Читать книгу Christian Reflections - Клайв Льюис, Клайв Стейплз Льюис, C. S. Lewis - Страница 7
ОглавлениеIf the heavenly life is not grown up in you, it signifies nothing what you have chosen in the stead of it, or why you have chosen it.
William Law
I
At an early age I came to believe that the life of culture (that is, of intellectual and aesthetic activity) was very good for its own sake, or even that it was good for man. After my conversion, which occurred in my later twenties, I continued to hold this belief without consciously asking how it could be reconciled with my new belief that the end of human life was salvation in Christ and the glorifying of God. I was awakened from this confused state of mind by finding that the friends of culture seemed to me to be exaggerating. In my reaction against what seemed exaggerated I was driven to the other extreme, and began, in my own mind, to belittle the claims of culture. As soon as I did this I was faced with the question, ‘If it is a thing of so little value, how are you justified in spending so much of your life on it?’
The present inordinate esteem of culture by the cultured began, I think, with Matthew Arnold – at least if I am right in supposing that he first popularized the use of the English word spiritual in the sense of German geistlich. This was nothing less than the identification of levels of life hitherto usually distinguished. After Arnold came the vogue of Croce, in whose philosophy the aesthetic and logical activities were made autonomous forms of ‘the spirit’ coordinate with the ethical. There followed the poetics of Dr I. A. Richards. This great atheist critic found in a good poetical taste the means of attaining psychological adjustments which improved a man’s power of effective and satisfactory living all round, while bad taste resulted in a corresponding loss. Since this theory of value was a purely psychological one, this amounted to giving poetry a kind of soteriological function; it held the keys of the only heaven that Dr Richards believed in. His work (which I respect profoundly) was continued, though not always in directions that he accepted, by the editors of Scrutiny,* who believe in ‘a necessary relationship between the quality of the individual’s response to art and his general fitness for humane living’. Finally, as might have been expected, a somewhat similar view was expressed by a Christian writer: in fact by Brother Every in Theology for March 1939. In an article entitled ‘The Necessity of Scrutiny’ Brother Every inquired what Mr Eliot’s admirers were to think of a Church where those who seemed to be theologically equipped preferred Housman, Mr Charles Morgan, and Miss Sayers, to Lawrence, Joyce and Mr E. M. Forster; he spoke (I think with sympathy) of the ‘sensitive questioning individual’ who is puzzled at finding the same judgments made by Christians as by ‘other conventional people’; and he talked of ‘testing’ theological students as regards their power to evaluate a new piece of writing on a secular subject.
As soon as I read this there was the devil to pay. I was not sure that I understood – I am still not sure that I understand – Brother Every’s position. But I felt that some readers might easily get the notion that ‘sensitivity’ or good taste were among the notes of the true Church, or that coarse, unimaginative people were less likely to be saved than refined and poetic people. In the heat of the moment I rushed to the opposite extreme. I felt, with some spiritual pride, that I had been saved in the nick of time from being ‘sensitive’. The ‘sentimentality and cheapness’ of much Christian hymnody had been a strong point in my own resistance to conversion. Now I felt almost thankful for the bad hymns.* It was good that we should have to lay down our precious refinement at the very doorstep of the church; good that we should be cured at the outset of our inveterate confusion between psyche and pneuma, nature and supernature.
A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility. Brother Every will not suspect me of being still in the condition I describe, nor of still attributing to him the preposterous beliefs I have just suggested. But there remains, none the less, a real problem which his article forced upon me in its most acute form. No one, presumably, is really maintaining that a fine taste in the arts is a condition of salvation. Yet the glory of God, and, as our only means to glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life. What, then, is the value of culture? It is, of course, no new question; but as a living question it was new to me.
I naturally turned first to the New Testament. Here I found, in the first place, a demand that whatever is most highly valued on the natural level is to be held, as it were, merely on sufferance, and to be abandoned without mercy the moment it conflicts with the service of God. The organs of sense (Matthew 5:29) and of virility (Matthew 19:12) may have to be sacrificed. And I took it that the least these words could mean was that a life, by natural standards, crippled and thwarted was not only no bar to salvation, but might easily be one of its conditions. The text about hating father and mother (Luke 14:26) and our Lord’s apparent belittling even of His own natural relation to the Blessed Virgin (Matthew 12:48) were even more discouraging. I took it for granted that anyone in his senses would hold it better to be a good son than a good critic, and that whatever was said of natural affection was implied a fortiori of culture. The worst of all was Philippians 3:8, where something obviously more relevant to spiritual life than culture can be – ‘blameless’ conformity to the Jewish Law – was described as ‘muck’.
In the second place I found a number of emphatic warnings against every kind of superiority. We were told to become as children (Matthew 18:3), not to be called Rabbi (Matthew 23:8), to dread reputation (Luke 6:26). We were reminded that few of the – which, I suppose, means precisely the intelligentsia – are called (1 Corinthians 1:26); that a man must become a fool by secular standards before he can attain real wisdom (1 Corinthians 3:18).
Against all this I found some passages that could be interpreted in a sense more favourable to culture. I argued that secular learning might be embodied in the Magi; that the Talents in the parable might conceivably include ‘talents’ in the modern sense of the word; that the miracle at Cana in Galilee by sanctifying an innocent, sensuous pleasure* could be taken to sanctify at least a recreational use of culture – mere ‘entertainment’; and that aesthetic enjoyment of nature was certainly hallowed by our Lord’s praise of the lilies. At least some use of science was implied in St Paul’s demand that we should perceive the Invisible through the visible (Romans 1:20). But I was more than doubtful whether his exhortation, ‘Be not children in mind’ (1 Corinthians 14:20), and his boast of ‘wisdom’ among the initiate, referred to anything that we should recognize as secular culture.
