[applause]
>> Thank you, Tom.
Those were good days
and ping-pong is something I can still do.
[laughter]
That's fun.
Talking about C. S. Lewis
and Intellectual Virtues
in Civil Discourse.
When I first was invited
to this conference
and thought, what could I talk about?
I thought about C. S.
Lewis and civil discourse.
I had some doubts as to whether Lewis
would be a particularly helpful model.
Because in 20th century England,
where Lewis was,
he was often a polarizing figure.
He remarked to a younger
colleague once with much passion,
"You don't know how much I'm hated."
And, as you may know,
his colleagues so detested him
that they blocked the possibility of him
receiving a chair at Oxford University.
Eventually Cambridge offered him a chair,
recognizing his academic merit.
And part of the problem was,
he was part of that
British academic culture
that relishes putting down opponents
and witty condescension
and disparagement of the people
whom you disagree with.
And Lewis partook of that culture
and he gave as much as he got probably.
For years he was the head of a,
what they called a Socratic club,
that cultivated clever argument.
And some of his witty
retorts to his critics
are brilliant and they're fun to read.
My favorite I think is,
his reply to
a Professor Norman Pittenger
that you can find in "God in the Dock."
Which is just a devastating
reply to a critique.
But that kind of wit
doesn't exactly cultivate
civic virtue and further discourse.
Even so,
despite recognizing that
Lewis was occasionally
polarizing.
I think we can learn much from him
as a model for cultivating
intellectual virtues
and also for promoting civil discourse.
First, I think it's clear
that Lewis thought of the Christian life
largely in terms of cultivating virtues.
In "Mere Christianity," he talks about
the four cardinal virtues
of prudence, temperance,
justice and fortitude.
And then the three theological virtues
of faith, hope and charity.
And he sees the proper
cultivation of human character
as a matter of developing
habits or practices.
He says in "Mere Christianity,"
"And taking your life as a whole,
"with your innumerable
choices all life long,
"you are slowly turning
this central thing,"
that is yourself,
"either into a heavenly creature
"or into a hellish creature.
"Either into a creature
that is in harmony with God
"and with other creatures and with itself.
"Or else one that is in a state
"of war and hatred with God
"and with your fellow creatures
"and with itself."
In "The Abolition of Man,"
Lewis provides what amounts to
his view of intellectual virtues.
He cites Augustine
as defining virtue as ordo amoris,
or right-ordered affections.
So intellectual virtues have to be
understood in that context.
In "Abolition of Man," Lewis' complaint
was that recent school textbooks,
reflecting the vogue of
logical positivism at the time,
were teaching that all
statements about values,
such as statements like,
"This waterfall is sublime."
That reflected merely the
subjective state of the observer,
and did not pass the modern
scientific test of objectivity.
Lewis' response was to cite
Augustine and Plato before
him that, as Lewis put it,
the head rules the body through the chest.
So quote "reason must rule
over the mere appetites
"by means of the spirited element."
And by the "spirited element,"
what Lewis means is the
properly cultivated affections, or loves.
These affections, or loves, I suggest,
ought to be cultivated as moral virtues.
The guiding principle for
shaping these virtues, he argues,
can be found in the Tao,
or natural law principles,
endorsed in all sorts of cultures,
such as duties to family and nation,
principles of justice, honesty, mercy,
magnanimity and so forth.
So our reason, when it's
properly functioning,
reason when properly functioning,
does not guide us purely dispassionately
as an objective agent.
But rather it should rule through
the properly cultivated,
and in the context, through
and in the context of,
the properly cultivated affections.
One example of what he has in mind
is found in a paper called
"The Obstinacy of Belief,"
which he published in 1955.
And there he criticized the
positivist scientific ideal
that said that people should tailor
the strength of their beliefs
to the strength of the evidence
supporting that belief.
But Lewis pointed out that
in ordinary experience
it's often necessary to commit to a belief
that goes beyond the immediate evidence
that we have for that belief.
For instance,
we often need simply to trust authority
or to trust other people
for all sorts of things,
important things that we believe.
And Lewis illustrates the legitimacy
of such trust as the basis for belief
by pointing out that there are
all sorts of situations in life,
when we can only help someone else
if they will simply trust us.
So he says this,
"In getting a dog out of a trap.
"In extracting a thorn
from a child's finger.
"In teaching a boy to swim
"or rescuing one who can't.
"In getting a frightened beginner over
"a nasty place on a mountain.
"The one fatal obstacle
may be their distrust.
"We are asking them to trust us
"in the teeth of their senses.
"Their imagination and
their intelligence."
So he says, he argues from that,
"So Christians who say that
they should continue to trust
"in the God that they
have once encountered,
"even when they face doubts
and trials to that faith,
"are not acting irrationally.
