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C.S. Lewis on Christianity: Conversion and New Life
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Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
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And I'm Juan Davalos. We're on to the next lecture of C.S. lewis on Christianity, conversion and new life. Again, we were talking about last week about good and evil, and the idea that there is this moral law that is objective, that it's outside of us and that we measure ourselves against. And why that's important becomes very clear in this lecture when we start talking about conversion in new life. Because Lewis believes that in order for any person to come to Christianity, to come to God, they first need to understand that they fall short of that moral law. And if that moral law would just be subjective and would be within us, then we really wouldn't fall short of it, because just whatever we believe. But if that law is outside of us and it's a standard law that comes from God, then you can measure yourself against it and know that you fall short of it. And then that's when Christianity fills that need.
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We see that in normal human behavior, you don't realize you need to get into good shape until you start feeling your knees ache or you feel lethargic, have no energy. You don't realize that you need to go see the doctor until you're sick. Christ makes an allusion to that which I think Lewis plays with a little bit in Mere Christianity, that church Jesus came to help the sinner, not the righteous. He came to help the sick, not the healthy. But who among us is actually righteous and who among us is actually healthy? If you watch the show House md, he hates giving full body scans to try to diagnose a patient because there's always something wrong with someone. It might not be the thing they're searching for. That's the way human beings are. There's always something wrong with us. We have to realize it.
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And I'd like to read a little bit from Lewis on what he says here. And this is from Mere Christianity. He says Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing, as far as I know, says Louis, to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realized that there is a real moral law and a power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that power. It is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to. And I think of if you're familiar with Dante and that we have that course, Dante's Divine Comedy, if You are familiar with that story. It is once Dante gets to the bottom of hell and he sees the evil that is before him and he recognizes the evil within his own soul. That's when he begins his ascent into purgatory and paradise eventually.
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Well, it's interesting that he doesn't even begin his descent into hell until he realizes he's lost in peril in the dark wood. And that's when God sends the first of the guides to help him. So there's a process by which you recognize deficiency and then recognize you've done something worthy of repentance.
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And you'll see that across all of Lewis's writings and Dr. Ward in this lecture will go into some of them. He calls it this descent to ascent. There's this V shaped pattern in stories that Lewis tells where you first must go down to understand how short you fall from this external law to yourself, and only when you understand how much you fall short of it. That's when you begin to ascend, when you accept Christ's righteousness.
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So stick with us as we descend and ascend along with Lewis and Ward by subscribing or following on whatever podcast service you like to use. Keep up with us. We post these podcasts every week so that you can continue to learn on your commute or when you're doing your chores, or whenever you like to listen to podcasts.
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And now let's turn to this lecture on C.S. lewis on creative Christianity, Conversion and New Life.
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Human beings have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way. And human beings do not in fact behave in that way. They know the law of nature. They break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and and the universe we live in. So writes CS Lewis in Mere Christianity. In the previous lecture, I described some of his arguments in Objective Moral Value, the law of nature, this belief that human beings have that they ought to behave in a certain way. But I didn't say much in that previous lecture about the universal human experience of breaking the natural law. Yet this is the second of the two facts which he says are foundational for clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in. We break the natural law. We don't live up to the standards that we recognize as objectively present in the world. Our consciences prick us with the awareness that we don't always behave as we should. This experience of guilt, this experience of shame, is a universal human experience. And interestingly, we can have this experience without necessarily believing in God, let alone believing in The Christian God. Intriguingly, almost amusingly, our very capacity for moral awareness is used by some people as an argument against God's existence. Lewis himself, in his atheist period, was one of those very people. My argument against God, Lewis said, was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. Cruelty, injustice. Lewis was aware that these things were objectively evil. But how had he got this idea of just and unjust? He says, a man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own subjectivism. