A Year with C. S. Lewis
Daily Readings from His Classic Works
C. S. LEWIS
Edited by Patricia S. Klein

Contents

Cover

Title Page

January

1 Supposing We Really Found Him?

2 Imagine a Mystical Limpet

3 Not Naked but Reclothed

4 O Taste and See

5 Enemies of Goodness

6 A Pleasant Theology

7 Damned Nonsense

8 Something Beyond

9 Somebody Who?

10 A Good Time Was Had by All

11 More Than Mere Kindness

12 Amazing Love, How Can It Be?

13 War in Heaven

14 Blurry Visions of God

15 Our Highest Activity

16 Our Three Responses to God

17 Always Now

18 Just a Bit of Coloured Paper?

19 Traveling Without a Map

20 Gradually the Truth Condenses …

21 From Poetic Myth to Humble Fact

22 God’s Remedies

23 On Authority

24 Finding Comfort

25 We Couldn’t Make It Up

26 Not Like a River but Like a Tree

27 Being Good

28 Finding a Balance

29 A Slip of the Tongue

30 Proceed with Great Caution

31 My Lifeline to the Temporal

February

1 Swimming Lessons Are Better

2 Just a Bit of My Own, Please

3 Count the Cost

4 Begin Again Daily

5 A Critical Distinction

6 Father and Son

7 The Spirit of God

8 Ever New Constructions

9 With a Bit of Coaxing

10 Unequal Love

11 A Good Infection

12 What Christianity Offers

13 The Absurd Claim

14 Not a Matter of Opinion

15 No Shortage of Good Ideas

16 Two Quick Clarifications

17 Bad Gas

18 Competition Rather Than Courtesy

19 Fixed Laws of Nature and Freedom of Will

20 The Holy Eraser

21 Voluntarily United

22 Second-Guessing God’s Wisdom

23 The Core Corruption

24 Human Will, the Weak Point of Creation

25 Becoming Yourself

26 A Real Right and Wrong

27 The Rules

28 Impulse Control

29 Not Moral Perfection

March

1 Morality: A Quick Lesson

2 The Moral Dilemma

3 Just Deserts

4 The Impulse for Vengeance

5 Face the Bad

6 The Truth About Ourselves

7 Time Does Not Cancel Sin

8 Bad Company

9 Virtues in Different Ages

10 Enemy-Occupied Territory

11 A Simple (Albeit Comical) Argument for Christian Theology

12 So What About God’s Authority?

13 Our Imperfect World: Creation in Process

14 Our Imperfect World: Creation Corrupted

15 Once Begun …

16 Correcting Our Arithmetic

17 With Every Choice

18 Understanding Evil

19 The Essential Vice

20 The Proud Competitor

21 How Marriage Reconciles

22 Too Proud to Know God

23 Forget Yourself

24 Dictatorship of Pride

25 A Humble Fault

26 Diabolical Pride

27 School Pride

28 Point of Contact

29 The First Step

30 Humility 101

31 Humility, the Wrong End

April

1 Humility, the Right End

2 The Primary Sin

3 The Gentle Slope to Nothing

4 Closer to God—or Closer to Hell?

5 A Matter of Meanings

6 The Unselfishness Game

7 Half-Hearted Desires

8 A Gradual Turning

9 The Horror of the Same Old Thing

10 The Demand for Novelty

11 The Thrill Is Gone

12 My Time Is My Own

13 Uninspected Assumptions

14 Nuances of Ownership

15 Mine, Mine, Mine

16 A Mother’s Love

17 Domestic Tyranny

18 God at Her Elbow

19 Signs of Attrition

20 Unravelling Souls

21 The Secret Thread

22 The Hint of More

23 A Most Complete Wife

24 A World Starving

25 Welcome to the Family

26 Part of the Mystical Body

27 To Become Really Doggy

28 The Right Job

