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C. S. Lewis: The Natural Law in Literature and Life

by Kathryn Lindskoog and Gracia Fay Ellwood

The human race is haunted by the idea of doing what is right. In the first
five chapters of Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis discusses the fact that
people are always referring to some standard of behavior that they expect
other people to know about. People are always defending themselves by
arguing that what they have been doing does not really go against that
standard, or that they have some special excuse for violating it.

What they have in mind is a law of fair play or a rule of decent behavior.
Different people use different labels for this law - traditional morality
or the Moral Law, the knowledge of right and wrong, or Virtue, or the Way.
We choose to call it the Natural Law. This law is an obvious principle that
is not made up by humans but is for humans to observe. Lewis claims that
all over the earth humans know about this law, and all over the earth they
break it; he further claims that there is Something or Somebody behind this
Natural Law.

A Law Hard As Nails

According to Lewis, we find out more about God from Natural Law than from
the universe in general, just as we find out more about a person by
listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he built. We can
tell from Natural Law that the Being behind the universe is intensely
interested in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and
truthfulness. However, the Natural Law does not give us any grounds for
assuming that God is soft or indulgent. Natural Law obliges us to do the
straight thing no matter how painful or dangerous or difficult it is to do.
Natural Law is hard: "It is as hard as nails" (Mere Christianity 23).

This last sentence also appears as the central thought in Lewis's moving
poem "Love." In the first stanza he tells us how love is as warm as tears;
in the second, how it is as fierce as fire; in the third, how it is as fresh as spring. And in the final stanza he tells us how love is as hard as nails.

Love's as hard as nails,
Love is nails; 
Blunt, thick, hammered through 
The medial nerve of One 
Who, having made us, knew 
The thing He had done, 
Seeing (with all that is) 
Our cross, and His. (Poems 123)

In Lewis's first chronicle of Narnia, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe,
this hardness of the love of God was predicted by the lion Aslan when he
promised to save Edmund from the results of treachery. He said "All shall
bes done. But it may be harder than you think" (104). When he and the White
Witch discussed her claim on Edmund's life, she referred to the law of that
universe as the Deep Magic. Aslan would not consider going against the Deep
Magic; instead, he gave himself to die in Edmund's place, and the next
morning came back to life. He explained to Susan that though the Witch knew
the Deep Magic, there is a far deeper magic that she did not know. This
deeper magic says that when a willing victim is killed in place of a
traitor, death itself would start working backwards. The deepest magic
worked toward life and goodness.

In Narnia, and in this world as well, if the universe is not governed by an
absolute goodness all our efforts and hopes are doomed. But at the
beginning of "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe,"
the first section of  Mere Christianity, Lewis explains that if the universe is ruled by perfect goodness, we are falling short of that goodness all the time; we are not good enough to consider ourselves allies of perfect goodness  In Narnia Edmund fell so far short of goodness that he finally realized with a shock of despair that he needed forgiveness.

At the end of the end of "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the
Universe" Lewis claimed that until people repent and want forgiveness,
Christianity won't make sense. Christianity explains how God can be the
impersonal mind behind the Natural Law and yet also be a Person. It tells
us how, since we cannot meet the demands of the law, God Himself became a
human being to save us from our failure. Lewis was of course aware that the presence of natural and moral evil in the world makes the governance of the world by absolute goodness seem questionable, to say the least. He understood Housman in his bitter complaint against "whatever brute and blackguard made the world." But Lewis asks by what standard the creator is judged a blackguard. The very lament for Moral law or rejection of Moral Law itself implies a Moral Law.

Natural Law Lost

Lewis was deeply concerned about the fact that many people in this century
are losing their belief in Natural Law. He spoke about this in the Riddell
Memorial Lectures given at the University of Durham in 1943 and published
as The Abolition of Man.

In Abolition he used "the Tao" as a shorthand term for the Natural Law or
First Principle. A clarification may be helpful. The term "Tao" in the West
is most often associated with Chinese Taoism. According to the Tao Te
Ching, the Tao (though ineffable) can best be described with words such as
"the Flow," "the way things change," "the Life," "the Source." Its locus is
first of all in nature. To follow the Tao is indeed to live morally, for it
requires respect for the lowly and avoidance of oppression or pride.
However, the Tao is ultimately a way of accepting what is, whether tending
toward life or death. 

Confucianists see the locus of the Tao as first of all in human society,
expressed primarily in the respect of inferiors for patriarchal superiors,
the responsibility of superiors for inferiors, and the subordination of the
individual to the welfare of the group. Neither of these uses quite
corresponds to what Lewis seems to intend in Abolition. Perhaps the Chinese
concept that comes closest to Lewis' apparent intent would be "The Way of
Heaven."

