The Sermon That Drove C.S. Lewis to Tears
It was remembered by those who heard it as the sermon Lewis almost never finished.
You likely have been moved to tears by something you’ve heard, something you saw, or something you read. Have you ever started crying over something you’ve said?
By the mid-1940s, C.S. Lewis had become a popular speaker. In 1941, he delivered what would be his most famous sermon, “The Weight of Glory.”
That same year, he began traveling across the country speaking to British troops. Later in 1941, he gave the first of his BBC radio addresses that would become Mere Christianity.
Published in 1942, The Screwtape Letters was a hit in the U.K. and would soon become an international best-seller.
Yet, one sermon delivered in 1944 was remembered by those who heard it as the sermon Lewis almost never finished.
On the surface, his sermon reads like a lecture, even a potentially dry one, about a theological and philosophical response to a skeptic’s objection. But something in this sermon struck deep into Lewis’ heart.
The Setting and the sermon
Before discussing Lewis’ response, let’s talk about the sermon itself.
In the introduction to The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, Walter Hooper, Lewis’ friend and secretary, writes that Nathaniel Micklem, the principle of Mansfield College, asked Lewis to preach on May 28, 1944, which was the Feast of Pentecost.
In the beginning of his sermon, Lewis notes the day “is set apart for commemorating the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the first Christians shortly after the Ascension” in the church to which he belongs.
He notes the church calendar for the Church of England because he was demonstrating his devotion to mere Christianity by speaking at a chapel with a different Christian heritage.
Mansfield was established as a school for nonconformist, Protestants who weren’t part of the Church of England, in 1838, It became part of Oxford in 1886. Lewis was a dedicated member of the Church of England and taught at Magdalen College, one of the oldest colleges at Oxford, founded in 1458.
Drawing on Pentecost, Lewis spoke to those gathered about “speaking in tongues.” Part of the reason he chose the topic was because he considered it “to be frank, an embarrassing phenomenon.”
You can almost hear the British stiff upper lip as he explains:
Every now and then we hear that in some revivalist meeting one or more of those present has burst into a torrent of what appears to be gibberish. The thing does not seem to be edifying, and all non-Christian opinion would regard it as a kind of hysteria, an involuntary discharge of nervous excitement. A good deal even of Christian opinion would explain most instances of it in exactly the same way; and I must confess that it would be very hard to believe that in all instances of it the Holy Ghost is operating.
But yet, Lewis argued we cannot entirely dismiss it entirely. This was the very thing that the risen Jesus had told His disciples to wait for.
So what do you say to the skeptic when they ask why Christians would look at 100 instances of speaking in tongues and reject 99 but keep one. “If most instances of glossolalia are covered by hysteria, is it not (he will ask) extremely probable that that explanation covers the remaining instances too?”
Lewis admits the skeptic has a strong prima facie case. Speaking in tongues and numerous other religious experiences seem as if they have natural explanations. In fact, much of what Christians believe could be explained away as an exaggerated or spiritualized version of the everyday world.
This is where he introduces the concept of “transposition.” Yes, when looked from below, the skeptic’s version makes sense, but it’s only because of their perspective. If they looked from above, it would change everything.
He gives several examples that everyone, skeptic included, would accept as instances where we can only know what is happening in the lower medium if we know the higher medium and use it as our guide.
We can recognize a three-dimensional cube drawn on two-dimensional paper only because we live in a three-dimensional world. Our knowledge of the higher, the real world, enables us to understand what is being communicated in the lower, a flat drawing.
Still, Lewis said we can imagine a person who perceived only two dimensions rejecting our claims of what drawings represent:
“You keep on telling me of this other world and its unimaginable shapes which you call solid. But isn't it very suspicious that all the shapes which you offer me as images or reflections of the solid ones turn out on inspection to be simply the old two-dimensional shapes of my own world as I have always known it? Is it not obvious that your vaunted other world, so far from being the archetype, is a dream which borrows all its elements from this one?”
If you’ve read The Silver Chair, you may remember the Lady of the Green Kirtle making a similar argument.
Prince Rilian, Eustace, Jill, and Puddleglum used objects around them in the underground city to explain the existence of things in the above-ground world, like describing the sun as like a lamp.1 The witch capitalized on their examples to dismiss everything they could not see:
“When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children's story.”
The witch tries to keep her captives from thinking of transposition. She wants their perspective to remain strictly from below.
To snap everyone out of their stupor, Puddleglum stamps out a fire with his foot and gives a version of the ontological argument for God’s existence. There’s nothing like the smell of burnt marshwiggle and deep philosophical thinking to rouse a sleepy, clouded mind.
Near the conclusion of his sermon, Lewis remarks that we can understand what the skeptic can’t because we are looking from above. This is how we understand things that are only “spiritually discerned.”2
Everything is different when you approach the Transposition from above, as we all do in the case of emotion and sensation or of the three-dimensional world and pictures, and as the spiritual man does in the case we are considering.
But in delivering this sermon, Lewis wasn’t merely speaking about emotions. He was experiencing them himself, as he considered all God did to communicate with us.
Emotional response
In the introduction to The Weight of Glory, Hooper quotes from a 1944 The Daily Telegraph article about Lewis that detailed the “Transposition” sermon.3
“[I]n the middle of the sermon, Mr. Lewis, under stress of emotion, stopped, saying ‘I’m sorry,’ and left the pulpit. Dr. Micklem, the principal, and the chaplain went to his assistance. After a hymn was sung, Mr. Lewis returned and finished his sermon … on a deeply moving note.”
Again, Lewis was an experienced public speaker by this point. This was not a matter of nerves. He wasn’t merely speaking about theology; he was moved by the theology he was speaking about.
We often imagine Lewis as a rational, intellectual man. That was certainly the case, but more than his intellect was converted when Lewis came to Christ. Hooper describes Lewis as the most thoroughly converted man he ever knew. The whole man was changed, including his emotions.
In a 1951 letter to friend and priest Giovanni Calabria, Lewis records an instance of his mental ascent to a theological truth giving way to an emotional experience and acceptance:
[D]uring the past year a great joy has befallen me. Difficult though it is, I shall try to explain this in words. It is astonishing that sometimes we believe that we believe what, really, in our heart, we do not believe.
For a long time I believed that I believed in the forgiveness of sins. But suddenly (on St. Mark’s Day) this truth appeared in my mind in so clear a light that I perceived that never before (and that after many confessions and absolutions) had I believed it with my whole heart.
So great is the difference between mere affirmation by the intellect and that faith, fixed in the very marrow and as it were palpable, which the Apostle wrote was substance.
In the years after, Lewis would repeatedly recall in letters this gaining a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the forgiveness of sins.
Theology, he recognized, could not stay in the abstract. The word itself means the study of God. How can we not be moved the more we learn of Him? Of course, a deeper grasp of His attributes, His nature, His character, and what those mean for us will stir our emotions.
“How little they know of Christianity who think that the story ends with conversion,” Lewis wrote in a 1954 letter.
If our theology never moves us to tears, something is wrong with our theology or something is wrong with us.
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In his Pentecost sermon, Lewis also uses an example of the sun and lamps, as he does in The Silver Chair.
1 Corinthians 2:14
In his article, “C.S. Lewis’ ‘Transposition:‘ Text and Context,” Arend Smilde argues Hooper mixed up the date of the sermon. He contends “Transposition” was actually preached in 1946 and the Daily Telegraph article is actually referring to a different sermon on the Ascension delivered February 26, 1944. For the purposes of this article, I’m treating Hooper’s dating as correct, but even if that is not the case, it is still true that Lewis was moved to tears and unable to immediately continue preaching for at least one sermon.