C.S. Lewis, Theology and The Trinity (part 1)

My first introduction to C.S. Lewis came decades ago in the context of an apologetics presentation during my high school years. The speaker invoked Lewis’s famous trilemma concerning the identity of Jesus Christ.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish 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 is the one thing we must not say. 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. 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 let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.¹

While over the decades numerous critics of Christianity have objected to the logic of the argument, there is a general consensus that it is a powerfully persuasive rhetorical argument. I was so captivated by the argument that I wrote out the key points and memorized them, cold.

 In other words I was introduced to Lewis the apologist. Later as a freshman in college I had an English professor who was a great fan of myth and fantasy. It was she who introduced me to the Chronicles of Narnia. In the months after reading the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe for her class I devoured the rest of the Chronicles of Narnia. Later as a senior I took a class in science fiction and fantasy literature. It was there that I first read Lewis’s space trilogy. I loved both Out Of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, (but I never liked That Hideous Strength). At some time during my college years I carved out enough time to also read Mere Christianity. I was and remain a bona fide fan of Lewis.

While I was doing my Ph.D. studies I took a doctoral seminar on C. S. Lewis focusing on his theology, by now I had read most of Lewis’s apologetic works as well as his biography and much of his fiction. I have since read nearly everything he wrote except his correspondences and some of his professional literary essays.

C.S. Lewis the Man

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Northern Ireland into a staunchly Protestant heritage on November 29, 1898. As a youngster Lewis was precocious in many ways. He disliked his name Clive. After his pet dog Jacksie was killed by a car, the four-year-old announced that his name was Jacksie. For quite some time that was the only name that he would respond to.  He was finally persuaded to answer to Jack, the name by which he was known to his friends for the rest of his life.

Lewis tells us that both of his parents were “bookish” people.² Following his parents’ example he read voraciously. The Lewis house was filled with books and finding a new book to read was, he said, as easy as finding a new blade of grass. Early on he read the works of Beatrix Potter and fell in love with the anthropomorphic animals. So taken was he that he and Warnie (his older brother Warren) created their own world populated by anthropomorphic animals and called it Boxen.

While literarily enriched, Lewis says his childhood was characterized by an absence of beauty. Although plentiful with books, there were no pictures in the house. Surprisingly, he says that despite the absence of beauty, both he and his brother Warnie (Warren) were incurable romantics. Aesthetic experiences, he says, were rare and religious experiences nonexistent.

We also see at this time the awakening of something that would haunt Lewis throughout the first half of  his life, until he came to faith in his early 30s.  His brother Warnie made a toy “garden” in a biscuit tin (a cookie tin). The first time he saw this “garden” made of moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so it resembled a garden or a forest, he was moved emotionally.  He reports that the garden was the “first beauty I ever knew.”³ He recalls remembering, a few years later, this “garden” and that fleeting memory filled him with a feeling which he called joy— this joy was not a feeling of ecstasy but a feeling of intense, almost painful longing. This search for joy became a major theme throughout Lewis’s life, and in fact his autobiography is entitled Surprised by Joy, 1955.⁴ (Lewis was a lifelong bachelor. However in his late 50s [1956], he secretly married Joy Davidman [Gresham], an American divorcee living in England.  The marriage was one of convenience undertaken in order to extend his English citizenship to her to keep her from being deported.  When the marriage became known the joke among his friends was, “Did you hear about Jack?  He was surprised by Joy!”)

This search for joy became a major theme in Jack’s young  life. It was instrumental in his turning his back on the Christianity in which he was raised (the faith to which he was exposed lacked any beauty or joy). The search was also instrumental in bringing him back to the faith.

The death of his mother to cancer when he was nine years old had a devastating effect on the young Jack. Although devoid of what he called “religious experience” he did grow up in a Christian home and had been taught to pray regularly. His grandfather was even a minister, and the immediate family attended his church weekly. But his grandfather’s anti-Catholic tirades coupled with the fits of weeping in the pulpit did not provide either Jack or Warnie with a positive model of Christianity.  His friend and biographer George Sayer observes, “It is not surprising that Jack acquired a dislike of Church services and a low opinion of what he knew as Christianity.  Of course he saw no connection between these dull, loveless rituals and his personal religious experience of joy.”⁵

He had prayed earnestly for his mother’s recovery – her death was a great emotional blow. He does say of these prayers, “I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear. He was, in my mental picture of this miracle, to appear neither as savior nor judge but merely as a magician; and when he had done what was required of him I suppose he would simply – well, go away.”⁶ With the death of his mother, all sense of security in Jack’s life departed.

