A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a generality, an “ideal,” or a “value” but “an utterly concrete fact.” On the contrary, today our minds are congenial to “Everythingism,” that is, that the whole show is merely self-existent and inclusive. The pantheist thinks that “everything is in the long run ‘merely’ a precursor or a development or a relic or an instance or a disguise, of everything else.” Lewis is completely opposed to such a philosophy. He contrasts the pantheistic conception of God as someone who animates the universe much as you animate your body with the Christian idea of God as the inventor and maker of the universe, the artist who can stand away from his own picture and examine it.

      LETTERS TO MALCOLM: CHIEFLY ON PRAYER

      The rich conception of God as creative artist continues in the posthumous volume Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. In this book Lewis describes creation as a “delegation through and through” and argues that “there are no words not derived from the Word.” Life is, or ought to be, a continuous theophany. Every bush is a Burning Bush, and the world is “crowded with God.” Because sin defies not merely God’s law but his whole creative purpose, it is more than disobedience—it is sacrilege. No physiological or psychological explanation of humanity goes deep enough. Neither the “I” nor the object is ultimate reality, and we are deceived when we take them as such. One great value of prayer is that it forces us to leave the continually impinging secularism of life and awaken to “the smell of Deity” that hangs over it. In prayer, as in the Lord’s Supper, we take and eat. Understanding, desirable as it may be, is for the time replaced by a contact with ultimacy.

      Our pleasures are “shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility.” What we call bad pleasures are actually those obtained by unlawful acts. “It is the stealing of the apple that is bad, not its sweetness. The sweetness is still a beam from the glory.” Lewis says that ever since he learned this long ago he has tried to make each pleasure of his life into a channel not simply of gratitude to God but of adoration. He thinks the difference is significant. “Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.”

      Lewis calls this book more nearly autobiography than theology and says that he has often simply “festooned” theological ideas with his reflections. Some years ago he wrote me that he had done a book on prayer but was not satisfied with it. That he still felt the tentative nature of some of his conclusions may be evident in the fact that he has put the book in the form of offhand letters to an old college friend.

      Had we not known before, this volume would leave little doubt that A Grief Observed, the book that appeared under the name N. W. Clerk, is by Lewis, for here we find numerous poignant allusions to the “great blow,” i.e., the death of his wife, and the deep love he had for her. It also gives us the best glimpse anywhere into the practical aspect of Lewis’s prayer life. He had a lengthy list of people, some of whom he had prayed over for a long span of years and some of whom he knew simply as “that old man at Crewe” or “the waitress” or even “that man.”

      In this book Lewis repeats the idea discussed in an appendix to Miracles that our prayers are granted, or not, before the beginning of time. In the initial act of creation God dovetailed all “future” spiritual and physical occurrences. Our difficulty in understanding this is that we experience in time the things that to God are outside time. The acts of men, whether prayer or sin, are not “predetermined,” for there is no “pre” with God. Because we cannot, like God, experience life in an “endless present,” it does not at all mean that we are not, living or dead, eternal in God’s eyes. Of a good act we may say with equal validity, “God did it” and “I did it.”

      Lewis’s remark that he believes in Purgatory can best be understood in terms of his conviction that God continues his beatitudes in the soul after death, that there is a “farther in and a higher up” and that all eternity perhaps involves a growth. Like Dr. Johnson, Lewis thinks that the closer one comes to the purity of heaven the more he will wish for some preparation, some hallowing of the soul, before it takes up its new citizenship. Purgatory is for him a place not of retributive punishment but rather of purification in which the saved soul “at the very foot of the throne, begs to be taken away and cleansed.”

      Then there is in this book the same profound sense of the reality of heaven that has permeated all of Lewis’s mature thinking. As usual, and with particular meaning in this his last book before his death, Lewis closes with a discussion of the Resurrection and the joy of heaven. He repeats that he came to believe in God before he believed in heaven and adds that even if the “impossible supposition” that there is no Resurrection were true, he would still take his stand on the side of Christianity. After his speculations concerning the nature of the resurrected body, he concludes that if he is incorrect something even better than he has imagined will be the Christian’s happy discovery at death.

      MERE CHRISTIANITY

      Lewis begins this book with two facts that he calls “the foundation of all clear thinking.” One is that people everywhere have the curious idea they ought to behave in a certain way, the other that they do not in fact so behave. The notion of right and wrong is not local and cultural but lodged deeply in the moral wisdom of mankind. We can call this “constant” in the world the law of human nature, or the moral law, or the rule of decent behavior. This law is not the “herd instinct” but rather directs the instincts. It is not a social convention inculcated by education but rather a real morality which measures conventions and systems. There is a big difference between the law of nature and the law of human nature. The former includes such laws as that of gravity and tells you, for instance, what a stone actually does if you drop it. But the law of human nature tells you what people ought to do and fail in doing.

      The materialist view of the universe is that it simply happened and that our earth and its people are what they are by strange or lucky accidents. The other view is the religious one that the universe came into being as the result of a conscious Person. If the second view is true, we must assume that such a Person is the creator of the facts as we observe them, not something to be discovered inside the facts. There is a third in-between view called creative evolution or emergent evolution or the life-force view, which produces a kind of tame God. Lewis wonders if this view is not the world’s greatest illustration of the folly of wishful thinking. The moral law, on the contrary, is as hard as nails and suggests that the universe is governed by an absolute goodness.

      Now among people who think there is a God, one class sees him as more or less animating the universe and such that if the universe expired he would expire with it. Another sees him as very separate from the universe and opposed to the bad things in it. But this second view leads to the important question of how a benevolent God should create a world in which badness could enter. People who get to thinking about the justice of God often conclude that the world is simply senseless. But strangely, their conclusion proves that one part of the world is not senseless, namely, their own idea of justice.

      Although Satan tries to destroy all good in the world, God woos people back to him through conscience, good dreams or myths, the scriptural depiction of his dealings with the Jews, and, by far the greatest, his own Son and Redeemer. This Son was either all he claimed to be or else a lunatic or worse, and he claimed to put us right with God not through following his teaching but through baptism, belief, and Holy Communion. The mystery of Christianity has unfathomable depths but its reality is genuine. The Christian has Christ actually operating in him.

      From the next section of Mere Christianity, which deals with Christian behavior, I shall mention only a few of Lewis’s exceptions to common viewpoints. He says that Moses, Aristotle, and the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages all agreed against the lending of money at interest, one of the main things on which our СКАЧАТЬ