Faith: The Two Minds of C. S. Lewis

One of the most exciting things about a new theory is that it can give us a different or deeper understanding of things that we didn’t originally consider when developing the theory itself. This post explores the writing of C. S. Lewis from the perspective of Two Minds Theory. C. S. Lewis is best known as a Christian apologist and the author of the Chronicles of Narnia children’s stories. However, two other facts make him an interesting case study: First, Lewis was a great observer of his own thoughts in books like his early allegorical novel The Pilgrim's Regress, his autobiography Surprised by Joy, and the journal that he wrote after his wife’s untimely death, A Grief Observed. Second, Lewis was himself a theorist about the workings of the mind. He was an inveterate reader, considered the best-read man in England during his lifetime, and drew routinely on classical as well as contemporary sources in his arguments. This combination of characteristics makes him a fascinating source of material for anyone seeking to understand thought and decision-making.

Like many close observers of human nature, Lewis noted the difference between his thoughts and his desires. For instance, Lewis related a story in which, as a schoolboy, he tried to pray only when he really meant the thing that he was praying. Sometimes he was able to do this, but more often not, and the more he focused on his lack of heartfelt devotion the more difficulty he had in praying at all. As an adolescent Lewis found refuge in reason, coming to believe that what one thought was much more important than what one felt. But this path, too, was ultimately unsatisfying as he discovered that reason only made him more discontented. Indeed, that the harder he tried to understand the sources of his own happiness, the further away he got from the thing he was trying to reach.

One could hardly ask for a clearer description of the Narrative and Intuitive systems than this passage from Lewis's essay Myth Became Fact (1944), which deals first with the Narrative form of thought and then with the more experiential Intuitive form: "Human intellect [Narrative] is incurably abstract. Pure mathematics is the type [i.e., archetypal form] of successful thought. Yet the only realities we experience [Intuitive] are concrete -- this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain, or Personality. When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: We are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma -- either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste -- or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off; the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyse the nature of humor while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things? 'If only my toothache would stop, I could write another chapter about Pain.' But once it stops, what do I know about pain?"

Lewis also talks about his own work writing fiction as a kind of effort to bring these two types of experience together. In his essay On Stories (1947), Lewis writes, "in life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive. Whether in real life there is any doctor who can teach us how to do it, so that at last either the meshes will become fine enough to hold the bird, or we be so changed that we can throw our nets away and follow the bird to its own country, is not a question for this essay. But I think it is sometimes done -- or very, very nearly done -- in stories."

In both of these examples, Lewis is talking about the distinction between the abstract beliefs native to the Narrative System ("knowing," the "net" in which we try to capture experience), and the experiential and non-language-based immediacy of the Intuitive System ("tasting," the "bird," the "successive moments" of life). As in TMT, Lewis identifies behaviors ("tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating") with the Intuitive system and points out that one cannot have a Narrative about something at the same time one is having the experience of it. Lewis felt this tension throughout his life, as a young man chasing many different experiences in pursuit of a feeling that he called "joy." This pursuit forms the main narrative line of both versions of his autobiography (the fictional one in Pilgrim's Regress and the nonfiction Surprised by Joy). In both versions, Lewis the protagonist was driven by the effort to capture joy, to pin it down, to keep it in a box. Joy might initially be found in nature, in mythology, in human love, in music, or in stories. But Lewis found that these sources of inspiration quickly faded -- once joy was analyzed or systematized, converted from the Intuitive experience to the Narrative description of what it was like, it ceased to be joy.

For Lewis, this tension became a signpost on the road to Christianity, and indeed both versions of his autobiography are most widely discussed not as philosophical explorations but as conversion stories. Lewis argued that even though the longing for joy could never be fulfilled in this life, it served as an intimation of heaven. Indeed, with this understanding in hand, he discovered that "the longing for joy was itself joy," that his Intuitive experience of wanting a connection with joy (or God) was in fact what he was looking for. This was Lewis's path to harmony between his two minds, using his powerful intellect to probe his own and others' experiences while at the same time regarding his Narrative mind as something limited and humble in the face of a much greater experiential reality.

Lewis noted that for him seeking to understand via the Narrative System was a necessary first stop in the development of faith: "Nearly everyone I know who has embraced Christianity in adult life, has been influenced by what seemed to him to be at least probable arguments for theism." It was only after coming to a conclusion that God existed on the basis of logic and reason, that Lewis started to have an experience of faith at the Intuitive level. He found this experiential ‘proof’ to be ultimately more convincing, but also more fleeting; because these experiences were not constant, he also continued to rely on the Narrative System. In a 1952 essay, Lewis wrote, "'Religious experience' in the narrower sense comes and goes: especially goes. The operation of faith is to retain, so far as the will and intellect are concerned, what is irresistible and obvious during the moments of special grace. By faith we believe always what we hope hereafter to see always and perfectly, and have already seen imperfectly and by flashes. In relation to the philosophical premises [of the Narrative System] a Christian's faith is of course excessive. In relation to what is sometimes shown him [via the Intuitive System], it is perhaps just as often defective. My faith even in an earthly friend goes beyond all that could be demonstrably proved; yet in another sense I may often trust him less than he deserves," (from Lewis's 1952 essay, Is Theism Important? A Reply).

Like many Western thinkers, Lewis saw the Narrative System as an essential human capability that can help us to know truth. Yet unlike many Western thinkers he did not idolize it. In fact, he saw Narratives as a pale reflection of the ultimate experiential reality. That reality can only be grasped, however "imperfectly and by flashes," through the operations of the Intuitive System.