Miracles - C. S. Lewis [86]
The reader should be warned that the angle from which Man is approached in Chapter IV is quite different from that which would be proper in a devotional or practical treatise on the spiritual life. The kind of analysis which you make of any complex thing depends on the purpose you have in view. Thus in a society the important distinctions, from one point of view, would be those of male and female, children and adults, and the like. From another point of view the important distinctions would be those of rulers and ruled. From a third point of view distinctions of class or occupation might be the most important. All these different analyses might be equally correct, but they would be useful for different purposes. When we are considering Man as evidence for the fact that this spatio-temporal Nature is not the only thing in existence, the important distinction is between that part of Man which belongs to this spatio-temporal Nature and that part which does not: or, if you prefer, between those phenomena of humanity which are rigidly interlocked with all other events in this space and time and those which have a certain independence. These two parts of a man may rightly be called Natural and Supernatural: in calling the second ‘Super-Natural’ we mean that it is something which invades, or is added to, the great interlocked event in space and time, instead of merely arising from it. On the other hand this ‘Supernatural’ part is itself a created being—a thing called into existence by the Absolute Being and given by Him a certain character or ‘nature’. We could therefore say that while ‘supernatural’ in relation to this Nature (this complex event in space and time) it is, in another sense, ‘natural’—i.e. it is a specimen of a class of things which God normally creates after a stable pattern.
There is, however, a sense in which the life of this part can become absolutely Supernatural, i.e. not beyond this Nature but beyond any and every Nature, in the sense that it can achieve a kind of life which could never have been given to any created being in its mere creation. The distinction will, perhaps, become clearer if we consider it in relation not to men but to angels. (It does not matter, here, whether the reader believes in angels or not. I am using them only to make the point clearer.) All angels, both the ‘good’ ones and the bad or ‘fallen’ ones which we call devils, are equally ‘Super-natural’ in relation to this spatio-temporal Nature: i.e. they are outside it and have powers and a mode of existence which it could not provide. But the good angels lead a life which is Supernatural in another sense as well. That is to say, they have, of their own free will, offered back to God in love the ‘natures’ He gave them at their creation. All creatures of course live from God in the sense that He made them and at every moment maintains them in existence. But there is a further and higher kind of ‘life from God’ which can be given only to a creature who voluntarily surrenders himself to it. This life the good angels have and the bad angels have not: and it is absolutely Supernatural because no creature in any world can have it by the mere fact of being the sort of creature it is.
As with angels, so with us. The rational part of every man is supernatural in the relative sense—the same sense in which both angels and devils are supernatural. But if it is, as the theologians say, ‘born again’, if it surrenders itself back to God in Christ, it will then have a life which is absolutely Supernatural, which is not created at all but begotten, for the creature is then sharing the begotten life of the Second Person of the Deity.
When devotional writers talk of the ‘spiritual life’—and often when they talk of the ‘supernatural life’ or when I myself, in another book, talked of Zoë—they mean this absolutely Supernatural life which no creature can be given simply by being created but which every rational creature can have by voluntarily surrendering itself to the life of Christ. But much confusion arises from the fact that in many books the