God in the Dock

by C.S. Lewis

it is quite astonishing how rarely outside Christianity we find—I am not sure that we ever find—a real doctrine of Creation.

we follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus—not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in His eyes than in ours.

Though He was to revive it a moment later, He wept at the shame;

Of all men, we hope most of death; yet nothing will reconcile us to—well, its unnaturalness.

It is to be hoped that we do not often mention these difficulties (especially the domestic ones) to outsiders.

It is a great step forward to realise that this is so; to face the fact that even if all external things went right, real happiness would still depend on the character of the people you have to live with—and that you can’t alter their characters.

He has given them intelligence to show them how it can be used, and conscience to show them how it ought to be used.

That is the next great step in wisdom—to realise that you also are just that sort of person. You also have a fatal flaw in your character.

It is important to realise that there is some really fatal flaw in you: something which gives the others just that same feeling of despair which their flaws give you.

That is one way in which God’s view must differ from mine. He sees all the characters: I see all except my own. But the second difference is this. He loves the people in spite of their faults. He goes on loving.

The more we can imitate God in both these respects, the more progress we shall make. We must love ‘X’ more; and we must learn to see ourselves as a person of exactly the same kind.

Abstain from all thinking about other people’s faults, unless your duties as a teacher or parent make it necessary to think about them. Whenever the thoughts come unnecessarily into one’s mind, why not simply shove them away? And think of one’s own faults instead?

What do you think of this advice?

nothing, not even God with all His power, can make ‘X’ really happy as long as ‘X’ remains envious, self-centred, and spiteful. Be sure there is something inside you which, unless it is altered, will put it out of God’s power to prevent your being eternally miserable.

While that something remains there can be no Heaven for you, just as there can be no sweet smells for a man with a cold in the nose, and no music for a man who is deaf. It’s not a question of God ‘sending’ us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.

WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF JESUS CHRIST? THIS IS A question which has, in a sense, a frantically comic side. For the real question is not what are we to make of Christ, but what is He to make of us? The picture of a fly sitting deciding what it is going to make of an elephant has comic elements about it. But perhaps the questioner meant what are we to make of Him in the sense of ‘How are we to solve the historical problem set us by the recorded sayings and acts of this Man?’

Sometimes the statements put forward the assumption that He, the Speaker, is completely without sin or fault. This is always the attitude. ‘You, to whom I am talking, are all sinners,’ and He never remotely suggests that this same reproach can be brought against Him.

He was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three effects—Hatred—Terror—Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.

none of His immediate followers or even of the New Testament writers embraced the doctrine at all easily.

as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don’t work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so.

In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author put it in simply because he had seen it.

I don’t mean that they disbelieved in ghost-survival. On the contrary, they believed in it so firmly that, on more than one occasion, Christ had had to assure them that He was not a ghost.

The Resurrection narratives are not a picture of survival after death; they record how a totally new mode of being has arisen in the Universe. Something new had appeared in the Universe: as new as the first coming of organic life.

‘What are we to make of Christ?’ There is no question of what we can make of Him, it is entirely a question of what He intends to make of us. You must accept or reject the story.

And yet, granting pain to be an evil, perhaps the greatest of evils, I have come to accept the Christian view of pain as not incompatible with the Christian concept of the Creator and of the world that He has made.

God gave man free will that he might increase in virtue by his own efforts and become, as a free moral being, a worthy object of God’s love.

Freedom entails freedom to go wrong: man did, in fact, go wrong, misusing God’s gift and doing evil. Pain is a by-product of evil; and so pain came into the world as a result of man’s misuse of God’s gift of free will.

the experience of succession, the succession of sensations, demands a self or soul which is other than the sensations which it experiences.

Consciousness, therefore, implies a continuing ego which recognizes the succession of sensations; sentience is their mere succession.

Mr Lewis recognizes this and concedes that the higher animals—apes, elephants, dogs, cats, and so on—have a self which connects experiences; have, in fact, what he calls a soul.4 But this assumption presents us with a new set of difficulties. (a) If animals have souls, what is to be done about their immortality?

not merely as a controversialist who demands, but as an inquirer who really desires, an answer.

unsatisfactory answers do not become satisfactory by being tentative.

The data which God has given us enable us in some degree to understand human pain. We lack such data about beasts. We know neither what they are nor why they are. All that we can say for certain is that if God is good (and I think we have grounds for saying that He is) then the appearance of divine cruelty in the animal world must be a false appearance. What the reality behind the false appearance may be we can only guess.

a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin.

Faith in sense A is not a religious state.

acceptance of tradition implies an argument which sometimes becomes explicit in the form ‘I reckon all those wise men wouldn’t have believed in it if it weren’t true.’

excess of certitude in a settled assent is not at all uncommon.

As soon as we have Faith-A in the existence of God, we are instructed to ask from God Himself the gift of Faith-B.

philosophical proofs never, by themselves, lead to religion. Something at least quasi-religious uses them before, and the ‘proofs’ remove an inhibition which was preventing their development into religion proper.

nothing can be described except in terms of its effects in consciousness.

we have the word Awe—an emotion very like fear, with the important difference that it need imply no estimate of danger. When we fear a tiger, we fear that it may kill us: when we fear a ghost—well, we just fear the ghost, not this or that mischief which it may do us.

I would find the seed of religious experience in our experience of the Numinous.

In ancient times I think experience of the Numinous developed into the Holy only in so far as the Numinous (not in itself at all necessarily moral) came to be connected with the morally good.

Thus we must admit that Faith, as we know it, does not flow from philosophical argument alone; nor from experience of the Numinous alone; nor from moral experience alone; nor from history alone; but from historical events which at once fulfil and transcend the moral category, which link themselves with the most numinous elements in Paganism, and which (as it seems to us) demand as their pre-supposition the existence of a Being who is more, but not less, than the God whom many reputable philosophers think they can establish.

The operation of Faith is to retain, so far as the will and intellect are concerned, what is irresistible and obvious during the moments of special grace.

In relation to the philosophical premises a Christian’s faith is of course excessive: in relation to what is sometimes shown him, it is perhaps just as often defective.

‘The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.’

We must, after all, speak the language of men. (I have got much light on this problem from Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism and Belief.)

believing both, I have stressed the transcendence of God more than His immanence. I thought, and think, that the present situation demands this.

Suppose the image is vulgar. If it gets across to the unbeliever what the unbeliever desperately needs to know, the vulgarity must be endured.

When I began, Christianity came before the great mass of my unbelieving fellow-countrymen either in the highly emotional form offered by revivalists or in the unintelligible language of highly cultured clergymen. Most men were reached by neither. My task was therefore simply that of a translator—one turning Christian doctrine, or what he believed to be such, into the vernacular, into language that unscholarly people would attend to and could understand.