C.S. Lewis on Good Works and Good Work

I recently came across the passage below by CS Lewis in The Joyful Christian (it's a book full of snippets; by clicking on the title of this entry you will be directed to the whole piece) and i found it interesting that he lists cabinetmakers amongst the last bastions of craftsmanship. He even goes into (some) details, when describing 'real honest-to-God work': 'sound structures; seasoned wood, accurately dovetailed, the stresses all calculated; skill and labour successfully used to do what is intended...'

This piece also resonated with me particularly in light of the discussions on a previous post about the religious community's role in environmentalism. Lewis proclaims, 'Let choirs sing well or not at all', reminding us that focussing on the 'real' thing is no excuse for doing things half-assed. Anyway, here is the piece:

'Good Works' in the plural is an expression much more familiar to modern Christendom than 'good work.' Good works are chiefly almsgiving or 'helping' in the parish. They are quite separate from one's 'work.' And good works need not be good work, as anyone can see by inspecting some of the objects made to be sold at bazaars for charitable purposes. This is not according to our example. When our Lord provided a poor wedding party with an extra glass of wine all around, he was doing good works. But also good work; it was a wine really worth drinking. Nor is the neglect of goodness in our 'work,' our job, according to precept. The apostle says everyone must not only work but work to produce what is 'good.'

The idea of Good Work is not quite extinct among us, though it is not, I fear, especially characteristic of religious people. I have found it among cabinetmakers, cobblers, and sailors. It is no use at all trying to impress sailors with a new liner because she is the biggest or costliest ship afloat. They look for what they call her 'lines': they predict how she will behave in a heavy sea. Artists also talk of Good Work; but decreasingly. They begin to prefer words like 'significant,' 'important', 'contemporary,' or 'daring.' These are not, to my mind, good symptoms.

But the great mass of men in all fully industrialised societies are the victims of a situation which almost excludes the idea of Good Work from the outset. 'Built-in obsolescence' becomes an economic necessity. Unless an article is so made that it will go to pieces in a year or two and thus have to be replaced, you will not get a sufficient turnover. A hundred years ago, when a man got married, he had built for him (if he were rich enough) a carriage in which he expected to drive for the rest of his life. He now buys a car which he expects to sell again in two years. Work nowadays must not be good.

For the wearer, zip fasteners have this advantage over buttons: that, while they last, they will save him an infinitesimal amount of time and trouble. For the producer, they have a much more solid merit; they don't remain in working order long. Bad work is the desideratum.

We must avoid taking a glibly moral view of this situation. It is not solely the result of original or actual sin. It has stolen upon us, unforeseen and unintended. The degraded commercialism of our minds is quite as much its result as its cause. Nor can it, in my opinion, be cured by purely moral efforts.

I guess when you think about it, the precedent for Good Works is in the first chapter of Genesis:

וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים, כִּי-טוֹב--and God saw that it was good.'

Ricky Gervais expounds on Good Work in Genesis:

Hooker on Chukim, Part II

I'm feeling a bit cognitively challenged at the moment. After many frustrating hours of trying to understand the relationship between law, natural law, the law of nature, rationalism, morality, voluntary natural law, first law eternal, second law eternal, etc., it dawned on me that i was not going to figure it out (It also occurred to me that it was a bit arrogant to even attempt it, but i will chalk it up to plummeting blood sugar and the inability to think clearly), considering the fact that it's a centuries-old debate (oh yeah...). Luckily (and oddly) my tiny flat has many glass doors, and the photo to the left illustrates the desperate (yet typical) measures i was forced to take in order to prevent my head from exploding. My work on Donne had taught me that structure of someone's argument, sometimes the very examples they bring, can offer us clues as to who they were reading. That didn't work so well here. Both Hooker and Maimonides bring up different examples of chukim in various contexts. Furthermore, the complications resulting from the subtleties of language--the shifting etymologies, the theological jargon, the scores of subcategories in defining words and axioms--used by both Hooker and Maimonides are not to be underestimated.

A common theme that emerges in the study of Maimonides (and a real pain in the ...neck) is that he says one thing in the Mishneh Torah and another thing in the Guide. Some people try to reconcile those differences, and some people chalk it up to Maimonides consciously addressing two very different audiences. I, unfortunately am not well-versed enough in this area.

I came across a lecture by Rav Aharon Lichtenstein on the relationship between being religious and being good, and was delighted to see that he actually quotes the passage from C.S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain in which Lewis quotes Hooker.

I've often noticed over the course of this dissertation that i have made my work much harder by choosing as my topic two different subjects (early modern literature and rabbinics) about which i know very little, and this is just one instance of that. So, i'm still not entirely sure where either of them stands on this issue, but it does seem like it's rather consciously complex on both of their parts, it would seem, intentionally so...

