In his final book, The
Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis writes about the Mediaeval world
view: "All the apparent contradictions must be harmonised. A
Model must be built which will get everything in without a clash; and
it can do this only by becoming intricate, by mediating its unity
through a great, and finely ordered, multiplicity"(Lewis 1964,
11). This apparent rational suicide is tempered with the caveat that
this model, to those in the era, was just that—a model. Lewis makes
the comment that the Mediaeval person loved to codify, to build, to
systematize; thus, it seems logical that the Mediaevals understood
the poetic and sign-nature of their world-view, their image. Lewis'
friend, Owen Barfield, in his profound and seminal book, Saving
the Appearances, allows the modern reader an experience of this
tension between the acknowledgement of the mysterious real and the
use of a working image, or model; the one example that found a
place-holding in my mind was his description of angels painted in the
Mediaeval period as dressed in contemporary clothing, with wings as a
symbolic indication of their differences, as if, in our day, we
painted angels in prom dresses or business suits—well, how are we
to dress angels? They aren't even dressed as we understand
it; so, like the Hindu depictions of blue or many-armed gods, the
symbolism, or the poetic, fantastical signs of wings or many arms
were pointing to a higher reality, that of other or supernatural.
We moderns risk thinking these ancients 'primitive' or 'childish,' or
risk a hyper-focus on a gritty standard of scientific reality, or the
‘objective view from individual eye-holes’ that means we miss the
higher Object which the peoples before us seemed to know were beyond
our categories, our ability to portray them. Yet, at the same time,
for the Mediaevals as for ancient cultures, the effect of the poetic
in speech, drama, and the visual arts, was deeply powerful, even
magical (Knight 2010, 254). Furthermore, the Western (through Ancient
Greece and Rome) and Christian worlds—one thinks of St. Thomas
Aquinas and St. Augustine, particularly—understood also that human
rationality, the highest human faculty, was in a fundamental
relationship with the deeper imagination that “is a fusing,
transforming, transcendent faculty that is creative in its power of
changing and refining ideas and images” (Knight 2010, 254). These
civilizations lived in a more healthy tension between the sweeping
power of the poet and the inordinate faith in the individual,
rational mind.
In other words, I think both Lewis and
Barfield posit an essential humble acknowledgement from earlier
Western ages like the Mediaeval that our lenses, our imaginum
mundorum, are fogged and dusty, and that our languages—poetic,
visual, scientific, theological, philosophical—are, via human power
alone, too blunt and boulder-like to adequately describe the Truth as
God sees it, as God is, and that the Muse is needed to approach
Reality. The great Western thinkers knew this sublime and True sight
and conversation was given from the time, out of time, when "we
will see as we are seen, know as we are known, and not as through a
glass darkly." Lewis writes, “No Model is a catalogue of
ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious
attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each
succeeds in getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each
reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it
reflects the state of that age’s knowledge. Hardly any battery of
new facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an
attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such battery
could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical” (Lewis 1964, 222).
I also believe the major themes of The
Discarded Image and Saving the Appearances are
the same, if one looks not just at the work but at the rhetorical
situation in which both were written; this has great import to how we
understand our present darkness, and also it answers some personal
questions I have had for many years about Lewis' theology.
First,
the point I take from both writers: It is not an easy idea to write
about in an essay, and even in a book, could I do it justice? It
invites, no--requires--a strange variety of others at the table to
adequately account for the strange variety of dead-pool imaginum
mundorum we now live within: Joseph Pieper, Charles Peirce
and his theory of semiotics, the sociologists Jacques Ellul and
Charles Taylor, St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Romano Guardini,
Charles Darwin, Emmanual Kant, Hegel, John Paul II, St.
Augustine, etc.. But nevertheless, let me take a stab at it; perhaps
it is a small, humble start to a conversation.
