Mystical Experience Through Ecstatic Epilepsy Triggered in the Anterior Insula

People with ecstatic epilepsy have epileptic auras in which they have mystical experiences.  In recent years, there has been growing evidence that this experience is triggered in the anterior insula in the temporal lobe of the brain.  This raises the question of whether all religious experience can be explained as rooted in the brain, and perhaps crucially in the anterior insula, as a product of the evolutionary history of the brain.  Does this show that there is a natural desire for religious experience as rooted in our evolved human nature?  If this is so, then we must wonder whether this is or is not a sign of the real existence of a transcendent realm of divinity that is the object of mystical experience.

DEFINING RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND MYSTICISM: WILLIAM JAMES

To begin, despite the difficulties of definition in this whole area of human experience, we must define what we mean by mystical experience; and in doing that, we must also define religious experience in so far as it is rooted in mystical experience.  I have found William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) to be a helpful starting point.

James distinguished two branches of religion--institutional religion and personal religion.  Institutional religion is about theology, ceremony, and ecclesiastical organization, by which the social life of religious believers is structured--the external life of a religious group.  By contrast, personal religion is about the inner life of each believer as he conducts his own religious feelings, thoughts, and activities.  James chose to concentrate on personal religion because it seemed more fundamental than institutional religion.  Theological, ceremonial, and ecclesiastical traditions of every religion depend upon the personal religious experience of their founders.  For example, Paul is often considered the founder of the Christian church, but his authority to preach to the early Christian churches depended on his mystical experiences--such as his conversion on the road to Damascus--in which he saw and heard Jesus Christ and received a direct revelation from God.

James proposed:

"Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.  Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow" (James 1987: 36).

He then proposed defining mysticism as having four marks.  1.  Ineffability:  By this negative trait, no mystical experience can be adequately reported in words, because it can be known only by direct experience--by being felt rather than understood.  2.  Noetic quality:  Although it is a state of feeling, a mystical experience does convey a profound mental clarity or revelation of the deepest truths about the universe, often an ecstatic sense of oneness with Everything or the Transcendent Order.  3.  Transiency:  Mystical states can be experienced for only brief periods of time--from a few minutes to an hour or two.  4.  Passivity:  Although mystical states can be facilitated by exercises such as meditation, prayer, and reading of spiritual texts, when the mystical consciousness arises, it feels as though it was compelled by a higher power beyond the person's will (James 1987: 343-44).

WHAT IS ECSTATIC EPILEPSY?

Ecstatic epilepsy is a rare form of focal epilepsy in which people have mystical experiences during the aura before the onset of convulsive epileptic seizures (Picard 2023).  (In Greek, ekstasis means "standing outside oneself.")  Epilepsy affects a small minority (between 4 and 10 per 1,000) of every human population.  It has occurred in every culture throughout history.  It is most easily recognized in its convulsive form, in which people suddenly fall to the ground, lose consciousness, and writhe with seizures. 

In ancient Greece, it was called the "sacred disease" because it appeared to be caused by divine inspiration.  Around 400 BC, Hippocrates (or someone belonging to the Hippocratic school of medicine) wrote "On the Sacred Disease," in which he began by dismissing the popular belief in epilepsy's divine origin: "The disease called sacred . . . appears to me no more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause from which it originates, like other affections."  And, in particular, epilepsy is caused by the brain: "Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations."

Since the end of the nineteenth century, neurologists have understood that epilepsy is caused by sudden, abnormal electrical discharges in the cortex of the brain (Sacks 2012).  In generalized seizures, the electrical discharge comes from both hemispheres of the brain simultaneously.  In a grand mal seizure, the person falls to the ground with convulsive twitching of the muscles and loses consciousness within seconds.  In a petit mal seizure, a person loses consciousness for only a few seconds without realizing what has happened.  And even the people around him might not notice anything unusual, as they continue talking with him.

In contrast to such generalized seizures, partial or focal epilepsy arises from a particular area of brain damage or sensitivity that can be genetically inherited or acquired by injury.  Focal conscious seizures are often called "auras," which are sometimes warnings that convulsive seizures with loss of consciousness will soon follow.  During an aura, depending on the location of the seizure in the brain, there will be different kinds of sensory or psychic hallucinations.  So, for example, a seizure in the olfactory area of the brain might produce strange smells, or a seizure in the visual cortex might produce visual hallucinations.

"The symptoms of partial seizures depend on the location of the focus:  they may be motor (twitching of certain muscles), autonomic (nausea, a rising feeling in the stomach, etc.), sensory (abnormalities or hallucinations of sight, sound, smell, or other sensations), or psychic (sudden feelings of joy or fear without apparent cause, deja vu or jamais vu, or sudden, often unusual, trains of thought).  Partial seizure activity may be confined to the epileptic focus, or it may spread to other areas of the brain, and occasionally it leads to a generalized convulsion" (Sacks 2012: 134).

What are here identified as "hallucinations" need to be distinguished from illusions and delusions.  In his Principles of Psychology, James explained:

"Hallucinations usually appear abruptly and have the character of being forced upon the subject. . . .They are often talked of as mental images projected outwards by mistake.  But where a hallucination is complete, it is much more than a mental image.  A hallucination is a strictly sensational form of consciousness, as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there.  The object happens not to be there, that is all" (James 1983: 758-59). 

In ecstatic temporal lobe epilepsy, the hallucinations are mystical experiences of ecstatic or transcendent joy or heavenly bliss, with a feeling of certainty or clarity in the revelation of divine truth (Picard 2023).  For example, one of the first clear reports of ecstatic epilepsy came from Fyodor Dostoevsky, who described his epileptic seizures in his letters and notebooks, and then he described characters in five of his novels as having similar experiences--such as Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (Voskuil 2013).  On one evening before Easter, Dostoevsky was talking with friends about religion.  Then, when a bell tolled midnight, he shouted, "God exists, He exists."  Later, he described his experience in a letter:

"The air was filled with a big noise, and I tried to move.  I felt the heaven was going down to earth, and that it had engulfed me.  I have really touched God.  He came into me, yes God exists, I cried, and I don't remember anything else.  You all, healthy people, can't imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second or so before our fit. . . . I don't know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours, or months, but believe me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one.

We might assume that people who are already predisposed to religious belief are most likely to have religious seizures.  But doctors who study ecstatic epilepsy have reported some cases of people with no religious belief having a religious conversion as a result their mystical seizures.  Kenneth Dewhurst and A. W. Beard (1970) provided some examples of this.  One was a bus conductor who had an ecstatic seizure while collecting fares:

"He was suddenly overcome with a feeling of bliss.  He felt he was literally in Heaven.  He collected the fares correctly, telling his passengers at the same time how pleased he was to be in Heaven. . . . He remained in this state of exaltation, hearing divine and angelic voices, for two days.  Afterwards he was able to recall these experiences, and he continued to believe in their validity."

But then, three years later, after three seizures over three days, he said that his mind had "cleared," and he had lost his faith.  His religious conversion had been overturned, and he had been converted to atheism!   One of Fabienne Picard's epileptic patients was an atheist physicist who became a Christian after having experienced ecstatic seizures.  Oddly, then, these ecstatic conversions can go from atheism to religion or from religion to atheism.

Gschwind and Picard (2016) surveyed 52 cases of epileptic patients who had had ecstatic auras.  Some of the most common descriptions of what the patients reported included:  ineffable joy, extreme happiness as if one being in Heaven, feeling union with the whole world and with god, feeling like an orgasm, bright and expanding light, complete mental clarity, everything is joined together in one whole, certainty immune to rational doubt, and intense feelings of bliss and well-being.

THE ANTERIOR INSULA HYPOTHESIS: FROM SELF-OWNERSHIP TO RELIGIOUS ECSTASY

In 2009, Picard and A. D. (Bud) Craig proposed the hypothesis that the primary brain structure involved in ecstatic epilepsy was the anterior insula deep in the temporal lobe.

I have written previously about Craig's studies of the insula.  He has shown that the insular cortex is a crucial part of the neural network of the brain that supports interoceptive self-awareness and self-ownership of one's body and the social emotions in which concern for oneself is extended to concern for others.  In understanding this, social neuroscience provides the evolved biological ground in the brain for what John Locke identified as human self-ownership or self-concern that is extended to concern for others in mammalian animals like humans.  The Lockean natural right to property is rooted in this natural sense of self-ownership.

