Justified True Belief

(●) An Oxford medievalist who lost his faith at thirteen, found it again at thirty-two, and then wrote both the century’s most read defense of the Christian faith and seven children’s books about a country reached through a wardrobe. + In August 1941 a bachelor don who taught English literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, stepped up to a BBC microphone to give the first of a few fifteen-minute talks about religion. Britain was being bombed. The talks went out on Wednesday evenings in the quarter of an hour before eight, to a country sitting in the dark with the blackout curtains drawn, and the man doing the talking sounded less like a preacher than like somebody’s clever uncle working something out at the kitchen table. Those broadcasts became Mere Christianity, and the book has never been out of print since. Lewis matters to Christian apologetics, the reasoned defense of the faith, for a reason that has little to do with originality. He invented almost no doctrine. What he did was translate. He took arguments that had lived for centuries in Latin textbooks and academic journals and put them into the speech of a man explaining something to a friend, and he did it without softening what the arguments actually claimed. Three of his lines of reasoning are still argued over by professional philosophers: the moral law as a clue to the meaning of the universe, the longing that no earthly thing satisfies, and the claim that a mind produced by mindless matter has no business trusting itself. He also wrote seven children’s books about a country reached through a wardrobe, and they have sold more than a hundred million copies. He thought the two kinds of writing were the same work. Reason, he said, is the natural organ of truth, and imagination the organ of meaning. He spent his life using both, and he had been an atheist for nearly twenty years of it.

(●) 1898 AD: Born in Belfast into a house full of books, and made motherless at nine. + Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast on 29 November 1898, the second son of Albert Lewis, a police court solicitor, which is to say a lawyer whose working days were spent on the small criminal cases that came before the Belfast magistrates, and of Flora Hamilton Lewis, a clergyman’s daughter who graduated in logic and mathematics from Queen’s College, Belfast, in 1886, one of ten women in the first group there allowed to take a degree at all. So the boy had a father who took evidence apart for a living and a mother who could follow a proof, and both of those habits turn up all through his later writing. There was an older brother too, Warren, called Warnie, three years ahead of him and his closest friend for the next sixty-five years. At about the age of four Clive announced that his name was now Jacksie, after a family dog that had been killed in the road, and would answer to nothing else. He was Jack to everyone who loved him for the rest of his life. The family moved in 1905 to a large new house on the edge of the city that the boys called Little Lea, and the thing Lewis remembered about it was books: books in the study, books in the cloakroom, books piled two deep in the attic, and rain outside for weeks at a time. Nobody told him which of them he was old enough for. He read whatever he found. On 23 August 1908 his mother died of cancer. He was nine. In Surprised by Joy, the account of his early life he published nearly fifty years later, he wrote that with her death all settled happiness disappeared from his life, and that what remained was a great deal of fun but no more security. His grieving father, unable to manage two boys, sent them to school in England within weeks.

(●) 1911 AD: Somewhere in his teens he stopped believing in God, and a private tutor taught him to argue. + The first English school was a small establishment in Watford whose headmaster was later certified insane and whose doors closed soon after Lewis left. He called it Belsen in his memoirs. What followed was better and no happier: a preparatory school at Malvern, then Malvern College itself, where he was miserable among boys who cared about games and social rank. His faith went quietly, sometime around the age of thirteen or fourteen, and no single argument knocked it over. Looking back he traced it to several things working on him at once, no one of them decisive. For one thing there was a school matron who dabbled in occultism and in theosophy, a movement then in fashion that mixed Eastern religion with spiritualism and taught that all the faiths are versions of one hidden wisdom underneath. Under that light, Christianity stopped looking like the truth about the world and started looking like one interesting option on a shelf of them. For another there was the settled assumption of every teacher and every editor he read that the old religions of Greece and Rome were sheer nonsense while Christianity somehow was not, an exception nobody troubled to defend; a boy who reads carefully will sooner or later ask why the exception. And there was his own reading in the pessimism of the late Victorians, who had concluded that the universe is indifferent and that saying so out loud is what an honest man does. Prayer, meanwhile, had become a duty he could never perform to his own satisfaction, a nightly effort to work up a feeling that would not come. It was a relief to put it down. In 1914 his father did the best thing he ever did for him and sent him to be tutored privately at Great Bookham in Surrey by William Kirkpatrick, an old headmaster of ferocious logical honesty whom Lewis called the Great Knock. Kirkpatrick was an atheist who did not argue about religion; he simply refused to let any sentence pass unexamined. Say the scenery in Surrey is beautiful and he would want to know what you meant by beautiful, on what evidence, and compared to what. That is a wearing way for a schoolboy to live, and Lewis loved it. Two and a half years of that produced a young man who read Homer for pleasure, thought in syllogisms, and was quite certain that the universe was a meaningless accident and that nobody had made it. A syllogism is simply an argument laid out so that its bones show: two claims and the conclusion that has to follow from them, as in all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. Lewis came away unable to hear a claim without hunting for the two claims underneath it. The habit stayed for life, and the atheism did not.

