Related articles and links |  1 of 3

Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis probably never met—though there is evidence that an unnamed Oxford professor called on Freud during the 15 months he lived in England before his death in 1939. If that professor was Lewis, Freud would have been 82 or 83 and Lewis 40 or 41. Lewis would by then have been a Christian for about a decade. His most important apologetic works were still in the future, but he had already begun to express his faith in symbol and metaphor (The Pilgrim's Regress and Out of the Silent Planet). Freud's major works were all behind him and his cultural legacy was already created.

If these two intellectual giants had met, their contrasting views—of God, religion, morality, truth, love, sex, suffering, and death—would have been revealed in stark contrast to each other. Though it is doubtful such a conversation ever took place, we do now have a thoughtful book that places Lewis's and Freud's fundamental ideas next to each other: Armand Nicholi's The Question of God. Nicholi has been teaching Harvard students (both undergraduates and medical students) about Freud's thought for over 30 years. Students have given his course, "Sigmund Freud & C. S. Lewis: Two Contrasting World Views," excellent ratings in a guide published by Harvard's Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE). To quote from the CUE Guide for 1993-94, "Calling the course one of the best at Harvard, and helpful in expanding one's understanding of one's self and one's personal life, nearly all of those polled recommended [it] without hesitation."

As one of the great explainers of the modern era, Freud was to human behavior what Marx was to economics and Darwin was to biology. You simply weren't educated unless you knew the thought of these three architects of modernity. But Nicholi's students found that reading Freud's philosophical works meant enduring a sustained attack on a spiritual worldview. They asked for balance. Nicholi searched for some other thinker who had the intellectual credibility to stand up to Freud's arguments. He discovered that C. S. Lewis was the perfect foil for Freud. "When Lewis was an atheist," Nicholi told me in an interview, "he read Freud's works … and used his philosophical works as a defense of his atheism. After Lewis's conversion, many of the arguments that he answered were those very arguments raised by Freud and used by Lewis himself when he was an atheist."

A book like this could be bloodless, abstract, and easily reduced to a series of PowerPoint slides: Freud's arguments for regarding God as an illusion listed opposite Lewis's argument for the reality of God; Freud's reduction of all love to sex opposite Lewis's elaboration of the richly interconnected varieties of love; and so forth.

But Nicholi joins the world of ideas to flesh-and-blood biography. As a psychiatrist, Nicholi is sensitive to the ways life experiences shape the ways we perceive the world—and great minds are no exception. Thus Nicholi begins with beginnings:

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was an Orthodox Jewish boy raised by a stern but loving Catholic nanny—until she was ripped from him at a tender age. At age 10 he learned about his father's experience of anti-Semitism in a largely Catholic society. He began to think of his father as a coward. As an impressionable teenager, he read Ludwig Feuerbach's argument that religion "is simply the projection of human need, a fulfillment of deep-seated wishes." He spent the rest of his life working out his troubled relation with his father and the implications of Feuerbach's views.

next page... |  1 of 3

April 22 2002, Vol. 46, No. 5