The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (48 page)

If “The Art of Being Shocked” was what Lewis was after, though, he went about it by an unexpected path, appealing to the intellect rather than the emotions, arguing first for the objective reality of the moral law, then for our chronic failure to obey it, and finally for God as the giver of the law, who alone, by means of the Atonement, is working to repair us. Lewis knew that he would have to make this point in the language of the street, however, and he discovered, with some help from Eric Fenn, that he had a gift for doing so. He began the first evening broadcast:

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: “That’s my seat, I was there first”—“Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”—“Why should you shove in first?”—“Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”—“How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”—“Come on, you promised.”

It was a brilliant move. The instinct to protest against unfairness is universal, and it emerges very early in childhood. The offended party in such a quarrel, Lewis observes, “is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about—and the other man very seldom replies, ‘To hell with your standard.’” In other words, the moral law is a principle of accountability that transcends cultural differences and cannot be reduced to herd instinct. As a principle of accountability, the moral law presupposes freedom—
ought
implies
can
. If we fail to live up to the moral law, it can only be because we have freely rejected it; and if we are in the habit of freely rejecting it, we are in serious disarray. Summing up his first fifteen-minute talk, Lewis said, “Well, those are the two points I wanted to make tonight. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they
ought
to behave in a certain way, and can’t really get rid of it. Secondly, that they don’t 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.”

So far, Lewis had said nothing especially original or specifically Christian; Kant would have smiled. It was no small achievement, however, to have secured so succinct a moral foundation for the Christian reflections to follow. Lewis was proceeding upon the assumption that what had served as
praeparatio evangelica
(preparation for the Gospel) in his own life might win over his listeners as well. Before he became a Christian, he had been a convinced moral realist. After his conversion, he came to see knowledge of the moral law—called “natural law” or “law of nature” because it is a universal pattern discoverable by reason—as the best introduction to the faith, especially for those outside the Church. As St. Paul said, the natural law is “written on the heart” (Romans 2:14–15) even of Gentiles who have not known divine revelation. Lewis studied the development of this idea in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, undisputed master of natural law theory, whose belief in the fundamental rationality of human beings Lewis wholeheartedly shared, and also in the works of the sixteenth-century Anglican divine Richard Hooker, whose adaptation of scholastic natural law theory laid the foundation for Anglican moral theology.

Some Protestant thinkers have worried that natural law theory gives too much credit to human reason. But Lewis was convinced that the risk to moral sanity comes from placing too little, not too much, stock in reason. He opposed, with every fiber of his being, subjectivism, relativism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and all views that came, he believed, from despising the objective, essentially commonsense morality of ordinary people. Though our minds are fallen instruments, we remain capable of discerning the difference between right and wrong, and honest self-appraisal suffices to show us what the revealed law makes even more transparent, that we are chronic sinners in need of grace. Far from being the remnant of herd instinct, the introjection of parental scolding, or the self-sufficient discovery of human reason, the moral law is the closest we are likely to get in this life to a vision of the God who made us.

Wisely, Lewis did not bring God directly into the argument until his fourth talk. Even then, he was nervous about losing his audience. To disarm suspicions, he resorted to a few special rhetorical devices. One was slang: “There’s been a great deal of soft soap talked about God for the last hundred years. That’s not what I am offering. You can cut all that out.” And again: “You may even have thought that I’d played a trick on you—that I’d been carefully wrapping up to look like philosophy what turns out to be one more ‘religious jaw.’” In revising the
Broadcast Talks
for publication as
Mere Christianity
, Lewis deleted the contractions, but the slang remained, giving academic theologians and stylistic purists one more reason to turn up their noses. He wooed his vast audience further by deploying, to great effect, the telling analogy and didactic exemplum, often introduced as a “supposal”:

Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, can’t itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law is, so to speak, the tune we’ve got to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

These techniques united to create a strong bond between Lewis and his vast audience, and the talks were an instant success. Justin Phillips, a BBC radio journalist and author of
C. S. Lewis in a Time of War
, quotes an RAF officer recalling an episode in the officers’ mess, in which Lewis’s voice boomed over the radio just as the barman was handing over a drink. “Suddenly everyone just froze listening to this extraordinary voice.” At the end of the fifteen-minute talk, “there was the barman with his arm still up there and the other man still waiting for his drink.” Letters from listeners poured in: “One gets funny letters after broadcasting—some from lunatics who sign themselves ‘Jehovah’ or begin ‘Dear Mr Lewis, I was married at the age of 20 to a man I didn’t love’—but many from serious inquirers whom it was a duty to answer fully. So letter writing has loomed pretty large!”

What Do Christians Believe?

Lewis broadcast his second series of talks—“What Christians Believe”—during January and February 1942. He began by presenting his credentials: he had been chosen to give the talks not because of his special expertise, but because, as a layman and converted atheist, he might be better able than some professional theologians to speak to the concerns of ordinary people. His aim was to express, in five fifteen-minute talks, the lineaments of the classical Christian worldview, or, as he would later call it, after the seventeenth-century English Puritan theologian Richard Baxter, “mere Christianity”—mere, that is, in the older sense of the word, meaning pure, unvarnished, and undistorted by sectarian bias. To that end, he sent his scripts to be vetted by four clergy friends: a Catholic (Bede Griffiths), a Methodist (the RAF padre Joseph Dowell), a Presbyterian (Eric Fenn), and an Anglican (possibly Austin Farrer, according to Walter Hooper).

