Tactical Faith
Equipping Christians in Alabama
Have you ever wondered if C.S. Lewis took his faith seriously? Well, he did. This might come as a surprise to very few, but if you have wondered just how much C.S. Lewis prayed, then you should hear out this podcast.
Matthew Burford interviews one of his professors, Dr. Lyle Dorsett. In this podcast Dr. Dorsett talks about C.S. Lewis’s letters, books, and dogs. All relevant to our faith. Dogs especially.
The Oxford Inklings, including their most famous members, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, are highly regarded as one of the most prolific and impactful collaborative intellectual groups in the 20th century, and there has arguably been no group like them since. At least in the Western world. Given this status, and considering the sheer quantity and cross-genre works they produced over their careers, it is always fascinating to run a thought experiment on who would be a likely candidate to be invited for their Tuesday meals at the Eagle and Child, and what would the talk turn to? The most likely intellectual in the Western world who would be invited, in my opinion, would be Dr. Jordan Peterson. It wouldn’t be because of his fame (that may indeed be a bit of a disqualifier for the group), but because his message to a lost and lonely society contains many similarities, and many differences, to what the Inklings were telling the same society over half a century ago. Dr. Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, came to fame (or infamy for some) in the autumn of 2016 from being ushered onto the public stage from his stance on Canada’s Bill C-16, regarding the use of personal pronouns for transgendered persons. Then, in 2018, his book 12 Rules for Life was published1, and it was followed by a slew of television interviews that subsequently went viral.2 He, unlike many in academia, bemoans the devaluing of myth and the human longing for transcendence. Modernity seeks to pull story into the subjective sphere and laughs at any notion that any significance or meaning transcends any one individual.
Peterson contends that we see the human imagination not opposed to reason, but stands alongside it as a legitimate organ of knowledge about ourselves and our world.
Imagination is the mental faculty of meaning-making3 (or meaning-realizing), and is a pre-rational commitment of the affections towards a particular narrative vision of the good. Myth is the imagination embodied, or as Alister McGrath says, it is “a story that invokes awe, enchantment, and inspiration,…an imaginative expression of the deepest meanings of life – meanings that prove totally elusive in the face of any attempt to express them conceptually or abstractly.”4 It is via the imagination where we get our framework for meaning, and from which we derive the hierarchy of goods that shape our understanding of who we are and what we ought to do. To be “pre-rational” is not to be “irrational” or “non-rational.” The Inklings broadly stood within the Augustinian anthropology which holds that we are primarily lovers, not thinkers. Descartes was grievously mistaken. And it is our affections, or our loves, that shape and form our imaginations on a subterranean level beneath our reason. The deepest truths are conveyed not by propositions, but by a story.
The recent phenomenon of Jordan Peterson is telling evidence that the pull of the imagination, while latent here in late modernity, is still potent. It is obvious that something he is saying is speaking into a vacuum. What is it?
