During a talk on November 3 sponsored by the Sons of Saint Patrick and Gratia Plena, Dr. Peter Kreeft argued that C.S. Lewis is “definitely one of the three greatest writers of the 20th century.” Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy at Boston College for nearly 60 years and author of over 100 books, has always found Lewis to be a great inspiration, embodied by the fact that the first book he ever wrote was C.S. Lewis: A Critical Essay.
He called Lewis’ works “utterly uncompromising and utterly clear,” noting that his books often take multiple reads to fully understand their obscure nuances, and that is “what makes Lewis timeless.”
“Lewis is very good at metaphors and analogies,” Kreeft said. For instance, Lewis describes the mystery of the Trinity using palatable parallels: “God the Father is the thing to which we pray, the goal which we try to reach; God the Holy Spirit is the thing inside us, our motivation; God the Son is the road or bridge by which we reach that goal.”
Kreeft also mentioned Lewis’ well-known trilemma refuting the common argument that Jesus was “a good man and holy preacher, but not God Himself.” Lewis shows that there are only three options regarding Christ, as it is historically proven that He both existed and claimed to be God: either He says He is Lord but knows He is not, making Him a liar; He says He is Lord because He thinks He is but He is not, making Him a lunatic; or He says He is Lord and He actually is.”
The only case in which one could validly claim Jesus was a “good man” is the last (which also necessitates that Jesus is God), because liars aren’t good preachers and neither are lunatics.
Lewis also took the controversial stance that there is no “right to happiness.” By “happiness,” Lewis contended, people usually just mean sexual happiness, because contrary to the popular opinion that people should treat sexual impulses like all other impulses, he points out the following contradiction: most people believe that other impulses such as cowardice, greed, sloth, and gluttony should be bridled in some way, yet the same is not true of sex.
Kreeft explained how Lewis was against this increasing moral subjectivism: “We call things good simply because we like them.”
In response to an audience member’s question of what Kreeft thought about Lewis being Christian but not Catholic, Kreeft replied that God kept Lewis outside the Church “so all the Protestants would read him. God needed spies outside the Church to do work that would be more difficult for Catholics.”
“One theme C.S. Lewis will be remembered for for centuries, [that he was] better at expressing than anyone,” said Kreeft, “was joy.” Lewis defined joy as “intense longing distinguished by two things”—acute painfulness and simultaneous delight. According to Kreeft, Lewis believed that essentially joy is the innate desire for God, though Aquinas says we cannot know Him entirely. But how can we desire that which we do not understand? Lewis says this is possible because “the human soul is designed to enjoy something that can never be given in the subjective space-time existence,” but, if it gains eternal life, shall finally obtain. Does that mean there is no joy, but rather boredom in Heaven? To answer this, Lewis employs a simile: joy is like a person longing towards the silhouette of the most beautiful person they’d ever seen, but not the person themself. When they finally meet the person, it is an entirely new and superior kind of “joy.”
When questioned by an audience member on “How can you love God if you don’t believe in Him?”, Kreeft responded that even those who do not believe in God per se “can love the good, true, and beautiful—and after death, God will say to them, ‘Surprise! It was me all along.’”
“God wants everyone to be saved,” Kreeft continued. “He is just, and will recompense for all our disadvantages to knowing Him.”
Kreeft explained that it is solely one’s own choices that damn them. Kreeft noted that Lewis, when writing of heaven and hell, believed that “saved [people] go to a place made for them … but the damned go to a place made for the devil and demons, not humans … they used to be [humans],” but chose to be something much less.
Lewis once wrote: “Remember that the dullest, most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.”
Lastly, Kreeft recommended three non-fiction books and three novels (respectively) by C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles; The Chronicles of Narnia, The Great Divorce, and Till We Have Faces.
Staff Photo by Liana Winans
Liana Winans is a lifelong Bostonian studying Biology as a freshman in MCAS. While not working on Torch articles or practicing pro-life apologetics, she will often be found playing basketball in the Rec, reading at the Res, playing piano, or watching old action movies. Her go-to prayer is the Divine Mercy Chaplet.
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