mere christianity essay

“Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis: Morality as a Natural Law Essay

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Around the world, Mere Christianity is considered a classic of Christian apologetics, and for a good reason too. Written in a clear yet evocative language, the book touches on the basics of Christian teachings in an easily accessible and understandable way. Lewis (1952) begins his work by addressing the issues of Christian morality, and this is when one of the most impactful epiphanies of the book takes place. A major takeaway from the way the author structures his argument is the objectivity of the moral law as the law of nature, and one may understand it reliably through reason and observation.

The major premise of the book’s argument regarding morality is that the moral law is at, for all intents and purposes, the law of nature. It means that it is as objective as the other laws of nature identified by science so far – such as gravity, conservation of mass, and so forth. When discussing the morality of their actions or those of somebody else, people habitually invoke a higher moral standard to which behaviors ought to correspond (Lewis, 1952). As the author points out, it indicates that they imply to share the universal standard of decent behavior that regulates what is to be done or not done. Moreover, people tend to judge different moral theories as more or less right correct (Lewis, 1952). According to the author, it indicates that people have a scale to measure the correctness of moral and ethical theories and, as shown in the previous example, imply this scale to be universal. As such, the author concludes, humans recognize, whether implicitly or explicitly, that there is a universal standard of moral behavior, which is as objective as the other laws of nature.

This argument is not new in itself, and philosophers discussed morality as a natural law long before Mere Christianity. None other than St. Thomas Aquinas (1485) argued that the natural law was discovered through reason and demanded that “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided” (94.2). However, while the essence of the argument is not new, the way in which Lewis (1952) approaches it is enlightening. Aquinas (1485) discovered and analyzed his natural law of morality through the application of abstract philosophical concepts rooted in ancient philosophy and Christian theology. Lewis (1952), on the other hand, asks people to take a look at the numerous societies throughout history, such as “ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans” (p. 12). His point is that, for all their differences, they developed codes of conduct that stressed the same ideas of unselfishness. The brilliance of this argument is that it is equally accessible to devout Christians and skeptics because they all can agree based on facts and not only belief that humans tend to follow the same moral principles throughout history.

As such, one major takeaway from Mere Christianity is the way in which the author structures his argument about morality. The idea of the moral law being a law of nature accessible to any reasonable human has been exercised by many philosophers, both Christian and otherwise, before Lewis. Yet rooting the argument in historical facts rather than merely abstract reasoning allows the author to create a case for objective and universal morality allows Mere Christianity to construct a case appealing to different audiences.

Aquinas, T., St. (1485). Summa Theologica . Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Web.

Lewis, C. S. (1952). Mere Christianity . Danville Area Community College. Web.

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Most people in the world have no experience of lasting joy in their lives. We’re on a mission to change that. All of our resources exist to guide you toward everlasting joy in Jesus Christ.

Mere Christianity

A reader’s guide to a christian classic.

George Marsden

Enthralled by the beauty of god.

Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame

What is it that makes C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity so lastingly compelling? While most books fade in popularity, Lewis’s apologetic volume has sold even better in the twenty-first century than it did when it was first published. In English alone, it has reached something like four million copies since 2001. It is still the favorite go-to book for those considering Christianity or having doubts about their faith. New York Times columnist David Brooks quipped that when he was contemplating commitment to Christianity, acquaintances sent him about three hundred books, “only a hundred of which were different copies of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity .”

Mere Christianity was not even originally written to be a book. It arose out of four sets of radio addresses that Lewis gave on the BBC during some very stressful years of World War II, from 1941 to 1944. Lewis had these published as separate little booklets soon after the broadcasts. But it was not until 1952 that he collected them into one volume with a new introduction as Mere Christianity .

Given the remarkable successes of this book, an edifying question to ask is, What were the qualities of Lewis’s communication of the faith that made it so lastingly effective? None of us is another C.S. Lewis, but each of us might learn from him how best to communicate our faith to others.

1. Lewis looked for timeless truths.

One of the strongest habits of thought both in Lewis’s day and in our own is to think that newer understandings of the most basic aspects of life and reality are better than older understandings. Lewis, as a student of history, recognized that many of the “latest ideas” of one’s own day will look quaint to future generations. When Lewis himself was on his journey to becoming a Christian, he came to realize that there was good reason to put one’s trust in ideas that had lasted a long time, rather than in the latest fads that would come and go.

He accordingly defined “mere Christianity” as “the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times” (viii). Rather than presenting the latest modern ideas about Christianity, he was presenting an essential Christianity that had been around “long before I was born and whether I like it or not” (ix).

Grounding his presentation in history also meant that he carefully avoided presenting Christianity as a support for some currently fashionable social or political cause — as he put it, like “Christianity and Vegetarianism” or “Christianity and the New Order.” In The Screwtape Letters , the senior devil Screwtape advises the junior devil Wormwood to suggest to his “patient” (the young man who is in “danger” of becoming a true Christian) that Christianity is valuable chiefly for the excellent arguments it provides for the positions of his political party (135). Such partisanship, Screwtape suggests, would lead the young man away from considering the more essential issues.

“C.S. Lewis was careful to avoid efforts to improve Christianity with modern theological fads.”

Likewise, Lewis was careful to avoid efforts to improve Christianity with modern theological fads. These, he says, turn out to be versions of “Christianity and water” that dilute the essence of an essentially strong, life-changing drink. Unlike the liberal ecumenism that was so prominent in his day, which offered a largely demythologized Christianity, Lewis insisted on a robust appropriation of the central supernaturalist claims that have been the gospel message throughout the ages.

2. Lewis connected with perennial human nature.

Lewis’s lifelong quest for timeless truths led him not only to emphasize core Christian doctrines, but also to be able to reach wide audiences. As a student of the history of literature, he was alert to finding common traits of human nature, revealed in many guises in differing times and places. So when he was asked to speak on the BBC to quite literally every sort of person in England, he knew where to start — with common human experience.

He started by appealing to individuals’ own experiences of the perennial human conviction that there was a real right and wrong in the universe. Most people could recognize that other humans (the Nazis whom they were fighting, for instance) often egregiously failed to live up to proper standards of right and wrong. And if they were honest, they might see that they themselves did not always live up to those standards either. So, Lewis began by trying to cultivate a sense of guilt that was a necessary first step toward looking for a cure.

3. Lewis put reason in the context of the imagination.

One of the most striking features of Mere Christianity is its clarity of language — especially its effective uses of imagination, metaphor, and analogy. Sometimes people assume that Lewis was primarily a rationalistic apologist, and they dismiss him without much attention or even say that such rationality is out-of-date in the twenty-first century. But as many commentators have pointed out, while there are some conspicuous arguments in Mere Christianity , Lewis appeals more essentially to the imagination. As a literary person and writer, he understood reality through analogies and images. So, the Lewis of Narnia and his other imaginative works is also the Lewis of Mere Christianity .

