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.