In one of my Friday’s cell meetings in 2008, we tackled the two most important questions of our life:
What should we believe? How should we live?
To help me answer the above questions, I bought a book called “the Question of God” written by a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Dr Armand N. Nicholi.
This book has an important message. This book goes beyond the usual issues raised in theology and science. It is not so much about academic theories. It is not a book brimming with catch lines or witty quotations all stringed up to hit the bestseller list. It is, on the contrary, a book about two living legends whose ideas and beliefs are at polar ends of each other.
It's about their lives, having lived it on their own terms and in their own way.
On one side is Dr Sigmund Freud, a militant atheist. And on the other is Professor Clive Staples Lewis or better known as CS Lewis, an atheist turned defender of the faith, a great Christian apologist.
But the highlight of these two lives is not in their differences. It is surprisingly in their similarities, and how such similarities motivated them to lead their lives so differently from each other.
Needless to say, both men were intellectual heavyweights of their time. Freud was the father of psychoanalysis and his works had influenced and is still influencing many in the field of psychology. CS Lewis was a revered philosopher and held the chair of medieval and renaissance literature in Cambridge University. Freud was nominated for the Nobel Prize. CS Lewis was conferred the Commander of the Order of the British Empire, an honor he declined. Neither of them were proud of their father.
Freud blamed his Jewish father for being a coward; who refused to stand up against anti-Semitism. CS Lewis begrudged his father for sending him off to boarding school after his mother died. He had the worst years of his life when he was in boarding school.
Both great thinkers suffered inconsolable personal losses. Freud lost his father, favorite daughter and grandson. Freud also battled with painful jaw cancer. CS Lewis lost his mother, uncle and wife. CS Lewis’ wife had cancer too.
The similarities were indeed uncanny. However, it did not end there. For all his life (83 years), Freud was an atheist. For half of his life, CS Lewis was also an atheist. In fact, CS Lewis was a compelling atheist who once admired Freud and based his atheism on Freud’s writings.
While Freud referred to religion as the “universal obsessional neurosis”, CS Lewis picked up from there and dismissed religion by writing that “all religions, that is, all mythologies, to give them their proper name, are man’s own invention.”
Tellingly, CS Lewis once recounted how he viewed the world before his conversion, “When I was an atheist, if anyone asked me, why do you not believe in God? My reply would run something like this…First, the starkness of the universe: the greatest part of it consists of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably cold…all forms of life live only by preying upon one another…The creatures cause pain by being born and live by inflicting pain and in pain they mostly die.
Next, in the most complex creatures, Man, yet another quality appears, which we call reason, whereby he is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with acute mental sufferings, and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence. This human history is a record of crime, war, disease, and terror with just sufficient happiness interposed to give…an agonizing apprehension of losing it.
In short, if you ask me to believe that this is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that all the evidence points in the opposite direction.”
The above sentiment was strongly attuned to what Freud had to say about life, which he pessimistically concluded, “What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer.”
Freud further added that our joy is threatened from three directions: from our body, which is irrevocably inclined to decay and degeneration; from the external world, where natural and unnatural causes conspire to cause us pain and sufferings; from our relations with others, which is self-evidently painful when heartaches prevails and emotional trauma persists.
Alas, these two great men could have been the best of friends had they not been a generation apart in age (about 40 years).
But along life’s uncharted journey, CS Lewis took a detour from his walk with atheism and experienced a mid-life conversion at age thirty-one when he was on his motorbike heading to the zoo. This was ironic to say the least because he once wrote when he was still an atheist that, “though I liked clergymen as I liked bears, I had as little wish to be in the church as in the zoo.” No one could have expected that his road to Damascus experience (like that of Paul’s) would be one when he was on his way to the zoo. However ironic the experience, it was one to savor for him.
Before the life-transforming zoo ride, CS Lewis spent hours talking to two of his friends - one of them was JJR Tolkien. He also read a book by GK Chesterton, entitled Everlasting Man, which sowed the seed of faith in his heart. Reflectively, CS Lewis referred to his conversion as an intellectual one.
For him, the conversion was more of the clarity of the mind rather than emotions. After devouring the New Testament, he finally connected the dots and surrendered his will to God. But it was not an easy experience for him.
Imagine a prodigal son coming home to his Father – after what seems like a lifetime of rebellion and open skepticism. This was how CS Lewis described the experience, “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity term…I gave in, and admitted that God was God and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
From that day onwards, during the doldrums of the 1930s depression, CS Lewis’s worldview took a drastic turn. He became a professing Christian, as demonstrated in his life and documented in his powerful writings. This was also when he parted company with Freud, once the object of his admiration.
