Mere Christianity - Book Four - The New Men

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book Four

 

 

Beyond Personality:

Or First Steps In The Doctrine Of The Trinity

 

 

 

11. The New Men

     In the last chapter I compared Christ's  work of making New Men to  the
process of turning a horse  into  a  winged creature.  I  used that  extreme
example in order to emphasise the point that it is not mere improvement  but
Transformation. The  nearest parallel to it in the  world of nature is to be
found in the  remarkable transformations  we can make in insects by applying
certain  rays to  them. Some  people think this is how Evolution worked. The
alterations in creatures on  which it all depends may  have been produced by
rays  coming  from outer  space. (Of course  once the alterations are there,
what  they  call "Natural Selection" gets to work on them: i.e.,  the useful
alterations survive and the other ones get weeded out.)

     Perhaps a modern man can understand the Christian idea best if he takes
it in connection with Evolution. Everyone now knows about Evolution (though,
of course, some educated people  disbelieve it): everyone has been told that
man has evolved from lower types  of life. Consequently, people often wonder
"What is  the  next  step? When is the  thing  beyond man going  to appear?"
Imaginative  writers try sometimes to  picture this next step-the "Superman"
as they call him; but they usually only succeed in picturing someone a  good
deal  nastier  than  man as we know him and then try to make up for that  by
sticking  on  extra  legs  or arms. But supposing  the next  step was  to be
something even  more different from the earlier steps than they ever dreamed
of? And is it not very likely it would be? Thousands of centuries  ago huge,
very heavily armoured  creatures were  evolved. If anyone  had  at that time
been watching  the course of Evolution  he would probably have expected that
it was going to go on to  heavier and heavier armour. But he would have been
wrong. The future had a card up  its sleeve which nothing at that time would
have  led him  to  expect.  It was  going to  spring  on him  little, naked,
unarmoured animals which  had better brains: and with those brains they were
going  to master the whole planet. They were not  merely going  to have more
power than the prehistoric monsters,  they were going to have  a new kind of
power. The next step was not only going to be different, but different  with
a new kind of difference. The stream of  Evolution was  not going to flow on
in the direction in which he saw it flowing: it  was in fact going to take a
sharp bend.

     Now it seems to  me that most of the  popular  guesses at the Next Step
are making just the  same sort  of mistake. People see (or at any rate  they
think they  see)  men developing greater  brains and getting greater mastery
over nature. And because they think the stream is flowing in that direction,
they imagine  it will go on flowing in  that  direction. But  I cannot  help
thinking  that  the  Next Step will  be  really new; it  will  go  off  in a
direction you could never have dreamed  of. It would hardly be worth calling
a New  Step unless it did.  I should expect  not merely difference but a new
kind  of difference. I should expect not merely  change but a  new method of
producing the change. Or, to make an Irish  bull, I should expect  the  next
stage in Evolution not to be a stage in Evolution at  all: should expect the
Evolution itself  as a method  of producing change,  will be superseded. And
finally,  I should not be surprised  if, when  the thing happened, very  few
people noticed that it was happening.

     Now,  if  you care  to talk  in  these  terms, the  Christian  view  is
precisely that the Next Step  has already appeared. And it is really new. It
is not a  change from brainy  men to brainier men: it  is a change that goes
off in a totally different direction-a change from being creatures of God to
being sons of  God.  The  first  instance appeared in Palestine two thousand
years ago. In  a sense, the change is not "Evolution" at all,  because it is
not something arising out of the natural  process  of  events but  something
coming  into  nature  from  outside. But that  is what I should  expect.  We
arrived at our idea of "Evolution" from studying the past. If there are real
novelties in  store  then of course our  idea,  based on the past,  will not
really cover them. And in fact this New Step differs from all previous  ones
not only in coming from outside nature but in several other ways as well.

