I am a big fan of C.S. Lewis. I have read Mere Christianity 4x (at least), The Chronicles of Narnia series at least 5x, The 
Weight of Glory (I have lost count!), The Screwtape Letters 2x, The Great Divorce 2x, The Problem of Pain, A Grief Observed at least 2x, Surprised by Joy, The Abolition of Man, Miracles, and parts of The Four Loves. (When I look over this list, I don’t think I have read any other author more than C.S. Lewis.)
I often tell people the following quote from The Weight of Glory changed my life:
If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
When I read this for the first time, I heard someone say, “Passion is good. Passion is not something to be squelched but rather oriented to the most satisfying object.” I also heard, “Bob, you are settling in your passion. Quit being such an ‘ignorant child’ and come to this ‘holiday by the sea.’” My life has never been the same.
I am not alone in this devotion or impact. Over 100 million books by C.S. Lewis’ fiction have been sold worldwide, putting him in pretty elite company as one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time. In a recent Desiring God blog, David Mathis declares, “Pascal had my attention at ‘All men seek happiness,’ but now Lewis had me reeling with ‘We are far too easily pleased.’
Yet, in all that I agree and find so stimulating about Lewis’ writing, I have a bone to pick with him. I want to critique the use of a word by the one who wrote the textbook on Medieval Literature.
In Mere Christianity, in the chapter titled The Great Sin (referring to pride), Lewis says the following:
Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive – is competitive by its very nature – while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not.”
Before I address why I disagree with Lewis, I want to make sure you get the gravity of what he is saying. At the core, he is saying COMPETITION is Bad! Notice his startling conclusion – “Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.” If pride is the great sin, and pride is about competition, then to eliminate the great sin, we need to eliminate competition.
The implications of this for anyone in sports or sports ministry are staggering. At the very least, as we encourage people to compete, we are encouraging pride, tapping people more deeply into the great sin. If what Lewis says is true about the great sin of pride and competition, one of the chief aims of sanctification would be to eliminate competition. Sports ministries would then be all about getting rid of sports not redeeming them.
While you can’t deny this is what Lewis says here, I don’t think this is what Lewis meant. I think he was referring to competition in the world today. This is competition after the Fall. If I could insert the adjective, worldly, in the paragraph above, before the noun of competition, then I think it gets at what he is saying. This worldly competition, this competition after the Fall, is all about pride, as Lewis asserts.
We say it this way –
“After the Fall, competition is striving against others
to more fully establish my and others’ God-given abilities
for the glory of the possessor.”
However, this is a limited look at competition. It doesn’t look at competition before the fall. We say it this way –
“Before the Fall, competition is striving with others
to more fully express my and others’ God-given abilities
for the glory of the giver.”
This distinction is not mere semantics. The rationale for sports and sports ministry rests on it. (For more, see “Was there competition in the Garden?” and For the Love of the Game). Before the fall, competition was very different. It was the opposite of pride. Competition was all about glorifying God and others.
The Fall changed all that. Redemption attempts to bring competition back to what God designed it to be, not eliminate it. This is why I must disagree with Lewis and appeal to the addition.
If Clive were alive today, I would do my best to discuss this with him to see if I get it. In the end, I think he would agree and allow me to make this addition. Since he isn’t and I can’t, I will be so presumptuous and add this one word to his great words. Look forward to finding out what he thinks!
