Abolition of Man moreover (C.S. Lewis p. III)...

The truth finally becomes apparent that neither in any operation with factual propositions nor in any appeal to instinct can the Innovator find the basis for a system of values. None of the principles he requires are to be found there: but they are all to be found somewhere else. 'All within the four seas are his brothers' (xii. 5) says Confucius of the Chün-tzu, the cuor gentil or gentleman. Humani nihil a me alienum puto says the Stoic. 'Do as you would be done by,' says Jesus. 'Humanity is to be preserved,' says Locke.⁴ All the practical principles behind the Innovator's case for posterity, or society, or the species, are there from time immemorial in the Tao. But they are nowhere else. Unless you accept these without question as being to the world of action what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have no practical principles whatever. You cannot reach them as conclusions: they are premisses. You may, since they can give no 'reason' for themselves of a kind to silence Gaius and Titius, regard them as sentiments: but then you must give up contrasting 'real' or 'rational' value with sentimental value. All value will be sentimental; and you must confess (on pain of abandoning every value) that all sentiment is not 'merely' subjective. You may, on the other hand, regard them as rational—nay as rationality itself—as things so obviously reasonable that they neither demand nor admit proof. But then you must allow that Reason can be practical, that an ought must not be dismissed because it cannot produce some is as its credential. If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.

To some it will appear that I have merely restored under another name what they always meant by basic or fundamental instinct. But much more than a choice of words is involved. The Innovator attacks traditional values (the Tao) in defence of what he at first supposes to be (in some special sense) 'rational' or 'biological' values. But as we have seen, all the values which he uses in attacking the Tao, and even claims to be substituting for it, are themselves derived from the Tao. If he had really started from scratch, from right outside the human tradition of value, no jugglery could have advanced him an inch towards the conception that a man should die for the community or work for posterity. If the Tao falls, all his own conceptions of value fall with it. Not one of them can claim any authority other than that of the Tao. Only by such shreds of the Tao as he has inherited is he enabled even to attack it. The question therefore arises what title he has to select bits of it for acceptance and to reject others. For if the bits he rejects have no authority, neither have those he retains: if what he retains is valid, what he rejects is equally valid too.

The Innovator, for example, rates high the claims of posterity. He cannot get any valid claim for posterity out of instinct or (in the modern sense) reason. He is really deriving our duty to posterity from the Tao; our duty to do good to all men is an axiom of Practical Reason, and our duty to do good to our descendants is a clear deduction from it. But then, in every form of the Tao which has come down to us, side by side with the duty to children and descendants lies the duty to parents and ancestors. By what right do we reject one and accept the other? Again, the Innovator may place economic value first. To get people fed and clothed is the great end, and in pursuit of its scruples about justice and good faith may be set aside. The Tao of course agrees with him about the importance of getting the people fed and clothed. Unless the Innovator were himself using the Tao he could never have learned of such a duty. But side by side with it in the Tao lie those duties of justice and good faith which he is ready to debunk. What is his warrant? He may be a Jingoist, a Racialist, an extreme nationalist, who maintains that the advancement of his own people is the object to which all else ought to yield. But no kind of factual observation and no appeal to instinct will give him a ground for this option. Once more, he is in fact deriving it from the Tao: a duty to our own kin, because they are our own kin, is a part of traditional morality. But side by side with it in the Tao, and limiting it, lie the inflexible demands of justice, and the rule that, in the long run, all men are our brothers. Whence comes the Innovator's authority to pick and choose?

Since I can see no answer to these questions, I draw the following conclusions. This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) 'ideologies', all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

More of the Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis - instincts?

But why ought we to obey Instinct? Is there another instinct of a higher order directing us to do so, and a third of a still higher order directing us to obey it?—an infinite regress of instincts? This is presumably impossible, but nothing else will serve. From the statement about psychological fact 'I have an impulse to do so and so' we cannot by any ingenuity derive the practical principle 'I ought to obey this impulse'. Even if it were true that men had a spontaneous, unreflective impulse to sacrifice their own lives for the preservation of their fellows, it remains a quite separate question whether this is an impulse they should control or one they should indulge. For even the Innovator admits that many impulses (those which conflict with the preservation of the species) have to be controlled. And this admission surely introduces us to a yet more fundamental difficulty.

Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey 'people'. People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own cause and deciding it in its own favour would be rather simple-minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged; or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.