"Continued trust in a person is often
"a perfectly legitimate basis
for belief in a commitment."
So the larger point is that
Lewis saw our rationality
as operating properly
only in the context of our
properly ordered affections.
These, in turn, are properly
shaped by, among other things,
our personal relationships.
And those involve trust and love,
things that go beyond
strictly scientific evidences
that we can deal with.
If you'll permit me a digression
that I think may be illuminating,
at least to some of you.
I think Lewis' view
that we can obtain true
intellectual virtues
only in the context of
properly ordered affections,
as similarities to that of
another Christian thinker
who has become quite popular
in the last generation.
And that is my friend, Jonathan Edwards.
For Edwards, right belief
cannot be separated
from the affections.
Typically, Edwards describes faith
as being given as a sixth sense,
like being given eyes to see
the overwhelming beauty of divine things.
And that experience of supreme beauty,
ultimately the experience
of seeing the beauty of God
in the sacrificial love of Christ,
draws us to God.
So that experience of beauty,
like meeting the person whom
we immediately recognize
to be perfectly good,
both reorders our affections
and shapes our trust
and love in that person.
And convinces us of
truths about that person.
Alvin Plantinga discusses
how Edwards approach
speaks to current discussions
of intellectual virtues at Warrant,
in the epistemological sense.
Now I don't think C. S. Lewis spells out
the role of affections in relation
to intellect quite as
fully as Edwards does.
But I think the model is similar.
Lewis' complaint against
modern rationalistic
positivistic trends
is that it's creating what he
calls "men without chests,"
or, in effect,
people without hearts or affections.
Lewis' effectiveness as
a winsome communicator
has a great deal to do
with his recognition
that intellect does not
operate independently
of the affections.
So even though Lewis
was a skilled logician
who used many effective arguments,
he surrounded those arguments
with a host of images and analogies
to make the meaning of what
he was saying come alive.
That approach fit his view
that reason must rule through the chest,
or through the affections.
As Lewis explains it,
he sees the imagination
as the organ of meaning
and reason as the natural organ of truth.
So the best way we have for understanding
the meaning of something
that we're not too mired with
is by way of analogy with
something we do know about.
So Lewis, who was a poet at heart,
constantly uses images and
analogies and metaphors
to explain things.
Such explanations help his audience relate
to what he is saying affectively,
as it connects to
something that is already
part of their experience.
His examples that gets quoted
about the dog in the trap
and the child with the thorn, etc.,
are great examples of how,
of helping to grasp an intellectual point
by building up an effective
understanding of the point.
We can feel the force of the argument.
So how might these understandings
of intellectual virtue
relate to civil discourse?
The first and most important point
is that Lewis' approach of
putting intellectual virtues
in the context of
cultivating other virtues
is an essential step in the first step
in the right direction.
Being a person of prudence and integrity
who is concerned with proper duties of
beneficence, justice, mercy, veracity,
magnanimity and so forth,
all go a long way toward helping
to get a hearing in the public arena
for Christian sorts of views.
Lewis' writings, and
especially in his fiction,
have wide resonance because he makes clear
that he's dedicated to
these ideals or virtues.
They shine through.
And also, in the more
people that study his life,
it confirms that he was
cultivating virtues,
he worked very hard at cultivating virtues
in his personal life.
In Mr. David Horner's
excellent presentation
he was talking about embody,
an embodied oral argument.
And Lewis had personal qualities that did,
he worked hard at trying to cultivate
these virtues that he talked about.
So the central lesson
we can learn from Lewis
is that the intellectual virtues have to,
ought to be operating within the context
of properly ordered moral virtues.
But going beyond that,
I want also to identify some
more specifically intellectual virtues,
or habits of mind, in Lewis' work
that might contribute
to a greater civility.
One of those intellectual traits
is that Lewis is always
looking for timeless,
or perennial, truths as
opposed to the latest insights
that are more culturally bound.
Laura Schmidt put it well yesterday saying
that it's an example of working within
an intellectual tradition.
And the counterpart of
working in a tradition
is that Lewis is rightfully well known for
his critique of what he called
"chronological snobbery."
And chronological snobbery was the idea
that the latest ideas are the thing
everyone has to agree with
and you can write off the old ideas
as romantic or medieval.
And by way of contrast,
Lewis saw that historical perspectives
provide a critical place to stand
in evaluating modern
intellectual fashions.
One of the best places
where he articulated that
is in a presentation
"Learning in War-Time."
In September of 1939,
just after the outbreak of World War II,
he's speaking to Oxford
students about the question
why you should continue
to study the classics
when the world is at war
and you're facing the draft
and there's this emergency situation.
