Mere Christianity: “Making Righteousness Readable"

by David C. Downing
C. S. Lewis’s earliest biographers, Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, wrote that if they were going to a desert island and could take only one Lewis book, it would probably be Mere Christianity. That’s a fascinating choice, considering that both men were thoroughly acquainted with Lewis’s whole body of work, including his children’s classics, the Narnia Chronicles, his international best-seller, The Screwtape Letters, and his ground-breaking literary studies such as The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image.

Yet I’m sure many other readers would agree with Green and Hooper. Mere Christianity is often cited as the single best introduction to Christian faith, a book that has been a spiritual milestone for thousands of readers. Both Charles Colson, founder of the Prison Fellowship, and Francis Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project, have discussed the pivotal role played by this book in their own journeys to faith.

Mere Christianity, first published in 1952, is based upon four series of radio talks that Lewis gave during World War II. The first broadcast, in August 1941, was heard by over a million listeners and created an unexpected sensation. Lewis’s careful reasoning, his folksy analogies, and his calm bass voice quickly caught on, and it is said his voice became the second most recognized in Britain, after that of Winston Churchill.

Lewis’s first series of broadcast talks argued that we all have an inborn sense of right and wrong, and that we all must admit we don’t live up to our own sense of decency and fair play. From this starting point, Lewis makes the case that all cultures share similar standards of right and wrong, moral laws that point to a lawgiver, a “Somebody” who is best sought not in the material world, for all its magnificence, but in our own hearts. Lewis concludes that, sooner or later, we will all meet the “gaze of absolute goodness,” an encounter that is sure to be both comforting and terrifying.

In his second series of talks, Book Two in Mere Christianity, Lewis compares competing world views such as atheism, pantheism, dualism, and Christianity. Not surprisingly, he finds fatal flaws in each of the non-Christian worldviews he examines, suggesting that the Christian understanding of the world best fits the facts—that we live in a fallen world and we can’t fix it ourselves; that the Creator needed to enter himself into the stream of history in order to redeem humans from their own bad choices; that Christians are not simply those who try to behave well, but rather those who are allowing an all-good Creator/Redeemer to begin transforming them from within.

Book Three, “Christian Behavior,” outlines the morality that grows out of Christian faith. One early commentator wrote, “Mr. Lewis possesses the rare gift of making righteousness readable.” That gift is nowhere more evident than in Lewis’s discussion of Christian ethics. Taking dowdy old words such as Prudence and Temperance, Lewis explains what they mean in contemporary practical terms. Prudence is simply common sense, “taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what will come of it.” Temperance is not simply an old-fashioned word for tee-totalism. Rather it is the virtue of moderation in all things, one that applies not only to alcohol but also to anything as extreme as sports-mania or runaway consumerism or excessive attention to one’s pets. In discussing all the virtues and vices (the worst of which is Pride, “the complete anti-God state of mind”), Lewis stresses that these are not simply arbitrary rules by which we seek to placate an all-demanding Creator. Rather they are the operating manual for the “human machine,” a machine that is ultimately fueled by God and his goodness, not by any motive power of our own.

In Book Four, Lewis reviews the basic doctrines of Christian belief, showing that theology is not merely a collection of abstract affirmations best left to specialists. Rather it is by grappling with the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Sanctification that we come to understand the true nature of the Christian life. As Lewis puts it, “The whole purpose for which we exist is to be taken into the life of God.” He adds, “The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.”

First-time readers of Mere Christianity may find it to be both less and more than they had expected. The book is not a wide-ranging apologetic for Christian belief. It does not address in detail the difficult question of how a good God could create a world with so much suffering and injustice. (Lewis tackled that thorny issue in The Problem of Pain, first published in 1940.) And it does not attempt to defend the inescapable supernaturalism of Christianity, the belief that natural laws may sometimes be superseded by the Lawgiver. (Lewis explored that question at length in Miracles: A Preliminary Study, first published in 1947.)

Yet Mere Christianity is also something more than a “defense of the faith.” Its purpose is not only to argue for Christian faith, but also to help readers understand the faith more fully and live it out more authentically. Modern readers may struggle with passages of the book. Some wish that Lewis had said more about simple agnosticism, a refusal to consider any worldview at all. And Lewis reaffirms the apostle Paul’s teaching on the headship of men in marriage, a statement that Lewis knew was unpopular in his own time and must surely be moreso in our own.

Besides his non-inclusive language, Lewis has been taken to task by some critics for his “logic-chopping” and by others for his sometimes startling similes. Yet Mere Christianity remains a modern classic less because of its arguments or analogies, but because of the compelling vision that shines through every page. For Lewis, Christianity is not simply a set of rules to be followed or a set of creeds to be affirmed. It is rather a glad and glorious cosmic reality, a chance to slough off our vain attempts to find happiness in our shabby amusements and our vain attempts to find goodness in our own ideals or self-effort.

