The Work
Miracles: A Preliminary Study was first published by Geoffrey Bles in 1947 and in a revised edition by Fontana/Collins in 1960. The revision addressed substantial objections raised in a famous 1948 debate with the philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe at the Oxford Socratic Club, at which she argued that Lewis's central argument (that naturalism undermines reason) was fallacious as stated. Lewis's 1960 revision of Chapter 3 substantially strengthened the argument. The book is approximately 180 pages, organized in seventeen chapters that move from a philosophical argument against naturalism to a positive account of the Incarnation and Resurrection as the 'Grand Miracle' from which all other miracles derive their meaning.
The book stands between Lewis's popular works of theological argument (Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain) and his more specialized philosophical work. It is the most philosophically technical of his popular works, engaging with issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion with considerable precision. Its argument is often misunderstood as merely defending the possibility of miracles; Lewis's actual concern is to show that the Incarnation and Resurrection are not peripheral oddities but the central events that give the entire universe its shape and meaning.
Biblical Engagement
John 1:14 - 'And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth' - is the theological center of Lewis's concept of the 'Grand Miracle.' The Incarnation is not one miracle among many; it is the entry of the supernatural (in the full sense - what is beyond nature) into nature itself. Every other miracle in the New Testament is either a preparation for this entry (Old Testament miracles) or a consequence of it (New Testament miracles). The Grand Miracle reshapes the entire universe from within.
1 Corinthians 15:14 - 'And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain' - is Paul's uncompromising statement of the centrality of the Resurrection. Lewis engages with Paul's logic directly: Christianity is not a philosophy, a moral code, or a spiritual experience - it is a set of claims about what happened in history. If the Resurrection did not occur, Christianity is false, not merely incomplete. Lewis is therefore engaged in the philosophical and historical question of whether the Resurrection is credible, not merely the theological question of its significance if true.
Hebrews 11:3 - 'Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear' - grounds Lewis's concept of the supernatural as the originating ground of the natural. Nature did not produce itself; it was made by what is 'behind' and 'beyond' nature. The existence of the supernatural is, for Lewis, required by the very existence of nature: a self-producing, self-explaining nature is incoherent.
Romans 1:20 - 'For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse' - supports Lewis's argument that nature itself, understood properly, points to the supernatural. The problem with naturalism is not that it attends to nature carefully but that it refuses to follow nature's pointer beyond itself to the supernatural ground of its existence.
Author and Context
C.S. Lewis was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1954. His scholarly expertise in medieval thought - which treated the distinction between natural and supernatural as uncontroversial - gave him a different perspective on the modern philosophical problem of miracles than those formed entirely within post-Enlightenment scientific naturalism. The medieval universe was a hierarchically ordered structure in which every level of being pointed beyond itself toward higher levels; miracles were not violations of nature but interventions from a higher level of reality.
Lewis completed his conversion to Christianity in 1931, after extensive philosophical conversations with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. The conversion was intellectually rigorous: he had been an atheist and then a theist before becoming a Christian, and his intellectual conscience required him to work through the philosophical objections to Christian miracle claims before he could embrace them. Miracles was the result of that working-through.
The historical context was the Enlightenment critique of miracles represented by Hume (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section 10, 1748) and its twentieth-century successors. Hume's argument - that no testimony for a miracle can be sufficient, since the uniform experience of nature against the miracle always outweighs any testimony for it - had shaped the educated English-speaking world's assumption that miracles were intellectually disreputable. Lewis's book was a direct engagement with this assumption.
The Central Philosophical Argument
The book's key argument (Chapters 3-5, revised in 1960) is that naturalism is self-defeating. If naturalism is true - if everything, including the human mind, is the product of non-rational natural processes - then there is no reason to trust the deliverances of the human mind, including the reasoning that leads to the conclusion that naturalism is true. Reason itself requires a ground that transcends the causal-material nexus of nature.
The argument has been developed by subsequent philosophers (particularly Alvin Plantinga's 'Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism') and challenged by others. G.E.M. Anscombe's 1948 challenge - that Lewis was confusing 'irrational' (meaning non-rational, i.e., lacking reason) with 'irrational' (meaning illogical, i.e., reaching conclusions that don't follow from premises) - led to the 1960 revision, which most commentators regard as successful.
The Grand Miracle
Chapters 14-17 address the Incarnation and Resurrection as the 'Grand Miracle' - the central event that gives all other miracles their meaning. The Incarnation is not a violation of nature but a fulfillment of it: the supernatural, which is the ground of nature, enters nature and takes it up into itself. The Resurrection is not a mere revival but a transformation: Christ rises in a transformed body that is the first instance of the new creation, the body that will be the pattern for all resurrection bodies.
Lewis's account of the Resurrection is explicitly anti-docetic and anti-spiritual: the risen Christ eats fish, allows Thomas to touch him, makes breakfast on the shore of Galilee. The Resurrection is not the escape of a soul from a body but the transformation of a body into a new mode of existence - a mode that transcends the limitations of the present natural order without abolishing materiality.
The 1948 Anscombe Debate
The debate with Elizabeth Anscombe at the Oxford Socratic Club on February 2, 1948, has been described by some commentators as a turning point in Lewis's career, after which he gave up philosophical argument and turned primarily to fiction (The Chronicles of Narnia began in 1948). This account is probably exaggerated: Lewis himself said the encounter was a genuine philosophical exchange and that Anscombe's points deserved to be addressed, which he did in the 1960 revision. But the debate does illustrate that Lewis's philosophical arguments were not immune to rigorous philosophical criticism.
Reception
The book was less widely read than Mere Christianity but more philosophically serious. Academic philosophers of religion engaged with it seriously. Victor Reppert's C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea (2003) developed Lewis's anti-naturalism argument into a full-length philosophical treatment.
Legacy
Miracles established Lewis as a serious (if accessible) philosopher of religion rather than merely a popular apologist. Its argument against naturalism has influenced the development of philosophical arguments for the existence of God from the existence of reason (Plantinga, Thomas Nagel in Mind and Cosmos, 2012). Its account of the Grand Miracle provides the most accessible theological account of the Incarnation and Resurrection as the central events of cosmic history.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study John 1:1-18 (the Logos and the Incarnation), 1 Corinthians 15 (the resurrection and its cosmic significance), Colossians 1:15-20 (Christ as the agent and goal of creation), John 20:19-29 (the risen Christ's transformed body), and Hebrews 1:1-4 (the Son as the agent of creation and the radiance of God's glory).
Further Reading
- Victor Reppert, C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (2003) - the most thorough philosophical development of Lewis's anti-naturalism argument. - G.E.M. Anscombe, 'A Reply to Mr C.S. Lewis's Argument that Naturalism is Self-Refuting,' Socratic Digest 4 (1948) - the primary philosophical challenge to Lewis's argument. - N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) - the full scholarly treatment of the Resurrection that Lewis addresses in popular form.