A Good Dose of C. S. Lewis for What Ails Us

From: L.M. Enterprises
To: David's Outcasts
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2000 8:09 AM
Subject: [888] A Good Dose for What Ails Us

A Good Dose for What Ails Us
by
Lynn Ridenhour

Sometimes we need a good dose for what ails us. I'm talking……C.S. Lewis. He's my man. Conservatives claim him; Liberals respect him; Protestants brag on him, and Catholics adore him. Even Mormons quote him. Lewis is Everyman's man.

What do I mean, we need a good dose of Lewis?

I noticed, here lately on David's Outcasts, we've taken a hearty plunge into the numinous [supernatural, sacred, magical, spiritual, mysterious]. And no one is more at home swimming with the numinous than Lewis. How's this for starters, a quote from Perelandra:

"Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial - was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall."

There we have it -- Lewis on Truth, Myth, and Fact.

Sure seems like subjects to me that we've been circling like Indians here lately on D.O. And JJ's Keys.

Let's explore briefly the three subjects from inside Lewis' wardrobe (if you get my drift) and see if we can't put our transcendental fingers on some spiritual gems for us all.

And I tread softly on these terrestrial eggs, for I'm fully aware of the difficult subject before us. Exploring truth, fact & myth never is easy. So……I think it's best to simply let Lewis speak for himself. In my humble opinion, he nails our topic in his classic essay "Myth Became Fact:" Hear him out.

"Human intellect," says Lewis, "is incurable abstract...Yet the only realities we experience are concrete--this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality. When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma - either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste -or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, living, hating, we do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. You cannot *study* Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, not analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things? 'If only my toothache would stop, I could write another chapter about Pain.' But once it stops, what do I know about pain? "Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. At his moment, for example, I am trying to understand something very abstract indeed - the fading, vanishing of tasted reality as we try to grasp it with the discursive reason. Probably I have made heavy weather of it. But if I remind you, instead, of Orpheus and Eurydice, how he was suffered to lead her by the hand but, when he turned round to look at her, she disappeared, what was merely a principle becomes imaginable. You may reply that you never till this moment attached that 'meaning' to that myth. Of course not. You are not looking for an abstract 'meaning' at all. If that was what you were doing the myth would be for you not true myth but a mere allegory. You were not knowing, but tasting; but what your tasting turns out to be a universal principle. The moment we *state* this principle, we are admittedly back in the world of abstraction. It is only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience the principle concretely. "When we translate we get abstraction - or rather, dozens of abstractions. What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always *about* something, but reality is that *about which* truth is), and , therefore, every myth become the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis ('In this valley of separation'). Or, if you prefer, myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular." (God in the Dock : Essays on Theology and Ethics -- C. S. Lewis, Walter Hooper (Editor); Paperback.)

Need we say more. As I said, Lewis nails it.

"……The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think……."

Reminds me of the jostling back and forth between David's Outcasts & JJ's Keys list here lately. Setting aside our presupposition (whether or not JJ is "of God"), both parties me thinks are attempting to articulate the inarticulate. And that's a bear.

Which brings us back to my thesis statement -- sometimes we need a good dose of what ails us. I think both camps could use a good dose of Lewis at the moment. Again, hear Lewis……

"What had been holding me back [from a conversion to Christianity] has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine *meant*: you can't believe a thing while you are ignorant *what* the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense has the life and death of Christ 'saved' or 'opened salvation to' the world..."Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me ... was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn't mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could not say in cold prose "what it meant". Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that *it really happened*: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the other are men's myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call "real things". Therefore, it is *true*, not in the sense of being a description of God (that no finite mind would take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to appear to our faculties. The "doctrines" we get *out of* the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our *concepts* and *ideas* of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection." (God in the Dock)

I think we'll leave it at that:

"...The 'doctrines' we get 'out of' the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our 'concepts' and 'ideas' of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection."

Yep, Lewis is my man.

From: L.M. Enterprises

To: David's Outcasts

Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2000 12:46 PM

Subject: [888] More on What Ails Us

More on What Ails Us
by
Lynn Ridenhour

Here's a bit more on what ails us. More on C.S. Lewis. Let's stay with our themes -- myth, truth, & fact.

