Repentance and Science: C. S. Lewis and the Natural Law

ULTIMATELY FOR LEWIS THE CHOICE BEFORE MAN is one of two paths. Either he goes left and rejects the Tao and becomes inhuman, a thing, subject to the whims and arbitrary impulses of appetite, or he goes right, the way of the Tao and keeps his human dignity by bowing to its absolute, objective authority. Tertium non datur. There is no third way where we can have both: we cannot be both human and inhuman, a human being and a thing.

We have been trying, like Lear,* to have it both ways: to lay down our human prerogative and yet at the same time to retain it. It is impossible. Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own 'natural' impulses.

Abolition, 73. The Tao is not only the vehicle that assures our human dignity, it is the an omnibus law that covers both ruler and ruled, and so orders the entirety of intra-human relations:

Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

Abolition, 73. The Tao is that law of liberty, the law of perfect liberty, the νόμον τέλειον τὸν τῆς ἐλευθερίας (James 1:25).

The rejection of the Tao is not limited to Communists, to Fascists. The rejection of the Tao is found not only among "enemies," but among false friends. It is every bit as prevalent in world's democracies, where the rejection of the Tao is equally as real, though "[t]he methods may (at first) differ in brutality." Abolition, 73. The basic sin is the "belief that we can invent 'ideologies' at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere ὕλη," mere stuff. Abolition, 74. The thought insinuates itself in euphemisms, in newspeak, in political correctness, in calling a fetus the "product of conception," or support for the intentional killing of human beings "pro-choice," or speaking of the incongruous right of two men or two women to "marriage."

We have, it would seem, entered into a Faustian bargain, a "magician's bargain," where the cloth we have exchanged becomes all unraveled, where we are forced to surrender "object after object," and finally even ourselves in our quest for power over Nature. Science is the new Magic, the new Gnosis. Francis Bacon and Marlowe's Faustus are blood brothers. Science and Magic were, in fact, brothers born of the same womb. Science is the senior branch, and Magic the cadet branch.

The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. . . . There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the 'wisdom' of the earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution of technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious--such as digging up and mutilating the dead.

Abolition, 77. It may be time, before it is too late, for us to reconsider the nonserviamatic attitude that spawned science. We must be honest with science's pedigree. Though science may not be "tainted from birth," it was at least "born in an unhealthy neighborhood," and "at an inauspicious moment." Science is heady with success. It sees not its destructive wake. It is sees only the good it has ushered in, but is completely blind to the evil it has spawned, to the good that it has squelched. Science is like the little child who insists that his room is clean and in order, when it most obviously is not. "[R]econsideration, and something like repentance, may be required." Abolition, 78. Lewis calls for a "regenerate science," one that sees the sacred in the cosmos, one that "would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself," one that would not only focus on the "It," but would also focus on the "I-Thou," that would recognize the "inly known reality of conscience" and not reduce "conscience to the category of Instinct." Abolition, 79. I would, not, however, hold my breath for it. Hubris, pride, like sexual lust, is a particularly hard sin to cure. "Perhaps," Lewis concludes, "I am asking impossiblities." Yet science must self-discipline. It must incur some self-flagellation. But it seems unable, as it believes itself subject to some law of exceptionalism, that it cannot be corrupt, that it will always have a handle on its fruits.

Such a reply springs from the fatal serialism of the modern imagination--the image of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds. Because we have to use numbers so much we tend to thing of every process as if it must be like the numerical series, where every step, to all eternity, is the same kind of step as the one before. . . . There are progressions in which the last step is sui generis--incommensurable with the others--and in which to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of your previous journey.

Abolition, 80.

It may be that science is more like a drug addict or an alcoholic who insists his life is altogether right and in control, when it is obvious that he is not in control, but is controlled, and that he is on a collision course with destruction. That last fix may be fatal. It may be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

It is time to go back to first principles.

It is not use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.

Abolition, 81.

It is to become an H. G. Wellsian Invisible Man. We will become Griffin. We do not see man as he is, and we slowly lapse into insanity. Only when we are beaten and put to death as Griffin in H. G. Wells's Invisible Man shall we appear again as we really are: naked and without shame. But the lack of shame that comes with death is altogether different from the lack of shame that came with life, and that Adam, in his paradisaical bliss, enjoyed.

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*The reference is to King Lear, who, in Shakespeare's play seeks both to relieve himself of the burden of kingship yet retain the authority of the office. You cannot yield kingship without yielding the benefits or its office and you cannot maintain kingship without carrying the burdens of office. The choice is either/or, not both/and.

Nature's Vengeance: C. S. Lewis and the Natural Law

LEWIS FEARS, AND HIS FEARS ARE REASONABLE ENOUGH, that the "Conditioners"--those people in whom the power over human nature shall rest--will not be governed by the Tao. Indeed, their very enterprise--to control human nature, to govern it, to dispose of it as they see fit--means to supersede the Tao. They have already soiled their hands, committed the great, unforgivable sin against the Tao, to be in the position they are in. Without the Tao reigning, arbitrariness is king. "Everything except the sic volo, sic jubeo has been explained away."* Abolition, 65. There is no more right, and the human will slips through any sieve of rational or spiritual standard, as if it were the thinnest and most mercurial of fluids. "If you will not obey the Tao, or else commit suicide, obedience to impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to mere 'nature') is the only course left open."**

There is not much hope that anything will manage the impulse of those who hold the power over human nature. Look at the controversy in trying to control those who would experiment on human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) or dabble in human cloning. These "Conditioners," who seek to trespass the Tao and treat the human embryo, indeed, the human person, as a thing, cry foul each time any restriction is placed upon their will. Their only ethics is power and control over human nature, though they dress it up in their view of the good.

Indeed, if history is to be referenced, it is dubious indeed that man, once holding rein over other men, will use that power for the common good: "I am very doubtful," says Lewis, "whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently." Abolition, 66.

But nature is not so easily fooled, and when deprived of the Tao and shown out the front door, she returns to the back with arbitrary, irrational, and darkened mien. Nature is not only reason and standard, but will and impulse, chaos run amok, and that is how she comes to take over her household from the back porch. She wields the sharpened knife and the wild-eyed look of a mad termagant.

At the moment, then, of Man's victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely 'natural'--to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioner and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. . . . We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. . . . Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. Ferum victorem cepit*** . . . .

Abolition, 68.

The Demystification of the World

Lewis elaborates by retracing the evolution of the thinking that has got us to where we are. The scientific revolution, and its attitude to nature as simply a subject matter to work with, has had its price. In the main, the benefits derived from its techniques are too tempting for us. But to deny the consideration we have had to pay is not to recognize the cost associated with the bargain. There has been a progressive de-mystification of reality--it is the disenchantment, the Entzauberung of the world, that Max Weber spoke of a century or so ago.

