director of the BBC’s Religious Broadcasting Department, and led to an invitation to do a series of radio broadcasts that would become his best-known apologetic work, and one of the most influential Christian books in the twentieth century, Mere Christianity. A survey of church leaders conducted in 2000 by the influential American evangelical magazine Christianity Today ranked it first among the “100 books that had a significant effect on Christians in this century” (Reference MarsdenMarsden 2016:1).

Lewis wrote four autobiographical volumes: All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922–1927; The Pilgrim’s Regress, a semi-autobiographical allegorical account of his conversion; Surprised by Joy, a more accessible and mature conversion account; and A Grief Observed, Lewis’s heart-wrenching reflections after the death of his wife Joy.

Kirkpatrick’s assessment of Lewis’s prospects as a scholar and writer was spot-on. He would have been shocked, though, to learn that the young man he tutored, who thrived on reading and reflection, would spend so much time outside of his study: lecturing to the RAF (Reference Babbage and KeefeBabbage 1980; Reference Gilmore and JamesGilmore 2005); addressing the nation on the BBC (Reference PhillipsPhillips 2002); enjoying the companionship of a circle of Christian friends, the Inklings (Reference DuriezDuriez 2015b; Reference GylerGlyer 2007; Reference Zaleski and ZaleskiZaleski and Zaleski 2015); and serving as the president of the Oxford Socratic Club (Reference Aldwinkle, White, Wolfe and WolfeAldwinkle 2015; Hooper 1979; Reference LewisLewis 1970: 126–8; Reference Mitchell and AngusMitchell 1997). Of his time studying with Kirkpatrick, Lewis wrote, “For if I could please myself I would always live as I lived there” (Reference Lewis1955b: 141), and emphasized a key component of those pleasant days: “it is an essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman’s knock” (143). At this time, Lewis loathed interruptions and interference. After his conversion, he had a different perspective on such things as “the postman’s knock”:

From Lewis’s public persona and his belief that he had “a duty to answer fully” letters from “serious inquirers” (504), “grew hundreds – eventually thousands – of letters replete with spiritual guidance to a wide range of inquirers among them spiritual seekers, recent converts … others struggling with temptation and guilt, and many healthy Christians simply in search of sound teaching” (Reference DorsettDorsett 2004: 116).

Although Lewis’s writings and activities were diverse, they all reflected a sense of vocation. At the outbreak of World War II, Lewis gave a sermon “Learning in War-Time,” in which he addressed the topic of vocation and underscored two principles:

All we do should be done to the glory of God:

A person’s interests are a good indication of his vocation:

For Lewis himself, a vocation-shaping circumstance came in the form of a physical defect:

While Lewis’s physical defect contributed to his sense of vocation, it was not what he would call a life-bending circumstance:

The great turning point in Lewis’s life was his realization that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. That change led to a special calling: “Since my conversion, it has seemed my particular task to tell the outside world what all Christians believe” (quoted in Reference HooperHooper 1996: 297).

For Further Reading: In C.S. Lewis’s List (Reference Werther and WertherWerther & Werther 2015), ten Lewis scholars introduce and discuss the works Lewis identified as having had the greatest impact on his sense of vocation. Will Vaus devotes a trilogy to these works (Reference Vaus2014; Reference Vaus2015; Reference Vaus2018). For a selection of Lewis’s letters of spiritual counsel, see (Reference Lewis and PaulLewis 2008).

1.2 Mere Christianity

That calling was nowhere more apparent than in Mere Christianity, where he sought “to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times” (Reference LewisLewis 2001b: viii), and – by extension – in The Chronicles of Narnia:

In The Fame of C.S. Lewis, Stephanie L. Derrick underscores the ongoing influence of The Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity:

In contrast to these bestsellers, Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism is one of the literary writings Mark Neal and Jerry Root include in their volume, The Neglected Lewis. In An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis makes a fundamental distinction between receiving and using a work:

Although Lewis had art and literature in mind, the receiving/using distinction can be applied more broadly to cover not only The Chronicles of Narnia, but Mere Christianity as well. In order to understand what sort of work Mere Christianity is, it is helpful to know how it came about. The first step in receiving a work is to identify its genre. Mere Christianity combines three earlier works, each consisting of scripts from Lewis’s BBC broadcasts, with minimal editing (Reference MarsdenMarsden 2016: 189–91). Lewis was allotted ten or fifteen minutes for each talk. The BBC’s Reference Lewis1942 handbook gives a good indication of the kind of talk the BBC wanted:

Within these parameters, Lewis’s goal was to “to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times” (Reference LewisLewis 2001b: viii). Continually focusing on Lewis’s objective is the key to “receiving” Mere Christianity.

Lewis reported that there was something of a consensus regarding his identification of core Christian claims: “So far as I can judge from reviews and letters written to me, the book did at least succeed in presenting an agreed upon or common, or central, or ‘mere’ Christianity” (Reference Lewis2001b: xi). Given Lewis’s coverage of the objectivity of the moral law, the deity of Christ, and the doctrine of the Trinity, “the central Christian message” (the atonement), the cardinal and theological virtues, and so forth, the consensus is not surprising.

Identifying core doctrines is one matter; staying within that core is another. Consider the doctrine of purgatory. Lewis scholar Jerry Walls writes, “Lewis’s belief in purgatory flows easily and consistently out of his theology, particularly his [transformational] account of the nature of salvation” (Reference WallsWalls 2012: 157). The theology Walls has in mind finds expression in Mere Christianity (2001b: 158–63). Though Lewis does not draw undue attention to that implication of transformational salvation in Mere Christianity – the word “purgatory” nowhere appears in Mere Christianity, as it does in Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer (108–9) – the implication is there: “Whatever suffering it may cost you in your early life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost you after death” (Reference Lewis2001b: 202), Christ will not rest “until you are literally perfect” (202). If Walls is right, and an affirmation of purgatory is not among central Christian beliefs, then Lewis seems to have strayed from core Christian beliefs. What might Lewis have said in response? He might well have agreed, and – as already noted – pointed out that he avoided using the word “purgatory” because he did not want to highlight a divisive doctrine. However, he might have argued that because salvation is transformational, he could not have both correctly portrayed salvation and completely avoided the implication of purgatory.

Identifying basic beliefs is but one step. After that comes explanation and defense, and both admit of degrees. It would be inappropriate to hold Lewis to the same standard as a theologian writing for scholars. When Lewis thought he was being judged according to that standard, he wrote:

Readers who do not hold Mere Christianity to an inappropriately high academic standard may nonetheless point out shortcomings in some of Lewis’s explanations and defenses. If they do, they may find themselves in the company of the author himself. For example, when Lewis wrote on the Christian doctrine of marriage, he acknowledged that his perspective was limited: “I have never been married myself, and therefore can only speak second hand” (Reference Lewis2001b: 104). “If you disagree with me, of course, you will say, ‘He knows nothing about it, he is not married.’ You may quite possibly be right.” (Reference Lewis2001b: 109). And regarding his defense of the deity of Christ, he came to recognize the need for a more comprehensive account: “something must be said about the historicity” (Reference LewisLewis 1970: 101).

Receiving Lewis’s work well – reading it in light of his stated goal – requires careful thought. The result may be agnosticism, acceptance of Christianity, or even rejection of it. Lewis was clear: “I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of evidence is against it” (Reference LewisLewis 2001b: 140).

For Further Reading: Thomas C. Oden devotes three volumes (Reference Oden2001a; Reference Oden2001b; Reference Oden2001c) to expressing “an ordered view of the faith of the Christian community upon which there has been generally substantial agreement between the traditions of East and West, including Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox” (Reference Oden2001a: ix).

1.3 The Chronicles of Narnia

As with Mere Christianity, so too with The Chronicles of Narnia: When determining the nature of this work it is helpful to know how it came about. In his essay, “It All Began with a Picture,” Lewis wrote:

Lewis explained in an essay, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” how a story may emerge from pictures:

As Lewis wrote in “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” his deliberate inventing was not a matter of fitting in predetermined morals:

Rather, any moral from the author should arise “inevitably from the whole cast of the author’s mind” (42), “from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life” (41). What arises from pictures in the author’s mind and spiritual roots will find its way into print only if the author can find an appropriate form for his material:

In the case of The Chronicles of Narnia:

In Reading with the Heart: The Way into Narnia, Peter J. Schakel aptly describes the Narnian stories as fairy tales embodying fantasy and romance:

And, just as importantly, C.S. Lewis himself underscored that The Chronicles are not allegories:

In sum, The Chronicles of Narnia are suppositions in the form of fairy tales embodying fantasy and romance.

Having identified the sort of work The Chronicles of Narnia is, we see that to “receive” them, we must keep in mind that Lewis has given us a suppositional world to live within, not an extended allegory. The perspective Peter J. Schakel advances in Reading with the Heart seems to be the right one to take:

Readers who know theology well need to keep in mind that some of the “allusions” they see may be “illusory.” For instance, Trevor Anderson (295–96) calls into question Douglas Wilson’s assertion that “The nature of the lion’s [Aslan’s] death … is seen as a very definite [limited] atonement” (Reference Wilson, Piper and MathisWilson 2014: 73).

In the same way, we must bear in mind Lewis’s “mythos, of romance.” Here again, Schakel is helpful:

Schakel goes on to show how Lewis not only works within the conventions of romance but also departs from them. So, for example, while Lewis did not dispense with violence altogether, he downplayed it relative to expectations of the genre.

Some may find even Lewis’s tempered romantic conventions too much to take. They may object to The Chronicles – not because they fail to present us with a consistent and coherent suppositional world – but because they find the suppositional world suspect on moral grounds. Richard Purtill correctly points out that an objection along the lines of “These ideas are false and you do a disservice by propagating them” is philosophical in nature and as such “must be backed by argument” (Reference PurtillPurtill 2006: 38). Without appropriate argumentation such objections run the risk of “chronology snobbery”: the “uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 207). To avoid this error one must find out “Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do?” (207–8).

For Further Reading: Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead provide a valuable resource for looking at The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe “through lenses gathered from Lewis’s literary criticism on the subject of literature and literary analysis” (Reference Ryken and Lamp Mead2005: 10). See also Devin Brown’s essay, “Are the Chronicles of Narnia Sexist?” (Reference Brown, Curtis and Key2015).

1.4 On the Reading of Old Books

In “On the Reading of Old Books,” Lewis encouraged the reading of older works as a way to combat our cultural myopia. Eighty years ago, he wrote:

More than 100 years have passed since Lewis’s first work Spirits in Bondage appeared, and 60 years since his last, Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer – enough time that Lewis’s own works fall under the category of older writings, especially since Lewis claimed that his works reflected still older periods. So then, approaching Lewis’s works we should expect some disharmony with our own cultural climate. And sometimes the disharmony may be jarring. But that is no reason to shy away from Lewis’s work or any other older works. Indeed, looking at the world through a different set of eyes is one of the reasons for turning to older works in the first place.

