The Anchor and Compass

C. S. Lewis was brought up in the Church of England but left any childhood faith behind as soon as his independent circumstances and the demands of compulsory church attendance allowed, and in response to what he felt his intellectual maturity demanded.  As an educated young “modern,” he came to view religion in general, including the Christianity of his youth, as a mere cultural construct that evolved to provide comfort and answers to less “enlightened” men.  He had long turned to poetry to supply the kind of “spiritual” and aesthetic satisfaction that religion provided for others.  In looking to poetry, he unwittingly set himself on the road to redemption.

What Lewis most wanted to be in early life was an accomplished poet.  After Magdalen College made him a fellow in 1925, and his long poem Dymer was published the following year, it looked like he might be on the path toward achieving his desire.  But in his own reading, he found himself continually drawn to religious writers, whose works were “were clearly those on whom I could really feed.”  Walter Hooper notes of Lewis at this time “All these years the greatest pleasure he ever had was from Christian poetry. Things like Spencer, Milton — all of these great poets. And yet he found out that he was reading them, as he later said, with the point left out. The same thing was happening with his friends — the people he thought he should’ve liked were the college atheists. But the ones he really liked were Tolkien, a practicing very devout Catholic, and Owen Barfield, who asked all the right questions” (Question of God, “A Leap in the Dark” segment)

What poetry, story, and myth did for Lewis was to draw him with an indescribable longing, but for what he did not yet know.  Later, the Christian Lewis would call this “Joy,” and it would be one of the central themes of his writing.  How he came to describe it as was not the thing itself desired, not even the satisfaction of a desire, but a desire itself that is more desirable than any satisfaction because it points one toward the source of the desired.  And that led Lewis down a logical path to infer that if, in life, there are “real” satisfactions for our desires in this world, should not the longing that was Joy also have its satisfaction, but perhaps in something beyond this world?

Then Lewis read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and, “for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense” (Surprised by Joy). He continues, “The fox had now been dislodged from the wood and was running in the open, bedraggled and weary, the hounds barely a field behind.”   Weary of running, he came to the realization the truth about his resistance:  “I had always wanted, above all things, not to be interfered with. I had wanted — mad wish — to call my soul my own.”  Then comes his famous description of the moment of surrender:  “You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark, were demanded. I gave in, and admitted that God was God … perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” (SJ).

Lewis now believed in God, but what remained unresolved were the claims of Jesus to be the Christ.  Walter Hooper describes the well-known night in 1931, when Lewis “had invited Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, two of his closest friends, to Magdalen College. It was a windy night, they went along before dinner, they walked along Addison’s Walk talking about mythology. They stayed up till 4:00 AM and Tolkien did his work well” (Question of God).  Lewis described a critical turning point in a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves:  “What Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this — that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a pagan story I didn’t mind it at all — I was mysteriously moved by it. The reason was that in pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound . . . . Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth.”

Lewis ruminated on this idea until it seeped into his soul.  In the Question of God, he describes his experience of what we American Evangelicals might call “accepting Christ” thus:  “I know very well when but hardly how the final step was taken. I went with my brother to have a picnic at Whipsnade Zoo. We started in fog, but by the end of our journey the sun was shining. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and when we reached the zoo I did. I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, becomes aware that he is now awake. But what of Joy? To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.”

In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis brings all of his philosophical and critical skill to bear in responding to this classic contra Deum claim:  “If God were good, He would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, he would be able to do what he wished.  But the creatures are not happy.  Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.”  This assertion, Lewis says, “is the problem of pain in its simplest form.”

His response, while deeply thoughtful and eloquently expressed, is far from simple.  In successive short yet profound chapters, Lewis proceeds not so much to answer the question, but to break it down into key elements; clarify the meaning, logical suppositions, and inferences in each; and engage the reader’s mind with the necessary and consequential implications that emerge from the exercise.  What does it really mean to speak of Divine Omnipotence?  How are we to understand Divine Goodness?  How and when do Human Wickedness and the Fall of Man figure into things?

What lies at the center of the question, Lewis points out, is the way we understand the nature of God’s love for His creation.  “The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word, ‘love,’ and look on things as if man were the centre of them.  Man is not the centre.  God does not exist for the sake of man.  Man does not exist for his own sake.”  We approach the problem of pain with a flawed assumption that our personal happiness and satisfaction in life should be the primary concern of our “loving” God.  Like spoiled children, we crave indulgence when we need discipline.  We expect to receive all we want without considering what we really need.  We assert our right to be free from all restrains while forsaking any sense of personal responsibility.  “To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are,” Lewis asserts, “is to ask that God should cease to be God.”

