by C. S. Lewis
‘The Grand Miracle’, God in the Dock
The Ascension of the Lord
What really worries us is the conviction that, whatever we say, the New Testament writers meant something quite different. We feel sure that they thought they had seen their Master setting off on a journey for a local ‘Heaven’ where God sat in a throne and where there was another throne waiting for Him. And I believe that in a sense that is just what they did think. And I believe that, for this reason, whatever they had actually seen . . . they would almost certainly have remembered it as a vertical movement. What we must not say is that they ‘mistook’ local ‘Heavens’ and celestial throne-rooms and the like for the ‘spiritual’ Heaven of union with God and supreme power and beatitude. . . . Heaven can mean (1) The unconditioned Divine Life beyond all worlds. (2) Blessed participation in that Life by a created spirit. (3) The whole Nature or system of conditions in which redeemed human spirits, still remaining human, can enjoy such participation fully and for ever. This is the Heaven Christ goes to ‘prepare’ for us. (4) The physical Heaven, the sky, the space in which Earth moves. What enables us to distinguish these senses and hold them clearly apart is not any special spiritual purity but the fact that we are the heirs to centuries of logical analysis: not that we are sons to Abraham but that we are sons to Aristotle. We are not to suppose that the writers of the New Testament mistook Heaven in sense four or three for Heaven in sense two or one. You cannot mistake a half-sovereign for a sixpence until you know the English system of coinage—that is, until you know the difference between them. In their idea of Heaven all these meanings were latent, ready to be brought out by later analysis. They never thought merely of the blue sky or merely of a ‘spiritual’ Heaven. When they looked up at the blue sky they never doubted that there . . . was the home of God: but on the other hand, when they thought of one ascending to that Heaven they never doubted He was ‘ascending’ in what we should call a ‘spiritual’ sense. . . . A man who really believes that ‘Heaven’ is in the sky may well, in his heart, have a far truer and more spiritual conception of it than many a modern logician who could expose that fallacy with a few strokes of his pen. For he who does the will of the Father shall know the doctrine. Irrelevant material splendours in such a man’s idea of the vision of God will do no harm, for they are not there for their own sakes.
Miracles, ch. 16
Pentecost
This third person is called, in technical language, the Holy Ghost or the ‘spirit’ of God. Do not be worried or surprised if you find it (or Him) rather vaguer or more shadowy in your mind than the other two. I think there is a reason why that must be so. In the Christian life you are not usually looking at Him: He is always acting through you. If you think of the Father as something ‘out there’, in front of you, and of the Son as something standing at your side, helping you to pray, trying to turn you into another son, then you have to think of the third Person as something inside you, or behind you. Perhaps some people might find it easier to begin with the third Person and work backwards. 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.
And now, what does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made. Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. . . . They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live for ever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?
Mere Christianity, bk 4, ch. 4
The Most Holy Trinity
A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures, but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.
Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings—just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a Being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal—something more than a person. . . . The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin any time—tonight, if you like.
What I mean is this. An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God—that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying—the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on—the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the threefold life of the three-Personal being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.
Mere Christianity, bk 4, ch. 2
The Body and Blood of Christ
Yes, you are always everywhere. But I,
Hunting in such immeasurable forests,
Could never bring the noble Hart to bay.
The scent was too perplexing for my hounds;
Nowhere sometimes, then again everywhere.
Other scents, too, seemed to them almost the same.
Therefore I turn my back on the unapproachable
Stars and horizons and all musical sounds,
Poetry itself, and the winding stair of thought.
Leaving the forests where you are pursued in vain
—Often a mere white gleam—I turn instead
To the appointed place where you pursue.
Not in Nature, not even in Man, but in one
Particular Man, with a date, so tall, weighing
So much, talking Aramaic, having learned a trade;
Not in all food, not in all bread and wine
(Not, I mean, as my littleness requires)
But this wine, this bread . . . no beauty we could desire.
‘No Beauty We Could Desire’, Poems
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, al
lowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and have been transformed into three major motion pictures.
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ALSO BY C. S. LEWIS
A Grief Observed
George MacDonald: An Anthology
Mere Christianity
Miracles
The Abolition of Man
The Great Divorce
The Problem of Pain
The Screwtape Letters (with “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”)
The Weight of Glory
The Four Loves
Till We Have Faces
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Reflections on the Psalms
Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer
The Personal Heresy
The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays
Poems
The Dark Tower: And Other Stories
Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
Narrative Poems
A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis
Letters of C. S. Lewis
All My Road Before Me
Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays
Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics
On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM HARPERCOLLINS
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Magician’s Nephew
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Horse and His Boy
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Last Battle
CREDITS
Cover design and illustration: Kimberly Glyder
COPYRIGHT
The editor wishes to acknowledge the following for permission to reprint material by C. S. Lewis: The Bodley Head, for selections from Perelandra and The Last Battle; Cambridge University Press, for selections from Selected Literary Essays and An Experiment in Criticism; Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., for selections from Christian Reflections and Letters to an American Lady; Harcourt, Inc., for selections from The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays, copyright © 1952, 1955, 1958, 1960 by C. S. Lewis, and selections from Surprised by Joy, Reflections on the Psalms, The Four Loves, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, Poems, and Letters of C. S. Lewis, copyright © 1955, 1958 by C. S. Lewis, copyright © 1960 by Helen Joy Lewis, copyright © 1963, 1964 by the Estate of C. S. Lewis and/or C. S. Lewis, copyright © 1964 by the Executors of the Estate of C. S. Lewis, copyright © 1966 by W. H. Lewis and Executors of C. S. Lewis; Macmillan Publishing Co., for selections from They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, edited by Walter Hooper, copyright © 1979 by the Estate of C. S. Lewis; and Oxford University Press, for selections from A Preface to Paradise Lost. Books published by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd from which selections are taken are listed in the bibliographical information on pages 429–32.
THE BUSINESS OF HEAVEN. Editing of this collection and preface by Walter Hooper. Copyright © 1984 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published as The Business of Heaven in 1984 by Harcourt Brace.
EPub Edition February 2017 ISBN 9780062565570
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963, author. | Hooper, Walter, editor.
Title: The business of heaven : daily readings from C. S. Lewis / C. S. Lewis ; edited by Walter Hooper.
Description: First edition. | San Francisco : HarperOne, 2017. | Originally published as The Business of Heaven in New York in 1984 by Harcourt Brace.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016030653 | ISBN 9780062643575 (paperback) | ISBN 9780062565570 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Devotional calendars. | BISAC: RELIGION / Spirituality. | RELIGION / Meditations. | RELIGION / Christianity / Literature & the Arts.
Classification: LCC BV4812 .L482 2017 | DDC 242/.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030653
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