The Four Pivotal Virtues—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

The Four Cardinal Virtues: From the Latin Word for the Hinge of a Door

C.S. Lewis gives us a glimpse of what it was like for him addressing a nation at war on the BBC: "If you are allowed to talk for only ten minutes, pretty well everything else has to be sacrificed to brevity. One of my chief reasons for dividing morality up into three parts (with my picture of the ships sailing in convoy in the last chapter) was that this seemed the shortest way of covering the ground. Here I want to give some idea of another way in which the subject has been divided by old writers." The four cardinal virtues "are those which all civilized people recognize.... The word cardinal has nothing to do with Cardinals in the Roman Church. It comes from a Latin word meaning 'the hinge of a door.' These were called 'cardinal' virtues because they are ... pivotal." They are PRUDENCE, TEMPERANCE, JUSTICE and FORTITUDE.

 
Prudence = Practical Sense. This means "taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it.... Because Christ said we could only get into His world by being like children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are 'good,' it does not matter being a fool. But that is a misunderstanding. In the first place, most children show plenty of prudence about doing the things they are really interested in, and think them out quite sensibly. In the second place, as St. Paul points out (Ephesians 4:14), Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary. He told us to be not only 'as harmless as doves,' but also 'as wise as serpents' (Matthew 10:16). He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job, and in first-class fighting trim. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian ... you are embarking on something that is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.... Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world" (John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress).

 
Temperance = Moderation in All Things.  "Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further.... One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way.  An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.... A man who makes his ... motorcycle the center of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes ... is being just as 'intemperate' as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it doesn't show on the outside so easily ... but God is not deceived by externals."

 

 
Justice = Fairness. "Justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on in law courts. It is the old name for everything we should now call 'fairness'; it includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises." C.S. Lewis provides an example of this promise-keeping aspect of justice in his chapter on marriage.

Fortitude = Courage. "Fortitude includes both kinds of courage—the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that 'sticks it' under pain. 'Guts' is perhaps the nearest modern equivalent." C.S. Lewis spoke of this elsewhere in one of his first books, The Abolition of Man. This thought-provoking quote is one of the most famous from it: "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

"There is a difference between doing some particular just or temperate action and being a just or temperate man.... A man who perseveres in doing just actions gets in the end a certain quality of character.... It is that quality ... we mean when we talk of a virtue.... Right actions done for the wrong reason do not help to build the internal quality or character.... We might think that God wanted simply obedience.... He really wants people of a particular sort ... for ... the deep, strong unshakable kind of happiness [He] intends for us."

Pictorial Chapter Highlights

First-Class Fighting Trim: Military

First-Class Fighting Trim: Boxing

A Book That Still Astonishes the World

 You Decide for Yourself!

Highlights from chapter 2: The Cardinal Virtues, book 3: Christian Behavior in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

A Positive Way of Looking at Morality—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

 What a Convoy of Ships Can Teach Us About Moral Rules

Sourpuss? Spoilsport?

Ultimate Censor?

"A schoolboy ... replied that, as far as he could make out, God was 'the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.' And I am afraid that is the sort of idea that the word Morality raises in ... many people's minds: something that interferes...that stops you having a good time.

Take Good Care of It!

"In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations. When you are being taught how to use any machine, the instructor keeps on saying, 'No, don't do it like that,' because, of course, there are all sorts of things that look all right and seem to you the natural way of treating the machine, but do not really work." (C.S. Lewis knew that all too well: because of a thumb defect, he was very clumsy with mechanical things and became a lifelong pedestrian and train traveler.) 

Lewis probes deeper into the subject of morality: "Perfect arithmetic is 'an ideal'; you will certainly make some mistakes in some calculations. But there is nothing very fine about trying to be quite accurate at each step in each sum. It would be idiotic not to try; for every mistake is going to cause you trouble later on. In the same way every moral failure is going to cause trouble, probably to others and certainly to yourself. By talking about rules and obedience instead of 'ideals' and 'idealism' we help remind ourselves of these facts.

