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Tag Archives: C.S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis: How to Spot a Truly Humble Person

06 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

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C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Humility, Mere Christianity, Pride, religion, sin

C.S. Lewis

“Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably, all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too.  At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed. […]

Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says, ‘Well done,’ are pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, ‘I have pleased him; all is well,’ to thinking, ‘What a fine person I must be to have done it.’ The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming. When you delight wholly in yourself and do not care about the praise at all, you have reached the bottom.”

__________

Excerpted from chapter 8 of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

More on the subject:

  • What Kipling’s “Recessional” can teach us about national hubris
  • A 79-year-old Ben Franklin summarizes his life advice: “Watch your head.”
  • Einstein’s eccentric and humble daily routine

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Remember the Signs

28 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

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belief, C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Fiction, literature, Narnia, novel, Prophecy, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Silver Chair

C. S. Lewis

“But first, remember, remember the signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from the following signs.

And secondly, I give you a warning. Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That it why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.”

__________

Excerpted from The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis.

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The Intoxicating Power of a Teacher Who Believes in You

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

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Art, beauty, C.S. Lewis, Character, Description, Donna Tartt, Ego, literature, Martin Amis, Mentors, novel, people, reading, Students, Superiority, Teachers, The Four Loves, The Secret History, Vladimir Nabokov, Writing

Donna Tartt

“It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent. I think that is because Julian himself was constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort. It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.

Now, of course, it would be easy for me to veer to the opposite extreme. I could say that the secret of Julian’s charm was that he latched on to young people who wanted to feel better than everybody else; that he had a strange gift for twisting feelings of inferiority into superiority and arrogance. I could also say that he did this not through altruistic motives but selfish ones, in order to fulfill some egotistic impulse of his own. And I could elaborate on this at some length and with, I believe, a fair degree of accuracy. But still that would not explain the fundamental magic of his personality…

It is similar to another remark made to me once by Georges Laforgue, on an occasion when I had been extolling Julian to the skies. ‘Julian,’ he said curtly, ‘will never be a scholar of the very first rate, and that is because he is only capable of seeing things on a selective basis.’

When I disagreed — strenuously — and asked what was wrong with focusing one’s entire attention on only two things, if those two things were Art and Beauty, Laforgue replied: ‘There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty — unless she is wed to something more meaningful — is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.’

It’s funny. In retelling these events, I have fought against a tendency to sentimentalize Julian, to make him seem very saintly — basically to falsify him — in order to make our veneration of him seem more explicable; to make it seem something more, in short, than my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good.”

Donna Tartt

__________

From Donna Tartt’s brilliant novel The Secret History.

For context: this reflection sets off History’s wistful denouement, as protagonist Richard Papen surveys the fragmentation of his college friends, all of whom had once coagulated around Julian, their charismatic classics professor at a New England liberal arts college.

In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis describes friendship as originating in that instant when one person says to another, “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…” So it has something to do with not being alone in the world, or not being so alone in the world, and the awareness that affinity is what ultimately spurs, in some sense, intimacy. This relational question applies to fiction as well, particularly in terms of whom within a story should be the ideal target of such a you too? epiphany. Nabokov’s advice for reading literature can be summarized in a single breath: In your progression through a novel, don’t try to identify with the story’s protagonist — try to identify with its author. Such challenging but sound counsel squares with the view — annexed from Martin Amis — that literature must be understood, not as communication, but as a means of communion. In other words, when you’re reading a book, you’re not just tracing a story arc or absorbing discreet facts about the world — you are communing in an immediate way with another person’s — the author’s — psyche.

Perhaps there is no more profound point in the course of reading a good book than when you snap out of full concentration on the text, fork the pages between your fingers, and look to the floor, thinking, “How’d [the author] know that about my life?” Sometimes this realization can alight on the ego, as you are reintroduced to a positive personal trait or pleasant memory that perhaps you’d forgotten. Though for me it more often comes in the form of an amused sense of incrimination, as I smirk and feel compelled to sigh something like, “I’ve been sized up. I’m busted.”

In the course of the two concluding pages from which the above excerpt is pulled, Donna Tartt coaxed this reaction from me a handful of times, most clearly in the initial evocation of teacher-spurred feelings of superiority (which brings a particular professor and mentor to mind) as well as the final thought in the final sentence, which I have learned can lead to very grave misjudgments about people you let into your life.

