Part 1: What Is This Post About?
This is a book review (of sorts) for “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis, a PDF version of which can be found free here. More specifically, this is for the audiobook version included in the C.S. Lewis Essential Audio Library, which can be bought on Amazon here. First published in 1952, this book is older than most of the Motte audience.
Even so, and to put the bottom line up early- I recommend “Mere Christianity” for anyone with the time to listen, be it during commutes or chores, to an exceptionally articulate Christian try to express his view of what Christianity distills down to at its most common shared elements. This is the ‘mere’ Christianity that specific denominations build from, but which is also distinct from non-Christianity. It also has a lot to say, albeit accidentally and indirectly, about the modern culture war.
I recommend it to practicing Christians who might appreciate a reminder of the sort of commonalities that are/used to be seen as common despite doctrinal disputes. I recommend it to non-practicing ‘cultural’ Christians who might appreciate a reflection on what parts of their culture are influenced by Christian thought, and what parts are not. I recommend it to non-Christians as a glimpse into the Christian mindset by a theologian deliberately trying to communicate that mindset to an audience that is assumed to not share it. I even recommend it to atheists, who C.S. Lewis engages with specific consideration. He is certainly familiar with many of the older anti-theist arguments, and even if you do not find the counterarguments as compelling as he did, you should at least know of them.
Most of all, I recommend “Mere Christianity” to The Motte, for its commentary on culture war issues and human dynamics that are so applicable in the present despite being written with the mid-last century in mind.
This is also an endorsement for the audio library version especially. Having both read the text and listened to it, I can attest that this is a work where a good narrator elevates the material. Mere Christianity uses a great deal of metaphors and personal engagement with the audience to make its argument, and this works far better with a skilled narrator than someone trying figure the intended tone of unfamiliar text. Given Lewis’s frequent techniques of leading the listener down a train of thought before doubling back to some part of it, the verbal context can make it clearer than powering through the text might.
This is not surprising, as Mere Christianity started as a radio lecture series during WW2. During the German Blitz bombings of England, C.S. Lewis was brought onto the BBC to talk to the British public about faith. These audio-lectures were recorded and adapted into text, and in this text was adapted back into audio. Given how the transition from verbal to written communication inevitably loses some nuance, something that was inevitably lost is in a sense regained with the re-transition to audio. This is poetically appropriate for the subject matter.
Finally, this endorsement will encourage you to not think the price tag is onerous. While it may feel hard to justify a bit over $40 USD for a single (old) book you can get for free, the broader audio-library is a bit under 40 hours and includes other C.S. Lewis works like The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, and other works. At roughly $1 an hour of listening and post-listen contemplations, this is a better money-to-time-entertainment that most.
And with that overly long endorsement out of the way, on to the review.
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Part 2: What Makes “Mere Christianity” Recommendable to The Motte? (And With What Caveats?)
The parts of Mere Christianity I think the Motte in general would most appreciate, regardless of their stance on Christianity, is the exceptional and self-aware use of non-technical language to communicate, the significant emphasis on virtue ethics in regards to the timeless human condition, and the appreciation of a clearly intelligent person providing a position with charity for those who would and will disagree. If Lewis was living contemporary, he would be the sort of writer that- if not a member of the Motte- would probably be the sort of writer Motte members would likely regularly rise in discussion as expanding understanding through insights.
These endorsements come with the caveats of an arguable (though deliberate) use of metaphors rather than technical language, some unquestionably anachronistic/dated views, and of course a lack of materialist proof of God. (He does engage the topic. I won’t claim you will find it convincing.)
I caution this caveat by advising against approaching this with a determination to discredit. In the Mottian sense, engage charitably. Lewis has some relevant words on how the meaning of words shifts over time and how mentality shapes perception, and he is being charitable enough towards the skeptical audience to warrant charity in turn. That said, charity with Lewis’s takes does not require Gellman amnesia of the parts you may strongly disagree with towards the parts you know less about.
On to the merits.
As both an author and a speaker, Lewis is incredibly aware- and honestly up front- about the subtle shifts that come with careless or deliberately misleading choice of words.
Lewis makes clear and distinct arguments about how semantic contexts and insinuations have changed meanings over time. He makes the distinction between ‘a good man’ and ‘a good Christian,’ of how the common understanding of various virtues and sins have changed over time, and so on. Given that he was writing in the mid-20th century from a perspective formed most by the early 20th century, the language games he raises from nearly a century ago remind us of even greater drift since. Lewis is very clearly trying to not argue by insinuation, and at many times will variously pre-emptively clarify against potential misunderstanding, or circle around to how something could be misunderstood.
