Brains and Stomachs - Part One

"They live that they may eat, but he himself (Sophocles) eats that he may live."
- Matthew Arnold

One of C.S. Lewis' less famous books is called "The Abolition of Man," and in it he takes the opportunity to respond to a book that had been published. C.S. Lewis called this book the Green Book, and renamed the authors Gaius and Titius so that he would not be on a frontal assault with them but rather could deal with the issues that Gaius and Titius had raised.

The Green Book tells the story of two young boys that happen across a waterfall. And one of them exclaims that the waterfall is beautiful. The other states that the waterfall is sublime, because it evokes a sense of awe within him. Gaius and Titius go on to say that the boy who said that the waterfall was wrong-headed, and needed to be retrained because there was no sense of sublimity out there, in the world. His feelings were glandular, the product of some enzyme secretion and certain feelings which engender prettiness and beauty, which he attributed to sublimity. Thus, this wrong-headed boy, according to the authors, needed to be retrained because his prior instruction had taken him in a wrong-headed direction.

C.S. Lewis' criticsm is thus; he says that if he were to take Gaius and Titius at their word, he would have to believe that mathematics is real, therefore his brain is real. Food s real, therefore his stomach is real; but sublimity is not real because there is no heart, no emotion, with which to also experience reality. Gaius and Titius, Lewis goes on to say, would then produce a generation of children of just brains and stomachs; no heart, that was also in keeping with the truth of reality.

It is a good thing that those who were kidnapped on an airplane on September 11th, and who realized that the terrorists intended to use the plane and its passengers as a mobile missle and therefore decided to take on the terrorists - it is a good thing that they did not read the Green Book. Otherwise, their feelings of courage and selflessness would not have been properly motivated; they too would have needed retraining because there is no such thing as courage, it is only in the glands, nor is there any such thing as self-sacrifice, it is only in the glands. Or just as well, they all might have helped the terrorists achieve their goals despite any feelings of guilt or shamefulness because in the world there are no such things and they needed simple retraining to correctly deal with their glandular secretions.

My dear readers, humanity is more than thoughts and hungers. And those of us in acadamia in particular tend to forget that. Indeed, that ivory tower becomes a very easy escape from the troubles of friends, family, humanity, and even one's own inner turmoil as we theorize and rationalize all of our problems away. But we have to remember that all of our proofs, and all of our theories, philosophy, and number games mean nothing to someone that has just crossed paths with a funeral procession. G.K. Chesterton says this concerning the topic in his book Orthodoxy, "Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world."

Very often we make this mistake. We assume that by meeting people's thoughts and hungers alone we can change people for the better. History, however, tells us otherwise and Jesus himself was given a similiar temptation by Satan in the desert. After Jesus has been fasting, Satan comes to him and tells him to turn the stones into bread.

But what is the significance of that?

Marx and Engles wanted to dedicate their work to Darwin because Darwin had given them their essential definition of man but Darwin, purportedly, declined. Atheistic economic theory saw some of its essential underpinnings in the idea of humans being merely the products of blind naturalistic processes, and the ramifications of such an idea have been with us ever since.

What we must remember is that if humanity is nothing but minds and stomachs, is that we eliminate soulishness as a real possibility. And when the soul is effectively non-existant, we must take the body to be the soul - that is, the thing toward which we protect, nourish and guard. And when soulishness is gone, and body is all that is left, the body eclipses the soul in importance and we lose all sight of the spiritual side of reality. History tells us what happens next, when we remove the soul we remove the concept of God.

Josef Stalin was, at one time, a seminary student who lost his faith in God. Later on, Lenin singularly selected Stalin because of his hatred of things religious and Malcom Muggeridge documents the last moments of Stalin's life, as he lay in bed, clenching his fists towards the heavens, and then died. Here was a man whose wife and son had killed themselves, and who himself was responsible for the deaths of over fifteen million people. What we must not forget was this: Stalin was an avowed atheist.

The Nazi regime was also atheistic; bowing to no God other than Hitler, and Hitler attempting to bring about the perfection of body in the superman, an idea he took from Nietche and summarily militarized. Hitler personally presented copies of Nietchze's work to Bonito Moussilini.

The slaughters in China and Cambodia were both the result of atheistic regimes coming to power, Mao Tse Dong (spelling?) and Pol Pot respectively, and that saw no reason to grant essential dignity to a life that can only be described as a random collection of molecules.

Let me clarify the point: when the soul is gone, and body is all that is left; it is the body that becomes God. And this idea will not remain in the abstract; it will not be simply man becoming the god of himself as Nietchze effectively claimed, "...some actual men will become God; either the erotomaniac or the megalomaniac; Hitler or Hugh Heffner, (Ravi Zacharias)." The worst crimes in history are ever brought about not by men and women whose stomachs are empty, but men and women whose stomachs are full.

"Turn these stones into bread," Satan tempts Jesus, attempting to lure Christ into the false belief that humanity is nothing but brains and stomachs. And Jesus replies in the fourth chapter of the gospel of Luke, "It is written: man does not live on bread alone."