C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law by Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson (review)

In this groundbreaking study, political scientists Dyer and Watson successfully challenge the commonly held idea that C. S. Lewis was indifferent to politics and its societal ramifications. Throughout their well-structured presentation, Dyer and Watson demonstrate Lewis's commitments to the natural law tradition and to limited government – viewpoints both grounded in Lewis's Christian convictions and evident in the various genres of his writings throughout his career.

The book's opening chapter, "The Apolitical and Political C. S. Lewis," notes that although both the testimony of Lewis's close friends and relatives and Lewis's personal statements proclaim his disdain for politics and politicians, his writings reveal his broader political concerns. Both Lewis's novels, including The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, and Till We Have Faces; and his apologetic and ethical writings, including The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, and The Abolition of Man, "brim with political themes" (11). Dyer and Watson contend that although "Lewis was not actively involved in partisan politics and took little interest in transitory policy questions," he "had much to say about the underlying foundations of a just political order" (7). To quote John G. West, Lewis was "always interested in identifying the 'permanent in the political"' (7). Moreover, biographical evidence suggests Lewis's lifelong interest in politics. At age ten, Lewis wrote an essay entitled "Home Rule" concerning "the future relationship between Ireland and the British crown" (8). At age twelve, Lewis composed two novels that "revolved entirely around politics" (5). Lewis regularly taught political theory at Magdalen College, Oxford. And his personal letters, including one written only six days before his death, comment on various contemporary political events and issues.

Chapter 2, "Creation, Fall, and Human Nature," addresses "the underlying philosophical commitments that ground Lewis' thought" (14). Dyer and Watson demonstrate how Lewis's Christianity compelled him to believe in a world with a natural order that was created good but was also profoundly fallen. Lewis's belief in natural law is seen in his book Miracles (1947), which articulates his "argument from reason," an "argument for the plausibility of theism and creation" that contradicts both "blind, purposeless materialism and teleological, rational naturalism" (26). Indeed, "Rational thought … is a metaphysical intrusion into the physical world," for "reason is not simply part of nature, and nature could have never produced reason" (28). For Lewis, "the reason of God is the self-existent principle by which the natural world was created" (29). God gave humans "the choice and the duty to rationally rule their nonrational appetites and passions," but fallen humans allow "appetite and passion" to rebel against God-given reason, causing human reason to be "disfigured and out of harmony with the natural world it was designed to rule" (30). Ultimately, human will is even more damaged by the Fall than is human reason, but "neither is totally depraved" (33). Rather, fallen humans are able to exercise reason and will, and even those without access to the special revelation of the Bible "can be illuminated by God's revelation in nature" (35). In holding this position, Lewis stands in the line of Aquinas and the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker, whose influence Lewis acknowledges in his English Literature of the Sixteenth Century (1954). Calling Lewis "a trenchant moral realist but a reluctant natural-law theorist," Dyer and Watson cite Mere Christianity (1952) to assert Lewis's contention that "belief in a moral law known through the exercise of reason" is "one of the pillars of 'all clear thinking about the universe we live in"' (37). According to Lewis, the foundations of morality "are known through reason and morally obligatory to follow" through reason's conquest over "appetites and passions" (37). Dyer and Watson then connect Lewis's beliefs concerning the moral law to Dostoevsky's depiction of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, stating that for both authors "the ingrained...