Miracles


 


Now, I really like C.S. Lewis. More than just his fiction, which is beautifully done, his brand of Christianity has room not only for the world but for the imagination. It's humanistic in all the best senses of the term.
Which is why I didn't expect that listening to his Miracles in the car would have me slamming the dashboard and shouting "No, no NO!" hard enough for other drivers to hear.

There is, of course, a problem with apologists: instead of using the tools of reason, logic and thought and following them wherever they may lead, the apologist knows the conclusion he or she wants, and rummages around trying to find the devices that will get him or her there. There will almost inevitably be a few strange angles and loops in the pipes.There's Aquinas, of whom I stand in complete awe, because his arguments, even if wrong headed and hewing to much to the dictates of the church, are still majestic constructions, but there are few in history like him.

Lewis is not a philosopher and neither am I. However, since started getting ambitious about writing this blog, I've been getting more and more sensitive to bad, clumsy, lazy and dishonest thinking. It causes my to yell at my tape player far too much, but there you have it.
Lewis is not bad or lazy, but he's often clumsy, and some of the tricks he pulls smack of dishonesty, much though it pains me. There's also some very good stuff, great metaphors and trenchant observations, real insights.
What I really wanted to do is sit down and annotate a copy of Miracles and put it up here. I know the C.S.Lewis co. (the actual name of the estate) would never let me do it in a million years, so I didn't ask. Lewis plunged into this with great enthusiasm, apparently thinking that he'd found some sparkling new ways to defend Christianity using the tools of philosophy. By and large, he dressed up old arguments in new tweed jackets--but that makes the book interesting. Miracles is not a ponderous tract, lumbering from point to point: Lewis keeps throwing in interesting arguments and illustrations, and even while I'm thumping and shouting, I get somewhere by poking it apart. What It really makes me want to do is sit down with ol' Jack and go over the book with him as if I were Tolkien or Owen Barfield , and make him rewrite it.
Since neither of these things are going to happen, I'm going to make a couple of generalized comments based on my reaction to the beginning of the tome itself, stuff that should make sense even if you aren't going to read the book. (I have no desire, none, to write my own book on miracles.)

One of Lewis's biggest sins is that old Aristotelian trap of the excluded middle. He starts out intent on blowing a hole in the common anti-religious world-view of his time, the view of the Universe as a big machine running by natural laws, with no God and no need of one. He calls the one alternative the Naturalist view and the other the Supernaturalist view.
And there's the problem right there. Comfortable with that division, he blows some holes in the Naturalist view, that then, of course, mean bonus points for the other side. And that's just kind of cheesy and maybe even dishonest, especially when the hits he scores against the Naturalist position depend on a narrow formulation of that position. To wit: he uses the fact that human thought exists including human consciousness, as a convincing proof that the universe is not just a big watch. I agree with him completely that human consciousness is a strange and wondrous thing that seems to be as irreducible as Time or Space--but he doesn't admit of the possibility that Nature can be a machine that includes thinking as part of its works, and certainly doesn't prove it's impossible. (I should note that this was written in 1949, when quantum mechanics hadn't yet filtered its way out of the physics departments into popular thought, and cybernetics even less so. Today, materialists/scientalists readily admit that the big watch has some mighty strange gears in it, and they're no longer scared by the word 'thought' simply (and illegitimately) substituting the word 'program'.)
He then turns around and makes a really good etiological point that there's really no necessity that laws should continue to work, and that since all the laws of nature are discovered by induction, there's absolutely nothing that says these laws can't either a) be violated or b) turn out to be a special case. (The questions I ask when I want to stop the usual science-based atheistic pomposity are ones like "Why is there natural law?" or "Why does chance work the way it does?" The questions are not ones science is equipped to answer by its very nature, and Lewis makes the point well.)
All this time Lewis is trying to prove the existence of God. He sings and he dances, but what he comes up with is the old First Cause argument, which tends to excite nobody. The problem is, he talks about the absurdity of 'a Creation without a Creator" and making a jump outside the mechanistic system of nature, and it sounds like God the Father has shown up. I don't think he's being dishonest here, but deliberately careless? Maybe.
One example, though, of a dishonest argument, I think, is when he takes on the problem that people have with the immense size of the universe, with a hundred million galaxies with a hundred million stars in each, give or take. He points out that folks from Ptolemy and Alfred the Great on down have mentioned how unbelievably huge the heavens are. So what's the big deal? It's completely disingenuous to leave out the part that called Galileo on the carpet and burned Giordano Bruno at the stake: the immense size of the universe and our position in it. You know, in a not-particulatly special portion of the fringes of a not particularly special galaxy. That part. C'mon, Jack: if the universe is rilly rilly big and you're at the center of it, it doesn't tend to give problems to the ego: quite the contrary. Lewis's deliberate omission here made me feel I was being conned.
And then he makes the wonderful, insightful comment that someone who looks at the immensity of the universe and begins to have problems with believing in God is probably having their first genuine religious thought.