It is the mark
of the primitive not to recognize one's imago mundi or
the Model one lives with, as image or model; in the early
primitive, the communal image was, simply, reality; later, in Greek
thought, attempts were made to discern between human imagination and
the Real, between images and Forms. It is also the mark of the
primitive not to recognize the inherent tension in us angel-beasts
between the ability to discern truth constituting our rational mind
(this is a manifestation of the unique, human Imago Dei) and
the fact that our finite, fallible, original-sin-clouded minds, the
rational and imaginative parts, cannot, alone, adequately explain or
encompass Reality or communicate its simultaneous whole-ness and
complex particulars. Of course, we can, though, use signs: lower,
poorer, alternately too-simplistic and too-complex signs pointing to,
as signs always do, Higher Objects. We can, in a sense, grope towards
the Whole, towards the Real, towards God; we can know and receive
hints of this Whole Real: Gerald Knight, in The Magical World of
the Inklings, paraphrases Coleridge’s thoughts on this: “In
[imagination’s] Primary mode it allows us to make ordered sense out
of a host of sensory perceptions and in its Secondary mode gives
expression to works of art or other forms of creative ability, or the
appreciation thereof. Nature itself, that provides the sense
impressions, Coleridge also divides [into] ’naturing’ or creative
nature [and] ‘natured’ or created nature. This is a complete
antithesis of the materialist viewpoint that all consciousness
evolved from matter. Rather it considers all matter to be projected
creations by denizens of a world of archetypal ideas and spiritual
wills” (Knight 2010, 254). In other words, there is a true order,
and purpose, for us to imagine and discern, not just electrons and
quarks in a chance dance.
Though we are capable of taking in
nature, in its essences, as created, and the Whole, we cannot, should
not, assume that we can understand the Whole, the Real, completely on
the basis of rational powers in a vacuum; this was the fundamental
mistake of the Rationalists like Bacon, the Progressivists, the
Cultural Evolutionists. We always require signs, in this life, and
they are always copies, images of the mysterious, complex within the
Oneness, the wholeness that must be understood first, through both
the reason and the imagination, before one can know everything
about a particular; one can discern the real question that should be
posed to modern culture, a scream in the maelstrom, mostly unheard:
"Do you see your model as an imperfect model? Or are you living,
Matrix-like, within your own images; are you really now a
primitive human who is lost because you have bought the lie to
yourself?" As Lewis says in The Discarded Image: “Always,
century by century, item after item is transferred from the object’s
side of the account to the subject’s. And now, in some extreme
forms of Behaviourism, the subject himself is discounted as merely
subjective; we only think that we think. Having eaten up everything
else, he eats himself up too” (Lewis 1964,215).
The
life-raft offered is the ability of a human being to recognize that
we must deal in terms of the Whole, in images, in partial
understanding of how real particulars fit within that great mystery
(though pace Hume and Kant, we can and are meant to know
truth, and order, and particulars, and wholes and parts, and
essences) and as Guardini says, to continue—like Abraham—to be
willing to hear the call of God past our suppositions—rationally,
logically airtight though they seem—and to be ready to discard
images that are shown to be false. Are we spiritually able to pull up
stakes, to always question ourselves about the images we live with?
Do I exaggerate when I claim that in modern and post-modern life, in
a world saturated—no, flooded—with images, we have in many cases
returned to the primitive belief that our images are all we
can ever know about the Real? This was the anthrax letter given us
via the likes of Rene Descartes, David Hume, and Emmanuel Kant; it is
no surprise that they are considered the fathers of the modern
world.
Thus, the rhetorical situation of Lewis' and Barfield's
books was among the leavings of Kant, who claimed that all we can
know of Reality is, simply, the imaginum mundorum we know
within our own minds, an individualistic primitivism, instead of the
ancient, communal primitive belief in images. Now, where are we? What
is the rhetorical situation now in a world that considers itself
post-modern, post-Christian, a secular utopia and dystopia all at
once? Do Lewis and Barfield still have something to say, and
are there those who have picked up their standard and who continue to
ask, to argue, for, simply, sanity?
