Wisdom From Nonsense?
The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast…. Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.
—C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
Lewis, describing here his own condition prior to his embrace of Christianity, gives us the essential truth about the agony of the modern Western world. If you have absorbed the materialist assumptions which dominate our culture (whether you realized you did so or not, and it’s probably worse if you didn’t), you believe, or are always fighting not to believe, that everything human is ultimately meaningless, a sort of vapor that emanates from matter and clings to it, then vanishes with the death of the body.
Love? Just a sentimental name we give to the reproductive instinct, not intrinsically different from the division of an amoeba. Beauty? Another sentimental word with which we justify a meaningless preference for one thing over another, not intrinsically different from a cat’s preference for fish over broccoli. Truth? Truth is death—we are dead stuff, briefly animated by chemical processes, and soon to revert to dead stuff. Nothing we ever did or can do has ultimate meaning.
Not to believe these ideas requires a constant effort. Their authority comes from the sciences, or rather from the misuse of the sciences: because the method of science requires limiting the scope of inquiry to physical data, and because technology has been so successful in using science to tame the physical world, the assumption that only what science can see is real penetrates our thinking like a toxic vapor.
To believe that what really matters does not really exist is a prescription for misery followed by despair. The souls that thrive best in this mental environment are those which are most defective. The more one believes that love, truth, and beauty are the essence of life, not just accidental and illusory by-products, the more miserable one is likely to be, unless supported by a solid faith, a set of beliefs that are strong and coherent enough to challenge materialism.
A few days ago I mentioned a long essay by Sigrid Undset that I’ve been reading, “Catholic Propaganda.” Here’s something else I liked from it:
Catholicism does not explain all the problems of existence, but it explains more and goes deeper than any other philosophy of life.
I believe this is true. I suspected it was true before I became a Catholic, and in fact it’s part of the reason I took that step. And I think anyone who takes a reasonable and fair-minded look at Catholic thought will find himself tending to agree; he may not go so far as to say that it explains more than any other philosophy, but he will agree that it is a very strong one, and that even in purely worldly terms, Catholic thought is strikingly accurate and wise about what we are, what we want, what is good for us and what is bad for us, how we think, how we behave, and how best to cultivate our virtues and limit our vices.
And yet Catholic philosophy cannot be separated from Catholic faith. It’s nonsense without the specific religious beliefs on which it’s based—that there is a God, that he is love, that he has made it possible for us to enter the sea of his love and live there forever, but will not force us to do so. Love and truth and beauty are every bit as real as the rocks and the stars. They are not emotional illusions; they are objective realities.
Is it possible for wisdom to be based on nonsense? The psychological and philosophical wisdom of Catholicism are only logical extensions of its religious doctrine. How can a logical extension of an absurdity be true? Or, to turn it the other way, if the conclusions are consistently true, how can the premises be consistently false?
Does the wisdom derived from the faith confirm the truth of the faith? This is not a rhetorical question, but one with which I wrestle every day.
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