In this lecture Dr Shane Clifton looks at reviewing film by using Bernard Lonergan's eight functional specialities.
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[from C S Lewis’ ‘Notes on the Way’, Time and Tide, vol. XXIV (4 September 1943), p. 717]
Every now and then one stands and looks at oneself in the now as compared to what we have been in the past. Perhaps a photo falls out of a box, perhaps we meet an old friend after many years of separation, perhaps we have a conversation with someone younger who wakens in us a memory…. whatever the spur, we are left thinking, “this is me as I was, and I am because of that, but that is not what I am”.
C.S. Lewis tells of meeting a young man ready to go back to school and of his shock at finding that the young man was not entirely unhappy to be back in term. Indeed, Lewis was shocked to find himself shocked – and it drove him to consider what of his own schooling had contributed to the person he became.
“Very little” and “a great deal” is his answer.
On the one hand, Lewis’ first school was a brutal and dehumanizing experience. English public schools (by which is meant the great private schools at the head of which are Rugby and Eton, a usage of the term ‘public’ quite different from that in Australia), were only then coming out of the nineteenth century of “Tom Brown’s School Days” – a system where cold baths and abuse was considered “good for the character”. It produced the rulers of empire, but (as Lewis could testify, as he watched his brother decline into alcoholism and physical decay) it also had a brutal impact on generations of “public servants” - and fathers and sons.
Added to the normal abuse and “fagging”, Lewis’ school was run by a genuine, certifiable madman, who died a year after the school collapsed in 1910. “The bellowing and grimacing old man with his cane, his threats, and his ogreish facetiousness, the inky walls, the stinking shed which served both as a latrine and a store for our play boxes, all “heavily vanished” like a dream’. Whatever other impact Lewis’s schooling had, it was vicious enough to leave a remarkably clear trace on a very small, bright boy’s mind.
Perhaps (or, rather, certainly!) it is because I am not as bright as Lewis –but I cannot remember anything of such significance in my own earliest schooling. My mother tells me I was somewhat vague and did not read at all until I reached fourth class – from which time I was so socially inept as to never again seen without a book in hand. My own haziness, and the brutal precisions of his own memories are perhaps a measure of the contrast between my own fairly happy upbringing and schooling experience and that relentlessly described by Lewis.
For Lewis, the occasion is grounds for reflection. He goes searching for the source of his reaction. He dismisses the thought that his envy was provoked by “the spirit which says “I went through it, why shouldn’t they”? He is right not to pass too quickly over this, though it does not apply in this case. The spirit of tradition is not all bad, the summary reflection of all that is good in local church traditions by many modern speakers notwithstanding. Tradition becomes deadly, not because it carries forward elements of the past, but when there is a “spirit” of condemning one generation to the pain and anguish of those that have gone before. No wonder that later generations looked upon the blood and oppression that were locked up in the Victorian categories of “manhood”, “womanhood”, “courage”, “duty” etc, and said “no thank you”. One may be proud of one’s forebears and their sacrifices without feeling the requirement to baptize the actions of contemporary stupid and venal political leaders in the blood of those who have gone before. Moral choices in the present are still present, and fully free, both for the good and the bad. “If it was good enough for them” doesn’t necessarily mean it is good enough for me – it simply means that previous generations had their frameworks and responsibilities to work within, and I have mine. Neither of us is acquitted by the other.
Lewis also does well in identifying the “dead hand” in intergenerational relationships for another reason. One of the great social institutions left my own generation – and we will perhaps be the last generation to carry this particular mark – was an almost total disconnection between public life and private life, between thought and emotion, between fathers as people and their children.
In churches, the marker for this shift has been the emergence of common worship styles, and disappearance of “the church of the ten commandments”. We threaten to replace that form of legalism with another, of course, removing the echoing voice from Sinai and replacing it with the bribery of blessing theology, but that is a more nakedly obvious institution, and one from which people have shown themselves capable of voting with their feet.
In the interim, there is space for freedom, for people to truly connect with one another in ways which are personal rather than institutional. It is a thought which came home to me forcefully when interviewing a leader of the 1970’s charismatic movement. Describing how he boarded a boat to go to Sydney for training, my subject noted that he watched the figure of his father retreating on the dock, his figure become smaller and smaller as the boat moved away, only to realize that neither of them had told the other that he loved him. His father, an “old school man”, never did so throughout his long life.
