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Part II: 1 Dangers of National RepentanceThe Guardian (15 March 1940) Copyright © 1970 by The Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis | |||
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The first and fatal charm of national repentance is, therefore, the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing but, first, of denouncing the conduct of others. If it were clear to the young that this is what he is doing, no doubt he would remember the law of charity. Unfortunately the very terms in which national repentance is recommended to him conceal its true nature. By a dangerous figure of speech, he calls the Government not they but we. And since, as penitents, we are not encouraged to be charitable to our own sins, nor to give ourselves the benefit of any doubt, a Government which is called we is ipso facto placed beyond the sphere of charity or even of justice. You can say anything you please about it. You can indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practicing contrition. | |||
The sight of a Christian rebuking his mother, though tragic, may be edifying; but only if we are quite sure that he has been a good son and that, in his rebuke, spiritual zeal is triumphing, not without agony, over strong natural affection. The moment there is reason to suspect that he enjoys rebuking her that he believes himself to be rising above the natural level while he is still, in reality, grovelling below it in the unnatural the spectacle becomes merely disgusting. The hard sayings of our Lord are wholesome to those only who find them hard. | |||
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Part II: 2 Two Ways With the SelfThe Guardian (3 May 1940) Copyright © 1970 by The Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis | |||
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The Christian must wage endless war against the clamour of the ego as ego: but he loves and approves selves as such, though not their sins. The very self-love which he has to reject is to him a specimen of how he ought to feel to all selves; and he may hope that when he has truly learned (which will hardly be in this life) to love his neighbour as himself, he may then be able to love himself as his neighbour: that is, with charity instead of partiality. The other kind of self-hatred, on the contrary, hates selves as such. It begins by accepting the special value of the particular self called me; then, wounded in its pride to find that such a darling object should be so disappointing, it seeks revenge, first upon that self, then on all. [...] The wrong asceticism torments the self: the right kind kills the selfness. We must die daily: but it is better to love the self than to love nothing, and to pity the self than to pity no one. | |||
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Part II: 3 Meditation on the Third CommandmentThe Guardian (10 January 1941) Copyright © 1970 by The Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis | |||
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The demon inherent in every party is at all times ready enough to disguise himself as the Holy Ghost; the formation of a Christian Party means handing over to him the most efficient make-up we can find. And when once the disguise has succeeded, his commands will presently be taken to abrogate all moral laws and to justify whatever the unbelieving allies of the Christian Party wish to do. If ever Christian men can be brought to think treachery and murder the lawful means of establishing the régime they desire, and faked trials, religious persecution and organized hooliganism the lawful means of maintaining it, it will, surely, be by just such a process as this. The history of the late medieval pseudo-Crusader, of the Covenanters, of the Orangemen, should be remembered. On those who add Thus said the Lord to their merely human utterances descends the doom of a conscience which seems clearer and clearer the more it is loaded with sin. All this comes from pretending that God has spoken when He has not spoken. [...] By the natural light He has shown us what means are lawful: to find out which one is efficacious He has given us brains. The rest He has left to us. | |||
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Part II: 4 On the Reading of Old BooksPreface to St Athanasius The Incarnation of the Word of God, translated by A Religious of C.S.M.V. Copyright © 1970 by The Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis | |||
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The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire. This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St Luke or St Paul or St Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or Mr Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself. Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. [...] sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. | |||
For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that nothing happens when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand. | |||
His approach to the Miracles is badly needed today, for it is the final answer to those who object to them as arbitrary and meaningless violations of the laws of Nature. They are here shown to be rather the re-telling in capital letters of the same message which Nature writes in her crabbed cursive hand; the very operations one would expect of Him who was so full of life that when He wished to die He had to borrow death from others. | |||
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Part II: 6 Meditation in a Tool ShedThe Coventry Evening Telegraph (17 July 1945) Copyright © 1970 by The Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis | |||
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It has been assumed without discussion that if you want the true account of religion you must go, not to religious people, but to anthropologists; that if you want the true account of sexual love you must go, not to lovers, but to psychologists; that if you want to understand some ideology (such as medieval chivalry or the nineteenth-century idea of a gentleman), you must listen not to those who lived inside it, but to sociologists. The people who look at things have had it all their own way; the people who look along things have simply been brow-beaten. It has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow refutes or debunks the account given from inside. | |||
But it is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving explanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, without having been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simply playing with counters. You go on explaining a thing without knowing what it is. | |||
