Jim Stockton is an emeritus lecturer in philosophy at Boise State University and the author of The Oxford University Socratic Club, 1942–1972: A Life. His work explores the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and the relationship between philosophy, literature, and film, with particular attention to the Inklings—the Oxford circle that included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Stockton has taught a wide range of courses, from introductory philosophy and logic to medieval thought, aesthetics, and interdisciplinary studies in film and literature. His research often focuses on the intellectual and theological debates surrounding the Oxford Socratic Club, especially its role in fostering thoughtful engagement between faith and reason.
Debate, disagreement, and even intellectual friction are often seen as problems to be managed—or avoided altogether. But what if they are essential to the life of the mind? In this interview (and many thanks to Ron Dart for his thoughtful questions, which draw out equally thoughtful responses), Jim Stockton reflects on his book The Oxford University Socratic Club, 1942–1972, recounting this remarkable forum where Christians, agnostics, and atheists gathered for sustained—and often spirited—conversation. Founded by Stella Aldwinckle and presided over by C. S. Lewis, the club became a kind of microcosm of mid-century intellectual life, drawing figures such as Austin Farrer, Antony Flew, Alasdair MacIntyre, A. J. Ayer, and Bernard Williams into conversation. It also gave rise to a vibrant “world of women,” including Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Mary Warnock. From the enduring controversy of the Anscombe–Lewis debate to the club’s wider engagement with faith, ethics, and modern philosophy, Stockton shows how ideas were tested, refined, and sometimes transformed. Altogether, his fastidious work not only introduces readers to the history of the Socratic Club but also offers a living example of what it means to think seriously—and together.
Names mentioned:
C. S. Lewis, James T. Como, Elizabeth Anscombe, Antony Flew, Bernard Williams, Stella Aldwinckle, Monica Shorten, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Dorothy L. Sayers, Austin Farrer, Charles Williams, J. B. S. Haldane, George Berkeley, Humphrey Carpenter, Walter Hooper, Roger Lancelyn Green, A. N. Wilson, Arnold Lunn, Karl Marx, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Warnock, John Locke, David Hume, George P. Grant, Donald MacKinnon, Eric Mascall, Alasdair MacIntyre, Alister McGrath, C. E. M. Joad, Joel Heck, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, H. H. Price, T. S. Eliot, Katharine Farrer, Joy Davidman, Warnie Lewis, Mary Midgley, Anthony Kenny, G. K. Chesterton
Books mentioned:
C. S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide (by Walter Hooper)
C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (by James T. Como)
Miracles (by C. S. Lewis)
The Inklings (by Humphrey Carpenter)
Faith and Logic: Oxford Essays in Philosophical Theology (edited volume)
New Essays in Philosophical Theology (edited by Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre)
Reflections on the Psalms (by C. S. Lewis)
People and Places (by Mary Warnock)
The Company They Keep (by Diana Pavlac Glyer)
The Lord of the Rings (by J. R. R. Tolkien)
The Chronicles of Narnia (by C. S. Lewis)
Father Brown (by G. K. Chesterton)
Chesterton and the Philosophers (ed., Landon Loftin)
Radix: Ron Dart and Jim Stockton—thank you so much for being willing to share your time, your experience, and breadth of insight. This book of yours, Jim, is not a simple read; one does not sit down and move through it quickly. There is a tremendous amount of history and backstory here, which is part of what makes this conversation so interesting. We’re able to explore not only the book itself, but also the larger historical significance behind it. And when that larger history gathers around someone like Lewis, it becomes something rather grand indeed.
Ron, perhaps I’ll let you begin.
Ron Dart: First of all, thank you, Jim, for the years of labor you have put into this meticulous work of research. There has long been a desperate need for the history, content, and final legacy of the Socratic Club to be brought into the light.
My first question is this: how did you first become interested in the Socratic Club, and how did that initial interest grow into a book?
Jim Stockton: In 2007, I was approached by some students from the English department who asked me to teach a course on C. S. Lewis and philosophy. At that time, there wasn’t anyone in the English department who wanted to take on an upper-division course on Lewis from a literary perspective, and several of the students were considering—in fact, three of them eventually completed—their MA theses on Lewis.
As I began preparing for the course that winter, I first came across the Socratic Club. I recall reading C. S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide and also C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table by James T. Como. Hooper, in particular, offers a great deal of history, including many of the minutes that were taken at club meetings. There were also recollections from other Socratic Club participants, especially concerning the Elizabeth Anscombe–Lewis debate and several other notable events.
That summer, I devoted about three lectures of the course to the Socratic Club—its history, and what it offered both philosophy and Christian theology. We also took a close look at the Anscombe–Lewis debate. For several years afterward, I continued bringing that debate into my philosophy classes, because it offered students a powerful example: here were two deeply committed Christians—engaged in a serious and rigorous disagreement over what was essentially an argument for God’s existence grounded in reason. I believe, in the end, that it proved to be a very good thing rather than a negative one, though many people would certainly disagree with that assessment.
