Mere Christianity
You probably recognize C.S. Lewis as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Considered a classic of children's literature, Narnia is a series of seven fantasy novels that Lewis wrote between 1949 and 1954. The series is Lewis's most popular work, having sold over 100 million copies in 41 languages. Mere Christianity was completed five years before it, thirteen years after the writer's conversion to Christianity.
Born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1898 and raised Christian in the Church of Ireland, Lewis became disillusioned with God at fifteen and started identifying as an atheist. But, due to an irresistible combination of factors, including the works of the Scottish writer George MacDonald, and G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, at thirty-one he converted to theism. He described himself as "kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape” this conversion. “That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me,” he wrote. “In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” At thirty-three he adopted Christianity as his preferred form of theism and became a member of the Church of England. This choice of denominations disappointed one of Lewis’s closest friends, Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien, who’d played a large role in convincing Lewis of God’s existence, and who’d hoped he would join the Catholic Church.
Regarding the title, Mere Christianity, my understanding of the phrase is that it’s referring to the religion as a whole, as opposed to one or a small number of specific communions, like Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy. Lewis says he is talking about “a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted.” Or could we say he’s talking about vanilla ice cream, and if we want to go explore other flavors or toppings, we can? And is “mere” also being used in a facetious way? I know this book was originally a series of radio lectures (pretty cool), so I like to imagine the radio execs approaching Lewis, asking if he’d talk about Christianity, and Lewis scoffing at the vastness of the topic. “Oh, just Christianity? Sure! It’s mere Christianity, after all.” And there was his title.
But that’s not actually how it happened. The good people at Wikipedia inform me that Lewis was given a choice by the BBC to do a series of radio lectures on either modern literature or Christianity as he understood it. He opted for the latter. Every Wednesday from 7:45 pm to 8 pm during August of 1941, Lewis gave live talks entitled "Right or Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe,” which would become the first book in Mere Christianity. The first set of talks became very popular and flooded Lewis with responses from an adoring and irate public. This feedback led to Lewis going back on the air to answer listeners' questions. The following January and February, Lewis gave the next set of talks on what would become “What Christians Believe,” Book 2 in Mere Christianity. In Autumn of 1942, the third series of talks were cut down from 15 to 10 minutes each. Due to a miscommunication, Lewis had prepared for 15 minutes, but added the cut material back into the next book and then added several more chapters. That book—the third—was titled “Christian Behavior.” The talks that comprised the fourth book, called “Beyond Personality: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity,” did not take place until 1944. All four talks were published in one volume—edited by Lewis to better suit the page as opposed to the radio—eight years later, in July of 1952. The fact that it contains four “books” makes Mere Christianity sound long, but it’s only just under two hundred pages. Which I will say did prove too long for the purposes—and deadlines—of this blog. For that reason I will only be addressing the first three books in this post. Feel free to explore Book 4 on your own.
And as for the general reception of Mere Christianity, Lewis biographer Margaret Patterson Hannay described it as Lewis’s "most popular and ... most disparaged" work, adding "probably because its fans have spoken of it as a profound piece of theology, while it is, as it was designed to be, only a primer.” I agree with one Christian critic who found Lewis writing "with his customary clarity and incisiveness, and with proofs that the average man will find convincing. It is a delight to see him demolish in a paragraph many of the heresies which have contributed to our present ghastly condition.” And another, who wrote that "his clarity of thought and simplicity of expression have a magic about them which makes plain the most abstruse problems of theological speculation.” Like the whole matter of God creating human beings who are capable of so much destruction. Why would He do that if He’s the ultimate good? Why would a good thing create something that so often behaves badly? I’ll come back to that later. And I’ll skip over the many examples of well-known people who’ve been influenced by Mere Christianity and simply say that it has been very influential. Not everyone—including me—agrees with all of Lewis’s ideas, but that’s to be expected. If everyone did agree with all of his ideas, I doubt I’d want to read his book.
