How did a guy named “Jack” go from being an atheistic World War I veteran to one of the 20th century’s greatest apologists? In this episode, Trent sits down with David Bates from Pints with Jack to find out everything we never knew about C.S. Lewis.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I am your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. A few weeks ago, I was reading comments relating to one of my interactions in the dialogues we’ve had here on the podcast, which by the way, your support at Trent Horn Podcast makes that possible. We’ve got future dialogues set up with people who believe Jesus never existed, hoping we can get a Satanist to come on the podcast around Halloween. You never know what we’ll end up discussing.
Trent Horn: But, your support is what makes the podcast possible. So, if you want to go and check that out, go to trenthornpodcast.com. I was reading the comments there, and one of the comments, I forget if it was under my discussion with Tom Rafferty on atheism or Steve Farrell on abortion, I think it was on atheism. The commenter said that my opponent had engaged in pure Bulverism, and I had never heard of that before. Our guest, who you’ve just heard off to the side, will tell us all about that and more.
Trent Horn: So I had to go and look it up. Bulverism is a term associated with C.S. Lewis, and there’s so many nuggets of wisdom related to C.S. Lewis. I thought it would be great this week to dedicate two shows to the man of letters, to someone who has brought the Christian faith, I would say two to millions of people, through his writings, through his radio plays, both his fiction and nonfiction works. Someone that Catholics should do a lot to understand more, and we have someone who will help us do that.
Trent Horn: So, welcoming him today is Mr. David Bates, who is the host of Pints With Jack. David, welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast.
David Bates: Thank you Trent, it’s lovely to be here.
Trent Horn: So you have a podcast about C.S. Lewis, it’s called Pints With Jack.
David Bates: Yes.
Trent Horn: What’s up with that?
David Bates: Well, it originally began life as the Eagle and Child, because that was the pub where C.S. Lewis used to drink. Unfortunately, when we came to try and find a domain name, we couldn’t get a good one. But prior to that, I had set up the Twitter and Instagram as Pints With Jack, as a little homage to Matt Fradd’s podcast.
Trent Horn: Pints With Aquinas.
David Bates: Pints With Aquinas. So then when we came to get a domain name and we couldn’t find the Eagle and Child, we thought, “Ah, let’s just get Pints With Jack.” But it also has a subtle effect of continually confusing Americans as to which is the English accent and which is the Australian accent, because we have similar sounding podcast names.
Trent Horn: Well, the Australian accent is just the criminal British accent, is what I thought it was. Although, honestly to compare them, I feel like Australian is to British, almost as Southern is to Midwest or Southwest. It’s almost like a Southerner’s British accent, it has kind of a twang to it.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative). What I tell people is you’ve got to listen for the inflection at the end of every sentence. Like you’re always going up, like you’re asking a question. That’s a real telltale sign that it’s Australian.
Trent Horn: So the Australians are the valley girl Brits-
David Bates: Kind of.
Trent Horn: Basically. Now we’re going to have to have Matt Fradd have that. What I noticed for Australian is, you see this a little bit in British accents, but in Australian, very distinct. There’s always R’s after every vowel. Every single vowel has an R after it.
David Bates: It’s also what they do, is they party with the vowels. When you get a diphthong, when you get a bunch of vowels together, they really ride them. So I would say something is great, Matt Fradd would say it’s great.
Trent Horn: Oh, so they’re really turning into the vowels, but it’s not a good idea, it’s a good idear. So notice the hidden R’s. If you want an Australian accent, put the R after the vowels. So we’re going to talk about C.S. Lewis, and some of our listeners, a few minutes ago when I brought up Bulverism, are probably wondering, “I hope Trent explains what Bulverism is,” because I was baffled by it. But I love these nuggets of wisdom that come from C.S. Lewis. So, what does that refer to?
David Bates: It’s really a form of the ad hominem fallacy, in so far as you’re assuming that your opponent is wrong, and then you spend all of your time psychologizing them, you’re explaining why they’re wrong. So the classic argument is, “Well, you only believe in God, because you’re afraid of death or you want control over other people.” That’s Bulverism. You’re not actually responding to the argument that somebody is bringing, you’re just immediately dismissing it and then you are explaining their real secret motivation behind their position.