Around 2011, I went to the University of Oxford for the first time, and that is where I found almost all of the surviving minutes of the Socratic Club. The minutes from the first three and a half years were located at Marion E. Wade Center. With those materials, along with secondary sources—especially biographies of the many participants—I was able to begin reconstructing a full history of the club.
There were 476 meetings that we know of, and another 56 that I am still in the process of validating. Between 1942 and 1972, those meetings involved 327 participants.
For the most part, the participants came from philosophy or philosophical theology, though there were also many voices from other disciplines, and from different generations—from Lewis’s contemporaries to figures such as Antony Flew and Bernard Williams. It made for a remarkable series of meetings. I ended up returning to Oxford twice more.
RD: How do you think this book will enrich the study of Lewis and the Inklings, and perhaps even offer a larger contribution to Christian thought, politics, education, and culture?
JS: Well, that is just about everything, isn’t it?
I think the greatest value this book has to offer is the amount of primary material it brings together. There are the minutes, the notes, and a wide range of secondary sources related to the club. Even if a reader does not particularly care for my voice, style, or the way I frame the material, I can assure them that for anyone engaged in Lewis studies, Inkling studies, or simply seeking a strong point of entry into the history of the club, there is a substantial body of material here to work with.
The larger theme I try to bring forward is that this was one of the significant clubs of the twentieth century. What made it so important was that it opened up a truly interdisciplinary forum. In many ways, Christianity is seen at its best in the history of the club. It was not merely a philosophy club, nor was it a narrowly faith-based gathering built around Bible readings. Nor was it even a formal interdisciplinary society in the modern academic sense, with a fixed structure of papers and invited speakers. Rather, it was a place where almost anyone who had something thoughtful to say about religion—especially theology and philosophy—was welcome to come and speak.
Some of the meetings were quite dull, and the minutes are correspondingly brief and, at times, not especially kind. But other meetings were simply fantastic: lively, spirited, sometimes feisty, and occasionally quite testy. There were arguments, tempers flared, people teased one another, and occasionally people lost patience. But by the end of the evening, one gets the impression that there was rarely lasting bitterness. People generally walked away feeling good about what had happened. The students, especially, seem to have greatly enjoyed attending the meetings, at least from what I have been able to gather.
RD: Let me ask you about the founders. In many ways, the central figures were Stella Aldwinckle and C. S. Lewis. Would you reflect a little on the relationship between Stella Aldwinckle, Lewis, and the Socratic Club? Most readers have probably never heard of Aldwinckle until this book, but she is enormously significant—in one sense, the true midwife of the Socratic Club.
JS: Yes, absolutely. There are a few articles and books by Lewis scholars that discuss Stella Aldwinckle, but she remains, in many ways, the unsung hero of the Socratic Club. I published an article-length biography of her titled “Chaplain Stella Aldwinckle: A Biographical Sketch of the Spiritual Foundation of the Oxford University Socratic Club” and, interestingly enough, it has become my most widely read piece. Aldwinckle’s role in the origins of the Socratic Club is crucial.
There is the well-known story of her meeting Monica Shorten at a Freshers’ Tea in the autumn term of 1941. Monica invited her to come and speak with her friends at Somerville College. What Monica was essentially asking Aldwinckle to do was explain what philosophy of religion—or what the British often call philosophical theology—was really about. These students had grown weary of the typical sort of church punditry and sermonizing that amounted to little more than “believe in Christ and all will be well.” From what I can tell, they were disappointed both by what they were hearing in church and by the absence of serious religious instruction within their philosophy courses during their first and second years at University of Oxford. By 1941, Oxford philosophy had moved a considerable distance away from the older philosophical-theological ground that had been far more prominent in the early twentieth century.
So Aldwinckle came and spoke to the women at Somerville three times during the autumn term of 1941, and from those conversations they decided to form a club. In the British academic world, the club president functioned primarily as an advisor. At that point, a friend of hers suggested that she speak with C. S. Lewis instead. I believe that friend may have been Austin Farrer, though I have not been able to confirm that with certainty; there are a couple of other possible candidates as well.
Lewis immediately said yes. He thought it sounded excellent. At the first meeting, the club admitted men only as visitors, which leads me to believe—and yes, this is an inference, though I think a strong one—that the young women from Somerville and the other women’s colleges initially envisioned the Socratic Club as a women’s intellectual space as well as a venue for philosophical and theological discussion. By the second meeting, however, men were being admitted as members. My assumption is that the university intervened and made it clear that if this was to be recognized as a university club, it had to be open to everyone. Otherwise, it would have had to remain a private society within one of the women’s colleges.
