Vigils Reading

MORALITY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

From “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis

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Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them

by their moral choices… When a man who has been perverted from his youth and

taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from

some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered

at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would

do if we gave up life itself for a friend…

Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of

a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom

we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had

been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and

then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge.

We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But

God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.

Most of the man’s psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his

body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose,

that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of

nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good

digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to

complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see

every one as he really was. There will be surprises…

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God

says, “If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other

thing.”… I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are

turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little

different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your

innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing

either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that

is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one

that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with

itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is it is joy and peace and

knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage,

impotence, and eternal loneliness…

One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and

another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at. But the

little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to

himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage

next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it.

Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man

straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not. The bigness

or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters…

When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil

that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own

badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a

thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right… Good people know about both good and

evil: bad people do not know about either.