(●) 1917 AD: He reached the front-line trenches on his nineteenth birthday, and came home owing a debt he paid for thirty years. + Lewis won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, and arrived in the spring of 1917 to find the place nearly empty of undergraduates. As an Irishman he was exempt from conscription, the compulsory call-up that was taking every fit Englishman of his age, and he volunteered anyway. In the officers’ training billet he shared a room with a cadet named Edward Moore, called Paddy, and the two made the sort of promise young men make on the eve of a war: if one of them did not come back, the other would look after his family. Neither of them, presumably, expected to have to keep it. He was commissioned into the Somerset Light Infantry and reached the front line in the Somme valley on 29 November 1917, his nineteenth birthday. He said afterwards that the war stayed with him mostly as sensations rather than ideas: the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the cold, the water rising over the tops of his boots. On 15 April 1918, near Mount Bernenchon during the German spring offensive, a British shell fell short and killed the sergeant standing beside him, Harry Ayres, and drove fragments into Lewis’s chest, wrist and leg. He spent the rest of the war in hospital and convalescence. One fragment stayed in his chest for twenty-six years and was cut out only in 1944. Paddy Moore had been killed in France that March, three weeks before the shell at Mount Bernenchon, so that Lewis came out of hospital with a promise on his hands. He kept it. From 1921 until her death in 1951 he shared a household with Paddy’s mother, Janie Moore, and her daughter Maureen, running errands, washing dishes and nursing her through a long decline that ended in senility. That is thirty years, most of a working life, given to a woman he had met because of a conversation in a training billet. He almost never spoke about the arrangement, and his friends found it eccentric. It cost him, by his brother’s reckoning, a great deal of the time and quiet a scholar needs.

(●) 1925 AD: Elected a Fellow of Magdalen College at twenty-six, he taught there for twenty-nine years. + Back in Oxford after the war he did something that hardly anybody does. Oxford ranks its honours examinations in classes, and the top class is called a First; Lewis took three of them. The first was in classical honour moderations, the examination in Greek and Latin literature, in 1920. The second was in Greats, the Oxford school of classics, ancient history and philosophy, in 1922. The third was in English in 1923, in a subject he had taken up only the year before. Men build whole careers on one of those. On 20 May 1925 Magdalen College elected him a Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature, which meant rooms of his own inside the college and the duty of teaching undergraduates one or two at a time, week in and week out, for as long as he held the job. He held it until 1954. His windows looked out on a deer park and on a strip of riverside path called Addison’s Walk, which was where he went when he wanted to walk and talk rather than sit. The teaching was relentless and the scholarship was real, which is a combination Oxford does not always get. The Allegory of Love (1936), his study of how medieval poets learned to write about love and about the inside of a person, changed its field and is still cited today. He later took on the sixteenth-century volume of the Oxford History of English Literature, a survey so vast that in letters he referred to it by the acronym of its series title, O.H.E.L., and left his correspondents to hear for themselves what that spelled. In 1926 he met a philologist from Pembroke College named J. R. R. Tolkien. Philology is the study of how words and languages change over the centuries, which for Tolkien meant Old English and Old Norse by day and, in private, languages he was inventing himself. He was also a Roman Catholic who was quietly writing an enormous private mythology. Out of that friendship grew the Inklings, an informal circle that met on Thursday evenings in Lewis’s college rooms and on Tuesday mornings in a pub, and read aloud to each other whatever they were writing. Much of The Lord of the Rings was first heard there, and Tolkien said afterwards that without Lewis’s encouragement he would never have finished it.

