by Michael Ward
Both writers recognise the paradox that this new and accelerated acquisition of power and control over “human nature” represents a radical threat to common humanity. Indeed, Lewis is very keen in his analysis here, and alert to the way in which general claims for scientific progress and “man’s power over nature” often mask unreconstructed power dynamics in which some human beings are simply seeking to entrench their power and control others. He sees this as happening in two stages: first of all, “Man’s power over Nature,” or indeed “the power of Man to make himself what he pleases,”
turns out really to be “a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” But beyond that he sees something even more sin-ister. In order to acquire the technique and the will so completely to control 14. Ibid., 44.
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and condition other people, the “controllers” of the new era will have denied and explained away their own humanity. What will be at work in them, motivating their choices as controllers, will be no more than the bundle of natural impulses and instincts to which they have reduced themselves: From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a
new light. We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may “conquer” them. We are always conquering Nature, because
“Nature” is the name for what we have, to some extent, con-
quered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature.
Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do
not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the
soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her.
The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as
soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to
the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been
sacrificed are one and the same.15
Given the confluence of their thought, it is extraordinary to find so little direct contact between Huxley and Lewis as public intellectuals. Lewis, I think, dismissed Huxley early as one of the set he calls “the clevers” in The Pilgrim’s Regress. The three or four references to Huxley in his Collected Letters are all dismissive and whilst one could understand Lewis’s dismissal of the early Huxley, the Huxley not only of Brave New World Revisited but also of The Perennial Philosophy would have been of great interest to him.
Indeed, it could be argued that both men in their very different ways were appealing to an earlier mystical tradition in order to counterbalance modern reductivism.
Be that as it may, The Abolition of Man still has a place among the prophetic books of the twentieth century, both in the sense that it foretells many things that have come to pass, but also in the far more important sense that it was an attempt, completely against the grain of his own culture, to speak truth to power. In particular, it recognized that the real power to open or close the mind rests not with pure philosophers at conversation in the universities, but rather with programmes of mass education and with the assumptions that lie behind widely used school textbooks, and that is why the opening of The Abolition of Man with its critique of The Green Book is not really perverse at all, but central to Lewis’s prophetic intention.
15. Ibid., 43.
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Problems with The Abolition of Man
Why, then, if it is so pertinent and prophetic, did Lewis find that his book had been almost totally ignored by the public? One reason may be that, although so much of it has proved prescient, it also shows evidence of some real cultural blindspots on Lewis’s part. There are problems with this text that need to be addressed by those who would like to see it revived and made useful in the twenty-first century.
The essential difficulty, as I see it, is the almost simplistic contrast that Lewis draws between The Green Book’s subjectivism reduced to absurdity, on the one hand, and a kind of golden and unassailable certainty in the Tao, on the other. Things are always more nuanced and complex, but for the sake of what he hoped would be clarity in his argument, Lewis ignores this complexity. He doesn’t give enough attention to the context in which and the purpose for which The Control of Language was written, and that context is the immense rift that the Great War opened between the large cultural claims of the nineteenth century and the bitter wasteland of the twentieth century. Lewis needs to recognise that if there is, among his contemporaries, a widespread suspicion and “debunking” of objective moral values it is because these values were so abused that they seemed in themselves, to many, to have given rise to the disaster of the war. This blindspot on Lewis’s part comes to sharp and dreadfully ironic focus when, of all the ambiguous truths of the old moral order, he seizes as an example, as though completely unambiguous, the well-known tag from Horace, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” He blunders into this wide-eyed. Here is what he says: Perhaps this will become clearer if we take a concrete instance.
