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Abstract

If Lewis’s Abolition of Man is simply an argument for objective moral value, or what we have called “the natural law,” then why begin with waterfalls that demand of us certain kinds of aesthetic judgment,[1] and end by saying that technocrats who take Nature in their own hands to control others with it have stepped outside of something larger than moral law, viz. the Tao, the Real itself, and thereby lost their very humanity?[2]

What, that is, is Nature in the Abolition? Certainly, it is not nature as construed in philosophical naturalism after Jane Austen, after the advent of the machine age[3]: nature “simple,” merely biological, detached from any posited transcendent realities. No, it is premodern nature – the nature shared by world religions (as Lewis demonstrates[4]): nature interpenetrated by, and carrying sacramentally, all of the Real—metaphysical as well as physical.

In other words, Lewis had through his study of Plato—and his reading of medieval writers whose cosmos was “tingling with anthropomorphic life,” “a festival, not a machine”[5]—picked up the premodern Western understanding of the world as pointing to God not by analogy or allegory, but by symbol or sacrament—by actually participating in the Reality of that higher Real.[6]

He had picked up what Hans Boersma and Andrew Davison have recently taught us to call “participatory ontology”: the participation of all of Creation, including humanity, in God himself. And he did so (1) in a consistent Christian way, (2) at a crucial modern moment, when the separation of nature and supernature had become a matter for intense discussion, and (3) in harmony and in parallel with such fellow Christian humanists as the Catholic nouvelle theologians (or ressourcement theologians). This paper will excavate numbers 2 and 3 here, examining the Abolition in the context of postwar Christian humanist participatory ontology.

[1] “The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than others.”

[2] “It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void.”

[3] The dividing line Lewis posited between premodern and modern, in his address “De Descriptione Temporum.”

[4] “In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta—that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality.”

[5] Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 4.

[6] As he explained in the Allegory of Love.

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