Apologetics

Men Must Endure Their Going Hence: Remembering C.S. Lewis

November 20, 2012 By Kathy Schiffer 1 Comment

Men Must Endure Their Going Hence.

So warns Edgar in Shakespeare’s classic King Lear.

And so says the tombstone shared by illustrious Christian apologist Clive Staples Lewis and his brother Warren. The tombstone, located in the yard of Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry, Oxford, commemorates the writer C.S. “Jack” Lewis, who died 48 years ago on November 23, 1963, and his quieter older brother who died in April 1973.

Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the 20^th century, contributing a wealth of literature ranging from children’s literature and fantasy (most popular being The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and others in the Chronicles of Narnia series), to allegory, to literary criticism and popular theology. During World War II, his reflections on his BBC radio broadcast—later republished as Mere Christianity—made the case for Christianity through the use of logic.

Despite Lewis’ prominence in Christian apologetics, he was not always a follower of Christ; during his university years, he was an avowed atheist. At Oxford, he often debated philosophy and religion with several Christian friends including J.R.R. Tolkien (best known for the Lord of the Rings trilogy). And those friends were persuasive! “Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully,” Lewis confided in his conversion story, Surprised by Joy. “Dangers lie in wait for him on every side.”

Lewis wrote poignantly in Surprised by Joy about his first steps toward faith, toward confirming the existence of God:

“You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

So Lewis embraced Christianity, albeit reluctantly. But was Jesus real? His interest piqued by the faith of friends who seemed too pragmatic to fall for a myth, Lewis read the Gospels—and he was amazed to find them believable. The writers, he thought, were too unimaginative to have made the whole thing up; they seemed to truly believe the accounts of Jesus’ ministry, death and Resurrection.

Perhaps Lewis’ best known application of Aristotelian logic is his “Liar, Lunatic or Lord” syllogism. Evaluating Jesus’ claims to be God, Lewis points to three possible explanations: either he really was God, he was deliberately lying, or he was not God but thought himself to be (in other words, he was delusional or insane). Nothing in the Gospel, according to Lewis, suggests that Jesus was not a person of truth; nor did he appear mentally impaired. The only logical answer, then, was that Jesus is truly what he said he was: He is God.

On September 19, 1931, Jack Lewis engaged his friends Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien in a discussion of myth. The trio walked and talked all night: Tolkien explaining how myths were God’s way of preparing the ground for the Christian story, and Dyson showing how Christianity worked for the believer, liberating him from sin and helping him to become a better person. Lewis’ stubborn arguments for atheism were demolished.

It took days of ruminating and meditating for Lewis’ conversion to be complete. Lewis himself explained that on November 12, he and his brother Warren traveled by motorcycle to Whipsnade Zoo. “When we set out,” Lewis wrote, “I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God; and when we reached the zoo, I did.”

Lewis’ book The Pilgrim’s Regress tells the story of his dramatic conversion in allegorical form.

Filed Under: Agnosticism, Apologetics, Bible, Books, Conversion, Faith, Philosophy, Writing Tagged With: Apologetics, C. S. Lewis, Christianity, Conversion, Faith, J.R.R. Tolkien, Shakespeare 1 Comment

TOMORROW IS CHESTERTON DAY! Well, If You’re in Rome, That Is.

May 16, 2011 By Kathy Schiffer Leave a Comment

I spotted the announcement this morning: Over on Facebook, Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J.—one of the organizers of the Vatican Blogfest—reported enthusiastically that tomorrow is Chesterton Day at La Civilta Cattolica, the College of Catholic Writers of Civilization.

So I looked it up. The panelists! The topics! And it’s free!! Now all I need to do is buy another ticket to Rome, head to the Via di Porta Pinciana….

* * * * *

Well, that’s just silly. Funny how, when you do something so extravagant once, you start to forget that you can’t do it all the time.

I did, though, recollect some of the great writings of the prolific apologist / novelist / essayist. Take this challenge: Use one of Chesterton’s pithy quotes as your Facebook status one morning, and you’ll be setting a new record for “likes.” Everyone recognizes the wit and wisdom of the man who was dubbed by Pope Pius XI “Defender of the Catholic Faith.”

During his 62 years, Chesterton produced some 80 books, 200 short stories, several hundred poems, 4,000 essays, and a number of stage plays. He was a frequent speaker and debater, earning the nickname “The Apostle of Common Sense.” His opus of work ranged from novels (The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday) to biographies (Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, and St. Francis of Assisi, The Everlasting Man), from mysteries (The Innocence of Father Brown) to epic poetry (Lepanto).

“A room without books,” Chesterton opined, “is like a body without a soul.”

“Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.”

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

Some humor for the business day: “I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.”

And one of my favorites: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”

* * * * *

Chesterton was a Catholic apologist extraordinaire, expressing and explaining his faith with dry wit and sound reasoning. In his essay “Why I Am a Catholic,” from the book Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creeds (1926), Chesterton explained his own convictions with clarity and patience. He wrote:

Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves. The truth about the Catholic attitude toward heresy, or as some would say, towards liberty, can best be expressed perhaps by the metaphor of a map. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze. It has been compiled from knowledge which, even considered as human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel.

There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them.

He was a harsh critic of both Fundamentalism and Protestantism, warning that we must make the intellectual world safe for democracy, but must prevent mere reaction and the dreary repetition of the old mistakes.

He closes his essay, sadly:

There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.

Filed Under: Apologetics, Books, Catholic, Imagination, Writing Tagged With: Apologetics, Books, Catholicism, Chesterton, writing Leave a Comment

HOW CAN I UNDERSTAND, UNLESS SOMEONE INSTRUCTS ME? The Ethiopian On Your Street

May 12, 2011 By Kathy Schiffer Leave a Comment

Today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 8:26-40) recounts the story of the Ethiopian eunuch.

This guy was a powerful officer in the court of the queen, in charge of her entire treasury. He was riding along through the desert in his chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah, when Philip—who had been prompted by an angel to catch up with the chariot—strode up alongside the eunuch and asked, “Do you understand what you’re reading?”

“How can I understand,” asked the eunuch, “unless I have someone to explain it to me?” And he invited Philip to join him in the coach so they could talk. He read Isaiah’s prophecy about Jesus:

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
so he opened not his mouth….

“Who,” he asked, “is he writing about?” And with such an opportunity before him, Philip proceeded to explain the Scriptures—teaching the powerful politician how the Old and New Testaments intersected, how Isaiah had prophesied about the coming of the Messiah, how Jesus had fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies, had risen from the dead, and had truly redeemed the world.

The eunuch, on hearing the message of the Gospel, was converted and asked to be baptized on the spot.

* * * * *

The story of the Ethiopian eunuch is a reminder for all of us that sometimes, we just need to reach out and explain ourselves—that there are people in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods, perhaps even in our families, who are ready to embrace Truth but who first need to hear the Gospel explained in simple terms.

Like the Ethiopian eunuch, these people are not in the pews on Sunday morning. You may be the only “Philip” they will meet along the way—and only through you will they ever hear the story of Redemption.

So tell them!

If you’re not sure where to start, then read a book—a good place to start might be Peter Kreeft’s Handbook of Catholic Apologetics or, shorter still, Patrick Madrid’s Pocket Guide to Catholic Apologetics. Or read the Gospel of John (and maybe the Acts of the Apostles) as preparation for questions from your non-believing friends.