Like Lewis’ experience, there was something about that generation which was the fruit of bitter experience. They (finding the love of God) were great pathfinders and starters of things. They founded missions, agencies, journals, schools, churches, hospitals and you name it, with astonishing energy. They were the generation of the Everready Bunny, driven by tasks and outcomes in part because they spent their lives seeking for the Father they had never met. In turn, they sought to become the fathers that they never had. The result is an experiment in progress.
The current generation is certainly better at emotional engagement and the life of groups – a factor which has shown itself in the growth of urban church cultures and perhaps in the decline of the spiritual frontiersmen (the “Pastor/Evangelist”) which typified the early Pentecostal churches. It is yet to be seen, however, whether they can engage with ideas and the life of the mind with the clarity required by the apologetics of their generation. There is an observable struggle with entering into maturity (whatever that is) which their parents didn’t know, simply because there is no point in which they are ‘kicked out of the nest’. Some have gone back down the pathway towards Sinai – others are enjoying the fading glow of the blessers. Yet others are seeking for a home somewhere between the two, and are discovering that unless they build it themselves, there is no home to be found in an age which Peter Berger has called the age of the ‘Homeless Mind’.
Lewis’ short account of his very first school is instructive here. If my experience of schooling in 1960’s Western Sydney and his in the supposedly privileged world of the English Public Schools in 1908-1910 (which he called “Belsen”) are worlds apart, they are similar on one point. Lewis ends his reflection by saying that “while we are planning the education of the future we can be rid of the illusions that we shall ever replace destiny. Make the plans as good as you can, of course. But be sure that the deep and final effect on every single boy [sic] will be something you never envisaged and will spring from little free movements is your machine which neither your blueprint nor your working model gave any hint of”. (p. 26). It is a sobering thought, but one which rings true.
The boy that was me at Kingswood Primary School can remember almost nothing of what he was taught. What I, and a thousand others learnt in Penrith’s schools in those days related to those elements of schooling (hours, holidays, friendships, sour milk, funny teachers, terror at dancing classes…etc) which built spaces between the elements of curriculum being taught. I learnt to read and write and add – for that I am grateful. What I was doing for the other five of the six years that I was at Primary I do not know. The man that I am now knows, however, that as I stand in front of students, as I stand in pulpits in various places, whatever it is that I am teaching is only a fragment of what is, and what will be learnt by those who hear me.
For Lewis, this possibility is a paean of freedom, a cry of victory over the oppressors and bullies who called themselves teachers, but who were in fact merely the educational press-gangs of Empire. For me it is a warning shot across the bows of teaching as a profession, and a reminder that it can only ever truly be teaching when it is a vocation. Most of the results of what I do are not in my hands, but in the hands of God, who alone can see the “little free movements” of formation suspended in grace.
Teaching is bread upon the waters: how it returns and in what quantity, needs to be the subject of prayer as well as good planning, attached to a hearty expectation that we will all be surprised when it comes out in the wash. To speak straight into the purposes of God – whether or not we can predict the outcomes – is a privilege beyond words, unless those words are ones of praise to the One who makes freedom out of our binding, blessings out of Sinai, wisdom out of our ignorance.
“There are three kinds of people in the world” is how Lewis begins his short essay “Three Kinds of Men”. There aren’t, of course, only three kinds of people, though there are (I would suggest) three kinds of “Men” (humans). There are many different kinds of people, depending on how we count, what sorts of criteria we use to categorize ourselves. Jeff Crabtree has a funny little song categorizing people as jelly beans – yellow and black and white…. We become aware through it that all the standard depictions of race which are in fact nothing to do with colour at all. In the midst of this diversity (and our nervous defence of the necessity of diversity, in case we should infringe upon someone’s individual right to define themselves). Lewis insists (as Christians around the world do) that from a God’s eye view, we are all individually loved but recognizably grouped as one of “three kind of Men”. Indeed the story of redemption is in part the story of release from the life of the herd, the realization of true individuality. On the other hand, it is not a release from our common nature – our oneness remains with us forever, our humanness an unmistakable part of who we shall always be even in our heavenly state. Like God himself – one and multiple – so does humanity come into the kingdom of heaven.