(●) 1931 AD: A night-long argument with Tolkien and Dyson carried the most reluctant convert in England from God to Christ. + The return took years, and it came in two stages rather than one. The first stage was to belief in God as such, and Lewis describes it as a surrender rather than a discovery. Alone in his rooms at Magdalen, night after night, he gave in, admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed. He called himself that night perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England, which is not how anyone expects a conversion story to sound, and it is worth noticing that he never afterwards tidied it up. Writing about it a quarter of a century later, he dated that evening to the Trinity term of 1929, which is what Oxford calls its summer term. He may simply have misremembered. His biographer Alister McGrath, working through the letters, has argued that the memory is a year out and that the term was really that of 1930: nothing Lewis wrote through 1929 shows any sign of the change, and he only began going to his college chapel in October 1930. The second stage was to Christ, and it turned on a conversation about mythology. On the night of 19 September 1931 Lewis dined in college with Tolkien and another friend, Hugo Dyson, and the three walked up and down Addison’s Walk until three in the morning. Lewis’s difficulty was an odd one, and he put it honestly. The story of a god who dies and rises again moved him almost to tears when he met it in pagan literature, in Balder or Adonis or Bacchus, and left him entirely cold when he met the same story in the creed. Why should it work as poetry and fail as doctrine? Tolkien’s answer was that he had the thing backwards. The pagan myths are men dreaming, half remembering and reaching for something they cannot name; in Christ that very story happens, at a datable time, under a named governor, in a body that could be touched. It is myth become fact. And the fact does not stop being a story that goes to the heart just because it also happened. Nine days later Lewis climbed into the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle for a day trip to Whipsnade Zoo. He wrote that when they set out he did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when they reached the zoo he did, and that he had not spent the journey in thought or in great emotion. It was less like a man solving a problem than like a man waking up.

(●) 1941 AD: The BBC put him on the air in wartime, and an Oxford tutor became a household voice. + The war made him famous. In 1940 a publisher had talked him into writing a short book on suffering, The Problem of Pain, which contained the sentence people still quote back at him: God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain, and that pain is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. James Welch, who ran religious broadcasting at the BBC, read it and wrote in February 1941 to ask whether the author would care to speak to the nation. He would, and did, in four series between 1941 and 1944, standing alone in a studio and talking to a microphone about right and wrong, about who Jesus claimed to be, about pride and forgiveness and what a Christian is actually for. There was no audience in the room and no way of telling from inside a studio whether anybody at all was out there. The letters told him. They came by the sackful for the rest of his life, from soldiers and schoolgirls and widows and unbelievers, and he answered them by hand, most mornings, with Warnie taking over much of the typing. Collected and lightly revised, the talks became Mere Christianity in 1952. At the same time he was travelling at weekends to lecture to Royal Air Force stations for the chaplain-in-chief, speaking to aircrew whose life expectancy everyone in the room knew, and finding it the hardest audience he ever had. In 1942 he published The Screwtape Letters, thirty-one letters of advice from a senior devil to a junior one on the ruin of an ordinary young Englishman, dedicated to Tolkien. It made him a public figure in a way that Oxford common rooms did not entirely forgive; a don who writes for the newspapers is suspect, and a don whom the newspapers write about is worse. In September 1947 his face was on the cover of Time magazine, which is not a thing that ordinarily happens to tutors in medieval poetry. The same years put him in a debating chair. From 1942 he was the first president of the Oxford Socratic Club, which the chaplain Stella Aldwinckle had started and which met weekly in term so that believers and unbelievers could argue in front of an audience, with the best atheist philosophers in Oxford invited to attack. On 2 February 1948 one of them took the invitation up. Elizabeth Anscombe, a Roman Catholic philosopher who had done her research at Cambridge under Ludwig Wittgenstein and who would become one of the most formidable philosophers of her generation, read a paper picking apart the central chapter of his book Miracles in front of the club he presided over. Lewis thought she had a point. He wrote no published reply of his own; he rewrote the chapter instead, for the 1960 edition of the book, and that rewritten version is the one philosophers argue with now.