Almost overnight, CS Lewis debunked all the baggage of atheism and looked at the world and eternity with a whole new pair of Calvary glasses. The redemption plan of God finally made sense to him. He no longer saw the purposelessness of the world. He saw eternity as a place to be reconciled with God. He understood sufferings as an inescapable part of human free will, taking away the latter would mean taking away what it means to be human. He also saw hope in place of pessimism. He endured the loss of his wife by believing that her death was for a higher divine purpose.
At first, when his wife died, he was in great pain and he cried out to God, “Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back – to be sucked back into it.” In frustration, he wrote, “Cancer, and cancer, and cancer. My mother, my father, my wife. I wonder who is next in the queue?”
Working through his grief, CS Lewis later came to full circle and wrote “bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer.” Subsequently, he deepened his understanding and embraced death as a friend and deliverer.
While Freud called God an idealized Superman in the sky, whose existence was created and sustained by a deluded mind, CS Lewis pointed us to the many “signposts” in the universe like the “starry heavens above and the moral law within” to prove God’s existence. While Freud equated happiness with pleasure, specifically the pleasure that came from satisfying our sexual needs, CS Lewis saw happiness as something that cannot be fully attained in this earthly life, lest we mistook this life as something permanent.
He wrote that the Creator “refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant Inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for our home.” This clearly ties in with the scriptures, which says, “We are in this world but not of this world.” In other words, the happiness of this life can never truly satisfy. CS Lewis therefore urges us to cast our eyes beyond the pleasures that this life misleadingly offers Ultimately, material wealth and comfort are not only temporary but illusory and they become a snare to us when they become the primary purpose of our lives.
What is most enlightening is the two great men’s view on death and suffering. While both of them started off asking the same question on suffering, that is, “If God is sovereign, if He really is in charge of the universe and if He really loves me, then how could he allow me to suffer so? Either He does not exist or He is not in control or He doesn’t really care,” they came to different conclusions altogether. Freud pointed to aimless suffering and extreme injustice as evidence that God does not exist. CS Lewis used them to demonstrate the exact opposite: that God exists.
It is easy to blame God for the unwarranted sufferings in this world. To those going through pain and grief, the idea of a loving God is difficult to swallow. I am sure Mother Theresa questioned God’s love and sovereignty when she held a dying Calcutta orphan in her frail and embattled arms.
I have read many testimony of death most unspeakable and most gruesome even the most seasoned mind could never fully comprehend. But how can we, as believers, explain to the bereaved, the tormented, the victimized and the wounded. What words of consolation can we give to the victims of the recent dragon boat misadventure?
Freud’s advice here is instructive: In times like these, silence is indeed golden. But this could only be an interim measure. Ultimately, we ourselves have to confront sufferings or even death. What will our attitude be when our time comes? Even Freud admitted that “if you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.”
But to an atheist, what is there to prepare? How do you console yourself about death when it is effectively a dead end for you as an atheist? Freud was obsessed with death, extraordinarily fearful and superstitious about it. He predicted his own death many times, so fearfully sure that he would die at 41, 51, 61, 62, then 70 and 80. Alas he died at 83. While CS Lewis died at 64, he was completely serene and tranquil about his own pending death. In fact, CS Lewis did not fear death but was all ready for it.
In 22 November 1963, in his passing, he calmly told his brother, Warren, these words, “I have done all that I was sent into the world to do, and I am ready to go.”
Finally, in accepting sufferings as an indispensable price of free will, CS Lewis explained, “God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what made evil possible. The more intelligent and more gifted the person God creates, the greater the capacity to love and to be a positive force in the universe, but also, if that person rebels, the greater capacity to cause evil, to inflict pain and to cause unhappiness…though free will makes evil possible, it is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”
This may not be the best answer to the inexplicable causes of sufferings and death; neither does it consoles or brings much comfort to a wounded heart. But it goes some way to help one understand what Socrates calls “the painful riddle of death”.
Let’s face it: evil is real. The heart is above all deceitful, conniving and conspiring. But if evil is real, our God cannot be just a figment of our imagination. He has to be real too. His presence can be felt even in the most intellectual and obstinacy of minds.
CS Lewis wrote, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” It is my personal conviction that we will never find complete and absolute rest until we seek that which our heart is longing for. And nothing will truly satisfy until we are reconciled with our Creator.
To an atheist, the reconciliation is with his early primate ancestor.
To a Christian, the reconciliation is with God. That is what this scripture in 2 Corinthians 5:18-19 is all about, “Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” This scripture is our everlasting hope and our emotional antidote against the merciless tides of human sufferings and apparent hopelessness.
Cheers out! Have a faith-resilient weekend.
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