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CHAPTER ONE
QUESTIONS OF HUMAN DISCOURSE, RELATION, AND ACTION:
THE NEED FOR GRACE
1.1 Introduction
In interpersonal communication studies, questions of human will and action in
discourse are central. Chapter One outlines major questions of interpersonal
communication: (1) what is the relationship between human being and language?; (2)
how do we relate to others?; and (3) how do we decide how to act? Each question will be
addressed in terms of the scholarly conversations in the interpersonal communication
literature, attentive to theories which are specifically relevant to the formation and
maintenance of intimate relationships. The literature review frames interpersonal
relationships as complex embodied and symbolic phenomena which are engaged,
constructed, maintained, and changed by selves in discourse with one another. At the core
of interpersonal communication studies is the search to understand human beings and our
relational choice, discourse, and action from theoretical and practical perspectives.
Following the review of major questions and theoretical perspectives in
interpersonal studies concerning discourse, relation, and action, the chapter utilizes a
philosophical perspective driven by the writings of C.S. Lewis and his Christian
intellectual mentors. Lewis, who wrote extensively on the theory and practice of love,
offers a compelling approach to understanding human relationships. Major themes in
interpersonal communication—such as the nature of the self, the formation of human
relationships, and the quality of discursive practices—already intersect with ideas from
rhetoric and philosophy of communication. This chapter argues that Lewis’s
interpretation of the Christian narrative frames human relationships in a robustly
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theoretical and practical manner; a manner framed by the presence and practice of love
and grace. Lewis characterizes the conditions of our discursive relational selves as
difficult yet joyful. Human beings are complex embodied, discursive creatures with
complicated needs, desires, and inclinations. Furthermore, we live in a created order—in
the presence of our Creator—which continually shapes our understanding and
responsiveness. Thus human beings must navigate a multi-dimensional reality, including
the temporal and the eternal, choice and necessity, truthfulness and deceit. Put within the
vocabulary of this project, interpersonal communication, and especially intimate
interpersonal communication, is considered a matter of sentiment understood
philosophically, will understood phenomenologically, and responsiveness understood
ontologically.
Such conditions of complexity within human being, discourse, and relation
provide continual fodder for our theoretical and practical considerations. We as
communication scholars are aware that there is still much work to be done in
understanding and living within relationships with others, and this project suggests that
grace is a compelling metaphor for thinking about the sustainability of human relation.
The metaphor of work provides an important entryway from interpersonal
communication studies to the Christian philosophical understanding of love as it is
framed in this project. C.S. Lewis particularly argues that our loves “work” for us in
different ways in body, mind, and heart (The Four Loves). Each moment of our loving is
made more salient by grace—we need to practice and receive graciousness from one
another if our relationships are to truly “work.” As will be further explored in this project,
grace frames human love as willful choice, purposeful labor, and responsiveness to form.
Especially within the intimate relations of marriages and households, human love needs
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the support of grace in our choices, labors, and responses with and toward the Other.
Interpersonal communication scholars perennially engage questions of how our
loves and relationships “work” in the everyday. The questions we ask point to the
difficulties emergent not only from relating in general but of human love and intimacy in
particular. A review of the literature suggests that the spirit of interpersonal inquiry is
complementary to major ideas and questions of the Christian philosophical perspective
guiding this project, whether or not the majority of scholars rely upon or directly address
the metaphor of grace in their works. Interpersonal scholars ask what it means to be
relational, discursive beings learning to know, understand, and commune with one
another competently, respectfully, and even lovingly—a task shared by the Christian
thinkers introduced within this project, particularly C.S. Lewis. These questions are not
always easy to address nor to practice, especially when it comes to intimacy and difficult
interpersonal situations. In beginning to approach the “how” and “why” of relating and
loving, this chapter casts a wide theoretical net by outlining these questions of human-
being-in-discourse through three major interrelated metaphors: language, relation, and
action. Each section is supplemented by the constructive addition of the ontological,
discursive, and relational presuppositions of the Christian intellectual tradition framed by
the writings of C.S. Lewis.
1.2 Human Being and Language
1.2.1 Symbols, Cognition, and Meaning in IPC Studies
One of the major presuppositions of interpersonal communication studies is that
human beings live in a world of symbols. In the semiotic and semantic traditions, humans
are understood as differing from other animals in their capacity to create and discover
symbols and communicate those symbols across time. The study of contemporary
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semiotics began with Ferdinand de Saussure and the linguistic school of the Formalists in
the late 1800s. In Course in General Linguistics, Saussure places the system of language
[langue] as paramount to human speech [langage] and utterances [parole]. By doing so,
he and the Formalists challenged the popular understanding of the direct connection
between the sign and the referent; instead, he posited an arbitrary relationship between
the sign (consisting of the signifier and the signified) and the referent based on the
internal components of language systems. Since its modern beginnings, however, the
study of semiotics would expand into more complex models of symbol structure. In the
mid-1940s, Charles K. Ogden and I. A. Richards articulate a three-fold relationship
between the reference, symbol, and referent of any communicative utterance, challenging
the dyadic sign-referent relationship in Saussure’s work. Even later, postmodern
semiotician Julia Kristeva’s work questions the Formalists’ abstraction of language
through its emphasis on langue; instead, she points to the inherent tension between the
world of conceptual “truth” and that of experienced “reality” in communicative acts.
The study of general semantics approaches the nature and use of language by way
of its syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. Pioneered by Alfred Korzybski in the early
20th century, general semantics emphasizes relationships between language and human
behavior. Korzybski’s work focuses particularly on the problematic processes of
perception and interpretation of environments and the linguistic abstraction which
necessarily occurs. Humans have the unique ability to “time-bind,” or to create and to
symbolize. However, both the structure and the function of language makes
communicators keenly aware of their symbolic limitations, causing us to construct
linguistic “maps” in navigation of the world of perception and interpretation. Humans are
cognitively, linguistically, and relationally complex.
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These presuppositions of cognitive and symbolic complexity hold important
implications for interpersonal communication studies, primarily by way of theories of
constructivism, interactive systems, and symbolic constructionism. For example, Jesse
Delia, Barbara O’Keefe, and Daniel O’Keefe’s work takes a constructivist approach to
interpersonal relationships, one that emphasizes the complexity of cognitive constructs
and the variety of communicative responses one can have to subtleties in interpersonal
exchanges. According to this framework, messages which are the most cognitively
complex refer to those which reflect awareness of and adaptations to environmental,
relational, subjective, and symbolic aspects of communicative contexts. In the same vein,
interactive systems studies presuppose a significant relationship between intrapersonal
cognition and interpretation and relational dynamics. Stemming from the work of Jurgen
Ruesch and Gregory Bateson in the 1950s and later Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick
Beavin, and Don D. Jackson in the 1960s, interactive systems studies articulate the nature
of communicative acts as not only illustrative of message content but also reflective of
the relational dynamics of self and other in the interchange. The famous axiom of “one
cannot not communicate” (Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson) illustrates how human
symbolic creation and acts of communication constitute the very nature of our selves as
interpretive and relational beings.
Studies attentive to the complexity of human thought and behavior in relationship
with one another address an important theoretical theme in interpersonal communication
studies: the construction and maintenance of social realities by way of language. The
summative work of this kind is illustrated in the writings of George Herbert Mead (Mind,
Self, and Society published in 1934) and Harold Blumer (Symbolic Interactionism
published in 1969). These works presuppose that humans have the unique capacity to
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conceptualize the self and take on the role of the other; we think by simultaneous
abstraction and relation. The result is a semantic and pragmatic phenomenon creating a
social existence which continues to guide interpretations, behaviors, and exchanges. Later
scholarship would term this phenomenon as the “coordinated management of meaning,”
(Barnett Pearce and Cronen) or the process by which persons-in-conversation reflexively
participate in the creation and maintenance of social worlds through communicative acts.
1.2.2 The Construction and Interpretation of Social Realities in Intimate
Interpersonal Contexts
The nature of human beings as symbol-users leads many interpersonal
communication scholars to conclude that one’s perception and interpretation of reality is
symbolically and socially created and managed. Some scholars, such as John Gottman in
Why Marriages Succeed or Fail and Mark L. Knapp and Anita Vangelisti in
Interpersonal Communication and Human Relationships, argue that relational conditions
are created and sustained through self-disclosure and interpersonal expectations. The
quality of communication patterns and exchanges within intimate relationships lead either
to relational health and growth or stagnation and decline. Relationships involve continual
and careful symbolic repositioning of individuals in relation to their perceptions,
expectations, and messages. Family systems studies, such as is illustrated in Laurie
Heatherington and Myrna L. Friedlander’s work on Family Relational Communication
Control Coding System (FRCCCS) (see for example “Complementarity and Symmetry in
Family Therapy Communication”), expand the dyadic relationships of marriage and
courtship into the larger family system, arguing for the expansion of intimate
interpersonal environments to include multiple discursive perspectives and exchanges.
The construction of social realities through symbolic and relational means holds
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significant implications for gender and expectations of intimacy in particular. For
example, gender communication scholar Julia Wood suggests that “the social groups
within which we are located powerfully shape what we experience and know as well as
how we understand and communicate with ourselves, others, and the world”
(Communication Theories in Action 250). She advocates for interpersonal theories
attentive to the complexity inherent in the shaping of gender roles: “gender is a system of
meanings that sculpts individuals’ standpoint by positioning most males and females in
disparate material, social and symbolic circumstances” (“Feminist Scholarship” 111). In a
similar vein as feminist epistemologist Sandra Harding, Wood posits for the standpoint
theory of relational communication, arguing that knowledge is situated within historical,
linguistic, and cultural enactments of the world. At the same time that scholars such as
Wood and Harding are working through issues of feminist epistemology, gender
communication scholar Deborah Tannen likewise assumed gender to be influenced by
symbolic constructs. Masculine and feminine communication styles essentially constitute
different cultural and social worlds framed by distinct “genderlects.” Gender
communication theorists suggest that while perceptual and communicative inclinations of
men and women may differ, persons in relationships still can work toward the shared
interpretation of goals and the subsequent coordination of messages and behaviors.[1]
Understanding human interpretive power in intimate relationships holds
significant implications for this project. Within the majority of the literature on intimate
interpersonal and gender communication, the emphasis is upon how relationships are
created, maintained, and changed through linguistic and interpretive means which are
influenced by historical, social, and cultural narratives. This project supports and
recognizes both the validity and importance of theoretical frameworks such as general
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semantics and social constructionism. However, it works from the assumption that a
phenomenological rendering of the Word and discourse lends even greater complexity to
human interpretive power. The Christian intellectual tradition framing this project adds
depth to theories of symbol and language use by way of its emphasis on the triadic nature
of human discourse.
From the perspective of Lewis and other thinkers introduced in these chapters,
language is tethered to both ontological significance and existential weight. Human
beings engage in responsiveness to intentions, alterity, and existence. Symbols and
discourse function relationally; yet the relation is a triadic phenomenon of the self,
others, and the Other Himself in the mystery of oneness. The interplay of communion and
alterity attends not just to the self or the other but to that which is within and beyond both.
Thus, the interpretive component of human symbolicity is expanded exponentially, as
interlocutors attend to meanings and forms beyond the present discursive moment but
which nonetheless addresses them both partners intimately. Consequently, the entry point
which Lewis affords us into understanding human discursive nature provides rich
theoretical ground from which we can begin to address issues of grace and love in
intimate relationships. Without the Word as ontological weight to our words, we have
little freedom of interpretive grace in communication and consequently limit our
relational experiences.
1.2.3 The Phenomenological Word and the Triadic Nature of Discourse
Many thinkers of the Christian intellectual tradition understand the Word as
phenomenologically distinct from any other type of human action. From the moment that
symbol use is introduced into our existence, our personhood as human beings is defined
relationally. As Jacques Ellul writes, the spoken word “ushers us into another dimension:
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relationship with other living beings, with persons,” making us “qualitatively different
from everything else” (14). We speak to and at the same time are being spoken to by God
and by others. As derivative of the Incarnate Deity, the Word is a phenomenon in which
humans have freedom of participatory creation. According to G. K. Chesterton, the
beginning of human history points to the unique role which humankind holds in its
capacity for symbolic creation and articulation. In The Everlasting Man, he writes “every
sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and
alone...this creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator
as well as a creature” (29). The capacity for speech and symbolicity allows humans to
relate to creation phenomenologically and to their Creator existentially.
However, linguistic acts are both the problem and the temporal solution to relating
to the world and others. In On the Trinity and Confessions, Augustine articulates the role
of discourse as constituting our epistemological and relational existence; it is how we
know and act in temporality. Yet Augustine also believes that the distance between
everyday discourse and the language of God has become incommensurable due to the
fallen condition of the world. God’s eternal Word, unlike human language, produces
without division of images or signs. Our corporeal condition, however, necessitates that
human knowledge remain divided in a succession of utterances. These acts of speech,
reflecting images in our memory, function to connect the verbal sign and the image of
that object as it is perceived in the world. Yet since the Fall in the Garden, all of humanity
is embedded in history and, consequently, our symbolic creations can be only partially
and opaquely understood as well as enacted. George MacDonald, in his Unspoken
Sermons, writes:
Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in
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words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly. For thought and feeling are
infinite, and human speech, although far-reaching in scope, and
marvellous in delicacy, can embody them after all but approximately and
suggestively...Our Lord had no design of constructing a system of truth in
intellectual forms. The truth of the moment in its relation to him, The
Truth, was what he spoke. He spoke out of a region of realities which he
knew could only be suggested—not represented—in the forms of intellect
and speech. (31)
There is a perpetual lack in human symbolic creation and discourse, a lack which reflects
the deficiencies inherent in human life in temporality. Our understanding is rudimentary
to begin with because we are creatures and not the Creator. Further still, we inherit
corrupted minds, hearts, and souls within an imperfect world. Our utterances inherently
are deficient in relation to the wholeness of Truth.
Nonetheless, the discursive Word is humankind’s most significant avenue of
meaningful relation with others and the world. Ellul articulates the complexity inherent in
Christianity’s understanding of the Word in temporality. Language, as an existential
phenomenon, involves connotations, intonations, paradoxes, and ambiguity. Yet “speech
fills the infinite gap which separates us,” allowing for the freedom of a “rich and blessed
redundancy” where the self may encounter Truth and meaningful relationships anew with
each communicative act (17). Encounters with meaning, however, rely upon the
condition of the heart. Herein lies the richness of speaking and being spoken to from a
phenomenological perspective. As Edmund Husserl claims, one’s perceptions of the
world are a product of one’s intentions. A person attends to the world based on a
“wakeful-world consciousness” which lends coherence and validity to communicative
action (Husserl 108). From the perspective of this project, a “wakeful-world
consciousness” involves attending to and listening for God’s Word, or to the Word which
is speaking out from creation to us in our existence. Humans attend to symbols and
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discourse not because they ought to, but because they have to do so. One can speak only
because one was first spoken to by God. Truth is spoken into the heart of every creature
of God by the Word Himself who is within and beyond temporality (see New American
Standard Bible, John 1.1).
One of the central tenets of this Christian philosophical perspective, then, is the
uniqueness of humankind in their derivation of the Word. Communication refers not only
to the spoken word but also to the communal embodiment of the Word in discourse and
action. In order to engage in successful communicative acts one must be attentive to the
relational aspect inherent in the semantic. By grace, we are spoken to first by and are able
to understand the Word—in this regard, all human beings are discursively unified. It is
our task to extend our experience of interpretive grace toward others. In order to do this,
Lewis offers the simple axiom: “We must be wholly empirical. We must listen, and note,
and memorise. And of course we must set aside every trace of snobbery or pedantry about
‘right’ or ‘wrong’ usages” (“Before We Can Communicate” 241). Lewis is aware of the
“problem” of communication; alterity of persons lead to varying interpretive relations.
Yet is it a “problem”? Lewis would argue not necessarily so. His call to be “empirical”
and to “listen” “before we can communicate” encourages individuals to practice a
measure of attentive grace in communicating meaning. There is great power in human
interpretation of messages and if we are not purposefully attentive, we cannot listen to the
manifestation of the Word through the mouth of the other. When the other speaks a true
word, we know it in our hearts ourselves. Thus, the measure of good communication is in
the unification of individual interpretive power of the Word: “If, given patience and
ordinary skill, you cannot explain a thing to any sensible person whatever (provided he
will listen), then you don’t really understand it yourself” (242). Understanding truly is a
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gift of grace, one which we receive as well as exercise in the presence of the other.
1.3 Alterity and the Condition of the Will
1.3.1 The Relationship of Self and the Other in IPC Studies
Consequently, another central question of interpersonal communication studies
concerns how persons-in-conversation find the ability not only to understand but to form
lasting relationships with one another in the midst of both similarity and difference.
Interpersonal communication theorists articulate the goals of communicative interactions
ranging from mutual understanding of meanings, messages, or motives, to the
coordination of individual behaviors within relational contexts, to emergent identity and
meaning from the discursive meeting itself. One of the cornerstones of early
interpersonal communication studies, John W. Thibault and Harold H. Kelley’s The
Social Psychology of Groups, grounds the study of relational decision-making in the
context of “objective interdependence” (4). The authors claim that individuals in
relationship work to find solutions to the “problems created by interdependency,” or
consequences of reciprocal control within the relationship itself (5). Each individual
simultaneously is dependent upon and independent from the other with whom their
behaviors and decisions are intimately tied. It is this dialectical interplay of the self and
the other in the context of a relationship that frames the ground of interpersonal
communication studies.
Early interpersonal communication studies advocated the recognition of
difference and its role in shaping relational identity as the key to addressing issues of
alterity. From as early as Mead’s claim in 1934 that the self in relationship is constituted
by the interaction of the “I” (or the self viewed as subject) and the “me” (or the self
viewed as object), most interpersonal theories assume that in any given communicative
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interaction a person both acts based upon one’s own interpretations of a given context
and reacts on the basis of his or her perception of the other’s interpretation as well. The
self relates not only to the particular other in relationship but also has its identity shaped
by the expectations and interpretations of the “generalized other” of community. The very
notion of the self as self is dependent upon the recognition of alterity in relation.
What constitutes an interpersonal relationship between the self and the other,
then? The answer to this question takes on a variety of forms within the interpersonal
communication literature. Stemming from the work of Mead and the idea of relational
role playing, some interpersonal communication theories presuppose that relationships
are constituted by the coordination of interdependent behaviors between the self and the
other. Roderick P. Hart and Don M. Burks’s 1972 article “Rhetorical Sensitivity and
Social Interaction” advocates for an understanding of human beings as inherently
complex with a multitude of rhetorical roles available in any given communicative
context. Consequently, what the authors call “flexible discretion” is a necessary frame of
mind as each individual approaches an interaction: “every verbal exchange is a fleeting,
ad hoc affair in which the guiding principle is flexible discretion, so buttressed by a
concern for the complexity of the Other that no inviolable verbal promise should be
brought to bear” (Hart and Burks 82). Since ideas can be rendered in many ways and
misunderstanding easily occurs, meaningful relationships can be found more readily
when communicators remain rhetorically sensitive to the demands of a particular
interactional context, adapting their roles, expectations, and messages accordingly. Later,
Barnett Pearce and Cronen’s theory on the Coordinated Management of Meaning, a
foundational approach to interpersonal studies, posits that successful relationships rely
less on mutual understanding than on the coordination and management of meaningful
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relational behaviors. These models share significant spatial metaphors to boundaries of
relationships; the way in which the self and the other position themselves and behave
toward the other makes all the difference in terms of relational identity.
Other frameworks of interpersonal communication—while they do not deny the
significance of the coordination of interdependent behaviors between the self and the
other—take a more symbolic approach to defining interpersonal relationships.
Relationships are seen as the product of cognitive and cultural construction. In his book,
Dyadic Communication, William Wilmot suggests that relationships begin with mutual
awareness, or “the perception of being perceived” (19). Relationships are constituted by
intrapersonal perception as well as shared understandings among others, creating worlds
which are defined by permeable boundaries of the roles and identities of the self and the
other in culture, history, and community (see Kenneth Gergen, Realities and
Relationships: Surroundings in Social Construction and W. Barnett Pearce, Interpersonal
Communication: Making Social Worlds for two significant examples of this framework).
As relationships develop, they begin to constitute “mini-cultures” themselves with
distinct rituals, shared languages, and common expectations (Wilmot). It all begins,
though, with the recognition of being perceived by the other, and, consequently, being
called into a relational world.
The relational world of shared understanding and coordinated behaviors is
primarily a dyadic world: a world of the self and the other. The literature in interpersonal
communication studies works primarily from these dyadic presuppositions. What this
project suggests, however, is the additive component of triadic considerations in
interpersonal relations: a world of the self, the other, and God. Some areas of study in
interpersonal communication begin to point to the existence of this triadic relation in
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their emphasis on human being and identity as emergent from discursive meetings.
Dialogic studies in interpersonal communication act a bridge between traditional dyadic
approaches to human intimate relationships in the literature and the trinitarian relational
phenomenon of intimacy as it is articulated in the Christian intellectual tradition framing
this project.
1.3.2 Dialogue and the Introduction to the Triadic
Dialogic theory suggests that relationships are constituted by the self, the other,
and the relational phenomenon of “the between” (Buber). Meaning in discourse does not
belong to either communicative partner; it is emergent of the relationship itself. An a
priori relational phenomenon—that which exists existentially prior to the relationship—
provides the ground for the meeting between the self and the other to occur. Within this
meeting, the self and the other are derived as communicatively and relationally
significant. Therefore, the relationship cannot be demanded, constructed, or coordinated;
one can only remain open to its emergence (see Arnett, Grayson, and McDowell). The
phenomenon of human relation itself provides the third element of interpersonal
encounters, in addition to the self and the other.
The introduction of the dialogic framework specifically into interpersonal
communication theory began in the 1970s with the publication of such texts as John
Stewart’s Bridges, Not Walls: A Book about Interpersonal Communication and Charles
Brown and Paul Keller’s Monologue to Dialogue. The dialogic framework shifts the
focus of interpersonal communication from the ideas of communicative self-competency
and progression of relational development to the importance of openness to emergent
understanding between the self and other. More notable for the purposes of this project,
though, the basic metaphors of dialogic studies have been applied specifically to intimate
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relationships by foundational works such as Leslie Baxter and Barbara Montgomery’s
Relating: Dialogue and Dialectics. Baxter and Montgomery situate intimate interpersonal
communication within the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, articulating a model of dialogue
attentive to the dialectical tensions both inherent within relations between the self and
other as well as external to the relationship itself. Dialectical tensions point to human
relation itself as an “other,” and openness to this otherness is the primary manner in
which the relationship can emerge within the meeting of two willing individuals.
With this relational phenomenon acting as the third element to interpersonal
communication, dialogic studies offers a rich philosophical and phenomenological
alternative to dyadic theories of intimacy. In intimate interpersonal communication
studies, however, the presence of alterity and dialectical tensions between the self and
other in interdependency call for a model of relating which advocates for more than the
impersonality of the relationship as an existential phenomenon. What Lewis and his
intellectual mentors offer beyond dialogic studies is the notion of a personhood at the
crux of this relational phenomenon: the personhood of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit. Intimacy, then, does not emerge discursively but is ontologically tethered in the
personhood of God and human participation in this relation.
1.3.3 God and Knowledge of the Self
From the perspective of the Christian thinkers introduced in this project, the self is
understood as being ontologically derived from and tethered to the Other. The story of
creation points to how human consciousness is marked by the revelation of divine
derivation: the first moment of awareness is of who one is (i.e., a creature) and also of
who one is not (the Creator). This consciousness constitutes in essence a moral, and
hence relational, existence. Lewis tells how, in the beginning of creation, God caused “a
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new kind of consciousness which could say ‘I’ and ‘me’, which could look upon itself as
an object, which knew God, which could make judgements of truth, beauty, and
goodness, and which was so far above time that it could perceive time flowing past” to
descend upon humankind (The Problem of Pain 72). This consciousness is both
epistemological and communicative, as it is a participatory act in creation. In a moment
of paradox, once one understands what it means to be “self” and to be “other,” it is
revealed that the self cannot know how to be. Augustine writes that to confess what he
knows about himself is “to confess also what I do not know about myself, since that too
which I know about myself I know because you [God] enlighten me” (Confessions 233).
Only God can know and be Himself wholly and absolutely, for He is the only true “I am.”
God speaks to the human self, and the self, by relation, is. As beings free by God’s grace
to engage in acts of knowing, humans can stand within the world yet remain transcendent
in relation to it, sharing God’s capacity for naming. With naming lies boundaries and,
with boundaries, relational order.
Knowledge of the self is tied intimately to the presence and exercise of the will.
Once the self as self is revealed, Lewis claims that one has a choice to regard oneself in
two ways. One can regard oneself as a creature of God and, although an object of
deficiency and in need of healing, is one to be loved in its proper essence as creature.
Alternatively, one can regard the self as an object of preference (“Two Ways With the
Self” 120). To know oneself in the former manner is true knowledge, and it can only
come about when humanity’s individualism is abandoned—even crucified—for the sake
of the eternal possession of their true personhood in God. For “we shall then first be true
persons when we have suffered ourselves to be fitted into our places” (Lewis,
“Membership” 173). To regard oneself in the latter manner is to base one’s personhood
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on a lie. It is the willful preference of the self that is the ground of all sin, and it is a
danger which human consciousness is born into because of the Fall. In The Problem of
Pain, Lewis writes:
from the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as
a self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or the self for the centre is
opened to it...it is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of each
individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins: at this very moment
you and I are either committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it.
(70)
Each act of the will is relation, for what one chooses is a person. It is only through
choosing the Person that one discovers the self. Consequently, Lewis calls for “the
conscious direction of all will and desire to a transcendental Person in whom I believe all
values to resides, and the reference to Him in every thought and act” (“Christianity and
Culture” 35).
Knowledge of the self through relation and attention of the will can only occur
with the aid of grace due to the fallen nature of humanity. Only God’s will is complete;
human will is deficient. Consequently, only human minds have a need for deliberation in
choice. As Augustine writes “when a man deliberates, a single soul wavers between
different wills” (Confessions 8.10.23). One can choose how to regard a person—either as
a self or an object—but one cannot and does not chose rightly again and again. The
beginning of the pursuit of wisdom in decision-making is “not to will what I willed and to
will what you [God] willed” (Augustine, Confessions 9.1.1). Yet the self cannot choose
this alone. God creates a relational order of intimate personhood for His creatures within
which we can practice selfhood by grace.
1.3.4 Intimacy of the Self, God, and the Other
The very nature of humankind reflects the centrality of intimacy in human
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relations. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis argues that because of our role as creatures, we
are granted with a unique relationship to our Creator, for “God is both further from us,
and nearer to us, than any other being” (33). Our power of will, thought, and indeed even
of selfhood is dependent upon God, and because of this, “the intimacy between God and
even the meanest creatures is closer than any that creatures can attain with one another”
(33). This dependence is not impersonal, however. God calls His creatures into an
intimate relationship with Him. MacDonald writes that if we are able to see God as
Father, then we should advance “to understand he is far more than father—that his
nearness to us is beyond the embodiment of the highest ideal of father; that that
fatherhood of God is but a step towards the Godhood for them that can receive it”
(Unspoken Sermons 27). We are called to participate in the Trinity of Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit and, consequently, to carry this triadic relation into all interactions with
others. The trinity is the shape of relationship. For example, Chesterton speaks
specifically of the basic human relation of father, mother, and child as the crux of human
history. He writes “if we are not of those who begin by invoking a divine Trinity, we must
none the less invoke a human Trinity: and see that triangle repeated everywhere in the
pattern of the world” (49). The human family, the basis of human temporal life of selves
and others, finds its roots in a trinity of relation.
In the beginning of creation, however, there was only one man and one woman.
Yet there is God. From the perspective of this project, then, even the most uniquely
“dyadic” relationships—namely, eros relationships—must be triadic in form. Eros holds a
unique position in human relations, for it constitutes one of the first human experiences of
truly placing the other in the space of the heart where the self once occupied. When we
reflect upon ourselves in romantic love, we realize that it “has made appetite itself
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altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of
another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the
law (towards one person) by loving our neighbors as ourselves” (Lewis, The Four Loves
114). In Eros, the self chooses the other, and, consequently, takes the first step in
choosing the Person and Relation underlying all relationships and the very identity of the
self. “It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in
us without a rival” (Lewis, The Four Loves 114). Accordingly, the unity of a man and a
woman is philosophically and phenomenologically significant. Ephesians 5:22-33
articulates the sacred relation between man and wife as a reflection of the relation
between Christ and His church. At the core of this relationship, then, is order, self-
sacrifice, and, most importantly, grace. By grace, Eros begets Charity, an even higher
order of love.
These relational dynamics emerge based on the movement of individual wills.
While humans cannot choose the form of relating in general (for this form is written into
the nature of creation), a person must choose how to relate each day to the other. Due to
the phenomenon of alterity and selfhood, decision-making in relationships becomes a
significant aspect of interpersonal communication theory and practice.
1.4. Moral Law, Judgment, and Action
1.4.1 Judgment and Decision-making in IPC Studies
The interpersonal communication literature treats the capacity for choice, the
methods of decision-making, and the consequences of relational decisions in a variety of
ways. The varieties in these approaches aim to answer questions of how a person makes
relational judgments as well as chooses to act or not act upon their interpretations. Due to
the social scientific foundation of much of the literature, many interpersonal theories
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maintain strong connections to presuppositions of learning theory. This framework
generally views interpersonal interactions as consisting of complex interplays of
cognitive behavior and communicative contexts which guide personal decision-making
and collective problem-solving. Behaviorism and cognitivism are two approaches to
learning theory which focus on the decision-making and behaviors of the self within the
learning environment (Smith). While these approaches differ concerning their focus on
either the role of the environment or the autonomy of the individual learner, both assume
that relational behaviors are shaped by the anticipation of consequences. Communicative
interchanges constitute complex stimulus-response contexts in which individual behavior
is conditioned by environmental reinforcement. Reinforcement helps the self to build
relational memory for further perception, interpretation, and decision-making.[2] Whether
the choice is to pursue or end relational encounters based on perceived mutual pleasure,
satisfaction, and gratification (Thibault and Kelly) or to avoid dissonant communicative
exchanges (Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance), these theories presuppose that
human beings are rational individuals who pursue consistency between thought and
action in relationships.
Other theorists take a social constructivist approach to learning theory,
presupposing that knowledge and, consequently, judgment are based on individual
relationships with others. Albert Bandura’s work articulates the role which modeling
others and imitation of behaviors plays in the formation of individual personalities and
value system. Other people exercise significant influence on individual values, co-
constructing relational environments consisting of particular expectations, behaviors, and
rules for intimacy. Rules for reciprocation, commitment, and authority are just some of
the ways in which relational decision-making is shaped by one’s interactions with the
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other (Cialdini). Essentially, one is socialized into relationships, a term which also holds
significant theoretical import for small group and organizational communication theories.
Consequently, many interpersonal theories advocate for mindfulness, or an awareness of
the extent to which perceptions and behaviors are shaped socially (see Langer, “Minding
Matters: The Consequences of Mindlessness-Mindfulness” for an earlier example of this
work). Becoming mindful in interpersonal situations involves an awareness of those
social expectations and contextual rules which trigger interpersonal behavior and the
ability to align these with interpersonal goals, roles, and messages.
Arguably, interpersonal decision-making from learning theory perspectives situate
the self at the crux of the communicative model of interchange. Self-competence, self-
validation, consistency between thought and action, and authenticity in behavior play key
roles in the complexity of relationships with others. Walter J. Carl and Steve Duck write
that “everyday talk is a matter of continuously seeking confirmation of the self in relation
to others” and that every interpersonal exchange allows the self to “take a position, to
espouse beliefs, and to promulgate attitudes and opinions” (3). Those individuals who are
able to utilize their full capacity for interpretation, knowledge, and judgment in
interpersonal situations are most able to submit to social influences and expectations of
communicative environments without compromising their personal goals and values.
Thus, in a significant way, the culmination of learning theory models in concepts such as
mindfulness, self-competence, and self-actualization points to the centrality of human
agency. As Carl Rogers claims, learning how to live as a whole person in a world of
others must be self-initiated. While the self is shaped and sustained through relationships
with others, a person ultimately has a choice.
From the Christian philosophical perspective guiding this project, the question of
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human choice is a foundational one. Lewis shares similar inquiries and interpretations
regarding self-concept and competency in interpersonal relationships with many major
theorists of the interpersonal communication literature. From his perspective, the self
absolutely is important. In fact, how the self is regarded in relation the Other is the pivot
upon which one’s eternal soul turns. Paradoxically, however, the self is significant only
in relation and derivation. Consequently, Lewis’s framework lends complexity to the
question of choice in interpersonal relationships in two ways: (1) it presupposes the
existence of a relational law a priori to discursive exchanges themselves and thus a priori
to the self; and (2) it frames human agency and capacity for judgment in the context of
love. This shifts the concepts of self-actualization and self-competency to the metaphors
of self-revelation and ordinate will.
1.4.2 The Moral Law and Reason
Lewis and his predecessors presuppose the existence of a relational, moral law
which has been in existence since the creation of the world. Generally speaking, concepts
of “right” or “wrong,” and “good” or “bad” guide relational behavior and expectation. In
Mere Christianity, Lewis writes “the Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of
instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right
conduct) by directing the instincts” (24). From a phenomenological standpoint, when we
encounter otherness, we become aware of boundaries. These boundaries point to an
inherent need for relational law. While contemporary interpersonal literature may posit
these relational laws as constructed and maintained through discourse, Lewis assumes
that this law is already there—not constructed. Lewis argues that this law, or this
“something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behaviour,” is “quite definitely
real—a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us” (30). This
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law is revealed to human beings at the very core of their relational selves and ultimately
points them to truth in judgment and action.
The quality of human relational experiences is dependent upon our recognition
and participation in the moral law of creation. The world is not constructed simply by
human experience; individual beings must claim a discursive space within a created
world. In the process, we are guided by glimpses of how things ought to be and really are.
Lewis argues that this belief once shaped daily interpersonal life and relational judgment.
He writes that until modern philosophical movements, most people believed and taught
“that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous”
to the universe and that phenomena “did not merely receive, but could merit, our
approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt” (The Abolition of Man 15). A
person feels pleasure or pain in a relational experience because one ought to do so: an
ought based not merely on socialization but on ontology. One’s ontological position
shapes one’s capacity for judgment. Lewis further argues:
And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of
objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional
states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought
to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that
liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in
that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be
reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform.
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
(19)
Thus the presupposition that human beings are rational beings who seek consistency
between thought and action is not a new idea to theories of interpersonal communication.
According to Lewis, reason itself calls for consistency. Yet to be rational is not merely a
capacity of the human agent, it is an ontological necessity because Truth is a priori. One
feels dissonance when one acts inconsistently with the objective order of relational
25
existence, yet it is a dissonance of a completely different phenomenological kind due to
its roots in ontological necessity. Humans feel “ought” in order to “be” at all, for the
feeling of the “shall” and “shall not” reveals the first steps toward relationally engaging
the other, the self, and, ultimately, God.
1.4.3 Pain and Happiness in Self-Revelation
What, then, are we to learn about interpersonal relationships from our physical
and emotional experiences of the world? What “ought” we to feel and do in the presence
of real others? In the Confessions, Augustine argues that while all individuals agree that
they want to be happy, the particularities of individual interpretations of satisfaction
necessarily vary. The presence of alterity may solicit relational problems as partners
attempt to find what satisfies them relationally. If the actualization of happiness were
dependent upon the individual, the hope for realizing satisfaction in relationships would
lie in contingencies of the communicative competence of relational partners. Happiness,
according to Lewis’s interpretation, must lie in a source of a different kind than theories
of interpersonal self-presentation and competence would allow one to believe. In fact, he
claims that joy is not something one contains or exercises but that which is revealed to a
person by God (Surprised by Joy). Augustine argues that at the seat of a person’s
memory, and hence knowledge, is God. We do learn and are motivated by experiential
memories and complex cognitive associations of abstract ideals; however, the capacity
for these memories and associations is derived from God. The very existence of
happiness as an idea depends upon the right relation between the will of the self and the
one Truth underlying all experiences. Augustine writes “when they love the happy life,
which is no different from joy in the truth, then indeed they love the truth as well”
(Confessions 10.23.33).
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Due to the fallen condition of humanity, however, it is difficult for humans to
know and to make good relational decisions. In fact, some good decisions are
momentarily, yet necessarily, painful. Lewis regards the root of all sin as the willful
preference of the self over God. This sin has plagued humanity since the garden of Eden
and taints, if not rules, human agency (Mere Christianity). Pain plays an important role
not only in one’s phenomenological experience of the world but the knowledge of the
world beyond the Fall. Lewis argues that pain operates to disrupt two of our ordinary
inclinations: it “shatters the illusion that all is well” and also “shatters the illusion that
what we have, whether good or bad in itself, is our own and enough for us” (The Problem
of Pain 94). We are born into a condition where we must learn how our impulses and
actions do or do not fit in the relational order of creation—pain dictates that we cannot
steadfastly ignore the Other. At the core of our relations is a true “ought”: we ought to
love. As Lewis writes, “to love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart
will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken” (The Four Loves 121). Love is not just
an act or an emotion. It is knowing itself; one knows what one loves (Augustine,
Confessions; On the Trinity). Knowledge of the self and the other are necessarily derived
from love.
Lewis claims that Christian teachings point to self-knowledge as a painful,
sacrificial experience. It is a sacrifice, however, that cannot be made within one’s own
power. In the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he uses the metaphor of scales being peeled
from a young boy’s skin in order to describe to moment of self-revelation before God.
After several attempts to remove the scales from himself, the young boy Eustace must
submit to the lion Aslan for help. The result is a revelatory episode of intense pain and
unspeakable pleasure:
27
The very first tear he [Aslan] made was so deep that I thought it had gone
right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse
than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it
was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off....Well, he peeled the
beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three
times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever
so much thicker, darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had
been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller
than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn’t like that much for I
was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me into
the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it
became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and
splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw
why. I’d turned into a boy again. (116)
The illustration of shedding one’s skin, or armor, points to the need for God to reveal the
self. The self must be sacrificed because that is the very nature of good relationships.
Lewis argues that the story of Christ’s sacrificial love is not meant to make us more
careful of our own happiness. On the contrary, “we shall draw nearer to God, not by
trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering
them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour” (The Four Loves 122). Good
relationships turn more upon holiness than happiness, and, in that, they bring real joy.
1.5 The Willful Choice of Intimacy
According to Lewis, the Christian tradition teaches that humans are made for
heaven, and, consequently, made for the most intimate and joyful existence. This desire
for heaven, for “our proper place,” (Lewis, “Weight of Glory” 29) is a piercing sweetness
underlying all of our relationships. There is a distinctly spatial orientation to love in this
Christian philosophical frame; love is a space of relation in which the self and the other
can truly be and know together. The fullness of the self is only found in relations that help
their ultimate desire to be revealed. In On the Trinity, Augustine claims that to truly know
anything or anyone in this world is to willfully engage in how that relation “is” in God’s
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created order, not in how they “ought to be” in personal interpretation. He writes:
The more a thing is known, but not fully known, the more the mind desires
to know the rest…For that form touches the mind that knows and thinks; it
reveals the beauty of minds that have been brought together in fellowship
by listening to and answering questions through signs that are known.
(10.1.2)
Within the created order, we are made to listen to all that is to be known from God and to
seek intimacy with the Knower. Lewis argues that such significant Christian thinkers as
Milton, Johnson, and Aquinas regard the source of all true desire as appreciation from
God. We want to be “good listeners” of God, much like a “good child” takes comfort in
listening to and doing the bidding of his parent: “nothing is so obvious in a child—not in
a conceited child, but in a good child—as its great and undisguised pleasure in being
praised...of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared” (“Weight of
Glory” 37). We are motivated by our shared created desire for intimacy with God.
Yet our attempts at intimacy in this world will be deficient as well as continually
subject to corruption from the Fall. Therefore, the task of intimacy now is to direct our
willful loves in good ways in order to prepare our hearts for such meetings. When
Augustine (Confessions; On the Trinity) addresses our need to properly order our will, he
is speaking to the multi-faceted phenomena of our loves. We must think first about the
placement of our loving attention: Is it proper in relation to other loves? (i.e, which love
do we attend to first?) Then, we are to be concerned with the quantity of our love: Is our
love true to its own order? (i.e., do we love too little or too much?) We have both of these
dynamics at play when we choose who and how to love. We do not always choose
correctly. We do not know the world, the self, or even our own will in any context but one
of derivation, and we cannot act outside of relation. Further still, we live in a world of
misguided and corrupted hearts—we both exercise and are vulnerable to imperfect loves.
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How are we to work faithfully at intimacy given such conditions?
Lewis argues that we must choose intimacy, and we must choose it with the
reality of our relational personhood in mind. He writes “but since it is only too obvious
that we can withhold ourselves, our wills and hearts, from God, we can, in that sense,
also give them” (The Four Loves 128). Given the trinity of human relations, every
communicative exchange is one between the self, the other, and God. Every relational
choice is a turning of the will either toward God or away from Him. Yet there exists even
more complexity in this formula. By the willful choice to give our love, we place
ourselves in a position of receptivity to love. Lewis’s discussion of need-love and gift-
love in The Four Loves illustrates how we receive love even before we recognize our
own capacity to give it. In a very real sense, we are made lovable because we are loved
first. This is how we are to choose intimacy. Not solely with the conviction of what it is
we ought to give; we enter into loving relations with the humble recognition that Love
first chose us.
When a person offers one’s heart to another in any loving capacity, he or she
receives Love. Lewis writes that we know God through our relations with others in the
everyday. He states that “next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the
holiest object presented to your senses” for God dwells in all persons (“Weight of Glory”
46). This project argues that when we are able to focus our attention on the eternal
Personhood within all persons as well as the particular person before us, we are able to
love each other well. There is something qualitatively different about approaching
intimate relationships with the “weight of glory” (Lewis) on our backs. It is not a
perspective which denies the existential—in fact, existence is given more weight because
of the ontological. Yet it is a challenging approach to human relations; one which calls for
30
a more thorough look at the presence and practice of grace in intimate interpersonal
communication.
1.6 The Presence and Practice of Grace: A Compelling Alternative
The remaining chapters of the project continue to address the initial questions and
concerns of human being in discourse and relation from these theoretical starting points.
Issues of sentiments, will, and responsiveness to the other in relationship create a
philosophical foundation for thinking about the presence of grace and its practice in
intimate interpersonal relationships. This chapter argues that we cannot interpret, know,
relate, or love rightly without the Other, and from Lewis’s standpoint, without God.
Lewis writes that our experiences in loving relationships themselves “prove that they are
unworthy to take the place of God by the fact that they cannot even remain themselves
and do what they promise to do without God’s help” (The Four Loves 118). We need help
in loving one another. Lewis’s work situates grace as both a presence and a practice in
intimacy. First, we are born into relations—both with God and other human beings—in
which love and mercy are extended to us. Second, we are compelled to extend grace to
others through the interpretive power of our sentiments, the willful choices of our minds
and hearts, and responsiveness to personhood. How then, as scholars and practitioners,
can we talk about intimate love with attention toward the presence and practice of grace
in the contemporary moment?
