Generosity and Ownership

Nothing that you have not given away will ever truly be yours.

C. S. Lewis

Originality

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

C. S. Lewis

Two Types of Knowing

“Meditation in a Toolshed"

  C. S. Lewis 

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes casual chat with her is more precious than all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. lie is, as they say, “in love”. Now comes a scientist and describes this young man's experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man's genes and a recognised biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it.

When you have got into the habit of making this distinction you will find examples of it all day long. The mathematician sits thinking, and to him it seems that he is contemplating timeless and spaceless truths about quantity. But the cerebral physiologist, if he could look inside the mathematician's head, would find nothing timeless and spaceless there - only tiny movements in the grey matter. The savage dances in ecstasy at midnight before Nyonga and feels with every muscle that his dance is helping to bring the new green crops and the spring rain and the babies. The anthropologist, observing that savage, records that he is performing a fertility ritual of the type so- and-so. The girl cries over her broken doll and feels that she has lost a real friend; the psychologist says that her nascent maternal instinct has been temporarily lavished on a bit of shaped and coloured wax.

As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction, it raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the “true” or “valid” experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you can hardly ask that question without noticing that for the last fifty years or so everyone has been taking the answer for granted. 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. “All these moral ideals which  look so transcendental and beautiful from inside”,  says the wiseacre, “are really only a mass of biological instincts and inherited taboos.” And no  one plays the game the other way round by  replying, “If you will only step inside, the things that look to you like instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real and transcendental nature.”

That, in fact, is the whole basis of the specifically “modern” type of thought. And is it not, you will ask, a very sensible basis? For, after all, we are often deceived by things from the inside. For example, the girl who looks so wonderful while we're in love, may really be a very plain, stupid, and disagreeable person. The savage's dance to Nyonga does not really cause the crops to grow. Having been so often deceived by looking along, are we not well advised to trust only to looking at?   in fact to discount all these inside experiences?

Well, no. There are two fatal objections to discounting them all. And the first is this. You discount them in order to think more accurately.  But you can't think at all - and therefore, of course, can't think accurately - if you have nothing to think about. A physiologist, for example, can study pain and find out that it “is” (whatever is means) such and such neural events. But the word pain would have no meaning for him unless he had “been inside” by actually suffering. If he had never looked along pain he simply wouldn't know what he was looking at. The very subject for his inquiries from outside exists for him only because he has, at least once, been inside.

This case is not likely to occur, because every man has felt pain. 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. That is why a great deal of contemporary thought is, strictly speaking, thought about nothing - all the apparatus of thought busily working in a vacuum.

The other objection is this: let us go back to the toolshed. I might have discounted what I saw when looking along the beam (i.e., the leaves moving and the sun) on the ground that it was “really only a strip of dusty light in a dark shed”. That is, I might have set up as “true” my “side vision” of the beam. But then that side vision is itself an instance of the activity we call seeing.  And this new instance could also be looked at from outside. I could allow a scientist to tell me that what seemed to be a beam of light in a shed was “really only an agitation of my own optic nerves”.  And that would be just as good (or as bad) a bit of debunking as the previous one. The picture of the beam in the toolshed would now have to be discounted just as the previous picture of the trees and the sun had been discounted. And then, where are you?

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 mathematician's thought is “only” tiny physical movements of the grey matter. But then what about the cerebral physiologist's 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 physiologist's 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. In particular cases we shall find reason for regarding the one or the other vision as inferior. Thus the inside vision of rational thinking must be truer than the outside vision which sees only movements of the grey matter; for if the outside vision were the correct one all thought (including this thought itself) would be valueless, and this is self-contradictory. You cannot have a proof that no proofs matter. On the other hand, the inside vision of the savage's dance to Nyonga may be found deceptive because we find reason to believe that crops and babies are not really affected by it.  In fact, we must take each case on its merits. But we must start with no prejudice for or against either kind of looking. We do not know in advance whether the lover or the psychologist is giving the more correct account of love, or whether both accounts are equally correct in different ways, or whether both are equally wrong. We just have to find out. But the period of brow-beating has got to end.

Donegality

(Click on the title link to a fascinating NT Wright article on a book about CS Lewis)

Donegality is essentially a way of getting at the experience of something in contrast to the knowledge of something. The difference between contemplation and enjoyment. I can contemplate a piece of music, or I can enjoy it...

The article explores the possibility that Lewis' seven book series was intended to help people enjoy something without contemplating it; that hiding the explicit viewpoint being expressed would help people to see the world through the viewpoint, instead of merely looking at the viewpoint itself. It is the difference between looking at a pair of glasses, and wearing them...

A Good Christian

One is sometimes glad not to be a great theologian, it is so easily confused with being a good Christian.

Obedience

We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.

The Nature of Evil

"…badness consists in pursuing [good things] by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much. …wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way."

C. S. Lewis

Repentance

"Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor--that is the only way out of our 'hole'. This process of surrender--this movement full speed astern--is what Christians call repentance."

C. S. Lewis

Repentance

"Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, 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."

C. S. Lewis

Perfection

...the command to be perfect as God is perfect is not idealistic nonsense, nor is it a command to do the impossible. God wants to make us into people who can obey the command.

United to God

There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made. Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prizes which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?

