This one comes to us from
W.H. Auden,
who included it as the entry on Puritanism in “A Certain World: a
commonplace book,” his collection of alphabetized wisdom. As beautiful a
distillation of the Protestant ‘break-through’ as it may be, the words
are actually not Wystan’s. It’s actually an excerpt from
The Oxford History of English Literature, written by none other than
Clive Staples Lewis.
“Theologically,
Protestantism was either a recovery, or a development, or an
exaggeration (it is not for the literary historian to say which) of
Pauline theology… In the mind of a Tyndale or Luther, as in the mind of
St. Paul himself, this theology was by no means an intellectual
construction made in the interests of speculative thought. It springs
directly out of a highly specialized religious experience; and all its
affirmations, when separated from that context, become meaningless or
else mean the opposite of what was intended… The experience is that of
catastrophic conversion. The man who has passed through it feels like
one who has waked from nightmare into ecstasy. Like an accepted
lover, he feels that he has done nothing, and never could have done
anything, to deserve such astonishing happiness. Never again can he
‘crow from the dunghill of desert.’ All the initiative has been on God’s side; all has been free, unbounded grace…
His own puny and ridiculous efforts would be as helpless to retain the
joy as they would have been to achieve it in the first place.
Fortunately they need not. Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned. ‘Works’ have no ‘merit’, though, of course faith, inevitably, even unconsciously, flows out into works of love at once. He
is not saved because he does works of love: he does works of love
because he is saved. It is faith alone that has saved him: faith
bestowed by sheer gift. From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the
self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples and
motive-scratchings, all the Protestant doctrines originally sprang…
Mockingbird
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