Lewis, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on \"Belief\"

Chapter 7: CSL—Clive, Søren, and Ludwig: An Unlikely Trinity

Several years ago I attended a conference of the C.S. Lewis and

the Inklings Society which had as its theme the question, “How do

the Inklings define ‘mere Christianity’?” A good question, but

one for which the answer seemed easy: the unity of all

Christians, that which makes them all “mere” Christians, is the

common virtue of faith in Jesus [the] Christ. What makes the

question such a good one, however, is that even though this is

obviously the correct answer to it, giving the answer does not

necessarily mean that we understand the answer, or that we fully

understand it. For it has become a truism: something that we

think we understand so well that we have forgotten what we mean

by it. So what I propose to do in this chapter is to do what a

well-known philosopher said is the work of a philosopher: to

“assemble reminders for a particular purpose.”1 My purpose is to

clear away confusions about what it means for a Christian to

“believe in God,” and I will be assembling reminders mostly from

three men who were especially good at reminding us of what we

mean: C.S. Lewis, Søren Kierkegaard, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A

fourth, Plato, could also be included, but since he was pre-

Christian, I will retain this trinity.

In his essay, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” C.S. Lewis addresses the

charge often made against Christians, that their attitude towards

belief is that it is “positively praiseworthy to believe without 1Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, third ed.(New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 50e.

evidence, or in excess of the evidence, or to maintain belief

unmodified in the teeth of steadily increasing evidence against

it.” The contrast to this attitude is the so-called “scientific”

attitude, that one ought to “proportion the strength of his

belief exactly to the evidence; to believe less as there is less

evidence, and to withdraw belief altogether when reliable adverse

evidence turns up.” As Lewis says, this superficial description

of the difference in attitude towards belief shows the need for

some conceptual (and grammatical) investigation: “The sense in

which scientists proportion their belief to the evidence, and the

sense in which Christians do not, both need to be defined more

closely.” He thus begins his discussion with a review of the ways

in which we actually use the word “belief.”

First, he reminds us, “no one uses the word ‘believe’ about

things he has found out.” That is, as similar as the use of the

word “belief” might be to the use of the word “knowledge,” there

is a definite distinction between them: when one knows, one can

no longer properly be said to believe. The most common use of the

word ‘belief’, Lewis says, “expresses a very weak degree of

opinion,” as in “Tom is in London, I believe.” Or, “I believe he

said the concert was at eight.” The negative form of this is also

common: “I don’t believe she is coming, so we may as well start

without her.” In contrast to these more common usages, Lewis

points out two related “special usages,” which, as he says, “may

imply a conviction which in subjective certitude might be hard to

distinguish from knowledge by experience.” One such use is the

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negative use: for example, “Mrs. Jones has run off with the

butler? I don’t believe it!” Or the reaction of the hardened

materialist who responds to the report of a miracle, “I don’t

believe it.” The other special use, Lewis says, is the positive

version of this negative use: “I believe” as uttered by the

Christian. In both of these special usages, Lewis says, “we are

speaking of belief and disbelief to the strongest degree, but not

of knowledge. Belief, in this sense, seems to me to be assent to

a proposition which we think so overwhelmingly probable that

there is a psychological exclusion of doubt, though not a logical

exclusion of dispute.” Lewis concludes that, although the

Christian’s belief is not knowledge, it is also not “without

evidence, or in the teeth of evidence.”2

Now as much as I value the distinctions that Lewis reminds us of

here, I think he has not gone far enough in his distinctions. He

is certainly right to point out these different uses of “belief,”

but he has not considered the possibility that the “I believe” as

uttered by the Christian is not really the positive use opposed

to the negative “I don’t believe it!”, but is actually a third

use, different from both of these. To illustrate, imagine two

intelligent people who hold very strong but opposing beliefs

regarding the existence of life on other planets. The one says,

“I strongly believe that life on other planets is not only

possible, but actual.” The other says, “I don’t believe it! It’s 2All of the above quotations are from C.S Lewis, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960), pp. 13-17

