2lJohann Wolfgang Goethe, Epitog zu Schillers Glocke, 1. 32. "das Gemeine" means something like "that which dominates us all."
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The divine orgies, making holy Their life-days, till the dance throbs In their heart-beats, while they romp with Dionysus on the mountains... ,22
Yes, almost; almost I'd sooner be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn
Almost, but not, of course, quite. If one is forced to such an alternative, it is perhaps better to starve in a wholly secularized and meaningless universe than to recall the obscenities and cruelties of paganism. They attract because they are a distortion of the truth, and therefore, retain some of its flavor. But with this remark I have passed into our second question. I shall not be expected at the end of this paper to begin an apologetic for the truth of Christianity. I will only say something which in one form or another I have said perhaps too often already. If there is no God, then we have no interest in the minimal religion or any other. We will not make a lie even to save civilization. But if there is, then it is so probable as to be almost axiomatic that the initiative lies wholly on His side. If He can be known it will be by self-revelation on His part, not by speculation on ours. We, therefore, look for Him where it is claimed that He has revealed Himself by miracle, by inspired teachers, by enjoined ritual. The traditions conflict, yet the longer and more sympathetically we study them the more we become aware of a common element in many of them: the theme of sacrifice, of mystical communion through the shed blood, of death and rebirth, of redemption, is too clear to escape notice. We are fully entitled to use moral and intellectual criticism. What we are not, in my opinion, entitled to do is simply to abstract the ethical element and set that up as a religion on its own. Rather in that tradition which is at once more completely ethical and most transcends mere ethics-in which the old themes of the sacrifice and rebirth recur in a form which transcends, though there it no longer revolts, our conscience and our reason-we may still most reasonably believe that we have the consummation of all religion, the fullest message from the wholly other, the living creator, who, if He is at all, must be the God not only of the philosophers, but of mystics and savages, not only of the head and heart, but also of the primitive emotions and the spiritual heights beyond all emotion. We may still reasonably attach ourselves to the church, to the only
"Euripides, Bacchae, 1. 74.
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concrete organization which has preserved down to this present time the core of all the messages, pagan and perhaps prepagan, that have ever come from beyond the world, and begin to practice the only religion which rests not upon some selection of certain supposedly "higher" elements in our nature, but on the shattering and rebuilding, the death and rebirth, of that nature in every part; neither Greek nor Jew nor barbarian, but a new creation.
[NOTE: The debate between Lewis and Professor Price did not end here. In The Socratic Digest, No. 4 [1948], there follows a "Reply" to Lewis's "Religion Without Dogma?" by Professor Price (pp. 94-102). Then, at a meeting of the Socratic Club on February 2, 1948, Miss G. E. M. An-scombe read a paper entitled "A Reply to Mr. C. S. Lewis's Argument that 'Naturalism is Self-Refuting,'" afterwards published in the same issue of the Digest (pp. 7-15) as Professor Price's "Reply." Miss Anscombe criticized the argument found on pp. 92-95 of the paper printed above as well as chapter III, "The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist," of Lewis's book Miracles (London, 1947). The two short pieces that follow are (A) the Socratic minute-book account of Lewis's reply to Miss Anscombe and (B) a reply written by Lewis himself-both reprinted from the same issue of the Digest mentioned above (pp. 15-16). Aware that the third chapter of his Miracles was ambiguous, Lewis revised this chapter for the Fontana (1960) issue of Miracles in which chapter III is retitled "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism."]
A
In his reply Mr. C. S. Lewis agreed that the words "cause" and "ground" were far from synonymous but said that the recognition of a ground could be the cause of assent, and that assent was only rational when such was its cause. He denied that such words as "recognition" and "perception" could be properly used of a mental act among whose causes the thing perceived or recognized was not one.
Miss Anscombe said that Mr. Lewis had misunderstood her and thus the first part of the discussion was confined to the two speakers who attempted to clarify their positions and their differences. Miss Anscombe said that Mr. Lewis was still not
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distinguishing between "having reasons" and "having reasoned" in the causal sense. Mr. Lewis understood the speaker to be making a tetrachotomy thus: (1) logical reasons; (2) having reasons (i.e. psychological); (3) historical causes; (4) scientific causes or observed regularities. The main point in his reply was that an observed regularity was only the symptom of a cause, and not the cause itself, and in reply to an interruption by the secretary he referred to his notion of cause as "magical." An open discussion followed, in which some members tried to show Miss Anscombe that there was a connection between ground and cause, while others contended against the president [Lewis] that the test for the validity of reason could never in any event be such a thing as the state of the bloodstream. The president finally admitted that the word "valid" was an unfortunate one. From the discussion in general it appeared that Mr. Lewis would have to turn his argument into a rigorous analytic one, if his notion of "validity" as the effect of causes were to stand the test of all the questions put to him.