Readers familiar with Mere Christianity may recall some of the many images that Lewis uses to describe becoming a Christian. It is like passing from death into life, or like laying down your rebel arms and surrendering, or like saying sorry, or like killing part of yourself, or like learning to walk or to write, or like buying God a present with his own money. Or it is like a drowning man clutching at a rescuer’s hand, or like a tin soldier or a statue becoming alive, or like a horse turning into a Pegasus, or like a compass needle swinging to north, or like a dark greenhouse transformed as the roof suddenly becomes bright in the sunlight. And many more.

4. “Mere” Christianity involved a demanding gospel message.

Lewis was not promoting “cheap grace” — to use the term that Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined in the same era. “Mere” Christianity is not minimal Christianity. It is not easy or safe. Rather, readers find that they are being drawn in to an understanding of Christianity that is going to be extraordinarily demanding on them personally.

They are being asked to give up their very “self” as a sovereign entity, and to experience Christ living in them. “To become new men means losing what we now call ‘ourselves.’ Out of our selves, into Christ, we must go” (224). Elsewhere he writes, “This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing else. . . . The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs” (199). We are being made into creatures who can obey the command, “Be ye perfect” (198). We are to be transformed “from being creatures of God to being Sons of God” (220). That is possible only by being “in Christ,” who is the first instance of this new humanity. So, there must be “a real giving up of the self” (226).

“‘Mere’ Christianity is not minimal Christianity. It is not easy or safe.”

The demands of giving up the liberties of self-rule to be “in Christ” have sometimes been obscured in the popular revivalist traditions, where being “born again” may be presented as a sort of magical moment based on one’s “decision for Christ,” as though we are still in control. For Lewis the emphasis is more clearly on seeking to be open to being “surprised by joy,” as he puts it in the title of his spiritual autobiography. Recognition of the beauty that brings that joy leads to the otherwise impossible submission of the self. Being “in Christ” means a radical reordering of one’s loves, as in the Augustinian tradition. We find ourselves in the orbit of the sun of Christ’s love so that our own loves begin to be brought into their proper places. We seek to love what God loves.

5. Lewis pointed readers to the luminosity of the gospel message itself.

In 1939 Lewis published an essay on “ The Personal Heresy ” in literary criticism. He argued that it was wrong to view a poem as about the poet’s state of mind. “The poet is not a man,” he wrote, “who asks me to look at him ; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him ” (14).

Lewis would have said the same for his work as an apologist. Had it drawn primary attention to himself, or have been just a reflection of his own peculiar views, it would have had little lasting impact. In fact, one of the greatest sources of the lasting vitality of the presentations is that Lewis deliberately points the listener or reader toward an object.

As others have observed, he does not simply present arguments; rather, he acts more like a friendly companion on a journey. To expand on that image, he is like a companion on a hike who is an expert naturalist and who points out all sorts of flora or tiny flowers or rock formations that you would have missed on your own. And if your guide leads you to see one of the most astonishing views of mountain peaks and distant lakes that you have ever seen, you will be duly grateful to him. Yet the most unforgettable part of the experience arises from the power of beauty that you have been led to see.

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Mere Christianity

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3 Sentence Summary

In Mere Christianity , C.S. Lewis aims to prove to the sensible skeptic that God does exist and that He sent His son Jesus Christ to redeem the world. The book begins with a logical proof for the Christian God and then transitions into a discussion of the common ground upon which all of those of the Christian faith stand together. Readers at all stages of belief will find that Mere Christianity  provides an approachable path to discover a powerful, rational case for the Christian faith.

5 Key Takeaways

• There is irrefutable Right and Wrong—referred to as the Law of Nature or Moral Law—that is unique to humanity. We can choose whether or not to obey this Law, and frequently, we do not.
• Our conscious may be the best proof that God exists. There must be Something that is directing the universe, and which appears in us as a law urging us to do right and making us feel responsible and uncomfortable when we do wrong.
• Christianity is not a simple religion. Much of it is unexpected. And that is all the more reason to suspect that it is true. Reality is tremendously complicated because one must deal with the facts. Anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.
• God gave man free will because, although it makes evil possible, it is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
• The utmost evil is Pride. It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

Mere Christianity Summary

Please Note

The following book summary is a collection of my notes and highlights taken straight from the book. Most of them are direct quotes. Some are paraphrases. Very few are my own words.

These notes are informal. I try to organize them by chapter. But I pick and choose ideas to include at my discretion.

• Our divisions [in the church] should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son.
• When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object.
• Be careful not to spiritualize the word Christian to the point that it becomes a useless, meaningless word. Christian does not mean “good.” Christian must be reserved for its original, obvious meaning.
• The name Christians was first given at Antioch (Acts 11:26) to ‘the disciples’, to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles.
• When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.

Book One: Right and Wrong As a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe

1. the law of human nature.

• Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
• The Law of (Human) Nature—as understood by the ancients—was the sense of Right and Wrong. Everybody knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. Humanity is bound to the Law of Nature just as they are bound by the Law of Gravity. There is no escaping it. However, mankind can choose to disobey it if they so choose. In this key way, the Law of Nature differs from other laws of physics.
• The Law of Nature only applies to humans, and not to animals, vegetables, or other inorganic things.

Counter-Argument

Some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities. But this is NOT true.

The moral teachings of the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans are remarkably similar.

Use this thought experiment: Imagine a country that had a totally different morality. Where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him.

Men across time and place may have differed in regards to what people you ought to be unselfish to, but they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired.

• It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table.

Key Idea #1

There is irrefutable Right and Wrong—referred to as the Law of Nature, Moral Law, or Rule of Decent Behavior—that is unique to humanity across all time and space. We experience and know this law without being taught it by our parents. In other words, the Law of Nature is not an arbitrary consequence of culture or society but is the very essence of human consciousness.

Key Idea #2

Despite knowing the Law of Nature, we all break it. We all fail to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people. We all break the golden rule.

• If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much—we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so—that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility.
• Key Idea #1 and #2 are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves the universe we live in.

2. Some Objections

Isn’t what you call the moral law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed just like all our other instincts.

• Instincts like love, sex, and hunger drive us with a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. There is no doubt that we sometimes act in accordance with what is Right (e.g. help another person) while being motivated by instinct.
• But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not.
• Suppose you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them.
• The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.
• The Moral Law is often there to encourage the weaker of two impulses—given that the weaker impulse is in alignment with what is Right (e.g. give help vs save yourself).
• There is no way of saying one impulse—say mother love or patriotism—are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All instincts must be restrained and encouraged at different times. Thus there must be something else, separate from instinct, that informs our instincts to the tune of Right conduct.

Isn’t what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?

• Something learned from a parent or teacher does NOT necessarily mean that what you learned was merely a human invention.
• Example: We all learned the multiplication tables at school. But that does not mean the multiplication table is something humans made up for themselves and might have made differently if they had so chosen.
• Mathematics are real truths. Humans discovered these truths, we did not invent them. The same is true of the Moral Law.

Moral Progress

• The fact that we can look across time and clearly identify “moral progress” means that we believe some moralities are better than others. We believe in Reformers—people who understood morality better than their neighbors did.
• The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other.
• If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about.