Lewis also makes deliberate and effective use of metaphor rather than technical/doctrinal language. This can come to a point of feeling like overreliance, but this is part of the deliberate effort to not rely on technical terminology or language only the already familiar will understand. Part of the why Lewis makes as good use of metaphors as he does- but also why it may feel over-leveraged- is that he is consistent and clear that the metaphor is a limited tool, not a literalism or last word on any doctrinal issue. If the metaphor feels like it’s undercut by some context of the metaphor, he freely and proactively encourages you to disregard it. This is positive in the sense that Lewis is making limited arguments more carefully but can be negative if you feel he’s not committing to a specific position enough, especially on controversial topics. This is expected, and he warns against it in his preface. Engage charitably, and it works better as the tool of understanding the point he is trying to make.
The second basis of endorsement is the emphasis on virtue ethics and the human condition.
Starting with the latter, Lewis speaks from a position of intellectual, and moral, humility. He is not appealing to his own credentials, or any sense of dogmatic or moral superiority. He may believe he is right, but he is not making an argument to ‘prove you wrong.’ Agreeing with Lewis is not a precondition for engaging further with the text. He is up front with the sort of personal and moral failings he talks about. He confesses easily to his own temper when he makes a point on the shortness of others, of doubts and questions, and so on. He is never resolving a point in terms of ‘this is so because Christianity says so.’
This is because, as much as religious ethics are associated with deontological ethical systems (duty-based, often derived from God), Lewis speaks far more in terms of virtue-ethics. Under virtue ethics, a trait can be virtuous in moderation but become a flaw in excess or deficiency. A classical, more secular example is how bravery can be cowardness in shortage, but foolhardiness in excess. However, Lewis makes the point of how even virtues can be this way, where an excess of virtue can become twisted into something more, and worse, even as the person doing so feels they are all the more virtuous for this Christian virtue. Humility to the degree that one knows they are so humble can become a source of poisonous pride over those less humble and more overtly proud.
This is where Lewis begins to speak on timeless human nature in ways that we would recognize as tropes of the culture war today. He does not use the term ‘virtue signaling,’ but you will recognize it. He does not use the term ‘march through the institutions’- a march that in the American sense began in earnest after his writings- but you will recognize his points about how changes in social norms and institutions have twisted meanings and understandings to allow new preferences. He does not speak of political tribes, but you will recognize when he speaks of political self-righteousness, and how hatred of that self-righteousness in others can spawn it in oneself.
Lewis does so with the sort of meta-framing awareness and metaphors to illuminate this that would be familiar with anyone familiar and/or moved by Scott and the broader rationalist-sphere luminaries should recognize. This may not be a coincidence. For example- in Scott’s classic I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, Scott makes a metaphor about how an Emperor gets no religious merit points for tolerating gays, transgenders, and so on when the Emperor has no issue or objection to them. Lewis makes a similarly structured, but secular-focused, metaphor on the merit of not-burning witches if one does not believe Witches pose any real harm to people. Both share similar concerns about how people approach moral principles, the intents they do so with, and the difference between a difference in principles and a difference in claimed facts. However, Lewis’s version was penned a good half century earlier. I don’t know if Scott was aware or influenced by it.
The point here is less about Lewis on the culture war, or even Christianity, and more on how Lewis approaches metaphysical structures and meta-context of organization. Lewis is writing from someone who may not have had the same words as the current audience for describing social structures, but he would recognize the discussion on social tensions, and efforts to change social norms one way or another. Some of the terms that he use may seem anachronistic of even quaint- Lewis does seem to believe in a literal entity we call the Devil/Satan as a corrupting force, as opposed to the far more rationally justifiable / observable / attributable villainous actors of the Cathedral / [Progressive/MAGA] movements / etc. Clearly, we are wiser and better informed of the context in our current era.
But more importantly Lewis- however imperfectly, and however imprecisely- has thoughts on dynamics that are often of interest on The Motte. Even if you don’t agree with him on the specifics of the conclusion, he can provide them charitably and interestingly enough to be entertaining.
On the demerits. What to say that’s not repetitive?
Lewis’s use of metaphors is a double-edged sword, to use one more. It can greatly assist with understanding a point he is trying to make. They are generally well constructed and appropriately used with limited scope. They are used in the way that good assumptions are used- clearly, purposely, but with the willingness to abandon them if they are unhelpful.
It may result in a sense of there not being enough there. The plus side of Lewis not arguing from the Bible as an ultimate authority is that it can come off as a delightfully constructed but questionably hollow sophistry. Not ‘sophistry’ in the sense of manipulation and misdirection, but rather a delightfully complicated model that builds off itself, but theory that one can doubt will survive reality, or even reflect it. Even if you find the arguments interesting, they may lack the sort of citations or tie-ins to real events and real denominations of Christianity that would normally bolster such claims.
I do believe this is to some degree unavoidable based on design constraints, as opposed to an unintended flaw of someone who didn’t think of them. Lewis is open- at least in the preface which is admittedly retrospective to the initial publishing. He was working under certain structural limitations that are reasonable to have, which can reasonably frustrate people who wish he didn’t. Lewis is not speaking about any specific denomination of Christianity, so he is not citing from any specific denomination. Lewis is avoiding the most controversial and friction-point disputes of doctrine in order to not distract from his points, and so he is not taking a position on controversial and frictional points.
