Deep Magic, Dragons and Talking Mice

How Reading C.S. Lewis Can Change Your Life

Alister E McGrath

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781444750324
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Letteratura e arti nel cristianesimo

What if you could ask C. S. Lewis his thoughts on the questions we all ask ourselves from time to time - questions about friendship, education, suffering, God... and the meaning of life itself?Alister McGrath's provocative and perceptive book Deep Magic, Dragons and Talking Mice takes Lewis as the perfect conversation companion for the persistent meaning-of-life questions everyone asks. Lewis travelled from staunch atheism to reluctant belief, from rational scepticism to the appreciation of human desires and imagination, and from Christian apologist during the Second World War to celebrated author of classic children's literature - and as such looked at life's mysteries from many different viewpoints. The questions Lewis thought so deeply about are still relevant today, and all are illuminated by his astonishingly varied body of work. Whether you're new to Lewis, a fan of the Narnia books or a devotee of his apologetic writings, McGrath will lead you into an exploration of life's deepest questions, using one of the twentieth century's most engaging writers as our guide.

1

The Grand Panorama: C.S. Lewis on the Meaning of Life

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

C.S. Lewis, ‘Is Theology Poetry?’

It’s easy to imagine arriving for our first meeting with Lewis with questions buzzing through our heads, not knowing quite what to ask first. But perhaps the first thing Lewis might emphasise is that meaning matters.

Maybe Lewis would have thumped the lunch table to emphasise his point, causing the crockery to shudder. We might be taken aback. Weren’t we the ones meant to be asking the questions? Yet Lewis is challenging us! Perhaps that’s because he realised how important it is to sort this out as a first order of business. We all need to build our lives on something that is stable, solid and secure. And until we find this foundation, we can’t really begin to live properly. To use a distinction that Lewis teased out in Mere Christianity, there’s a big difference between just existing and really living.

So why does meaning matter?

Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. Deep down within all of us is a longing to work out what life is all about and what we’re meant to be doing. Whether it’s the university student wondering what subject to study or the Christian seeking God’s will or the armchair philosopher contemplating his or her purpose in the world, most of us want a reliable foundation for our lives and are asking questions that relate to it. Why am I alive? What is this life about? What is at life’s core? What is my relationship to the physical world and the others around me? Is there a God, and what difference does it make?

We all need a lens through which to look at reality and make sense of it. Otherwise we are overwhelmed by it. The poet T.S. Eliot made this point in one of his poems. Humanity, he remarked, ‘cannot bear very much reality’. We need a way of focusing it or weaving its threads together to disclose a pattern. Otherwise everything looks chaotic – blurred, out of focus and meaningless.

The French atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who shaped the thinking of many bright young things in the 1960s, saw life as pointless: ‘Here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.’1 Yet it’s hard to live in a meaningless world. What’s the point?

Realising that there is meaning and purpose in life keeps us going in times of perplexity and difficulty. This point was underscored by Viktor Frankl, whose experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War showed the importance of discerning meaning in traumatic situations.2 Frankl realised that someone’s chance of survival depended on a will to live, which in turn depended on being able to find meaning and purpose in hopeless situations. Those who coped best with apparently hopeless situations were those with ‘frameworks of meaning’. These allowed them to make sense of their experiences.

Frankl argued that if we can’t make sense of events and situations, we are unable to cope with reality. He quoted from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: the person ‘who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how’. We need a mental map of reality that allows us to position ourselves, helping us to find our way along the road of life. We need a lens which brings into focus the fundamental questions about human nature, the world and God.

Recent studies of trauma have emphasised the importance of sustaining a ‘sense of coherence’3 as a means of coping with seemingly senseless or irrational events, particularly those which involve suffering.4 In other words, those who cope best are those who can see beneath the surface of an apparently random and pointless world and grasp the deeper structure of reality. The great Harvard psychologist William James pointed out many years ago that this is what religious faith is all about. According to James, we need to have ‘faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained’.5

Of course, some would argue that any quest for meaning is simply misguided. There is nothing to find, so there is no point in looking. Richard Dawkins, who modestly declares himself to be the world’s most famous and respected atheist, insists that the universe has ‘no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference’.6 We may invent meaning to console ourselves, but there is no ‘bigger picture’. It’s all a delusion, something we have made up.

I took that view myself in my late teens. I thought people who believed in God were mad, bad, or sad. I was better than that! Atheism was an act of rebellion, an assertion of my right to believe whatever I liked. Admittedly, it was a little dull. But who cared about that? It may have been austere to the point of being dreary, but it was right! The fact that it did nothing for me was proof that I had adopted it because of its truth, not its attractiveness or relevance. Yet a tiny voice within me whispered, Are things really that simple? What if there is more to life than this?

