Over the past few posts, I have addressed the output, or impact, of C.S. Lewis’ erudition. My assumption is that a person of erudition of the highest order would accomplish great things with all that knowledge. This means writing profusely and with great impact. Lewis did that. It also means putting forth compelling ideas and manifesting profound wisdom. Lewis did that, too.
In this post I share my thoughts on the impact C.S. Lewis had on the world–specifically, his impact on the Christian world (is there any other?) through his participation with the Oxford Socratic Club. I believe this is the least known and most underappreciated of Lewis’ accomplishments.
In assessing Lewis’ role as a defender of the Christian faith, the one area that stands out for a lack of attention received is his role with the Socratic Club. Except for Lewis’ books, no other activity has proven to have a greater impact upon Christianity than this.
The Oxford Socratic Club
The Oxford Socratic Club was a student club that met from 1942 to 1954. It provided an open forum for the discussion of the intellectual difficulties connected with religion and with Christianity in particular.
Reflecting on the original intent of the Socratic Club, C.S. Lewis wisely noted:
“In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university, there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into ‘coteries’ where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumor that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other groups can say.”
Founded by Stella Aldwinckle and a group of undergraduate students, The Socratic Club was created to fill that gap. Though not a founder, C.S. Lewis was asked to be the Club’s first president, and he served in that role from 1942 until his departure for Cambridge University.
The Socratic Club met on Monday evenings during term from 8.15 pm to 10.30 pm, with many undergraduates lingering long afterward. Though technically a student club, the featured speakers were never students but instead were faculty members and other renowned intellectuals from around England.
In its mission and quality of participants, the Oxford Socratic Club has never been surpassed as a forum for examining the veracity of the Christian faith.
C.S. Lewis: Star of the Show
These were friendly but vigorous debates conducted weekly between Christian believers and non-believers. To enter the Socratic Club arena was to confront challenging arguments presented by very smart people. You could not go into battle armed with pious platitudes or Scripture, for the Bible has no credibility with nonbelievers. Lewis understood this implicitly.
Lewis was sometimes a presenter, and sometimes a respondent, but he was always a towering presence. His skills in argumentation coupled with his prodigious erudition made him a matchless debater.
Surprisingly, Lewis was the first speaker on only eleven occasions during the twelve years he was president. However, as president, it usually fell to Lewis to launch the discussions. Students and colleagues alike looked primarily to Lewis to uphold the Christian position.
Despite his effort to promote balanced repartee and badinage, Lewis remained the chief attraction at most meetings. Lewis always seemed to have the right retort, leaving opponents stunned and the students delighted in watching their hero utterly vanquish the opposition.
John Wain, a poet, novelist (and part-time Inkling) reflected on the performance of the great verbal pugilist C.S. Lewis:
“It was Lewis’s show . . . a kind of prize ring in which various champions appeared to try conclusions with Lewis, who week after week put on a knock‐down‐and‐drag‐out performance that really was impressive. Our time has produced no better debater . . . I can remember packed meetings in stifling college common rooms where the atmosphere was positively gladiatorial.”
Impact of the Socratic Club
The importance of The Socratic Club—and especially Lewis’ role in it—are grossly undervalued. Few realize that the Socratic Club debates played a pivotal role in the development of modern Christian apologetics. The Socratic Club brought atheism and agnosticism out of the shadows and into the spotlight of the public arena. The policy of point-counterpoint and civil dialogue introduced by Lewis was entirely new to Oxford. As a result of the Socratic Club, believers everywhere gained the confidence to enter the arena.
For many Oxford students during Lewis’ tenure, Monday evenings were the treasured highlights of their university career. As one student member of the Socratic Club commented to Lewis’ biographer, George Sayer:
“If I have an adult Christian faith that is a rational one, I owe it to the meetings of the Socratic society. I never realized before I went there that Christianity could be defended logically, and that most of the arguments used by its opponents could be shown to be irrational.”
The Detested Don
Lewis was deeply resented by most of his fellow Oxford dons, and they conspired to block his path to professorship. What was it that they disliked about him? To start, Lewis was the most popular (and intellectually challenging) instructor at Oxford University. School administrators reserved the largest halls for Lewis’ lectures . . . and they were always filled.
Worse yet, Lewis spoke on Christianity and wrote in a common vernacular deemed unbefitting an Oxford professor. To make matters worse, due to the wartime BBC broadcasts, Lewis’ voice was the 2nd most recognized in all of England. Then in 1947 Time Magazine put his face on the cover. (Aaargh!)
Perhaps worst of all, at the Socratic Club Lewis exposed his peers intellectual and philosophical weaknesses. Many adversaries left the arena hat in hand, vowing never to return.
Lewis’ Training
C.S. Lewis’ journey from intellectual atheism to Christianity prepared him to engage in verbal battle with skeptics. Nearly all the premises Lewis challenged so effectively in Socratic Club debates were positions he ardently defended years earlier. His critique of those ideas proved plausible precisely because he had formulated his arguments in criticism of his own positions.
It seems incredible that an unbeliever like Lewis would one day become “The Apostle to The Skeptics”. His intellectual depth as a Christian thinker is due to his years as a non-Christian thinker. Not an effective defender of the faith despite his unbelief, but because of it.
Lewis’ Skill Set: Erudition
Lewis had simply read far more than anyone in England. Moreover, his unparalleled comprehension of ancient and Medieval literature led him to say:
“I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners.”
On top of all that, Lewis’s prodigious memory enabled him to be exceedingly well-armed with countless quotes from great thinkers that he could draw upon at a moment’s notice.
This entire series has been about the plausibility of my premise that C.S. Lewis might be the most erudite person in history. To that end, I have attempted to create a perspective on Lewis’ erudition as measured by three primary factors:
- The number of literary books that C.S. Lewis read.
