The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

Collectivism has various meanings but broadly refers to an ideology that emphasizes group identity, needs, goals, etc., over those of individuals; it can be an organizing principle for political or economic systems, but it can also operate more loosely on the level of culture. In Chapter 7, “Membership,” Lewis comes down hard on 20th-century collectivism, characterizing it as reducing human beings to interchangeable “units” in a way that is incompatible with their spiritual worth and purpose.

For Lewis, glory is an aspect of heavenly happiness in Christian belief, associated in scripture with various positive images. Lewis sums up glory as denoting both divine approval and “brightness, splendour, luminosity” (42). For Lewis, both these aspects satisfy deep human longings: to be welcomed by God, and to become in some sense at one with creation.

Glossolalia is the phenomenon of “speaking in tongues” as experienced by early Christians and by some modern Christian denominations—in the latter cases, usually manifesting as incomprehensible speech uttered in a religious ecstasy, and in the former case as the ability to speak real languages not formerly known by the speaker. Lewis uses this practice to argue, in Chapter 4, “Transposition,” that spiritual experience should not be explained away as a merely natural phenomenon but should instead be understood as the manifestation of another, supernatural world.

Like collectivism, with which it is often contrasted, individualism encompasses various attitudes and ideologies. It can refer to the bare pursuit of self-interest, but it can also describe a system (political, cultural, etc.) in which individual values, actions, identities, etc., are prioritized over those of the community. Lewis is somewhat more sympathetic to individualism than to collectivism, noting in Chapter 7 that political rights for the individual are important. Nevertheless, he sees secular individualism as fundamentally incomplete, arguing that the corporate life of Christians in the Body of Christ is more lasting and essential.

This is Lewis’s term for a social clique or “in group.” Lewis’s discussion of this occurs in Chapter 6, the first of a pair of chapters about social belonging. Lewis sees the desire to be on the “inside” as naturally human yet morally dangerous, leading people gradually away from a moral life.

Membership, for Lewis, is the type of belonging that exists within the church, in which different members together form the Body of Christ. As theorized by St. Paul, membership honors individual difference and function while also providing a point of unity in the person of Christ. Lewis sees membership as the ideal social organization and an antidote to both individualism and collectivism.

Pacifism refers to opposition to war as such (i.e., over and apart from objections to any particular conflict). In Chapter 3, “Why I Am Not a Pacifist,” Lewis builds an argument against pacifism, based in particular on pacifism having weak moral and historical support. Instead of pacifism, Lewis comes out in favor of the theory of just war and for smaller-scale efforts at social improvement.