Oxford Pastorate

The Pastorate, CS Lewis and the Socratic Club

 

Throughout its history, the Pastorate has offered both friendship and guidance to individuals and also facilitated informal groups of students meeting in college rooms or churches.  However, in late 1941 a Pastorate Chaplain, Stella Aldwinckle, took the unprecedented step of helping with the foundation and organisation of an official student society.[1]

Miss Aldwinckle’s work was primarily with the female undergraduate students of the women’s colleges.  She had herself studied theology at Oxford and as a Chaplain she demonstrated ‘particular powers of imagination, organization and capability’; she was particularly gifted ‘in helping those who were intellectually at sea or in difficulties’.[2]  One such struggling student was Monica Shorten of Somerville College who observed to Miss Aldwinckle that ‘The sermons and the religious clubs just take the real difficulties as solved – things like the existence of God, the divinity of Christ and so on.’[3]  Shorten insisted that there were many agnostics and atheists who felt as she did and, at Miss Aldwinckle’s suggestion, she posted a ‘lurid’ poster on the college noticeboard and summoned them to hear Miss Aldwinckle address some of these issues.  Miss Aldwinckle later recalled: ‘I went a few days later as a Daniel to a den of lions expecting to be torn limb from limb’ but, in fact, the meeting was a great success with lively discussion and a request from those that attended that such a meeting be repeated, only this time with their boyfriends present.[4]  This call issued in the birth of the Socratic Club.

 

Miss Aldwinckle’s genius was to pass over the obvious contenders to be invited to lead this new initiative (the theologians, chaplains or ministers abounding in Oxford) and, instead, to turn to a fellow of Magdalen College and lecturer in English literature who she knew to have turned from committed atheism to orthodox Christianity.  It was an inspired choice, because while her choice of president  was relatively unknown in 1941, his first Christian book, A Pilgrim’s Regress, had not been popular, Turner observes that, in fact, ‘The single twentieth-century Oxford religious figure whose influence extended far beyond the University was Clive Staples Lewis, who was neither a member of the faculty of theology, nor even a theologian.’[5]  Nonetheless, Lewis’s response to the invitation to become the president of the nascent society was positive.  He wrote:  ‘Dear Miss Aldwinckle, This club is long overdue.  Come to coffee on Tuesday evening in my rooms to discuss plans.’[6]

 

 

Lewis held the presidency for thirteen years (1942-54) and under his leadership the Socratic Club was a ‘phenomenon’.[7]  Meetings were frequently standing room only; the club had in excess of 100 registered members by the end of its first year; and some of the most prominent thinkers of the time engaged with Lewis around the rational trustworthiness and coherency of Christian faith.  Lewis in no way tried to hide the fact that the club was not ‘neutral’.  ‘It was the Christians who constructed the arena and issued the challenge [...] We never claimed to be impartial.  But argument is.  It has a life of its own.  No man can tell where it will go.  We expose ourselves, and the weakest of our party, to your fire no less than you are exposed to ours.’[8] 

Christopher Mitchell, who has written one of the few article-length accounts of the Socratic Club, interviewed a number of Oxford students who had attended the club.  On the basis of their accounts, he suggests:

Visiting opponents typically viewed Lewis as a fearless and formidable opponent, yet equally “generous” in argument.  He was admired for the intellectual rigor he brought to each topic and discussion, and was known both for his “courage” and “open-mindedness”.  Often it was the chance to cross intellectual swords with him more than anything else, that attracted some of Britain’s best non-Christian thinkers.[9]

Miss Aldwinckle as Chairperson and CS Lewis as President, were both convinced of the importance of this type of rational engagement in a context like Oxford University.  As Austin Farrer, an Oxford theologian who occasionally deputised for Lewis in these debates, commented in his account of Lewis as an apologist, ‘Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish’.[10]  The author of the Pastorate history, writing just a few years after the foundation of the club, goes further: ‘There can be no doubt that the Socratic Club has not only taken its place among the most alive societies in University, with packed meetings and the best available speakers, but has been a means of grace whereby some have found their way to God.’[11] 

While the Socratic Club itself did not long outlast Lewis’s move to take up a Professorship at Cambridge University, it is interesting to note that the Pastorate’s desire to engage those who are on the outside of Christian faith, and kept there in part by their intellectual doubts and questions, has never gone away.  Through the immensely vital period of the Pastorate’s ministry at St Aldate’s, which will be discussed in the next section, there was a group known as Agnostics Anonymous which met under the leadership of Pastorate Chaplain Colin Bennetts.  As the 1977-8 Pastorate Newsletter reports, ‘In a place like Oxford there is no shortage of agnostics – people for whom the truth is obscured by many unanswered questions.  But there is a shortage of opportunities to discuss those questions openly [...] Topics were closely argued for anything up to 3 hours [and] Colin, the only Christian present [...] often emerged from these sessions emotionally and mentally drained (!) but he has the satisfaction of knowing that, through patience, and by taking people’s questions seriously, the barriers to faith have been removed for several members of the group.’[12]

The last academic year, 2008-09, saw the Pastorate again involved in the setting-up of a space where those of Christian faith, of other faiths, or of no faith can come together to explore and to feel their way towards the truth.  Cafe Theology was set up by Associate Chaplain, Rev. Sally Hitchiner, and met on Saturday mornings in a coffee shop opposite St Peter’s college.  The group grew through the year and engaged with philosophers and theologians of different beliefs.  In the next academic year the group will continue under the Pastorate’s oversight, led by Jacob Waldenmaier a final year DPhil student in theology of religions.