A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

by C.S. Lewis

Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, ‘If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is God.’ The Christian replies, ‘Don’t talk damned nonsense.’ For Christianity is a fighting religion.

I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.

If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness.

If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

what is everywhere and always, imageless and ineffable, only to be glimpsed in dream and symbol and the acted poetry of ritual becomes small, solid—no bigger than a man who can lie asleep in a rowing boat on the Lake of Galilee. You may say that this, after all, is a still deeper poetry. I will not contradict you. The humiliation leads to a greater glory. But the humiliation of God and the shrinking or condensation of the myth as it becomes fact are also quite real.

It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.

Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.

He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us;

This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea (I think St. John of the Cross called God a sea) and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal.

...shallow vs deep waters

Swimming lessons are better than a lifeline to the shore.

hmmm

Does it matter to a man dying in a desert by which choice of route he missed the only well?

What matters, what Heaven desires and Hell fears, is precisely that further step, out of our depth, out of our own control.

...wow. Where have I heard this before? Edisto.

the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons.

The union between the Father and the Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person.

this spirit of love is, from all eternity, a love going on between the Father and the Son.

As St. Paul writes, to have died for valuable men would have been not divine but merely heroic; but God died for sinners.

Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?

Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist.

But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.

If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will—that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings—then we may take it it is worth paying.