A Mind Awake

by C. S. Lewis

  ‘Oh no. It’s not so bad as that. I haven’t got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You’ll get something far better. Never fear.’

  ‘That’s just what I say. I haven’t got my rights. I always done my best and I never done nothing wrong. And what I don’t see is why I should be put below a bloody murderer like you.’

  ‘Who knows whether you will be? Only be happy and come with me.’

  ‘What do you keep on arguing for? I’m only telling you the sort of chap I am. I only want my rights. I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity.’

  ‘Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.’

  The Great Divorce, ch. 4

  God provides not for an abstraction called Man but for individual souls.

  Letters (16 April 1940)

  Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you—you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another’s. . . . Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

  The Problem of Pain, ch. 10

  It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion. Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realise for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.

  Miracles, ch. 7

  If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.

  Mere Christianity, bk 4, ch. 2

  In a sense the converted Jew is the only normal human being in the world. . . . He calls Abraham his father by hereditary right as well as by divine courtesy. He has taken the whole syllabus in order, as it was set; eaten the dinner according to the menu. . . . We ourselves, we christened gentiles, are after all the graft, the wild vine, possessing ‘joys not promised to our birth’.

  Foreword to Joy Davidman’s Smoke on the Mountain

  When all is said (and truly said) about the divisions of Christendom, there remains, by God’s mercy, an enormous common ground.

  Preface to Christian Reflections

  The divisions of Christendom are undeniable. . . . But if any man is tempted to think—as one might be tempted who read only contemporaries—that ‘Christianity’ is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages ‘mere Christianity’ turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible. . . . We are all rightly distressed, and ashamed also, at the divisions of Christendom. But those who have always lived within the Christian fold may be too easily dispirited by them.

  Introduction to St Athanasius’s The Incarnation of the Word of God

  When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft; Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being much too like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics.

  The Allegory of Love, ch. 7, sec. 3

  By nature I demand from the arrangements of this world just that permanence which God has expressly refused to give them. . . . I would like everything to be immemorial—to have the same old horizons, the same garden, the same smells and sounds, always there, changeless. The old wine is to me always better. That is, I desire the ‘abiding city’ where I well know it is not and ought not to be found. . . . We must ‘sit light’ not only to life itself but to all its phases.

  Letters (21 November 1962)

  3. SALVATION

  ‘Die before you die. There is no chance after.’

  Till We Have Faces, bk 2, ch. 2

  Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?

  ‘Historicism’, Christian Reflections

  The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.

  ‘Christianity and Literature’, Christian Reflections

  The glory of God, and, as our only means to glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life.

  ‘Christianity and Culture’, Christian Reflections

  In reality, the difference between Biological life and Spiritual life is so important that I am going to give them two distinct names. The Biological sort which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in Nature) is always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc., is Bios. The Spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.

  And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

  Mere Christianity, bk 4, ch. 1

  The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made. Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?

  Mere Christianity, bk 4, ch. 4

  It is not enough to want to get rid of one’s sins. We also need to believe in the One who saves us from our sins. . . . Because we are sinners, it does not follow that we are saved.

  ‘Cross-Examination’, God in the Dock

  ‘Well, exactly the same thing happened again. And I thought to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take off? . . . So I scratched away for the third time and got off a third skin, just like the two others, and stepped out of it. But as soon as I looked at myself in the water I knew it had been no good.

  ‘Then the lion said, “You will have to let me u
ndress you. . . .”

  ‘The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. . . . And there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker and darker, and more knobbly looking than the others had been. . . .

  ‘After a bit the lion took me out and dressed me . . . in new clothes—the same I’ve got on now, as a matter of fact.’

  The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’, ch. 7

  I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given.

  The Problem of Pain, ch. 8

  ‘I hardly know, Sir. What some people say on earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.’

  ‘Ye see it does not.’

  ‘I feel in a way that it ought to.’

  ‘That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.’

  The Great Divorce, ch. 13

  If people like you and me find much that we don’t naturally like in the public and corporate side of Christianity all the better for us; it will teach us humility and charity towards simple low-brow people who may be better Christians than ourselves. I naturally loathe nearly all hymns; the face and life of the charwoman in the next pew who revels in them teach me that good taste in poetry or music are not necessary to salvation.

  Letters (7 December 1950)

  The puritans were so called because they claimed to be purists or purifiers in ecclesiastical polity: not because they laid more emphasis than other Christians on ‘purity’ in the sense of chastity. . . . We want, above all, to know what it felt like to be an early Protestant. . . . The experience is that of catastrophic conversion. The man who has passed through it feels like one who has waked from nightmare into ecstasy. Like an accepted lover, he feels that he has done nothing, and never could have done anything to deserve such astonishing happiness. Never again can he ‘crow from the dunghill of desert’. All the initiative has been on God’s side; all has been free, unbounded grace. And all will continue to be free, unbounded grace. His own puny and ridiculous efforts would be as helpless to retain the joy as they would have been to achieve it in the first place. Fortunately they need not. Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned. ‘Works’ have no ‘merit’, though of course faith, inevitably, even unconsciously, flows out into works of love at once. He is not saved because he does works of love: he does works of love because he is saved. It is faith alone that has saved him: faith bestowed by sheer gift. From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive-scratchings, all Protestant doctrines originally sprang.

