Many people are Christians because of the work of C.S. Lewis. With wit and wisdom, Lewis imaginatively exploded the hollow pretensions of the secular. More, he helped many for the first time see the world in the light of fact that "it had really happened once."

It is, therefore, not easy to criticize Lewis when he has such a devoted following. Yet I must write critically of Lewis because here I want to examine his views concerning violence and war.

I am a pacifist. Lewis was anything but a pacifist. I want to show that his arguments against pacifism are inadequate, but I also that he provides imaginative resources for Christians to imagine a very different form of Christian nonviolence, a form unknown to Lewis, with which I hope he might have had some sympathy.

Before turning to Lewis's arguments against pacifism, I think it important to set the context for his more formal reflections on war by calling attention to Lewis's experience of war.

C.S. Lewis and war

Lewis fought in World War I and endured World War II. It never occurred to him that there was an alternative to war. War was simply a fact of life.

Moreover, for Lewis the claim that war is a fact of life is not only an empirical generalization, but a claim about the way things necessarily are. For Lewis war is a fact of life we must accept if we are to be rational.

Lewis, however, was anything but an enthusiast on behalf of war. He tells us in Surprised by Joy that as a student still not draft age he began to realize he would probably have to go to war when he reached military age.

Though he was Irish, and thus not subject to conscription, he had decided when he reached military age he would allow himself to be drafted. However, having made that fateful decision he thought himself absolved from undertaking any further rational analysis of the war.

He knew some might consider such an attitude to be a flight from reality, but he thought of it as a "treaty with reality." It was as if, as he puts it, he was saying to his country,

"You shall have me on a certain date, not before. I will die in your wars if need be, but till then I shall live my own life. You may have my body but not my mind. I will take part in battles but not read about them."

He acknowledges that the quality that allowed him to adopt such an attitude was "somewhat repellent," but he does not regret escaping the appalling waste of time and spirit involved in reading news of the war.

Lewis was conscripted, becoming a Second Lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry. In November, 1917, his nineteenth birthday, he found himself on the front in France, near the village of Arras. Lewis, who was averse to being part of any "collective," observes that he was surprised to discover he did not dislike the army as much as he thought he might.

He does not mean that he did not find life in the army detestable and war at best an "odious necessity." But the honest recognition by all concerned that you were not supposed to like the army or war meant that there was an honesty about what it meant to be in the army, an honesty that Lewis found refreshing.

War was a tribulation, but it was a tribulation you could bear because it did not disguise itself as a pleasure.

Lewis was, of course, lucky to have survived. Soon after arriving at the front he contracted "trench fever," which required hospitalization. He tells us he spent a delightful three weeks in a hospital in Le Treport. His stay in the hospital gave him the opportunity to read a volume of G.K. Chesterton's essays.

He was returned to the front only to be wounded by shrapnel in April, 1918. Lewis's war had come to an end after he served on the front for three and a half months. There are, however, 11,000 thousand British soldiers buried in a cemetery in Etaples not far from where Lewis served. Lewis was not to forget them.

Like many who survived World War I, Lewis had no time for the glorification of war. He tells us he "came to know and pity and reverence" the ordinary men with whom he served. He had a particular fondness for his sergeant, a man named Ayres, who was killed by the same shell that wounded Lewis.

Lewis credits Sergeant Ayres with saving him from bad judgments he might have made given his inexperience with war. Lewis even describes himself as "a puppet" moved about by Ayres so that his ridiculous and painful position as a Lieutenant was turned into something beautiful. Ayers became for him "almost a father."

But the fact that war is capable of producing such close relationships does not mean that Lewis was ever tempted to think war a "good thing." In an extraordinarily moving passage, he reports on the horror of war:

"the smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet."

The problem is that such experiences are so cut off from the rest of our experience that it seems to be something happening to someone else. As a result the horror of war can grow faint in memory.

Lewis being Lewis reports, however, that he was able to remember the horror because of an "imaginative moment" that occurred early in his experience of war, a moment that seemed more real than all that followed. It was the first bullet he heard. It "whined," as a journalist or poet might describe it.

At that moment, he reports, there was something not exactly like fear, even less like indifference, but rather a "little quavering signal that said, 'This is War. This is what Homer wrote about.'"

As World War II neared, Lewis could be quite impatient with those who forgot the horror of war. In 1939 Lewis heard a priest pray "Prosper, O Lord our righteous cause." In a letter to his brother Lewis reports that as he left the church he reproved the reverend for

"the audacity of informing God that our cause was righteous ... a point on which He may have his own view ... I hope it is quite like ours, of course: but you never know with him."

