Catholic Thought discussion
Mere Christianity
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Week 5: Book Four 1 - 6
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Beautifully and intelligently written, Kerstin. Thank you.
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HOW CAN WE MAKE SENSE OF GOOD FRIDAY AND EASTER?How can we make sense of Jesus’ crucifixion on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday? CS Lewis proclaims, “The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.” “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.” CS Lewis discusses how atonement erases the stain of original sin from mankind, but he avoids using these Catholic-sounding words.
CS Lewis admits that both the Church of England and the Church of Rome, and he does not call them Catholics, as both accept multiple explanations for this Easter mystery. This is one of the rare instances where CS Lewis even mentions Catholicism.
What does it mean to say that the innocent Christ, who is sinless, has born the punishment for our sins? CS Lewis explains that fallen man is not merely imperfect, “he is a rebel who must lay down his arms” and surrenders by repenting of his sins. We find it difficult to repent, as “it means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years.
CS Lewis continues, “This repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death” to sin, “is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen.”
We cannot do this on our own. But CS Lewis posits, “Suppose God became a man, suppose our human nature, which can suffer and die, was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person, then that person could help us.” Observe how CS Lewis avoids the technical theological terminology that all too often prompts members of various denominations to bicker. “Jess would surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God.”
“Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God’s dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God’s dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which Jesus pays our debt and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.”[18]
CS Lewis discusses this sacrifice in his Chronicles of Narnia, where the mighty lion Aslan is an allegory to Jesus in the alternate world of Narnia, where server children of London are involved in the moral struggles of that land. The wicked White Witch has deceived the London boy Edmund into betraying Aslan, and she declares that the Deep Magic requires that Aslan hand him over to her for capital punishment. But then Aslan offers his own life in place of the traitorous Edmund.
CS Lewis recounts Aslan’s execution by the wicked White Witch on the ancient Stone Table, surrounded by “Cruels and Hags and Incubuses, Wraiths, Horrors, Efreets, Sprits, Orknies, Wooses, and Ettins” “carrying torches which burned with evil-looking red flames and black smoke.” Aslan permitted them to bind his four paws together and humiliate him by shaving off his majestic mane. The wicked White Witch then bared her arms, whet her knife, and plunged the blade into Aslan.
But the next day, this evil deed by the wicked White Witch was undone when the Stone Table spontaneously cracked, leading to the resurrection of Aslan, whose majestic mane was restored in all its glory. Aslan told the London children: “Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”[19]
But why would there be a deeper magic that ruled Aslan, who is an allegory of Christ? Does the question even make sense? This resembles the satisfaction theory of atonement drawing from the works of Anselm of Canterbury.[20] Although this is accepted Catholic doctrine, many are uncomfortable with the inference that Christ is subject to a principle deeper than His omniscience of God.
We see similar logical difficulties caused by the notion of Jesus being both God and man. For example, after the teenage Jesus is found by his frantic parents arguing with the rabbis in the Temple, we read in Luke that “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man.”[21]
How can an omniscient Jesus increase in wisdom? There are many unanswerable questions. Perhaps we should primarily focus on this message:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”[22]
Why did God do this? Perhaps the simplest answer is He wanted to, that God desires our salvation.
[18] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 4, The Perfect Penitent, pp. 54-58.
[19] CS Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (New York: Harper Collins Publishing, 1982, 1953), The Magician’s Nephew, Chapters 13-15, pp. 173-185.
[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfa...
[21] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
[22] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
ST AUGUSTINE CONDEMNS MANICHEANISM IN HIS CONFESSIONSCS Lewis repeats St Augustine’s arguments in his Confessions against the dualist Manicheans, likely because if he had tipped his hand, Protestants would reject the argument out of hand. “Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war.” “One of these powers likes hatred and cruelty, the other likes love and mercy, and each backs its own view.”
Then CS Lewis repeats the classic Catholic teaching that evil has no existential existence, that evil is the absence of good, but he tinkers with the phrasing so it does not sound Catholic. “Goodness is itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.” “Evil is a parasite, not the original thing.”
“If Dualism is true, then the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in reality, we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad. The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty. But in real life, people are cruel for one of two reasons: either because they are sadists,” including sexual perverts, “or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it: money power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or the wrong way, or too much.” “You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness.”
CS Lewis directly quotes St Augustine, but does not dare attribute this famous passage from his Confessions: “A famous Christian long ago told us that when he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realized that while his lips had been saying, ‘Oh Lord, make me chaste,’ his heart had been secretly adding, ‘But Please don’t do it just yet.’”[9]
St Augustine’s Confessions, His Conversion, Baptism, St Monica’s Death, and Philosophy, Books 8 & 9
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/st...
https://youtu.be/Vijtjxm3Ta0
JOHN MILTON: SATAN OVERTHROWN IN PARADISE LOST
CS Lewis repeats what Milton has to say: “Christianity thinks the Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong.” Christianity does not believe the struggle between right and wrong is “between independent powers. Christianity says it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.”[10]
No doubt CS Lewis is referring to John Milton’s classical work, Paradise Lost:
“The infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile,
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The Mother of Mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel Angels, by whose aid, aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equaled the Most High,”
“If Satan opposed; and with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of God
Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud,
With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition; there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.”[11]
It has been many years since I have read Milton’s Paradise Lost. As you can see, he is consciously crafting a Christian epic poem mirroring the majesty of the Iliad and Odyssey. Dr Wikipedia states that CS Lewis was inspired by Milton, he concurred with his opposition of the monarchy and his support of the Commonwealth established by Oliver Cromwell, after King Charles I was beheaded.[12] This is consistent with CS Lewis’ opposition to the totalitarian Nazi state.
CS LEWIS ON FREE WILL, IGNORING PREDESTINATION
CS Lewis ponders free will, but he avoids discussing the extreme Calvinist doctrine of predestination, where some are preordained to be among the elect, meaning they are saved, while others are preordained to be damned. Catholics officially believe that we can only be saved through God’s grace, but that we must cooperate with God’s grace to be saved. Simply put, the question is: Are we puppets, helpless to change our fate? Catholics think not.
Why did God give us free will? CS Lewis teaches us, “free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata, of creatures that worked like machines, would hardly be worth creating.”[13]
CS Lewis continues: “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 is mere milk and water. And for that, they must be free.”[14]
CS Lewis appears to be describing what Catholics describe as the beatific vision, but avoiding using these words to describe it, since Protestants avoid discussions of visions. One example is the dual vision of St Augustine and his mother St Monica in the garden shortly before her passing. [15]
CS Lewis describes the fall of the angels in Milton: “The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first, wanting to be at the center, wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think that the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake. The story in the Book of Genesis rather suggests that some corruption in our sexual nature followed the fall and was its result, not its cause.”[16]
How does CS Lewis respond to those who say, “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God?” CS Lewis responds, “Either Jesus was, and is, the Son of God, or else he was a madman or something worse.” We have no other choice.[17]
But the spiritual danger in clinging too tightly to this proposition is that you might downplay the moral teachings of Jesus, as His goodness, and the truth of his teachings, are central to Christianity, and are really the primary proof of His Divinity.
[9] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 5, Sexual Morality, p. 99 and St Augustine, Confessions, translated by RS Pine-Coffin (New York: Dorset Press, 1986, 1961, originally 400 AD), Book 8, Chapter 7, p. 169.
[10] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 2, The Invasion, p. 41.
[11] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/joh...
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradis...
[13] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 3, The Shocking Alternative, p. 48.
[14] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 3, The Shocking Alternative, p. 48.
[15] Phillip Cary, Augustine, Philosopher and Saint, The Great Courses, 1997.
[16] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 3, The Shocking Alternative, p. 49.
[17] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 3, The Shocking Alternative, p. 52.
WAS CS LEWIS A CLOSET CATHOLIC?CS Lewis is the only theologian whose works are enthusiastically accepted by Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians. This universal acceptance is because CS Lewis wished to encourage all Christians to lead a godly life, he avoided the debates surrounding which Christian sect possessed the secrets of salvation. Born in Dublin in 1898 before the partition of Ireland, CS Lewis was baptized into the Anglican Church of Ireland, but became disenchanted because of his experiences at school and serving in the trenches of World War I.
As a youngster, he was fascinated by Norse and Greek mythology, which helped people his imaginary world of Narnia. He excelled academically, becoming a professor specializing in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. His writings attest to his immersion in the works of ancient Greece and Rome, and the early Church Fathers. Perhaps this influenced his organizing Mere Christianity into Books and Chapters, as was the practice in many ancient works, including St Augustine’s Confessions.
Like St Augustine in his Confessions, CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity addresses many of the concerns and cultural deceits that CS Lewis had that led him towards his flirtation with atheism. His friendship with the Catholic JRR Tolkien influenced his conversion back to Christianity, as did the works of the Scottish Protestant George MacDonald and the Catholic GK Chesterton. His first work after conversion in the early 1930s, The Pilgrim’s Regress, a retelling of the Protestant Paul Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress, didn’t sell well. The Chronicles of Narnia is his most popular book, selling over a hundred million copies in over forty languages.
I have read a speculation that CS Lewis, in his later years, often received confession from a Catholic priest. How could this be possible? Simple, though a Catholic priest cannot bestow technical absolution on a Protestant, any Christian can pray to God to forgive another Christian. CS Lewis was a high church Anglican, the Protestant denomination closest to Catholicism, even believing that the Apostolic Succession is preserved through the Bishop of Canterbury.
In the Preface, CS Lewis states that “the reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian denominations. You will not learn from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic.” “There is no mystery of my own position. I am a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially high, nor especially low, nor especially anything else.” He states he avoids discussions that divide, such as the controversies on the exact nature of the Virgin Mary, and avoiding topics like birth control.
CS Lewis compares his Mere Christianity to a central hall opening up to many rooms, representative of the various denominations, saying that this hall is a place to wait while you try the various doors.[1] Is this comparable to the imagery in the Chronicles of Narnia, where there is a wood between all worlds, where the children of London were able to hop in pools taking them to London, or to the dying world of Charn, or the world of Narnia, where the Lion Aslan was about to begin the work of creation?[2]
CS Lewis teaches us that Christians believe that Jesus was, and is, God, and that Christ becomes alive in our hearts when we are baptized, when we believe, and when we partake of His body and blood, whether that is named Holy Communion, the Mass, or the Lord’s Supper. CS Lewis declares: “I believe this on Christ’s authority.”
CS Lewis elaborates, “Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine percent of the things we believe are believed on authority.” For instance, Londoners believe that York exist even if they have never been there, and believe that historical facts like the Norman Conquest and the defeat of the Spanish Armada actually happened. CS Lewis states that “ordinary people believe in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of blood on authority, because the scientists say so.”[3]
Catholics would argue that the next logical step in this argument is that the teachings of the Church have authority, and if they are not parsing carefully what he has written, they may assume he said that. But CS Lewis does not say that, and evangelical Christians would assume he is referring the authority of Scripture. How Anglicans interpret this likely depends on whether they are high church or low church.
CS Lewis frames his discussions on Catholic rather than Protestant themes, explicitly discussing the four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude, which are not controversial since they are first discussed in Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and in Stoic philosophy, before they were adopted by St Thomas Aquinas.[4] He also discusses the three Theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity, which all Christians share.[5]
QUARELING CHRISTIANS
How does CS Lewis begin Book 1? “Everyone has heard people quarreling.” Later he explains, “Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong.” Christians of all denominations are quick to quarrel about this doctrine or that, but they are less interested in pondering of the two-fold Love of God and neighbor. Of all my YouTube videos, those that rank lowest are those that discuss the Decalogue!
