James E Hartley

C.S. Lewis and Progress

C. S. Lewis’ The Seeing Eye is a posthumous collection of otherwise not collected essays.

As always with such things, it is hard to review. If you step back and ask, “What unifies these essays?,” the honest answer is “Well, Lewis never put them in a collection of essays he made during his lifetime.” Not much of a hook there.

So, who buys a book like this? Presumably people who just can’t enough of Lewis. Should you read it? Yep—if you have read everything else he wrote and just can’t get enough of Lewis.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a bad book at all. There are some interesting essays in here; indeed, I didn’t detest any of the essays.

Lewis writes well; he is an easy person to read, which is presumably a part of his appeal. It is conversational writing, and not simply because many of his essays were originally talks he gave. It is one of those depressing facts of life that far too many people giving talks cannot manage a conversational style even when giving a talk. So, I found the book easy and thoughtful reading. Perfect for while having that second and third cup of coffee in the morning.

But, and here is the problem with the book, the best of this book is already embedded in The Abolition of Man. Indeed, parts of the book could have been labeled, “First drafts of material which will later be included in another book.” There are other essays which read like precursors to Lewis’ book on the Psalms. So, if you have read the other Lewis books and come to this one, do you learn anything new? Sort of. It is interesting to see familiar material presented in a new way.

Every now and then there is an interesting turn of phrase that stands out. (“Some people make allowances for local and temporary conditions in the speeches of Our Lord on a scale which really implies that God chose the time and place of the Incarnation very injudiciously.” “It may even be the duty of some Christians to be culture-sellers.”)

The good thing about reading a book like this is not really the book itself, but the idle speculation to which a book like this leads you. Halfway through that third cup of coffee, you finish an essay, stare out the window and start mulling.

For Example: What Exactly is Progress?

Lewis is hard on the Apostles of Progress, the charlatans who talk about Societal Evolution as if evolution always improves matters. But set aside Lewis’ specific target for a second, and wonder: suppose we wanted society to progress. What change would constitute progress?

The first instinct is to say that progress would be fixing things I don’t like about the society. But, that is a rather amusing answer. Does Society progress when it becomes more to my liking? That is rather egocentric of me. I am confusing “I like these things” with “A Society progresses when it has more of the things I like and it regresses when it has fewer of the things I like.” When did I become the standard for progress?

So, if we become a little less egocentric and say society progresses when it has more of the things people like me like, then it doesn’t sound quite so silly, but it still sounds weird. So, we modify it to say society progresses when it has more of the things Enlightened People like, which is a circular argument saying the same thing.

So, to get progress, we have to have something more abstract. Society progresses when it has more Liberty or Equality or Fraternity? Take the second one. As society becomes more equal, it makes progress on being more equal. Tautologically true. But “society progresses when it becomes more equal” just begs the question. Why is more equality progress? What enthroned equality as the progressive endpoint? Or Liberty? Or Fraternity? And again, we are back to the idea that society progresses when people like me like the society more.

In the absence of something outside myself establishing the goal, I am not sure what Progress means.

Does theism get around the problem? Does Society progress when God likes it more? That gets us into all sorts of theological problems. Is God’s goal for this society to improve until it hits an eschatological end? Does Society progress when it gets more like Heaven and regress when it gets less like Heaven?

If the world ends in fire and condemnation, which the New Testament seems to suggest it does, is it progress to get closer or further away from condemnation? There seem to be a slide here from the idea of progress as found in Pilgrim’s Progress and the idea of a society progressing by…what? What are the rules to measure the progress of a society?

The very term “progress” implies a goal which society is either moving toward or not. Without a stated goal, it is a meaningless term. Calling someone “progressive” sure sounds like a compliment, but surely it matters to what end they are progressing. When you frame it that way, you realize that every act of progress toward one goal is simultaneously an act of regress from the opposite goal. There is no such thing as progress in the abstract. We spend too much time talking about progress and not enough time establishing what the goal is to which the progress is occurring.

And that is where I get stuck. As soon as you try to articulate the goal toward which a society is progressing when people talk about “societal progress” it gets rather messy. I suspect if the goals were stated more clearly, it would be less attractive to talk about progress. I suspect that the very idea of “progress” is just a mask for some very muddled thinking.

I’ve been puzzling over this for a while now, which is of course the sign of a good book. At best, Lewis only hints at any of this. I have no idea if he would even recognize these ruminations as related to the essays he wrote. Then again, I am certain Lewis would not really mind about the topic as long as he knew his essays set my mind wandering.

Our Socialist Moment

Is what divides us greater than what unites us? If you pay attention to the popular narrative of the day, then the answer sure seems to be an unqualified “Yes.”