And if we turn to Lewis’s work to feel “the clear sea breeze of the centuries,” we would do well to acquaint ourselves with the breadth of Lewis’s work. A good rule of thumb would be that after reading a book in one genre of Lewis’s writings, e.g. apologetics, not to allow yourself another until you have read a work in a different genre, e.g. philosophy, fiction, literary criticism, theology or autobiography.

For Further Reading: In the Neglected Lewis, Mark Neal and Jerry Root examine eight of Lewis’s literary works to provide “a starting point to whet the interest of those who love C.S. Lewis but are not familiar with these works” (Reference Neal and Root2020: 10). Joel D. Heck lists all of Lewis’s works, numbering over 500, in chronological order: www.joelheck.com/resources/TheCompleteWorksofCSLewis.pdf. See also Walter Hooper’s excellent bibliography (2005a). For a look at Lewis’s own reading, Joel D. Heck draws upon Lewis’s diary, All My Road Before Me, and lists the 407 books Lewis read from April 1, 1922 through March 2, 1927 (Reference HeckHeck 2005, 145–56).

2.1 The End of All Settled Happiness

Shortly after his sixteenth birthday, Lewis engaged in “one of the worst acts of my life” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 161). He allowed himself “to be prepared for confirmation, and confirmed, and to make my first Communion” at St. Mark’s Church in Belfast, Ireland, on December 6, 1914, and did so “in total disbelief, acting a part, eating and drinking my own condemnation,” knowing “very well that I was acting a lie with the greatest possible solemnity” (161). Lewis’s shameful behavior raises several questions: Was there a time prior to this act when Lewis did believe the gospel? If so, how did he lose his faith, and why did he allow himself to go through confirmation “in total disbelief”?

Thomas Hamilton, Lewis’s maternal grandfather and vicar of St. Mark’s Church, baptized Clive Staples Lewis on January 29, 1899, two months after his birth on November 29, 1898. Insofar as Lewis had any faith growing up, it was propositional, not personal: “I was taught the usual things … I naturally accepted what I was told but I cannot remember feeling much interest in it” (7). He became “an effective believer” during the days at his first boarding school (September 1908–July 1910), when he “heard the doctrines of Christianity (as distinct from general “uplift”) taught by men who obviously believed them” (33).

Between baptism and boarding school, Lewis had his first experiences of a desire unlike any other, as well as an unparalleled loss from which he would never completely recover. Lewis used the word “Joy” to distinguish this superlative desire, “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any satisfaction” (17–18), from pleasure and happiness. Unlike happiness, Joy might be classified as a certain sort of grief (18); unlike pleasure, Joy is never under our control (18). As with pleasure and happiness, anyone who has experienced Joy will want to experience it again and again. The significance Lewis attached to Joy may seem out of proportion to the circumstances of its occurrence: remembering a toy garden his brother had made in a biscuit tin; encountering the “Idea of Autumn” in Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin; reading lines found in Longfellow’s “Saga of King Olaf”: “I heard a voice that cried, Balder the Beautiful / Is dead, is dead” (16–17). Of Longfellow’s lines, Lewis commented:

Lewis would experience Joy again, but the loss he suffered was final. Lewis was nine years old when his mother Flora died, on August 23, 1908. Flora’s death was preceded by the death of Lewis’s grandfather, Richard Lewis, earlier that year on the 2nd of April, and followed by the death of an uncle, Joseph Lewis, on the 3rd of September (Reference HeckHeck 2022b: 26). Prior to Flora’s passing, Lewis prayed for her recovery and afterwards for God to bring her back to life. In retrospect, he would come to see that the essence of prayer is communion with God, an awesome Judge and Savior, and that he was treating God as a magician. At the time, Flora’s death meant “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 21).

2.2 Finding and Losing Faith

Within a month of his mother’s death, Lewis was packed off to Wynyard, a boarding school in Hertfordshire, England. To get a sense of Lewis’s unhappiness at that school, note that in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he used the name of a Nazi concentration camp, Belsen, to refer to it (24). One might dispute the appropriateness of Lewis’s concentration-camp comparison, but what is beyond dispute is that the school’s headmaster caned the students and was eventually declared insane (Reference DowningDowning 2002: 36–37). Looking back on his life, in a letter to Bede Griffiths, Lewis referred to the death of his mother and his traumatic school experiences as among the causes contributing to his unbelief (Reference Lewis and HooperLewis 2004b: 747). That Lewis would, for a time, come to accept the Christian faith and “become an effective believer” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 33) during his days at Belsen, speaks volumes about his experiences at the church where he heard Christian doctrine affirmed by those who truly believed it. In terms of the distinction Lewis made in his essay “Is Theism Important?” it was at this time that Lewis moved from “a settled intellectual assent” to “trust” (Reference LewisLewis 1970: 172–74).

Following Lewis’s time at Belsen (1908–1910), he returned to Belfast for a half term at Campbell College in September 1910. Lewis again returned to England and attended Cherbourg House in Malvern, which he referred to as “Chartres.” When Lewis came to Chartres, Joy – that “inconsolable longing” that had meant so much to him – was conspicuously absent from his life; “not even the memory or the desire of it remained” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 72). That soon changed when he saw in a literary publication the words, “Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods,” with an illustration by Arthur Rackham (72). That experience led to a fascination with Wagner and Norse Mythology, such that Lewis came close to feeling about the Norse Gods what he ought to have felt for the Christian God (thankfulness for His glory). Lewis was, however, under no illusions that the world of Northernness was anything but imaginary (82).

Lewis’s discovery of Northernness and his recovery of Joy were matched by a loss of faith. It was at Chartres that he ceased to be a Christian. Contributing to Lewis’s unbelief were an introduction to the occult, frustrating experiences praying, studies in classics, and the argument from Un-Design. Lewis’s acquaintance with the occult came through “Miss C,” the matron of the school. She was “one of the most selfless people I have ever known” and hopelessly confused, “floundering in the mazes of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism; the whole Anglo-American Occultist tradition” (59). Interactions with her sparked in Lewis a passion for the occult (59–60), though the passion was never to become a practice: “I have killed no chickens” (Reference LewisLewis 2013: 20). The real harm was lost confidence in the Christian creeds.

While Lewis’s assurance in the creeds was crumbling, his prayer life was imploding. Believing that a prayer was genuine only if the petitioner’s mind did not wander – and desperately wanting to get it right – Lewis began to obsess over the authenticity of his prayers. As a result, praying became a painful introspective experience (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 61–62). Studies in classics also took their toll on Lewis’s faith. Lewis noted that his teachers took it for granted that the religious views of Virgil and other classical authors were false. Why then make an exception for Christian beliefs? (62–63). Lewis decided not to and reveled in his newfound freedom: “At last I could say to the universe ‘Mind your own business.’ I had some department, however small, in which I was supreme and unchallenged. And this, I am convinced, is the permanent charm of unbelief” (Reference LewisLewis 2013: 29).

Lewis’s unbelief fit well with the “Argument from Undesign” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 65). In The Problem of Pain, Lewis outlined the key elements of “undesign”: most of the universe “consists of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably cold” (Reference LewisLewis 2001d: 1); “creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die” (2); our history consists mostly of “crime, war, disease, and terror” (2); in the end, “All stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter” (3).

Losing one’s faith is one matter; going through the motions of confirmation “in total disbelief” is another. Cowardice was the immediate cause of Lewis’s hypocrisy; he wished to avoid the awful interactions he envisioned with his father were he to confess his unbelief. Cowardice, as Lewis came to see, is no small matter. Echoing Samuel Johnson, he wrote, “where courage is not, no other virtue can survive except by accident” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 161).

2.3 Reason and Imagination

When Eric Fenn of the BBC asked Lewis if he would give an account of his return to faith, Lewis demurred, “Not my pigeon, I think. My own history was so mixed up with technical philosophy as to be useless to the general [public]” (Reference Lewis and HooperLewis 2004b: 568). In the preface to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis described his philosophical long and winding road as passing from “‘popular realism’ to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity” (Reference LewisLewis 1958b: 5). In a letter to Mr. More, he used slightly different language, describing his journey as “from materialism to idealism, from idealism to Pantheism, from pantheism to theism, and from theism to Christianity” (Reference Lewis and HooperLewis 2004b: 145).

Notwithstanding the role of “technical philosophy” in Lewis’s path to faith, when Lewis wrote his spiritual autobiography he prefaced his account with the caveat, “How far the story matters to anyone but myself depends upon the degree to which others have experienced what I call ‘joy’” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: vii), and described his story as “suffocatingly subjective” (viii). As a courtesy to his readers he “tried so to write the first chapter that those who can’t bear such a story will see at once what they are in for and close the book with the least waste of time” (viii). To be sure, philosophy is not absent from that account, but neither is it the primary focus. In “Early Prose Joy,” Lewis wrote about both the role of “technical philosophy” and Joy in his return to faith, but sharply distinguished between them:

In the following account, Lewis’s return to faith proceeds chronologically, weaving the roles of reason and Joy together. After Chartres Lewis attended Malvern College, where he continued to explore Norse mythology, writing a tragedy, Loki Bound, in which Loki cautions Odin against creation and then opposes him when he disregards Loki’s warning. Thor sides with Odin and attempts to use force to bring Loki in line; Loki looks down upon Thor for his might-makes-right approach. In all of this, Lewis came to see that Loki was a projection of himself. He resented “the Bloods,” Malvern’s ruling elite students, for using their status and power to make his life miserable, and wished, like Loki, to assert his superiority.

A theme in Loki Bound is the desire to be left alone. Loki asked, “Why should creatures have the burden of existence forced on them without their consent?” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 115). Never mind that existing is a necessary condition for consent. Lewis’s anger was getting the best of his reason: “I was at this time living … in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world” (115).

From Malvern College, Lewis went to Great Bookham to be tutored by William Kirkpatrick. When he arrived, his “Atheism and Pessimism were fully formed” (139–40); he believed “in nothing but atoms and evolution and military service” (174). But seeing the world as a “meaningless dance of atoms” came at a price: “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless” (170). There was a payoff though: “at least it [Kirkpatrick’s rationalism] was free of the Christian God” (171). Lewis found this being particularly odious because he was “a transcendental Interferer” and “No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word Interference” (172).