     (1)  It is not carried on by sexual reproduction. Need we  be surprised
at that? There was a time before sex had appeared; development used to go on
by different methods. Consequently, we might  have expected that there would
come a  time when  sex  disappeared,  or  else (which  is  what  is actually
happening) a time  when sex, though it continued to exist, ceased to  be the
main channel of development.

     (2) At the earlier stages living organisms have had either no choice or
very little choice about taking the  new step. Progress  was,  in the  main,
something  that happened to them, not  something that they  did. But the new
step, the  step from being creatures to being sons,  is voluntary. At least,
voluntary  in one  sense.  It  is  not  voluntary in  the sense  that we, of
ourselves, could have chosen to take it or could even have imagined  it; but
it is voluntary in the sense that when it is offered to us we can refuse it.
We  can, if we  please, shrink back: we can dig in our heels and let the new
Humanity go on without us.

     (3)  I  have called  Christ the "first instance" of the new man. But of
course He is something much more than  that. He is not merely a new man, one
specimen of the species, but the  new  man. He  is the origin and centre and
life of all the new men. He came into the created universe, of His own will,
bringing with Him  the Zoe, the new  life. (I mean  new to us, of course: in
its own place Zoe has existed for ever and ever.) And He transmits it not by
heredity but by what I have called "good  infection." Everyone  who  gets it
gets it  by personal contact with Him.  Other men become "new" by  being "in
Him."

     (4) This step  is taken  at a different  speed  from the previous ones.
Compared  with the development of man  on  this  planet,  the  diffusion  of
Christianity  over the human race seems to go  like a flash of lightning-for
two thousand years is almost nothing in the history  of the universe. (Never
forget that we are all  still "the early Christians." The present wicked and
wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy: we are
still  teething.  The outer  world, no doubt,  thinks just the  opposite. It
thinks we are dying  of  old age. But it has drought that  so  often before!
Again and again it has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions
from without or corruptions from  within, by the rise of Mohammedanism,  the
rise   of  the  physical   sciences,  the  rise   of   great  anti-Christian
revolutionary movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its
first disappointment was over  the crucifixion. The Man came to  life again.
In a  sense-and  I  quite realise how  frightfully  unfair  it must seem  to
them-that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that
He started: and each time, just as  they are  patting down the  earth on its
grave, they suddenly  hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in
some new place. No wonder they hate us.)

     (5)  The  stakes are  higher.  By falling back at  the earlier steps  a
creature lost, at the worst, its few years of life on this earth: very often
it  did not lose  even  that. By falling back at this  step  we lose a prize
which is (in the strictest sense of the word) infinite. For now the critical
moment has arrived. Century by century God has guided nature up to the point
of producing  creatures which  can (if  they will) be  taken  right  out  of
nature,  turned  into  "gods." Will  they allow themselves to be taken? In a
way, it is like the crisis of birth. Until  we rise and follow Christ we are
still parts of Nature, still  in the womb of our great mother. Her pregnancy
has been long and painful and anxious, but  it has reached its  climax.  The
great moment has come. Everything is ready. The Doctor has arrived. Will the
birth "go off all right"? But of course it differs from an ordinary birth in
one important respect. In an ordinary birth the  baby  has not  much choice:
here it has. I wonder what an ordinary baby  would do if it  had the choice.
It might prefer to stay in the dark and warmth  and safety of  the womb. For
of course it would  think the womb meant safety. That would be just where it
was wrong; for if it stays there it will die.

