Showing posts with label C. S. Lewis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label C. S. Lewis. Show all posts
Sunday, June 21, 2015
What is the characteristic blindness of our age?
When we read the writings coming from previous centuries, we say "Typical Victorian. Typical Medieval. Typical eighteenth-century." But then we have to start wondering what the characteristic blindness of our age is. We can see the problems with other ages because we aren't in them and we haven't absorbed the typical prejudices of that time. We have, however, absorbed the typical prejudices of our time, and those are hard to see. How much of what we say is going to be read by people in the future as "sooo early twenty-first century?" That's what C. S. Lewis talks about in his introduction to a fourth-century theological treatise:
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Sunday, September 28, 2014
A review of Adam Barkmans "C. S. Lewis and Philosophy as a Way of Life"
C. S. Lewis’s work is certainly varied, from children’s fantasy fiction, to science fiction, to scholarly writings in English literature, to Christian apologetics, and of course this is only the beginning. Most of this work has philosophical relevance to a greater or lesser extent. While some attention has been paid to Lewis as a philosopher in recent years, in general I would have to say that, for the most part, Lewis has been neglected even by Christian philosophers.
Some of Lewis’s critics would attribute this to the fact that while Lewis was capable of powerful rhetoric, the philosophical thinking underlying his writings is shallow, superficial, and prone to fallacy. Such is the verdict of John Beversluis’s C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Now, Beversluis apparently considers the Christian theism that Lewis defends to be in error. But other philosophers who indeed embrace Lewis’s overall philosophical perspective often find him difficult to bring into contemporary philosophical debate. This is partly because Lewis’s writings are not typically written for an audience of philosophers, and also because philosophical style and terminology is subject to change. A professional philosophical culture has developed in the Anglo-American world that was not present when Lewis was getting his philosophical training, and Lewis didn’t consider it has calling to address that culture. This makes Lewis something of a misfit from the point of view of present-day philosophy. He is, I believe, closer to what we today would call analytic philosophy than he is to Continental philosophy, and yet his work doesn’t fit the framework of contemporary analytic philosophy either.
People who want to make use of Lewis’s work in the context of contemporary philosophy have to do a certain amount of translating. Lewis’s argument from reason, for example, today meets with objections based on cognitive science, or supervenience theory, or functionalism, or eliminativism, all concepts that Lewis would not have known about in his time. Hence, in my work defending the argument, Lewis provides the basic idea and the starting point, but I have to develop the argument to make it responsive to current philosophical developments.
Some critical readers of Lewis’s apologetics focus on certain sharply-worded passages which seem to make Christian apologetics look easy, indeed easier than it really is. Yet an acquaintance with Lewis’s overall work leaves us firmly convinced that his convictions were reached at the end of a long, hard process. That process seems indeed to have been a process of long philosophical reflection. While philosophers such as myself have concentrated on bringing Lewis’s arguments into play in contemporary philosophy, Adam Barkman has taken a different path, and that path primarily involves tracing out Lewis’s philosophical journey, and trying to understand the philosophical positions he takes through the lens of that journey.
The first step in that process is to replace a narrowly professional conception of philosophy with the idea of philosophy as a way of life. It is this concept of philosophy that Plato would have understood, as opposed to the idea that a philosopher is someone who has a job with a philosophy department and delivers papers to APA meetings on a regular basis.
Barkman’s second step is to trace out Lewis’s philosophical journey leading up to his conversion to Christianity, a conversion he frequently described as an almost purely philosophical conversion. We now have access to a comprehensive set of Lewis letters, and other biographical material that Lewis scholars of previous generations could only dream about, and Barkman makes good use of them to reconstruct this story. Barkman claims that Lewis’s own account of his conversion story in Surprised by Joy actually downplays the philosophical content of his conversion for the sake of his audience. (I should note that, in spite of this, you can see Lewis’s philosophical wheels turning even in that book. For example, in Lewis’s account of his rejection of what he there calls Realism we see the biographical basis of his Argument from Reason). The starting point for Barkman’s study is from an account of Lewis’s own development found in his preface to Pilgrim’s Regress, he offers an account of the philosophical content of the stages of his conversion:
'On the intellectual side my own progress had been from 'popular realism' to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity.1
However, Barkman finds this summary somewhat incomplete. “Popular realism” has to be identified as a metaphysical materialism. Barkman also identifies a “metaphysical dualist” phase in 1918 which is left out of this account. Third, a distinction has to be drawn between Lucretian materialism and Stoical materialism. When Lewis became an idealist, he oscillated between subjective idealism and absolute idealism, identifying only absolute idealism with pantheism. In fact, he thinks there were seven stages on Lewis’s way: Lucretian Materialism, Pseudo-Manichean Dualism, Stoical Materialism, Subjective Idealism, Absolute Idealism, Theism, and Neoplatonic Christianity.
At this point it pays to pause and consider how different the philosophical climate is today than it was in this time. Many debates in philosophy or religion are conducted between people who accept some version of materialism and those who accept some kind of theism, and idealisms of whatever sort are not currently on the map. When Lewis rejected materialism, he became, not a theist, but an idealist, and then after that found reasons for becoming a theist.
