What is Nature doing in Lewis's Abolition of Man? Part III (final part)
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.”[1] 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.”[2]
Throughout his writing career, Lewis expressed this patristic-medieval Christian idea in many ways. One of the most interesting of those expressions is his discussion of symbol and sacrament in his early scholarly book the Allegory of Love. There he compares allegory – the use of lower, physical characters and objects to represent higher truths and realities – to what he calls “sacramentalism or symbolism,” which starts with the assumption that “our material world . . . is the copy of an invisible world.” This approach, Lewis noted, originated with Plato’s idea of the Forms, by virtue of which all things exist, then showed up in Augustine, pseudo-Dionysius, Boethius, and many other Christian thinkers.[3]
Lewis gives image after image of this principle of communication of a higher Reality in the medium of a lower in his sermon “Transposition”: two-dimensional “flatlanders” trying to understand three-dimensional realities, an orchestra composition reduced to piano notation, etc. But as is often observed, Lewis is at his most Platonic in the passage in the Last Battle in which Digory, now in heaven after the end of the world in Narnia, says “‘Of course it [heaven] is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.’ His voice stirred everyone like a trumpet as he spoke these words: but when he added under his breath ‘It’s all in Plato, all in Plato,” etc.[4]
Conclusion
While we can’t draw many direct lines of influence from the nouvelle theologians to Lewis, we can at least invoke the principle “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Both Lewis and the Nouvelle theologians had the same objections to neo-Thomism.
In at least one spot, however, we get an intriguing indication that Lewis saw himself as being engaged, with others, in a culture-wide attempt to save participatory ontology. This is in his preface to D. E. Harding’s 1952 book The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe.[5] The whole preface is something of an elegy for the loss of participatory ontology, and worth reading in full for that reason. But as he concludes, he shows his sense that as he defends PO, he is engaged in a work that others have taken up as well. QUOTE,
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)
Participatory ontology in the Abolition
That Lewis wove a participatory ontology into his writings, fictional as well as non-fictional, we can easily see. It is patent in Narnia and The Discarded Image and the Ransom Trilogy and more. We see this principle of PO too in the sacramentalism Lewis borrows from the “long Middle Ages” and discusses explicitly in his scholarly work (e.g. Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image, and Sixteenth Century Literature). But does he really bring this principle to bear in his non-theistic public argument for “objective value?” – the Abolition? Consider this single quotation, which draws together much in that small book:
In the Tao itself, as long as we remain within it, we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and common reason of humanity, alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation varies, into ever new beauties and dignities of application.[6]
In other words, when we live within the Tao, or participate in the Real, we are truly human. Outside of the Tao, we lose our humanity. The Tao is therefore essentially participatory.[7]
Thus, Lewis’s argument in the abolition is a defense of the long tradition of participatory ontology, which includes a capacious and sacramental Christian humanist understanding of human nature as part of God-graced Nature, “capital N”. Yes, he does not bring the argument home to a theistic God. He simply points to the water of the Tao, and not He who is the Spring from which the eternal, living water flows to us, making us ever more human. But one does not have to look hard to see behind the “sublime waterfall” of the Abolition’s famous opening illustration that divine waterfall in which it, and we, and all of natures, subsists.
[1] “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.
[2] Discarded Image, 115.
[3] C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love was an early work from Lewis, originally published by Clarendon Press in 1936. This quoted material is taken from the Kindle Edition (HarperCollins, 2013), 56-58. The Kindle edition is based on the paperback edition (Canto, 2012) taken, in turn, from the Cambridge University Press, 1961 edition.
[4] C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1956), p. 159–160; cited in Brazier, 680.
[5] New York, 1952.
[6] Lewis, Discarded Image, 1947; 74–75.
[7] And the participatory ontology it assumes is, furthermore, necessary for any true humanism (of the sort described by Alan Jacobs in his Year of Our Lord 1943, of which he takes the Abolition to be an instance). And as a matter of historical fact, in the Christian tradition of humanism, the values of the moral law as they describe humans individually and in our common humanity have flowed historically and theologically from the participatory fountainheads of the imago dei and the Incarnation. Jens Zimmermann shows this systematically in his Incarnational Humanism: A Philosophy of Culture for the Church in the World (IVP Academic, 2012) as well as Humanism and Religion: A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture (Oxford University Press, 2012). He also summarized the story in the introduction of his edited volume Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism: Education and the Restoration of Humanity (Oxford University Press, 2017).