     on this view the thing has happened: the new step has been taken and is
being taken. Already  the new men  are dotted here  and  there all over  the
earth. Some, as I have  admitted, are still  hardly recognisable: but others
can be recognised. Every now and then one  meets them. Their very voices and
faces  are different from  ours;  stronger, quieter,  happier, more radiant.
They begin where most of us leave off.  They  are, I say, recognisable;  but
you  must know  what to look  for.  They will not  be very like the  idea of
"religious people" which you have formed from your  general reading. They do
not draw  attention to themselves. You tend to think that you are being kind
to them when they are  really  being  kind to  you. They love  you more than
other men  do,  but  they need  you less. (We must get over  wanting  to  be
needed: in  some goodish people, specially women, that is the hardest of all
temptations to  resist.) They will usually seem to have  a lot of  time: you
will wonder  where  it comes from. When you have recognised one of them, you
will  recognise the next one much more easily. And  I  strongly suspect (but
how  should  I  know?)  that  they recognise  one  another  immediately  and
infallibly,  across  every barrier of  colour, sex, class, age, and even  of
creeds. In that way, to become holy is rather like joining a secret society.
To put it at the very lowest, it must be great fun.

     But you must not imagine  that the new men are,  in the ordinary sense,
all  alike. A good deal of what I  have been saying in this  last book might
make  you  suppose  that  that  was bound to be so. To become new  men means
losing what we now call "ourselves." Out of ourselves,  into Christ, we must
go. His will is to become ours and  we are to  think His  thoughts, to "have
the mind of Christ" as the Bible  says. And if  Christ is  one, and if He is
thus to be  "in"  us  all,  shall we  not be  exactly the same? It certainly
sounds like it; but in fact it is not so.

     It is difficult here to get a good illustration; because, of course, no
other two things are related to each other just as the Creator is related to
one of His creatures.  But I will try two very imperfect illustrations which
may give a hint of  the truth. Imagine a lot of people who have always lived
in the dark. You  come and try to describe to them  what  light is like. You
might tell them that if they come into the light  that same light would fall
on  them  all  and they  would all reflect it and thus become  what we  call
visible. Is it not  quite possible that they would imagine that, since  they
were  all receiving  the same light, and all  reacting to it in the same way
(i.e., all reflecting it), they would all look alike? Whereas you and I know
that the light will in  fact bring out, or show up, how different they  are.
Or again, suppose a person who knew nothing about salt. You give him a pinch
to taste and he experiences a particular  strong, sharp taste. You then tell
him that in your country people use  salt in all their cookery. Might he not
reply  "In  that case I  suppose  all your dishes taste  exactly  the  same:
because the taste of that  stuff you have just given me is so strong that it
will kill the taste of  everything else."  But you and I know that the  real
effect of salt is exactly the opposite. So far from killing the taste of the
egg and the tripe and  the cabbage,  it actually brings it  out. They do not
show their real taste till you have  added the salt. (Of course, as I warned
you, this is  not really a  very  good illustration, because you can,  after
all, kill the other  tastes by putting in too much salt, whereas  you cannot
kill the  taste of a human  personality by putting in too much  Christ. I am
doing the best I can.)

     It is something like that with Christ  and us. The more  we get what we
now call "ourselves" out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly
ourselves we become. There  is so much  of Him that millions and millions of
"little Christs," all different, will still be too few to express Him fully.
He made them all. He invented-as an author invents characters in a novel-all
the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real
selves are all waiting for  us in Him. It is  no good trying to  "be myself"
without Him.  The  more I resist Him and  try to  live on my own, the more I
become dominated  by  my own heredity and  upbringing  and surroundings  and
natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call "Myself" becomes  merely the
meeting place for trains of events which I never  started and which I cannot
stop.  What I call "My  wishes" become merely  the desires thrown up  by  my
physical  organism  or  pumped  into  me  by other men's  thoughts  or  even
suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night's sleep will be
the real  origins  of what I flatter  myself  by regarding as my own  highly
personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me
in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard
as  my own personal political  ideals, I am not, in my natural state, nearly
so much of a person as  I like to believe: most  of what I call "me" can  be
very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to
His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own. At
the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now.
There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until  you have given up your
self  to Him you will not have a  real self.  Sameness is to  be  found most
among the most "natural" men, not among  those who surrender to Christ.  How
monotonously alike  all  the great  tyrants  and conquerors have  been:  how
gloriously different are the saints.

