Abstract
This study is a critical reflection on C. S. Lewis’s rich apologetic method, especially in Mere Christianity, which is shown to mingle an explicit appeal to reason and an implicit appeal to the imagination. The implications of this for how the churches might engage modern and postmodern cultures are considered.
C. S. Lewis is now firmly established as one of the greatest apologists of the twentieth century, with a continuing legacy of influence in the twenty-first. 1 Few apologists have achieved anything approaching his impact, which transcends denominational barriers. Although until recently Lewis’s impact was largely confined to the English-speaking world, there are signs of growing interest in his approaches to apologetics in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
So what is his approach to apologetics, and why has it been so successful? In this article, I propose to explore Lewis’s distinctive understanding of the rationality of faith, which emphasizes the reasonableness of Christianity without imprisoning it within an impersonal and austere rationalism.
Lewis himself was an atheist as a younger man, convinced of the fundamental irrationality of faith and its incapacity to accommodate the brutality and senselessness of the Great War, in which he fought from 1917 to 1918. Yet Lewis’s decision to limit himself to a rationalist world-view proved to be imaginatively sterile and uninteresting, leaving him existentially dissatisfied. His study of English literature, especially the poetry of George Herbert, left him with doubts about his atheism. Herbert and others seemed to connect with a world he was tempted to dismiss as illusory, yet which haunted his imagination. ‘On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other, a glib and shallow rationalism.’ 2 Might his deepest intuitions challenge the shallow truths of reason?
It seemed to Lewis that pure reason offered him a bleak intellectual landscape that he could not bear to inhabit. Yet this, his reason insisted, was all that there was. To believe otherwise was pure fantasy. Yet Lewis’s imagination taught him that there had to be more. ‘Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.’ 3
So how did Lewis break free from this rationalist prison? And what may be learned from it? There is no simple answer to this first question, as Lewis’s account of his own conversion, set out in Surprised by Joy, presents autobiographical memories rather than detailed conceptual analysis. It is, however, clear that Lewis was drawn to Christianity because of its intellectual capaciousness and imaginative appeal. It made sense of things, without limiting itself to what could be understood or grasped by reason. There was always a sense of a ‘beyond’, a ‘numinous’ – something captured before him by G. K. Chesterton (who Lewis greatly admired). ‘Every true artist’, Chesterton argued, feels ‘that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.’ 4
Lewis’s understanding of the reasonableness of the Christian faith rests on a distinct way of grasping the rationality of the created order, and its ultimate grounding in God. Where some favour deductive arguments for the existence of God, Lewis offers his own distinct approach which is more inductive than deductive, visual rather than rational. It is perhaps best summed up in his lapidary statement at the end of his essay ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ Using a powerful visual image, Lewis invites us to see God as both the ground of the rationality of the world and the one who enables us to grasp that rationality. ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.’ 5
There are clear echoes here of what we might call an ‘illuminationist’ epistemology; yet Lewis never presses this to the point at which it begins to break down. For Lewis, ‘seeing’ is simply an analogy for something that cannot adequately be stated in words. The intellectual capaciousness of the Christian faith can be rationally analysed; it is, however, best imaginatively communicated.
Lewis invites us to see Christianity as offering us a standpoint (a Platonic synoptikon, if you like) from which we may survey things and grasp their intrinsic interconnectedness. We see how things connect together. Lewis consistently uses a remarkably wide range of visual metaphors – such as sun, light, blindness and shadows – to help us understand the nature of a true understanding of things. 6 Where some argue that rationality concerns the ability of reason to give an account of things, Lewis frames this more in terms of our ability to see their relationships. This has two highly significant consequences.
In the first place, it means that Lewis sees reason and imagination as existing in a collaborative relationship. Reason without imagination is potentially dull and limited; imagination without reason is potentially delusory and escapist. Lewis develops a notion of ‘imagined’ reality, which is capable of being grasped by reason and visualized by the imagination. 7
In the second, it means that Lewis makes extensive use of analogies, to enable us to see things in a new way. Lewis’s famous apologetic for the doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity suggests that our difficulties arise primarily because we fail to see it properly. If we see it another way – as, for example, an inhabitant of a two-dimensional world might try to grasp and describe the structure of a three-dimensional reality 8 – then we begin to grasp its intrinsic rationality. Lewis’s apologetic often takes the form of a visual imperative: ‘Try seeing it this way!’