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not possible.” Both of them can give persuasive, convincing

arguments and cite evidence in favor of their beliefs, yet

because of the subjective strength of each one’s convictions,

they will not succeed in making the other doubt what they

believe. This would be a case of one person using “I believe” and

the other one using “I don’t believe” in the special sense that

Lewis is talking about. But now imagine that the disagreement is

not about the existence of life on other planets, but about the

existence of God. In the former example both persons have some

idea about what would and what would not count as evidence for

the proposition that life exists on another planet. And even

though they might call into question the reliability or the

relevance of any particular piece of evidence, they certainly do

not disagree about what sorts of things would or could count as

evidence either way. But is there such agreement in the second

case? Do the opposing parties agree on what sorts of things would

or could count as evidence either way? Let’s say the one person

sees the harmony and order in nature as evidence of an

intelligent creator. The second person also sees this harmony and

order—the same order and harmony and to the same degree—as no

evidence at all, perhaps even as evidence of the chaotic forces

of nature blindly working to produce this harmony and order over

a very long period of time. Is the believer in an intelligent

creator more or less rational than the unbeliever here? Their

disagreement goes deeper than the first case: they not only

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disagree in their beliefs, they disagree on what sorts of thing

can even be considered as evidence for their beliefs.

Interestingly, there are plenty of indications that despite his

temptation to be the sort of apologist who wants to give

sufficient reasons for belief in God, Lewis is aware of this last

distinctive kind of belief. He goes on to say, “And, in fact, the

man who accepts Christianity always thinks he had good evidence;

whether, like Dante, fisici e metafisici argomenti, or historical

evidence, or the evidence of religious experience, or authority,

or all these together. For of course authority, however we may

value it in this or that particular instance, is a kind of

evidence.”3 Now surely Lewis is well aware that the argument

against authority as a primary basis of belief is as old as

philosophy itself. From Socrates’ question to Euthyphro, “Is the

pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious

because it is loved by the gods?” to Kant’s insistence on the

autonomy of reason to discover and legislate laws of nature and

morality, to Peirce’s critique that the “method of authority”

amounts to intellectual slavery, philosophers have questioned

authority as a basis for belief. Put simply, the problem with

authority is this: how do you determine who is or is not an

authority? If you just take the so-called authority’s word for

it, then you will be easily duped; but making your own

determination of whether or not someone is an authority means

that you yourself are more authoritative than the authority, for 3 Ibid., p. 17

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you have the authority to tell who is or isn’t an authority. Now

everyone recognizes that people do, in fact, rely on authorities

for many of their beliefs—it is hardly avoidable from a practical

standpoint—but this does not mean that they ought to. So when

Lewis says that authority is a kind of evidence, he must know it

can count as evidence only when the authority is genuine. And

since in most cases we need evidence for that, he can only be

thinking of the kind of case where it makes no sense to question

authority or to ask for evidence that would warrant taking it to

be an authority.

Another subtle indication that Lewis is aware of the

distinctiveness of religious belief is the example he gives of a

non-theological belief that implies “assent to a proposition

which we think so overwhelmingly probable that there is a

psychological exclusion of doubt, though not a logical exclusion

of dispute.” He says, “Most of my generation had a belief in the

reality of the external world and of other people—if you prefer

it, a disbelief in solipsism—far in excess of our strongest

arguments.”4 It is hard not to read this passage tongue-in-cheek,

but if you read it straight up, you might begin to wonder here,

what arguments or experiences would or could count as evidence

either for or against this “belief”? If you “believe” in the

reality of the external world and other people, then what could

you say or do or point out that would serve as counter-evidence

to the solipsist? He thinks the external world and other people—4 Ibid., p. 16.

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everything but his own mind—are the contents of his own mind.

