Where Did I Read That?

Have you ever plagued yourself trying to remember where you read some given thing? It happens to me all the time. Sometimes I want to tell my wife about something I read in just the last day and can’t remember where I read it: News story? Novel? Philosophical work? In other instances, I look for years for the elusive source of my mental Nile. One imaginary Dr. Livingstone slashed about for about fifteen years through the densest tangle of confused memories seeking the place where I had first read about the difference between wit and judgment. He finally fulfilled his quest when I reread Thomas Hobbes in 2009. (Wit is the power of comparing disparate things, while judgment is the power of discerning differences in similar things.)

Another jungle trek came to an end in just the last few days. I really don’t know how long I had been hoping to rediscover where C. S. Lewis talks about creation as the greatest miracle. The words as I remembered them were something like these: “Creation is the first and greatest miracle because by Creation, God brought into existence what is not God.” I thought sure I’d come across it in Miracles when I revisited that book a few years ago. But I had to wait until rereading The Problem of Pain to find my rest.

It turns out that those words were all mine (except where they borrowed from Jesus talking about commandments). But the gist was accurate. Here is the actual phrasing in the inimitable style of the great professor: “To make things which are not Itself, and thus to become, in a sense, capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity.”

But wait. Creation in a book about pain? Yes. In his answer to the age-old question of how an all-powerful loving God can allow evil (he’s especially interested in the pain involved in the consciousness of evil), Lewis speculates on why God made a physical universe. I don’t know of anything else like this passage, although if I told him that, he’d probably chuckle and tell me I just hadn’t read enough. Lewis then runs through his ideas on the moral constitution of humans, sin, the Fall, the meaning of goodness, the Incarnation, Redemption, Heaven, and more. Maybe this, and not Mere Christianity, is the fundamental exposition of Lewis’s view of life, the universe, and everything. Why isn’t it more popular?