C. S. Lewis: The Sense or Nonsense of the Christian Idea (Part 3)

Like I said in the last post, the two most important points in which C. S. Lewis saw the Christian story to fit reality were (1) its pattern of death and rebirth, and (2) its vicariousness. Let me explain the first one for now:

(1) The pattern of death and rebirth.

As I explain in my book The C. S. Lewis Book on the Bible [1], Paganism can be said to have foreshadowed the death and resurrection of Christ. The reason is that the theme of death and rebirth is so engrained into nature that it became a main feature in the so-called nature religions. They are full of gods that die and rise again because nature itself bears this pattern. The seed falls into the soil and dies, and out of its death rises new life. The annual cycle of nature is one of life and death. Plants blossom and plants die, only to come to life again in next year’s cycle.

In this sense the death and resurrection of Christ fit as naturally into the picture as the nature religions do. And that raises a suspicion: “Is it not fitting a great deal too well? In other words, does not the Christian story show this pattern of descent and re-ascent because that is part of all the nature religions in the world?”[2] If we accept Christianity because it fits so well, wouldn’t we then have to accept all the nature religions too? Is it not obvious that Nature itself explains the existence of these religions, including Christianity?

This would be plausible, if first-century Judaism showed any signs of being influenced by nature religions. But C. S. Lewis maintained that it did not. He relates how he found the Pagan idea of the dying God very poetic, mysterious, and quickening, and that, when he turned to the Gospels, he was sorely disappointed at finding hardly anything about it at all.

Writes he, “The metaphor of the seed dropping into the ground in this connection occurs (I think) twice in the New Testament (John 12:24; I Corinthians 15:36), and for the rest hardly any notice is taken; it seemed to me extraordinary. You had a dying God, Who was always representative of the corn: you see Him holding the corn, that is, bread, in His hand, and saying, ‘This is My Body’ (Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19; I Corinthians 11:24), and from my point of view, as I then was, He did not seem to realise what He was saying. Surely there, if anywhere, this connection between the Christian story and the corn must have come out; the whole context is crying out for it. But everything goes on as if the principal actor and still more those about Him, were totally ignorant of what they were doing. It is as if you got very good evidence concerning the sea-serpent, but the men who brought this good evidence seemed never to have heard of sea-serpents. Or to put it another way, why is it that the only case of the ‘dying God’ which might conceivably have been historical occurred among people (and the only people in the whole Mediterranean world) who had not got any trace of this nature religion, and indeed seem to know nothing about it? Why is it among them the thing suddenly appears to happen?”[3]

The absence of this idea is almost incomprehensible, except if we asked, “How if the corn king is not mentioned in that Book, because He is here of whom the corn king was an image? How if the representation is absent because here at last, the thing represented is present? If the shadows are absent because the thing of which they were shadows is here?”[4]

As Lewis observes in Surprised by Joy, “If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognizable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson (ten times more so than Eckermann’s Goethe or Lockhart’s Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not ‘a religion,’ nor ‘a philosophy.’ It is the summing up and actuality of them all.”[5]

Thus Christianity fits nature, even though it does not seem to be inferred from nature; it seems rather that Christ Himself is the reality, and the nature religions the shadow which He casts. Christianity is, in fact, as Lewis said above, not a religion at all. It is rather the summing up, the pivotal point, of them all. Like the culprit in the detective story, Christ makes sense of them in a way that made C. S. Lewis exclaim, “That is what they have been pointing to all the time!”

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[1] See Chapter X, “The Alleged Evidence of Messianic Prophecies.”

[2] Lewis, “The Grand Miracle.”

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Chapter XV.