By Chris Armstrong, reprinted from Humanism as a Way of Life.
This series is adapted from a talk I’m giving at a local Roman Catholic church, on Lewis and the relationship between earthly and heavenly human flourishing.
These days, lots of folks are thinking and writing about “human flourishing” – Harvard University even has a whole initiative dedicated to studying it. But what is it? And what might the Christian tradition have to say about it?
This talk jumps off from C S Lewis’s beloved spiritual memoir of his early life, Surprised by Joy, then finds human flourishing to be a golden thread winding its way through many of his other works. We’ll see how his lifelong interest in flourishing–earthly as well as heavenly–began on his path to conversion and continued to unfold throughout his life and writings.
Introduction
Many scholars are researching “human flourishing” today, including Tyler Vanderweele, director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, whose work is being used to actually measure human flourishing in countries around the world.
What does this term mean? Vanderweele suggests that five main experiences constitute human flourishing:
· first, Happiness and Life Satisfaction—that is, being generally contented with life;
· second, Mental and Physical Health—that is, having psychological resilience and functioning well both emotionally and bodily;
· third, Meaning and Purpose—that is, having a life direction, good things to do, and a sense that you’re contributing to the world;
· fourth, Character and Virtue—that is, being a person of moral integrity and habits, able to sacrifice short-term happiness for long-term goodness; and
· fifth, Close Social Relationships—that is, having good friendships and family connections.
VanderWeele adds to these five experiences a sixth, supporting experience—financial and material security—which helps us sustain flourishing over time. He also emphasizes four key pathways to flourishing: Family, Work, Education, and Religious Communities.
So, keep these factors in mind as we look at Lewis on earthly and heavenly flourishing.
Let’s start with what the kids call the “tl;dr” – that is the “too long, didn’t read” summary of what’s to come.
I’m going to suggest that Lewis’s main conclusion on earthly and heavenly flourishing—though it took him many years to settle into this—is the belief that our experiences of the world are potentially sacramental.
In other words, our material and social experiences – and the pleasures we derive from them – can serve as signposts to a spiritual reality: they are not completely fulfilling in themselves, but they are also by no means spiritually irrelevant, let alone inherently bad. [Explained in detail by Hans Boersma in his Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry.] The world and our flourishing in it can point us to God—even draw us to God.
This is consistent with Lewis’s claim, in an early unpublished draft of his short memoir Surprised by Joy, that he himself was “an empirical theist” – someone who found God by testing the world and finding him through his experiences [C. S. Lewis “Early Prose Joy” (unpublished); see Andrew Lazo, “Early Prose Joy” VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center, 30 (2013): 5-12]. He states this in the published book, the eleventh chapter, as follows:
“What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.”
In the next few minutes, starting with a focus on his 1955 spiritual memoir Surprised by Joy, and then moving to other texts, I’d like to explore with you what Lewis discovered about human flourishing when, as he grew and matured in the faith after his 1930 conversion, he set out to “fairly test the universe.”
Why Lewis on Human Flourishing?
But you may ask, first of all, why should we care what this 20th-century British layman has to say about human flourishing? I’ll suggest at least two reasons.
The first is that, as we said last month, many of us have been benefited spiritually by reading Lewis. And the second is that Lewis has a lot to say about human flourishing. It shows up all over his writings.
So to start, let’s turn to the story of his early life as he told it in Surprised by Joy. I believe this book gives us some clues about why, in writing the story of his path to the Christian hope that transcends this world, Lewis attended so much to matters related to the material and social, not just the spiritual, dimensions of human flourishing.
What we find out in Surprised by Joy is that Lewis pursued philosophical and theological inquiry about the nature of the world and humanity for the same reasons Augustine of Hippo did in the fourth century. That is, to find out how he himself should live.
Therefore even the more intellectual parts of Lewis’s personal biography shows us a man wrestling with how he could flourish as a human being.
So let’s jump into Surprised by Joy. In this memoir, Lewis shows us that from his early childhood, he had experienced tremendous interruptions of flourishing, a sort of precariousness of all happiness.
These “precarious” dimensions of his early life included life with an erratic father; his early education at a boarding school under a clinically insane headmaster; his extreme manual clumsiness that thwarted almost all that he tried to make or do in the material world; his ingrained belief, caught from his father, that although he grew up quite financially comfortable middle-class he was doomed to live perpetually on the verge of poverty, no matter how hard he worked; and there’s more.
Maybe the most influential event that led Lewis to believe in the precariousness of flourishing was his mother’s death before his tenth birthday. In that moment, he remembered, “the great continent sank” – leaving him struggling with long-term disorientation. There is something intensive about the search for flourishing and personal identity that begins with the childhood loss of a parent.
All of these discouraging experiences contributed, Lewis wrote, to the “deeply ingrained pessimism” that led him early in life to “[form] the opinion that the universe was . . . a rather regrettable institution.” From his youth, he believed earthly flourishing was difficult to find, fleeting, and fragile.
The second biographical period in Lewis’s lifelong inquiry into flourishing was his teen studies in the classics under a retired Irish schoolmaster.
In Aristotle and the rest, Lewis found a language for his quest for flourishing. The Greek philosophers all started with the question: how do we attain flourishing (they used the word “eudaemonia”)? Philosophy was not a set of abstract questions. It was a way of life. It was a quest for flourishing.
Lewis, on first discovering this quest, was electrified. He experienced the study of the philosophers as “red meat and strong beer.” There’s little doubt that it made him what he would remain for the rest of his life – at heart a philosopher (though never a professional one), who would always probe the meaning, purpose, and happiness of human life – starting with his own.
For the rest of his life he looked to philosophy and “letters” – that is, the liberal arts – for the answers to life’s persistent questions, as Guy Noir put it.
The Green Room 