The Magician's Book

I've been giving my grumpy side free rein lately, so I figured I should write about a book I really like: Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008). Though, as the title makes clear, Miller's focus is on C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, the subject of the book is reading -- what it means to be a reader, how one learns to read, and the complex relationship between the writer, the writing, and the reader.

Miller was handed a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by a teacher when she was in second grade. For a few years she read and reread the series, though she also read and loved other books too. But as she grew older, things changed.

Although I miss the childhood experience of being engulfed by a story, I would not willingly surrender my adult ability to recognize when a writer is taking me someplace I don't want to go. In my early teens, I discovered what is instantly obvious to any adult reader: that the Chronicles of Narnia are filled with Christian symbolism and that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe offers a parallel account of the Passion of Christ. I'd been raised as a Catholic, but what faith I'd had was never based on anything more than the fact that children tend to believe whatever adults tell them. As soon as I acquired any independence of thought, I drifted away from the Church and what I saw as its endless proscriptions and requirements, its guilt-mongering and tedious rituals. So I was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia, the joy of my childhood and the cornerstone of my imaginative life, were really just the doctrines of the church in disguise. I looked back at my favorite book and found it appallingly transfigured. Of course, the self-sacrifice of Aslan to compensate for the treachery of Edmund was exactly like the crucifixion of Christ to pay off the sins of mankind! How could I have missed that? I felt angry and humiliated because I have been fooled [6].

About ten years ago, Miller was assigned to write about the book that had meant the most to her, so she reread the Chronicles of Narnia to see how she responded to them as an adult.

When I finally came back to Narnia, I found that, for me, it had not lost its power or its beauty, or at least not entirely. Although I am a little bit abashed about this ... the radiant books of my youth still seem radiant to me. Yet there are aspects of Narnia I can no longer embrace with the childish credulousness that [Graham] Greene describes. ... Nevertheless, what I dislike about Narnia no longer eclipses what I love about it, and the contents of my own mind still have the capacity to surprise me when I study them carefully enough [8].

It's not easy to review a book. There's so much going in any text of any length that it's hard to keep track of it all. I was always nervous when I did book reviewing that I'd make some awful embarrassing mistake. Reviewers do this, as any fan of a book will know. The book editor of the Seattle Times, for example, smooshed together Miller's original encounter with Narnia with her disillusionment:

Literary critic Laura Miller first passed through the Narnia portal in the second grade. She was raised Catholic but had fallen away from what she calls the church's "guilt-mongering and tedious rituals." She writes, "I was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia, the joy of my childhood and the cornerstone of my imaginative life, were really just the doctrine of the Church in disguise."

If Miller could have read the Chronicles that way in the second grade, she probably would never have come to love them: her disillusionment was deepened by her earlier acceptance of the tale. She would also have been remarkably precocious, since few if any second-graders can spot multiple meanings in stories this way; many adults never manage to do it. The reviewer continues:

But Miller could never escape Narnia's spell, and in "The Magician's Book," she returns to the landscape of Narnia to search for its deeper meaning.

To her credit, the reviewer acknowledges, "It's a journey of great pleasure -- Miller is a wise, down-to-earth and often funny narrator. The result is one of the best books about stories and their power that I have ever read." Here I agree on every point; I'd only add that it is also a book about readers and their power, how we learn to understand stories in all their richness.

The Magician's Book contains a wealth of ideas and stories, partly the result of following up her original assignment. Miller interviewed many fans and critics of Narnia, starting with the teacher who first gave her the book.

Long before I learned of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, before it was even written, a twelve-year-old girl named Wilanne Belden walked two miles once a week to the library in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, to check out the maximum quantity of five books. It was the Depression, and buying any book was a luxury. The deal Wilanne's parents struck with her was that if she checked out the same title from the library three times, and read it from cover to cover, she could have a copy of her own. This arrangement worked well enough until Wilanne discovered what would become her favorite book, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (then in its first edition, before even Tolkien himself knew the significance of Bilbo Baggins's magic ring). The Hobbit is long for a children's book, and by the time she had read it three times, it had gone out of stock in bookstores. Buying a copy was no longer an option. So Wilanne decided to make her own, checking the book out of the library over and over again, typing up a couple dozen pages at a time using two fingers on the family's manual typewriter. She got as far as page 107 before the book returned to the stores [21].

This story won me over completely. I made my own handwritten copies of poems I liked in high school, copied from Louis Untermeyer's anthologies, not so much because I couldn't afford the books themselves (though I couldn't), but because copying them out by hand helped me to concentrate on the poems. And I recognize that craving to own a copy of a book one loves.

I'm lucky, because I still get immersed, lost, in books I'm reading. Not always, of course, but often enough. Sometimes it even happens with non-fiction, as it did with parts of The Magician's Book.