Perhaps this helps us appreciate the special appeal of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, 9 which present a way of seeing things, embodied within stories, which turns out to be rationally plausible and imaginatively attractive. Lewis’s Oxford colleague Austin Farrer noticed this trait in Lewis’s writings, including his prosaic The Problem of Pain (1940). Lewis’s apologetic looks like an argument; but, on closer inspection, it is an encouragement to see things in a new way, and thus grasp the rationality of faith. Lewis makes us ‘think we are listening to an argument’, when in reality ‘we are presented with a vision, and it is the vision that carries conviction’. 10
Although some have tried to force Lewis into a rationalist mode of argument, it is clear that this does him a gross injustice. Lewis does not try to prove the existence of God on a priori grounds. Lewis invites us to see how what we observe in the world around us and experience within us ‘fits’ the Christian way of seeing things. Rather, Lewis often articulates this way of ‘seeing things’ in terms of a ‘myth’ – that is to say, a story about reality which both invites its ‘imaginative embrace’ and communicates a conceptual framework, by which other things are to be seen. 11
So how does this approach to the reasonableness of faith work out in practice? In what follows, we shall look at Lewis’s celebrated ‘argument from desire’, exploring both its rational structure and its apologetic appeal. 12
The starting point for Lewis’s approach is an experience – a longing for something undefined and possibly undefinable, that is as insatiable as it is elusive. Lewis sets out versions of this argument at several points in his writings, including the Chronicles of Narnia. The most important statements of the argument, however, are the following:
The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), written shortly after his conversion to Christianity, in which Lewis sets out an allegorical account of his own conversion, focusing on the theme of desire. The university sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’, preached in Oxford in June 1941, and subsequently published as an article in Theology. This is the most elegant statement of the argument, here framed primarily in terms of the human quest for beauty. The talk ‘Hope’, given during the third series of Broadcast Talks for the British Broadcasting Corporation during the Second World War, and subsequently included as a chapter in Mere Christianity. This is generally considered to be Lewis’s most influential statement of the argument. The autobiographical work Surprised by Joy, in which the theme of ‘Joy’ (see below) plays a significant role in arousing Lewis’s openness towards God.
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis described his childhood experiences of intense longing (which he names ‘Joy’) for something unknown and elusive, triggered off by such things as the fragrance of a flowering currant bush in the garden of his childhood home in Belfast, or reading Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem in the style of the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér. 13 Lewis’s epiphany of ‘Joy’ bathed his everyday world of experience with beauty and wonder. But what did it mean – if it meant anything at all? What way of seeing it might help him to make sense of it? How was he to interpret it?
While an atheist, Lewis dismissed such experiences as illusory. Yet he became increasingly dissatisfied with such simplistic reductive explanations. His growing familiarity with what he termed the ‘Christian mythology’ – Lewis here uses the myth in the sense of a ‘narrated world-view’ – led him to appreciate that these experiences could easily and naturally be accommodated within its explanatory framework. What if God were an active questing personal agent, as Christianity affirmed to be the case? If so, God could easily be understood as the ‘source from which those arrows of Joy had been shot at me ever since childhood’. 14
In the sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’, Lewis develops this theme further by exploring the human quest for beauty. Lewis argues that this eventually turns out to be a search for the source of that beauty, which is mediated through the things of this world, but not contained within them. ‘The books of the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them: it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.’ 15 Our sense of longing remains within us, ‘still wandering and uncertain of its object’. Its true goal remains to be identified and attained, despite our intuition that it is to be understood as ‘a longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the inside’. This longing is an invitation or summons ‘to pass in and through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects’. 16
In Mere Christianity, Lewis sets out this approach in a somewhat different way, while still appealing to the elusiveness of our experiences of ‘Joy’. The experiences he had in mind are shared across the human spectrum, whether expressed in quotidian language as a sense of ‘something there’,
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or in more literary forms. The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for example, spoke of ‘a nostalgic yearning, bordering at times on unendurably poignant sorrow’, which he experienced in ‘the dreams of my heart and in the reveries of my soul’.
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Bertrand Russell, one of the most articulate and influential British atheist writers of the twentieth century, put a similar thought into words as follows:
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The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain … a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite – the beatific vision, God – I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found – but the love of it is my life … it is the actual spring of life within me.
These are the kinds of experience to which Lewis appeals – a sense of hovering on the brink of discovering something of immense significance, and a sense of sorrow and frustration when what seemed to be so close disappears, like smoke. As Lewis puts it: ‘There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.’ 21 So what does this sense of unfulfilled longing mean? To what does it point?
