Work, Vocation, and the Good Life in Narnia
Everyone knows what work means. Like the gnomes of Underland, we’ve all had days when we’ve felt like saying, “I’m blessed if I know why I’m carrying this load, and I’m not going to carry it any further” (SC, Chapter 14, p. 642).
Vocation is a less common term. “Vocation”—if you’re interested in this kind of thing—comes from the Latin word vocare, which means to call, the same root from which we get vocal, voice, and even vociferous. When people refer to their vocation, they mean the task or occupation they have been called to—as opposed to just doing what their father or mother did, picking it out of a hat, or using a dart and a dartboard, for example. Sometimes people may talk about having a divine calling, but people can also talk about vocation without referring to the supernatural. They might talk about being called by some thing rather than some one.
Finally, the “good life” is a term that philosophers have been talking about for, well, for as long as there have been philosophers. Like a response in Jeopardy, this term typically appears in the form of a question: What is the good life? By this philosophers don’t mean, “How many plasma TVs and vacation homes do you own?” but rather, “What is the best and most fulfilling way to live?”
First Things First
Before we start talking about the philosophy of work, vocation, and the good life in The Chronicles of Narnia, we should ask about our presuppositions. What are the general things we are supposing or accepting as true before we even begin?
Here’s one presupposition: When we—more importantly, when the philosophical giants—ask the question, “What is the good life?” of course we realize that people in different places, times, and situations will answer it in somewhat different ways. However, just by asking, “What is the good life?” we are assuming there is an answer which in some ways will be true for everybody.
Here’s a second presupposition: Looking for a general answer to questions about work, vocation, and the good life—something that will hold true for everyone—presupposes that there is something common to all of us, some universal nature we all share. If this were not true, if each of us was essentially a separate species, we would each have our own separate answer. It would be like asking, “What’s the good life for a cat? For an elephant? How about for a goldfish?”
Here’s a final presupposition. In creating the fantasy world of Narnia, Lewis certainly intended to transcend the bounds of known reality—life for most of us does not include wardrobes that open onto a world filled with fauns, centaurs, and unicorns. But at the same time, not despite his use of fantasy but specifically through his use of fantasy, Lewis set out to communicate important truths about the world of human beings.
As Thomas Arp and Greg Johnson have pointed out, “Some of the world’s greatest works of literature have been partly or wholly fantasy: The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, The Tempest, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, and Alice in Wonderland all offer profound and significant insights into the human condition.”1 Lewis himself referred to “beings other than human” found in fairy tales that can serve as “admirable hieroglyphic[s]” of some aspect of human life and behavior.2
Epicurus and the Tom Sawyer Philosophy of Work
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet we are told that, often through indirection, direction can be found, meaning that we can frequently learn a great deal by coming at something in a roundabout way. With this in mind, let’s begin looking at the philosophy of work, vocation, and the good life in The Chronicles of Narnia by first briefly noting what Lewis is not saying.
Epicurus, a Greek philosopher who lived from 342 to 270 B.C., taught that the goal of life is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, a philosophy that is called hedonism. You may have heard of the modern-day resort named Hedonism that claims to be “a lush garden of pure pleasure,” and in fact the Greek word hedones means pleasures. As Epicurus explained to a young disciple, “We recognize pleasure as the first and natural good; starting from pleasure we accept or reject; and we return to this as we judge every good thing, trusting this feeling of pleasure as our guide.”3
Like Kleenex, Epicurus has the distinction of having had his name made into a general noun, although one not as well-known. If you look up epicure in the dictionary, you’ll find that it refers to a person who takes great pleasure in eating, drinking, or other bodily pleasures.
There is more complexity to Epicureanism than you might think, however. For example, what if what you think of as the height of pleasure—staying in bed all day, eating Turkish Delight, and watching MTV—ends up being, well, not all that pleasurable? As a point of fact, Epicurus didn’t advocate a life of wild sex and parties, as many people wrongly assume. But the goal of pleasure is certainly central to his thought, and in this sense we can see Epicurus as the great-grandfather of what we might call the Tom Sawyer philosophy of work.
In the second chapter of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom appears on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash in one hand, a long-handled brush in the other, and a “deep melancholy” in his heart. Aunt Polly has ordered him to paint the fence. In the end, he convinces every boy who passes by that painting a fence is actually a privilege, not a chore. But Tom doesn’t fool us for a minute.