The idea that, without appealing to any court higher than the instincts themselves, we can yet find grounds for preferring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard. We grasp at useless words: we call it the 'basic', or 'fundamental', or 'primal', or 'deepest' instinct. It is of no avail. Either these words conceal a value judgement passed upon the instinct and therefore not derivable from it, or else they merely record its felt intensity, the frequency of its operation and its wide distribution. If the former, the whole attempt to base value upon instinct has been abandoned: if the latter, these observations about the quantitative aspects of a psychological event lead to no practical conclusion. It is the old dilemma. Either the premisses already concealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely in the indicative.³

The Ring of Power

Another interesting argument is Stratford Caldecott's theological view on the Ring and what it represents. "The Ring of Power exemplifies the dark magic of the corrupted will, the assertion of self in disobedience to God. It appears to give freedom, but its true function is to enslave the wearer to the Fallen Angel. It corrodes the human will of the wearer, rendering him increasingly “thin” and unreal; indeed, its gift of invisibility symbolizes this ability to destroy all natural human relationships and identity. You could say the Ring is sin itself: tempting and seemingly harmless to begin with, increasingly hard to give up and corrupting in the long run"

Caldecott, Stratford (January/February 2002). "The Lord & Lady of the Rings". Touchstone Magazine. http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=15-01-051-f. Retrieved 27 March 2011.

Evil is nothing, without substance, not substantive...

"The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them ..."
(The Return of the King, p. 190) John Roland Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973)

Abolition of Man...

C.S. Lewis writes that if the standard of law or the way, the dao, is destroyed or on trial, then the only standard that will survive is pleasure.  A group of guardians will decide what is good or bad for man, not on any standard above them that they also must follow, but on pleasure alone. We also will not be able to place value judgements like, "Bad", or "corrupt", etc upon them as these are value judgements and cannot be applied since there is not objective law, way, dao, or truth that will define these terms. It will simply be "Thus I will, thus I command... sic volo sic jubeo. The law of God is on trial and something else has to take its place. And that something else is the new standard imposed by those who feel it is best for us. Now presently, we see the debates about morality as a popular belief debate, vote of the masses. So then what standard dictates what is good besides popular beliefs or appeal to the masses? Moral relativism? Decide what is good from a person to person perspective: your truth is not my truth, and my truth is not your truth. Have we all become little gods without earning that right? Judges of right or wrong within ourselves and for ourselves? Was Eden the attempt for men to become god-like with proper striving and delay of self-gratification? If man had attained Christ-like virtue and become god-like, then would God have shown the knowledge of good and evil to them and they, by grace and virtue, would have rejected it as nothing? C.S. Lewis says that traditions were passed down to teachers who also followed those traditions and taught them not as above the traditions but below them. So they kept these standards and taught them as well. Now when the traditions are on trial, what is the source of objective truth to judge our acts? What then replaces these things? It can only be man and his pleasure principle. What is good for one man may not be good for another. The pleasures of some are not the pleasures of others. Who will decide? Since we cannot judge one pleasure over another as that is a "value" judgment and we have passed that stage, we must then be motivated by the strength of the pleasure or passion; its emotional content or weight will decide. The impulse and its persistent nature must rule.

Elder Paisios: On Darwinian and Theistic Evolution

By Elder Paisios the Athonite

The nonsense we hear in schools these days about Darwin's theory and the rest, even the teachers themselves do not believe what they are teaching. Instead they proceed because they want to pollute the minds of our youth and take them away from the Church.

This is what someone told me: "Let's say the soil contained various substances and micro-organisms, and God took these and created man..."

"You mean," I replied, "that if those elements did not exist in the soil, God would not have been able to create man? It would have been really difficult for Him?"

"Well, let's say," he continued, "that He took some things from the ape and perfected them. Couldn't that be how it happened?"

"Are you trying to say," I answered, "that God cannot create a perfect creature, that he cannot create a human being, even after dedicating a whole day to it? What should He have done? Go get spare parts? Why don't you read the prophecy of Job [1] from the Scripture readings of Holy Thursday? Science does not accept all the claims about our kinship with apes. How long has it been since man went to the moon? In all these years, have apes evolved enough to build a bicycle or at least a skateboard? Have you ever seen an ape on a skateboard? Of course you can teach him to do that, but that's not the same thing."

But the man would not give up. He would insist, "Let's assume this," or "let's say that...."

"Well, let's just say that you will not assume a thing," I finally told him. "This way you'll find the certainty you want."

The theory of evolution was being taught by a professor I knew at the University. Once, I said to him: "In time and with proper care a green bean plant will become a better green bean plant, the eggplant a better eggplant. If you feed and take care of an ape, he will become a better ape, but he will not turn into a human being."

And then there's this thing to think about. Christ was born of a human being, the Panagia. Are we to believe that His ancestors were apes? What blasphemy! And those who support this theory don't realize that they are blaspheming. They throw a stone and do not check to see how many heads they have cracked. All you will hear from them is: "Mine went further than the other fellow's." That's what they are all about these days; they marvel at who will throw a stone the farthest. But they care nothing about those who are passing by and the many heads their stones will crack.

