LaGrave Avenue
Christian Reformed Church
The Real C.S. Lewis
Part 4
His Life and Writings: Pain, Suffering, Joy (Shadowlands)
“You’ll never get to the bottom of him.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
Complied by
Paulo F. Ribeiro
MBA, PhD, PE, IEEE Fellow
March 28, 2004, AD
Grand Rapids
1
2
The Problem of Pain is possibly the most rational treatment in modern
times of the most irrational problem at all times, the primary
intellectual objection to the Faith, the problem of evil. The problem is
perennial, of course, but the need is greater today because of the
decay of the conviction that faith and reason are allies and that
objections to the faith can be met and refuted; and this is more and
more becoming a popular excuse for irrationalism, subjectivism and
relativism in the churches.
Lewis addressed the problem of evil:
Rationally (The Problem of Pain)
Psychologically (Screwtape and The Great Divorce)
Narratively (in the character of Orual in Till We Have Faces)
Autobiographically (In Grief Observed).
3
“I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are
yourself the answer. Before your face questions die
away. What other answer would suffice?”
Till We Have Faces
4
“The "Heaven" chapter in The Problem of Pain is so heavenly
that I beg you to tell me any other book or chapter ever written
that explains the ultimate meaning and end of human life, the
life of Heaven, and the joy that is "the serious business of
Heaven," with more theological, moral, and aesthetic depth and
attractiveness, or which combines the sophistication of a
scholar, the passion of a saint, and the joy of a poet so
seamlessly. Tell me what that book is and I will trade you my
whole library for it.”
Peter Kreeft
5
"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in
our conscience, but shouts in our pains ......."
6
The Problem of Pain
The main argument of The Problem of Pain is preceded by a presentation
of an atheist objection to the existence of God based on the observable
futility of the universe.
"Not many years ago when I was an atheist … ". There follows a
compelling picture of a universe filled with futility and chance, darkness
and cold, misery and suffering; a spectacle of civilizations passing away,
of human race scientifically condemned to a final doom and of a universe
bound to die.
Thus, "either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit
indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit". On the other hand, "if the
universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings
ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? […]
The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have
been ground for religion: it must always have been something in spite of
which religion, acquired from a different source, was held". But, where
should we look for the sources?
7
The Problem of Pain
The "experience of the Numinous", a special kind of fear which
excites awe, exemplified by, but not limited to, fear of the dead, yet
going beyond mere dread or danger, is the first source; the other is
the moral experience; and both "cannot be the result of inference from
the visible universe" for nothing in the visible universe suggests them.
Likewise, the identification of the Numinous with the Moral, "when the
Numinous Power to which [men] feel awe is made the guardian of the
morality to which they feel obligation" — a choice made by the Jews
— must be viewed as utterly "unnatural" and very much unlike mere
wish fulfillment, for "we desire nothing less than to see that Law
whose naked authority is already insupportable armed with the
incalculable claims of the Numinous". In Christianity, a historical
component is added: an extraordinary man walking about in
Palestine, claiming to be "one with" the Numinous and the Moral.
"Either He was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or
else He was, and is, precisely what He said".
8
The Problem of Pain
What is the meaning of God's Omnipotence? Can he do whatever he
pleases? You may attribute miracles to him but not nonsense: "Nonsense
remains nonsense even if we talk it about God."
Lewis discovers that "not even Omnipotence could create a society of free
souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and
'inexorable' Nature"; that a fixed nature of matter implies a possibility,
though not a necessity, of evil and suffering, for "not all states of matter will
be equally agreeable to the wishes of a given soul"; that souls, if they are
free, may take advantage of the fixed laws of nature to hurt one another;
that a "corrective" intervention by God in the laws of nature, which would
remove the possibility — or the effect — of such abuse, while clearly
imaginable, would eventually lead to a wholly meaningless universe, in
which nothing important depended on man's choices. "Try to exclude the
possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of freewills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself". Thus, the
universe as we know it might as well be a product of a wise and omnipotent
Creator; it remains to be shown "how, perceiving a suffering world, and
being assured, on quite different grounds, that God is good, we are to
conceive that goodness and that suffering without a contradiction".