Again, we live in a period
in which Kant's 'imaginum mundorum in the mind' has
become a cartoonish reality: we literally, with headphones and
supremely portable screens, live quite a lot of our lives in a
virtual reality of images; it is as if we are being slowly acclimated
to the equation Reality=Image=Unanswerable Skepticism=Total
Relativism=Total Dogmatism. Not only that, but our sciences—and
like a good classicist and liberal artist, I include here philosophy,
theology, mathematics, and the natural and social sciences—have
become mixed like oppositional, complementary colours; there are
dogmatic natural sciences and theoretical dogmas: rational
contradiction, instead of sane tension, has become accepted; we have
lost paradox, itself a sign pointing to a Higher Resolution, and live
dogmatically within deep contradiction.
This deep
contradiction is only possible if one presupposes deep pluralism as
not an image or model, but as Reality itself; in other words, we can
only accept these contradictions rationally as true, breaking the law
of non-contradiction, if we adore as a first principle the lie that
we truly know only the images in our heads. Thus, we have
de-ascended, de-generated, de-progressed from those who understood
their place in a larger, mysterious universe and believed in both the
human ability to know the order of the Real through the
givenness of a mind ordered to know that order, and in the fallible,
limited nature of that mind in a hierarchical relationship with the
Mind that created Order itself. We have decomposed because an order
like that of the finely-tuned, exact universe we actually live in
requires one who Orders, a Maker; when we believed in his absence, we
lost belief in order itself, and rationality cut off from any order
other than its own cannot be communicated or trusted.
Lewis
expresses this degeneration in The Abolition of Man, and
he follows in the footsteps of G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, and
others of that time period, who saw, prophetically, this degeneration
that was seeded in the conception of the modern era. Lewis speaks
provocatively, for example, about the "suppositions" of the
natural sciences; we call these suppositions "theories" and
in the classical understanding of the sciences, questioning these
suppositions as Socrates did, a kind of dialectical practice in terms
of evidence and experimentation, was essential to a truth-seeking
discipline. A good science is a questionable science ensconced in the
real hope that we can find truth, can know reality more and more;
this reflects also the classical Greek and Mediaeval humility about
the scope of our abilities in the face of a mysterious universe, a
deeply complex and yet absolutely ordered universe. Thus, in all the
classical sciences, we find mirrored that Mediaeval tension between
all that we can ascertain truthfully, permanently, and all
that reaches, yet, far beyond us.
Yet modern 'suppositions' or
'theories' have now become no longer models, but inappropriately,
unquestionable dogmas. A perfectly sane questioner can be labeled
unassailably insane and run out of 'reality,' unable to affect the
conversation, silenced, hopelessly marginalized. Theories can be
surreptitious results of prior beliefs, not truth-seeking: for
example, Lewis writes that dogmatic, pseudo-religious forms of
natural and cultural evolution were not a result of "facts"
primarily, but were theories born out of a prior belief in
progressivism, the belief that in the progression of time,
everything must be moving towards a certain natural and
cultural perfection; it is the opposite of the Platonic and
neo-Platonic conception of supplementation, or degeneration as one
moves farther from the Origin (implicitly calling for a return, via
reason, to the Origin, or as Plotinus put it, the One). Progressivism
is a particularly Christian heresy, in my mind, a hybrid of a
Calvinism (a kind of pre-destination and creation of the perfect
Christian earthly state, or "city on a hill," an imbalanced
loss of the mystical understanding of St. Augustine on the Kingdom
outside of time, not of this world, and the fundamental natural and
supernatural realism of St. Thomas Aquinas as found in On
Kingship) and Bacon-ism, the belief that the rational mind,
the sciences, can and should encompass, fundamentally
use, nature, an attitude that presupposes a belief that our
human images vis-à-vis nature are in fact, our reality to
live within and can be perfected. It also supposes, à
la Bacon, a pre-supposition that nature is a closed system,
a kind of machine from which God is fundamentally absent. This is a
theological and philosophical attitude to all the sciences that
smacks of, ends in, Callicles' and Nietzsche’s will to power,
rather than the humble questioning of Socrates or the receptive,
humble scientist (a rare bird).
