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... (Abolition 46) The Magician's Nephew, the tale of the creation of Narnia, gives two characters who exemplify the Controllers -- Jadis and Uncle AndrewKetterley. Both claimed to be above Natural Law; they had "a high and lonely destiny. " Jadis was a monarch and Uncle Andrew was a magician, but both were strongly suggestive of modern science gone wrong. They bothwell that common rules are fine for common people, but that singular great people must be free-to experiment without limits in search of knowledge, to seize power and wealth. The result was cruelty and destruction. In contrast, the wise men of old had sought to conform the soul to reality, and the resulted been knowledge, Two examples from Lewis's verse illustrate this traditional wisdom. The 1956 poem "After Aristotle" praises virtue, stating that in Greece men gladly toiled in search of virtue as their most valuable treasure.
Men would willingly die or live in hard labor for the beauty of virtue. Virtuepowerfully touched the heart and gave unfading fruit; virtue made A second example is "On a Theme from Nicolas of Cusa, " published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1955. In the first stanza Lewis notes how physical foods are transformed by our bodies when we assimilate them; in the second, he points out that when we assimilate goodness and truth they are not At the end of Abolition Lewis implores his readers to pause before considering Natural Law only one more accident of human history in a wholly material universe. To "explain away" this transcendent reality is perhaps to explain away all explanations.
To "see through" the Natural Law is the same The idea that some things are inherently good and others are not is also the basis for Lewis's approach to literature in An Experiment in Criticism. His thesis is that the work of art, and particularly the literary work, is to be received for its own sake, not used for other purposes. Each details to be savored and, if good, enjoyed. We are to look at the work, not use it as a mirror to reflect ourselves and our own fantasies or as alen's through which This principle is a particular application of the Natural Law. We approach work of literature, as we might a person or flower, with the assumption that here is something good for its own sake, something worth attending to. After we have looked at it attentively, objectively, either our efforts will have been rewarded or we may decide it is not of much value after all; but in any case we will have given it a fair try, done it justice.
In Experiment Lewis contrasts the principle of the inherent value works of literature with the habits of people who use literature (andrus misuse it), who prostitute the work to some other purpose. The unliterary read a work only for the excitement they can get fromthe plot (as in an adventure story), for the provocation and satisfaction of their curiosity (as in a detective story), or for vicarious emotional fulfillment (as in a love story). Such readers use literature much as acid uses a toy, or a worshiper a crucifix: as a starting point for a journey inward or beyond. Unlike the child or the worshiper, who cherish their objected use it many times over, the unliterary usually use a story only once; then it is There are also users among the literary. There are the status seekers, who read the academically fashionable literature in order to impress themselves and others.
There are the self-improvers, whose concern with their mental enrichment takes the place of a focus on the work itself. And there are the wisdom-seekers, who value a work for the Statement about Life that it presents. But, says Lewis, works of art do not give us adequate world views. Too much selection is involved. In life, suffering is not often grand and noble and attributable to Tragic Flaws; matters done end at points of satisfying finality, but go drizzling on.
Works of literature may in fact make us wiser, but that is really incidental to their true function; and the wisdom we think came from a particular Great Workman in fact have come largely from within ourselves. Wisdom seeking is carried to absurdity in a particularly keen group he calls the Vigilant's (he is surely referring to F. R. Leavis and friends) who will place their stamps approval only on those few works that express their own conception oxbow life should be lived. They form a kind of Committee of Public Safety, lopping a new head every month.
By contrast with the users, the receivers surrender to a work of literature, getting themselves out of the way, attending closely to each part and its relationship to other parts, for the time being taking the author's viewpoint as their own. Their refusal of a subjective reading enables them to enlarge the narrow prison of the self and see with others' eyes. The temporary annihilation of the self that takes place actually serves to heal the loneliness of these. Lewis overtly compares the process to what happens in the pursuit of knowledge, or of justice, or the experience of love: we temporarily reject the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are. In the work literature we are experiencing the (morally) good or evil data, the (aesthetically) good or poor data, that really are out there and really possess the qualities we perceived. Lewis does not deny that our perception and judgment are sometimes flawed.
But good Lewis's aesthetic provides a necessary and refreshing corrective to rigorously dutiful approaches that have ruined the enjoyment of literature for many from student days onward. For those Christians to whom literary pleasures have seemed frivolous or dangerous temptations that might lead away fromthe Straight Path, Lewis affirms their goodness. He also exposes the sort single-issue criticism that darkens counsel by words without knowledge. Unless we can put ourselves to one side for a time and see what is actually in the text, we ought not to say anything about a work; and in many instances we might be better off not reading it at all. Having gratefully accepted Lewis's basic aesthetic enterprise, we must express a few reservations. Of course it is true that any work of imaginative literature is too selective to present an adequate philosophy of life.
But much the same could be said of any essay or multi-volumed work in discursive prose. Any time we want to speak of the whole, of universals (or the absence thereof), we must be selective. Most formal treatises on Being, Becoming or Causality leave out the terror and the joy of the world. The supposedly universal human experience of Reality discussed in nearly all of theology turns out to be male reality. Humans are limited; we may intend the universal, but any reflection upon it is bound to be limited.
