S5E4 – TFL 2 – “Likings and loves for the sub-human” (Part II)

The gang discusses “love of nature”.

S5E4: “Likings and loves for the sub-human” – Part II (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

“Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be overwhelmed and, after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

Chit-Chat

• Andrew’s Updates
  • Camp Allen
  • Books going on eBay
  • Travelling to Florida for Thanksgiving

• Matt’s Updates
  • Taylor Swift has released a new version of her album, Red.
  • Reading book by Sr. Miriam James‘ new book, Loved as I am, after seeing her on Pints With Aquinas. She quotes Lewis several times:

“In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing.”

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

“In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.”

C.S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader

• David’s Updates
  • I’ve been rather sick! Way to prepare for the Nativity Fast!
  • All Pints With Jack mugs are now sold! Please take a picture of yourself with your mug, tag us and use the hashtag #muglife.
  • Given the success of Most Reluctant Convert, I reached out to former guest of the show, Joseph Loconte, to check on the status of his documentary project: A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. Details can be found here.
  • We’re putting together a video and that we would like the help of our listeners!
    • The video will be in honour of William O’Flaherty, whose website, EssentialCSLewis.com, and podcast, All About Jack, are celebrating their ten year anniversary. 
    • William wrote The Misquotable C.S. Lewis, where he debunks many of the common C.S. Lewis misquotations you’ll find on the Internet. We thought it would be fun if we recorded ourselves reading some of the more popular misquotations and, after each one, have a clip of a different listener shaking his or her head and saying something like “That’s not Lewis!”
    • So, if anyone listening would like to be part of this project, all you need to do is send us a video clip of yourself expressing your disapproval at hearing a misquotation. All of the details can be found here.

Beverage and Toast

• Andrew
  • Penderyn Peated Single Malt

• Matt
  • Lost Distillery Series – Gerston

• David
  • I’m continuing to work through the New Glarus Brewing collection. Today I’m drinking a Classic Country Lager which was a collaboration between New Glarus Brewing and Weyermann Malting. Since both companies have female CEOs, they decided to call it  Two Women.

Recap & Summary

Recap

In Chapter 1, Lewis divided love into Need-love and Gift-love. He also divided closeness to God into Nearness-by-approach and Nearness-by-likeness. Following this analysis, Jack warned us that, when they’re at their best, loves can make divine claims, and if we acquiesce to their demands, they will become gods, then demons, and even cease to be loves at all!

Then, last week, we began Chapter 2, “Likings and loves for the sub-human”. Jack began by looking at the subject of pleasures, dividing them, once again, into two. The first are Need-pleasures, which require a preceding desire in order to be a pleasure. Once satisfied, these kinds of pleasures “die on us” very quickly. Lewis says that they foreshadow the Need-loves we read about in Chapter 1. The second kind of pleasures are Pleasures of Appreciation These are pleasurable in and of themselves. He says these pleasures are much longer-lasting and we feel like we owe the objects of this kind of pleasure our attention. These Appreciative pleasures foreshadow a new category of love which Jack calls “Appreciative Love”.

Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: “We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

Summary

Today we examine one particular “sub-human” love – the love of nature. This isn’t love of beauty, views, or the details of flora and fauna, but receiving the “spirit” and “moods” of nature, something Jack says has been “debunked” by moderns.

Lewis rejects the claim that nature is a teacher. He says that in nature we find what we seek, be they beauties or horrors. Despite this, nature can give meaning to the words we use about God, and if we never let nature become a god, and hence a demon, we can continue to have great love for her.

S5E5 Episode Summary

Discussion

1. “Love of nature”

Jack says that he wants to talk about two non-personal loves, two loves for things which are sub-human, less-than-human… We’ll deal with the second one next Tuesday, but today we’re going to talk about “love of nature”, which Lewis thinks is particularly strong among the English and the Russians.

Lewis clearly has something specific in mind by this phrase and he attempts to explain what he means by contrasting the nature lovers he has in mind with two other kinds… It’s actually rather funny – he says that his nature lovers would hate to go on a hike (or, in English English, “a ramble”) with either of the other two kinds:

(A) The first kind would be someone such as a botanist. This would be intolerable because a botanist would keep drawing their attention to the details of individual flora and fauna.

(B) The second kind of person would be a landscape painter. This would be awful because he would want to hunt out “views”. William Wordsworth said that this kind of attitude leads to comparison and it’s just about pampering yourself with novelties of size and colour… and Lewis seems to agree! 