How can “The Good God” not have our ultimate happiness and absolute well-being as the focus of His love for us?  Perhaps He does, and it is our own conceptions of what it means to be happy and well and fulfilled and satisfied which are skewed.  But if this were true, then we would be required to submit ourselves to a measure outside of ourselves in order to “right” our perspective.  Our resistance (or refusal) to do so is rooted in the same disobedience that produced the Fall of Man:  we wish to be “our own” and to exist for “ourselves.”  “From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self,” Lewis writes, “the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it.”  To choose self as the center is the “basic sin behind all particular sins,” and we are “either committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it” every day of our lives.

But suppose we rightly choose to submit, rightly place ourselves in relation to Him, and rightly align our sense of goodness and love and happiness as He teaches us?  And what if, even though we do so, our beloved falls ill and dies?  How does one whose mind was able to so insightfully reflect upon (and even make sense of) “the problem of pain” react when the “problem” becomes personal?  Lewis shows us with brutal honesty in A Grief Observed.  After his wife’s death, Lewis observes,

I can believe He [is a Good God] when I think of my own suffering.  It is harder when I think of hers.  What is grief compared with physical pain?  Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind.  The mind has some power of evasion.

In this painfully intimate little book, Lewis offers no answers beyond faithful obedience to what one knows despite what one so viscerally feels.  Near the end, he simply states, “We cannot understand.”  Is our ability to understand God, in such times, “an act of intelligence or of love?  That,” Lewis concludes, “is probably another of the nonsense questions.”

In the Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis examines the problems with “modern” education by taking to task the authors of “a book on English intended for  . . . the upper forms of schools.’”  Lewis’s concerns run far deeper than matters of methodology or curricula.  Modern education, he fears, has fallen into the hands of pseudo-intellectual “Innovators” and “Conditioners” who disdain anything smacking of traditional order.  “I am not supposing them to be bad men,” Lewis writes.  “They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all.”  As a result, they “sacrifice their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to deciding what ‘Humanity’ shall henceforth mean.”  At best, their work produces “men without chests.”  At worst, it facilitates the end of Man altogether.

“The differences between us . . . go all the way down,” Lewis asserts.  In the new scheme, words which “appear to be saying something important” are in reality “only saying something about our own feelings” and/or advancing an agenda.  Language is relegated to articulations of subjective feeling, the mere expression of which makes the thing so.  Lewis will have none of this nominalist heresy:  “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it.” The objects of our emotional (and verbal and literary) responses “did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.”

Lewis also sees at the root of this transformation the modern quest to subdue “nature” to serve the needs of humanity.  In the exercise of “Man’s power” over a natural order Lewis sees a harsher reality—“What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men by which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by.”  And here lies the real danger:  through the modern emphasis on therapeutics and exercise of techniques—particularly in the areas of “eugenics and scientific education”—Man will not rest until he has “obtained full control over himself.  Human nature,” Lewis asserts, “will be the last part of nature to surrender to man.  The battle will then be won.”

This “battle,” of course, is the central theme of Lewis’s novel, That Hideous Strength.  It is being fought on many levels:  in the marriage of main characters Jane and Mark Studdock; among the “Progressive Element” and traditional “Die-Hards” on the Bracton College faculty; and most importantly (though surreptitiously) between the forces of Belbury and St. Anne’s.  As Lord Feverstone attempts to lure Mark over to work for the N.I.C.E., he speaks directly to the battle at hand:  “You’ll hear people . . . burbling away about the ‘war’ against reaction.  It never enters their heads that it might be a real war with real casualties.”  From Feverstone’s “modern” perspective, the reactionary resistance, though slumbering for centuries, was beginning to rally (as Lewis hoped it might).  “They know now that we have got real powers:  that the question of what humanity is to be is going to be decided in the next sixty years.  They’re going to fight every inch.”

Lewis’s portrayal of this great battle in the novel reaches far beyond mere cultural wars.  The deeper powers and principalities at work are brought to light as well.  The novel extends The Abolition’s criticism of modern education into (as David Mills points out) practically every area of consequence Lewis wished to comment on:  “God and man[;] marriage, sex, and the differences between men and women; academic politics; ideological languages; the nature of modernizers and reformers . . . ; industrial versus pastoral ideals; the importance of beauty of order and tradition; and the nature of the spiritual struggle, particularly the need to subordinate the ego in submission to God.” (“Great Escapes & Lesser Stories” in Touchstone, Jan/Feb 2004)

In The Abolition, Lewis concludes, “There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages.” The latter sought to “conform the soul to reality” through “knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.”  For both magic and applied science, the goal is “how to subdue reality to the wishes of men” through “technique.”  The essence of humanity is preserved in “wisdom of old.”  The “subdued reality” wrought by magic and applied science results in the End of Man.

