Love—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

The old English word for distinctively Christian love is charity. "Charity," writes C.S. Lewis, "now means simply ... giving to the poor. Originally it had a much wider meaning. (You can see how it got the modern sense. If a man has 'charity,' giving to the poor is one of the most obvious things he does, and so people came to talk as if that were the whole of charity. In the same way, 'rhyme' is the most obvious thing about poetry, and so people came to mean by 'poetry' simply rhyme and nothing else.) Charity means 'Love in the Christian sense.'... It is a state not of the feelings but of the will: that state of the will we naturally have about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people. I pointed out in the chapter on Forgiveness that our love for ourselves does not mean that we like ourselves. It means that we wish our own good. In the same way Christian Love ... is quite different from liking or affection. We 'like' or are 'fond of' some people, and not of others.... This natural 'liking' is neither a sin nor a virtue, any more than your likes and dislikes in food.... It is just a fact. But, of course, what we do about it is either sinful or virtuous."

"Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find out one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.... Whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.... The Christian, trying to treat everyone kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on.... Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of."

"Ask yourself, 'If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do? When you have found the answer, go and do it.... Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.... Though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not.... It is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of [our] sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him."

Lewis later went on to write one of the greatest books ever written about love. Click here for an illustrated summary of The Four Loves.

Highlights from chapter 9: Charity, 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.

Marriage—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

One Mechanism

After explaining in the last chapter, Sexual Morality, what is wrong with the sexual impulse in man, C.S. Lewis now describes its right working with several memorable illustrations: "The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ's words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism—for that is what the words 'one flesh' would be in modern English.... He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact—just as one is stating a fact ... that a lock and its key are one mechanism.... The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not merely on the sexual level, but totally combined.

"The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union ... from all the other kinds of union that were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again. As a consequence, Christianity teaches that marriage is for life."

"Churches all agree with one another about marriage a great deal more than ... with the outside world.... They all regard divorce ... like cutting up a living body ... than it is like dissolving a business partnership.... What they all disagree with is the modern view that it is a simple readjustment of partners, to be made whenever people feel they are no longer in love with one another, or when either of them falls in love with someone else.

C.S. Lewis tells us to remember the concept of justice, which he discussed in the chapter on the four pivotal virtues. Justice "includes the keeping of promises. Now everyone who has been married ... has made a public, solemn promise to stick to his (or her) partner till death. The duty of keeping that promise has no special connection with sexual morality: it is in the same position as any other promise....   The idea that 'being in love' is the only reason for remaining married...leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise.... Those who are in love have a natural inclination to bind themselves by promises. Love songs all over the world are full of vows of eternal constancy. The Christian law is not forcing upon the passion of love something that is foreign to that passion's own nature: it is demanding that lovers should take seriously [what] their passion ... itself impels them to do.... A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way.... But what ... is the use of keeping two people together if they are no longer in love? There are several sound, social reasons: to provide a home for their children, to protect the woman (who probably sacrificed or damaged her own career by getting married)."

What Keeps the Engine Running in Marriage

"Feelings come and go.... Ceasing to be 'in love' need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense ... is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be 'in love' with someone else. 'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it."

What the Mature Thrill Teaches about Marriage

"Our experienced is colored through and through by the books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves. People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on 'being in love' forever.... In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last. The sort of thrill a boy has at the first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R.A.F. and is really learning to fly. The thrill you feel first seeing some delightful place dies away when you really go to live there. Does this mean it would be better not to learn to fly and not to live in the beautiful place? By no means. In both cases, if you go through with it, the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest. What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction. The man who has learned to fly and become a good pilot will suddenly discover music; the man who has settled down to live in the beauty spot will discover gardening. This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies. It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time.

"If you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them....

"So much for the Christian doctrine about the permanence of marriage. Something else, even more unpopular, remains to be dealt with. Christian wives promise to obey their husbands. In Christian marriage the man is said to be the 'head.'... The need for some head follows from the idea that marriage is permanent.... When there is a real disagreement ... they cannot decide by a majority vote, for in a council of two there can be no majority.... Either they must separate and go their own ways or else one of them must have a casting vote.... Why the man?... Is there any very serious wish that it should be the woman? Even a woman who wants to be the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of things when she finds it going on next door. She is much more likely to say, 'Poor Mr. X! Why he allows that appalling woman to boss him about the way she does is more than I can imagine.'...  The relations of the family to the outer world--what might be called its foreign policy--must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband.... She is the special trustee of their interests.... The husband ... has the last word ... to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife. If anyone doubts me, let me ask a simple question. If your dog has bitten the child next door, or if your child has hurt the dog next door, which would you sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress?"

