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.