29 Two Final Points

30 Troughs and Peaks

May

1 Servants Who Become Sons

2 … And Still Obeys

3 At Just That Point in History

4 The Great Weapon

5 The Very Pattern of Reality

6 New Life

7 Vicarious Needs

8 It’s Not Fair

9 Full Surrender

10 With God’s Help

11 Nice Is Not Enough

12 That Some Day We May Ride Bare-Back

13 Recognizing Christ’s New Men

14 Imagine Being Who You Really Are

15 My Own Personality

16 All Good Masters Are Servants

17 God’s Arrangements

18 Blessed Matter

19 Carriers of Christ

20 A Body—Muscular, Vital, and Diverse

21 Should the Church Take the Lead?

22 A Christian Society

23 The Longest Way Round

24 For No Other Purpose

25 A Gentle Welcome

26 Creating Hatred in Church

27 A Suitable Church

28 Hints of Our Future

29 A Curious Consolation

30 Work Offered to God

31 Avoid Clarity

June

1 Untold Millions

2 The Apostolic Witness

3 What the Apostles Meant

4 The Beginning of the New Creation

5 Like a Ghost, Yet Not

6 A Much Stranger Story Than Expected

7 A Whole New Nature

8 No Ordinary People

9 What Did They See and What Did They Think They Saw?

10 Witness Reports

11 Reliable Eyewitnesses?

12 An Idea Why Heaven Is Always “Up”

13 Close Up and Small

14 Fitting into the Pattern

15 How to Think About the Miracles of Jesus

16 Be Careful What You Think You Want

17 Threshold of Belief

18 What the World Is Really Like

19 Discerning What’s Real

20 Everythingism

21 Wild Rumours

22 God in Our Prayers

23 Very Hard, Yet Very Easy

24 The Most Difficult Is the Easiest

25 Let’s Pretend

26 Pretending a Little Less

27 Pretence Becomes Reality

28 As We Become Like Christ

29 Rats in the Cellar

30 And More Rats Yet

July

1 Lead Them by the Nose

2 “I’m as Good as You Are”

3 The Undemocratic Incantation

4 The Tyranny of Democracy

5 The Democratic Imperative

6 Medicine, Not Food

7 New Perspective

8 Coming in Out of the Wind

9 The Full Treatment

10 “I Will Make You Perfect”

11 All or Nothing

12 Faux Humility

13 Simply a Phase

14 Cigars in Heaven

15 Tenderly, Tenderly

16 A Sword in God’s Hand

17 Two Sides of the Truth

18 Transformed

19 The Real Self

20 Defining Our Terms

21 Reflection of the Divine Life

22 Judging by Results

23 Out of Action

24 A Warning or an Encouragement?

25 Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

26 Love the Sinner …

27 The Real Test

28 Love Your Enemy

29 The Thing Called Selves

30 This Terrible Duty

31 Start Small

August

1 Grieving, and Thinking About Grieving

2 A Jab of Red-Hot Memory

3 Alone into the Alone

4 Lament

5 Would I Wish Her Back?

6 Cherishing Our Unhappiness

7 Holy Intentions

8 Hell’s Parody

9 One Flesh

10 I Promise You

11 Falling in Love

12 Being in Love

13 Romance Novels

14 Love Then Marriage—or Marriage Then Love?

15 That Love May Find a Foothold

16 The Least Bad of All Sins

17 Bent Appetites

18 One Reason We Don’t Desire Chastity

19 Another Reason We Don’t Desire Chastity

20 A Final Reason We Don’t Desire Chastity

21 Gluttony of Delicacy

22 Profile of a Glutton: The Demure Little Smile

23 Profile of a Glutton: “All I Want …”

24 In the Know

25 Deadly Annoyances

26 Under the Same Roof

27 “All I Said …”