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too. For the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist, in other words that the whole of reality was senseless, I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality, namely my idea of justice, was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning. This is one of the many reasons why Lewis eventually abandoned atheism and became a theist. He realized that his awareness of an objective moral law led to an awareness of an objective moral lawgiver. And if Lewis had broken the moral law, as he knew he had, he had also offended the one whose moral perfection was expressed in and through that moral law. For the law, as Lewis eventually came to see, was not a set of arbitrary divine edicts that could have been otherwise. No, the law was an expression of God's very nature. God neither submits to the moral law nor makes the moral law. Rather, God propagates it. God fathers it almost as if the law were his child. The moral law is an expression of God's nature. The law is not something greater than God to which God has to conform. Nor is it something simply made by him out of his arbitrary and untrammeled volition. Rather, the moral law discloses the character of God. God and his goodness are inseparable. God and goodness are effectively one. Now, anyone who has the slightest familiarity with Christian vocabulary, Christian doctrine will hear in this description of the moral law an echo of the language that Christians use to describe Jesus Christ. Christ, the Son of God. The word of God, who is one with God, is begotten, not made. And so CS Lewis can ask the Rhetorical question is not the dao the Word himself, Christ Himself considered from a particular point of view. And he then adds, I abstained from all that in the Abolition of Man because I was there trying to write ethics, not theology. But it's time in this second lecture to turn to theology. The Dao is the way of being moral. Christ says of himself, I am the way, the truth and the life, the way of being moral. This objective ethical ecology became a human being in the person of Jesus when the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus is the perfect human being, the one who actually keeps the law, who does what the rest of us fail to do. So very quickly summarizing a whole tranche of Lewis's thought and writing, we don't just have a law, we have a lawgiver. And more than that, we have a law fulfiller, a law keeper. The steps that Lewis takes as he moves from law to God to Christ deserve much more attention than we can give them here. And I recommend that you reread Mere Christianity if you want more details. But what I want to focus on in this talk is two things. First, how Lewis himself came into a personal relationship with Christ. And second, how he wrote about that process of coming into relationship with Christ, how he depicted it, reimagined it in his fiction. And then in the next lecture, we'll talk about how he wrote about his own conversion. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis returned to the practice of the Christian faith in 1931. We don't have time to retell the whole story here, but a crystallizing moment was a long nighttime conversation that he had with two friends, one who is extremely well known, J.R.R. tolkien, the other of whom is less well known, a chap called Hugo Dyson. And these three men, Lewis, Tolkien and Dyson, spent an evening walking around the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford, where Lewis was a fellow and tutor. In recounting this conversation, Lewis explained that it had been centered largely upon something very mysterious, namely, the center of Christianity, the death of someone else, whoever he was 2000 years ago. Christian accounts of Christ's death had always, up to that point, seemed to Lewis, he said, either silly or shocking. He'd ridiculed the traditional Christian formulations about sacrifice, propitiation, the blood of the lamb. But Tolkien and Dyson showed Lewis that if he met the idea of divine sacrifice in a pagan myth, he had no objection to it. Quite the reverse. And this is Lewis talking. If I met the idea of a God sacrificing himself to himself, I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it again. The idea of a God such as Bulda or Adonis or Bacchus, who somehow dies and revives similarly moved me, Lewis said, provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. Lewis found pagan mythology imaginatively nourishing, stirring, meaningful. But when he read about Jesus being crucified and rising again from the dead, he didn't respond in that way, because he immediately got distracted by theological explanations as to how Christ's death and resurrection were applicable to the believer. Tolkien and Dyson encouraged Lewis to forget about theological explanations for a moment and simply relax into the Christian story. Enjoy the story of Christ as a dramatic sequence of events, approach it with the imagination. They effectively said to him, don't ask for explications or additional testament is just accepted on its own terms. And in this respect, Tolkien and Dyson were, in a sense, treating the Christ story, rather as CS Lewis was already treating moral value. Moral value, remember the Dao is a premise, not a conclusion. Moral value is axiomatic. It shines by its own light. Similarly, here, Tolkien and Dyson are urging Lewis to sink into the adventure, to immerse himself in the mythic richness of the Christian story without troubling himself about any deeper ground for why it matters or any alternative account of it in other terms. So Lewis began to see, thanks to Tolkien and Dyson, that whereas with the pagan myths, he had accepted them on their own terms as stories with Christianity, he'd been treating the story not as a myth, but as an allegory, as something that had to be translated into a second set of terms in order to make sense. But what if he just took it on his own terms? What if the actual incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ was what it was all about? What if that was, as he puts it, the language, more adequate than any other? Could this be the ultimate expression of reality, this story of one particular man in Palestine in About the year 33, when the Roman procurator was a man called Pontius Pilate. Lewis, by this stage, had already come to a belief in God. He was a theist. Now, in large part thanks to Tolkien and Dyson, he came to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God. He begins to interpret his situation through the lens of the Christian myth. But myth here