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.