"Morality, the Tao and Men Without Chests" Oct 1998
By Michael Cassidy
Many times at Oxbridge '98, CS Lewis' little book, The Abolition of Man, was referred to, along with his chapter in there called "Men without Chests". And I felt in the dark, not having read it. This morning I corrected that and read the volume. It is not for the fainthearted, but it says some exceedingly important things of relevance for our present times when the idea of there being objective and eternally valid moral truths or standards is so up for question, both in society and even at places in the Church. The book has the curious subtitle: "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools".
The occasion of the three lectures was an invitation from the University of Durham following shortly after Lewis had received a book for review by two English schoolmasters setting out their views on teaching English. What followed was not what they had bargained for! Lewis uses the moment to set about all teachers and educators (whether in schools, universities or theological colleges and no doubt he would include "influencers" of public opinion), whose ethics are relative and changeable and who teach that both aesthetic and moral values are purely subjective and not based on an objective moral law or set of standards and values which he calls "the Tao", the Chinese word for "Way". (More anon.) Such people, he said in an epoch less anxious about gender correctness (or perhaps he was scared to apply the suggestive image to women!), we can call
I. MEN WITHOUT CHESTS
Who are "the men without chests"? Anglican theologian James Packer shed light on this at Oxbridge '98, noting that "this is a bit of Platonic analysis which comes from Plato's Republic. There is the mind, says Plato, which is to direct, and there is the belly which is the seat of all strong desires. And between the mind which is located in the head, and the belly, there comes the chest. And the chest is the seat of what Plato saw as the spirit or heart, understood as character or formed character. This character has learned from the mind habitually to direct the individual along the path the mind knows to be morally right. The aim is to channel desire along that path rather than letting desire, located in the belly, lead the whole person astray."
Going on, Packer noted that Lewis was accusing contemporary culture, by its subjectivism and its refusal to acknowledge that there are any universal values which ought to be taught to children from their youth up, of abolishing the chest and producing human beings without chests, people who have a mind which is adrift, operating alongside a whole range of unbridled and uncontrolled desires.
People without chests will be led by those desires, and their lives will be irrational and they will not even seek sense. They will simply follow the strongest desire.
"And so says Lewis, if you have lost the Tao (those values and morals common to all religions and seen in the absolute standards which Christians have seen as given to the world in General Revelation according to the teaching of the first two chapters of Romans), if you lose that, and if you lose the chest (e.g. in the attempt to form the character of the young without the absolutes), you lose the whole heritage of developed wisdom. You become a cultural castaway and you end up lost in the cosmos, with your life becoming a matter of merely 'existing', but hardly deserving the name of living. You don't know where you are going, your life doesn't make sense and you are in very truth lost, which is tragic. And you need someone who by the grace of God will bring you the light of the Gospel or you will never find yourself at all."
In a nutshell, Lewis is gunning for those who train young minds to deny or reject objective concepts of morality or value. James Packer saw Lewis here intending to "highlight the dreadful effects of the slippage into subjectivism which he saw going on all around him. Slip into subjectivism, said Lewis, and you lose truth and joy. You lose freedom. You lose wisdom...This is the result of a rebellion against the cosmic order." In The Abolition of Man, Lewis challenges those modern "value-free" intellectuals and sceptics whom he sees as people with heads but no hearts, or at least if they have hearts (chests), they don't read them properly. These are the people who present values as in some way "unreal" when compared to "facts", especially facts of science. For Lewis, such people who indulge in separating values and facts are responsible for many ills in society, and most notably for producing after their own kind from the young a species of learned experts who are likewise "without chests".
Such people in wishing to subordinate the human spirit and mind simply to the processes of Nature, as if there is nothing more to reality than Nature, actually bring about the abolition of humanity, because they are abolishing that which makes us distinctively human.
Moreover, charges Lewis: "It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence...Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so." What Lewis is doing here is to issue a wake-up call to a generation of people busy supervising their own demise. Values-free Education
The consequence of all this is the development of "values-free" education, whether in the teaching of English, or science, or sexuality and morals, or whatever. More and more then does society catastrophically lose its way and begin more desperately than ever to need but not find leaders and opinion makers with the very qualities we are being taught to reject. (Thus anguished America right now is struggling to cope with a President who is a logical product of their own system.)
So it is that people suddenly begin to cry out for something to be operating as a "liaison officer between cerebral man and visceral man". The search is for "this middle element" by which "man is man". In other words, we are searching for and needing the operation of that which makes us uniquely human.
The linking element needed between our intellects and the animal part of us, "the middle element", is the chest, says Lewis, the heart, the location of conscience and a value system. If that is in place, the qualities of the chest (heart) such as honesty, purity, morality, courage, magnanimity, feeling (sentiment) and the like will operate. This is what is needed to save us, but our prevailing philosophies are teaching us to reject these qualities as irrelevant or unreal.
Noted Packer: "So how can we wonder now that we have people living in adult bodies with childish and utterly unformed characters who simply become apostles of irrational, violent behaviour? Breaking all bounds and doing so simply because that is the feeling they have at the moment."
Listen to Lewis: "And all the time such is the tragi-comedy of our situation we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible ...In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
In effect, we should all ask of any who teach us or our children, whether in school, college or church, "Have they got chests?" In any event, the fact is that we do find ourselves with political leaders without chests, school teachers without chests (teaching no values to their pupils yet being shocked by their shameless, amoral behaviour), academics without chests, or even ministers without chests.
