Why Objective Truth Still Matters: Michael Ward on C.S. Lewis (Transcript)

In fact, Lewis uses as his umbrella term for this corpus of moral value a Chinese term, the dao. The way he deliberately reaches into Confucian philosophy to make the point that he’s not trying here to defend a specifically Western or Christian understanding. This is humanity’s ethical inheritance.

The Waterfall Incident and the Green Book

LARRY P. ARNN: So let’s try to make the argument for the book of Abolition of Man, which will be hard, but we’re pretty good. Maybe we can. And I think a good way to approach it is to ask the contrast between the beginning and the end of the book. The book begins, famously, with Coleridge at a waterfall. And somebody says, the waterfall is pretty, and somebody else says it’s sublime. And Coleridge approves of sublime and not of pretty. And then how does that come up? Explain it?

MICHAEL WARD: Yeah. So this incident at the waterfall is used in a book called the Green Book, or at least Lewis calls it the Green Book. That’s his target, that’s his main interlocutor, his main foil at the start of the book. Because in the Green Book, which is a textbook for English school students, which is supposed to be about literary criticism, not philosophy, the authors of this Green Book say that when Coleridge approved the word sublime and disapproved of the word pretty for the waterfall. He was not really making any statement about the objective properties of the waterfall. He was just referring to his own subjective response, how the waterfall made him feel.

And that’s what the authors of the Green Book propound, subjectivism, when they’re really meant to be teaching the readers of their book how to write English better. But they’re smuggling in a really damaging moral philosophy, which really gets Lewis’s goat. That’s what vexes him, irks him. These authors are supposed to be writing a book on one subject, and they’re actually poisoning the minds of the young generation.

So that’s his target. And he rips them to shreds, philosophically speaking, in the opening chapter, and says they’re utterly wrong. To get into the precise terms of the argument is, as you say, not very easy. And however brilliant you and I are, it’s difficult to summarize.

The Structure and Argument of The Abolition of Man

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah, we’re going to try, though, this way. So the book is arranged into three main parts, and all three parts are vital, and all three parts are steps in an argument. And the book is, I caution the reader, and I urge the reader, I think I would suggest this order. Go read The Abolition of Man, and anytime you’re going to read a great book, I have advice that I give all the time, I’ll give it to you, to everybody. The first thing is just try to get down what it says, not some profound. What are these statements? What do they mean? Read it for that, and then read after humanity, which is an exploration of it with a lot of information about it and analysis of it, and then read that a time or two, and then go back and read Abolition man again, and all of a sudden it won’t seem formidable.

My own experience with it, which began in 1974 in my first semester of graduate school, an illustrious professor assigned this book. He was a nihilist. He was a really great teacher, I think he was really not really a nihilist, but he always maintained he was, and he thought this book shows where the world is going. Okay, so now let’s see where the world is going.

So to connect these arguments, I’m going to propose what I think is the destination that the book reaches. I’m going to read a little bit from late in the book, he says. Remember that his complaint about the Green Book is that the Green Book claims that your feelings are not ordinate with the nature. You’re not sufficiently connected to the nature outside you. They’re thinking it’s only your feelings that make you see things, not the things right. Nature is, in that sense, insufficiently influential in you, according to the Green Book.

But look at this. This argument turns into a claim that we’ve engaged in the conquest of nature. It begins with the claim we’re not listening to it, but it ends with the claim we’re going to destroy it. And it’s this. The power of man over nature becomes the power of some man over others. He mentions in this context the airplane. He says the airplane doesn’t make you stronger. Somebody has to provide the airplane. Somebody has to fly the airplane. You can get somewhere quicker, but if you walked there, you’d be on your own.

Then he says that this value thing, what offends him and what offends anybody who thinks about it? Like, first of all, have you ever seen a beautiful waterfall? You know, they make you stop and to claim that it’s only your own feelings that make you do that. He says, in other words, you don’t see that it’s not just good. It’s particularly good. It’s beautiful, high, kind of good. When all that says it is good has been debunked, what says I want remains. It cannot be exploded or seen through because it never had any pretensions.