The work of this project is to bring the foundational questions of interpersonal
communication studies concerning human nature, discourse, relation, and action to bear
with a philosophical understanding of love and grace from the framework of Lewis and
other major thinkers of the Christian intellectual tradition. Bringing premodern
philosophical assumptions of heart, choice, and action in human relation to contemporary
31
discourse concerning intimacy, we can better understand the dynamics at play when
young adults develop intimate relationships today. During the onset and subsequent
growth of interpersonal communication studies in the modern age, the literature builds
upon questions of human agency and relational and social progress. Into postmodernity,
the literature expands into considerations of subjectivity and the discursive creation of
relational spaces. Lewis’s work emerges historically amidst these transitions—when
modern and postmodern theoretical trends are beginning to be in conversation with one
another. Consequently, Chapter Two situates Lewis’s work not only as an entry point into
premodern Christian philosophical presuppositions concerning human relations but also
as a compelling alternative to theoretical trends and issues of human communication that
were at play in his historical moment. As the concluding chapter of the project suggests,
such an alternative continues to address the questions and practices of intimacy by young
adults even today. The remaining chapters frame the writings of Lewis as a useful guide
in building a theory of grace in intimate interpersonal communication attentive to love as
heartfelt choice, willful labor, and responsiveness to forms of personhood.
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CHAPTER TWO
LEWIS ON QUESTIONS OF HUMAN RELATIONAL BEING
IN THE MODERN AGE
2.1 Introduction
This chapter outlines the scholarly discussion concerning the theoretical
presuppositions and trends of modernity, paying particular attention to issues relevant to
interpersonal communication. Lewis engages similar questions and concerns regarding
his historical moment as other philosophers who reflect on the epistemological and
relational implications of modernity, such as Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Charles
Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Christopher Lasch. Lewis sees how modernity holds
serious implications for the theoretical and pragmatic conditions of human relation, loss
of public and private spheres defining relational order, and for decision-making in
relational contexts.
Although he is not entirely unique in this approach,[1] Lewis’s Christian theism
lends him a compelling scholarly and pragmatic standpoint amongst the other critics of
modernity which is worth pursuing within the study and practice of interpersonal
communication. Most importantly, he is a Christian theist writing and living within the
cusp of historical change. Challenging political and social contexts are at the forefront of
everyday human life (see, for example, his lecture on “Learning in War-Time”).
Developments in technology and mass media are shaping expectations for human agency
in relationships (see The Screwtape Letters and That Hideous Strength as examples of his
fictional works which address these themes). Science and history are being reconsidered
through shifting paradigmatic assumptions (see “Historicism” and “Modern Man and the
33
Categories of His Thought”). Accordingly, the chapter discusses key texts in which Lewis
articulates the problematic trends within his historical moment concerning
presuppositions of human discourse and relation. Together, these texts speak to the
presence and practice of grace in intimate interpersonal communication.
2.2 Modernity’s Critics and Implications for IPC
2.2.1 Progress and the Condition of Human Relation
Many critics find the presupposed conditions guiding human knowledge, relation,
and behavior in modernity to be problematic. One of the most significant themes framing
these presuppositions is modernity’s emphasis on progress. Christopher Lasch argues that
the modern conception of progress offers “the promise of steady improvement with no
foreseeable ending at all” and the conviction that “nothing is certain expect the imminent
obsolescence of all our certainties” in modern scientific theory, technology, and
philosophy (47-48). The result is the emergence of a social order founded on science: a
consequence of the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and discourse. In “Modernity
Versus Postmodernity,” Habermas characterizes cultural modernity of the Enlightenment,
from the work of Max Weber, as “the separation of the substantive reason expressed in
religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are: science, morality, and
art” (8). The autonomous structures of the cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and
aesthetic-expressive frame human-being-in-discourse as subject to specialization.
Habermas explains that the modern project introduces “the culture of expertise” (9) as
autonomous conditions of discourse are assessed and institutionalized. The goal is to
address questions of knowledge, justice, and taste in their appropriate domains as distinct
manifestations of human relation. Ideologies and issues of belief are thus divorced from
issues of knowledge or even aesthetics. The aim of discourse becomes unduly descriptive
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and the lack of prescription in analyzing conditions of human life leads to the treatment
of interpersonal relations as “an engineering science of human relations” (Arendt,
Between Past and Future 59). To its detriment, modernity segments human-being-in-
discourse from what Habermas calls “the hermeneutics of everyday communication” (9).
Consequently, the ideal of progress calls into question the inherent and complex sociality
of human life.
The metaphor of progress and the consequent segmentation of human discourse
undermines the philosophical understanding of action as relational in nature. The
premodern world of the Greeks understood human life as essentially social and human
action as entirely dependent upon the presence of others (Arendt, The Human Condition).
Modernity’s narrative of progress assumes a world of consequentiality, not necessarily of
relation. This is understood most distinctly in the Enlightenment ideals of utilitarianism
and humanitarianism, modern philosophies which posited “the ideal of self-responsible
reason,” “the pursuit of happiness,” and “the ideal of universal and impartial
benevolence” as maintaining central significance (C. Taylor, Sources of the Self 322). The
Lockean radical disengagement and the Cartesian emphasis on self-reason frees the
individual from error and prejudice in order to practice utility and universal benevolence.
Thus the narrative of progress is one of “the successive unchainings of reason, leading to
successive discoveries of truth, and hence overcomings of error” (C. Taylor, Sources of
the Self 352) so that human beings can live in a society in which the consequences of
their actions are universally understood and communally enforced for the betterment of
all involved. In this philosophy lies the seeds of the “reification” of “everyday praxis”
(Habermas 11) and objectification of human relations in order to improve life together.
Critics of modernity argue that, ironically, this emphasis on universal freedoms
35
for humanity undermine the social complexity of human life in relation. This is a result
from the loss of particularity—specifically in interpersonal role. Hannah Arendt
characterizes the modern age as one in which the distinction between the public and
private of spheres of life have become blurred in a new relational existence which she
deems “the social realm” (The Human Condition 28). Prior to the onset of modernity, the
city-state and the household maintained distinct boundaries which were interrelated. The
household functioned as a monarchy designed to meet the necessities of life and labor of
each of its members. The polis, by contrast, constituted the realm of freedom of speech
and action for citizens. These spheres of human relation depended upon on another for
the fulfillment of individual and collective potential. To successfully carry out the basic
order of the household in the meeting of fundamental needs provided one not only with a
physical but also with a phenomenological space to engage the public world of ideas. An
individual knew order as a result of relationships with others in the household and thus
was prepared to meet others in the public realm with a freedom of relational perspective;
thus, “the mastering of the necessities of life in the household was the condition for
freedom of the polis” (The Human Condition 30-31). Human action is inherently ordered
and relational: in no other manner can one realize freedom. Therefore, modern arguments
for the collapse of distinct private and public spheres in order to support the goals of
universal freedom for humanity in fact compromise what essentially makes us human.
2.2.2 The Secular Public and Inordinate Private Relationships
The modern conception of progress leads to dominant presuppositions of
secularity in the public realm. Secularity constitutes a radical shift from premodern
presuppositions of understanding human being in ordinate relation. In A Secular Age,
Taylor characterizes the public spaces of all premodern societies as being “in some way
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connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion
of ultimate reality” (1). Lasch, quoting Richard Niebuhr, argues that the Christian
conviction that life in temporality bears hope of redemption calls for a critical
engagement of the ontological significance of human history, traditions, and
relationships. By contrast, the public and private spaces of modernity have been emptied
of this ontological adherence. Instead, as we function within various spheres of activity in
the public realm, such as the economic, the political, or the moral, “the norms and
principles we follow, the deliberations we engage in, generally don’t refer us to God or to
any religious belief; the considerations we act on are internal to the ‘rationality’ of each
sphere” (C. Taylor, A Secular Age 2). Through the segmentation of the “culture of
expertise” (Habermas 9), modernity finds its public spaces ontologically de-centered and,
thus, hard-pressed to find definitive boundaries and purposes beyond human arbitration.
Since one’s boundaries between the public and the household are most often permeable,
the ontological challenges of public secularity also manifest challenges within the realm
of intimate interpersonal communication.
With the loss of purpose within public spheres of politics and the workplace, the
private domain becomes overtaxed. The modern secular emphasis on the universals of
human rational and behavioral freedom counter the essence of intimate relationships in
the household: that is, particularity of relation and role. The household contains the
foundational relations of a society with definitive purposes. Due to the loss of
particularity and ontological purpose in the public sphere, Lasch argues that modernity
finds people desperately trying to recreate that significance within circles of intimate
friends and family, “stretching its [the household’s] emotional resources to the limit”
(32). Love and intimacy, as a result, become undirected, undifferentiated, and
37
disengaged. He claims:
My study of the family suggested a broader conclusion: that the capacity
for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the
hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race. It needs to attach itself to
specific people and places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human
rights. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general. The
dream of universal brotherhood, because it rests on the sentimental fiction
that men and women are all the same, cannot survive the discovery that
they differ. Love, on the other hand—flesh-and-blood love, as opposed to
a vague, watery, humanitarianism—is attracted to complementary
differences, not to sameness. (36)
These scholarly critiques of modernity suggest that our current frames for intimate
relationships have become idealistic. In contrast to premodern assumptions of
interpersonal relations in the household, modern concepts of intimate relations lack
ordinate relationships subject to particular roles in line with ontological and existential
significance. From this modern idealism rises challenges articulated in the interpersonal
communication scholarship such as Giddens’s “plastic sexuality,” Gurstein’s
“claustrophobic atmosphere of intimacy,” and Hall and Zhao’s work on cohabitation and
divorce wherein the conditions of intimacy have become restrained by idealism and,
consequently, subjective individualism.
2.2.3 Subjective Decision-Making in Relational Contexts
The emphasis on universal rationality and progress leads to a subjectivism in the
public realm which holds significant implications for relational contexts and personal
decision-making. This stems primarily from a lack of “strong evaluations” of relational
behavior and discourse in both public and private contexts (C. Taylor, Sources of the
Self). Alasdair MacIntyre writes of the loss of impersonal criteria underlying individual
opinion for debate within the public realm. Paradoxically, he claims that the modern
conception of universal rationality—instead of supplying public moral argument with
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tools for debate—has deprived the very theories and practices upon which discourse
occurs at all. By discrediting ideologies and overemphasizing human capacity for
disengaged reason, most modern philosophies lead to the assumption that moral
disagreement is nothing but “a clash of antagonistic wills” while individuals vie for the
articulation of objective standards (MacIntyre 9). Moral discourse is denied particular
conviction yet embraces individual power of argument. He argues that “we
simultaneously and inconsistently treat moral argument as an exercise of our rational
power and as a mere expressive assertion” (MacIntyre 11, emphasis added). With
discursive tools of ordinance, reason, and persuasion subverted, the self is left alone to
decide among a myriad of seemingly viable options of relation. This ultimately leads to
the emergence of what MacIntyre deems the discursive and relational framework of the
modern age: emotivism. He defines emotivism as “the doctrine that all evaluative
judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of
preference, expression of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in
character” (12, emphasis original). In the modern era, decision-making itself struggles for
relational significance.
Scholarly debate concerning effects of modern presuppositions on interpersonal
relationships in the postmodern era points to the dominant trends of subjectivism and
individualism. Anthony Giddens’s work, The Transformation of Intimacy, addresses
changing sexual activity and expectations of intimate relational partners in contemporary
life. Giddens claims that his work concentrates on an interpersonal order characterized by
the “pure relationship,” a relationship of sexual and emotional equality (1-2). From the
rise of romanticism, an emotional abyss separates male and female as the perception of
successful intimacy becomes less concerned with extrinsic assessments and
39
manifestations of relational stability and more focused on the intrinsic qualities of a bond
which perpetuate emotional satisfaction for intimate partners. Simply put, a pure
relationship exists “purely” within itself, as opposed to a traditional relationship which
presupposes societal, cultural, and familial extensions of relational partners. Giddens
suggests that the sexuality emergent from this intimacy revolution—which he coins
“plastic sexuality”—is de-centered, de-naturalized, de-socialized, and bound in individual
subjectivity (2). He writes:
“Sexuality” today has been discovered, opened up and made accessible to
the development of varying life-styles. It is something each of us “has,” or
cultivates, no longer a natural condition which an individual accepts as a
preordained state of affairs. Somehow, in a way that has to be investigated,
sexuality functions as a malleable feature of the self, a prime connecting
point between body, self-identity and social norms. (15)
In contemporary discourse and practice in interpersonal relations, traditional conceptions
of intimacy have been usurped by the sexual and emotional drives of multiple
individuals.
The emergence of “pure relationships” out of the practices of “plastic sexuality”
creates expectations and conditions of intimacy which have become problematic for
discursive beings who function relationally. Among young adults especially, there is
increasing unawareness or consideration of boundary and purpose in the formation of
intimate relationships. Rochelle Gurstein, in The Repeal of Reticence, points to the
problem of “the claustrophobic atmosphere of intimacy” due to the collapse of public and
private boundaries in the postmodern era after the emergence of “the cult of domesticity”
(28-29). Like Lasch in The True and Only Heaven, Gurstein argues that with shifting
gender roles and identity in the domestic sphere, and most notably with the loss of the
public function of the household, the conditions of marriage and family have become “a
40
refuge for emotion and self-disclosure” as “the promise of happiness” overburdens the
scope and practices of interpersonal communication among family members (29). As a
result, intimacy becomes isolationist, emotivistic, and short-lived. Notably, scholars who
have extended Gidden’s work on intimacy, such as David Hall and John Zhao, have
found that the attitude of a “pure relationship” in cohabiting couples correlates to higher
relational dissatisfaction and divorce rate. Studies such as these show that, ironically,
those individuals who adopt an overly inclusive and accepting ethic in terms of relational
identity and practices are more likely to find themselves isolated in their preferences and
unable to be relationally responsive.
Contemporary scholarship concerning decision-making in relational contexts is
less likely to be attentive to ordinate relations manifested in discourse than to issues of
mutual self-satisfaction, competency, and relational success. Critics of modernity point to
the problems inherent within these assumptions: the objectification of human relations,
the loss of particularity in social life, and undue subjectivism in discourse and decision-
making. C.S. Lewis is, without doubt, critical of the major theoretical and practical trends
of his historical moment and his writings will be framed as such in this chapter. However,
through his criticisms one can see a deep attentiveness and concern for the legitimacy of
the questions and problems of social and private life as they are disclosed in his lifetime.
The modern age brings to bear questions of technology, objectivity and subjectivity, and
purpose in decision-making to the expectations and practices of interpersonal
relationships in unprecedented ways. Lewis finds his response to these questions through
hermeneutic inquiry grounded within the Christian intellectual tradition. Lewis is by no
means the only critic of modernity working from a Judeo-Christian perspective. Arendt,
for example, works from the perspective of the Jewish tradition while also is influenced
41
significantly by the existentialism of St. Augustine (see her Love and St. Augustine).
Taylor and MacIntyre, like Lewis, work with Christian theist presuppositions and are
specifically attentive to the religious and intellectual traditions of Catholicism. Lewis
takes his place among these thinkers and, as an additive viewpoint, he speaks directly to
the unique relational challenges of his historical moment as they are concerned with the
practical need for grace in all intimate interpersonal contexts.
2.3 Lewis’s Response to Modernity
2.3.1 The “Modern Man and Categories of His Thought”
In his list of modern categories of thought, Lewis critiques two specific
philosophical stances of the modern thinker: practicality and historicism. Like other
critics of modernity, Lewis posits utility and radical disengagement as obscuring human
understanding of the phenomenal world. In both his nonfiction and fiction, he places
particular emphasis on the dangers of technology in the pursuit of progressively objective
and practical concern with the world. This quest leads to an unquestioned belief in
technological and sociological progress. Lewis argues that these philosophies hold
detrimental implications for human being in relation: mainly, the objectification of
interpersonal relationships.
Lewis is keenly aware of the dangers of materialism which modernity promotes.
The result has been the disengagement of humankind from nature and, consequently,
from natural relationships with each other. Lewis characterizes this as “practicality”
(“Modern Man and the Categories of His Thought” 211). Modernity supports a
technology of thinking and relating which is characteristic of disembodied scientism—all
choices must past the test of consistent interpretation and applicability to the observable,
material world. In this frame, humankind itself becomes an object of measurement,
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directing modern thought into a false sense of intellectual autonomy through science and
technology. Ironically, however, Lewis argues that the quest for complete objectivity and
scientific understanding degenerates humankind into subhuman-like engagement of the
world. He describes modernity as a mindset encouraging the “disinterested concern with
truth for truth’s sake;” instead, humans are becoming “as narrowly ‘practical’ as the
irrational animals” (“Modern Man and the Categories of His Thought” 209, 211). Modern
objectivity encourages a disengagement from interest, for interest may skew observation
and interpretation. Thinkers are encouraged metaphorically to step further and further
back from an object until nothing is clear but the “objective.” Lewis argues, however,
that this is a fool’s move: modern thinkers do not gain more “distance” from what they
are observing. On the contrary, they become so near to the object of explanation that they
cannot see it for what it truly is: an object of interest. Without the perspective of interest,
the object becomes limited by immediacy and consequentiality. Thus, modern
philosophies encourage a kind of animalistic practicality, in which bias, a uniquely
human phenomenon (see Gadamer’s Truth and Method for a phenomenological rendering
of bias), is argued to be suppressed.
According to Lewis, interest and objectivity are interrelated. As a Christian theist,
he argues that human capacity for understanding is divinely derived. Therefore, any and
all objects worth identifying and studying exist within an established matrix of both
eternal and temporal interests and significance. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis argues
that to reason truly is to recognize the congruity or incongruity of our sentiments and
interests in accordance with the reality of a divinely created universe. He supports
premodern presuppositions of the interrelation of material and spirit, or that which is
natural and supernatural. When human interests become divorced from what is truly here
43
to know in both the eternal and temporal, the result is a society obscured by information,
not informed by reason.
Thus modern theoretical assumptions concerning human interest and objective
decision-making compromise the development of healthy relationships. In That Hideous
Strength, Lewis extrapolates modern materialistic assumptions into a dystopian
technocracy under the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E). The
N.I.C.E is a progressive partnership of the state and science, engaging in social
experiments to engineer and control intellectually and materially ideal humans capable of
communication with superhuman beings. According to the leadership of the N.I.C.E., the
first step to higher intelligence involves radical materialism, or “the realisation that one
must go outside the whole world of our subjective emotions. It is only as you begin to do
so, that you discover how much of what you mistook for your thought was merely a by-
product of your blood and nervous tissues” (Lewis, That Hideous Stength 258). The goal
of this dystopia is clear: the elimination of the natural by way of radical materialism and
scientism. “The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all
Technocracy” (259). In modernity, what is natural is overtaken by what is technical, and
what is worth knowing is only that which is useful for the progression of humankind.
From Lewis’s point of view, what necessarily results is a “hard, unchangeable core of
individuals,” such as the N.I.C.E, who are vulnerable to being run by a cold, stuttering
Deputy Director who is disembodied objectivity (242). Relationally, such a framework is
unavoidably detrimental and ultimately unsustainable. Real human growth (Lewis does
not use the terminology of intellectual or technological “progress”) constitutes a fullness
of willful interest and relational attentiveness.
How one regards human purpose in history, then, holds significant implications
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for how one chooses to live today. Lewis argues that modern philosophical assumptions
of progress truncate the capacity for human choice and action in everyday contexts. He
argues that the adoption of developmentalism, or historicism, is the principle of reality
for modern thinkers due to their comfort with abstraction: “the modern mind accepts as a
formula for the universe in general the principle ‘Almost nothing may be expected to turn
into almost everything’” (“Modern Man and His Categories of Thought” 210). The
modern man begins with nothing (“that a ordered cosmos should emerge from chaos, that
life should come out of the inanimate, reason out of instinct, civilization out of savagery,
virtue out of animalism”) and ends with a human-engineered utopia (210). The modern
manifestations of historicism emerged from Hegelian philosophy and Marxist
materialism, in which the progression of human spiritual, intellectual, and material
capacities drive history forward. Consequently, Lewis argues that modernists emphasize
the future as the center of human significance.
For Lewis, history and the future are meaningful. However, they are meaningful
only in the context of eternity. He quotes George MacDonald in describing the experience
of temporality as one with "the holy present" (“Historicism” 224) and writes that “the
Present is all lit up with eternal rays” (The Screwtape Letters 76). It is in the present that
human beings are able to exercise their capacity for choice and action. Yet Lewis knows
that one’s focus of attention regarding the relationship between choice, action, and time
can be distracted easily and thus compromised. For example, in The Screwtape Letters,
Screwtape tells his nephew that a demon’s job is to keep his “patient” away from the
Present and focused on the Future. Screwtape argues that “thought about the Future
inflames hope and fear” and the patient will act based on unknown realities rather than
“the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace,
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giving thanks for the present pleasure” (76). It is not necessarily the focus on any single
moment in time which causes concern for Lewis—one can think about the past or the
future purposefully and fruitfully. It is the discursive isolation of all moments of time
from Eternity which he fears. He laments that the average thinker in his day is
encouraged to consider most history “bunk” (Lewis, “Is History Bunk?”) unless there is a
discernible linearity between the events of the past and the needs of the present moving
into the future. Real human beings do not live in linearity; we live in a phenomenological
fullness of time which brings existential and, Lewis would argue, ontological weight to
our choices in the everyday. How one considers the “then,” the “now,” and the “later”
holds significant implications for decision-making in everyday interpersonal contexts.
It is necessary to be attentive to a phenomenological engagement of past, present,
and future in the development of habits and relationships. Simply put, it matters how one
moves through history, and it is in the interpersonal realm where everyday choices hold
particular poignancy and immediacy. Lewis identifies a false sense of movement in
human relationships within the popular thinking of his day. One is led to believe that we
move in the abstracted space called “now” without regard to how where we’ve been and
where ultimately we are going matters. Accordingly, he argues that this linear
objectification constrains history within the limits of human achievement. Like
Screwtape suggests in the above quote, discourse concerning all forms of success—from
relational to intellectual—becomes rooted in “unrealities” (76): hypotheses concerning
what may happen or could be achieved. What happens interpersonally is the isolation of
persons from relational purposes in real time. Models of behavior and techniques of
communicative competence take the place of lived experiences of relational growth. By
contrast, Lewis’s Christian phenomenological framework opens history to the will of the
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Eternal. Such a belief by no means clarifies all of history; Lewis recognizes that there are
still many mysteries to human temporal life. Yet the perspective establishes teleological
weight for human decision-making and provides persons with direction to all relational
contexts. The role of the interlocutor thus shifts from that of the sole creator and
manager of a relationship to the enactor of relationships which have been afforded to
him since before time began.
The common thread of critique which Lewis holds for modern thought both in
regards to scientism and historicism is the assumption of relational disengagement. Yet,
under the guise of disengagement, we can become unduly contained (and thus
constrained) by the world and by one another. In such a state, humans lose the ability to
see and understand the truth of something in its entirety. Human relationships, and thus
humans themselves, become objects to be studied, engineered, controlled, and possessed:
Arendt’s “engineering science of human relations” (Between Past and Future 59). We
lose our agency, our responsiveness, and our power of enactment. Lewis argues that to
compromise understanding of human responsiveness is to compromise our most intimate
of relations. In his chapter on “Eros” in The Four Loves, Lewis counters the modern
evolutionist and psychoanalytic assumptions that sexual desire is the driving force of
human relational decision making. He specifically quotes George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four where:
his dreadful hero (so much less human than the four-footed heroes of his
excellent Animal Farm!), before towsing the heroine, demands a
reassurance, “You like doing this?” he asks, “I don’t mean simply me; I
mean the thing in itself.” He is not satisfied till he gets the answer, “I
adore it.”...Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros
wants the Beloved. (94, emphasis original)
One may experience sexuality without Eros, but what one encounters is subhuman. The
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power of human agency does not emerge by segmenting human functions into
dismembered categories. Lewis argues that we enter into relationships as participants of
the purposes, function, and needs of that relation, for “to participate is to be truly human”
(The Abolition of Man 74). Responsiveness in romance and intimacy is a uniquely human
phenomenon wherein the personhood of the other—embodied, emotional, intellectual,
and spiritual personhood reflective of God Himself—becomes the focus.
What Lewis points to is the easy movement in modern thought from
disengagement to dismemberment of the living, breathing creation. It is no wonder, then,
that he should take a strong stance against the modern scientific practice of vivisection:
“the victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral
utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law” (“Vivisection” 288). Metaphorically
speaking, complex human relationships are being mechanically and surgically simplified
in the modern dystopia. Lewis claims that this severely constrains human beings from
experiencing functional, discursive, and relational unity.
2.3.2 The “Inner Ring” Versus “Membership”
The disunity of modern technocracies is characterized by Lewis in a number of
ways. One such critique pertinent to this project is the modern perceptions of the elite, or
the expert. In the same vein as Habermas, Lewis points to the detrimental modernist drive
toward the segmentation and demonstrated expertise of categories of human experience.
He argues how this trend of modernity perverts the desire for knowledge and need for
relation. The result is dangerous to a basic human relational structure: the Inner Ring.
Lewis characterizes the Inner Ring as the desire to belong to a particular group of
persons exclusive of others. At face value, the inner ring is an unavoidable and relatively
neutral human discursive phenomenon. It can occur among friends sharing intimate
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thoughts or companions who need to get a particular job done. However, the danger of
the Inner Ring lies in the tendency for it to become the primary relational motivation for
an individual: “unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the
chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the
day you are too old to care” (Lewis, “The Inner Ring” 318). Lewis warns that what soon
results from the endless pursuit of Inner Rings is that the phenomenon of belonging
ceases to bring joy because the source of pleasure is not relational but situational. This is
precisely the problem with Mark Studdock in That Hideous Strength—the compulsive
desire to belong to the progressive inner ring of the N.I.C.E. at the expense of his
relationship with his wife and even his own safety. Lewis warns “inner ringers” such as
Mark: “You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humor or learning or wit
or any of the things that can be really enjoyed. You merely wanted to be ‘in.’ And that is a
pleasure that cannot last” (“The Inner Ring” 319).
When the object of pleasure from the Inner Ring ceases to be relational, it
subverts to other sources of meaning. In modernity’s “culture of expertise” (Habermas 9),
Lewis argues that the source of significance for groups of people are deemed to be purely
practical and objective. This leads to social structures being defined by access to
particular realms of knowledge or presuppositions which allow them to coordinate
behaviors and discourse with one another. In That Hideous Strength, Frost explains that
the initiation into the “Circle” at Belbury is to demonstrate discipline in objectivity. If
Mark were to join the circle because of feelings of confidence in or affection for the
others, the group would be weakened. Feelings are arbitrary, short-lived, and easily
replicable. Instead, Frost tells Mark that he was “made to pass through a number of
conflicting feelings about the Deputy Director and others in order that your future
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association with us may not be based on feelings at all” (255). Lewis describes this as
“the delicious knowledge that we – we four or five all huddled beside the stove – are the
people who know” while all others are left in ignorance (“The Inner Ring” 316). The
irony is that, while modernity stems from egalitarian and humanitarian ideals of the
Enlightenment, the end result is a world with a specific elite aiming to dismember
themselves from the collective. Simply put, the social structures of modernity, guided by
utility, are artificially engineered and maintained for a singular purpose: progress. On the
other hand, authentic Inner Rings, Lewis argues, are relationally grounded in the
metaphor of membership.
Membership promotes particularity of identity and role which characterizes
human-beings-in-discourse. In similar fashion to Arendt and Lasch, Lewis laments the
loss of definitive public and private boundaries in modernity, leading individuals to
undue reliance upon ideals of equality. Lewis believes that the metaphor of “equality” has
a very specific role in the fallen world: “Equality is for me in the same position as
clothes. It is a result of the Fall and the remedy for it” (“Membership” 169). Political
democracy is a necessary move in a world introduced to sin, for any human being with
power can in the very least err and, at worst, corrupt or be corrupted. To share
government amongst the collective provides a chance to defend ourselves against each
other’s cruelty. Yet the metaphor of equality will always remain “a legal fiction” (168)
which, particularly in modernity, robs people of real identity and relational purpose. Like
Arendt’s metaphor of “the social” (The Human Condition), Lewis’s metaphor of the
egalitarian fiction blurs the particularity of role and relation in public and private life into
an amorphous collective of individual comrades. He writes, “we live, in fact, in a world
starved for solitude, silence, and privacy, and therefore starved for meditation and true
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friendship” (Lewis, “Membership” 160). Without a consideration of particular
individuals and standards for relational structures—something which is absent from
egalitarianism—persons are left to collect arbitrarily, relate superficially, and live in an
impersonal world of sameness.
The household, as a model of membership, promotes a particularity of role and
hierarchy of order which is absent in modernity’s collectives. Each person in the
household is physically and phenomenologically “a different kind of person” (Lewis,
“Membership” 164) from the other, and he or she embodies many interpersonal roles on
multiple levels in relation to one another (i.e., husband/wife, father/son). This is the
character of true membership: “the grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child,
the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense) precisely because they are
not members of units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person
is almost a species in himself” (“Membership” 164). In the modern egalitarian collective
of individuals, interchangeability is a necessity. In the membership of a body of persons,
particularity of role is the key. Human beings in discourse desire to live out these
particular relations, stemming from our natural instincts for a lived (not just nominal)
identity with others. It is for this reason that Lewis finds the modern notion that children
call their parents by their first names particularly obstinate. Those who support
modernity’s egalitarianism in the household “are trying to inoculate the child with the
preposterous view that one’s mother is simply a fellow citizen like anyone else,” a
prospect which any child should know instinctively is not the case (165). On the contrary,
Lewis argues that human beings do know and recognize themselves to be relationally
significant.
Lewis’s basic tenants of human-being-in-discourse are clear: humans have a
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natural desire to belong with and to one another, to seek knowledge and wisdom as they
grow together, to recognize the unique space which they as well as others occupy in the
world, and to act accordingly. In such a frame, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual
developments of a particular group (such as a family) are not manufactured—they are
natural. This is an Inner Ring in its best form. Modern philosophies promote Inner Rings
of another kind. As mentioned above, these Inner Rings work from situational
presuppositions. As people are admitted or expelled into various “circles” defined by
expertise, talent, or any other variety of arbitrary necessity, they begin to believe that to
possess—not to be—is most important. From the objectification of interpersonal
relationships in particular (such as the discussion of sexuality devoid of Eros above)
comes the possession of human relation in general (e.g., Mark Studdock’s obsession with
the “progressive element” in That Hideous Strength). This further dissembles human
beings from participation in structured communities embodied with ethical and moral
purpose. Lewis argues that modernity’s final blow to human relation lies exactly in this—
the tendency toward subjectivism.
2.3.3 “The Poison of Subjectivism”
The emphasis on possession in the modern egalitarian technocracy, according to
Lewis, brings a person full circle from attempts at absolute objectivity to insubstantial
subjectivity. In “The Poison of Subjectivism,” Lewis critiques the modern understanding
of practical reason. Unlike the Aristotelian perspective of practical reason, modern
thinkers assume that “value judgments are not really judgments at all. They are
sentiments, or complexes, or attitudes, produced in a community by the pressure of its
environment and its tradition, and differing from one community to another” (250). As a
result, Lewis claims that “out of this apparently innocent idea comes the disease that will
52
certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed; the fatal
superstition that men can create values, that a community can choose its ‘ideology’ as
men choose their clothes” (250). Like MacIntyre’s metaphor of “emotivism,” Lewis
deems “subjectivism” as a lack of tools for public moral discourse in modernity. By
wanting to engineer, control, or own knowledge of the world, Lewis suggests that
modernists lose the relational component to wisdom – truth-seeking becomes a matter of
appropriation of ideas rather than a positioning of the self to the Truth in existence. In
The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape celebrates modern notions of argument as
disconnected with issues of truth and falsehood. According to the demon, jargon has
replaced reason: “Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a
dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think
of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical,’ ‘outworn’ or
‘contemporary,’ ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’” (1). As a result, persons cannot participate
in society—they can merely be spectators of trends.
Lewis and Arendt, both premodern scholars, work from the presupposition that all
action is relational in nature. Simply put, action is participatory. Where Lewis’s Christian
theism provides an additive component to the idea of participation in social action,
however, is in the metaphor of sacrifice. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lewis
points to how true knowledge—knowledge rooted in the eternal—stems only from the
ultimate sacrifice (i.e., a repositioning) of the self. When Aslan is resurrected at the Stone
Table, he tells Susan and Lucy:
though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still
which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of
time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness
and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a
different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim
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who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table
would crack and Death itself would start working backward. (178-179)
The White Witch’s view of the Deep Magic was one of utilization and possession. The
Deeper Magic placed Aslan squarely in an eternal narrative in which he is a participant—
body and soul. In order to find one’s place in this narrative, however, one must give up
the desire to possess, to control, or to operationalize a given experience. The self must be
sacrificed in order to find the self participating in a relational being that does not begin or
end in the self, yet constitutes its very existence. As Lewis writes in “Membership,” “it is
not the individual as such who will share Christ’s victory over death. We shall share the
victory by being in the Victor” (172). In the simplest way, to participate is to gain just
such an insight into the position of the self in the world.
True subjectivity, as opposed to subjectivism, is a phenomenological endeavor.
Phenomenology holds unique implications for how one looks at the world, others, or
objects. Such a perspective comes from the ability to maintain intellectual distance from
as well as recognize one’s place within the experience of perception and interpretation
among and with others. Participation from any subject must begin with distinct spaces of
embedded experience. For Lewis, these embodied spaces are subject to corruption due to
the Fall, but they are still spaces to be occupied: “our righteousness may be filthy and
ragged; but Christianity gives us no ground for holding that our perceptions of right are
in the same condition. They may, no doubt, be impaired; but there is a difference between
imperfect sight and blindness” (“The Poison of Subjectivism” 255). Lewis works from
the assumption that human beings have direct (although imperfect) access to objective
Truth. One’s very ability to reason is dependent upon this access. Lewis often uses the
metaphor of light in both his fiction and nonfiction to show that an object or person’s true
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form is dependent upon its revelation by the light of God.[2] However, because of the Fall
into temporality, human beings in discourse experience God’s eternal light only from a
distance, as if looking through glass which has been fogged over (see 1 Corinthians
13.12). We bring obscurity to every object of knowledge and every relation. While Lewis
claims that we cannot experience clarity until we experience the heavenly realm, our duty
in this moment is to seek God’s assistance in knowing, recognizing that we cannot rely
completely on what our own eyes tell us.
This holds particularly poignant implications for interpersonal relationships, for
knowing anything—since it cannot be done alone—becomes a relational, participatory
act. In the simplest sense, knowing becomes an act of love.[3] Lewis argues that
modernity would have the individual believe that “vision” is most important for success
in relationships and works, a metaphor which supports modern ideals of possession,
clarity of objectivity, and creativity in the pursuit of progress (“The Poison of
Subjectivism” 257). Lewis’s interpretation of the Christian theological tradition, on the
other hand, would have a person “see” as an act of relational disclosure. In “Meditation
in a Toolshed,” Lewis takes such a phenomenological approach to “seeing” another in
relationship. He describes an example of the difference between looking at (explaining)
and looking along (living within) the phenomenon of love:
A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees
her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember
all his life, and ten minutes’ casual chat with her is more precious than all
the favours that all other women in the world could grant. He is, as they
say, “in love.” Now comes a scientist and describes this young man’s
experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man’s
genes and a recognised biological stimulus. That is the difference between
looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it. (199)
At first glance, this passage seems to suggest that looking along is always the perspective
55
to take in a relationship. However, Lewis argues that this is not so. Since the discursive
world contains both unchanging Truth and particular phenomenal experiences, human
beings must occupy a unique position of being both within (subject of) and without
(object to) this world. Relationships with one another must continually be reoriented to
reflect these realities—we are like the young man in love whose life is made joyful by his
beloved yet struggles not to be swept away with his desire. Simply put, it is a relational
misnomer, and a serious mistake, either strictly to look at or look along one’s experience
with another. Instead, Lewis argues that a balance between looking both ways is essential
for one’s experience with anyone in this world. That is what it means to be blind but yet
be able to “see.”
At the core of all interpersonal relationships, from Lewis’s perspective as a
Christian theist, is not just a person. It is a personhood. The personhood of Christ is
Lewis’s answer to what he deems as the problematic conditions of interpersonal
relationships in this world. Lewis is concerned about the direction which discourse
concerning human relationships and action in the modern age could take young lovers,
such as Jane and Mark in That Hideous Strength. Legitimate issues of human decision-
making and interpersonal understanding underlie the theoretical trends of his time, a
moment of increasing technological advancement and shifts in scientific, social, and
psychological narratives. Lewis argues that scholars and practitioners alike must regain
the discourse of human-being-in-relation for the sake of personhood. In order to
understand what personhood means, one must have a standard of comparison. In order to
live with other persons and within personhood, one must have an invitation to participate.
Christ offers both of these in interpersonal relationships. The paragraphs above began to
articulate Lewis’s unique position amongst modernity’s critics given his Christian theism.
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The next section specifically grounds Lewis’s responses to modernity in the Christian
intellectual tradition and his belief in the personhood of Christ as the standard for our
understanding of all relationships. Christ’s life and death points to how the core of our
relational existence is situated in the presence and practice of grace. As such, the
concluding section of this chapter outlines how Christ provides the standard and
opportunity for the exercise of grace within human sentiment, will, and responsiveness in
relation, three metaphors which will be further explored in the following chapters.
2.4 Christ: The Presence and Practice of Grace in Human Relationships
First, Lewis’s Christian theist tradition understands human discursive and
relational being as incarnated; spirit and flesh together. Consequently, two central
metaphors are spiritual and physical death and resurrection. Human beings are creatures
of God. We exist in the temporal, material world. As a result of the Fall, death and
suffering are introduced into temporality: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your
food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to
dust you will return” (Genesis 3.19). Therefore, our imperfection is twofold: we are
deficient because we are derived and we are subject to corruption because we sin. Lewis
writes “in our flesh dwells no good thing, that we are, through and through, creatures not
creators, derived beings, living not of ourselves but from Christ” (“Membership” 175).
Within this imperfection, however, humans have access to the perfection of the Eternal
God. Our embodiment, consequently, exists as a meeting of the temporal and the eternal.
As George MacDonald says:
It is by the body that we come into contact with Nature, with our fellow-
men, with all their revelations of God to us. It through the body that we
receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of love, of beauty, of
science. It is through the body that we are both trained outwards from
ourselves, and driven inwards into our deepest selves to find God.
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(Unspoken Sermons, 91)
The body is the nexus of all physical, relational, and spiritual experiences in this world. It
is in the body that humans experience both suffering and joy, the temporal and the
eternal.
Consequently, from both a spiritual and a material standpoint, human beings live
in necessity. Prior to the Fall, the sole necessity of human being was God, just as the very
idea of a creature necessitates the existence of its creator. After the Fall, however, human
need for God transformed and grew exponentially. The reality of physical death brings
with it a temporal lifetime of fulfilling bodily needs, instincts, and desires. Most
importantly, though, the spiritual death of the human race opened up the whole of
creation to the need for redemption. Humans struggle in perversion, as “sold into
bondage to sin,” many times struggling with contradictory needs, desires, thoughts, and
purposes as articulated by the Apostle Paul: “For what I am doing, I do not understand;
for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate”
(Romans 7.14-15, emphasis original). Humans occupy a different space in the material
world—one characterized by, in the very least, embeddedness and, at worst, enslavement.
Consequently, the greatest necessity of the temporal world is not disengagement from or
control of material necessities. Given our status as fallen creatures, this is an
impossibility. Instead, the greatest necessity of temporality is redemption.
The redemption of the world could only come from Him in both material and
spiritual perfection: Christ. According to Lewis, the central tenet of the Christian faith is
that Christ perfectly lived all of the physical and emotional sufferings of human being
when He was incarnated so that His death would “somehow put us right with God and
[give] us a fresh start” (Mere Christianity 58). Christ brought perfection once again to us
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by redeeming our bodies and spirits for Himself through His death and resurrection: “We
are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by
dying He disabled death itself” (Mere Christianity 59). The promise of this perfection
brings renewal to the world and to human beings. Lewis compares the healing of a
natural, living body with Christ’s grace extended to the spiritual body of a man. Just as a
wounded body has the potential to heal itself through time, the incarnate power of Christ
brings healing to humankind struggling in sin. Lewis writes that in the same way, a
Christian is not a person who never goes wrong or suffers injury; instead he is a person
“who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble—
because the Christ-life inside of him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat
(in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out” (Mere
Christianity 64). We are born into embodied and spiritual need and desire for relational
restoration and renewal, and Christ’s incarnation allows for this to be so.
Consequently, Lewis argues that Christianity articulates a phenomenological
embodiment of a participatory, relational reality. He states that in both body and soul, we
are a participant in “the grand miracle,” or the reality of God’s creation of, incarnation
within, and redemption of the natural world: “I believe that God really has dived down
into the bottom of creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed Nature on His
shoulder” (“The Grand Miracle” 62). God’s redemption is first and foremost a relational
redemption; even the resurrection of the body restores the relation between the natural
and the eternal. Thus even the simplest aspects of human existence constitute a
participatory relation with Otherness. The source of all intention and purpose exists in the
labor, pain, affections, and delights of our everyday lives. Lewis suggests that the
Christian narrative calls us to participatory and purposeful relationships with one another.
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The presence of God in our midst allows us to be persons with real relationships
reflecting real needs and desires. So when we speak to the other, we speak to and
participate within an embodied personhood of spirit, sentiment, and intellect.
However, Lewis would argue that the Christian tradition teaches that even our
most well-intentioned relational acts are in need of grace. In fact, we cannot choose or act
at all without Activity Himself in our life. Lewis discusses how the Christian conviction
that “God is love” speaks volumes concerning the invitation which human beings hold to
participate in the dynamics of Eternity. He writes “in Christianity God is not a static
thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of
drama” (Mere Christianity 152). We move and attend because we are creatures of Action;
this is why Augustine characterizes the act as love (On the Trinity). The Incarnated Christ
chose, acted, and loved perfectly and His greatest act, the “grand miracle” (Lewis, “The
Grand Miracle”), is an act of grace. Thus the very enactment of our lives is a grace given
to us, and we have to choose whether our actions will extend or inhibit this kind of love
in everyday relations.
Lewis recognizes that this is indeed a difficult choice to make, or at least to follow
through on from day to day. He writes that when he comes to his evening prayers and
moments of confession, he realizes that his most obvious sin is in the enactment of grace
and charity toward others: “I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed”
(Mere Christianity 166). He may try to excuse his behavior by thinking about the
suddenness of the provocation or the fact that he was caught off guard by the other
person. Yet, “on the other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the
best evidence for what sort of a man he is?” (166). It is then that he comes to realize that
there always is and always will be something not quite right about his own ability to
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choose and to act charitably. Thus, “the change which I most need to undergo is a change
that my own direct, voluntary efforts cannot bring about...[it] can only be done by God”
(166). In this Lewis echoes George MacDonald: “the perfection of his [Christ’s] relation
to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defects, all our evils” (Unspoken Sermons
15). It is only through repositioning all our action toward Grace Himself that we can hope
to experience the fullest extent of our love for and with others.
