The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Question for CS Lewis fans/scholars

Evangelical Universalism
#1

I seem to remember very strongly that CS Lewis wrote something along the lines of this somewhere: God gives us just enough knowledge that makes free will possible. This is interesting because the idea is contained in John Hick’s “epistemic distance” theory and Aquinas’ account of free will.

I’m wondering if anyone can locate where this is written (Jason, come on my friend!) I’m pretty sure it was in the collected letters of his (though I could be wrong). If anyone has that volume(s) they may be able to index search free will. If it is found, perhaps someone wouldn’t mind quoting the letter in full?

Thanks!

#2

I don’t have the collected letters (any of the three volumes), and I’m honestly kind of suspicious if Walter Hooper was involved in editing and compiling them together, since he demonstrably altered some things in earlier editions of Lewis’ texts that he was involved with (including an earlier partial collection of Lewis’ letters).

So anyway, I can’t help you with that. But I can say, based on extensive study of his theological corpus (and outside it, too) that that doesn’t sound like what he wrote regarding free will in other books.

(Of course, the remark might have been made early in his life before he started actually writing theology publicly; he wrote a ton of things regarding theology pro and con, not necessarily Christian theology either, before he converted and afterward before publishing his first theological book aside from Pilgrim’s Regress.)

That’s so much the reverse of what he believed about free will that, even if he thought some kind of maximum minimum was involved (so to speak), he would have put it the other way around: that God gives us just enough free will to make knowledge possible, not just enough knowledge to make free will possible. Lewis’ key chapter in Miracles: A Preliminary Study (whether the original early 40s edition or the revised and improved early 60s 2nd edition) is based precisely on an argument that we ought to reject atheism and accept theism as true on the ground that our knowledge on any topic is called inextricably into question if we deny or even seriously doubt the existence of our free will (although he doesn’t use that term per se), which atheism (somewhat mistermed as “naturalism” by Lewis) necessarily requires us to do as a corollary of its principles. He repeated variations of the same argument going all the way back to Pilgrim’s Regress and forward to the end of his life; he got it from people (not all of them Christian) predating his own conversion to theism from atheism, and was arguably the main reason why he became a theist (as an adult) at all.

(Not arguably the main reason why he became a Christian per se, but he organizes MaPS consistently with that progression: the Argument from Reason, as it came to be called later, arrives at theism vs. atheism, but in itself that’s as far as it goes. It doesn’t even arrive at supernaturalistic theism necessarily; it might arrive, as Lewis originally thought it did, at some variety of pantheism instead.)

Beyond the central importance of free will for his theistic apologetics, Lewis is categorized as an Arminian for good reason: he had a very strong and central belief in human free will; derivative from and dependent on God, and with natural limitations consonant with being natural creatures (a main reason in itself why he had to reject pantheism and move to supernaturalistic theism, by the way), plus problems due to moral corruption passed along through inheritance due to the original sin of our first ancestors (and freshly generated by our own abuse of our own free will as well)–but still, he didn’t regard free will as a minor gift passed slightly on by God Who otherwise kept strong determination of our behaviors (either directly or through natural determination of automatic reactive cause and effect).

On the contrary, Lewis followed his Teacher, George MacDonald, on the idea that God gives His children as much free will as possible under the circumstances, and intends to give His children maximal (maybe ever-always-increasing) free will upon maturity and freedom from sin.

Lewis was so strongly in favor of free will, that his explanation for the hopeless final state of some sinners was that, in effect, God allowed them to destroy their own free will by their own choice out of respect for their freely willed choices on the matter–not because God stopped loving them (much less because God never loved them to begin with), but because they made it finally impossible for God to save them, out of their own free will. This has become a staple argument by educated Arminians (and even by some Calvinists, weirdly :wink: ), both among Protestants and even among Western and Eastern Catholics (Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, although they do have traditions of their own suggesting that explanation for final damnation, very probably being drawn on by Lewis himself.)

I realize that such an explanation for damnation doesn’t make a single iota of coherent sense–Lewis should have concluded (as MacDonald did, though without metaphysical rigorousness) that inasmuch as free will is a special gift of God’s love, related (though derivatively) to God’s own ultimately and independently free-willed existence, precisely because of God’s love for His children whose child-hood consists in being made spiritually in God’s image with their own free will, God would NOT allow His children to utterly and finally destroy their free will by abusing their free will in sin. If that involves temporary restrictions on free will in various ways, then fine, Lewis believed and understood that by our nature our free will was limited in various ways already, including punitively. But he didn’t regard those limits as being nearly as important as the importance of the gift of free will.

