Truth Unites - Did C.S. Lewis Abandon Apologetics After the Anscombe Debate?

Episode Date: November 12, 2023

In this video I argue against the myth, articulated in several biographies, that C.S. Lewis abandoned apologetics after his 1948 debate with Elizabeth Anscombe. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

On February 2nd, 1948, C.S. Lewis had a debate with Elizabeth Anscom, who was a Roman Catholic philosopher. This was at the Socratic Club in Oxford. This is basically just like a student club. Lewis was the president of this club for many years. Imagine, I wish I could have been there. Can you imagine how fun it would be to watch this debate? Anne Scome was only 28 years old at the time. But she was a very good philosopher and a fascinating person. It takes some courage, I think, to go out at C.S. Lewis as a 28-year-old. But a lot of of people think, basically she succeeded in the debate in criticizing his argument from reason, which he had promoted in the book Miracles in Chapter 3 of that book, which had just been

published in the previous year. We're not going to get into that argument here. I'll put up a quote from John Haldane, the British scientist, that sums up its essential thought. And maybe I'll do a video on that argument in the future. If you want to get a good contemporary defense of it, check out this book that I'll put up on the screen, C.S. Lewis's dangerous idea. But here I want to address this claim that's been popularized by some of the biographers of Lewis that basically this event resulted in this big crisis for Lewis and basically it caused him to abandon apologetics and to turn instead to children's literature for the rest of his career. In George Sayer's biography, it's described as a humiliating experience in which Lewis saw that his argument

had been demolished and he realized he was no longer capable of writing apologetics books. A.N. Wilson's biography goes much further, claiming that Lewis was in a state of near despair after the encounter and comparing him to a little boy who was degraded and shaken. And according to Wilson, not only did Lewis turn away from apologetics from that time forward, but he actually rejected his prior apologetics works. Quote, though miracles and the argumentative works which preceded, the problem of pain, mere Christianity, remained so vastly popular in the Christian world and continue to sell in Christian bookshops, Lewis came to feel that their method and manner were spurious. Now, it's worth exploring this a little bit because a lot is actually at stake with this

question. If Lewis himself rejected his apologetics books, then obviously we don't need to take them very seriously. So this is a really important historical question. But I think the whole episode has been blown out of proportion in these biographies and in some of the popular summaries of this, and I think it's mistaken to see some kind of crisis or mid-career shift or anything like that for Lewis from this event. Let me give three reasons why. First of all, there's no evidence from the event itself that Lewis came to reject his apologetics works. The extent to which he was personally bothered is unclear, but it seems to have been wildly blown out of proportion by, especially by someone like Willis. and his biography, a much fairer and more balanced treatment of the event is given in this

outstanding book by Alan Jacobs called the Narnian. It's a well-written book, too. Jacobs basically goes through the evidence from the time in question, and he gives quotes from Lewis's friends and people who are there and that kind of thing, and he shows there's kind of mixed views about it. Basically, all that emerges is Anscone revealed some ambiguities in Lewis's argument, and he later revised the argument to the satisfaction of even Anne Scome to some extent. She praised the later revisions as demonstrating Lewis's honesty and his seriousness as a philosopher. Some of Lewis's friends, like Derek Brewer, did speak of him as disturbed by this incident, but others had no memory of anything like that, like Humphrey Havard, Lewis's physician,

had both Lewis and Anscom over for dinner a few weeks later and had no memory of any kind of crisis for Lewis. But importantly, whatever his personal feelings were, no one at the time claimed that he had a crisis of faith, and to my awareness, no one claimed that he rejected his earlier works. Walter Hooper, who knew Lewis, perhaps more than anybody, reports that at the end of his life, Lewis told him that he thought he had won the debate, even though he conceded some of his language had been unclear and needed to be revised. You could also look at this outstanding book by Michael Ward called Planet Narnia. This is an amazing work of scholarship for other reasons. but he addresses this question briefly, and he notes that although Lewis thought his particular expression of the argument had some weaknesses, the argument itself, he thought was still defensible.

Here's how Anskone herself recalled the evening. The meeting of the Socratic Club at which I read my paper has been described by several of his friends as a horrible and shocking experience which upset him very much. My own recollection is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticism. which Lewis's rethinking and rewriting showed he thought was accurate. I'm 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 of the subject matter, as an interesting example of the phenomenon called projection. This is what happens a lot of times when people watch a debate.

They're looking for the fireworks and the personalities and they're not even listening to the arguments. But just think about this. I wonder how Anskone would regard Wilson's biography. If she's thinking these more restrained reactions of Lewis's friends were projection and were odd, I wonder what she would make of Wilson's biography. Wilson's biography is pretty out there. If I recall correctly, Wilson even supposes that Lewis wrote the character of the White Witch as a personification of Anscolm.

He thinks that Lewis was so disturbed by this that he made this character that is this sort of demonic personification of Anscone, which is just ridiculous, you know. But this is something I've observed. A lot of times people, when there's someone who's perceived to be this threat, you know, people want to try to take him down, you know. And I think people try to do that with Lewis. Here's the second problem. So the first thing is there's nothing, no evidence from the time in question that Lewis rejected his apologetics works.

