The Anti-Reductionist Reductionist: C.S.Lewis, Science, and Gender Relations

The C. S. Lewis Lecture at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

March 29, 2004

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

Professor of Psychology and Philosophy, Eastern University, St. Davids Pennsylvania

“The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped … Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power had been the result.” C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945)1

“No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each succeeds in getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age’s knowledge. Hardly any battery of facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical.”

C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (1964)2

“ ‘Your trouble [said Ransom, the Director to Jane] has been what the old poets called Daungier. We call it pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.’

‘You mean I shall have to become a Christian?’ said Jane

‘It looks like it,’ said the Director.”

C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength (1945)3

“It is arrogance in us [men] to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry ‘masculine’ when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them [women] to describe a man’s sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as ‘feminine.’ But also what poor, warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to make the implications of that arrogance plausible. Marriage heals this. Jointly the two become fully human. ‘In the image of God created He them.’ Thus, by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes.”

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (1961)4

Between 1945 and 1948 two middle-aged scholars on opposite sides of the Atlantic each published a visionary novel intended to be a commentary on the place of science in a society coping with the aftermath of World War Two. One was a British Medieval and Renaissance

1 That Hideous strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1945), p. 203 2 The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1964), p.222. 3 That Hideous Strength, pp. 315-16. 4 C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), pp. 40-41 (Lewis’ emphasis). 2 literature scholar who had little detailed knowledge of the natural or social sciences. But as a historian of ideas he had a keen sense of the dangers of scientism – that is, the assumption that the methods of science can in principle yield exhaustive and ultimate knowledge about all of reality. In one of several challenges to this reductionistic epistemology he produced a dystopian novel about what might happen in a small university setting where science becomes the ultimate source of authority, and the language of value, meaning and purpose is replaced by the supposedly- neutral language of empirical reference and efficient causality. While criticizing this overblown positivism he also defended an essentialist and hierarchical view of gender relations, the demise of which he saw as correlated with the loss of scientific humility and integrity. In this novel, stereotypical masculinity and femininity are presented as timeless archetypes, deeper even than biological sex and apparently more significant for the ideal organization of society than any ‘mere humanity’ shared by women and men. That scholar was C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), who spent most of his academic career at Oxford, but finished it at Cambridge. His dystopia – the third in a trilogy of popular space-travel novels – was called That Hideous Strength, its title drawn from a sixteenth century poetic reference to the biblical Tower of Babel.5

The other scholar, an American, spent his undergraduate years as an English literature major but turned to behavioral science as a doctoral student after a brief but unsuccessful attempt to become a professional writer. He returned briefly to his literary roots towards the middle of his academic career, most of which was spent at Harvard, in order to write a utopian novel in which the opposite theme was central – namely, a scientific triumphalism with regard to both the physical and social world. That scholar was B.F. Skinner (1904-1990), and his behaviorist utopia was called Walden Two, after Thoreau’s nineteenth-century Walden (an account of the latter’s two-year experiment in pastoral self-sufficiency) but anchored in a more collectivist and decidedly less Transcendentalist philosophy.6 Skinner’s philosophy of science was Baconian and positivist. Not only did he doubt the scientific relevance anything that could not be directly observed (such as the mind); he also believed in the possibility of bias-free observation, and in the power of inductive reasoning and experimentation to produce a cumulative edifice of scientific knowledge. In Walden Two the reform of gender relations was also a recurring theme, but in a way that anticipated the second wave of feminism and its campaign for gender equity that was to begin almost two decades later. The women and men of Walden Two share both domestic and non-domestic tasks while their children are cared for communally, and neither kind of work counts for more in terms of monetary or social status in the group.7

My first thesis is that Lewis was the more astute of these two scholars in his anti-reductionist analysis of the nature and limits of science. This is so not just because he drew on the resources of earlier traditions in his critique of scientism, but because in his later writings he anticipated the post-positivist philosophy of science that began with the work of Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi, but took flight with a book published the year of Lewis’ death – namely, Thomas Kuhn’s

5 For Lewis’ views on science as related to the history of ideas in general (and to medieval versus modern cosmologies in particular) see The Discarded Image, especially the Epilogue, pp. 216-23. 6 B.F. Skinner, Walden Two (New York: MacMillan, 1948). Given their very different views of the authority of science, the fact that the American edition of Lewis’ Hideous Strength was also published by MacMillan (although not until 1965) might be seen as a nice historical irony. Both books have been steadily reprinted since their original editions appeared. 7 It is unclear whether Lewis and Skinner knew about – let alone read – each other’s novels. But Lewis makes critical references to behaviorism in That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man (Oxford, 1943), and passing references to it in The Discarded Image (pp. 166 and 215).

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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.8 In this respect at least Lewis was not the reflex romanticizer of the past that he is often made out to be.9 My second thesis is that Lewis’ theories of gender essentialism and gender hierarchy were misguided, but understandable given his historical location and intellectual heritage. That this theme is notably muted in his final writings (e.g., The Discarded Image, A Grief Observed, and Till We Have Faces10) suggests that if he had married Joy Davidman a couple of decades earlier than he did he might not have ascribed to his theories of fixed, hierarchical gender archetypes the almost-confessional status he gave them in the 1940s and 1950s.11

In saying that Lewis’ views are understandable partly in terms of his historical and personal circumstances, I am aware that I am committing what Lewis, earlier in his career, called ‘the personal heresy.’12 However, I take such a position not as a social scientist trying to do cheap psychohistory but as a neo-Calvinist with a high view of the incarnate nature of all human thought, and a recognition that good and evil, truth and error, are complexly intertwined throughout all of human history. If this is so, then it is irresponsible to romanticize any period of history, or to lionize any thinker – Christian or otherwise – as having some kind of ahistoric, disembodied, ‘immaculate perception.’13 In his less-polemical moments, Lewis himself was profoundly aware of this, as the second quotation heading this essay indicates. Thus, as I affirm his emergent philosophy of science and question his reductionistic – though later more relaxed -- view of gender, I trust that I am working in the tradition of Lewis himself.

A Tale of Two Communities There are other intriguing contrasts between Skinner and Lewis and their forays into science fiction. Lewis, an Anglo-Irishman born in Belfast, entered adulthood as a classically-trained

8 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1963) 9 For example by John Wain in “A Great Clerke,” in James T. Como, ed., “C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table” and Other Reminiscences (New York: MacMillan, 1979), pp. 68-76; A. N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1990); and Lionel Ady, C.S. Lewis: Writer, Dreamer and Mentor (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1998). 10 C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1956) 11 Lewis and Davidman began a trans-Atlantic correspondence in 1950, met in 1952 during her visit to England, established a closer friendship after she divorced and moved to England with her sons in 1953, married civilly in 1956 and ecclesiastically in 1957. Joy Davidman Lewis died of cancer in July of 1960. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis:A Biography (London: Collins, 1974). 12 C.S. Lewis and E.M.W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (Oxford University Press, 1929). See also A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 146 and 221, and Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride, Women Among the Inklings: Gender, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), pp. xv-xvi. The latter note (p. xvi) that “Lewis readers have come to use the term personal heresy for any reading of an author’s personal life into his or her work. Yet … Lewis critics turn a blind eye toward “the personal heresy” when personal data support their own point of view.” 13 See for example Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man (University of Chicago Press, 1959); Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason Within the Bounds of Religion (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1976); Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1989); Bert H. Hodges, “Perception, Relativity, and Knowing and Doing the Truth” in Stanton L. Jones, Psychology and the Christian Faith: A Reader (Grand Rapids MI: Baker, 1986), pp. 51-77; Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, “Scuttling the Schizophrenic Student Mind: On Teaching the Unity of Faith and Learning in Psychology” in Arlin Migliazzo, ed., Teaching as an Act of Faith: Theory and Practice in Church-Related Higher Education (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 21-40.

3 4 rationalist and a philosophical idealist with romantic overtones.14 He became a serious Christian in his early thirties and thereafter devoted much energy to explaining and defending his understanding of ‘mere’ Christianity in essays, letters, broadcast talks and stories for both children and adults. A recurrent theme for him was the irreducibility of human freedom and rationality to the mechanics of nature or nurture, and the need to defend a strong version of each in order to promote both societal morality and a science that was appropriately humble.15 Skinner, by contrast, was raised in a strict Presbyterian family in rural Pennsylvania but became (and remained) a scientific humanist in adulthood. He reassured readers in Walden Two that to reject the language of free will and personal responsibility and embrace determinism was simply an improved, more scientific way of expressing the outdated doctrines of predestination and God’s sovereignty. Furthermore, while Lewis saw in the study of history and of old texts – including mythology and poetry -- an essential safeguard against intellectual faddishness and moral corruption, Skinner rejected moral and political conclusions based on any appeal to non- repeatable, experimentally-uncontrolled historical events. Children in Walden Two are formally educated only in mathematics, logic and scientific method, and history books are relegated to a storage barn for the amusement of those who might want to consult them in their spare time.16

The two stories are similar in that each takes place well away from any large urban setting or centralized seat of government, probably to make the totalistic social experiment of each more manageable dramatically.17 Interestingly, both Lewis and Skinner used their respective novels to express ecological concerns to a degree that was rare on either side of the Atlantic in the 1940s. Skinner’s feminism notwithstanding, in both books academically-trained males engage in frequent debates with each other about ethics, epistemology and human nature, reflecting the elite ‘world without women’ that was still the dominant university culture of England and (though to a lesser extent) of America in the 1940s.18 And in both tales nuclear families are strangely absent.

14 Thus his Pilgrim’s Regress (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1933, 1943) first published when he was thirty-five years old, is subtitled An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. In his preface to the book’s third edition, Lewis spells out the various means of the term ‘romanticism’ and clarifies what he intends by the term in light of his conversion to Christianity, which occurred in 1931. 15 For example The Abolition of Man; Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947; revised edition, London: Collins- Fontana, 1960); “De Futilitate,” in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1967), esp. pp. 63-64; “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1970), pp. 212-15; “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock, pp. 287-300. See also Victor Reppert, C.S. Lewis’ Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003) 16 C.S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,” written in 1943 and reprinted in God in the Dock, pp. 200- 207. Skinner’s academic (as opposed to fictional) treatises on behaviorism appeared later, especially in his volumes Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Knopf, 1971) and About Behaviorism (New York: Knopf, 1974). 17 The unexplained independence of each community from wider societal and state influence does not make for a convincing narrative in either case. Lewis’ attempt to use his novel as a pulpit to sermonize about his favorite epistemological and ethical issues makes the result, in Chad Walsh’s words, “intellectually overstuffed.” See Walsh’s The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (London and New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), p. 118. For further critical analyses of That Hideous Strength see Lionel Adey, C.S. Lewis: Writer, Dreamer and Mentor (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1998) and Doris T. Myers, C.S. Lewis in Context (Kent OH and London: Kent State University Press, 1994). For background and analysis of Walden Two see B.F. Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist (New York: Knopf, 1979) and Daniel W. Bjork, B.F. Skinner: A Life (Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1997). 18 See especially David Noble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: Oxford, 1992), and also David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (New York: Russell Sage, 1992). Though Oxford and Cambridge began as all-male institutions in 1249 and 1284 respectively, the first two colleges for women in

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There are no children even in minor roles in Lewis’ imaginary town of Edgestow, either in the university community that is descending into corruption or in the little Christian band, St. Anne’s, that assembles to challenge ‘that hideous strength.’19 There are many children in Skinner’s Walden Two, but like children in the emerging Israeli kibbutzim, they live in age-graded groups under the surveillance of trained caretakers and teachers and have a merely avuncular relationship with their biological parents, who themselves often commute between separate bedrooms.