doesn't mean something false. The Christian myth is unique because it is the true story. It's historical. It really happened. It's a story in the sense that it's a sequence of events. It's Got plot and character. But this drama has actually happened in a real time, in a real place, as the myths of Balder and Adonis and Bacchus had not. Now, in another series of lectures that I did for Hillsdale some Years ago with Dr. Arne and Dr. Whalen, I spoke quite a bit about imagination and reason and myth. So I mustn't say more about that here. Suffice it to say that Lewis came to believe in Christianity as the true myth. He embraced it as a story, as a drama rather than a system of thought, rather than a table of doctrines. We saw in the previous lecture how much importance he attached to participation in the dao in the way of being moral. To participate in it is to be fully human, he said. Goodness is not just an inert mental construct, but something to be lived into. Similarly, here he found himself a participant in a story because the story of Christ was still happening. The story hadn't ended with the death of Christ after all. Christ rises from the dead and ascends to heaven and the Holy Spirit is sent on the church. And so the story continues across the world, down through the centuries. Coming UP and embracing CS Lewis in Oxford in 1931. He was now a bit part player in this drama and he soon begins to find his own place in this continuing and never ending story. The greatest story ever told. Now, if Christianity is best understood as a story, it's best communicated as a story. And we find Lewis in his post conversion life repeatedly writing his own stories in order to reimagine re present this story of Christ in some way or another. Lewis writes this Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing, as far as I know, to say to people who do not know that they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It's after you've realized that there is a real moral law and a power behind the law and that you have broken the law and put yourself wrong with that power. It is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you'll listen to the doctor. When you've realized that our position is nearly desperate, you'll begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf. How God himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God. It is an old story, very terrifying. I wish it was possible to say something more agreeable, but I must say what I think. True. Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion is in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort. It begins in the dismay I have been describing. And it's no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. Hey, it's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour and the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast. I want to know what do you think about the show you're listening to right now? Visit Podcast Hillsdale. Edu and click the survey Pop up to take our very first ever listener survey. Tell us what you like, what you don't like, and what you want to hear from us in the future. Visit Podcast Hillsdale. Edu and click the Pop up to take the survey and thank you for listening. Hillsdale College is a small Christian classical liberal arts college that operates independently of government funding and we want you or your son or daughter to apply. At Hillsdale, students grow in heart and mind by studying timeless trees in a support of community dedicated to the highest things. Hillsdale College costs significantly less than other nationally ranked private liberal arts colleges and receives regular recognition as a best value, and nearly all students receive financial aid. Our robust core curriculum, vibrant student life, and 8 to 1 student to faculty ratio make for an education like no other. For more information or to fill out an application, visit hillsdill eduinfo. That's Hillsdale Edu Info. So this is the pattern of entrance into the Christian drama. This realization that one's own moral nature is compromised is insufficient, that we need help. The story of God in Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit is then a story written in a language of descent and then of utter descent and then of ascent higher to the place where you started. For a biblical example of that, look at the second chapter of the Epistle to the Philippians. Christ, who is in the form of God, became a man and then became a servant, even unto death, death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him in Lewis's works. There's a beautiful reworking of that in his book Miracles where he talks about a diver diving into the water and then going down through the green and warm water into the cold and dark water, and finally grasping a precious jewel and breaking the surface of the water, his lungs almost bursting, bringing up again the precious dripping thing that he went down to find. And that thing is the whole of humanity. That V shaped narrative is a pattern that Lewis uses as a kind of template for all his retellings of this story. If you know the Narnia Chronicles, think of the Silver Chair. The whole structure of the Silver Chair is based on this pattern. You start out in England and Aslan's country, go down into Narnia, then into the underworld with a glimpse down into Byzum, then back to the underworld, Narnia, Aslan's country and England. The whole architectonics of that story reflects this pattern. Any talk about Christ and conversion must somehow be couched in terms which reflect this divine V shaped narrative. That's what Christians do, is they reenact in their own conversions, Christ's eternal victory over sin and death. If we've died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. As St. Paul puts it in the New Testament. There must be at the barest minimum, this basic shape to all presentations conversion. Down, down, further up, up. Higher than before. So it's no accident in the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for instance, that the spare room, the spare oom where the wardrobe stands, is reached by three steps down and five steps up in that hideous strength. The third book in Lewis's Ransom trilogy, Jane can find Ransom's rooms only by