Lewis claimed in Abolition that until quite recent times everyone believed
that objects could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our
contempt. It was assumed that some emotional reactions were more
appropriate than others.

This conception is vividly represented in The Lion, The Witch and the
Wardrobe; Edmund had inappropriate emotional responses from the very
beginning. His brother and sisters imagined pleasant creatures they would
like to meet in the woods, and Edmund hoped for foxes; but Lewis changed
Edmund's choice to snakes for readers of the Macmillan version in the
United States. In both versions, when the children met the wise old
professor, Edmund laughed at his looks. When Edmund met the White Witch,
his initial fear quickly turned to trust; and when she gave him a choice of
foods, he stuffed himself with Turkish Delight candy. His attitude toward
his sister Lucy was resentful and superior; he was even suspicious of the
good Robin and Beaver who came to guide the children to safety. Instead of
noticing the Beaver's house, he noticed the location of the Witch's castle
in the distance. When the name Aslan was first spoken to the four children,
they all had wonderful feelings except Edmund; he had a sensation of
mysterious horror. Later events would educate Edmund to respond as the
others did.

Lewis pointed out that according to Aristotle the aim of education, the
foundation of ethics, was to make a pupil like and dislike what he ought.
According to Plato, we need to learn to feel pleasure at pleasant things,
liking for likeable things, disgust for disgusting things, and hatred for
hateful things. In early Hindu teaching righteousness and correctness
corresponded to knowing truth and reality. Psalm 119 says the law is
"true." The Hebrew word for truth here is "emeth," meaning intrinsic
validity, rockbottom reality, and a firmness and dependability as solid as
nature.

This meaning is reflected in the final book of Narnia, The Last Battle,
where Lewis introduced a young man named Emeth who had grown up in an
oppressive country where people worship the evil deity Tash. In spite of
his upbringing, Emeth was a man of honor and honesty who sought what was
good. He died worshipping Tash and found himself in the presence of Aslan
instead. He responded with reverence and delight. All that he thought he
was doing for Tash could be counted as service to Aslan instead. He was one
of Aslan's friends long before he knew it because he liked what was
likeable and hated what was hateful.

Innovation in Values

Lewis was alarmed by all the people in our day who deny that some things
are inherently likeable, debunking traditional morality and the Natural
Law, thinking that there can be innovation in values. Some of them try to
substitute necessity, progress or efficiency for goodness. But in fact
necessity, progress or efficiency have to be related to a standard outside
themselves to have any meaning. In many cases that standard will be, in the
last analysis, the preservation of the person who thinks of himself as a
moral innovator, or the preservation of the society of his choice. Such
people direct their scepticism toward any values but their own, disparaging
other values as "sentimental" (Abolition 19).

But Lewis's analysis shows that if Natural Law is sentimental, all value is
sentimental. No factual propositions such as "our society is in danger of
extinction" can give any basis for a system of values; no observations of
instinct such as "I want to prolong my life" give any basis for a system of
values. Why is our society valuable? Why is my life worth preserving? Only
the Natural Law, asserting that human life is of value, gives us a basis
for a coherent system of values.

"If nothing is self evident, nothing can be proved," Lewis claimed. "If
nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all" (27).
He means that if we do not accept Natural Law as self-evident and obligatory
for its own sake, then all a person's conceptions of value fall away. There
are no values that are not derived from Natural Law. Anything that is
judged good is such because of values in the Natural Law. The concept of
goodness springs from no other source.

Thus, modern innovations in ethics are just shreds of the old Natural Law,
sometimes isolated and exaggerated. If any values at all are retained, the
Natural Law is retained. According to Lewis, there never has been and never
will be a radically new value or value system. The human mind has no more
power of inventing a new value than of inventing a new primary color.

Admittedly, there are imperfections and contradictions in historical
manifestation and interpretations of Natural Law. Some reformers help us to
improve our perceptions of value. But only those who live by the Law know
its spirit well enough to interpret it successfully. People who live
outside the Natural Law have no grounds for criticizing Natural Law or
anything else. A few who reject it intend to take the logical next step as
well: they intend to live without any values at all, disbelieving all
values and choosing to live their lives according to their whims and
fancies.

Lewis's poem "The Country of the Blind," published in Punch in 1951,
presents an image of people who have come to this. He describes what it
would be like to live as a misfit with eyes in a country of eyeless people
who no longer believe that vision ever existed.

