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Although C. S. Lewis was a great Christian apologist,
he had an “astonishingly
faint and crude” understanding of the Church.
The delusion
of Mere Christianity
By W. Patrick Cunningham
One of the most popular books by C. S. Lewis is Mere Christianity (Simon & Schuster
Touchstone, 1996 edition), a compilation of four essays written during World War II to
defend the reasonableness of Christian faith. Many Catholic clergy have recommended it to
inquirers and catechumens over the years since its components’ first publication.
Lewis intended it as a kind of anteroom to Christianity, an introduction to the common
elements believed by all followers of Christ. Once these doctrines, he hoped, were
assimilated, the reader would find his way out of the anteroom into a “room” or
Christian communion. We may want to rethink our recommending this book, or at least
circumscribe it with counseling, in the light of the sheer decline of faith and reason in
the late twentieth century. Some thirty-five years after Clive Lewis died on the same day
as John Kennedy, we have to admit that his collection has not worn very well.
James Nuechterlein, writing in First Things (November 1998 at 7), tells
a disturbing story of how, as a freshman at Valparaiso University taking a basic Christian
doctrine course, he was required to read Lewis’s book. From it, the instructor drew
out the doctrine of Original Sin. We inherit, it was said, a condition from our first
parents in which we sin because our nature is not capable of doing good. In
Nuechterlein’s words, “If the wrongs that I did proceeded inevitably from the
nature of my fallen being, then what had previously seemed the ineffable grace of God in
Christ saving me from the deserved consequence of my deeds became the superfluous action
of an arbitrary, indeed quite absurd, deity. I should be grateful for being rescued from a
situation for which I had no moral responsibility in the first place?” He
subsequently became an agnostic and only by a convoluted path regained his Christian (in
his case, Lutheran) footing.
Now we can speculate that Nuechterlein’s problem was really a
function of a specific instructor’s comprehension of Lutheran theology, but must also
ask the more fundamental question: What is it about Lewis’s writing, coupled with the
subtleties of Christian doctrine, that might lead a well-disposed reader to a conclusion
precisely the opposite of what Lewis intended? I am not referring to the reader’s
problem. Some readers do not or cannot understand Lewis. As Randall Paine wrote
(“Catholics and Mr. Lewis,” HPR, July 1989 at 22), “we of the twentieth
century are so very, very bad when it comes to using our minds.” The intrinsic
problems in Mere Christianity today will affect even moderately intelligent novice
readers.
The Protestant Lewis
Lewis’s background, of course, had an impact on his thought and
expression. He was reared in what we would consider an excessive Calvinistic environment,
and early in his academic career reacted by retreating into atheism. Over a period of
time, as he relates in Surprised by Joy, he regained his Christian, but Protestant
“soul,” and turned his considerable writing skills to the defense of Christian
“basics.” Apologetics comprised a minor part of his output, much of it
originally written for 10-30 minute radio broadcasts. A master of the modern parable, he
also wrote a number of novels, particularly the “Space Trilogy,” and Until We
Have Faces. It is critical to understand that, although Lewis was a practicing Anglican,
he expressly avoided anything smacking of “Romanism.” Some might argue that he
had a “Catholic soul,” but there is more evidence that he remained frozen in a
kind of early twentieth-century Protestant Anglicanism, the gentlemanly delusion that what
Henry VIII bequeathed his people was actually a “middle way” between the
Catholic and Reformed paths. Lewis was a moderate Calvinist, much affected by his
extensive reading, particularly of the classics and of moralizing novelist-preacher George
MacDonald. From MacDonald, Lewis derived the model of God as “easy to please but hard
to satisfy.” A reader, then, whose mind-set was formed in a more optimistic or
secular atmosphere than Lewis’s might find his sometimes pungent turns of phrase
(e.g., “an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this
World”) disturbing, even bewildering.
