Spiritual life: statues becoming real

When we come to man, the highest of the animals, we get the completest resemblance to God which we know of. (There may be creatures in other worlds who are more like God than man is, but we do not know about them.) Man not only lives, but loves and reasons: biological life reaches its highest known level in him.
     But what man, in his natural condition, has not got, is Spiritual life—the higher and different sort of life that exists in God. We use the same word life for both: but if you thought that both must therefore be the same sort of thing, that would be like thinking that the ‘greatness’ of space and the ‘greatness’ of God were the same sort of greatness. In reality, the difference between Biological life and Spiritual life is so important that I am going to give them two distinct names. The Biological sort which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in Nature) is always tending to rundown and decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc., is Bios. The Spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from haying Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.
    And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; Harper Collins: 2001) 158-159.

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Why doesn’t good advice stick?

For when you get down to it, is not the popular idea of Christianity simply this: that Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher and that if only we took His advice we might be able to establish a better social order and avoid another war? Now, mind you, that is quite true. But it tells you much less than the whole truth about Christianity and it has no practical importance at all.
    It is quite true that if we took Christ’s advice we should soon be living in a happier world. You need not even go as far as Christ. If we did all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told us, we should get on a great deal better than we do. And so what? We never have followed the advice of the great teachers. Why are we likely to begin now? Why are we more likely to follow Christ than any of the others? Because He is the best moral teacher? But that makes it even less likely that we shall follow Him. If we cannot take the elementary lessons, is it likely we are going to take the most advanced one? If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.
    But as soon as you look at any real Christian writings, you find that they are talking about something quite different from this popular religion. They say that Christ is the Son of God (whatever that means). They say that those who give Him their confidence can also become Sons of God (whatever that means). They say that His death saved us from our sins (whatever that means).
    There is no good complaining that these statements are difficult. Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You may think the claim false, but if it were true, what it tells us would be bound to be difficult—at least as difficult as modern Physics, and for the same reason.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; Harper Collins: 2001) 155-156.

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The faith that crosses the Atlantic to Newfoundland

Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you in this last book. They all say ‘the ordinary reader does not want Theology; give him plain practical religion’. I have rejected their advice….
    In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, ‘I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!’ 
   Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach,  and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to [Canada].
    Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God—experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on-—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work: like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.     In other words, Theology is practical: especially now…. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England is retrogression—like believing the earth is flat.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; Harper Collins: 2001) 153-155.

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Star Wars: May the Force be revealed for what it is

In a chapter of Mere Christianity where Lewis has contrasted the two basic worldviews of Materialism (what we would call Naturalism or Atheism) and the Religious view (Theism). As a note at the end of this chapter, Lewis discusses a third alternative (Pantheism) in a way that starts to sound a lot like George Lucas and the Force from Star Wars.(At least that’s the way I read it. Opinion: Ken Symes)In order to keep this section short enough when it was given on the air, I mentioned only the Materialist view and the Religious view. But to be complete I ought to mention the In-between view called Life-Force philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution. The wittiest expositions of it come in the works of Bernard Shaw, but the most profound ones in those of Bergson. People who hold this view say that the small variations by which life on this planet ‘evolved’ from the lowest forms to Man were not due to chance but to the ‘striving’ or ‘purposiveness’ of a Life-Force. When people say this we must ask them whether by Life-Force they mean something with a mind or not. If they do, then ‘a mind bringing life into existence and leading it to perfection’ is really a God, and their view is thus identical with the Religious. If they do not, then what is the sense in saying that something without a mind ‘strives’ or has ‘purposes’?  This seems to me fatal to their view. One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952, this edition: 2001) 26-27.

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Napoleon muttering about whose fault it was

Ever wonder if people in hell will meet celebrities and other famous people? The topic is briefly explored by Lewis in The Great Divorce.

