I’ve been mulling over the best way to start this blog. There’s so much to say about my decision to quit my job and to start working for an American company; so much to say about my nomadic life and eventual move to the United States…but I’m getting ahead of myself. As Glinda, the Good Witch Of The South, would say, it’s best to begin at the beginning…
Begin the beguine
Although in some ways the seeds of this adventure had been planted earlier, things started to come to the fore in 2006. I had been living in Cheltenham for about four years. I had moved there following university, after a brief, false start in Salisbury (my employer went bankrupt three days after I joined). There was nothing wrong, per se, with my life in Cheltenham; I had good friends, a lovely church and a great place to live, but I couldn’t shake my feeling of unease. Life just seemed a little bit too….predicable and, well, comfortable. There was nothing in my life which was pushing me out of my comfort zone. I had recently passed into my mid-twenties and it felt like I was just getting old and boring before my time…
I was at a loss as to what I should do to get out of this funk. I considered changing careers. I thought about becoming an IT trainer (I’ve always enjoyed telling people what to do). I also gave serious consideration to resurrecting my sign language and training to be an interpreter. I considered moving to another town or city in England. The trouble was, after living in Cheltenham, pretty much everywhere else appeared ugly, boring or had limited job opportunities. I did consider moving abroad, but that just seemed far too scary!
Picking back up my notes for C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”…
Notes & Quotes
1. Jack doesn’t want to talk about marriage
(a) Christian doctrines surrounding marriage are very unpopular
(b) He (at the time) hadn’t been married
…but he can’t ignore it when he is speaking on the subject of morality!
2. The idea of Christian marriage is based on Christ’s words
(a) Husband and wife are “one flesh”
“The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism… He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact – just as… when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument”
(b) …and therefore what makes fornication wrong is that it tries to separate the different intended unions, isolating the pleasures
“…those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again”
3. Marriage is permanent
(a) There are some differences on this subject between different Churches
(i) They different on when, if ever, there can be divorce (or, more strictly remarriage)
“…some do not admit divorce at all; some allow it reluctantly in very special cases. It is a great pity that Christians should disagree about such a question…”
(ii) …but they agree with each other much more than they agree with the world
“…they all regard divorce as something like cutting up a living body, as a kind of surgical operation. Some of them think the operation so violent that it cannot be done at all; others admit it as a desperate remedy in extreme cases. They are all agreed that it is more like having both your legs cut off than it is like dissolving a business partnership…they all disagree with is the modern view that it is a simple readjustment of partners…”
(b) Its permanence isn’t just rooted in the virtue of chastity, but in justice because just involves keeping promises
“…everyone who has been married in a church has made a public, solemn promise to stick to his (or her) partner till death. The duty of keeping that promise has no special connection with sexual morality: it is in the same position as any other promise.
If, as modern people are always telling us, the sexual impulse is just like all our other impulses, then it ought to be treated like all our other impulses; and as their indulgence is controlled by our promises, so should its be. If, as I think, it is not like all our other impulses, but is morbidly inflamed, then we should be especially careful not to let it lead us into dishonesty”
(c) Some might respond saying that the promise was a mere formality which they never intended to keep
“Whom, then, was he trying to deceive when he made it? God? That was really very unwise. Himself? That was not very much wiser. The bride, or bridegroom, or the “in-laws”? That was treacherous. Most often, I think, the couple (or one of them) hoped to deceive the public. They wanted the respectability that is attached to marriage without intending to pay the price… If people do not believe in permanent marriage, it is perhaps better that they should live together unmarried than that they should make vows they do not mean to keep. It is true that by living together without marriage they will be guilty (in Christian eyes) of fornication. But one fault is not mended by adding another: unchastity is not improved by adding perjury”
(d) Some might respond saying that the whole point of marriage is “being in love”
(i) In which case, there’s no point of making a promise!
