I’ve read a lot of C.S. Lewis. He’s one of my favourite writers and an author whose writings on theology I always find helpful. Lewis tends to be clear, concise, and powerful. God in the Dock is a collection of short essays, mostly published in the 1940s, with a couple from the ’60s. I enjoyed being able to read a single essay each morning while I drank my coffee.
The collection started strong for me with “Miracles”, which is an essay made all the more poignant by its original date of 1942. The essays move through questions of dogma, myth, and the laws of nature. While I hadn’t read these particular pieces before, some of the thought processes that Lewis guides his readers through were familiar to me from his larger works.
Two of the essays gave me pause, both because of the way that Lewis discusses women. In “Priestesses in the Church?”, Lewis addresses the idea of women priests or pastors. This is not a new question in the church and it’s not one that will probably ever be entirely settled. Various denominations have come up with various solutions and some have ruptured over questions like this. Lewis is unequivocally not in favour but I found his arguments here to not feel as solid as he generally does. Perhaps because I bring my own biases and opinions to this question and they aren’t in line with Lewis’. But he seems fine with women preaching and seems overly caught up in the question of a woman being able to represent God to the people. As well – and this is probably as much a matter of era as Lewis himself – he leans heavily into stereotypes of what it means to be a woman. This is even more evident in the final essay, “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness'”. In this last essay, while I generally agree with Lewis’ opinion, the way he talks about women didn’t sit quite right with me. Both of these essays were written in 1963, at the end of Lewis’ life and are, no doubt, reflections of the culture and society that he lived his life in. It would be interesting to see what Lewis might make of women and the church as they are today.
All told, this isn’t the essay collection or book I would hand to someone wanting to get to know Lewis’ Christian writings. I think it’s better read with a wider background of his history and belief. It was a good reminder, for me, that anyone writing on Christianity and faith is at the end of the day, a human being and I might not agree with everything they say. And that’s ok, and it doesn’t have to negate the other good and true things I’ve learned from Lewis. As with any work that speaks to Christianity, we are called to hold it up to the Bible and the Holy Spirit and I think Lewis would certainly encourage any of his readers to do just that.
Karissa Reads Books 
Really enjoyed this post! I agree – both that Lewis is one of my favourite writers on theology and I generally find his work very helpful, and that the way he writes about women is a bit peculiar. I’m less inclined to write it off as part of the era – when you look at how his closest immediate contemporary, Tolkien, wrote about women, it was with more respect and less stereotyping, so I feel like Lewis had a good example right next to him that he wasn’t taking. As you say, though, a good reminder that any writer writing about God is still a human being and will bring their own perspective.
That’s a good point re: Tolkien, though I know they did disagree about a few things between the two of them. I also wonder if Tolkien having been married for so long and at a relatively young age as opposed to Lewis’ later in life, briefer marriage makes a difference. Lewis’ writing about women is stereotyped and makes them a bit inhuman, like someone who hasn’t spent as much time intimately among women. I think living with a woman for decades as Tolkien did would offer a different perspective.
Oooh, I really like that point, Lou. I think I’m quick to say something happened because of the time period, but I remember one time a student asked me if people knew better. What he meant was about things like racism, slavery, sexism, etc. I said yes, they did know better. I mean, to an extent. Basically, we didn’t all the sudden wake up enlightened in the 1960s. People knew before then that racism was wrong and baseless. Then again, I tried to remember that there are people who aren’t as educated, or may have various cognitive disabilities that keep them from analyzing beyond what they’re told or what makes them afraid.
I think evolution of views and norms over time is so complex that it’s really accurate to say something was or wasn’t normal for the time. I think Lewis’ views probably *were* normal for his time, circumstances, and background. I also think that – since one of his closest friends had different views – he had the opportunity to come to a different position and didn’t. (That said, Lewis was considerate and thoughtful across a whole range of topics we wouldn’t necessarily assume he was – and like Karissa says, he’d had almost no interaction with women throughout his life, so of course he believed a lot of nonsense stereotypes).
How….how did he have almost no interactions with women throughout his life??
Not much meaningful interaction, at least. His mum died when he was young, he was sent to boys’ boarding schools, he served in the First World War, he went to Oxford (where there would have been some women but not many), he spent most of his adult life living and working around other Oxford dons. He did have a couple of female friends – Mrs Moore, the mother of a friend who was killed in the war, whom he lived with for some years, and the author DL Sayers. I’m sure he also would have interacted with women at church. But he didn’t marry until towards the end of his life and most of his meaningful friendships were with men. (One of the things he writes in The Four Loves, which I mostly like very much, is that he doesn’t believe a man and a woman can be friends unless the woman is really ugly!)
That is interesting. Then we get writers like Nietzsche, who fantasized and agonized over one woman his whole life despite her fraternizing with Nietzsche’s other male friend.
I think it’s good to not cut someone like Lewis too much slack by remembering that others of his time had better views but also realizing that he was a product of his time and upbringing. I see him as someone who put women too much on a pedestal, which is something I still see men do. He could have done better – as he did in a lot of other circumstances and opinions – but he also had a lot of reasons working against him.
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