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In the preface, Lewis begins his exploration at the very beginning: with a definition of the word Christian. He defines it as “one who accepts the common doctrines of Christianity,” not just someone whose life aligns with the spirit of Christ. So even though I behave in many “Christian” ways, the fact that I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell—or in a God the Father—precludes my saying I’m a Christian. Not that I would want to say that, anyway. I cannot deny the logic of Lewis’s arguments in Mere Christianity; if my spirituality were determined by logic alone, his arguments just might have converted me. But my spirituality is not determined by logic alone. I’m reminded of what Jungian analyst Marion Woodman says in her book Addiction to Perfection: “Through consciousness a woman may find she can protect herself from the rape of the masculine power principle… She may listen to his arguments (his logic is excellent) and then firmly respond, ‘Yes, that is true. You argue well, but you are without feelings. Those arguments have nothing to do with my essence…’ The feminine ego can be terrorized by the masculine invasion and its only defense is its authentic feeling.”
There’s some strong language in that passage. Woodman refers to the masculine power principle as “raping” the unconscious feminine. By quoting her, am I implying that Christianity is a masculine power principle, capable of rape? Not necessarily, but it’s an interesting thought. One could make the argument that Christianity is the Patriarchy par excellence, citing the ways in which it oppresses women… I’m not going to make that argument, though. I’m just interested in the role that logic plays in Lewis’s arguments, and how he epitomizes the conscious masculine principle in that way. And I think that because he is conscious, he is not inclined toward rape of any kind; he is, however—I think—in need of some more conscious feminine energy, just to balance things out a little. But then maybe he’d be perfect—or as close to perfect as a human can get—and that’s not what he is supposed to be. It’s useless to expect such perfection in a person, and if our expectations were met, we’d probably find the person boring. You’ve got to disagree with people—see flaws in them, essentially—in order to understand how you really feel, and what your own flaws are. And that’s when things get interesting.
And to be fair to C.S. Lewis, I will say that I read on Wikipedia that a philosopher by the name of Victor Reppert defended Lewis against some attacks related to Mere Christianity’s publication. Reppert apparently points out that many of Lewis's arguments are not strictly logical, and some critics overestimated the degree to which he rested his case for Christianity on reason alone. Apparently Lewis himself says in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, that Christianity rests on far more than solely reason.
But I was saying, back at the beginning of this rambly thing, that I wouldn’t want to call myself a Christian. And that’s not because of the masculine principle or an overly-logical approach to explaining existence. It’s simply because I don’t like the way it feels, to think that one mind created our universe. A mind with a personality, and rules about right and wrong, and a gender. I can’t put it into words, other than to say that I don’t like the way it feels. And there’s the aforementioned fact that I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell. And yet I would say, though C.S. Lewis would disagree, that I am more Christian than a lot of self-proclaimed Christians. I’m also sure there are some atheists or agnostics out there—or people who don’t think of themselves as any particular way because they aren’t really interested in spirituality per se—who are more Buddhist than I am.
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The first book/section of Mere Christianity is titled “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.” This is where Lewis makes his argument for the existence of God-the-Creator. Proof of such a God’s existence, he says, can be found in humankind’s having always upheld the concept of a Moral Law. Our species has an idea of how people should act. This idea is not an instinct or even a set of instincts, Lewis says, but rather something that directs our instincts or keeps them in check. He gives as an example that, in some circumstances, if a stranger calls out to us for help, our first instinct is to ignore them—maybe because it would feel dangerous to linger in a dark alleyway or whatever the context might be, in order to help them. But then another voice joins our inner dialogue, exhorting us to be brave for the sake of the person in need. That voice, Lewis says—or at least this is what I think he’s saying—is God. In some cases, it might actually be too dangerous to answer that cry for help, and God will not judge us for trying preserve our own lives by not helping, but there might still be a part of us that feels bad for not being able to help, because we have this notion that being helpful is the ideal. But where did this notion come from?
Lewis points out that the Natural Law, as opposed to the Moral one, is basically just a statement of facts: we say that such-and-such aspects of trees, rocks, oceans, birds, bees, etc. are “nature’s law” because those aspects are just the observable facts of what those things actually do. But with the Moral Law, or the Law of Decent Behavior, we’re not referring to what human beings actually do; we’re referring to what they should do—and in many cases, they don’t do. “In the rest of the universe,” Lewis says, “there need not be anything but the facts… But men behave in a certain way and that is not the whole story, for all the time you know that they ought to behave differently.” He goes on to say this is how God makes himself known. As “a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way.” Here I have to ask: doesn’t the inside of a human being count as “one of the facts inside the universe” that Lewis claims God can’t show himself as? I’m not really grasping the distinction there.