He says that we’re going to be run by conditioners now and that they too won’t have any way to say a thing is good and only what they want will govern. And the argument goes on then to establish. I think establish is the right word too. Then we’ll be just like the dogs. We just have our wants. And that means that attempting to conquer nature, we have to address the question, why does this cutting us off from nature lead to attempt to conquer nature? That’s one question.

And another one is why does destroying our ability to see the good in things, nature, the other things, the magnificent in things, the beauty in things, the ugliness, therefore, of some things, why does that make us just like dogs and therefore part of nature? Because, you know, in my family we have dogs and children, and we raise them the same. And the children grow up different than the dogs. And thankfully.

But the dogs are entirely creatures of their instinct and our wishes. They have an instinct to obey our wishes. They are domesticated. And so the dogs are our dogs and we love them. They form an ecosystem with my wife, who’s a very loving person and cares for them, and the children and the grandchildren and me. But the difference between my wife and me and the grandchildren, on the one hand, and the dogs on the other is something. And Lewis’s argument is that something is what is destroyed in principle by the Green Book. Why?

Reading Recommendations and Moral Arguments

MICHAEL WARD: Oh my word. Well, I will answer that question, but first let me just add a little gloss on what you said about the reading process to get into The Abolition of Man, because you’re quite right, you should read Lewis, then read my commentary, then go back to Lewis, hopefully enriched. But even before you read The Abolition of Man, I think it would be helpful for those who are non philosophically trained to read the first few chapters of Mere Christianity, which is a kind of much more accessible version of the argument of The Abolition of Man, written to be broadcast over the BBC during the Second World War. It’s the same argument in essence, but at a much more popular level. Right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe. That’s how mere Christianity begins.

LARRY P. ARNN: So mere Christianity put people on a bus? Yes, you took my seat.

MICHAEL WARD: I was there first. Give me that seat. I gave you a bit of my orange, you give me a bit of yours. Yeah, people are quarreling all the time. And it’s because they implicitly accept a moral ecosystem that they and their interlocutors ought to correspond to behaviorally.

The Path from Relativism to Abolition

LARRY P. ARNN: So the movement of Mere Christianity, I actually believe myself that evangelizing today, teaching somebody about Christianity, seeing that it’s worthy, I actually think it begins. I think mere Christianity is a beautiful model for that because it starts with something we all know, we all know right and wrong, we all feel it.

Abolition of man goes in the opposite direction. Right. It. Imagine that’s gone now. And you don’t have to imagine, by the way, not only will God disappear, you will disappear.

MICHAEL WARD: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LARRY P. ARNN: And that’s. And it seems to me that those two things are profoundly connected in my own life. I grew up in an evangelical church in Hills of Arkansas. Good, very good. And my parents were fine people and I met the arguments of the Green Book when I went to college and different guises, but the same thing. And again smuggled in. Nobody ever said your dad was wrong. Right and wrong is silly. My dad said that all the time. My mom said it. We taught them right from wrong.

And I can remember thinking to myself when I was a teenager, yeah, they did, but when did they do that? Exactly. And somehow they did. But then I get there and all that’s cast into doubt. And for me to return to the Christian faith, I never actively discarded it, it just faded. And for me to return to it, I. I began to have my expression for it Is I had to come to understand things are real, things outside me are real and I can see them and therefore I can evaluate them.

And my education began in earnest when I was forced to read Plato’s Republic and tried to get out of it. And that was the revolution in the beginning of that book. It’s like Abolition of Man. It’s a different kind of thing, but it’s very complex. It’s twists and turns. But there’s this signal thing that is present from the first sentence and that is they are taking things seriously and trying to find out what they mean. And Mere Christianity, doesn’t it start with that and then reach all the way up eventually to Jesus?

MICHAEL WARD: That’s right, yeah.

LARRY P. ARNN: God first on the way, some God. And then what about this God? Yeah, you know, and. And I think that I personally may have gone through those steps and I think everyone does.

MICHAEL WARD: Yeah.

LARRY P. ARNN: But this one, it starts with the waterfall. Is anything you think it is? And you can just see little boys in a room. This boys school he’s talking about, they’re reading this book, little boys in a room reading that. And first of all, it’s kind of attractive, right, because you are the measure of all things. You know, ever met with little boys, they’re terribly like that. And so. Okay. And then he gets to the place that that doctrine doesn’t make you more powerful, it eliminates you.