But it is safe to say that the similarities end there. Walden Two is a ‘soft determinist’ or ‘compatibilist’ Utopia: its children are programmed through the judicious use of positive reinforcement to grow up without the negative emotions of selfishness, envy, or aggressiveness. They are, Skinner explains, no more free of their genes and (especially) their environmental conditioning than apple trees are free (or not) to produce apples. But because positive reinforcers rather than coercive means are used to shape them, and because life at Walden Two is so well organized that the average work day is only four hours, with plenty of variety in both work and leisure activities, its inhabitants have the happy illusion of being free in a way that is ‘compatible’ with their actually-determined state. They are doing what they want, not what they are forced to do, secure in a community that maximizes individual contentment and social co-operation under the benign management of a self-perpetuating board of planners and scientists whose expertise and enlightened self-interest guarantee that their power will never be misused. “The good life is waiting for us here and now,” Walden Two’s founder says, with an earnestness that makes one of his visitors imagine hearing “a Salvation Army drum throbbing in the distance.” This behaviorist utopia “doesn’t depend on a change in government or on the machinations of world politics. It doesn’t wait upon an improvement in human nature. At this very moment we have the necessary techniques, both material and psychological, to create a full and satisfying life for everyone.”20

England (Queen’s and Bedford, both in London) opened only in the 1840s – with Cambridge and Oxford incorporating their first women’s colleges (Girton and Lady Margaret) only in 1873 and 1878 respectively. However, no woman was actually allowed to earn a B.Sc. degree anywhere in the British Empire until 1875, and the first B.A. degrees awarded to women in Great Britain were in 1877. In the United States, by contrast, the first coeducational college (Oberlin) admitted women in 1836, and the first all-women’s college (Mount Holyoke) opened at about the same time. Tyack and Hansot note (pp. 112-13) that, throughout the second half of the 19th century, “foreign visitors to the United States were often astonished to find boys and girls – even in their adolescent years – studying together … They sometimes wondered if educational opportunities for young women – far greater than those found in Europe – translated into a challenge to gender distinctions in the broader society and adult life … Some foreign commentators (upper- class Englishmen, in particular) feared that coeducation would feminize the boys or overstress conscientious girls, or simply stir up sexual desire.” 19 Children are obviously at the heart of Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles, but even here they are strangely detached from their parents, living with an elderly bachelor professor in a rural setting in order to be safe from wartime bombings, or embarking on adventures with each other and with various Narnia characters. Moreover, despite his success as a children’s author, Lewis himself admitted, in The Abolition of Man (p.17): “I myself do not enjoy the company of small children; [but] because I speak within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself – just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or color blind.” His brother Warren Lewis confirmed this unease in his account of Lewis’ resentment of the arrival in his household (in 1924) of the children of a family whose mother was dying. His other housemate, Mrs. Moore, had agreed to house the children indefinitely, and Warren Lewis notes that “Jack never felt at ease with children and must have wished very much that they were not there…” The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 1850-1930 (Wheaton IL: Marion Wade Collection, Wheaton College), Vol. 8, p. 232. 20 Walden Two, p.193. As a social blueprint Walden Two did not really catch on until the 1960s, when a wave of anti-establishment sentiment led two groups of people to set up communities – one in Virginia and one in Mexico -- using Skinner’s novel as a model. Although both communities (Twin Oaks and Los Horcones) still exist, neither retains more than a superficial resemblance to the fictitious Walden Two with

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By contrast, in That Hideous Strength and other writings of the 1940s, Lewis warns that it is just such scientific hubris – especially when its techniques are applied to people – that leads not to ‘the relief of man’s estate’21 but to political totalitarianism and to a view of humans (except for those of an elite ‘inner ring’) as eminently expendable.22 As the power-hungry Lord Feverstone explains to Mark, the gullible young sociologist in That Hideous Strength, “Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest … You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of.”23 Indeed, Willliam Hingest, the one truly disinterested and careful scientist in the group, is eventually murdered by his corrupt Belbury colleagues, the inevitable outcome of a process by which both rationality and goodness have been reduced to mere products of cause and chance: Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists [and] indifference to [objective truth] and a concentration upon mere power had been the result … Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow grave the old dream of Man as God.24

Lewis’ Fear of Positivist Science and Limitless Technology:

There is little doubt that Lewis in the 1940s saw a threat of catastrophic proportions in the misuse of natural science – and perhaps in the very existence of the social sciences as modeled on Baconian inductivism and experimentalism.25 In The Abolition of Man (a 1943 lectureship of only 48 published pages) he refers to activities of human ‘conditioners’ (often with a capital ‘C’) no fewer than twenty-four times, and in language indicating that he regarded the potential power of science as almost unlimited. Thus, “The man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistable scientific technique: we shall at last get a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.”26 And: It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere ‘natural object and his own judgments of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will … [I]f man chooses to treat himself as raw

regard to childrearing practices, economic self-sufficiency in the context of expanded leisure, or non- democratic rule by a benign scientific elite. See Kathleen Kinkade, A Walden Two Experiment: The First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community (New York: Wm. Morrow, 1973) and Is It Utopia Yet? An Insider’s View of Twin Oaks Community in its Twenty-Sixth Year (Louisa VA: Twin Oaks Publishers, 1994). 21 The phrase is from Francis Bacon’s (1620) Novum Organum, an early treatise on the inductive method in science. B.F. Skinner was a self-professed admirer of Bacon, patterning Walden two after Bacon’s early Utopia The New Atlantis. See Bjork, B.F. Skinner: A Life and Laurence D. Smith, “On Prediction and Control: B. F. Skinner and the Technological Ideal of Science, American Psychologist, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Feb. 1992), pp. 216-23. 22 See also Lewis, The Abolition of Man, ch. 3 and “The Inner Ring,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1965), pp. 55-66. 23 That Hideous Strength, p. 42. 24 Ibid., p. 203. 25 Lewis says this of Francis Bacon, whose 1620 Novum Organum was the beginning blueprint for an inductive science that would be joined at the hip with technology and that would regard nature as devoid of Aristotelian telos, or purpose: “If we compare the chief trumpeter of the new era (Bacon) with Marlowe’s Fausus, the similarity is striking … It is not truth that [Faust] wants from his devils, but gold, guns and girls … In the same spirit Bacon condemns those who value knowledge as an end in itself: this, for him, is to use as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit. The true object [of science] is to extend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible. He rejects magic because it does not work; but his goal is that of the magician” (The Abolition of Man, p. 53). 26 The Abolition of Man, p. 43.

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material, raw material he will be … to be manipulated [not], as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is mere Nature in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.27 In his 1949 essay, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” he decried the emerging tendency to treat criminals as badly-conditioned organisms to be rehabilitated, rather than as responsible agents serving a sentence that fits their crime. By reducing such persons to mere mechanisms, Lewis wrote, we are being anything but humanitarian. Moreover, if crimes are the result not of misused human agency, but of environmentally-conditioned ‘sickness,’ then the idea of limited punishment evaporates, for it is up to the doctors alone to decide when one is well. Here too he leaves us in little doubt about the power he actually attributes to emerging behavioral technology:

To undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to be re-made after some pattern of ‘normality’ hatched in a Viennese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I grow wise enough to cheat them with apparent success – who cares whether this is called punishment or not? That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared … is obvious. Only enormous ill-desert could justify it; but ill-desert is the very conception which the Humanitarian theory has thrown overboard.28

Why was Lewis in the 1940s so in awe of a behavioral science and technology which, at that point in time, had been tested almost exclusively on pigeons and sub-primate mammals in restricted laboratory conditions? Part of it has to do with the confident rhetoric of imminent breakthrough that characterized many social scientists of the time, including the Skinner of Walden Two.29 (Over half a century later, one can point out to students that Skinner never actually went beyond his fictional blueprint to set up anything like a Walden Two, and that his few followers who tried to do so have ended up with communities that are only a pale shadow –

27 Ibid., p. 50. See also pp. 41, 44-48, and 51-52. 28 C. S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1949), pp. 5-12. Reprinted in God in the Dock, pp. 287-300. This quotation betrays Lewis’ limited knowledge of psychology. The techniques of behavioral conditioning that he deplores were ‘hatched’ not in Vienna (where Freud developed early psychoanalysis as a clinical – not a laboratory— endeavor). They were developed in Leningrad as Pavlov’s respondent conditioning and later at Harvard as Skinner’s operant conditioning, both of whom were adamantly opposed to Freud’s ‘Viennese’ mentalism. 29 Some of Lewis’ fear of science’s power may also have come from his fascination (even after his conversion) with Manichean dualism, the belief that good and evil are two eternally-preexistent and independent powers locked in endless combat. In some dualistic schemes, the existence of matter itself “is explained by the existence of rival or lesser divinities who made the world of sin and change while, unseen, the First mover sits indifferently above … Lewis’s [Platonic] imagination had a naturally dualistic tendency, which was why he was so brilliant at dreaming up letters from the devil” (Wilson, C. S. Lewis, pp. 257-58. In Mere Christianity (London: Collins Fontana, 1952), Lewis explains that in Christian theology evil is not regarded as independent, but a fallen, parasitic distortion of God’s good. Yet he also writes (though without explaining why) that in his view, “[n]ext to Christianity, Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market” (p. 44). In That Hideous Strength – against the reassurances of the New Testament -- even members of the Christian remnant have no guarantee that evil, in the end, will not triumph. Of the reductionistic, value-free science of Belbury Lewis writes: “The time was ripe. From the point of view which is accepted in Hell, the whole history of our Earth had led up to this moment. There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would at last be incarnate” (pp. 203-204). And when Professor Dimble (of the Company of St. Anne’s) offers to help the ambivalent Mark Studdock leave Belbury, he bluntly asserts: “I can offer you no security … There is no security for anyone now. The battle has started. I’m offering you a place on the right side. I don’t which will win” (p. 223).