9
The Problem of Pain
The goodness of God means that we are true objects of his love, not of his
disinterested concern for our welfare.
"You asked for a loving God: you have one. […] The consuming fire that
made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as
a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a
child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes". We may
wish for less love; but then we would dream an impossible dream. God is
our only good. He gives "what he has, not what he has not; the happiness
that there is, not the happiness that is not. If we will not learn to eat the only
food that the universe grows — the only food that any possible universe
ever can grow — then we must starve eternally."
10
The Problem of Pain
Because God loves us he will not rest until he sees us wholly lovable. From
that perspective, the suffering of a creature in need of alteration is a mere
corollary to God's goodness. Yet, the problem is that the perception of
man's sinful condition.
Lewis insists, "Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis — in itself a
very bad news — before it can win the hearing for the cure." He considers
two modern developments that contributed to the rise of a belief in the
original innocence: the reduction of all virtues to kindness ("nothing except
kindness is really good"), and the effect of psychoanalysis on the public
mind ("shame is dangerous and must be done away with").
"Kindness is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite
inadequate grounds", for we can feel comfortably benevolent towards fellow
men, as long as their good does not conflict with ours.
"We are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects,
a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves." And at
once we perceive a contradiction.
11
The Problem of Pain
How could a bad creature have come from the hands of a good
Creator? Man, and the rest of creation, was initially good, but through
the abuse of freedom, man made himself an abominable, wicked
creature he now is. This doctrine, which finds no support in science —
only in the Scripture, in the human heart and in newspapers — is
particularly foreign to the modern mind.
Lewis insists that "science has nothing to say for or against the doctrine
of the Fall". Focusing his analysis on the meaning of the terms 'savage'
and 'brute', he shows that the popular notion of a 'savage' needs
correction: "The prehistoric men who made the worst pottery might have
made the best poetry and we should never know it". Also, he shows,
there is no reason why mere "brutality" (in the sense of "animality") of
our remote ancestors should imply their moral wickedness. Thus, it is
conceivable that the paradisal man possessed goodness along with his
natural 'savagery' and 'brutality'. He just may have been created good.
He may have walked in God's will. And he may have chosen to walk out
of it.
12
The Problem of Pain
"We are not merely imperfect creatures that need improvement: we are
rebels that need lay down their arms".
God is in charge; he supervises the circulation of good and evil; and He
does it in a way that satisfies his Goodness, that is, with total respect for
man's freedom.
"In the fallen and partially redeemed universe we may distinguish (1) the
simple good descending from God, (2) the simple evil produced by
rebellious creatures, and (3) the exploitation of that evil by God for His
redemptive purpose, which produces (4) the complex good to which
accepted suffering and repented sin contribute. […] A merciful man aims at
his neighbor's good as so does 'God's' will, consciously co-operating with
'the simple good'. A cruel man oppresses his neighbor and so does simple
evil. But in doing such evil he is used by God, without his knowledge or
consent, to produce the complex good — so that the first man serves God
as a son, and the second as a tool. For you will certainly carry out God's
purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you
serve like Judas or like John".
13
The Problem of Pain
The proper good of a creature is to surrender to its Creator. However, the
human spirit, hardened through "millennia of usurpation", will not "even
begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it."
Thus, the function of pain, on the lowest level, is to shatter the illusion that
"all is well", to plant "the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul". "We
may rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities", but "pain insists on
being attended to.“
On a higher level, pain shatters yet another illusion: that we are selfsufficient; that all we have is our own doing. This is perhaps where pain,
when it afflicts "honest and decent people", seems most cruel and
undeserved. But Lewis calls it a sign of "divine humility": it is "a poor thing
to come to [God] as a last resort, to offer up 'our own' when it is no longer
worth keeping. […] If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we
came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?"
On the highest level, pain teaches true self-sufficiency: "Human will
becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is
one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it."
14
Thus, the ordinary function of pain within the tribulation system is to make a
The Problem of Pain
Thus, the ordinary function of pain within the tribulation system is to make a
creature's submission to the will of God easier. Lest it should seem a
justification of pain, Lewis clarifies:
"Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the
old Christian doctrine of being made perfect through suffering is not
incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design."