28 I Believe in the Forgiveness of Sins

29 Forgiving Versus Excusing

30 Two Remedies for Excuses

31 As We Forgive Others

September

1 No Exceptions

2 Past, Present, and Future

3 Life on the Edge of a Precipice

4 The Imaginary Claims of War and Religion

5 The Claims of War: Render unto Caesar

6 The Claims of Religion: Do All to the Glory of God

7 Learning as Vocation

8 Learning as a Necessary Weapon

9 What Is Charity?

10 The Rule of Love

11 Compound Interest

12 No Manufactured Feelings

13 On Giving

14 Is It Really Kindness?

15 Wise as Serpents

16 Not Just About Falling Down

17 When Worlds Collide

18 Faith in Training

19 Real Temptation

20 Not Really So Bad

21 Lessons from Practising Christian Virtues

22 Like the Spokes of a Wheel

23 Leaving It to God

24 A First Faint Gleam of Heaven

25 Faith or Works

26 God in Tandem

27 Follow Thou Me

28 Fantasy Virtues

29 Where Is God?

30 At Peace

October

1 Blurred Vision

2 Mustn’t Grumble

3 The Great Iconoclast

4 A Chuckle in the Darkness

5 Reconciling Human Suffering with a God Who Loves

6 The Source of Pain

7 Surrender

8 The Rebellious Self

9 God’s Megaphone

10 Clinging to Our Own Lives

11 Tender Words

12 Surrender in Obedience

13 Collaborators in Creation

14 Don’t Stone the Messenger

15 One Man’s Tale of Tribulation

16 The Products of Suffering

17 To Produce the Complex Good

18 Some Pleasant Inns

19 To Stop One Tooth from Aching

20 Heaven Will Work Backwards

21 Present at the Creation of the World

22 A Defence Against the Enemy of Excitement

23 A Defence Against the Enemy of Frustration

24 A Defence Against the Enemy of Fear

25 Death Is Real

26 How God Can Answer Prayer

27 Time Reconsidered

28 Our Contribution to the Cosmic Shape

29 Not a Film Unrolling

30 Our Keenest Pleasure

31 On Enemy Ground

November

1 Real Pleasure

2 Raw Material

3 Scientific Theories

4 Scientific Observation

5 Science or Magic?

6 From Dream to Waking

7 Turn the Other Cheek?

8 What “Turn the Other Cheek” Doesn’t Mean

9 Virtue’s Testing Point

10 How to Create a Coward

11 A Logical Conclusion to Pacifist Politics

12 Weighing the Costs

13 Weighing Hell’s Miseries

14 Of Heaven and Earth

15 No Chocolates?

16 A Gradual Change

17 The Sweet, Secret Desire

18 Well Done

19 Perfect Humility

20 The Promise of Glory

21 Overheard Messages

22 To Be at Last Summoned Inside

23 Is It Wrong to Want Heaven?

24 Aim at Heaven

25 Books for Grown-Ups

26 Comparing Cats and Dogs

27 Sooner or Later They Fell

28 The Place of Finality and Darkness

29 Shall Hell Veto Heaven?

30 Must Pity Die?

December

1 Hell’s Doors

2 Left Alone

3 A Detestable Doctrine

4 You Be the Judge

5 Viewing the Remains

6 Either-Or

7 Choose Now, Choose Well

8 Thy Will Be Done

9 Better to Reign in Hell

10 The Man Who Mistook the Means for the End

11 To the Extreme

12 From Outsider to Insider

13 From Vanity into Pride

14 To Be on the Inside

15 The Sly Impulse

16 A Permanent Mainspring of Human Action

17 Why Avoid Becoming an “Inner Ringer”?

18 Discovering Your Own Ring of True Friendship

19 The Obstinate Tin Soldier

20 One Tin Soldier Comes Alive

21 A God Distinct

22 Think of It Like This

23 Everywhere the Great Enters the Little

24 God Descends to Reascend

25 The Grand Miracle

26 The Signature of the Soul

27 A New and Secret Name

28 To Drink Joy from the Fountain of Joy

29 A Hymn to God’s Creation

30 Heaven’s Revels

31 Glory as Brightness, Splendour, Luminosity

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JANUARY

1 Supposing We Really Found Him?

It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. ‘Look out!’ we cry, ‘it’s alive’. And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?

—from Miracles

January 1911 Lewis (age twelve) enrolls at Cherbourg Preparatory School in Malvern.

