Mere Christianity: The natural self

In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis has a lot to say about the natural self. He says that what reveals our true selves is the way we react to situations before we have time to organize ourselves. How do I respond to something unpleasant, or inconvenient to me, if I don't have time to arrange my face and settle my own emotions on the matter? This reaction, this unfiltered reaction, is the real us. 

For me this is a rather frightful idea, since I work pretty hard to curate my responses to things that are inconvenient or unpleasant to me. I can tolerate most of them, but it takes me a moment to figure out how to arrange my reaction. When I am truly caught off guard, I'm afraid I don't respond very charitably. My knee jerks pretty violently. 

In this weekend's listening to the book on audio, two points about the self have come up which I think are interesting. 

The first is the idea that most of us take religion or Christianity as a way to control this natural self of ours - some sort of straight jacket we can put on our natural selves to tame its impulses. "I go to church in order to fill me with charity and love towards others, so that during the week I can respond with love to my sister or brother." That sort of understanding of religion's role. 

Lewis says that this is the wrong way to go about it. We should not consider how Christianity adjusts us in order to make us better. It positively transforms us into different beings. 

Here is how he puts it: 

Christ says "Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours."

I nearly laughed when I heard the line "I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it." Lewis calls Christianity both harder and easier than the version of religion where we try to maintain our old selves while allowing Christ to torment us about our wrongs, and deny us the things we desire. This is so frank! And it provides a strange sense of relief - my old self is irrelevant to the new project! Now, allowing yourself to be killed seems hard. Indeed, for me, this is the sticking point of Christianity. I do not want to give myself up to God. I like to be in control, and I'm afraid of what he will do with me if I actually give myself over in the complete sense described above. 

Another part of the book is helpful here, however. Lewis says that the "self" we are keen to maintain is not truly as much our original creation as we like to think. We are created by society. 

Here is how he puts it:

The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call "Myself" becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call "My wishes" become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men's thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. 

... 

Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call "me" can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

I guess I agree. The things that I don't want to relinquish about me - my tastes, the way I look and talk and walk and work and relate to others - are all results of things outside of me. I have capitulated to their control without much thought. I have already given myself over, essentially, to the ideals that govern my daily life and my long term ambitions. Do I feel a sense of control over these? Yes. I do feel as though at least among these, I have free will to choose. If I saw an ambition I didn't like, I would steer clear of it. But that is not even true. I find myself captive of certain ideals and beliefs which I would rather dispense with. But I can't. 

At the end of the book, which I reached today, Lewis mentions the way we can tell when we are in the presence of people who seem to have a real sense of the divine. They are different. Their faces and countenances are different. They have a peace which others don't; which we don't. I am grateful to know some people like this. They have all given themselves over to something larger than themselves, and are not concerned with the small machinations which provoke my anxieties. 

I am glad for their example, and I hope to catch what they have!