More than a half century ago, C.S. Lewis warned about how science (a good thing) could be twisted in order to attack religion, undermine ethics, and limit human freedom. In the provocative new half-hour documentary The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism, leading Lewis scholars explore Lewis’s prophetic warnings about the abuse of science and how Lewis’s concerns are increasingly relevant for us today.

The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism received its television premiere on the NRB Network. The film now can be viewed for free on YouTube.

Experts featured in the video include Michael Aeschliman, author of C.S. Lewis and the Restitution of Man; Jay Richards, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Indivisible; Angus Menuge, author of Agents Under Fire; John West, editor of The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society; Victor Reppert, author of C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea; and C. John Collins, author of Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?

The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis’s Case Against Scientism is the first part of a three-part video series that will explore C.S. Lewis’s view of science and scientism. The next two parts, which will explore Lewis’s views on evolution and intelligent design, are slated to be released during the first half of 2013.

The Magician’s Twin video is inspired by the book of the same name, which can be purchased right now at Amazon.com at more than 30% off the list price.

The unpublished material is described and quoted from for the first time in the new book The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, out this month at Amazon.com and other booksellers.

“C.S. Lewis’s personal library contained more than three dozen books and pamphlets on scientific topics, many of them focused on evolution,” said Dr. John West, editor of The Magician’s Twin. “Several of the books on evolution contained annotations and underlining by Lewis, including Lewis’s personal copy of Charles Darwin’s Autobiography.”

“One of Lewis’s most heavily annotated books was a nearly 400-page book critiquing the creative power of Darwinian natural selection that Lewis first read as a 19-year-old soldier during World War I,” explained West. “Lewis wrote careful notes on most pages of that book, and he later stated that the book’s ‘critique of orthodox Darwinism is not easy to answer.’ Just a few years later, Lewis wrote a letter to his father saying that the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were built ‘on a foundation of sand.’ Lewis was still an atheist when he expressed these early doubts about Darwin.”

Near the end of his life, meanwhile, Lewis marked up with critical comments his copy of The Phenomenon of Man by prominent theistic evolutionist Teilhard de Chardin.

The Magician’s Twin explores C.S. Lewis’s far-ranging views on science and society, not just evolution, and it features chapters by a number of leading scholars, including Michael Aeschliman, author of C.S. Lewis and the Restitution of Man; Victor Reppert, author of C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea; Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward Larson; and New York Times-bestselling author Jay Richards. The editor of the book, John West, previously co-edited the award-winning C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia and directs the C.S. Lewis Fellows Program on Science and Society at Discovery Institute.

More information, including the download of a free chapter on “C.S. Lewis and Intelligent Design,” is available at the website for The Magician’s Twin.

Edited by Dr. John West (who previously co-edited The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia), The Magician’s Twin book will explore Lewis’s warnings about the dehumanizing impact of scientism on ethics, politics, faith, reason, and science itself. Issues explored include Lewis’s views on bioethics, eugenics, evolution, intelligent design, and what he called “scientocracy.” Contributors to the volume include Michael Aeschliman, author of C.S. Lewis and the Restitution of Man; Victor Reppert, author of C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea; Jay Richards, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Indivisible; and C. John Collins, author of Science and Faith: Friends or Foes.

For more information, check out the book’s webpage.

One thing Lewis is not particularly well known for is his views on science.

Yet he ultimately wrote nine books, nearly 30 essays, and several poems that explored science and its cultural impact, including The Discarded Image, his last book, which critically examined the nature of scientific revolutions, especially the Darwinian revolution in biology.[ii] Lewis’s personal library, meanwhile, contained more than three dozen books and pamphlets on scientific subjects, many of them dealing with the topic of evolution. Several of these books were marked up with underlining and annotations, including Lewis’s copy of Charles Darwin’s Autobiography.[iii]

Throughout his life, Lewis displayed a healthy skepticism of claims made in the name of science. He expressed this skepticism even before he was a Christian. For example, while still an unbelieving undergraduate in 1922, he recorded in his diary a discussion with friends where they expressed their doubts about Freud.[iv] In 1925, he wrote his father about his gratitude toward philosophy for showing him “that the scientist and the materialist have not the last word.”[v] The next year he published his narrative poem Dymer, which offered a nightmarish vision of a totalitarian state that served “scientific food” and “[c]hose for eugenic reasons who should mate.”[vi]

In 1932, just a few months after becoming a Christian, Lewis wrote to his brother about the efforts of the Rationalist Press Association to publish cheap editions of scientific works they thought debunked religion. Lewis said their efforts reminded him of the remark of another writer “that a priest is a man who disseminates little lies in defence of a great truth, and a scientist is a man who disseminates little truths in defence of a great lie.”[vii]

By the 1940s and 50s, Lewis became more vocal about the looming dangers of what he called “scientocracy,” the effort to hand over the reigns of cultural and political power to an elite group of experts claiming to speak in the name of science.[viii] Lewis regarded this proposal as fundamentally subversive of a free society, and he worried about the creation of a new oligarchy that would “increasingly rely on the advice of scientists till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets.”[ix]

Lewis took pains to emphasize that he was not “anti-science.”[x] But he unequivocally opposed scientism, the wrong-headed belief that modern science supplies the only reliable method of knowledge about the world, and its corollary that scientists have the right to dictate a society’s morals, religious beliefs, and even government policies merely because of their scientific expertise.

