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A Philosophical Walking Tour with C.S. Lewis

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A Philosophical Walking Tour with C.S. Lewis A Philosophical Walking Tour with C. S. Lewis ii A Philosophical Walking Tour with C. S. Lewis Why it Did Not Include Rome Stewart Goetz Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Stewart Goetz, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2316-2 PB: 978-1-6289-2317-9 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2320-9 ePub: 978-1-6289-2319-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India In Memory of Rich Craven 1954–2014 “Men must endure their going hence” From William Shakespeare’s King Lear Oddly enough as time goes on the vision of J [Jack] as he was in his later years grows fainter, that of him in earlier days more and more vivid. Perhaps it has been sharpened by the fact that I am reliving something of the middle years by going through our old walking tours in my diaries, and I can see him almost as if he was visible, on a path in front of me, striding along with stick and pack in his shapeless old fisherman’s hat. I am glad to remember that J himself re-read these chronicles only a few weeks before his death and got a great deal of pleasure from them. Warren Hamilton Lewis, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, 255. Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part One 1 Hedonistic Happiness 17 Common sense and happiness 17 The nature of happiness, good, and evil 21 Euthyphro and action 29 Hedonism 35 The relation between happiness and morality 38 Eudaemonism 46 Possible objections to Lewis’s understanding of happiness 52 Natural law 57 Joy or Sehnsucht 59 Can we really understand the nature of perfect happiness? 65 2 Supernatural Persons 69 The body and happiness 69 Lewis’s view of the body 70 Mental-to-mental causation 74 Mental-to-physical causation 84 The soul is the person 90 Once more on common sense 94 The pleasure of the soul 98 Part Two 3 Privation and Goodness 103 Augustine, Aquinas, and Lewis 103 Augustine’s understanding of evil 104 viii Contents Aquinas’s understanding of evil 107 Is pain evil? 108 Aquinas’s account of pleasure, happiness, and goodness 114 Eudaemonism and “Good” 121 Lewis and Aquinas 122 4 Body and Soul 131 Cartesian dualism 131 Aquinas’s view of the soul 132 Aquinas’s view of the body 135 What would Lewis have thought? 138 The resurrection body’s relationship to pleasure and happiness 141 Lewis, Aquinas, and the soul 145 A section not strictly necessary 148 Part Three 5 A Rational Journey 151 Why not Roman Catholicism? 151 Conversion and mere Christianity 152 Firmly an Anglican 154 Lack of exposure 161 Homegrown prejudices 162 Vocational aspirations 164 Ignorance of history 165 Difficulties based in reason 166 Thomas Aquinas and Roman Catholicism 168 Common sense, mere Christianity, and Roman Catholicism 177 Conclusion 179 Bibliography 181 Author Index 189 Acknowledgments I am indebted to several people who read and discussed the manuscript with me. Those who deserve special mention are my son, Andrew, Charles Taliaferro, Jerry Walls, and especially my wife, Carolyn, who kept pushing me to make “this stuff” accessible to the layperson. I am grateful to Marjorie Mead and staff of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College for their warm welcome and friendliness. The late Christopher Mitchell, former director of the Wade Center, was extremely welcoming to Carolyn and me, even having us up to his office for afternoon tea, in the true spirit of Lewis. For help in providing Lewis materials at the Wade Center, I especially acknowledge Laura Schmidt. I also thank Walter Hooper for emailing with me at the outset of my writing about an obscure matter of Lewisania. While writing this book, I benefitted from a research fellowship at Biola University’s Center for Christian Thought, which was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation or Biola’s Center for Christian Thought. Finally, Mary Al-Sayed and Anita Singh were extremely helpful with the preparation of the manuscript. And I thank Haaris Naqvi of Bloomsbury for his support. As always, it has been an absolute delight to work with him. x Introduction How do you come to be in this benighted part of the country? ‘I’m on a walking-tour,’ said Ransom . ‘God!’ exclaimed Devine, his corkscrew still idle. ‘Do you do it for money, or is it sheer masochism?’ ‘Pleasure, of course,’ said Ransom . .1 For most of my adult life, I avoided reading the works of C. S. Lewis. My reason for not reading Lewis went back to my time as a graduate student at Oxford, where Lewis had taught for much of his life. When I arrived in Oxford in the late 1970s, there was an interest in Lewis that bordered on the obsessive. A book entitled A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken, which recounted his time in Oxford as a graduate student and friendship with Lewis in the 1950s, was all the rage. This book and many other works about Lewis seemed to me to be servings in a literary sacrificial meal shared by members of a Lewis cult, and I was determined not to become a member of a cult. When I say that I avoided reading Lewis’s books for much of my adult life, I do not mean to imply that prior to the late 1970s I had never read anything by him. By that time, copies of Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain had been on my bookshelf for several years. Fingering through them now, it is evident that I had read the last in its entirety and the first two in bits and pieces. But that was pretty much it. Then, in October 2006, my wife, Carolyn, and I wandered into a used-book store in Hyannis, Massachusetts. We were on Cape Cod for our customary five days of relaxation during my college’s fall break and looking for something to read. As a philosophy professor, it is hard for me to stay away from bookstores generally and their philosophy sections in particular. Because many Boston academics retire on the Cape and not infrequently sell off some or all of their libraries, I found the philosophy section of this used-book store to be especially well stocked. After examining the philosophy collection, I moved, as I almost always do in any bookstore, to the religion section (I am a Christian who has a serious interest in thoughtful literature about Christianity), where I found several Lewis books. Then in the literature and biography sections I came across some works by and about J. R. R. Tolkien. I called Carolyn over (she always 1 C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Scribner, 2003), 18. 2 A Philosophical Walking Tour with C. S. Lewis makes a beeline to the children’s literature in bookstores) and we ended up buying several paperbacks by Lewis and a book of selected letters of Tolkien. I can’t recall all of the titles by Lewis that I picked up that day, but I remember The Screwtape Letters, Reflections on the Psalms, and That Hideous Strength were among them. By this time in my life, I was well beyond worrying about becoming part of a Lewis cult, so I could read his books without my old inhibition. We left the bookstore that day and headed to Nauset Beach for a time of sitting by the ocean and reading. The day passed quickly as it always does when one becomes lost in a good book. As I read Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, I remember turning to Carolyn and saying something like “This is incredibly good stuff.” I was hooked. Over the five days, I finished the books by Lewis and was on my way to becoming a Lewis addict. On subsequent journeys to the Cape, we returned to what was now our favorite used book store and combed the stacks for anything by or related to Lewis. Out of the Silent Planet, Surprised by Joy, Perelandra, Mere Christianity, A Grief Observed, and many others were there to be had. I even found a copy of A Severe Mercy and bought it. Carolyn found Walter Hooper’s massive volume C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide and Lewis’s The Oxford History of English Literature: Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century and The Allegory of Love. Now when we visit the bookstore, we buy extra copies of books by Lewis so that we can give them to others. So I love reading Lewis. But why write a book about him? After all, so much has already been written about his life and thought.
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