The shift from an
understanding about when a scientific or cultural theory is
'suppositional' or theoretical to dogmatic theorizing (another
post-modern contradiction that abolished man seems happy to live
with) is a truly dangerous one, and it leaves us, simply, so locked
in our silos that we are no longer able to pose the right questions
or look at facts in a true scientific manner; furthermore, we will
kill those who do ask those questions. Dr. John West, who wrote The
Magician's Twin, on Lewis' attitudes to evolution theory, gives
this example: In the 80's, DNA theorists, with a progressivist and
strict secular evolutionist imago mundi, assumed that
large sections of DNA that seemed 'useless' were indeed just that:
junk. Thus, the "Junk DNA Theory" was readily accepted
because it logically, rationally, upheld the dogmas of present
science, in that these were large sections 'left over' from multiple
chance variations over millennia. However, this theory has been
overturned and it seems all that "junk" has deeper, still
mysterious purposes that reach beyond our current understanding. We
are beginning to be faced with the fact that we find evidence of a
complete, ordered system, a fine-tuned being, not a body carrying
evidence of chance variation and species-change. The real point Dr.
West is making is that the scientists in the 80s did not know how to
ask the right questions, the questions born from an acknowledgement
of ignorance about a more beautiful, ordered, and mysterious, created
reality, questions generated by an acknowledgement of our own
temporary models, our signs, which may or may not encompass
reality.
The most dangerous and tragic aspect of this is that
we no longer understand how to question, and this ability
is perhaps the fundamental tool for discovery of the
great dance of truth, of love, of reality. We become dogs locked in
our own cars, irrationally ready to defend our own
silo-rationalities, unaware that we are becoming beasts, full of
feeling and commitment, but lacking the necessary, fundamental
virtues and tools that mark the truly human:
Turning and
turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the
falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere
anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is
loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is
drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are
full of passionate intensity.
I see this deep concern
and mission—reflected in Yeats' poem—permeating Lewis' books, and
it births a 'supposition' regarding a question I've had about him for
years.
Lewis has been to me, since childhood, a kind of
spiritual father, a mentor, a living sign, as it were, pointing to
the Good, True, and Beautiful. He was, at times in my life, the one
thread that, in Chesterton's and Waugh's turn of phrase, God twitched
to pull me back from the abyss. When I became Catholic, and
discovered the riches of Tolkien and Waugh and others, I lamented
that my main mentor had never come across the Tiber. I wondered why;
I kept looking back across the waters towards the empty place on the
bank where he once stood, wondering deep inside if he ever found
bridges between his hallway of mere Christianity and the Door into a
room that opens onto Heaven. Thus, I was always interested in
anyone's theories about it, especially the musings of his Catholic
friends and contemporaries. Some thought he could not get past his
Ulster Protestant prejudices; some thought in his Englishness, his
Christian turn meant a return to the English church. Some thought he
wanted to stay beyond, away from, controversies about (to him) the
more minor things that divided Christians—that essentially, he
wanted to reach the common person, to provide a rational, simple,
spiritual life-boat.
All of these reasons seem good and are
possibly valid; but they are, using Lewis' own term, "suppositions"
with various facts supporting each. To my knowledge, Lewis never
himself absolutely declared anything that would finally silence the
debate; he loved Chesterton and Tolkien, and his Protestant friends;
he was a man who thought for himself, and he was, truly, as Tolkien
portrayed him, Treebeard who says, "I am on nobody's side
because nobody is on my side." I don't believe this was
prideful, if Lewis felt this way; I theorize that it was a result of
his deep commitment, intellectually, morally, and spiritually, to
that tension he speaks of, over and over, between the belief that we
can know truth and the conviction that we must also know how and when
to ask the right questions, to see clearly our own fallibility in
regard to our own imago mundi, even amidst those
theological differences he saw as 'not mere Christianity.'