The most dramatic evidence for the anterior insula hypothesis to explain ecstatic epilepsy has come from Picard's treatment of epileptics at the University Hospitals of Geneva, Switzerland (Picard 2023).  Working with a patient with ecstatic epilepsy, who was undergoing presurgical evaluation with intracerebral electrodes, she recorded spontaneous seizures that were associated with electrical discharges in the anterior insula.  Moreover, her ecstatic auras could be reproduced through electrical stimulation of her anterior insula.  Even more amazing than that, Picard found that she could induce ecstatic auras by the electrical stimulation of the anterior insula in one patient with temporal lobe epilepsy who had never had ecstatic experiences previously!

If we're persuaded by this evidence that ecstatic epilepsy is somehow connected to the anterior insula, then the next question would be how to explain this:  What exactly is happening in the anterior insula to cause ecstatic seizures?  Picard's primary hypothesis for answering this question proposes "that temporary disruptions to activity in the anterior insula could interrupt the generation of interoceptive prediction errors, and cause one to experience the absence of uncertainty, and thereby, a sense of bliss," because this would "mimic perfect prediction of the body's physiological state" (Picard 2023: 1372).

Craig has claimed that the posterior insula is the primary place in the brain for the representation of interoceptive signals--the signals of the internal physiological state of the body--and integrating those signals with signals from the external environment.  The signals are combined with information from limbic and frontal cortices, and then they are represented as consciously experienced feelings in the anterior part of the insula.

Picard has extended Craig's theory through the theory of predictive coding that has become popular with many neuroscientists (Clark 2023).  The idea of predictive coding is that rather than passively perceiving reality, our mind actively predicts it.  Before our brain receives external signals from our environment and internal signals from our body, our brain has already made top-down predictions about what those signals are likely to be; and then when the real bottom-up signals arrive in the brain, they are compared with the prediction.  The mismatch between the prediction and the real incoming signals provides a prediction error, which can then be used to change the future prediction.

Picard's theory is that an epileptic seizure in the anterior insula can interrupt the predictive coding system, so that a person in the ecstatic state will feel the internal state of his body and the external state of his environment as if he had predicted them perfectly.  This would create a sense of clarity, certainty, and unity with everything in the world, resulting in a feeling of perfect, even heavenly, bliss.

Even if this theory proves not to be completely correct, it does look like the kind of theory that would explain how an epileptic seizure in the anterior insula could produce an experience of mystical ecstasy in contact with the divine.

Of course, this does not mean that ecstatic epilepsy is the only source in the brain for religious experience.  There are other ways in which the brain might facilitate human access to the divine (Nelson 2011; Newberg 2018).

"ALL ARE DIVINE, AND ALL HUMAN"

Does this mystical experience affirm the reality of the supernatural realm that fulfills our deepest longings for eternal happiness?  Some of us will say no, because, as James said, it's a hallucination--"a strictly sensational form of consciousness, as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there," but "the object happens not to be there, that is all."  Others will say yes, because, as C. S. Lewis said, the natural desire for Joy manifest in mystical experience is a sign of the real existence of the object that would satisfy that desire.  I see no way to prove which answer is correct.

Even if we are convinced by a neurological explanation of how mystical experiences arise in the brain, that does not prove that those experiences are pure hallucinations.  After all, God could be using the neural apparatus of the brain as a medium for revealing His truth--a natural cause for a supernatural Revelation.

Something like this might have been intimated by Hippocrates at the beginning of "On the Sacred Disease" when he said that epilepsy was "no more divine than other diseases" that have natural causes.  At the end of his essay, he declared:

"The disease called the Sacred arises from causes as the others, namely, those things which enter and quit the body, such as cold, the sun, and the winds, which are ever changing and are never at rest.  And these things are divine, so that there is no necessity for making a distinction, and holding this disease to be more divine than the others, but all are divine, and all human."

In my next post, I will consider the case of St. Paul.  His mystical vision on the road to Damascus might have been caused by an ecstatic epileptic seizure.  But it's not clear to me that that would deny the possibility that it was also a revelation from God.

REFERENCES

Clark, Andy.  2023.  The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. New York: Pantheon Books.

Dewhurst, Kenneth, and A. W. Beard.  1970.  "Sudden Religious Conversions in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy."  British Journal of Psychiatry 117: 497-507.

Gschwind, Markus, and Fabrienne Picard.  2016.  "Ecstatic Epileptic Seizures: A Glimpse into the Multiple Roles of the Insula."  Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 10:21.

James, William.  1983.  Principles of Psychology.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

James, William.  1987.  The Varieties of Religious Experience.  In Writings 1902-1910, 1-477.  New York: The Library of America.

Nelson, Kevin.  2011.  The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience.  New York: Dutton.

Newberg, Andrew.  2018.  Neurotheology: How Science Can Enlighten Us About Spirituality. New York: Columbia University Press.

Picard, Fabienne.  2023.  "Ecstatic or Mystical Experience Through Epilepsy."  Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 35 (9): 1372-1381.

Picard, Fabienne, and A. D. Craig.  2009.  "Ecstatic Epileptic Seizures: A Potential Window on the Neural Basis for Human Self-Awareness."  Epilepsy and Behavior 16: 539-546.

Sacks, Oliver.  2012.  Hallucinations.  New York: Random House.

Voskuil, Piet H. A.  2013.  "Epilepsy in Dostoevsky's Novel."  Frontiers in Neurology and Neuroscience 31: 195-214.

C. S. Lewis on the Fringes of Mysticism

I have been wondering whether evolutionary psychology and cognitive science can explain the varieties of religious experience.  In particular, I have been thinking about the essential religious experience of mysticism--the immediate sense experience of the divine by seeing, hearing, or feeling the Transcendent Order behind or beyond Nature.  I am considering whether mystical experience ultimately expresses the shamanic ecstasy or awe before the Numinous that was the original religious experience in prehistoric foraging bands of human beings, which C. S. Lewis identified as "the seed of religious experience."

A preeminent example of Christian mysticism in the New Testament is the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus.  Paul was a Jewish leader who persecuted the Jewish Christians.  He was on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus where he would persecute the Christians there.  Suddenly, a light from heaven flashed around him.  He fell to the ground and heard the voice of Jesus asking him why he persecuted Jesus.  Those travelling with Paul saw the light and heard a sound, but they did not hear or see Jesus.  When Paul rose from the ground, he was blind, and would remain blind for three days.  In Damascus, Ananias, a Christian disciple, had a vision of Jesus telling him that Paul would be chosen to preach Christ not only to the Jews but also to the Gentiles.  When Ananias placed his hands on Paul, Paul's sight was restored, and he was filled with the Holy Spirit and baptized.  He began to preach that Jesus was the Messiah and the Son of God.  This provoked the Jews to persecute him.  Some of the Roman rulers believed that he was insane (Acts 9:3-19; 22:6-21; 26:12-24).

Although he was not one of the original apostles, Paul claimed that his having seen Jesus entitled him to be considered an apostle.  "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" (1 Corinthians 9:1).  He interpreted his mystical vision as a direct revelation from Jesus: "I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin.  I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ" (Galatians 1:11-12).  He even claimed to have ascended into "the third heaven" and up to "paradise"--"whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know--God knows" (2 Corinthians 12:1-4).  Paul also affirmed one of the fundamental themes of mysticism--deification.  As believers contemplate God, they become like God.  As Paul said: "we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate (or reflect) the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

As the most popular Christian writer of the past one hundred years, Lewis offers a good entry into the modern Christian understanding of mysticism.  David Downing has shown in his book Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C. S. Lewis (2005) that Lewis studied the history and literature of mysticism throughout his life, and the themes of mysticism ran through his writings.  The title of Downing's book refers to a passage where Lewis describes his conversion in mystical terms: "Into the region of awe, in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with . . . the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired" (Surprised by Joy, 221).  

In one of his letters, Lewis defined mysticism as "a kind of direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or colour" (Letters, 3:109).  This echoes the language of Evelyn Underhill, whose work on mysticism Lewis studied, who described mysticism as "the direct intuition or experience of God."  She claimed that while "every human soul has a latent capacity for God," mystics have "realized this capacity with an astonishing success" (Mystics, 9, 11).