First, CS Lewis confronts Pantheism, the belief that “God exists beyond good and evil,” a belief that was held by the Prussian philosopher Hegel,” and is the title of a famous work by Frederick Nietzsche, and possibly by the Hindus, but is a belief that is rejected by Jews, Christians, and even Muslims. CS Lewis warns us, “If you do not take the distinction between good and evil seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God.”[6]
CS Lewis remembers why he first adopted atheism. “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust.” Others have had this same question: St Augustine, in his Confessions, recounted that he spurned the Catholicism of his youth because of the question of evil, asking the question of the ages: Why do bad things happen to good people? Just as CS Lewis tried out atheism, St Augustine was initially misled that the Dualist Manichean heresy provided the more logical answer. Likewise, this question has also led the biblical scholar Bart Ehrman to abandon evangelical Christianity.
Summary of St Augustine’s Confessions of Faith and Repentance
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/su...
https://youtu.be/sIpx5qJMGvw
CS Lewis concludes: “Atheism is too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. DARK would be a word without meaning.”
CS Lewis observes that many atheistic and agnostic critics construct “a version of Christianity suitable for child of six and make that the object of their attack.” “I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed.[7]
This point was made by the influential medieval Jewish rabbi Nachminides, or Ramban, at the Disputation at Barcelona: It seems most strange that “the Creator of Heaven and Earth resorted to the womb of a certain Jewish lady, grew there for nine months and was born as an infant, and afterwards grew up and was betrayed into the hands of his enemies who sentenced him to death and executed him, and that afterwards” “He came to life and returned to his original place. The mind of a Jew, or any other person, simply cannot tolerate these assertions. You have listened all your life to the priests who have filled your brain and the marrow of your bones with this doctrine, and it has settled into you because of that accustomed habit. I would argue that if you were hearing these ideas for the first time, now, as a grown adult, you would never accept them.”[8]
Yet the logical impossibility of Divine Grace, of our Father who would send his only Begotten Son Jesus to live among us, is also a proof of its truth. God is more concerned with our Salvation than He is with the human logical consistency of His inscrutable actions.
[1] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, included in volume containing Mere Christianity and the Screwtape Letters (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003, 1944), Preface, pp. viii-xii.
[2] CS Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (New York: Harper Collins Publishing, 1982, 1953), The Magician’s Nephew, Chapters 1-9.
[3] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 5, The Practical Conclusion, pp. 61-62.
[4] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 2, The Cardinal Virtues, pp. 76-81 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardina... .
[5] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapters 9-12.
[6] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 1, The Rival Conceptions of God, pp. 36-37.
[7] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 2, The Invasion, pp. 42-45.
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disputa...
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Didn't Pope Benedict push back on the extreme Catholic practice of referring to the Virgin Mary as co-redemptrix with Jesus?My copy of Mere Christianity does not have an index. Where did CS Lewis refer to Mariology?
It would be consistent with his middle of the road approach for CS Lewis to briefly mention, which I think he did, the Virgin Mary, and then tread on the Protestant side of the fence, but not emphasize it greatly. Personally, I think CS Lewis was consistently sympathetic to both the Catholic and Protestant views of Mother Mary, because he was a medieval scholar, and this doctrine is core to understanding medieval theology and philosophy, as they were not separated in the time of St Thomas Aquinas.
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My copy of Mere Christianity does not have an index. Where did CS Lewis ..."
No, I don't think Lewis mentions the Virgin Mary at all in Mere Christianity. I'm going by outside commentary. I think Joseph Peirce, who did a biography of Lewis, mentioned Lewis's distaste for Catholic veneration of Mary.
Yes, I think Pope Benedict XVI did push back Mary as Co-Redemptoris. I got the impression he was very Christo-centric.
LAW OF NATURE, THERE REALLY IS RIGHT AND WRONGCS Lewis was arguing against the notion that right and wrong is relative; but how can that be, since Nazism is so evidently evil? CS Lewis proclaims, “We are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong,” this is a Law of Nature shared by all cultures.[1]
CS Lewis teaches us: “The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other.”[2]
CS Lewis has many aphorisms:
“Christians must fair, unselfish, and display decent behavior towards their neighbor.”[3]
“God puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another.”[4]
CS Lewis has “two bits of evidence that the Somebody,” whom we worship as the Almighty God, truly exists. “One is the universe he made.” “The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the other because it is inside information.” In the Judeo-Christian traditions, “we conclude that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct: in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness.”
CS Lewis continues: “Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness.” It says nothing “to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness.”[5]
Why doesn’t CS Lewis explicitly discuss the two-fold Love of God and love of neighbor at the end of Part 1? St Augustine is my favorite Catholic saint because, in every major work, he explicitly repeats this core belief. Our saint teaches us that all Scripture must be interpreted in light of this two-fold love, and when the literal reading of the Scriptures appears to violate this two-fold love, then it should be interpreted allegorically. This principle can be extended to our relations to our neighbors, that we should think the best of our neighbor, so we can bring out the best in our neighbor, and that everything we think, say, or do should be beneficial to all concerned.
St Augustine: On Christian Teaching, aka On Christian Doctrine, How To Read Scripture
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
https://youtu.be/uQCnAJMPoos
If you lose sight of this foundation of Christianity, you risk becoming judgmental, you risk losing your compassion. One telling criticism that many agnostic liberals level against evangelical Christianity is that not only does it embraces cruelty rather compassion, but that “Cruelty is the Point.”[6]
WHAT IS MORALITY?
CS Lewis begins the third book of Mere Christianity: “There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was ‘the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.’” Is that what morality is: “something that stops you from having a good time?”[7]
Here CS Lewis is sharing his prior childish misconception of Christianity, a misconception that deceived him to turn his back on the faith and profess atheism for a time in his youth. Jesus does not seek to eliminate joy from our lives, Jesus scolded his disciples when they sought to keep the little children from Him, for children bring joy! But children also bring chaos.
But such attitudes mirror how far society has receded from monastic ascetic ideals, monasteries that stressed the seriousness of the spiritual life, the seriousness that focuses on the daily spiritual disciplines that improve our soul. Many of the original monasteries in the Egyptian desert banned women and children, women had their own convents. To this day, women and children visiting the monasteries on Mount Athos in Greece are required to leave the peninsula at dusk.
Should Christians joke? The Greek Orthodox Saint Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain of Mount Athos, compiler of the Greek Philokalia, argues that Christians should not joke. We must remember that in his lifetime, he may have felt the need to emphasize Christian seriousness to the severe Muslim masters who were ruling Greece at the time.
St Nicodemus: Can Christians Laugh and Joke?
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/st...
https://youtu.be/WAroedUiytY
But yet there is a spiritual danger when Christians laugh and joke. In the years before the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Erasmus criticized the corruption of the Catholic Church using biting satire. Though his criticisms were legitimate, the troubling question is whether his use of satire helped prepare the way for the rebelliousness of the Protestant Reformation.
Did Erasmus' On Praise of Folly Influence the Protestant Reformation?
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/er...
https://youtu.be/FYuIbYlIx5U
THE CARDINAL VIRTUES
The cardinal virtues are Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude. This list of virtues was first introduced in Plato’s Republic, and was then adopted by the Stoic philosophers and Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics formed the core of St Thomas Aquinas’ commentaries. Later we will reflect on these original definitions, comparing them to CS Lewis’ reflections. Here CS Lewis is refuting his prior immature misunderstanding of Christian morality.
WHAT IS PRUDENCE?
What is prudence? CS Lewis teaches us: “Prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it. Nowadays most people hardly think of Prudence as one of the ‘virtues.’ In fact, because Christ said we could only get into His world by being like children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are ‘good,’ it does not matter whether you are a fool.”
CS Lewis continues, “Jesus wants us to have a child’s heart, but a grown-up’s head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children are; but he also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job, and in first-class fighting trim.”[8]
Perhaps CS Lewis is suggesting that Christians should be purposely naïve. We can be wary of those who have taken advantage us in the past, to preserve our fortune and dignity; but on the other hand, we should think the best of our family, friends, and acquaintances, so we can bring out the best in them, even though they might have disappointed or even hurt us in the past.
CS Lewis is referring to this charming passage in Matthew:
“The disciples came to Jesus, saying, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them, and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’”[9]
[1] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, included in volume containing Mere Christianity and the Screwtape Letters (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003, 1944), Book 1, Chapter 1, The Law of Human Nature, pp. 3-7.
[2] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 1, Chapter 2, Some Objections, p. 13.
[3] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 1, Chapter 3, The Reality of the Law, pp. 18-20.
[4] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 2, The Invasion, p. 41.
[5] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 4, The Perfect Penitent, p. 57.
[6] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc...
[7] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 1, The Three Parts of Morality, pp. 74-75.
[8] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 2, The Cardinal Virtues, p. 76.
[9] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
WHAT IS TEMPERANCE?CS Lewis teaches us: “Temperance is one of those words that has changed its meaning. It now usually means teetotalism.” But in times past, temperance referred to “all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining but going the right length and no further.”
CS Lewis notes that “a man who makes his golf or his motorcycle the center of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is being just as intemperate as someone who gets drunk every evening.” Perhaps CS Lewis is going too far, perhaps we should condemn only those who devote themselves to their CATS rather than to their DOGS. But certainly, the drunkard and the drug addict, who was not prevalent in CS Lewis’ day, are more threatening to their families and acquaintances than those who are obsessively devoted to their hobbies and vanities.
We are puzzled why CS Lewis did not mention the ancient Greek philosophy that all things should be practiced in moderation. Many people ask: Should Christians watch secular movies and listen to secular music? Certainly not when they directly conflict with Christian values. But surely we are not sinning when we look forward to enjoying the movies and family time on the weekends.
This tension was also felt by the ancient Greeks, in the tension between Stoicism and Epicureanism, who say that we should enjoy the pleasures of life in moderation.
Was Epicurus Really a Stoic-Lite Philosopher? Were all Epicureans hedonists?
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
Epicurus, Aristippus, and Lucretius: History of Epicurean Philosophy
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
Epicurus, Aristippus, and Lucretius: Were the Epicureans Stoic-Lite Philosophers?
https://youtu.be/49Qv3Be86Jw
Many wise monks of Mount Athos realized the spiritual danger of brooding, of the radical denial of pleasure. The sixth century St John Climacus in his Ladder of Divine Ascent teaches us that despondency itself can be a sin.
Ladder of Divine Ascent, Remembrance of Death, Joy Making Mourning, and Despondency, Steps 6,7, & 13
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/la...
https://youtu.be/pFwC2nDf1CQ
JUSTICE AND FORTITUDE: IS JUSTICE THE SAME AS MORALITY?
What does the Greek word commonly translated as Justice in English really mean? In his translation of Plato’s Republic, Robin Waterfield shares that the Greek word that is customarily translated as justice in English he prefers to translate as morality.[10] The English word of Justice implies that it is something done in the courthouse, whereas the original meaning was more synonymous with loving your neighbor, particularly with those neighbors who are acquaintances or strangers. So justice here is the same as loving your neighbors, seen and unseen, including those you have never met.
CS Lewis agrees, reminding us: “Justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on in law courts. It is the old name for everything we now call fairness; it includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises, and all that side of life.”
CS Lewis teaches us that fortitude includes two kinds of courage, “the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that ‘sticks it’ under pain. ‘Guts’ is perhaps the nearest modern English word.”[11]
Fortitude is replaced by courage in the ancient Greek lists. Courage was a primary virtue by Plato and Aristotle because the ancient Greek culture, like most ancient cultures, was a warrior culture. Every male citizen was expected to serve in the army because in the ancient world when the enemy defeated your city, often your property was seized, your military age men were slaughtered, and your women and children were enslaved.
