A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby
tackles what he regards as the modern fallacy that the articles of the Christian creed are unacceptable because they are primitive in their imagery, for instance, the statement that God “came down from Heaven” rather than, as we prefer today, “entered the universe” and the notion that since hell “fire” is a metaphor it means nothing more serious than remorse. He insists that such metaphorical conceptions reveal just as supernatural a cosmos as modern abstractions and, what is more significant to his purpose, that both the so-called primitive and the modern and supposedly unmetaphorical imagery are equally figurative. To call God a “spiritual force” or “the indwelling principle of beauty, truth, and goodness” is to make one or both of two mistakes—to suppose one has escaped metaphor into some more realistic imagery, or actually to hide from reality in a verbal smoke screen.
Lewis declares that because most accounts of miracles are probably false, a standard of probability is needed. How can we determine a real from a spurious claim of miracle? One way is by the “fitness of things,” a method actually deep in the best of science, a conviction as real as the color of one’s hair. It was this conviction that earlier led to the very possibility of science. People expected law in nature because they believed in a Legislator. A modern agnostic science will yet discover how the omission of God inevitably leads to improbabilities in the uniformity of nature. It is a dangerous thing to make nature absolute, because claiming too much you are likely to end up with too little. “Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian free to continue his prayers.”
This fitness of things tells us that the miracle of the Resurrection is on a different level from someone using her patron saint to find her second best thimble. The Resurrection is a part of an immutable and eternal plan, not a last-minute “expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author’s control.” The whole story is actually about Death and Resurrection. The grand miracle is that of the Incarnation, a part of an eternal plan. Christ is indeed the corn king of mythology but not for the reason ascribed by the anthropologists. The death and rebirth pattern is in nature because it was first in this eternal plan, a plan going back before both nature and nature religions. There is rebirth in nature myths, but the Resurrection of Christ is described in the Bible as a completely unique event. The whole of creation shadowed, “mythologized,” in a thousand ways the event that was to change all of history.
Miracles, which Lewis subtitles A Preliminary Study, is directed not at the subtleties of theological parlance but at people who really want to ask the question of whether miracles are possible. It is addressed to people of naturalistic and pantheistic minds, groups Lewis believes to include the great mass of people today. He holds that “an immoral, naive and sentimental pantheism” is the chief obstacle against Christian conversion in our time. Most people in effect regard God as incapable not only of miracle but of anything else. They have some place heard the usual anthropological accounts and hazily suppose that because these are modern they are more enlightened than the Christian revelation. Pantheism, says Lewis, is not new but very ancient and in fact the natural tendency of the human mind. Only the Greeks were able to rise above it and then only in their greatest men. Today it is manifest in theosophy, the elevation of a life force, and the race worship of the Germans under Hitler. The tragedy is that people suppose “each new relapse into this immemorial ‘religion’” to be the last word in truth and fact.
God is not diffused in all things, as pantheism teaches, and neither are we contained in him as “parts,” but God is the great Concrete who feeds a torrent of “opaque actualities” into the world. God is not a principle, a generality, an “ideal,” or a “value” but “an utterly concrete fact.” On the contrary, today our minds are congenial to “Everythingism,” that is, that the whole show is merely self-existent and inclusive. The pantheist thinks that “everything is in the long run ‘merely’ a precursor or a development or a relic or an instance or a disguise, of everything else.” Lewis is completely opposed to such a philosophy. He contrasts the pantheistic conception of God as someone who animates the universe much as you animate your body with the Christian idea of God as the inventor and maker of the universe, the artist who can stand away from his own picture and examine it.
LETTERS TO MALCOLM: CHIEFLY ON PRAYER
The rich conception of God as creative artist continues in the posthumous volume Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. In this book Lewis describes creation as a “delegation through and through” and argues that “there are no words not derived from the Word.” Life is, or ought to be, a continuous theophany. Every bush is a Burning Bush, and the world is “crowded with God.” Because sin defies not merely God’s law but his whole creative purpose, it is more than disobedience—it is sacrilege. No physiological or psychological explanation of humanity goes deep enough. Neither the “I” nor the object is ultimate reality, and we are deceived when we take them as such. One great value of prayer is that it forces us to leave the continually impinging secularism of life and awaken to “the smell of Deity” that hangs over it. In prayer, as in the Lord’s Supper, we take and eat. Understanding, desirable as it may be, is for the time replaced by a contact with ultimacy.
Our pleasures are “shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility.” What we call bad pleasures are actually those obtained by unlawful acts. “It is the stealing of the apple that is bad, not its sweetness. The sweetness is still a beam from the glory.” Lewis says that ever since he learned this long ago he has tried to make each pleasure of his life into a channel not simply of gratitude to God but of adoration. He thinks the difference is significant. “Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.”
Lewis calls this book more nearly autobiography than theology and says that he has often simply “festooned” theological ideas with his reflections. Some years ago he wrote me that he had done a book on prayer but was not satisfied with it. That he still felt the tentative nature of some of his conclusions may be evident in the fact that he has put the book in the form of offhand letters to an old college friend.
Had we not known before, this volume would leave little doubt that A Grief Observed, the book that appeared under the name N. W. Clerk, is by Lewis, for here we find numerous poignant allusions to the “great blow,” i.e., the death of his wife, and the deep love he had for her. It also gives us the best glimpse anywhere into the practical aspect of Lewis’s prayer life. He had a lengthy list of people, some of whom he had prayed over for a long span of years and some of whom he knew simply as “that old man at Crewe” or “the waitress” or even “that man.”
In this book Lewis repeats the idea discussed in an appendix to Miracles that our prayers are granted, or not, before the beginning of time. In the initial act of creation God dovetailed all “future” spiritual and physical occurrences. Our difficulty in understanding this is that we experience in time the things that to God are outside time. The acts of men, whether prayer or sin, are not “predetermined,” for there is no “pre” with God. Because we cannot, like God, experience life in an “endless present,” it does not at all mean that we are not, living or dead, eternal in God’s eyes. Of a good act we may say with equal validity, “God did it” and “I did it.”
Lewis’s remark that he believes in Purgatory can best be understood in terms of his conviction that God continues his beatitudes in the soul after death, that there is a “farther in and a higher up” and that all eternity perhaps involves a growth. Like Dr. Johnson, Lewis thinks that the closer one comes to the purity of heaven the more he will wish for some preparation, some hallowing of the soul, before it takes up its new citizenship. Purgatory is for him a place not of retributive punishment but rather of purification in which the saved soul “at the very foot of the throne, begs to be taken away and cleansed.”
Then there is in this book the same profound sense of the reality of heaven that has permeated all of Lewis’s mature thinking. As usual, and with particular meaning in this his last book before his death, Lewis closes with a discussion of the Resurrection and the joy of heaven.