The Midas Touch of Modern Subjectivism

MICHAEL WARD: Yeah. You think it’s going to enrich you beyond the lot of Midas. And in fact, King Midas is someone that Lewis alludes to, that man had become as rich as Midas, but everything he touched had gone dead and cold. You know, Goldfinger. Yeah. Brilliantly rich. You don’t want everything to be gold in your life because then where would you find waterfalls and people to love and woolly lambs and all the beautiful rainbows and things, if it all turned to gold, why would that be an advantage?

But yeah, you’re quite right. It’s a crucially kind of definitive question. Objective value. And yes, in mere Christianity, Lewis answers the question positively, will accept that value is objective. That will lead us to the idea that there’s not only a moral law, but a moral law giver. And then who is God? And then a moral law transcender in Christ. That’s his progression. In Mere Christianity and in the abolition of man, he takes quite the opposite path, the downward path.

If we don’t accept the objectivity of value, well, then, as you say, we are the measure of all things. We can begin to say that this is thus. And Thus, as we wish, and we think, oh, for a little bit, a short time, that does seem to make us free and strong. But eventually it has quite the opposite effect. It’s like any kind of addiction really. You know, you enjoy a bit of alcohol and you get a bit tipsy and then you get a bit drunk and then you get a little bit, you know, like a sot in the gutter and it’s beginning to take you over.

It’s interesting, you say in your own return to Christian faith. It took you to that stage where you had to discern that this is real. And the way you said it made me think of someone sobering up. Someone who after a bender on a three week drinking session, finally wakes up in some foreign hotel and says, I’m in a really bad place. And for the first time in their life, maybe they think there is a real problem in my life and I really need to deal with it or else I’m going to die.

The Contest for Souls in Plato’s Republic

LARRY P. ARNN: I remember that’s right. That’s one of the implications. The way I remember it. Lord knows how it happens a long time ago now, but the way I remember it was that something exciting and positive to pursue, you know. Oh, this is what it’s about. I do remember that I regretted. See, I almost went to law school. I’d always wanted to go to law school. I like to say of students here that it’s a thing of going to law school. That means they’re interested in ruling, governance, you know, and there’s lots of motives in every kid and some of them have that one more than others.

But I remember thinking to myself, I can remember, I actually can find the page in the translation of Plato’s Republic that we were reading a book that’s still in my office over there that where we were talking. And it was the first book of Plato’s Republic is monumentally important. And it ends with the banishment and refutation of a sophist. And the Green book is like sophism in this Thrasymachus is his name. And he teaches young men to be powerful for a living.

And he’s very indignant in the conversation because Socrates is talking with another man. His name actually means warlord Polemarchus. And it seems that Socrates is being too simple and too pious, talking about justice. And the young men who are listening to the dialogue, and ultimately the main participants in the dialogue are actually two young men who are known to be Plato’s brothers. And that means that the republic opens with a contest for the souls of Plato’s Brothers, between a sophist and Plato’s teacher, it’s a very important moral situation.

And so it says that Thrasymachus rises up like a wild beast, not the spirit of the Green Book. The Green Book is smug, you know, Smug. Smuggled. I bet those are cognates smuggled in, right? No, he’s indignant. You know, Socrates, everyone knows what justice is. It’s the interest of the strongest person. You see? Interest of the strongest. And Socrates destroys that in about 15 pages.

And the way he does it is indirect and very deep and has to be followed carefully. But the effect of it is easy to see. And that is, he says, okay, what is in your interest? Show me that you’re the strongest. I give it what is good for you. So questions reduce to the good. And then he’s driven out. He leaves this man who was in this contest and vying for Glaucon and Adeimantus, and then Glaucon especially, who’s the more spirited of the two brothers, takes over the argument and drives the rest of it.

Book two opens with him saying, that wasn’t good enough. Socrates, you’re going to have to make a better argument than that. Still haven’t told us. Show us that justice is good for its own sake. So that’s a drama, Right? And once you see because the argument of the Green Book makes you powerful, right. Stand in front of Niagara Falls and.

