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- [00:00]
Dr. Michael Ward
Foreign.
- [00:08]
Jeremiah Regan
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
- [00:12]
Juan Davalos
I'm Juan Davalos, and I'm back after a few weeks. Yeah, thank you. We're back with a new course, and this is one of my favorite courses. This is CS Lewis on Christianity. And I was telling Jeremiah before we started recording that I watched this course 11 times because I was working on this course when I worked in production, and every time that I watched it, I learned something new.
- [00:37]
Jeremiah Regan
So you didn't really just watch it, you helped shape it.
- [00:40]
Juan Davalos
That's right. That's right. Very much choosing the B roll that we used, all the images and building the study guides and everything for the course. And this is a beautiful course with Dr. Michael Ward as the teacher. And as we get into this lecture, Good and Evil, you'll understand why it's a foundational topic. We start with C.S. lewis's abolition of man, and it's a famous book. If you haven't read the book, we definitely recommend that you read it. But the basic point of the book is that there is such a thing as objective reality. Lewis famously describes the scene of a children's book that was presented to him in which in the book, there's two individuals that are looking at a waterfall and. And one of them calls it sublime, and the other one just simply says that it's like his own perception that is beautiful. And the difference is, is the beauty of that waterfall in the waterfall itself that is beauty objective, or is it something that is just perception?
- [01:37]
Jeremiah Regan
Yeah, the authors of this children's book has one character. I think it's Coleridge says that it's sublime. The other says it's some word that doesn't quite capture the beauty and the grandeur of the waterfall. Maybe it's beautiful or maybe it's pretty. And the authors of the children's book say both are equally valid, and Lewis says they're not.
- [01:55]
Juan Davalos
That's right. Because there is such a thing as objective reality. There is such a thing as objective beauty. And of course, that has important and huge ramifications for everything in life. Is there such a thing as truth? Is there such a thing as beauty? Or is it just simply our opinions of it?
- [02:14]
Jeremiah Regan
Are the standards outside of human creation, or are the standards made by humans? That's really the question. So if the waterfall is sublime, that's a recognition that a creator, that God, made this thing, and we owe a certain degree of respect to it. The assertion that the waterfall is merely pretty means that the. The observer is the determiner he gets to decide what it is.
- [02:37]
Juan Davalos
And so I'm super excited for you to join us in this course. I. CS Lewis is one of my favorite authors. I think that as you go through this course that you will always also fall in love with his writing. I think he's one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century and he communicates in a way that everybody can understand, which is why you should get the book if you haven't read it. The Abolition of Men by C.S. lewis. We have it in our shop at Hillsdale. Edu course. That's Hillsdale. Edu course and you can get the book, you can get other CS Lewis books there and start reading Lewis, which is a great mind to help you understand the world better.
- [03:16]
Jeremiah Regan
Now let's turn to Dr. Michael Ward with the first lecture of C.S. lewis on Christianity, Good and Evil.