If that is your answer, then Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a book just for you.

North and South. Originally published in the 1850s.

Some things really don’t ever change

The 1850s were, to put it mildly, a tempestuous time in Europe. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. The complaints were loud: the rich capitalists were appropriating more and more wealth for themselves while the poor working class was getting less and less, living in misery. Democracy was a sham, as the government was simply a tool for the rich to impose their will on the majority.

Sound familiar?

The next time someone tells you how bad things are in modern society, ask if they were better or worse in 1850. And, remember: the rhetoric of the 1850s frequently tipped into bloodshed.

Gaskell walked into the middle of that battlefield, held her head erect, and tried to stare down the warring sides. She did this by writing a novel. A Victorian novel.

It has the frame of a love story. (Obviously—this is a Victorian novel, after all.) Woman from the rural South meets man from industrial North. You instantly know they will get married in the end. They, of course, do not know this until the end.

You have read that plot a million times, so the joy in a novel like this is not the shock of the ending, but the artistry of the story telling.

How does Gaskell’s artistry rate? Well, this isn’t Pride and Prejudice. But then nothing else is Pride and Prejudice. Setting that comparison aside, North and South is really good. If you want to slip into the cozy world of a Victorian novel, and you aren’t in the mood for the charming nature of Dickens, then this novel is perfect.

But, it is not the romance that sets this novel so far apart from its obvious relations. It is the statement on the relationship between the capitalists and the proletariat.

Margaret Hale, our heroine, moves with her parents from a pleasant little rural town in the south to the burgeoning industrial town of Milton in the North. There she meets two people who will frame the story.

Thornton (our hero) is the factory owner, who rose up from humble origins to wealth and position. Higgins, the poor working man, is a widower struggling to earn enough to keep body and soul together. He has an incredibly charming but very sick daughter who, of course you know this instantly, is destined to die in the middle of the novel.

If you imagine reading this novel in 1850, the question the novel must solve is obvious. Will Margaret side with the capitalists or the proletariat? Obviously, she has to pick a side.

The novel was originally published in serial form in Dickens’ own journal, Household Words, so there really was no doubt which side would win out. After all, Dickens is always on Team Proletariat.

The moment of crisis comes. A strike. The union flexes its muscle to protest the capitalists cutting the wages of the working men. Behind closed doors, the capitalists are being hurt by a fall in the prices of the goods they sell, so they no longer can afford the wages they had been paying. (The economic details on all this are a bit, shall we say, sketchy, but we are left with no doubt that the owners really do have to cut the wages.) Of course the capitalists don’t feel any need to explain these market forces to the workers, so they just come across as cold-hearted.

The strike turns violent. Well, a little bit violent. A few rocks are thrown. The capitalists hold out. Irish scabs are brought in. The union breaks. Higgins’ neighbor, who was quite active in the strike, ends up killing himself in despair. Higgins’ neighbor’s wife soon follows. The orphaned kids are farmed out to neighbors. Strike over. Workers beg to get their jobs back.

Victory for the capitalists? Nope. The strike amplified Thornton’s financial problems and so he goes broke.

Who wins? Nobody.

But, along the way, Thornton and Higgins discover something really important. They detest each other, but they both admire our Heroine. And they both realize that if Margaret likes the other one, then maybe, they can, you know, talk with each other. And when they start talking to one another, they realize that they actually have a lot in common. Maybe they should, you know, work together instead of being constantly opposed to one another.

Next thing you know, Thornton has built a dining hall for his workers and occasionally has lunch with them. His business fails anyway.

But, Thornton has a new plan; why not try out new ways of organizing a factory in which the employees and the employers work together? We never learn the details of these possible future “experiments,” but we are left with every expectation that the trial and error of this new way of manufacturing will prove every bit as blissful as the marriage of Margaret and Thornton.

Elizabeth Gaskell thus did something amazing. In Dickens’ very own publication, she argued that in the great class conflict of the day, in the face of the division between the rich employer and the poor workers, conflict hurts everybody.

Just like the conflict between Thornton and Margaret masked the fact that they really did belong together, the conflict between the factory owners and the workers masked the fact that they too need each other. What unites them is vastly bigger than what divides them.

I almost closed by saying: We need a new North and South for today.

But, then I realized, we already have it. Elizabeth Gaskell already wrote the North and South for today. So, the next time you start thinking there are unrepairable divisions and conflicts in society, read it.

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Finding Joy in Great Books

Let’s start by getting this out of the way: The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky is a Great Book (you also knew that).

Not only is it Great, it is perhaps the Greatest Novel Ever Written. I think its only competitors for that status are Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch. Maybe War and Peace.

