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1963年11月22日是一个值得纪念的日子。美国第35任总统约翰肯尼迪（John F. Kennedy）在这一天被暗杀身亡。«美丽新世界»（Brave New World）作者Aldous Leonard Huxley 和基督教思想家C. S. Lewis也在同一天逝世。

　　因着《纳尼亚王国》 (The Chronicles of Narnia) 的上映，很多人认识了它的作者——C. S.Lewis。但他不仅是童书作家，他同时拥有三种身份（也被称为“三个C.S.Lewis”）：第一，他是牛津和剑桥大学著名的文学批评家和教授（中世纪及文艺复兴时期英语文学教授）；第二，他是广受好评的奇幻小说和儿童文学作家；第三，他是知名的基督教神学作家和护教家。

　　适逢C. S. Lewis逝世50周年，我们特选辑他最广为人知的20句话，是为纪念。

　　【论基督教 】

　　Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

　　有限的人可以提出连上帝也无法回答的问题吗？我想，这一点也不困难，因为所有无稽之问都是无法回答的。

　　I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

　　我寻找宗教，并不是因为它能让我快乐。我向来知道，一瓶酒已经能够让我开心。如果你想寻找一个令自己感觉舒服的宗教，那么我肯定不会推荐基督教。

　　If you look for truth, you may find comfortin the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

　　寻找真理，你最终或可以找到安慰；寻找安慰，你既得不到安慰，也得不到真理，只会在开始阶段得到一些泡沫和不实际的思想，和最终彻底的失望。

　　If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

　　如果整个宇宙没有意义，我们就从来不会发现它没有意义。正如，如果这宇宙没有光，那生物也不会有眼睛，我们也察觉不出黑暗，而黑暗本身根本也没有任何意义。

　　If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

　　如果我们发现自己内心有一个渴望，不是这世间所能满足的，最可能的解释是，我们的存在是为了另一世界。

　　I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be alunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

　　我在这里试图让人避免说一些对耶稣的认识缺乏智慧的话，尽管别人经常这样说：”我愿意承认耶稣是一位伟大的道德教师，但我不能接受他自以为是上帝的宣称。”这样的话不应该出自我们的口。一个人，若他只是凡人，却说出像耶稣说的那些话，决不可能是一个伟大的道德教师。要么，他是个疯子，就像说自己是个卤蛋的人那样；要不然，他就是来自地狱的魔鬼。你得自己作决定，要么，相信这耶稣在当时和现在都是上帝的儿子；要不然，就得相信这人是个疯子，或是比疯子更坏的东西。你可以当他是个笨蛋，叫他闭嘴；你也可以吐唾沫在他身上，把他当妖魔宰了；你也可以俯伏在他的脚前，称他为主、为上帝。但千万别自作聪明、自以为是地把他当作一位伟大的教师。他没有给我们这样说他的可能性，他根本不容许我们这么做。

　　Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.

　　人不是宇宙的中心。上帝不是为了人而存在，人也不是为了自己而存在。

　【论信仰生活 】

　　I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

　　我相信基督教，正如我相信太阳已经升上来了一样：这并不只是因为我看见了它，而是因为通过它，我看见了一切事物。

　　A cold, self-righteous prig who goesregularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.

　　一个冷漠、自义的道学先生，尽管经常上教堂，他可能比一个妓女更接近地狱。

　　Those that hate goodness are sometime snearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.

　　那些恨恶良善的人，有时倒比那些对良善一无所知却又自命良善的人，更接近良善。

　　Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of –throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

　　就幻想你自己是一幢住家房屋吧，上帝来要重建这屋。起初你或许能明白祂在做什么，祂修整沟渠，将屋顶的漏补好，这些你都知道是应该做的，因此不觉得有什么希奇。但祂随即对整幢房子敲敲打打，每一动作都令你极度痛苦，看不出当中有什么意义。祂到底在干什么呀？答案是，祂要建造一幢和你所想的完全不同的房屋，在这边建一座新翼，在那里加多一层，筑高塔，建庭苑。你以为祂要造一间小庄园，但原来祂要建造王宫，因为祂打算自己来住在其中。

　　To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

　　成为一个基督徒，就是宽恕那不可宽恕的，因为神已经宽恕了你生命里不可宽恕的一切。

　　The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so.

　　这世界并不是由百分百的基督徒和百分百的非基督徒所组成。这当中有人，许许多多称呼自己是基督徒的人，包括一些神职人员，但却缓慢地不再是基督徒；这当中也有不自认为基督徒的人，却是逐渐地成为基督徒。

　　　　【论爱、勇气、痛苦】

　　To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries;avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of yourselfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

　　去爱，就会受到伤害。爱任何事物，你的心就会有苦恼、会伤痛。如果你想保护你的心不受任何伤害，你必须什么都不爱，甚至连动物也不行，你要用很多的嗜好及享受，把它小心翼翼地包裹起来，避免任何情感上的牵挂；把你的心完全封锁在自我中心的棺木里。然而在那里，安全、黑暗、稳定、真空，心却变了质。它不会收到伤害，但却会变得坚硬不破、麻木不仁、不可救药。

　　The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”

　　基督徒不认为，因为我们是良善的，所以上帝爱我们；而是因为祂爱我们，他使我们成为良善的。

　　If God is Love, He is, by definition something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

　　如果上帝是爱，那么就定义上说，祂远远不只是仁慈的。从所有的记载都可以看到，尽管祂经常训斥我们、谴责我们，但祂从不轻视我们。祂爱人，给予人不可承受的尊重，是最为深沉、最具悲情，同时是无可抗拒的爱。

　　Courage is not simply one of the virtues,but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

　　勇气不只是一个德行，它是每一个德行在受严谨考验时刻所呈现的形式。

　　God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

　　上帝在我们的欢愉中对我们低语，通过我们的良心向我们说话，但却在我们的痛苦中大声疾呼：痛苦原来是神的扬声器，为要唤醒充耳不闻的众生。

　　
　　　【论教育 】

　　Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

　　教育若失去了价值观的层次，不管它多么有用，都只能塑造一个更聪明的妖魔。

　　Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

　　在文学和艺术的创作中，谁拘泥于原创性，谁就不可能原创。然而，如果你单纯地尝试说出真理，一点都不在乎它是否被说过多少次，十之八九你正在原创中而不自知。

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