Read on:

  • I reviewed in one sentence every book I read last year
  • A short essay on why the novel is imperishable
  • Also from The Secret History, on the memory of adolescent friends

Donna Tartt

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C.S. Lewis Reflects on the Birds and the Bees

10 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

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C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Eros, friendship, God, Love, marriage, relationships, Romance, Romantic Love, sex, The Four Loves

C. S. Lewis

“When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass – may pass in the first half-hour – into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later. And conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship between the lovers. But this, so far from obliterating the distinction between the two loves, puts it in a clearer light. If one who was first, in the deep and full sense, your Friend, is then gradually or suddenly revealed as also your lover you will certainly not want to share the Beloved’s erotic love with any third. But you will have no jealousy at all about sharing the Friendship. Nothing so enriches an erotic love as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply, truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with the Friends you already had: to feel that not only are we two united by erotic love but we three or four or five are all traveller’s on the same quest, have all a common vision.

The co-existence of Friendship and Eros may also help some moderns to realise that Friendship is in reality a love, and even as great a love as Eros. Suppose you are fortunate enough to have ‘fallen in love with’ and married your Friend. And now suppose it possible that you were offered the choice of two futures: ‘Either you two will cease to be lovers but remain forever joint seekers of the same God, the same beauty, the same truth, or else, losing all that, you will retain as long as you live the raptures and ardours, all the wonder and the wild desire of Eros. Choose which you please.’ Which should we choose? Which choice should we not regret after we had made it?”

__________

C.S. Lewis, writing in The Four Loves.

More from Clive Staples:

  • How his conversion was catalyzed by the beauty of the gospel story
  • Why a mother’s work is the most important job of all
  • On what our earthly desires tell us about heaven

C. S. Lewis

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Does the Beauty of the Gospel Story Attest to Its Truth? (Einstein, C.S. Lewis, and Others Answer)

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 15 Comments

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Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, Alistair McGrath, beauty, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, C.S. Lewis, Caravaggio, Christian Apologetics, doubt, Faith, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, Julian Barnes, Luke, Mark, Matthew, Narrative, Nothing to Be Frighted Of, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, religion, Resurrection, Storytelling, The Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, the gospels, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Thomas Cahill, truth, Walter Isaacson

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio

Does the aesthetic splendor of the four Gospels, when considered like works of literature, emit the ineffable whiff of something genuine? Is there a patina of truth — truth endorsed by beauty — coating the Biblical account of the Nazarene? Cahill explained the concept; Einstein flirted with the idea; C.S. Lewis, through his buddy Tolkien, was converted by it; and Julian Barnes paid it some provocative thoughts. You can decide for yourself.

From the pen of Thomas Cahill, writing in his even-handed historical survey The Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus:

What especially makes the gospels — from a literary point of view — works like no others is that they are about a good human being. As every writer knows, such a creature is all but impossible to capture on the page, and there are exceedingly few figures in all literature who are both good and memorable. Yet the evangelists, who left no juvenilia behind them — no failed novels, rhythmless poems, or other early works by which we might judge their progress as writers — whose Greek was often odd or imprecise, and who were not practiced writers of any sort, these four succeeded where almost all others have failed. To a writer’s eyes, this feat is a miracle just short of raising the dead.

As retold in Walter Isaacson’s biography, Albert Einstein had grappled with the question, too:

Shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Einstein gave a remarkable interview in which he was more revealing than he had ever been about his religious thinking. It was with a pompous but ingratiating poet and propagandist named George Sylvester Viereck… For reasons not quite clear, Einstein assumed Viereck was Jewish…

Viereck began by asking Einstein whether he considered himself a German or a Jew. ‘It’s possible to be both,’ replied Einstein. ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.’

Should Jews try to assimilate? ‘We Jews have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies in order to conform.’

To what extent are you influenced by Christianity? ‘As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.’

You accept the historical existence of Jesus? ‘Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.’

In Alistair McGrath’s biography of C.S. Lewis, there is an account of how, ultimately, the great medievalist don was swayed after studying the Gospels according to J.R.R. Tolkien’s conception of them as “True Myths”.