During his time at Great Bookham, Lewis began to harbor some doubts about materialism. He greatly respected the poet Yeats and knew that Yeats believed in Magic. Perhaps Yeats was right to reject materialism. Perhaps there was more than a “meaningless dance of atoms,” and something other than the Christian God. With that possibility in mind, “all the old Occultist lore, and all the old excitement which the Matron of Chartres had innocently aroused in me, rose out of the past” (175). And, for the first time, Lewis wondered about a connection between the longing for Joy and the desire for the occult.

Lewis had a profound experience of Joy while at Great Bookham, and it was as far from the occult as it could be; it was an experience he would come to recognize as holiness. The occasion was reading George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Fairie Romance. This experience of Joy, unlike previous ones, enhanced rather than diminished the world around him: “Up till now each visitation of Joy had left the common world momentarily a desert… . But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things” (181). This Joy not only transformed Lewis’s outer world but also his inner world, as evidenced in Lewis’s Introduction to George MacDonald: An Anthology:

Between the time Lewis purchased Phantastes on March 4, 1916, and his nineteenth birthday, November 29, 1917, he finished his studies with Kirkpatrick, won a scholarship from University College, Oxford, trained for the military, and arrived on the frontlines in France as a second lieutenant. This was a world of death, “horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles,” and desolation, “the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 196), the exact opposite of Phantastes’ bright-shadowy world. Writing to Arthur Greeves in May and June of 1918, Lewis sketched a view Adam Barkman characterized as “Pseudo-Manichean-Dualism” (Reference Barkman2009: 30–34) and David Downing described as “almost Manichean, insisting that Spirit and Matter existed in a state of perpetual opposition” (Reference Downing2002: 92):

A world war later, Lewis gave broadcasts on the BBC, offering critiques of dualism (Reference Lewis2001b: 4–5). He showed that referring to one side as evil and the other as good required a standard more fundamental than either side, thus depriving the competing sides of their status as ultimate reality (43).

When Lewis returned to Oxford after the war, he no longer affirmed the “spiritual & nonmaterial.” His “‘New Look’ … adopting a turn of phrase from the world of fashion and applying it to the intellectual trends of his day, as he chose to appropriate them” (Reference McGrathMcGrath 2014: 32) combined: materialistic monism (metaphysics), empiricism (epistemology), Stoicism (ethics), a debunking psychology, and “chronological snobbery.” As a monist, Lewis believed that the material universe is all that exists. Joy now was merely an aesthetic experience, “But it came very seldom and when it came it didn’t amount to much” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 205). As an empiricist, he accepted “as rock-bottom reality the universe revealed by the senses” (208). If Bergson was right – and Lewis thought he was – the universe exists necessarily, and “There is no sense in blaming or praising the Whole… . since you are part of it” (204). What is called for is acceptance, hence Stoicism. Influenced by the “New Psychology,” Lewis now considered the romantic images he had once valued as so much “wishful thinking”; he had “seen through” them, and “was never going to be taken in again” (204). As a chronological snob, Lewis assumed that “whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited” (207).

Lewis’s good friend, Owen Barfield, did not like the look of Lewis’s new fashion statement. Barfield found holes in Lewis’s chronological snobbery. He claimed that before dismissing an earlier view, “You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood” (207–8). Worse yet, Barfield showed Lewis that in accepting “as rock-bottom reality the universe revealed by the senses,” Lewis had to either give up his views that “abstract thought (if obedient to logical rules) gave indisputable truth, that our moral judgment was ‘valid,’ and our aesthetic experience not merely pleasing but ‘valuable,’” or “adopt a Behavioristic theory of logic, ethics, and aesthetics” (208). Lewis was not willing to give up the objectivity of thought and pronounced himself unable to accept Behaviorism: “I cannot force my thought into that shape any more than I can scratch my ear with my big toe” (209). His only alternative was hitherto unthinkable: “I must admit that … the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos” (209).

Lewis had moved from an initial belief in “atoms and evolution” to idealism. He then explored two different forms of idealism: subjective and absolute. He initially turned to George Berkeley’s (1685–1753) subjective idealism. On this view, all that exists are minds – first and foremost the divine mind – and their ideas. Lewis dropped this position when he saw that it could not account for interaction between finite minds (Reference BarkmanBarkman 2009: 224), and turned to the absolute idealism of F. H. Bradley (1846–1924). Michael L. Peterson summarizes Bradley’s view:

Adam Barkman notes that Lewis referred to F. H. Bradley as a “British Hegelian” and to G. F. W. Hegel (1770–1831) as a pantheist (Reference Barkman2009: 46): “Bradley’s absolute idealism, which focuses on the conditions for an intelligible world, is really no different than pantheism, which focuses on religion, since both doctrines would agree that everything is God” (46). Lewis had now shifted from subjective idealism to pantheism.

Pantheism, like subjective idealism, would turn out to be just another way station, but – for the time being – a pleasant one, comfort without cost:

After his conversion, Lewis compared and contrasted Christianity and pantheism in “The Rival Conceptions of God” Reference Lewis2001b: 35–39) and “Christianity and ‘Religion’” (Reference LewisLewis 2001c: 129–50).

2.4 Two Conversions

Lewis had come a long way from his New Look. Any remaining detritus was “annihilated” (Reference Lewis1955b: 217) when he reread Euripides’s Hippolytus: “I was off once more into the land of longing, my heart at once broken and exalted as it had never been since the old days at Bookham [where Lewis read Phantastes]. There was nothing whatever to do about it; no question of returning to the desert” (217). Reading Samuel Alexander’s Gifford Lectures Space, Time, and Deity gave Lewis a new understanding of this longing. He saw that “one essential property of love, hate, fear, hope, or desire was attention to their object” (218). From Alexander, Lewis learned that one cannot both experience love, hate, hope or the like, and reflect on that experience simultaneously: “You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself” (218). When Lewis made the connection with Joy, he realized that he had been on a fool’s errand:

In looking inside himself to attend to a mental state that can only exist unattended to, and in looking inside himself to find the object of a desire that exists outside himself, Lewis’s approach was self-defeating. He now knew that – properly approached – Joy provides “a road right out of the self” (221).

With a new understanding and experience of Joy, and a different philosophical framework (absolute idealism/pantheism), Lewis saw the possibility of a confluence:

In the 1924–25 academic year, when Lewis was tutoring in philosophy, he hit a pedagogical wall: “A tutor must make things clear. Now the Absolute cannot be made clear” (222). Lewis chose to circumvent the wall by shifting back to Berkeley’s subjective idealism, a form of theism. The move was pedagogically sound but personally troubling; Lewis wished to distance himself from the religious connotations of subjective idealism, and so referred to Berkeley’s God as “Spirit,” and emphasized the impossibility of having a personal relationship with it.

Although Lewis wished to keep matters philosophical and impersonal, more than a few factors threatened his wish. Among them were: an atheist colleague’s reflection that the historicity of the gospels looked pretty good – maybe there had been a dying and rising god (Reference HeckHeck 2021: 213–17; Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 223–24); Lewis’s sense that he had been holding something “at bay,” and needed to decide whether or not to keep the door shut (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 224); and a realization that, contrary to the great philosophers, Lewis had been treating philosophy merely as a subject, when it was in fact a way of life (225–26). When Lewis decided to open the door and live his philosophy, he became – not a Christian – but a theist “pure and simple” (230).

Lewis’s turn to Christianity came later, after a long conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson that began on September 19, Reference Lewis and Hooper1931 and spilled over into the next day. Tolkien reflected on that evening in his poem, Mythopoeia, dedicating it to “one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver’” (Reference TolkienJ.R.R. Tolkien 1988: 85). Tolkien’s son Christopher later noted that his father was referring to C.S. Lewis (Reference TolkienC. Tolkien 1988: vii).

Tolkien countered Lewis’s characterization with an image of his own, “refracted light.”

There are echoes of Tolkien’s poem in Lewis’s description of myth in Miracles, “at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination” (Reference Lewis2001c: 218).

Lewis gave his own account of the evening in his letters to Arthur Greeves on October 1 and 18, 1931:

Lewis’s long journey that began with a toy garden in a biscuit tin and his mother’s death, culminated in belief in Christ.

For Further Reading: Two works chronicle Lewis’s conversion to Christianity (Reference DowningDowning 2002; Reference HeckHeck 2017). Another (Reference BrownBrown 2013) takes a longer look at Lewis’s spiritual journey, encompassing his entire life. On the dating of Lewis’s conversion, see Alister McGrath’s groundbreaking work (Reference McGrathMcGrath 2013: 141–46). Lewis’s semi-autobiographical, allegorical conversion account, The Pilgrim’s Regress, is a challenging work; the Wade Center’s annotated edition is a valuable resource (Reference Lewis and DavidLewis 2014). Michael L. Peterson offers a lucid account of Lewis’s “worldview journey” (Reference Peterson2020:15–30). For a detailed account of Lewis’s philosophical development see Reference BarkmanAdam Barkman (2009: 11–213). Harry Lee Poe’s Biographical Trilogy (Reference Poe2019, Reference Poe2021, Reference Poe2022) provides a thorough account of Lewis’s entire life. Joel Heck’s chronology of the lives of C.S. Lewis and Warren Lewis is an invaluable resource (Reference Heck2022b).

3.1 An Ontological Argument in Narnia?

The Silver Chair, one of The Chronicles of Narnia, introduces Puddleglum, a character who takes pessimism to new lows. Notwithstanding his gloomy outlook – it is not for nothing that his name ends in “glum” – he turns out to be a hero: he stomps out the Queen of Underland’s enchanted fire, breaking her spell. It is clear from one of Lewis’s letters that he took this episode in The Silver Chair to be philosophically significant:

Lest the philosophical import escape us, Walter Hooper provides some commentary:

Here Hooper uncharacteristically falters. He conflates Anselm’s a priori conceptual approach with an a posteriori matter, a causal question over the origin of ideas. Anselm, as represented by Hooper, is arguing from the supposition that God is the greatest being which can be thought, to God’s existence. Anselm is not concerned with the question, Where did our idea of God come from? But a question like Where did Puddleglum’s idea of Aslan come from? is at the heart of the dispute between the Queen of Underland and Puddleglum. They are not concerned with conceptual questions along the lines of Given the supposition that Aslan is king of the beasts, can we infer that Aslan exists?

