Tag Archives: CS Lewis

Becoming Men with Chests

Anthropology, Virtue, , , , , , ,

CS Lewis once described modernity as being inhabited by “men without chests.”  His pithy characterization highlights the fact that men no longer are educated to have a healthy emotional life.  Lewis describes how in reviewing an elementary textbook, he came across a description of a waterfall as “sublime”.  The authors insist that the speaker is “not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings.”  Lewis is concerned that such language, even in what appears to be a mere throwaway remark, betray a certain universal prejudice towards sentiments as nothing more than private feelings that have no objective basis in reality.  Devoid of any real meaning attached to emotions, modern man suffers from a shrinking of his heart.

Lewis gives a sketch of man as having three parts: head, belly, and chest.  By head he is referring to our spiritual faculties and by belly our bodily sensations.  For most of us, that would be a sufficient description.  But in order to be more than mere parts, they must be an integrated whole—they must be connected in the middle by the chest.  To ignore the chest is literally disintegrating, you might even say dehumanizing.  “It is by this middle element that man is man; for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite a mere animal.”  It is the heart that makes humanity unique and it is through its proper integration that we become fully human.

The heart is the “place” where man’s hybrid nature meets and where man is most properly himself.  But most of us have learned to be suspicious of our own hearts—and rightly so.  But we cannot remain masters of suspicion without doing great harm to ourselves.  We must confront this suspicion head on if we are to be authentically happy.  After all happiness is not just a feeling, but a happiness that isn’t felt isn’t true happiness either.

Lewis thought part of the problem was in education.  Although he doesn’t go into details about a proper pedagogy, it most certainly would begin by defining what we mean are talking about when we speak of the Heart.  For modern man, the heart is really the place where our feelings reside.  But this is far vaguer and narrower than the classical and Biblical notion of the heart.  There are different kinds of feelings that we experience and these feelings are on different levels according to the unique powers of the human soul.  There are the mere vegetative feelings like hunger and thirst.  There are the animal feelings like contentment and anger.  Finally, there are the spiritual feelings like peace and joy.  When we speak of a heart that is fully alive, then we are speaking about a heart that has the capacity for the animal feelings (under the control of reason and will) and the spiritual feelings.

Men without Chests

At the end of his first chapter in The Abolition of Man, Lewis sums up the modern dilemma as follows: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”  His point is that without a healthy emotional life, we will never be able to be virtuous—it is like asking a castrated horse to reproduce.  Notice what he is saying—neither the Stoic nor the Sentimentalist can be truly virtuous.  To see why this is we need to reflect briefly upon the nature of virtue and its relationship with the emotions.

Temperance and fortitude and all their sub-virtues are ordered to the proper use of our emotions, or to use a more Thomistic term, the concupiscible and irascible passions.  Notice the italics are use.  Our emotions are not something that are to be killed or to be allowed to run free, but something that, when properly put to use, enable us to enjoy the good. 

An example will help.  All too often we hear “Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear.”  This is not the virtue of courage.  The truly courageous person does not feel fear, but daring.  Daring, when moderated by courage, gives him a motor by which he can energetically fight against the evil he must not avoid.  Without it, he will succumb to fear or only fight back only weakly.

Virtue conditions the passions to act in accord with reason.  When the courageous man is faced with evil, he does not need to deliberate or wait to stir up daring, it is automatically conditioned to arise in the face of some threat.  In fact it may arise before he is even conscious of a threat and act as an alarm for the person. 

Passions not only make the act easier then, but also make it better. St. Thomas says that when the passions are involved in a morally good act then it makes the act more meritorious.  This is because the entire person—head, heart and hands—is involved in the act as opposed to simply white knuckling it.  White knuckling is still good but doing so fervently is better.  The less interior resistance we have to doing the good, the better the action is.  So, despite popular misconceptions, there are moral reasons why we should be emotionally healthy as well.

