An intellectual presence? Alister McGrath on C. S. Lewis 1

If you look at Stefan Collini’s excellent collection of articles on major British intellectuals of the last century or so, ² you will look in vain for any mention of C. S. Lewis – or indeed of any substantially ‘religious’ writer, with the doubtful and interesting exceptions of Herbert Butterfield and T. S. Eliot. This may suggest an assumption that professed religious commitment automatically disqualifies a person from the status of a true public intellectual; or it may simply point to the less than stellar record of English or British religious writing for a lot of the twentieth century. It can’t be entirely the latter: there may be no twentieth-century Coleridge or Newman, but we can hardly write off William Temple or Donald MacKinnon. Equally, it probably isn’t pure prejudice. A good many Christians have been major literary presences, but have not quite broken through to the broader intellectual world. W. H. Auden liked the idea of being ‘a minor Mid-Atlantic Goethe’, ³ but the jury is out on whether such a description would really be appropriate. Yet, on any showing, Lewis has some claim to be considered as a genuine candidate for the role of public intellectual. A wholly serious scholar, he was also a commentator, in expository prose as well as fiction, on the shape of the culture overall. The fact that he felt able blithely to ignore most dimensions of ‘current affairs’ does not help, of course; but he never thought that cultural critique had much to do with what you could read in the newspapers. What he did was to read a rather limited spectrum of semi-scholarship, popular philosophy and fiction, and tease out of it some fundamental and very wide-ranging themes of general importance, taking the temperature of what the culture thought, or allowed or encouraged to be thought, about the nature of humanity. In addition to some imaginative moralizing about individual behaviour, as in Screwtape, the kind of thing that an earlier generation might have looked for in Addison’s Spectator, he ventured some remarkable diagnoses of broader cultural pathologies in works like The Abolition of Man. Translated into the admittedly eccentric idiom of his science fiction novels, this critique reached a substantial public; but it is perhaps the least familiar aspect of his work – and it is not completely comfortable for some of those who see Lewis as simply a stout conservative ally in various campaigns of the North Atlantic culture wars.

Lewis was able to pinpoint the fact that technocratic obsessions lead inexorably to a highly problematic picture of the human – isolated from nature, oriented to problem-solving, frustrated by mortality and often by the body itself, both anarchic and preoccupied with control, hypnotized by change, greedy for autonomy, sentimental and judgemental in equal measure because of the atrophy of empathy and imagination in this anxious and hectic world. Not too hard to recognize such a portrait; but Lewis’s characterization is challenging to both Left and Right. He disliked the Left’s traditional optimism about solving human problems and was – not unreasonably – suspicious of a dominant progressive rhetoric which, up to the thirties, still favoured massively managerial solutions to human misery, including enforced eugenic policies (John Gray’s 2011 work ⁴ is essential reading on this) and a sometimes pretty naked elitism. But it is none too easy to claim Lewis as a supporter for many of the most familiar aspects of the modern conservative political project. He is wary of individualist pictures of human good, entirely uninterested in economic growth, savagely critical of functional, ‘value-for-money’ approaches to education. His views of public welfare are not very clear but, on the rare occasions when he touches on such matters, he sounds like an old-style paternalist, conscious of the duty of the prosperous to the less fortunate. There is a streak in him of what has been called ‘Tory anarchism’, a robust suspicion of most forms of human authority combined with a serious reverence for tradition and a strong inclination to resist most kinds of rationally approved change. It is not a position found at all widely these days, though it has echoes in some of the philosophy of Private Eye.

What Alister McGrath does very successfully in the essays collected in The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis is to show that Lewis deserves proper intellectual attention – and by implication that the title ‘intellectual’ is not misplaced (not that Lewis would have thanked us for the designation, I suspect). In an admirably startling analogy from the world of neo-Marxist theory in the last of these papers, McGrath suggests that we need a Gramscian analysis of Lewis as an ‘organic intellectual’ working outside conventional academic hierarchies, at least as far as his theological work is concerned – and, I would add, his work as a cultural critic. He both writes for and helps to create a public that is not restricted to the usual educated suspects; and McGrath is surely right to say that issues of power and legitimacy hover in the background. The overturning of self-satisfied and self-perpetuating authority is, after all, a familiar theme in Lewis. And while he may have enjoyed an entirely traditional status as an Oxford academic, the force of his voice as cultural critic and pastoral theologian owed little to his more traditional expertise as a literary scholar. ‘Tory anarchism’ has always been a favoured territory for the best English journalists and essayists, deeply annoying to both academics and activists. It is no derogation from Lewis’s stature to set him alongside such essayists – with Johnson, Carlyle, Chesterton, or, indeed, Orwell, more of a Tory anarchist than you might think.

