Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (IV)

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

In Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (I) I said the Christian God is Perfect Goodness. In Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (II), that God is Perfect Love. And in Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (III), I ascribed the idea of God as Perfect Penitence to the nature of Jesus Christ as the incarnation of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.

In that last essay I listed a number of roles this Second Divine Person plays in Christian belief. He is the Son of God. He is, as Eternal Word, the Co-Creator of the World. He is, by virtue of the love he and his Father share, a participant in the neverending beatific union whose name is Holy Spirit. He is, as I also wrote, the Ideal Person whom we, when we pray, "dress up as" and impersonate. As such, he is the Patient Partner who stands beside us each time we pray and guides us in our impersonation.

I now see that an aspect of one of these facets of Christ's identity which I listed in the previous post was given too short shrift. In saying that he is the Perfect Penitent — that his death on a cross as a God-become-mortal saves us both communally and individually — I brushed right by something essential to Lewis's anatomy of the Christian viewpoint: the idea that God as Christ is (in my own words) the Perfect Captain.

The point that I needed to enlarge on and didn't was the one about Christ as the communal, or corporate, Savior and Redeemer of us all. Christians speak of themselves, taken together, as the Body of Christ. That makes Christ their corporate Head, or as I would prefer to put it, their Perfect Captain.

I very definitely mean to use the word "captain" in the sense of a military leader of a group of fighting soldiers, since in Lewis's view, the coming of Christ has in fact amounted to an "invasion" of Enemy-held land. The Enemy in this case is Satan, and the land Satan holds hostage is our fallen world. We who are the Body of Christ are accordingly the Perfect Captain's footsoldiers.

To extend the analogy a bit further: the Commander-in-Chief of our invading good army is God the Father. The Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, can perhaps be visualised, accordingly, as Company Chaplain.

Notice that the "cap" in "captain" derives from the Latin for "head." As the head of his invading company, Christ leads us in the battle against entrenched Evil. Any leader demands and deserves his troops' loyalty. A function of our loyalty to our captian is that we are commissioned to follow his commands. A second function is that we ordinary footsoldiers need to be mutually wacthful after one another's survival and welfare. We, as the saying goes, watch each other's backs.

It's like any company or brigade or regiment in wartime. We don't necessarily have to like the guy in the foxhole next to us to feel responsible for seeing that he doesn't die in battle, if we can possibly help him stay alive.


The analogy which Lewis uses is an even better one. The Body of Christ is, in that picture, an actual bodily organism, full of different organs, of which Christ is the Head. We humans constitute, quite naturally, the individual organs.

In this view we are anything but exact copies of one another, anything but interchangeable parts. We are all different, and we each have disparate roles in keeping the Body going. Our duties to one another are not solely for the sake of aiding the other individual organs qua individuals; they are just as much for the sake of maintaining the Body as a whole.

In saying such a thing there is a danger of "overcompensating" for the arrant individualism which such a Body analogy is meant to offset in each of us, who often behave as if we were the center of our own universe. Yet there is also the danger of our taking overweening pride in our own individual function in the Body of Christ, as if a pancreas were to lord it over an appendix. Lewis deals with this twin danger in his "Two Notes" chapter, in Book IV:

The idea that the whole human race is, in a sense, one thing — one large organism, like a tree — must not be confused with the idea that individual differences do not matter or that real people, Tom and Nobby and Kate, are somehow less important than collective things like classes, races, and so forth. Indeed the two ideas are opposites. Things which are parts of a single organism may be very different from one another: things which are not, may be very alike. Six pennies are quite separate and very alike: my nose and my lungs are very different but they are only alive at all because they are parts of my body and share its common life. Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group of items in a list, but as organs in a body — different from one another and each contributing what no other could. When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things. On the other hand, when you are tempted not to bother about someone else's troubles because they are "no business of yours," remember that though he is different from you he is part of the same organism as you. If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself you will become an Individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian. But a Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist.

I feel a strong desire to tell you — and I suspect you feel a strong desire to tell me — which of these two errors is the worse. 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. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.

Quite a lot of Christian wisdom is concentrated in these two straightforward paragraphs. As separate organs in a single Body whose Head is Christ, we realize that our love for God and love for neighbor — the two Great Commandments our Perfect Captain gives us — amount to the same thing. They together constitute our solemn duties as footsoldiers of the Lord.

They serve, furthermore, to guide us between the twin errors of (as Lewis calls them) Individualism and Totalitarianism. If we were independent organisms, and not mere organs in this one metaphorical Body, we would be justified in being selfish Individualists. But if we were as indistinguishable as pennies in a roll, our proper form of governance would be Totalitarianism.

The Twin Commandments of love for God and neighbor hence model for us a religion whose entire genius lies in its moderation. If we are to avoid the snares of Satan, we must navigate between all sorts of errors that Satan makes into pairs of tempting opposites. It is natural that each of us is going to be tempted by one counterpoised error, more so than the other. But as Christians we are to seek the spiritual over the natural, when the latter poses a mortal threat to us. This is why we need a Perfect Captain to lead us past the diabolical land mines and on into battle.

Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (III)

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

In Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (I) and Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (II) I made two main points about the Christian religion as described by C.S. Lewis, the great British defender of the faith, in his ever-popular book Mere Christianity. In the first of my two previous installments, I noted that God is Perfect Goodness. In the second, I said that God is Perfect Love.

Now I would like to add a third characteristic: God as Perfect Penitence.

I said in the first two installments that the Christian God is Three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is primarily as Father that God is the Power for Good who calls us to live by his will and not by our own self-seeking. God, as Father, is the taproot of Moral Law.

The Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, has the same sort of uncreated life as the Father: "begotten" not made. The Father and Son unendingly share perfect love for one another. Their union is the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit who is the spirit of all love. Lewis says that "a living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else." That is to say, what God has created or made — the world, us — comes from this "activity" of perfect Father-Son love.

But in Christianity, the Son is more than that statement alone would indicate. He is also Christ Jesus, "The Perfect Penitent" of chapter 4 of Lewis's Book II: What Christians Believe.

We can think of the crucial process as penitence, or as atonement, or as regeneration, or as repentance, or as salvation — indeed, as any of several other words and phrases that Christians use to indicate that we need to reorient ourselves back to God and Moral Law, and that we can never do so quite adequately, all by ourselves. From the Christian perspective, the core of the problem we face is that moral purity or spiritual perfection is out of reach for us, until we accept Christ's help.


Christ is, of course, the man Jesus of Nazareth who died ignominously on a cross in first-century Palestine and rose again from the dead. His disciples and apostles were sure then, after they witnessed the Resurrection, that he was God. Later the Gospels were written down, memorializing the dawning realization that Jesus was in fact the eternal Word of God. Still later, the religion that had begun to flourish in Jesus's name codified the divine relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, identifying the man, Jesus, the Christ, as the only begotten Son who is coeternal with the Father.

If all that is the truth, then (as Lewis point out in his chapter "The Shocking Alternative") the core belief which separates Christianity from all other religions — that an uncreated God became a man, like us in all ways but sin, and somehow by his death made up for our sinfulness — ought to galvanize us in a way that no other religious belief can.


For Christ indeed was, and is, the Perfect Penitent. We are called to penitence — the sincere desire to reform — but by itself our penitence is never enough. There is in this world, Lewis says, a Dark Power. By dint of it our every effort at excellence "all slides back into misery and ruin." That is true in the communal sphere, and in the individual. Hence, under this unseen Power's sway, our penitence is intrinsically imperfect.

Christ, free of our own sinfulness, remedied that imperfection by coming here to us bodily and dwelling among us in order to teach us about the Father, and ultimately to be put to death. It was the dying of One Who Cannot Die — because he is God — that forms the paradox which electrifies the heart of Christian belief.

Here is how Lewis so aptly puts it in his "The Perfect Penitent" chapter:

But supposing God became a man — suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person [with a "small-p"] — then that person could help us. He could surrender his will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and he could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying ... but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.

These core beliefs obviously require two others. First, they require us to believe that there is, in fact, such a Dark Power in the world as that Great Rebel who is called Satan. The Devil, as he is also known, is the Power for Evil which I talked about in Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (I). He is not coeternal and coequal with God, in the Christian view, but is a creature of God who has turned against his creator. As Prince of This World, he engages in ongoing rebellion, and it is part of his strategy for waging that rebellion that we would be held in in sin.

Second, we need to believe that there is another world, a heaven, an afterlife. In fact, the whole point of our accepting Christ's penetential help is to allow ourselves to become fitted for that afterlife.


This goes along with what I said in Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (II) about the categorical difference between the Christian spiritual life, which Lewis calls Zoe, and our ordinary biological life, Bios. Zoe can be thought of as our soul-life. We, with Christ's help, cease to cling to Bios as we are "born again" in spirit or Zoe.

The meaning of that phrase, "with Christ's help," is key. Lewis brings out that meaning towards the end of his book, starting with his "The Obstinate Toy Soldiers" chapter in Book IV: Beyond Personality. After having characterized the Trinity and giving some idea what it means to say the Three-Personal God exists outside of time itself, Lewis has already claimed that being reborn to Zoe lets us in on the begotten-not-made life shared by Christ with his Father.


Now, Lewis goes on to say that we get this life only by letting Christ stand beside us and help us in making our otherwise inadequate efforts to "appropriate" that which his cross has established for us:

What, then, is the difference which He has made to the whole human mass? It is just this; that the business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into timeless "spiritual" life, has been done for us. Humanity is already "saved" in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work — the bit we could not have done for ourselves — has been done for us. We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts; it has already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves open to the one Man in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of being God, is also a real man, He will do it in us and for us.

In other words, when we let Jesus stand beside us and help us as we pray, we will catch this "good infection," this neverending spiritual life, directly from him.


Lewis as much as admits that our praying is — and always must be — something of a pretense. In his chapter "Let's Pretend," he shows how it all works. Prayer, he says in italicized type, is "dressing up as Christ."

That is, we have the "outrageous cheek," when we pray to God, of "pretending to be what [we] are not." But this letting on that we are like Christ is the "good kind" of pretending, one "where the pretence leads up to the real thing." Whenever we say our prayers, we open ourselves to the realization of what we ought to be doing — perhaps even instead of praying — because we are for once able to become aware of what Christ would have us do, to grow to be like him. Or, as Lewis puts it:

The Christ Himself, the Son of God who is man (just like you) and God (just like His Father) is actually at your side and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretence into a reality.

This, Lewis points out. is more than the ordinary voice of conscience:

If you simply ask your conscience, you get one result: if you remember that you are dressing up as Christ, you get a different one. There are lots of things which your conscience might not call definitely wrong (specially things in your mind) but which you will see at once that you cannot go on doing if you are seriously trying to be like Christ. For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying to catch the good infection from a Person ... The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to "inject" his kind of life and thought, His Zoe, into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier [that you figuratively are] into a live man.

