A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby
EVERYMAN’S THEOLOGIAN
Kilby examines a few key concepts in Lewis’s writing: pain, redemption, sanctification, and that mysterious, unbidden nostalgia that gently pulls us toward heaven. This article first appeared in Christianity Today in January 1964.
The death of Clive Staples Lewis on November 22, 1963, removed from the world one of the most lucid, winsome, and powerful writers on Christianity. We have reason to thank God that such a man was raised up in our time to become, as Chad Walsh has put it, the apostle to the skeptics. “His books exposed the shallowness of our atheist prejudices; his vision illumined the Mystery which lay behind the appearances of daily life,” said one man who turned to Christ from Communism, alcoholism, and attempted suicide. “Without his works, I wonder if I and many others might not still be infants ‘crying in the night,’” said another intellectual who had turned from atheism and Communism to Christianity.
Sixty-four when he died, Lewis had been converted at the age of thirty after a long span of atheism. He thereafter produced more than a score of books, both expository and fictional, to set forth his conception of the meaning of Christianity. Millions of copies have been read and widely acclaimed by both theologians and laymen all over the Western world. Nearly all of his books are now available in paperback, a good sign of their wide acceptance.
His best-known book is The Screwtape Letters, a brilliant story in which an undersecretary to the High Command of Hell writes letters of instruction and warning to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter in charge of a young man in England at the time of World War II. Wormwood is in trouble from the beginning because he has failed to prevent his “patient” from becoming a Christian. Screwtape suggests many devices for reclaiming the patient’s soul. He must prepare for the time when the first emotional excitement of conversion begins to fade. He must turn the thoughts while in prayer, from God to his own moods and feelings. When the patient prays for charity, Wormwood must cause him to start trying to manufacture charitable feelings in himself. He must also stir up irritations between the patient and his mother. He must persuade the young man to think of devils as comic creatures in red tights and tails. He must cause the patient to believe that his “dry” periods are signs that God is unreal. The young man must be introduced to smart, superficially intellectual, and skeptical people who will teach him to despise “Puritanism” and love religious flippancy, and he must be persuaded to shoulder the future with all its cloud of indefinite fears rather than live in a simple, immediate dependence on God. He must be made spiritually resentful and proud. If possible, he must be brought to love theological newness for its own sake and to think of the “historical Jesus” rather than the Jesus of the Gospels. The patient’s prayer life must be rationalized so that if the thing he prays for does not come to pass, he will see it as proof that petitionary prayers simply do not work, or if it does come to pass, as nothing more than the operation of natural causes.
In this book both human and divine conduct are seen from the viewpoint of hell. One of the best things is the devil’s-eye conception of God, who is observed as having none of the high dignity and austerity of hell but rather as “irredeemably vulgar” and bourgeois-minded, a hedonist who invented pleasure and filled the world full of happy things like eating, sleeping, bathing, playing, and working. Hell hates God’s undignified stooping to communication and fellowship with a man on his knees. Hell’s intelligence department, though it has worked hard to do so, has never been able to discover one great fact about God—that is, his disinterested love for verminous man and his wish to make every man more individual, more himself in the right sense, rather than, as is the custom in hell, simply to absorb him. Whereas in hell there is nothing but competition and terrorism, the swallowing up of all who by shrewdness and power one is able to overcome. God loves distinctiveness. Hell’s unity is dominated by a constant lust to devour; but God aims at the paradox of infinite differences among all creatures, a world of selves, like that of a loving family. God loves “otherness”; hell hates it. Hell hates God’s complex and dangerous world pervaded with choices, a world that God has inseminated with all sorts of realities that carry their hidden winsome reminders of himself, such as beauty, silence, reverence, and music. Concerning the last, hell hopes to one day make the universe one unending noise.
Lewis’s book called Mere Christianity is a direct treatment of many of the ideas that have been deliberately turned upside down in The Screwtape Letters. He begins this book with two facts that he calls “the foundation of all clear thinking.” One is that people everywhere have the curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way: the other is that they do not in fact so behave. The notion of right and wrong, he says, is not local and cultural but is lodged deeply in the moral wisdom of mankind. There is a big difference between the law of nature and the law of human nature. The former includes such laws as that of gravity and tells you, for instance, what a stone actually does if you drop it. But the law of human nature tells you what people ought to do and fail in doing.
Atheism, says Lewis, is too simple. Christianity is complicated and “odd,” yet with the density of reality itself, not something you would easily have guessed. Take the matter of free will. Why did God give men free will if he knew they would misuse it? Because free will makes evil possible, it is also the only thing that makes joy and love and goodness possible. Without free will men are toys on a string. With free will they have vast possibilities for good as well as evil. If men choose evil, God’s law will withhold from them the happiness they thirst for. This, he says, is the key to all history.
Later on in Mere Christianity Lewis declares that Christ was the first “real man” and that he made it possible for us to be real if we only will. To gain this reality, the Christian must each day shove back his own wishes and hopes and let God’s “larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.” It is not God’s purpose, says Lewis, to bring people barely within the gates of heaven; he intends their absolute perfection, and late and hereafter will direct toward that end. “When He said, ‘Be perfect,’ He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. . . . It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
Lewis has written books on miracles, on pain, on love, and on the dangers of an unlimited trust in science. In Miracles Lewis discusses, among many other things, his belief that most people today are afflicted with “chronological snobbery,” that is, the idea that people in an older time could accept miracles because of their ignorance of the laws of nature. Joseph, Lewis points out, was fully as wise as any modern gynecologist on the main point of Mary’s situation—that a virgin birth is contrary to nature. In finally accepting the situation as miracle, Joseph was affirming not only the miracle but, equally, the law of nature itself as it applies to childbirth. Joseph is by no means an example of a naive or primitive ignoramus; rather, he was a realist whose head was as hard as anybody’s as far as the regularity of nature is concerned. He saw the exception in Mary’s case only because he had a pristine conviction about the rule.
In the Problem of Pain Lewis begins with his once sufficient reasons for being an atheist—a vast and mostly lifeless cosmos with a nature “red in tooth and claw,” and the like. But one significant question, he adds, never arose in his mind: “If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth could human beings ever come to attribute to it the activity of a wise and good Creator?” If we had never supposed God to be good, there would of course never have arisen any problem of pain. The problem is conditional. “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.” Thus Lewis puts the case before beginning to answer it.
Among Lewis’s most popular books are the space trilogy Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. The first involves a visit to the unfallen world of Malacandra (Mars). In the second a demon-possessed man from earth does his best