Lewis’s chief concern was to combat the tendency to reduce the faith, as Enlightenment thinkers were wont to do, to nothing but window dressing on the moral law. It’s only “after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it’s
after
all that that Christianity begins to talk.” And what Christianity begins to talk about, Lewis expressed with a favorite analogy: that we are living in “enemy-occupied territory,” in a world under siege. Christianity is “the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you’re really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends: that’s why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us going.” One could hear, amid the groans of liberal theologians who had thought we were done with Devil talk, the echo of Churchill’s BBC addresses to a world overshadowed by “the dark curse of Hitler.” In wartime, Lewis could count on the siege analogy appealing even to the lapsed Christians in his audience.

The analogy is a powerful one, and perhaps just as effective when encountered in peacetime. Lewis’s point was that we are always overshadowed by a dark curse; it’s just that Hitler brought the curse into plain view. Shortly before the first series of radio talks, Lewis had skirmished with C.E.M. Joad in the pages of
The Spectator
over whether the problem of evil has a “new urgency” during wartime.

…
what
new urgency? Evil may seem more urgent to us than it did to the Victorian philosophers—favoured members of the happiest class in the happiest country in the world at the world’s happiest period. But it is no more urgent for us than for the great majority of monotheists all down the ages. The classic expositions of the doctrine that the world’s miseries are compatible with its creation and guidance by a wholly good Being come from Boethius waiting in prison to be beaten to death and from St Augustine meditating on the sack of Rome. The present state of the world is normal; it was the last century that was the abnormality.

Whether in war or in peace, questions of religious commitment are always urgent. It is always on “this day” (Deuteronomy 30:15) that we are offered the choice of good or evil, life or death. Lewis’s argumentative mind tended to run to such dichotomies in any case, so it seemed natural to set forth the options for belief in pairs of opposites: atheism and theism, pantheism and monotheism, dualism and its Christian alternative. Dualism appealed for its vigor, but Christianity proved the better “fighting religion,” contending for the good world God made against the evils that are parasitic on that good.

In the third talk, Lewis restated in plain language the standard free- will theodicy: that it was a greater good for God to have created a world in which his intelligent creatures (angels and men) were free to choose between good and evil than it would have been for God to create a race of automatons, hardwired to choose good. That free creatures might decide to choose evil was the risk God took in creating us—and when they did choose badly, and creation was marred, God determined to rescue us from the ruin, first by giving us an innate knowledge of right and wrong; second, by sending the human race, in the form of myths and cults, “good dreams” of a dying-and-rising god; third, by electing the children of Israel and spending “several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was,” and finally by visiting his sorry planet in the person of a Jewish man who said “the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.” At this point, Lewis resumed the
aut Deus, aut malus homo
argument, converting the dilemma (God or bad man) into a trilemma: lunatic, liar, or Lord:

I’m trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really silly thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That’s the one thing we mustn’t say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said wouldn’t be a great moral teacher. He’d either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he’s a poached egg—or else he’d be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But don’t let us come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He hasn’t left that open to us. He didn’t intend to.

Such stark oppositions are often recipes for disaster, and one wonders that Lewis, who prized logic, brought this one to the table. Other views of Jesus may be—and have been—offered: that he was sane on the whole but mistaken on this one point, that he was misled by his handlers into a false understanding of his identity and mission, that he was a mystic who spoke in allegorical code. There is also the possibility that Jesus did not actually claim divinity but was a prophet divinized by his followers after death.

This last objection was one Lewis did not bother to consider. In his youth, he had been a great proponent of “higher criticism,” writing knowingly to Arthur about a “Hebrew philosopher Yeshua” who became the object of a mystery cult after his death. But for the mature Lewis, higher criticism had no traction; some years later he wrote, “as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends.” Not artistic enough for mythology, yet filled with small details—like Jesus scribbling in the dust—that only the modern realistic novel would think to include. The so-called “historical Jesus” has proven to be an elusive figure, each version supplanting its predecessor; but the Jesus of the Gospels gives every indication of being conscious of his divinity, forgiving sins, casting out demons, uttering “I AM” sayings that echo the tetragrammaton (YHWH), and promising to return as judge at the end of time.

In the original broadcast, though not in the published versions, Lewis anticipated the historicist objection: “Of course you can take the line of saying He didn’t say these things, but his followers invented them. But that’s only shifting the difficulty. They were Jews, too: the last people who would invent such a thing, the people who had never said anything of the sort about Moses or Elijah. That theory only saddles you with twelve inexplicable lunatics instead of one.” It was just as well that he removed this passage, for it would not withstand a deep study of Christian beginnings in the Jewish and Mediterranean world. Lewis’s impression of Judaism rested largely on his reading of the Old Testament, viewed through the lens of a general philosophical monotheism; but it was not unusual for Jewish thinkers during the Second Temple period, in which Christianity took shape, to dream of quasi-divine, or angelomorphic, prophets and saints. Moreover, that God sometimes chose to become manifest to his people, whether in the still, small voice or as an overwhelming angelic presence, was a fundamentally Jewish belief. The Incarnation was a new idea, but not an alien one; as Lewis himself notes, the Jews were being prepared from the moment of their election for just such a saving invasion of history.