Wisdom from C.S. Lewis: The End Times and the New Persons

From C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, Book IV, Beyond Personality, "The New Men":

     [...] now the critical moment has arrived. Century by century God has guided nature up to the 

     point of producing creatures which can (if they will) be taken right out of nature, turned into 

     "gods." Will they allow themselves to be taken? In a way, it is like the crisis of birth. Until we 

     rise and follow Christ we are still parts of Nature, still in the womb of our great mother. Her 

     pregnancy has been long and painful and anxious, but it has reached its climax. The great 

     moment has come. Everything is ready. The Doctor has arrived. Will the birth "go off all 

     right"? But of course it differs from an ordinary birth in one important respect. In an ordinary 

     birth the baby has not much choice: here it has. I wonder what an ordinary baby would do if it 

     had the choice. It might prefer to stay in the dark and warmth and safety of the womb. For of 

     course it would think the womb meant safety. That would be just where it was wrong; for if it 

     stays there it will die. 

          On this view the thing has happened: the new step has been taken and is being taken. 

     Already the new men are dotted here and there all over the earth. Some, as I have admitted, 

     are still hardly recognisable: but others can be recognised. Every now and then one meets 

     them. Their very voices and faces are different from ours; stronger, quieter, happier, more 

     radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. They are, I say, recognisable; but you must 

     know what to look for. They will not be very like the idea of "religious people" which you have 

     formed from your general reading. They do not draw attention to themselves. You tend to 

     think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you 

     more than other men do, but they need you less. (We must get over wanting to be needed: in 

     some goodish people, specially women, that is the hardest of all temptations to resist.) They 

     will usually seem to have a lot of time: you will wonder where it comes from. When you have 

     recognised one of them, you will recognise the next one much more easily. And I strongly 

     suspect (but how should I know?) that they recognise one another immediately and infallibly, 

     across every barrier of colour, sex, class, age, and even of creeds. In that way, to become 

     holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at the very lowest, it must be great fun.

          But you must not imagine that the new men are, in the ordinary sense, all alike. A good 

     deal of what I have been saying in this last book might make you suppose that that was 

     bound to be so. To become new men means losing what we now call "ourselves." Out of 

     ourselves, into Christ, we must go. His will is to become ours and we are to think His 

     thoughts, to "have the mind of Christ" as the Bible says. And if Christ is one, and if He is 

     thus to be "in" us all, shall we not be exactly the same? It certainly sounds like it; but in fact it 

     is not so.

          It is difficult here to get a good illustration; because, of course, no other two things are 

     related to each other just as the Creator is related to one of His creatures. But I will try two 

     very imperfect illustrations which may give a hint of the truth. Imagine a lot of people who 

     have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe to them what light is like. You 

     might tell them that if they come into the light that same light would fall on them all and they 

     would all reflect it and thus become what we call visible. Is it not quite possible that they 

     would imagine that, since they were all receiving the same light, and all reacting to it in the 

     same way (i.e., all reflecting it), they would all look alike? Whereas you and I know that the 

     light will in fact bring out, or show up, how different they are. Or again, suppose a person 

     who knew nothing about salt. You give him a pinch to taste and he experiences a particular 

     strong, sharp taste. You then tell him that in your country people use salt in all their cookery. 

     Might he not reply "In that case I suppose all your dishes taste exactly the same: because 

     the taste of that stuff you have just given me is so strong that it will kill the taste of everything 

     else." But you and I know that the real effect of salt is exactly the opposite. So far from killing 

     the taste of the egg and the tripe and the cabbage, it actually brings it out. They do not show 

     their real taste till you have added the salt. (Of course, as I warned you, this is not really a 

     very good illustration, because you can, after all, kill the other tastes by putting in too much 

     salt, whereas you cannot kill the taste of a human personality by putting in too much Christ. I 

     am doing the best I can.)

          It is something like that with Christ and us. The more we get what we now call "ourselves" 

     out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so 

     much of Him that millions and millions of "little Christs," all different, will still be too few to 

     express Him fully. He made them all. He invented--as an author invents characters in a 

     novel--all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves 

     are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to "be myself" without Him. The more I resist 

     Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and 

     upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call "Myself" 

     becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I 

     cannot stop. What I call "My wishes" become merely the desires thrown up by my physical 

     organism or pumped into me by other men's thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. 

     Eggs and alcohol and a good night's sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by 

     regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl 

     opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as 

     my own personal political ideals, I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as 

     I like to believe: most of what I call "me" can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to 

     Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of 

     my own.

          At the beginning I said there were [Three] Personalities in God. I will go further now. 

     There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you 

     will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most "natural" men, not 

     among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and 

     conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.

          But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away "blindly" so to 

     speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake 

     of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to 

     Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self 

     (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as 

     you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? 

     The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will 

     never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of 

     impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality 

     will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how 

     often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever 

     having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up your self, and 

     you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your 

     ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit 

     with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that 

     you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever 

     be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, 

     loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with 

     Him everything else thrown in.

In Christ,

Teopile/Theophilos Porter