Conformity to Good is True: C. S. Lewis and the Natural Law

THE SENSE THAT EMOTIONS OUGHT TO CORRESPOND TO REALITY, that the subjective world of an individual man should appropriately conform to the objective world around him, was, until fairly recently, regarded as a commonplace. Even such free-thinking neurotics such as Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) recognized the link, an umbilical cord as it were, between the objective and subjective worlds, and understood that human sensibilities were like an Aeolian lyre, which could be tuned through "internal adjustment" so that it could "accomodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them." Abolition, 16-17.[1]

C. S. Lewis also reaches back to the English poet Thomas Traherne (ca. 1636 - 1674), to the latter's Centuries of Meditations, for a literary anecdotal evidence that such congruence between objective world and subjective response was the foundation of virtue. "Can you be righteous," Traherene asks rhetorically--which itself is evidence of how common the belief was--"unless you be just in rendering to things their due esteem?" Abolition, 15-16.[2]

The concept that is assumed and shared by both Shelley and Traherne has both Christian and Pagan roots, which is evidence of its fundamental humanness. It is shared by Saint Augustine, who, in his magnum opus De Civitate Dei (On the City of God), calls virtue ordo amoris, which is to say "the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it." Abolition, 16.[3] It is at the heart of the Greek notion of paideia (παιδεία), of education, when Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics states "that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought." Abolition, 16.[4]

Inculcating a proper correspondence between internal emotional states or affections and the objective order, especially among the youth, is central to the educational enterprise as traditionally understood. Through this sort of teaching, youth are trained to be predisposed to liking and not liking things in proportion to the objective fact of whether they are good or not good. The young man or woman then has a well-ordered predisposition to like what is good and dislike what is bad as a result of being taught the proper correspondence between objective world and a proper moral subjective response to it when he comes to the age of reason, "the age of reflective thought." If, instead of being properly ordered through proper training, this correspondence between objective order and affection is corrupted during youth's formative stage, it may be that the need for emotion to correspond justly to the objective world "will never be visible at all," and the young man or woman as he or she reaches adulthood will be unable to make progress in the science of Ethics. The moral world, the natural law, will be virtually foreclosed to him, or at least veiled from him, in whole or in part.

The Tao (道)

The wisdom of this insight is the inheritance of mankind. It is, for example, found in Plato, who in his Republic speaks specifically of the need to train the youth to appreciate the correspondence between the objective world and the subjective world of emotion, of passion, of affection.[5] It is, moreover, shared by the Hindu notion of Ṛta (ऋतं), which means something that is properly joined, a correspondence between a person and the truth, the real order, the pattern of the cosmos. As Lewis defines it, Ṛta is "that great ritual or patten of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality." Abolition, 17. The same concept is comprehended by the notion of the Tao (道). What is the Tao or Dao?

It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in the imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.

Abolition, 18. The notion of law as a correspondence to truth is also found among the revelation of the Jew. As an example of this, Lewis reaches into the Psalms, specifically Psalm 119(118):151, where the Law, God's commandments, his mitzvot (מִצְוֹתֶ), are venerated as truth, emeth (אֱמֶת).

You are near, O LORD, And all Your commandments are truth.

ἐγγὺς εἶ σύ κύριε καὶ πᾶσαι αἱ ἐντολαί σου ἀλήθεια

קָרֹוב אַתָּה יְהוָה וְכָל־מִצְוֹתֶיךָ אֱמֶת׃

Prope es tu Domine et omnia mandata tua veritas.

The Hebrew word used in the Psalm, אֱמֶת, or emeth--translated by the Septuagint as ἀλήθεια and by the Vulgate as veritas--means firmness, faithfulness, in short, truth. The Hebrew word connotes less a correspondence theory of truth, which is the connotation of the Hindu satya (सत्या), but instead emphasizes a reliability, firmness, trustworthiness, and permanence of truth. But the essential principle is the same, and and whether viewed as a correspondence or as firmness, the fundamental principle is shared among all great religions and philosophies of all time.

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as "the Tao". . . . It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. . . .

Abolition, 18.

Lewis's Tao is, in short, the concept that we have been advocating in this blog. It is the notion of the Eternal Law, and of man's particular participation in that Eternal Law, the Natural Law.