We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who dis so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture.

Abolition, 71. Something of great beauty has been lost in this process. And what is true of rustling trees and shivering leaves, of stars flickering gently in the carapace of the heavens above, of the silent death of germinating grains of wheat, the example of which the Lord himself ennobled (cf. John 12:20:36), is seventy-times-seven true, when the scientific and exploitative enterprise touches man.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been . . . .

Hopkins, "Binsey Poplars."

Not only is something of great beauty lost, a hugeous truth is lost:

It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality is lost.

Abolition, 70-71. Emphasis on the empirical by our scientific and exploitative Horatios has made us too familiar with matter, and we have lost the sense of "strangeness" that is required to have wonder with respect to the greater reality behind the detail of the empirical:

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Shakespeare, Hamlet act 1, sc. 5, 159–167.

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*The reference "sic volo, sic jubeo" refers to "sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas," which, translated, means, "thus I wish, thus I insist, my will shall stand as reason." It is a popular though inaccurate quotation from the Roman satirist Juvenal, who actually stated without changing the meaning much: "Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas." Satires VI. 223. Martin Luther, a "Conditioner" of the Word of God, after being accused of conditioning the biblical text to conform to his teaching by adding "alone" to Romans 3:28 (So halten wir nun dafür, daß der Mensch gerecht werde ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben. The Greek text does not warrant the addition of the adverb "allein" or "alone": λογιζόμεθα γὰρ δικαιοῦσθαι πίστει ἄνθρωπον χωρὶς ἔργων νόμου), fittingly adopted Juvenal's saying: Sic volo, sic jubeo. Sit pro ratione voluntas. Lutherus ita vult, et ait se doctorem esse super omnes doctores in toto papatu. "Thus I wish, thus I command. Let my will stand for a reason. Luther wishes it so, and says that he is a teacher above all the teachers in the whole of the Papacy." Not particularly submissive, but then again, when was Luther submissive?
**By "nature" Lewis means here natural or irrational impulses or urges, whims: "heredity, digestion, the weather, and the association of ideas." Abolition, 67. He does not mean nature as a stable standard. "Chance here means Nature." Basically, the will of the Conditioner is what sets the standard for human nature.
***Ferum victorem cepit: it took captive its savage conqueror. From Horace's Epistles where he describes how the culture of the conquered Greeks took over their savage Roman conquerors, so that the defeated actually conquered the defeators: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis intulit agresti Latio. "Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium." Bk II, epist. i.156-157.
****Virgil, Aeneid, III.24-35; Spenser, Fairie Queene, I.ii ("He pluck'd a Bough; out of whose Rift there came / Small drops of gory Blood, that trickled down the same.") The reference to the "Dying God," the Deus moriendi, is a reference to the various myths, both Eastern and Western, of a dying good, most frequently related to agriculture, but such myth, and the intimation of reality, the logos, that was behind it, became flesh, and is historically true in the God-become-Man Christ Jesus. As Lewis himself put it in the book of essays God in the Dock:

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens — at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.

C. S. Lewis, "Myth Become Fact," in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1967), 66-67.

Power over Nature Corrupts: C. S. Lewis and the Natural Law

ANY POWER WRESTED BY MAN FROM NATURE MUST END UP under someone's control. After all, power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If that power is over human nature, then where that power ends up, and what its effect will be on the holder of that power, is of particular significance. The recipients of that power are called by Lewis the "Conditioners." If they are unconstrained by the Tao, the natural law, then the question natural arises: by what, then, will they be governed? The "Conditioners," if ungoverned by the Tao, will hold the keys to right and to wrong (not in a metaphysical, true sense, but in a practical, sitz in leben, for-all-practical-purposes sense).

The Tao has some staying power. Accumulated social capital, like a hard-earned savings account one inherits, takes some time to spend. Like social capital, if the inheritance is not added to, inflation or natural erosion can have its effect, especially if there are constant withdrawals. But over time--it is a certainty--the failure to save, earn dividends, and the propensity to invade principal will lead to the exhaustion of capital, both social and financial. Bankruptcy is the result. In the long run, we will all be paupers.

So likewise with the "Conditioners" if they are inculturated in the Tao. But it will not take long for the very holding of the reins of power to corrupt them, to draw them out of the way of the Tao. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and power of one's nature, the most absolute power of all, corrupts like possession of the Platonic Ring of Gyges or the Tolkienesque One Ring of the Dark Lord Sauron corrupts all who bear it:

The One Ring of Sauron

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

From being under nature, to being over nature is simply too heady a temptation for man, whose moral brain collapses in cerebral edema caused by the ethical thin air, the death zone of morality, where autonomy is joined with power over others. There is no such thing as duty, or good for that matter, if one is the master of it all:

Duty itself is up for trial: it cannot also be the judge. And 'good' fares no better. They [the "Conditioners"] know quite well how to produce a dozen different conceptions of good in us. The question [for them] is which, if any, they should produce. No conception of good can help them decide.

Abolition, 62-63. Indeed, to suggest that the "Conditioners" are subject to the Tao is to suggest that they still have not conquered human nature. But the very desire of modern Promethean man is to steal the power to define man's nature from nature, which is the same thing as saying to steal it from God. How--when the end is autonomy--can the means be anything but autonomy?

If they accept [the Tao], then they are no longer the makers of conscience but still its subjects, and their final conquest over Nature has not really happened. . . . . Every motive they try to act on becomes at once a petition. . . . Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. They are not men at all: they are artefacts.

Abolition, 64. "Force," says Simone Weil in her marvelous essay, The Iliad or the Poem of Force, "is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it. Exercised to the extreme, it makes the human being a thing . . . ."* But it also makes the one who exercise the power over the other a thing. When man becomes a thing, an artifact, then man is no longer man. We have come to the "abolition of Man." To conquer our nature means to make us a thing, which means to abolish ourselves, for if man is a thing he he is no longer man, for, as Sartre said--in a sort of unwitting Caiphatic prophecy**--man is no thing, l'homme n'est pas une chose.

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*Simone Weil, The Iliad or The Poem of Force (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006) (Holoka, James P., trans. & ed.) 45.
**Cf. John 11:45 ff.

Warning: Who's Got the Power? C. S. Lewis and the Natural Law

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION HAS USHERED IN WONDERS of scientific knowledge and technical prowess and the seeming unceasing "conquest" of nature has eased the condition of mankind in so many ways. To be ungrateful as to the physical good which science has given us seems obscurantist. To be unappreciative of the sacrifices made, and the contributions to our well-being by the likes of Isaac Newton, Carl Linnaeus, Louis Pasteur, Jonas Salk, or Albert Einstein . . . the list could go on, and on, is to be an ingrate. But there is another side to science, there is a cost, both moral and physical, to it, and there is a very danger that we may be enslaved, even abolished, as science begins its seeming ineluctable effort to control--not just physical nature--but our physical nature. There is a difference between man's conquest of nature, and man's conquest of man's nature.

