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October 7, 2017 - July 29, 2018
So why does meaning matter? Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. Deep down within all of us is a longing to work out what life is all about and what we’re meant to be doing. Whether it’s the university student wondering what to major in or the Christian seeking God’s will or the armchair philosopher contemplating his or her purpose in the world, most of us want a reliable foundation for our lives and are asking questions that relate to it.
Realising that there is meaning and purpose in life keeps us going in times of perplexity and difficulty. This point was underscored by Viktor Frankl, whose experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War showed the importance of discerning meaning in traumatic situations.[2] Frankl realised that someone’s chance of survival depended on a will to live, which in turn depended on being able to find meaning and purpose in hopeless situations. Those who coped best with apparently hopeless situations were those with “frameworks of meaning.” These allowed them to make sense of
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Lewis’s continuing commitment to atheism in the 1920s was grounded in his belief that it was right, a “wholesome severity,”[9] even though he admitted that it offered a “grim and meaningless” view of life. He took the view that atheism’s intellectual rectitude trumped its emotional and existential inadequacy. Lewis did not regard atheism as liberating or exciting; he seems simply to have accepted it, without enthusiasm, as the thinking person’s only intellectual option—a default position, without any particular virtues or graces. Yet during the 1920s, Lewis reconsidered his attitude towards
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There are clear signs that Lewis began to become disenchanted with atheism in the early 1920s. For a start, it was imaginatively uninteresting. Lewis began to realize that atheism did not—and could not—satisfy the deepest longings of his heart or his intuition that there was more to life than what was seen on the surface.
“Every true artist,” he argued, feels “that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.”[12]
To challenge the status quo demands fellowship and commitment.
A God that is reduced to what reason can cope with is not a God that can be worshipped.
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.”[73]
Christianity gives us a “big picture” that we couldn’t figure out for ourselves. But once we are given it, we discover just how much sense it makes. When Lewis tells us that faith is both “beyond reason” and “reasonable,” he means that we need to be told and shown the way things really are. Yet once we have been given this way of seeing things, we discover just how much sense it makes.
what we believe (or what we are taught to believe) has a massive impact on our values and actions.
The reading of literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. . . . In reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.[94]
Reading literature, Lewis suggests, enables us “to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own.”[95]
For Lewis, Christianity is at its best when it is rooted in the past and engaged with the present. In explaining what he meant by “Deep Church,” Lewis declared that it designated “the Christian religion as understood ubique et ab omnibus”—a shortened form of a Latin tagline, meaning “the faith believed everywhere and by everyone”—in other words, a basic consensual orthodoxy. Lewis put it like this in 1944: we need a “standard of plain, central Christianity (‘mere Christianity’ as Baxter called it).”[100] This is not some “insipid” minimalist conception of Christianity, reduced to its lowest
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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. —C. S. LEWIS, A Grief Observed
In the face of all this pointlessness, Lewis explains to his readers that he initially concluded, “Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.”[108] Yet doubts began to arise in his mind. Is it really that straightforward? “If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?” Pain is only a “problem” from a Christian perspective. If the universe is meaningless, no explanation need be offered. Pain is meaningless, like
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Yet Lewis points out that we need to look more closely at the meaning of these words—such as “good.” In the everyday sense of the words, there is a problem. But what if they have special meanings when used about God? For example, what if we confuse “goodness” with “kindness”? We would then approach the problem of pain from a false perspective.
not a testing of God, but a testing of Lewis. “God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t.”[121]
Suffering does not call into question the “big picture” of the Christian faith. It reminds us that we do not see the whole picture, and are thus unable to fit all of its pieces neatly into place.
Donne’s point was very simple: “Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.” No man is an island, entire of itself; . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.[128]
Yet it was obvious from the photographs that they were important members of Lewis’s circle of family and friends. Once they mattered; now they were forgotten, reduced to anonymous traces on photographic paper. Their memory and identity had simply faded out of history, like the ink on a piece of writing paper being washed away by a spilled glass of water. Memory is fragile. We are so easily forgotten. Lewis is one of the few who have left footprints on history—footprints by which he will be remembered.
