C. S. Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church. C. S. Lewis

be part of liberal knowledge, and is pursued for purely pastoral ends, gain in ‘meritoriousness’ but loses in liberality ‘just as a face worn by tears and fasting loses its beauty’.¹¹ On the other hand Newman is certain that liberal knowledge is an end in itself; the whole of the fourth Discourse is devoted to this theme. The solution of this apparent antinomy lies in his doctrine that everything, including, of course, the intellect, ‘has its own perfection. Things animate, inanimate, visible, invisible, all are good in their kind, and have a best of themselves, which is an object of pursuit.’¹² To perfect the mind is ‘an object as intelligible as the cultivation of virtue, while, at the same time, it is absolutely distinct from it’.¹³

      Whether because I am too poor a theologian to understand the implied doctrine of grace and nature, or for some other reason, I have not been able to make Newman’s conclusion my own. I can well understand that there is a kind of goodness which is not moral; as a well-grown healthy toad is ‘better’ or ‘more perfect’ than a three-legged toad, or an archangel is ‘better’ than an angel. In this sense a clever man is ‘better’ than a dull one, or any man than any chimpanzee. The trouble comes when we start asking how much of our time and energy God wants us to spend in becoming ‘better’ or ‘more perfect’ in this sense. If Newman is right in saying that culture has no tendency ‘to make us pleasing to our Maker’, then the answer would seem to be, ‘None.’ And that is a tenable view: as though God said, ‘Your natural degree of perfection, your place in the chain of being, is my affair: do you get on with what I have explicitly left as your task–righteousness.’ But if Newman had thought this he would not, I suppose, have written the discourse on ‘Liberal Knowledge its Own End’. On the other hand, it would be possible to hold (perhaps it is pretty generally held) that one of the moral duties of a rational creature was to attain to the highest non-moral perfection it could. But if this were so, then (a) The perfecting of the mind would not be ‘absolutely distinct’ from virtue but part of the content of virtue; and (b) It would be very odd that Scripture and the tradition of the Church have little or nothing to say about this duty. I am afraid that Newman has left the problem very much where he found it. He has clarified our minds by explaining that culture gives us a non-moral ‘perfection’. But on the real problem–that of relating such non-moral values to the duty or interest of creatures who are every minute advancing either to heaven or hell–he seems to help little. ‘Sensitivity’ may be a perfection: but if by becoming sensitive I neither please God nor save my soul, why should I become sensitive? Indeed, what exactly is meant by a ‘perfection’ compatible with utter loss of the end for which I was created?

      My researches left me with the impression that there could be no question of restoring to culture the kind of status which I had given it before my conversion. If any constructive case for culture was to be built up it would have to be of a much humbler kind; and the whole tradition of educated infidelity from Arnold to Scrutiny appeared to me as but one phase in that general rebellion against God which began in the eighteenth century. In this mood I set about construction.

      1. I begin at the lowest and least ambitious level. My own professional work, though conditioned by taste and talents, is immediately motivated by the need for earning my living. And on earning one’s living I was relieved to note that Christianity, in spite of its revolutionary and apocalyptic elements, can be delightfully humdrum. The Baptist did not give the tax-gatherers and soldiers lectures on the immediate necessity of turning the economic and military system of the ancient world upside down; he told them to obey the moral law–as they had presumably learned it from their mothers and nurses–and sent them back to their jobs. St Paul advised the Thessalonians to stick to their work (1 Thessalonians 4:11) and not to become busybodies (2 Thessalonians 3:11). The need for money is therefore simpliciter an innocent, though by no means a splendid, motive for any occupation. The Ephesians are warned to work professionally at something that is ‘good’ (Ephesians 4:28). I hoped that ‘good’ here did not mean much more than ‘harmless’, and I was certain it did not imply anything very elevated. Provided, then, that there was a demand for culture, and that culture was not actually deleterious, I concluded I was justified in making my living by supplying that demand–and that all others in my position (dons, schoolmasters, professional authors, critics, reviewers) were similarly justified; especially if, like me, they had few or no talents for any other career– if their ‘vocation’ to a cultural profession consisted in the brute fact of not being fit for anything else.

      2. But is culture even harmless? It certainly can be harmful and often is. If a Christian found himself in the position of one inaugurating a new society in vacuo he might well decide not to introduce something whose abuse is so easy and whose use is, at any rate, not necessary. But that is not our position. The abuse of culture is already there, and will continue whether Christians cease to be cultured or not. It is therefore probably better that the ranks of the ‘culture-sellers’ should include some Christians–as an antidote. It may even be the duty of some Christians to be culture-sellers. Not that I have yet said anything to show that even the lawful use of culture stands very high. The lawful use might be no more than innocent pleasure; but if the abuse is common, the task of resisting that abuse might be not only lawful but obligatory. Thus people in my position might be said to be ‘working the thing which is good’ in a stronger sense than that reached in the last paragraph.

      In order to avoid misunderstanding, I must add that when I speak of ‘resisting the abuse of culture’ I do not mean that a Christian should take money for supplying one thing (culture) and use the opportunity thus gained to supply a quite different thing (homiletics and apologetics). That is stealing. The mere presence of Christians in the ranks of the culture-sellers will inevitably provide an antidote.

      It will be seen that I have now reached something very like the Gregorian view of culture as a weapon. Can I now go a step further and find any intrinsic goodness in culture for its own sake?

      3. When I ask what culture has done to me personally, the most obviously true answer is that it has given me quite an enormous amount of pleasure. I have no doubt at all that pleasure is in itself a good and pain in itself an evil; if not, then the whole Christian tradition about heaven and hell and the passion of our Lord seems to have no meaning. Pleasure, then, is good; a ‘sinful’ pleasure means a good offered, and accepted, under conditions which involve a breach of the moral law. The pleasures of culture are not intrinsically bound up with such conditions–though of course they can very easily be so enjoyed as to involve them. Often, as Newman saw, they are an excellent diversion from guilty pleasures. We may, therefore, enjoy them ourselves, and lawfully, even charitably, teach others to enjoy them.

      This view gives us some ease, though it would go a very little way towards satisfying the editors of Scrutiny. We should, indeed, be justified in propagating good taste on the ground that cultured pleasure in the arts is more varied, intense, and lasting, than vulgar or ‘popular’ pleasure.¹⁴ But we should not regard it as meritorious. In fact, much as we should differ from Bentham about value in general, we should have to be Benthamites on the issue between pushpin and poetry.

      4. It was noticed above that the values assumed in literature were seldom those of Christianity. Some of the principal values actually implicit in European literature were described as (a) honour, (b) sexual love, (c) material prosperity, (d) pantheistic contemplation of nature, (e) Sehnsucht awakened by the past, the remote, or the (imagined) supernatural, (f) liberation of impulses. These were called ‘sub-Christian’. This is a term of disapproval if we are comparing them with Christian values: but if we take ‘sub-Christian’ to mean ‘immediately sub-Christian’ (i.e. the highest level of merely natural value lying immediately below the lowest level of spiritual value) it may be a term of relative approval. Some of the six values I have enumerated may be sub-Christian in this (relatively) good sense. For (c) and (f) I can make no defence; whenever they are accepted by the reader with anything more than a ‘willing suspension of disbelief they must make him worse. But the other four are all two-edged. I may symbolise what I think of them all by the aphorism ‘Any