Thursday, April 03, 2014
G.K. Chesterton & C.S. Lewis: A Comparative Appreciation
Here are my prepared remarks for an evening's discussion with Dale Ahlquist, president and co-founder of the American Chesterton Society, on the relationship between G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. Our discussion (which was followed by a time of Q&A) was hosted by the Aquinas Centre in the Waldegrave Drawing Room in St. Mary's University, Twickenham, 1st April 2014. An audio recording of the event is available here.
G.K. Chesterton held that ‘Talking about serious
questions is a pleasure’[1],
so let me to begin by thanking everyone who has made this pleasurable, serious
discussion possible.
I love the writings of C.S. Lewis, and, like
Lewis, I love the writings of G.K. Chesterton. With Lewis, I especially love The Everlasting Man. Neo-atheist
Lawrence Krauss could have saved himself from writing A Universe from Nothing if only he’d paid attention to Chesterton’s
observation that: ‘Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something.
Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something would turn into
something else.’[2]
Researching my book C.S. Lewis vs. the New Atheists (Paternoster, 2013), it struck me
that Lewis had been the kind of atheist who takes philosophy seriously. As an
atheist, Lewis rejected the positivism and scientism that characterised ‘modernity’. One
might even say that the atheism of Lucretius saved Lewis from the non-theism of
A.J. Ayer!
Lewis believed language puts us in touch with
reality, and he argued, against the positivists, that there’s more than one way
of being in touch with reality. Lewis’ paper on ‘The Language of Religion’ is a
significant rejoinder to positivism.
Lewis didn’t lurch from the strictures of
modernism into the louchness
of post-modernity. His love of philosophy produced neither a narrow rationalism
nor a romantic anti-rationalism, but a pre-modern wisdom that recognised the value of
empirical data without rejecting the transcendent facts of truth, goodness and
beauty.
Lewis holes scientism below the
waterline by observing that acts of reason, upon which science depends, don’t
depend upon science but upon rational intuition: ‘You cannot produce rational intuition by argument,
because argument depends upon rational intuition. Proof rests upon the
unprovable which just has to be “seen”.’[3]
Likewise, in
‘A Plea for Popular Philosophy’ Chesterton points out that:
‘all argument begins
with assumption; that is, with something that you do not doubt… let us clearly
realize this fact, that we do believe in a number of things which are part of
our existence, but which cannot be demonstrated… Every sane man believes that the world around
him and the people in it are real, and not his own delusion or dream.’[4]
One might almost say that by embracing medieval
ideas about philosophy Chesterton and Lewis anticipated the ‘reformed
epistemology’ of the 1960’s. This goes to show the great sense Chesterton
showed in noting that ‘What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not
upon the clock or the century.’[5]
In the same vein, Lewis warned against ‘the
uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the
assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.’[6]
There is no epistemological good news needed
more by people today than the news that there’s more to knowledge than science.
The failure of scientism means it makes sense to say that murder is objectively
evil and that rainbows are objectively beautiful. Lewis’ influential lectures
on The Abolition of Man remain a
powerful statement of such axiological realism.
Lewis was as much a poet as a philosopher; not
as a centaur is half man and half horse, but as Jesus is fully man yet fully
divine. Lewis was a philosophical poet and a poetical philosopher. When Lewis was memorialised in Westminster Abbey
last year, he was celebrated as much for being the Christian apologist who gave
us Mere Christianity and Miracles as he was for being the
Christian novelist who gave us The
Screwtape
Letters and The
Chronicles of Narnia.
One can’t separate Lewis’ philosophy from his
fiction. On the one hand, his philosophy uses story to elicit rational insight.
Consider ‘Meditation in a Toolshed’, with its distinction between ‘looking at’
and ‘looking along’ a beam of light. On the other hand, Lewis’ fiction fleshes
out a philosophical skeleton, allowing us to imbibe the atmosphere of a philosophy. I particularly enjoy imbibing The Abolition of Man through That Hideous Strength. I was thrilled by
Michael Ward’s recent discovery of how the medieval cosmology Lewis describes
in The Discarded Image shapes Narnia.
Chesterton said ‘it is only too easy to forget
that there is a thrill in theism.’[7]
I find reading Lewis is thrilling, not because he has anything original to say,
but because he puts his mastery of language wholly at the service of truth. As Lewis advised:
‘no man who bothers about originality will
ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring
twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten,
become original without ever having noticed it.’[8]
Unlike the neo-atheists, Lewis attended
carefully to arguments for the falsehood of naturalism and the truth of theism.