This poem tells of "hard" light shining on a whole nation of eyeless men
who were unaware of their handicap. Blindness had come on gradually through
many centuries. At some transitional stage a few citizens remained who
still had eyes and vision after most people were blind. The blind were
normal and uptodate. They used the same words that their ancestors had
used, but no longer knew their meaning. They spoke of light still, meaning
an abstract thought. If one who could see tried to describe the grey dawn
or the stars or the greensloped sea waves or the color of a lady's cheek,
the blind majority insisted that they understood the feeling the sighted
one expressed in metaphor. There was no way he could explain the facts to
them. The blind ridiculed such a person who took figures of speech
literally and concocted a myth about a kind of sense perception that no one
has ever really had.

Beyond the Natural Law

If one thinks this is a farfetched picture, Lewis concluded, one need only
go to famous men today and try to talk to them about the truths of Natural
Law which used to stand huge, awesome, and clear to the inner eye. One of
those famous men is B. F. Skinner, who answered in his book Beyond Freedomand Dignity that the abolition of the inner man and traditional morality is necessary so that science can prevent the abolition of the human race.
Lewis had already exclaimed in Abolition, "The preservation of the
species?-But why should the species be preserved?" (40) Skinner does not
provide an answer, but welcomes Lewis's scientific "Controllers" who aim to
change and dehumanize the human race in order more efficiently to fulfill
their purposes.

Lewis satirized this kind of progress in his poem "Evolutionary Hymn,"
which appeared in The Cambridge Review in 1957. Using Longfellow's popular
hymn stanza form from "Psalm of Life," Lewis exclaimed: What do we care
about wrong or justice, joy or sorrow, so long as our posterity survives?
The old norms of good and evil are outmoded. It matters not if our
posterity turns out to be hairy, squashy, or crustacean, tusked or
toothless, mild or ruthless. "Goodness is what comes next." His conclusion
is that our progeny may be far from pleasant by present standards; but that
matters not, if they survive.

Lewis has often been carelessly accused of being against science. In fact,
he gives us an admirable scientist in Bill Hingest in That Hideous
Strength. Significantly, Hingest was murdered by order of the supposed
scientists who directed the NICE. The enemy is not true science, which is
fueled by a love of truth, but that applied science whose practitioners are
motivated by a love of power. In Lewis's opinion the technological
developments that are called steps in Man's Conquest of Nature in fact give
certain men power over others. Discarding Natural Law will always increase
the dangers of having some people control others. Only Natural Law provides
human standards which overarch rulers and ruled alike. Lewis went so far as
to claim, "A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very
idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery."
(Abolition 46)

The Magician's Nephew, the tale of the creation of Narnia, gives us two
characters who exemplify the Controllers-Jadis and Uncle Andrew Ketterley.
Both claimed to be above Natural Law; they had "a high and lonely destiny."
Jadis was a monarch and Uncle Andrew was a magician, but both were strongly
suggestive of modern science gone wrong. They both held that common rules
are fine for common people, but that singular great people must be free-to
experiment without limits in search of knowledge, to seize power and
wealth. The result was cruelty and destruction. In contrast, the wise men
of old had sought to conform the soul to reality, and the result had been
knowledge, selfdiscipline, and virtue.

Two examples from Lewis's verse illustrate this traditional wisdom. The
1956 poem "After Aristotle" praises virtue, stating that in Greece men
gladly toiled in search of virtue as their most valuable treasure. Men
would willingly die or live in hard labor for the beauty of virtue. Virtue
powerfully touched the heart and gave unfading fruit; virtue made those who
love her strong.

A second example is "On a Theme from Nicolas of Cusa," published in the
Times Literary Supplement in 1955. In the first stanza Lewis notes how
physical foods are transformed by our bodies when we assimilate them; in
the second, he points out that when we assimilate goodness and truth they
are not transformed, but we are.

At the end of Abolition Lewis implores his readers to pause before
considering Natural Law only one more accident of human history in a wholly
material universe. To "explain away" this transcendent reality is perhaps
to explain away all explanations. To "see through" the Natural Law is the
same as not to see at all.

Lewis's Literary Criticism

The idea that some things are inherently good and others are not is also
the basis for Lewis's approach to literature in An Experiment in Criticism.
His thesis is that the work of art, and particularly the literary work, is
to be received for its own sake, not used for other purposes. Each detail
is to be savored and, if good, enjoyed. We are to look at the work, not to
use it as a mirror to reflect ourselves and our own fantasies or as a lens
through which we look at the world.

This principle is a particular application of the Natural Law. We approach
a work of literature, as we might a person or flower, with the assumption
that here is something good for its own sake, something worth attending to.
After we have looked at it attentively, objectively, either our efforts
will have been rewarded or we may decide it is not of much value after all;
but in any case we will have given it a fair try, done it justice.