The state they come out of, however, has alternative modes of being. There are three kinds of men, says Lewis – there are those for whom the world is a storehouse of diversions for their own pleasure, those who recognize the existence and claims of divinity and try to placate Him, and those who can say with Paul “for me to live is Christ….” Lewis is less concerned here with the first and third classes of people than with the second. In his short essay, he descries this “neither hot nor cold” crew as in the worst of the three situations. Elsewhere, Lewis refers to the phenomenon of being “spoiled for Christ”, of having known Him and therefore not being left the option of not recognizing His existence. Lewis’ aim here is to demonstrate that the costs of not being “hot”, not being able to say “to live is Christ”, are higher than simply relaxing into the arms of grace. For the lukewarm (which I would think includes most of us from time to time) this is not a condemnation but a description of painful accuracy, a pen portrait of what Douglas Adams described in his acute little title “the long, dark tea-time of the soul”. Trying to calculate what God wants and then apportioning one’s life so you can “pay the tax” required by divine government voids the fatherhood of God and the true nature of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is (says Paul) “love, joy, peace…..” It is not a divine autocracy, a state of domination, but a continuous becoming of revelation and wholeness, a state of transformation. We cannot say enough to placate God and expect that there will be enough left over to live on. Until what is mine is His, what is His cannot be mine. And given that everything is His, we can understand why “the members of the second class (to which most of us belong) are always and necessarily unhappy”. Lewis refers to the taxation mentality as “the taxation of moral conscience”, or the resolution into law and technique that which can only properly be grasped in terms of grace and relationship. Lewis of course is speaking to the members of a national church, for whom bureaucratization and nominalism was an everyday reality. Taxation to support the national church had been a fact of history, compulsion toward adherence to the destruction of a faith-filled conscience, a national scandal. It is not so in our contemporary churches which are voluntary associations of people seeking common ends. Yet even where the permutation of Presence into moral conscience takes place, in the tyranny of rosters and events, in the framing of “the word” with “the announcements” and “the giving message”. We have an unfailing capacity, we humans, of putting lightning in a bottle, and then burying it under tons of concrete. It is what Weber and others have referred to as the “institutionalization of Charisma”, and it is not the particular fault of churches so much as a reflex of all human beings – for whom the search for safety and a guaranteed food supply has been dominant ever since we discovered caves. The ‘cave man reflex’ in churches, however, results in the condition of the lukewarm, of emerging from the cave to placate the Gods and hunt, only to return to the cave. In times of plenty, the spiritual lack is less evident, though no less in existence. In difficult or barren times, however, the cave becomes a trap as much as a shelter, and it is then that we realize that the true and living God is not placated with the blood of bulls or bison, but only with us coming out of our caves and surrendering all that is ours for all that is His.
Now Lewis poses a problem for himself. Because there are three kinds of men, he suggests, “any merely twofold division of the world into good and bad is disastrous”. It is disastrous on functional grounds, because it foreshortens graciousness, and so cuts off from view grace. And assuredly, there are few less gracious sights in the world than a Christian who preaches grace but practices Law. Lewis tries to avoid this foreshortening by allowing for a middle space – a space for those who want to be permanent residents of the kingdom rather than citizens, to pay the tax but avoid the “loss of identity” contingent on making one’s own will over to Him. But the state is an illusory one, as Lewis notes: “we must either feel guilt because we have not paid the tax or penury because we have.” The real point is his second: “back or on we must go, but there is no going on simply by our own efforts”. Residence in the middle space is not a factor of not wanting to be happy. It is a result of the season of Grace which must arrive before the gaining of new skin, a new identity can become bearable to the soul which fears nakedness. “If the new self, the new will, does not come at his own good pleasure to be born in us, we cannot produce Him synthetically”. Crossing the line into the kingdom is not a matter of will (though surely a conversion of will is necessary), but an expectation of transformation, an awaiting of the breathe which will stir into flame the constitutive desire. Perhaps it would be better, Lewis implies, if we lost the language of “sinners” and “saved”, and spoke rather of stages of “coming to be” in the streetscape, forecourt and household of God. This, after all, is the language of the New Testament, which contrasts the koinonia of the household, made possible (John tells us) through the shared experience of a gospel we have heard and seen and touched, with those who are not of the household (that household which is the oikos or economy of God). There are those who are not, and by their choice, never will be, of that household. There are those who are not, but who are carrying the load of permanent residency, and who are listening for the wind. And there are those who are crossing or have crossed the threshold into the household.
None of us have gone far in, for the House is a large one – and even the oldest of us has only seen a few of the rooms laid before us. But we share one thing in common. Our desire is met with delight as we walk through every new door, around every corner of the hallways and staircases of that household. There is nothing left to pay, no lack to fill- for we are in His household, which is by nature abundantly supplied from the life which flows from beneath the throne. In the end, there are not three kinds of people at all, once we discover the fullness of what we were meant to be as people. As the stone is rolled away and we emerge into light, surprisingly we discover ourselves to be not shades, facsimiles of human beings, but living souls with many faces but one nature.
Notes:
1. First printed in The Sunday Times, no. 6258 (21 March 1943), reprinted in W. Hooper (ed), C S Lewis: Present Concerns, Collins/Fount, 1986.