A Christian reflection on pain must end with a vision of heaven:
“The suffering of the present time offers nothing that a mercenary soul
could desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for
only the pure in heart want to".
"God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love".
Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you alone, because you
were made for it.”
15
The Problem of Pain
When the book was published in 1940, Lewis offered the reader this overly
humble confession: "You would like to know how I behave when I am
experiencing pain, not writing books about it. You need not guess for I will tell
you; I am a great coward."
"If you are writing a book about pain and then you get some actual pain […] it
does not either, as the cynic would expect, blow the doctrine to bits, nor, as a
Christian would hope, turn into practice, but remains quite unconnected and
irrelevant, just as any other bit of actual life does when you are reading or
writing."
In 1961, Lewis wrote about pain again, this time about his own. In A Grief
Observed he satisfied the alleged curiosity of his readers. But he did not
come across as a coward; nor did his firm grasp of "a theory of suffering"
prove altogether irrelevant. True, his faith in God was challenged; he uttered
blasphemies; worst of all, he went through the very objections to God's
goodness which he had refuted in The Problem of Pain. But then, reason
returned: "Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I
hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less?"
16
Shawdowlands - Themes
Pain and God's Power
"Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all of the great
religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without
chloroform." (The Problem of Pain)
Pain and God's Goodness
"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a
lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling 'darkness' on the walls of his cell."
(The Problem of Pain)
Grief and Faith
"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." (A Grief Observed)
The Shadowlands
"The world is like a picture with a golden background, and we the figures in the
picture. Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large dimensions of
death you cannot see the gold." (The Problem of Pain)
17
"For a good wife contains so many persons in herself.
What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my
mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my
sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my
trusty comrade, friend, shipmate fellow-soldier. My
mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend
(and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps
more. If we had never fallen in love we should have none
the less been always together, and created a scandal.”
CS Lewis
18
Quotes From The Problem of Pain
“If the universe is so bad...how on earth did human beings ever come
to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?"
"Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness."
"Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love
cannot cease to will their removal."
"When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in
fact be happy."
"When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own
creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme selfsacrifice and leads to Calvary."
19
Quotes From The Problem of Pain
"If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then
we must starve eternally."
"Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at
the moment."
"Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which
we have in moments of shame must be the only true one..."
"The 'frankness' of people sunk below shame is a very cheap
frankness."
"We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time
does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin."
20
Quotes From The Problem of Pain
"Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical,
do not know what they ask."
"[God] is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that
we prefer everything else to Him."
"If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him
from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?"
"Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees
that our remaking is now hopeless."
"Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere
"opiate of the people" have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all
mankind except the poor."
21
Quotes From The Problem of Pain
"It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of
nature, that we have poverty and overwork."
"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but
shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
"[Pain] removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of
a rebel soul."
"We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for
emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it."
"It matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth."
22
Quotes From The Problem of Pain
"Every uncorrected error and un-repented sin is, in its own right, a
fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time."
"Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire."
"Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to
Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you."
"God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first
love."
23
How Hollywood Reinvented C. S. Lewis in the film "Shadowlands."
by John G. West, Jr.
It is understandable why the film Shadowlands (now available on videotape) won rave reviews from almost
everybody. The acting is splendid, the script is literate, and the production design is first-rate. All things
considered, the film is a wonderful piece of cinema and well worth seeing. For those of us who never had the
rare privilege of meeting C. S. Lewis in person, Shadowlands brings Lewis and his world to life in a new way.
Nevertheless, despite its beauty and its pathos, Shadowlands is not without major failings in the realm of
accuracy. Unfortunately, many people seem to take at face value the film's opening claim that "this is a true
story." The reviewer for Christianity Today, for instance, wrote that although "the filmmakers have taken some
liberties with facts…and simplified some of Lewis's complex musings… the film is generally true to Lewis's
life."
As a matter of fact, it isn't. The names of the principal characters are the same, but much of the plot has been
contrived to fit the point of view of scriptwriter William Nicholson.
I'm not complaining about the numerous small inaccuracies. I expected those. After all, it doesn't really matter
that Joy had two sons instead of one (though it might matter if you were the son who was left out). Nor does it
really matter that the marriage between Joy and Jack went on a lot longer than the film indicates (more than
three years in reality). Such errors are minor and certainly fall within the domain of legitimate dramatic license.