But there are also points where you listen to what Lewis says, and as with any position from a century ago, it will reflect biases and views which may be worse than anachronistic. When you read or listen to these, and feel they are very clearly wrong, you may rightly wonder what else he is wrong about. This is fair, within reason.
A more benign example of this anachronism is his view on patriotism, of which a good number of people nowadays have a far more negative view then he, which is clearly a (measured) positivism. Given the selection bias for Lewis being selected to make this in the first place, this may not be surprising but may be disappointing. A more cringe-worthy view of this is his characterization of Christian marriage, including an expectation to a wife defer to the husband. I won’t defend or justify it- he tries to enough, given it is his longest chapter- but I will say I felt it was also his weakest chapter, not least because he is clearly speaking on it from the perspective as an outsider (a lifelong bachelor at that point in his life, i.e. never married), as opposed to something clearly had more personal experience with (morally imperfect human nature).
I will reassure (or disappoint) that Lewis does not drop any racial slurs or outrageous cultural prejudices in his work. He is not exactly expressing contempt for other religions or unbelievers either, like some Crusader / Conquistador / Zealot stereotype. He is not preaching the white man’s burden, the civilizing impact of European Christianity on non-Europeans, justifying imperialism, or weighing in on eugenics / geopolitics / AI. While he undoubtably had / would have had views on some of those, they are not the subject of Mere Christianity
This is a more measured point that Lewis- despite being so well measured in his language and topic material in other respects- is going to inevitably discomfort people. Some of that discomfort is the subject matter. And some of that discomfort is a result of speaking from the internalized aspects of someone of his time and place and history.
That time and place, in turn, was the tail end of the British Empire.
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Part 3: The Meta-Context of “Mere Christianity” – Why It Is What It Was When
“Mere Christianity” is a product of its author and its time, which is to say the product of both World Wars.
C.S. Lewis is most known in retrospect for his literary career. He was a contemporary- and personal friend for some time- of J.R.R. Tolkien. Between the latter’s Lord of the Rings and the former’s Narnia, both published in the 1950s, he was part of the mid-20th century Christian-influenced literary fantasy movement that shaped a fair deal of modern fantasy literature. The Christian influences of Lord of the Rings are sometimes less known than the influences of LotR on the broader fantasy genre since, or the Christian influences in Narnia. Still, Lewis could be considered one of the more successful and influential authors of the mid-20th century ground just on the ‘mutual influence on and of fellow writers’ grounds alone. Of course, Lewis did more than that and is more broadly known as a specifically Christian writer and thinker in ways that Tolkien wasn’t… even though Tolkien actually had a hand in C.S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.
This is because a less-known part of Lewis’s history is that he was an atheist for the first half of his life. Born in 1898 and dying in 1963, Lewis was part of the World War 1 generation. He had his 19th birthday in the trenches of the Somme Valley, albeit the year after the 1916 battle of the Somme, and in 1918 he was wounded but survived a British artillery shell that fell short and killed two his companions. This remarkably unlikely event was a traumatic and influential part of Lewis’s life, and is recognizable in elements of his later writing, particularly Screwtape Letters. It is not, however, what triggered his conversion.
Lewis converted to Christianity in 1933, 15 years after his what some might have called his ‘miraculous’ survival. In reflections- including a few allusions in Mere Christianity- he references his eventual conversion as something that was grudging and resisted. Rather than view his experience at the time as a clear act of God and the basis of conversion in a ‘no atheists in a foxhole’, Lewis spent the next decade and a half dealing with it as a self-described temperamental atheist. From his later writings on his earlier mind set, one can imagine- though he does not specifically claim- that he would have bristled at someone of faith trying to tell him that he should feel grateful or religious because he survived when two others died beside him. Lewis’s eventual conversion was despite, not on the immediate basis of, that wartime experience.
Despite the experience and the self-professed anger, this is not the same as saying Lewis was disillusioned by World War 1 per see. Or at least, not in the way some might expect. As a product of his time in various ways, one of the anachronisms that separates Lewis from a more modern speaker is his frank and even meritorious view on nationalism. Lewis was not part of the generation that became disillusioned with nationalism entirely by WW1, in the way that some people now view it as a character flaw to feel. Rather, Lewis approaches nationalism in the sense of virtue ethics, where the moderation of an aspect is the key for it to be virtuous rather than a sin of excess or deficit. Lewis remained a moderate nationalist. When WW2 began, he volunteered to join the Home Guard auxiliaries despite his age and scars. He later declined a position in the British Honors System offered by Winston Churchill, due to concerns of perception.
This context matters because it probably helps explain why C.S. Lewis was selected to speak on BBC to the British public during WW2, the radio broadcasts of which are the basis / original form of Mere Christianity.