We know Tom hates work, any kind of work. At the merest thought of work, we are told, “all gladness left him,” life “seemed hollow,” and “existence a burden.” Tom, normally a very upbeat guy, doesn’t see whitewashing the fence as a privilege. He sees it, and work in general (including going to school), as an obstacle to the fun things he would rather be doing.4
In The Chronicles of Narnia we find a character that, while not as lovable as Tom, definitely adheres to Tom’s philosophy of work. Through him we can see what Lewis’s view of work, vocation, and the good life is not. In The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” Eustace Scrubb is clearly one who practices his own brand of hedonism and sees his highest good as his own comfort and pleasure. Eustace, like Tom, looks on any kind of work, even what is rightfully his own share, with dread and foreboding because it interferes with his selfish pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. (Note that these comments apply only to the early Eustace because, as you know if you have read the book, he later becomes quite a different character, which of course is Lewis’s point.)
One of the best examples of Eustace’s hedonism occurs when the Dawn Treader puts ashore on Dragon Island. At this point, the ship is a bit of a wreck. Casks have to be brought ashore, fixed, and refilled. A tree has to be cut down and made into a new mast. Sails must be repaired, a hunting party organized, and clothes washed and mended. In short, “there was everything to be done” (VDT, Chapter 5, p. 459).
Everyone immediately jumps in and begins working—everyone, that is, except Eustace. Here’s what Lewis says about him:
As Eustace lay under a tree and heard all these plans being discussed his heart sank. Was there going to be no rest? It looked as if their first day on the longed-for land was going to be quite as hard work as a day at sea. Then a delightful idea occurred to him. Nobody was looking—they were all chattering about their ship as if they actually liked the beastly thing. Why shouldn’t he simply slip away? He would take a stroll inland, find a cool, airy place up in the mountains, have a good long sleep, and not rejoin the others till the day’s work was over. (VDT, Chapter 5, p. 459)
The other crew members—who begin working not only without complaining but even with a sense of a happiness—have a vastly different philosophy of work, vocation, and the good life than Eustace does.
By having Eustace grow and develop, from someone who at first cares only about his own pleasure, Lewis suggests that this pleasure-seeking state is an immature one. It’s a position that might be understandable in a child but not in someone who has grown up. After his transformation, Eustace remarks, “I’m afraid I’ve been pretty beastly” (VDT, Chapter 7, p. 475). In associating the word beastly with Eustace’s first condition, Lewis further suggests that if the love of pleasure is something we share with the animals, being human requires that we acquire a purpose in life that is greater than just our own hedonistic desires.
John Stuart Mill and the Sherlock Holmes Philosophy of Work
In the eighteenth century, the British thinker Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) founded the philosophy of Utilitarianism, which claims that the aim of action should be the largest possible amount of pleasure or happiness for the greatest number of people.5 Building on the foundations laid by Epicurus, he writes, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.”6 Bentham goes on to distinguish several sources from which pleasure and pain flow, with the physical realm as only one source.
His philosophical successor John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) took the next step by ranking these sources. Mill writes, “some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others,” and asserts that we “assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation.”7
No matter how content your dog, cat, or gerbil might seem to be, Mill argues, nobody would “consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures.”8 Why? Because these lower pleasures of mere sensation are not truly fulfilling for a human being, as Eustace discovers for himself.
Shortly after sneaking off to avoid working on the ship, Eustace falls asleep on a dragon’s hoard “with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart” (VDT, Chapter 6, p. 466). He wakes to find he has changed into a dragon. “There was nothing to be afraid of any more,” Eustace quickly recognizes. “He was a terror himself and nothing in the world but a knight (and not all of those) would dare to attack him” (VDT, Chapter 6, p. 466). As a powerful dragon, Eustace can have anything he wants to eat and as much of it as he wants. He can sleep all day and certainly will never have to work again.
But as Eustace almost immediately realizes, a life of ease and pleasure isn’t what will make him happy. What he wants are the distinctively human pleasures that are higher than “those of mere sensation.” What he wants, as Lewis says, is “to be friends” and to “get back among humans and talk and laugh and share things” (VDT, Chapter 6, p. 466). And he wants this even though it means giving up a life of comfort and ease for one that will include hardship and toil.
