Archive for June, 2008

XV

Don June 27th, 2008

XV Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”   

            I’m back from England, and so we return for a while to our history of the growth of my poetic mind.  There is no form to add interest to this next poem, but I include it anyway for the sake of an arresting image:

 IMPRESSION: SUN”S RAYS 

It is evening—

And the Sun, tired from a full day’s work,

Rests feebly behind a cloud,

Reaching earthward with golden fingers to

Steady herself for one last look at the

World before she drops gratefully

Into bed.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

Oxford, 6/20/08

Don June 20th, 2008

Our revels now are ended.

This was our last day of class, and the students are dispersing across the British Isles and the Continent for Grand Tours before heading home. I more modestly will hang around Oxford for a few more days before “going down,” as Oxonians call the trip back home. But there are a few more items to report first.

“The Taming of the Shrew” at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford last night was the best performance technically, and the worst in interpretation, that I have ever seen. All the irony and ambiguity in Petruchio’s character was lost: he was just a male chauvinist jerk who broke Katherine’s spirit with unrelenting cruelty. The audience was not left to make out the meaning of Kate’s final speach. The formerly spunky and fiery lady delivered it in a flat, lifeless manner as one who feared for her life if she didn’t say it. Petruchio’s “There’s a wench! Come, kiss me, Kate” led to her hanging limply in his arms and “submitting” to his embrace in a manner most chilling. Then in a surreal sequel added to the text, it turned out that Petruchio is really Christofero Sly raping the servant who had played his wife in the introduction when they were trying to convince the derelict wino that he was a lord. He is caught in the act, stipped naked, and
turned back out humiliated into the street.

We did some debriefing this morning in class, as the students found the production, not surprisingly, quite disturbing. What genre is “Shrew” supposed to be? I asked them. It is supposed to be a comedy. Every editor for 400 years has thought so. A comedy is a play with a happy ending. But what we saw was a tragedy. Kate and Petruchio both end up being destroyed and humiliated, and no good of any kind comes to anyone.

So the evidence of genre is that Shakespeare thought Kate’s submission was a happy ending and really did bode peace and love and quiet life. And even most secular–even most feminist–directors have not seen her losing her spunkiness at the end of the play, but rather redirecting it: she realizes that playing Petruchio’s game, letting him lead in the dance, can be a lot of fun. Some see her truly submitting, while others see irony in the last speech as if she has merely learned that a different set of techniques work better for manipulating Petruchio than other men. Either of these interpretations is legitimate in the sense that you can make a case for it and it preserves the play as a comedy. What we saw on the other hand was not an interpretation of Shakespeare’ s play but a rejection of it, a substitution of a different vision altogether. You may not like Shakespeare’ s vision, or what you think it is, but at least the audience deserve a chance to evaluate it and make up their own minds. Students who had not read or seen the play before were astonished (but releaved) to learn that the last scene was not part of the original play and that there were more positive ways of playing it–that it really could be a comedy! Let the reader and theatre goer beware.

Then I finished up Tolkien by talking about the way the themes of Providence and “Not by might” come to their climax at Sammath Naur, and how Peter Jackson’s scene, in which Frodo actually pushes Gollum off the cliff instead of his falling by accident, obscures what Tolkien was trying to say. Not by might, and not even by Frodo’s goodness, which also proves insufficient, is the Quest acheived, but ironically by Gollum’s treachery and by chance–if chance you call it. Tolkien’s habit of adding that last phrase speaks volumes.

Finally, Dr. Bauman summarized Lewis’s “‘Til we Have Faces” and then led a discussion on what kind of faces we are developing: Have we realized with Orual that we are Ungit? Are we becoming more like Ungit/Orual, one who demands the sacrifice of others, or like Psyche, one who is ready to sacrifice herself? On that note, the first Summit Summer Oxford Program came to an end. I had the last word: “And so we come to our final parting on the shores of Middle Earth. I will not say, ‘Do not weep,’ for not all tears are an evil.”

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

Oxford, 6/19/08

Don June 20th, 2008

Today Dr. Bauman finished his discussion of Reflections on the Psalms and I started talking about Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. Though the word God never appears in the entire trilogy, the Christian worldview permeates it, though in a more subtle and deeply buried way than it does in the Narnia books. This is especially evident if you have read the creation story for Middle Earth in The Silmarillion, but it is there even without that.