The four Pevensie children at the center of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe are referred to in Narnia as “Sons of Adam” and “Daughters of Eve.”  No doubt C. S. Lewis intends for readers to see in these four children aspects of all people’s responses to the fantastic proposition that there is more to being human than  may appear “in the flesh.”  Lewis seems to make a point in many scenes where the children appear together (both in and outside of Narnia) of highlighting their individually distinctive reactions and attitudes.  Perhaps there is more for us to see here than just four children.

The most dramatic of such scenes is in Ch. 7 when Lewis describes each child’s response to “the name of Aslan.”  In each description we see an essential element of each character, which I think shows itself in other ways throughout the book.  “Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror.  Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous.  Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her.  And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.”  We all respond to the idea of God, and what His existence means for us personally, in ways that are something similar.  If we are self-centered and deceptive (like Edmund) we fear being held to account.  If we fit the mold of responsible elder (like Peter), we respond with courage.  If our sensibilities are nurturing and romantic (like Susan), our hearts take wing.  If we are naturally honest and joyful (like Lucy), we delight in the unanticipated moment of grace.

In their interactions with one another and reactions to situations in the story, the children demonstrate aspects of these basic character types.  Some situations reveal positive traits; but at times more negative responses are manifest as well.  When the four first meet the professor, their reactions to the strange old man are telling.  Edmund “wanted to laugh” at his appearance. Peter sees opportunity to “do anything we want.” Susan thinks him “an old dear.” Lucy is “a little afraid” owing to his odd appearance (an “honest” response, given her age).  Edmund makes fun, Peter makes plans, Susan is sentimental, Lucy is scared.

When Lucy returns from her first visit to Narnia, she’s concerned the others will have worried and is excited to share her amazing experience.  Peter’s response is condescending and dismissive. Edmund (again) pokes fun.  Susan goes the wardrobe but finds all as it should be.  When all four do make their way to Narnia, noble Peter is quick to apologize, and when scheming Edmund is tripped up by his deceit he’s harshly treated by his brother.  Lucy is equally quick to forgive and forge ahead.  Nurturing Susan looks out for everyone’s welfare by suggesting using fur coats to stave off the cold.

The presents each receives from Father Christmas also reflect their characters and equip them for the coming struggle:  Peter’s sword and shield; Susan’s bow and horn, Lucy’s cordial and dagger.  Edmund, not present to receive one, will receive his great “present” directly from Aslan himself after he’s been rescued from the Witch’s deceptions.  When the Witch demands the boy’s life in keeping with “the Deep Magic,” Aslan steps in. As the great Lion engaged the evil Witch, Edmund stood by his side, “looking all the time into his face.”  Susan presses Aslan to “do something about the Deep Magic” that would sacrifice Edmund’s life, urging him to “find something to use against it.”  Peter “stood with his back to the others, looking out at the distant sea.”  Lucy, most wronged by her brother, cries out his name in pity.  Susan would win the day by craft.  Peter has turned away, perhaps wondering if justice should prevail.  Lucy’s cry begs for mercy.  Edmund, finally on the right side of things, is saved by grace.

The idea of “Joy” is among C. S. Lewis’s most famous and familiar contributions to Christian literature.  Its influence on “the shape of his early life” is the central theme of Surprised by Joy (SJ), and its attainment is the irresistible impetus of young John’s quest in The Pilgrim’s Regress (PR).

Lewis seems initially hesitant to name the thing at all for fear that naming it would fix it in place. Joy is too transcendent to be individually defined; yet it is also such a visceral reality that one must at least attempt descriptions of encounters with it.  Lewis describes three experiences in SJ which occurred in the innocence of childhood.  First was his brother’s toy garden, which evoked “a sensation of desire; but desire for what?”  Here we first encounter the word “longing” as a descriptor; he felt himself “stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased.”  The second he describes as “the Idea of Autumn,” encountered through reading Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin.  “One went back to the book, not to gratify the desire . . . but to reawaken it.”  The third came through poetry, in which a passage from Tegner’s Drapa (“Balder the beautiful/Is dead, is dead –“) evoked a fleeting desire for “Northernness” of “almost sickening intensity” and left him immediately “wishing I were back in it” as it passed.

