CSL—Clive, Søren, and Ludwig: An Unlikely Trinity

Let me begin by giving the answer to the thematic question of this conference, “How do the Inklings define ‘mere Christianity’?” The unity of all Christians, that which makes them all “mere” Christians, is the common virtue of faith in Jesus [the] Christ. This, of course, is obvious. It is the correct answer: it is the answer we find in the Scriptures, and from a whole host of thinkers, from Augustine to Barth. Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi knew it, as did Martin Luther and John Calvin. So did those men who formed the ecumenical brotherhood we all feel an affinity with, the Inklings. It was, at bottom, this common virtue of faith in Christ that so closely united the denominationally diverse C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield and others. It is also what unites the diverse Body of Christ—the “one holy catholic church,” “the communion of the saints,” as the Apostle’s Creed puts it—over the miles and the centuries, over the languages and the circumstances, over the opinions and perspectives. It is the answer defined by all who live lives of loving and pious devotion to God in Christ Jesus, the author and finisher of faith.

It is obviously the correct answer. But that does not mean that we understand it. For it has become a truism: something that we think we understand so well that we have forgotten what we mean by it. So what I propose to do in the remainder of this paper is to do what a well-known philosopher said is the work of a philosopher: to “assemble reminders for a particular purpose.” My purpose is to clear away confusions about what it means (for a Christian) to “believe in God,” and I will be assembling reminders mostly from three men who were especially good at reminding us of what we mean: C.S. Lewis, Søren Kierkegaard, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (A fourth, Plato, could also be included, but since he was pre-Christian, I will retain this trinity.)

In his essay, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” C.S. Lewis addresses the charge often made against Christians, that their attitude towards belief is that it is “positively praiseworthy to believe without evidence, or in excess of the evidence, or to maintain belief unmodified in the teeth of steadily increasing evidence against it.” The contrast to this attitude is the so-called “scientific” attitude, that one ought to “proportion the strength of his belief exactly to the evidence; to believe less as there is less evidence, and to withdraw belief altogether when reliable adverse evidence turns up.” As Lewis says, this superficial description of the difference in attitude towards belief shows the need for some conceptual (and grammatical) investigation: “The sense in which scientists proportion their belief to the evidence, and the sense in which Christians do not, both need to be defined more closely.” He thus begins his discussion with a review of the ways in which we actually use the word “belief.”

First, he reminds us, “no one uses the word ‘believe’ about things he has found out.” That is, as similar as the use of the word “belief” might be to the use of the word “knowledge,” there is a definite distinction between them: when one knows, one can no longer properly be said to believe. The most common use of the word ‘belief’, Lewis says, “expresses a very weak degree of opinion,” as in “Tom is in London, I believe.” Or, “I believe he said the concert was at eight.” The negative form of this is also common: “I don’t believe she is coming, so we may as well start without her.” In contrast to these more common usages, Lewis points out two related “special usages,” which, as he says, “may imply a conviction which in subjective certitude might be hard to distinguish from knowledge by experience.” One such use is the negative use: e.g., “Mrs. Jones has run off with the butler? I don’t believe it!” Or the reaction of the hardened materialist who responds to the report of a miracle, “I don’t believe it.” The other special use, Lewis says, is the positive version of this negative use: “I believe” as uttered by the Christian. In both of these special usages, Lewis says, “we are speaking of belief and disbelief to the strongest degree, but not of knowledge. Belief, in this sense, seems to me to be assent to a proposition which we think so overwhelmingly probable that there is a psychological exclusion of doubt, though not a logical exclusion of dispute.” Lewis concludes that, although the Christian’s belief is not knowledge, it is also not “without evidence, or in the teeth of evidence.”[i]