‘The nearest of those old ones is Napoleon. We know that because two chaps made the journey to see him. They’d started long before I came, of course, but I was there when they came back.’ ….
     ‘But they got there?’
    ‘That’s right. He’d built himself a huge house all in the Empire style—rows of windows flaming with light….’
    ‘Did they see Napoleon?’
    ‘That’s right. They went up and looked through one of the windows. Napoleon was there all right.’
    ‘What was he doing?’
    ‘Walking up and down—up and down all the time— left-right, left-right—never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. “It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English.” Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired. But he didn’t seem able to stop it.’

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (1946, Harper Collins edition 2001) 11-12.

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On the reading of old Christian books

This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St Luke or St Paul or St Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Richard Hooker or Joseph Butler, but Nicolas Berdyaev or Jacques Maritain or Reinhold Niebuhr or Dorothy Sayers or even myself.
     Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light… The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (‘mere Christianity’ as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the, old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

C.S. Lewis, “On the reading of old books,” God in the Dock (Eerdmans: 1970) 200.

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On the reading of old books

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about ‘isms’ and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

C.S. Lewis, “On the reading of old books,” God in the Dock (Eerdmans: 1970) 200.

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Why pray?… Why not?

Pascal says that God 'instituted prayer in order to allow His creatures the dignity of causality'. It would perhaps be truer to say that He invented both prayer and physical action for that purpose.  He gave us small creatures the dignity of being able to contribute to the course of events in two different ways. He made the matter of the universe such that we can (in those limits) do things to it; that is why we can wash our own hands and feed or murder our fellow creatures. Similarly, He made His own plan or plot of history such that it admits a certain amount of free play and can be modified in response to our prayers. If it is foolish and impudent to ask for victory in a war (on the ground that God might be expected to know best), it would be equally foolish and impudent to put on a mackintosh - does not God know best whether you ought to be wet or dry?

C.S. Lewis, “Work and Prayer,” God in the Dock (Eerdmans: 1970) 106. 

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Why pray?… What good can it do?

We know that we can act and that our actions produce results. Everyone who believes in God must therefore admit (quite apart from the question of prayer) that God has not chosen to write the whole of history with His own hand. Most of the events that go on in the universe are indeed out of our control, but not all. It is like a play in which the scene and the general outline of the story is fixed by the author, but certain minor details are left for the actors to improvise.
It may be a mystery why He should have allowed us to cause real events at all; but it is no odder that He should allow us to cause them by praying than by any other method.

C.S. Lewis, “Work and Prayer,” God in the Dock (Eerdmans: 1970) 105-106.

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Why pray?… Why do anything?

The case against prayer (I mean the 'low' or old-fashioned kind) is this. The thing you ask for is either good—for you and for the world in general—or else it is not. If it is, then a good and wise God will do it anyway. If it is not, then He won't. In neither case can your prayer make any difference. But if this argument is sound, surely it is an argument not only against praying, but against doing anything whatever?
    In every action, just as in every prayer, you are trying to bring about a certain result; and this result must be good or bad. Why, then, do we not argue as the opponents of prayer argue, and say that if the intended result is good God will bring it to pass without your interference, and that if it is bad He will prevent it happening whatever you do? Why wash your hands? If God intends them to be clean, they'll come clean without your washing them. If He doesn't, they'll remain dirty (as Lady Macbeth found) however much soap you use. Why ask for the salt? Why put on your boots? Why do anything?

C.S. Lewis, “Work and Prayer,” God in the Dock (Eerdmans: 1970) 105.

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Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? The same with people. For years I would have said that I had perfect confidence in B.R. Then came the moment when I had to decide whether I would or would not trust him with a really important secret. That threw quite a new light on what I called my ‘confidence’ in him. I discovered that there was no such thing. Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 20-21.