Lewis denied that he himself was a mystic.  In his Letters to Malcolm, he observed: "You and I are people of the foothills.  In the happy days when I was still a walker, I loved the hills, and even mountain walks, but I was no climber.  I hadn't the head.  So now, I do not attempt the precipices of mysticism" (85).  In a private letter to a woman who was troubled by some shocking passages in the Bible, Lewis wrote: "But why are baffling passages left in at all?  Oh, because God speaks not only for us little ones but for the great sages and mystics who experience what we only read about, and to whom all the words have therefore different (richer) contents" (Letters, 3:357).

But even if Lewis was not a mystic, he developed the mystical theme of deification.  He interpreted Paul's teaching about how reflecting God's glory transforms Christians into God's likeness by saying "a Christian is to Christ as a mirror is to an object" (Christian Reflections, 6).  He repeatedly used this metaphor of spiritual growth as mirroring Christ.  Thus, "every Christian is to become a little Christ" (MC, 153).  "The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God" (141).  In Heaven, we will be "gods and goddesses" (175).  We will be "true and everlasting and really divine persons only in Heaven" (WG, 174-75).

Since Lewis was not a mystic, he could not directly experience--he could not really see--the divinization of human beings in Heaven.  He could only imagine what this is like and express this through metaphorical imagery.  So, at the end of his Narnia Chronicles--his fairy-tale for children that has sold over 100 million copies, which has become a series of major motion pictures--he evoked a figurative image of eternal bliss in Heaven.  At the end of The Last Battle, Aslan the Lion--the Christ-like ruler of Narnia--has been speaking to the characters about how they now must die and then enter the real Narnia, where they will live forever.  Lewis has Jewel the Unicorn declare:

"I have come home at last!  This is my real country!  I belong here.  This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.  The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.  Bree-hee-hee!  Come further up, come further in!" (196).

Then Lewis writes about death and eternal life in the last sentences of The Last Battle: 

"And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them.  And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after.  But for them it was only the beginning of the real story.  All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before" (210-211).

In his "spiritual biography of C. S. Lewis," Devin Brown adapted these words to give a vision of Lewis (Jack) after death entering Heaven:

"And for us this is the end of Jack's story, and we can most truly say that he lived happily ever after.  But for Jack, it was only the beginning of the real story.  All his life in this world and all his adventures on earth had only been the cover and the title page: now at last he was beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before" (224).

But while Lewis could only evoke the reality of Heaven through the metaphorical language of a fairy-tale, mystics like Paul could actually see Heaven through mystical hallucinations arising from ecstatic experiences in their brains, particularly through ecstatic epilepsy.  That's the topic for my next post.

REFERENCES 

Brown, Devin.  2013.  A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press.

Downing, David C.  2005.  In the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C. S. Lewis.  Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Lewis, C. S. 1955.  Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life.  New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

Lewis, C. S. 1960.  Mere Christianity.  New York: Macmillan.

Lewis, C. S. 1964.  Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer.  New York: HarperCollins.

Lewis, C. S. 1973.  Christian Reflections.  Edited by Walter Hooper.  Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Lewis, C. S. 1980.  The Weight of Glory, and Other Essays.  New York: HarperCollins.

Lewis, C. S. 1984.  The Last Battle.  New York: HarperCollins.

Lewis, C. S. 2007.  The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963.  Edited by Walter Hooper.  New York: HarperCollins.

Underhill, Evelyn. 1964. The Mystics of the Church.  New York: Schocken.

The Failure of C. S. Lewis's Moral Argument for God

 In Mark St. Germain's play "Freud's Last Session," but not in the movie, there is one scene where Freud and Lewis disagree about the source of morality (14):

LEWIS. We have to begin by accepting that there's a moral law at work ---

FREUD.  I don't accept it.  There is no moral law, only our feeble attempts to control chaos.

LEWIS.  Moral codes have existed throughout time.  Tell me one civilization that admired theft or cowardice.  Mankind has never rewarded selfishness.

FREUD.  Selfishness rewards itself.

LEWIS.  Then the Nazis are right in their actions?

FREUD.  Of course not.

LEWIS.  So there is a morality you're comparing them with.  A man can't call a line crooked unless he knows what a straight line is.

FREUD.  Ah! Geometric morality.

LEWIS.  Moral conscience is something we're born with.  It grows as we do.  When I was younger, I thought about right and wrong as much as a baboon thinks about Beethoven.

FREUD.  And this "conscience" is God-created?

LEWIS.  Yes.

FREUD.  Ha.  I am laughing.  You might argue God did an adequate job with the sunset, but as far as "conscience," he failed completely.  What you call "conscience" are behaviors indoctrinated into children by their parents.  These become the crippling inhibitions they struggle with all their lives.

Here Lewis is alluding to his moral argument for the existence of God, or what he calls in Mere Christianity "right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe" (17-39).  All human beings--or all normal human beings--have a sense of right and wrong, of what they and others ought to do or ought not to do.  Even though human beings often disobey this moral law, they show their knowledge of this moral law by feeling guilt and shame when they disobey.  And while there is a lot of variation across cultures in their moral standards, there is remarkable agreement:  for example, all agree that lying, stealing, murder, and betrayal of one's friends are wrong.  "It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong.  People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table" (20).  And so, "it begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behavior, and yet quite definitely real--a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us" (30).  This intimates "the idea that in the Moral Law somebody or something from beyond the material universe was actually getting at us" (36).  At some point, you realize "that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power" (39).  There is "a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong" (34).  Here we see what Lewis identifies in The Problem of Pain as the third stage of religious development--when human beings believed that the Divine Power before whom they felt dread and awe was the source and the enforcer of the Moral Law.

But Lewis never provides a compelling argument for why the reality of the moral law of right and wrong proves the reality of a Divine Power behind that law.  After all, we could follow the lead of the ethical naturalists--from David Hume to Charles Darwin to Edward Westermarck--in explaining this universal moral law as rooted in a universal human nature shaped by natural evolution.  We could explain the common moral rules as arising from the natural needs and desires common to all human beings.  The natural desires for self-preservation and for respect for life, persons, and property shape the moral rules in all societies.

Even Lewis seems to agree with this when he identifies this Moral Law as "the Law of Human Nature."  One can see this in his book The Abolition of Man, where he speaks of the Moral Law as the Tao or Way that is universal to all human societies.  I have written about this in some previous posts.

Although natural moral law is often assumed to come from a supernatural lawgiver, Lewis insists that understanding the Tao as natural law does not require any belief in the supernatural. He writes:

"Though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reasoning as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become skeptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more 'realistic' basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with" (61).

It seems, then, that there is no necessity for grounding the Moral Law in "a Something which is directing the universe."

Did C. S. Lewis's Natural Desire for Joy Show the Supernatural Reality of God and Heaven? The Evolutionary Psychology of Religious Experience

The end of the movie--but not the stage play--"Freud's Last Session" suggests that Freud has been persuaded by Lewis's Argument from Desire for the reality of Heaven.  

On his train back to Oxford, Lewis looks at the book that Freud had slipped into his coat pocket.  It's Freud's copy of Lewis's book The Pilgrim's Regress (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 2014, originally published in 1933).  Lewis sees that Freud has written inside the book "from error to error, one discovers the entire truth."  Lewis smiles as his train enters a tunnel, and then the movie fades out.

The quotation is so enigmatic that most viewers will be confused as to what it means, although they can see that Lewis is pleased or amused by it.  As I noted in a previous post, the quotation is an altered version of a quotation from Francis Bacon: "Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion."

Anyone who has read The Pilgrim's Regress could see how this applies to the book.  It's the story of the pilgrim John whose journey to an enchanting island takes him through adventures with a series of people, most of whom are allegorical representations of various errors that he must avoid.  In the "Afterword to the Third Edition" of the book, Lewis explained it as a depiction of his own experience of intense Desire as he progressed "from 'popular realism' to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity" (231).  In later writings--particularly, in Surprised by Joy (1955)--Lewis called this Desire Joy, and he said that "in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else" (17).

