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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Great Minds
- Sprache: Englisch
The definitive exploration of C.S. Lewis's philosophical thought, and its connection with his theological and literary work Arguably one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis is widely hailed as a literary giant, his seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia having sold over 65 million copies in print worldwide. A prolific author and scholar whose intellectual contributions transcend the realm of children's fantasy literature, Lewis is commonly read and studied as a significant theological figure in his own right. What is often overlooked is that Lewis first loved and was academically trained in philosophy. In this newest addition to the Blackwell Great Minds series, well-known philosopher and Lewis authority Stewart Goetz discusses Lewis's philosophical thought and illustrates how it informs his theological and literary work. Drawing from Lewis's published writing and private correspondence, including unpublished materials, C.S. Lewis is the first book to develop a cohesive and holistic understanding of Lewis as a philosopher. In this groundbreaking project, Goetz explores how Lewis's views on topics of lasting interest such as happiness, morality, the soul, human freedom, reason, and imagination shape his understanding of myth and his use of it in his own stories, establishing new connections between Lewis's philosophical convictions and his wider body of published work. Written in a scholarly yet accessible style, this short, engaging book makes a significant contribution to Lewis scholarship while remaining suitable for readers who have only read his stories, offering new insight into the intellectual life of this figure of enduring popular interest.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
acknowledgments
introduction
chapter 1: a philosophical mind
1.1 A Brief Biography
1.2 Lewis as a Philosopher
1.3 Lewis and Common Sense
1.4 Reading Lewis
1.5 What Is to Come
chapter 2: the thinking, reasoning, and sensing soul
2.1 The
Aboutness
of Thought
2.2 Reasoning and the Falsity of Naturalism
2.3 A Possible Quibble
2.4 Caveat: Bulverism
2.5 First‐ and Third‐Person Points of View
2.6 The Soul
2.7 Thought, Image, and the Immaterial
2.8 Pleasurable Reason
chapter 3: the meaning of life
3.1 Setting the Stage
3.2 The Purpose of Life
3.3 What Makes Life Worth Living
3.4 Pain, Pleasure, and Happiness
3.5 An Alternative Rejected
3.6 Space, Time, and Meaning
3.7 Another Alternative Rejected
3.8 Joy or
Sehnsucht
3.9 Things Making Sense
chapter 4: morality
4.1 More than Morality
4.2 Morality, Pleasure, and Happiness
4.3 Pride
4.4 Moral Value and Purpose for Acting
4.5 Euthyphro’s Dilemma
4.6 Natural Law
4.7 Heaven without Morality
4.8 Naturalism and Morality
4.9 Naturalism and Making Sense of Things
4.10 Naturalism, Science, and Certitude
chapter 5: free choice and miracles
5.1 Lewis the Supernaturalist
5.2 Choice
5.3 The Nature of Freedom
5.4 The “Iffyness” of Nature
5.5 Arguments against Mental‐to‐Physical Causation
5.6 The Relevance of the Subnatural
5.7 Lewis as a Causal Interactionist
5.8 “Miracles” and Miracles
chapter 6: the grand miracle, death to self, and myth
6.1 Incarnation
6.2 The Seed Must Die
6.3 The Paradox of Hedonism
6.4 Pleasure and Passion
6.5 Myth
chapter 7: belief in god
7.1 Reason and Religion
7.2 Supernaturalism versus Theistic Supernaturalism
7.3 From Self to God
7.4 Further Considerations
7.5 The Argument from Desire
chapter 8: the problem of evil
8.1 Statement of the Problem
8.2 Human Beings and Evil
8.3 The Irrelevance of Possible Worlds
8.4 Lewis’s View of the Fall
8.5 Imaginative Metaphysics and Evolution
8.6 Evil before the Existence of Human Beings
8.7 Evil and Beasts
8.8 Hell
chapter 9: an enduring mind
bibliography
index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 05
Table 5.1
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Blackwell Great Minds
Edited by Steven Nadler
The Blackwell Great Minds series gives readers a strong sense of the fundamental views of the great western thinkers and captures the relevance of these figures to the way we think and live today.
Kant
by Allen W. Wood
Augustine
by Gareth B. Matthews
Descartes
by André Gombay
Sartre
by Katherine J. Morris
Charles Darwin
by Michael Ruse
Schopenhauer
by Robert Wicks
Shakespeare’s Ideas
by David Bevington
Camus
by David Sherman
Kierkegaard
by M. Jamie Ferreira
Mill
by Wendy Donner and Richard Fumerton
Socrates
by George H. Rudebusch
Maimonides
by T.M. Rudavsky
Wittgenstein
by Hans Sluga
Locke
by Samuel Rickless
Newton
by Andrew Janiak
C. S. Lewis
by Stewart Goetz
blackwell great minds
c. s. lewis
Stewart Goetz
This edition first published 2018© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goetz, Stewart, author.Title: C.S. Lewis / by Stewart Goetz, Ursinus College, US.Description: First Edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2018. | Series: Blackwell great minds ; 16 | Includes bibliographical references and index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2017037694 (print) | LCCN 2017042737 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119190066 (paper) | ISBN 9781119190271 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119190172 (cloth)Subjects: LCSH: Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898–1963.Classification: LCC BX4827.L44 (ebook) | LCC BX4827.L44 G64 2017 (print) | DDC 230.092–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037694
Cover image: Photo by Arthur P. Strong © Ingrid Franzon.Cover design by Wiley
To David Charles,Friend and Mentor,Who first taught me the importance of philosophy of mind for philosophy of religion
acknowledgments
I am indebted to numerous people who helped bring this book to completion. Patrick Casey, Timothy Mawson, and Jerry Walls read and commented on the manuscript in its entirety. Patrick and Jerry “know Lewis,” and kept driving me back to reread this or that. Tim helped me clarify various points where Lewis’s work intersects with the contemporary philosophical scene. The criticisms and suggestions of all of them reminded me time and again of how important it is to have others read one’s work with a critical eye.