The Socratic Club offered something very different. Its central purpose in those early years was to create a place where theology, philosophy, and above all Christianity could be openly discussed. There were a few debates in those first years in which an atheist opposed a theist or Christian position. Yet, as Lewis himself later acknowledged in one of his essays, such encounters were far fewer than later myth has suggested. There simply were not that many atheists coming to the club to speak in those earliest years.
Later, in the late 1940s, more atheists did begin to participate, and discussions became rather feisty on that account. But the popular myth of the Socratic Club as a venue where atheists and Christians met month after month for fierce intellectual combat over a decade or more is, frankly, not borne out by the historical record. It simply did not happen that way. What we do find, however, are many meetings in which people of faith—often with deeply differing perspectives—engaged in vigorous disagreement. The most famous example, of course, is the Anscombe–Lewis debate, where strong opinions were very much on display, both from the principal speakers and from members of the audience.
RD: Your chapter on Stella Aldwinckle and C. S. Lewis is a wonderful entrée into both the origins of the book and the crucial role she played. Each chapter of the book addresses a different season in the life of the Socratic Club. Could you briefly reflect on that structure for us?
JS: Yes, certainly. I do not immediately recall all of the chapter subtitles as they finally appeared, but the structure works roughly this way. The opening chapter offers a history of how the club began, followed by a biography of Aldwinckle and then a biography of Lewis. With the Lewis section in particular, I tried to remain closely focused on what was directly relevant to the history of the club. Because of that, readers already familiar with Lewis biographies will notice that certain things are missing.
For example, I do not spend much time discussing Lewis’s own journey of faith—his movement from atheism to Christianity. A few colleagues in Lewis studies have mentioned that this is an important dimension that might have been included. That may well be true, but I suspect someone in Lewis studies will eventually write that article far better than I could, so I was content to leave that task to them.
The second chapter turns to the beginning of the club itself, which of course takes place during the years of World War II. There I work through a substantial number of the minutes and introduce many of the personalities involved, while also showing how discussions at the club were actually conducted. Unlike the Union and many other debating societies, the Socratic Club did not organize formal teams, point-counterpoint structures, or scheduled rebuttals. Someone would come and read a paper or deliver a talk, and then another person would often respond. Lewis himself frequently served as the first respondent, opening the discussion.
This may sound rather ordinary now, but in 1942 and 1943 it was anything but. Imagine having someone like C. S. Lewis present a paper, followed by Charles Williams opening the discussion—as happened with Lewis’s first paper to the club on Christianity and aesthetics—and then inviting a room full of freshmen into the conversation. That was extraordinarily uncommon. At that time, students, especially first-year students, were generally expected to remain quiet, take notes, and be respectful observers. Instead, here they were being invited into the discussion itself.
Before long, after the first few meetings, those conversations often became wonderfully lively—sometimes even rowdy—and a great deal of fun. Word spread quickly. The meetings became especially popular with students because they were able not only to hear some of their favorite faculty members lecture, but also to hear their tutors and readers speak on subjects closely related to what many of them were studying, especially in PPE. And beyond that, they knew there would likely be a spirited argument afterward. Most importantly, they were able to ask questions and offer their own opinions, which, unsurprisingly, students always enjoy. I present what I would call soft rather than hard evidence in the book for the idea that this style of discussion contributed significantly to the club’s success. I will leave it to the pedagogues to sort out what that means in terms of the broader educational history of the club.
Radix: Sorry to interrupt, but could you just define what PPE is, and its context?
JS: Certainly. I may mix up the order of the disciplines, but PPE stands for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, one of the most well-known undergraduate courses of study at the University of Oxford. In many ways, it is Oxford’s answer to something close to a classical education for a young scholar. I have been told by British colleagues and friends that, on the job market, it is highly desirable and opens a great many doors.
As many people know, life at Oxford largely comes down to the examinations at the end of term. There are three terms: you attend lectures, read extensively, and write a paper every week for your tutor. Then, at the end, you sit a lengthy series of examinations. Those results determine your final standing—a first, a second, or a third—and students at Oxford, Cambridge, and other UK universities are, of course, hoping for a first, or at least a strong upper second, because that carries significant weight in future interviews and appointments.
So if your philosophy tutor in 1943 or 1944 happened to be an atheist and a logical positivist, and you were perhaps the most devout Christian at the Socratic Club, you still wanted to hear what he had to say—because there was a very good chance you would be writing an essay for him. As every student quickly learns, it is generally wise to mention a philosopher’s own work in the paper you hand to them.