Lewis’s descriptions of Joy also have an element of distance in them.  The best works of Matthew Arnold, he writes, gave him “a sense, not indeed of passionless vision, but of a passionate, silent gazing at things a long way off” (SJ). He later describes his older perceptions (after “Joy had left”) of “Northerness” as an “endless twilight of . . . remoteness, severity”; and “with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like a heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself.”  In reading Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, Lewis recognized what had been lost and equated “the distance of the Twilight” with “the distance of my own past Joy.”  Both, he realized, were unattainable, they “flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss.”  More pointedly, Lewis frankly offers, “Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure.  It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing” (all SJ).

That sense of “inconsolable longing,” of course, it what motivates the Pilgrim in his search for the illusive Western Island that serves as an image of Joy in PR.  Upon first seeing a vision of the Island though the window in the garden wall, he immediately found himself “straining to grasp” not the island itself, but the long-forgotten childhood memory it evoked.  “There came to him from beyond the wood a sweetness and a pang so piercing” that he forgot all else, concluding, “I know now what I want.”  What follows is a quest for the Island itself (a mistake, of course), during which innumerable worldly substitutes offer themselves as replacements (and are invariably found wanting).

And of course Lewis himself (in SJ) relates the many such substitutes for Joy that tempted him along his own journey.  The beginning of clarity arrived when he realized “the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.  There, to have is to want, and to want is to have.”  God gives us experiences of Joy to inspire our longing for Him, and He allows us the pangs of loss and longing that come from trying to find Joy in things other than Him—even in our own memories of Joy.  When young John finally “sees” his Island (along with a sacred throng, not merely on his own), “the pain and the longing were changed and all unlike what they had been of old:  for humility was mixed with their wildness, and the sweetness came not with pride and with the lonely dreams of poets nor with the glamour of a secret, but with the homespun truth of folk-tales.”  And he realized that “the Island should be different than his desires, and so different that, if he had known it, he would not have sought it.”  It was the Island’s Creator, not the Island, which drew him.

C. S. Lewis was working simultaneously on the material that appeared in these two works–perhaps his best known writings outside of the Narnia books.  Mere Christianity was a compilation of a series of radio talks Lewis gave on BBC Radio in 1942.  Lewis was writing The Screwtape Letters at the same time he was preparing scripts for those radio programs.  Reading the two together, as I recently did for a class, made for an interesting experience.  Both communicate similar and important truths about Christian understanding of reality, but each does so using very different rhetorical and artistic approaches.

In Mere Christianity (MC) Lewis the Christian teacher employs his gifts of profound clarity in language and deep simplicity in illustration to demonstrate the “sensible realities” built into the Cosmos of God’s creation.  He reveals God’s truth by showing how it is woven through the fabric of human experience and may be comprehended by the rational mind of any honest seeker.  He gives us simple propositions ( “First, human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it.  Secondly, they do not behave in that way.”).  He assembles logical inferences and conclusions on such foundations (“The moral law is not any one instinct or set of instincts; it is something which makes a kind of tune [goodness or right conduct] by directing the instincts.”).

At times, the discourse in MC is brusquely matter-of-fact (“Christianity is a fighting religion.”), other times it is more of a folksy wisdom (“We have to take reality as it comes to us; three is no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or what we should have expected it to be like.”).  Always, always, he’s pointing us to First Principles that—despite our determination to avoid or redefine them–provide the moorings for civilized existence and the basis of Christian reality (“The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see . . . .”).

In The Screwtape Letters (SL), Lewis the Christian artist crafts a remarkably creative articulation of the same deep truths, but as they might be seen from the other side of the mirror.  Again, the propositions are made—but now how crafty; how ironic! (“Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.”).  Consequent inferences and expositions seem just as rationally derived, yet through a completely perverted lens of reality (“Our cause is never more in danger that when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”).

Advice and admonitions from Wormtongue’s “affectionate uncle” provide a kind of “back-handed” vision of the truths which must not be seen or even acknowledged.  In permitting his “patient” a good book and simple walk, poor Wormtongue is derided for such an act of unmitigated ignorance (“you allowed him two real positive Pleasures . . . .  The characteristics of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore . . . give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality.”).  Here we also are given a demonic inversion of First Principles:  “The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart” and continuing, “But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate this horror of the Same Old Thing into a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in the will.”

This juxtaposed reading allows us, I think, to receive the same “lesson” (the nature of “Mere Christianity”) in two distinct forms.  MC itself shows us clearly who God wants us to be:  “servants who can finally become sons.”  But SL cleverly reveals the true desires of our True Enemy, who sees us as “cattle who can finally become food.”  Lewis shows us human reality from both sides of the mirror; in doing so he hopes to show us who we really are.