The Socratic Club

“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”

— 1 Thessalonians 5:21, KJV

Stella Aldwinckle’s Idea

In the autumn of 1941 a woman named Stella Aldwinckle, who worked as a chaplain to women students for the Oxford Pastorate, an evangelical ministry in the university, had an idea. She had noticed that many students had honest questions about the Christian faith and nowhere to ask them. The religious societies in Oxford were for believers. The atheist and secular societies were for unbelievers. There was no place where the two sides could meet on equal terms and argue the case out in public. She decided to start one, and she asked Lewis to be its president.

Lewis agreed with enthusiasm. It was exactly the kind of thing he loved. The new society was named the Socratic Club, after the Greek philosopher who had taught that one should follow the argument wherever it leads. Its first meeting was held in January 1942. Its rule was simple. At each meeting a speaker would read a paper, and someone from the other side would reply, or the other way round, and then the floor was open. Christians were to hear the strongest case against their faith, and unbelievers the strongest case for it. Lewis was president for twelve years, until he left for Cambridge in 1954.

The Meetings

The club met on Monday evenings during term, usually in a college common room, and the meetings were often crowded. Students sat on the floor and stood in the doorway. The speakers included some of the most distinguished philosophers, scientists and theologians in Britain, believers and unbelievers alike. Lewis read papers himself, replied to others, and took part in the discussion. He was in his element. Those who attended remembered his booming voice, his quickness, his good humour, and his capacity to demolish a careless argument in a sentence.

It was not always comfortable. Some of the unbelieving speakers were very able, and some of the debates went badly for the Christian side. Lewis did not mind that. He thought it was the whole point. A faith that could not stand up to argument was not worth having, and a Christian who had never heard the case against his faith was not ready to defend it. He wanted the club to be fair. He wanted the believers to lose sometimes, if they deserved to.

Miracles

In 1947 Lewis published Miracles, a book arguing that the miracles of the Bible are not ruled out by reason or science. Part of its argument, in the third chapter, was directed against naturalism, the view that nature is all there is. Lewis argued that if naturalism were true, human reasoning would be nothing more than the product of blind physical causes, and we would then have no grounds for trusting it, including the reasoning that led to naturalism. The theory, in other words, cut away the branch it was sitting on.

It was an argument he had held since the 1920s, and he thought it was one of his strongest. The book sold well, and in September 1947 the American news magazine Time put Lewis on its cover. He was by now one of the most famous Christians in the English-speaking world.

2 February 1948

On 2 February 1948, a young philosopher named Elizabeth Anscombe read a paper to the Socratic Club replying to the third chapter of Miracles. She was twenty-eight, a research fellow at Somerville College, a former pupil of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a devout Roman Catholic. She was not attacking Christianity. She was attacking what she considered a bad argument for it. Her criticism was technical. She argued that Lewis had confused two different senses of words like cause and reason, and that his argument against naturalism, as he had stated it, did not work.

By the accounts of those present, it was a sharp and difficult evening. Lewis replied and the discussion went on. Afterwards some who were there thought he had been badly beaten. Lewis himself seems to have agreed that she had made a real point. Over the following years he rewrote the chapter, and in 1960, when a new edition of Miracles was published, the third chapter had been carefully revised to meet her objections.

The Legend

Out of that evening grew a legend that is still often repeated. It holds that Lewis was so humiliated by Anscombe that he lost confidence in reason, gave up writing apologetics, and retreated into children’s stories. A. N. Wilson’s biography gave the story wide currency in 1990.

The legend is mostly false. It is true that Lewis wrote fewer books of direct apologetics after 1948, and true that he took Anscombe’s criticism seriously. But he did not abandon apologetics. He went on presiding over the Socratic Club for six more years, went on lecturing and debating, and went on writing Christian books of many kinds for the rest of his life, including a revised version of the very argument she had criticised. The Narnia books had been in his mind for years before 1948, and he began to write the first of them in earnest in 1948 and 1949 for reasons that had nothing to do with Anscombe. And Anscombe herself, later in life, said that the legend was nonsense. She remembered the meeting as a serious discussion of a definite philosophical point, and she thought Lewis’s revised chapter was a great improvement, though she still had reservations. She also observed, drily, that those who wrote about the occasion as a great defeat seemed to her to be showing more about their own attitudes than about what happened.

What does seem to be true is that the evening left a mark on Lewis. Friends who saw him soon afterwards remembered him as unusually low, and he did not hide from them that he thought he had come off worse. It reminded him that his arguments were not infallible, and that he could be wrong. He may well have concluded that the kind of apologetics he had done during the war had served its time, and that other kinds of writing would now reach people better. But that is a long way from a crisis of faith.

Prove All Things

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s instruction to test everything and to keep what is good. It could have been the motto of the Socratic Club. It is also a fair description of how Lewis dealt with his defeat. He tested his own argument, found it wanting, revised it, and kept what was good in it. That is not the behaviour of a man whose faith was shaken. It is the behaviour of a scholar who believed that the truth could survive any honest criticism, and that a Christian should be the first to welcome it. His pride was hurt. His faith was not.