Loving praise for Read online

  Loving praise for

  C. S. LEWIS

  "We owed each a great debt to the other, and that tie with the deep affection it begot, remains. He was a great man."

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  "Lewis struck me as the most thoroughly converted man I ever met. Christianity was never for him a separate department of life... His whole vision of life was such that the natural and the supernatural seemed inseparably combined."

  Walter Hooper

  BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

  Copyright (c) 1970 by The Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto, Canada.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 70-129851 ISBN 0-345-33658-5

  This edition published by arrangement with William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Ballantine Books Edition: April 1983 Fifth Printing: July 1986

  CONTENTS

  1. Miracles

  2. Dogma and the Universe

  3. Answers to Questions on Christianity

  4. Myth Became Fact

  5. "Horrid Red Things"

  6. Religion and Science

  7. The Laws of Nature

  8. The Grand Miracle

  9. Christian Apologetics

  10. Work and Prayer

  11. Man or Rabbit?

  12. Religion Without Dogma?

  13. Some Thoughts

  14. "The Trouble with 'X'..."

  15. What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?

  16. Dangers of National Repentance

  17. Two Ways with the Self

  18. On the Reading of Old Books

  19. Scraps

  20. The Decline of Religion

  21. Vivisection

  22. Modern Translations of the Bible

  23. God in the Dock

  24. Cross-Examination

  25. The Sermon and the Lunch

  26. What Christmas Means to Me

  1.

  MIRACLES

  I HAVE KNOWN ONLY ONE PERSON IN MY LIFE WHO

  claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles. Whatever experiences we may have, we shall not regard them as miraculous if we already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural. Any event which is claimed as a miracle is, in the last resort, an experience received from the senses; and the senses are not infallible. We can always say we have been the victims of an illusion; if we disbelieve in the supernatural this is what we always shall say. Hence, whether miracles have really ceased or not, they would certainly appear to cease in Western Europe as materialism became the popular creed. For let us make no mistake. If the end of the world appeared in all the literal trappings of the Apocalypse,1 if the modern materialist saw with his own eyes the heavens rolled up2 and the great white throne appearing,3 if he had the sensation of being himself hurled into the Lake of Fire,4 he would continue forever, in that lake itself, to regard his experience as an illusion and to find the explanation of it in psychoanalysis, or cerebral pathology. Experience by itself proves nothing. If a man doubts whether he is dreaming or waking, no experiment can solve his doubt, since every experiment may itself be part of the dream. Experience proves

  'The book of Revelation.

  nbid., vi. 14.

  nbid., xx. 11.

  *lbid., xix. 20; xx. 10; xx. 14-15; xxi. 8.

  this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it.

  This fact, that the interpretation of experiences depends on preconceptions, is often used as an argument against miracles. It is said that our ancestors, taking the supernatural for granted and greedy of wonders, read the miraculous into events that were really not miracles. And in a sense I grant it. That is to say, I think that just as our preconceptions would prevent us from apprehending miracles if they really occurred, so their preconceptions would lead them to imagine miracles even if they did not occur. In the same way, the doting man will think" his wife faithful when she is not and the suspicious man will not think her faithful when she is: the question of her actual fidelity remains, meanwhile, to be settled, if at all, on other grounds. But there is one thing often said about our ancestors we must not say. We must not say "They believed in miracles because they did not know the Laws of Nature." This is nonsense. When St. Joseph discovered that his bride was pregnant, he was "minded to put her away."5 He knew enough biology for that. Otherwise, of course he would not have regarded pregnancy as a proof of infidelity. When he accepted the Christian explanation, he regarded it as a miracle precisely because he knew enough of the Laws of Nature to know that this was a suspension of them. When the disciples saw Christ walking on the water they were frightened:6 they would not have been frightened unless they had known the Laws of Nature and known that this was an exception. If a man had no conception of a regular order in Nature, then of course he could not notice departures from that order: just as a dunce who does not understand the normal meter of a poem is also unconscious of the poet's variations from it. Nothing is wonderful except the abnormal and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm. Complete ignorance of the Laws of Nature would preclude the perception of the miraculous just as rigidly as complete disbelief in the supernatural precludes it, perhaps even more so. For while the materialist would have at least to explain miracles away, the man wholly ignorant of Nature would simply not notice them.

  The experience of a miracle in fact requires two conditions. First we must believe in a normal stability of Nature, which

  'Matthew i. 19.