Another reason students in PPE would have been so interested in these meetings is that philosophy, unlike literary criticism with its stronger historical emphasis, tends to operate very much in the present tense. At Oxford—as at places like Stanford University, Yale University, Harvard University, or University of Cambridge—the faculty wanted to teach what was happening in philosophy now. A little time might be given to Plato, Aristotle, and a few others, but very quickly the conversation moved into the contemporary field. That is another reason students reading PPE would have been drawn to the club.
The Socratic Club also had its own study sessions, and I discuss that at some length in the book. I do suspect there was a certain awkwardness for Stella Aldwinckle in maintaining these sessions while so many of the principal voices in the club came from the philosophical community. Still, they accomplished something very important: they kept Christianity and theology alive as an active conversation within the club.
One thing Aldwinckle was especially good at was making sure that any gathering outside the regularly scheduled meetings included tea. As we all know, students will always show up if there is something to eat. In America we might have pizza; in Oxford, in 1951, they had tea—and, as many Americans do not always realize, this was closer to what we would call high tea, with rather more food involved than just the beverage itself.
The Farrers, famously, were known for this. I have read repeatedly from former students that Katharine Farrer was especially gifted at hosting high tea, and that students were often invited over on Friday afternoons. She became quite famous for it.
RD: I should mention as well that George Grant, one of our great Canadian political philosophers, did his PhD with Austin Farrer, so he knew Katharine and Austin Farrer quite well, as much as one can in that setting.
JS: Yes, and she was also very good friends with Joy Davidman, as well as with Warnie Lewis. Katharine and Warnie, in particular, became close friends, and they spent quite a lot of time socializing together in the early 1960s.
Radix: All these lovely bits of information! Okay—sorry, before I interrupted, Ron, you were asking Jim about the chapter structure.
RD: You briefly mentioned the Anscombe–Lewis dialogue, which has often been misread and misinterpreted. Could you expand on that for us?
JS: Yes, certainly. If you read Miracles, one of the most important things to pay close attention to is the opening three chapters. In the first two chapters, Lewis makes it quite clear that he is not writing primarily for an academic audience. He is writing for the general public—what one might call the common reader. He adopts what could be described as a triumphant apologetic approach. There is a tone of proclamation in those chapters: the joy of Christ’s resurrection, the language of redemption, and the larger claim that Christianity offers a coherent account of human existence.
For the most part, he stays within that register in the opening chapters. At the same time, however, he begins pressing philosophy to provide what he sees as a stronger explanation for naturalism. Throughout his post-conversion career, Lewis had a very low opinion of naturalism. He tended to assume that naturalists were effectively atheists, and that they were, in some sense, working against the older tutorial and intellectual culture of Oxford in which he himself had flourished during the 1920s and 1930s. There is some truth to that perception, but only a very thin truth. Lewis was not as deeply familiar with the developments in Oxford philosophy as he perhaps might have been before writing Miracles.
Then, in chapter three, he advances his formal argument for why the naturalist position fails—and this is where he runs into difficulty. He makes a number of bold philosophical claims that cannot easily be sustained either linguistically or philosophically. One of the clearest examples is his insistence on a full and complete explanation of the naturalist account of reason. This is precisely where Elizabeth Anscombe presses him. One of her central criticisms is that there is no such thing as a fully complete explanation in either the theist or atheist position. That kind of total explanatory closure simply is not available. He also uses causal terminology in ways that are, frankly, awkward and not especially helpful to his case.
Anscombe does not address every one of those issues directly in her paper, but they are certainly present. Lewis also leans rather heavily on a line of thought drawn from J. B. S. Haldane—essentially a paradoxical argument suggesting that if we do not know where reason comes from, then we cannot trust reason at all, and therefore anything we say must undermine itself.[1] The problem is that if you actually go back to Haldane’s text, it becomes clear that he is being at least partly ironic, if not outright sarcastic. He does not treat the argument with the same seriousness Lewis later assigns to it. Haldane does concede that there may be something more to reason than a strict naturalist account allows, but he ultimately remains an atheist and a naturalist. Lewis’s use of that paradoxical puzzle is, I think, one of the weaker points in his case, and I go into that at greater depth in the book.
What Anscombe is really doing in her response is saying: choose your language more carefully. Tone down the pulpit-thumping dimension of the rhetoric and look much more closely at the language of causation, explanation, premises, and conclusions. She is not merely dismissing him; rather, she is insisting that if the argument is to work, it must be philosophically sharper. In fact, one of the striking things about the exchange is that Anscombe herself suggests there is room for a stronger version of the argument. And when Lewis is given the opportunity to respond, the first thing he does is admit that his language was not as precise as it should have been.
I think the deeper difference between them lies here: Lewis is working largely within what philosophers would call informal rhetorical logic—the sort of reasoning often taught today in communication or English departments through rhetoric, persuasion, and the study of fallacies. Anscombe, by contrast, is looking at propositions, inferential structures, proofs, and the internal coherence of claims. So the two of them are, in a sense, speaking across different intellectual registers.