3. The Reality of the Law

• When dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts (how men behave) and you also have something else (how men ought to behave). In the rest of the universe, there need not be anything but the facts.
• If a man asks what is the point of behaving decently, it is no good replying, ‘in order to benefit society’, for trying to benefit society, in other words being unselfish (for ‘society’ after all only means ‘other people’), is one of the things decent behavior consists in; all you are really saying is that decent behavior is decent behavior.
• There is nothing beneath the statement, “Men ought to be unselfish.” You cannot explain it away. You must acknowledge the Moral Law.

4. What Lies Behind the Law

• If we acknowledge the Law of Nature, or of Right and Wrong, what does this tell us about the universe we live in?
• Materialist view : By pure chance and evolution the Earth came to produce living, thinking creatures like us.
• Religious view: Behind the universe is something more like a mind, that is to say, a conscious, that prefers one thing to another. For purposes we do not know, but partly, in order to produce creatures like itself, at least to the extent of having minds that think.
• You cannot find out which view is the right one by science. Science works by experiments. It observes how things behave.
• Why something comes to be at all, and whether there is anything behind the thing science observes—these are not scientific questions. E.g. Why is there a universe? Why does it go on as it does? Has it any meaning?
• There is only ONE thing that we can know more about than we can learn from external observation. That one thing is Man.
• If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions?
• There must be Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong.

5. We Have Cause to Be Uneasy

• 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 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.
• Now, from this second bit of evidence we conclude that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct—in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness. In that sense we should agree with the account given by Christianity and some other religions, that God is ‘good’.
• If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft. It is no use, at this stage, saying that what you mean by a ‘good’ God is a God who can forgive. You are going too quickly. Only a Person can forgive. And we have not yet got as far as a personal God—only as far as a power, behind the Moral Law, and more like a mind than it is like anything else.
• 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.
• Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. But you need not repent until you are aware of the Moral Law and your need for forgiveness. Only once you realize that you fall short of God’s goodness will Christianity speak to you.

Book Two: What Christians Believe

1. the rival conceptions of god.

• If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through.
• If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.
• But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic—there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong; but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others.
• God is beyond good and evil. What we call good and bad is merely a human perspective.
• Cancer is bad because it kills man. But a successful surgeon is also bad because he kills cancer.
• This view was held by the great Prussian philosopher Hegel and by the Hindus.
• God, so to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe almost is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist either, and anything you find in the universe is a part of God.

Other View of God

• God is definitely ‘good’ or ‘righteous’. God takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred.
• This view is held by Jews, Mohammedans, and Christians.
• God invented and made the universe—like a man making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed.

Discrediting Atheism

If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong?

“For many years I [C.S. Lewis] simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling ‘whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn’t it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren’t all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?’ But then that threw me back into another difficulty. My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?…

…Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.”

2. The Invasion

• It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not.
• Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.
• Beware of people who complain that the Christian doctrine is all too complicated and that if there really were a God they are sure He would have made ‘religion’ simple, because simplicity is so beautiful, etc. Their idea of God ‘making religion simple’ is flawed because God did not invent religion. Religion is God’s statement to us of certain quite unalterable facts about His own nature.
• 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.

“A universe that contains much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless.

There are only two views that face all the facts.

One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been.

The other is the view called Dualism.”

• Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war.
• If Dualism is true, then the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad. The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty. But in real life people are cruel for one of two reasons—either because they are sadists, that is, because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it—money, or power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much.
• Wickedness is the pursuit of some good in the wrong way.
• Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.
• Therefore he must be getting them from the Good Power: even to be bad he must borrow or steal from his opponent. And do you now begin to see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel? That is not a mere story for the children. It is a real recognition of the fact that evil is a parasite, not an original thing. The powers which enable evil to carry on are powers given it by goodness. All the things which enable a bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things—resolution, cleverness, good looks, existence itself. That is why Dualism, in a strict sense, will not work.

3. The Shocking Alternative

• God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible.
• Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.

Why did God give us free will if it could all go wrong?

“The better stuff a creature is made of—the cleverer and stronger and freer it is—then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong.

A cow cannot be very good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius, still more so; a superhuman spirit best—or worst—of all.”

• The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first—wanting to be the center—wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race.
• What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could ‘be like gods’—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
• Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

What God Did to Help Us

• 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.

Who Was Jesus?

• Jesus was a Jew who spoke as if He was God and claimed to forgive sins.
• He [Jesus] unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivaled by any other character in history.
• I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say.
• You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

4. The Perfect Penitent

• The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.
• We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.

One Theory Anyhow

• Consider a debt where one person with assets pays the debt on behalf of someone who has not. When a person gets himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind of friend.
• Now what was the sort of ‘hole’ man had got himself into? He had tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself.
• The only way out of our ‘hole’ is surrender. This process of surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance.
• Here’s 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.
• God becoming man is the only person that could help us. Jesus was the perfect sacrifice of repentance.

Objections to Atonement

• I have heard some people complain that if Jesus was God as well as man, then His sufferings and death lose all value in their eyes, ‘because it must have been so easy for Him’.
• In one sense, of course, those who make it are right. They have even understated their own case. The perfect submission, the perfect suffering, the perfect death were not only easier to Jesus because He was God, but were possible only because He was God.
• If I am drowning in a rapid river, a man who still has one foot on the bank may give me a hand which saves my life. Ought I to shout back (between my gasps) ‘No, it’s not fair! You have an advantage! You’re keeping one foot on the bank’? That advantage—call it ‘unfair’ if you like—is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?

5. The Practical Conclusion

• 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.
• Why these three things? Who knows. That’s not for us to say. It’s the way God made it to be.
• We have to take reality as it comes to us: there is no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or what we should have expected it to be like.
• Christians believe it to be true because Jesus taught it to his followers. We take 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 percent of the things you believe are believed 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.

The Christian Life

• Your natural life is derived from your parents; that does not mean it will stay there if you do nothing about it. You can lose it by neglect, or you can drive it away by committing suicide. You have to feed it and look after it: but always remember you are not making it, you are only keeping up a life you got from someone else. In the same way a Christian can lose the Christ-life which has been put into him, and he has to make efforts to keep it. But 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.
• 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.
• The church is a physical organism through which Christ acts. We, as Christians, are his body—arms and legs that move and act in the world.

Is it not frightfully unfair that this new Christ-life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him?

“God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.

But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ’s body, the organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. Cutting off a man’s fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work.”

Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine evil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough?

“Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely.

God is going to invade, all right: but what good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else—something it never entered your head to conceive—comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side.”

Book Three: Christian Behavior

1. the three parts of morality.

• Moral rules do not exist to get in the way of us having a good time. They are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine.
• It is dangerous to describe a man who tries very hard to keep the moral law as a ‘man of high ideals’, because this might lead you to think that moral perfection was a private taste of his own and that the rest of us were not called on to share it.

How the Human Machine Goes Wrong

• When human individuals drift apart from one another, or else collide with one another and do one another damage, by cheating or bullying.
• When things go wrong inside the individual—when the different parts of him (his different faculties and desires and so on) either drift apart or interfere with one another.
• Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonizing the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.
• You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society. That is why we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality inside the individual.
• Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever. Therefore, how you conduct yourself now has eternal significance.
• And immortality makes this other difference, which, by the by, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy. If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment.