7 8 in size, socioeconomic and political structure – of their fictitious ideal.30) But it is also because the academic milieu that both Lewis and Skinner were immersed in when they wrote their novels was that of the ‘two cultures’ described by the Cambridge physicist-turned novelist, C.P. Snow: one in which the separability of so-called facts from values was still largely taken for granted, with the positivist, cumulative edifice of science the guarantor of the former, and the humanities (though with progressively enfeebled voice) the guardian of the latter.31

Snow himself expressed hope that the social sciences could emerge as a mediating voice between these two camps, but Lewis would have none of this. Aside from a cautious appreciation of Freudian psychoanalysis32 and a more significant respect for “the other great psychologist, Jung”33 he saw practitioners of the social sciences mainly as lackeys of the technologically- minded natural scientists. It is no accident that the young college don Lewis chooses to place on the path of spiritual re-education in That Hideous Strength is a sociologist, Mark Studdock, whose petulant response to the dilemma he creates for himself in joining Belbury is to assume no responsibility whatever. (“Damn the whole thing …Why had he such a rotten heredity? Why had his education been so ineffective? Why was the system of society so irrational? Why was his luck so bad?”)34 Lewis comments:

It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical – erely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by, and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor artistocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge …35

Here we see Lewis’ embrace of the ‘two cultures’ dilemma. He assumes that both proper classical and proper scientific education will yield ‘exact’ knowledge, the former about timeless forms of the good, the true, and the beautiful, the latter about the workings of nature. The problem for Lewis comes when the two are sundered: when scientists lack the classical training (and the noblesse oblige of a well-functioning class system) to keep them from misusing their acquired power over nature, and further presuming that it can be used to reduce and manipulate

30 Kinkade, Twin Oaks and Is It Utopia Yet? Though not patterned deliberately along behaviorist lines, the much larger kibbutz movement in Israel bears some resemblance to Walden Two. Committed to an ideology of both economic and gender equality, this movement structured its rural communities over a half century ago to have infants and children sleep and eat separately from parents, and to be nurtured as a group by trained child care workers, in order to free up mothers as well as fathers for full participation in the life of the kibbutzim. But as in the would-be Walden Two communities (see note 19) most kibbutzim have gradually moved back to nuclear family living arrangements, although communal meals, communal child-care and a common purse remain normative. See Ofra Anson, Arieh Levenson and Dan Y. Bonneh, “Gender and Health on the Kibbutz,” Sex Roles 22 (1990), pp. 213-33, and Aryei Fishman, Judaism and the Collective Life: Self and Community in the Religious Kibbutz (New York: Routledge, 2002). 31 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1959). 32 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Collins Fontana, 1952), pp. 89-94. 33 Ibid., p. 79. Lewis’ biographer (and former student-turned colleague) George Sayer reports that apart from some appreciation for Freud’s theories concerning parent-child relations, “Carl Jung was the only philosopher of the Viennese School for whose work [Lewis] had much respect.” See his Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 102. See also Lewis’ 1942 essay, “Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism,” reprinted in Selected Literary Essays, Walter Hooper, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 286-300. 34 That Hideous Strength, p. 224. 35 Ibid., p. 185.

8 9 human nature.36 That is why he lionizes Hingest, the aristocratic chemist who leaves Belbury after stating flatly to Mark that “There are no sciences like sociology … I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing.”37 But it is also why MacPhee, the resident scientist-skeptic among the Christians at St. Anne’s, is exempt from the contempt Lewis expresses for the power-hungry, occult-leaning technocrats of Belbury:

You could not have done it with Nineteenth-century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe [in occult forces], their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now.38

Oxbridge Positivism in the 1940s

Was the Oxford zeitgeist of the 1940s ‘different’ in the way that Lewis implies? There is little evidence that most of its scholars had despaired over the possibility of objective truth and started looking to ancient occult sources in a compensatory quest for raw power.39 On the contrary, this was the heyday of analytical philosophy and logical positivism, revolts against philosophical idealism mounted earlier in the century by Cambridge scholars like G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead.40 In its strongest form, logical positivism was the view that no statement is meaningful unless it can be verified empirically, or is true just by virtue of the logical or mathematical connections among its terms. All other statements – religious, aesthetic or moral – were relegated to the category of ‘non-sense’: perhaps generating useful and pleasant emotions, but not (like science) a source of certain or ‘positive’ knowledge.41 Implicit in this was a very high view (anything but despairing) of the possibility of observing with complete

36 Lewis did not seem to expect a reciprocal attempt at scientific literacy from classically-trained scholars, although this is what Snow vehemently recommended in The Two Cultures. 37 Ibid., pp. 70-71. The distinction (that Lewis embraced in the 1940s) between natural scientists objectively ‘studying’ man and human scientists ‘getting to know him’ by the method of empathic understanding (verstehen) goes back to the 19th century distinction made by German scholars such as Wilhelm Dilthey between Natuurwissenschaften (sciences of nature) and Geisteswissenschaften (sciences of the human spirit). Like other idealists adhering to this line of thought, Lewis is drawing a sharp distinction between the natural and the cultural, between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. 38 Ibid., p. 203. 39 In Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London: Collins Fontana, 1955) Lewis does mention in passing (pp. 143-44) that, as an agnostic undergraduate at Oxford, he came to meet “Magicians, Spiritualists and the like,” and that though he was tempted then to go that route, he knew by then that real ‘joy’ did not lie in that direction. Yet as late as 1961, mourning his wife’s death in A Grief Observed, Lewis writes of longing for assurance of his wife’s continued existence. But he concludes (p. 11) “At any rate, I must keep clear of the spiritualists. I promised H. I would. She knew something of those circles.” 40 As early as 1924, Lewis wrote an analysis of Bertrand Russell’s Worship of a Free Man, about which he later said “I found it a very clear and noble statement of what I myself believed a few years ago … that our ideals are after all a natural product, facts with a [causal] relation to all other facts” (Lewis Papers, Vol. 8, p. 172). According to A.N. Wilson, even after his conversion to Christianity Lewis was interested in Russell “Because he appeared to embody a phenomenon which to a lesser degree had been shown forth in [his old tutor] Kirkpatrick [who was also the model for MacPhee in That Hideous Strength]: a passionate belief in virtue, without any philosophical justification for his position” (C.S.Lewis: A Biography, p. 87). 41 Some logical positivists even rejected the use of theory in the natural sciences, saying that every scientific term must be defined strictly and completely in terms of sensory observation. For an accessible introduction to these issues see Del Ratzsch, Science and Its Limits: The Natural Sciences in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity, 2000). For a more technical treatment, see Frederick Suppe, The Structure of Scientific Theories (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977) or W.H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

9 10 objectivity, organizing data in bias-free ways, and using the resulting ‘discoveries’ to build a cumulative edifice of scientific theories that are known to be true -- if not absolutely, at least with a high degree of probability.

Among the Oxford advocates of hard positivism were Gilbert Ryle and A.J. Ayer, who used it to reduce concepts like right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly to the status of subjective, unverifiable feelings.42 As late as 1954 Lewis wrote in a letter to a colleague that the “Logical Positivist menace” at Oxford was making Christian apologetics very challenging, adding that at Oxford Socratic Club debates “the enemy often wipe the floor with us.”43 The stark language of enemy confrontation recalls Lewis’ use of the language of principalities and powers in Mere Christianity, where he writes that the world at large is “[e]nemy-occupied territory” and that “Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”44 Again, there is no evidence that positivists like Ayer and Ryle had entered into a conscious Belbury-esque pact with the devil. But as A.N. Wilson observes about Lewis’ Abolition of Man,

[I]t was written at a period when, abroad, Hitler and Stalin were defying all previously understood notions of decency – indeed, inventing value or non-value systems of their own – while at home Lewis was finding himself, at the Socratic Club and elsewhere, with philosophers like A.J. Ayer who absolutely denied the possibility of attaching meaning to sentences which were not either verifiable through sense perception or verifiable as a priori truths … [M]urder, dishonesty, theft, unkindness, disregard of the old, cruelty to children, ruthless ‘justice’ untempered by mercy: [t]hat these should be considered abhorrent, Lewis gently explains, is no longer taken for granted … Where does that leave us? Lewis predicts that it will leave us in the hands of unscrupulous operators who do not believe in humanity itself. The abolition of man will have occurred because there will [no longer be] reason to regard man … as a moral being.45

Thus it hardly mattered to Lewis that colleagues like Ayer were positivists who rejected the very idea of the devil as empirically unattestable and thus meaningless. Because goodness, truth and beauty were interdependent for Lewis (as they were for Plato) the reduction of any one of these signals danger for the others. Those who reduce truth, like the architects of Belbury, risk ending up on the side of evil whether they intend to consciously or not – the more so as they steadily lose touch with the intellectual resources and moral capital of a philosophically idealist and Christian theist heritage.46 At the same time, as I have noted, Lewis accepted the view of science advanced by his positivist rivals. As long as science stuck to the study of the material realm, its objective, inductive methods would result in a ‘catalogue of ultimate realities’ or laws

42 For example, Gilbert Ryle, Philosophical Arguments (Oxford: 1945) and The Concept of Mind (Oxford, 1949); A.. J.Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (Oxford, 1936), The Problem of Knowledge (Oxford, 1956) and A. J. Ayer, ed. Logical Positivism (New York: Free Press, 1959) 43 April 22, 1954 letter to Dom Bede Griffith (Wheaton IL: Marion Wade Collection), as quoted in Doris T. Myers, C.S. Lewis in Context (Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1994), p. 183). 44 Mere Christianity, p. 47. 45 A.N. Wilson, C.S.Lewis, pp. 198-99. 46 Thus in Mere Christianity (pp. 47- 48) Lewis, after describing the universe in terms of a spiritual battle between the biblical God and a rebellious angelic power, imagines a skeptic asking: “’Do you really mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the devil – hoofs and horns and all?’ Well [Lewis replies], what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer is ‘Yes, I do.’ I do not claim to know anything about his personal appearance. If anybody really wants to know him better I would say to that person, ‘Don’t worry. If you really want to, you will. Whether you’ll like it or not when you do is another question.’” (See also Reppert, C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, especially ch. 3).

10 11 about the essential workings of nature.47 The Lewis of the 1940s still defended a fairly strong version of scientific realism – the view that scientific theories refer to real, existing entities in a way that is or can be completely true.48 He was only starting to move toward a critical realism that takes account of the historically-located and paradigm-dependent nature of all scientific work.

Consequently, in his writings of the l940s and early 1950s Lewis focused more on the reductionistic tendencies of positivism, and less on its overall philosophy of science. He mainly attacked ‘the Logical Positivist menace’ (which he usually referred to simply as ‘Naturalism’) by exposing its logical inconsistencies.49 If, as doctrinaire positivists claim, ‘The only meaningful statements are those that are empirically or analytically true,’ then this central claim of positivism (which is itself neither empirical nor analytic) is self-stultifying: its adherents cut off the very epistemological limb on which they sit. Furthermore, if all thought is merely the inevitable consequence of the thinker’s biological state and learning history, then the very enterprise of science -- which assumes that its research conclusions are not arbitrary, but supported by certain rules of evidence -- is rendered meaningless. (How, for example, can Skinner claim anything about the truth of behaviorism if all thoughts – including his own about behaviorism -- are merely the inevitable result of his genetic and learning histories?) Finally, Lewis argued, a consistent logical positivism also renders all moral prescriptions (such as ‘Work for the betterment of humankind’) subjective and meaningless, since such statements are also neither empirically nor analytically grounded. For Lewis, the fact that his logical positivist colleagues were not, in practice, moral nihilists did not rescue them from intellectual inconsistency: it simply meant that as people they were better than their theories. Thus he wrote in Miracles:

A moment after [Naturalists] have admitted that good and evil are illusions, [they exhort us] to work for posterity, to educate, revolutionise, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race … But surely this is very odd? Just as all the books about spiral nebulae, atoms and cave men would really have had you suppose that the Naturalists claimed to be able to know something, so all the books in which Naturalists tell us what we ought to do would really make you believe that they thought some ideas of good (their own, for example) to be somehow preferable to others … Do they remember while they are writing thus that, when they tell us we ‘ought to make a better world’ the words ‘ought’ and ‘better’ must, on their own showing, refer to an irrationally conditioned impulse which cannot be true or false any more than a vomit or a yawn? My idea is that sometimes they do forget. That is their glory. Holding a philosophy which excludes humanity, they yet remain human.50