- [03:26]
Dr. Michael Ward
Welcome to this study of C.S. lewis on Christianity. My name is Michael Ward. I'm a visiting fellow here at Hillsdale College, but I'm based at the University of Oxford in England, my native England. I'm a member there of the faculty of theology and religion. C.S. lewis on Christianity is a rich, rich topic and I look forward to mining with you some very profitable veins of inquiry over the next six talks. But before we start investigating the topic of the first talk, good and evil, let's briefly sketch Lewis's life so that we know who we're dealing with. Clive Staples Lewis was born at the end of the Victorian era and died at the start of the swinging 60s. He was not quite 65 when he died, which by modern standards is not a very long lifespan. Nonetheless, he lived through an exceptionally tumultuous period of human history, including two world wars and the coming of the nuclear age, not to mention major epoch making technological developments such as the invention of the radio, television, the motor car, the aeroplane. He witnessed many large changes in British society, such as in the role of women, the nature of the family, the mass immigration of the 1950s. There's much that could be said about all these social, political, cultural changes, but interestingly, Lewis paid relatively little attention to them. He focused on matters of perennial concern, the timeless questions of God and humanity, the purpose of life, why we're here in the first place, what may await us after we die. In other words, Lewis, even as he was bombarded from every direction by changes and developments in his society, kept his eyes firmly fixed on the unchanging challenges that affect all people in all places at all times. The theological, moral, spiritual questions which we all have to address and so as we begin these talks on Lewis, on Christianity, it'll be worth saying just a little about his specifically theological background in order to get a better understanding of where he was coming from in that regard, what his own religious context was, what his spiritual upbringing was like. He was born into a Christian family in Belfast in the north of Ireland. And note that I say the north of Ireland, not Northern Ireland. Ireland was still one united island in 1898 when Lewis was born. It wasn't until the 1920s that Ireland was partitioned into the Republic in the south and the six counties of Ulster in the north that remained part of the United Kingdom. That was yet another of the major changes that Lewis lived through. His family was Protestant, more specifically Anglican. Lewis's maternal grandfather was a clergyman in the Church of Ireland, part of the Anglican Communion. And the infant Lewis was baptized by that clerical grandfather at St. Mark's Church in the suburbs of Belfast, where the family lived. Lewis was taken to church and as he would later say, he was taught the usual things and made to say my prayers. His father Albert, delighted in the language of the King James version of the Bible, in the Book of Common Prayer and in other features of Anglican tradition. Lewis's mother, Florence, the clergyman's daughter, was a very well educated woman. She had a first class degree in mathematics at a time when women's education was relatively unusual. Alas, she died when Lewis was only nine years old, the first of several blows that he was to suffer over the next ten years or so. Within just a matter of weeks after his mother died, Lewis was sent away from home to be educated privately at a small independent school in England. And this school seems to have been one of the worst schools in the whole of the country. It was headed up by someone who could have stepped out of the pages of a novel by Charles Dickens. Think Wackford Squeers, the wicked headmaster in Nicholas Nickleby. Lewis's father had chosen just about the worst school available because this headmaster was positively sadistic. He flogged many of the boys mercilessly, teaching them almost nothing. He was later certified insane and died in a lunatic asylum. And even though Lewis himself was more of a teacher's pet than a victim of these beatings, he later confessed that it took him years and years to forgive that headmaster for his cruelty. But despite having lost his mother so young, and despite having to put up with this terrible experience at school, Lewis didn't stop considering himself a Christian. In fact, he says that it was during this period that he first became an effective believer. He and his fellow schoolboys were taken to church twice every Sunday. And this church, though it was very high, Anglo Catholic, much higher even than the churchmanship of Lewis's father. It acquainted the young Lewis with what he called the doctrines of Christianity, as distinct from general uplift. And these doctrines, he said, were taught by clergymen who obviously believed them. I began seriously to pray, Lewis said, and to read my Bible and to attempt to obey my conscience. But this period of religious seriousness didn't last. And interestingly, one of the reasons it didn't last had to do with the excessive seriousness with which Lewis approached what he understood to be his duty of saying his prayers. And we'll come on to that topic in the fourth of these six talks. Around about the same time, he began to have intellectual doubts about some of the truth claims of Christianity. One such doubt arose from his study of the classics. As he studied the mythologies of ancient Greece and Rome and their associated religions, he was told that these ancient myths and religious practices weren't true. They weren't true at all. But Christianity was true, was exactly true, was the only true faith. The accepted position among his schoolmasters seemed to be that religion in general was some kind of endemic nonsense that the humanity continually blundered into. But by a fortunate exception, our own religion, Christianity was entirely trustworthy. And Lewis found this incredible. He wasn't so much troubled by the claims of the validity of Christianity. He was troubled by the claim that every other tradition was entirely false. That was what perplexed him. No one ever attempted to show how Christianity might have been the fulfillment of paganism, or how paganism might have prefigured