After the debate itself, remarkably little is said publicly about it for quite some time. That changes when Humphrey Carpenter publishes The Inklings in the early 1970s. Carpenter presents the debate as something deeply wounding for Lewis—that he was, in effect, crushed by it. Then, about a year and a half later, Walter Hooper and Roger Lancelyn Green publish their Lewis biography and push back strongly, suggesting instead that Lewis had acquitted himself well. The historical reality, as far as I can tell, is that the house was divided. Some present believed Lewis had won; others thought Anscombe had clearly prevailed. There was no universally accepted verdict.
That question—who won?—then takes on a life of its own for the next fifteen to twenty years, with philosophers and Lewis scholars continuing to revisit the debate. Some treatments are generous, some considerably less so. Then, in 1990, A. N. Wilson publishes his biography of Lewis and advances what I consider a deeply problematic interpretation. Wilson was and remains a major British biographer, and many of his other biographies are excellent. But in this case he writes, to my mind, with something of a chip on his shoulder. He advances the rather dramatic theory that Lewis was intellectually demolished by the debate and that this is what drove him away from serious philosophical theology and into the writing of the Narnia books.
I simply do not think that is fair. It is not fair to Lewis, because it is historically inaccurate, and it is not fair to Anscombe either. Some of what has been written about Anscombe in the wake of this debate has been less than kind, and as a philosopher I am perhaps more sensitive to that than some readers might be. What I often tell students and readers is this: neither Lewis nor Anscombe were fragile personalities.
These were two of the strongest intellectual figures of twentieth-century academia. They could both give and take serious criticism. The idea that Lewis was somehow emotionally shattered by this exchange strikes me as rather silly. A far healthier way to approach the debate is with reserve and proportion. Do not make too much of it. Do not demean either Lewis or Anscombe. Instead, see it for what it is: one of the best examples we have of two deeply committed Christians engaging in a serious intellectual disagreement over a matter of reason and faith. That, to me, is its real significance.
For readers particularly interested in Lewis’s argument from reason, I point them to some of the excellent secondary work on the subject, which lays out the philosophical stakes in much greater detail. In my own book, I deliberately kept the explanation as clear and accessible as possible. Some of my philosophical colleagues have already teased me for simplifying it a little too much. But I am very aware that many readers will have had only an introductory philosophy course, and I wanted the material to remain readable without sacrificing the substance of the debate.
RD: For those interested, this is chapter six: “The Anscombe–Lewis Debate of February 2, 1948.”I think your more balanced—and, frankly, healthier—approach helps prevent readers from slipping into an overly polarized reading of the exchange.
Let me move to the next question. There is a tendency, when thinking about the Socratic Club, to focus on theology, biblical interpretation, or philosophy. But the club also hosted a number of important political debates. And how could it not? On pages 91 to 98, you discuss the debate between Arnold Lunn and Professor Burnell of Birkbeck, University of London, a school historically associated with the political left. Reflect for us, then, not only on that particular debate, but more broadly on the Socratic Club meetings that dealt with the relationship between faith, politics, economics, and social issues.
JS: Quite a number of those discussions take place after World War II, and the club changes significantly during those years. By 1946 and 1947, philosophers who had served in the war are beginning to return to Oxford. A younger generation of philosophers also begins to emerge—many of whom would later become major figures in twentieth-century thought. You have Antony Flew, Bernard Williams, Basil Mitchell, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Among the women philosophers associated with the colleges, you have Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Warnock. By the early 1950s, yet another generation begins to enter the conversation. A good deal of what these thinkers brought to the table involved political and social questions.
The meeting you referred to was one of the largest and most exciting of them. Whenever the club hosted a discussion on political issues—and especially when the topic involved Christianity and Marxism, which was often a somewhat gentler way of saying Christianity and communism—people turned out in large numbers. They were interested not only in the issues themselves but in the personalities involved. Figures such as Arnold Lunn and others were exceptional public speakers. They knew how to command a room and work a stage.
By the late 1940s and early 1950s, many students were reading Karl Marx for the first time and were seriously discussing communism as a legitimate alternative within Britain’s political framework. One of the most interesting voices responding to these questions was Iris Murdoch, who repeatedly offered thoughtful replies. She did an excellent job of explaining that the philosophical and theological community did not need to be frightened by Marxism or existentialism.
In her view, both traditions shared certain empirical concerns that could be placed in conversation with the broader British philosophical tradition—one deeply shaped by figures such as John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley. These were among the club’s finest meetings, though they were not the most common. Most meetings remained grounded more directly in religion and theology.