The Seattle Times reviewer concluded, "It will come as no surprise that the rift between Miller, a bright young girl grown older and wiser, and Lewis, a magician of stories and their power, ends in reconciliation." I don't think "reconciliation" is the right word, though of course it's the kind of thing many people like to believe. Miller remains a "skeptic," as her subtitle labels her, and she remains critical of Lewis as man and, more important, as writer. Though the books are still "radiant" for her, she probably dislikes more about Narnia than she did as a teenager, because she's older and more knowledgeable now. That, I think, is part of what it means to be an adult: to be able to love without blinding oneself to the shortcomings of the beloved, and perhaps also to separate the artist from the art.

One Amazon user complained that Miller didn't cut Lewis much slack, but I think that only an idolatrous fan could think so; Miller cuts him a great deal of slack, more than most of his Christian fans seem to be able to do. Because they can't admire him or his work while admitting any failings at all, they have to deny, excuse, explain them away. "C. S. Lewis’s most devoted Christian readers regard his writings as, if not quite sacred, then at least sacralized," Miller says. "For them, the temptation to deny that he held a lot of objectionable opinions is very strong" (171). Anyone who can see Lewis more or less whole must be wholly on the other side; there is no middle ground. It's odd, but not at all unusual, I think, that it's Christians -- who like to suppose that only they really grasp human imperfection (or "sinfulness") -- who refuse to see any imperfection in someone like Lewis, and a non-Christian like Miller who, because she doesn't see Lewis as a saint, doesn't need to deny that he had feet of clay.

There's more I'd like to write about The Magician's Book, but it'll keep until later. Happy Labor Day!

The Magician's Book

I've been giving my grumpy side free rein lately, so I figured I should write about a book I really like: Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008). Though, as the title makes clear, Miller's focus is on C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, the subject of the book is reading -- what it means to be a reader, how one learns to read, and the complex relationship between the writer, the writing, and the reader.

Miller was handed a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by a teacher when she was in second grade. For a few years she read and reread the series, though she also read and loved other books too. But as she grew older, things changed.

Although I miss the childhood experience of being engulfed by a story, I would not willingly surrender my adult ability to recognize when a writer is taking me someplace I don't want to go. In my early teens, I discovered what is instantly obvious to any adult reader: that the Chronicles of Narnia are filled with Christian symbolism and that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe offers a parallel account of the Passion of Christ. I'd been raised as a Catholic, but what faith I'd had was never based on anything more than the fact that children tend to believe whatever adults tell them. As soon as I acquired any independence of thought, I drifted away from the Church and what I saw as its endless proscriptions and requirements, its guilt-mongering and tedious rituals. So I was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia, the joy of my childhood and the cornerstone of my imaginative life, were really just the doctrines of the church in disguise. I looked back at my favorite book and found it appallingly transfigured. Of course, the self-sacrifice of Aslan to compensate for the treachery of Edmund was exactly like the crucifixion of Christ to pay off the sins of mankind! How could I have missed that? I felt angry and humiliated because I have been fooled [6].

About ten years ago, Miller was assigned to write about the book that had meant the most to her, so she reread the Chronicles of Narnia to see how she responded to them as an adult.

When I finally came back to Narnia, I found that, for me, it had not lost its power or its beauty, or at least not entirely. Although I am a little bit abashed about this ... the radiant books of my youth still seem radiant to me. Yet there are aspects of Narnia I can no longer embrace with the childish credulousness that [Graham] Greene describes. ... Nevertheless, what I dislike about Narnia no longer eclipses what I love about it, and the contents of my own mind still have the capacity to surprise me when I study them carefully enough [8].

It's not easy to review a book. There's so much going in any text of any length that it's hard to keep track of it all. I was always nervous when I did book reviewing that I'd make some awful embarrassing mistake. Reviewers do this, as any fan of a book will know. The book editor of the Seattle Times, for example, smooshed together Miller's original encounter with Narnia with her disillusionment:

Literary critic Laura Miller first passed through the Narnia portal in the second grade. She was raised Catholic but had fallen away from what she calls the church's "guilt-mongering and tedious rituals." She writes, "I was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia, the joy of my childhood and the cornerstone of my imaginative life, were really just the doctrine of the Church in disguise."

If Miller could have read the Chronicles that way in the second grade, she probably would never have come to love them: her disillusionment was deepened by her earlier acceptance of the tale. She would also have been remarkably precocious, since few if any second-graders can spot multiple meanings in stories this way; many adults never manage to do it. The reviewer continues:

But Miller could never escape Narnia's spell, and in "The Magician's Book," she returns to the landscape of Narnia to search for its deeper meaning.

To her credit, the reviewer acknowledges, "It's a journey of great pleasure -- Miller is a wise, down-to-earth and often funny narrator. The result is one of the best books about stories and their power that I have ever read." Here I agree on every point; I'd only add that it is also a book about readers and their power, how we learn to understand stories in all their richness.