The loss of his mother profoundly affected him and caused him to doubt the existence of God. During his teenage years this doubt turned into atheism. After a traumatizing two years in the English ”public” school system,⁷ the academically precocious but socially awkward Lewis was finally placed under the tutelage of William T. Kirkpatrick (whom Lewis called the Great Knock), who had been his father’s tutor. For Lewis this was a perfect match. Kirkpatrick was widely read and possessed a razor sharp mind that pounced on every offhanded comment Lewis made as a challenge for debate. Kirkpatrick sharpened Jack’s skills in debate and sound reasoning. While Kirkpatrick’s personal tutelage prepared him well for Oxford University, no doubt it also contributed to the hardening of his atheism. Kirkpatrick honed the young Lewis’s mind to a sharp edge. It became a sword which he used for years to fend off the claims of Christianity. At the age of 15 he embraced atheism.  By the age of 18 he was clear headed and articulate about his atheism:

As to the other question about religion, I was sad to read your letter. You ask me my religious views: you know, I think, that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name are merely man’s own invention—Christ as much as Loki. Primitive man found himself surrounded by all sorts of terrible things he didn’t understand—thunder, pestilence, snakes etc.: what more natural than to suppose that these were animated by evil spirits trying to torture him. These he kept off by cringing to them, singing songs and making sacrifices etc. Gradually from being mere nature-spirits these supposed being[s] were elevated into more elaborate ideas, such as the old gods: and when man became more refined he pretended that these spirits were good as well as powerful.

Thus religion, that is to say mythology grew up. Often, too, great men were regarded as gods after their death—such as Heracles or Odin: thus after the death of a Hebrew philosopher Yeshua (whose name we have corrupted into Jesus) he became regarded as a god, a cult sprang up, which was afterwards connected with the ancient Hebrew Jahweh-worship, and so Christianity came into being—one mythology among many, but the one that we happen to have been brought up in.⁸

 But the rationalism did not stamp out the other equally strong bent in Lewis’s personality—romanticism, or as he came to call it—joy. Before becoming Kirkpatrick’s student Lewis had already developed a love of Norse mythology which evoked a longing in him that he labeled “northerness.” While he continued his interest in Norse mythology, Kirkpatrick introduced him to Greek literature and then Irish mythology.  Lewis became a thoroughgoing romantic for whom the search for “joy” became nearly an obsession. Particularly he sought out literature that would evoke “joy.”

While a student at Oxford Lewis looked forward to breaks and the pleasure of reading.  One particular day, while awaiting the train and lacking any new reading material he tells us,  “The glorious weekend of reading was before me. Turning to the bookstall, I picked out [a used copy of], Phantastes, a faerie Romance, [by] George MacDonald.”⁹ He dove into the book immediately. MacDonald’s storytelling gripped him and would not let him go. “That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.”¹⁰

MacDonald, as a Christian author, grabbed his heart and opened up new vistas for him. While the process of coming to faith took years, Lewis reflecting on this experience observed, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere. . . God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”¹¹

Lewis’s road to Christianity was long and conflicted. He describes his attitude at this time: “I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.”¹² The militant young atheist was unnerved in 1926 when as a young Oxford Don, one of his fellow Dons who was a “hard boiled atheist” remarked “Rum thing, all that about the Dying God. Seems to have really happened once.”¹³

But Lewis’s road to Christianity lay not in the road through reason, proofs and thought nor the realm of apologetics but through the road of literature.  As a tutor in the subject of Medieval and Renaissance literature he had to digest the writings of the age, which were most decidedly Christian in their worldview. McGrath observes: “Lewis’s love of literature is not a backdrop to his conversion; it is integral to his discovery of the rational and imaginative appeal of Christianity.”¹⁴ He saw that Christian authors were more in touch with reality than those who denied the faith and realized with other literary critics that modern authors, by leaving God out, could not give their characters any depth.¹⁵ During this time he flirted with philosophical idealism as well as with the occult, but found both unsatisfying. Of idealism he says “Idealism can be talked, and even felt; it cannot be lived.”¹⁶ During this time although he was still an unbeliever he even occasionally attended a church service, not out of belief but to keep his options open. He was being pursued by the hound of heaven.  He knew it and try as he might he could not escape. From God, “The demand was not even ‘All or nothing.’ the demand was simply ‘All’.”¹⁷

Conversion

Lewis relates his surrender to God:

You must picture me alone in that room in 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. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.¹⁸

But this was not a conversion to Christianity; rather it was a step from atheism to theism. He is unequivocal, “1929 is the date of my conversion to Theism, not to Christianity.”¹⁹ There was a God and he was personal.  But Lewis was still unable to embrace the deity of Christ. This was simply mythology in the same vein as pagan mythologies.  The cross and the resurrection were still stumbling blocks.  His acceptance of the deity of Christ did not come for another two years.