The hell of it (so to speak) is that in the book where Lewis argues most strongly in favor of final perdition, The Problem of Pain–with an admittedly clever attempt at mixing both annihilation and eternal conscious torment together–in a prior chapter of the same book he had insisted even more strongly that God would never give up acting to save sinners from sin and we’d be poor Christians to expect Him to! (I wrote about this extensively in a multi-part essay a couple of years ago, “How close did Lewis get to universalism? This close!”)

If Lewis had believed in God granting only a minimal level of free will (at the time he wrote his public theological works anyway, although I know he often speculated on things piecemeal in correspondence in that period, too), it wouldn’t have been for us to achieve a minimal relevant level of knowledge (much less the other way around, being gifted a minimal level of knowledge in order to attain a minimal level of free will). It would have been for the reason Lewis elsewhere spoke of God giving us free will: so that we may freely love other people, both God and our fellow creatures.

But that rationale for the gift of free will, to freely and thus truly love, doesn’t have merely minimal maximum limitations in view. :slight_smile:

(It certainly couldn’t if trinitarian theism is true; and while Lewis never quite got around to working out a full trinitarian metaphysic, he knew it had something important to do with God, the foundational self-existent rational action, being intrinsically and essentially true love. It was exactly those hints from his writing that I was working at working out, when I came to realize that if trinitarian theism is true, then I ought to expect God to persist at acting toward saving all sinners from sin until He gets it done, never giving up, and never being defeated. And that’s basically Christian universalism.)

How close did Lewis get to universalism? This close!
#3

This is a truly fascinating idea. The whole problem with explaining true libertarian free will has to do with thinking linearly in terms of knowledge preceding action. An intellect presents a will with a good that the intellect judges as highest, and the will reaches out towards that good. There’s really no room for any “choosing.” It’s simply a matter of mechanistic calculation. Where then is blame, praise, etc? Indeed, how could sin ever occur? If the mind truly thought a thing wrong, the will would never extend to it.

BUT, thought of in terms – Ohkamist? – of the will in a way preceding the intellect, in that it reaches out towards goods in a more or less perfect way, the presentation and perception of such goods would follow then afterwards. It would then be possible for the will to “reject the truth” or “go against what it knows to be right.” Sin is then possible. The only problem here is understanding in what way the will “senses” goods, if not from its intellect to begin with.

Could you talk a little bit more about this Jason?

#4

I don’t think for Lewis (and I’m following Lewis on this in my work SttH, the third edition of which is available for free download below in my sig) “will” and “intellect” are so divisible that one comes before the other. Skill of the intellect develops, and talent may vary depending on circumstances, but the will is rational from the moment it begins to exist (derivatively speaking)–not necessarily competent, but rational.

Data arrives to a newborn will as a stream of sense experiences, and the will actively begins accepting (or even actively rejecting, but probably not yet) and sorting the data, and actively reaches to search out more data sooner or later. The environment, not the intellect, is what brings the data to work with, and from which the will acquires more data; the intellect represents the will’s competency at (for want of a more accurate word) “truth-ing” the data, whether the data arrives unsought or is acquired by the reaching of the will. The will also generates data to be processed for true understanding by will (whether by that will or by another will with access to the data thus generated).

Not all libertarians might agree with me (and Lewis :wink: ) on this–in fact I’ve been called a complementarian by a libertarian and vice versa, both of them rejecting me in disgust :laughing: – but the only truly libertarian free will must be God’s. And from God’s Boethian standpoint transcendent to linear time (at right angles to linear time, as Lewis suggests in an appendix to MaPS 2nd edition, although he stresses he’s using a physical analogy for convenience of illustration), God’s knowledge doesn’t precede God’s action or action precede knowledge, not even in an ontological hierarchy where one depends on the other for relation of existence.

That’s kind-of true for us, too: knowledge and action occur simultaneously, but competency doesn’t. Nor does specific consciousness (for us derivative act-ers) of knowledge. People sometimes know things without knowing they know. :wink:

If I had to come down in favor of one preceding the other for created intelligences like ourselves, however, I’d definitely go in favor of action preceding knowledge, since competency and extent of knowledge depends on action. (As well as on environmental conditions, for us who are generated in a naturally reactive universe.)