Trent Horn: Right, so it’s like when I was engaging with Steve Farrell and it’s just saying, “Look, you just want to erase women, you just want to oppress women. You’re wrong that abortion is killing babies, because you want to oppress women and you want to do this.” So, Bulverism is when, instead of choosing to show why a person’s argument is wrong, you just assume that they’re wrong and then list their character flaws and the nefarious reasons behind their arguments.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: Okay, so that’s helpful there, and C.S. Lewis coined that term.
David Bates: Yes, he did.
Trent Horn: He coins a wonderful amount of terms, and we’ll get into some of those as well in the second episode, because today I want to focus on the secret life of C.S. Lewis. I thought about calling this episode You Don’t Know Jack. I know that’s kind of what we’re running with, but I was worried people would look at the podcast title and be like, “What is this about?” Whereas, The Secret Life of C.S. Lewis fits a bit better, though I think You Don’t Know Jack works, because, one, people call him Jack, but I thought he was C.S. Lewis. How does that work?
David Bates: Well, he was baptized Clive Staples Lewis, but when he was very young, around the age of four, his dog died, Jacksy. For whatever reason, from then onwards, he refused to respond to any of the name other than Jacksy. That eventually gets shortened to Jack, and that’s what all of his friends always called him.
Trent Horn: So Jack was a nickname, and then he just kind of kept that for a long time.
David Bates: That’s why our podcast is called Pints With Jack.
Trent Horn: Alrighty. So today what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about the secret life of C.S. Lewis, the man people never knew. Most people who’ve heard of C.S. Lewis know he is the author of Mere Christianity. So his most famous nonfiction work would doubtlessly be Mere Christianity. But he’s also the author of several other nonfiction works related to Christianity.
Trent Horn: So things like The Abolition of Man, The Problem of Pain, The Great Divorce, Screwtape Letters. Screwtape though is … the genre there starts to blend into fiction a little bit, even with Great Divorce. He’s also an author of fiction. His most famous, the Perelandra series, the Space Trilogy. But his most famous fictional book series are The Chronicles of Narnia.
David Bates: Yeah.
Trent Horn: So that’s the most, I think many people will know, they’ll say, “Oh, well, he was that delightful English man who wrote these great works to build up people’s faith, whether it’s through apologetics or through fiction to present the Christian faith to people, and he had a nice way of reaching the common man.” I want to dig a little bit deeper then into C.S. Lewis today, and then tomorrow, the next time we sit down, we’re going to talk about some of the bits of wisdom he gives us for explaining and defending the Christian faith. Which are still relevant today, just as much as they were 60, 70 years ago when he first wrote them.
Trent Horn: So the first bit is this, I said he’s that delightful English man who wrote these books, and you tell me right here he wasn’t English.
David Bates: No. A lot of people make that mistake.
Trent Horn: What, what?
David Bates: There are a few remaining audio recordings of him and he has a very plummy accent, but he was actually born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. But he has the accent that he has, because he was educated in England from a very young age, and he lived in Oxford most of his life.
Trent Horn: So he’s born in Belfast though, it’s in Northern Ireland. Here’s the thing, I have a hard time, and you can help me out with this. There’s the United Kingdom, the British Isles and England, and I can never keep them straight. So if he’s born in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, he’s not English, but does that make him Irish or British? What would you say he is?
David Bates: You could chop it up a few different ways. He is Ireland born, but he was a member of the United Kingdom, since he was part of that Northern part of Ireland. Because you have the British Isles, those are just the geographical shapes, those two major islands, one is Britain and the other is the Island of Ireland.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: Britain has got three countries, England, Wales and Scotland. Then when you add Northern Ireland, that together makes the United Kingdom.
Trent Horn: Okay, so when you talk about Britain, you’re talking about England, Scotland and Wales?
David Bates: Technically. Lewis actually said nobody refers to Britain apart from foreigners and politicians. It’s also just a very all encompassing term. People would say, “I have a British accent.” I technically have an English accent, but I know what they mean.
Trent Horn: So, okay, right, because somebody from Wales is going to sound different from somebody who is in … because technically, Sean Connery has a British accent-
David Bates: Exactly.
Trent Horn: By the standard. But Sean Connery’s accent sounds a lot different than you Moneypenny.
David Bates: Even when he’s playing a Russian.
Trent Horn: Right, exactly. So he was born in Northern Ireland in 1898, but then later is educated in England and Oxford. One of the notes here you shared with me is that he experienced a tragedy as a child, and he wasn’t always a Christian. So tell us about his early life.