Some of the materials needed to write this book are unpublished, and Laura Schmidt of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College helped me locate what I could not find on my own. I am deeply indebted to her.
Anandan Bommen, Manish Luthra, and Susan Dunsmore each helped with the preparation of the manuscript, and Emily Corkhill and Marissa Koors wisely oversaw its production. Because of them, it is an absolute delight and privilege to publish with Wiley‐Blackwell. I am deeply grateful to my wife, Carolyn, who carefully proofread the manuscript.
Finally, I thank Deirdre Ilkson, who approached me about writing this book and commissioned it.
introduction
The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. After that has been discovered, the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about the cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing is to understand the object before you: as long as you think the corkscrew was meant for opening tins or the cathedral for entertaining tourists you can say nothing to the purpose about them. The first thing the reader needs to know about Paradise Lost is what Milton meant it to be.
(Lewis 1942, 1)
C. S. Lewis distinguished between two kinds of readers, what he termed “the majority” and “the minority.” Members of the majority do not put much value on reading, do not think much about and are largely unaffected by what they do read, and never read anything a second time. Members of the minority are contrary in every way. They are constantly looking for periods of leisure and silence in which to read without distraction. For them, reading a certain work is an experience so momentous that the only standard of comparison is provided by experiences of love, religion, or bereavement, and, as a result, what they read is constantly and prominently before their minds. Minority readers will not infrequently read the same book ten, twenty, or thirty times over the course of their lives (Lewis 1961a, 2–3).
Lewis not only wrote about minority readers but was one himself, and what he wrote was read by other minority readers. For example, Sister Penelope of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin penned the following in a letter to Lewis in 1940 about his book The Problem of Pain:
I expected to enjoy myself reading it, & I have done so even beyond my hope. It made me bolt my dinner to get more time for it … & now that I have finished it, reading every word, & a good many bits twice over, I am longing to read it again. That, I think, is a peculiar quality of your writing: I am aching to re‐read both Pilgrim’s Regress & Out of the Silent Planet, tho’ I have already read the latter twice, once aloud; but this book outstrips even those …
(Lewis 2004b, 449–50)
Sister Penelope’s letter made clear that she was a minority kind of reader. For a time, however, the number of readers of Lewis’s books, whether minority or majority, was in decline. In 1957, Jocelyn Gibb, the managing director of Geoffrey Bles Ltd., which originally published many of Lewis’s less scholarly books, wrote to Lewis about the declining readership of his works: “Sales are not too happy at the moment … Your older books are falling off in sales which I suppose is bound to happen after some of them have been out for such a long time” (Lewis 2007, 869). But Gibb could not have been more wrong about what was bound to happen. In a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, George Marsden, a historian of American Christianity, writes that, since 2001, Lewis’s book Mere Christianity has sold more than 3.5 million copies in English and been translated into at least 36 languages (Marsden 2016b). Marsden adds that Mere Christianity is the book that educated Chinese Christians are most likely to have read after the Bible. And the British philosopher Anthony Kenny points out that by the end of the last century Lewis had become a cultural icon and patron saint of the evangelical wing of American Christianity (Kenny 2013).
Though I am a professional philosopher (I teach philosophy as a subject at the university level) and a lover of books, I was for much of my life a majority reader when it came to the works of C. S. Lewis. I had read a few of them in part, and even fewer in whole. And most certainly, I had not reread them. However, as Lewis wrote, “[t]he two sorts of readers are not cut off by immovable barriers. Individuals who once belonged to the many are converted and join the few” (Lewis 1961a, 6). About a decade ago, I crossed over from the majority into the minority readership of Lewis, having devoured several of his works in a short period of time. Like Sister Penelope, I enjoyed them in a way that I could not have imagined. While the books by Lewis I was reading were not written for a professional philosophical audience, what particularly intrigued me about them was that they were obviously authored by a philosophical mind. It was as a philosopher that I began to buy, read, and, yes, reread, anything and everything written by Lewis.
As a minority reader of Lewis, it did not take me long to discover that there was a significant body of secondary literature about him and his thought. “Having read [my] way so far into his mind … ” (Lewis 1954, 414), I found one thing in particular about this secondary body of work very perplexing: while it had been the philosophical character of Lewis’s thought that had initially impressed me, very few of those writing about Lewis and his work recognized and discussed him in terms of the philosopher that he was. Most seemed intent on disregarding or were simply unaware of what Lewis himself had stressed, which was that he had “had a philosophical … education” (Lewis 2001c, 20). Indeed, Warren Lewis, his brother and only sibling, wrote that “the study of philosophy was to him as inevitable as death will be” (W. Lewis 1982, 161).