Weary of the “glib and shallow rationalism”5 as the young C.S. Lewis reflects, and still haunted by the transcendent longings6 that spontaneously pull back the “veil of familiarity” that permeates our secular age, many in the modern West have become enraptured with the compelling yet controversial vision contained in Dr. Peterson’s books and lectures7. What is this vision? Simply put, it is meaning. Peterson seeks to ennoble men and woman to contend with the Chaos that is everything unknown to us, and that the myths, stories, and archetypes of our ancestors provide profound insights into how we are to do this.8 His writings attempt to combine reason (evolutionary theory, neuroscience of emotion, and psychology) with imagination. And it his respect for the imagination together with the reason he values that has made his ideas magnetic to so many. In respecting the imagination, Peterson agrees with much of what the Inklings had to say about myth and “faerie-stories,” which is that they convey deep truths beyond the narrow boundaries of rationalism and that inserting ourselves within “the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.”9
In his seminal work: Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Peterson lays out his theory of reality. He states that
The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, or as a place of things. The former manner of interpretation – more primordial, and less clearly understood – finds its expression in the arts or humanities, in ritual, drama, literature and mythology. The world as a forum for action is a place of value, a place where all things have meaning. This meaning, which is shaped as a consequence of social interaction, is implication for action…No complete world-picture can be generated without use of both modes of construal.10
From this statement throughout much of the first section of the book, Peterson’s language is spookily similar to Lewis’s lecture as published in The Discarded Image. Peterson argues that since the Enlightenment, we have sought to force the world as a “forum for action” entirely within the subjective realm and placing science, or how we know the “forum of things” as the supreme epistemology. Yet, we still unwittingly act on both stages, as it is inherent to who we are as human beings. He goes on to say that “everything is something, and means something – and the distinction between essence and significance is not necessarily drawn [in the mind of medieval man]…The automatic attribute of meaning to things…is characteristic of narrative, of myth, not of scientific thought…We are not yet ‘objective’ even in our most clear-headed moments (and thank God for that).”11 Once again, with very clear yet unreferenced echoes of The Discarded Image, Peterson says, “the ‘natural,’ pre-experimental, or mythical mind is in fact primarily concerned with meaning…and not with objective nature.” He laments that
We have lost the mythic universe of the pre-experimental mind, or have at least ceased to further its development. That loss has left our increased technological power ever more dangerously at the mercy of our still unconscious systems of valuation. Prior to the time of Descartes, Bacon, and Newton, man lived in an animated, spiritual world, saturated with meaning, imbued with moral purpose. The nature of this purpose was revealed in the stories people told each other – stories about the structure of the cosmos and the place of man. But now we think empirically (at least we think we think empirically), and the spirits that once inhabited the universe have vanished.12
So far, so good, and it is clear that Peterson understands what is missing from the modern mind, and can articulate it well. But here is where the problem begins to present itself. For Peterson, the human imagination, while not subjective, is still nonetheless merely a product of accumulated human behavior over hundreds of centuries of adapting to the “Chaos” of the unknown. This adaptive behavior is emulated, imitated, retold, acted, and codified as myth. So, in one sense it is a true story about human beings and how we relate to and experience the world (the cosmos). However, it still does not rise above biology. It is merely an epiphenomenal, emergent truth. And it is entirely contingent. While clearly articulating that he does not think the stories accumulated in the “collective unconscious” are true in the historical sense (including the accounts of Creation and The Fall in Genesis 1-3 and the Flood in Genesis 6), he believes them to be true as signposts of meaning and significance.
Here is the convergence: Myth enables us to see more clearly the things we most knowingly long for, restoring “the rich significance” of an existence shrouded by shadows of ourselves. Reason locates truths nested in the mythos within space and time. “Myth became Fact,” “The Word became Flesh, and dwelt among us.”13 This is theology at its most raw, and imagination at its purest. To read these words makes one want “to embrace its object completely, to take it in at a single glance, and see in it something harmonious, symmetrical, and self-explanatory…it also loves to lose itself in a labyrinth, to surrender to the inextricable.”14 We see, through Divine revelation, that Love and Reason are intermingled, and that Love which grounds all of Reality is the shoot of Jesse.15
Against this discovery of absolute Reality grounded in Love, imagination and myth that fail to grasp the fundamental Reality that is Love fall prey to becoming the myths of the “dark gods.” To elaborate, Lewis writes that moderns:
Love nature in so far as, for them, shall calls to ‘the dark gods in the blood;’ not although, but because sex and hunger and sheer power there operate without pity or shame…Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, somber desolation are flung at you. Make you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, ‘Look. Listen. Attend.’…We must get our theology or philosophy elsewhere.16
