C.S. Lewis (part II)

Evangelizer and defender of the authentic evangelical faith

Author: Fr. Massimo Cardamone

Lewis considered his ability to translate Christian doctrine into simple language, not so much as a mere instrumental reality, but as his particular vocation. He wrote: «When I started, Christianity came before the great mass of other Christians who do not believe either in the extremely emotional form offered by the revivalists or in the unintelligible language of the clergy of high culture. Most people weren’t reached by either. Therefore, my job was simply that of a translator, of a person who transformed or carried the Christian doctrine, or what he believed was such, into the vernacular, into a language that uneducated people could listen to and understand. At least one thing is certain: if true theologians had faced this difficult translation work about a hundred years ago, when they began to lose contact with the people, the people for whom Christ died, there would have been no room for me now».

He also strenuously opposed the subjectivity of faith, the germ that infected many individual believers, who replaced the divine authority of Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium of the Church, with a private “do it yourself” creed, both with regard to things to believe and to the moral practice to be followed. In the essay The poison of subjectivism, to the objection that binding to a moral and immutable code means undermining the foundations of possible human progress and being condemned to a quiescent stagnation, he replied: “Space does not stink, because it has maintained its three dimensions from the beginning: the square on the hypotenuse did not make mushrooms continuing to be equal to the sums of the squares on the other two sides; love is not dishonored by constancy and when we wash our hands we are looking for stagnation and turning back the clock, restoring artificially our hands towards the status quo in which we had started the day and resisting the natural tendency of events, which would lead to increase their dirt constantly from our birth to our death. For the term and adjective “stagnant” we use a substitute, the descriptive term “permanent”, a permanent moral standard. Maybe a foreclosure to progress? On the contrary, if an immutable standard is not set, progress is impossible, if the good is a fixed point, at least it is possible to get closer and closer to it, but if the terminal is as mobile as the train, how is it possible that the train can approach this end point? Our ideas of the good can change but they cannot change for the better or for the worse, if there is no absolute and immutable good to which they can approximate or from which they can withdraw. We can continue to obtain a sum that is ever closer to the right, only if the perfectly right answer is stagnant”.

Here are the other teachings that Lewis offers: the law of simplicity that must characterize our evangelical witness; maturing the awareness that subjectivism is for faith a poisonous dart, which neutralizes the prophetic and truthful charge of the Gospel.