2. The Four Cardinal Virtues

• Cardinal virtues are those which all civilized people recognize.
• “Cardinal” comes from the Latin word meaning “the hinge of a door.”
• Prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it.
• Just because you are a “good” person does not mean that you can act a fool.
• God wants us to use every bit of sense that he has given us. He is not fond of intellectual slackers.
• If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. But, fortunately, it works the other way round. Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.
• Temperance referred not especially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further.
• It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion.
• One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way.
• A man who makes his golf or his motor-bicycle the center of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is being just as ‘intemperate’ as someone who gets drunk every evening.
• Justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on in law courts. It is the old name for everything we should now call ‘fairness’; it includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises, and all that side of life.
• Fortitude includes both kinds of courage—the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that ‘sticks it’ under pain. ‘Guts’ is perhaps the nearest modern English. You will notice, of course, that you cannot practice any of the other virtues very long without bringing this one into play.

Acting Out Virtues

• Acting “virtuous” is a quality of your character, not the result of one specific action.
• Right actions done for the wrong reason do not help to build the internal quality or character called a ‘virtue’, and it is this quality or character that really matters.
• God doesn’t want people who simply obey a set of rules. He really wants people of a particular sort.

3. Social Morality

• Christ did not come to teach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule is a summing up of what every one had always known to be right.
• Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed. Samuel Johnson

• Christianity has not, and does not profess to have, a detailed political programme for applying ‘Do as you would be done by’ to a particular society at a particular moment.

The Left Side of Christian Society

• All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like.
• It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat.
• Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one’s work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them.
• And there is to be no ‘swank’ or ‘side’, no putting on airs.

The Right Side of Christian Society

• On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience—obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands.
• It is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong.
• Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls ‘busybodies’.

The True Christian Society

“If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, ‘advanced’, but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old-fashioned—perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic.

Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing. That is just what one would expect if Christianity is the total plan for the human machine.

We have all departed from the total plan in different ways, and each of us wants to make out that his own modifications of the original plan is the plan itself. You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian: everyone is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest.

That is why we do not get much further: and that is why people who are fighting for quite opposite things can both say they are fighting for Christianity.

A Note on Interest

• There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest; and lending money at interest—what we call investment—is the basis of our whole system.

A Note on Charity

• In the passage where the New Testament says that every one must work, it gives as a reason ‘in order that he may have something to give to those in need’. Charity—giving to the poor—is an essential part of Christian morality.
• Some people nowadays say that charity ought to be unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we ought to be producing a society in which there were no poor to give to. They may be quite right in saying that we ought to produce this kind of society. But if anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you can stop giving in the meantime, then he has parted company with all Christian morality.
• I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.
• Sometimes our pride also hinders our charity; we are tempted to spend more than we ought on the showy forms of generosity (tipping, hospitality) and less than we ought on those who really need our help.

A Final Note on Society

• Most of us are not really approaching the subject [of what is ‘Christian society’] in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party.
• 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 neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love God: and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him.

4. Morality and Psychoanalysis

• Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.
• Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler?
• That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.
• Christian morality is NOT some kind of bargain with God in which God says, “If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.”
• Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature.
• When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.
• Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

5. Sexual Morality

• The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of ‘modesty’; i.e. propriety, or decency. What is considered ‘modest’ or not is a product of the culture.
• When people break the rule of propriety current in their own time and place, if they do so in order to excite lust in themselves or others, then they are offending against chastity.
• Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’ Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong.
• They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not.
• Modern people are always saying, ‘Sex is nothing to be ashamed of.’ They may mean two things. They may mean ‘There is nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way, nor in the fact that it gives pleasure.’ If they mean that, they are right. Christianity says the same.
• But, of course, when people say, ‘Sex is nothing to be ashamed of,’ they may mean ‘the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of’. If they mean that, I think they are wrong.

Why Chastity is So Difficult Today

Lie #1: sexual indulgence is ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’ for you.

• In the first place our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural’, so ‘healthy’, and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them.
• Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour. Now this association is a lie. Like all powerful lies, it is based on a truth—the truth, acknowledged above, that sex in itself (apart from the excesses and obsessions that have grown round it) is ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’, and all the rest of it. The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal. Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense.
• For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim made by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing.

Lie #2: Chastity is impossible, so don’t bother trying

• In the second place, many people are deterred from seriously attempting Christian chastity because they think (before trying) that it is impossible. But when a thing has to be attempted, one must never think about possibility or impossibility. Faced with an optional question in an examination paper, one considers whether one can do it or not: faced with a compulsory question, one must do the best one can.
• Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
• For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process 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.

Lie #3: ‘Repressed’ sex is dangerous

• Repressed sexuality does not appear to the patient to be sexuality at all. When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of creating a repression. On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else.

The Supreme Vice

• I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the center of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong.
• The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred.

6. Christian Marriage

• The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism—for that is what the words ‘one flesh’ would be in modern English.
• The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined.
• The monstrosity of sexual intercourse out of marriage is that people are trying to indulge in the pleasure of sex apart from the other kinds of union that are supposed to accompany it. You must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.
• Christianity teaches that marriage is for life.
• Churches differ in their views on how divorce should proceed. But despite their disagreements, they all agree far more with each other on the matter than they do with the outside world.
• They are all agreed that it is more like having both your legs cut off than it is like dissolving a business partnership or even deserting a regiment. What they all disagree with is the modern view that it is a simple readjustment of partners, to be made whenever people feel they are no longer in love with one another, or when either of them falls in love with someone else.

Promises Made, Promises Kept

• The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love.
• A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise never to have a headache or always to feel hungry.
• But what, it may be asked, is the use of keeping two people together if they are no longer in love? There are several sound, social reasons; to provide a home for their children, to protect the woman (who has probably sacrificed or damaged her own career by getting married) from being dropped whenever the man is tired of her.
• Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all.
• Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go.
• But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love.

Wives Obey Their Husbands

• Something else, even more unpopular, remains to be dealt with. Christian wives promise to obey their husbands. In Christian marriage the man is said to be the ‘head’. Two questions obviously arise here. (1) Why should there be a head at all—why not equality? (2) Why should it be the man?

Why A Head?

• The need for some head follows from the idea that marriage is permanent.
• If marriage is permanent, one or other party must, in the last resort, have the power of deciding the family policy.
• You cannot have a permanent association without a constitution.

Why does the husband lead?

• There must be something unnatural about the rule of wives over husbands, because the wives themselves are half ashamed of it and despise the husbands whom they rule.
• The relations of the family to the outer world—what might be called its foreign policy—must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders.
• A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world.
• He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife.

7. Forgiveness

• Christians are called to love their neighbor as themselves. This includes our enemies. Therefore we have the terrible duty of forgiving our enemies.
• There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it.

What it Means to Love Your Enemy

• First, ask yourself, “What does it mean to love myself?”
• Loving your enemy does NOT mean that you must ‘feel fond of him’ or ‘find him attractive.’
• Loving your enemy does NOT mean thinking them nice either. You are allowed to loathe and hate some of the things your enemies do.
• Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself.

