C.S. Lewis on Holy Saturday

As Lewis reminds us in Miracles, every good general, every good chess player, takes the strength of his opponent's plan and makes it the pivot of his own plan.  Just ask Custer.  So it is with our Lord Jesus Christ, our "Bobby Fischer" of the grave and our "Patton" over sin death and devil; He is the Supreme Commander of angels, archangels and all the host of heaven, defeating death by death and bringing light and life to immortality through His Gospel.  Consider the following selection from Miracles on the Grand Miracle that leads to Good Friday that leads to the Great Eucatastrophe.


It ought to be noticed at this stage that the Christian doctrine, if accepted, involves a particular vie of Death.  There are two attitudes towards Death which the human mind naturally adopts.  One is the lofty view, which reached its greatest intensity among the Stoics, that Death 'doesn't matter', that it is 'kind nature's signal for retreat', and that we ought to regard it with indifference.  The other is the 'natural' point of view, implicit in nearly all private conversations on the subject, and in much modern thought about the survival of the human species, that Death is the greatest of all evils: Hobbes is perhaps the only philosopher who erected a system on this basis.  The first idea simply negates, the second simply affirms, our instinct for self-preservation; neither throws any new light on Nature, and Christianity countenances neither.  Its doctrine is subtler.  On the one hand Death is the triumph of Satan, the punishment of the fall, and the last enemy.  Christ shed  tears at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane: the Life of Lives that was in Him detested this penal obscenity not less than we do, but more.  On the other hand, only he who loses his life will save it.  We are baptized into the death of Christ, and it is the remedy for the fall.  Death is, in fact, what some modern people call 'ambivalent'.  It is Satan's great weapon and also God's great weapon: it is holy and unholy; our supreme disgrace and our only hope; the thing Christ came to conquer and the means by which He conquered.


A blessed Easter Vigil to you all.  Alleluia!  Christ is Risen!