1. Alternatives
Your bid—for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity—will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.
A Grief Observed, ch. 3
In the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say ‘Mine’ of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.
The Screwtape Letters, ch. 21
As there is one Face above all worlds merely to see which is irrevocable joy, so at the bottom of all worlds that face is waiting whose sight alone is the misery from which none who beholds it can recover. And though there seemed to be, and indeed were, a thousand roads by which a man could walk through the world, there was not a single one which did not lead sooner or later either to the Beatific or the Miserific Vision.
Perelandra, ch. 9
Honest rejection of Christ, however mistaken, will be forgiven and healed—‘whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him.’ But to evade the Son of Man; to look the other way; to pretend you haven’t noticed; to become suddenly absorbed in something on the other side of the street; to leave the receiver off the telephone because it might be He who was ringing up; to leave unopened certain letters in a strange handwriting because they might be from Him—this is a different matter. You may not be certain yet whether you ought to be a Christian; but you do know you ought to be a Man, not an ostrich hiding its head in the sand.
‘Man or Rabbit?’, God in the Dock
‘There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It’s not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels. The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.’
The Great Divorce, ch. 11
I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse. It is, paradoxically, dangerous to draw nearer to God.
Letters (20 December 1961)
Those who will not be God’s sons become His tools.
A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, ch. 10
‘We have been on a fool’s errand, then,’ said John, ‘ever since we left the main road.’
The Pilgrim’s Regress, bk 6, ch. 5
Virtue—even attempted virtue—brings light; indulgence brings fog.
Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 5
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. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. 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.
Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 4
As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
The Screwtape Letters, ch. 13
And the longer and more beautifully the Lion sang the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.
The Magician’s Nephew, ch. 10
If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.
‘Man or Rabbit?’, God in the Dock
‘I saw that for years my life had been lived in two halves, never fitted together.’
Till We Have Faces, bk 1, ch. 13
Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fulness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?
The Four Loves, ch. 1
We must insist that dread and awe are in a different dimension from fear. They are in the nature of an interpretation man gives to the universe, or an impression he gets from it; and just as no enumeration of the physical qualities of a beautiful object could ever include its beauty, or give the faintest hint of what we mean by beauty to a creature without aesthetic experience, so no factual description of any human environment could include the uncanny and the Numinous or even hint at them. There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given.
The Problem of Pain, ch. 1
When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else—something it never entered your head to conceive—comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side.
Mere Christianity, bk 2, ch. 5
‘No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.’
The Great Divorce, ch. 11
The idea of reaching ‘a good life’ without Christ is based on a double error. Firstly, we cannot do it; and secondly, in setting up ‘a good life’ as our final goal, we have missed the very point of our existence. Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are ‘done away’ and the rest is a matter of flying.
‘Man or Rabbit?’, God in the Dock
If you continue to love Jesus, nothing much can go wrong with you, and I hope you may always do so.
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III (26 October 1963)