"C.S.Lewis. Mere christianity " - читать интересную книгу автора

are other questions as to which I am definitely on one side of the fence,
and yet say nothing. For I am not writing to expound something I could call
'my religion', but to expound 'mere' Christianity, which is what it is and
what it was long before I was born and whether I like it or not.
Some people draw unwarranted conclusions from the fact that I never say
more about the Blessed Virgin Mary than is involved in asserting the Virgin
Birth of Christ. But surely my reason for not doing so is obvious? To say
more would take me at once into highly controversial regions. And there is
no controversy between Christians which needs to be so delicately touched as
this. The Roman Catholic beliefs on that subject are held not only with the
ordinary fervour that attaches to all sincere religious belief, but (very
naturally) with the peculiar and, as it were, chivalrous sensibility that a
man feels when the honour of his mother or his beloved is at stake. It is
very difficult so to dissent from them that you will not appear to them a
cad as well as a heretic. And contrariwise, the opposed Protestant beliefs
on this subject call forth feelings which go down to the very roots of all
Monotheism whatever. To radical Protestants it seems that the distinction
between Creator and creature (however holy) is imperilled: that Polytheism
is risen again. Hence it is hard so to dissent from them that you will not
appear something worse than a heretic - a Pagan. If any topic could be
relied upon to wreck a book about 'mere' Christianity - if any topic makes
utterly unprofitable reading for those who do not yet believe that the
Virgin's son is God - surely this is it.
Oddly enough, you cannot even conclude, from my silence on disputed
points, either that I think them important or that I think them unimportant.
For this is itself one of the disputed points. One of the things Christians
are disagreed about is the importance oftheir disagreements. When two
Christians of different denominations start arguing, it is usually not long
before one asks whether such-and-such a point 'really matters' and the other
replies: 'Matter? Why, it's absolutely essential.'
All this is said simply in order to make clear what kind of book I was
trying to write; not in the least to conceal or evade responsibility for my
own beliefs. About those, as I said before, there is no secret. To quote
Uncle Toby: 'They are written in the Common-Prayer Book.'
The danger clearly was that I should put forward as common Christianity
anything that was peculiar to the Church of England or (worse still) to
myself. I tried to guard against this by sending the original script of what
is now Book II to four clergymen (Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman
Catholic) and asking for their criticism. The Methodist thought I had not
said enough about Faith, and the Roman Catholic thought I had gone rather
too far about the comparative unimportance of theories in explanation of the
Atonement. Otherwise all five of us were agreed. I did not have the
remaining books similarly 'vetted' because in them, though differences might
arise among Christians, these would be differences between individuals or
schools of thought, not between denominations.
So far as I can judge from reviews and from the numerous letters
written to me, the book, however faulty in other respects, did at least
succeed in presenting an agreed, or common, or central, or 'mere'
Christianity. In that way it may possibly be of some help in silencing the
view that, if we omit the disputed points, we shall have left only a vague