Tolkien embeds the Christian worldview in his world by making innocent-sounding statements that raise unavoidable questions for those who think about what they are reading. Gandalf or other characters are constantly making statements like, “We must deal with the time we were given,” or “Another power was at work,” or “Bilbo was meant to find the Ring . . . and that is an encouraging thought.” The time we were “given,” not the time in which we find ourselves: so who “gave” it to us? If Bilbo was “meant” to find the Ring, who “meant” it? And why is this an encouraging thought? Elrond says that the Fellowship was “called” to his Council, though he did not call them. Then who did? A secular worldview, the belief that only atoms exist, will not let you say such things meaningfully. You cannot write this way without being either a Christian, confused, or dishonest; and Tolkien was neither confused nor dishonest. Living in Middle Earth raises questions to which only the Christian worldview has answers.

I also talked about Lewis as a poet. His chief ambition was to be a great poet. He was not a great poet, but he was a very good one, a careful craftsman who creates narratives full of longing and hope.

In a few minutes we leave for Stratford on Avon to visit Shakespeare’ s home town and see “The Taming of the Shrew” at the National Shakespeare Company. So I must away. More tomorrow, Deo volente.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

Oxford, 6/18/08

Don June 20th, 2008

Today I talked about the Chronicles of Narnia. We had a wide-ranging two-hour discussion that touched on all of them but focused on two questions: the preferable order for reading them and how they relate to the new movie versions.

HarperCollins has reordered the series into chronological order, starting with The Magician’s Nephew instead of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, because Lewis’s stepson Doug Gresham says that Lewis told him that was the way to read them. I offered four reasons why the original order is better the first time you read the series.

First, Lewis understood the way an epic works: you start in medias res [in the middle of things]. Then you fill in the background to that situation in a flashback, and finally finish up the story. This plunges you into the action and allows for suspense and surprises that are not possible with a straight chronological narrative. Second, starting with TMN ruins a number of passages in LWW that simply cannot have the effect on the reader that they were designed to have. When Mr. Beaver first tells the children that ‘Aslan is on the move,’ the narrater says, ‘Now, they did not know who Aslan is any more than you do.’ Not only does this comment make no sense if you have already read TMN, but it hinders the sense of mystery about Aslan that Lewis is trying to build up in that passage. Third, when Professor Kirk gives his reasons for believing Lucy, it is more effective if you do not know that he himself has already been to Narnia as Digory. This forces you to attend to the reasons and puts the burden on Lucy’s character and whether you really know in advance that such things can not happen. The impact is lessened if you know that Kirk knows, and is not himself believing and depending on the reasons for that belief that he gives. Fourth, you are deprived of several delightful surprises that come your way as the stories unfold–like finding out who Professor Kirk is and how the Lamp Post got there.

Therefore, while all serious students of Narnia should read the books chronologically at some point, it is better for us, our children, and any students we are able to influence, if we read the books in original publication order the first time. I have no reason to think Doug is lying. Therefore, either Doug misunderstood Lewis, or read more into his statement than was there, or Lewis actually did say it but was wrong. Based on my reading of Lewis as a literary critic, on my knowledge of his knowledge of literature, I think the last option the least likely.

My review of the Prince Caspian film appeared here earlier. We talked about my theory that the changes to the character of Peter are not accidental but parallel to the changes Peter Jackson made to Aragorn and Faramir in his LOTR. We live in a cynical age, and such directors fear that an unambiguous hero who does not waver in his commitment to the right will be unbelievable to their audience. But this misses the point that Lewis and Tolkien were trying to make: that it is precisely in a cynical age that we need literature to give us better role models than nature herself can. They represent a tradition that goes back to Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy. Their directors and screenwriters unfortunately do not get that, and so their works get distorted in the translation to screen in ways that are not demanded by the new medium as such, but are more related to a failure of moral imagination in society.

Then Dr. Bauman spent an hour on Lewis’s less well known book Reflections on the Psalms. [See my website, doulomen.tripod. com, under topics for my own take on that work.] Lewis deals among other things with challenges like the imprecatory psalms, such as the one saying that the man would be happy who dashes the head of Babylonian babies against a stone. Ever the Advocatus Diaboli, Bauman started channelling Hitchens and Dawkins and the other new atheists with their belief that the Old Testament God is simply evil, a supporter of ethnic cleansing [the Amorites] and infanticide. The students had to try to defend against these attacks and to evaluate the accuracy and effectiveness of Lewis’s defense. At the end of the hour they had more questions than answers–a state in which Dr. B. loves to leave them. They’ll spend the evening shoring up the answers and come back tomorrow ready for more.