47 Lewis was so caught up in the positivist, mechanistic model of physical science of the 1940s that in the third chapter of Miracles (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947; Rev. ed. Collins Fontana, 1960) he expresses incredulity about emerging quantum physical theory, with its model of random (and hence incalculable) particle movement. Of quantum physicists he writes (pp. 13-14) “ [I] find it almost impossible to believe that the scientists really believe what they seem to be saying. I cannot help thinking they mean no more than that the movements of individual units are permanently incalculable to us, not that they are in themselves random and lawless … [S]ome new scientific development may … tomorrow abolish this whole idea of a lawless Subnature. For it is the glory of science to progress.” 48 The terminology of scientific realism can be confusing, for the scientific ‘realist’ assumes that even theoretical entities (such as electrons) that cannot be observed directly are still ‘real.’ Hence scientific realists are not strict positivists, but in a sense are idealists regarding many terms in their theories. Lewis contributes to this confusion by often using ‘realism’ as a synonym for philosophical materialism, which is often (though not inevitably) anti-realist, as that term is used by contemporary philosophers of science. For an accessible introduction to this debate, see Ratzsch, Science and Its Limits. 49 See especially The Abolition of Man, ch.3 and Miracles, ch. 3-5. 50 Miracles, pp. 36-37 (1960 ed.) In Calvinist terms, this inconsistency can be seen as a testimony to the working of ‘common grace’ which, in distinction from ‘saving grace,’ refers to “that attitude of divine

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Towards a Post-Positivist Critique

However, the beginnings of a critical realist approach to science can be seen in Lewis’ 1945 essay “Meditation in a Toolshed.” There Lewis distinguishes between looking ‘at’ a beam of light and looking ‘along’ it, and points out that one cannot do both at once – i.e., analyze the beam of light at the same time one uses it by which to see something else. This has intriguing anticipations of Karl Popper’s (1959) distinction between ‘background knowledge’ (e.g., taken-for-granted instrumentation) in science and ‘theoretical problem-solving.’ Popper pointed out that the scientist cannot at the same time question both a scientific theory and its background knowledge: for example, in conducting an experiment the scientist necessarily assumes that her apparatus is in working order. If there are unanticipated difficulties, the scientist may have to stop looking ‘along’ the apparatus and look ‘at’ it to see if its malfunctioning and/or limitations are the accidental source of an anomalous finding. But she cannot do both at once.51

Thomas Kuhn in 1963 made the same point about ‘dogmatic’ scientific paradigms: to be useful at all, they have to be taken for granted while their empirical reach is ‘articulated’ in the course of ‘normal science.’52 But if enough embarrassments or unanticipated ‘anomalies’ accumulate in the course of articulating a paradigm some scientists will eventually stop looking ‘along’ the paradigm and look ‘at’ it critically. The result may be a full-blown scientific revolution and the ascendancy of a new paradigm. Michael Polanyi, on whose thought Kuhn drew, made a similar point in 1964 about the nature of tools. For example, while a surgeon is using a probe (Lewis’ ‘looking along’ it) to explore a body cavity, he is only ‘tacitly’ aware of the probe itself, for his attention is ‘focally’ directed on what the probe can do. At a later time, he may look at the probe, consider its limitations and think about possibly re-designing it. But he cannot do both at once.53 Finally, in 1989, Lesslie Newbigin made thoughtful use of Polanyi’s distinction to point out similarities in the conduct of science and of theology. In theology too, says Newbigin, one must faithfully indwell a tradition (‘look along it’) whose presuppositions are adopted uncritically, in order to explore its problem-solving possibilities. But at times the church also proposes modifications to doctrinal and theological traditions (‘looks at them’) – changes that, as in science, must be submitted to the wider community in order to be adjudicated.54

favor that extends to humanity in general; to believers and unbelievers alike. The church has observed three distinct evidences of common grace in the world. First, God gives natural gifts to unbelievers as well as believers … Second, God restrains sin in all people. Because of sin, human beings are not as good as they could be; but because of common grace, they are not as bad as they could be either. This is why unbelievers at times actually seem to behave better than believers. Virtues such as patience, courage, and compassion never totally lose their resonance in any image bearer of God. Third, God enables unbelievers to perform positive acts of civic good. God preserves a basic sense of civic justice that enables human societies to function in an orderly way. Common grace prevents society, marred and distorted by sin and evil, from ever totally disintegrating.” What It Means to Be Reformed: An Identity Statement (Grand Rapids MI: Christian Reformed Church in North America, 2002), p. 20. See also Richard J. Mouw, He Shines In All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). 51 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper, 1959). 52 Thomas S. Kuhn, “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,” in Alistair C. Crombie, ed., Scientific Change (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 347-69. 53Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1964). 54. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1989). Newbigin, however, sees Scripture (and especially its Gospel core) as a foundational authority that the church and its theologians systematize more or less clearly throughout the ages. In the same way the critical realist tradition in science assumes that ‘real’ (even if empirically elusive) laws are at work in the universe, but

12 13

An anticipation of the postmodern critique of naturalism was begun as early as 1940 by Lewis’ Magdalen College colleague, philosopher R. G. Collingwood. In his Essay on Metaphysics55 Collingwood pointed out that positivists like Ayer were confusing propositions (statements to be verified by an appeal to facts) with suppositions – that is, unverifiable, faith- based axioms, categories or assumptions that the mind imposes in order to organize experience in the first place. Thus, wrote Collingwood, there is a sense in which every ‘fact’ – scientific or historical – is known ‘by faith’ because it is based on presuppositions that are taken for granted but are neither empirically nor analytically ‘true’ in the positivist sense.56 In his 1947 book Miracles, Lewis discusses an example of one such presupposition upon which the very enterprise of science rests – namely, the principle (read: faith-assumption) of the uniformity of nature:

We observe many regularities in Nature. But of course all the observations that men have made or will make … cover only a minute fraction of the events that actually go on … Experience therefore cannot prove uniformity, because uniformity has to be assumed before experience proves anything. And mere length of experience does not help matters … for that argument works only on the assumption that the future will resemble the past – which is simply the assumption of Uniformity under a new name. Can we say that Uniformity is at any rate very probable? Unfortunately not … [because] unless Nature is uniform, nothing is either probable or improbable. And clearly the assumption that you have to make before there is any such thing as probability cannot itself be probable.57

Here we have further anticipations of the postmodern turn in philosophy of science – one that does not gather momentum until the 1960s, when scholars begin to realize that the ‘two cultures’ of the sciences and the humanities are not as epistemologically distinct as C.P Snow and the champions of positivism had assumed.58 Examining how science has actually been conducted (rather than trying to articulate a timeless logical model) the post-positivists proceeded to show that scientific theorizing is affected by everything from economic conditions and perceptual constraints, to metaphysical convictions and science fiction-like imaginings. True objectivity thus consists not in denying such influences, but in publicly owning one’s convictions and showing how they lead to imaginative and at least provisionally testable theories. And as Polanyi repeatedly observed, we always know more than we can tell, which is why scientific and religious knowledge are both advanced by praxis – in the lab or research field for the scientist, in engagement with worship, study, and other people for the Christian.59

To say that good science rests on such ‘tacit’ knowledge challenges the positivist view of science as a body of highly formalizable and wholly explicit propositions. On Polanyi’s account, science, the arts, and the Christian life all require what Saint Augustine called ‘faith seeking understanding.’ All require that we commit ourselves to learning from a prior tradition so that we can develop that tradition in fruitful and often surprising ways. As Lesslie Newbigin later put it:

that scientific theories attest to these more or less completely, and thus are themselves open to criticism and modification. 55 R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940); The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946). 56 Myers, C.S.Lewis in Context, p. 183. See also James Patrick, The Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901-1945 (Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1985). 57 Miracles, p. 102. 58 Yu Zhenhua, “Two Cultures Revisited: Michael Polanyi on the Continuity Between Natural Sciences and the Study of Man,” Tradition and Discovery, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2000-2001), pp. 6-19. 59 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge and The Tacit Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966).

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Holding [a scientific] theory is an act of faith in the rationality of the cosmos. The justification – if one may put it so – is by faith; only afterward, as a spin-off, does one find that it is also justified because it works. The analogy with Christian faith hardly needs to be pointed out.60

That Collingwood and Lewis did not gain a ready audience for their emerging critical realism was partly due to the fact that neither was a bench scientist before beginning to question the rigid separation of the ‘two cultures.’ Just as only a conservative Republican president like Richard Nixon could open dialogue between the U.S. and communist China in the 1960s, so it was only when established physicists like Popper, Kuhn, and Polanyi questioned the received view of science that the Anglo-American academy began to take serious notice.61

In addition, although both Popper and Polanyi were European emigres to British universities and contemporaries of Lewis, the accidents of history appear to have kept the three on paths that ran parallel to each other, rather than crossing. Both Polanyi and Popper were Jews who left Germany in the 1930s during the rise of Hitler. Popper took a nine-year detour to an academic post in New Zealand before coming to the London School of Economics in 1946, and much of his writing in the post-war period focused on a critique of Hegelian historicism and its contribution to left-wing and right-wing totalitarianiam.62 Only in 1959 did he publish The Logic of Scientific Discovery, in which he demonstrated the historical role of imagination in the construction of scientific theories, while deconstructing positivist notions of induction and verification as the demarcation criteria separating science from non-science. Polanyi, on the other hand, came directly to England in 1933, but took a post at Manchester University as a chemist. He remained a productive scientist until 1948, when he exchanged his chair in chemistry for one in social science. Only in 1959 did he move to Merton College at Oxford, a mere four years before Lewis’ death, a year after which he published Personal Knowledge, his major critique of positivism.63

It is tempting to speculate about what might have emerged had Lewis crossed paths in England with either of these scholars from the late 1940s on. The earlier Lewis often wrote about

60 Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, p. 46. See also Thomas F. Torrance, “Michael Polanyi and the Christian Faith,” Tradition and Discovery, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2000-2001), pp. 26-32, and David Kettle, “Newbigin, Polanyi and Impossible Frameworks,” Tradition and Discovery, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2001-2002), pp. 20-22. 61 Popper’s had early training in mathematics and physics; Polanyi had double doctorates in medicine and physical chemistry, and Kuhn’s doctorate was in particle physics. 62 For example, The Poverty of Historicism (1944) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper moved to the University of London in 1949 and remained there until his semi-retirement in 1959, when he accepted a chair at Merton College, Oxford. 63 J.R.R. Tolkien held The Merton Chair in English Language and Literature from 1945 to 1959, retiring just as Polanyi came to Merton. While Tolkien and Lewis met regularly from the early 1930s to the mid - 1950s in the Oxford-based reading group known as The Inklings, Polanyi met from about 1944 to 1956 with a similar group organized by the British ecumenical leader and religious intellectual, J.H. Oldham. Known in one of its incarnations as ‘The Moot,’ this group met for papers and responses two or three times a year and included, besides Polanyi (who was baptized Catholic as a adult about the same time he married a Catholic), religious and literary figures such as T.S. Eliot, John Middleton Murray, and Hendrick Kraemer. The group stimulated and influenced Polanyi’s continuing interest in religion and culture, but it does not seem to have had any formal contact with the Oxford intellectuals represented by the Inklings. (Lewis, according to Sayer’s biography Jack, had an aversion to T.S. Elliot and his work until the late 1950s when the two worked together as stylists for the Psalms in a revision of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer). Polanyi does, however, refer to C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man in his last major work: see Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 28. For details on Oldham’s Moot and Polanyi’s participation in it, see Marjorie Reeves, ed. Christian Thinking and Social Order: Conviction Politics from the 1930s to the Present Day (New York: Cassell, 1999).

