The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand M. Nicholi Jr.

Today’s reviewed book ended up as a four-hour series on U.S. public television a few years ago. I don’t know if it’s been rebroadcast since then, though anyone with enough interest in seeing it should be able to purchase it without much difficulty.

The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand M. Nicholi Jr.

Harvard professor Armand Nicholi has been teaching a class about Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis for the past decade or two. In his class, he compares the lives and philosophies of the two men, focusing in particular on their very different perspectives on religion, sex, love, friendship, and other overarching questions of life. In The Question of God, Nicholi has turned his class notes into a book, one which uses Lewis and Freud’s writings to look at how these two men approached belief, disbelief, and everything in between.

Nicholi has certainly done his homework for this class. The book looks at both Freud and Lewis’s public and private writings, incorporating published works and letters in an attempt to examine how their personal philosophies shaped their attitudes towards family members, friends, colleagues, and the general public. It’s fascinating and quite insightful to see the two men’s opinions on various aspects of life laid out side by side, and Nicholi finds a number of interesting parallels between them. Both Freud and Lewis had poor relationships with their fathers and with their fathers’ ideas of religion, and suffered deep personal losses early in their childhoods that seriously affected their outlooks on life from a young age. Freud ended up rejecting religious belief entirely, and Lewis himself admits that he was essentially dragged into Christianity kicking and screaming (in a metaphysical sense). Nicholi puts together a good narrative for their stories. Yet by the end of the book, I realised that Nicholi’s thesis could be boiled down to a single sentence — ‘Freud was a depressed and depressing old chain-smoking misanthrope, and he makes Lewis (and, by extension, Lewis’s answer to the question of God) seem the very embodiment of happiness and personal fulfilment by comparison’.

Even if Nicholi tries not to sound biased towards either Lewis or Freud, the very method of his comparison paints Freud and his opinions in an almost unrelentingly dismal light. Nicholi clearly finds Lewis to be the more compelling figure of the two, and he takes pains to compare Lewis’s conversion experience with his own studies into the conversion experiences of young adults. By contrasting Lewis’s deep, long-lasting friendships and late if happy marriage with Freud’s penchant for alienating and disowning his colleagues and the puritanical froideur of his marital life…well, it is little wonder that Lewis and his philosophies on life seem to come out the better for it. Nicholi never openly says that Lewis’s world-view is the better, but from the evidence he has assembled, he doesn’t exactly need to. So even though the book is written well and seems to stem from an interesting and original premise, fans of both Lewis and Freud would be wise to read it with a skeptical eye.

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis

From a short review to a quite long one, to round out the month of October.

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis

The Discarded Image was the last book that C.S. Lewis wrote, and in essence it summarises a number of lectures and talks he gave on the subject of Medieval and Renaissance Literature — the subject he taught for the greater part of his lifetime. The ‘image’ in question is a complete and complex picture of history, science, and theology that served as the foundation for literature in the Western world from the turn of the first millennium A.D. up until around the early 1600s. In the space of a little over 200 pages, Lewis picks this intricate and detailed image apart to show the pieces that make up the whole, before putting everything back together again to point out the places where the whole contributed to how authors, historians, philosophers, and religious writers wrote about the various facets of the world they knew.

Explaining the entirety of the book would be tedious and would force me to set aside an interesting and noteworthy point. As with the majority of Lewis’s non-fiction writings, it’s very easy to see how his scholarly research and religious studies influenced the worlds he created — not just Narnia and its inhabitants, but also the planets of the Space Trilogy, the bureaucratic Hell of The Screwtape Letters, and even the twilight town and pre-dawn countryside of The Great Divorce. One quote in particular reminded me of different aspects of the fiction I’ve read:

[in a discussion of how man can have Free Will if God is omniscient]

Strictly speaking, He never foresees; He simply sees. Your ‘future’ is only an area, and only for us a special area, of His infinite Now. He sees (not remembers) your yesterday’s acts because yesterday is still ‘there’ for Him; he sees (not foresees) your tomorrow’s acts because He is already in tomorrow. As a human spectator, by watching my present act, does not at all infringe its freedom, so I am none the less free to act as I choose in the future because God, in that future (His present) watches me acting.