Because Lewis died nearly five decades ago, we might be tempted to think that he inhabited a vastly different world than we do when it comes to the relationship between science and culture. But in key respects, Lewis’s world was very much like our own. Then, as now, certain prominent intellectuals claimed that science provides a view of the universe that refutes the traditional religious view. Then, as now, certain pundits claimed that you were “anti-science” merely for being skeptical of certain claims made in the name of science. And then, as now, some spokespersons for the scientific establishment insisted that public policy should be guided—even dictated—by an elite class of “scientific” experts.

As the essays in this book show, Lewis has important things to tell us about the limits of science, the need for dissent in science, and the dangers of trying to govern in the name of science. Along the way, Lewis offers penetrating insights into many hot-button issues of our time, including evolution, intelligent design, bioengineering, moral relativism, and even the role of government.

Consider this book an invitation to think more deeply about the growing power of science in the public square by drawing on the timeless wisdom of C.S. Lewis. After you have read the book, I encourage you to avail yourself of the additional articles, companion videos, and other resources at the website www.cslewisweb.com, including a new documentary film about Lewis and scientism inspired by this book.

1. Phantastes by George MacDonald.
2.The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton.
3. The Aeneid by Virgil.
4. The Temple by George Herbert.
5. The Prelude by William Wordsworth.
6. The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto.
7. The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius.
8. Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell.
9. Descent into Hell by Charles Williams.
10. Theism and Humanism by Arthur James Balfour.

[From the June 6, 1962 issue of The Christian Century]

1. Educated at the University of Oxford.
2. An instructor at the University of Oxford.
3. A brilliant and innovative scholar.
4. Wrote important scholarly books.
5. Born in the 1800s.
6. His father was a successful professional man.
7. His mother died prematurely, in her forties.
8. His father never remarried.
9. Loved to teach people things he knew.
10. Witty, and believed in the value of humor.
11. Lived frugally and gave generously.
12. His first name began with C.
13. Published books under a pseudonym.
14. Used the name Lewis on his bestsellers.
15. A sincerely devout Christian.
16. Prayed for people.
17. Sometimes wrote and delivered sermons.
18. Was interested in George MacDonald.
19. A prodigious and delightful letter writer.
20. Never had any children.
21. Sent charming letters to children.
22. Published extremely successful fantasies for children.
23. Highly quotable.
24. Has been translated into many languages.
25. Died in his mid-sixties, just days before his birthday.
26. Has sold millions of books and is world famous.
27. There is a society for his literary fans.
28. A favorite of Kathryn Lindskoog.
29. 1998 was observed as his centenary year.
30. Featured on a 1998 Royal Mail stamp.

Answer: C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (1832-1898).

This article by the late Kathryn Lindskoog was originally published in Issue # 79 of The Lewis Legacy (Winter 1999).

Nearly half-a-century later, Lewis’s question still resonates. Modern society continues to operate largely on the materialistic premises of such thinkers as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Yet few today feel at home in the materialist universe where God does not exist, where ideas do not matter, and where every human behavior is reduced to non-rational causes.

C. S. Lewis spent much of his life debunking the sterility of materialist thinking; and his insights are as relevant now as when they were first offered, because our culture remains dominated by four of materialism’s most deadly legacies.

Rejection of Reason and Truth

Materialism’s first deadly legacy is the rejection of reason and objective truth. Nineteenth-century materialists depicted our thoughts as the irrational products of environment or heredity or brain chemistry. As a consequence, the intellectual classes became convinced that only the reality was material, and thus the only true explanations were reductive. If you wanted to explain a flower, you described its cell structure, not its beauty. If you wanted to explain human beings, you looked not to their greatest achievements, but to the raw materials that made them up. This sort of reductionism permeates contemporary society, from politics and the social sciences to literature and the performing arts.

Lewis’s first sustained attack on reductionism came in his allegory The Pilgrim’s Regress in the early 1930s. In a section of the book titled “Through Darkest Zeitgeistheim” (literally, “through the darkest abode of the Spirit of the Age”), Lewis’s pilgrim is arrested by the flunkies of a giant who symbolizes the materialistic reductionism that was the Spirit of the Age. The pilgrim, named John, is subsequently jailed, leading to a nightmarish sequence. Lewis relates that the eyes of the giant had the property of making whatever they looked on transparent: “Consequently, when John looked around into the dungeon he retreated from his fellow prisoners in terror.… A woman was seated near him, but he did not know it was a woman, because, through the face, he saw the skull and through that the brains and the passages of the nose, and the larynx, and the saliva moving in the glands and the blood in the veins… And when John sat down and drooped his head, not to see the horrors, he saw only the working of his own inwards.…”

John is rescued from the dungeon by a towering woman in blue–Lady Reason, who slays the giant with her sword. She tells John that the giant had deceived him about the real nature of human beings: “He showed you by a trick what our inwards would look like if they were visible… But in the real world our inwards are invisible.“

“But if I cut a man open I should see them in him,” replied John.

“A man cut open,” returned the Lady, “is, so far, not a man: and if you did not sew him up speedily you would be seeing not organs, but death. I am not denying that death is ugly: but the giant made you believe that life is ugly.”

