C. S. Lewis once compared world religions to soups—thick soups and clear soups. The “thick” soups bubbled with mystery, matter, and ritual (e.g., ancient mystery religions) while the “clear ” soups blended philosophy, thought, and ethics (e.g., Confucianism). The truest religion, Lewis believed, would be both thick and clear because neither alone could do justice to the fullness of reality. That’s why Lewis sought a religion of sacraments and dogma, body and soul, poetry and proposition.?

Lewis found all this in Christianity. What’s more, Lewis saw Christian transformation in “thick” and “clear” terms too. To “be saved” was something more than just an external pardon by God or an intellectual consent to an idea—what he might call a “clear” approach to this crucial reality. For Lewis, salvation was an inward process involving the transformation of the whole person by the Holy Spirit and leading to nothing less than mystical union with God. In other words, Lewis embraced the ancient Christian doctrine of deification (or theosis) much as it was taught by the likes of St. Basil the Great, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, and St. Maximus the Confessor, and which is still taught today in the Eastern Orthodox Church. This doctrine was neatly expressed by St. Basil in the fourth century when he said that man is nothing less than a creature who has received the order to become god (note the lowercase “g”). Similarly, Lewis asserts in Mere Christianity that the whole purpose of Christianity is to turn people into “new men,” “little Christs,” “sons of God”—even “gods and goddesses.”[1]

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