Faith & Spirit Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis is doing something characteristically tactical here: he drags anxiety out of the moral courtroom and into the hospital ward. The line refuses the pious reflex to treat inner distress as evidence for the prosecution - a "defect of faith" - and recasts it as an affliction, a condition that happens to you, not a failure you choose. That distinction matters because Christian cultures often outsource spiritual maturity to emotional stability: if you were really trusting God, you would feel calm. Lewis punctures that tidy calculus.

The subtext is pastoral but also quietly polemical. He is pushing back against a strain of triumphal religiosity that equates holiness with cheerfulness and turns mental anguish into a shameful secret. Calling anxieties "not sins" is a theological demotion with psychological consequences: it removes the double burden of suffering plus self-condemnation. Guilt becomes a misdiagnosis.

Then Lewis pulls his most daring move: he doesn't merely excuse anxiety; he gives it meaning. "Our share in the passion of Christ" doesn't romanticize suffering so much as reframe it as participation rather than punishment. The phrase "if we can so take them" is the key caveat - he knows people can't always alchemize pain into devotion on demand. It's an invitation, not a commandment.

Contextually, this lands in a mid-century Christian world where stoicism could masquerade as sanctity, and where "nerves" and despair were often treated as spiritual embarrassments. Lewis offers an alternative ethic: faith isn't the absence of tremor; it's what you do when the tremor won't stop.