RD: Speaking of which, Iris Murdoch is one of my favorite writers. George P. Grant, held her in very high regard. When Murdoch came to Canada, she would often stay with the Grant family, and there are some fascinating Canadian connections there between George Grant and Iris Murdoch. He had immense respect for both her and her husband, who was himself a very important thinker.
There were, of course, many other major figures who participated in the Socratic Club, Austin Farrer—whom I’m actually supervising an MA on right now—Donald MacKinnon, Eric Mascall, and Alasdair MacIntyre. All of this really speaks to the extraordinary depth and breadth of the club. Could you comment on that?
JS: Yes, and I think that breadth is one of the defining features of the club. There were, in fact, far more philosophers involved than there were evangelical Christians who would have occupied the same general theological camp as C. S. Lewis. During the war years, the club experiences something of an identity crisis. At first, it is essentially a Christian speakers’ society. Most of those who come to speak are explicitly relating their scholarly work to Christianity or showing how Christianity informs their academic discipline.
Then, beginning in 1946 and 1947, the club becomes much more philosophical. This is actually a period when Farrer and Lewis, along with some of their colleagues, are at their very best in terms of speaking and responding to other voices within the club. One gets the sense that they were genuinely enjoying themselves intellectually. By the latter part of 1947, however, and certainly by the time of the Anscombe–Lewis debate on February 2, 1948, it becomes clear that the philosophical community is beginning to emerge as the dominant voice within the club.
Within a year or two, it becomes the majority presence. Now, as I said earlier, I do think Anscombe carried the day in that debate. Lewis himself more or less acknowledged as much. But I do not believe the debate itself explains the larger shift in the club. If anything, it is only a minor factor. A far more significant factor is what is happening in Lewis’s personal life during 1947 through 1949. As Alister McGrath has pointed out in his biographies of Lewis, these were deeply difficult years for him personally. Mrs. Moore’s health was declining, his brother’s alcoholism was becoming more severe, and Lewis was carrying a heavy burden of responsibility. I suspect that had much more to do with any change in his presence at the club than the debate itself. And it is important to note that Lewis did not withdraw after the debate. He continued attending meetings.
Both Lewis and Anscombe remained active in the club afterward, and both continued to enjoy its intellectual life. What really changes is the content of the discussions. By 1949 and 1950, the philosophical questions being discussed were increasingly outside Lewis’s primary interests. By 1950 and 1951, I am left with the impression that Lewis is occasionally having difficulty following where some of the more analytically trained philosophers are taking the discussion.
And yet Lewis continues attending, continues giving papers, and continues replying all the way until he leaves Oxford in December 1954 and takes up his post at University of Cambridge in January 1955. That, more than anything else, explains the gradual decline both in Lewis’s presence and in the explicitly Christocentric papers that had once been more central to the club.
RD: Yes, very interesting. As I mentioned earlier, I’m supervising this MA on Farrer and Mascall and the Metaphysicals. And, of course, Lewis dedicated Reflections on the Psalms to Austin and Katharine Farrer as well. Then, as Lewis came toward the end of his life, it was Farrer who was there to administer the final rites. So, there is clearly a deep intellectual and spiritual companionship there. Many of the doubters or opponents of Christianity were also invited into the club. Could you comment on that, and on what it says about the nature and maturity of the club itself?
JS: There were some very strong atheistic voices involved in the club. I would not want to call them “devout atheists,” because that is really a misnomer, but there were thinkers who were more than willing to step forward and offer the atheistic counterargument. In a few instances, those voices even led the discussion.
One of the most significant figures here is Antony Flew, who was a strong atheist during the years when the club was active. There are, of course, later articles and books that discuss Flew’s views toward the end of his life and suggest that he became more open to a charitable view of theism, though not necessarily to Christianity itself. I deliberately chose not to bring that later material into the book for two reasons. First, I discuss very little that occurs after 1972, and I did not want that later episode to become the singular postscript to the club’s history. Second, while the scholarship on that later period appears to be quite good, I would want to study it more carefully and speak with some of Flew’s surviving students before making any strong judgment on it.
There was also the very important figure of C. E. M. Joad. Joad is often described, rightly I think, as the great champion of agnosticism. Lewis himself refers to him in different places as both an agnostic and an atheist, but I think it is important to preserve the distinction and to continue to think of him primarily in terms of agnosticism. Those who still work on Joad’s thought are very committed to that understanding. In the final year of his life, when he was suffering from cancer, he did return to the church.
My friend and colleague Joel Heck has written on the possible role the Socratic Club and Lewis may have played in that movement toward Christianity. Joel and I are broadly in agreement that Joad did indeed return to the faith in the last year of his life. Where we differ slightly is in how much of that can be attributed to the club. I tend to be more cautious on that point, while Joel—perhaps understandably, given his own theological commitments—leans a bit more toward seeing the club as a positive influence. Still, it is certainly true that Joad and Lewis became good friends, which is itself rather fascinating.