When a Roman father told his son that it was a sweet and seemly
thing to die for his country, he believed what he said. He was
communicating to the son an emotion which he himself shared
and which he believed to be in accord with the value which his
judgement discerned in noble death. He was giving the boy the
best he had, giving of his spirit to humanize him as he had given
of his body to beget him. But Gaius and Titius cannot believe
that in calling such a death sweet and seemly they would be say-
ing “something important about something.” Their own method
of debunking would cry out against them if they attempted to
do so. For death is not something to eat and therefore cannot be
dulce in the literal sense, and it is unlikely that the real sensations preceding it will be dulce even by analogy. And as for decorum—
that is only a word describing how some other people will feel
about your death when they happen to think of it, which won’t
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be often, and will certainly do you no good. There are only two
courses open to Gaius and Titius. Either they must go the whole
way and debunk this sentiment like any other, or must set them-
selves to work to produce, from outside, a sentiment which they
believe to be of no value to the pupil and which may cost him
his life, because it is useful to us (the survivors) that our young men should feel it.16
Of course it is impossible for us to read this now without seeing the whole thing in the light of Wilfred Owen’s heart-breaking poem, “Dulce et decorum est. ” And one wonders how it was possible for Lewis to write such a paragraph a good twenty-three years after that poem had been published.
Owen zeroes in not simply on the contrast between hideous death in modern warfare and this golden Latin motto, but much more crucially on the fact that it is a lie told by the comfortable to the condemned:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.17
That is the context in which the
whole culture of scepticism and suspicion of which The Green Book is a part has arisen and there are real questions to be answered given the way in which even the most self-evident moral truths are misappropriated, exploited, made part of cultural power structures. There is a constant task of confession and discernment for those who, nevertheless, wish to point to some surviving and unassailable objectivity in moral truth. It is no longer enough simply to repeat the words
“dulce et decorum est” and expect to have them taken at face value.
And here the ironies become almost unbearable, for Lewis himself was, like Owen, a young officer writing poetry on the Western Front, and Lewis’s own war poetry in Spirits in Bondage, published the year before Owen’s, deals with many of the same things and unmasks many of the same lies. Of 16. Ibid., 17–18.
17. See The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (2nd ed.), ed. Silkin, 182–83.
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all people, Lewis would have been the most qualified to read Owen’s poem with sympathy, and had he acknowledged Owen’s critique of Horace at this point in The Abolition of Man, had he gone on to show that in fact Owen himself was still writing from within the Tao, still appealing in those final ringing lines to the objective moral value of truth-telling, then this whole part of his argument would have been itself more nuanced, more truthful, and more compelling. Yet in all three volumes of Lewis’s immense correspondence, there is not a single reference to Wilfred Owen. Yesterday Lewis was remembered just beside Owen in Poets’ Corner. It may only be through an imaginary conversation between these two great men that we can begin to develop a line of argument that is missing from Lewis’s book. That is the task that remains to be done. But let us turn to what we in the twenty-first century can draw from Lewis’s text as we have it now.
The Abolition of Man in the Twenty-First Century If Lewis felt this favourite book had been “almost totally ignored” in his own day, why should it not be ignored now? What can we draw from it? I want to conclude by suggesting that there are four important insights this small book has to offer us in the twenty-first century.
First, the great transformative ideas—whether for better or worse, whether keys to liberty or shackles on the human mind—are encountered at work in ordinary education, not just in the rarefied world of formal philosophical debate, and it is in schools where they do their harm and their good. Lewis sets us an example here: the best minds in the greatest universities should be as deeply, closely, and intimately concerned with what is taught in secondary schools as they are with the ideas of their most promising post-doctoral students.
Secondly, in his general remarks on education, he emphasizes that
there is all the difference in the world between conditioning and initiation as approaches to teaching. Education is not something that is done to children by formed and finished adults who are somehow aloof and detached from the principles they teach. Education is a shared pilgrimage, a communal celebration, an entering together into both the delights and the challenges of a common text.
Thirdly, utter reductivism reduces itself and is self-negating; even the most sceptical critique of the powers-that-be ultimately requires a transcendent frame of reference. In this insight Lewis has been joined by many other
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later writers. I think particularly of what Seamus Heaney has to say about redressing our reductivism in his brilliant book, The Redress of Poetry.18
And finally, and I think most hauntingly, we get the traces, the beginnings, the hints, of a whole new way of doing both science and the arts, the key to which is participation rather than detachment. For although at first blush Lewis might seem to be attacking science itself, in fact he is calling for a new approach to nature that radically anticipates many of the insights of the ecological movement, the work of James Lovelock, and even the developments more recently of eco-criticism. He wonders if in a return to the Tao we might also develop what he calls a “regenerate science”:
The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even
to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do
to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away.
