Do All Interesting Questions Have to be Answerable?

“[A] question can be very interesting without being answerable and one of my main efforts as a teacher has been to train people to say those (apparently difficult) words ‘We don’t know.’”

- C. S. Lewis, in a letter dating Sept. 26, 1960

Visiting the Childhood Home of C. S. Lewis

I had to go to Belfast yesterday and used the opportunity to visit the childhood home of C. S. Lewis:

C. S. Lewis Spells Liberty

A few years ago, we had a rather disastrous series of spelling reforms in Germany. As an English-German book translator, the reforms have been a source of some minor frustration to me. This made me all the happier to find a comrade in C. S. Lewis when I read this letter by him a few days ago:

Nearly everything I have ever read about spelling reform assumes from the outset that it is necessary for us all to spell alike. Why?

We got on for centuries without an agreed common orthography. Most men of my age remember censoring the letters of soldiers an know that even the wildest idiosyncrasies of spelling hardly ever made them unintelligible. Printing houses will always have, as they have now, their own rules, whether authors like them or not. Scholars, who know the ancestry of the words they use, will generally spell them accordingly.

A few hards words will still have to be learned by everyone. But for the rest, who would be a penny the worse if though and tho, existence and existance, sieze, seize and seeze were all equally tolerated?

If our spelling were either genuinely phonetic or genuinely etymological, or if any reform made it either the one or the other were worth the trouble, it would be another matter. As things are, surely Liberty is the simple and inexpensive “Reform” we need?

This would save children and teachers thousands of hours’ work. It would also force those to whom applications for jobs are made to exercise their critical faculties on the logic and vocabulary of the candidate instead of tossing his letter aside with the words “can’t even spell.”

C. S. Lewis

Important Issues in My Lifetime: The Next 50 Years

I’m thirty now. Supposing I shall be so graced as to witness my eightieth birthday, I wonder about the next half a century. What are going to be some of the most important worldwide issues between now and 2060?

Well, here are some of them:

1. The Environment

We cannot keep acting like Saruman and think we’re safe in our self-constructed tower. Our twisted minions will not keep us from the green revenge of Treebeard & His Many-Leafed Company.

Seriously, though: The environment is simply the name for EVERYTHING on this planet, and EVERYTHING is pretty darn important. We humans are not self-sufficient beings; we are a hundred percent dependent on everything around us. In the next fifty years, we just absolutely have to get a grip on ourselves, send our orks into the fires of doom, and re-plant some trees in Isengard. Otherwise the whole place will come down.

2. Over-Population

Like C. S. Lewis already noted in 1959: “We shall fairly soon hopelessly overpopulate this planet and that population will be as defective in quality as excessive in quantity.”

We cannot keep multiplying indefinitely. We will reach a limit. The only question is how that limit will be reached. Through huge disasters? Or through rational, peaceful population control? I opt for the latter.

3. The Economy

Most thinkers of the past would have been horrified at the foundation of our economic system today, which is usury – money begetting money. It’s a system out of line with reality. Will it be able to last?

Aristotle would have probably said no. As he wrote in the third century BC:

“The most hated sort [of wealth-getting], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.”

4. Religion

Maybe I put too much emphasis on this, since I’m particularly interested in religion, but it will be very interesting to see how religion is going to develop in the next fifty years. Will Fundamentalism – meaning a narrow worldview that leaves little room for discussion – win the upper hand? Or will Atheism spread and marginalize religion completely? Or will a more mature, balanced, open-minded form of religious practice win the majority?

We’ll see, but I propose it will have a big effect – including on the first three points.

Don’t Buy into the Bible too Easily

In my last post, I said that C. S. Lewis did not begin his journey to faith by trying to substantiate the claim of the Bible; he started with no claim at all and came to believe in the Bible by gradual steps.

It is always better to underestimate the value of a claim and be proven wrong than to be proven wrong at overestimating the value of a claim. This is a principle that most of us know all too well. Since our world is cluttered with advertisements, many of us are well aware that we should be cautious at overestimating the value of a catchy slogan or an incredible promise. If we read an advertisement and think “That’s too good to be true,” most of the time it really is. We still have to read the small print to find out the catch to it.

It is the same with the Bible. Better to start by supposing it is not divinely inspired and to later find out that Got is behind it after all, than to start by believing an outrageous claim only to be disappointed.

If you’re interested, you can read more about C. S. Lewis’ faith in relation to the Bible in The C. S. Lewis Book on the Bible: What the Greatest Christian Writer Thought About the Greatest Book.

