Mere Christianity – Book IV – Chapter 7 (“Let’s Pretend”)

Picking back up my notes for C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”…

1. This chapter is about how people pretend and their pretense leads to reality

(a) Beauty and the Beast

(b) A man wearing a beautiful mask for a year and his face becomes conformed to the attractive shape of the mask

2. We “pretend” as soon as we say the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer

“…Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending”

(a) When you pretend, you realize what a poor imitation you really make

“…the moment you realise what the words mean, you realise that you are not a son of God. You are not being like The Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of self-centred fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death”

(b) This seems like cheek, but this is what God has commanded us to do

“…this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek. But the odd thing is that He has ordered us to do it.

He has done so because there are two kinds of pretending:

(i) The bad kind

“…where the pretence is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping you:

(ii) The good kind

“…where the pretence leads up to the real thing”

This explains some of our experience:

(A) Pretending to be friendly 

“When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already”

(B) Children’s Games

“They are always pretending to be grown-ups-playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time, they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits, so that the pretence of being grown-up helps them to grow up in earnest.”

(c) When we pretend, we can see ways in which we could increase the likeness

“Now, the moment you realise ‘Here I am, dressing up as Christ,’ it is extremely likely that you will see at once some way in which at that very moment the pretence could be made less of a pretence and more of a reality”

(i) …in what you think

“You will find several things going on in your mind which would not be going on there if you were really a son of God. Well, stop them”

(ii) …in what you do

“Or you may realise that, instead of saying your prayers, you ought to be downstairs writing a letter, or helping your wife to wash-up. Well, go and do it”

(d) Jesus making this change in you

“The Christ Himself… is actually at your side and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretence into a reality… He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to ‘inject’ His kind of life and thought, His Zoe, into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin”

(i) This is not just your conscience

“This is not merely a fancy way of saying that your conscience is telling you what to do”

(ii) Conscience will give you one answer, but pretending to be Christ will give you a far more exacting one

“If you simply ask your conscience, you get one result: if you remember that you are dressing up as Christ, you get a different one. There are lots of things which your conscience might not call definitely wrong (specially things in your mind) but which you will see at once you cannot go on doing if you are seriously trying to be like Christ. For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying to catch the good infection from a Person”

(iii) This is both harder and easier than simple morality

“It is more like painting a portrait than like obeying a set of rules. And the odd thing is that while in one way it is much harder than keeping rules, in another way it is far easier”

(e) This change is through Christ directly and through instruments

“…[It] is rather like the woman in the first war who said that if there were a bread shortage it would not bother her house because they always ate toast. If there is no bread there will be no toast. If there were no help from Christ, there would be no help from other human beings… He works through Nature, through our own bodies, through books, sometimes through experiences which seem (at the time) anti-Christian…”

(i) In particular, he works through other men

“But above all, He works on us through each other… Men are mirrors, or ‘carriers’ of Christ to other men… That is why the Church, the whole body of Christians showing Him to one another, is so important.”

(ii) However, these other men may do it unconsciously

“Sometimes unconscious carriers. This ‘good infection’ can be carried by those who have not got it themselves. People who were not Christians themselves helped me to Christianity”

(iii) It is important that we recognize Christ behind His instrument…

“At first it is natural for a baby to take its mother’s milk without knowing its mother. It is equally natural for us to see the man who helps us without seeing Christ behind him. But we must not remain babies. We must go on to recognise the real Giver”

(iv) …because if we don’t, we will be disappointed

“…if we do not, we shall be relying on human beings. And that is going to let us down. The best of them will make mistakes; all of them will die. We must be thankful to all the people who have helped us, we must honour them and love them. But never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it”

3. The phrase “putting on Christ” doesn’t simply mean reading about Jesus and trying to do the same.

“Put right out of your head the idea that these are only fancy ways of saying that Christians are to read what Christ said and try to carry it out – as a man may read what Plato or Marx said and try to carry it out… It is a living Man… really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has. At first, only for moments. Then for longer periods. Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into a new little Christ, a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God; which shares in His power, joy, knowledge and eternity. 

As we proceed through this process, we notice two things:

(a) We notice not just our sinful acts, but our sinful nature

“…We begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our sinfulness; begin to be alarmed not only about what we do, but about what we are”

(i) When we consider our sins, we often make a certain kind of excuse

“…the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected: I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself… surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth?”

(ii) It is like rats in a cellar

“If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man: it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light. Apparently the rats of resentment and vindictiveness are always there in the cellar of my soul”

(iii) The problem is that this is outside the reach of my will

“I can to some extent control my acts: I have no direct control over my temperament. And if (as I said before) what we are matters even more than what we do-if, indeed, what we do matters chiefly as evidence of what we are-then it follows that the change which I most need to undergo is a change that my own direct, voluntary efforts cannot bring about… After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God. 

(b) It is God who works in us

“I have been talking as if it were we who did everything. In reality, of course, it is God who does everything. We, at most, allow it to be done to us. In a sense you might even say it is God who does the pretending… to make the pretence into a reality.”… I daresay this idea of a divine make-believe sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is not that how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does. We treat our dogs as if they were ‘almost human’: that is why they really become ‘almost human’ in the end”