Lewis was not one to expose his "subjectivity," observing in the "Preface" to Surprised by Joy that he fears his story may be "suffocatingly subjective." But in a letter occasioned by the approach of World War II, he confessed his memories of the last war had haunted his dreams for years. He observed that war and military service

"includes the threat of every temporal evil, pain and death, which is what we fear from sickness; isolation from what we love, which is what we fear from exile; toil under arbitrary master, which is what we fear from slavery ... I am not a pacifist. If it has got to be it's got to be. But the flesh is weak and selfish, and I think death would be much better than to live through another war."

The complexity of Lewis's attitude toward the war is made explicit in The Screwtape Letters. Lewis, for example, has Screwtape warn Wormwood from thinking that the European war is necessarily good for their cause.

To be sure the war will involve a good deal of cruelty and unchastity, but the war will also lead many to have their attention diverted from themselves to values and causes higher than the self.

Screwtape observes that "the Enemy" - that is, God - may disapprove of many of those values and causes, but war at least has the benefit from the Enemy's perspective of reminding humans that they are not going to live forever.

Nor should Wormwood, Screwtape advises, rely too much on the generalized hatred the war engenders against Germans. The English, who at one moment say that torture is too good for their enemies, turn out to be more than willing to give tea and cigarettes to the first German pilot who turns up at their door after they have shot them down.

Far more promising is to encourage those faced with war to identify their Patriotism or Pacifism with their faith in God. Once Christians confuse their faith with their stance toward the war, Screwtape suggests, they will completely confuse the "cause" with faith in God.

This is particularly useful when dealing with pacifists because they will be tempted to identify ending the war with Christianity, thereby forgetting we have another destiny.

Lewis thought war horrible, but not the worst thing that could happen to us. To kill or to be killed in war is not murder. Rather, war is a species of punishment that may require our death or the death of the enemy, but we cannot hate or enjoy hating those we kill. Punishment is necessary, but we cannot enjoy that which we must do.

He even suggests that if in World War I some young German and he had simultaneously killed one another, the moment after their death neither of them "would have felt resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it."

During the time Lewis participated in as well as thought about war there was little discussion of the conditions necessary to make a war just. He was, however, a student of Thomas Aquinas and Richard Hooker. He could not help, therefore, have some understanding of what makes a war just.

There are hints throughout his discussions of war that he thought a just war would be a last resort, declared by a lawful authority, a defensive rather than an imperialistic endeavour, that the aims of the war are limited, there is some chance of success, and there is a willingness of the combatants to take responsibility for their actions so that civilians will be properly protected.

But just as important for Lewis, as is clear from his description of the laugh he and the German soldier could share, was his hope that at the end of a war mercy and reconciliation would be possible.

Darrell Cole argues, therefore, that informing Lewis's understanding of war was an understanding of the kind of person necessary to make a war just. Too often, Cole observes, advocates of just war forget that those who would sustain a war that would be just must have a particular set of virtues.

Lewis rightly thought only a just people would be capable of fighting a just war. His ideal was the knight - "the Christian in arms for the defence of a good cause" - who could go to war "fierce to the nth degree and meek to the nth degree." Such a person is possible because they recognize that it is not war that threatens our salvation, but our lack of confidence in God's promise of salvation.

That is the perspective Lewis brought to his engagement with pacifism. "If it has got to be it's got to be." A seemingly innocent remark, but one that is at the heart of how he understood moral rationality. His argument against pacifism nicely illustrates that contention.

Why C.S. Lewis was not a pacifist

"Why I Am Not a Pacifist" was a talk Lewis gave sometime in 1940 to a pacifist society in Oxford. We do not have a copy of the original so we are fortunate that Lewis gave a copy to his friend, George Sayer. We are fortunate because Lewis not only develops his most considered case for the "facticity" of war, but he does so by first making clear how he understands the character of moral reason in general.

He thus begins by asking "how do we decide what is good or evil?" The usual answer to that question, Lewis observes, is some appeal to the conscience. Such an answer does not signal the end of the matter, however, because conscience can be changed by argument.

Argument is but another name for reason, which, according to Lewis, involves three main elements: (1) the reception of facts about which to reason, (2) the simple and intuitive act of perceiving self-evident truths, and (3) the art and skill of "arranging the facts so as to yield a series of such intuitions which linked together produce a proof of the truth or falsehood of the propositions we are considering."

Lewis suggests that to correct error in our reasoning involves the first and third elements. Particularly important is the role authority plays in the reception of facts, because most of what we reliably believe is based on authority.

We are, moreover, right to rely on the authority of our common sense because it reflects a law that constitutes our nature, a law that we did not need to be taught.