To name such names makes it clear that this is not at all to write down Lewis as an irresponsible pontificator. And McGrath’s studies trace the lineaments, if not of a systematic theology or philosophy, at least of a consistent intellectual temperament and a cluster of interdependent concerns. McGrath lays out very clearly some of the interweaving in Lewis’s work of not-quite-finished arguments about how the human desire for the endless and the strange and the blissful might prompt us to say that at the very least the existence of an infinite, transcendent and joyful God makes perfect sense of such a desire. It is what McGrath, following the pragmatist philosopher C. S. Peirce, calls ‘abductive’ reasoning. If A were the case, B and C would be natural results to expect; but B and C are the case; so it is reasonable to think that A is likely. It is a very informal argument and anything but watertight. At most it can tell us that the supposition of God’s reality fits with what we know of the world; it can’t help us with those aspects of the world which may seem to sit less well with such a supposition, and it cannot show that B and C could follow only from A. But there is a discernible continuity here with the probabilistic English tradition of Butler and Newman (and perhaps Ian Ramsey as well), tracing the ways in which we might be brought to a point where a next step (not at all rationally unavoidable) insistently presents itself. Although McGrath has some intriguing things to say about the philosophical climate in Oxford in the twenties and its impact on Lewis, I wonder whether it is not to Butler that we might best look for a philosophical genealogy. But if so, it is a Butler much enlarged and enriched by appeal to the imagination, and to the developed notion of myth that Lewis hammered out in his famous night-time discussion with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson in 1931. The Christian ‘myth’ (a word he uses in a completely different sense to that familiar to anthropologists or Bultmannian theologians) is the story of how in the world of time and space the archetypal narratives of cosmic sacrifice, dissolution and re-creation actually occurred. What you could call the mythic intuition of the human race is vindicated by these specific events, upon which the whole of human cultural history converges. McGrath’s chapter on myth is one of the most interesting in a very interesting book, making the reader think again about what Lewis was trying to do in his own fictions, up to and including his fictional masterpiece, Till We Have Faces. It is as if he is himself exploring these ‘mythic intuitions’ to see if their narrative logic leads to a recognizably Christlike focus.

All this is to say that Lewis is culturally a long way from fundamentalism. McGrath skilfully brings out how much Lewis’s discussions of the Bible appeal less to principles about inerrancy than to a basically literary claim for realism and coherence. As such, these discussions have a good deal of informal force, but do not ultimately offer a fully worked theological account of scriptural authority. This may be a strength as well as a weakness, of course. It implies that Scripture can stand on its own feet as an authoritative human document, without needing the anxiety-driven back-up of a belief in total and isomorphic divine responsibility for every textual detail. But this still leaves open the theological question of exactly what the responsibility of God for the Bible is. McGrath notes in passing, in a section at the end of his biography, that Lewis is anathema for some conservative evangelicals (not only in the USA, it might be added); and in sensing an ambivalence around the usual version of verbal inspiration, not to mention a certain wobbliness about the opportunities of post-mortem conversion, such evangelicals have correctly picked up the scent of something very different from their own orthodoxy. The formidable Martin Lloyd-Jones regarded Lewis (along with Barth) as a thinly disguised liberal. Yet the bare fact of Lewis’s conversion, the impeccably traditional insistence on the doctrines of the creeds in their most full-blooded sense and the memorable evocation of substitutionary atonement in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe continue to persuade most evangelicals not only to give Lewis the benefit of the doubt but to regard him as a champion.

McGrath has a good brief account in the biography of the process we might call ‘Becoming C. S. Lewis’, reminding us that his most enthusiastic early readers in the USA were Episcopalians rather than evangelicals and that up to the late sixties he was not quite the canonized authority he later became (I wonder slightly about this – my own recollection is that he was being read with enthusiasm by teenage evangelicals in South Wales by the mid-sixties; but perhaps my friends were untypical). There is surely a book to be written on exactly how Lewis’s work was diffused and received in the USA and in the UK, what impact the flood of posthumous publications had on his standing, how far he benefited from reaction against the high tide of academic theological revisionism in the seventies and similar questions. One of the many good things in McGrath’s volumes is the way in which trails of this kind are laid. Another such – connected with the previous point – arises in the context of McGrath’s essay on Lewis as an Anglican theologian. He rightly notes that Lewis has in fact almost none of what many would think of as typically Anglican preoccupations – ecclesiology in particular; yet he continues to appeal to many Anglicans worldwide, and has been a factor in leading a good number away from independent Protestant groups towards the Anglican Communion. McGrath observes drily that the question of interest is perhaps not, ‘Why isn’t Lewis more Anglican?’ but ‘Why isn’t Anglicanism more like Lewis?’ Why, that is, does the Anglican family not share Lewis’s unselfconscious and ‘unfussy’ (to use McGrath’s word) immersion in the great truths of the tradition as expressed in the liturgy, rather than hectically reinventing itself in both selfconsciously reactionary and selfconsciously radical modes? It’s not a bad question, even if the answer is quite a complex one and there is no simple way back to the Church of England that Lewis knew.