“…[but this] leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all. If love is the whole thing, then the promise can add nothing; and if it adds nothing, then it should not be made…
(ii) But, this is what lovers naturally do!
As Chesterton* pointed out, those who are in love have a natural inclination to bind themselves by promises. Love songs all over the world are full of vows of eternal constancy. The Christian law is not forcing upon the passion of love something which is foreign to that passion’s own nature: it is demanding that lovers should take seriously something which their passion of itself impels them to do…
* G.K. Chesterton, the Catholic writer and apologist
(iii) A promise is about action, not feelings
A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise never to have a headache or always to feel hungry.
(iv) There are sound, social reasons why two people should remain together, even if they are no longer “in love”
“…to provide a home for their children, to protect the woman (who has probably sacrificed or damaged her own career by getting married) from being dropped whenever the man is tired of her. “
(A) “Being in love” is a good thing, but not the best thing.
“[People] like thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better, and best, or bad, worse and worst… “What we call ‘being in love’ is a glorious state… It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it subordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality; in that sense, love is the great conqueror of lust. No one in his senses would deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or cold self-centredness… Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing.
(B) Feelings fade
It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go.
(C) Feelings fade
“…ceasing to be “in love” need not mean ceasing to love… It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both parents ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be “in love” with someone else… It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it”
(d) If you disagree with me, are you doing this based on real experience?
(i) Books and movies often distort the truth
“If you disagree with me, of course, you will say, ‘He knows nothing about it, he is not married.’ You may quite possibly be right. But before you say that, make quite sure that you are judging me by what you really know from your own experience and from watching the lives of your friends, and not by ideas you have derived from novels and films… Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves“
(ii) They tell us that you can be “in love” always and forever
People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on “being in love” for ever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change – not realising that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one.
In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last. The sort of thrill a boy has at the first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R.A.F. and is really learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some delightful place dies away when you really go to live there. Does this mean it would be better not to learn to fly and not to live in the beautiful place? By no means. In both cases, if you go through with it, the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest… it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction. The man who has learned to fly and becomes a good pilot will suddenly discover music; the man who has settled down to live in the beauty spot will discover gardening.
(iii) They tell us that falling in love is irresistible
“Another notion we get from novels and plays is that ‘falling in love’ is something quite irresistible; something that just happens to one, like measles. And because they believe this, some married people throw up the sponge and give in when they find themselves attracted by a new acquaintance. But I am inclined to think that these irresistible passions are much rarer in real life than in books, at any rate when one is grown up. When we meet someone beautiful and clever and sympathetic, of course we ought, in one sense, to admire and love these good qualities. But is it not very largely in our own choice whether this love shall, or shall not, turn into what we call “being in love”? No doubt, if our minds are full of novels and plays and sentimental songs, and our bodies full of alcohol, we shall turn any love we feel into that kind of love: just as if you have a rut in your path all the rainwater will run into that rut, and if you wear blue spectacles everything you see will turn blue. But that will be our own fault”
(e) Should Christian matrimony and marriage be distinguished?
“…if [Christians] are voters or Members of Parliament, ought [they] try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws[?] A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not”
4. Headship
“Christian wives promise to obey their husbands. In Christian marriage the man is said to be the ‘head'”
(a) Why should there be a head at all – why not equality?
“The need for some head follows from the idea that marriage is permanent. Of course, as long as the husband and wife are agreed, no question of a head need arise; and we may hope that this will be the normal state of affairs in a Christian marriage. But when there is a real disagreement, what is to happen? Talk it over, of course; but I am assuming they have done that and still failed to reach agreement What do they do next? They cannot decide by a majority vote, for in a council of two there can be no majority. Surely, only one or other of two things can happen: either they must separate and go their own ways or else one or other of them must have a casting vote. If marriage is permanent, one or other party must, in the last resort, have the power of deciding the family policy. You cannot have a permanent association without a constitution”
(b) Why should it be the man?
(i) Is there any very serious wish that it should be the woman?