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God in outer space

The Russians, I am told, report that they have not found God in outer space. On the other hand, a good many people in many different times and countries claim to have found God, or been found by God, here on earth. The conclusion some want us to draw from these data is that God does not exist. As a corollary, those who think they have met Him on earth were suffering from a delusion. But other conclusions might be drawn.
    (1) We have not yet gone far enough in space. There had been ships on the Atlantic for a good time before America was discovered.
    (2) God does exist but is locally confined to this planet.
    (3) The Russians did find God in space without knowing it because they lacked the requisite apparatus for detecting Him.
    (4) God does exist but is not an object either located in a particular part of space nor diffused, as we once thought “ether” was, throughout space.
    The first two conclusions do not interest me. The sort of religion for which they could be a defense would be a religion for savages: the belief in a local deity who can be contained in a particular temple, island, or grove. That, in fact, seems to be the sort of religion about which the Russians—or some Russians, and a good many people in the West—are being irreligious. It is not in the least disquieting that no astronauts have discovered a god of that sort. The really disquieting thing would be if they had.
    The third and fourth conclusions are the ones for my money….
     Space travel really has nothing to do with the matter. To some, God is discoverable everywhere; to others, nowhere. Those who do not find Him on earth are unlikely to find Him in space. (Hang it all, we’re in space already; every year we go a huge circular tour in space.) But send a saint up in a spaceship and he’ll find God in space as he found God on earth. Much depends on the seeing eye.

C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections 167, 171

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Cool your own porridge!

But I’ve no business to judge them. All guesswork; I’d better keep my breath to cool my own porridge. For me at any rate the programme is plain.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 48.

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Talking about the Christian faith in public

C.S. Lewis was President of the Oxford Socratic Club from its first meeting in 1942 until he went to Cambridge in 1954. At the “Socratic,” Christians, atheists and others from Oxford University discussed the pros and cons of Christianity. Instead of theoretical apologetics, it was real world, real time engagement, discussion and debate. Here is one interesting paragraph Lewis wrote in the Preface to the first Socratic Digest vol. 1 (1942-1943).

Others may have quite a different objection to our proceedings [at the Oxford Socratic Club]. They may protest that intellectual discussion can neither build Christianity nor destroy it. They may feel that religion is too sacred to be thus bandied to and fro in public debate, too sacred to be talked of — almost, perhaps, too sacred for anything to be done with it at all. Clearly, the Christian members of the Socratic think differently. They know that intellectual assent is not faith, but they do not believe that religion is only ‘what a man does with his solitude’. Or, if it is, then they care nothing for ‘religion’ and all for Christianity. Christianity is not merely what a man does with his solitude. It is not even what God does with His solitude. It tells of God descending into the coarse publicity of history and there enacting what can and must be talked about.

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Why the next generation is indifferent about Christianity

If we had noticed that the young men of the present day found it harder and harder to get the right answers to sums, we should consider that this had been adequately explained the moment we discovered that schools had for some years ceased to teach arithmetic. After that discovery we should turn a deaf ear to people who offered explanations of a vaguer and larger kind — people who said that the influence of Einstein had sapped the ancestral belief in fixed numerical relations, or that gangster films had undermined the desire to get right answers, or that the evolution of consciousness was now entering on its post-arithmetical phase. Where a clear and simple explanation completely covers the facts no other explanation is in court.  If the younger generation have never been told what the Christians say and never heard any arguments in defence of it, then their agnosticism or indifference is fully explained. There is no need to look any further: no need to talk about the general intellectual climate of the age. the influence of mechanistic civilization on the character of urban life. And having discovered that the cause of their ignorance is lack of instruction, we have also discovered the remedy. There is nothing in the nature of the younger generation which incapacitates them for receiving Christianity. If any one is prepared to tell them, they are apparently ready to hear.

C.S. Lewis, “On the Transmission of Christianity,” God in the Dock 115, originally a Preface to B.G. Sandhurt, How Heathen is Britain? (London, 1946).

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The Gospels were not written to make Christians

This excerpt from The Screwtape Letters may be written in the voice of the demon Screwtape, but it sure sounds like C.S. Lewis.

Indeed materials for a full biography [of Jesus] have been withheld from men. The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin which they already had... The ‘Gospels’ come later and were written not to make Christians but to edify Christians already made.

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 126.