On the whole, the New Testament seemed, if not hostile, yet unmistakably cold to culture. I think we can still believe culture to be innocent after we have read the New Testament; I cannot see that we are encouraged to think it important.
It might be important none the less, for Hooker has finally answered the contention that Scripture must contain everything important or even everything necessary. Remembering this, I continued my researches. If my selection of authorities seems arbitary, that is due not to a bias but to my ignorance. I used such authors as I happened to know.
Of the great pagans Aristotle is on our side. Plato will tolerate no culture that does not directly or indirectly conduce either to the intellectual vision of the good or the military efficiency of the commonwealth. Joyce and D. H. Lawrence would have fared ill in the Republic. The Buddha was, I believe, anti-cultural, but here especially I speak under correction.
St Augustine regarded the liberal education which he had undergone in his boyhood as a dementia, and wondered why it should be considered honestior et uberior than the really useful ‘primary’ education which preceded it (Conf. I, xiii). He is extremely distrustful of his own delight in church music (ibid., X, xxxiii). Tragedy (which for Dr Richards is ‘a great exercise of the spirit’)* is for St Augustine a kind of sore. The spectator suffers, yet loves his suffering, and this is a miserabilis insania … quid autem mirum cum infelix pecus aberrans a grege tuo et inpatiens custodiae tuae turpi scabie foedarer (ibid., III, ii).
St Jerome, allegorizing the parable of the Prodigal Son, suggests that the husks with which he was fain to fill his belly may signify cibus daemonum … carmina poetarum, saecularis sapientia, rhetoricorum pompa verborum (Ep. xxi, 4).
Let none reply that the Fathers were speaking of polytheistic literature at a time when polytheism was still a danger. The scheme of values presupposed in most imaginative literature has not become very much more Christian since the time of St Jerome. In Hamlet we see everything questioned except the duty of revenge. In all Shakespeare’s works the conception of good really operative – whatever the characters may say – seems to be purely worldly. In medieval romance, honour and sexual love are the true values; in nineteenth-century fiction, sexual love and material prosperity. In romantic poetry, either the enjoyment of nature (ranging from pantheistic mysticism at one end of the scale to mere innocent sensuousness at the other) or else the indulgence of a Sehnsucht awakened by the past, the distant, and the imagined, but not believed, supernatural. In modern literature, the life of liberated instinct. There are, of course, exceptions: but to study these exceptions would not be to study literature as such, and as a whole. ‘All literatures,’ as Newman has said*, ‘are one; they are the voices of the natural man … if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man.’ And I could not doubt that the sub-Christian or anti-Christian values implicit in most literature did actually infect many readers. Only a few days ago I was watching, in some scholarship papers, the results of this infection in a belief that the crimes of such Shakespearian characters as Cleopatra and Macbeth were somehow compensated for by a quality described as their ‘greatness’. This very morning I have read in a critic the remark that if the wicked lovers in Webster’s White Devil had repented we should hardly have forgiven them. And many people certainly draw from Keat’s phrase about negative capability or ‘love of good and evil’ (if the reading which attributes to him such meaningless words is correct) a strange doctrine that experience simpliciter is good. I do not say that the sympathetic reading of literature must produce such results, but that it may and often does. If we are to answer the Fathers’ attack on pagan literature we must not ground our answer on a belief that literature as a whole has become, in any important sense, more Christian since their days.
In Thomas Aquinas I could not find anything directly bearing on my problem; but I am very poor Thomist and shall be grateful for correction on this point.
Thomas à Kempis I take to be definitely on the anti-cultural side.
In the Theologia Germanica (cap. XX) I found that nature’s refusal of the life of Christ ‘happeneth most of all where there are high natural gifts of reason, for that soareth upwards in its own light and by its own power, till at last it cometh to think itself the true Eternal Light.’ But in a later chapter (XLII) I found the evil of the false light identified with its tendency to love knowledge and discernment more than the object known and discerned. This seemed to point to the possibility of a knowledge which avoided that error.
The cumulative effect of all this was very discouraging to culture. On the other side – perhaps only through the accidental distribution of my ignorance – I found much less.
I found the famous saying, attributed to Gregory, that our use of secular culture was comparable to the action of the Israelites in going down to the Philistines to have their knives sharpened. This seems to me a most satisfactory argument as far as it goes, and very relevant to modern conditions. If we are to convert our heathen neighbours, we must understand their culture. We must ‘beat them at their own game’. But of course, while this would justify Christian culture (at least for some Christians whose vocation lay in that direction) at the moment, it would come very far short of the claims made for culture in our modern tradition. On the Gregorian view culture is a weapon; and a weapon is essentially a thing we lay aside as soon as we safely can.
In Milton I found a disquieting ally. His Areopagitica troubled me just as Brother Every’s article had troubled me. He seemed to make too little of the difficulties; and his glorious defence of freedom to explore all good and evil seemed, after all, to be based on an aristocratic preoccupation with great souls and a contemptuous indifference to the mass of mankind which, I suppose, no Christian can tolerate.