In addition to the mismatch between the approaches in The Proslogion and The Silver Chair, there is another reason for supposing that, pace Hooper, Lewis did not have in mind Anselm’s conceptual proof of God’s existence: Lewis dismissed the possibility of such proofs and appealed to the explanatory power of the Christian worldview in their place:

While Lewis identified both Anselm and Descartes as originators of the “Ontological Proof” (Lewis’s scare quotes) in The Silver Chair passage, he did not point to any specific passages. However, his comments on a Cartesian proof in a letter to his brother seem pertinent:

In his editorial notes on this letter, Walter Hooper correctly identifies the relevant Cartesian argument:

Keeping Lewis’s letter to his brother in mind, recall Puddleglum’s response to the Queen of Underland:

We can easily express the reasoning implicit in Puddleglum’s remarks in the form of a Cartesian argument: Puddleglum has the idea of a world of light and beauty. He, being a “baby,” could not have invented that idea if the Queen’s “black pit” had been the only world he knew. So, it seems that Puddleglum received his ideas either from a world filled with sunlight or from someone who knew of such a world. There is, then, good reason to think that Descartes’ causal proof in the Third Meditation is the “Ontological Proof” (Lewis’s scare quotes) that Lewis gave “in a form suitable for children” in The Silver Chair.

For Further Reading: For a different interpretation of The Silver Chair passage and the ontological argument, see Reference WilliamsDonald T. Williams (2016: 75–80). Reference McGrathMcGrath (2014: 129–46) discusses Lewis’s apologetic approach.

3.2 The Moral Argument

C.S. Lewis once remarked to his friend Neville Coghill, “I believe I have proved that the Renaissance never happened in England. Alternatively … that if it did, it had no importance” (Reference Coghill and GibbCoghill 1965: 61). It was fitting, then, for Cambridge University to offer Lewis a chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, which led Lewis to conclude that Cambridge “was encouraging my own belief that the barrier between those two ages has been greatly exaggerated” (Reference LewisLewis 1979: 2). In his inaugural address “De Descriptione Temporum,” Lewis focused on what he took to be a much deeper division: “I have come to regard as the greatest of all divisions in the history of the West that which divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen [1775–1817] and Scott [1771–1832]” (7); “In her [Jane Austen’s] days some kind and degree of religious belief and practice were the norm: now, though … they are the exception” (9–10).

Lewis saw the present age as post-Christian and considered Paganism preferable to it, as early Christian missionaries had an advantage over evangelists to post-Christians:

Aware that his war-time broadcast audience was post-Christian, Lewis set out to make Christianity meaningful by starting off with reflections on the moral law. In adducing evidence for an objective moral law, Lewis noted that quarreling presupposes a shared moral standard (Reference LewisLewis 2001b: 3–4); a denial of such a standard leads to an absurdity: “What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced?” (5); moral differences across cultures have been exaggerated (Reference Lewis1955a: 95–121; Reference Lewis2001b: 6); and mistaken moral beliefs no more undermine the objectivity of morality than do errors in mathematics (Reference LewisLewis 2001b: 7). Following these considerations, Lewis addressed some objections: the moral law is just “herd instinct,” (9–12) or social convention (12–14). Satisfied that he had made his case, Lewis concluded that there is a moral law, which differs from the laws of nature in that it does not merely report what is, but expresses what ought to be. It is “a real law, which none of us made, but which we feel pressing on us” (20), “which we know we ought to obey” (21).

Taking the reality of the moral law as a datum, Lewis then considered its implications for deciding between two opposing philosophies: the materialist view and the religious view:

In favor of a fit between the reality of the moral law and the religious view, Lewis argued that since our knowledge of morality cannot come, as does scientific knowledge, from the third-person perspective, it must be known from the first-person perspective:

Such “inside information” is just what we would expect were the religious view true:

In contrast, the materialist view – relying on science – cannot tell us whether or not there is something more than the physical universe, for questions like that lie beyond the purview of science (23), and do not offer us much hope for confidence in our moral convictions. For on this view, it is only “by a very long series of chances, the living creatures developed into things like us” (22). As Lewis saw it, the result of comparing the religious and materialist views on the reality of the moral law pointed to “Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right… . is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know” (25). It is important to keep Lewis’s moral argument in perspective. If successful, he has shown that the religious view is preferable to strict materialism in accounting for our knowledge of the moral law. Whether or not this is so for a broader form of naturalism is another matter (Reference Taliaferro, MacSwain and WardTaliaferro 2010: 111–12). And, as Lewis was aware, there are other phenomena to consider, not least our desire for heaven and our ability to make rational inferences.

For Further Reading: See Reference Baggett and WallsBaggett and Walls (2019: 162–80) for a discussion of Lewis’s moral arguments, and the exemplary exchange between Wielenberg, con (Reference Wielenberg and Bassham2015a; Reference Wielenberg and Bassham2015b) and Baggett, pro (Reference Baggett and Bassham2015a; Reference Baggett and Bassham2015b). C.S. Lewis argued for the objectivity of morality in The Abolition of Man (Reference Lewis1955a); Michael Ward’s guide (Reference Ward2021) is an essential resource for that work. Jerry Root shows that “Lewis believed subjectivism, left unchecked, leads to evil” (Reference Root2009: 1)

3.3 The Argument from Desire

Augustine addressed God, “You have made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in You” (Reference Augustine and Pine1961:21). Pascal wrote about an “infinite abyss” that “can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object, in other words by God himself” (Reference Pascal and Krailsheimer1966: 75). And C.S. Lewis described “a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,” (Reference LewisLewis 2001a: 136–37), a longing where “the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting of it is felt somehow to be a delight” (Reference LewisLewis 1958b: 7), and “our lifelong nostalgia” (Reference LewisLewis 1980: 12). The richness and complexity of this desire is apparent in the variety of terms Lewis used to characterize it: Platonic Eros; Romanticism; the Numinous; Sehnsucht; Joy; and Hope (Reference BarkmanBarkman 2009: 67–86). In Mere Christianity Lewis referred to the desire’s object as “Heaven” (Reference Lewis2001b: 135), “infinite happiness” (136), and “my true country” (137). In “The Weight of Glory” he referred to it as “a transtemporal, transfinite good” (Reference LewisLewis 1980: 6), “our longing to be united with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off” (16), and “freshness and purity” (17). The importance of this transfinite good cannot be overemphasized. If there were no such good, the universe would be a fraud (Reference LewisLewis 2001b: 137); but if there were such a good, then “If we lose this, we lose all” (Reference LewisLewis 2001d: 151). Nothing less is at stake than the meaningfulness of life (Reference GoetzGoetz 2018: 174; Reference PetersonPeterson, Michael L. 2020: 43–6; Reference WielenbergWielenberg 2008: 111; Reference Williams and BasshamWilliams, Peter S. 2015a: 44).

Lewis never offered a formal argument from desire for infinite happiness. And, when he did discuss the significance of desire, he assessed it differently. He used the language of probability in “The Weight of Glory”: “I think it is a pretty good indication that such a thing exists” (Reference Lewis1980: 6), and in Mere Christianity: “Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it” (Reference Lewis2001b: 137). But in The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis was more emphatic: “the One who can sit in this chair must exist” (Reference Lewis1958b: 10). If nature does nothing in vain, the object of the desire “must” exist:

As Lewis used both the language of demonstrative certainty, “must,” and probability, Lewis scholars have formalized his reasoning from desire to infinite good in a variety of ways: Abductive (Reference McGrathMcGrath 2014: 117–120); Inference to the best explanation (John Haldane inReference McGrathMcGrath 2014: 120–2; Reference WilliamsWilliams, Donald 2017; Reference Williams and BasshamWilliams, Peter S. 2015a); Bayesian (Reference SimekSimek 2022); Inductive (Reference BeversluisBeversluis 2007: 43; Reference HolyerHoyler 1988: 68–70); Deductive (Reference BeversluisBeversluis 2007: 41; Reference Kreeft, Michael and AndrewKreeft 1989: 250; Reference Williams and BasshamWilliams, Peter S. 2015a: 41); “Deductive with epistemic qualifiers” (Reference Lee, David, Gary and JerryLee 2017: 324–25); Reductio argument from absurdity (Reference LovellLovell 2003: 139–45; Reference Williams and BasshamWilliams, Peter S. 2015a: 43–44).

In order to clarify and consider some of the issues Lewis’s argument raises, it will be helpful to have an explicit version of the argument before us. The following is from Peter Kreeft:

Note that in the major premise, there is an implied distinction between natural/innate desires and external desires. John Haldane provides the following characterization of natural/innate desires:

By way of clarification, Lewis notes that from the fact that there is such an object for every natural desire, it follows only that every natural desire can be satisfied, not that every one will be satisfied. We have a natural desire for food, yet some starve.

The minor premise presupposes that the desire for heaven/infinite happiness is universal. Even so, Lewis realizes that some may miss it: “when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognize it. Most people if they had really learned to look into their hearts, would know and know that they want, and want acutely. Something that cannot be had in this world” (Reference LewisLewis 2001b: 135). The key is knowing how to look. If we look at our desires only from a third-person point of view, the results will be reductionistic and leave us with knowledge of neural pathways. If we look at our desires from the first-person point of view, we will see that they are teleological and point beyond themselves. This is the distinction Lewis drew between “looking at” (third-person perspective) and “looking along” (first-person perspective) in “Meditation in a Toolshed.” Looking at a beam of light coming in through a crack in the toolshed, we see “specks of dust floating in it” (Reference LewisLewis 1970: 212). Looking along the beam, we see “green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, ninety odd million miles away, the sun” (212).

For Further Reading: For different perspectives on Lewis’s argument from desire, see the exchange between Peter S. Williams, pro (Reference Williams and Bassham2015a; Reference Williams and Bassham2015b; Reference Williams2016) and Gregory Bassham, con (Reference Bassham and Bassham2015a; Reference Bassham and Bassham2015b) as well as Erik J. Wielenberg’s critique (Reference Wielenberg2008: 116–17) and Stewart Goetz’s “Lewisian” response (Reference Goetz2018: 174–77). Reference McGrathMcGrath (2019) compares the views of C.S. Lewis and Richard Dawkins on the meaning of life.

3.4 The Argument from Reason

On March 11, 1936, Lewis wrote a fan letter to Charles Williams:

In The Place of the Lion (Reference Williams1950), Williams’ protagonist Damaris Tighe (her first name appears in Acts 17:34), studies Plato and Aristotle but fails to see the significance of events – the return of Archetypes – in the world around her. Lewis thought that naturalist philosophers have the opposite problem; they fail to perceive the significance of the events within them: “The Naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking” Reference LewisLewis (2001c: 65).

Lewis took it for granted that self-reflection shows that we make rational inferences, and if we arrive at theories only through such inferences, then any theory that rules them out is self-refuting:

By way of example, Lewis quoted J.B. Haldane to show that “strict materialism” is self-refuting: “‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true … and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms’” (quoted in Reference Lewis2001c: 22).