During the second world war, the British society was well into the gradual secularization from a strongly Christian nation to what we would recognize as more common today. According to a C.S. Lewis historians on the BBC approach at the time, the BBC wartime audience was roughly 1/3rd embracing religion, 1/3rd hostile against it, and 1/3rd neutral. It faced not only the challenge of a divided nation in terms of people’s views on religion, but also the issue of having a speaker who could speak to all of them at once. When higher-ranking, more senior, and more experienced of the Clergy were brought on, they struggled to connect with the audience, not least because they spoke in more theological/doctrinal/dogmatic terms that variously did not make sense or were viewed more negatively by the audience.
This is the sort of problem that Lewis was brought in for to work through. A former and self-described irritable atheist who understood the perspective that was hostile to religious pressures. A more junior layperson not inclined to the sort of doctrinal and technical sophistication that lost the casual or uncommitted audience. But also a believer to appeal to the other believers to come together and pull through in terms they would respond to. And, of course, a nationalist enough to still volunteer to serve, despite first-hand experience with the horrors and tragedies of WW1.
A cynical perspective is that the person or committee making the selection to Lewis could have these cynical considerations for selecting Lewis for what is, in crudest forms, a propaganda role. There is no requirement, or claim, of their own belief in God one way or the other, anymore than there is a requirement that they had to like or respect Lewis to put him on the podium.
But there is also little argument that ‘their’ cynical motive, if there was a ‘they’ like that in the first place, imposed itself onto Lewis’s stated views/
There are no serious arguments I am aware of that Lewis’s views expressed in the broadcasts or Mere Christianity were false or influenced or dictated by propagandists with him as the mere mouthpiece. While there were editing changes between adaptations from audio to text, there were no major post-war retractions of major arguments. Lewis’s views in the broadcasts that became “Mere Christianity,” while useful to them, were by all accounts his own. While you certainly could poison the well by believing everything he says is mere wartime propaganda, this would be the sort of lack of charity that avoids rather than engages with the argument.
The wartime context does, however, go some way towards explaining why Mere Christianity is organized as it is.
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Part 4: The Structure of Mere Christianity
Mere Christianity is organized to be easily broken down into short periods of engagement, not something you need to- or should- do all at once.
As a consolidated book, the PDF provided earlier is a modest 108 PDF pages, with the preface- the first real words from Lewis- starting on page 6. The just-over 100 pages of content are broken down to across four books of distinct themes, each book broken into distinct chapters of narrower topics. At 34 chapters across four books, 35 if you count the preface, you are averaging less than 3 pages a chapter. ‘Average’ does a lot of work here, since there is a good deal of variability on specific chapters, but this is something that can easily be a bit of bedtime reading.
As an audiobook, Mere Christianity is around 7 hours in total at normal speed, with each chapter averaging about 12 minutes. Again, average is doing some work here, but mostly in the favor of manageability. The longest chapter, “Christian Marriage,” is 21-and-a-half minutes. The next two longest chapters, the last two of the last book and the culmination of the series, are just over 20 and 19 minutes respectively. Everything else is shorter, and so feasible for even a short 15-minute commute.
After the preface, the four books in turn are build on four general themes. These themes provide a general arc from justifying why the audience should give some consideration to what follows, characterizing Christianity as a religion, Christian behaviors, and Christian purpose of what these are building towards.
(These are not the exact terms that Lewis himself uses, but consider this the review trying to reframe / rephrase for the Motte audience.)
The following books, and their chapters, will be elaborated more in the following section. What follows is just the structural organization.
The preface serves as both establishing context and as a series of disclaimers. Lewis’s first concern is to clear misapprehensions about what the series is not, chief of which is that it is/was not to convert the listener.
Book One, Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe, is five chapters. The purpose of this book is to establish a basis of believing in God, even if not specifically the Christian God. It engages with some of the limits of a purely materialist world view.
Book Two, What Christians Believe, is also five chapters. The purpose of this book is to characterize core / common doctrinal of Christian tradition in general, distinct from other religions. It is a book where specific Christian denominations may take issue with specific parts in the sense of ‘this is not how we’d put it,’ but concede it as a bootstrap for others to start understanding Christianity.
Book Three, Christian Behavior, is twelve chapters. The purpose of this book is to characterize more specific aspects of what Christan tradition and what advocates in terms of practical beliefs and values. This is also the book where Lewis touches the most on human nature, and in ways that’d we recognize in relation to the culture war.
Book Four, Beyond Personality: Or First Steps In The Doctrine Of The Trinity, is eleven chapters. The purpose of this book is to introduce Christian Theology, in the capital-T sense of ‘the science of God.’ This is the conclusion, and the argument about how Christianity provides a practical, practicable, and reproducible process for becoming like God. (Or- Christ. See again books two and three.)
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Part 5: The Book 1 Review
Oh dear did I really do this
This section is a summary-review of the first book of Mere Christianity. It is not exhaustive but is intended to give a sense of the opening chapters and Lewis’s framing efforts. I include this mainly to illustrate Lewis’s ability to pursue both direct arguments and meta-argument in parallel, which becomes clear by chapter five. Also, Lewis has some good line drops I wanted to call out.