And his answer was that,
especially in times of crisis,
people needed to know the past
in order to recognize that quote
"much which seems certain
to the uneducated,
"is merely temporary fashion."
And he says, "One who
has lived in many places
"is not likely to be deceived
"by the local errors
of his native village.
"The scholar who has lived in many times
"is therefore to some degree immune
"from the great cataract of nonsense
"that pours from the press
"and from the microphone of our own age."
Perspectives from the past
were helpful to Lewis, I think,
in leading him to quite consciously avoid
the political temptation.
And that is to identify Christianity
with a political position.
You might remember in Screwtape
he has a nice passage where he suggests,
Screwtape suggests to
his subordinate devil,
you can undermine your patient's faith
by getting him to think the
chief value of the faith
is for the good arguments that it provides
for his political position.
In addition to staying away from politics,
Lewis is relentless, however,
in undermining the temporary fashion
of mid-20th century culture.
Particularly the fashion in
the intellectual outlook of his day,
that trusted far too much
naturalistic, scientific models
as providing the best and
the definitive explanations
of the human condition.
If you read Lewis' fiction,
particularly in the space trilogies,
his villains are often deluded scientists.
Most notably Weston in
the interplanetary novels,
who wants to exploit the other
planets for economic profit.
And these are examples of
what Lewis is talking about
when he says "men without chests,"
who actually understand nothing about
the true human condition.
Critiquing popular
contemporary assumptions
in the light of broad historical
perspectives and traditions
seems to qualify as an
intellectual virtue,
in the sense of improving our chances
of getting things right.
But it's not so clear that such dismissals
of the assumptions of our contemporaries
are conducive to
promoting civil discourse.
Furthermore, we might ask
whether using satire and fiction
for such dismissals is the most
civil way to make our case.
Satire does not really
invite further conversation.
Nonetheless, flat-out arguments
have the same problem.
One rule of life is
that our best arguments
almost never convince our opponents,
but rather only bribe them
to be more resourceful
in finding counterarguments.
So that we end up with
arguing further apart
than we were when we began.
So perhaps it's the case for fiction
as a way to make our points
without confrontation.
Especially if we do it with good humor,
as in the case of "The Screwtape Letters."
Or even better, in the case of Narnia.
Lewis works in his critiques
of modern thought in those stories,
but he does it in a whimsical way
that wins assent by, you
hardly know it, by indirection.
Lewis' creation of alternative
worlds in his fiction,
like his historical perspectives,
provide contemporary
people ways of viewing
the most basic underlying assumptions,
or mythologies, of their own culture.
One of Lewis' most important insights
is that modern people need to recognize
the degree to which modernized cultures
have disenchanted their
perceptions about reality.
So a first step in
turning people to be open
to the claims of Christianity,
is to help them to re-enchant
their sensibilities.
So in a famous sermon,
"The Weight of Glory,"
Lewis, after invoking a
sense of our deepest desires
and longing for beauty,
he then asks, he says this:
"Do you think I'm trying to weave a spell?
"Perhaps I am.
"But remember your fairy tales.
"Spells are used for
breaking enchantments,
"as well as for inducing them.
"And you and I have need
of the strongest spell
"that can be found to wake us up
"from the evil enchantment of worldliness
"as it's been laid upon us
for nearly a hundred years.
"Almost our whole
education has been directed
"to silencing this shy,
persistent inner voice.
"Almost all our modern philosophies
"have been devised to convince us
"that the good of man is
to be found on this earth."
So fiction and storytelling
are one of the most
effective ways to help break that spell.
For instance, in "The
Magician's Nephew" story
about the origins of Narnia,
there's a wonderful
character of Uncle Andrew,
who believes himself to be a magician,
but, in fact, is a
hopelessly modern person
who is self-centered
and also has thoroughly
modern scientific assumptions.
So when Aslan begins to
sing a beautiful song
that leads to the creation of Narnia.
Uncle Andrew convinces himself
that he's only hearing a roar,
because who ever heard of a lion singing?
Unlike the other characters,
Uncle Andrew cannot hear Aslan
or the other animals speak,
because he knows that it's
impossible for animals to speak.
Opening people up to recognizing
there's more to reality
than modern disenchanted
scientism would allow
is an important step toward bridging
what otherwise is often
an unbridgeable barrier
in communicating with our
secular contemporaries.
In Elaine Ecklund's talk
about talking to scientists.
This would fit with that.
Such re-enchanting and, hence, connecting
with the perennial and
cross-cultural dimensions
of historical human experience will,
of course, only win some people
and will not touch the
Uncle Andrews of the world
who do not have the ears to hear.
But nonetheless, as I mentioned above,
Lewis' quest for perennial
and lasting truths
about the human condition
does have a dimension
that can at least foster
some communication
with wider audiences.