“Strict materialism” is but one form of naturalism. In general, “The Naturalist believes that a great process, of ‘becoming’, exists ‘on its own’ in space and time, and that nothing else exists” (12), and that whatever occurs is “an inevitable result of the character of the whole system” (15). Note that Lewis’s account of naturalism does not rule out the existence of minds: “The great interlocking event called Nature might be such as to produce at some stage a great cosmic consciousness, an indwelling ‘God’ arising from the whole process as human mind arises (according to the Naturalists) from human organisms” (11). However, minds that are the inevitable result of an entirely naturalistic system cannot accommodate reasoning:

Central to Lewis’s critique of naturalism, whether natural selection or strict materialism, is his principle that “a train of thought loses all rational credentials as soon as it can be shown to be wholly the result of non-rational causes” (Reference LewisLewis 2001c: 39). Note the qualification “wholly”: “the argument from reason does not require that our cognitive functioning be completely unaffected by physical causes, evolutionary or otherwise” (Reference PetersonPeterson 2020: 55). So, if we make rational inferences, there must be a sense in which each of us is “a more than natural agent” (2001c: 177). As such, if a miracle is “an interference with Nature by supernatural power” (5), then our reasoning is – in some sense – miraculous and hints at “the grand miracle,” the incarnation:

For Further Reading: C.S. Lewis encountered the argument from reason in Arthur Balfour’s Theism and Humanism (Reference Balfour and Michael2000). Reference Taliaferro, Werther and WertherTaliaferro (2015) provides an overview of Balfour’s work and contrasts it with the work of influential contemporary philosophers. Lewis first offered the argument in Miracles (Reference LewisLewis 1947: 23–32) and then recast it in the 1960 revised edition of Miracles (Reference LewisLewis 2001c: 17–36). For Elizabeth Anscombe’s critique of Lewis’s first version of the argument see (Reference AnscombeAnscombe 1981: 224–32) and for her subsequent reflections, see (Reference Anscombe1981: ix-x). For her discussion of Lewis’s revised argument, see (Reference Anscombe, White, Wolfe and WolfeAnscombe 2015: 15–23). No one has done more to explicate, defend, and develop C.S. Lewis’s argument from reason than Victor Reppert. Representative writings include: C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea (Reference Reppert2003), and an exchange with David Kyle Johnson (Reference Johnson and BasshamJohnson 2015a, Reference Johnson and Bassham2015b, Reference Johnson2018; Reference Reppert and BasshamReppert 2015a, Reference Reppert and Bassham2015b, Reference Reppert2018). Alvin Reference PlantingaPlantinga (2011: 310) sees his own evolutionary argument against naturalism as a descendent of Lewis’s. For a comparison of the approaches of Plantinga and Lewis, see Reference GoetzGoetz (2013) and Reference DepoeDepoe (2014).

4.1 The Myth Became Fact

Reflecting on his friendship with Arthur Greeves, Lewis wrote, “I learned charity from him and failed, for all my efforts, to teach him arrogance in return” (Reference Lewis and HooperLewis 2004a: 995). Lewis’s conceit was on full display in his letter to Arthur on October 12, 1916:

On October 18, 1916, Lewis wrote Greeves to clarify comments in his previous letter:

Lewis wrote these letters when William T. Kirkpatrick was his tutor. Kirkpatrick, once a believer, was at that time an atheist. “At the time when I knew him, the fuel of Kirk’s Atheism was chiefly of the anthropological and pessimistic kind. He was great on The Golden Bough and Schopenhauer” (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 139).

Kirkpatrick did not convert Lewis to atheism – it was too late for that – but he did provide Lewis with “fresh ammunition” (140). Lewis’s remarks to Arthur Greeves are in keeping with James Frazer’s perspective in The Golden Bough:

A breakthrough in Lewis’s understanding of myth and an openness to Christianity came through a conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. Lewis shared the lessons he learned from Dyson and Tolkien in a letter to Arthur Greeves, written fifteen years to the day after his October 18, 1916 “tomfoolery letter”:

Taking his cue from Tolkien and Dyson, Lewis eventually moved from seeing the presence of parallels between Christianity and nature religions as problematic to the position that their absence would be worrisome:

The pattern of death and rebirth occurs in nature religions because the natural world is God’s creation: “The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God” (Reference LewisLewis 2001c: 181). Christ “from all eternity has been incessantly plunging Himself in the blessed death of self-surrender to the Father” (211). And, since God provides “the true light which enlightens everyone” (John 1:9 ESV),

These glimpses were “preparatio evangelica” (Reference LewisLewis 1970: 132) before religion had reached its maturity (Reference LewisLewis 1955b: 235). When religion finally matured in Christianity, the “elements of Nature-religion are strikingly absent from the teaching of Jesus,” for “Where the real God is present the shadows of that God do not appear” (Reference LewisLewis 2001c: 186). That the Christian story can account for both the presence and absence of “shadows,” counts strongly in its favor: “The truth of a given worldview … is in its ability not to fit into other myths, but its ability to ‘fit in’ the other myths into its own story” (Reference Honeycutt, David, Gary and JerryHoneycut 2017: 117).

Lewis argued that “the Grand Miracle” (Reference Lewis2001c: 174), the doctrine of the incarnation, explained more than “parallels” and “Pagan Christs” (Reference Lewis1970: 67). Among other things, it elucidated the vicariousness found in nature: “Everything is indebted to everything else, sacrificed to everything else, dependent on everything else” (Reference LewisLewis 2001c: 191), and “the composite nature of man” (191). In general, for Lewis, the credibility of the doctrine “will depend upon the extent to which the doctrine, if accepted, can illuminate and integrate that whole mass [of our knowledge]” (176).

For Further Reading: Those interested in reflecting on the ways Lewis’s view of myth can integrate and illuminate the collective unconscious may wish to peruse “Synthesizing True Myth and Jungian Criticism: Jordan Peterson, Carl Jung, and C.S. Lewis in Conversation” (Reference TrudeauTrudeau 2021). For a comparison of the views of C.S. Lewis and James Campbell, see (Reference MenziesMenzies 2014), and for a broader and briefer introduction (Reference Hyles and KennethHyles 1992).

4.2 More than a Great Moral Teacher

Throughout his writings, Lewis contrasted descriptions of Jesus’s claims about himself with his moral teaching: The Problem of Pain (Reference Lewis2001d: 13); “What Are We To Make of Jesus Christ?” (Reference Lewis1970: 156); Mere Christianity (Reference Lewis2001b: 51–52):

Elaborating on this apparent megalomania, Lewis noted that Jesus claimed “to be, or to be the son of, or to be ‘one with,’ the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law” (Reference LewisLewis 2001d: 13); acted as if “He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin” (Reference LewisLewis 2001b: 52); asserted that he can forgive sins (51); “that His mere presence suspends all normal rules” and stated that “before Abraham was, I am” (Reference Lewis1970: 157); and “denied all sin of Himself” (Reference LewisLewis 1986b: 135), all the while describing himself as “meek and lowly of heart” (135).

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis argued that Jesus’s exalted claims would have been false only if he were either a liar or a lunatic. However, if we assume – as Lewis did – that Jesus was a great moral teacher, then the liar and lunatic options are off the table. The only remaining possibility is that Jesus was God incarnate.

Friends and foes of Lewis’s line of reasoning agree that Lewis’s three options do not exhaust the possibilities. Indeed, Lewis himself recognized that the possibility of legend needed to be addressed: “Something will usually have to be said about the historicity of the Gospels” (Reference LewisLewis 1970: 101). In addition to the legend, lunatic, liar, and God incarnate possibilities, Alister McGrath suggests another: perhaps “Jesus was someone who was not mad or bad, but was nevertheless wrong about his identity” (Reference McGrathMcGrath 2013: 227). In keeping with McGrath’s suggestion, John Beversluis makes a sharp distinction between the content of Jesus’s teaching and the question of his identity:

Could Jesus have been mistaken about his identity – falsely believing himself to be divine, while giving sound moral instruction? This seems unlikely. Insofar as Jesus believed himself to be divine, he would have at least implicitly taught that the first and greatest commandment (to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and might) applied to himself (cf. Reference Bowman, Robert and KomoszewskiBowman Jr. and Komoszewski 2007:31). Wrongly hinting, or worse, to others that their highest duty is to love you, is sufficient reason for exclusion from the class of great moral teachers.

Daniel Howard-Snyder believes that Jesus is divine, but thinks that it is possible that a merely human Jesus could have sufficient reasons for affirming his own divinity. In that case, Jesus would have been merely mistaken, albeit about a momentous matter. One way Howard-Synder offers support for this option is to sketch two possible scenarios. In one, the Beelzebub Story (473–75), Jesus is deceived by Satan. In the other, the Messianic Story, “first, Jesus came to believe he himself was Messiah ben David. Then, given his reading of the Jewish Scriptures, he came to believe that Messiah was divine. He made the natural deduction” (477).

Note that in order to establish the merely-mistaken option, it is not enough to provide possible scenarios. One must show that given one or both of these scenarios, “it is no less plausible to suppose that Jesus was neither mad nor bad but merely mistaken than that he was divine” (456). In response to Howard-Snyder’s scenarios, Stephen T. Davis emphasizes that we should not lose sight of the fact that the Jesus in question is the one presented in the New Testament.

Whether or not these thought experiments square with the Jesus of the New Testament is left for the reader’s reflection.

In an exchange with Donald S. Williams, Adam Barkman explores – without endorsing – one more possibility: in contrast to the conservative view in which Jesus is divine, and the liberal view in which he was “merely a wise man” (Reference Barkman and BasshamBarkman 2015a: 193) perhaps Jesus was neither divine nor human. Perhaps he was a different sort of being altogether, more than human but less than divine. In casting reasonable doubt on the conservative view that Jesus claimed to be God, Barkman rightly cautions about a tendency to “want to put difficult-to-classify entities [e.g. Jesus as the Son of Man] into easily identifiable boxes” (192). There is a danger of “seeing” more in a text than is actually there, as “Worship” (195); “Son of God” (Reference Barkman and BasshamBarkman 2015a: 196; Reference BaynesBaynes 2017: 44–45); and “Son of Man” (Reference Barkman and BasshamBarkman 2015a: 194–7; Reference BaynesBaynes 2017: 61–63) each has a range of meanings.

In trying to determine if, and to what extent, Jesus claimed to be divine, the “I am” sayings in the gospel of John are key texts. Barkman allows that they are among the sayings that “do support the traditional Trinitarian case but not as many – including, perhaps, Lewis – have thought” (197). Donald Williams, Barkman’s interlocutor, is among the “many” who see “Before Abraham was I am” (John 8:58) as providing strong support for Jesus’s claim to divinity.