Your attempts to give him evidence to the contrary would be like

a phantom trying to convince you that it isn’t a phantom, but

real. One shouldn’t pay any heed to arguments from phantoms—they

are phantom arguments. Likewise, if the solipsist were to forget

for a moment that he is a solipsist and try to convince you (a

phenomenon of his own mind) of solipsism (“you really ought to be

a solipsist yourself!”), what things could he say, do, or point

out that would make you reconsider your “belief” in the reality

of the external world and other people? Furthermore, what sense

can we possibly make out of the statement that the reality of the

external world and other people is a belief? For to take this as a

belief, we must also be able to understand its opposite as a

belief: we must be able to make sense out of a belief in the

unreality of the external world. What would such a belief amount

to? Would it be a belief in “the internal world” as opposed to

“the external world”; belief in “mentally-projected people” as

opposed to “other people”? But what is “the internal world,” and

how is it different from “the external world”; what are

“mentally-projected people,” and how are they different from

“other people”? The solipsist can make no sense of these

distinctions, and the rest of us who are not solipsists can make

the distinctions only if “the external world” is something we

know to exist, not something we believe; other people are people

we know to be real, not people we believe to be real. There

would, in other words, be no distinction between what the

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solipsist calls “the world” and what the rest of us call “the

world,” or between those whom the solipsist calls “other people”

and those who the rest of us call “other people.” Since we cannot

make sense of the distinction, we cannot make sense of solipsism

as a “belief”; and therefore neither can we make sense of its

opposite—the “belief” in an external world an in other people. It

makes no sense to say of either that it is a “belief.” It is, in

short, a very odd thing to say that you “believe” in the reality

of the external world and other people on the basis of any sort

of “evidence”. This is not what we would ordinarily call a

“belief.” But even if we are tempted to call it an extraordinary

(but possibly still legitimate) use of the word “belief,” in any

case it is not a matter on which it would make sense to say we

had “evidence” either for or against.

In That Hideous Strength, when Arthur and Camilla Denniston are

attempting to convince Jane Studdock to join the Pendragon (Dr.

Ransom) and his band of followers, Arthur says to his wife, “You

must see it from Mrs. Studdock’s point of view, dear. You forget

that she knows practically nothing at all about us. And that is

the real difficulty. We can’t tell her much until she has joined.

We are in fact asking her to take a leap in the dark.” “In that

case it is rather difficult to see why one should take it all

all,” responds Jane. “I admit frankly,” said Denniston, “that you

can only take it on trust. It all depends really, I suppose, what

impression the Dimbles and Grace and we two have made on you:

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and, of course, the Head himself, when you meet Him.”5 There are

several examples also from The Chronicles of Narnia where the children

are asked to “take a leap in the dark,” to simply believe,

without (and seemingly in the teeth of) anything we’d ordinarily

call evidence or proof: when Lucy first returns from the wardrobe

and asks the others to believe that she has been to another world

(The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe); when she again asks them to

believe that she can see Aslan in the dark, and that he wants

them to follow him down into the river gorge (Prince Caspian); when

Eustace, in his dragon form, must believe that Aslan’s tearing

off of his dragon skin will not kill him but restore him (The

Voyage of the Dawn Treader); when Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum must

decide if the Black Knight, chained in the silver chair, is or is

not really Prince Rilian (The Silver Chair).

In Till We Have Faces, after Psyche has been received and wed to the

god of the Mountain, her sister Orual confronts her with the

question of evidence that would show that he really is a god, or,

if a god, that he is good. Orual presents her arguments, which

amount merely to an appeal to the opinions and guesses of herself

and others as to the possible identity and nature of this so-

called god: “There’s your lover, child. Either a monster—shadow

and monster in one, maybe, a ghostly, un-dead thing—or a salt

villain whose lips, even on your feet or the hem of your robe,

would be a stain to our blood.” To which Psyche responds, “But

what is all this to me? How should they know? I am his wife. I 5Lewis, That Hideous Strength (New York: Scribner, 1996), pp. 115-116.

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know.” “How can you know if you have never seen him?” Orual asks.

“Orual, how could you be so simple? I—could I not know?” “But

how, Psyche?” “What am I to answer to such a question? It’s not

fitting. . .” When Orual then proposes that Psyche take a lamp

and look upon the god’s face in the night, Psyche tells her that

she cannot do it. Orual then insinuates that Psyche is afraid to

do it, afraid of what she will find. Psyche responds, “Oh, Orual,

what evil you think! The reason I cannot look at him—least of all

by such trickery as you would have me do—is that he has forbidden

me.” “I can think of one reason only for such a forbidding. And

of one only for your obeying it,” says Orual. Psyche answers,

“Then you know little of love.”6

It is clear from this passage that Psyche’s ground for believing

in the god is the love he has for her. She does not present what

we would ordinarily call “evidence” for her belief, her trust.

