Celebrating C.S. Lewis

Narnia, Desire and the Indian Connection

It’s the sixtieth anniversary, this autumn, of the death of the great British writer and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898 - 1963). We marked the moment on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking this week with a delightfully Christmassy conversation about Narnia and the nature of desire.

One of our guests, Meg Thomson, is the producer of a new film, Freud’s Last Session, which imagines an encounter between C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) and Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins). The two men meet in Freud’s home in London, right at the end of his life, in September 1939.

As war with Nazi Germany looms, and the capital is being prepared for air attacks that could come at any time, Lewis and Freud ponder religious belief, suffering and God. As Meg put it in our conversation, here we have the famously atheistic Freud right at the end of his life, wondering whether he might have missed something.

---

---

One of the big questions at stake in the film is what, as human beings, we do with our desires. For Freud, they’re the product, in the end, of biological drives - no matter how sublime the form they take: in art, literature or the treasured intimacies of a person’s life.

Lewis, we discovered in our conversation, would more or less have agreed with this account of desire as a young man. Another of our guests was Ruth Jackson, a producer with Premier Unbelievable and co-host of the C.S. Lewis podcast. She sketched for us a portrait of the young Lewis as a man whose sexual desires ran from requesting that his friends let him “whip them for the sum of one shilling a lash” to - perhaps - having an affair with an older woman, the mother of a comrade of his who was killed in the First World War.

Much for Freud to work on, then, had Lewis become a regular client. But as our third guest, Jem Bloomfield, pointed out, it’s easy to take something like desire and treat it purely in psychological terms. Bloomfield has written a wonderful new book about Lewis’s Narnia: Paths in the Snow: A Literary Journey through The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Having explored both Lewis’s literary inspirations and the twentieth-century backdrop to his work, Jem suggested that the danger with theories like Freud’s can be offering ‘explanations’ that begin with assumptions - in Freud’s case, a view of reality in which physical nature is all there is - and then work from there.

In the words of our fourth guest, the writer and broadcaster Justin Brierley, this can have the effect of holding people back from pulling at the thread of desire to see where it leads. Justin’s new book is The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: a look at the decline of New Atheism and the rise of serious interest in Christianity.

---

---

Some of that interest has taken the place of high-profile conversions, like that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Much of it, though, is bubbling away in the form of ‘cultural Christianity’: a resonance with, and affection for, Christian values, without a belief in the claims about the world that Christianity makes. Big names in this broad camp include Jordan Peterson and the historian Tom Holland, who told Justin in an interview that so deeply embedded is Christianity in western life that it might be better to talk not of Christian values but of Christian ‘instincts’.

I asked Justin what he thought it might take for cultural Christians to shed that qualifying term ‘cultural’. He suggested they keep on following the thread that desire provides.

One of the most poignant moments in Freud’s Last Session comes when Freud confronts Lewis on what religion has to say about devastation and suffering - Freud having suffered terrible losses in his own life, with the death of a daughter and grand-daughter.

‘I don’t know… I don’t know’, Lewis replies - before adding that perhaps suffering is one of the ways that God allows people to see where the only real solace in life is to be found. ‘If pleasure is God’s whisper,’ offers Lewis, ‘pain is his megaphone’.

Later on in our conversation, Ruth reminded us of a scene in The Magician’s Nephew, where the young boy Digory is talking about his mother’s illness and begging Aslan to heal her. He looks up, and sees ‘big, bright tears’ rolling down the great lion’s face. At the heart of the Christian story is the idea that God is very much in this with us.

I brought my 1987 copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe into the studio with me, for some inspiration while we chatted. But as you’ll see from the photograph below, Justin Brierley beat me by more than twenty years - with a very old copy of Lewis’s spiritual autobiography, Surprised By Joy.

I often wonder how many readers of that book raise their eyebrows a little when, in the midst of Lewis’s discussion of desire and where it might lead us, he declares that in only two places might the fullness of religion be found: Christianity - and Hinduism.

Why Hinduism?

There’s a clue on the dedication page to Surprised By Joy: ‘To Dom Bede Griffiths, OSB’. Towards the end of the book, Lewis notes that Griffiths had been his ‘chief companion’ at a crucial stage of his spiritual journey.

The two men first met at Oxford University, when Alan Griffiths (as he then was) became a student of Lewis’s at Magdalen college. Lewis found Griffiths a little narrow, at first, interested in the Romantic poets and little else - the likes of Wordsworth were the only ones who could put a name to the feelings of joy and desire that Griffiths had experienced one evening, as a schoolboy, on a walk in the countryside:

A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank, still singing, to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel.

Eventually, Lewis persuaded the rather stubborn Griffiths to read a little philosophy. He tried Plato, Aristotle and Augustine. He read the New Testament, along with Lao Tzu, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Griffiths eventually became a Catholic, and Lewis an Anglican - stories told, respectively, in The Golden String and Surprised by Joy.

---

---

The two men remained friends right up until Lewis’s death. But while Griffiths lived in India for almost forty years, from the mid-1950s until the early 1990s, entering into a pioneering dialogue with Indian wisdom traditions, Lewis changed his mind about Hinduism.

His desires had led him, in the end, to a personal God who called him into a relationship. By contrast, the Hindu traditions that Lewis knew of pictured reality as continuous emanation from an impersonal divine source. There seemed to be no real separation between Creator and Creation. As he put it in a letter to Griffiths:

I now believe that refined, philosophical eastern Pantheism is far further from the true Faith than the semi-barbarous pagan religions - even including all their cruelties and obscenities... I no longer want to read Eastern books except good, non-religious philosophers like Confucius.

Would that these two men had possessed the technology of our own times. The Lewis & Griffiths Podcast - or, better, The Alan and Clive Show - would have been well worth a listen. Their letters hint at a sometimes-tempestuous relationship, founded on contested ideas, East and West.

And yet what they shared was more important: a conviction that the materialist philosophies and trends of their day - Freud, Marx, literary modernism - were two-dimensional, and ultimately doomed. That thread of desire - what Griffiths, borrowing from William Blake, called the ‘golden string’ - led them somewhere else entirely. Both hoped to persuade others to brave that journey for themselves.

The two men’s interests feel very timely now, especially where this cultural trend towards serious interest in Christianity is concerned. Are people primarily nostalgic for a more ordered, civil past - in which case a materialist viewpoint plus good behaviour might be enough? Or are they picking up the scent of something more?

---

Left to right: Jem Bloomfield, Justin Brierley, Ruth Jackson, Meg Thomson and yours truly, pondering some tinsel. Note the well-loved copy of Surprised by Joy!

---