What is more difficult to accept are the two huge errors on which the whole plot seems to hinge.
The first of these errors is the depiction of Lewis's life before he met Joy. The film portrays Lewis as leading a
cloistered existence in which he avoided women, children, and --above all-- commitments to any relationship
or situation that offered him the potential for risk or pain. This depiction of Lewis is a convenient way to set up
him up for the film's subsequent love story. But the portrayal invents a C. S. Lewis who never existed.
24
Contrary to the storyline of the film, Lewis had lived a life that was anything but cloistered or free from pain or
commitment. During World War I, the supposedly cloistered Lewis served in the trenches in France, where he was
wounded in action. After the war, the supposedly sexless Lewis apparently became infatuated with Mrs. Moore, a
widow old enough to be his mother. When the affair ended and Lewis became a Christian, Lewis the uncommitted
somehow felt obliged to support Mrs. Moore for the rest of her life, and she lived with Lewis and his brother until
she had to be moved to a rest home (where he visited her every day). Meanwhile, the Lewis who did not associate
with children had three children come and stay with him during World War II (they had been sent out of London
because of the air raids (just like Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe).
Similarly, the Lewis who supposedly avoided women also developed a close friendship with English poetess Ruth
Pitter; he even told a friend that were he the kind of man to get married, he would marry her! And the Lewis who
walked through life without painful experiences had to deal with his rejection by Oxford's academic community,
which never saw fit to select this brilliant scholar for a professorship (Cambridge finally did in the 1950s).
The second huge error of the film is its suggestion that Lewis's faith in God was undermined by Joy's death. While
the film shows grief-torn Lewis saying (quite tentatively) to his stepson that he still believes in heaven, there is
little indication in the film that Lewis still believes in a loving God. Indeed, in an outburst before his friends, Lewis
is shown railing at the brutality of a God who acts as cosmic vivisectionist. Although this scene is invented
(Lewisís grief was intensely private), the speech against God that William Nicholson puts in Lewis's mouth is
actually inspired from a passage in Lewis's A Grief Observed. The problem is that Nicholson is slipshod in the
thoughts he chooses to lift from Lewis: He appropriates Lewis's struggles from A Grief Observed but doesn't bother
to give any sense of the reaffirmation of faith found in the rest of that book -- or in the many other letters,
interviews, and articles by Lewis during the rest of his life. It seems that Mr. Nicholson wasn't interested in
portraying an orthodox Christian who experienced intense grief and yet maintained both his faith and his intellect.
Here is where the pernicious aspect of Shadowlands becomes evident. Lewis's writings -- including his intimate
confessions in A Grief Observed --were largely efforts to vindicate God's often unfathomable ways to man. Lewis
sought to remove the obstacles that separate us from a living relationship with the One who truly loves us.
Shadowlands does precisely the opposite by setting up Lewis's faith as a straw man and then proceeding to knock it
25
down.
The film repeatedly shows Lewis delivering a simplistic speech about how God uses painful experiences to make us
listen to Him. The facile confidence with which Lewis delivers the speech is gradually contrasted with personal hell he
goes through during Joy's sickness and eventual death. By the end of the film, Lewis has presumably recognized that
his simplistic theological dogmas won't wash. He doesn't find God in suffering; he finds a silent void. Thus is the most
cogent defender of Christian orthodoxy of the twentieth century transformed into a modern champion of anguished
doubt.
I tend to think that most people who view Shadowlands will overlook the underlying contempt the film displays for
Lewis's faith because Lewis is portrayed so sympathetically. And make no mistake: Despite the biographical
inaccuracies mentioned above, Lewis is portrayed sympathetically. This film is not anti-Lewis. But perhaps that is
because the villain in this story is not Lewis, but God.
The great irony of Shadowlands is that it even as it draws people closer to Lewis, it may drive them further away from
the One in whom Lewis found the meaning of life. What a tragedy it would be if those who see the film come away
thinking that Lewis's earlier faith was somehow refuted by reality. Mind you, I am not claiming that this will be the
result of Shadowlands. One can only speculate about the effect of the film on individual viewers, and this sort of
speculation is rather dubious anyway. I can only suggest that given the film's script that some viewers may conclude
that Lewis's defense of Christianity could not stand the scrutiny of real life.
