Table Talk
God alone, through his word, instructs the heart, so that it may come to the serious knowledge how wicked it is, and corrupt and hostile to God. Afterwards God brings man to the knowledge of God, and how he may be freed from sin, and how, after this miserable, evanescent world, he may obtain life everlasting. Human reason, with all its wisdom, can bring it no further than to instruct people how to live honestly and decently in the world, how to keep house, build, etc., things learned from philosophy and heathenish books. But how they should learn to know God and his dear Son, Christ Jesus, and to be saved, this the Holy Ghost alone teaches through God’s word; for philosophy understands naught of divine matters. I don’t say that men may not teach and learn philosophy; I approve thereof, so that it be within reason and moderation. Let philosophy remain within her bounds, as God has appointed, and let us make use of her as of a character in a comedy; but to mix her up with divinity may not be endured; nor is it tolerable to make faith an accidens or quality, happening by chance; for such words are merely philosophical,—used in schools and in temporal affairs, which human sense and reason may comprehend. But faith is a thing in the heart, having its being and substance by itself, given of God as his proper work, not a corporal thing, that may be seen, felt, or touched.
Martin Luther (1483–1546)—An Augustinian monk who became the father of the Protestant Reformation, Luther was an indefatigable theologian and pastor and champion of the doctrine of justification by “faith alone.”
City of God
It is not permitted with a heart impure to see that which is seen only by the pure heart. You will be repelled, driven back from it, and will not see it. For “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” How often already has he enumerated the blessed, and the causes of their blessedness, and their works and recompenses, their merits and rewards! But nowhere has it been said, “They shall see God.” “Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” In none of these has it been said, “They shall see God.” When we come to the “pure in heart,” there is the vision of God promised. And not without good cause; for there, in the heart, are the eyes, by which God is seen. Speaking of these eyes, the Apostle Paul says, “The eyes of your heart being enlightened.” At present then these eyes are enlightened, as is suitable to their infirmity, by faith; hereafter as shall be suited to their strength, they shall be enlightened by sight. “For as long as we are in the body we are absent from the Lord; For we walk by faith, not by sight.” Now as long as we are in this state of faith, what is said of us? “We see now through a glass darkly; but then face to face.”
Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430)—Born in Numidia, a Roman province in North Africa, to a pagan father and Christian mother, Saint Augustine was consecrated bishop of Hippo and wrote numerous treatises on Christianity, including The Confessions.
The Foundations of Belief
Everyone has a “right” to adopt any opinions he pleases. It is his “duty,” before exercising this “right,” critically to sift the reasons by which such opinions may be supported, and so to adjust the degree of his convictions that they shall accurately correspond with the evidences adduced in their favor. Authority, therefore, has no place among the legitimate causes of belief. If it appears among them, it is as an intruder to be jealously hunted down and mercilessly expelled. Reason, and reason only, can be safely permitted to mould the convictions of mankind. By its inward counsels alone should beings who boast that they are rational submit to be controlled.
Sentiments like these are among the commonplaces of political and social philosophy. Yet, looked at scientifically, they seem to me to be, not merely erroneous, but absurd. Suppose for a moment a community of which each member should deliberately set himself to the task of throwing off so far as possible all prejudices due to education; where each should consider it his duty critically to examine the grounds whereon rest every positive enactment and every moral precept which he has been accustomed to obey; to dissect all the great loyalties which make social life possible, and all the minor conventions which help to make it easy; and to weigh out with scrupulous precision the exact degree of assent which in each particular case the results of this process might seem to justify. To say that such a community, if it acted upon the opinions thus arrived at, would stand but a poor chance in the struggle for existence is to say far too little. It could never even begin to be; and if by a miracle it was created, it would without doubt immediately resolve itself into its constituent elements.
Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930)—This Scottish philosopher and statesman had his Gifford Lectures (1915) published as Theism and Humanism, a work enjoyed by C. S. Lewis. He was responsible for the famous Balfour Declaration, which promised Zionists a home in Palestine.
Table Talk
Everything that is done in the world is done by hope. No husbandman would sow one grain of corn, if he hoped not it would grow up and become seed; no bachelor would marry a wife, if he hoped not to have children; no merchant or tradesman would set himself to work, if he did not hope to reap benefit thereby. How much more, then, does hope urge us on to everlasting life and salvation?
Faith’s substance is our will; its manner is that we take hold on Christ by divine instinct; its final cause and fruit, that it purifies the heart, makes us children of God, and brings with it the remission of sin.
A Christian must be well armed, grounded, and furnished with sentences out of God’s Word, that so he may stand and defend religion and himself against the devil, in case he should be asked to embrace another doctrine.
The article of our justification before God is as with a son who is born heir to all his father’s goods, and comes not thereto by deserts, but naturally, of ordinary course. But yet, meantime, his father admonishes him to do such and such things, and promises him gifts to make him the more willing. As when he says to him: if you will be good, be obedient, study diligently, then I will buy you a fine coat; or, come here to me, and I will give you an apple. In such ways does he teach his son industry; though the whole inheritance belongs to him of course, yet will he make him, by promises, pliable and willing to do what he would have done.
