CS Lewis on translating expertise

From Lewis’s 1945 address “Christian Apologetics,” collected in God in the Dock:

“I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning. ”

This passage has haunted me for years.

Lewis was addressing a conference of Anglican priests and youth leaders on the challenges facing them in presenting and defending Christianity. This passage follows immediately after a list of terms which mean one thing to theologians and something almost totally different to even educated laymen. The jargon has been barbarized, and so miscommunication is a grave danger.

I’ve long had an allergy to the kind of arcane scholarly jargon—academese—that characterizes a lot of humanities scholarship nowadays. Such writing and specialist vocabulary has its uses as does all technical language, but more often than not it obscures meaning and functions as a code for initiates, the privileged few who have been admitted to the higher mysteries of the “studies” disciplines. This doesn’t educate students or ordinary people, which is its gravest failing. But an additional, hidden danger is that, in the enclosed hothouse of academic journals and conferences and ever finer splitting of hairs, communicating so often and so exclusively in jargony “educated” language will obscure not only your subject but the failures of your own mind. Compare Orwell.

“[Y]ou must translate every bit of your theology into the vernacular,” Lewis writes. “This is very troublesome and it means you can say very little in half an hour, but it is essential. It is also of the greatest service to your own thought.” I find I have learned as much by teaching, by striving to make my subject understood to my students, distilling complicated historical argument into understandable classroom language, as I ever learned through my own study. On my own, in my yet smaller bubble of interest and study, I might miss something, misunderstand something. Communicating it to them has caught me out more than once, to my benefit.

You can read the entirety of Lewis’s essay here. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics is an excellent, wide-ranging collection of Lewis’s writings and well worth owning. You can find it on Amazon here.