History Book: Lasting wartime talks

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, August 11th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next, the WORLD History Book. We return to London. August 1941.

NEWSREEL: Thick smoke lies over the heart of England as a choking dawn reveals the terrors of the night.

The Germans have dropped seven hundred tons of bombs, hitting a million homes. The Luftwaffe attack at night. Not just under the cover of darkness but for effect. A week into the bombings, Hitler confidant Joseph Goebbels writes in his dairy, “We are leading a war against sleep, then the devil will really be let loose.”

EICHER: The British Broadcasting Corporation has been hit, but it continues to broadcast. The program director invites a new guest to speak to the nation. a relatively unknown English professor. WORLD’s Caleb Welde picks up the story from here.

CALEB WELDE: On August 6th, C.S. Lewis walks into the BBC headquarters. The building has already been hit twice by bombs.

NEWSREEL: Preceded by a shower of flares, German bombers rain fire and high-explosive bombs on Londond…

The head of the Religious Broadcasting Department has just read Lewis’ book– The Problem of Pain. The department head insists Lewis’ message must be shared. He says more than a million people will be listening.

LEWIS: Good evening.

Jon Gauger as the voice of Lewis.

LEWIS: Everyone has heard people quarreling.

Lewis doesn’t mention God in his first talk. Instead, he argues everyone, whether they know it or not, believes in a moral law.

LEWIS: What is the sense in saying the Enemy is in the wrong, unless right is a real thing, which the Germans at bottom know as well as we do.

Britain responded to the London bombings, by bombing Berlin.

NEWSREEL: Ever since the war began, one important question has been will we bomb Berlin. Now we know the answer.

LEWIS: As for decent behaviour in ourselves, I suppose it’s pretty obvious that it doesn’t mean the behaviour that pays.

BBC ID: London calling in the home and European service of the BBC…

A million and a half tune in to Lewis’ third broadcast.

LEWIS: It means things like being content with thirty shillings when you might have got three pounds, staying in dangerous places when you could go somewhere safer, keeping promises you’d rather not keep, and telling the truth even when it makes you look a fool.

In talk five, Lewis argues if there’s a moral law, there must be a law giver. That it’s no use ignoring Him or saying you don’t like Him.

LEWIS: The trouble is, one part of you is on his side, and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation.

February 1st, 1942. Sunday evening. Lewis sits down again at the mic. Pearl Harbor is fresh on the mind of the Allies. Thirty thousand London families are grieving loved ones killed closer to home during the Blitz.

LEWIS: If a thing is free to be good, it is also free to be bad.

Lewis isn’t the only one speaking. Two days earlier, in Berlin, Hitler declared, “The result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews.”

LEWIS: Free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy.

While Lewis speaks, across the English channel, a Dutch woman named Corrie Ten Boom is risking her life to find safe houses for hunted Jews.

LEWIS: You must make your choice. LEWIS: Half of you already want to ask me, ‘I wonder how you'd feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew.’ So do I. I wonder very much. …I can do precious little. I am telling you what Christianity is.

Lewis closes his eighth broadcast talking about a man who chose to die for his enemies.

LEWIS: Either this man was and is the son of God, or else a madman or something worse. …But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

The talks are intensely practical. Lewis asks listeners to imagine they are a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first it makes sense what he’s doing. He’s patching the holes in the roof, etc.

LEWIS: But presently, he starts knocking the house about in a way that does not seem to make sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of, throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage, but he is building a palace.

Lewis gives twenty-five talks from 1941 to 1944. After the war, the talks become one of his most well known books. Mere Christianity.

MICHAEL WARD: It's been fantastically influential.

Michael Ward is a leading C.S. Lewis scholar in Oxford.

WARD: It's been translated into about 40 languages, I think. It's just it's almost impossible to measure its influence.

At the time, the public generally responds in one of two ways. A BBC producer tells Lewis,

WARD: Either everybody thinks you are the bee's knees or they think you are beneath contempt.

Lewis responds:

WARD: Well, I don't know that says very much about me, but perhaps it says something about my subject matter, namely Christianity and Christ Jesus himself.

Behind the scenes, Lewis is doing his best to respond to every serious letter from listeners. He also hosts several refugee children, works nights in a Home Guard unit, and speaks on weekends to pilots defending London.

WARD: And some of the RAF chaplains who invited Lewis to give talks were very impressed by him, because he he didn't try to sugarcoat what these men were facing.

Lewis is also still teaching at Oxford and writing. The Screwtape Letters, The Abolition of Man:

WARD: …Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, The Great Divorce, and any number of addresses and sermons and articles for newspapers.

Lewis does all this while regularly appearing on the BBC. He ends his last wartime talk with this. It’s the only known surviving recording from the presentations.

LEWIS: Give up yourself, and you will find your real self, lose your life, and you will save it. Submit to death, submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Look for Christ, and you will get him, and with him, everything else thrown in. Look for yourself and you will get only hatred, loneliness, despair and ruin.

For WORLD, I’m Caleb Welde.

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