Theologically interpreted, this means that the myths grounded merely in a “Romans 1” realm of reasoning, or what is theologically called “general revelation,” comes close to but ultimately falls short of mythical ideals. Now, our storytelling ancestors (both in blood and spirit) have reasoned from the order and beauty of the cosmos to hand us down myths and imaginative symbols that parallel the true Myth in significant ways, and are a far off gleam of the Gospel in the real world. 17 The story is frequently told of how Tolkien showed this to Lewis that late night on Addison’s Walk which played a critical role in Lewis’s conversion to Christ. Again, though, without the Incarnational aspect of the True Myth, or at least the hopeful expectation “through a glass darkly” of this event, myth falls short. Tolkien affirms that this is “the magic of Faerie,” which among its operations “are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another (as will be seen) to hold communion with other living things.”18 Lewis echoes this sentiment when he says that, “we do not want to merely see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have people air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves…”19
This leads us to the fatal flaw in Peterson’s faerie-story, his mythos: The gaping absence of the Incarnational eucatastrophe. The nature of the myth propounded by Peterson, whatever else it may be, is not romantic. Critical to good myth, or proper faerie-story, says Tolkien, is this:
The ‘consolation’ of fairy-stories has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending…The eucatastrophe tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function…It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as belief.20
His mythos, while not materialistic, is also not personal and lacks the consolation that all will be well in the end. Peterson writes that, “the constituent elements of the world as drama were Order and Chaos…meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way. And that’s much better than happiness.” 21 The “way forward,” or “way out,” according to Peterson, is not going to come from without in the form of a Person, from an unexpected Happy Ending. The tendency to be overcome by Chaos or lulled into complacency by Order is overcome or challenged only by the notion:
That people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons. We require rules, standards, values – alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown – and that’s also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path…the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine Being, and that the willingness to take on the responsibility is identical to the decision to live a meaningful life.22
C.S. Lewis does have respect for the prima facie nobility of myths akin to Peterson’s. The primordial hero and heroine struggling against all odds to lift herself upwards from the suboptimal world she finds herself in is indeed the basis for many Tragedies. Against the backdrop of infinite suffering, they fight, spread, and thrive on the way to becoming true Man who learns to master Nature. Eventually, in the far future, we find them becoming demigods approaching divinity. And, as Lewis points out, this myth hits its “final stroke of genius…the last scene recourses all. We have the Twilight of the Gods. All this time, silently, unceasingly, out of all reach of human power, Nature, the old enemy, has been steadily gnawing away. The sun will cool – all suns cool – the whole universe will run down…all ends in nothingness…It is the pattern of many Elizabethan tragedies.”23 Inserting Peterson’s Chaos and Order in the place of “Nature” in the previous quote, it is easy to see the resemblance. The best we can do, Peterson tells us, is to stand up straight with our shoulders back and push against the Chaos for as long as we can endure.
In Peterson’s myth, Chaos and Order, while not strictly material entities, are also not personal. There is no “thing” to commune with, to relate to. The desire for this communion pulses deeply, according to Tolkien, within the veins of true Faerie-Story. No, we are all alone. It is up to us to take up the mantle of the Hero archetype and reorder what we can until the cooling of the sun. In the end, the imaginative appeal falls short. Beauty perfected is Beauty Personified, and it is Beauty that we really long for. Yet, within the Christian tradition, we also recognize that the thought of a personal Divinity with whom we were made for also terrifies us. Absolute Beauty is safe, as are Order and Chaos, for there is certainly a certain beauty in the yin/yang interplay of the two. “It,” or “They” could never come here and make a nuisance in our own lives, and it really costs us nothing. What terrifies us is the notion of Personified Beauty is that it (He) demands, by the very nature of His Being, that we pull our gaze off of ourselves and look outwards. There is a cost to true self-forgetfulness. And yet, there is also freedom.
Peterson offers us no freedom, but only a brief consolation. His mythos, while important to our culture as it has reawakened in our atrophied imaginations the desire for seeking a home for our affections that pulsate beneath the thin rationalism of our age. The imaginative “end-state” for human beings is to conform to and commune with the Archetype of Creation, building and ordering as a bastion against the black entropy of Chaos. What his imagination is missing is not merely reason, but Reason. The Logos. The Eucatastrophe. What he is missing is not merely the Archetype of all Creation, but the Archetype of all Relation.
When telling readers why Dante did not allow Virgil into Paradise in his Divine Comedy, Dorothy Sayers says that “faith is imagination actualized by the will; what was lacking to Virgil’s faith was precisely the imagination.”24 If Dante rewrote his Divine Comedy using figures from our secular age, Jordan Peterson may indeed be our modern Virgil. Virtuous and imaginative, yet nonetheless barred from Paradise, the fount of Joy. And also like Virgil, his faith lacks imagination. An imagination not too big, but too small. Too small to contain the true Eucatastrophe, the Incarnation, that we all long to behold.
