In the Highest Degree: Volume One

Essays on C. S. Lewis's Philosophical Theology—Method, Content, & Reason

Brazier

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781532651939
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism

The theological and philosophical works of C. S. Lewis were grounded in the argument from reason. As such reason is a form of revelation that predates nature and relates to the divine: the Word of God, Christ the Logos. These essays provide some understanding of the essentials to Lewis's philosophical theology, that is, the essentia, "in the highest degree." Lewis's corpus can seem disparate, but here we find unity in his aims, objectives, and methodology, a consistency that demonstrates the deep roots of his philosophical theology in Scripture, in Greek philosophy, patristic and medieval theology, and in some of the Reformers, all framed by a reasoned discipline from a perceptive and critical mind: method and form; content and reason--for the glory of God. Here is the essentia of Lewis's thinking. From an analysis of reason, through a theoretically unified proposition for atonement, to the evidence of Christ as the light of the world across human endeavors and religions, to a doctrine of election, to an understanding of Scripture, to "the Philosophy of the Incarnation" (as Lewis termed it,) through fundamental arguments with various modern/liberal theologians, we find evidence for the actuality of the incarnation: the divinity of Christ.

“In the Highest Degree” Volume I

Introduction

It has often been stated and acknowledged that C. S. Lewis, while being subject to a profound encounter with the Holy Spirit as a young man, which led to his conversion, actually thought his way to faith, to being a Christian, and accepting that God is God, a God who as Lord, laid claim to his life. Lewis submitted to El Shaddai, Almighty God, the Lordship of ywhw, but he had undergone a long, difficult period in having to sort out in his mind the why, the wherefore, the reasoned logic of faith. From his teenage years Lewis had been a stubborn, logical atheist (and like most reasoned atheists, there lay hidden subjective psychological issues, a legion of confused and disordered factors in his life and mind, that had led to and bolstered his atheism). Lewis from his time at the University of Oxford specialized in English literature and philosophy, including “Greats.” His entire worldview was reasoned-out, logically—or so he thought. This worldview had to be dismantled brick-by-brick before he could allow God in, though as he later acknowledged, God was already “in” and had been most unscrupulous: as he commented, “Really, a young atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully.”1

So Lewis was no stranger to reasoning-out beliefs, to logical reasoning, so it is no wonder that when he came to write theology and to argue in the common rooms of Oxford, his position was one of a philosophical theologian. As such, philosophical theology can be seen as a branch of theology, but also—arguably, though disputed by some philosophers—of philosophy. Philosophical theology is therefore a form of theology in which philosophical methods are used in developing and analyzing theological concepts: it is an attempt to explicate, to find rational proofs for faith. Many modern, Western philosophers appear to regard atheism as a pre-requisite for philosophical thinking, for faith is often regarded as a denial of academic neutrality. But this position is, as we shall see, contestable.

C. S. Lewis was a trained philosopher; indeed he taught philosophy at Oxford in the 1920s, early in his career. In philosophical terms, Lewis was unashamedly a Platonist (drawing inspiration from the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato [c.424–348BC]). The term also applies to later systems of philosophy developed from Plato’s work and ideas, for example, Neoplatonism or Platonic realism. Central to Platonism is the theory of forms. The forms are transcendent archetypes; the objects we take for reality—the things we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell—are in some way a pale imitation of the forms: reality relates to the forms as an imperfect copy does to an original. The forms tell us that what we take for reality is perceivable but not intelligible, but that there is another higher reality that is intelligible but not perceivable. Platonism is a type of philosophy that Lewis not only subscribed to but which characterized his work throughout his life. And in this he was holding fast to the classical Christian heritage. Most patristic theologians were Platonists, to varying degrees; Neoplatonism was in many ways part of patristic theology. However, many Protestant, Reformed, or Evangelical supporters of Lewis’s work today object strongly to his Platonism not realizing that it is fundamental to Lewis’s interpretation of the gospel and is at the heart of his understanding of revelation. The precise nature of Lewis’s Platonism will become clear in the subsequent chapters of this work.

