by C. S. Lewis
‘Is Theism Important? A Reply’, God in the Dock
Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
The Screwtape Letters, ch. 8
If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?
Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 11
The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.
Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 7
‘There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself . . . as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.’
The Great Divorce, ch. 9
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.
Miracles, ch. 16
Just as the Christian has his moments when the clamour of this visible and audible world is so persistent and the whisper of the spiritual world so faint that faith and reason can hardly stick to their guns, so, as I well remember, the atheist too has his moments of shuddering misgiving, of an all but irresistible suspicion that old tales may after all be true, that something or someone from outside may at any moment break into his neat, explicable, mechanical universe. Believe in God and you will have to face hours when it seems obvious that this material world is the only reality: disbelieve in Him and you must face hours when this material world seems to shout at you that it is not all. No conviction, religious or irreligious, will, of itself, end once and for all this fifth-columnist in the soul. Only the practise of Faith resulting in the habit of Faith will gradually do that.
‘Religion: Reality or Substitute?’, Christian Reflections
‘Why is it called Aslan’s table?’ asked Lucy presently.
‘It is set here by his bidding. . . .’
‘But how does the food keep?’ asked the practical Eustace.
‘It is eaten, and renewed, every day,’ said the girl.
The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’, ch. 13
‘Give us our daily bread’ (not an annuity for life) applies to spiritual gifts too; the little daily support for the daily trial. Life has to be taken day by day and hour by hour.
Letters (17 July 1953)
Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.
Letters (c. September 1949)
Thank God He has not allowed my faith to be greatly tempted by the present horrors. I do not doubt that whatever misery He permits will be for our ultimate good, unless by rebellious, will we convert it to evil. But I get no further than Gethsemane: and am daily thankful that that scene of all others in Our Lord’s life did not go unrecorded. . . . The process of living seems to consist in coming to realise truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.
Letters (8 May 1939)
If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, ‘I am.’ To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him.
Surprised by Joy, ch. 15
Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality.
‘Membership’, The Weight of Glory
Nor must we postpone obedience to a precept until its credentials have been examined. Only those who are practising the Tao will understand it. It is the well-nurtured man, the cuor gentil, and he alone, who can recognize Reason when it comes. It is Paul, the Pharisee, the man ‘perfect as touching the Law’ who learns where and how that Law was deficient.
The Abolition of Man, ch. 2
‘Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?’
Perelandra, ch. 9
‘All His biddings are joys.’
Perelandra, ch. 6
For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process [trying again after failure] trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.
Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 5
Obedience is the key to all doors; feelings come (or don’t come) and go as God pleases.
Letters (7 December 1950)
We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.
Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 2
Nothing gives one a more spuriously good conscience than keeping rules, even if there has been a total absence of all real charity and faith.
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III (20 February 1955)
Because we love something else more than this world we love even this world better than those who know no other.
‘Some Thoughts’, God in the Dock
Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something. If we cannot ‘practise the presence of God’, it is something to practise the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like men who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep.
The Four Loves, ch. 6
Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.
The Four Loves, ch. 1
The allegorical sense of [St Mary Magdalene’s] great action dawned on me the other day. The precious alabaster box which one must break over the Holy Feet is one’s heart. Easier said than done. And the contents become perfume only when it is broken. While they are safe inside they are more like sewage.
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III (1 November 1954)
A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat ‘Do as you would be done by’ till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God: and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him. And so . . . we are driven on to something more inward—driven on from social matters to religious matters.
Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 3
When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.
Letters (8 November 1952)
I would prefer to combat the ‘I’m special’ feeling not by the thought ‘I’m no more special than anyone else’, but by the feeling ‘Everyone is as special as me’. In one way there is no difference, I grant, for both remove the specialty. But there is a difference in another way. The first might lead you to think, ‘I’m only one of the crowd like everyone else’. But the secon
d leads to the truth that there isn’t any crowd. No one is like anyone else. All are ‘members’ (organs) in the Body of Christ. All different and all necessary to the whole and to one another; each loved by God individually, as if it were the only creature in existence. Otherwise you might get the idea that God is like the government which can only deal with the people in the mass.
Letters (20 June 1952)
A perfect man would never act from sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits, etc.) can do the journey on their own.
Letters (18 July 1957)
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.
Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 9
We ought perhaps to regard the work of miracles, however rare, as the true Christian norm and ourselves as spiritual cripples.
‘Petitionary Prayer’, Christian Reflections
We might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbour as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself?
Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently ‘Love your neighbour’ does not mean ‘feel fond of him’ or ‘find him attractive’. I ought to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments), but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either.
Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 7
The love we are commanded to have for God and our neighbour is a state of the will, not of the affections (though if they ever also play their part so much the better).
