Notes
to ‘What
Lewis really did to Miracles’
1. First
published in The Socratic Digest Nr.
4 (1948), pp. 7-15; later in The Collected
Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, vol. II, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Basil Blackwell, Oxford
1981), 224-232, with the relevant part of her preface on pp. ix-x. Page
references are to the latter edition.
2. A term not employed by either Lewis or Anscombe but much used, for
example, by Victor Reppert in his book C. S.
Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (InterVarsity
Press, Downers Grove, Illinois 2003).
3. Anscombe, 226. Two further fragments from this part of her attack
are worth quoting: “What do you mean by ‘really valid’?” and “What can you mean by ‘valid’ beyond what
would be indicated by the explanation you would give for distinguishing between
valid and invalid … ?” Mary Midgley, a friend and fellow student of
Elizabeth Anscombe’s at Oxford from
about 1940 onward, has reflected
in her autobiography that during their undergraduate days “her [Anscombe’s]
approach was as far as possible from the standard triumphant ‘But what could
that possibly mean?’ which was the
parrot cry of brisk young men who had picked up enough logical positivism to be
sure already that it couldn’t mean anything. She could see that it did mean
something … but it was still very hard to say just what.” However, Anscombe
“was sometimes fractious, intolerant and unreasonable” and “ her devils were a
good deal less active in those early days than they became later [i.e. from
1942 on] after she moved to Cambridge and came under Wittgenstein’s influence”
(Midgley, The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir,
2005, p. 115). During the academic year 1946-47, Anscombe was back in Oxford
but still attending tutorials with Wittgenstein in Cambridge on the philosophy
of religion. She became good friends with Wittgenstein, who named her as one of
his three literary executors. She was a devout and sometimes militant Catholic
from her early undergraduate days till the end of her life.
4. Anscombe, ix.
5. ʻOxford’s Bonny Fighter’, chapter 16 in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (ed. James T. Como, new edition,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego etc. 1992; re-issued by Ignatius Press,
San Francisco in 2005 as Remembering C.
S. Lewis), 162. The chapter is a brief history of the Oxford University
Socratic Club during its first thirteen years (1942-54) when Lewis was the
Club’s president and presented a paper of his own there about once a year.
6. In a letter of 4 December 1959 to his publisher Lewis suggests a
cover or advertisement text for the paperback Miracles: “This is neither an abridgement nor a reprint but a new
edition. The author has re-written a large part of Chapter ? [sic] and corrected all errors that he
could find elsewhere” (Collected Letters
III, p. 1103) See Appendices C and D below for a full survey of all the
changes outside the re-written chapter. Some of the additional changes are
clearly relevant to the Anscombe affair, such as the one in ch. II and the
first one in ch. XIV.
7. Anscombe, 231. Lewis’s “Note” and the excerpt from the Socratic
minute-book have also appeared as appendices to his paper “Religion without
Dogma?”, as printed in several collections including the more-or-less-complete Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces,
ed. Lesley Walmsley, published by HarperCollins, London 2000.
8. Bles edition 1947, ch. III, paragraphs 8
through 12.
9. Fontana
edition 1960, pp. 23, 27, 28, resp. 22, 23.
10. Compare the
first (Geoffrey Bles) edition’s pp. 33, 34, 35, 39 with Fontana pp. 29, 30, 31,
34. The other changes in chapter IV are: (1) a considerable expansion of the
first sentence; (2) three cases of “Rational” changed to “rational”, one case
of “Reason” and one of “a Reason” both changed to “reason”; (3) the deletion of
one sentence, perhaps considered to be redundant, in the fifth paragraph.
11. Compare
Bles pp. 44, 46, 91, 125, 126, 127, 152 with Fontana pp. 38-39, 41, 79, 108,
109, 130.
12. Bles
p. 152 and Fontana p. 130; Bles p. 127 and Fontana p. 109.
13. A
very good concise example of the two key arguments in conjunction is in Lewis’s
essay “Miracles” (1942, originally a sermon; published in the 2000 Essay Collection mentioned in note 7),
which as a whole prefigures the book of the same name: “In order to think we
must claim for our own reasoning a validity which is not credible if our
thought is merely a function of our brain, and our brains a by-product of
irrational physical processes. In order to act, above the level of mere
impulse, we must claim a similar validity for our judgements of good and evil.