Finally I came to that book of Newman’s from which I have already quoted, the lectures on University Education. Here at last I found an author who seemed to be aware of both sides of the question; for no one ever insisted so eloquently as Newman on the beauty of culture for its own sake, and no one ever so sternly resisted the temptation to confuse it with things spiritual. The cultivation of the intellect, according to him, is ‘for this world’:* between it and ‘genuine religion’ there is a ‘radical difference’;† it makes ‘not the Christian … but the gentleman’, and looks like virtue ‘only at a distance’,‡ he ‘will not for an instant allow’ that it makes men better§. The ‘pastors of the Church’ may indeed welcome culture because it provides innocent distraction at those moments of spiritual relaxation which would otherwise very likely lead to sin; and in this way it often ‘draws the mind off from things which will harm it to subjects worthy of a rational being’. But even in so doing ‘it does not raise it above nature, nor has any tendency to make us pleasing to our Maker’.* In some instances the cultural and the spiritual value of an activity may even be in inverse ratio. Theology, when it ceases to be part of liberal knowledge, and is pursued for purely pastoral ends, gain in ‘meritoriousness’ but loses in liberality ‘just as a face worn by tears and fasting loses its beauty’.† On the other hand Newman is certain that liberal knowledge is an end in itself; the whole of the fourth Discourse is devoted to this theme. The solution of this apparent antinomy lies in his doctrine that everything, including, of course, the intellect, ‘has its own perfection. Things animate, inanimate, visible, invisible, all are good in their kind, and have a best of themselves, which is an object of pursuit.’‡ To perfect the mind is ‘an object as intelligible as the cultivation of virtue, while, at the same time, it is absolutely distinct from it’.§
Whether because I am too poor a theologian to understand the implied doctrine of grace and nature, or for some other reason, I have not been able to make Newman’s conclusion my own. I can well understand that there is a kind of goodness which is not moral; as a well-grown healthy toad is ‘better’ or ‘more perfect’ than a three-legged toad, or an archangel is ‘better’ than an angel. In this sense a clever man is ‘better’ than a dull one, or any man than any chimpanzee. The trouble comes when we start asking how much of our time and energy God wants us to spend in becoming ‘better’ or ‘more perfect’ in this sense. If Newman is right in saying that culture has no tendency ‘to make us pleasing to our Maker’, then the answer would seem to be, ‘None.’ And that is a tenable view: as though God said, ‘Your natural degree of perfection, your place in the chain of being, is my affair: do you get on with what I have explicitly left as your task – righteousness.’ But if Newman had thought this he would not, I suppose, have written the discourse on ‘Liberal Knowledge its Own End’. On the other hand, it would be possible to hold (perhaps it is pretty generally held) that one of the moral duties of a rational creature was to attain to the highest non-moral perfection it could. But if this were so, then (a) The perfecting of the mind would not be ‘absolutely distinct’ from virtue but part of the content of virtue; and (b) It would be very odd that Scripture and the tradition of the Church have little or nothing to say about this duty. I am afraid that Newman has left the problem very much where he found it. He has clarified our minds by explaining that culture gives us a non-moral ‘perfection’. But on the real problem – that of relating such non-moral values to the duty or interest of creatures who are every minute advancing either to heaven or hell – he seems to help little. ‘Sensitivity’ may be a perfection: but if by becoming sensitive I neither please God nor save my soul, why should I become sensitive? Indeed, what exactly is meant by a ‘perfection’ compatible with utter loss of the end for which I was created?
My researches left me with the impression that there could be no question of restoring to culture the kind of status which I had given it before my conversion. If any constructive case for culture was to be built up it would have to be of a much humbler kind; and the whole tradition of educated infidelity from Arnold to Scrutiny appeared to me as but one phase in that general rebellion against God which began in the eighteenth century. In this mood I set about construction.
1. I begin at the lowest and least ambitious level. My own professional work, though conditioned by taste and talents, is immediately motivated by the need for earning my living. And on earning one’s living I was relieved to note that Christianity, in spite of its revolutionary and apocalyptic elements, can be delightfully humdrum. The Baptist did not give the tax-gatherers and soldiers lectures on the immediate necessity of turning the economic and military system of the ancient world upside down; he told them to obey the moral law – as they had presumably learned it from their mothers and nurses – and sent them back to their jobs. St Paul advised the Thessalonians to stick to their work (1 Thessalonians 4:11) and not to become busybodies (2 Thessalonians 3:11). The need for money is therefore simpliciter an innocent, though by no means a splendid, motive for any occupation. The Ephesians are warned to work professionally at something that is ‘good’ (Ephesians 4:28). I hoped that ‘good’ here did not mean much more than ‘harmless’, and I was certain it did not imply anything very elevated. Provided, then, that there was a demand for culture, and that culture was not actually deleterious, I concluded I was justified in making my living by supplying that demand – and that all others in my position (dons, schoolmasters, professional authors, critics, reviewers) were similarly justified; especially if, like me, they had few or no talents for any other career – if their ‘vocation’ to a cultural profession consisted in the brute fact of not being fit for anything else.
2. But is culture even harmless? It certainly can be harmful and often is. If a Christian found himself in the position of one inaugurating a new society in vacuo he might well decide not to introduce something whose abuse is so easy and whose use is, at any rate, not necessary. But that is not our position. The abuse of culture is already there, and will continue whether Christians cease to be cultured or not. It is therefore probably better that the ranks of the ‘culture-sellers’ should include some Christians – as an antidote. It may even be the duty of some Christians to be culture-sellers. Not that I have yet said anything to show that even the lawful use of culture stands very high. The lawful use might be no more than innocent pleasure; but if the abuse is common, the task of resisting that abuse might be not only lawful but obligatory. Thus people in my position might be said to be ‘working the thing which is good’ in a stronger sense than that reached in the last paragraph.
In order to avoid misunderstanding, I must add that when I speak of ‘resisting the abuse of culture’ I do not mean that a Christian should take money for supplying one thing (culture) and use the opportunity thus gained to supply a quite different thing (homiletics and apologetics). That is stealing. The mere presence of Christians in the ranks of the culture-sellers will inevitably provide an antidote.