With Christ as the source and standard of human relation, we are presented with a
form for loving. Because Christ was incarnated in temporality, relationships are
manifested in both historical and eternal forms. During Christ’s time on Earth he was a
son, a friend, and a citizen. He lived and worked within both public and private
institutions of relation—the family, the synagogue, and the marketplace. Yet in addition
to being a son, He is the Son. He is both standards for the individual: “The Christ
Himself, the Son of God who is man (just like you) and God (just like His Father) is
actually at your side” (Lewis, Mere Christianity 163). Thus every human relationship and
institution is both of the flesh and also divinely inspired. Since they are of the flesh, they
are prone to imperfection, corruption, and error. Lewis argues that any experience in
human history will tell you that people, organizations, and societies err time and time
again: “That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended—civilizations are built
up—excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong” (54). We are
called to form particular relationships in particular ways, yet at times we cannot act and
relate as we would like; our families, friendships, and organizations still remain
vulnerable to troubles and tensions. Yet because our relationships are divinely inspired by
Christ’s relationship to the Father and the Holy Spirit, we are called to see these
relationships as purposefully derived from Him. Lewis writes:
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If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would not
look like a lot of separate things dotted about. It would look like one
single growing thing—rather like a very complicated tree. Every
individual would appear connected with every other. And not only that.
Individuals are not really separate from God any more than from one
another. (157)
Individually and collectively, we form relations in their proper places. That is why the
metaphor of membership is so significant for Lewis’s understanding of the Church
institution: “By members ([Greek]) he [St. Paul] meant what we should call organs,
things essentially different from, and complementary to, one another, things differing not
only in structure and function but also in dignity” (“Membership” 164). We are most
fully ourselves, especially in relation, when “we occupy those places in the structure of
the eternal cosmos for which we were designed and invented” (“Membership” 172-173).
Branches in the tree of humanity, we have the gracious opportunity to bear good fruit for
one another according to our proper function.
In a similar manner, we must be responsive to the particularity of role and
function of persons within each of our interpersonal relationships. According Lewis,
Christ’s promise of renewal allows us, at each moment of choice, to be responsive to His
personhood in the other before us, a personhood which manifests itself throughout the
vast particularity of the human race. In light of a theory of interpersonal grace, this
conviction functions in two ways. First, the one form—the one standard of relation
always before us as Christ—affords the space for us to respond consistently with love
toward the other, regardless of the level of alterity. In moments of tension or trouble, we
can recall that it is Christ to whom we are responding (Mere Christianity; “The Weight of
Glory”) and that the purpose of our relations already has been established for us. Second,
with the knowledge that the structure and function of relationships are set, we are free to
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participate in the particularity of human experience and be present—attentive—to the
emergent needs of the other. Basic commandments to love, honor, and forgive one
another thus become poignantly real when faced with real relational responsibilities with
real persons.
In bodily sentiment, willful action, and loving responsiveness we see Christ as the
standard for relationships. His standard fixes the presence and practice of grace at the
center of human relational experience. The next chapters explore the three metaphors of
sentiment, will, and responsiveness in both theoretical and practical ways from the
perspective of the Christian intellectual tradition primarily through the works of Lewis.
In order to establish these metaphors as central to the theory and practice of grace in
intimacy, each chapter will conclude with a reflection on general implications of the
metaphor for interpersonal communication vis a vis fundamental theories and
presuppositions in the literature.
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CHAPTER THREE
SENTIMENTS AND TRAINING OF THE HEART
3.1 Introduction
This chapter articulates the role that sentiment plays in a theory of grace in
intimate interpersonal communication contexts. For the purposes of this project,
sentiment refers to the visceral, emotional, and aesthetic relations that human beings
experience in the context of the everyday. These experiences hold significant implications
for the knowledge the self as an embodied soul, the ontological order of the temporal and
the eternal, and emergent relational significance in the existential world. Sentiment
creates a foundation for understanding human-being-in-discourse as a condition of
heartfelt choice.
First, the chapter explores a brief philosophical lineage of the metaphor of
sentiment, paying particular attention to those thinkers working within from a Christian
standpoint. Sentiment functions as a defense of universal values from ontological,
teleological, and humanistic perspectives. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and the
philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment all point to how attentiveness to and the
cultivation of sentiments holds significance to ethical human relations. Second, the
chapter explores how Lewis’s The Abolition of Man situates him within this conversation
regarding moral training and the reality of our embodied selves. Read alongside key texts
such as Mere Christianity, “Weight of Glory,” and The Four Loves, one begins to see how
a phenomenological rendering of sentiments and discourse is Lewis’s first step in
understanding how and why we relate to each other and God. Lewis’s writings address
questions of pain and pleasure, death and life, and the joy of eternity all within the
context of one’s relational participation in the ontological order of existence. The chapter
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concludes with implications which Lewis’s work brings to issues of need, relational
training, and embodied values in the study and practice of interpersonal communication,
particularly within the context of the household.
3.2 Sentiments and A Defense of Universal Values
3.2.1 Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine
In situating sentiments as important for understanding human relationships, Lewis
falls in line with major thinkers of ancient, modern, and Christian philosophical
traditions. In The Abolition of Man, he cites Aristotle, Augustine, and Plato in his defense
of the link between training in moral virtue and the affections. These early thinkers argue
that the principles of ethical conduct begin with an attentiveness to sentiments in the
choices and behaviors of human relationships. Consequently, the metaphor of sentiments
continued to be a significant component of the philosophical foundation for thinkers of
the early modern era. Specifically, the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment
centered their theories of ethical conduct and moral virtue in issues of pleasure, universal
benevolence, moral reasoning, and justice. All of these thinkers together provide rich
theoretical ground for practices in interpersonal communication attentive to sentiments
and the embodiment of moral value.
For Plato and Aristotle, sentiments and reason both play a significant role in the
moral development of a person. In the Republic, Plato argues that human infants are not
born with appropriate responses to the world and its relations. We all must learn just
responses to our conditions. We are born with the capacity for pleasure and dislike, but
we must be trained to delight in that which is beautiful and good while disavowing
ourselves from ugly and hurtful relations. Plato writes that this must be done before one
is of “an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has
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been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he
bears to her” (qtd. in Lewis, The Abolition of Man 16-17). Reason is not just a capacity of
the mind; it is the proper balance of all internal relations—heart, soul, and mind (Plato
Book 4). Aristotle later argues that virtue is the result of proper habitudes, or the exercise
of our natural capacities for the sake of choices and acts which do not come to us
naturally (such as temperance, charity, and justice). In his Nicomachean Ethics, he writes
“the moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by Nature nor against Nature. Nature,
indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the
product of habit” (2.1, emphasis original). Thus, when we exercise virtue, we necessarily
feel pleasure, because we engage in proper relations. We feel that we relate purposefully
to the world and to others, or, as Aristotle puts it, we “observe the mean relative to us,
this being determined by such a rule or principle as would take shape in the mind or a
man of sense or practical wisdom” (2.6). For Aristotle, practical wisdom is the principle
of human relations. What both Plato and Aristotle point to is that there is a just and proper
way for us to relate to the world and to one another. Our ability to recognize and act upon
what is valuable and good in the universe stems from our nature as feeling and thinking
human beings. Thus our hearts and minds must be trained to align with the Good if we
are to be good.
St. Augustine later expands upon the notion of alignment of the heart and mind in
his discussion of the movement of the will and our loves and affections. He refers to
virtue as ordinated, or aligned in proper quality and degree to Truth and Love. Lewis
describes it as “ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every
object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it” (The Abolition of
Man 16). Augustine’s emphasis on the incarnate God positions love as deeply concerned
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with embodiment: affections and sentiments matter. He writes that a human being is
indeed “a creature of needs”; every creature and creation on the earth asserts its own
mutability before God (Confessions, 12.1.1). The implications of human mutability are
twofold: (1) we are endowed with the ability to move just as the One who created us
moves, yet (2) our changefulness is predicated by our derivation. Thus, the movement of
our hearts are subject to the push and pull of creaturely needs. Our pains, our pleasures,
our necessities, and our desires serve either to help us attend toward or away from God.
In Book 13 of the Confessions, Augustine describes God as the “Spirit above the waters”
as in the Genesis story of creation. A Personhood—a Trinity—who rests over and within
all of creation, God calls into the hearts of human beings (Confessions 13.5.6). Augustine
writes that our embodied, spiritual selves can either be lifted up or weighed down as we
respond to the call of the Spirit. What allows our souls to move in such a manner?:
They are affections; they are loves: the filthiness of our spirit, flowing
away downwards with a love that brings but care. But here too is holiness
of your Spirit, raising us aloft by a love that is free from care, so that we
may lift up our hearts to you (13.7.8)
One’s affections, then, hold significant implications in regards to the attention of one’s
will. According to Augustine, our hearts move in response to a call. Therefore, it is vital
that an individual learn the doctrine of Truth, or as the heart naturally moves it will be
misinformed or misdirected (On the Trinity). Like the Greek philosophers, moral training
plays an important role in Augustine’s understanding of a life embodied with sentiments.
His defense of a philosophical and ethical treatment of the affections supports his
presuppositions regarding Truth and the proper condition of human relations.
3.2.2 The Scottish Enlightenment Philosophers
The ancient thinkers create a philosophical foundation attentive to sentiments, a
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ground which continues into the early modern age in the Scottish Enlightenment.
Philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid
were concerned with the question of moral training and its connection to motives and
action. Generally, their approaches emphasize the humanistic ground of moral inquiry
and action, rather than the teleological and ontological doctrines of the ancients. Yet their
attentiveness to the common basis of humanity in the appetites and affections, as well as
our inclination to articulate and act upon moral precepts in community with others, leads
them to a concern for the presence of universal values and motivations in human
relations.
A precursor to the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, Hutcheson presupposes
that immediate judgements are propelled by a natural moral sense. This inherent moral
sense allows us to apprehend moral qualities in others and in the world and compels us to
approve and act upon certain phenomena. He echoes the Stoic tradition of perfect virtue
as “vita secundum naturam,” or “‘acting according to what we may see from the
Constitution of our Nature, we were intended for by our Creator’” (xvii.19-20). Moral
sense—our sense of obligatory response to the world—always precedes our ability to
reason. Thus, our sentiments serve as the conceptual source for our moral reasoning;
reason alone cannot compel us to perceive ideas such as beauty or goodness. Hutcheson
argues against the Hobbesian world of selfishness and brutality. Instead, any action is
good, in a moral sense, “when it flows from benevolent Affection, or Intention of
absolute Good to others,” (I.ii.38.18-19) or what Hutcheson terms as the “calm universal
Benevolence” (I.ii.34.18). Moral action and moral judgment are thus disinterested; that
is, not egoistic. We approve of benevolence by nature and value it universally according
to our moral sensibilities.
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Later, Hume, in A Treatise on Human Nature, agrees with Hutcheson we are
incapable of choice and action without our sentiments. He writes “the chief spring or
actuating principle of the human mind is pleasure or pain; and when these sensations are
remov’d, both from our thought and feeling; we are, in a great measure, incapable of
passion or action, of desire or volition” (Hume III.iii.1.2). We are able to distinguish
pleasure and virtue from pain and vice because we have sympathy, or a responsiveness to
the common experiences of humanity. However, Hume maintains a more indirect
connection between sympathetic responses and moral judgement than Hutcheson does in
his writings. Sympathy constitutes a conceptual ground for the distinctions of moral
action in the same manner as the concept of “colors” allows us to distinguish between
red, blue, or green. Thus, we feel direct (or original) satisfaction with the idea of the
pleasure that a person or object generates for us and for others (i.e., a natural virtue). We
further feel “indirect passion” to morally approve of said person or object because of
their character traits (i.e., an artificial virtue) (Hume). Thus, moral judgements are not
mere expressions of sympathetic responses; instead they “exhibit both a stability and an
independence from individual perspectives that our sympathetic responses do not”
(Sayre-McCord xxiv). Hume argues that our moral standards are set not by how we
individually feel at any given time but instead by how we all would feel were we to
universally conceptualize and operationalize our responses. It is both our ability to reason
and to feel which constitute our capacity to think morally.
In A Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith offers more complexity to the
issue of sentiments, sympathy, and moral action. Like Hume, sympathy is central to
Smith’s account of morality. However, Smith’s theory of moral sentiments is grounded
more in justice than utility and emphasizes the role that the moral agent’s motive plays in
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the act. He regards sympathetic relations as a complex mirroring of sentiments between
agent, recipient, and spectator. We are endowed with the ability for basic judgment of
right and wrong not only by observing effects of actions but also by the motives of the
agent. Pleasant or painful effects of action certainly are relevant to moral judgment,
Smith argues. Yet, these effects are of little use or consolation due to their particularity—
general social utility is more of an afterthought, not the foundation for action.
Sympathetic responses must be guided by (and guide us to) principles of meritorious
action. Smith claims that nature has “implanted in the human breast” the consciousness
of deserved reward, of ill-desert, and the “terrors of merited punishment” (II.ii.4.3). We
feel gratitude or resentment toward others when we witness benefit or harm respectively,
not just when we experience pleasure or pain particularly. Simply, we have a natural
consciousness for justice—for merit and demerit. Smith writes that the best society
stands on the condition of benevolence as well as the reciprocity of just judgement and
action by its moral agents: “all the members of human society stand in need of each
others assistance, and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. Where the necessary
assistance is reciprocally afforded from love, from gratitude, from friendship, and
esteem, the society flourishes” (II.ii.3.1-3, emphasis added). Because of his emphasis on
the complexity of moral judgement and agency in relationships, Smith’s theory of moral
sentiments is tempered by issues of relational approbation and praise-worthiness, duty,
and justice.
Thomas Reid answers Hume’s and Smith’s accounts of moral sentiments through
his notion of common sense, a theory which is emerges from his Christian theism. In
Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, Reid recognizes appetites, desires,
affections, and passions as principles of action. He works from the presupposition that
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“human knowledge and human virtue are both very imperfect,” and the sentiments are
“necessary supplements to our imperfections” (Reid III.ii.2). Similar to Plato, Reid
recognizes that knowledge and virtue come in slow degrees to individuals; thus in their
procurement we learn first how to intend and to will, then we sharpen our abilities to
judge and reason. Growth in knowledge and virtue occurs when a person is able to
discover the connections and consequences of his actions in time and relation, or what
Reid terms “our good on the whole” (III.iii.2). Thus, all powers of the human mind,
including the affections, are “useful and necessary in our present state. The perfection of
human nature consists, not in extinguishing, but in restraining them within their proper
bounds, and keeping them in due subordination to the governing principles” (III.iii.8).
Our conscience keeps us aware of the governing principles of God’s purposes for our
bodies, minds, and hearts, and “we condemn ourselves, or, in the language of Scripture,
our heart condemns us, whenever we go beyond the rule of right and wrong which
conscience prescribes” (III.iii.8). We all possess common sense concerning the governing
principles of creation because of our relationship with the Creator. The faculty of
common sense furnishes the human mind with the ability to imagine, conceive, and judge
existence purposefully with consideration of that which is other than themselves. Thus,
one’s sensations of the world confirm what one already conceives to be true about the
nature of humanity—that the “good on the whole” (III.iii.2) brings purpose to the
existence of even the most mundane of our appetites and affections.
What the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and other early modern
philosophers point to is that sentiments are central to ethics. Consequently, there exists a
distinct pedagogical implication to the experience of sentiment. Ancient and early
modern philosophers contend that our sentiments not only teach us something about the
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nature of the relational universe, but that we have a moral obligation to teach ourselves
how to cultivate their willful expression in a society of others. Even those sentiments
which are undesirable for a community, such as anger or desire to harm, are
consequences of limited or mistaken understandings of the larger good. Thus, these
philosophers carefully place sentiments not only in particular systems of human relation
but also universal systems of moral responsiveness with varying levels of ontological,
teleological, or humanistic significance. Together they create a defense for universal
values, or a “reflection on the universal ‘oeconomy’” (Garrett xvi), a picture of the
household of humankind.
3.3 Lewis and the Training of the Heart
Lewis is able to talk meaningfully about sentiments and moral training in The
Abolition of Man because of those before him, such as the philosophers mentioned above,
who have thought seriously about such issues. In his own defense of universal values, he
references Augustine, Plato, and Aristotle, and the tone of his conclusions pays homage to
the presuppositions which Reid holds. From this theoretical ground, Lewis calls for the
recollection of sentiments in modern discourse concerning human beings in relation. The
Abolition of Man is a pedagogical piece; he subtitles it in part “Reflections on
Education.” In this and other keys texts, he lays the groundwork for moral training—
relational training—as attentive to human embodiment with its subsequent needs,
pleasures, and loves. As Lewis argues, the “weight” of our bodies matter from the
perspective of Eternal Glory (see reference to “The Weight of Glory” below), and by
thinking, feeling, and loving we participate in the ontological order of Creation. The
following section outlines Lewis’s position regarding the cultivation of moral sentiments,
the place of the body in such discussions, and the difficult questions of pain and pleasure,
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death and joy in our relationship with God and others.
Lewis regards sentiments as a fundamental characteristic of human beings. Yet
unfortunately, he finds himself within a time in history in which all deemed emotional or
sentimental is unduly criticized and philosophically simplified. In The Abolition of Man,
Lewis discusses a modern English schoolbook under the fabricated title The Green Book.
In this book, the authors, who Lewis calls Gaius and Titius, refer to a story of the poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a waterfall, and the remarks of two tourists. One tourist calls
the waterfall “sublime” while the other deems it “pretty.” The authors argue that, on the
surface, it seems as if the two tourists are commenting about an observable characteristic
of the waterfall and, consequently, articulating a statement of value. However, Gaius and
Titius state that this is not the case: “‘This confusion is continually present in language as
we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and
actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.’” (Lewis, The Abolition of
Man 2-3). The lesson to be learned in the modern schoolbook, Lewis argues, is that all
sentences which contain statements of value are merely reflections of the emotional state
of the speaker and, as such, these statements are insignificant. The modern emphasis on
rationalism and objectivity leads to a denial of the subjective: ironically, Lewis argues,
the very thing which tempts a person into subjectivism.
As is discussed in Chapter Two, Lewis’s critique of modernity’s subjectivism
leads him to recover the metaphor of sentiment in its theological and philosophical
significance. For Lewis, sentiments constitute a phenomenon of the human self in an
ordered, eternal reality. We are both witnesses of and participants in the goodness of
God’s creation, for we have the privilege of naming reality. Consequently, when a person
remarks “This is sublime” in the face of a great waterfall, she speaks from out of the
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experience of a real condition in the world. The waterfall is beautiful, good, and sublime
because God created it. It is intrinsically valuable. Lewis argues that modernity has lost
the conviction of intrinsic value; instead, modernists argue that value is contingent and
conditional. With no essential standard for decision-making, modernists become seduced
by the call to overextend their capacities of rationalization and may become trapped in
their own minds. Lewis characterizes this state as Hell. In The Great Divorce, the Teacher
tells the narrator:
Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of
mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of
its own mind—is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind.
Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be
shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable remains. (68)
When we face any creation or creature on Earth, we meet a reflection of Heaven, the true
reality. As such, the object “merits” emotions of awe and appreciation from us (Lewis,
The Abolition of Man 15).
The manner in which humans come to perceive the goodness of God’s creation is
phenomenological in nature. Lewis challenges the modern understanding of how we
know in the world; real knowledge is a complex meeting of the self, a particular
phenomenon in the world, and an emergent knowing of the thing itself. We have a
participatory consciousness of the world because we are not only creatures of God but
also co-creators of the phenomenal world. We are created good so we are to know that
which is good. Lewis argues that even modernists must recognize that there are actions
and decisions which are more preferable than others (hence their emphasis on
technological, rational, and social progress) (“The Poison of Subjectivism”). The very
fact that we are inclined to make one decision over another suggests that phenomena
called “good” and “bad,” “better” and “worse,” exists. This is why Lewis begins his
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famous apologetic, Mere Christianity, not specifically with the question of God but with
the question of moral law and “right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe”
(15). Good acts as a phenomenological “fixed point” for our attention: “Our ideas of the
good may change, but they cannot change either for better or the worse if there is no
absolute and immutable good to which they can approximate or from which they can
recede” (“The Poison of Subjectivism” 253, emphasis added). The “fixed point” of good
is not an imposing epistemological framework, however. Contrary scholars such as Gaius
and Titius in The Abolition of Man who suggest that a person brings knowledge to an
object of perception (and, in a sense, imposes this knowing on it), Lewis argues that the
Christian tradition teaches that human beings engage in an emergent—an incarnate—
knowledge of the world. Our mind and hearts are derived from the Divine (see
Augustine’s Confessions and On the Trinity). Good is the transcendental epochē of all
perception and interpretation; it is the way in which are able to know and reason at all.[1]
Human experience of the world calls for the exercise of both mind and heart.
Much like St. Augustine (Confessions), Lewis understands the communicative act as an
incarnation of Truth, or the Word as flesh. When humans name, it is a relational
participation in the personhood of Eternity. Yet because we are willful creatures, we can
choose either to name justly or unjustly. Lewis quotes Traherne’s Centuries of
Meditations: “Can you be righteous unless you be just in rendering to things their due
esteem? All things were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to
their value” (The Abolition of Man 16). The world is ripe for revelatory naming, and as
human-beings-in-discourse, Lewis recognizes that we will name according to our
inclinations, and, ultimately, our hearts. We will experience anger, and it can be righteous
or unrighteous. We will find things beautiful, and we can appreciate or misplace the
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source of glory. We will love, and we name or misname its object. To deny the validity of
such sentiments is not simply to deny what makes us human; Lewis argues that is it an
outright lie. That is why he argues that the “cold vulgarity” of modern education leaves
students defenseless against the conditions of the world: “The right defense against false
sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we
only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes...a hard heart is no
infallible protection against a soft head” (The Abolition of Man 13-14). Both head and
heart are necessary for reason and relationship.
We live as embodied souls in a world that demands both our hearts and minds
when it comes to how we exist, how we know, and how we relate to others. A
philosophical and theological understanding of sentiment, such as Lewis supports, crafts
our personhood as eternally and relationally significant. Consequently, Lewis argues that
relational training begins with a consideration of how our bodies meet the world and how
this meeting brings us to recognition, appreciation, and love for the other as a result.
3.3.1 The Body and the “Weight of Glory”
In his writings, Lewis assumes the importance of the body in the Christian
understanding of grace. The body experiences need, pain, and pleasure manifested in both
physical and spiritual ways. The function of all of these, according to Lewis, is to
introduce the potential for disinterested love into human existence. Disinterested love
paves the way for gratitude, appreciation, and acceptance of Love’s gifts. This can only
occur, however, when the body is understood from within the ordinate relation of the
temporal and the eternal, or simply put, when it is given its proper weight.
We inhabit a unique existence in this world. It is an existence where the spiritual
and the carnal, the eternal and the temporal, meet. As Screwtape writes to his nephew,
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“humans are amphibians—half spirit, half animal....As spirits they belong to the eternal
world, but as animals they inhabit time” (Lewis, The Screwtape Letters 37). Because
humans are temporal creatures, we are subject to change. While the eternal demonstrates
a constancy of existence, temporal undulations of experience subject human beings to our
fundamental characteristic as creatures—need. Lewis argues that our need creates within
us a homeostatic impulse toward eternal constancy or, perhaps more accurately, a
teleological push toward the fulfillment of potential. However, our temporal needs will
not be satisfied because the vehicle for realizing them is the body, a fallen instrument. In
its simplest form, need introduces us to our embodied selves. With desires like thirst and
hunger, we become aware of ourselves as object-like or, more accurately, as “composite
creatures” (Lewis, The Four Loves 100). Something about our temporal selves exists
beyond our subjective control (e.g., as in an experience of sickness) and our existence
becomes predicated by a need for something which is external, whether it is water, food,
or warmth. Yet at the same time, we can possess a disinterested awareness concerning our
own need; we have the willful ability to act toward meeting or sacrificing those needs.
What this creates in us is a choice in how to view ourselves as bodies. Lewis
describes three views of the body. There are those, like the ascetic Pagans, who view the
body as a tomb or a prison of need and desire; it is something to be destroyed, escaped
from, or transcended. There are others, such as the Neo-Pagans, to whom the body is the
most glorious creation and something to be celebrated and revered. Lewis supports a
different view. In line with St. Francis, he refers to the body as “Brother Ass.” In the same
manner that a donkey is a “useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating
beast,” Lewis argues, so is the body. We live most authentically in our own bodies when
we acknowledge that “one of its functions in our lives is to play the part of buffoon. Until
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some theory has sophisticated them, every man, woman and child in the world knows
this. The fact that we have bodies is the oldest joke there is” (The Four Loves 101). The
human condition is all at once messy, tiresome, and at times ravenously needful as well
as transcendent, gratifying, and capable of sacrifice. This is the divine joke—that which
allows us to view our own bodies both with egocentric concern and with selfless
disinterest. And as Lewis writes: “It is a bad thing not to be able to take a joke” (The Four
Loves 100).
The danger of not being able to understand the divine joke of an embodied soul
lies in the metaphor of ownership. Lewis claims that Christian doctrine teaches that the
human creature is derivative of God and, thus, necessarily incomplete. Consequently, the
Absolute is incarnated in the flesh, but it is not located therein. Attempts to locate
certainty, security, and control in the body may suggest a false sense of ownership of the
natural, but it really limits humanity to the boundaries of the temporal. Lewis argues that
this aggrandizement of the body often occurs in sexual encounters in intimate
relationships. Our bodies, as a medium through which one can experience physical and
emotional pleasure, can often become confused as the end of all such desire.
Consequently, human beings are in danger of believing pleasure to be something that
which we can own and call forth instead of something which is given to us by God and
by others. Especially in matters of sex, Lewis writes that we must not be too serious
about it: “Indeed we can’t be totally serious without doing violence to our humanity....We
must not attempt to find an absolute in the flesh. Banish play and laughter from the bed of
love and you may let in a false goddess” (The Four Loves 99). The laughter which Lewis
calls for is not mere levity or inappropriate frivolity. Rather he argues for a sense of
humor which lends weight to the human body, for humor involves placing the body in its
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proper context and allows for proper relation of the self to others.
In his fictional writings, Lewis often contrasts the solidity and fullness of Heaven
with the shadows and reflections of Earth. In The Great Divorce, for example, the ghosts
who are brought to Heaven on the bus from Hell—once they are bathed in the glorious
light of the Eternal—become fully transparent. The narrator describes them as “smudgy
and imperfectly opaque” against the landscape as if they were “man-shaped stains on the
brightness of that air” (28). The phantoms are unable to walk without pain, for their
insubstantial bodies cannot bend even a blade of grass against the solidity of that which is
Eternal. Only those creatures who belong to Heaven are “solid people” (32) with proper
weight and substance. In the preface to the story, Lewis describes his choice of depicting
heavenly matter with an “unbendable and unbreakable quality” as an indication of the
fullness of bodies in their eternal glory (11). Lewis argues that human beings are made
for heaven, and its glory gives our embodiment not only physical but relational weight
and substance (“The Weight of Glory”).
The metaphor of the physical and relational weight of glory is one which Lewis
inherits from his intellectual and theological heritage. Lewis considered George
MacDonald his spiritual mentor and literary master. In fact, MacDonald plays the part of
the “Teacher” to the narrator (presumably Lewis) in The Great Divorce. MacDonald’s
writings not only introduced Lewis to the revelation of joy as holiness (see discussion
below) but also to his presuppositions of the body and soul as self in relation.
MacDonald’s “country whence the shadows fall” in “The Golden Key” (36) contains a
powerful allegory of Earth’s relation to Heaven, one that is clearly reflected in Lewis’s
The Great Divorce. A more significant parable of the weight of glory, especially in terms
of relational training, is “The Light Princess.” In this story, a princess is cursed as a baby
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to grow up absolutely weightless. She floats from place to place and must be tethered to a
person or object lest she should fly away. Her weightlessness is not only physical, but it is
relational. Her heart is without weight; she cannot cry, she cannot smile, and she cannot
truly laugh. Instead, she giggles mindlessly and apathetically from place to place, from
person to person, concerned only with herself. It is not until the end of the story when a
prince lovingly and willingly sacrifices his own life to save hers that she begins to
transform into a “solid” person. Learning how to walk under her own weight for the first
time, the princess continually falls and is hurt but happy:
“Is this the gravity you used to make so much of?” said she one day to the
prince, as he raised her from the floor. “For my part, I was a great deal
more comfortable without it.”
“No, no, that’s not is. This is it,” replied the prince, as he took her
up, and carried her about like a baby, kissing her all the time. “This is
gravity.”
“That’s better,” said she. “I don’t mind that so much.” (106)
As all fairy-tales go, the prince and princess lived a happy and fruitful life. The last line
of the story illustrates how their legacy, their children, inherited the lessons which the
princess learned in both body and heart: “not one of whom, was ever known, on the most
critical occasion, to lose the smallest atom of his or her due proportion of gravity” (107).
MacDonald’s story, and Lewis’s robust retelling of these themes in his own works
of fiction, points to the phenomenological and theological texture to human bodies in
relation with one another. First, the earthly and the temporal are serious. Yet they are not
serious absolutely; the Absolute is also other than the body. It is the context in which the
body is to be placed, or the Light which allows for it to be seen completely and truly.
“The Glory flows into everyone, and back from everyone: like light and mirrors. But the
light’s the thing” (Lewis, The Great Divorce 81). This Eternal Light allows us to see the
fullness of ourselves and of others with merriment—grading imperfections as both
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inconsequential idiosyncrasies and burdens we carry toward the hope of glory. In the
proper weight of Earth’s temporality, we are simultaneously needful and disinterested
bodies.
Second, these stories articulate how our substance is derived from relation.
Ultimately, one’s willful acceptance of the Eternal Relation with God brings fullness to
the self. However, it is through temporal relations that Love is made manifest and
incarnate. The princess bore no weight to her body or soul without love for another. The
first thing that love brought to her was sadness and pain, for it was predicated by an act of
self-sacrifice, or a disinterested act of selflessness. Yet her disinterest in herself gave back
her self. When she gained substance, she was able to feel her own foot on the ground and
to feel her husband carry her. A “due proportion of gravity” (MacDonald, “The Light
Princess” 107) allowed her to do so. Without it, she is unable to experience existential,
relational, or spiritual weight. This weight is not ours alone; it is derivative from Whom
gives substance and purpose to all of creation. Yet as the story suggests, gravity—as a
force pulling upon human bodies and hearts in temporality—is so much easier to bear
when we are carried. Discomfort and pain are only the beginning of the fullness of self in
body and soul.
3.3.2 The Function of Pain and Death
From Lewis’s perspective, to take the body seriously means to understand the
function of pain and death from not only physical but also relational and spiritual
perspectives. Throughout his writings he points to the fact that pain is not a created
condition. All that which is created is good and real, and pain is evil (Lewis, The Problem
of Pain). In the vein of St. Augustine in the Confessions, Lewis understands evil as a lack
of that which is good. Pain, in its simplest form, is an empty space—it is the unreality of
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the fallen world amidst the reality of the fullness of God. Pain exists because absence
exists in temporality: not the absence of God but the absence of full personhood. Human
beings live and labor in a fallen world of deficient, broken selves. Consequently, it is
painful to be a self as well as to be in relation with another. “Pain is inherent in the very
existence of a world where souls can meet,” writes Lewis (The Problem of Pain 86). Yet
the function of pain is for us to recognize that a condition of lack is not our created
nature. Pain reminds us that this deficient selfhood will (and must) end; that is, it must
die.
At its basest level, Lewis describes how human experience of pain rouses the
body and the soul out of complacency. That is why demons such as Screwtape advise
their protegés to keep humans in a comfortable, mundane existence: it keeps them from
remembering the Eternal. “They find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar
while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of
things” (Lewis, The Screwtape Letters 4, emphasis original). However, pain finds its way
into human experience despite Hell’s best efforts. Lewis writes that the wages of sin in
temporality manifest itself in two experiences of pain: (1) “a particular kind of sensation,
probably conveyed by specialised nerve fibres, and recognisable by the patient as that
kind of sensation whether he dislikes it or not,” and (2) “any experience, whether
physical or mental, which the patient dislikes” (The Problem of Pain 87). Simply put,
human beings since Adam both inherit and suffer pain. Even though pain is not God’s
creation, it is nonetheless one of His tools for our restoration. Lewis argues that “pain
insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our
conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” (91).
Pain constitutes a phenomenological encounter with the self in temporality. We
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have a choice of where we focus our attention in a moment of pain. One can focus on the
self through the pain; that is, through the awareness of the need, brokenness, and lack of
ourselves as fallen creatures. On the other hand, one can focus on the self in pain—that
is, to drown in pain until it envelopes the heart and mind in perverted comfort. For
example, a mother holds on to the misery of losing her son until the grief causes her to
disregard anyone but herself and anything but her own pain (Lewis, The Great Divorce
89-94). Her grief functions as something she believes she can hold on to and control and
that which can fill her life with purpose. Phenomenologically speaking, there is no
distance between her and the pain; it is too close for her to see it clearly. Because of this
danger, God must act as the intermediary between us and our pain, for without Him
suffering is devoid of its proper function and purpose.
Suffering and sacrifice characterize the faithful movement from desperate lack to
sufficiency in Christ. As Lewis writes, pain shatters our misconception that we are and
can be for ourselves: “if the first and lowest operation of pain shatters the illusion that all
is well, the second shatters the illusion that what we have, whether good or bad in itself,
is our own and enough for us” (The Problem of Pain 94). Pain means loss, brokenness,
and absence. It is an indication that what we know as ourselves, from our temporal birth,
must be given up if we are to realize anything greater. Lewis, quoting Augustine’s De
Civitate Dei, names the sufficiency of God as the only way to fullness of strength in body
and spirit: “in supreme ‘Trial’ or ‘Sacrifice’ it [pain] teaches him the self-sufficiency
which really ought to be his—the ‘strength, which, if Heaven gave it, may be called his
own’” (The Problem of Pain 101). The shift from faith in the self alone to faith in the self
in God allows human beings to participate in the life and death of Christ. In a moment of
suffering and uncertainty, when one can “leave it to God,” he “trusts that Christ will
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somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His
birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself, and, in a sense,
make good his deficiencies” (Lewis, Mere Christianity 130). Consequently, “martyrdom
always remains the supreme enacting and perfection of Christianity” (The Problem of
Pain 102). Christ, in His sacrifice, places Himself between us and death and gives us the
space to perceive and interpret pain rightly. It is only in this context that we experience
absolution and comfort from the burdens of our bodies and souls.
Lewis clarifies that interest in or attention to one’s own pain is not a willful act of
disobedience toward God. On the contrary, pain is, in colloquial terms, a necessary evil in
our world. It allows for our interests to become phenomenologically disinterested from
the self. Our interest in our existence is placed in an eternal framework which
simultaneously is in, with, and beyond the self. Thus our sentiments function relationally;
even pain helps us to attend to the other if we allow it. Good relational training, then,
considers human physical and emotional need not only as an inconvenience or pain, but
also as a pleasure afforded to us by Grace.
3.3.3 The Gift of Pleasure
Lewis introduces his treatise on love in The Four Loves with this very issue of the
relation between need and pleasure. There are two classes of human experience of
pleasure: need-pleasure and pleasures of appreciation. They differ in two regards: (1) the
relation of the object to the person experiencing the pleasure, and (2) the temporal
experience of the thing itself (Lewis, The Four Loves). Need-pleasures are preceded by
natural desires of embodiment, such as thirst or hunger. Appreciative pleasures, on the
other hand, are experienced as moments of pleasure without qualification or preparation,
a “super-added gift” of delight (11). Need-pleasures, once the desire is fulfilled, “die on
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us” abruptly and completely (13). Pleasures of appreciation linger in our minds and souls:
“they make us feel that something has not merely gratified our senses but in fact claimed
our appreciation by right” (13). Need-pleasures speak to the “momentary condition” of
“the human frame” (14), while appreciative pleasures are savored as a glimpse of the
eternal. At first glance, one may surmise that pleasures of appreciation are better or more
desirable than those of need-pleasure. Yet this is not Lewis’s point in making such a
distinction. Together these experiences constitute our embodied souls, and together they
allow us to appreciate a world created by Goodness.
The juxtaposition of our experiences of need and appreciation invites us into a
world of disinterested (i.e., selfless) love. Our needs create a space for appreciation to
manifest itself. Need-pleasure, or the fulfillment of need, begets gratitude. Gratitude
momentarily breaks the bonds of the self to temporality. In these momentary glimpses of
life where bodily need is satisfied, the self is free to exist as a self in proper perspective.
This is the perspective of “goodness” of God’s creation. Lewis describes it as a feeling of
appreciation for the beauty and creativity which sustains us. When we encounter great
works of art, magnificent landscapes, or even quaint gardens nestled in the sun, “we do
not merely like these things; we pronounce them, in a momentarily God-like sense, ‘very
good’” (Lewis, The Four Loves 16). Appreciation for what exists as good for the self
turns into gratitude for what exists in goodness by its own right. We are then able to take
on a disinterested love toward the self—not because the self is devoid of good but
because goodness surpasses the boundaries of self. The pleasures of beauty and goodness
in this world are our gift: not originated or given by us but nonetheless completely for us
if we should accept it.
Appreciative-pleasure, according to Lewis, foreshadows our existence as creatures
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who are defined by love. There is one need-pleasure which endures, and it is the pleasure
humans experience from needing Love Himself. Our need of God can never end, for we
are not only His creation but His children. In “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis writes “I
suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child, and nothing is so
obvious in a child—not in a conceited child, but in a good child—as its great and
undisguised pleasure in being praised” (37). The satisfaction of pleasing “those whom I
rightly loved and rightly feared” (37) is at the very core of who we are as human beings
whose first heartbeats, first breaths—even our very conception—are predicated by need.
It is both a fearful and a joyful thing to be so needful as creatures. “We are born helpless.
As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically,
emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves”
(Lewis, The Four Loves 2). There is real pleasure, and even joy, to be found in being
needful creatures.
Because our existence is relational, everything we feel holds implications for how
we live among the other. One of the first steps in understanding relationships from a
philosophical understanding of love and grace is to be attentive to our embodied
experiences. Lewis describes such an understanding as one characterized by “surprise” as
it is a robust, emergent meeting (Surprised by Joy). When we are met with significance in
the world, we feel it in the racing beat of our hearts, the fluttering of our stomachs, and
the tightness of our throats—we are there not only to meet an embodied experience but a
relationship of the self with otherness. Any weighty interpersonal moment—either
pleasurable or painful—can teach us that our bodies react to our discourse. From his
understanding of pleasure and pain, Lewis transitions to a framework of interpersonal
affections and relationships as being predicated by embodied meetings. First, however, it
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is necessary to discuss his characterization of Joy as a meeting with Holiness, for this
establishes weight to our affections. Our everyday experiences and relationships matter to
Lewis, for it is in the ordinary that we are surprised by the joy of the extraordinary of life
together. [1]
3.3.4 A Soul Surprised by Joy
Lewis describes his moments of meeting otherness as occasions for
contemplation, comfort, longing, and joy. The first experience Lewis claims to have had
with Joy is in the memory of a memory. While standing beside a flowering bush on a
summer’s day in the garden, a memory of his brother’s toy garden in the nursery
overtakes him. Lewis writes that is was difficult for him to find the words to describe
exactly what he felt: “Milton’s ‘enormous bliss’ of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning
to ‘enormous’) comes somewhere near it” (Surprised by Joy 16). He could only describe
it as a sensation of desire, yet the object of his desire was just beyond the grasp of
identification. As quickly as the sensation arrived, it departed: “the whole glimpse
withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the
longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense
everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison” (16).
Lewis’s experience of joy “was something quite different from ordinary life and even
from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, ‘in another dimension’” (17).
Joy constitutes a participatory moment in Eternal Glory. In such a moment, we can make
no distinction between wanting and having: it just is before and within us.
The first error in approaching Joy is in thinking that one can approach it at all.
Lewis writes of the frustration he felt in his early adulthood at the fact that the “old thrill”
of Joy was becoming rarer and rarer for him (Surprised by Joy 168). Then he realized that
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to regard Joy as a thrill at all is a mistake, for it is “only when your whole attention and
desire are fixed on something else—whether a distant mountain, or the past, or the gods
of Asgard—does the ‘thrill’ arise. It is a by-product” (168). Having falsely understood
Joy as being a state of mind (i.e., a “thrill,”) Lewis mistook Joy for a product of his own
efforts and interpretation. There were moments where life startled him into self-
forgetfulness, yet more often than not Joy was frightened away “by my greedy
impatience to snare it, and, even when it came, [I] instantly destroyed it by introspection,
and at all times vulgarized it by my false assumption about its nature” (169). Lewis’s
focus of attention made all of the difference when it came to finding satisfaction for his
longings.
It was not until Lewis picked up a copy of George MacDonald’s Phantastes, a
faerie Romance at a train station bookstall that he recognized Joy as Holiness. While he
read, Lewis remembers that a voice which before seemed so distant was suddenly
speaking to him right here. “It was with me in the room, or in my own body, or behind
me. It is had once eluded my by its distance, it now eluded me by proximity—something
too near to see, too plain to be understood, on this side of knowledge” (Surprised by Joy,
180). Unlike his first taste of Joy as a child with the memory of his brother’s toy garden,
the revelation of Joy as Holiness rendered the common world not as insignificant but as
being drawn into Significance Itself. He saw all things common as a reflection of the
Divine; he inhabited a world engulfed in the bright shadow of Heaven.
The revelation of God through our existential and embodied experiences in this
world has significant implications for human relationships: mainly, that what happens
between us and others in the everyday absolutely matters. We each are souls marching
either toward Heaven or Hell, and all of our relations should be considered in this light
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(Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”). Our bodies and souls mirror the Incarnate Christ. Lewis
writes:
our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads,
the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all
peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything
we can attribute to the Divine itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the
Divine life operating under human conditions. (The Four Loves 6)
Even the most ordinary relationships are eternal in nature, because the humans who
create and sustain these relations are so. Christ, as the substance of human personhood,
worked and served among others with sadness, anger, exhaustion, and pain—all for the
sake of Joy being made manifest in the temporal. We are to approach our relationships in
the same manner: with Goodness and Joy providing a phenomenological framework for
understanding the complexity of our everyday affections.
3.4 Lewis on Living in the Household in the Everyday
3.4.1 Our Natural Affections
Lewis describes those ordinary human relationships as affection. As “the humblest
and most widely diffused of loves,” affection is particularly embodied and familiar
(Lewis, The Four Loves 31). The Greeks called it storge, or the affection parents have for
offspring. Lewis maintains the central meaning of this metaphor, imaging this love as
“that of a mother nursing a baby; a bitch or a cat with a basketful of puppies or kittens; all
in a squeaking, nuzzling heap together; purring, lickings, baby-talk, milk, warmth, the
smell of young life” (The Four Loves 32). Affection is a comfortable, warm, and quiet
love which continues to grow as we grow with it.