Lewis’s point was that reductionism really does not explain that which is human at all. In fact, in the name of explaining man, reductionism explains him away.

In a 1956 essay titled “Behind the Scenes,” Lewis articulated his own view of the relation between man and his material components. He likened life to a stage play. In one sense, nothing in the play is real; it is all imaginary. The only “realities” are the sets, costumes, and lighting. The play is “appearance” and the sets are “reality.” Yet, as Lewis points out, “in the theatre of course the play, ‘the appearance’, is the thing. All the backstage ‘realities’ exist only for its sake and are valuable only in so far as they promote it.”

The materialist may scoff at this approach, but as Lewis relished in pointing out, the materialist has his own problems: The materialist who debunks everyone else’s ideas as the subrational products of their brain chemistry or environment cannot avoid being debunked himself. If he is honest, says Lewis, the materialist will have to admit that his own ideas are merely the “epiphe-nomenon which accompanies chemical or electrical events in a cortex which is itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary process.” If all thoughts are merely the products of non-rational causes, this includes the materialist’s own thoughts. In other words, there is no reason according to materialism for materialism itself to be regarded as true.

Debunking of Objective Morality

Closely related to materialism’s attack on reason is its debunking of objective morality. Materialists early in our century denied the existence of objective standards binding on all cultures, claiming that environment dictated our moral beliefs. Such relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology, and sociology.

Lewis attacked moral relativism in his opening chapters of Mere Christianity, where he pointed out that all people–even criminals–appeal to a universal standard when trying to excuse their own behavior. Even those who claim that right and wrong are mere conventions will hotly protest when wronged.

In Abolition of Man, Lewis made this argument in more detail, pointing out that we cannot escape making moral judgments. Every action presupposes a goal toward which the actor acts, and the goal (no matter how clinically it is expressed) represents a judgment of value. We cannot exist without making moral judgments, argued Lewis. The only question is what those judgments will be. Speaking within the western natural law tradition, Lewis proposed that at the foundation of all moral judgments is one set of ethical first principles known intuitively by all human beings. These first principles include obligations to treat other people justly and to keep one’s promises. All other moral judgments and ethical systems are derived from these principles.

Lewis added that the major civilizations agree almost wholly on ethical fundamentals (such as extolling honesty and kindness and reproving treachery and injustice). To be sure, there are “blindnesses in particular cultures–just as there are savages who cannot count up to twenty. But the pretence that we are presented with a mere chaos–that no outline of universally accepted value shows through–is simply false.…”

Denial of Personal Responsibility

If materialism has been hard on reason and morality, it has been equally destructive of personal responsibility. By claiming that human thoughts and actions are dictated by our biology and environment, materialism undermined personal responsibility. The results can be seen in our criminal justice system, our civil justice system, and our welfare system. Ever since sin entered the world, human beings have sought excuses for their behavior, but materialism handed us an inexhaustible supply of excuses. No matter what we do, it can be attributed to a cause other than our own choices: our social environment, subconscious drives, or brain chemistry.

Against this modern ethic that no one is responsible, Lewis strove to make people aware of just how responsible they really are. Lewis countered this mentality not so much by direct disputation, but by trying to place a mirror in front of us that would cause us to recognize the evil in our own souls. This is most apparent in his fictional works, where there are key moments of self-revelation when major characters realize that they are really to blame for the fix they are in.

In the novel That Hideous Strength, Mark Studdock is a young sociologist who has spent his life cravenly currying favor with others in order to promote himself. When he subsequently finds himself in the middle of a totalitarian conspiracy, he first wonders what bad luck put him there. “Why had he such a rotten heredity?” he complained. “Why had his education been so ineffective? Why was the system of society so irrational?” Finally hitting bottom, he suddenly sees with brutal clarity who he really is and how his choices led to the mess he was in.

One cannot read Lewis’s fiction without being convicted of the fact that we are more accountable than we would like to think. Lewis calls us to responsibility by reminding us that every action has a consequence, and that no wrong choice–however small–is insignificant.

Proliferation of Coercive Utopianism

The final legacy of materialism is coercive utopianism. Although the belief that all thought and behavior are predetermined by material causes would seem to deny the power of human beings to reshape their world, materialism in fact inspired a fierce strain of coercive utopianism. Claiming either that they were merely the servants of the forces of materialism–or with Nietzsche, that they could overcome materialism by a sheer act of will–materialist reformers tried to create secular utopias in Russia and Germany. In America, meanwhile, significant parts of the cultural elite began to believe that we could engineer the perfect society through social science and planning.

The coercive utopians in Germany and Russia were both targets of Lewis’s scorn. But fascism and communism were far from the only forms of coercive utopianism about which Lewis was concerned. He also feared the modern welfare state, which he thought would become ever more intrusive as government planners allied themselves with the tools of materialist social science.

According to Lewis, if people act because of environmental and biological necessities, the government no longer need deal with them as free moral agents, and preemption replaces punishment as the preferred method of social control. Instead of punishing you for making the wrong choice, the state simply eliminates your choice.

Lewis painted a grim portrait of this kind of despotism in his novel That Hideous Strength. There the spirit of modern social science becomes incarnate in something called the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments—NICE, for short. Of course, there is nothing nice about NICE; its social scientists are exactly the type of technocrats that Lewis feared. In the name of science and humanity, they claimed the right to remake society without bothering to obtain its consent.

