Illustrated Summary of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Christianity is all about Christ. That was the message C.S. Lewis gave to a nation that was facing death daily, but had lost touch with or didn't know what the Bible teaches and why they should believe it. What began as World War 2 radio addresses became Mere Christianity, one classic book (comprised of 4 small books) that still stands the test of time. It was the first Christian book I purchased and read (not counting the Bible) so as a tribute, it was the first book I summarized (with lively illustrations, direct quotations, and simplified spelling and punctuation), mostly by 1 post per chapter. In this post I give you the big picture by listing Mere Christianity's contents on the left with links to my individual posts on the right. My titles, whenever they differ from Lewis's titles, are attempts to add clarity so you can read about what most interests you.

Mere Christianity

Preface. Serving Where the Line Is Thinnest,  At Her Center Where Her Truest Children Dwell,  Keeping the Term "Christian" Truly Useful, Where There Are Fires and Chairs and Meals! (Not until Book 2 did I develop my usual style of selecting a relevant, edifying image to illuminate not only each blog post, but also each paragraph of text.)

Book 1. Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe

1.  The Law of Human Nature - Right and Wrong as Clues  
2.  Some Objections - Is "Decent Behavior" Basically Instinct? 
3.  The Reality of the Law - The Reality of the Law 
4.  What Lies Behind the Law - What Lies Behind the Law 
5.  We Have Cause to Be Uneasy - We Have Cause to Be Uneasy

Book 2. What Christians Believe

1. The Rival Conceptions of God - The Rival Conceptions of God 
2. The Invasion - What's Behind a Universe at War? 
3. The Shocking Alternative - Some People Say the Silliest Things About Jesus
4. The Perfect Penitent - Why on Earth Did Christ HAVE to Die? 
5. The Practical Conclusion - What to Do Before the King Returns?

Book 3. Christian Behavior

1. The Three Parts of Morality - A Positive Way of Looking at Morality 
2. The Cardinal Virtues - The Four Pivotal Virtues 
3. Social Morality - Social Morality 
4. Morality and Psychoanalysis - Morality and Psychoanalysis
5. Sexual Morality - Sexual Morality
6. Christian Marriage - Marriage  
7. Forgiveness - Forgiveness
8. The Great Sin - Pride: The Great Sin
9. Charity - Love 
10. Hope - Hope  
11. Faith - Faith as Belief 
12. Faith - Faith as Trust 

Book 4. Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity

1. Making and Begetting - First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity
2. The Three-Personal God - The Three-Personal God 
3. Time and Beyond Time - Time and Beyond Time 
4. Good Infection - Good Infection
5. The Obstinate Toy Soldiers - The Obstinate Toy Soldiers 
6. Two Notes - Neither Individualism Nor Totalitarianism
7. Let's Pretend - Let's Pretend 
8. Is Christianity Hard or Easy? - Is Christianity Hard or Easy? 
9. Counting the Cost - Counting the Cost
10. Nice People or New Men - Nice People or New Men?
11. The New Men - The New Men 

Enjoy Reading the Whole Book for Yourself!

 

Is Christianity Hard or Easy?—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

"Putting on Christ, or first 'dressing up' as a son of God," the subject C.S Lewis addressed in his previous chapter on Divine Make-believe, "that you may finally become a real son ... is not a ... special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of Christianity. Christianity offers nothing else at all.... It differs from ordinary ideas of 'morality' and 'being good'.... We take as a starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and interests. We then admit that something else—call it 'morality' or 'decent behavior' ... has claims on this self.... We are very like an honest man paying his taxes. He pays them all right, but he does hope that there will be enough left over for him to live on."

"The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you. and your natural self, which is thus being starved and hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier and angrier. In the end, you will either give up trying to be good, or else become one of those people who...'live for others' but in a discontented, grumbling way.... The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says 'Give me All.... I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good.... Hand over the whole natural self.... I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: My own will shall become yours.'"

"Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, 'Take up your Cross'.... Next minute He says, 'My yoke is easy and my burden is light.' He means both.... In a battle, or in mountain climbing, there is often one thing that it takes a lot of [courage] to do; but it is also, in the long run, the safest thing to do. If you [chicken out], you will find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger.... It is like that here. The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. But it is far easier than ... trying to let our mind and heart go their own way—centered on money or pleasure or ambition—and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be plowed up and re-sown.

"The very moment you wake up each morning all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.... The new sort of life will be spreading ... because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us.... When He said, 'Be perfect,' He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment.... We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."

"It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects—education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think that the State has a lot of different objects—military, political, economic, and whatnot. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—this is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs.  If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons ... are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.... It says in the Bible that the whole universe was made for Christ and that everything is to be gathered together in Him.... We men can be drawn into Christ—can become part of that wonderful present which the young Prince of the universe wants to offer His Father.... It is the only thing we were made for."

