I thought of you when I read this quote from “The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams” by Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski –

“If “The Art of Being Shocked” was what Lewis was after, though, he went about it by an unexpected path, appealing to the intellect rather than the emotions, arguing first for the objective reality of the moral law, then for our chronic failure to obey it, and finally for God as the giver of the law, who alone, by means of the Atonement, is working to repair us. Lewis knew that he would have to make this point in the language of the street, however, and he discovered, with some help from Eric Fenn, that he had a gift for doing so. He began the first evening broadcast: Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: “That’s my seat, I was there first”—“Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”—“Why should you shove in first?”—“Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”—“How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”—“Come on, you promised.” It was a brilliant move. The instinct to protest against unfairness is universal, and it emerges very early in childhood. The offended party in such a quarrel, Lewis observes, “is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about—and the other man very seldom replies, ‘To hell with your standard.’” In other words, the moral law is a principle of accountability that transcends cultural differences and cannot be reduced to herd instinct. As a principle of accountability, the moral law presupposes freedom—ought implies can. If we fail to live up to the moral law, it can only be because we have freely rejected it; and if we are in the habit of freely rejecting it, we are in serious disarray. Summing up his first fifteen-minute talk, Lewis said, “Well, those are the two points I wanted to make tonight. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can’t really get rid of it. Secondly, that they don’t in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.” So far, Lewis had said nothing especially original or specifically Christian; Kant would have smiled. It was no small achievement, however, to have secured so succinct a moral foundation for the Christian reflections to follow. Lewis was proceeding upon the assumption that what had served as praeparatio evangelica (preparation for the Gospel) in his own life might win over his listeners as well. Before he became a Christian, he had been a convinced moral realist. After his conversion, he came to see knowledge of the moral law—called “natural law” or “law of nature” because it is a universal pattern discoverable by reason—as the best introduction to the faith, especially for those outside the Church. As St. Paul said, the natural law is “written on the heart” (Romans 2:14–15) even of Gentiles who have not known divine revelation. Lewis studied the development of this idea in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, undisputed master of natural law theory, whose belief in the fundamental rationality of human beings Lewis wholeheartedly shared, and also in the works of the sixteenth-century Anglican divine Richard Hooker, whose adaptation of scholastic natural law theory laid the foundation for Anglican moral theology.”

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