MERE CHRISTIANITY is Lewis’s most well-known Christian text. For that reason, I was hesitant to read it to our podcast, wanting to promote his lesser known, but excellent series of essays.
I have always found the ”Preface” a worthy and incisive part of what MERE CHRISTIANITY gives us. For me, there are two points drawn from it that have stayed with me from the moment I first read the text, one a metaphor and the other a point of special theoretical importance concerning the use of language.
The latter first. Our use of language is indexical. That is, its purpose is communication, which contains the notion of ”common” within itself. While language changes and evolves, Lewis sets a stake in the ground here around which I myself have ever-after tied myself. ”Christianity” means SOMETHING, as do all useful words. I would guess that Lewis, like me, would concede that what it means is never fully captured in any human use of the term. None of us know the Divine Mystery in Christ, but we can agree about the pointing function, and we can agree that whatever is added to (or taken from) the reality by our use of the term, is false and wrong. The ”mere” of MERE CHRISTIANITY means that we are talking of reality itself, and it is God who defines it, not us. Our purpose in relation to Christianity is discovery, not construction. Our duty is faithfulness to the Divine idea, not the formation and promotion of our own.
”The point is not a theological or moral one. It is only a question of using words so that we can all understand what is being said.”
Finally, the metaphor. In The Magician’s Nephew Digory and Polly explore the attic in their row home, finding that it traverses all the homes in their row, a sort of neutral place between homes, not part of any but connecting them all. Likewise, by magic they travel to the Wood Between the Worlds, a sleepy, rich, uneventful place, a place of potential but not actual commitment, action and opportunity. Different worlds are accessed here by choosing and committing oneself to a pool. One is either all in, or all out. For me, this metaphor has represented the place of indecision, most notably between theism and atheism. Agnosticism is the one completely defensible intellectual position, but it gets us nowhere when we simply stay there. It seems to me cowardice, unmanly lack of decision and commitment, but it is also a necessary way-station on the journey to somewhere. It is Socrates to Plato, the bare plains of reality, of ignorance stark and barren. The temptation is to fall asleep here instead of moving on into the richness of commitment and life, but this is only found by jumping into faith feet first. Lewis ends his Preface here with a variation on this same metaphor. Mere Christianity, he says, ”is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms.... The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try various doors, not a place to live in .... you must regard it as waiting, not as camping ... and ... even in the hall you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house.... When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.” I think that even for Lewis the Wood Between the Worlds and the Hall form one continuous paradoxical metaphor.
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