THE ARGUMENT FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF JOY

In the "Afterword" and in Surprised by Joy, Lewis indicated that there is a peculiar mystery about the object of this Joyful Desire.  When people feel this Desire, they think they know what they are desiring.  A child looks wistfully at a distant hillside and thinks he would be happy "if only I were there."  Or he reads a fairy tale and thinks he would be happy if that fairy-tale land really existed.  A man in love thinks he would be happy if he possessed the perfect beloved.  Or a man longs to travel to foreign lands, and he thinks he would be fulfilled if he could see visit those places.  Or a man driven by ambition to gain great status and power thinks he would be happy if he could satisfy that ambition.  Or a man absorbed by his studies in philosophy or science thinks he would be fully satisfied if only he could achieve a full intellectual understanding of his subject.  

Lewis claims that by his own experience he has proven all of these impressions to be wrong.  Every one of these supposed objects for this Joyful Desire is inadequate because having any of these objects would not satisfy the Desire.

"It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given--nay, cannot even be imagined as given--in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.  This Desire was, in the soul, as the Siege Perilous in Arthur's castle--the chair in which only one could sit.  And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist" (PR, 237).

Lewis concludes that the One who can sit in that chair is God.  So our search for Joy can be satisfied by nothing in the natural world but only by our entering the supernatural Heaven where we will be united with God.  Freud was perhaps suggesting his agreement--"from error to error, one discovers the entire truth."

But is this really the truth?  Has Lewis made a cogent argument for this conclusion?  John Beversluis (C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion) has made a good case for saying No.  And I agree with Beversluis that Lewis's desire for Joy--for religious transcendence--is not evidence for the transcendent reality of God and Heaven.  

But I disagree with Beversluis's claim that this is not a natural desire at all.  There are good reasons for believing that the desire for religious transcendence is one of the 20 natural desires of our evolved human nature, although the natural reality of this desire neither proves nor disproves the supernatural reality of its transcendent object.

As Beversluis indicates, Lewis's Argument from Desire can be framed schematically as either deductive or inductive.    The deductive version goes like this (Beversluis, 41):

1.  Nature makes nothing in vain, that is, every natural desire has an object that can satisfy it.

2.  Joy is a natural desire, but not for any natural object because no object in the natural world can satisfy it.

3.  Therefore, Joy is a desire for an object beyond the natural world and that object must exist.

Lewis suggested this deductive form when he used the word "must" in his conclusion: "And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist."

The inductive version of the argument goes like this (Beversluis, 43):

1.  Many natural desires have objects that can satisfy them.

2.  Joy is a natural desire for a kind of satisfaction that no object in the natural world can satisfy.

3.  Therefore, Joy is a desire for an object beyond the natural world and that object probably exists.

Lewis suggested this inductive form when he used words like "a pretty good indication" and "most probable explanation."   In "The Weight of Glory," he wrote:

"Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy.  But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it?  'Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.'  But I think it may be urged that this misses the point.  A man's physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic.  But surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist.  In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.  A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called 'falling in love' occurred in a sexless world" (The Weight of Glory, New York: HarperCollins, 2001, pp. 32-33, italics added).

In Mere Christianity, he wrote:

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.  A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food.  A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water.  Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex.  If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world" (120, italics added). 

In his play (p. 16), but not in his screenplay for the movie, Mark St. Germain has Lewis repeat this passage but without the sentence on sexual desire. 

Beversluis correctly observes that Lewis's argument--in both its deductive and inductive forms--fails.  The deductive argument fails because it begs the question at issue: the major proposition assumes that "every natural desire has an object that can satisfy it," but that's what Lewis needs to prove.

The inductive argument rests on a false analogy: it's not at all clear that the desire for supernatural transcendence is a natural desire of the same kind as the natural human desires for food and sex or the duckling's natural desire to swim.  From the fact that the natural desires for food, sex, and swimming have natural objects that can satisfy them, it does not follow that a natural desire for a supernatural bliss probably shows that there really is a supernatural object that can satisfy it.

The natural desire for religious transcendence is different in kind from all other natural desires, because it is the only natural desire that aims at a supernatural end that cannot be achieved in the natural world.  Beversluis contends that this desire is so radically different from all other natural desires that it should not be considered a natural desire at all.  Here is where I disagree with him.

Although Lewis does not explain what he means by natural desires, his examples--human desires for food and sex and a duckling's desire to swim--suggest that he means innate desires that arise spontaneously in all normal members of a species as part of their evolved nature.  Natural desires are evolutionary adaptations that are necessary for the survival and reproductive success of a species.  But, Beversluis observes, Lewis's Joy does not seem to be biologically instinctive in this way, because it is not necessary for the survival or reproductive success of the human species.  Moreover, if it were an instinctive desire of evolved human nature, one would expect to find evidence that it is universal for all human cultures throughout human history; but Lewis has not provided such evidence (45, 52-53).

LEWIS ON THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Lewis does suggest, however, an evolutionary explanation of religious experience that could be judged in the light of the modern evolutionary psychology and cognitive science of religion.  Showing the influence of Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), Lewis sketches the evolutionary development of religion through four stages in the Introduction to The Problem of Pain (16-25).  The first stage is what Otto called the experience of the Numinous--the feeling of dread and awe in the experience of the uncanny.  Otto coined the word "numinous" from the Latin word numen for "divinity."  According to Lewis, this arose first among prehistoric human beings.  "Now nothing is more certain than that man, from a very early period, began to believe that the universe was haunted by spirits" (17).  This dreadful and awful feeling of ghostly invisible spirits was "the seed of religious experience" (God in the Dock, 189).

The second stage in religious evolution came with the human feeling that there is a moral law--the sense that we "ought" or "ought not" to engage in certain kinds of conduct.  Human beings agreed in prescribing this moral law although they often failed to obey it.

The third stage in religious development was when human beings identified the Numinous Power as the guardian of that moral law.  The Jews in the Hebrew Bible show this identification of the Numinous with the moral law:  God is righteous and loves righteousness.

Finally, in New Testament Christianity, a man is born who claims to be the son of, or the same as, that Numinous Power who is also the giver of the moral law.  The teaching of the New Testament--the incarnation of Jesus as both human and divine and the promise that his sacrificial death and resurrection will redeem sinful human beings so that they can be resurrected to eternal life in Heaven--is the completion of all previous religious development.  Because now, for the first time in history, human beings can satisfy their deepest natural desire for supernatural happiness by being resurrected after death to eternal life in the presence of God, and thus return to the true home from which they came.

Lewis suggests that this evolution of religious experience through four stages could be explained in two ways.  It could be a fully natural evolution of human religious experience through four stages of the biological and cultural evolution of the human mind.  Or it could be that at each of these four stages of natural evolution, there was some human experience of a supernatural Revelation from God.

As I have indicated in some previous posts, Lewis was a theistic evolutionist, who thought there was no conflict between the natural science of evolution and the supernatural Revelation of Christianity, because Christians should see that God could carry out His will through the natural process of evolution along with some supernatural interventions into natural history (such as the Incarnation of Christ).

So, when prehistoric human ancestors first began to experience the Numinous--feeling dread and awe in the belief that "the universe was haunted by spirits"--Lewis says there are only two possible explanations:

"There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe.  Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given" (Mere Christianity, 20-21).

Presumably, most readers of this passage will dismiss the first alternative--"a mere twist in the human mind"--as unsatisfactory, and thus they might think there is no good alternative to Revelation as an explanation.  But here Lewis displays one of his favorite rhetorical tricks--the false dichotomy.  Anyone who knows anything about the evolutionary psychology of religion will know that to explain the appearance of the first religious experience of a world "haunted by spirits" in human evolution, we are not forced to choose between "a mere twist in the human mind" that is inexplicable and a Revelation that erupts miraculously in human experience. 

THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

In saying that a mental capacity for religious experience would be "serving no biological function," Lewis adopted the position of Alfred Russel Wallace, who agreed with Charles Darwin in developing the theory of evolution by natural selection, but who denied that this could explain the higher mental and moral capacities of human beings.  Wallace argued that since the mental power for religious experience does not serve any biological need for survival and reproduction, this mental power could not have evolved by natural selection.  So natural selection shaped the "animal nature" of human beings but not their "spiritual nature," which must arise from "the unseen universe of Spirit."

