Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, Post #5

This is the fifth of a series of posts on Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.

You can find Post #1 here.  

Post #2 here.  

Post #3 here.  

Post #4 here.  

 

Book 3: Christian Behavior

Summary for Chapters 7 thru 12:

Chapter 7:  Forgiveness

One the most difficult tenets of Christianity is that one must love our neighbor as ourselves, including the forgiveness of our enemies.  We are only forgiven of our sins on the basis that we forgive other’s sins.  This does not entail that one allows evil to stand unchecked.

Chapter 8: The Great Sin

The greatest sin in Christianity, and this differentiates Christianity from almost all other religions, is the sin of pride or self-conceit.  Pride, which is opposite the virtue of humility, is at the heart of all other sins.  Other sins may bring people together, but the sin of pride brings enmity between man and man and man and God.

Chapter 9: Charity

Charity, which means love in a Christian sense, does not mean emotion or sentimentality.  Charity is an act of the will, which makes it irrelevant whether you are fond of other or not.  Once you treat all people with charity you will find that it will lead to affection for all people.

Chapter 10:  Hope

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.  We are meant to hope for our final destination that can only be achieved after this life has ended.

Chapter 11: Faith

One sense of the notion of Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.  This rebellion of your moods against your real self is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

Chapter 12: Faith

Faith in the second sense, the higher sense. arises after a man has tried his level best to practise the Christian virtues, and found that he fails, and seen that even if he could he would only be giving back to God what was already God’s own.  All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, “You must do this. I can’t.”  Then you are living by Christian faith.

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Manny’s Comments:

 

The chapter on forgiveness was fairly straight forward.  His explanation of the sin of pride and the need for humility seems to come right out of Thomas Aquinas.  Lewis has a great quote on pride that is worthy of memorizing: “For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”

 

It is interesting Lewis connects hope with the disparity of the imperfect of the earthly world with the perfect of the heavenly world.  He doesn’t say this in these words but he seems to define hope as the desire to close the gap between the imperfect and the perfect.  That is an interesting way of thinking about it.

 

My thought on hope jumped to Dante’s Divine Comedy, where Dante the character is questioned by St. James on what is hope in Canto 25 of Paradiso.  Dante’s response is this:

 

'Hope,' I said, 'is the certain expectation

of future glory, springing

from heavenly grace and merit we have won.

 

'This light comes down to me from many stars,

but he who first instilled it in my heart

was that exalted singer of our exalted Lord.

 

'"Let them have hope in you," he declares

in his god-song, "those who know your name."

Among those who share my faith, who does not know it?

 

'After he had imbued me with his song,

you poured your epistle down on me so that I,

overflowing, now rain your rain on others.' (Par 25:67-78)

 

To Dante, and this is right out of Medieval scholasticism, hope is the expectation of achieving future glory (beatitude) instilled in him by God through grace.  Hope is not something we do on ourselves, but something given to us.

 

How does this compare with Lewis?   I think Lewis is much more human centered than Dante or the Medieval scholastics.  On the other hand, Lewis does say that desires are innate and therefore must have their satisfaction somewhere, and that somewhere is heaven.  Hope I can’t help feeling is overly simplified here.  Hope is a virtue that is required.  Despair, the opposite of hope, is a mortal sin, and so hope is not just something that seeks satisfaction but something that is connected to salvation.  I’m not saying Lewis is denying any of this, but that he makes it too mundane.

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Manny’s Comments:

 

It is interesting Lewis divides faith into two parts: one that can be summarized as belief and the other that can be summarized as trust.  It was very insightful for me.

 

The first definition of faith is the belief that the God exists and that the Christian doctrines are true.  Lewis goes on to conclude that faith in this sense is a virtue.  Here is a pertinent passage:

 

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. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

 

In this sense, a Christian must maintain a strength against the fluctuations of doubts.  I love the quote: “Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.”  That is so true.  I occasionally suffer from such a doubt when in a particular mood, and when I was an atheist I had the same occasional intuition.  We are all prone to have moments of doubts and moments of faith as our daily activities cause us to have thoughts.  Lewis is not saying it is wrong to have such moments, or that we shouldn’t evaluate those moments, but he is saying that a person of faith will not find the moments of doubts compelling.

 

The other type of faith is to live in the trust of God.  We all at some point realize that we don’t have the power to control the plan of our lives.  There are times when a crises or multiple crises hit us that we should step back and “let go and let God” as the saying goes.  That’s not to say we shouldn’t organize our lives and strive for our wellbeing, but at some point things go awry and that is when we need to turn to the Lord.  Perhaps one should think of it as God letting it go awry to test your faith.  Lewis frames it this way: “All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, “You must do this. I can’t.”  Lewis in the chapter speaks of this faith when things come to a crises, but I think one should step back at various points of one’s life and ask God to let Him lead you, crises or not. 

 

Now that I’ve summarized Lewis’s two concepts of faith, I would like to see how that compares to the Biblical definition of faith.  The Letter to the Hebrews has two chapters on faith.  First from chapter eleven.

 

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 2 Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. 3 By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. (Heb 11:1-3)

 

Indeed the rest of the chapter provides Biblical examples of faith.  Then in chapter twelve, there is more.

 

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.  (Heb 12:1-2)

 

Hebrews chapter 12 goes on to give advice on how one should live one’s life, “enduring trials,” being disciplined to bear “the fruit of righteousness,” strengthening feet and hands, and accepting God’s graces without bitterness.  Between the two chapters of Hebrews, I think we can see both sides of Lewis’s definition of faith.  I think Lewis has explained a difficult Biblical definition of faith simply and well. 

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This section of Mere Christianity is focused on the theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity (sometimes named as “love” but I think that “charity” is the more accurate term in our contemporary English).  I found this video that fills out more of Lewis’s view of the theological virtues insightful.  It’s a philosophical set of lectures from Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History called “Faith, Hope, Charity, and Love in CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity: The Theological Virtues.”