C.S. Lewis and Psychology (III) 

C.S. Lewis and Psychology (III)

I have two more offerings on this theme: Justice and Wishful thinking; and then (in another post) philosophers in limbo (living with desires, but no hope).

Lewis has an ingenious treatment of wishful thinking in Pilgrim's Regress. Sophisticated people tell the pilgrim that religious belief results from wishful thinking--the desire for a father figure to take care of things, a crutch, and so on. The rather imperious female figure of Reason sets John straight on this about half-way through the book. The "wish-fulfillment" theory must mean that all sane people have these desires for a father-figure, and so on, but it is only the pious who give in to these desires. "Now think. Is it really true that [a number of vicious characters] are going about filled with a longing that there should be a Landlord, and cards of rules, and a mountain land beyond the brook, with a possibility of a black hole?" (The protagonist, John, laughs uncontrollably).

The "black hole" represents hell, so the idea here is that many sinners do not wish for any full-blooded religion to be true at all; they would fear and dread the reality of a just God. In The Great Divorce, Lewis presents a whole class of people who are presented with the reality of heaven, so that they only have to say "yes" to be accepted there, but they refuse. As a friend of mine said, it is probably un-Platonic to believe there are such people.

There may be very few people who are ready to "take inventory" of their own souls, list their sins, and even become candidates to be believers who humbly seek forgiveness. On the other hand, it is surely a common or even universal phenomenon that human beings hope there is going to be justice in the form of punishment for their enemies, whether their transgressions are small or large, while also hoping that their own sins can be forgiven somehow. Isn't belief in Christianity and other faiths partly a belief that there will be two groups, no matter what we do--those who suffer eternal punishment, and those who enjoy eternal rewards--with an over-riding desire to join the latter?

Lewis seems confident that there are many people in hell, and it also seems he finds this deeply satisfying. Richard Neuhaus recently stirred controversy in First Things by suggesting that hell may be totally unpopulated. His critics were able to quote Scripture against him, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they want to be sure there are many sinners who are suffering. Nietzsche suggests in the Genealogy of Morals that this is an important psychological basis for Christianity (First Essay, Section 15).

Back to the Republic. My teachers used to say that the first known use of the word "theology" appears in Book II of the Republic. Socrates asks: what should we teach young potential guardians about the gods? The main teaching is that gods don't do anything that we would regard as vicious if a human being did it, so many classic tales in Homer must be edited accordingly. The more surprising teaching is that gods may not do anything bad to human beings at all--not even as punishment--and they may not help friends or hurt enemies among human beings (380b-c, 382d-e). The thought seems to be: it is natural to turn to the gods, and seek the support of the gods, in a discussion of justice. We all have experience of the fact that in life as we know it, the unjust flourish, and the just suffer. Many of us wish it were otherwise--at least, when we identify with the suffering just. But if gods are "good" enough to help with justice, it is not clear why they would have anything to do with justice, or with the weak human concerns that make us seek justice.

Quite simply, to say God is "godlike," and thus good, and then to say He is just, may always be incoherent.

It is a further argument that to say God is in an important respect mysterious or unknowable, and then that He has specific qualities that can more or less be comprehended by us, may always be incoherent.