The Discarded Image and the Debunked Tao: Objective Value in C.S. Lewis’ Medieval Model and His Critique of Modernity
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. C.S. Lewis’ Medieval Model and the Doctrine of Objective Value
2.1. The Objective Value of the Ultimate Reality
2.2. The Objective Value of the Lower Levels
[T]he Model universe of our ancestors had a built-in significance. And that in two senses; as having ‘significant form’ (it is an admirable design) and as a manifestation of the wisdom and goodness that created it. There was no question of waking it into beauty or life. … The achieved perfection was already there. The only difficulty was to make an adequate response.34
2.3. Proper Attitude and Response toward Objective Reality and Its Values
3. The Abolition of Man and the Tao
3.1. Lewis’ Appropriation of the Tao as “Belief of Objective Value” and Its Chinese Description in Tao Te Ching
The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates … It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar…This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as “the Tao.”52
what lies beyond existence, what admits no contingency, what lends divinity to all else, what is the ground of all existence, … not simply a law but also a begetting love, a love begotten, and the love … imminent in all those who are caught up to share the unity of their self-caused life … the Tao of the Chinese from which all realities proceed.53
3.2. Critiquing and Correcting of Lewis’ Appropriation of Tao
3.3. Tao as the Universally Shared Objective Value Debunked in the Modern World
Lewis reminds us that “until modern times” thinkers “of the first rank” all knew this value of the Tao. No matter whether it was Plato, the mystic Idealist, or Aristotle, the master of common sense, or the more recent “Hooker, Butler, and Doctor Johnson,” they all walked within the Tao, and they never doubted that “our judgments of value were rational judgments or that what they discovered was objective.”72 In Abolition, he extends this knowledge of the Tao to the common sense shared by all pre-moderns:Tao … is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world… The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.71
Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.73
Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.84
4. Tao in The Discarded Image vs. “Poison of Subjectivism”
4.1. Tao vs. Empty Cosmos
By reducing Nature to her mathematical elements it substituted a mechanical for a genial or animistic conception of the universe. The world was emptied, first of her indwelling spirits, then of her occult sympathies and antipathies, finally of her colors, smells and tastes … Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.91
4.2. Tao vs. Faltering Logic
The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account: classified as sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The subjects become gorged, inflated, at the expense of the object…. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves.93
[T]he man of genius … today often, perhaps usually, feels himself confronted with a reality whose significance he cannot know, or a reality that has no significance; or even a reality such that the very question whether it has a meaning is itself a meaningless question. It is for him, by his own sensibility, to discover a meaning, or, out of his own subjectivity, to give a meaning—or at least a shape—to what in itself had neither.95
From the undeniable fact of pluralism, it is frequently inferred that moral and cultural relativism is true, that there are no norms and values rightly applicable to people of all times and places. (Hence the incoherence of attempts to abandon truth as a category: its denial always involves at least this one truth claim. Consistently to abandon truth requires that one stop making assertions or arguments.)
Denials of truth and of non-subjective moral norms in the name of toleration and diversity are self-defeating and self-contradictory—unless one is prepared to go the whole way, and grant that genocide, rape, slavery, and torture are acceptable. Thankfully, only the pathological would claim as much, although why this is so is unclear if ethics lacks any objective basis.98
4.3. Tao’s Prescription for the Rational Soul’s Response to the Objective Reality
It is through the orderly function of these “officers” that reality is grasped and its values are acted out. However, for the “Innovator” of values who supersedes Reason and conscience with “instinct”, Lewis warns:We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat … of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.111
Neither in any operation with factual propositions nor in any appeal to instinct can the Innovator find the basis for a system of values. None of the principles he requires are to be found there: but they are all to be found somewhere else. ‘All within the four seas are his brothers’ ([Analects] xii. 5) says Confucius. …All the practical principles behind the Innovator’s case for posterity, or society, or the species, are there from time immemorial in the Tao. But they are nowhere else. 112
5. Conclusions
Funding
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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12 | Walter Hooper’s footnote to “On Ethics” 1967, p. 47. |
13 | Title of another article by Lewis in defense of the Tao, a condensed form of The Abolition of Man, first published in Religion in Life (vol. XII, Summer 1943). |
