Here's the second half of my current draft on C. S. Lewis's argument from desire. Let me know what you think.
C. S. Lewis’s argument from desire
is simple, yet potent because I have found this discontentment with the world
and the desire for something beyond it to be well-nigh universal: We have a desire for something that cannot be
satisfied by this world. But our hunger demonstrates that we need something
beyond this world.
 |
| Lewis, likely talking about the argument from desire |
Imbedded
in his comments on the theological virtue of hope, Lewis writes this:
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 within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
This
citation is embedded in Mere Christianity’s
section on our hope for Heaven to which I return below. But it is worth noting
from the outset, that joy and hope are pointers to God’s fulfillment.
In order to grasp
the progression of this argument, I will first outline that desire—and thus
pleasure—can be trusted as a good. Then I will fill out more fully the three
principal places that Lewis addresses the argument from desire. I conclude with an evaluation of this apologetic,
especially on the question of whether it delivers what it promises.
Pleasure comes from God
Before we see how Lewis unfolded this apologetic argument,
we must grasp what is implicit: for Lewis pleasure is ultimately good because it
ushers from a God who loves to give good gifts. This may strike us as
contradictory because almost every use of pleasure we see is against Christian
faith. Either Christian moralists warn us about money, sex, and power as things
that lure us away from God, or secular culture presents the argument that all
the best things are sinful.
Lewis moves in an
entirely different direction. Lewis is drawing on an older tradition, which he
does so effortlessly that the reader might miss how much scholarship lies in
the background of his satirical wit in the citation below. (Lewis always
carries his considerable scholarship lightly.) At any rate, this older
tradition tells us that God is the ultimate good. The first chapter of the book
of James (1:17) enunciates the connection between goodness and God quite
clearly: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down
from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of
turning.” Similarly, God is the source of beauty because God is beautiful, “And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us”
(Psalm 90:17). “From Zion, perfect in beauty, God shines forth” (Psalm
50:2). And beauty gives us pleasure. Therefore to know God is to experience
what is best and what is most pleasurable. Lewis sets this best in the mouth of
the tempter, Screwtape, as he talks about his adversary, God:
He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are “pleasures for evermore.” Ugh! I don't think He has the least inkling of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision. He's vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working, Everything has to be twisted before it's any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.
Implicit in that word twisted is Lewis’s understanding of evil
as a privation—that only good exists, and that evil is parasitic on good. As
Screwtape puts it: “Everything has to be twisted
before it’s any use to us.”
For
that reason, Lewis can argue that God can be food as we seek true pleasure, and
the truest pleasure of all, God Himself, or glory. This, in the famous triad of
Platonic transcendentals, Good, True, and Beautiful, is an apologetic for the
Beautiful. And beauty lures us. It is what we desire. It is what makes truth
interesting. In some ways, beauty—as a synonym for joy—constitutes the goal of
human life. As he phrases this in his magnificent sermon, “The Weight of Glory”
at Church of St Mary the Virgin,
Oxford, on 8 June 1942:
We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else that can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
Desire
leads to glory
As Lewis preaches his sermon,
“The Weight of Glory,” to a crowded congregation of Oxford undergraduates, he
describes his own discovery: At first he was shocked to find that great
Christian writers as different as Milton, Johnson, and Aquinas depicted
heavenly glory as approval by God. Lewis had rejected this previously as
simplistic, but when he took in this connection, he also resolved the relation
between desire and glory:
If I had rejected the authoritative and scriptural image of glory and stuck obstinately to the vague desire which was, at the outset, my only pointer to heaven, I could see no connection at all between that desire and the Christian promise. But now, having followed up what seemed puzzling and repellent in the sacred books, I find, to my great surprise, looking back, that connection is perfectly clear. Glory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed to reveal an element in that desire which I had not noticed…. welcome into the heart of all things. The door on which we had been knocking all our lives will open at last.
This longing for something greater leads us to desire its
consummation. In his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis argues that joy leads
us to glory. “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open
at last.” And “No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.” Our yearning for something more will be satisfied by God’s promise of heaven.
Conversely, to reject joy is to live in
hell, as
the Dwarf Ghost does in The Great Divorce
even when beckoned toward the joy of heaven by his wife on earth, Sara Smith,
who could “awaken all dead things of the universe into life” with her unmitigated joy. I will have more to say on heaven as the fulfillment
of human life in chapter nine; for now I am emphasizing the way this leads us
to God. It is in fact the direction this argument takes us.
Evaluation: The connection of
crisis
I offer myself as Exhibit A for engaging with this crisis. As
I searched for meaning in the first year of college, I knew at some level that there had to be more. There had to be
something beyond this material world. In Lewis I met a fellow discoverer.
This apologetic certainly
worked for me, but does this it work generally? Not if we believe this is a
logical, deductive argument. And sadly, I have often heard Lewis presented as
one more logical, evidentialist apologist. This is simply not his approach.
Instead, his apologetics are better seen this way: When Lewis described what he
was doing with Narnia, he steadfastly denied that these stories were
allegories, where each particular element had an exact meaning. Here I’m
thinking of Lewis’s own The Pilgrim’s
Regress, but even more of John Bunyan’s landmark The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the Pilgrim, Christian, meets the
Slough of Despair, which is not surprisingly about facing despair in the
Christian life. Or Lewis points to the giant who represents despair:
If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become like if there were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours. So in “Perelandra.” This works out a supposition. (“Suppose, even now, in some other planet there were a first couple undergoing the same that Adam and Eve underwent here, but successfully.”
Lewis is drawing then a supposition, not an allegory or
deductively logical argument. Indeed, as the citation above suggests, it is
based on imagination. If it is an apologetic argument, it is an imaginative
one. And I believe that makes it more powerful because it “baptizes” our
imagination, just as George MacDonald’s Phantastes
baptized Lewis’s imagination in February 1916.
Does this
apologetic work? It works for Lewis because of his formidable imagination. In
many ways, this is a literary more than philosophical argument. It is important
here to recall his preaching in that University chapel:
In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each of you—the secret that hurts to much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolesence….
This task—to open
up our latent desire for something more than this world has to offer—is one I
took up with a worship team in which we started with that beautiful Harold
Arlen tune with lyrics by E. Y. Harburg from the playbook of American movies, Somewhere Over the Rainbow:
Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream,
Really do come true.
We played the song to remind our congregation that Lewis was
right: we desire heaven almost as naturally as we breathe. It doesn’t even take
Scripture to evoke those thoughts. They lie close.
No comments:
Post a Comment