C. S. Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church. C. S. Lewis
‘Who is authoritative?’ One of the things my reason tells me is that I ought to check the results of my own thinking by the opinions of the wise. I go to authority because reason sends me to it–just as Mr Carritt, after adding up a column of figures, might ask a friend, known to be a good calculator, to check it for him, and might distrust his own result if his friend got a different one.
I said that culture was a storehouse of the best sub-Christian values, not the best sub-Christian virtues. I meant by this that culture recorded man’s striving for those ends which, though not the true end of man (the fruition of God), have nevertheless some degree of similarity to it, and are not so grossly inadequate to the nature of man as, say, physical pleasure, or money. This similarity, of course, while making it less evil to rest in them, makes the danger of resting in them greater and more subtle.
The salvation of souls in a means to the glorifying of God because only saved souls can duly glorify Him. The thing to which, on my view, culture must be subordinated, is not (though it includes) moral virtue, but the conscious direction of all will and desire to a transcendental Person in whom I believe all values to reside, and the reference to Him in every thought and act. Since that Person ‘loves righteousness’ this total surrender to Him involves Mr Carritt’s ‘conscientiousness’. It would therefore be impossible to ‘glorify God by doing what we thought wrong’. Doing what we think right, on the other hand, is not the same as glorifying God. I fully agree with Mr Carritt that a priori we might expect the production of whatever is ‘good’ to be one of our duties. If God had never spoken to man, we should be justified in basing the conduct of life wholly on such a priori grounds. Those who think God has spoken will naturally listen to what He has to say about the where, how, to what extent, and in what spirit any ‘good’ is to be pursued. This does not mean that our own ‘conscience’ is simply negated. On the contrary, just as reason sends me to authority, so conscience sends me to obedience: for one of the things my conscience tells me is that if there exists an absolutely wise and good Person (Aristotle’s
I mentioned Hooker, not because he simply denied that Scripture contains all things necessary, but because he advanced a proof that it cannot–which proof, I supposed, most readers of Theology would remember. ‘Text-hunting’ is, of course, ‘Puritanical’, but also scholastic, patristic, apostolic, and Dominical. To that kind of charge I venture, presuming on an indulgence which Mr Carritt has extended to me for nearly twenty years, to reply with homely saws: as that an old trout can’t be caught by tickling, and they know a trick worth two of that where I come from. Puritan, quotha!
Yours faithfully, C.S. Lewis
III
Peace Proposals for Brother Every and Mr Bethell
I believe there is little real disagreement between my critics (Brother Every and Mr Bethell) and myself. Mr Carritt, who does not accept the Christian premises, must here be left out of account, though with all the respect and affection I feel for my old tutor and friend.
The conclusion I reached in Theology, March 1940, was that culture, though not in itself meritorious, was innocent and pleasant, might be a vocation for some, was helpful in bringing certain souls to Christ, and could be pursued to the glory of God. I do not see that Brother Every and Mr Bethell really want me to go beyond this position.
The argument of Mr Bethell’s paper in Theology, July 1939 (excluding its historical section, which does not here concern us), was that the deepest, and often unconscious, beliefs of a writer were implicit in his work, even in what might seem the minor details of its style, and that, unless we were Croceans, such beliefs must be taken into account in estimating the value of that work. In Theology, May 1940, Mr Bethell reaffirmed this doctrine, with the addition that the latent beliefs in much modern fiction were naturalistic, and that we needed trained critics to put Christian readers on their guard against this pervasive influence.
Brother Every, in Theology, September 1940, maintained that our tastes are symptomatic of our real standards of value, which may differ from our professed standards; and that we needed trained critics to show us the real latent standards in literature–in fact ‘to teach us how to read’.
I cannot see that my own doctrine and those of my critics come into direct contradiction at any point. My fear was lest excellence in reading and writing were being elevated into a spiritual value, into something meritorious per se; just as other things excellent and wholesome in themselves, like conjugal love (in the sense of eros) or physical cleanliness, have at some times and in some circles been confused with virtue itself or esteemed necessary parts of it. But it now appears that my critics never intended to make any such claim. Bad Taste for them is not itself spiritual evil but the symptom which betrays, or the ‘carrier’ which circulates, spiritual evil. And the spiritual evil thus betrayed or carried turns out not to be any specifically cultural or literary kind of evil, but false beliefs or standards–that is, intellectual error or moral baseness; and as I never intended to deny that error and baseness were evils nor that literature could imply and carry them, I think that all three of us may shake hands and say we are agreed. I do not mean to suggest that my critics have merely restated a platitude which neither I nor anyone else ever disputed. The value of their contribution lies in their insistence that the real beliefs may differ from the professed and may lurk in the turn of a phrase or the choice of an epithet; with the result that many preferences which seem to the ignorant to be simply ‘matters of taste’ are visible to the trained critic as choices between good and evil, or truth and error. And I fully admit that this important point had been neglected in my essay of March 1940. Now that it has been made, I heartily accept it. I think this is agreement.
But to test the depth of agreement I would like my critics to consider the following positions. By agreement I mean only agreement in our doctrines. Differences of temper and emphasis between Christian critics are inevitable and probably desirable.
1. Is it the function of the ‘trained critic’ to discover the latent beliefs and standards in a book, or to pass judgement on them when discovered, or both? I think Brother Every confines the critic’s function to discovery. About Mr Bethell I am not so sure. When he says (Theology, May 1940, p. 360) that we need a minority of trained critics to ‘lay bare the false values of contemporary culture’ this might mean two things: (a) ‘To expose the falsity of the values of contemporary culture’; (b) ‘To reveal what the values of contemporary culture actually are–and, by the way, I personally think those values false.’ It is necessary to clear this up before we know what is meant by a ‘trained critic’. Trained in what? A man who has had a literary training may be an expert in disengaging the beliefs and values latent in literature; but the judgement on those beliefs and values (that is, the judgement on all possible human thoughts and moralities) belongs either to a quite different set of experts (theologians, philosophers, casuists, scientists) or else not to experts at all but to the unspe-cialised ‘good and wise man’, the