While we are a long way off from the nightmare vision depicted by Lewis in That Hideous Strength, we certainly should be able to understand some of what he is getting at. Public policy decisions in America today are made increasingly by the type of technocrats that Lewis talked about, as legislators have transferred much of their authority to a vast array of independent regulatory agencies staffed by unelected experts.

Lewis did not dispute that technocrats have plenty of knowledge that may be necessary for good public policy. But it is not sufficient. Political problems are preeminently moral problems, according to Lewis, and technocrats are no better equipped than any other citizen to function as moralists.

A New Natural Philosophy

At the end of The Abolition of Man, Lewis called for a new natural philosophy that would understand human beings as they really are. “When it explained,” said Lewis, “it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole.”

Lewis was not quite sure what he was asking for, and–being a realist–he certainly was not convinced that the revolution would actually come about. Yet during the next decade it just might. We live during an era of tumultuous change, and nowhere is this fact more evident than in the sciences. Recent developments in biology, physics, and cognitive science are raising serious doubts about the most fundamental assumptions of materialism. In biology, scientists are discovering such irreducible complexity in biological systems that the only reasonable explanation seems to be a non-material designer. In physics, our understanding of matter is becoming increasingly non-material. In cognitive science, efforts to reduce mind to the physical processes of the brain have failed repeatedly.

In other words, for perhaps the first time since the materialist onslaught we have an opportunity to bring about the collapse of materialism and to re-found both science and culture along the lines envisioned by C. S. Lewis more than half-a-century ago.

This essay was originally published in Religion and Liberty, Vol. 6, No. 6.

A Protestant clergyman in England, Baxter lived from 1615 to 1691. Though all but forgotten today, Baxter was a popular and prolific author in his own day and for many decades following his death. He wrote more than 160 separate works—nearly 200, by some estimates. One Anglican Bishop said of Baxter that had he lived during the earliest years of Christianity, he would have been “one of the fathers of the church.” The famed Dr. Samuel Johnson, when asked by Boswell which books by Baxter he should read, replied: “Read any of them; they are all good.” In particular, Dr. Johnson thought that Baxter’s Reasons for the Christian Religion “contained the best collection of the evidences of the divinity of the Christian system.” Many years after Baxter’s death, famed English statesman William Wilberforce called Baxter’s writings on the spiritual life “a treasury of Christian wisdom.”

Those wishing more information about Richard Baxter and the relationship of his thought to C. S. Lewis should consult N. H. Keeble, “C.S. Lewis, Richard Baxter, and ‘Mere Christianity,’” in Christianity and Literature (Vol XXX, No. 3, Spring 1981), pp. 27-44.

Following are some selections from Baxter’s works that relate to the idea of “Mere Christianity”:

From Baxter’s Church-History of the Government of Bishops (1680):

I am a CHRISTIAN, a MEER CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian Religion and Church hath been visible: But must you know what Sect or Party I am of? I am against all Sects and dividing Parties: But if any will call Meer Christians by the name of a Party, because they take up with Meer Chrisitanity, Creed, and Scripture, and will not be of any dividing or contentious Sect, I am of that Party which is so against Parties: If the Name CHRISTIAN be not enough, call me a CATHOLICK CHRISTIAN; not as that word signifieth an hereticating majority of Bishops, but as it signifieth one that hath no Religion, but that which by Christ and the Apostles was left to the Catholick Church, or the Body of Jesus Christ on Earth.

From “To the Reader” in Baxter’s A Treatise of Conversion, Addressed to the Ignorant and Ungodly:

I like to hear a man dwell much on the same essentials of Christianity. For we have but one God, one Christ, and one faith to preach; and I will not preach another gospel to please men with variety, as if our Saviour and our gospel were grown stale–For it is the essentials and common truths, as I have often said, that we daily live upon as our bread and drink. And we have incomparably more work before us, to know these better, and use them better, than to know more. The sea will afford us more water after we have taken out a thousands tuns, than an hundred of those wells and pits from whence we never yet brought any.

From the Preface of Baxter’s Now or Never, or the Believer Justified and Directed and the Opposers and Neglecters of the Gospel Convinced:

Whosoever holds all that is necessary to salvation, and is serious and diligent in living according thereunto, shall be saved, whatever error he holds with it. For if he be serious and diligent in the practice of all things necessary to salvation, he hath all that is necessary to salvation, viz. in belief and practice: and it must needs follow, that his errors and either not contradictory to the things necessary which he holds and practices, or that he holds not those errors practically but notionally, as an opinion, or ineffectual cogitation in a dream, which provokes not to action; and in such a case the error keeps no man from salvation.