And Orual, of course, knows that this is not evidence, for she

knows that there are charlatans, seducers and villains in the

world. She thinks this so-called god may be one of them. But

Orual does not present evidence either. She presents a

hypothesis: he’s not a god, but a monster or a villain. At least

it looks like a hypothesis—but is it? For it to be a hypothesis,

there must be the possibility of evidence either confirming or

falsifying it. What could it be? She says that the test will be

to look at his face in the light of the oil lamp. But how will

6 Lewis, Till We Have Faces (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956), p. 159, pp. 161-162.

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that help? Does she (or Psyche, or anyone) know what a god’s face

is supposed to look like? How will looking help? And wouldn’t the

result—whatever it is—fail to convince Orual that he is a god, and

fail to persuade Psyche that he is not? This is not the sort of

question for which we could sensibly ask for evidence, in the

sense that we ordinarily use that term. And, since Psyche’s

relationship of love and faith in the god of the Mountain is a

picture of the Christian’s relationship of love and faith in

Christ, it is appropriate to be reminded that “if there were

evidence, this would in fact spoil the whole business. Anything

that I normally call evidence wouldn’t in the slightest influence

me.”7

The upshot of all this is that there may be one case in which we

can say that a genuine authority is the basis for our belief

without begging the question whether or not we have any evidence

for that authority; the kind of case where it makes no sense to

question authority. The case I have in mind is precisely the case

of belief in God. If we believe that God is the authority, the

standard of reliability, trustworthiness, and goodness, then could

it make sense to ask for evidence for this? This is something we

either accept or reject, without proof or evidence.

Correlatively, we cannot say that either—acceptance or rejection—

is rational or irrational. It is not a choice that can be

categorized in this way. In his essay, Lewis might easily have

7Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 56.

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arrived at this last distinctive use of “believe” if, instead of

referring to the “‘I believe’ as uttered by the Christian,” he

had completed the expression by giving the subject matter of the

Christian’s belief. Something like the lines of the Apostle’s

Creed would do the trick: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of

heaven and earth”; “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son”; “I

believe in the Holy Spirit.” By not giving the subject of the belief,

we are tempted by the illusion that this kind of belief—

religious, and specifically Christian belief—is a matter of

reason, or rational decision. For without identifying the subject

of the belief we might fall under the illusion that what it means

to “believe in God” is the same as what it means to “believe in”

anything or anyone else. When what we believe in is another human

being, or ourselves, or even something like our abilities, we can

sensibly ask whether or not such belief is reasonable, for there

is the possibility that that person, or our abilities, or a

government are not as trustworthy, reliable, strong, or good as

we think. As long as our judgments of these things are correct,

our belief can be said to be reasonable: if our judgments turn

out to be incorrect, we can be said to hold unreasonable beliefs.

But can our belief be said to be either reasonable or

unreasonable if the person or object of our belief is the person

or object that is the very manifestation of our ideal standards of

trustworthiness, love, justice, goodness, reliability, and

strength?

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In remark 50 of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein describes

this case: “There is one thing of which one can say neither that

it is one meter long, nor that it is not one meter long, and that

is the standard meter in Paris. —But this is, of course, not to

ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its

peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with the meter-

rule.”8 Would it make sense to ask of the standard meter whether or

not it was a meter long? And what could we say about the person

who does ask the question? Could we say that he is either

reasonable or unreasonable in asking the question? Similarly, if

God is the standard of trust, love, goodness, justice, and power,

then what would it mean to “believe in God,” or to “have faith in

God”? Certainly it would not mean that we have somehow rightly

judged God to have these attributes, and so have good reasons to

believe in him.