2 Imagine a Mystical Limpet

Why are many people prepared in advance to maintain that, whatever else God may be, He is not the concrete, living, willing, and acting God of Christian theology? I think the reason is as follows. Let us suppose a mystical limpet, a sage among limpets, who (rapt in vision) catches a glimpse of what Man is like. In reporting it to his disciples, who have some vision themselves (though less than he) he will have to use many negatives. He will have to tell them that Man has no shell, is not attached to a rock, is not surrounded by water. And his disciples, having a little vision of their own to help them, do get some idea of Man. But then there come erudite limpets, limpets who write histories of philosophy and give lectures on comparative religion, and who have never had any vision of their own. What they get out of the prophetic limpet’s words is simply and solely the negatives. From these, uncorrected by any positive insight, they build up a picture of Man as a sort of amorphous jelly (he has no shell) existing nowhere in particular (he is not attached to a rock) and never taking nourishment (there is no water to drift it towards him). And having a traditional reverence for Man they conclude that to be a famished jelly in a dimensionless void is the supreme mode of existence, and reject as crude, materialistic superstition any doctrine which would attribute to Man a definite shape, a structure, and organs.

—from Miracles

January 1914 Lewis and childhood Belfast friend Arthur Greeves begin what would be a lifelong correspondence.

3 Not Naked but Reclothed

Our own situation is much like that of the erudite limpets. Great prophets and saints have an intuition of God which is positive and concrete in the highest degree. Because, just touching the fringes of His being, they have seen that He is plenitude of life and energy and joy, therefore (and for no other reason) they have to pronounce that He transcends those limitations which we call personality, passion, change, materiality, and the like. The positive quality in Him which repels these limitations is their only ground for all the negatives. But when we come limping after and try to construct an intellectual or ‘enlightened’ religion, we take over these negatives (infinite, immaterial, impassible, immutable, etc.) and use them unchecked by any positive intuition. At each step we have to strip off from our idea of God some human attribute. But the only real reason for stripping off the human attribute is to make room for putting in some positive divine attribute. In St Paul’s language, the purpose of all this unclothing is not that our idea of God should reach nakedness but that it should be reclothed. But unhappily we have no means of doing the reclothing. When we have removed from our idea of God some puny human characteristic, we (as merely erudite or intelligent enquirers) have no resources from which to supply that blindingly real and concrete attribute of Deity which ought to replace it. Thus at each step in the process of refinement our idea of God contains less, and the fatal pictures come in (an endless, silent sea, an empty sky beyond all stars, a dome of white radiance) and we reach at last mere zero and worship a nonentity.

—from Miracles

1892 J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis’s longtime friend, colleague, and fellow Inkling (a group of friends who meet regularly from about 1930 to 1963 to share writings, good conversation, and the odd pint), is born in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

4 O Taste and See

The Christian statement that only He who does the will of the Father will ever know the true doctrine is philosophically accurate. Imagination may help a little: but in the moral life, and (still more) in the devotional life we touch something concrete which will at once begin to correct the growing emptiness of our idea of God. One moment even of feeble contrition or blurred thankfulness will, at least in some degree, head us off from the abyss of abstraction. It is Reason herself which teaches us not to rely on Reason only in this matter. For Reason knows that she cannot work without materials. When it becomes clear that you cannot find out by reasoning whether the cat is in the linen-cupboard, it is Reason herself who whispers, ‘Go and look. This is not my job: it is a matter for the senses’. So here. The materials for correcting our abstract conception of God cannot be supplied by Reason: she will be the first to tell you to go and try experience—‘Oh, taste and see!’ For of course she will have already pointed out that your present position is absurd. As long as we remain Erudite Limpets we are forgetting that if no one had ever seen more of God than we, we should have no reason even to believe Him immaterial, immutable, impassible and all the rest of it. Even that negative knowledge which seems to us so enlightened is only a relic left over from the positive knowledge of better men—only the pattern which that heavenly wave left on the sand when it retreated.

—from Miracles

5 Enemies of Goodness

It is no use either saying that if there is a God of that sort—an impersonal absolute goodness—then you do not like Him and are not going to bother about Him. For the trouble is that one part of you is on His side and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behaviour, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do. This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger—according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way.

—from Mere Christianity

6 A Pleasant Theology

One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

—from Mere Christianity

1943 The Abolition of Man is published by Oxford University Press.

7 Damned Nonsense

If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will. Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, ‘If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is God.’ The Christian replies, ‘Don’t talk damned nonsense.’ For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His head’ as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.

—from Mere Christianity

1955 Lewis takes up residence in Magdalene College, Cambridge.

8 Something Beyond

I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one’s eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people’s eyes can see further than mine.

