What is Christian Behavior?
Part 3 of Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
This is Part 3 of my deep dive into Mere Christianity by CS Lewis, a series that is posting every Sunday of Pride month. Part 1 contains my overall preface for this series, and reviews the Preface and Book 1 from Lewis’ work, and Part 2 delves into Christian beliefs. Since I read the ebook version from the library, I have no page numbers for any of my quotations, which is another reason I am separating these points by chapter and book, so they can be properly found. Anything I write in double quotations is from the book, and single quotes are my personal emphasis.
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Christian Behavior
The premise of this book is to paint Christian morality as wholly different from any other moral framework, as if these things are unique to the faith and cannot possibly be applicable to anything else. His thoughts on marriage and sexuality prove annoying at best and deeply unsettling at worst, as he sets up both to be absolutes with one purpose, yet never considers how an alternative could possibly be true. This was written before he married and lost his wife (which is what A Grief Observed is about), with whom he had no biological children, so I wonder if some of these notions changed once he wasn’t an armchair theologian on the subject.
The Three Parts of Morality
For Lewis, there are many aspects to morality that help to understand how humans are meant to operate in the world. “In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, a strain, or a friction, in running that machine.” As I stated in a previous essay, it bothers me when people say that humans are machines, or should run like machines. Because we are not and should not. Furthermore, the “moral rules” that he suggests aren’t true for all people in all cases.
I believe I am simply quite partial to his analogies of music, because no matter what point he tries to make, I can understand where he’s coming from. “Think of humanity as a band playing a tune. To get a good result, you need two things. Each player’s individual instrument must be in tune and also each must come in at the right moment so as to combine with all the others.” Isn’t that lovely? However, the idea that the whole world should be playing a singular tune, forever, and we can each only play a singular instrument, forever, without deviating from our part of the song lest the entire world fall to chaos, bothers me. I’d like to take this analogy and tweak it a bit, as is my nature. Think of mashups: two songs that seem so different from each other, yet when you overlay the lyrics of one over the beat of another, something delightful is created. I’d much rather live in a world where we can play as many songs and instruments as we like.
However lovely Lewis’ analogies may be, let’s not forget that we are discussing several important, real-world concepts. “Remember that religion involves a series of statements about facts, which must be either true or false.” *Sigh* Oh, Jack. This black-and-white thinking is putting God into such a tiny box. What is the point of faith, of belief, if religions are just “statements about facts”? I don’t even know what to say about this point. I’m flummoxed.
Lewis ends the chapter stating plainly what exactly these three “departments” of morality are: “If we are to think about morality, we must think of all three departments: relations between man and man: things inside each man: and relations between man and the power that made him.” In the first essay of this series, I pointed out the biggest issue I have with this text is how regularly he uses “man” and “he” when, one would think, he means to speak of all humanity. The rest of us could be included in theory, but, time and again, he proves that he uses these words as literally as he does the Bible. He is speaking to men about men and the male god who made them. If anyone else who is not a man reads this work, then it’s up to them to translate their experiences accordingly.
The ‘Cardinal Virtues’
We’re gonna need to take a breath with this one. And, probably the next several chapters. Inhale. Exhale. Here, Lewis introduces the virtues, separating them into “cardinal” and “theological”. ”The ‘cardinal’ [virtues] are those which all civilized people recognize: the ‘theological’ are those which, as a rule, only Christians know about.” Goodness, what the shit is this? Theology is the study of god, and literally all religions have theologies and virtues. Therefore, there’s a certain brand of arrogance in believing that only Christians could possibly have these specific theological virtues, which we will get to in later chapters and I’m sure you’ll be able to see, dear reader, that these things are common to many, many faith traditions.
The “cardinal” virtues are “Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude”, which I won’t go too much into detail individually, as we have a great deal of ground to cover, but when Lewis speaks of “Temperance” (which is basically not overindulging in anything, but often associated with not drinking to excess) he says something quite interesting: “One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way.” Ha. Haha! Hahahahaha! Oh please, Christian Nationalists, hear this man! Especially because there is so much in modern Evangelical spaces that are trying to force the rest of us to adhere to the rules of their faith, when many of those same people are absolutely terrified of ‘Sharia Law’. Much of the leadership in this administration admires the leaders in the Middle East who are subjugating a great deal of their populace, and wish to do the same thing here, but calling it ‘Christian biblical values’ instead. They like theocracy when it is their faith, but any other faith simply existing without giving them special treatment is ‘oppression’. I swear, conservative Christians wanna be persecuted so bad, like the early Christians were, without realizing that they were persecuted because they challenged the authority of the empire, while conservative Christians today are that empire.
