Week 17: Apologetics

Apart from the Narnia books, Lewis is most famous as a Christian apologist. What does his writing actually tell us about apologetics as an intellectual enterprise?

Dear Friends,

Last week I wrote to you about Jack’s commitment to linguistic clarity, focusing particularly on his essay “Christian Apologetics.” This week, I’m turning my attention to the title of that essay—which is to say, I reflect here on Jack’s role as a Christian apologist.

In the 1930s, Jack built a moderately successful career as a man of letters—an Oxford don and minor novelist. Only with the onset of the Second World War did he become famous, not as a scholar, but as an intellectual advocate for Christianity. He gave talks in person and over radio, he wrote for newspapers and journals (Screwtape was first published as a serial in The Guardian), and he published long apologetic works such as The Problem of Pain and Miracles. In 1947, he appeared on the cover of Time. Beneath his face, the headline read: “Oxford’s C. S. Lewis: His Heresy: Christianity.” (Jack deplored that headline.)

Image Credit: Time Magazine

Then, in the beginning of the 50s, that period in his intellectual life seems to draw to a close. He began writing the Chronicles of Narnia. His BBC talks took their final form in Mere Christianity (which is a compilation of three volumes already published in the early 40s). He produced fewer essays each year.

By 1955, when Carl F. H. Henry wrote to ask Jack to contribute pieces to his new periodical Christianity Today, he refused the request categorically:

I wish your project heartily well but can’t write you articles. My thought and talent (such as they are) now flow in different, though I think not less Christian, channels, and I do not think I am at all likely to write more directly theological pieces. The last work of that sort which I attempted had to be abandoned. If I am now good for anything it is for catching the reader unawares—thro’ fiction and symbol. I have done what I could in the way of frontal attacks, but I now feel quite sure those days are over. (Letters III.650)

(For those curious, the ‘abandoned’ book he mentions was one about prayer. I am unsure how this project relates to his eventual (1964) publication of Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer.)

As this letter makes clear, Jack was very thoughtful about his limits as a defender of faith. Even during the 1940s, when he gave many talks and a large proportion of his writing was apologetic in nature, he set firm boundaries about what he would and would not do.

He would not share his testimony, which he considered far too idiosyncratic and philosophical to be useful to most audiences. (Though he did eventually provide such a record in Surprised by Joy.) He would not engage in emotional appeals or altar calls—not out of a distaste for them, but because he thought himself incapable of doing this effectively. He would not ‘pump something up’ just for the sake of giving another talk, unless he already had something substantive to say (Letters II.628).

He likewise refused to touch certain subjects. In 1944, Captain Bernard Acworth, president and founder of the Evolution Protest Movement wrote to urge him to include attacks on evolution in his writing, and Jack replied with a polite but firm refusal:

I am not either attacking or defending Evolution. I believe that Christianity can still be believed, even if Evolution is true. That is where you and I differ. Thinking as I do, I can’t help regarding your advice (that I henceforth include arguments against Evolution in all my Christian apologetics) as a temptation to fight the battle on what is really a false issue: and also on terrain very unsuitable for the only weapon I have. (Letters II.633)

Jack would debate the philosophical coherency of materialism and naturalism (in Miracles and elsewhere), but he would not dispute specific scientific theories. Indeed, a number of his apologetic arguments, most notably The Problem of Pain, are designed to incorporate belief in evolution.

What I find even more interesting, though, is Jack’s evident awareness of the spiritual limitations of apologetics. He remarks often on the perils of the enterprise. At the end of “Christian Apologetics,” he warns his audience:

I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. (EC 159)

Around the same time he wrote the short poem he entitled “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer,” which he later sent to a friend as a guide in how to pray for him (Letters II.527). Therein, he wrote, “From all my proofs of Thy divinity, / Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.”

Jack could have built an extremely lucrative career on the back of his BBC broadcasts during the war. The demand for his writing and speaking was far higher than he was willing or able to supply; and his work in the 40s would have made him quite financially comfortable, had he not given the vast majority of his income away. To me, his step back from apologetics as a vocational path is a mark of integrity. He began to give talks on Christianity out of a sense of personal duty, and he gave it up when he felt he could no longer do the work usefully.