14 15 the importance of the ‘baptized imagination’ -- a romantic, mystical intuitive sense – for apprehending the good, the true, the beautiful and the holy, and contrasted this mode of knowing with the abstract analysis of reality practiced by both philosophers and scientists.64 Popper and Polanyi (as well as Kuhn and his successors in America) demonstrated that this distinction is too sharp, for scientists themselves adjudicate theories by appealing to shifting packages of ‘epistemic values,’ all of which include more than the criteria of empirical adequacy and logical coherence. Theories are embraced because they are elegantly simple, metaphorically gripping, fruitful, broad in their reach, and compatible with certain metaphysical assumptions – of which the uniformity of nature is only one.65 It would thus appear that the ‘baptized imagination’ with its ‘assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen’66 is as much a part of science as it is of artistic and literary activity, and of religious life and thought.

Lewis on Gender Archetypes and Gender Hierarchy

Thus far I have argued that in the last two decades of his life Lewis was moving from a more Platonic realist to a more critical realist view of science, and from an acceptance of the ‘two cultures’ thesis to a recognition that scientific knowing is not as discontinuous with religious and artistic knowing as either the positivists or their critics in his generation had assumed. It is, however, a matter of continuing debate as to how much his views on gender changed in the same period, and how much more they might have changed had he lived longer, and collaborated longer with his wife of four years, Joy Davidman. Certainly the Lewis of the 1940s and 50s endorsed both an essentialist and hierarchical reading of gender that is rooted at least as much in Pagan mythology as it is in a biblical anthropology.67 We see an example of this in the third quotation heading this essay, taken from Lewis’ 1946 novel That Hideous Strength. For in that ‘Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups’ (so Lewis subtitled it), it is not just Mark Studdock -- the shallow, positivist sociologist -- who needs a spiritual rebirth but also his new wife Jane, who as an English literature scholar is writing a doctoral thesis on John Donne.

As the opposing sides gather in the course of the story – Belbury representing science gone wrong, and St. Anne’s representing the Christians who, however fumblingly, at least want to be on the side of right – Lewis paints a very limiting portrait of what Christian females ought to become. As chaste single women, they can be learned professionals like Grace Ironwood, the doctor who treats Jane for the strange dreams she is having and who interacts on a somewhat collegial level with Ransom, the quasi-Christ figure who leads the St. Anne’s group. As married women, they can become like Mrs. Dimble, the wife of one of Jane’s professors, who though

64 ‘I am a rationalist,’ Lewis wrote in the 1930s. ‘For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.’ “Bluspels and Flalensferes: A Semantic Nightmare,” in Rehabilitations and Other Essays (Oxford, 1939), p. 265. See also Surprised by Joy, ch. 11; Paul L. Holmer, C.S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), and Michael J. Christensen, C.S. Lewis on Scripture (Waco TX: Word, 1979). 65 For further discussion of epistemic values in science, see Harold I. Brown, Perception, Theory and Commitment (University of Chicago Press, 1977); Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1977), Frederick Suppe, The Structure of Scientific Theories (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977), and W.H Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 66 Hebrews 11:1 (RSV). 67 See also Lewis’ Perelandra (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1943), p. 200. See also Fredrick and McBride, Women Among the Inkling; also Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context; and Wilson, C.S.Lewis. For a more recent critical conversation on biblical theology and gender relations in marriage, see David Blankenhorn, Don Browning and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, eds., Does Christianity Teach Male Headship? The Equal-Regard Marriage and Its Critics (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2004).

15 16 childless herself channels her maternal instincts into taking care of her husband’s students. But they cannot, like Jane, try to get the best of both worlds.68 Thus Ransom says to Jane just prior to her conversion: “A virginal rejection of the male, He would allow. Such [feminine] souls can bypass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine higher up, to which they must make an even deeper surrender.” But, he adds, “Mother Dimble … is a Christian wife. And you, you know, are not. Neither are you a virgin … I’m afraid there’s no niche in the world for people who won’t be either Pagan or Christian.”69

Lewis strongly hints in That Hideous Strength at what he thinks can happen to women if they do not embrace either neutral celibacy or wifely submission. They risk becoming like Fairy Hardcastle, the head of the private police force at Belbury, who acts like ‘one of the boys’: dressing in corsetless uniforms, smoking cigars, walking and sitting with legs apart, and surrounded by vacuous young girls who have a sado-masochistic relationship with her. Clearly Jane must choose, and according to Lewis, if she is to be Christian she must choose for archetypal femininity and wifely obedience in a universe that, at its core, is one continuous hierarchy:

“Religion” [Jane thought] ought to mean a realm in which her haunting female fear of being treated as a thing, an object of barter and desire and possession, would be set permanently at rest and what she called her ‘true self’ would soar upward and expand in some freer and purer world … [But] supposing one were thing after all – a thing designed by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one’s true self? Supposing all those people who, from the bachelor uncles down to Mark and Mother Dimble, had infuriatingly found her sweet and fresh when she wanted them to find her also interesting and important, had all along been simply right and perceived the sort of thing she was?70

A moment later, Jane has a conversion experience: she is thrust “into a world, or into a Person, or into the presence of a Person … with no veil or protection between.” And at this point she sees that she is indeed “a person (not the person she thought) yet also a thing, a made thing, made to please Another and in Him to please all others, a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of.” 71 By the novel’s end, she is ready to follow Ransom’s urging to return to her changed (but still less-than-perfect) husband. “Go in obedience and you will find love,” he asserts. “You will have no more dreams. Have children instead.”72

In Mere Christianity, a 1952 compendium of some of his World War Two-era essays and broadcast talks, Lewis makes both an Aristotelian and a Freudian argument for male headship in marriage. He notes the need for a tie-breaker when domestic disagreements arise, then goes on to explain why that tie-breaking authority should belong to the husband:

The relations of the family to the outer world – what might be called its foreign policy – must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children against the rest of the world …She is the special trustee of their interests. The function of the husband is to see that this natural

68 Doris Myers comments: “To show that feminine submission is not slavery … Lewis depicts the men and women [at St. Anne’s] doing housework on alternate days. But it is unconvincing because the women (except for Dr. Grace Ironwood) have no other work, such as Dimble’s position as a Don, or MacPhee’s gardening, to perform when they are not doing housework. A large segment of present-day readers also find patronizing the idea that men and women cannot work together.”(C. S. Lewis In Context, pp. 101-102.) 69 That Hideous Strength, pp. 314-15. 70 Ibid., p. 318. 71 Ibid., pp. 318-19. 72 Ibid., pp. 379-80.

16 17

preference is not given its head. He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife.73

Both Aristotle and Freud asserted that women were driven more by emotion and less by reason than men. For Aristotle, all things in the universe are arranged in a hierarchical scala naturae, or ‘ladder of nature’, beginning with inanimate matter and proceeding to plants, animals, humans, and ultimately the ‘unmoved mover’ which gives all natural objects their purposes. But within the human part of the ladder women are on a lower rung: in relation to men, they are irrational (given to opinions rather than true knowledge), unequal (fit for obedience rather than rule), and passive (even in pregnancy they provide only the ‘matter’ in which the man’s reproductively complete seed or ‘form’ grows).74 For Freud too ‘anatomy is destiny’: women even in adulthood have less-developed superegos than men, and hence less capacity for disinterested justice – though for Freud this is rooted in biology but mediated by women’s less- than-complete resolution of the Oedipal problem in early childhood.75

Lewis goes further, blending Pagan and Jungian themes in his analysis of sexuality. “In the act of love,” he wrote as late as 1960, “we are not merely ourselves … In us all the masculinity and femininity of the world, all that is assailant and responsive, are momentarily focused. The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman the Earth-Mother; he does play Form, and she Matter.”76 This so-called reality – Lewis calls it the “Pagan sacrament” of the sex act – leads (he believes) to sadomasochistic games in “most pairs of lovers,” a practice he regards as “harmless and wholesome” provided the participants do not forget their first loyalty is to God:

A woman who accepted as literally her own this extreme self-surrender would be an idolatress offering to a man what belongs only to God. And a man would have to be the coxcomb of all coxcombs, and indeed a blasphemer, if he arrogated to himself, as the mere person he is, the sort of sovereignty to which Venus for a moment exalts him. But what cannot lawfully be yielded or claimed can be lawfully enacted. Outside this ritual or drama he and she are two immortal souls, two free-born adults, two citizens … But within this rite or drama they become a god and goddess between whom there is no equality – whose relations are asymmetrical.77

As in the bedroom, so in the church. In his 1948 essay arguing against opening up the Anglican priesthood to women, Lewis (backing away from his Aristotelian misogyny), freely concedes that women are “no less capable than men of piety, zeal, learning and whatever else

73 Mere Christianity, p. 100. Lewis regularly assumed the existence of a ‘maternal instinct’ without advancing any clear arguments for it. See for example The Four Loves (London: Collins Fontana, 1960), pp. 33, 40, 49, and 50. 74 Aristotle’s views on gender relations are variously described in his Politics, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics. Detailed analyses of those views and their impact on later Western thought can be found in Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1936) and Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 B.C. –A.D. 1250 (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1997). 75 James Strachey, ed.,The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19, pp. 241-60 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1974). The debate about women’s and men’s respective moral capacities was continued in the 1960s in neo-Kantian and neo- Piagetian theory and research of Lawrence Kohlberg, which was in turn challenged in the 1970s by the Harvard educational theorist Carol Gilligan. For an introduction to these later debates, see Rosemarie Tong, Feminine and Feminist Ethics (Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 1993). 76 The Four Loves, p. 95. See also Faith Martin, “Mystical Masculinity: The New Questions Facing Women,” Priscilla Papers, Vol. 12, No. 1 (winter 1998), pp. 6-12. 77 Ibid., pp. 95-96.

17 18 seems necessary for the pastoral office.”78 A woman, he adds, can be a competent church administrator, pastoral visitor, or even a preacher. It is not the case that she is “necessarily or even probably, less holy or less charitable or stupider than a man.”79 What she cannot do, wearing the ‘feminine uniform,’ is sacramentally represent the people of God before God, who represents (for Lewis) the ultimate in masculinity beside which everything else is feminine by contrast:80

The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant … This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality … The kind of equality which implies that the equals are interchangeable (like counters or identical machines) is, among humans, a legal fiction. It may be a useful legal fiction. But in the church we turn our back on fictions. One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize for us the hidden things of God … [Thus] only one wearing the masculine uniform can (provisionally, and till the Parousia) represent the Lord to the Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him.81

Lewis thus drew boundaries around male headship: it will, he writes, disappear at the Lord’s return (the Parousia), and even before then it is limited to certain aspects of marital and ecclesial life. In his wartime essay “Membership” he explains that he does believe in political and legal equality and that he “should view with the strongest disapproval any proposal to abolish

78 “Priestesses in the Church?” in C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, Walter Hooper, ed. (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1970), pp. 234-39 (quotation from p. 235). Unfortunately, Lewis’ journey away from misogyny was uneven. For example, seven years later in his 1955 autobiography Surprised by Joy he explains how as a young boy he developed a insect phobia in part as the result of a rather frightening childhood picture book. But he also adds (quite gratuitously), “You may add that in the hive and the ant-hill we see fully realised the two things that some of us dread most for our own species – the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective” (p. 13). Fredrick and McBride, in ch. 4 and 5 of Women Among the Inklings, also cite evidence (some of it contested by other scholars) of rather profound misogyny in some of Lewis’ last short stories, which were collected and edited by Walter Hooper under the title The Dark Tower and Other Stories (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977). 79 Ibid., p. 236. 80 So also Lewis’ second space-travel novel, Perelandra (London:John Lane,1943): “[G]ender [is not] an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others. Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine … the real polarity.” (p. 200). 81 “Priestesses in the Church,” pp. 237, 238, 239. Lewis, in this essay, shows a careless reading of Scripture when he asserts (p. 236) that Jesus’ mother “was absent from the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost” and suggests that this is further evidence that the feminine cannot operate on the same plane as the masculine, either in the church or in heaven. However, Acts 1:14 speaks of all Jesus’ disciples “together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus” devoting themselves to prayer in an upper room in Jerusalem prior to Pentecost. Moreover, when the Spirit descends at Pentecost, Peter announces that it is a fulfillment of Joel 2, in which God pours out his spirit on “sons and daughters … menservants and maidservants.” It is difficult to suppose that this very specific comparison would have been apt had there not been women (including Mary) present at Pentecost as well as men.