For all of you who are listening to the Theology and Film podcasts, we are now posting from a slightly different address in order to correct the RSS feed for itunes. Theology and Film Lecture Two, along with Dreu Harrison's film review of 'Life of Brian' can both be found at http://scc.typepad.com/theology_and_film/
Enjoy!
The presumption of the value of social equality is deeply entrenched in Australia. Australians downplay class difference, even though that difference is deeply entrenched in their society. From the clash between the ‘silvertail’ Manly Sea Eagles and the working class South Sydney Rabitohs (both filled with players earning ten times the average wage) to the political bearpit, egalitarianism is a presumed value in the culture of ‘mateship’. As one commentator notes, it plays a significant part in a candidate’s political chances, and reactions for and against it may even have decided the 2001 Federal election. [1]
Gabriel lists at least five variants of the egalitarian impulse ‘deployed in Australian public life’:
Understanding this is important, as much of the Labor left reaction against growing Pentecostal churches in the ‘marginal seats’ was based on the same critique their spokesmen made of ‘the aspirationals’. As both Gabriel, and C S Lewis, point out, they are wrong on a number of accounts. It is, however, important to realize that this sort of ideology is strong in democratic societies, and departure from it can be the cause of secular critique of Christian values. The assumption among the ideologs is that resistance among Christians to egalitarianism as a form of sameness (Gabriel’s type 4) is the same as rejection of egalitarianism as a whole is both baseless and destructive. The peril in that line of thought was pointed out by C S Lewis in his 1943 essay in the Spectator, simply called ‘Equality’.
‘I am a democrat’, wrote Lewis, ‘because I believe in the Fall of man’. [2] Lewis’ point was that political equality existed not as a tried solution for training humans toward the Good, but as a defense against the evident historical recurrence of human evil. In his apologetic fantasy, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, he notes:
For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first hint of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be.
One can misread him here. This is no Anglican traditionalist attempt to grasp at fading elitist power (though Lewis worked in the high temples of elitism, the pre-mass society University system all his professional life), but rather an attempt to ask what is the ‘good’ towards which the values of a society are directed. It is a question not asked in Australia. We do not ask ‘what is the good?’ but rather ‘what is the useful?’It is the well-attested byproduct of having sprung into existence as a string of British colonies in the late Enlightenment, under the particular gaze of Jeremy Bentham. [3] The problem with that is that it can lead one to assume that having values necessarily means having good values. With religious views derided in the public sphere (I write two weeks after Richard Dawkins’ recent potboiler – The God Delusion- was turned into a television special on the Australia public broadcaster, and a week after the Australian Writers Festival hosted Michel Onfray, author of the Atheist Manifesto), seeking for ‘the good’ is out of style. Dawkins’ self-promoting delivery of what Alister McGrath calls ‘ another dogmatic fundamentalism’ [4] may be embarrassing to other atheists, but it is a common enough faith at this end of the world.
As Lewis notes, however, Christians hold social equality as a relative rather than absolute good. Democracy is necessary, because it restrains evil (mostly). Like ‘tolerance’ (by whom? Of what?) however it is a functional necessity, rather than a source of life or energy: ‘there is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality’. [5] So Christians find themselves in all sorts of sectors of the political spectrum. Some, are indeed collective egalitarians, participating in communes, working for greater equality in economic distribution around the world. They are so, however, not because their aim is equality, so much as a restoration of God’s justice, or simply because they seek a purer expression of Acts 2 spirituality. Some, like Lewis, know history well enough to be distrustful of those who claim improper authority. In that sense, they are anti-hierarchical egalitarians rather than anti-establishment egalitarians. Their political positions might well coincide with anti-establishment egalitarians, but the very word ‘anti’ would give them pause. Their egalitarianism in this sense is based on the priority of protecting the weak against the effects of the Fall, and of preserving for God a proper primacy of authority. Long before Marx promoted revolution against capitalist elitism, therefore, the covenanters in Scotland overthrew a government which sought to impose secular authority over spiritual matters, and to place the King on the same standing as the ‘one head of the Church’, Christ. Both are social revolutions, and though their inspirations are miles apart, they converge in one matter- the need for proper restraint of human claims to power over others.