(●) 1956 AD: He married a dying American poet, was given four years, and wrote down what her death did to his faith. + Oxford never gave him a chair. A chair is a full professorship, the senior post that a university keeps for whoever is thought to lead a field, and Lewis was passed over more than once; the posts in the field he had made his own kept going to other men, and there were colleagues who quite openly held the religious broadcasting against him. Cambridge did better. In 1954 it created a professorship of medieval and Renaissance English and gave it to him. He gave his inaugural lecture on his fifty-sixth birthday, described himself in it as a specimen of the old Western order left over into a new age, and told the audience to use him while he lasted. Joy Davidman was a New York poet, a former Communist and a Jewish convert to Christianity who had read her way to faith partly through his books. She wrote to him, and he wrote back, and they argued by post for years in the way that two people argue when both of them are enjoying it. Then she moved to England with two sons and a broken marriage behind her. On 23 April 1956 Lewis married her at the Oxford register office so that she would not be deported, and he told his friends it was a legal formality and nothing more, and there is no reason to think he was lying. Then she was found to have bone cancer, far advanced. That was when he discovered what he actually felt. On 21 March 1957 a priest married them properly at her hospital bedside and prayed for her healing. The cancer went into remission for three years, and Lewis, at nearly sixty, was happy in a way he had not expected to be. She died on 13 July 1960. He found four empty notebooks in the house and filled them with what was happening to him, and then published them anonymously as A Grief Observed, under the name N. W. Clerk, because he did not want the author of The Problem of Pain writing the dust jacket for it. The book begins by reporting that nobody had ever told him grief feels so like fear. Then it goes on to say the thing an apologist is not supposed to say out loud: that the danger is not that a man will stop believing in God, but that he will come to believe dreadful things about him. It works its way back, slowly and without triumph, to trust. Friends who did not know he had written it sent him copies to help him with his own bereavement.

(●) 1963 AD: He died at home on the day the world was watching Dallas, and the books went on selling. + His health gave way through 1963, and he seems to have known where it was going. A heart attack in July put him briefly into a coma; he resigned the Cambridge chair in August and came home for good to the Kilns, the house under Shotover Hill outside Oxford where he had lived since 1930. Warnie was there with him, as he had been for most of both their lives. He died in his bedroom on the afternoon of 22 November 1963, a week short of his sixty-fifth birthday, and was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, the ordinary parish church where he had worshipped, week by week and without any fuss made of him, for thirty years. The death went almost unnoticed, and for a reason nobody could have arranged. Within the hour President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, and after that the newspapers of the world had room for nothing else. Aldous Huxley, the novelist who wrote Brave New World, died the same day and got the same silence. The obituaries that did appear treated Lewis mainly as a literary scholar who had also written popular religion, and one or two suggested the religion had cost him his reputation. The books did not cooperate. Mere Christianity and the Narnia stories sold more each decade after his death than they had in his lifetime, and half a century on he was among the most quoted Christian writers in the English language. On 22 November 2013, fifty years to the day, a memorial stone was set in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, among the graves of Chaucer and Dickens and Tennyson, carrying one sentence of his about the sun.

