C. S. Lewis: The Sense or Nonsense of the Christian Idea (Part 4)

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. After I explained the first one in my last post, let me now tackle the second one:

(2) The vicariousness. The idea of vicariousness, particularly of vicarious suffering, stands at the very center of Christianity. It is the idea that one person profits from someone else’s sacrifice; that Christ’s death and resurrection have a profound effect on all humanity; that humanity has been “redeemed” through the death of God.

Does this idea make sense? Does vicariousness fit into the picture? Before C. S. Lewis became a Christian, he could not quite understand why the death of Christ should have the said effect on mankind. But then, on September 19, 1931, he had a conversation with his Christian friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson.

In a letter he composed about a month later, Lewis wrote about that night, “Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all; again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself […] I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacher) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant.’ […] Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

From a Pagan perspective, therefore, the Christian chapter of history fits very well. It carries the same theme of vicarious suffering (and the dying God, as discussed above) that we find in other places of humanity. This means that vicariousness is not something foreign to human understanding. Almost all cultures seem to understand that vicarious sacrifice and suffering can have a real effect on the beneficiary.

The only difference between the animal sacrifices in the Pagan-Judaic world and the sacrifice of Christ is that the latter is the perfect sacrifice—the only sacrifice of a completely innocent and completely voluntary victim. Not only did He go to the cross on His own accord; He was even born of His own accord. He chose to live His life among us, though He did not have to, and chose to be killed by us, though He could have ruled over us.

People might still find objections to the validity of Christianity on other grounds. But one thing, Lewis maintained, they cannot do. They cannot accuse it of having a nonsensical idea at its center. Such an argument sets itself against the testimony of humanity.

Lewis also pointed out that vicariousness is a strong characteristic of Nature. We find in Nature a law by which no creature can exist by itself. Everyone and everything is indebted to everyone and everything else. This is the case both in a positive and a negative sense. On the one hand, there are parasites under people’s skin that only live by destroying their bearers. On the other hand, the principle does not always take this negative form. Almost everything good in nature also comes from it. The newborn lives on the mother as much as the parasite; but what revolts us in one case is in the other case “the source of almost every natural goodness in the world.” The goodness or badness of the principle of vicariousness depends on what you do with it.

C. S. Lewis said he could quite easily picture a universe in which vicariousness has been redeemed and is only used in a good way. We do not have to throw out Nature with the bathwater. The Christian message neither merely confirms nor flatly contradicts our experience in nature, but offers a new twist to a recognized principle.

Read more about it in The C. S. Lewis Book on the Bible: What the Greatest Christian Writer Thought about the Greatest Book.