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[1] Lewis quotes Shelley's In Defence of Poetry, Part I, ¶2, §§ 7, 8. The entire quote is:

§7 Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre; which move it, by their motion, to ever-changing melody. §8 But there is a principle within the human being and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. §9 It is as if the lyre could accomodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accomodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. §10 A child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so the child seeks by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. §11 In relation to the objects which delight a child, these expressions are, what Poetry is to higher objects. §12 The savage (for the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects and of his apprehension of them. §13 Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of expressions, and language, gesture and the imitative arts become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. §14 The social sympathies, or those laws from which as from its elements society results, begin to develope themselves from the moment that two human beings co-exist; the future is contained within the present as the plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependance become the principles alone capable of affording the motives according to which the will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind. §15 Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. §16 But let us dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an enquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms.

[2] Lewis quotes, in part, from Traherene's Centuries of Meditations, i.12. The entire section is as follows:

Can you be Holy without accomplishing the end for which you are created? Can you be Divine unless you be Holy? Can you accomplish the end for which you were created, unless you be Righteous? Can you then be Righteous, unless you be just in rendering to Things their due esteem? All things were made to be yours; and you were made to prize them according to their value: which is your office and duty, the end for which you were created, and the means whereby you enjoy. The end for which you were created, is that by prizing all that God hath done, you may enjoy yourself and Him in Blessedness.

[3] Lewis cites principally to De Civ. Dei, xv.22, but also to ix.5, and xi.28. Excerpts to the first citation is provided in the original Latin and in English (Marcus Dods, trans.) translation:

. . . . quemadmodum iustitia deserta et aurum amatur ab avaris, nullo peccato auri, sed hominis. Ita se habet omnis creatura. Cum enim bona sit, et bene amari potest et male: bene scilicet ordine custodito, male ordine perturbato. Quod in laude quadam cerei breviter versibus dixi: "Haec tua sunt, bona sunt, quia tu bonus ista creasti. Nihil nostrum est in eis, nisi quod peccamus amantes ordine neglecto pro te, quod conditur abs te." [Cf. Ant. lat.; cf. anche Laus Cerei (PL 46, 817)] Creator autem si veraciter ametur, hoc est si ipse, non aliud pro illo quod non est ipse, ametur, male amari non potest. Nam et amor ipse ordinate amandus est, quo bene amatur quod amandum est, ut sit in nobis virtus qua vivitur bene. Unde mihi videtur, quod definitio brevis et vera virtutis ordo est amoris; propter quod in sancto Cantico canticorum cantat sponsa Christi, civitas Dei: Ordinate in me caritatem. [Cant 2, 4.]

When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every created thing. For though it be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately. It is this which some one has briefly said in these verses in praise of the Creator: "These are Yours, they are good, because You are good who created them. There is in them nothing of ours, unless the sin we commit when we forget the order of things, and instead of You love that which You have made."

But if the Creator is truly loved, that is, if He Himself is loved and not another thing in His stead, He cannot be evilly loved; for love itself is to be ordinately loved, because we do well to love that which, when we love it, makes us live well and virtuously. So that it seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love; and on this account, in the Canticles, the bride of Christ, the city of God, sings, "Order love within me." Song of Songs 2:4

[4]Lewis quotes Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1104b. The reference in the Greek and in English translation (H. Rackham, trans.) is provided below:

περὶ ἡδονὰς γὰρ καὶ λύπας ἐστὶν ἡ ἠθικὴ ἀρετή: διὰ μὲν γὰρ τὴν ἡδονὴν τὰ φαῦλα πράττομεν, διὰ δὲ τὴν λύπην τῶν καλῶν ἀπεχόμεθα. διὸ δεῖ ἦχθαί πως εὐθὺς ἐκ νέων, ὡς ὁ Πλάτων φησίν, ὥστε χαίρειν τε καὶ λυπεῖσθαι οἷς δεῖ: ἡ γὰρ ὀρθὴ παιδεία αὕτη ἐστίν.

In fact pleasures and pains are the things with which moral virtue is concerned. For pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain cause us to abstain from doing noble actions. Hence the importance, as Plato points out, of having been definitely trained from childhood to like and dislike the proper things; this is what good education means.

[5] Lewis refers to Plato's Laws (653), and quotes rather loosely from Plato's Republic (401d-402a) which refers to the education of youth in music:

"In the Republic, the well-nurtured you is one 'who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her."