This also comes with the giant disclaimer that this is all my interpretation / understanding / summary, and that if you feel I missed some significant part of Lewis’s point… okay! Omissions are already admitted, as well as reorganization for the sake of summary and context. I am also using terms and characterizations other than his own words, so if you read this and then listen to it, don't be surprised.
Additionally, and hopefully it wouldn’t need to be said, I am trying to characterize, not endorse, the arguments that follow.
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Preface
The preface serves as both establishing context and as a series of disclaimers. Lewis’s first concern is to clear misapprehensions about what the series is not, chief of which is that it is/was not to convert the listener.
This section was written after the war broadcasts and is in some respects a response to feedback Lewis received after them. In it, he elaborates his intent on how he approached this. At the same time, this is a retroactive characterization the initial listeners/readers wouldn’t have had. It is useful to know this going in for your first time, but recognize that if you read this, you won’t have the same first impression someone else might have. (Then again- you won’t be listening during a German bombing campaign.)
Lewis makes clear that he is not taking a position on any specific denomination of Christianity, or any specific political topic. He views it as distracting from the point of the book but asserts it should not be interpreted as any position, for or against, any other position. Nor should it be viewed as omitting because he views the subject as too important, or not important enough.
Lewis spends a surprising number of words on how words lose value due to semantic drift. He specifically talks about how ‘good person’ and ‘good Christian’ are not the same thing, and how the conflation makes some words lose value in the sense that saying someone is not a good Christian can be perceived as a character attack of saying they are not a good person. This is a clear-minded distinction between a theological sense and a moral sense of ‘good,’ and his analogy to the transition of the meaning ‘gentlemen’ overlaps with the concept we’d call the euphemism treadmill.
Lewis makes a metaphor of Christianity to a house with many rooms but a shared hall. He places his own work- the Mere Christianity- as the invitation for people to come into the common all hall, but not to live there. He has Words (gentle but cautionary) on people who are undecided on which room they enter for reasons of personal taste rather than Truth.
Quote of the Chapter:
It is very difficult so to dissent from them that you will not appear to them a cad as well as a heretic.
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Book One: Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe
This was summarized earlier as-
Book One, Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe, is five chapters. The purpose of this book is to establish a basis of believing in God, even if not specifically the Christian God. It engages with some of the limits of a purely materialist world view.
This book is not an argument on materialist grounds god exists. It is instead a series of arguments that collectively challenge the premise of a purely material view of the universe and people. It works on grounds that may or may not be compelling for abandoning the pure-materialist view in the first place, but more strongly challenges any attempt at compromise.
In other words, it is structured as an anti-motte and bailey argument in which it attempts to cut off a retreat to a potential motte.
Structurally, it treats pure-materialistic world views as the advantageous/expansive bailey which serves to discredit / ignore God. It starts by establishing the existence of a “Moral Law” that people recognize / appeal to on non-materialist grounds. It attempts to defend this position against materialist-based counterarguments of evolution or social convention. From there, it explores the implications of non-materialist law in the material universe that exists but does not obey the normal conventions of material laws of nature. It concludes by cutting off a retreat to syncretism- of a hybrid materialist-spiritualist world view that might be a nominal motte-compromise of ‘well, some of what you say may be true.’ This retreat is a… not trap, but rather the basis of a renewed argument thrust. If Moral Law is true and a part of the universe from a non-materialist source, it reveals implications that Humans can only respond to.
If you want to know how to defend your (dis)belief against this line of argument, the defense works by not conceding the Moral Law premise in the first place. This will most likely to be done by adapting the materialist counter-arguments on grounds of evolution (what he discusses in terms of a biological evolved herd instinct) and combining it with social evolution to argue that societies evolve values, rather than the values having a non-materialist source.
Or this is all what I would say… if there was not a trick revealed in chapter five, making all the above points about ‘winning’ the argument meaningless.
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Chapter One: The Law of Human Nature
This chapter advances a claim that humans have an intrinsic sense of right or wrong that- even if they claim it doesn’t matter when it comes to them- they recognize others of violating instantly. This knowledge is in turn broadly applicable across time and cultures, with variations in morality being differences of emphasis, not type. Even when people disagree about whom is in the wrong, they all broadly have a sub-strata mutual agreement about the general nature of right and wrong. The differences are in degrees (what is emphasized or not), not in kind (no society or human instinct valorizes treachery against the society).
The existence of this shared understanding is not just akin to a law of nature, but is a law of nature in an original / older sense of the term. Like other laws of nature, it applies without having to be taught. People do not have to be taught a sense that others have wronged them, any more than gravity has to taught to the object it applies to. It is in the nature of the thing, even if various specifics (what the sense focuses on) are cultural.