If
one is committed, like Socrates, to the questions that climb to an
eternal, mysterious, Real, to the Great Dance as portrayed by Lewis
in Perelandra; if one is committed to that humble,
rational receptivity towards a God that cannot, as Lewis says of
Aslan, be tamed and domesticated and fit inside the human mind, then
how does one view the Catholic Church from the outside?
The
view from the outside of the Church, as I know from my own experience
as a convert, is quite different from the one inside. It is a
mystery--it is Augustine's "I believe to understand, I
understand to believe" paradox. A lack of faith and
understanding can mis-perceive a bunch of mindless sheep saying
formulaic prayers and worshiping statues of those who have swallowed
the kool-aid successfully in the past. Catholics, and Catholic dogma,
can appear to build a prison for the questioner, a place where
questions about God and theology are suspect just because they are
questions. The outsider asks--because there is perhaps an
unquestioned, dogma-like supposition that the Church is, like other
churches one knows, a man-made institution--how can these Christians
live within this image, and aren't they lost to the mysterious that
cannot be contained in a human institution, in human tradition?
Then
there is a liminal moment, God-given, when one sees a glimpse of what
an institution that has a Divine Spirit looks like, is like, like
Orual in Lewis' 'Til We Have Faces sees Psyche's
castle "Tower upon tower, battlements, beauty"—one
suddenly sees that almost unbearable tension, that simultaneously
humble and overwhelmingly powerful, engulfing and creative love
between Christ and His Church, that tension living between the human,
fallible images and the Divine Reality; it is a continuing of the
Incarnation. It is beyond sight, beyond reason, an image of truth
that breaks in from the outside and shatters all others. I saw it
simply, in one simple and profound moment, one image: the Eucharist
residing in a crypt chapel underneath a Catholic church in Annapolis.
I was given, literally on the doorstep, a liminal view—but
absolutely clear—of the Hidden Christ in the foundations of the
Church. It was the physical presence of Christ I'd looked for all my
life, and I knew He was there, the way you simply know another person
is in the room. My inner heart saw all at once, and said, in my real,
true voice, "If Christ is here then this must be His Church."
It was a sight I did not need to wrestle with, though it produced, of
course, a thousand other wrestlings.
Yet, there are Catholics,
individuals, who live in fear of questions, thus seeming to confirm
the false image of the Church; there are also Catholics who live in
awe of God and their own God-given permission to seek, and so can
live the balance. These are rarer--but let it never be said that
individual Catholics are the sum of the Church. We are more
like patients in a hospital.
Perhaps, and this is only a
"supposition" open to questions, Lewis was--as I was in
many areas--taught in his modern, Protestant academic culture to see
only a flat image of the Church, one which pandered its own competing
image and was calcified against a culture of valid questioning and
development. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but perhaps
even Lewis was caught within an image without recognizing it as a
false, formative model. It is hard, as a modern, to know the right
questions to ask, to know when all questions fall silent in the
Presence of absolute Truth, of Revelation.
Yet, the Lord asks
us to walk this road, abandoned more and more to Divine Providence;
he asks us, as Thomas Merton cried out, to supernaturally hope
against worldly hope that our simple desire to please Him, to find
him, means that He will find us and walk with us and teach us, as Our
Lord taught the disciples along the roads and shores of Palestine,
and at the foot of the Cross, the right questions, the right prayers,
the humility necessary. It is, truly, the reality of His strength
made perfect in our weakness, and the weapon-out-of-weakness to
defeat the lies.
And as I believe Lewis tried to do as best he
could, we must model it in the present maelstrom, especially those of
us already within the Church.
Knight, Gareth. The Magical World of
the Inklings. Cheltenham: Skylight Press, 2010.
Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.