descending to a landing and ascending again. Let's look now at the Pilgrim's Regress. That's Lewis's allegorical account of his own conversion, the first book that he published after he became a Christian in 1931. Obviously, we don't have time to examine the book in detail, but take a brief glance at the crucial part of the story, when John finally glimpses the object of his desire, the island in the west which he has been trying to get to all this time. That island in the west is the allegorical equivalent of belief, of Christ, of union with God. And this is how Lewis describes that climactic moment. What the others saw, I do not know. But John, that's Lewis's stand in in the story. But John saw the island, and the morning wind blowing off shore from it brought the sweet smell of its orchards to them, but rarefied and made faint with the thinness and purity of early air and mixed with a little sharpness of the sea. But for John, because so many thousands looked at it with him, the pain and the longing were changed, and all unlike what they had been of old. For humility was mixed with their wildness and the sweetness came not with pride and with the lonely dreams of poets, nor with the glamour of a secret, but with the homespun truth of folk tales and with the sadness of graves and freshness as of earth in the morning, there was fear in it, also hope. And it began to seem well to him that the island should be different from his desires, and so different that if he had known it, he would not have sought it. Note how in that passage Lewis is continually fluctuating between the bane and the blessing, between condolence and congratulation between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. So he mentions, for instance, the sharpness of the sea, but also the sweet smell of the orchards. He mentions the sadness of graves, but also freshness as of earth in the mornings he brings in fear and hope directly, without any mediating image. And then the poles of the experience seem almost to merge in the final crush. Note, if he had known it, he would not have sought. Seems that he's been tricked, deceived. Yes, he has been. But thanks be to God for this deception, because how could John ever have desired this holiness in his original state? The apparent disaster is really a testimony to the spirit of God's grace, grace which not only gives John unmerited reward, this fulfilment of desire, but it excites in him the capacity for enjoying it now that it turns out to be different from what he had expected in all of Lewis's works, in my view, there's hardly another sentence which so perfectly encapsulates both the loss and the more than compensatory gain of conversion. The Pilgrim's Regress is, as I say, the first book he wrote after he became a Christian, when the bittersweet poignancy of the transition was still very keenly felt by him. And from a literary point of view, I think he hits the jackpot in the Pilgrim's Regress. The book, of course, is modeled on John Bunyan's classic the Pilgrim's Progress, a book which has astonished the world according to Lewis. And it's interesting to note when writing about Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, that Lewis didn't think particularly highly of the conversion moment in that story, when the pilgrim Christian standing at the foot of a cross, loses a burden from off his back and it rolls downhill into the mouth of a sepulchre. He thought much more highly of the scene in the Valley of Humiliation, which he said is the most beautiful thing in Bunyan and can be the most beautiful thing in life if a man takes it quite rightly. As we read the Pilgrim's Progress, Lewis contends, we ought to be discovering that humility is like that green valley, not that the green valley somehow represents humility that way, always moving into the book, not out of it. From the concept to the image, from humility to the Green Valley enriches the concept, enriches our understanding of humility. And that's what allegory is for, Lewis says. So we see here that Lewis, even as he reads an allegory, reads it very mythically. He's not so much trying to decipher it as if it were a code to be cracked as a story that needs to be translated into a secondary set of terms. Rather, he's trying to get into the heart of the book as much as possible, to be drawn further into its own meanings. And that's what allegory is for. That's what the best allegories are like. They are mythical. They can't easily be decrypted, deciphered. It's typical of Lewis to value not the fictional moment when Christian officially comes to Jesus, but the moment in the book which he feels is most like the process of coming to Jesus. And so he reworks it in his last novel, till we have Faces, when the heroine of that story, Orwell, journeys through a warm green valley and finds a priest in the woods who tells her all she ever did. From the imaginative point of view, this going down into a green valley is a very efficient way of portraying salvation because it gets in both the crucifixion element and the resurrection element almost simultaneously. There's descent, yes, there's loss, but there's descent into greenness and fertility, which signify gain, which signify new life, which symbolize ascent. Like John's vision of the island, Christian's passage through the green Valley of humiliation conveys powerfully what Lewis elsewhere calls the bittersweet of first falling in love. And it's this bittersweet that is the essence of the conversion experience. It's the turn. It's what Tolkien called Eucatastrophe, the good catastrophe, the moment in the fairy tale when beauty kisses the beast as if it were a man and miraculously, the beast turns into a man. It's that split second when you cross the border and for a brief moment stand with a foot in each camp. Death and life, shadow and sunshine. And this view of conversion springs from Lewis's realization that the crucifixion, the judicial murder of God in Dorothy L. Sayers famous phrase, is both the most heinous act in the history of the world and the salvation of that world. That is why it is Good Friday, that spearing of Christ's side is, at one and the same moment, the shattering of Perfection and the means by which perfection is able to share itself with