The Strange Case of the Self-Dwarfing Man: Modernity, Magnanimity, and Thomas Aquinas

Abstract

1. Modern Dilemma IN 1959 THE ENGLISH AUTHOR C. S. Lewis wrote a short piece titled Screwtape Proposes a Toast, a sequel to the famous Screwtape Letters, the fanciful correspondence between an experienced devil and his novice nephew on the art of tempting humans. Lewis in this second work opens his readers upon the scene of a graduation banquet at the Tempters' Training College. esteemed Screwtape has been asked to give a concluding toast to the feast, whose main item of delectation has been, fittingly, lost souls. As Screwtape begins, he cannot avoid complaining about the content of the meal: would be vain to deny, he remarks, the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality. Not all the most skilful cookery of our tormentors could make them better than insipid. What in particular was so annoying to Screwtape's palate? The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbiness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible. Oh, to get one's teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII or even a Hitler! (1) Screwtape does give his young tempters a scrap of comfort. If these modern souls were a poor sort of provender, at least they were available in far greater numbers than formerly, and quantity went some way toward making up for lack of quality. humorous but seriously intended critique of the modern human type was made more explicit by Lewis in a short work with the expressive title, Abolition of Man. The head, says Lewis, rules the belly through the chest--the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity. chest, according to this rendering, is the element by which is man. But the modern era is producing a type of man who lacks this crucial quality. a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. (2) observation by Lewis that there is something small and flabby, incomplete, robbed of generative power, un-great, in the typical human type produced by modernity, is by no means unique to him. It has appeared often since the beginning of the modern period, and from various quarters. We find for example the French liberal Catholic Charles de Montalembert lamenting the process as early as 1850. In the introduction to his six-volume history of monasticism, he observes, Throughout the whole duration of the Christian ages, the cloister was the permanent nursery of great souls--that is to say, of that in which modern civilization most fails. (3) A hundred years later another Frenchman, the novelist George Bernanos, wrote, You must not by any means believe that events today exceed the measure of man, so that there is nothing to do but submit to them. ... Events are no larger than they used to be; it is men who have become smaller. devaluation of man is a phenomenon comparable to the devaluation of money. (4) Among the most trenchant of the critics of the modern character was Friederich Nietzsche. His whole body of work might be seen as an extended discussion of the problem and its causes. One such comment out of many: This is how things are: the diminution and leveling of European man constitutes our greatest danger, for the sight of him makes us weary. We can see nothing today that wants to grow greater, we suspect that things will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian.... Here precisely is what has become a fatality for Europe-together with the fear of man we have also lost our love for him, our reverence for him, our hopes for him, even the will to him. …