Christianity. And that's something we'll come on to later as well, in other lectures. So for these and for other reasons, Lewis gradually fell away from the practice of the faith, eventually abandoning Christianity around about the age of 13, with no sense of loss, but, as he put it with the greatest relief. And he would remain in that state of unbelief until his late 20s, early 30s. And the story of how he regained his Christian faith is something we'll discuss in the next two lectures. But that, I hope, is enough. By way of background, let's now jump ahead and consider the adult Lewis, the great Christian writer, the friend of Tolkien, the broadcaster on the BBC, the man with his face on the COVID of Time magazine. That man is now, of course, best known for his Chronicles of Narnia and for writing great works that defend the Christian faith, mere Christianity most prominent among them. But Lewis was primarily neither A writer of fiction, nor a Christian apologist. He was first and foremost an academic. He taught at Oxford for nearly 30 years, and he finished his career at the University of Cambridge, and his subject for most of that academic career was English literature. But what's little known is that he started out in philosophy. He had studied classical philosophy as part of his undergraduate degree, and then after he graduated, after his old tutor went on sabbatical for a year, Lewis was asked to fill in for him. And so his professional career began in philosophy, and he'd have liked to have made that temporary post permanent if he could have done. He applied for lots of posts in philosophy, thinking for quite a while that was his principal vocation. And even after he turned to teaching English, he continued to tutor philosophy students for many years. So we oversimplify Lewis if we think of him just as an English literary critic, or just a writer of children's fiction, or just a Christian apologist. He was also a philosopher, ethicist, and his first series of lectures at Oxford was entitled the Good and Its Position among the Values. The following term he lectured on moral good. And this is worth emphasizing, I think. Lewis began his entire academic career by lecturing on the nature of goodness. And so it's highly appropriate that in these six talks we should start out with what he has to say about good and evil. There's a lot to say, and we can only scratch the surface. In what remains of this talk, I'll focus in on just three points. First, that moral value is objective. Second, that moral value is universally held to be objective. And third, we learn moral value by practice. So, first, and foundationally, it's important to get clear at the outset that Lewis regarded moral value as objective. Just as there's an objective physical environment comprised of three dimensions, the ground and the sky and the near and the far, so there's an objectively real moral environment. The moral environment is not something we've invented or simply projected out from ourselves. It's something we've discovered, something that couldn't have been otherwise. It's like the rules of mathematics. The multiplication table isn't something that could work in a way other than the way it does work. And if you want to claim that two plus two is five or three rather than four, you're not being mathematically adventurous or creative. You're just being enumerate. Likewise, if you try to say that, for instance, causing innocent people to suffer is good or that lying and stealing are good, you're not showing moral intuition, moral initiative or moral enterprise. You're showing that you're morally blind because these basic principles of morality are just seen as we see the first principles of algebra. They are truly fundamental. They're premises, not conclusions. You can't prove them because they are the basis for all subsequent moral proofs. These essential moral laws are self evident, axiomatic. And if you demand that they justify themselves on some other grounds, you're asking the impossible reality. Moral reality isn't like that. If nothing is morally self evident, nothing can be proved to be moral or immoral. And to recognize this objective moral ecology is part of what defines us as human beings. If we try to explain these basic principles of good and evil by reference to some other thing, something like animal instinct, say, or social norms, we're only putting off the real issue for the question then why should we obey our instincts? Why should we conform to social norms? Sooner or later we come up against the hard immovable bedrock of the self evidently good and the self evidently evil. You do the good because it's good. You avoid the evil because it's evil. There is no other reason. Morality in this sense is found, not made. It's objectively there, whether we subjectively happen to like it or not. Let me give you a quote from Lewis's book Miracles. He says, I believe that the primary moral principles on which all others depend are rationally perceived. We just see that there is no reason why my neighbor's happiness should be sacrificed to my own. As we just see that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. If we cannot prove either axiom, that is not because they are irrational, but because they are self evident and all proofs depend on them. Their intrinsic reasonableness shines by its own light. It's because all morality is based on such self evident principles that we say to a man when we would recall him to right conduct be reasonable. Reason in this sense is the organ of morality. And Lewis presents this view in a number of places. There's his book Miracles that I just quoted from his essay on ethics. His essay the Poison of Subjectivism. The first part of Mere Christianity is entitled Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe. Hey, it's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour and the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast. I want to know what do you think about the show you're listening to right now? Visit Podcast Hillsdale Edu and and click the survey Pop up to take our very first ever listener survey. Tell us what you like, what you don't like and what you want to hear from us in the future, Visit podcast hillsdale.edu and click the Pop up to take the survey and thank you for listening.
