C.S. Lewis on good deeds
"The mere suspicion that what seemed an act of spontaneous friendliness or generosity was really done as a duty subtly poisons it
—English Literature in the Sixteenth Century,
Labels: Ethics
posted by Mr. Spog | 4:59 p.m.
1 Comments:
I do not ordinarily have much interest in reading histories of literature, but Eng. Lit. in the 16th Cent. is worth looking at just for the cultural context. In the well-known first section of the book, Lewis denounces the Renaissance "humanists", those who wished to restore Classical civilization—and whose educational programme was the foundation of Western education until within living memory—as Philistines. The humanists, Lewis claims, were culturally childlike men who wished to adopt the forms of Roman adulthood without concerning themselves with its content. They successfully discredited the edifice of Scholastic rational philosophy merely by mocking its style. They had nothing of comparable depth to put in its place; so humanism represents a cultural regression, not progress. At the hands of the humanists, philosophy was vulgarized into the mere Stoic endurance of suffering. (Lewis also blames the humanists for killing Latin as a living language by insisting that it be used in its classical form, instead of the living Medieval Latin of the Scholastics.)
I was also surprised to realize, though I ought to have done so before, that Western education spread up the social scale. Western aristocrats frequently started out as ignorant conquering barbarians, while the Church, the home of education, was open to intellectual talent from all social levels. In England, the ideal of aristocratic illiteracy did not disappear until Tudor times. Then, in the reign of Elizabeth, the exclusion of the poor from education began.
Lewis also has interesting descriptions of the first Puritans, who were decidedly un-"Puritanical". Protestant doctrines were at first not of terror but of joy and hope; they were criticized not for gloomy severity but as "easy, short, pleasant lessons" that lulled their victim to sleep (p. 34). (This seems strongly reminiscent about what some people have said about the recently popular A Course in Miracles: on the surface joyous, it is supposed to be deeply pessimistic at a more profound level.)
Post a Comment
<< Home