CS Lewis: Modern Prophet and Secret Dissident

Many think that they are familiar with the thought of 20th century Christian apologist and literary giant, Clive Staples Lewis. Most aren't.

The world is full of trash- you know it, I know it, everybody knows it. There are many hot-button topics available to rightfully (and wrongfully) complain about. However, for the sake of preserving both your sanity and mine, I will not go on and on about how much life sucks, and how much of a poor and hapless victim of the modern world I am, and how much I want you to be a victim with me in the gutter. I am instead here to talk about the Good, the Beautiful, and the True; though not in an unhelpful or immaterial way- I should hope not, anyways.

Instead, I would wish to bring some personal enrichment to your life. The way that I most often do this on the Crux podcast is by exhorting you to read CS Lewis- and not just whatever book I had mentioned in my feverish ranting to Landen, but all of Lewis’ books. This is advice that I have failed to follow myself, although I am in the process of rectifying that (I received a copy of Lewis’ Till We Have Faces for Christmas, which I hope to read after the New Year). However, I have read more of Lewis’ work than most- The Narnia series many times over, The Four Loves, The Space Trilogy, A Grief Observed, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Pilgrim’s Regress, Christian Reflections, God in the Dock, The Great Divorce, The Abolition of Man, Miracles, and other assorted writings of his. I may not be an academic (yet, unfortunately for you), and I may not be a very smart man, but I know CS Lewis- and I’m here to tell you that you’re probably reading him wrong.

Lewis is regularly depicted by marginal (and/or liberal) Christians, secular commentators, and those only vaguely familiar with his work as a soft, cheery, wonderful man who typified the “right way” to be a public Christian: always considerate and charitable toward others, never curt with his words, never treading on anyone’s toes, always preaching the bare bones of Christianity, and never entering into “frivolous” debates about current events, public morality, or social commentary writ large. This is not right. Lewis will regularly toss aside core beliefs of his materialistic modern audience, going so far as to undermine Egalitarianism, Democracy, and the Enlightenment itself- the only reason that uncritical readers do not notice is because Lewis only does so while offering concessions (a point I will hit on later).

Unfortunately, this is actually a rather common pattern with Lewis. He is misread and accused of being a Protestant & borderline atheist subversive by extremely traditional Catholics (hoping to be more Traditional than Tolkien- a tall task, indeed) and of being a crypto-papist by five point ultra-Calvinists. As I alluded to beforehand, he is even accused of being a bleeding heart liberal, or a socialist- or, perhaps even worse- a libertarian.

This pattern is not unique to our friend Clive (or Jack, as he would prefer)- many authors much more widely read than Lewis- like Plato, Shakespeare, or Nietzsche- are often twisted by dishonest readers who are looking for an ally to aide in supplying their cause with intellectual ammunition. Everyone has met this sort of person before, and some people even do it with the Holy Scriptures- wolves and snakes, as they say. However, many well-intentioned people misread Lewis in one of the aforementioned ways, so I thought it necessary to take the time to explain why he is so often misread, and show that many of his ways of thinking do not just undermine his harshest critics, but also offer hidden messages to unlikely allies.

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Reading Lewis, Correctly

Jack Lewis comes off to most as the wholesome, perpetually charitable, beloved children’s author primarily because of his style of writing- and what sort of writing it is! From the very first time I read the Narnia books as a child, I have been enchanted with his writer’s voice: he writes so humbly, so lowly, in an attempt to make himself a near non-entity in his own writing; and yet writes with more wisdom and a tighter grasp of worldly knowledge than the vast majority of his 20th century contemporaries. This is also probably the primary reason he is misread so often: because his default is to be deferential. For example, in Mere Christianity, Lewis repeats over and over again that he is not a theologian, and that you should go and ask your priest or pastor about every idea that he expresses- they are the real experts, after all. He pretends to be an amateur in order to avoid self-aggrandizement, and as a result, comes off as charming to most who take the time to read him.

Lewis’ deferential and humble writing style has an additional benefit (or drawback, depending upon how you look at it): he can mask his true beliefs by making concessions to hostile audiences- this was the point I had mentioned earlier that I will contemplate a bit more deeply here. Lewis will throw out all sorts of statements meant to throw modern audiences (especially his embattled, embittered, and atheistic postwar British audience) off the scent of his anti-modernism. Let’s go over the most prominent example of this phenomenon, so you know that I’m not selling you snake oil.

