Magnanimity Against the Void

Lewis really cracked the riddle when he said, “In battle it is not the syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.”[1] And amongst the logic teachers there was weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

In that same work, Lewis said that the head rules the belly through the chest. He was relying on the likes of Plato and Alan of Lille for the observation. Alan, a bit lesser known than Plato, was quite the thunderer in his day. Surrounded by homosexual practice back in 12th century France, he wrote—

“I see that the essential decrees of Nature are denied a hearing, while large numbers are shipwrecked and lost because of a Venus turned monster, when Venus wars with Venus and changes “hes” into “shes” and with her witchcraft unmans man. The active sex shudders in disgrace as it sees itself degenerate into the passive sex. A man turned woman blackens the fair name of his sex. The witchcraft of Venus turns him into a hermaphrodite. He is subject and predicate.”

A little bit later, he made essentially the same points we find in Plato and Lewis, namely that man’s reason can only control his baser passions through the chest, that seat of the emotions which should be trained by habit into stable sentiments. This chest is depicted by Bunyan’s Great-Heart in Pilgrim’s Progress. It is also the vital thing missing in That Hideous Strength as a mere head plays its part in everything coming apart due to unchecked bellies.

Most of the problems we will hand to the next generation will not be a result of our lack of skill. It won’t be due to pedagogical ignorance or an absence of data. It will be due to our lack of character. To state the matter positively, most of the advantages we will pass on will not be because we have obtained the latest model for success. It will be due to our magnanimity. Magnanimity is contagious, as is vanity. We march from glory to glory, from weight to weight, from substance to substance. Or, we march from hollow to hollow, shallow to shallow, void to void, We are either going farther up and farther in or farther down and farther out.

So the battle we are in as one between men with chests and men without chests, and between chest builders and chest diminishers. 

The War We’re Really In

We’re in a war between substance and the void. Fruit and famine. It is not ultimately an intellectual battle or even a moral battle. Call it an ontological battle between true things, good things, beautiful things and the abyss without a bottom. That really is something isn’t it? This abyss without a bottom. One would think that the for an abyss to indeed be an abyss, it must have a bottom. But, alas, there is a hole without a floor, into which one falls without ever going thwack (Revelation 9:1).

Augustine helps get the point across. He spoke of sin as a privation, a lack, a void. There was, after all, no day upon which God made the goo of sin. Everything that He made was good. Evil, then, is the lack of such good things, or the twisting of them. We can mark several instances of our society falling into the void.

How do you feel after your Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram scroll? Empty, that’s how you feel. The ladies have the same sense when they finish that hallmark movie around the holidays, you know that one called, “Mistletoe Mishap: Love’s Christmas Miracle.” The dollar is being hollowed out. Grades are being hollowed out. Consider this whopper, which details how GPAs have been climbing every decade since 1960 while students have simultaneously spent less and less time actually studying. Wombs are being hollowed out, too, with the birth rate dropping below “replacement rate.” We’re down around 1.7 children per woman. Last week’s presidential debate was a cringeworthy testimony that our politics is as empty as a desert’s rain gauge.

Supply Chain Issues 

How did we end up void of substance? Supply chain issues.

Man has been cut off from the heavens: We have bought into what Francis Schaeffer called the great dichotomy. We have left saving faith, and for that matter the Christian faith, in the upper story. Man resolves to live in the lower story by reason alone, the only instrument to be employed when considering matters of earth. But, this is a recipe for going mad, as Chesterton has well documented—”The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason . . . If you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air.”[2]

Modern man is also cut off from others. The rise and triumph of the modern self has resulted in lonely man. He was so focused on who he really was on the inside he has lost touch with the people around him. He has also lost touch with the good things of creation. Robert Capon once said, “Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are.” But trouble comes when man merely diagrams: “Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him—every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact—he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him; and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol. Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods—to make them too important, and therefore to make themunimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things.”

Severed from the heavens, others, and the good things of creation, man also finds himself cut off from history. He has lost any notion of heritage and tradition, opting to tear down the statues of our fathers. You may think Alexis went to far, but he has a point when he writes, “Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”[3]

As things fall apart in our modern day Belbury, the magnanimous must labor to keep those supply chains functioning. For more on keeping the heavens supply chain open, read Escape from Reason. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self will aid the “others” supply chain. Capon’s Supper of the Lamb will remind you about the goodness of God’s created world. And Why Liberalism Failed can aid the history angle.

Keys to Magnanimity

We do, however, need to recover more fundamental principles, without which there will be no rebuilding the chest. Two brief leads for now:

First, pursue enlarged hearts. David prayed, “I have stuck unto thy testimonies: O LORD, put me not to shame. I will run they way of thy commandments, when thou shalt enlarge my heart” (Psalm 119:31-32). It is one thing to think about God’s commands and another thing to stick to them. David sounds like he’s out on a limb and could easily look like a fool, which is precisely where we end up when we actually stick to God’s commands. How much blood do you suppose the central organ was pumping through the body when the Son of Jesse walked in the valley of Elah with those five stones? And how about Abraham when he was halfway to that land he knew not, venturing out on God’s word alone? Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego? Daniel in the lions’ den? Moses pinned between the sea called red and Pharaoh’s chariots? There’s a reason men stay home and watch Netflix.

Second, Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This faith is a key virtue, as you cannot develop any others apart from it. It is also radically misunderstood, in part due to a poor translation which calls faith the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen. It is one thing to be convicted of something and another thing to give evidence of it. You can be convicted that there are wheat fields in Idaho. But what good does that do for others? Now, if you provide evidence to others that there are wheat fields in Idaho, then they can come and harvest some of the grain. Faith is not simply a conviction. It is the evidence of unseen things. Wherever faith goes, unseen things will be seen. Likewise, it is one thing to have assurance that you will obtain a large piece of real estate in the mountains of Colorado. And it is another thing to have the substance of that real estate. Many Christians have reduced faith to mere assurance about what they will one day have, and with such a notion, it is not surprising that our civilization has come to rot. It is another thing entirely to see faith as the substance of those unseen things. 

After all, the kingdom of God was not in Canaan’s land before Abraham arrived there. The man of faith had not entered the land and the substance of the hoped for things was in him. But then the man of faith walked into that land of the giants and the substance of the kingdom with him.

[1] Lewis, Abolition of Man

[2] Chesterton, Orthodoxy

[3] Tocqueville, Democracy in America

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