To understand how Lewis passed from theism to Christianity, we need to reflect further on the ideas of J. R. R. Tolkien. For it was he, more than anyone else, who helped Lewis along in the final stage of what the medieval writer Bonaventure of Bagnoregio describes as the ‘journey of the mind to God.’…

Tolkien argued that Lewis ought to approach the New Testament with the same sense of imaginative openness and expectation that he brought to the reading of pagan myths in his professional studies. But, as Tolkien emphasized, there was a decisive difference. As Lewis expressed in his second letter to Greeves, ‘The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.‘

The reader must appreciate that the word myth is not being used here in the loose sense of a ‘fairy tale’ or the pejorative sense of a ‘deliberate lie told in order to deceive.’… For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys ‘fundamental things’—in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. They are like splintered fragments of the true light…

In his somberly comic study of mortality, Nothing to Be Frighted Of, Julian Barnes imagines a moment in which some unnamed future generation could look back and evaluate the history of the now-disappeared Christian religion:

It lasted also because it was a beautiful story, because the characters, the plot, the various coups de théâtre, the over-arching struggle between Good and Evil, made up a great novel. The story of Jesus—high-minded mission, facing-down of the oppressor, persecution, betrayal, execution, resurrection—is the perfect example of that formula Hollywood famously and furiously seeks: a tragedy with a happy ending. Reading the Bible as ‘literature,’ as that puckish old schoolmaster was trying to point out to us, is not a patch on reading the Bible as truth, the truth endorsed by beauty.

__________

The painting is Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602).

Explore on:

  • Eric Metaxas answers the droll question – Would Jesus be a Republican or a Democrat?
  • Lewis, Wittgenstein, and Updike address whether we can assume the existence of God
  • Cahill contrasts the Greek and Christian worldviews

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A Mother’s Work

26 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

C.S. Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis, home, letters, motherhood, mothers, parenthood, Sisyphus, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Work

C.S. Lewis by Arthur Strong

“I think I can understand that feeling about a mother’s work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rolling gentleman). But it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, miners, cars, government etc. exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr. Johnson said, ‘To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavor’. (1st to be happy to prepare for being happy in our own real home hereafter: 2nd in the meantime to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So the job of motherhood is the one for which all others exist…”

__________

C.S. Lewis, writing in a letter to a “Mrs. Johnson” on March 16th, 1955. This correspondence can be found in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume lll: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963.

As I was busy posting about the anniversary of Jack Kennedy’s assassination, I forgot to note two other events which November 22nd, 1963 also marks — the death of Clive Staples Lewis and the eleventh birthday of my mother, a reader of this blog.

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Updike, C. S. Lewis, and Wittgenstein: Can We Just Assume God Exists?

23 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Alvin Plantinga, Anthony Flew, Atheism, belief, C.S. Lewis, Cambridge, Faith, General Philosophy, God, Jim Holt, John Updike, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Metropolitan, Oxford, Philosophical Investigations, religion, science, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, theism, There Is a God, Whit Stillman

John Updike, Massachusetts, 1984; photographs by Dominique Nabokov

“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Perhaps there are two kinds of people: those for whom nothingness is no problem, and those for whom it is an insuperable problem, an outrageous cancellation rendering every other concern, from mismatching socks to nuclear holocaust, negligible. Tenacious of this terror, this adamant essence as crucial to us as our sexuality, we resist those kindly stoic consolers who assure us that we will outwear the fright, that we will grow numb and accepting and, as it were, religiously impotent. As Unamuno says, with the rhythms of a stubborn child, ‘I do not want to die – no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live forever and ever and ever. I want this ‘I’ to live – this poor ‘I’ that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now.’

The objections of material science and liberal ethics to this desperate wanting to belong to the outer, sunlit world, of sense and the senses; our wanting and its soothing belong to the elusive dark world within. Emerson, in Nature, points out ‘the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world’s being.’ Evidence of God’s being lies with that of our own; it is on our side of the total disparity that God lives. In the light, we disown Him, embarrassedly; in the dark, He is our only guarantor, our only shield against death. The impalpable self cries out to Him and wonders if it detects an answer. Like the inner of the two bonded strips of metal in a thermostat, the self curls against Him and presses. The need for our ‘I’ to have its ‘Thou,’ something other than ourselves yet sharing our subjectivity, something amplifying it indeed to the out rim of creation, survives all embarrassments, all silence, all refusals on either side. The sensation of silence cannot be helped: a loud and evident God would be a bully, an insecure tyrant, an all-crushing datum instead of, as He is, a bottomless encouragement to our faltering and frightened being. His answers come in the long run, as the large facts of our lives, strung on that thread running through all things. Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.