1 Karen Heller. “Jordan Peterson is On a Crusade to Toughen Up Young Men. It’s Landed Him in Our Cultural Divide.” The Washington Post, May 2, 2018. Accessed 4 November, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/jordan-peterson-is-on-a-crusade-to-toughen-up-young-men-its-landed-him-on-our-cultural-divide/2018/05/02/c5bafe48-31d6-11e8-94fa-32d48460b955_story.html
2Robert Barron, “The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon,” Word on Fire, February 27. 2018, https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/article/the-jordan-peterson-phenomenon/5717.
3 Tolkien defined one aspect of Imagination as “the mental power of image-making,” but I believe “meaning-making” wraps up a more robust definition.
4 McGrath, Alister E.The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Accessed October 29, 2020, 2013, ProQuest Ebook Central.
5 CS Lewis. Surprised By Joy (1984, repr. New York, NY: Inspirational Press, 2012), 97.
6 James K.A. Smith. How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm.B. Eerdman’s Publishing, 2014). 10
7 Karen Heller. “Jordan Peterson is On a Crusade to Toughen Up Young Men. It’s Landed Him in Our Cultural Divide.” The Washington Post, May 2, 2018. Accessed 4 November, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/jordan-peterson-is-on-a-crusade-to-toughen-up-young-men-its-landed-him-on-our-cultural-divide/2018/05/02/c5bafe48-31d6-11e8-94fa-32d48460b955_story.html
8 Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Toronto: CA, Random House Canada, 2018). xxiv.
9 CS Lewis. “On Stories”, in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947, repr. 1966 Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing),101.
10 Jordan B. Peterson. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 1.
11 Jordan B. Peterson. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 3.
12 Jordan B. Peterson. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 5.
13 John 1:14 (English Standard Version).
14 C.S. Lewis. “Is Theology Poetry?” in The Weight of Glory And Other Addresses (1949, repr. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1999), 119.
15 Is. 11:1 (English Standard Version).
16 C.S. Lewis. The Four Loves (1960, repr. 2012 New York, NY: Inspirational Press), 223.
17 McGrath, Alister E. The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central.
18 J.R.R. Tolkien. “On Fairy-Stories” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947, repr. 1966 Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing), 44.
19 C.S. Lewis. The Weight of Glory in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresess (1949, repr. 1980, New York, NY: Harpercollins Publishers), 42.
20 J.R.R. Tolkien. “On Fairy-Stories” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947, repr. 1966 Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing), 81.
21 Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Toronto, CA: Random House Canada, 2017), xxviii.
22 Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Toronto, CA: Random House Canada, 2017), xxxiv.
23 C.S. Lewis. “Is Theology Poetry?”in The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (1949, repr. 1999, New York, NY: HarperCollins), 124-125.
24 Dorothy Sayers. “On Telling You A Story” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947, repr. 1966 Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing), 33
Review
So far in this series of blogs, we’ve looked at the problem of faith and talked about how faith is used in contexts that are not necessarily religious, as well as discussing what science tells us about the world.
What is the problem with faith, according to most of its critics? It is that people claim that faith is a means of gaining knowledge of the world. But faith is (highly) suspect, because it arises from a set of values—that is, we might say that the person with faith is looking for something that they really wish to be true. Having such values colors what one sees, even to the point of the person seeing something that isn’t true. That is why “faith” has led to countless divisions and disagreements—from personal problems to religious wars. (Whether faith will, in fact, lead to such divisions is an important question. Perhaps, these divisive kinds of “faith” are not really faith at all?)
Of course, we’ve seen that science too is driven by values. It gets started by the value of world-control (again, note that this control is not necessarily bad, but most often very good), and is used by those who control parts the world for the sake of other values—from caring for the sick to eating lunch to killing someone.
