The first essay captures a very important truth, one that helps explain Lewis's statement that, to the redeemed, all their past will one day be seen as a part of heaven, while to the damned, all their past will be seen as a part of hell. The kernel idea is found toward the conclusion of the essay, in a quotation from Charles Williams's work, He Came Down from Heaven: "'Repentance is no more than a passionate intention to know all things after the mode of heaven, and it is impossible to know evil as good if you insist on knowing it as evil.' For man's evil knowledge, 'there could be but one perfect remedy---to know the evil of the past itself as good, and to be free from the necessity of evil in the future---to find right knowledge and perfect freedom together; to know all things as occasions of love.'"(78)
This may seem at first blush a frightingly perverse idea. But, if one is a Christian, one's past, with all its evil, can be affirmed to the extent that it has led to repentance and works of love. Repentance involves dying to self, with all its demands, and casting oneself upon God. By the choice of willing God's will and being obedient to his commands to live in love, one's life by God's grace becomes a life of virtue, which would not have happened apart from the experiences one has come through. Good has come out of evil.
Indulge me an illustration, unsavory though it may be. I love gardening, the growing of fruits and flowers, and I am especially fond of growing the best possible lilies and dahlias. I have a friend living not too far away who keeps three fine horses on his little acreage, and in the fall of the year I ring him and ask if, when he cleans his stable, I can get some bags of the manure, and he obligingly tells me I may. I bring 15 - 20 bags home in my pick-up and begin the composting process. In my bins, I repeatedly layer 3 - 4 inches of manure on top of a like amount of garden debris, finely ground, adding some water to keep it all moist. The bins are soon full.
It is just a matter of 2 - 3 days until the mixture is really steaming, and I then begin the essential process of "turning" the mixture, that is, pitching it from one bin to another, in order to help the composting process along. This greatly accelerates the working of the bacteria that are mysteriously present. The decomposing is hastened by exposing the materials to air; the effect is similar to that of adding air to a fire. By next season the seemingly miraculous has occurred: the mixture has become beautiful black dirt. To view it one would never in the world guess from what it has come, but it works miracles in the garden.
The composting process--with the labor and time involved--is indispensable to success. I had a neighbor in our former home who, having freshly moved in, wanted to have a garden similar to ours, and thought to minimize the labor involved. He hired a load of fresh manure dumped on his garden plot in the spring of the year, spaded it in, and planted a full array of plants. The result was disastrous--a plot of deformed, yellow, struggling plants that were a pitiful sight, yielding no fruit.
You get the point. God is in the business of composting evil; he supplies all the materials and in grace enlists our working with him to effect his great purposes. Loving labor is the turning process, and all occasions are occasions for love. The end is a glorious good, a good that could not otherwise be achieved.
Sayers notes that Christ tells us to become like little children (74, 75), and every child looks forward to growing up. Affirming the process of effecting good from evil changes one's attitude towards human suffering and fuels Christian hope. It creates a positive attitude towards all experiences in life and increases one's desire for that which is ahead: attitudes quite different from those of people who have no hope, and for whom growing old is the greatest of regrets. The Christian attitude is in sharp opposition to that of those who lament old age, with a haunting regret for past sins and failures. We are the sum total of all our experiences (77); by accepting that truth, perceiving the good, and working through love to achieve greater good, we change the meaning of the past. Experiencing this process is to see in one's life the paradigm present in Christ's experiences (78, 79).This seems the only possible justification for God's abiding and sustaining the world as it is, with all its evil constantly intensifying, for as long as he has.
It must be with these thoughts in mind that we approach the next essay, "The Other Six Deadly Sins." In it our minds are focused upon the evil attitudes of the culture at large, but it is this very reality out of which good may come.
It is dangerous to ponder directly the sins of the world, as one quickly adopts self-righteous attitudes in spite of one's knowing better. Christ condemned self-righteousness more than any other sin, and the Bible repeatedly tells us not to judge. Yet Christians seem to feel they have the gift to do so. The remedy is to look within one's own heart for these attitudes in their incipient forms, repent of their presence, and maintain a watchful attitude of culpability.
The essay contains a number of perceptive indictments, alerting the reader to the prevalence and extent of human depravity, not only in individuals, but also in the world at large. Sayers remarks how the seemingly innocent motive to "raising our standard of living . . . . means that every citizen is encouraged to consider more and more complicated luxuries necessary to his well being. The gluttonous consumption of manufactured goods had become, before the war, the prime civic virtue. And why? Because machines can produce cheaply only if they produce in vast quantities; because unless the machines can produce cheaply nobody can afford to keep them running; and because, unless they are kept running, millions of citizens will be thrown out of employment, and the community will starve. . . . We need not remind ourselves of the furious barrage of advertisements by which people are flattered and frightened out of a reasonable contentment into a greedy hankering after goods that they do not really need; nor point out for the thousandth time how every evil passion---snobbery, laziness, vanity, concupiscence, ignorance, greed---is appealed to in these campaigns." (88, 89). Although the passage describes the world between the world wars, it is yet more apropos to contemporary America. The system is fueled by evil attitudes and conduct.
This is the spirit symbolically depicted as Babylon so poignantly described in Revelation 17: it is "the great harlot, who is seated upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and with the wine of whose fornication the dwellers on earth have become drunk . . . . The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and bedecked with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication; and on her forehead was written a name of mystery: 'Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of earth's abominations.' And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus" (vv. 1 - 6).
But this is the context out of which good may come when we recognize nature and reality of evil, with all of the disasters it effects in people's lives, and see all evil as occasions to love, as Williams says. It is in such a dark economic and social context that Christians are to function as lights. Christ was defining what loving responses look like when he said: "But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you" (Matt. 5:38 -42). All occasions are occasions for Christian love; in living and loving, we give the system its lie. The Church is not called upon to change the system, but to see it as a context in which Christians can live sensible, virtuous lives, exercising self-discipline, generosity, moderation: in short, all the Christian virtues.
Minus the redemptive purposes which proper Christian thinking brings to life, people caught in its meshes fall into attitudes of cynicism and ennui. Sayers aptly describes such attitudes: ". . . all pretension to superiority can be debunked. . . . [between the wars] Great artists were debunked by disclosures of their private weaknesses; great statesmen, by attributing to them mercenary and petty motives . . . . Religion was debunked and shown to consist of a mixture of craven superstition and greed. Courage was debunked, patriotism was debunked learning and art were debunked, love was debunked . . . . (101) Such is the pervasive spirit of our times, with which our contemporary media are full.
In another penetrating description of the contemporary spirit, Sayers comments on how contemporary unrest is really an expression of the sin of sloth: ". . . violent activity seems to offer an escape from the horrors of sloth. So the other sins hasten to provide a cloak for sloth. Gluttony offers a whirl of dancing, dining, sports, and dashing very fast from place to place to gape at beauty spots, which, when we get to them, we defile with vulgarity and waste. Covetousness rakes us out of bed at an early hour in order that we may put pep and hustle into our business. Envy sets us to gossip and scandal, to writing cantankerous letters to the papers, and to the unearthing of secrets and scavenging of dustbins. Wrath provides (very ingeniously) the argument that the only fitting activity in a world so full of evil-doers and demons is to curse loudly and incessantly: 'Whatever brute and blackguard made the world'; while lust provides that round of dreary promiscuity that passes for bodily vigor. But these are all disguises for the empty heart and the empty brain and the empty soul of acedia [ennui] (104). It is for Christians to be on guard, lest in any wise this description fits them.
Life lived according to Christ's precepts is in every way characterized by the opposite of such attitudes. The world in which we find ourselves is the right place for the generating and perfecting of Christian virtues.