Now as much as I value the distinctions that Lewis reminds us of here, I must say that I think he has overlooked something; he has not gone far enough in his distinctions. He is certainly right to point out these different uses of “belief,” but in his eagerness to maintain the intellectual warrant for religious belief, he has not considered the possibility that the “I believe” as uttered by the Christian is not really the positive use opposed to the negative “I don’t believe it!”, but is actually a third use, different from both of these. To illustrate, imagine two intelligent people who hold very strong but opposing beliefs regarding the existence of life on other planets. The one says, “I believe wholeheartedly that life on other planets is not only possible, but actual.” The other says, “I don’t believe it! It’s not possible.” Both of them can give persuasive, convincing arguments and cite evidence in favor of their beliefs, yet because of the subjective strength of each one’s convictions, they will not succeed in making the other doubt what they believe. This would be a case of one person using “I believe” and the other one using “I don’t believe” in the special sense that Lewis is talking about. But now imagine that the disagreement is not about the existence of life on other planets, but about the existence of God. In the former example both persons have some idea about what would and what would not count as evidence for the proposition that life exists on another planet. And even though they might call into question the reliability or the relevance of any particular piece of evidence, they certainly do not disagree about what sorts of things would or could count as evidence either way. But is there such agreement in the second case? Do the opposing parties agree on what sorts of things would or could count as evidence either way? Let’s say the one person sees the harmony and order in nature as evidence of an intelligent creator. The second person also sees this harmony and order—the same order and harmony and to the same degree—as no evidence at all, perhaps even as evidence of the blind forces of nature working coincidentally. Is the believer more or less rational than the unbeliever here? Their disagreement goes deeper than the first case: they not only disagree in their beliefs, they disagree on what sorts of thing can even be considered as evidence for their beliefs.

You may be wondering why I am so concerned about this further distinction of kinds of belief here. Why not simply go along with the vast majority of Christian apologists and agree that there are good reasons for belief in God, or at least for believing that there is a god who has certain inferable attributes? Why not agree that belief in God is a matter of reason, of rational decision? My concern may be overblown, but I believe there is a subtle danger in thinking of religious belief in this way. The danger is primarily a spiritual one, the danger of deceiving oneself. More specifically, the danger of a person thinking that he has “become a believer” when, in fact, he has not. But this danger, as with every spiritual danger, brings other consequent dangers—for example, a false sense of pride in having seen and “chosen” the right path for himself, and a false sense of superiority over others; inconsistency between what he says and what he does accompanied by blindness to this inconsistency, often resulting in an inordinate hatred towards others who might question or challenge his way of life. Such attitudes would clearly not be consonant with a true Christian faith. So if the characterization of faith as a matter of good or bad reasoning can lead to such attitudes, it is important to distinguish it’s peculiarity.

Interestingly, there are plenty of indications—both in “Obstinacy in Belief” and in his other writings—that despite his temptation to be the sort of Christian apologist who wants to give sufficient reasons for belief in God, Lewis is aware of this last distinctive kind of belief. He goes on to say, “And, in fact, the man who accepts Christianity always thinks he had good evidence; whether, like Dante, fisici e metafisici argomenti, or historical evidence, or the evidence of religious experience, or authority, or all these together. For of course authority, however we may value it in this or that particular instance, is a kind of evidence.”[ii] Now surely Lewis is well aware that the argument against authority as a primary basis of belief is as old as philosophy itself. From Socrates’ question to Euthyphro, “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” to Kant’s insistence on the autonomy of reason to discover and legislate laws of nature and morality, to Peirce’s critique of the “method of authority”—that it amounts to “intellectual slavery”—philosophers have questioned authority. Put simply, the problem with authority is this: how do you determine who is or is not an authority? If you just take the so-called authority’s word for it, then you will be easily duped; but making your own determination of whether or not someone is an authority means that you yourself are more authoritative than the authority, for you have the authority to tell who is or isn’t an authority. Now everyone (including Lewis) recognizes that people do, in fact, rely on authorities for many of their beliefs—it is hardly avoidable from a practical standpoint—but this does not mean that they ought to. So when Lewis says that authority is a kind of evidence, he must know it can count as evidence only when the authority is a genuine authority. And since in most cases we need evidence for that, he can only be thinking of the kind of case where it makes no sense to question authority, to ask for evidence that would warrant taking it to be an authority.