Early in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the children are not the brave kings and queens they will later become, but still just regular children. Narnia is not very pleasurable at this point—it’s cold, they are in danger, and everyone is hungry. And for a moment Susan wants to turn around and not help the Faun, Mr. Tumnus, who has been arrested by the White Witch.
“What about just going home?” Susan suggests.
“Oh, but we can’t,” Lucy replies. “We can’t.” (LWW, Chapter 6, p. 137)
In Lucy’s response we find Lewis’s position also. The children can’t just go home, although this would clearly be the more comfortable choice—not if they are to live as they should. We see Lewis making a similar point in The Silver Chair when Jill forgets Aslan’s signs at Harfang because all she can think of are “baths and beds and hot drinks” (SC, Chapter 7, p. 596). The view Lewis presents in these passages is what might be called the Sherlock Holmes philosophy of work.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, begins The Sign of Four like this: “Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.”9 When Dr. Watson protests his friend’s use of cocaine, Holmes replies, “Give me problems, give me work. And I can dispense then with artificial stimulants.” Holmes claims that the only time he is in his “proper atmosphere” is when he is using his talents to work on a case.
Lewis agrees with Holmes that life should be—in fact must be—something more than comfortable idleness. Part of this something more involves work—some task, some goal beyond simply “having fun” or making life more pleasurable for oneself.
Near the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Susan again wants to turn back, this time from hunting the White Stag. Peter replies, “Never since we four were Kings and Queens in Narnia have we set our hands to any high matter, as battles, quests, feats of arms, acts of justice and the like, and then given over” (LWW, Chapter 17, p. 196). In The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” we find a similar illustration of Lewis’s philosophy. When asked what use their quest is, Reepicheep replies: “Use, Captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all” (VDT, Chapter 12, p. 507).
Peter and Reepicheep have radically different philosophies of work, vocation, and the good life than Eustace does. They embody Lewis’s own position, one that is also seen in The Last Battle. In talking to Eustace before a skirmish where the odds look grim, Jill says: “I almost wish. No I don’t though. I was going to say I wished we’d never come. But I don’t, I don’t. Even if we are killed. I’d rather be killed fighting for Narnia than grow old and stupid at home and perhaps go about in a bath-chair and then die in the end just the same” (LB, Chapter 9, p. 720).
The Life of Thought versus the Life of Action
According to Lewis, the good life must be more than idle comfort and pleasure; it must involve some kind of action or work. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) took a similar view. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that happiness is an activity, not a feeling or a state of mind.10
What kind of work makes for the good life? Aristotle believes that complete happiness consists in contemplation of the highest, noblest, and most enduring objects of human thought. For him, the contemplative life is far more valuable than a life of mere physical activity. As Adriano Tilgher points out, Aristotle (and Plato as well) holds that the solution to the question of the good life is “to have the hard, troublesome work of transforming raw material for the satisfaction of our needs done by a part—the majority—of men, in order that the minority, the elite, might engage in pure exercise of the mind—art, philosophy, politics.”11
Though Lewis strongly disagreed with Aristotle’s social and economic elitism, he also saw great value in the contemplative life, and this sentiment is echoed many times throughout The Chronicles of Narnia. For a start, we have the Professor, whose house has a whole series of rooms “lined with books” (LWW, Chapter 2, p. 112). Later we find him coaching Peter, another scholar, for his college entrance exams (VDT, Chapter 1, p. 425). The children’s father, Mr. Pevensie, is also a college professor, and we learn in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” that he has been invited to lecture in the United States (VDT, Chapter 1, p. 425). Mr. Tumnus, while not quite as scholarly as the Professor or Mr. Pevensie, has a bookshelf “full of books” on one wall of his little cave (LWW, Chapter 2, p. 116).
Readers are told that Caspian has a deep love for history and for his tutor Doctor Cornelius (PC, Chapter 4, p. 336). Caspian values learning so much that despite the danger he continues his lessons in secret after his uncle has forbidden them. In The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” we meet Coriakin the Magician, who has a large room “lined floor to ceiling with books, more books than Lucy had ever seen before, tiny little books, fat and dumpy books, and books bigger than any church Bible you have ever seen, all bound in leather and smelling old and learned and magical” (VDT, Chapter 10, p. 494).