Q: Elder, some people think these theories will help bring Marxists to the Church.

A: Well, perhaps a few Marxists might come to the Church at first. But then they will want to organize as a party and start giving dictates to others: "Now you must go to church; now you may not. Now do this, now do that." They will have rules for everything. And in the end, they will start telling people: "Who told you that there is a God? There is no God! The priests are all making it up to deceive you." This is what will happen; the Marxists will use these good willing folks to achieve their goal. Marxists with a good will and disposition will come back to the Church, repent, and go to confession. But those who have no good disposition, they will never change.

1. Job 38:14 - "Or perhaps it was you who took dust from the earth, formed clay, made it into a living being with a mouth and the ability to speak, and placed him on earth."

St. John of Kronstadt on Forgiveness

By St. John of Kronstadt

Fear evil like fire. Don't let it touch your heart even if it seems just or righteous. No matter what the circumstances, don't let it come into you. Evil is always evil. Sometimes evil presents itself as an endeavor to God's glory, or as something with good intentions towards your neighbor. Even in these cases, don't trust this feeling. It's a wrong labor and is not filled with wisdom. Instead, work on chasing evil from yourself. Evil, however innocent it looks, offends God's long-suffering love, which is His foremost glory. Judas betrayed his Lord for 30 silver pieces under the guise of helping the poor. Keep in mind that the enemy continuously seeks your death and attacks more fiercely when you're not alert. His evil is endless. Don't let self-esteem and the love of material goods win you over.

When you feel anger against someone, believe with your whole heart that it's a result of the devil's work in your heart. Try to hate him and his deeds and it will leave you. Don't admit it as a part of yourself and don't justify it. I know this from experience. The devil hides himself behind our souls and we blindly think we're acting by ourselves. Then we defend the devil's work as something that is a part of us. Sometimes we think that anger is a fair reaction to something bad. But the idea that a passion could ever be fair is a total and deadly lie. When someone is angry at you, remember that this evil feeling is not him. He's just fooled by the devil and is a suffering instrument in his hand. Pray that the enemy leaves him and that God opens his spiritual eyes, which have been darkened by the evil spirit. Pray to God for all people enslaved by passions because the enemy is acting in their hearts. Perhaps you hate your neighbor, despise him, don't want to talk to him peacefully and lovingly because he has been rude, arrogant, or disgusting in his speech or manners. You may despise him for being full of himself or proud or disrespectful. But you are to blame more than he is. "Physician, heal yourself!" (Luke 4:23). So, teacher, teach yourself. This kind of anger is worse than any other evil. How could evil be chased out by another evil? How can you take a needle from the eye of another person while having a log in your own? Evil defects must be fixed with love, kindness, resignation, and patience. Admit yourself as the worst of all sinners, and believe it. Consider yourself the worst one, chase away any boldness, anger, impatience and fury. Then you may start helping others. Be indulgent about defects of others, because if you see their faults all the time, there will be continuous enmity. "The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows" (Psalm 129:3). "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you" (Matthew 6:14). We can feel from time to time the most perfect love for God without loving each other. This is a strange thing, and only few care about it. But love for our neighbor will never come without our own effort.

A real Christian doesn't have any reason to be angry about anybody. Anger is the devil's deed. A Christian should have only love inside and since love doesn't boast, he shouldn't boast or have any bad thoughts towards others. For example, I must not think about another person that he is evil, proud etc; and I must not think that if I forgive his offense he would laugh at me or upset me again. We must not let evil hide in us under any pretense. Evil and anger usually have many different veils.

Don't yield to gloomy feelings in your heart but control and eradicate them with the power of faith and the light of the sane mind. These strengths will make you feel secure. "Let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in you" (Psalm 25:20). Gloomy feelings usually develop deep in the heart. Someone who didn't learn how to control them will be gloomy, pensive most of the time, and it will be hard for him to deal with himself and other people. When he comes close to you, sustain yourself with inner strength, happiness and innocent jokes: and they will leave you soon. This is from experience.

Lord, give me strength to love everyone like myself and never to get angry or work for the devil. Give me strength to crucify my self-esteem, my pride, my greed, my skepticism and other passions. Let us have a name: a mutual love. Let us not worry about anything. Be the only God of our hearts, and let us desire nothing except You. Let us live always in unifying love and let us hate anything that separates us from each other and from love. So be it! So be it!

If God showed Himself to us and lives inside us as we in Him (according to His eternal word), wouldn't He give us everything? Would He ever trick us or leave us? He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all—how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:32). Now be comforted, my dear, and know nothing but love. "This is my command: Love one another" (John 15:17).