Originality

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

C. S. Lewis

A Sneaking Platonism

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Nations, cultures, arts, civilization-these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit-immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously-no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner-no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses."

C. S. Lewis

Prosperity

"Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

C. S. Lewis

Philip Yancey

A story is told about a group of English theologians discussing the Gospel.

They were trying to define what it was about Christianity that was different than all other religions. To begin they talked about resurrection but other religions also deal with this, they brought up the death of God but other religions have within them a god who dies, they were in the midst of trying to determine the attribute that made Christianity unique when C. S. Lewis entered the room. He asked what the discussion was about, they told him. Lewis answered, “That’s easy, it’s grace.”

Philip Yancey

Redeeming the Trades

"People say, 'The Church ought to give us a lead.' That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way. By the Church they ought to mean the whole body of practising Christians. And when they say that the Church should give us a lead, they ought to mean that some Christians - those who happen to have the right talents - should be economists and statesmen, and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting 'Do as you would be done by' into action. If that happened, and if we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly. But, of course, when they ask for a lead from the Church most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political programme. That is silly. The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live for ever: and we are asking them to do quite a different job for which they have not been trained. The job is really on us, on the laymen. The application of Christian principles, say, to trade unionism or education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters: just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists - not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time."

C. S. Lewis

Will

"There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘Thy will be done.’"

C. S. Lewis

Hell

I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.
All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will [a grumbling] mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood...
--excerpted from The Problem of Pain and The Great Divorce

CS Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis is, on a personal level, the most influential author in my library. I have enjoyed his fiction and philosophy, and even bits of his literary critique. I have greatly enjoyed his work in elucidating the Christian faith. I can point to no single work of his, however, as having any tremendous and immediate impact upon my life. Lewis' influence upon me is best described as that of familiarity; I grew up reading his fiction and continue to read books in the many genre's of his works. I find myself at home in his mind. His peculiar blend of logical mental capacity and poetic mental outlook, his characteristic intellectual humility, and his common sense approach to ideas have greatly influenced my way of thinking and perceiving.

The Abolition of Man

The Four Loves

The Great Divorce

Mere Christianity

Miracles

The Problem of Pain

Reflections on the Psalms

The Screwtape Letters

Suprised by Joy

The Chronicles of Narnia:
The Horse and His Boy
The Last Battle
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Magician's Nephew
Prince Caspian
The Silver Chair
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The Space Trilogy:
Out of the Silent Planet
Perelandra
That Hideous Strength

Collections:
The Grand Miracle
The Joyful Christian
The Seeing Eye
The Weight of Glory

Life

Asking the wrong questions is the surest way to get the wrong answers!

And sometimes…

…asking questions is the surest way to get answers that, right or wrong, will distract us from the path of action in front of us.

Remember, “Knowing the path, and walking the path, are not the same thing.”

Our relationship to God is not about answers to questions but about interaction with a super-personal being who fathered the whole of creation. To reduce that interaction to a series of propositional truths is to miss the whole point (not that these too, do not have their time and place as God is immediate as well as transcendent). It is akin to reducing our whole network of pains and pleasures, familiarity, love and sacrifice, that we call “family,” to a genealogical record. It is not the real thing, it is a statement about the real thing (albeit an accurate one).

Or, as someone once wrote, “Faith without works is dead.”

It is a dangerous thing to be consumed with knowledge, it can inhibit action; we can be so consumed with the minutia of theological definition that we fail at loving the individual in front of us or the God who created, MAY THIS NEVER BE!

There is a disconnect between what we know and how we act. We must be wary of this; knowing something about God does not make us close to Him, knowing much about the Bible does not equate to living a life shaped by its pages. We should seek first to live our faith, in that pursuit our faith will grow. If we seek however, to grow our knowledge as an end in itself, it will cause our very selves to whither away.

How wonderful that God is not this way. Who He is and what He does are not inconsistent; when Moses asked God who He was, He answered Moses, “I AM.”

May we also, in this same simple yet transcendent way, BE…

I have always been a great fan of C. S. Lewis. I have said that, “I am at home in his mind.” I have grown up reading his fantasies, and been influenced by his concepts, always, I am amazed at his uncanny ability to approach an issue from an odd angle. I read recently a chapter out of Miracles that spoke to me about the nature of God.

“The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance. If He were the truth, then we could really say that all the Christian images of kingship were a historical accident of which our religion ought to be cleansed. It is with a shock that we discover them to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters-when the line pulls a your hand, when something breathes beside you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. ‘Look out!’ we cry, ‘it’s alive’. And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back-I would have done so myself if I could-and proceed no further with Christianity. An ‘impersonal God’-well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads-better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap-best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband-that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?

So it is a sort of Rubicon. One goes across: or not. But if one does, there is no manner of security against miracles. One may be in for anything.”

Chapter 11 - Christianity and ‘Religion’

All of us want God to be a ‘tame’ lion… (which is to cease to be a lion)
…none of us are truly comfortable with the ‘good’ lion; who’s very goodness promises us no such security or comfort, only life eternal and infinite and abundant.

“I know deep down there must be an exciting world waiting for us if we would only pull back the curtain or jump to the other side of the ravine – but we're all too afraid to make the leap. My inner being says, ‘Jump!’”

Burlap Bob