Feeding Our Nature

Returning to Lewis’ point, education in the emotions is important because it is the thing that makes virtue easier.  But this education must be aimed not so much on the feeling, but on the object that invokes the feeling.  This cannot be emphasized enough.  As long as the student is focused on the waterfall and not on the pleasure of the feeling of awe or wonder that can only be described as “sublime” he is focused on the good before him.  The minute he turns to the pleasure as his focus, the pleasure is gone and the object is deemed boring.  But if he remains focused on the object, he can learn to contemplate it to find out why it evokes such a response and if the response is, in fact, the appropriate one.  This is one of the reasons why we must always protect and promote children’s capacity to wonder. 

It is by taking in reality that they begin to grow in self-knowledge as well.  Combined with education from parents especially, the child learns that there are right and wrong emotions.  The right and wrongness depends upon the object that causes it.  A young girl touching a cobra because she is charmed by it, needs to be shouted at so that she associates fear with it instead.  All too often parents attempt to diffuse children’s emotions rather than guide them.  This only causes moral problems later on down the road as Lewis points out “By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”    

On the Possibility of Miracles

Apologetics, , , , , , , ,

The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, better known as the Jeffersonian Bible, was compiled in 1820 by the founding father of the same name.  Using a literal cut and paste method, Jefferson extracted sections of the New Testament that he thought presented Jesus as a great moral exemplar.  Left behind are only mentions of the miracles He performed, including the Resurrection, and any passages that even have a whiff of his divinity.  The famous tinkerer could find no reasons to believe in the divinity of Christ and the operation of the supernatural so he imposed his naturalism upon the texts of the Bible.  Although he hid it away for fear of reprisal, there are many, even inside confines of the Church, who openly adopt and preach naturalism. 

Naturalism

Simply put, naturalism is the position that all that exists is nature.  It usually goes hand in hand with scientism, that is, the belief that the only field of knowledge is empirical science.  Within this philosophical framework the supernatural is a priori excluded such that there must be a natural explanation for everything.  This would include the divinity of Christ and miracles.  Rather than scientifically investigating the possibility of miracles, they simply conclude that miracles are impossible because they are impossible.  As we shall see, however, the miracles of Jesus are in fact quite possible.

CS Lewis makes a helpful distinction in categorizing the miracles of Jesus into two very broad categories: miracles of the Old Creation and miracles of the New Creation.  The former are those miracles in which, seemingly, the laws of nature are altered.  The latter are those that pertain to the laws of supernature.  As an example of the former we could have the changing of the water into wine and of the latter, the walking on water.  Both however respect nature and are no mere suspension of natural laws.  The super-natural always builds upon and assumes the natural. 

Using the Miracle of Cana as an example, let us examine whether or not such a miracle of the Old Creation is possible.  But before doing so, a disclaimer of sorts must be made.  The goal of this discussion is to show that miracles are possible and if possible then probable.  This is not a definitive proof that any particular miracle, including the changing of water into wine, actually happened.  That must be taken upon faith.  Instead the goal is more modest and that is to show that there is nothing irrational about believing in miracles, and, in fact, it is irrational not to believe in their possibility.

Returning to our example, let us examine what is happening.  A substance, namely water, is being changed into another substance, wine.  Change is a reality within the natural world and occurs everywhere we look so there is nothing per se out of the ordinary here.  All substantial change is governed by the enduring principle of matter.  In each substantial change, the matter takes on a new form; water gets into a grape seed and the matter becomes the grape vine which then bears grapes which undergo another substantial change through the process of fermentation and become wine.  So, we see, using the laws of substantial change, it is quite possible that water becomes wine. 

The Lord of Nature

This is not to explain away the miraculous, but to set it in its proper context.  Properly speaking the miracle is not in the change itself, but in the rapidity of the change.  Christ is revealing that He is the Lord of Nature and so it is fitting that He would respect the laws of nature and yet show His mastery over them.  He is the Sovereign King of Creation and thus He can do all things.  He came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it means not just the religious laws like the ritual washing that made the stone jars necessary, but also the laws of nature as well.  In fact, He uses the miracle as a sign that it is His power over nature that also gives Him the authority over the religious law. This mastery over nature is precisely what lends credibility to His claims of divinity and is the reason why He always uses some form of matter in His miracles rather than just creating it out of nothing.  The fact that He also produced a superabundance of 520 liters of wine shows how His absolute mastery.  A similar thing can be shown with the other miracles such as the multiplication of the loaves. 