- His unparalleled ability to comprehend the original author’s meaning.
- His legendary powers of retention.
In earlier posts I used simple graphics to depict Lewis’ erudition as compared to several different classes of readers, notably “Voracious Readers” and “Moderate Readers”. According to my speculations, C.S. Lewis read 20,000 different literary books over the course of his life. By comparison, the “Voracious Reader” would read 4,800 books and the “Moderate Reader” would finish only 605 books over his or her life.
By this analysis, it seems that Lewis would have read more than 4 times as many books as the “Voracious Reader” and 33 times as many books as the “Moderate Reader.”
Imagine for a moment that you are a “Voracious Reader” (probably comparable to an Oxford student) faced with the prospect of debating an adversary who had four times as much knowledge as you. How daunting would that be!
Actually, the relative gap in erudition is far wider than that. How so? Because accessible erudition is not just a factor of the number of books one has read, but what the reader has comprehended AND retained.
So, if we assume that C.S. Lewis had 100% comprehension and 100% retention then he had access to the erudition that comes from 20,000 books during any given Socrates Club debate. That’s a lot, eh? By contrast, if a “Voracious Reader” has 50% comprehension coupled with 25% retention (trust me, these are normal rates) then Lewis would have not 4 but 52 times the amount of erudition to call upon.
Against the “Moderate Reader” who might have 35% comprehension and 15% retention, C.S. Lewis would have nearly 2,000 times as much accessible knowledge in his head. Now that is daunting on steroids!
What about the class of intellectuals Lewis typically did face off against in his Socratic Club debates? Using conservative assumptions, it is reasonable to believe Lewis had 4 to 7 times as much knowledge in his head as his opponent.
Is it any surprise then that Lewis never squared off a second time against such brilliant adversaries like C.M. Joad or Shaw Desmond, or D.E. Harding, or Archibald Robertson? It would be exhilarating to be a student in the hall . . . on the “hot seat” not so much.
Lewis Skill Set: Rhetoric
Despite the vastness of Lewis scholarship through his prodigious reading, his rhetorical genius has yet to be explored in depth. Lewis’ Medieval and Renaissance studies brought him into contact with the great rhetoricians, such as Aristotle, Cicero and Erasmus. Although developed last, it is his ability to influence that puts the worth to all the other aspects of his genius.
Professor James Como, an authority on rhetoric AND C.S. Lewis, sheds light on Lewis’ consummate genius:
“Lewis’ rhetorical gifts are arguably unmatched in this century in their adroitness and versatility. He is among the great men of letters in the English-speaking world, not only in this century but ever.”
Lewis’ Argumentation Style
Definitionally, “apologetics” is a branch of theology devoted to the defense of the divine origin and authority of Christianity. Distilled to its purest meaning, this word would seem to imply “arguments FOR belief”. To be sure, C.S. Lewis did produce powerful arguments FOR belief, such as:
- the Argument from the Numinous
- the Argument from Morality
- the Argument from Desire
- the Argument from Reason
- the Trilemma
But Lewis was more about “arguments AGAINST disbelief”. This includes not only The Problem of Pain, but also his many rebuttals of philosophical fallacies, such as one finds in The Abolition of Man.
Lewis’ audience was NOT believers, but thoroughly modern skeptics, not unlike the intellectual elites at Oxford. Consequently, Lewis rarely argued directly for the Christian faith, and almost never quoted from Scripture as a basis for belief. Instead, he based his arguments on logic and human experience. The “Apostle to the Skeptics” mostly debunked heresies and philosophical fallacies; he was best at “knocking down reasons NOT to believe”.
Lewis’ mission was not so much to make unbelievers believe in belief, but to make skeptics skeptical of skepticism. He focused less on proving Christianity true than demolishing barriers to belief. This mirrors Lewis’ own faith journey, which was less one of finding truths but of eliminating false belief systems.
Lewis presumed the hortatory style of evangelism is like water off a duck’s back to people who neither recognize a need to come to Jesus, nor feel uncomfortable where they are. To skeptics, hortatory evangelism is “barren and banal bromides”. Lewis understood that to exhort nonbelievers to come to Jesus on the basis of platitudes is to add irritation to ignorance . . . like uttering “abracadabra” over “hocus pocus”.
It is in large measure a product of Lewis’ work with the Socratic Club that Oxford and Cambridge are today blessed to have such leading thinkers as: John Lennox, Alister McGrath, Michael Ward and Malcolm Guite. In addition, Lewis’ work had a profound influence on such great Christian apologists as Peter Kreeft, Randy Alcorn, William Lane Craig, and Alvin Plantinga.
A Final Thought from Walter Hooper
Who could have greater insights into Lewis’ work at the Socratic Club, than Walter Hooper? While compiling Lewis’ shorter works, Walter Hooper discerned a trend in Lewis’ development as a writer. This trend points to the true source of his inspiration. As Hooper observed:
“When I was editing Lewis’s diary covering the years 1922–1927, one thing seemed to me more and more obvious. Lewis had always been brilliant, as an atheist as well as a Christian. Before his conversion he could write well, and he was more ambitious than at any time in his life. But apart from two—his early volumes of verse—nothing happened. I believe the whole thing can be summed up in five words: Lewis had nothing to say. It really does appear that when Lewis cared more about God than being a writer, God gave him things to say.”
I believe what Walter Hooper said is true. Moreover, I believe Lewis’ body of work with the Oxford Socratic Club confirms beyond all doubt that he put his prodigious erudition to great use.
In the next post, I will close out this section on the “accomplishments of Lewis’ erudition” by reflecting upon Lewis’ impact upon me . . . and perhaps upon you as well.
Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27
Erudition Series Index