Platonism, as distinct from modern philosophy (if by modern we are citing the numerous ideas and theories of philosophy that pervaded post-Reformation thought in the West2), defines the form and method of Lewis’s thinking and therefore the particular character of his apologetics. Lewis was not, however, immune from modern philosophy. He was schooled in, and to a degree a follower of, logical positivism in the immediate years after World War I.3 However, his philosophical education had begun in earnest when he was invalided out of the First World War. Wounded near Arras on April 15, 1918, Lewis developed a serious interest in philosophy while recovering in Étaples hospital. He read and studied John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.4 Lewis absorbed Locke’s proposition that reality cannot be comprehended totally by the mind; this was in many ways a preparation for the influence of the Platonist Bishop Berkeley. Therefore, we need to focus particularly on Lewis the philosopher: his understanding of truth and reason, his Platonic idealism, and especially the proximity of his thought to that of the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist Henry More and the eighteenth-century philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, both of whom Lewis valued greatly.

His relationship with modern philosophy will be seen from his very public encounter in the Socratic Club with Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe (a young philosophy don, trained in analytic philosophy, and a follower of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but also a believing and traditional Roman Catholic).

Post-conversion, Lewis was firmly grounded in theological and philosophical orthodoxy by his reading of many patristic theologians and philosophers, essentially, Augustine of Hippo (a rhetorician in the classical tradition, adult convert, as well as a theologian and philosopher). In the early years after his conversion he read, studied, and translated Augustine’s City of God, a massive and seminal work, which also defined much of his argumentative method, and his respect for reason.5 Furthermore, he used as a reference and source, Aquinas’ Summa on an almost daily basis in the 1940s when writing much of his corpus.6 The early patristic theologian Tertullian may have argued that the temple (Jerusalem) has nothing to do with the academy (Greek philosophy),7 but Lewis saw, accepted, and promoted reasoning as essential to the preaching and promotion of the gospel.

So why Lewis and philosophical theology? Because he never missed an opportunity to spell out his beliefs, to analyze his beliefs in a reasoned and logical manner, to justify before the atheistic common rooms of Oxford, the reasoned evidence for the gospel—even in his children’s stories, The Chronicles of Narnia!

So, In the Highest Degree: Essays on C. S. Lewis’s Philosophical Theology—Method, Content, & Reason Vol. I and Vol. II: the term “essential,” in middle English, evoked, “in the highest degree”; from late Latin, essentia, what we find here in these essays is the essence of C. S. Lewis’s philosophical theology by analyzing his method, content, and form. The sum total (summa; feminine of summus, “highest”), gives us the being or essence of a thing, so, the essence, substance, being, actuality, essential thing, existing entity, whole: the highest degree, the highest essentials of C. S. Lewis’s theological and philosophical thinking.

In this first volume, we open with the Anscombe-Lewis debate, possibly one of the most infamous encounters Lewis had with philosophers, pertinently the exponents of analytic philosophy and linguistic philosophy: movements from Central Europe that were relatively new to Oxford in the post-WWII years. The debate related to the fundamental philosophical propositions that underpin Christianity, pertinently how we speak and write about Christianity; the debate illustrates and defines a point where Lewis’s work changes, a shift in his theological method, including his censure of naturalism and scientism. Elizabeth Anscombe’s criticism of Lewis’s key argument against naturalism (the argument from reason) revealed a minefield in terms of causation and our use of language. She was not denying his argument but pointing out how his defense was inadequately formulated, phrased: the defense did not stand up to analysis and deconstruction. Lewis’s response (the rewriting of his book entitled Miracles, 2nd edition, 1960) illustrates his mature theological understanding of revelation and reason, and thereby foundationalism: illustrating a symbiotic relationship between revelation and reason—religion is rational, reason is religious, reason precedes nature, it does not issue from nature. What we find is Lewis’s championing of apologetics through the analogia entis (the analogy of being) in the 1930s and 1940s; after the debate he takes a more cautious, reflective, and nuanced line in the 1950s; reason is complemented by wisdom though his use of the analogia fidei (the analogy of faith): fides quaerens intellectum (faith leads to understanding), faith is the ground from which reason can work.