Given the prevailing failure to acknowledge Lewis as the philosopher that he was, I have written this book for the purpose of giving him the philosophical attention he deserves. At many points, I have been tempted to interject my own views of matters that Lewis addressed. Dorothy L. Sayers, who was a contemporary of Lewis and an influential literary figure in her own right, understood this temptation all too well and wrote the following to him in 1948:
There is to‐day far too little straightforward interpretive criticism. Everybody insists on doing “creative” criticism—which means that the critic simply uses his author as a spring‐board from which to leap off into an exposition of his own views about the universe … [W]e need the pure interpreter, who will sit down before a poem, or whatever it is, with humility to it and charity to the reader, and begin by finding out and explaining what the author actually did say, before he starts to explain what the author ought to have said and would have said if he had been as enlightened a person as his critic. A friend of mine, after toiling through several unintelligible books about modern poetry, said plaintively: “I want a critic who will say: ‘This is a poem about a bus; this is what the poem says about the bus; this is the conclusion the writer draws from his observation about the bus; I think he has said it well (beautifully, badly, etc.) for the following reason.’ After that he can say what he likes, and I shall know where I am.”
(Lewis 2004b, 885)
Although Lewis was a first‐rate critic in his own right and not shy about expressing his own views, he wrote in response to Sayers that “I am absolutely with you about criticism: or, should I say, absolutely with you in feeling that we have far too much criticism and far too little commentary” (Lewis 2004b, 886). So with the observations of Sayers and Lewis’s answer to them as my guide, I have for the most part resisted temptation and authored a straightforward descriptive account of Lewis’s philosophical views. I hope I am justified in thinking that what I have written has a bit more life to it than “this is a poem about a bus; this is what the poem says about the bus … ” My thinking this is in part explained by the fact that I often quote Lewis in the course of the exposition of his views. Whatever one might think about the quality of Lewis’s philosophical thought, no one can reasonably deny that he was a gifted writer of prose. As Owen Barfield, one of Lewis’s closest friends from their undergraduate days together at Oxford, remarked, years after his friend’s death, just about everything Lewis wrote was “so easy to read, because so simply and lucidly written … ” (1989, 11). Interestingly, Barfield went on to explain this quality of his friend’s written work in terms of the role Lewis’s philosophical thought had played in his development as a writer. But while much of what Lewis authored was simply and lucidly written, Lewis himself once pointed out in personal correspondence that he had two ways of writing, “one for the people (to be used in works of popularized theology) and one that never aimed at simplicity (in scholarly or imaginative works)” (Lewis 2004b, 797). So Lewis’s own words serve as a bit of a corrective to Barfield’s comments about the simplicity of his friend’s works and forewarn any reader of them that some of what he penned is not all that straightforward and easy to understand. Hence, at many points, I have had to reread what Lewis wrote, not as a minority reader but for the purpose of understanding his philosophical convictions so as to be able to convey them to readers of this book.
As I stated in the previous paragraph, I have for the most part resisted the temptation to engage in criticism of Lewis’s thought. For the most part, but not totally. In the spirit of a sympathetic but not servile presentation of Lewis’s views, I have occasionally succumbed to temptation and injected some critical remarks of my own because I believe Lewis would have appreciated and perhaps, upon reflection, even agreed with them. I say this because I have been reminded from my rereading of Lewis’s personal correspondence (he was a prolific letter writer) about how grateful he was for good criticism and, when he was persuaded, openly acknowledged his change of mind.
I also mentioned a moment ago without explanation that I quote Lewis frequently in subsequent chapters. My primary reason for quoting him often and sometimes at length (Lewis himself had a “gift for quoting” (Sayer 1994, 243)) is to make clear to readers that I have not misread him. Philosophically, Lewis was his own man. As the Lewis scholar Michael Ward has recently commented, Lewis “was to a certain extent a ‘Free Thinker’; he wasn’t trammelled by expectations and conventions in the same way that most of his contemporaries were” (Ward 2016, 44). And another serious student of Lewis, Adam Barkman, describes Lewis as “a lone thinker” (2009, 12). Yet, many try to pigeonhole him as a “this” or a “that,” when in reality he was neither.
Here, for illustrative purposes, it is helpful to consider the issue of knowledge. In his book The Allegory of Love, Lewis wrote about Edmund Spenser that
[he was] writing in an age [the sixteenth century] of religious doubt and controversy when the avoidance of error [was] a problem as pressing as, and in a sense prior to, the conquest of sin: a fact which would have rendered his story uninteresting in some centuries, but which should recommend it to us.
(Lewis 1936, 334)
Recall now Kenny’s point, which I mentioned a moment ago, that Lewis has become the patron saint of the evangelical wing of American Christianity, which itself exists in an age that, not unlike Spenser’s, is preoccupied with doubt, avoiding error, and, most generally, whether and how we can know. While Lewis was certainly theologically orthodox, he was just as certainly philosophically deeply at odds with a view of our ability to know that a significant segment of the evangelical community espoused and continues to maintain in response to the spirit of the age. As I will make clear in Chapter 2, Lewis believed in the fundamentally unimpaired quality of reason, and he argued that our philosophical views begin with reason because they can begin nowhere else. Contrary to Lewis, the evangelical wing of American Christianity was and remains heavily influenced by what it calls “presuppositionalism.” In simplest terms, presuppositionalism is the view that one’s ability to know is impaired (often explained in terms of the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden) and, because it is, to avoid error one must have in place certain intellectual commitments before one can know. For many evangelicals, one must rely on what they think of as Christian or biblical presuppositions (regularly referred to as the biblical or Christian worldview, or what God has willed or said as revealed in the Bible) to support one’s foundational claims to know and to have reasoned well.