Before Lewis goes into this in his last chapter of the Abolition of Man, he backtracks. He asks a question which at first seems so silly that we wonder why he asks it. What does it mean that man has conquered nature, that man has power over nature. It means, C. S. Lewis cautions, that man has power, and an ever increasing power, over man. C. S. Lewis makes his point by selecting three examples: the airplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive, all modern devices.*

What Power Does Contraception Give Us Over Future Generations?

The first thing that C. S. Lewis notes is that these "powers" over nature are not owned by men in common. They are obtained only by payment, which means that title to them is owned by someone other than men in general. "Any or all," of modern technological gadgets, or conveniences, or medicines or inventions, "can be withheld from some men by other men--by those who sell, or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of production." Abolition, 54. Some men hold the power, some men sell that power, other men have to buy that power.

The second thing that C. S. Lewis notes is that men are both beneficiaries and maleficiaries of these powers. We can be "patient or subject" as much as "possessor." Man is as much a passenger on a plane as he is the target of aerial bombing. Man can be informed by television, and he can be propagandized by television. By means of its unique target, however, contraception makes living men its subject, but it also has a particular deleterious effect on future generations. As a result of using contraceptive methods we control the future generations. And we do this without their choice, without their informed consent, without what such future generations may have chosen to prefer.

It is apparent, then, that man's power over nature can be viewed, and ought to be viewed more accurately, as "a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument." Abolition, 55. This observation has nothing to do whether the possession of that power, much less its use or abuse, is moral or immoral. Wherever we place this power--in private hands, in corporate hands, in national government's hands, in world organizations' hands--it will be controlled by some and suffered by others. This means that the power is exercised, and "all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding, must mean the power of earlier generations over later ones." Abolition, 56.

Sociologists have tended to forget or at least to neglect time in their analysis of the effect of certain phenomena. They have also tended to forget the fact that our present choices affect the future options of generations as yet unborn.

Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.

Abolition, 56. What may therefore appear to be a "progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power," may in fact be something vastly different if the dimension of time, and the effect on future generations, is considered. We neglect those that come after us, though what we do now affects them, often by limiting their options, their existence, or even how and who they may be. This is particularly true in the area of the manipulation of birth: of contraception, of eugenics, of genetic engineering. We have power over future generations, which means, of course, that future generations will have less power over themselves, and in fact there will less of the future generations than would otherwise have been. As we march forward, then, the "last me, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future."** Abolition, 57-58.

In short, if both the title to power over nature and the time element are considered, there "neither is nor cannot be any simple increase of power on Man's side." We have to come to realize that "[e]ach new power won by man is a power over man as well." This means that every advance makes him stronger in one sense, but weaker in another. This forebodes particularly ominous in birth technology and in genetic engineering:

The final stage [of Man's conquest of nature] is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have 'taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho' and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be.

Abolition, 59.

The warning seems prescient, if ignored: "For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please." Abolition, 59. The warning seems positively ominous when we realize that modern man, to whom some power has been given (or who has seized this power) does not recognize the moral bounds of the Tao. This power, then, is unconstrained by any objective law. Can man resist this Ring of Gyges? If he thinks himself invisible to the Tao, to the natural law, what sorts of temptations will he succumb to?

Those with their hands on the reins of power--Lewis calls them the "Conditioners"--will chose "what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the Human race." Abolition, 61-62. They will say among themselves (most of us will not be included in their intimate conversation): "Nice customs curtsy to great kings . . [and] you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion. We are the makers of manners . . . and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults." (Shakespeare, Henry V, v.2.)

By what shall they be motivated? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes if it be neither God nor Tao?

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*This is not entirely true for contraception, as contraceptive methods and devices have been available to men and women since ancient Egypt. The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus (also Kahun Papyrus, Kahun Medical Papyrus, or UC 32057), found El-Lahun by Flinders Petrie in 1889, dated about 1800 B.C., deals with a variety of women's health—gynaecological issues, including contraception, etc. But the efficacy of such methods under the hands of science has been, without question, improved.
**One can think also in terms of debt. To the extent current generations live beyond their means so as to incur trade imbalances or government debt as a result of deficit spending, future generations will have to pay for it. Even if defaulted upon by the debtor, the holder of the debt will then have to pay for it.

Within and Without the Tao: C. S. Lewis and the Natural Law

NEITHER IN UTILITARIAN FACT NOR IN FELT INSTINCT will a system of moral values be found. To seek an ought from a consequential fact or from an instinctive or psychological fact is doomed to failure. Moral values, the oughtness-engine that drives moral norms, can only be found in one place: the Tao or the natural law, and it traverses across cultures and history. For example, the Tao that forms the basis that it may be good to die for our country is found in the lips of man, sage, philosopher, and playwright, and even on the lips of God.

All within the four seas are his brothers
四海之內、皆兄弟也
(Confucius, Analects, xii.5)

I am man: nothing human is foreign to me.
Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.
(Terence, Heautontimorumenos 1.1.25)

All things therefore whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you also to them.
Πάντα οὖν ὅσα ἐὰν θέλητε ἵνα ποιῶσιν ὑμῖν οῖ ἄνθρωποι οὕτως καὶ ὑμεῖς ποιεῖτε αὐτοῖς
Omnia ergo quaecumque vultis ut faciant vobis homines et vos facite eis.
(Jesus, Matthew 7:12)

Humanity is to be preserved.
(John Locke, Second Treatise, III.16)

Here are statements of the Tao traversing culture and time, statements of the natural law which the liberal subjectivist, so disdainful of an

"This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments."
--C. S. Lewisobjective reality about him that informs value, simply cannot find any source for. Unless such fundamental expressions of the natural law are accepted as givens, as self-evident, "as being to the world of action what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have no practical principles whatever." Abolition, 40. The individual injunctions of the Tao are starting points, premises, and not conclusions derived from something yet more basic. The Tao is the fundamental oughtness from which all other norms of oughtness are deduced. An ought cannot be dismissed from reality, from its role in practical reason, because it cannot show a pedigree built upon an is. "If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved" in the world of theoretical or speculative reason. "Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all." Abolition, 40.

The moral feltness of the Tao may be confused with, perhaps even categorized as a sort of sentiment. If the Tao is categorized as sentiment, then sentiment ceases to be purely subjective and so it ought not to contrasted to rationality or reason. On the other hand, if the Tao is considered rational, then reason must be regarded as practical. Either sentiment must be broadened to include reason, or reason must be broadened to include the practical. However one views the Tao, it is the foundation from which all reasonable morality springs.

