Mere Christianity

Metadata

This is a slim read dense with thoughts and I have yet to sort through everything. Collected here is a first pass at notes from the source, without yet drawing in much of my own commentary.

Summary

  • In B-Mere Christianity, CS Lewis puts forward the 'why' underlying Christianity, both from the perspective of a current Christian and former Atheist.
  • He reasons through arguments and explanations in a philosophical fashion, using the Logic to build up from a concept of innate Morality to ultimately the tenets of Christianity and who God is.
  • Lewis argues that There are no ordinary people because Individuals are infinite beings. If we believe everyone, or at least their soul, to be immortal, that completely reframes how we see people and the world.
  • He suggests that Morality is innate in humanity and so we are all led to seek some higher meaning or cause. Throughout history this has been the case and while specifics differ (religions, facts, laws, etc.), the overarching similarities (murder, not liking people who betray you) are greater.
  • If Morality is innate in humanity, this leads to the idea that there must be some sort of higher reality or law, otherwise how did this innate moral law come about?
  • To accept this, we must accept our notions can be wrong. Progress requires admitting mistakes. At this point Lewis is does not even mean Christianity, simply that there is a moral law innate in us and at some point we must begin to wonder where or what (or who) that comes from.
  • Throughout history religions have sprung up to try and make sense of this and the universe. Lewis says being Christian means you can see each of these are seeking after some hint of Truth. Atheism means you must assume all of history was making the same massive mistake.
  • Even so, people like to pick and choose bits of Morality and religions but by suggesting that some ideas are more right than others, we again return to the problem that there is some innate standard (Morality is innate in humanity).
  • God is not the world. He is not the same as the world and will be here before and after. Gave us free will so naturally some things in the world are contrary to his will.
  • The inconceivable can only be believed. If we understood all it would not be inconceivable so it would be lying.
  • Christianity can not be done in halves because God wants all of you. Based on his claims, Jesus is either God or a lunatic, not a great moral teacher. There is no in between.
  • Right does not mean comfortable
  • Free will makes evil, but also love, possible
  • Cannot earn anything by being good
  • Moral laws are directions not restrictions for living. God judges by moral choices.
  • Hate the actions, not the man. We say impossible but this is actually how we treat ourselves. 'Do unto others as you would onto yourself'
  • Feelings follow action
  • Generosity is not optional
  • Evil cannot stand alone . Pride leads to every other vice
  • The lesser of two evils is still evil
  • Faith is not in opposition to reason

Highlights

  • "When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object."
  • "Our declaring the notion of sin to be obsolete has not diminished human suffering. And the easy answers: blaming technology, or, for that matter, the world’s religions, have not solved the problem."
  • "CS Lewis, who was once described by a friend as a man in love with the imagination"
  • "Lewis once stated, that “There are no ordinary people” and that “it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.” Once we tune ourselves to this reality, Lewis believes, we open ourselves to imaginatively transform our lives in such a way that evil diminishes and good prevails."
  • ==“How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different the saints.”==

Morality is innate in humanity

  • "Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are;"
  • "There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference."
  • "If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently?"
  • "First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in."
  • "The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys."
  • "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."
  • "==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. ==But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.=="
  • "...your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about".
  • =="Differences of morality and differences of belief about facts."==
  • "It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behaviour, and yet quite definitely real—a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us."

Right does not mean comfortable

  • "...for the behaviour we call bad or unfair is not exactly the same as the behaviour we find inconvenient, and may even be the opposite."
  • "All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?"
  • "In religion, as in war and everything else, ==comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it.== If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth..."

Progress requires admitting mistakes

  • "We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. ==If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road;=="
  • "If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. 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."
  • "When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most;"

God is not the world

  • =="A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed."==
  • "You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will."
  • "Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, ‘Why is there a universe?’ ‘Why does it go on as it does?’ ‘Has it any meaning?’ would remain just as they were?"
  • "Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it."
  • "My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line."
  • =="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. Dark would be a word without meaning."
  • "Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect."
  • =="Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed."==

Evil cannot stand alone

  • "I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. ==You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness.=="
  • =="...one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong—only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him."==
  • "...badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness."

Free will makes evil, but also love, possible

  • "You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible."
  • "Why, then, did God give them free will? Because ==free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.=="
  • "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."
  • "...money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

Jesus is either God or a lunatic

  • "God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man [Jesus] said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips."
  • "But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did."
  • "In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history."
  • =="A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic"==

The inconceivable can only be believed

  • "...if we found that we could fully understand it, that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be—the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning."
  • "To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?"
  • =="Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority."==
  • "A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life."