B
I admit that valid was a bad word for what I meant; verdical (or verific or veriferous) would have been better. I also admit that the cause and effect relation between events and the ground and consequent relation between propositions are distinct. Since English uses the word because of both, let us here use because CE for the cause-and-effect relation ("This doll always falls on its feet because CE its feet are weighted") and because GC for the ground and consequent relation ("A equals C because GC they both equal B"). But the sharper this distinction becomes the more my difficulty increases. If an argument is to be verific the conclusion must be related to the premises as consequent to ground, i.e. the conclusion is there because GC certain other propositions are true. On the other hand, our thinking the conclusion is an event and must be related to previous events as effect to cause, i.e. this act of thinking must occur because CE previous events have occured. It would seem, therefore, that we never think the conclusion because GC it is the consequent of its grounds but only because CE certain previous events have happened. If so, it does not seem that the GC sequence makes us more likely to think the true conclusion than not. And this is very much what I meant by the difficulty in naturalism.
13.
SOME THOUGHTS
AT FIRST SIGHT NOTHING SEEMS MORE OBVIOUS THAN THAT
religious persons should care for the sick; no Christian building, except perhaps a church, is more self-explanatory than a Christian hospital. Yet on further consideration the thing is really connected with the undying paradox, the blessedly two-edged character, of Christianity. And if any of us were now encountering Christianity for the first time he would be vividly aware of this paradox.
Let us suppose that such a person began by observing those Christian activities which are, in a sense, directed toward this present world. He would find that this religion had, as a mere matter of historical fact, been the agent which preserved such secular civilization as survived the fall of the Roman Empire; that to it Europe owes the salvation, in those perilous ages, of civilized agriculture, architecture, laws, and literacy itself. He would find this same religion has always been healing the sick and caring for the poor; that it has, more than any other, blessed marriage; and that arts and philosophy tend to flourish in its neighborhood. In a word, it is always either doing, or at least repenting with shame for not having done, all the things which secular humanitarianism enjoins. If our inquirer stopped at this point he would have no difficulty in classifying Christianity-giving it its place on a map of the "great religions." Obviously
(he would say), this is one of the world-affirming religions like Confucianism or the agricultural religions of the great Meso-potamian city-states.
But how if our inquirer began (as he well might) with quite a different series of Christian phenomena? He might notice that the central image in all Christian art was that of a Man slowly dying by torture; that the instrument of His torture was the worldwide symbol of the faith; that martyrdom was almost a specifically Christian action; that our calendar was as full of
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fasts as of feasts; that we meditated constantly on the mortality not only of ourselves but of the whole universe; that we were bidden to entrust all our treasure to another world; and that even a certain disdain for the whole natural order (contemptus mundi) had sometimes been reckoned a Christian virtue. And-here, once again, if he knew no more, the inquirer would find Christianity quite easy to classify; but this time he would classify it as one of the world-denying religions. It would be pigeonholed along with Buddhism.
Either conclusion would be justified if a man had only the one or the other half of the evidence before him. It is when he puts both halves together and sees that Christianity cuts right across the classification he was attempting to make-it is then that he first knows what he is up against, and I think he will be bewildered.
Probably most of those who read this page have been Christians all their lives. If so, they may find it hard to sympathize with the bewilderment I refer to. To Christians the explanation of this two-edged character in their faith seems obvious. They live in a graded or hierarchical universe where there is a place for everything and everything should be kept in its right place. The supernatural is higher than the natural, but each has its place; just as a man is higher than a dog, but a dog has its place. It is, therefore, to us not at all surprising that healing for the sick and provision for the poor should be less important than (when they are, as sometimes happens, alternative to) the salvation of souls; and yet very important. Because God created the natural-invented it out of His love and artistry-it demands our reverence; because it is only a creature and not He, it is, from another point of view, of little account. And still more, because Nature, and especially human nature, is fallen it must be corrected and the evil within it must be mortified. But its essence is good; correction is something quite different from Manichaean repudiation or Stoic superiority. Hence, in all true Christian asceticism, that respect for the thing rejected which, I think, we never find in pagan asceticism. Marriage is good, though not for me; wine is good, though I must not drink it; feasts are good, though today we fast.
This attitude will, I think, be found to depend logically on the doctrines of the Creation and the Fall. Some hazy adumbrations of a doctrine of the Fall can be found in paganism; but it is quite astonishing how rarely outside Christianity we
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find-I am not sure that we ever find-a real doctrine of Creation. In polytheism the gods are usually the product of a universe already in existence-Keats's Hyperion, in spirit, if not in detail, is true enough as a picture of pagan theogony. In pantheism the universe is never something that God made. It is an emanation, something that oozes out of Him, or an appearance, something He looks like to us but really is not, or even an attack of incurable schizophrenia from which He is unaccountably suffering. Polytheism is always, in the long run, nature worship; pantheism always, in the long run, hostility to Nature. None of these beliefs really leaves you free both to enjoy your breakfast and to mortify your inordinate appetites- much less to mortify appetites recognized as innocent at present lest they should become inordinate.
