A Mind Awake Read online

  Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 2

  If we encourage others, or ourselves, to hear, see, or read great art on the ground that it is a cultured thing to do, we call into play precisely those elements in us which must be in abeyance before we can enjoy art at all. We are calling up the desire for self-improvement, the desire for distinction, the desire to revolt (from one group) and to agree (with another), and a dozen busy passions which, whether good or bad in themselves, are, in relation to the arts, simply a blinding and paralysing distraction. . . .

  Those who read poetry to improve their minds will never improve their minds by reading poetry. For the true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.

  The World’s Last Night, ch. 3

  In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.

  Mere Christianity, bk 1, ch. 5

  The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost.

  Surprised by Joy, ch. 7

  We no more become bad by thinking of badness than we become triangular by thinking about triangles.

  A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, ch. 12

  Games are essentially for pleasure, but they happen to produce health. They are not likely, however, to produce health if they are played for the sake of it.

  ‘Our English Syllabus’, Image and Imagination

  We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism—the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good. But we have hardly yet begun what may be called Hedonics, the science or philosophy of Pleasure.

  ‘Hedonics’, Present Concerns

  The woman who makes a dog the centre of her life loses, in the end, not only her human usefulness and dignity but even the proper pleasure of dog-keeping. . . . Every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made. . . . You can get second things only by putting first things first. . . .

  It is impossible, in this context, not to inquire what our own civilisation has been putting first for the last thirty years. And the answer is plain. It has been putting itself first. To preserve civilisation has been the great aim; the collapse of civilisation, the great bugbear. Peace, a high standard of life, hygiene, transport, science and amusement—all these, which are what we usually mean by civilisation, have been our ends. . . . How if civilisation has been imperilled precisely by the fact that we have made civilisation our summum bonum. . . . Perhaps civilisation will never be safe until we care for something else more than we care for it.

  ‘First and Second Things’, God in the Dock

  Many things—such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly—are done worst when we try hardest to do them.

  Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ch. 9, sec. 3

  Conquest is an evil productive of almost every other evil both to those who commit and to those who suffer it.

  Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ch. 9, sec. 1

  What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.

  Surprised by Joy, ch. 11

  A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt.

  ‘A Reply to Professor Haldane’, Of Other Worlds

  If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.

  Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 1

  Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask—half our great theological and metaphysical problems—are like that. . . .

  Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.

  A Grief Observed, ch. 4

  5. RELIGION AND IRRELIGION

  I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.

  Surprised by Joy, ch. 7

  The notion that everyone would like Christianity to be true, and therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense.

  A Severe Mercy

  Men are reluctant to pass over the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery. It was hated not, at bottom, because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance.

  Miracles, ch. 11

  The difficulty of preaching Christ in India is that there is no difficulty. One is up against true Paganism—the best sort of it as well as the worst—hospitable to all gods, naturally religious, ready to take any shape but able to retain none.

  Letters (30 April 1959)

  The god of whom no dogmas are believed is a mere shadow. He will not produce that fear of the Lord in which wisdom begins, and, therefore, will not produce that love in which it is consummated. . . . There is in this minimal religion nothing that can convince, convert, or (in the higher sense) console; nothing, therefore, which can restore vitality to our civilisation. It is not costly enough. It can never be a controller or even a rival to our natural sloth and greed.

  ‘Religion Without Dogma?’, God in the Dock

  Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.

  Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 11

  He has substituted religion for God—as if navigation were substituted for arrival, or battle for victory, or wooing for marriage, or in general the means for the end. But even in this present life, there is danger in the very concept of religion. It carries the suggestion that this is one more department of life, an extra department added to the economic, the social, the intellectual, the recreational, and all the rest.

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 6

  Men who have gods worship those gods; it is the spectators who describe this as ‘religion’. The Maenads thought about Dionysus, not about religion. Mutatis mutandis this goes for Christians too. The moment a man seriously accepts a deity his interest in ‘religion’ is at an end. He’s got something else to think about. The ease with which we can now get an audience for a discussion of religion does not prove that more people are becoming religious. What it really proves is the existence of a large ‘floating vote’. Every conversion will reduce this potential audience.r />
  ‘Revival or Decay?’, God in the Dock

  Fascism and Communism, like all other evils, are potent because of the good they contain or imitate. . . . And of course their occasion is the failure of those who left humanity starved of that particular good. This does not for me alter the conviction that they are very bad indeed.

  Letters (17 January 1940)

  III

  THE BIBLE

  Men can read the life of Our Lord (because it is a human life) as nothing but a human life. . . . Just in the same way Scripture can be read as merely human literature. . . . For what is required, on all these levels alike, is not merely knowledge but a certain insight; getting the focus right. . . . One who contended that a poem was nothing but black marks on white paper would be unanswerable if he addressed an audience who couldn’t read. Look at it through microscopes, analyse the printer’s ink and the paper, study it (in that way) as long as you like; you will never find something over and above all the products of analysis whereof you can say ‘This is the poem’. Those who can read, however, will continue to say the poem exists. . . .

  Taken by a literalist, He will always prove the most elusive of teachers. Systems cannot keep up with that darting illumination. No net less wide than a man’s whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish.

  Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 11

  The Day of Judgement is an idea very familiar, and very dreadful, to Christians. . . . If there is any concept which cannot by any conjuring be removed from the teaching of Our Lord, it is that of the great separation; the sheep and the goats, the broad way and the narrow, the wheat and the tares, the winnowing fan, the wise and the foolish virgins, the good fish and the refuse, the door closed on the marriage feast, with some inside and some outside in the dark. . . . It is from His own words that the picture of ‘Doomsday’ has come into Christianity.