David Bates: So Lewis’ his mother died of cancer when he was about the age of 10, and he has a spiritual autobiography called Surprised by Joy, and he writes very movingly about it. He says, “All settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, they disappeared from my life.” Shortly afterwards, Jack was sent to England to boarding school, and he really hated England from the very first moment.
Trent Horn: What did he hate about it?
David Bates: He didn’t like the way people spoke, he didn’t like the unfamiliar, whether they had stone walls versus fences, everything was just different. It was just alien to him and it just seems very strange. But he went through his schooling and he progressively became an atheist. It was for a couple of reasons. One was that he really loved mythology, particularly the Norse myths. But in his education, he was told that all paganism is false, all of Christianity is true. Not only did that not ring true to him, well, if the pagan mythology is just made up, well then, so is Christianity. They’re just myths, lies breathed through silver, as he described it.
Trent Horn: Right, so he would be like a lot of modern atheists today who say, “Well, I just believe in one less God than you do. You don’t believe in Thor, you don’t believe in Zeus. Well, I just believe in one less one.” So he basically, he was adopting this modern atheist argument, even in the early 20th century.
David Bates: The other argument he adopted is also a very common one, it’s the problem of pain and suffering.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: He would often quote the Epicurean poet Lucretius who wrote, “Had God designed the world, it would not be a world so frail and faulty as we see.” He couldn’t reconcile the idea of a good God with the world that he saw around him and also the suffering that he himself had experienced.
Trent Horn: After the death of his mother.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: So he’s going through boarding school, he’s an atheist, after school though, he goes and he fights in World War I.
David Bates: Yes. It surprised a lot of people to know that he’s a veteran. He actually arrived at the front lines on his 19th birthday.
Trent Horn: Oh, wow.
David Bates: That’s quite a present.
Trent Horn: So you get these atheist already has a pretty hardened view about the world. You go into World War I, I mean, honestly, even compared to World War II, that was probably the most devastating war in the history of the 20th century. Just in its brutality, with the trench warfare, chemical warfare. I’m sure that probably had an effect on him.
David Bates: Absolutely. But he said he never sank so low as to pray.
Trent Horn: So even still, people sometimes say there’s no atheists in foxholes, but there are people who are still atheists and even the horror of war kind of solidifies their cynicism towards the world. They just see all this evil and they can’t see God. Though that changes, because afterwards, he goes back to Oxford and he really doubles down on the schooling.
David Bates: Oh, yes. He gets three firsts. He gets it in Greek and Latin literature, philosophy and ancient history, and lastly in English. Although it doesn’t warm my heart to know he was just terrible at mathematics. You have this very great man, but with this very great failing, he just couldn’t add numbers together.
Trent Horn: Well, you know, I appreciate that. That helps me, because I am not very good at math, and I think, honestly, it deals with the teachers you have. In high school, I had an amazing history teacher and that set me on my love of history. So that’s allowed things to go very well for me to really enjoy studying ancient history, connecting to the faith in that way. I didn’t have a strong teachers in mathematics though, and so when I was doing my math work, it just didn’t click for me.
Trent Horn: So it’s so funny, now I can do history, I can do English, but math just still boggles my mind, we can’t be perfect at everything. It’s the same with Lewis.
David Bates: What’s quite delightful, is you’ll find regularly in his books, he’ll use mathematics as an example. In particular, that if you’re doing a sum and you make a mistake, there’s no good in just carrying on, you’re just going to propagate the error. You have to go back to where you made the mistake and fix it there.
Trent Horn: He knew that from experience, trying to do all his math homework.
David Bates: Exactly.
Trent Horn: All right, so he’s going, he’s a very learned individual, has all these degrees, but he’s not Christian yet. He doesn’t even believe in God. What changes?
David Bates: Well, over time he becomes discontent with the imaginative and explanatory power of atheism. Remember earlier when I said that he just saw this problem of pain and he couldn’t resolve it, he saw the world as cruel and unjust?
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: In Mere Christianity he says, “But it then starts to dawn on me where I even got this idea of just and unjust. You don’t call a line crooked, unless you have an idea of what a straight line is.” So to what was he comparing the universe when he called it unjust? This started him down a road, a number of philosophical evolutions before he finally accepted the inevitable, that there was a God.