Barkman demurs. He argues that if Williams’ reading of John 8 were right, then every time Jesus used the expression “I am” there would be a similar response.

However, in the other seven instances of “I am” that Barkman identifies (John 6:35, 8:12, 10:7, 10:11, 11:25, 14:6, 15:1), all of them metaphorical (e.g. “I am the bread that came down from heaven”), none elicits a violent reaction. Barkman concludes, “there is little evidence that Jesus’ use of ‘I am’ statements in John were either intended or understood to claim that he was God” (Reference Barkman and BasshamBarkman 2015b: 206). As for the crowd’s reaction to “Before Abraham was, I am,” he advises,

Note that one could agree with Barkman regarding the evidential status of Jesus’s metaphorical uses of “I am,” but part company with him on the significance of John 8:58 “as the one apparent exception.” So, for example, Gary Manning looks at John 8:58 together with John 6:19–20 and John 18: 6–8 and draws an altogether different conclusion.

• They saw Jesus walking on the sea … and they were frightened. But he said to them,

  “It is I (ἐγώ εἰμι); do not be afraid.”

  (John 6:19–20)

• “Truly, truly I say to you: before Abraham was, I am (ἐγώ εἰμι).”

  (John 8:58)

• Jesus said to [the soldiers], “Whom do you seek?” They answered “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus answered “I am he (ἐγώ εἰμι).” … when Jesus said to them “I am he (ἐγώ εἰμι),” they retreated and fell to the ground … Jesus answered “I told you that I am he (ἐγώ εἰμι).”

  (John 18:6–8)

If Manning is correct, several “I am” statements in John’s gospel were intended and/or understood to be claims to deity. Whether or not this is so, the interpretive issues surrounding Jesus’s use of “I am” show that any credible assessment of Lewis’s trilemma will depend upon very close readings of the relevant texts.

For Further Reading: Those interested in pursuing the historical reliability of the gospels may wish to consult Reference BlombergBlomberg (1987), and for John’s gospel in particular, Reference BlombergBlomberg (2001). On the Gospels as eyewitness testimony, see Reference BauckhamBauckham (2017), and for a contemporary assessment of Lewis’s arguments in “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” in Christian Reflections, see Reference BauckhamBauckham (2013: 152–66). Reference RainbowRainbow (2014: 148–72) provides an overview of pertinent passages concerning the deity of Christ in John’s Gospel; Reference JustJust (2018) surveys the forty-five times Jesus uses the expression “I am” or is quoted as doing so in John’s gospel. On the significance of Jesus’s forgiveness of sins, Davis provides a helpful discussion of Mark 2:1–12 (Reference Davis2009: 39–48). Brazier looks at the place of the trilemma in the history of theology (Reference Brazier2012: 103–26).

5.1 Mere Freedom

In Broadcast Talks and Beyond Personality, two of the three books that became the basis for Mere Christianity, Lewis emphasized the role of free will in coming to faith and continuing in that faith. Except for changing a single contraction, he used the very same wording in Mere Christianity:

As is apparent from the passages above, on this view of freedom, what Miss Bates and Dick Firkin do is up to them; they have the power to accept God and the power to reject Him. Burson and Walls highlight the implications of this:

Such power is incompatible with “antecedent conditions and/or causal laws” determining a person’s choice (Reference PlantingaPlantinga 1977: 29), where determining antecedent conditions includes divine actions. “Will they, or will they not, turn to Him?” is incompatible with Calvinist affirmations of irresistible grace, and “There are people … who are slowly ceasing to be Christians” is at odds with the Calvinist commitment to the perseverance of the saints. It seems, then, that Lewis would have regarded Calvinists, who take these doctrines to be soteriological essentials, to have erred in their understanding. That is, unless Lewis had second thoughts about free choice.

There are passages in Lewis’s subsequent writings that seem to suggest a shift in his perspective. When commenting on his own conversion in an interview toward the end of his life, Lewis appeared to downplay the significance of his choice:

Along with this autobiographical reflection, there are passages in Lewis’s correspondence with Mrs Mary Van Deusen, October 20, 1952 (Reference Lewis and HooperLewis 2007: 237–38), and Mrs Emily McLay, August 3, 1953 (354–55), where he appears to back off from any definite view regarding free will and divine sovereignty:

Lewis’s remarks to Mrs Van Deusen and Mrs McLay are puzzling because he wrote them not long after publishing Mere Christianity (July 7, 1952). “Leave it alone” and talk of inadequate faculties clash with earlier quotations on free will. It is implausible to suppose that when Lewis wrote to Mrs. Van Deusen, he had abandoned the views on free will that he had already published in Broadcast Talks (1942) and Beyond Personality (1944), and just incorporated into Mere Christianity.

Lewis’s responses to Mr Wirt on May 7, Reference Lewis and Hooper1963 (date found in Reference DuriezDuriez 2005: 292) are also puzzling. Lewis’s revision of Miracles came out in 1960, and in it he repeated verbatim what he had written in the original Reference Lewis1947 version of Miracles where he underscored divine surrender:

It would be odd if Lewis abandoned his long-standing view of God “surrendering a portion of omnipotence,” but it is also hard to see how it could fit in with “I was the object rather than the subject of the affair. I was decided upon” (Reference LewisLewis 1979: 261).

Is there a way to reconcile Lewis’s comments to Mrs Van Deusen and Mrs McLay, and his remarks about his conversion with the affirmations of free will in Mere Christianity and in Miracles? Scott R. Burson and Jerry L. Walls provide a plausible perspective:

A letter Lewis wrote to Mr. Beimer on September 7, 1962 (Reference Lewis and Hooper2007: 1356–57) illustrates the distinction Burson and Walls make between the philosophical and the “colloquial and the concrete.” In this late letter – in contrast to the ones written to Mrs. Van Deusen on October 20, 1952, and Mrs. Mclay on August 3, 1953 – Lewis was working in “the more rigorous philosophical realm” and gave a “self–consistent and coherent” argument for free will:

If Burson and Walls’ comments regarding the context of Lewis’s assertions about free will are correct, then Lewis never abandoned his belief in libertarian freedom, the sort of freedom he expressed as an essential aspect of the faith in Mere Christianity.

For Further Reading: Adam Barkman argues that theological differences between Lewis and Calvinists “are not, or do not have to be, as large as Lewis and many Calvinists think” (Reference Barkman2011: 26).

5.2 God, Freedom, and Evil

Christianity presupposes the presence of evil, for the Christian message of forgiveness assumes that God’s moral law has been broken. At the same time Christianity teaches that God is perfectly powerful and good, and those perfections appear to be incompatible with the presence of evil. C.S. Lewis sums up the problem of evil:

The reasoning in Lewis’s summation is valid, an instance of modus tollens: If P then Q, not Q, so not P.

Given the validity of the reasoning, the argument’s success depends upon how its key concepts – perfect power, and perfect goodness and happiness – are understood. If perfect power meant that with God, 1) absolutely nothing is impossible, 2) perfect goodness required providing every rational creature (hereafter creature) with a self-satisfying, contented, pain-free existence, and 3) that perfect happiness called for self-satisfied, contented, pain-free lives all around, then the argument would indeed show that the existence of evil is incompatible with God’s existence. Lewis, however, would have none of that.

Lewis held that if God is all-powerful, then God can do whatever is intrinsically possible, whatever is free of contradiction. God can create unicorns, red barns, and entire worlds, but not two-horned unicorns, colorless red barns, and uncreated worlds, “meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them ‘God can.’” (18).

If God is all-good as well as all-powerful, God can make covenants and protect the innocent. He cannot break covenants or torture the innocent. Those actions, like creating an uncreated world, are contradictory. To see why, it is helpful to consider a Socratic question Lewis knew well. In Plato’s dialogue, The Euthyphro, Socrates asks, “Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?” (Reference Hamilton, Cairns and CooperPlato 1961: 178). Translated into a monotheistic context, we could have something like: “Are these things [moral laws] right because God commands them or does God command them because they are right?” (Reference Lewis and HooperLewis 1967a: 79). If the theist takes God’s commands to be the sole basis of rightness, then the theist is saddled with moral absurdities. God could have made rape and murder right actions, and the commandment “Thou shalt commit adultery,” in the so-called Wicked Bible (Reference McGrathMcGrath 2002: 216), need not have been a misprint. On the other hand, if theists hold that God commands the moral law because it is right, then the moral law would appear to be independent of God, and we would be “compelled to think of Him, making it in conformity with some yet more ultimate pattern of goodness (in which case that pattern, and not He, would be supreme)” (Reference LewisLewis 1967a: 80).

In “The Poison of Subjectivism” Lewis pointed to a third possibility. “But it might be permissible to lay down two negations: that God neither obeys nor creates the moral law… . God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God” (80). If God is by His very nature good, “Good Himself” (Reference LewisLewis 2001d: 159), then God could no more break a promise or torture the innocent than an iron anvil could float. With God, wrong actions are intrinsic impossibilities.

Unlike scourging the guiltless, there is nothing inconsistent about a perfectly good and powerful God creating free rational creatures with the ability to make morally significant choices. However, not even an all-powerful God could make them freely choose to act rightly. “Christianity asserts that God is good; that He made all things good … that one of the good things He made, namely, the free will of rational creatures, by its very nature included the possibility of evil” (63). As indicated in “Mere Freedom” above, Lewis considered genuine freedom to be libertarian freedom and therefore incompatible with divine determinism. So, determining a creaturely free choice is an intrinsic impossibility and therefore outside of God’s power. Creatures free to act rightly are free to act wrongly.

In elaborating the conditions needed for creatures to choose, Lewis issued a caution, “What follows is to be regarded as less an assertion of what they are than a sample of what they might be” (19). Lewis thought a common environment with “a fixed nature of its own” (22) might be necessary. That stability would enable creatures to interact and accommodate morally significant choices. Fire can be used to cook a neighbor’s dinner or burn her house down. God could, on occasion, put out house fires, but constant intervention is not possible in a world where creatures have free will. “[A] world in which God corrected … so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon… . would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void” (24).