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Spiritual renewal won’t be found by digging up the past

Many religious people lament that the first fervors of their conversion have died away. They think—sometimes rightly, but not, I believe, always—that their sins account for this. They may even try by pitiful efforts of will to revive what now seem to have been the golden days. But were those fervors—the operative word is those—ever intended to last?
    It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore. And how should the Infinite repeat Himself? All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them once.
     And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments in the past, which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are content to accept them for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing. “Unless a seed die….”

C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 26-27.

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Miracle, but only if you know where babies come from

'Miracles," said my friend. 'Oh, come. Science has knocked the bottom out of all that. We know that Nature is governed by fixed laws.’
    ‘Didn’t people always know that?’ said I.
    ‘Good Lord, no,’ said he. ‘For instance, take a story like the Virgin Birth. We know now that such a thing couldn’t happen. We know there must be a male spermatozoon.’
    ‘But look here’, said I, ‘St Joseph —‘
    ‘Who’s he?’ asked my friend.
    ‘He was the husband of the Virgin Mary. If you’ll read the story in the Bible you’ll find that when he saw his fiancée was going to have a baby he decided to cry off the marriage. Why did he do that?’
    ‘Wouldn’t most men?’
    ‘Any man would’, said I, ‘provided he knew the laws of Nature — in other words, provided he knew that a girl doesn’t ordinarily have a baby unless she’s been sleeping with a man. But according to your theory people in the old days didn’t know that Nature was governed by fixed laws. I’m pointing out that the story shows that St Joseph knew that law just as well as you do.’
    ‘But he came to believe in the Virgin Birth afterwards, didn’t he?’
    ‘Quite. But he didn’t do so because he was under any illusion as to where babies came from in the ordinary course of Nature. He believed in the Virgin Birth as something supernatural. He knew Nature works in fixed, regular ways: but he also believed that there existed something beyond Nature which could interfere with her workings — from outside, so to speak.’
    ‘But modern science has shown there’s no such thing.’
‘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 out by studying simply Nature?’

C.S. Lewis, "Religion and Science," God in the Dock (Eerdmans: 1970) 72-73.

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New year, new goals, new dreams

 

 

 

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.  
                                —C.S. Lewis

Grief, prayer and a rather special sort of ‘No answer’

Be sure to read the Jan 2nd post before this one so you'll better understand where it's coming from. 

Am I… just sidling back to God because I know that if there’s any road to [Helen Joy], it runs through Him? But then of course I know perfectly well that He can’t be used as a road. If you’re approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you’re not really approaching Him at all. That’s what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy re-unions ‘on the further shore’; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a by—product of the true End.
    Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet [Helen Joy] again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, ‘No toffee now. But when you’ve grown up and don’t really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose?’
    If I knew that to be eternally divided from [Helen Joy] and eternally forgotten by her would add a greater joy and splendour to her being, of course I’d say ‘Fire ahead’. Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her cancer by never seeing her again, I’d have arranged never to see her again. I’d have had to. Any decent person would. But that’s quite different. That’s not the situation I’m in.
    When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer’. It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’
    Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems— are like that.
    And now that I come to think of it, there’s no practical problem before me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I’d better get on with them.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 57-59.

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Highway to Heaven

Tomorrow, I’m posting a follow-up quotation from Lewis regarding our belief that heaven is all about our reunion with loved ones. We’ve all heard that message, especially at funerals. To set the context for tomorrow’s quotation, I recommend re-reading the post: “Regarding heaven: reality never repeats,” in which I contrasted the views of Billy Graham (and much of the church today) with that of C.S. Lewis (anyone on his side?). I’d really like to hear from people as to whether you support Billy Graham or C.S. Lewis – please post your vote (and comments) after reading “Regarding heaven: reality never repeats.”

Q: Do you believe that we'll be reunited with our loved ones when we get to heaven?

 
Billy Graham’s Answer: Yes, I firmly believe we will be reunited with those who have died in Christ and entered heaven before us.

 

C.S. Lewis’ Answer: Don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore’, pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false.

To read the full question and “answers” provided by Graham and Lewis, please go back to the post “Regarding heaven: reality never repeats” and be sure to leave your vote and comments.

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