Seeking Something We Call "Truth"

C.C.LEWIS was a passable science fiction writer until he became a fervent Christian relatively late in life. Then, he changed. His writing became more rigid, stilted, dogmatic, serious. Religions does that to many previously, already perfectly good people. It has often been noted that the people who become most intolerantly zealous are the late bloomers in religious belief. Lewis started writing about his new faith, and spewing dubious, often untenable assertions, again, often the product of rigid, dogmatic thinking. People who claim to know nothing are invariably more interesting than those who know the truth. Among his most memorable assertions is that, taking into consideration the totally of the message of Jesus Christ, that he was either a madman, or he was what he seemingly claimed to be; the only begotten son of the living god, come to earth to offer salvation to anyone who follows him, and accepts him as their lord and savior. That's a bluff many are willing to call; in this world, there are many more mentally ill men than saviors. Lewis conspicuously omits mention of many other possibilities. Among those possibilities is that the Bible is simply wrong about Jesus, and about who he was, what he said, and who he claimed to be. In fact, nowhere in the four gospels does Jesus say that he is God, or any part of God. That interpretation of his statements came about much later, mainly as an extension of the gospel most ardently supportive of the idea of Jesus as lord; the gospel of John. A little poem by Goethe accurately describes the situation: "Pure was Jesus in his passion, in his heart but one God serving. Who of him a God would fashion, from his sacred will is swerving". The four gospels all contradict each other at every turn. Each of the four gives Jesus a different personality. Each of the four describes different events, occurring at different times. This is best explained by the fact that none of the four was written by people who knew Jesus, or each other, and all were written decades after the death of Jesus, by unknown authors, using a disparity of sources now lost to us. Every beautiful teaching of Jesus can be found in earlier writings, by Confucius, or in other religious texts in Buddhism, Taoism, or Hinduism. The message Jesus hammered home most urgently was that the world would soon end, and god would soon come to Earth, in the form of the "son of Man" to bring about an entirely new world order, a world in which all the wickedness of this world would be replaced by God's grace and goodness. Jesus, in brief, was an apocalyptic preacher. Most of us are neither madmen nor divine beings. We are somewhere in the middle, suspended, between the sublime and the sordid. We are, in short, a bit of both. As Wallace Stevens said: "A poetic synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." C.S. Lewis, like the rest of us, sought truth. And like the rest of us, he never found it outside himself, but had to content himself to embrace only what he could discern from within. We live in a universe of relativity, in which the truth is dependent upon point of view. That may have been the only true message Jesus ever taught, handled and handed down to us so very clumsily by people who failed to fully understand him. The truth that Jesus gave us might well have been that the attainment of truth is only a matter of seeking, and the seeking only occurs within each of our very different selves, in our very different universes.