In Experiment Lewis contrasts the principle of the inherent value of works
of literature with the habits of people who use literature (and thus misuse
it), who prostitute the work to some other purpose.
The unliterary read a work only for the excitement they can get from the
plot (as in an adventure story), for the provocation and satisfaction of
their curiosity (as in a detective story), or for vicarious emotional
fulfillment (as in a love story). Such readers use literature much as a
child uses a toy, or a worshipper a crucifix: as a starting point for a
journey inward or beyond. Unlike the child or the worshipper, who cherish
their object and use it many times over, the unliterary usually use a story
only once; then it is used up, discarded.

There are also users among the literary. There are the status seekers, who
read the academically fashionable literature in order to impress themselves
and others. There are the selfimprovers-whose concern with their mental
enrichment takes the place of a focus on the work itself.
And there are the wisdomseekers, who value a work for the Statement about
Life that it presents. But, says Lewis, works of art do not give us
adequate world views. Too much selection is involved. In life, suffering is
not often grand and noble and attributable to Tragic Flaws; matters do not
end at points of satisfying finality, but go drizzling on. Works of
literature may in fact make us wiser, but that is really incidental to
their true function; and the wisdom we think came from a particular Great
Work may in fact have come largely from within ourselves. Wisdom seeking is
carried to absurdity in a particularly keen group he calls the Vigilants
(he is surely referring to F.R. Leavis and friends) who will place their
stamp of approval only on those few works that express their own conception
of how life should be lived. They form a kind of Committee of Public
Safety, lopping a new head every month.

By contrast with the users, the receivers surrender to a work of
literature, getting themselves out of the way, attending closely to each
part and its relationship to other parts, for the time being taking the
author's viewpoint as their own. Their refusal of a subjective reading
enables them to enlarge the narrow prison of the self and see with others'
eyes. The temporary annihilation of the self that takes place actually
serves to heal the loneliness of the self. Lewis overtly compares the
process to what happens in the pursuit of knowledge, or of justice, or the
experience of love: we temporarily reject the facts as they are for us in
favor of the facts as they are. In the work of literature we are
experiencing the (morally) good or evil data, the (aesthetically) good or
poor data, that really are out there and really possess the qualities we
perceived. Lewis does not deny that our perception and judgment are
sometimes flawed. But good and bad are real.

Lewis's aesthetic provides a necessary and refreshing corrective to
rigorously dutiful approaches that have ruined the enjoyment of literature
for many from student days onward. For those Christians to whom literary
pleasures have seemed frivolous or dangerous temptations that might lead
away from the Straight Path, Lewis affirms their goodness. He also exposes
the sort of single-issue criticism that darkens counsel by words without
knowledge. Unless we can put ourselves to one side for a time and see what
is actually in the text, we ought not to say anything about a work; and in
many instances we might be better off not reading it at all.

Minor Reservations

Having gratefully accepted Lewis's basic aesthetic enterprise, we must
express a few reservations. Of course it is true that any work of
imaginative literature is too selective to present an adequate philosophy
of life. But much the same could be said of any essay or multi-volumed work
in discursive prose. Any time we want to speak of the whole, of universals
(or the absence thereof), we must be selective. Most formal treatises on
Being, Becoming or Causality leave out the terror and the joy of the world.
The supposedly universal human experience of Reality discussed in nearly
all of theology turns out to be a truncated view of reality. Humans are
limited; we may intend the universal, but any reflection upon Reality is
bound to be limited.

The need for selectivity does not prohibit a work of literature from being
intended, or taken, as a dramatized world view. This is particularly
evident when a work gives support to oppressive social structures. For
example, a story whose few Jewish characters are rapacious schemers or (if
admirable) get baptized, may well give generous minds such as Lewis's the
enlarging experience of finding out what it is like to be antisemitic.
Unfortunately, it will also cause certain readers to come away with
sharpened convictions that the Jewish Conspiracy is the fountainhead of the
world's evil. Likewise, a work whose achieving and admirable characters are
all male, with its females frothy, manipulative, passive, victimized,
and/or marginal, is saying something about the relative value of male and
female.

Lewis in fact acknowledges, in an exchange of letters in Theology
(1939-1940), that there are (morally) bad books that corrupt people by
making false values attractive (Christian Reflections 30-35). He does not
refer specifically to fiction, nor does he exclude it. Surely, then a
(morally) bad work of literature can be bad because it presents a
dangerously false view of life, quite possibly by its selections. In
contrast, a (morally) good work of literature can present true values.
There is no reason why we cannot receive such a work with diligent and
delighted care, and also use it as a parable. Surely what is objectionable
is, in Kant's language, to make the work a means only and not an end also.
It is ironic that Lewis should have rejected the concept of the literary
work as a parable, in view of the fact that his own novels (especially the
Narnian tales) are parables of such enormous power and wisdom.