Abolition, 16-17. The principle with respect to education in music in the Republic is extended to education generally in the Laws. The heart of the Platonic text referred to by Lewis is the following:

γίγνοιτο καλός τε κἀγαθός, τὰ δ᾽ αἰσχρὰ ψέγοι τ᾽ ἂν ὀρθῶς καὶ μισοῖ ἔτι νέος ὤν, πρὶν λόγον δυνατὸς εἶναι λαβεῖν, ἐλθόντος δὲ τοῦ λόγου ἀσπάζοιτ᾽ ἂν αὐτὸν γνωρίζων δι᾽ οἰκειότητα μάλιστα ὁ οὕτω τραφείς.

The ugly he would rightly disapprove of and hate while still young and yet unable to apprehend the reason, but when reason came the man thus nurtured would be the first to give her welcome, for by this affinity he would know her.

"Petit pan de mur jaune"--Proust, Vermeer, the Color Yellow, and the Natural Law

The French writer Marcel Proust, in his À la recherche du temps perdu, contains a well-known passage which relates to the notion of the natural moral law and the natural dispositions or tendencies hidden in man. From time to time, these are felt particularly strongly. Often, these moments are called "epiphanies" or "revelations" by those who experience them. These point to a Beyond as the source of standards by which man ought to conform his life. In this instance, Proust, drawing upon a personal experience, has one of his protagonists, the elderly writer Bergotte, visit a Dutch art exhibition. While examining the detail of Vermeer's View of Delft, the old writer falls ill and dies. The seeming innocuous element that triggers Bergotte's last-minute musings is the small piece of yellow wall, a petit pan de mur jaune.

The Death of Bergotte

by Marcel Proust

The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer's `View of Delft' (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. "That's how I ought to have written," he said. "My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of color, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall." Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. "All the same," he said to himself, "I shouldn't like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers." He repeated to himself: "Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall." Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee; whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: "It's nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were undercooked." A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self- sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there – those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only – if then! – to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable.

They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

Un petit pan de mur jaune! a little patch of yellow wall! As Christians, we must overlook the Proustian reference to Platonic metempsychosis, as we must reject Proust's empirically-based nihilism and the decadence which infects his work as a whole. But a Catholic will spot the good within the bad, the true within the false, the Christ among the thieves. Perhaps it is best to invoke the guidance of the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel on the meaning of this epiphany.

[W]hat is here strongly asserted, and what should certainly be retained, is the transcendent character (in the exact and non-theological senses of the word) of the standards to which the true man, together with the artist, recognizes that he must conform his life; but it is also the refusal, implicit at least, to be satisfied with a purely abstract set of rules, it is consequently the rehabilitation of what in the last analysis we must agree to call the Beyond. . . . [I]t seems to me admirable that the writer who has perhaps gone further than any other in micro-psychological investigation should have been able to recognize, at least in certain great moments, the existence of fixed stars in the heaven of the soul. . . .

The reflections of Proust and Marcel bear a striking similarity to those of the Indian philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore:

When the fruit has served its full term, drawing its juice from the branch as it dances with the wind and matures in the sun, then it finds in its core the call of the beyond and become ready for its career of a wider life.

The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore (Atlantic Publisher, 2007), IV, 375.

All this is quite classical. The color yellow is linked with the interlaced nature of time, and of life, and of that time when life is at the end of its stages, when life is drying out, and the hope of a beyond is what begins to motivate us. The typical memento mori, or a mediation on death enjoined on us by all spiritual writers, is an effort to place us in an artificial yellow mood, as it were, where we contemplate life as if we are in the throes of death. But the specter of death is universal. So in Pseudo-Aristotle, in the treatise on colors (de Coloribus), this understanding of the color yellow makes its appearance. Leaves of trees yellow at the end, when nourishment fails and dessication follows, but before all color departs. Similarly fruits will fall off a tree and yellow because of the failure of nutrition. We ought to learn from the plants, and from their fruit.