From the Preface of Baxter’s Now or Never, or the Believer Justified and Directed and the Opposers and Neglecters of the Gospel Convinced:

The Christian faith is the believing an everlasting life of happiness to be offered by God, with the pardon of all sin, as procured by the sufferings and merits of Jesus Christ, to all that are sanctified by the Holy Ghost, persevere in love to God, and to each other, and in a holy and heavenly conversation. This is saving faith and Christianity, if we consent as well as assent. All that was necessary to salvation to be believed, was formerly thought to be contained in the creed, and that was the test or symbol of the Christian faith; and the Christian religion is the same, hath the same rule, test, and symbol in all ages. But since faction and tyranny, pride and covetousness, became the matters of the religion of too many, vice and selfish interest hath commanded them to change the rule of faith by their additions, and to make so much necessary to salvation, as is necessary to their affected universal dominion, and to their carnal ends. And since faction entered, and hath torn the church into many sects (the Greek, Roman, Armenian, Jacobites, Abassine, and many more) it seems meet to the more tyrannical sect to call these several religions, and to say that every man that differs from them in any of their opinions or additions, which they please to call articles of faith, is of another religion.

If the word religion be taken in this sense, and if all that agree in one Christian religion, are said to be of as many religions, as different opinions, in points that some call necessary, then I answer the question thus: He is the true catholic Christian that hath but one, even the Christian religion: and this is the case of the Protestants, who, casting off the additions of popery, adhere to the primitive simplicity and unity: if Papists, or any others, corrupt this religion with human additions and innovations, the great danger of these corruptions is, lest they draw them from the sound belief and serious practice of that ancient Christianity which we are all agreed in: among Papists, or any other sect, where their corruptions do not thus corrupt their faith and practice in the true essentials, it is certain that those corruptions shall not damn them. For he that truly believes all things that are essential to Christianity, and lives accordingly with serious diligence, hath the promise of salvation: and it is certain, that whatever error that man holds, it is either not inconsistent with true Christianity, or not practically, but notionally held, and so not inconsistent as held by him: for how can that be inconsistent which actually doth consist with it?

If a Papist or any other sectarian seriously love God, and his brother, and set his heart upon the life to come, give up himself to the merits and grace of Jesus Christ, and the sanctification of the Holy Spirit, to be fitted for that glory, lives by faith above the world, mortifies the desires of the flesh, and lives wilfully in no known sin, but presses after further degrees of holiness, I doubt not of the salvation of that person; no more than of the life of him that hath taken poison but into his mouth and spit it out again, or let down so little as nature and antidotes do expel: but I will not therefore plead for poison, nor take it, because men may live that thus take it.

From Part II of Baxter’s Now or Never, or the Believer Justified and Directed and the Opposers and Neglecters of the Gospel Convinced:

Live as those that believe that you are to be members of the holy catholic church, and therein to hold the communion of saints. Then you will know that it is not as a member of any sect or party, but as a holy member of this holy church, that you must be saved; and that it is the name of a Christian which is more honourable than the name of any division or subdivision among Christians, whether Greek, or Papists, or Protestant, or Prelates, or Presbyterian, or Independent, or Baptist. It is easy to be of any one of these parties; but to be a Christian, which all pretend to, is not so easy. It is easy to have a burning zeal for any divided party or cause; but the zeal for the Christian religion is not so easy to be kindled or kept alive; but requires as much diligence to maintain it, as dividing zeal requires to quench it. It is easy to love a party as a party: but to keep up catholic charity to all Christians, and to live in that holy love and converse which is requisite to a communion of saints, it is not so easy. Satan and corrupted nature befriend the love and zeal of faction, which is confined to a party on a controverted cause; but they are enemies to the love of saints, to the zeal for holiness, and to the catholic charity which is from the spirit of Christ. You see I call you not to division, nor to side with sects; but to live as members of a holy catholic church, which consists of all that are holy in the world; and to live as those that believe the communion of saints.

From Baxter’s Directions to Weak Christians for their Establishment, Growth, and Perseverance:

Direct. XIII. Subdue your passions, and abhor all uncharitable principles anmd practices, and live in love; maintiaing peace in your families and with your neighbors, but especially in the church of God.

Especially be most tender of the union of true Christians, and of the church’s peace: when you hear the men of several sects representing one another as odious, understand that it is the language of the devil to draw you from love, into hatred and divisions: and when you must speak odiously of men’s sin, speak charitably of their persons, and be as ready to speak of the good that is in them, as of the evil. Believe not that dividing, ungrounded doctrine, which tells you that you cannot sufficiently disown the errors of any party in doctrine, worship, and discipline, without a separation of withdrawing from their communion; which tells you that you are guilty of the ministerial faults of every pastor that you join with, or of the faults of all that worship which you are present at, which would first separate you from every worshipping society and person upon earth, and then lead you to give over the worshipping of God yourselves. You must love Christians as Christians, though they have errors and faults repgunant to the right order and manner of worship: so be it you join not in that worship which is substantially evil, and such as God doth utterly diown; or that you commit no actual sin yourselves, of that you approve not of the errors and faults of the worshippers, and justify not their smallest evil; or that you prefer not defective, faulty worship before that which is more pure and agreeable to the will of God. For while all the worshippers are faulty and imperfect, all their worship will be too: and if your actual sin, when you pray or preach effectively yourselves, doth not signify that you approve your faultiness; much less will your presence prove that you allow of the faultiness of others. The business that you come upon is to join with a Christian congregation in the use of those ordinances which God hath appointed, supposing that the ministers and worshippers will all be sinfully defective, in method, order, words, or circumstances: and to bear with that which God doth bear with, and not to refuse that which is God’s for the adherent faults of men, no more than you will refuse every dish of meat which is unhandsomely cooked, as long as there is no poison in it, and you prefer it not before better.

