We are Christians, not Stoics: C.S. Lewis on Anxiety and Grief
Why anxiety is an affliction rather than a sin, and how Lewis's own grief shows that faith does not require composure
We are Christians, not Stoics: C.S. Lewis on Anxiety and Grief
Why anxiety is an affliction rather than a sin, and how Lewis’s own grief shows that faith does not require composure
By Andrew Snyder
Giovanni Bellini, The Agony in the Garden, about 1458 to 1460. National Gallery, London. Public domain.
Many faithful Christians carry two burdens at once: the anxiety itself and the guilt of feeling it. Paul tells the Philippians, "do not be anxious about anything,"[1] and an anxious believer can easily hear that command as an accusation. If I really trusted God, the reasoning goes, I would not feel this knot in my stomach at three in the morning. The anxiety then becomes evidence of spiritual failure, and the guilt feeds the very anxiety it condemns. Near the end of his life, C. S. Lewis offered a remedy for this cycle in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, a fictional book of letters to a friend that was published in 1964, the year after his death. In the eighth letter he writes:
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ. For the beginning of the Passion--the first move, so to speak--is in Gethsemane. ... the prayer in Gethsemane shows that the preceding anxiety is equally God's will and equally part of our human destiny. The perfect Man experienced it. And the servant is not greater than the master. We are Christians, not Stoics.[2]
Lewis makes three claims in this short passage. The first is that anxiety is an affliction and not a sin: a sin is a free act or omission by which we turn from God, whereas an affliction is something we suffer, like an illness or a bereavement. The second is that afflictions can be taken up as a share in the Passion of Christ, a word that comes from the Latin passio, meaning suffering. The third is that the Passion begins in Gethsemane, so that dread itself, and not only the pain that follows it, is part of what the perfect Man accepted.
The Gospel accounts of Gethsemane support Lewis's reading. Mark tells us that Jesus "began to be greatly distressed and troubled," and that He said, "My soul is very sorrowful, even to death."[3] Matthew records His prayer, "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will."[4] Luke adds that "his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground."[5] Hebrews recalls that He offered up prayers "with loud cries and tears," yet insists that He was tempted "in every respect" as we are, "yet without sin."[6] None of this describes a calm stoic sage who has risen above his circumstances. It stands to follow that if the sinless One experienced dread, then dread cannot be the mark of sin.
Lewis goes further in the same letter. He argues that Christ's foreknowledge of His death must somehow have been withdrawn in the garden, because He "could not, with whatever reservation about the Father's will, have prayed that the cup might pass and simultaneously known that it would not."[7] In this way, Lewis says, "the torments of hope" were "at the last moment loosed upon Him."[8] I should be clear that this is a speculative claim about the inner life of the incarnate Son, and theologians have long debated what Christ knew in His human mind. Lewis gets in trouble from time to time for playing around with real ideas in his fictional writing, and that is certainly what he is doing here, but he is making an interesting point. Anxiety belongs to a creature who does not know how things will turn out, and Christ entered that condition fully. As Lewis puts it, "To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a man."[9]
Lewis's closing line, "We are Christians, not Stoics," brings us to the central point at hand. Stoicism is an ancient school of philosophy whose best known teachers include Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Its moral ideal was apatheia, which does not mean apathy in our sense of indifference but freedom from the passions, a state in which fear and grief have been extinguished because the wise person judges that nothing outside his own will is truly good or evil. Epictetus taught that people are disturbed not by events but by their judgments about events.[10] The Stoic accepts what happens by ceasing to be troubled by it, whereas Christ accepts the cup while troubled to the point of agony.
This difference changes what Christians mean by acceptance. Christian acceptance is not the absence of feeling but the surrender of the will to the Father in the midst of feeling. Jesus does not first master His dread and then pray "not as I will," since He asks for the cup to pass and submits in the same breath. When Lewis calls the preceding anxiety "equally God's will," he means that God does not merely tolerate our dread as a lapse, but ordains it as a condition of human existence that we are to receive well.
Lewis did not write these lines as a spectator to anguish. In July 1960 his wife, Joy Davidman, died of cancer, and Lewis filled several notebooks with his reactions, which he later published under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk as A Grief Observed. That book is about grief and not about anxiety as such, yet Lewis draws the connection in its opening lines: "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning."[11] Later he refines the point: "Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense."[12] His stepson Douglas Gresham describes the book as "a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane."[13]
The anguish Lewis records was not only emotional but spiritual. The most unsettling symptom of all, he says, was the apparent absence of God. In one of the best known passages of the book, he describes what happens when a person turns to God in desperate need:
But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.[14]
When a friend reminded him that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ on the cross, Lewis answered, "I know. Does that make it easier to understand?"[15] This is the answer of a believer who knows the right doctrine and still finds that it does not quiet his heart. A true doctrine can be held in the mind long before it reaches sensation.