But now the evolutionary psychology of religion--as developed by Justin Barrett, Jesse Bering, and others--can show how although the propensity to religious experience has not evolved directly to serve a biological function, it has evolved as a byproduct of innate mental mechanisms directly shaped by biological evolution for detecting agency--for identifying objects in the environment (particularly, animals and other human beings) that move themselves for the sake of goals as guided by mental states like beliefs and desires.  Once such agents have been detected, the human capacity for mind-reading generates predictions about the mental states of these agents and how these mental states might direct their actions.  As naturally social animals whose survival and reproductive fitness has depended on a subtle negotiation of the complex social interactions among human agents, human beings have been endowed by evolution with intuitive mental tools necessary for social life.

For that reason, our agency detection device becomes hypersensitive: we detect agency based on limited evidence.  Particularly, in urgent situations of distress, where we cannot account for what is happening based on natural causes, we are quick to infer supernatural agents at work.  We then want to negotiate with these supernatural agents--spirits, ghosts, or gods--to protect ourselves from harm.  All human societies throughout history show this natural propensity to believe in supernatural agents to be a human universal.  The original expression of that religious experience was in our hunter-gatherer ancestors who had shamans as mediators with supernatural agents, and who lived in a world "haunted by spirits"--feeling the awe and dread of the Numinous, which Lewis saw as "the seed of the religious experience."

The subsequent development of religion beyond this original experience of awful spirits came through cultural evolution, in which some religious traditions had a selective advantage in that some were better than others in satisfying the innate mental tools of the evolved human mind for detecting supernatural agency.  Justin Barrett has argued that the Abrahamic monotheistic religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--are more naturally attractive to the human mind, because the human mind is naturally inclined to believe in the divine traits of the Abrahamic God--God as moral, God as superknowing, God as immortal, God as superpowerful, and God as Creator.  This would confirm Lewis's claim that Judaism and Christianity became the most humanly satisfying forms of religious development.

But this Darwinian science of the biological and cultural evolution of religion as culminating in Abrahamic monotheism does not either prove or disprove the real supernatural existence of the Abrahamic God.  A Christian evolutionist like Justin Barrett can see this as showing that the natural evolution of religious belief is compatible with believing in the truth of Revelation, because we can believe that God used the evolutionary process to create a human mind that would have a desire for religious transcendence that would be fulfilled by faith in the revealed truth of God and Heaven.  But an atheistic evolutionist like Jesse Bering can see this natural evolution of religious belief as showing the natural human propensity for believing religious illusions.

Thus, Lewis's natural desire for Joy--for the Paradise of eternal life with God in Heaven--does not by itself prove the reality of that supernatural object of his desire.

We are left, then, with the unresolvable debate between Reason and Revelation, in which neither side can refute the other.  But as Lewis saw in his many years of debating atheists and skeptics in the Oxford Socratic Club, a modern liberal social order can secure the freedom of thought that makes it possible to have such a public debate that would not be possible in a more theocratic or illiberal social order.

And even if the Socratic and Darwinian zetetic philosophers lack the absolute knowledge or wisdom that would be necessary to refute Revelation, they can find such joy in the philosophic life of loving wisdom even without ever fully achieving it that they can attain the natural happiness possible in this life, so that they need feel no longing for a supernatural happiness in some heavenly afterlife.  Those living the philosophic life might even find joy in understanding--in at least some limited way--that everything in the Universe, and even the Universe itself, must eventually die.

I have written about the evolution of Heaven and Hell and given some reasons for agreeing with Wallace Stevens that "death is the mother of beauty."

Lewis was mistaken in thinking his desire for Joy was a desire for Heaven.  A deathless life in a heavenly paradise would not satisfy us, because it would not be a human life at all.

Can Socratic Argument Prove the Existence of God? C. S. Lewis's Answer

Before I examine Lewis's argument from desire for the existence of God, I should explain what Lewis thought generally about rational arguments for the existence of God.

As the founding President, and most active member, of the Oxford Socratic Club from 1942 to 1954, Lewis was eager for Socratic debate between Christians and unbelievers because he was sure that Christianity could be defended against its opponents by rational argument and evidence (Hooper 1979).  In his statement on "The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club," he explained: "Socrates had exhorted men to 'follow the argument wherever it led them': the Club came into existence to apply this principle to one particular subject-matter--the pros and cons of the Christian Religion" (Lewis 1970: 131).  

Lewis disagreed, therefore, with those Christians who believed that their religious life was based on faith alone without any appeal to reason.  If Christianity is not reasonable, Lewis insisted, then it cannot be credible at all.

In contrast to my claim that there can be no final resolution to the Reason/Revelation debate, Lewis argued that even if Reason can neither prove nor refute the truth of Revelation, Reason is on the side of Revelation at least to some degree.  But then, we must wonder what it means for Reason to favor Revelation to some degree?

Lewis's clearest explanation was in his reply to a paper by H. H. Price on "Is Theism Important?" read to the Oxford Socratic Club.  Lewis suggested that we need to distinguish two kinds of Faith (Lewis 1970: 186-91).  Faith-A is "a settled intellectual assent" to the existence of God as First Cause.  Faith-B is "a trust, or confidence, in the God whose existence is thus assented to," which is the faith that Christians have in the God of the Bible--the Creator who created human beings in his Image, and who sent His Son to redeem them from their sinful state, so that they could have eternal life in Heaven.  Faith-A is the Theism that arises from philosophical arguments (such as the Argument from Design) for the existence of a philosophical God, which is not strictly a religious state.  Faith-B is a religious faith that this God is actually the Christian God of the Bible, and the New Testament identifies this faith as a "gift" from God through the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:1-11; Ephesians 2:8).

This distinction between the two kinds of faith runs throughout Lewis's apologetic writings.  So, for example, in Mere Christianity, Lewis argues for the existence of "a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears to me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong."  But then he warns his reader: "I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology" (34).  Similarly, in Miracles, he says: "I do not maintain that God's creation of Nature can be proved as rigorously as God's existence" (Lewis 1966: 33; 1974: 50).

In Surprised by Joy, his spiritual autobiography, Lewis distinguished between his conversion to Theism in 1929 and his conversion to Christianity in 1931: "It must be understood that the conversion recorded in the last chapter was only to Theism, pure and simple, not to Christianity.  I knew nothing yet about the Incarnation.  The God to whom I surrendered was sheerly nonhuman" (228-30).

As I said in some previous posts, at least one of the philosophical atheists who were active in the Oxford Socratic Club--Antony Flew--seemed to have been converted to Theism at the end of his life.  And Charles Darwin was open to scientific and philosophical arguments for God as First Cause.  But neither Flew nor Darwin were ever converted to Faith-B--to believing in the God of the Bible.

But as I will indicate in my next post, I am not persuaded that Lewis's Argument from Desire--from the experience of Joy--is a good argument supported by evidence for the existence of God, and for this as a first step to faith in the Christian God.

REFERENCES

Hooper, Walter. 1979. "Oxford's Bonny Fighter." In James T. Como, ed., C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, and Other Reminiscences. New York: Macmillan.

Lewis, C. S. 1952. Mere Christianity. New York: Macmillan.

________.  1955. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

________.  1966. Miracles: A Preliminary Study. New York: Macmillan.

________.  1970. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Ed. Walter Hooper.  Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing.

________,  1974. Miracles: A Preliminary Study. Revised edition. New York: HarperCollins.

The Argument from Desire: C. S. Lewis in "Freud's Last Session"

RATIONAL CHRISTIANITY?

"I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it."  

That was C. S. Lewis's claim in Mere Christianity (123) that he had rational arguments for showing how the weight of the evidence supported Christianity.  In the Reason/Revelation debate, Lewis thought that Reason could prove, or at least render probable, the truth of Christian Revelation.  

If Lewis was right about this, that would deny my contention that while there is an evolved natural desire for religious transcendence, or for what Lewis calls "Joy," the existence of this desire provides no evidence for the real existence of the supernatural object--God--that would satisfy this desire.

That all of Lewis's rational arguments for Christianity fail has been well-argued by John Beversluis in C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (2007), which is the only book-length critical study of Lewis's apologetic writings.  My thinking about Lewis has been influenced by Beversluis.