I’m reminded here of Aslan’s comment to Lucy in The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’: ‘I call all times soon’. But something of this is also present in Screwtape’s comments to Wormwood about the restricted ways by which tempters can influence the free will of a ‘patient’, and also (I believe) is hinted at in The Great Divorce when the spirit of George MacDonald is talking to Lewis’s Dantean avatar about choices and decisions. This is only one passage of several that illustrate ideas and thoughts that Lewis drew upon in his world-creation, or so it seemed to me when I was going through the book on my initial read-through.

Far be it from me to attribute all of Lewis’s writings to ideas covered in this particular book. Yet Lewis fans will likely find it a treat, even though it is probably best enjoyed if you have at least read Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales beforehand. I’ll end this review with a second quote from the book, one which is near the end and which rather nicely sums up the underlying structure of the book’s thesis:

It follows that the book-author unit, basic for modern criticism, must often be abandoned when we are dealing with medieval literature. Some books — if I may use a comparison I have used elsewhere — must be regarded more as we regard those cathedrals where work of many different periods is mixed and produces a total effect, admirable indeed but never foreseen nor intended by any one of the successive builders.

I’m not familiar enough with a wide spread of medieval and Renaissance literature/history/philosophy/religious writings to judge this statement on my knowledge alone. But from what I’ve read and from what others (who are far more knowledgeable about this subject than I am) have told me, Lewis was most definitely an expert in his field and his observations are spot-on.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas

I thought my review of this was longer, but I think it says pretty much all of what I wanted to say about this very good book.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas

Keith Thomas’s book is a classic study of the effect that the social and religious upheavals of the Reformation had on traditional folk beliefs in England — the ‘magic’ of which he speaks. Magic, in this sense, was not necessarily the magic of evil witchcraft — maleficium, as it tended to be known in those days — but rather the span of the occult and esoteric that ranges from astrology and horoscopes to Christian prayers for the sick. Any serious attempt to change or determine the course of one’s life through supernatural means would fall under Thomas’s definition of magic. This mundane kind of magic was often an integral part of daily life in pre-Reformation England, and the changes in English society that took place between 1550 and 1688 soon meant that magic, in the traditional sense, would fade into little more than the folk sayings and superstition that remain with familiar today.

Religion and the Decline of Magic is a footnote lover’s dream, with copious citations of period sources and later commentaries woven into the text. Thomas provides fascinating insights into the origins of folk sayings and prevalent myths, as well as the prominence of horoscopes and star-gazing, which were used to learn the most auspicious day to do anything from setting out on a journey to having one’s tooth pulled. As a book about the history of the English Reformation and its effects on society — leading into Oliver Cromwell’s time — Religion and the Decline of Magic presents a particularly useful sociological study. It’s a lengthy work, but worth looking into if you have any interest in the origins of folk history and the deep and abiding connections between the sacred and profane worlds.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick

I may actually make a post that isn’t a review one of these days, but at the moment I doubt that anyone wants to read my ramblings about the Liberal Democrats’ leadership race. So I’ll set that aside for now in favour of something a little less topical.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick

The Age of Enlightenment is a name commonly given to the philosophical and intellectual movements in Europe and in the American colonies during the eighteenth (and early seventeenth) century. A list of contributors to the ‘Enlightenment’ would have to include a remarkably diverse group of thinkers and writers who debated any number of philosophical, political, and social topics, many of whom disagreed vehemently with the writings of others. Whether it’s the pamphlets of Thomas Paine or the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot, Mary Wollstonecraft denouncing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opinions on the education of women or Edmund Burke ‘reflecting’ on the French Revolution, Immanuel Kant’s critique of pure reason or the sheer prolific fury of just about anything written by Voltaire, the Enlightenment writers put their emphasis on reason, rational thought, scientific analysis, and the study of natural law in relation to the individual and society. The idea was to move away from irrationality and superstition (which some of these writers, though by no means all of them, attributed in part to the tyranny of organised religions) and towards a more unified framework for how the world operated. This intellectual framework helped form the basis for classical liberalism, democracy, and capitalistic thought — and by extension, formed the philosophical underpinnings of the American and French Revolutions.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader is a set of texts taken from the writings of the Enlightenment’s most notable philosophers, grouped by subject and topic and pulled together into a single volume. The texts chosen for this portable edition are, I’d have to say, a fairly good selection. All of the big names of the time period are there — Locke and Rousseau and Hume take up a decent amount of space, and the selections are usually long enough to provide a taste of the topic without taking up too much room. The idea in a book like this is to give the casual reader a sense of how each of these writers wrote and what they wrote about. For example, if you’ve ever wondered whether Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is worth reading, then the selection provided in the Portable Enlightenment Reader may give you a sense of whether you think you’d like to try to tackle his prose.

