Category Archives: C.S. Lewis

The Christian Idea of Marriage

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Matrimony, Mere Christianity

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The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism—for that is what the words ‘one flesh’ would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact—just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument. The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined. The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

This has got to be one of the best and most concise explanations for why sex before marriage is forbidden for Christians. But it still may be hard for people (even Christians) to understand because our society no longer views mankind as an integral (inseparable) union of body and soul.

Many people today act as if the soul does not exist at all, but then would contradict this by saying they believe there is a soul. The reason for the inconsistency seems to be the the false philosophy that is promoted by various forms of media and politicians: the whole separation of church and state mentality. The effect of this on our understanding of the human person is that we compartmentalize what we believe in the public sector and what we believe in the private sector, which is where religion has been relegated to. This false notion is then reinforced by so-called scientists who are really just material reductionists that deny anything spiritual because they cannot see it, touch it, or smell it.

Christians, on the other hand, are called to see the world and mankind as it really is. We were created by God as a hylomorphic union of body (matter) and soul (form): the one cannot exist without the other. (* see note) From this correct understanding of mankind we can see that what we do with the body does in fact have an effect the soul, because you cannot separate the two. And when you use your body in an improper way, as in sex before marriage and especially homosexual activity, then the negative consequences can be felt in your entire being.

Now some people may protest at this point and claim that they feel no negative effects from premarital sex or homosexual activity. I suspect that some of these people, if they were honest, would admit to a certain hollowness within themselves. For the others that do not admit to this, we can explain their lack of remorse on a society that for decades has been filling our minds with the mantra “Oh come on, it’s ok. Everyone is doing it.”

But Christians know that is not true. It is not ok. When the Church says that sex should be saved for marriage (just to clarify – one man and one woman) she is not trying to take away anyone’s fun. She is simply trying to help her children to be truly happy, which can only happen if they are living their lives in accordance with the Truth. And the truth in question here is that mankind is a union of body AND soul. Understanding this and helping others to understand is of great importance.

*Note: At least in this world they cannot exist separately. On the other hand, the Saints in heaven, the souls in Purgatory, and those in Hell exist in a spiritual state until Christ returns and everyone receives their bodies back. God created our souls as immortal and so they cannot cease to exist, but our bodies can and do die as a result of sin. This existence of the soul without the body should be viewed as a Divine concession that has been allowed until all things are restored when Christ returns.

Sharing Christ’s Life

12 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Theosis, Thought for the Day, Transformation in Christ

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Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in 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.

Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis

Follow Your (Informed) Conscience

27 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Pro-Death 'Catholics', Pro-Life, The Weight of Glory

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(Conscience) can mean (a) the pressure a man feels upon his will to do what he thinks is right; (b) his judgment as to what the content of right and wrong are. In sense (a) conscience is always to be followed. It is the sovereign of the universe, which ‘if it had power as it has right, would absolutely rule the world.’ It is not to be argued with, but obeyed, and even to question it is to incur guilt. But in sense (b) it is a very different matter. People may be mistaken about wrong and right; most people in some degree are mistaken. By what means are mistakes in this field to be corrected?

The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis

That last question is very important. As he rightly says, we are all mistaken to some degree about what is right and what is wrong. As fallen and sinful creatures we can and often do misunderstand or misinterpret the truths that would establish for us what is right and what is wrong. Surely most (all?) of us have encountered a situation in which something we thought for sure was true turned out to be false. If someone tells us this has never happened to them then we can only assume one of three things about them: a) they are perfect and know the good and act on it perfectly – but this is only true of God and perhaps could be said of the good angels that serve Him; b) they are lying to us; c) they are delusional. Basically, if someone (except God Himself) thinks they are right about everything – that they have the ultimate source of knowledge for what is good and evil – then they should not be trusted. To say it another way, we all need to be willing to admit that we make mistakes in our understanding about what is right and what is wrong. If this is not your understanding of yourself then you can stop reading now.

And now that it is just the mere mortals of sound mind left, let us ask the question again: how do we correct our conscience when it is mistaken? And this really requires another question to be answered: how can we even know when our conscience is wrong? First of all, we need to be humble, acknowledge our shortcomings, realize that we do not ‘know it all’, and always be on the search for the Truth; because truth brings knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong. This truth can come to us in different ways: first through intuition. Most people understand that it is not right to just walk up to someone on the street and shoot them in the face. Our basic moral intuition tells us that. On the other hand, many people today would not apply that same understanding to the unborn. Instead, they have been brainwashed by a political and social system that is constantly screaming about a woman’s ‘right’ to reproductive choice. The result is, that according to many people’s conscience, the unborn child, who is really no different from the innocent person walking down the street, does not deserve the same protection. This is obviously an instance of someone’s conscience (and here we are talking about a large group of people) being seriously distorted.

There is another way, though, that we can know our conscience is wrong and that is from authority. An example would be when parents help their children understand that a certain behavior is wrong. And here I am not talking about the parent who simply says, “Stop doing that!” Instead, I am speaking of the parents who take the time to help their children understand why a certain behavior is wrong. The same can be said of the priest in the confessional when he causes you to think to yourself, “Wow! I’ve never thought of it that way before, but he is right.” And of course the ultimate example would be Authority of Christ Himself, who speaks to us through Scripture and also speaks to us through His Church. Truly, it is with Authority that the Chruch teaches us what is right and what is wrong.

And yet, how many so-called Catholics use the excuse “My conscience says it is ok” to vote for pro-abortion politicians, to use contraception, to skip Mass on Sunday, etc. Of course the main problem here is that these people think that if their conscience says it is ok then there is nothing else to consider. But, they are missing the crucial step that is needed to rightly follow your conscience and that is to make sure you have a properly formed conscience. And this formation comes primarily from authority.