Thus Lewis believed that we rightly think the idea of decent behaviour is obvious to everyone. That does not mean that there are not differences between moralities but that such differences have never amounted to anything like a total difference.

Lewis will, therefore, base his case against pacifism on the natural law grounds he thinks enshrined in the common conscience of our humanity. He is quite clear that all three elements of reason are also found in the conscience, but the difference is that inarguable intuitions of the conscience are much more likely to be corrupted by the passions in matters of good and evil than when considering questions of truth and falsehood.

That is why authority is so important for checking and superseding our grasp of the facts. Our judgments as to right and wrong are a mixture of inarguable intuitions and arguable processes of reasoning or submission to authority. Accordingly nothing is to be treated as an intuition unless it is such that no good man has ever dreamed of doubting it.

Therefore Lewis rules out any presumption by a pacifist that their disavowal of killing can be based on an intuition that taking life is always wrong. A person may think they should not kill by appealing to an authority, but not to an intuition. The former are open to argument but the latter are not.

A pacifist who would base his or her position on such an intuition is simply someone who has excommunicated themselves from the human race. Lewis does not think, however, that most pacifists base their position on such an intuitive ground.

He, therefore, begins systematically to characterize and then critique the arguments he understands pacifists to make. He begins by observing that all agree that war is very disagreeable, but pacifists seem to hold the view that wars do more harm than good. Lewis argues such a view is speculative, making it impossible to know what might count as evidence for such a conclusion.

Lewis happily concedes that rulers often promise more than they should but that is no argument that no good comes from war. In fact Lewis asserts that history is full of useful wars as well as useless wars.

The pacifist case, moreover, seems to be committed to the idea that we can do good to and for some without harming others. But what Lewis calls, "the law of beneficence," means that we must do good to some men, at some times making it impossible to avoid helping some in preference to others.

It is certainly true, Lewis acknowledges, that the lesser violence and harm is to be preferred, but that does not mean that killing X or Y is always wrong or can be avoided. Nor can it be shown that war is always a greater evil. Such a view, Lewis argues, seems to imply a materialistic ethic, that is, the view that death and pain are the greatest evils. But surely Christians cannot believe that.

Only people parasitic on liberal societies can afford to be pacifists, believing as they do that the miseries of human suffering can be eliminated if we just find the right cures. But Lewis contends it a mistake to think we can eradicate suffering. Rather we must

"work quietly away at limited objectives such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace."

Nor can the pacifist case be made by appeals to authority. The special human authority that should command our conscience, Lewis argues, is that of the society to which we belong. That society has decided the issue against pacifism through figures such as Arthur and Aelfred, Elizabeth and Cromwell, Walpole and Burke.

Also standing against the pacifist is the literature of his country represented by Beowulf, Shakespeare, Johnson and Wordsworth. Lewis concedes that the authority of England is not final, but by being indebted by birth, upbringing, and education the weight is against the pacifist.

Not only the authority of England but the authority of all humanity is against the pacifist. To be a pacifist means we must part company with Homer, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Montaigne, with the sagas of Iceland and Egypt.

Those who would appeal to human progress to dismiss such voices Lewis simply dismisses as hopeless. He will not argue with them because he and they do not share enough in common to have an argument.

But he is willing to argue with those who would dismiss the authority of humanity on grounds of the authority of the Divine. Those that appeal to Divine authority do so almost exclusively by appeal to certain sayings of our Lord. In doing so Lewis argues they pass over the authority of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine.

For each of these authorities maintained it lawful for Christians at the command of the magistrates to serve in wars. The whole pacifist case, therefore, rests on a doubtful interpretation of the dominical saying "Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."

Lewis acknowledges that a pacifist interpretation of this text is possible, that is, the text seems to impose a duty of non-resistance on all men in all circumstances. But he argues that the text means what it says but with an understood reservation of obvious exceptions that the hearer would understand without being told.

Thus confronted by a homicidal maniac attempting murder against a third party, we must come to the aid of the innocent.

According to Lewis our Lord was simply not thinking that his call not to resist evil would apply to those with the duty to protect the public good. How otherwise could we explain Jesus's praise of the Roman centurion?

So rests Lewis case against pacifism. He ends his case against pacifism by acknowledging that moral decisions do not admit of certainty, so pacifism may be right. But he concludes:

"it seems to me very long odds, longer odds than I would care to take with the voice of almost all humanity against me."

Why C.S. Lewis should have been a pacifist

I have spelled out Lewis's arguments against pacifism not only in an effort to be fair to him, but because he gives voice to what many assume are the knockdown arguments against any account of Christian nonviolence.

