What is the Christian idea of a "Good" man?
(and)
How do we go about putting the human machine right, making it good again?
But before he gets into those details, Lewis has two more general points:
*It's important to distinguish between psychoanalysis as a medical field and psychoanalysis as merely philosophical theory because the philosophical/theoretical additions (like those by Sigmund Freud) generally stand in direct contradiction with Christianity, but the medical field of psychoanalysis actually overlaps with Christianity, and it is useful for us to find out how.
Morality is concerned with the act of choosing and what we do with the raw material we are given. The bad psychological material that exists inside a person - the feelings, experiences, impulses, temperaments, inclinations we each may have - are not sin that needs to be repented of but disease that needs to be cured. We judge each other by our external actions, but God only judges the moral choice because all the rest is not our fault and often beyond our control. "We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it."
B.) Christianity is often seen as a negotiation humans have with God where we keep all the rules in order to be rewarded, or we are punished if we break any of those rules. But Lewis has this to say about it:
"I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other. |