Even so God deals with us; he is loving unto us with friendly and sweet words, promises us spiritual and temporal blessings, though everlasting life is presented to those who believe in Christ, by mere grace and mercy, gratis, without any merits, works, or worthiness.
Martin Luther (1483–1546)—An Augustinian monk who became the father of the Protestant Reformation, Luther was an indefatigable theologian and pastor and champion of the doctrine of justification by “faith alone.”
The Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect
Blessed for ever and ever be that mother’s child whose faith has made him the child of God. The earth may shake, the pillars of the world may tremble under us, the countenance of the heaven may be appalled, the sun may lose his light, the moon her beauty, the stars their glory; but concerning the man that trusts in God, if the fire has proclaimed itself unable as much as to singe a hair of his head, if lions, beasts ravenous by nature and keen with hunger, being set to devour, have as it were religiously adored the very flesh of the faithful man; what is there in the world that shall change his heart, overthrow his faith, alter his affection towards God, or the affection of God to him? If I be of this note, who shall make a separation between me and my God? “Shall tribulation, or anguish, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” No; “I am persuaded that neither tribulation, nor anguish, nor persecution, nor famine, nor nakedness, nor peril, nor sword, nor death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature,” shall ever prevail so far over me. “I know in whom I have believed”; I am not ignorant whose precious blood has been shed for me; I have a Shepherd full of kindness, full of care, and full of power: unto him I commit myself; his own finger has engraven this sentence in the tables of my heart, “Satan has desired to winnow you as wheat, but I have prayed that your faith fail not.” Therefore the assurance of my hope I will labor to keep as a jewel unto the end; and by labor, through the gracious mediation of his prayer, I shall keep it.
Richard Hooker (ca. 1554–1600)—Theologian and defender of the Church of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Hooker wrote The Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie. C. S. Lewis believed this book to be well written and full of wisdom and good sense.
Waiting on God
The sympathy of the weak for the strong is natural, for the weak in putting himself into the place of the other acquires an imaginary strength. The sympathy of the strong for the weak, being in the opposite direction, is against nature.
That is why the sympathy of the weak for the strong is only pure if its sole object is the sympathy received from the other, when the other is truly generous. This is supernatural gratitude, which means gladness to be the recipient of supernatural compassion. It leaves self-respect absolutely intact. The preservation of true self-respect in affliction is also something supernatural. Gratitude which is pure, like pure compassion, is essentially the acceptance of affliction. The afflicted man and his benefactor, between whom diversity of fortune places an infinite distance, are united in this acceptance. There is friendship between them in the sense of the Pythagoreans, miraculous harmony and equality.
Both of them recognize at the same time, with all their soul, that it is better not to command wherever one has power to do so. If this thought fills the whole soul and controls the imagination, which is the source of our actions, it constitutes true faith. For it places the Good outside this world, where are all the sources of power; it recognizes it as the archetype of the secret point which lies at the center of human personality and which is the principle of renunciation.
Even in art and science, though second-class work, brilliant or mediocre, is an extension of the self, work of the very highest order, true creation, means self-loss. We do not perceive this truth, because fame confuses, and covers with its glory achievements of the highest order, often giving the advantage to the latter.
Love for our neighbors, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius.
Simone Weil (1909–1943)—Weil was born into a Jewish intellectual family and became a philosopher, essayist, thinker, contemplative, and mystic who opposed institutional abuse and sought to identify with the oppressed.
Ring of Truth
When I started translating some of Paul’s shorter letters I was at first alternately stimulated and annoyed by the outrageous certainty of his faith. It was not until I realised afresh what the man had actually achieved, and suffered, that I began to see that here was someone who was writing, not indeed at God’s dictation, but by the inspiration of God himself. Sometimes you can see the conflicts between the pharisaic spirit of the former Saul (who could say such grudging things about marriage and insist upon the perennial submission of women), and the Spirit of God who inspired Paul to write that in Christ there is neither “Jew nor Greek … male nor female”!
Paul had, and still has, his detractors. There are those who say he is like the man who says “I don’t want to boast, but—,” and then proceeds to do that very thing! Very well then, but let us look at his list of “boasting.” We have only to turn up 2 Corinthians 11:23–27. Have any of us gone through a tenth of that catalogue of suffering and humiliation? Yet this is the man who can not only say that in all these things we are more than conquerors, but can also “reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18). Here is no armchair philosopher, no ivory-tower scholar, but a man of almost incredible drive and courage, living out in actual human dangers and agonies the implications of his unswerving faith.
John Bertram Phillips (1906–1982)—This Bible translator, author, and broadcaster was an acquaintance of C. S. Lewis and claimed to have had a visitation by Lewis’s apparition after his death. Lewis wrote the introduction to Phillips’s Letters to Young Churches.