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[universal] suffrage, or the Married Women’s Property Act.”82 But even so, he writes, such equality “is medicine, not food”:

I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple, to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe that if we had not fallen … patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful form of government. But since we have learned sin … [t]he only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality … Equality is for me in the same position as clothes. It is a result of the Fall and the remedy for it … But it is the hierarchical world, still alive and (very properly) hidden behind a façade of equal citizenship, which is our real concern … As democracy becomes more complete in the outer world and opportunities for reverence are successively removed, the refreshment, the cleansing, and invigorating returns to inequality, which the Church offers us, become more and more necessary.83

For Lewis even through about 1960, this inequality also meant that men and women could come together in affection and in erotic love, but not – or at least not at the same time – in friendship. The rightness of separate spheres – public and domestic -- for men and women (once they are husbands and wives) is simply taken for granted. It is bad enough, he writes in The Four Loves, when a leisured, culturally-aware wife tries to make a down-to-earth, business-like husband share her artistic and literary interests.84 It is even worse when a less-educated wife tries to horn in on the intellectual conversations her husband has with his male peers. “[W]hat might have been a real discussion is deliberately diluted and peters out in gossip, anecdotes and jokes”:

Her presence has thus destroyed the very thing she was brought to share. She can never really enter the circle because the circle ceases to be itself when she enters it … She may be quite as clever as the men whose evening she has spoiled, or cleverer. But she is not really interested in the same things, nor mistress of the same methods … She does not realise that the husband she has succeeded in isolating from his own kind will not be very worth having; she has emasculated him … The sensible women who, if they wanted, would certainly be able to qualify themselves for the world of discussion and ideals, are precisely those who, if they are not qualified, never try to enter it or destroy it. They have other fish to fry. At a mixed party they gravitate to one end of the room and talk women’s talk to each other … It is only the riff-raff of each sex that wants to be incessantly hanging on to the other.85

So far we have seen Lewis defending women’s political and legal equality only to add that, if they are intelligent Christian women they will embrace symbolic and actual inequality in the marriage bed, in the church, and in the friendships they try to pursue. For scholars (of whom I am one) who have done research showing that the rates of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse – overwhelmingly of women and children by men -- are not significantly different among the

82 “Membership,” reprinted in C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1965), pp. 30-42 (Quotation from p. 37). 83 Ibid., pp. 36, 37, 38. 84 Lewis shared a household for over twenty years with a surrogate mother (and possibly sometime mistress, at least before his conversion), Mrs. Janie Moore. Despite this longstanding domestic arrangement (from 1930 to Mrs. Moore’s death in 1951), Lewis seemed to assume that women running households had very little responsibility – indeed, he invokes this as one reason that they cannot be friends with men who are burdened with weighty public and/or intellectual tasks. Thus, “Where men are educated and women not, where one sex works and the other is idle, or where they do totally different work, they will usually have nothing to be Friends about.” (The Four Loves, p. 68, my emphasis). 85 The Four Loves, pp. 70, 71, 72.

19 20 churched and the unchurched, this is rather alarming.86 And indeed, in The Four Loves, Lewis qualifies his stance further, but only to substitute for the more covert risk of promoting abuse the more overt one of allowing husbands to infantilize their wives. Though he explicitly discourages men from seeking such asymmetry in their marriages, he nonetheless sees manly endurance of it -- if it occurs -- as the most complete reflection of Christ’s relationship to the church:

The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the church. He is to love her as Christ loved the church – read on – and gave his life for her (Eph. 5:25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied … in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion … in the sicknesses and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence. As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm church on earth the Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. He is a King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears.87

Was Lewis a better man than his theories in his dealings with women? It is true that he had a longstanding correspondence with, and appreciation for women intellectuals like Dorothy Sayers and Sister Penelope Lawson.88 He also had pupils from Oxford women’s colleges throughout his career. But prior to taking up teaching duties at Oxford in 1924 he expressed his belief that the limited capacities of women students would make his work more difficult.89 In 1927 he voted not to open up Magdalen College to women, siding with the majority of what he called “the anti- feminist” dons, and expressing his relief, in a letter to his brother, that “the appalling danger of degenerating into a women’s university” had not come to pass.90 And the intellectual and Christian appreciation that both Lewis and Charles Williams had for Dorothy Sayers’ work never weakened the Inklings’ insistence that their literary group should be composed only of males. “The Inklings did not function solely at the level of ideas,” two of their biographers have noted. For all of them, -- Lewis, Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien and others – “ideas, situated in the mind, are always embodied and therefore gendered."91 Not surprisingly, given his archetypal notions of gender, Lewis’ tribute to Sayers at her 1957 memorial service concluded with an emphasis on her “richly feminine qualities,” even though these “showed through a port and manner superficially masculine and even gleefully ogreish.”92 Even when worth considering, women’s ideas for Lewis were not separable from their essence as gendered females.93

86 See for example The Committee to Study Physical, Emotional and Sexual Abuse, Report 30, Agenda for Synod of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (Grand Rapids MI: C.R.C. Publications, 1992), and also Catherine Clark Kroeger and Nancy Nason-Clark, No Place for Abuse: Biblical and Practical Resources to Counteract Domestic Violence (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity, 2001). 87 The Four Loves, pp. 97-98. 88 For further details, see Fredrick and McBride, Women Among the Inklings, ch. 1 and 3. 89 Letter to his father, July 26, 1922. Lewis Papers, Vol. 7, p. 185. During Lewis’ time at Oxford, there were five women’s colleges in contrast to nearly thirty for men. 90 As quoted in Fredrick and McBride, p. 56 (no attribution). They also report (p. 56) Lewis’ comment that the middle-aged Magdalen dons, heady from “the balmy days of J.S. Mill, when feminism was the new exciting, enlightened thing,” voted to admit women, whereas younger scholars like himself voted against them. The suggestion is that his generation had discovered (thanks to the liberalism of the previous one) enough about the true nature of women not to want them as a central part of their academic life. 91 Ibid., p. 22. 92 C. S. Lewis, “A Panegyric for Dorothy L. Sayers,” in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, Walter Hooper, ed. (San Diego CA: Harcourt Brace, 1982), p. 95. 93 Dorothy Sayers challenged this ideology in two essays, “Are Women Human?” and “The Human-Not- Quite-Human,” both in her volume Unpopular Opinions (1947), reprinted in Are Women Human? (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1971). The first of these was delivered in 1938 to a British Women’s Society.

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‘Mere’ Christianity?

We have seen that Lewis’ complex theory of gender relations drew in large measure on classical mythology and philosophy and, to a lesser degree, on Jungian notions of archetypes functioning within a cumulative, collective human unconscious.94 Since most of this goes well beyond both the biblical record and the basic creeds of the church, how did Lewis justify speaking with such authority as if it were all part of ‘mere’ – that is, basic – Christian belief? Lewis was convinced that a major function of mythology was “to foreshadow the coming of Christ and to build up metaphors and mental pictures through which pagans can understand the significance of the Incarnation when they hear about it.”95 In the words of the hermit in Lewis’ early post-conversion allegory, The Pilgrim’s Regress, mythic stories throughout history have been one way that “the Landlord succeeded in getting a lot of messages through.”96 The hermit goes on to tell Pilgrim John “the definition of a Pagan – a man so travelling that, if all goes well, he arrives at Mother Kirk’s chair.” Pagan myths, he explains, are “a starting point from which one road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.”97 And when John is later tempted to conclude that the his strange pilgrimage experiences are only ‘mythic’ (in the sense of being ‘untrue fantasies’) a voice from behind him assures him that it is otherwise:

Child if you will, it is mythology … but then it is My mythology … [T]his is My inventing, This is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now. For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see My face and live … Have you not heard among the Pagans the story of Semele? Or was there any age in any land when men did not know that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying yet living God?98

Lewis, it seems, concluded that if more-clearly biblical themes such as the ‘dying yet living God’ are foreshadowed in ancient myths, then other mythic themes that he found personally attractive – such as the ultimate masculinity of God, the incompatibility of eros and friendship between the sexes, and the archetypal gendering of all creation – could also come along for the ride. This of course does not follow: remember, Lewis himself warned that from Pagan myths “one road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.” But he seems to have concluded – at least until very late in his life -- that whatever he selected to put on that one road regarding gender relations was indeed part of ‘mere’ Christianity. And not a few influential Evangelicals have followed his lead. Elisabeth Elliot, in her 1982 book Let Me Be a Woman, warned her female readers that initiative is a masculine prerogative, and that Eve, in taking the initiative to eat the apple, was trying to be like the ultimately-masculine God. She also appealed to the ancient Chinese concept of yin and yang to buttress her ‘Christian’ argument for gender essentialism and gender hierarchy.99 Her brother Thomas Howard, in a 1978 article titled “A Note from Antiquity on the Question of Women’s Ordination” freely acknowledged that the Bible does not supply enough resources to justify talking about God in terms of sex or gender. Undeterred by this, he invited his readers to consider the abundance of sexual imagery in pagan myths, and came to the conclusion that “a Christian would tend to attach some weight to this.”100

94 See especially Lewis’ “Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism,” pp. 296-300. 95 Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context, pp. 210-11. 96 The Pilgrim’s Regress, p. 153. 97 Ibid., p. 155 (Lewis’ emphasis). 98 Ibid., p. 171. 99 Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman (Wheaton IL: Tyndale, 1982), pp. 60, 64. 100 Thomas Howard, “A Note from Antiquity on the Question of Women’s Ordination,” The Churchman: A Journal of Anglican Theology, Vol. 92, No. 4 (1978), p. 323.