And why must it be a creationist God who’s pressing on us to behave in a certain way? Why not just more of a Life-Force kind of God? Lewis dismisses the notion of a Life-Force as perhaps “the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen.” He calls it "a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost.” He says that Christianity only “begins to talk” when people realize there is a price they must pay—i.e., they must repent—because there is a Moral Law, and they realize they have broken that law. But what have we done that’s so bad, you might ask? What is it that we supposedly need to repent for? Lewis says we “tried to set up on [our] own, to behave as if [we] belonged to [ourselves].” We are “rebels who must lay down [our] arms.” To repent we must “unlearn all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years.”
I’m not a huge fan of the word “repent,” but I think it’s helpful to keep in mind that Christianity says God forgives us when we repent. It’s not as if He’s hard to please in that way. There needn’t be a bunch of melodrama or self-flagellation. We recognize we’ve made an error or missed the mark—a.k.a. sinned—and we acknowledge it and go about doing our best to right the wrong. And God forgives us. He doesn’t make a big deal out of it, either—the equivalent of an appreciative nod or a gentle pat on the back. Or that’s how I like to picture it, even though I don’t believe in that type of God. I do agree, though, that we humans have been missing the mark in, as Lewis says, “trying to set up on our own, to behave as if we belonged to ourselves.” But I view this through the lens of my belief that God is in everything. I interpret the phrase “tried to set up on our own” as “separated ourselves from Nature.” If you think about it, you might see, as I do, how much of our society’s way of functioning is based on a total lack of faith in Nature, in the Universe. We are taught to hoard money. We are taught to pay for insurance. And the word “insurance,” by the way, is etymologically very close to the word “assurance,” which comes from the Latin “ad-securus,” which basically means “to secure.” We are so incredibly, existentially insecure—so devoid of faith—that we have come up with ways to buy security. So much of our agricultural system is a result of this insecurity, too.
We’ve separated ourselves from nature in all kinds of ways, and I do believe we need to acknowledge what we’ve done and set about trying to do better. As for forgiveness, I think we’re the only ones who can give that to ourselves. What does it mean, after all, to know—to feel, to believe—that God has forgiven you? I can only speak as a non-Christian when I say that it must mean you have forgiven yourself. I just don’t see how it can mean anything else! And as for that bit about “behaving as if we belonged to ourselves,” I can see that as not meaning that we belong to God the Father, but that we belong to Nature. We are not immune to her brutality, nor exempt from enjoying her beauty. We go about thinking our bodies belong to us—to the “us” we’ve built out of stories and delusions—and we are appalled and dismayed by the notion of pain, sickness and death. Especially death. Our fear of death is the ultimate proof of how deeply rooted it is, our belief that we belong to ourselves.
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I haven’t done justice to Lewis’s argument for the existence of a God the Creator. If you’d like to get a better grasp of it, I recommend reading Book One of Mere Christianity (it’s a mere twenty pages), so that you can see the various examples Lewis provides, and just experience his incisive but approachable prose. There were definitely some points that made me go “hmm,” which I haven’t adequately conveyed here. But I’m not going to spend any more time on that part of the book because I myself am not terribly interested in any argument for the existence of God the Father, who is a separate entity from me, who created this world but is not of it. Nothing will “prove" that theory, and I don’t feel the need or even the desire to believe it, so arguments like Lewis’s, while fascinating, aren’t something I’m inclined to give a ton of time or attention to.
Which isn’t to say that I think it’s silly to believe in such a God. I don’t. I respect the belief very much, and I love reading about it. But I’m more interested in reading about what people then do with that belief, and how they use it to explain the world and our place in it, than I am in why they have the belief to begin with. That’s why I so enjoyed Book Two of Mere Christianity, titled “What Christians Believe.” It’s in this section, in the chapter called “The Shocking Alternative,” that Lewis addresses a question I’ve been pondering forever: “Why did god give us free will if that is what makes evil possible?”