However, the law of nature of human morality, or what he later calls moral law, is distinct from other laws of nature. It is a law of nature that does not work purely materialist grounds. People can choose to disobey, in ways they cannot choose to disobey gravity or thermodynamics. Disobeying is a choice that is not rooted in purely materialist grounds, any more than the existence of the shared understanding of wrong that exists across time / cultures / prior agreement.
These two points- that a moral law exists as a natural law, but that people can break it unlike purely material natural laws- is the starting point for establishing a non-material premise to the universe.
Quote of the Chapter:
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him, he will be complaining "It's not fair" before you can say Jack Robinson.
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Chapter Two: Some Objections
This chapter is Lewis anticipating some arguments against the premise of the moral law.
One counterargument is that the moral law impulse is merely an evolved herd instinct, a biological impulse. Lewis does not dismiss that a herd instinct exists and does align it with things like maternal instinct. Lewis disputes that the moral law is an instinctual impulse- rather, he asserts it is the factor balancing instincts, the element that helps people know which herd instinct to suppress, and which to elevate, such as when someone is faced with persona danger to themselves, but also to another. The moral law is the judgement about which impulse to follow, not the choice of which to follow. In is the outside-context force that establishes what the ‘good zone’ of virtue ethics is so that no one herd instinct is taken to extreme, not the instinct or even decision itself.
A second counterargument is that moral law is just a social construct instilled into people by education. Lewis disputes this, in terms that can dispute a bit of contemporary post-modernism, everything is social convention.’ Part of his disputation is that the differences in the social construct disputes- what is formally educated by specific cultures- is very small between cultures and times, not very large, and thus the social construction angle is of marginal input.
The other, larger, argument is that a comparative judgement of better and thus worse moral systems has to be comparing them by some standard outside the claimed system itself. In order to say Nazi morality is wrong, despite Nazi morality saying itself was right, you have to be comparing to a more objective idea- a more ‘real’ morality. But if you embrace absolute moral relativity- not that this is the term he uses- then you have no argument to say the Nazi morality is objectively wrong. Objective moral denunciation requires an objective standard, outside of a social construct, for the social construct to be measured by. Once this concession is made, all moral systems- even those claiming to be the right one- can be tested by this outside-the-structure measure.
Quote of the Chapter:
For example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things.
If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
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Chapter 3: The Reality of the Law
This chapter assumes success of chapter two in defending chapter one to advance the implications of the existence of the moral law.
This chapter advances the distinction in the purely materialist natural laws, where only facts (of physics) matter, and the moral law which has both facts (how people behave), but also something else (how people ought to behave). This non-purely materialist distinction is furthered by how people know how they ‘ought’ to behave even if they don’t.
Similarly, this ‘fact of what is’ and ‘fact of how ought’ is advanced by the difference in (not necessarily taught) moral instinct when the same action is done to you under different contexts, or even if the violation helps you. The person who accidentally trips you is a greater offense than the person who tried but failed to deliberately trip you despite the greater material impact. Additionally, the traitor who betrays the enemy in your favor is still triggering a moral instinct of wrongness, despite their utility. Moral law defies pure materialist predictors of instinctually endorsing material gains or condemning material costs.
Lewis also disputes that consequentialism alone is sufficient to explain this moral instinct. ‘Be unselfish because it is good for society’ begs the question of why ‘good for the society’ is not wrong, but is circular. The ‘why’ of a duty to be unselfish- the classic deontological question of ‘duty to whom?’- must come from outside to break the circular reasoning. This outside is the law of nature- the nature of the thing of what ‘ought’ to be, which is neither constructed by or even necessarily taught to humans, but which appears across time and cultures and social constructors.
Quote of the Chapter
Consequently, this Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing— a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves.
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Chapter 4: What Lies Behind the Law
This chapter advances the implications of the existence of the moral law on the rest of the universe by contesting pure materialism, and even hybrid materialist-spiritualism.
After reviewing key points so far- about how a non-material rule of nature exists and acts differently by being subject to choice to disobey- Lewis does a brief review of a purely materialist world view. Action and consequence all through history. However, Lewis contests materialism by noting the limits of materialism.
One of these is that accurate scientific observations can only record what is observed at a time in place- it must infer what is not observed. We can theorize that A is a consequence of B, but Science (the objective, testable, verifiable sort) does not claim to prove to have seen B. The overreach of science to things not actually claimed by observable / replicable science is dismissed as the more pop-cultural/fanciful (what we would deem political) use of science more by people other than professional scientists than actual scientists. Science also does not assert why what was there was there in the first place, i.e. why did the big bang originate into the universe. Science cannot observe it. If there was some actor responsible, it would still have to be inferred, or else inform the observer in another way.
Lewis makes an additional, longer, and harder to summarize series of arguments about the nature of observing the creation of universe from within the universe. This includes the difficulty of observing an outside-universe from within the boundaries of the universe. He uses the analogy of observing an architect from within the architecture he built. He concludes to a point that one of the ways to reason there is another actor is if it interacts and acts upon you in distinct ways. Say by establishing a force of nature that acts upon humans in way distinct from other, purely materialistic, forces of nature.