This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. . . . The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of inventing a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

Abolition, 43-44. The Tao is simply part of reality, and to chose part of it and reject another part, or to reject all of it, is to engage in self-deception, to venture into the unreal. It is the very opposite of Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem: it is ex veritate in umbras et imagines.**

The Tao is Not Writ on Tablets of Stone

That is not to say that the Tao is like the Ten Commandments, writ in stone (or at least once writ in stone, and now writ on paper) or like the Leges Duodecim Tabularum, the Twelve Tables of the Law of the Romans, writ in gold tablets and placed in the center of the Forum Romanum for all to see and none to contest. No, the Tao is evidenced in a number of traditions, West and East, across time and place and culture, and with varying levels of insight and of purity. We may also find contradictions, or apparent contradictions, and opposing principles. Accordingly, the Tao requires an active and critical intellect, and so also allows for development, if not of the Tao itself, at least of our understanding of it:

Some criticism, some removal of contradictions, even some real development, is required. But there are two kinds of criticism. . . . It is the difference between alteration from within and alteration from without: between the organic and the surgical.

Abolition, 45. In other words, development is legitimate if we approach the Tao in a spirit of humility, as learners, as discoverers. Development will be illegitimate if we approach the Tao as critics, as judges, in a spirit of hubris and skepticism. "You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao." Abolition, 49.

"From within the Tao itself comes the only authority to modify the Tao. . . . Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing the Tao or anything else." Abolition, 47-48. It is the difference between being an Aristotle or a St. Thomas Aquinas or a Richard Hooker versus being a Hobbes or a Hume or a Nietzsche. It is the difference between being a Stoic or a Sophist and a Skeptic. We must therefore approach the Tao with some trepidation, some fear and trembling, in the matter of the Aristotelian σπουδαῖος (spoudaios), or man who lives rightly, what Lewis refers to as the "well-nurtured man, the cuor gentil." Abolition, 49. To be in one group of critics is entirely different from being found among the other group. In a rather vivid image:

It like the difference between a man who says to us: 'you like your vegetables moderately fresh; why not grow your own and have them perfectly fresh?' and a man who says, 'Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes instead.'

Abolition, 46. It is the difference between being open minded in the area of conclusions and being open minded in the area of fundamental premises. "An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundation either of Theoretical or Practical Reason is idiocy." Abolition, 48.

Since the scientific revolution, modern man has had a disposition, learned from Francis Bacon, to bind nature into servility, to hound her in her wanderings, and to put her on the rack and torture her for her secrets. The temptation to do so to the Tao is great, as modern man abhors any limits. Sapere audem. Dare to know. The Enlightenment's motto. Kant's creed. Why should modern man stop at the Tao? "Why not this? Why must our conquest of nature stop short, in stupid reverence, before this final and toughest bit of 'nature' which has hitherto been called the conscience of man?" Abolition, 50. The modern says in Nietzschean madness, in Sartrean hubris, and in full nonserviamic Satanic revolt: "Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny." Abolition, 51.

Giving the devil his due, Lewis cautiously states: "This is a very possible position." And at least it has the merit of not being inconsistent like that thinking of a man in the middle who debunks traditional ethics even while not casting it totally aside. It is not a lukewarm theory. It is not a theory hot with the Tao. It is a cold, bitter cold theory. The man who holds this is bold, nihilistic, and rejects the concept of value altogether. What do we say to the man who would make himself God, who would make himself a self-creator, an autonomous self-legislator, a judge of his own cause, whose errant libido sciendi may bribe the objectivity of his existence, his law, and his judgment?
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*See Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government (Chapter III.16): "By the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being." A better quote would have been Lactantius? "Therefore humanity is to be preserved, if we wish rightly to be called men." Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, VI.11.
**Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, which means out of the shades and imaginings into the truth (perhaps a reference to Plato's allegory of the cave) was the early motto of the recently-beatified John Henry Newman. The motto of the liberal (C. S. Lewis calls such a one as an Innovator) who rejects the Tao may be said to be exactly the opposite: ex veritate in umbras et imagines, out of the truth and into the shades and imaginings.

Man is "Instinkt Arm": C. S. Lewis and the Natural Law

PURE REASON WRESTED FROM ANY NOTION OF THE TAO, of the natural law, leads pretty much to a dead end in explaining moral oughtness, at least if utilitarian calculus is invoked. As we saw in our last posting, C. S. Lewis hoists the utilitarian with his own Humean petard. Having stung the liberals with the failure of their reason-without-Tao to explain moral oughtness, C. S. Lewis then explores an alternative explanation frequently posited by the relativists: instinct, most fundamentally the instinct of preserving the species. Here we enter into the Hobbesian apologetic, the Hobbesian brutal, nasty, short-lived world where the moral law is dumbed down to red tooth and red claw. We fall from Seneca's noble sentiment, Homo sacra res homini, man is something sacred to man, to the vicious Plautian bruteness, homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man. The Tao can be disposed of as, in the final analysis, conventional, at best. It is for the weak. The real law is dark, ominous, and completely self-regarding and Darwinian:

We have no instinctive urge to keep promises or to respect individual life: that is why scruples of justice and humanity--in fact the Tao--can be properly swept away when they conflict with our real end, the preservation of the species.

Abolition, 33. The Hobbesian ethic gets even more vicious as man's technical progress virtually assures his survival, so that the sole basis of morality becomes literally dispensable. Thus man is able to dismantle virtually any natural law, any natural institution, beginning with sex and with the advocacy of contraception:*

That . . . is why the modern situation permits and demands a new sexual morality: the old taboos served some real purpose in helping to preserve the species, but contraceptives have modified this and now we can abandon many of the taboos. For of course sexual desire, being instinctive, is to be gratified whenever it does not conflict with the preservation of the species.

Abolition, 33. The notion of instinct as the basis for morality presents significant problems. The first which C. S. Lewis discusses in his Abolition of Man relates to the problem of determinism. If instinct is what drives us on compulsively, if we have no choice but to obey instinct, then it would appear that all is determined by "unreflective or spontaneous impulse." In which case, it would seem, there is no basis for morality. We are going to do what instinct compels us to do willy nilly, and there does not seem much point in encouraging certain behavior or discouraging other behavior since instinct does what instinct does.

To circumvent the determinism problem, the advocate of instinct must then say that man has a choice in the matter, and therefore may suggest that instinct is not compelling yet it has a measure of oughtness to it. But this is to trade one problem for another, and the problem traded for is one that begs the question. If we ought to obey instinct, why is it that we ought to? Is there an instinct above the instinct that informs us that we ought to obey instinct, a sort of Urinstinkt or primal or meta-instinct above the ordinary instinct that informs the latter's oughtness? If so, then why ought we to obey this primal or meta-instinct? Is there a primal-primal instinct, a meta-meta instinct, an ururinstinkt? And we begin to see the kind of Borgian infinite regress we have just entered. Adding more primals and metas and urs to a word doesn't really get us anywhere. "This is presumably impossible, but nothing else will serve." Lewis finds the kernel of illogic in the argument, and it is similar to the Humean "is/ought" problem he detected in the utilitarian:

From the statement about psychological fact 'I have an impulse to do so and so' we cannot be any ingenuity derive the practical principle 'I ought to obey this impulse'. Even if it were true that men had a spontaneous, unreflective impulse to sacrifice their own lives for the preservation of their fellows,** it remains a quite separate question whether this is an impulse they should control or one they should indulge.