The second problem is the chronology of Lewis's career shows that, in fact, he didn't abandon apologetics. So after 1948, you can see Lewis continues to write Apologetics Works. You could just take a look at the contents and original publication dates for some of the essays in God and the Dock. And I'll put up on the screen some examples of that. You could also note that in 1952, he revised his wartime broadcasts as the book Mure Christianity. So this book is maybe, you know, you could say this is like the most popular level, apologetics. text of the 20th century. It's sold so many copies. And then even miracles. In 1960, Lewis published a revised edition of miracles. That goes unmentioned in Wilson's biography. And that edition contains the very

same argument. He does rework the argument to meet Anscolm's concerns. And it's expanded. It goes from a little under 3,000 words, that chapter, chapter three, to a little under 5,000. But the substance of the argument isn't actually changed. You know, a lot of Anscombe. Cromes critiques were they had to do with ambiguity in language, you know. She criticized him for using the word irrational rather than non-rational, things like this, his use of the word valid, things like this. But there are kind of technicalities in the way the argument is unfolded, not the argument itself. So all of that is pretty impossible to square with Wilson's narrative in his biography or sayers. You know, clearly Lewis is still doing apologetics. Here's the third

problem, and that is that this idea of a turn from apologetics to children's literature is a very artificial way to understand Lewis as a writer. Even some of Lewis's more sympathetic interpreters, when they're criticizing the Anskone legend, they'll still feel a need to kind of find some kind of explanation for how Lewis, why Lewis suddenly started writing children's literature. I think there's three problems with that. First, Lewis had always loved children's literature. It was a lifelong interest. He'd already begun writing several children's stories before 1948, although they had not been finished. The picture that was in his mind that eventually led him to write the Narnia books, a fawn walking through a snowy wood at night, that had been on his mind since he was a teenager. So children's literature was not a new interest. Second of all, his literary output had already been extremely diverse. It wasn't just apologetics that he was writing. It was poetry, science fiction, short stories, literary criticism, social criticism, allegory, The Great Divorce.

I don't know how to categorize that book. So it's not at all shocking that he would suddenly write in a new genre, and it's not the last time he would do so. You've also got books like reflections on the Psalms till we have faces. These are books later in his career. So in other words, it's not as though Lewis was writing one kind of book, then he had this debate, then he started writing another kind of book. Rather, all throughout his career, he's just writing all different kinds of books.

Thirdly, the sense that you need to find some kind of external cause in Lewis's life for the Narnian books suffers from a mechanical view of literary production. Anybody who likes writing, especially if you write poetry or music or stories, knows that the motivation for that is often more spontaneous

and not possible to identify with one event in your life, you know? Sometimes the imagination itself is the catalyst, and sometimes even with your own writing, you won't be able to tell exactly where is this coming from, but certainly with somebody else. I often think if you always need to find some kind of external cause for literary production,

then you'd have to go through Wilson's life and Sayer's life and try to figure out what happened in their life to cause them to write these biographies, right? So the point is just that basically it's a very artificial way to read Lewis as, kind of transferring from one kind of writing to another. He just, he was an incredible, he had an incredible imagination and literary skill and he wrote all kinds of books all his lifelong. And he was always interested in children's literature. Okay, to summarize,

we're saying, number one, there's no evidence from the event that Lewis rejected apologetics. Two, in fact, he continued to do apologetics. And three, the whole idea of a turn to children's literature from apologetics is a very superficial and misleading way to understand Lewis to begin with. So the conclusion and the upshot and the relevance of all of this is to simply say, you know, to leverage all of that for a point today, it's don't let people dismiss C.S. Lewis as an apologist. A lot of people try to act. And the people did this in his own day too. They act like because C.S. Lewis is a popularizer, therefore he's less sophisticated. So people say, you know, because he's writing so clearly and because he's read and loved so widely, I think sometimes I wonder if academics

are jealous of Lewis because he's so loved and he's so successful as a writer. But people use that against him. They say, well, he's writing plainly, therefore he's not as sophisticated and so forth. That happened in his own lifetime. Many of his colleagues at Oxford looked down on him for being a supernaturalist and for writing children's stories. And of course, he was never offered a chair position at Oxford that may have been part of the reason. Eventually, he left for Cambridge in 1954. These books, Jacobs at least, has a great discussion of that as well and all the politics with that. But if you read Lewis's academic works, they are good works. You could read through the discarded image or a preface to Paradise Lost or English literature in the 16th century. It's not

the case that Lewis lacks sophistication or learning. It's that he hides his learning in order to serve the reader. In fact, in the Cambridge companion to Lewis, John Fleming is describing Lewis's academic work as a literary critic, and he commends the discarded image for this very reason. It would be hard to say whether it is more impressive in its erudition or in the artful manner in which the erudition is masked, lest it intimidate a beginner. I love that. One of the reasons I love C.S. Lewis is, for all of his great learning, he is a humble writer. He's not trying to impress you. I think that's, you can tell in his writing. He's trying to be clear, and he's writing to be accessible and engaging and winsome. I think that takes greater skill, not lesser. I think anybody

can be obscure, but to write clearly is actually really difficult. And I think he wrote in that way as an act of service to the reader. I really admire that. I aspire to follow in those steps in my writing, but also in my YouTube videos. I want my videos to be a service to people. I'm hoping that I'm breaking things down to the best of my ability. Sometimes I won't, you know, not do it perfectly, but I try to break things down from complicated discussion to make it accessible and clear for people as an act of service. That's really what I aspire to do. And I think that Christians who believe that God has come down onto our level and served us through the life of Jesus Christ should be motivated to not try to be impressive and obscure, whether we're in our writing or in any other

sphere of life, but we should try to serve other people. That's the beauty of the gospel. So anyways, that's my defense of C.S. Lewis. I love C.S. Lewis, so I feel defensive of him, but in this case, I think I've got good grounds to be defensive, because I think this legend that has developed, and I, of course, many other people have pointed this out as well, but it's good to put it out there on YouTube. I think these legends that have developed really are, they don't have any foundation. It's just, there's a lot of spin and exaggeration in them. So anyway, let me know what you think in the comments. Some of you who watch my videos love CS Lewis like I do, and you may know way more than I do. So there may be things about this that you think were left out. Let me know if you

think so. I'll be curious to read the comments. Thanks for watching everybody.