So I was reading C. S. Lewis’s Miracles: A Preliminary Study and I was going nowhere coz he took up a few chapters to define Naturalism and the laws of nature and how it contrasts with Supernaturalism and I was thinking, “OMGA what ever made me think I could DO Philosophy at all?” Everything I read literally just went over my head.
He is SUCH a genius though. Once I got to “A Chapter Not Strictly Necessary” I was just so amazed by the way he LOOKS at things, the way he argues them out, the way he draws out the absurdities contained in ideas that we’ve always believed in because it sounds “right” and now, even though I still think there is no need to complicate the discussion of miracles THAT much [but then again, for me there is no doubting the existence of miracles, or why God would perform them or that He is capable of performing them at all. But in the past few weeks, I've learnt that not everyone has the same privilege and understanding that I have, simply because they haven't been exposed to that side of God's nature, and they've been taught to believe that miracles no longer take place] I am enjoying it because he has gone on to argue about language and now I feel like I can follow it a little!!
I feel like typing EVERYTHING out, since all my cutting and pasting will mean that you’ll miss some of the clarifications that come in later but I shall just post snippets of it so you can go get the book and read it yourself!
“[God] is unspeakable not by being indefinite but by being too definite for the unavoidable vagueness of language. The words incorporeal and impersonal are misleading because they suggest that He lacks some reality which we possess. It would be safer to call Him trans-corporeal, trans-personal. Body and personality as we know them are the real negatives – they are what is left of positive being when it is sufficiently diluted to appear in temporal or finite forms. Even our sexuality should be regarded as the transposition into a minor key of that creative joy which in Him is unceasing and irresistible. Grammatically the things we say of Him are ‘metaphorical’: but in a deeper sense it is our physical and psychic energies that are mere ‘metaphors’ of real Life which is God. Divine Sonship is, so to speak, the solid of which biological sonship is merely a diagrammatic representation on the flat.
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We have now three guiding principles before us: (1) That thought is distinct from the imagination which accompanies it.
(2) That thought may be in the main sound even when the false images that accompany it are mistaken by the thinker for the true ones.
(3) That anyone who talks about things which cannot be seen, or touched, or heard, or the like, must inevitably talk as if they could be seen or touched or heard (e.g. must talk of ‘complexes’ and ‘repressions’, as if desires could really be tied up in bundles or shoved back; of ‘growth’ and ‘development’ as if institutions could really grow like trees or unfold like flowers; of energy being ‘released’ as if it were an animal let out of a cage).
Let us now apply this to the ’savage’ or ‘primitive’ articles of the Christian creed. And let us admit at once that many Christians (though by no means all) when they make these assertions do have in mind just those crude mental pictures which so horrify the sceptic. When they say that Christ ‘came down from Heaven’ they do have a vague image of something shooting or floating downwards out of the sky. When they say that Christ is the ‘Son’ of ‘the Father’ they may have a picture of two human forms, the one looking rather older than the other. But we now know that the mere presence of these mental pictures does not, of itself, tell us anything about the reasonableness or absurdity of the thoughts they accompany. If absurd images meant absurd thought, then we should all be thinking nonsense all the time. And the Christians themselves make it clear that the images are not to be identified with the thing believed. They may picture the Father as a human form, but they also maintain that He has no body. They may picture Him older than the Son, but they also maintain the one did not exist before the other, both having existed from all eternity.
[...]
At this stage I must turn aside to deal with a rather simple-minded illusion. When we point out that what the Christians mean is not to be identified wit their mental pictures, some people say, ‘In that case, would it not be better to get rid of the mental pictures, and of the language which suggests them, altogether?’ But this is impossible. The people who recommend it have not noticed that when they try to get rid of man-like, or as they are called ‘anthropomorphic’, images they merely succeed in substituting images of some other kind. ‘I don’t believe in a personal God,’ says one, ‘but I do believe in a great spiritual force.’ What he has not noticed is that he word ‘force’ has let in all sorts of images about winds and tides and electricity and gravitation. ‘I don’t believe in a personal God,’ says another, ‘but I do believe we are all parts of one great Being which moves and works through us all’ – not noticing that he has merely exchanged the image of a fatherly and royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas or fluid. A girl I knew was bought up by ‘higher thinking’ parents to regard God as a perfect ’substance’; in later life she realised that this had actually led her to think of Him as something like a vast tapioca pudding. (To make matters worse, she disliked tapioca.) We may feel ourselves quite safe from this degree of absurdity, but we are mistaken. If a man watches his own mind, I believe he will find that what profess to be specially advanced or philosophic conceptions of God are, in his thinking, always accompanied by vague images which, if inspected, would turn out to be even more absurd than the man-like images aroused by Christian theology.
[...]