Lewis is famously quoted as saying “I am a Democrat because I believe in the fall of man,”¹ which people take at face value. They will also note that, in Mere Christianity, he says:

“Immortality makes this other difference, which, by the by, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy. If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.”²

Such people claim that Lewis “championed democracy” and fail to read passages like these in the full light of his body of work. Lewis, in these passages, is only showing the reader that he is a normal man too; that he believes what his audience believes. He wants to be seen as trustworthy, and so he won’t give the audience ammunition to use against him (think of Lewis’ best friend Tolkien, who was and is oft maligned because of his open support of Franco and the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War). Lewis grants the small concession of Democracy in order to get his audience to focus on the more important theme: why Christianity is true. When he does shift his attention to Democracy, he does so not in a direct way (after all, he is not a political thinker), but instead undermines the very bedrock of democratic thought: the idea that equality is always inherently good:

“Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she grants her favors. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demands for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death.”³

Jack finds Beauty, Virtue, and Truth to be undemocratic. How very odd. It makes one think that perhaps- just maybe- Lewis would not be wringing his hands about people who dissent with our Democratic rulers, or scold those who point out the large and numerous shortcomings of “Our Democracy” (if he were alive today). But surely, some will note that Lewis is, at bare minimum, legitimizing political Democracy. Really? Read a bit more of his own thought on the subject:

“Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead— even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served— deny it food and it will gobble poison.”⁴

That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement of egalitarian or democratic thought to me. How about you? Maybe we should keep reading.

Lewis is more forthright about his actual beliefs in his fiction, where his works are widely lauded as prophetic- no one who has read The Screwtape Letters or That Hideous Strength will be unfamiliar with the varied unsettling innovations of our modern society and politics. Lewis hammers down even harder on “democracy” through the mouth of the evil Screwtape in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, from which I will quote at length:

“Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that Democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them…”

“…You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word Democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of all human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided. The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say ‘I’m as good as you…’”

“…No man who says ‘I’m as good as you’ believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior…”

“…Now this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to the humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it—make it respectable and even laudable— by the incantatory use of the word democratic…”

“…Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic. I am credibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their Being like Folks; that people who would really wish to be—and are offered the Grace which would enable them to be—honest, chaste, or temperate, refuse it. To accept might make them Different, might offend again the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals…”⁵

Democracy produces unhealthy envy? It drags everyone down to the level of the lowest and most inept people? It is a vehicle to damage true greatness among humanity? It produces unhealthy conformity?

It is very hard to read passages like this and conclude that Lewis was *actually* a democrat. He makes brief mention of how to read Aristotle correctly, and mentions the Greek Tyrants, but that area of political philosophy is not my expertise (I would instead recommend that you ask my dear friends Sanfedesti and Lucius, who are real academics writing over at Position & Decision; or my friend Brian Wilson, the founder of Montana Classical College). In any case, it doesn’t seem to me that CS Lewis is a liberal in any real sense of the word. In fact, he seems positively illiberal by today’s standards.

Once you become aware of these idiosyncrasies in Lewis’ writing- his humble and deferential style, the concessions he grants to hostile audiences, and reading his nonfictional texts in the light of his fictional works- the full picture of his philosophy becomes much clearer: Lewis is positively bursting with dissident thought.

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Lewis… Secret Dissident?

In his essay, On the Reading of Old Books,⁶ Lewis tells us that newer Christian books are “still on trial,” and so the new books must be “tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all [their] hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light.”⁷ Now that his books are old enough (I happen to think so, anyway), it’s far easier to see both the obvious and hidden implications of his works.

There are at least five flavors of Progress that Lewis criticizes in his writing over and over again: we have already discussed the over-extension of Democratic thought. The other four are “Chronological Snobbery,” the belief in unlimited scientific progress, the conflation of Approval with Belief— and, most of all, the belief that Reality ought to conform to Man and not that Man ought to conform to Reality. Let’s go over them, one by one.

1. Chronological Snobbery

Lewis coined the term “Chronological Snobbery” in his autobiography. He defines Chronological Snobbery as…

“…the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”⁸

Lewis is not a fan of this idea, and tells us that the said “uncritical acceptance” must be combatted in the following way:

“You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.”⁹

Leftism (like all forms of Modernism) is terribly reliant on the ignorance of its adherents to History. It depends upon ignorance of any and all notable historical figures & movements before 1915, except when said historical figures are useful to promote Leftist narratives. No one need be aware of Aristotle except to warn against “unfairness” and the dangers of Hierarchy; or be aware of of Julius Caesar except to be warned of the dangers of Authoritarianism; or be aware of the American Founders except to decry “Racism;” or be aware of Nietzsche except to warn against Misogyny— and no one need be aware of the Bible and the Church, unless their words can be used to decry “backwards” Christian Morality.