The thermostat image needs adjusting: God is a dark sphere enclosing the pinpoint of our selves, an adamant bubble enclosing us, protecting us, enabling us to let go, to ride the waves of what is.”

__________

From John Updike’s Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. No one writes with such self-assurance and style about the metaphysical headaches that plague anyone who honestly tries to find answers to The Big Questions. Updike brings to this task the same eye for detail and consummate precision that make his novels so distinct and so engrossing.

Still, there are some additional voices which may be worth bringing into this discussion about whether belief in the existence of God may be rightfully called ‘properly basic’ — that’s to say, whether it may be reflexively assumed by “the elusive dark world within”.

In Whit Stillman’s movie Metropolitan (1990), a scene at a posh Manhattan cocktail party kicks off with the following heady exchange between two of the film’s young protagonists:

Charlie Black: Of course there is a God. We all basically know there is.

Cynthia McLean: I know no such thing.

Charlie Black: Of course you do. When you think to yourself — and most of our waking life is taken up thinking to ourselves — you must have that feeling that your thoughts aren’t entirely wasted, that in some sense they are being heard. Rationally, they aren’t. You’re entirely alone. Even the people to whom we are closest can have no real idea of what is going on in our minds. We aren’t devastated by loneliness because, at a hardly conscious level, we don’t accept that we’re entirely alone. I think this sensation of being silently listened to with total comprehension — something you never find in real life — represents our innate belief in a supreme being, some all-comprehending intelligence.

When he was eighty-four, the renowned Oxford philosopher and lifelong atheist Anthony Flew wrote There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, a short treatise that justified his controversial late-life turn to theism. In it, he writes about a challenge made to one of his arguments for atheism:

By far, the headiest challenge to the argument [Flew’s ‘presumption of atheism’: the argument that the burden of proof is on the theist] came from America. The modal logician Alvin Plantinga introduced the idea that theism is a properly basic belief. He asserted that belief in God is similar to belief in other basic truths, such as belief in other minds or perception (seeing a tree) or memory (belief in the past). In al these instances, you trust your cognitive faculties, although you cannot prove the truth of the belief in question. Similarly, people take on certain propositions (e.g., the existence of the world) as basic and others as derivative from these basic propositions. Believers, it is argued, take the existence of God as a basic proposition.

Another great Oxford don, C.S. Lewis, provided a foundation for Plantinga’s theory in his 1945 lecture “Is Theology Poetry?”. This talk contains the following excerpt, which is widely acclaimed but often ignored or distorted by those who merely quote its final sentence:

This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience.

The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dream world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

While Lewis was making this speech at Oxford, Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself as resolute a skeptic as Flew and Lewis and Updike had once been, was at Cambridge compiling the text of his famed Philosophical Investigations, which contain the following affirmation of god as a properly basic belief:

A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their ‘belief’ an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could ‘convince someone that God exists’ by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such a way.

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the ‘existence of this being’, but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, — life can force this concept on us.

I have posted more from this work as well as some further reflections on in on it: Wittgenstein on God and Belief.

If you want to read more about Updike’s cosmology, check out his discussion of it in Jim Holt’s book Why Does the World Exist?:

John Updike

 The Universe Was Once Bounded in a Point the Size of a Period.

If you want some heavier and headier stuff, wade through a challenging section from Plantinga’s essay “Game Scientists Play”:

Alvin Plantinga Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame

Evolutionary Psychology and Christian Belief

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Sehnsucht

12 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

C.S. Lewis, Julian Barnes, language, Levels of Life, loss, Love

Julian Barnes“There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence. I remember my first visit to Paris in 1964; I was eighteen. Each day I did my cultural duty — galleries, museums, churches; I even bought the cheapest seat available at the Opéra Comique (and remember the impossible heat up there, the impossible sightlines, and the impossible-to-comprehend opera). I was lonely in the Métro, on the streets, and in the public parks where I would sit on a bench by myself reading a Sartre novel, which was probably about existential isolation. I was lonely even among those who befriended me. Remembering those weeks now, I realize that I never went upwards — the Eiffel Tower seemed an absurd, and absurdly popular, structure — but I did go down. I visited the Paris sewers, entering from somewhere near the Pont de l’Alma for a guided boat tour; and from the Place Denfert-Rochereau I descended into the catacombs, my candle lighting up the neat banks of femurs and solid cubes of skulls.