This ‘force’ is not claimed to be the God of Christian mythology, specifically. This is the ‘a god,’ not ‘the god’ stage of the argument. It is, however, as close to a mind as any other metaphor Lewis will use, because it seems interested in both establishing a non-materialist sense of right, and making people feel a sense of wrong.
Lewis then ends by promising you that you’ve heard to much about a nice and pleasant God for too long, and that you should be uneasy about what he’ll say in his next issue, helpfully titled “We Have Cause To Be Uneasy.”
*The chapter then breaks for a post-script subject on the merits, or weakness, of trying to synthesis pure materialism against pure religion. Lewis raises what was presumably more popular at the time, variously called creative evolution / life force philosophy. These entertain a spiritual origin to the universe to cover the gaps of materialism, but without the deliberate presence, purpose, or requirements of God in the religious sense. Lewis is not a fan.
Quote of the Chapter:
One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences.
When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?
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Chapter 5: We Have Cause To Be Uneasy
This chapter begins with a not-quite apology to readers who feel they been tricked into a religious sermon, and that they were only listening to Lewis as long as he had something new to say. If all Lewis has is more religion, that already failed, it’d be like moving a clock back. Lewis counters this in three ways.
One is that going back the way you came is sometimes progress. Progress is going closer to where you want to be, and if you find yourself going the wrong way, progress is turning course even if that means turning back. The sooner one does, the wiser and truer they are to progress. (Yes- Lewis makes an argument that a reactionary can be progressive. Culture war of a different century.)
Second, Lewis reiterates that he is not yet arguing for the Christian God, merely a somebody or something beyond the moral law. Things can be inferred from the consideration of the moral law, since it counterbalances what can be inferred from the creation of the purely material universe. The universe may be a beautiful creation, but the material laws of nature are also pitiless and merciless to people. The moral law is the counterbalance, as the moral law creates the duty, and the discomfort, to make each other’s burdens easier (the practice of morality) in the pitiless material plane.
Second-point-five, this God described to date does not have to forgive you for your failures- and violations- of the Moral Law.
Lewis makes a distinction here between the construct he has said up to date- a creator force that dictates morality- and the Christian claim/interpretation. What Lewis is describing is the implications of a power behind the moral law, but not necessarily a personal god to have a personal relationship and- especially- forgive failure.
This is root of the implication of a moral law that is supposed to make you uneasy. If there is a force- a mind- behind the moral law, which again is a premise of a natural law that intrinsically is a part of you and that you know of, it doesn’t matter if you intellectually disagree with it or rationalize your excuses. Part of you- the natural part- is siding with this creator against yourself regardless, because that part innately agrees with the condemnation of greed/cruelty even if you’d rather it made exceptions for your own.
In this context, you are thus entering the crux of existential terror and nihilism (though Lewis doesn’t use those exact words). If there is no non-materialist moral law in the first place, for there being no creator or non-materialist purpose, then there is in turn no greater purpose to appeal or take solace in. It is moral relativism all the way down in a merciless material universe with no claim to an objective right and wrong. If, on the other hand, you do concede there is a creator who cared enough to create moral law, then you begin to concede that you are making yourself Its enemy through every failure and opposition. Facing judgement is Not Fun.
Third, this entire chain of reasoning does not exist to convince you that it is true. It exists to put you in a Christian frame of mind, so that the chapters to follow will make sense.
Lewis breaks flow, not character, to make an assertion on why people do not understand what Christianity is. (Remember the context- WW2 where 2/3rds of Brits were opposed or neutral on the topic.) People who do not think about the creation of the universe- not just how it functions in the present but before the observable parts- do not think in terms of the formation of natural laws. People who do not think in terms of natural laws may not think in terms of natural moral law. People do not think of natural moral law in turn may not think in terms of what it means if there is a creator behind that moral law. And people who are not thinking about the creator of a moral law, are probably not what it means to that creator when you choose to break it.
Lewis is not claiming that Christians think all of these things either. He is not even claiming indisputable correctness of these facts. What he is claiming, however, is that it’s hard to convince people of a need to repent if they don’t believe there was a transgression against something (moral law) or someone (the creator of said moral law) that they need to repent for.
The point does not hinge on if you are convinced by Lewis’s argument for a moral law and its creator. The point is that it will be hard to understand Christianity if you do not understand how these premises combine to form uncomfortable questions that Christianity claims to answer.
Understanding this connection is key to understanding Lewis’s portrait of Mere Christianity. It was also the sort of the purposeful combination of direct and meta-argument for illustration that convinced me to write this review.
Quote of the Chapter
Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor.
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Conclusion
And… that’s the end of this book review, of sorts.
Going any further would not capture Lewis’s work well and my failed attempt to is a lot of time well spent but that I’m not getting back. Also, it would take too damn long. This review is already over 8,000 words. Any further and you might as well read or listen to it yourself.