What He Taught

(T1) Everyone appeals to a standard of fair play they did not invent, and that standard is a clue to what the universe is. + Listen to two people quarrelling, Lewis says, and notice what they are doing. Hardly anyone says "your behaviour displeases me." They say "that’s my seat, I was there first," or "how’d you like it if someone did the same to you," or "you promised." Every one of those is an appeal to a standard the other man is expected to know already and expected to accept. And he almost never says there is no such thing as fairness. He says the case is different because his brother started it, or because he was going to give the orange back. He is arguing about the application of a rule, which means he has conceded the rule. Lewis calls that shared standard the Law of Human Nature, and his point is that it behaves differently from the other laws we know. A falling stone cannot disobey gravity. A man can disobey fairness, and does, every day, which is why the law shows up in our talk mainly as a complaint. So here is one thing in the whole universe that we know from the inside rather than by observing it from without: our own conduct, and the rule pressing on it that we did not make and cannot quite shake off. That is as far as the first four broadcasts go, and it is worth noticing how little they claim. This is not yet God, and Lewis says so; it is a Somebody or Something behind the universe that is intensely interested in right conduct. Nor is it the claim that everyone agrees about morality in detail. Cultures have differed about how many wives a man may have. None has admired the man who runs away in battle, or thought double-crossing the people who were kindest to you was the mark of a fine fellow. Paul makes the same observation about people who never had the law of Moses: "They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts" (Romans 2:15). Lewis, who was arguing with atheists, went one step at a time and refused to skip any.

(Q) "These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in." + Source: C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book I, chapter 1, "The Law of Human Nature." The close of the first broadcast talk, given in August 1941. Everything else in the book is built on those two sentences, and Lewis spends the next three talks refusing to let the listener escape either of them (T1).

(T2) A longing that nothing in this world satisfies is evidence that we were made for another one. + Think of the last time a piece of music, or a smell of woodsmoke, or a particular quality of light on a hillside, gave you a stab of wanting so sharp that you could not say what it was you wanted. You went looking for it again. You bought the record, went back to the hill, and it was not there. Lewis had that experience from childhood, tracked it for forty years, and gave it a name: Joy, a technical term of his own, meaning a desire that is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. The German Romantics called it Sehnsucht, longing. His argument from it is short and easily misheard. It is not that wanting something proves the thing exists; a man can want a hundred pounds he will never get. It is an argument from the kind of desire. A baby feels hunger, and there is such a thing as food. Ducklings want to swim, and there is water. A creature is not normally born with a built-in craving for something that does not exist anywhere in its world. Now consider a desire that every earthly thing promises and no earthly thing keeps: not a craving for a better marriage or a better country or better music, since those are the things that raised it and then failed to satisfy it. The most probable explanation, Lewis says, is that we were made for somewhere else. He is careful about the strength of the claim. Probable, not proved. And he adds the warning that gives the argument its practical edge: the danger is not that we want too much but that we settle, going on making mud pies in a slum because we cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. Augustine had said it in one line sixteen centuries earlier, that our hearts are restless until they rest in God, and Lewis had read him. What he added was the patient description of the experience itself, so that a reader recognises it before being told what it might mean.

(Q) "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." + Source: C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book III, chapter 10, "Hope." It closes the short list where he sets a baby’s hunger beside food and a duckling’s urge to swim beside water. Note the wording Lewis chose: the most probable explanation, not the only one (T2).

(T3) A man who said what Jesus said cannot be filed under great moral teacher. + The polite Englishman’s position on Jesus, then and now, is that he was a fine moral teacher whose followers made extravagant claims about him afterwards. Lewis’s reply is that the position will not stand, because of what the teacher is reported to have said. He forgave sins, not sins against himself but sins committed against other people, which is either meaningless or the act of the party actually wronged by every sin. He said he had always existed. He said he would come to judge the world. Asked directly whether he was the Christ, the Son of the Blessed, he said he was. So the man is either telling the truth, or he is deceiving, or he is deluded. Those three are the only options Lewis will allow, which is why the argument came to be called the trilemma: a dilemma forces a choice between two, and a trilemma forces a choice between three. The trick of it is what it does to the middle ground. A person who says the sort of thing Jesus said and is wrong about it is not a great moral teacher, whatever else he may be. He is on a level with a man who claims to be a poached egg, or he is something worse. You can call him a lunatic, you can call him a fiend, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. What you cannot do is pat him on the head as a wise rabbi. The argument has taken a beating over the years, and the strongest form of the objection deserves stating at full strength rather than in a weakened version. It is that Lewis offers three doors where there are four. The fourth is legend: perhaps Jesus never made these claims at all, and the church put the words into his mouth in the decades between his death and the writing of the Gospels. Lewis knew that objection perfectly well, and he answered it from his own trade rather than from theology. He had spent his working life reading myths, romances and legends in half a dozen languages, and he said flatly that the Gospels do not read like any of them: either this is reportage, or else some unknown writer in the second century, with no known predecessors or successors, anticipated the whole technique of modern realistic narrative. The trilemma, in other words, is not the whole case. It is what remains after the historical question about the sayings has been settled, and Lewis argued that question separately.