From Baxter’s The Character of a Sound Confirmed Christian as also of a Weak and Seeming Christian:

LII. A Christian indeed is one who greatly esteems the unity of the church, and is greatly averse to all divisions among believers. As there is in the natural body an abhorring of dismembering or separating any part from the whole; so there is in the mystical body of Christ. The members that have life, cannot but feel the smart of any distempering attempt: for abscission is destruction. The members die that are separated from the body. And if there be but any obstruction or hinderance of communion, they will be painful or useless: he feels in himself the reason of all those strict commans, and earnest exhortations. `Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind, and in the same judgment.If there be any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies; fulfil ye my joy, that ye be like minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind, let each esteem other better than themselves.Look not every man on his ohn things, but every man also on the things of others.I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you, that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, on faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. But unto every one of us is given grace, according to the measure of the gift of Christ.’ He looks at uncharitableness and divisions, with more abhorrence than weak Christians do at drunkenness or whoredom, or such other heinous sins. He fears such dreadful warnings as Acts xx.29,30. `For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also, of your ownselves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them;’ and he cannot slight such a vehement exhortation as Rom. xvi. 17, 18. `Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences, contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned, and avoid them. For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly, and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.’ Therefore he is so far from being a divider himself, that when he sees any one making divisions among Christians, he looks on him as on one that is mangling the body of his dearest friend, or as one that is setting fire to his house, and therefore doth all that he can to quench it; as knowing the confusion and calamity to which it tends. He is a christian, and therefore of a truly catholic spirit; that is, he makes not himself a member of a divided party, or a sect; he regards the interest and welfare of the body, the universal church, above the interest or presperity of any party whatsoever; and he will do nothing for a party which is injurious to the whole, or to the Christian cause. The very names of sects and parties are displeasing to him; and he could wish that there were no name but that of Christians among us, save only the necessary names of the criminal, such as that of the Nicolaitans, by which those that are to be avoided by Christians must be known.

Christianity is confined to so narrow a compass in the world, that he is unwilling to contract it yet into a narrower. The greatest party of divided Christians, whether it be the Greeks or Papists, is too small a body for him to take for the catholic (or universal) church. He grieves at the blindness and cruelty of faction, that can make men damn all the rest of the church for the interest of their proper sect; and take all those as non-Christians that are better Christians than themselves The confirmed Christian can distinguish between the strong and weak, the sound and unsound members of the church, without dismembering any, and without unwarrantable separations from any. He will worship God in the purest manner he can, and locally join with those assemblies, where, all things considered, he may most honour God, and receive most edification; and will not sin for communion with any. He will sufficiently distinguish between a holy, orderly assembly, and a corrupt, disordered one; and between an able, faithful pastor, and an ignorant or worldly hireling. He desires that the pastors of the church may make that due separation by the holy discipline of Christ, which may prevent the people’s disorderly separation. But for all this, he will not deny his presence upon just occasion, to any Christian congregation that worships God in truth, though with many modal imperfections, so be it they impose no sin upon him as necessary to his communion with them. Nor will he deny the spiritual communion of faith and love to those that he holds not local communion with: he knows that all our worshp of God is sinfully imperfect, and that it is a dividing principle to hold, that we may join with none that worship God in a faulty manner; for then we must join in the worship of none on earth

While men who are all imperfect and corrupt, are the worshippers, the manner of their worship will be such as they, in some degree, imperfect and corrupt. The solid Christian hath an eye upon all the churches in the world, in the determining of such questions; he considers what worship is offered to God in the churches of the several parties of Christians, the Greeks, Armenians, Abassines, Lutherans, as well as what is done in the country where he lives; and he considers whether God disown and reject the worship of almost all the churches in the world, or not; for he dares no further reject them than God rejects them. Nor will he voluntarily separate from those assemblies where the presence of Christ, in his spirit and acceptance yet remains. His fuller acquaintance with the gracious nature, office, and tenderness of Christ, together with greater love to his brethren, causes him in this to judge more gently than young censorious Christians do. And his humble acquaintance with his own infirmities, makes him the more compassionate to others. If he should think that God would reject all that order not, and word not their prayers aright, he would be afraid of being rejected himself, who is still conscious of greater faultiness in his own prayers, than a mere defect in words and order; even of a great defectiveness in that faith, desire, love, zeal, and reverence which should be manifested in prayer. Though he be more apprehensive than others, of the excellency and necessity of the holiness and spirituality of the soul in worship; yet withal he is more judicious and charitable than the peevish and passionate infant Christians, who think that God doth judge as they do, and sees no grace where they see none; and takes all to be superstitious of fanatical, that differ from their opinions or manner of worship; or that he is as ready to call every error in the method or the words of prayer, idolatry or will-worship, as those are that speak not what they know, but what they have heard some teachers, whom they reverence, say before them. `He that dwelleth in love, dwells in God, and God in him:’ and he that dwells with God, is likelier to be best acquainted with his mind, concerning his children and his worship, than he that dwells in wrath, pride, and partiality.