Many people, even believers, think of Christian faith as a kind of bargain with God: if you lead a good life, he will reward you with a good afterlife. There is nothing particularly selfless or spiritual in this arrangement; it is a matter of mere self-interest. It is rather like an employer who tells his workers that if they do a good job for many years, he will give them a good pension when they retire. As for “goodness,” people may see it in the same prosaic terms they think about faith. We may think “virtue” consists mainly in abstaining from many of life’s pleasures in order to avoid the disapproval of our grumpy grandpa in the sky.

Mere Christianity explodes these misconceptions about the life of faith, offering a much more radical and engaging vision of the place of each human being in the cosmic drama. As Lewis himself summed up his view of the Christian life: “If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror that reflects back to God . . . his own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less.”

For many readers, that “Nothing less,” as Lewis defined it, is the Something more they have been seeking in their own spiritual quests.


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David C. Downing is the R. W. Schlosser Professor of English at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He has written numerous articles and reviews on C. S. Lewis, as well as four books: Planets in Peril (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), a critical study of the Ransom trilogy; The Most Reluctant Convert (InterVarsity, 2002), an examination of Lewis’s journey to faith; Into the Wardrobe (Jossey-Bass, 2005), an in-depth overview of the Narnia Chronicles; Into the Region of Awe (InterVarsity, 2005), a study of how Lewis’s wide reading in Christian mysticism enhanced his own faith and enriched his imaginative writings.

Downing serves as a consulting editor on Lewis for Christian Scholars Review, Christianity and Literature, and Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review. His most recent book is A South Divided: Portraits of Dissent in the Confederacy (Cumberland Press, 2007). His college website may be found at http://users.etown.edu/d/downindc/)

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Mere Friendship: Lewis on a Great Joy

by David J. Theroux
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that gives value to survival.”
—C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Love has been the favorite topic of philosophers, artists, poets, musicians, and religious leaders since humankind began. The Apostle John stated that “God is love,” and Jesus affirmed God’s law as the two commandments of unconditional love for God and loving one’s neighbor as oneself.

In The Four Loves, Lewis explores the nature, glories, and misuses of love in its four distinct forms: family affection (storge), friendship (philia), erotic love (eros), and charity or divine love (agape). He notes that “[a]s soon as we are fully conscience we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.” Yet, of the four loves, Lewis says that friendship is the least instinctive, or biological, and unnecessary from simply a survival basis. In contrast, the affection of parents for a child and the earthiness of erotic love are both directly connected organically to the natural world.

However, for the ancients, friendship was generally viewed as the highest state of happiness and human fulfillment. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle considers friendship among people as well as between people and animals to be virtuous and necessary as a means to happiness: “no one would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods.” Similarly, in On Friendship Cicero writes about how honesty, unconditional giving, and truthfulness are essential among friends.

The modern world has often viewed friendship with suspicion and even derision. For many modern thinkers, friendship has appeared as superficial and insubstantial compared with the “organic loves” mentioned above. Freud discounts friendship as a separate love altogether, claiming it merely to be disguised heterosexual or homosexual eros. For such moderns, only metaphysical materialism can be true and evident, and thus friendship as mere carnal instinct must be true. However, Lewis refutes this claim by pointing out that “nothing is less like a friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”

Lewis points out that friendship embodies a spiritual relationship that begins from the companionship among peers, when two or more individuals choose to break away as they discover and wish to share some common interest. As he notes, the development of friendship involves the question, “Do you see the same truth?—Or at least, ‘Do you care about the same truth?’” Contrasted with mere companions or colleagues who pursue a common physical goal, friends share a common interest that is more introspective and nonmaterial. And seeking friends as a material goal is pointless: “The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. . . . There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice.”

Friends were among the greatest joys and blessings of Lewis’s life. He and his brother Warren were not just brothers bonded by family affection, but lifelong friends. Until his death in 1963, Lewis maintained many close friends, including a regular correspondence with Arthur Greaves, who had been his friend since childhood. His friendship with other members of the Inklings literary society in Oxford is legendary, including J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Christopher Tolkien, Hugo Dyson, Roger Lancelyn Green, Adam Fox, Robert Havard, J. A. W. Bennett, Lord David Cecil, and Nevil Coghill, among others.

These friends shared common interests in literature, philosophy, theology, history, and Christian narrative fiction, as well as an enthusiasm for a wide assortment of other cultural and intellectual pursuits. For Lewis, though, friendship in its essence was much more than the pursuit of common interests—it was a selfless and joyous harmony among equals: “Those are the golden sessions; when four or five of us after a hard day’s walking have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life—natural life—has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?”

Through his close friendship with Tolkien, Lewis found God and became a Christian. Tolkien and Lewis also influenced each other intellectually on the nature of language, imagination, myth, and religion. Lewis in turn provided a matchless gift that Tolkien later described: “The unpayable debt that I owe him was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The Lord of the Rings to a conclusion.” The friendship between Lewis and Tolkien, despite any ups and downs, exhibited friendship at its finest as a spiritual reality. As Colin Duriez notes in his book about Tolkien and Lewis’s friendship, “Tolkien and Lewis were alike in welcoming a sense of Other-ness—or ‘other-worldliness.’”