Again, Wittgenstein reminds us of the confusion and of why it is

an easy confusion into which to fall: “The word ‘God’ is amongst

the earliest learnt—pictures and catechisms, etc. But not [with]

the same consequences as with pictures of aunts. I wasn’t shown

[that which the picture pictured]. . . . The word is used like a

word representing a person. God sees, rewards, etc.” Wittgenstein

then asks whether or not someone who does not believe in God

could understand what the word ‘God’ meant. His answer is “Yes

and no.” Such a person could answer questions about God, and come

to understand different questions about God when put in different8Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 25e.

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ways, but such a person would not use the word ‘God’ or the

expression ‘believe in God’ in the same way that a believer

would. Wittgenstein goes on:

If the question arises as to the existence of a god or God,

it plays an entirely different role to that of the existence

of any person or object I ever heard of. One said, had to

say, that one believed in the existence, and if one did not

believe, this was regarded as something bad. Normally if I

did not believe in the existence of something no one would

think there was anything wrong in this. Also, there is this

extraordinary use of the word ‘believe’. One talks of

believing and at the same time one doesn’t use ‘believe’ as

one does ordinarily. You might say (in the normal use): “You

only believe—oh, well. . . .” Here it is used entirely

differently; on the other hand it is not used as we

generally use the word ‘know’. If I even vaguely remember

what I was taught about God, I might say: “Whatever

believing in God may be, it can’t be believing in something

we can test, or find means of testing.” You might say: “This

is nonsense, because people say they believe on evidence or

say they believe on religious experiences.” I would say:

“The mere fact that someone says they believe on evidence

doesn’t tell me enough for me to be able to say now whether

I can say of a sentence ‘God exists’ that your evidence is

unsatisfactory or insufficient.”9

9Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, pp. 59-60.

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Wittgenstein reminds us here of the uses—or, as he would say, the

grammar—of the word ‘God’ and expressions about God. These uses

show what can or cannot be sensibly said about God. What

theologians call “doctrines” are what Wittgenstein might call

“grammatical remarks”: reminders of what can and cannot be

sensibly said about God and God’s relation to the world and to

men. What an investigation of these uses reveals is that ‘God’ is

used in ways similar to both how we speak of a standard of trust,

love, goodness, justice, and power, and how we speak of a person

—“God sees, rewards, etc.” So the reason it was regarded as

something bad if one did not believe in the existence of God is

that this unbelief involves not only doubting the existence of a

person, but also doubting the reality of a standard of trust,

love, justice, and power. It is this latter doubt that makes the

unbelief “something bad,” a moral fault, and not just an

intellectual failure.

What finally convinces me that Lewis is aware of the distinction

is his explicit awareness of how a person’s reasoning that there

is a God can easily lead to the illusion that “belief in God,” or

“having faith in God” is simply a matter of intellectual assent

to the proposition that there exists such a standard, such a

person. This kind of belief or unbelief is not enough for it to

count as faith; believing that there is a God is not necessarily the

same as believing in God. Faith is belief of a different sort.

Bouwsma makes the point clearly: taking the conversion of Saul

[the apostle Paul] as a paradigm case of someone confessing

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Christian faith, he notes that in Saul’s saying “Who art thou,

Lord?” “Saul did not merely nod his head. His falling to the

ground may be taken as a sign of his subjection to his Lord.

Knowledge is not involved. Lordship here is not a matter of royal

purple and a golden seal. . . . there is no room here for

evidence.” It is not “as though he noticed something and inferred

that Jesus was after all someone important, perhaps Moses or

Elijah, as men had said earlier. In this utterance Saul becomes a

servant . . . It is a mistake to regard Saul as believing at one

moment and obeying the next—as though he then said, ‘Well, I had

better.’”10

Now it is in connection with this last kind of mistake that

Kierkegaard, under the pseudonymous voice of Johannes Climacus,

says that “faith is a passion.” In The Point of View for My Work as an

Author, Kierkegaard says “that the whole of my work as an author

is related to ‘the problem of becoming a Christian’. . . with the

direct or indirect polemic against . . . the illusion that in

such a land as ours all are Christians of a sort.”11 Kierkegaard

sees his task as a writer to dispel the illusion that Christian

faith is not essentially different from any other sort of faith;

that the only difference is a difference in object—that faith in

God is not essentially different from faith in oneself or in

anyone or anything else. In his writing he attempts to illustrate

10O. K. Bouwsma, Without Proof or Evidence, eds. J.L. Craft and R.E. Hustwit (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 12-13.11Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 5.