The fear that haunted Lewis most was not atheism but a dreadful picture of God. "Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God," he writes. "The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him."[16] He goes on to imagine God as a "Cosmic Sadist" and asks, "Supposing the truth were 'God always vivisects'?"[17] These pages are hard to read, and many readers are shocked that the author of Mere Christianity wrote them. Yet they have the shape of anxiety, which fixes on a feared possibility that seems to explain everything and leaves no room for hope. Regular readers of the biblical Psalms will find something familiar in this.
Lewis does not remain in that place, and the way he judges his own outbursts is instructive. After one of his bitterest entries he writes, "I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought."[18] Later he offers an image worth remembering: "But the mood is no evidence. Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector."[19] Here the distinction between affliction and sin is applied in practice. The terror came upon Lewis unbidden, whereas the cruel conclusions it suggested were temptations that he examined and finally refused. Anxiety is an affliction, but it becomes spiritually dangerous when we allow it to write our theology for us. Furthermore, if we do not articulate this affliction, it often works beneath even our own recognition. As Orual learns to ask of the divine, "How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"[20]
The turning point of the book comes when Lewis returns to the cross. Wishing that he could bear Joy's suffering in her place, he recognizes that such a substitution has been permitted only once: "It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done."[21] He has not argued his way out of the darkness; he has been led back to the One who entered it. Gradually the door that seemed bolted begins to open:
I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs.[22]
A drowning man is not guilty for flailing in the water, and Lewis does not accuse himself of sin here. The anguish was real and forgivable, yet it was not a good place to remain. Christ Himself did not stay in the garden, but rose from prayer and went to meet what was coming.
The later chapters show that the silence of God had changed character without disappearing. "Turned to God," Lewis writes, "my mind no longer meets that locked door."[23] When he brings his questions about Joy before God, he still receives no direct reply, but he describes the silence in very different terms:
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'[24]
The book therefore shows anguish as a road rather than a residence. "Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process," Lewis writes in the final notebook.[25] He also comes to see that God "has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't."[26] Lewis himself ties this trial to the eighth letter to Malcolm, which he addresses to a friend waiting on a frightening diagnosis, recalling the time "when I was in my own trouble."[27] The man who wrote that anxieties are afflictions and not sins had already learned, under the severest trial of his life, that a Christian may tremble without ceasing to be faithful.
What, then, should an anxious Christian take from Lewis? First, anxiety is not proof that faith has failed, so do not add guilt to an affliction that is already heavy. Second, Paul's command not to be anxious is completed by an invitation, "in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God,"[28] which is what Christ did in the garden. Third, distinguish the feeling of dread from the dreadful conclusions it suggests about God, because the first is an affliction to be borne, whereas the second is a temptation to be refused. Finally, the anxiety you cannot yet escape need not be wasted, since, if we can so take it, it becomes our share in the Passion.
Christ told His disciples that "a servant is not greater than his master,"[29] and Lewis applies that saying in a direction we might not expect. We should expect not only persecution but also the garden, the sleepless night, and the cup we ask to have taken away. After His prayer of anguish, Lewis notes, Christ "turns to His friends," and "They are asleep."[30] Anyone who has lain awake alone with dread knows that scene well. Dread can unite us with others, but, on a fundamental level, it is something of our own that we experience alone.
The Christian faith does not promise the serene detachment of the Stoic sage, but a Lord who has trembled before us and meets us in our trembling. We are Christians, not Stoics.
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Andrew Snyder, Ph.D., is a professor of theology and philosophy, founder of the Mythic Mind Fellowship, and host of all three Mythic Mind podcasts.
[1] Philippians 4:6 (ESV).
[2] C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 61-63.
[3] Mark 14:33-34 (ESV).
[4] Matthew 26:39 (ESV).
[5] Luke 22:44 (ESV).
[6] Hebrews 5:7; 4:15 (ESV).
[7] Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 62.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 62-63.
[10] Epictetus, Enchiridion 5.
[11] C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 3.
[12] Ibid., 33.
[13] Douglas H. Gresham, introduction to A Grief Observed, by C. S. Lewis (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), xx.
[14] Lewis, A Grief Observed, 5-6.
[15] Ibid., 6.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid., 29-30.
[18] Ibid., 30.
[19] Ibid., 40.
[20] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (New York: HarperOne, 2017), 335.
[21] Lewis, A Grief Observed, 44.
[22] Ibid., 46.
[23] Ibid., 61.
[24] Ibid., 69.
[25] Ibid., 59.
[26] Ibid., 52.
[27] Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 60.
[28] Philippians 4:6 (ESV).
[29] John 13:16 (ESV).
[30] Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 63.
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