One of the things I realized in listening to the book is that Lewis is in the same position I am: doing amateur philosophy (which, as I've said before, is less of a contradiction than a redundancy.) We're both trying to handle Big Questions without the systematic knowledge and specialized tools a member of a university philosophy department would have. It's perilous in that we tend to replace rigor with insight, and a well turned phrase for a strong argument and both of us (Lewis with his immense popularity, I with my near-total obscurity) can go on for quite a while before somebody stops us.

The big difference is that he's an apologist and I'm feeling my way around in the fog.

He's a bit of a pleasant surprise as an apologist, for someone used to Scholastics, Jesuits, and the dark bellowing Calvinism of fundie America: he has no problem with spiritual wisdom and power coming from somewhere outside the Church; and he doesn't balk at life on other planets and the possibility of a hundred trillion Redemptions taking place, or (no surprise to anyone who's read his Perelandra ) planets where the Fall never took place. It's an open Christianity--probably the only one he could have connected with--and a pleasure where so many others give a cramped sort of pain.

Still, it was a good thing for me that the previous book I had read (in my random walk through the noösphere) was the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda . Once you get beyond the effort to argue for a world including spirit at all, Lewis talks (eloquently) about story--specifically, the Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension (let's not forget the Ascension!) of Jesus Christ as the central Story of the universe et. al. All spiritual events are reflections of it, prefiguration or postfiguration. And perhaps the strange thing is, after all the effort to justify miracles, he ends up, really, with only one.

By comparison, the world of Yogananda does not resemble the Gospels so much as the Marvel Universe: oodles and oodles of divine beings showing up, performing miracles, vanishing, showing up elsewhere in a spaghetti bowl of storylines. Yogananda late in the book makes contact with jesus and they trade divine sublimities and good vibrations, and (so sue me) it felt more like a Superman/Spider-man crossover than anything else.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...

But to make this more than just a book report, the problem that many people who, for whatever reason or unreason, believe in Spirit in some way have with Christianity, is that its miracles are so narrow. In previous times the universal dogma was that any miracle (or hemidemisemimiracle) that was not performed by Christ or an officially sanctioned subsidiary was the work of Satan's demons, and you'd better watch out or bam! You're Joan of Arc on a spit.
From a modern perspective, it seems particularly strange that Christians seek to expand the world from its physicality only to condense it to a point. It becomes all the more unappetizing when, as the centuries go by, the bright world of the spirit becomes more and more exclusive, distant, and unobtainable. The further we go, the more Christianity's One Miracle seems to get eaten away. Christ's own preachings say that those who live righteously, help their fellows and love God all go to the kingdom of Heaven. Then it gets smaller and more exclusive until we have the frankly repulsive Calvinist tenet that Christ did not die to save all humankind but only the elect. The pressure of religion has seemed to be a smaller and smaller miracle, for fewer and fewer people. It has seemed to me to be perhaps the greatest blasphemy for much of Christianity to stand up and say "Surprise! Everybody gets to go to Heaven!" I'm pretty sure there's a lot of people who would be highly offended at such a turn of events.

It's one of the driving forces behind the New Age movement--and why the fundies hate it so. There's much fatuous goofiness in the New Age--but there's one message that resonates with so many people: the idea that the spiritual world is big, diverse, complex, and multiple. Y'know, like the universe. And it's that expansiveness that Lewis shares with those folks. Lewis clearly loves complexity, diversity and broad horizons. He's satisfied to eschew the narrow view for the broader, while he points out the underlying unity of it all--something Yogananda would agree with in a heartbeat. He gives that unity a name: Christ.

It's that wide view of reality that makes Lewis so appealing--which makes it poignant that he has such a difficult time supporting it.

But maybe that's as it should be. And maybe that's the point.

Posted: Monday - October 09, 2006 at 09:50 PM        

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