Accordingly we see that Christ Jesus plays several intelocking roles in Christian belief. He is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity whose mutually shared love for and with the Father turns into the Third Person, the Holy Spirit who is the spirit of all love. He is the eternal Word of God whose activity, with that of the Father, creates us and the world. He is the Perfect Penitent who, taking on our humanity, died on a cross to save us both communally and individually. He is the Ideal Person whom we, in prayer, "dress up as" and impersonate. And he is the Patient Partner who stands beside us each time we pray and guides us in our impersonation.

It is through his Perfect Penitence that our own imperfect efforts at penitence can fit us, bit by bit, for sharing his begotten-not-made spiritual life with the Father, forevermore.

Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (II)

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

In Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (I) I said that the great British defender of Christian faith C.S. Lewis, who died in 1963, argues in his ever-popular Mere Christianity that we all believe certain immutable things about good and evil. Neither we nor our world are perfectly good though, as we very well know. Hence, the sources of pure good and evil lie outside our impure world. Furthermore, Lewis argues, the Power for Good must transcend the Power for Evil since, for us, good can be its own reward, while evil cannot.

Is the transcendent Power for Good a person, then? What would that even mean?

Christians say that the Power for Good is the God who "has brought us into existence and loves us and looks after us," and the Christian God is accordingly to be thought of as our Heavenly Father (see the chapter on "Making and Begetting" in Book IV, Beyond Personailty: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity).

When Christians (and Jews and Muslims) say God is a person, according to Lewis, they make a doctrinal assertion that they know not to be fully adequate in describing the transcendent Power for Good. That Power is a person, and more. Any such attribution of divine personhood, says Lewis, is like a map of the world. It does not give us the full experience of (say) being on an ocean, but it does guide us to the other side of that ocean in a practical way.

Like all maps, this doctrinal "map" which likens God to a person is "based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God — experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused."


Once you allow that God is a Father, a person and not just an abstract power, you start to see why Christ is called the Son of God. For good reason, Lewis makes a lot of this. If Jesus is the Son of God and not just a great moral teacher, there can (indeed, there must) be a quantum difference in what Jesus Christ ought to mean to us, above and beyond all the other great moral teachers whose advice we so often ignore.

If Christ is the Son of God, as our Christian doctrinal map tells us, he was "begotten, not made," and this was so "before all worlds" were created. That implies the Son, unlike us mere creatures, has exactly the same sort of life as the Father. Nothing that is made or created has the identical sort of life that the maker has; even the most sophisticated human-made robot would not be alive, by our standard. That which is begotten does — as a human infant has the same sort of life its own parents have.


Christians say they are called to a spiritual life, different in kind from their merely biological one. The kind of biological life we are born with, called Bios by Lewis, is one we share with all living creatures. The spiritual life, which Lewis calls Zoe, can never, like our biological life, "run down [or] decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature." Zoe or spiritual life is exactly the kind of life shared by the Father and the Son. When we are changed, in Christ, "from having Bios to having Zoe," we inherit that same kind of transcendent life on high, and we ourselves become Sons of God. Only then, we might say, are we fully persons.

Unfailingly, "love is something that one person has for another person," writes Lewis. Consequently, if "God is love" — given that we have noted that God is the Power for Good that is outside the domain of time and, never having not existed, has made our temporal world — "the words 'God is love' have no real meaning unless God contains [and has always done so] at least two Persons." These first two divine Persons, the Father and his only begotten Son, accordingly engage in "a living, dynamic activity of love [that] has been going on in God forever and has created everything else." (This comes from the chapter "Good Infection," in Book IV.)

Moreover, Lewis continues, "the union between the Father and Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person." Just as any fruitful human association is apt to develop a "spirit" of corporate behavior, a "communal personality" which could survive even if the original members left, the timeless Father-Son union is the "spirit" of God. It is the third Person of the Christian Trinity: the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit.

Though the Holy Spirit is also a Person, Lewis says we find "it (or Him) rather vaguer or more shadowy in [our] mind than the other two" for an excellent reason. "If you think of the Father as something 'out there', in front of you, and of the Son as someone standing at your side, helping you to pray, then you have to think of the third Person as something inside you, or behind you ... God is love, and that love works through men — especially through the whole community of Christians. But this spirit of love is, from all eternity, a love going on between the Father and Son."


We are a long way from the original idea of a Power for Good here, one that is opposed by a Power for Evil named Satan. To be sure, so far I have blithely skipped over the entirety of Lewis's Book III, a primer on Christian Behaviour, which outlines our moral obligations as Christians. I have also short-shrifted the discussion in "The Perfect Penitent" in Book II of why (at least, the best we who have such limited minds can tell) the sinless Son needed to take on human form: in order that we can say that "His death has washed out our sins." For, as Lewis demonstrates, it is simply not possible for sinful mere creatures to redeem themselves.

Accodingly, it is fair to say that the above presentation summarizes mostly the "feel-good" aspects of Christianity. It talks about love and says nothing about sin.

It is, in short, all about spirituality — as contrasted with morality. I have switched so abruptly from the latter to the former in order to bring out the fact that C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity embraces both facets of Christian faith. I think my strategy is only right and proper, because in his other Christian writings Lewis talks about the lifelong, ultimately unsatisfiable yearning for "joy" which stimulated his search for God. It was coming to believe in God which allowed him to find his joy — or, rather, to find something so far greater that his thirst for joy was utterly transcended.

Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (I)

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

In The Taproot of Moral Law and also in C.S. Lewis on "The Invasion", I talked of the ever-popular book Mere Christianity. Its author, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), was an English professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University and author of such other books as the children's series The Chronicles of Narnia. During World War II, in a series of brief BBC radio addresses, Lewis laid out what he felt to be the bare essentials of Christian belief. Those addresses became Mere Christianity, which has never since disappeared from bookstore shelves.

I was something between an agnostic and an atheist when I first read Mere Christianity back in 1988. For a number of reasons, I felt at that juncture in my life that I needed to consider the possibility of believing in God. I stumbled upon Lewis's book and found myself convinced by it: there is a God, and Christ is his only begotten son.

One thing that made Lewis so convincing to me was that he too had been an atheist as recently as ten years before making his radio addresses, and even after once admitting to a divine Father's existence in the abstract he had taken years to understand and accept the implications of the Son's appearance in the form of a man and subsequent sacrifice on the cross. Because he had had to think so carefully about his beliefs, and this had happened in the not-too-distant past, Lewis consequently explained things in a way any uncommitted reader can take in, if not agree with unreservedly.


In the nearly 20 years since I first read Lewis, I find that my religious faith has somewhat dimmed, in part because my belief has atrophied. That is, practicing my faith has become a matter of going through motions, while the core beliefs that underlie such pietistic gestures have somehow faded from my thoughts.

Nowhere is that more true, I find, than when it comes to those beliefs which relate to the most transcendental aspects of Christianity: God, Christ, and Spirit as inconceivably above and beyond the material world. Also, an immaterial Force for Evil: God's enemy, known as Satan.

This has been my own fault, I know. For perhaps ten years, I have been absorbed in trying to see how the workings of the material world might vouchsafe the existence of an immanent deity, one who dwells in every atom, particle and photon of energy in the universe. It was not so much that I personally needed to apprehend that divine immanence in some mystical, New Age way as that I felt such an approach could bring Christian religion closer to acceptability for the masses of unbelievers. An immanent divinity might explain, for example, why the cosmic "dice" seem to be "loaded" in such a way as to guide evolution's progress toward intelligent creatures like us.


Immanence is, as some Christians know, an attribute of the Christian God, along with his transcendence. It's not wrong to believe God dwells at the heart of his Creation. But now I find that minimizing God's transcendence in favor of an immanentist outlook tends to throw out the baby with the bathwater. As my present rereading of Mere Christianity brings home to me, there are crucial aspects of Christian belief that can be made sense of only by imagining God to be outside material reality — indeed, outside time itself.

Not that Lewis begins his defense of Christian belief with these aspects. Rather, he begins it by noting that all of us seem to act as if there exists, somewhere, somehow, a Moral Law, an immutable standard of what is fair, right, and good to which we all will invariably appeal whenever we feel we have been wronged.

At the same time as we feel that such a Moral Law truly exists, we have to admit that none of us succeeds in living strictly by it at all times and in all places. We slight our families and neighbors and shirk our duties repeatedly and incessantly. In fact, it is as if there is an agent — call him Satan, or Devil, or Prince of This World — responsible for sowing that which is wrong or evil in our hearts.


These, then, are the two Powers (Lewis has at this early stage of the book not taken up what it means to call them Persons) that Lewis insists exist outside material reality. One is a Power for Good, and the other is a Power for Evil. This idea of supernatural powers is contrary to what an atheist holds true.

Why, in Lewis's view, is the atheist wrong? Because reality is ineluctably complex, and atheism is far too simple. For instance, the atheist will typically deny God's existence on the basis that the world is cruel and unjust; how could a good, all-powerful God let so much bad stuff happen?

Well, says Lewis, if the atheist's viewpoint about an unjust or morally indifferent cosmos refuting God's existence is correct, there can ultimately be no sense or meaning in the world. Yet even the atheist has an idea of justice, and must perforce agree that he thinks this idea itself to make absolute sense. Therein lies a contradiction. One can read Lewis's chapter on "The Rival Conceptions of God," in Book II of Mere Christianity, to flesh out this logical-flaw argument which Lewis makes against atheism.

So atheism is too simplistic, because its arguments cannot embrace all the known facts of human experience: specifically, our invariably acting as if justice is something real. But if it is absolutely real, then there must be Powers above this seemingly amoral (if not immoral) world, outside time and space, which underlie and sow the seeds of worldly Good or Evil.


Then the question becomes, is the Power for Evil coequal and coeternal with the Power for Good, rather than one of the Good Power's creatures turned in rebellious enmity against its very source of being? If so, the philosophy called Dualism is the right one.

If one assumes to be true the assumption that the Power for Good "likes" goodness qua goodness — if it favors goodness for its own sake — then a coequal and coeternal Power for Evil would accordingly choose badness for its own sake. After all, says Lewis, we often feel we like goodness for itself alone, and not always as a means to some end. But we have no experience of liking badness for its own sake.

This argument is made by Lewis in Book II, chapter 2, "The Invasion." For us, he says, cruelty (to take one example of evil) always is done to further some end — sexual satisfaction, for the sadist; money, power, or the assurance of safety, for others. Otherwise, we would not bother to be cruel. That's so because we experience an inner preference for cruelty's opposite — even if we aren't always kind to others. Put another way, we know that our default orientation is toward the good because we like goodness for its own sake, as much as for any goal-seeking purpose.


Here, then, is an example of how Lewis makes arguments by relating his conclusions to our inner experiences. If we simply trust our personal experience in such matters, we can come to believe that Lewis is right about the Power for Good having (shall I put it) existential primacy over the Power for Evil.