The arguments Lewis gives us are popularisations or developments of arguments
others had already made and which had convinced him. For example, in Mere Christianity he succinctly popularised the sort of
meta-ethical moral argument for God developed in W.R. Sorley’s Gifford lectures
on Moral Values and the Idea of God. Likewise, Lewis clearly owes
Chesterton an apologetic debt.
In general terms, in addition to the use of
multiple literary genres, we should note that Lewis’ desire to advocate Mere Christianity follows Chesterton’s
emphasis in Orthodoxy upon ‘the
central Christian theology (sufficiently summarised in the Apostle’s Creed)’[9]
at the expense of ‘the fascinating but quite different question of what is the
present seat of authority for the proclamation of that creed.’[10]
In specific terms, one sees ancestors to many of
Lewis’ arguments in Chesterton’s work. In The
Everlasting Man he pre-cedes Lewis in debunking the mythical Jesus myth[11],
lays the foundation for Lewis’ argument from desire[12]
and gives Lewis the ‘mad, bad or God’ trilemma.[13]
In Orthodoxy Chesterton touches upon
the argument from desire[14]
and spends several pages planting seeds that may have contributed to Lewis’
anti-naturalism arguments. Chesterton writes:
‘Evolution is a good
example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys
itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain
things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon
thought itself.’[15]
His arguments for this conclusion are best
described as ‘suggestive’. Indeed, Chesterton describes his own style as
attempting ‘in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather
than a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to
believe.’[16]
When Lewis takes over from Chesterton in the
wrestling match with naturalism, he comes into the ring equipped with clear
definitions, lean distinctions and a range of heavy-hitting deductions that
continue to spark debate in the professional literature.
In fact, all
of these arguments live on in contemporary debates. For example, the ‘argument
from desire’ has been developed and defended by John Cottingham, John Haldane,
Robert Hoyler, Peter Kreeft and Alister McGrath, among others. The ‘trilemma’
has been developed and defended by the likes of Stephen T. Davis, Douglas
Groothuis and David A. Horner.
However, of all the arguments Lewis defended,
it’s the anti-naturalism arguments of Miracles
and of essays such as ‘De Futilitate’ that resonate most insistently today.
Alvin Plantinga acknowledges his debt to Lewis for his ‘anti-naturalism
argument from evolution’. Moreover, it’s not only in reading contemporary
Christian philosophers such as Plantinga, Victor Reppert, R. Scott Smith or
Angus L. Menuge that one recalls Lewis’ anti-naturalism arguments; it’s also in
reading contemporary non-Christian thinkers such as John Gray, Thomas Nagel,
Alex Rosenberg, John Searle and Raymond Tallis.
Through the many friendships that constituted
‘The Inklings’, Lewis teaches us the importance of being nourished by a
community of scholarship jointly dedicated to following the argument wherever
it leads. Through reading what Lewis called ‘old books’, we have the privilege
of transcending the chronological snobbery of our own age and communing in just
such a fellowship with C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton.
Peter S.
Williams – March 2014.
[1]
G.K. Chesterton, ‘No Such Thing’ in Prophet
of Orthodoxy: The Wisdom of G.K.
Chesterton (Fount, 1997), p. 127.
[2] G.K.
Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Hodder
& Stoughton, 1927), p. 25.
[3] C.S.
Lewis, ‘Why I am not a Pacifist’
[4] G.K.
Chesterton, ‘A Plea for Popular Philosophy’ in Prophet of Orthodoxy: The
Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton (Fount, 1997), p. 127.
[5]
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (House of
Stratus, 2011), p. 53.
[6]
C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (Fount).
[7] Chesterton,
The Everlasting Man, p. 103.
[8]
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
(Fount).
[9]
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (House of
Stratus, 2011), p. 4.
[10]
Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 4
[11]
Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.
132 & 199.
[12]
Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.
106-107.
[13] Chesterton,
The Everlasting Man, p. 215 & 229.
[14] Chesterton,
Orthodoxy, p. 57.
[15] Chesterton,
Orthodoxy, p. 21.
[16] Chesterton,
Orthodoxy, p. 1.
Labels: C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Peter S. Williams
