C.S. Lewis Speaks to Fifty Shades of Grey (Dillon T. Thornton)

The film version of the erotic novel, Fifty Shades of Grey, was released on February 13, 2015. E.L. James’ first installment in the trilogy follows the liaison between the timorous Anastasia Steele and the tormented “epitome of male beauty,” Christian Grey. I have not read the books, nor do I plan to see the movies. But the Internet is suffused with the trilogy, and everyone watching Super Bowl XLIX (the most-watched show in U.S. television history) saw the Fifty Shades of Grey trailer, so unless you live an unplugged life, you know the basic plot. The story is known for its sexually explicit scenes involving bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism (BDSM). The book series that gave rise to the “mommy porn” genre hit its 100 millionth sale in early 2014. That puts E.L. James in the company of Michael Crichton, Ian Fleming, John Grisham, Dr. Seuss, and C.S. Lewis.

What would C.S. Lewis say about Fifty Shades of Grey?

As I pondered the fact that this erotic trilogy has sold roughly the same number of copies as The Chronicles of Narnia, it got me thinking: What would C.S. Lewis say about Fifty Shades of Grey? Clive Staples Lewis died on November 22, ­­­1963, the same day President Kennedy was assassinated. But Lewis’ mind lives in his many writings. As a novelist, poet, scholar, lay theologian, and Christian apologist, Lewis appealed to a wide audience. He wrote more than thirty books in his sixty-four years of living. Lewis was also a formidable conversationalist. For a large portion of his life he met regularly with fellow writers, such as Charles Williams and J.R.R. Tolkien. “The Inklings,” as they were called, was a group of literary enthusiasts who placed a high value on fantasy. The club existed so that members could read unpublished material aloud and ask for comments from their colleagues. Lewis was capable of offering considerable encouragement to the other Inklings. In his award-winning biography, The Inklings, Humphrey Carpenter records Tolkien’s impression of Lewis: “The unpayable debt that I owe to [Lewis] was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby.” But Lewis also had a critical streak. As Carpenter puts it, “When faced with something he hated, he did not tolerate it but went to war on it.” If Lewis were alive today, would he “go to war” on Fifty Shades of Grey?

I suspect he would. In my informed imagination, I see the central figure of the Inklings, setting aside his cup of tea or pint of beer, vehemently criticizing James’ lewd fantasy. I say this is an “informed” image, because, though we cannot know how an author of another time and place would respond to James, we can venture an educated guess based on the writings that author has left us. And Lewis has left us quite a corpus. Indeed, it is striking how clearly Lewis—writing over fifty years ago!—speaks to the very issues raised by Fifty Shades. Three of his works in particular merit our attention, The Screwtape Letters (1942), Mere Christianity (1952), and The Four Loves (1960).

Pleasure: God’s territory

In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis twists himself into the diabolical mindset, posing as Screwtape, a senior tempter, writing to the young, inexperienced devil, Wormwood. Several of the letters touch on the subject of sex. In the first of these letters, Screwtape reminds Wormwood that any pleasure, in its healthy and normal form, is God’s territory. “He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one,” the senior tempter writes. All the devils can do is entice humans to enjoy the pleasures God has produced, at times, or in ways, which he has forbidden. In latter correspondence, it becomes clear that God’s demand on humans is “either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy.” Screwtape explains that in every age devils far down in the Lowerarchy work to make this a seemingly impossible demand. They do so by using a small circle of authors, artists, actors/actresses, and advertisers. The aim is to keep the sex instinct inflamed, to bombard the population with propaganda in favor of sexual immorality, and to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually healthy marriages are most likely.

Several points are unmistakably clear here. For Lewis, God is the inventor of sex and all pleasure, and sex is to be enjoyed in the context of marriage. Second, sex has to be distorted before it is of any use to the powers of darkness. And, third, the principal adversary utilizes public figures (like E.L. James, I would suggest) to persuade men and women to experiment with sex in ways that displease the creator.

