How do we discern our
vocation? How do we find our way in life? Sometimes it takes some
disappointment, some closing of doors. I am thinking of the story of how C. S.
Lewis the apologist for the faith (“apologist” doesn’t mean someone saying he’s
sorry; it means one who explains the faith and offers a reasoned defense for
belief) became a children’s fantasy writer.
Lewis was first
hooked by faith through his imagination, according to theologian biographer
Alister McGrath, but he immediately began to construct rational arguments to
show that his new faith was true. He was a genius at making big abstract
philosophical arguments into ideas accessible to ordinary people. He wrote
several books along that line, the most famous of them being The Pilgrim’s Regress, The Problem of Pain, and Mere Christianity. Then when he wrote
the whimsical morality book, The
Screwtape Letters, he became famous throughout the English-speaking world.
His real vocational identity was grounded in a series of BBC radio broadcasts
during WW II in which he articulated the reasons for belief.
I confess I am
lukewarm about all of those books. The well-loved Mere Christianity does not seem to me to really get the Christian faith. What’s more, it
is all pretty individualistic and intellectual. It reminds me of Mozart saying
“The problem with Protestantism is that it’s all in the head.” Lewis doesn’t
articulate a sense of the Church as continuing the Incarnation in a community
and why it takes a community to continue the Incarnation. He doesn’t have a
handle on Christian mission to a broken, suffering world. He is pretty weak on
grace.
But then I see I am
not really criticizing what Lewis wrote. As far as it goes, it’s fine. I am
criticizing him for not writing other books I wanted written. Academic
theologians were quietly critical but only quietly, since people were flocking
to the faith through his words, not theirs. So the critics of Lewis, like me,
tend to keep quiet.
Then in 1947,
something happened. Lewis became the faculty sponsor for The Socratic Club, a
philosophical student discussion group of Christians at Oxford, primarily
women. One day Lewis presented to them a paper, which was an early draft of a
chapter from his work in progress Miracles.
In that paper he took on the fallacy of the naturalist argument that our
beliefs are unreliable because they are the product of chemical processes in
our brains. 28-year-old Elizabeth Anscombe was in the room. She agreed with
Lewis that naturalism is “self-refuting” but she did not think his arguments
made the case. Anscombe was a devotee of Ludwig Wittgenstein and would go on to
become one of the great analytic philosophers of the 20th Century. At
a subsequent meeting, she presented a paper using analytic philosophy to punch holes
in Lewis’s arguments. He then rewrote the chapter to cover her concerns.
After that point,
there are various versions of the story. Some say Lewis was publicly shamed and
personally shaken. Some say he lost faith in the rational basis for belief and
turned to imagination instead. Others (including Anscombe) say it was a
collegial conversation that merely refined his ideas and he appreciated
it. What we do know is that he stopped
making apologetic (rational defense of the faith) presentations and writing
books on that theme after 1947. In 1950, he was asked to pick a lineup of
speakers for The Socratic Club. His first pick was Elizabeth Anscombe to speak
on “Why I Believe In God.” He said to the President of the club, “Having
obliterated me as an apologist, ought she (Ancombe) not succeed me?”[i]
My speculative
opinion is this: Lewis was a bright guy. He knew that as a philosophical/
theological defender of the faith, he was not as good as he was popular. He
knew that he was weak in philosophy, theology, history, and other key elements
of rational argument for faith. He knew and he said that others could do that job
better. But he also knew that rational argument is secondary. Anselm said that
theological arguments were “faith seeking understanding.” Faith first; then understanding
follows. Lewis knew that the sacred imagination is not just a fantasy game but
also a way of accessing truth. He knew the distinction G. K. Chesterton made
between imaginative (meaning finding
truth through images arising in the mind) and imaginary (essentially escapist fantasy).[ii]
Perhaps he even knew that the sacred imagination was the main vehicle of
Ignatian spirituality.
So Lewis turned from
what he had been doing – writing that was more popular than it was good – to do
something new, something important. He wrote imaginative literature to express
the faith rather than explain it. He had already done a bit of this with the Ransom Sci-Fi Trilogy, but now he did it
brilliantly, beautifully, magnificently in The
Chronicles of Narnia.
It may not have been an
easy shift. Lewis seems to have been a bit gloomy between 1947 and 1949 when he
penned The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe. There were various reasons for his unhappiness, but I wonder if
he was not mourning the loss of his identity as the apologist for the common
person. Still, he had been muddling over the idea of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for 10 years before he
actually wrote it. In the next 5 years, he went on to write 6 more books of the
Narnia series. Something had to die
to clear the way for his masterpiece.
When I think of Lewis
I wonder how my identity may encase me and hold me back from doing what God has
in mind for me. I wonder how many of us are encased in identities, which are in
some sense comfortable and rewarding – but less than we are capable of
becoming.
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