Then this afternoon we visited The Kilns, Lewis’s house, which has been restored by the C. S. Lewis Foundation to the form it was in when Lewis lived there. Behind the house is a pond where Lewis swam and a nature preserve where he loved to walk. We got a ways into the woods to a lovely clearing next to a very English looking paddock with two horses that we immediately christened Bree and Whin. ‘We’ve got to Narnia,’ the students cried. Wish you were here.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

Oxford, 6/17/08

Don June 18th, 2008

Tuesday was a busy day.  Dr. Bauman’s wife, Nicole, introduced the students to Dorothy L. Sayers.  Dr. Bauman talked about the theology of Charles Williams, explaining his ideas on Exchange, Co-Inherence, and Substitution.  We live by exchange and no one is an island; we live in one another; and we can bear one another’s burdens through substitution.  Christ’s exchange of his righteousness for our sins, his substitutionary atonement, and his indwelling of us through his Holy Spirit, are not just isolated spiritual events but flow from the very Trinitarian nature of God and are imprinted by him on all of creation; they are the way the universe works. Calvary then was not a random act but simply the place where these principles are revealed in their greatest purity and profundity.

Then we had a lecture by Lewis’s former secretary and the editor of his many posthumously published works, Walter Hooper.  Hooper described his meeting Lewis as parallel in his own life to Lewis’s meeting Kirkpatrick–only Lewis’s ‘Stop–what do you mean by . . .’ was delivered with more charity and humor and with Christian rather than atheist underpinnings.  Tidbits included Hooper’s opinion that the cooling of the friendship between Lewis and Tolkien in the last decade of Lewis’s life has been exaggerated:  ‘Lewis adored Tolkien, and Tolkien always spoke of Lewis to me with great love.’  Hooper claims to have won one argument [and only one, and even that one only posthumously] with Lewis:  Lewis was sure that after he died his books would gradually fade into oblivion, and Hooper was sure they would not.  ‘I believe,’ he said with mock modesty, ‘that I may have been right on that one.’  And we must honor him as one of the reasons why he was right.  In his first negotiations with Harper Collins to begin his 45-year career of editing and publishing Lewis’s literary remains and collecting his essays, letters, etc., Hooper asked as a condition that for every new Lewis book published they would bring back into print an old one.  ‘All right,’ Lady Collins agreed, ‘which one should be first?’  The Abolition of Man was the reply.  Good choice.  We can be very grateful that we still have so much of Lewis’s work so easily available to us today.  My own life would have been profoundly impoverished without it.

Then we continued the day by visiting nearby Blenheim Palace, the seat of Duke of Marlborough and birthplace of Winston Churchill and topped it off with formal dinner in hall for the students at New College.  A good time was had by all.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

Oxford, 6/16/08

Don June 16th, 2008

Over the weekend some of us went up to Cambridge to check out the other university in Lewis’s life.  After three decades of being denied promotion to full professor at Oxford because of resentment of his Christian testimony and his popularity outside of academia, he was finally offered a professorship of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge and became for the last decade of his career a fellow of Magdalen College, Cambridge.  Lewis still maintained his residence at The Kilns in Oxford and commuted to Cambridge during term–it’s about a three hour drive–coming home on the weekends.  While the Inklings connections to Oxford run longer and deeper–Tolkien, of course, spent his whole career here–one must be grateful to Cambridge for the recognition it gave Lewis at the end of his career, and for occasioning that wonderful inaugural lecture, “De Descriptione Temporum.”

Cambridge is a little younger than Oxford and a little smaller, though it does have colleges such as King’s and St. John’s that can rival anything here in size and ornateness.  Oxford has distinguished itself more in the humanities, Cambridge in the sciences.  Oxford was more Anglican and royalist in sympathy during the Civil War, Cambridge comparatively more Puritan and parliamentarian.  My biggest regret in our visit was that the renowned and magnificent King’s College Chapel was closed.  But we had full access to Magdalen, and so the main reason for my visit was fulfilled.