There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means ‘the longing for something’. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the ‘inconsolable longing’ in the human heart for ‘we know not what’. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something — or, in our case, for someone. Sehnsucht describes the first kind of loneliness. But the second kind comes from the opposite condition: the absence of a very specific someone. Not so much loneliness as her-lessness.”

__________

From the new book Levels of Lifeby Julian Barnes.

As any fairly consistent reader of this blog will know, one of the books I’ve enjoyed most recently has been Barnes’s meditation on mortality Nothing to Be Frightened Of. It’s an almost preternaturally honest and self-flagellating look at what death means to someone who doubts both the existence of a personal god and the prospect of an eternal life to come.

Nothing is a darkly philosophical examination of death, bearing all its considerable weight on the cerebellum. (And do your brain a favor by reading it.) But Levels, which Barnes wrote after experiencing the most intimate deprivation of his life, is a story of the heart. The text is part history, part literature, and part memoir — a memoir about the collision between what you know and what you feel when you have been devastated, when your knees have hit the earth, when you have been leveled by life. The final third of the book (that memoir part) is probably the heaviest piece of writing I’ve ever read. Yet its final two pages, and especially its closing thought, are somehow so spiritually resilient, even buoyant, that you’ll turn the final page, glance up, and feel reoriented somewhat positively towards existence.

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A Desire No Experience Can Satisfy

11 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

C.S. Lewis, desire, God, heaven, Mere Christianity, sin

C.S. Lewis

“The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.’

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of ‘Heaven’ ridiculous by saying they do not want ‘to spend eternity playing harps.’ The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”

__________

From Book III, Section 10in C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

The photograph was taken for Life Magazine in 1946, as Lewis wandered the countryside outside of his town, one of my favorite places in the world, Oxford, UK.

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Wittgenstein on God and Belief

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, belief, C.S. Lewis, Culture and Value, De Carne Christi, God, Is Theology Poetry?, language, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophische Untersuchungen, St. Augustine, Tertullian

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their ‘belief’ an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could ‘convince someone that God exists’ by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such a way.

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the ‘existence of this being’, but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, — life can force this concept on us.

It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation. Instruction in religious faith, therefore, would have to take the form of a portrayal, a description, of that system of reference, while at the same time being an appeal to conscience. And this combination would have to result in the pupil himself, of his own accord, passionately taking hold of the system of reference. It would be as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of my rescue until, of my own accord, or not at any rate led to it by my instructor, I ran to it and grasped it.

Suppose someone said: ‘What do you believe, Wittgenstein? Are you a sceptic? Do you know whether you will survive death?’ I would really, this is a fact, say ‘I can’t say. I don’t know’, because I haven’t any clear idea what I am saying when I am saying, ‘I don’t cease to exist.'”

__________

Excerpts from Culture and Value and Philosophical Investigations (3rd Edition). Two quotes to supplement Wittgenstein’s interpretation of religious conversion and the religious worldview:

“Credo quia absurdum.” (“I believe because it is absurd”)
Tertullian, De Carne Christi 

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?

In terms of the final paragraph, Wittgenstein’s answer is my favorite reply I’ve yet read to the question, “What do you think happens after death?”

I can’t say. I don’t know, because I haven’t any clear idea of what I am saying when I am saying, ‘I don’t cease to exist.’

Acute and essential. I can’t believe I’ve never thought of (or ever heard of) that line of reasoning.

Also, for a very condensed introduction to Wittgenstein’s fixation with objects and qualities, read the illustration below (from his dissection of Augustine’s theory of language in Philosophical Investigations).