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what Wittgenstein reminds us of, that faith in God—in so far as

that is the same as belief in God—is essentially different from

faith in anything else, precisely because it is faith in God. In

all but a grammatical sense, God is no object.

But how can one dispel such an illusion? It is not sufficient to

simply say, “Look, this is an illusion. Here is how it

works . . .” For the illusion is not an optical illusion, but an

intellectual one. Mere argument will not dispel the illusion, for

the illusion consists in thinking that mere rational assent to the

conclusion of an argument for the existence of God or the

reasonableness of believing in God constitutes being a “Christian of

a sort.” Since most of Kierkegaard’s readers were living under

this illusion, his method of demonstration must be indirect: he

must do more showing than saying. He must show his readers where

their thinking leads by presenting literary characters (including

his pseudonymous authors) who say and think the sort of things

his readers might be made to say or think. Kierkegaard considered

the dispelling of this illusion his calling, his task. And as

such, he pursued it with all the passion of John the Baptist or

an Old Testament prophet. For the illusion concerns the very

nature of faith and what it means to “become a Christian.” The

illusion might be expressed this way: People think they

understand Christianity and therefore live in the illusion that

they are Christians. The illusion makes them impervious to, let

us say, Jesus Christ. They keep on hearing and repeating what

Jesus Christ said, and then, through mere repetitiveness, this

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language becomes a shield against understanding the Word. How

ironic that the Word, described by Paul as “the sword of the

Spirit,” “piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of

both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and

intentions of the heart” can become, through confusion due to

ignorance and misuse, a shield against itself! And then be

mistaken for faith, which Paul, in the same passage, describes as

“a shield . . . with which you will be able to extinguish all the

flaming missiles of the Evil One.” It is an illusion spawned by

the easily made—but difficult to spot—confusion between what it

means to understand a statement (or an assertion or a report or a

theory), and what it means to understand a command (or an

invitation or a request or a plea), especially when it comes from

someone both authoritative and loving. If the latter kind of

understanding is mistaken for the former, there is no radical

change in a person’s life, no transformation. But “becoming a

Christian,” says Kierkegaard, is a “qualitative leap” from one

way of life—one “mode of existence,” as Johannes Climacus puts it

—to another. A Christian’s testimony does not consist in

testifying about an eternal happiness, but in transforming one’s

existence into a testimony concerning it.

But this confusion between different senses of understanding is

just the root of the problem. The problem itself is not how to

point out the confusion, but how to help effect just such a

transformation as is described by Johannes Climacus. That is, not

simply to get people to see what it means to become a Christian,

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but to help them become Christians. To be of any help in doing

the latter, Kierkegaard knew that he must not just tell; he must

show, for only by portraying the various possible ways of life

(including the ways each form of life would understand

Christianity itself) could he evoke the “pathos,” or the type of

felt suffering, that each form of life would entail. This is why

Kierkegaard so often writes in parables, and why all of

Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors portray a certain “mode of

existence” more or less similar to that of a true disciple of

Christ. By portraying such ways of life, we are compelled to

examine our own lives in relation to Christ.

For example, by having Johannes Climacus characterize religious

faith as a passion, Kierkegaard forces his readers to judge the

passion in terms of who or what one’s faith is in, rather than

who or what it is a belief about. Such a move also forces the

reader to look at what the passion leads to, in terms of a

person’s actions and way of life, rather than merely in terms of

intellectual assent. Furthermore, the pictures Kierkegaard paints

with these pseudonymous authors and their stories also evokes in

his readers the appropriate passions for the life of faith that

they portray—a deep longing for such a life; an abiding desire to

know such a Teacher as Christ; a spine-tingling wonder at the

thought of that which cannot (merely) be thought: the God-Man,

the Absolute Paradox; and a profound fear and trembling before

the Father and the Son. So, although it may be misleading to

call faith a passion—because it is different from other, ordinary

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passions, like, say, erotic love—it is nevertheless true that a

person who lives a life of faith lives like someone in love. One

cannot live a life of faith without the kinds of passions the

stories evoke. And calling faith a passion will prevent the more

harmful illusion that it is, say, an intellectual virtue.