Whether we know it or not, everyone’s conscience if formed in large part from authority. What makes the difference between pro-life and pro-abortion Catholics, for instance, is which authority their consciences have been formed by. Those who believe in abortion have been formed by the ‘authority’ of the secular worldview. They have been formed by the opinions of the supposed experts that surround them in the media, movies, music and books. On the other hand, those who are pro-life have formed their conscience in accordance with Authority of the Church, which is nothing less that the teaching of Christ that has been handed down to us throughout the centuries.

The Missing Part

29 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Miracles, Thought for the Day

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Let us suppose we possess parts of a novel or a symphony. Someone now brings us a newly discovered piece of manuscript and says, ‘This is the missing part of the work. This is the chapter on which the whole plot of the novel really turned. This is the main theme of the symphony’. Our business would be to see whether the new passage, if admitted to the central place which the discoverer claimed for it, did actually illuminate all the parts we had already seen and ‘pull them together’. Nor should we be likely to go very far wrong. The new passage, if spurious, however attractive it looked at the first glance, would become harder and harder to reconcile with the rest of the work the longer we considered the matter. But if it were genuine then at every fresh hearing of the music or every fresh reading of the book, we should find it settling down, making itself more at home and eliciting significance from all sorts of details in the whole work which we had hitherto neglected. Even though the new central chapter or main theme contained great difficulties in itself, we should still think it genuine provided that it continually removed difficulties elsewhere. Something like this we must do with the doctrine of the Incarnation. Here, instead of a symphony or a novel, we have the whole mass of our knowledge. The credibility will depend on the extent to which the doctrine, if accepted, can illuminate and integrate that whole mass. It is much less important that the doctrine itself should be fully comprehensible. We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else.

Miracles by C.S. Lewis

A Man Unafraid to Tell the Truth

22 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Free Will, God's Will, Salvation, The Great Divorce

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On this day 51 years ago C.S. Lewis died. I have had the pleasure of meeting a few men that actually met and talked with Lewis (one of them being my friend Thomas Howard) but I never had the pleasure of meeting the man himself. In fact, I was not even alive when he died. But even though I never met him he has greatly impacted my life. He was the first one that helped me to truly see what Christianity really is through his book Mere Christianity. Even though he never converted to the Catholic Faith, I count him as one of the influences that led me necessarily into the Catholic Church. I owe him a great deal. So much do I owe him that I even nicknamed my first son Jack (my wife wouldn’t let me name him Clive Staples, or so I jokingly tell people). Lewis is on my top 10 list of people I most want to meet when I get to Heaven (assuming that in the end I choose that instead of my own miserable desires.)

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” 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.

The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis

Thank you St. Jack for everything you did in serving Christ and His Church.

 

Lewis on Chance

16 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Thought for the Day

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Now as to your other story, about Isaiah 66? It doesn’t really matter whether the Bible was open at that page thru’ a miracle or through some (unobserved) natural cause. We think it matters because we tend to call the second alternative ‘chance.’ But when you come to think of it, there can be no such thing as chance from God’s point of view. Since He is omniscient His acts have no consequences which He has not foreseen and taken into account and intended. Suppose it was the draught from the window that blew your Bible open at Isaiah 66. Well, that current of air was linked up with the whole history of weather from the beginning of the world and you may be quite sure that the result it had for you at that moment (like all its other results) was intended and allowed for in the act of creation. ‘Not one sparrow,’ you know the rest [Matthew 10:29]. So of course the message was addressed to you. To suggest that your eye fell on it without this intention, is to suggest that you could take Him by surprise. Fiddle-de-dee! This is not Predestination: your will is perfectly free: but all physical events are adapted to fit in as God sees best with the free actions He knows we are going to do. There’s something about this in Screwtape.

The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III

(An alternate opinion on ‘chance’ from a Catholic philosopher will be offered later.)

In Regards to the Fall

29 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Salvation, The Fall, Thought for the Day

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The doctrine of the Fall (both of man and of some ‘gods,’ ‘eldils’ or ‘angels’) is the only satisfactory explanation. Evil begins, in a universe where all was good, from free will, which was permitted because it makes possible the greatest good of all. The corruption of the first sinner consists not in choosing some evil thing (there are no evil things for him to choose) but in preferring a lesser good (himself) before a greater (God). The Fall is, in fact, Pride. The possibility of this wrong preference is inherent in the v. (very) fact of having, or being, a self at all. But though freedom is real it is not infinite. Every choice reduces a little one’s freedom to choose the next time. There therefore comes a time when the creature is fully built, irrevocably attached either to God or to itself. This irrevocableness is what we call Heaven or Hell. Every conscious agent is finally committed in the long run: i.e., it rises above freedom into willed, but henceforth unalterable, union with God, or else sinks below freedom into the black fire of self-imprisonment. That is why the universe (as even the physicists now admit) has a real history, a fifth act with a finale in which the good characters ‘live happily ever after’ and the bad ones are cast out. At least that is how I see it.
The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume II

Niceness and the Need of Salvation

19 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Salvation, Thought for the Day

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‘Niceness’—wholesome, integrated personality—is an excellent thing. We must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up ‘nice’; just as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to eat. But 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.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to pro- duce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so: and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders—no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings—may even give it an awkward appearance.

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

 

What We All Desire

02 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Thought for the Day

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The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose* an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis

*Note: It seems to me that “oppose” should instead be “pose as”, but I haven't been able to confirm this.