Tag: philosophical idealism

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When metaphors become real

Continuing from the previous installment from C. S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress.

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….. As a man in a dream talks without fear to his dead friend, and only afterwards bethinks himself, “It was a ghost! I have talked with a ghost!” and wakes screaming: even so John sprang up as he saw what he had done.

“I have been praying,” he said. “It is the Landlord under a new name. It is the rules and the black hole and the slavery dressed out in a new fashion to catch me. And I am caught…”

But this was insupportable to him and he said that he had only fallen into a metaphor. Even Mr. Wisdom had confessed that Mother Kirk and the Stewards gave an account of the truth in picture writing. And one must use metaphors. The feelings and the imagination needed that support. “The great thing,” said John, “is to keep the intellect free from them: to remember that they are metaphors.”

John continues onward but the trail down into this Grand Canyon becomes so treacherous he finds he must call upon “Mr. Wisdom’s ‘Absolute’ incessantly….He knew now that he was praying, but he thought he had drawn the fangs of that knowledge.” Finally, the path becomes so dark that he fears falling and stops to rest, hungry and thirsty as he is.

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

Then I dreamed that once more a Man came to him in the darkness and said, “You must pass the night where you are, but I have brought you a loaf and if you crawl along the ledge ten paces more you will find that a little fall of water comes down the cliff.”

“Sir,” said John. “I do not know your name and I cannot see your face, but I thank you. Will you not sit down and eat, yourself?”

“I am full and not hungry,” said the Man. “And I will pass on. But one word before I go. You cannot have it both ways.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Your life has been saved all this day by crying out to something which you call by many names, and you have said to yourself that you used metaphors.”

“Was I wrong, sir?”

“Perhaps not. But you must play fair. If its help is not a metaphor, neither are its commands. If it can answer when you call, then it can speak without your asking. If you can go to it, it can come to you.”

Afterword

John is confronted with the shortcomings of thinking of God as Universal Spirit, a great Mind of which we are each a small part. It’s easy to picture it, like a great mist or nebula of stars high above us.

But does this Mind truly have consciousness? If so, then it must have a will of its own. And so it must be able to initiate and not merely respond. (And how can we continue to refer to it with the neutral pronoun “it” when the only minds we know are either male or female?)

Avoiding such questions can keep us out of dangerous waters for a while. Universal Spirit, like the God of monism or pantheism, is a rather lame creature. As Lewis writes in another book, “The pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf.“

Jewish and Christian thought teach a concept quite different. Many would like to dispense with the Bible’s apparent metaphors for God too, but, Lewis writes, “it is with a shock that we discover [the Christian images of kingship] to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters–when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes besides you in the dark. But what If He were searching for us? Someone wholly other, such as you experience when you are fishing and there is a sudden tug at the end of the line. It’s alive!”

“Universal Spirit” or the dreaded “Landlord”?

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Continuing with C. S. Lewis’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Regress, we find John continuing his hopelessly difficult struggle down and up a treacherous, dry canyon in pursuit of his heart’s desire, an Island he has glimpsed and desired throughout his life. In the allegory we can be sure that the Island is Heaven or unity with God. His companion Vertue has gone on ahead, not caring whether he or John dies. John decides the climb is too treacherous and his supplies are gone and he must go back “and live out the rest of my life as best I can.”

Then a mysterious “Man” appears coming towards him down the path. John tells him that his companion Vertue has gone insane. But the man replies that Vertue is no more insane than John, and if they do not stick together neither of them will regain sanity. The Man pulls John up and across a particularly difficult gap. The Man disappears, and John looks back and sees that trying to go back would now be impossible. But the way ahead makes his heart fail.

John has learned from Wisdom that his true identity is Universal Spirit, that in essence they are one.

From The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book VIII, chapter 3

Then he tried to recall the lessons of Mr. Wisdom, whether they would give him any strength. “It is only myself,” he said. “It is myself, eternal Spirit, who drives this Me, the slave, along that ledge. I ought not to care whether he falls and breaks his neck or not. It is not he that is real, it is I–I–I. Can I remember that?”

But then he felt so different from the eternal Spirit that he could call it “I” no longer. “It is all very well for him,” said John, “but why does he give me no help? I want help. Help.”

Photo by Wil Stewart on Unsplash

Then he gazed up at the cliffs and the narrow sky, blue and remote, between them, and he thought of that universal mind and of the shining tranquility hidden somewhere behind the colors and the shapes, the pregnant silence under all the sounds, and he thought, “If one drop of all that ocean would flow into me now–if I, the mortal, could but realize that I am that, all would be well. I know there is something there. I know the sensuous curtain is not a cheat.” In the bitterness of his soul he looked up again, saying: “Help. Help. I want Help.”

But as soon as the words were out of his mouth, a new fear, far deeper than his fear of the cliffs, sprang at him from the hiding-place, close to the surface, where it had lain against this moment. As a man in a dream talks without fear to his dead friend, and only afterwards bethinks himself, “It was a ghost! I have talked with a ghost!” and wakes screaming: even so John sprang up as he saw what he had done.

