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| C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity |
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.
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