While it may be familiar, Lewis claims that an extraordinary thing about affection
is that it teaches us to love the unfamiliar. Affectionate thoughts, acts, and moments are
experienced between people of varying ages, classes, and sexes. It is an indiscriminating
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love; we can feel it for anyone who “happen[s] to be there” (Lewis, The Four Loves 37)
in our household or in our community. It helps us to develop, as Lewis calls it, a “truly
wide taste in humanity” allowing us to find “something to appreciate in the cross-section
of humanity whom one has to meet every day...teaching us first to notice, then to endure,
then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who ‘happen to be
there.’” (37). This simple and humble love teaches us to recognize and appreciate
otherness as a necessary condition for the fulfillment of our everyday lives. Just as in the
first moment when a baby opens its eyes to his mother, “affection opens our eyes to
goodness we could not have seen” otherwise (37).
Because of the closeness—both in body and soul—of our affectionate relations,
need-love and gift-love play a complex role in its manifestation. Mother and child, for
example, both need and give to the other simultaneously and paradoxically, for “it is a
Need-love but what it needs is to give. It is a Gift-love but it needs to be needed” (Lewis,
The Four Loves 32). Bodily, both the mother and child need each other or else they suffer.
Yet emotionally, they also crave the affection of the other. They give to each other
because they need each other. Need-love and gift-love in affection teaches us that we can
love another person not just because of what she can do for us, but because of the fact
that who she is gives so much to us. We learn how to offer love to one another in our
being and in our actions. Lewis argues that, unfortunately, it is exactly this juxtaposition
of need-love and gift-love which places us in danger of coming to expect this love from
others, regardless of how we treat them. We have what Lewis calls a “reasonable
expectation” (40) of loving and being loved by those in our households and communities,
but the very fact of the matter is that we may not be (neither worthy nor loved). Due to
the unassuming and comfortable nature of affection, we may take the love and the
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relationship for granted.
Consequently, affection introduces us to a paradoxical element of love. In order to
be loved, we must be lovable. Yet we are made lovable by being loved. That is why the
constancy and integrity of affection depends upon the presence of Love Himself. Only
God can establish the right groundwork for affection to keep it from going wrong, for
only He loves completely. He has no need and thus, we have nothing to offer Him in our
love. He loves simply because that is His nature, and we are loved because that is why we
were created. When it comes to loving other people (who perhaps have nothing
particularly lovable about them), “it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He
loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are
the things called selves” (Lewis, Mere Christianity 108). Lewis points to the fact that it is
not only our actions, but our focus which establishes and maintains affection. If we focus
on Christ as Love, then we can offer love to others and receive their love in return.
Affection becomes as natural as being the things called selves.
All that which is natural, Lewis argues, functions as a doorway into the unnatural
or the supernatural. “No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves.
They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on
their own and make themselves into false gods” (Lewis, The Great Divorce 92).
Consequently, the humblest of loves has the potential to become either the most perverted
or the most glorious.
3.4.2 Affection and Ownership
Affection, like any human condition, is subject to perversion. Lewis’s demons in
The Screwtape Letters knew this all too well. In the preface to the 1961 edition to The
Screwtape Letters, Lewis writes that the devils in his story are not motivated by a pursuit
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of Evil itself. They are first and foremost motivated by a fear of punishment. The second
motivation is a kind of hunger: “I feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one
another; and us” (Lewis, “Preface” 8). The hunger to devour the other exists even in
human relationships, for “we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one’s
fellow; to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one’s
own” (8). The demons satisfy their hunger only through violent strength, for in Hell, the
stronger spirit survives by “suck[ing] the weaker into itself” and gorging on the other’s
individual body and soul (8). The need for the other becomes excessive and perverted in
Lewis’s understanding of Hell, a temptation from which humans are not immune.
People often confuse overwhelming passion for the other as “true love,”
especially in intimate relationships of the household. Lewis argues how, in reality, this
experience is an inordinate affection where one is focused on the self rather than on Love.
Lewis demonstrates such relationships in much of his fiction. At the end of The
Screwtape Letters, Uncle Screwtape is enraged that his nephew Wormwood has lost his
patient to the Enemy (i.e., God). However, his last letter to Wormwood addresses the
devouring affection he feels for his nephew:
How mistakenly now that all is lost you come whimpering to ask me
whether the terms of affection in which I address you meant nothing from
the beginning. Far from it! Rest assured, my love for you and your love for
me are as like as two peas. I have always desired you, as you (pitiful fool)
desired me. The difference is that I am the stronger. I think they will give
you to me now; or a bit of you. Love you? Why, yes. As dainty a morsel as
ever I grew fat on. (171)
Wormwood has failed and so he is no longer useful to Screwtape. The stronger spirit can
now devour the weaker. More significantly, however, is the fact that the arrangement of
affection between Screwtape and Wormwood was mutual. Each maintained preference
for himself while naming their desire “love.” They loved, indeed. Yet what they loved
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was only themselves and how the other nourished their own spirits. As such,
Wormwood’s last attempts to solicit pity from his uncle falls on deaf ears. He remains, to
the end, his “increasingly and ravenously affectionate uncle” (175), and his hunger will
be satisfied.
Here again in Lewis’s writings is his caution toward an inordinate understanding
of ownership. The simplest of affections, such as that between a mother and a son, will
become perverted when the mark of love ceases to be Love Himself. In such a relation,
the other becomes an object to hold tight, to control, and even to possess for the sake of
the one’s own mistaken presuppositions of security, fidelity, and happiness. “Change is a
threat to affection,” Lewis writes (The Four Loves 45). If one’s object of selfish affection
is changed or taken away, misery and hatred’s slow consumption of the soul inevitably
results. In The Great Divorce, the narrator witnesses how the ghost of a controlling,
overbearing wife begs for the soul of her husband back, for “there’s lots, lots, lots of
things I still want to do with him....Please, please! I’m so miserable. I must have someone
to—to do things to” (Lewis 87). Later, he sees this scene between a Spirit and the ghost
of a broken mother searching for her son in Heaven:
Give me my boy. Do you hear? I don’t care about all your rules and
regulations. I don’t believe in a God who keeps mother and son apart. I
believe in a God of Love. No one has a right to come between me and my
son. Not even God. Tell Him that to His face. I want my boy, and I mean
to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever
and ever.
He will be, Pam. Everything will be yours. God himself will be
yours. But not that way. Nothing can be yours by nature. (93-93)
That which is given to us naturally, including our affections, is not ours to own. We carry
them only for a little while they guide us to Love Himself. Only through God can we
belong to and with anything, even ourselves.
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Consequently, Lewis’s understanding of how we can have anything in this world
at all is more akin to the metaphor of belonging than to ownership. Ownership connotes
an exclusivity of control and a distance between proprietor and property. Belonging, on
the other hand, indicates a phenomenological participation of the self in the potentiality
of the world. From Lewis’s perspective, human beings belong in, with, and to God. When
human beings are obedient to Him, the authority of Heaven is bestowed upon them over
all of creation: “From beyond all place and time, out of the very Place, authority will be
given you: the strengths that once opposed your will shall be obedient in your blood and
heavenly thunder in your voice” (Lewis, The Great Divorce 101). We have the ability to
participate in the created order of temporality and eternity with God as the Master. It is a
relational order, placing all relationships before Him. Let us take, for example, the
relationship between a husband and wife. Lewis writes that when a woman can say “I
belong to You, God,” only then can she truly understand what it means to say “I belong to
you” to her husband. A husband has headship over his wife in so far as he understands his
belonging to Christ as the embodiment of his authority: “He is to love her as Christ loved
the Church—read on—and give his life for her (Eph. V, 25). This headship, then, is most
fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is
most like a crucifixion” (Lewis, The Four Loves 105, emphasis original). To belong
means to be rightly placed before God just as Christ is placed as our intermediary at the
right hand of the Father. A husband and wife do not own one another. They belong to one
another in a relation of two selves meeting each other in the fullness of willful obedience
to and embodied participation within Love.
3.10 Moving With and Beyond Our Affections
Affection is the most basic form of love, coloring all other forms of loves touched
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by familiarity, comfort, and warmth. Yet affection alone does not suffice; Eternity within
us wills that our relationships provide greater depth than simply what comfort can
provide. There must be real grace in an affectionate relationship if it is to be considered
love at all. “Affection produces happiness if—and only if—there is common sense and
give and take and ‘decency,’” Lewis writes. “In other words, only if something more, and
other, than Affection is added.” (The Four Loves 54-55). In affection, we are introduced
to both the lovable and unlovable characteristics of those persons closest to us, including
ourselves. Sometimes it is easy to love; yet at other times maintaining real affection—
especially within the ordinariness of the everyday year after year—is difficult. All love is
costly love, but the rewards for loving rightly are eternal. Consequently, while all
affections can become rivals to our love for God, Lewis argues that “they can also be
preparatory imitations of it, training (so to speak) of the spiritual muscles which Grace
may later put to a higher service” (24).
Even the simplest of sentiments and affections work for us interpersonally. They
demonstrate need, they rouse us to alterity, and they bring us joy in relation. Like those
thinkers before him from the ancient Greeks to the Scottish Enlightenment, Lewis
contends that our bodies are persuasive vehicles indeed—the material situates the
discursive and, hence, the ethical. Our embodied existence establishes a framework for
living according to universal values of relation, such as interpersonal affection and
sympathetic relations. Yet Lewis also recognizes that persons have a choice in the naming
of their own sentiments and how inclinations and affections are realized in
communicative action with others. It is not enough to need or to feel; we must situate
those sentiments relationally. Consequently, Lewis agrees with Plato, Aristotle,
Augustine, and others in defense of the training of the heart in interpersonal relationships.
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As both Plato and Aristotle argue, from a very young age, we all must learn good habits
and practices which address the needs of our bodies and the desires of our hearts as well
as the good of relational reason and responsibility.
Lewis’s philosophical rendering of sentiments carries significant implications for
how people feel, act, and relate in everyday contexts. Thus, his writings exhibit
theoretical touch points with the literature in interpersonal communication studies. First,
Lewis’s work establishes a common ground of embodiment in human relationships.
Much like the common values of Sissela Bok or the universal ethics of Clifford
Christians, Lewis articulates a defense of universal values in human relation. In addition,
his framework attends to the need for grace in the enactment of values, both in body and
discourse. Consequently, Lewis’s writings also articulate the need for the training of our
hearts in interpersonal relationships. He challenges us to think about the complexity of
need in interpersonal relationships, and how our inclinations of fairness and exchange in
relation are almost right—but not quite. Lewis argues that our hearts need the assistance
of grace in making good relational choices, especially in the everyday communicative
interactions of the household.
3.5 Implications for IPC: A Common Place to Begin
Ethicists Sissela Bok and Clifford Christians have pioneered the reclamation of
universal moral norms in philosophy of communication and communication studies in
recent years. Although their philosophical approaches are different, both argue for the
establishment of a common place to begin thinking and talking about communicative
theory and practices, especially in global and technological infrastructures which
illuminate the alterity of human life together. Both are keenly aware of the reality of
human fallibility in moral discourse and action and bring to bear important questions
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concerning the discovery of values which speak to the challenges of human being in
discourse and relation.
Bok’s work particularly is relevant to understanding interpersonal meetings
between and among diverse people. In her book Common Values, Sissela Bok suggests
that a “limited set of common values so down-to-earth and so commonplace as to be most
easily recognized across societal and other boundaries” (1) would provide a basis for
collaboration and opportunities for dialogue among persons and cultures. Such values,
she argues, would allow for people to approach both the human and natural demands of
communal life. Bok’s framework is a minimalist approach to ethics, one that addresses
the basic necessities and inclinations of human existence and participation in the world.
Although her focus is societal and global in scope, her theory of common values holds
significant implications for understanding the intersection of moral theory and practical
ethics in all types of human discourse and relation.
Christians takes a more historical and interpretive approach to understanding our
common humanity. In his “The Ethics of Being in a Communications Context,” he argues
that philosophical defenses of universal morality have eroded since the late 20th century.
The language of “universal norms” now is being replaced by language theories,
deconstructionist ethics, and philosophical relativism. However, Christians writes that
although many philosophers and ethical theorists now “speak in concert against the
totalizing conditions of knowledge that the 18th century fostered,” this condition shows
itself to be problematic when “there are no widely accepted rational means for people
committed to different beliefs to debate them constructively” (5). He claims that a
reclamation of universal morals may be conceivable and intellectually defensible. The
question of such a “metaethics” would be: “Are there global principles or a moral order
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or master norms which belong to our humanness?” (6). Christians’s approach to ethics in
human relations calls for attention to the universal within the particular—the discovery of
the ontological within the existential.
Lewis shares the concern for articulating common values such as is demonstrated
by Bok and Christians. In The Abolition of Man, he argues that even Gaius and Titus have
an end in mind—a good which drives the whole purpose of the book, even if that end be
to “debunk” the traditional idea of values. What Gaius and Titus do not realize, however,
is that in order to move propositions of fact to issues of practice, there must be a moral
component introduced. For example, Lewis writes “This will preserve society cannot lead
to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved” (32, emphasis
original). With “ought” introduced into the equation, we come to realize that our impulses
for action are framed by choice and reflection. We seek a “way” to lend validity to our
assumptions. It is exactly in this idea of “the way”—the Tao—which helps Lewis to
advance the thinking of universal moral theorists. Whether it is referred to as Natural
Law, Traditional Morality, or the First Principles of Practical Reason, “it is the sole
source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is
retained, it is retained” (43). Lewis argues that we inherit a moral world, thus “there has
never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the
world;” all ideologies find their way back to the Tao (43).[3] He admits that his purpose
specifically within this context is not to advance his Christian theism. He is simply
arguing that there is a value-system in our consciousness and discourse—it gives us the
ability to think and talk in terms of “ought” at all. “Outside of the Tao there is no ground
for criticizing the Tao or anything else...if we are to have values at all, we must accept the
ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity” (48-49). Our common
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values, then, are never abstract principles. They are concrete manners in which we live
together in existence.
Where does the concrete manner of our life together “begin”? Although he may
not self-identify as such, Lewis is indeed a philosopher of communication who is
concerned deeply with the relationship between the material and the spiritual, the
universal and the particular, and the moral and the practical. He situates the body as a
starting point for our common values and subsequent relationships. In The Problem of
Pain, Lewis articulates a phenomenological approach to understanding the language use
of embodied selves:
What we need for human society is exactly what we have—a neutral
something, neither you nor I, which we can both manipulate so as to make
signs to each other. I can talk to you because we can both set up sound-
waves in the common air between us. Matter, which keeps souls apart,
also brings them together. It enables each of us to have an “outside” as
well as an “inside”, so that what are acts of will and thought for you are
noises and glances for me; you are enabled not only to be but to appear;
and hence I have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. (21-22)
For Lewis, the common place to begin is our phenomenological encounter with the
material world of other selves. The space of our bodies introduces us to alterity and
makes us aware of the thing called a self. With the consciousness of selves as such, one
meets the ethical in every interpersonal context.
As a Christian theist and essentialist, Lewis understands that the ontological order
of creation manifests itself in existence every day. The fact that the “Divine life
operat[ed] under human conditions” (Lewis, The Four Loves 6) establishes the temporal
and material as eternally significant. Thus we need to attend to that which happens within
and among us as human beings—the movements, the appearances, the inclinations, the
thoughts, the “inside” and the “outside” (Lewis, The Problem of Pain 22). Although
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Lewis claims that our standards of relation are deeply material, he contends that they
should never rely on the material alone. He writes that God will someday redeem all of
the temporal world in fullness and perfection (Mere Christianity; see also the example of
Heaven in The Great Divorce), but we are not there yet. In the meantime, we have many
physical and emotional burdens to bear within our lives together; our fallibility makes
this so. Our humanity needs to be tethered to that which will help us realize that our
hearts constitute a longing for more than just the bodily, the immediate, or the necessary.
We desire to commune, not simply to identify commonalities. In order to do so, one must
recognize that which is other than the body of the self while remaining an embodied self.
Thus Lewis contends that relational training must include a consideration of the
unique space which sentiments hold in allowing human selves to establish households
and communities. Interpersonal relationships are an issue of heart, and our hearts must be
guided by Love to make good choices. What begins in basic needs and affections must be
translated into standards for communicative practices. As discussed in Chapter Two,
Christ’s incarnation within and redemption of the material and temporal world allows for
relational redemption and significance (Mere Christianity). According to Lewis, then, the
standard for our embodied relations is already set—we need only to make the choice to
follow. We must be taught what these choices look like in everyday contexts, however.
Consequently, Lewis defends the need for intellectual, moral, and relational development
of all people in the inculcation of just sentiments (see also Simon’s The Disciplined
Heart).
3.6 Implications for IPC: “Men Without Chests”
Lewis’s work in The Abolition of Man fundamentally is a warning against of a
world of “men without chests.” His critique of modern models of education such as is
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illustrated in The Green Book is twofold: (1) he laments the loss of universally valued
relational practices as they are exhibited in the literature, philosophy, and history of
premodern times, such as courage, honor, and compassion; and (2) he blames this loss on
the rationalism and intellectualism which characterizes most of modern pedagogy. Lewis
writes that although modern educators are proud of the intellectuals which they create in
their school, it is “not the excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion
that marks” students of his time: “Their heads are no bigger than ordinary: it is the
atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so” (25). He calls for the training of
sentiments as a crucial component of educating young minds for good relationships in the
world. One cannot expect virtuous actions of anyone if the assumption is that one’s heart
is disconnected from one’s head.
Lewis’s approach to relational training attentive to sentiments still holds weight in
the context of interpersonal communication theory and practice today. While much of the
interpersonal communication literature does not deny the role which sentiments and
affections play in relational development, some dominant theoretical trends do
overemphasize the cognitive demands of interpersonal communicative contexts. Lewis
would find the social scientific analytical framework of evaluating, quantifying, or
objectifying human interpersonal experiences as especially problematic. Working from
Lewis’s framework, other foundational theories can be viewed as almost right when it
comes to understanding the complexities of human relationships, but still are deficient.[4]
Social exchange theory is a significant example in this regard.[5] The theory assumes that
human beings in relation experience an “objective interdependence” with one another and
make relational decisions accordingly, which in turn creates relational “problems” toward
which we must attend (Thibault and Kelley 4-5). Each person simultaneously is
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dependent upon and independent from the other with whom their behaviors and decisions
are intimately tied, and each vies for the fulfillment of interpersonal needs. Thibault and
Kelley explain that relational decisions are made based on a cost-reward analysis, where
the most beneficial relationships allow one to maintain or pursue desirable
communicative and relational behaviors in the context of mutual pleasure, satisfaction,
and gratification. If a relationship is not deemed satisfactory by one or both partners in
terms of the fulfillment of interpersonal needs and desires, then the relationship is subject
to termination.
Need obviously exists in human relationships, and we do act according to these
needs. In addition, we do think according to issues of exchange and reason together on
how to meet individual requirements for fulfillment. However, Lewis’s argument against
theories such as social exchange would highlight two presuppositions: (1) the assumption
that all interpersonal needs should be fulfilled and (2) that people have an expectation of
consistent fair exchange of communicative efforts in a given relationship. The hearts of
real people in real relationships, Lewis argues, are much more complicated than that.
First, Lewis’s claims that there is a real liability within the relational state of need.
Interpersonal needs demand to be filled, and once they are they “die on us” (Lewis, The
Four Loves 13). This poses a risk in relational contexts—once needs are met, there is
little left to motivate reciprocity of care, not to mention acts of charity. What happens
when needs become the primary motivator for care in a family, for example? Lewis
describes a challenging scenario of need and affection in a family in the character of Mrs.
Fidget, who “lived for her family” (The Four Loves 49). She did all of their laundry
(despite the fact that she was begged not to—she had not the talent for it); she provided
every hot meal for them (even when they asked for cold food during midsummer); she
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would stay up late until they got home safely (to the point where they would not go out at
all for fear of facing that pale and weary face when they returned) (49). Her family,
because they knew it was the right thing to do, had no choice in the matter. In the end,
they “did things for her to help her to do things for them which they didn’t want done” in
the first place (50). Lewis writes that in an effort to remain “needed” even after the wants
and desires of her family have been addressed, Mrs. Fidget made all of them miserable,
including herself. On the surface level of needs and affections, she could not remain
relevant—few of us can. He continues to write “that is why the world rings with the
complaints of mothers whose grown-up children neglect them and of forsaken mistresses
whose lovers’ love was pure need—which they have satisfied” (15). Some of our very
real needs—such as Mrs. Fidget’s need to be needed—can indeed be detrimental to
healthy relationships. With the existence of need in real relationships, fair exchange and
reciprocity often goes to the wayside.
For this reason, standards for good interpersonal relationships must be attentive to
need and feelings but not overemphasize our abilities to satisfy or address them for each
other. Simply, we cannot expect a fair exchange of effort and care in all communicative
situations. In the very least it would be exhausting to try and, at worst, disingenuous for
those in the relationship. Lewis argues that since we are derivative creatures of God, we
live in inescapable need of our Creator. There is a desire and longing in our hearts which
no one else but Him can satisfy (Mere Christianity; The Problem of Pain). Practically
speaking, we will live in unceasing need in this world—both in body and soul.
Consequently, a relationship predicated by the fulfillment of needs will never be
satisfactory. In addition, from a communicative standpoint, it would be unwise for us to
assume that we can understand completely the needs and feelings of the other. Lewis’s
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treatment of gender relations in his writings on Eros (The Four Loves), Christian
marriage (Mere Christianity), and even the story of Jane and Mark in That Hideous
Strength, suggest that difficulty and tension permeates human communicative action,
especially between the sexes. We try to attend to the ones that we love as best as we can,
but at times we misunderstand or disappoint each other. Human fallibility makes this so.
In poignant ways, Lewis challenges his readers to consider the difficult questions in any
interpersonal relationship: What happens when the other person is not giving “enough”
for you? Or further still, is there ever reason to care for another even when he or she has
nothing left to offer?
Lewis contends that healthy marriages, families, and communities need to ask
these challenging questions concerning just what it is we are asked to give to one another
and under whose terms. To train true women and men with “chests” takes more than just
considerations of fair exchange, rational approaches to relating, or making sure everyone
is happy and satisfied. It takes heart. We must be attentive to our own hearts and the
hearts of others—it is an “ought” of our existence together. Thus, placed in our chests are
hearts inclined to seek the presence and practice of grace in our loving. Our hearts give
weight to our existence with one another, yet lend us levity—allowing us to carry one
another when called. Our hearts allow us to be needful persons who are also capable of
reflection, choice, and sacrifice with and for the other. Our hearts call us to commune
with one another and work toward a better life. Lewis argues that it is men and women
“with chests” who exhibit the practical reason for which healthy households and
communities call. At the center of it all is grace—grace for how we are created, how we
meet one another in discourse, and how we choose Joy.
From Lewis’s perspective, real heart constitutes an embodiment of goodness,
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affording our loves their proper weight in relation. Because of the choice which we have
in displaying and naming our pleasures, pains, and affections with one another, Lewis’s
framework for sentiment is tied inescapably with his understanding of human will. The
next chapter examines more closely the question of human will in relationships and
Lewis’s stance on how bodies are moved into relation.
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CHAPTER FOUR
WILL AND THE MOVEMENT OF REFLECTIVE SOULS
4.1 Introduction
This chapter discusses will as a critical theoretical and practical component in
building a theory of the presence and practice of grace in intimate interpersonal
communication. The question of human will is a significant issue for rhetoricians and
philosophers of communication, a question which holds ontological, existential,
epistemological, and discursive implications. As discussed below, will constitutes the
manner in which we meet the world in decision, action, and affirmation of response.
Questions such as “To what extent can we determine our own beliefs, deeds, and
formation of character within a world of others?,” “How do we decide to act on particular
beliefs?,” and “How are we motivated through language and relationships?” are all
questions of will from a rhetorical perspective. The Christian philosophical tradition
framing this project garners a particularly unique approach to and reverence for human
will in relational considerations. Accordingly, for the sake of clarity and consistency of
theoretical approach, the preliminary discussion regarding the question of will is framed
by primarily an Augustinian framework. Will creates an understanding of human-being-
in-discourse as a condition of loving labor with the other.
First, the chapter briefly addresses the distinctive character of will from the
perspective of St. Augustine. The metaphor of will, like the metaphor of sentiment
discussed in Chapter Three, describes how we meet the world. Yet will is an incremental
step toward a fuller understanding of and appreciation for the self as we consider the
movement of the soul in our discursive practices. Extrapolating on Chapter Three’s focus
on the relational training of the heart, this chapter discusses the loving labor we meet
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when particular souls face each other in relation. In Augustine’s work, the metaphor of
will integrates both belief and practice in everyday discourse, for he posits knowing,
loving, and willing as consubstantial. Will is a function of our relations both theoretically
and practically as we learn to love in proper ways. Taken in light of fundamental
questions in interpersonal communication studies such as cognition in decision-making,
shared symbolic action, and self competence in relational contexts, an Augustinian
understanding of will offers a compelling approach to the literature. Thus, the preliminary
section concludes with a brief discussion of the functional importance of will in
interpersonal communication studies.
Next, the chapter illustrates specifically how Lewis’s writings address questions
of will and decision-making in interpersonal relationships. Although Lewis only
occasionally references the writings of St. Augustine in his own books (see The Abolition
of Man for an example), reading Lewis’s writings in juxtaposition with an Augustinian
perspective on the nature of the will allows one to see how Lewis closely followed in the
footsteps of the saint. He describes the will as an issue of attention and movement of the
soul. We exercise our will from within a fallen condition, and good responsiveness of the
self lies in the recognition of the need for grace from the Other. Lewis shows how each
person is granted a choice; one of positioning the self in the space of pride or
personhood. Throughout his writings, Lewis urges his readers to choose the orientation of
personhood over that of pride, for only in personhood do we experience the fullness of
self in loving relation. Building upon the discussion of sentiments in Chapter Three, this
chapter shows how Lewis’s writings provide a framework for understanding human
beings in discourse as constituted by both choice and labor. The final section of the
chapter will reflect on the heuristic value which Lewis’s writings on human will have for
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understanding love and discourse in the interpersonal communication literature.
Responsiveness, choice, labor, and grace all play a part in Lewis’s recommendations for
relational wisdom in everyday interpersonal encounters.
4.2 An Augustinian Approach to the Will
St. Augustine was one of the earliest Christian philosophers to discuss human will
within a relational context—he considered one’s relationship to the world as well as to
others as one constituted by a loving willfulness of the self. According to the saint, the
order of creation is constituted by love. In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine articulates
that no creature (including the self), should be loved for the sake of itself, but instead
should be loved on account of being derivative of God’s substance and will (1.22.21).
God as Love is the source and medium for all subsequent acts of will. Human love, then,
functions as attentiveness to and acceptance of willful relationships within and to the
world.
The relation of soul to the world is one of intention. In Epistulae 166.2.4,
Augustine writes that the soul “…is stretched out through the whole body which it
animates, not by a local diffusion, but by a vital intention” (qtd. in Teske 119).
Consequently, Augustine assumes that we learn by meeting the world with a willfulness
in body, mind, and spirit unlike any other creature made. The human mind—our thoughts,
our beliefs, our capacity for volition—is the same substance or spirit as love.
Consequently, Augustine argues that love is not merely a subject to be thought about or
felt, but an act of the will and an exercise of knowing (On the Trinity 9.4.5). Our mind,
our love, and our knowledge, in other words, form a trinity of substance that constitutes
the complexity of the human self—a consubstantiality as exhibited by the Trinity of the
Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Thus, when we are compelled to meet the world and act
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within it, our willfulness is consubstantial with love.
Augustine argues that human love is responsive to a form, or an order. To know is
to love and to love is to will to imitate. He understands imitation as the act of moving
toward an exemplar or form. He works from the belief that each person’s soul moves with
and is moved by a desire to know, and this desire is relationally driven. When we are
introduced to the beauty of forms, we want to know more—that is, we want not only to
know but to fellowship: “For that form touches the mind that knows and thinks; it reveals
the beauty of minds that have been brought together in fellowship by listening to and
answering questions through signs that are known” (On the Trinity 10.1.2, emphasis
added). The mention of fellowship here is key. For Augustine, behind every movement of
the soul—ultimately that which compels us to act—is not just a form; it is a Person.
Every heart, mind, and will in creation calls out in a restless state to know God. He is the
origin and the compulsion for all action and all knowing (Confessions 1.1-2). Directing
our hearts and minds toward God in a desire to know and to imitate Him is by no means a
homogenizing moment, Augustine claims. On the contrary, every instance of love is a
unique act because particular people meet existence in particular moments. This lends a
beauty to our loving—human beings truly participate in this world. Yet, at the same time,
within fallen existence all human knowledge is fragmentary and our wills are corrupted
(On the Trinity; Confessions; On Christian Doctrine). Augustine argues that,
epistemologically, to move toward a Form is to willfully recall the images of all related
forms according to their proper place. Even though the Truth of God is available to all
human beings, we must work to make connections, to know objects and others as they are
to be known, and to align our decisions and actions accordingly. We think and act
relationally. Yet in the exercise of a corrupted will, knowledge of our place within the
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world can become distorted (Christian Doctrine 1.26.27). In other words, we can love
“out of order” when we imitate a form or forms not true to the self’s position in the
created order.
Consequently, Augustine argues that each individual, while wholly participatory
in knowledge, will, and love in existence, never belongs completely to oneself. Augustine
argues that to truly know oneself as a self is to know that one is from God. After his
conversion experience, Augustine writes in the Confessions that he continued to pursue
the question of the self. In Book 9, he asks “Who am I, and what am I?” and claims that
the answer lies in “…not to will what I willed and to will what you willed” (9.1.1). For
Augustine, the turning of the will toward God’s will, or the participation in and imitation
of God’s order, is the beginning of knowledge and love. The pursuit of wisdom begins
with a question about knowing the function and position of the self in relation. In other
words, Augustine argues that a self knows form and function before one knows
particularity. This is because one must know oneself as a creature of God first and then as
a particular self. In describing the form of an individual soul, Augustine uses the
metaphor of a mirror: we “…will never see [our]selves except in a mirror; nor are we to
believe in any way that such means may be also used for the contemplation of
incorporeal things, as the mind should know itself as it were in a mirror” (On the Trinity
10.3.5). Human minds and hearts, by the light of divine illumination, are made to reflect,
not to create, images of God’s truth.
To exercise the will is a participatory movement of the soul, but as Chapter Three
intimated, we are born with hearts and minds which inherently are needful. When we
begin with the question “Who am I, and what am I?” the self eventually finds the
proclamation “I am not he, but he who has made me” (Augustine, Confessions 10.6.9).
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Augustine argues that it is a fundamental truth; we are ourselves, but we are nonetheless
made. Thus, the will is a function of relations—relations which inform our practices. One
never engages anything within the created world, including the self, without the presence
of relation. Specifically, Augustine (On the Trinity) argues that this relation is always
between the self, the person or object of attention, and the third Person—God—who
endows our souls with the ability to attend in the first place. God is present in every act of
decision, allowing the act to be so. In recognizing our willful relations, according to
Augustine’s work, we can know and love “properly” under God.
4.3 The Functional Importance of Will in IPC
Augustine’s understanding of will emphasizes the relational in the context of
personal decision-making. He is concerned with how one’s attention to and within
everyday relationships reflect our selves and inform our practices. Such questions of the
will and self are not unfamiliar to general interpersonal communication studies. As
outlined in Chapter One, key studies within the interpersonal communication literature
examine how a person decides to act in a relational context. Yet the discourse of the
literature is often framed in such terms as “decision-making” and “motive,” not
necessarily “will.” This chapter argues that the metaphor of will introduces a more
complex dimension to studies of decision-making and motive in interpersonal
communication, for according to Augustine and Lewis, the will constitutes the manner in
which a human being meets the world in discursive and practical response.
As discussed later within this chapter, will is a phenomenological labor to know
the self and others in loving relation. First, however, the chapter briefly returns to the
functional purpose of will in personal decision-making as it is introduced in Chapter One.
Functionally, both Augustine and Lewis are concerned with similar questions as many
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interpersonal communication scholars; that is, how does (and, they argue, should) one’s
relationship with the Other shape our discursive practices? The question of will is
important not only theoretically but also functionally for interpersonal studies because
issues of decision-making and motive are inescapably tied to relational practices. How
theorists frame human agency—cognitively, socially, and discursively—shapes
understanding of how we learn together, respond to contexts with competence, achieve
and share communicative control, and exercise the ability to act on our beliefs in
everyday relational situations. In order to discuss how interpersonal theorists regard the
connection between volition and practices in interpersonal studies, three theoretical issues
concerning human agency will be outlined briefly: (1) human cognition and perception
formation, (2) the social significance of meaning construction, and (3) the development
of self-competence.
To begin, it is important to note that learning theories of development maintain
strong connections to the interpersonal communication literature when it comes to
discussion of human cognition in decision-making. As discussed in Chapter One, learning
theory presupposes that personal decision-making as well as collective problem solving
are a result of the complex interplays of cognitive behavior and environmental and
relational contexts. Foundational texts in the field of psychology and sociology, such as
the writings of Jean Piaget, Robert Gagné, and Kurt Lewin, describe communicative
interchanges as complex stimulus-response contexts in which individual behavior is
conditioned by environmental reinforcement. Such reinforcement helps the self to build
relational memory for further perception, interpretation, and decision-making.
Within the interpersonal communication literature, theorists who emphasize
cognitive functionality and development in relationships often focus on the capacity for
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human beings to rationalize contextually and learn to act accordingly. Two theoretical
examples which work in tandem are Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance and
Charles Berger and Richard Calabrese’s uncertainty reduction theory. Festinger (A Theory
of Cognitive Dissonance) examines the human compulsion for cognitive and behavioral
consistency or what Berger and Calabrese refer to as predictability of communicative
contexts. Humans seeks to reduce the discomfort of cognitive dissonance (or conscious
inconsistency) associated with our decision-making. Thus, upon initial encounter with a
new person, one’s “primary concern is one of uncertainty reduction or increasing
predictability about the behavior of both themselves and others in the interaction” (Berger
and Calabrese 100). We seek out as much information as possible in order to form
accurate expectations for future encounters. Once these perceptions are formulated, a
person will seek supporting and avoid contradictory evidence of their presuppositions
(Festinger A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance). However, as human beings we will be
faced with contradiction and inconsistency of our assumptions and expectations.
Consequently, we may attempt to distort, discredit, or forget the source of new and
contradictory information. If it proves impossible to eliminate or forget inconsistency, a
person eventually concedes to modifying one’s beliefs or actions in an attempt to relieve
the dissonance. Consequently, interpersonal decision-making, according to these
foundational theories of cognitive behavior within the literature, is largely a matter of the
formation of particular relational expectations. Whether the choice is to pursue or end
relational encounters based on perceived mutual pleasure, satisfaction, and gratification,
(Thibault and Kelly) or to design person-centered messages (O’Keefe), these theories
presuppose that human beings are individuals marked by cognitive complexity and who
reason about their communicative practices.
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Interpersonal communication theorists continue to broaden our understanding of
human complexity as it relates to interpersonal decision-making and action. Studies in the
literature show how interpersonal knowledge and judgment do not function solely
cognitively—they emerge discursively and relationally. For example, as discussed in
Chapter One, Albert Bandura’s work articulates the role which mimetic behaviors and
social cues play in the formation of individual personalities and systems for decision-
making. Together, we construct relational environments consisting of particular
interpretations, behaviors, and rules for engagement with one another. Expectations for
reciprocation, commitment, and authority are just some of the ways in which relational
decision-making is shaped by one’s interactions with the other (Cialdini). Essentially,
human volition is a phenomenon with roots and consequences in sociality. Accordingly,
many interpersonal theories advocate for mindfulness, or an awareness of the extent to
which perceptions and behaviors are socially determined (see Ellen Langer, “Minding
Matters: The Consequences of Mindlessness-Mindfulness” for an earlier example of this
work). Becoming mindful in interpersonal situations involves an awareness of those
social expectations and contextual rules which trigger interpersonal behavior and the
ability to align these with interpersonal goals, roles, and messages. We not only reason
about our individual choices, we reason together concerning the consequences of our
discursive practices.
Consequently, the majority of interpersonal decision-making models within the
literature situate the development of communicative self-competence at the core of the
interchange.[1] Chapter One argued how issues of message competence, consistency
between thought and action, and authenticity in behavior are important theoretical and
functional issues of relational decision-making. Interpersonal theorists Walter Carl and
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Steve Duck argue that interpersonal communication affords one to “take a position, to
espouse beliefs, and to promulgate attitudes and opinions,” and as human beings we
“continuously [seek] confirmation of the self in relation to others” (3). The goal of
relational exchanges is for all persons involved to exercise their capacity for
interpretation and volition in the pursuit of shared communicative goals while remaining
attentive to expectations and limitations of relational contexts. Foundational concepts in
interpersonal communication studies, such as face (e.g., Erving Goffman, “On Facework:
An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction”), social comparison (e.g., Leon
Festinger, “A Theory of Social Comparison Processes”; Jerry Suls and Ladd Wheeler,
The Handbook of Social Comparison Theory and Research), self-disclosure (e.g.,
Lawrence Wheeless, “A Follow-Up Study of the Relationships Among Trust, Disclosure,
and Interpersonal Solidarity”; Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, “The Johari Window, A
Graphic Model of Interpersonal Awareness”), and self-awareness (e.g., Mead, Mind, Self,
and Society) all point to how the self in relation constitutes human agency. While the self
is shaped and sustained through relationships with others, a person ultimately has a
choice in interpersonal communication contexts concerning exhibited behaviors and
continued practices.[2]
Thus questions of decision-making and volition in interpersonal communication
studies are attentive to issues of the self in relation and how the understanding of the self
guides and shapes communicative practices. From both a theoretical and functional
perspective, it matters how one understands the self—cognitively, socially,
discursively—and his or her capacity to choose. A Christian understanding of human will
as articulated by St. Augustine and discussed by Lewis shares these concerns. Yet this
project argues that two fundamental issues differentiate Lewis (following Augustine)
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from the presuppositions of many interpersonal communication competence models: (1)
the will as derivative yet deficient and (2) the presence of God in all relationships and
action. The final sections of this chapter explores more fully the heuristic value which
Lewis’s work holds for the study and practice of interpersonal communication. Before
that discussion, however, the chapter provides a review of Lewis’s arguments concerning
human will and personhood in relational contexts.
4.4 Lewis on the Movement of the Will and the Fall
In line with the discussion in the previous chapter concerning the body and its
need for fullness and glory through Christ, Lewis also supports that we are not born with
a will which reflects the fullness of personhood. This is due to the Fall of humankind into
an existence of limited consciousness and impeded relations. Consequently, the human
will suffers lack and even corruption from epistemological and communicative
standpoints. Yet although we cannot perfectly know or relate in temporality, we can
nonetheless attend. Like Augustine, Lewis’s writings point to how the divine gift of
attention, or the movement of the will, characterizes human relationships and is lends us
the ability to work toward relational restoration and fulfillment with God and others.
Human beings have always been creatures, and thus derivative, of God. Yet in the
beginning of time the human creature enjoyed a complete consciousness and fullness of
self, a consequence of an unimpeded relation with the Creator. In The Problem of Pain,
Lewis describes how the Paradisal human came to self awareness:
Then, in the fullness of time, God caused to descend upon this organism,
both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which
could say “I” and “me,” which could look upon itself as an object, which
knew God, which could make judgments of truth, beauty, and goodness,
and which was so far above time that it could perceive time flowing past.
This new consciousness ruled and illuminated the whole organism,
flooding every part of it with light, and was not, like ours, limited to a
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selection of the movements going on in one part of the organism, mainly
the brain. Man was then all consciousness. (72)
The consciousness of Paradisal man constituted a perfect will; an unencumbered relation
of choice, being, and response. The first human experienced a fullness in matter and mind
we cannot now imagine, for even the natural processes of the body were obedient to the
will. His entire being—body, soul, and will—reposed fully in God and His creation.
Lewis describes how “in perfect cyclic movement, being, power and joy descended from
God to man in the form of gift and returned from man to God in the form of obedient
love and ecstatic adoration” (The Problem of Pain 74). God and human being enacted a
perfect relation; creatures in perfect attention toward the Creator.
Lewis’s understanding of the movement of the human will is deeply indebted to
the Christian teaching that “God is love.” This statement, Lewis claims, speaks volumes
concerning the invitation which human beings hold to participate in the dynamics of
Eternity. He writes “in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a
dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama” (Mere Christianity 152). We
move and attend because we are creatures of Action; this is why Augustine characterizes
the act as love (On the Trinity). Consequently, in order for us to choose at all, we must
move in and with Movement and Life Himself. Human beings were brought into this
world not as fixtures, but as living participants in a world responsive to its Creator. In
Lewis’s terms, humans are to be adjectives to God as Noun (The Problem of Pain 75).
Essentially and existentially, it matters how we know and relate to the world. The will, as
the instrument for our attention, moves the self toward or away from the subject of
knowledge and relation; we can only know that toward which we attend and we attend
toward what we love (Augustine, Confessions; On the Trinity). The Paradisal human
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attended to Love Himself absolutely; perfect adjectives of the Eternal Subject of
attention.
Lewis asserts that God created the freedom of attention as a good for all rational
creatures. Yet there is an inherent risk in this gift: “The freedom of a creature means a
freedom to choose: and choice implies the existence of things to choose between” (The
Problem of Pain 20). With the introduction of sin into temporality came the realization
that one could turn toward someone or something else as if it were God—most notably
the self. Prior to the Fall, the Paradisal human “had...no temptation (in our sense) to
choose the self—no passion, or inclination obstinately inclining that way—nothing but
the bare fact that the self was himself” (The Problem of Pain 77, emphasis original).
When the Fall occurred, Lewis writes how “someone or something whispered that they
[the Paradisal humans] could be as gods” and that the self could be the primary object of
attention. As a result, there was a shift in the human will as “they wanted, as we say, to
‘call their souls their own’” (The Problem of Pain 75). It is important to note that the
capacity to choose was not afforded to us during that moment of the Fall. Since we were
created, we always have had volition. According to Lewis’s description of the original
Paradise, we always chose God. We chose Him because that is what we are. Attending to
God never meant forsaking the self. Yet with the Fall, we began to believe this to be so.
However, Lewis argues that for human beings to believe that they can live “as
their own” (The Problem of Pain) is a self-contradiction and a lie. Adjectives cannot be
the Subject; mirrors cannot be Light; response cannot act as Being. Fallen humans turned
their attention inward only to find the self recede from his grasp, like an object eternally
in the periphery of their vision. Consequently, after the Fall humankind’s vision of and
relation to God and to His creation became impaired. In his writings on human
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knowledge and volition after the Fall, Lewis echoes Ephesians 5:8: we are born into
darkness, or into an imperfect relation with Light.[3] Our task now is to cast our eyes
back toward Him, and it is a labor for beings with a corrupted will. Yet MacDonald
describes how God sees us in such labor: “for he regards men not as they are merely...but
as they are now growing, towards that image after which he made them that they might
grow to it” (Unspoken Sermons 20). When sin entered human existence, God did not
deprive us of the gift of attention. Without it, we cannot experience the movement of
growth. Even simpler still, if we cannot move, we cannot fall—either at God’s feet or
away from His side.