Specifically, the Bad Power must start out, Lewis says, by having "good things to want and then [he, the Bad Power, must come] to pursue them in the wrong way: he must have impulses which were originally good in order to be able to pervert them. ... To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in themselves good. Therefore he must be getting them from the Good Power: even to be bad he must borrow and steal from his opponent."

Hence, in a very real sense, good qua good must logically and metaphysically precede evil qua evil.


Notice that Lewis' whole argument depends crucially then on our crediting and honoring universal aspects of human experience, such as our deep belief in justice. Otherwise we are free to ask, for example, why shouldn't we say that the Bad Power seeks evil for its own sake? But we are simply not able to ask that and at the same moment remain true to our inner belief that the good serves ultimately as its own reward.

That experience-based modality of argument lies at the core of Lewis's whole case for God. And Lewis is able at every juncture so successfully to relate such abstract concepts as Powers That Exist Beyond This World to our everyday experience, that it is hard to see how anyone who is in basic accord with this logcial modality which Lewis uses couldn't accept Lewis's entire worldview.

In short, Lewis argues that deep down, we all believe certain immutable things about good and evil, about justice and injustice. These things we universally believe in contradict our own behavior much of the time, and they certainly contradict what we see going on in the world around us every day. Hence, the sources of good and evil must lie outside this impure world. Furthermore, the Power for Good must be said to transcend the Power for Evil by virtue of the fact that, for us, good can be its own reward, while evil cannot.

Earthly Powers and Political Religions

Frankly, I'm beginning to regret having styled myself as a "neo-Manachaean" in my recent series of posts culminating in Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V.

The reason, in part, is that I have begun reading Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War by Michael Burleigh. The British historian traces the development of "political religion" — aka "secular" or "civil" religion, meaning "the political use of religious belief" (p. 93) — in Europe from the Enlightenment through World War I.

Beginning with the French Revolution — if not with the Puritans of England a century or so before — Christianity morphed into often lethal forms in service to earthly political ends. In France, the original 1789 revolution, relatively soft and moderate in comparison to what soon ensued, quickly radicalized into an instrument of death-by-guillotine at the hands of the Jacobins, famous for their Reign of Terror.

Burleigh anatomizes the Jacobins' "underlying pathologies" in a section titled "Goodness and Virtue," in his "Puritans Thinking They Are Spartans" chapter (pp. 88-95). The Jacobins were anything but rabble, writes Burleigh. They were well-to-do professionals, many of them lawyers. As many as six percent were priests. They met openly in thousands of local clubs during their infamous reign over France, which ended in 1794. The watchwords at their gatherings were supposedly reason and civility; yet, as Burleigh details, "a tearful sentimentalism" like as not would prevail "whenever the People were invoked."


Their besottedness with "the People" as a disembodied, bloodless concept in turn reflected the Jacobins' "fateful infatuation with an abstract ought-world to which mere human beings in all their complexity necessarily failed to conform." Thus was justified the reign's "moral imperialism" and "terroristic violence," wherein "any form of dissent or opposition, real or imagined, bore the taint of moral leprosy, something to be amputated or excised from an otherwise healthy body."

The object of the revolution, in Jacobin eyes, was a "new political religion" which would foster "a regenerated people" — wherein a "new man" would supplant the old, corrupted sort. Regeneration was (and remains) a motif associated with traditional Christianity, and one of Burleigh's main points is that political religion is often a sort of Christianity-sans-God.

In revolutionary France, Burleigh indicates, many of the intellectuals were heirs of philosophes such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montaigne whose religious positions were typically Deist, if not outright atheist. Others continued to put faith in God, though not always in Church. But what kind of God?


The God of the French Revolution was, per Burleigh, a deity whose Providence could allow one Geffroy, a "local locksmith and father of three" who survived in hospital after taking a random bullet in a melee after a failed assassination attempt on Robespierre and other Jacobin notables, to be cast instead as "a Christ-like figure at what was tantamount to a revolutionary Day of Judgement in which the righteous virtuous would be separated from the incorrigibly corrupt ... ."

This "Manichaean view of the world," writes Burleigh, was one of "Openness versus Hypocrisy, Virtue versus Vice, Good versus Evil, Light versus Darkness" — and it was "heavily indebted to monotheistic religion."


I would prefer to call it, in a phrase I borrow from literary critics, a "demonic parody" of Christianity. As I have discussed in earlier posts (see, for instance, Rededication: To Solidarity, Above All), Albert Nolan, a provincial for the South African Province of the Dominicans, wrote in his book Jesus before Christianity about how Christ conspicuously sat down to dinner with lepers and other outcasts. Per the interpretation of Jewish law that prevailed in his time, their sickness was taken as a sign that God found them (to borrow a phrase) "incorrigibly corrupt." They were to be shunned lest, in Yahweh's eyes, they infect all Israel.

But Jesus taught and showed by living example that there is no such thing as a moral leper.


The political religions Burleigh talks about hence would seem to be ugly burlesques of true Christianity. Where Christianity celebrates life, they wield death.

So, if a "Manichaean" outlook is in fact the wellspring of such demonic parodies and ugly burlesques, as modern usage à la Burleigh indicates, I hereby recant. I am no neo-Manichaean after all. In truth, by calling myself that I meant to associate myself with a diametrically opposite view, one in which pure good and pure evil are so mixed in every creature that "mere human beings in all their complexity" lack the capacity for self-regeneration via worldly institutions. That's why it has taken the death on a cross of a God-man who is himself without sin to accomplish our regeneration.