“We might think that God wanted simple obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.” But if this is true, then couldn’t people get there through living according to these virtues without adhering to the strict rules that some believe are necessary in this particular form of Christianity? If it’s “the character that really matters”, then perhaps the rules are arbitrary.
Social Morality
This chapter discusses mostly what people (men) need to do in society to behave properly according to this Christian morality. “The real job of every moral teacher is to keep bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see.” I think that the actual stories from Jesus in the Bible are a great example of that, as he reminds people again and again to help the poor, feed the hungry, heal the sick, and treat everyone kindly regardless of national origin. I do wish that people who claim to be his followers would remember to live in accordance with these things instead of quoting literally everyone but him as a reason why others need to be subjugated and have no rights.
Lewis then goes into one of my favorite parts of the Bible (I say, sarcastically): “[The New Testament] tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if a man does not work, he ought not eat.” Cool, good thing I am no man, or I’d be fucked. This is a very problematic piece of theology that is only given the slightest nuance as he goes on: “In the passage where the New Testament says that everyone must work, it gives as a reason ‘in order that he may have something to give to those in need’.” Which, again, just proves to me that he never expected someone who is disabled to read his work, who would be the recipient of this charity he claims is so important to the Christian faith. Telling people (men) they must work so that they have something to give to the poor implies that he is not talking to the poor, or believes that poor people have no sort of agency or purpose outside of being the recipients of charity from ‘good men’.
“If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.” I agree with Lewis on this point, and I think that there are many people in church pews today who would say this is far too radical. They have money for multiple streaming services and restaurants, to tithe to their megachurches, but give a mere pittance to those who actually need it, which is most certainly not what Jesus would do.
Morality & Psychoanalysis
This chapter is a hard one, as Lewis attempts to dabble in mental disorders as a way to say that certain things that were once considered ‘sins’ could actually be attributed to an illness that can be cured. Being that I am posting this during Pride month, I am sure you can see where this is going. “The desire of a man for a woman would be of the first kind [normal]: the perverted desire of a man for a man would be of the second [unnatural].” This is another point where his view of desire is in terms of what is best for procreation, what we were ‘designed’ for. As I stated in the intro, this was before he met and married his wife with whom he had no children, so if the true purpose of marriage was to have biological children, he did not fulfill that purpose, so why marry at all? This also flattens the desires of queer people into merely sexual, because with this view of marriage as primarily for having children (and many queer people cannot have biological children on their own), queerness is therefore merely a sexual perversion, completely ignoring literally any other aspect of what marriage and partnership can bring to people’s lives.
“The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured.” Genuinely, I think Lewis is trying to be kind here, as problematic as this view seems today. Psychoanalysis was still a relatively new concept at this time, and now we are far more aware of how queerness is just in our nature, like the color of our skin. Though, many people believe darker skin is demonic, so perhaps this analogy doesn’t actually help very much. But, I think, because of his very limited worldview, he believed that it was a good thing to understand these “perversions” as illnesses with cures instead of intentional, sinful choices.
”Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before.” I do agree with him on this point. We make choices based on the information we have at any given time, and those choices lead us down different paths based on them, presenting us with new choices. Unconscious choices, however, often steer us more than our conscious ones, especially if we are in the habit of doing certain things that are actually detrimental to ourselves.
The way Lewis discusses these choices, however, is in an attempt to show that what we do with certain emotions that come up within us will have the same mark on our souls. “The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters.” This sounds almost comforting, as if the consequences of our emotions don’t matter so much when it comes to our salvation. His example though compares the anger that causes the murder of thousands with the anger that only gets one laughed at as having the same mark on the soul. That, of course, is nonsense.