In relational terms, to attend toward something means to care for it. Herein lies
Augustine’s insight into the condition of will and love. What or who one loves, one wills
to attend to in responsiveness (On the Trinity). As Lewis puts it, to love is to respond to
the question of whom “(when the alternative comes) do you serve, or choose, or put
first?” (The Four Loves 123). Love is a promise of return of the self; so, how one regards
the self is of crucial significance for his or her relations. Recognizing this, Lewis frames
the basis of human relations within a fundamental choice of the will regarding self.
4.5 “Two Ways with the Self” in Relation
4.5.1 Pride
As discussed in Chapter Three, relation begins from where the self is positioned
among others. This positioning is a phenomenological act of attention and manifests itself
a fundamental choice: “From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and
of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to
it” (Lewis, The Problem of Pain 70). Lewis writes of the choice in terms of love. On the
one hand, the self is a creature of God and thus “an occasion of love and rejoicing; now,
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indeed, hateful in condition, but to be pitied and healed” (“Two Ways with the Self” 120).
On the other hand, Lewis argues, “it is that one self of all others which is called I and me,
and which on that ground puts forward an irrational claim to preference” (120, emphasis
original). The claim to preference which Lewis addresses is a positioning of the self as
the primary object of attention. In its simplest form, it is an act of pride. Lewis,
referencing St. Augustine in De Civitate Dei, describes this sin as the result of Pride, or
“the movement whereby a creature (that is, an essentially dependent being whose
principle of existence lies not in itself but in another) tries to set up on its own, to exist
for itself” (The Problem of Pain 69). Echoing St. Augustine, Lewis writes that pride is
“the basic sin behind all particular sins” (The Problem of Pain 70) and “is the complete
anti-God state of mind” (Mere Christianity 110). There is an ordinate relation of the self
to all other beings and to Being Himself. Each sinful act is a positioning the self in
improper spaces of relation. Simply, sin is loving wrongly.
Consequently, a sin is an act not just inordinate to a law but an act contrary to
personhood as modeled by God Himself. Lewis rejects modern theological arguments,
such as is supported by N. P. Williams in The Ideas and the Fall of Original Sin, that the
first sin was a social sin, or a sin against a law of human relations. Instead, he argues that
the first sin was one against the personhood of God, and it is only within the personhood
of the Trinity that the nature of relation and society can be manifested (The Problem of
Pain 20). According to Lewis, Christian doctrine teaches that the Person of God and the
Law are one. Thus in the Personhood of God is the condition of all being, all relation, and
all motivation. For example, when a Christian kneels in prayer to God, he is praying to a
three-fold personality; God is simultaneously the subject, the motivation, and the way of
prayer. In this communicative act, the man is “being pulled into God, by God, while
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remaining himself” (Mere Christianity 143). For a creature “to exist for itself” (The
Problem of Pain 69) essentially is an attempt to position the self apart from Relation
Himself. Thus when placed as primary, derivative subjects lend disappointment and
resentment to our hearts, for we frame the object of attention in the narrowest terms—
absent of its situatedness in Relation.
Lewis speaks clearly of the sin of pride in terms of love. There is one Subject of
love—God—and all other subjects are derivative and thus lower than. Since attending to
Love Himself is the only way in which our actions can be considered loving, when we
love wrongly we essentially experience a manifestation of hate. In “Two Ways with the
Self,” Lewis writes of the complexity of self-love. Essentially, the issue becomes one of
how a person attends to selves as such, their own self included. All selves, he claims, are
to be regarded with disinterest. A disinterested love emerges only when one willfully
attends to the truth that all interests are of and in Love. When we properly love ourselves,
we recognize our derivative nature and the depravity of our fallen condition.
Subsequently, we recognize that we love any and all things by way of God. Our selves are
loved and capable of loving, but we are not the source of love. Improper self-love, on the
other hand, attempts to love through the self and finds only the lack which characterizes
the heart of the creature called “me.” Thus, what would be proper disinterest of the self
breeds into hatred for all selves:
The other kind of self-hatred, on the contrary, hates selves as such. It
begins by accepting the special value of the particular self called me; then,
wounded in its pride to find that such a darling object should be so
disappointing, it seeks revenge, first upon that self, then on all. Deeply
egoistic, but now with an invented egoism, it uses the revealing arguments,
“I don’t spare myself”—with the implication “then a fortiori I need not
spare others”—and becomes like the centurion in Tacitus, immitior quia
toleraverant [“More relentless because he had endured (it himself).”]
(Lewis, “Two Ways with the Self” 120-121, emphasis original, footnote
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added for translation purposes).
Herein lies Lewis’s argument concerning the implications for interpersonal relationships
stemming from the seeds of pride. The disappointment which a person experiences from
improper self-love colors all loving in general. One cannot properly relate to or love any
self at all. Eventually, the person is unable to recognize the ability to live out his or her
own personhood in love nor to extend true grace toward others.
In many interpersonal relationships, pride and selfishness are evident. There is
real danger to one’s relations when one engages in obvious preferential treatment of the
self. According to Lewis, however, this is not pride of the most dangerous kind when it
comes to intimacy. Throughout his writings, he points to how the most deceptive type of
pride parades as unselfishness in interpersonal relationships. The temptation for so-called
“unselfishness” is particularly prominent in marriages and families. For example, in The
Screwtape Letters, Screwtape describes the dangers in the perceptions of obligatory
unselfishness of a married couple:
In discussing any joint action, it become obligatory that A should argue in
favour of B’s supposed wishes and against his own, while B does the
opposite. It is often impossible to find out either party’s real wishes; with
luck, they end by doing something that neither wants, while each feels a
glow of self-righteousness and harbours a secret claim to preferential
treatment for the unselfishness shown and a secret grudge against the other
for the ease with which the sacrifice has been accepted. (143)
The particularly deceptive sin in this example stems from Lewis’s arguments concerning
what it means to be a human being in discourse. As discussed in Chapter Three, Lewis
claims that we must recognize our needs and interests in their proper condition. It follows
in this chapter that we are beings characterized by phenomenological attention. Simply
put, we will love and we will attend. However, in a twisted articulation of personhood,
each spouse is too prideful to admit that they have personal preferences. They want to see
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themselves as blameless, selfless—the very condition from which love should emerge.
Yet human being constitutes no such condition of selflessness; we must remain a self
responsive to such ground. Thus, by denying their preferences the husband and wife
succeed only in exalting them, leaving grace toward each other by the wayside. Both are
martyrs to the wrong subject of their love.
When pride is chosen, we experience a perversion of our personhood. Our will
constitutes a turning toward an anti-self; a being isolated from interest, relation, and love.
Lewis characterizes this turning from anti-self (i.e., pride) to self (i.e., personhood) as a
painful movement which is to be endured continuously. The condition of pride is our
“habitual self”: “thus all day long and all the days of our life, we are sliding, slipping,
falling away—as if God were, to our present consciousness, a smooth inclined plane on
which there is no resting” (The Problem of Pain 71). Yet God did not create us to be so.
He created human beings to participate in a fullness of personhood in the reflection of
His glory. Lewis argues, however, that our selves can be claimed only when we give them
up to God.
4.5.2 Personhood
It is the nature of our fallen condition that we should live egocentrically. We have
embodied needs and desires which vie for our attention and a disposition toward self-
interested intent. Lewis recognizes this throughout his writings. He knows that we are
keenly aware of the lack in our existence and the faults of our character. Yet somehow we
manage to find forgiveness and restoration. In his chapter on “Forgiveness” in Mere
Christianity, Lewis cites the Biblical commandment of “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself” juxtaposed with the petition in the Lord’s prayer to “Forgive us our sins as we
forgive those that sin against us” (104). At the center of the Christian message of
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restoration is a complex understanding of grace and scorn: we are commanded to love yet
there are conditions of our character which render us unlovable. Thus for clarity’s sake,
Lewis suggests that we begin with the question: “Well, how exactly do I love myself?”
(105). He argues that loving one’s self does not necessarily think oneself nice or
attractive. At times, it is appropriate to loathe one’s own thoughts, inclinations, and
behaviors. However, hate only becomes appropriate in the context of ordinate self-love:
Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man
who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to
reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought
to hate them....But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which
we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done
such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow,
somewhere, he can be cured and made human again. (105-106)
For Lewis, self-love means the recognition of faults and the need for salvation. It is a
personhood participating in the Law of Relation. That which tempts our wills to turn
from Love should be scorned and, ultimately, destroyed.
What is to be hated above all is the fallen, prideful ego. Pride aims to destroy
relation: “pride always mean enmity—it is enmity” (Lewis, Mere Christianity 111). “As
long as you are proud you cannot know God,” Lewis writes, for “a proud man is always
looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you
cannot see something that is above you” (111). The position of pride not only impedes
our vision of God and others, but it takes the very condition of our knowledge out of
context. As creatures, we have derivative knowledge of the creature called a self. Only
God knows us completely; we lack perfect knowledge all things, even of ourselves.
Lewis argues that God’s condition of personhood is of a particular kind: “God wills our
good, and our good is to love Him (with the responsive love proper to creatures) and to
love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces”
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(The Problem of Pain 46). Thus pride robs one of being placed in the position of
personhood and, consequently, it must be destroyed. The “irrational claim to preference”
of the self “is to be not only hated, but simply killed”: “The Christian must wage endless
war against the clamor of ego as ego: but he loves and approves selves as such, though
not their sins” (“Two Ways with the Self” 120.). The self is more than the ego; he or she
is a participant in Relation Himself. God desires that His children live in the fullness of
personhood through Him. If one’s will attends solely and primarily to the self, one’s
being is spiritually, temporally, and relationally limited.
We experience the fullness of personhood only through submitting our will to
Christ. Trusting the self to God means trusting that “Christ will somehow share with him
the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that
Christ will make the man more like Himself and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies”
(Lewis, Mere Christianity 150). Only in Christ can a person exercise willful obedience,
experience spiritual fullness, promise relational perfection, and live in eternity, for Christ
Himself does and is all of these things. It is the most significant, if not the only, choice
humans make. The offer of Christianity is to share in the life of Christ and, if one chooses
to do so, little by little he or she is able to “become a little Christ” with each subsequent
choice (Mere Christianity 154). Each self is to become a person through Christ; the one
Man who encompasses complete humanity. A person spreads the “good infection” (154)
of His will, His glory, and His love, responding as a vehicle for just such gifts toward
other selves.
Thus martyrdom becomes a crucial metaphor for the revelation of personhood.
Lewis argues that the surrender which Christ displayed during His life and crucifixion
defined His mortality; His resurrection reveals His immortality. The personhood available
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to us within the temporal mandates just such surrender. The act, by its very definition, is a
willful choice. Lewis writes “Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however
small or however easy, in living to God rather than to myself” (The Problem of Pain 76).
What is to be surrendered is not the true, glorious creation of self; it is the fallen temporal
hold of a corrupted heart. In his fiction, Lewis often frames this choice as one that cannot
be made alone. In The Great Divorce, the narrator witnesses a Burning Angel poised to
kill the Lizard (representative of the sinful self) on the shoulder of a Ghost:
“If you wanted to help me, why didn’t you kill the damned thing without
asking me—before I knew? It would be all over by now if you had.”
“I cannot kill it against your will. It is impossible. Have I your
permission?”...
“I know it will kill me.”
“It won’t. But supposing it did?”
“You’re right. It would be better to be dead than to live with this
creature.”
“Then I may?”
“Damn and blast you! Go on can’t you? Get it over. Do what you
like,” bellowed the Ghost: but ended, whimpering, “God help me. God
help me.”
Next moment the Ghost gave a scream of agony such as I never
heard on Earth. The Burning One closed his crimson grip on the reptile:
twisted it, while it bit and writhed, and then flung it, broken backed, on the
turf.
“Ow! That’s done for me,” gasped the Ghost, reeling backward. (99-100)
The next moment, the narrator witnessed the Ghost as he grew in fullness and strength.
He emerged as a Person materialized in glory while the Lizard transformed into the
stallion which was to carry the man off into Heaven. With this story, Lewis seems to say
to his audience: “Look at who you are today, in all of your brokenness, needfulness, and
spite. It is not who you are truly. You can choose otherwise. But if you let it, this will be
the only lizardly thing you can become.” Glory ultimately strangles that which hisses
death and deceit in our hearts. All we need is to attend to the Hands which free us. (See
also Simon’s discussion of love, marriage, and sacrifice in The Disciplined Heart).
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Because of the will, the issue of self-love in Christianity is complexly tied with
the seemingly contradictory metaphor of self-surrender. Lewis’s writings call us to reject
that deceitful preference toward what is really just the shadow of our true selves. Instead,
he asks that we consider the choice to give up the ghost—to die to that shadow—and
become embedded and enfolded in the arms of Relation. An act of love is always an act
of submission. When a person learns to attend to the Other, he moves closer to fullness of
self. “To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter
spiritual ruin;” Lewis writes, “though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire
anything more than we love and admire God” (Mere Christianity 113). Loving another is
a good act; to love God as the Other is the source of all goodness. Such a choice situates a
person firmly in the path to selfhood. Thus, in the moments of relation throughout his
life, a person “may hope that when he has truly learned (which will hardly be in this life)
to love his neighbor as himself, he may then be able to love himself as his neighbor”
(“Two Ways with the Self” 120). Human beings are lovable only because the choice of
loving is first granted to them.
4.6 The Lovability of Human Beings
Lewis claims that Christian doctrine teaches that loving is a human being’s willful
responsiveness to the condition of being in Love. He argues that the human self is
derivative of Love and thus has the potential only to live in Love. We cannot be Love.
Only God is Love Himself; His love and His being are the same. He cannot be concerned
with Himself in loving because, by loving, He is exercising the fullness of His nature.
Lewis writes “God gives what He has, not what He has not” (The Problem of Pain 47).
Human beings, on the other hand, are creatures of and can participate in Love, but our
selves necessarily remain other than Him. We must come to love within a condition
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which is not love—ourselves. In the very act of loving, we experience both union and
alterity; we feel both comfortably at home and painfully vulnerable.
Human beings feel at home in love and relation because of God’s nature as and
choice to Love. He makes us lovable by drawing us into Love Himself: “the very
possibility of our loving is His gift to us” (Lewis, The Problem of Pain 45). Lewis argues
that we are not loved for any reason inherent to us; instead, we are lovable only by
relation. Because the condition of the human creature is one of need, our nature cannot
exist apart from the condition of fulfillment. Before and behind all relations which a
person holds to the self and to the world lies a debt: “a Divine act of pure giving—the
election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense)
the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He
eternally has, and is, all goodness” (The Problem of Pain 44). Love constitutes both the
debt human beings owe from their birth and also the fulfillment of that debt through
relation. Thus “God’s love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all
the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though
derivative, lovability” (43). Through God’s love, our debt is paid. We are fulfilled into
selfhood and are invited to participate in the condition of lovability—a condition for
which we were made. All we are called to do is to choose it.
Yet love creates unease in relational knowledge and practice, especially in the
relationship between humans and the divine. Lewis’s writings consistently admit the
element of the absurd inherent within God’s love for us. It is a love not predicated by
need nor by merit—two conditions within which we find ourselves inescapably tied in
our relationships. It is the question of “why” directed at God (or any other person) who
loves us: “But why do you love me?” Those who chose to love improperly will forever
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only speculate at the answer to such a question, for their focus of attention is in the wrong
place. For example, in The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape discusses with Wormwood what
the Enemy must really mean by love. “We know that He cannot really love: nobody can:
it doesn’t make sense,” Screwtape writes (Lewis 101, emphasis added). The demons test
hypothesis after hypothesis while “more and more complicated theories, fuller and fuller
collections of data, richer rewards for researchers who make progress, more and more
terrible punishments for those who fail” are invested in the pursuit to figure out why God
loves as He does (101). Yet the demons are disappointed time and time again. Herein lies
one of Lewis’s powerful critiques of the modernist understanding of human relation. The
demons attend to the “why” of love solely through cognition and scientism, completely
ignoring issues of heart and choice. With a limited understanding of the depth and
breadth of relational and epistemological ground, they remain in a position unwilling to
attend to Love Itself, deliberately averting their eyes. Yet even human beings, who are
created by, in, and for Love, cannot fully understand the “why” of love while in
temporality. The ontological and epistemological functions of love, as St. Augustine
claims (Confessions; On the Trinity), are incarnate yet incomplete in human relationships.
While we remain in temporality, the fullness of “why” cannot be placed before our eyes.
We may attend to love, but it will be a veiled meeting.
Consequently, not only the question but also the practice of a loving relation
creates a wonderful yet painful burden of being. Lewis admits that it is deceptively easier
to choose not to attend to others in love. Yet in reality, it is a move not worth making at
all. In The Four Loves, he writes:
to love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will
certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of
keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an
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animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all
entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will
not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.
The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all
the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. (121)
We are often at a miss as to “how” one should or does love another, for, as Lewis
suggests, the option of not loving seems an impossibility: a contradiction to our created
existence. Real human love runs the risk of tragedy, brokenness, and disappointment. In
the temporal, fallen world of human existence, pain exists necessarily side by side with
love. As Chapter Three suggests, without the darkness of existence we cannot recognize
light—we cannot know comfort if we do not know need and pain. We must learn how to
live in such a juxtaposition, and the task is a difficult one. Thus Lewis sets forth this
simple admonishment regarding the “how” of loving relations: “Christian Love, either
towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will” (Mere Christianity 117-118). We
must accept it; we must practice it. Love is revealed as the choice to labor for the gifts of
joy and comfort.
Because of these two factors—the burden of vulnerability but also the potential
for divine joy—Lewis calls for us to approach our loving relations with humility.
However, such humility does not abandon the self; instead, we turn toward the very
source of our selfhood. God wants nothing more than for His creatures to know Him, to
attend to Him, and thus to attend to others. When one is successful even a little bit in this
movement, one begins to feel humble. Lewis describes this humility as “the infinite relief
of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has
made you restless and unhappy all of your life” (Mere Christianity 114). Humility brings
existential and relational fullness to our being for it makes “this moment possible” with
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the self and others (114). It allows us “to take off a lot of silly, ugly, fancy-dress in which
we have all got ourselves up and are strutting about like the little idiots we are” and
experience “the relief, the comfort, of...getting rid of the false self, with all its ‘Look at
me’ and ‘Aren’t I a good boy?’ and all it posing and posturing. To get even near it, even
for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert” (114). Only humility
frames the condition for us to truly love others. As relational beings, we are attune to
what humility is and looks like in practice. Lewis describes how it is to meet a truly
humble person: “he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling
you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed
a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him” (114). A
humble person’s self is necessarily present and significant in any relationship because
God loves all selves. Yet the wonder of such love is that it leads the humble person into a
relational space where he quite forgets to think about himself all together.
The movement toward humility is the practice of selflessness. Lewis does not
pretend that it is an easy step to take. He knows the condition of his own heart and
imagines others experience similar difficulties living as egocentric, needful beings with
corrupted wills and selfish hearts. As his introductory chapters of The Four Loves
suggest, all human love is grounded in and colored by need. As such, there is often “the
clash of interests” (The Problem of Pain 42) between people in interpersonal
relationships, a condition derived from need. We continually are tempted to satisfy our
own needs at the expense of another’s, especially in the comforts of the household: “as
when a father keeps at home, because he cannot bear to relinquish their society, children
who ought, in their own interests, to be put out into the world” (42). In such intimate,
complicated relations, there often is “a need or passion on the part of the lover, an
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incompatible need on the part of the beloved, and the lover’s disregard or culpable
ignorance of the beloved’s need” (43). We are thinking, willing, loving creatures who do
not always think, will, or love in the same direction. It is a difficult consequence of being-
with-others in this world. Lewis, in response to relational realities of the household and
beyond, calls his readers to attend to the practices rather than worry about the perfect
alignment of the heart: “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour;
act as if you did” (Mere Christianity,116, emphasis added). Love will be revealed in a
heart attentive to loving practices.
It is the issue of practices which moves Lewis’s phenomenological understanding
of the will into conversation with foundational theories of interpersonal communication.
How are questions of self, choice, otherness, and love framed in contemporary
interpersonal communication discourse? As discussed above, interpersonal
communication scholarship frames the self in relation from a variety of cognitive, social,
behavioral, and symbolic frames, and if we look closely, we can see how Lewis’s work
speaks to major theoretical touch-points of interpersonal studies. The heuristic value of
Lewis’s writings, however, is his grounding in an intellectual tradition which presupposes
the will as a derivative yet corrupted characteristic of our lives together. It is a manner in
which we meet existence in the reality and possibility of grace. Simply put, Lewis’s
interpretation of the Christian tradition makes successful interpersonal communication a
matter of loving labor. Consequently, understanding decision-making and choice in
interpersonal relationships shifts from cognitive and discursive phenomena to discernible
communicative practices of the heart. The concluding section of the paper addresses how
Lewis’s writings on will meet the study and practice of interpersonal communication,
paying particular attention to the relational wisdom afforded by grace in real
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interpersonal relationships.
4.7 Implications for IPC: The Looking-Glass Self
Heuristically, Lewis’s work addresses and broadens major theoretical assumptions
concerning the relationship between discourse and self-concept. A particularly salient and
familiar metaphor within the interpersonal literature is “the looking glass self” (Cooley;
Mead). The looking-glass self assumes that identification and meaning-making lies in our
unique capacity to reflect and relate with the other. Mead’s work especially points to how
linguistic role-taking, or role-playing, is the manner in which we learn and think at all. He
describes the developmental stages of childhood and the symbolic role-playing games
which children love, games which develop identity, empathy, and relational maturity.
However, the taking on of a role is not complete until the self and the other coordinate
behaviors in the co-construction of meaning. Even identifying oneself involves the
coordination of expectations, attitudes, and behaviors between the self and the other. The
self is actualized through the dynamic interplay of the “I” and the “me.” Any given
communicative interaction presupposes that a person both acts based upon one’s own
interpretations of a given context and reacts on the basis of his or her perception of the
other’s interpretation as well. The issue of communicative responsiveness allows us to
see our own selves in the looking-glass of the other’s face (Cooley; Mead).
Symbolic interactionism and theories of role-playing in the creation and
maintenance of self-concept situate human relationships as undeniably participatory. Yet
what lends Lewis’s voice unique in this conversation stems from the his theoretical
grounding in the Augustinian trinity of knowledge, will, and love. The exercise of choice
is a movement of the will toward greater or lesser knowledge of a Person. The Christian
understanding of “God is Love” brings even more “relating” to our relations; even more
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complexity to our personhood. Thus, Lewis’s viewpoint offers a unique perspective on
how exactly discursive meetings between others should and do take place due to: (1) the
reality of created, as well as co-constructed, ordinance in relationships; (2) the presence
of a standard of role-playing; and (3) the revelation of the purpose in communicative
responsiveness.
Lewis argues that relational ordinance is both created and co-constructed. The
important role which others play in shaping identity is evident in his works. He certainly
does not argue that the self is determined completely, for the presence of the will points to
the fact that we are active participants in our own making. Yet our relationships are not
entirely discursively negotiated either. As will be discussed further in Chapter Five,
human relationships—especially the intimate relation of man and wife—begins with a
created template. In That Hideous Strength, the heroine Jane is walking through the
garden while reflecting on her “true self.” She is frustrated at the idea that others such as
her husband and friends may regard her one way (“sweet and fresh”) while she really
wants them to think of her in another way (“interesting and important”) (318). Like many
people, she wants to be able to own and construct her identity and the perception others
have of her. The last thing she wants, she has convinced herself, is to be a “thing” with
determined qualities. Then, she has a spiritual revelation as she meets the presence of
God:
In this height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had
hitherto called me dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into
bottomless distance, like a bird in a space without air. The name me was
the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected, a being that
did not yet fully exist but which was demanded. It was a person (not the
person she had thought), yet also a thing, a made thing, made to please
Another and in Him to please all others, a thing being made at this very
moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of. (318-319)
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Jane’s true self is not just a perception; it is absolutely a created thing with a particular
purpose. She exists with other “things” with particular purposes, and, while they call each
other into particular relationships, it is God who first calls them into existence and
commands them to love. The discursive world of human relationships, manifested in the
face of the other, works with the reality of created relations in the construction of human
identity. What results is a template which human beings inherit for responsiveness to the
Other and others.
The life and the personhood of Christ is the model for all relationships. According
to Lewis, Christ represents an impossible relational standard for human beings in
discourse, but yet He is the only standard and source for relational being. Consequently,
Lewis uses the analogy of “pretending” to characterize our relationships. The very first
words of the Lord’s prayer are “Our Father,” suggesting that the speaker puts himself in
the same position as the Son of God. This is an act of pretending of the most significant
kind, since “you realise that you are not a son of God. You are not being like the Son of
God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of
self-centered fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death”
(Mere Christianity 163). It is outrageous to think that we can even pretend to be a Son of
God. Yet God commands that we do so, for He knows how we learn. Lewis writes that
“very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it
already” and, just as children playing at their games of make-believe, those who are
dressing up as Christ “are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits, so that the
pretense of being grown-up helps them to grow up in earnest” (163). This is a serious
pretense for it not only shapes the reality of one’s own personhood but also carries the
capacity of personhood to others. We must all practice at becoming our selves.
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Our communicative practices are purposefully reflective. In the same vein as St.
Augustine, a metaphor which Lewis uses throughout his fiction and nonfiction to
describe the responsiveness of human being is that of a mirror. In Mere Christianity, he
writes “Men are mirrors, or ‘carriers’ of Christ to other men” (164). The reflection of the
looking-glass is not simply contextual or constructed—it is teleological. To be responsive
to such a role is an occasion of great joy and comfort, for the core of human identity is
filled with light, love, and activity. That is why, Lewis argues, we must continually “play”
at this thing called relationships and identity; merriment is called for in such work. Yet
our task is also one of fear and trembling at the “weight of glory.” We reflect by design,
not by coincidence. Therefore, Lewis writes “our merriment must be of that kind (and it
is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset,
taken each other seriously” (“The Weight of Glory” 46). As human beings in discourse—
participating in the movement and naming of the world—we are designed to reflect a
particular Personhood. Yet can a mirror practice its reflections? Lewis would argue not
necessarily; reflections just are. We can, however, choose the movement of our turning
and the strength of our reflections in our own and other’s eyes.
4.8 Implications for IPC: Wisdom and Work Through Weak Spots and Blind Spots
Practicing good choices in real interpersonal communication reveals that we often
are weak, distorted, or muddied reflections of our selves. As the discussion above
articulates, human beings fight selfishness and pride in every relationship since the Fall.
Thus practical wisdom in relational choices merits a lot of our daily attention. Themes of
relational maintenance permeate through interpersonal communication studies, especially
in the context of intimacy and family. The “work” of relationships has been characterized
in a variety of ways by scholars in the discipline. To name just a few examples, Mark
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Knapp and Anita Vangelisti describe the stages of “coming together” and “coming apart”
of a romantic couple based on the patterns of communicative behaviors. Laura Stafford
and Dan Canary observe the range of strategies that satisfied couples use in relationship
maintenance, such as positivity, openness, assurances, and sharing activities and tasks.[4]
Leslie Baxter and Barbara Montgomery view the creation and sustenance of relationships
as a complex interplay of dialectal tensions and dialogic responsiveness between
interlocutors. However it may be characterized, many interpersonal scholars recognize
that relationships require communicative labor. Lewis, grounded in the Christian
tradition, articulates grace as a necessary presence and practice of the relational work
before us each day. In his exploration of gracious wisdom through his writings, Lewis
contributes to the conversation in interpersonal communication studies concerning self-
concept and alterity by reflecting on just what it means to lovingly labor in relationships.
Lewis begins with the assumption that we have a “weak spot” built into the nature
of our loving. It is a risk, he writes, “which God apparently thinks worth taking” (The
Problem of Pain 76). In “The Trouble with ‘X’...,” he describes the wisdom of God in His
choice to grant humans a derivative will, a characteristic that makes us particularly
unique yet allows for us to share a common being. God has granted human beings with
particular characters and unique manifestations of His character. Because of such alterity,
people in our households and workplaces do and will “rub us the wrong way” from day to
day because of our varying “clash of interests” (Lewis, The Problem of Pain 42). Even in
our most intimate of interpersonal relationships, we come to realize that we must live, at
times, with people who act in insufferable ways. Further still, we may even come to
realize how we ourselves become insufferable toward the other, a disappointment of our
own relational expectations. In love, vulnerability is inevitable.
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One of the first steps toward relational wisdom among human beings who
disappoint each other is to understand that one’s essential character endures; we cannot
erase it. One of the most significant relational identities of human beings lies in the
choice of responsiveness, even if that choice is not what we expect or desire. Since all
relations are derivative of the Relation in God, Lewis writes that we find ourselves in a
similar situation with others as God sustains with us as human beings. He has provided
all that we may need in order to be fruitful and happy in this world, Lewis writes, yet we
succeed in spoiling His plans with our quarreling, jealousy, gluttony, and selfishness.
Despite this, God will not alter people’s character by force; he waits for us to choose. “He
would rather have a world of free beings, with all its risks, than a world of people who
did right like machines because they couldn’t do anything else” (Lewis, “The Trouble
with ‘X’...” 108). In imagining what such a world of automatons would be like—
relationally, intellectually, spiritually—we cannot help but to recognize God’s wisdom in
His choice. By recognizing the necessity of regarding others as willful creatures whose
characters we dare not deprive, we share in God’s wisdom.
A further step to relational wisdom involves recognizing the limitations of the self
in difficult interpersonal situations. The flaws of the self, according to Lewis, are not just
character flaws. They are deficiencies in loving—mistakes and misinterpretations we are
doomed to repeat throughout our relationships if we are unable or unwilling to address
them in the proper way. He writes, “it is no good passing this over with some vague,
general admission such as ‘Of course, I know I have my faults.’ It is important to realize
that there is some really fatal flaw in you: something which gives the others just that
same feeling of despair which their flaws give you” (“The Trouble with ‘X’...” 109,
emphasis original). Just as we cannot change the characters of those with whom we live
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and work, we cannot change our fallen character. Lewis argues that the Christian tradition
calls us to die to the self: in relational terms, we must seek grace from the Other. This
sensibility of one’s own character is more than insightful; it is willful. We must never
encourage “a man to mistake his first insights into his own corruption for the first
beginnings of a halo round his own silly head” (Lewis, The Problem of Pain 62).
Deficiencies in loving call for a change of heart which never forgets the necessity of
grace.
God’s relational wisdom provides our standard for exercising grace toward others.
The Creator’s relationship with His creatures differs from human relationships in two
ways. First, He sees all characters completely, even our own. We cannot see our own
character completely; we maintain blind spots to our self identity which at times are
painful to address in relationships. Thus, we need the Other to not only help us recognize
our blind spots but also to extend grace toward us in their manifestation.[5] Second, He
loves all people despite their flaws: “He goes on loving. He does not let go....He is with
them far more intimately and closely and incessantly than we can ever be” (Lewis, “The
Trouble with ‘X’...” 109). We, on the other hand, are necessarily limited in our loves. We
are physically, spiritually, and intellectually other than one another. No matter how hard
we strive for union, alterity presides. In fact, without otherness, relations are not possible
at all. Therefore, we need to direct our loves in charitable ways by loving practice. Thus
Lewis argues that “the more we can imitate God in both these respects, the more progress
we shall make. We must love ‘X’ more; and we must learn to see ourselves as a person of
exactly the same kind” (“The Trouble with ‘X’...” 110).
Good communicative practices acknowledge the other not only by recognizing the
particular person before you but also attending toward the potential for the good which
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the self, the other, and the relationship can exhibit. In his chapter on “Affection” in The
Four Loves, Lewis claims that when we come to love those in our communities and
households “in their own way,” we are crossing into a liberating type of love. He writes
“‘in his own way’ means that we are getting beyond our own idiosyncrasies, that we are
learning to appreciate goodness or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or
intelligence flavoured and served to suit our own palate” (The Four Loves 36).
Recognizing that all relationships and selves have weak spots and blind spots, we fashion
our relational expectations and messages with interpretive and communicative grace.
Thus we regard love in interpersonal relationships not only as an issue of choice
but as a charitable labor. As Lewis writes, Christianity situates the personal and the
purposeful in every willful act, creating a multi-faceted life in which “you advance to
more real and more complicated levels” of understanding human existence with each
relation (Mere Christianity 142). According to Lewis, Christianity teaches that the Trinity
is the manifestation of God’s perfect functional, relational personhood. In derivative
fashion, our habitudes attend to the complexity of love as all at once ordering,
maintaining, creating, inspiring, and serving our different functions, responsibilities,
potentialities, and perspectives. There is much work to be done in interpersonal
relationships, a reality making the necessity of grace fully evident. Should our work in
relationships be limited primarily to “relational maintenance,” “negotiating dialectical
tensions” or “coming together and coming apart,” we would have many opportunities to
fail and disappoint one another. Yet when the task at hand reflects the fullness of God’s
purposes for human love in its many forms, the habits of our souls become tethered to a
potentiality which drives us beyond the relationship itself, compelling us to labor well,
attend deliberately, and forgive often. We can then approach the work of intimacy in
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proper perspective as husbands and wives, friends, co-workers, and family members who
work for and with each other, but not themselves only.
The metaphor of will is a cornerstone in building a theory of the presence and
practice of grace in intimate interpersonal communication. The discussion of will builds
upon the previous chapter’s exploration of human sentiments and relational training of
the heart. With the addition of will into the equation, a philosophical understanding of
love can be characterized by the choice of loving labor. Chapter Five extrapolates on
these components of interpersonal relationships even further through the metaphor of
responsiveness. Love constitutes responsiveness to both the ontological and existential
forms of our relationships with one another, and through his discussion of the forms of
love, Lewis shows us the necessity for the presence and practice of charitable
responsiveness in intimacy. Without it, he argues, we should never fully know our own
personhood.
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CHAPTER FIVE
REPSONSIVENESS TO THE FORMS OF PERSONHOOD
5.1 Introduction
This chapter discusses the metaphor of responsiveness as characteristic of the
nature of human action in relationship with one another. Responsiveness is a widespread
theoretical and practical component of both interpersonal communication and the
philosophy of communication in general. Questions of discursive exchanges, relational
reciprocity, and the factors which shape our communicative practices are major themes of
scholarly discussion regarding human action and response to the world and others. The
chapter’s discussion of human action from different theoretical standpoints functions to
locate Lewis’s work solidly in a tradition attentive to issues of human action as
responsive. Building upon the previous two chapters on will and sentiment, we begin to
see how the totality of human responsiveness creates a framework for understanding love
as constituted by heartfelt choice, willful labor, and responsiveness to form in
communicative interactions.
First, the chapter briefly outlines questions of communicative reciprocity in
intimate interpersonal communication studies. The majority of our communicative
models suggest that the reciprocal nature of exchanges fosters a complex understanding
of our expectation for relational response. In these models, the self and the other in
relation constitutes a powerful dyad of responsiveness to messages, goals, roles, and
interpretations in the communicative context. Yet, this chapter argues that in order for the
presence and practice of grace to be available in intimate relationships, it is important to
move beyond to the dyadic and into a triadic understanding of human discursive
responsiveness. The rhetoric and philosophy of communication, framed by such thinkers
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as Calvin Schrag, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, articulate how a person stands
in relation not only to the other but also to existence, or that which is otherwise than the
immediate relation itself. Dialogic theory holds particularly important implications for
understanding human responsiveness in this regard. It is the work of Mikhail Bakhtin,
however, that creates a theoretical bridge between the rhetoric and philosophy of
communication and a Christian philosophical understanding of the conditions of human
responsiveness. Bakhtin’s understanding of the Third, or the super-addressee, as
articulated in Toward a Philosophy of Act introduces the triadic personhood into
interpersonal interactions.
From Bakhtin, the chapter moves into a Christian framework for human
responsiveness driven by the writings of St. Augustine and George MacDonald. These
thinkers situate human relationship as a trinity of self, other, and God. Faith, hope, and
charity characterize all of our loving relationships as we willfully submit to Love
Himself. Lewis, building upon the works of Augustine and MacDonald, characterizes
human responsiveness as feminine responsiveness—creatures to Creator; mirror to
Divine Light; bride to Bridegroom. All persons can participate in such responsiveness,
regardless of their sex, for it calls for a perfection of our willful obedience, reflection of
glory, and communicative labor together. We participate in forms of personhood which
reflect both our ontological and existential significance.
Lewis’s writings help us to understand the nature of personhood through a
relational lens, allowing us to better approach interpersonal contexts which may
challenge our beliefs and expectations regarding the self and other. Nothing tests our
ability to respond well to the other quite like a conflict situation; consequently, conflict
management is the focus of the implications section of this chapter. Conflict is a major
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obstacle to intimacy development in relationships. Lewis’s “The Trouble with ‘X...’”
suggests that until we can take a perspective that allows us to see people and ourselves as
we really are, we will not be able to successfully manage conflict. By being able to frame
our relationships with others both ontologically and existentially, we are better able to
interpret the conditions of a conflict situation and submit to the other while maintaining
the validity of our own interpretations, inclinations, needs, and desires. The emphasis for
this framework of conflict management sets expectations and practices on the self and
avers the flaws of others. In addition to the conflicts of everyday life with one another,
the differences between male and female and masculine and feminine threaten intimacy.
These are differences which threaten to be an unresolvable conflict and thus can create
continual tension within an intimate relationship. Lewis suggests that the solution is to
look to grace so that we can interpret the other charitably. We are called to meet our
essential natures—our eternal teleology—in an authentic form of personhood in intimacy.
The implications of this framework suggest that our communicative expectations and
practices be driven by a loving desire to develop the personhood of each partner in all of
its forms in intimacy.
5.2 Communicative Reciprocity in Intimate IPC Studies
Textbook introductions to the interpersonal communication literature often begin
by articulating the structure and nature of the communicative act. Scholars generally
regard communication as an action, a transaction, and an interaction (Foulger). All three
characteristics point to communication as discrete speech acts textured by the dynamic
interplay of the self and other in relation. Commonly, our models expect reciprocity,
situating the term in varying degrees of theoretical importance. One of the earliest
communication models, Claude Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication”
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published in 1948, describes the elements present in a speech act, yet does not touch upon
the reciprocal nature of communication. Shannon characterizes communication as a
system of constitutive elements (source, transmission, channel, and receiver) unilaterally
functioning for the successful transmission of a message. As the field of interpersonal and
small group studies developed, scholars nuanced and expanded the basic communicative
model into interactional and transactional forms which more readily articulate the
complexity of message exchange, the bi-directionality of transmission, the relationship of
sender and receiver, and the complications of transmission in a medium. For example,
Weiner’s work in cybernetics (Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine; Human Use of Human Beings) posits that both senders and receivers
provide feedback in real time and adapt their messages to the demands of the
communicative exchange. While the practice of communicative reciprocity at times may
seem mechanistically oriented, the principles behind relational exchanges are indeed
complex. Human communication is a phenomenon of "who...says what...in which
channel...to whom...with what effect" (Laswell).
Generally, interpersonal communication models assume that human beings seek
reciprocity from communicative and relational perspectives. Our speech acts are guided
by expectations of response—we speak out into the world and expect something to
happen as a result. From some theoretical standpoints, the expectations of response are
egocentrically oriented (i.e., the self is the focal point of communicative presentation and
speech act completion). For example, sociological and communicative theoretical
frameworks such as social exchange theory (Thibault and Kelly; Roloff) or Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs assume a level of reciprocity in intimate relationships that addresses
basic and universal human desires such as security and emotional and physical comfort
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for each self in the relationship. Alternatively, the expectation of response may be other-
oriented, such as feminine ethics of care preposed by scholars such as Nel Noddings (e.g.,
Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education) or Julia Wood (e.g., Who
Cares?: Women, Care and Culture), in which the self’s attentiveness to the other takes
precedence in a communicative exchange. Attentiveness to the self or the other may not
be mutually exclusive from any one of these theoretical standpoints, for human
communication constitutes a system of reciprocal verbal and nonverbal dynamics as
interlocutors attend to a variety of relational, nonverbal, verbal, and interpretive
constraints in order to be successful.[1] Clearly, responsiveness and relationship are a
symbiotic pair.
The dyad is the core of interpersonal studies. The patterns of communication are
definable and the interlocutors are discernible. As the scope of human interaction expands
into small group and family, for instance, the dynamics of dyadic responsiveness
necessarily change. Interactive systems theory, studying how and why individuals align
themselves in groups, families, and organizations, assumes that the self can only
experience comprehensive development through interaction with others. Communication
occurs in various levels of social relationships, starting with the intrapersonal and moving
finally to the cultural. Any communicative act not only indicates the content of what a
person is trying to say but also reflects the relational complexity of self and other in the
communicative act (see Reusch and Bateson and Watson, Beavin, and Jackson).
Relational communication is about the “interact,” or how the mutual positioning of acting
individuals within dyadic and small group situations produce patterns of interrelation
(Rogers). Individuals can position and re-position themselves in spaces of relational
control through their messages and communicative behaviors, positing either to “one up,”
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“one down,” or “one across” the others in the system (see, for example, Markman and
Notarius, and Millar and Rogers). Yet the theoretical and pragmatic pivot upon which the
communicative system turns is the dyadic relation of the self and the other.
Positions of interaction and spaces of responsiveness hold important implications
for studies of intimacy and marriage. In Gottman’s Why Marriages Succeed or Fail, for
example, he suggests that maintaining a five to one ratio of positive to negative messages
sustains a healthy relational environment. The author encodes messages for patterns of
dominance, submissiveness, conflict negotiation, and relational support and warns
against speech acts such as stonewalling or resentment which damage relational integrity.
Other examples in the literature, such as Knapp and Vangelisti’s Stages of Relational
Development, characterize how the interactions of two individuals create, sustain, or
inhibit relational growth and decline. Relational growth articulates a movement from
identifiable interpersonal boundaries in communicative exchanges (e.g., limited self
disclosure) to interactions indicative of shared relational identity and integration of
perspectives, goals, and expectations (e.g., public and private recognition of “we” and
“us”). While the individuals are in relationship with one another, they move within a
system of intimacy development and relational decline, renegotiating communicative acts
and expectations and, consequently, their relational identity.
Human communicative action presupposes responsiveness by both the self and the
other. The literature suggests that the communicative exchange is tightly contained by
what verbal, nonverbal, interpretive, and relational dynamics each person brings to the
interlocution. The dyad, being the crux of theoretical and functional responsiveness, takes
into account a variety of factors on the horizontal plane of influence, such as cultural,
gender, ethnic, or racial dynamics at play in relationships.. Yet we have a tendency to
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orient our studies toward how these issues work within and upon a particular boundary
of a relationship. It is necessary to maintain the dyadic nature of the interchange, for what
this project builds upon is one human being in an intimate relationship with another. Yet,
before considering the necessity of charity within an intimate interpersonal relationship,
the responsiveness assumed within the relation must be contextualized by that which is
transcendent to the relationship as well as what is brought to bear within the relationship
itself. We as scholars should account for both the horizontal (dyadic) and the vertical
(triadic) dimensions of relationships if we are to consider the nature of human
responsiveness more deeply. The rhetoric and philosophy of communication introduces
the interpersonal literature to the third dimension of human interaction through
considerations of human responsiveness to existence. In a triadic model, the third element
can thus be understood as a third person, which is where the Christian intellectual
tradition framing this project expands and strengthens a philosophical perspective on
interpersonal studies.
