A Mind Awake

by C. S. Lewis

  ‘But how do you know there is no Landlord?’

  ‘Christopher Columbus, Galileo, the earth is round, invention of printing, gunpowder!!’ exclaimed Mr Enlightenment in such a loud voice that the pony shied.

  The Pilgrim’s Regress, bk 2, ch. 1

  By universal evolutionism I mean the belief that the very formula of universal process is from imperfect to perfect, from small beginnings to great endings, from the rudimentary to the elaborate: the belief which makes people find it natural to think that morality springs from savage taboos, adult sentiment from infantile sexual maladjustments, thought from instinct, mind from matter, organic from inorganic, cosmos from chaos. This is perhaps the deepest habit of mind in the contemporary world. It seems to me immensely unplausible, because it makes the general course of nature so very unlike those parts of nature we can observe.

  ‘Is Theology Poetry?’, The Weight of Glory

  One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

  Mere Christianity, bk 1, ch. 4

  There is lodged in popular thought the conception that improvement is, somehow, a cosmic law: a conception to which the sciences give no support at all. There is no general tendency even for organisms to improve. There is no evidence that the mental and moral capacities of the human race have been increased since man became man. And there is certainly no tendency for the universe as a whole to move in any direction which we should call ‘good’.

  ‘De Futilitate’, Christian Reflections

  Evolution is not only not a doctrine of moral improvement, but of biological changes, some improvements, some deteriorations.

  Letters (1 August 1949)

  There is no general law of progress in biological history. . . .

  No one looking at world history without some preconception in favour of progress could find it in a steady up gradient. . . . The idea which here shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalisation from experience.

  The World’s Last Night, ch. 7

  What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive. Higher organisms are often conquered by lower ones. . . . We ask too often why cultures perish and too seldom why they survive; as though their conservation were the normal and obvious fact and their death the abnormality for which special causes must be found. It is not so. An art, a whole civilisation, may at any time slip through men’s fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery. If we are alive when such a thing is happening we shall hardly notice it until too late; and it is most unlikely that we shall know its causes.

  English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, bk 1, ch. 1

  Experience beats in vain upon a congenital progressive.

  Introduction to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century

  The demand for a developing world . . . grows up first; when it is full grown the scientists go to work and discover the evidence on which our belief in that sort of universe would now be held to rest. There is no question here of the old Model’s being shattered by the inrush of new phenomena. The truth would seem to be the reverse; that when changes in the human mind produce a sufficient disrelish of the old Model and a sufficient hankering for some new one, phenomena to support that new one will obediently turn up. I do not at all mean that these new phenomena are illusory. Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes.

  The Discarded Image, Epilogue

  In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in [medieval thought] he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light.

  The Discarded Image, ch. 4, sec. C

  One of the most dangerous errors instilled into us by nineteenth-century progressive optimism is the idea that civilisation is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilisation is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of our planet is salt water. . . . Human life means to me the life of beings for whom the leisured activities of thought, art, literature, conversation are the end, and the preservation and propagation of life merely the means. That is why education seems to me so important: it actualises that potentiality for leisure, if you like for amateurishness, which is man’s prerogative.

  ‘Our English Syllabus’, Image and Imagination

  One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on love; every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want.

  A Grief Observed, ch. 1

  We are told to ‘get things out into the open’, not for the sake of self-humiliation, but on the ground that these ‘things’ are very natural and we need not be ashamed of them. But unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one. . . . In trying to extirpate shame we have broken down one of the ramparts of the human spirit. . . . The ‘frankness’ of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness.

  A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity.

  The Problem of Pain, ch. 4

  But there is also a merely morbid and fidgety curiosity about one’s self—the slop-over from modern psychology—which surely does no good? The unfinished picture would so like to jump off the easel and have a look at itself! And analysis doesn’t cure that. We all know people who have undergone it and seem to have made themselves a lifelong subject of research ever since.

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 6

  Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to ‘cure’ it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers. Often they have never given the question any serious thought.

  Letters (c. October 1947)

  The presence which we voluntarily evade is often, and we know it, His presence in wrath.

  And out of this evil comes a good. If I never fled from His presence, then I should suspect those moments when I seemed to delight in it of being wish-fulfilment dreams. That, by the way, explains the feebleness of all those water versions of Christianity which leave out all the darker elements and try to establish a religion of pure consolation. No real belief in the watered versions can last. Bemused and besotted as we are, we still dimly know at heart that nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never st
ub your toes or bang your knee.

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 14

  Mathematicians, astronomers, and physicists are often religious, even mystical; biologists much less often; economists and psychologists very seldom indeed. It is as their subject matter comes nearer to man himself that their anti-religious bias hardens.

  ‘Religion Without Dogma?’, God in the Dock

  In our age I think it would be fair to say that the ease with which a scientific theory assumes the dignity and rigidity of fact varies inversely with the individual’s scientific education.

  The Discarded Image, ch. 2

  In science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.

  Miracles, ch. 14

  3. EDUCATION AND RELIGION

  Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now.