Trent Horn: That’s how he opens Mere Christianity. Mere Christianity was not a book originally, it was a series of radio addresses-
David Bates: During World War II.
Trent Horn: So he was invited just to give these to motivate people, essentially?
David Bates: Yes, the BBC, one of the producers there had read his book, Miracles, had been very impressed and then invited him to come and give a series of talks on whatever he wanted. Lewis wanted to present, to the British public, here again British-
Trent Horn: Oh, because it’s radio, even people in Wales are hearing this as Ireland, yeah.
David Bates: But he wanted to present to the public Christianity, because he didn’t feel like anybody had ever really presented to them the faith. As you say, this is how he begins. He begins by going back to the basics and this idea that there is this moral law, that there is this right and this wrong. This is what we’re using when we say that somebody is right or wrong.
Trent Horn: Nowadays, the moral argument, it still has a lot of force with people, but I feel like it would have had so much more force, he’s giving these talks during World War II where it’s a fight of good against evil. That the idea that if there was a chance Hitler could have won, that he wouldn’t be right just because he won, and deep down people would know. They wouldn’t just be if Hitler got there, you wouldn’t say in England, “Oh, all right, Heil Hitler, I guess, you won. So now we have to do what you say.” You’re still wrong, even if you have power.
Trent Horn: So I think that, more so or nowadays, I’ve been to Catholic high schools where students can’t say it’s a fact that Hitler was wrong. It’s sad.
David Bates: And worrying.
Trent Horn: It’s very much so. But when you’re actually hiding in bunkers from Blitzkriegers and bombing raids on your home, it takes a lot of different meaning. What’s helpful for me also, is that when I’ve written on the problem of evil, I kind of call this the backdoor approach to the existence of God. You’re upset by evil, but here’s the thing, that implies there’s a way things ought to be.
David Bates: It’s funny, because people resist that and resist it and resist it, but then they’ll immediately reveal that’s what they truly believe in their reactions rather than their actions. So it might be okay for me to swipe this person’s iPod, but if somebody swiped mine, suddenly I feel this righteous indignation and I’m going to say those immortal words, “But that was wrong.”
Trent Horn: Yeah, and not just, “I don’t like it or I think it’s wrong,” we speak about it, because some people will say, “What if somebody stole your iPod, your iPhone?” Well, I would be mad and I would do something about it, because it’s mine. But you don’t speak in ways as if you’re expressing a personal preference, it’s more an objective state that you have been wronged. Someone has broken some kind of law that transcends you and the other person. So that’s what Lewis is getting at. So, all right, so he sees that there’s a moral law and there’s God, but you still have a big distance between that and Christianity.
David Bates: Well, to get there, we’ve really got to talk about his friends, because Lewis was a guy who loved good beer, good tobacco, and good conversation, and his friends would play a huge role in his life. Probably the most famous is J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Hobbit and Lord of the rings. Actually, Tolkien fans have Lewis to thank for those books, because Lewis was the one that kept pushing him to finish them and eventually publish them.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: He also had friends like Hugo Dyson, Owen Barfield, and together they formed the Inklings. It was this literary discussion group where they would read each other’s work and discuss ideas.
Trent Horn: What denominations do we have here? Because Tolkien is Catholic, or the others Catholic? Or do you have a mixture here?
David Bates: You have quite a range. You’ve got a lot of Anglicans and then you’ve got a Catholic in Tolkien and his son Christopher, and you also have some people with some, you would say there were spiritualists, or they had spiritual beliefs. They were supernaturalists, that’s probably a better word.
Trent Horn: So they’re more united by their intellectual pursuits, than of where they’ve ended up in their beliefs. They’re all people who just enjoy thinking, writing, intellectualism.
David Bates: That was what bound them together. In his book, The Four Loves, Lewis, when he’s talking about friendship, he says it’s the moment when one person says to another, “What, you too? I thought I was the only one.” That they care about the same things.
Trent Horn: Right. Aristotle once said that a friendship is one soul dwelling in two bodies. The idea here that friends are people who we are united to by passions, by experiences, by shared mutual goals, whether it’s intellectual, social, whatever it may be. I love the way you’ve put that there, a friend is somebody say, “Oh, you too?” Then you realize this, but your deepest friends are ones who share your same passions, essentially.
David Bates: Yeah.
