C. S. Lewis | Mere Christianity
Book IV | Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity
Chapter 4 | “Good Infection”
Question: What picture does C.S. Lewis want us to have in mind as he begins this chapter?
Answer: Two books are stacked on top of each other on a table. The book on top (book B) is at rest above and not touching the table because it is supported by the one underneath (book A).
Q: What then are we to imagine next?
A: Both books have always been that way for all eternity. Book B’s position has always been caused by book A’s position. Normally there is a cause and effect in life, but in this case, there is none. And this is important for reasons to be seen.
Q: What previous lesson does Lewis return to?
A: The idea of God as three Persons in one Being, “just as a cube contains six squares while remaining one body.”
Q: What problem comes up with this picture?
A: The problem is that “to explain how these Persons are connected” requires Lewis “to use words which make it sound as if one of them was there before the others.” The Father begets the Son, which “unfortunately . . . suggests that He is there first—just as a human father exists before his son.” This is not how it is. The Father was the source of the Son and the Son exists because of the Father, “but there never was a time before the Father produced the Son.”
Q: What’s the best way to think about it?
A: Remember how it came to be that you imagined the mental picture of the two books on the table. There was a cause of your imagining and the effect was the picture. “But that does not mean that you first did the imagining and then got the picture.” Both the cause of your will and the effect of the picture happened at the same time. Lewis says this is what God is like. The picture of the Son coming from the Father is “just as eternal as the act.”
Q: What images of the Son does Lewis give?
A: He is “like light from a lamp, or heat from a fire, or thoughts from a mind. He is the self-expression of the Father—what the Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it.”
Q: What happens when we say this?
A: It sounds like God the Father and God the Son are two separate things rather than two separate Persons. We need to use the picture that the New Testament gives us of Father and Son, which “turns out to be much more accurate than anything we try to substitute for it.” This loving relationship of the Father and Son is seen in the Father who “delight in His Son,” and the Son who “looks up to His Father.”
Q: What is the practical importance of this?
A: We often say that “God is love,” but this is meaningless “unless God contains at least two Persons,” because “Love is something that one person has for another person.” Before Creation, God was love because the Father loved the Son and this “living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God for ever and has created everything else.”
Q: What do people often mean when they say God is love?
A: They mean something very different, more like “Love is God.” In other words, “our feelings of love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they produce, are to be treated with great respect. Perhaps they are: but that is something quite different from what Christians mean by the statement ‘God is love.’”
Q: How is the Christian statement that “God is love” different than other religions and what does it mean?
A: It is not a “is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama.” It is even like “a kind of dance,” if we will not think Lewis is being irreverent. In fact, this “union between the Father and Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person.”
Q: What helps us to imagine this?
A: Imagine a collection of people—for example, a “family, or a club, or a trade union”— as they get together. These collections of people have a kind of “spirit” as they relate to each other. Now imagine that this “communal personality came into existence.” It would be something like a person. With God, it actually is a person: “What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God.”
Q: What do we know about this third Person who is God?
A: This is the Holy Spirit and Lewis says, “Do not be worried or surprised if you find it (or Him) rather vaguer or more shadowy in your mind than the other two.”
Q: Why is the Holy Spirit not as easy to understand?
A: We don’t look at the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit works through us. We pray to the Father in front of us. The Son stands next to us helping us to pray and become “another son.” The Holy Spirit is in or behind us, as the “spirit of love” who “from all eternity” is “a love going on between the Father and Son.”
Q: What does this all mean?
A: We should become part of this dance. “There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.” The way we become part is through infection. “If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. … Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?”
Q: How are we united to God?
A: In our normal, natural state, we have only “biological life which is presently going to run down and die.” We need spiritual life that allows us “to share in the life of Christ.” This is the offer Christianity makes, “if we let God have His way.” If we do, we share in that begotten life that “always has existed and always will exist.” We are to be little Christs, who love the Father as Jesus does and “the Holy Ghost will arise in us.” This is a “good infection” that is meant to spread to others.
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