The reality of evil in Lewis’s age was no more than it is in our
own, but it was unarguably more palpable. Lewis’s early adulthood was spent in the
muddy, bloody trenches of the left Allied flank in World War I Belgium and France. He left
some of his own blood there. He witnessed the decadent lifestyles of fellow writers like
Bertrand Russell and Ernest Hemingway in the interwar period. In the Second War, Hitler
was an ever-present embodiment of evil to Englishmen of all faiths as they daily waited
for an Axis bomb or V-1 warhead to dismember their families. Wars tend to help humans
think in black-and-white terms, to believe in the Law of Decent Behavior, as he calls it
(p. 22) and in the inability of humans to keep it.
Over fifty years after the conclusion of that war, we are in a vastly
different cultural situation. The only experiences of war recalled by the majority of
Americans were less “heroic.” Korea, Vietnam, even Kuwait were experiences of
moral ambiguity and incompleteness. Modern philosophers speak in terms of graded shades of
gray. Law protects abortionists even while it makes babies fair game in the process of
being born. Even some Catholic prelates have supported the starvation of comatose patients
as an act of compassion. Finally, those whom we wish to bring to Christ, especially the
young, have been raised in an environment of drugs, MTV and free condom distribution,
while their public role models have acted as if the moral law ends above the beltline. In
short, the moral consensus that “good people” like C. S. Lewis agreed on at the
turn of this century has all but disappeared in its final decades.
Shocks to the system
Now C. S. Lewis holds to a moral code practically indistinguishable
from that preached by every Pope of the twentieth century. That is to his credit, but it
is precisely the problem with using Mere Christianity as an introduction to generic
Christianity. The unguided proselyte who reads it could find it both a culture shock and a
“humbug.” Consider the perfectly correct passage “The monstrosity of sexual
intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one
kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go
along with it and make up the total union.” Then consider a generation-X reader,
raised on a regime of feel-good pap and self-esteem, where the only rules surrounding sex
he’s ever heard of involve the correct use of prophylactics. Will that reader say
“Wow! That is so cool. That speaks to my life and experience”? Probably not.
Furthermore, if by some miracle of grace he, like Augustine, accepts that teaching, he
won’t find it anymore lying on the reading stand in Lewis’s generic entry hall
to Christianity. Those Protestant clerics whom the media quote on matters of sex are
those, like Jon Spong, who take decidedly heterodox stands. In fact, we know that even
most Catholic preachers avoid talking about sexual morality entirely these days. I myself
have not heard any Sunday sermon on the topic since 1963.
Furthermore, Lewis never tries to reconcile his magnificent ode to
marriage in this book, and its emphasis on Christian procreation, with his refusal to come
down on the “right” side of the birth-control debate. He gives us one of the
finest expositions of the reality of the Natural Law, but flees from the obvious
application to the inextricably conjoined unitive and procreative ends of marriage. His
rationale? Because he is not a woman, not married, and “did not think it my place to
take a firm line about pains, dangers and expenses from which I am protected” (p. 9).
He unwittingly—we hope—thus gave ammunition to the moral cretins who chanted to
Pope Paul VI back in the sixties: “You no playa the game, you no makea the
rules.”
Lewis’s style and method are both his greatest asset and his worst
enemy. Because he writes in an informal, almost chatty method, the reader might from time
to time want to talk back to him. So, for instance, at the exposition on Original Sin he
might object (like Nuechterlein) “but that’s not fair.” Yet the author
doesn’t anticipate that question, and so the conversation is one-sided. Furthermore,
his method is ruthlessly inductive. He looks about for examples of the Truth he is trying
to expose, and marshals them to advance it. But the strength of induction becomes its
ultimate misfortune. Lewis uses timely examples to make its point quickly and effectively.
But timely examples are inadequate in the pursuit of timeless truth. They may age poorly.
That is probably why Lewis’s chapter on “The Great Sin” of Pride may seem
less than compelling. His examples seem frozen in an earlier, simpler, pre-technological
age.
