“A Christmas Sermon for Pagans” by C. S. Lewis

Posted on 20 December 2023 by Fr Aidan Kimel

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4 Responses to “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans” by C. S. Lewis

  1. Iainlovejoy says:
    20 December 2023 at 8:04 am

    I think I have to disagree with Lewis on this one. I don’t think he really properly distinguishes between pagan and Christian morality, which, I would say, are, or at least ought to be, fundamentally different in kind. C S Lewis suggests that the difference between pagan and Christian understanding is simply that Christians know what the rules actually are, while the pagans had them wrong. This doesn’t seem to me to be right. In the ancient Pagan conception of things, as I understand it, the world was entirely indifferent to man, and the gods were arbitrary, if not downright hostile. Morality was imposed by the whim of the gods based on what happened to irk them at any given time, and the aim was to avoid their attention in the main, or flatter or bribe them if one could. Christian morality, certainly as I understand it, is about experiencing divine love and reciprocating it and reflecting it in the world, and the world itself declares that love. It has nothing to do with appeasing divine wrath by following divinely-imposed rules.

    This in the main puts “post Christians” in a different (and better) position than the ancient pagans, it seems to me. With the exception of a few Nietzschian-style rejection of morality at all, most modern atheistic concepts of morality seem to assume love of neighbour, and creation as a whole, as being the essence of morality, and that these are objectively good things, but then struggle to find a logical basis as to why this should be so. Rejection of Christian morality tends to come from seeing Christian rules as opposing loving principles (as they see it) and from an idea of God as imposing arbitrary rules and punishing breaches of them in a way which they regard as, ultimately, immoral.

    Lewis refers to Christianity having the “cure.” What Christianity purports to “cure” is not, it seems to me, what Lewis suggests is the wrath of the gods / God for breaching their / His rules, but the suffering and death directly stemming from our own actions and disconnection from the divine. The route from post-Christian morality to Christian salvation is not persuasion that the death and suffering witnessed in the world is punishment by God for not doing what we are told, but recognition that the moral sense, love of neighbour and joy in creation that “post-Christians” recognise as true and valuable is indeed valuable precisely because what they are seeing / feeling but can’t identify is in fact from God and is God, and God in Christ Jesus is there to bring what they already know in their bones ought to and will be the case.

    Becoming frightened because sky-daddy will hurt them if they don’t comply would be a step back, not forward, in my view.

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    • David Llewellyn Dodds says:
      1 January 2024 at 10:07 pm

      I do not see that you are actually addressing what is said in the last three sentences of the antepenultimate paragraph.

      If The Strand had invited – or permitted – Lewis to add some suggested further reading in his own work (or the editor(s) had mentioned any books themselves), I suspect The Abolition of Man would be included. It gives a more detailed sense of the range and scope of ‘pagan’ (e.g., including Plato, and (presumably contemporary) Hindu thought). And it attends in detail to the problems of ‘post-Christian’ assumptions and any attempted basing of them.

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  2. Iainlovejoy says:
    7 January 2024 at 3:39 pm

    (Missed your comment earlier.)
    I am exactly addressing what Lewis says in that paragraph, in that I fundamentally disagree with it. Lewis’s notion is that our problems stem from being “up against” God and we are suffering because we refusing to obey him. The pagan understanding of this was that the suffering was direct punishment from the gods for lese majesty, disobedience and insufficient worship / respect, and that the purpose of avoiding offending the gods was so that they would not punish us but leave us to our own devices alone and unmolested. Lewis is not 100% clear on this, but he seems to me to be endorsing this view: I, by contrast, regard this view as fundamentally unChristian. The Christian notion is the opposite, that our present sufferings are precisely because our rejection of God means we are left to our own devices alone and unmolested, and it is we who have been making a mess of everything through our own efforts, not God. Lewis’s stages are, in my view, simply wrong. Modern post-Christians don’t think everything is fine, far from it. Stage 1 is Pagan: everything sucks and it’s God’s / the gods fault and we need to get them back on side and stop being angry at us and punishing us to fix it. Stage 2 is where most post Christians are at: everything sucks and we need to live in love of neighbour to fix it. Stage 3 is where we should be at: everything sucks, we need to live in love of neighbour to fix it, but we’re never going to do so except through God in Christ.

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  3. Iainlovejoy says:
    7 January 2024 at 3:40 pm

    I’ve finally noticed and replied to this, but being rubbish at technology means the reply has ended up being to the post generally, not you.

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