SPECIAL NOTE: C.S. Lewis married late in life and enjoyed a particularly blessed marriage, described at the end of my illustrated biography of his and J.R.R. Tolkien's lives. During that special period of Lewis's life, he wrote his masterpiece  The Four Loves, which I have summarized and illustrated. The excerpt above is from chapter 6: Christian Marriage, book 3: Christian Behavior in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter on marriage relates to the whole book.

Morality and Psychoanalysis—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

"Since Christian morality claims to be a technique for putting the human machine right," says C.S. Lewis, "I think you would like to know how it is related to another technique which seems to make a similar claim—namely, psychoanalysis.... When a man makes a moral choice, two things are involved. One is the act of choosing. The other is the various feelings, impulses and so on which his psychological outfit presents him with, and what are the raw materials of his choice. Now this raw material may be of two kinds ... normal ... or else it may consist of quite unnatural feelings.... Thus fear of things that are really dangerous would be an example of the first kind; an irrational fear of cats or spiders would be an example of the second kind. The desire of a man for a woman would be of the first kind: the perverted desire of a man for a man would be of the second. Now what psychoanalysis undertakes to do is remove the abnormal feelings ... to give the man better raw material for his acts of choice; morality is concerned with the acts of choice themselves.... Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices."

"Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge.... Most of a man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked.... We shall then, for the first time, see everyone as he really was. There will be surprises."
 

"Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before.... All your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace, and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other."

"That explains what always used to puzzle me about Christian writers: they seem to be so very strict at one moment and so very free and easy at another. They talk about mere sins of thought as if they were immensely important, and then they talk about the most frightful murders and treacheries as if you had only to repent and all would be forgiven. But I have come to see that they are right. What they are always thinking of is the mark that the action leaves on that tiny central self that no one sees in this life but each of us will have to endure—or enjoy—forever. One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, an another so placed that however angry he gets will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage the next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again; each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not."
 

"The right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge. When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.... You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either." 

Highlights from chapter 4: Morality and Psychoanalysis, 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.

Is "Decent Behavior" Basically Instinct?—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

"The Moral Law tells us the tune...our instincts are merely the keys."

C.S. Lewis said these two facts are foundational to all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe:

1. Human beings all over the world have the unshakable notion that they ought to behave in a certain way.
2. None of us do, in fact, behave that way: we know the Rule of Decent Behavior; we break it.

"If they are the foundation," Lewis begins in Chapter 2 of Mere Christianity, "I had better stop to make that foundation firm before I go on. Some of the letters I have had show that a good many people find it difficult to understand just what this Law of Human Nature, or Moral Law, or Rule of Decent Behaviour is. For example... 'Isn't what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn't it been developed just like all our other instincts?' Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law.... Feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling ... you ought to help whether you want to or not....

"The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play; our instincts are merely the keys.... There are no such thing as good and bad impulses... .A piano ... has not got ...'right' notes and 'wrong' ones.  Every single not is right at one time and wrong at another.... The most dangerous thing you can do is take any one impulse ... and set it up as the thing...to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials 'for the sake of humanity', and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man....

Worth Reading

"We learn the Rule of Decent Behavior from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn everything else. But some of the things we learn are mere conventions," such as what side of the road to drive on, "and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs. There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics. The first is ... that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are ... not nearly so great as most people imagine." Lewis mentions he devoted an appendix to citing the evidence for that fact in his book The Abolition of Man. In short, it is the reason you won't find people of any time or place exalting cowardice or treachery to friends.

The other reason for believing morality is like math is when you think about the differences between the morality of one people and another, "Do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another?.... Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were any truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others.... If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about....

"One word before I end. I have met people who exaggerate the differences [between moralities] because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and ... belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, 'Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of ... Right Conduct?' But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that ... if we really thought that there were people ... who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him...to kill their neighbors or drive them mad...surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy [traitors] did?... You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house."

Highlights from chapter 2: Some Objections, book 1: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.