- [18:51]
Scott Bertram
When you think of America's founding, you might picture the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, or great figures like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. But those moments and those men didn't appear out of nowhere and they didn't succeed by chance. The ideas that shaped our nation were forged over more than a century of struggle and faith. Tested and proven by the colonists who carved a civilization from the wilderness, these men and women escaped tyranny, defined self government, and set the stage for history's greatest fight for freedom. In Hillsdale College's free six part documentary series on colonial America, you'll discover how the virtues of courage, faith, hard work and freedom defined our earliest Americans and why they still matter today. You'll hear their stories set against the backdrop of the Great Awakening, the Glorious Revolution and the French and Indian War, and see how the American character was forged long before 1776. Watch the series for free at hillsdale. Edu Network. That's Hillsdale. Edu Network.
- [20:01]
Dr. Michael Ward
But the place where he goes into the greatest detail on this topic is his book the Abolition of Man. The Abolition of man was originally three philosophical lectures that Lewis delivered in the early 1940s, and it's now generally acknowledged as one of his most powerful and influential works. Both the National Review and the Intercollegiate Review have listed the Abolition of man among the 10 best non fiction books of the 20th century century. My own book, After Humanity, is a guide to the Abolition of Man. Abolition grew out of those early academic lectures that Lewis gave in Oxford at the start of his career when he spoke about the good, its position among the values, and he chose to give his book the title the Abolition of Man because if you don't, or won't, or possibly even can't see that value is objective, shining by its own light, you show yourself to be other than human because this is our moral inheritance as a human species. You negate your own humanity if you pretend that fundamental morality could be otherwise than it is. So Lewis's argument here boils down to a claim in philosophical anthropology. What makes us all human beings, he says, is this awareness of certain irrefutable axiomatic moral truths, which he calls the first principles of practical reason, or, borrowing a word from Chinese philosophy, the dao dao, meaning way. He chooses this term as his summary term for the basic principles of good and evil, not because he has any special interest in confucius and Chinese philosophy, but to remind his readers that what he's talking about isn't confined to Christianity, isn't confined to the West. No, he's talking about something which is much more elemental, something that all peoples in all times and in all places, have some grasp of. And in saying this, we've moved over from the first point to the second point of this talk. We've shifted from saying that moral value is objective to saying that moral value is universally recognized as objective. All cultures exhibit some awareness of this reality, Lewis argues, and so he's happy to quote, alongside the Chinese philosophy of Confucius, a wide array of authorities in defense of his claim. He quotes Plato, he quotes Aristotle, Jesus, St. Paul, John Locke, the poet Shelley, and many others. A diverse chorus of voices indicating that, yes, the human family is a real family with certain core values in common. It's something of a melee at times, like any family, but it's still united at its root. To try and insist that moral value isn't objective, but is merely a subjective preference would be to withdraw oneself from a tradition of human wisdom that can be found down through history and in every corner of the globe. By the way, when he mentions Jesus among these other human teachers, he's doing so because he sees a great degree of overlap between Jesus teaching and the moral traditions you find in other religions. The really distinctive thing about Jesus is not his teaching, but his person and his divine office. In the appendix to the Abolition of Man, Lewis lists eight key moral laws, such as the duty of special beneficence, the duty of general beneficence, duty to ancestors and elders, duty to children and posterity, the law of justice, and several others. And in support of each of these moral laws, he cites authorities drawn from all across the world's cultures. Babylonian, Hindu, Jewish, Egyptian, Aboriginal, Australian, Native American, Greek, Roman, Christian, and others besides. In order to drive home his point that the objectivity of moral value is recognized the world over, he admits readily that by lumping together the traditional moralities of east and west, the Christian, the pagan, and the Jewish, we will find many contradictions, even some absurdities. But his claim is not that all traditions of morality coincide on every point, only that they all agree on the objectivity of value. But although there is such widespread evidence to support the claim that the objectivity of moral value is universally recognized, there