As readers and interpreters of Lewis, evangelical presuppositionalists mistakenly portray Lewis as one of their own. For example, in his short book about Lewis’s view of education, entitled C. S. Lewis: An Apologist for Education, Louis Markos writes:
Lewis … insisted that all conclusions be traced back to their foundational assumptions and presuppositions … Lewis … believed … in the importance of following an argument wherever it leads … All was open for discussion, though Lewis himself looked to the Bible and the Christian creeds as touchstones for measuring truth claims.
(2015, 6, 18–19)
However, as will become obvious in subsequent chapters, Lewis thought that foundational truth claims did not need touchstones by which to be measured. They were simply known to be true. Thus, in discussing our supposed knowledge of the goodness of God, Lewis acknowledged that “some will reply, ‘Ah, but we are fallen and don’t recognise good when we see it’,” to which he replied “But God Himself does not say we are as fallen as all that” (Lewis 2007, 1437). More generally, Lewis reasoned that if one needed to depend on presuppositions (which, by hypothesis, could not themselves just be known to be true, because they would then no longer be presuppositions) in order to know foundational truths, then what justification could one provide to explain one’s reliance on those presuppositions? If one reasoned to a presupposition from something one knew, one would have needed a second‐order presupposition to validate the reasoning and knowledge which one took respectively to be valid and true and, thereby, supportive of that first‐order presupposition. Lewis believed there could be no principled way to stop this regress.
Markos rightly goes on to maintain that:
[whether Lewis]was writing literature, teaching it, or criticizing it, [he] kept his eye firmly on the work itself, instructing his students and his readers to pay attention to what the work was trying to do and trying to say rather than to impose on the work their own … presuppositions.
(2015, 27)
Thus, Lewis would have instructed us regarding his own work that we should receive it by fairly and squarely laying our minds open to what he wrote and letting it do its work on us. We ought to get ourselves and our views out of the way (Lewis 1961a, 12, 13, 19). In terms of presuppositionalism, we should be careful not to presuppose that Lewis was a presuppositionalist.
So while the theological embrace of Lewis by evangelicals is understandable, it is nevertheless the case that he philosophically parted ways with most of them when it came to questions about the integrity of reason. Lewis thought that Jerusalem (religion) had much to do with Athens (philosophy), but he was convinced that in terms of what we know, one had to start with unaided reason in Athens (without what Christian theologians term “special revelation”) and journey to Jerusalem. And while Lewis held that what the biblical authors wrote contains many foundational truths, he believed that when those writers avoided error, they often did so without presupposing anything.
In one of his scholarly books entitled The Discarded Image, Lewis wrote:
[it is] [t]he business of the natural philosopher … to construct theories which will “save appearances” … A scientific theory must “save” or “preserve” the appearances, the phenomena, it deals with, in the sense of getting them all in, doing justice to them.
(1964, 14)
In writing this book, I have sought in a systematic way within limited space to get in and do justice to the main ideas in Lewis’s settled philosophical thought. George Sayer, a student of Lewis’s in the mid‐1930s, recounted his first meeting with Lewis in Oxford. As he approached the door to Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College, he came upon a man standing outside who was waiting to see Lewis:
“Are you a pupil come for a tutorial?” he asked.
“No. But Mr. Lewis is going to be my tutor next term.” …
“You’re lucky in having him as your tutor,” he said …
As I walked away [after my meeting], I found the man that Lewis had called “Tollers” [he was J. R. R. Tolkien] sitting on one of the stone steps in front of the arcade.
“How did you get on?” he asked.
“I think rather well. I think he will be a most interesting tutor to have.”
“Interesting? Yes, he’s certainly that. You’ll never get to the bottom of him.”
(Sayer 1994, xvii–xviii, xx)
I am sure I have not gotten to the bottom of Lewis. But I am just as sure that I have gotten below the surface of him in terms of his philosophical views. In getting below the surface, I hope I have managed to avoid committing what Lewis described as “the one sin for which, in literature, no merits can compensate; [that of being] rather dull” (Lewis 1954, 363). Lewis and what he thought were most certainly not dull, as the brief overview of his life and the explanation of the sense in which he was a philosopher in Chapter 1 will begin to make clear. After this overview and explanation, I plunge headfirst in the remaining chapters into the task of setting forth the particulars of Lewis’s philosophical ideas. My presentation of them reflects their ordered philosophical importance in Lewis’s mind. Thus, I start with longer chapters on Lewis’s views of reason, happiness, morality, and free will, and end with shorter treatments of his views of dying to self, God, and the problem of pain. If one does not understand his views of the former, one will have a more difficult time understanding what he had to say about the latter.
“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
(Boswell 2008, 446)
chapter 1a philosophical mind
Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated … My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others … [I]n reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
(Lewis 1961a, 140–1)
As soon as the mind of the maker has been made manifest in a work, a way of communication is established between other minds and his. That is to say, it is possible for a reader, by reading a book, to discover something about the mind of the writer.
(Sayers 1987, 49)
1.1 A Brief Biography
Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Ireland. He was the second of two children, his brother Warnie being three years his elder. According to Warnie, one morning during a holiday at the sea, his younger brother, while still a child with the habit of referring to himself in the third person,
marched up to my mother, put a forefinger on his chest, and announced, “He is Jacksie”; an announcement no doubt received by our mother with an absentminded, “Yes dear”. But on the following day he was still Jacksie, and as he refused absolutely to answer to any other name, Jacksie it had to be; a name afterwards contracted to Jacks, and finally to Jack. So to the family and his intimate friends he remained Jack for the rest of his life. (W. H. Lewis n.d., 8; “Jacksie” was apparently borrowed from the name of a recently‐deceased dog of which the young Lewis had been fond.