As if the problem of infinite regress were not enough for the instinctivist to try to tackle, Lewis then asks what standard the instinctivists*** reach for in determining what instincts should be followed and which should not. It is a fundamental experience which no man can deny: "Our instincts are at war." Abolition, 36. When instincts clash, and we are instructed that one instinct should take precedence, "whence do we derive this rule of precedence?" Instincts do not judge themselves. There must be something outside the instincts to judge them.

The idea that, without appealing to any court higher than the instincts themselves, we can yet find grounds for preferring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard. We grasp at useless words: we call it the 'basic', or 'fundamental', or 'primal', or 'deepest' instinct. It is of no avail. Either these words conceal a value judgment passed upon the instinct and therefore not derivable from it, or else they merely record its felt intensity, the frequency of its operation and its wide distribution. If the former, the whole attempt to base value upon instinct has been abandoned: if the latter, these observations about the quantitative aspects of a psychological event lead to no practical conclusion. It is the old dilemma. Either the premises already concealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely in the indicative.

Abolition, 36-37. It looks more and more like instinctivists, sort of like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, are caught up in some sort of spiraling gyre and heading out of Kansas into some Ozian world of logic. Or perhaps, more classically, it looks like the instinctivists in their Odyssean quest for a basic of morality are being ineluctably swallowed up by some sort of Charybdian enemy of logic.

Ur, ur, ur, ur, ur, ur, ur, ur . . .

Lewis has yet another point against the instinctivists, specific to the notion of preservation of the species as a "basic" instinct. He has doubts that it even exists, and that if it exists it is conventional. How go about proving that it is an instinct at all?

I do not discovery [an instinct to care for posterity] in myself . . . . Much less do I find it easy to believe that the majority of people who have sat opposite me in buses or stood with me in queues feel an unreflective impulse to do anything at all about the species, or posterity. . . . . What we have by nature is an impulse to preserve our own children and grandchildren; an impulse which grows progressively feebler as the imagination looks forward and finally dies out in the 'deserts of vast futurity'.*** . . . . If we are to base ourselves upon instinct, these things are the substance, and care for posterity the shadow--the huge, flickering shadow of he nursery happiness cast upon the screen of the unknown future.

Abolition, 38-39. What it looks like to Lewis is that the alleged instinct of preservation of the species is not something instinctive, but a taste highly refined and reflective, one nurtured not natured, and one generally found in such characters, many of them misanthropic but some just idealistic activists, with grandiose idealogies such as the the innocuous pedagogue and social reformer Friedrich Fröbel, the liberal political philosopher Rousseau, and the much less liberal and much more ominous Marx, Hitler, Mao, or Pol Pot.
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*Lewis was Anglican with Catholic leanings. Published in 1943, his book Abolition of Man came after the controversial Lambeth Conference in 1930. Look at the great Fall of the Anglican Church, the great sexual apostasy in just one decade between the Sixth Lambeth Conference (1920) and the Seventh Lambeth Conference (1930).
Here is the Anglican teaching in 1920:

Resolution 68

Problems of Marriage and Sexual Morality

The Conference, while declining to lay down rules which will meet the needs of every abnormal case, regards with grave concern the spread in modern society of theories and practices hostile to the family. We utter an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception, together with the grave dangers - physical, moral and religious - thereby incurred, and against the evils with which the extension of such use threatens the race. In opposition to the teaching which, under the name of science and religion, encourages married people in the deliberate cultivation of sexual union as an end in itself, we steadfastly uphold what must always be regarded as the governing considerations of Christian marriage. One is the primary purpose for which marriage exists, namely the continuation of the race through the gift and heritage of children; the other is the paramount importance in married life of deliberate and thoughtful self-control.

We desire solemnly to commend what we have said to Christian people and to all who will hear.

Here is the Anglican teaching only one decade later, in 1930:

Resolution 15

The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage and Sex

Where there is clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, the method must be decided on Christian principles. The primary and obvious method is complete abstinence from intercourse (as far as may be necessary) in a life of discipline and self-control lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles. The Conference records its strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.

Voting: For 193; Against 67.

By 1968, at the Tenth Lambeth Conference, the Anglican bishops had the temerity to disagree with Pope Paul VI's recent encyclical Humanae vitae which reaffirmed the Tao and the Church's teaching regarding artificial contraception:

Resolution 22

Responsible Parenthood

This Conference has taken note of the papal encyclical letter Humanae vitae recently issued by his holiness Pope Paul VI. This Conference records its appreciation for the pope's deep concern for the institution of marriage and the integrity of married life.

Nevertheless, the Conference finds itself unable to agree with the Pope's conclusion that all methods of conception control other than abstinence from sexual intercourse or its confinement to periods of infecundity are contrary to the "order established by God." It reaffirms the findings of the Lambeth Conference of 1958 contained in Resolutions 112, 113, and 115 which are as follows:

112. The Conference records its profound conviction that the idea of the human family is rooted in the Godhead and that consequently all problems of sex relations, the procreation of children, and the organisation of family life must be related, consciously and directly, to the creative, redemptive, and sanctifying power of God.

113. The Conference affirms that marriage is a vocation to holiness, through which men and women may share in the love and creative purpose of God. The sins of self-indulgence and sensuality, born of selfishness and a refusal to accept marriage as a divine vocation, destroy its true nature and depth, and the right fullness and balance of the relationship between men and women. Christians need always to remember that sexual love is not an end in itself nor a means to self-gratification, and that self-discipline and restraint are essential conditions of the responsible freedom of marriage and family planning.

115. The Conference believes that the responsibility for deciding upon the number and frequency of children has been laid by God upon the consciences of parents everywhere; that this planning, in such ways as are mutually acceptable to husband and wife in Christian conscience, is a right and important factor in Christian family life and should be the result of positive choice before God. Such responsible parenthood, built on obedience to all the duties of marriage, requires a wise stewardship of the resources and abilities of the family as well as a thoughtful consideration of the varying population needs and problems of society and the claims of future generations.

The Conference commends the Report of Committee 5 of the Lambeth Conference 1958, together with the study entitled "The Family in Contemporary Society" which formed the basis of the work of that Committee, to the attention of all men of good will for further study in the light of the continuing sociological and scientific developments of the past decades.