—from Mere Christianity

9 Somebody Who?

We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody [behind the Moral Law]. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place). The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.

—from Mere Christianity

10 A Good Time Was Had by All

By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness—the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’. Not many people, I admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds. I do not claim to be an exception: I should very much like to live in a universe which was governed on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don’t, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.

—from The Problem of Pain

1950 Lewis receives his first letter from American fan Joy Davidman Gresham.

11 More Than Mere Kindness

There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object—we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished [Hebrews 12:8]. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

—from The Problem of Pain

1942 Lewis begins his second series of BBC talks entitled “What Christians Believe.” These talks were later published in Broadcast Talks (or, in the U.S., The Case for Christianity) and comprise Book 2 in Mere Christianity.

12 Amazing Love, How Can It Be?

When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some ‘disinterested’, because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of terrible aspect’, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring; we are inclined, like the maidens in the old play, to deprecate the love of Zeus. But the fact seems unquestionable.

—from The Problem of Pain

1951 Janie King Moore (Mrs. Moore) dies at the age of seventy-eight in Oxford and is buried at Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry, Oxford. Mrs. Moore (the mother of Lewis’s army buddy Paddy Moore) and her daughter Maureen come under Lewis’s care after Paddy’s death in World War I.

13 War in Heaven

The Screwtape Letters is a fictional correspondence between a senior tempter, Screwtape, and his protégé, Wormwood. In this letter Screwtape attempts to explain the great Quarrel between the Enemy (God) and the “father” of all tempters, Satan:

What does He stand to make out of them? That is the insoluble question. I do not see that it can do any harm to tell you that this very problem was a chief cause of Our Father’s quarrel with the Enemy. When the creation of man was first mooted and when, even at that stage, the Enemy freely confessed that He foresaw a certain episode about a cross, Our Father very naturally sought an interview and asked for an explanation. The Enemy gave no reply except to produce the cock-and-bull story about disinterested love which He has been circulating ever since. This Our Father naturally could not accept. He implored the Enemy to lay His cards on the table, and gave Him every opportunity. He admitted that he felt a real anxiety to know the secret; the Enemy replied ‘I wish with all my heart that you did.’ It was, I imagine, at this stage in the interview that Our Father’s disgust at such an unprovoked lack of confidence caused him to remove himself an infinite distance from the Presence with a suddenness which has given rise to the ridiculous Enemy story that he was forcibly thrown out of Heaven. Since then, we have begun to see why our Oppressor was so secretive. His throne depends on the secret. Members of His faction have frequently admitted that if ever we came to understand what He means by love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven. And there lies the great task. We know that He cannot really love: nobody can: it doesn’t make sense. If we could only find out what He is really up to!

—from The Screwtape Letters

1919 Lewis (age twenty) is demobilized from his military service in World War I and returns to Oxford.

14 Blurry Visions of God

When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others—not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.

You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred—like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.

—from Mere Christianity

1946 The Great Divorce is published by Geoffrey Bles/The Centenary Press, London.

15 Our Highest Activity

If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving—the election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things. For we are only creatures: our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being.

—from The Problem of Pain

16 Our Three Responses to God

It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature’s nature: but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream. George Macdonald, in a passage I cannot now find, represents God as saying to men, ‘You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness, for I have no other to give you.’ That is the conclusion of the whole matter. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God—to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response—to be miserable—these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows—the only food that any possible universe ever can grow—then we must starve eternally.

—from The Problem of Pain

17 Always Now

Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow. But if He knows I am going to do so-and-so, how can I be free to do otherwise? Well, here once again, the difficulty comes from thinking that God is progressing along the Timeline like us: the only difference being that He can see ahead and we cannot. Well, if that were true, if God foresaw our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call ‘tomorrow’ is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call ‘today’. All the days are ‘Now’ for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not ‘foresee’ you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow’s actions in just the same way—because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already ‘Now’ for Him.

—from Mere Christianity

18 Just a Bit of Coloured Paper?

I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, ‘I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!’

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

—from Mere Christianity

19 Traveling Without a Map

Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map 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. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work: like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.