(Q) "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic, on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the Devil of Hell." + Source: C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book II, chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative." Lewis says he is trying to stop people from saying the one foolish thing they often say, that they are ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher but not his claim to be God. The passage began as a wartime broadcast, which explains its bluntness: he had fifteen minutes (T3).

(T4) If thinking is only the by-product of mindless matter, then no thought is worth believing, including that one. + Start with the two ways of using the word "because." A man says the bridge collapsed because the steel was fatigued: that is a cause producing an effect. A man says the bridge must have been fatigued because the fracture surface is granular: that is a reason supporting a conclusion. The first kind of because runs on physics and does not care whether anything is true. The second is the only kind that gives us knowledge. Now take naturalism, which is the view that nature is the whole show: that everything there is, thought included, is the product of physical causes running on from the beginning with no mind anywhere behind them. On that view every one of your beliefs arrived by the first kind of because. The atoms in your head did what atoms do, and out came the belief, in the way the fatigued steel did what fatigued steel does and down came the bridge. Which raises the obvious question. Why should a process like that produce true beliefs rather than merely useful ones, beliefs that kept a line of ancestors alive and breeding whether or not they matched the world? A frightened animal that runs from every rustle in the grass survives beautifully and is wrong most of the time. Something has to be said in reply, and here is the difficulty: whatever the naturalist says, he must say it by reasoning, and reasoning is precisely the thing whose credentials are under examination. He is being asked to vouch for the witness, and the only witness available is himself. Lewis’s conclusion is not that naturalism is false because it is unpleasant, and he is careful about that. It is that naturalism, if it were true, could not be rationally believed, because it saws off the branch that every argument for it is sitting on. This is the argument Elizabeth Anscombe attacked in 1948, and she was right about the version she attacked. Lewis had written as though a belief that has a physical cause could not also have a reason behind it, and that simply does not follow. The two can sit together: the firing of the neurons and the force of the evidence can both be true of one and the same act of thinking, the way the ink on a page and the meaning of the sentence are both really there. He took the criticism, spent twelve years turning it over, and rewrote the chapter for the 1960 edition of Miracles, narrowing the claim down to what it can actually carry: not that causes and reasons never coexist, but that naturalism gives no account of how the two of them could line up so reliably that our reasoning deserves to be trusted. In that form the argument is alive in professional philosophy. Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, the most discussed version now, names Lewis among the thinkers who had already seen the point, and the exchange is a small model of how an honest thinker handles being caught out.

(Q) "A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court." + Source: C. S. Lewis, Miracles, chapter 3, "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism" (1960 revised edition). The rule Lewis lays down before applying it: no account of the universe can be true unless it leaves room for our thinking to be a real insight, because the account itself is a piece of thinking (T4).