Cambridge’s Magdalen College is smaller and more intimate in feel than Oxford’s, in which Lewis spent most of his career.  The Pepysian Library, the most familiar building, is Eighteenth Century rather than medieval.  There is no deer park, but a very nice Fellow’s Garden with a smaller and more enclosed version of Addison’s Walk, and a corner or two that put one in mind of Bragdon Wood (though Lewis wrote That Hideous Strength a decade before going there).  The Chapel is smaller and less ornate, but beautiful in its simplicity and very peaceful.  There is a plaque honoring Lewis’s time there in the vestibule.  On the busride back we were treated to one of those long, lingering English summer sunsets, the towering clouds flecked with rose as they turned to gray, begging for a Gainsborough or a Constable to capture their skyscape before they faded into dusk.   

Today (Monday) we returned to class with a focus on The Space Trilogy.  I suggested that it would be most fully appreciated if one saw each of the tree books in a group portrait with its literary siblings. 

For example, Out of the Silent Planet is a journey in many ways like Swift’s Gulliver’s travels.  Just as Gulliver’s embarassment at trying to explain European society and its customs to Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, and Houynyhms is a vehicle for Swift’s satire of his contemporaries, Ransom’s attempts to explain human customs to the Hrossa bring out Lewis’s perspectives on fallen humanity.  (Hross is the Anglo-Saxon word for horse, reminding us obliquely of Gulliver’s last journey.)  It is as important to see the differences as the similarities.  Gulliver’s experiences lead him ironically to adopt the pride of his Houynyhm masters, while Ransom’s is a journey to wisdom and humility.  Realizing the literary connections brings both the parallels and the contrasts into sharp focus.

In like manner, Perelandra belongs with Genesis and Paradise Lost, and That Hideous Strength stretches roots back to Mallory and the Arthurian legend and out to its contemporary dystopias, 1984 and Brave New World.  Lewis sees similar dangers to our society as Huxley and Orwell, but has resources for solutions to them that they lacked.  1984 ends with Winston loving Big Brother in spite of his long career of trying to escape him, but THS ends with Mark rejecting Frost, Wither, and Fairy Hardcastle inspite of his long career of trying to insinuate himself into their society.  Grace is the difference.

The books of the Space Trilogy can also be seen as fictional incarnations of the ideas in Lewis’s non fiction popular apologetics works.  Miracles, “Myth become Fact,” and Problem of Pain show up in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, and Abolition of Man and “The Inner Ring” in That Hideous Strength. 

On another note, THS shows the Christian worldview and its secular reductionist opponent, not just as opposing ideas, but as ideas incarnated in the two opposing communities of St. Anne’s and the N.I.C.E.  The failure of our churches to be contemporary versions of St. Anne’s–their failure to be real communities of faith that offer a viable alternative to secularism as opposed to accomodating themselves to it–might be addressed better if we learned the lessons of this book and planted its seeds in our own communities.  

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

Oxford, 6/13/08

Don June 13th, 2008

Today was a field trip to London for Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and Churchill’s war room, the bunker from which he and the war cabinet conducted WWII–an austere and sobering reminder that never have so many owed so much to so few.  Then we had some free time before heading back to Oxford.  I spent mine in the National Gallery, across Trafalgar Square from Westminster.  It was my first time in the National Gallery, so that’s what I want to talk about.  Some highlights in chronological order:

Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks [ca. 1491-1508], made famous by The Da Vinci Code, is arresting from a distance through its rich color and exquisite compositional balance; but up close the details are all disappointing–except for Mary’s face, intensely human compared to the other figures.  If he did that on purpose, it was brilliant.

Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous portrait of Erasmus [1523] shows up in black and white in many history books.  In the full sized original you realize what an enigmatic expression Erasmus has on his face.  It reminded me of the Mona Lisa.  He seems simultaneously tired, humorous, and a little sad.  Somehow the man who cracked bi-lingual puns with Thomas More and the one who was in despair over the dissolution of Christendom both seem to be looking out of that one set of eyes. 

In the same room is Holbein’s The Ambassadors [1533], the one with the two young and splendidly arrayed ambassadors flanking a table covered with mathematical and scientific instruments and a lute with a broken string.  On the floor in front of them is the distorted shadow of a human skull.  I’ve never been able to see the skull in reproductions, but if you stand at the very right corner of the painting and look across it, the skull comes into perfect proportion just as the figures of the ambassadors become unrecognizable.  In the upper left corner, the rich green curtain in the background is pulled back just enough to show a wooden crucifix behind it.  It makes a rather chilling memento mori, and a rather strange one for that date, as if Salvador Dali had somehow retouched the Renaissance original.  Intriguing in reproductions, the original is more so, and strangely haunting as well.