This, of course, is not to say that every work of literature offers a world
view. The comedy is not necessarily saying that life is finally a joke, nor
is the whodunit perforce telling us that the ills of the world have a neat
and gratifying solution right at hand, if we could only be perceptive
enough to see. Even Freud realized that sometimes a cigar is just a good
cigar.

Life's Intrinsic Value

We have affirmed, with minor reservations, Lewis's reasoning that a work of
literature possesses value in itself. Now we turn back to his thesis of
intrinsic value as applied to all of life, his corrective to a totally
relativistic value (or rather nonvalue) system. Sensitive persons who have
felt their meaning-world collapse around them know how dehumanizing felt
meaninglessness is. Lewis knew whereof he spoke. (People who experience
this collapse without pain are even more dehumanized.) As to the end result
of consistent subjectivism, the world of the Controllers, Lewis's portraits
of Jadis and the directors of the NICE tell us more vividly than his
discursive prose just how nightmarish such a world would be.

Within the context of a basic agreement, once more we offer a qualifier.
Consistent and total subjectivism we certainly do not want, and we know
why. But within limits subjectivism and relativism have value; they can be
freeing. People with a sharp and absolute vision are not often as broad in
mental sympathies and as rich in charity as Lewis; they tend more towards
psychological imperialism. Many of us, Lewis included, would rather live
among people who hold firmly that "Love thy neighbor as thyself" is the
only universally binding principle in personal morality than among people
who know in detail God's will for other private lives as well as their own
and are busy trying to bring about theocracy. Theocracy is one of our
oldest banes, and one that Lewis particularly detested. 

In conclusion, Lewis's teaching about Natural Law has acquired unique
urgency since his day. In 1933 Lewis published the allegorical Pilgrim's
Regress, in which he warned that savage dwarfs called "the Cruels" were
then multiplying; communists, fascists, organized crime syndicates, and many other sub-species that value violence and a perverse kind of heroism. (It seems reasonable to assume that he would have included contemporary perpetrators of genocide and terrorist groups of all kinds as sub-species of the Cruels.) He
published Abolition in 1943; since then there have been radical shifts in
the locus and imminence of threat to the world. 

Lewis sensed, by 1955, the increasing power of modern death technology. In
The Magician's Nephew Jadis decided to use the Deplorable Word, a weapon
she had paid a terrible price to obtain. A moment later every living thing
in the world of Charn was dead. She did this in outright defiance of
Natural Law. There was not enough of a nuclear arsenal in 1955 to destroy
all life on earth; only part of the public foresaw the cancerlike
proliferation of nuclear weapons that would soon threaten to destroy human
life (and our libraries and literary heritage), and to cause a nuclear
winter. (This scenario sounds like the end of the world as foretold in the
Norse mythology that Lewis found so compelling.) Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the threat of worldwide destruction caused by weaponry is far more diffuse. Biological and nuclear tools of modern death technology (as well as possible new alternatives) are sought by power-hungry men with many motives.

In The Last Battle, published in1956, the land of Narnia dies away more
gradually than the land of Charn, ending in darkness and ice. "I did hope,"
said Jill, "That it might go on forever. I knew our world couldn't" (160).
Lewis knew that our earth had to die eventually, but he would be intensely
grieved by today's accelerated destruction of the environment caused not by
acts of war, but by reckless plundering and pollution in defiance of the
Natural Law. (Obvious examples are depletion of the ozone layer, burning of
the rain forests, accumulation of nuclear waste, and contamination of the
oceans.)

In Aslan's beautiful everlasting country Peter found that Lucy was crying
because of the death of Narnia, and he tried to stop her. But Lucy appealed
to the law in all our hearts and said she was sure it was not wrong to
mourn the death of the world they dearly loved. And Tirian, last king of
Narnia, affirmed her. "It were no virtue, but grave discourtesy, if we did
not mourn" (160).

The Natural Law teaches us to fight to save our world from death, and,
should it die, to mourn its destruction. But C.S. Lewis predicted that the
Natural Law itself will outlast all worlds. And he promises us a new life
that will be the Great Story which goes on for ever, in which every chapter
is better than the one before. (184). And all who live that story will be
receivers.

Works Cited

Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Macmillan, 1947. 
Christian Reflections. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967. 
The Last Battle. London: The Bodley Head, 1956. 
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Macmillan, 1950. 
Mere Christianity. New York: Macmillan, 1953. Poems. New York: Harcourt,
1964.
 

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