It would be easy, reading Jack’s apologetic works, to think of him as a creature of pure reason. When one reads in Screwtape, for instance, of the titular tempter advising his nephew to keep their human victims’ focus on feelings rather than beliefs, the natural conclusion is that the author is downright suspicious of emotion.

And this is true, to a certain extent. Intellect was important in Jack’s conversion and crucial to his project as an apologist. But just as he was aware of the spiritual dangers of defending Christianity, he was also conscious of the role of emotion in the life of faith, both as a challenge and an opportunity.

In a December 1947 letter, he cautioned a lady desiring to believe in Christianity not to try to force herself to feel something: “No one can make himself believe anything and the effort does harm. Nor make himself feel anything, and that effort also does harm. What is under our own control is action and intellectual inquiry. Stick to that” (Letters II.824). I resonate deeply with this warning. It’s sometimes easy to fall into the belief that a life of faith means constantly trying to synthesise appropriate emotions; Jack’s advice is, by contrast, liberating.

He elaborates upon the ways emotion can impede reason and weaken faith in a 1941 essay entitled “Religion: Reality or Substitute?”:

It is always assumed that the difficulties of faith are intellectual difficulties, that a man who’s once accepted a certain proposition will automatically go on believing it till real grounds for disbelief occur. Nothing could be more superficial. How many of the freshmen who come up to Oxford from religious homes and lose their Christianity in the first year have been honestly argued out of it?… I find that mere change of scene always has a tendency to decrease my faith at first—God is less credible when I pray in a hotel bedroom than when I am in College. (EC 135–36).

Against such emotional frailties stand Faith and Reason: “If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the gift of Faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference” (EC 137).

We can read this as an account of the perils of emotion, but it speaks equally to the limits of reason. The earlier quote from “Christian Apologetics” describes the emotional dangers which a rational defence of Christianity may present: doctrines can feel unreal precisely because they have been successfully defended.

And just as negative emotions may imperil faith, positive emotions may strengthen it. Surprised by Joy is not just an autobiography, but an account of how Jack’s experiences of joyous longing contributed to his conversion. I’ll have much more to say on that subject in a future post.

For now, I want to suggest that Jack may ultimately have left behind his apologetic writing to focus on fiction because fiction allowed him a way to unite reason and emotion in his presentation of Christian faith. Writing novels allowed him to “steal past those watchful dragons” (“Sometimes Fairy Stories”), to ‘catch the reader unawares’, as he wrote to Carl Henry, rather than arguing directly. Perhaps the processing of expressing these truths in art, rather than in argument, was also more spiritually nourishing to the author.

What I’m trying to get at here is an intuition I have, based on my own experience of Lewis and of religion and literature more broadly: that emotion and aesthetics are just as important to individual spiritual development as reason.

This was certainly true of Jack. He spent years debating about religion with friends like Owen Barfield and J. R. R. Tolkien before his conversion—but he also spent years delighting in the work of Christian writers like George MacDonald. Those influences seem to go hand-in-hand in his faith journey, and both play a role in his writing career.

The same might be said of my own spiritual development. At various points, Jack’s apologetic writings were helpful to me as rational defences of Christian belief. But his fiction has, in my estimation, been more important, by shaping my emotions and my perception of beauty.

I keep searching for a neat conclusion for this letter, but in truth what I’m laying out for you is a set of questions I will continue to contemplate as my reading reaches the later stages of Jack’s career. How does he relate reason and emotion? What role does beauty play in his understanding of faith and its formation? How can art answer spiritual needs? Where is Jack’s fiction a vehicle for his theology, and where does it move beyond that intent? Why does it work for me, when the vast majority of “Christian fiction” falls absolutely flat?

I’m tempted to offer hypotheses and premature conclusions, to try to put a bow on all this, but I’m going to refrain. Let’s see where the reading takes us, shall we?

May you all be spared from jealousy, boredom, indifference, and the desolation of hotel bedrooms this week,

Sarah