(T5) What all Christians have believed at all times is a hall with rooms off it, and the hall is worth defending. + Lewis took the phrase mere Christianity from Richard Baxter, a seventeenth-century English pastor who had served as a chaplain in a civil war fought partly over religion and who said afterwards that he was of no party but was a mere Christian. What Lewis meant by it he set out in a preface, and the picture he used has done more work than most arguments. Christianity is a house with a hall and several rooms opening off it. The hall is what Christians of every century have held in common, whichever communion they belonged to, communion here meaning a church body: Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist. The rooms are those bodies themselves, with their confessions and their orders of service, and the rooms are where the fires are lit and the meals are served. Three things follow from the picture, and he says all three rather than leaving them to be inferred. The first is that nobody is meant to live in the hall. It is a place to wait in, out of the weather, and the object is to get into one of the rooms. The second is that a man chooses his room by asking whether the doctrines taught there are true, and not by asking which door has the nicer paint on it or which room he happens to like the smell of. The third is about how he behaves while he is still waiting: he keeps the rules that hold good for the whole house, and he is courteous to the people already inside the rooms, because some of them are a great deal further along than he is. He kept to it in practice with a discipline that is easy to underestimate. He was a layman of the Church of England and said so, but he warned his readers at the start that they would not learn from him whether to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian or a Roman Catholic, and when he came to the Lord’s Supper he declined even to say which of the competing accounts of it he held, on the ground that the disputed points were not his brief. Before the second series of talks went out, the ones on what Christians believe, he did something that would be worth copying. He posted the script to four clergymen and asked them to criticise it: an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian and a Roman Catholic. Two of them came back with complaints. The Methodist thought he had said too little about faith. The Roman Catholic thought he had made the theories of the atonement sound less important than they are, the atonement being the church’s name for what the death of Christ did about sin, and the theories being the various accounts Christians give of how exactly it did it. On everything else, Lewis reported, all five of them were agreed, and the fifth man was Lewis. That is the reason a Baptist in Texas, a Catholic in Manila and an Orthodox reader in Athens can all hand the same paperback to a doubting friend.

(Q) "It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals." + Source: C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, preface (1952). He is explaining what the book is not. The hall is agreement, not a religion of its own, and he adds that when a reader does enter a room he must be kind to those who have chosen different doors and remember that they are all under the same roof (T5).

(Q) "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." + Source: C. S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?", a paper read to the Oxford Socratic Club on 6 November 1944, collected by Lewis in They Asked for a Paper and now printed in The Weight of Glory. The last sentence of the paper, and the sentence the Abbey chose for his memorial stone in Poets’ Corner. It says what he thought the arguments were finally for: not a proof held at arm’s length, but a light to work by.

What Christians Made of Him

(†) The church gained a translator, and half a century later it is still handing out his paperbacks. + There had been no shortage of learned defences of the faith before 1941. Aquinas had written one, and Butler, and Paley, and a shelf of Victorians after them. What there had not been was one that an ordinary reader could actually finish. Lewis wrote for the man on the bus, and the effect of that turned up first in conversions that somebody happened to write down. Charles Colson was a Nixon aide on his way to prison when he sat in a friend’s house in August 1973 and heard the chapter on pride read aloud to him. He broke down in his car outside, worked through the rest of the book, and gave his life to Christ a week later. Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the sequencing of the human genome, was floored by a dying patient who asked him what he himself believed, and a local Methodist minister handed him Mere Christianity; he tells that story in the first chapter of The Language of God. The American writer Sheldon Vanauken had it easier than either of them, because he worked through his doubts by letter with Lewis himself, and he printed the replies in A Severe Mercy. What makes all this unusual is that the endorsement crosses the lines it is not supposed to cross. American evangelicals adopted him wholesale, although he was an Anglican who believed a number of things many of them do not, and the adoption shows up in the numbers: when Christianity Today asked more than a hundred of its contributors and church leaders in 2000 to name the ten best religious books of the century, Mere Christianity was the book named more often than any other. Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox writers quote him just as freely. And Walter Hooper, who had worked as his secretary only through the last months of his life, spent the following half century editing the letters and the essays into print, which is a great deal of devotion to buy with a single summer’s employment. The plainest measure is that the words are still doing the job. A memorial stone went into Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, which is an honour England gives to writers rather than to apologists, and the sentence chosen for it is one about seeing everything else by the light of Christianity.