  The Weight of Glory

  For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head. . . .

  The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful. . . .

  And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilisation needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

  The Abolition of Man, ch. 1

  It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely ‘Modern’.

  That Hideous Strength, ch. 9

  What an answer, by the by, Wyvern [College] was to those who derive all the ills of society from economics! For money had nothing to do with its class system. It was not (thank Heaven) the boys with threadbare coats who became Punts, nor the boys with plenty of pocket-money who became Bloods. According to some theorists, therefore, it ought to have been entirely free from bourgeois vulgarities and iniquities. Yet I have never seen a community so competitive, so full of snobbery and flunkeyism, a ruling class so selfish and so class-conscious, or a proletariat so fawning, so lacking in all solidarity and sense of corporate honour.

  Surprised by Joy, ch. 7

  I have some difficulty in talking of the greatest things; it is the fault of our generation and of the English schools.

  Letters (20 June 1918)

  The very play

  Of mind, I think, is birth-controlled today.

  ‘To Roy Campbell’, Poems

  His education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as ‘man’ or ‘woman’. He preferred to write about ‘vocational groups’, ‘elements’, ‘classes’, and ‘populations’: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.

  That Hideous Strength, ch. 4

  Where the old education initiated, the new merely ‘conditions’. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly: the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds—making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men: the new is merely propaganda.

  The Abolition of Man, ch. 1

  ‘But do you really mean, Sir,’ said Peter, ‘that there could be other worlds—all over the place, just round the corner—like that?’

  ‘Nothing is more probable,’ said the Professor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, ‘I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.’

  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ch. 5

  Speak about beauty, truth and goodness, or about a God who is simply the indwelling principle of these three, speak about a great spiritual force pervading all things, a common mind of which we are all parts, a pool of generalised spirituality to which we can all flow, and you will command friendly interest. But the temperature drops as soon as you mention a God who has purposes and performs a particular action, who does one thing and not another, a concrete, choosing, commanding, prohibiting God with a determinate character. People become embarrassed or angry. Such a conception seems to them primitive and crude and even irreverent. The popular ‘religion’ excludes miracles because it excludes the ‘living God’ of Christianity and believes instead in a kind of God who obviously would not do miracles, or indeed anything else.

  Miracles, ch. 11

  Liberal Christianity can only supply an ineffectual echo to the massive chorus of agreed and admitted unbelief. . . .

  By the way, did you ever meet, or hear of, anyone who was converted from scepticism to a ‘liberal’ or ‘demythologised’ Christianity? I think that when unbelievers come in at all, they come in a good deal further.

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 22

  That structural position in the Church which the humblest Christian occupies is eternal and even cosmic. The Church will outlive the universe; in it the individual person will outlive the universe. Everything that is joined to the immortal Head will share His immortality. We hear little of this from the Christian pulpit today. What has come of our silence may be judged from the fact that recently addressing the Forces on this subject, I found that one of my audience regarded this doctrine as ‘theosophical’. If we do not believe it let us be honest and relegate the Christian faith to museums. If we do, let us give up the pretence that it makes no difference. For this is the real answer to every excessive claim made by the collective. It is mortal; we shall live forever. There will come a time when every culture, every institution, every nation, the human race, all biological life, is extinct, and every one of us is still alive. Immortality is promised to us, not to these generalities.

  ‘Membership’, The Weight of Glory

  A great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England is retrogression—like believing the earth is flat.

  Mere Christianity, bk 4, ch. 1

  Athanasius stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, ‘whole and undefiled’, when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those ‘sensible’ synthetic religions which are so stro
ngly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.

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

  4. THE ARTS

  The pother about ‘originality’ all comes from the people who have nothing to say; if they had, they’d be original without noticing it.

  Letters (c. August 1942)

  I am afraid that some vainglorious writers may be encouraged to forget that they are called ‘creative’ only by a metaphor. . . . All the ‘creative’ artists of the human race cannot so much as summon up the phantasm of a single new primary colour or a single new dimension. . . . Nor do artists give their so-called creatures substantial existence.

  Book review, Theology (October 1941)

  Many modern novels, poems, and pictures, which we are brow-beaten into ‘appreciating’, are not good work because they are not work at all. They are mere puddles of spilled sensibility or reflection. When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing taste, interests, and capacity of his audience. These, no less than the language, the marble, or the paint, are part of his raw material; to be used, tamed, sublimated, not ignored nor defied. Haughty indifference to them is not genius nor integrity; it is laziness and incompetence.

  The World’s Last Night, ch. 5

  I think the only hope for poetry now lies in lowering [the poet’s] status. Unless he speedily returns to the workmanlike humility of his great predecessors and submits to the necessity of interesting and pleasing as a preliminary to doing anything else, the art of poetry will disappear from among us altogether.

  The Personal Heresy, ch. 5

  When every one feels it natural to attempt the same kind of writing, that kind is in danger. Its characteristics are formalised. A stereotyped monotony, unnoticed by contemporaries but cruelly apparent to posterity, begins to pervade it.