Sexual Morality
This chapter also has some very interesting logic and wild notions in regard to what is moral concerning sexuality. I appreciate that Lewis makes the distinction that what is considered proper in different cultures varies widely, stating someone who lives on an island and wears very little clothing could actually be more ‘chaste’ than a Victorian who’s completely covered up. “When people break the rule of propriety current in their own time and place, if they do so in order to excite lust in themselves or others, then they are offending against chastity. But if they break it through ignorance or carelessness they are guilty only of bad manners.” Intention is very important here, as well as what is proper in one’s own culture, which is an excellent distinction,
When it comes to actual sex, however, Lewis is much less forgiving. “Contraceptives have made sexual indulgence far less costly within marriage and far safer outside it than ever before, and public opinion is less hostile to illicit unions and even to perversion than it has been since Pagan times.” Heaven forbid a married couple enjoy having sex with each other without the stress of having more mouths to feed, or putting the mother at risk! I feel that this need for a certain subset of Christianity to say it’s most important for people to have as many children as possible, the prevention of which being one of the worst things you can do, is the least ‘pro-life’ thing imaginable. Bringing children into the world should be a careful and conscious decision, not something done as often as possible without considering how the children will be cared for, and especially not as a punishment for having sex. This is why queerness is seen as such a “perversion”: they cannot fathom any sort of love between people where procreation is not the point of the relationship, and therefore believe that we’re giving in to the ‘sin of lust’ by putting our sexual desires before all else. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I am not a lesbian because of sex alone. I am a lesbian because I enjoy the company of women and femmes most ardently. I am a lesbian because building a life with a woman who shares the burden of turning a house into a home is far more appealing than attempting to do so with a man. Also, have you seen women? Have you seen femmes? I’m swooning just thinking about them.
Lewis then goes on to compare desires for food to desires for sex. “Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.” He continues the metaphor of a striptease, but for a steak instead of a woman, saying it would be very concerning if a society was going to such lengths to have these “titillations”. It’s clear to me that, for this section especially, he is assuming a straight, male audience yet again. If he had considered that anyone other than men would read this book, would he have considered how it would feel to read the love they have for their partner is a perversion? Or to be compared to meat, as something to be consumed by men? “Perversions of the food appetite are rare. But perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure and frightful.” Ah, yes, the absolutely frightful thought that there are people living fulfilling non-heterosexual lives. Horrifying.
For someone who, in just the last chapter, stated that it’s “not the Christian way” to force others to abstain from things that they abstain from, Lewis sure loves to do so when it comes to sexuality and the body. “If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once.” Following this logic, strange as it is, I can see where he’s coming from. In his view, heterosexual sex in the confines of marriage for the purpose of procreation is very good. It’s only literally every other kind of sex that is bad, you heathens. He then goes on to say that, “Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy.” Clearly, this was written by a straight, white, man who never got compared to a piece of gum, or piece of meat, or an old piece of tape, or used car, or told that his body was inherently sinful because it caused others to stumble. “Thoroughly approves of the body” he says, as if we weren’t told to not trust our bodies, that we can’t trust our own instincts. Maybe the church wasn’t so strict about things… in *checks notes* the ‘40s… as it is now. This is a huge blind spot in his argument where it is clear he never considered any of these points before making sweeping claims such as these.
“For ‘nature’ [in the sense of natural desire] will have to be controlled anyway, unless you are going to ruin your whole life.” This is a very Western white male take. You cannot control nature, not really. You can erect buildings, cultivate gardens, extract resources, but without constant upkeep, nature will reclaim what is hers, and the end result might just be a world that is not habitable for humans. Though, Lewis is talking about human desires, and I believe that this is in an attempt to say that not giving in to every whim will be better for overall wellbeing. “For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim made by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing.” I agree in the very loosest sense of the word, as I have very strong desires for my girlfriend, but because I also have disabilities that lead me to become overstimulated, unable to breathe, and likely to pass out if I’m not careful, I cannot jump her bones the moment I see her, no matter how badly I want to. I must micro dose pleasure til my nervous system builds up a tolerance for it. Though I am about 104% sure that he was not considering any of that in his original statement.
Christian Marriage
Goodness, this one is a doozy, so buckle up. Maybe we need to take another breath. Inhale. Exhale. Remembering that Lewis was unmarried when he said all this reminds me of all the podcast bros in the manosphere who tell young men how to get women when they’ve never had a girlfriend before. Though, I believe he makes far more coherent points than any of them. “The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate [the sexual] union from all other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.” As someone who has had many different kinds of sex with several different people (none of which in the confines of marriage), at this point in my life, I will say that having sex with someone I love feels far better than sex with someone I don’t care for at all. Though, I don’t think that distinction matters to Lewis. For me, though, sex is never the most important thing in a relationship to feel like it is a good one. In fact, if sex is the best part of the relationship, it feels most unfulfilling. But that could also be due to the fact that I am demisexual. For others, they have no such qualms and should be free to live their lives as they see fit. The only issue I see is people who value sex without needing a deep bond, and those who need a deep bond before feeling comfortable enough to have sex, trying to date each other and get the other to conform to their view. Like how monogamy and polyamory are neither better or worse relationship styles, it just depends on the people involved. But trying to make a monogamous person become polyamorous, or vice versa, is not great.