On October 1, 1931, Lewis wrote to his lifelong friend Arthur Greeves “. . . . I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”²⁰

Sometime earlier²¹ Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien, fellow Oxford dons who shared with Lewis a deep love of mythology, spent a long night in deep discussion.  During that windy night the three of them strolled on “Addison’s Walk” a path near Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College at Oxford. They talked about mythology, especially about dying and rising gods.  Although Lewis loved myth he thought that myths “were lies breathed through silver.”²² As the weather worsened they retired indoors and continued the conversation until about 4 A.M.  Tolkien and Dyson believed that mythology contains a type of truth, and that Christianity too partook of that mythological genre.  The difference was that Christianity was true myth, the reality to which all the pagan myths pointed. Lewis described the night’s conversation in a letter to Arthur Greeves:

Now 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: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . . I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened.²³

 This conversation gave him a bridge to the Christian faith, a bridge that used his lifelong passion for mythology as the means to usher him into the faith.  Pagan myths were not to be viewed merely as lies, nor as escapist wishful thinking, rather they pointed to supra-rational realities that while partial and distorted pointed beyond themselves to a fulfillment in space and time.

This conversation was pivotal to his conversion.  Most of his biographers place the conversion to Christ about 10 days later.  In Surprised by Joy he states: ‘I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought…”²⁴

Concerning his conversion one more item deserves attention.  Lewis’ search in life was for joy.  The great irony is that he never once considered that God was the source of joy.  Quite the opposite.  Having grown up in a dour form of Christianity he saw God more as the cosmic killjoy who demanded obedience and renunciation of joy and pleasure.  He describes his surprise when in coming to Christ he found what he had been seeking for all his life:

It may be asked whether my terror was at all relieved by the thought that I was now approaching the source from which those arrows of Joy had been shot at me ever since childhood. Not in the least. No slightest hint was vouchsafed me that there ever had been or ever would be any connection between God and Joy. If anything, it was the reverse. I had hoped that the heart of reality might be of such a kind that we can best symbolize it as a place; instead, I found it to be a Person. For all I knew, the total rejection of what I called Joy might be one of the demands, might be the very first demand, He would make upon me. There was no strain of music from within, no smell of eternal orchards at the threshold, when I was dragged through the doorway. No kind of desire was present at all.²⁵

Lewis’s conversion while not swift was dramatic.  Walter Hooper, Lewis’s secretary for several months before he died, observed that Lewis was “The most thoroughly converted man” he had ever met.   This thorough conversion was not a slow process.  Lewis took seriously the demand from God for “All.”  Within two years he published The Pilgrims Regress patterned after Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. This work is an allegorical account of his own spiritual search that brought him full circle. Over the next two and a half decades numerous books in several genres flowed from his pen, science fiction (the space trilogy), fantasy /fiction (The Great Divorce, and The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, Till We Have Faces), apologetics (Miracles, The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man) and Christian theology (BBC Broadcast Talks finally published as Mere Christianity).

1. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 52. It must be noted that Lewis did not come up with this argument on his own. In one form or another, this argument turns up numerous times on the lips of 19th and early 20th century Christian preachers and apologists including G.K .Chesterton. [↩]
2. C. S. Lewis Surprised by Joy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,1966 ,Kindle Edition). 4. [↩]
3. Ibid. 6. [↩]
4. The book was started in 1948 four years before he met his future wife and published before there was any thought of marriage, of convenience or otherwise. [↩]
5. George Sayer, Jack  (Wheaton: Crossway, 1994), 218. [↩]
6. Surprised by Joy, 21. [↩]
7. The English “public schools” are in fact privately run boarding schools.  They are not to be compared with the American understanding of “public schools.” [↩]
8. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, vol. 1 (New York: HarperCollins e-books; HarperSanFrancisco, 2004–2007), 230–231. [↩]
9. Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. 179. [↩]
10. Ibid. 181. [↩]
11. Ibid. 191. [↩]
12. Ibid. 115. [↩]
13. Ibid. 235. [↩]
14. McGrath, Alister (2013-02-18). C. S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Tyndale House Publishers). Kindle Edition. 133. [↩]
15. Ibid. [↩]
16. Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1966).  Kindle Edition. 226. [↩]
17. Ibid, 228. [↩]
18. Ibid, 228-229. Lewis was notoriously bad with anything to do with numbers, including calendar dates.  Some of his biographers in trying to harmonize inconsistencies in the timeline of events in Lewis’s experience during this period insist that the date here was 1930 as opposed to 1929. See Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life, Tyndale House, Kindle Ed., location 191. [↩]
19. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, vol. 3 (New York: HarperCollins e-books; HarperSanFrancisco, 2004–2007), 1343. [↩]
20. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, vol. 1 (New York: HarperCollins e-books; HarperSanFrancisco, 2004–2007), 974. [↩]
21. Most of his biographers place Lewis’ conversion 10 days after the night with Dyson and Tolkein.  McGrath questions the received chronology and places the actual conversion several months later.  See McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life. Tyndale House, Kindle Ed. location 3013. [↩]
22. Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and their Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 43. [↩]
23. C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, vol. 1 (New York: HarperCollins e-books; HarperSanFrancisco, 2004–2007), 976–977. One of Lewis’s great essays is entitled Myth Became Fact. It can be found in God in the Dock. [↩]
24. Lewis, C. S. (1966-03-23). Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition), 230-231. [↩]
25. Lewis, C. S., Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Kindle Edition.) 231. Italics added. [↩]