He gave us free will, Lewis says, because that is “the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.” God deemed it worth the risk to give mankind a choice as to how to behave, because having that choice is the only way we have any shot at happiness. Otherwise we’re automatons. Lewis says we’re made of really good stuff, and “the better stuff a creature is made of—the cleverer and stronger and freer it is—then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong.” The same creature that invented the bicycle, the condom, and peanut butter (just to name my husband’s top three favorite inventions) also created the atom bomb. It makes sense that the other side of the coin has to be there. You can’t create a being who’s incredibly intelligent and expect it to only invent certain types of things. Unless it’s just an automaton. What I’m seeing in Lewis’s argument is that badness has to exist for goodness to exist, just as darkness would not exist without light—because what is darkness if darkness is all there is? It’s not anything. Lewis uses this metaphor in the first chapter of Book Two, in regards to atheism. He proclaims that atheism is “too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark.”
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In Chapter Two of “What Christians Believe,” Lewis compares the only two views that “face all the facts” when it comes to the nature of human existence. One, of course, is Christianity, which asserts “that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been.” The other view is Dualism, “the belief that there are two equal and undefended 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.” Lewis appreciates Dualism, except for one big catch: who is judging each side in a given conflict, deciding which is morally superior to the other? It’s a third party, separate from the good and the bad, and that third party is “the real God.”
Lewis makes another interesting point in this same chapter when revealing what he sees as an additional logistical flaw in Dualism. “If Dualism is true,” he says, “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 badness consists in pursuing [good things like pleasure, money, power, safety] by the wrong method.” Lewis asserts that “you can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness… No one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong—only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him.” How fascinating! Humans don’t want to feel bad, right? In cases of self-harming behavior and other manifestations of psychic imbalance, we might get perverse enjoyment out of feeling bad—but even then, it’s enjoyment. We don’t do things in order to simply feel bad; there’s always some purpose or even pleasure to our feeling bad. In much the same way, we are not cruel for the sake of being cruel. Cruelty is one way we humans have of putting ourselves first—a belief in our primacy that has become warped to the point of our feeling justified in treating other beings meanly. “The moment you have a self at all,” Lewis says, “there is a possibility of putting yourself first—wanting to be the centre—wanting to be God, in fact.”
Earlier on in Mere Christianity, in Chapter Two of Book One, Lewis says, “The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.” What comes to mind for me, from current events, is how some people cling to their beliefs about abortion, to the point of saying that all pregnancies should be carried to term no matter what—even if there’s a good chance the mother will die, or both mother and baby will die, or the baby is going to be born with some ungodly health condition that would make her life and her parents’ lives a total hell. I’m truly amazed that people actually take this stance, but apparently they do. It’s so insane you can’t even argue with it, because you’d be “arguing with a madman,” to borrow Ed Abbey’s phrase, and that’s a total waste of time and energy. I think that “devils” is another great word for describing such people, those who “take any one impulse of [their] own nature and set it up as the thing [they] ought to follow at all costs.”
Another example, much different from the abortion one, is health. The following passage actually comes from a chapter called “Hope,” in Book Three of Mere Christianity: “Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilization as long as civilization is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.” The “something else” he’s referring to here is Heaven, which I’ll address a little later.
And yet a third example of something we should not set up as the impulse to follow at all costs, is spirituality itself. The concept of spiritual bypassing comes to mind, which refers to people not adequately addressing their psychological issues—their grief and trauma, for instance—and/or suppressing their valid emotional needs because all that stuff’s an illusion, anyway, so what’s the point in giving it any attention? That’s all ego stuff, and I’m trying to get beyond ego. But according to Lewis, “God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature.” It does seem like the proof of this can be found in the fact that God gave us bodies. Lewis also cites how God “uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.” I think of my late grandmother here, who, based on what I’ve read in her voluminous diaries, seemed to believe that she should be a purely spiritual creature. And when she didn’t meet her own expectations—which was pretty much always the case because those expectation weren’t realistic—she suffered. I’m not going to say she became a devil—she was far too sweet a soul to ever say such a thing about—but she certainly did have a type of devil in her psyche, always expecting her to be different than she was, always shaming her for not meeting those expectations.
Again: “The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.” Lewis actually repeats that admonition twice in Mere Christianity, so I thought I’d do the same here.
