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Lewis begins this book with two facts that he calls “the foundation of all clear thinking.” One is that people everywhere have the curious idea they ought to behave in a certain way, the other that they do not in fact so behave. The notion of right and wrong is not local and cultural but lodged deeply in the moral wisdom of mankind. We can call this “constant” in the world the law of human nature, or the moral law, or the rule of decent behavior. This law is not the “herd instinct” but rather directs the instincts. It is not a social convention inculcated by education but rather a real morality which measures conventions and systems. There is a big difference between the law of nature and the law of human nature. The former includes such laws as that of gravity and tells you, for instance, what a stone actually does if you drop it. But the law of human nature tells you what people ought to do and fail in doing.

The materialist view of the universe is that it simply happened and that our earth and its people are what they are by strange or lucky accidents. The other view is the religious one that the universe came into being as the result of a conscious Person. If the second view is true, we must assume that such a Person is the creator of the facts as we observe them, not something to be discovered inside the facts. There is a third in-between view called creative evolution or emergent evolution or the life-force view, which produces a kind of tame God. Lewis wonders if this view is not the world’s greatest illustration of the folly of wishful thinking. The moral law, on the contrary, is as hard as nails and suggests that the universe is governed by an absolute goodness.

Now among people who think there is a God, one class sees him as more or less animating the universe and such that if the universe expired he would expire with it. Another sees him as very separate from the universe and opposed to the bad things in it. But this second view leads to the important question of how a benevolent God should create a world in which badness could enter. People who get to thinking about the justice of God often conclude that the world is simply senseless. But strangely, their conclusion proves that one part of the world is not senseless, namely, their own idea of justice.

Although Satan tries to destroy all good in the world, God woos people back to him through conscience, good dreams or myths, the scriptural depiction of his dealings with the Jews, and, by far the greatest, his own Son and Redeemer. This Son was either all he claimed to be or else a lunatic or worse, and he claimed to put us right with God not through following his teaching but through baptism, belief, and Holy Communion. The mystery of Christianity has unfathomable depths but its reality is genuine. The Christian has Christ actually operating in him.

From the next section of Mere Christianity, which deals with Christian behavior, I shall mention only a few of Lewis’s exceptions to common viewpoints. He says that Moses, Aristotle, and the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages all agreed against the lending of money at interest, one of the main things on which our present economy is based. As to Christian giving, the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. Like Christianity, psychoanalysis claims to put the human machine right. The philosophy of Freud is in direct contradiction to Christianity, but psychoanalysis itself is not when it tries to remove abnormal feelings connected with moral choices. Christianity is concerned primarily with the choices. A person’s choices through a period of many years slowly turn him or her into a heavenly or hellish creature. This is why one who is getting worse understands badness less and less.

Marriage, despite modern views to the contrary, is for life. Novels and movies have misled us to believe that “being in love” should be a normal lifetime expectation, whereas it is properly no more than the explosion that starts the engine of a quieter and different sort of love. Forgiveness is much unpracticed as a Christian virtue. To love one’s neighbor does not at all mean making out that he is a nice fellow when he is not; we are only asked to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, and what is very lovable in any of us? The great vice loathed by all when observed in another person yet common to all of us is pride, “the complete anti-God state of mind.” It can subtly reside like a spiritual cancer at the very center of even a religious person. In the Christian sense, love is not a condition of the feelings but of the will. You are not to be always weighing whether or not you “love” your neighbor but proceed as if you did and then you will come to a genuine love. The hope of heaven is not escapism. The failure of Christians to think effectively of another world is a cause of their ineffectiveness in this world. In the attempt to satisfy a deep longing that haunts us, we may try ocean voyages, a succession of women, hobbies, and other things. Yet the longing is from God and only God can satisfy it. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Dependence on one’s moods will allow one to be neither a good atheist nor a good Christian. Faith consists in holding on to things your reason has accepted despite moods that may overtake you and the recognition that one’s own efforts are to be swallowed up in Christ’s indwelling power.

Both Miracles and Mere Christianity are intended as simple presentations of orthodox views. One section of the latter volume Lewis submitted in manuscript to an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic for their criticism and discovered only minor differences from his own view. The difference between these books and most others, particularly theological, on the same subjects is resident in Lewis’s ability to select the basic issues from the corpus of their vast theological history and to present them in apt analogies, homely illustrations, clear insight, and classically simple diction. His method is proof that a sanctified imagination is a legitimate tool for any Christian apologist.

One theologian who objected to Miracles did so partly on the ground that Lewis was, as he said, crude in visualizing the Trinity as like a cube of six squares while remaining one cube. But was not this the very method employed by our Lord who seemed invariably to turn to things close at hand as illustrations of holy things—vines, and fig trees, and lamps, and bushel baskets, and even vultures. It was likewise St. Paul’s method when he spoke of sounding brass and tinkling cymbals or the resurrection of Christ as the firstfruits. Indeed it was St. Augustine’s method in De Trinitate and has been the method of great writers ever. Lewis points out that Plato, one of the great creators of metaphor, is “therefore among the masters of meaning.” He holds that the attempt to speak unfiguratively about high abstractions is likely to result in “mere syntax masquerading as meaning” and indeed that metaphor, while not primarily the organ of truth, is the great organ for the depiction of essential meaning either in this world or others.

6Corbin Carnell, The Dialectic of Desire: C. S. Lewis’ Interpretation of Sehnsucht, PhD dissertation (Gainesville: University of Florida, 1960), 124.

7Marjorie E. Wright, The Cosmic Kingdom of Myth: A Study in the Myth-Philosophy of Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, PhD dissertation (University of Illinois, 1961), 141.

8C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 135. Does this sentence contradict Lewis’s charges against some of the vengeful psalmists?

9It occurs to me that, following the same analogy, Lewis might well have controverted the idea of a vengeful deity in the Old Testament by showing how often the Psalms speak of his mercy.

10In The World’s Last Night.

11Chad Walsh, C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, (New York: MacMillan, 1949), 107.