Catholic Thought discussion
Mere Christianity
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Week 2, Book 2
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1. A pantheistic universe is amoral while a transcendent God universe contains morality.
2. In a pantheistic universe, God is the universe while in a transcendent God universe, the universe is God’s creation.
3. In a pantheistic universe, there is no distinction between good and evil while in a transcendent God universe, there must exist a difference between good and evil.
That is fascinating. I think he is right to limit the notion of God to either ontologically being the universe or ontologically being separated from the universe. Can you have something other than these two options? I can’t conceptualize one.
I have to admit I’m not totally convinced of his derived notions of the pantheistic universe. I’ve never given it any thought but I’m not sure why a pantheistic universe would have to be amoral. Couldn’t you have a degeneration from an originally good pantheistic universe, a corruption of that origin?
Hmm... interesting question. Well for the pantheist if all is God and God is all then everything has godliness in it. Or if we say God is the highest thing then the universe is the highest thing which means everything is the highest thing which is the same as saying nothing is the highest thing. In other words nothing has any special value over anything else.I'd suppose for the pantheist wrong is simply swimming against the current of the universe.
The quote from this section that sticks out for me is "But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love is because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us"Don't you think this sums up the biggest misconception non-Christians have about Christians? Our struggle is not to please God or win His favor but to get out of God's way so he can take us over.
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I'd suppose for the pantheist wrong is simply swimming against the current of the universe."
Yeah, I just don't know enough about pantheism to pin anything down. So is the pantheistic god inside individual people too, and how would they understand an act such as murder? The fact that I can conceptualize alternatives that could show a corruption from the deity may mean that it's possible to have a belief in morality within pantheism. But frankly this is pure speculation on my part.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absence...
It quotes Augustine on the subject from Book 7 of the Confessions: “And it was made clear unto me that those things are good which yet are corrupted, which, neither were they supremely good, nor unless they were good, could be corrupted; because if supremely good, they were incorruptible, and if not good at all, there was nothing in them to be corrupted.”
Augustine seems to be saying that if something is good it can’t be corrupted. The Wikipedia article also cites other Catholic theologians who hold that evil is the absence of good:
Through the influence of Augustine, this doctrine influenced much of Catholic thought on the subject of evil. For instance, Boethius famously proved, in Book III of his Consolation of Philosophy, that "evil is nothing". The theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite also states that all being is good, in Chapter 4 of his work The Divine Names. Further to the East, John of Damascus wrote in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (book 2, chapter 4) that "evil is nothing else than absence of goodness, just as darkness also is absence of light. For goodness is the light of the mind, and, similarly, evil is the darkness of the mind." Thomas Aquinas concluded, in article 1 of question 5 of the First Part of his Summa Theologiae, that "goodness and being are really the same, and differ only in idea"
Is there a distinction between those writers and what Lewis presented in chapter 2? It seems to me that there is.
I guess saying pantheism is like saying monotheism. How one understands the One God leads one down very different paths. So some might say nature is good. A mountain is good or more good than a skyscraper. So acting in a way that's one with nature is good. But then why is a skyscraper not equivalent to an anthill? We are nature too.
The other way to see it is that man is at the top of the natural world. I think this would be in line with ancient Greek thought. So what's good for man is what is good for all men. Golden rule kind of thing.
But I can't see where morality emerges really. In other words a pantheist would say murder is wrong because how could you say otherwise but it doesn't emerge from their pantheism. They just rig up a reason that shows it is consistent.
I'm having a hard time articulating but I hope that's somewhat clear. The thing is nobody says "I'm a pantheist." They're a particular thing that falls under that category.
Regarding goodness and badness, I think the distinction is this: There is a hierarchy of goods. Food is a good. it is right to pursue food. the absence of food or starvation is an evil. That's the philosophical idea. What Lewis is saying is that we go wrong when we pursue food as if it were at the top of the hierarchy. We aim wrongly. Become gluttons. We've spoiled the food so to speak.
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LOL. I've never met one. It's so far afield from our concept of the universe that we can't grasp it or articulate it. I don't think Lewis is an expert on it himself. Let's just say we would need more expert information, and it's not really relevant to this book. I do appreciate the fact that Lewis did articulate these two distinct possibilities. That in itself is a idea to have learned.
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Yes, I understand that Casey. We can also think of gluttony as good and proper eating having lost some of the good. The good diminished and so it became disordered and to how much good diminished leads to the severity. I guess "spoiled goodness" can encapsulate the same concept. The diminished good has spoiled eating. Perhaps it's the same idea.
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A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. 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.
That is spot on!
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We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.
