C.S. Lewis | Mere Christianity
Book IV | Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity
Chapter 8 | “Is Christianity Hard or Easy”
Question: What does C.S. Lewis want to make clear as he opens this chapter?
Answer: The topic of last chapter, “‘putting on Christ,’ or first ‘dressing up’ as a son of God in order that you may finally become a real son,” is not one of a number of jobs for Christians to do, but “it is the whole of Christianity.”
Q: How is this different “from ordinary ideas of ‘morality’ and ‘being good’”?
A: Before we become Christians, our starting point is “our ordinary self with is various desires and interests.” The idea is that “morality” or “decent behavior” or “the good of society” come along and tell our self what to do and what not to do. We are “being good” when we don’t do wrong things that we wanted to do and do right things that we didn’t want to do. The hope is that when we’ve met all the demands of morality there will be some part of our “poor natural self” that can “get on with its own life and do what is likes.” It’s like paying taxes. We hope there will be something left to live on.
Q: What happens when we think this way?
A: “Either we give up trying to be good, or else we become very unhappy indeed.” The more we try to follow our conscience, the more our conscience will ask of us. Our natural self doesn’t like these demands and so we either give up the “being good” project and go back to doing our own thing or we approach being good as a martyrs “in a discontented, grumbling way.” Lewis says the latter is worse than someone who had remained selfish.
Q: How is the Christian way different?
A: It is harder and easier. It begins with Christ’s demand, “Give me All.” It’s not giving up part of our time or work or treasure, but giving up our whole self. As Lewis puts it, Christ comes to us and says, “No half-measure are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down.” We are to give up both the parts of us that we think are innocent as well as the parts we think are wicked. And we receive a new self from Christ.
This is harder and easier than trying to be good. Christianity is hard because Jesus says, “Take up your cross.” There is a death involved. But he also says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Ultimately, handing over our whole self is much easier than trying to remain ourselves “to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good.’” It doesn’t work to do whatever our mind and hearts choose—for example to obsess with “money or pleasure or ambition”—and at the same time “behave honestly and chastely and humbly.” To use a local analogy, the hay field produces hay. If you want it to produce something else, it “must be plowed up and re-sown.”
Q: Where does the real problem in the Christian life take place?
A: As soon as you wake up in the morning. “All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.” Lewis says this takes practice to let the life of Christ soak in. It is the difference between paint and stain.
Q: What gets confusing about the Church and the State?
A: It looks like the Church and the State of lots of things to do. For example the Church has “education, building, missions, holding services” in the same way that the State has things to do in the areas of “military, political, economic.” Lewis wants us to see that it is much simpler. “The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life.” A similar thing is true of the Church, which “exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs.”
Q: What happens if the Church is not doing this?
A: “All the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.” God became a human being to make little Christs. Lewis thinks, “It is even doubtful . . . whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose” as “the whole universe was made for Christ and . . . everything is to be gathered together in Him.”
Q: Lewis’ imagination extends to the rest of the universe, but what is the one thing we are told?
A: We can become part of Christ and “become part of that wonderful present which the young Prince of the universe wants to offer to His Father—that present which is Himself and therefor us in Him.” Lewis stresses, “It is the only thing we were made for.”
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