Most of Lewis's arguments for Christianity and against atheism show up in Mark St. Germain's "Freud's Last Session"--both the play and the movie.  Here and in subsequent posts, I will start with the texts of the play (first published in 2010) and the screenplay for the movie released a few weeks ago.  My references to the screenplay will be to the scene numbers.  As I have indicated, St. Germain draws most of his material from Armand Nicholi's book The Question of God (2002).

In a later post, I will consider William Nicholson's stage play and movie screenplay "Shadowlands," which tells the story of Lewis's marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham and her tragic death from cancer, after only a few years of marriage, which threw Lewis into a dark crisis of faith.  In the movie "Shadowlands," Anthony Hopkins played Lewis; in the movie "Freud's Last Session," Hopkins plays Freud in his debate with Lewis.  

These plays and movies are impressive examples of how popular culture in a modern liberal social order can probe into the deepest questions raised by the Reason/Revelation debate.  I do not know of any historical evidence that anything like this has been possible in any illiberal societies.  On the contrary, in the illiberal closed societies of the past, such a public debate about religious orthodoxy and atheism would have been considered dangerously subversive of the social order.  

Doesn't this refute those many critics of liberalism (like Patrick Deneen) who whine about the moral, intellectual, and spiritual degradation coming from liberal culture?  Doesn't this support those proponents of liberalism (like Deirdre McCloskey) who celebrate the human excellence that comes from the bourgeois virtues of a liberal culture?

I should note, however, that the movie "Freud's Last Session" has not been very popular.  When I saw it, there were no more than a dozen people in the theater.  The original stage play was more successful.  In 2012, when I saw the play twice at the Mercury Theater in Chicago, and I helped to lead a discussion of the play with the audience after they had just seen it, I saw large audiences that wanted to talk about the play.  

DOES THE DESIRE FOR JOY POINT TO GOD?

In both plays and both movies, Lewis's primary argument is that the desire for Joy points to God as the supernatural object that will satisfy that desire.

Lewis's argument elicits this conversation in St. Germain's play:

LEWIS.  None of us are born with desires unless satisfaction for them exists.

FREUD.  Not true.

LEWIS.  It is.

FREUD.  Example?

LEWIS.  A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food.  A duckling wants to swim, water exists to do it.  So if I find within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most likely explanation is that I was made for another world.

FREUD.  You have just abandoned facts for fairy tales.  Our deepest cravings are never satisfied or even identified.  In German we call it 'Seinsucht,' a longing.  For years I have felt this.  A strong desire to walk in the woods with my father, as I did when I was young.  He would hold my hand, but I would always pull away and run from him as fast as I could, deep into the trees.

LEWIS.  What were you running to?

FREUD.  Perhaps I ran to be alone or to escape from my father.  I only know the desire was overwhelming.

LEWIS.  I call that desire "joy."

FREUD.  "Joy."

LEWIS.  I don't know a better word for it.  I felt it for the first time through a sort of "woods" as well.

FREUD.  Yes?

LEWIS.  I wasn't yet six.  My brother Warren brought a biscuit box into the nursery that he decorated with moss and twigs, tiny stones and flowers.  A toy forest.  I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.  I still do.  The moment I saw it, it created a yearning I never felt before.

FREUD.  To live in a tiny Eden with a tiny God.

LEWIS.  God never entered my mind.

FREUD.  And this "joy" you equate with an inherent desire for a Creator.

LEWIS.  Yes.

FREUD.  You were led to God by a biscuit tin.

A slightly altered version of this conversation appears in the movie (31-33).  What they say here is taken directly from Nicholi's book, and what Lewis says is taken directly from Lewis's writing--particularly Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy.  

Keep in mind that the book Mere Christianity originated as a series of Lewis's radio broadcast talks on the BBC in 1942.  In the midst of the terrifying turmoil of World War Two in Great Britain, Lewis was speaking to a general audience of ordinary English people in a calmly conversational tone about "the case for Christianity."  Lewis was asked to give these talks by a BBC producer who thought the radio audience would want to hear them as they worried about whether religion could help them make sense of the war.  It is fitting, therefore, that the conversation between Freud and Lewis in "Freud's Last Session" is set on September 3, 1939, the day that Great Britain's war with Nazi Germany began.

A crucial passage in Mere Christianity is in his chapter on "Hope," which is about the hope for Heaven (118-21).  Lewis writes:

". . . when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognize it.  Most people, if they had really learned to look into their hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world.  There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.  The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy.  I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers.  I am speaking of the best possible ones.  There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.  I think everyone knows what I mean.  The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.  Now there are two wrong ways of dealing with this fact, and one right one."

One wrong way is the "fool's way"--he "goes on all his life thinking that if only he tried another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday, or whatever it is, then, this time, he really would catch the mysterious something we are after."  The other wrong way is the Disillusioned "Sensible Man" who decides that the whole thing is adolescent moonshine, and that grown-up people learn to settle for the modest pleasures of life rather than strive for an unattainable infinite happiness.

The right way is the Christian Way.  The Christian says:

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.  A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food.  A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water.  Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex.  If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.  If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.  Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.  If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.  I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same."

Those who scorn the Christian Way will ridicule the idea of Heaven by saying that they do not want "to spend eternity playing harps."  But, of course, this is a silly objection because it fails to see that the metaphorical imagery of Heaven will always be "a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible."  And "musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity."

In Surprised by Joy--Lewis's spiritual autobiography, the story of his conversion to Christianity--he described his search for Joy--"an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other desire"--and said that "in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else" (6-8, 17-18, 73, 78, 169-70, 220-222).

Reading these passages from Lewis's writings makes the story of "Freud's Last Session" more comprehensible than it would otherwise be.  For example, many viewers of the movie will be confused by the prolonged depictions of Lewis's sexual affair with Janie Moore and the lesbian liaison of Freud's daughter Anna and her lover Dorothy Burlingham, to which Freud objects because of his perverse sexual attachment to his daughter.  

What does all of this frisson of sexual feeling have to do with Lewis and Freud's debate over God?  The answer is that this is all about Lewis's argument from Joy, and for Lewis sex is often a poor substitute for Joy.  At the end of the screenplay for the movie, as Lewis is leaving Freud's house, he sees Anna and Dorothy meeting: "Anna turns and smiles at seeing her.  Lewis watches their joy in seeing each other, and the two embrace.  Lewis realizes their intimacy and looks disappointed, then back at the house, better understanding Freud's struggle" (131).

Similarly, understanding Lewis's account of music as stirring the joyful emotions of "ecstasy and infinity" explains the place of music in the play and the movie.  Freud repeatedly turns on his radio to hear news announcements and political statements about the threat of war, but as soon as the broadcast switches from news to music, Freud turns off the radio.  Lewis asks Freud why he never wants to hear music (122).  

FREUD.  I object to being manipulated.  To me, it's all church music.

LEWIS.  My objection to church music is that it trivializes emotions I already feel.  I think you're afraid to feel them at all.

For Freud to reject all music as "church music" suggests that music often elicits deep emotions of transcendence that he does not want to feel.

At the end of the movie, Anna and Dorothy sit together near Freud in his living room.  Earlier in the movie, we have learned that Freud had always forbidden Anna to bring Dorothy to his house.  But now Freud sits quietly at his radio listening to music.

"MUSIC swells -- Anna looks to her father, surprised to see him listening to music.  He turns, meets her eyes."

"Freud then stares at the radio, listening intently, trying to decipher what he should feel" (137).

The play ends here.  The movie adds two scenes with Lewis travelling by train back to Oxford.  In the first scene, Lewis falls asleep on the train, and he dreams that he is walking in a forest: "The forest is golden now, shimmering between reality and fantasy.  The brightness of a single beam of light stops him.  He shields his eyes, trying to see--His expression changes, astonishment, awe, at what he--."

Then, the screaming of the train's breaks jolts him awake.  As he reaches down for his bag, he feels the book in his pocket that Freud had given him.  He looks at the book and sees that it is his own book Pilgrim's Regress.  So while Freud earlier in the day had said he had not read this book, which includes a satirical character named Sigismund Enlightenment, Lewis now sees that Freud had indeed read the book.  Inside the book, Freud had written: "From error to error, one discovers the entire truth."  Lewis smiles as he reads this, and the train enters a tunnel.