Leftism, and Liberalism in particular, need both their believers and their detractors to believe that nothing was good until universal suffrage and market economies, and that nearly all past regimes— Rome, Soviet Russia, Imperial China, the Aztecs, or Charlemagne’s Kingdom— were all equally repugnant because they were all equally undemocratic. Don’t be trapped in the context of your own age because you are a snob (chronologically, of course).

2. The Belief in Unlimited Scientific Progress

The second dissident criticism of Progress we find in Lewis is his criticism of the widespread belief in unlimited scientific progress. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis anticipates that many will interpret the book as “an attack on Science,” which he says is not the case. Lewis instead says that he wishes to encourage “a new Natural Philosophy,” which may be worth revisiting at another time. However, Lewis fears something worse than misplaced criticism.

What he most dreads those who read the book and ignore his warning: that casting aside objective morality in the spheres of the English language, Society, and Science will lead to dire consequences for all mankind:

“What I most fear is the reply that I am ‘only one more’ obscurantist, that this barrier, like all previous barriers set up against the advance of science, can be safely passed. Such a reply springs from the fatal serialism of the modern imagination—the image of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds.”¹⁰

Read that last sentence again.

“…the fatal serialism of the modern imagination—the image of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds.”

This is Lewis attacking the Myth of Progress itself (through one of Progress’ proxies, Scientific Innovation). The “image of infinite unilinear progression” dovetails nicely with his idea of “Chronological Snobbery;” and there is a passage in God in the Dock where the two ideas come together. Lewis says that his young-ish modern British audience…

“…did not really believe that we have any reliable knowledge of historic man. But this was often curiously combined with a conviction that we knew a great deal about Pre-Historic Man: doubtless because Pre-Historic Man is labelled ‘Science’ (which is reliable) whereas Napoleon or Julius Caesar is labelled as ‘History’ (which is not)…”

“…Thus a pseudoscientific picture of the ‘caveman’ and a picture of ‘the present’ filled almost the whole of their imaginations; between these, there lay only a shadowy and unimportant region in which the phantasmal shapes of Roman soldiers, stagecoaches, pirates, knights-in-armor, highwaymen, etc., moved in a mist. I had supposed that if my hearers disbelieved the Gospels, they would do so because the Gospels recorded miracles. But my impression is that they disbelieved them simply because they dealt with events that happened a long time ago: that they would be almost as incredulous of the battle of Actium as of the Resurrection— and for the same reason.”¹¹

This stated belief in the ultimate supremacy and constant march of Scientific Progress describes modern Leftism to a T. Leftists always use words like “archaic” and “medieval” as insults, and in this specific context, describe their opposition as “anti-science.” Those who were nobly opposed to The Shot, but made slobbering attempts to convince Leftists that The Shot was unsafe based upon scientific grounds, missed this point: Leftists are not actually pro-Science— which is only the process of measuring data in a repeatable way. They use “The Science” or the word “Scientific” to roughly equal “current thinking.” Current thinking is hence “Authoritative,” which to a Leftist, means “True.”

This is also why Leftists feel no shame believing now that the original Lab Leak hypothesis was the true, despite believing at the time the hypothesis was relevant that the Lab Leak theory was “racist.” It is the very same reason that so many of the Leftists who cried out for the Unvaxxed to lose their jobs and have their children taken from them had no qualms about asking for “reconciliation” with those who were right ahead of time, and demanding that we “let it go already” (Either that, or else simply because Leftists are awful, self-and-God-hating, sniveling cretins).

Get with the current thinking! But only if you hate CS Lewis.

3. The Conflation of Approval with Belief

A third, perhaps less obvious, Progressive belief that Lewis defines and undermines is the common-but-dangerous conflation of Approval with Belief. Here is what that means:

“In lecturing to popular audiences I have repeatedly found it almost impossible to make them understand that I recommended Christianity because I thought its affirmations to be objectively true. They are simply not interested in the question of truth or falsehood. They only want to know if it will be comforting, or “inspiring”, or socially useful (In English we have a peculiar difficulty here because in popular speech “believe in” has two meanings, (a) To accept as true, (b) To approve of — e.g., “I believe in free trade”. Hence when an Englishman says he “believes in” or “does not believe in” Christianity, he may not be thinking about truth at all. Very often he is only telling us whether he approves or disapproves of the Church as a social institution).”¹²

Approval and Belief cannot really mean the same thing- if I say “I approve of the Sun’s orbit” I am not really making much sense, but if I say “I believe in the Sun’s orbit” then I am making an assent to the idea that the Sun orbits.

Liberals (Right and Left), but especially Feminists, make this mistake all the time when dialoguing with genuine Right-Wingers, especially Christians. For a Christian to state realities about past conceptions of each Sex’s role in Society, in the Family, and in the State sounds to the Liberal’s ear very much like an endorsement.