It will be seen that I have now reached something very like the Gregorian view of culture as a weapon. Can I now go a step further and find any intrinsic goodness in culture for its own sake?
3. When I ask what culture has done to me personally, the most obviously true answer is that it has given me quite an enormous amount of pleasure. I have no doubt at all that pleasure is in itself a good and pain in itself an evil; if not, then the whole Christian tradition about heaven and hell and the passion of our Lord seems to have no meaning. Pleasure, then, is good; a ‘sinful’ pleasure means a good offered, and accepted, under conditions which involve a breach of the moral law. The pleasures of culture are not intrinsically bound up with such conditions – though of course they can very easily be so enjoyed as to involve them. Often, as Newman saw, they are an excellent diversion from guilty pleasures. We may, therefore, enjoy them ourselves, and lawfully, even charitably, teach others to enjoy them.
This view gives us some ease, though it would go a very little way towards satisfying the editors of Scrutiny. We should, indeed, be justified in propagating good taste on the ground that cultured pleasure in the arts is more varied, intense, and lasting, than vulgar or ‘popular’ pleasure.* But we should not regard it as meritorious. In fact, much as we should differ from Bentham about value in general, we should have to be Benthamites on the issue between pushpin and poetry.
4. It was noticed above that the values assumed in literature were seldom those of Christianity. Some of the principal values actually implicit in European literature were described as (a) honour, (b) sexual love, (c) material prosperity, (d) pantheistic contemplation of nature, (e) Sehnsucht awakened by the past, the remote, or the (imagined) supernatural, (f) liberation of impulses. These were called ‘sub-Christian’. This is a term of disapproval if we are comparing them with Christian values: but if we take ‘sub-Christian’ to mean ‘immediately sub-Christian’ (i.e. the highest level of merely natural value lying immediately below the lowest level of spiritual value) it may be a term of relative approval. Some of the six values I have enumerated may be sub-Christian in this (relatively) good sense. For (c) and (f) I can make no defence; whenever they are accepted by the reader with anything more than a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ they must make him worse. But the other four are all two-edged. I may symbolize what I think of them all by the aphorism ‘Any road out of Jerusalem must also be a road into Jerusalem.’ Thus:
(a) To the perfected Christian the ideal of honour is simply a temptation. His courage has a better root, and, being learned in Gethsemane, may have no honour about it. But to the man coming up from below, the ideal of knighthood may prove a schoolmaster to the ideal of martyrdom. Galahad is the son of Launcelot.
(b) The road described by Dante and Patmore is a dangerous one. But mere animalism, however disguised as ‘honesty’, ‘frankness’, or the like, is not dangerous, but fatal. And not all are qualified to be, even in sentiment, eunuchs for the Kingdom’s sake. For some souls romantic love also has proved a schoolmaster.*
(d) There is any easy transition from Theism to Pantheism; but there is also a blessed transition in the other direction. For some souls I believe, for my own I remember, Wordsworthian contemplation can be the first and lowest form of recognition that there is something outside ourselves which demands reverence. To return to Pantheistic errors about the nature of this something would, for a Christian, be very bad. But once again, for ‘the man coming up from below’ the Wordsworthian experience is an advance. Even if he goes no further he has escaped the worst arrogance of materialism: if he goes on he will be converted.
(e) The dangers of romantic Sehnsucht are very great. Eroticism and even occultism lie in wait for it. On this subject I can only give my own experience for what it is worth. When we are first converted I suppose we think mostly of our recent sins; but as we go on, more and more of the terrible past comes under review. In this process I have not (or not yet) reached a point at which I can honestly repent of my earlier experiences of romantic Sehnsucht. That they were occasions to much that I do repent, is clear; but I still cannot help thinking that this was my abuse of them, and that the experiences themselves contained, from the very first, a wholly good element. Without them my conversion would have been more difficult.*
I have dwelt chiefly on certain kinds of literature, not because I think them the only elements in culture that have this value as schoolmasters, but because I know them best; and on literature rather than art and knowledge for the same reason. My general case may be stated in Ricardian terms – that culture is a storehouse of the best (sub-Christian) values. These values are in themselves of the soul, not the spirit. But God created the soul. Its values may be expected, therefore, to contain some reflection or antepast of the spiritual values. They will save no man. They resemble the regenerate life only as affection resembles charity, or honour resembles virtue, or the moon the sun. But though ‘like is not the same’, it is better than unlike. Imitation may pass into initiation. For some it is a good beginning. For others it is not; culture is not everyone’s road into Jerusalem, and for some it is a road out.
There is another way in which it may predispose to conversion. The difficulty of converting an uneducated man nowadays lies in his complacency. Popularized science, the conventions or ‘unconventions’ of his immediate circle, party programmes, etc., enclose him in a tiny windowless universe which he mistakes for the only possible universe. There are no distant horizons, no mysteries. He thinks everything has been settled. A cultured person, on the other hand, is almost compelled to be aware that reality is very odd and that the ultimate truth, whatever it may be, must have the characteristics of strangeness – must be something that would seem remote and fantastic to the uncultured. Thus some obstacles to faith have been removed already.
On these grounds I conclude that culture has a distinct part to play in bringing certain souls to Christ. Not all souls – there is a shorter, and safer, way which has always been followed by thousands of simple affectional natures who begin, where we hope to end, with devotion to the person of Christ.