Lewis did not help me break free from this dull and lifeless worldview. Yet as I began to read Lewis from about 1974 on, he did help me in one very important way. Lewis enabled me to name what I had found wrong with atheism. He helped me to put a jumble of insights and intuitions into words. And as I struggled to find my feet and my bearings in the Christian world, he quickly became my unofficial mentor. I had never met him, yet his words and wisdom became – and have remained – important to me. I would love to have met Lewis – over lunch, or a drink, or in a tutorial – not so much to bombard him with questions, but simply to thank him for helping me grow in my faith.

It’s time to bring C.S. Lewis into the conversation. Lewis was an atheist as a young man, yet he gradually realised that atheism was intellectually vulnerable and existentially unsatisfying. Let’s find out why. Let’s imagine that a group of us are having lunch with Lewis, and one of us asks him how he came to find meaning in life – or, specifically for him, how he became a Christian. What might he say?

Lewis’s Doubts about His ‘Glib and Shallow Rationalism’

Lewis was a convinced atheist by the age of sixteen. He was quite clear that religion had been explained away by the leading scholars of the 1910s. All the best scholarship of the day had shown that religion was just a primitive human instinct. This scholarship seemed to say, ‘We’ve grown up now and don’t need this.’ Nobody could take belief in God seriously any more.

His views were hardened by the suffering and violence he witnessed while serving in the trenches in the First World War. Lewis had trained in an officer-cadet battalion in Oxford during the summer of 1917 before being commissioned as an officer in the Somerset Light Infantry and posted to northern France. The suffering and destruction he saw around him convinced him of the pointlessness of life and the non-existence of God.

Lewis’s experiences during the First World War made him angry with God – even though he believed that there was no God to be angry with. Like so many disillusioned and cynical young men, Lewis wanted someone to hate, someone to blame for the ills of the world. And, like so many before and after him, Lewis blamed God for everything. How dare God create him without his permission!7 But his atheism did not provide him with a ‘framework of meaning’ that made any sense of the devastation and anguish caused by the war. And he had to face up to the awkward fact that, if there was no God, blame for the war’s horrors had to be laid firmly on human beings. Lewis seems gradually to have realised that the violence and brutality of the war raised troubling questions about a godless humanism as much as it did about Christianity. His ‘grim and deadly’ atheism did not make much sense of his wartime trauma, let alone help him to cope with it.8

The literature concerning the Great War and its aftermath emphasises the physical and psychological damage it wreaked on soldiers at the time and on their return home. The irrationality of the war called into question whether there was any meaning in the universe or in individual existence. Many students returning to study at Oxford after the war experienced considerable difficulty adjusting to normal life, which led to frequent nervous breakdowns.

Lewis himself hardly ever mentions the Great War. He seems to have ‘partitioned’ or ‘compartmentalised’ his life as a way of retaining his sanity. Literature – above all, poetry – became Lewis’s firewall. It allowed him to keep the chaotic and meaningless external world at a safe distance and shielded him from the existential devastation it wreaked on others.

Lewis’s continuing commitment to atheism in the 1920s was grounded in his belief that it was right, a ‘wholesome severity’,9 even though he admitted that it offered a ‘grim and meaningless’ view of life. He took the view that atheism’s intellectual rectitude trumped its emotional and existential inadequacy. Lewis did not regard atheism as liberating or exciting; he seems simply to have accepted it, without enthusiasm, as the thinking person’s only intellectual option – a default position, without any particular virtues or graces.

Yet during the 1920s, Lewis reconsidered his attitude towards Christianity. The story of his return to the faith he had abandoned as a boy is described in great detail in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. After wrestling with the clues concerning God that he found in human reason and experience, he eventually decided that intellectual honesty compelled him to believe and trust in God. He did not want to; he felt, however, that he had no choice.

In Surprised by Joy, Lewis tells us how he experienced the gradual approach of God. It was, he suggests, like a game of chess. Every move he made to defend himself was countered by a better move on God’s part. His arguments against faith seemed increasingly inadequate and unconvincing. Finally, he felt he had no option but to give in and admit that God was God, becoming the ‘most dejected and reluctant convert in all England’.

So what made Lewis change his mind? How did a hardened, dogmatic atheist become one of the greatest apologists for Christianity of the twentieth century and beyond? And what can we learn from this? Let’s begin by looking at how Lewis’s disenchantment with atheism began, and where it took him.

There are clear signs that Lewis began to become disenchanted with atheism in the early 1920s. For a start, it was imaginatively uninteresting. Lewis began to realise that atheism did not – and could not – satisfy the deepest longings of his heart or his intuition that there was more to life than what was seen on the surface. Lewis put it this way in a famous passage from Surprised by Joy:

On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other, a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.10

So what did Lewis mean by this? For a start, Lewis was putting into words his growing dissatisfaction with the simplistic account of things offered by atheism. His ‘glib and shallow rationalism’ dismissed the deep questions of life, offering only superficial responses. Atheism was existentially insignificant, having nothing to say about the deepest question...