Them Without Chests - Part I
Learning to use language and learning to be good aren’t the same thing. But, as C.S. Lewis taught me, you might not be able to do one without the other.
You know how we forget things? That’s weird, right? I’m not talking about short-term lapses and absentmindedness. That’s just how I go through the world. I once locked myself out of my own apartment, then biked to work to pick up a copy of my key—which I’d sagaciously left there just in (the inevitable) case I locked myself out—biked back home, unlocked the door, picked up some material for work, pulled the door closed, and locked both keys inside.1 I’m pretty sure I have a clinical problem.
That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how we lose track of things that were once dear to us. Competing habits and the preoccupations we collect over time wear away at the prongs, and the jewel just sort of falls out of the ring without us noticing. Speaking of rings, many a marriage has failed from such neglect. But this sort of forgetting isn’t exclusively the domain of romantic devotion. We keep lots of things besides our partners locked up in our hearts: our children, our birth families, our friends, our callings—and sometimes even works of art that helped wake up our minds. And all of those things are prone to being taken for granted.
What woke my mind was the writing of C.S. Lewis. I was a decent student as a kid, but my teachers had to constantly pull my head out of the clouds, and nothing roused actual passion, except maybe Star Wars.2 The excerpts from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature that were included in my sophomore-year literature textbook sparked my imagination enough to inspire me to buy a copy of his collected works. “After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours,” Emerson writes, “and though we are always engaged with particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate universal laws.” That was consolation to my sensitive teenage soul, overwhelmed by the disenchantment of everything and desperate for hard and fast principles. But there’s something sibylline about Emerson’s prose. He wrote at a time when orators spoke for hours on end, and writers went on for page after page, at a pitch more removed from everyday speech than I was accustomed to. So nothing, not even Emerson, could set my heart aflame until I re-encountered C.S. Lewis.
I had read (and still own; it’s sitting on my son’s shelf) the boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia my aunt had given me for Christmas as a kid, and the books’ charms weren’t lost on me. But I only ever truly appreciated their immense pleasures after I came to know the other two genres in Lewis’s oeuvre: essays and literary criticism. I’m sure there are some who will roll their eyes when I label one of Lewis’s genres “essays”; for they will tell me that C.S. Lewis was a Christian apologist and not really an essayist, as if his being a defender of the Christian faith precludes him from being a writer of essays. First of all, I’m not sure what the crap an essay even is. I much prefer the term “creative nonfiction” to describe what I write here on Substack. As David Foster Wallace once noted, much of the stuff people write these days that gets labeled “essays” seems pretty “remote from the sort of thing that Montaigne and Chesterton were doing when the essay was being codified.” So whatever an essay is, if G.K. Chesterton gets equal billing with Montaigne as one of the form’s systematizers, then C.S. Lewis was an essayist—because Lewis was indebted to Chesterton, and the debt was enormous. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And like Lewis, Chesterton was a Christian apologist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I think the way some folks dismiss the literary merits of Lewis’s essays is analogous to how we dismiss hagiography. The word hagiography basically means “life of a holy person,”3 as you find in basically every religious tradition—Islamic, Buddhist, Taoist, Sikh. But think of the Acta Martyra, or Ælfric of Eynsham’s Lives of the Saints, or Rev. Alban Butler’s eighteenth century version. Such collections of fact and legend about saints’s lives, their miracles, and their martyrdoms provided, for a millennium, inspiring models for following Jesus’ example. But a more skeptical (perhaps cynical) take on such writing also set root. For some, hagiography came across as naive at best, blinkered and deluded at worst.
That meaning has stuck around. Analysis with a highly up-to-date corpus like NOW (News on the Web) verifies that basically every use of hagiography (as of yesterday) has exactly that pejorative denotation: uncritical of or reverential toward its subject. Just the same chary reproach is leveled against religiosity generally, so the tsk and eye-roll at my asserting the value of Lewis’s writing comes as no surprise. But it’s worth noting that, really, the hypothetical hater is begging questions4 Lewis was trying to ask in the first place: Is the supernatural (or, as he once clarified5—almost certainly channeling the metaphysics of his friend Charles Williams—the archnatural6) plausible?7 Can there have been a divine birth and a Resurrection? What meaning could those things have for all humanity and for each and every person privately? To dismiss C.S. Lewis’s essays out of hand because he answers the first two questions in the positive and conjectures about the last is sort of pigheaded. Tsk tsk. Eyeroll.