Crime and Punishment

• Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment—even to death.
• It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.
• It is no good quoting ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There are two Greek words: the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder. And when Christ quotes that commandment He uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And I am told there is the same distinction in Hebrew. All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery. When soldiers came to St John the Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army: nor did Christ when He met a Roman sergeant-major—what they called a centurion. The idea of the knight—the Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause—is one of the great Christian ideas.
• We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it.
• Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves—to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.
• I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself. God intends us to love all selves in the same way and for the same reason.

8. The Great Sin

• There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves.
• The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.
• According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.
• Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

The Pride Test

“I pointed out a moment ago that the more pride one had, the more one disliked pride in others.

In fact, if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, ‘How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronize me, or show off?’

The point is that each person’s pride is in competition with every one else’s pride.”

• Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
• Greed may drive men into competition if there is not enough to go round; but the proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will try to get still more just to assert his power.
• Power is what Pride really enjoys: there is nothing that makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers.

Pride Misunderstood

• Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says ‘Well done,’ are pleased and ought to be.
• The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration, too much and is always angling for it. It is a fault, but a child-like and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own admiration. You value other people enough to want them to look at you. You are, in fact, still human. The real black, diabolical Pride, comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you.
• We say in English that a man is ‘proud’ of his son, or his father, or his school, or regiment, and it may be asked whether ‘pride’ in this sense is a sin. I think it depends on what, exactly, we mean by ‘proud of’. Very often, in such sentences, the phrase ‘is proud of’ means ‘has a warm-hearted admiration for’. Such an admiration is, of course, very far from being a sin.
• God does not forbid Pride because he is offended at it, or that Humility something He demands as due to his own dignity. God detests Pride because it comes in the way of your relationship with Him.
• A truly humble man will not be the sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. He will probably seem like a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.
• Charity means ‘Love, in the Christian sense’. But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.
• The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did.
• The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become—and so on in a vicious circle for ever.
• Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.
• Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.

Unsatisfied

• The Fool’s Way —He puts the blame on the things themselves. He goes on all his life thinking that if only he tried another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday, or whatever it is, then, this time, he really would catch the mysterious something we are all after. Most of the bored, discontented, rich people in the world are of this type.
• The Way of the Disillusioned ‘Sensible Man’ —He soon decides that the whole thing was moonshine. ‘Of course,’ he says, ‘one feels like that when one’s young. But by the time you get to my age you’ve given up chasing the rainbow’s end.’ And so he settles down and learns not to expect too much and represses the part of himself which used, as he would say, ‘to cry for the moon’.
• The Christian Way —The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

11. Faith as Belief

How can Belief be a virtue?

“But what I did not see then—and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up.

In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so.

For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics.

It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.”

• Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in.
• Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
• That is why daily prayers and religious readings and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.

12. Faith as Reliance on Christ

• Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious moral effort is the only thing that will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point: and out of that Faith in Him good actions must inevitably come.

Book Four: Beyond Personality—or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity

1. making and begetting, why we need theology.

The Theological Map

“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.

Now, Theology is like the map.”

• Theology is practical: especially now. In the old days, when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones—bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England is retrogression—like believing the earth is flat.
• If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.

Made In His Image

• We don’t use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make.
• What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.
• And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

2. The Three-Personal God

• Again, some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several lives, human souls will be ‘absorbed’ into God. But when they try to explain what they mean, they seem to be thinking of our being absorbed into God as one material thing is absorbed into another. They say it is like a drop of water slipping into the sea. But of course that is the end of the drop. If that is what happens to us, then being absorbed is the same as ceasing to exist. It is only the Christians who have any idea of how human souls can be taken into the life of God and yet remain themselves—in fact, be very much more themselves than they were before.
• Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings—just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal—something more than a person.
• 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.

Disregard Simple Religion

• If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course, anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.

3. Time and Beyond Time

How god answers the prayers of millions.

• Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty—and every other moment from the beginning of the world—is always the Present for Him. If you like to put it that way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.
• Suppose I am writing a novel. I write ‘Mary laid down her work; next moment came a knock at the door!’ For Mary who has to live in the imaginary time of my story there is no interval between putting down the work and hearing the knock. But I, who am Mary’s maker, do not live in that imaginary time at all. Between writing the first half of that sentence and the second, I might sit down for three hours and think steadily about Mary. I could think about Mary as if she were the only character in the book and for as long as I pleased, and the hours I spent in doing so would not appear in Mary’s time (the time inside the story) at all.
• He [God] has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. He does not have to deal with us in the mass. You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created. When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only man in the world.
• If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all.
• 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 Time-line 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.

4. Good Infection

• The Son exists because the Father exists: but there never was a time before the Father produced the Son.
• All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love’. But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons.
• Of course, what these people mean when they say that God is love is often something quite different: they really mean ‘Love is God’. They really mean that 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’.
• And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama.
• 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. This third Person is called, in technical language, the Holy Ghost or the ‘spirit’ of God.
• The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.
• Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us.
• Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

5. The Obstinate Toy Soldiers

• If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would not look like a lot of separate things dotted about. It would look like one single growing thing—rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other. And not only that. Individuals are not really separate from God any more than from one another. Every man, woman, and child all over the world is feeling and breathing at this moment only because God, so to speak, is ‘keeping him going’.

6. Two Notes

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?

The easy 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. They were able to do this because He gave them free will: He gave them free will because a world of mere automata could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness.”

The difficult answer: It may have been possible for God to beget many sons because they would not have been different in any way.

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.

“Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body—different from one another and each contributing what no other could. When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, 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. On the other hand, when you are tempted not to bother about someone else’s troubles because they are ‘no business of yours’, remember that though he is different from you he is part of the same organism as you. If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself you will become an Individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian. But a Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist.”

“That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. “

7. Let’s Pretend

Reciting the lord’s prayer.

• Its very first words are Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending.

Benefits of Pretending

• What is the good of pretending to be what you are not? Well, even on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There is a bad kind, where the pretence is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping you. But there is also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the real thing. When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were.
• Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.
• Men are mirrors, or ‘carriers’ of Christ to other men.

Discoveries Through Prayer

• We begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our sinfulness; begin to be alarmed not only about what we do, but about what we are.
• We realize that it is God who is working through us. We, at most, allow it to be done to us.
• God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one.
• I daresay this idea of a divine make-believe sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is not that how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does. We treat our dogs as if they were ‘almost human’: that is why they really become ‘almost human’ in the end.

8. Is Christianity Hard or Easy?

• The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call ‘ourselves’, to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good’.

9. Counting the Cost

• Every father is pleased at the baby’s first attempt to walk: no father would be satisfied with anything less than a firm, free, manly walk in a grown-up son. In the same way, he said, ‘God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.’
• On the one hand, God’s demand for perfection need not discourage you in the least in your present attempts to be good, or even in your present failures. Each time you fall He will pick you up again. And He knows perfectly well that your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection. On the other hand, you must realise from the outset that the goal towards which He is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole universe, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that goal.