Lucas Cranach the Elder has an allegorical figure of Charity [ca. 1537-1550] that is identical to the verbal protrait Edmund Spenser would draw in Book I of The Fairie Queene a generation later.

I love the middle ages and the Renaissance, and I love much of the Nineteenth Century in art, but the interminable procession of fat, naked gods of the Baroque does nothing for me.  The Eighteenth Century is a vast wasteland of repetitive ostentation until suddenly the English landscape painters make art interesting again by anticipating the Romantics in literature.  In Gainsborough’s Watering Place [1777] and Market Cart [1786], Nature seems to swirl energetically around the central figure in an effect that is strangely peaceful.  Then in the Nineteenth Century proper, a representational realism that is more than mere representation reaches its peak in Constable’s Stratford Mill [1820], Hay Wain [1821], and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows [1831].  Somehow he combines a fine use of detail in the foreground with a sense of distance in his skies to capture the largeness as well as the beauty of the outdoors. 

Then, with realism having run its course, the Impressionists look for new ways in which to interpret nature and convey their feelings for it even as they render it.  This attempt reaches its apex in the tender beauty of Monet and the energetic power of Van Gogh. Monet’s Irises, Japanese Bridge, Water Lily Pond [under the same bridge but handled very differently], and Houses of Parliament at Sunset are symphonies of color that study their subjects lovingly, one might even say caressingly. 

After that, the Twentieth Century gives itself up to distortion for its own sake, or in the service of dehumanizing philosophies, and the off-putting aesthetic of difficulty, and I find myself losing interest again.  Cezanne’s Bathers, for example, is just ugly and boring after an afternoon spent absorbing the works described above.  And then come Da Da and even more self conscious attempts at cleverness.  One feels profoundly sorry for a century that could not find anything better to do with its talent, and profoundly grateful that the work of more humane times has been preserved.  As for the current century, it is too early to tell what we will do.  We could do worse than start by spending an afternoon in England’s National Gallery for instruction and inspiration.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

Oxford, 6/12/08

Don June 12th, 2008

Dr. Bauman finished his discussion of The Four Loves today.  For those who have not read that rich little book, Lewis takes the four basic Greek words translated “love” in English to stand for four types, or maybe four modes, of love.  They are STORGE, affection (for pets or family members), PHILIA, friendship, EROS, romantic love, and AGAPE, divine love.  STORGE is the humblest and least demanding of loves.  In PHILIA, we stand side by side looking out together at some common interest.  In EROS, the lovers stand face to face, absorbed in each other.  AGAPE is the love God has for us, not because we are loveable, but because he is loving.  It is thus sometimes called unconditional or sacrificial love.

All human loves are capable of corruption.  They can all try to become idols.  As Lewis puts it, they all cease to be demons only when they cease trying to be gods.  PHILIA is undervalued by moderns, who are obsessed with EROS (and confuse it wit sex, though it is much more).  All need to be completed by AGAPE to keep from going bad and turning their potential blessing into a curse. 

Bauman ended each section with practical questions for discussion:  What does this love look like when it goes bad?  How can we cooperate with grace to keep that from happening?  The young people took more time on EROS than any of the others, naturally.  They all want good marriages and they know by looking at their elders and their peers how dicey a proposition getting there (and staying there) is.  Some of these kids are thinking about these things in a more mature and wise way than I was at the same age, and I think Bauman’s discussion of Lewis will help too.  There might actually be some hope for some of them.  We shall see.

Then our hosts at OSAP (Oxford Studies Abroad Program) arranged a special treat for us:  a lecture and discussion session with Sir Roger Bannister, the Oxford student who first broke the four minute mile barrier in 1954.  Bannister went on to become a doctor of medicine and an accomplished researcher in neurophysiology; it was he who developed the first reliable test for steroid use by athletes.  He also served for many years as principal of Pembroke College, Oxford.  He spoke on the history of the ancient and modern Olympic games and his concerns over the corruption of international sport by drugs and politicization–this from a man who is a living reminder of a more innocent age.  The now elderly and very gentlemanly Bannister was as interested in the students as they were in him, questioning them closely about their own involvement with athletics and its relation to other areas of their lives.  Being surrounded by reminders of history is one of the chief benefits of studying in Oxford town.  Here was a chance to connect with another bit of history we weren’t so much expecting.

