in people being introduced to or reminded of Lewis’s works.
More generally, I hope the whole two-day memorial
event will focus people’s minds on carrying Lewis’s legacy for-
ward into the future and help engender ideas about how that
might best be achieved. It’s important in every generation
for there to be talented artists, diligent scholars, and faithful
apologists who are able to work both through argument and
through story. By thinking about what Lewis achieved in these
respects, people will be encouraged, I hope, to find ways of
emulating and updating his example in the modern day.
SMITH
I would imagine that you will feel a sense of satisfaction in see-
ing this accomplished. With this particular milestone in the
Lewis community and the wide spectrum of Lewis admirers,
what are you most pleased about and proud of?
WARD
There are two things that most please me about this event. The
first is that it’s going to be international and will feature almost every conceivable constituency in what you might call “the
Lewis world”: people who knew him, people who worked with
him, theologians and philosophers and poets who admire him,
scholars who have studied and written about him, professors
who have tutored and lectured on his works, priests and pas-
tors and ministers who have handed on his wisdom, children
who love Narnia, regular readers who just like his stories or his
style, and so on and so forth. And I’m particularly pleased that
it will involve people who knew him and worked with him,
because their number, alas, is getting smaller every year. This
is really the last chance for a gathering of this kind on such a
scale.
And the other thing that especially pleases me is that this
event is being organized by British people and in an Anglican
context. Lewis himself was British and Anglican, and at last he
is being commemorated by his countrymen in that setting, but
with the whole world, as it were, welcome and involved at the
same time. So many previous Lewis-related events have been
principally American and Evangelical, and although those
events have often been excellent and I’ve been proud to be
xxiv
introduction
associated with many of them myself, this event is different. It
feels like a sort of home-coming or a long overdue recognition.
It’s going to be, I trust, a very happy occasion for everyone who
attends, wherever they come from and whatever their par-
ticular connection with Lewis. I count myself tremendously
fortunate to have a role in helping bring it about.
SMITH
What will be involved in the two days?
WARD
During the afternoon and evening of Thursday 21st
November, there will be four events:
Lewis presented the Christian faith through rational
argument;
ii. a lecture by Dr. Malcolm Guite, looking at how Lewis pre-
sented Christianity through story and poetry;
iii. a service of Choral Evensong—as happens every evening
in the Abbey;
iv. a panel discussion that I will chair, featuring William
Lane Craig, Michael Ramsden, Jeanette Sears, Peter S.
Williams, and Judith Wolfe.
Then on Friday 22nd November, there will be a Memorial Ser-
vice, at which the Lewis memorial will be formally unveiled;
Walter Hooper, Lewis’s editor and biographer, will lay flow-
ers on it. The service will feature hymns, prayers, and read-
ings both from Scripture and from Lewis’s works, including
an audio-recording of his own voice reading a passage from
Mere Christianity (a passage that, by a pleasing coincidence, contains the phrase “telling the truth”). There will also be a
specially commissioned choral anthem, a setting of one of
Lewis’s poems, composed by Paul Mealor. The address will be
given by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canter-
bury, and now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge (the
college where, of course, Lewis finished his career).
SMITH
Where will the Symposium events take place?
introduction
xxv
WARD
The two lectures and the panel discussion will take place in St.
Margaret’s Church, which is right next door to the Abbey and
is part of the overall Abbey foundation.
SMITH
Will there be any official gatherings before or after the
conference?
WARD
Dr. John Hall will kindly be hosting a dinner for the lectur-
ers and the panelists on the Thursday night in the Deanery.
There’ll also be a reception for a number of invited guests, after the Memorial Service, in the Jerusalem Chamber—a beautiful fourteenth-century room where the translators of the Au-
thorised Version met in 1611, and where Henry IV famously
died in 1413. The room can only accommodate about seventy
people, so the guests will be mostly those with a particular
connection to Lewis—relatives, colleagues, friends, former
students, and so on.
SMITH
Are there any final details you would like to add?
