Mere Christianity: “Making Righteousness Readable"

by David C. Downing
C. S. Lewis’s earliest biographers, Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, wrote that if they were going to a desert island and could take only one Lewis book, it would probably be Mere Christianity. That’s a fascinating choice, considering that both men were thoroughly acquainted with Lewis’s whole body of work, including his children’s classics, the Narnia Chronicles, his international best-seller, The Screwtape Letters, and his ground-breaking literary studies such as The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image.

Yet I’m sure many other readers would agree with Green and Hooper. Mere Christianity is often cited as the single best introduction to Christian faith, a book that has been a spiritual milestone for thousands of readers. Both Charles Colson, founder of the Prison Fellowship, and Francis Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project, have discussed the pivotal role played by this book in their own journeys to faith.

Mere Christianity, first published in 1952, is based upon four series of radio talks that Lewis gave during World War II. The first broadcast, in August 1941, was heard by over a million listeners and created an unexpected sensation. Lewis’s careful reasoning, his folksy analogies, and his calm bass voice quickly caught on, and it is said his voice became the second most recognized in Britain, after that of Winston Churchill.

Lewis’s first series of broadcast talks argued that we all have an inborn sense of right and wrong, and that we all must admit we don’t live up to our own sense of decency and fair play. From this starting point, Lewis makes the case that all cultures share similar standards of right and wrong, moral laws that point to a lawgiver, a “Somebody” who is best sought not in the material world, for all its magnificence, but in our own hearts. Lewis concludes that, sooner or later, we will all meet the “gaze of absolute goodness,” an encounter that is sure to be both comforting and terrifying.

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Mere Friendship: Lewis on a Great Joy

by David J. Theroux
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that gives value to survival.”
—C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Love has been the favorite topic of philosophers, artists, poets, musicians, and religious leaders since humankind began. The Apostle John stated that “God is love,” and Jesus affirmed God’s law as the two commandments of unconditional love for God and loving one’s neighbor as oneself.

In The Four Loves, Lewis explores the nature, glories, and misuses of love in its four distinct forms: family affection (storge), friendship (philia), erotic love (eros), and charity or divine love (agape). He notes that “[a]s soon as we are fully conscience we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.” Yet, of the four loves, Lewis says that friendship is the least instinctive, or biological, and unnecessary from simply a survival basis. In contrast, the affection of parents for a child and the earthiness of erotic love are both directly connected organically to the natural world.

However, for the ancients, friendship was generally viewed as the highest state of happiness and human fulfillment. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle considers friendship among people as well as between people and animals to be virtuous and necessary as a means to happiness: “no one would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods.” Similarly, in On Friendship Cicero writes about how honesty, unconditional giving, and truthfulness are essential among friends.

The modern world has often viewed friendship with suspicion and even derision. For many modern thinkers, friendship has appeared as superficial and insubstantial compared with the “organic loves” mentioned above. Freud discounts friendship as a separate love altogether, claiming it merely to be disguised heterosexual or homosexual eros. For such moderns, only metaphysical materialism can be true and evident, and thus friendship as mere carnal instinct must be true. However, Lewis refutes this claim by pointing out that “nothing is less like a friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”

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