But even if it’s a hard no for you with the Christianity, there’s still plenty to love in Lewis’s public-facing essays (and in the academic writing, too—there wasn’t much of a qualitative difference back then.) Thomas Williams writes in the introduction to his translation of St. Augustine’s Confessions,8
one need not share any of his theological beliefs to find Augustine well worth reading. Philosophers of all sorts still engage with his understanding of belief and knowledge, his analysis of human action, his accounts of will and desire and freedom, his subtle exploration of time and eternity, and his astute observation of the human condition.
And any reader—Christian or not, philosopher or not—will find much in Augustine that is captivating, inspiring, and challenging.
Much the same can be said of C.S. Lewis’s work. It might have seemed like a ruse when, in 2007, David Foster Wallace contributed his list to J. Peder Zane’s The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books and included books like Steven King’s The Stand, both Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, and Shelley Katz’s Alligator, a now–out-of-print Jaws-esque potboiler from 1977 about a group of people (that slowly dwindles down to two hyper-masculine dudes) hunting a murderous alligator in the Florida Everglades. Certainly Foster Wallace wanted to be a counterintuitive screwball, but the list was written in all seriousness. He had diverse tastes, had no patience with the highbrow/lowbrow distinction, and liked a good page turner. And if anyone was surprised that number 1 on his list was C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (an epistolary story written between a cunning demon and his nephew, who is struggling to lead his “patient” by the nose toward damnation), then they never really understood Foster Wallace’s writing. You can’t read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men without hearing Wormwood whispering in the ears of the the eponymous men. C.S. Lewis was one of the best writers of the twentieth century.
I had a set of cassette-recordings of Lewis himself reading the lectures that would become his book The Four Loves (number 2 on my list, by the way; his novel Till We Have Faces is number 1) that I wore out listening to in my car. There is not a word he has written that I haven’t read. My Master’s thesis was a critical apparatus and a reflection on how the literary scholar Alistair Fowler used stylistics as his only means to sublimate Lewis’s leftover Cambridge lecture notes on the theme of pageantry in Spenser’s Fairie Queene into a book, Spenser’s Images of Life, which captures a bit of Lewis’s delightful literary voice.9
And yet, somehow, I let C.S. Lewis fall by the wayside. I spent some time going to Lewis society meetings in the years when I was still studying. But I often had the feeling that the people there were too . . . hagiographic. Their ideas were somehow a bit insipid, and the writing and places they published seemed a bit insular. I couldn’t say whether that was their own fault or the fault of an academic establishment that had long-since looked askance at Lewis’s non-scholarly work and considered these writers, motivated by religious beliefs, as academically adjacent at best. When I graduated, the directors of my M.A. program—some of the most renowned literary scholars in the English language—made jokes about each graduate, and lampooned me, saying, “There is no question to which Aaron thinks C.S. Lewis is not the answer.” Mockery is flattery, and I shrugged it off. But it still stung.
And, frankly, over time my friendly engagement with Lewis’s writing became a little more combative.10 Sometimes I think he drew conclusions a little too easily, and he missed nuances. I never actively renounced Lewis, but I hadn’t read a thing by Lewis (except some of the Narnia Chronicles, out loud with my kids) in probably ten years—until last month.
Back in September, I released part two of “Best Behavior,” a series about where norms and values come from, and instead of diving directly into Virtue Ethics (which I had already announced in part one would be my next subject), I strayed into a lengthy rumination on homeschooling, attitudes toward public schools, and education versus indoctrination. If that felt like an out-of-place tangent to you, it did to me, too. And yet, the compulsion was strong to write it, and I followed the impulse. Only last month did it occur to me where the urge came from.
That entire piece—unbeknownst to my conscious self at the time of writing—is a present-day riff on one of Lewis’s most famous works, The Abolition of Man, an expansion of a set of three lectures Lewis gave at the University of Durham in 1943, subtitled “Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools.” His springboard for that book was his beef with an excerpt from a textbook for upper-form schools in Britain. He labeled that text the “Green Book,” edited by schoolmasters he named only as “Gaius and Titius.” We now know he was referring to The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing, edited by Alexander King and Martin Ketley.
