The previous post concluded by finding that if “mere” Christianity means merely what all or almost all who call themselves Christians have believed, there is nothing left of it.  Lewis’s book would seem to be demolished.  But it isn’t.  It is a great book.

What saves the book is that although Lewis says he is defending what all or almost all who have called themselves Christians have believed, he isn’t really; he only thinks he is.  He is actually defending a particular conception of what is truly most central to the Church founded by Christ.  A very particular conception.

In fact, it is a high-church Anglican conception, of roughly the sort held by John Henry Newman before he became Catholic.  This type is rare among actual Anglicans, perhaps because so many of those who hold it end up joining Newman on the other side of the Tiber.  It looks remarkably like Catholicism with a few pieces missing -- just enough of them to allow putting off the decision to convert.  As Newman discovered, the difficulty is that these missing pieces want to be replaced; the holes cry out to them, “Return!”

For example, although Lewis stops short of a full-blown Catholic account of the sacraments, he clearly defends the Catholic view that they are more than mere symbols; they are symbols plus, symbols through which God is actually bringing about the thing symbolized.  Baptism is not just a symbol of new birth but a new birth, marriage is not just a symbol of joining but a joining, and so on.

Whatever Lewis thought it was, this view is far from mere.  Granted, one can hold it without being Catholic, but it is far more characteristic of Catholicism than of Protestantism.  It is especially alien to Evangelical Protestantism, which is curious, because Evangelicals are probably the book’s most enthusiastic readers.  If you wanted to draw Evangelicals to the Catholic Church, you could hardly do better than to have them read Mere Christianity, then point out how Catholic many of their favorite passages are.

But I wish to propose a larger point, which is not about Lewis’s book, and not about Protestantism and Catholicism, but about minimalism.

It is simply this:  Every minimalism is some minimalism.

Lewis’s minimalism turns out to be almost Catholic, but if it hadn’t been almost Catholic, it would have been almost something else.  The mere fact that one avoids certain questions does not make one neutral about their answers. 

Lewis closes his preface with the hope that no reader will take what he calls mere Christianity to be a kind of Christianity, as though someone could be a mere Christian rather than, say, Congregationalist or Greek Orthodox.  He says it is “more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms,” emphasizing that “the hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.”  For living in, he thinks, even the worst of the rooms would be preferable to the hall.

But if the hall is defined, not by what is truly most central to the Church founded by Christ, but only by what all or almost all who call themselves Christians have believed, then if the hall exists at all, it is tiny, and some of these doors may not open into rooms at all, but into the street.

Must we then oppose every sort of minimalism?  No.  Every conversation must begin somewhere.  Since one cannot talk about everything at once, one must begin with something that one’s conversational partner is willing to concede.

But this can never last for long.  The mind, like the stomach, desires a meal. Just as some foods are digestible and delicious only in combination with other foods, so also some beliefs are helpful and plausible only in combination with other ideas. In order to stand firm they must have context, as the single stone requires the arch.

Next:  Not so mere natural law

One of the twentieth century’s greatest defenses of the Christian faith is C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.  The book contains many good and persuasive arguments; I often recommend it, and expect to go on doing so.  And yet the book’s greatest strength, viewed in one way – the minimalism expressed by the adjective mere -- turns out to be identical with its greatest weakness, viewed in another way.

The point of the mere is that Lewis was not trying to defend a particular conception of Christianity, be it Catholic, Evangelical, Presbyterian, or what have you, but just Christianity.  His strategy was to get the reader into the entrance hall; the reader could decide on his own what room to enter from there.

How wonderful to avoid the sectarian quarrels and go straight to the heart of things.  So what is the problem?  The problem is that Lewis was not really doing that.

In fact, he couldn’t have done that, for consider what kind of mere his mere is.  To go to the heart of things, Lewis would have had to identify and defend the beliefs most truly central to the Church founded by Christ.  But to do that would have risked the very quarrels he was trying to avoid, for as he points out, which beliefs are central is one of the things which the different conceptions of Christianity disagree about.  Instead, Lewis said, his aim was to defend only the beliefs about God and man shared by almost all or almost all who have called themselves Christians.

