After Joy's Death: How C. S. Lewis Lost His Faith in the Rational Defense of Christianity

 

                                         Joy and Jack Lewis in Oxford at Their Home ("the Kilns")

                                          Joy Davidman at a Younger Age in New York City

After writing a series of posts on C. S. Lewis a month ago, I thought I had said enough about him for now.  But one unanswered question about him has continued to bang around my brain.  

William Nicholson raised the question in Shadowlands--his 1985 television screenplay, 1989 stage play, and 1993 screenplay for the motion picture (with Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as Joy Gresham).  Based on his careful reading of Lewis's writings, Nicholson tells the love story of Lewis and Gresham and Lewis's suffering when she dies from cancer after only three years of joyful marriage.

Nicholson's play has two acts (Nicholson 1991).  Act One begins with Lewis lecturing to a popular audience and asking: "If God loves us, why does He allow us to suffer so much?"  Lewis's answer is that God uses suffering to teach us that we need God--that we need God to save us from life in this world so that we can enter another world after death where we can live our "real life."  

In a subtle way, Nicholson's play leads us to wonder whether Lewis's personal experience with the pain of suffering Joy's death forced him to doubt this faith in God's goodness and love for human beings.  My hesitant conclusion is that in his grief, Lewis wavered in his Christian faith, but he did not lose it, although he did lose his faith that Christianity could be rationally defended as supported by evidence.  In other words, Lewis resolved that he would believe that God is good, and that eternal bliss is achieved in another world after death, even though all the evidence from his suffering contradicted this belief.

In Mere Christianity, Lewis wrote:  "I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it" (123).  After the death of Joy, Lewis changed his mind, because then he asked us to accept Christianity by faith even when the weight of the evidence is against it.  If I am right about this, then after a long life of trying to engage in the Reason/Revelation debate (particularly, in the Oxford Socratic Club), Lewis decided that such debate was impossible, because there is no common ground ("the weight of the evidence") on which rational debate could be conducted.

In the lecture at the beginning of Act One, Lewis asserts that while "God doesn't necessarily want us to be happy," "He wants us to be lovable."  And to make us lovable, God must use suffering to break through our selfishness.

"God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in the world, and that mechanism is suffering.  To put it another way, pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.  Why must it be pain?  Why can't He wake us more gently, with violins or laughter?  Because the dream from which we must be awakened is the dream that all is well."

"Now that is the most dangerous illusion of them all.  Self-sufficient is the enemy of salvation.  If you are self-sufficient, you have no need of God.  If you have no need of God, you do not seek Him.  If you do not seek Him, you will not find Him."

"God loves us, so He makes us the gift of suffering.  Through suffering, we release our hold on the toys of this world, and know our true good lies in another world."

"We're like blocks of stone, out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men.  The blows of His chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect.  The suffering in the world is not the failure of God's love for us; it is that love in action."

"For believe me, this world that seems to us so substantial is no more than the shadowlands.  Real life has not begun yet" (2-3).

In Act One, Nicholson tells the story of Jack and Joy becoming friends.  Joy had been a Jewish communist atheist in New York City who converted to Christianity, and who had been deeply influenced by reading Lewis's writings.  She was forced to divorce her husband because of his sexual affairs with other women and his drinking.  She moved to London, became a good friend of Lewis's, and then moved to Oxford to be close to Lewis.  When she discovered that her visa for staying in England would not be renewed, Lewis agreed to marry her so that she could have British citizenship.  They agreed that this was not a "real" marriage, but only a way to continue their friendship.  But the audience for the play and the movie can tell that they have fallen deeply into romantic love, although neither one will acknowledge this.

But then at the end of Act One, Joy is walking in her home and falls to the floor.  A bone in her leg has broken because she has a cancer that has spread into her skeleton.  Doctors will tell her that her cancer will probably kill her in a short time.

Act Two begins with Lewis delivering another popular lecture on suffering and the goodness of God that closely resembles the lecture at the beginning of Act One.  But Lewis starts this second lecture by reflecting on Joy's suffering:

"Recently, a friend of mine, a brave and Christian woman, collapsed in terrible pain.  One minute she seemed fit and well.  The next minute she was in agony.  She is now in the hospital, suffering from advanced bone cancer, and almost certainly dying.  Why?"

"I find it hard to believe that God loves her.  If you love someone, you don't want them to suffer.  You can't bear it.  You want to take their suffering onto yourself.  If even I feel that, why doesn't God?  Not just once in history, on the cross, but again and again?  Today.  Now."

He then goes on to make the same argument he had made in the first lecture about how God uses suffering to teach us that "our true good lies in another world."  But Nicholson has this note at the beginning of Act Two for whoever plays the part of Lewis: "As the talk proceeds, there are signs that he is using it to persuade himself of a belief that is beginning to slide.  However, at this stage, he hardly realizes this process himself" (59).

Through the rest of Act Two, we see the ever deeper crisis of faith for Lewis.  Lewis and a friend of his who is an Anglican priest pray that God will intervene to give Joy a miraculous recovery.  And indeed her cancer does go into remission, and her doctors say it looks like a miracle.  But Lewis tells Joy that "Miracles frighten me," because "I'm frightened of loving God too much for giving you back to me.  That way, I could just as easily hate God, later" (81).

