Beyond "monism" and "dualism"; beyond "spiritual" and "fleshly"
In which I disagree ever so reluctantly with C. S. Lewis regarding one particular
In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis famously wrote that “spiritual sins” are worse than “sins of the flesh.” Without in any way wishing to debate with the revered shade of Lewis (and I do revere him), I have never shared that view. I was seventeen when I first read Mere Christianity, and even at that young age, I thought his balancing of sins “spiritual” and “fleshly,” with the former tipping the scales, a bit artificial and unconvincing, as plausible as Lewis’s argument made it seem. (He certainly wasn’t the only one to make the case, incidentally.) I couldn’t accept the argument on two grounds. First, I had to ask myself, is it practically possible to separate the spiritual and the fleshly so cleanly? In the matter of actual sin (as distinguished from temptation), the two aspects – spiritual and physical – seemed to me to be inextricable. And second, at seventeen I was also voraciously reading my Bible with all the fervency of a youthful convert in the Charismatic Renewal of the 1970s (a stage I passed through quite rapidly, in retrospect, to enter into the incense clouds and “mystical gloom” of Anglo-Catholicism). In my Bible reading, I could find no such gradation of sins. Indeed, what I read there suggested rather decisively — decisive, at least, for me — that Lewis had got it wrong in this instance. Although many of my views have altered considerably since those salad days, my reasoning about this topic has never substantially changed. Having reluctantly declared myself in a very early Substack post on consciousness and materiality to be a “dual-aspect monist” – a designation that, in effect, refuses to plunk down either on the side of an insipid physicalism or an idealist view that “consciousness is really all there is” (in other words, my perspective can be called an example of the Higher Waffling) – I can only reaffirm my first objection to Lewis’s position; and, where my second objection is concerned, even though my understanding of the Bible has become much more sophisticated over the intervening half-century, I still can’t find anything in the Scriptural canon — when analyzed closely — supportive of the view that “spiritual sins” are worse than “fleshly” ones.
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