MICHAEL WARD: Describe it as pretty.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. And I remember the teacher in that class, whose name was Jeffrey Wallen, to whom I owe an eternal debt. He’s still alive, strong man. He stopped teaching because he inherited a lot of money. So I always say he went to seed because he was a very great teacher. He said, you don’t have any curiosity in class. After I’d argued with him hard for a couple weeks, I was disrupting the class, but I wasn’t powerful enough to do it. He knew so much more. Probably still does.

He said, you give the same answer for everything. Your answer is always, no one has the right to say, but justice is a big thing. It comes up a lot. Aren’t you curious what it might mean? In other words, he’s saying, look outside yourself, you know? And this argument, relativism actually is a tricky but definite assertion of power.

The Self-Refuting Nature of Subjectivism

MICHAEL WARD: Yeah. Because when you said no one has the right to say, you were asserting the right to say that.

LARRY P. ARNN: That’s right.

MICHAEL WARD: Yes. You can’t get out of this. That’s what Lewis says about the authors of the Green Book, Gaius and Titius. He gives them pseudonyms in the Abolition of Man, they were actually two men called Alec King and Martin Ketley. And the Green Book was actually called the Control of Language.

LARRY P. ARNN: The Control.

MICHAEL WARD: The control of language, exactly. Yes. They were almost explicit about the fact that they were seeking power. But Lewis says in his critique of Gaius and Titius that they are better than their principles. In other words, they propound subjectivism while all the way. All the while smuggling in or, you know, retaining a kernel of belief and objective value, which they must do.

Because when they say that language is merely the expression of private emotion, what they want you, the reader, to hear is that they have said something true, not that their own statement is the expression of their private emotion. In other words, they’re subjective about everybody else’s opinions, but their own opinions are objective. And of course, this is the problem about subjectivism, that it’s sort of easy to apply to everybody else, but as soon as you apply it to the thing you’re saying, it undercuts itself. It’s self refuting.

And that’s basically the trick that Lewis had better than almost anybody else. According to Owen Barfield, Lewis’s great friend. He said, you’re like Sir Andrew Ague Cheek in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, who had the back trick better than any man in Illyria. You just step round the back of your opponent and trip him over from behind, make him apply to himself the thing he’s trying to apply to everybody else.

LARRY P. ARNN: I overheard an argument among a new. We’re in the beginning of the term here right now. And so fun when the new ones show up, right? And I overheard a new graduate student the other day arguing with somebody about determinism. He was a determinist. He said. And I stopped and I listened for a minute and I said, that’s a worthless argument. And he looked at me and he knew who I was. I don’t know him, I can’t remember his name, but I’ll meet him. And he said, why? And I said, well, it can’t be you making that argument if you’re determined to make it. I would need to talk to the one who really made it. And he said, that’s a shutdown argument. And I said, yes, it is, isn’t it?

Rationality as the Essence of Humanity

MICHAEL WARD: Yeah, it shuts down the nonsense which is preparatory to establishing rationality. Yeah, exactly. This is Lewis’s point that if. If there’s no reason for applying the word sublime to the waterfall, if it’s purely the expression of your own emotion, then, well, where did. Where did your own emotion come from it’s, it’s. That is a non rational thing. Part of you. It’s not a bad part of you, but it’s not a rational part of you. And it’s affected by the weather, by your digestion, by the random association of ideas, by your heredity. All these non rational forces begin to provoke your emotional responses to the world.

And it’s your rational ability to approve one emotion over another that constitutes your humanity and distinguishes you from the animals. To come back to your earlier question, this is why we are different from dogs. This is why we are not trousered apes. That’s a phrase Lewis uses in the Abolition of Man. That we are homo sapiens, we are the wise man, the rational man. That’s the definition of humanity. We are rational animals.

LARRY P. ARNN: And that. Now this rationality, where the idea of value comes from, I take that back. Where our perception of value is located, that looks to the authors of the Green Book and to Thrasymachus the Sophist, as a control on you, a limit. Much of modern philosophy, by the way, is the attempt to destroy all standards so we can be free. Why, let’s put that argument together. Why does that lead to our enslavement or disappearance or abolition? If we give that up, if we don’t have that anymore.

