ARE WE LOVABLE OR UGLY?

Dear Professor Theophilus:

I have been reading quite a bit of the Christian writers G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis over the past few months and I am having difficulty reconciling them. In The Great Divorce, Lewis exposes the utter ugliness of sin. It includes the story of a mother and her son, in which her seeming motherly love is exposed as pure selfishness with a complete lack of regard for her son's true good. This makes me think that when I see the average Joe, he is utterly ugly, and only my own spiritual blindness makes me think he's "a pretty good guy."

Chesterton, on the other hand, has such a deep love and admiration for every common man that through his writing I almost start thinking that everyone is wonderful. He can cast even the grouchiness of an old man in such a lovable light that you would almost be glad the old man was a curmudgeon. I haven't yet come across Chesterton's views on depravity, but I assume they are very similar to Lewis. How can people be utterly ugly and sinful without salvation, yet be so beautiful in their own ways and seemingly even in their sins? Is there a contradiction between these two ideas? What am I missing?

Reply

Good question. The reason it throws you is that in order to make any progress with it, we have to make some distinctions. There is the sin, there is the person disfigured by the sin, and there is the disfigurement itself.

Yes, sin itself is utterly ugly and loathsome, but stop for a moment and think what this loathsomeness implies. The reason why the woman in Lewis's story horrifies us isn't simply that she makes use of her son, or that she has no consideration for him, or even that she tries to engulf him and make him an organ of her own personality. After all, we don't blame an earthworm for being selfish toward other earthworms, a rock for having no consideration for other rocks, or an amoeba for engulfing smaller amoebas. The reason the behavior of the woman is so ugly is that it debases and perverts something beautiful. She is more than an earthworm, a rock, or an amoeba. For all her sin, she is a human being — an image of the Lover of Souls, meant to become a perfect likeness. Nothing God has given us is incapable of being taken into that likeness, if only we yield it to Him. Laid on His anvil, shaped by the hammers of His grace, her merely instinctual mother-love could have been made into a golden glory. Taken from His anvil and laid on the anvil of her selfishness, it has become a creeping horror.

Remember that in Lewis's story, the process of corruption has gone very far. The woman's life is over. What she has been choosing all her life has at last come upon her; she has irrevocably identified with her separation from God. So terribly has her mother-love been twisted and bloated by self-love that it takes effort for us to remember the beautiful thing that was ruined. She resents God for wanting better for her son than she does. At the very threshold of damnation, knowing that her son is in heaven, she wants to keep him with her.

But she wasn't always like that, and it isn't in her state that we meet other people in this life. Because of preserving grace, their beauty has not yet been totally overgrown. They are still full of possibilities, still within range of redemption. If this were not so, we could not even desire to be healed. Both Lewis and Chesterton know this.

Don't think for a moment that Chesterton considers the people in hell one bit nicer than Lewis does. But in the books you have read, he writes mainly about the charming, infuriating, astonishing, bewildering varieties of people in this present life. We are fallen and in desperate need of grace, but good is not annihilated; by that same grace it yet gleams in a thousand piercing hues, like the rubies and purples and cobalts of a stained glass window. Nothing stands still. Nobody is in his final state, as he will be in hell or in heaven. Everyone and everything is getting either better or worse, either lovelier or uglier, under the influences of either grace or sin or both. Some things in us are very good and some are very bad, some are drawing nearer to Christ and some moving further away, and some move in maddening spirals. There are a thousand things to laugh, cry, sing, shout, spin stories, and tell riddles about.

That, I think, is the angle from which you have to view the world to see how Chesterton can show a crotchety old curmudgeon as lovable in all his crankiness. That crankiness is not a finished thing; we don't see it as it will be in the end. It is a quality still in the making. Like us the old man is an image of God; like us he bears the same human nature that Christ took onto Himself; like us he is damaged by sin; like us he is offered redemption. Probably, then, his quality of being a curmudgeon includes both something good (say a wry sense of humor or a noble indifference to vulgar opinion), something that disfigures that good (say selfishness or conceit), and something that calls him back to its Author.

In heaven or hell, his personality will reach its final state. In this life we can't even see which side is winning. No matter; love hopes all things, and there lies the genius of Chesterton. He enables us to relish the old man's grouchy spirits in the light of the good that they may yet contain, even under pressure from sin. He enables us to catch in the old man's actual crotchetiness a glimpse of the possibility of what might be called Crotchetiness Redeemed, the selfishness, conceit, or whatever makes it hateful all burned away, the nobility, wry humor, or whatever makes it lovable all glowing like molten gold. As Paul says of the resurrected body, so it will one day be of the resurrected personality: "It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory."¹

When you love people for this-worldly qualities that are not altogether sinful but not altogether lovable either, I think you must be loving them like that. It isn't the whole of charity, because that involves loving the other just because he is, not only for the qualities that he possesses. But it is part of it.

Grace and peace,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS

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TRAVELERS' TALES

Dear Professor Theophilus:

I'm in an extended conversation about morality with a non- Christian friend at an Ivy League School who is skeptical, but interested enough to keep talking.