(†) His arguments left the radio and turned up in the philosophy journals. + Lewis stopped being a professional philosopher in 1925, when Magdalen hired him to teach English instead, and he never pretended otherwise afterwards. So the striking thing is how much of his reasoning survived contact with people who had stayed in the trade. The argument from reason (T4) is the clearest case. Alvin Plantinga, working at Notre Dame from the 1980s, turned it into what he called the evolutionary argument against naturalism, a careful claim about how probable it is that unguided evolution would hand us belief-forming faculties we could trust, and he named Lewis among those who had seen the difficulty first. Victor Reppert then wrote a book-length defence of the Lewis version, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea (2003). The objections and the replies to them now fill an academic literature of their own, which is not the usual fate of an argument set out by a tutor in medieval poetry for a popular book on miracles. The moral argument (T1) had a similar afterlife. In The Abolition of Man, the three Riddell Memorial Lectures he gave at Newcastle over three February evenings in 1943, Lewis pushed it further than the broadcasts had. Teach a generation of children that a value judgement is only a report of the speaker’s feelings, he said, and you will find, when the day comes that you want to tell them cruelty is wrong, that you have taken away the ground you needed to stand on to say it. The men who debunk all values end by having none of their own left to obey. To show that he was not defending a merely English set of rules, he added an appendix lining up the same basic precepts in Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, Chinese, Greek and Norse voices, so that a reader could see them recurring in cultures that had never met. Philosophers who share not one word of his theology have kept that book in print ever since. The trilemma (T3) has had the roughest ride of the three and the widest circulation of any of them, and both of those facts are worth reporting. Critics have pressed the legend option from the beginning. Defenders have answered that Lewis was speaking to readers who already granted that the Gospels report roughly what Jesus said, and that the argument was never meant to work on its own, but alongside a historical case for the sayings. Neither side has gone away. The debate is itself a kind of monument, because a fifteen-minute talk given over the wireless in wartime is still being answered, in print, seventy years later.

(†) Where his own record is open to challenge: purgatory, the historicity of some Old Testament books, and his hope for the unevangelised. + He would have expected the objections and asked for them. He called himself a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially high nor especially low nor especially anything else, and said that where he was wrong the reader should say so. Three places are worth naming, because Christians who love the rest of him do part company with him at each of them. - Prayers for the dead, and purgatory. Purgatory is the belief that a soul on its way to God is put through some further cleansing after death before it is fit to see him. In Letters to Malcolm, published after his death, Lewis says that he prays for the dead and that he believes in a purgatory, though not the medieval one in which a debt of punishment is paid off by degrees; his picture is a washing, a soul that asks to be cleaned up before it comes to the table. Most Protestants deny both the prayers and the purgatory, holding that Scripture gives no warrant for the practice and that the work was finished at the cross, and they press the text that says, "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). Roman Catholics and the Orthodox pray for the dead and always have. The disagreement here is a real one rather than a matter of words, and it should not be smoothed over. - How he read parts of the Old Testament. In Reflections on the Psalms he treats the book of Job as a dramatic poem rather than a chronicle, and suggests Jonah may be closer to a moral tale than to reportage, while holding that the Scriptures carry the word of God and that the history sharpens into fact as it moves toward Christ. Readers with a higher view of the historical character of every narrative book part company with him at that point, and it is a fair objection to make: the concession is his own, made in print, and not an invention of his critics. - Those who never heard. This is the question of the unevangelised, meaning the people who lived and died without the gospel ever reaching them. Lewis hoped that some who do not know Christ by name are saved by him even so, and he put the hope into a story at the end of The Last Battle, where a young Calormene soldier who has served the false god Tash all his life is received by Aslan, and is told that the service he rendered in sincerity was rendered to Aslan. The critics’ reply is short and scriptural: "there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). Lewis never claimed a mechanism and never taught that other religions save; what he refused to do was pronounce on the destiny of people he had not met. Whether that refusal is faithfulness or slippage is exactly the argument, and it has been going on since he died. None of these is a small point, and it is worth saying that he did not hide any of them: each comes from a book he signed. He also got caught out in public by Elizabeth Anscombe and rewrote his own chapter rather than bluff it through (T4), which is a better answer to the charge of amateurism than any defence his admirers have made for him.