Which, to be fair, is the point of this effort-review. If any of this has caught your interest, consider this your invitation to go get that audiobook. There is a lot to enjoy there, it makes good commute listening, and it doesn't demand a lot of time even as it gives a lot to think about. If you are the sort who comes to the Motte to build your understanding, Lewis is a person to build off of. Even if- or especially if- you disagree with him.
The C.S. Lewis Essential Audio Library is a bit over $40 USD on Amazon.
(Now, do I really want to try to review The Screwtape Letters...)
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Notes -
Thank you for this.
One piece of context, as near as I can tell, is that Lewis came to Christianity by way of Platonism. As such, a lot of his metaphysics (particularly anti-materialism) come from that perspective.
Plato does loom large over a lot of Lewis's writing: The Silver Chair's climax is the Allegory of the Cave, and The Last Battle portrays the Kingdom of God as being the Realm of the Forms. The latter especially is not exactly orthodox (small-o) Christianity: the influence of Plato is something controversial in Christianity ("What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?") especially as Platonism wants absolute primacy of the immaterial over the material, which reacts with Christianity to get very Gnostic.
But it does provide the map he uses here.
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Nice write up.
2 fairly off topic points.
I listened to the audio version a while back, I did so through the Libby app on my phone (you enter your library card info into the app and it lets you check out digital books and audiobooks), each library's selection is different, but I bet the audiobook version of Mere Christianity is a pretty common offering across most libraries.
I'm highly confident that Scott has read a fair amount of Lewis -
"The best analogy I can think of is C.S. Lewis. Lewis was a believer in the Old Religion, which at this point has been reduced to cliche. What could be less interesting than hearing that Jesus loves you, or being harangued about sin, or getting promised Heaven, or threatened with Hell? But for some reason, when Lewis writes, the cliches suddenly work. Jesus’ love becomes a palpable force. Sin becomes so revolting you want to take a shower just for having ever engaged in it. When Lewis writes about Heaven you can hear harp music; when he writes about Hell you can smell brimstone."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/26/book-review-twelve-rules-for-life/
I think that shout out was what motivated me to listen to it.
Did Scott miss the plot here? CS Lewis has remarkably little to say about God as punisher. That's one of his signature traits as an apologist. In one brief section in The Problem of Pain, he concedes it as part of a thought experiment to defend the goodness of eternal hell in its most repugnant aspect. But everywhere else, he describe sin as self-torture, and hell as something you do to yourself.
Here lies the primary genius of Lewis as a Christian essayist. Reading him, you really feel, intuitively, that Sin, Hell, and Death are the same thing, rather than the last two being something God arbitrarily imposes on those who do the first. It's the explicit theme of his novella The Great Divorce, where God tries to draw everyone into heaven, but they flee into outer darkness because they prefer their bitter and envious ways. More theoretically, in Mere Christianity, he spends his chapters on the capital vices showing how they make you miserable even at a natural level — in my opinion, this chapter on Pride is one of the greatest ever written, and even a fourth grader can understand it.
Here is a poem in his first work of apologetics, Pilgrim's Regress, sung by an (implied) angel when seeing doomed souls on the fringes of hell:
This is, on its own, counterintuitive to accept, and IMO the through line of Lewis's oeuvre after Pilgrim's Regress is showing how it's true. CS Lewis's God is a big softie.
Relevant passage from The Great Divorce, spoken by Lewis's spiritual guide:
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Gonna echo mister Hale and say this is an amazing write-up! Mere Christianity was quite important for my own conversion and I whole heartedly recommend it as well. You're making me want to get the audio version at some point now...
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Thanks for this, you may have inspired me to make the purchase. I haven't revisited Lewis in a long time. Whatever people think of his arguments, I think his popularity is due to how well he's able to explain things to laypeople, to lead them along a journey, setting out his arguments one step at a time. It's very easy to follow and very accessible. I'm not aware of many high-quality modern authors who can write with that same accessibility AND intellectual rigor.
Of course some of his writings are less dated than others. Stuff like The Abolition of Man and even That Hideous Strength are eerie when they are describing social and intellectual trends that we still see today, although set in a very different time and place.
Every time C.S. Lewis comes up I have to recommend Till We Have Faces. It's not one of his better known ones, apparently, but I think it's one of his fiction works that really doesn't seem dated to me at all. It has a lot to say on the nature of love and possessiveness and what kinds of gods are worthy of worship.
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Great write-up. Thanks for putting in the considerable amount of time it must have taken. I read Mere Christianity many years ago a few times along with whatever else was in the small box set. The Abolition of Man, The Problem of Pain, and I think Screwtape Letters, and eventually A Grief Observed, and all were extremely readable in a way I have often wished other writers, more prone to a desire to be clever or profound, would mimic. Now I feel like I should read them again.
Edit: Or, perhaps, listen
I get something new out of The Abolition of Man and The Great Divorce each time I read them.
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