Once the template of these various positions is laid out, he proceeds to use them to trace Lewis’s development as it concerns various ideas, such as heavenly desire, myth, culture, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. The insights he provides from a chronological perspective are worthwhile certainly. Sometimes, he defends Lewis’s central claims, such as when he defends the argument from desire. And sometimes, he is critical, as when he discusses the so-called “trilemma” argument, where he takes the view that the argument is at best very incomplete, since it merely assumes that Jesus made claims to his own divinity.
The book is long, (611 pages) and it takes work to get something out of it. But it will reward those who study it carefully.
1 C. S. Lewis, the preface to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, in C. S. Lewis: Selected Books (Short Edition) (1933 reprint; London, Harper Collins, 2002), 5.
Some of Lewis’s critics would attribute this to the fact that while Lewis was capable of powerful rhetoric, the philosophical thinking underlying his writings is shallow, superficial, and prone to fallacy. Such is the verdict of John Beversluis’s C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Now, Beversluis apparently considers the Christian theism that Lewis defends to be in error. But other philosophers who indeed embrace Lewis’s overall philosophical perspective often find him difficult to bring into contemporary philosophical debate. This is partly because Lewis’s writings are not typically written for an audience of philosophers, and also because philosophical style and terminology is subject to change. A professional philosophical culture has developed in the Anglo-American world that was not present when Lewis was getting his philosophical training, and Lewis didn’t consider it has calling to address that culture. This makes Lewis something of a misfit from the point of view of present-day philosophy. He is, I believe, closer to what we today would call analytic philosophy than he is to Continental philosophy, and yet his work doesn’t fit the framework of contemporary analytic philosophy either.
People who want to make use of Lewis’s work in the context of contemporary philosophy have to do a certain amount of translating. Lewis’s argument from reason, for example, today meets with objections based on cognitive science, or supervenience theory, or functionalism, or eliminativism, all concepts that Lewis would not have known about in his time. Hence, in my work defending the argument, Lewis provides the basic idea and the starting point, but I have to develop the argument to make it responsive to current philosophical developments.
Some critical readers of Lewis’s apologetics focus on certain sharply-worded passages which seem to make Christian apologetics look easy, indeed easier than it really is. Yet an acquaintance with Lewis’s overall work leaves us firmly convinced that his convictions were reached at the end of a long, hard process. That process seems indeed to have been a process of long philosophical reflection. While philosophers such as myself have concentrated on bringing Lewis’s arguments into play in contemporary philosophy, Adam Barkman has taken a different path, and that path primarily involves tracing out Lewis’s philosophical journey, and trying to understand the philosophical positions he takes through the lens of that journey.
The first step in that process is to replace a narrowly professional conception of philosophy with the idea of philosophy as a way of life. It is this concept of philosophy that Plato would have understood, as opposed to the idea that a philosopher is someone who has a job with a philosophy department and delivers papers to APA meetings on a regular basis.
Barkman’s second step is to trace out Lewis’s philosophical journey leading up to his conversion to Christianity, a conversion he frequently described as an almost purely philosophical conversion. We now have access to a comprehensive set of Lewis letters, and other biographical material that Lewis scholars of previous generations could only dream about, and Barkman makes good use of them to reconstruct this story. Barkman claims that Lewis’s own account of his conversion story in Surprised by Joy actually downplays the philosophical content of his conversion for the sake of his audience. (I should note that, in spite of this, you can see Lewis’s philosophical wheels turning even in that book. For example, in Lewis’s account of his rejection of what he there calls Realism we see the biographical basis of his Argument from Reason). The starting point for Barkman’s study is from an account of Lewis’s own development found in his preface to Pilgrim’s Regress, he offers an account of the philosophical content of the stages of his conversion:
'On the intellectual side my own progress had been from 'popular realism' to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity.1
However, Barkman finds this summary somewhat incomplete. “Popular realism” has to be identified as a metaphysical materialism. Barkman also identifies a “metaphysical dualist” phase in 1918 which is left out of this account. Third, a distinction has to be drawn between Lucretian materialism and Stoical materialism. When Lewis became an idealist, he oscillated between subjective idealism and absolute idealism, identifying only absolute idealism with pantheism. In fact, he thinks there were seven stages on Lewis’s way: Lucretian Materialism, Pseudo-Manichean Dualism, Stoical Materialism, Subjective Idealism, Absolute Idealism, Theism, and Neoplatonic Christianity.
At this point it pays to pause and consider how different the philosophical climate is today than it was in this time. Many debates in philosophy or religion are conducted between people who accept some version of materialism and those who accept some kind of theism, and idealisms of whatever sort are not currently on the map. When Lewis rejected materialism, he became, not a theist, but an idealist, and then after that found reasons for becoming a theist.