Letters (c. March 1956)
I am thinking of Mrs Fidget, who died a few months ago. It is really astonishing how her family have brightened up. The drawn look has gone from her husband’s face; he begins to be able to laugh. The younger boy, whom I had always thought an embittered, peevish little creature, turns out to be quite human. The elder, who was hardly ever at home except when he was in bed, is nearly always there now and has begun to reorganise the garden. The girl, who was always supposed to be ‘delicate’ (though I never found out what exactly the trouble was), now has the riding lessons which were once out of the question, dances all night, and plays any amount of tennis. Even the dog who was never allowed out except on a lead is now a well-known member of the Lamp-post Club in their road.
Mrs Fidget very often said that she lived for her family. And it was not untrue. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew it. . . .
The Vicar says Mrs Fidget is now at rest. Let us hope she is.
The Four Loves, ch. 3
Did we pretend to be angry about one thing when we knew, or could have known, that our anger had a different and much less presentable cause? Did we pretend to be ‘hurt’ in our sensitive and tender feelings . . . when envy, ungratified vanity, or thwarted self-will was our real trouble? Such tactics often succeed. The other parties give in. They give in not because they don’t know what is really wrong with us but because they have long known it only too well. . . . It needs surgery which they know we will never face. And so we win; by cheating. But the unfairness is very deeply felt. Indeed what is commonly called ‘sensitiveness’ is the most powerful engine of domestic tyranny, sometimes a lifelong tyranny.
Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 2
Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.
Till We Have Faces, bk 2, ch. 1
Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. . . . This process of surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person—and he would not need it.
Mere Christianity, bk 2, ch. 4
We need to forgive our brother seventy times seven not only for 490 offences but for one offence.
Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 3
It is always just possible that Jesus Christ meant what He said when He told us to seek the secret place and to close the door.
‘Cross-Examination’, God in the Dock
Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it God shows Himself to us.
The World’s Last Night, ch. 1
Now the disquieting thing is not simply that we skimp and begrudge the duty of prayer. The really disquieting thing is it should have to be numbered among duties at all. For we believe that we were created ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever’. And if the few, the very few, minutes we now spend on intercourse with God are a burden to us rather than a delight, what then? If I were a Calvinist this symptom would fill me with despair. What can be done for—or what should be done with—a rose-tree that dislikes producing roses? Surely it ought to want to? . . .
If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be delight. Some day, please God, it will be. The same is true of many other behaviours which now appear as duties. If I loved my neighbour as myself, most of the actions which are now my moral duty would flow out of me as spontaneously as song from a lark or fragrance from a flower. Why is this not so yet? . . . The very activities for which we were created are, while we live on earth, variously impeded: by evil in ourselves or in others. Not to practise them is to abandon our humanity. To practise them spontaneously and delightfully is not yet possible. This situation creates the category of duty, the whole specifically moral realm. . . .
I must say my prayers today whether I feel devout or not; but that is only as I must learn my grammar if I am ever to read the poets.
Letters to Malcolm, ch. 21
The advantage of a fixed form of service is that we know what is coming. Ex tempore public prayer has this difficulty; we don’t know whether we can mentally join in it until we’ve heard it—it might be phoney or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a critical and a devotional activity at the same moment: two things hardly compatible. In a fixed form we ought to have ‘gone through the motions’ before in our private prayers; the rigid form really sets our devotions free. I also find the more rigid it is, the easier it is to keep one’s thoughts from straying. Also it prevents getting too completely eaten up by whatever happens to be the preoccupation of the moment (i.e., war, an election, or what not). The permanent shape of Christianity shows through. I don’t see how the ex tempore method can help becoming provincial, and I think it has a great tendency to direct attention to the minister rather than to God.
Letter
s (1 April 1952)
The efficacy of prayer is . . . no more of a problem than the efficacy of all human acts, i.e., if you say ‘It is useless to pray because Providence already knows what is best and will certainly do it’, then why is it not equally useless (and for the same reason) to try to alter the course of events in any way whatever?
Letters (21 February 1932)
If there is—as the very concept of prayer presupposes—an adaptation between the free actions of men in prayer and the course of events, this adaptation is from the beginning inherent in the great single creative act. Our prayers are heard—don’t say ‘have been heard’ or you are putting God into time—not only before we make them but before we are made ourselves.
Letters to Malcolm, ch. 9
That wisdom must sometimes refuse what ignorance may quite innocently ask seems to be self-evident.
‘Petitionary Prayer’, Christian Reflections
. . . if His action lingers
Till men have prayed, and suffers their weak prayers indeed
To move as very muscles His delaying fingers,
Who, in His longanimity and love for our
Small dignities, enfeebles, for a time, His power.
‘Sonnet’, Poems
Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusade, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more ‘religious’ (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here.
The Screwtape Letters, ch. 7
[Our Vicar] assures me that, so far as he has been able to discover, the overwhelming majority of his parishioners mean by ‘saying their prayers’ repeating whatever little formula they were taught in childhood by their mothers. I wonder how this can come about. It can’t be that they are never penitent or thankful—they’re dear people, many of them—or have no needs. Is it that there is a sort of water-tight bulk-head between their ‘religion’ and their ‘real life’, in which case the part of their life which they call ‘religious’ is really the irreligious part?