You are His Temple

• Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

10. Nice People or New Men

If christianity is true why are not all christians obviously nicer than all non-christians.

• If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man’s outward actions—if he continues to be just as snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before—then I think we must suspect that his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary…Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ‘religion’ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better; just as in an illness ‘feeling better is not much good if the thermometer shows that your temperature is still going up. In that sense, the outer world is quite right to judge Christianity by its results.
• But the world is not neatly divided into two camps—Christian and non-Christian. People in the first camp at any given moment should not be expected to be nicer than people in the second.

Christian Miss Bates and Unbelieving Dick Firkin

• Christian Miss Bates may have an unkinder tongue than unbelieving Dick Firkin. That, by itself, does not tell us whether Christianity works. The question is what Miss Bates’s tongue would be like if she were not a Christian and what Dick’s would be like if he became one.
• Miss Bates and Dick, as a result of natural causes and early upbringing, have certain temperaments: Christianity professes to put both temperaments under new management if they will allow it to do so. What you have a right to ask is whether that management, if allowed to take over, improves the concern.

Being Nice is Not Nearly Enough

• Believing that niceness is all that God demanded would be a fatal mistake. The truth is that in God’s eyes Dick Firkin needs ‘saving’ every bit as much as Miss Bates.
• You cannot expect God to look at Dick’s placid temper and friendly disposition exactly as we do. They result from natural causes which God Himself creates. Being merely temperamental, they will all disappear if Dick’s digestion alters. The niceness, in fact, is God’s gift to Dick, not Dick’s gift to God.
• We must, therefore, not be surprised if we find among the Christians some people who are still nasty. There is even, when you come to think it over, a reason why nasty people might be expected to turn to Christ in greater numbers than nice ones. That was what people objected to about Christ during His life on earth: He seemed to attract ‘such awful people’.

Who Needs God Anyways?

• One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realize your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing cheques, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.
• Now quite plainly, natural gifts carry with them a similar danger. If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is. ‘Why drag God into it?’ you may ask.
• There is either a warning or an encouragement here for every one of us. If you are a nice person—if virtue comes easily to you—beware! Much is expected from those to whom much is given. If you mistake for your own merits what are really God’s gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel: and all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous. The Devil was an archangel once; his natural gifts were as far above yours as yours are above those of a chimpanzee.
• But if you are a poor creature—poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels—saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion—nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends—do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can.

Mere Improvement is Not Redemption

• But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save.
• For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine.

11. The New Men

• Their very voices and faces are different from ours: stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. They are, I say, recognizable; but you must know what to look for.
• They will not be very like the idea of ‘religious people’ which you have formed from your general reading. They do not draw attention to themselves. You tend to think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do, but they need you less. (We must get over wanting to be needed: in some goodish people, especially women, that is the hardest of all temptations to resist.)
• They will usually seem to have a lot of time: you will wonder where it comes from. When you have recognized one of them, you will recognize the next one much more easily. And I strongly suspect (but how should I know?) that they recognize one another immediately and infallibly, across every barrier of color, sex, class, age, and even of creeds. In that way, to become holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at the very lowest, it must be great fun.
• The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him [Christ] take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented—as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense, our real selves are all waiting for us in Him.
• Sameness is to be found most among the most ‘natural’ men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
• Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

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Mere Christianity

69 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Book 1, Chapter 3

Book 1, Chapters 4-5

Book 2, Chapters 1-3

Book 2, Chapters 4-5

Book 3, Chapters 1-4

Book 3, Chapters 5-8

Book 3, Chapters 9-12

Book 4, Chapters 1-4

Book 4, Chapters 5-11

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

Mere Christianity by Clive Staples Lewis (more commonly known as C. S. Lewis ) was first published in 1952 as an expansion of some radio talks Lewis gave during World War II. Though Lewis himself is best known for his children’s fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia , Mere Christianity is likely Lewis’s most famous work of Christian apologetics—a genre dedicated to addressing various critiques of Christian theology. Lewis was well poised to make this kind of argument, having grown disillusioned with Christianity as a teenager only to return to it as an adult. The success Mere Christianity has enjoyed since its publication is also due to its accessibility; Lewis was a scholar of literature rather than of theology, and so discusses complicated religious concepts in more conversational terms than a non-layperson might. This study guide refers to the 2001 HarperCollins edition of the work.

At the book’s outset, Lewis states that that there are aspects of Christian thought that have become muddled, and that Christians themselves have been subject to internal strife. Lewis seeks to restore unity to the Christian religion, focusing on the difference between Christian and non-Christian belief (as opposed to disputes between—and within—the various denominations of Christianity).

Lewis begins by discussing morality, arguing that almost all humans have an innate sense of right and wrong, and that the content of this moral code is largely universal. Although Lewis acknowledges that cultural differences do exist, he believes that these are generally minor and superficial. However, while this moral law appears to be objective in a certain sense, it isn’t binding; human beings have free will and can disobey it. Lewis concludes Book 1 by suggesting that while only a force similar to our own mind could provide us with a sense of what is good and right, our own behavior must put us at odds with that force a great deal of the time.

In Book 2, Lewis moves on to consider various religious ideas of what this force might be in light of his earlier discussion of the existence of good and evil. Whereas Pantheists believe that God is the universe, Christianity believes that God created the universe. It follows that, for Pantheists, God is both good and bad—or rather, that our understanding of good and bad is the byproduct of our own limitations, and that God is beyond such concepts. For Christians, by contrast, God is infinitely good and wants humans to behave in particular ways. Although Christianity recognizes that people can be wicked, it does not see badness as inherent in the way that religious Dualism does; to the Christian, all badness is ultimately perverted goodness, twisted as a result of humanity’s fall, which was the result of people thinking they could find happiness outside of God. The Christian story is ultimately about how the Son of God (Jesus Christ) took humanity’s sins upon Himself, because only God could do “perfect” penance for those sins and, in the process, restore us to our original nature. It is up to us, however, to choose to partake in the life that Christ’s sacrifice offers to us.

Book 3 elaborates on what that choice looks like in practice, expanding on the three “Theological” virtues (faith, hope, and charity) and the four “Cardinal” virtues (prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude) that Christians should seek to practice. He also devotes attention to the importance of chastity outside of marriage, and to the form a truly Christian society might take, emphasizing that it would likely not correspond to modern political notions of right and left. Finally, Lewis emphasizes the dangers of pride, which is the sin from which all other sins ultimately flow.

The final section of the book consists of basic Christian theology, as Lewis understands it. Lewis discusses the idea of a three-personed God (the Holy Trinity) and of God as existing beyond linear human time. The bulk of his argument, however, concerns the ultimate purpose of Christian morality, which is to transform us into “sons of God” in the truest sense—that is, to enable us to partake not only in biological life but in the spiritual life of Christ. This process is difficult; in fact, it is a kind of death. By choosing it, however, we become a new sort of person—the sort of person God intended us to be—and more fully ourselves.