  'Matthew xiv. 26; Mark vi. 49; John vi. 19

  means we must recognize that the data offered by our senses recur in regular patterns. Secondly, we must believe in some reality beyond Nature. When both beliefs are held, and not till then, we can approach with an open mind the various reports which claim that this super- or extra-natural reality has sometimes invaded and disturbed the sensuous content of space and time which makes our "natural" world. The belief in such a supernatural reality itself can neither be proved nor disproved by experience. The arguments for its existence are metaphysical, and to me conclusive. They turn on the fact that even to think and act in the natural world we have to assume something beyond it and even assume that we partly belong to that something. In order to think we must claim for our own reasoning a validity which is not credible if our own thought is merely a function of our brain, and our brains a by-product of irrational physical processes. In order to act, above the level of mere impulse, we must claim a similar validity for our judgments of good and evil. In both cases we get the same disquieting result. The concept of Nature itself is one we have reached only tacitly by claiming a sort of super-natural status for ourselves.

  If we frankly accept this position and then turn to the evidence, we find, of course, that accounts of the supernatural meet us on every side. History is full of them-often in the same documents which we accept wherever they do not report miracles. Respectable missionaries report them not infrequently. The whole Church of Rome claims their continued occurrence. Intimate conversation elicits from almost every acquaintance at least one episode in his life which is what he would call "queer" or "rum." No doubt most stories of miracles are unreliable; but then, as anyone can see by reading the papers, so are most stories of all events. Each story must be taken on its merits: what
one must not do is to rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation. Thus you may disbelieve in the Mons Angels7 because you cannot find a sufficient number of sensible people who say they saw them. But if you found a sufficient number, it would, in my view, be unreasonable to explain this by collective hallucination. For

  'Lewis is referring to the story that angels appeared, protecting British troops in their retreat from Mons, France, on August 26, 1914. A recent summary of the event by Jill Kitson "Did Angels appear to British troops at Mons?" is found in History Makers, No. 3 (1969), pp. 132-33.

  we know enough of psychology to know that spontaneous unanimity in hallucination is very improbable, and we do not know enough of the supernatural to know that a manifestation of angels is equally improbable. The supernatural theory is the less improbable of the two. When the Old Testament says that Sennacherib's invasion was stopped by angels,8 and Herodotus says it was stopped by a lot of mice who came and ate up all the bowstrings of his army,9 an open-minded man will be on the side of the angels. Unless you start by begging the question, there is nothing intrinsically unlikely in the existence of angels or in the action ascribed to them. But mice just don't do these things.

  A great deal of scepticism now current about the miracles of our Lord does not, however, come from disbelief of all reality beyond Nature. It comes from two ideas which are respectable but I think mistaken. In the first place, modern people have an almost aesthetic dislike of miracles. Admitting that God can, they doubt if He would. To violate the laws He Himself has imposed on His creation seems to them arbitrary, clumsy, a theatrical device only fit to impress savages-a solecism against the grammar of the universe. In the second place, many people confuse the Laws of Nature with the laws of thought and imagine that their reversal or suspension would be a contradiction in terms-as if the resurrection of the dead were the same sort of thing as two and two making five.

  I have only recently found the answer to the first objection. I found it first in George MacDonald and then later in St. Athanasius. This is what St. Athanasius says in his little book On the Incarnation: "Our Lord took a body like to ours and lived as a man in order that those who had refused to recognize Him in His superintendence and captaincy of the whole universe might come to recognize from the works He did here below in the body that what dwelled in this body was the Word of God." This accords exactly with Christ's own account of His miracles: "The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do."10 The doctrine, as I understand it, is something like this:

  There is an activity of God displayed throughout creation, a wholesale activity let us say which men refuse to recognize.

  8II Kings xix. 35. 'Herodotus, Bk. II, Sect. 141. '"John v. 19.

  The miracles done by God incarnate, living as a man in Palestine, perform the very same things as this wholesale activity, but at a different speed and on a smaller scale. One of their chief purposes is that men, having seen a thing done by personal power on the small scale, may recognize, when they see the same thing done on the large scale, that the power behind it is also personal--is indeed the very same person who lived among us two thousand years ago. The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. Of that larger script part is already visible, part is still unsolved. In other words, some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do. In that sense, and from our human point of view, some are reminders and others prophecies.