5.3 The Rhetoric and Philosophy of Human Communicative Action and
Responsiveness
The rhetoric and philosophy of communicative action adds an understanding of
discourse as both relationally and existentially responsive within interpersonal
encounters. Philosophers of communication such as Calvin Schrag, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur discuss the texture inherent in human communicative acts. In
The Self After Postmodernity (1997), Schrag recognizes that human subjectivity emerges
from embedded discursive practices. Embedded communicative action counters the
postmodern deconstructionist threat of the “death of the subject” (Foucault 387); one’s
subjectivity manifests itself within a rhetorical and existential community of practices
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(Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity). Schrag frames four
characteristics of the human subject: the self in discourse (“Who is speaking?”), the self
in action (“Who is acting?”), the self in community (“Who is responding to other
selves?”), and the self in transcendence (“Who stands within and before transcendence?”)
(Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity 4). These four questions point to a spatial model of
human communicative action along both vertical and horizontal axes. Individuals move
with and among others in relationship toward a transcendental understanding of human
experience (Y axis) while their action is embedded in dynamic historical and communal
constitution, or “the cultural-spheres of science, morality, art, and religion” (X axis) (The
Self After Postmodernity 5). Discursive responsiveness is at the core of subjectivity; we
respond not only to our historical and cultural embeddedness but, more importantly, we
are compelled to transcendence by the speech acts of the self and Other.
What gives meaning to communicative action is one’s hermeneutic response to
the phenomenon of human discourse. If one’s aim is to understand a given text or
communicative event, one must be prepared “for it to tell him something” and “to be
aware of one’s own bias, so that the text [or communicative act] may present itself in all
its newness and thus be able to assert it own truth against one’s own fore-meanings”
(Gadamer, Truth and Method 238). As Ronald C. Arnett suggests in “Interpretive Inquiry
as Qualitative Communication Research,” openness to the phenomenon of human bias
situates understanding within an historical and relational mode of being. We must be
responsive to how given fulcrums of meaning, or what Ricoeur calls metaphors in The
Rule of Metaphor, emerge, shift, retract, and reemerge throughout history and within
communities. Meaning emerges not just between two people but also in the context of a
dyad’s responsiveness to the influence of the triadic. In other words, human
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communicative action takes place not only within relationships but also within existence.
Responsiveness is a fundamentally relational act. One stands in relation to the
Other and to existence, compelled to respond. Consequently, dialogic studies is a
significant realm of theoretical overlap between the rhetoric and philosophy of
communication and interpersonal communication. Emergent from the works of
philosophers of communication such as Martin Buber, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel
Levinas, and Jürgen Habermas,[2] dialogic studies marries the discursive, the relational,
the existential, and the transcendental in everyday contexts. Early works in the discipline
stemmed mostly from the philosophy of Martin Buber,[3] showing how the “essential
movement in dialogue” is the turn toward the Other (Johannesen 375) and that the self,
the Other, and the “between” constitute the dialogic act. Later, perspectives on dialogic
theory advanced by John Stewart (“Foundations of Dialogic Communication”) and
Ronald C. Arnett (“Toward a Phenomenological Dialogue”) explore how the study and
practice of dialogue from a phenomenological perspective lend a unique understanding of
the nature of human-being-in-discourse as embedded, intentional, and relational.
Dialogue shifts the focus of interpersonal communication from the ideas of
communicative self-competency and progression of relational development to the
importance of openness to the other, responsiveness in communicative expectations, and
emergent understanding between the self and other.[4] These scholarly trends lend
particular importance to the theory and practice of intimate communication from a
philosophical and rhetorical perspective. Specifically, Baxter and Montgomery situate
interpersonal communication within the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, articulating a model
of intimacy as being constituted by responsiveness to the Other and recognition of the
dialectical constitution of self-identity (i.e., self-other dynamics).
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In particular, the presence of Bakhtin’s work in intimate interpersonal studies
allows for the consideration of a triadic model of intimacy. Bakhtin works from the
assumption that what informs and guides one’s understanding of of all relationships is the
existence of a transcendental third addressee. Bakhtin explains how each person in
relation acts as “the witness and the judge” for the other; we see both what is and what
ought to be in our relationships. As we function in dyadic relation with each other in
temporal existence, we reflect what he calls the supra-existence, or a component both
within and beyond all existence that acts first and foremost as “the witness and the judge”
of our discourse (Bakhtin, “From Notes Made in 1970 to 1971”). All communicative
action occurs not only among the self and other within existence but also to the self and
the other in relation to the supra-existence of Being.
Bakhtin’s understanding of the act is not only ontological; it is rhetorical. In
Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin defines “act” as “an actual living participant in
the ongoing event of Being” (2). All communicative acts are predicated by
responsiveness—not only of the self but also of others and of Being. We are driven by an
ethic of responsibility, or an inclination to participate in a rhetorical “ought” that
articulates both what is (the witness) and what ought to be (the judge) in our actions. We
do this all from within consciousness of being judged and witnessed ourselves. The
rhetorical introduces a personal component to our responsiveness. We speak because our
existence is personal; our existence reflects the personhood of the Other.
What Bakhtin points to in his work and what other Christian thinkers fully
emphasize is that the “third” element of human communication and relation is a Person,
not just Being. People respond to people, not just to existence. The study of rhetoric and
philosophy of communication frames responsiveness in interpersonal studies with
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existential and transcendental considerations. The Christian philosophical perspective
guiding this project demands that responsiveness be ontologically tethered and
relationally particular as we meet the Person behind all personhood. To respond to and
within such personhood is the very nature of charitable responsiveness. As such, this
tradition holds significant implications for the study and practice of intimate interpersonal
communication, especially in conflict situations. Each person within a relationship carries
a multidimensional role, or forms of personhood which create spaces for us to respond
truthfully, faithfully, and graciously toward one another in each communicative moment.
5.4 Responsiveness to Personhood
From the Christian narrative perspective framing this project, the Incarnation
characterizes how speech acts are understood. In John 1:1, it is described how the Word
already was in the beginning of human existence, and the Word and God are one. In 1
Corinthians 1:21, one reads how the Word was incarnated in the flesh through Christ.
Thus any and all speech acts are incarnated into existence as the Word dwells among the
flesh. St. Augustine describes our speech as thus:
In order that what we are thinking may reach the mind of the listener
through the fleshly ears, that which we have in mind is expressed in words
and is called speech. But our thought is not transformed into sounds; it
remains entire in itself and assumes the form of words by means of which
it may reach the ears without suffering any deterioration in itself. In the
same way the Word of God was made flesh without change that He might
dwell among us. (On Christian Doctrine, 1.13.12)
The Word of God, which exists beyond time, dwells in human hearts and minds. Yet in
time, the Word is to be incarnated through speech. Augustine recognizes that all sounds,
even though they are necessary for communication, are temporal and subject to distortion
and noise (On Christian Doctrine, 2.4.5). In addition, our symbolicity can just as easily
lend obscurity as understanding (2.1-6). He does not despair in this, however. For human
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beings speak not only into the incarnate temporality but also to the eternity dwelling in
the heart of the other. We speak to the Word of God always, and the Truth of God remains
entire and incorruptible. Since the Word and God are the same, all communicative acts
are, at their core, responsive to the Person of God.
We speak with and to people, or more accurately, Personhood. From the beginning
our existence, we have been relational, social creatures. Lewis argues that God, in
Himself, is a “society”: the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity demonstrates how “within
Him, the concrete reciprocities of love exist before all worlds and are thence derived to
the creatures” (The Problem of Pain 20). God exists relationally, with three distinct
persons constituting His essence in perfect unity. St. Augustine describes the relation of
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as each “a full substance, and at the same time all
are one substance....All three have the same eternity, the same immutability, the same
majesty, and the same power. In the Father is unity, in the Son equality, and in the Holy
Spirit a concord of unity and equality” (On Christian Doctrine 1.5.5). Each Being of the
Trinity has a particular role, yet they work as One in perfect responsiveness to the Other.
As creatures of God, we too exist relationally. Our personhood is never static—it
is always dynamic, always respondent, always active. We are reminded of this dynamism
in the face of the other. George MacDonald argues that “words for their full meaning
depend upon their source, the person who speaks them. An utterance may even seem
commonplace, till you are told that thus spoke one whom you know to be always
thinking, always feeling, always acting” (Unspoken Sermons 32, emphasis added). The
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all act together perfectly in both unity and alterity.
Human beings, on the other hand, think, feel, and act within finitude. We must because
we live as temporal creatures. Yet MacDonald argues that we have access to Eternal
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Truth, and we must speak to that Word if we want to speak that which is good and act
faithfully toward the other: “Whatever a good word means, as used by a good man, it
means just infinitely more as used by God. And the feeling or thought expressed by that
word takes higher and higher forms in us as we become capable of understanding him,—
that is, as we become like him” (Unspoken Sermons 32-33). Communicative action
addresses the person before us as well as the Person among us.
How, then, are we to act toward others given the dynamic presence of the
Personhood of God? We begin with the most universally human yet eternally significant
act: love. “If there be any meaning in the Incarnation, it is through the Human that we
must climb up to the Divine” (MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons 33), and we are to respond
to the other in love. St. Augustine describes the manners in which we can position the
people and things of this world in relation to the eternal Person of God. He characterizes
the distinction as either use or enjoyment. To “enjoy” someone is to love him for his own
sake. To “use” someone is to love him for the sake of someone or something else
(Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 1.22.20). It may seem contrary to our inclinations, but
Augustine argues that we are called to “use” one another rather than “enjoy,” for a person
“is better when he adheres to and is bound completely to the immutable good than when
he lapses away from it, even toward himself” (1.22.21). The only Person to be enjoyed is
God, for from Him and in Him all joy resides. When we love the other “for the sake of”
(i.e., use), we love what is true, good, and perfect in that imperfect, fallen person before
us. Loving “for the sake of” means recognizing the Personhood inside the other and
loving that, responding in the hope and faith that all selves are worth loving because
Love resides in us.
Consequently, faithfulness to our loves characterizes our discursive meetings.
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Because of our relationally derivative nature, we recognize Love; it is always situated in
immediacy to us. Love moves us in faithful meeting with others. Yet the expectations we
hold of loving encounters do not always characterize the actual meetings we have with
real persons in the world. Augustine explains that temporal things are always loved more
before we meet them; when we do find ourselves in a space of meeting, we realize that all
temporal relations are subject to flux, strain, imperfection, and eventually death (On
Christian Doctrine 1.38.42). Now, his argument by no means challenges the significance
of emergent, unexpected meaning in interpersonal relationships. In fact, he advocates for
openness to such encounters (see, for example, Augustine’s account in the Confessions of
the influence his mother played in his conversion to Christianity). There can be real value
in an interpersonal moment where our expectations are not met in with one another or our
discursive practices are stretched and changed. What Augustine points to, however, is that
anything beautiful, truthful, or good which emerges from our relationships is eternal. It
endures beyond the relationship itself and enables us to love more (On Christian
Doctrine 1.38.42). We not only love and attend to the particular person in front of us, we
love the goodness and truthfulness in which their personhood participates. Thus, faith and
hope are necessary when we meet particular others. We may not recognize them in their
difference and, if we do, we have no assurance that our words will be understood or
accepted by them. Faith and hope help us to be certain of at least one Who is immediately
before us—the recognizable face of Love. In other words, faithful responsiveness allows
us to place another in a space of recognition. We hope that as we respond to Love we will
be heard and validated in our utterances (see Bakhtin’s Toward a Philosophy of the Act).
When we communicate faithfully and hopefully to Personhood, we glimpse what it is like
to love charitably.
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Charity is perfect responsiveness. The eternal is present in all loves, yet when we
love charitably, we exercise the fullest capacity of human love. When we speak
charitably, we speak to both the temporal and the eternal personhood in the face before
us. We speak to who they are, who they are to be, and how we mean together. Charity is
existentially, teleologically, and relationally driven. As such, charity is the characteristic
of enduring love; it remains “more certain and more vigorous” than any other
manifestation of human responsiveness (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 1.39.43).
Augustine argues that in eternity we will not need faith or hope to extend love to one
another. We will love and know perfectly simply because we are; God makes it so. All
those who enjoy Him will enjoy one another completely (On Christian Doctrine 1.32.35).
In the meantime, however, we must exercise charity. We must be deliberate in our
responsiveness to Love. We must seek the Personhood within all faces.
Consequently, a trinity of faith, hope, and charity characterize our communicative
acts toward one another in this world. We have faith in the Personhood dwelling in each
self. We hope that our responsiveness to the other “for the sake of” Love leads to the
presence of truth and joy in relationships. We exercise charity toward the other, for
charity fulfills all of our potentialities for loving. From these key thinkers of the Christian
intellectual tradition, Lewis builds his understanding of what charity in intimate
interpersonal communication looks like. He shares the conviction of human action as
responsiveness to the call of Personhood. Particularly relevant to this project, however, is
Lewis’s continued reference to the feminine nature of human responsiveness in the
presence of the masculine Creator. Human action is subject to eternal order, and such
order is characterized by particularity and loving submission. This holds significant
implications for intimate interpersonal communication, especially within the study of
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conflict management and gender communication. Lewis’s writings suggest that charitable
responsiveness becomes a necessary practice for understanding the forms of personhood
which manifest themselves in intimacy—the male and the female, the masculine and the
feminine, the Divine and the human.
5.5 The Femininity of Human Responsiveness: That Hideous Strength
As previous chapters of this project address, human beings are creatures;
derivative and reflective of the Creator. Thus “our role must always be that of patient to
agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be
response, not initiative” (Lewis, The Problem of Pain 44, emphasis added). God as the
Word initiates all relations and all discourse. It is the proper function of human being to
be responsive to the Word; we are to allow ourselves to be set within a space of
receptivity. Just as a broken bone needs to be set in order to bear the weight of the body’s
work, so too human beings need to be set into proper relation to God and to others in
order to allow the dynamic presence of Love to work in and for them. Lewis writes that
God designs His creatures for participation in particular spaces of existence. When
humans are able to realize their essential nature in knowledge and practice, then goodness
and joy are attained. As Lewis claims, “God is the only good of all creatures: and by
necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is
proper to its nature” (The Problem of Pain 46-47). Primarily setting oneself in proper
relation to one Being—God—by no means suggests that we forsake particularity of
human action and relation. God is not a homogenizing force. On the contrary, all
particularity is unified in Him. Living in responsiveness to Him, human being in general,
as well as each person in particular, participates in distinct roles demanding particular
work in both the temporal and eternal.
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Lewis describes the work of human responsiveness as distinctly feminine. He
describes the femininity of humanity specifically in his work of fiction, That Hideous
Strength, a book which articulates important themes to the study of intimate interpersonal
communication. The heroine Jane has much to learn about the masculine, the feminine,
obedience, marriage, and love. The Director teaches her that the context of all human
action is undeniably feminine:
You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive
thing—the gold lion, the bearded bull—which breaks through hedges and
scatters the little kingdom of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the
carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on
the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is
above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in
relation to it. (315-316)
Jane thought religion as “something civilized, or modern, or (of late) ‘spiritual’” (316)
which allows her soul to aspire to “some neutral, or democratic, vacuum where
differences disappeared, where sex and sense were not transcended but simply taken
away” (315). Reality suggests no such thing. God, as Lewis describes Him, is
Masculinity. As a Personhood, God is wisdom, strength, creativity, possession, and
protection. As the Eternal Word, God is voice and volume, penetrating the flesh. Human
beings are the flesh which receives the Word and the soul which God covets as His own.
What does it mean that Lewis characterizes human action as feminine
responsiveness? First, it suggests that action is preceded by the will to obedience. We
meet the penetrating presence of the Masculine. God would have that, as a response, our
will be placed in His Hands. However, He has given us the capacity to choose otherwise.
In That Hideous Strength, the Director and Jane are speaking of obedience in marriage.
When Jane asks him what the Masters would say about the call to obedience from a wife
who does not love her husband, the Director replies: “They would say...that you do not
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fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted
obedience” (Lewis 147). In intimate interpersonal relationships, obedience—the choice
of turning one’s will into the Other’s hands—coincides with love. Both a husband and a
wife must place one’s willfulness at the Other’s feet, an articulation of unity and
submission. The submission is never “for submission’s sake.” It is always “for the sake
of” welcoming the Person before us—both God and the other. In a like manner, our
communicative actions are rightly submissive, or a “letting in” of the world at the same
time that we affirm our ability to think, to will, to move. Our acts are not for their own
sake, but “for the sake of” and responsive to that which is before us.
Second, the femininity of human responsiveness suggests that our communicative
action is reflective of the other. The human soul in the presence of God, as well as in the
presence of another, is an occasion for both beauty and celebration. In the last chapter of
That Hideous Strength entitled “Venus at St. Anne’s,” the women of the house prepare for
the feast prior to the ascent of the Director by adorning each other with rich and colorful
robes. As the women dress, they delight that each one’s dress typifies and perfects the
other’s character. The ritual harkens back to the beginning of the story, when Jane finds a
book in the house with the following passage:
The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the
male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger
than the god. To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of
Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of
Eve, and to both it is in the loved that the beloved tastes her own
delightfulness. (63)
Echoing the distinction between “enjoyment” and “use” articulated by St. Augustine in
On Christian Doctrine, Lewis characterizes the inclination toward and appreciation of
that which is beautiful, including the self, as an act of righteousness. All that is beautiful
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is so because of God, and to recognize and to adorn oneself in beauty for Him, just as a
bride dresses for the bridegroom, is a good and joyous occasion. From a communicative
perspective, our responsiveness to the other adorns us and the relationship. We cloak each
other in our words and, more importantly still, we see our own reflections in the face of
the Other. When Mother Dimble distresses that there is no mirror in their dressing room,
Jane replies: “I don’t believe we were meant to see ourselves...He said something about
being mirrors enough to see another” (That Hideous Strength 362). Lewis claims that the
feminine is responsive to and appreciates such reflection for we are reflections. The soul
knows the importance of adorning the self and others not only properly but in a manner
which gives delight. It is a gift which is given to us by the Creator; the care to participate
in and celebrate the adornment of our relations.
Lastly, characterizing human responsiveness as feminine frames human action as
purposeful work. Men and women alike are called to labor, yet the work of the feminine,
according to Lewis, is primarily responsive and often ritualistic. Throughout That
Hideous Strength, the women of St. Anne’s attend the others of the household in a busy
yet directed matter. Needs like hunger and warmth are not only met, they are thoroughly
satisfied in a proper manner, or properly responsive to the moment before them.
Depending on what time it is or who may be coming to visit, they know how to lay out
the bed or when to put the kettle on. Their work becomes ritualistic to the point that their
communication becomes concise yet fluid. MacPhee comments how women do not use
nouns in the kitchen: “Put that in the other one in there” is substituted for “Put this bowl
inside the bigger bowl which you’ll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard” (That
Hideous Strength 167). The men are confused by such statements, but the women know.
It is a ritual, and they move among and with one another with purpose. They work not
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only because these things must be done, but because it is their nature to do so. In like
manner, the human soul has a proper function, or a nature of responsiveness. In a way,
our speech is an act of domestic labor—carrying, lifting, pulling, setting, and attending to
the household of meaning.[5] The work is continuous and becomes ritual, yet it never
loses its purpose, for a household is an institution of and for people exclusively. The
others in the household compel the feminine to responsiveness. Thus, even though human
beings are called “mirrors” to God’s light, Lewis does not reduce human activity to total
passivity. His use of the metaphor of the household suggests that the response of human
being is present, willful, and dynamic, just like the Personhood of God.
It is important to note that although he uses women characters in That Hideous
Strength to convey his assumptions, Lewis regards feminine responsiveness as human
responsiveness, not just the response of the female. In the chapter titled “Counting the
Cost” in Mere Christianity, Lewis discusses God’s plan for those who love and follow
Him. The plan is nothing less than absolute perfection. We may not expect or want
complete perfection, but that is what Christ intends. Echoing Isaiah 64:8, Lewis writes
“the question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be
when He made us. He is the inventor, we are only the machine. He is the painter, we are
only the picture. How should we know what He means us to be like?” (Mere Christianity
175). God wants us—all of us—to be in perfect loving relation with Him. God continues
to shape our personhood; He has a plan for our souls. Lewis states that God’s plan is to
shape His creatures in extraordinary ways: “to shrink back from that plan is not humility;
it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania; it is
obedience” (175). God wants to makes us “new men” in Christ, creatures who can obey
the command “be ye perfect” (175-191). This calls for obedience. We are to see and
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reflect the light and glory of the Divine. It is a labor indeed, akin to rebuilding a derelict
house into a palace. It is not just a female task; it is a Divine task in concert with all
persons. All persons obey, reflect, and labor in their responsiveness to God and the other.
In every human soul lies the ability to reflect the brilliant light of the Divine. In
That Hideous Strength, charity is represented by the goddess of love, descending to Earth
in brilliant light. Charitable love, according to Lewis, is a powerful force of God, a force
“ready to kill, ready to die” (323). It is the Eternal’s deafening response to the cries of the
world, an “outspeeding light” (323) which illuminates where Need does yet even exist.
We are invited into this powerful responsiveness. Yet such responsiveness cannot
overtake us, we have but to willfully act with charity in order to manifest it in our
relations. To deny charity is to deny the fullest capacity of human communicative
responsiveness.
5.6 The Communicative Work of Charitable Responsiveness
If charitable responsiveness is a necessity in interpersonal relationships, then what
work does charity actually do for us and for our capacity to respond to others? In The
Four Loves, Lewis describes the presence of charity among the natural loves (affection,
eros, and friendship) as the love which works to “prune” all others. He uses the
illustration of a garden:
When God planted a garden He set a man over it and set the man under
Himself. When He planted the garden of our nature and caused the
flowering, fruiting loves to grow there, He set our will to “dress” them.
And unless His grace comes down, like the rain and the sunshine, we shall
use this tool to little purpose. (117)
Charity, set apart from all other loves, works within affection, friendship, and romance in
order to allow them to grow stronger, last longer, and be known more fully. The
“outspeeding light” (That Hideous Strength, 323) of charity is ever-moving, ever-
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responding; yet it allows us to situate the other loves firmly, just as “we cannot see light,
though by light we can see things” (The Four Loves 126). Simply, charity draws all
loving into itself, perfecting their focus, form, and practice. Lewis writes that charitable
love reflects the perfection which Christ brought to humanity: “As God become Man
‘Not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God,’ so
here; Charity does not dwindle into merely natural love but natural love is taken up into,
made the tuned and obedient instrument of, Love Himself” (The Four Loves 134).
Charity meets all other loves as they are, yet it works toward their beauty, health, and
perfection.
Because charity works among and within all categories of relationship, its
implications reach both need-love and gift-love. Lewis describes the gift of charity as
simply this: we love that which is unlovable in others and ourselves. We are able to attend
and to give to the other amidst unpleasant idiosyncratic behavior, wrong doings,
cowardice, hurt, and exhaustion. We give that which is most difficult and most
precious—ourselves, our will—to the other. Yet according to Lewis, this is not the only
miracle of charity in human love. Charity also allows for the supernatural Need-love of
God and of others. The presence of God’s charitable love creates in us a “natural
receptivity of Charity from our fellow-men” (The Four Loves 129). As Lewis describes in
the early chapters of The Four Loves, need is a given condition of our existence as
temporal, fallen creatures. In the state we are born, we are unaware of need as a space for
love to enter our lives—we only experience hunger, cold, or discomfort. As we grow in
awareness, Grace allows that we learn about and accept Need for what it is: a
manifestation of relation. Lewis argues that there is joy in such a realization: “From this
tangled absurdity of a Need, even a Need-love, which never fully acknowledges its own
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neediness, Grace substitutes a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy
in total dependence” (The Four Loves 131). We are born into relationships which call us
into Love. By Grace, we learn that our loving relationships are dependent and needful,
but they are never simply so. Through charitable responsiveness, we willfully accept the
personhood of the self and the other in relation—the ultimate desire of all forms of
lasting love.
We both need and desire personhood. It is what we seek, both in the face of the
other and in our meeting with the world. Yet our search for personhood often is
complicated by our selves and other selves. Practically, we cannot expect to practice
obedience, respond perfectly, or labor well always with other people—especially within
intimate relationships of the household. Further still, our own needs and desires become
frustrated with our efforts at relation. We often have to compromise but do not want to do
so. We try our hardest to make ourselves heard or to listen to the other, but exhaustion,
misunderstanding, or disagreement gets in the way. We know what it is we need to do or
to say but sometimes we just cannot (or will not) find the courage and confidence for the
moment. Consequently, Lewis’s writings regarding responsiveness—and specifically
charitable responsiveness—speaks to how we understand and manage relational
expectations. Further still, he helps us to frame managing conflict in intimacy in a manner
which gives validity to our choices and utterances, lending us the confidence to be
properly assertive yet charitable. What results is a picture, or a form, of intimacy which
complements our created and derivative personhood. The final section of the chapter
discusses these implications for intimate interpersonal communication.
5.7 Implications for IPC: “The Trouble with ‘X’...”
Conflict in interpersonal relationships is one of the biggest obstacles to practicing
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good responsiveness to and with the other. In the interpersonal communication literature,
conflict is understood to be a transactional process between people who perceive
incompatible goals, scarce resources, or disagreement and interference by the other
(Wilmot and Hocker). In general, conflict management can be approached in a variety of
ways; from avoidance or accommodation to competition or collaboration (see, for
example, M. Afzalur Rahim and Nace R. Magner’s “Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the
Styles of Handling Interpersonal Conflict: First-order Factor Models and its Invariance
Across Groups”). A significant factor which influences our choices in approaching
conflict management lies in our perceptions of power in relationships. Wilmot and
Hocker suggest that power is always present in relationships—it is granted by persons or
groups who allow others to exert influence or control over them. In order to acquire
power in a relationship, a person has to possess some form of power currency, or a
resource which others value. These currencies include the power of owning sought after
resources, fostering strong social networks, possessing expert knowledge or skill in a
given area, having desirable and attractive personal characteristics, and even holding
intimate bonds with another (Wilmot and Hocker). We exercise a good deal of influence
over one another in relationships, and our perceptions of such influence shape how we
categorize and manage difficult interpersonal situations.
Questions of who holds what kind and how much influence over the other become
particularly salient in intimate interpersonal communication contexts. Most conflicts
occur between people involved in close relationships, especially marriage and
relationships of the household (Benoit and Benoit). In fact, scholars who study conflict in
marriages and families often regard the phenomenon as normative (Sillars, Canary, and
Tafoya). If the prolonged proximity to one another is not enough to set the stage for
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disagreements and conflicts, the intensity of care toward others in the household certainly
suggests that we become more emotionally invested, protective of perceptions, and more
resolute in our attempts to have the other understand and support us in difficult moments.
Managing conflict in close relationships, then, presents its own unique challenges.
Consequently, scholars who study the contexts and patterns of conflict in marriages and
households often focus on how relational partners communicate in the midst of difficult
moments, not necessarily on the source or the resolution of said conflict (Sillars, Canary,
and Tafoya). Responsiveness within conflict situations matters—arguably even more so
than resolution in conflict management.
Scholars who have studied verbal strategies toward conflict in intimate
relationships have found that finding good approaches to conflict can be difficult, yet it
can make all of the difference in the quality of the relationship over time. In those tough
moments of relation, we often become frustrated in discerning the exact source of a
conflict (see for example David Stiebel’s discussion of the difference between a
disagreement or misunderstanding in When Talking Makes Things Worse!: Resolving
Problems When Communication Fails). The verbal strategies which we choose in
approaching conflict depend upon our understanding of the context, our abilities to be
assertive in communicating our beliefs and the content of our messages, or the perceived
behavioral or relational changes necessary for the resolution of the conflict.[6] The ability
of romantic partners to choose well in response to conflict can be due in part to the
condition of the relationship prior to the emergence of conflict. According to Alan Sillars
and William Wilmot in “Communication Strategies in Conflict and Mediation,” strategies
in conflict management by either distressed or non-distressed couples vary significantly;
those couples in distress prior to the emergence of conflict do not generally take
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constructive approaches to its management. Often what begins as particular conflict
situations branches out into cyclical complaints and counter-complaints by both partners,
or unwanted repetitive patterns (see Trenholm and Jensen) of unhealthy communicative
responses. Consequently, how partners regard one another and the relationship prior to a
conflict situation makes all of the difference in their responses once conflict arises.
Herein lies the significance of a couples’ perceptions of one another’s personhood
within an intimate relationship. One’s beliefs regarding their partner’s personality,
inclinations, and motivations will make a difference in how conflict is managed in a
relationship. Consequently, attribution plays a major role in the conflict management of
intimate partners. People attribute their success within difficult experiences through the
lens of locus, stability, and control. Generally, we do so in order to maintain a positive
self-image (B. Weiner). Thus in approaching conflict in intimacy, we struggle with the
need to validate our own beliefs and interpretations while situating the cause of the
conflict in controllable, stable contexts which can be “resolved.” What often happens as a
result is the shift of blame from the self toward others—from the internal to the external.
Consequently, we tend to attribute the causes of conflict in intimate relationships to stable
characteristics of our partners, such as their personalities and dispositions.[7] In general,
most couples have a difficult time focusing on specific behaviors which perpetuate
conflict; the inclination consistently is to describe the conflict by way of the negative
dispositions of their partners (Kelley, Personal Relationships: Their Structures and
Processes). Furthermore, those couples who are dissatisfied with their relationship prior
to the emergence of conflict are more likely to attribute responsibility for negative
interactions to the condition of their relationship as a whole (e.g, “You never ask me if its
okay if you spend all that money!”) and to their partners’ selfishness or difficult
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disposition in particular (e.g., “Because you only think about yourself!”). On the other
hand, when positive events happen in a relationship, unhappy couples attribute the
responsibility to short-lived conditions of the specific situation instead of recognizing a
positive aspect of their partner’s character (e.g., “You only remembered our anniversary
because my sister mentioned it over dinner last week.”) (Bradbury and Finchman). We
have a tendency to attribute blame in conflict whether we begin with happy relationships
or not; but the key is that we cannot manage conflict in a healthy way together if
attribution is our only strategy in approach. Lewis would argue that human relationships
are much more complicated than that.
Lewis situates conflict management in an attentiveness to and affirmation of
personhood, not just blame-shifting between disparate personalities. He understands that
attitudes of attribution are difficult to circumvent, because we do want to place the blame
for conflict somewhere. Yet attributing conflict to a person’s character makes it all the
more difficult to approach its management—more often than not, our partners’
personality will not change. More importantly still, Lewis argues that one’s essential
nature does not change. We will remain broken and imperfect selves in relationships
(Mere Christianity; The Four Loves). Yet we are willful creatures who are able to attend
toward new and challenging contexts and ideas. Accordingly, the management of conflict
is a complicated issue. One’s response must all at once attend to the nature of who we are
as humans in relationships, the particularity of our unique personhood, and the demands
of the relational context with our significant other. And all of our efforts will be frustrated
by our own selves—our misunderstandings, disagreements, and defensive behaviors.
Consequently, Lewis would agree with interpersonal scholars such as Wilmot and Hocker
in that collaborative work in conflict management begins with a focus on the problematic
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issues and behaviors of the relational contexts. Yet these problematic issues and behaviors
begin with a proper understanding of the flaws of the self, not in one’s focus on the
other’s fault in the matter. Real change begins with the self, but never the self in isolation.
In the midst of relational struggle, we must work together toward the growth of
personhood through our loving communicative practices.
Lewis outlines this approach to conflict management most clearly in his essay
titled “The Trouble with ‘X’...”. He begins the essay with the statement: “I suppose I may
assume that seven out of ten of those who read these lines are in some kind of difficulty
about some other human being” either at work, at home, or otherwise (Lewis, “The
Trouble with ‘X’...” 107). Eventually, the topic of said conflict with another person will
come up in the conversation with a third party, and it is at this point particularly we are
tempted to say “Well, the trouble with X is...”. We know X’s character. We know that he
will not listen to reason, nor will he change his attitude. We know that she is making
things difficult by her incurable ill-temper or jealousy. For a while, we had the illusion
that “some external stroke of good fortune—an improvement in health, a rise in salary,
the end of the war—would solve [our] difficulty;” now, however, we “realize that even if
the other things happened, ‘X’ would still be ‘X,’ and [we] would still be up against the
same old problem” (108). Lewis claims that this recognition—the recognition that one
cannot alter the character of another person—is a great step forward. It is a much better
place to be than thinking you can change the other to the person who you would like him
or her to be for you. Yet if we stop only at this step, we have an incomplete picture of the
difficulty.
The trouble with “X” is that we are all an “X.” We are all selves with seemingly
incurable idiosyncrasies or flaws in personality. We all frustrate one another. We all
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become jealous, bothersome, selfish, stubborn, or inclined toward quarreling at times.
The “next great step in wisdom” is “to realize that you also are just that sort of person.
You also have a fatal flaw in your character” (Lewis, “The Trouble with ‘X’...” 109).
Often, we cannot see or fully admit our own flaws; it is difficult for us to recognize and
acknowledge patterns of our own troublesome or embarrassing behavior. Our loved ones,
however, see us as we really are in relationships from day to day. I may admit that “I lost
my temper last night”; but every one else in the household knows that I am a bad-
tempered person. Or I may admit “I did spend too much on that new painting”; but my
spouse knows that I am a continual spendthrift. Lewis writes that “when we see how all
our plans shipwreck on the characters of other people...we are ‘in one way’ seeing what it
must be like for God” (109). God has provided a rich, beautiful world for us to enjoy, but
His plans are continually spoiled by “the crookedness of the people themselves” (108).
Yet we can only see as God does in one way. For God “sees all characters: I see all except
my own” (109). Furthermore—and more importantly still—God “loves the people in
spite of their faults” (109). He loves unceasingly, even when He sees the most
embarrassing moments of our character and the most selfish, arrogant thoughts of our
hearts.
Lewis claims that, unfortunately, human beings seem to enjoy thinking about
other people’s faults. Yet we rarely think about our own faults and, if we do, we fail to
situate them in their proper perspective (e.g., allowing an undue amount of guilt or shame
to sink us into desperation). What he suggests is that we try to avoid thinking about the
faults of others (unless we are a parent or a teacher and our duty is to help train the moral
and relational characters of the young or ill-advised). Instead, we should think about our
own faults, “for there, with God’s help, one can do something” (“The Trouble with ‘X’...”
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110). Practically speaking, there is only one person in your household whom you can
improve very much—yourself. Lewis argues: Why not start there? God, because He
knows and loves us completely, is our mediator in difficult interpersonal situations. He
will reveal the truthfulness of our intentions or perceptions and the flaws in our own
characters, yet He will give us hope for change. We may not have the power to change
the hearts of others, but we certainly can manage our own relational expectations and
communicative practices. We can do so with the confidence that God always gives
validity to what we say and do as a person, even when misunderstanding, disagreement,
or frustration is immediately before us.[8] Thus, we need not become defensive when
conflict arises; we need only be responsive to problematic interpretations, messages, and
behaviors.
Lewis states that a wonderful result of the shift from “how others ought to be” to
“how I really am” is that it gives us a fuller picture of charitable responsiveness in the
household. One can begin to see that charity lies not only in the giving. It also lies in the
receiving. We are all the recipients of charity, Lewis writes. Each one of us exhibits those
problematic characteristics which lend our selves quite unlovable. Naturally speaking, we
cannot blame others for not loving us when we are being selfish or foolish. Yet, “we can
be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way” (Lewis, The
Four Loves 133, emphasis added). Lewis argues that if we have good parents, spouses,
children, or friends, we “may be sure that at some times—and perhaps at all times in
respect of some one particular trait or habit—[we] are receiving Charity, are loved not
because [we] are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them” (The Four
Loves 133). The beauty of charity is that it should not come with the expectation of
reciprocity. We should deem the self unworthy and that our only duty is to give—and that
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is the end of it. Yet, God would not have this so. Since the moment we are born, we have
already received. It is also our duty to keep on receiving charity, for it is in its reception
we find the powerful alternative to egoistic relational expectations: being first loved and
loving in return.
Both being loved and loving lends us a stronger framework for understanding and
managing those difficult moments in intimate relationships. Lewis writes that experience
in intimate interpersonal relationships tells us that “the invitation to turn our natural loves
into Charity is never lacking” (The Four Loves 135). We can claim the “ifs” of our
capacity to love in intimate relationships: “If only my husband was more considerate...”
or “If only my wife was more sensible...,” then we could have loved more completely or
more perfectly. Yet the fact of the matter is, we cannot. At least not on our own, in such a
dyad. We need the triad, the presence of Grace Himself among and between us, to allow
us to express our loves charitably. Grace always precedes forgiveness and restoration, for
Grace makes charity possible. As George MacDonald writes:
But, looking upon forgiveness, then, as the perfecting of a work ever going
on, as the contact of God’s heart and our, in spite and in destruction of the
intervening wrong, we may say that God’s love is ever in front of his
forgiveness. God’s love is the prime mover, ever seeking to perfect his
forgiveness, which latter needs the human condition for its consummation.
(Unspoken Sermons, 36)
Lewis writes that God “has been a party to, has made, sustained, and moved moment by
moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love” (The Four Loves 139). God
forms our personhood through grace, allowing us to see personhood (of both ourselves
and of the other) more clearly with each moment of meeting.
Our efforts at charity will cease when the temporal world ceases. Only then, in
eternity, will charity constitute perfect responsiveness; human mirrors as perfect
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reflections of the Divine Grace. “Natural loves can hope for eternity only in so far as they
have allowed themselves to be taken into the eternity of Charity; have at least allowed the
process to begin here on earth, before the night comes when no man can work” (Lewis,
The Four Loves 137, emphasis added). Only in perfect Charity will our relationships
cease to be constrained by a contingent understanding of “ought” (“I ought to say this
right now...” or “You ought not to do that to that person...”). In its place will be an
ontological “ought”; a new creature in Christ who just does because it is, fulfilling its
proper function effortlessly in Love. In the meantime, however, we continue to work
toward responsive intimacy. In the presence and with the practice of Grace in both
difficult and everyday relational moments, we are better able to labor well with one
another, see each other more clearly, and submit to the other while maintaining the
validity of our own interpretations, inclinations, need, and desires. This is our duty of
responsiveness in relationships—to meet challenging moments of a flawed existence with
the fullness of our essential natures. The final section of this chapter describes how Lewis
suggests we meet our essential natures in a form of intimacy worth pursuing.
5.8 Implications for IPC: A Complementary Form of Intimacy
How do we practice good responsiveness in conflict management when intimacy
itself seems so inherently complicated and our expectations and inclinations so seemingly
different from others? As will be discussed briefly below, within the literature on intimate
interpersonal communication, many scholars recognize gender differences as one of the
most significant challenges to intimacy development. These differences often seem to
lead to unresolvable issues of miscommunication, misinterpretation, or mismeeting
between romantic partners. Yet gender is a significant form of personhood—it shapes our
expectations for responsiveness in intimacy. How are we to approach issues of sex and
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gender in a manner which remains true to our natures yet remains attentive to their
cultural and contextual manifestations? As it was intimated above in the discussion
regarding the femininity of human responsiveness, Lewis’s answer is the
complementarity of the male and female—we are created to complement one another in
all manifestations of our unique personhood, not to compete with or to debunk one
another’s particularity. By taking this perspective, Lewis by no means disagrees that men
and women have a difficult time relating within interpersonal contexts, especially
intimate ones. Lewis reflects on the problem of gender differences in intimacy
development in both his nonfiction and fiction.[9] Yet his writings point to the fact that,
because of the Fall, the complementarity of the male and the female and the masculine
and feminine is subject to disorder and corruption. Conflict emerges from the Fall, not
from the complementarity. Thus, Lewis argues that we are able to see the shadows of our
true personhood together in intimacy, but we must work together toward their faithful
manifestation in our discourse and practices. Consequently, this project argues that the
idea of complementarity is well worth pursing in the study of intimate interpersonal
communication.
In interpersonal studies, gender and sex are complex topics. It recently has been
established in wide disciplinary circles that “gender” and “sex” merit distinct definitions.
One’s sex is biological, while gender constitutes a composite of social, cultural and
psychological attributes that characterize a person as masculine or feminine (Canary,
Emmers-Sommer, and Faulker). In other words, one is socialized into a gender role by
learning from family, friends, and other external influences concerning what it means to
be masculine or feminine. Cognitively speaking, there are distinct differences between
men and women. For example, scientists have shown that the cerebral cortex of the brain
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varies between men and women. The difference accounts for evidence which suggests
that men perceive time, speed, and three-dimensionality more accurately than women.
Likewise, the difference in women’s cerebral cortex structure allows them to easily
understand and manipulate spatial relationships as well as to more accurately identify the
emotions of others. Women also have a greater ability to process information related to
language simultaneously in both of the brain’s frontal lobes, resulting in higher average
scores on tests of language competence than most men.[10] There are documented cases
of biological differences between the cognitive and linguistic functioning of men and
women.
Yet, whether differences in brain structure and corresponding abilities translate
into substantial differences between men and women’s communication patterns is an
issue of perennial debate among communication scholars. The continual recollection of
the “nature vs. nurture” discussion suggests that scholars take a vested interest in how
(i.e., to what extent) human nature is shaped by discourse. For example, one of the most
prominent scholars of gender studies in the context of interpersonal communication is
Julia Wood. In Communication Theories in Action, Wood argues that “the social groups
within which we are located powerfully shape what we experience and know as well as
how we understand and communicate with ourselves, others, and the world” (250).
Simply put, one’s social, cultural, and even gender standpoint determines one’s view of
the world. Women, as a culturally marginalized group, experience unique perspectives on
language, relationships, power, and intimacy. Consequently, Wood’s work advocates for a
certain level of cultural determinism from a symbolic interactionist frame: “gender is a
system of meanings that sculpts individuals’ standpoint by positioning most males and
females in disparate material, social and symbolic circumstances” (“Feminist
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Scholarship,” 111). Yet, standpoint theory also recognizes that knowledge is situated.
Conditions of human discursive practices, such as self-other relationships, prevent our
discursive knowledge from being completely relative. Although we meet others in the
world and are shaped by our communicative interactions, we still remain selves with
distinct perceptions and abilities. Much of the gender communication scholarship aims to
find this balance between the complexity of the particular self meeting generalized roles,
relational expectations, and agreed-upon patterns of behavior for both men and women.
A compelling avenue of gender communication research—one which lends
validity to the argument for the complex nature of gender in general—is in ethics and
care. Ethicists such as Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings speak about the distinctly
feminine communication patterns in caring communication. Gilligan, in In a Different
Voice, identifies a unique ethic inherent in the discourse of women. Feminine morality is
one focused on consequences, value caring, mutual responsibility, and collaboration. She
encourages women to extend their voices into the world and to care for the other only in
the way in which feminine subjectivity can perceive and feminine discourse can allow.