That science can be used for good or for evil makes science appear somewhat neutral. But this neutrality is really just the universality of the human value of control: Everyone wants (some level of) control of their environment/world. But no one wants control alone. We always want control for some other reason, some other goal or value that we hold.
Thus, science is not “objective”—not in the sense of being valueless pursuit of knowledge—nor is the value that gives rise to science, the value of world-control, sufficient for a meaningful human life.
But we can say that science is “objective” insofar as we understand that term to mean “to perceive objects only in terms of how they are controlled and what control they exert (cause-effect).” In fact, we might define “object” as “that which is understood as merely something that is or can be controlled.” Science objectifies the world, and thus helps us to understand causation and control. That is the objectivity that science possesses—useful but limited.
The Head, the Chest, and the Stomach
Given that science is consistently presented as being opposed to faith, I want to look a little more at how science functions in human thinking and motivation. I want to do this by drawing from The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis.
Lewis begins this prescient work by critiquing the two authors of what he refers to as The Green Book. These two authors describe the situation of seeing a waterfall and how one would describe the waterfall as “sublime.” They claim that when you say that the waterfall is sublime you are really only describing something about your emotional state in response to the waterfall. Thus, “sublime” does not describe anything objective in the waterfall. The elements of the waterfall contain nothing that can be objectively determined to be sublime. It is merely a relatively quicker elevation drop in the flow of water to the sea.
Lewis critiques this view rather thoroughly in the book, showing some serious dangers that might come with such a view. He first sets out to describe the human person by referring to three parts: the head, the chest, and the stomach. The stomach refers to those desires that we might call instinctual—not necessarily just the body’s desires, but they are those that are connected with survival, reproduction, and so forth (including, of course, the desire to ascend to the top of hierarchies, since this is related to survival).
The head is the capacity for humans to reason: The head is a problem solver. The head has no particular desire, no goal, except that which is given from either the stomach or the chest. The head is merely concerned to figure out how to get from point A to point B—when point B has been given to it by either the stomach or the chest. For example, you might want to get from this side of a large lake to the other, and given that desire to get to the other side, your head would kick in to try to gauge the costs and benefits (given the values fed to it by the stomach and chest) of various routes, whether they are do-able or not, etc. Build a raft? Walk around? Grab a log and swim while holding the log? Perhaps the goal is to get from single to dating-that-person-over-there. Your head may kick in to give advice. (If you’re like I was when I was in high school, your head lacks the requisite knowledge to offer anything approaching useful.) You may also be in a place of ignorance about why things tend to fall to the ground, if unhindered (and heavier than air). You are at point A, a place of ignorance mixed with curiosity, and want to be at point B, a place of knowledge, or at least a recognition of the limits of knowledge.
The question is whether the head has any motivation at all. Lewis says no. I think it might have one motive: To obtain knowledge of the world as objects—specifically, as objects that can be controlled. What is the nature of a thing’s cause, effect, and what can I do to manipulate it? This might be the head’s only motive—a universal motive of humanity.[1] Of course, as I said in the previous blog on this topic, this motive to know-things-as-objects-that-can-be-controlled is not enough of a motive for any meaningful action, let alone a life. One must at least desire to eat and to rest.
Lewis also talks of the chest. He says the chest is drawn to things that the stomach does not desire and that the head is unable to see or analyze. The chest sees beauty, sublimity, glory and goodness. It is how we recognize love and honor, and are drawn by compassion and shame.
Of course, the authors of The Green Book argue that the claims of the chest that the sublime is out there, that “sublime” is a true description of the waterfall, are false or at least misleading. The head, in this case science, gives us the factual description of the waterfall. Sublimity or beauty, they say, are merely subjective emotional responses. That is, it is not that one is lying or deluded when one says that the waterfall is sublime, but one advertently uses the adjective to describe the object, when one should be using the adjective to describe one’s emotional state.
Now, the implications of this view are manifold. But let me mention two that are significant, and dangerous.
First, if such claims as to the value of things out there—such as beautiful, awesome, sublime, honorable, etc.—are merely references to our emotional states, then the chest can only be motivating us to have more experiences, rather than to great things. There really is no difference between having a “sublime” experience before a mountain and being, say, synthetically stimulated to feel such feelings. For the mountain is not sublime—you are merely describing your feelings.
