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CS Lewis on Beauty, Truth, and Goodness Part II Inklings Forever Volume 8 A Collection of Essays Presented at the Joint Meeting of The Eighth Frances White Ewbank Article 29 Colloquium on C.S. Lewis & Friends and The C.S. Lewis & The Inklings Society Conference 5-31-2012 A Tryst with the Transcendentals: C.S. Lewis on Beauty, Truth, and Goodness Part II: Truth Donald T. Williams Toccoa Falls College Follow this and additional works at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Williams, Donald T. (2012) "A Tryst with the Transcendentals: C.S. Lewis on Beauty, Truth, and Goodness Part II: Truth," Inklings Forever: Vol. 8 , Article 29. Available at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever/vol8/iss1/29 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis & Friends at Pillars at Taylor University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Inklings Forever by an authorized editor of Pillars at Taylor University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INKLINGS FOREVER, Volume VIII A Collection of Essays Presented at the Joint Meeting of The Eighth FRANCES WHITE EWBANK COLLOQUIUM ON C.S. LEWIS & FRIENDS and THE C.S. LEWIS AND THE INKLINGS SOCIETY CONFERENCE Taylor University 2012 Upland, Indiana A Tryst with the Transcendentals: C.S. Lewis on Beauty, Truth, and Goodness Part II: Truth Donald T. Williams Toccoa Falls College Williams, Donald T. “A Tryst with the Transcendentals: C.S. Lewis on Beauty, Truth, and Goodness – Part II: Truth.” Inklings Forever 8 (2012) www.taylor.edu/cslewis 1 A Tryst with the Transcendentals: C.S. Lewis on Beauty, Truth, and Goodness Part II: Truth Donald T. Williams Toccoa Falls College INTRODUCTION THE NATURE OF TRUTH “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is Simply put, C. S. Lewis held to the all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to classical “correspondence theory” of truth: know,” says Keats’ Grecian Urn. If the Truth is a property of propositions such that Romantics tended to conflate Truth and their content corresponds to the state of Beauty, the Moderns tended to explain Beauty affairs in the real and objective external away as a mere subjective emotional world which they assert to be so. So far Lewis response; and now some Post-Moderns seem is not original in his concept of truth. His to do the same with Truth itself. C. S. Lewis, contribution at this point is helping us to a rooted in the classical Christian world view, fuller and richer understanding of what it sought a more whole vision of the relations means to hold such a concept. among the Transcendentals than any of these For example, he complains, other approaches can provide. As we If naturalists do not claim to know any summarized that Christian view in part one of truths, ought they not to have warned this study, truth when we find it in the world us rather earlier of the fact? For really is a reflection of God’s mind, goodness of His from all the books they have written, in character, and beauty of His glory, impressed which the behaviour of the remotest into the very fabric of what He has made (see nebula, the shyest proton, and the most Kreeft 23-5). We started with Beauty in part prehistoric man are described, one one because it was Beauty, coming through would have got the idea that they were Joy, or , that led Lewis to Truth. But sehnsucht claiming to give us a true account of to Truth he believed he had arrived. What real things. (Miracles 24). was Lewis’s view of Truth? How did he defend it against the Reductionisms prevalent The key words here are “account” and “real in the middle of the Twentieth Century? Can things.” Truth is propositional; it is an that defense still help us to withstand the account. The person holding to these assaults typical of our own times? These are propositions, i.e., making this account, may the questions on which we shall attempt to not be capable of perfect objectivity. Indeed, shed some light. In our age of Post- if he is a finite human being, he cannot be; but Modernism and Post-Foundationalism when his account is an account of objective reality the very concept of truth is subject to nonetheless, of real things. And he can in deconstruction, there are hardly any more theory overcome his subjectivity sufficiently important questions we could address. to verify the truth of his account, if indeed the nebulae, protons, and cavemen behave as his propositions claim they do; if the state of affairs they assert “obtains” in the real world. 2 A Tryst with the Transcendentals · Donald T. Williams The theoretical possibility of thus The existence of truth in this sense sufficiently overcoming our subjectivity—and entails the existence of falsehood. Of knowing when we have done so—is then contradictory propositions, only one of them essential to our ability to perceive, know, and can be true, and if that one is true, the other state truth as correspondence. Traditional must perforce be false. “Your Hindus philosophy and nihilistic Post-Modernism certainly sound delightful,” Lewis wrote to actually agree on this point; they part Dom Bede Griffiths, “But what do they deny? company on the question of whether that That’s always been my trouble with Indians— possibility exists. Lewis argues that it has to: to find any proposition they would pronounce false. But truth surely must involve The reason why your idea of New York exclusions?” ( 3:704). A precondition can be truer or less true than mine is Letters of truth then is the universal validity of the that New York is a real place, existing law of non-contradiction. Two contradictory quite apart from what either of us propositions cannot both be true in the same thinks. If, when each of us said “New way, in the same place, at the same time. If York” each meant merely “The town I they could, the claim that either was true am imagining in my own head,” how would be empty. could one of us have truer ideas than In other words, a true thought the other? There would be no question “reflects,” not just the mind of the thinker, but of truth or falsehood at all. (Mere “universal reality” (“De Futilitate” 60). Christianity 25) “Christianity claims to give you an account of Post-Kantian relativism, before we facts—to tell you what the real universe is even arrive at Post-Structuralism and like” (“Man or Rabbit?” 108). One who claims Deconstruction, holds that the real objective anything less is simply not claiming that New York, the New York an sich, is Christianity (or any other account of the state unreachable, and that therefore only the of things) is true. phenomenal New York, the one that exists as The radical nature of this concern for an image constructed in our heads, can be truth was apparent already by the middle of directly known. Common sense would seem the Twentieth Century, as can be seen by to be on the side of Lewis and the older looking at some of the typical academic Tradition, though; for there actually is a real concerns of late Modernism with which Lewis New York, and the simple expedient of contrasts it. visiting it can determine which of two What makes some theological works accounts of it is closer to the reality, so that like sawdust to me is the way the the town being imagined in one head can be authors can go on discussing how far rejected in favor of that being imagined in the certain positions are adjustable to other for good and sufficient reason—to wit, contemporary thought, or beneficial in the town existing outside of either head. Is relation to social problems, or “have a Times Square in Manhattan, Brooklyn, future” before them, but never squarely Queens, Staten Island, or the Bronx? Unless ask what grounds we have for the real New York outside our heads both supposing them to be true accounts of exists and is accessible to our heads, the any objective reality. ( 104) question is unanswerable. But the question is Malcolm in fact answerable; therefore, truth must be Screwtape encourages Wormwood to make what Lewis conceived it to be, an account of good use of such an intellectual climate: New York that is theoretically capable of Your man has been accustomed, ever getting what we think closer to the real place since he was a boy, to have a dozen that exists quite apart from what any of us incompatible philosophies dancing thinks. about together inside his head. He 3 A Tryst with the Transcendentals · Donald T. Williams doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily do function, not surprisingly given that “true” or “false,” but as “academic” or Derrida correctly realized that once the very “practical,” “outworn” or possibility of truth has been banished, the “contemporary,” “conventional” or “play of signification” is extended precisely to “ruthless.” Jargon, not argument, is infinity (1207). your best ally in keeping him from the Here is the point: Lewis would want Church. Don’t waste time trying to to ask of the claim that, by the very nature of make him think materialism is true! discourse, questions of truth are endlessly Make him think it is strong or stark or deferred, “Is it true? Does it correspond to courageous—that it is the philosophy the way things actually are in the real world?” of the future.
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