“… as far as I can see, even a woman who wants to be the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of things when she finds it going on next door…. I do not think she is even very flattered if anyone mentions the fact of her own “headship.” There must be something unnatural about the rule of wives over husbands, because the wives themselves are half ashamed of it and despise the husbands whom they rule.
(ii) Foreign policy
“The relations of the family to the outer world-what might be called its foreign policy – must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. Naturally, almost, in a sense, rightly, their claims override, for her, all other claims. She is the special trustee of their interests. The function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers is not given its head. He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife.
(A) Who would you prefer to deal with?
“If your dog has bitten the child next door, or if your child has hurt the dog next door, which would you sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress?
(B) If you are a married woman…
“Much as you admire your husband, would you not say that his chief failing is his tendency not to stick up for his rights and yours against the neighbours as vigorously as you would like? A bit of an Appeaser?”
Discussion Questions
1. On what is Christian marriage based?
2. How does Jack defend the idea that Christian marriage is permanent? What are the main objections presented?
3. How does Jack defend the idea of headship in marriage? How does he respond to the different objections to this? Do you think there are other arguments which can be marshaled?
In this post I would like to give a little bit of my testimony. The full story of my faith journey is obviously quite long, so today I would just like to share with you the genesis of my walk with God.
“In The Beginning…” – Genesis 1:1
I grew up in a home with a mother who was a practising Catholic and a father of somewhat nominal Anglican background. My mother took my sister and me to Mass every week and always encouraged both of us in our faith. At our parish, my sister sang in the choir and I was an altar server. Some of the most vivid memories of my childhood are of the three of us praying together at home and singing along in the car with Psalty the Singing Songbook … 🙂
As a teenager I never had any real rebellion against religion. Sure, I had some doubts at times, but on the whole I enjoyed going to Mass. I took my altar serving duties very seriously and enjoyed the stillness of the Saturday Vigil and the otherwordliness of the Sunday morning celebrations at the Abbey Church.
I then went to University. Although I had been a believer up until this point and prayed pretty regularly, something was about to change…
In my second year of university I moved out of the campus accommodation into a house that was owned by, and situated next to, a Catholic church in the city. As well as having a student Mass, a prayer group was inaugurated shortly after my arrival by an Irish missionary named Maeve who played a significant role in my formation while at University. It was at one of these tiny prayer meetings, in the small back room of the church, that my faith was ignited.
The format of the prayer group was as follows. After an opening prayer, one of the Verbum Dei missionaries would give a short reflection on a particular topic, such as “The Holy Spirit” or “Faith”. Afterwards we would spend some time in silence reading a handout containing some verses of Scripture related to the topic for that week.
Called By Name
It was during one of these times of silence that my eyes came to rest upon the following passage from the prophet Jeremiah:
The word of the LORD came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
– Jeremiah 1:5
This wasn’t an unfamiliar passage to me – I had taken Religious Studies at school and learned a whole bunch of Scripture by heart for my exams. However, that night, those words had special power in them. This wasn’t just something God had said to Jeremiah in Judah in ~600 BC, but it was something that He was saying to me in that little room, that night, two and a half thousand years later.
Restless Heart
That night I truly knew that I was known by God and that my life had purpose. It was like someone had turned on a homing beacon inside of me. Sixteen hundred years earlier, St. Augustine wrote in his “Confessions”:
“You made us for Yourself O Lord, and our hearts will wander restless…until we rest in You”
That night I began to recognise the deep restlessness of my heart, and the space inside it that only God could fill. And so began my adult journey of faith and my love affair with Sacred Scripture. The Word is “alive” indeed…
We will spend the remaining episodes of Book III, we will be looking at the theological virtues. Today we begin with Christian love, also known as “charity”…
I was recently a guest on two episodes of The Counsel of Trent podcast to talk about C.S. Lewis. We spent the first episode simply talking about his life. Lewis was a man who left an indelible mark on the Twentieth Century. However, despite being such an influential figure, today many people only know him for his Chronicles of Narnia, and almost next to nothing about the man himself.