So facilely, easily did the Anglicans cast of the natural law's teaching on artificial contraception and the meaning and purpose of the conjugal act. The lawlessness, 'tis true, is draped in pious sounding language: but that is about as effective as suggesting a traitor's corpse is patriotic because it is a coffin and draped in an American Flag. I do not know Lewis's personal views on the liciety of artificial contraception, although he appears to be generally against it in this particular text.
**One should recall that Lewis is here exploring the concrete teaching: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (it is a sweet and useful thing to die for one's country) from the perspective of those who reject the Tao. It is his experimentum crucis, or critical experiment, meant to ferret out the problems of the non-traditionalist, liberal, subjective and relativist view.
***Lewis has some lengthy footnotes discussing the doctrines of literary critic Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979) and the biologist Conrad Hal Waddington (1905–1975) not discussed herein.
****This appears to be an allusion to Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress":

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Utilitarian Failure: C. S. Lewis and the Natural Law

IN DEPARTING FROM THE WAY WHEN EDUCATING THE YOUNG and lapsing into the slough of relativism and subjectivism one is assuring the eventual destruction of society. Strictly speaking, perhaps, the fact that a certain doctrine will lead to the demise of society does not speak as to its untruth. Contrariwise, the fact that a certain doctrine works does not assure its conformity with truth. Pragmatic sanction is not necessarily the seal of truth. "The true doctrine might be a doctrine which if we accept we die." Abolition, 27. If truth were to lead to our demise, then reality would be a cruel joke, to be sure, and the hopeless existentialists such as Sartre could all be right. We just need to man up and take it. It might be our fate to pray to Zeus in the manner of the ancient Greeks who were awash in the determinism of fate, of μοῖρα, moira. The world, and its God--if he be Zeus not Yahweh--may be hostile to us:

ἐν δὲ φάει καὶ ὄλεσσον.*

In the light do thou e'en slay us.

Homer, Iliad, XVII.647. But there is a curious inconsistency in the liberal mind. While it rejects absolute norms and the existence of an objective reality to which the mind and morals ought to conform, a "Reason" behind "reason," and therefore rejects a purpose or end to the entire structure of reality, it has the audacity to promote an end of its own. The doctrine of liberalism is therefore overwhelmingly hypocritical. It says one thing and does another. They claim to be free of doctrinal bias, all the while they have a doctrinal bias of their own. The talk about "progress" or "enlightenment" or "evolving" begs the question: progress to, enlightenment with, evolving towards what? What is the liberal ineluctable good which liberals deny everyone else? It is simply an "uncritical dogmatism," a "system of values which happen[] to be in vogue," which is anti-tradition, anti-religion, anti-natural law. Ultimately, the dogmatism of the liberal rests on absurdity.

The Subjectivist, Relativist Liberal Hoisted by the Humean Petard

Since the liberal rejects the notion of the Tao or the natural law as providing a reason for doing things, or eminently as being even part of reality and Reason itself, the liberal must seek for the basis of the good elsewhere. Lewis explores this and finds the subjectivism of the liberal wanting in foundation. He uses the Horatian sentiment: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as the "experimentum crucis,"** How does the liberal argue to the fellow liberal that he ought to die for the good of his country?

The first possibility is the notion of the useful. Perhaps the good is based upon utility: "'Good', he might say, 'means what is useful to the community.'" Abolition, 30. Death is not useful to the community, so what must be meant is death of an individual is useful to the community. And we may grant the premises as true in fact. It may be factual that the death of one man saves many. Why then should any one man sacrifice himself for the others? On the liberal premise, one cannot appeal to those sentiments, central to the Tao, that are based upon an objective order (pride, honor, shame, love, etc.) and thus are "natural" to us but cannot be strictly ascribed to "pure reasoning." Why should one man sacrifice himself for the community and not another man? Isn't it as equally "rational" that another man (and not me) sacrifice himself for the community's good? Selfishness seems more rationally justifiable than altruism if the Tao is not to be taken into account. Refusal to sacrifice, then, seems equally as rational as sacrifice. Why is this the case? It is the case because the liberal is hoisted by his own petard. The Humean Guillotine kills the liberal: one cannot build value on utilitarian fact:

From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The Innovator [i.e., the liberal if he bases his ethic on some sort of utilitarian or consequentialist reasoning] is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premises in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible.

Abolition, 32-33. The Tao, of course, would add the oughtness and make it part of the entire reasoning process. But far be it from the liberal to acknowledge his mistake. So from the "rational" and "enlightened" utilitarian principles which have failed him, where does he turn? Perhaps to instinct?

(continued)
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*Homer, Iliad, XVII.647. (My text, published by Harper, has: 'εν δε φαει και 'δλεσσου, which appears to be a misprint. Apparently, the editor did not know Greek!)
**The term experimentum crucis means "crucial experiment" or "critical experiment." It is a term that is given to an experiment that decisively determines the superiority of one hypothesis or theory to all other hypotheses or theories whose acceptance commonly held by others in the community.

The Need for the Tao: C. S. Lewis and the Natural Law

LIBERALISM AND RELATIVISM IN EDUCATION IS FATAL to the human spirit because it excludes reality from its auspices, and so is completely unable to come to terms with the emotional life of man. Sentiment can be reasonable or unreasonable, but in the world of liberalism and relativism the standard by which sentiment can be judged and then reined is rejected. Plato's chariot runs wild: the horse of reason will never control the horse of passion.* The Gaiuses and Titituses of the world exclude a "reference to something beyond the emotion." Abolition, 20.

As C. S. Lewis observes emotions, in themselves, are arational or non-rational. If they are regarded as irrational, it is not because they are ipso facto against reason; rather, they are irrational only in the sense that the emotion or sentiment, judged against the external standard, is adjudged aberrant. To judge some emotions as irrational and others as rational, then, one has to to stand within the Tao, and not outside of it like the modern educators that C. S. Lewis criticizes. Those within the Tao, within the tradition, within the natural law, see the task of moral formation, of education, of paideia, of the studia humanitatis.

For those within [the Tao, the task is to train in the pupil those responses which are in themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists. Those without, if they are logical, must regard all sentiments as equally non-rational, as mere mists between us and the real objects. As a result, they must either decide to remove all sentiments, as far as possible, from the pupil's mind; or else to encourage some sentiments for reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic 'justness' or 'ordinacy'.

Abolition 21.

C. S. Lewis concretizes, and he takes as an example a Roman father, let us call him Marcus Porcius, steeped in the traditions of a Republican Rome: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, the Father, quoting the poet Horace** instructs his son. "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country." The Roman father believed that such an emotion was fitting, was true, and was ordered to nobility in death for causes greater than oneself such as the common good. Gaius and Titius would find this statement impossible. Two courses would be open to them: they either debunk the sentiment of patriotism which Marcus Porcius wishes to instill in his son, or they must find some other basis for inculcating such a sentiment other than that it is right, perhaps by seizing a utilitarian motive. Either way, the young Roman has been corrupted if his head and heart are influenced by Gaius and Titius. What in the old way was pedagogy--a system of educare, of drawing out, of inculturare, of inculturating, is not the same thing in the new.