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18 | (Qtd. Lewis 1964, p. 113). |
19 | As illustrated in the following Scripture: “God is love.” (1 John 4:8; 16) “All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” (John 1:3–4) “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights.” (James 1:17) “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6). |
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23 | (ibid., p. 26). |
24 | (ibid., p. 92). |
25 | (ibid., p. 10). |
26 | (ibid., p. 10). |
27 | (ibid., p. 74). |
28 | (ibid., p. 56). |
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33 | (Qtd. Lewis 1964, p. 79). |
34 | (ibid., p. 204). |
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37 | (ibid., pp. 158, 159). |
38 | Lewis was well aware of the limitation of human knowledge and capacity, as demonstrated in “Meditation in a Toolshed,” God in the Dock. (Hooper 1970, p. 212). |
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41 | Please see Lewis, “Imagination in the Middle Ages”, (Lewis 1966, p. 43). Here Lewis uses an apt analogy to illustrate how the Medieval Model was founded upon the surviving legacy of antiquity: “The peculiar predicament of medieval man was in fact just this: he was a literate man who had lost a great many of his books and forgotten how to read all his Greek books. He works with the rather chancy selection he has. … An exaggerated, but not wholly fake, model would be a party of shipwrecked people setting to work to try to build up a culture on an uninhabited island and depending on the odd collection of books which happened to be on board their ship.” |
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44 | Lewis’s works on literary theories, relatively few and little, such as An Experiment in Criticism (1961) and The Personal Heresy (1939), can all be regarded as a tribute Lewis pays to his admired medieval predecessors. Also see (Su 2012). |
45 | (ibid., pp. 5, 11). |
46 | (ibid., p. 10). |
47 | (ibid., p. 12). |
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55 | (Yang 2019, p. 3). Yang Peng’s 2019 new translation of Tao Te Ching will be used for this article unless otherwise specified; my adaptations when necessary are in the square brackets. Yang uses the exact Pinyin of “道”, i.e., “Dao”, for Lewis’s “Tao”. |
56 | My own translation. |
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58 | (ibid., p. 50). |
59 | (ibid., p. 94). |
60 | (ibid., p. 59). |
61 | (ibid., p. 29). |
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63 | “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.”(John 1:1) In the late 19th and early 20th century the Western missionary translators of the Chinse Union Version of the Bible (1919) was well aware of the homogeny of the Christian God and the Chinese Tao with its multiple senses, and use this word—道—for Logos. (See John 1:1 in any Chinese Union Version of the Bible.) |
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65 | The Revd. Dr. Malcolm Guite of University of Cambridge wrote in “The Abolition of Man: From Literary Criticism to Prophetic Resistance” that Lewis was “borrowing his term [Tao] rather surprisingly from the Chinese mystic, Lao Tsu.” (Ward and Williams 2016) This is not so: Lewis did not consciously appropriate Lao Tze. But Guite’s observation does support my argument that Lewis’ interpretation of the Tao is more in line with Lao Tze than with Confucius. |
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69 | (Damascene 2012, p. 44). This correspondence or “deep call[ing] unto deep” (Psalms 42:7) is given a detailed and impressive treatment in Hieromonk Damascene’s Christ the Eternal Tao (Damascene 2012). |
70 | All biblical quotes are from the King James Version (KJV). |
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75 | (ibid., pp. 46, 49). |
76 | “The Poison of Subjectivism” deals with Nietzsche’s violation of the doctrine of objective value in the following statements: “The morality of Nietzsche is a mere innovation. … Nietzschean ethics can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgements at all.” (Christian Reflections, p. 77). |
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79 | (ibid., p. 51). |
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81 | (ibid., p. 72). |
82 | Ref. Chapter 3, “The Abolition of Man” in Abolition, pp. 53–81. |
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86 | (ibid., p. 25). |
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95 | (ibid., pp. 203–4). |
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106 | (ibid., p. 70). |
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109 | (ibid., pp. 74–75). |
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112 | (ibid., pp. 39–40). |
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Su, Y. The Discarded Image and the Debunked Tao: Objective Value in C.S. Lewis’ Medieval Model and His Critique of Modernity. Religions 2019, 10, 597. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10110597
Su Y. The Discarded Image and the Debunked Tao: Objective Value in C.S. Lewis’ Medieval Model and His Critique of Modernity. Religions. 2019; 10(11):597. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10110597
Chicago/Turabian StyleSu, Yuxiao. 2019. "The Discarded Image and the Debunked Tao: Objective Value in C.S. Lewis’ Medieval Model and His Critique of Modernity" Religions 10, no. 11: 597. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10110597