Has it any part to play in the life of the converted? I think so, and in two ways. (a) If all the cultural values, on the way up to Christianity, were dim antepasts and ectypes of the truth, we can recognize them as such still. And since we must rest and play, where can we do so better than here – in the suburbs of Jerusalem? It is lawful to rest our eyes in moonlight – especially now that we know where it comes from, that it is only sunlight at second hand. (b) Whether the purely contemplative life is, or is not, desirable for any, it is certainly not the vocation of all. Most men must glorify God by doing to His glory something which is not per se an act of glorifying but which becomes so by being offered. If, as I now hope, cultural activities are innocent and even useful, then they also (like the sweeping of the room in Herbert’s poem) can be done to the Lord. The work of a charwoman and the work of a poet become spiritual in the same way and on the same condition. There must be no return to the Arnoldian or Richardian view. Let us stop giving ourselves airs.
If it is argued that the ‘sensitivity’ which Brother Every desires is something different from my ‘culture’ or ‘good taste’, I must reply that I have chosen those words as the most general terms for something which is differently conceived in every age – ‘wit’, ‘correctness’, ‘imagination’ and (now) ‘sensitivity’. These names, of course, record real changes of opinion about it. But if it were contended that the latest conception is so different from all its predecessors that we now have a radically new situation – that while ‘wit’ was not necessary for a seventeenth-century Christian, ‘sensitivity’ is necessary for a twentieth-century Christian – I should find this very hard to believe. ‘Sensitivity’ is a potentiality, therefore neutral. It can no more be an end to Christians than ‘experience’. If Philippians 1:9 is quoted against me, I reply that delicate discriminations are there traced to charity, not to critical experience of books. Every virtue is a habitus – i.e. a good stock response. Dr Richards very candidly recognizes this when he speaks of people ‘hag-ridden by their vices or their virtues’ (op. cit., p. 52, italics mine). But we want to be so ridden. I do not want a sensitivity which will show me how different each temptation to lust or cowardice is from the last, how unique, how unamenable to general rules. A stock response is precisely what I need to acquire. Moral theologians, I believe, tell us to fly at sight from temptations to faith or chastity. If that is not (in Dr Richards’s words) a ‘stock’, ‘stereotyped’, ‘conventional’ response, I do not know what is. In fact, the new ideal of ‘sensitivity’ seems to me to present culture to Christians in a somewhat less favourable light than its predecessors. Sidney’s poetics would be better. The whole school of critical thought which descends from Dr Richards bears such deep marks of its anti-Christian origins that I question if it can ever be baptized.
II
To the Editor of Theology.
Sir,
Mr Bethell’s main position is so important that I hope you will allow me at some future date to deal with it in a full-length argument. For the moment, therefore, I will only say: (1) That I made no reference to his previous paper for the worst of reasons and the best of causes – namely, that I had forgotten it. For this negligence I ask his pardon. On looking back at the relevant number of Theology, I see from marginalia in my own hand that I must have read his contribution with great interest; for my forgetfulness I can only plead that a great many things have happened to us all since then. I am distressed that Mr Bethell should suppose himself deliberately slighted. I intended no disrespect to him. (2) That my position ‘logically implies … total depravity’ I deny simply. How any logician could derive the proposition ‘Human nature is totally depraved’ from the proposition ‘Cultural activities do not in themselves improve our spiritual condition’, I cannot understand. Even if I had said (which I did not), ‘Man’s aesthetic nature is totally depraved’, no one could infer ‘Man’s whole nature is totally depraved’ without a glaring transference from secundum quid to simpliciter. I put it to Mr Bethell that he has used ‘logically implies’ to mean ‘may without gross uncharity rouse the suspicion of’ – and that he ought not to use words that way.
To Mr Carritt I reply that my argument assumed the divinity of Christ, the truth of the creeds, and the authority of the Christian tradition, because I was writing in an Anglican periodical. That is why Dominical and patristic sayings have for me more than an antiquarian interest. But though my attribution of authority to Christ or the Fathers may depend on premises which Mr Carritt does not accept, my belief that it is proper to combine my own reasonings with the witness of authority has a different ground, prior to any decision on the question, ‘Who is authoritative?’ One of the things my reason tells me is that I ought to check the results of my own thinking by the opinions of the wise. I go to authority because reason sends me to it – just as Mr Carritt, after adding up a column of figures, might ask a friend, known to be a good calculator, to check it for him, and might distrust his own result if his friend got a different one.
I said that culture was a storehouse of the best sub-Christian values, not the best sub-Christian virtues. I meant by this that culture recorded man’s striving for those ends which, though not the true end of man (the fruition of God), have nevertheless some degree of similarity to it, and are not so grossly inadequate to the nature of man as, say, physical pleasure, or money. This similarity, of course, while making it less evil to rest in them, makes the danger of resting in them greater and more subtle.
The salvation of souls is a means to the glorifying of God because only saved souls can duly glorify Him. The thing to which, on my view, culture must be subordinated, is not (though it includes) moral virtue, but the conscious direction of all will and desire to a transcendental Person in whom I believe all values to reside, and the reference to Him in every thought and act. Since that Person ‘loves righteousness’ this total surrender to Him involves Mr Carritt’s ‘conscientiousness’. It would therefore be impossible to ‘glorify God by doing what we thought wrong’. Doing what we think right, on the other hand, is not the same as glorifying God. I fully agree with Mr Carritt that a priori we might expect the production of whatever is ‘good’ to be one of our duties. If God had never spoken to man, we should be justified in basing the conduct of life wholly on such a priori grounds. Those who think God has spoken will naturally listen to what He has to say about the where, how, to what extent, and in what spirit any ‘good’ is to be pursued. This does not mean that our own ‘conscience’ is simply negated. On the contrary, just as reason sends me to authority, so conscience sends me to obedience: for one of the things my conscience tells me is that if there exists an absolutely wise and good Person (Aristotle’s raised to the nth) I owe Him obedience, specially when that Person, as the ground of my existence, has a kind of paternal claim on me, and, as a benefactor, has a claim on my gratitude. What would happen if there were an absolute clash between God’s will and my own conscience – i.e. if either God could be bad or I were an incurable moral idiot – I naturally do not know, any more than Mr Carritt knows what would happen if he found absolutely demonstrative evidence for two contradictory propositions.