The Magician's Book contains a wealth of ideas and stories, partly the result of following up her original assignment. Miller interviewed many fans and critics of Narnia, starting with the teacher who first gave her the book.

Long before I learned of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, before it was even written, a twelve-year-old girl named Wilanne Belden walked two miles once a week to the library in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, to check out the maximum quantity of five books. It was the Depression, and buying any book was a luxury. The deal Wilanne's parents struck with her was that if she checked out the same title from the library three times, and read it from cover to cover, she could have a copy of her own. This arrangement worked well enough until Wilanne discovered what would become her favorite book, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (then in its first edition, before even Tolkien himself knew the significance of Bilbo Baggins's magic ring). The Hobbit is long for a children's book, and by the time she had read it three times, it had gone out of stock in bookstores. Buying a copy was no longer an option. So Wilanne decided to make her own, checking the book out of the library over and over again, typing up a couple dozen pages at a time using two fingers on the family's manual typewriter. She got as far as page 107 before the book returned to the stores [21].

This story won me over completely. I made my own handwritten copies of poems I liked in high school, copied from Louis Untermeyer's anthologies, not so much because I couldn't afford the books themselves (though I couldn't), but because copying them out by hand helped me to concentrate on the poems. And I recognize that craving to own a copy of a book one loves.

I'm lucky, because I still get immersed, lost, in books I'm reading. Not always, of course, but often enough. Sometimes it even happens with non-fiction, as it did with parts of The Magician's Book.

The Seattle Times reviewer concluded, "It will come as no surprise that the rift between Miller, a bright young girl grown older and wiser, and Lewis, a magician of stories and their power, ends in reconciliation." I don't think "reconciliation" is the right word, though of course it's the kind of thing many people like to believe. Miller remains a "skeptic," as her subtitle labels her, and she remains critical of Lewis as man and, more important, as writer. Though the books are still "radiant" for her, she probably dislikes more about Narnia than she did as a teenager, because she's older and more knowledgeable now. That, I think, is part of what it means to be an adult: to be able to love without blinding oneself to the shortcomings of the beloved, and perhaps also to separate the artist from the art.

One Amazon user complained that Miller didn't cut Lewis much slack, but I think that only an idolatrous fan could think so; Miller cuts him a great deal of slack, more than most of his Christian fans seem to be able to do. Because they can't admire him or his work while admitting any failings at all, they have to deny, excuse, explain them away. "C. S. Lewis’s most devoted Christian readers regard his writings as, if not quite sacred, then at least sacralized," Miller says. "For them, the temptation to deny that he held a lot of objectionable opinions is very strong" (171). Anyone who can see Lewis more or less whole must be wholly on the other side; there is no middle ground. It's odd, but not at all unusual, I think, that it's Christians -- who like to suppose that only they really grasp human imperfection (or "sinfulness") -- who refuse to see any imperfection in someone like Lewis, and a non-Christian like Miller who, because she doesn't see Lewis as a saint, doesn't need to deny that he had feet of clay.

There's more I'd like to write about The Magician's Book, but it'll keep until later. Happy Labor Day!

The Theory and Practice of Paradise

I haven't read any of C. S. Lewis's books on Christianity in a long time, so John Beversluis's book on Lewis takes me back. This passage from Lewis's book The Problem of Pain, for example, explaining why his God lets people suffer:

We are perplexed to see misfortune falling on decent, inoffensive, worthy people -- on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said? ... Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God who made these deserving people, may really be right when He says that their modest prosperity has not made them blessed; that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands before them and recognition of this need; He makes that life less sweet to them. ... The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered. ... And this illusion ... may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, on on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall [96-98, quoted by Beversluis 241-242].

There's a lot to be said about this, and Beversluis says it quite well, so if you want a detailed discussion read Chapter Ten of C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Prometheus, 2007).

But I have a few things to add, among them that suffering falls not on only the self-satisfied bourgeois but on the devout and self-abasing Christian. According to orthodox Christian doctrine of course (and Lewis was very orthodox), there is none good, not one, and everyone deserves the worst misery that Yahweh can inflict on them, because we have fallen short of his glory. The most devout Christian is still harboring pride, self-love, and all the other monstrous faults that God just has to gouge out, without anesthetic. It happened to Lewis too, twenty years after he wrote The Problem of Pain, when his wife died of cancer, and in the book he wrote after her death, A Grief Observed, he admitted that he had been smug and complacent in writing so lightly about the agony his god inflicts for the crime of "insufficiency." None of this proves, of course, that Lewis was not describing the way the universe is actually organized; it doesn't, however, establish that Yahweh is just.

