C.S. Lewis: Brilliant or Cringe?

And an announcement

First off, apologies that there is no podcast episode this week. My goal is to put out one per week, and this week’s  was intended to be a solo episode, a sort of audio/video essay on the disenchantment and re-enchantment. As I began to research the points that I wanted to make, it became clear to me that this topic was going to take quite a bit longer to write than I had intended, and will probably stretch to 2 episodes. 

The primary detour my research took me on was to the work of C.S. Lewis. While he’s mostly remembered today as  the author of The Chronicles of Narnia and his defense and explication of Christianity for a popular audience, his profession was that of a scholar of English Literature, specializing in the Medieval and Renaissance periods— precisely the time periods that warrant further exploration on this topic of disenchantment. Prompted by a footnote in a Wikipedia article, I dove into some of his literary criticism and found myself as enthralled and delighted as I did when I was an eight year old reading The Silver Chair.

This was punctuated by reading an account of a recent (and predictably stupid) Twitter/X debate over Lewis. In one corner was a podcaster of the staunchly Christian anti-woke sort asserting that “C.S. Lewis gives you permission to fight the culture wars.” In the other was a self-identified “C.S. Lewis scholar” claiming him for the side of progressive identitarian politics.

Anyone who has read even one of his books touching on social mores would have a hard time believing he’d be down with the current fashion for ever-metastasizing identities. Lewis tended to lean toward affirming conservative sexual and social ideals, even if he didn’t always hew to them himself. At the same time, he exhibited a great deal of compassion and nuance in considering the controversial issues of his own day, like divorce and homosexuality, and despite his impassioned defense of Christian faith, it’s hard to see him as a culture warrior. For Lewis, debate was a convivial affair, an opportunity to refine his own thinking, and he tended to show a great deal of grace and respect toward those with whom he disagreed.

I’ve always enjoyed Lewis as writer, in his fiction and nonfiction; it is undoubtedly this sheer pleasurability that’s made him such a perennial bestseller.  Whether it’s a fantastical land full of talking beasts, the richly layered imaginal of the Medieval cosmos, or the diabolical machinations of an underworld bureaucracy,  he has a way painting worlds that draw you in and invite you to get lost while stimulating deeper reflection on one’s own reality. He’s also a keen observer of human character with a sometimes puncturing wit, as in the observation of The Screwtape Letters’ titular demon: “She's the sort of woman who lives for others— you can tell the others by their hunted expression.” Ouch.

Despite this, it’s been decades since I’ve picked up anything by Lewis. When a discussion on his sci-fi Space Trilogy broke out in The Unfolding subscribers group, I asked myself why that was. Why haven’t I read Out of the Silent Planet or The Great Divorce since I was a (very) young adult? I think the answer is, though I don’t think he entirely deserves it, that Lewis’s work became very wrapped up in the baggage of my evangelical youth. 

Evangelicals adore C.S. Lewis with a devotion bordering on the idolatrous. If you have ever attended any sort of church that prioritized the notion of spreading the gospel and making converts (as opposed to living the gospel in lifestyle and works of charity), you have likely heard some earnest proselytizer regurgitating Lewis’ famous “trilemma”: 

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

I have never found this argument to be terribly convincing. One can be sincerely deluded and still exhibit something of the holy. Russian literature has a famous archetype predicated on this notion, that of the “Holy Fool,” a simple-minded and pitiable character whose madness— possibly feigned and possibly real— permits them to perceive and speak divine truth in a sometimes shocking or paradoxical way. At the same time, many modern biblical scholars doubt that Jesus ever claimed to be God, judging by the synoptic gospels. Despite this, evangelical apologists— most notably Josh McDowell in the 80’s and Lee Strobel in the 90’s— have continued to trot out Lewis’s dubious “gotcha” with all the panache of flop-sweated salesmen assuring you that their concoction has been verified by a gen-yoo-wine Oxbridge in-teh-leck-shoo-ull. 

It’s this last bit, more than anything, that explains the deep love of American Protestants for Lewis. Throughout their history, Evangelicals have been characterized by a reactionary anti-elitist populism that steadfastly refuses to engage with not only the intellectual currents of the day, but often any thought that developed post-nineteenth century.  Christian historian Mark Noll, elucidating the anti-intellectual strain in American religion, scathingly wrote, “The scandal of the evangelical mind… is that there is none.”¹  C.S Lewis consequently becomes a potent talisman in the evangelical’s quest to prove otherwise. 

Never mind that Lewis’s attempts at proving the rationality of Christian faith are the least compelling aspects of his work. In 1948 he debated philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe at a meeting of the Socratic Club at Oxford. Anscombe took aim at Lewis’s attack, laid out in the third chapter of Miracles, on what he called Naturalism (as opposed to Supernaturalism), not because she fundamentally disagreed with his aim— she herself was a devout Catholic convert— but because she thought it was poorly argued. By many accounts, the debate left Lewis seriously rattled. He would later acknowledge Anscombe as a “superior intellect,” and his theological work took a turn more toward the pastoral and personal. When Miracles was reissued in 1960, it was with a re-written third chapter.

It’s Lewis’s insights on the difficulties and consolations of actually living a life of faith— or really any life— that I suspect people find far more rewarding. In The Problem of Pain he offers a precise account of the unfulfilled longing we all carry deep inside of us:

“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of— something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it— tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest— if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself— you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for.”

That’s a passage that anyone can recognize themselves in. And in A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife, Lewis provides a far more compelling defense of faith than any pseudo-rationalist trilemma: 

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?”

We don’t come to faith because it’s rational, though rationalist considerations may help to remove the barriers that keep us away. We come because at some point we have reached the end of our own rope, and faith is the only thing left to hold on to. Or, better yet, we come because we’ve nothing left to cling to, and in the falling we find ourselves met by love. C.S. Lewis, for all his faults, knew something of the love and joy that one finds after the fall, and it’s that knowledge that shines through most clearly in his works.

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Having finished our book club on Recovery: The Sacred Art, the participants have chosen Out of the Silent Planet for our next book. We’ll be reading it over the month of February, and while I won’t be blogging about it here (unless I feel like it) we will be discussing it in the private subscriber’s group and in a live Zoom call at the end of the month. 

We’ve been developing some pretty rich and nourishing relationships in our interactions so far, and it you’d like to join, it’s only $7/month of $70 a year. That will get you access to all bonus podcast content, the private group, and any Zoom calls or other events we have. Right now I’m planning two for next month— one on the topic of disenchantment and re-enchantment through an interspiritually-oriented Christian lens, and the other for the book club.

1. In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, published in 1994. Noll has a new book out called… C.S. Lewis in America. I haven’t read that one yet.