This quotation is often attributed to Francis Bacon, although the correct quotation is "Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion," which appears in Bacon's New Organon (II.20), Bacon's book on scientific method.  Apparently, it means that the scientific pursuit of truth requires formulating clear interpretations or hypotheses about nature that can be tested and usually falsified, so that from error, the truth might eventually emerge.  Lewis's Pilgrim's Regress is about Lewis's search for meaning and spiritual truth--through the story of the pilgrim John--in which he must meet many people with mistaken views of the world.  In writing this quotation as a response to Lewis's book, Freud suggests that Lewis really is pursuing the truth in the right way.

In all of this, we can see how "Freud's Last Session"--both the play and the movie--is slanted in favor of Lewis's side of the debate with Freud.  The title "Freud's Last Session" is ambiguous.  It could mean that Freud is psychoanalyzing Lewis to free him from his religious illusions.  But by the end of the story, we see that Freud is the patient, and Lewis is the doctor.  At one point in the movie, we see Freud laying on his own couch as he speaks with Lewis.

As I indicated in my previous post, "Freud's Last Session" does not present us with a fair debate because it shows us that Lewis is so superior to Freud--morally and intellectually--that this gives Lewis an unfair advantage over Freud in the debate.

Lewis did not seek out this kind of debate, in which he was sure to defeat a weaker opponent.  On the contrary, for twelve years, he was the President of the Oxford Socratic Club, which brought together the smartest Christians, atheists, and agnostics for debates about Christianity and atheism.  Participants included some of the best philosophers and scientists of the day--such as Elizabeth Anscombe, A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, Antony Flew, C. E. M. Joad, Gilbert Ryle, and C. H. Waddington.  Lewis was President of this club from its founding in 1942 until he left for Cambridge in 1954.  At its founding, he wrote a statement about how the club would be Socratic in the sense that Christians would agree to debate their opponents while accepting the principle of Socrates that "we must go wherever the wind of the argument carries us" (Plato, Republic 394d; Lewis, "The Founding of the Socratic Club," 131).

The Oxford Socratic Club met every Monday evening during term from 8:15 pm to 10:30 pm.  On one Monday, a Christian would deliver a paper on a certain topic, and then another person would deliver a paper criticizing the first paper.  On the following Monday, the first speaker would be a non-Christian, followed by a Christian.  The meetings were open to all Oxford students and faculty as well as the general public.  Usually, it was standing-room-only.  And the discussions would continue late into the night.  Lewis almost never missed a meeting.

This is the kind of open public debate over Reason and Revelation that began in England in the Metaphysical Society that met from 1869 to 1880, which was made possible by the liberal culture that had emerged in England at that time.

So if we were to rewrite "Freud's Last Session" to make it more like the debates in the Oxford Socratic Club, we would need to introduce a third debater who would be Lewis's intellectual equal and thus able to really challenge him.  As I suggested in my previous post, we should look for someone like David Hume or a Humean philosopher who could turn the debate into something like Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

A Humean philosopher (like John Beversluis) could seriously challenge, perhaps even refute, Lewis's argument from desire by showing that Lewis's search for Joy does not necessarily point to the reality of God.  That will be the question for my next post.

REFERENCES

Beversluis, John.  2007.  C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion.  Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Lewis, C. S. 1955.  Surprised by Joy.  New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

Lewis, C. S. 1960.  Mere Christianity.  New York: Macmillan.

Lewis, C. S.  1970.  "The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club."  In God in the Dock, 130-34.  Edited by Walter Hooper.  Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans Publishing.

Nicholi, Armand.  2002.  The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.  New York: Free Press.

Are Religious Believers Happier Than Unbelievers? Sigmund Freud Debates C. S. Lewis

 

                                                      The Trailer for "Freud's Last Session"

In 2012, I wrote some posts on C. S. Lewis as depicted in Mark St. Germain's play "Freud's Last Session" (2010).  This play is based on Armand Nicholi's book The Question of God (2002), which presents the debate between Sigmund Freud and Lewis over "God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life."  This book was based on a course on the Freud-Lewis debate that Nicholi had taught for 35 years at Harvard University.  In 2004, PBS broadcast a four-hour series of programs based on Nicholi's book.  St. Germain's play is a fictional portrayal of a conversation between Freud and Lewis at Freud's home in London on September 3, 1939, the day Great Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, and twenty days before Freud ended his life by suicide at age 83.

Now, a film version of this play has been released.  St. Germain has written the screenplay with the help of Matthew Brown, the Director of the movie.  In the movie, Anthony Hopkins plays Freud, and Matthew Goode plays Lewis.  (Some years ago, Hopkins played the role of Lewis, while Debra Winger played Joy Gresham, in "Shadowlands," a movie about the poignant story of Lewis's marriage to Gresham and his grief over her death from cancer after only a few years of a joyful marriage.)

Although I have not yet had a chance to see the new movie, I have read the screenplay.  I have been comparing the movie screenplay with St. Germain's stage play and with Nicholi's book.

One reason for my interest in this debate between Freud and Lewis is that it helps me to reexamine my claim that the natural desire for religious understanding is one of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature.  Is that true?  And if it is, does that natural desire for God give us any reason to believe that God really exists, as Lewis asserted?  Or is that natural longing for God only delusional wish-fulfillment, as Freud asserted?  Does an evolutionary science of religion support Lewis or Freud? 

Do the book, the play, and the movie come down on one side or the other of this debate?  In deciding this debate, are the biographies of the debaters more decisive than their arguments, because the biographies show which way of life is happier and more fulfilling?

Before considering the other questions, I will take up those last two question in this post.

In his book, as in his course at Harvard, Nicholi claimed that to properly assess the debate between Freud and Lewis, it was not enough to study their arguments as presented in their writings, because we needed to study their biographies.  "Their arguments can never prove or disprove the existence of God.  Their lives, however, offer sharp commentary on the truth, believability, and utility of their views" (5).  We can then "see if their biographies--how they actually lived their lives--strengthen or weaken their arguments and tell us more than their words convey" (9).

This combination of arguments and biographies in Nicholi's book is represented dramatically in St. Germain's stage play and screenplay as a philosophical dialogue--rather like a Platonic dialogue in which we can judge both the arguments and the characters of the interlocutors.

When Nicholi's book was first published in 2002, Ken Gewertz wrote an article on the book for The Harvard Gazette.  He observed: "As he does in his seminar, Nicholi avoids taking sides in the debate, but rather allows Freud and Lewis to speak for themselves.  He also examines their lives to detrmine the impact of their beliefs.  Ultimately, the book asks the question, which man was happier, more satisfied?  Is it better to be a believer or an unbeliever?"

When Gewertz directly posed this question to Nicoli, he maintained a "spinxlike reticence"--saying that he did not take sides in the debate.  "What I do is try to present an objective, dispassionate, critical assessment of both worldviews."

"Nicholi's book, however, tells another story," Gewertz insisted.  Because "in response to the question of happiness, the evidence is clear: Lewis wins, hands down."  

As I indicated in my previous posts on Nicholi's book, I think Gewertz was right:  even though Nicholi professed to be even-handed in his presentation of the debate between Freud and Lewis, Nicholi was clearly biased in favor of Lewis, because he showed us how Lewis's conversion to Christianity led him to a life that was happier and healthier than Freud's life, which confirmed that Lewis had the better argument because he had the better life.  Although it is not quite as clear as it is in the book, both the play and the movie tend to favor Lewis over Freud.

The problem with this, however, is that in selecting Freud as Lewis's opponent, Nicholi gave Lewis an unfair advantage.   Nicholi could have selected a far more formidable opponent--someone like David Hume, for example--who would have been intellectually and morally superior to Freud, and who would have shown that a skeptic or atheist can live a happy and fulfilled life.

It was too easy for Nicholi to show Freud's intellectual and moral failures and thus make Lewis look good by comparison.  For example, Freud explained religious belief as childish wish-fulfillment--as an expression of the child's helplessness and longing for a father-figure, so that God becomes an exalted father.  And since the child's attitude to the father shows ambivalence (both love and fear), God must be both feared and loved.