Some, Lewis concedes, might suggest that this frustration arises from looking for its true object in the wrong places; others that, since further searching will only result in repeated disappointment, there is simply no point trying to find something better than the present world.
Yet Lewis suggests that there is a third approach, which recognizes that these earthly longings are ‘only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage’ of our true homeland. Since this overwhelming desire cannot be fulfilled through anything in the present world, this suggests that its ultimate object lies beyond the present world. ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.’ 22
Here, as throughout his apologetic writings, Lewis appeals, not primarily to the Bible or to Christian tradition, but to shared human experience and observation. How do we make sense of them? Lewis’s genius as an apologist lay in his ability to show how a ‘viewpoint’ which was derived from the Bible and the Christian tradition was able to offer a more satisfactory explanation of common human experience than its rivals – especially the atheism he had once himself espoused.
Lewis’s apologetic approach is to identify a common human observation or experience, and then show how it fits in, naturally and plausibly, within a Christian way of looking at things. Lewis was always emphatic that nothing can be proved on the basis of observation or experience. Yet, while such observations of nature or our own experiences prove nothing, they can suggest certain possibilities, and even intimate what they might mean.
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A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means.
Lewis’s approach could be framed like this. Christianity holds that the natural order – including our own reasoning – is shaped by the God who created all things. As Augustine of Hippo and Blaise Pascal had argued before him, Lewis affirms that the absence of God causes us to experience longing – a yearning for God, which we misinterpret as a longing for something located within the finite and created order. Conversion is about a semiotic transformation, when we realize that something we believed to be pointing to one thing in fact points to another.
We could set Lewis’s argument out more formally as follows. We experience desires that no experience in this world seems able to satisfy. Yet Christianity tells us that we are made for another world. And, when things are seen in this way, this sort of experience is exactly what we would expect. The appeal is not so much to cold logic, as to intuition and imagination, resting on an imaginative dynamic of discovery. Lewis invites his audience to see their experiences through a set of Christian spectacles, and notice how these bring what might otherwise be fuzzy or blurred into sharp focus. For Lewis, the ability of the Christian faith to accommodate such things, naturally and easily, is an indicator of its truth.
As Lewis states this approach from desire, therefore, it is not really an argument; it is about observing and affirming the fit between a theory and observation. It is like trying on a hat or shirt for size. How well does it fit? How many of our observations of the world can it accommodate, and how persuasively? Lewis’s way of thinking also shows some similarity to a related approach within the natural sciences, now generally known as ‘inference to the best explanation’. 24 This approach recognizes that there are multiple explanations of observations, and suggests how criteria might be identified to determine which such explanation is to be considered as ‘the best’.
The same approach is found in Lewis’s ‘argument from morality’. This is sometimes portrayed in ridiculously simplistic terms – for example, ‘experiencing a sense of moral obligation proves there is a God’. Lewis did not say this, and did not think this. As with the ‘argument from desire’, his argument is rather that the common human experience of a sense of moral obligation is easily and naturally accommodated within a Christian framework.
For Lewis, experiences and intuitions – for example, concerning morality and desire – are meant to ‘arouse our suspicions’ that there is indeed ‘Something which is directing the universe.’ We come to suspect that our moral experience suggests a ‘real law which we did not invent, and which we know we ought to obey’, 25 in much the same way as our experience of desire is ‘a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage’ of another place, which is our true homeland. 26 And as we track this suspicion, we begin to realize that it has considerable imaginative and explanatory potential. What was initially a dawning suspicion becomes solidified as a growing conviction.
So what can be learned from Lewis’s approach? Perhaps I could mention two points in closing. First, Lewis helps us see that apologetics need not take the form of deductive argument, but can be construed and presented as an invitation to step into the Christian way of seeing things, and explore how things look when seen from its standpoint. ‘Try seeing things this way!’ If world-views or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into sharpest focus?
And second, we need to realize that Lewis’s explicit appeal to reason involves an implicit appeal to the imagination. Perhaps this helps us understand why Lewis appeals to both modern and postmodern people. I see no historical evidence that compels me to argue that Lewis intended to do this. The evidence suggests that he saw things this way naturally, and never formalized it in terms of a synthesis of these two very different modalities of thought. But it is a point of enormous importance: Lewis gives us a synoptikon which transcends the great divide between modernity and postmodernity, affirming the strengths of each, and subtly accommodating their weaknesses. As the churches face an increasingly complex cultural context in which they must preach and minister, Lewis offers insights and approaches that are potentially enriching – and persuasive.