C.S. Lewis and the World God Didn’t Create
Hermann Melville once noted that Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Sage of Cambridge, had some good things to say but gave the impression that he would have had some good advice for the Almighty if he’d been present at the moment of Creation. I get that same impression from the writings of C.S. Lewis — especially his fictional writings.
I can almost imagine Lewis saying:
Not bad, Lord, but you need to get rid of those bones in the sands of Africa and forget about this four-dimensional space-time business. Then you could add a few wise wizards who cast spells with literary style and a host of evil scientists scheming to corrupt all of Creation. A much better world it would be.
On the other hand, Lewis wasn’t in rebellion against the most important of Christian truths as was Emerson. Lewis also didn’t seem to be aware that he was in rebellion of a sort against God as Creator.
Before going on, I will say that I have few serious problems with Lewis’ expressions of the revealed truths of Christianity though I don’t consider him to be particularly profound in any aspects of theological or philosophical thought. He was a good popularizer of some difficult ideas, a good teacher. In fact, his appreciation of the goodness of the material world, of sacramentality, and the Sacraments, didn’t really fit well with his pessimistic views of those fields of thought and research, physics and evolutionary biology, which have been so much more fruitful in modern times than the fields that Lewis preferred. I don’t celebrate that, being a novelist and a philosopher and theologian who specializes in studying the created world. I have a foot in each camp, that of Einstein and Darwin and also that of Lewis and Tolkien — more appropriately, that of Melville and Flannery O’Connor. I’ll also say that Lewis was far from unique among Christians in rejecting the modern project of empirical knowledge-gathering and advocating a return to a magical view of reality.
Lewis was convinced that truth could not be embodied. (This was the issue in his debate with G.E.M. Anscombe, though I think she took an overly weak position on the embodiment of truth if she really was a Thomist.) In Lewis’ view, the truths we know come to us from some better place than this physical world. He seemed to view the world as a strange sort of place, itself having no direct part in truth but being a setting for stories populated by beings concerned with truth. This is certainly preferable to the modern skepticism about truth, but it isn’t good enough for a Christian.
I’ll side with Aquinas: things are true. They’re true because they’re manifestations of thoughts of God. I suspect Lewis, and perhaps Professor Anscombe as well, would be upset or at least mystified by my claim in various writings that not only are things true, but those statements that we consider absolute truths are thing-like — they’re created by God. To understand this claim, at least as I understand it, requires enough knowledge of the expansion of mathematics in the modern world to push through to a parallel expansion of metaphysics. Hellenistic metaphysics and Hellenistic mathematics were Siamese twins of a sort, but our modern view of metaphysics hasn’t expanded as our modern view of mathematics has. In fact, few there are who appreciate the great but still incomplete expansion of metaphysics to be found in the works of Aquinas. I’m not sure that Professor Anscombe even understood that this expansion had occurred in the works of that poet of the Eucharistic Presence.
In his fictional works, Lewis presented the empirical knowledge of physics, evolutionary biology, etc. as the evil magic practiced by demonic men while good men, and even Christ the Lion, used white magic. He couldn’t deal with modern empirical knowledge. To be sure, it’s hard to re-form your mind and acquire radically different skills past the adolescent years. Faraday, one of the founders of modern electromagnetic theory, received most of his education as an adult and is said to have been incapable of following Maxwell’s work in turning Faraday’s most important results into a mathematical system. In any case, Lewis seems to have viewed the modern project of gathering empirical knowledge (sometimes excessive and to no clear purpose, to be sure) to be some sort of conspiracy by evil scientists, a conspiracy intended to devalue literary knowledge. Like Tolkien who probably viewed Gollum digging for the roots of things to be a scientist of sorts, Lewis preferred to live on the surface of God’s Creation and to rely on magic to do any necessary penetration.