Even if it could be shown, then, that the early Christians accepted their imagery literally, this would not mean that we are justified in relegating their doctrines as a whole to the lumber-room. Whether they actually did, is another matter. The difficulty here is that they were not writing as philosophers to satisfy speculative curiosity about the nature of God and of the universe. They believed in God; and once a man does that, philosophical definiteness can never be the first necessity. A drowning man does not analyse the rope that is flung at him, nor an impassioned lover consider the chemistry of his mistress’s complexion. Hence the sort of question we are now considering is never raised by the New Testament writers. When once it is raised, Christianity decides quite clearly that the naif images are false. The sect in the Egyptian desert which thought that God was like a man is condemned: the desert monk who felt he had lost something by its correction is recognised as ‘muddle-headed’. All three Persons o the Trinity are declared ‘incomprehensible’. God is pronounced ‘inexpressible, unthinkable, invisible to all created beings’. The Second Person is not only bodiless but so unlike man that if self-revelation had been His sole purpose He would not have chosen to be incarnate in a human form. We do not find similar statements in the New Testament, because the issue has not yet been made explicit: but we do find statements which make it certain how that issue will be decided when once it becomes explicit. The title ‘Son’ may sound ‘primitive’ or ‘naif’. But already in the New Testament this ‘Son’ is identified with the Discourse or Reason or Word which was eternally ‘with God’ and yet also was God. He is the all-pervasive principle of concretion or cohesion whereby the universe holds together. All things, and specially Life, arose within Him, and within Him all things will reach their conclusion – the final statement of what they have been trying to express.
[...]
Mr Barfield has shown, as regards the history of language, that words did not start by referring merely to physical objects and then get extended by metaphor to refer to emotions, mental states and the like. On the contrary, what we now call the ‘literal and metaphorical’ meanings have both been disengaged by analysis from an ancient unity of meaning which was neither or both. In the same way it is quite erroneous to think that man started with a ‘material’ God or ‘Heaven’ and gradually spiritualised them. He could not have started with something ‘material’ for the ‘material’, as we understand it, comes to be realised only by contrast to the ‘immaterial’, and the two sides of the contrast grow at the same speed. He started with something which was neither and both. As long as we are trying to read back into that ancient unity either the one or the other or the two opposites which have since been analysed out of it, we shall misread all early literature and ignore many states of consciousness which we ourselves still from time to time experience. The point is crucial not only for the present discussion but for any sound literary criticism or philosophy.
The Christian doctrines, and even the Jewish doctrines which preceded them, have always been statements about spiritual reality, not specimens of primitive physical science. Whatever is positive in the conception of the spiritual has always been contained in them; it is only its negative aspect (immateriality) which has had to wait for recognition until abstract thought was fully developed. The material imagery has never been taken literally by anyone who had reached the stage when he could understand what ‘taking it literally’ meant. And now we come to the difference between ‘explaining’ and ‘explaining away’. It shows itself in two ways. (1) Some people when they say that a thing is meant ‘metaphorically’ conclude from this that it is hardly meant at all. They rightly think that Christ spoke metaphorically when he told us to carry the cross: they wrongly conclude that carrying the cross means nothing more than leading a respectable life and subscribing moderately to charities. They reasonably think that hell ‘fire’ is a metaphor – and unwisely conclude that it means nothing more serious than remorse. They say that the story of the Fall in Genesis is not literal; and then go on to say (I have heard them myself) that it was really a fall upwards – which is like saying that because ‘My heart is broken’ contains a metaphor, it therefore means ‘I feel very cheerful’. This mode of interpretation I regard, frankly, as nonsense. For me the Christian doctrines which are ‘metaphorical’ – or which have become metaphorical with the increase of abstract thought – means something which is just as ’supernatural’ or shocking after we have removed the ancient imagery as it was before. They mean that in addition to they physical or psycho-physical universe known to the sciences, there exists an uncreated and unconditioned reality which causes the universe to be; that this reality has a positive structure or constitution which is usefully, though doubtless not completely, described in the doctrine of the Trinity; and that this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the universe we know by becoming one of its own creatures and there produced effects on the historical level which the normal workings of the natural universe do not produce; and that this has brought about a change in our relationship to the unconditioned reality. It will be noticed that our colourless ‘entered the universe’ is not a whit less metaphorical than the more picturesque ‘came down from Heaven’. We have only substituted a picture of horizontal or unspecified movement for one of vertical movement. And every attempt to improve the ancient language will have the same result. These things not only cannot be asserted – they cannot even be presented for discussion – without metaphor. We can make our speech duller; we cannot make it more literal.
(2) These statements concern two things – the supernatural, unconditioned reality, and those events on the historical level which its irruption into the natural universe is held to have produced. The first thing is indescribable in ‘literal’ speech, and therefore we rightly interpret all that is said about it metaphorically. But the second thing is in a wholly different position. Events on the historical level are the sort of things we can talk about literally. If they occurred, they were perceived by the senses of men. Legitimate ‘explanation’ degenerates into muddled or dishonest ‘explaining away’ as soon as we start applying to these events the metaphorical interpretation which we rightly apply to the statements about God.”