When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While
studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation. The analogy between the Tao of Man and the instincts of an animal species would mean for it new light cast
on the unknown thing, Instinct, by the inly known reality of
conscience and not a reduction of conscience to the category
of Instinct. Its followers would not be free with words only and merely. In a word, it would conquer Nature without being at the same time conquered by her and buy knowledge at a lower cost
than that of life.19
I would like to conclude not with the many negatives in this trenchantly critical book, but rather with a gathering together of the beautiful hints and guesses of a whole new approach that, perhaps, we can look forward to in the rest of this century. I have in fact drawn together many of the phrases from this book that most haunt me, that seem most pertinent to our present situation, and made out of them a “found” sonnet called “Imagine.” I shall end with that.
18. Heaney, The Redress of Poetry.
19. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 47.
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“Imagine”
(A found sonnet from The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis.) Imagine a new natural philosophy;
I hardly know what I am asking for;
Far-off echoes, that primeval sense,
With blood and sap, Man’s pre-historic piety,
Continually conscious, continually . . .
Alive, alive and growing like a tree
And trees as dryads, or as beautiful,
The bleeding trees in Virgil and in Spenser,
The tree of knowledge and the tree of life
Growing together, that great ritual
Pattern of nature, beauties branching out
The cosmic order, ceremonial,
Regenerate science, seeing from within . . .
To participate is to be truly human.20
20. Guite, The Singing Bowl, 60.
14
The Soul of C. S. Lewis
Stephen Logan 1
What Is a Soul?
I don’t suppose too many readers of C. S. Lewis would be tempted to say that “soul” is a simple word. Look it up in OED and you’ll find fifteen basic senses, illustrated with quotations from the very earliest stages in the history of the English language. As a theological concept, too, there’s not much room for doubting its complexity. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church explains that “No precise teaching about the soul received general acceptance in the Christian Church until the Middle Ages.”2 But since there are reams of passages in Old English containing the word “soul,”
this evidently doesn’t mean that no one had offered an account of what the word “soul” might mean before the Middle Ages; it means only that there was no official agreement about its meaning before then. There were bound to be difficulties. “Soul” is an English word of Germanic origin. It 1. Dr. Stephen Logan is Principal Supervisor in English at Clare College, Cambridge, and works also as a psychotherapist. He is the editor of William Wordsworth: Everyman’s Poetry Library (Dent, 1998) and author of “Literary Theorist” in The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 2010). A Welsh musician and poet, he has written ten volumes of poetry, and his poem for the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis’s death, “Westminster Abbey Unvisited,” is included at the end of this essay. He has released two solo albums, Signs and Wonders (2014) and Deliverance (2015), and maintains a web presence at www.stevelogan.co.uk.
2. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn., ed. F.L. Cross and E.A.
Living
stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1520.
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is used, in the Old Testament, to translate a Hebrew word, nephesh, which means something like “living being” and precludes the familiar distinction between “soul” and “body.” In English versions of the New Testament, the word “soul” translates the Greek psyche: a word that has only to be spoken in order to suggest a pulsating diversity of mythological stories very different in atmosphere from the Gospels (the myth of Cupid and Psyche, of course, being a subject of lifelong interest to C. S. Lewis). In short, the Hebrew and Greek words for which “soul” is often a translation have meanings with which those of the word “soul” are likely to be misaligned. Yet the biblical contexts in which the word occurs leave no doubt as to its importance:
“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36)
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.” (Mark 12:30)
“The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” (Ezek 18:20)
“I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of
his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.” (Ps 131:2)
I select these examples pretty much at random. If they were the only surviving evidence of the meaning of the word “soul,” we could infer that the soul was something of supreme value; that it is, with the heart, mind, and strength, an essential constituent of a person; that it is capable of being killed by its own activity when that activity is evil; and that it is capable of being comforted by oneself, implying that it exists in a peculiarly intimate relation to the self, but is not identical with it.
Lewis’s own uses of the word “soul” certainly attest its importance to him:
Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is