Therefore, in this article I would like to introduce you more fully to the man behind the Lion, and the author behind works which have deeply shaped modern Christianity and apologetics. If you would like to listen to the audio version of these articles, click here.
1. He wasn’t English
Often I have found people assume that C.S. Lewis was English, particularly if they have listened to one of the few remaining audio recordings of him. Lewis was, in fact, born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1898. He was, however, educated in England and lived in Oxford for most of his adult life.
2. He had several names…
He was baptised Clive Staples Lewis, but that wasn’t what his friends called him. When Lewis was about four, his dog, Jacksie, died. From then onwards, he stubbornly refused to respond to any other name, although it was eventually shortened to “Jack”. This is why the name of my podcast is Pints with Jack, the “Jack” in question being C.S. Lewis himself.
3. Jack experienced tragedy as a child
Lewis’ mother died of cancer when he was ten. He writes about it movingly in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised By Joy, describing it as follows:
“…all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life”
C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy
C.S. Lewis
The Lewis Family
Flora Lewis
The young Jack was soon afterwards sent to boarding school in England. He disliked England immediately and hated most of his schooling, so much so that in his autobiography, he names one of the schools he attended after one of the most notorious World War Two concentration camps, Belsen. Fittingly enough, the headmaster at that school would later be committed to an asylum.
4. Lewis wasn’t always a Christian
Most people who have heard of Lewis will know that he was a famous Christian of his generation. However, he was not a Christian all of his life. He was raised in the Church of Ireland, but became an Atheist as a teenager. There were several reasons for this…
Lewis loved the old Pagan myths, particularly those of the Norse. As he received his education in classics, he was told that Paganism was all false, whereas Christianity was entirely true. Not only did this assessment seem wrong to the young Lewis, but since he saw clear parallels between the two, he assumed that both Paganism and Christianity were simply fanciful stories.
Like many who embraced Atheism, the problem of pain and suffering also loomed large in Jack’s mind. He couldn’t reconcile a good God with the world he saw around him or with the pain he himself had endured in his life. He would often quote the Epicurean poet Lucretius who wrote:
Had God designed the world, it would not be a world so frail and faulty as we see
Lucretius (Epicurean Poet)
5. He was a war veteran
Jack fought in World War One. In fact, he arrived at the front line on his nineteenth birthday. After being wounded in combat about a year later, he returned home.
During his training he had met a young man named Paddy Moore. The two had agreed that if one of them died, that the other would look after his family. Unfortunately, Paddy did not return from the trenches. Lewis was true to his word, living with and taking care of both Paddy’s mother, Janie, and Paddy’s sister, Maureen, for the rest of his life.
Jack and Paddy Moore
Jack with Janie and Maureen Moore
6. Jack was really, really clever…
Upon returning to Oxford after the war, Lewis excelled in his studies, earning multiple degrees. He got a First in Greek and Latin literature (“Moderations”), Philosophy and Ancient History (“Greats”), and finally in English.
It’s clear that Lewis was very intelligent, particularly when it came to language. He was, unfortunately, terrible at mathematics. In fact, his inability with numbers nearly barred his entrance to Oxford. Fortunately, upon returning from war, his military service granted him a dispensation from those exams.
7. He became a theist before becoming a Christian
Over time, Lewis started to become discontented with the imaginative and explanatory power of Atheism. He had originally embraced Atheism, in part, because of the cruel and unjust nature of the universe. However, as he would later argue in Mere Christianity:
…how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Jack moved through a number of philosophical evolutions before he finally accepted the inevitable. In his autobiography he writes:
You must picture me alone in [my] room…, night after night, feeling… the steady, unrelenting approach, of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. [I eventually]…gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England”.
