Category: Catholicism

At last we come to the final chapter of “Mere Christianity” completing my notes for the book.

1. Christ came to transform

“…Christ’s work…is not mere improvement but Transformation. The nearest parallel to it in the world of nature is to be found in the remarkable transformations we can make in insects by applying certain rays to them. Some people think this is how Evolution worked”

(a) We are used to transformation through evolution

“…Everyone now knows about Evolution (though, of course, some educated people disbelieve it): everyone has been told that man has evolved from lower types of life. Consequently, people often wonder ‘What is the next step? When is the thing beyond man going to appear?'”

(b) People have constantly been incorrectly predicting the next step

“…I cannot help thinking that the Next Step will be really new; it will go off in a direction you could never have dreamed of. It would hardly be worth calling a New Step unless it did. I should expect not merely difference but a new kind of difference. I should expect not merely change but a new method of producing the change…. And finally, I should not be surprised if, when the thing happened, very few people noticed that it was happening”

(c) The Next Step is here

“Now, if you care to talk in these terms, the Christian view is precisely that the Next Step has already appeared. And it is really new. It is not a change from brainy men to brainier men: it is a change that goes off in a totally different direction – a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God. The first instance appeared in Palestine two thousand years ago”

This step has some differences in relation to the past…

“And in fact this New Step differs from all previous ones not only in coming from outside nature but in several other ways as well”

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

1. “Be ye perfect” does not mean that God isn’t going to help us until we get our act together

“Some people seem to think this means ‘Unless you are perfect, I will not help you’; and as we cannot be perfect…our position is hopeless. But I do not think He did mean that. I think He meant ‘The only help I will give is help to become perfect. You may want something less: but I will give you nothing less'”

(a) Jack wouldn’t go to his mother with a toothache because he knew he’d get something else in addition to the relief from immediate pain…

(i) He’d wait until the pain got really bad

“When I was a child I often had toothache, and I knew that if I went to my mother she would give me something which would deaden the pain for that night and let me get to sleep. But I did not go to my mother – at least, not till the pain became very bad…”

(ii) …because he knew he’d also get a trip to the dentist…

“I did not doubt she would give me the aspirin; but I knew she would also do something else. I knew she would take me to the dentist next morning. I could not get what I wanted out of her without getting something more, which I did not want…”

(iii) …and the dentist wouldn’t restrict himself just to that tooth…

And I knew those dentists; I knew they started fiddling about with all sorts of other teeth which had not yet begun to ache… if you gave them an inch they took an ell”

(b) God is like a dentist

“Our Lord is like the dentists. If you give Him an inch, He will take an ell. Dozens of people go to Him to be cured of some one particular sin which they are ashamed of (like masturbation or physical cowardice) or which is obviously spoiling daily life (like bad temper or drunkenness). Well, He will cure it all right: but He will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if once you call Him in, He will give you the full treatment”

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

1. Becoming a “son of God” is the entire point of Christianity

What I want to make clear is that this is not one among many jobs a Christian has to do; and it is not a sort of special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of Christianity. Christianity offers nothing else at all.

2. Becoming a “son of God” is not the same thing as “being good”

And I should like to point out how it differs from ordinary ideas of “morality” and “being good.”

(a) A person typically begins by recognizing the demands of the Moral Law upon his desires

We take as starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and interests. We then admit that something else call it “morality”… has claims on this self: claims which interfere with its own desires… Some of the things the ordinary self wanted to do turn out to be what we call “wrong”: well, we must give them up. Other things…turn out to be what we call “right”: well, we shall have to do them.

(b) We secretly hope that once we have met these demands, the natural self will be free to do what it wants

But we are hoping all the time that when all the demands have been met, the poor natural self will still have some chance, and some time, to get on with its own life and do what it likes.

(c) However, this will not work

…if you are really going to try to meet all the demands made on the natural self, it will not have enough left over to live on. The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you. And your natural self, which is thus being starved and hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier and angrier.

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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.”

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