Taste for perversion

Similar themes are developed in Mere Christianity, Lewis’ explanation and defense of the teachings that have been common to nearly all Christians throughout time. In the third part of the work, “Christian Behaviour,” Lewis turns to the topic of sexual morality. Again, he emphasizes that sex, in itself, is good. The problem is that, having been fed a steady diet of good solid lies about sex, we have now acquired a taste for perversion. It is the sexual instinct, Lewis contends, that has gone awry. He illustrates the point powerfully:

You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act–that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?

Akin to the argument made by Screwtape, Lewis goes on to suggest that the blame for the present situation falls at least partly on those popular figures who promote unchastity. Novel after novel, film after film, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, and so on. This association is a lie, but like every effective lie, it is based on a truth—the truth that sex in itself is good. The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which a person is tempted is acceptable. Lewis freely admits that the Christian virtue of chastity is unfashionable. Nowadays it is considered more of a horse-and-buggy virtue than it was in Lewis’ time, due largely to the increase in stories like Fifty Shades, stories that celebrate sexual exploration—nay, deviance. But the Christian requirement must be upheld: “Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.” For, as Lewis explains later in Mere Christianity, the Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a husband and wife are to be regarded as a single organism, “one flesh.” The inventor of humanity was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were built to be combined together in pairs, not merely on the sexual level, but totally united. “The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it.”

Christian Grey “doesn’t do romance”

This raises an important question: What are we to make of a relationship that seems purely or at least predominantly sexual? According to reports, roughly twenty percent of the film adaptation of Fifty Shades consists of sex scenes. As the trailer makes plain, Christian Grey “doesn’t do romance.” Is this supposed to be appealing to women? Or put another way: Do women really want to extol the type of man who is consumed by sex and characterized by animally sexual behavior, even sexual violence? Hidden behind Christian Grey, that facade of mystery and extravagance, is a detestable message, which Lewis helps us to see. In The Four Loves, the work that perhaps most directly addresses the problems associated with James’ work, Lewis writes of Eros and Venus. By Eros he means the state that is commonly called “being in love.” By Venus he means the sexual element within Eros. According to Lewis, sexual desire, without Eros, wants sex itself. He writes, “The thing [sex] is a sensory pleasure; that is, an event occurring within one’s own body. We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he ‘wants a woman.’ Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus.” Eros, on the contrary, wants the Beloved. A man “in love” is characterized by a delighted preoccupation with one particular woman, a general fascination with her in her totality, rather than an obsession with the pleasure she can give. In Lewis’ words, “The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself.” Call me crazy, but I say this lovely expression puts Christian Grey’s “I don’t do romance” to shame.

One matter deserves further comment. Fifty Shades is known for BDSM. How should a Christian couple think of this? Again, The Four Loves guides us. Lewis avers that Venus often is taken too seriously, or at least with a wrong kind of seriousness. Culture, at its sexiest, paints the business of sex “in terms of the rapt, the intense, the swoony-devout; seldom a hint of playfulness.” To Lewis’ mind, nothing is more needed in the bedroom than a roar of old-fashioned laughter! Lewis reminds us that real lovers laugh between the sheets; again and again they feel an element, not only of play, but even of buffoonery, in the body’s expression of Eros. Preserve always this attitude of playfulness, Lewis tells us, for to banish laughter from the bed of love is to bring trouble into the marriage. For example, the removal of play can invite the man “to an extreme, though short-lived, masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror or a captor, and the woman to a correspondingly extreme subjection and surrender.” In a way, Lewis says, the man is crowned. Here the master illustrator is at his best, quickly noting that Christianity bestows—or rather inflicts—a certain “headship” on the man, though this is a coronation of an entirely different sort. “The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the Church—read on—and give his life for her (Eph. V, 25).” Thus, for Lewis, the male does indeed wear a crown. A crown of thorns.

Dillon T. Thornton has pastored churches in the southeastern part of the United States and on the south island of New Zealand. He has contributed to a number of scholarly journals and popular periodicals, and presently is writing a book on the Apostles’ Creed. Thornton blogs at Mindful of God (dtthornton.com).