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Book Three, “Christian Behavior,” is loaded with interesting ideas. At sixty-five pages, it is the longest section in the book and the one with the most chapters. The first five chapters of Book Three are about morality. They’re titled, “The Three Parts of Morality,” “The ‘Cardinal Virtues’,” “Social Morality,” “Morality and Psychoanalysis,” and “Sexual Morality.” Chapter One divides morality into three parts, based on the three things it’s primarily concerned with: “Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonizing the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.” In its dealings with the third, Lewis says, Christian morality makes itself quite distinct from other types.
One of my favorite lines in Mere Christianity appears in Chapter Three of Book Three, and it’s one I quoted last week when discussing The Spirituality of Imperfection. Reflecting on social morality, Lewis says, “Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr. Johnson said, ‘People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.’ The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see.” (Dr. Johnson, by the way, refers to Samuel Johnson, English poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer, born 1709, died 1784.) Reading this, I feel reassured that I have not been quack- or crank-like in my approach to this blog. None of the stuff I write about is new information. When it comes to spirituality, we don’t need any new information. The great teachers have been saying that for centuries, even millennia. Of course, I’m sure some readers have learned things they didn’t know before perusing this blog, but when it comes to the basic spiritual truths, nothing I share here is new—except for my own personal anecdotes about working with these truths in my own life—which is partly why I include said anecdotes. No one else is living my life; it is what I have to offer to the conversation, an offering that’s never existed before and will never exist again once I die.
This notion touches on another way to interpret Lewis’s (and Johnson’s) words: we need to be reminded more than instructed because we are ultimately the only ones who can teach ourselves. No one else can get in our head and heart and muscles and bones and know exactly how it feels to be us. Only we know what we’re working with, what we’re capable of. Encouragement from others is certainly helpful, but others cannot put lessons inside of us; we have to accept the lessons and be willing to learn from them. And in that way, we create the lessons. Spiritual teachings remind us that we are the best teacher we can ever hope to have.
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Lewis addresses the notion of charity twice in Book Three of Mere Christianity. Giving to the poor, he says, “is an essential part of Christian morality.” He reminds us of what the New Testament says about everyone needing to work, at least in part so they might have something to give to those in need. That whole concept is definitely severely underrepresented in our current society! I can at least speak for myself when saying I did not start my first job (at Manhattan Bagel when I was fifteen) so that I’d have something to give to the needy. And having that ability to give was never a reason for starting any of my subsequent jobs. When I became a therapist, though, it was my intention to be financially accessible to people, and in that way I guess I was trying to give to the needy—but still making money off them. Once I got to where I was actually saving some of that money, and had something “extra” for the first time in my life, I was happy to give to charity. I’m just saying that the ability to give was never my primary motivation for working.
I will also admit that I could probably be giving more. But how can we know when enough is enough? Lewis says that “the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.” Yes, you heard that right: “more than we can spare.” “In other words,” he says, “if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.” Well that’s humbling. And the first place my mind goes is to wondering if Lewis adhered to his own standard when it came to charitable giving. Did he give more than he could spare? I guess it doesn’t matter all that much, because even if he didn’t, it wouldn’t negate the validity of his argument. Again, it’s that notion that people should behave in certain ways, but don’t. Lewis himself was no exception, I’m sure—if not when it came to charitable giving, then to other things.
Also regarding charity, in the chapter called “Charity,” Lewis says that it means “Love, in the Christian sense.” But this is not referring to 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.” It is largely a behavior. Whether we emotionally love our neighbors doesn’t really matter; regardless of how we feel toward them, we must act as if we loved them. “As soon as we do this,” Lewis says, “we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more.” This notion reminds me of something I once read in a grad school text about social psychology: if you’re worried that someone doesn’t like you—a co-worker, let’s say—then a good way to win that person over is to ask them for a favor. This seems counter-intuitive, I know. Seems like doing them a favor would result in the desired outcome. And I can’t recall exactly how doing someone a favor makes us like them more, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s because when we are kind and helpful to others, we feel more aligned with our source, and that alignment feels good, and we associate that good feeling with the person we’re helping or have just helped. Also: our brains are rationalization machines: if we do something nice for someone, we can rationalize it during or after the fact by thinking that we like them.