There is another possibility, of course: The film may inspire those who see it to read Lewis's writings for themselves
and discover the reality of the faith to which he pointed. I hope that this second possibility will turn out to be the
reality.
26
Review: Shadowlands - by Andrew Rilstone
I forget how much of my news you and your mother know. It is wonderful. Last year I married, at her bedside in
hospital, a woman who seemed to be dying: so you can imagine it was a sad wedding. But Aslan has done great things
for us, and she is now walking about again, showing the doctors how wrong they were and making us very happy....
C.S Lewis: Letters to Children
I'd been building up to Shadowlands with some trepidation. Richard Attenborough has made a career out of
sentimentalising the lives of well known historical figures. (Don't you think that Ghandi would have been improved if
we'd been allowed to hear about what he liked to do with naked women...?) The thought of him getting to work on one
of my personal heroes was not an inspiring prospect. The Hollywoodized publicity campaign didn't make me very
hopeful. 'He thought that magic only existed in books.... then he met her.' Oh dear.
So I was relieved to find that what we had was a pretty good movie, with Hopkins almost managing to be convincing
as Lewis although he looked nothing like him, and Deborah Winger pulling off a very nearly perfect Joy Gresham.
When you've read practically every that's been written about a pair of people, you get a very fixed idea of what they
were like, and its impressive when actors manage to personify that idea. And the visuals, full of mists and sunrises and
scenery and churches and crowds of undergraduates could hardly have been better.
In fact if Mr Attenborough hadn't removed the point of the story and twisted its meaning, I would be in a position to
recommend it.
Shadowlands, in its three versions—TV, stage and now screen—is unashamedly a work of a hagiography rather than
biography. It is selective about what it tells us about Lewis. The TV version didn't mention that C.S Lewis's brother,
Warren, was an alcoholic, or that Joy Gresham's American abrasiveness made her very unpopular with Lewis's friends.
Both of these were incorporated into the stage play, improving it enormously. Other awkward themes were ignored. We
learned nothing of Lewis's alleged sado-masochism, nothing of his quarrel with Tolkien, and nothing of the mysterious
Mrs Moore, who may or may not have been the lover of this 'confirmed bachelor'.. Nevertheless, it seemed to me to be
a valid account of this part of Lewis's life: partial, yes, somewhat idealised, yes, but capturing some of the spirit of the
man (or at any rate, that part of it which we know from his books.) Douglas Gresham (Lewis's stepson) told Lewis's
biographer A.N Wilson 'how authentic it all felt, apart from the fact that so many of the details were untrue.'
27
Bill Nicholson, playwright of all three versions, said that in some biographies you have to work quite hard to find the patterns,
the connections that can make the facts of someone's life into a story. In C.S Lewis's case, he found the work done already.
Certainly, it seems as if Lewis was forced, at the end of his life, to live out a parable of everything that he had ever written—
about Christianity, about children, about love, about death, about suffering. Doubtless over-simplistic biographies have made it
all seem more clear cut than it actually was, but the bare bones of the story seem to be entirely true. A crusty old bachelor has a
purely platonic friendship with an outrageous American; he enters into a marriage of convenience so she can stay in the
country; she turns out to be suffering from cancer; their friendship turns into sexual love; there is a death-bed marriage, a three
year remission: they are happy, she dies. Alone again, the Christian scholar has to re-assess everything he ever believed.
Is there a more painful book in the English language than A Grief Observed, Lewis's diary of the month's following Joy's
death? It has been said that in those months he lost his faith: what actually happened seems to have been rather worse. In the
TV version of Shadowlands, Nicholson has him say 'I still believe in God, but what kind of God?'. His beliefs still seemed
intellectually valid to him: but he doubted that God was good, or feared that a truly good God might be more dreadful, more
terrifying than a malevolent deity. He rebuilt his faith, and his final books (Prayer: Letters to Malcolm and The Great Divorce)
are probably his best: less smug, more considered, more pious, more concerned with searching for the truth, less with winning
the argument.
