"THE HISTORY OF OUR KIND":

Not Wholly in Vain (James V. Schall, S.J., 02/25/09, First Principles)

With no forethought, one evening, I pulled from my shelf a very large tome. I opened what was the third volume of C. S. Lewis’ Letters, to page 1390, to be exact. This page number gives one some idea of the massiveness of Lewis’ correspondence. This third volume alone contains 1737 pages. But here was a very short letter, dated Christmas Eve, 1962. Lewis complained of the hassle of Christmas, but wanted to send Tolkien at least a “warm greeting.” [...]

[T]he sentence in this letter that particularly struck me was in the first paragraph: “All my philosophy of history hangs upon a sentence of your own: ‘Deeds were done which were not wholly in vain.’” The adverb “wholly” in this sentence literally leaps out at you. We cannot help but realize that many of our deeds do have something of the “in vain” about them. Aristotle had warned us of the consequences of a world in which everything was “in vain,” with no purpose, no origin, and no relations.

As a reader of Tolkien, of course, I had seen this memorable sentence before. In fact, the editor of the Letters gives the text in a footnote. It is from The Fellowship of the Ring (Bk. I, ch. 2). It reads: “There was sorrow there too, and gathering dark, but great valour; and great deeds that were not wholly in vain.” The “great deeds” are to be seen against the background of real “sorrow” and of the “gathering dark.”

Much doom comes into our souls while reading Tolkien. It is only alleviated by the glimmer of hope that arrives in us when we realize that some of our deeds are not wholly in vain. A purpose is found even within us that points our deeds beyond ourselves. Even the smallest and most insignificant of us makes a difference.

“Valour” is the determination not to be defeated by the sorrows of our lot. They too have become redemptive. “Valour” does not just let the “gathering dark” happen, at least not without a fight, not without hope. An individualistic and self-autonomous age will think little but one’s self is worth standing up for. A noble age remembers that the distinction between right and wrong is a real distinction, nothing arbitrary about it. It is found in the nature of things. Its recognition is what differentiates souls and states from one another. [...]

[The doctrine of original sin] forces us to take account of the many things in history that did “go wrong,” but evidently did not need to have done so at their inception. The doctrine implies that the acts that we do, whether they be good or evil, do influence not merely the actors but also those who are touched by their acts. Thus, the “original sin” of Adam and Eve so changed them that their children and hence the human race itself fell under the effects of their original sin.

Many insist that this consequence is cruel. But what others do does affect us. Could not perhaps, we think, God have prevented any act of mine from having an effect on others? Of course, had this been the case, the very social bond among all men is broken. God would have had to create each person’s world anew so that nothing that went before could bother what went after. We would become totally indifferent to one another.

In other words, in getting rid of this sin, we get rid of the world itself, the world in which what we do or do not do actually makes a difference to others. We would exchange a meaningful world in which our deeds make a difference for a meaningless one in which they do not. The fact is that we are the kind of beings who do have their own power of acting for good or for ill. The “philosophy of history,” to use Lewis’s phrase, must acknowledge that real men perform real deeds in a real world in which we are all affected by what we do and intend to do. The consequent question is whether we can repair the evil that we do. The Socratic principle, that it is never right to do wrong, intimates that the first step away from evil is not to do it.