Modern empirical knowledge speaks of a world and implies possible ways to speak of the plenitude of Creation. These modern possibilities are disturbing to those who try to think in conventional terms, even terms developed by the greatest of pre-modern thinkers. Lewis preferred a magical world of his imagination to the universe of Einstein and Darwin, though this latter universe seems to be the physical aspects of the world God created. It isn’t wise to prefer your own world over the one created by God, nor is it a sign of the truest sort of faith.
As Nathaniel Hawthorne said:
Keep the imagination sane, — this is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.
A sane imagination works with God’s world rather than feverishly creating a world populated by fantastic creatures with natures not even consistent with what we know of God’s world. This is not to say that fantasy is not a legitimate literary genre. It’s a minor genre, but it’s a legitimate genre with great power to teach moral lessons or to create playgrounds for the human imagination. Fantastic literature ceases to be legitimate when it becomes an effort to create a view of reality rather than just being a home for comments upon reality, perhaps on moral problems.
We Christians should choose to be sane and to develop our thinking abilities and our understanding of the story which is our world, a story which includes our apish ancestors as well as the evolution of stars and galaxies in the early years of the expansion of our universe. On the other hand, the most important part of that story is the life and death and resurrection of Christ. Lewis appreciated this, even if he did try to turn Christ into a lion who practiced magic.
January 8, 2008 at 10:53 pm
[...] Here’s another interesting post I read today by To See a World in a Grain of Sand [...]
October 14, 2008 at 3:54 pm
What do you make of Lewis’s idea (especially in “Abolition of Man”, third chapter) that knowledge is good when it is sought for its own sake, but not when it is used for power over others and exploitation of the natural world? In his conception, in fact, science and magic come of the same impulse, “twins” he calls them, one of whom withered as the other grew, but both arising out of the same unholy desire for mastery. Be careful with your discussion of magic– Lewis has a more complicated theory of magic than you acknowledge here.
October 14, 2008 at 5:29 pm
I’ve tended over the past few years to rely on a profound analysis of such issues which Hugh Barbour, O.Praem. and prior of St. Michael’s Abbey in CA published in the March, 2005 issue of the magazine Chronicles. In that article, he said, “Magic is one of the arts, a kind of technology, but one that, according to Saint Thomas in his fourth Quodlibet may be known but never used, since its means, and usually its end, are evil.” From this viewpoint, what seeks to control nature by unnatural means or for unnatural ends is magic. Science, as we moderns know it, is the art of coming to know nature, certain fundamental aspects of the world which is one phase of God’s Creation. It can also be used to control nature by natural means and for good purposes — for example, to better understand the proper care of farmland. When science uses unnatural means or aims for unnatural ends, it becomes magic.
I’m not sure there’s any good way to separate the seeking of natural knowledge for its own sake from the seeking of such knowledge for ends which are both natural and useful. I recently learned that Einstein’s most often cited and most heavily referenced paper was a slight expansion of his doctoral thesis which dealt with the question: are molecules and atoms real or only useful ways of speaking? It turned out that his discussions and calculations of the interactions of molecules and atoms have widespread application in a lot of industrial processes, such as the understanding of the solidification of concretes.
In the end, we have to set moral ends but often use science as one of our ways of achieving those ends. Lewis was certainly good at understanding the priority of morality over utility and he was also solid in his theology, outside of a certain attitude towards this world. To be sure, he didn’t despise matter as such and taught that heaven was likely to be heavy and matter-like rather than ghostly. My problem with him perhaps is that so many of his followers take his thoughts as an excuse to deny the importance and goodness of disciplined exploration of this phase of God’s Creation, including human nature.
You may wish to an entry at my other blog, Hellenistic Metaphysics is too Small, for my view on our need to expand our understanding of what human thought can be. Pope Benedict has also called for a broadening of human reason which I interpret as his way of expressing an instinct that modern knowledge can allow a much richer understanding of Creation. Lewis, at least as understood by some of his major followers, is an obstacle to achieving that richer understanding.
The category “Christian in the universe of Einstein” might also be of interest to you.