In a chapter in Mere Christianity called “The Three Parts of Morality,” C. S. Lewis memorably compares man to “a fleet of ships sailing in formation,” explaining,
“The Voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the ships do not collide and get in one another’s way; and, secondly, if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order. As a matter of fact, you cannot have either of these two things without the other.”
Visualizing this marine metaphor in my mind’s eye, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my childhood delight at reading Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which has just been released as ‘a major motion picture.’ Lewis goes on to add that the third part of morality is the agreed destination of the fleet, saying, “…however well the fleet sailed, its voyage would be a failure if it were meant to reach New York and actually arrived at Calcutta.”
Lewis then goes on to point out that “modern people” nearly always discuss morality in terms of the first part, the social need to avoid collisions between ships, to the exclusion of the other two. For example, sermons in a Christian church are more likely to concentrate on how one person should interact or conduct himself with others than on how that person might clean his inner house, what Lewis calls “morality inside the individual.” In other words, evil thoughts like President Jimmy Carter’s famous confession that he had lusted in his head many times, are of far less import than evil acts.
With his metaphor of ships in a fleet, Lewis may have hit on one of the key distinctions between Christianity and the Eastern religions. Through chanting, meditation, and their emphasis on going inside one’s self to find the Truth, Hinduism and Buddhism clearly concern themselves more with what Lewis calls the “things inside man” (part 2 of morality) than they do directly with the “relations between man and man” (part 1.) Christianity seems to emphasize that if a human ship works hard to avoid collisions with another ship, it will improve itself in the eyes of God, whereas Hinduism and Buddhism teach that if a human ship works hard to repair its own engine, rudder and hull, it will avoid collisions other ships. For example, in Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, Deepak Chopra tells the vivid and moving account of how the monk Gautauma tried to interfere in the drama of others, by helping a quarreling married couple to right their donkey cart, which he witnessed turning over in a ditch. Gautama’s guru at the time laughs at him, and the clear lesson is that if Gautauma had only attended to his inner self rather than attempting to interfere in the affairs of others, both his own destiny and those of the peasants would have proceeded more smoothly according to the Divine Plan.
To be sure, Lewis points out that Christian morality does not concern itself solely with the relations between man and man, he simply stresses that man as a social being has a tendency to concentrate on this aspect of morality to the exclusion of the other one, internal morality. His main point, though, is that the third part of morality is the most important of all because it has to do with the direction the fleet is sailing towards. If it has set a course toward God, obviously it has set the right course. Lewis goes so far as to submit that at least for Christians, we are not the captains of our ships, and therefore we do not set the course:
“But does it not make a great difference whether his ship is his own property or not? Does it not make a great difference whether I am, so to speak, the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord? If somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself.”
Reasonably for those who believe in God, Lewis concludes that God is the real commander of the fleet, because we each have an immortal soul whose destiny is in our power to shape and in God’s power to judge. Therefore, to Lewis, the most important part of morality is where each of us stands with God, “(the) relations between man and the power that made him.” He seems to view this formula as evidence of what makes Christianity unique among religions, but what religion would dispute the thesis that our relationship to God is of paramount importance? Instead, what actually appears to be unique about Christianity with regard to morality is its primary insistence on the role of God as Judge. Christianity is obviously not the only religion to view God as the judge of man – Judaism and Islam clearly do so as well, to name just two – but Christianity has a unique way of counting up and tabulating all our breaches of morality as sins that must be judged. By contrast, a rabbi once told me, “I am not so much concerned with sin.”
There is an important difference between Christian sin and the Eastern concept of karma. In both systems, we are perfectly capable of transgressing moral standards, but sinning leads to an ‘either/or’ result: either God will forgive us for Eternity or He will condemn us. By contrast, one who commits an act of bad karma will receive not eternal justice but a relative justice commensurate with the crime. Moreover, the point of the punishment is not so much to do penance per se, but to receive a moral lesson. Once the lesson is learned, the karmic transgressor can move on unfettered. The mechanism for this process is that he will either be punished by a reciprocal act of karma by another human agent in this lifetime, or he will be reborn to a lower or more difficult station in his next life. In both systems, God determines the outcome, but in the Eastern system what we receive is swift justice rather than eternal Judgment. By contrast, Lewis says that if his bad temper or his jealousy was gradually getting worse in his lifetime, “it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be.”
In this way, reincarnation is a sort of escape valve from ultimate Judgment that Christianity does not permit itself. Christians may regard reincarnation as being for sissies because anyone who believes in it could simply say, to paraphrase Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, “I’ll worry about it tomorrow,” as in my next life. Yet this is a misreading of reincarnation. Yes, reincarnation puts off punishment at times, but it does not absolve the human actor from his karmic debt. What it does do that I admire and that draws me toward Hinduism and Buddhism, is that it allows God to emerge as above judgment. Yes, He judges, but His judgments follow scientific laws of cause and effect, like the mathematical law of probability or the predictable collisions of specific molecules with one another. God does not have to play good cop/bad cop as He does in Christianity. Instead, God is All-Good, All-Forgiving and completely above the fray of our human dramas of cruelty and betrayal. This, I believe, allows us to devote ourselves to God without simultaneously fearing Him.
Bird of Spirit 