But then, as Nicholi says, Lewis "astutely notes" that Freud's argument about our ambivalence in our wishes about our father and our God can work both ways:  our wish that God not exist should be as strong as the wish for his existence (42-47).  Lewis reports that before his conversion at age 33, he was a staunch atheist who wished that God not exist, because this satisfied Lewis's wish that he be left alone, free from any "transcendental Interferer."  Freud's atheism could be explained the same way--as satisfying his wish that God not exist and as an expression of his ambivalent feelings about his father.  Indeed, Freud's life-long vehemence in attacking religious belief showed an obsessive wish to be free from God's authority.  Both the play and the film versions of "Freud's Last Session" depict Freud's angry struggle against God, which Freud himself described as a struggle against a "longing" for God that haunted his whole life.

Nicholi also noticed this in Freud's letters, which are full of phrases such as "if God so wills," "the good Lord," and "until after the Resurrection."  Of course, we could dismiss this as a casual use of figures of speech.  But then, Freud would say that even a slip of the tongue should be revealing (50-51).  This comes up in both the play and the movie.

One can see here and throughout Nicholi's book the signs of Nicholi's background as a physician and psychiatrist.  He was a clinical psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital.  His clinical work and research concentrated on studying the emotional development of children and young adults.  As part of that work, he studied the psychology of religious conversion among young people, including students at Harvard.  He first discovered Lewis when he was a medical intern, and he read Lewis's The Problem of Pain with the hope that this would help him deal with the suffering he was seeing in his patients.  That would explain his interest in teaching a course on Freud and Lewis for Harvard students.

In his book, Nicholi repeatedly cited the psychiatric and medical research--conducted by himself and others--on the psychological effects of religious conversion (46-47, 52-53, 80, 92-94, 114-15, 141-43, 155-59, 251-52).  He reported that this research denied Freud's claim that religious believers are delusional and emotionally ill and confirmed Lewis's claim that religious believers are generally happy and healthy human beings.

In 1974, Nicholi published an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry that reported his study of 17 Harvard undergraduates who had experienced a religious conversion.  He interviewed these students and also people who had known them before and after their conversion.  He found that conversion had enhanced rather than impaired their "functioning."  Each of them showed "a marked improvement in ego functioning, a radical change in life style with an abrupt halt in the use of drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes; improved impulse control, with adoption of a strict sexual code demanding chastity or marriage with fidelity; improved academic performance; enhanced self-image and greater access to inner feelings; an increased capacity for establishing close, satisfying relationships; improved communication with parents, though most parents at first expressed some degree of alarm over the student's rather sudden, intense religious interest; a positive change in affect, with lessening of 'existential despair'; and a decrease in preoccupation with the passage of time and apprehension over death" (80).

Nicholi found that Lewis showed the same beneficial consequences from his conversion:  "both Lewis and each of the students, after their conversion, found their new faith enhanced their functioning.  They reported positive changes in their relationships, their image of themselves, their temperament, and their productivity.  People who knew Lewis and those who knew the students before and after their transition confirmed these changes" (94).  This evidence denies Freud's claim that religious believers suffer from "obsessional neurosis" or "hallucinatory psychosis."  "If Freud analyzed Lewis," Nicholi argued, "the evidence suggests that he would not have dismissed him as dysfunctional. . . . Freud would have observed that the transition Lewis experienced matured him emotionally and did not impair, but enhanced, his functioning."

In contrast to Lewis, Nicholi observed, Freud was an arrogant and mean-spirited man who argued violently with most of his friends and professional colleagues.  He thought most human beings were despicable.  In one letter, he wrote: "I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole.  In may experience, most of them are trash" (181).

Freud often fell into deep bouts of depression and despair.  He found little joy in life.  And he feared death.  To escape the pain of his cancer at the end of his life, he committed suicide.

Remarkably, in contrast to his reputation for teaching sexual freedom, Freud's sex life was very limited.  He did not marry until he was 30, and apparently he had no sexual experience before marriage.  With his wife Martha, he had six children in eight years.  But he had long periods during which, as he reported in a letter to a friend, "we are now living in abstinence."  At the age of 39, after the birth of his last child, Anna, Freud stopped all sexual relations with his wife permanently.  He also warned people about the dangers of masturbation because it caused mental illness.

Freud was very close to his daughter Anna, who followed the lead of her father in becoming a psychoanalyst.  When Freud's friend Ernest Jones suggested that he was interested in a personal relationship with Anna, Freud told him to stay away, and that Anna had agreed not to consider marriage without Freud's approval.  Anna never did marry.

Nicholi had visited Anna's clinic in London.  In talking with her secretary Gina Bon, he once asked her why Anna had never married.  She answered sternly, "Don't ever ask that question."

In St. Germain's play and movie, Lewis notices Freud's seemingly incestuous feeling for Anna.  And when Lewis asks Freud about this, Freud refuses to talk about it.  Lewis also notices Anna's apparently lesbian partnership with Dorothy Burlingham.

In the movie, Lewis saw this photograph of Freud and Anna in Freud's office, and he noticed that this could be easily mistaken for a young woman with her suitor.

In the play and the movie, after Lewis has questioned Freud about his relationship with Anna, Freud responds by questioning Lewis about why he has never married and about his relationship with the older woman living with him.  This comes up briefly in the play, and it becomes a big part of the movie.

When Lewis went to France as a young soldier in World War One, he became friends with Edward "Paddy" Moore; and the two of them made a promise to one another that if one of them was killed, the other would take care of his parent.  Paddy was killed.  And Lewis kept his promise: he moved in with Paddy's mother--Janie Moore--and her daughter Maureen.  Lewis was 20 years old, and Janie was 46.  Lewis's mother had died when he was 9, and he spoke of Mrs. Moore as his surrogate mother.  But Lewis and Mrs. Moore also became lovers.

Nicholi dismisses this story in one sentence: "Some biographers have speculated that Lewis and Mrs. Moore wee lovers, but the evidence weighs against it" (34).  But now the evidence strongly favors this story.  Walter Hooper worked briefly as a secretary for Lewis, and after Lewis's death in 1963, Hooper devoted his life to writing about Lewis and editing his papers and letters.  In an interview that was published after Hooper's death in 2020, he said that Owen Barfield, one of Lewis's closest friends, had reported that Lewis had told Barfield that he had in fact been Janie's lover, but that after Lewis's conversion, he had broken off their sexual affair.

Lewis then remained chaste until he became friends with Joy Davidman Gresham in 1952 and then married her in 1956.  She became ill with cancer shortly after their marriage.  She recovered for a few years, but then died in 1960.  Joy and Lewis enjoyed three years and four months of a deeply loving marriage.  In letters, Joy and Lewis spoke openly about their sexual happiness.  Lewis said that they "feasted on love; every mode of it," so that "no cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied" (158).

Nicholi concludes that Lewis enjoyed a more active and satisfying sexual life than did Freud, because after Lewis's conversion, he lived by the Christian standard of sexual love expressed only in a faithful marriage, so that he and his wife could love one another as persons rather than sexual objects.

Of course, Lewis's marriage cannot come up in St. Germain's play and movie, where the story does not extend beyond 1939.

All of this does, I think, support Nicholi's conclusion that Lewis's life as a Christian was morally and intellectually superior to Freud's life as an atheist.  But, again, as I said at the beginning, this fails to consider the possibility that there are better examples than Freud of how atheists or skeptics might live good lives.  

I have written about David Hume as one famous example of a philosophical skeptic who seemed to live a happy and flourishing life.  When his friend Adam Smith described Hume as "both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit," this got Smith into trouble with the many Christians who wanted to hear that Hume's fatal illness during the last year of his life had shaken him with the fear of death and perhaps forced him to plead with God for forgiveness as he faced the prospect of eternal damnation. 

Now, I understand that St. Germain could not have added Hume to his play to meet with Freud and Lewis, because the fictional meeting occurs on September 3, 1939, and Hume had died in 1776!  But he could have added a contemporary of Freud and Lewis--Edward Westermarck--the Finnish philosopher and sociologist who was a Humean skeptic and ethical subjectivist.  So, Westermarck could have defended the Humean position as an alternative to both Freud and Lewis.  

Coincidentally, Westermarck died in Finland on September 3, 1939!  But St. Germain could have imagined Westermarck being in London on that day just before his death.