3. Salvation
‘Die before you die. There is no chance after.’
Till We Have Faces, bk 2, ch. 2
Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?
‘Historicism’, Christian Reflections
The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.
‘Christianity and Literature’, Christian Reflections
The glory of God, and, as our only means to glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life.
‘Christianity and Culture’, Christian Reflections
In reality, the difference between Biological life and Spiritual life is so important that I am going to give them two distinct names. The Biological sort which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in Nature) is always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc., is Bios. The Spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.
And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
Mere Christianity, bk 4, ch. 1
The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made. Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?
Mere Christianity, bk 4, ch. 4
It is not enough to want to get rid of one’s sins. We also need to believe in the One who saves us from our sins. . . . Because we are sinners, it does not follow that we are saved.
‘Cross-Examination’, God in the Dock
‘Well, exactly the same thing happened again. And I thought to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take off? . . . So I scratched away for the third time and got off a third skin, just like the two others, and stepped out of it. But as soon as I looked at myself in the water I knew it had been no good.
‘Then the lion said, “You will have to let me undress you. . . .”
‘The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. . . . And there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker and darker, and more knobbly looking than the others had been. . . .
‘After a bit the lion took me out and dressed me . . . in new clothes—the same I’ve got on now, as a matter of fact.’
The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’, ch. 7
I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given.
The Problem of Pain, ch. 8
‘I hardly know, Sir. What some people say on earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.’
‘Ye see it does not.’
‘I feel in a way that it ought to.’
‘That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it.’
‘What?’
‘The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.’
The Great Divorce, ch. 13
If people like you and me find much that we don’t naturally like in the public and corporate side of Christianity all the better for us; it will teach us humility and charity towards simple low-brow people who may be better Christians than ourselves. I naturally loathe nearly all hymns; the face and life of the charwoman in the next pew who revels in them teach me that good taste in poetry or music are not necessary to salvation.
Letters (7 December 1950)
The puritans were so called because they claimed to be purists or purifiers in ecclesiastical polity: not because they laid more emphasis than other Christians on ‘purity’ in the sense of chastity. . . . We want, above all, to know what it felt like to be an early Protestant. . . . The experience is that of catastrophic conversion. The man who has passed through it feels like one who has waked from nightmare into ecstasy. Like an accepted lover, he feels that he has done nothing, and never could have done anything to deserve such astonishing happiness. Never again can he ‘crow from the dunghill of desert’. All the initiative has been on God’s side; all has been free, unbounded grace. And all will continue to be free, unbounded grace. His own puny and ridiculous efforts would be as helpless to retain the joy as they would have been to achieve it in the first place. Fortunately they need not. Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned. ‘Works’ have no ‘merit’, though of course faith, inevitably, even unconsciously, flows out into works of love at once. He is not saved because he does works of love: he does works of love because he is saved. It is faith alone that has saved him: faith bestowed by sheer gift. From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive-scratchings, all Protestant doctrines originally sprang.
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Introduction
But it is, I think, a gross exaggeration to picture the saving of a soul as being, normally, at all like the development from seed to flower. The very words repentance, regeneration, the New Man, suggest something very different.
‘Membership’, The Weight of Glory
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. . . . The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
Surprised by Joy, ch. 14
‘I have come to give myself up,’ he said.
‘It is well,’ said Mother Kirk. ‘You have come a long way round to reach this place, whither I would have carried you in a few moments. But it is very well.’
‘What must I do?’ said John.
‘You must take off your rags,’ said she, ‘as your friend has done already, and then you must dive into this water.’
‘Alas,’ said he, ‘I have never learned to dive.’
‘There is nothing to learn,’ she said. ‘The art of diving is not to do anything new but simply to cease doing something. You have only to let yourself go.’
The Pilgrim’s Regress, bk 9, ch. 4
It would, no doubt, have been possible for God to remove by miracle the results of the first sin ever committed by a human being; but this would not have been much good unless He was prepared to remove the results of the second sin, and of the third, and so on forever.
The Problem of Pain, ch. 5
We find thus by experience that there is no good applying to Heaven for earthly comfort. Heaven can give heavenly comfort; no other kind. And earth cannot give earthly comfort either. There is no earthly comfort in the long run.
The Four Loves, ch. 6