The Nature of Freedom and Virtue

MICHAEL WARD: Well, what do we mean by freedom? You know, am I free to play the violin? Yes. Nobody is stopping me. But I haven’t learned how to play the violin. I haven’t acquired the skills, I haven’t done the practice. I don’t know how to hold the bow, I don’t know where to form the notes. I will only acquire that freedom by long practice and habituation in the virtue of violin playing.

So with any virtue, any moral practice, or any exercise of the reason, you know, it’s all the values, it’s goodness, truth and beauty that are all at stake here. And I’m not free to be good. Unless I become good by a long process of trying and failing and repenting and being forgiven and watching other people, then I’ll be a good man and freely in control, control of my capacities.

Think of that marvelous line in the Anglican prayer about God, whose service is perfect freedom, which is very paradoxical. You wouldn’t think service equates with freedom, but it’s precisely that it’s in surrendering to law, moral law, aesthetic law, the laws of reason and logic, that you become a free human being and distinguish yourself from the amoeba.

Character Formation Through Choice

LARRY P. ARNN: So there’s an argument that I regard as one of the best ever made in Aristotle about how your character gets formed. And he says, you it, your choices are more important in the forming of your character than your actions are. And if you dramatize that a man charges up a hill and wins the Congressional Medal of Honor risk of his life, maybe survives, maybe doesn’t, it was more important to his character that he decided to do that than the doing of it.

And if you think about that for a minute, you can see why that might be true. Once you’re doing it, you’re doing it. And he says the test in the choice, it’s in book four of the Ethics, if I remember correctly. He says, the test of the choice is you’re pulled in two directions and one of the pulls comes from your sense of the good. You know, what would be right might be inconvenient, might be dangerous, might give up pleasure, but, you know, and every time you make the choice either way, it makes a mark on your soul.

Now, do you think Lewis is writing about that sense of the good?

The Test of Objective Value

MICHAEL WARD: Yes, and I’m so pleased you brought up the question of the soldier in battle, because that’s the crucial test, that’s the experimentum crucis, as Lewis puts it in the Abolition of Man. The critical test of all belief in objective value is that choice we have to make when the consequence will be bad for us individually. That’s the real, that’s where the rubber hits the road.

Because for as long as our choices do not inconvenience us, it’s hard to tell whether we are choosing them because we really believe in their objective worth or simply because they happen to be convenient for us. They’re not causing us any trouble, so we do them. But ah, what about that occasion when keeping your word will put you out, when, you know, your vow to your wife to be faithful to her really ruins your evening, to put it mildly. Or, you know, in the case of the soldier in the battlefield, I’ve not.

LARRY P. ARNN: Had that experience, but I can imagine it.

MICHAEL WARD: Lewis keeps coming back to the Horatian maxim, dulcet decorum est pro patria mori, it’s sweet and fitting to die for your country. And he says, well, how can that possibly be true? Because from the point of view of the soldier dying in pain on the battlefield, there’s nothing sweet and fitting about it from his own subjective vantage point.

But that’s the whole flipping point, that it’s not subjectively good for him, but it’s objectively good that people sacrifice themselves out of love. That’s what it finally comes down to love. And only when we are prepared to pay a price for our belief in a value do we know for sure that we believe in its objectivity.

The Connection Between Being and Good

LARRY P. ARNN: See, that’s very good. And that means that maybe we’ve isolated the thing. I’ll put Aristotle’s argument together quickly because it’s handy. And by the way, I’m going to add to the reading list. So we want to. You should go and read Abolition of Man. Read it with a view to saying what is the claim at each stage, Just so you get it in your mind, right? That’s all you got to do. Not that hard. If that’s what you’re trying to do, then read after humanity, then read Abolition of Man. And along the way, read the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. We have an online course about that. I think it’s pretty good.