Still, it was not Kierkegaard’s main goal to classify faith as a

‘this’ or a ‘that’. That would be to set up yet another version

of the illusion; that by being able to classify it, according to

terms familiar from more ordinary language and more ordinary

passions, we would then know it. Kierkegaard’s main goal was to

dispel the illusion altogether. So it should perhaps not be

surprising to find the idea that “faith is a passion” might also

become a source of danger. (A danger Kierkegaard implicitly

acknowledges by writing under the pseudonym.) There are many in

our time who have become “Christians of another sort”: those who

live under the illusion that faith is simply and literally a passion,

like all other passions with which most people are ordinarily

familiar, and that as long as one has this “passion,” one is a

Christian—of a sort. Concern over this sort of danger might

easily lead to a rejection of Kierkegaard’s supposed

“subjectivism.”

But, in fact, Kierkegaard is no more (and no less) a

“subjectivist” than Aquinas or Augustine or Calvin or Luther or

Lewis or Tolkien. Like them, he recognizes the unique nature of

religious belief because he recognizes the unique nature of

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Christ. The idea in Christianity is that Jesus is the divine

standard of human goodness, love, justice, hope and faith. A

person must, if he or she knows what this means and accepts the

idea, subject himself to God, completely and absolutely. If a

person does not do this, then he cannot truly be said to have

faith or to believe in God. Such subjection implies passion; it

simply isn’t submission—it simply isn’t faith—if it is cold and

dispassionate. “To believe in the Invisible One is not only to

believe that there is the Invisible but to be subject to the

Invisible, to be haunted by, to be demanded of, to be touched by,

accused by a man who had it in his power to make such a gift.”12

Lewis, too, is clear and eloquent about this essential nature of

Christian faith. Speaking of his own conversion from atheism to

theism (and then to Christianity), Lewis describes his call to

faith in similar terms. In his autobiographical Surprised by Joy,

Lewis recalls the beginnings of a conscious turn towards faith

from a conversation with his friend Owen Barfield and Griffiths

(a student of Lewis’s), in which Lewis referred to philosophy as

a ‘subject’. Barfield retorted, “It wasn’t a subject to Plato, it

was a way.” “The quiet but fervent agreement of Griffiths, and

the quick glance of understanding between these two, revealed to

me my own frivolity. Enough had been thought, and said, and felt,

and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.”13

And when the moment came for this “something” that should be

12Bouwsma, Without Proof or Evidence, p. 39. 13Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956), p. 225.

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done, Lewis says that “now what had been an ideal became a

command . . . Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark,

were demanded. The reality with which no treaty can be made was

upon me. The demand was not even ‘All or nothing.’ . . . Now, the

demand was simply ‘All.’”14 “The commands were inexorable, but

they were backed by no sanctions [rewards or punishments, in this

life or in the life to come]. God was to be obeyed simply because

he was God. . . . If you ask why we should obey God, in the last

resort the answer is, ‘I am.’ To know God is to know that our

obedience is due to Him.”15 Indeed, to know God is to Love and

obey Him. This is the kind of “knowing” that we call faith.

In his literary works, Lewis also portrays faith in this way, as

an act of total surrender, of submission to the compelling

commands of God. And, like Kierkegaard, Lewis recognizes that an

essential element of this total surrender is a complete assurance

that what God wills, will be done. It is this assurance that is

the basis for the supernatural “joy” that comes to those with

faith. If faith is a gift of the Spirit, then joy is one of the

fruits of that gift. For example, in Lewis’s novel Perelandra, Dr.

Elwin Ransom is sent to the planet Perelandra as an emissary of

Maleldil [the otherworldly name for God] to the Green Woman of

Perelandra—the first created woman of that planet, similar to

Earth’s Eve. He meets her on one of the many floating islands on

the planet, and soon discovers that she has been commanded by

14Ibid., p. 228.15Ibid., p. 231.