I hope to show, however, that his case against pacifism is not persuasive. It is not persuasive first and foremost because he made little effort to understand the most defensible forms of Christian pacifism.

As far as one can tell from his text he seems to think pacifism can be equated with a general disavowal of war. Pacifism is, of course, a stance against war, but it makes all the difference how that stance is shaped by more constitutive practices.

Lewis seems to have assumed that pacifism is rightly identified with liberal forms of pacifism, that is, the view that war is so horrible it has got to be wrong. Liberal pacifists often, as Lewis's critique presupposes, thought war must be some kind of mistake or the result of a conspiracy, because no right thinking human being can believe war to be a "good thing."

Such a view may seem naive but it was a very common position held by many after World War I. Lewis, therefore, had a far too easy target for his critique of pacifism.

What Lewis does not consider - an avoidance I fear that touches the heart of not only his understanding of pacifism but of his account of reason and Christianity - is that Christian nonviolence does not derive from any one dominical saying but from the very character of Jesus's life, death and resurrection.

John Howard Yoder identifies such Christological nonviolence as the pacifism of the messianic community. Christian nonviolence must be embodied in a community that is an alternative to the world's violence.

Accordingly, Jesus's authority is not expressed only in his teachings or his spiritual depth, but in "the way he went about representing a new moral option in Palestine, at the cost of his death."

Christians are nonviolent not, therefore, because we believe that nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but because nonviolence is constitutive of what it means to be a disciple to Jesus.

To be sure, such an account of nonviolence draws on an eschatological understanding of the relation of the church to the world, an account that is foreign to Lewis's theology. Lewis, as is clear from his appeal to common sense, assumes a strong identification between what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be a human being.

Throughout his work Lewis emphasized the difference being a Christian makes for what it means to believe in God, but how he understood that difference did not shape his thinking about war.

I think he failed to draw out the implications of his theological convictions for war because of his conviction that a natural law ethic was sufficient to account for how we should think about war.

Lewis's flatfooted interpretation of "resist not evil" nicely illustrates his inability to recognize the difference Christ makes for the transformation of our "reason." He dismisses any accounts of how to read the passage that might be constructed through historical criticism, because he has learned as a scholar of literature that such methods are no way to read a text.

But Lewis's suggestion that those hearing Jesus's words were "private people in a disarmed nation" and, therefore, would have not thought "Our Lord to be referring to war" is as nice an example as one could wish for the kind of speculative reading sometimes associated with historical criticism.

Lewis's account of practical reason in "Why I am not a Pacifist" drew on his general view that "prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it."

The problem is not in his account of the three elements of reason, but rather in his failure to see how reason and conscience must be transformed by the virtues. Such a view seems odd given his claim that though every moral judgment involves facts, intuitions, and reasoning, regard for authority commensurate with the virtue of humility is also required.

That seems exactly right, but then I cannot help but wonder why Lewis does not include the lives of the martyrs as authorities for the shaping of Christian practical reason.

In "Learning in War-Time," Lewis observes that before he became a Christian he did not realize his life after conversion would consist in doing most of the same things he had done prior to his conversion. He notes that he hopes he is doing the same things in a new spirit, but they are still the same things.

There is wisdom in what he says because we rightly believe that what it means to be a Christian is what God has created all to be. Therefore there is some continuity between the natural moral virtues and the theological virtues, but Lewis is wrong to think what he is doing is "the same thing." It cannot be the same thing because what he "does" is part of a different narrative.

Pacifists, at least pacifists shaped by Christological convictions, can agree with most of the arguments Lewis makes in "Why I am not a Pacifist." We have no stake in arguments that try to ground pacifism on an immediate intuition that the killing of a human being is an absolute evil.

We believe, however, that we were not created to kill, so we will not be surprised that those who do not count themselves Christians may also think it rational to be a pacifist. But Christian pacifism does not appeal to such intuitions for its justification.

Nor is Christian pacifism grounded in claims about the "disagreeable" character of war. Any serious moral conviction may entail quite disagreeable consequences. So Lewis is quite right that we simply cannot know whether wars do more harm than good.

Lewis, even after rightly naming the speculative character of questions concerning whether war has a good or bad result, says it seems to him that history is full of useful wars. I assume, however, he does not mean that observation to be a justification for war. For if he did so it would have the same speculative character which he rightly criticized the pacifist for assuming.

Lewis is quite right, moreover, to criticize liberal pacifists for underwriting the presumption that death and pain are the greatest evils we encounter. Indeed Christological pacifism is determined by the conviction that there is much for which it is worth dying.

