Overcoming the Great Divorce II: C.S. Lewis

Part I

If our social structure is disintegrating, is that not precisely because it has no constitutive spiritual principle, no ‘idea’ in Solovyov’s (and Coleridge’s) sense of the term, incarnate in it.

Owen Barfield, Introduction in Vladimir Solovyov. The Meaning of Love (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1985):14 – 15.

The institution of marriage has always been a difficult institution for Christians to discuss. On the one hand, we know it was established long before the coming of Christ, and was a necessary part of society. On the other hand, we also know that Christ had transformed it, raised it up, and made it something new. It now points to the relationship between Christ with the Church. It brings grace to those involved. But how are we to connect the original institution with the Christian one? For when we try to do so, we note that the history of the institution is confusing, to say the least: some things, like polygamy, have their place in Scripture, but do not have their place in Christianity. Yet, since people came from a pre-Christian to a Christian state of being, many questions emerged. What was one to do with someone in a form of marriage which is not respected by the Church? Take, for example, polygamy. Should the man choose one wife, and kick the other women out of his house? Wouldn’t that be hard on the women? While the Church desired the man to be monogamous, no general solution to this one difficult question could be found. Instead, the answer was often given on a case by case basis, reflecting upon the needs of those involved. The same was true to other difficult cases. The Christian response to such difficult questions has, for the most part, been generous, but not sufficient. Yet, things changed. Christendom was established and most people were raised Christian. These questions disappeared from the limelight. There was a sense that there was a general understanding as to what marriage was and how it was to be practiced. In recent times, things have changed once again. What are Christians to do in a society which is trying to redefine the institution of marriage while their faith believes it to be something else? The questions which have been left unanswered have come back to us and demand an answer. But something else has been revealed in the midst of our crisis: Christians, even in the heyday of Christendom, really didn’t have theological agreement as to the nature of marriage.[1]  The ways Christians answered the difficult questions before became the means by which different theological traditions about marriage were established. Thus, when trying to engage society, Christians must return to the basics and come to terms with what marriage is and isn’t for themselves as well.

C.S. Lewis tried to enter the discussion on a pragmatic level. Since Christianity no longer held sway over society, its moral concepts could no longer be enforced by the state. However, this did not mean Christians could not, nor should not, keep to their own values. Thus, Lewis believed that society could and should create its own norms, its own idea of marriage, and Christians when entering their vows should do so following the requirements of the state. At the same time, Christians must follow the dictates of their faith, and the rights and responsibilities of a Christian marriage, with its sanctifying grace, can only come about from a religious, not a secular, ceremony. “My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christian and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.“[2] One must assume, of course, that the only true marriage for Christians is the religious kind, and if the laws infringed upon the Christian’s right to practice their faith as they see fit, such laws would not have to be obeyed. Lewis tied this belief with his belief that divorce should be allowed by the state, because not everyone held to the Christian belief that marriage could not be dissolved. “A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine.“[3]

Taking what Lewis said above into the modern situation, it would seem that Lewis would support a state redefining marriage, and allowing various other kinds of practices: polygamy, homosexual marriage, and the like, if the society desired it. But he would complain if one element in society tried to force their views upon the state by changing the established norms if the rest of the state did not agree. This kind of reasoning, of course, transcends the issue of marriage and goes into the question of morality and its enforcement by the state. Who decides which morality the state is to follow? Lewis, it would seem, wanted to establish a kind of social contract which would allow, even require, the state to change its laws when societal morality has changed. “When the prevalent morality of a nation comes to differ unduly from that presupposed in its laws, the laws must sooner or late change and conform to it. And the sooner they do so the better. For till they do we inevitably have humbug, perjury, and confusion.“[4] Lewis would demand the law to be flexible, to allow for personal choice and virtue. He would not want it to be used to make people do actions which they would consider immoral (such as to make them have sex, make them drink wine, make them have an abortion). Of course, there would be times when personal morality and societal morality are in conflict, and Lewis’s position would offer little help in such cases. He would readily admit it. Indeed, he understood how difficult it could be to produce ethical solutions to moral dilemmas, but that was due to the nature of human fallibility: “The man without a moral code, like an animal, is free from moral problems. The man who has not learned to count is free from mathematical problems. A man asleep is free from all problems. Within the framework of general human ethics problems will, of course, arise and will sometimes be solved wrongly. This possibility of error is simply the symptom that we are awake, not asleep, that we are men, not beasts or gods.“[5]This would mean, of course, making laws based upon a society’s moral code would also be a difficult, and fallible, activity.

