With all his polyphonic variations, C. S. Lewis has molded an architectonic project—belletristic as well as apologetic—of enormous reach and impact, and, further, this varied virtuosity has placed him among the greatest figures in the world of English letters, at least for those who pay objective attention to such a standing. Just there is the What of Lewis. Now, though, I ask after the How, looking behind and through the rhetorical palace. My title is an early spoiler, but by no means do I intend a survey of existentialism—no Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, nor even the horrifyingly brilliant Nietzsche. Rather I would use it as a lens,“it” in this case being the thinking and practice of one particular figure.
In trying to debunk existentialism, one of Lewis’s more astute critics focuses so narrowly on the loathsome Sartre that he completely neglects the godfather of modern existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). That’s like describing baseball in terms of the Black Sox scandal of 1919 but leaving out Babe Ruth. But I note here that though Kierkegaard’s character and career are of compelling interest these are not my subject. Further: Lewis found reading him like “walking in sawdust,” as I sometimes do. But many lineaments in Kierkegaard’s works are remarkably congruent with what we can find in Lewis. My objective is not an improved understanding of existentialism, or even of Kierkegaard (this not coming anywhere close to a study of him), but to appreciate that Lewis, though not at all an existentialist philosopher, did proceed existentially, his What, arising from a recognizable How hiding in plain sight.
Existentialism is called a philosophy, but it is too elusive to make that cut. Then, a methodology? Not close. None of its spokespersons speak of it as such, and the closer one looks the less method one finds. Better a “route of discovery.” Or perhaps even a “meta-route.” Not irrational but supra-rational, neither severely logical as Euclid and Aristotle are logical nor preposterously random let alone absurd in its course and conclusions. Consider:
Lewis believed that we live in a post-Christian age. Kierkegaard went further:
If men had forgotten what it means to exist religiously, they had doubtless also forgotten what it means to exist as human beings; this must therefore be set forth. But above all it must not be done in a dogmatizing manner, for then the misunderstanding would instantly take . . . itself in a new misunderstanding.
—Concluding Unscientific Postscript (CUP)
That is Lewis through and through. And now I recall the first or second meeting of the New York C. S. Lewis Society in 1969, at the home of Jack and Elaine Boise. Jack was an accomplished scholar and a Christian, and when I said (I forget the exact conversational context) that I found existentialism—“vapid” was the word I think I used—Jack disagreed strongly, saying that if he ever needed psychotherapy, he would seek a therapist with existentialist training. That unsettled my smugness.
Eventually I discovered Paul Holmer, the distinguished Yale philosopher and Kierkegaard scholar and author of one of the finest books on Lewis, C. S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought, with that word, “shape,” rather than, say, “content” (let alone “argument”), being central. Other elements began to wander in. A favorite, Walker Percy, a National Book Award Award-winning novelist, turned out to be an existential philosopher (as well as a physician). And of course there it was in the Confessions of St. Augustine, (who may be the actual father of existentialism, as well as, not coincidentally, our first autobiographer). Further on, and by quite a different route, I arrived at Cardinal Newman’s Grammar of Assent, where I learned of the “illative” sense, an inferential leap intrinsic to all reasoning.
But it was Holmer who led me to Kierkegaard, our inside man, so to speak. To be sure, his titles alone could put one off—Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, Either/Or—as could his occasional belligerence and his declaration that he wrote for the one person who could understand him! Moreover, his great intellect and spirit are often expressed obliquely, a feature intrinsic to existential “discovering” (rather like that spooky electron, the acceleration and location of which we cannot know simultaneously), or, better yet, intrinsic to existential choice, as are “leaps,” “anxiety,” and “fear.”
A definition here would be helpful, I know, but I offer none. Rather, I can suggest the contours of the concept as found in Lewis. Kierkegaardian rhetorical features and even mental states and actions are all over Surprised by Joy, Lewis’s spiritual autobiography, where he calls himself “the most reluctant convert in England,” a conversion as unlikely as the mouse chasing the cat. I adduce in particular Lewis’s idea of “Joy,” or Sehnsucht, the intrinsically human longing, a stabbing desire, for what—to the honest seeker—turns out to be Heaven. Lewis had been “surprised” by it as a very young child by way of a toy garden. Here is what Kierkegaard had to say about the phenomenon, a very personal discovery, a “‘subjective truth” for him exactly as it was for Lewis:
There is an indescribable joy that glows through us just as inexplicably as the apostle’s unmotivated exclamation: “Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice.” Not a joy over this or that, but a full-bodied shout of the soul; with mouth and lips and heart so deep.
Then this: how very much of Lewis’s writing calls upon his personal experience (for example, his early onset atheism, his early parental loss, even his visits to the dentist, as in The Problem of Pain): all consonant with that subjective truth of Kierkegaard’s, precisely like looking along instead of at the beam of light that Lewis describes in “Meditation in a Toolshed,” a subjective seeing. And here I must note what a bad job he does in the autobiography of trying to map out the utterly unsystematic journey of his conversion, not an irrational one, but, again and importantly, far from Euclidean.
There is much more: the reading of actual experience—internal and external—and its signs, utter authenticity (like the peeling off of the layers of dragon skin, as happens to the young Digory in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, one of the seven Chronicles of Narnia), and of course Lewis’s use of pseudonyms, Kierkegaard’s common indirect tactic.