We had been scheduled to vist Blenheim Palace after class, but that trip was postponed, so about half of us trooped over to the Bird (the Eagle and Child, or “Bird and Baby” pub, famous haunt of the original Inklings) for lunch instead of grabbing a quick baguette on our dash to the coach.  There steak or chicken pie, or bangers and mash, or fish and chips were consumed with gusto as we re-enacted one of the classic Thursday lunch meetings, with conversation that rivaled Jack and Tollers in enthusiasm and enjoyment if not in brilliance.  Now in mid-afternoon, early clouds are breaking up into glorious sunlight, but with temperatures in the sixties.  We are trying to gin up some sympathy for the Yanks (i.e., Americans, including Southerners) languishing in ninety degree heat and humidity back home, but not with much success.  We are glad to be here for lots of reasons.  I feel a sudden need to remind you, gentle reader, once again, that Envy is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.  And now, back to basking in bliss, er, Oxford . . .

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program
Chester House, George Street, Oxford, UK       

Oxford, 6/11/08

Don June 11th, 2008

Today I spent two hours on what may be Lewis’s finest non-fiction work, Miracles.  We laid the groundwork for it by looking at three general reasons why modern people find miracles inconceivable.  First is the assumption of naturalism; second the belief that science has shown the universe to be the kind of place where miracles don’t happen; third, even some believers don’t think miracles the kind of thing God would do: if he designed nature so badly that he has to keep breaking his own laws, he wouldn’t be very intelligent, would he? 

We then looked specifically at David Hume’s argument against belief in miracles.  A miracle is a violation of a natural law.  But natural laws are based on uniform human experience.  Therefore, it is always more rational to believe that someone who reports a miracle is either deceived or deceiving than it is to believe he is telling the truth.

Lewis brilliantly designed his defense of miracles to deal with all of these arguments.  One thing they have in common is that they all define a miracle as a “violation” of a natural law.  Lewis cuts the ground out from under all of them in one fell swoop with his definition of miracle: an “interference” with nature by a supernatural power.  The word choice is significant.  How God works his miracles we do not know; it might involve breaking natural laws.  But if that is not essential to the definition, then the skeptics’ arguments become mostly irrelevant.  Lewis uses the example of a billiards table.  The laws of physics tell you where the eight-ball will go if the q-ball strikes it with such and such a force at such and such an angle, etc.: into the side pocket.  But if someone reaches his hand in and deflects the ball so that it goes into the corner pocket instead of the side, have any laws of physics been broken?  No.  Those laws are still followed perfectly.  It’s just that the original calculation did not take one of the forces that was going to be applied into account.  God might reach his hand into Nature, as it were, without necessarily even breaking any of his own rules.

But Lewis is not content just to make miracles possible; he will not stop until he had made naturalism impossible.  If naturalism is true, then all our thoughts are just arrangements of atoms in our heads produced by the chance operations of the laws of physics and chemistry.  But how can one arrangement of atoms be “true” about something and another one be false?  And who (or what) is to judge between these two arrangements?  Another arrangement of atoms equally produced, not by reason, but by the impersonal and inevitable outcome of the Big Bang.  This gets us nowhere.  Naturalism is a philosophy that makes thought invalid.  Therefore, as soon as a naturalist says that naturalism is true, he contradicts himself.  No view which by implication denies the validity of thought can be allowed to use thought to establish itself; no system that makes truth meaningless can be allowed to claim it is true. 

If naturalism is impossible but miracles are possible, then how do we decide which miracles to believe in?  Lewis spends much of the book noticing that the biblical miracles are not just arbitrary shows of power.  Instead, they are acts of revelation that show us the character of the God we worship.  Especially the Grand Miracle, the Resurrection of Christ, fulfills the pattern of incarnation, death, and rebirth that God stamped on nature itself and on pagan myth because it is central to who he is: the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  So the book is not only a brilliant defense of miracles in a skeptical age, it is also a profound meditation on the meaning and significance of the biblical miracles.  It is a book to be read slowly and many times.