One of the things that McGrath’s discussion of this brings out is a point very readily forgotten or overlooked in a lot of Lewis literature. Most of those closest to Lewis in the Anglican world of the forties and fifties were unambiguously Anglo-Catholic in their loyalties – Austin Farrer, Dorothy Sayers and Charles Williams above all (and we should not underrate the importance of his friendship with Sister Penelope and the Anglican convent at Wantage). Put this together with the fact that Lewis was a regular penitent, with a strong belief in the Communion of Saints and (thanks to Charles Williams) in the capacity of the believer to suffer vicariously for other believers, and it looks as though an underlying Catholic sensibility in Lewis has been underrated (to be autobiographical again, my own reading of him as a teenager seemed to me to be completely convergent with the mild, rather Lux Mundi-ish Anglo-Catholicism of my parish church). Tolkien’s quip about the ‘Ulsterior motive’ in Lewis, the resurgence at times of a visceral anti-papalism rooted in an Ulster upbringing, has been taken more seriously than it deserves. It is really not true as some still assert that Lewis’s conversion brought him back to his childhood faith.

But McGrath is especially good on Lewis’s Ulster context, and very properly does not allow us to forget that he remains in some significant sense an Irish writer. The biography fleshes out Lewis’s Ulster as no other life has fully done. But ‘fleshing-out’ is the dominant register for this biography. McGrath has not written a magisterial critical life, although there are important corrections in detail to earlier efforts (not least in the redating of Lewis’s actual conversion in 1930–1, for which McGrath makes a pretty conclusive case). What he does is to add to a fairly brisk account of the main facts a number of substantial marginalia – more on Ulster, more on the details of the Oxford academic context and so on – which will have to be reckoned with in future studies. He is reticent about Lewis’s marriage (and rather evidently, like many of Lewis’s friends, not charmed by Joy Davidman, who remains a somewhat shadowy figure here; Don King’s edition of her letters is a surprising omission from an otherwise model bibliography) but gives a full, intelligent and sympathetic account of A Grief Observed. And, as noted already, he offers, in the final chapter of the biography, a helpful sketch of the history of the reception of Lewis on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades following his death, a sketch that ought to prompt further research and further nuancing of the popular portrait.

Because it becomes clearer and clearer that Lewis cannot be fairly or usefully understood as simply the mouthpiece of a modern Christian conservatism. He is a profoundly traditional believer, of course, in respect of doctrine and ethics; he is not culturally or theologically a liberal. He is famously sceptical about women’s ordination, and writes about it as – in rather loose terms – a potentially ‘paganising’ move. It would be surprising if someone with his keen sense of what it is to inhabit a symbol-drenched world failed to note the significance of shifts in gender symbolism. I suspect he would still be opposed in the present context, challenging us to take seriously the effects of upsetting a symbolic ecology – though an exchange of letters with Dorothy Sayers suggests that he was also sensitive to the ecumenical implications (Sayers agrees about this, but – interestingly – cannot see any strictly theological arguments against). Likewise on homosexuality, he takes a traditional line – but with a notable reluctance to make it a leading issue. He has some rather ill-considered things to say on the subject in The Four Loves, but it is important to remember that he is no more daft than most (nearly all) of his contemporaries and a good deal less than some. We don’t, for instance, find in his public or private writing the kind of visceral contempt for homosexuality that can startle the unwary reader of Orwell. And for all his well-known insistence on the decision-making authority of the male in a marriage partnership, it is not true that his fiction – certainly his later fiction – fails to present strong and positive images of women’s decision-making. The picture is a complex and diverse one.

So although he can look like someone who belongs clearly in one camp of the modern religious culture wars, he constantly escapes categorization, largely because – unlike some contemporary polemicists – he has a sense of the immensity and complexity of Christian history. His approach to the reading of the Psalms, to the meaning of non-Christian religions, to the Last Things, not to mention his deep commitment to the religious role of the imagination, is grounded in a tradition that is a good deal richer than any simply reactive conservatism, and has proved unsettling enough to more anxious defenders of the faith. Despite his self-description as a ‘dinosaur’ in his reading matter and his reading habits, everything about him bespeaks a vast intellectual hospitality – not the open mind that proverbially lets things fall out of the other end, but a curiosity and mental energy that is on the lookout for new perspectives on the familiar. And it is this cultural hinterland that allows him to cut through the detail of ‘current affairs’ to observe as he does some of the most disturbing trends of what we’d now call ‘late modernity’ – the tyranny of reducing issues to technological problem-solving, the deep schism between the human and nature, the lethal impatience with the limits of the body. If the definition of a serious intellectual is someone who obliges us to think harder about what is involved in being and becoming human in society, it is impossible to deny Lewis the title. McGrath has done a real service in prompting his readers to think of Lewis in this way, as a public intellectual worth tackling and respecting. He has opened several new doors in the study of Lewis, and given us a sense of the kind of studies we shall need in order to get the fuller measure of this remarkable man.