“I have been praying,” he said. “It is the Landlord under a new name. It is the rules and the black hole and the slavery dressed out in a new fashion to catch me. And I am caught…”

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(C) 1943 Clive Staples Lewis. Paragraphs added to increase readability. First photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash.

In the House of Wisdom

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Continuing with C. S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress. John has grown up and left to pursue the vision of his Island, which filled him with immense longing. The path westward toward the Island is interrupted by something like the Grand Canyon (most likely representing sin), which no one can cross. John and his companion, Vertue, travel north and south along the canyon’s rim seeking help from many people representing different world views and ways of life, but no one understands or believes his goal is real. (Mother Kirk is the exception, but they reject her offer of guidance.) Vertue has become very sick and weak from these interactions and needs healing. And then they arrive at the house of Mr. Wisdom. Here, in allegorical form, is a defense of Longing, the desire for something this world can never satisfy.

Old Mr. Wisdom sits them down on his porch, looking west, and begins to speak.

From The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book VII, chapter 9.

“The words between you and and Reason were true. What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring. If water will not set a man at ease, then be sure it not thirst, or not thirst only, that tormented him: he wanted drunkenness to cure his dullness, or talk to cure his solitude, or the like. How, indeed, do we know our desires save by their satisfaction? When do we know them until we say, “Ah, this was what I wanted”? And if there were any desire which it was natural for man to feel but impossible for man to satisfy, would not the nature of this desire remain to him always ambiguous?

“If old tales were true, if a man without putting off humanity could indeed pass the frontiers of our country, if he could be, and yet be a man, in that fabled East and fabled West, then indeed at the moment of fruition, the raising of the cup, the assumption of the crown, the kiss of the spouse–then first, to his backward glance, the long roads of desire that he had trodden would become plain in all their winding, and when he found, he would know what it was that he had sought.

A lady named Contemplation takes John by moonlight to see the island.
Illustration by Michael Hague (c) 1981

“I am old and full of tears, and I see that you also begin to feel the sorrow that is born with us. Abandon hope: do not abandon desire. Feel no wonder that these glimpses of your Island so easily confuse themselves with viler things, and are so easily blasphemed. Above all, never try to keep them, never try to revisit the same place or time wherein the vision was accorded to you. You will pay the penalty of all who could bind down to one place or time within our country that which our country cannot contain. Have you not heard from the Steward of the sin of idolatry, and how, in their old chronicles, the manna turned to worms if any tried to hoard it? Be not greedy, be not passionate; you will but crush dead on your own breast with hot, rough hands the thing loved. But if ever you incline to doubt that the thing you long for is something real, remember what your own experience has taught you.

“Think that it is a feeling, and at once the feeling has no value. Stand sentinel at your own mind, watching for that feeling, and you will find–what shall I say?–a flutter in the heart, an image in the head, a sob in the throat: and was that your desire? You know that it was not, and that not feeling whatever will appease you, that feeling, refine it a you will, is but one more spurious claimant–spurious as the gross lusts of which the giant* speaks.

“Let us conclude then that what you desire is no state of yourself at all, but something, for that very reason, Other and Outer. And knowing this you will find tolerable the truth that you cannot attain it. That the thing should be, is so great a good that when you remember “it is” you will forget to be sorry that you can never have it….”

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*The Spirit of the Age, Freudianism, which says spiritual longing is merely disguised sexual desire.

Afterword

Wisdom is not the lady Wisdom of the Bible; he is the spokesman for Philosophical Idealism. In the next chapter John discovers that Wisdom’s children do not adhere to his strict diet. The children of philosophical idealism include Marx, Herbert Spencer, Spinoza, Rudolf Steiner, Kant, and Bernard Bosanquet (a 19th century English philosophical idealist and neo-Hegelian). They enjoy rich foods from other world-views and their own views are all over the map.

In his next session with John, which I will skip, Wisdom explains philosophical idealism without, of course, calling it that. The explanation is allegorical, like the rest of the novel, and terse. But those qualities may make it easier to follow if you’re unacquainted with the topic. If you are familiar with Hindu philosophy, theosophy, or typical New Age thinking, the similarities will leap out at you:

The “esoteric” wisdom is that John and this Other he longs for are actually of one and the same substance. “Atman is Brahman” is the famous Hindu saying. The Island John envisions is a glimpse of the great Universal Mind of which each of our minds is a small part or microcosm, not knowing its true nature.

Following these talks, Vertue is completely healed. Physically, anyway. He says he must go onward, down into the canyon bottom and then up the other side. He and John argue, for has not Wisdom told them that the other side cannot be reached, except by contemplation? To Vertue it matters not; he must go on even if he dies. Vertue is willing to abandon every scrap of creature comfort, including friendship. John decides he must follow him.

And we will find out if Mr. Wisdom was right about this: that our spiritual longings are real and good and must be kept alive, but their attainment is hopeless.

Grand Canyon photo by Lionello DelPiccolo on Unsplash