Not all of the selections are weighty philosophical treatises or explorations of history. There’s a downright smutty snippet from John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, a work of erotic fiction billed as the memoirs of a ‘woman of pleasure’ — indicative of the interest that the Enlightenment writers took in the definition, understanding, and pursuit of pleasure. There are some noteworthy perspectives on the early women’s rights movement, including a short passage written by Thomas Paine that reflects on the unfortunate state of women as he saw it. The tail end of the Enlightenment saw some consideration on the nature of the slave trade and the position of the ‘Negro race’ (as many writers called it) with respect to white Europeans. The book as a whole is meant for dabbling — a means of tempting the appetite, as it were. Now that I know where to start from, the Portable Enlightenment Reader has given me a solid basis for continuing my reading of the works of writers who helped shape Western thought at a crucial moment in Western history.

The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

I have to admit, I picked up this book because of its title. It sounded oddly provocative, and I wanted to see if it would be a polemic thinly disgused as a historical study. (It happens far more often than you might think, believe me.)

The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

The basic premise of Charles Freeman’s book might not go over so well with those of the Christian faith. He claims that the early Christian church played a pivotal role in stifling many of the intellectual traditions that had developed over the centuries, beginning with the ancient Greeks. The Greek gods seemed to operate at a distance from humanity, allowing the separation of faith and belief from reason and the scientific method. This degree of separation, and the Greeks’ attempts to make sense of it, gave rise to many crucial developments in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and other rigorously intellectual disciplines. But as Christianity grew from a small cult following into a greater religious (and later political) movement, the early Christian leaders did their best to paper over the cracks in their doctrine by stifling dissent and debate, imposing a religious orthodoxy that helped to crush the practice of free and open philosophical debate that had been inherited from the Greek world. The attempt to hammer out a comprehensive religious doctrine from a mishmash of conflicting sources is the central narrative of Freeman’s book, and it’s fairly clear that while he understands why events happened as they did, he isn’t entirely happy about it.

Truthfully, I almost don’t feel qualified to pass judgement on this book. There is a lot of information here, covering nearly a millennia of history (and ancient history, at that). What is more, my knowledge of Christianity and basic Christian doctrine is general at best — and decidedly based in a nonreligious perspective. I feel as if I don’t have enough background knowledge to go through and challenge some of the points Freeman has made in his book even if I wanted to. But I did find his historical work fairly convincing, particularly with regard to the development of Christianity from its roots as an offshoot of the variations on Judaism found during the Second Temple period. I was also pleasantly surprised by his organisation and writing style, and then when I started getting into the meat of the book the sheer amount of information crammed into the pages caught me and held me fast. Fortunately for other less-informed readers such as myself, Freeman has given his audience a slew of excellent footnotes to go through and form their own conclusions. I think I may have to do some further digging on my own.

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

I wasn’t planning to post another Umberto Eco book review so soon, but with new material coming out on this book’s primary subject, I simply couldn’t resist.

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

When you’re an editor at an Italian publishing house that’s essentially a glorified vanity press specialising in occult and esoteric literature, you’re bound to read some (or rather, many) manuscripts that would be best filed under the term ‘crackpot.’ Whether the subject at hand happens to be those pesky Freemasons who keep poisoning the wells, or incontrovertible proof that the Knights Templar are alive, well, and plotting with the Soviets, the BBC, and a reincarnated Joseph of Arimathea to find the Holy Grail and take over the world…well, even conspiracy theories can get boring if you read enough of them. So three editors — an academic researcher named Causabon, an eccentric writer named Belbo, and a numerology enthusiast named Diotavelli — decide to have a little fun with what is otherwise a fairly dull job.

Their plan (which they later refer to as ‘the Plan’) is very simple. They will pull random ideas and statements from their piles of crackpot manuscripts and start to weave them together as carefully as possible. Belbo even has a computer program that is capable of shuffling the ideas around in random patterns, which the three men can then use to keep coming up with increasingly fantastical connections between seemingly unrelated incidents. The basic idea behind the Plan is to rewrite world history as one massive conspiracy theory, involving the Knights Templar and a mysterious power source greater than an entire atomic arsenal. It’s a game, and an intellectual challenge, and a way to stave off the boredom of their work. But when the Plan they create out of nowhere soon starts to take on a life of its own, the three men get increasingly caught up in the nonsensical story they’ve bashed together. And they will soon discover that there are more than a few people out there who are eager to believe in the greatest conspiracy theory of all time — and will do anything to ensure that the Plan comes to fruition.