The BBC's play concentrated on what might be termed this theological plot. Despite its omissions, it was full of convincing,
pointed scenes. We are shown that David and Douglas Gresham were the same ages that Lewis and his brother were when their
mother died. We see Douglas reading the passage from the Magicians Nephew about Aslan bringing the magic apple back from
Narnia to save a mother's life; and Lewis realising the absurd naiveté of the stories he had been feeding children. The play
shows us Lewis's loss of faith—overstates it, according to some who knew Lewis—but culminates with his mystical
experience, quoted directly from A Grief Observed—in which he realises that God is still there, unchanged.
The stage version improved the characterisation of Joy Gresham—we could finally see why Lewis's friends at Oxford might
have disliked her. It incorporated a series of long monologues from Lewis, derived from the Problem of Pain, about the nature
of suffering in the world. It removed David Gresham from the story altogether (ostensibly for reasons of dramatic economy,
but one wonders if this was at the request of the adult David, who seems not to have shared his brother's hero-worship of
Lewis.) It foolishly spends a lot of the second act on a series of rather inept tableaux of Joy and Jack being happily married,
and incorporates their 'honeymoon' in Greece. Not good theatrical material, I'm afraid. It also made a lot more of the
psychological element, arguing that Lewis was a screwed up kid, who never got over the death of his mother, and had been
emotionally frozen by the experience.
28
The film manages to cut much of what was interesting in the two plays. Warren Lewis's alcoholism is touched on, but to
nothing like the extent that it was in the stage play. Strangely, the off-stage character of Bill Gresham (Joy's first husband)
is whitewashed. In both plays, we are told that he used to fire loaded guns to work off his anger, and once broke a bottle
over Douglas head. On the screen, Douglas briefly complains that his dad shouts too much. Viewers who are not very
familiar with Lewis's life and work are likely to miss entirely the symbolism of the attic, so nicely brought out on the TV.
Lewis's emotional coldness since his mother's death is reduced to a single conversation between him and Joy. His antipathy
to women vanishes altogether: the common room bore who explains that men have the intellect where women have souls
(and is demolished by Joy) is expressing a view that Lewis himself might well have put forward. 'Why on earth marry a
woman' he was supposed to have said 'All the topics of conversation would be used up in a fortnight.' But Lewis the (very
chivalrous) misogynist wouldn't fit Shadowlands according to Attenborough, so out it goes.
But the films greatest sin is the way in which Attenborough marginalises all the specifically Christian ideas in the story. We
lose a conversation between Lewis and his friends about the meaning of Christmas, and gain an explanation of the
symbolism of the Wardrobe. (Is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe really the only Lewis book that anyone has heard
of?) Later, he asks another bachelor friend if he feels a sense of waste. 'Of course.' replies the friend, and the scene ends. In
the play, he was allowed to add 'I don't have your faith in divine recycling.' To be fare, we keep the Problem of Pain
monologue from the stage play, which presents something not a million miles from what Lewis's beliefs actually were. 'I'm
not sure God particularly wants us to be happy . . .Pain is God's megaphone for shouting at a callous world.' He says that
we all long to take each others pain on ourselves but does not add, as the real Lewis undoubtedly would have done, that we
can't do so, whereas God can, and did.
These are fairly trivial points. The loss of Joy's account of her conversion from communism to Christianity, and Lewis's
account of his own conversion from paganism seems more serious. A longish talk drawn directly from the couple's
correspondence becomes a single gag about them both being 'lapsed atheists'. A very nice scene, created specially for the
film, in which the embarrassed Lewis shares a bed with Joy for the first time, has him commenting that each night he
kneels at the end of the bed and says his prayers. 'Like a little boy' comments Joy. Lewis might have said that as a little boy
he was a humanistic atheist with leanings towards paganism and the occult. He doesn't. The film makes his Christianity
something childlike and Anglican, which it wasn't.
Most seriously of all, the meaning of Joy's remission is changed beyond all recognition. In the two plays, the clergyman,
having pronounced them man and wife and stumbled touchingly over expressions like 'in sickness and in health' and ''till
death do you part' says 'I thought I might say a brief prayer of healing. Would you object if I laid hands on you?' This
happened in real life: Lewis wrote in 1959—
29
I have stood by the beside of a woman whose thigh bone was eaten through with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the
disease in many other bones as well...The doctors predicted a few months of life: the nurses, who often know better, a few weeks.
