More of CS Lewis

Dear Tom,

I’ve never been sure what to make of CS Lewis’ arguments for Christianity. Many people credit his book, Mere Christianity, for their conversion, or at least for a renewed devotion to their faith. Sam Harris described Lewis’ arguments for Christianity as “risible”, which seems a more apt description for the parts of Mere Christianity that I’ve read. I’m wary, however, of dismissing outright everything Lewis has to say; it was Lewis who was so swayed by the historicity of Jesus that he converted to Christianity. I dismissed this fact as insignificant when I first heard it. Now I find it quite profound. Perhaps the rest of Lewis’ arguments are equally profound and I’m just slower than your typical reader.

I wanted to discuss another of his ideas, which I believe I read in Mere Christianity and recently re-heard in a YouTube video. The video was titled “What do we make of Jesus Christ?”. Lewis begins his answer with the fact that Jesus’ moral teachings are near universally accepted in the West—back then, at least—even by atheists. This is entirely unsurprising if, like you and I, one believes that Western culture is essentially Christian culture. Atheists find Jesus’ teachings compelling because those teachings have been passed from generation to generation for over a millennia. We no longer believe Jesus was the son of God, but that doesn’t mean we can easily swim against the current of culture flowing from the past.

Unsurprising as it might be, Lewis points out how rare a moral worldview sufficiently coherent as to be universally accepted is. Yet we find that worldview presented by Jesus. Given the coherence of his teachings, Lewis argues that Jesus must have been a man of sound mental faculties. A madman does not spout perfect moral wisdom, even if on occasion he might say something insightful. Jesus the moral teacher was, it appears, perfectly sane.

But the gospels are not only filled with Jesus’ teachings. They also document his extraordinary claim to be the son of God. We’ve become numb to how radical this must have sounded, but Lewis points out that such a claim is indicative of a megalomania that is rarely paralleled in the absence of profound mental illness (although easily surpassed by the highly contemptible rappers of today). It is an enormous claim, particularly in the context of first century Judea where saying such things could get you killed (which, of course, is what happened). It wasn’t just words that got Jesus in trouble, either. He also went around forgiving people their sins, an act normally reserved for God himself, and accepting worship from his followers. In stark contrast to the moral teacher, Jesus acted like a madman.

Lewis seems to regard this as the main problem to be solved to answer the question, “What are we to make of Jesus?”. Before continuing, however, Lewis lays some more ground work. He claims first that we cannot simply dismiss the gospels as myths, invented to tell the tale of an imaginary man. The Jews are the last people who would invent such a story, obsessed as they are with their monotheism. No, Lewis believed the gospels were historical testimony, evidenced by the inclusion of strange and superfluous details such as Jesus stooping to draw something in the sand. This detail was included, not for its theological implications (of which there are none), but simply because the author saw it happen and wrote it down. If we accept the gospels as historical testimony, we must reconcile how these two sides of Jesus’ character—moral teacher and megalomaniac—can appear in a single man. We cannot cherry pick one and discard the other.

Lewis goes on to claim that the story of Jesus is unique among religions. There are no other examples where a prophet claims to be one with the creator of the universe. It certainly didn’t fly in Judaism, and simply asking Mohamed if he were God would get you beheaded. The Buddha would have made no such claim to divine origins. The emperor Augustus, who lived around the same time as Jesus, did claim to be a god, but he didn’t start a religion and no one today is interested in his supposed divinity. Jesus stands alone as the human founder of a religion who also identified himself as God made man. And his followers were so convinced of this that they raced around the Mediterranean to set in motion what became the religion that dominated the Western world.

To add to this is his resurrection, which is far from straightforward. Jesus does not come back as a ghost, nor does he simply inhabit his old body. His followers don’t recognise him at first, but something about him convinces them that this was the same man they spent a few years with wondering around Galilee. This too, Lewis says, is unique among the myths of the world: whatever happened to Jesus after his death appears to be an unprecedented event in world history.

Finally, Lewis returns to the question. We have a man who appears to be sane and morally sound—perhaps perfectly so—who also proclaims to be the son of God. We know of these two sides of his character because of the eye-witness testimonies captured in the gospels—testimonies which seem to be describing a series of events unique in the history of mankind. Lewis wraps all this up into a final dichotomy: Jesus was therefore either a madman or he really was who he says he was. There is nothing in between, or so Lewis claims. And Lewis, for his part, cannot believe that Jesus was a madman, so he believes he was the son of God.

Now, I don’t believe this is the final argument on which Lewis faith rested. I think he had many reasons—a whole book’s worth—to believe in Christianity. Nonetheless, the feeling I get from this argument is similar to a lot of what I read from Lewis. Assuming I understood it correctly, it seems too simple, or like he’s left something out, or just unimportant. There’s nothing compelling about it; it’s certainly not going to convince me of the divinity of Christ. But perhaps I’m not swayed by this argument because I don’t have a good sense of who Jesus was as a person. I have nothing to lose denouncing Jesus as a madman. I would be far more reluctant to do the same with Harry Potter. Lewis instead accepts Jesus’ divinity precisely because he refuses to denounce him as a madman. But even if I refused to admit that Jesus was mad, I’m not entirely convinced of the dichotomy: if Jesus wasn’t mad, does he have to have been the son of God? (I must admit, there is some thinking I need to do here that I haven’t done. This part of the argument is not very clear to me.)

Then there is his point of the uniqueness of Christianity. I’m willing to accept that there’s something different about Christianity, but I don’t know how important this is or why Lewis stresses it so. In a world where all religions are viewed as equal (that is, equally implausible, equally ridiculous), I guess Lewis is trying to find some sort of foot hold; some reason why someone might take Christianity more seriously than any other faith. Perhaps I don’t find this important because I already see Christianity as the only religion I’d be able to adopt. I don’t need to be persuaded that there is something special about Christianity: I already believe it.

Finally, does the strangeness of Christ’s resurrection have any significance, as Lewis seems to suggest? There is certainly something confusing about it—captured in stories like the road to Emmaus—which makes it both harder and easier to believe that it happened. Easier because, if you were trying to invent a world religion, why not keep it simple? Jesus rose, we all saw him, no problem. The fact that it’s hard to know precisely what the disciples experienced—and Tom Holland agrees that they must have experienced something—does help Lewis’ argument that something very interesting happened at the end of Jesus’ life. But again, this is not enough to convince me that therefore it must have happened, even if Jesus was perfectly sane.

In short, Tom, I’m confused, as you can tell by my incoherent musings about Lewis’ incoherent musings. I know two negatives tend to make a positive, but that’s not the case here. Clearly Lewis, a professor at Oxford University, was no fool; if I find his musings incoherent, I’m probably the one who’s missing something. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve found Lewis entirely dismissible, only to realise later how profound what he said actually was. As I mentioned in other letters, the coming of Jesus—madman or God—changed the course of history. His teaching affected the moral compass of every European for over a thousand years, and still governs what we consider to be right and wrong today. He transformed our moral and physical landscape because of the few short years he spent wandering around Galilee. Are we really to believe that a madman lies at the centre of our culture?

James

PS. GK Chesterton, who I so enjoy quoting, said something along the same lines as Lewis. He says that our tendency is to consider Jesus as a meek and mild moral teacher—the sane man in Lewis’ argument. But Chesterton reminds us that Jesus actually spent very little of his time being meek and mild:

Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god, and always like a god.