C S Lewis and medieval morality - part II
Lewis compares the moral world of medieval faith to the modern loss of Reality through the disconnection of the natural from the supernatural
The following are some concluding thoughts on how C S Lewis can guide us into the look and feel of the “moral fabric of the Middle Ages,” and how that fabric differs from our own. It’s basically me grinding away at the grist for this Medieval Wisdom for Modern Protestants book.
While working away at this question of a medieval moral fabric, I learned from a gem of a dissertation: Sister Mary J. Beattie, The Humane Medievalist: A Study of C. S. Lewis’ Criticism of Medieval Literature (Ph.D. [in Language and Literature, general], University of Pittsburgh, 1967). What follows are some of the insights I captured from that source:
Flowing from and dependent upon the hierarchic order of the discarded image is the last important characteristic of Lewis’ medieval universe, the doctrine of objective value. This is ‘. . . the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of thing we are.’[1] Lewis has established his model as one having a significant order imposed by its Creator, its structure, and its purpose. Therefore, the function of man as artist was not to invest the universe with value but to respond adequately to the value already inherent in the universe. (27)
Such a belief in the objective value of the universe was not opposed to the Platonism or Neo-Platonism of [28] the Middle Ages. The order of the universe always retained value, for even if it were seen only as an image of a higher order, it had at least that order and meaning. . . . Instead of opposing his model to Platonism, Lewis contrasts the ancient and medieval objectivity with the modern denial of objective value. He writes that ‘. . . a man today often, perhaps usually, feels himself confronted with a reality whose significance he cannot know, or a reality that has no significance, or even a reality such that the very question whether it has a meaning is itself a meaningless question. It is for him, by his own sensibility, to discover a meaning, or out of his own subjectivity, to give a meaning [I take this to be what Charles Taylor has called “expressive individualism”]—or at least a shape—to what in itself had neither. But the Model universe of our ancestors had a built-in significance. And that in two senses, as having “significant form” (it is an admirable design) and as a manifestation of the wisdom and goodness that created it. There was no question of waking it into beauty or life. . . . The achieved perfection was already there. The only difficulty was to make an adequate response.[2] (27-28)
The doctrine of objective value as it was contained in the ‘medieval model’ carried, for Lewis, crucial ethical implications. He described the transition from [30] the objective value of the Middle Ages to the modern condition as ‘that great movement of internalization, and that consequent aggrandizement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.’[3] The debilitation of value and law resulting from this internalization would lead in Lewis’ opinion to the abolition of man himself. (29 – 30)
Sister Beattie continues:
Lewis made two attempts to halt the progress of abolition, or at least to point out its dangers to his contemporaries. The first of these, a series of collected lectures titled The Abolition of Man, attempts to demonstrate that analytical man in conquering Nature is, in reality, destroying value both in Nature and in himself.[4] I shall not now argue for the validity of the Natural Law as a response to objective value and as the essential requirement for law. Instead, I wish simply to state that this is the conviction which L sets forth in these lectures. In his second attempt to halt the internalizing process, Lewis presents for public approval a book calculated ‘to reverse a movement of thought which has been going on since the beginning of philosophy.’
Beattie is referring here to the preface Lewis wrote to The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe by D. E. Harding (New York, 1952), p. 9. Here is some of what Lewis says there:
We can observe a single one-way progression. At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account: classified as our sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not rest there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just as mistaken (and mistaken in much the same way) when we attributed ‘souls’, or ‘selves’ or minds’ to human organisms, as when we attributed Dryads to the trees. Animism, apparently, begins at home. We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves mere personifications. Man is indeed akin to the gods: that is, he is no less phantasmal than they. Just as the Dryad is a ‘ghost’, an abbreviated symbol for all the facts we know about the tree foolishly mistaken for a mysterious entity over and above the facts, so [10] the man’s ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ is an abbreviated symbol for certain verifiable facts about his behaviour: a symbol mistaken for a thing. And just as we have been broken of our bad habit of personifying trees, so we must now be broken of our bad habit of personifying men: a reform already effected in the political field. There never was a Subjective account into which we could transfer the items which the Object had lost. There is no ‘consciousness’ to contain, as images or private experiences, all the lost gods, colours, and concepts. Consciousness is ‘not the sort of noun that can be used that way’. (9-10)
The preface, continued:
It is as though a man, deceived by the linguistic similarity between ‘myself’ and ‘my spectacles’, should start looking round for his ‘self’ to put in his pocket before he left his bedroom in the morning: he might want it during the course of the day. If we lament the discovery that our friends have no ‘selves’ in the old sense, we shall be behaving like a man who shed bitter tears at being unable to find his ‘self’ anywhere on the dressing-table or even underneath it.” (10) and “Now there is of course nothing new in the attempt to arrest the process that has led us from the living universe where man meets the gods to the final void where almost-nobody discovers his mistakes about almost-nothing. Every step in that process has been contested. Many rearguard actions have been fought: some are being fought at the moment. But it has only been a question of arresting, not of reversing, the movement . . . (11)
As Beattie puts it in conclusion:
The process is described grimly as that ‘which has led us from the living universe where man meets the gods to the final void where almost-nobody discovers his mistakes about almost-nothing.’ The final void of the modern space [31] age was a reality to which Lewis could never become reconciled after reconstructing the Heavens of medieval man, filled with life, light, and music. (30-31)
[1] N. 49: The Abolition of Man (New York, 1965), p. 29.
[2] N. 50: The Discarded Image (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 203-204)
[3] N. 54: The Discarded Image, p. 42.
[4] N. 55: See especially Chapter 3, “The Abolition of Man,” pp. 67-96.