A good man laid hands on her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, though rough woodland) and the man
who took the last X-ray photos was saying 'These bones are as solid as rock. It's miraculous.'
Lewis believed that Joy's remission was a miraculous act of God. In stage and TV, as in life, this was the point of the story.
In the movie, no prayer-of-healing is given by the clergyman, and we jump straight from the wedding to scenes of Joy undergoing
chemotherapy. The chemotherapy replaces the prayer. Attenborough could hardly have put it more strongly than that. True, we
hear Lewis's own parish priest saying that he knows how hard he has been praying. However the film has Lewis say that he does
not pray to change God, but for the effect it has on him. This would not have been the real Lewis's view. I don't say that
Attenborough, who is not, I think, a Christian, should have turned the movie into a piece of religious evangelism. You may not
believe that Joy's remission was miraculous. Peter Bide, the clergyman in question, doubted that it was. What is important is that
Lewis thought so. If Attenborough was worried about the film turning into a piece of polemic, he could have introduce a sensible
atheist for Lewis to talk to. He could have had Lewis meet Bertrand Russel or A.J Ayer, who were both around at the right time.
He could have re-staged the famous debate about miracles in which G.E.M Anscombe ripped holes in Lewis's argument, to the
extent that he never wrote another book of theological argument. But instead, he simply shunts any specifically Christian,—or
Lewisian—God off to the sidelines.
I didn't see Chaplin. Maybe they played down the fact that he was a comedian.
I could go on, and on. TV left Joy's final moments to our imagination; screen shows it to us. In real life, Lewis reports Joy's last
words were 'I am at peace with God'. The screen gives us 'You have to let go, Jack.' TV let us hear the dreadful, poignant
conversation that Lewis reports in A Grief Observed ('If it is allowed, will you come to me when I too am on my deathbed?'
'Allowed? Heaven would have a job to stop me, and as for Hell, I'd smash it to pieces.') Film cuts it.
As in all previous versions of the story, we end with Lewis talking to Douglas Gresham, and the old man and the little boy crying
together. Lewis, on this view, was emotionally frozen, and, in particular, couldn't bare to show emotion in front of other men.
Hence, in the play, being able to embrace his stepson and weep was the culmination of a process which started when he met Joy.
Douglas is represented as being in the same position that Lewis was in at his age: not believing in heaven, but wanting his mother
back. It is an extraordinarily affecting scene. In the play, it pulled the two themes of the story—Lewis's childhood, Lewis's faith—
together. In the film, it loses its point (though not its emotional punch) since the themes of motherhood and Christianity have been
so played down. It is no big thing for Lewis to hug Douglas when we have already seen him kissing him goodnight; no big thing
for him to cry when we have already seen him do so. And no big thing for him to say 'I believe in heaven' when we haven't been
shown any significant loss of faith.
30
So what are we left with? A film about a man who wrote children's books (and little else, apparently) and gave lectures to
old ladies; who married late and lost but was pleased he had done so. It has genuinely moving moments: the death bed
marriage; Jack and Douglas crying in the attic; Jack haranguing the priest. Genuinely moving moments: but do they carry
their power because of my memories of other, better version and of my reading of the works of the man himself? I don't
know.
I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from seeing what is in the final analysis a good movie: Hopkins really is
phenomenal, particularly given some of the lines he has to work with. But I do hope that the BBC take the opportunity to
repeat the original: and that when audiences have put their hankies away they read A Grief Observed, maybe the best
Christian book written this century.
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hope that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.
C.S Lewis, 'Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman'
31
He took in more, he felt more, he remember more, he
invented more … His writings record an intense
awareness, a vigorous reaction, a taking of the world into
his heart … His blacks and whites of good and evil and
his ecstasies and miseries were the tokens of a capacity
for experience beyond our scope.
Austin Farrer on C.S. Lewis
32
“There was one candle on the coffin as it was
carried out into the churchyard. It seemed not only
appropriate but also a symbol of the man and his
integrity and absoluteness and his faith that the
flame burned so steadily, even in an open air, and
seemed so bright, even in the bright sun.”
Peter Bayley at Lewis’s funeral
33