Beversluis also quotes one of Lewis's defenders, one Thomas Talbott, who has objected to Beversluis's argument that the world would be improved if Yahweh simply removed cancer from it, and argued that

Any such world [that is, any world with less pain and suffering and without cancer] that God could have created would have contained a less favorable balance of good over evil than exists in the actual world [quoted in Beversluis, 244].

How Talbott knows this, he apparently doesn't say. He goes further:

To begin with ... we must delete from the world (in our imagination) all the pain and suffering caused by this terrible disease as well as all the psychological torment experienced by both those cancer victims and those who love such victims; then we must delete all those goods -- such as the courageous endurance of pain - for which the cancer is a logically necessary condition; then we must delete all the free choices -- that either would have been made at all or would have been made differently if our world had been devoid of cancer ... [W]e must also add in all the options, all the free choices, and all the consequences of such free choices that would have been different. ... If in the absence of cancer, more people would have become more vicious, more likely to engage in warfare or to inflict suffering on others, the total quality of suffering might have been increased by the elimination of cancer [quoted in Beversluis, 245].

Talbott's morals are wanting, but his clarity at least is admirable. The position he holds is quite common, even standard, among theists grappling with the Problem of Evil. "Everybody's doing it" is not an excuse, but it's important to remember that he's not a lone wacko. Consider Rabbi Harold Kushner, a cozily mainstream figure, who told Newsweek after the Haitian earthquake, "The will of God is not to send us the disaster, but to send us the disaster to overcome." That's what Lewis and Talbott are saying too. It's not that God wants to hurt us, but things would be so much worse if he didn't. (It's a common move in this discourse to blame a lot of human suffering on human agents, but shouldn't they simply be viewed as Yahweh's instruments? A person's complacency can be shattered just as effectively by a course of waterboarding, rape, or being run over by a tank as it can by cancer, earthquake, or drought.)

What no one seems to notice is the difficulty this presents to the Christian hope of Heaven, an eternal state free of suffering and full of joy. If Yahweh cannot create a world without suffering because suffering makes us better by shaking our illusions out of us until our teeth rattle, then he can't create a Paradise where there is no suffering. In that case, it might be that we're living in Paradise already -- except, perhaps, that our suffering does end, sooner or later, when we die. No doubt in Paradise that little oversight will be remedied, and Yahweh and his angels will ensure that we suffer eternally. For our own good, of course, and in a loving, caring way, until every last bit of rebellion and self-sufficiency is squeezed out of us.

Which reminds me irresistibly (and mischievously) of this bit from Noam Chomsky's elegant evisceration of B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity:

Elsewhere, we learn that freedom "waxes as visible control wanes" (p. 70). Therefore the situation just described is one of maximal freedom, since there is no visible control. Furthermore, since "our task" is simply "to make life less punishing" (p. 81), the situation just described would seem ideal. Since people behave well, there will be no punishing. In this way, we can progress "toward an environment in which men are automatically good" (p. 73).

Extending these thoughts, let us consider a well-run concentration camp with inmates spying on one another and the gas ovens smoking in the distance, and perhaps an occasional verbal hint as a reminder of the meaning of this reinforcer. It would appear to be an almost perfect world. Skinner claims that a totalitarian state is morally wrong because it has deferred aversive consequences (p. 174). But in the delightful culture we have just designed there should be no aversive consequences, immediate or deferred. Unwanted behavior would be eliminated from the start by the threat of the crematoria and the all-seeing spies. Thus all behavior would be automatically "good," as required. There would be no punishment. Everyone would be reinforced -- differentially, of course, in accordance with his ability to obey the rules.

Within Skinner's scheme there is no objection to this social order. Rather, it seems close to ideal. Perhaps we could improve it still further by noting that "the release from threat becomes more reinforcing the greater the threat" (as in mountain climbing -- p. 111). We can, then, enhance the total reinforcement and improve the culture by devising a still more intense threat, say, by introducing occasional screams, or by flashing pictures of hideous torture as we describe the crematoria to our fellow citizens. The culture might survive, perhaps for 1,000 years.

There you have it -- a little bit of Heaven right here on Earth, and a beautiful prefiguring of the bliss that awaits us (not all of us, of course!) when God calls us home.

The Theory and Practice of Paradise

I haven't read any of C. S. Lewis's books on Christianity in a long time, so John Beversluis's book on Lewis takes me back. This passage from Lewis's book The Problem of Pain, for example, explaining why his God lets people suffer:

We are perplexed to see misfortune falling on decent, inoffensive, worthy people -- on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said? ... Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God who made these deserving people, may really be right when He says that their modest prosperity has not made them blessed; that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands before them and recognition of this need; He makes that life less sweet to them. ... The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered. ... And this illusion ... may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, on on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall [96-98, quoted by Beversluis 241-242].

There's a lot to be said about this, and Beversluis says it quite well, so if you want a detailed discussion read Chapter Ten of C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Prometheus, 2007).

