Today's Reading
Let us suppose () we possess parts of a novel or a
symphony. Someone now brings us a newly discovered piece of manuscript
and says, ‘This is the missing part of the work. This is the chapter //on
which the whole plot of the novel really turned.
This is the main theme
of the symphony’.
Our business would be [to see whether the new passage,
if admitted /to the central place //which the discoverer claimed for it,
did actually illuminate [all the parts () we had already seen] and ‘pull them
together’.
Nor should we be likely to go very far wrong.
The new
passage, if spurious, however attractive it looked /at the first glance,
would become harder and harder to reconcile with the rest of the work
/the longer we considered the matter.
* spurious to mean "illegitimate," but the more common meaning is "false"
* the + comparative
Note that in these expressions the word the is not really the definite article. It is a form of the demonstrative pronoun,
meaning ‘by that much’.
But if it were genuine then at
every fresh hearing of the music or every fresh reading of the book, we
should find it settling down, making itself /more at home and eliciting
significance from all sorts of details /in the whole work //which we had
hitherto neglected.
Even though the new central chapter or main theme
contained great difficulties in itself, we should still think it genuine
/provided that it continually removed difficulties elsewhere.
Something
like this we must do with the doctrine of the Incarnation.
Here, instead
of a symphony or a novel, we have the whole mass of our knowledge.
The
credibility will depend on the extent //to which the doctrine, if
accepted, can illuminate and integrate that whole mass.
It is much less
important [that the doctrine itself should be fully comprehensible].
We
believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer /not because we
can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot)
but because we can see
everything else.
From Miracles
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
Miracles: A Preliminary Study.
Copyright 1947 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1947 C. S.
Lewis Pte. Ltd. Revised 1960, restored 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All
rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.