It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations -these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously – no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.
And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner – no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat – the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself is truly hidden.
This short excerpt is from The Weight of Glory, by C.S. Lewis. Lewis delivered this sermon at Oxford University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, on June 8, 1941. It was originally published in England in Theology, November, 1941, and by the S.P.C.K., 1942, and in 1949 by The Macmillan Company, USA.]
Top photo credit: Jake Yap giving a tour of Oxford University with a group of Koinonia students from London, UK, © 2002 Sword of the Spirit archives.
A short commentary on C.S. Lewis and the Doctrine of Deification
by Chris Jensen, published in October 31, 2007
The 1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory,” preached to one of the largest modern crowds ever to assemble at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, is an important statement of Lewis’ doctrine of deification. In the sermon, Lewis equates salvation with the Biblical term glory, a word commonly used in patristic writings on deification.32 Lewis thought glory carried twin connotations of luminosity and fame that together describe the goal of human life – the first suggests a transformation of human persons by divine grace into radiant new creatures, the second a personal encounter with God in which approbation and recognition were the blessed hallmarks. One of Lewis’ favorite ways to describe this glorious acceptance by God was through the image of the dance, which hints at the order, love, and festivity of heaven. Lewis once said that one of the most important differences between Christianity and all other religions is that the Trinitarian God is not a static thing (not even a single person) but “a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life.… Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.”33
Far from irreverent, this analogy calls to mind early theologians who described the dynamic exchange of love in God as perichoresis (meaning a dance or indwelling, from which we get our word choreography). As John Meyendorff has explained, “deification or theosis of the Greek fathers is an acceptance of human persons within a divine life, which already is itself a fellowship of love between three co-eternal Persons, welcoming humanity within their mutuality.”34 Such divine welcome is what Lewis has in mind when he says, “Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”35
In this sermon Lewis makes clear how deification is connected to his cherished theory of Joy or Sehnsucht (a.k.a. longing or desire), an idea which “flashes like summer lightning through all of Lewis’s work.”36 Its importance for Lewis can hardly be overstated. “In a sense,” he wrote in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, “the central story of my life is about nothing else.”37 The theory holds that human beings are conscious of a desire that no natural happiness will satisfy. Joy, then, is the fleeting and sweetly painful experience of longing for divine or numinous beauty. From his youth, Lewis had many experiences of such spiritual longings that kept him seeking something more, like “some vague picnicker’s hankering for a ‘better’ place.”38
Deification is the capstone to his theory of Joy insofar as it explains the means by which the “old ache” of longing finally will be satisfied on that day when we are “to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to become part of it.”39 Our choice in life, Lewis says, is either “to be like God” – by sharing the divine life – or to be miserable: “If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows… then we must starve eternally.”40 Adds Lewis, “There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.”41
Here the connection between deification and temptation becomes apparent, because human beings are drawn inevitably to lesser substitutes for happiness, immortality, or pleasure. These can become tiresome parodies of true joy, blurring our vision of more profound and otherworldly consolations: “Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us…. We are far too easily pleased.”4
See fully essay, Shine As the Sun: C.S. Lewis and the Doctrine of Deification, by Chris Jenson.
Clive Staples Lewis (November 29, 1898 – November 22, 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as Jack, was an Irish-born British novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist. He is also known for his fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy.
Lewis was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, and both authors were leading figures in the English faculty at Oxford University and in the informal Oxford literary group known as the “Inklings,” According to his memoir Surprised by Joy, Lewis had been baptised in the Church of Ireland at birth, but fell away from his faith during his adolescence. Owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, at the age of 32 Lewis returned to Christianity, becoming “a very ordinary layman of the Church of England.” His conversion had a profound effect on his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.