While being more flexible on the question of divorce, and believing that the state can define marriage as it sees fit, Lewis believed that there was something which made marriage important for all involved, whether or not it was a Christian marriage. One should not enter marriage lightly. Marriage vows should be respected for what they are, and treated seriously. Indeed, they should plan for the marriage to last. It they didn’t, they would be better off shacking up instead. “If people do not believe in permanent marriage, it is perhaps better that they should live together unmarried than that they should make vows they do not mean to keep. It is true that by living together without marriage they will be guilty (in Christian eyes) of fornication. But one fault is not mended by another; unchastity is not improved by adding perjury.“[6]

Lewis took his theory of marriage seriously, as can be seen in his relationship with Joy. When he first married her, it was purely a civil affair, one which allowed her to stay in England. He acted as if that was all there was to it, but no one (except maybe himself) was fooled by this, least of all his brother. “J assured me that Joy would continue to occupy her own house as ‘Mrs. Gresham’, and that the marriage was a pure formality designed to give Joy the right to go on living in England: and I saw the uselessness of disabusing him. Joy, whose intentions were obvious from the outset, soon began to press for her rights, pointing out with perfect truth that her reputation was suffering from J’s being in her house every day, often stopping until eleven at night; and all arrangements had been made for the installation of the family at The Kilns, when disaster overtook us.“[7] Only when Joy was discovered with cancer, and it looked as if she were going to die, did C.S. Lewis go one step further and enter into a Christian marriage with her. It was not an easy thing to arrange: she was a divorcee, and many, including his own bishop, were against the marriage. He had to get the service of an old pupil of his, who was from a different diocese, to bless his union.[8]

By putting his theory of marriage – and even divorce – into action, Lewis had created a scandal for himself. And many of his friends, like Tolkien, were upset enough about it. What made things much more complicated was the fact that Lewis didn’t even bother to tell many of his friends about his marriage. They had to learn about it from others. The two facts together created a great amount of friction between Lewis and Tolkien. “Tolkien, like many of Lewis’s friends, had not heard of the marriage until some time after it took place. When he did learn of it, probably at second hand rather than from Lewis himself, he was profoundly injured by the fact that Lewis had concealed it from him. He was also distressed by the fact that Lewis had married a divorcee, for his own views on divorce and remarriage were much less liberal than Lewis’s. In his eyes, Joy was still Mrs Gresham.”[9] Joy really wasn’t well liked by many of Lewis’ friends; she was often seen as an outsider forced into a well-defined territory she did not belong, and his friends used all kinds of excuses to avoid being around her.[10]Perhaps one of the greatest surprises to this story is how Tolkien’s wife, Edith, who had often found Tolkien’s Inkling meetings an annoyance which got in the way of his work and family life, was able to start a friendship with Joy.[11]

Lewis’ theories of marriage were seriously questioned by Tolkien, and indeed, he believed Lewis was trying to do two things at once: proclaim a kind of morality but also take it away, all with one stroke. The result, as we shall see, is that he thought Lewis was playing close to the kind of relativism he normally abhorred.

Footnotes

[1] While there are some basics held by most Christians, we must realize that Protestants do not, for the most part, recognize the sacramental nature of marriage. Moreover, Catholicism itself has at least two distinct understandings of marriage within its mantle. The West sees the couple as giving the sacrament to each other, while the East sees the priest as the one who confers the sacrament upon the couple. While this explains why in the West a deacon can preside over the marriage while in the East they cannot, we are left to question what this distinction means theologically, if anything.
[2] C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965), 101-2.
[3] Ibid., 101.
[4] C.S Lewis. “Sex in Literature,” pages 105 -108 in Present Concerns(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1986): 105.
[5] C.S. Lewis, “On Ethics,” pages 44 – 56 in Christian Reflections  (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992): 56.
[6] C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity, 97
[7]Clyde Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead, eds. Brothers & Friends: The Diaries of Marjor Warren Hamilton Lewis (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 245.
[8]Roger Lancelyn Greek and Walter Hooper. C.S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Harper Collins, 2002), 379.
[9] Humphrey Carpenter. The Inklings(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979), 242.
[10] A.N. Wilson. C.S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1990), 271.
[11] Humphrey Carpenter. J.R.R. Tolkien: The Authorized Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988), 237.