Essay

This essay is a critique of ‘Mere Christianity’ by C S Lewis, an intellectual of the mid 20th century who was famous for being an atheist who converted to Christianity. His most famous publication was ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ the first of seven novels in The Chronicles of Narnia’. 1,400 words.

Mere Christianity

 

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C S Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’ is in a sense a contradiction in terms. Taken out of the context of the time in which it was written there is nothing ‘mere’ about it. It would be easy to call Lewis a homophobic misogynist, obsessed with courage, war and fighting with a view of ethics that borders on the dangerously naïve. He is also a very clever man who puts his ideas across in an entertaining and incisive way even though the results of the thought process can, at times, be outrageous.

 

The book can be divided crudely into two halves. The second outlines his ideas on how to live the Christian life. The first explains why he believes Christianity is true and thus why the second half is worth saying. He asks first ‘is there a God?’ And he seeks to answer this by drawing on the notion of Good and Evil. How, he asks, can there be a perfect God when there is such evil in the world? His examples can be disappointingly trivial. Someone refuses to share his orange or won’t give up his seat when he had previously received a share or a seat from someone else, and we note the injustice and unfairness of it, though he then goes on to mention the Nazi era. But, he says, notice that making an issue of injustice and unfairness would be pointless if we did not believe that the object of our complaint did not also accept the same rules. A game of football would be impossible if both sides did not agree what a foul was. If the Nazis had not realised that they were in the wrong then we could have no more blamed them for what they did than for the colour of their hair. In Lewis’ view the fact of recognising the evil in the world proves the existence of God rather than the reverse. All men (he grudgingly accepts, on occasion, that women may be part of it all somewhere) share the same notion of right and wrong. The fact that they do wrong does not disprove a loving God. The general recognition that they have done wrong proves the opposite, that God has instilled into all of us the rules of decent behaviour and fair play and we know they are there whether or not we deny it or break those rules.

 

He recognises that some have pointed out that different civilisations and ages have held different moralities but disagrees with that view. The differences, he says, are marginal. A different morality would mean an admiration for those who ran away in battle or where a man felt proud for double crossing those who had been kindest to him. There is always an underlying morality that has held in all places and at all times and that is that men feel they should treat other men in the way they would themselves like to be treated. This argument can be rejected immediately by the simple example of slavery, a practice of christians and non-christians alike that was a social norm for several thousand years and has been considered fundamentally immoral only for the last couple of hundred. It is just untrue that ‘men’ have always treated others in the way they would like to be treated.

 

Lewis has a naïve, black and white view of the world or, at least, that is what he portrays in this book. It is a world of sheep and goats, of devils and angels, of nice men and monsters, of good practice and of horrifying perversion. For him morality is a simple matter. There are no half measures or contradictions or qualifications. The trouble is it does not reflect the world is it is or ever was. He is not suggesting there was a theoretical time when man did no wrong – if we ignore Adam and Eve for the moment. But he is suggesting that there never was a time when man would not have agreed on what ‘wrong’ meant.

 

To support that claim, to accept that there is a timeless standard of morality summed in the requirement ‘to do as you would be done by’ we have to ignore those governments who torture their own citizens, those people who commit genocide, even the American constitution that declares ‘all men are created equal’ when what they meant was ‘only men with white faces’ (and no women). Lewis’ own standard of morality would no longer be accepted by many just a few years after he wrote the book. He believes, for example, that homosexuality is a filthy perversion and that capital punishment is a good thing. It is not necessary to show that he is right or wrong, only to show that standards of morality change continuously and rapidly and that it is not true that we have always agreed about ‘doing as you would be done by’.

 

His view of war is curious. Whilst he accepts, though disagrees with, the notion of pacifism he cannot accept that one should go into battle with ‘a long face’ in recognition that what one is about to do is a necessary evil. ‘It is that feeling’ he says ‘that robs lots of magnificent young christians in the armed services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage – a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness.’ What? He ignores the possibility that Germans were also christians, that they also prayed to God for victory because they or their leaders considered that what they were doing was right for their country. According to Lewis they were bad people and knew it, as though they got up each morning and prepared a list of evil things to do that day.

 

Morality is a relative term and it seems odd that intellectuals like Lewis cannot see it. But, while his attempt to show that God exists, because we all have the same imposed moral standard, fails, it would not be so easy to deny that all men have a moral code and it is that need for morality and ethics, no matter how perverted that standard might appear to others, that suggests a higher entity. For why is it that we all need to understand what we should and shouldn’t do, that we all recognise that there is an internal tension when we do something that we understand should not have been done?

 

Lewis would have done better to argue along these lines, that we all recognise a moral standard because God built us to need one. It would have had the added advantage of providing a solution to the conundrum of other religions. If they abide by their own sincerely held rules perhaps they are doing all right. But that would not be good enough for Lewis. He says that they are not all entirely wrong, that God helps non-Christians to concentrate on those bits of their beliefs that more closely match Christian thought but that some nations are ‘horrible’ and have ‘horrible’ religions. He thinks that Christianity is developing along the lines of evolution. He believes a Next Step is occurring, that Christian men are turning into sons of God. Some are hardly recognisable, others are easily so. They have different faces and voices, happier and more radiant. They are becoming a race apart.

 

It gets difficult to know how to respond to this sort of deluded view of the world. One last quote shows his childish, confused and arrogant views and why in the end one has to just shrug one’s shoulders and walk away. Describing the need to deny one’s self and ignore those desires imparted by other men and devils, he says ‘Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage.’ Where does one begin with a sentence like that?