The Grand Miracle

Big idea

Summary

Lewis names the Incarnation — God becoming man in Christ — as the Grand Miracle: the single central event around which every other Christian miracle, and indeed the whole shape of the Christian story, organizes itself. All the other miracles are, in one way or another, working out the consequences of this one decisive act of God entering his own creation.

His governing image for the Incarnation is a great pattern of descent and reascent: God, the 'huge and complex episode' at the center of history, descends from the heights of divine glory down into the depths of human nature, further still into death and burial, and then rises again, carrying redeemed humanity up with him. Lewis compares this to a strong swimmer diving deep into dark water to retrieve something precious lying on the bottom, then rising back to the surface with his prize; and to the natural cycle familiar to every farmer, in which grain must first go down into the cold, dark earth and appear to be lost before it can rise again as a living crop, multiplied.

Lewis suggests that the many ancient myths of dying and rising corn-gods, found across widely scattered cultures, are not embarrassing parallels that discredit Christianity's originality; rather, he reads them as a kind of unconscious anticipation, a shadow cast backward by the one true event before it actually happened in history — myth becoming fact, in Lewis's phrase, at a real time and place. The Grand Miracle, on this reading, is not one miracle competing for attention alongside many equally important others; it is the key event that makes sense of everything else the book has to say, before or after it, in the Gospel story.

This chapter directly answers the philosophical case built across Chapters 2 through 6: if Supernaturalism is true, and the reasoning and moral sense we all rely on point beyond a merely natural universe, then the Incarnation is exactly the kind of definite, particular, world-altering act one might expect the God behind Nature to perform — not proof by itself, but the shape the evidence would have if Christianity's central claim were true.

Key points

• The Incarnation is 'the Grand Miracle': the one central event from which every other Christian miracle and the whole shape of the Gospel story take their meaning.
• Lewis's governing image is descent and reascent: God going down into human nature, further down into death, and rising again, carrying redeemed humanity with him.
• Ancient myths of dying and rising gods are read not as embarrassing rivals to Christianity but as unconscious anticipations of the one true historical event — 'myth become fact.'
• The Grand Miracle draws together the book's earlier philosophical argument (that something beyond Nature exists and reason/morality point to it) with the concrete, particular shape of the Christian story.

Illustrations & analogies

• A strong swimmer diving into dark water to retrieve something precious, then surfacing with his prize, pictures Christ's descent into death and his resurrection.
• A grain of wheat that must go down into cold earth and seem lost before it can rise again multiplied is used both as a natural parallel and, Lewis notes, as an image the New Testament itself uses for death and resurrection.

Related Scripture

• John 12:24
• Philippians 2:5-11

For reflection and discussion

1. What do you make of Lewis's claim that pagan dying-and-rising god myths are 'good dreams' anticipating the real event of Christ, rather than evidence against Christianity's originality?
2. How does the image of descent-then-ascent (the diver, the seed) change the way you think about the relationship between Christ's death and resurrection?