What If They Were Hired to Provide Dance Music?

"Now let us go a step further. There are two ways in which the human machine goes wrong. One is when human individuals drift apart from one another, or else collide with one another and do one another damage. The other is when things go wrong inside the individual—when the different parts of him (his different faculties and desires and so on).... You can get the idea plain if you think of us as a fleet of ships sailing in formation. The voyage will be a success only ... if the ships do not collide and ... if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order.... Or, if you like, think of humanity as a band playing a tune. To get a good result ... each player's individual instrument must be in tune and also each must come in at the right moment so as to combine with all the others. But there is one thing we have not yet taken into account. We have not asked where the fleet is trying to get to, or what piece of music the band is trying to play. The instruments might be all in tune and ... come in at the right moment, but even so the performance would not be a success if they had been engaged to provide dance music and actually played nothing but Dead Marches. And however well the fleet sailed, its voyage would be a failure if it were meant to reach New York and actually arrived at Calcutta. Morality ... seems to be concerned with three things:

1. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals.
2. Secondly, with ... tidying up or harmonizing the things inside each individual.
3. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.... Modern people are nearly always thinking about the first thing and forgetting the other two.

What If We're Rusty Inside?

"When a man says about something he wants to do, 'It can't be wrong because it doesn't do anyone else any harm,' he is thinking only of the first thing. He is thinking it does not matter what his ship is like inside provided that he does not run into the next ship. And it is quite natural, when we start thinking about morality, to begin with...social relations. For one thing, the results of bad morality in that sphere are so obvious and press on us every day: war and poverty and graft and lies and shoddy work....  But ... if our thinking about morality stops there, we might just as well not have thought at all. Unless we go onto the second thing—the tidying up inside each human being—we are only deceiving ourselves. What is the good of telling the ships how to steer so as to avoid collisions if, in fact, they are such crazy old tubs that they cannot be steered at all?"

Are You the Rightful Owner?

"Religion involves a series of statements about facts, which must be either true or false. If they are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the right sailing of the human fleet: if they are false, quite a different set. For example, let us go back to the man who says that a thing cannot be wrong unless it hurts some other human being. He quite understands that he must not damage the other ships in the convoy, but he honestly thinks that what he does to his own ship is simply his own business. But does it not make a great difference whether his ship is his own property or not? Does it not make a great difference whether I am ... the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord? If somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself."

"Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things that would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever.... If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, 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 civilization, compared with his, is only a moment."

Which Lasts Longer: The Individual or the State? 

Highlights from chapter 1: The Three Parts of Morality, book 3: Christian Behaviour in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

What to Do Before the King Returns?—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

How Much Time Is Left?

"The Christian belief is that if we somehow share the humility and suffering of Christ we shall also share in His conquest of death and find a new life after we have died and in it become perfect, and perfectly happy, creatures. This means something much more than our trying to follow His teaching," explains C.S. in The Practical Conclusion, the last chapter of the book within Mere Christianity that explains what Christians believe.

Do You Have to See It to Believe It?

"In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put in us.... There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and ... the Lord's Supper.... [Jesus] taught His followers that the new life was communicated in this way.... I believe it on His authority. Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine percent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so....None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them.... A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life."

God Likes Matter: He Invented It

The Christian "is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts. And that has practical consequences. As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing that body.... A Christian ... is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble—because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.... The Christian ... does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.... When Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral.... They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts.... That explains why this new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion.... There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature.... He likes matter. He invented it."

Now Lewis asks a question I've asked many times myself, and while I don't agree with everything he has to say on the subject, I think these ideas are worth considering: "Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what [all] His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ....But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ's body, the organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ, who alone can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work.

Imagine Normandy to the Nth Degree!

"Another possible objection is this. Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it?... Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will invade.... When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks onto the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right ... God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you chose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. It will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it."