Ancient Warrior Societies, Blog 1, The Warrior Ethos of Ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/an...
https://youtu.be/7QAZ_s6zw4E
Ancient Warrior Societies, Blog 2, Greek and Roman Armies and Navies
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/an...
Ancient Warrior Societies, Blog 3, World of the Old Testament
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/an...
Ancient Warfare in Ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. Did Joshua Massacre Pagans in Promised Land?
https://youtu.be/9xKxqAbJ2qY
CS Lewis asks, Are these cardinal virtues who we are, or are they what we do?
Certainly, our actions do influence our inner life, as much as our inner life influences our actions. This duality is seen in the vision seen by Cornelius before he approached Jesus in Acts: “Your prayers and your almsgiving have ascended as a memorial before God.”[12]
But CS Lewis stays clear and avoids referring directly to this debate between faith and works that has been raging for millennia.
CS Lewis reflects on three wrong ideas of modern man from a Protestant perspective, to which we add the Catholic perspective.
• “We might think that, provided you did the right thing, it did not matter how or why you did it.” Although if you do the right thing, it may become a habit, improving your soul.
• “We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.” What sort of people? Those who are obedient.
• “We might think that the virtues are necessary only for this present life, that in the world to come we could stop being just because there is nothing to quarrel about and stop being brave because there is no danger.”[13] All Christians agree that virtues improve our soul, leading us to perform good works.
The spiritual danger of a radical rejection of works is you do not emphasize the crucial role of forming and practicing good habits daily in our spiritual life. Many Protestants are under the delusion that this debate between faith and works was initiated by Martin Luther. In the fifth Century, St Mark the Ascetic penned a work titled: No Righteousness By Works. St John Cassian also reflected on this debate, as did theologians around the era of the Carolingian Renaissance, including the theologians Ratherius and Othoh. History has forgotten these debates because they did not lead to a split in the church.[14]
St Mark the Ascetic, No Righteousness By Works
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
https://youtu.be/7Heuz7tRlBc
This is the closest CS Lewis comes to discussing the effects of good habits when living the Christian life day-to-day. “Taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself.”
What are the consequences? The heavenly creature experiences, both here and hereafter, “joy and peace and knowledge and power.” But the hellish creature experiences “madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.”
CS Lewis continues: “When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less.”[15]
This concept of hell not so much as a place of fire and brimstone, but as a place of eternal loneliness, is developed in his work, The Great Divorce, where inhabitants of the dank, dark, lonely, endless, empty streets of Hell are given a chance to take a bus to heaven, but they are as so unused to the bright, joyous, sunny climate of heaven that the grass underneath their feet feels like slivers of glass, and they choose to return to hell.
CS Lewis describes how, in heaven, we eternally climb the mountain towards the glory of God. Perhaps he is copying the same imagery at St Gregory of Nyssa, where he describes how the Christian climbs this same mountain when he leaves Plato’s Allegory of the Cave of willful ignorance.
St Gregory of Nyssa, Beatitudes, Blog 1, The Allegory of the Cave
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
CS Lewis’ Great Divorce, An Allegory of Hell and Plato’s Cave
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
St Gregory Of Nyssa on Beatitudes, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and CS Lewis and the Great Divorce
https://youtu.be/wuqwy3GyO_4
[10] Plato, The Republic, translated by Robin Waterfield (London: Oxford University Press, 2008, 1993, originally 375 BC), Preface, p. xii.
[11] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 2, The Cardinal Virtues, p. 79.
[12] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
[13] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 2, The Cardinal Virtues, pp. 80-81.
[14] Jaroslav Pelikan, Volume 3, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600-1300), including in The Christian Tradition, A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 114-115.
[15] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 4, Morality and Psychoanalysis, pp. 92-93.
MORALITY IN THE MODERN WORLDWhat would a Christian society look like? CS Lewis assures us that everyone will be willfully and eagerly obedient to those who are in authority. The Christian society will also be a “cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues,” with no busybodies.
Finally, deep in Book 3, CS Lewis finally teaches us that the two-fold Love is the cornerstone of the Christian life. “I may repeat ‘do as you would be done by’ till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to Love God: and I cannot learn to Love God except by learning to obey Him.”[1]
CS Lewis also tackles the question that has engaged theologians for millennia: the commandment for us to love our neighbor as ourselves.
CS Lewis asks: “How exactly do I love myself?” He does not fall into the theological trap that self-love is a third type of love, which is thoroughly discussed by Anders Nygren in his wonderful book on Eros and Agape. Rather, CS Lewis declares that old adage, “hate the sin but not the sinner,” applies especially to yourself if you are repentant. CS Lewis does not answer this question directly, but he implies that we love ourselves when we truly repent.[2]
Anders Nygren, On Christian Agape-Love and Eros-Love in Gospels and Pauline Epistles
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/an...
https://youtu.be/KniBalQMemM
What about the mentally ill? What about those who suffer from dementia? What about the autistic? Are they morally responsible for their actions?
CS Lewis assures us that psychological problems are “not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured.” But people often forget this. People “judge one another by their external actions, but God judges them by their moral choices.”
These questions reflect my personal experience as an officer of an over-55 condominium association. I was censured after I stopped the foreclosure of a destitute owner who had advanced dementia. He was behind in paying his maintenance fees, and had harassed his neighbors and office staff. In short, his demented behavior turned everyone in our community against him, the concept that he could NOT be held responsible for his actions was inconceivable.
Case studies of the life of Glen Campbell, who passed away from dementia, and other neurological case studies, demonstrate mental illness can rob you of your moral compass, that you are controlled solely by your emotions.
How I Halted a Foreclosure on a Destitute Owner with Advanced Dementia! We Discuss Dementia
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/ho...
https://youtu.be/_uAJPCCRNQ8
How Do We Treat our Neighbors Who Suffer From Dementia? Guidance for Over-55 Condos
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/ho...
https://youtu.be/zwQK3VgaNOo
Glen Campbell Suffering from Alzheimer’s, Early Signs and Symptoms
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/gl...
https://youtu.be/F9NmDiiPowI
Neurological Case Studies Including the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and the Curious Story of Phineas Gage
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/ca...
https://youtu.be/tBZIs0YZ05A
IF YOU WILL NOT WORK, YOU WILL NOT EAT
CS Lewis continues: “The New Testament tells us that” in a Christian society “there would be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat.” But CS Lewis also notes that “in the passage where the New Testament says that everyone must work, it gives as a reason ‘in order that the Christian may have something to give to those in need.’ Charity, giving to the poor, is an essential part of Christian morality.”[3]
CS Lewis is referring to this verse from Second Thessalonians, which is often misinterpreted:
“For even when we were with you, we gave you this command:
If anyone will not work, let him not eat.
For we hear that some of you are living in idleness,
mere busybodies, not doing any work.”[4]
The context of this verse is that in the first Book of Thessalonians, St Paul discussed the imminent coming of the Lord, but some in the community were counting on this coming a bit too much, quitting their jobs and causing problems in the community. In the second book, St Paul is urging those who quit their jobs to wait on the Lord’s coming to find another job.
We will quote from the conservative Baptist Broadman Commentary: “Due to their confusion as to the time of the Lord’s return, some Thessalonians, thinking that it would be immediately, had stopped working. They had become idle troublemakers. Paul ordered his readers to keep away from any brother who is living in idleness contrary to Paul’s tradition,”[5] as Paul himself set an example of continuing to work as a tentmaker when he was visiting the community, so they would not need to support him.
How do we know we have been sufficiently generous in our almsgiving? CS Lewis suggests that “the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.”
CS Lewis continues: “For many of us, the great obstacle to charity lies not in our luxurious living or desire for money, but in our fear: fear of insecurity,” which is a “temptation. Sometimes our pride also hinders our charity; we are tempted to spend more than we ought on the showy forms of generosity, such as tipping and hospitality, and less than we ought on those who really need our help.”[6]
St John Chrysostom teaches us that neglecting to feed the poor is a type of theft: “If you cannot remember everything, instead of everything, I beg you, remember this without fail, that not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth but theirs. If we have this attitude, we will certainly offer our money; and by nourishing Christ in poverty here and laying up great profit hereafter, we will be able to attain the good things which are to come.”[7]
Likewise, when we receive bad service in a restaurant, who are we to stiff the waitress? She may be a single mother living on the edge, struggling to put food on her table for her children. Instead, give her twenty percent, and ask her about her day, whether she is struggling, and whether you or your church can help. Always tip our waitress, God is punishing her enough: because she is a waitress!
There are two versions of Jesus’ memorable sermon, the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, which begins with, Blessed are the poor in spirit, and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke, which begins with, Blessed are you poor. Perhaps when Luke’s Jesus says, Blessed are you poor, perhaps that is the exact meaning of this verse. This is the first paired couplet:
Blessed are you poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
But woe to you that are rich,
for you have received your consolation.[8]
Blessed Are the Poor, Woe to the Rich, and Other Woke Compassionate Bible Verses
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/bl...
https://youtu.be/576TYemgA8o
THE FORGIVENESS THAT PRECEDES REPENTANCE
CS Lewis notes that in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer we pray: “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” He observes: “There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive, we shall not be forgiven.”
Indeed, immediately after the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew, Jesus exhorts us: “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”[9]
Also, after Jesus exhorts us to love our enemies, he also exhorts us to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”[10]
We should strive for perfection, but what, in particular, demands perfectinon? FORGIVENESS. When we make excuses to hold grudges against one person, our attitude becomes contagious: we always find more who deserve our dislike and hatred.
[1] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 3, Social Morality, p. 87.
[2] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 7, Forgiveness, pp. 116-117.
[3] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 3, Social Morality, pp. 84-87.
[4] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
[5] The Broadman Bible Commentary, Volume 11, 2 Corinthians – Philemon (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1971), p. 296.
[6] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 3, Social Morality, pp. 84-87.
[7] https://blog.acton.org/archives/18664... quoting St John Chrysostom, On Living Simply, Sermon XLIII, also in collection of essays, On Wealth and Poverty, https://www.oca.org/reflections/fr.-s...
[8] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
[9] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
[10] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
PRIDE AND ENVY: THE ORIGINAL AND ORIGINATING SINSPride is the original sin, pride how the serpent tempts Eve in the Garden of Eden when he says to her: “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it,” the forbidden fruit, “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”[11]
CS Lewis teaches us that Pride is also called Self-Conceit, and its opposite virtue is Humility. CS Lewis teaches us: “Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”
CS Lewis continues: “Pride is essentially competitive, while the other vices are competitive only by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.” “If I am a proud man, then, as long as there is one man in the whole world more powerful, or richer, or cleverer than I, then he is my rival and my enemy.”
By this definition, pride is supercharged envy. Envy is the commandment that precedes the breaking of any other commandment in the Decalogue that harms your neighbor. CS Lewis teaches us: “Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”
Pride was the first sin tempting Eve in the Garden, but perhaps it is also a final temptation when all other temptations fail to deceive the devout. CS Lewis asks a terrible question: “How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious?”
And often fool many acquaintances, or even followers. “I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really imaging how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people.”[12]
In the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, the Pharisee is obviously swelled with pride about his religiosity: “Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others:” “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you; this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”[13]
Perhaps we can ask ourselves this terrible question, particularly if we see ourselves as devout, church-attending Christians: Do we see ourselves as falling into the trap of the Pharisee, or do we self-identify as the Publican, or tax collector? If we attend church regularly, and take pride in being Christian, how can we not be like the Pharisee?
CAN PRIDE EVER BE GOOD?
There are several behaviors that we label as pride that are beneficial. Praising your children’s accomplishments to encourage them is admirable. CS Lewis says: “Pleasure in being praised is not Pride,” we should appreciate others when they sincerely praise us.
