A Life Observed by Devin Brown

Author:Devin Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL062000REL012040, Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples) (1898–1963)—Religion, Christian literature (English)—History and criticism
ISBN: 9781441242860
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2013-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

Idealism Soon Crumbles and Jack Moves to an Impersonal Theism

When Jack abandoned realism, the belief that the physical world is all there is, and embraced idealism, the belief that there was some sort of Absolute that transcended the physical world, things started off well, initially. “This was a religion that cost nothing,” Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy. “We could talk religiously about the Absolute: but there was no danger of Its doing anything about us” (210).

Lewis notes the influence of three idealists—the English Hegelians—T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet. Perhaps a closer look at just one of them will be sufficient to indicate the general position taken by idealist thinkers at the time. In The Most Reluctant Convert, David Downing offers this summary of the thesis in Bradley’s influential work Appearance and Reality:

Bradley envisioned an all-embracing Absolute in which the contradictions and illusions of the sensory world are transcended and resolved. This Absolute should not be confused with the God of religion, because it is not a Person apart from the universe; rather it is immanent in the universe, transforming the physical into the metaphysical. Just as each human body has a “soul,” the Absolute is the “soul” of the cosmos. (128)

Looking back at the idealism which he embraced at this time, Lewis writes in his autobiography that it was astonishing that he could view this position as something distinct from theism and concludes: “I suspect there was some willful blindness” (209). In addition to his own willful blindness, Jack had help from the idealist philosophers, who provided him with a number of useful “blankets, insulators, and insurances” which allowed him to get all the “conveniences” of theism without having to actually believe in God.

Writing in 1943 in the afterword to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis traces his faith journey this way: “On the intellectual side my own progress had been from ‘popular realism’ to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity” (200). These stages are perhaps worth unpacking a bit. Jack’s idealism held that there was a vague Absolute—but its nature, location, and other attributes were left largely undefined. Jack’s pantheism then saw this Absolute as immanent in and part of the universe. Finally, his theism placed this Absolute above and apart from the physical universe. There were two stages to Jack’s theism, as he first came to believe in an impersonal Spirit and then later in a personal God. After his move to theism, Jack still had a final move to Christianity.

Lewis goes on to say in the afterword that while he believes his path to belief to be a very natural road, at the same time he confesses that he had come to see his own particular sequence of steps to faith as a road very rarely trodden. In fact, very few Christians today have followed Lewis’s intellectual path. One reason for this, Lewis goes on to note, is that idealism soon ceased to have the appeal it had when he was one of its adherents.

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