But I have a few things to add, among them that suffering falls not on only the self-satisfied bourgeois but on the devout and self-abasing Christian. According to orthodox Christian doctrine of course (and Lewis was very orthodox), there is none good, not one, and everyone deserves the worst misery that Yahweh can inflict on them, because we have fallen short of his glory. The most devout Christian is still harboring pride, self-love, and all the other monstrous faults that God just has to gouge out, without anesthetic. It happened to Lewis too, twenty years after he wrote The Problem of Pain, when his wife died of cancer, and in the book he wrote after her death, A Grief Observed, he admitted that he had been smug and complacent in writing so lightly about the agony his god inflicts for the crime of "insufficiency." None of this proves, of course, that Lewis was not describing the way the universe is actually organized; it doesn't, however, establish that Yahweh is just.

Beversluis also quotes one of Lewis's defenders, one Thomas Talbott, who has objected to Beversluis's argument that the world would be improved if Yahweh simply removed cancer from it, and argued that

Any such world [that is, any world with less pain and suffering and without cancer] that God could have created would have contained a less favorable balance of good over evil than exists in the actual world [quoted in Beversluis, 244].

How Talbott knows this, he apparently doesn't say. He goes further:

To begin with ... we must delete from the world (in our imagination) all the pain and suffering caused by this terrible disease as well as all the psychological torment experienced by both those cancer victims and those who love such victims; then we must delete all those goods -- such as the courageous endurance of pain - for which the cancer is a logically necessary condition; then we must delete all the free choices -- that either would have been made at all or would have been made differently if our world had been devoid of cancer ... [W]e must also add in all the options, all the free choices, and all the consequences of such free choices that would have been different. ... If in the absence of cancer, more people would have become more vicious, more likely to engage in warfare or to inflict suffering on others, the total quality of suffering might have been increased by the elimination of cancer [quoted in Beversluis, 245].

Talbott's morals are wanting, but his clarity at least is admirable. The position he holds is quite common, even standard, among theists grappling with the Problem of Evil. "Everybody's doing it" is not an excuse, but it's important to remember that he's not a lone wacko. Consider Rabbi Harold Kushner, a cozily mainstream figure, who told Newsweek after the Haitian earthquake, "The will of God is not to send us the disaster, but to send us the disaster to overcome." That's what Lewis and Talbott are saying too. It's not that God wants to hurt us, but things would be so much worse if he didn't. (It's a common move in this discourse to blame a lot of human suffering on human agents, but shouldn't they simply be viewed as Yahweh's instruments? A person's complacency can be shattered just as effectively by a course of waterboarding, rape, or being run over by a tank as it can by cancer, earthquake, or drought.)

What no one seems to notice is the difficulty this presents to the Christian hope of Heaven, an eternal state free of suffering and full of joy. If Yahweh cannot create a world without suffering because suffering makes us better by shaking our illusions out of us until our teeth rattle, then he can't create a Paradise where there is no suffering. In that case, it might be that we're living in Paradise already -- except, perhaps, that our suffering does end, sooner or later, when we die. No doubt in Paradise that little oversight will be remedied, and Yahweh and his angels will ensure that we suffer eternally. For our own good, of course, and in a loving, caring way, until every last bit of rebellion and self-sufficiency is squeezed out of us.

Which reminds me irresistibly (and mischievously) of this bit from Noam Chomsky's elegant evisceration of B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity:

Elsewhere, we learn that freedom "waxes as visible control wanes" (p. 70). Therefore the situation just described is one of maximal freedom, since there is no visible control. Furthermore, since "our task" is simply "to make life less punishing" (p. 81), the situation just described would seem ideal. Since people behave well, there will be no punishing. In this way, we can progress "toward an environment in which men are automatically good" (p. 73).

Extending these thoughts, let us consider a well-run concentration camp with inmates spying on one another and the gas ovens smoking in the distance, and perhaps an occasional verbal hint as a reminder of the meaning of this reinforcer. It would appear to be an almost perfect world. Skinner claims that a totalitarian state is morally wrong because it has deferred aversive consequences (p. 174). But in the delightful culture we have just designed there should be no aversive consequences, immediate or deferred. Unwanted behavior would be eliminated from the start by the threat of the crematoria and the all-seeing spies. Thus all behavior would be automatically "good," as required. There would be no punishment. Everyone would be reinforced -- differentially, of course, in accordance with his ability to obey the rules.

Within Skinner's scheme there is no objection to this social order. Rather, it seems close to ideal. Perhaps we could improve it still further by noting that "the release from threat becomes more reinforcing the greater the threat" (as in mountain climbing -- p. 111). We can, then, enhance the total reinforcement and improve the culture by devising a still more intense threat, say, by introducing occasional screams, or by flashing pictures of hideous torture as we describe the crematoria to our fellow citizens. The culture might survive, perhaps for 1,000 years.

