blog

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.

[tags]C.S. Lewis, Mir­a­cles, The Prob­lem of Pain[/tags]