And that is by studying various
cultures throughout history,
Lewis is cultivating
the intellectual virtue
of looking for perennial human nature.
And that perennial human nature
helps him communicate so well.
It's one of the reasons why
he can communicate so well
in his radio addresses that
become "Mere Christianity."
He understands ordinary
people in his own day
because he's looked for the
common elements in human nature.
Those common elements once again
are related to the common moral traits
that he identifies with the Tao.
And even though he recognizes the vast gap
between Christians and
people such as Uncle Andrew,
whose combination of selfish affections
and modern learning make him deaf
to what Christians are saying.
Lewis still sees a point of contact.
He is someone who is influenced
by 18th century common sense philosophy.
He's an admirer of Samuel Johnson.
And in Lewis' case it's not
a naive trust in common sense
as though there's simply just
a common rationality there.
Because, as I said,
he recognizes the prior
dispositional affective
and intellectual obstacles
to common understanding.
But nonetheless, despite that,
all humans still hold
many beliefs in common
and one can still build
on such commonalities,
and Lewis does that with great skill.
One final intellectual
virtue that Lewis displays
that I think is especially important,
both for being an effective evangelist
and in communicating civility
with diverse audiences,
is that even when he is
talking about himself
and his own intellectual
and spiritual journey
he is not primarily drawing
attention to himself.
He wrote an essay called
"The Personal Heresy."
An essay in literary criticism.
And in it he argues that
when we interpret a poem,
we should not be just trying to understand
the poet's state of mind.
Quote, "The poet is not a man," or woman,
"who asks me to look at him.
"He is a man who says,
'Look at that,' and points.
"The more I follow the
pointing of his finger,
"the less I can possibly see of him."
And Lewis would have said the same thing
of his work as an
advocate of Christianity.
Even though his personality
is very much present
in his apologetic writings.
He acts, as many commentators
have pointed out,
as a friendly guide, or
companion, on a journey.
To expand that image,
he's like a companion on
a hike in the mountains
who's a naturalist,
who can point out all
the beautiful flowers
and formations that you
might not have noticed
on your own.
And you're very grateful to
this guide, or intermediary,
for pointing out these things.
But then he leads you,
or she leads you, around the bend
and you see the most beautiful sight
of mountains and lakes
that you've ever seen.
You're overwhelmed by
the beauty of that sight
and by the beauty of the object
that has been pointed to.
So you're deeply grateful to the guide,
but that is not the essence of your
unforgettable encounter
with this luminous beauty.
So Lewis points his audience
towards seeing Christianity,
not as a set of abstract teachings,
but rather that it is something
that can be seen, experienced and enjoyed
as the most beautiful of all realities.
Nonetheless, for all Lewis'
moral and intellectual virtues,
which I tried to outline.
And for all his winsomeness.
He could also be a very divisive person.
They did a survey during
his BBC radio talks,
that eventually became
"Mere Christianity,"
and the person who did the
survey wrote to him and said,
gave this report:
"They obviously either regard you
as the cat's whiskers
or beneath contempt."
And Lewis wrote back and said,
"These two views you report,
"cat's whiskers or beneath contempt,
"aren't very illuminating
about me perhaps.
"About my subject matter
"it is an old story, isn't it?
"They love it or they hate it."
And that sums up one
dimension of the problem
we as Christians have in
trying to promote both
intellectual virtues and civility.
The primary intellectual virtues
are those that aid us in
discovering the truth.
Yet for Christians that truth leads to
the offense of the cross,
and to viewpoints that our fellow citizens
are either going to love
or, very often, to hate.
So if we, following Lewis' example,
are frank in pointing out how radically
Christianity separates us
from most contemporary views of things.
Then inevitable we will, like him,
experience the disdain of
some of our contemporaries.
Nonetheless,
the counter to the
inevitable tension involved
in the offense of the gospel
is to surround our truth-seeking
intellectual virtues
with all the moral virtues
that would promote civility.
And here Lewis turns out
to be a very helpful guide,
in that he recognizes
that the intellectual life
takes place in the
context of the moral life.
And hence, if we are to be
effective intellectually
and communicators beyond just a circle
of our fellow believers,
we need to start by
cultivating moral virtues,
such as humility,
self-criticism, winsomeness,
self-deprecating humor, compassion,
concern for justice, concern for mercy,
love for our enemies.
We need, as Lewis did,
to look for common humanity
and for what we share with
those with whom we differ.
Such moral virtues that
shape our intellectual life
still will not keep us from
the offense of the cross
and from some conflict.
But if we conscientiously practice
and cultivate such virtues,
it may at least help us
to counter the tendency
that we have to think
that we can win the day
simply by arguing.
Thank you.
[applause]