I mentioned Hooker, not because he simply denied that Scripture contains all things necessary, but because he advanced a proof that it cannot – which proof, I supposed, most readers of Theology would remember. ‘Text-hunting’ is, of course, ‘Puritanical’, but also scholastic, patristic, apostolic, and Dominical. To that kind of charge I venture, presuming on an indulgence which Mr Carritt has extended to me for nearly twenty years, to reply with homely saws: as that an old trout can’t be caught by tickling, and they know a trick worth two of that where I come from. Puritan, quotha!
Yours faithfully,
C. S. Lewis
III
Peace Proposals for Brother Every and Mr Bethell
I believe there is little real disagreement between my critics (Brother Every and Mr Bethell) and myself. Mr Carritt, who does not accept the Christian premises, must here be left out of account, though with all the respect and affection I feel for my old tutor and friend.
The conclusion I reached in Theology, March 1940, was that culture, though not in itself meritorious, was innocent and pleasant, might be a vocation for some, was helpful in bringing certain souls to Christ, and could be pursued to the glory of God. I do not see that Brother Every and Mr Bethell really want me to go beyond this position.
The argument of Mr Bethell’s paper in Theology, July 1939 (excluding its historical section, which does not here concern us), was that the deepest, and often unconscious, beliefs of a writer were implicit in his work, even in what might seem the minor details of its style, and that, unless we were Croceans, such beliefs must be taken into account in estimating the value of that work. In Theology, May 1940, Mr Bethell reaffirmed this doctrine, with the addition that the latent beliefs in much modern fiction were naturalistic, and that we needed trained critics to put Christian readers on their guard against this pervasive influence.
Brother Every, in Theology, September 1940, maintained that our tastes are symptomatic of our real standards of value, which may differ from our professed standards; and that we needed trained critics to show us the real latent standards in literature – in fact ‘to teach us how to read’.
I cannot see that my own doctrine and those of my critics come into direct contradiction at any point. My fear was lest excellence in reading and writing were being elevated into a spiritual value, into something meritorious per se; just as other things excellent and wholesome in themselves, like conjugal love (in the sense of eros) or physical cleanliness, have at some times and in some circles been confused with virtue itself or esteemed necessary parts of it. But it now appears that my critics never intended to make any such claim. Bad Taste for them is not itself spiritual evil but the symptom which betrays, or the ‘carrier’ which circulates, spiritual evil. And the spiritual evil thus betrayed or carried turns out not to be any specifically cultural or literary kind of evil, but false beliefs or standards – that is, intellectual error or moral baseness; and as I never intended to deny that error and baseness were evils nor that literature could imply and carry them, I think that all three of us may shake hands and say we are agreed. I do not mean to suggest that my critics have merely restated a platitude which neither I nor anyone else ever disputed. The value of their contribution lies in their insistence that the real beliefs may differ from the professed and may lurk in the turn of a phrase or the choice of an epithet; with the result that many preferences which seem to the ignorant to be simply ‘matters of taste’ are visible to the trained critic as choices between good and evil, or truth and error. And I fully admit that this important point had been neglected in my essay of March 1940. Now that it has been made, I heartily accept it. I think this is agreement.
But to test the depth of agreement I would like my critics to consider the following positions. By agreement I mean only agreement in our doctrines. Differences of temper and emphasis between Christian critics are inevitable and probably desirable.
1. Is it the function of the ‘trained critic’ to discover the latent beliefs and standards in a book, or to pass judgment on them when discovered, or both? I think Brother Every confines the critic’s function to discovery. About Mr Bethell I am not so sure. When he says (Theology, May 1940, p. 360) that we need a minority of trained critics to ‘lay bare the false values of contemporary culture’ this might mean two things: (a) ‘To expose the falsity of the values of contemporary culture’; (b) ‘To reveal what the values of contemporary culture actually are – and, by the way, I personally think those values false.’ It is necessary to clear this up before we know what is meant by a ‘trained critic’. Trained in what? A man who has had a literary training may be an expert in disengaging the beliefs and values latent in literature; but the judgment on those beliefs and values (that is, the judgment on all possible human thoughts and moralities) belongs either to a quite different set of experts (theologians, philosophers, casuists, scientists) or else not to experts at all but to the unspecialized ‘good and wise man’, the . Now I for my part have no objection to our doing both when we criticize, but I think it very important to keep the two operations distinct. In the discovery of the latent belief we have had a special training, and speak as experts; in the judgment of the beliefs, once they have been discovered, we humbly hope that we are being trained, like everyone else, by reason and ripening experience, under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, as long as we live, but we speak on them simply as men, on a level with all our even-Christians, and indeed with less authority than any illiterate man who happens to be older, wiser, and purer, than we. To transfer to these judgments any specialist authority which may belong to us as ‘trained critics’ is charlatanism, if the attempt is conscious, and confusion if it is not. If Brother Every (see Theology, September 1940, p. 161) condemns a book because of ‘English Liberal’ implications he is really saying two things: (a) This book has English Liberal implications; (b) English Liberalism is an evil. The first he utters with authority because he is a trained critic. In the second, he may be right or he may be wrong; but he speaks with no more authority than any other man. Failure to observe this distinction may turn literary criticism into a sort of stalking horse from behind which a man may shoot all his personal opinions on any and every subject, without ever really arguing in their defence and under cover of a quite irrelevant specialist training in literature. I do not accuse Brother Every of this. But a glance at any modern review will show that it is an ever-present danger.