CS Lewis does not totally answer the question: Is there good pride and bad pride? Is there divine pride and evil pride? Or is pride a human emotion that can be either beneficial or corrupting? Or is the word PRIDE merely an example of how difficult it can be to reduce divine concepts into imperfect language and understanding?
Or would these be better questions to ask? Are there both spiritually beneficial and spiritually corrupting types of pride? Do all forms of pride have an element of spiritual danger, the danger that spiritually beneficial pride can evolve in a spiritually damaging pride?
CS Lewis praises spiritually beneficial pride: “To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we Love and admire God.” CS Lewis also characterizes the sin of taking praise too much to heart as one of the most pardonable of sins.
Pride can be both a subtle and substantial sin, so we must concentrate when reading this observation by CS Lewis: “We must not think Pride is something God forbids because He is offended at it, or that Humility is something He demands as due to His dignity, as if God Himself was proud. God is not in the least worried about His dignity. The point is: God wants you to know Him: He wants to give you Himself.”
God seeks to make us humble. How can we become humble? CS Lewis teaches us: “The first step to humility is to realize that one if proud.” This is a big step. “Nothing whatever can be done before” rejecting Pride. “If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.”[14]
[11] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
[12] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 8, The Great Sin, pp. 121-125.
[13] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
[14] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 8, The Great Sin, pp. 125-128.
Mod
Concerning the differences between the Beatitudes of Matthew and Luke, if you look through Luke's Gospel the theme of the underclass overtaking the upper-class runs through the entire work. It's right there in in the Magnificat:
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
Cast down the mighty and uplifted the lowly is a motif throughout Luke.
That is the trap when reading the Holy Scriptures, they are so familiar we sometimes miss the obvious meaning we would see if we were reading them for the very first time.
FAITH, HOPE, CHARITY OR LOVE: THE THEOLOGICAL VIRTUESAll Christian denominations mostly concur in their understanding of the theological virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity, which many English Bibles translate as love.
Should we fault CS Lewis for not repeatedly emphasizing the Christian core belief, the two-fold Love of God and neighbor? After all, in all his literary works, St Augustine explicitly and repeatedly emphasized the centrality of this two-fold Love of God and neighbor in many of the books in this work. In his longer works, like the Confessions, he mentions the two-fold Love in many of the books.
St Augustine: On Christian Teaching, aka On Christian Doctrine, How To Read Scripture
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
https://youtu.be/uQCnAJMPoos
What is roughly the progression CS Lewis follows in Mere Christianity? He first refutes his initial misunderstanding of Christianity that led him to be an atheist in his youth, misconceptions that many in the modern world share. CS Lewis then discusses the essence of Christian morality in our modern world. Next, he discusses why the Cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice or morality, and fortitude or courage apply to us today. CS Lewis then discusses forgiveness, and then Pride, or Envy, and then our current reflection on Faith, Hope, and Love or Charity.
CHARITY: LOVE IN THE CHRISTIAN SENSE
Many Christians deprecate Charity, preferring Love, as if they are separate virtues, where Charity is bad, encouraging dependence, while Love is good, encouraging liberty and freedom.
But CS Lewis would reject this view. CS Lewis teaches us, “Charity means Love in the Christian sense. But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves and must learn to have about other people.”
“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did.” Be kind to your neighbor, and often you will like and love him more. But if they do not reciprocate, or are openly hostile, love them anyway, and help them if you can. We always find it easier to love, or like, those who are courteous towards us.
But CS Lewis warns us of this spiritual trap: “If you do your neighbor a good deed, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his gratitude, you will probably be disappointed.”
“But whenever we do good to another person, just because they are a person, made like us by God, and desiring their happiness as we desire our happiness, we shall have learned to live them a little more, or, at least, to dislike them less.”
“Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I Loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.”
Encouraging good habits is the core of a monastic mindset, and is the core of classic Catholicism, but CS Lewis never uses these words, perhaps he is avoiding sounding too Catholic.
How does CS Lewis close this chapter? Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will, we are obeying the Commandments, ‘Thou shalt Love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right.”[1]
What does this last sentence mean? I am not quite sure, perhaps he is echoing a thought in a patristic writing. Perhaps this means we should not strain for love, we should just let Love flow when we are most receptive to the Holy Spirit.
CS Lewis continues, But we must remember, “though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.”
CS Lewis does not say this here, but the main “cost” to God is the begetting and sending of his Son Jesus Christ to descend to assume our flesh, so that we may ascend to become adopted sons of the Father.
CS Lewis lived in a different time when Christians battled real evil personified by Nazism, communism, and totalitarianism. He does not address the recent notion that Christians should not be charitable towards their poor neighbor, that they should instead be cruel towards them, perhaps to punish or improve them, is a dangerous temptation.
HOPE: YEARNING FOR ETERNAL VIRTUES
“Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not, as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.” “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in:’ aim at earth and you will get neither.”
CS Lewis, in his London broadcasts on Christianity, gave the besieged British hope that the forces of good would prevail, that Britain would defeat the evil Nazi regime. In the same way, the psychologist Viktor Frankl encouraged his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz not to lose their soul, to keep their hope alive that they would see their loved ones once the war ended.
Is the yearning we feel for a loved one whom we miss like the ardent hope we experience for the kingdom of God? Indeed, hope thrives with love. Thoughts of their loved ones was what kept many Jews alive who toiled in the Auschwitz work camps of World War II. Viktor Frankl tells us: “The truth is that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire.” In the suffering of the camps, Frankl tells us that he realized that “the salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”[2]
The concentration camp prisoners with a rich inner spiritual life possessed hope, they were more likely to survive. Viktor Frankl remembers, “In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may suffer more pain, but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom.”[3]
Viktor Frankl’s Logo-therapy, Man’s Search For Meaning in Life, Love, and Suffering
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/vi...
https://youtu.be/1nTYlhDUJh8
Many people ridicule the Christian concept of Heaven, saying: “They do not want to spend eternity playing harps.” But CS Lewis points out: “Scriptural imagery, harps, crowns, gold, and such, are a symbolic attempt to express the inexpressible. Musician instruments are mentioned because for many people music” “strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendor and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heave, since gold does not rust, and the preciseness of it.”[4]
[1] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, included in the volume containing Mere Christianity and the Screwtape Letters (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003, 1944), Book 3, Chapter 9, Charity, pp. 129-133.
[2] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006, 1959), pp. 37-38.
[3] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 36.
[4] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 10, Hope, pp. 134-137.
CS LEWIS ON FAITHCS Lewis teaches us that “the battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.”
How can you keep your faith, how can your faith not dim like a candle starved for oxygen? CS Lewis advises us: “Deliberately hold your faith daily before your mind and for some time every day,” “by daily prayers, religious readings, and church-going.” “We have to be continually reminded of what we believe.”[5]
St Augustine remembers the well-read philosopher Victorinus. “Victorinus had read the Holy Scriptures, and made the most painstaking and careful study of all Christian literature. Privately, between friends, though never in public, he used to say to Simplicianus, ‘I want you to know that I’m now a Christian.’
Simplicianus replied, ‘I shall not believe it or count you as a Christian until I see you in the Church of Christ.’ At this, Victorinus would laugh and say, ‘Is it then the walls of the church that make the Christian?’”
St Augustine continues, “But later on, as a result of his attentive reading, he became resolute. He was seized by the fear that Christ might deny him before the holy angels if he was too faint-hearted to acknowledge Christ before men, and he felt himself guilty of a great crime in being ashamed of the sacraments instituted by Your Word in his lowly state.”[6]
His studies answered his question, Victorinus came to realize that, indeed, the walls of the church do make the Christian. He submitted his name to the bishop to be baptized the next Easter publicly in the church, to his fellow Christians in public worship of Christ, encouraging one another, as Hebrews states.
St Augustine’s Confessions, His Conversion, Baptism, St Monica’s Death, and Philosophy, Books 8 & 9
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/st...
https://youtu.be/Vijtjxm3Ta0
CS Lewis reminds us: “The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues is that we fail.” “Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God.”
What is it like when we do something to please God? “It is like a small child going to its father and saying, ‘Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.’ Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father sixpence to the good on the transaction.”[7] If we could succeed in living the Christian virtues, we “would only be giving back to God what was already God’s own.”
Should we have faith in our own efforts to be virtuous, or should “we despair of doing anything for ourselves and leave it to God?” This realization may come slowly, or it may come in “a sudden flash, as it did to St Paul or John Bunyan.” This is one of the few times CS Lewis mentions a theologian by name: John Bunyan was the Protestant auto of Pilgrim’s Progress. CS Lewis had written a work titled Pilgrim’s Regress shortly after his conversion.
CS Lewis says: “The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, He will share His sonship with us, will make us, like Himself, Sons of God.”[8]
In his Agape and Eros, the Lutheran Anders Nygren links St Paul’s understanding of faith to the Love of God. Nygren teaches us that Paul seeks to give man’s “Love towards God” “its proper name, which he calls ‘FAITH.’ Faith includes in itself the whole devotion of love, while emphasizing it is a reciprocated love. Faith is love towards God, but a love of which the keynote is receptivity, not spontaneity.”[9]
Anders Nygren, On Christian Agape-Love and Eros-Love in Gospels and Pauline Epistles
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/an...
https://youtu.be/KniBalQMemM
Maybe faith, like love, like hope, is simply being kind. In Auschwitz, small acts of kindness helped Viktor Frankl survive many monotonous cruelties.
One capo took a liking to him because Viktor, during those long marches,
Attentively “listened to his love stories and matrimonial troubles.”
This kind capo placed Viktor in the front lines to avoid the worst work parties,
And made sure that at lunch the cook, when Viktor time came in line,
“Dipped the ladle to the bottom of the vat to fish out a few peas.”[10]
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning, His Life in a Nazi Concentration Camp in WWII
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
https://youtu.be/O-YtC9qGWPI
When listening to CS Lewis’ broadcasts on Christianity on the radio, the London listeners must have wondered when the German bombing raids early in the war, then the German V1 and V2 buzz rockets later in the war, would halt their death and destruction, the same way those laboring in the Nazi work camps wondered when the war would be over, whether they would survive the war.
Viktor Frankl remembers the days after the war ended, when he was released from the camps, when he learned that his wife did not survive the war, and that he was the only Jew in his family who survived the war.
“One day, a few days after liberation, I walked and walked,
Miles and miles through flowering meadows, larks rising to the skies.
There was no one seen for miles around, nothing but the wide earth and sky,
Noting but the lark’s jubilation and the freedom of space.”
Viktor remembered the prayer, “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison,
The Lord answered me in the freedom of space.” [11]
[5] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 11, Faith (in the first sense), p. 141.
[6] St Augustine, Confessions, translated by RS Pine-Coffin (New York: Dorset Press, 1986, 1961, originally 400 AD), Book 7, Chapter 2, pp. 159-161.
[7] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 11, Faith (in the first sense), pp. 142-143.
[8] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 12, Faith (in the second sense), pp. 144-147.
[9] Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, translated by Philip Watson (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1969, 1932 & 1938), Introduction, The Agape Motif, The Agape of the Cross, pp. 109-129.
[10] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, pp. 26-27.
[11] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 89, quoting Psalm 118.