Lewis assumes that myth, through the imagination, supplies meaning, and some day myth and fact will become indistinguishable. However, because of the Fall, man can not currently comprehend all of life as flowing from the "mountain" of all "facthood," and, therefore, we struggle with meaning. Thus, the existence of "philosophy" is needed by creatures whose deepest truths are not experienced concretely.

According to Lewis, when God removes the curse, all thought will consist of particulars. Life will be so rich that there will be no room for the general or hypothetical. We will need no ontological compartments such as -- nature & supernature, the spiritual & the physical. Lewis believes that once the distinction between myth, truth, and fact is smashed, we will no longer talk "about" God; we will "feed" on Him. (What holy fun!)

Lewis takes up this very theme in his marvelous essay "Meditation in a Tool Shed" and weaves the theme in front of us--much like a master craftsman weaves his craft:

"I was standing today," says Lewis, "in the dark tool shed. The light was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dusts floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

"Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly, the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no tool shed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

"But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes casual chat with her is more precious that all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. He is, as they say, "in love". Now comes a scientist and describes this young man's experience from the
outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man's genes and a recognized biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking *along* the sexual impulse and looking *at* it.

"When you have got into the habit of making this distinction you will find examples of it all day long. The mathematician sits thinking, and to him it seems that he is contemplating timeless and spaceless truths about quantity. But the cerebral physiologist, if he could look inside the mathematicians head, would find nothing timeless and spaceless there - only tiny movements of grey matter. The savage dances in ecstasy at midnight before Nyonga and feels with every muscle that his dance is helping to bring the new green crops and the spring rain and the babies. The anthropologist, observing that savage, records that he is performing a fertility ritual of the type so-and-so. The girl cries over her broken doll and feels that she has lost a real friend; the psychologist says that her nascent maternal instinct has been temporarily lavished on a bit of shaped and coloured wax.

"As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction, it raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the 'true' or 'valid' experience? Which tells you most about the thing? "The people who look *at* things have had it all their own way; the people who look *along* things have simply been brow-beaten. It has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow refutes or 'debunks' the account given from inside. 'All these moral ideals which look so transcendental and beautiful from inside', says the wiseacre, 'are really only a mass of biological instincts and inherited taboos.' And no one plays the game the other way round by replying, 'If you will only step inside, the things that look to you like instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real and transcendental nature.' "That, in fact, is the whole basis of the specifically 'modern' type of thought. And is it not, you will ask, a very sensible basis? For, after all, we are often deceived by things from the inside. For example, the girl who looks so wonderful while we're in love, may really be a very plain, stupid, and disagreeable person. The savage's dance to Nyonga does not really cause the crops to grow. Having been so often deceived by looking along, are we not well advised to trust only to looking at? -- in fact to discount all these inside experiences?

"Well, no. There are two fatal objections to discounting them *all*. And the first is this. You discount them in order to think more accurately. But you can't think at all - if you have nothing to think about. A physiologist, for example, can study pain and find out that it 'is' (whatever *is* means) such and such neural events. But the word *pain* would have no meaning for him unless he had 'been inside' by actually suffering. If he never looked *along* pain he simply wouldn't know what he was looking *at*. The very subject for his inquiries from outside exists for him only because he has, at least once, been inside.

"This case is not likely to occur, because every man has felt pain. But it is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving explanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, without having been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simply playing with counters. You go explaining what a thing is without knowing what it is..."We must ... deny from the very outset the idea that looking *at* is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking *along.* One must look both *along* and *at* everything." To look *at* something and *along* it are both true, but in particular cases, one may be more true than the other. One truth may be full of meaning while the other is not."

No question about it--the above is Lewisonian par excellence.

"……We must deny from the very outset the idea that looking "at" is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking "along"……"

Again, back to our thesis--if the Fall produced a distinction between truth, myth, and fact, question: what will be our experience when God removes this curse?

Lewis shares his answer in "Myth Became Fact" and believes Christianity supplies a partial reconciliation:

"Now as myth transcends thought," says Lewis, "Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, *without ceasing to be myth*, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It *happens* -- at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) *under Pontius Pilate*. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle."

I'll say it again -- Lewis is my man. He makes holiness fun.