In the mythic language of Genesis (and if you know Lewis you know I don’t mean to deny historicity thereby), Adam and Eve acquire the knowledge of good and evil by the action they choose to make. But they do have a pretty clear option set to choose from, and prior knowledge (developed by their actions as rational entities). They can either choose to trust God, Whom they have exactly no good reason NOT to trust, or they can choose not to. They choose not to, breaking the interpersonal relationship. They would have received the knowledge of good and evil EITHER WAY–the fruit of the tree was good after all. But they chose to get it by acting irrationally, over against what they already had good reason to believe was true about reality. They could have been intentionally responsible, but they intentionally chose to act irresponsibly. In principle, there isn’t any difference between their sin (or any sin of ours subsequently) and that of Satan: we’re all, in that regard, the chief of sinners, acting against the ground of our existence, Who is Himself an interpersonal relationship of fair-togetherness–and Who because He eternally chooses to exist self-begettingly and self-begotten, thus in and as a valid supportive interpersonal communion acts to keep us in existence anyway, despite our doing things which would result in God’s annihilation if He did them.

But that means God has intentions for us which don’t result in a fulfillment of final non-fair-togetherness between us as persons and other persons. To keep us in existence while we continue impenitently, or to let us go (or to force us) out of existence as impenitent sinners, would be a breach of His own existence as Justice; He must be acting toward bringing us back to accepting and acting in righteousness instead.

The blame thus comes, not in honestly but mistakenly valuating what is properly good and choosing to attain it, but in choosing to act against what the will perceives and understands (even if mistakenly!) to be true.

(So for example St. Paul says it would be a sin to try to coerce people into doing or even into accepting what they believe to be ethically wrong, even if what they’re rejecting is not in fact ethically wrong: they’d still be acting against the truth in principle.)

As Lewis puts it, referencing Romans 2, none of us sin against a foreign law, but against what we ourselves already regard to be truly good. Any sin, consequently, is a sin against the light, a sin against the Holy Spirit: “You are saying I cast demons out by Beezeboul! If I am casting out by power of the Plunder-possessor, by whom do your sons cast them out!? Consequently, they shall be your judges!” We cheat against the principles we accept when we think it’s in our favor.

chapter 40"]In this, and in other ways, I know that I ought to do something because I think reality (especially interpersonal reality) is such-n-such a way; but I nevertheless sometimes choose to do the other thing, if I possibly can.

Essentially, I want to be the person who defines what is and is not the actual principles of interpersonal relations (or what is “good”), and to be the one who defines what is and is not true.

In fact, I do not merely want to define them (since that might involve discovery and categorization of them), but to change them from what I know (or think) them to be.

At those times, I do not merely want to be God with the authority of God.

In essence, I want–and more importantly I am willfully trying–to be God over against God.

#5

Thanks for the reply Jason.

Let me post an email I sent to a Aquinas professor (whom I haven’t got a reply from) that I think addresses my main concern. A bit jumbled, I know, but I was in a hurry and hasn’t panned it all out.

Dr. Grant,

In particular, the issues which initially vexed me about regarding Aquinas’ understanding of human nature is that, if the will follows the intellect, and the intellect presents to it a good considered as such, it would seem impossible for a sin to actually occur – if we take sin to mean the commission of an act which we know to be immoral. It reduces all sin to a sort of miscomputation on part of the intellect, and it becomes difficult to connect such a computational mistake, as it were, with the notion of guilt, blame, praise, etc. It seems impossible, then, to conceive of Adam as sinning, if he could not be deceived. Wouldn’t his intellect have to intially comprehend the necessary badness in committing such an act; and, so comprehended, wouldn’t it be impossible (in Aquinian thought) for the will to reach out with appetite towards that?

But, more recently, I’ve been considering what Aquinas says regarding the will moving the intellect and the fact that the will, though it necessarily tends towards happiness or Good in general, such a thing (which is God) is not presented to it in this life. It is only broken up and put into things in a fractured or incomplete sort of way. Thus, if we imagine the will as reaching out in front of the intellect, as it were, we can perhaps imagine the will as defectively desiring lower goods. It almost seems though in this case that the will would be acting “irrationally” since it is what is moving the intellect itself to view these lower goods as better than they are. The will would of course be being “defective” in this sense, since it could have reached out towards good in a more complete or perfect way. But this act of willing could not have any act of apprehension preceding it. It has to be imagined in such a way that makes the will precede the intellect, and guide it. Sin, then, is actually a matter of one willing to think of a lesser good as greater. It seems necessary to state that the intellect doesn’t present this to the will first. That is what sets up the whole trap regarding the impossibility of sinning, since the will would never desire what it knows to be wrong (and knowing a thing to be wrong is none other than thinking a thing is a lesser good for oneself than something else.)

