Fred's Book Club: A Turning Point.

Hello, book lovers! Welcome to our Wednesday Humpback Writers feature, where writers without humps (or maybe with; we're not ableist) are celebrated on Hump Day.

This being Holy Week, I wanted to make a brief mention of a brief book that was crucially important to me.

Mere Christianity was not the first C.S. Lewis book I ever read. Like so many other people, I came to meet him through the Chronicles of Narnia, when I was in high school and reading my way through every classic science fiction and fantasy series I could find. Then, in college, I read his Space Trilogy, which is a series written for adults and also follows Christian themes in a compelling way. Then I borrowed his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, from the library, and that was a body-blow to my muddled mess of neo-paganistic pseudo-Christianish soul. That led me to Mere Christianity.

As Anthony Burgess wrote, "Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way." I think that's true, but I also think in cases like mine that it was not all intellect but also mental glitches and half-baked notions -- and maybe most of all the fear that I was going to have to give up things I liked if I followed this path. How did he bring me around? It is a logical progression from first principles, like showing that people believe in Right and Wrong even though that would not possible in a world without transcendent meaning, and from there leading up to where our instincts should lead us, to the Source of happiness and all good things.

Mere Christianity (titled mere as in basic, or what all Christians believe regardless of denomination or sect) is just 173 pages in my Collier edition, but every page has a powerful thought put in a plain and dynamic way. Let's look at some bits from this immensely quotable book:

"Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right or Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson."

"Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all of the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two plus two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to  be unselfish to -- whether it was only your own family, or your countrymen, or everybody else. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired."

“This is the fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion.”

“There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.”

“Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with ever fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

"Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world -- that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His Head’ as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again."

“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.”

"He chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His human desires at every turn --poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. And then, after being thus killed—killed every day in a sense—the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God."

It is powerful writing with the concision that any poet ought to envy. It is amazing that a book built on a reasonable argument could have so many quotes that are clear and potent when standing alone, as if every brick in a lovely home could be a work of art by itself.

Lewis was about as educated in the liberal arts as a man could get; also a combat veteran of the First World War. He was a hardened atheist brought to his knees by faith. He brings myth (as the echoes of reality) and stone cold fact together to reveal the truth that is beyond nature itself.

This book contains a somewhat simplified version of his philosophy and apologetics; classics like The Abolition of Man and Miracles are more sophisticated. But his goal here in these essays was to lay out his case plainly, and he did, and it hit me like a thunderbolt. I'll tell you one thing: He's the best modern writer you'll find at Hobby Lobby.