If our use of language is critical, if how we speak and write to promote the gospel, to convert fallen souls to redemption and God’s glory, if how we speak and write is to be subjected to philosophical analysis, where our misuse of language can invalidate our beliefs, then we need to examine Lewis on a fundamental tenet of Christianity: the divinity of Christ, Yeshua the Nazarene, very God and very man. The proposition that Jesus was “Bad, Mad, or God” is central to C. S. Lewis’s popular apologetics, however, it was often scorned by philosophers of religion. This second essay examines the roots of this proposition in a two-thousand-year-old theological and philosophical tradition—aut Deus aut malus homo—grounded in the Johannine trilemma (“unbalanced liar,” or “demonically possessed,” or “the God of Israel come amongst his people”). Jesus can only be understood in the context of the Jewish religious categories of the world he was born into; therefore, for Lewis, Jesus is who he reveals himself to be. Jesus’s self-understanding reflects his identity, his triune salvific role: the transposed reality of divine Sonship. Reason and logic are paramount here, reflected in the structure of Lewis’s argument. Lewis’s trilemma is not so much a proof of God’s existence, but a question, a dilemma, where each and every person must come to a decision. In the film/movie, Kingdom of Heaven (2005), the Christian princess Sibylla, daughter of the King of Jerusalem (to be Queen of Jerusalem), comments succinctly on the difference between Islam and Christianity: “The prophet says submit; Jesus says decide.” Despite criticisms, Lewis’s trilemma is still a very successful piece of Christian apologetic that confronts us with the existential imperative to decide.

If we can justify speaking of Jesus Christ’s divinity, then what can we say of his salvific role? What did C. S. Lewis write about atonement? Salvation issues from the incarnation-cross-resurrection; at the center of salvation is atonement: how can we explain the function of atonement? How did C. S. Lewis argue for atonement? The aim of this third essay is to identify and analyze Lewis’s doctrine of atonement and how he formulated his argument and proposition. First, we can assess how Lewis understood and rationalized the tradition, how he applied logic to the different components of these atonement theories, and therefore what Lewis asserted and denied; second, we can demonstrate the potential for a unified model of atonement read from Lewis’s works, a model that reconciles—in potential—the different and often contradictory atonement theories that various churches have proposed during the last two thousand years? This is seen in the event, the story or drama, of atonement framed by sacrifice and election, by judgement and reconciliation. This drama emerges from and is framed by philosophical propositions. Narrative theology must be framed in a manner that is acceptable to linguistic philosophy.

In the fourth essay, we can consider what Lewis understood about the word of God: Scripture. God’s revelation to us in the Bible is God’s word; but so too is God’s revelation to us in Jesus Christ. (True revelation is not religious speculation, or theologoumena.) Therefore, this essays explores the three-fold forms of the word of God in the theology of C. S. Lewis, and by comparison, the same three-fold forms in the work of Karl Barth. Lewis, in his doctrine of Scripture, grounded in the relationship between the Bible and revelation, is much like Barth. Both distinguish between the word of God (Scripture) and the Word of God (Christ). The key to the interpretation of Scripture, for Lewis, is ontological: “it is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God.” Here, as we shall see later, is convergence and divergence in their respective understanding of the three-fold forms of the Word of God, which are essentially ecclesiological, existential, and Platonic.

C. S. Lewis was not without his detractors: from within the Church of England, from within the common rooms of Oxford, but more pertinently from the American apologist W. Norman Pittenger, who publically accused Lewis of heresy. This fifth essay analyses a fundamental ontological difference between Lewis and Pittenger in terms of the very natu...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• “In the Highest Degree” Volume I
• Chapter 1: The Anscombe-Lewis Debate:from analogia entis to analogia fidei
• Chapter 2: “God . . . or a Bad, or Mad, Man”:C. S. Lewis’s Argument for Christ’s Divinity—A Systematic Theological, Historical, and Philosophical Analysis of aut Deus aut malus homo
• Chapter 3: Atonement:A Unified Model and Event,the Drama of Redemption—Understanding and Rationalizing the Tradition
• Chapter 4: Scripture and the Christ, the Word of God:C. S. Lewis and Karl Barth—Convergence and Divergence
• Chapter 5: The Pittenger-Lewis Debate:Fundamentals of an Ontological Christology
• Chapter 6: The Question of Multiple Incarnations:Imagination and Paradox, Reality and Salvation
• Select Bibliography “In the Highest Degree” Vol. I