Highlights from Chapter 8: Is Christianity Hard or Easy? in Book 4: Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

Faith as Trust—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Since C.S. Lewis considers faith to be the most difficult subject he has tackled thus far in Mere Christianity, he gives his readers some encouragement: "There are certain things in Christianity that can be understood from the outside, before you become a Christian. But there are a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have gone a certain distance along the Christian road.... There are directions for dealing with particular crossroads and obstacles on the journey and they do not make sense until a man has reached those places. Whenever you find a statement in Christian writings that you can make nothing of, do not worry. Leave it alone. There will come a day, perhaps years later, when you suddenly see what it meant."

In the last chapter, Lewis talked about faith in the sense of a steady belief in facts. In this chapter, he says, "I am trying to talk about faith in the second sense ... after a man ... discovers his bankruptcy.... It is the change from being confident about our own efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything for ourselves and leave it to God.... He ... trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience that He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion.... In Christian language, He will share His 'sonship' with us.... Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing."

"Handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means ... trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.... The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things [good works and faith] together into one amazing sentence [Philippians 2:12-13]. The first half is, 'Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling'—which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, 'For it is God who works in you'—which looks as if God did everything and we did nothing."

"Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Everyone there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is near the stage when the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further than mine."

Highlights from chapter 12: Faith, 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.

Sexual Morality—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

These Kinds of Things Change

On this delicate topic C.S. Lewis carefully defines the key terms: "The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of 'modesty'... i.e. propriety, or decency .. .how much of the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be referred to, and in what words.... While the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes.... When people break the rule of propriety current in their own time and place, if they do so ... to excite lust ... then they are offending against chastity. But if they break it through ignorance or carelessness they are guilty only of bad manners. When, as often happens, they break it defiantly ... to shock or embarrass others, they are not necessarily being unchaste, but they are being uncharitable: for it is uncharitable to take pleasure in making other people feel uncomfortable. I do not think that a very strict or fussy standard of propriety is any proof of chastity or any help, and I therefore regard the great relaxation and simplifying of the rule ... as a good thing.... It has this inconvenience ... people of different ages and types do not all acknowledge the same standard.... A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems."

"Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.... The Christian rule is, 'Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.' Now this is so difficult and contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct that has gone wrong. But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want ... most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but ... not for ten.... But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.

Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act.... Suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theater by simply bringing a covered plate onto the stage and then slowly lifting the cover ... to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained ... a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?.... The sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons.... You and I ... have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told ... that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing in up, everything ... will be lovely. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not.... If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think ... the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess....

"Christianity is almost the only [religion] that thoroughly approves of the body—that believes matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, or beauty and our energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But, of course, when people say, 'Sex is nothing to be ashamed of,' they may mean 'the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of.'... I think it is everything to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food....

"I do not say you and I are ... responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect: and we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favor of unchastity.... God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them."

"Perfect chastity ... will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you ... that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind.... Ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.  For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection." 

"When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of creating a repression. On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue—even attempted virtue—brings light; indulgence brings fog. 

Better to Be Neither

"If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred.... That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither."

Highlights from chapter 5: Sexual 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.

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.

Social Morality—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

The third chapter of the third book in C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity is on social morality. It explains that "the Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that....

"Christianity has not ... a detailed political programme for applying 'Do as you would be done by' to a particular society at a particular moment....  It is meant for all men at all times and the particular programme which suited one place or time would not suit another.... It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal."

"People say, 'The Church ought to give us a lead.' That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way. By the church they ought to mean the whole body of practicing Christians. And when they say that the Church should give us a lead, they ought to mean that some Christians—those who happen to have the right talents—should be economists and statesmen, and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting 'Do as you would be done by' into action. If that happened and if we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly. But, of course, when they ask for a lead from the Church most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political program. That is silly.  The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live forever.... The application of Christian principles, say, to trade unionism or education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian [educators]: just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists—not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time."

From a biblical view of society, "there are to be no passengers or parasites: if a man does not work, he ought not to eat. Everyone is to work with his own hands, and what is more, everyone's work is to produce something good ... no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to buy them.... To that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience  ... and ... respect ... to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and ... from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls 'busybodies.'"

"In the passage where the New Testament says that everyone must work, it gives as a reason 'in order that he may have something to give to those in need'.... I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.... There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot because our [generosity] excludes them. I am speaking now of charities in the common way. Particular cases of distress among your own relatives, friends, neighbors or employees, which God, as it were, forces upon your notice, may demand much more: even to the crippling and endangering of your own position." 

"Christianity is the total plan for the human machine. We have all departed from that total plan in different ways.... Everyone is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest.... A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat 'Do as you would be done by' till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love God.... We are driven on to something more inward ... from social matters to religious matters. For the longest way round is the shortest way home."

Highlights from chapter 3: Social 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.