Lewis’ concern was for the body politic. ‘Life’, to Christians, is not a biological sideproduct, but the result of attachment to God’s creative energy. Attempts to establish relative values as absolutes, he suggests, will only result in disillusionment. ‘We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life.’ [6] ‘Enraptured’ is the key term – the result of displacing true religion is not secularity, but secularism – an ideology which substitutes as false religion. Hence Professor Dawkins’ crusade, his preaching style, his televangelism – all religious modes he has adopted on the utilitarian presumption that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. But the goose knows that crusading, pompous preaching, and televangelism are actually the substance of their beliefs in the first place, leaving the world awash with pseudo-religious accretions of secularist individualism in place of concerted efforts to find and live the good life. ‘And that is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers, or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology.’ [7] Lewis, of course, was writing in the middle of the Nazi terror. Attacks on the Church had to do with the mere established order and those elements of the church which had adulterated their faith with Enlightenment apologetics. He would not have foreseen the day when collective egalitarianism, run ironically by political elites, would have been so powerful in a country as to demonize other forms of equality, or the priests of high science stooped to ensure equality of thought by insisting on ‘egalitarianism as sameness’. He did, however, understand that the human mind rationates through the process of ‘distinction’, and that to declare by social fiat that all distinction is bad would have deleterious effects on our ability to think clearly. His particular desire was to preserve proper obedience and ‘the desire to kneel’ – these spoke to his hold on a natural order in which obeisance both maintained social order, and allowed the social order to be linked to a divine order, in which obeisance is a categorical necessity. The unlinking of the latter from the former cut society off from its deepest legitimizations, disconnecting the realm in which people may choose to bow to another’s authority from that realm in which ‘every knee shall bow, and tongue confess…’. In Lewis’ mind, of course, was his great scholarly love, the medieval synthesis. To understand why Lewis felt that the democratic reductionism ‘will kill us all if it grows unchecked’, one has to read his Discarded Image. Such a love does not drive most Christians today. Translating his thought for those who live in a society which self-consciously constructs itself as the anthesis of the medieval synthesis which Lewis thought produced great beauty, requires some doing. His fundamental point, however, is still graspable – and true. Proper distinction is necessary to clear thought – and clear thinking requires the a priori acceptance of an assessment of the proper. It is not proper, in most Christian schemas, to make the relative into an absolute, to mistake mere living with Life, or to compress (as Lewis notes is so common) distinct categories of human expression and relationship into lowest common denominators. (Lewis’ example of this latter is in the compression of love into friendship. ‘Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other: that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.’ If Lewis was back amongst us and relocated to New York, would what would he have made of the iconic status of the American sitcom, ‘Friends’?). As Terry Eagleton notes in a searing review of Dawkins’ book:
Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself. [8]
Social equality need not erase epistemic distinction; social distinction need not erase a commitment to ontological equality. Just because Christians promote social equality does not necessarily mean that they need to do so on the bases accepted by other people. We may well choose to believe in Collective egalitarianism without supporting expropriation, or a proper distrustfulness of those who claim authority, without being anti-establishment. We might well hold that classlessness is a description of heaven, without holding that, on the one hand, classlessness is to be equated to sameness, or that either is fully achievable here in this Fallen state. Finally, we can believe in equality of opportunity, just as political liberals do, without folding Christian conscience into liberal political rationales. We might just be doing so because of our fundamental belief that ‘He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous’ (Matt 5:45). To do otherwise is to collapse categories into preferred public solutions which attack those distinctions which allow people to be private citizens. The result would merely be another form of tyranny, dressed up in the form of rational democracy. In Lewis’ day, the struggle was through the value of equality against Nazism. In our own day, it is the struggle through the value of tolerance against tribalizing fundamentalism. The result, however, is similar, albeit the voice of Christians in the public sphere is weaker today than it was in Lewis’ time.
We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear equality [as we wear clothing]; but let us undress every night. [9]
Notes
[1] Michelle Gabriel, ‘Aspirationalism: The Search for Respect in an Unequal Society’, JAS, Australia's Public Intellectual Forum, no.80, 2004, p. 147.
[2] C S Lewis, ‘Equality’, in W H Hooper (ed), Present Concerns, London: Fount Paperbacks, 1986, p. 17.
[3] See for instance, Stephen R. Graubard (ed), Australia: the Daedalus symposium, North Ryde, N.S.W.: Angus & Robertson, 1985.
[4] A McGrath, ‘Do stop behaving as if you are God, Professor Dawkins’, The Daily Mail , 18 May 2007
[5] Lewis, ‘Equality’, p. 18.
[6] Lewis, ‘Equality’, p. 18.
[7] Lewis, ‘Equality’, p. 18.
[8] Terry Eagleton, 'Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching', London Review of Books, vol. 28, no. 20, 19 October 2006, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html
[9] Lewis, ‘Equality’, p. 20.