God in the Dock

by C.S. Lewis

PREFACE

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Regardless of one’s education, it is impossible to decide whether Christianity is true or false if you do not know what it is about.

If things can improve, this means that there must be some absolute standard of good above and outside the cosmic process to which that process can approximate.

Mellontolatry, or the worship of the future, is a fuddled religion.

The metaphysical difficulty is this. The two Powers, the good and the evil, do not explain each other.

A sound theory of value demands something different. It demands that good should be original and evil a mere perversion; that good should be the tree and evil the ivy; that good should be able to see all round evil (as when sane men understand lunacy) while evil cannot retaliate in kind; that good should be able to exist on its own while evil requires the good on which it is parasitic in order to continue its parasitic existence.

In reality, cruelty does not come from desiring evil as such, but from perverted sexuality, inordinate resentment, or lawless ambition and avarice. That is precisely why it can be judged and condemned from the standpoint of innocent sexuality, righteous anger, and ordinate acquisitiveness.

The difference between the Christian and the Dualist is that the Christian thinks one stage further and sees that if Michael is really in the right and Satan really in the wrong this must mean that they stand in two different relations to somebody or something far further back, to the ultimate ground of reality itself.

Whatever experiences we may have, we shall not regard them as miraculous if we already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural.

Experience by itself proves nothing. If a man doubts whether he is dreaming or waking, no experiment can solve his doubt, since every experiment may itself be part of the dream. Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it.

Complete ignorance of the laws of Nature would preclude the perception of the miraculous just as rigidly as complete disbelief in the supernatural precludes it, perhaps even more so.

This time He was creating not simply a man, but the man who was to be Himself: the only true Man.

Thus the filth that our poor, muddled, sincere, resentful enemies fling at the Holy One, either does not stick, or, sticking, turns into glory.

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.

I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music.

And of course the profession of Christianity is not confined to the clergy. It is professed by millions of women and laymen who earn thereby contempt, unpopularity, suspicion, and the hostility of their own families. How does this come to happen?

‘Would not conversation be much more rational than dancing?’ said Jane Austen’s Miss Bingley. ‘Much more rational,’ replied Mr Bingley, ‘but much less like a ball.’

we must try to teach something about the difference between thinking and imagining.

(super monstratas vias)

one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes5

‘Textual Criticism’

To things they do, but do not regard as sins. They are usually not drunkards. They are mostly fornicators, but then they do not feel fornication to be wrong.

a priori

anthropomorphists.

A passage from some theological work for translation into the vernacular ought to be a compulsory paper in every Ordination examination.

Non omnia possumus omnes.

aut Deus aut malus homo17

Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.)

One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

salva reverentia20

One last word. I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.

oremus pro invicem.

if a little boy never asked for cake because he was so high-minded and spiritual that he didn’t want any cake. But there’s nothing specially pretty about a little boy who doesn’t

ask because he has learned that it is no use asking.

Pascal says that God ‘instituted prayer in order to allow His creatures the dignity of causality’.

The two methods by which we are allowed to produce events may be called work and prayer.

laborare est orare (work is prayer)

Honest rejection of Christ, however mistaken, will be forgiven and healed—‘Whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him.’1 But to evade the Son of Man, to look the other way, to pretend you haven’t noticed, to become suddenly absorbed in something on the other side of the street, to leave the receiver off the telephone because it might be He who was ringing up,

to leave unopened certain letters in a strange handwriting because they might be from Him—this is a different matter. You may not be certain yet whether you ought to be a Christian; but you do know you ought to be a Man, not an ostrich, hiding its head in the sand.

the Twenties that now dominates the form room class.

As the teachers are, so they will teach.

Je ne connais rien de plus contraire à l’esprit social.

‘miserable offenders’.

Attempts at such a minimal religion are not new—from Akhenaten16 and Julian the Apostate17 down to Lord Herbert of Cherbury18 and the late H. G. Wells.

The greatest of such attempts was that simplification of Jewish and Christian traditions which we call Islam.

Is its God to be conceived pantheistically, or after the Jewish, Platonic, Christian fashion?

disdain for the whole natural order (contemptus mundi)

meet the prima facie case against theism based on human pain.

Conceding (positionis causa)