As a child, Lewis grew up in a house with rooms like Coriakin’s, and throughout his sixty-five years he led a mostly contemplative life—from his years of private tutoring with William Kirkpatrick (the “Great Knock,” who served as the model for the Professor in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), to his rare “triple-first” as an Oxford undergraduate, to his long tenure as a fellow at Oxford, and finally to his position late in life as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. Lewis claimed he was the product of the “endless books” he had been surrounded by as a youth: “books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attics, books of all kinds.”12
Clearly, Lewis agrees with Aristotle about the worth of the contemplative life, but he doesn’t stop there. Unlike Aristotle, Lewis sees equal value in the life of action, as is evident from the fact that the Chronicles are mostly about adventures, battles, and quests.
We see this emphasis on action from the very outset of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when it’s raining and the children are looking for something to do. When Susan suggests that there are “lots of books” they might read, Peter replies, “Not for me. I’m going to explore in the house” (LWW, Chapter 1, p. 112). Everyone agrees to Peter’s suggestion, and we are told “this was how the adventures began.”
Each of the Narnia books opens with some kind of crisis. Each character is then called upon to help in whatever way is appropriate to him or her. Again, the point is that what is needed in these situations is a willingness to act.
Karl Marx in Narnia
In his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Karl Marx, the father of communism, penned the famous dictum “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Marx did not exactly originate this idea, as it had earlier expressions such as in the Saint-Simonian movement in France in the 1820s and even in the New Testament (Acts 4:34–35), so perhaps we should not be so surprised to see Lewis embracing a similar idea in The Chronicles of Narnia.13
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan plays a major part—you could say the major part—in rescuing Narnia from the White Witch. However, in spite of the fact that it is Aslan who in a somewhat gruesome battle scene kills the Witch in the end, the children and the Talking Animals are expected to assume active roles, each in accordance with their abilities. Immediately after Aslan overcomes the Witch, we are told that “all war-like creatures whom Aslan had led from the Witch’s house rushed madly on the enemy lines,” including “dwarfs with their battleaxes, dogs with teeth, the Giant with his club,” . . . “unicorns with their horns, and centaurs with swords and hoofs” (LWW, Chapter 10, p. 191).
Earlier, there is a scene in which the children receive gifts from Father Christmas, gifts that are appropriate to their natural capacities and temperaments, and are to be used for the good of Narnia. Peter gets a sword and shield, Susan receives a bow, arrows, and an ivory horn, and Lucy is given a healing cordial and a small dagger (LWW, Chapter 10, p. 160). Father Christmas tells the girls that, unlike Peter, they are to use their weapons “only in greatest need.”
Is Lewis here saying that girls can’t be fighters and guys can’t be healers? Not at all. What Lewis is illustrating, in this scene and elsewhere, is what I like to call the Acorn Philosophy of Vocation.
What is an acorn supposed to do in life? Based on its natural tendencies, we would have to say it’s supposed to grow up to become an oak tree. The late Joseph Campbell took this same approach to questions about vocation. He told his students, “Follow your bliss.”
So what are the characters in Narnia—including Peter, Susan, and Lucy—to do? To put their natural abilities and inclinations to use—and not just in their own service, but when necessary in the service of Narnia. As Shasta explains in The Horse and His Boy, when Narnia is in need, “everyone must do what he can do best” (HHB, Chapter 14, pp, 302–03).
After Aslan frees the animals that the White Witch had turned to stone, he calls for those who are fast to help carry those who are slow, those who are good with their noses to help smell out where the battle is, and for the Giant Rumblebuffin, who is good with his club, to break down the castle gates (LWW, Chapter 16, p. 190).
With this Acorn Philosophy of Vocation, Lewis was taking the same tack seen in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. There we find a Fellowship made up of nine quite different individuals, each contributing according to his own ability. In one scene early in the quest, the members of the Fellowship find themselves stuck in the snow. Aragorn and Boromir, the two strongest members, are trying to tunnel a way through the drifts, but they need to know how far the snow extends. As Legolas springs lightly upon the surface of the snow to go find out, he utters these words which epitomize Lewis and Tolkien’s philosophy of vocation: “The strongest must seek a way, say you? but I say: let a ploughman plough, but choose an otter for swimming, and for running light over grass and leaf, or over snow—an Elf.”14
Perhaps one of Lewis’s clearest illustrations of the Acorn Philosophy of Vocation occurs in The Last Battle. On their way to rescue Jewel, King Tirian, Eustace, and Jill must force their way through dense thickets where it’s hard to get a bearing. Lewis tells us, “It was Jill who set them right,” and as soon as Tirian notices that she is “the best pathfinder of the three of them,” he puts her in front to lead (LB, Chapter 6, p. 700).