  English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Introduction

  But it is, I think, a gross exaggeration to picture the saving of a soul as being, normally, at all like the development from seed to flower. The very words repentance, regeneration, the New Man, suggest something very different.

  ‘Membership’, The Weight of Glory

  You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, 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. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. . . . The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

  Surprised by Joy, ch. 14

  ‘I have come to give myself up,’ he said.

  ‘It is well,’ said Mother Kirk. ‘You have come a long way round to reach this place, whither I would have carried you in a few moments. But it is very well.’

  ‘What must I do?’ said John.

  ‘You must take off your rags,’ said she, ‘as your friend has done already, and then you must dive into this water.’

  ‘Alas,’ said he, ‘I have never learned to dive.’

  ‘There is nothing to learn,’ she said. ‘The art of diving is not to do anything new but simply to cease doing something. You have only to let yourself go.’

  The Pilgrim’s Regress, bk 9, ch. 4

  It would, no doubt, have been possible for God to remove by miracle the results of the first sin ever committed by a human being; but this would not have been much good unless He was prepared to remove the results of the second sin, and of the third, and so on forever.

  The Problem of Pain, ch. 5

  We find thus by experience that there is no good applying to Heaven for earthly comfort. Heaven can give heavenly comfort; no other kind. And earth cannot give earthly comfort either. There is no earthly comfort in the long run.

  The Four Loves, ch. 6

  4. PRACTISING THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

  You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

  A Grief Observed, ch. 2

  Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place, I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority—because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.

  Mere Christianity, bk 2, ch. 5

  The moment one asks oneself ‘Do I believe?’ all belief seems to go. I think this is because one is trying to turn round and look at something which is there to be used and work from—trying to take out one’s eyes instead of keeping them in the right place and seeing with them. I find that it happens about other matters as well as faith. In my experience only very robust pleasures will stand the question, ‘Am I really enjoying this?’ Or attention—the moment I begin thinking about my attention (to a book or a lecture) I have ipso facto ceased attending. St Paul speaks of ‘Faith actualised in Love’. And ‘the heart is deceitful’; you know better than I how very unreliable introspection is. I should be much more alarmed about your progress if you wrote claiming to be overflowing with Faith, Hope and Charity.

  Letters (27 September 1949)

  When Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they speak of being ‘in Christ’ or of Christ being ‘in them’, this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts—that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body.

  Mere Christianity, bk 2, ch. 5

  How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing . . . it is irresistible. If even ten per cent of the world’s population had it, would not the whole world be converted and happy before a year’s end?

  The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III (1 August 1953)


  There must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible; for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?

  A Severe Mercy

  When you are asked for trust you may give it or withhold it; it is senseless to say that you will trust if you are given demonstrative certainty. There would be no room for trust if demonstration were given.

  The World’s Last Night, ch. 2

  If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the gift of Faith, for the power to go on believing, not in the teeth of reason, but in the teeth of lust, and terror, and jealousy, and boredom, and indifference, that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth.

  ‘Religion: Reality or Substitute?’, Christian Reflections

  Faith may mean (a) A settled intellectual assent. In that sense faith (or ‘belief’) in God hardly differs from faith in the uniformity of Nature or in the consciousness of other people. This is what, I think, has sometimes been called a ‘notional’ or ‘intellectual’ or ‘carnal’ faith. It may also mean (b) A trust, or confidence, in the God whose existence is thus assented to. This involves an attitude of the will. It is more like our confidence in a friend. It would be generally agreed that Faith in sense A is not a religious state. The devils who ‘believe and tremble’ have Faith A. A man who curses or ignores God may have Faith A. Philosophical arguments for the existence of God are presumably intended to produce Faith A because it is a necessary pre-condition of Faith B, and in that sense their ultimate intention is religious. But their immediate object, the conclusion they attempt to prove, is not. I therefore think they cannot be justly accused of trying to get a religious conclusion out of non-religious premisses. I agree . . . that this cannot be done; but I deny that the religious philosophers are trying to do it.

  ‘Is Theism Important? A Reply’, God in the Dock

  We must admit that Faith, as we know it, does not flow from philosophical argument alone; nor from experience of the Numinous alone; nor from moral experience alone; nor from history alone; but from historical events which at once will fulfil and transcend the moral category, which link themselves with the most numinous elements in Paganism, and which (as it seems to us) demand as their pre-supposition the existence of a Being who is more, but not less, than the God whom many reputable philosophers think they can establish.