The Taproot of Moral Law

I talked in C.S. Lewis on "The Invasion" about Mere Christianity, the primer on Christian belief by a great defender of the faith whose lectures on British radio during World War II that still-popular book recapitulates. It was a time when the great evil of Nazi aggression under Hitler threatened to undermine European and world civilization. As bombs were falling on London, Lewis told his countrymen of God's ongoing battle with Satan, the Prince of This World.

Lewis's argument toward God and Christ in Mere Christianity begins from the axiom that we all believe, deep down, in right and wrong. That is, we all think that the right is really and truly distinct from the wrong, even if our fumbling attempts to say what is right in particular situations often result in honest disagreements among ourselves, and even if none of us manages to obey even our own conscience with notable constancy.

Francis S. Collins, in The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, says the Lewis book was and remains a touchstone of his commitment to Christian belief, following a period of atheism as a young man. Lewis also started out as an atheist. Collins, again like Lewis, cites the existence of a universal notion of Moral Law among us humans as (along with a common experience of spiritual longing) a prime reason why he now firmly rejects his former nonbelief on God.

Collins says science cannot explain the sense we humans invariably have of an absolutely real right-wrong, fair-unfair, unselfish-selfish, good-evil dichotomy. Lewis, in his discussion, pretty much ignores whatever advances science may or may not claim to be capable of making towards filling the "gaps" in our naturalistic understanding of why things are the way they are, including why we humans think the way we do. For the most part, he simply assumes that the Moral Law binds us, ergo there must be something real outside this world to which we are thereby bound.

At some point, it seems to me, these two arguments run the risk of circularity, of begging the question. Either by treating the phenomenon of our awareness of right and wrong as a brute fact needing no further explanation (Lewis) or by assigning it to an explanatory realm wholly beyond scientific inquiry (Collins), both arguments fail to convince those who begin from a different axiom: that all that can be explained, science will eventually explain.

Of course, those who propose such an axiom are prone to their own sort of circularity. There is something better — i.e., more good, more right — about adopting a wholly materialistic view of the world, they seem to say. But that implies a "higher standard" of what is good and right and proper, a yardstick by which their worldview ought to be judged superior to the theistic worldview.

They may well say their yardstick is reason, or human progress, or (since so many injustices have been committed by religion) justice. But even so, they are making Lewis's and Collins's point: we all believe there is such a yardstick.


My approach to resolving this deadlock of dueling circularities is to try to figure out which, if any, brute fact about our common human experience we ought to treat axiomatically, as a given.

In addressing such a question, I don't think Collins hits the nail bang on the head when he identifies the Moral Law mainly with our capacity for noble, unreciprocated, entirely altruistic acts which, especially when they are done in secret, cannot boost our evolutionary "fitness." While that argument is true as far as it goes, it doesn't encompass human goodness in its entirety. Most of the good we do is not that pure or noble. A lot of it comes, quite grudgingly, out of a sense of duty which overrides our usual inclination to bypass doing the right thing.

In this regard Lewis is spot on. He acknowledges time and again our absolute incapacity to do the right thing all the time, or even most of the time. The insufficiency in his discussion, by today's scientific standards, is that he doesn't actually specify in no uncertain terms exactly what the feature of the human soul is that we would like science to explain, without foreseeable result. Instead, he resorts to homely examples that (quite successfully, in my opinion) call up for us the experience of being committed to a higher standard.

One is tempted at first to call this scientifically inexplicable feature of the universal human experience a sense of "duty," or perhaps of "obligation." We all know we have a moral duty, an obligation to live by some high standard of conduct which, if lived by, would keep us from doing evil.

So I would say that what science has to try to explain, entirely under its own steam, is the combination of our knowledge of a higher standard and our wavering — yet sometimes passionate, and never quite dead — commitment to it.

Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

This goes along with something I said a while back in a post in another blog. The blog is called Beyond Darwin, and the post was Non-Crazy Questions (II). It was one of a series of posts looking into Robert Wright's book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright, who is a science writer, not a scientist, suggests that life on earth has a non-intelligent designer: natural selection itself. Natural selection processes information in the form of feedback from the environment and "decides" which variants of existing life forms are best-suited to survive. In so doing it blindly pursues a goal: ever more elaborate expressions of living complexity.

That sort of thing is pretty much bound to result, eventually, in the advent and further increase of intelligent life, in the form of organisms that are ever better at doing their own information processing and maximizing the gains they realize from playing "non-zero sum games" with one another. Positive non-zero sum games are interactions in which both parties benefit. Wright says they predominate in evolutionary history over either one-winner-one-loser zero sum games or negative non-zero sum games in which both parties lose.

But, says Wright, intelligence is not the same as consciousness, no matter how high creaturely IQs soar. Consciousness — sentience, subjectivity, "inner" experience — is not necessary to evolutionary fitness. It's an add-on. There might exist in the world (though there aren't actually) quite clever living and breathing zombies with no inner experience whatever, "robots with unusually good skin" (pp. 320-1), who would be just as expert as we human beings are at gaming the environment and fostering their own evolutionary success.

Crucially, these imaginable-if-nonexistent zombies provide us with a moral lesson, says Wright. Because they lack subjective, sentient inner experience, they partake of the same moral standing as a computer. It is not morally wrong to turn off a computer, or to dismantle it into its component parts, or to throw it on the junk heap when its useful life is over. The same would be true of these hypothetical zombies: Thou Shalt Not Kill would not apply to them.

In other words, the taproot of our moral obligation lies in the soil of our sentience. If we were not conscious, the whole idea of moral imperatives borne toward one another would be null and void.


