C.S. Lewis: Vampire Hunter

I have always loved a good novel, and I have particular affection for English classics of the 19th century. In addition to the beauty of their prose, the best authors of this period tended to possess greater moral clarity than their modern counterparts and were thus able to produce literature filled with uncommon virtue and wisdom. 

A good story is hard to beat (and the story we are about to discuss is certainly that), but I find it especially thrilling when—through revisiting a novel at an older age or hearing insight from a more perceptive reader—I discover a theme or application that has previously escaped me. Such was the case during my recent re-reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Aside from the obvious theme of Good versus Evil, and the array of weapons marshaled by the protagonists whose connection to Catholic sacraments is hardly subtle, I noticed that Stoker’s vampire-hunting professor, Dr. Van Helsing, often sounds quite like the great Christian philosopher—though not yet born at the time of Dracula’s publication—C.S. Lewis.

Van Helsing, though a man of science, has not been taken in by the philosophical error of scientism: “Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.”¹ Lewis, likewise, devoted much effort to refuting the materialistic conclusions of 19th and 20th century science—conclusions which it had no grounds to make. In an article titled “Religion and Science” Lewis records a hypothetical conversation with a scientific materialist:

‘Miracles,’ said my friend. ‘Oh, come. Science has knocked the bottom out of all that. We know that Nature is governed by fixed laws…modern science has shown there’s no such thing [as miracles].’

‘Really,’ said I. ‘Which of the sciences?’

‘Oh, well that’s a matter of detail,’ said my friend. ‘I can’t give you chapter and verse from memory.’

‘But, don’t you see,’ said I, ‘that science never could show anything of the sort?’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Because science studies Nature. And the question is whether anything besides Nature exists—anything “outside.” How could you find that by studying simply Nature?’²

Furthermore, Van Helsing’s diagnosis of deeper beliefs that continue to persist even in the modern age of rationality will sound familiar to those who have read Lewis’s Abolition of Man and, specifically, his commentary on the Tao (“which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes”³). 

Van Helsing: “Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young…”⁴

Lewis: “There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess… The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.”⁵

Lewis certainly would have considered Van Helsing to be a “man with a chest,”⁶ as he must be to combat the supernatural evil that is Count Dracula. A scientific materialist would be incapable of hunting out this evil, or even of recognizing it if he saw it. According to Lewis, “Whatever experiences we may have, we shall not regard them as miraculous if we already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural.”⁷

Of course, the obvious response to all of this is that Van Helsing is a fictional character, and vampires aren’t real, so isn’t it a bit silly to use this story as a warning against materialism? I think not. Van Helsing and Vampires might not be real, but Good and Evil certainly are and—being fundamentally metaphysical—are outside the reach of natural science. These metaphysical matters are what most concerned Lewis, and for that reason I submit—with only a hint of facetiousness—that we can call him a real-life vampire hunter. After all, few writers have been such effective combatants against the vampires of materialism, atheism, and subjectivism—vampires that feed on man’s soul, if not his blood.

Footnotes:

1. Bram Stoker, Dracula, Chapter 14
2. C.S. Lewis, “Religion and Science,” The Coventry Evening Telegraph, January 3, 1945
3. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Chapter 2, “The Way”
4. Stoker (see footnote 1)
5. Lewis (see footnote 3)
6. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Chapter 1, “Men Without Chests”
7. C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, Part 1, Chapter 2, “Miracles”