One thing that emerged repeatedly as I worked on the book, though I did not explicitly foreground it there, was Lewis’s habit of first becoming deeply irritated by another scholar’s work—sometimes even attacking both the work and, at times, their faith commitments—only later to meet them personally and become close friends. Today we might consider that rhetorically rude or politically incorrect. But Lewis belongs to one of the last generations of public intellectual orators. That is how he saw himself.
These were men of that era who did not simply inhabit a narrow academic specialization. You were not merely a don of English literature dealing with medieval and Renaissance texts. You came forward with what felt like an all-encompassing account of reality—faith, God, science, literature, culture—all in one grand package, and you offered it to the public. And if someone said, “Lewis, you have got this wrong,” then they went at one another vigorously. I think many of the students who attended the Socratic Club understood that those days were beginning to come to an end. And that is precisely why they came.
The club was one of the last places where one could still witness that kind of grand rhetorical debate and hear those sorts of speakers. In that respect, figures like Austin Farrer and Lewis are wonderful examples of younger scholars who still retained something of that earlier intellectual breadth. And of course, as the century moves forward, that grand style is increasingly challenged by figures such as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who profoundly reshape the philosophical landscape. Yet even in that transformation, they too become extraordinary public intellectual voices.
So in many ways, the first half of the twentieth century really does represent some of the last flames of that great tradition of public lecturing and disputation. And then there are figures such as Eric Lionel Mascall, Austin Farrer, and Basil Mitchell. Those three, in particular, are among the finest philosophical theologians of the twentieth century. They did exceptional work, and they shared a good deal of it through the Socratic Club. The club was very important to all three of them. In fact, after Lewis, Farrer delivered and responded more than anyone else in the history of the club.
Then comes Mascall. He appeared roughly ten times, either delivering a paper or responding to one. There were others—such as H. H. Price—who also participated repeatedly. This repeated return by major thinkers says something important about the seriousness and maturity of the club itself.
RD: I was thinking of that rhetorically confrontational style that existed for a time between the Inklings, Lewis, and T. S. Eliot, and how Charles Williams eventually helped bring them together at a certain point. In some ways, they were climbing the same mountain, perhaps from different sides.
So, first of all, let me say that I think this is an outstanding book. It is going to contribute not only to scholarship on Lewis and the Inklings, but to the much broader question of how faith engages the larger world. There are very few universities that have ever sustained this level of intellectual quality. You touch on some of this in the conclusion.
Are there any final comments you would like to share about the long process of bringing this remarkable book together and finally getting it off the publishing tarmac?
JS: Yes—and it has indeed been a long process. I began my initial research in 2007, and the serious research really began in 2011, with my first trip to Oxford. I went back again in 2012 or 2013, and then for the final time in 2015. After that, I began writing the book itself. I also made one rather significant mistake. I joined a large university-wide general education teaching initiative—a model involving large lectures and smaller tutorial-style classes. What I did not realize, because I was unfamiliar with that pedagogical model, was just how time-consuming it would be.
For a good three years of my life, I was almost completely absorbed by those responsibilities. Then, around 2018 into 2019, I had a major health scare. I simply was not ready to return to serious writing until about 2021. I want to say this quite plainly: I am deeply grateful for my physical therapists. My family genuinely thought I was going to die. At times, I thought I was going to die. They truly brought me back. So for all the older men out there who have had a heart attack, severe spinal issues, or arthritis—as I have—my advice is simple: go to physical therapy as soon as you can. It is absolutely worth the time. That was what slowed the book down most significantly.
The other factor, which I do not really discuss in the book itself, is that I wanted to ensure everything was as close to copyright-clear as possible. I was working very carefully with archival material, keeping well within accepted limits and wanting not merely permission but genuine archival approval from both the Bodleian Libraries and the Marion E. Wade Center. That approval gradually came together around 2016–2017, and once I had that confidence, I began writing in earnest. The writing itself took nearly three years.
Throughout these fifteen years, Ron kept emailing me. He kept encouraging me to stay with the book. And I really do want to say this, because I think it matters. In a way, Ron was to me what Lewis was to Tolkien in encouraging him to finish The Lord of the Rings. Now, my book does not even belong in the same room as Tolkien’s work—so this is not a comparison in any literary sense. But Ron’s encouragement truly kept me going, especially during the years when I was physically incapacitated.
During the pandemic, because of my health, I scarcely left the house for almost three years. I simply could not risk COVID. So hearing from the outside world once in a while meant a great deal. Ron, truly—thank you. I do not think I would have finished the book without that encouragement.