“When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples; the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of the voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires…

Think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked ‘five red apples’. He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked ‘apples’, then he looks up the word ‘red’ in a table and finds a color sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers—I assume that he knows them by heart—up to the word ‘five’ and for each number he takes an apple of the same color as the sample out of the drawer.—It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words—’But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word “five”?’ Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.—But what is the meaning of the word ‘five’? No such thing was in question here, only how the word ‘five’ is used.”

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The Simplest Pattern

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Boethius, C.S. Lewis, desire, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Amis, Of Human Bondage, relationships, Saul Bellow, W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham

The following are two selections from W. Someset Maugham’s acclaimed and highly autobiographical novel, Of Human Bondage. Both passages describe the protagonist, Philip, as he is reflecting on the tension between his carnal desires — which lure him to the enticing yet disloyal waitress, Mildred — and his common sense, which quietly calls him to love the sensitive and sweet Norah Nesbitt. The second passage is the concluding paragraph of the book, and it ranks (along with Ulyssess, A Tale of Two Cities, The Great Gasby, The Road, A Midsummer Nights Dream, and a handful of others) as one of the finest closings to a story ever put to page. Enjoy:

____

“He went through an elaborate form of stamping his foot and walking about. Then he stood in front of the fire so that she should not resume her position. While she talked he thought that she was worth ten of Mildred; she amused him much more and was jollier to talk to; she was cleverer, and she had a much nicer nature. She was a good, brave, honest little woman; and Mildred, he thought bitterly, deserved none of these epithets. If he had any sense he would stick to Norah, she would make him much happier than he would ever be with Mildred: after all she loved him, and Mildred was only grateful for his help. But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved; and he yearned for Mildred with his whole soul. He would sooner have ten minutes with her than a whole afternoon with Norah, he prized one kiss of her cold lips more than all Norah could give him.

‘I can’t help myself,’ he thought. ‘I’ve just got her in my bones.’

He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with the one than happiness with the other.”

____

“He realised that he had deceived himself; it was no self-sacrifice that had driven him to think of marrying, but the desire for a wife and a home and love; and now that it all seemed to slip through his fingers he was seized with despair. He wanted all that more than anything in the world. What did he care for Spain and its cities, Cordova, Toledo, Leon; what to him were the pagodas of Burmah and the lagoons of South Sea Islands? America was here and now. It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. He put all that aside now with a gesture of impatience. He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slipped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life: had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.”

__________

From W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage.

Ever since I first heard it, I’ve liked the notion of “the consolations of philosophy”. Many thinkers, beginning with Boethius in the sixth century, have used this idea to encapsulate — and to an extent justify — the role of philosophy in the “everyday life” of man. Millennia later, Wittgenstein was only extending this epigram when he famously described philosophy as a form of therapy for maladaptive thinking.

And it is in that same way that I consider fiction a form of therapy for maladaptive feeling.

I won’t go into the typical, or perhaps even trite details of my personal life that have made these words of Maugham’s so immediately therapeutic, but I can say with complete certainty that their remedial powers are, at least for the moment, far greater than any of the head-banging, skull-scratching, and languid pacing that I’ve been doing over the past weeks.

A large part of literature’s emotionally sanative effects emanate from the fact that, when engrossed in a story, you are engaged in a form of vicarious living; and the person living this new life must share, to a greater or lesser extent, your same experiences and emotions, your thoughts and mental tendencies. There is no storytelling without this congruence between reader and character. A protagonist’s eyes are yours onto a new world, and when you identify with that character and that world, you are not only intertwined with another person — you’re engaged with that person’s psyche. For this reason, novelists are like companions, and your relationship with them begins, as C.S. Lewis noted about friendship, “at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”

As Martin Amis wrote in his memoir, about his close friend Saul Bellow,

I see Saul perhaps twice a year, and we call, and we write. But that accounts for only a fraction of the time I spend in his company. He is on the shelves, on the desk, he is all over the house, and always in the mood to talk. That’s what writing is, not communication but a means of communion. And here are the other writers who swirl around you, like friends, patient, intimate, sleeplessly accessible, over centuries. This is the definition of literature.

The allure and consolations of fiction emanate from this simple fact: you can replace “he” in that passage with the name of any novelist you like, and they’ll be, like old friends, always in the mood to talk. Today, Maugham is the one who’s in my ear.

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