What about the miracles of the New Creation, those like the walking on the water and the Resurrection?  How can we reconcile these?  Here again we must admit that we cannot prove them, but we can show how the follow from the possibility of the Miracles of the Old Creation and how they are not a repudiation of the laws of Nature.  If we view the miracles of the Old Creation as signs, motives of credibility if you will, then we can say that these miracles of the New Creation are the fulfillment of those signs.  They are meant to show that the laws of nature are not what is altered but man and his relationship to nature that is altered.  Water is still wet and still permeable, but man is given power over it.  Peter, a mere man in the process of becoming a new man, is able to walk on the water as long as he kept his eyes fixed on Christ.  Death, a natural consequence of man’s material being, no longer can hold him.  In both cases the laws are still in place, but man himself has changed.  Previously governed by the material laws because of his material body, he is governed by the laws of a spiritual body.  Spirit asserts its dominance against matter. 

We see now that we must admit at least of the possibility of miracles of Jesus and any philosophy that eliminates them by definition is necessarily false.  There is nothing contrary to the character of nature that would preclude them.  To eliminate them a priori means that you must in some way deny some of the attributes of nature itself.  To eliminate the possibility of the supernatural in this case means a denial of the natural as well.  The only way they could be excluded is if God did not allow them, a question that the Naturalist is not even willing to consider.

Not surprisingly most naturalists are also atheists (or at least deists).  In other words, they form their philosophy based on their belief, rather than as true scientists who would allow the data to take them wherever it goes.  In other words, they invent a philosophy to fit their belief rather than fitting their belief to a correct philosophy.  One may not know whether Christ was God or not, but to eliminate the possibility of the miraculous ultimately is unreasonable. 

Hope and the Mystery of Evil

Atheism, Last Things, Mercy, Theology, , , , , , , , , , ,

Atheists, at least those who are honest, often cite the problem of suffering as their main obstacle to believing in God.  They reason that if there is a loving God, then there wouldn’t be so much suffering.  A believer may counter with the burden of free will, but that really only accounts for the moral evils in this world.  What about the natural evils, those like we see in the wake of hurricane, where suffering and death seem to be everywhere?  The problem facing the believer is how he can explain a mystery, that is the mystery of evil, to one who does not yet have faith.  And so, the unbeliever goes away with only more reasons for disbelief.  But if we are to give them reasons for belief, then we must be willing to dive into this question a little more deeply.

Evil and suffering are, as we said, a mystery.  The word mystery comes from the Greek word mysterion which literally means closed.  Mysteries, at least in the sense we are using it here, are closed to the rational mind.  The human mind, unaided by revelation, can not even conceive of the mystery.  Once it is revealed, it becomes intelligible, but the light of full understanding cannot be seen.  The mystery of evil is one such revealed truth that, absent the gift of divine faith, is completely incomprehensible.  No amount of reasoning about suffering and evil could ever bring us to the point where we could conclude that “all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

Hope and the Desire for Justice

Even if we could intellectually assent to this truth, it remains elusive because it is also the foundation of the theological virtue of hope.  Like faith, hope is a gift and not something we can earn.  It resides in the will and acts like a holy fortitude that enables us to habitually cling to the truth of God’s Word even in the presence of manifold evils.    It is in “hope we are saved” (Romans 8:24).  At every corner, the believer is tempted to despair, that is, to give up on the fact that God always fulfills His promises so we should not be surprised when the unbeliever, who lives without these supernatural gifts, finds no seeds of hope in this world. 