After reading it 4 or 5 times, I still find it brilliant from beginning to end, gripping, thoughtful, and amazingly fun to read. Everything you could possibly want in a novel. If you have never read it, do so. You won’t regret it. Get the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. (Unless you can read Russian, in which case get the original.)

So, what does one write about the Greatest Novel Ever Written? The problem here is not a paucity of things to say, but a surfeit of topics. Pick a page and start your mind wandering—it will go interesting places.

So, let’s take the very end:

“Well, and now let’s end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don’t be disturbed that we will be eating pancakes. It’s an ancient, eternal thing, and there is good in that, too,” laughed Alyosha. “Well, let’s go! And we go like this now, hand in hand.”
“And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya cried once more ecstatically, and once more all the boys joined in his exclamation.

Eating pancakes. At the end of a novel exploring the deepest philosophical matters which have occupied the mind of man, the eternal, ancient questions, they head off to eat pancakes at a memorial dinner. Pancakes. Simple, basic pancakes.

I was thinking about those pancakes when I read an essay by C.S. Lewis: “Christianity and Literature” (reprinted in The Seeing Eye). The essay itself is a bit of a mess—Lewis is trying to figure out how Christianity and Literature connect, and his answers are tentative and terribly unsatisfying. But he made the following observation toward the end which startled me with its relationship to those pancakes I had been pondering.

The Christian will take literature a little less seriously than the cultured Pagan: he will feel less uneasy with a purely hedonistic standard for at least many kinds of works.

Lewis’ reasoning leading to this conclusion is a bit wobbly. (“The unbeliever is always apt to make a kind of religion of his aesthetic experience” while the Christian knows his aesthetic experiences are not as important as the salvation of mankind, so things like literature are smaller and thus easier to simply enjoy. Like I said, wobbly.)

But, set Lewis’ reasoning aside and just think about the premise: how seriously should we take literature?

An aside before getting back to Dostoevsky. I teach courses using Great Books at Mount Holyoke whenever I can figure out a way to sneak one into the curriculum. To say these courses are not popular with my colleagues in the Humanities would be an understatement. Their (my colleagues) principal complaint: here is an economist (insert tone of disgust) talking about…Literature or History or Philosophy. What could I possibly know about…Literature? Surely I don’t know enough Theory (said in hushed reverent tones) to be competent in discussing Literature.

To which complaints, I invariably laugh and point out that Shakespeare was Great long before Derrida showed up to tell us how to take apart Shakespeare and find a nothing but a mirror for the obsession of the day of the 21^stcentury academic. Surely, we can all just read Shakespeare and, you know, enjoy him. Surely enjoyment is part of the point of Great Books. My colleagues in the Humanities find me utterly incomprehensible when I say things like this.

Lewis again: “It thus may come about that Christian views on literature will strike the world as shallow and flippant.” There is no doubt that “shallow and flippant” is exactly how my colleagues in the Humanities see my views on teaching Great Books.

The serendipitous shock I had on reading Lewis’ essay: this was exactly why I thought that pancake passage is so fascinating.

Fyodor! You just wrote The Greatest Novel Ever and you end by having your hero wander off to have pancakes with some kids?? After all the talk of Life and God and Meaning, you end your novel with pancakes?

Which is, of course, exactly how I read Great Books—they are Great, Amazing, Worth Reading, Deep, Profound, Insightful, Etc., Etc., Etc.—but after setting them down, I go on with my life. I don’t read Great Books Seriously; I read them for pleasure, including the pleasure of thinking thoughts I have never before thought and ruminating on unanswerable questions and learning new things. And all that Learning is Important, Very Important, not because it is Serious, but because it is Joyful.

That is exactly what I try to teach whenever I am teaching a course or giving a lecture (or, come to think of it, writing a blog post): this book is Awesome because reading it will bring you Joy.

It is a message far too few teachers seem to understand. I cannot think of anything more dreary that taking a positively amazing novel like The Brothers Karamazov and dissecting it according to the Dictates of Theory. Give me the genuine human reaction to a book every time, give me the sense of rapturous joy or utter disgust with the argument, the parts that make you weep or cry, the shocks and twists, the parts that caused you to stop and just stare into space for half an hour—tell me about these things.

And as we talk about those things we will learn something worth learning. And then we will go eat pancakes and enjoy a pleasant conversation over a meal. An ancient and eternal practice there. To remember the dead, the past, and simultaneously take joy in the present.