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Many Christians would indeed, if sales of Lewis’ Mere Christianity and The Four Loves, are any indication. Others with as high a view of Scripture – and an even more conservative reading of it101 – would not. Carl F. H. Henry rightly noted in God, Revelation, and Authority that

Masculine and feminine elements are excluded from both the Old Testament and New Testament doctrine of deity. The God of the Bible is a sexless God. When Scripture speaks of God as ‘he’ the pronoun is primarily personal (generic) rather than masculine (specific); it emphasizes God’s personality – and in turn, that of the Father, Son and Spirit as trinitarian distinctions in contrast to impersonal entities … Biblical religion is quite disinterested in any discussion of God’s sexuality (masculine or feminine) or God’s asexuality, but freely uses whatever images are appropriate to advance its central interest in God’s personal covenant-relationships with Israel … Scripture does not depict God either as ontologically masculine or feminine.102

Thus attempts to read a kind of mystical gendering into God – whether stereotypically masculine, feminine, or both – reflect not so much careful biblical theology as “the long arm of Paganism.”103 For it is pagan worldviews, Jewish commentator Nahum Sarna reminds us, that are “unable to conceive of any primal creative force other than in terms of sex … [In Paganism] the sex element existed before the cosmos came into being and all the gods themselves were creatures of sex. On the other hand, the Creator in Genesis is uniquely without any female counterpart and the very association of sex with God is utterly alien to the religion of the Bible.”104

And what about the theological impossibility of priesthood for those not wearing ‘the masculine uniform’? It is an interesting irony that only a few miles northeast of Cambridge University (where Lewis finished his academic career) stands Ely Cathedral, a former abbey which dates back to the seventh century. That abbey was one of many conhospitae or mixed-sex religious houses in the Celtic Christian world prior to the Viking invasions of the ninth century, and on Ely’s kneeling-cushions visitors can still see embroidered images of its first four leaders – the founding abbess Ethelreda, and her female successors Sexburga, Ermenhilda, and Werburga.105 In such conhospitae men and women religious were equally eligible for leadership, and could marry and raise children in the service of the church. Celtic scholar Peter Berresford Ellis lists many female founders of joint houses in the early western church. In Anglo- Saxon England, besides Ethelreda of Ely, he describes Hilda of Whitby and Aebbe of Coldingham; in Ireland, Brigid of Kildare (whom records indicate was ordained both as a priest and bishop); in Wales, Winnifred of Gwyntherin – and others as far east as present-day France and Italy.106 Ellis adds,

101 In his 1959 essay “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” reprinted in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1967, pp. 152-66) Lewis concludes that the gospel accounts of Jesus are basically historical, and that the Bultmannian project to eliminate mythical, unhistorical elements is misguided, as we have no criteria for separating the historical from the unhistorical: the texts we have are the texts we have. But he accepts much critical scholarship of the Bible as being valuable and, speaking for his original audience of Anglican theological students at Cambridge, says “We are not fundamentalists” (p. 163). See also Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context, ch. 5. 102 Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, Vol. V (Waco TX: Word Books, 1982), pp. 159-60. See also Martin, “Mystical Masculinity,” pp. 10-11. 103 Martin, “Mystical Masculinity,” p. 11. 104 Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis: The Heritage of Biblical Israel (New York: Schocken, 1966), p. 76. 105 Noble, A World Without Women, ch. 1. 106 Peter Berresford Ellis, Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1995), ch. 6.

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This is not to claim that Celtic churchmen refused to accept the concept of celibacy nor the Roman cultural concept of the inferior place of women which was then permeating the western church. But the Celtic cultural ideas of the coequality of women and the pursuit of normal sexual relationships within the framework of the new religion were in evidence for a long time.”107

A World Without Women

On what grounds can Lewis claim that this ancient tradition of mutuality and gender role- flexibility is less biblical than his own classically-filtered model of eternal gender archetypes and gender hierarchy? And why did Lewis largely ignore this alternate tradition of Christianity right on his own doorstep – both in England and his native Ireland?108 Part of the answer may be found in Lewis’ academic and personal history. With regard to the first of these, Lewis’ brother Warren records a telling exchange during his first conversation, over lunch at Magdalen College in 1952, with the notoriously-blunt, New York-born Joy Davidman, with whom Lewis had corresponded since 1950, and whom he eventually married in 1956. “She turned to me in the presence of three or four men and asked, in the most natural tone in the world, ‘Is there anywhere in this monastic establishment where a lady can relieve herself?’”109

The question was an apt one, for historian David Noble, in his book A World Without Women, points out that the male-monastic tone of Oxford had a long pedigree. The institution began in the mid-thirteenth century as part of the European shift from more local education, which had been available to both women and men with religious vocations, to cathedral schools and eventually universities, both of which were restricted to celibate male clerics or ‘clerks.’110 Surprisingly, the English Reformation did nothing to change this because, Noble notes,

In 1561, in angry defiance of the Anglican rejection of clerical celibacy, Queen Elizabeth I issued an order to the archbishops of Canterbury and York, insisting that academic celibacy be continued

107 Ibid., p. 158. Under the pseudonym Peter Tremayne, Ellis has written a series of mystery novels featuring a 7th-century Celtic religieuse and legal advocate, Sister Fidelma. The first of these, Absolution by Murder (New York: St. Martins, ), takes place in the context of the 663-664 Synod of Whitby, where the Northumbrian kingdom ambivalently agreed to substitute Roman for Celtic church order. This decision gradually led to the acceptance of Roman norms in the rest of the British Isles, and brought that westernmost outpost of Christianity into closer relationships with the European continent. 108 In an interview reproduced on the extended DVD of the 2001 film version of The Fellowship of the Ring, J. R. R. Tolkien scholar notes that Tolkien invented his elaborate mythology to compensate for the virtual disappearance of the records of native Anglo-Saxon mythology after the Norman invasion of 1066 (New Line Productions, 2002, Appendices, Part One). It is fair to wonder why he (and his fellow Inklings) were so reluctant to make use of the many extant records of Celtic mythology and its segué into early Christianity, as Ellis/Tremayne (notes ciii and civ) has done. It is not impossible that the gender egalitarianism of the latter tradition was offensive to their masculinist and arguably misogynist sentiments. (See Fredrick and McBride, Women Among the Inklings, especially ch. 6). In Surprised by Joy (pp. 93-94) Lewis does speak of a time during his boarding school days when “a book on Celtic mythology … became if not a rival, yet a humble companion to Norse [mythology] ... but Northerness still came first.” 109 Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Clyde Kilby and Marjorie Lampe Mead (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 276. The lunch referred to took place n the fall of 1952, during Joy Davidman’s first visit to England. 110 So Lewis to his Magdalen College male students in a 1941 sermon: “A university is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages call clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians.” “Learning in War-Time,” in Walter Hooper, ed. Fern-seeds and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity by C. S. Lewis (London: Collins Fontana, 1971), p. 26-38 (quotation from p. 26).

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and commanding that no woman be allowed into the universities on any pretext … It was not until 1882 … that the Fellows of Oxford and Cambridge were allowed to marry.111

1882 was a mere four years after the opening of Oxford’s first college for women, just sixteen years before C. S. Lewis’ birth, and only thirty-five years prior to his arrival at Oxford as an undergraduate. Even then, an atmosphere of male celibacy prevailed: a student contemporary of Lewis noted that the Oxford he knew “was still a semi-monastic institution; some of the dons clearly detested women; and the only moral offences they condoned were discreetly managed homosexual passions.”112 As late as the 1940s most Oxford dons were unmarried and lived within their colleges: “their lives centered, professionally and personally, around the university and relationships with male counterparts … [and] even in the 1950s marriage was considered as failing at one’s profession.”113 Not until 1974 were the previously all-male Oxford Colleges completely opened up to women students. University education in Lewis’ era was also highly stratified by class: by 1930 only about 2% of young adults in the U.K. went on to university.114

I am old enough to recall how taken-for-granted misogynist talk was in academic circles as late as the 1980s – delivered by men and tolerated, ignored or laughed off by women who sensed they had been admitted to the group on sufferance and thus had limited voice. One can thus see Lewis’ misogyny as an understandable by-product of an elite, almost entirely male-centered education and academic life, lived out at the zenith of the doctrine of separate spheres for women and men that spread prior to and during the industrial revolution in the West.115 But there is more. With regard to Lewis’ personal history, we do not know how different his attitude to women might have been had he not lost his mother at the age of nine, or not had a father who, though intelligent and financially successful, seemed incapable of recovering from that loss and parenting his sons wisely.

Lewis’ autobiography Surprised by Joy and other sources note that Flora Hamilton Lewis was the granddaughter of a Church of Ireland bishop, and the daughter of a clergyman with whom she spent the early part of her life in Rome, where he was an Anglican chaplain. At a time when very few women were university-trained, she obtained an honors degree in mathematics at Queen’s University, Belfast, and until she fell victim to cancer in 1908, took charge of much her son Clive’s education at home, including his introduction to French and Latin. Given the quality of her own education, she would have been happy to send her two sons as day students to a Belfast preparatory school as they grew older, but yielded to her husband’s wish that they be educated in England.116 In any event, Lewis’ earliest female role model was a very positive one: he describes

111 Noble, A World Without Women, p. 154. 112 Poet Peter Quennell, as quoted (without attribution) in Wilson, C.S. Lewis, p. 65. Wilson notes that because Oxford students were severely disciplined for even the appearance of sexual fraternization with women, Lewis took great risks as an undergraduate in the amount of time he covertly spent with Janie Moore, the woman twenty-six years his senior with whom Lewis had a close relationship from the fall of 1917 until her death early in 1951. 113 Fredrick and McBride, Women and the Inklings, p. 4. 114 By contrast, 43% of U.K secondary school graduates were going on to tertiary education in 2003. 115 See for example Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton Unviersity Press, 1981); Merry E. Weisner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1993); Lindsay Charles and Lorna Duffin, eds., Women and Work in Preindustrial England (London: Croom Helm, 1985); and Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Wife (New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 2001). 116 Wilson, C. S. Lewis, ch. 1 and 2. Sayer, however, observes that by 1920 Albert Lewis “much disliked what the English educational system that he had chosen for his sons had done to them, turning one into an extravagant and class-conscious officer and gentleman, and the other into a clever, conceited Oxford undergraduate” (Jack, p. 91).

24 25 her as “ordinarily so wise … sensible and sunny,”117 and states that with her death “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable disappeared from my life … no more of the old security. It was islands and sea now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.118 Only a few weeks later, at age nine, he was sent to England to get the rest of his education in all-male settings, much of it in the context of habitual cruelty, sodomy and ruthless social climbing. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis is candid about the fact that, in the context of his mother’s death he had “already learned to fear and hate emotion. [School] was a fresh reason to do so.119

More than one of Lewis’ biographers has noted that it is neither excessively Freudian nor taking refuge in Lewis’ so-called personal heresy to observe that he was vulnerable as a young adult to forming a long-term attachment to a substitute mother.120 When, during his World War One service just after entering Oxford, he met Mrs. Janie Moore, the mother of a fellow-soldier, and a woman twenty-six years his senior – Irish, the daughter of a clergyman, well-read (though with less formal education than his mother), mysteriously separated from her husband, generous and hospitable to a fault – he was ripe for infatuation.121 When Moore’s own son died during the war, Lewis became her life-long fictive son, and she his ‘mother’. As an undergraduate he spent as much time as he could safely risk in her home (to the bewilderment and concern of his family) and early in his academic career co-purchased a house near Oxford with her and with his brother Warren (recently retired from the British army), who had apparently resigned himself to forming such a ménage à trois if he was to have a continuing relationship with his sibling. This arrangement lasted for almost twenty years, until Janie Moore’s death in 1951.