Another subtle indication that Lewis is aware of the distinctiveness of religious belief is the example he gives of a non-theological belief that implies “assent to a proposition which we think so overwhelmingly probable that there is a psychological exclusion of doubt, though not a logical exclusion of dispute.” He says, “Most of my generation had a belief in the reality of the external world and of other people—if you prefer it, a disbelief in solipsism—far in excess of our strongest arguments.”[iii] It is hard not to read this passage tongue-in-cheek, but if you read it straight up, you might begin to wonder here, what arguments or experiences would or could count as evidence either for or against this “belief”? If you “believe” in the reality of the external world (as opposed to what?  “The internal world”? “The world”?) and other people, then what could you say or do or point out that would serve as counter-evidence to the solipsist? He thinks the external world and other people—everything but his own mind—are the contents of his own mind. Your attempts to give him evidence to the contrary would be like a phantom trying to convince you that it isn’t a phantom, but real. One shouldn’t pay any heed to arguments from phantoms—they are phantom arguments. Likewise, if the solipsist were to forget for a moment that he is a solipsist and try to convince you (a phenomenon of his own mind) of solipsism (“you really ought to be a solipsist yourself!”), what things could he say, do, or point out that would make you reconsider your “belief” in the reality of the external world and other people? It is, in short, a very odd thing to say that you “believe” on the basis of any sort of “evidence” in the reality of the external world and other people. This is not what we would ordinarily call a “belief.” But even if we are tempted to call it an extraordinary (but still legitimate) use of the word “belief,” in any case it is not a matter on which it would make sense to say we had “evidence” either for or against.

The upshot of all this is that there may be one case in which we can say that a genuine authority is the basis for our belief without begging the question whether or not we have any evidence for that authority; the kind of case where it makes no sense to question authority. The case I have in mind is precisely the case of belief in God. If we believe that God is the authority, the standard of reliability, trustworthiness, and goodness, then could it make sense to ask for evidence for this? This is something we either accept or reject, without proof or evidence. Correlatively, we cannot say that either—acceptance or rejection—is rational or irrational. It is not a choice that can be categorized in this way.

Lewis clearly shows that he is aware of the distinctiveness of religious belief in his literary works. In That Hideous Strength, for example, when Arthur and Camilla Denniston are attempting to convince Jane Studdock to join the Pendragon (Dr. Ransom) and his band of followers, Arthur says to his wife,

   “You must see it from Mrs. Studdock’s point of view, dear. You forget that she knows practically nothing at all about us. And that is the real difficulty. We can’t tell her much until she has joined. We are in fact asking her to take a leap in the dark.” He turned to Jane with a slightly quizzical smile on his face which was, nevertheless, grave. “It is like that,” he said, “like getting married, or going into the Navy as a boy, or becoming a monk, or trying a new thing to eat. You can’t know what it’s like until you take the plunge.” He did not know (or again perhaps he did) the complicated resentments and resistances which his choice of illustrations awoke in Jane, nor could she herself analyse them. She merely replied in a colder voice than she had yet used:

   “In that case it is rather difficult to see why one should take it all all.”

   “I admit frankly,” said Denniston, “that you can only take it on trust. It all depends really, I suppose, what impression the Dimbles and Grace and we two have made on you: and, of course, the Head himself, when you meet Him.”[iv]

There are several examples also from The Chronicles of Narnia where the children are asked to “take a leap in the dark,” to simply believe, without (and seemingly in the teeth of) anything we’d ordinarily call evidence or proof: When Lucy first returns from the wardrobe and asks the others to believe that she has been to another world; when she again asks them to believe that she can see Aslan in the dark, and that he wants them to follow him down into the river gorge; when Eustace, in his dragon form, must believe that Aslan’s tearing off of his dragon skin will not kill him but restore him; when Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum must decide if the Black Knight, chained in the silver chair, is or is not really Prince Rilian.