(Gresham 2005, 2))
Jack’s parents were Albert and Florence Lewis. Albert was a career solicitor, who by all accounts had a strained relationship with his sons. Florence, an educated woman gifted in logic and mathematics, earned first‐ and second‐class honors respectively in those subjects at the Royal University (now Queen’s University) in Belfast. She tutored the young Jack in French and Latin, and he loved her dearly. Tragically, her life was cut short by abdominal cancer in August of 1908, when Jack was nine years of age. He recounted his thoughts about the effects of her demise in the following memorable words:
With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures … ; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.
(Lewis 1955, 21)
Though there were certainly pleasures, Lewis tersely wrote in his forties that “I had a not very happy boyhood … ” (Lewis 1967, 57).
With his mother dead not even a month, Jack’s unhappiness from her passing was compounded by his being sent off to Wynyard School in England, a boarding school which his parents chose without ever having set eyes on it (Sayer 1994, 57). His life there was nightmarish (Lewis in his later years referred to the school as Belsen, after the World War II German concentration camp). The headmaster of the school was tyrannical and cruel (he regularly flogged his few and decreasing number of students). The school permanently closed in June of 1910, with the headmaster soon thereafter committed to an asylum. In the fall of 1910, Jack was enrolled at Campbell College, a boarding school not far from his home in Belfast. Because of an illness in November of that year and an ensuing convalescence at home, his time at the school was brief. In January of 1911, Jack was sent off again to England and another boarding school, Cherbourg, a preparatory school for entrance into Malvern College, a public school which Albert believed would prepare his son for possible admission to a university like Oxford. Jack’s experience in school this time was not as bad as that which he had on the first go‐around, and a reader of an examination taken by Jack at Cherbourg for a scholarship at Malvern saw academic promise: “Came into his own in the verse. Some of his rendering truly alpha, with a poetic feeling rare in any boy. I believe he is just the sort to develop to gain a Classics award at Oxford” (Sayer 1994, 75).
Jack entered Malvern College in the fall of 1913. In his first term there, he wrote a poem CARPE DIEM? After Horace, which Albert sent to William Kirkpatrick, the former headmaster of a school Albert had attended in his youth. Kirkpatrick was impressed by Jack’s work: “It is an amazing performance for a boy of his age—indeed for a boy of any age” (Sayer 1994, 89). Despite his academic development, Lewis was not happy at Malvern, and he more than once petitioned his father to remove him. Much later in his life, Lewis wrote generally about his life at school that “I never hated anything as much, not even the front line trenches in World War I” (2007, 1325). Warnie believed the idea of placing his brother in boarding school was a mistake from the beginning:
The fact is that Jack should never have been sent to a Public School at all. It would have been a miracle if the boy who in his first term wrote Carpe Diem could have found a congenial companion amongst those of his own age, or for that matter at any age level … [H]e would have found himself much more at home amongst first year undergraduates … For the main function of the Public School in those days was to produce a standardized article. With two or three notable exceptions they were factories turning out the spare parts and replacements needed to keep Imperial and commercial machinery functioning efficiently, and obviously it was essential that the new part should be identical with the worn‐out one. But no polishing, filing, or grinding could have made Jack a cog in any machine …
(W. H. Lewis, n.d., 35–6)
In September, 1914, after only one year at Malvern, Lewis’s life in public school was over. Albert sent Jack to live and study with Kirkpatrick, whom Lewis came to refer to as “Kirk” or “The Great Knock.” Kirkpatrick was a rationalist and atheist, and Lewis, who also did not believe in God, thrived intellectually under Kirkpatrick’s instruction. The Great Knock worked one‐on‐one with Lewis, schooling him to articulate and defend his views with cold, analytic rigor. By this time, Lewis was proficient in Greek, Latin, and French, with more than a little knowledge of Italian. Kirkpatrick was so impressed with his student that he wrote the following to Albert on January 7, 1915:
I do not think there can be much doubt as to the genuine and lasting quality of Clive’s intellectual abilities. He was born with the literary temperament, and we have to face that fact with all that it implies. This is not a case of early precocity showing itself in rapid assimilation of knowledge … As I said before, it is the maturity and originality of his literary judgements which is so unusual and surprising. By an unerring instinct he detects first rate quality in literary workmanship, and the second rate does not interest him in any way. Now you will observe that these endowments, in themselves remarkable, do not in some ways facilitate the work of the teacher, whose business, let us say, is to prepare the pupil for a Classical Scholarship in entering Oxford University. The ideal pupil for that purpose is a boy gifted with memory, receptiveness, patience, and strict attention to grammatical accuracy, and so on … The fact is that a critical and original faculty, whatever may be its promise for the future, is as much of a hindrance as a help in the drudgery of early classical training—Clive has ideas of his own and is not at all the sort of boy to be made a mere receptive machine.
(W. H. Lewis 1933, 279)
In December of the same year, Kirkpatrick once again wrote to Albert:
Of Clive himself we may say that it is difficult to conceive of him doing anything else than what he is doing now. Anything else is so repugnant to him that he simply excludes it from his thoughts … In dealing with a natural bias of temperament so strongly accentuated, we must make great allowances, but what is perfectly clear in the case is this: that outside a life of literary study, a career of literary interests, life has neither meaning nor attraction for him … [H]e is adapted for nothing else. You may make up your mind on that.