Dr. Bauman finished our lecture time by introducing The Four Loves.  Then it was off to lunch in hall at New College where we are visiting scholars, and from there to the library and other pursuits.  All too soon our time will be gone and we will look back to Oxford like the Fellowship looked back on their time in Loth Lorien.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

Oxford, 6/10/08

Don June 10th, 2008

Most of the students are in a set of flats about a mile from town center.  They’ve organized themselves into a cooperative so they can pool their money and cook dinner for one another: home made meals for less than 2 pounds a person!  They were kind enough to invite me last night.  After cleaning up they disperse to the Bod (Bodleian Library) to study, then to the Bird (Eagle and Child, the original Inklings’ favorite pub) to hang out before heading back to bed.  This is not a for credit course, but they are studying harder than most of my students for whom the work counts.  Maybe it’s the romanesque, gothic, or neoclassical surroundings in the various parts of the library.  It couldn’t be that our lectures are actually motivating them–could it?

Today I covered Mere Christianity, concentrating on two of Lewis’s arguments: the moral argument for theism and the famous trilemma (”Lord, Liar, Lunatic) argument for the deity of Christ.  Lewis’s version of the Moral Argument (the existence of an objective and absolute moral law requires a moral Lawgiver) is somewhat dated, because sixty years ago he could make certain assumptions that we can no longer take for granted.  For example, he says with some confidence that nobody says, “To hell with your standard” when caught in a moral breach; they are more likely to make excuses.  Today people are quite capable of saying such things–or, at least, they think they are.  But it’s one thing to say that you theoretically believe in no moral absolutes when you are thinking of yourself as the one potentially getting away with something you want to do, such as preserving your promiscuous lifestyle.  It is quite another thing when you are asked to contemplate yourself as the potential victim.  “So, if I were strong enough to get away with it, it would be perfectly all right for me to . . .”  No, it wouldn’t.  The moral argument can still work, but we may need to add some extra steps today that Lewis six decades ago could afford to skip. 

The Trilemma has been attacked (e.g., by Beversluis) as fallacious.  So we analyzed it carefully to see if it can withstand its critics.  There are two ways it could fail.  First, logically, it might commit the fallacy of false dilemma:  there might be other options that Lewis left out.  Assuming that Jesus really did seriously claim to be God incarnate, are there any other alternatives?  He was telling the truth, he was lying, he was insane.  We tried hard to think of other options, but they all quickly reduced to being versions of one of Lewis’s three.  So we concluded that the argument does hold together logically.

The other way an argument can fail is if one of its premises is factually incorrect.  The trilemma has been attacked at this point: it assumes that Jesus said he was God, but, it has been argued, modern scholarship casts significant doubt on whether Jesus actually said those things.  N. T. Wright criticizes Mere Christianity on this point in a recent Chrstianity Today article.  But this attack fails when one brings in the essay we read yesterday, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” or “Fernseed and Elephants.”  Lewis shows the methodologies by which the historical reliability of the Gospels is supposedly overturned to be fundamentally flawed.  Wright ignores the audience for which Mere Christianity was written: uneducated English laymen in World War II.  It would have been inappropriate, indeed silly, to bring Biblical criticism in to complicate things for them.  But Lewis shows elsewhere that if someone raises that issue he is more than prepared to deal with it.  So the trilemma is also valid, if we are prepared to deal with the potential objections from negative critics.  The burden of proof is on them that the eyewitness sources are unreliable, and their reasons for questioning them are woefully inadequate.

Then Dr. Bauman spent an hour on A Grief Observed, Lewis’s account of his grief over the loss of his wife Joy to cancer after their happy but painfully brief marriage.  Lewis brilliantly describes the process of grief, openly lets us see his doubts and struggles, and wins through them back to vigorous faith in the end.  We finished with a practical discussion of how to counsel people who are grieving.  The consensus was that it was better to listen and be there for them rather than try to hurry them through the process with lame words. 

This afternoon the students have a seminar on how to get into grad school at an Oxford college.  They are absolutely drooling over the idea.  After that I think some are heading over to the Ashmolean Museum, full of Greek, Roman, Assyrian, and Egyptian antiquities, Modern (i,e., Renaissance through the present) European art, and the Alfred Jewel, which apparently actually belonged to Alfred the Great, the scholar king of the ninth century who saved England from both the barbarity of the Vikings and the darkness of her own illiteracy.  But don’t get me started on Alfred.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

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