Christian Reflections. C. S. Lewis

not repeat ‘image’, but I question whether the omission is intentional, and I suggest that we shall have a fairly Pauline picture of this whole series of Head relations running from God to woman if we picture each term as the ‘image and glory’ of the preceding term. And I suppose that of which one is the image and glory is that which one glorifies by copying or imitating. Let me once again insist that I am not trying to twist St Paul’s metaphors into a logical system. I know well that whatever picture he is building up, he himself will be the first to throw it aside when it has served its turn and to adopt some quite different picture when some new aspect of the truth is present to his mind. But I want to see clearly the sort of picture implied in this passage – to get it clear however temporary its use or partial its application. And it seems to me a quite clear picture; we are to think of some original divine virtue passing downwards from rung to rung of a hierarchical ladder, and the mode in which each lower rung receives it is, quite frankly, imitation.

      What is perhaps most startling in this picture is the apparent equivalence of the woman-man and man-God relation with the relation between Christ and God, or, in Trinitarian language, with the relation between the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. As a layman and a comparatively recently reclaimed apostate I have of course, no intention of building a theological system – still less of setting up a catena of New Testament metaphors as a criticism of the Nicene or the Athanasian creed, documents which I wholly accept. But it is legitimate to notice what kinds of metaphor the New Testament uses; more especially when what we are in search of is not dogma but a kind of flavour or atmosphere. And there is no doubt that this kind of proportion sum – A:B : : B:C – is quite freely used in the New Testament where A and B represent the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. Thus St Paul has already told us earlier in the same epistle that we are ‘of Christ’ and Christ is ‘of God’ (3:23). Thus again in the Fourth Gospel, Our Lord Himself compares the relation of the Father to the Son with that of the Son to His flock, in respect of knowledge (10:15) and of love (15:9).

      I suggest, therefore, that this picture of a hierarchical order in which we are encouraged – though, of course, only from certain points of view and in certain respects – to regard the Second Person Himself as a step, or stage, or degree, is wholly in accord with the spirit of the New Testament. And if we ask how the stages are connected the answer always seems to be something like imitation, reflection, assimilation. Thus in Galatians 4:19, Christ is to be ‘formed’ inside each believer – the verb here used

meaning to shape, to figure, or even to draw a sketch. In First Thessalonians (1:6) Christians are told to imitate St Paul and the Lord, and elsewhere (1 Corinthians 11:1) to imitate St Paul as he in turn imitates Christ – thus giving us another stage of progressive imitation. Changing the metaphor we find that believers are to acquire the fragrance of Christ, redolere Christum (2 Corinthians 2:16): that the glory of God has appeared in the face of Christ as, at the creation, light appeared in the universe (2 Corinthians 4:6); and, finally, if my reading of a much disputed passage is correct, that a Christian is to Christ as a mirror to an object (2 Corinthians 3:18).

      These passages, you will notice, are all Pauline; but there is a place in the Fourth Gospel which goes much further – so far that if it were not a Dominical utterance we would not venture to think along such lines. There (5:19) we are told that the Son does only what He sees the Father doing. He watches the Father’s operations and does the same

or ‘copies’. The Father, because of His love for the Son, shows Him all that He does. I have already explained that I am not a theologian. What aspect of the Trinitarian reality Our Lord, as God, saw while He spoke these words, I do not venture to define; but I think we have a right and even a duty to notice carefully the earthly image by which He expressed it – to see clearly the picture He puts before us. It is a picture of a boy learning to do things by watching a man at work. I think we may even guess what memory, humanly speaking, was in His mind. It is hard not to imagine that He remembered His boyhood, that He saw Himself as a boy in a carpenter’s shop, a boy learning how to do things by watching while St Joseph did them. So taken, the passage does not seem to me to conflict with anything I have learned from the creeds, but greatly to enrich my conception of the Divine sonship.

      Now it may be that there is no absolute logical contradiction between the passages I have quoted and the assumptions of modern criticism: but I think there is so great a difference of temper that a man whose mind was at one with the mind of the New Testament would not, and indeed could not, fall into the language which most critics now adopt. In the New Testament the art of life itself is an art of imitation: can we, believing this, believe that literature, which must derive from real life, is to aim at being ‘creative’, ‘original’, and ‘spontaneous’? ‘Originality’ in the New Testament is quite plainly the prerogative of God alone; even within the triune being of God it seems to be confined to the Father. The duty and happiness of every other being is placed in being derivative, in reflecting like a mirror. Nothing could be more foreign to the tone of scripture than the language of those who describe a saint as a ‘moral genius’ or a ‘spiritual genius’ thus insinuating that his virtue or spirituality is ‘creative’ or ‘original’. If I have read the New Testament aright, it leaves no room for ‘creativeness’ even in a modified or metaphorical sense. Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours. I am not here supporting the doctrine of total depravity, and I do not say that the New Testament supports it; I am saying only that the highest good of a creature must be creaturely – that is, derivative or reflective – good. In other words, as St Augustine makes plain (De Civ. Dei 12, cap. 1), pride does not only go before a fall but is a fall – a fall of the creature’s attention from what is better, God, to what is worse, itself.

      Applying this principle to literature, in its greatest generality, we should get as the basis of all critical theory the maxim that an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom. Our criticism would therefore from the beginning group itself with some existing theories of poetry against others. It would have affinities with the primitive or Homeric theory in which the poet is the mere pensioner of the Muse. It would have affinities with the Platonic doctrine of a transcendent Form partly imitable on earth; and remoter affinities with the Aristotelian doctrine of

and the Augustan doctrine about the imitation of Nature and the Ancients. It would be opposed to the theory of genius as, perhaps, generally understood; and above all it would be opposed to the idea that literature is self-expression.

      But here some distinctions must be made. I spoke just now of the ancient idea that the poet was merely the servant of some god, of Apollo, or the Muse; but let us not forget the highly paradoxical words in which Homer’s Phemius asserts his claim to be a poet:

      ‘I am self-taught; a god has inspired me with all manner of songs.’ It sounds like a direct contradiction. How can he be self-taught if the god has taught him all he knows? Doubtless because the god’s instruction is given internally, not through the senses, and is therefore regarded as part of the Self, to be contrasted with such external aids as, say, the example of other poets. And this seems to blur the distinction I am trying to draw between Christian imitation and the ‘originality’ praised by modern critics. Phemius obviously claims to be original, in the sense of being no other poet’s disciple, and in the same breath admits his complete dependence on a supernatural teacher. Does not this let in ‘originality’ and ‘creativeness’ of the only kind that have ever been claimed?

      If you said: ‘The only kind that ought to have been claimed’, I would agree; but as things are, I think the distinction remains, though it becomes finer than our first glance suggested. A Christian and an unbelieving poet may both be equally original in the sense that they neglect the example of their poetic forebears