 In his essay, Lewis might easily have arrived at this last distinctive use of “believe” if, instead of referring to the “‘I believe’ as uttered by the Christian,” he had completed the expression by giving the subject matter of the Christian’s belief. Something like the lines of the Apostle’s Creed would do the trick: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth”; “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son”; “I believe in the Holy Spirit.” By not giving the subject of the belief, we are tempted by the illusion that this kind of belief—religious, and specifically Christian belief—is a matter of reason, or rational (or irrational) decision.

For without identifying the subject of the belief we might fall under the illusion that what it means to “believe in God” is the same as what it means to “believe in” anything or anyone else. When what we believe in is another human being, or ourselves, or even something like our abilities, we can sensibly ask whether or not such belief is reasonable, for there is the possibility that that person, or our abilities, or a government are not as trustworthy, reliable, strong, or good as we think. As long as our judgments of these things are correct, our belief can be said to be reasonable: if our judgments turn out to be incorrect, we can be said to hold unreasonable beliefs. But can our belief be said to be either reasonable or unreasonable if the person or object of our belief is the person or object that is the very manifestation of our ideal standards of trustworthiness, love, justice, goodness, reliability, and strength?

In remark 50 of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein describes this case:

There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one meter long, nor that it is not one meter long, and that is the standard meter in Paris. —But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with the meter-rule.[v]

Would it make sense to ask of the standard meter whether or not it was a meter long? And what could we say about the person who does ask the question? Could we say that he is either reasonable or unreasonable in asking the question?

Similarly, if God is the standard of trust, love, goodness, justice, and power, then what would it mean to “believe in God,” or to “have faith in God”? Certainly it would not mean that we have somehow rightly judged God to have these attributes, and so have good reasons to believe in him.

Again, Wittgenstein reminds us of the confusion and of why it is an easy confusion into which to fall.

The word ‘God’ is amongst the earliest learnt—pictures and catechisms, etc. But not the same consequences as with pictures of aunts. I wasn’t shown [that which the picture pictured].

The word is used like a word representing a person. God sees, rewards, etc.

“Being shown all these things, did you understand what this word meant?” I’d say: “Yes and no. I did learn what it didn’t mean. I made myself understand. I could answer questions, understand questions when they were put in different ways—and in that sense could be said to understand.”

If the question arises as to the existence of a god or God, it plays an entirely different role to that of the existence of any person or object I ever heard of. One said, had to say, that one believed in the existence, and if one did not believe, this was regarded as something bad. Normally if I did not believe in the existence of something no one would think there was anything wrong in this.

Also, there is this extraordinary use of the word ‘believe’. One talks of believing and at the same time one doesn’t use ‘believe’ as one does ordinarily. You might say (in the normal use): “You only believe—oh, well. . . .” Here it is used entirely differently; on the other hand it is not used as we generally use the word ‘know’.

If I even vaguely remember what I was taught about God, I might say: “Whatever believing in God may be, it can’t be believing in something we can test, or find means of testing.” You might say: “This is nonsense, because people say they believe on evidence or say they believe on religious experiences.” I would say: “The mere fact that someone says they believe on evidence doesn’t tell me enough for me to be able to say now whether I can say of a sentence ‘God exists’ that your evidence is unsatisfactory or insufficient.”[vi]

Wittgenstein reminds us here of the uses—or, as he would say, the grammar—of the word ‘God’ and expressions about God. These uses show what can or cannot be sensibly said about God. What theologians call “doctrines” are what Wittgenstein might call “grammatical remarks”: reminders of what can and cannot be sensibly said about God and God’s relation to the world and to men. What an investigation of these uses reveals is that ‘God’ is used in ways similar to both how we speak of a standard of trust, love, goodness, justice, and power, and how we speak of a person—“God sees, rewards, etc.” So the reason it was (or is) regarded as something bad if one did not (or does not) believe in the existence of God is that this unbelief involves not only doubting the existence of a person, but also doubting the reality of a standard of trust, love, justice, and power. It is this latter doubt that makes the unbelief “something bad,” a moral fault, and not just an intellectual failure.