Lewis’ biographers differ vehemently as to whether theirs was a sexual relationship, and if so for how long.122 They also differ as to whether his years with Moore and her remaining child (a daughter, Maureen) brought a much-needed balance to his highly-cerebral existence or kept him from doing more scholarship by turning him into a meek and dutiful householder.123 Lewis’ earlier diaries show him enjoying routine domestic tasks and most of the guests who passed through, freely helping young Maureen with her studies and hobbies, and only occasionally feeling over-burdened if there was a passing domestic crisis.124 “She was generous and taught me to be generous, too,” he told his early student and biographer George Sayer. “If it were not for

117 Surprised by Joy, pp. 14, 22. 118 Ibid., p. 23 119 Surprised by Joy, p. 32. Lewis gives a mixed review of his childhood boarding-schools, but the earliest (from ages nine to eleven) was so horrific that he refers to it (in ch. 2) as “Belsen” and “The Concentration Camp.” About his second, one-year experience at Malvern College he records (in ch. 6) that homosexual activity between older and younger boys was wooed, not forced (“I suppose it might be called the Greek Tradition” – p. 74), and that he managed to avoid this ‘tradition’ out of sheer indifference to the activity, though he adds: ‘Possibly, if I had only stayed longer at the Coll, I might, in this respect as in others, have been turned into a Normal Boy, as the system promises” (p. 74). For a historical critique of the English public school system, see Nick Duffell, The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System (U.K.: Lone Arrow Press, 2000). In a review of this book, John Le Carre comments that “The British are knows to be mad. But in the maiming of their privileged young, they are criminally insane.” http://boardingschoolsurvivors.co.uk/reviews.html. 120 Green and Hooper, C.S. Lewis, ch. 2-5;Sayer, Jack, ch. 6-9 and 13; Wilson, C.S. Lewis, ch. 7-9. 121 ‘Infatuation’ is a term common to various Lewis’ biographers when they describe his early relationship with Janie Moore. 122 Green and Hooper say ‘no’; Sayer says ‘perhaps’; Wilson says ‘almost certainly yes.’ 123 Sayer argues for the first; Warren Lewis, as well as Green and Hooper, argue for the second; Wilson concludes that there is evidence for both. 124 Sayer, Jack, p. 93.

25 26 her, I should know little or nothing about ordinary domestic life as lived by most people.”125 On the other hand, after the stresses of World War Two (including the hosting of a string of young evacuees) Janie Moore’s physical and mental health deteriorated rapidly, putting Lewis under increasing physical, temporal and financial burdens until her 1951 death in a nursing home.126 Lewis was by then fifty-three years of age, having never married. Beyond Misogyny

It seems safe to conclude that the emotional effect of Lewis’ history with these two salient women -- a biological mother who died early in his life, and an adoptive one with whom he was perhaps ambivalently enmeshed through middle age -- was at best mixed. This may, when added to the institutional androcentrism of Oxford, help to explain both his not-infrequent eruptions of misogyny and his insistent inclusion of an essentialist gender hierarchy in his account of ‘mere’ Christianity. When we add to this his romanticization of the British class system, his disinterest in modern poetry, his conservative views on divorce, and his dislike of Americans, it is more than a little interesting (and perhaps indicative of God’s sense of humor) that when he finally married in 1956, it was to an ex-communist, divorced American woman who wrote free-verse poetry and was anything but a shrinking violet. Joy Davidman Gresham (1915-1960) was a New York Jew who completed her M.A. in literature at Columbia before turning twenty, won the Yale Younger Poets Award at age twenty-three, and went on to become a successful novelist, translator and editor as well. It was in part through reading some of Lewis’ work that she turned from communism to Christianity, in the midst of a troubled marriage which eventually broke up and led her to move to England with her two young sons.127

Lewis’ growing friendship with Joy Davidman coincided with his 1954 move to the Cambridge University Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Ironically, given the increased freedom the move gave him for writing, it also coincided with his first serious bout of writer’s block. It was largely due to Joy Davidman’s help and inspiration that he eventually wrote the novel he considered his best, Till We Have Faces, which he dedicated to her. Lewis’ former student George Sayer, who knew them both, writes that “[h]er part in the book, and there is so much that she can almost be called its joint author, put him very much in her debt. She stimulated and helped him to such an extent that he began to feel that he could hardly write without her.”128 The novel is a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche story that illustrates Lewis’ theory of the foreshadowing of the Gospel in myth. It is Lewis’ only novel told through the voice of a woman: a strong woman ruler on the fringes of the classical Greek world, struggling against pride and toward belief in a way that parallels Lewis’ own journey to faith as recorded in Surprised by Joy.

125 Ibid., pp. 89-90. Sayer adds, from his own personal acquaintance with Lewis, that “if he had lived the cloistered existence of a bachelor don, his writing would have suffered from a loss of warmth, humanity, and the understanding of pain and suffering” (Jack, p. 203). 126 Some of Lewis’ biographers trace his misogyny to his ambivalent relationship with Janie Moore, but Sayer notes that Lewis had an equally difficult housemate in his alcoholic brother, Warren, whose problem he disguised from his friends until fairly late in his life. But from 1949 “he spoke freely to me and to other friends about Warren’s alcoholism … He was devoted to his brother and deeply worried about his future. Yet, except through prayer, he was powerless to help … He once asked me if I thought he should ‘show his teeth’ to his brother. ‘There is nothing I should dislike more,’ he said. ‘But it might work. The knowledge that he causes vast expense and upsets the entire household influences him not at all.’” (Jack, p. 201). 127 Joy Davidman, “The Longest Way Around,” in David Wesley Soper, ed., These Found the way: Thirteen Converts to Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1951), pp. 13-26. Prior to their 1956 marriage, Lewis also wrote the foreword to her Smoke of the Mountain: The Ten Commandments in Terms of Today (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955). 128 Sayer, Jack, p. 220.

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Lewis, as is well known, first contracted a civil marriage of convenience with Joy Davidman in 1956 to enable her to become a permanent resident in England after her divorce from her American husband. When she was diagnosed with cancer soon after and given very little time to live, they were married according to Anglican rites in 1957.129 As it turned out, her cancer went into remission for three years, during which time they lived together as husband and wife (with Warren Lewis still part of the household) until her death in 1960. Here too there are ironies, not the least of which is that this period coincided with the cooling of Lewis’ longtime friendship with fellow Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien. The latter’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, writes that

he and Lewis might conceivably have preserved something of their old friendship had not Tolkien been puzzled and even angered by Lewis’ marriage to Joy Davidman … Some of [the Roman Catholic Tolkien’s] feelings may be explained by the fact that she had been divorced from her first husband before she married Lewis, some by resentment of Lewis’ expectation that his friends should pay court to his new wife – whereas in the thirties Lewis, very much the bachelor, had liked to ignore the fact that his friends had wives to go home to.130

This period also coincided with Lewis’ work on The Discarded Image, an introduction to medieval and Renaissance literature based on a course regularly given to packed lecture halls at Oxford. It is an engaging, detailed portrait of the medieval world view, and one which clearly illustrates its hierarchical cosmology – but with one difference. In a book where one would expect Lewis, given his previous writing, to include an exposition on gender hierarchy, as part of the Aristotelian ladder of nature (which became the medieval ‘great chain of being’), there is not a word on this topic. Indeed, his only explicit mention of gender relations is a leveling one, when he challenges the modern illusion that medieval persons of both sexes lived a static life. On the contrary, Lewis writes, “Kings, armies, prelates, diplomats, merchants and wandering scholars were continually on the move. Thanks to the popularity of pilgrimages even women, and women of the middle class, went far afield; witness [Chaucer’s] Wife of Bath and Margery Kempe.”131 Was Lewis simply compartmentalizing when he gave these lectures – avoiding controversial views with his more-secular students that he would continue to defend in his more explicitly Christian writings? Or was his position on gender relations actually changing in the midst of his late marriage to a gifted and feisty woman? Since The Discarded Image was published only after Lewis’ death, we may never know. But the correlation and chronology of events are intriguing.

Finally, there is Lewis’ painful notebook on his wife’s death, A Grief Observed, source of the remarkable fourth quotation with which I began this lecture. “There is,” he prefaces those remarks, “hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.” The extent to which that reconciliation took place is so vividly recalled throughout this little volume that it is hard not to see Lewis’ previous misogyny as a crude cover for the scars of an early-wounded man. In the first, most agonizing stage of his grief he writes:

129 See Brian Sibley, Shadowlands: The Story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman ( 1985), which was based on a British television documentary by Bill Nicholson. See also Lyle W. Dorsett, And God Came In: The Extraordinary Story of Joy Davidman, Her Life and Marriage to C. S. Lewis ( Wheaton IL: Crossway, 1991). 130 Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (New York: Ballentine, 1978). p. 268. Carpenter adds (p. 268): “But there was more to it than that. It was almost as if Tolkien felt betrayed by the marriage, resented the intrusion of a woman into his friendship with Lewis – just as [his wife] Edith had resented Lewis’ intrusion into their marriage. Ironically, it was Edith who became friends with Joy Davidman.” 131 The Discarded Image, p. 143.

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The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet al the same unmistakably other, resistant – in a word, real. Is all that work to be undone? Is what I shall still call [Joy] to sink back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor pipe-dreams? Oh my dear, my dear, come back for a moment and drive that miserable phantom away. Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back – to be sucked back – into it?132

A few days later, he pictures his marriage in a pointedly non-hierarchical fashion, and notes also that both his wife and his mother fell victim to agonizing deaths by cancer:

One flesh. Or, if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends. How can I assume a harbour? A lee shore, more likely, a black night, a deafening gale, breakers ahead – and any lights shown from the land probably being waved by wreckers. Such was [Joy’s] landfall. Such was my mother’s. I say their landfalls, not their arrivals.133

And finally, in a clear reversal of his earlier insistence that women and men cannot be both friends and lovers, he writes that

a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was [Joy] not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding these all in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have had good ones) has ever been to me … Solomon calls his bride Sister. Could a woman be a complete wife unless, for a moment, in one particular mood, a man felt almost inclined to call her Brother?134

In all this, Lewis is careful not to fall victim to the romanticizing tendencies that were such a part of his pre-Christian life: his wife, he writes “was a splendid thing; a soul straight, bright, and tempered like a sword. But not a perfected saint. A sinful woman married to a sinful man; two of God’s patients, not yet cured” -- a very even-handed and biblical conclusion about the human frailties of both sexes. Indeed, had he lived till the present, Lewis might have found himself having to insist that the romanticizing and rank-ordering of gender archetypes is Christianly questionable whether it is done by gender-role traditionalists (like his former self), by cultural feminists who reverse the hierarchy by valorizing the stereotypically feminine, or by evangelical writers who baptize the trendy men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus rhetoric with a thin Christian veneer. Far more in keeping with our created human status and the cultural mandate to which God calls all humans is the bumper sticker I recently saw that read “Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Get used to it.” Yale theologian Miroslav Volf summarizes it well:

The ontologization of gender would ill serve both the notion of God and the understanding of gender. Nothing in God is specifically feminine; nothing in God is specifically masculine; therefore nothing in our notions of God entails duties or prerogatives specific to one gender; all … are prerogatives of both genders. Men and women share maleness and femaleness not with God but with animals. They image God in their common humanity. Hence we ought to resist every construction of the relations between God and femininity or God and masculinity that privileges one gender, say by claiming that men on account of their maleness represent God more adequately than women, or by saying that women, being by nature more relational, are closer to the divine as the power of connectedness and love …To find peace [women and men] with self-enclosed

132 A Grief Observed, p. 18. See also the memoir of his stepson, Douglas Gresham, Lenten Lands (New York: MacMillan, 1988) and Ann Loades, “The Grief of C. S. Lewis, Theology Today, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Oct. 1989), pp. 269-76. 133 Ibid., p. 29. 134 Ibid., pp. 39-40.

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identities need to open themselves for one another and give themselves to one another, yet without loss of the self or domination of the other.135

Lewis’ three late books – Till We Have Faces, The Discarded Image, and A Grief Observed – are for various reasons among his least read. Hence we are left with the common portrait of Lewis as the unchanging defender of gender stereotypes and gender hierarchy. Many of his readers, including myself, wish that his shift on this issue – whatever its source – had occurred earlier, and found its way into his much better-selling apologetic works and his novels for children and adults. But better late than never. And after the Parousia we will all be healed.

135 Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), pp. 173-74, 176.

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