To put it another way, his mere is not the essential mere, but only the statistical mere.

But aren’t these two meres the same thing?  Aren’t the beliefs most truly central to the Church founded by Christ the very same as the beliefs of most people who call themselves Christians?  Hasn’t orthodox Christian faith been defined by St. Vincent of Lerins as “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all”?

St. Vincent did say that.  But his excellent criterion has no meaning unless we specify who is meant by that “all.”  Who did St. Vincent himself mean by it?  He meant all who cling to the Sacred Tradition of the Catholic Church.  As he explained, “We shall hold to this rule if we follow universality, antiquity, and consent. We shall follow universality if we acknowledge that one Faith to be true which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is clear that our ancestors and fathers proclaimed; consent, if in antiquity itself, we keep following the definitions and opinions of all, or certainly nearly all, Bishops and Doctors alike.”

Unlike St. Vincent’s “all,” which is really a criterion of adherence to Sacred Tradition, Lewis’s statistical “all” opens the door to a zoological garden of beliefs, and every day the zoo grows larger.  Mary Baker Eddy called herself a Christian.  The “God is dead” theologians of the nineteen-sixties called themselves Christians.  Mormons, who think God one of an infinity of gods, call themselves Christians (at least these days they do).  I used to know an Episcopalian chaplain who denied the Resurrection, but recited the Creed “as an act of solidarity with the community."

Some of these species of belief are pretty well populated, so that if mere Christianity means merely what all or almost all who call themselves Christians have believed, there is nothing left of it.

But I suggested that the book is great.  So what saves it?  See the next post for the answer.

The other day, one of my students suggested that there is no such thing a morality, because to be moral is to be unselfish, and even so-called moral behavior is really selfish at the core.  His example was that even a martyr isn’t acting morally, because he gains something by dying for others.

It would be easy to expand the list of examples.  Friendship is selfish because we get something from it; a mother’s care for her child is selfish because it makes her happy.

This view is mistaken, but there are kernels of truth in every believable mistake.  Otherwise they couldn’t be believable.  In this case, one of the kernels of truth is that we necessarily seek our own happiness.  The other is that morality has something to do with love, and love is a commitment of the will to the true good of other persons.

The misstep lies in thinking that unselfishness means loving the others instead of myself.  No, I must love them asmyself.  For human beings, the good is of such a nature that unless we share it, we cannot enjoy it at all.

To put it another way, if you think the difference between a selfish and unselfish person is that one sort seeks his own happiness and the other sort doesn’t, then of course you will think there is no such thing as morality, because everyone seeks his own happiness.  The real difference between selfish and unselfish persons lies elsewhere -- in how they are related to other selves.

The selfish person is indifferent to them.  He thinks not caring about other selves will make him happy.  This is a delusion, which makes him miserable.

But the unselfish person identifies with other selves.  If those he loves flourish, he flourishes; if not, then not; and so he flourishes.  The greatest love is to lay down his life for them – not because he is indifferent to his happiness, but because it is inseparable from theirs.

From this point of view, one might almost say that the problem with the selfish person is not that he desires happiness too much, but that he doesn’t desire it enough.  If only he conceived happiness more adequately, he would not seek it in such a cramped and unimaginative way.  Only the one who spends himself saves himself.  Misers lose everything.

I closed the last post with a question:  Having abandoned the vision on which the medieval university was built, what are modern universities organized around?  The answer is “Nothing in particular.”

They are queasy alliances of interest groups which have no ultimate commitments in common.

Among the more respectable things the university tries to be are a job training center, a place for technological research, and an accreditor of fitness for employment.  But universities don’t do any of these things well, and each of them can be better and more cheaply by other kinds of institution.

You don’t need to go to college to learn how to manage a hotel, or to prove that you can program a computer.  Government and industry can carry out technological research just as well at their own facilities.  And college prepares people for employment so poorly that some corporations are now forced to run their own classes in math and English composition.