DISCUSSION OF FAITH VERSUS WORKSCS Lewis does wade into the debate of Faith versus Works, although he calls works actions. “Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or faith in Christ.” “But you will find that even those who insist most strongly on the importance of good actions tell you that you need Faith; and even those who insist most strongly on Faith tell you to do good actions.”[12]
CS Lewis discusses these two verses in Philippians: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”[13] The first verse implies that everything depends on our actions, the second verse implies that God does everything and we do nothing. Perhaps both are true.[14]
The most famous verse is in James: “Faith apart from works is dead.”[15] Martin Luther called James a gospel of straw. Did Luther exclude James from the German Bible? The answer is no, James is included in all Lutheran Bibles, past and present.[16]
The spiritual danger of a radical rejection of works is you do not emphasize the crucial role of forming and practicing good habits daily in our spiritual life. Many Protestants are under the delusion that this debate between faith and works was initiated by Martin Luther. In the fifth Century, St Mark the Ascetic penned a work titled: No Righteousness By Works. St John Cassian also reflected on this debate, as did theologians around the era of the Carolingian Renaissance, including the theologians Ratherius and Othoh. History has forgotten these debates because they did not lead to a split in the church.[17]
St Mark the Ascetic, No Righteousness By Works
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
https://youtu.be/7Heuz7tRlBc
This is the closest CS Lewis comes to discussing the effects of good habits when living the Christian life day-to-day. “Taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself.”
What are the consequences? The heavenly creature experiences, both here and hereafter, “joy and peace and knowledge and power.” But the hellish creature experiences “madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.”
CS Lewis continues: “When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less.”[18]
This concept of hell not so much as a place of fire and brimstone, but as a place of eternal loneliness, is developed in his work, The Great Divorce, where inhabitants of the dank, dark, lonely, endless, empty streets of Hell are given a chance to take a bus to heaven, but they are as so unused to the bright, joyous, sunny climate of heaven that the grass underneath their feet feels like slivers of glass, and they choose to return to hell.
CS Lewis describes how, in heaven, we eternally climb the mountain towards the glory of God. Perhaps he is copying the same imagery at St Gregory of Nyssa, where he describes how the Christian climbs this same mountain when he leaves Plato’s Allegory of the Cave of willful ignorance.
St Gregory of Nyssa, Beatitudes, Blog 1, The Allegory of the Cave
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
CS Lewis’ Great Divorce, An Allegory of Hell and Plato’s Cave
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
St Gregory Of Nyssa on Beatitudes, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and CS Lewis and the Great Divorce
https://youtu.be/wuqwy3GyO_4
[12] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 12, Faith (in the second sense), p. 148.
[13] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
[14] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 12, Faith (in the second sense), p. 149.
[15] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
[16] https://zondervanacademic.com/blog/ma...
COMBATTING NAZISM AND TOTALITARIANISMMere Christianity was compiled from a series of radio addresses explaining the tenets of Christianity which were broadcast during the dark days of World War II, when Londoners fled to the safety of the underground subway tunnels while Nazi bombers destroyed their homes above. We will reflect on the many instances where CS Lewis referred often to this monumental struggle, one of the rare political struggles that actually pitted the forces of good and evil against each other, in Mere Christianity.
CS Lewis was arguing against the notion that right and wrong is relative, but how can that be, since Nazism is so evidently evil? CS Lewis proclaims, “We are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong,” this is a Law of Nature shared by all cultures.[1]
CAN SOLDIERS FOLLOW THE COMMANDMENT: DO NOT KILL?
CS Lewis served in the army in the trenches of World War I. He asserts that a “Christian soldier can kill an enemy,” since the commandment, “Do not kill,” actually means “Do not murder” in the original Hebrew.
DS Lewis observes: “War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken. What I cannot understand is this sort of semi-pacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it.”
But CS Lewis does offer this caution: “We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it.”
CS Lewis continues: “Even while we kill and punish, we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves: to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. This is what is meant in the Bible by loving our enemy: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.”[2]
CS Lewis also mentions the psychological difficulty some may face when drafted to serve in the military, the man who is psychologically incapable of defeating the fear men face when they are facing the enemy on the front lines.[3]
HOW CAN YOU FORGIVE THE NAZIS, ARCHITECTS OF THE HOLOCAUST?
CS Lewis observes: “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war. And then, to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger.” “Half of you,” his radio audience, “want to ask me, ‘I wonder how you’d feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?”[4]
Surprisingly, in his chapter on Morality and Psychoanalysis, CS Lewis ponders this question: “Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological problems, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on his raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.”[5]
This question of how you can forgive the Nazis is discussed in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, where Frankl shares how some Jews survived the work camps of Auschwitz. In the afterword, Dr Winslade says, “Frankl felt an intense connection to Vienna, especially to psychiatric patients who needed his help in the postwar period. He also believed strongly in reconciliation rather than revenge; he once remarked, ‘I do not forget any good deed done to me, and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.’
Notably, Frankl renounced the idea of collective guilt. Frankl was able to accept that his Viennese colleagues and neighbors may have known about or even participated in his persecution, and he did not condemn them for failing to join the resistance or die heroic deaths.”
When Jews returned to their old homes, often they found that others had moved in, and quite often they refused to leave what they saw as their home. We do not know what the post-war Austrian policy was in these situations, this passage suggests that Frankl had moved into his old house, or at least found another in his old neighborhood.
Dr Winslade continues, “Instead, Frankl was deeply committed to the idea that even a vile Nazi criminal or a seemingly hopeless madman has the potential to transcend evil or insanity by making responsible choices.”[6]
Viktor Frankl’s Logo-therapy, Man’s Search For Meaning in Life, Love, and Suffering
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/vi...
https://youtu.be/1nTYlhDUJh8
But Frankl notes that many who were released from the concentration camps were unable to forgive their tormentors. “People with natures of a more primitive kind could not escape the brutality that had surrounded them in camp life. Now, being free, they thought they could use their freedom licentiously and ruthlessly. The only thing that changed was that they were now the oppressors instead of the oppressed. They became instigators, not objects, of willful force and injustice. They justified their behavior by their own terrible experiences.”[7]
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning, His Life in a Nazi Concentration Camp in WWII
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
https://youtu.be/O-YtC9qGWPI
HOW TOTALITARIAN REGIMES ENDANGER CHRISTIANITY
Nazism is a totalitarian regime that seeks to have all human institutions serve the needs of the state. But CS Lewis teaches us: “The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life,” to permit them the personal liberty to enjoy time with their families and friends, to live a normal life. “Unless the State is helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. In the same way, the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.”[8]
Many of CS Lewis’ thoughts are confirmed in Vatican II’s decree on Freedom of Religion, and many of his arguments echo those made by Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, in his book, Sources of Renewal, The Implementation of Vatican II.
What distinguishes the authoritarian fascist state from a democracy? Authoritarians deny liberty and due process to the individual to serve the state, while democracy protects the rights of the individual. CS Lewis teaches us that the Christian teaching of the immorality of the soul means we should cherish the dignity and freedom of the individual.
Vatican II Decree on Freedom of Religion, Embracing Democracy, Rejecting Fascism
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
https://youtu.be/i_zGeTW9QMI
CS Lewis reasons, “If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment.”[9]
One of the primary dangers that Christians faced when confronting totalitarian regimes in the past century is that they seek to corrupt Christianity itself. This happened under Stalin and his successors, where the communists insisted on appointing compromised church leaders to lead the Orthodox Church. This is happening today in Communist China, where the current dictator seeks to undermine both the Buddhist and Catholic faith traditions in China. And it happened in Hitler’s Germany, where the Nazis attempted to found a state church that believed that Jesus was not a Jew! Both the Protestant Confessing Churches and the Catholic Church resisted this encroachment of the Nazi state, although some were compromised. Pope Pius XI famously smuggled in the Easter message that was read in pulpits across Germany in the midst of World War II, when most of the world could not imagine how the Nazis could be driven from the European Continent.
How the Catholic Church and the Confessing Church Survived Under Hitler's Pagan Nazi Regime
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
https://youtu.be/QP9UR8fqfvs
[1] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, included in volume containing Mere Christianity and the Screwtape Letters (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003, 1944), Book 1, Chapter 1, The Law of Human Nature, pp. 3-7.
[2] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 7, Forgiveness, pp. 118-120.
[3] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 4, Morality and Psychoanalysis, p. 90.
[4] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 7, Forgiveness, p. 115.
[5] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 4, Morality and Psychoanalysis, p. 91.
[6] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006, 1959), p. 163 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_...
[7] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 90.
[8] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 8, Is Christianity Hard or Easy?, p. 199.
[9] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 1, The Three Parts of Morality, p. 69.
PREPARING THE WAY FOR THE DECREES OF VATICAN IIWhen broadcasting his thoughts on Christianity, CS Lewis was comforting his British listeners to help them cope with the current crisis, he was not preparing them for the future world after World War II. But us a practical proponent of ecumenism, in a way CS Lewis was paving the way for the decrees of Vatican II, which was convened only a few decades after this great war. In many ways, the decrees of Vatican II are unimaginable without the trauma of World War II, they are responses to the bad experiences of Catholics while coping under the various fascist regimes.
How Did the Experiences of World War II Influence the Second Vatican Council?
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/ho...
https://youtu.be/QQEd9LDzV1U
CS Lewis did not wave the flag of ecumenicism, attending this conference or that on interfaith dialogues, but instead prepares the way, saying that what denominational creed you profess is less important than whether you truly believe the core Christian teaching of the two-fold Love of God and neighbor. This was the key change wrought by Vatican II, no longer did the Catholic Church believe you needed to be Catholic to be saved. Likewise, CS Lewis is against the notion that Catholics cannot be saved.
For example, CS Lewis answers the question: How do you explain that Christ is both human and divine, bringing salvation to those who believe in Him? “You can express this In all sorts of different ways. You can say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that we’re washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true. If any of them do not appeal to you, leave it alone and get on with the formula that does. And, whatever you do, do not start quarreling with other people because they use a different formula than yours.”[10]
The decrees of Vatican II agree, declaring that though the Catholic Church possesses the seeds of faith through the Apostolic Succession, that Catholics have much to learn from our Protestant brothers. Furthermore, Catholics should respect the religious traditions of Protestants, as well as non-Christians.
What Happened at Vatican II, Embracing Democracy and Modernity
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
https://youtu.be/vHtYu6UtiuE
CS Lewis agrees: “If you are a Christian, you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through.” “If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.”
“But of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions: Christianity is right, and they are wrong.” Pope Benedict and the decrees of Vatican II also affirm this, adding that, nevertheless, we should treat all major religious traditions with dignity and respect, seeking dialogue rather than acrimony.
CS Lewis proclaims, “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.”[11]
St Augustine, in On Christian Teaching, or On Christian Doctrine, observes that though it would be preferable for a Christian to reach salvation by taking the narrow road, sometimes he can find the faith through a longer route through the fields.
St Augustine teaches us: “Whoever takes another meaning out of Scripture than the writer intended goes astray, but not through any falsehood in Scripture.” But “if his mistaken interpretation tends to build up love, which is the end of the commandments, he goes astray in much the same way as a man who, by mistake, quits the high road, but yet reaches through the fields the same place to which the road leads.” But he reminds us that the high road is preferable.[12]
LACK OF MISSIONARY ZEAL AFTER VATICAN II
Many conservative bishops opposed some of the decrees of Vatican II, worrying that there would be a loss of missionary zeal if the Catholic Church no longer stressed you needed to convert to Catholicism to gain your salvation. They were assured that the ethos of Vatican II would increase missionary zeal rather than decrease it.
However, the future Pope Benedict confirmed in his Ratzinger Report, that in the years following the Council, there was indeed a loss of missionary zeal. He did not regret the decrees of Vatican II, as it was essential that, in light of the decolonization movement in Africa and Asia, that local church leaders be initiated into the church hierarchy in these newly formed nations.
