Lewis seeks in Mere Christianity to help us see the religion with fresh eyes, as a radical faith whose adherents might be likened to an underground group gathering in a war zone, a place where evil seems to have the upper hand, to hear messages of hope from the other side.
The mere Christianity of C. S. Lewis is not a philosophy or even a theology that may be considered, argued, and put away in a book on a shelf. It is a way of life, one that challenges us always to remember, as Lewis once stated, that there are no ordinary people and that it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.4 Once we tune ourselves to this reality, Lewis believes, we open ourselves to imaginatively transform our lives in such a way that evil diminishes and good prevails. It is what Christ asked of us in taking on our humanity, sanctifying our flesh, and asking us in turn to reveal God to one another.
If the world would make this seem a hopeless task, Lewis insists that it is not. Even someone he envisions as poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels5 can be assured that God is well aware of what a wretched machine you are trying to drive, and asks only that you keep on, [doing] the best you can. The Christianity Lewis espouses is humane, but not easy: it asks us to recognize that the great religious struggle is not fought on a spectacular battleground, but within the ordinary human heart, when every morning we awake and feel the pressures of the day crowding in on us, and we must decide what sort of immortals we wish to be. Perhaps it helps us, as surely it helped the war-weary British people who first heard these talks, to remember that God plays a great joke on those who would seek after power at any cost. As Lewis reminds us, with his customary humor and wit, How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different the saints.6
Kathleen Norris
1 Information on the blitz and Royal Air Force pilots by William Griffin, Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life; sections on the years 1941 & 1942. Holt & Rinehart, 1986.
2 The longest way round, quoted from Mere Christianity.
3 An amateur, from January 11, 1942, radio broadcast; cited in Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life.
4 There are no ordinary people, quoted from The Weight of Glory, a C. S. Lewis sermon delivered June 8, 1941.
5 Poisoned by a wretched upbringing, quoted from Mere Christianity.
6 How monotonously alike, quoted from Mere Christianity.
1 THE LAW OF HUMAN NATURE
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other mans behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: To hell with your standard. Nearly
always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the laws of nature we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong the Law of Nature, they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his lawwith this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.