LIII. 1. A Christian indeed is not only zealous for the unity and concord of believers, but he seeks it on the right terms, and in the way that is fittest to attain it. Unity, peace and concord, are like piety and honesty, things so unquestionably good, that there are scarcely any men of reason and common sobriety, that ever were heard to oppose them directly and for themselves: therefore all that are enemies to them, are yet pretenders to them and oppose them 1. In their causes only. 2. Or covertly and under some other name…

The judicious, faithful Christian knows, that there are three degrees or sorts of Christian communion, which have their several terms. 1. The universal church communion which all Christians, as such, must hold among themselves…

[T]he terms of [this] catholic communion, he knows, are such as these: 1. They must be such as were the terms of church communion in the days of the apostles. 2. They must be such as are plainly and certainly expressed in the holy scriptures. 3. And such as the universal church has in some ages since been actually agreed in. 4. And those points are likeliest to be such, which all the differing parties of Christians are agreed in as necessary to communion to this day (so we call not those Christians that deny the essentials of Christianity.) 5. Every man in the former ages of the church was admitted to this catholic church communion, who in the baptismal vow or covenant gave up himself to God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, as his Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, his Owner, Governor and Father, renouncing the flesh, the world and the devil.

Some readers have called The Great Divorce Lewis’s Divine Comedy, and for good reason. In both stories, the author/narrator journeys from hell to heaven, meets a variety of people along the way, and discovers that in the afterlife unredeemed souls are not solid; they are ghosts. In both books the redeemed are radiant “solid people.” At the end of both books the pilgrim returns to earth to resume his life and tell readers what he has seen and heard.

The Bus Driver

There are other connections between Lewis’s Great Divorce and Dante’s
Divine Comedy. On July 30, 1954, two years before I talked with Lewis, he wrote to an American reader named Mr. Kinter. “The closest conscious connection to Dante in G. Divorce,” he said, “is the angel who drives the bus: cg – Inferno IX 79-102.”

All Lewis said about “the angel who drives the bus” down into the twilight city in The Great Divorce was “The Driver himself seemed full of light and he used only one hand to drive with. The other he waved before his face to fan away the greasy steam of rain…. he had a look of authority and seemed intent on carrying out his job.”

Dante said little more than that about his angel that came down through the dark air and thick fog of the fifth circle of Hell:

…I saw more than a thousand ruined souls scattering out of the way of one who crossed the swampy Styx without wetting his feet. He kept waving the thick air away from his face with his left hand, and that was all that seemed to require any effort.

I could tell that he was a heavenly messenger.

I turned to my teacher, and he signalled me to keep quiet and bow down to him.

He seemed to be full of scorn [for Furies guarding the gate of Dis]. He reached the gate and touched it with a wand to open it; there was no resistance….

Then he turned and retraced his path through the filth, without a word to us; and looked like one concerned about matters different from the ones at hand.

In his 1962 preface to The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis spoke of Dante’s angels: “In Scripture the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying ‘Fear not.’ The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say, ‘There, there.’ The literary symbols are more dangerous [than sculptures and pictures] because they are not so easily recognized as symbolical. Those of Dante are best. Before his angels we sink in awe.”

Some readers also sink in awe before Lewis’s angelic Driver and take him for the Holy Spirit or Christ. David Clark makes a good case for the latter interpretation and concludes “Jesus is the only possible identity of the One he is describing.” (See “‘Only One Has Descended into Hell’: Who Is the Bus Driver in The Great Divorce?” in The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society, Vol. 23, Number 2, Summer 1999.) But if Lewis’s bus driver represents Jesus, then Lewis must have taken Dante’s angelic helper in the Inferno to be Jesus; and there is no record in Lewis’s letters or his essays about Dante that he held such a revolutionary opinion. If he had, it seems he would at least have said so to his friends Charles Williams and Dorothy Sayers, both Dante experts. David Clark does not address this problem.

Sarah Smith

In his 1954 letter to Mr. Kinter, Lewis continued: “The unsuccessful meeting between the ‘Tragedian’ and his wife is a sort of pendant to the successful meeting of D. [Dante] and Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise.”

In The Great Divorce Lewis describes the Tragedian’s wife, Sarah Smith. She had no high position or prominence in her first life, but in Heaven she is a great saint: “Love shone not from her face only, but from all her limbs, as if it were some liquid in which she had just been bathing.” She is brisk, candid, and beneficent, with a sense of humor and no sentimentality. She came all the way down from the mountains of heaven to the Valley of the Shadow of Life to meet her husband Frank and escort him to the mountains; but he refuses to go. The real inner man has been taken over by a grotesque Tragedian persona that is all manipulative ego.

Likewise, on earth Beatrice had no high position or prominence, but in heaven her face is indescribably radiant with love. She is brisk, candid, and beneficent, with no sentimentality. She came all the way down from the Empyrean to meet Dante in the Earthly Paradise (see Canto 30 of Purgatory) and escort him to Paradise; and although she rebukes him, he eagerly goes with her. In Canto 31 of Paradise he sees her back in her assigned place in the Empyrion, on a throne in the third row from the top.

Ironically, Lewis biographer A. N. Wilson has completely misread Chapters 12 and 13 of The Great Divorce. He claims “Perhaps none of Lewis’s portraits is more cruel than that of the figure of Dante himself, who … is represented as a dwarf leading the other part of himself, the Tragedian, round on a chain …” Sarah Smith is definitely a Beatrice figure, but the Tragedian is definitely not a Dante figure. He shows what Dante might have been like if he had been an idolator on his way to hell.