Perhaps if the will had its own mode of comprehension, or, perhaps a better word would be, appreciation or experientation, it could “sense” goodness apart from the intellect itself? Indeed, we say that other senses, through their own modes, sense things – eyes color, skin touch, etc – so why can we not suppose that the will has a mode through which it senses reality independent of the intellect? If the intellect only senses “truth” or propositional knowledge, it would seem possible that it itself is not what senses “good.” A computer could know things and not necessarily think them good. Therefore, perhaps the will alone is what “knows,” as it were, goodness, and in which case perhaps it precedes the intellect in reaching out towards that good it senses?

#6

If sin however amounts to willfully cheating in order to obtain something we perceive to be a benefit, it doesn’t matter how accurate our evaluation of the benefit is. It’s the intention to cheat that’s the problem, setting ourselves willfully against the truth in principle (regardless of how effective we currently are at perceiving truth) rather than willfully attempting to cooperate in subordination with and to the truth.

Which by the way is something a computer can’t do. Code for it to react to stimulus in various ways can be implemented which could fake or simulate “cheating”, but the computer is just going about its business shuffling bits of electricity around. It isn’t intending to cheat. It was the programmer who intended to cheat and is using the computer like a very advanced screwdriver to do so!

#7

Just to say that alister mcgraths new cs lewis biopic is out soon:

mobile.tyndale.com/02-products/product-details.php?isbn=9781414339351&pref=MOBILE&lang=eng

#8

I was going to say, “Lord, I hope it’s better than the Shadowlands film with Anthony Hopkins (although he would have made a fine Lewis–that was just the source material’s fault)”; but then I realized you weren’t actually talking about a bioPIC. :wink:

Yes, I’m looking forward to the new biography, too, although I would prefer to catch up on the collected letters first.

#9

Hey, I liked Shadowlands! :wink:

Speaking of which, did you ever watch the British TV version with Joss Ackland? It’s a different spin, and you may like it better.
In some places it’s more intimate and moving than the Hopkins version, though I think Hopkins looks more like Lewis than Ackland does. It is nice to see Joss Ackland playing a good guy though, since he almost always plays villains. :stuck_out_tongue:

#10

No, I haven’t seen the other adaptation. I may try to Netflix or AmazonPrime it, if you think it’s better at representing what Lewis actually thought and did.

Does he have a deep baritone Entish voice? Because that would explain a lot. :sunglasses:

#11

Found it here, page 106.

books.google.com/books?id=BCc6Aq … 81&f=false

“And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible: for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?”

#12

Ooh! I’m glad that page was part of Google’s random sample scan. Not sure how to directly point a link there myself (I had to search around some more until I found it)…

Oh well, the relevant paragraph reads: “My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a lonely road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible: for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?”

The context is Lewis’ congratulations at the conversion of Sheldon Vanauken (author later of A Severe Mercy, which has some Christian universalist leanings by the way); and isn’t about free will per se, certainly not about the metaphysics involved, but about a notion of faith that doesn’t involve certainty.

As it happens, Lewis wrote strongly against this notion that faith necessarily requires some level of uncertainty in his official works; but rather that faith involves a willed resolution to hold to what the intellect has perceived to be true over-against assaults by mere emotion. (See the chapter on “Faith” in Mere Christianity, and perhaps even moreso the essay “Obstinacy and Belief”.)

If I recall correctly, though, he did hold to the more common notion that hope necessarily requires some level of remaining uncertainty; but he did so following an interpretation of St. Paul to the effect that hope is not faith because hope doesn’t yet see its object while faith does. I’m not sure how Paul thought that fit with his declaration that these three would be remaining when all else has passed away, faith, hope and love (the greatest being love), but perhaps the apostle was thinking in terms of our experiences continuing to grow, therefore we will always have something new to look forward to in hope as each hope is fulfilled.

Anyway, what he said to SV still doesn’t fit the strong majority of what he had to say on the topic elsewhere: Lewis was well aware that natural accident and sinful rebellion can both involve desires and intentions to make 2+2 come out to be 5, so long as it’s in our favor.

I rather suspect Lewis’ inconsistency here was based on his notions of soteriology, where he sometimes tried to explain why God wouldn’t accept repentance under conditions of absolute or even sufficiently sufficient demonstrations of truth, because somehow that would have no value. As if the goal of righteous behavior had no value. :unamused: But he had to contradict his own principles elsewhere on this topic, or else he would have arrived at an expectation that Christian universalism is true, or would have been even closer to it than he already was. (Usually he didn’t explain non-universalism in terms of God refusing to save someone, but in terms of God being unable to save someone from sin. But so long as he was thinking of scriptural testimony of God’s punishment, he had to come up with some reason why God would actively refuse to save someone after a certain point, and that’s the best he could think of.)