A Healer’s Geste

Abolition of Man Book Club: “The Way”

Cindy is hostess and it continues, though I was out for a couple weeks. I guess I’m fully back now, giving you what by now you expect of me: house cleaning pep talks and theoretical, philosophical musings on education books. No one is making you read, though. :)

In the first essay, Lewis talked about how the textbook he reviewed attempted to debunk traditional sentiments and how, if taught to doubt or even despise nobility and honor, the next generation is not noble or honorable. In this essay, then, Lewis demonstrates how we are dependent upon values that are ingrained or outside ourselves, not dependent upon our perceptions, opinions, instincts, or resolves. Though modernity in his days was attempting to locate their values and judgments in biological or psychological terms so that they could reject natural law (Tao), Lewis explains how this is actually impossible and inconsistent. In the next essay Lewis says he will explore the possibilities that will ensue if modernity becomes consistent, that is, if it denies the existence of all value judgments.

So, then, in this essay, “The Way”, Lewis demonstrates how we cannot escape “oughts,” try as we might to dodge them. Having listened to and seen several Christian v. atheist debates from a presuppositional stance over the years, this line of reasoning is fairly familiar to me. Still, though it is logical and true, attempts to show atheists that they have no way to have ethics or morality without God generally seem simply to prove that those who say there is no God have hardened their hearts and had their eyes darkened. Understandably, they can’t see it. So, while it is helpful for “those within the Tao” as Lewis would say, I’m not sure this line of argumentation touches the atheist or pragmatist. If it serves to strengthen our resolve and confidence, though, that is enough.

Lewis writes, “Nor must we postpone obedience to a precept until its credentials have been examined. Only those who are practising the Tao will understand it. It is the well-nurtured man, the cuor gentil [noble heart], and he alone, who can recognize Reason when it comes.” We begin with obedience and submission, and reasoning ethics come to the one brought up to it. Precepts and obedience come first. We do not reason our way from blank slates to ethics, but we are brought up to ethics and thence to reason by being under submission to it.

Lewis explains this is the case regardless of the system, regardless of the tradition, but I cannot. This beginning with submission and obedience only makes sense if the ethical system is higher than human. It is above us and that is why reason will elude us if we set ourselves above it to judge it. It may and will judge us because it is God’s own very nature, the nature we were formed by and created to imitate. Hence, we can only find reason and ethics to the extent we are living consistently (and being partially consistent unawares is certainly possible) with the created order and with the Image imprinted into us all.

So how do we nurture this sense? Scripture, corporate worship, living in harmony and fellowship, eating together, reading stories of nobility, applying ourselves to our work and studies, being trained and tutored “under law” while in immaturity so that as freedom comes with maturity, we find ourselves on the right path, loving what we ought to love and hating what we ought to hate.

Of course stories and poetry are an important factor in this cultivation, but since that drum is beaten heavily in this circle, my mind got to thinking instead of our manner of living together. Just as training to recognize counterfeit bills begins with thorough and implicit knowledge of the real thing, so our cultivation should begin with a steeping in the real thing: joyful obedience to and love of God’s ways. We come to love right living when it is a part of who we are, and it becomes a part of who we are through atmosphere, through the way we live: how we speak to each other in the family, how and how often we eat together, singing and playing together, laughing together, talking and listening and working together. These form the unconscious impressions of what life is that will influence what our children accept as right and good and what they reject as shams and counterfeits of the Good Life.