The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (58 page)

Lewis’s view faced its most formidable criticism on February 2, 1948, at a Monday evening meeting of the Socratic Club, when G.E.M. (Elizabeth) Anscombe, a Catholic convert, student of Wittgenstein, and arguably the most brilliant moral philosopher of her generation, read a paper to the Socratic Club pointing out, as a fatal flaw in Lewis’s argument, his conflation of
irrational
with
nonrational
factors in belief-formation, and arguing that reasoning, considered as a process or event, can be described naturalistically without prejudice to a judgment of rational validity:

Whether [a man’s] conclusions are rational or irrational is settled by considering the chain of reasoning that he gives and whether his conclusions follow from it. When we are giving a causal account of this thought, e.g. an account of the physiological processes which issue in the utterance of his reasoning, we are not considering his utterances from the point of view of evidence, reasoning, valid argument, truth, at all; we are considering them merely as events. Just
because
that is how we are considering them, our description has in itself no bearing on the question of “valid,” “invalid,” “rational,” “irrational,” and so on.

Anscombe noted other ambiguities as well, and Lewis conceded some of them: “veridical” might have expressed his meaning better than “valid,” and “cause” should have been distinguished from “ground.” The minutes of the meeting concluded that “in general it appeared that Mr Lewis would have to turn his argument into a rigorous analytic one, if his notion were to stand the test of all the questions put to him.”

For a 1960 edition of
Miracles
, Lewis made revisions with Anscombe’s criticisms in mind, changing the title of his third chapter from “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist” to “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism,” substituting “non-rational” for many occurrences of “irrational,” and clarifying the cause-effect/ground-consequent distinction. Anscombe remained unconvinced by Lewis’s arguments but noted that “the fact that Lewis rewrote that chapter, and rewrote it so that it now has these qualities, shows his honesty and seriousness.”

As of this writing, the jury is still out on the soundness of Lewis’s “argument from reason,” as it is now called, even in its improved 1960 form, but it has its notable defenders, among them the philosopher Alvin Plantinga. While Lewis failed to consider naturalism in all its varieties, he successfully refuted naturalism of the most virulent kind—eliminative materialism. In place of this crude and unsatisfying worldview,
Miracles
paints a portrait of the harmony between mind and reality, and between faith and reason, that should encourage scientists and believers alike: “The rightful demand that all reality should be consistent and systematic does not therefore exclude miracles … By definition, miracles must of course interrupt the usual course of Nature; but if they are real they must, in the very act of so doing, assert all the more the unity and self-consistency of total reality at some deeper level…” This sense of a deep harmony achieved by the sovereignty of reason over nature and of God over all was what Lewis wanted most to convey, and Anscombe’s valid criticisms do not diminish this insight.

Nonetheless, he was bruised by the debate. Derek Brewer, his student at the time, remembered Lewis speaking of the event “with real horror”: “His imagery was all of the fog of war, the retreat of infantry thrown back under heavy attack.” Brewer also recalled hearing Dyson say, with sympathy, that Lewis “had lost everything and was come to the foot of the Cross.” Some biographers, missing the hyperbole in these descriptions, have advanced the view that Lewis was so devastated by the Anscombe affair that he abandoned apologetics and retreated into children’s fantasy. This belief has gained traction in recent years, but there are good reasons to reject it. For one thing, it does not match Anscombe’s impression. “My own recollection,” she wrote later, “is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis’ rethinking and rewriting showed he thought were accurate. I am inclined to construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of his friends—who seem not to have been interested in the actual arguments or the subject-matter—as an interesting example of the phenomenon called ‘projection.’” For another, it overlooks Lewis’s enjoyment of a good fight. When Stella Aldwinckle asked him to nominate speakers for the 1951 Socratic Club season, Anscombe was his first choice: “The lady is quite right to refute what she thinks bad theistic arguments, but does this not almost oblige her as a Christian to find good ones in their place: having obliterated me as an Apologist ought she not to
succeed
me?”

The truth is, as we saw in chapter 13, Lewis had been worrying for many years about the baleful effects of apologetics upon the apologist. In
The Great Divorce
, completed by the summer of 1944, nearly four years before the Anscombe debate, the Teacher (George MacDonald) warns Lewis about Christians so caught up in proving God’s existence that they ignore the living God. “It is,” MacDonald says, “the subtlest of all the snares.” Lewis picked up the theme again in an address to Anglican clergy in 1945, telling his audience that “nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist.” The problem, as he saw it, was that a successful debater for Christ, aware of the flaws in his arguments, may come to see what he has defended as “spectral” and “unreal.” The only hope, Lewis said, is for the believer to turn “from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself.”