RD: Thank you for sharing that backstory. I did not know whether those little emails meant anything at all, but I knew you were doing magnificent work, and I knew that in time it would be born. I may have played only a minuscule part, but you have done the truly heroic work. And I know this book is going to mean a great deal to many people—not only those interested in Lewis and the Inklings, but anyone interested in what education ought to be at its best: a place where the great issues are taken up with seriousness and intellectual integrity.
And to have done all of this in the midst of the health journey you have lived through—that speaks profoundly to your character. Thank you.
Radix: Well, this has been greatly enjoyable. Thank you so much, both of you. And for those who may not already be familiar with this field, I really appreciate the way both of you have been willing to dip into some of the wider contexts and implications. Ron, thank you especially for the questions you have asked, because they give such breadth to the field. This, I suspect, will also open the door for new students considering further academic work in the area.
One final question, if you’re willing. For a long time, in the earlier understanding of the Inklings—really up until Diana Pavlac Glyer’s book The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community—the prevailing assumption was that figures such as C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien were largely creating their work in relatively individualistic ways. Then, of course, there was a shift in understanding, and Glyer’s work made it very clear that this was not the case—that there was genuine collaboration, mutual influence, conviviality, and a kind of shared intellectual life. More broadly, I think within the Western world, and certainly within Christianity, there is a growing appreciation for the importance of community.
So as I read about this community of minds gathering together—rubbing shoulders, debating, asking what about this? what about that?—and as you describe Lewis’s personality, his willingness to argue vigorously and yet revise and return in conversation, it seems to me that the Socratic Club was very much a communal rather than an individualistic endeavor. Would you agree with that?
JS: Absolutely. I do not know whether I say this explicitly in the book, though I may have, but I think it is one of the finest examples of a community-based academic club in the Western intellectual world of the twentieth century. As far as its Christian identity is concerned, once again Stella Aldwinckle is the unsung hero of the entire story.
She not only created the community—she fostered it, sustained it, and kept it going until her retirement in 1966. And even after retiring, she continued attending meetings. As far as she was concerned, the club remained fundamentally a Christian club, one that existed for the students. Now, for Lewis, it was also an opportunity for Christians to gather, discuss their work, and share it with students—but crucially, with students and scholars across theistic, atheistic, and entirely different disciplinary perspectives. It was a place for people to come together and wrestle with large ideas and large debates.
But Lewis, too, was deeply concerned for the students. In the chapter where I discuss the two Socratic Club weekend conferences during the war years, we have one of those rare bodies of material that really shows how Lewis interacted with students. In one of those conferences, for example, there were twenty-four young women and only two young men. The second conference was not much different. So not only was this a Christian community, a philosophical community, and an open-door intellectual community, it was also, in many ways, a women’s community.
That foundation matters. I know, for example, that the club meant a great deal to Iris Murdoch. It also mattered deeply to Mary Warnock. For figures such as Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Elizabeth Anscombe, it may not have meant quite as much as it did to Murdoch, but it certainly mattered. And they were going to make sure their voices were heard, because they knew the club’s foundation had emerged from the women’s colleges. That base remained significant throughout its history.
I still remember one former member—now long since passed—telling me, some twenty years ago, that most of them thought of it as “a girlish sort of club.” Now, whether he meant that sarcastically or simply meant that it was where the women were, I suspect it was the latter. And that, again, points us back to Aldwinckle. She was the Anglican chaplain to the women’s colleges. She was a constant presence in the lives of those young women. She wanted to ensure that they remained grounded in the faith, if in nothing else. She was deeply devout and a very strong personality. She is a fascinating figure. If I ever write another biography, it may well be on her.
So yes—community all the way. The club was fundamentally about community, and I think that is one of the reasons it was so successful.
Radix: There are so many wonderful leads here. Are there any titles either of you would especially recommend as a further reading? As a bit of a Chesterton nerd, when I am asked which books to read of his, I’ll often say that it’s also important to know the context in which he was placed – what the historical, philosophical and theological issues where that he was dealing with. Because context matters. So, to you both, are there any supplemental readings you’d suggest for readers?
JS: Two come immediately to mind. One is A Memoir: People and Places by Mary Warnock, which is one of the finest historical reflections on what was happening during that period. Another, Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher’s Diary is a work by Anthony Kenny, who offers similarly rich reflections on the academic and political world he inhabited. Those two, in particular, are very informative for readers coming from English or theology who want to understand the intellectual world surrounding Lewis. And of course there is now a rich body of scholarship on Lewis and philosophy as well.
[1]Here is the quote from Lewis: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to believe my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that doesn’t make them sound logical. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” Note that Lewis dropped the sentence “They may be sound chemically, but that doesn’t make them sound logical.” J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Papers (New York and London: Harper & Brothers: 1928), 220.