This chapter, though, is about a specific kind of monogamous marriage, and the point Lewis is trying to make is a good one up until it devolves into nonsense, as is his tradition. “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.” He is again comparing women to food, not equal humans with agency, merely an object for the consumption of another (even though in theory women could be chewing up men to spit them out again without intending any relationship with them, but I don’t think Lewis considered this to be an option).
This idea of permanent marriage as a contract and something not to be got into lightly, I believe, is a really good point. For example, I don’t think people should have to get married if someone gets pregnant. That makes the marriage, like the pregnancy, feel like a punishment for wrongdoing that you are then meant to live with the rest of your life, not considering the ramifications of that added consequence. “If people do not believe in permanent marriage, it is perhaps better that they should live together unmarried than that they should make vows they do not mean to keep.” Excellent! Yes! Let people live together, especially before getting married, so they know what they’re getting themselves into. I’m sure when he originally gave these talks, that was quite the scandalous thing to say. “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.” This is a very fair point, as the honeymoon phase of being in love is a fleeting feeling, but once that transforms along the way into a truly deep bond, I believe, that’s where the promise comes in.
I can only speak for myself, of course, but if one gets past that phase and finds themselves not wishing to be with the person any longer, it’s very good that they are unmarried. It saddens me how many people get married after only a few months of knowing each other so they can start popping out babies (lookin’ at you, Christian Nationalists), which can lead to so very many problems. Of course, we cannot control our feelings, and falling in love feels so very big, but sustaining love is a much different thing. “Love in this second sense—love as distinct from ‘being in love’—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by the grace which both partners ask, and receive, by God [in Christian marriages].” Some may enjoy the chase, the thrill of falling in love, yet feel utterly repulsed by the idea of staying with only one person forever. I say, as long as they’re doing so intentionally and not hurting anyone in the process, go ahead and chase those thrills. But, Lewis believes, “if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life.”
Forgiveness
Then topic of forgiveness is one that I have wrestled with a great deal, having been on the receiving end of multiple rapes, assaults, childhood neglect, racism, misogyny, ableism, and homophobia. One of the most important things about this is that no one can tell you when the ‘right’ time is to forgive someone, especially if the one doing the telling has never been through anything genuinely traumatic in their lives. For Lewis, “it is not that people think [forgiveness] too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful and contemptible.” He does not consider any of the experiences that I listed in this statement. I like to put several caveats in here because, though his examples make sense for men who have perhaps been swindled or lied to, it is much, much harder to forgive someone who has raped you, or to forgive the community who sided with the rapist and abandoned you, and it’s especially hard to forgive your mother for telling you the rape was your fault in the first place. Forgiveness is not something you even have to tell the other person. Forgiveness is something you do for your own healing, acknowledging the pain that happened, grieving the loss of innocence, and figuring out a way to repair so you can move on with your life.
“It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it.” This is another black-and-white view that Lewis has of how the world works, making me wonder why I should believe in a God that would not forgive me for the times I may have been deceitful or prideful if I did not explicitly forgive every man who assaulted me, every man who raped me, or every partner who screamed at me. Those are quite unequal transgressions.
But, since this is a book for men and we are not considering those things at all, we shall move along to what Lewis is actually getting at. “We might try to understand what exactly loving your neighbor as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself?” This is a fair question. I feel like several people in the Christian Nationalist movement believe that love is just something they say they are doing in the name of actually wielding suppression and hatred. I do not think they actually love themselves in a loving way. They believe love is a transactional thing that they are always unworthy of, instead of a state of being they could access at any time. I think that’s one of the many reasons they hate queer people so much. Not only because we aren’t adhering to gender norms, but because we love ourselves enough to be ourselves. We love ourselves enough to want to live, out loud, even when they clearly want us all to be silent or dead.
“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.” This feels like a much more tangible version of ‘love the sinner hate the sin’ that we hear so often. Extending compassion and grace to people is something to strive for, but forgiveness doesn’t mean we have to be in community with people who hurt us. To forgive someone doesn’t mean forgetting what they’ve done and allow them to get close enough to do it again and again. Sometimes, forgiveness requires distance. In my personal practice, I do wish healing on those who have wronged me. Not every day, not all the time, but if they bubble into my conscious thoughts, I pray they are on a healing journey. Because, for any of us who have been on this journey of true healing, of looking to all the painful, repressed, traumatized parts of ourselves that we would rather avoid, to allow the darkness to meet the light, we know it is a deeply uncomfortable, if not downright painful, experience. “Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves—to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good.”