Hurrah for Karamazov! If this book has ever been taught and the students did not scream that at the end, then the teacher should be immediately removed from the classroom as a positive danger to mankind. Hurrah for Karamazov! Read The Brothers Karamazov and eat pancakes. That is about as good a recipe for the Good Life, the Life Worth Living, as I can imagine. Hurrah for Karamazov!

Jane Eyre is an Awful Book

Jane Eyre is absolutely the worst book which ever, for reasons I cannot fathom, ended up on anyone’s list of Great Books.

It is awful. Just awful.

Now that we have established that fact, perhaps you can help me solve a mystery.

I have talked about this book many times with students. I always have exactly the same experience. To take an example:

I once read the book with five amazing students (all women) in a tutorial. I told the students they should each pick a Great Book and we would read them and discuss them. Much to my horror, and I do mean horror, one of them picked Jane Eyre.

So, I read it again. (Yes, I merit a Great Professor Badge for subjecting myself to this book (again!) for the benefit of a set of students.)

Just to be clear: When I reread it, I hated it. All of it. Every single page of it.

Then we gathered to talk about it in the tutorial. Everyone else in the tutorial…loved…the book.

We start every tutorial with the simple question “What did you think about the book?” Such paroxysms of joy have ne’er been heard by mortal ears.

“Jane Eyre is a role model, a stunningly great example of womanhood and a daring, brave, courageous, independent woman.”

I would have thought that Jane Eyre was the woman being described in the brochures for Mount Holyoke from listening to the students in the tutorial. And all of them loved her. Loved her.

So, here I have a problem. Jane Eyre is often listed as a Great Book. Presumably, lots of people have read it for pleasure and profit for many years. Five bright, intelligent women in my tutorial loved the book. And I hate it. Something is wrong here.

Jane has got to be the most whiny protagonist ever.

I mentioned this in the tutorial. Everyone there told me I was wrong, that she isn’t whiny at all. I opened the book at random, read the first sentence—Jane was whining. I thought, “Aha!”

I was told she wasn’t whining in that sentence. I was stunned. How could nobody else in the room notice that this sentence I choose at random was an example of being whiny? Something is wrong here.

I then tried on Rochester—the guy is the least lovely romantic love interest ever. Oddly, they all agreed. I thought “Aha!”

I was then told it didn’t matter that Jane was in love with an Absolute Loser. The guy has his wife locked in an attic and Jane loves this guy? Yet, somehow, “Jane is still amazing.” How can this be? Something is wrong here.

And so on. For two hours, I made the case this book is terrible and for two hours I was told that I was wrong. Every inane, silly thing about the book simply didn’t matter.

Yes, the plot is contrived. But “Jane is still amazing.”

Yes, in the end she ends up playing the servant anyway. But “Jane is still amazingly independent.”

Yes, she didn’t really have that hard of a life. “But her cousins were really mean to her, and Jane is really amazing.”

On and on and on.

I have no idea what to make of this. Either I am wrong and this book does have merit or the rest of humanity is wrong and it is a really idiotic book, a half-penny romance novel masquerading as literature.

Just to be clear: I really hate this book.

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The Quest for Answers

During graduation weekend, I gave a talk encouraging the students to never cease asking the important questions in life. Questions like: Does your life have a purpose? What is a Good life?

A student stopped by the next day to talk about it. She was worried. How could she possibly ever find a definitive answer to hard questions like that?

My student’s question is an interesting one, but not for the reason she imagined.

In the final chapter of Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker, she makes a distinction between problems of the sort found in detective novels (of which she wrote some truly great ones, e.g., Gaudy Night) and “life-problems.”

She notes there are four characteristics of a detective mystery. People want to find these same characteristics in real life. But, “because we are accustomed to find them in the one, we look for them in the other, and experience a sense of frustration and resentment when we do not find them.”

The four characteristics:

1. The detective problem is always soluble.

2. The detective problem is completely soluble.

3. The detective problem is solved in the same terms in which it is set.

4. The detective problem is finite.

Sayers is entirely correct about detective problems. A mystery novel is completely unsatisfying if there is no solution, if there are loose, unexplained ends, if there is some deus ex machina needed to wrap the thing up, or if there is no finality. We like mystery novels exactly because they give this sense of completeness.

But, then when we turn to the problems of life, none of these things exist.

The answer to my student is quite simply that she may indeed never find a definitive answer to the important questions of life.

That does not mean, however, that she should not constantly strive to find those answers. The quest to find the answers matters.

Why should we spend our lives wrestling with overwhelming questions for which we may never find a satisfactory answer?

First of all, we don’t have a choice. Our minds seem to be built to be constantly peering into the unknown to learn just a little bit more. Our minds seem to be built to stare at the world in wonder. Our minds seem to be built in a way the leaves us asking, “Why am I here?”