Men Without Chests

If instead of mere debunking the emotion the modern educator who has rejected the guidance of the Tao turns to steer emotions, there is much to beware. Since such a one rejects the Tao, his only standard is his own, an arbitrary one, an ideology. Pedagogy, then, becomes demagogy or ideagogy (to coin a neologism)--a system of propagandization, of brain washing. The words dulci et decorum est pro patria mori are decidedly different in the lips of a Roman father, steeped in the Tao, than in the hands of an idealogue who stands without the Tao. They become too horrible to hear on the lips of the Islam radical cleric, say an Abu Hamza al-Masri, or on the lips of Baldur von Schirach, the Reichsjugendführer or leader of the Hitler Youth movement. Both of these latter stand outside the Tao.

If, however, the modern educator turns to debunking the emotion on the basis that there is no objective standard by which to measure it, while it may be slightly less objectionable than the person who co-opts the emotions to recruit them to his ideology, it still is a destructive response. To begin with, the denial of objective standards is itself problematic. Can virtues even exist if there is no objective reality? Assuming that they can, can the virtues exist when unsupported by properly trained emotions? Pace Socrates and his belief that knowledge alone is necessary and sufficient to assure justice,*** it seems apparent to Lewis that the proposition is rather dubious:

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. . . . In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of bombardment. . . . The head rules the belly through the chest--the seat, as Alanus tells us,**** of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment--these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

Abolition, 24-25. It is Alan of Lille's Magnanimity, the seat of the emotions that hover between the viscera, the pudenda, below and the mind, the Geist, above, that Lewis calls a man's chest. The liberals, then, seek to create men without Magnanimity, without trained or habitually disposed emotions, "Men without Chests."

Liberals, of course, like to think themselves as intellectuals, and those who insist that traditional values ought to be inculcated in youth and believe in an objective normative order against which emotions ought to be judged they view as fools. But this is an outrage, as the intellectual virtues are not possessed by the liberals alone, and any perception of a big brain is only the result of a trick of the senses, and optical or intellectual illusion:

It is an outrage that they [the liberal debunkers] should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. . . . Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath them that makes them seem so.

Abolition, 25. And the "tragi-comedy" of liberal making is that the liberals cannot figure things out. They cannot seem to solve social problems they have engendered or exacerbated, and they refuse to believe that it may be their theories that are the problem to begin with:

We make men without chests and we expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor [or chastity, or piety, or obedience, or any other virtuous quality] and we are shocked to find traitors [or pedophiles, or Satan worshipers, or anarchists] in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Abolition, 26.

Let us leave the Lewisian horse metaphor and speak plainly: We unman men, emasculate them, and then expect them to have, as we might say in South Texas, cojones. To continue the South Texas theme: That dog just don't hunt.
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*See Plato, Phaedrus, 246a-254e.
**Horace, Odes (III.2.13).
***See Plato's Protagoras, 361b. See also discussion of Plato's Protagoras in Contra Consequentialismum: Virtue.
****For Alanus ab Insulis (Alan of Lille) and his De Planctu Naturae, see, generally the posting Nature's Complaint: Alan of Lille's The Plaint of Nature, Part 1. For the particular reference to Magnanimity referred to be Lewis, see the posting Alan of Lille's The Plaint of Nature, Part 3.

Debunking of Traditional Values: C. S. Lewis and the Natural Law

IT IS NOT ONLY THE SUBJECTIVIZATION of reality that is insulted by the authors of The Green Book and which offends C. S. Lewis's traditional values. Gaius and Titius, the epithets given by C. S. Lewis to the authors of The Green Book, engaged in a two prong attack. First, they conflated the objective and the subjective, making the subjective the only thing that is real, and therefore making everything unreal. But they also go about "debunking" or deprecating traditional habits or sentiments under the guise of rationalism. If they succeed, then, in removing the habit by debunking the sentiment associated with it, they will have left a man flailing in the winds of subjectivism all under the guise of being rational.

The authors of The Green Book take issue at a "silly" advertisement for a cruise to the "Western Ocean where Drake of Devon sailed." That the "venal and bathetic exploitation of those emotions of awe and pleasure which men feel in visiting places that have striking associations with history or legend" which this advertisement makes trite is certainly something C. S. Lewis understands. The right course would have been to show how these emotions might be properly expressed. But instead of attacking the advertisement, The Green Book attacks the emotion that the advertisement seeks to exploit and which necessarily it cheapens by such exploitation.

There is something fundamentally human in the desire to visit places that have great significance in history or in legend or in faith. It is what drives us to pilgrimage, to Santiago de Compostela, to Bethlehem, to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It is what drives the Muslim to Mecca, the Hindu to the Ganges, the Buddhist to Bodh Gaya. The desire is not only religious, as we see it expressed by the desire to travel to Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Giza, the Parthenon in Athens, the Gettysburg National Cemetery, or the facade of the Library of Celsus, the remarkable Theater, or the humble abode of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Ephesus. The places accorded special status are as various as the desires of the men that visit them. This fundamental and deep desire in man is seen, and honored even in its triteness, in its most cheap manifestations, say, the visits to Graceland by the fans of Elvis Presley. How many texts were available to Gaius and Titius to which they could point to as examples of proper expression of such emotion? Between the 4th century account of Etheria's pilgrimage to Jerusalem to John Muir's account of his night at the Bonaventure Cemetery in Georgia, hundreds of texts abound! C. S. Lewis points to Samuel Johnson's passage from his A Journey to the Western Islands:

We were no treading that illustrious island, which was one the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge, and the blessing of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish, if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plan of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.

(Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides(London: Penguin 1984), 140-41.

Yet it is just this "foolish" and "frigid philosophy" mentioned by Johnson that the authors of The Green Book are peddling! Instead of ennobling the emotion, instead of criticizing its exploitation by the advertisers and the draping of it in verbal kitsch, the authors "debunk" the emotion itself as irrational:

What [the authors] actually do is to point out that the luxurious motor-vessel won't really sail where Drake did, that the tourists will not have any adventures, that the treasures they bring home will be of a purely metaphorical nature, and that a trip to Margate* might provide 'all the pleasure and rest' they required. . . . What [the schoolboy] will learn quickly enough, and perhaps indelibly, is the belief that all emotions aroused by local association are in themselves contrary to reason and contemptible--that it falls equally flat on those who are above it and those who are below it, on the man of real sensibility and on the mere trousered ape . . . .