In that book, King and Ketley recall a famous story William Wordsworth’s (brilliant and overlooked) sister Dorothy relates in her journal about a trip she took with her brother and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Scotland in 1803, during which they went on several walking tours, often stopping to remark at the spectacular Falls of Clyde near the town of Lanark. Apparently Wordsworth and Coleridge tried their best on several occasions to find the most fitting epithet for the largest of the four Clyde waterfalls, the Corra Linn. On 21 August, they made their way up a path offering periodic lookouts upon the Linn, and stopped occasionally to sit on a bench and take in the view. Having twice before been passed by some fellow hikers, a husband and wife, when they again overtook the couple, Coleridge—always one for a chat—struck up a conversation. The husband observed
that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. ‘Yes, sir,’ says Coleridge, ‘it is a majestic waterfall.’ ‘Sublime and beautiful,’ replied his friend [i.e. the man’s wife]. Poor Coleridge could make no answer, and, not very desirous to continue the conversation, came to us and related the story, laughing heartily.11
In other words, Coleridge and Wordsworth had been debating exactly what each above-mentioned word meant, as Coleridge was famously of the opinion that there were no perfect synonyms; that each word exists because it is the correlative of some distinct facet of the primary imagination (God's imagination).12 Coleridge was happy to accept the comparability of majestic and sublime, but when the lady suggested that the Corra Linn was “sublime and beautiful,” Coleridge was outraged (the overreaction of a word nerd): Beautiful and sublime are wholly different things.
King and Ketley take up this anecdote to make a point about the impressionistic nature of certain adjectives—that they refer to no thing beside the feelings of the speaker:
Why did Coleridge think the one word was exactly right, and the other exactly wrong? Obviously not because the one adjective described correctly, as we say, a quality of the water or the rocks or the landscape, and the other adjective described this quality incorrectly. It is not as if the man had said "That is brown" (referring, say, to the water) and the woman (also referring to the water) had added, "Yes, it is green." No, Coleridge thought "sublime" exactly the right word, because it was associated in his mind with the emotion he was himself feeling as he looked at the waterfall in its setting of rock and landscape; and he thought "pretty" exactly the wrong word, because it was associated with feelings quite different from those he was actually feeling at the time, and with feelings that, to his way of thinking, no sensitive person would ever have while looking at such a sight.13
This really got C.S. Lewis’s goat. First he points out an error of logic: the words sublime or pretty (which no one in the original anecdote actually ever said, but still) don’t describe anyone’s feelings. In the presence of something they define as “sublime,” a person’s emotions would be described as “humble” or “reverent.” But even leaving that logical inexactitude aside, the problem remains: young people are taught by our textbooks, and they are smart enough to read the tea leaves. The “Green Book” could only leave a young schoolchild with two propositions: “firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.”14
You might think it’s the latter proposition that troubled Lewis, but in fact no degradation of emotions is possible without first robbing them of their groundedness in the real world.
The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same. The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions. But for this claim there would be nothing to agree or disagree about. To disagree with This is pretty if those words simply described the lady’s feelings, would be absurd: if she had said I feel sick, Coleridge would hardly have replied No; I feel quite well.
[. . .]
St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science.15
Lewis argues that this systematic removal of appropriate emotional responses to the world, and denying that the world can merit those responses, robs people of the part of themselves that mediates between their intellectual spirit and their animal appetites: “Men without chests.”
Lewis repeatedly draws a distinction between the critique of stylistic decisions and attacks on emotions themselves and the notion that anything in the world properly invites such emotional responses. The latter is totally egregious. And yet, he clearly doesn’t think lexical choices and turns of phrase have nothing to do with cultivating “ordinate affections.” On the contrary, a virtuous person is spiritually, socially nourished by well-wrought language.
I had grown dubious of this proposition. But now I think it’s just infinitely complex. Who would dare make the case that using language well makes you more virtuous? There are plenty of articulate assholes. And yet, it’s hard to shake the intuition that an aesthetic experience—and I would argue that language acquisition is a profound aesthetic experience (fight me!)—binds us to community, makes our nerves raw and acute, and magnifies the profoundness of our every practical judgement.
In the next parts of this series, we will examine how language acquired as a child is different from that acquired as a second language later in life. We’ll consider how second-language acquisition gives the lie to our misguided association of “original”language with good language. We’ll posit some connections between second-language acquisition and how large language-learning models work.
And throughout we will consider how words and virtues are two serpents entwined around the caduceus.
In my defense, I was in my twenties. I wasn’t really an adult yet.
It’s hard to believe now, but that was sort of rare at the time. No one else I knew was thinking much about Star Wars in the late eighties and early nineties, and there was no internet where I could find others of my ilk. My friends and classmates thought it was a weird, childish sort of nostalgia. I’m pretty sure The Mandalorian is appointment viewing for most of those fairweather nerds now, though.