Foucault’s Pendulum, first and foremost, isn’t a reference to philosopher Michel Foucault. It’s a reference to the physics experiment designed by French physicist Léon Foucault; specifically, the one located at the Musée des arts et métiers in Paris. That said, the book does for the suspense thriller what Eco’s The Name of the Rose did for the period detective story: it faithfully follows all of the standard elements of the genre while simultaneously giving you a crash course in world history, classical and occult literature, crosscultural studies, and heaven knows what else besides. It’s by no means an easy book to read — I freely admit that there were entire chapters where names and literary references were completely lost on me and I had to piece together the characters’ train of thought as best I could — but Eco does a fine job explaining the crucial plot points and information in a way that doesn’t make it sound as if he’s talking down to the readers. And while I didn’t find the characters as engaging as those in The Name of the Rose, they’re still carefully drawn and interesting to follow. The story takes time to unfold and set up, and the Plan isn’t introduced until almost two-thirds of the way through the book, but the build-up is absolutely necessary to give the reader a sense of place in the story and a slightly more distanced perspective on the madness that brings the plot to its conclusion.

Perhaps the most important point that Eco makes in this book about conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theories (no matter how small at the outset) are by their very nature insidious, all too adept at getting under your skin and completely skewing your view of reality. Even the three editors are not immune to the power of conspiracy theories, even though they are fully aware that they’ve made the whole thing up as part of a silly game. As Causabon notes bitterly, on reflection, ‘I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.’ There’s a very clear warning in that comment, one that I definitely had to keep in mind as I read this book — and one which I have a feeling I’ll keep in mind for some time to come when looking at historical and literary connections.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Slipping a bit of historical literature into the book review list today.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

The Name of the Rose is, to put it in crudest terms, a murder mystery. The story begins with the investigation into the death of a Benedictine monk, and the corpses of more of his brethern begin to pile up over the course of the novel in a way that would shock those who are used to a more genteel kind of murder mystery. (From my extensive reading of the more formulaic examples of the genre, any more than three corpses tends to strain the story; most authors shy away from mass bloodshed and would prefer to confine themselves to one or two victims.) But The Name of the Rose is more than just a simple murder mystery — it is practically a history lesson in the schisms of the mediaeval Church, a discourse on the nature of heresy and the purpose of the clergy, and a fictional but still factual rendering of the bloody conflict between temporal and spiritual power in Europe in the early 14th century. Furthermore, the story takes place in an abbey that is essentially a massive library, a veritable temple of books and a home to those who jealously guard knowledge like dragons on a mountain of gold. Everyone in the story is a little bit crazy over books, some more so than others, and the books play their own part in the drama. Since I very much enjoy books, history, and murder mysteries, I think it safe to say that this book had my full attention from the start.

The tale is told by a aged Benedictine monk, Adso of Melk, as a recollection of past events — in the story, he is a young man barely into the cloister, serving as an apprentice and as the Dr Watson to the Sherlock Holmes-like figure of English Franciscan monk William of Baskerville. As the story progress, William uses his skills of deduction and logical reasoning to investigate a number of mysterious goings-on at the abbey, many of which appear to be connected to the knowledge that is hidden in the innermost depths of the abbey’s labyrinthine library. And as the body count increases at a pace that both startled and intrigued this reader, William begins to learn that someone has (or believes they have) a very good reason for ensuring that the secrets concealed in the library remain secret…for there are those who wholeheartedly believe that death is not too small a price to pay to ensure that God is not mocked.

The Name of the Rose is a small masterpiece of literary complexity, because there are so many plot points and twists and turns to follow (both for the characters and for the reader) that at times it seems as if the story will never end — and that is by no means a bad thing. Having had this book recommended to me by many people, I picked up a copy in anticipation of a long stretch of time when I could read uninterrupted. I’m very glad I did, because if I had had to keep stopping and starting it and trying to pick up where I’d left off, I think I wouldn’t have enjoyed it half as much as I did. It demands a lot of concentration and attention, but the story is well-worth the effort put into reading it. I certainly learned a lot from reading it, and I have a feeling that it will take at least another two or three full re-reads before I can fully appreciate all of the work that Eco put into it. As far as murder mysteries go, The Name of the Rose stands well apart from the vast majority of its kind.