the imperfect. I mentioned Charles Dickens in the last lecture. Let me mention him again. Tale of Two Cities. Remember Sidney Carton's Sacrifice? It signifies both the best of times and the worst of times. Think of the Silver Chair. I mentioned that too. Think of Rillian, the lost prince. And he tells the adventurers, Puddleglum, Gillen, Eustace, in Aslan's name save me. And that's precisely what they've just sworn to one another. They won't obey. And yet it's also precisely the form of words when anyone commands you to do something in Aslan's name that they've previously told Aslan they must obey. So they're caught in the Great Divorce, which is set in the outskirts of heaven. There's a man with a lizard of lust on his shoulder, a lizard which is eventually killed, enabling him to enter heaven. And after that release occurs. We're told that the lizard man's face shone with tears, but it may have been only the liquid love and brightness. One cannot distinguish them in that country which flowed from him in that hideous strength. When Jane becomes a Christian, the remaking of her soul went on amidst a kind of splendor or sorrow or both. And this ties in very much with how Lewis wrote to a real life correspondent who had just become a Christian. He sent to this correspondent both his congratulations and his commiserations on becoming a Christian. Why commiserations? Because no adult conversion is without its pains. Indeed, its pains, he says, are a sign that it is a real conversion. As well as liking John Bunyan's BITTERSweet Green Valley, CS Lewis was a great admirer of the book lilith by George MacDonald. Lewis described George Madonald, as his master said he never wrote a book in which he didn't Quite quote from MacDonald, either consciously or unconsciously. And in Lilith, Lilith can only be saved if she consents to having her hand cut off. She repeatedly dreams that it has happened, and repeatedly dreams that she has come awake, but in fact, all this time she's still asleep. The imagery of ruthless surgery, cutting off a hand, was an image of salvation that Lewis thought was terrible but true. As he writes in his address, some tendencies in each natural man may have to be simply rejected. Our Lord speaks of eyes being plucked out and hands lopped off. A frankly Procrustean method of adaptation. Remember Procrustes, the bed of procrustes, chopping people's feet off so they fit on the bed. In the Voyage of The Dawn Treader. There's the undragoning of Eustace Clarence Scrub, who's been turned into a dragon, and then he's undragoned. That's a very obvious reworking of MacDonald's passage from Lilith. Eustace sheds his own dragon skin three times, but each time finds himself still a dragon. Only when he lies back to be un dragoned, undressed by the the lion Aslan, does he find a claw going deep enough into his hide to rip off the thick, dark, knobbly skin, turning him back into a boy again. Possibly the most memorable depiction of conversion in any of Lewis's stories. However, when all is said and done, stories are only stories. Reading an account of a conversion does not make a reader into a convert. Lewis knew of this danger. Indeed, this is one of the messages that he gets out of that favorite MacDonald passage from Lilith. Lilith's dream that she has woken only to find herself still asleep has, Lewis says, a terrible meaning, especially for imaginative people. We read of spiritual efforts and our imagination makes us believe that because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them. I'm appalled, he says, to see how much of the change which I thought I had undergone lately was only imaginary. The real work seems still to be done. It's so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself. To dream that you have waked, washed and dressed, and then to find yourself still in bed. And if this is a special danger for imaginative people, it's perhaps a particular danger for religious imaginative people, people who may have been brought up on C.S. lewis. The imitation of Christ can so easily be corrupted into parrot learning, which he says, any child given a certain kind of religious education will soon learn. But to discover and know things of God in real living experience is to enter into a new realm. To know God, however dimly, and to be known by God. These things are far more important than reading conversion stories, more important even than reading Bible stories. What, after all, are stories? Only words, words to be led out to battle against other words. So writes C.S. lewis in his last novel, Till we have Faces. Since God himself is the Word Christ, the living Word, what other utterance could suffice than Christ himself? Let's finish with Lewis's essay on stories. If the author's plot is only a net, and usually an imperfect one, a net of time and event for catching what is not really a process at all is life much more in life and art, both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments, something that is not successive, whether in real life there is any doctor who can teach us how to do it so that at last either the meshes will become fine enough to hold the bird, or we be so changed that we can throw our nets away and follow the bird to its own country is not a question for this essay, but I think it is sometimes done, or very, very nearly done. In stories, I believe the effort to be well worth making. The net of a story can catch the bird, can catch the dove of the Holy Spirit, can communicate something about the divine life, and we may follow that bird to its own country, but we may need to throw away the nets of the story in order to do so. And notice the subtle biblical allusion Lewis uses there with that phrase, throwing our nets away. That's what the fishermen, James and John did, of course, when they followed Jesus. And that's what Lewis is hoping to encourage among his own readers, a life changing encounter with Christ, such as he had himself in that nighttime conversation with Tolkien and Dyson in Magdalen College. If Lewis's readers have to throw away his stories, those nets of imagined time and event, in order to follow the living Word, so be it. That's a price that he's very willing to pay.
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