After two years of delightful life together, the cancerous growth returns, and Joy dies.  Lewis is thrown into the deepest grief and he tells his friends that his faith makes no sense of what has happened.  He tells his brother Warnie: "I'm so terribly afraid.  Of never seeing her again.  Of thinking that suffering is just suffering after all.  No cause.  No purpose.  No pattern.  No sense.  Just pain, in a world of pain" (97).

As she was dying, Joy had worried about Jack's grief.  She told him: "What I'm trying to say is that pain, then, is part of this happiness, now.  That's the deal" (90).

Lewis repeats this thought from Joy in the last words of the play, when he says: "I find I can live with the pain, after all.  The pain, now, is part of the happiness, then.  That's the deal.  Only shadows, Joy" (100).

The movie differs in two ways.  In the play, Lewis is imagining himself speaking to Joy.  In the movie, he is speaking to Douglas, his stepson.  And in the movie, Lewis ends with "That's the deal."

By dropping the sentence "Only shadows, Joy," Nicholson might be implying that Lewis is wavering in his belief that this life is only "shadows" of the "real life" after death in another world.  That "the pain, now, is part of the happiness, then" is "the deal" in this life, and there's no promise of another life.

In any case, Lewis seems to have concluded that the Christian faith in the good and loving God cannot be defended rationally based on evidence.

Shortly before he moved to Cambridge University in 1954, Lewis read his last paper to the Oxford Socratic Club on April 30, 1953 (Hooper 1979: 170-172).  The paper was called "Faith and Evidence," and Professor H. H. Price, the Professor of Logic at Oxford who was an agnostic, responded to the paper.  Lewis's paper was later published under the title "On Obstinacy in Belief" (Lewis 2017).

Lewis began by noting that in some of the papers read to the Oxford Socratic Club, people contrasted the Christian attitude of believing without evidence or despite the evidence against it and the scientific attitude of proportioning the strength of one's belief to the evidence and withdrawing belief for which there is insufficient evidence.  If this were true, Lewis observed, these two groups of people would have nothing to say to one another, and neither side could comprehend the other.

But in fact, Lewis argued, this contrast is not true.  Usually, even when there is some evidence that appears to contradict Christian beliefs, there is also some favorable evidence.  Some of the favorable evidence is "in the form of external events: as when I go to see a man, moved by what I felt to be a whim, and find he has been praying that I should come to him that day" (2017, 25).  Therefore, answered prayer is an example of evidence favoring Christianity, even though it is not absolutely conclusive empirical proof.

In his essay on "The Efficacy of Prayer," Lewis referred to the miraculous recovery of Joy in answer to prayer as an example of this.  

"I have stood by the bedside of a woman whose thighbone was eaten through with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the disease in many other bones as well.  It took three people to move her in bed.  The doctors predicted a few months of life; the nurses (who often know better), a few weeks.  A good man laid his hands on her and prayed.  A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, through rough woodland) and the man who took the last X-ray photos was saying, 'These bones are as solid as rock.  It's miraculous" (2017: 2).

But, a few years after this essay was first published, and after Joy's death, Lewis wrote this in A Grief Observed, his notebook of his thoughts about grieving for her death:

"Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language.  What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, 'good'?  Doesn't all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite?  What have we to set against it?"

. . .

"What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. [Joy] and I offered and all the false hopes we had.  Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking; hopes encouraged, even forced upon, by false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle.  Step by step we were 'led up the garden path.'  Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture."

"I wrote that last night.  It was a yell rather than a thought.  Let me try it over again.  Is it rational to believe in a bad God?  Anyway, in a God so bad as all that?  The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile?" (42-43)

One sees here that while Lewis did not doubt God's existence, he did doubt His goodness, because all evidence was against it and in favor of God as the Cosmic Sadist.  So, in A Grief Observed, he wrote:  "Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God.  The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.  The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like.  Deceive yourself no longer.'" (18-19).

But then in the last lines of A Grief Observed, Lewis indicated that God's goodness would be vindicated by Joy's mystical union with God in Heaven:  "How wicked it would be, if we would, to call the dead back!  She said not to me but to the chaplain, 'I am at peace with God.'  She smiled, but not at me.  Poi si torno all' eterna fontana" (89).  The last line is from Canto 31 of Dante's Paradiso, where Dante described Beatrice looking at him for the last time in Paradise:  "So I prayed; and as distant as she was, she smiled and gazed at me.  Then she turned back to the Eternal Fountain."

But notice that Lewis must rely on Dante's poetic invention without offering any evidence supporting the belief in Joy's eternal bliss.

In some of her last words to Lewis, Joy professed to believe this, but she suggested a lack of confidence: "Only shadows, Jack.  That's what you're always saying.  Real life hasn't begun yet.  You'd just better be right" (91).

Joy and Jack believed this as a matter of blind faith even though the weight of the evidence was against it.  They had lost their faith in the rational defense of Christianity.

REFERENCES

Hooper, Walter.  1979.  "Oxford's Bonny Fighter."  In James T. Como, ed., C. S. Lewis a the Breakfast Table, and Other Reminiscences, 137-185.  New York: Macmillan.

Lewis, C. S.  1952.  Mere Christianity.  New York: Macmillan.

Lewis, C. S.  1989.  A Grief Observed.  New York: HarperCollins.

Lewis, C. S.  2017.  The World's Last Night, and Other Essays.  New York: HarperOne.

Nicholson, William.  1991.  Shadowlands.  New York: Penguin.