There you have it -- a little bit of Heaven right here on Earth, and a beautiful prefiguring of the bliss that awaits us (not all of us, of course!) when God calls us home.

On Obstinacy in Unbelief

I'm reading the revised edition of John Beversluis's C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Prometheus, 2007), and it occurred to me that much of Christian pastoral counseling -- which is a form of apologetic in itself: one of its functions is to reassure Christians that the problems they're having don't invalidate their commitment to Christian faith -- relies on convincing people that their God isn't God after all, that he's not even a very good human being.

As Lewis said in a piece called "On Obstinacy in Belief", one's trust in God should not depend on one's mood, or falter when things aren't going perfectly:

We believe that His intention is to create a certain personal relation between Himself and us, a relation really sui generis but analogically describable in terms of filial or of erotic love. Complete trust is an ingredient in that relation -- such trust as could have no room to grow except where there is also room for doubt. To love involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence, even against much evidence. No man is our friend who believes in our good intentions only when they are proved. No man is our friend who will not be very slow to accept evidence against them. Such confidence, between one man and another, is in fact almost universally praised as a moral beauty, not blamed as a logical error. And the suspicious man is blamed for a meanness of character, not admired for the excellence of his logic [in The World's Last Night, Harcourt 1960, pp. 25-6].

Lewis properly declares the relation between the believer and God as sui generis, that is, unique and not comparable to any other relation. But it can, he allows, be described by analogy to relations we are familiar with, like parent/child, erotic love, or friendship. The trouble is that because the relation is sui generis, all analogies break down quickly. I'd say, myself, that better analogies are available -- they're just less flattering.

Take one of Lewis's own examples: "No man is our friend who will not be very slow to accept evidence against them." True. That's because we can't know any other person's inner self, appearances can be deceiving, evidence can be falsified and we have to wait until our friend can explain problems that arise. Our friend promised to meet us at our favorite restaurant at 2 p.m., but he didn't show. Only later do we learn that he was hit by a car and taken to the hospital unconscious with two broken legs and a smashed cell phone. If we stomp back and forth fuming about our friend's unreliability without knowing the facts, it's our friendship that in question, not our friend's.

Another example is one I read years ago. Suppose you are fighting in the Resistance against the Nazi occupation, and you meet a highly placed collaborator in a secret encounter, who assures you that he is really on your side and he will soon act to prove it, but in the meantime you must trust him. For some reason you do, although more of your comrades are rounded up and executed each day.

Another example of Lewis's, after his wife died of cancer. He compared his God to a surgeon, who must do terrible, painful things to us in order to make us better. It hurts him as much as it hurts us, but there is no other way to improve us. (This would be something like Rabbi Kushner's claim that God sends us disasters so that we can overcome them. The dead, who don't get to overcome anything, don't show up in the balance sheet.)

There's one other thing I should mention here, an example which seems to be Beversluis's: "'Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,' says Job (Job 13:15), who surely was not unaware of the problem of apparently contrary evidence" (210). "Apparently"! Job, for those who've forgotten, lost his wealth, his family and his own health as the result of a bet between Yahweh and Satan. Satan bet that if Yahweh removed the fence of protection to which Job owed his fabled well-being, Job would lose his trust in him, and Yahweh gave Satan permission to do everything to Job but kill him. Tormented beyond measure, Job finally denied the justice of Yahweh. In context, Job is saying that he'll continue attacking Yahweh for mistreating him, even if Yahweh slays him. I suspect that Job 13:15 is mistranslated here (it's the King James Version, I believe, but the text of Job is notoriously "corrupt," which means that experts aren't always sure what the Hebrew is, let alone what it means. [An explanation here.] Walter Kaufmann, whose discussion of Job and the Problem of Evil in The Faith of a Heretic (Doubleday, 1961) is still the best I've encountered, translated the verse as "He will slay me? For that I hope. But my ways I will maintain to his face. And let this be my salvation that no hypocrite comes to face him." (This translation is found in Kaufmann's Critique of Religion and Philosophy [Harper, 1958], page 349; I don't know Hebrew, but Kaufmann did, and I think this rendering fits the context better than the AV.) And rightly so, since nowhere in the book is it claimed by anyone (except his false friends) that Job has done anything wrong. And as Kaufmann pointed out [151],

Nowhere else in the the Bible does shadday ['almighty'] appear so constantly as the name of God as in the book of Job. But the claim that God's omnipotence is not questioned in the book does not rest merely on the use of a word. Rather, the point is that it never occurs to anybody that God might simply be unable to prevent Job's suffering.

The trouble is that these sorts of excuses can't apply to relations with a god who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly benevolent. If such a god promises to meet you for lunch at 2 p.m., no auto accident can stop him, he can't be knocked unconscious, and his cell phone battery is always charged. If your friend who promised to meet you turns up later undamaged and breezily says, "Oh yeah, I was supposed to meet you; sorry, I just didn't feel like lunch, and I decided I didn't need to check in with you," then you would have a sound reason to begin doubting his friendship. If he's never behaved like this before, you'd give him a second and even a third chance. God needs a better excuse than this kind of analogy.