There is in fact a person similar to Dante in The Great Divorce, a person sometimes foolish and sometimes fearful, but always eager to learn. That person is C. S. Lewis, the narrator. And just as Dante wrote his favorite author, Virgil, into Divine Comedy to be his guide, C. S. Lewis wrote George MacDonald into The Great Divorce to be his guide.

Meeting a Mentor

Lewis and MacDonald met in Chapter 9. Lewis says “I tried, trembling, to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I first bought a copy of Phantastes had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the New Life.”

Dante and Virgil met in Canto 1 of the Inferno. Dante said, “Are you Virgil, then? Are you that fountain which pours forth so rich a stream of words? …O light and glory of other poets! May my long years of study and great love for your poetry help me now. You are my teacher and my favorite author; you alone gave me the noble writing style that made me a successful poet.” (Shortly after Dante’s death, the author Boccaccio claimed that Dante was predicting at the beginning of his Comedy that it would become a great epic like Virgil’s Aeneid.)

Trajan

Shortly after meeting MacDonald, Lewis asked him how Ghosts could visit
Heaven and whether any of them could possibly stay. “Aye,” MacDonald answered. “Ye’ll have heard that the emperor Trajan did.”

According to a medieval tradition, after the virtuous pagan emperor Trajan spent time in Hell he had a chance to enter Heaven and stay there. Lewis would have read about this in Dante’s Comedy. In Canto 10 of Purgatory Dante recounted the kindness of Trajan to a widow, and in Canto 20 of Paradise he located Trajan in Heaven: “…the one closest to the beak consoled the widow for her son. Now he knows from his experience of this sweet life and its opposite the price of not following Christ.”

Quoting an Author

Lewis pressed MacDonald farther. “But I don’t understand. Is judgment not final? Is there really a way out of Hell into Heaven?”

MacDonald answered “It depends on the way ye’re using the words. If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand.”

Lewis added in parentheses, “Here he smiled at me.” This is a hint to readers that Lewis (the author of the story) was being playful when he had MacDonald say this to Lewis (the protagonist in the story). In fact, Lewis had first used the term “Deep Heaven” in his interplanetary fiction almost fifty years after MacDonald’s death.

Dante also caused one author to quote another in his fantasy. In Canto 15 of the Inferno Dante greeted his teacher Brunetto Latini. (Brunetto was a scholar and statesman who lived in Florence when Dante did, but died five years before Dante allegedly journeyed to Hell and discovered him there.) Dante said, “If I had my wish, you would not yet have left the human race. For I have in my memory, and now it goes to my heart, an image of you that is dear, kind, and fatherly, when back in the world, from time to time, you taught me how a man achieves immortality. As long as I live, it is fitting that my tongue should express my gratitude for this.” Dante is echoing these words from Brunetto’s own book Le Livre dou Tresor. So it is that Dante put one of his mentors into Hell, visited him, and affectionately quoted his own writing to him there.

The Amplitude of Heaven

In The Great Divorce and Dante’s Divine Comedy Heaven is, in Lewis’s words, “a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before.”

Lewis had entered a bus in Hell, an infinite grey town, and ascended to a country at the top of towering cliffs. There

“I saw an infinite abyss. And cliffs towering up and up. And then this country on top of the cliffs.”

“Aye, but the voyage was not mere locomotion. The bus, and all you inside it, were increasing in size.”

“Do you mean then that Hell—all that infinite empty town— is down in some little crack like this?”

“Yes. All Hell is smaller than one small pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.”

“It seems big enough when you’re in it, Sir.”

“And yet all the loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt in heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into the great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.”

In The Divine Comedy Beatrice has led Dante up past the stars, beyond the universe, into the Empyrean. “We have ascended from the largest sphere into the Heaven of pure light—intellectual light, abounding in love; love of true goodness, abounding in ecstasy; ecstasy that surpasses every sweetness.”

Dante’s eyes are no longer impeded by distance.

There is a light on high that makes the Creator visible to the creature who finds peace only in beholding Him. That light expands into such a great circle that its circumference would be far too large to serve as a belt for the sun. It is made in its entirety by a Ray of Light, beamed down to the highest part of the First Moved, which draws its energy and power from that radiance. And like a mountainside that reflects itself in the water at its base as if to look at its rich adornment of grass and flowers, so I saw everyone who has returned up there in more than a thousand tiers that were mirrored in the light.

If the lowest row encircles such an immense light, what can the expanse of the rose’s outermost petals be! My sight did not get lost in all its breadth and height, but absorbed the full magnitude and quality of that bliss. (Neither near nor far adds or subtracts anything there, for where God rules without any intermediary the laws of nature have no relevance.)

Beatrice drew me, like one who is silent and wishes to speak, into the gold of the eternal rose that spreads itself open, row after row, and releases the fragrance of praise to the Sun that makes this perpetual spring. And she said, “Behold how great this white-robed gathering is! See how vast our city spreads!”

In conclusion, although the title of Lewis’s Cinderella is a response to William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the content is inspired by Dante’s masterpiece.

This article by the late Kathryn Lindskoog was originally published in Issue #83 of The Lewis Legacy.