I remember my daughter, then in first or second grade, coming to me and talking about having learned in school the difference between fact and opinion. Opinion, of course, included all value judgments, while fact included all…well, facts. So I asked her, “Is the claim ‘murder is wrong’ a fact or an opinion?”[2] She thought for a moment, because, being a value claim, it sure sounded like an opinion. But, after some hesitation, she said, “That is a fact.” My daughter in first (or second grade) was smarter than the (in)famous A.J. Ayer (at least in his Language, Truth, and Logic)!
What she said has tremendous implications, though: My daughter was declaring that the chest also points to realities about the world. And thus the attraction of the chest toward the great and beautiful is not merely a subjective desire for how we think things should be, but in fact a response to what is true and good. Indeed, it includes the claim (stated first in Genesis 1, echoed in Plato, but firmly rejected these days) that reality is in fact bound up with the good.[3]
But if The Green Book is to be believed, then my daughter is wrong, and what is good is unrelated to how things are.
The second bad implication that arises from the belief that value claims are merely descriptions of subjective emotions is that the head can only now be motivated by the stomach. It is emphatically not now free to pursue unadulterated truth, unhindered by silly and childish sentiments. No, the head always acts as a response to a motivator other than itself: either the chest or the stomach. And the stomach never stops motivating the head. The only question is whether you also have a functioning chest. Once the chest is emaciated away by rejecting such value claims as mere subjective emotion, then one is left with a head and only a stomach to motivate that head.
Do I need to make note of how we have become such “men without chests” as Lewis describes? People claim that their true, essential identities are tied to stomach-desires—primarily sexual desire. At the same time, ideas like honor, self-sacrifice, honesty, forgiveness, beauty—these are mocked as silly, exclusive, steeped in traditions that have done terrible things. A banana duct-taped to a wall sells for over $100,000. A man then eats it. Such is a mockery (and was likely intended to be so) of art. But what, we might say, is art but some sort of self-expression? That, indeed, is precisely what a chest-less person would say! Since the chest is only subjective emotion—the object itself has no value at all. And thus, too, I have emotions, spew them on a canvas of some sort, and it is art. That simple little claim in The Green Book announced this trajectory, and we are reaping the potassium-rich results.
The duct-taped banana is in fact a perfect picture: Without the chest to draw us toward real art, we are left with the useful as determined by the head (duct tape) and the stomach to motivate (the banana). The chest can see nothing of beauty or sublimity here. Only the head and the stomach see anything that they desire.
The authors of The Green Book were wrong. And that banana isn’t art. My daughter was right. The waterfall is in fact wondrous. Beauty does exist. We should pursue honor. In the next blog, we’ll bring these ideas to deal directly with faith and science. In the meantime, if you haven’t read The Abolition of Man, do it!
[1] It might be that this desire to control is, in fact, a motive of the stomach, or a motive that the stomach and chest share. I’m not interested in arguing one way or the other at this point.
[2] You astute thinkers out there might say, “Given that ‘murder’ is defined as ‘wrongful killing,’ it is analytically true that ‘murder is wrong.'” Yes, yes. But I was talking to a young child. I could have said, “Is killing innocent people wrong a fact or an opinion?” But that would have been needlessly confusing for her, I think.
[3] That reality is bound up with the good does not mean that “all things are good as they are.” It means something more like, “When things are all made good, they become what they truly are. And, therefore, to see things that are beautiful, sublime, etc., is to see glimpses of things as they are truly meant to be.” This is not as foreign an idea as you might think. We call people “inhuman” or “beasts” or “animals” when they act terrible toward others. And we use the word “humane” (from an earlier English form of “human”) to refer to acts that show kindness and compassion. That is, we think that a human is more truly a human when they exhibit certain virtues. That is, goodness is tied to what we really are. We speak the same way about a variety of other things. “Now, that’s a car!” means the same thing as “That is a very good car!” That is, to say that it is really what it is is another way to say that it is good. To be a good X simply means to truly be X.