  God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn that water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah's time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see. Either like the Pagans they refer the process to some finite spirit, Bacchus or Dionysus: or else, like the moderns, they attribute real and ultimate causality to the chemical and other material phenomena which are all that our senses can discover in it. But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off." The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana. Every year God makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase, and men, according to the fashion of their age, say "It is Ceres, it is Adonis, it is the Corn King," or else "It is the Laws of Nature." The close-up, the translation, of this annual wonder is the feeding of the five thousand.12 Bread is not made there of nothing. Bread is not made of stones, as the Devil once suggested to our Lord in vain.13 A little bread is made into much bread. The Son will do nothing but what He sees the Father do. There is, so to speak, a family style. The miracles of healing fall into

  "John ii. 1-11.

  12Matthew xiv. 15-21; Mark vi. 34-44; Luke ix. 12-17; John vi. 1-

  l3Matthew iv. 3; Luke iv. 3.

  6

  the same pattern. This is sometimes obscured for us by the somewhat magical view we tend to take of ordinary medicine. The doctors themselves do not take this view. The magic is not in the medicine but in the patient's body. What the doctor does is to stimulate Nature's functions in the body, or to remove hindrances. In a sense, though we speak for convenience of healing a cut, every cut heals itself; no dressing will make skin grow over a cut on a corpse. That same mysterious energy which we call gravitational when it steers the planets and biochemical when it heals a body is the efficient cause of all recoveries, and if God exists, that energy, directly or indirectly, is His. All who are cured are cured by Him, the healer within. But once He did it visibly, a Man meeting a man. Where He does not work within in this mode, the organism dies. Hence Christ's one miracle of destruction is also in harmony with God's wholesale activity. His bodily hand held out in symbolic wrath blasted a single fig tree;14 but no tree died that year in Palestine, or any year, or in any land, or even ever will, save because He has done something, or (more likely) ceased to do something, to it.

  When He fed the thousands he multiplied fish as well as bread. Look in every bay and almost every river. This swarming, pulsating fecundity shows He is still at work. The ancients had a god called Genius-the god of animal and human fertility, the presiding spirit of gynecology, embryology, or the marriage bed-the "genial bed" as they called it after its god Genius.15 As the miracles of wine and bread and healing showed who Bacchus really was, who Ceres, who Apollo, and that all were one, so this miraculous multiplication of fish reveals the real Genius. And with that we stand at the threshold of the miracle which for some reason most offends modern ears. I can understand the man who denies the miraculous altogether; but what is one to make of the people who admit some miracles but deny the Virgin Birth? Is it that for all their lip service to the Laws of Nature there is only one Law of Nature that they really believe? Or is it that they see in this miracle a slur upon sexual intercourse which is rapidly becoming the one thing venerated in a world without veneration? No miracle is in fact

  "Matthew xxi. 19; Mark xi. 13-20.

  15For further information on this subject see the chapter on "Genius and Genius" in Lewis's Studies in Medieval and Renaissance, Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 169-74.

  7

  more significant. What happens in ordinary generation? What is a father's function in the act of begetting? A microscopic particle of matter from his body fertilizes the female: and with that microscopic particle passes, it may be, the color of his hair and his great-grandfather's hanging lip, and the human form in all its complexity of bones, liver, sinews, heart, and limbs, and prehuman form which the embryo will recapitulate in the womb. Behind every spermatozoon lies the whole history of the universe: locked withirtit is no small part of the world's future. That is God's normal way of making a man-a process that takes centuries, beginning with the creation of matter itself, and narrow
ing to one second and one particle at the moment of begetting. And once again men will mistake the sense impressions which this creative act throws off for the act itself or else refer it to some infinite being such as Genius. Once, therefore, God does it directly, instantaneously; without a spermatozoon, without the millenniums of organic history behind the spermatozoon. There was of course another reason. This time He was creating not simply a man, but the man who was to be Himself: the only true Man. The process which leads to the spermatozoon has carried down with it through the centuries much undesirable silt; the life which reaches us by that normal route is tainted. To avoid that taint, to give humanity a fresh start, He once short-circuited the process. There is a vulgar anti-God paper which some anonymous donor sends me every week. In it I recently saw the taunt that we Christians believe in a God who committed adultery with the wife of a Jewish carpenter. The answer to that is that if you describe the action of God in fertilizing Mary as "adultery," then, in that sense, God would have committed adultery with every women who ever had a baby. For what He did once without a human father, He does always even when He uses a human father as His instrument. For the human father in ordinary generation is only a carrier, sometimes an unwilling carrier, always the last in a long line of carriers, of life that comes from the supreme life. Thus the filth that our poor, muddled, sincere, resentful enemies fling at the Holy One, either does not stick, or, sticking, turns into glory.