Often, it is the case that we, living within the Body of Christ (or else those who put themselves within the historic/traditional/western/conservative/right-wing tradition) have some criticism of modern feminism, and so wish to measure modern society against the “clean sea breeze of the centuries.”¹³ However, if I observe (or notice) something, it does not follow that I endorse said thing. I could merely be telling you about the conditions and ideologies that arose in say, Europe in the late 19th century; but it does not follow that I am a lover of either Nicolas II or Bismarck.

In political conversation, make sure to clarify in your own mind whether you are saying that you believe that something is true, or whether you approve of something that you think is good. Evaluate others’ statements in this way as well, and you may become a more erudite political participant.

4. The Belief that Reality Ought to Conform to Man’s Wishes

At the ending of The Abolition of Man, Lewis offers an interesting contrast between Science and Magic:

“…the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages…”

“…For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead…”¹⁴

Lewis shows us that the Magician and the Scientist are mostly the same character; the problem that both wish to solve is “how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.” Understood from a Christian perspective, this is deeply wrong. We conform to God’s divine order, each taking our position that God has preordained for us. Reality is not ours to tamper with.

In our modern context, it is easy to see the phenomenon that Lewis describes: don’t like the body you were born with? That’s fine. Fix that nose with plastic surgery. And maybe your bad temper can be fixed too! Just take some pills. Don’t feel comfortable being a man or a woman altogether? That’s alright too. We’ll just have to chop, cut, saw and mold you, and remake you as you see fit… to remake you in your own image. The Scientist is just as comfortable doing the “disgusting and impious” as the magician— perhaps even more so.

All of these dissident themes are immediately accessible in Lewis’ writings, and we haven’t even covered them all- Lewis had over the course of his writing career taken potshots at some favorite children of Progressivism: Feminists, Biblical Critics, Theological Liberals, and Journalists. But, in order to respect your time, we can end this section here. Lewis was highly critical of Democratic impulses, Chronological Snobbery, Scientific Progress, confusion of Approval & Belief, and the subjugation of Reality to Man’s wishes. The fact of the matter is that CS Lewis was based out of his gourd.

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Some Final Thoughts…

Making note of the dissident undercurrent in Lewis’ work is fun for me. I have found it beneficial to get acquainted with other critics of modernity, but in this department I feel that Lewis is often overlooked. It may be because Lewis is simply too wholesome. There is an idea among dissidents that one must have a gloom about them if they wish to see things more clearly, but I don’t think this is the case— there is no good reason not to be optimistic that historical aberrations like political Leftism can be defeated.

Lewis’ dissident themes slip unnoticed for another reason: he is primarily concerned with the human heart. Lewis once said that politics “is a subject in which I cannot take any interest,”¹⁵ by which I think he meant current events. Given his context- former atheist, World War One veteran, English professor, Myth Enjoyer, Christian writer- it is easy to see why. If all one does is contemplate eternal truth, the detail of everyday life can sometimes become blurry.

Lewis writes something in Mere Christianity that I think shows his primary concern is the heart, and is deeply relevant to our political & cultural moment:

“…Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy’s Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity—that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride—just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer.”¹⁶

Dissidents ask those who wish to join their ranks to stop eating seed oils, lift weights, slonk eggs, be sarcastic, or attack other dissidents publicly; and I am glad enough to support many of these. It is good for one to get in shape, to treat others more kindly, to take public stands against evil and to foster loyalty- but the Devil may still capture you if you practice all of these without defeating your pride. Be careful not to mix up temporal political beliefs with those things that are eternal: the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

The point? CS Lewis was right about everything, and you should read him more often.

1. Present Concerns, a collection of some of Lewis’ notable essays during his lifetime

2. Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 1: “The Three Parts of Morality”

3. From “Democratic Education,” a chapter in Present Concerns

4. Present Concerns

5. Selected passages from Screwtape Proposes a Toast, which is an epilogue to the events of The Screwtape Letters

6. On the Reading of Old Books was originally published as an introduction to a 1944 translation of St Athanasius’ The Incarnation of the Word of God

7. On the Reading of Old Books

8. Surprised by Joy, chapter 13

9. Surprised by Joy

10. The Abolition of Man

11. From God in the Dock, the namesake essay for Lewis’ book God in the Dock

12. From “Modern Man and his Categories of Thought,” a chapter in Present Concerns

13. On the Reading of Old Books

14. The Abolition of Man

15. Some of Lewis’ personal correspondence with an admirer.

16. Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 8: “The Great Sin”