Being good does not earn anything

"That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or—if they think there is not—at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. ==He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us;=="

Moral laws are directions not restrictions for living

  • =="We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it."==
  • "...moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine.
  • "Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for:"
  • =="You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society. ==That is why we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality inside the individual."
  • "Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further."
  • "And Fortitude includes both kinds of courage—the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that ‘sticks it’ under pain."
  • =="We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort."==

Individuals are infinite beings

  • "...individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, 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 civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.=="

Generosity is not optional

  • "You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian: every one is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest."
  • "I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare."
  • =="For many of us the great obstacle to charity lies not in our luxurious living or desire for more money, but in our fear—fear of insecurity."==

God judges by moral choices

  • "However much you improve the man’s raw material, you have still got something else: the real, free choice of the man, on the material presented to him,"
  • "Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices."
  • =="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 the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it."==
  • =="A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right."==
  • =="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."==

[[Hate the actions, not the man]]

  • =="Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive..."==
  • "For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself."
  • "Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment—even to death."
  • "‘Love your neighbour’ does not mean ‘feel fond of him’ or ‘find him attractive’."
  • "The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black."
  • =="That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not."==

Pride leads to every other vice

  • "...it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice."
  • "Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man."
  • "Nearly all those evils in the world which people put down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of Pride."
  • "Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."
  • =="If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed."==
  • "If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud."

Feelings follow actions

  • "They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not."
  • "The idea that ‘being in love’ is the only reason for remaining married really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all. If love is the whole thing, then the promise can add nothing; and if it adds nothing, then it should not be made."
  • =="Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go."==
  • "But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will;"
  • "Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did."
  • =="Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance."==
  • =="Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither."==
  • "To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice."
  • "Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already."
  • =="Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ‘religion’ mean nothing unless they make our actual behaviour better;"==

Faith is not in opposition to reason

  • "If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all."
  • "In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so."
  • =="The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other."==
  • "Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods."
  • "That is why daily prayers and religious readings and church-going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. ==Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind.=="
  • "No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good."

God acts within and outside us

  • "...we begin by thinking it is like two men working together, so that you could say, ‘He did this bit and I did that.’ But this way of thinking breaks down. God is not like that. He is inside you as well as outside."
  • "And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life."
  • "He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others—not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. ==Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.=="
  • "If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact."

God is outside time

  • ==There is total free will. God is outside time so their is no prediction or determining because to him there is no yesterday/today/tomorrow. He sees it all at once.==
  • "In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already ‘Now’ for Him."
  • "For, of course, to have a history means losing part of your reality (because it has already slipped away into the past) and not yet having another part (because it is still in the future): in fact having nothing but the tiny little present, which has gone before you can speak about it."

Love requires the trinity

  • "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" --> ==Humans like 2D, God/trinity is like 3D==
  • =="...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."==
  • There was always the son
  • =="Of course, what these people mean when they say that God is love is often something quite different: they really mean ‘Love is God’."==
  • "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."

God wants to make us good because he loves us

  • "He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has—by what I call ‘good infection’. ==Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.=="
  • "If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would not look like a lot of separate things dotted about. It would look like one single growing thing—rather like a very complicated tree."
  • "Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body—different from one another and each contributing what no other could."

The lesser of two evils is still evil

  • "That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one."

God wants all of you

  • =="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. No half-measures are any good."==
  • "...surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is?"
  • "Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours."
  • =="The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call ‘ourselves’, to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good’."==
  • "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."

God has a plan to perfect you

  • "We have been shown the plan only in so far as it concerns ourselves."
  • "I think He meant ‘The only help I will give is help to become perfect. You may want something less: but I will give you nothing less.’"
  • =="...you must realise from the outset that the goal towards which He is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole universe, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that goal."==
  • "The job will not be completed in this life; but He means to get us as far as possible before death."

Being a christian is not a question of being nice or nasty

  • ==God looks at what you are working with. He knows what two pennies are worth to you vs the two bags of gold.==
  • "The question is what Miss Bates’s tongue would be like if she were not a Christian and what Dick’s would be like if he became one."
  • "We have been talking, in fact, as if Dick were all right; as if Christianity was something nasty people needed and nice ones could afford to do without; and as if niceness was all that God demanded. But this would be a fatal mistake."
  • =="The niceness, in fact, is God’s gift to Dick, not Dick’s gift to God."==
  • "...because that niceness in Dick was merely part of nature, it will all go to pieces in the end. Nature herself will all pass away."
  • "...chance to turn (or rather, to allow God to turn) that momentary pattern into the beauty of an eternal spirit:"
  • =="We must, therefore, not be surprised if we find among the Christians some people who are still nasty. There is even, when you come to think it over, a reason why nasty people might be expected to turn to Christ in greater numbers than nice ones. That was what people objected to about Christ during His life on earth:"==
  • "Now quite plainly, natural gifts carry with them a similar danger. If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is."
  • "If you mistake for your own merits what are really God’s gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel:"
  • "...we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save."

We only become ourselves when we give everything to God

  • "God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man."
  • =="What can you ever really know of other people’s souls—of their temptations, their opportunity, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands."==
  • "...because they think the stream is flowing in that direction, they imagine it will go on flowing in that direction. But I cannot help thinking that the Next Step will be really new; it will go off in a direction you could never have dreamed of. It would hardly be worth calling a New Step unless it did."
  • =="The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become."==
  • "...most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own."
  • =="How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints."==
  • =="Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours."==