(W. H. Lewis 1934, 39)
About four months later in April, 1916, Kirkpatrick could not refrain from expressing further praise of Lewis in a letter to Albert:
I do not look on Clive as a school boy in any sense of the term. He is a student who has no interest except in reading and study … He hardly realizes – how could he at his age – with what a liberal hand nature has bestowed her bounties upon him … [A]s far as preparation [for university] is concerned, it is difficult to conceive of any candidate who ought to be in better position to face the ordeal. He has read more classics than any boy I ever had – or indeed I might add than any I ever heard of, unless it be an Addison or Landor or Macaulay. These are people we read of, but I have never met any.
(W. H. Lewis 1934, 74)
Finally, in December, 1916, toward the end of his time tutoring Lewis, Kirkpatrick penned the following words to Albert: “As a dialectician, an intellectual disputant, I shall miss him, and he will have no successor. Clive can hold his own in any discussion, and the higher the range of the conversation, the more he feels himself at home” (W. H. Lewis 1934, 165). Even though Lewis would write in later years that “we of the teaching professions often exaggerate the influence of teachers” (1954, 350), when he learned of Kirk’s death in March, 1921, he spared no praise for his former mentor:
I at least owe to him in the intellectual sphere as much as one human being can owe another. That he enabled me to win a scholarship is the least that he did for me. It was an atmosphere of unrelenting clearness and rigid honesty of thought that one breathed from living with him – and this I shall be the better for as long as I live.
(Lewis 2004a, 535)
Summing up his life in school, Lewis wrote: “I was at four schools, and learnt nothing at three of them; but on the other hand I was lucky in having a first class tutor” (2007, 1047).
The scholarship to which Lewis referred in the penultimate quote was in classics at University College, Oxford,1 where he went to reside as a student in April of 1917. He headed to University College, even though in late March he had failed an Oxford university entrance exam called “Responsions,” which included mathematics, a subject at which Lewis was extremely weak. Lewis again failed Responsions in June of that year, and never passed the exam, but was allowed to continue at Oxford nevertheless because of his service in World War I. He entered the war in November, 1917, in the trenches in France, and in the spring of 1918 was wounded there. As to the nature of his war experience, it is best to let Lewis speak for himself:
I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gum boots with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire. Familiarity both with the very old and the very recent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed the moment I saw my dead mother. I came to know and pity and reverence the ordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose) killed by the same shell that wounded me … But for the rest, the war—the frights, the cold, … the horribly smashed men still moving like half‐crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet … “This is War. This is what Homer wrote about.”
(Lewis 1955, 195–6)
Upon returning to Oxford after the war, Lewis earned three firsts, one in Honours Moderations (mainly a course of study in Greek and Latin texts) in 1920, one in Greats (essentially the study of classics, philosophy, and ancient history) in 1922 (Honours Moderations and Greats were two parts of the single degree Literae Humaniores), and one in English language and literature in 1923 (a second degree). It was in part because permanent academic posts in philosophy and classics were hard to come by in Oxford in the early 1920s that Lewis concluded he would do the additional degree in English language and literature. He wrote to Albert in 1922 that
[t]he actual subjects of my own Greats school are a doubtful quality at the moment; for no one quite knows what place Classics and Philosophy will hold in the educational world in a year’s time. On the other hand the prestige of the Greats School is still enormous; so what is wanted everywhere is a man who combines the general qualifications which Greats is supposed to give, with the special qualifications of any other subjects. And English Literature is a “rising” subject.
(W. H. Lewis n.d., 114)
John Wain, a former student of Lewis’s, succinctly explained Lewis’s decision to enter the English school in the following way: “[A]lthough [Lewis] didn’t particularly want to teach in the English School, he thought it might be a job” (2015, 244–5).
During this time of uncertainty about his prospects for future academic employment in Oxford, Lewis was in need of money. Albert wrote in his diary on October 11, 1923, that
[w]hile Jacks was at home I repeated my promise to provide for him at Oxford if I possibly could, for a maximum of three years this summer. I again pointed out to him the difficulty of getting anything to do at 28 if he had ultimately to leave Oxford.
(W. H. Lewis n.d., 148)
But Lewis did not have to leave. After taking a one‐year replacement position in philosophy at University College, Oxford, in 1924–25, about which Lewis wrote to Albert, “Well, it is poorly paid and temporary … but it is better to be inside than out, and is always a beginning” (2004a, 628), Lewis was hired by Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925 to teach English. He wired his father “Elected fellow of Magdalen. Jack,” and Albert wrote in his diary “I went up to his room and burst into tears of joy. I knelt down and thanked God with a full heart” (Lewis 2004a, 642). Lewis wrote to his father the following: “[L]et me thank you from the bottom of my heart for the generous support, extended over six years, which alone has enabled me to hang on till this” (2004a, 642). Though Albert had made it financially possible for Jack to hang on for so long, his son’s letters during these years reveal a serious lack of respect for his father. Jack repented of his “many sins” against Albert years after the latter’s death and acknowledged more than once in personal correspondence that the relationship with his father was “the blackest chapter in my life” (Lewis 2004b, 340), because he had “treated [his] own father abominably and no sin in [his] whole life now seem[ed] to be so serious” (Lewis 2007, 445).
