Читать книгу A Well of Wonder - Clyde S. Kilby - Страница 14

Different from the meditative and devotional nature of Reflections on the Psalms, the book called Miracles is closely reasoned. It consists of three parts plus an epilogue and two very interesting appendixes. The first seven chapters, preliminary to the main theme, describe two basic types of thought about the universe. One is that of the Naturalist, one who believes that nature is “the whole show” and that nothing else exists. This person thinks of nature as being like a pond of an infinite depth with nothing but water. The other is the Supernaturalist, who believes that one Thing exists outside time and space and has produced nature. He believes that the pond is not merely water forever but has a bottom—mud, earth, rock, and finally the whole bulk of earth itself.

The Naturalist believes that nothing exists beyond some great process or “becoming,” while the Supernaturalist believes nature may be only one “system” or choice among possibilities chosen by some Primary Thing. If Naturalism is true, then miracles are impossible, yet if Supernaturalism is true, it is still possible to inquire whether God does in fact perform miracles. But Naturalism contains a great self-contradiction: it assumes that the mind itself is also “nature” and hence irrational. It is nonsense when one uses the human mind to prove the irrationality of the human mind. “All arguments about the validity of thought make a tacit, and illegitimate, exception in favor of the bit of thought you are doing at that moment.” Lewis insists that reason exists on its own and that nature is powerless to produce it. Nature can only “keep on keeping on.”

Naturalism for Lewis is also faced with an insurmountable problem in the “oughtness” of things. If nature is all, then conscience is also a product of nature and there is no logical place for the notion that one ought to die for his country or practice any other moral action. Contrariwise, Lewis holds that the practices of conscience are a product of a reason derived from a greater Moral Wisdom which exists absolutely and could not possibly arise out of a theory that supposes blind nature as the basis of life and thought. In fact, human rationality is itself a miracle.

Lewis then proceeds to his main theme and begins with an instance of what he calls chronological snobbery, that is, the idea that people in older times could believe in miracles because they were unacquainted with the laws of nature. Joseph, he points out, was fully as wise as any modern gynecologist on the main point of Mary’s situation—that a virgin birth is contrary to nature. In finally accepting the situation as a miracle, Joseph was affirming not only the miracle but, equally, the law of nature itself as it applies to childbirth. Joseph is by no means an example of a naive or primitive ignoramus but rather of a realist whose head was as hard as anybody’s so far as the regularity of nature is concerned. He saw the exception in Mary’s case only because he had a pristine conviction about the rule. Believing in miracles does not at all mean any hazy notion about the regular operation of the laws of nature but rather the opposite.

Next Lewis tackles what he regards as the modern fallacy that the articles of the Christian creed are unacceptable because they are primitive in their imagery, for instance, the statement that God “came down from Heaven” rather than, as we prefer today, “entered the universe” and the notion that since hell “fire” is a metaphor it means nothing more serious than remorse. He insists that such metaphorical conceptions reveal just as supernatural a cosmos as modern abstractions and, what is more significant to his purpose, that both the so-called primitive and the modern and supposedly unmetaphorical imagery are equally figurative. To call God a “spiritual force” or “the indwelling principle of beauty, truth, and goodness” is to make one or both of two mistakes—to suppose one has escaped metaphor into some more realistic imagery, or actually to hide from reality in a verbal smoke screen.

Lewis declares that because most accounts of miracles are probably false, a standard of probability is needed. How can we determine a real from a spurious claim of miracle? One way is by the “fitness of things,” a method actually deep in the best of science, a conviction as real as the color of one’s hair. It was this conviction that earlier led to the very possibility of science. People expected law in nature because they believed in a Legislator. A modern agnostic science will yet discover how the omission of God inevitably leads to improbabilities in the uniformity of nature. It is a dangerous thing to make nature absolute, because claiming too much you are likely to end up with too little. “Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian free to continue his prayers.”

This fitness of things tells us that the miracle of the Resurrection is on a different level from someone using her patron saint to find her second best thimble. The Resurrection is a part of an immutable and eternal plan, not a last-minute “expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author’s control.” The whole story is actually about Death and Resurrection. The grand miracle is that of the Incarnation, a part of an eternal plan. Christ is indeed the corn king of mythology but not for the reason ascribed by the anthropologists. The death and rebirth pattern is in nature because it was first in this eternal plan, a plan going back before both nature and nature religions. There is rebirth in nature myths, but the Resurrection of Christ is described in the Bible as a completely unique event. The whole of creation shadowed, “mythologized,” in a thousand ways the event that was to change all of history.

Miracles, which Lewis subtitles A Preliminary Study, is directed not at the subtleties of theological parlance but at people who really want to ask the question of whether miracles are possible. It is addressed to people of naturalistic and pantheistic minds, groups Lewis believes to include the great mass of people today. He holds that “an immoral, naive and sentimental pantheism” is the chief obstacle against Christian conversion in our time. Most people in effect regard God as incapable not only of miracle but of anything else. They have some place heard the usual anthropological accounts and hazily suppose that because these are modern they are more enlightened than the Christian revelation. Pantheism, says Lewis, is not new but very ancient and in fact the natural tendency of the human mind. Only the Greeks were able to rise above it and then only in their greatest men. Today it is manifest in theosophy, the elevation of a life force, and the race worship of the Germans under Hitler. The tragedy is that people suppose “each new relapse into this immemorial ‘religion’” to be the last word in truth and fact.

God is not diffused in all things, as pantheism teaches, and neither are we contained in him as “parts,” but God is the great Concrete who feeds a torrent of “opaque actualities” into the world. God is not a principle, a generality, an “ideal,” or a “value” but “an utterly concrete fact.” On the contrary, today our minds are congenial to “Everythingism,” that is, that the whole show is merely self-existent and inclusive. The pantheist thinks that “everything is in the long run ‘merely’ a precursor or a development or a relic or an instance or a disguise, of everything else.” Lewis is completely opposed to such a philosophy. He contrasts the pantheistic conception of God as someone who animates the universe much as you animate your body with the Christian idea of God as the inventor and maker of the universe, the artist who can stand away from his own picture and examine it.