Greek manners and Gothic morals

The last time I said that Nehring's polemic turns to Christianity next but that is an overstatement. What it turns to is CC Lewis. I grew up in a household where CS Lewis pretty much defined Christianity and I sometimes forget.

Anyway, the real battle here is with CS Lewis and Lewis has a tendency to complicate things and so my big challenge is not to introduce too many of his complications. I do want to complicate them more than Nehring does.

Anytime you want to pick an argument with someone you have two choices. You can attack their argument at its weakest point or at its strongest point. If all you want to do is knock down their castle so you can move on to what really matters to you, you'll go for the weakest point. Most of us go after the weakest point as a matter of instinct. But if we really want to learn someting, we'll go after the strongest thing.

So, where is the weakest point in CS Lewis's argument? It's in his claim that a new emotion was created. When we talk about love, we can talk in cultural or psychological terms but we cannot really talk about both. Human nature doesn't change. So, while it is reasonable to say that a whole new culture grew up around love in the courts of what is now southern France, it isn't reasonable to say that a new kind of sentiment, feeling or emotion was created there. Unfortunately, that is exactly what CS Lewis does claim in The Allegory of Love.

Every one has heard of courtly love, and everyone knows that it appears quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in the Languedoc.

That might seem defensible, as I say, if all he means by that is that a new kind of cultural practice. But he means much more than that.

The new thing itself, I do not pretend to explain. Real changes in human sentiment are very rare - there are perhaps three or four on record - but I believe that they occur, and that this is one of them.

The very wording there tells us that Lewis realizes he is on shaky ground. Unfortunately, he didn't stop to think it through or, if he did stop and think it through, there was something he found in his own character that scared him so badly he didn't want to go there. Yes that is quite a thing to say of poor Lewis but say it I must for it is true.

 Lewis is unfailingly stupid about erotic love and remained so until he had a wild love affair of his own years after writing The Allegory of Love. Not stupid the way most of us are stupid, which is to by becoming irrational and immature. No, Lewis never does that. (Not in print anyway.) No he becomes stupid the way mad scientists and computers do in science fiction. He becomes super rational in ways that are a little scary while, at the same point, arouse pity because he never seems to really see the point.

 And you can see this in his own efforts at fiction and autobiography. There is absolutely no sense of real eroticism in Lewis. At the same time, to try and meet him on the issue in his critical writing is to find yourself dealing with the mad scientist whose rationality is so rigid it ceases to feel human and you begin to wonder what the man is capable of in the name of rationality.

 And yet there is something here that is really good and that will require more attention that Nehring gives it. And that will begin (and possibly conclude) tomorrow).

This series begins here.
The next post will be here.