are still some people who claim, or try to claim otherwise, who want to argue that value is just a projection, just a subjective preference, a private whim. You have your truth, I have my truth. These are subjectivists, emotivists, positivists. They come under many headings. But the interesting thing is that though these people deny that value is objective, they simultaneously try to make out that their denial of objective value is something objectively valuable. They say there is no objective truth, except the truth that there is no objective truth. Point out that even subjectivists recognize objective value and they get squirmy because they then have to be a bit more consistent. When you go to a subjectivist and say how nice, how charming that you feel that objective value is merely subjective, they become irritated. They want their statement to be taken seriously. But if what they're saying is true, it can't be taken seriously because it cuts its own throat. In other words, it's very hard to live a human life as a thoroughgoing subjectivist. You can make a philosophical career out of it. You can write books about it, you can teach courses on it. But if you look at how subjectivists in theory live in practice, they are usually better than their principles. Lewis says the people who are most successful at being subjectivists, who are most consistent, are to be found, alas, mostly in prisons and in lunatic asylums. Because those who step outside the dao, those who withdraw themselves from this moral ecology that surrounds all human beings, well, they've stepped outside the human community by definition, because it's only within the dao, within the framework of practical reason, that human beings can make rational moral choices. Outside that framework, the only basis for moral decision making is fundamentally sheer willpower, but a willpower that is essentially irrational, not sustained by the intrinsic rationality of the dao. Rather, it's motivated by momentary fugitive impulses, impulses that depend on the weather, your digestion, momentary passing passion or random association of ideas. And these impulses are all, by definition, not reasonable. They are irrational. The embrace of the will to power was a growing tendency in Lewis's day. Remember, he gave these lectures during the Second World War. But we mustn't assume that he's only attacking the power hungry Nazis who are trying to overrun Europe. Nor is he just attacking the Italian fascists who were allied with the Nazis. He also has in mind Britain's own ally, Russia, Communist Russia. But also, more significantly, this is where the rubber hits the road, Britain itself. Because there were then and there still are now plenty of people, even in stable, tolerant, democratic England, who are fine with this irrational subjectivist philosophy. Lewis points out that subjectivism is on the march among our allies and among our own people, as well as among our Enemies, so he says. The methods may at first differ in brutality, but many a mild eyed scientist in Pince Ney, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. The mild eyed scientist is probably meant to suggest Sigmund Freud. The popular dramatist is George Bernard Shaw. And the amateur philosopher in our midst is AJ Ayer, a prominent figure in the field of logical positivism, which is one of Lewis's principal philosophical targets here. It's very interesting, I think, that Lewis clumps together communism and fascism with democracy in the warning that he gives because what he's talking about is not peculiar to totalitarian dictatorships and there's no room for complacency even in a well established democracy. A democracy only tells you where the power is located, it doesn't tell you how the power will be used. And if power is considered the only valuable thing rather than a way of helping to bring about the value of goodness, well, who has the power becomes the all important issue, might becomes right, and ethical questions evaporate into the purely practical and political. Who has their hands on the levers of power becomes the only question worth asking. And even that question is not worth asking for very long. Your side may gain power, but if your side is not constrained by a belief in objective value, it won't be long before your side becomes very unreliable and eventually unrecognisable. Think of George Orwell's famous allegory about Russian Communism, Animal Farm, a book which Lewis admired greatly. All the animals rise up and overthrow the wicked human beings who run the farm. And the animals trust some of their number. They trust the pigs to run the farm for them and to run it better than the wicked old humans had been doing. And for a while it looks like the revolution has worked. But gradually things turn sour. The story ends with the bitter realization that the pigs are no better than the humans. And here I'm. There was no question now what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures looked from pig to man and from man to pig and from pig to man again. But already it was impossible to say which was which. In other words, the pigs have been interested only in