THE GRAND PANORAMA

C. S. Lewis on the Meaning of Life

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I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. —C. S. LEWIS, "is THEOLOGY POETRY?"

It's easy to imagine arriving at our first lunch with Lewis with questions buzzing through our heads, not knowing quite what to ask first. But perhaps the first thing Lewis might emphasize is that meaning matters.

Maybe Lewis would have thumped the lunch table to emphasize his point, causing the crockery to shudder. We might be taken aback. Weren't we the ones meant to be asking the questions? Yet Lewis is challenging us! Perhaps that's because he realized how important it is to sort this out as a first order of business. We all need to build our lives on something that is stable, solid, and secure. And until we find this foundation, we can't really begin to live properly. To use a distinction that Lewis teased out in Mere Christianity, there's a big difference between just existing and really living.

So why does meaning matter?

Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. Deep down within all of us is a longing to work out what life is all about and what we're meant to be doing. Whether it's the university student wondering what to major in or the Christian seeking God's will or the armchair philosopher contemplating his or her purpose in the world, most of us want a reliable foundation for our lives and are asking questions that relate to it. Why am I alive? What is this life about? What is at life's core? What is my relationship to the physical world and the others around me? Is there a God, and what difference does it make?

We all need a lens through which to look at reality and make sense of it. Otherwise we are overwhelmed by it. The poet T. S. Eliot made this point in one of his poems, "Burnt Norton" (1935). Humanity, he remarked, "cannot bear very much reality." We need a way of focussing it or weaving its threads together to disclose a pattern. Otherwise everything looks chaotic—blurred, out of focus, and meaningless.

The French atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who shaped the thinking of many bright young things in the 1960s, saw life as pointless: "Here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing." Yet it's hard to live in a meaningless world. What's the point?

Realising that there is meaning and purpose in life keeps us going in times of perplexity and difficulty. This point was underscored by Viktor Frankl, whose experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War showed the importance of discerning meaning in traumatic situations. Frankl realised that someone's chance of survival depended on a will to live, which in turn depended on being able to find meaning and purpose in hopeless situations. Those who coped best with apparently hopeless situations were those with "frameworks of meaning." These allowed them to make sense of their experiences.

Frankl argued that if we can't make sense of events and situations, we are unable to cope with reality. He quoted from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: the person "who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how." We need a mental map of reality that allows us to position ourselves, helping us to find our way along the road of life. We need a lens which brings into focus the fundamental questions about human nature, the world, and God.

Recent studies of trauma have emphasized the importance of sustaining a "sense of coherence" as a means of coping with seemingly senseless or irrational events, particularly those which involve suffering. In other words, those who cope best are those who can see beneath the surface of an apparently random and pointless world and grasp the deeper structure of reality. The great Harvard psychologist William James pointed out many years ago that this is what religious faith is all about. According to James, we need to have "faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained."

Of course, some would argue that any quest for meaning is simply misguided. There is nothing to find, so there is no point in looking. Richard Dawkins, who modestly declares himself to be the world's most famous and respected atheist, insists that the universe has "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." We may invent meaning to console ourselves, but there is no "bigger picture." It's all a delusion, something we have made up.

I took that view myself in my late teens. I thought people who believed in God were mad, bad, or sad. I was better than that! Atheism was an act of rebellion, an assertion of my right to believe whatever I liked. Admittedly, it was a little dull. But who cared about that? It may have been austere to the point of being dreary, but it was right! The fact that it did nothing for me was proof that I had adopted it because of its truth, not its attractiveness or relevance. Yet a tiny voice within me whispered, Are things really that simple? What if there is more to life than this?

Lewis did not help me break free from this dull and lifeless worldview. Yet as I began to read Lewis from about 1974 on, he did help me in one very important way. Lewis enabled me to name what I had found wrong with atheism. He helped me to put a jumble of insights and intuitions into words. And as I struggled to find my feet and my bearings in the Christian world, he quickly became my unofficial mentor. I had never met him, yet his words and wisdom became—and have remained—important to me. I would love to have had lunch with Lewis, not so much to bombard him with questions, but simply to thank him for helping me grow in my faith.

It's time to bring C. S. Lewis into the conversation. Lewis was an atheist as a young man, yet he gradually realised that atheism was intellectually vulnerable and existentially unsatisfying. Let's find out why. Let's imagine that we're having lunch with Lewis, and one of us asks him how he came to find meaning in life—or, specifically for him, how he became a Christian. What might he say?

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