I find this a crucial addition to the argument that both Collins and Lewis make about how there exists a basic Moral Law, common to all humans, that serves as a signpost to God. If we are aware of bearing a shared, mutual commitment to a higher standard, however much we may waver and wobble in living by it, then both the awareness and the commitment bespeak our non-zombieness. The fact that we are conscious, something the most highly evolved robotoids could never be, shows that there is something extra in our makeup.

Accordingly, Wright's argument that the existence of God is a "non-crazy question" patterns closely with the logic of Collins and Lewis. They too advert to a "something extra" in us which Darwinian evolution by natural selection cannot account for. In their case, it is the Moral Law. In Wright's, it is the sheer fact that we are conscious, though we needn't be.

I would be remiss here if I didn't note, by the way, that Wright's ideas about human consciousness being superfluous to our underlying brain states/processes is not universally held. Philosophers of mind like Daniel Dennett dispute that consciousness is anything at all above and beyond a strict identity with those underlying mechanics.

Or, sometimes, Dennett and others like him talk as if consciousness does exist as a mental state, separate from the underlying brain mechanics — but one with its own independent causal functionality, such that natural selection would "see" it and act on it.

Wright carefully admits to there being such a view as Dennett's, while stating how incomprehensible it seems to him. The gist of Wright's rebuttal, extended a bit by me, is this: if there is no distinguishable human trait of consciousness, apart from our brain mechanics, then any advanced robotoids who evolve naturally on some hypothetical planet elsewhere in the galaxy, and who have the same brain mechanics as we do, will perforce be as conscious as we, and it would accordingly be a sin to destroy them. Put another way, such non-human robotoids as these imaginary ones could never ever be — they'd be as "human" as we are!

But that would mean that Thou Shalt Not Kill would apply to them too. Reducing consciousness to a mere identity with certain neurochemical mechanics of the human brain fails utterly to obviate the Moral Law which serves us a signpost to God.

Or, if consciousness is a real mental state above and beyond the brain's neurochemical transactions, but it is not transparent to natural selection — if it produces its own causal effects in the material world, that is — then science as we know it cannot properly deal with it. "Truly scientific models," Wright says in an endnote on p. 398, "must invoke only 'publicly observable' causal phenomena (neurotransmitters, etc.)." Purely "mental forces," even if they exist, are not "publicly observable" and as such lie outside the legitimate range of scientific inquiry!

Again, in this case, science fails to explain the Moral Law. Thus Wright argues (I think quite convincingly) that human consciousness is something which science alone cannot account for. I accordingly find it to be the soil wherein lies the taproot of Moral Law.


But there is another essential part of the argument concerning the Moral Law, one which I don't think Collins pays enough attention to: the sheer impossibility we encounter in trying to live by this standard. Lewis says:

And what did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded. (p. 54, Collier ppbk.)

It is this feature of our situation, our wavering commitment to a higher standard, which makes the Christian religion so specifically appropriate. Jesus, after all, made the shocking claim to forgive us our sins, just as if he were God and the wrongs we have done were wrongs against him (see p. 55).

P.D. James says in one of her Adam Dalgleish mysteries that all murders are motivated by Love, Lust, Lucre, or Loathing, with Love being paradoxically the most dangerous. You would think our sense of moral obligation would invariably be clarified by it, but no. Love can be a killer.

I attribute this wrinkle in the fabric of our nature — as well as our susceptibility to Lust, Lucre, and Loathing — to the fact that we who possess the Moral Law descend from species that do not. Their instincts, passions, and moral blindness linger on in us today. Here is another reason why Christians ought to feel Darwinian evolution is their ally, not their enemy!

C.S. Lewis on "The Invasion"

In The Burden of Evil I said that I have:

... recently been exploring my at least quasi-heretical notion of "neo-Manachaeanism" in posts beginning with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I and ending with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V. It's not good Christian doctrine because it sees God as all-good but not all-powerful. God's ongoing struggle with Satan reflects into the material world as a neverending clash between (say) order and chaos.

I then went on to posit an alternate explanation for why we encounter such evil in a God-made world, an explanation that I think is far less "neo-Manichaean." I said that God, who could trounce evil once and for all, refrains from doing so in order to "co-opt" it instead. Our lives are thereby burdened with not only the results of evil but the tempatation to do evil deeds, or else to fail to do good ones. To be so tested and challenged is the only way we can possibly be brought to die, little by little, to our own innate selfishness.

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

I'd now like to extend those remarks by noting how the great Christian defender C.S. Lewis dealt with the same subject in Mere Christianity. Lewis (1898-1963) was an English professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University and author of such books as the children's series The Chronicles of Narnia. During World War II, in a series of radio addresses, Lewis laid out what he felt to be the bare essentials of Christian belief. Those addresses became Mere Christianity, which has never since disappeared from bookstore shelves.

Lewis had been a staunch atheist in his younger years but had suddeenly come to recognize in Christian belief the most accurate way of understanding and explaining precisely what we face here in this world. The most telling aspect of our human experience, he says in the introductory chapters of Mere Christianity, is that we are, all of us, aware of a standard of good and evil which presses on us to do naught but the former. Yet we so often do the latter instead, and then we make all sorts of excuses about it. In fact, we are incapable of perfect goodness.

Lewis gives his reasons for dismissing religions that attribute everything that occurs in the world to the actions of a pantheistic God or gods, far beyond "good" and "evil." Then, in his chapter on "The Invasion," Lewis takes aim at dualism: "next to Christianity ... the manliest and most sensible creed on the market" (this is from p. 48 in my Collier Books paperback edition).