acquiring power for themselves, not in using power to further objective value, objective goodness. They therefore turn out to be just as wicked as the people they've ejected from power. The only solution to this problem, Lewis says, is dogmatic belief in objective value. For this is a belief necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery. Only. The dao, he says, provides a common human law of action which can overarch rulers and ruled alike. So we've seen that moral value is objective. It's universally recognized as objective. And if we give up on that universal recognition, we're on a short road to prison, to madness, to tyranny, to slavery. Now thirdly, and more briefly, moral value is something to be practiced, to be lived into, to be participated in. One of the most important lines in the abolition of man comes when Lewis describes the dao as the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human. Lewis says this because of his belief that the dao is not an inert system of thought, but rather a vital matrix of goodness, a way of life, indeed, the way of all moral life. Another name for the dao is practical reason. And the adjective practical is not accidental. This kind of reasoning is a practice. It's not just a theory. It's more like a muscle than an idea. If you want strength, you must exercise. If you want to be moral, you must try to be moral. You can't just think about it. You've got to do it. It's not enough to just talk a good game. You've got to walk the talk. A good philosopher may know about the dao, but a good person knows it from within. And that's why character formation is a prerequisite for sound and wise development in moral understanding. We mature into the dao as our parents and pedagogues and pastors and priests and politicians and public figures all model for us what it means to be moral. For Lewis, the dao is a road of active adventure in the drama of character, a drama that features uniquely valuable and valuing individuals, each of whom has a peculiar and important part to play. Moral action isn't understood according to rigid categories of formal concepts and regularities. It's dynamic. It's dangerous, even. It's more like a river than a roster. One becomes good not by assenting to ideas, but by heroically actualizing one's identity as either courageous or not, either chaste or not, either honest or not. It's sometimes assumed that in arguing for the objectivity of value and against subjectivism, Lewis is denying any role for subjectivity. But this he is careful to avoid because it would reinforce the division between subject and object, the division between value and fact, divisions which have contributed to the rise of subjectivism in the first place, the very rise of subjectivism. My values in the last hundred years or so can be seen as a reaction against an absolutism. The facts, as if facts and values are utterly incommensurable. Lewis acknowledges that we are subjects, necessarily individuals, with our own personal perspective on things. But there is also objective value, and we can come to know it better or worse, as the case may be. As he writes in one of the Narnia Chronicles, what you see and hear depends a great deal on where you're standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are. So we've seen that moral value is objective, that value is universally held to be objective, at least for as long as we wish to remain human, and that value is something we all participate in or should participate in. And all this Lewis has argued for on purely philosophical grounds. He's rested none of his arguments in the Abolition of man theology, let alone on specifically Christian theology. But of course, Lewis was a Christian, and he considered this philosophical understanding of good and evil to be entirely consistent with Christianity because it's a basic tenet of Christian theology that God has created humanity in his own image and therefore with a moral nature, with a conscience, with the ability to distinguish good from evil, right from wrong. In other words, we are morally responsible beings. But what happens when we make the wrong choice, when we err, when we sin? What does Lewis have to say about getting back on the right road after we've left it? Well, that brings us to the subject of our next lecture, Christ and Conversion.
- [38:17]
Juan Davalos
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. If you want to continue learning, please visit Hillsdale. Edu Course. There you will find over 40 free online courses, including Ancient Christianity, the Genesis Story, Classic Children's Literature, and many more. The courses include additional readings, study guides, fully produced videos and and you can chat with your fellow students on a dedicated forum. Upon completing a course, you will also get a certificate. All our courses are free because we believe that what you'll learn will enrich your life and that a virtuous citizen is the best defense for liberty. So pursue the education necessary for freedom and happiness at Hillsdale. Edu coursetoday. That's Hillsdale Edu Course. Thanks for listening.
- [39:05]
Dr. Michael Ward
Sat.