WARD
I ought to add that the Westminster events will not be the
only commemorations being held in England for the fiftieth
anniversary of Lewis’s death. There will be a day-conference
at Magdalene College Cambridge, a celebratory event at Mag-
dalen College Oxford, and the Oxford University C. S. Lewis
But as regards the Westminster events specifically: one
very exciting piece of news, which I alluded to earlier, is that
the Director of Music at the Abbey, Professor James O’Donnell,
has suggested that a special piece of music, a choral anthem,
be commissioned for the Memorial Service. He asked me to
propose some passages that might serve for the libretto, so I
pored over Lewis’s poetry, looking for poems that were short
enough and lyrical enough to be viable candidates for a musi-
cal setting. There were lots of contenders, of course, but even-
tually I settled on three possible choices (“Love’s As Warm
As Tears,” “The Naked Seed,” and “After Prayers, Lie Cold”),
which I submitted to the Abbey for their consideration. I also
suggested Paul Mealor as a suitable composer, having greatly
admired his motet, Ubi caritas, which he wrote for the 2011
Royal Wedding; and James O’Donnell instantly agreed that
xxvi
introduction
Paul would be a very fine choice. Paul consented to come on
board and to work on that poem which was—very happily—
the first choice of both the Dean and myself, namely “Love’s
As Warm As Tears.”
An anonymous donor has kindly come forward to fund
the commission and my hope is not only that this piece of
music will bring beauty and creativity to the Memorial Ser-
vice, but also that it will become a standard part of the cho-
; ral repertoire in this country—maybe even throughout the
world—and be performed long after these commemorative
events have passed into history. The poem in question is suited
equally, I think, to weddings and funerals, but is also apt for
any religious service or musical concert that aims to celebrate
human and divine love. The way the poem talks about love as
being “as warm as tears”, “as fierce as fire”, “as fresh as spring”, and “as hard as nails”, makes it applicable in all sorts of circumstances. I suspect Lewis was wanting to allude to the four
elements (water, fire, air, and earth) in those four descriptions.
Subtly, he’s suggesting that love informs the entire cosmos, it
“moves the sun and the other stars”—in Dante’s immortal line.
SMITH
How can readers and Lewis admirers participate and help sup-
port this effort?
WARD
If you pray, please pray that this whole project will be edifying
and successful. If you want to attend the events, please feel free to come to London in person on 21st and 22nd November.
And if you don’t pray or can’t come, then please at least make a
donation or encourage others to do so! And please also spread
the word in general through social media. We still need to raise
nearly £15,000. Any money raised over and above the costs of
the memorial will go towards a new C. S. Lewis Scholarship at
the University of Cambridge.5
SMITH
My thanks to Dr. Ward for his efforts to bring the Lewis Memo-
rial to fruition and for his generous sharing in this interview.
5. Donations to the scholarship may still be made. Enquiries about how to contribute should be directed to database@alumni.cam.ac.uk.
part one
Symposium
1
Telling the Truth through
Rational Argument
C. S. Lewis on the Reasonableness
of Christian Faith
Alister E. McGrath 1
It is a great pleasure to be able to contribute to Westminster Abbey’s series of public lectures on “Telling the Truth” by exploring how C. S. Lewis used rational argument to commend and communicate the Christian faith.2
Lewis is now firmly established as one of the greatest apologists of the twentieth century, with a continuing legacy of influence in the twenty-first.
Few apologists have achieved anything approaching his impact, which transcends denominational barriers.
Lewis was British, and a layman of the Church of England. The decision to honour him here at Westminster is an important reaffirmation of his 1. The Revd. Dr. Alister E. McGrath is the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, and Fellow of Harris Manchester College. He is the author of numerous books, including C. S. Lewis: A Life (Hodder & Stoughton, 2013) and The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). He maintains a web presence at www.
alistermcgrath.weebly.com.
2. This article represents the full, corrected text of the lecture given at Westminster Abbey on 21 November 2013. A shorter version, rewritten for a more academic readership, was published as “An Enhanced Vision of Rationality: C. S. Lewis on the Reasonableness of Christian Faith,” Theology 116.6 (2013) 410–17. The author and editors are grateful to the editor of Theology for permission to reproduce some material from this earlier article. A video of Professor McGrath’s lecture is available online: https://
youtube/aAJh6Z9Q3c4.
3
4
part one—symposium
cultural and religious identity, here at the heart of the British religious and political establishment. Lewis’s genius is such that he is loved and valued far beyond the confines of Great Britain and the Church of England; yet, as the recent anniversary events here in Britain have made abundantly clear—
attendances have been huge!—Lewis is both remembered and admired
here, in this nation and church.
Lewis also appeals to both fans and academics. If I might borrow a phrase from Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), his works are “like a river, both shallow and deep, in which a lamb may walk and an elephant swim.”3
The point that Gregory was making was that the Bible could be read and appreciated at multiple levels, popular and academic. And that is most certainly true of Lewis. Lewis is read and loved by a wide readership. Yet this anniversary year has marked an important transition, in that Lewis is now being taken with increased seriousness by academics, especially at Oxford and Cambridge. Many of you will have read Rowan Williams’s brilliant engagement with Narnia.4 It is surely significant that one of the world’s greatest theologians, a former archbishop of Canterbury who is now Master of Lewis’s old Cambridge college, takes such delight in Narnia, and helps us find new depths of meaning within it.