Similarly for the high-placed Nazi collaborator. Sure, he must move carefully, marshal his resources and allies, and strike when the moment is right, or he'll end up with a bullet in his brain too. But a god doesn't have this excuse. He's not vulnerable, he's in no danger from the Nazis and can act when it suits him -- indeed, to deny that is to deny his divine sovereignty. Nor does he need to sneak around at night, meeting his partisans by candlelight with secret handshakes and passwords, making portentous promises. (Christians sometimes like to talk as though the earth were in the hands of the devil and his forces, and so God must sneak around to escape detection as he prepares for his final victory. Um, no.) He can safely keep you informed without danger to you, let alone to himself. Doubting a god is not like doubting a mere human being. The standards for a god are higher than they are for us, yet to listen to Christian apologists, you'd think they were lower.

The same thing goes for the divine Surgeon. Surgeons cut you up, oncologists prescribe intensely unpleasant courses of chemotherapy or radiation, because they are not omnipotent or omniscient. A surgeon who insisted on vivisecting you when he or she could simply wave a hand and say, "Be healed," could reasonably be suspected of being a vicious sadist, and the burden of proof would be on him or her to give reasons why not. This applies to a god even more, and Lewis's argument isn't helped by the fact that his lord and savior didn't heal people by invasive procedures -- he simply said the word. If there's a reason why "spiritual" healing requires prolonged torture that may just as well destroy the patient's trust in the doctor as achieve its nominal end, the patient needs to know the reason. (Notice that if the patient loses faith, Christians see that as a failure of the patient, not of the doctor's abusive treatment.) If no such reason is given, it's time to look for a new doctor.

And so on. I've never yet encountered an analogical defense of God that didn't rely on excuses that might just barely excuse a human being, but not an all-powerful deity. This doesn't prove that the Christian god doesn't exist, of course; it only gives what I think is a plausible reason not to trust him. Considering that the Bible presents its god as an abusive husband, and in other unflattering ways, it's hard not to feel about suffering Christians who cling to their faith as I would about a human being who won't leave an abusive relationship, and keeps making the most extravagant excuses for the abuser. They have to find their own way out, but they need support when they're ready to leave. Otherwise the cycle of abuse will continue.

On Obstinacy in Unbelief

I'm reading the revised edition of John Beversluis's C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Prometheus, 2007), and it occurred to me that much of Christian pastoral counseling -- which is a form of apologetic in itself: one of its functions is to reassure Christians that the problems they're having don't invalidate their commitment to Christian faith -- relies on convincing people that their God isn't God after all, that he's not even a very good human being.

As Lewis said in a piece called "On Obstinacy in Belief", one's trust in God should not depend on one's mood, or falter when things aren't going perfectly:

We believe that His intention is to create a certain personal relation between Himself and us, a relation really sui generis but analogically describable in terms of filial or of erotic love. Complete trust is an ingredient in that relation -- such trust as could have no room to grow except where there is also room for doubt. To love involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence, even against much evidence. No man is our friend who believes in our good intentions only when they are proved. No man is our friend who will not be very slow to accept evidence against them. Such confidence, between one man and another, is in fact almost universally praised as a moral beauty, not blamed as a logical error. And the suspicious man is blamed for a meanness of character, not admired for the excellence of his logic [in The World's Last Night, Harcourt 1960, pp. 25-6].

Lewis properly declares the relation between the believer and God as sui generis, that is, unique and not comparable to any other relation. But it can, he allows, be described by analogy to relations we are familiar with, like parent/child, erotic love, or friendship. The trouble is that because the relation is sui generis, all analogies break down quickly. I'd say, myself, that better analogies are available -- they're just less flattering.

Take one of Lewis's own examples: "No man is our friend who will not be very slow to accept evidence against them." True. That's because we can't know any other person's inner self, appearances can be deceiving, evidence can be falsified and we have to wait until our friend can explain problems that arise. Our friend promised to meet us at our favorite restaurant at 2 p.m., but he didn't show. Only later do we learn that he was hit by a car and taken to the hospital unconscious with two broken legs and a smashed cell phone. If we stomp back and forth fuming about our friend's unreliability without knowing the facts, it's our friendship that in question, not our friend's.

Another example is one I read years ago. Suppose you are fighting in the Resistance against the Nazi occupation, and you meet a highly placed collaborator in a secret encounter, who assures you that he is really on your side and he will soon act to prove it, but in the meantime you must trust him. For some reason you do, although more of your comrades are rounded up and executed each day.