As I have indicated, I think Lewis does acknowledge this distinction, even if he does not do so in his essay, “On Obstinacy in Belief.” What finally convinces me that he is aware of the distinction is his explicit awareness of how a person’s reasoning that there is a God can easily lead the illusion that “belief in God,” or “having faith in God” is simply a matter of intellectual assent to the proposition that there exists such a standard, such a person. This kind of belief or unbelief is not enough for it to count as faith; believing that there is a God is not necessarily the same as believing in God. Faith is belief of a different sort.

 A person can believe that God exists, that Jesus is God incarnate—intellectually assent to these propositions—and still fail to have faith. He might be like Ivan Karamazov (“the atheist who believes in God”), only still under the illusion of having faith. Faith, as it is exemplified in the Scriptures by Abraham, Moses, Job, Rahab, Ruth, David, Jeremiah, Mary, Peter, John, Paul, and most of all by Jesus himself, is essentially a matter of loving obedience and servitude, not of intellectual assent or understanding. Bouwsma makes the point clearly:

If we now ask: And when Saul asked, “Who art thou, Lord?” was there one who from now on ordered his life? Or was it all in Saul’s head? If the answer to the first question is yes, this [Saul’s question] must be regarded as a confession of faith and as a token too of one’s own servitude. Only another servant has a right to say yes. For Saul did not merely nod his head. His falling to the ground may be taken as a sign of his subjection to his Lord. Knowledge is not involved. Lordship here is not a matter of royal purple and a golden seal. . . . [T]here is no room here for evidence. “Who art thou Lord?” is said by one who in saying it does not make a discovery, as though he noticed something and inferred that Jesus was after all someone important, perhaps Moses or Elijah, as men had said earlier. In this utterance Saul becomes a servant, certainly not knowing what the end would be and, as he would have said, “through the grace of God.” It is a mistake to regard Saul as believing at one moment and obeying the next—as though he then said, “Well, I had better.”[vii]

Now it is in connection with the danger that results from this second illusion that Kierkegaard, under the pseudonymous voice of Johannes Climacus, says that “faith is a passion.” In The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard says,

The contents of this little book affirm, then, what I truly am as an author, that the whole of my work as an author is related to Christianity, to “the problem of becoming a Christian” with the direct or indirect polemic against “the monstrous illusion” we call Christendom, or against the illusion that in such a land as ours all are Christians of a sort.[viii]

    Kierkegaard sees his task as a writer to dispel the illusion that Christian faith is not essentially different from any other sort of faith; that the only difference is a difference in object—that faith in God is not essentially different from faith in oneself or in anyone or anything else. In his writing he attempts to illustrate what Wittgenstein reminds us of, that faith in God—in so far as that is the same as belief in God—is essentially different from faith in anything else, precisely because it is faith in God. In all but a grammatical sense, God is no object.

But how can one dispel such an illusion? It is not sufficient to simply say, “Look, this is an illusion. Here is how it works . . .”; for the illusion is not an optical illusion, but an intellectual one. Mere argument will not dispel the illusion, for the illusion consists in thinking that mere rational assent to the conclusion of an argument for the existence of God or the reasonableness of believing in God constitutes being a “Christian of a sort.” Since most of Kierkegaard’s readers were living under this illusion, his method of demonstration must be indirect: he must do more showing than saying. He must show his readers where their thinking leads by presenting literary characters (including his pseudonymous authors) who say and think the sort of things his readers might be made to say or think.

For example, by having Johannes Climacus characterize faith as a passion, Kierkegaard forces his readers to judge the passion in terms of who or what one’s faith is in, rather than who or what it is a belief about. Such a move also forces the reader to look at what the passion leads to, in terms of a person’s actions and way of life, rather than merely in terms of intellectual assent. Furthermore, the pictures Kierkegaard paints with these pseudonymous authors and their stories also evokes in his readers the appropriate passions for the life of faith that they portray—a deep longing for such a life; an abiding desire to know such a Teacher as Christ; a spine-tingling wonder at the thought of that which cannot (merely) be thought: the God-Man, the Absolute Paradox; and a profound fear and trembling before the Father and the Son. So, although it may be misleading to call faith a passion—because it is different from other, ordinary passions, like, say, erotic love—it is nevertheless true that a person who lives a life of faith lives like someone in love. One cannot live a life of faith without the kinds of passions the stories evoke. And calling faith a passion will prevent the more harmful illusion that it is, say, an intellectual virtue.