A few remarks in Lewis’s letters might seem to support the picture of a demoralized Lewis abandoning the intellectual defense of Christianity, but they need not be so construed. Thus, in a letter to the BBC declining to participate in a series of broadcast dialogues on the evidences for Christianity, Lewis begged off by saying that “like the old fangless snake in
The Jungle Book
, I’ve largely lost my dialectical power.” Fatigue, the tedium that such a project would promise for anyone who has already performed in that circus, polite humor, and the wisdom of late middle age more than account for the self-deprecation. In a similar spirit, he declined an invitation to write for the American evangelical magazine
Christianity Today
: “My thought and talent (such as they are) now flow in different, though I think not less Christian, channels, and I do not think I am at all likely to write more
directly
theological pieces. The last work of that sort which I attempted had to be abandoned. If I am now good for anything it is for catching the reader unawares—thro’ fiction and symbol. I have done what I could in the way of frontal attacks, but I now feel quite sure those days are over.” The abandoned work to which he refers here is not
Miracles
, but a projected book of private prayers for the use of the laity. As any experienced writer knows, abandoning books when they fail to gel is no defeat but a crucial part of the creative process.

Lewis still had a great deal of theological and philosophical writing ahead of him. Though 1948 marked the end of his most productive period in Christian apologetics, he continued to publish polemical and meditative essays expounding and defending Christian doctrine from different angles, many of which appeared in collections like
The World’s Last Night
,
Christian Reflections
, and
Undeceptions
(
God in the Dock
in the United States). In books still to come, such as
The Four Loves
and
Letters to Malcolm
, the Christian apologist is alive and well; and in
Surprised by Joy
he would present, under the guise of autobiography, a winning articulation of the case for theism.
Miracles
was a capstone, not a swan song, as Lewis himself suggested in a whimsical note to the poet and Arthurian scholar William L. Kinter in 1953: “It’s fun laying out all my books as a cathedral. Personally I’d make
Miracles
and the other ‘treatises’ the cathedral school: my children’s stories are the real side-chapels, each with its own little altar.” What went on in the side-chapels—
The Chronicles of Narnia
—will be explored in the next chapter.

Other Friendships

Dorothy L. Sayers was not the only woman who might have made a splendid Inkling. Sister Penelope, with her skill in Latin and Greek, her puckish humor, and her outpouring of works on Christian doctrine, each one better than the previous in Lewis’s estimation, perfectly fit the mold. An equally strong case could be made for the poet and painter Ruth Pitter (1897–1992). Pitter came within the orbit of the (future) Inklings as early as 1932, when David Cecil read her poetry collection
A Trophy at Arms
and dashed off a laudatory letter. “I must tell you how very beautiful I think your poems,” he wrote. “I read them last week in a fit of drab depression brought on by the condition of the world: and I cannot tell you what a ray of light spread out on my horizon to discover that someone cared still to write such firm spontaneous glowing poetry—could feel the essential normal beauties of soul & body, so freshly, so strongly, so unsentimentally.”

At the time, Pitter was in her late thirties, a friend of Belloc, Orwell, AE, and Orage, struggling to make ends meet by comanaging a company that sold painted furniture. Her poetry was just the sort that Cecil loved, with its precise traditional forms and Christian values (later, L. P. Hartley described her poems as “closely-worked, carved like gems, and immediately intelligible,” and John Wain declared her “a poet of the full singing voice,” of the “high style”—the latter a very Inklingesque compliment). Cecil became a lifelong friend, and thanks in large measure to his support,
A Trophy at Arms
won the 1937 Hawthornden Prize.

A few years later, Pitter forged her most important Inklings bond, befriending C. S. Lewis. He had first heard of her early during the war, when Cecil had showed him her poetry. Lewis had been “deeply struck,” Cecil wrote Pitter, “& went off to buy your poems.” The following year, she read
The Screwtape Letters
and told Cecil that the book had “excited me more than anything has done for a long time.” When she heard Lewis’s BBC broadcasts, excitement turned into something more significant:

There were air raids at night. The factory was dark and dirty. And I remember thinking—well—I must find somebody or something because like this I cannot go on … sometime afterwards I heard the broadcast talks of C. S. Lewis, and I at once grappled them to my soul, as Shakespeare says … I had to be intellectually satisfied as well as emotionally … and I was satisfied at every point.