Lacking supernatural faith and hope, it would seem that the unbeliever’s ears remain permanently closed to any possible theological explanation.  It only seems that way however when we ask an important question.  Why is it that the unbeliever expects things to be otherwise?  The answer, once it is uttered, turns the issue on its head.  What makes evil and suffering so bad in the mind of the unbeliever is that it appears to be indiscriminate; favoring, if anything the guilty more than the innocent.  Peeling back a layer of his thoughts he will find that, like all men, he has an innate desire for justice.  This desire, even if it is unacknowledged cannot be stamped out.  He finds within himself a fundamental paradox—”there is no God and yet I expect justice.”

Every true desire that we have has an object.  We experience hunger and there is food, we experience loneliness there are companions, we desire knowledge, there are things to be known.  We could go on and on listing our desires and find that each matches to some object.  Justice however remains mostly elusive.  We certainly believe there is an object, or else all the political machinations in which we try to create a utopic paradise are pointless.  But those objects have proven to be woefully inadequate.  It is reasonable then to expand our horizons. 

This line of reasoning is not unlike CS Lewis’ argument from desire, except that it points towards an event—the Last Judgment.  The Last Judgment, the moment when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead, will be first and foremost an event of justice.  Every injustice will be set right, every wrong righted, everlasting crowns given to those who suffered injustice and everlasting shame to those who doled it out.  The judgment of history will be corrected and “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.”  Justice will be served. 

The Final Judgment as a Beacon of Hope

In short, the desire for justice is meant to serve as a signpost pointing towards the truth of eternal life.  Pope Benedict XVI calls this “the most important motive for believing in eternal life” in Spe Salvi, his second encyclical:

There is justice. There is an “undoing” of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright. For this reason, faith in the Last Judgement is first and foremost hope—the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals of recent centuries. I am convinced that the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favor of faith in eternal life. The purely individual need for a fulfilment that is denied to us in this life, for an everlasting love that we await, is certainly an important motive for believing that man was made for eternity; but only in connection with the impossibility that the injustice of history should be the final word does the necessity for Christ’s return and for new life become fully convincing.

Spe Salvi (SS) #43

Following this line of reasoning a little further, we see that the unfulfilled desire for justice in this life becomes a beacon of hope for the next.  It is according to God’s Providential design that justice will be lacking in this world precisely to spur our desire for the next.  Revelation then becomes the venue where desire meets object.  The heart testifies and Revelation answers.

Based on this view, the Pope wants us to correct our view of the Final Judgment and see it in the light of the Good News.  “The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror, but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of hope” (SS, 44).  When we see it as part and parcel of the Good News as a response to man’s universal longing for justice, its evangelical power can be unleashed.

On True Friendships

Friendship, , , , , , ,

For those who approach Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for the first time, they are often surprised by the fact that he devotes more pages, two whole books in fact, to the topic of friendship than to any other.  From the modern viewpoint, this seems to be an unnecessary tangent that has little to do with ethics.  That is, until we realize that for Aristotle and most Christian Philosophers up until the Middle Ages, ethics was not an abstract set of rules, but practical principles for living a full and happy life.  So when Aristotle apportions such a large percentage of his book on ethics to friendship we realize that he sees it as one of the most important components of a life well lived.  In fact he ranks it among one of the greatest of life’s goods saying that “friendship is especially necessary for living, to the extent that no one, even though he had all other goods would choose to live without friends.”

First, a disclaimer of sorts.  Because Aristotle struck out in his physics and his views on women and slaves, he has fallen out of favor in modern times.  But there is a certain timelessness to his writings, especially in his ethics, because he roots them in unchanging human nature.  Therefore we ought to take what he says seriously, even if we find good reasons to disagree with him.  In a culture undergoing a crisis in friendship his writings on the topic are like a hidden treasure whose mining promises to enrich our lives greatly.

Because everyone needs friends, everyone wants friends.  This natural desire for friendship can lead us into unhealthy friendships.  This is what makes his study of friendship so important—it enables us to see our relationships more clearly and to have the right expectations.  There is not a single person among us who has not at some point experienced betrayal in one of their friendships.  Like all the loves, friendship requires a certain level of vulnerability, but much pain can be avoided through a proper understanding of friendship in general and Aristotle’s three levels of friendship in particular.

