C. S. Lewis, the Inklings, & Others: The Resurrection in Miracles

Miracles
By C. S. Lewis
HarperSanFrancisco, 2001
(304 pages, $12.95, paperback)

C. S. Lewis gives his fullest treatment of the resurrection of Jesus in the last chapter of Miracles. Yet one is struck by how little he deals there with the typical issues about the Resurrection addressed in most Christian apologetics. Content to leave mundane arguments for historicity to specialists, Lewis stays focused on the large mythic picture of Jesus and the miraculous that he begins painting three chapters earlier. (Remember that for Lewis myth became fact in Christian history.)

Lewis opens that earlier chapter by pointing out that the central miracle of the Christian faith is the “Grand Miracle” of the Incarnation, God becoming Man. “Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this.” For Lewis the Grand Miracle merits historical consideration primarily because it is a theme that illuminates the symphony of Nature and human existence. It illuminates and unifies at least four other major themes we hear in that symphony: the composite physical and spiritual nature of human beings, the pattern of “descent and reascent…written all over the world,” the principle of Selectiveness or Election (also known as “the scandal of particularity”), which reveals not Divine favoritism, but the fourth theme Vicariousness: “The Sinless Man suffers for the sinful, and in their degree, all good men for all bad men.”

Lewis places all miracles other than the Grand Miracle in two categories: those of the Old Creation and those of the New Creation. The Resurrection initiates the New Creation, but some earlier miracles (walking on water, the Transfiguration) anticipate it.

The New Creation clearly has affinity and connection to the Old. For our contemporary minds, afflicted with vague and timid postmodern notions about “spiritual” experience and “spiritual” realities, Lewis offers the strong antidote of the bodily resurrection of Jesus and the marriage of Spirit and Nature in the New Creation in which the risen Jesus is the “firstfruits” and “pioneer”:

I suspect that our conception of Heaven as merely a state of mind is not unconnected with the fact that the specifically Christian virtue of Hope has in our time grown so languid. Where our fathers, peering into the future, saw gleams of gold, we see only the mist, white, featureless, cold and never moving.

But does the glorious hope that Christians find in the Resurrection of the Body distract us from our present duties to live virtuously and to love God and neighbor? At the end of the last chapter of Miracles, in one of his characteristically vivid and challenging codas, Lewis reminds us of what other writers whom we shall consider in this issue remind us: belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus and in our own future bodily resurrection should have powerful impact on how we live and how we use our bodies now.

There is in our present pilgrim condition plenty of room (more room than most of us would like) for abstinence and renun-ciation and mortification of our natural desires. But behind all asceticism the thought should be, ‘Who will trust us with the true wealth if we cannot be trusted even with the wealth that perishes?’ Who will trust me with a spiritual body if I cannot control even an earthly body? These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies are given to schoolboys. We must learn to manage: not that we may some day be free of horses altogether but that some day we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world-shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King’s stables. Not that the gallop would be of any value unless it were a gallop with the King; but how else – since He has retained His own charger – should we accompany Him?