Ratzinger Report, by Future Pope Benedict XVI, Preparing for Catholic Catechism
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/ra...
https://youtu.be/dTpbczGCAto
CS LEWIS OPPOSING ANTI-SEMITISM OF NAZISM
CS Lewis has only a few references to anti-Semitism, which played such a central role in the ideology of Nazism. But then CS Lewis is not commenting, directly or indirectly, on the evils of the Nazi regime, he is explaining how Christians can survive the current crisis of bombs dropping on London and the need to fight in yet another World War opposing Germany. Anti-Semitism was not as much of an issue in England as it was France, in part because there were so few Jews in England. England did not directly experience the trauma of the Dreyfus Affair that tore Catholic France in half at the turn of the century.[13]
CS Lewis writes: “Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, ‘Take up your Cross.’ In other words, it is like going to be beaten to death in a concentration camp. Next minute he says, ‘My yoke is easy and my burden light.’ He means both,” “and both are true.”[14]
In his discussion on Christian Charity, or Love, CS Lewis observed: “The German Nazis, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them. Afterwards, they hated them much more because they had ill-treated them.”[15]
How could ordinary Germans and Christians tolerate the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany? Many German Confessing Christians who were interviewed shortly after the war pondered this question. One lady could not recall when she first heard of the mass murders:
“We knew some things, but we never knew the entirety. We knew more than others, but we actually learned the extent of the horrors after 1945. No one ever came back from the concentration camps, and when people did return, they had to sign that they wouldn’t talk, and they were much too afraid to talk.”[16]
The war softened the hearts of many Germans. One German remembers shopping during the brutal Allied bombing of Berlin, the “shopkeeper was talking to another customer whom she knew and said, ‘This is the punishment for what we’ve done to the Jews.’ And she dared to say that much, although I was a stranger in her shop.”[17]
How Did Confessing Christians Tolerate Hitler? Excerpts From Post-War Interviews
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/ho...
https://youtu.be/ALl4HhEhgyY
[10] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 5, The Obstinate Toy Soldiers, pp. 181-182.
[11] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 5, The Practical Conclusion, p. 64.
[12] St Augustine, “On Christian Doctrine,” In the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volume 2, translated by Rev JF Shaw (Boston: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994, first published 1887), Book 1, Chapter 36, Passage 41, p. 533.
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus...
[14] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 8, Is Christianity Hard or Easy?, p. 197, quoting https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/... and https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
[15] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 9, Charity, pp. 131-132.
[16] Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People, Protestant Protest Against Hitler (New York, Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 148.
[17] Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People, p. 170.
WHY DID THE DECREES OF VATICAN II EMBRACE DEMOCRACY?Why did many Catholics, and the Catholic Church, embrace fascism in the interwar years? Exploring this question will also provide insight into the political climate that CS Lewis and all other Christians before, during, and after the dark days when the allies were facing the Nazi tide.
Before we answer this question, we must assure our gentle readers that Nazism is an extreme form of fascism, and that Italian fascism under Mussolini was not originally anti-Semitic. Mussolini was initially a friend and protector of the Catholic Church in Italy, assuring that the Pope was in charge of religious instruction in the state-run schools.
But after Mussolini fell fully under the spell of Hitler shortly before he invaded Poland, passing laws persecuting the Jews. Pope Pius XI, who had signed the 1927 Concordat with Mussolini creating Vatican City, fearing for his salvation, became the bitter enemy of Mussolini and Nazism. The lesson was clear: totalitarian regimes could never be trusted, even if they supported the church, as they could turn against the church on a dime.
Mussolini's Fascist Regime and the Catholic Church
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
https://youtu.be/LvNynEdZFuM
In the interwar years, fascism was seen as the enemy of communism. At the turn of the century, Lenin and the communists in the Russian Revolution martyred more Orthodox believers than all Christians in all other countries in all preceding centuries combined. Likewise, during the Spanish Civil War, the communists murdered priests and nuns by the thousands. The fascist General Franco defended the interests of the Catholic Church, he massacred public school teachers instead.
Spanish Civil War and the Catholic Church
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
https://youtu.be/ozEioe6yyY8
Likewise, in Vichy France, the World War I hero General Petain collaborated with the Nazis, sending many Jews to the death camps, while simultaneously championing the Catholic Church. This damaged the credibility of the Catholic Church, after the war most French Catholic bishops were compelled to resign. What helped the reputation of Christians, Protestants and Catholics alike, was that many of them fought in the French underground side-by-side with the communists in the French Resistance.[18]
Regardless of your position on abortion, there is little doubt that the memory of the collaboration of the Vichy Regime damaged both Catholicism and the pro-life movement in modern France.
Vichy France Regime, Blog 1, Pro-Life, Pro-Catholic, and Fascist
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
Vichy France, Blog 2, Collaborating with the Germans in the Early Years, 1940-1942
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
Vichy France, Blog 3, The Tide Turns, Resistance and Collaboration
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
Vichy France, Blog 4, Christianity in Vichy France
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
Vichy France in WWII: Pro-Fascist, Pro-Catholic, Pro-Life, Anti-Semitic
https://youtu.be/yYpNrhpmsYw
The European bishops congregating in Rome for Vatican II remembered that, even after the horrors of the war, even after knowing the extent of the Holocaust, there were still fascist-leaning Cardinals and high-ranking church officials in the Vatican who abused their diplomatic privileges by assisting in the escape of Nazi war criminals to Latin America via the infamous Ratlines.[19]
CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
Viktor Frankl tells us, “The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. Apathy can be overcome; irritability can be suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”[20] No matter how dire your circumstances, you can hope, you can always be kind to those around you.
How can we discover the meaning of life? “According to Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in three different ways:
• By creating a work or doing a deed.
• By experiencing something, such as goodness, truth and beauty, in nature or culture,
• Or encountering someone, by experiencing another person in his very uniqueness, by loving him.
• By the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.”[21]
We will conclude with CS Lewis’ observation: “Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer to better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality.”[22]
[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_...
[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratline...
[20] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 65.
[21] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 111.
[22] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 1, Chapter 2, Some Objections, p. 13.
THE NATURE OF THE TRINITYThe most puzzling mystery of Christianity is the Trinity. The most puzzling part of CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity is his explanation of the Trinity. Perhaps this is because he wishes to hide his Catholic sources by restating the teachings of the Catholic Church Fathers so his Protestant listeners won’t close their ears.
His explanation would have been clearer if he had started with St Augustine’s classic seven-fold explanation of the Trinity:
1. “The Father is not the Son nor the Holy Spirit.
2. The Son is not the Father nor the Holy Spirit.
3. The Holy Spirit is not the Father nor the Son.
4. The Father is only the Father.
5. The Son is only the Son.
6. The Holy Spirit is only the Holy Spirit.”
7. There is only one God, as Deuteronomy exhorts us. As St Augustine teaches us, “To all three belong the same eternity, the same unchangeableness, the same majesty, the same power.”
St Augustine continues, “In the Father is unity, in the Son equality, in the Holy Spirit the harmony of unity and equality; and these three attributes are all one because of the Father, all equal because of the Son, and all harmonious because of the Holy Spirit.”[6]
CS Lewis repeats this formulation briefly: “In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube has six faces while remaining one cube.”
CS Lewis simplifies our understanding of the Trinity and how it affects us: When “an ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers,” “he knows that his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God, that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him.” “God is to whom he is praying, the goal he is trying to reach. God is also inside him pushing him on, the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal.”
CS Lewis concludes: “So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.”[7]
St Augustine wrote a treatise on the Trinity, which is on my list of books to read.
THE TRINITY: BEGETTING AND PROCEEDING
CS Lewis discusses the puzzle of how Christ is the Son of God: “One of the creeds,” the Nicene Creed, “says that Christ is the Son of God ‘begotten, not created;’ and it adds ‘begotten by his Father before all worlds,” in other words, eternally begotten, but not created. What CS Lewis does not explain is that the ancient Arian heresy proclaimed that Christ was created by the Father, and there was a time when Christ was not. No Christian denomination today believes this heresy.
CS Lewis distinguishes between making and begetting: “To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself.”[8]
CS Lewis avoids discussing the clause in the Nicene Creed regarding the procession of the Holy Spirit. The Orthodox and original Nicene Creed states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father only, while the Catholic Church version states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. This is the contentious Filioque controversy,[9] which CS Lewis prefers to avoid. CS Lewis also avoids discussing the proper doctrinal belief concerning the Virgin Mary, another contentious issue dividing Protestants and Catholics.
We can never be certain what the words BEGOTTEN and PROCESSION in the Nicene Creed actually mean, as no mortal human being can ever comprehend the mystery of the Trinity. All we can say for sure is that BEGETTING distinguishes the Son from the Father, and that PROCEEDING distinguishes the Holy Spirit from the Father.
The Filioque issue may no longer be blocking full communion between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Dr Wikipedia notes that “Pope Francis omitted the Filioque during his 2021 pastoral visit to Greece. Pope Benedict XVI also omitted the Filioque while reciting the Creed with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I during the Feast of St Peter and St Paul in Rome.”[10]
CS LEWIS AND ST AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS ON TIME AND MEMORY
Was CS Lewis’ chapter on Time and Beyond Time influenced by St Augustine’s reflections on Memory and Time in Book 11 of his Confessions? God is not only beyond time, as St Augustine prays to God, “You are the Maker of all time. If there was any time before you made heaven and earth, how can anyone say that you were idle? You must have created time, for time could not elapse before you had created it.”
As mortal creatures, we experience time differently from God. St Augustine prays to God, “Our years are completed when they move into the past. Your years, God, are one day, yet your day does not come daily but is always today, because your today does not give way to any tomorrow, nor does it take the place of any yesterday. Your today is eternity.”[11]
St Augustine seeks a scientific definition of time. St Augustine remembers that “once I heard a learned man say that time is nothing but the movement of the sun and the moon and the stars, but I did not agree.”[12] But St Augustine is frustrated in his search, as he prays, “I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is.”[13] One fact we can be sure of, is that we should not waste our time on earth on selfish endeavors but seek true happiness in Loving God and our neighbor.
St Augustine’s Confessions, Creation in Genesis, Manicheism, and Pagan Myths, Books 11 Through 13
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/st...
https://youtu.be/Ff-XsE5CuSo
CS Lewis is repeating St Augustine, that “God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another.” He adds the question that many modern Christians have: “If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet with we call ten-thirty.” “Jesus has infinite attention to spare for each one of us.”
CS Lewis refers to the incident when Jesus sensed that a woman seeking to be healed touched his garment, sensing the healing power that flowed out of him. “He is the God who knows everything and also a man asking his disciples, ‘Who touched Me?’”
This understanding that God is beyond time can help to explain the puzzle of predestination. CS Lewis, paraphrasing St Augustine’s Confessions, teaches us: “All the days are NOW for God. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not foresee you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you don them: because, though tomorrow into yet there for you, it is for Him.”[14]
CONCLUSION
CS Lewis says that, as a Christian, you can explain the mystery of Christ “in all sorts of different ways. You can say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true.”
Throughout Mere Christianity CS Lewis shows that he only wants to proclaim the two-fold Love of God and neighbor, that he is not in the least concerned about saying which Christian denomination is truer than the others. He continues, If any of these explanations “do not appeal to you, leave it alone and get on with the formula that does. And, whatever you do, do not start quarreling with other people because they use a different formula from yours.”[15]
[6] St Augustine, “On Christian Doctrine,” In the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volume 2, translated by Rev JF Shaw (Boston: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994, first published 1887), Book 1, Chapter 5, p. 524.
[7] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 2, The Three-Person God, pp. 160-163. When CS Lewis says that “a cube is six squares,” he must mean “a cube has six faces.” This is an error his editor did not catch.
[8] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 1, Making and Begetting, p. 157 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianism
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filioque
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History..., footnotes 126 and 127.
[11] St Augustine, Confessions, Book 11, Chapter 13, p. 263.