In this latter regard, the villain of the piece for Lewis is what he calls the "thoroughly modern, liberal minded clergyman", or the "over acculturated cleric" who can't believe he could land up in Hell, "penalised" for his "honest opinions. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that those opinions were mistaken." To be sincere but hopelessly wrong, says Lewis, is perilous to our salvation. Perhaps especially if you've led others astray! But where did all this relativising and denying of the Gospel begin? What are its origins? It begins, says Lewis shatteringly, with teachers without chests, this time in theological colleges. In The Great Divorce, Lewis' character, Dick, a pastor in heaven, confronts the tragedy with his old friend, just arrived by bus from Hell for a visit to the edge of heaven: "Friend, let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that get good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause...Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith."
The Great Divorce, however, is not primarily about intellectual dishonesty but more about the attempt to blur right and wrong which nevertheless has its roots in intellectual dishonesty. Notes Lewis: "The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable 'either-or'; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives (i.e. good and evil) can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error."
However, all need not be lost if there is repentance and a going back to identify where we went wrong. Writes Lewis: "I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good...It is still 'either-or'." In the Abolition of Man, the issue for Lewis is whether we will choose the Tao and the God behind it and see where that leads, or not. And facing this helps mightily to get us back on track and keep us there.
II. THE TAO THE LAW THE WAY
For Lewis, as indicated, the Tao is that common set of moral beliefs and values about Right and Wrong which is found in all major, stable and responsible religions and cultures that there have ever been since civilisation began.
In his appendix to The Abolition of Man, he lists many of these as drawn from Hindu, Confucian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Platonic, Aristotelian and Christian traditions. "What is common to them," says Lewis, "is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are." Within the Tao, Lewis would find such notions as basic justice, truthfulness, kind-heartedness, mercy, magnanimity, respect for parents and elders, the wrongness of murder, stealing or lying, the necessity of looking after widows and orphans, the unacceptability of incest and the obligation not to abandon one's wife or children.
Perhaps in the South Africa of today he might have included Ubuntu. Anyway, this natural law or traditional morality or "first principles of natural reason", Lewis sees as not one among a series of possible systems of values, but the sole source of all the value judgements there are.
Says Lewis: "If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There never has been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) 'ideologies', all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess."
And it was this objective value system which was missing in that English text book sent to Lewis by the two schoolmasters outlining their approach in teaching English to schoolboys. Their lack of an objective value or truth system in his view would de-humanise those schoolboys by destroying rationality and morality, because it is this Tao, this bedrock of basic values, which defines us as humans as distinct from animals. "Stepping out of the Tao," says Lewis, "they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man."
Elaborating on this in Mere Christianity, Lewis also explodes the notion of basic morality and the Tao being culturally conditioned or just a social construct, as when people say different civilisations have different moralities.
"But this is not so", says Lewis. "There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference... I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five...Likewise selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked."
In the Old Testament, this Law, this moral code written into the fabric of reality, is written down in the 10 Commandments. For the New Testament "The Way" (Acts 16:17; 18:26; 2 Peter 2:15; 2 Peter 2:21), as personalised in Jesus is not only the Way to salvation but the Way for everything for living, loving, behaving and doing. To follow "The Way" is to live out and cooperate with the Moral Law (Tao) written into the fabric of the universe by Jesus Himself, "without whom was not anything made that was made". (John 1:3) For Paul in Romans 2:15a, the Tao is seen, I believe, in what he calls "the law written on their hearts" and to which our "conscience" bears "witness" (2:15b). And it is this, of course, along with God's testimony to Himself in the Created order ("the things that are made"), which leaves us "without excuse" (Romans 1:20) before the just demands or even judgements of a Holy God. And being "without excuse" and guilty before God, we now have to face something awesome namely
III. THE TERRIBLE FIX WE ARE IN
The fix we are in is guilt before a holy God, the one who is the Giver of this Law. The fact is that without even opening our Bibles we are aware of two realities, observes Lewis. "First that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not, in fact, behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in." At this point, as Roman Catholic scholar Richard John Neuhaus at Oxbridge noted, Lewis might well ask, as he often did: "Is it not true? Do you not find it to be so?" IV. CONCLUSION
And so, in concluding, we have to say "Yes, we find it to be so." Yes, we find it to be so that there is such a thing as a moral code written into the fabric of the universe and into our hearts (chests) and into nature by God Himself. And we find it to be so that there is such a thing as right and wrong. And we find it to be so that this Moral Law is known and discerned in Natural Revelation by the major religions of the world, by the dictates of conscience and by the constituted order of things in nature. Hence, incidentally, Paul's condemnation in Romans 2 of certain sexual sins as being "against Nature" i.e. against the constituted natural order of creation. Against the Tao, in effect.
That is why, all of that being so, "we have cause to be uneasy", because faced with this Law (Tao) of God, and with Absolute Goodness, and its demands, we see we have "all sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23). That's why we are in "a terrible fix". And that's how we become ready for the Gospel.
You see, the fact is that once we understand that we are in "a terrible fix", Christianity begins to talk. And it tells us the Good News that this "Law is our tutor to bring us to Christ that we might be justified by faith". (Gal. 3:24) It tells us in short that we are sinners in need of a Saviour. Knowing all that, we are now ready to hear about Jesus and the Cross, and forgiveness and eternal life and heaven for all who believe. And as we respond and follow, there is also the prospect of built-up chests for all of us! Talk about Amazing Grace!!
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