So, the kind of people Lewis has in mind don’t care about minutiae of nature and they don’t care for landscapes. So after saying what “love of nature” isn’t, what those people don’t care about, he tries to give the positive case, saying:

…it is the “moods” or the “spirit” that matter. Nature-lovers want to receive as fully as possible whatever nature, at each particular time and place, is, so to speak, saying.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

However, he points out it doesn’t have to be something beautiful:

The obvious richness, grace, and harmony of some scenes are no more precious to them than the grimness, bleakness, terror, monotony, or “visionary dreariness” of others… They want to absorb it into themselves, to be coloured through and through by it.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

Andrew explained Romanticism and quoted the following lines from Wordsworth:

Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

2. “Debunked!”

Lewis says that such a love of nature was greatly praised in the Nineteenth Century but, like much else, has been “debunked” in the Twentieth…and this isn’t all bad. While Jack is willing to say that Wordsworth was a great poet, he thinks he was a pretty pathetic philosopher who “said some very silly things”. In fact, he calls him a “philosophaster” which is the name of someone who just dabbles in philosophy. He identifies two of the silly things which Wordsworth said.

The first is the idea that “flowers enjoy the air they breathe” and therefore that they also feel pains as well as pleasures.

3. “Nature the Teacher”

The second Wordsworthian idea which Lewis rejects is that people can be “…taught moral philosophy by an ‘impulse from a vernal wood’” Lewis says that if people are taught moral philosophy by nature, Wordsworth himself might not approve of the lessons! This reminded David of the following passage from Mere Christianity:

We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody [behind the Moral Law]. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place)

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book I, Chapter 5)

Lewis talks about “dark gods in the blood”, which seem to be our base, animal parts of human nature.

Jack says “If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lessons you had already decided to learn” …which means that nature doesn’t actually teach. Such an idea can be “grafted in” to “love of nature”, but really…

…the “moods” and “spirits” of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, “Look. Listen. Attend.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

4. “Nature as icon and incarnation”

This call of nature to “Look. Listen. Attend.” is often misinterpreted and people set about constructing theories about God, pantheism, or atheism.  If we want theology or philosophy, Lewis tells us that we should go to theologians and philosophers, not nature. But that begs the question: what then does nature give us?

Well, Lewis says that whether you’re a Romantic or someone of the “dark-gods-in-the-blood variety”, what you get from nature is…

“an iconography, a language of images…[not just] visual images; it is the “moods” or “spirits” themselves – the powerful expositions of terror, gloom, jocundity, cruelty, lust, innocence, purity”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

He says that he’s not talking about using nature as metaphor, rather using it to fill and incarnate our beliefs and the words we use. He gives the examples of nature giving meaning to the words “glory” and “fear” of God. Interestingly, he also notes that:

…if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the “love” of God would never, so far as I can see, have existed 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

However, just because a Christian can use nature in this way doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true. Those “suffering from Dark Gods” can do the same. He offers this maxim:

A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

Having said that, from the Christian point-of-view, this is what we’d expect, the visible giving hints to the invisible. However, he says it’s not as simple as we might first imagine.

…there are worms in the belly as well as primroses in the wood. Try to reconcile them, or to show that they don’t really need reconciliation, and you are turning from direct experience of nature… to metaphysics or theodicy or something of that sort. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

A theodicy is an explanation of suffering, given divine goodness. Lewis says that while constructing a metaphysic or a theodicy might be quite sensible, it should be kept separate from love of nature. It gives an “image of glory” and we can only follow it so far. We need philosophy, Scripture, and prayer. Without these, “love of nature” becomes nature religion, leading us either to the Dark Gods or general nonsense.

5. “Keeping love pure”

Lewis ends this discourse on love of nature by saying that although “love of nature” needs to be “chastened and limited”, we don’t have to surrender it to the debunkers.

Our journey to God, while helped to some degree by nature, and for some people indispensable, will necessarily involve a transition from nature to an ugly little church in a poor part of London (“East End parish”). 

Nature cannot satisfy the desires she arouses nor answer theological questions nor sanctify us.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

Love of nature can actually continue to help us, particularly if we have kept our love of nature in proportion. If it’s not set up as a God, it won’t become a demon, and therefore will remain a true and authentic love. This is something which Lewis claims the poets failed to do:

And demons never keep their promises. Nature “dies on” those who try to live for a love of nature. Coleridge ended by being insensible to her; Wordsworth, by lamenting that the glory had passed away. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

Lewis ends with a piece of advice:

Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be overwhelmed and, after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

Wrap-Up

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