In particular those shaped by the presumptions of Christological pacifism assume it is better to die than to kill. Lewis is quite right, therefore, to remind us that what war does is not different than what we face every day - that is, that we face death. The only difference war makes is to help us remember we are destined to die.

Nor do pacifists have reason to disagree with Lewis's concern that the innocent be protected from homicidal maniacs. But there are nonviolent alternatives to protect innocent people from unjust attack. It is, moreover, quite a logical leap from using force to stop a homicidal maniac to justifying war.

At best Lewis has given a justification for the police function of governing authorities. But war is essentially a different reality than the largely peaceable work of the police.

Lewis's strongest argument against pacifism is quite simply that war is a "fact" of life. We cannot imagine a world without war. How would we have the resources to read Homer, Virgil, Plato, Montaigne if we have disavowed war?

War must remain a permanent possibility because without war we will lack the resources to sustain lives of gallantry. Michael Ward, I think, sums up well Lewis's most determinative position about war by characterizing Lewis's basic view as the attempt to sustain an ethic of chivalry.

Lewis well knew that the innocent suffer in war, but you cannot alleviate the suffering of the peasant by banishing the knight. Lewis's view of the imaginative power of war for making our lives morally significant should not be dismissed lightly.

I suspect that such an account of war is what compels many to think it unthinkable to disavow war. Yet I also believe that the Gospel, as Lewis often argued, requires us to think the unthinkable by refusing to think that the way things are is the way things have to be.

To be able to conceive a world without war would have been the kind of imaginative challenge befitting an imagination like that of Lewis.

Lewis was quite right, moreover, to suggest that we do much better if we do not try to eliminate evil qua evil. Much better is the attempt to work away at limited objectives. Such is the work of nonviolence.

Christian nonviolence believes war has been ended, making it possible for Christians in a world of war to do the small and simple things that make war less likely. So the refusal to go to war is the necessary condition to force us to consider possibilities that would not otherwise exist.

In his wonderful sermon, "Learning in War-Time," Lewis struck what I take to be a note for such an understanding of nonviolence by insisting that war does not create a new situation of crisis to which all activities must be subordinated. By not letting war prevent students from pursuing knowledge, to not let the war prevent them from the recognition of beauty, to not let the war prevent them trying to see God is the work of peace.

The intellectual life, Lewis observes, may not be the only road to God, nor the safest, but it is the road the student has been given. Failure to take that road is to make war more likely.

Lewis advises the students who must begin their work in a time of war not to let their lives be subject to the frustration of not having time to finish. Lewis observes that no one in or out of war ever has time to finish. According to Lewis

"a more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God's hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not."

But that is exactly the stance that makes it possible to have the patience to sustain the work of nonviolence.

A nonviolent Narnia?

The Chronicles of Narnia are war-determined stories. I do not think Lewis could have written well or truthfully if he had tried to avoid the reality of war. Christians are after all in a battle with "the enemy." Lewis rightly wanted Christians to recognize we live in a dangerous world - a world all the more dangerous because we are Christians.

I would have wished, however, that Lewis might have imagined what it might have meant for the conflicts that make those books so readable to have been fought nonviolently.

There are hints, however, that Lewis's imagination could see alternatives to war. Consider, for example, the story of Reepicheep in Prince Caspian.

Reepicheep may seem like an unlikely source for support of nonviolence. This honour-obsessed mouse is one of Lewis's most militaristic creations in the most war-centred book of the Narnia Chronicles. But it is just here that we meet the possibility of an "imaginative moment."

After the great battle in which he has fought bravely, Reepicheep, who has had his wounds healed by Lucy, bows before Aslan. In the process he discovers, because he has difficulty keeping his balance, that he has lost most of his tail.

He is confounded, explaining to Aslan that "a tail is the honour and glory of a mouse." Which prompts Aslan to say: "I have sometimes wondered, friend, whether you do not think too much of your honour."

Reepicheep defends himself by noting that, given their small size, if mice did not guard their dignity some might take advantage of them. But what moves Aslan is that all the other mice have drawn their swords to cut off their tails so that they will "not bear the shame of wearing an honour which is denied to the High Mouse."

Aslan restores Reepicheep's tail not for the sake of his dignity, but "for the love that is between you and your people, and still more for the kindness you people showed me long ago when you ate away the cords that bound me on the Stone Table."

Surely such love and service is at the heart of the gifts God has given that makes possible an alternative to violence. Lewis, a man of war, I believe could see that.

Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. His most recent books are Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian (Wipf and Stock, 2011), and War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity, which will be published by Baker Academic in October 2011. In 2001 he was named "America's Best Theologian" by Time magazine.