In other words, you can step outside one experience only by stepping inside another. Therefore, if all inside experiences are misleading, we are always misled. The cerebral physiologist may say, if he chooses, that the mathematicians thought is only tiny physical movements of the grey matter. But then what about the cerebral physiologists own thought at that very moment? A second physiologist, looking at it, could pronounce it also to be only tiny physical movements in the first physiologists skull. Where is the rot to end? The answer is that we must never allow the rot to begin. We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. One must look both along and at everything. | |||
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Part II: 8 The Decline of ReligionThe Cherwell, vol. XXVI (29 November 1946) Copyright © 1970 by The Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis | |||
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The decline of religion is no doubt a bad thing for the World. By it all the things that made England a fairly happy country are, I suppose, endangered: the comparative purity of her public life, the comparative humanity of her police, and the possibility of some mutual respect and kindness between political opponents. But I am not clear that it makes conversions to Christianity rarer or more difficult: rather the reverse. It makes the choice more unescapable. When the Round Table is broken every man must follow either Galahad or Mordred: middle things are gone. | |||
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Part II: 11 Priestesses in the Church?published as Notes on the Way in Time and Tide, vol. XXIX (14 August 1948) Copyright © 1970 by The Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis | |||
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But there is nothing irrational in exercising other powers than our reason. On certain occasions and for certain purposes the real irrationality is with those who will not do so. The man who would try to break a horse or write a poem or beget a child by pure syllogizing would be an irrational man; though at the same time syllogizing is in itself a more rational activity than the activities demanded by these achievements. It is rational not to reason, or not to limit oneself to reason, in the wrong place; and the more rational a man is the better he knows this. | |||
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Part II: 12 God in the DockDifficulties in Presenting the Christian Faith to Modern Unbelievers
Copyright © 1970 by The Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis | |||
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The next thing I learned from the R.A.F. was that the English Proletariat is sceptical about History to a degree which academically educated persons can hardly imagine. This, indeed, seems to me to be far the widest cleavage between the learned and the unlearned. The educated man habitually, almost without noticing it, sees the present as something that grows out of a long perspective of centuries. In the minds of my R.A.F. hearers this perspective simply did not exist. It seemed to me that they did not really believe that we have any reliable knowledge of historic man. But this was often curiously combined with a conviction that we knew a great deal about Pre-Historic Man: doubtless because Pre-Historic Man is labelled Science (which is reliable) whereas Napoleon or Julius Caesar is labelled as History (which is not). [...] I had supposed that if my hearers disbelieved the Gospels, they would do so because the Gospels recorded miracles. But my impression is that they disbelieved them simply because they dealt with events that happened a long time ago: that they would be almost as incredulous of the Battle of Actium as of the Resurrection and for the same reason. Sometimes this scepticism was defended by the argument that all books before the invention of printing must have been copied and re-copied till the text was changed beyond recognition. And here came another surprise. When their historical scepticism took that rational form, it was sometimes easily allayed by the mere statement that there existed a science called textual criticism which gave us a reasonable assurance that some ancient texts were accurate. This ready acceptance of the authority of specialists is significant, not only for its ingenuousness but also because it underlines a fact of which my experiences on the whole convinced me; i.e. that very little of the opposition we meet is inspired by malice or suspicion. It is based on genuine doubt, and often on doubt that is reasonable in the state of the doubters knowledge. | |||
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defence for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in Gods acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God is in the Dock. | |||
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Part II: 14 Revival or Decay?Punch, vol. CCXXXV (9 July 1958) Copyright © 1970 by The Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis | |||
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For of course religious people that is, people when they are being religious are not interested in religion. Men who have gods worship those gods; it is the spectators who describe this as religion. The Maenads thought about Dionysus, not about religion. Mutatis mutandis this goes for Christians too. The moment a man seriously accepts a deity his interest in religion is at an end. Hes got something else to think about. | |||
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Part II: 16 Cross-Examinationinterview with Mr Sherwood E. Wirt of the Billy Graham Association, 7 May 1963
Copyright © 1970 by The Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis | |||
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Scripture itself is not systematic; the New Testament shows the greatest variety. God has shown us that he can use any instrument. | |||
There is a difference between a private devotional life and a corporate one. Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa. For example, I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church. | |||
Not only do we need to recognize that we are sinners; we need to believe in a Saviour who takes away sin. Matthew Arnold once wrote, Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread. Because we are sinners, it does not follow that we are saved. | |||
The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it. | |||
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