The Good, the Bad, and the ?!?!: Hooker on Chukim--part 1 (because it's just too long)

The book of Leviticus is a code of conduct required of Israel as a result of the establishment of a relationship with God in the books of Genesis and Exodus. More or less. There's loads of stuff in here; rules about moral, sexual, and sacrificial conduct, Sabbath, slavery, harvest, social justice, etc. Most of us nod enthusiastically when reading about many of these laws (like the prohibitions of stealing, cheating, and lying--19:11). And then there are those, called chukim, or divine decrees that just seem...random (like mixing wool and linnen--19:19). Richard Hooker, the 16th century divine (basically the father of Anglicanism) addresses these unusual laws in the context of his discussion about the reformation of laws or church practises:

It may so fall out that the reason why some lawes of God were given is neither opened nor possible to be gathered by the wit of man. As why God should forbid Adam that one tree, there was no way for Adam ever to have certainely understoode. And at Adam’s ignorance of this pointe Satan tooke advantage, urging the more securely a faulse cause because the true was unto Adam unknowen. Why the Jewes were forbidden to plowe their grounde with an oxe and an asse, why to cloth them selves with mingled attire of wooll and lynnen, both it was unto them, and unto us it remaineth obscure. Such lawes perhaps can not be abrogated saving onely by whome they were made: because the intent of them being knowne unto none but the author, he alone can judge how long it is requisite they should indure.

(Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book III, Chapter 10.1)

Obviously Hooker, like most Christians, would hold that these laws were abrogated by Jesus. However, Hooker's belief in Divine law as moral and just, despite humanity's inability to fathom the reasons, led Hooker to differ from scholars such as John Selden, Dionysius Vossius (a pupil of Menasseh Ben Israel), and John Spencer. It also underscores Hooker's own puzzling relationship with his go-to guy on the subject of the 'Israelite State'--Maimonides. In The Guide of the Perplexed (III:37), Maimonides explains the reason for the prohibition on shaving (Leviticus 19: 27, 28) as follows:

The shaving of the corner of the head and of the corner of the beard has been forbidden because it was a usage of idolatrous priests. This is also the reason for the prohibition of mingled stuff, for this too was a usage of these priests, as they put together in their garments vegetable and animal substances bearing at the same time a seal made out of some mineral..." (trans. by Shlomo Pines, p. 544)

In Book IV, Hooker pretty explicitly parts ways with Maimonides, who had been his authority until then:

That shaving therefore and cutting, which the law doth mention, was not a matter in itself indifferent, and forbidden only because it was in use amongst such idolaters as were neighbours to the people of God: but to use it had been a crime, though no other people or nation under heaven should have done it saving only themselves. As for those laws concerning attires : " There shall no garment of linen and wool- Levit. len come upon thee ;" as also those touching food and diet, wherein swine's flesh, together with sundry other meats, are forbidden; the use of these things had been indeed of itself harmless and indifferent: so that hereby it doth appear, how the law of God forbad in some special consideration, such things as were lawful enough in themselves. But yet even here they likewise fail of that they intend. For it doth not Dent, appear that the consideration, in regard whereof the law forbiddeth these things, was because those nations did use them. Likely enough it is, that the Canaanites used to feed as well on sheep as on swine's flesh; and therefore, if the forbidding of the latter had no other reason than dissimilitude with that people, they which of their own heads allege this for reason, can shew I think some reason more than we are able to find why the former was not also forbidden. Might there not be some other mystery in this prohibition than they think of? Yes, some other mystery there was in it by all likelihood. For what reason is there, which should but induce, and therefore much less enforce us to think, that care of dissimilitude between the people of God and the heathen nations about them, was any more the cause of forbidding them to put on garments of sundry stuff, than of charging them withal not to sow their fields with meslin; or that this was any more the cause of forbidding them to eat swine's flesh, than of charging them withal not to eat the flesh of eagles, hawks, and the like? Wherefore, although the church of Rome were to us, as to Israel the Egyptians and Canaanites were of old ; yet doth it not follow, that the wisdom of God without respect doth teach us to erect between us and them a partition-wall of difference, in such things indifferent as have been hitherto disputed of.

Eagles, hawks, and the like? Mmm...and now the forbidden fowl must be tasted:


Hey! Pay attention!

As I was saying, quite simply, it would seem that Hooker is against the idea of God telling people what to do 'because i told you so'. He argued against the voluntarist position of the Puritans who felt that law was dependent on God's will alone. In The Problem of Pain, CS Lewis meditates on the relationship between religion and morality:

It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. With Hooker, and against Dr. Johnson, I emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion (reached, I think, by Paley) that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it—that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. I believe, on the contrary, that ‘they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will'

Ok-that's all for part 1. Just thinking aloud. Thanks for reading. And if you didn't--it will get better soon (not in part 2--just when i get unstuck and off this topic).