C. S. Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church. C. S. Lewis

you may say, to address to a First Cause, an Ens Realissimum, or an Unmoved Mover. It might be argued, and I think I would argue myself, that even such an aridly philosophical God rather fails to invite than actually repels a personal approach. It would, at any rate, do no harm to try it. But I fully admit that most of those who, having reached Faith-A, pray for Faith-B, do so because they have already had something like religious experience. Perhaps the best way of putting it would be to say that Faith-A converts into religious experience what was hitherto only potentially or implicitly religious. In this modified form I would accept Professor Price’s view that philosophical proofs never, by themselves, lead to religion. Something at least quasi-religious uses them before, and the ‘proofs’ remove an inhibition which was preventing their development into religion proper.

      This is not exactly fides quaerens intellectum,² for these quasi-religious experiences were not fides. In spite of Professor Price’s rejection I still think Otto’s account of the Numinous³ is the best analysis of them we have. I believe it is a mistake to regard the Numinous as merely an affair of ‘feeling’. Admittedly, Otto can describe it only by referring to the emotions it arouses in us; but then nothing can be described except in terms of its effects in consciousness. We have in English an exact name for the emotion aroused by the Numinous, which Otto, writing in German, lacked; we have the word Awe–an emotion very like fear, with the important difference that it need imply no estimate of danger. When we fear a tiger, we fear that it may kill us: when we fear a ghost–well, we just fear the ghost, not this or that mischief which it may do us. The Numinous or Awful is that of which we have this, as it were, objectless or disinterested fear–this awe. And ‘the Numinous’ is not a name for our own feeling of Awe any more than ‘the Contemptible’ is a name for contempt. It is the answer to the question ‘Of what do you feel awe?’ And what we feel awe of is certainly not itself awe.

      With Otto and, in a sense, with Professor Price, I would find the seed of religious experience in our experience of the Numinous. In an age like our own such experience does occur but, until religion comes and retrospectively transforms it, it usually appears to the subject to be a special form of aesthetic experience. In ancient times I think experience of the Numinous developed into the Holy only in so far as the Numinous (not in itself at all necessarily moral) came to be connected with the morally good. This happened regularly in Israel, sporadically elsewhere. But even in the higher Paganism, I do not think this process led to anything exactly like fides. There is nothing credal in Paganism. In Israel we do get fides but this is always connected with certain historical affirmations. Faith is not simply in the numinous Elohim, nor even simply in the holy Jahweh, but in the God ‘of our fathers’, the God who called Abraham and brought Israel out of Egypt. In Christianity this historical element is strongly reaffirmed. The object of faith is at once the ens entium⁴ of the philosophers, the Awful Mystery of Paganism, the Holy Law given of the moralists, and Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and rose again on the third day.

      Thus we must admit that Faith, as we know it, does not flow from philosophical argument alone; nor from experience of the Numinous alone; nor from moral experience alone; nor from history alone; but from historical events which at once fulfil and transcend the moral category, which link themselves with the most numinous elements in Paganism, and which (as it seems to us) demand as their presupposition the existence of a Being who is more, but not less, than the God whom many reputable philosophers think they can establish.

      Religious experience, as we know it, really involves all these elements. We may, however, use the word in a narrower sense to denote moments of mystical, or devotional, or merely numinous experience; and we may then ask, with Professor Price, how such moments, being a kind of visio, are related to faith, which by definition is ‘not sight’. This does not seem to me one of the hardest questions. ‘Religious experience’ in the narrower sense comes and goes: especially goes. The operation of Faith is to retain, so far as the will and intellect are concerned, what is irresistible and obvious during the moments of special grace. By faith we believe always what we hope hereafter to see always and perfectly and have already seen imperfectly and by flashes. In relation to the philosophical premises a Christian’s faith is of course excessive: in relation to what is sometimes shown him, it is perhaps just as often defective. My faith even in an earthly friend goes beyond all that could be demonstratively proved; yet in another sense I may often trust him less than he deserves.

       [8] THE SEEING EYE

      First published in the American periodical Show, Volume III (February 1963), the editor entitled it ‘Onward, Christian Spacemen, a title which Lewis so disliked that it was renamed for publication in Christian Reflections (1998).

      The Russians, I am told, report that they have not found God in outer space. On the other hand, a good many people in many different times and countries claim to have found God, or been found by God, here on earth.

      The conclusion some want us to draw from these data is that God does not exist. As a corollary, those who think they have met Him on earth were suffering from a delusion.

      But other conclusions might be drawn:

      1 We have not yet gone far enough in space. There had been ships on the Atlantic for a good time before America was discovered.

      2 God does exist but is locally confined to this planet.

      3 The Russians did find God in space without knowing it, because they lacked the requisite apparatus for detecting Him.

      4 God does exist but is not an object either located in a particular part of space nor diffused, as we once thought ‘ether’ was, throughout space.

      The first two conclusions do not interest me. The sort of religion for which they could be a defence would be a religion for savages: the belief in a local deity who can be contained in a particular temple, island or grove. That, in fact, seems to be the sort of religion about which the Russians–or some Russians, and a good many people in the West–are being irreligious. It is not in the least disquieting that no astronauts have discovered a god of that sort. The really disquieting thing would be if they had.

      The third and fourth conclusions are the ones for my money.

      Looking for God–or Heaven–by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare’s plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play. But he is never present in the same way as Falstaff or Lady Macbeth. Nor is he diffused through the play like a gas.

      If there were an idiot who thought plays existed on their own, without an author (not to mention actors, producer, manager, stage-hands and what not), our belief in Shakespeare would not be much affected by his saying, quite truly, that he had studied all the plays and never found Shakespeare in them.

      The rest of us, in varying degrees according to our perceptiveness, ‘found Shakespeare’ in the plays. But it is a quite different sort of ‘finding’ from anything our poor friend has in mind.

      Even he has in reality been in some way affected by Shakespeare, but without knowing it. He lacked the necessary apparatus for detecting Shakespeare.

      Now of course this is only an analogy. I am not suggesting at all that the existence of God is as easily established as the existence of Shakespeare. My point is that, if God does exist, He is related to the universe more as an author is related to a play than as one object in the universe is related to another.

      If God created the universe, He created space-time, which is to the universe as the metre is to a poem or the key is to music. To look for Him as one item within the framework which He Himself invented is nonsensical.

      If God–such a God as any adult religion believes in–exists, mere movement in