But Lewis was now a Fellow of Magdalen. According to Warnie, his brother was relieved and “the relief was enormous. It had been a long, wearisome, often heartbreaking struggle to fight his way into that seemingly impregnable fortress which he used to describe as ‘the real Oxford’; and now at last the battle was won” (W. H. Lewis, n.d., 161). But the job was officially in English, not philosophy. Perhaps at least in part as an after‐the‐fact attempt to convince himself that he would find life in the English faculty more hospitable than a life in philosophy, Lewis wrote to Albert the following in August, 1925:
As to the other change – from Philosophy to English – I … think you are mistaken in supposing that the field is less crowded in Philosophy: it seems so to you only because you have more chance of seeing the literary crowd … On other grounds I am rather glad of the change. I have come to think that if I had the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy. A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all that plain men take for granted … – is this the best life for temperaments such as ours? …
I am not condemning philosophy. Indeed in turning from it to literary history and criticism, I am conscious of a descent: and if the air on the heights did not suit me, still I have brought back something of value.
(2004a, 648–9)
Although hired de jure to teach English language and literature, de facto Magdalen College hired Lewis because he could also teach philosophy. According to Lewis biographers, Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, “Lewis had to be always ready to ‘fill in’ with a philosophy tutorial or lecture if required. Of the sixteen pupils Lewis had in 1926 only five were reading English” (2003, 76).
During the years Lewis was struggling to move from the life of an Oxford student to that of an Oxford don, he was also slowly but surely moving intellectually from atheism to theism.2 He recounted that the “long‐evaded encounter [with God] happened at a time when I was making a serious effort to obey my conscience” (Lewis 1967, 169). The date of the momentous “meeting” (it is contested) was in the spring of either 1929 or 1930. The following is Lewis’s oft‐quoted summary of it:
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term … I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
(Lewis 1955, 228–9)
Though a dejected and reluctant convert to theism, Lewis wrote not too long afterward to his life‐long friend Arthur Greeves that “[i]t is emphatically coming home” (Lewis 2004a, 873). Years later, Lewis recounted that “[i]t must be understood that the conversion … was only to Theism, pure and simple, not to Christianity” (Lewis 1955, 230). For some time, he had had longstanding reservations about the Christian religion. For example, in October, 1916, Lewis had written to Greeves that
there was once a Hebrew called Yeshua … : when I say “Christ” of course I mean the mythological being into whom he was afterwards converted by popular imagination, and I am thinking of the legends about his magic performances and resurrection etc. That the man Yeshua or Jesus did actually exist, is as certain as that the Buddha did actually exist … But all the other tomfoolery about virgin birth, magic healings, apparitions and so forth is on exactly the same footing as any other mythology.
(Lewis 2004a, 234)
But by the time of his conversion to theism, Lewis’s views of Christianity were changing. Though not yet a Christian, he acknowledged in writing to his friend Hamilton Jenkin that “it may turn out that way in the end” (Lewis 2004a, 887). And when it finally did turn out that way, Lewis wrote to Greeves that “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it” (2004a, 974).
The long talk to which Lewis referred was with English colleagues Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien and stretched into the wee hours of a morning in September, 1931. The topic of conversation was about the nature of myth and its relationship to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Lewis was familiar with and a lover of pagan stories about dying and rising gods, and up to the time of his discussion with Dyson and Tolkien, he had believed Christianity to be just one more such imaginative myth. As a result of the eventful talk, he became convinced that Christianity was not just another myth like the others, as he had asserted to Greeves in 1916. He was now convinced and wrote to Greeves in October, 1931 that “[t]he story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened” (Lewis 2004a, 977). The true myth was that to which all others were pointers. Lewis’s belief in the significance of the mythology of dying and rising gods was in part a result of his already having become convinced of the importance of dying to self (obeying one’s conscience) in living one’s life. Many years after his conversion to Christianity, he explained that “[t]he value of myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity’” (Lewis 2013b, 108). The veil of familiarity included the truth that the seed must be buried in order to come to life, and that before there can be spring and summer there must be fall and winter. Thus, the story of Christ dying and rising was not only the fulfillment of stories about dying and rising gods, but also reflected the philosophical truth about how one ought to approach life. In response to Greeves’s frustration with rejection as a writer in 1930, Lewis penned the practical advice that “[a]s you know so well, we have got to die … I am writing as I do simply [and] solely because I think the only thing for you to do is absolutely to kill the part of you that wants success” (2004a, 926, 927).
Firmly settled in both Oxford and the Christian religion, Lewis began to make a name for himself in academic circles. The Allegory of Love was published in 1936. Other academic books of note followed, including A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), the massive English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama in 1954, and An Experiment in Criticism in 1961. Prior to any of these academic monographs, Lewis had published in 1933 a semi‐autobiographical account of his conversion to Christianity entitled The Pilgrim’s Regress. The book contained in his own words “needless obscurity” (Lewis 1992b, 200), and it was not until the appearance of The Problem of Pain in 1940 that Lewis began to acquire a reputation as a Christian apologist and public intellectual. In light of the book’s success, the British Broadcasting Corporation chose Lewis to speak on the radio to the British people during World War II about Christianity. The popular talks were eventually included in the book Mere Christianity (1952). In the meantime, publication of The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Great Divorce (1946), and Miracles (1947) solidified Lewis’s reputation as a spokesperson for Christianity. Lewis read aloud drafts of many of his works to members of the literary group known as the Inklings, which usually met in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College on Thursday nights during the academic year, from roughly 1933 through 1949. Members of the group included such notable authors as J. R. R. Tolkien, who read aloud parts of what would become his Ring Trilogy, and Charles Williams.3
During the 1950s, Lewis turned to writing children’s literature in the form of the Narnia stories. There would be seven books in all, the best‐known of which was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In 1954, after thirty years as a tutor at Oxford, Lewis accepted the professorship of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University. In the mid‐1950s, he also met an American woman named Joy Davidman, and through a singular series of events ended up marrying her. Lewis told his friend Nevill Coghill that “I never expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in my twenties” (Green and Hooper 1974, 270). But the happiness was short‐lived, as Davidman died from cancer in July, 1960. Lewis recounted his sorrow in A Grief Observed. He lived for three‐and‐a‐quarter more years after the death of Davidman and passed away on November 22, 1963, the day the American President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
1.2 Lewis as a Philosopher
Lewis was a most distinguished academic with what in his day was a philosophical pedigree second to none. Yet he was not a member of the professional philosophical guild, and never wrote philosophical books and papers for a strictly professional philosophical audience. In what way, then, was he preeminently a philosopher?
