This
is the second of a series of posts on Mere
Christianity by C. S. Lewis.
You can find Post #1 here.
On
the first post of Mere Christianity,
I provided an overview, a summary of the five chapters of Book 1, and presented
the discussion of Book 1. I didn’t have the
space to provide some notable quotes from Book 1. I could have, but I don’t think super long
posts lend to a reader friendliness. So
here are some quotes from the five chapters of Book 1 that I think are
memorable.
From Chapter 1: The Law of Human
Nature
Every one has heard
people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely
unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very
important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like
this: “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”—“That’s my seat, I was
there first”—“Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”—“Why should you
shove in first?” “Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”—“Come
on, you promised.” People say things like that every day, educated people as
well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
⁂
Now what interests me
about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying
that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing
to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know
about. And the other man very seldom replies: “To hell with your standard.”
Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really
go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He
pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person
who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different
when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets
him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties
had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or
morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And
they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they
could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to
show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in 4trying
to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and
Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had
committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
⁂
…a man could choose
either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
⁂
These, then, are the two
points I wanted to make. 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.
⁂
From Chapter 2: Some Objections
(Objection from Instinct)
If the Moral Law was one
of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us
which was always what we call “good,” always in agreement with the rule of
right ivilize. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral
Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes
tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses—say
mother love or patriotism—are good, and others, like sex or the fighting
instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting
instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent
than those for restraining mother love or patriotism.
⁂
(Objection from Social
Convention)
There are two reasons for
saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics. The first is, as I said in
the first chapter, that though there are differences between the moral ideas of
one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very
great—not nearly so great as most people imagine—and you can 11recognise the
same law running through them all: whereas mere conventions, like the rule of
the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent. The
other reason is this. When you think about these differences between the
morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people
is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been
improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress.
Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of
moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in
preferring ivilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi
morality.
⁂
From Chapter 3: The Reality of the
Law
The laws of nature, as
applied to stones or trees, may only mean “what Nature, in fact, does.” But if
you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a
different matter. That law certainly does not mean “what human beings, in fact,
do”; for as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none
of them obey it completely. The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you
drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do
and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else
comes in above and beyond the actual facts.
⁂
From Chapter 4: What Lies Behind the
Law
The Law of Human Nature,
or of Right and Wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual facts of
human behaviour. In this case, besides the actual facts, you have something
else—a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.
⁂
The other view is the
religious view. According to it, what is
behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know.
That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to
another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes we do not
know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself—I
mean, like itself to the extent of having minds. Please do not think that one
of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken
its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both views turn up.
⁂
The position of the
question, then, is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply
happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it
that makes it what it is. 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. There is only one case in which we can know whether there is
anything more, namely our own case. And in that one case we find there is. Or
put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the
universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the
universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or
staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it
to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to
get us to behave in a certain way.
⁂
From Chapter 5: We have Cause to be
Uneasy
We have not yet got as
far as the God of any actual religion, still less the God of that particular
religion called Christianity. We have only got as far as a Somebody or
Something behind the Moral Law. We are not taking anything from the Bible or
the Churches, we are trying to see what we can find out about this Somebody on
our own steam. And I want to make it quite clear that what we find out on our
own steam is something that gives us a shock.
⁂
Now, from this second bit
of evidence we conclude that the Being behind the universe is intensely
interested in right conduct—in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith,
honesty and truthfulness. In that sense we should agree with the account given
by Christianity and some other religions, that God is “good.” But do not let us
go too fast here. The Moral Law does not give us any grounds for thinking that
God is “good” in the sense of being indulgent, or soft, or sympathetic. There
is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you
to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or
dangerous, or difficult it is to do. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is
not soft.
⁂
Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.
⁂
Finally
I really like this summary of C. S. Lewis and his work from
Bishop Robert Barron, put out on YouTube on the 50th anniversary of
Lewis’s death.
