A handful of Miracles
We’ve been reading Miracles in the C.S. Lewis Society, and although the first few chapters ended up almost devoid of markings, the chapters since then have seen a fair amount of scribbles. Here are some of the quotes I liked:
In chapter 8, Lewis says:
It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn’t…. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born…. Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.
And in chapter 9:
To say that God has created her [Nature] is not to say that she is unreal, but precisely that she is real. Would you make God less creative than Shakespeare or Dickens? What He creates is created in the round: it is far more concrete than Falstaff or Sam Weller.
And in chapter 11:
The ultimate spiritual reality is not vaguer, more inert, more transparent than the images, but more positive, more dynamic, more opaque. Confusion between Spirit and soul (or ‘ghost’) has here done much harm. Ghosts must be pictured, if we are to picture them at all, as shadowy and tenuous, for ghosts are half-men, one element abstracted from a creature that ought to have flesh. But Spirit, if pictured at all, must be pictured in the very opposite way. Neither God nor even the gods are ’shadowy’ in traditional imagination: even the human dead, when glorified in Christ, cease to be ‘ghosts’ and become ’saints’. The difference of atmosphere which even now surrounds the words ‘I saw a ghost’ and the words ‘I saw a saint’ — all the pallor and insubstantiality of the one, all the gold and blue of the other — contains more wisdom than whole libraries of ‘religion’. If we must have a mental picture to symbolise Spirit, we should represent it as something heavier than matter.
Reminds me of Joseph Smith’s teaching that “there is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it, but when our bodies are purified, we shall see that it is all matter.”
Finally, from chapter 14:
For God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been, more glorious than any unfallen race now is (if at this moment the night sky conceals any such). The greater the sin, the greater the mercy: the deeper the death the brighter the rebirth.
Death is, in fact, what some modern people call ‘ambivalent’. It is Satan’s great weapon and also God’s great weapon: it is holy and unholy; our supreme disgrace and our only hope; the thing Christ came to conquer and the means by which He conquered.
At present spirit can retain its foothold against the incessant counter-attacks of Nature (both physiological and psychological) only by perpetual vigilance, and physiological Nature always defeats it in the end. Sooner or later it becomces unable to resist the disintegrating processes at work in the body and death ensues. A little later the Natural organism (for it does not long enjoy its triumph) is similarly conquered by merely physical Nature and returns to the inorganic. But, on the Christian view, this was not always so. The spirit was once not a garrison, maintaining its post with difficulty in a hostile Nature, but was fully ‘at home’ with its organism, like a king in his own country or a rider on his own horse — or better still, as the human part of a Centaur was ‘at home’ with the equine part.
I rather liked the corn-religion part of chapter 14 as well. (I’d describe it, but I’ll leave it to you to read it on your own. That’s half the fun, anyway. 
) Eighty pages remain unread and I’m sure there’ll be more quotables to come. We’re reading The Problem of Pain next, by the way.