[12] St Augustine, Confessions, Book 11, Chapter 23, p. 271.
[13] St Augustine, Confessions, Book 11, Chapter 25, p. 273.
[14] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 3, Time and Beyond Time, pp. 167-170.
[15] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 5, Obstinate Toy Soldiers, pp. 181-182.
CS LEWIS AND VICTORIAN SENSIBILITIESCS Lewis lived in the aftermath of the Victorian era, she reigned from 1837 to 1901.[1] He observed that the Victorian prudishness had been relaxed in the younger generation of his day, and that older people should not assume that the young are corrupt, just as the young should refrain from calling their elders prudes of puritans. He provides good advice: “A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.” He also points out that Christian chastity should not be confused with modesty, though modesty is desirable.[2]
But CS Lewis still has Victorian sensibilities, he habitually calls evil badness: “Goodness is itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.” “Evil is a parasite, not the original thing.”
CS Lewis continues: “Pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or the wrong way, or too much.” “You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness.”[3]
CS LEWIS ON INTIMACY IN RELATIONSHIPS
CS Lewis writes: “Some people think that the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake. The story in the Book of Genesis rather suggests that some corruption in our sexual nature followed the fall and was its result, not its cause.”[4] He even says that “the old Christian teachers said that if man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now, would actually have been greater.” I doubt St Augustine said this, and I cannot imagine which Church Father would have said this, so I wish he would tell us his ancient sources. [5]
CS Lewis does directly quote St Augustine from his Confessions, but does not attribute this famous passage: “A famous Christian long ago told us that when he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realized that while his lips had been saying, ‘Oh Lord, make me chaste,’ his heart had been secretly adding, ‘But Please don’t do it just yet.’”[6]
CS Lewis says that “modern people are always saying that sex is nothing to be ashamed of,” noting that there is nothing wrong with the pleasure that comes with intimacy.
Personally, though I do not disagree with CS Lewis’ teachings on sexual morality, I disagree with the common usage, I prefer to speak of intimacy rather than sex. People should not be treated as objects, they should be treated with dignity, and there is always a danger that when we seek pleasure from our partners, that we will treat them as objects.
In the Hebrew and in the transliteral translations of Leviticus, there are multiple commandments that exhort us: THOU SHALT NOT UNCOVER THE NAKEDNESS OF anyone who is not your wife, and this is not a doctrinal issue since these same commandments in Exodus use concise words that are similar to English usage that mean having sex with, in more or less vulgar or clinical terms. This language in Leviticus emphasizes that even illicit and immoral physical relationships can lead to either deep emotional attachments, or deep emotional resentments, and trauma, so we always prefer to use the phrase, being physically intimate, because this also suggests that the cousin of physical intimacy is emotional intimacy in a caring relationship.
We discussed this and other similar topics in our video explaining my personal philosophy, which parallels our channel philosophy.
Our Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History: Ancient and Modern Classics
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
https://youtu.be/Si0TsO5bNr0
This concept of treating your loved one with dignity and respect is a core teaching of Pope John Paul II’s post-Vatican II Theology of the Body. This theology encourages romantic love between committed partners, in addition to the classical Catholic teaching that the purpose of marriage is to bear children. Perhaps the main reason for this evolution of doctrine is the stunning medical advances in modern times, no longer do women literally risk their lives bearing children.
Likewise, CS Lewis warns of the dangers of lust. “Our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural and healthy’ that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them.” We see this view in our culture, in our movies, in our romance novels, everywhere around us.
CS Lewis warns us that, “like all powerful lies, this is based on a truth” that intimacy can be healthy and normal. “The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal.”
CS Lewis does not caution us about a related lie I have often heard: that all intimacy in marriage is healthy. A husband can treat his wife as a sexual object, denying her dignity, just as easily as a single man can treat his girlfriend as a sexual object, denying her dignity. This is a tendency all couples should guard against.
CS Lewis closes this chapter with the observation that sins of passion can be less dangerous spiritually than sins of destruction. “If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins.”
CD Lewis continues, “All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasures of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power and hatred.” The Diabolical self is more dangerous than the Animal self. CS Lewis concludes, “That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.”[7]
CS LEWIS DISCUSSES DIVORCE
CS Lewis observed that “Christianity teaches that marriage is for life. There is, of course, a difference between different Churches: some do not admit divorce at all; some allow it reluctantly in very special cases.” All Churches view divorce as a desperate remedy, “it is more like having both your legs cut off than it is like dissolving a business partnership.” But all Churches “disagree with the modern view that it is a simple readjustment of partners, to be made whenever people feel they are no longer in love with one another, or when either of them falls in love with someone else.”
“As GK Chesterton pointed out, those who are in love have a natural inclination to bind themselves by promises. Love songs all over the world are full of vows of eternal constancy. The Christian law is not forcing upon the passion of love something which is foreign to that passion’s own nature: it is demanding that lovers should take seriously something which their passion of itself impels them to do.”
CS LEWIS DISCUSSED DIVORCE AS A LAST RESORT
CS Lewis asks, Why “keep two people together if they are no longer in love? There are several sound, social reasons: to provide a home for their children, to protect the woman, who has probably sacrificed or damaged her own career by getting married, from being dropped whenever the man is tired of her.”
The world has changed since the World War II era of CS Lewis, divorce is far more common, even in the Catholic Church. For many years, I was active in a divorce support ministry. On rare occasion, young mothers will ponder whether they should divorce their ex-husband. Rather than preach to them, my preference was to simply ask this simple question: How is he with the kids?
The implication is that if the father is good with the children, give him the benefit of the doubt. Do the kids like to spend time with him? Does he look forward to spending time with the kids? If your children dislike their dad, that is not good. The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is for the children, and that is a practical truth.
The most common misconception is that a divorce ministry is somehow immoral, that it does not try to heal broken marriages, that it ignores the teachings of the Church. The truth is, of all the years I was active in the divorce support ministry, only once did estranged spouses reconcile immediately. Quite often, reconciliation is impossible either because he is a serial cheater, or because physical abuse is occurring. No matter what the wife will admit, you just never know.
The unequivocal message we need to convey is: If either the wife or the children are suffering physical abuse, Jesus wants them to IMMEDIATELY leave and go to a safe place. Jesus may not like divorce, but often separation is necessary. It is very problematic to trust that men who are abusers will ever change, in part because the fear women feel in these situations is so debilitating and humiliating.
A second warning for those contemplating divorce is that second marriages can be problematic for a similar reason: based on my observations, the proportion of stepfathers who molest their stepdaughters is astoundingly high, likely above ten percent, though it would be impossible to obtain accurate statistics on this. IMHO, this is a far greater problem than spouses who fight all the time, as long as the fights don’t get physical.
We always counseled our divorced couples to reconcile, but we defined reconciling as becoming slightly less angry and judgmental tomorrow. Reconciling is a life-long process.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_V...
[2] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 5, Sexual Morality, pp. 94-95.
[3] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, included in volume containing Mere Christianity and the Screwtape Letters (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003, 1944), Book 2, Chapter 2, The Invasion, p. 41.
[4] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 3, The Shocking Alternative, p. 49.
[5] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 5, Sexual Morality, p. 98.
[6] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 5, Sexual Morality, p. 99 and St Augustine, Confessions, translated by RS Pine-Coffin (New York: Dorset Press, 1986, 1961, originally 400 AD), Book 8, Chapter 7, p. 169.
[7] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 5, Sexual Morality, pp. 98-103.
CHASTITY AND FALLING INTO LOVECS Lewis observes: “Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’”
CS Lewis warns us: “The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate the sexual union from” “the total union” of the marriage.[8]
That is true, but today far fewer couples are married than they were in CS Lewis’ time. However, Christians should refrain from criticizing those couples who did not marry. After a few years, we relabeled our support group to the Divorced and Separated Support Group, because we wanted to assure those who needed help that we would not judge them, we would only help them to heal their relationship.
CS Lewis teaches us: “What we call ‘being in love’ is a glorious state, and, in several ways, good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it can subordinate our animal sexuality; in that sense, love is the great conqueror of lust.”
“Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing.” “You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling.” But CS Lewis warns us that the initial excitement will not last, that “love in the second sense is not merely a feeling, but is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit, reinforced in Christian marriages by the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God.”
CS Lewis continues: “‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.”
“People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person, you may expect to go on ‘being in love’ forever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change.”
Should legislators force their Christian views on divorce on the electorate? CS Lewis cautions against this, saying that perhaps there should be two kinds of marriage, a civil marriage and a Church marriage.[9]
Tobit, which is part of the Catholic Scripture but is included in the Protestant Apocrypha,
In this delightful book, Tobias and Sarah are newlyweds who kneel and pray to God before climbing into their wedding bed, asking God to protect them from evil before they consummate their marriage.[10]
What follows the chapter on Christian Marriage? The chapter reflecting on the need for Forgiveness, of course.
[8] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 6, Christian Marriage, pp. 104-105.
[9] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 6, Christian Marriage, pp. 106-114.
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of...
Forgot to include this in my discussion on Catholic divorce:Divorce Care is a non-denominational divorce support group ministry that distributes a thirteen-session set of DVDs with Christian counselors. After the DVD is played, those in the support group are asked to share. Both Protestant and Catholic Churches run these support groups.
https://www.divorcecare.org/
Catholics Surviving Divorce is a similar support group for Catholics, that also provides information on the Catholic annulment process.
https://www.catholicsdivorce.com/
IS CHRISTIANITY HARD OR EASY?In the closing chapters of his Mere Christianity, CS Lewis asks this question: Is Christianity Hard or Easy? The answer is YES, because Christianity is both Hard, and it is easy.
CS Lewis teaches us: “Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, ‘Take up your Cross.’ In other words, it is like going to be beaten to death in a concentration camp. Next minute Jesus says, ‘My yoke is easy and my burden light.’ He means both,” “and both are true.”[1]
The Christian way is both harder and easier. CS Lewis teaches us: “Christ says, ‘Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it.”
“When Christ said, ‘Be perfect,’ He meant it. Christ meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder. In fact, it is impossible.”[2]
What does the command, BE PERRECT, mean? CS Lewis elaborates: “Some people seem to think this means” that Jesus is saying, “Unless you are perfect, I will not help you.” Since this is impossible, they think “our position is hopeless.” But CS Lewis thinks that Jesus meant: “The only help I will give is help to become perfect. You may want something less: but I will give you nothing less.” Basically, CS Lewis is expounding a monastic ideal that is the foundation of Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
CS Lewis says this is what Christ is telling us: “Whatever suffering it may cost you in your earthly life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost you after death, whatever it costs Me, I will never rest, nor let you rest, until you are literally perfect; until my Father can say without reservation that He is well pleased with you, as He said He was well please with Me. This I can do and will do. But I will not do anything less.”[3]
Is CS Lewis’ comment on purification after death a reference to a Catholic purgatory? Many Catholics view purgatory as a physical place, but the Catechism implies that it is spiritual, that “purgatory is the final purification of the elect.” Pope Benedict XVI teaches us that purgatory may be “simply a purification through fire in the encounter with the Lord, Judge and Savior.”[4]
But for many with many with little faith, they rarely ask Christ, How can I become more perfect? Rather, our question to Jesus is instead: What have you done for me lately? What happens to these shallow Christians when, as CS Lewis puts it, they experience “illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptations,” and many other problems, perhaps the sudden death of a loved one. They cry to God, Why me? Why now? What have You done to me? Often, they will choose to lose their faith, rather than realize, as CS Lewis teaches us that these troubles puts man “into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before.” “This process will be long and in parts very painful.”[5]
This question has a theological name: Theodicy, or the question: Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God let us suffer? The fact that there are books complaining about these questions tells us more about ourselves than it tells us about God.