Trent Horn: So these people were his friends and they moved him towards Christianity.
David Bates: Yes. So after he had converted to theism and his account in Surprised by Joy is lovely, when he describes himself as the most reluctant convert in all of England. He really did not want to believe in God, but he reasoned his way to it.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: But after he’d converted to theism, he started to suspect that Christianity might be true. But it was after a late all night conversation with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, that really removed the final obstacle. Earlier I said that Lewis regarded Christianity is just another myth, lies breathed through silver. So very pretty, but not true. But what Dyson and Tolkien helped him see is that Christianity is the true myth, that prior to Christianity, man had been reaching out to God, searching, and had this idea of the dying and rising God. If you dig into the early church fathers, they say something very similar about Greek philosophy, that it prepared the pagan world for Christianity.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: Well, they said it was something very similar with myth, but it was true. Myth became fact in Jesus of Nazareth.
Trent Horn: Right, and that would make sense, that deep down these people are all connected by the moral law, for example, that the most basic understanding of right and wrong. Another thing people are connected by is an understanding of what is due to other people. So some people say that Christianity is just like every other religion, you’ve got a “cult of human sacrifice.” But what’s funny to me is that every religion in the world, people have understood the idea of sacrifice. There is a deep human desire, that when you come to realize God made you in the world, there’s this gratitude, you want to give something back to God.
Trent Horn: It’s just a normal thing, I’ve been given all of this, through no merit of my own, what can I offer back? So, I think that it’s helpful for Lewis to see, it’s not contradictory, it’s complimentary, how other religions and mythologies see the truth of Christianity, it’s kind of veiled within human nature itself.
David Bates: Yes, he said it’s actually what you would expect. That was one of the great powers of Christianity, it made sense of his experience when he found these desires within him, he found them clearly expressed in Christianity, but also the faint shadows of them in pagan religions.
Trent Horn: So then after that he becomes Christian, he gives these radio addresses that are later compiled as Mere Christianity. He wrote a lot of other books too. So tell us a bit more about those.
David Bates: He wrote, I want to say about 30 books, and they are of many, many different literary styles. The other thing that I always like to try and remember as I’m reading one of his books, is that he wrote this with a dip pen, wasn’t with a nice little laptop where he’s tapping away, it’s with a dip pen. So, every sentence or so you’d have to go and replenish the ink.
Trent Horn: But just imagine trying to edit and go back and change things. I wouldn’t be able to write on that writing style.
David Bates: But yet Lewis produced apologetics, fairytales, science fiction, essays, poetry, as well as all of his academic work in literary criticism.
Trent Horn: Do you think that his genius really, and he writes across all these different styles, but what unites them is just he’s able to get inside other people’s heads to communicate to them. He can pick any style, because he just knows how to communicate.
David Bates: Also he was so well-read.
Trent Horn: Yes.
David Bates: He had an incredible memory and he had read, basically, the canon of Western literature.
Trent Horn: That’s important, because many people will say, “How do I become a better evangelist? How do I go about sharing the faith?” It isn’t just reading Catholic stuff that makes you better at that, it’s just reading, understanding the corpus of knowledge, so that you can connect with people. That’s why what’s funny is, you could almost call Christopher Hitchens, the anti-C.S. Lewis.
David Bates: Very much.
Trent Horn: Because if you remember the late Christopher Hitchens, he has these articulate ways, these rhetorical flourishes, to tear down the Christian faith, and he’s able to make all these literary and historical references when he does so, which makes it somewhat charming. So it’s funny to understand C.S. Lewis, maybe that’s another … we should talk, there’s a book right there. C.S. Lewis and the anti-C.S. Lewis, see, there’s an idea right there. I’ll add that to my list.
Trent Horn: I want to write enough books one day to maybe beat Peter Kreeft. I don’t think that’ll ever happen, because he keeps writing books. I think he’ll even keep writing books after he’s passed this mortal coil. But maybe I could go past C.S. Lewis, that’s a more reasonable goal.
David Bates: Okay, that’s quite a goal still.
Trent Horn: So, yes, although, I mean, it’s not just quantity, of course, it’s quality. The things he writes, they really connect with people. I know this might be a cliche question, but of the Lewis corpus, what do you enjoy the most or what has affected you the most?