Recently he sent me an article about a new book on the history of marriage which claims that among the Na people in China, "brothers help sisters raise the children they conceive through casual sex with nonfamily members." The article goes on to ask, "will we all be like the Na in the future? With divorce and illegitimacy rates still high, the institution of marriage seems headed for obsolescence in much of the world." It quotes the book's author, Stephanie Coontz, as saying "there's no turning back. The only hope is accepting these changes and figuring out how to work with them."²

In your talks and books about natural law, you've advised skepticism about travelers' tales — like the tale of the Samoans, who were supposed to be promiscuous but turned out to be fierce defenders of chastity, and of the Ik, who were supposed to have no conscience but turned out to have strong views about mutual obligation. Does the tale of the Na fit into that category? Can you offer a natural law perspective that may help me in talking with my friend?

Reply

I would still advise skepticism of travelers' tales. But even if the story should be true — I have no independent knowledge of the Na — it only tells you that a small group of people live like that. Small groups of people live in strange ways in our society too. We know from bitter experience that the fact that something can be done doesn't mean that it should be done. So such an example of an odd way of life proves nothing.

As to the statement in the article that "the institution of marriage seems headed for obsolescence in much of the world" — this statement mainly describes the West. By contrast, in much of the third world (really the two-thirds world), marriage is actually being rediscovered, and the trend is away from polygamy toward monogamy. The global spread of Christianity has much to do with this. So despite the gesture toward the Na, the view of the book reviewer is amazingly parochial.

The reviewer attributes to the author the view that the decline of marriage in our society is partly due to the romantic ideal. There is something to this view, but we need to make distinctions. The problem lies not with the idea that says spouses should love each other, which some people call the romantic ideal. The problem lies with a debasement of that idea, which says that if spouses are not in a constant state of romantic excitement, they may as well "hang it up." Such a notion fails even to understand the nature of love.

"There's no turning back. The only hope is accepting these changes and figuring out how to work with them." This is not an argument but an assertion. It is based on what C.S. Lewis mordantly described as the "chronological fallacy," that whatever has happened must go on happening. Nonsense. If I am on the wrong road, then the sensible thing to do is turn around, retrace my steps until I find the fork where I took the wrong turn, and then take the right one. I don't say that this is easy, but continuing as I am is even worse.

Grace and peace,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS

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DENY CHRIST, OR I'LL TORTURE YOUR FRIENDS

Dear Professor Theophilus:

Should we care more about human suffering than our devotion to Christ? I just read a book about early Portuguese missionaries to the Japanese. Many of the missionaries remained true to their faith, and many were martyred. But others apostacized. At the end of the story, one of the apostates has a vision in which Christ speaks to him saying, "Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross." And so he gave in to the demand of his persecutors that he trampled on a "fumie," or image of Mary with Christ. Afterwards, he was free to go.

The Japanese authorities persuaded him to trample the image by torturing three Christian peasants over a "pit" where they would die unless he cast off his faith. How do we deal with such demands? The authorities called them mere "formalities." Can we deny Christ to save others? Japanese Christianity faded away in the late 1600s, and today only a tiny percentage of Japanese are Christians. Some people think that Christianity could never take hold there, so the missionary efforts were futile anyway.

Reply

Apostasy is gravely and intrinsically wrong: It is sinful regardless of the consequences, for ourselves or for others. There are countless situations in which it is perfectly appropriate to decide what to do according to what we think will result. However, an act which is intrinsically evil must never be done at all. To deny Christ in response to a threat is no more allowable than to murder or commit incest in response to a threat. What sense does it make to say I am acting for others, but deny the God who loved them into existence? That option is not on the table.

It's hard, I know, but when we are afraid that something bad will happen for doing the right thing, we must trust the outcome to God. Only He knows what will really happen anyway. For all we know, if only the Japanese apostates had held out, their tormentors would have been converted on the spot. Maybe not; that is up to God. But that is the point. It is not up to us. We must trust that He knows what the true good of others requires better than we do.

As to the supposed vision in which Christ commanded one of the missionaries to deny Him, consider: If we say that the vision truly came from Christ, don't we make Christ a liar? For He said in Matthew 10, "But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven." And who are we to say where Christianity can take root? The Light didn't come into the darkness because it wasn't dark, but because it was.

It is not for us to judge the apostates. We have utterly no room for self-righteousness. May God have mercy on them! May He have granted them repentance! None of us knows how his own courage would fare if it were put to such a test. That's why we pray to our Father, "Lead us not into temptation." To be guarded against sin, though, we must recognize sin when we see it.

Grace and peace,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS

NOTES

¹ 1 Corinthians 15:43.

² Barbara Kantrowitz, "What's Love Got to Do With It? Everything. In a New Book, a Marriage Historian Says Romance Wrecked Family Stability." Review of Marriage, a History, by Stephanie Coontz (Newsweek, June 6, 2005).

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If you have a question you'd like Professor Theophilus to consider for this column, please send it to asktheo@trueu.org. Please note, all questions that are selected for "Ask Theophilus" may be edited for clarity and privacy and become the property of Focus on the Family.