A Philosophical Walking Tour with C. S. Lewis, by Stewart Goetz

Why didn’t C. S. Lewis’s religious journey end in Rome? Stewart Goetz suggests that the answer involves a theoretical quarrel with Thomas Aquinas about pleasure and the soul. It is a provocative thesis, carefully argued, but I am puzzled about why the ordinary reader of Lewis would be worried about the road not taken. On the other hand, the question does strike me as one that some Roman Catholics might ask. Catholicism often presents itself as a sort of theological geometry: no matter where you enter the system, the whole structure of practice and dogma follows with deductive finality. This theological geometry requires that if Lewis espouses Christianity at all, the Catholic system will follow necessarily.

Lewis experienced Catholic systematization at Oxford in the form of a version of neoscholasticism at the Dominican priory of Blackfriars. According to the evidence in Goetz’s account, he found Catholic necessitarianism quite uncongenial (as I do, even though I am a Roman Catholic). He wrote to one correspondent: “I repudiate their practice of defining and systematizing and continually enumerating a list of things that must be accepted.” Deductive Catholicism led to what Lewis called add-ons: doctrines such as the Assumption of Mary to which there is little or no reference in biblical testimony. His most influential book was titled Mere Christianity for good reason.

Goetz puts great store in Lewis’s commitment to common sense, which would mark a sharp difference between mere Christianity and the metaphysical complexities of Aquinas’s Summa. Lewis regarded the church’s official promotion of Aquinas as just another Catholic add-on. He claimed that it is common sense that all pleasure is essentially, intrinsically good. But aren’t there bad, illicit, or sinful pleasures? Lewis thinks not. An act may be sinful, but the pleasure it elicits is simply pleasure, and pleasures are what we go for. Fornication is wrong, but sexual pleasure, like all pleasure, is good. Lewis held that the essential good of pleasure and the essential evil of pain are part of the Christian doctrines of heaven (a place of infinite pleasure) and hell (a place of infinite pain).