What is Nature doing in Lewis's Abolition of Man? Part II
The nouvelle theologie vs the neo-Thomists
In the full paper, I say more on how these concerns fit in Lewis’s intellectual context, including the thought of Adler and Hutchins at the University of Chicago and Eliot in England.
But given our limited time, I’ll focus on a single group of thinkers contemporary to Lewis who wrestled with the division of humanity from both the natural and the moral Real. This was the Catholic nouvelle theologians of the period between WW I and Vatican II. Also known as “ressourcement” thinkers for their careful use of premodern sources, this group included Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.[1]
Much unites Lewis to these nouvelle thinkers – though I have found little evidence they interacted; rather, they seem to have worked in parallel, harmonizing at important points (as I’ll show), with both of them reacting against facets of neo-Thomism as well as of modernity more generally.
The nature-supernatural divide
The nouvelle theologians found in the official Thomism of their era a strict division between Nature and the supernatural that seemed to them inconsistent with Scripture and tradition. Plumbing entire early and medieval texts for a more holistic theology, they launched their attack on Neo-Thomism.
Of course Lewis was in his own way a ressourcement thinker, a reader of old books, and in his Allegory of Love, interestingly, we find a bit of a smoking gun: an explicit objection to the nature-supernature of the neo-Thomists, while citing ressourcement scholar Etienne Gilson. QUOTE:
Aristotle is, before all, the philosopher of divisions. His effect on his greatest disciple [Aquinas], as M. Gilson has traced it, was to dig new chasms between God and the world, between human knowledge and reality, between faith and reason. Heaven began, under this dispensation, to seem farther off. The danger of Pantheism grew less: the danger of mechanical Deism came a step nearer.[2]
Participatory ontology
What the ressourcement movement drew from their patristic and medieval sources against the neo-Thomists can be summarized in the phrase “participatory ontology,” or just the word “participation.” In Hans Boersma’s words, “for people throughout at least the first thousand years of the church’s history, [participation] meant . . . that natural realities participate in something greater.” “[N]ature is graced, from the outset, by sharing, or participating in the life of God”—and that life explains the beauty, truth, and goodness of the world: Nature reflects those qualities in God himself.[3]
Participatory ontology in Lewis
The nouvelle theologians, through their ressourcement efforts, attempted to recover the premodern sacramental understanding of the world – in Lewis’s words, the “discarded image” of the cosmos as having its own “built-in significance.”[4] For Lewis, the medieval cosmos was one of vibrancy and wonder. In his Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom peers out of the window of a spaceship to see not the black void of space but a pulsing, glowing matrix of glory. This is how the medievals saw their universe, as a place where “each sphere . . . is a conscious and intellectual being, moved by ‘intellectual love’ of God.”[5]
[1] Patricia Kelly, Ressourcement: A Sourcebook (T&T Clark, 2020), 1; Gabriel Flynn, “Introduction: The Twentieth-Century Renaissance in Catholic Theology,” in Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, ed. Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray (Oxford University Press, 2012), 1-2.
[2] C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in the Medieval Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 110.
[3] “The created world is a sacrament that owes everything—even its very existence itself—to the God who has called it into being.” Hans Boersma, “Reconnecting the Threads: Theology as Sacramental Tapestry,” Crux, Fall 2011, Vol 47, #3, 35. For Boersma’s main works on the ressourcement movement, the nature-supernature split, and participatory ontology, see his Nouvelle Theologie and Sacramental Ontology (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011).
[4] “If I am right, the man of genius then found himself in a situation very different from that of his modern successor. Such 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—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.” C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Canto Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 204.
[5] Discarded Image, 115.