Once the template of these various positions is laid out, he proceeds to use them to trace Lewis’s development as it concerns various ideas, such as heavenly desire, myth, culture, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. The insights he provides from a chronological perspective are worthwhile certainly. Sometimes, he defends Lewis’s central claims, such as when he defends the argument from desire. And sometimes, he is critical, as when he discusses the so-called “trilemma” argument, where he takes the view that the argument is at best very incomplete, since it merely assumes that Jesus made claims to his own divinity.
The book is long, (611 pages) and it takes work to get something out of it. But it will reward those who study it carefully.
1 C. S. Lewis, the preface to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, in C. S. Lewis: Selected Books (Short Edition) (1933 reprint; London, Harper Collins, 2002), 5.
Friday, August 15, 2014
Thick and Clear Religions
A redated post.
From C. S. Lewis's essay "Christian Apologetics, " found in God in the Dock.
“I have sometimes told my audience that the only two things really worth considering are Christianity and Hinduism. (Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies, Buddhism only the greatest of the Hindu heresies. Real Paganism is dead. All that was best in Judaism and Platonism survives in Christianity.) There isn’t really, for an adult mind, this infinite variety of religions to consider. We may [reverently] divide religions, as we do soups, into ‘thick’ and ‘clear’. By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfil this condition are Hinduism and Christianity. But Hinduism fulfils it imperfectly. The Clear religion of the Brahmin hermit in the jungle and the Thick religion of the neighbouring temple go on side by side. The Brahmin hermit doesn’t bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshipper in the temple about the hermit’s metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be Clear: I have to be Thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.”
From C. S. Lewis's essay "Christian Apologetics, " found in God in the Dock.
“I have sometimes told my audience that the only two things really worth considering are Christianity and Hinduism. (Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies, Buddhism only the greatest of the Hindu heresies. Real Paganism is dead. All that was best in Judaism and Platonism survives in Christianity.) There isn’t really, for an adult mind, this infinite variety of religions to consider. We may [reverently] divide religions, as we do soups, into ‘thick’ and ‘clear’. By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfil this condition are Hinduism and Christianity. But Hinduism fulfils it imperfectly. The Clear religion of the Brahmin hermit in the jungle and the Thick religion of the neighbouring temple go on side by side. The Brahmin hermit doesn’t bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshipper in the temple about the hermit’s metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be Clear: I have to be Thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.”
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
C. S. Lewis rejects idealism
A tutor must make things clear. Now the Absolute cannot be made clear. Do you mean Nobody-knows-what, or do you mean a superhuman mind and therefore (we may as well admit) a Person? After all, did Hegel and Bradley and all the rest of them ever do more than add mystifications to the simple, workable, theistic idealism of Berkeley? I thought not. And didn't Berkeley's "God" do all the same work as the Absolute, with the added advantage that we had at least some notion of what we meant by Him? I thought He did. So I was driven back into something like Berkeleyanism; but Berkeleyanism with a few top dressings of my own. I distinguished this philosophical "God" very sharply (or so I said) from "the God of popular religion." There was, I explained, no possibility of being in a personal relation with Him. For I thought He projected us as a dramatist projects his characters, and I could no more "meet" Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare. I didn't call Him "God" either; I called Him "Spirit." One fights for one's remaining comforts.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
A redated April Fool's Day meditation
April Fool's day is today, but what I have to say is not specific to that day. On AFD, people try to show up the gullibility of their fellows by trying to get them to believe things that aren't true. I think, though, that in many ways Christians have failed to value the virtue of wisdom, and the result has been a kind of gullibility that makes us look as if the charges of credulity that are leveled by unbelievers at believers have some merit to them.
Consider the following passage from C. S. Lewis, where he talks about the virtue of prudence:
He wants a child’s heart but a grown-up’s head. . . . The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. . . . It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a second-rate brain. He has room for people with little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. . . . God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. (Mere Christianity pp. 77-78).
In an essay I will be publishing in the upcoming volume on philosophy and the Chronicles of Narnia, I add:
Like many passages in Lewis, this one has tremendous contemporary relevance. Many people in the Christian community (and outside of it) have been slack in their intellectual responsibilities, and the results have been disastrous. The mass suicides in Guyana and the suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California are grim reminders of what happens when religious people give up on thinking critically and simply follow what a leader says. Or to take less dramatic examples, but ones closer to home, think about how millions of Christians get caught up in spiritual fads like the recent “prayer of Jabez” phenomenon or the sensational eschatology of the Left Behind series. How many people have given money they can hardly afford to television evangelists, only to find out that the money went for air-conditioned dog houses and visits to sleazy motel rooms? The Christian community suffers greatly whenever it is intellectually lazy and careless.
But are matters of faith and exception to the policy of prudence? Should we be prudent in the rest of our lives and exercise faith (believe without regard to evidence) in matters of religion? Lewis's answer is emphatically no.
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in...Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. . . . That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.
Hence Faith and Prudence are not polar opposites, but are rather two sides of the same coin. The job of Christian apologetics, in my view, is to show that the life of prudence and the life of faith are in harmony with one another, in short to show that Christianity is rational. Much of the world thinks it is not rational, and a lot of things Christians say and do supports them in this, making the task of Christian apologetics more difficult than it would otherwise be.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Sunday, December 8, 2013
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