The Great Apologists, Pt. 5

Like G.K. Chesterton, whom Lewis admired greatly, he was a writer with tremendous range, authoring the best-selling children’s series Chronicles of Narnia, plus numerous books and essays about medieval literature, contemporary education, literary criticism and apologetics. Although Lewis never became Catholic (and apparently did not like to discuss the subject of Catholicism), he was about as Catholic as one could be without formally being a member of the Church, much like two of his famous acquaintances, T.S. Eliot and Dorothy Sayers.

The popularity of Lewis’s writing is due in part to his clarity of expression and thought. Even when dealing with the most complex subjects, Lewis was able to communicate the truths of the Christian Faith in a way that was accessible to the lay person without sacrificing any sophistication or depth of knowledge. He also wrote with great wit and a lively style, avoiding that cardinal sin practiced by far too many academics: deadly dullness.

Lewis understood the thinking and objections of unbelievers (having been one himself) and met them on their ground, using their standards of empirical proof and rational thinking in combatting them. Like Chesterton, Lewis was a self-described agnostic as a teenager. In his autobiographical work Surprised By Joy, Lewis remarked on the profound influence Chesterton’s Everlasting Man had on him while he was still an agnostic. In reading it, Lewis wrote that “for the first time [I] saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken.” (Surprised By Joy [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1956] 223). After many months spent wrestling with intellectual doubts and deep anxieties, Lewis came to the point of decision. One night in 1929, as Lewis later described, “I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and relunctant convert in all England.” (Surprised by Joy, 228-229).

Thankfully, the dejection and reluctance didn’t last long. Lewis went on to write dozens of books and essays on Christianity, including several apologetic works. In Miracles he took up arms against secular materialism and naturalism, showing that miracles are not only possible, they really cannot be denied. The Problem of Pain tackled the issue of evil and suffering, perhaps the greatest challenge to the Christian worldview. The need for a moral center in a world full of “men without chests” was the central argument of The Abolition of Man. And The Screwtape Letters contains a clever and penetrating series of letters between an a young demon and his wily mentor.

But Lewis’s most famous work is probably the classic Mere Christianity, originally heard on the radio in a series of broadcasts that Lewis gave during World War II. In fact, the idea of “mere Christianity” has become an important and meaningful term in ecumenical dialogues between many Catholics, Evangelicals, and Eastern Orthodox (the magazine, Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, is a case in point). In this slim but powerful work, Lewis put forth the argument that the man Jesus Christ, if we examine his words and actions with honesty, could have been only one of three things: Lord, liar or lunatic. In a justly famous passage, he states:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who is merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (Mere Christianity [New York: Touchstone, 1996] 56).

In dealing with a non-Christian, Lewis reminds us, the topic must finally turn to the person of Jesus Christ; otherwise the apologist is arguing about peripherals and not the heart of the Faith. Our culture has largely accepted the ignorant and wishful thought that Jesus was just a good man, a fine teacher, a misunderstood Jewish rabbi, but nothing more. There exist numerous variations of the “Jesus was a great man, but…” argument that Lewis addressed so well. Most of the time they are put forth by people who have never actually read the Gospels, but have picked up their views from second-hand sources: popular magazines, movies, and television shows. The apologist can begin to challenge the “great teacher” stance by taking people to Christ’s very words, his claims to divinity, his miracles, and especially his Passion, Death, and Resurrection. Certainly this most honest and lucid of men was not a liar or a lunatic. He said “I am the way, and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me” (John 14:6). Either it was true, or he was lying, or he was insane. As C.S. Lewis so brilliantly demonstrated, there are no other alternatives.

(This article was originally published in a different form in the November/December 1999 This Rock, a publication of Catholic Answers: www.catholic.com.)

Here are the previous four installments of Carl Olson's “The Great Apologists” series:

Part 4: Frank J. Sheed