The Stoic assertion, and stoicism was a secondary influence to Apostolic Christianity, second only to Judaism, is that suffering exists, God does not promise to alleviate suffering. Whatever happens to us, suffering or blessings, should make our faith in God stronger rather than weaker, and we should be thankful for both, though Jesus likely does not mind if we are less enthusiastic about suffering, at least in the moments of suffering.
Major Roman Stoic Philosophers, My Favorite Maxims: Epictetus, Rufus, Seneca & Marcus Aurelius
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/ma...
https://youtu.be/E0qQgqGkoOE
Greek Stoic and Cynic Philosophers: My Favorite Maxims: Heraclitus, Antisthenes, Diogenes, and Zeno
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/gr...
https://youtu.be/rq3oRftjM4c
Modern Stoic Philosophers: My Favorite Maxims: Viktor Frankl, Nelson Mandela, and Others
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/mo...
https://youtu.be/rq3oRftjM4c
WHY AREN’T CHRISTIANS OBVIOUSLY NICER?
How does CS Lewis answer the common question many ask: “If Christianity is true, why are not all Christians obviously nicer than all non-Christians?” CS Lewis wrote an entire book answering this question: The Screwtape Letters.
CS Lewis teaches us: “Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ‘religion’ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better; just as in an illness ‘feeling better’ is not much good if the thermometer shows that your temperature is still going up.”
CS Lewis warns us: “When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.” When Christians live “careless lives, this sets the outer world taking; and we give them grounds” to “doubt the truth of Christianity.”
CS Lewis notes that the world is complicated, there are no countries that are a hundred percent Christian, and none that are one hundred percent non-Christian. CS Lewis observes: “There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it.”[6]
CS Lewis is likely referring to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave when he describes how some who are not Christians have not seen the light. “Imagine a lot of people who have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe to them what light is like. You might tell them that if they come into the light, that same light would fall on them and they would all reflect it and thus become what we call visible.”
This could apply to those who have lived their lives in the dark Platonic cave of ignorance, where they refuse to come up into the light even after their chains of ignorance have been loosened. It can also apply to those in CS Lewis’ imagining of what Hell would be like: a dark, lonely place where the sun never shines, where everyone moves further and further away from their neighbors, a place of perpetual loneliness. But extremely few, even when given the opportunity, would take and get off the bus that travels to the brightness of Heaven.
CS Lewis’ Great Divorce, An Allegory of Hell and Plato’s Cave
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com...
St Gregory Of Nyssa on Beatitudes, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and CS Lewis and the Great Divorce
https://youtu.be/wuqwy3GyO_4
CS Lewis concludes Mere Christianity with these reflections:
“Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.
Lose your life and you will save it.
Submit to death, death of your ambition and favorite wishes every day,”
“Submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life.
Keep back nothing, nothing that you have not given away will be really yours.
Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.
Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run
only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay.
But look for Christ and you will find Him,
and with Him everything else thrown in.”[7]
[1] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 8, Is Christianity Hard or Easy?, p. 197, quoting https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/... and https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...
[2] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 8, Is Christianity Hard or Easy? pp. 196-198.
[3] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 9, Counting the Cost, pp. 201-202.
[4] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Edition (Washington DC: US Catholic Conference: 1997), Part One, Section 2, Article 12, The Final Purification, or Purgatory, paragraph 1031, pp. 268-269 and https://aleteia.org/2017/11/02/benedi... which quotes from Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical on Hope, paragraph 48.
[5] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 9, Counting the Cost, pp. 205-206.
[6] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 10, Nice People or New Men, pp. 207-209.
[7] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, Chapter 11, The New Men, pp. 221-227.
Mod
There is a lot of good stuff in these chapters. Five points which were especially illuminating for me.
(1) I guess I never understood fully the concept of Christ as the “begotten” Son of God. I never focused on the distinguished the difference between the concepts of begetting and creating. Here’s the important passage:
We don’t use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set—or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set: say, a statue. If he is a clever enough carver he may make a statue which is very like a man indeed. But, of course, it is not a real man; it only looks like one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.
(2) That the Trinity is a revelation from the understanding of theology from the available facts. It is complex just like understanding three dimensions is complex. He doesn’t actually explain the Trinity but here he gives an analogy why coming to the conclusion of the Trinity is possible:
A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.
(3) How God can see before Him all stages of time simultaneously is important in understanding God’s omniscience. I like Lewis’s example of a novelist seeing the entire time within his novel as God sees all in one flash. Here is the implication of that:
Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty—and every other moment from the beginning of the world—is always the Present for Him. If you like to put it that way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.
Here’s another example not from Lewis. Have you ever heard of a Rube Goldberg cartoon? You can read about it here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Go... In short, it’s a cartoon that lays out a sequence of crazy events which if you let your imagination put them in motion in a domino effect would result in a funny outcome at the end. The sequence is all laid out in front of you but you can take it in with one view. God sees everything in such a laid out fashion. Here is a Rube Goldberg cartoon.
https://whyy.org/wp-content/uploads/2...
(4) I thought how Lewis formulated the Trinity as a dynamic relationship that has always existed and will always exist as very good. It is why we can conceptualize God as love itself.
All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that “God is love.” But they seem not to notice that the words “God is love” have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love…. that is something quite different from what Christians mean by the statement “God is love.” They believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else…And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama.
(5) Chapter 5 of Book Four I think is very important. Here Lewis lays out the reason why the Second Person of the Trinity became incarnate. “For the first time we saw a real man.” That is a man as originally intended in the Eden. He came not just to show us what a real man is but to reverse the fall of man and to provide a means for the rest of us to join Him in paradise. One can quote almost the entire chapter but here is what I think the most important passage.
What, then, is the difference which He has made to the whole human mass? It is just this; that the business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into timeless “spiritual” life, has been done for us. Humanity is already “saved” in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work—the bit we could not have done for ourselves—has been done for us. We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts; it has already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves open to the one Man in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of being God, is also a real man, He will do it in us and for us.
That I think summarizes succinctly the goal of every Christian life. I’m not sure one can summarize Christianity any better than that.
CS Lewis is not a systematic theologian; what his source was for this observation I would really like to know. “All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love.’ But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.”We may say that God is three persons, but that does not mean a Trinity person is the same as a human person. Perhaps personality would be a better word than person, or perhaps not, as the persons of the Trinity are distinguished by the puzzling divine properties of begotten and procession. We really do not know what it means to be a person of the Trinity, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that each person of the Trinity possesses a unique divine personal property.
There is a book of essays by scholars on CS Lewis and Mere Christianity, and his other works, including one by a famed Orthodox author Kallistos Ware:The Pilgrim's Guide: CS Lewis and the Art of Witness
Amazon has lots of used copies of this, I may go through these essays in a month or so.
Most of my screeds on Mere Christianity, including some of Manny's observations, are now posted on my YouTube channel/blog/powerpoint site:www.youtube.com/@ReflectionsMPH
There will be two more postings this week, and then the summary next week, as many people prefer reading summaries.
In summarizing Mere Christianity, I will add this:
WAS CS LEWIS INSPIRED BY PURITAN RICHARD BAXTER?
Many scholars speculate on whether CS Lewis was inspired by the writings of Richard Baxter, a Puritan and prolific author who first coined the phrase “Mere Christianity.” Baxter lived during the intense religious struggle in the late 1600’s, a century after Henry VIII split from the Catholic Church to form the Anglican Church. Baxter was appointed to the royal chaplaincy, but he left his post after the passage of the Act of Uniformity in 1662, which required that all pastors exclusively use the Book of Common Prayer and be ordained as Anglican ministers. Baxter was reluctant to adopt a denomination, proclaiming that “I am a Christian, a MEER CHRISTIAN, of no other religion,” and “I am against all sects and dividing parties.” He did not want to identify either with Catholics, Anglicans, or Presbyterians.
Baxter defines a Christian as someone who “is an esteemer of the unity of the church and is greatly averse to all divisions between believers.” “When he sees anyone making divisions among Christians, he sees them as someone mangling the body of his dearest friend, or as one that is setting fire to his house, and does all that he can to quench the fire.”
Baxter’s definition of a Mere Christian is someone who:
• “Holds beliefs evident from apostolic times.”
• “Adheres to teaches plainly and certainly expressed in Holy Scripture.”
• “Agrees to doctrines held by the universal church throughout the ages.”
• Maintains a “harmony of essential belief amidst a modern community of faith.”
• Experiences a true change of heart, not merely lip service to correct belief, upon his baptism and conversion into the faith.
CS Lewis does not use this exact formula, so the author of the paper we are quoting from, Timothy Miller, concludes that we cannot be sure whether Richard Baxter inspired for CS Lewis. He compares and contrasts the views of CS Lewis and Baxter, noting that they lived during very different historical times. He observes that CS Lewis thought that the denominational differences between Christians were a necessary evil, that we must all choose a church to join, and though we will never be able to bridge these differences, that Christians should avoid interdenominational squabbling so they can instead confront the modern world hostile to the universal “Mere Christianity.”[2]
[2] Timothy Miller, Detroit Baptist Seminar Journal, DBSJ 20, 2015, pp. 65-88.
BEYOND PERSONALITY: OR FIRST STEPS IN THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY
1 – MAKING AND BEGETTING
We have need of theology, as it gives us a roadmap of who God is. Many fall under the false premise that God can only be experienced, and even though these experiences are powerful and valid, on their own they can lead us to wrong ideas about God. We are in need of theology, the knowledge about God as it has been transmitted to us down the ages, as the roadmap to the true God.
In the Nicene Creed we say of Christ that he is “begotten, not made”. The difference between the two words is that begetting means to be the progenitor of one’s own kind. Man begets man, a dog begets a dog, etc. In contrast, when we make something, it is something different from us, such as a piece of furniture, knitting a sweater, or shingling a roof.
There is distinction in how the word ‘life’ is used. Our biological existence is Bios and our Spiritual life is Zoe
2 – THE THREE-PERSONAL GOD
To explain how this can be Lewis follows the concept of the three dimensions, how a line, a square, and a cube are all three in one. The line is part of the cube but remains the line, etc.
God also seeks to be in relationship with us. If we are open to Him, we can get to know Him on a much deeper level as someone who chooses his distance from God.
3 – TIME AND BEYOND TIME
We live in time, from moment to moment. There is the past, present, and future. We should not make the mistake of thinking God is bound by time as we are. He is in the eternal now. As an analogy, we can imagine Him to be an author, who is the creator of the story, but not the story itself.
4 – GOOD INTENTIONS
In an eloquent way Lewis presents to us a good working picture of how to understand the Trinity. If God is love, then this doesn’t automatically mean the reverse, ‘love is God’, as it is often interpreted. Love is a reciprocal action, it always needs another upon which to lavish the love upon. The giving and the receiving happens in equal measure. So the Son was there from the very beginning, otherwise the statement ‘God is love’ would be nonsensical. The reciprocity of this love is the Holy Spirit. This makes Christianity very unique, for God is not a static thing, but Love in action.
5 – THE OBSTINATE TOY SOLDIERS
We have a tendency to live as if God doesn’t exist, because then we can remain within our comfortable habits. However, we are not living the life God had in mind for us. The only person who truly lived like this was Jesus Christ. His perfect union with God enabled Him to come to life again after the crucifixion. God sees mankind from his eternal perspective where all generations form a cohesive being. We only get to see ourselves as individuals who are currently living.
6 – TWO NOTES
Why did God not have more than one Son? God can only beget of Himself, so additional sons would just have been copies of one another.
Looking at mankind as a generational organism doesn’t mean the individual is nothing more than a cog in a machine. Each person is created uniquely with a specific purpose to do the work of God.