In both cases we get the same disquieting result. The concept of nature itself
is one we have reached only tacitly by claiming a sort of super-natural status for ourselves.” His use of “valid” and
“irrational” in this piece is, of course, pre-Anscombian. The “argument from
Ethics” got its fullest Lewisian treatment in The Abolition of Man (1943).
14. Bles
p. 26; Fontana p. 19.
15. Bles
p. 27.
16. Bles
p. 28.
17. Reppert, 59-60. This book is certainly not the “gem”
perceived by one reviewer who was perhaps describing what he and I hoped to see
rather than what actually lay before him. The title is clever and the opening
chapter is inviting; and I guess there is an important truth in the assertion
that Lewis is not a provider of finished philosophical products but, rather, of
ideas which deserve further development in view of his “outstanding
philosophical instincts”. The book contains a couple of useful ideas and distinctions; and it is my abiding impression that the author
has the kind of brains and training required for the job and which I lack. Yet
I cannot doubt that this book will for most of its readers turn out to be an
exercise in “finding out what the author says in spite of all the author does
to prevent you” – as C. S. Lewis once described another book whose author had
“no order, no power of exposition, no care for the reader”. At any rate, the
chapter about the Anscombe affair is a botched job; it was in fact what made me
decide to make an attempt myself.
18. Anscombe,
x.
19. A specialist who (like Victor Reppert)
wrote a PhD thesis on Lewis and Naturalism is Steven Lovell. He has presented
many fruits of his thinking on the internet. My decision to concentrate on
Lewis’s and Anscombe’s own writings has so far kept me from reading Lovell.
Indeed the opening line of one of his pieces, “C. S. Lewis’s Case against
Naturalism” was forbidding for any philosophical layman, i.e. for the great
majority of Lewis readers including myself: “The subject to be explored ...
is a complex one, and one on which much more could be written than I am qualified
to write.” A brief and useful text which I did consult in the course of this
inquiry is “Restoration of Man” (published on the internet), a lecture given by
the Oxford (Merton) philosopher J. R. Lucas in Durham in 1992 to celebrate the
50th anniversary of Lewis’s Abolition of
Man. Lucas mentions a thing called “the self-referential argument” which,
I gather, is more or less the same as the Argument from Reason. Happily for Lewis,
Lucas asserts that the self-referential argument can be made “water-tight”. Unhappily
for most of us, however, he adds that it is “fiendishly difficult” to follow
the process of proving this. The proof was given by Gödel in 1931 and
explained, more or less, in a 19-page article by Father P. J. Fitzpatrick
in 1966. It “provides a schema of refutation of all world-views that make out
man to be nothing but the plaything of irrational causes,” says Lucas,
apparently ignoring here, as Lewis first did, the category of non-rational causes. Nevertheless Lucas
also tells about a re-run of the Lewis-Anscombe debate in 1969, “with Miss
Anscombe present and myself taking part”, where “the floor remained – to the
expressed disappointment of some – unwiped with me.” Interestingly, if not
surprisingly, there appears to have been not only a re-run of the debate but
also a prefiguration of it. In a footnote to his Dangerous Idea (p. 100), Victor Reppert points out that Lewis’s
argument against naturalism was very similar to that presented by James Balfour
in his Theism and Humanism (Gifford
Lectures 1914). Reppert’s dissertation adviser had noticed that ‘[G. E.]
Moore’s criticism of Balfour and Anscombe’s criticism of Lewis were similar’. I
haven’t looked into this yet, but all I know about Moore and about Balfour
makes the suggestion extremely plausible. Balfour’s work certainly was one
great and obvious inspiration for Lewis; it is available online. In this book
there are four instances of ‘non-rational’ and two of ‘irrational’,
apparently used as interchangeable terms, and with ‘a-logical’ as yet another
variant.
20. Roger Lancelyn Green & Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Fully revised & expanded edition
(HarperCollins, London 2002), 290. “Lewis told Walter Hooper in 1963 that he
‘won’; when Hooper met Miss Anscombe for the first time in 1964 she said, ‘I
won.’” The biography’s first edition (Collins, London 1974, p. 228) has: “Lewis
told Walter Hooper he was not defeated, and Miss Anscombe told Hooper that he
was.”
21. Anscombe, x.