See? It’s for their own good.
The Great Sin
Of course, here is the reason for the season. “According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.” Many conservative Christians today feel this way about Pride month, insisting it is demonic because of this narrow view of what the word means. Pride month is not about arrogance. It’s about being ourselves, out loud, instead of hiding in closets. These same people immediately forget how horrible the sin of pride is once July rolls around. Suddenly, they are proud to be Americans. It’s almost like being proud of being queer and being proud of being a certain nationality are completely different things, because words have multiple definitions, and how dare I not consider nuance. *Sigh*
“How is it that people who are obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God.” I think this may be my favorite statement in the whole book. This makes me think of Arrogance, the Ego Power noted in the Gospel of Mary, of claiming to know more about how the world works, looking down on others who are ignorant of the knowledge they so clearly have. I think it’s important to think of this notion of Pride like Arrogance, instead of conflating it with being proud of yourself for your accomplishments, or proud of your trans neighbor for being themselves out loud.
“Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive—is competitive by its very nature—while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident,” states Lewis. I can think of a few people in power right now who are completely eaten up by their Arrogance, “for, of course, power is what Pride really enjoys: there is nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers.” I mean, I won’t name any names, but I’m sure you, dear reader, can think of a fair amount of people who fit this description exactly, and who love to make all the world’s problems the fault of the marginalized instead of allowing anyone to see who’s really pulling all the strings. “The proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will still try to get more just to assert his power.”
“Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good—above all! that we are better than someone else—I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil.” I would like for Christian Nationalists to hear this phrase specifically, to have the self-awareness necessary to think that maybe, perhaps, forcing people to believe in what you believe in, giving no one any choices, lest they be consciously tortured for eternity, is not actually what a loving deity would wish for the world. “Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”
Another example Lewis gives is there for us to understand the difference between ‘pride’ as in ‘arrogance’ and ‘pride’ as in ‘being proud of ourselves’. In his view, it’s not bad to enjoy being praised for a job well done, or praising others in kind. However, “the more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming.” I feel this is a bit problematic, because why is it bad to do so? I feel that it is much healthier to not need praise from others because you are genuinely content with who you are and the work you put out. The praise is nice, but knowing you’ve done a good job by your own standards, in my view, feels more grounded in reality. I fear one would chase praise and validation without it. He makes the case that vanity is a lesser form of pride, which is why he believes not needing the outward praise leads to pridefulness. “We must try not to be vain, but we must never call in our Pride to cure our vanity.”
The final example I will give from this chapter is a very heteronormative one: “A proud man will take your girl from you, not because he wants her, but just to prove to himself that he is a better man than you.” Yet again, allowing no agency for the girl in question, but I believe is also an example of a deeper Arrogance on the part of Lewis. It is not always boastful or rude, this Arrogance, but believing you are the one who knows how the world works, how things operate, from your limited human vantage point, is itself an Arrogance. He never considers that the girl prefers the proud man and thus has made the choice to leave you for him (if you are the good man reading the original text), because from his perspective, as kind as he is trying to be, women are objects and resources for men to compete over. Not full human beings with their own agency, or even their own preferences.
Charity
This is the first of the “theological virtues” that only Christians have and no one else. “Charity means ‘love in the Christian sense’.” I believe that, if more Christians were charitable (as will be further described in this section), the better off we would all be. For far too long, Christian Nationalism has been trying to force as many people as possible to be hateful and cruel to those Jesus himself would’ve hung out with, in favor of believing themselves better than them. However, Lewis gives us an interesting directive: “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did.” Truly, what does it mean to be loving? Is it actually loving to tell people they are going to endure conscious torture for eternity if they don’t change everything about themselves? Is it loving to deny people healthcare? Is it loving to withhold food from babies? “The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become—and so on in a vicious circle forever.” Is it loving to bomb other countries? Is it loving to force people to believe the same things that you do? Is it loving? Is it kind?
Truly, I love this description of what a charitable Christian is in Lewis’ view: “The difference between a Christian man and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections or ‘likings’ and the Christian man has only ‘charity’. The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat everyone kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on—including people he could not even have imagined himself liking in the beginning.” Those who act this way, I believe, are not as loud about it as those who use the name of Jesus to be hateful and cruel. I do hope there are more of these sort of charitable Christians in the world.