The need for selectivity does not prohibit a work of literature from being intended, or taken, as a dramatized world view. This is particularly evident when a work gives support to oppressive social structures. For example, a story whose few Jewish characters are rapacious schemers or (if admirable) get baptized, may well give generous minds such as Lewis's the enlarging experience of finding out what it is like to be antisemitic. Unfortunately, it will also cause certain readers to come away with sharpened convictions that the Jewish Conspiracy is the fountainhead of the world's evil. Likewise, a work whose achieving and admirable characters are all male, with its females frothy, manipulative, passive, victimized, and / or marginal, is saying something about the relative value of male and female. Lewis in fact acknowledges, in an exchange of letters in Theology (1939 - 1940), that there are (morally) bad books that corrupt people by making false values attractive (Christian Reflections 30 - 35).
He does not refer specifically to fiction, nor does he exclude it. Surely, then a (morally) bad work of literature can be bad because it presents a dangerously false view of life, quite possibly by its selections. In contrast, a (morally) good work of literature can present true values. There is no reason where cannot receive such a work with diligent and delighted care, and arouse it as a parable. Surely what is objectionable is, in Kant's language, to make the work a means only and not an end also. It is ironic that Lewis should have rejected the concept of the literary work as a parable, in view the fact that his own novels (especially the Narnia tales) are parables of such enormous power and wisdom.
This, of course, is not to say that every work of literature offers award view. The comedy is not necessarily saying that life is finally above, nor is the whodunit perforce telling us that the ills of the world have a neat and gratifying solution right at hand, if we could only be perceptive enough to see. Even Freud realized that sometimes a cigar is just a good cigar. We have affirmed, with minor reservations, Lewis's reasoning that a work literature possesses value in itself.
Now we turn back to his thesis of intrinsic value as applied to all of life, his corrective to a totally relativistic value (or rather non value) system. Sensitive persons who have felt their meaning-world collapse around them know how dehumanizing felt meaninglessness is. Lewis knew whereof he spoke. (People who experience this collapse without pain are even more dehumanized. ) As to the end results consistent subjectivism, the world of the Controllers, Lewis's portraits of Jadis and the directors of the NICE tell us more vividly than his discursive prose just how nightmarish such a world would be. Within the context of a basic agreement, once more we offer a qualifier.
Consistent and total subjectivism we certainly do not want, and we know why. But subjectivism and relativism can be good things sometimes; theban be freeing. People with a sharp and absolute vision are not often abroad in mental sympathies and as rich in charity as Lewis; they tend more towards psychological imperialism. Many of us, Lewis included, would rather live among people who hold firmly that "Love thy neighbor as thyself " is the only universally binding principle in personal morality, leaving the individual's own judgment this rule's application to sexual ethics, the role of women, or to political allegiance- than among people who known detail God's will for other private lives as well as for their own andrew busy trying to bring about theocracy. Theocracy is one of our oldest banes, and one that Lewis particularly detested.
In conclusion, Lewis's teaching about Natural Law has acquired unique urgency since his day. He published Abolition in 1947; since then there have been radical shifts in the locus and imminence of threat to the world. The danger of nuclear armaments was obvious in 1947, but there were not enough in existence then to destroy all life on earth. Only part ofthe public foresaw the cancer-like proliferation of nuclear weapons that would soon threaten to destroy human life (and our libraries and literary heritage), and to cause a nuclear winter. This scenario sounds like then of the world as foretold in the Norse mythology that Lewis found so compelling. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the threat of worldwide destruction caused by weaponry is far more diffuse.
Biological and nuclear tools of modern death technology (as well as possible new alternatives) are sought by power-hungry men with many motives. In 1932 Lewis published the allegorical Pilgrim's Regress, in which he warned that savage dwarfs called "the Cruels" were then multiplying; communists, fascists, organized crime syndicates, and many other sub-species that value violence and a perverse kind of heroism. It seems reasonable to assume that he would have included contemporary perpetrators of genocide and terrorist groups of all Lewis sensed, by 1955, the increasing power of modern death technology. In The Magician's Nephew Jadis decided to use the Deplorable Word, a weapon she had paid a terrible price to obtain. A moment later every living thing in the world of Charn was dead.
She did this in outright defiance of Natural Law. The fate of Charn can be read as Lewis's commentary on possible large-scale In 1956 Lewis published The Last Battle, in which the land of Narnia died away more gradually than the land of Charn, ending in ice. "Yes, and I did hope, " said Jill, "That it might go on forever. I knew our world couldn't" (160). Lewis always assumed that our earth has die eventually, but he would have been intensely grieved by today's accelerated destruction of the environment caused not by acts of war, but by reckless plundering and pollution in defiance of the Natural Law. (Obvious examples are depletion of the ozone layer, burning of the rain forests, accumulation of nuclear waste, In Aslan's beautiful everlasting country Peter found that Lucy was crying because of the death of Narnia, and he tried to stop her. But Lucy appealed to the law in all our hearts and said she was sure it was not wrong to mourne death of the world they dearly loved.
And Trial, last king of Narnia, affirmed her. "It were no virtue, but grave discourtesy, if we didnt The Natural Law teaches us to fight to save our world from death, and, should it die, to mourn its destruction. But C. S. Lewis predicted that the Natural Law itself will outlast all worlds. And he promises us a new life that will be the Great Story which goes on for ever, in which every chapter better than the one before (184). And all who live that story will be receivers.
Bibliography: The Abolition of Man. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Christian Reflections. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967. The Last Battle. London: The Body Head, 1956.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Macmillan, 1950. Mere Christianity. New York: Macmillan, 1953.
Poems. New York: Harcourt, 1964.
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