When C. S. Lewis Came to Believe in the Inspiration of the Bible

In his  journey to faith, C. S. Lewis did not take the claim of the Bible’s divine origin as the starting point and then tried to substantiate it. His road was the other way around.

The Bible stood on his shelf without any distinction among authors like Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Cicero, Virgil, Plutarch, and the like. The Bible was merely the Hebrew section of Antiquity, without any special claim of divine inspiration on it.

He did not become a Christian by trying to substantiate an outrageous claim, but by beginning with no claim at all and slowly becoming convinced of the existence of God and, several years later, the resurrection of Christ. Only then did he begin to see the Bible as “Scripture.”

The divine inspiration of the Bible came last; it was not C. S. Lewis’ starting point.

Read more about C. S. Lewis’ approach to the Bible in The C. S. Lewis Book on the Bible: What the Greatest Christian Writer Thought About the Greatest Book.

C. S. Lewis: The Sense or Nonsense of the Christian Idea (Part 5 of 5)

I ended my last post by saying that C. S. Lewis could quite easily picture a universe in which vicariousness has been redeemed and is only used in a good way. In his view, 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.

That point is an important one, because it distinguishes Christianity from the vicariousness of other religions that are either nature religions or anti-nature religions. The nature religions simply drive men to fulfill their natural desires: “You actually got drunk in the temple of Bacchus. You actually committed fornication in the temple of Aphrodite. […] The nature religions simply give a new sanction to what I already always thought about the universe in my moments of rude health and cheerful brutality.”[1]

And the anti-natural religions are simply a flat denial of nature: “I starve my flesh. I care not whether I live or die.”[2] This merely repeats “what I have always thought about it in my moods of lassitude, or delicacy, or compassion.”[3]

But Christianity is different. It never says that death does not matter, that we ought to deny nature altogether. Jesus wept at the grave of Lazarus and shed tears of blood in Gethsemane. Death—that is, Christ’s vicarious suffering—is “an appalling horror; a stinking indignity.”[4] And yet, it is not only that. It is also infinitely good. “Christianity does not simply affirm or simply deny the horror of death: it tells me something quite new about it.”

Again it does not, like Nietzsche, simply confirm my desire to be stronger, or cleverer than other people. On the other hand, it does not allow me to say, ‘Oh, Lord, won’t there be a day when everyone will be as good as everyone else?’ In the same way, about vicariousness. It will not, in any way, allow me to be an exploiter, to act as a parasite on other people; yet it will not allow me any dream of living on my own. It will teach me to accept with glad humility the enormous sacrifice that others make for me, as well as to make sacrifices for others.”[5]

That is why C. S. Lewis considered Christianity to be the missing chapter in the story of world history, “the chapter on which the whole plot turns.”[6]

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

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[1] Lewis, “The Grand Miracle”

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

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.

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.

C. S. Lewis: The Sense or Nonsense of the Christian Idea (Part 2)

Of course, before we can decide whether the death and resurrection of Christ might be this missing chapter of world history—this culprit in the detective story—we first have to have a clear picture in our minds as to its content. C. S. Lewis dedicated much of writings to explaining it, and it can be briefly stated thus.

The eternal God becomes Man. This He does by choosing out of all nations one nation, and out of all people in that nation one woman, into whom He enters and begins to develop as a small lump of cells. After nine months He is born as a common baby, grows into boyhood, and finally into manhood. As a man He is rejected and crucified, and through His innocent suffering He works the redemption of humanity.

He crawls down, so to speak, from above like a gold miner descends into some deep and dark shaft, and, through His sweat and toil, retrieves the gold from the worthless dirt and rock. He retrieves humanity from its own sinfulness. Then He rises from the dead, and henceforth humanity is no longer what it used to be. It no longer lies down in the deep, dark shafts; it is being carried up, up into Godhood. The miner returns to the surface, His face still dirty, and in His hands He holds the pure gold. He holds redeemed mankind.

This is the story: God crawling down into the darkness of humanity in order to take it up into the dazzling light of Godhood. And the means by which He does it is His own death and resurrection; His vicarious suffering.

Now does this story make sense? Does it fit into world history? Are there other signs that point to this story being the missing chapter, the culprit in the detective story?

C. S. Lewis answered this question with a resounding Yes. Probably the two most important points in which he saw the Christian story to fit were (1) its pattern of death and rebirth, and (2) its vicariousness. Let me explain in the next post what he meant by these terms.