all souls are by nature christian…
At worship today, the speaker mentioned that Leo Tolstoy believed that every person was created to be Christlike and that when we do come to an awareness of Jesus it is as if we remember, or discover, ourselves for the first time. The quote is as follows….
By its nature the human soul is Christian; Christianity is always adopted by people as something forgotten and suddenly remembered. Leo Tolstoy
I have always found this idea intriquing. Of course C.S. Lewis hasd uch to say on this. He recalls his coming to awareness of God as coming to an awareness of “…a music that resembles some earlier music that men are born remembering.” I recently came across some reflections on this notion of ’sehnsucht’ or joy in an book by Alistair McGrath called Intellectuals Don’t Need God & Other Modern Myths Here are some of his reflections.
Like Augustine, C. S. Lewis was aware of deep human emotions that point to a dimension of our existence beyond time and space, a deep and intense feeling of longing that no earthly object or experience can satisfy. Lewis calls this emotion “joy.” It is “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction … anyone who has experienced it will want it again.” (Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis) Lewis describes this experience ( better known to students of German Romanticism as Sehnsucht) in his autobiography. He relates how, as a young child, he was standing by a flowering currant bush, when– for some unexplained reason– a memory was triggered. There suddenly rose in me without warning, as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden … comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? Not, certainly for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past … and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had only taken a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison. (Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis) Lewis here describes a brief moment of insight , an overwhelming moment of feeling caught up in something that goes far beyond the realms of everyday experience. But what did it mean? What, if anything, did it point to? Lewis addressed this question in a remarkable sermon entitled “The Weight of Glory.” There is something self-defeating about human desire: that which is desired, when achieved, seems to leave the desire unsatisfied. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things–the beauty, the memory of own past–are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited. (”The Weight of Glory” by C. S. Lewis) Human desire, the deep and bittersweet longing for something that will satisfy us, points beyond finite objects and finite persons ( who seem able to fulfill this desire, yet eventually prove incapable of doing so). It points through these objects and persons toward their real goal and fulfillment in God himself.
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April 9th, 2008 at 7:58 am
Interesting.
Get’s you to think.
When did Tolstoy write the first one?
April 9th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I think Tolstoy could say this because even in his day the Russian Orthodox Church so permeated Russian culture that indeed, to some degree, to breathe the air was to breathe some reminder of Christ.
But Russia is well past that now. And so are we.
I’d put the framing of this a bit differently– the way some neurologists have begun to describe it, and in his own way, Augustine did, too. We’re hardwired for God.
Being hardwired for God doesn’t necessarily make us Christian, though. At least not if being Christian necessarily means having a commitment to follow the way of Jesus. That, it seems to me, requires more than a capacity built into us. It also requires our participation– whether actively ourselves or as part of a community that bears that faith and life with us, and at times for us.
April 9th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Hi Alan,
have you read “The pilgrims regress” by Lewis? Ever so often I turn back to his parablelike autobio and the more I do the more I understand. He really is a man full of insights in the human soul and still able to help us understand human nature today. ‘Sehnsucht’ or the “god shaped hole” (in a song by U2) is a common longing for all of us thinking us so enlightend western influenced human beings.
Thanks for the post - Lewis still is a wonderful writer. Are you familiar with the book by Louis Markos: “Lewis Agonistes: How C.S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World”? Digging deep in the well of Lewis Thoughts and helping us along the way…
Greetings
Bjoern
April 11th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Intriguing but I know many Wiccans who have said Wicca “is always adopted by people as something forgotten and suddenly remembered” or words to the same effect. So, to what extent should Tolstoy’s experience be taken as uniquely Christian and to what extent should it be taken as suggestive of broader issues in the conversion process?
April 11th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
We are created by God for relationship with Him… it is no wonder we are “out of sorts” if we are out of relationship.
It does make me think the quote by the Wiccans is suggestive of a broader issue… that we are spiritual beings as well as physical ones… but in the secular West this reality about us has limited expression. When Western people engage in ANY spiritual practices they are engaging a neglected latent part of them that starts to “come alive”… their spirits, their innate longing to worship Another. All manner of new age spiritualities gain adherents because people are spiritually hungry, and they find some food there. Whenever we engage in some kind of spiritual practice, we are closer what we are designed to be than if we are self-focused and/or secular.
(I’ve just been re-reading “Mere Christianity”… such riches are to be mined in these books. Wonderful stuff)
April 11th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Of course when you read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky you are reading texts with vast subterranean oceans of Christianity.
I heard Stephen Said speaking on sehnsucht a few weeks ago and really enjoyed what he said.
I probably hesitate to go as far as Tolstoy but like the hard-wired for God angle. The difficulty on viewing any spiritual search as a way of “coming alive” as Janet put it, is that the Bible simply doesn’t warrant that view, in fact it goes in the opposite direction and declares that any spiritual search not sanctioned by YHWH is a sign of being spiritually dead.
April 13th, 2008 at 12:39 am
This concept takes so much of the pressure off when it comes to our mission. When we realize that our responsibility is to help people become awakened to what is behind this sehnsucht, we see that people are not as far from the kingdom as we make them out to be. I love what N.T. Wright says about hearing an echo of a voice. There are many things that we interact with in our lives (sehnsucht, a desire for justice, etc) and these are merely echoes of a voice. Our responsibility in mission is to help people understand who owns that voice and why they are hearing it. In this we can embrace many of the longings that people have and hopefully over time and in the context of relationship, we can point people to the person of Jesus.
April 14th, 2008 at 7:29 am
I read your book, about the church in the 21st century. It was great.
http://www.matthewsblog.waynesborochurchofchrist.org
April 14th, 2008 at 8:29 am
My understanding is that the old humanity in Adam is totally incapable of seeing, hearing or knowing God. Only by revelation of God and a new humanity in Christ that we can know God.
I do think that we were originally designed to know God but sin has totally destroyed that ability. Without Jesus we are totally stuffed and without hope.
April 14th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Steve, you are right to observe the Bible declares that “any spiritual search not sanctioned by YHWH is a sign of being spiritually dead” but I feel there is a subjective / objective issue lurking here.
From God’s higher perspective their search is misguided but from down in the trenches of bankrupt secular life (or in the recovery room from abusive religion) any whisper of spirituality and grace can be taken as a breath of fresh air. Without denying God’s word I think their personal experiences need to be respected. And its from out of these subjective considerations that my question originates.
Sometimes the subjective path we/God needs to lead people on is not so much from bad to good but from good to great. Sometimes the badness is not perceptible till one has arrived at great and realised that what was formerly thought of as good was not so good. Revelation in retrospect you might say.