As Christopher Derrick observed in the week after Lewis’s death
(Tablet, 11/30/1963 at 1296), although Lewis was one of the “greatest Christian
apologists of his time,” he had an “astonishingly faint and crude” sense of
Church. In fact, the Church herself is almost ignored as an instrument of salvation and
corporate identification with Christ in his writings as a whole. His early Calvinism shows
through in this way. In fact, he concentrates almost exclusively on the individual act of
faith and the individual’s relationship to Christ. Thus he is eager to classify
questions about the Mother of God as among those disputed points he will not address:
“I never say more about the Blessed Virgin Mary than is involved in asserting the
virgin birth of Christ . . . to say more would take me at once into highly controversial
regions” (p. 7).
But as Lumen Gentium (2) insists, an essential part of the plan of the
Father is to call together in one Church all those who believe in Christ. The Virgin Mary,
as Lewis knew, was intimately bound up with all the mysteries of Christ (LG at 61). She
was, he was bound to affirm, Mother of Jesus and Mother of God. All these mysteries were
part of even the Anglican communion’s heritage. It may have reduced the volume of
protest letters directed to his radio shows to downplay her role in salvation history
along with the Church’s vital work, but it also impoverishes his treatment of the
Christian life. Once again, Lewis’s Protestant soul keeps him from anything remotely
smacking of human merit in Christ. Frankly, one cannot understand the mysteries of the
application of the grace of Christ through the Church without an appreciation of and
devotion to the Mother of Jesus.
In the end, Lewis’s little volume misses the mark he set for
himself. His essays really do create a kind of minimalist Christianity that unfortunately
become a kind of religion in themselves for many evangelical Christians. We only need look
around at the vigorously growing “non-denominational” generic Christian
assemblies that are taking root in every major city of the U.S. to see that this is true.
The only criterion of membership is “accepting Jesus into your heart.” These
congregations never recite a Creed of any kind, and don’t generally believe in a
Church at all (except as the local congregation of believers). They generally accept
Lewis’s interpretation of the moral law, and, like him, are usually nonchalant about
contraception, which is the real litmus test of belief in the natural moral law. They,
therefore, have made permanent camp in Lewis’s anteroom, the last place he wanted
them to be, precisely because of his refusal himself to see the real structure of the
house.
For it is true, as Paine suggests, that the house we call Church is not
at all an anteroom with several rooms built out from it. Historically and doctrinally,
Catholics built a house but the residents, from time to time, walled off parts of it from
the main house, and then built annex after annex out from their little parlors. Lewis did
not see this architecture because he never ventured into the main house. He sat,
researched and wrote in his proper Anglican parlor, noting all the doors that led from
there to mainline Protestant denominations. He declined to leave the parlor, or his
Anglo-Calvinist parlor-set, to explore the true riches of Catholicism, the “big
house” the Holy Spirit built.
Is Lewis still useful?
We are led, then, to ask, can we use Mere Christianity in any
constructive way, and, if so, how do we do it? It should be clear that it is not the
treatise to hand without preparation to those inquiring into the faith at a first meeting.
But I believe that it can still be extremely useful in two situations. First, as a series
of readings to stimulate a discussion group, especially on Christian ethics and the moral
life. Second, as moral “backfill” for the committed Catholic.
Unquestionably, Lewis has a riveting literary style, and his facility
with examples is without peer. As Thomas Fox, C.S.P. said at the original 1945 publication
of the chapters on the Trinity, “Idea and illustration are happily married, becoming
two in one.” (HPR, October 1945 at 77). In a discussion or study group, Lewis’s
exposition can become the springboard for a conversation on the Catholic view of a moral
or theological topic. Of course, for a Catholic who is already versed in the teachings of
the Church, much of the hard Calvinism that leaks through Lewis’s exposition can be
discounted as hyperbole, or reviewed with a competent spiritual director.
C. S. Lewis never thought of himself as a great theologian. He would be
shocked and unamused to learn that, in some cases, the book would lead young Christians
away from Christ. We would do well to follow his humble example and use Mere Christianity
with great caution.
Mr. W. Patrick Cunningham received his B.A. and M.A. in theology from St. Mary’s University in Texas. He also earned an M.A. in education from Stanford University. He has taught business ethics at Incarnate Word College and is now on the adjunct faculty of the University of Texas at San Antonio. His last article in HPR appeared in February 1999.
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