Reading Stuff

C.S. Lewis, of whom I’m a fan, did not feel that atheism (in my case, better labeled agnosticism) and Christianity were compatible.  In Mere Christianity, he asserts that “Either [Jesus] was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. […] But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.”  While my respect for Lewis and his oeuvre are here recorded, I do not agree with his assertion.  Let me explain why.

The Sermon on the Mount, as presented in Matthew, is, to me, as Carl Sagan once wrote in Contact, “one of the greatest ethical speeches ever written.”  It defines the holiest of human philosophies—that we should love others not because they deserve it, but rather because loving those nominally undeserving is what separates any real concept of love from mere reciprocity: “If you love those who love you,” says Jesus, “what merit is there in that?  Do not tax collectors do as much?”  And it is important that we distinguish love from reciprocity: if we feel that love is paying for what you get, than love is as mundane as buying lunch and as altruistic as revenge.  No, love, according to Matthew’s rendition of this sermon, is transcending the facile human idea of just deserts; it is about loving all equally with the impartiality of a sun shining on all people alike, withholding from neither the good nor the bad.

Now, to return to Lewis’ assertion, one need not believe in the divinity of Jesus the Nazarene to hold with what I’ve just articulated: one need only look at the particular words of the sermon and not any extracurricular mythologizing that any of the disciples add to the rest of the narrative of his life.  Lewis holds that Jesus asserted his divinity, and that the words of the evangelists must be fully accepted or wholly rejected.  I don’t buy that dualism for an instant.  Accepting that Jesus is divine is, after all, not accepting the words of Jesus, who never by anyone’s contention wrote anything, but the words of his followers that wrote about him.  And frankly, the words of the sermon, whoever wrote them, are astounding.  Whether we take them to be verbatim recitation of Jesus of is largely irrelevant to their value, just as taking the words of Homer or Hesiod or Plato or Lao Tsu or the Buddha to be the words of one man is unnecessary in appreciating their majesty.  If, as some suggest, the plays of Shakespeare were written by Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, it would not make for less great plays.  To phrase the matter differently: should we sacrifice the luster of a gem to ascertain the biography of its maker?  I can, and do, think that the walking-on-water, rising-from-the-dead stuff is almost certainly a bunch of bunk, and yet can read Matthew and see the profound wisdom in the teachings of Jesus.  Contrary to what Lewis believed, I only have to view the latter as deity or loon as much as I believe Matthew an accurate historian, which is to say not very much.  And whether or not I view Matthew as accurate biographer, as distinct from historian, I can (and will) still cherry-pick the brilliant piece of rhetoric that  is his record of the Sermon on the Mount, without having to buy and consume (or reject) his larger narrative as a whole.

Ultimately, it is not so intellectually problematic as is argued to believe in the divine inspiration of a text (concluding that there is universal utility in its message) without believing in the Divine Inspiration (incontrovertible literal truth) of a text: the Bhagavad-Gita is my favorite book, yet I do not believe it to be a terribly accurate report of any ancient world battle, any more than I see Homer’s siege of Troy as an accurate representation of an ancient world battle, nor the Odyssey as an accurate portrayal of a man’s journey home.  Myth exists and is (justly) revered for its intellectual and spiritual benefits, but certainly not for its historical accuracy.  Jesus can be, and in fact is, profoundly inspiring.  That I must choose to accept that a man blighted fig trees and raised the dead, or instead that he was a lunatic with a God complex, is a ridiculous choice that I reject out of hand (sorry, C.S.).  One can find inspiration aplenty in myth, without having to subscribe to its literal authenticity.  I would argue that literal subscription is precise evidence that one has missed the inspiration.  One can see wisdom in fable, and understand that to be the principal value of fable, without having to sign on to orthodoxies about apostasy.  Atheists and agnostics can love the great spiritual books of the world by believing in their philosophical, enduring, human truths without believing in them literally.  Even scriptural literalists, on some level, know this: because what Swift or Dickens or Joyce or Faulkner wrote is not true in an actual sense does not mean that it lacks truth in a more permanent sense; truth often comes packaged in tales, as Jesus himself seemed to know through his frequent use of parables; and it is folly to assert that fact and truth are always the same—the myth of every age and place has demonstrated the contrary.  It is odd that a man like Lewis who wrote his own epic fable about Christianity (y’all know the one I mean) would assume so fervently that men 2,000 years earlier had not done the same, for similar reasons.