Noddings suggests that the ethic of caring is a feminine perspective as well. The moral
attitude of “natural care” may take much physical and emotional effort, but it often comes
natural to the experience of women in relationships. Such experiences show that
receptivity and relatedness are embedded in our natural experiences with others, and,
thus, should hold significant import for our moral and intellectual education.
Yet, as referenced above in Lewis’s understanding of human communicative
action as characterized by feminine responsiveness, care need not be a task reserved for
women alone. In fact, scholars argue this perspective at any point on a variable plane of
biological and cultural assumptions: from the necessity of men to learn the civilizing
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force of feminine sexuality and consequent nurturing of communities (see Gilder’s Men
and Marriage) to the questioning of cultural assumptions which devalue caregiving and,
consequently, feminine caregivers (see Wood’s Who Cares? Women, Care, and Culture).
There is something about the distinctiveness of care which lends mystery to gendered
roles in communication. What does it mean to care for each other as a man, as a woman,
and as a human being? And how do we care for each other differently based on how we
are formed, both biologically and discursively?
The scholarly conversations regarding gender differences from both biological
and discursive perspectives may seem chaotic. Which holds more weight in the formation
of our personalities, inclinations, expectations, needs, and desires—nature or nurture?
More important still, even if the two are not regarded as mutually exclusive, which one
merits more of our disciplinary attention in this historical moment? Some scholars
working contrary to hegemonic masculine trends in social scientific and humanities
research, such as Wood, Harding, Gilligan, and Noddings, emphasize the discursive
implications of gender formation from the perspective of power and epistemology. These
women suggest that gender communication is much more complicated than biological
research alone would suggest. Further still, perspectives of the masculine and feminine
shift dramatically given historical, cultural, and familial influences. The masculine and
the feminine are not as simple as they may seem and we as communication scholars
should attend to this complexity. Yet the current scholarly conversation regarding gender
differences remains loyal to the nomenclature of masculine and feminine, not necessarily
the male and female. Simply, scholarship in gender communication seems to favor the
pulling of “gender” from “sex” in order to examine them each more closely. In the
process, however, Lewis would argue that contemporary perspectives exhibit a truncated
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version of our own personhood.
Lewis by no means discredits the cultural and discursive significance of gender
formation. In fact, he addresses this clearly in his discussion regarding friendship
between the sexes and its cultural constraints in The Four Loves. Yet what Lewis is
unwilling to do is to pull gender and sex apart. They must remain whole in one’s
personhood. In intimacy, there is a complexity that is made up of both the essential
realities of male and female as well as the culturally located manifestations of the
masculine and the feminine. His writings suggest that we are endowed with
complementary forms of personhood in intimacy—manhood and womanhood. As Sam
Keen claims in his chapter titled “Men and Women: Becoming Together” in Fire in the
Belly: On Being a Man, if we are to peel away the complex layers of gender socialization,
there still remains “the prime fact of the duality of men and women. Throughout the eons
of history we move toward becoming fully human only through a sexual dance of men
and women. Each sex is one side of a Möbius strip, a fragment necessary to create a
whole” (389). The idea of complementarity often becomes lost in the contemporary
literature concerning gender and sex—we as communication scholars find ourselves
enamored with issues of alterity and conflict in and, at best, management of gendered
discourse. Yet according to both Keen and Lewis, we cannot ignore the essential. Further
still, the essential and the discursive cannot exist without the other. We cannot separate
the natural from the symbolic—our capacity for discourse and symbolicity is natural.
Thus, both manhood and womanhood are essential to the fullness of the human form—
both eternally and temporally. We exhibit a derivative personhood in the face of God; we
exercise our particular personhood in existence with others. The forms of male and
female are created and derived, and the forms of masculinity and femininity are
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discursively participatory.
Yet what work do forms do for us, rhetorically and practically speaking?
According to Aristotle, one only has proper knowledge of an object if one is familiar with
the causes of its existence. In the Metaphysics, he determines the four causes of a
creation: the material, the efficient, the final, and the formal. The formal cause is perhaps
the most difficult to ascertain, for it is the account of what something is to be, or the
recognizable character of it. Rhetorically speaking, the formal cause marries the
intentions of creator of the object (such as an artist) with the interpretation and
expectations of the other (or the audience). Aristotle argues, then, that if a silversmith
creates an object which is totally unrecognizable as a distinct form, than the audience
cannot have any knowledge about it—they cannot know what it is to be. On the other
hand, if the smith fashions a fork-like object—and the audience recognizes it as such a
tool—then it is useful for eating and, perhaps, pleasurable in its use. While this
discussion of Aristotle’s formal cause may seem simplistic, the crux of the argument is
relevant here; all creations must maintain distinct forms if they are to be at all, both
intrapersonally and interpersonally speaking. Forms unite interpretations, expectations,
responses, and practices.
In like manner to Aristotle, Lewis sees the necessity of forms for communicative
action. The forms of male and female shape the discursive manifestations of the
masculine and the feminine. Simply, Lewis argues that we are derived with templates for
expectations and practices in intimacy, and we carry these into our interpretive and
discursive powers of relation. No where is this most evident in his writings on intimacy
and love than in his dealings with Christian marriage. Lewis asserts that the Christian
idea of marriage is based on Christ’s teaching that man and wife are to be regarded as a
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single organism, or body.[11] Christians believe that this constitutes an undeniable fact of
human intimacy—that man and woman “become one” just as “a lock and its key are one
mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument” (Lewis, Mere
Christianity 96). Lewis writes that, by creating manhood and womanhood as distinct,
“the inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the
female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on a sexual level, but
totally combined” (Mere Christianity 96). Thus, for Lewis, the forms of human gender
are ontological, and their significance carries into the rhetorical. The male and female not
only fit together, they function together. Lewis argues that we are meant to work with and
for one another in intimacy. Such a perspective can make all of the difference when
approaching questions of and forming expectations for intimate relationships.
Rather than framing it simply as a “nature vs. nurture” debate, Lewis suggests that
one’s very personhood is at stake based on how one understands the conditions of one’s
responsiveness. In The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape writes this statement to Wormwood
concerning sexuality and the sexes: “the whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of
the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another
self. My good is my good and your good yours. What one gains another loses. ...‘To be’
means ‘to be in competition’” (Lewis 94, emphasis original). Lewis’s understanding of
gendered relations is not an “either/or”; “either/or,” he argues, breeds a competitive
duality. Instead, we live in a duality of “both/and”—we are both particular persons and
united by our forms. We are both men and women and brides to our Bridegroom. As
Aristotle argues in the Metaphysics, a form unites both the creator and the audience in
significance. In the same manner, we are both the recipient (i.e., the creation) and the
audience of our own forms of personhood—God as creator holds our forms ontologically
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secure while allowing us to grow into them. Consequently, in relationships marked by
intimacy, we are able to ask both these questions: What is my ontological duty toward
and with the other in intimacy? What are the existential constraints of my ability to see
and exercise my own personhood while developing an intimate relationship with another
person?
When it comes to sustaining intimacy, especially during those difficult moments
of marriage, Lewis suggests that we let these questions of both essence and existence
inform our practices. To dissolve a marriage in divorce, he claims, is more akin to
“cutting up a living body” rather than “a simple readjustment of partners” (Lewis, Mere
Christianity 97), and it should be regarded with the utmost sobriety. Divorce under the
conditions of “feelings”—that is, when partners feel as if they are no longer in love with
one another or when either of them feels as if they have fallen in love with someone
else—most likely results from a relationship unmarked by the practical power of forms.
When one’s essence, one’s personhood, within a marriage relationship is ontologically
secure, then we are liberated from simply feeling unified to being unified in intimacy.
Now, Lewis admits that forms do not offer a panacea for all relational ills. In fact, one
will still feel lonely, angry, and unloved often throughout the course of a marriage. So, in
those moments when the essential selves of manhood and womanhood must meet the
difficult spaces of real relationships in the everyday, he suggests that we work on our
practices—our responsiveness to our personhood together. Lewis writes about the
promise of lovers to remain “in love”: “A promise must be about things that I can do,
about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way.” (Mere Christianity
98) Consequently, real love (as distinct from the feeling of “being in love”) constitutes “a
deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by
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(in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive” (100). What
Lewis points to is the fact that human forms of personhood in marriage are participatory.
We interpret them in our discourse together, we enact them in our relational spaces, and
we turn to them in difficult moments of meeting, asking recurrent questions such as
“What does it mean to be a wife/husband?” and “How can I be that person with and for
my partner?” Married couples continually ask these questions and strengthen their habits
as they face new moments in their relationship together.
As discussed above, God extends the forms of personhood to us through grace,
allowing us to see both ourselves and of the other more clearly with each moment of
meeting. Because of the Incarnation of Christ, Grace is present in human form—we live
in the presence of grace simply by being human. Yet we also are asked to practice grace
toward one another based on the forms of personhood. When we respond to the other, we
are responding to a Person; that is, the unity of the Personhood behind all persons and the
particular person herself. Our responsiveness in intimacy should take note of such forms
before us; the other holds an ontological significance both as a creature and a man which
demands our reverence. Lewis writes that every person one meets is immortal—either an
glorious or a diabolical being who meets you in the everyday—and we must respond with
this always in mind (“The Weight of Glory”). What, then, is to be the focus and quality of
responsiveness with one’s husband or wife; not just a “neighbor” but a person unified
with you in form? It is a challenge indeed. As Lewis suggests, the “weight” of your
partner’s glory “should be laid on [your] back, a load so heavy that only humility can
carry it” (“The Weight of Glory” 45). Furthermore, “our charity must be a real and costly
love” (46) as we willfully obey, reflect the other’s glory, and labor well with one another.
Lewis’s understanding of human responsiveness to personhood in intimacy holds
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significant implications for its practice in contemporary society. Some of these
implications have been discussed here; however, the subject of the forms and practices of
intimacy in our current historical moment merits more attention. The final chapter of this
project unites the three major metaphors of sentiment, will, and responsiveness in a form
of intimacy based in the presence and practice of loving grace—an alternative to
contemporary relational expectations, discourse, and practices concerning intimacy
development in young adults.
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CHAPTER SIX
BUILDING INTIMACY WITH GRACE IN
CONTEMPORARY DISCOURSE AND PRACTICE
6.1 Introduction
The sixth and final chapter addresses the practices of intimacy in our current
historical moment. The chapter frames intimacy as the ongoing growth of shared
relational choices, labors, and forms for living together by romantic partners. Intimacy
includes but does not refer exclusively to sexual encounters nor to a static end of a
relationship. Intimacy is something which is built continually throughout the course of a
relationship.
The chapter begins with a discussion of the status quo for sexual practices and
relationship building in contemporary society. Utilizing the work of Anthony Giddens in
The Transformation of Intimacy as an entry point, the discussion begins with the changing
sexual practices and relational expectations of young adults due to emergent reproductive
technologies in the contemporary age. These shifts in practices are juxtaposed with
changing contemporary discourse concerning intimacy development in young adults. The
research discussed below indicates that there is an incongruence between the beliefs and
practices of young adults when it comes to intimacy-building. In fact, various scholarly
perspectives seem to suggest that young adults’ default practices actually hinder the
formation of the meaningful intimate relationships which they hope to develop later in
their lives.
Healthy intimate relationships are not directed by personal preferences of isolated
individuals and furthermore, unlike the myth “love at first sight,” real human intimacy
takes a long time to cultivate and much labor of love to sustain. In a culmination of the
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major metaphors of this project, intimacy can be regarded as enduring attentiveness to the
intonation of our hearts and the hearts of the other, participation in a shared habitude of
love, and mutual maintenance of relational structures over time. The project concludes
with implications which the trinity of choice, labor, and form in intimacy, tempered by
the presence and practice of grace, hold for the study and practice of intimate
interpersonal communication.
6.2 The Status Quo for Sexual Practices and Intimacy Development in
Contemporary Society
As discussed in Chapter Two, our current age faces difficult questions of human
relationships and decision-making in intimacy. We are in a moment of narrative decline
with untethered personal stories. Without narratives, stories become fragmented from
traditional sources of ontological security such as religion, institutions, nations,
communities and even families, and the practices of our lives are at risk of becoming
limited and superficial. Consequently, our actions, habits, and patterns of behavior, as
described by Anthony Giddens in The Transformation of Intimacy, are becoming framed
by the contemporary project of self reflexivity:
Where large areas of a person’s life are no longer set by pre-existing
patterns and habits, the individual is continually obliged to negotiate life-
style options. Moreover – and this is crucial – such choices are not just
“external” or marginal aspects of the individual’s attitudes, but define who
the individual “is.” In other words, life-style choices are constitutive of the
reflexive narrative of the self. (74-75)
The emphasis on narrative and identity formation brings a distinctly communicative
framework to understanding the sociological, cultural, and historical issues at work
within human sexuality. Giddens’s work points to the fact that the way in which we talk
about sex and relationships in our age influences the way we practice intimacy. While it
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may seem like a simple connection, the interplay of discourse and practices holds
significant implications for understanding the role that human sentiment, will, and
responsiveness play in our relational identity. Giddens’s work, along with that of other
scholars who are concerned with questions of interpersonal relationships and sexual
practices, are describing a society of individuals fighting for identity through personal
decisions about intimacy. Thus, like Giddens, this chapter discusses the changing face of
intimacy in our age through two frames: the practical and the discursive.
6.2.1 Sexual Practices and Reproductive Technology
Theoretical trends of intimacy in a postmodern age, as discussed in Chapter Two,
are due in large part to advancements in reproductive technologies which have changed
cultural and ethical mores concerning intimacy, marriage, and parenthood. While certain
reproductive technologies (such as condoms and oral contraceptives) have been in use for
several decades, it has only been within the most recent generation that public discourse
concerning sexuality and the marketing and distribution of reproductive technologies has
had unprecedented influences on the sexual practices of teenagers and young adults.
According to reports of the National Center for Health Statistics from 2002-2008 as well
as information from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, although only 13% of teens have had
sex by age 15, most initiate sex in their later teen years. By their 19th birthday, seven in
10 female and male teens have had intercourse. On average, young people have sex for
the first time at about age 17, but they do not marry until their mid-20s. Consequently,
young adults may be at increased risk for unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted
diseases for nearly a decade or longer, and the use of contraceptives during premarital sex
has become a volatile issue in public discourse about sexual health and family
planning.[1]
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Increased accessibility and distribution of condoms and oral contraceptives by
schools, health clinics, and family planning centers significantly influences rates of
contraceptive use and sexual activity among teenagers and young adults. National
institutions such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the
American School Health Association, and the National Medical Association have all
adopted policies recommending that condoms be made available to adolescents as part of
comprehensive school health programs. As of January 1995, at least 431 public schools in
50 U.S. school districts made condoms available—2.2% of all public high schools and
0.3% of high school districts (Kirby and Brown). In 2005, nearly two million women
younger than 20 obtained services at publicly supported family planning centers; these
teens represented one-quarter of the centers’ contraceptive clients (Jones, Purcell, Singh,
and Finer). Teenagers and young adults are taught that they now have more opportunities
than ever to enjoy “safer” or “more responsible” sexual activity, meaning sex with fewer
risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases as well as greater freedom of
personal choice and control over their future.
One of the most controversial medical developments and marketing of
reproductive technology in the most recent generation is that of emergency contraceptive
(EC).[2] Giving young women even more opportunities to prevent unwanted pregnancies,
emergency contraceptives gained greater interest in both scientific and layperson
communities in the late 1990s. By 2001, over 60 medical and women’s groups, including
the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, petitioned the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) and declared their support for making emergency contraceptive
pills available over the counter. Later in 2004, the Feminist Majority Foundation
organized a petition urging the FDA to “stop playing politics with women's lives”; more
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than 70,000 Americans sent an e-mail to the FDA in support of making emergency
contraceptives available over-the-counter, without a prescription and without an age
restriction (The Emergency Contraception Website). On August 24th, 2006, the
emergency contraceptive called “Plan B” was approved by the FDA for nonprescription
sale to those 18 and older in the United States.
As a result, protocol in the distribution, advertising, and accessibility of
emergency contraceptives for young women in the United States is increasing—
especially for those on college campuses. The 2006 to 2008 National Survey of Family
Growth indicated that use of emergency contraception in the United States has increased
after changes in its prescription status, and by 2011, more than 43% of university and
college health clinics were distributing emergency contraceptives. Studies indicate that
most women consider emergency contraceptives to be safe (92%) and effective (98%). In
fact, young women who have advance provision or convenient access to emergency
contraceptives, as long as they are effective users of the medication and have not
contracted sexual transmitted diseases, show increased occurrence of contraceptive use in
the future.[3] Sexual health promotion strategies within environments aimed at young
adult audiences, such as college campuses, low-cost public health clinics, and even high
schools, seem to be experiencing success in the distribution of contraceptives.
The question remains regarding the impact which educational and marketing
strategies of reproductive technologies has on the behaviors, attitudes, and expectations
of sexual activity of young adults. On average, the use of contraceptives has steadily
increased within the past generation. For example, in 1985, 56% of young women used a
contraceptive during their first occurrence of premarital sex. The percentage rose to 76%
among those who first had sex in 2000–2004 and to 84% among those whose first sex
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occurred in 2005–2008 (Mosher and Jones). When it comes to sexual behavior in
teenagers, increased contraceptive availability does not necessarily correlate to increased
sexual activity; yet some studies show that it does correlate to increased concerned
attitudes toward sex. While most adolescents and young adults may accept the efficacy of
contraceptives, most still voice concerns or are misinformed about the implications which
their sexual practices have on their overall physical, emotional, and relational health.[4] It
has been argued that sexual health promotion strategies primarily through the distribution
of contraception does not address adequately the broad range of anxieties held by
teenagers and young adults about their sexuality, such as reputation management, power
issues in intimate relationships, and dealing with issues of arousal and desire (Hillier,
Harrison, and Warr). Thus, instead of increasing adolescent and young adult comfort and
confidence in their sexual practices, public initiatives in sexual health education and
contraceptive distribution seems to have made young people even more concerned and
confused about sex and its consequences. From a communicative standpoint, then, while
the marketed goals of practicing safer sex, preventing pregnancy, and exercising more
freedom of personal choice for young adults are all practices which can be achieved by
the proper use of contraceptives, these goals nonetheless overlook how young people are
talking about intimacy. To consider the public discourse surrounding the nature and
formation of intimate relationships introduces an entirely new dynamic to what the
practice of sexual and relational health really means to young adults today.
6.2.2 Discourse and the Formation of Intimate Relationships
The status quo for the formation of intimate relationships has shifted significantly
in the past few decades. The Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for
American Values and the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia reports
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that cohabitation, rather than divorce, is now on the upward trend of intimacy. For the
current generation of young adults who are dating, to ask the question of their romantic
partner “should we live together?” seems to be an almost unavoidable question. David
Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead write that today’s young adults are “the first
generation to come of age in the divorce revolution” (Should We Live Together 1), a term
which refers to the period from 1960 to 1980 and specifically the years after 1969 when
the first no-fault divorce bill was passed in California. Changing cultural and social
mores, including the sexual revolution, anti-institutionalism, and psychological
revolutions concerning personal fulfillment and growth, presented divorce as a more
acceptable option for any married couple. During this time, “the divorce rate more than
doubled—from 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women to 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married
women. This meant that while less than 20% of couples who married in 1950 ended up
divorced, about 50% of couples who married in 1970 did” (Wilcox 81). Consequently,
“approximately half of the children born to married parents in the 1970s saw their parents
part, compared to only about 11% of those born in the 1950s” (Wilcox 81). While the
divorce rate in America declined in the 1980s and marital happiness became more
stabilized, the implications for intimacy and marital trends are significant. Children who
saw their parents’ marriage dissolve during the divorce boom of the 1970s began thinking
about marriage themselves in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Increasingly aware of the
fragility of marriage, these young couples wait longer to get married, engage in
cohabitation before marriage, or choose not to get married at all. Thus by the year 2000,
the total number of unmarried couples in America was almost 4.75 million, an increase of
over eight-fold from 1960. Furthermore, it is estimated that over a quarter of unmarried
women ages 25 to 39 are currently cohabiting with their partner. Consequently, over half
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of all first marriages are preceded by cohabitation (Bumpass and Lu). For the first
generation to come of age after the divorce revolution as well as for all preceding
generations, cohabitation has emerged as a powerful alternative to marriage.
Consequently, the most current generation learns cohabitation as the status quo for
intimacy formation. According to a report of the National Marriage Project titled, “Why
Marriage Matters,” in 2011, 24% of children in the U.S. were born into cohabiting
households, while another 20% spend time in a cohabiting household with an unrelated
adult (such as a girlfriend or boyfriend after the parents’ marriage dissolves) at some
point during their childhood. In addition, a study by Sheela Kennedy and Larry Bumpass
for Demographic Research shows that currently, around 42% of children are exposed to a
cohabiting relationship at some point in their formative relational years of childhood (by
age 12). Living with a partner prior to marriage has become “the norm” in the eyes of
many adolescents and young adults, and the long-term alternative to cohabitation (mainly
marriage) increasingly holds perceived risks, especially for young men (see Whitehead
and Popenoe, “Why Men Won’t Commit”). These changing practices in the formation of
relationships hold significant implications for how the current generation of young adults
think and talk about intimacy and marriage.
The expectations and attitudes which adolescents and young adults hold toward
long-term committed relationships and marriage is in the midst of transformation. In The
Transformation of Intimacy, Giddens cites a 1989 study by Lillian Rubin of the sexual
histories of a thousand heterosexual people in the U.S. aged 18 to 48. The findings
suggest that the current generation experiences an expanded variety of sexual activity and
changing relational expectations—especially concerning marriage—at most age groups.
Yet Rubin’s work shows, and the thesis of Gidden’s book suggests, that the
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“transformation of intimacy” in the modern age primarily concerns the sexual activity of
teenage girls and young women, and it is this demographic which has seen the most
dramatic changes in sexual expectations and practices from previous generations.
Although female virginity prior to marriage continues to be acknowledged by both sexes
as ideal, teenage girls now are much less likely to make decisions concerning their
sexuality based on expectations of marriage or even lasting commitment. Instead, “girls
feel they have an entitlement to engage in sexual activity, including sexual intercourse, at
whatever age seems appropriate to them” (Giddens 10). Giddens argues that, in our
current historical moment, young adults especially are experiencing a radical reframing of
interpersonal expectations and identities:
if the teenage girls do not speak much about marriage, it’s not because
they have successfully made a transition to a non-domestic future, but
because they are participants in, and contributors to, a major
reorganisation in what marriage, and other forms of close personal ties,
actually are. They talk of relationships rather than marriage as such, and
they are right to do so. (57-58, emphasis added)
To “be in a relationship,” not to be married, is what young adults (especially women)
expect when it comes to goals of intimacy. These relationships may seem relatively long-
lasting, but they are more often than not subject to termination at any time based on as
little as one partner’s relational dissatisfaction. Giddens’ argument is not that the current
generation is moving from traditional patterns and expectations of intimacy to no patterns
or expectations. Instead, the transformation is away from practices of long-term
commitment and sexual fidelity to patterns of interpersonal intimacy that are untethered
and incongruous with beliefs.
Teenagers and young adults are being socialized into a dating culture which
emphasizes personal preference when it comes to sexual encounters and intimacy
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development. The current generation of teens and young adults experiences a good deal
of transparency in public discourse concerning their sexual practices. By the age of 18,
the majority of teens are presented with information regarding contraceptives, abstinence,
or sexuality in general, a trend which decisively has reduced the rates of teen pregnancy
within the past decade.[5] Yet, there is a significant lack of public discourse concerning
how to create and to maintain healthy relationships within the formative years of young
adulthood and into the future. As a result, “teens are street-savvy about the attractions of
sex and school-smart about its perils” but are increasingly faced with a “knowledge
deficit” concerning individual behaviors and strategies which lead to healthy marriages
and families (Whitehead and Pearson 11, 14). Thus, in the “prolonged transition from
adolescence into adulthood,” (Whitehead and Pearson) teenagers and young adults are
losing the connection between sexuality, love, marriage, and parenthood.
Sex is now considered as a separate activity from intimacy-building in teenage
years. According to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey, “more
than half of high school seniors agree with the statement ‘having a child out of wedlock is
experimenting with a worthwhile lifestyle or not affecting anyone else’” (qtd. in
Whitehead and Pearson 16). While many teenagers and young adults may not want to
have a child out of wedlock themselves, they are increasingly approving of such choices
because most teenagers today see sexual activity and the consequences thereof (including
childbirth) primarily to be a personal choice and expression of identity. A young woman’s
choice to have sex and birth a baby prior to marriage, many teenage girls argue, will not
influence their chances of being married in the future: a goal which still remains
important to many teenagers (83 percent of senior girls and 70 percent of senior boys
agree that a good marriage is important to them, according to the University of
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Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey). Sadly, popular expectations of marriage after
teen pregnancy are misinformed. Daniel Lichter and Deborah Roempke Graefe’s study
“Finding a Mate?: The Marriage and Cohabitation Histories of Unwed Mothers” suggests
that the chances of a young unwed mother ever marrying is reduced by 40 percent for
those who have their first child outside of marriage. The percentage decreases by 51
percent for women who do not marry the biological father of their child within six
months of the birth. In popular discourse, sexual activity is now considered separate from
(and even in some cases contrary to) the development of stable households, a script which
becomes increasingly more difficult for teenage women to manage as they grow into
adulthood.
This is due in part to the changing trends in sexual activity to favor the
inclinations of young men rather than women. While female sexuality is still endowed
with value (virginity and chastity as being highly regarded), the social mores surrounding
male sexuality continues to be descriptive (i.e, young men sustain fewer social pressures
concerning the ethical responsibilities of their sexual activity). In a dating culture of
young professionals not only where women outnumber men but also where opportunities
for casual sex saturate “the market,” women must learn to adjust their expectations and
patterns of sexual behavior to young men’s appetites and interests (Baumeister and Vohs).
Consequently, young women admit that “their sex lives are following a male script”
(Whitehead and Popenoe, “Sex without Strings” 15). In addition to engaging in more
frequent sexual encounters as well as taking on numerous partners, the “male script” of
sexuality leads young women to perceive a double standard of male and female roles in
intimate relationships. Young professional women “complain bitterly” that “men expect
them to be submissive and strong, faithful and independent, while ‘he’s doing what he
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wants to do’” (“Sex without Strings” 15). Changing relational expectations for patterns of
intimacy and commitment often leave young women relationally unsatisfied and
compromising of their natural inclinations for sexual modesty (see Shalit’s A Return to
Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue for one account of a natural female inclination for
modesty).
Public scripts for intimacy development are in the midst of a major transition due
in part to changing relationships between young adults and economic, political, academic,
and cultural institutions. For many, traditional scripts for personal, professional, and
relational development are no longer perceived as viable options. Pew research on the
Millennial generation (those born after 1983) indicates that the current generation of
young adults has a much lower level of social trust and a higher aversion to risk than
previous generations. Paul Taylor, Executive Vice President of Pew Research, makes the
following comment in a panel discussion titled “Millennials: A Portrait of Generation
Next”: “this is a generation that I think by all empirical evidence has been dealt a lousy
hand. They’ve got a bad economy. Their family situations started broken, become broken,
got recombined, whatever. Their political system is looking pretty dysfunctional these
days. There are mountains of debt that we’re piling on this generation” (np). The
Millennials feel compelled to look to families and institutions for “shelter” or safety-nets
during these difficult economic and political times, leaving them in relational spaces
complicated by the presence of both dependence and apprehension. Consequently, “they
value marriage; they are not rushing to the altar” (P. Taylor np). We live in a challenging
historical moment where risk is a real issue for the next generation—it is understandable
that their discourse should reflect their apprehension in making any significant decisions
in professional or personal contexts. Young adults may want successful marriages
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eventually, yet how they talk about developing and nourishing long-lasting intimate
relationships can be misled by the popular discursive environment concerned with risk
and self-protection.
Thus for the current generation of teenagers and young adults, the purpose of
marriage has shifted dramatically. In “Marriage Today: Exploring the Incongruence of
Between American’s Beliefs and Practices,” Kelly Campbell and David W. Wright
suggest that although Americans continue to marry in large numbers (85% of the U.S.
adult population will marry at some point in their lives) and expect lifelong monogamous
relationships, the rates of infidelity and divorce remain high. Approximately 20-25% of
partners engage in extramarital sex during the course of their marriage, while 50% of first
marriages end in divorce (Campbell and Wright). According to their research, there
appears to be an incongruence between how Americans conceptualize marriage and how
they actually behave in marriage relationships. In Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, A
History: How Love Conquered Marriage, she suggests that entering into a marriage
relationship “for love” is a phenomenon which is unique our current historical moment.
Historically, the majority of people married for reasons of familial, social, economic,
religious, or political significance. With the shift toward love and personal fulfillment as
being the primary motivation for marriage in the past few generations, the structure of
American marriages has become unstable and marriage itself is being deinstitutionalized
(see Andrew Cherlin, “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage”). When
personal preference and security becomes the driving force of intimacy-development,
infidelity and divorce are a viable option.
Young adults are well aware of the prevalence of infidelity in marriages and
intimate relationships. Not surprisingly, then, current attitudes concerning intimacy from
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both young male and female perspectives are marked by apprehension. Young adults are
caught in a complicated dating culture in which they desire fidelity and commitment yet
continually caution themselves against the perceived risks of marital life. By the time
teenagers arrive at their twenties, they already may be participants in the culture of “sex
without strings, relationships without rings” (Whitehead and Popenoe). In a national
study of young professional men and women in their twenties conducted in 2000, the
relational expectations of non-college twentysomethings were described as falling into
two dominant spheres: causal sexual activity and loyal relationships outside of marriage.
Casual “no-strings-attached” sex “requires no commitments beyond the sexual encounter
itself, no ethical obligation beyond mutual consent,” while relationships demand trust,
honesty, and sexual fidelity (Whitehead and Popenoe, “Sex without Strings” 9). Social
indicators of trust and loyalty are often characterized by “sex without protection” (in
which both partners are assured of the other’s honesty in disclosing all risk factors of
sexually transmitted diseases) and cohabitation. According to this demographic,
cohabitation allows for each person to learn more about the habits, character, and fidelity
of a partner as well as their compatibility for long-term commitment. As a result, “these
young men and women reject traditional courtship as a way of finding out about a
person’s character. They see dating as a ‘game,’ full of artifice and role-playing, while
living together is more natural, honest and revealing” (12). Young adults now are
evaluating the fitness of prospective romantic partners from almost exclusively private
standards.
Cohabitation provides an enticing alternative to marriage for young adults since it
promises the enjoyment all of the sexual, domestic, and financial benefits of marriage
without the legal risk and consequences of separation. For example, many young men
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argue that “their financial assets are better protected if they cohabit rather than marry.
They fear that an ex-wife will ‘Take you for all you’ve got’” (Whitehead and Popenoe,
“Why Men Won’t Commit” 12). Young adults still are highly critical of divorce. They
desire monogamous, lifelong commitments (Campbell and Wright). Yet it has become
“too easy” to divorce as young men and women both are entrenched in societal trends of
consumerism (i.e, “too many choices” of potential partners), increased perceptions of
independence in sexual practices, and a misrepresentative public discourse concerning
expectations in intimacy development. Despite their criticisms, young adults approve of
divorce if the couple “falls out of love” or experiences marital problems. Young adults are
likely to see marriage as the end result of a long process of “growing up,” and, once
achieved, marriage functions as the final stage of many years of sexual and relational
encounters.[6]
Ensuring personal, financial, and professional success and stability are
understandable and worthwhile goals for all young adults. However, this project argues
that as the current generation of young adults grow professionally and personally, their
popular discourse may be sending misleading information regarding successful intimacy
development. The result is a culture of prolonged dating, more numerous sexual
encounters as abstinence becomes a more difficult choice, increased apprehension of
marriage, and most significantly, incongruent beliefs and practices concerning the focus
and purpose of healthy marriages. The studies mentioned above suggest that there seem
to be two metaphors which describe the discourse of marriage and intimacy in the current
dating culture: sexual economics and soul-mate unions. Representing two extremes of
human relational perspectives, intimacy is now perceived as a “marketplace of exchange”
while an individual may or may not be waiting for “the one.” According to recent studies
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by Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs, “a heterosexual community can be analyzed
as a marketplace in which men seek to acquire sex from women by offering other
resources in exchange. Societies will therefore define gender roles as if women are sellers
and men buyers of sex” (339). Young women as thus encouraged to flaunt their “erotic
capital” in all contexts, from professional to dating (Hakim), while young men remain
happy consumers of the trend. Yet the myriad of social science perspectives, from
economic to sociological to psychological, still show that deep in the heart of most young
adults is a desire for a satisfying and long-lasting union with another person. Men and
women are still holding on to the dream of finding a “soul mate”–“the one”–who will
fulfill their lives with love and companionship.[7] With changing standards of intimacy,
“a relationship, and especially, marriage is idealized as a soul-mate union” and,
consequently, “there must be extensive round-the-clock testing to evaluate the emotional
fitness and capacities of a mate for this special kind of intimate friendship” (Whitehead
and Popenoe, “Sex without Strings” 12). At first glance, these two metaphors seem to be
at odds with one another. On the one hand, young men and women are encouraged to
“consume” sexual activity and relationships, indicating numerous, short-lived encounters.
On the other hand, the constant testing of compatibility and “fit” for a soul mate suggests
significant commitments of personal time and energy. However, the juxtaposition of these
two metaphors in the current dating culture show how these trends emerge from the same
central assumptions; mainly, men and women now perceive that the core of intimacy lies
in personal attitudes, inclinations, and preferences.
Contemporary society would have young men and women believe that intimacy is
solely something you feel. One either feels like having a sexual encounter, or he doesn’t.
One either feels she is “the one,” or that there is “someone better out there.” Practices of
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intimacy are addressed in the vast majority of public discourse only insofar as the
avoidance of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are concerned. From a
communicative perspective, this creates a problematic dynamic for understanding
intimacy in a postmodern age. Globally, the practices of intimacy are less likely tied to
larger public narratives which shape identity and guide relational behaviors. Colloquially
speaking, sexuality and dating are “free-floating”—divorced from communicative
structures such as marriages, families, religious organizations, or communities which give
intimacy a home. More specifically, however, young men and women are less likely to
regard intimacy as a practice in itself, or something that requires work, lasting promises,
and a habitude of love. When intimacy is considered nothing more than a “fair exchange”
or even “something which will make me happy forever,” there is no room for true love
and grace in such a context. Herein lies a significant additive perspective which the
Christian intellectual tradition framing this project brings to the contemporary dating
culture: the conviction that intimacy is something you build, like a household, and is not
just something you stumble upon. To regard intimacy as a communicative household
brings issues of order, restraint, work, and, most significantly, grace to bear when
thinking about marriage. A Christian philosophical standpoint asks the question, as the
subtitle of Gary Thomas’s book Sacred Marriage articulates, “What if God designed
marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?” Consequently, the chapter now
moves into Lewis’s response to contemporary dating culture and how he presents the
metaphors of promise and practices as communicative correctives.
6.3 Sexuality and Intimacy in the Public Sphere according to Lewis
Lewis admits that we live in a difficult historical moment when it comes to trends
of human sexuality and intimacy. Before Giddens (The Transformation of Intimacy),
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Lewis posits technological advancements in contraceptives as changing the practices of
human intimacy in unprecedented ways. He also points to how the media encourages
sexual encounters outside of marriage by promoting the pursuit of individual sexual
indulgence. His generation is being told lies about sex, Lewis argues; the lie that the
Victorian notion of “hushing it up” has perverted our sexual understanding. On the
contrary, Lewis writes that “for the last twenty years it has not been hushed up. It has
been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still a mess” (Mere Christianity 92). He writes
that there is no problem with the nature of sex. That has remained the same. The problem
for the current generation, he argues, is one of practices. The difficulty originally stems
from the Fall, an event which distorts all human instincts, needs, knowledge, and acts.
While Lewis does not excuse this, he certainly takes the Fall into proper consideration in
discussion of human instincts and relationships: “I do not say that you and I are
individually responsible for the present situation. Our ancestor have handed over to us
organisms which are warped in this respect” (Mere Christianity 93). Yet the problem has
become compounded in recent generations by public discourse concerning expectations
of sexuality and intimacy.
Lewis contends that such narratives are the product of the modern thrust toward
economic and scientific progress, a narrative which has detrimental consequences for
human relationships. As discussed in Chapter Two, one of the modern theoretical trends is
scientism and the abstraction of the natural from issues of human interest and relation.
That which is descriptive becomes primary, while issues of prescription are deemed
antiquated or myopic. Thus, the modern narrative of scientism, under the guise of “the
natural” describes human sexual activity devoid of issues of ought. Lewis argues that our
warped natures as fallen human beings inclines us toward lustfulness; we all struggle to
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practice sexual morality. We then add to the mix “the contemporary propaganda for lust,”
which makes us feel that “the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural,’ so ‘healthy,’ and so
reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them. Poster after poster, film
after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of
health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humor” (Mere Christianity 93). Science
observes human sexual instincts and deem the promotion and progression of these
instincts as “normal” and “healthy”; more and freer practices of these kind must be even
healthier. Lewis argues that the powerful lie of contemporary propaganda, like all
powerful lies, is based on a fundamental truth about sex—the truth that sex, apart from its
perversions and obsessions, is healthy in itself. The lie, Lewis suggests, “consists in the
suggestion that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy
and normal” (93, emphasis added). What is lost is all sense of moderation, restraint, or
purpose in public discourse concerning sexual practices. Thus, we are submerged in
narratives which promote unrestraint and indulgence of impulses. It sounds very much
like commercial consumption from Lewis’s standpoint: “there are people who want to
keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a
man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance” (93). In
contemporary Western society, we have become conditioned to consume sex in the same
manner as we are encouraged to consume most ordinary goods or services. Thus, it has
become a communicative problem.
By contrast, the Christian intellectual tradition framing this project promotes
restraint in human practices, especially sexuality. Augustine recognizes the “quarrel
between will and lust” that results from the Fall (City of God 14.23). If it were not for
Adam and Eve’s disobedience in Paradise, all humans would have complete control over
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our bodies. While we indeed maintain some level of self-command over our bodies, we
learn that many of our actions must be restrained, much like an artisan restrains his
movement for the sake of his craft. Thus, “weakness and clumsiness of nature become,
through industrious exercise, wonderfully dexterous” (14.23). Restraint is “for the sake
of” health, creativity, and goodness in human relationships (Augustine, On Christian
Doctrine 1.22.20-21), and it grounds practices in a purpose beyond the act itself. In this
frame, the phenomenological becomes married to the teleological, for both the present act
and the future end have poignancy in our decisions. What happens in the present matters
in the context of our ultimate end.
Contrary to contemporary discourse concerning sexuality which favors
satisfaction in the present almost exclusively, Lewis argues that, from a Christian
standpoint, indulgence ultimately does not bring happiness. He writes “for any happiness,
even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim made by
every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing. Every
sane and civilized man must have some set of principles by which he choses to reject
some of his desires and to permit others” (Mere Christianity 93-94). Restraint indicates
order of prioritization; order emerges from moral principles and beliefs. We practice
restraint in human discourse and relationships not because it may be what we immediately
want to do, but because we recognize that our acts call for responsiveness to that which is
beyond ourselves—an act for and with others.
However, restraint may be considered a pejorative term by many in contemporary
society. That which suggests lack of personal license or boundaries on personal acts and
inclinations runs contrary to postmodern interpersonal presuppositions and trends (see
Chapter Two). Indeed, the denial of human freedom and action is contrary to Lewis’s
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assumptions as well. The significance of restraint does not lie in denial; it lies in purpose.
A Christian philosophical perspective such as is promoted by Augustine, MacDonald,
Lewis, and others brings the additive components of relation and purpose to all human
action. With the relational in mind, restraint becomes an issue of interpersonal and social
promise, a promise primarily built upon the “yes” of freedom of willful choice and not
the “no” of constraint.
6.4 Promise and Practices
From a communicative standpoint, promises hold relationships together by
tethering them to larger narratives guiding expectations for human discourse and action in
public and private spheres. Specifically in the ancient and Christian intellectual traditions,
many philosophers work from the presupposition that the very nexus where private
promises meet societal health is in the household. Aristotle argues that the fundamental
relations are the relations of the household—that of man and wife and master and slave.
From these relations arises the village and then the state (The Politics and Economics of
Aristotle 6). As Augustine claims in City of God, the Christian narrative points to how the
City of God manifests itself through human households and promises made by God and
in His presence. Augustine references the story of Abraham and the birth of his sons,
Ishmael and Isaac. Although the birth of Ishmael “according to the common law of
human generation, by sexual intercourse” (City of God 15.3) was certainly a blessing, it is
the birth of Isaac which demonstrates how God’s promises are weaved into the fabric of
creation. The birth of Isaac typifies: “the children of grace, the citizens of a free city, who
dwell together in everlasting peace” in the kingdom of God (15.2). God’s promises are of
an eternal kingdom, and a kingdom denotes communicative acts and bonds of loyalty
among the ruler and subjects. Thus promises should not be identified solely as a response
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to sin or a safeguard against wrongdoing. A promise refers to an order which is a priori to
our actions. In colloquial terms, the premodern understanding of promise is a “yes,” not a
“no.” Both Aristotle and Augustine point to how promises are commitments to
faithfulness in deed and discourse which sustain an ordered bond.
Consequently, Lewis recognizes the virtue of justice as significant to our
understanding of intimacy and marriage. He argues that marriage is a public promise of
fidelity and commitment. What the promise of marriage functions to do is to frame our
loves by charitable willfulness. Such a framing is especially significant for sexuality.
Were our sexual impulses just like any other inclination, Lewis claims, then these
promises more easily could be kept. However, “if, as I think, it is not like all our other
impulses, but is morbidly inflamed, then we should be especially careful not to let it lead
us into dishonesty” (Mere Christianity 97). Lewis points to the fact that, of all other
impulses, our sexual inclinations carry the most significant public implications. At its
basic level, procreation sustains or constrains societal health. That is, the most private of
acts carries the most public of ramifications. Because of the presence of sexuality in
intimate relationships, promises made in these interpersonal contexts are an issue of
justice. Infidelity and sexual immorality in marriage are not just private violations; they
are public ones. Those who violate this public promise not only are unchaste but are
guilty of perjury. If an individual or couple never intends to keep the promises of
marriage, Lewis argues, they are much better off simply living together unmarried in
exclusively private relationships. That way, they cannot be a strain upon (nor reap the
benefits of) public support of their relationship.
As a matter of justice, the metaphor of promise unifies word and deed. Lewis
argues that within the Christian narrative, God’s infallible promises of mercy, salvation,
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and glory for His people are about what He can and will do for them should they accept
His Word. It is a covenant which guides how He meets us in the everyday. Thus, when it
comes to human practices from day-to-day, Lewis writes that the words of our promises,
like God’s, must be anchored in our will and actions: “a promise must be about things I
can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way” (Mere
Christianity 98). Should we base our promises solely on feelings and inclinations, we
would all surely fail again and again. Sentiments will swell and subside in us because we
are creatures with heart; yet sentiment absent of purpose of will is chaotic. Never denying
or diminishing the power of human sentiment, we must choose at times to act “for the
sake of” someone or something other than how we feel. Thus, the promise of “I will
always love you” made by a wife to her husband is a promise of willful responsiveness—
to choose to act in charitable love even when anger, hurt, or sadness are present. As
Augustine suggests, when action is framed “for the sake of” the other, the appropriateness
of such action is judged not only by the person before us but also by the third Other in
discourse (On Christian Doctrine 1.22.20-21). Human beings rely on one another in
interpersonal as well as communal relationships; living in intimacy “for the sake of”
recognizes that a person dwells in an order of relations which extends well beyond—yet
at the same time addresses and completes—the self.