But, perhaps more importantly, we need to think about the unanswerable questions because it is very important to constantly remind ourselves that is it perfectly OK if we don’t have it all figured out.

You see people all the time who try to wrap up all of life in a neat little ball, who have an answer to everything, who never want to say, “I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet.”

Such people, without really realizing what they have done, have set themselves up as a local deity, all knowing and all wise.

Sooner or later, however, the person who has it all figured out meets a question for which they do not and then what happens? The walls go up. The question is ruled out of bounds or trivialized or corrupted into something answerable.

Theology is far too often like that. When we contemplate God, should we ever expect to figure Him out?

You will never have all the answers. Acknowledge the existence of mystery. And then. never cease exploring that mystery even knowing you will never find all the answers.

Hopes About Eternity

Hope is one of those virtues about which we don’t often think. Somehow, it doesn’t even seem like a virtue.

We talk a lot about how to love more or be more faithful or trustworthy or just. But hope?

Indeed, it seems a bit strange to imagine encouraging people to have more hope. Hope is one of those things that silly optimists have, right?

Level headed realists and practical pessimists surely don’t need hope. Life is what it is. Life is a tragedy. Why do you want hope?

But, once you start thinking about it, you realize this: you do want hope. Indeed, you need hope. If you really believe that nothing good is on the horizon, then this world is a very poor place.

John Eldredge in All Things New wants to give you hope. Not just a small amount of hope, though. He wants to give you a massive, overwhelming, tear-inducing joyful kind of hope.

The book has a simple argument. It is one of those books that makes its argument by a long string of anecdotes, both real and literary. (Middle Earth and Narnia are frequently referenced.)

Eldredge’s argument begins with gospel of Matthew:

Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. (Matthew 19: 28-29, ESV)

“In the new world.” Or, as the NIV puts it: “At the renewal of all things.” Eldredge wants you to notice that life after death does not take place in Heaven. It takes place on the New Earth, with all things made new, all things renewed or restored.

From that observation, Eldredge spins a tale telling you how much you should be looking forward to, hoping for, that new world. So far, so good.

What is that new world going to be like? To hear Eldredge tell it, the new world is a super-amazing version of the current world. Think of your favorite spot on Earth and imagine going to that spot in the future when that spot is perfect.

You don’t have to imagine only spots you have been. You’ll get to go to every spot on earth in the infinite length of time in which you will live in that new earth. You can hear Eldredge on every single page saying, “It is going to be awesome.”

Will it? Not, “will it be awesome?” That question is easy. If the new Earth is going to exist in anything resembling the way Christian theology discusses, it will, by definition, be perfect.

Will it be the way Eldredge describes it? To hear Eldredge talking, the New Earth is like the greatest place imaginable to spend eternity hiking and camping. Lo and behold, Eldredge really likes hiking and camping. So, much of the book is Eldredge imagining a new world made exactly to his specifications. He is going to love it.

Late in the book, he lets everyone else know that even if they don’t want to go hiking and camping forever, there will also be great things they can do on the New Earth.

You can learn to play a musical instrument or listen to the most amazing people playing the most amazing songs ever. You can take classes with Aquinas and learn some theology. You can have Galileo teach you about astronomy. Lincoln can tell you stories about the Civil War. (Yes, those are really his examples.)

It all sounds really nice.

If you buy into it, then Eldredge has just given you hope, which is undoubtedly the reason Eldredge wrote the book. Not only will you be able to spend eternity with the people you love who are no longer living, but you will get to spend time with them doing all the things you really wanted to do with them here on earth if only they had lived a little longer. And, you will get to do those things in a more amazing version of the Earth than the one in which we currently live. It will be great. Stand firm, have hope, and someday this will all come.

But, is this true?

Here is where I get stuck. Will time and space exist in eternity? I have no idea.

If we accept the Christian narrative, then God created time and space when he created this world. Eldredge is reading Mathew 19 and the account in Revelation of Heaven and the New Earth as telling us that time and space do not pass away, that we continue to live in them forever.

Maybe that is true. Or, maybe that language is figurative, meant to convey to us that our future will be every bit as amazing as Eldredge imagines it to be, actually even better than Eldredge imagines it to be, but there are no words in human language to describe the reality of what we will experience. So, the language used in the Bible is there because it is as close as we can get in our language to describing that future reality.

Eldredge’s book is wonderful in reminding us to have hope. Life is painful; indeed, as Eldredge notes, if we are being honest, it is very, very painful. But, a future standing in the presence of Christ will be joyful.

All that is true. But, will that future be exactly the way Eldredge describes it? I still suspect it will actually be much better than this.