David Bates: Well, what would affected me the most is probably The Chronicles of Narnia. Because like most people, they were read to me as a child and they got into my blood and they got into my bones, and they really shaped the way that I thought. Well, I didn’t even realize it at the time. Because this is one of the reasons that Lewis wrote in some of these other genres, because he knew the power of story, and about how in a story, you can slip past the readers, he called them watchful dragons. Basically their prejudice, and start communicating an idea, a fresh and, in particular, Christianity with a renewed potency.
Trent Horn: You know, it’s funny, that happens today, though in reverse of course, that many people won’t take their kids, obviously, to see a documentary on atheism, but they’ll let their kids listen to Pullman’s, His Dark Materials, which are another anti-C.S. Lewis. It’s essentially an anti-Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials is a story about atheism told through the similar kinds of imagery. But Christians can do that in the same way, that we want to share our faith, but people will immediately, “Oh, it’s a Christian movie? Christian book? I don’t …”
Trent Horn: To be fair to them, many Christian films and books are terrible, so I actually sympathize with them. But to have good art that doesn’t bang you over the head with its message, that’s what Lewis is a genius at.
David Bates: Exactly, exactly.
Trent Horn: Well, what else more is there about The Chronicles of Narnia? We know that it’s a story of children who go through a wardrobe to find this kingdom ruled over by a lion named Aslan, who’s a Christ figure. Lot of allegory and imagery here, but many people may not know, first of all, a lot of people only know The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, they don’t know that it’s a series.
David Bates: Yeah.
Trent Horn: There’s other things that they may not have picked up on dealing with this series.
David Bates: There are seven other books. My friends at Lamppost Listener, they’re going through them chapter by chapter, which is a lovely way to re-experience them if you read them as a child. But one thing I do have to say, a lot of people just regard them as Christian allegory. Lewis was very emphatic, this is not allegory. He called this an imaginative supposal. He says, “Well, what if there was a land like Narnia with these talking beasts? And what if it also had some kind of fall and Christ needed to incarnate and be sacrificed there? What might that look like?” That’s how we get the Chronicles of Narnia.
David Bates: So you have some books that very much parallel the Christian story, in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, you’ve effectively have Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: In the Magician’s Nephew, you actually have a Genesis accounts, the creation of Narnia, and in The Last Battle you have something akin to the apocalypse. But all the way throughout, Lewis telling you a story and it’s just being influenced by his Christianity and trying to answer this, what if? What would happen if Christ came to Narnia? But even then, there are more layers.
David Bates: About 10 years ago, Dr. Michael Ward, who happens to be a convert to Catholicism and is one of the priests in the Anglican Ordinariate, he published a book called Planet Narnia. In it he argues very convincingly, that Lewis based The Chronicles of Narnia upon the medieval cosmos. So each of the books corresponds to one of the Seven Heavens, one of the seven planets.
Trent Horn: You said he’s well-read in medieval literature, English, literary corpus, that would make sense for him to incorporate these ideas.
David Bates: Oh, when you start reading his book, you then start seeing it everywhere in his Cosmic Trilogy. With Ransom, he’s dealing with these same things, in The Discarded Image, he speaks about the medieval heavens. So then when you come to The Chronicles of Narnia, and for example, Prince Caspian is based on Mars. So Mars was associated with war and he was previously related to trees, vegetation deity. You then start reading Prince Caspian, you start seeing these things everywhere. It’s like he’s setting a key signature for music, you see the themes and the motifs come through. This had remained hidden from Lewis scholars, up until the point Dr. Ward discovered it.
Trent Horn: So he includes mythology, medieval literature and understandings of even astronomy and sciences, but Christianity is still at the forefront. Yet for Lewis, he stops essentially at Mere Christianity, that he was not Catholic, and there may be a specific reason why.
David Bates: That’s another thing that surprises a lot of people, my mother always assumed he was Catholic, so I had to be the one to break the news.
Trent Horn: Well, he even said that he understood purgatory, not like the Catholic view, but just God would want to essentially wash us up before we enter the banquet hall, or it’s like going to the dentist, basically, it might hurt a little bit. So he’s friendly to Catholic concepts, but never became Catholic.