Another example of Lewis's, after his wife died of cancer. He compared his God to a surgeon, who must do terrible, painful things to us in order to make us better. It hurts him as much as it hurts us, but there is no other way to improve us. (This would be something like Rabbi Kushner's claim that God sends us disasters so that we can overcome them. The dead, who don't get to overcome anything, don't show up in the balance sheet.)

There's one other thing I should mention here, an example which seems to be Beversluis's: "'Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,' says Job (Job 13:15), who surely was not unaware of the problem of apparently contrary evidence" (210). "Apparently"! Job, for those who've forgotten, lost his wealth, his family and his own health as the result of a bet between Yahweh and Satan. Satan bet that if Yahweh removed the fence of protection to which Job owed his fabled well-being, Job would lose his trust in him, and Yahweh gave Satan permission to do everything to Job but kill him. Tormented beyond measure, Job finally denied the justice of Yahweh. In context, Job is saying that he'll continue attacking Yahweh for mistreating him, even if Yahweh slays him. I suspect that Job 13:15 is mistranslated here (it's the King James Version, I believe, but the text of Job is notoriously "corrupt," which means that experts aren't always sure what the Hebrew is, let alone what it means. [An explanation here.] Walter Kaufmann, whose discussion of Job and the Problem of Evil in The Faith of a Heretic (Doubleday, 1961) is still the best I've encountered, translated the verse as "He will slay me? For that I hope. But my ways I will maintain to his face. And let this be my salvation that no hypocrite comes to face him." (This translation is found in Kaufmann's Critique of Religion and Philosophy [Harper, 1958], page 349; I don't know Hebrew, but Kaufmann did, and I think this rendering fits the context better than the AV.) And rightly so, since nowhere in the book is it claimed by anyone (except his false friends) that Job has done anything wrong. And as Kaufmann pointed out [151],

Nowhere else in the the Bible does shadday ['almighty'] appear so constantly as the name of God as in the book of Job. But the claim that God's omnipotence is not questioned in the book does not rest merely on the use of a word. Rather, the point is that it never occurs to anybody that God might simply be unable to prevent Job's suffering.

The trouble is that these sorts of excuses can't apply to relations with a god who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly benevolent. If such a god promises to meet you for lunch at 2 p.m., no auto accident can stop him, he can't be knocked unconscious, and his cell phone battery is always charged. If your friend who promised to meet you turns up later undamaged and breezily says, "Oh yeah, I was supposed to meet you; sorry, I just didn't feel like lunch, and I decided I didn't need to check in with you," then you would have a sound reason to begin doubting his friendship. If he's never behaved like this before, you'd give him a second and even a third chance. God needs a better excuse than this kind of analogy.

Similarly for the high-placed Nazi collaborator. Sure, he must move carefully, marshal his resources and allies, and strike when the moment is right, or he'll end up with a bullet in his brain too. But a god doesn't have this excuse. He's not vulnerable, he's in no danger from the Nazis and can act when it suits him -- indeed, to deny that is to deny his divine sovereignty. Nor does he need to sneak around at night, meeting his partisans by candlelight with secret handshakes and passwords, making portentous promises. (Christians sometimes like to talk as though the earth were in the hands of the devil and his forces, and so God must sneak around to escape detection as he prepares for his final victory. Um, no.) He can safely keep you informed without danger to you, let alone to himself. Doubting a god is not like doubting a mere human being. The standards for a god are higher than they are for us, yet to listen to Christian apologists, you'd think they were lower.

The same thing goes for the divine Surgeon. Surgeons cut you up, oncologists prescribe intensely unpleasant courses of chemotherapy or radiation, because they are not omnipotent or omniscient. A surgeon who insisted on vivisecting you when he or she could simply wave a hand and say, "Be healed," could reasonably be suspected of being a vicious sadist, and the burden of proof would be on him or her to give reasons why not. This applies to a god even more, and Lewis's argument isn't helped by the fact that his lord and savior didn't heal people by invasive procedures -- he simply said the word. If there's a reason why "spiritual" healing requires prolonged torture that may just as well destroy the patient's trust in the doctor as achieve its nominal end, the patient needs to know the reason. (Notice that if the patient loses faith, Christians see that as a failure of the patient, not of the doctor's abusive treatment.) If no such reason is given, it's time to look for a new doctor.

And so on. I've never yet encountered an analogical defense of God that didn't rely on excuses that might just barely excuse a human being, but not an all-powerful deity. This doesn't prove that the Christian god doesn't exist, of course; it only gives what I think is a plausible reason not to trust him. Considering that the Bible presents its god as an abusive husband, and in other unflattering ways, it's hard not to feel about suffering Christians who cling to their faith as I would about a human being who won't leave an abusive relationship, and keeps making the most extravagant excuses for the abuser. They have to find their own way out, but they need support when they're ready to leave. Otherwise the cycle of abuse will continue.