Following the Frenchman Proust, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges also links the color yellow, in this case a yellow rose, to an epiphany relating to the "Beyond." These are the dying thoughts of the illustrious Giambattista Marina:

Ni aquella tarde ni la otra murió el ilustre Giambattista Marino, que las bocas unánimes de la Fama (para usar una imagen que le fue cara) proclamaron el nuevo Homero y el nuevo Dante, pero el hecho inmóvil y silencioso que entonces ocurrió fue en verdad el último de su vida. Colmado de años y de gloria, el hombre se moría en un vasto lecho español de columnas labradas. Nada cuesta imaginar a unos pasos del sereno balcón que mira al poniente y, más abajo, mármoles y laureles y un jardín que duplica sus graderías en un agua rectangular. Una mujer ha puesto en una copa una rosa amarilla; el hombre murmura los versos inevitables que a él mismo, para hablar con sinceridad, ya lo hastían un poco:

Púrpura del jardín, pompo del prado,
Gema de primavera, ojo de abril...

Entonces ocurrió la revelación. Marino vio la rosa, como Adán pudo verla en el Paraíso, y sintió que ella estaba en su eternidad y no en sus palabras y que podemos mencionar o aludir pero no expresar y que los altos y soberbios volúmenes que formaban un ángulo de la sala en la penumbra de oro no eran (como su vanidad soñó) un espejo del mundo, sino una cosa más agregada al mundo.

Esta iluminación alcanzó Marino en la víspera de su muerte, y Homero y Dante acaso la alcanzaron también.

Neither that afternoon nor the next did the illustrious Giambattista Marino die, he whom the unanimous mouths of Fame — to use an image dear to him — proclaimed as the new Homer and the new Dante. But still, the noiseless fact that took place then was in reality the last event of his life. Laden with years and with glory, he lay dying in a huge Spanish bed with carved bedposts. It is not hard to imagine a serene balcony a few steps away, facing the west, and, below, marble and laurels and a garden whose various levels are duplicated in a rectangle of water. A woman has placed in a goblet a yellow rose. The man murmurs the inevitable lines that now, to tell the truth, bore even him a little:

Purple of the garden, pomp of the meadow,
Gem of the spring, April’s eye . . .

Then the revelation occured: Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise, and he thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it; and that the tall, proud volumes casting a golden shadow in a corner were not — as his vanity had dreamed — a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world.

Marino achieved this illumination on the eve of his death, and Homer and Dante may have achieved it as well.

Through the yellow rose, Marino was brought back "to the beginning," in principio, at the creation of heaven and earth, as the yet-unfaulted Adam may have seen it. For those with eyes, or touched by grace, the entirety of the eternal law can be seen in the petal of a yellow rose! A world within a world, a world invisible superadded to the world visible. And we need not wait 'til death to see it if we open ourselves to it.

The color yellow is an intermediate color, between a vital green and the color beyond. It thus partakes in both life and death, and informs us of both life's end, its terminus ad quem, and its lasting in time, its temporality. It is a desiccating, though not dessicated, color, the color of the humours of the blood evaporating, but not yet fully evaporated, through the passage of time and heat of life. It is a color of late life, not a color of death, though it points to death's closeness. It is a color that looks both toward the past, and towards the future. Wistful, on the one hand, and either hopeful (if one hopes for a life in the time beyond) or full of despair (if one does not), on the other hand. It is a color interim, a color in flux, a Heraclitean color, and so suffers from a certain temporal ambiguity.

For Proust and for Borges, therefore, the color yellow is the color that serves to remind us of the "call of the Beyond," Plato's ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, C. S. Lewis's "deep Magic," the Thomistic "Eternal Law," Marcel's "fixed stars in the heaven of the soul," the Hindu Dharma, or Lao Tze's Dao. Call it what you will with the lights that God has given you, it is the Word of God in the order of things. Ultimately, though you may not recognize it, though you may be ignorant of it, though you may even disbelieve it, it is the voice of the Logos, the one who became man for us, Jesus, who is our Law. Perhaps that is the wisdom behind Tertullian's observation: anima naturaliter Christiana, the soul is naturally Christian.

This is also the reason--perhaps--why Gauguin painted his yellow Christ, his Le Christ jaune, a Christ that speaks of life's shortness, and life's eternity. A Christ that beckons us to the beyond. A Christ crucified in the fields of Breton, yet a Christ crucified for all times. A Christ dead before the pious wives of Breton peasants, yet a Christ dead before all mankind. In autumn, yet for all seasons.

V. Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi.
R. Quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum.

"Lex Christianorum crux est sancta Christi, filii Dei vivi."
--Pseudo-Cyprian, De duobus montibus Sina et Sion