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• Mere Christianity Summary

by C. S. Lewis

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In Mere Christianity , C.S. Lewis argues for the existence of God, and then proceeds to outline what he believes are the fundamental tenants of Christianity.

In Book I, Lewis explores the notion of right and wrong, which he argues is, at its core, an inherently human characteristic that is not, as some would argue, merely a social construct. He calls our fundamental and universal understanding of fairness, or right and wrong, “The Law of Human Nature,” distinguishing it from other natural laws (such as gravity) by the fact that humans can choose whether or not to obey it. Lewis points out that we all know how we ought to behave, and yet we constantly find ourselves doing the opposite. He distinguishes the Law of Human Nature, or Moral Law, from the herd instinct. This Moral Law is not itself an instinct, but it helps us choose which of our instincts to act on. He also distinguishes it from social convention, arguing that, if all morality were truly subjective, then there would be no sense in arguing that one morality is better or worse than the other. We could not say that Nazi morality is inherently worse than any other set of morals. In order for there to be any comparison at all, there must be some true or correct morality to compare them to.

Lewis points out that, between the two commonly held views of the universe—the materialist view and the religious view—neither can be proven or disproven by science. However, that we do have more inside information into mankind, since we are ourselves human, than we would have just by observation. This, then, is how we know there is a moral law that we ought to obey even though our behavior alone indicates no such pattern. It is how we conclude that, “there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behavior, and yet quite definitely real—a real law which none of us made, but we which we find pressing on us” (20). If we find, then, inside ourselves a law that we did not create, then there must be some sort of power that exists above and outside of us. Lewis notes here that he is not “within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology” (25); he has merely arrived at the existence of “Something which is directing the universe” (25) and which seems to urge us toward morality. He points out that, if there is a force behind this Moral Law, is that it is not lenient nor indulgent; it instructs us to do the right thing regardless of how difficult or painful it is. It is a force that likes goodness, and we know that “if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do” (31). This, he argues, is where one must arrive before one can except Christianity. One must acknowledge that there is a Moral Law, and that he has broken it, and that we need to be set right again.

In Book II, Lewis tells us that Christians do not have to believe that all religions are absolutely wrong; some wrong answers, he says, are closer to being correct than others. There is a division among religions on the nature of God: a Pantheistic notion of a God who is beyond good and evil, and exists in everything in the universe without distinction between good and bad, and a God who created the universe and is very much on the side of good as opposed to evil. The latter, which is the Christian view, acknowledges that the world is not as it should be, which raises the question: “If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong?” He agues, though, that so long as we have any notion of “just” and “unjust,” there must exist some standard of “just” to compare it to, bringing him back to a firm belief in God, without whom words like “right” and “wrong” would be meaningless.

Atheism, therefore, is too simple, as is what Lewis calls “Christianity-and-water” which is a belief that there is a God and everything is good, leaving out the dark parts of theology. Christian doctrine is not the simple, watered down version that is so prevalent; it is actually far more complicated than most adults can easily comprehend. Lewis points out that reality is usually complicated and not what a person could have guessed, and notes that this is one of the reasons he himself believes Christianity.

Lewis argues against Dualism, the notion that good and evil are two independent forces that are at war in the universe. Evil is, instead, a parasite; it is a defected form of goodness, and cannot exist on its own. He says that, “wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way” (44). There is, however, a dark power at work in the universe, and the world we live in is “enemy-occupied territory” (46).

How then, can the state of the world be against God’s will, if God has absolute power? He compares this to a mother who wants her children to learn to clean their room on their own. She does not make them, and it remains dirty, and although this is against her will it is also her will for them to choose on their own that has made it possible. This is like free will. There is no happiness if we have no choice, so God has made us free to choose, but we use this freedom in a way that is not in accordance with his will. Things can go wrong because we want to be the center, we want to be more than God. This, he argues, is likely where evil came from in the first place. However, this can never be successful: we are created to run on God Himself, and there is no happiness outside of him. God has done three things to help us in our predicament. He left us a conscience, he sent the human race “good dreams,” or stories in other religions about a dying god who is resurrected and through this gives new life, and he selected a people group (the Jews) to teach what kind of God he was. The most shocking part is the appearance of Jesus, who claims to forgive sins. This, he argues, is a rather ridiculous claim, since he purports to forgive sins made by other men against other men; he is forgiving things in which he has no part. Lewis argues that we must not claim that Jesus was merely a great moral teacher. Since he claimed to be God, we have only three options: he is a lunatic, he is evil and a liar, or he is God. There is no other option.

Lewis walks through several theories about how Jesus’s death brings about salvation: that he paid a sort of debt by dying for our sins, or that he taught us how to repent by first doing it himself. It does not, he argues, really matter what one believes about how it works; we must simply know that it does work, though Lewis seems to advocate more for the latter—that Jesus taught us by example how to repent. Since Christ is our example, and because we can become like Christ, there is a “Christ-life” that is spread to us in three ways: baptism, belief, and Holy Communion/Mass/The Lord’s Supper. Christ-life does not make us perfect, but enables us to repair ourselves each time we fall. A Christian has God in him to make him good.

In Book III, Lewis outlines the three parts of morality. A human must be right with himself, he must be right with those around him, and he must be following a certain purpose. Lewis explains this through the metaphors of a fleet of ships and of a musical band. The fact that we are made by someone else for a purpose means we have more duties than if we only belonged to ourselves.

There are seven virtues in Christianity. Four are “Cardinal virtues,” recognized by all civilized people, and three are “Theological virtues,” recognized specifically by Christians. The Cardinal virtues are Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude. Virtues are not qualifiers for getting into Heaven, but by practicing them they mold individuals into the kind of people God wants, the kind of people who will be happy with the Heaven God has created.

Christian morality does not offer details about how to apply its virtues to a particular society at a particular time. It can be applied to any society. None of us, he argues, would probably like a fully Christian society, since we have all departed from God’s plan in some way. We cannot, however, pick and choose. We should not approach Christianity to find support for our beliefs, we should approach it to find out what to believe.

Lewis discusses the overlap between Christianity and psychoanalysis. The act of making choices involves what he calls our “raw material” and that is different for every person. Therefore we cannot judge based on someone’s outward appearance or action; it may be that they have done far more with their raw material than someone who began in much better place and have not made use of it. Each choice changes a central part of us and molds us into the person we are becoming. Each choice brings us closer or farther from the person God intended.

Lewis goes on to summarize Christian views on sex—chastity or marriage—and argues that our sexual impulse has deviated from what it ought to be. He argues against the notion that we should be free to follow our impulses; no impulse, sexual or otherwise, can be followed freely at all times without restraint. However, he does not believe that sexual sins are the worst; the worst are the ones that are “purely spiritual” such as hatred, since their effect on the soul is worse. He then examines Christian marriage, a promise that must be followed. It is not acceptable to break a promise when the feelings go away. When the feeling of being in love fades, it is replaced by a deeper, quieter love. Next, he examines forgiveness. We have a duty to forgive our enemies. This is difficult, but we can start small. However, there is a difference between loving one’s neighbor and feeling affection toward them. We can hate what a person does without hating them, which we do for ourselves all the time. We can hate an action but hope that that person can “be cured and made human again” ( 117). To love one’s neighbor is to wish him good, not to feel fond of him or to say nice things that are untrue.