The radio talks worked their magic and “driven to it by the pull of C. S. Lewis and the push of misery,” she formally entered, a few years later, the English Church.

Thanks to the poet Herbert Palmer, a mutual friend who acted as go-between, Pitter finally met the great evangelizer at his Magdalen digs on the morning of July 17, 1946. “My visit to you has discountenanced all the gypsy’s warnings of people who say ‘never meet your favourite authors,’” she wrote happily to her new friend that evening. He replied a few days later, having just read
A Trophy of Arms
: “I was prepared for the more definitely mystical poems, but not for this cool, classical style … I meant to send you something of mine but I shan’t. It all sounds like a brass band after yours … Why wasn’t I told you were as good as this?” Five days later he did mail her a handful of his own poems, confessing that he had doubts about their value: “I know (or think) that some of these contain important thought and v. great metrical ingenuity … But are they real poems or do the content and the form remain separable—fitted together only by force?” Pitter assured him that they were indeed real; to a friend she remarked that she hadn’t known that poetry (in any language!) could blend such metrical brilliance and deep thought. Lewis was “greatly relieved” by her assessment—he was far more assured of his skill with prose than with poetry—and admitted that “I often lust after a metre as a man might lust after a woman.”

This satisfying round of congratulations and assurances initiated one of the significant artistic friendships of Lewis’s life. He and Pitter exchanged scores of letters and met dozens of times. He visited her at home in Chelsea, invited her to lectures and debates, and introduced her to other Inklings, including Warnie, Barfield, and Dyson—but never, of course, to an official Inklings meeting, the prohibition against women remaining unbreachable. During their lunches, the two friends discussed faith, fellow writers, what to read, and what to write. Their correspondence flourished. Lewis’s letters, less confessional than those to Sister Penelope, combine banter with serious reflections on a variety of topics, including the fall of the angels, the beauties of nature, and the space romances of David Lindsay. They couldn’t stop talking about poetry: “The important thing is that we put the individual poet firmly in his place,” Lewis said. “He is not the creator, only the mother, of something whose father is the Universe or Time.” He continued to seek Pitter’s advice on his verse, on at least one occasion sending her two versions of a poem (“Two Kinds of Memory”) and asking which she preferred. If she had said neither, he would have agreed, for he still doubted that his poems were “real” and wondered whether her praise came from “kindness and liking for my prose work.” Pitter later saw the legitimacy of Lewis’s qualms; he had the tools of a poet, but his obsession with technique hampered his expression. “Did he ever,” she mused, “catch some floating bit of emotional thistledown & go on from that?”

While corresponding with Pitter, Lewis started up yet another epistolary exchange, in this instance with someone who differed from him “in place, nationality, language, obedience and age.” Don Giovanni Calabria, an Italian Catholic priest and founder of the Poor Servants of Divine Providence, initiated the letters, writing to Lewis from Verona on September 1, 1947, that he had just read
Le Lettere di Berlicche
(
The Screwtape Letters
) and wished to consult the author on “a problem of the greatest importance,” that of the schism between Catholics and Protestants. Not knowing English, he addressed Lewis in Latin. Delighted, Lewis rose to the challenge and replied in kind, apologizing for any rust in his delivery. Ecumenical issues were, for him, too, “a source of grief and a matter for prayers.” However, he thought himself unqualified to tackle such subtle matters, which should be addressed by “bishops and learned men.” He preferred to concentrate on “those things which still, by God’s grace, after so many sins and errors, are shared by us.” This may sound disingenuous, given his willingness to pronounce on many theological issues for which he had no professional training (a practice that irked Tolkien mightily, as the reader will recall), but there is an appealing note of humility in Lewis’s voice, an echo of Don Giovanni’s own self-deprecating tone. Carried on until Don Giovanni’s death in 1954, the exchange covered many conventional but heartfelt themes, such as the love of God, moral darkness, the threat of atheism, and prayers of encouragement. Lewis enjoyed the correspondence and revered the correspondent; on September 13, 1951, after hearing that Don Giovanni was ill and fearing that he may be dead, he wrote that “never in the least did I cease from my prayers for you; for not even the River of Death ought to abolish the sweet intercourse of love and meditations.” These letters reveal Lewis at his most tender, kind, and conciliatory; the bullying don and bullheaded debater annihilated by love through his encounter with the saintly Italian (Don Giovanni was canonized by Pope John Paul II on April 18, 1999).