David Bates: Yes, and he also went to [inaudible 00:27:48] confession, to an Anglican priest. He believed in praying for the dead, he spoke about the sacraments and had spoken very volted terms about the blessed sacrament. But he didn’t really like to be pushed on it, but when he was, he cited the Pope and the veneration of Our Lady, as his main complaints about the church in Rome. However, Tolkien who was Catholic, he cited, he called it Lewis’ Ulster-ier motive, so Ulster is Northern Ireland, effectively.
Trent Horn: Oh, this is a play on words, like an ulterior motive.
David Bates: But an Ulster-ier motive.
Trent Horn: Okay.
David Bates: He believed that the prejudice that was taught to Lewis as a child, never entirely left him. When you read Surprised by Joy, Lewis himself even says that when he first met Tolkien, he was told as a child to never trust a papist. When he entered the English department to never trust a philologist, and here was Tolkien who was both of them.
Trent Horn: Right, philologist is a study of language. So never trust a papist, never trust a philologist. Here’s Tolkien, the papal philologist, who becomes this friend and opens him up to Christianity. It’s almost like he steps on the doorstep of Catholicism, but he just couldn’t get past just a few hurdles before the end of his life.
David Bates: Joseph [inaudible 00:29:02] has written a very good book on this. When you ask Peter Kreeft, why did he never convert? He just sees him as a gateway drug, because so many people have cited Lewis as their reason for ultimately converting to Catholicism.
Trent Horn: Which may not have happened if Lewis became Catholic today, a lot of Protestants may not read him.
David Bates: Exactly.
Trent Horn: This is funny, because Randall Rauser and I had a talk a while back about why would God call everyone to be Catholic? I believe he does, I don’t believe God directly wills for anyone not to know the fullness of his revelation. But I do believe that God can still bring a tremendous amount of good, even from someone who rejects the fullness of his revelation, like Billy Graham’s preaching or C.S. Lewis’ writing. That just because God can bring good from someone who chooses to not be Catholic, doesn’t mean that God doesn’t want that for everybody.
David Bates: Absolutely. Thanks to that, we now have Peter Kreeft, Dwight Longenecker, Thomas Howard and even Lewis’ own secretary, Walter Hooper. They’re now all Catholic, and they cite Lewis’ works as leading them to that doorstep.
Trent Horn: Let’s talk about one … Let’s see, well, one more point, and then we’ll pick up tomorrow to go through some more of these points, and then also the wisdom in his writings. You said that Lewis won most of the arguments in his life, except for one. What’s the most famous argument you think he lost?
David Bates: Well, this is Walter Hooper, Lewis’ secretary in the final months of his life, he said that he lost every argument he had with Lewis, because he was a very smart guy, except one. Lewis was convinced that after his death, nobody would continue reading his work. But Hooper, he disagreed, and not only did history vindicate him, Hooper himself actually got to have a hand in making sure that happened.
David Bates: Because following Lewis’ death, Hooper effectively took care of the literary estate, and what he would do, is he would go to publishers and offer them some unpublished works of C.S. Lewis. They could have it, as long as they republished two of his older works. So what that did is it kept all of Lewis’ books in print.
Trent Horn: Okay. So by doing that, it’s kind of the package deal, it keeps it out there long enough for people to be able to rediscover it. Of course, this happens a lot in England. Do you know what made him more popular in the United States? If there’s anything particular that helped to drive that.
David Bates: There are several books on this phenomenon, because Lewis was exceptionally popular here. It’s actually interesting seeing the shift around in the denominations who particularly loved him.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: Because today, you will ultimately find the evangelicals, in particular, he is effectively their patron saint of apologetics.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: But you see that shift over the course of even his own lifetime and then after his death. It was very often from the various champions within those denominations, introducing their own people to the works of Lewis. I’d also say Lewis is just a very versatile writer. When Catholics read him, we just naturally assume that he’s Catholic, and the same thing happens when Presbyterians read him. Apart from anything else, he’s just an excellent communicator and teaches us a good way of doing apologetics.
Trent Horn: That is what we’re going to talk about on our next episode, all the great ways to defend and explain the basics of Christianity from an artful communicator like C.S. Lewis. So be sure to stay with us for our next episode, our next chat with David Bates, the host of Pints With Jack. We’re going to be talking about the wisdom of C.S. Lewis. You’re not going to want to miss it, check out that episode.
Trent Horn: Be sure to comment, leave a comment, and let us know more of what you’d like to hear at trenthornpodcast.com. Thank you guys for being with us today, and I hope you all have a very blessed day.
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