2. In Theology, May 1940 (p. 359), Mr Bethell speaks of ‘some form of biological or economic naturalism’ as the unconscious attitude in most popular fiction of today, and cities, as straws that show the wind, the popularity of ‘urges’ and ‘overmastering passions’. Now, fortunately, I agree with Mr Bethell in thinking naturalism an erroneous philosophy: and I am ready to grant, for the purposes of argument, that those who talk about ‘urges’ do so because they are unconsciously naturalistic. But when all this has been granted, can we honestly say that the whole of our dislike of ‘urges’ is explained, without remainder, by our disagreement with naturalism? Surely not. Surely we object to that way of writing for another reason as well – because it is so worn, so facile, so obviously attempting to be impressive, so associated in our minds with dullness and pomposity.* In other words, there are two elements in our reaction. One is the detection of an attitude in the writer which, as instructed Christians and amateur philosophers, we disapprove; the other is really, and strictly, an affair of taste. Now these, again, require to be kept distinct. Being fallen creatures we tend to resent offences against our taste, at least as much as, or even more than, offences against our conscience or reason; and we would dearly like to be able – if only we can find any plausible argument for doing so – to inflict upon the man whose writing (perhaps for reasons utterly unconnected with good and evil) has afflicted us like a bad smell, the same kind of condemnation which we can inflict on him who has uttered the false and the evil. The tendency is easily observed among children; friendship wavers when you discover that a hitherto trusted playmate actually likes prunes. But even for adults it is ‘sweet, sweet, sweet poison’ to feel able to imply ‘thus saith the Lord’ at the end of every expression of our pet aversions. To avoid this horrible danger we must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined both by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste. This is difficult, because the latter are often so much more obvious and provoke such a very violent response. The only safe course seems to me to be this: to reserve our condemnation of attitudes for attitudes universally acknowledged to be bad by the Christian conscience speaking in agreement with Scripture and ecumenical tradition. A bad book is to be deemed a real evil in so far as it can be shown to prompt to sensuality, or pride, or murder, or to conflict with the doctrine of Divine Providence, or the like. The other dyslogistic terms dear to critics (vulgar, derivative, cheap, precious, academic, affected, bourgeois, Victorian, Georgian, ‘literary’, etc.) had better be kept strictly on the taste side of the account. In discovering what attitudes are present you can be as subtle as you like. But in your theological and ethical condemnation (as distinct from your dislike of the taste) you had better be very un-subtle. You had better reserve it for plain mortal sins, and plain atheism and heresy. For our passions are always urging us in the opposite direction, and if we are not careful criticism may become a mere excuse for taking revenge on books whose smell we dislike by erecting our temperamental antipathies into pseudo-moral judgments.
3. In practical life a certain amount of ‘reading between the lines’ is necessary: if we took every letter and every remark simply at its face value we should soon find ourselves in difficulties. On the other hand, most of us have known people with whom ‘reading between the lines’ became such a mania that they overlooked the obvious truth of every situation and lived in the perpetual discovery of mares’ nests; and doctors tell us of a form of lunacy in which the simplest remark uttered in the patient’s presence becomes to him evidence of a conspiracy and the very furniture of his cell takes on an infinitely sinister significance. Will my critics admit that the subtle and difficult task of digging out the latent beliefs and values, however necessary, is attended with some danger of our neglecting the obvious and surface facts about a book, whose importance, even if less than that of the latent facts, is certainly much higher than zero? Suppose two books A and B. Suppose it can be truly said of A: ‘The very style of this book reveals great sensitivity and honesty, and a readiness for total commitments; excellent raw material for sanctity if ever the author were converted.’ And suppose it can be truly said of B: ‘The very style of this book betrays a woolly, compromising state of mind, knee-deep entangled in the materialistic values which the author thinks he has rejected.’ But might it not also be true to say of book A, ‘Despite its excellent latent implications, its ostensible purpose (which will corrupt thousands of readers) is the continued glorification of mortal sin’; and of B, ‘Despite its dreadful latent materialism, it does set courage and fidelity before the reader in an attractive light, and thousands of readers will be edified (though much less edified than they suppose) by reading it’? And is there not a danger of this second truth being neglected? We want the abstruse knowledge in addition to the obvious: not instead of it.
4. It is clear that the simple and ignorant are least able to resist, by reason, the influence of latent evil in the books they read. But is it not also true that this is often balanced by a kind of protection which comes to them through ignorance itself? I base this on three grounds: (a) Adults often disquiet themselves about the effect of a work upon children – for example, the effect of the bad elements in Peter Pan, such as the desire not to grow up or the sentimentalities about Wendy. But if I may trust my own memory, childhood simply does not receive these things. It rightly wants and enjoys the flying, the Indians, and the pirates (not to mention the pleasure of being in a theatre at all), and just accepts the rest as part of the meaningless ‘roughage’ which occurs in all books and plays; for at that age we never expect any work of art to be interesting all through. (When I began writing stories in exercise books I tried to put off all the things I really wanted to write about till at least the second page – I thought it wouldn’t be like a real grown-up book if it became interesting at once). (b) I often find expressions in my pupils’ essays which seem to me to imply a great deal of latent error and evil. Now, since it would, in any case, be latent, one does not expect them to own up to it when challenged. But one does expect that a process of exploration would dicover the mental atmosphere to which the expression belonged. But in my experience exploration often produces a conviction that it had, in my pupils’ minds, no evil associations, because it had no associations at all. They just thought it was the ordinary way of translating thought into what they suppose to be ‘literary English’. Thousands of people are no more corrupted by the implications of ‘urges’, ‘dynamism’, and ‘progressive’ than they are edified by the implications of ‘secular’, ‘charity’, and Platonic’*. The same process of attrition which empties good language of its virtue does, after all, empty bad language of much of its vice.† (c) If one speaks to an uneducated man about some of the worst features in a film or a book, does he not often reply unconcernedly, ‘Ah … they always got to bring a bit of that into a film,’ or, ‘I reckon they put that in to wind it up like’? And does this not mean that he is aware, even to excess, of the difference between art and life? He expects a certain amount of meaningless nonsense – which expectation, though very regrettable from the cultural point of view, largely protects him from the consequences of which we, in our sophisticated naivety, are afraid.
