C.S. LEWIS TALKS TO A DOG ABOUT LUST
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The following is a reproduction of the original article found here.
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People sometimes think of Christian morality as a
straitjacket—as if God has given us arbitrary commands that we must keep in
order to prove our devotion to him. Following God’s instructions (especially in
matters related to sexuality) requires us to sacrifice what we truly want, or
to squelch our desires, in order to show God how much we love him. We are to
give up what we want and obey him instead.
Reading through the collected letters of C. S.
Lewis this year, I came across this gem in a letter from Lewis to his lifelong
friend, Arthur Greeves, on September 12, 1933. Lewis was no stranger to lust and
sexual temptation, and neither was Greeves, who experienced same-sex
attraction.
But Lewis believed that the “Christian morality is
arbitrary” perspective doesn’t go deep enough. It doesn’t consider what we really
want. Neither does it deal with what God really wants. He uses
his dog as an example:
“Supposing
you are taking a dog on a lead through a turnstile or past a post. You know
what happens (apart from his usual ceremonies in passing a post!). He tries to
go to the wrong side and gets his head looped round the post. You see
that he can’t do it, and therefore pull him back. You pull him back because
you want to enable him to go forward. He wants exactly the
same thing—namely to go forward: for that very reason he resists
your pull back, or, if he is an obedient dog, yields to it
reluctantly as a matter of duty which seems to him to be quite in opposition to
his own will: though in fact it is only by yielding to you
that he will ever succeed in getting where he wants.”
I wish I’d come across this illustration sooner, because I
would have included it in
This Is Our Time as an example of one of my book’s
main points
—that underneath the myths we believe and the actions we
perform are both longings and lies.
The dog believes the lie that the only way forward, the only
way to get what it wants, is to push ahead. Lewis, the dog-owner, affirms the
longing of the dog to go forward, but he must pull the dog back in order for it
to actually make any progress.
Lewis Talks to His Dog
Next, Lewis explains what he would say to his dog, if
suddenly it became a theologian and was frustrated by the owner’s thwarting of
its will:
‘My dear dog, if by your will you mean what you really want to
do, viz. to get forward along the road, I not only understand this desire but share it.
Forward is exactly where I want you to go.
‘If by
your will, on the other hand, you mean your will to pull against the collar and
try to force yourself forward in a direction which is no use—why I understand it
of course: but just because I understand it (and the whole situation, which you don’t understand)
I cannot possibly share it. In fact the more I sympathize with your real wish—that
is, the wish to get on—the less can I sympathize (in the sense of ‘share’ or
‘agree with’) your resistance to the collar: for I see that this is actually
rendering the attainment of your real wish impossible.’
God Shares Our Ultimate Desire
Lewis applies this parable to our own situation. As human
beings, we long for happiness, yet believe the lies that lead to evil actions:
God not
only understands but shares the desire which is at the root of
all my evil—the desire for complete and ecstatic happiness. He made me for no
other purpose than to enjoy it. But He knows, and I do not, how it can be
really and permanently attained. He knows that most of my personal
attempts to reach it are actually putting it further and further out of my
reach. With these therefore He cannot sympathize or ‘agree’: His sympathy with
my real will makes that impossible. (He may pity my
misdirected struggles, but that is another matter.)
So, over against the person who says, “I must squelch my
desires, out of duty to God” Lewis says, No, God actually shares your
ultimate desire. He is redirecting your path so you can actually find that joy
you long for.
And over against the person who says, “God affirms me as I
am and sympathizes with all my desires,” Lewis would say, No. Because
God affirms your ultimate desire, he must categorically reject your sinful
actions and desires, for they will forever keep you from what you really want.
The Longing for Joy and the Lie of Sin
What’s the takeaway? First, Lewis says we can look back at
our history and see there is a God-given longing behind many of our sinful
actions.
“I may
always feel looking back on any past sin that in the very heart of my evil
passion there was something that God approves and wants me to feel not less but
more. Take a sin of Lust. The overwhelming thirst for rapture was
good and even divine: it has not got to be unsaid (so to speak) and recanted.”
But now Lewis exposes the lie: the idea that giving into
your sinful, illicit lust will fulfill that longing:
“But
[the thirst] will never be quenched as I tried to quench it. If I refrain—if I
submit to the collar and come round the right side of the lamp-post—God will be
guiding me quickly as He can to where I shall get what I really wanted all the
time.”
The Gracious, Ruthless God
Second, Lewis says this parable applies to future
temptation, and helps us understand why we should expect God to be ruthless in
condemning our sin:
“When we are thinking of a sin in the future, i.e. when we are
tempted, we must remember that just because God wants for us
what we really want and knows the only way to get it, therefore He must, in a
sense, be quite ruthless towards sin.
“He is
not like a human authority who can be begged off or caught in an indulgent
mood. The more He loves you the more determined He must be to pull you back
from your way which leads nowhere into His way which leads you where you want
to God. Hence MacDonald’s words ‘The all-punishing, all-pardoning Father’.”
It is impossible to appeal to God’s “love” in order to
affirm you in your lusts. God cannot and will not affirm
your sinful desires and actions because to do so would make it impossible for
you to know true joy.
So what should you do when you fall into sin? Ask for
forgiveness and redirection.
“You may
go the wrong way again, and again He may forgive you: as the dog’s master may
extricate the dog after he has tied the whole lead round the lamp-post. But
there is no hope in the end of getting where you want to go
except by going God’s way.”
Longings and Lies in Our Lust
This parable about the dog helps us see both the longings
and the lies in the world’s understanding of sexuality, and it smashes the idea
that God wants to kill our joy or obliterate all our desires. Far from it!
Instead, Lewis believes that God pulls back the collar precisely because He
wants us to find the delight we crave, in Him:
“I think one may be quite rid of the old haunting
suspicion—which raises its head in every temptation—that there is something
else than God, some other country into which He forbids us to trespass—some
kind of delight which He ‘doesn’t appreciate’ or just chooses to forbid, but
which would be real delight if only we were allowed to get it. The thing just
isn’t there. Whatever we desire is either what God is trying to give
us as quickly as He can, or else a false picture of what He is trying to give
us—a false picture which would not attract us for a moment if we saw the real
thing.
“God knows what we want, even in our vilest acts. He is longing
to give it to us. He is not looking on from the outside at some new ‘taste’ or
‘separate desire of our own.’ Only because he has laid up real goods
for us to desire are we able to go wrong by snatching at them in greedy,
misdirected ways. . . .
“Thus
you may well feel that God understands our temptations—understands them a great
deal more than we do. But don’t forget MacDonald again—’Only God understands
evil and hates it.’ Only the dog’s master knows how useless it is to
try to get on with the lead knotted around the lamppost. This is why we must be
prepared to find God implacably and immovably forbidding what may seem to us
very small and trivial things.”
God
understands our temptations. He knows our hearts better than we do. He
sympathizes with our ignorant attempts to find joy apart from him. But in his
great love, he refuses to affirm us in our misdirected ways. To do so would be
to abandon us to the leash and lamppost, where we would strangle ourselves.