Abolition, 8-9.

Automedon and the Horses of Achilles,
by Henri Alexandre Georges Regnault (1868)

The same sort of "debunking," though perhaps in a less severe form, occurs in another text to which C. S. Lewis refers his auditor or reader. This text, by a certain "Orbilius"** who attacks a "silly bit of writing on horses, where these animals are praised as the 'willing servants' of the early colonists in Australia.'" The Orbilian criticism is that horses, being brute animals, are not interested in colonial expansion, and so it is not literally accurate, not according to the letter (secundum litteram) to suggest it. But what is this? This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The evil is poor writing, not the deep regard that man ought to have for animals, and which has traditionally been expressed by the "semi-anthropomorphic treatment of beasts . . . . and of the literature where it finds noble or piquant expression." Abolition, 10. Why shut this tradition down? Why deprecate the Brer Rabbit of the Uncle Remus stories by J. C. Harris, or Peter Cottontail of Beatrix Potter and remove this genre from children? And who and why would someone debunk the noble tradition of referring to horses, or dogs for that matter, as man's companion? Who would squelch from grown men the lines of Matthew Arnold's poem "Sohrab and Rustum," and their telling of Rustum's faithful horse, Ruksh, who grieved with his master?

So arm'd, he issued forth; and Ruksh, his horse,
Follow'd him like a faithful hound at heel--
Ruksh, whose renown was noised through all the earth . . .
When they saw Rustum's grief; and Ruksh, the horse,
With his head bowing to the ground and mane
Sweeping the dust, came near, and in mute woe
First to the one then to the other moved
His head, as if enquiring what their grief
Might mean; and from his dark, compassionate eyes,
The big warm tears roll'd down, and caked the sand.

Or even poignant, weeping horses of Achilles, Xanthus and Balius, who, in their sorrow for Patroclus, would not enter battle?

But the horses of Aikides standing apart from the battle
wept, as they had done since they heard how their charioteer
had fallen in the dust at the hands of murderous Hektor.

ἵπποι δ᾽ Αἰακίδαο μάχης ἀπάνευθεν ἐόντες
κλαῖον, ἐπεὶ δὴ πρῶτα πυθέσθην ἡνιόχοιο
ἐν κονίῃσι πεσόντος ὑφ᾽ Ἕκτορος ἀνδροφόνοιο.

Iliad, XVII.426-28 (Lattimore, trans.) Are such anthropomorphisms irrational, or are they rather non-rational? What is it Orbilius wants? For us to become Black Beauty's Mr Nicholas Skinner?

Some pleasure in their own ponies and dogs they will have lost; some incentive to cruelty or neglect they will have received; some pleasure in their own knowingness will have entered their minds. That is their day's lesson in English, though of English they have learned nothing.

Abolition, 11.

It may be, though Lewis doubts it, that of Gaius and Titius and Orbilius it may be said:

They may really hold that the ordinary human feelings about the past or animals or large waterfalls are contrary to reason and contemptible and ought to be eradicated. They may be intending to make a clean sweep of traditional values and start with a new set.

Abolition, 12. If this is the case, it obviously has no place in books of English and Literature. More likely, what's involved is a sort of intellectual torpor. More likely it is not "theory they put in [the schoolboy's mind], but an assumption." Abolition, 5 (emphasis added). It is an assumption, moreover, based on lazy thought. "To explain why a bad treatment of some basic human emotion is bad literature is, if we exclude all question-begging attacks on the emotion itself, a very hard thing to do." Abolition, 13. Much easier is to "'debunk' the emotion, on the basis of a commonplace rationalism," as that is within the simpleton's ability. It is, in fact replacing triteness with banality, replacing "weak excess of sensibility" with "the slumber of cold vulgarity." Abolition, 13. So not only is the cure contraindicated, the disease is misdiagnosed. "The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts." Abolition, 13-14.

The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. 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.

Abolition, 14. And the modern educators have given their students both a starved sensibility and a soft head. It is this simultaneous combination of subjectivism (all is emotion, and emotion has no tie to the real) and deprecation of emotion that is particularly vicious. It is as foolish as having a society with neither custom nor law. It is a moral anarchy that is being taught under the ruse that it is of reason. It is like a man without a heart, whose head looks big only because his chest has imploded. Inside it is is all gangrenous.

The job of the educator is not to grow "men without chests," or "trousered apes" with mindless hearts, or "urban blockheads" with heartless minds. The task of the educator is to grow a "men of real sensibility," men of tradition, men with both heart and mind. Real men. Men, incidentally, though one within the tradition would already know this, means both men and women.

The problem is that the modern educator has jettisoned the philosophical and pedagogical tools to be able to do this. To order emotions, there must be a standard against which the emotions are to be ordered. Our emotions must be congruous or incongruous to some external norm, and the tradition found this normative measure in the cosmos, in nature. Traditionally, the datum against which emotions were weighed was objective. This is the inheritance of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Traherne, Coleridge, even Shelley. Looking East, it was the inheritance of Hinduism's Ṛta, the Confucian shù,and the Oriental Tao. The tradition has been lost, particularly in the West. Where is it taught in the public schools or the colleges and universities, taught by a whole army of willing or unwilling Gaiuses and Titiuses and Orbliuses, priests of relative liberalism, priests of such idiocies, such pseudo-histories as Black Athena?

If such a standard is to be found anywhere in any way hale and whole, it is in the Catholic Church which has preserved it much like the Benedictines of old preserved the pagan classics in their scriptoria. She shouts it from the the seven hills of Rome, but also from the Collis Vaticanus, in the person of Benedict XVI all dressed in white, who warns about the tyranny of relativism. Most of his words are devoured, put into soundbites or misinterpreted, before they reach the people. Some of his words fall rocky ground, where they yield no fruit for want of soil. Some of his words fall among thorns of materialism and of lust, and are choked out of life. Thus, for various reasons, the rich in modern culture, and poor in the tradition, walk empty away, though their pockets are laden with their paper money and their latex condoms. They walk away looking like Lewis's urban blockheads and trousered apes: men without chests. Thus far none but the powerless, the anawim, seem to listen. And they wait, this faithful remnant, for the time that the seed the Pope is trying to plant should grab root, grow, and bear fruit and should yield thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.
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*Margate was a popular local resort for Londoners and other English vacationers.
**Again using an pseudonym so as to charitably (or maybe not so charitably given the connotation attached to the name) to protect the author, C. S. Lewis is referring to E. G. Biaggini's The Reading and Writing of English (1936). Orbilius refers to the Roman grammarian and language teacher (114 BC – c. 14 BC), Lucius Orbilius Pupillus. The Roman poet Horace (Epistulae II.1, 70) called him Orbilius Plagosus or "Orbilius the Flogger" because of his abuse of pupils who translated Homer's Greek poorly.