The university also tries to be a place for doing things that just don’t need to be done at all, like giving young people a place to “discover themselves.”

This which means giving them a place for a protracted period of dissipation while avoiding adult responsibilities.  Parents who think this is the best way for their children to grow up could save money by just sending them on cruises.

Universities offer places for preserving failed ideologies and validating faddish “identities,” but we have politics for that; we don’t need universities.

And they are massive public-works programs for keeping a larger number of people employed as scholars than could otherwise find that kind of work.  We do need scholars, but let us be honest: Most scholars would be better employed at something else.

The things universities do which other institutions can do better eventually will be done by other institutions.  The things they do which don’t need to be done will eventually lose public support.  I will not mourn these changes.  They are overdue.

I will mourn the loss of the one thing universities can do well, which was done in medieval universities, but which the modern university no longer believes in:  Pursuing the vision of the coherence of reality and its friendliness to the mind, and forming minds which are capable of sharing it.

We will have to find another way to do that.  I don’t know what it will be.  I believe it will be found, but it will not be found in my time.  There are signs on the horizon, but they are faint.

And so to reply to Vedder and Denhart:  Gentlemen, you are mistaken.  These are the reasons why the college bubble will pop; this is why the higher education system will collapse.  Not because it is “still tied to its medieval origins.”

A recent Wall Street Journal article by Richard Vedder and Christopher Denhart concludes, “Many poorly endowed and undistinguished schools may bite the dust, but America flourished when buggy manufacturers went bankrupt thanks to the automobile.  The cleansing would be good for a higher education system still tied to its medieval origins – and for the students it’s robbing.”

Vedder and Denhart are right about the need for reform, but they are mistaken about what kind of reform is needed.  And they are utterly confused in thinking that the problem is that universities are “still tied to medieval origins.”

Medieval students had to master seven elementary studies before going on to advanced degrees.  The first three, called the trivium, were grammar, or the laws of language; rhetoric, or the laws of argument; and dialectic, or the laws of clear thought.  The next four, called the quadrivium, were arithmetic, or the laws of number; geometry, or the laws of figure; music, or the laws of harmony; and astronomy, or the laws of inherent motion.

Why these seven?  Because medieval universities were organized around the view that the universe makes sense, that knowledge is grasping that sense, that the mind can really grasp it, that all knowledge is related, and that all of its parts form a meaningful whole. 

By contrast, our universities are organized around – what?  Actually, they aren’t universities at all, because they have given up their vision, the coherence of universal reality and its friendliness to the rational mind.

Most humanities scholars gave up that view some time ago.  In fact, they mock it.  That’s why we have so little that even pretends to be a core curriculum, and why even general education courses are a smorgasbord.  The pretentious postmodernist credo is “suspicion of metanarratives,” which means no one gets the Big Story right.

Of course that is a Big Story too.  “Once upon a time people believed there was a Big Story which would make sense of things if only they could get it right.  Now we know better, because there isn't any Big Story, so no one gets it right.  And we are the clever ones the ones who got that right.”

How clever are these clever ones?  You tell me.  Several years ago my own university sponsored a freshman assembly about choosing a major.  Faculty in the humanities and sciences presented pep talks for their fields of study; student leaders asked them questions.  The tone of the event was epitomized by the question, “If you were a bar of soap, whose shower would you want to be in?”  Grinningly, the faculty moderator pressed the faculty panelists to answer.

I am ashamed to say that they did.

This is not the sort of problem which can be solved by cost-savings, team-teaching, or distance learning.  Such solutions are merely economic.  The problem is spiritual.

Though scientists have held out longer, belief in the coherence of universal reality is vanishing among them too.  The physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote in his book Across the Frontiers that “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”

This view isn’t a finding of science.  It’s merely a culmination of a line of thought which began with philosophers like Kant, who thought our minds can never really get at reality itself, but only at their own thoughts about reality.

Having abandoned the vision of universal truth on which the medieval university was built, what are modern universities organized around?  Stay tuned.

* “How the College Bubble will Pop,” Wall Street Journal, p. A13, 9 January 2014.