It was not, we must remember, Kierkegaard’s main goal to classify faith as a this or a that. That would be to set up yet another version of the illusion; that by being able to classify it, according to terms familiar from more ordinary language and more ordinary passions, we would then know it. Kierkegaard’s main goal was to dispel the illusion altogether. So it should perhaps not be surprising to find the idea that “faith is a passion” might also become a source of danger. There are many in our time who have become “Christians of another sort”: those who live under the illusion that faith is simply and literally a passion, like all other passions with which most people are ordinarily familiar, and that as long as one has this “passion,” one is a Christian—of a sort. Concern over this sort of danger might easily lead to a rejection of Kierkegaard’s supposed “subjectivism.”

But, in fact, Kierkegaard is no more (and no less) a “subjectivist” than Aquinas or Augustine or Calvin or Luther or Lewis or Tolkein. Like them, he recognizes the unique nature of religious belief because he recognizes the unique nature of Christ. The idea in Christianity is that Jesus is the divine standard of human goodness, love, justice, hope and faith. A person must, if he or she knows what this means and accepts the idea, subject himself to God, completely and absolutely. If a person does not do this, then he cannot truly be said to have faith or to believe in God. Such subjection, submission, implies passion; it simply isn’t submission—it simply isn’t faith—if it is cold and dispassionate. So Climacus’s story, that “faith is a passion,” is a far better story than the one widely believed by his intellectual contemporaries—and by many of our contemporaries, too. Such faith has no parallel—witness Christ himself—so it is difficult to avoid misleading analogies.

Lewis, too, is clear and eloquent about this essential nature of Christian faith. The majority of his essay, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” is concerned with what he calls the Christian’s “adherence to his belief,” what I (and Kierkegaard, and Lewis himself, I believe) would properly call faith. This “adherence to belief,” he says, is where “the charge of irrationality and resistance to evidence really becomes important. For it must be admitted at once that Christians do praise such an adherence as if it were meritorious; and even, in a sense, more meritorious the stronger the apparent evidence against their faith becomes.” “Christians seem to praise an adherence to the original belief which holds out against any evidence whatever.” But, Lewis argues, “such praise is in fact a logical conclusion from the original belief itself.”[ix] To show this, Lewis does what I have already said he ought to have done earlier: he emphasizes the peculiarity of the One in whom we believe. If we believe that God is a Person, definitive of goodness, love, justice, power and order, and that “his intention is to create a certain personal relation between Himself and us”—a relationship of unconditional love—then there must be complete trust. For “to love involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence, even against much evidence.”[x] And although at the strictly human level this kind of trust might be a mistake—there is always the possibility that the one we trust is not the good, trustworthy, loving, just person he or she appears to be—it is the rejection of this as a possibility that makes faith in this God—the God of Christianity—both unique and certain. As Lewis concludes, because of this uniqueness

there is no parallel between Christian obstinacy in faith and the obstinacy of a bad scientist trying to preserve a hypothesis although the evidence has turned against it. Unbelievers very pardonably get the impression that an adherence to our faith is like that, because they meet Christianity, if at all, mainly in apologetic works. And there, of course, the existence and beneficence of God must appear as a speculative question like any other. Indeed, it is a speculative question as long as it is a question at all. . . To believe that God—at least this God—exists is to believe that you as a person now stand in the presence of God as a Person. What would, a moment before, have been variations in opinion, now become variations in your personal attitude to a Person. You are no longer faced with an argument which demands your assent, but with a Person who demands your confidence.

Credere Deum esse turns into Credere in Deum. And Deum here is this God, the increasingly knowable Lord.[xi]

David Rozema                           

Department of Philosophy           

University of Nebraska at Kearney

Notes