     But there must  be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away
"blindly" so to speak. Christ will indeed give  you a real  personality: but
you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality
is what you  are bothering  about you are not going to Him at  all. The very
first step is  to  try to forget  about the self altogether.  Your real, new
self (which is  Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it  is  His)
will  not come as  long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are
looking for Him. Does  that sound  strange?  The  same  principle holds, you
know, for more everyday  matters. Even in social life, you will never make a
good impression on other  people until you stop thinking about what  sort of
impression  you are making.  Even in literature and art,  no man who bothers
about originality  will ever be original: whereas if you  simply try to tell
the truth (without caring twopence how  often it  has  been told before) you
will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up  your  self,
and you will  find  your  real self.  Lose  your life and  you will save it.
Submit to death, death of your  ambitions and favourite wishes every day and
death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of  your being,
and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not
given away will ever be  really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will
ever be  raised from  the dead. Look for  yourself, and you will find in the
long run only hatred,  loneliness, despair,  rage, ruin, and decay. But look
for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lewis uses the idea of evolution to describe the Christian transformation.

1. What is the next step in the evolution of man that Lewis describes?
2. How does this "new step" differ from previous ones?
3. How is Christ not merely a new man but the new man?
4. How are the new men recognized?
5. Are all people in Christ the same? How is being in Christ like light or salt?
6. What is the principle which runs through life from top to bottom?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do NOT get all bent out of shape over Lewis' use of Evolution as an illustration. He uses it to very, very good effect, regardless of anyone's personal view of Evolution.

In this chapter, Lewis uses the illustration of Evolutionary change. Of how man came to be (according to that theory), and the common views of "what's next" for humanity, according to Evolutionary extrapolation.

But what should we expect? We should expect something completely new, not something marginally new. Lewis makes the case that "the Next Step" is already upon us.... Christianity is the Next Step for humanity.

1. It is not carried out through sexual reproduction.
2. In this Step, we get a choice -- we are free to reject the change.
3. Christ is not just the "First" of the new creature, Christ is the new creature. We get the transformation by direct contact with Him!
4. This Step happens at a different speed -- in a flash!
   • We are still "the early Christians"
   • our present wickedness, divisions, issues, corruptions and failures are the teething problems of our infancy
   • The World keeps thinking we are dying or dead only to find us alive somewhere else
5. The stakes are high. It's not merely a matter of a life or species not living, if we fail in this step, everything is lost.

Every now and then one meets them. Their very voices and faces are different from ours; stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. They are, I say, recognisable; but you must know what to look for. They will not be very like the idea of 'religious people' which you have formed from your general reading. They do not draw attention to themselves. You tend to think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do, but they need you less. (We must get over wanting to be needed: in some goodish people, specially women, that is the harder of all temptations to resist.) They will usually seem to have a lot of time: you will wonder where it comes from. When you have recognised one of them, you will recognise the next one much more easily. And I strongly suspect (but how should I know?) that they recognise one another immediately and infallibly, across every barrier of colour, sex, class, age, and even of creeds. In that way, to become holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at the very lowest, it must be great fun.

• These new men are not all alike.
• In Christ, we are made wholly into the individuals God created us to be
• The Light of God makes our individuality more apparent. The Salt of Christ brings out our unique flavors
• If we go to him, clinging to our "selves" or seeking first our true selves, we won't get in.
• We have to die to our selves and our desires. THEN, we are filled with the Light and Salt, and God forms us into the selves He intended for us to be.
• There are no real Personalities outside of God. Everything outside of god can be explained away with genetics, personal history, opportunity... the trains of history.

At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most 'natural' men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints. But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away 'blindly' to so speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom, Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

 

 

 

The End

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt 

http://www.opendiscipleship.org/Mere_Christianity_leaders_notes

http://www.gordy-stith.com/Mere%20Christianity/mere_christianity_study_guide.htm