This recognition is long overdue. The foundations for this recognition were laid as long ago as 1946, when the ancient Scottish University of St.
Andrews awarded Lewis the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity. Professor Donald Baillie, Dean of the university’s Faculty of Divinity, declared that Lewis had “succeeded in capturing the attention of many who will not readily listen to professional theologians,” and had “arranged a new kind of marriage between theological reflection and poetic imagination.” The passing of time has confirmed that Baillie was right on both counts. Perhaps, to use a musical image, Lewis is better seen as an arranger than as a composer. But some of his theological “arrangements” and “variations on themes” seem to have captured the popular imagination, where the originals did not.
So what is Lewis’s approach to telling the truth, and why has it been so successful? In this lecture, I am going to explore Lewis’s distinctive understanding of the rationality of faith, which emphasises the reasonableness of Christianity without imprisoning it within an impersonal and austere rationalism.
Lewis himself was an atheist as a younger man,5 convinced of the
fundamental irrationality of faith, and its incapacity to accommodate the 3. Gregory the Great , Moralia, 4; J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina LXXV, 16.
4. Cf. Williams, The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia.
5. For further details, see McGrath, C. S. Lewis—A Life.
mcgrath—telling the truth through rational argument 5
brutality and senselessness of the Great War, in which he fought from 1917–18. Yet Lewis’s decision to limit himself to a rationalist worldview proved to be imaginatively sterile and uninteresting, leaving him existentially dissatisfied. It became clear to Lewis that pure reason offered him a bleak intellectual landscape that he could not bear to inhabit. Yet this, his reason insisted, was all that there was. To believe otherwise was pure fantasy. Lewis’s imagination taught him that there had to be more. “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.”6
Lewis’s study of English literature, especially the poetry of George Herbert, left him with gnawing doubts about his atheism. Herbert and others seemed able to connect up with a world that Lewis was tempted to dismiss as illusory, yet which haunted his imagination. “The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other, a glib and shallow rationalism.”7 Might, Lewis wondered, the deepest intuitions of his imagination challenge the shallow truths of his dogmatic reason? And even triumph over it?
So how did Lewis break free from this rationalist prison? Lewis’s understanding of the reasonableness of the Christian faith rests on a distinct way of grasping the rationality of the created order, and its ultimate grounding in God. Where some favour deductive arguments for the existence of God, Lewis offer
s his own distinct approach which is more inductive than deductive; more visual rather than purely rational.
Lewis’s approach is difficult to simplify, as it is highly nuanced. But perhaps we could set out the key aspects of his approach as follows. The truths of the Christian faith lie beyond the reach of human reason; yet when those truths are presented and grasped, their rationality can easily be discerned. And one hallmark of that rationality is the ability of the Christian faith to make things intelligible.
It is clear that Lewis was drawn to Christianity because of both its intellectual capaciousness and its imaginative appeal. It made sense of things, without limiting itself to what could be understood or grasped by reason.
Lewis, it seems to me, echoes a theme we find in the final canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy, where the great Florentine poet and theologian expresses the idea that Christianity provides a vision of things—something wonderful which can be seen, yet which proves resistant to verbal expression: From that moment onwards my power of sight exceeded
6. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 197.
7. Ibid.
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part one—symposium
That of speech, which fails at such a vision.8
For Lewis, there is always a sense of a “beyond,” a “numinous”—something of enormous significance that lies beyond our reason, hinted at more by intuition than by logic. This point had been made earlier by G. K. Chesterton (whom Lewis greatly admired). “Every true artist,” Chesterton argued, feels
“that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.”9 While the intellectual capaciousness of the Christian faith can be rationally analysed, Lewis hints that it is best imaginatively communicated.
Lewis invites us to see Christianity as offering us a standpoint (a Platonic synoptikon, if you like) from which we may survey things, and grasp their intrinsic coherence and interconnectedness. We see how things connect together. Lewis consistently uses a remarkably wide range of visual metaphors—such as sun, light, blindness, and shadows—to help us understand the nature of a true understanding of things. Where some argue that rationality concerns the ability of reason to give an account of things, Lewis frames this more in terms of our ability to see their relationships. This has two highly significant consequences.
First, it means that Lewis sees reason and imagination as existing in a collaborative relationship. Reason without imagination is potentially dull and limited; imagination without reason is potentially delusory and escap-ist. Lewis develops a notion of “imagined”—not imaginary—reality, which is capable of being grasped by reason and visualised by the imagination.