From C.S. Lewis, part of his autobiography:
. . . What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ ‘saved’ or ‘opened salvation to’ the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary: one could see from ordinary experience how sin (e.g. the case of a drunkard) could get a man to such a point that he was to reach hell (i.e. complete degradation and misery) in this life unless something quite beyond mere natural help or effort stepped in. I could imagine a whole world being in the same state and similarly in need of a miracle. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now—except insofar as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the center of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (‘propitiation’—‘sacrifice’—the blood of the Lamb’) expressions wh. and cd. only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.
. . . .Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself (cf. the quotation opposite the title page of Dymer ) I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really hit happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a description of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense in being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened.
Not time for more now. I hope to have some literary chat in my next letter.
Yours Jack
C. S. Lewis, The Essentials of C.S. Lewis (Touchstone, New Your, N.Y. 1996), 55-56