Evidently existentialism is not an -ism at all but more of an adverb: not Lewis the existentialist, but Lewis existentially, like Kierkegaard as much a psychologist as a theologian. For example, in “Three Kinds of Men” Lewis describes those who seek pleasure, those who acknowledge a higher claim upon them, and a third who seek to “live in Christ,” like St. Paul. So I ask, how is that taxonomy not Kierkegaard’s aesthetic, ethical, and religious man? And was Lewis not a Knight of Faith, as Kierkegaard puts it, rejecting the crowd to follow God—whatever the price (which Lewis paid at Oxford)?
As for “indirect communication,” are the Chronicles, and The Screwtape Letters, and the hyper-allegorical Pilgrim’s Regress anything other than that? There John leaves home to find the Landlord, struggles through a landscape fraught with the intellectual idols of the day, finally with the help of a Man crosses a canyon wherein he must swim, then regresses through the same landscape (now benignly transformed; there is a spoiler here, but I desist). Moreover, beyond this and the other titles, I ask: Has Lewis ever directly argued for a Christian dogma, rather than clearing away resistant brush and showing the possibility of said dogma, including the Incarnation, as in Miracles?
Actual experience, including intellectual and imaginative experience, and choices emerging from such experience—not argued for as in a legal brief but as in the dots finally connecting—are at the center of an existential act. An act, as when riding on a bus Lewis chose to enter the door to belief in God—“I say, ‘I chose,’” he wrote, adding “yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite….” Or as when, upon visiting the Whipsnade zoo, he affirms the divinity of Christ, but “can’t say why.” He writes that his conversion was “much too gradual and intellectual” to be described briefly, but was it all that intellectual? Certainly the experience of Joy is not “intellectual,” even though his pondering of it, of its consequentiality, is perfectly rational.
That—a certain appealing but also confounding imprecision—is what Paul Holmer intended when he wrote that meaning in Lewis must be read off the whole shape of his faith and thought; it is not a “case.” A toy garden, a late-night walk in the woods (that included J.R.R. Tolkien), belief in the Natural Law, the existence of his conscience: These and other experiential facts are the dots that Lewis actually connected. According to Lewis himself, these are the dots and their connectedness that made for a decisive act. The process was illative, making Lewis his own apologetic project and inviting us to come along.
Actually? That entails an uncompelled decision arising out of a concrete psychological and spiritual experience, or a gathering of experiences. Those are at the center of an existential choice, and they are all over Lewis’s work: as when the young man in The Great Divorce (about a bus trip to the fringe of Heaven) stops arguing and begs the angel finally to kill the lizard on his back, or when Puddleglum the Marshwiggle stamps out the witch’s fire in The Silver Chair even though he allows he may be wrong, or when Ransom in Perelandra knows he must fight the Unman even though he will probably lose, or when Orual, the complaining first-person narrator and Queen of Glome in the consummately existential Till We have Faces at last gives in (she cannot meet God face to face until she has one of her own). Note: In at least two of these cases—Puddleglum’s and Ransom’s—logic was with the other side.
Walker Percy, whom I mentioned earlier, sums up the existential conception nicely, in his Message in a Bottle:
The existentialists have taught us that what man is cannot be grasped by the sciences of man. The case is rather that man’s science is one of the things that man does, a mode of existence. Another mode is speech. Man is not merely a higher organism.... He is, in Heidegger’s words, that being in the world whose calling it is to find a name for Being, to give testimony to it, and to provide for it a clearing.
This, too, conforms to Lewis’s profound distrust, not of science but of scientism, the ideology of science turned against humans (as we see in “Reply to Professor Haldane,” and in That Hideous Strength, the third book of the Space Trilogy). Kierkegaard is, predictably, close:
In our times, it is especially the natural sciences that are dangerous. Physiology will ultimately expand so much that it will annex ethics. Indeed, there are already signs of a new attempt to treat ethics as physics, whereby the whole of ethics becomes an illusion....
Closer still is Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, a defense of Natural Law which in warning against the “Conditioners” indeed clears the ground (not unlike the very beginning of Mere Christianity: “Every one has heard people quarrelling”).
Perhaps it is The Chronicles of Narnia that best sneaks past those watchful dragons (is Kierkegaard’s “indirect communication” anything else?), and maybe that—the inherent obliqueness of the form—is why Kierkegaard loved fairy tales:
What does the soul find so recuperative about reading fairy tales? When I am tired of everything and “full of days,” fairy tales are for me always the refreshing bath that proves beneficial. There all earthly, all finite cares vanish....
Once again, a clearing, and a near-perfect one at that. About such an unobstructed clearing Lewis had this to say in his autobiography: “experience…is such an honest thing.” Not the whole story, of course, just as road signs are not the journey. But, like road signs, the phenomena can make all the difference to our getting on, if only we pay attention.
Some decades ago I began to make a number of observations about Lewis in print: that his work is one thing, variegated yet whole, like a tapestry; that his method is indeed often indirect; that he used himself promiscuously in his apologetic project; that he described a classical paradigm, namely three types of men; and that he was himself the prototypical Knight of Faith.
About the last two I’m being coy: Those are straight out of Kierkegaard, and so I stated at the time. But it had not occurred to me consciously that all of them are intimately consonant with SK’s thinking. And so, to close the circle, I thought to yoke together the two explicitly. In doing so, we find Lewis’s avenue of conversion, the How of his personal and public What that makes of him a reliable guide, gone there and then back, just like John the Pilgrim, showing us the way, and beckoning.