What Lewis has to say about loving our neighbors is actually an echo of something he says earlier in Book Three of Mere Christianity. In the chapter titled “Forgiveness,” he considers what it really means to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” And he starts by asking, “How exactly do I love myself?” It’s definitely not always through feelings of fondness or affection; in many instances he doesn’t even enjoy his own company. So in his mind this implies that he need not always feel fond of his neighbor or find him attractive in order to love him. He doesn’t even have to think his neighbor is a nice person or a good person, as he doesn’t always think that of himself. The love comes in, though, in what he wants for his neighbor, which is the same thing he wants for himself: to be that nice, good person. You can hate a person’s behavior, but not the person himself. Lewis says that for the longest time he scoffed at the notion of “hate the sin but not the sinner.” He simply couldn’t see how it was possible. “But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.” So it’s really more of a disappointment that we feel towards the man (or woman, or non-binary person) in question. Lewis says you can test how well you’re doing with hating the sin but not the sinner by noticing how you react when you learn that someone who’s behavior you generally abhor—Donald Trump, for instance—is reported to have just behaved in some newly abhorrent way. But then “something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.” If your first thought is “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” then you’re doing well at hating the sin but not the sinner. But if you experience disappointment upon learning that Trump didn’t behave so badly after all, in this hypothetical situation, you’ve got some work to do. If you are determined “to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible,” then Lewis says you are engaged in a process which, if followed to the end, will turn you into a devil.
And my god, people! Isn’t that what so many of us are doing when it comes to how politically polarized we’ve become as a nation? How many of you die-hard Democrats out there want Trump to be a bad man? It’s a dangerous way to be. It is definitely not a Christian way to be. And if you don’t identify as Christian, maybe you don’t need to worry about that dangerous behavior. But I don’t identify as Christian, and I worry about it. I want to love my neighbor, because the alternative feels gross. I want to love my neighbor in the Christian sense, as Lewis describes it, which doesn’t mean I feel fond of him or say he is nice when he isn’t, but that I simply wish his good, and “hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured [of his badness].”
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The last two ideas I’ll address from Book Three of Mere Christianity have to do with Heaven and faith. Lewis argues that the proof of Heaven’s existence lies in the fact that we humans are never satisfied with life on earth. He says that we are not born with desires “unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” It’s yet another fascinating point to consider, and it upholds that seemingly unassailable logic that Lewis is such a master of. But it asserts that there are no exceptions to the desire rule. Just because we can find ways of fulfilling most desires, why must that necessarily mean that all desires can be fulfilled? It goes against the essence of the Buddha’s first teaching, which consisted of the Four Noble Truths: there is suffering, the cause of suffering is desire, the cure for suffering is in the cessation of desire, and the cessation of desire can be achieved by following the Eight-fold Path. I prefer the Buddhist take on desire for multiple reasons, a big one being that it doesn’t make our happiness dependent on our desires being fulfilled—or in the case of the Christian idea of Heaven, on those desires being fulfilled after we die. I like to think the real trick is to get better at not having every desire fulfilled, to accept Life on its own terms.
And finally, I’ll briefly address what Lewis has to say about faith. He actually ends Book Three with two chapters that are both titled “Faith,” as he believes there are two types of faith that Christians possess. One type is actually a habit, the habit of exposing themselves to the teachings, so that they can be reminded of what they believe. It is a type of training. In that way it is no different from my Buddhist practice. A refrain in the daily recitation that we read at my sangha says, “In this way, I do most deeply vow to train the self.” An important part of that training is going to the Buddha hall, just as for Christians it’s going to church.
The second type of faith Lewis addresses in Book Three of Mere Christianity is the notion of trusting Christ, or “handing everything over to Him.” At first glance this seems more emotional than the first. Trust is more of a feeling we have than a habit we cultivate… Or is it? Lewis says that trusting Christ simply means “trying to do all that He says.” So again, it’s all about behavior. “There would be no sense,” Lewis says, “in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to [Christ], it must follow that you are trying to obey Him.” I just love how practical and utilitarian that is! When you trust someone, you take their advice. And Lord knows Christ has a lot of it to give. Lewis goes on to say, “if what you call ‘faith’ in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what He says, then it is not Faith at all—not faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him.”
I will leave you with one last passage from Lewis, borrowed from the chapter on sexual morality. He says, “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. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasure of power, of hatred.”