The presence of the public within intimate relationships by no means diminishes a
couple’s private significance. The public promise between two people in marriage is a
natural extension of their feelings of love for one another. People who truly love each
other really do claim loyalty and consistency toward the other. Accordingly, Lewis writes
that “the Christian law is not forcing upon the passion of love something which is foreign
to that passion’s own nature: it is demanding that lovers should take seriously something
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which their passion of itself compels them to do” (Mere Christianity 98). Being in love is
a glorious state. We recognize and appreciate beauty, and we open our hearts to the
sweetness of care and vulnerability toward the other. Love is much better than lust, Lewis
argues. Yet, although “being in love” is a good thing, it is not the best thing: “There are
many things below it, but there also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a
whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling” (99). Sentiments must be tethered
to our will, and the will frames our action. Therefore, there will be times in the life of a
marriage when each individual must choose to pursue quieter, persistent acts of love prior
to the explosive, passionate feeling of being in love.
Such a choice is made available to a couple when Eros is sustained by Charity. To
this end, the following sections reflect on general practices of intimacy guided by
charitable responsiveness. The practices briefly mentioned here are descriptive of
intimate relationships sustained by a framework of interpersonal grace according to
Lewis and his grounding in the Christian intellectual tradition. In response to the status
quo of practices and discourse of intimacy in a contemporary age as described above, a
theory of the presence and practice of grace in intimacy may function to answer many
concerns and challenges which young adults face in the formation of intimate
relationships today. Each of these practices reflect an understanding of human nature as
characterized by sentiment, will, and responsiveness as well as the need for grace in
intimate relations.
The framework is pedagogical, focusing on the education of adolescents and
young adults in alternatives informed by a Christian philosophical alternative to the status
quo of intimacy. Although public discourse may be misleading or misrepresentative of
expectations and practices of intimacy development, this project argues that the teaching
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must not start there. It must start in the home. Young adults who grew up in households
marked by healthy marriages are more likely to develop their own successful intimate
relationships.[8] This project suggests that a “healthy” marriage, like any relationship, is
by no means one devoid of conflict and difficulty; however, it is in the very least one
which tempers relational maintenance with congruency of communicative beliefs,
practices, and the demands of living together. More important still, healthier marriages
emerge from shared beliefs concerning the nature of personhood, one’s ability to choose
and participate within the relationship, and purpose and function of intimate relationships
in the household.
From Lewis’s perspective, the presence and practice of grace in marriages and
households creates a space for relationships to matter always—what is now, then, and yet
to be. Simply, only grace can beget graciousness. In The Four Loves, Lewis characterizes
charity as the only love which turns what is natural into the supernatural, or that which is
more than our own capacities and abilities of responsiveness. We see this perspective
echoed by other Christian thinkers, such as Reinhold Neibuhr. Grace, Neibuhr states, is a
power to extend human capacity: “it represents an accession of resources, which man
does not have of himself, enabling him to become what he truly ought to be” (99). From
Lewis’s perspective, if we want young adults to live for and with one another joyfully and
purposefully, we need to teach and practice an attentiveness to the conditions of our
ontological and existential significance which only grace can afford. We need to show our
children that Grace is completion; that which literally incarnates our relational beings (as
in his description of persons living in glory in The Great Divorce). Intimacy is so much
more than personal preference—it is a matter of choice, labor, and responsiveness to
forms of personhood.
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6.5 Sentiment: Attentiveness to the Intonation of the Heart
To begin, we need to regain an understanding of the necessary relationship
between human sentiment, discourse, and action. In much of today’s popular discourse
concerning intimacy and relationships, teenagers and young adults learn the misguided
assumption that their feelings are isolated from relational purposes. Simply, our current
generation is taught that one’s own happiness and comfort are the solitary or primary
goals of intimate relations. Lewis, led by the belief in the Incarnation of Christ and the
consequent implications for embodied relations, does not deny personal happiness and
pleasure as an important element of intimacy. On the contrary, as Chapter Three
articulates, all that which is pleasurable and joyful comes only from God Himself, and He
wants His children to love, to laugh, and to be blessed. Yet our sentiments emerge from
and should be grounded in willful attentiveness to relational purposes. From Lewis’s
perspective, these purposes emerge from our ontological derivation from God and the
significance of existential life together. All of human relation and human history suggests
that we cannot complete ourselves. We cannot find meaning, truth, fulfillment, and joy in
isolation. Only in derivation, community, and love. As Lewis’s intellectual mentor George
MacDonald suggests, we live in “the mystery of individuality and consequent relation”
(Unspoken Sermons 76).[9] Our relational purpose is to reflect and relate to the Other in
good ways—only in this will we enjoy our true selfhood.
Thus to the contemporary mantra of “do what makes you happy” in intimate
interpersonal relationships, Lewis’s work begs the question: “Yes, but wherein does
happiness lie?” While the impulses of contemporary discourse concerning intimacy,
pleasure, and happiness carry validity, the tone is skewed. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis
argues that one’s tone functions either to associate or disassociate one’s words to the
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condition of their soul and what they know to be true (53). A major challenge for young
adults, then, is learning how to intonate their sentiments in fruitful ways concerning
intimacy. Relational happiness and success are a very real possibility, but one cannot be
happy by oneself, for it is our nature to think, feel, and act relationally. The very
intonations of our hearts presuppose that it is the Other whom we are speaking with, to,
and about continually. Such a framework brings real persons to bear in the consideration
of how love and happiness are connected.
Because we are attracted to and fall in love with real people, our sentiments
should be grounded in good, purposeful attention toward the other person. Purposeful
attention suggests discernible boundaries for discourse; boundaries which never “box in”
but instead identify and clarify the truthful perceptions and expectations of our own
hearts and the hearts of others. Both discursive and nonverbal expressions of intimacy
carry consequences for others and thus maintain an ethical dimension. Lewis argues that
we always have the choice of how our sentiments are expressed, not only among others
but within ourselves. For example, he counters the idea that “falling in love” is something
irresistible beyond control. He admits that “when we meet someone beautiful and clever
and sympathetic, of course we ought, in one sense, to admire and love these good
qualities. But is it not very largely our own choice whether this love shall, or shall not,
turn into what we call ‘being in love’?” (Mere Christianity 101). It is a good thing to be
attracted to admirable qualities in the other; by doing so we attend to standards of conduct
and character which inform good relational practices. Yet we must be careful to name
such goodness in proper ways. In other words, we must be keenly aware of the object or
subject of our interests, for misplaced attention can lead to misnomers, especially when it
comes to affection, desire, and other sentiments which lend us quite vulnerable.
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Unfortunately, the name of love often has been used in attempts to propagate questionable
impulses and actions.
Thus, the intonation of our hearts should be situated in a space which calls for
grace in intimate interpersonal relationships. How we talk about questions of relational
happiness and love will make all the difference when it comes to seeing those sentiments
realized in intimacy. The other is not there solely to create or prolong particular feelings
or experiences in and for us. We may feel love, but it is never to be named merely a
feeling. Love denotes choice, action, and, above all, real knowledge of the other
(Augustine’s On the Trinity; Confessions, Tillich, “Knowledge through Love;” “Doing
the Truth”). That is why Lewis advises young lovers to let the “thrill” of being in love die
away, to “go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that
follow” (Mere Christianity 101). Attempts to make “thrills” and relational bliss the status
quo for intimacy soon find the wooers exhausted and jaded: “if you decide to make thrills
your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker, and fewer
and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life” (101).
Grace presupposes that something must be sacrificed—in a sense, must die—for the sake
of relational health. We must talk of intimacy in a manner which allows for
considerations of sacrifice. According to Lewis, the Christian narrative of grace suggests
that such a sacrifice is never a giving up on our heart’s desires, but instead a giving to the
Other whom our heart desires to be with. Thus the focus of attention in intimate
relationships shifts from articulations of “you make me happy” to “happiness is here.”
From a practical standpoint, discourse and practices in the household concerning
sexuality and intimacy should prepare young lovers for the complexity of sentiments,
choices, practices, and sacrifices which they are about to face in real relationships. To
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address intimate interpersonal communication as an issue of heart—and consequently
those issues of heart as grounded in relational purposes of reflecting and relating to the
Other—will draw attention to the importance of how we name “love,” “desire,”
“happiness,” and “health” in our lives with intimate others. Partners who not only
articulate similar relational expectations but also speak about love in the same tone are
better able to unite their hearts through discourse. Simply put, relational satisfaction
should be a shared sentiment, and each person must work to assure that the Other is well-
pleased with the purpose and attention of the intimacy.
6.6 Will: Participation in a Habitude of Love
Purposeful naming of sentiments brings necessary but difficult work to bear on
those who are in an intimate relationship. One of the roadblocks which young adults
often face is the recognition of intimacy as a continual labor of participatory and
reciprocal love. From a phenomenological perspective, participation characterizes human
understanding and activity. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis writes “to participate is to be
truly human” (74). In fact, Lewis’s writings suggest that truth and practices are united.
Jesus is the Truth; He does the Truth (John 14.6). Truth happens—it is something which
is done by God in history and thus done continually by persons derivative of Him
(Tillich, “Doing the Truth”; see also MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons and Mikhail
Bakhtin’s Toward a Philosophy of the Act). Thus there is an urgent need to regain an
understanding of participation in intimacy and the fruitfulness of labor in such a context.
One of the primary ways of characterizing human relationships as participatory labor is
by way of the present popular discourse concerning choices and habits of intimacy.
Contemporary discourse concerning sexual practices and intimacy would have
young adults believe that personal choices and habits are isolated phenomenon. However,
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such articulations lead the current generation to work from truncated versions of what it
really means to act as a self in the present moment. First, contemporary discourse allows
many young adults to believe that their choices in intimacy hold consequences primarily
in the context of freedom and expression of self. Issues of gratification and pleasure play
a major part in such discussions. While Lewis’s understanding of sexuality and intimacy
does not exclude pleasure (see his chapter on Eros in The Four Loves), it nevertheless
teaches that all things pleasurable emerge from relational purposes. As the work of
Giddens suggests, the radical self-reflexivity of the contemporary age leaves little room
for habitudes and choice in intimacy as being relationally driven. However, as described
in Chapter Four, the work of St. Augustine and Lewis articulates an understanding of
human will as a movement of our attention toward someone or something. At its core,
then, an act of will is a relational phenomenon—it necessarily involves others. A choice
of intimacy never concerns the self solely; in the very least, there is another person who
bears the burden of one’s choices and actions.
While most contemporary discourse concerning intimacy would not and does not
deny the presence of other people as bearing upon one’s personal choices in sexuality and
relationship development, there is little understanding of the need one has for the other.
By communicating and practicing need for the other, young adults can work toward
loving in its fullest complexity. In the The Four Loves, Lewis claims that all forms of
love—both need-love and gift-love—inform one another. A person does not need others
less as their loves become more sophisticated. On the contrary, it is the continual
presence of need we have for otherness which serves as an indicator that grace is
manifested in all relationships: George MacDonald in fact calls it “the needful grace”
(Unspoken Sermons 75). Lewis writes: “What Grace gives is the full recognition, the
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sensible awareness, the complete acceptance—even, with certain reservations, the glad
acceptance—of this Need. For, without Grace, our wishes and our necessities are in
conflict” (The Four Loves 130). Grace allows for the translation of needs into pleasures,
desires, and gifts.
This holds significant implications for the understanding of unity in the context of
intimacy and marriage. Lewis argues that while their particular doctrines may differ
slightly regarding practices, all churches of the Historic Christian Faith work from the
metaphor of marriage as a body. That is, divorce is regarded “as something like cutting
up a living body, as a kind of surgical operation...it is more like having both your legs cut
off than it is like dissolving a business partnership or ever deserting a regiment” (Mere
Christianity 97). Contemporary discourse concerning the formation of intimate
relationships persuades young adults that the termination of intimacy or marriage is much
like “a simple readjustment of partners, to be made whenever people feel they are no
longer in love with one another, or when either of them falls in love with someone else”
(97). Just like needs of our bodies, our need of others compels our choices. To omit the
question of need from discourse concerning intimacy and marriage gives a skewed
understanding of what indeed guides the choices of young adults. In addition, without
recognition of need, there is no room for grace in love.
Further still, the self primarily chooses within a truncated version of the present.
Within most popular discourse concerning intimacy, the utilization of terms which
address the future, such as “family planning,” often connote the deferment of particular
choices and habits until later. There is very little understanding of how one can live
purposefully in the present while at the same time creating habitudes which will bring the
self to fullness in the future. When Lewis quotes George MacDonald in naming this
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moment “the holy present” (“Historicism” 224), he means that we must exercise our wills
with the conviction that the fullness of time and eternity bears upon this very moment. It
is not fruitful to think about our choices and habits as segmented into “now” and “later,”
for both the past and future are present within this moment, shaping our discourse and
actions (Augustine, Confessions 11.11.13). When we speak and act in the world, we must
remember that truth emerges in particular places, in particular times, and within
particular personalities (Tillich, “Doing the Truth”). One never holds an “alibi” within
existence—one is always accountable for what one says and does right now (Bakhtin,
Toward a Philosophy of the Act).
Current trends of sexuality and cohabitation work from the assumption that young
adults should defer particular choices and commitments until later—until they feel it is
“safe” or “right” to do so. While discretion in intimacy formation is well advised, the
challenge to such thinking is that it undermines the ability of young adults to exercise
their will in sexuality. The nomenclature of “choices” may be rampant in contemporary
discourse concerning sex and intimacy, but when alternatives to “having so many
choices” begin to fade away, then young adults are really left with no choice at all.
Commercial images of youthful sexuality as well as ready access to contraceptives for
adolescents and young adults create the expectation that they will be sexually active prior
to marriage. Popular discourse surrounding the necessity of cohabitation lend
apprehension toward traditional paths toward marriage, such as courtship. These
conversations limit a young adult’s understanding of the fullness and capacity of their
will; that they can indeed choose for the sake of “now” and “later.” Such choices are not
meant to compromise the self’s desires, pleasure, or health. Instead, true exercise of the
will attends to the fullness of who you are and are meant to be.
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Further still, contemporary discourse which segments “now” and “later” in
intimacy-building compromises the ability of young adults to equip themselves for such
relationships. Teenagers and young adults may desire monogamous, intimate
relationships “some day,” yet they lack the compulsion and direction to work faithfully
and steadily toward that goal due to deficiencies in contemporary discourse concerning
choices and practices of intimacy. Once the moment arrives for intimacy, their relational
expectations and communicative practices may still be immature, lending even more
difficulty to a challenging turn in a young adult’s personhood. That is why Lewis’s
emphasis on the continual participation of the self within the world is so important to
understanding intimacy. The development of willful habits of loving is crucial to all
manifestations of healthy selves and relationships.
Lewis contends that the “habits of the soul” (Mere Christianity 94) are more
important than any isolated decision. That is ultimately what the exercise of one’s will
means—to reveal and develop purposeful habits of the soul which reveal the truth of
one’s nature. Will unites our discourse and practices: when we act truthfully, we “prove
existentially that our words are honest” (Boros, Meeting God in Man 71). Given such a
framework, the practices of intimacy should be understood as a continual labor of love.
Grace allows us to undertake difficult decisions with faithful confidence, for not only are
we working from habitudes that lay a groundwork for willful action in the everyday, but
we can more often than not depend upon the chance to try again. “Very often what God
first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again,”
writes Lewis (Mere Christianity 94). Thus with the encouragement to develop purposeful
habitudes in sexuality and intimacy, young adults will be better able to decide quickly,
confidently, and with integrity in those difficult relational moments. If they are
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participating in a relationship characterized by reciprocal love and grace with the other,
then they can be rest assured that, even when they make a mistake, choice is always
present, for there is still more work to be done.
6.7 Responsiveness: Maintaining Relational Roles and Structures
Developing habitudes of love allows one to participate in relational
responsiveness grounded by a sense of order and purpose. As mentioned above, young
men and women are struggling with making choices in intimacy which speak to
differences in gender, relational expectations, and sexuality. In their own practice and
discourse, young women are struggling even as they attempt to adhere to the “male
script” of sexuality (“Sex without Strings” 15). The sexual revolution of the 1960s and
1970s, in addition to more recent technological developments in reproductive technology,
has created a public discourse in which gender differences in intimacy are being obscured
or transformed (Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy). In popular conversation, there
seems to be a dichotomy. On the one hand, discussion of differences in relational
expectations between men and women is viewed as sexist. On the other hand, when
gender differences are addressed, conversation is dominated by metaphors of the “battle
of the sexes” or overly simplistic sketches of relationships between men and women.
It would be fruitful for young adults to understand the complexity of otherness in
gender relations in a different framework than what contemporary discourse posits. A
helpful starting point would be in addressing expectations and understandings of equality
in romantic relationships. In That Hideous Strength, Lewis sums up the contemporary
notion of gender equality through the character of Jane. She tells the Director that she
always thought that to love someone means to engage in a companionship of freedom and
equality. Equality is the most essential human characteristic, Jane argues, for it is in our
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souls that we are the same. The Director tells her that she is mistaken, for:
That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law,
equality of incomes—that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t
make it. It is medicine, not food. ...Courtship knows nothing of it; nor
does fruition. What does free companionship have to do with that? Those
who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are
companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. ...No one has
ever told you that obedience—humility—is an erotic necessity. You are
putting equality just where it ought not to be. (148)
According to Lewis, the notion of equality—especially the modern understanding of
equality which is more akin to sameness—is a necessity due to the social consequences
of the Fall, much like clothes have become necessary to cover our naked bodies. True
Eros does not speak of equality because the lover is too concerned with attending to the
other in loving submission. The Director points to the fact that if one has ever seen a
young man seeking the hand of a young woman one would know that humility, not
equality, is the driving force of romantic love. The desire to identify and commune with
the other brings her alterity to bear in every moment of relation. All orders of relation are
characterized by the mystery of alterity and union, for there are “differences and contrasts
all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer, at every rung of the ascent” (315). We
respond to real people with real differences in our loves.
We must recognize that we respond to both a person and a role in intimate
relationships. The fact that we are able to respond to others, even in the midst of radical
difference, is the real essence of freedom in intimate relationships. In The Problem of
Pain, Lewis writes "the very possibility of our loving is [God’s] gift to us, and...our
freedom is only a freedom of better or worse response" (45). Simply, our freedom lies in
ability, not in status. Thus better (and perhaps freest) responsiveness means better
understanding toward whom and what we are responding. Truly intimate love makes it
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possible for one’s partner to be who he is—better still, it “sees in him the person that he
will become” (Boros, Meeting God in Man 78). In intimate relationships, partners “enjoy
or suffer one another” (Lewis, That Hideous Strength 148) in a twofold manner: as
responsive to the person before them and to the role which that person plays in larger
orders of relation. A husband lives with and loves a unique human being with particular
idiosyncrasies as well as a wife. A young woman cares for her lover because he is a good
person and also a good man. While the particulars of role may take on many practical
and discursive forms, it is nonetheless persistently present in all human relationships.
Thus contrary to popular inclination, issues of role in intimacy and households are not
constraining. In good responsive intimacy one never limits her partner by denying him the
fullest capacity for responsibility in existence (Boros, Meeting God in Man). Roles matter
too much. The presence of role in intimate responsiveness creates relational standards and
expectations which emerge from a textured understanding of the many dimensions of
what it means to be a human being. Partners complement each others’ roles, not debunk
them.
In teaching adolescents and young adults about fruitful responsiveness in
intimacy, the goal should be to strive for the union and complementarity of relational
expectations and roles, not mere sameness. Lewis argues that God “caused things to be
other than Himself that, being distinct, they might learn to love Him, and achieve union
instead of mere sameness” (The Problem of Pain 156). Lewis does not put undue
emphasis on either the individual nor the collective, for his belief is that each person
maintains particularity while being unified participants of God’s world.[10] All persons
work for the greater purpose that is in Him, and because of this, men and women can be
regarded as complementary in body and soul.[11] By creating men and women distinctly,
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“the inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the
female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but
totally combined” (Mere Christianity 96). There is a form to all phenomena in this
created world, and intimacy and marriage are no exception.
The task within intimate relationships is to work within particular forms for the
sake of One Form of Personhood—one Truth, one Love, one Will, and one Action. Dallas
Willard, in his book Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God,
describes how we respond to the structure of created order by way of our words. We work
with certain “ingredients” in life, and “we must adapt ourselves and our actions” to “the
structure already within the substances with which we must work” (123). Thus the order
of things limits our responsiveness, but it limits us in a way that gives us freedom to work
with particular boundaries of experience purposefully. Boundaries make the One and the
many possible—without them, we find ourselves in an amorphous existence. Men and
women, then, find freedom of intimate responsiveness by recognizing, accepting, and
working within the boundaries of both created and discursive existence. What if, instead
of trying to assimilate to inauthentic communication and behavior patterns, young women
accept and take pride in the particularity of their sexual and gendered perspectives? What
if young men carefully and joyfully considered all of the discursive and practical
manifestations of what personhood means in real relational encounters? When each
partner comes to a relationship with a better understanding of how the particularity of the
self is enhanced by the complementarity of others, intimacy begins on fruitful ground
indeed.
6.8 Intimacy and Grace: Where Does This Leave Us as Scholars and Practitioners?
Together, these approaches toward the development of healthy discourse and
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practices of intimacy by young adults point to the necessity of tethering Eros to Grace.
The metaphor of grace presupposes the following manifestations of love in intimate
interpersonal communication: (1) love as a heartfelt choice, (2) love as a loving labor,
and (3) love as a responsiveness to form. In both popular and disciplinary discourse
concerning intimacy and relationship development, the essence of these metaphors is
present. We already talk about and study human choices in the building of intimate
relationships in all of their forms. However, these metaphors are often not named as such.
Thus, Lewis’s writings, grounded in a Christian philosophical perspective, bring an
additive component to these conversations by way of expanding the vocabulary we use
when discussing human practices and experiences in love. At the very core of this
vocabulary is Grace or the incarnation of Grace Himself into human experience. Lewis
works from the assumption that the Word is already present and already working in our
condition—we need only intonate its truth through our words. With that conviction in
mind, we can reflect on just how properly we can name our loves.
The first—love as a choice—situates the discussion of intimate interpersonal
communication as an issue of heart. The literature in intimate interpersonal
communication studies has done well in addressing communicative activities and
strategies for “intimate behaviors,” “relational satisfaction,” “bonding,” or “relational
quality.”[12] However, what these studies reveal is the need to address the metaphor of
heart as philosophical sentiment. Sentiment is more than just nonverbal communication;
there is a “phenomenology of intimacy” (Register and Henley) which involves the
meeting of embodied selves. Lewis argues how the development of intimacy—indeed the
very opportunity to communicate with other selves in time and space—is a condition
graciously extended to us by the Incarnate Word (The Problem of Pain). Given the radical
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alterity of our embodiment and our consciousness (Levinas, Totality and Infinity), we
have no course to expect identification and communion with others; existential thinkers
speak particularly of the loneliness to be found in alterity. Yet, somehow, we do find each
other. We do relate. We do form intimate unions through body and discourse. Lewis
regards this possibility as a consequence of God’s grace toward human beings in
temporality. We are not banished from communion with God or one another completely.
We may not see clearly or comprehensively, but we are not alone. We share a common
center, a heart, which inspires all subsequent particularities of human being. Thus by
grace we can choose the Other and the possibility of intimate relationships, and any
measure of relational satisfaction or quality resultant of that choice affirms our ability to
translate our sentiments into practices of love.
Consequently, the second—love as labor—characterizes choices in intimate
interpersonal communication as working toward the creation of purposeful habitudes.
Within the study of intimate interpersonal communication, the “work” of the relationship
has been characterized in a variety of ways by scholars in the discipline. Knapp and
Vangelisti describe the stages of “coming together” and “coming apart” of a romantic
couple based on the patterns of communicative behaviors. The work of Stafford and
Canary observes the range of strategies that satisfied couples use in relationship
maintenance, such as positivity, openness, assurances, and sharing activities and tasks.[13]
Baxter and Montgomery view the creation and sustenance of relationships as a complex
interplay of dialectal tensions and dialogic responsiveness between partners. However it
may be characterized, interpersonal scholars recognize that communicative work is a
necessary component of intimacy, and the work is complex. Yet this labor is often framed
in ways which limit the scope of human attention and communicative potential.
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In Chapter Four, the issues of purpose and potential was discussed in relation to a
person’s exercise of the will. Relational purposes and potentiality are ontologically
grounded yet existentially significant. Much of the contemporary interpersonal
scholarship concerning the scope of relational participation by romantic partners may
focus on communicative expectations and patterns, but the vocabulary of purpose or
potentiality are rarely used.[14] An existential phenomenological rendering of love as
labor, such as is articulated by the Christian thinkers in this project, lends an
understanding of both the historical and eternal dimensions to our attention and purpose.
Each relational moment is fully “now.” We are secured as ontologically significant
because of our derivation from God. This inheritance focuses our habitudes in existence.
Yet we can become unfocused, inattentive, or misdirected in the pursuit of relational
telos. Thus, men and women must labor together purposefully if we are to labor well.
The actual utterances of such work will vary from relationship to relationship—
from moment to moment. That is why love’s labor must focus on the multi-dimensional
components of intimacy. As Lewis writes, Christianity situates the personal as well as the
super-personal in every willful action, creating a multi-faceted, purposeful life in which
“you advance to more real and more complicated levels” of understanding human
existence (Mere Christianity 142). The Trinity illustrates how multiple purposes and
functions permeate God’s personhood and reflect into our own. The habitudes which we
propagate must attend to the complexity of love as all at once ordering, maintaining,
creating, inspiring, and serving our relational purposes in real life with real people. With a
multitude of work to be done in intimacy, the necessity of grace is more fully evident.
Should our work in intimate relationships be limited primarily to “relational
maintenance” or “negotiating dialectical tensions” or “coming together and coming
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apart,” we would have many opportunities to fail and disappoint one another. Yet when
the task at hand reflects the fullness of God’s purposes for human love in its many forms,
the habits of our souls become tethered to a potentiality which drives us beyond the
relationship itself, compelling us to labor well, attend deliberately, and forgive often. We
can then approach the work of intimacy in proper perspective as husbands, wives, and
lovers who work for and with each other, but not themselves only.
Finally, the third—love as a form—frames intimate interpersonal communication
as characterized by responsiveness to ontological and existential structures. One of the
most fruitful avenues for discussing such structures within the literature on intimate
interpersonal communication is in the area of gender studies. As discussed on Chapter
Five, scholars such as Nel Noddings, Carol Gilligan, Julia Wood, and Sandra Harding
already speak to the particularity of standpoint and role which women bring to
communicative interactions, and gender communication theorists such as Deborah
Tannen have translated these frameworks into studies of the everyday discourse of
intimacy. The writings of these women are important within the discipline because they
have and continue to call our attention to the cultural, historical, and discursive
manifestations of gender. We cannot sketch issues of femininity or masculinity in simple
ways in our scholarship, for gendered relations encompass the complexities of alterity,
power, and epistemology in public and private discourse. The cultural and discursive
experiences of women are of particular concern from the standpoint of scholars such as
Wood, Harding, Noddings, and Gilligan. Thus, discussion of gender at times
overshadows the serious consideration of biological sex—to the point where scholars in
our discipline may argue that such conversations are antagonizing, anachronistic,
unfruitful, or limiting.
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Lewis can contribute to this scholarly conversation concerning the tensions
between gender and sex. From his standpoint, both sex and gender are significant—
moreover, they are complementary. Lewis’s Christian framework assists in the
understanding of gender relations as responsiveness to a unique form of human
relationships which carries both ontological and existential weight. Men and women are
created within a distinct structure of human relations, and the freedom of our
responsiveness emerges from the recognition and appropriation of the particularity of our
roles. Thus, in bringing the element of ontological significance to contemporary
disciplinary discourse concerning gender roles, Lewis places a standard of relations at the
forefront of discussion; that is, the relationship between Christ and His Church as the
structure of intimacy and marriage (Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Four Loves). With the
establishment of a standard—a form—of intimacy, interlocutors are thus able to move
freely within the established ground, rather than speculating how and to whom they
should be responsive.
The revelation of a form is a gift of grace as well as an avenue which allows us to
practice grace toward others. For example, a man who appropriates his role as a husband
is free to attend to his wife with disinterest toward the self, for his self is ontologically
secure in the role. Further still, he is able to be gracious toward the wife, woman, and
human being in front of him because it is the structure of the relationship as well as the
particularity of the person which matters existentially. When it is just one person standing
in front of him, without the support of a standard of relation, practicing grace toward the
other becomes difficult indeed. In a triadic form of intimacy as it is framed in this project,
the relationship becomes mediated by Love Himself. Thus, when it comes to men and
women developing intimate relationships with one another, it is a true grace to recognize
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that this is a relation worthy of the very best of forms.
The three metaphors of choice, labor, and form characterize intimate love as a
condition and a practice of grace. Many of the scholarly conversations within the
discipline already address these metaphors in one manner or another. How humans
choose based on the perception and interpretation of needs and desires is not a novel
question in interpersonal communication studies. The communicative work of
interpersonal relationships is articulated from a variety of perspectives. The structures and
shapes of our discursive lives together touches upon a multitude of theories of
interpersonal communication. Yet, few perspectives outside of Christianity consider these
three metaphors as a trinity—working together in a unified theory of intimate
relationships. This project works from the presupposition that the inclinations of our
hearts are misrepresented if we do not recognize toward whom we move. Our labor is
useless without the willful engagement of purpose. Form is empty without existential
choice and participation. A philosophical rendering of sentiments, will, and action in
human relationships, grounded in a Christian philosophical perspective informed by the
writings of C.S. Lewis, situates gracious love at the forefront of questions of who we are
as human beings and how we relate to one another. Thus, conversations regarding the
presence and practice of grace in intimate communicative relationships are evident in the
literature—we as scholars need only properly name and more fully articulate them as
such.
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Endnotes
Chapter One
1. Note that communication scholars such as Kathryn A. Dindia and Daniel J.
Canary dispute the degree to which masculine and feminine approaches to
communication may differ. See, for example, Dindia’s chapter titled “Men are
from North Dakota, Women are from South Dakota” in Dindia and Canary’s Sex
Differences and Similarities in Communication.
2. For more information on behavioral approaches to learning, see seminal theorists
such as B. F. Skinner (Freedom and Dignity) and Edward Thorndike (Educational
Psychology: The Original Nature of Man). Cognitive learning theorists include
Jean Piaget’s work on child psychology (The Child’s Conception of the World;
Origins of Intelligence in Children), Robert Gagné’s models on forms of learning
(The Conditions of Learning), and Kurt Lewin’s work on group dynamics (A
Dynamic Theory on Personality; Resolving Social Conflicts: Selected Papers on
Group Dynamics).
Chapter Two
1. As discussed later in the chapter, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, for
example, work from a Catholic narrative perspective. In addition, Hannah Arendt
works from the Jewish intellectual tradition which, although not guided by the
belief in the Incarnate Christ, nonetheless lends ontological significance to human
relationships. In addition, her philosophical writings are framed by the
existentialism of St. Augustine.
2. See his essay “Transposition” or his novel The Great Divorce for two such
examples. The light of God in each of these works is understood to illuminate all
that is but yet be so unfathomably bright for this temporal world that it is
necessarily obscured. That is why, in many of his allegories of the temporal world
and the eternal, Lewis uses the metaphor of shadows to describe all creation
outside of the heavenly realm (an idea stemming from George MacDonald’s
works of fiction such as The Golden Key).
3. Chapter Four will expand more fully on the trinitarian relation between knowing,
willing, and loving according to the works of St. Augustine and Lewis’s
grounding in this theory.
Chapter Three
1. For more on epistemology, phenomenological reduction, and transcendental
epochē, see works of Edmund Husserl such as Cartesian Meditations or The
Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
2. For another philosophical approach on love and the “training of the heart,” see
Caroline J. Simon’s The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny, and Imagination.
Simon treats self-knowledge and interpersonal experiences from a Christian
philosophical perspective on love in the everyday. She draws from examples in
literature to frame the complexity of sentiments in relational encounters.
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3. See also Charles Taylor’s discussion of the sources of moral reasoning, identity,
and development in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.
4. See Lewis’s chapter on “The Rival Conceptions of God” in Mere Christianity. He
admits that many theories of human existence, especially in relation to the
supernatural, are valid and contain elements of truth, and we must be attentive to
their theoretical manifestations. Yet, according to Lewis, Christians must believe
that all belief systems other Christianity may be “almost right”—but are always
“not quite.”
5. Thibault and Kelley’s work is an early example. Later, Michael Roloff, in
Interpersonal Communication: A Social Exchange Approach, offers a review
of communication theories through the lens of social exchange.
Chapter Four
1. A quick survey of introductory interpersonal communication textbooks shows
that questions of “self” and “self-competence” are often the subjects of the first
chapters of the text, indicating that a better understanding of the self is essential
for interpersonal communication studies as a whole. See Sarah Trenholm and
Arthur Jensen’s model of communication competence in Interpersonal
Communication (6th edition) for a specific example of the centrality of self-
competence in interpersonal theory and practice.
2. Note Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of a Goffmanesque perspective in After
Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.
3. As discussed in Chapter Two, see “The Poison of Subjectivism” for an example
of his critique of the modern metaphor of “vision” in contrast to the Christian
understanding of reflection and light. Also see his use of the metaphors of
light and shadows in The Great Divorce.
4. See Stafford and Canary’s essays on relationship maintenance such as
“Relational Maintenance Strategies and Equity in Marriage,” “Maintaining
Relationships Through Strategic and Routine Interaction,” “Maintaining
Romantic Relationships: A Summary and Analysis of One Research
Program,” and “Maintenance Strategies and Romantic Relationship Type, Gender
and Relational Characteristics.”
5. The Johari window (Luft and Ingham) speaks to self and relational awareness
and management from the perspective of disclosed or revealed information
between the self and others. One of the four quadrants is the “blind spot,” or those
characteristics of the self evident to others but unknown to the self.
Chapter Five
1. See elements of communication competence models such as is described by
Trenholm and Jensen in Interpersonal Communication, which describe the
interpretive, verbal, nonverbal, role, goal, message, and relational dynamics at
play in communicative acts.
2. See “Dialogue as ‘Enlarged Communicative Mentality’: Review, Assessment, and
Ongoing Difference” by Arnett, Grayson, and McDowell in Communication
Research Trends for an historical and interpretive review of the philosophical
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foundations of dialogic studies in the discipline of communication.
3. The reference here is to seminal books and essays published in the 1960s and
1970s such as Howe’s The Miracle of Dialogue, Floyd Matson and Ashley
Montagu’s The Human Dialogue: Perspectives on Communication, Richard
Johannesen’s “The Emerging Concept of Communication as Dialogue,” and John
Poulakos’s “The Components of Dialogue.”
4. See foundational texts such as John Stewart’s Bridges, Not Walls: A Book about
Interpersonal Communication, Charles Brown and Paul Keller’s Monologue to
Dialogue, Rob Anderson, Leslie Baxter and Ken Cissna’s Dialogue: Theorizing
Difference in Communication Studies, and Leslie Baxter and Barbara
Montgomery’s (Relating: Dialogue and Dialectics).
5. See Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time for a philosophical account of language
as the “house of Being.”
6. For a relevant study on strategies for conflict resolution by married couples who
exhibit content-validation, self-assertion, and relational accusations, see “The Use
and Consequences of Verbal Influence Strategies During Interpersonal
Disagreements” by Deborah A. Newton and Judee K. Burgoon. Also see John
Gottman’s Why Marriages Succeed or Fail for an account of how particular
verbal strategies contribute to the health or decline of marriage relationships.
7. For example studies regarding attribution in marriage, see Thomas Bradbury and
Frank Finchman’s “Attribution in Marriage: Review and Critique,” John Harvey,
Gary Wells, and Marlene Alvarez’s “Attribution in the Context of Conflict
and Separation in Close Relationships,” Harold Kelley’s Personal Relationships:
Their Structures and Processes, Bruce Orvis, Harold Kelley, and Deborah Butler’s
“Attributional Conflict in Young Couples,” and Alan L. Sillars’ “Attributions and
Interpersonal Conflicts” and “Interpersonal Perception in Relationships.”
8. As discussed previously in the project, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the super
addressee in Toward a Philosophy of the Act. The Third acts as a witness and a
judge to our utterances and lends validity to our communicative practices.
9. For examples in nonfiction, see the discussion of Eros in The Four Loves and
Christian marriage in Mere Christianity. Also, That Hideous Strength, The Great
Divorce, and Till We Haves Faces include just a few examples of fictional
relationships between men and women marked by challenging communicative
and relational aspects.
10. For example studies, see Melissa Frederikse, Angela Lu, Elizabeth Aylward,
Patrick Barta, and Godfrey Pearlson’s “Sex Differences in the Inferior Parietal
Lobule” in Cerebral Cortex and Thomas Schlaepfer, Gordon Harris, Allen Tien,
Luon Peng, Seong Lee, and Godfrey Pearlson’s “Structural Differences in the
Cerebral Cortex of Healthy Female and Male Subjects: A Magnetic Resonance
Imaging Study” in Psychiatry Research.
11. Lewis’s understanding of marriage in the Christian tradition emerges from his
interpretation of Ephesians 5:21-32. In this particular Biblical passage, the
relationship between a man and his wife is compared to the relationship between
Christ and His Church, or the body of believers. In addition to its implications for
understanding complementarity of the male and female in intimacy, Lewis’s
interpretation of the Ephesians passage lends particular significance to questions
of role, obedience, and responsiveness of the masculine and feminine within
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intimate relational contexts.
Chapter Six
1. See Joyce Abma, Gladys Martinez, and Casey Copen, “Teenagers in the United
States: Sexual Activity, Contraceptive Use, and Childbearing: Data from the
National Survey of Family Growth 2006-2008,” Anjani Chandra et al., “Fertility,
Family Planning, and Reproductive Health of U.S. Women: Data from the 2002
National Survey of Family Growth,” Gladys Martinez et al., “Fertility,
Contraception, and Fatherhood: Data on Men and Women from Cycle 6 (2002) of
the National Survey of Family Growth,” and U.S. Bureau of Census, America’s
Families and Living Arrangement.
2. It should be noted that the use of the term “emergency contraception” is itself a
highly contested issue in popular discourse. Different ideological perspectives use
different labels (e.g., “contraceptive” versus “abortive”) for the same medicinal
formula.
3. See Megan Kavanaugh, Sanithia Williams, and E. Bimla Schwarz, “Emergency
Contraception Use and Counseling After Changes in United States Prescription
Status,” Laura Miller, “Emergency Contraceptive Pill (ECP) Use and Experiences
at College Health Centers in the Mid-Atlantic United States: Changes Since ECP
Went Over-the-Counter,” Corrine Rocca et. al, “Beyond Access: Acceptability,
Use and Nonuse of Emergency Contraception among Young Women,” and Petra
Sander, Elizabeth Raymond, and Mark Weaver, “Emergency Contraceptive Use as
a Marker of Future Risky Sex, Pregnancy, and Sexually Transmitted Infection.”
4. National surveys published by the Center for Disease Control Youth Risk
Behavior Survey and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation support these
correlations between contraceptive use, sexual activity, and knowledge and
attitudes toward sex by adolescents and young adults.
5. For more information, see Jacqueline Darroch, David Landry, and Susheela Singh
“Changing Emphases in Sexuality Education in U.S. Public Secondary Schools,
1988-99” and Joyce Abma, Gladys Martinez, William Mosher, and Brittany
Dawson, “Teenagers in the United States: Sexual Activity, Contraceptive Use, and
Childbearing, 2002.”
6. See the National Marriage Project’s State of the Union Reports from 2001 and
2002 concerning commitment and relational expectations of young adults.
7. See Campbell and Wright’s “Marriage Today: Exploring the Incongruence
Between Americans’ Beliefs and Practices” for interpersonal indicators of higher
risks of divorce. One indicator is “high expectations,” or romantic ideals typical
of individualistic cultures which incline young adults to seek passionate, exciting
marriages.
8. For just a few examples, see Paul Amato and Danielle DoBoer’s “The
Transmission of Marital Instability Across Generations: Relationships Skills or
Commitment to Marriage,” Irving Tallman, Thomas Rotolo, and Louis Gray’s
“Continuity or Change?: The Impact of Parents’ Divorce on Newly Married
Couples,” and Sharon Sassler, Anna Cunningham, and Daniel Licther’s
“Intergenerational Patterns of Union Formation and Relationship Quality.”
9. For other examples of Christian thinkers who proclaim derivation and otherness
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as necessary conditions of human self-identity, see Reinhold Niebuhr’s The
Nature and Destiny of Man and Paul Tillich’s “Knowledge Through Love.”
10. See also MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons, Boros Meeting God in Man, G. K.
Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together for
evidence of other Christian thinkers who support Lewis’s convictions concerning
particularity within the unified body of believers.
11. There is much theological and ideological debate concerning issues of equality
and responsibility of men and women before God in light of the Genesis story of
Creation (Genesis 1-3). Such conversations are not ignored nor invalidated by this
project. Working from the perspective of Lewis, who himself is informed and
influenced by St. Augustine, George MacDonald, and G. K. Chesterton, this
project supports the theory of the created complementarity of the sexes as a
reflection of God’s purposes for the world. For example, see Augustine’s
treatment of sexuality and divine promise in the story of Abraham and Sarah in
The City of God or Chesterton’s discussion of the trinity of man, woman, and
child in The Everlasting Man.
12. Just a few examples of the work being done in the discipline concerning
nonverbal communication and “intimate behaviors” are by Kory Floyd and Judee
Burgoon, Kory Floyd and Mark Morman, and Mark Palmer and Karl Simmons.
For relational “satisfaction,” see theories based in assumptions of social exchange
emergent from the work of Thibault and Kelley in The Social Psychology of
Groups. For “bonding,” see Stages of Relational Development as articulated by
Knapp and Vangelisti in Interpersonal Communication and Human Relationships.
For “relational quality,” see works emergent from interactive systems in family
and marital communication, such as the works of Rogers, Millar and Rogers, and
Gottman.
13. See Stafford and Canary’s essays on relationship maintenance such as “Relational
Maintenance Strategies and Equity in Marriage,” “Maintaining Relationships
Through Strategic and Routine Interaction,” “Maintaining Romantic
Relationships: A Summary and Analysis of One Research Program,” and
“Maintenance Strategies and Romantic Relationship Type, Gender and Relational
Characteristics.”
14. A notable exception is the work of Marie Baker-Ohler and Annette Holba in The
Communicative Relationship Between Dialogue and Care.