The basic choice of every creature is loving God more than the self, or the self more than God. Its proper good “is to surrender itself to its Creator – to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature” (88). Obeying and submitting to God, as befits the creature-Creator relationship leads to fulfillment. Disobeying and rebelling against God, which is contrary to the appropriate creature-Creator relationship, results in frustration. Lewis refers to the decision of “choosing God or self for the centre,” as “the terrible alternative” (70). Terrible because the consequences are so momentous. Each creature faces the prospect of “utter satisfaction” or ruin:

A perfectly good God would want every creature to be completely satisfied and would attempt to prevent any creature’s ruin. And so God does. Piling analogy on analogy, Lewis describes God’s love as “persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for his dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes” (39). For creatures who have not surrendered to their Creator in obedience and submission, “Goodness itself” uses pain as a corrective. It is impossible to ignore and shatters the illusion of self-sufficiency. A rebel forced to recognize that its independence is an impossibility may choose to change its center from self to God. May, but need not: “In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of such defeat” (129).

Returning to the initial objection:

God is indeed good and does wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, utterly satisfied. Creatures have free will and so not even omnipotence can make them freely choose to love God more than self. If they do not, they will not be happy, but they will have chosen their misery. “To be God – to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response – to be miserable – these are the only three alternatives” (47).

For Further Reading: Reference Tallon and BasshamPhilip Tallon (2015) notes that Lewis’s approach to the problem of evil anticipated Alvin Plantinga’s free will defense and John Hick’s soul-making theodicy. Reference Peterson, David, Gary and JerryMichael Peterson (2017) explores how Lewis would respond to the evidential argument from gratuitous evil. Reference RootJerry Root (2009) examines the connection between subjectivism and evil in a variety of Lewis’s writings. Reference DuriezColin Duriez (2015a) considers the battle between good and evil – in the seen and unseen realms – in the writings of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

5.3 Trinity and Incarnation

When N.T. Wright was a College Chaplain and a student said, “I don’t believe in god,” he gave a stock response: “Oh, that’s interesting; which god is it you don’t believe in?” (Reference WrightWright 1998). After the student had given a “spy-in-the-sky” description Wright would reply, “Well, I’m not surprised you don’t believe in that god. I don’t believe in that god either” (Reference WrightWright 1998).

If a student had asked C.S. Lewis, What do you mean by God? C.S. Lewis would have replied, “Love Himself” (Reference Lewis1960b: 11) and noted that “Love is something that one person has for another person” (Reference Lewis2001b: 174). And as a “mere Christian” who affirmed the doctrine of the Trinity, he might well have been sympathetic to Richard Swinburne’s argument that a loving God requires at least three persons.

As one cube contains six squares, so God is “a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being” (Reference LewisLewis 2001b: 162). In explaining the relationship between the first two persons, Lewis borrowed a distinction from the Nicene Creed, “begotten, not made.”

As the first person of the Trinity begets the second, we refer to them as “God the Father” and “God the Son.” What is unique about this begetting is that there is no temporal sequence, “there never was a time before the Father produced the Son” (173). After attempting to convey the difficult notion of nontemporal begetting, Lewis noted that “the most important thing to know is that it [the Father-Son relation] is “a relation of love” (174). The third person of the Trinity comes from this relation: “What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God” (175).

God’s existence as three loving persons squares well with the standard theistic belief that God had no need to create. Brian Hebblethwaite comments:

God freely and graciously chose to create and – when His creatures freely and ungratefully rebelled – God met ingratitude with graciousness. God the Son humbled Himself, taking on the form of a servant (Phil 2:5–7). It was as if a playwright became one of the actors.

The Incarnate Son of God is fully human and fully divine:

Determining what it means to be fully human requires distinguishing between common human properties and essential ones:

To be fully human is to possess all essential human properties, and for Lewis, that included the possibility of a mistaken belief.

Reflecting on Mark 13:30, Lewis referred to Jesus’s remark, “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” as “certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible” (Reference LewisLewis 2017: 98). Embarrassing, for as Lewis read Mark chapter 13, “these things” included Jesus’s return:

That Jesus confessed ignorance is – given the reliability of the gospel account – indisputable. That Jesus’s claim about “this generation” is false is another matter. Though Lewis did not mention it, Jesus followed that claim with a remarkable assertion about the weightiness of his words: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Mark 13:31 ESV). If Lewis’s reading is correct, this verse adds to the embarrassment, calling into question the general reliability of Jesus’s teachings. Whether or not God Incarnate could have made a false theological claim is not a matter to explore, much less settle here. By itself, Mark 13:31 suggests that Jesus would not have thought so. For now, perhaps it will be enough to show that on the reading of one preeminent New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright, there is nothing to be embarrassed about.

Wright makes four fundamental points: First, Mark 13 is about the fall of the Jerusalem temple (Reference WrightWright 2001: 178). Next, in this context, talk of Jesus’s return would be a category mistake:

Further, if Jesus had been talking about a literal end of the space-time world, He would not have counseled His disciples to flee: “Had it been the end of the world, what would have been the point of running away so frantically?” (Reference Wright2001: 183). Finally, it is essential to note that Jesus’s words, “they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory” (Mark 13: 26), are an allusion to Daniel 7, and there the topic is the Son of Man’s return to the Ancient of Days, not His descent from the heavens.

Daniel 7 conceives the scene from the perspective of heaven, not earth. The “son of man” figure “comes” to the Ancient of Days. He comes from earth to heaven (Reference Wright1996: 361).

Pace Lewis, Jesus did not claim in Mark 13 that he would return within a generation. So then, even if Lewis were right to think that making false claims is compatible with being fully human and fully divine, at least on N.T. Wright’s reading, Mark 13 is not the place to make that case.

Mere Christians may differ as to what they believe constitutes full humanity and divinity. However, they should agree that becoming human was not simply a passing phase in the life of God the Son:

For Further Reading: Favorite readings of Lewis include Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word (Reference Athanasius and Lawson1946) and Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Man Born to be King (Reference Sayers1943), which Lewis read every year during Holy Week since its publication (Reference Lewis and HooperLewis 1982: 93). For more information on the Augustinian background of C.S. Lewis’s account of the Trinity, see Reference RossRoss (2012).

5.4 The Central Christian Belief/Atonement

Among the beliefs that make up “mere Christianity” one stands out: “The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start” (Reference LewisLewis 2001b: 54). Lewis stated that before he became a Christian he thought that he needed to affirm one particular theory about this belief which he summed up – some would say caricatured (Reference RigneyRigney 2018: 60) – as follows: “God wanted to punish men for having deserted and joined the Great Rebel, but Christ volunteered to be punished instead, and God let us off” (Reference LewisLewis 2001b: 53). Though Lewis did not name the theory, he had in mind penal substitutionary atonement. He dismissed it as implausible, “immoral,” and “silly” (54).

In contrast to penal substitutionary atonement, Lewis mentioned his own theory. On that account, God the Son Incarnate also plays a substitutionary role, but that role is not one of punishment but repentance, “willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death” (57):

Despite the stark contrast between the two substitutionary theories, in one sense Lewis considered them on equal footing; neither one is an essential component of “mere Christianity.” And of his own view, Lewis wrote, “Do not mistake it for the thing itself; and if it does not help you, drop it” (59).

What is essential to “mere Christianity” is what Christ accomplished:

Since all the formulas come from the Bible, it is odd to find Lewis telling his readers to drop what doesn’t appeal to them. It would make sense though, if the readers Lewis had in mind were non-Christians. In that case his advice would be, Don’t put off becoming a Christian because you do not understand or cannot relate to one of the metaphors the Bible uses to describe Christ’s work, and would be of a piece with his counsel to avoid letting a theory about how the atonement works become a stumbling block.

That Lewis had non-Christians in mind in the above passage becomes clear from Lewis’s imaginary correspondence between two believers, Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer. There the advice is neither to drop what does not appeal, nor to replace biblical images with one’s own:

Lewis made it clear in a letter to Mr. Young that settling on a single biblical image would be a mistake:

And in his portrayal of Aslan’s death Lewis avoided that error:

For Further Reading: Reference AndersonAnderson (2016/17) presents Lewis’s rejection of penal substitutionary atonement as “A Problem Case for New Calvinist Theology.” Reference RigneyRigney (2018: 59–67) critiques Lewis’s dismissal of penal substitution. Reference TaliaferroTaliaferro (2022) surveys the atonement theme in The Chronicles of Narnia, defends a Christus Victor Ransom theory, and shows how that theory complements classic and contemporary atonement theories. Reference Johnson and BruceAdam J. Johnson (2022) turns to Lewis’s Ransom trilogy to consider “the cosmological implications of the Christus Victor theory.”

6.1 Faith

C.S. Lewis’s second novel in the Ransom Trilogy, Perelandra, begins with the narrator – call him Clive – recounting a walk from a train station to his friend Elwin Ransom’s cottage. As Clive approached Ransom’s home, his emotions and imagination began to take hold of him. He felt that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and imagined that Ransom had either been duped by, or was in league with, malevolent supernatural creatures. His reason, however, told him something different: “The reader, not knowing Ransom, will not understand how contrary to all reason this idea [emphasis added] was. The rational part of my mind, even at the very moment, knew perfectly well that even if the whole universe was hostile, Ransom was sane and wholesome and honest” (1965b: 13). Clive followed his reason over and against his emotions and imagination, continuing to believe that Ransom was trustworthy, and completed his journey to Ransom’s cottage. In C.S. Lewis’s terminology, Clive exercised faith: “Now Faith, in the sense in which I am using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods” (Reference Lewis2001b: 140).

This kind of faith, call it belief-that faith, is concerned with propositions. There is nothing inherently Christian about it. Without it “you can never be either a sound Christian or a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion” (141).

Lewis contrasted belief-that faith with a higher faith, call it belief-in faith or trust. Here, the object of faith is not a proposition but a person, the person of Christ. This faith arises out of crisis. When one has tried one’s hardest to practice Christianity, repeatedly failed, and recognized one’s utter inadequacy, the stage is set for unqualified trust in God the Son:

When one moves from belief-that to belief-in, one shifts from “the logic of speculative thought” to “the logic of personal relations” (Reference LewisLewis 2017: 30). In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, one of The Chronicles of Narnia, Lucy, the youngest of four siblings, is adamant about having visited another world, “I don’t care what you think or what you say… I know I’ve met a Faun in there” (Reference Lewis2000a: 46). Her older siblings, Peter and Susan, assume that she is mistaken. When they share that assumption with their host Professor Kirk, they are surprised by his response. He says, regarding the falseness of Lucy’s claims, “That is more than I know … and a charge against someone you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed” (48). Were Peter and Susan to consider claims about the existence of Fauns – in a purely theoretical sense – they might think evidence for them is lacking. If it turned out that they were wrong, their mistake would have been about the truth value of a statement, “Fauns exist.” Were they to consider claims about the existence of Fauns – in light of their sister’s testimony – and reach the same conclusion, their mistake would have been about the honesty and/or sanity of their sister, “a very serious thing indeed.” If Peter and Susan had very strong evidence for Lucy’s reliability, it might well have been appropriate for them to accept her otherwise astounding claim.