Don't Let a Moment Slip Past without Christ

Highlights from chapter 5: The Practical Conclusion, book 2: What Christians Believe in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

Why on Earth Did Christ HAVE to Die?—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

What Was the Purpose of It All?

"God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form," states C.S. Lewis in "The Perfect Penitent" (chapter 4, book 2 of Mere Christianity). "What was the purpose of it all? What did He come to do? Well, to teach, of course; but as soon as you look into the New Testament or any other Christian writing you will find they are constantly talking about...His death and His coming to life again. It is obvious that Christians think the chief point of the story lies there. They think the main thing He came to earth to do was to suffer and be killed.... The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start."

Very Hard to Do

"Man had tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself.... Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor...this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself....In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent."

"Can we do it if God helps us? Yes, but what do we mean when we talk of God helping us? We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself....He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another....We now need God's help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all—to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this process at all....But supposing God became a man—suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person—then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God.... This is [one] sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.

Thank God for the Advantage of the Rescuer!

"I have heard some people complain that if Jesus was God as well as man, then His sufferings and death lose all value in their eyes, 'because it must have been so easy for Him'. Others may (very rightly) rebuke the ingratitude and ungraciousness of this objection; what staggers me is the misunderstanding it betrays....The perfect submission, the perfect suffering, the perfect death were not only easier to Jesus because He was God, but were possible only because He was God....If I am drowning in a rapid river, a man who still has one foot on the bank may give me a hand which saves my life. Ought I to shout back (between my gasps) 'No, it's not fair! You have an advantage! You're keeping one foot on the bank'? That advantage—call it 'unfair' if you like—is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?"

Highlights from chapter 4: The Perfect Penitent, book 2: What Christians Believe in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

Some People Say the Silliest Things About Jesus—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

What You Don't Want to Say About Jesus and Why

Mere Christianity Book 2, Chapter 3 is widely recognized as one of the most important book chapters ever written. Why? Because of how clearly it explains why things are as they are in our universe, and why Christ must be who He said He is. 

C.S. Lewis begins this all-important chapter by saying, "Christians ... believe that an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this World.... Is this state of affairs in accordance with God's will, or not?... How can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power? But anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in accordance with your will in one way and not in another." For example, any mother prefers her children to be tidy, but "it is her will which has left the children free to be untidy. The same thing arises in any regiment, or trade union, or school. You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible. It is probably the same in the universe. God created things which had free will.... If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.... Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.... The happiness God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water."

"Of course, God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He though it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him, you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will—that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world that moves only when He pulls the strings—then we may take it it is worth paying."

Which Is Better?

"The better stuff a creature is made of—the cleverer and stronger and freer it is—then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow cannot be very good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius, still more so; a superhuman spirit best—or worst—of all. How did the Dark Power go wrong?... A reasonable (and traditional) guess: ...The moment you have a self at all, there is the possibility of putting yourself first—wanting to be the center—wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race ... the idea that [people] could 'be like gods' ... be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God." 

"Out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history ... poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires slavery—the long, terrible story of man trying to find something other than God that will make him happy. The reason it can never succeed is this: God made us, invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself.... There is no such thing. That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended—civilizations are built up—excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.

The Old Testament Hammering Process

"And what did God do? First of all, He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded. Secondly, He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes back to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men. Thirdly, He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was—that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process.

What Does Forgiveness Imply?

"Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time.... What this man said was ... the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.... What should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that He forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money?... Jesus ... told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaves as if He was the party chiefly concerned.... This makes sense only if He was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin....

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher [or prophet], but I don't accept His claim to be God.'... A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

The idea of the Road Closed sign comes from one of my favorite editorial projects with the Grace to You ministry: a Gospel tract that illustrates each biblical point with road signs.

GTY Gospel Tract

         

Highlights from chapter 3: The Shocking Alternative, book 2: What Christians Believe in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.