C.S. Lewis | Mere Christianity
Book IV | Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity
Chapter 6 | “Two Notes”
Question: After the previous chapter, what question was Lewis asked by a sensible critic?
Answer: “Why, if God wanted sons instead of ‘toy soldiers,’ He did not beget many sons at the outset instead of first making toy soldiers and then bringing them to life by such a difficult and painful process”?
Question: What is the easy part of the answer?
Answer: “The process of being turned from a creature into a son would not have been difficult or painful if the human race had not turned away from God centuries ago.” God gave us free will so that we could love and know infinite happiness, but free will made it possible for us to turn away from God.
Question: What part of the answer “is probably beyond all human knowledge”?
Answer: “All Christians are agreed that there is, in the full and original sense, only one ‘Son of God’ . . . ‘But could there have been many?’” This gets us into “very deep water.” If something God created was different, then other things would be different, in the same way that a book would be different if the printer had used red ink.
Question: How does the answer change when we consider God?
Answer: The big problem is considering “could have been” when it comes to God, who is “the rock bottom, irreducible Fact on which all other facts depend— it is nonsensical to ask if It could have been otherwise. It is what It is, and there is an end of the matter.”
If we think about the Father begetting many, how would they be different from each other? Lewis says, “Two pennies have the same shape. How are they two? By occupying different places and containing different atoms.” We need a created universe to think about this where we don’t need space or matter to understand the Father and the Son.
Lewis has trouble imagining “many sons” before the universe was created. He wonders if the space, time, and matter of nature was necessary “to make many-ness possible.” Perhaps the only way to get many eternal creatures is to begin in an universe with many natural creatures “and then spiritualizing them.”
All of this is a guess.
Question: What second thing does Lewis want to clarify?
Answer: “The idea that the whole human race is, in a sense, one thing —one huge organism, like a tree—must not be confused with the idea that individual differences do not matter or that real people, Tom and Nobby and Kate, are somehow less important than collective things like classes, races, and so forth.”
The individual and the collective are opposites. Your nose and lungs are very different even though they are part of your body. Six pennies are “quite separate and very alike.”
Question: How does the Christian think about human individuals?
Answer: “Not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body.” Each of us are different from the others and contribute what others cannot.
Question: What warning does Lewis offer?
Answer: “When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbors, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things.”
Question: What is the trouble with being an Individualist or a Totalitarian?
Answer: If you’re concerned only with your individual self, you may think the troubles of others aren’t your business and you forget that you are part of the same organism. If you forget that others are different from you and you try “to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian.”
The Christian is neither an Individualist or a Totalitarian.
Question: How does the devil enter into this and what insight does Lewis have?
Answer: The devil enters in when we want to say which error is worse. The insight is that the devil sends errors “into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites.” If we spend time thinking about which is worse, our dislike of one error will lead us into the opposite error.
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It strikes me that this is the essence of God’s love. He loves people in a collective sense (“For God so loved the world . . .”) but he also loves us individually (“You have searched me, LORD, and you know me.”). Both are true. We should never forget either.
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