So this. Aristotle’s claim, by the way, is very radical. He says that we know that this is a cup, although there are many cups and they differ. And for somehow we learn to call, to recognize them all, and we don’t do it by looking at pictures of them. We just see. Right. And he has a beautiful argument about how we’re able to do that. But the point is, it has the being of the cup, and that is identical to the good of the cup. And this is why we are able to use common nouns, which dogs cannot do. And that means that reason and speech are the same thing. Jesus is the word, and that means that our essence is in there.

You have to just add one more thing. This immortal. Eternal and infinite ability to see the being and the good of things, which is present in us all the time, as Lewis shows, is present in Gaius and Titius, unbeknownst to them, even while they’re making this argument that you locate that in a mortal body and you have a certain kind of being now. And he says that our communication. He says that politics arises from that. Right? Everything about us arises from that.

And if you take out that sense of the good, which is what Gaius and Titius do, you don’t liberate. You make us creatures of our indigestion and our failure to get a good night’s sleep. Is that the argument?

The Replacement of Reason with Will

MICHAEL WARD: Essentially, yes. That in giving up the idea of rationally apprehensible and articulable reality, it’s all what I want it to be. You are giving up on your distinctively human nature. You’re saying that reason is replaceable by will, and most of us will. Will to be as powerful as we can, therefore we will seek to dominate the subjective perceptions of others.

And you see that in tyrants throughout history, only their view matters. Everybody must submit to the great leader. But we come back to Midas. What’s the point of that? You annihilate the world in exalting yourself. It’s the other way around that you need to go in order to become truly human. You need not to exalt yourself over reality, but surrender yourself to reality at the ultimate. That might mean surrendering your very life, but in principle it’s that action of submission and surrender which is at the root of all of our moral and indeed aesthetic and rational activities.

LARRY P. ARNN: And emphasize the point in the title, you eliminate everything you can see. And especially you eliminate yourself. Yeah, that’s. You abolish yourself. Yeah, and that’s a shutdown argument.

The Danger of Seeing Through Everything

MICHAEL WARD: Yeah. But to go back to your exchange with that student who said, well, that’s a shutdown argument. And you said, well, yes, it is. And there are certain arguments that need to be shut down because they are self destructive, they are anti rational, they are cancerous, they will destroy everything if they are given their head. They need to be shut down.

And then once you have shut down, or in Lewis’s example, his metaphor is once you have established that certain things cannot be just shuffled around to suit your own convenience, but have their own objective opaque value which you cannot see through. Ah, well, then you’ve begun to understand the value of sight because certain things need to be seen through. Yes, it’s good that I can see through that window because I can see the garden beyond it. But what if the garden was transparent as well? What would I see beyond the garden?

A wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is the same as not to see at all. There are certain things that must resist our penetrative sight and then we can see them. But what if we penetrated everything? We would become like basilisks. Lewis says that kills when it sees and only sees by killing.

LARRY P. ARNN: What is a basilisk?

MICHAEL WARD: Well, it’s a legendary serpent that looked at things and killed them.

LARRY P. ARNN: I’ve seen one in a Harry Potter movie.

MICHAEL WARD: Yeah, yeah, it’s quite. Got to be careful of basilisks.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah, that’s it.

The Daily Choice Between Human and Less Human

MICHAEL WARD: You’ve got to be careful not to gradually turn yourself into a basilisk. That’s the thing. I mean, although Lewis’s argument is very, you might say highfalutin and philosophical and also rather political about the conditioners who are going to run the world, you know, start controlling us, his basic Point is that we’re all making this decision every day of our lives, whether we want to believe in objective value or not.

And so many of us gradually seed the ability to perceive reality objectively that when a conditioner comes along who wants to control us, we’ve already seeded the field to him. You know, we’ve become servile. And therefore a tyrant can exploit our servility all the more easily. You know, the abuse of power is not just one way tyrants become tyrants because people are servile to them. So all of us, in every moment of our lives, are either turning that central part of us more human or less human.

Mere Christianity and the College’s Purpose

LARRY P. ARNN: Now, I want to go back to Mere Christianity. I think that so I. That you wrote a beautiful article, written a lot of them, but you wrote a beautiful article in a magazine about our chapel. And I was very proud of that article. It was beside one other, the best thing written about it. Michael Lewis wrote a good article about it. He’s an architecture critic, very serious man. And so when people like that write something about something you’re involved with, you go, okay, good.