What Lewis is alluding is the theology of atonement, how does Christ’s death save us. He is right to say how it is really vague on how that works. As far as I know, the Catholic Church does not have a single, dogmatic belief on it. The Catholic Church offers several possibilities: Christ as sacrificial offering in the mode of a sin offering, Christus Victor (Christ the conqueror of death and victor over Satan), Christ as paying a ransom (Christ paid a debt for us that we couldn’t pay), and Christ as a model of vicarious love. These concepts are not mutually exclusive. They can all be true at the same time, and a Catholic is free to believe in any one or all three. I tend to believe all four.
What is interesting is that Lewis gives one option, and it’s the ransom theory. Why I find this interesting is that the Lutherans and Calvinists do have a dogmatic theory, and it’s the penal substitution theory. In the penal substitution theory Christ is punished by a wrathful God the Father in substitution for human sins. God redirects His wrath to Christ rather than on human beings. In other words God punishes the innocent and lets the guilty go free. The Catholic Church explicitly rejects this view (God cannot be unjust), and per the Council of Trent Catholics are not allowed to hold this view. You are free to hold any of the other options but not penal substitution. I find it interesting that Lewis, a Protestant (and not all types of Protestants subscribe to the penal substitution belief) promotes one of the Catholic options and not the most widely known Protestant option.
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People often ask when the next step in evolution—the step to something beyond man—will happen. But on the Christian view, it has happened already. In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us.
Our mission in this life is to evolve to be Christ so that we can pass into the next life in the state of this new man. And then Lewis reduces how this is done into three things:
There are three things that spread the Christ life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names—Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord’s Supper. At least, those are the three ordinary methods. I am not saying there may not be special cases where it is spread without one or more of these.
Another interesting point from this chapter is how God transforms us. Through those three things, Christ-life is instilled in us, and that Christ is working through us.
You can lose [the Christ-life] by neglect, or you can drive it away by committing suicide. You have to feed it and look after it: but always remember you are not making it, you are only keeping up a life you got from someone else. In the same way a Christian can lose the Christ-life which has been put into him, and he has to make efforts to keep it. But even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam—he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts.
And so we get to the “practical consequence” of which Lewis names this chapter.
And that has practical consequences. As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing that body. Cut it, and up to a point it will heal, as a dead body would not. A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble—because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.
And there is so much more to this chapter. He explains how we Christians make up the Body of Christ and how Christ operates through Christians. One of the most satisfying things (at least for me) Lewis touches on is the possible eternal destiny of non-Christians.
Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him. But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ’s body, the organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. Cutting off a man’s fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work.
Again Lewis seems to go against the fundamentalist Protestant who restrict salvation not just Christians but certain types of Christians who are of the “elect.” I even see it in some of the ultra-traditionalist Catholics who insist that no one outside the Church can be saved. That is not actually the Catholic position.
WHAT CHRISTIANS BELIEVE
1 – THE RIVAL CONCEPTIONS OF GOD
There are essentially two forms of belief, one loving and good God and Pantheism. The loving God is interested and works in his creation, a universe infused with meaning. In Pantheism you have a disinterested god who is more of a clockmaker and the universe has no meaning.
2-THE INVASION
There are many attempts to reduce Christianity to a simplistic world view, and that the problem of evil is not properly addressed. Lewis argues that there is a flaw in this reasoning. In order to be able to discern good from evil one has to have a standard that is beyond good and evil. Where does this standard come from? It cannot come from a disinterested pantheistic god. Also, there is no such thing as pure evil, because evil is always less than good. It needs the ideal of good to exist, and therefore it is better understood as a parasite.
3 – THE SHOCKING ALTERNATIVE
If God wants us to love him truly, then we have to be able to choose Him freely. This also means we can reject Him freely. If we choose to disagree with God we run into a problem, because all our reasoning powers originate with Him. To make Himself better known to mankind he chose one people to infuse the ideas as to what kind of God he is. Then he sent his own Son who forgave sins, conducted miracles, died for our sins and was resurrected on the third day.
4 – THE PERFECT PENITENT
The Christian believes that Christ’s death on the cross is a redemptive act. How is this possible? Ultimately the Fall was not just an act of disobedience, but an act of rebellion. One has to lay down one’s arms, surrender, if one is to make things right with God. This surrender is a kind of death. There is one conundrum though, the imperfect cannot fully repent, and the perfect don’t need the repentance. Only God Himself can lift the burden from us.
5 – PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS
If Christ already redeemed us, what is left? To live in Him. Practically this means worship and evangelization. God gives us this opportunity so as many as possible are converted.