pedo mellon a minno

From C. S. Lewis, on Membership (Sobornost, No 31, June 1945)

"It is idle to say that men are of equal value. If value is taken in a worldly sense- if we mean that all men are equally useful or beautiful or good or entertaining- then it is nonsense. If it means that all are of equal value as immmortal souls then I think it conceals a dangerous error. The infinte value of each human soul is not a christian doctrine. God did not die for man because of some value he perceived in him. The value of each human soul considered simply in itself, out of relation to God, is zero. As St Paul writes, to have died for valuable men would have been not divine but merely heroic; but God died for sinners. He loved us not because we were lovable, but because he is Love. It may be that He loves all equally- he certainly loved all to the death- and I am not certain what the expression means. If there is equality it is his love, not in us.

"Equality is a quantitative term and therefore love often knows nothing of it. Authority exercised with humility and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live....

"I have wanted to try to expel that quite unchristian worship of the human individual simply as such which is so rampant in modern thought sided by side with our collectivism; for one error begets the opposite error and, far from neutralizing, they aggravate each other. I mean the pestilent notion (one sees it in literary criticism) that each of us starts with a treasure called 'personality' locked up inside him, and that to expand and express this, to guard it from interference, to be 'original', is the main end of life. This is Pelagian, or worse, and it defeats even itself. No man who values originality will ever be origianl. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought. Even on that level, the submission of the individual to the function is already beginning to bring true personality to birth. And secondly, I have wanted to show that Christianity is not, in the long run, concerned either with individuals or communities. Neither the individual nor the community as popular thought understands them can inherit eternal life: neither the natural self, nor the collective mass, but a new creature."