May I be a weird linguistic person for a moment? Hagiography is a great little example of a word with lots of embedded morphemes. You have your base hagio-, which comes from ἅγιος/ἁγίᾱ/ἅγῐον (hágios/hágiā/hágiо̄n), meaning holy, sacred, pious, or pure. But that base already has an interfix, the bound morpheme -o-, which originated in Greek and spread via Latin to the Romance and later other languages.
-O- was initially used to create compounds in which the first word was the theme for the latter word, meaning “of that kind.” For example, if you combine δῆμος (demos) with κρᾰ́τος (kratos), and then add on the suffix ία (-ia), you wouldn’t get δῆμοςκρᾰτῐ́ᾱ (dēmoskratíā), but rather δημοκρᾰτῐ́ᾱ (dēmokratíā). It’s the “people” kind of ruling. But then in an ancient example of a “misuse” becoming the rule, words started being formed using the same interfix with other stems that weren’t really thematic, as in μητρόπολις (metrópolis), from μήτηρ (mḗtēr), meaning mother, and πόλῐς (pólis), meaing city-state. In early modern Latin, they carried on with that same sort of “misuse,” finding it particularly handy for connecting ethnological and geographical terms like Gallo-, Greco-, and Anglo-. For our part, in English we’ve not only taken up that tradition (Judeo-Christian, Russophobia) but also made even more polysemous use of -o-: (Socio-economic, sadomasochism, blogosphere).
So, anyhow, you’ve got hagio-, and then you add on -graphy. The stem there is the Greek verb γράφω (gráphō), meaning write or draw. But there’s once again a suffix taped onto the end of this stem: -y. That’s adapted from Greek suffix -η (-ē), which was attached to a verb stem to make an “action” noun. Unlike with -o-, we’ve cleaved pretty vigilantly to the “action-y” meaning of -y. When we add -y to some verb, that means we’re talking about things that happen. But just because we’re obedient in that way doesn’t mean our puckish refusal to stick to the rules suddenly disappeared in this case. Sometimes we’ll take a verb and make an agent noun out of it by adding the -er suffix . . . and then add the -y suffix. Often this is a way for us to imbue a word with disapproving connotations: Cuisine and cookery mean the same thing, but then again the don’t, do they? Or take my personal favorite example: fuckery.
I include the link to clarify how I’m using the phrase beg the question not to be a scold and implicitly complain about the loss of meaning in that phrase, but . . . I sort of am? People sometimes use begs the question to mean “leads to the question” or “makes one consider whether . . . .” And that’s fine. That’s how language change works. I have designs much bigger than rehashing the old prescriptivist/descriptivist chestnut in this series, but for now let me say that when Robert Lowth (author of the most important eighteenth-century English grammar text, and famous for, among other things, vilifying the so-called “stranded preposition”—thereby making discussions of that about which we want to write more difficult to be than they need) lists irregular verb forms that he bemoans are falling out of usage, things get a little dicey. As an American, I’m totally on board with gotten as the past participle of get. (USA! USA!) But when he complains that the kids aren’t saying holpen as the past participle of help anymore (“You should have holpen”), he loses me.
However, Dr. Samuel Johnson was onto something entirely more profound when he wrote in the preface to his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language,
I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.
It’s hard to say whether “things” are more permanent than the signs that denote them (see Book II vs. 1 and 2 of A Million Little Gods). But I do think that when language usage drops a valuable idea because we’ve stopped paying attention to it in our practical reasoning, then our social fabric really does become impoverished. Maybe we’ll have to give it another name, but we shouldn’t forget to call out the particular sort of error of judgement that is begging the question.
p. 67
“The use of this unusual word, which is intended to avoid the polarization of natural and supernatural, draws attention to Williams’s intention to find a metaphysical category that allowed him to achieve a fusion of the two categories.” p. 132
There’s no dearth of non-Christian scholars and essayists asking similar questions.
p. x. For what it’s worth, Williams’s is the absolute best translation of Augustine into modern English idiom—and by a country mile. It is both magisterial and philosophically clear. Consider this my strongest possible endorsement.
More on that later in this series.
I don’t say with Lewis himself: he died 14 years before I was born, and—as he argued—his words are not his self.
p. 195
More on that later in this series.
pp. 16–17. It’s fascinating to see the inaccuracies these scholars wield. The husband in Dorothy Wordsworth’s story actually called the Corra Linn “majestic”; the wife called it “sublime and beautiful.” I suspect their recollections here were somehow conflated with recollections of Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Lewis, it should be noted, doesn’t question their recollection.
p. 4
pp. 15–16