And you asked me sitting in the chapel, and you’ve got a keen eye because you’ve been an Anglican priest and now you’re a Catholic priest, and I’ve not been a priest of either kind. So you’re looking around for the liturgical cues. Better at that and quicker to do that than I am. And you said, what is the idea? And I said, mere Christianity. And I said that because I believe it. I said that because I know you know a lot about CS Lewis. And you wrote that up.

And it looks to me like that if you just look at the order we talked about in that book, Mere Christianity, you get a sort of a purpose for a college. In this day and age, a college can very respectfully be a denominational college. We were founded that way, but we broke when the Free Will Baptist disappeared. But we’d always had a very ecumenical way about us. We had a seminary in the 1880s and both Catholic and Protestants studied in it always been like that. And we’ve never required a particular doctrinal faith statement to come to Hillsdale College.

And that works, I think, because a college’s purpose is to learn not the same thing as a church. And Christianity is a thing that’s very worth learning about. Beckons one to know Jesus word. Now, we made a connection at the beginning of this, and I want to return to it. This ground that is defended and established in abolition of man is the beginning point toward Thinking about Christianity, does that seem true to you?

MICHAEL WARD: Yeah.

LARRY P. ARNN: And what do we mean? What does he mean by Mere Christianity? Describe that.

Defining Mere Christianity

MICHAEL WARD: Mere Christianity, according to Lewis in the preface to his book of that name is the broad central mainstream of Christian belief which has been held to by nearly all Christians at all times, in all places. Lewis talks about the St. Vincent of Lerins, if that’s Lauran, however you say that name, who was the first to sort of posit that as a sort of slogan believed everywhere by all people, in all places, at all times. If you focus just on that, you can’t go far wrong. Different ecclesial traditions, different denominations will have their own peculiarities and they may be right and they may be wrong. But Lewis isn’t concerned with those oddities as he would regard them, but only with the thing that everybody can agree on, the common ground.

LARRY P. ARNN: And this common ground would be a test for arbitrating among the different denominational claims. And I think the attitude in that book is any that meets that test and more than one does do, I guess tricky that more than one does join that one if you want to. He’s got his. But then there might be one you could imagine that didn’t meet that test and that would be a heresy, I guess.

MICHAEL WARD: Yeah.

LARRY P. ARNN: You. It might be worth naming. The central things are what the moral law is included in Mere Christianity, as he argues in this book. Everything else is. It’s included in everything. It has to be. If you’re a human. What are the other main elements?

The Organic Development of Mere Christianity

MICHAEL WARD: Well, the incarnation, the salvific death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the cardinal virtues, the theological virtues. Those are some of the things he expounds on in Mere Christianity.

But it’s worth pointing out actually that that book arose out of a series of broadcasts that he gave over the BBC during the Second World War. And he was just asked initially to give four talks. And then because they were well received, the BBC said give us another series, then a third series, then a fourth series.

And after he’d done all four and also responded to listeners questions along the way, he eventually assembled all these materials under the umbrella heading of Mere Christianity, a term which incidentally never appeared in any one of those earlier smaller parts. And it is, you know, it grew sort of organically and incrementally. It wasn’t a systematic defense of Mere Christianity.

The nearest Lewis comes really to defending mere Christianity is in the preface that he wrote to the book, which was published in 1952. And he defines Mere Christianity really as the entryway, the hallway that all Christians, as it were, go through on their way to their particular room in the house, the room representing their denomination.

And Lewis says that the hallway is, you know, it’s that part of the house which is common to all the rooms, but it’s a place not for living in. It’s a place that you go through into the other rooms. And it’s the other rooms that have the chairs and the meals and the fires. And that’s where you must go and find your dwelling place. The hallway is not a place for lingering in longer than you need to.

And when you’re choosing which of your rooms to go into, you must make the choice on the basis of whether there is godliness here, whether there is truth here, not whether you like the particular paneling of that door or the look of the doorkeeper.