One might think a good way to answer this question would be to query the question itself, which assumes that Lewis was a philosopher. Perhaps despite what he and those who knew him claimed, he was not. But this argumentative move must be dismissed. While Lewis did not write academic philosophical books for professional philosophers, anyone who reads his works knows that many of them are deeply philosophical in nature. Here, Miracles immediately comes to mind, along with The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man, and the first part of Mere Christianity. Some Lewis scholars have intimated that Lewis likely would have continued producing such philosophical works had it not been for a public debate with the young professional philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe in 1948, at which she criticized his argument against the philosophical view known as “naturalism” (Anscombe 1981, 227). For example, the Lewis scholar Colin Duriez has recently written that in light of Anscombe’s critique, Lewis eventually “acknowledge[d] … that philosophy had become increasingly specialized and analytical” (2015, 190) and it had left him behind. Duriez adds that Lewis “felt that if he tried to continue in that more and more rarified world, he would only be communicating with a smaller and smaller audience” (2015, 190).
I will have something to say about the exchange between Anscombe and Lewis in Chapter 2. Here I want to make clear that Duriez is mistaken when he writes that Anscombe’s criticism made Lewis realize that philosophy had become increasingly specialized and led him to conclude that he would no longer try to move in that rarified world. Lewis had already come to this realization more than two decades earlier in 1925 when he acknowledged in writing to his father (see the quote in the previous section) that while he had the mind for professional philosophy, he had neither the brain nor temperament for it. Whatever Lewis took away from Anscombe’s criticism, it could not have been that it would be wise for him not to continue in the rarified world of philosophy. Lewis could not have ceased at that time to continue in that world because he had walked away from it years earlier.
But Duriez is mistaken only in part. He is also in part correct. As he says, philosophy had become more and more specialized. Since Lewis’s days as an undergraduate, the academic discipline had taken a linguistic turn and, among other things, was focused on whether religious, moral, and aesthetic statements are meaningful declarative statements that can be true or false. The accepted view became that assertions like “God exists,” “the purpose of life is that we be happy,” and “murder is wrong” are strictly speaking neither true nor false, but disguised emotive claims like “Hopefully there is a God!” and “I disapprove of murder and you should too!” Lewis believed this accepted view was seriously mistaken. When he wrote that he had had “a philosophical … education” (Lewis 2001c, 20), he was referring to a course of study of historical works in which these and similar declarative statements were understood to be genuinely declarative and either true or false. Philosophy, as he learned it, was a discipline concerned with questions about what makes life worth living, what constitutes a good life, what is the nature of the self, and arguments for and against God’s existence. Lewis never wavered in his conviction that these “Big Questions” were the real subject matter of philosophy, and the breadth and depth of his education concerning historical thought about them are evidenced by references in his own published works to philosophical luminaries like Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Confucius, Augustine, Aquinas, Berkeley, Spinoza, Rousseau, Locke, Hegel, Bradley, Bergson, and a veritable host of others. His interactions with the ideas of some of these philosophers are found early on in the unpublished notes for his philosophy lectures (Lewis 1924).
So Lewis’s abiding interest in and written work about the Big Questions highlights one important way in which he was first and foremost a philosopher. But there was another way, one which complemented his interest in the Big Questions. This additional way is perhaps best characterized as an issue of personal ownership or livability (cf. Barkman 2009, 1–20). As Robin Lane Fox has recently written, for pagan Greeks and Romans, a conversion to philosophy was a conversion to “its accompanying way of life” (Fox 2015, 6). And Lewis knew as well as anyone else the thought of the pagan Greeks and Romans. An important event in terms of the issue of livability was a lunch conversation Lewis had as a young don at Oxford with his friend Owen Barfield and a pupil Alan Griffiths. Lewis referred to philosophy as a subject, to which Barfield responded:
“It wasn’t a subject to Plato … it was a way.” The quiet but fervent agreement of Griffiths, and the quick glance of understanding between these two, revealed to me my own frivolity. Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.
(Lewis 1955, 225)
Lewis took Barfield’s point to heart. As George Sayer wrote, “[m]any men who read ‘Greats’ (classical philosophy) at Oxford read it as a subject of academic study, not as something that might affect their conduct. Jack, on the other hand, wanted the study of philosophy to be a road to belief” (1994, 219). At the time of the conversation with Barfield and Griffiths, Lewis espoused philosophical Idealism, which is roughly the view that reality is ultimately spiritual in nature and everything, including seemingly distinct human persons, is a manifestation of Spirit and ultimately identical with it in being. Lewis concluded that one of the major problems with Idealism was that it could not be lived. He acknowledged that “there had long been an ethic (theoretically) attached to my Idealism,” but, he continued,