—from Mere Christianity

20 Gradually the Truth Condenses …

Theology, while saying that a special illumination has been vouchsafed to Christians and (earlier) to Jews, also says that there is some divine illumination vouchsafed to all men. The Divine light, we are told, “lighteneth every man.” We should, therefore, expect to find in the imagination of great Pagan teachers and myth makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole cosmic story—the theme of incarnation, death, and rebirth. And the differences between the Pagan Christs (Balder, Osiris, etc.) and the Christ Himself is much what we should expect to find. The Pagan stories are all about someone dying and rising, either every year, or else nobody knows where and nobody knows when. The Christian story is about a historical personage, whose execution can be dated pretty accurately, under a named Roman magistrate, and with whom the society that He founded is in a continuous relation down to the present day. It is not the difference between falsehood and truth. It is the difference between a real event on the one hand and dim dreams or premonitions of that same event on the other. It is like watching something come gradually into focus; first it hangs in the clouds of myth and ritual, vast and vague, then it condenses, grows hard and in a sense small, as a historical event in first century Palestine.

—from “Is Theology Poetry?” (The Weight of Glory)

21 From Poetic Myth to Humble Fact

The essential meaning of all things came down from the “heaven” of myth to the “earth” of history. In so doing, it partly emptied itself of its glory, as Christ emptied Himself of His glory to be Man. That is the real explanation of the fact that Theology, far from defeating its rivals by a superior poetry, is, in a superficial but quite real sense, less poetical than they. That is why the New Testament is, in the same sense, less poetical than the Old. Have you not often felt in Church, if the first lesson is some great passage, that the second lesson is somehow small by comparison—almost, if one might say so, humdrum? So it is and so it must be. That is the humiliation of myth into fact, of God into Man; what is everywhere and always, imageless and ineffable, only to be glimpsed in dream and symbol and the acted poetry of ritual becomes small, solid—no bigger than a man who can lie asleep in a rowing boat on the Lake of Galilee. You may say that this, after all, is a still deeper poetry. I will not contradict you. The humiliation leads to a greater glory. But the humiliation of God and the shrinking or condensation of the myth as it becomes fact are also quite real.

—from “Is Theology Poetry?” (The Weight of Glory)

22 God’s Remedies

And what did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded. Secondly, He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men. Thirdly, He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was—that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process.

Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

—from Mere Christianity

1959 Lewis attends the first meeting of the Commission to Revise the Psalms, at the invitation of Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher.

23 On Authority

There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names—Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord’s Supper. At least, those are the three ordinary methods..…

I cannot myself see why these things should be the conductors of the new kind of life. …. But though I cannot see why it should be so, I can tell you why I believe it is so. I have explained why I have to believe that Jesus was (and is) God. And it seems plain as a matter of history that He taught His followers that the new life was communicated in this way. In other words, I believe it on His authority. Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority—because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.

—from Mere Christianity

1926 Lewis gives his first lecture as a don in the English School at Oxford, entitled “Some Eighteenth-Century Precursors of the Romantic Movement.”

24 Finding Comfort

All I am doing is to ask people to face the facts—to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer. And they are very terrifying facts. I wish it was possible to say something more agreeable. But I must say what I think true. Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.

—from Mere Christianity

25 We Couldn’t Make It Up

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. For instance, when you have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go round the sun, you would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match—all at equal distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly increased, or all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go further from the sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either the sizes or the distances; and some of them have one moon, one has four, one has two, some have none, and one has a ring.

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.

—from Mere Christianity

January 1917 Lewis (age eighteen) returns to Great Bookham, Surrey, and William T. Kirkpatrick (“the Great Knock”) to prepare for Responsions, the entrance examination for Oxford University.

26 Not Like a River but Like a Tree

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.

—from The Great Divorce, Preface

1942 The Oxford University Socratic Club, Somerville College, Oxford, holds its first meeting. Lewis serves as its first president.

27 Being Good

Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam—he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts. And that has practical consequences. As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing that body. Cut it, and up to a point it will heal, as a dead body would not. A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble—because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.

That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or—if they think there is not—at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.

—from Mere Christianity

1964 Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer is published by Geoffrey Bles, London.

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