Lewis then discusses what he calls the “worst sin” which is pride, the opposite of humility. He argues that “Pride leads to every other vice” (122). It provokes other sins and makes it impossible to know God, since prideful people cannot know anything greater than themselves.

The first theological virtues is Charity, which is essentially love—though Lewis points out that love does not mean feeling a certain way but acting a certain way. If you do not feel love toward someone, act as though you do. The second is Hope, looking forward to the eternal world. God gave us desires that can be satisfied, and the fact that we desire something that cannot be had in this world means that there is another world. The third Theological virtue is Faith. This does not mean believing something in spite of evidence. It means that, once you have accepted something on the basis of evidence, you continue to believe it in spite of your changing moods. All our attempts at the Christian virtues will ultimately fail. We must keep trying and failing, and trying again.

In Book IV, Lewis says that Theology is like a map. It is not God, but it points us to God. He distinguishes between making and begetting and between biological life, or Bios, and spiritual life, or Zoe. Jesus is begotten, and we are made; we are like statues, not sons, but through Christ we are brought to life. He then delves into the notion of a three-person God, which is something that we cannot understand. He is beyond personality, but he is not impersonal; he is super-personal. He is within us and beside us as he brings us toward him. This complex notion is where theology began. We are the instruments through which we see God, but if our instruments are not kept well, we see a distorted version of God. Lewis goes on to argue that God is beyond and outside of time. He is not bound by it, and every moment is the present for him. He compares this to a writer writing a novel; though the novel’s events are bound by time, the writer is not. He can take days to write a single scene. Lewis then explains this in terms of the Trinity, or three-person God. The Son is a product of the Father, but there was never a time when the Son did not exist. Lewis delves here more fully into the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is important because God cannot be love unless he contains two or more beings. These three beings are at play in the world and in every Christian as we become “little Christs,” which Lewis tells us is the sole purpose of Christianity.

Lewis compares humanity to toy soldiers brought to life, but the difference is that all of humanity is interwoven and we are not so distinct as we believe. By becoming human, then, Christ has infected humanity with his Spiritual life. In becoming what Lewis calls “little Christs,” there is an element of pretending. We pretend to be better than we are so that we can truly become better. When we act as though we are better than we are, we turn ourselves into people who are better. By pretending, we make it a reality.

Christianity therefore, is both harder and easier than non-Christian life. More is expected of us, but God helps us in ways that others do not. There is a cost, and it is often more than we have bargained for. He compares the individual to a living house. God comes in and begins to make improvements and at first you understand what he is fixing, but then he begins to knock things down that seem to be destructive. You find that “you thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself” (205). We can only become perfect when we put ourselves into his hands.

He acknowledges, however, the apparent irony in that not all Christians are nice than non-Christians. However, the world is not split into fully Christian and fully non-Christian. Furthermore, we ought not to compare a Christian to another non-Christian, but to the person they would be if they were not Christian. “Nice” people need saving just as much as “unkind” people do. Our natural temperament is not so much within our control and not so important as our choices, and whether we give ourselves and our raw material to God. Christianity is not about mere improvement but about Transformation. In the Christian view there is an evolutionary “Next Step” that is already at work. It is unique in that it is not carried out by sexual reproduction, it contains an element of choice, it originates from Christ and is passed on by “good infection,” it has happened relatively quickly compared to other evolutionary advances, and finally, the stakes are much higher.

Ultimately, Lewis explains, we must give ourselves over to Christ completely in order to both become like him and to fully become ourselves. It is the only way.

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Mere Christianity Questions and Answers

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Mere Christianity

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Lewis discusses the major divisions of belief in God

The major division are found in the people who believe in God, or some type of god, and those who have no belief system (atheist).

What is Transcendentalism?

Simply put Transcendentalism is a philosophy that asserts the spiritual and romantic world over the material and empirical world.

Study Guide for Mere Christianity

Mere Christianity study guide contains a biography of C.S. Lewis, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Mere Christianity
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George Marsden

George Marsden, Professor of History Emeritus at University of Notre Dame, is an influential historian who has written extensively on the interaction between Christianity and American culture, particularly on Christianity in American higher education and on American evangelicalism. He is well known for his biography Jonathan Edwards: A Life . He has authored other books including The Soul of the American University, Religion and American Culture , and Fundamentalism and American Culture . His most recent book is C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity”: A Biography . Marsden studied at Haverford College, Westminster Theological Seminary, and Yale University; he has taught at Calvin University, Duke University, and the University of Notre Dame, and is now scholar in residence at Calvin University.

Recommended Reading: George Marsden, C. S. Lewis’s  "Mere Christianity”: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books) (Princeton University Press, 2016)

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis’s eloquent and winsome defense of the Christian faith, originated as a series of BBC radio talks broadcast during the dark days of World War Two. Here is the story of the extraordinary life and afterlife of this influential and much-beloved book.

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Morality, Religion, and Reason

In Book One of Mere Christianity , C. S. Lewis attempts to use reason and logic to prove the existence of God—in the sense of an all-powerful, non-material being—and later to argue for the divinity of Jesus Christ. These two arguments—the so-called “argument from morality” and the “Christian trilemma”—are two of the most famous aspects of the book, and reflect Lewis’s overall project to justify Christianity through logic—a project that, by Lewis’s own admission, is…

Good, Evil, and Free Will

Book Two of Mere Christianity is largely concerned with the Christian definition of God—the almighty being who creates the moral law (as discussed in Book One—see above). As Lewis shows, Christians define God as an all-powerful being of infinite goodness. Right away, such a definition raises an important point—if God is infinitely moral and powerful, how could he allow pain, suffering, and other forms of evil in the world? In order to resolve this problem…

Christianity and Practice

In the third and fourth parts of his book, Lewis moves from an analysis of the logical bases for Christianity to a discussion of how a Christian lives—i.e., how to translate God’s teachings into one’s day-to-day existence. Lewis emphasizes the importance of Christian “practice ” : rituals, ceremonies, and other religious behaviors (e.g., praying, going to church, giving money to charity, etc.) that must be repeated again and again, sometimes against the Christian’s own will…

Faith, Works, and Salvation

One of the cornerstones of Christianity is the debate between “faith and works.” Traditionally, certain Christian sects and denominations (especially Protestant sects) emphasize the importance of “faith alone”—in other words, these sects maintain that Christians need only believe in the divinity and sacrifice of Jesus Christ in order to go to Heaven. Then there are other branches of Christianity (such as Catholicism) that emphasize the importance of good “works”; in other words, performing good deeds…

Christianity and the Two Kinds of “Life”

In the fourth part of Mere Christianity , Lewis studies the process by which a human being spends a lifetime preparing for salvation. In Lewis’s view, there are two distinct kinds of life: first, the material, biological life of earthly beings (or bios ); second, the spiritual, eternal life of Jesus Christ and his followers (or zoe ). Lewis develops a complex theory of how humans transition from bios to zoe —in short, a scientific…

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