The distinction between the logic of speculative thought, and the logic of personal relations, takes on immeasurably more importance when the relation is between a Christian and God. Lewis supposed that if one believed the central claims of the Christian worldview, one would do so only after evaluating the evidence for them. Among the claims that comprise the Christian worldview are: God is infinitely wiser and more benevolent than any Christian, and the Christian’s trust in God will be tested. Assuming that one affirmed the Christian worldview on the basis of good evidence one would be justified in continuing to trust in the face of contrary evidence, for “the content of our original belief by logical necessity entails the proposition that such behaviour is appropriate” (Reference LewisLewis 2017: 24). Failure to trust Christ once the shift has been made from the logic of speculative thought to the logic of personal relations, is not a theoretical error but a failure to love, for “To love involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence, even against the evidence” (252–56).

For further reading: On the question, Did C.S. Lewis lose his faith?, see (Reference BeversluisBeversluis 2007: 303–11) and (Reference PurtillPurtill 2006: 227–52).

6.2 Prayer

Nine-year-old Jack Lewis prayed for his mother’s healing from cancer. She died. Looking back, the adult Lewis offered these reflections on this episode:

In A Grief Observed, where Lewis shared his anguish over another death to cancer and another case of unanswered prayer, he exclaimed, “Not my idea of God, but God” (Reference Lewis2001a: 67) and referred to God as “the great iconoclast” (66). In his final work Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer, Lewis wrote that “The prayer preceding all prayers is ‘May it be the real I that speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to’” (Reference Lewis1964: 82).

At the center of prayer is the relationship between creature and creator:

Though petition may only be a small part of prayer, there is no license to overlook it, as it is an essential feature of The Lord’s Prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread.” As a child, Lewis had been taught “that prayers offered in faith would be granted” (Reference Lewis1955b: 20). As an adult, Lewis reflected on those teachings. In “Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer,” Lewis contrasted “A Pattern prayers,” conditional prayers: “Thy will be done” (1967a:143), with “B Pattern prayers,” requiring “faith that the particular thing the petitioner asks will be given him” (144). Together they demanded of the petitioner an untenable frame of mind: “How is it possible to say, simultaneously, ‘I firmly believe that Thou wilt give me this,’ and, ‘If Thou shalt deny me it, Thy will be done’? How can one mental act both exclude possible refusal and consider it?” (Reference Lewis and Hooper2007: 281).

Unable to solve the theoretical conundrum, Lewis arrived at a practical solution. The prayers of unwavering faith are for “very advanced pupils” (Reference Lewis1964: 60). As Lewis did not count himself in that class, he had no need to worry about a conflict between unwavering and conditional prayers. Further, if he had ever been able to pray with unwavering faith, it would have been clear that it was God’s will that he do so, ruling out any conflict with the conditional form of prayer.

Lewis believed one kind of petitionary prayer to be outside of God’s will. In a chapter on “cursings” in Reflections on the Psalms, he referred to imprecatory prayers as “devilish” (Reference Lewis1986b: 20), “diabolical,” and “hideously distorted by the human instrument” (32), and cited Psalm 109 as an example:

Though Lewis considered these curses to be morally repugnant, he found some spiritual value in them. They can be an occasion for addressing our own resentments and reflecting on the consequences that can come from harming others (Reference Lewis1986b: 23–24).

Lewis did well to address curses in the psalms, “Where we find a difficulty we may always expect that a discovery awaits us” (28). But he did not go nearly far enough. Elizabeth Anscombe noted that in rejecting some passages, Lewis overlooked their presence in the New Testament:

In a similar vein, one might mention Peter’s appeal in Acts 1:20 to two of the psalms Lewis found problematic: 69 and 109.

Far removed from imprecations are the Psalms’ expressions of adoration. At one time Lewis found admonitions to praise God problematic; he could not grasp “this perpetual eulogy” (Reference LewisLewis 1986b: 91). Demands to praise recalled insecure people seeking reassurance and toadies applauding dictators (90). He changed his mind when he realized that failure to admire, say, a beautiful painting would reveal our inadequacies. Admiration may be the appropriate response to a painting, and “if we do not admire we shall be stupid, insensible, and great losers” (92). But then, all the more so with God: “He is that Object to admire which … is simply to be awake, to have entered the real world; not to appreciate which is to have lost the greatest experience, and in the end to have lost all” (92). If a creature were able to fully delight in God, and give his delight perfect expression, the creature would be “in supreme beatitude” (96).

For Further Reading: Reference Houston, Michael and AndrewJames M. Houston (1989) describes six traits of Lewis’s prayer life. Reference Williams and BruceDonald T. Williams (2007) introduces, summarizes, and analyzes Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms. Charles Taliaferro’s devotional work enables the reader to pray “in the way that Lewis did about issues and themes that were central to his experience” (Reference Taliaferro1998: 8).

6.3 Theosis / The Weight of Glory

On June 8, 1941, C.S. Lewis preached “The Weight of Glory” in the twelfth century Oxford University Church of St. Mary the Virgin. Walter Hooper described it as “so magnificent” as to be “worthy of a place with some of the Church Fathers” (Reference LewisLewis 1980: xxi). In The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, Marvin Hinton’s final words were “A masterpiece” (Reference Hinton, Schultz and West1998: 423). At the end of his sermon, Lewis contrasted corruption with deification:

This language was not hyperbole for the pulpit. Similar phrases appear throughout Lewis’s writings: “He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess” (Reference Lewis2001b: 205–6); “the Divine Life … calls us to be gods” (Reference Lewis1970: 112); “We shall be true and everlasting divine persons only in Heaven” (Reference Lewis1980: 119); “when we shall be those gods that we are described as being in Scripture” (Psalm 82:6; John 10:34–36; Reference LewisLewis 1970: 87); “Now get on with it. Become a god” (Reference LewisLewis 2001a: 72).

Athanasius wrote in On the Incarnation, “He [God the Son], indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God” (Reference Athanasius and Lawson1946: 86). Christopher Armstrong reflects on the significance of this work for Lewis:

Lewis’s view on the purpose of the incarnation, “The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God” (Reference Lewis2001b: 178), was in line with the views of Athanasius and Eastern Christianity:

Note that conceptual agreement does not necessitate identical vocabulary:

Nor does agreement require acquaintance with the same source materials. Dom Bede Griffins notes that “Lewis showed very little interest in the Fathers of the Church” (Reference Griffiths, James and RememberingGriffiths 2005: 89–90). Where Lewis “reached conclusions Eastern Christians could wholeheartedly endorse” he did so “starting from Western premises” (Reference Ware and MillsWare 1998: 55).

Ralph C. Wood notes the distinction between “image” and “likeness” in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and Chris Jensen comments on its soteriological significance:

Francis J. Caponi, O.S.A. and Ralph Wood compare Lewis’s distinction between “nearness by likeness” and “nearness by approach” (Reference LewisLewis 1960b: 15) with the Orthodox distinction between “image” and “likeness” (Reference CaponiCaponi 2010: 69; Reference WoodWood 2014). In The Four Loves, Lewis’s nearness by likeness corresponds to the Orthodox understanding of image, and nearness by approach to the Orthodox view of likeness:

All who approach God, do so only because God has first approached them. “When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him” (Reference Lewis2001b: 164).

While God takes the initiative, He awaits the creature’s permission:

We see a picture of this kind of permission in The Great Divorce. There a ghost, on a day trip from Hell to Heaven, bothered and beleaguered by a reptile representing lust, is approached by an angel who offers to kill the creature. The angel knows that the ghost will have no peace while the reptile lives. The angel also knows that deliverance depends upon the ghost’s free choice: “I cannot kill it against your will. It is impossible. Have I your permission?” (Reference Lewis1946: 100). In response to the ghost’s trepidation, “How can I tell you to kill it? You’d kill me if you did,” the angel answers, “It is not so,” and then adds, “I never said it wouldn’t hurt you. I said it wouldn’t kill you” (100).

When a creature freely gives up its natural life, its self-centeredness (Reference Lewis2001b: 178), and draws near to Christ, it begins to receive “the good infection” or “Zoe” (176, 177, 181, 221). “He [Christ] came into the created universe, of His own will, bringing with him the Zoe, the new life… . Everyone who gets it gets it by personal contact with Him” (221). Contact comes through baptism, belief, and Holy Communion (61), prayer (161–62, 176, 187–8), other Christians (165, 190); “dressing up as Christ” or “good pretending” (187–8). The transformation from a mere creature to a son of God (220), which Lewis compared to “turning a tin soldier into a real little man” (179) and “turning a horse into a winged creature” (116), is not accomplished in this lifetime (204, 207). It cannot be, for physical death is required for the transformation (207). Beyond that, in his last work Letters to Malcolm, a fictional correspondence, the Lewis character wrote “I believe in Purgatory… . Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they?” (Reference Lewis1964: 108).

The transformed creature will be “a little Christ” (Reference Lewis2001b: 177, 192, 199, 225), a son of God (181), but never a Son of God: “All Christians are agreed that there is, in the full and original sense, only one ‘Son of God’” (183). “What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is” (157–58). Becoming a son of God is not the end of individuality but its true beginning, “It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own” (226). Each son of God, each little Christ, “shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the Divine beauty better than any other creature can” (Reference Lewis2001d: 154). Even so, there could never be enough “little Christs” to adequately express the grandeur of God: “There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs,’ all different, will still be too few to express Him fully” (Reference Lewis2001b: 225).

For Further Reading: David Merconi argues that “the unifying lens through which every page of Mere Christianity is best read, is the divination of the human person in Christ” (Reference MerconiMerconi 2017: 3). Myk Habets applies “the concept of ‘Transposition’ to Lewis’s doctrine of theosis” to allow “an investigation into possible ways in which the discussion of theosis may be extended” (Reference Habets2010). On the place of theosis in the Anglican tradition, see Reference AllchinAllchin (1988). Reference HumphreyHumphrey (2017) provides an Orthodox perspective on Lewis’s theology. Wayne Reference MartindaleMartindale (2005) finds in Lewis’s fiction corrections of caricatures of heaven and hell. Jerry L. Reference WallsWalls (2012: 153–176) discusses Lewis’s view of purgatory. In his work, The Lion’s Country, Charlie W. Starr includes in chapter 10, “Lewis’s Vision of Heaven,” a hitherto unpublished excerpt from “Lewis’s Prayer Manuscript” (Reference StarrStarr 2022: 113–160).