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Maleldil not to set foot on the “fixed land.” Ransom’s former

adversary, Dr. Weston soon also arrives on the planet, and, after

becoming possessed by an evil spirit, attempts to persuade the

Green Woman to break—or at least come to question and resent—the

command of Maleldil. Ransom realizes that he has been sent to

counteract the deceptive and beguiling arguments of the enemy,

but after many wearisome days and nights of countering these

relentless and cunning attacks, Ransom realizes that something

more drastic must be done. In desperation, he prays for guidance,

for help, and he “hears” the voice of Maleldil, gently but firmly

calling him to fight the Un-man [the possessed Dr. Weston], to

physically attack and destroy the enemy. Ransom quails at this

suggestion, putting up various arguments against it, but the

Voice is inexorable. Then, “something happened”:

The thing still seemed impossible. But gradually something

happened to him . . . without any apparent movement of the

will, as objective and unemotional as the reading on a dial,

there [arose] before him, with perfect certitude, the

knowledge “about this same time tomorrow you will have done

the impossible.” His fear, his shame, his love, all his

arguments, were not altered in the least. The thing was

neither more nor less dreadful than it had been before. The

only difference was that he knew—almost as a historical

proposition—that it was going to be done. He might beg, weep

or rebel—might curse or adore—sing like a martyr or

blaspheme like a devil. It made not the slightest

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difference. The thing was going to be done. There was going

to arrive, in the course of time, a moment at which he would

have done it. The future act stood there, fixed and

unaltered as if he had already performed it. It was a mere

irrelevant detail that it happened to occupy the position we

call future instead of that which we call past. The whole

struggle was over, and yet there seemed to have been no

moment of victory.16

Thus, as Lewis clearly sees, faith in God, and all one’s actions

based on that faith, consists not merely nor primarily in an

intellectual grasp and understanding of certain doctrines, but

rather in a “way”: a life of active obedience, devotion, and

charity.

Finally, returning to where we began the chapter, the majority of

Lewis’s essay, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” is concerned with what

he calls the Christian’s “adherence to his belief,” what is

properly called faith. This “adherence to belief,” he says, is

where “the charge of irrationality and resistance to evidence

really becomes important. For it must be admitted at once that

Christians do praise such an adherence as if it were meritorious;

and even, in a sense, more meritorious the stronger the apparent

evidence against their faith becomes.” “Christians seem to praise

an adherence to the original belief which holds out against any

evidence whatever.” But, Lewis argues, “such praise is in fact a

16Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 149. See also the account of Jane’s conversion in That Hideous Strength, pp. 318-319.

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logical conclusion from the original belief itself.”17 To show

this, Lewis does indeed emphasize the peculiarity of the One in

whom we believe. If we believe that God is a Person, definitive

of goodness, love, justice, power and order, and that “his

intention is to create a certain personal relation between

Himself and us,” then there must be complete trust. For “to love

involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence, even against

much evidence.”18 And although at the strictly human level this

kind of trust might be a mistake, it is the rejection of this as

a possibility that makes faith in this God—the God of Christianity—

both unique and certain. As Lewis concludes, because of this

uniqueness

there is no parallel between Christian obstinacy in faith

and the obstinacy of a bad scientist trying to preserve a

hypothesis although the evidence has turned against it.

Unbelievers very pardonably get the impression that an

adherence to our faith is like that, because they meet

Christianity, if at all, mainly in apologetic works. And

there, of course, the existence and beneficence of God must

appear as a speculative question like any other. Indeed, it

is a speculative question as long as it is a question at

all. . . To believe that God—at least this God—exists is to

believe that you as a person now stand in the presence of

God as a Person. What would, a moment before, have been

17Lewis, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays, p. 21, p.23.18 Ibid., p. 25.

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variations in opinion, now become variations in your

personal attitude to a Person. You are no longer faced with

an argument which demands your assent, but with a Person who

demands your confidence.

Credere Deum esse turns into Credere in Deum. And Deum here is

this God, the increasingly knowable Lord.19

19Ibid., p. 26, p. 30.

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