And, for the record, charity is not just a Christian virtue. Literally anyone can behave in this way, without having to believe in any god at all, let alone this specific one.
Hope
This is the second “theological virtue” that only Christians have. No one else has hope, only Christians, so you must convert lest ye be hopeless. Hope in the sense that Lewis speaks of it is in reference to heaven and the promise of eternal life. “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.” Though, I feel like many Christians have this same notion: that this world is not as important as whatever comes after death. I think that this is a big reason why so many don’t care about what is happening to the earth, or how much damage we are doing to it as a collective, because it doesn’t matter. But even Jesus said that the kingdom is here and the time is now, so I think aiming at heaven misses the earth entirely. I think we’re meant to leave this world better than we found it, not look at how awful things have become and accept that it’s ‘the way things are’. Be that as it may, what if it could be better?
The last thing I’ll say about this section (which is very quick compared to many of the others) is one of the more interesting conclusions Lewis poses: “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.” In my own view, I believe that our desires are ours for a reason, and it is our grand quest to see how closely we can get to those ideals by pulling our dreams into reality. Being content with the way things are has never been my style, as the way things are belittles and diminishes what I have been allowed to believe is true for myself. I know things can be much better, but the way things are right now prioritizes the fast and cheap, which separates us from the earth and from each other.
Faith
The final “theological virtue”, Lewis split into two chapters of the same name, which I will condense into one here, but will mention where the split is. This one is the most infuriating to be painted as only belonging to Christians, because literally anyone who is religious or spiritual has some sort of faith. Christians do not have a monopoly on it. “The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.” Again with the battles, Jack. All of those things are important parts of being human. There need not be a battle at all, for they each have their place. Also, having “faith and reason” lumped together doesn’t make sense to me. He has been spending many chapters as this point claiming that his faith is a reasonable one, though time and again he discusses beliefs as if they were facts. To have faith is to not know based on logic or reason. “Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes.” On this point I do agree with him. Believing in the vision you have for your life and going towards that end, no matter what obstacles get in your way, is having faith in it. But in no way is this merely a Christian endeavor.
This section of faith, in general, is about resisting the temptation of ‘sin’ in order to continue toward the reward of heaven. “We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.” Literal application of the Bible will be the downfall of so many, I fear. The things that are tempting us to do ‘evil’, a lot of the time, are things that are within our bodies, like any form of embodied pleasure: the indulgence of food, the enjoyment of sex with a loved one, customizing our avatar in the way we see fit. I, of course, am not talking about anything that involves harming others. Temptations to rape or murder are ones that need to be resisted at all costs, because your desire to do things ends right where another person’s autonomy begins. Removing someone else’s autonomy, to me, is the worst thing a person can do.
Now we’re getting into the chapter of faith that means Christianity in particular. “There are certain things in Christianity that can be understood from the outside, before you have become a Christian. But there are a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have gone a certain distance along the Christian road.” For Lewis, these things are how exactly one can become more like Jesus (the literal son of God). What God cares about most is that we act in accordance to what was intended of us. “Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home.” This statement confused me a bit the first time I read it, for how can we try and not try at the same time? I think what is meant here is that an obstacle is overcome once that intense effort is no longer there, like how you don’t keep jumping over hurdles if there are no hurdles in front of you. It reminds me of one of the Universal Laws (I forget which one) where a certain energy keeps coming up because we expect it to, but once we face that energy and make a conscious choice, over and over til that is the new habit, that energy is overcome. “In a sense, you may say that no temptation is ever overcome until we stop trying to overcome it.”
The last example of what Lewis means of this view of faith is discussing what the point of emulating Jesus really is. “In Christian language, He will share His ‘sonship’ with us, will make us, like Himself, ‘Sons of God’.” I’m sure you understand by now, dear reader, how many times he makes these claims assuming maleness, and how much it incenses me. What about the daughters? What about saying ‘children’ instead? Even Paul said ‘there is neither male nor female for all are one in Christ Jesus’. Why would I wish to be a Son of God? Why is maleness so important? Why does this book leave me with more questions than answers?
Thus concludes Book 3. Next week, I dive into Book 4: Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity, which is another long one. It includes my final conclusion and opinion of the work as a whole, which I’m sure you can guess is not a very favorable one.
Related Essays
Mere Christianity: Where CS Lewis Missed the Mark
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Closing Thots
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