For Aristotle, there are two factors of friendship.  There is the good will that the two friends bear towards each other and there is the common good that brings them together.  As a form of love, friendship is first and foremost about willing the good for another person.  Friendship is not just a relationship, but a mutual relationship in which both parties actively will some good for the other person.  Without this, no real friendship can be found.

CS Lewis in his book The Four Loves captures the second aspect well when he compares friendship with erotic love.  He says that erotic lovers stand face to face while friends stand side by side looking at the thing that brings them together.  He says that “friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”  This is what Aristotle means by the common good that brings them together.  Friendships are always based upon not just willing the good but willing a particular good.  These goods fall into three broad categories, each one corresponding to the different levels of friendship.

The Categories of Friendship

His first category is friendship of pleasure.  Because it is the lowest level of friendship, it is the most common, especially among younger people.  This is based upon two people “having a good time together.”  It might two “golfing buddies” who enjoy playing golf together simply for the pleasure of the game itself.  What makes this friendship rather than simply mutual use is that they each will that the other plays well and has a good time, not so they will have someone to play with again, but because they truly desire that pleasure for them.  They desire the particular good of pleasure for them, although not at the expense of their own pleasure.  These types of friendships tend to dissolve when the pleasure that united the parties ceases.  One of the golfers might stop playing golf for whatever reason and the two eventually lose touch with each other.

Aristotle’s second category is a friendship of utility.  In these types of friendships there is a certain tradeoff between the two parties in which they somehow supply each other’s needs.  They are brought together primarily for the love of the good they get from the other person.  This type of friendship is most common in the adult years when “working your contacts” has become an art form.  It is a mutual coincidence of wants that brings the two parties together, a transaction of sorts.  The notion of mutual service or sacrifice is likely not a part of this type of this friendship.  Once they cease being useful to each other, the friendship usually dies.

There is always a certain amount of use in these two types of friendships because the parties love the thing that unites them more than they love the person.  This does not make them wrong per se, just incomplete.  St. Thomas says they are not friendships essentially but incidentally because the person is loved more for what they can give than in themselves.  This is why Aristotle thought only the third category of friendship, that is a friendship of virtue, was the only true friendship.

A virtuous friendship is one in which, to borrow from CS Lewis’ definition, the two parties are both looking at virtue.  They desire true happiness for each other.  Aristotle thought this the only true friendship because only a virtuous person is capable of loving the other for their own sake and because only a virtuous person can actually help another person be happy.  It is not so much that the two people are perfect, but that they are both striving for perfection.

As a true friendship, it includes the other two friendships but in an authentic way.  Rather than a friendship of pleasure, one derives pleasure simply from pleasure his friend receives in doing something.  Rather than a friendship of utility, one receives payment simply by serving the other person.  True friends look upon each other as an “other self.”

The Work of Friendship

These categories are important for two reasons.  First because many of us lack true friendships.  This lack may be simply because we lack the capacity, that is virtue, for true friendships.  We prefer the superficial to the hard work of growing in virtue.  It may also be that we are trying to form authentic friendships with people who are not capable of it because they lack the virtue or, at least, the desire for virtue that is always necessary. Remember Lewis’ definition—we will not find true friends until we decide virtue is important.

The second reason is that we often fail to properly “categorize” our friends, leaving us with unreal expectations.   A person whom we only have a friendship of pleasure with is not someone we should be going to for personal advice in a time of crisis.  We may develop a friendship of utility with our mailman, but this does not mean we should have him sit down with us to open our mail.  Those types of friendship cannot bear the weight—either because one of the parties lacks the necessary virtue to truly will the good for the other person or because there is a lack of intimacy.  True friendships are rare not only because virtue is rare, but because we simply do not have the time and emotional energy to maintain authentic friendships with that may people.  Overcommitting ourselves to too many true friendships can be a mortal pitfall for our overall well-being.

Many people in today’s culture view friendship as an unnecessary luxury rather than an integral part of a truly happy life.  By reflecting on friendship in the works of Aristotle, we can come to enjoy what the book of Sirach calls “the elixir of life” (Sir 6:16).