When Lewis met the American writer Joy Davidman in the early 1950s, they initially became close friends and only later felt eros and crossed into marriage. When friendship develops between a man and a woman, it may transition to include eros, unless conflicting relationships or other factors interfere. The fact that eros is not determined by friendship and that friendship between two people can be shared with others, whereas eros cannot, should further dispel the notion that friendship is not a distinct love in itself. Lewis carefully explains that “where the sexes, having no real shared activities, can meet only in Affection and Eros—cannot be Friends—it is healthy that each should have a lively sense of the other’s absurdity.”

Yet friendship is fiercely individualistic: friends secede or even rebel from the group, exclude others, and enjoy common interests apart from the group. Friendship is as a result commonly viewed as subversive to authorities, and majorities often portray circles of friends as “gangs,” “elites,” “cliques,” and worse. However, even in turning away from the rest of the world, “small groups” of friends can transform the world—whether for good or for bad—as each friend is transformed by friendship: “The little pockets of early Christians survived because they cared exclusively for the love of ‘the brethren’ and stopped their ears to the opinion of the Pagan society all around them. But a circle of criminals, cranks, or perverts survives in just the same way; by becoming deaf to the opinion of the outer world, by discounting it as the chatter of outsiders who ‘don’t understand,’ of the ‘conventional,’ ‘the bourgeois,’ the ‘Establishment,’ of prigs, prudes and humbugs.” In Plato’s book, The Symposium, Pausanius similarly asserts that in Greece tyranny involved the suppression of friendship.

In addition, friendship is not based on one’s social status, profession, race, or class. The easy-going Lewis and the high-strung Tolkien were an unlikely pair except for the common interests that formed the glue of their friendship. Unlike eros, friendship is not based on matters of fact, but rather on ideas and minds—on seeing the same truth. Friends come to know each other honestly based on their sharing of ideas that is based on trust and truth, but doing so is not the reason for the friendship. Lewis describes this distinction bluntly: “Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.” In his view, “This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. ...Have we here found a natural love, which is Love itself?”

But can friendship and the other forms of love become harmful or even dangerous? The ancients viewed friendship solely as virtuous. Erotic love or love of country or family affection or friendship may “become gods.” However, God’s being love does not mean that love is God. Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont phrases this idea succinctly: “In ceasing to be a god, he [love] ceases to be a demon.” Lewis notes that although a group of friends alone cannot oppress a society, it can develop into a real danger if it insulates itself from others and “disdain[s] as well as ignore[s] those outside it. It will, in effect, have turned itself into something very like a class. A coterie is a self-appointed aristocracy.” The result can be a hardened pride and contempt for others: “The snob wishes to attach himself to some group because it is already regarded as an elite; friends are in danger of coming to regard themselves as an elite because they are already attached.”

The suspicions of the majority may not be entirely wrong; as a spiritual love, friendship is exposed to a spiritual danger—pride. Friendship then exhibits a unique character among the other loves in that it alone cannot save itself. Friendship involves having “chosen one another, the insight of each finding the intrinsic beauty of the rest, like to like, a voluntary nobility; that we have ascended above the rest of mankind by our native powers. The other loves do not invite the same illusion.”

This hubristic distortion of the longing for friendship manifests itself in what Lewis describes as the powerful lure for acceptance, the desire to belong to an “Inner Ring” of the “Important People” or the “People in the Know”—“one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action.” In contrast with the love of friendship, the longing for the Inner Ring is not a love at all, but a disconnected and prideful self-absorption that on its own tends to make “a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.” (Lewis addresses this misdirected passion in a number of his books, especially the novel That Hideous Strength.)

Acceptance in any inner circle is based solely on excluding others, not on merit or shared interests. No Inner Ring is based on friendship, nor can it produce happiness because it is empty of the spiritual connection and luminosity that makes friendship possible. However, if in one’s work and associations with others, the soundness of the work itself becomes the end, then genuine friendship can naturally but indirectly arise among equals as common interests come to light to be shared, creating what appears to be something like an Inner Ring. In this case, however, exclusion exists as a by-product based on merit, and it is established for practical reasons and not for its own sake.

Hence, friendship exists in a nonmaterial reality or nearness to God. We do not choose friends; rather, friendship itself is chosen, and we are afforded it by a love that comes from God: “The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.” As Lewis saw it, friendship was as close to heaven as we can get in this world.

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David J. Theroux is the founder and president of The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.; founder and president of the C. S. Lewis Society of California; and publisher of The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy. You can contact him at dtheroux@independent.org.

Works Referenced Above (in order as they appear)
C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography
Colin Duriez, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship
Plato, The Symposium
Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World
C. S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

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