Now, his own room was Anglicanism. But he says, though I’m an Anglican, I’m not especially high, nor especially low, nor especially anything else. He liked to present his own Anglicanism as fairly neutral. In fact, he was very high, but we didn’t get into that. But he says in the course of the preface, I’m not here trying to persuade anyone to become an Anglican. I’m trying to persuade you to become a Christian. And your particular brand of Christianity will be up for you to decide.

The Abolition of College

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah, that’s good. I want to go back to college a minute. I think that the abolition of man, the argument in it is also the reason why what’s going on in our time is the abolition of college.

Last spring, elite colleges and other colleges all over the country became incapable of functioning. They couldn’t have class, canceled classes because the students and faculty and others were at each other’s throats and they couldn’t stop it. In some cases, they didn’t seem to try very hard. But then in some cases they did try and they couldn’t. And it was shocking to me.

And I’m going to posit why. And you can tell me first of all, if you disagree about policy in the Middle East, if you think Israel is at fault, although Israel was the one attacked then in a college, the right reaction to that would be to try to find out, study it up. They stop studying. I think maybe they never started studying.

And I think the source of it is here. I think that they begin by telling them there isn’t really anything to learn. There are only things to do. Do you think that’s right?

The Culture of Incommensurable Opinions

MICHAEL WARD: Yeah. There are only things to do. There are only opinions to have. And your opinion is your opinion, my opinion is my opinion. And who can tell which of us has the right opinion? Who cares which of us has the right opinion? And that just has a completely annihilating effect upon rational discourse and justice and truth and beauty and everything sooner or later. Hence the abolition.

I’ve opened my book because I want to quote you a passage from the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the great Notre Dame philosopher who’s famous mostly for his book After Virtue. And After Virtue is, I think, much dependent upon the abolition of man. They make effectively the same argument. MacIntyre makes it more sophisticatedly and at greater length, but it’s essentially the same point that value is objective, and if we give up on that, we’re completely lost as a species anyway.

Can I just read you a half a page? Alastair MacIntyre observes how in our present culture differences of view have become incommensurable. There’s no common yardstick against which diverse perspectives can be reckoned for as long as these differences are considered unimportant, there can be a naive celebration of diversity as a good thing in and of itself. But once diversity reveals its inability to arbitrate serious disputes, the pendulum swings to the opposite pole.

Hence, and now I’m quoting McIntyre: “It’s easy to understand why protest becomes a distinctive moral feature of the modern age and why indignation is a predominant modern emotion. The self assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protesters can never win an argument. The indignant self righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protesters can never lose an argument either. Hence, protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protesters premises. Protesters rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective. It’s to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this.”

That’s just brilliant.

LARRY P. ARNN: Isn’t that brilliant?

MICHAEL WARD: Yeah. That gets our modern culture down to a T.

From Rational Discourse to Violence

LARRY P. ARNN: Lewis’s argument is that Gaius and Titius deprive human beings of their identity, of their existence and of anything to do. And our immediate point is it deprives colleges of anything to do.

And see, if you go back to that we did on the Hillsdale dialogue, something I do most weeks we’re talking about Plato and yesterday we were doing it and Thrasymachus of what is he, an apostle? Strength become strong. You’re never going to establish anything by proof. You’re going to do it by strength. And that’s these protests.

MICHAEL WARD: Yes. Scratch a liberal and you find a fascist.

LARRY P. ARNN: And I thought, I will tell you, I’m naive my great age. I thought the people who run those colleges have been teaching this stuff for two generations now, and they’re in complete control and they have every interest in the college functioning and not embarrassing itself. And so after they’ve made their point for a week or two or three, they’ll go back to work. They were unable to go back to work, couldn’t do it.

And you know, that’s going to start happening, is starting to happen right now in the context of this election that’s coming up. And that means that we are tending to decide our elections through violence now. And that’s a grim thing, and it’s a natural result of the abolition of man.

MICHAEL WARD: Hmm.

Conclusion

LARRY P. ARNN: So this is, Michael, an important book. All of your books are. And I urge people to, maybe we should do an online course on this. I urge people to study these books in the order that we said and attend to Michael Ward, who’s a great man, and I thank you.

MICHAEL WARD: Thank you, Larry.

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