C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy
He was not yet a Christian, but the seeds had already been sown…
8. He really loved his friends
Contrary to some depictions of Lewis, he was not an isolated stoic academic. He loved good beer and good conversation. He really loved his friends and they would play a huge role in his life, particularly J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In fact, Tolkien fans owe a great debt of gratitude to Lewis, as he was for a long time the only audience for these works and he did much to encourage Tolkien to finish them and get them published. Unfortunately, Tolkien disliked much of Lewis’ work, even The Screwtape Letters, a book which Lewis dedicated to him!
Many other names could be added to the list of Lewis’ close friends, such as Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield. All of these men shared a love of literature. In The Four Loves, Lewis would write:
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Later these men would come together to form The Inklings, a literary discussion group where they would debate ideas and where they would read their work to each other. They would meet on Tuesday mornings in their favourite pub, The Eagle and Child, affectionately known to locals as The Bird and Baby, but they would also meet on Thursday nights in Lewis’ rooms at Magdalen College where they’d have a drink and smoke.
9. Speaking of smoking, Lewis really loved tobacco
I recently came across a biography of Lewis which estimated that he smoked sixty cigarettes a day! Now, since I’m marginally better at mathematics than Lewis, I sat down and worked out that, assuming he was awake for 14 hours a day and that it takes approximately five minutes to smoke a cigarette, that he spent a third of his waking life smoking!
Last year I visited Lewis’ home and although they had repainted the walls in the living room, they left the ceiling untouched so you could see how it was thoroughly stained by the nicotine!
10. His friends helped bring him to Christ
After converting to Theism, Lewis began to suspect that Christianity might be true. However, it was after a long, late-night conversation with Tolkien and Dyson that the last major obstacle was removed. Lewis had regarded Christianity as a myth like any of the other Pagan myths – “lies breathed through silver” – emotionally moving, but false.
Owen Barfield, Tolkien, Lewis and Charles Williams
Over the course of their conversation, Tolkien and Dyson helped Lewis see that Christianity was the true myth. For centuries before Christianity, man’s myths had intuited a dying and rising God. However, in Jesus of Nazareth, that myth became fact.
That’s the end of the first part of this series! The concluding part will be published tomorrow…
In case you didn’t know, here in San Diego I’m part of a C.S. Lewis reading group called “The Eagle and Child”, named after the pub in which Lewis and “The Inklings” would regularly meet. Inspired through these group discussions, my friend Matt and I have launched a podcast where we will be working our way chapter-by-chapter through “Mere Christianity”. In today’s episode, we begin the Preface…
Continuing my notes for The Four Loves, this is the second of two posts which continue my summary of Chapter 2 (“Likings and Loves for the subhuman”) of The Four Loves. In this post we will be looking at the final section of the chapter which Lewis devotes to the love of country, patriotism.
1. Everyone knows that patriotism can turn turn bad
…we all know now that this love [of country] becomes a demon when it becomes a god. Some begin to suspect that it is never anything but a demon.
2. But if we say it is always bad, we have to reject much
But then they have to reject half the high poetry and half the heroic action our race has achieved. We cannot keep even Christ’s lament over Jerusalem. He too exhibits love for His country.
3. In this chapter we will attempt to distinguish authentic patriotism from its demonic form
Let us limit our field…. We are only considering the sentiment itself in the shape of being able to distinguish its innocent from its demoniac condition.
4. We will be focussing on patriotism in subjects rather than rulers
Neither…[innocent nor demonic patriotism] is the efficient cause* of national behaviour. For strictly speaking it is rulers, not nations, who behave internationally. Demoniac patriotism in their subjects…will make it easier for them to act wickedly; healthy patriotism may make it harder: when they are wicked they may by propaganda encourage a demoniac condition of our sentiments in order to secure our acquiescence in their wickedness. If they are good, they could do the opposite. That is one reason why we private persons should keep a wary eye on the health or disease of our own love for our country.
* Jack is referring to one of the four causes described by Aristotle.
