I recently re-read that great collection of essays & talks by C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory. Any regular readers here know I cannot go long without referring to Lewis’s thought in some way. I’m afraid that is just the way it’s going to be. I find reading Lewis to be like spreading a large bag of super-fertilizer all over the garden of my mind – it stimulates growth and activity of all kinds.
One of the essays in that book is called ‘Transposition’. It is on the more philosophical end of things, discussing how things on one level of reality look to the level below it, such as how 3-dimensional shapes can be represented on 2-dimensional paper but only in a flattened and reductionist way. You can find it online (usually bundled with other essays) but here is an audio version of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXwJk8WtpUY.
He uses this analogy to make sense of how the reality of the spiritual so often looks and feels prosaic and explainable in material terms. He argues that this is exactly what we should expect, but that when one assumes there cannot be a higher realm then he will always find some such explanation:
And the sceptic’s conclusion that the so-called spiritual is really derived from the natural, that it is a mirage or projection or imaginary extension of the natural, is also exactly what we should expect; for, as we have seen, this is the mistake which an observer who knew only the lower medium would be bound to make in every case of Transposition. The brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander never can find anything but flat shapes in a picture; physiology never can find anything in thought except twitchings of the grey matter. It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition from below. On the evidence available to him his conclusion is the only one possible.
This line of reasoning found its apogee in the New Atheists, who never grew tired of pointing out that such and such transcendent experience was really “just” this or that. You can see this little trick being pulled by Dawkins, Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and so on. Here is a little clip of Jonathan Pageau making the very same point as Lewis:
It’s surely no accident that Pageau looks at the world hierarchically and symbolically, seeing it as laid out across different levels of being or reality. This is the same basic structure as what Lewis lays out in his essay. Near the end of the essay, Lewis makes his point even more explicitly, and I quite enjoyed it. Allow me to quote it at length:
I have tried to stress throughout the inevitableness of the error made about every transposition by one who approaches it from the lower medium only. The strength of such a critic lies in the words “merely” or “nothing but”. He sees all the facts but not the meaning. Quite truly, therefore, he claims to have seen all the facts. There is nothing else there; except the meaning. He is therefore, as regards the matter in hand, in the position of an animal.
You will have noticed that most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor: the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all. His world is all fact and no meaning. And in a period when factual realism is dominant we shall find people deliberately inducing upon themselves this doglike mind. A man who has experienced love from within will deliberately go about to inspect it analytically from outside and regard the results of this analysis as truer than his experience.
The extreme limit of this self-blinding is seen in those who, like the rest of us, have consciousness, yet go about to study the human organism as if they did not know it was conscious. As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism. The critique of every experience from below, the voluntary ignoring of meaning and concentration on fact, will always have the same plausibility. There will always be evidence, and every month fresh evidence, to show that religion is only psychological, justice only self-protection, politics only economics, love only lust, and thought itself only cerebral biochemistry.
His line about the one who has experienced love from within analyzing it and finding “the results of this analysis as truer than his experience” reminds me of the Preface to J. Budziszewski’s book “The Revenge of Conscience.” I read this fifteen years ago but I have never forgotten those opening pages. In them the Budziszewski tells the story of his conversion from materialistic naturalism (or nihilism as he refers to it) to Christianity. This is how he describes his love for his wife and family during that time:
I resisted the temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value. Think what this did to very capacity to love them. After all, love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person, and how can one’s will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good, denies the reality of persons, and denies that his commitments are in his control?
In another place, he writes this memorable quote:
Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all.
It was ultimately his existential dread at the kind of person he was becoming that convinced him that if there was horror there must be its opposite as well: “I knew that if there existed a horrible, there had to exist a wonderful of which the horrible was the absence. So my walls of self-deception collapsed all at once.”
As the dominance of New Atheism fades and crumbles, there remain a huge number of people whose operative worldview was shaped and cemented by their arguments. Yes, there may be a “Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God” dawning among leading thinkers but these things take time to filter down to the masses. The fact is that there are still countless millions of people walking around with basically the same form of nihilism as Budziszewski describes above.
May their “walls of self-deception” collapse as well, unto light and life and salvation.
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