There is a well-known evening in the life of C.S.Lewis, - in September 1931 - when he went for a walk with Hugo Dyson – then teaching English at Reading, and J.R.R.Tolkien, a fellow-member of the Oxford English Faculty. As they paced round Addison’s Walk in the gloaming, Lewis, at that stage an unbeliever, said that Christianity was Myth. Yes, replied his friends. It is a myth which happens to be true.
“What I couldn’t see”, Lewis told a friend, “was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2,000 years ago could help us here and now – except in so far as his example helped us”. Tolkien pointed out that this was, as much as anything, an imaginative failure on Lewis’s part. When Lewis came across myths of dying and reviving gods, he was moved. When he read stories about Balder, Adonis and Bacchus, he was prepared to “feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp, even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’. He stopped short of understanding Christianity because when he thought about that, he laid aside the receptive imagination with which he allowed himself to appreciate myth and became rigidly narrow and empiricist. He should understand that ‘the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened; and one must be prepared to accept it in the same way”.
I am not completely convinced that Lewis every totally grasped what Tolkien was saying – or at any rate, in his first decade as a Christian convert, I am not sure Lewis grasped it. No sooner had he been converted than he wanted to understand Christianity in a “rigidly narrow and empiricist” way. When I was writing Lewis’s biography, - it was published in 1990 – I found myself so alienated by what he called “Mere Christianity” that I felt my faith ebbing away. There followed about a decade of unbelief in my life, which I found not merely personally bleak, but intellectually unsatisfying, since I could not, and cannot, accept a purely mechanistic or materialist explanation for the phenomenon of human consciousness, for the mysterious fact that we can contemplate ourselves contemplating, that we are aware of what Milton’s Beelzebub calls “this intellectual Being, the thoughts that wander through eternity”.
But then, I too, made the rigid and empiricist mistake of thinking that you could either defend or demolish the Christian claims by appeals to the “historical” evidence.
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