5. Finally, I agree with Brother Every that our leisure, even our play, is a matter of serious concern. There is no neutral gound in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan. But will Brother Every agree in acknowledging a real difficulty about merely recreational reading (I do not include all reading under this head), as about games? I mean that they are serious, and yet, to do them at all, we must somehow do them as if they were not. It is a serious matter to choose wholesome recreations: but they would no longer be recreations if we pursued them seriously. When Mr Bethell speaks of the critic’s ‘working hours’ (May 1940, p. 360) I hope he means his hours of criticism, not his hours of reading. For a great deal (not all) of our literature was made to be read lightly for entertainment. If we do not read it, in a sense, ‘for fun’ and with our feet on the fender, we are not using it as it was meant to be used, and all our criticism of it will be pure illusion. For you cannot judge any artefact except by using it as it was intended. It is no good judging a butter-knife by seeing whether it will saw logs. Much bad criticism, indeed, results from the efforts of critics to get a work-time result out of something that never aimed at producing more than pleasure. There is a real problem here, and I do not see my way through it. But I should be disappointed if my critics denied the existence of the problem.
If any real disagreement remains between us, I anticipate that it will be about my third point – about the distinction there drawn between the real spiritual evil carried or betrayed in a book and its mere faults of taste. And on this subject I confess that my critics can present me with a very puzzling dilemma. They can ask me whether the statement, ‘This is tawdry writing’, is an objective statement describing something bad in a book and capable of being true or false, or whether it is merely a statement about the speaker’s own feelings – different in form, but fundamentally the same, as the proposition ‘I don’t like oysters.’ If I choose the latter, then most criticism becomes purely subjective – which I don’t want. If I choose the former then they can ask me, ‘What are these qualities in a book which you admit to be in some sense good and bad but which, you keep on warning us, are not “really” or “spiritually” good and bad? Is there a kind of good which is not good? Is there any good that is not pleasing to God or any bad which is not hateful to Him?’ And if you press me along these lines I end in doubts. But I will not get rid of those doubts by falsifying the little light I already have. That little light seems to compel me to say that there are two kinds of good and bad. The first, such as virtue and vice or love and hatred, besides being good or bad themselves make the possessor good or bad. The second do not. They include such things as physical beauty or ugliness, the possession or lack of a sense of humour, strength or weakness, pleasure or pain. But the two most relevant for us are the two I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, conjugal eros (as distinct from agape, which, of course, is a good of the first class) and physical cleanliness. Surely we have all met people who said, indeed, that the latter was next to godliness, but whose unconscious attitude made it a part of godliness, and no small part? And surely we agree that any good of this second class, however good on its own level, becomes an enemy when it thus assumes demonic pretensions and erects itself into a quasispiritual value. As M. de Rougemont has recently told us, the conjugal eros ‘ceases to be a devil only when it ceases to be a god’. My whole contention is that in literature, in addition to the spiritual good and evil which it carries, there is also a good and evil of this second class, a properly cultural or literary good and evil, which must not be allowed to masquerade as good and evil of the first class. And I shall feel really happy about all the minor differences between my critics and me when I find in them some recognition of this danger – some admission that they and I, and all of the like education, are daily tempted to a kind of idolatry.
I am not pretending to know how this baffling phenomenon – the two kinds or levels of good and evil – is to be fitted into a consistent philosophy of values. But it is one thing to be unable to explain a phenomenon, another to ignore it. And I admit that all of these lower goods ought to be encouraged, that, as pedagogues, it is our duty to try to make our pupils happy and beautiful, to give them cleanly habits and good taste; and the discharge of that duty is, of course, a good of the first class. I will admit, too, that evils of this second class are often the result and symptom of real spiritual evil; dirty fingernails, a sluggish liver, boredom, and a bad English style, may often in a given case result from disobedience, laziness, arrogance, or intemperance. But they may also result from poverty or other misfortune. They may even result from virtue. The man’s ears may be unwashed behind or his English style borrowed from the jargon of the daily press, because he has given to good works the time and energy which others use to acquire elegant habits or good language. Gregory the Great, I believe, vaunted the barbarity of his style. Our Lord ate with unwashed hands.
I am stating, not solving, a problem. If my critics want to continue the discussion I think they can do so most usefully by taking it right away from literature and the arts to some other of these mysterious ‘lower goods’ – where, probably, all our minds will work more coolly. I should welcome an essay from Brother Every or Mr Bethell on conjugal eros or personal cleanliness. My dilemma about literature is that I admit bad taste to be, in some sense, ‘a bad thing’, but do not think it per se ‘evil’. My critics will probably say the same of physical dirt. If we could thrash the problem out on the neutral ground of clean and dirty fingers, we might return to the battlefield of literature with new lights.
I hope it is now unnecessary to point out that in denying ‘taste’ to be a spiritual value, I am not for a moment suggesting, as Mr Bethell thought (May 1940, p. 357), that it comes ‘under God’s arbitrary condemnation’. I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it. The distinction does not seem to me a very fine one.