  ‘The Psalms’, Christian Reflections

  When you accepted the exodus of Israel from Egypt as a type of the soul’s escape from sin, you did not on that account abolish the exodus as a historical event.

  The Allegory of Love, ch. 5, sec. 2

  Some people when they say that a thing is meant ‘metaphorically’ conclude from this that it is hardly meant at all. They rightly think that Christ spoke metaphorically when he told us to carry the cross: they wrongly conclude that carrying the cross means nothing more than leading a respectable life and subscribing moderately to charities. They reasonably think that hell ‘fire’ is a metaphor—and unwisely conclude that it means nothing more serious than remorse. They say that the story of the Fall in Genesis is not literal; and then go on to say that it was really a fall upwards—which is like saying that because ‘My heart is broken’ contains a metaphor, it therefore means ‘I feel very cheerful’. This mode of interpretation I regard, frankly, as nonsense. For me the Christian doctrines which are ‘metaphorical’—or which have become metaphorical with the increase of abstract thought—mean something which is just as ‘supernatural’ or shocking after we have removed the ancient imagery as it was before.

  Miracles, ch. 10

  Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion.

  Miracles, ch. 10

  Our age has, indeed, coined the expression ‘the Bible as literature’. It is very generally implied that those who have rejected its theological pretentions nevertheless continue to enjoy it as a treasure house of English prose. It may be so. There may be people who, not having been forced upon familiarity with it by believing parents, have yet been drawn to it by its literary charms and remained as constant readers. But I never happen to meet them. Perhaps it is because I live in the provinces. But I cannot help suspecting, if I may make an Irish bull, that those who read the Bible as literature do not read the Bible. . . .

  Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only ‘mouth honour’ and that decreasingly.

  ‘The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version’, Selected Literary Essays

  The same divine humility which decreed that God should become a baby at a peasant-woman’s breast, and later an arrested field-preacher in the hands of the Roman police, decreed also that He should be preached in a vulgar, prosaic and unliterary language. If you can stomach the one, you can stomach the other. The Incarnation is in that sense an irreverent doctrine: Christianity, in that sense, an incurably irreverent religion. When we expect that it should have come before the World in all the beauty that we now feel in the Authorised Version we are as wide of the mark as the Jews were in expecting that the Messiah would come as a great earthly King. The real sanctity, the real beauty and sublimity of the New Testament (as of Christ’s life) are of a different sort: miles deeper or further in.

  Introduction to J. B. Phillips’s Letters to Young Churches

  And finally, though it may seem a sour paradox—we must sometimes get away from the Authorised Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame or struck dumb with terror or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations.

  Introduction to J. B. Phillips’s Letters to Young Churches

  Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated.

  Letters (25 May 1962)

  It seems to me appropriate, almost inevitable, that when that great Imagination which in the beginning, for Its own delight and for the delight of men and angels and (in their proper mode) of beasts, had invented and formed the whole world of Nature, submitted to express Itself in human speech, that speech should sometimes be poetry. For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

  Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 1

  A visitor from another world who judged humanity simply by its poetry would get the impression from profane poetry that we were creatures who lived habitually on a high, level plateau of consistent passion; from our sacred poetry, and from it almost alone, would he get any notion of human experience as it really is, with all its lee-shores and doldrums and rudderless hithering and thithering. . . . It is the profane poetry which assumes attitudes of greater clarity and consistency than inner experience will really support; it is the sacred poetry which gives us life in the raw. For whatever else the religious life may be, it is the fountain of self-knowledge and disillusion, the safest form of psychoanalysis.

  Book review, Review of English Studies (January 1941)

  The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance. . . .

  [The Psalmists] express a longing for Him, for His mere presence, which comes only to the best Christians or to Christians in their best moments.

  Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 5

  The dominant impression I get from reading the Psalms is one of antiquity. I seem to be looking into a deep pit of time, but looking through a lens which brings the figures who inhabit that depth up close to my eye. In that momentary proximity they are almost shockingly alien; creatures of unrestrained emotion, wallowing in self-pity, sobbing, cursing, screaming in exultation, clashing uncouth weapons or dancing to the din of strange musical instruments. Yet, side by side with this, there is also a different image in my mind: Anglican choirs, well laundered surplices, soapy boys’ faces, hassocks, an organ, prayer-books, and perhaps the smell of new-mown graveyard grass coming in with the sunlight through an open door. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, impression grows faint, but neither, perhaps, ever quite disappears.

  ‘The Psalms’, Christian Reflections

  [Psalm 119] is a pattern, a thing done like embroidery, stitch by stitch, through l
ong, quiet hours, for love of the subject and for the delight in leisurely, disciplined craftsmanship. . . .

  This is not priggery nor even scrupulosity; it is the language of a man ravished by a moral beauty.

  Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 6

  The Psalmists . . . give us little landscape. What they do give us, far more sensuously and delightedly than anything I have seen in Greek, is the very feel of weather—weather seen with a real countryman’s eyes, enjoyed almost as a vegetable might be supposed to enjoy it.

  Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 8

  What an admirable thing it is in the Divine economy that the sacred literature of the world should have been entrusted to a people whose poetry, depending largely on parallelism, should remain poetry in any language you translate it into.

  Letters (16 July 1940)

  The question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.

  Miracles, ch. 1

  The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern. . . .

  A miracle is emphatically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its results follow according to Natural law. . . . Its peculiarity is that it is not in that way interlocked backwards, interlocked with the previous history of Nature. . . . To find how it is interlocked with the previous history of Nature you must replace both Nature and the miracle in a larger context. Everything is connected with everything else: but not all things are connected by the short and straight roads we expected.