And none of them leaves anyone free to do what is being done in the Lourdes Hospital every day: to fight against death as earnestly, skillfully, and calmly as if you were a secular humanitarian while knowing all the time that death is, both for better and worse, something that the secular humanitarian has never dreamed of. The world, knowing how all our real investments are beyond the grave, might expect us to be less concerned than other people who go in for what is called Higher Thought and tell us that "death doesn't matter"; but we "are not high minded,"1 and we follow one who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus-not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in His eyes than in ours. The nature which He had created as God, the nature which He had assumed as man, lay there before Him in its ignominy; a foul smell, food for worms. Though He was to revive it a moment later, He wept at the shame; if I may here quote a writer of my own communion, "I am not so much afraid of death as ashamed of it."2 And that brings us again to the paradox. Of all men, we hope most of death; yet nothing will reconcile us to-well, its unnaturalness. We know that we were not made for it; we know how it crept into our destiny as an intruder;
'Psalm cxxxi. 1.
2The reference is to Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, First Part, Section 40, where he says "I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof."
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and we know who has defeated it. Because our Lord is risen we know that on one level it is an enemy already disarmed; but because we know that the natural level also is God's creation we cannot cease to fight against the death which mars it, as against all those other blemishes upon it, against pain and poverty, barbarism and ignorance. Because we love something else more than this world we love even this world better than those who know no other.
14.
"THE TROUBLE WITH'X'..."
I SUPPOSE I MAY ASSUME THAT SEVEN OUT OF TEN OF THOSE
who read these lines are in some kind of difficulty about some other human being. Either at work or at home, either the people who employ you or those whom you employ, either those who share your house or those whose house you share, either your in-laws or parents or children, your wife or your husband, are making life harder for you than it need be even in these days. It is to be hoped that we do not often mention these difficulties (especially the domestic ones) to outsiders. But sometimes we do. An outside friend asks us why we are looking so glum, and the truth comes out.
On such occasions the outside friend usually says, "But why don't you tell them? Why don't you go to your wife (or husband, or father, or daughter, or boss, or landlady, or lodger) and have it all out? People are usually reasonable. All you've got to do is to make them see things in the right light. Explain it to them in a reasonable, quiet, friendly way." And we, whatever we say outwardly, think sadly to ourselves, "He doesn't know 'X.'" We do. We know how utterly hopeless it is to make "X" see reason. Either we've tried it over and over again- tried it till we are sick of trying it-or else we've never tried it because we saw from the beginning how useless it would be. We know that if we attempt to "have it all out with 'X'" there will either be a "scene," or else "X" will stare at us in blank amazement and say, "I don't know what on earth you're talking about"; or else (which is perhaps worst of all) "X" will quite agree with us and promise to turn over a new leaf and put everything on a new footing-and then, twenty-four hours later, will be exactly the same as "X" has always been.
You know, in fact, that any attempt to talk things over with "X" will shipwreck on the old, fatal flaw in "X's" character. And you see, looking back, how all the plans you have ever
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made always have shipwrecked on that fatal flaw-on "X's" incurable jealousy, or laziness, or touchiness, or muddlehead-edness, or bossiness, or ill temper, or changeableness. Up to a certain age you have perhaps had the illusion that some external stroke of good fortune-an improvement in health, a rise of salary, the end of the war-would solve your difficulty. But you know better now. The war is over, and you realize that even if the other things happened, "X" would still be "X," and you would still be up against the same old problem. Even if you became a millionaire, your husband would still be a bully, or your wife would still nag or your son would still drink, or you'd still have to have your mother-in-law to live with you.<
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It is a great step forward to realize that this is so; to face the fact that even if all external things went right, real happiness would still depend on the character of the people you have to live with-and that you can't alter their characters. And now comes the point. When you have seen this you have, for the first time, had a glimpse of what it must be like for God. For, of course, this is (in one way) just what God Himself is up against. He has provided a rich, beautiful world for people to live in. He has given them intelligence to show them how it can be used, and conscience to show them how it ought to be used. He has contrived that the things they need for their biological life (food, drink, rest, sleep, exercise) should be positively delightful to them. And, having done all this, He then sees all His plans spoiled-just as our little plans are spoiled- by the crookedness of the people themselves. All the things He has given them to be happy with they turn into occasions for quarreling and jealousy, and excess and hoarding, and tomfoolery.
You may say it is very different for God because He could, if He pleased, alter people's characters, and we can't. But this difference doesn't go quite as deep as we may at first think. God has made it a rule for Himself that He won't alter people's character by force. He can and will alter them-but only if the people will let Him. In that way He has really and truly limited His power. Sometimes we wonder why He has done so, or even wish that He hadn't. But apparently He thinks it worth doing. He would rather have a world of free beings, with all its risks, than a world of people who did right like machines because they couldn't do anything else. The more
Loving praise for Page 13
