Before C.S. Lewis made a decision to become a practicing
Anglican Christian, he was engaged in thinking about spiritual and
psychological matters--matters beyond objective, rational literalisms. Lewis protested
the temptation to be drawn into the certainty of metaphysical and occult
"systems of truth" with their established categories which froze the
infinite. One might wonder if his eventual strong adherence to orthodox Christian
theology belies his wariness of freezing the infinite. Here is a letter Lewis wrote in 1926 at the age
of 28. In this letter he chastises Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical system of metaphysical certainty:
"No
one is more convinced than I that reason is utterly inadequate to the richness
and spirituality of real things: indeed this is itself a deliverance of reason.
Nor do I doubt the presence, even in us, of faculties embryonic or atrophied,
that lie in an indefinite margin around the little finite bit of focus which is
intelligence—faculties anticipating or remembering the possession of huge
tracts of reality that slip through the meshes of the intellect. And, to be
sure, I believe that the symbols presented by imagination at its height are the
workings of that fringe and present to us as much of the super-intelligible
reality as we can get while we retain our present form of consciousness.
My scepticism begins when people offer me explicit accounts of the super-intelligible and in so doing use all the categories of the intellect. If the higher worlds have to be represented in terms of number, subject and attribute, time, space, causation etc (and thus they always are represented by occultists and illuminati), the fact that knowledge of them had to come through the fringe remains inexplicable. It is more natural to suppose in such cases that the illuminati have done what all of us are tempted to do:—allowed their intellect to fasten on those hints that come from the fringe, and squeezing them, has made a hint (that was full of truth) into a mere false hard statement. Seeking to know (in the only way we can know) more, we know less. I, at any rate, am at present inclined to believe that we must be content to feel the highest truths 'in our bones': if we try to make them explicit, we really make them untruth.
At all events if more knowledge is to come, it must be the wordless and thoughtless knowledge of the mystic: not the celestial statistics of Swedenborg, the Lemurian history of Steiner, or the demonology of the Platonists. All this seems to me merely an attempt to know the super-intelligible as if it were a new slice of the intelligible: as though a man with a bad cold tried to get back smells with a microscope."
My scepticism begins when people offer me explicit accounts of the super-intelligible and in so doing use all the categories of the intellect. If the higher worlds have to be represented in terms of number, subject and attribute, time, space, causation etc (and thus they always are represented by occultists and illuminati), the fact that knowledge of them had to come through the fringe remains inexplicable. It is more natural to suppose in such cases that the illuminati have done what all of us are tempted to do:—allowed their intellect to fasten on those hints that come from the fringe, and squeezing them, has made a hint (that was full of truth) into a mere false hard statement. Seeking to know (in the only way we can know) more, we know less. I, at any rate, am at present inclined to believe that we must be content to feel the highest truths 'in our bones': if we try to make them explicit, we really make them untruth.
At all events if more knowledge is to come, it must be the wordless and thoughtless knowledge of the mystic: not the celestial statistics of Swedenborg, the Lemurian history of Steiner, or the demonology of the Platonists. All this seems to me merely an attempt to know the super-intelligible as if it were a new slice of the intelligible: as though a man with a bad cold tried to get back smells with a microscope."
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