Dualism holds "that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war" (p. 48). Lewis doesn't name Manichaeanism as a dualist philosophy, but I'd say it quite obviously is. So if my self-styled "neo-Manichaeanism" isn't dualist, I'd better say why not. Otherwise, as Lewis makes clear, I'm no Christian.

To Lewis, the crux of dualism is the idea that the two "powers at the back of everything" are independent of one another. The "good" one is good for goodness's own sake. (Either that, or the goodness we each attribute to it degenerates into a matter of personal preference, in which case there is really no such as goodness qua goodness, and the whole discussion is pointless.)

So if the "bad" is equal and independent, this power "at the back of everything" must accordingly be bad for badness's own sake. But Lewis shows this to be a contradiction in terms. We cannot really conceive of badness for badness's sake. All our experience of badness shows it to be universally employed as a means to an end, such as "money, or power, or safety" (p. 49).

Actual badness or evil is in every instance "a parasite, not an original thing," Lewis says (p. 50). It takes something which is fine in itself, such as money, power, or safety, and perverts it by pursuing it in a wrong way. Evil is spoiled good.

Good therefore has primacy over evil. Good ends can be used to explain perverted ones in a way in which perverted ones cannot serve to explain good ones.

Here is where that old Christian chestnut the devil comes into the picture, for Lewis. As a fallen angel, Satan is a self-willed, rebellious, perverted creation of the good God. And we live in "enemy-occupied territory," in this world of ours (p. 51). Christ, our "rightful king," has fortunately staged an invasion. He has "landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage."


Lewis's other main point in this chapter is that the foregoing in no way justifies us in believing that our "campaign for good" can be simple or pure:

It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. ... And if you are content to stop there [i.e., with false and wishful thinking about the possibility of simplicity and moral clarity in the real world], well and good. But if you are not — and the modern world usually is not — if you want to go on and ask what is really happening — then you must be prepared for something difficult. ... 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. ... The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either. (pp. 46-48)

Christianity, says Lewis, is precisely a religion which admits how complex the problem of sabotaging Satan's earthly intrigues really is.

I find that, in spirit and letter, Lewis's explication of all this is exactly what I had in mind by calling myself a neo-Manichaean before. There is such a thing as pure goodness. It is real; it is God. But in our reality, it is ever polluted by Satan's nefarious schemes, which keep us from performing facile acts of sabotage without first disentangling the good (metaphorically, the innocent civilians) from the bad — to extend the metaphor, Satan's minions.

So maybe I'm right on the mark, Christianity-wise, to believe in both a pure source of good and a morally complex world.

The Burden of Evil

I've recently been exploring my at least quasi-heretical notion of "neo-Manachaeanism" in posts beginning with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I and ending with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V. It's not good Christian doctrine because it sees God as all-good but not all-powerful. God's ongoing struggle with Satan reflects into the material world as a neverending clash between (say) order and chaos.

I've thought of another approach to the same question of why the all-good, all-powerful God of standard Christian belief would not trounce Satan straight away and end all our suffering and vulnerability at the hands of evil. This approach, unlike neo-Manichaeanism, would probably pass muster with most theologians.

To lead up to it, I have to make an admission. I am a person who has trouble distinguishing between two categories of experience: the truly evil, and the merely burdensome. By our personal burdens I mean all the "stuff" we have to endure in life: things which we would rather not have to put up with, like hangnails and nosy neighbors, menstrual cramps and hot, humid days. By evil I mean that which either is prima facie wrong or is absolutely wrong, as I laid out toward the end of Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V. From a religious perspective, it's what an all-good God doesn't want.

My admission is that I all too often identify anything which ruins my own particular day as evil.

This is a mistake that perhaps many others are prone to as well. And, I think, the problem of distinguishing between the two is rendered all the more complex because there can be actual evil behind that which ruins one's own particular day.

In my case, I have had assorted health woes of late: an operation to fix an aortic aneurysm and perform a double heart bypass seems to have brought on a reactive bout of clinical depression. A fair number of my days have been "ruined." I'm now recovered from the surgery and am taking an antidepressant to combat the mental woes. Perhaps quite naturally, this thought has on several occasions popped into my head, "Why is God doing this to me?"

Now, if evil is real, I think it's fair to identify the ground of suffering as Something or Someone Evil. Human suffering, writ large, is much worse than just "having a bad day." So another way to ask the question is, "Why doesn't God destroy the ground of suffering once and for all?"

And this is the answer that has just occurred to me: He doesn't destroy it, but he does "co-opt" it. He does turn evil into a burden for us, and for good reason. Bearing burdens is absolutely necessary for us if we are to grow as persons.

Personal growth seems to require that we die, little by little, to our selfishness. That's the bottom line. We won't die to our selfishness unless we are somehow burdened in life. Jesus was burdened with carrying his own cross prior to his crucifixion. We, too, must pay a (much smaller) price and bear a (much lighter) burden, if we are to locate a more "selfless self" to supplant our native selfishness.


Turning evil into a growth-sparking challenge to us: it patterns with a notion I draw from the new sciences of complexity. Some scientists have discovered an "edge of chaos," a fecund conceptual/mathematical region between order and chaos that is said to be the seat of evolutionary progress. The edge of chaos exerts its pull on computer models of living systems in such a way that perturbing a system into actual chaos causes a rebound toward order. During that rebound, growth and progress accelerate.

Perhaps this is exactly what happens when God co-opts evil, rather than banishing it outright.