During the Middle Ages, the term vocation came to used exclusively for the religious vocations of priests, monks and nuns, as though other professions were not something you could be called to. Martin Luther challenged this concept. In a treatise written in 1520 he wrote that “a cobbler, a smith, and a peasant” each has a vocation in the work they do, just as much as a priest or bishop does. To Luther’s list, Lewis would add a centaur, a dwarf, a unicorn—in short, all rational beings.
Wrong Livelihood
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was the leading European philosopher of his time. His philosophy is called “Aristotelian” because Aquinas took Aristotle’s premises and developed his own conclusions. Like Aristotle, Aquinas had much to say about work and its relationship to the good life. In his Summa Theologica he wrote, “To live well is to work well” (I-11, q. 57, a. 5). For Aquinas, good living and good working went together. Likewise, one of Buddha’s basic teachings was that one’s livelihood must be ethical and not inconsistent with one’s deepest values and ideals.
It’s not enough to just say that life must consist of more than idle pleasure. If one can work well or correctly, then it follows that one can also work wrongly, and Lewis provides a number of examples of wrong work in Narnia.
One example of wrong livelihood is working against one’s deepest wishes. In The Last Battle, when a wicked ape takes over Narnia as its tyrant, he orders all the animals to work against their will, telling them, “You think freedom means doing what you like. Well, you’re wrong. That isn’t true freedom. True freedom means doing what I tell you” (LB, Ch. 3, p. 685). Even if the task is itself good, coercion makes it wrong.
Of course, this isn’t to deny that sometimes we have a duty to do something, even when we’re strongly inclined not to. Here perhaps we must distinguish between our selfish inclinations and our deepest inclinations. While duty may call us to act against our selfish inclinations, it will fulfill our deepest ones. Near the end of The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” Caspian wants to abandon his ship and go with Reepicheep to the end of the world. Reepicheep appeals to his sense of duty to persuade him he shouldn’t: “You are the King of Narnia. You break faith with all your subjects, and especially Trumpkin, if you do not return. You shall not please yourself with adventures as if you were a private person” (VDT, Chapter 16, p. 537).
Another of Lewis’s illustrations of wrong livelihood has to do with the ends justifying the means. His point is that they don’t. In The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” Governor Gumpas has achieved his goal of economic prosperity through profits from the slave trade, by allowing the ends to justify the means. When Caspian orders him to end the wicked practice, Gumpas replies, “But that would be putting the clock back. Have you no idea of progress?” (VDT, Chapter 4, p. 450) It turns out that Caspian not only has an idea of progress, he also has an idea of what is right and wrong, and Gumpas is immediately relieved of his duties. So for Lewis, not only is what you do important, but also how you do it, the means as well as the ends.
Leisure and Play
No discussion of Lewis’s philosophy of work, vocation, and the good life in the Chronicles would be complete without a brief look at his philosophy of leisure.
In The Last Battle Jewel explains to Jill that because the children were brought out of their world “only at times when Narnia was stirred and upset,” she must not think it was always like that. In between these times came whole centuries when dances, feasts, and tournaments “were the only things that could be remembered, and every day and week had been better than the last.” Jill wishes they could “get back to those good, ordinary times” as soon as possible (LB, Chapter 8, p. 715).
We find examples of feasting, romping, celebration, and enjoyment of the “good, ordinary” pleasures of life throughout the Chronicles, and by including these scenes Lewis balances his philosophy of work with an equally important emphasis on leisure and enjoyment. Mr. Tumnus and Lucy enjoy tea with “a nice brown egg, lightly boiled . . . and then sardines on toast, and then buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar-topped cake” (LWW, Chapter 2, p. 116). Later, everyone relaxes at the Beavers’ with a wonderful supper that includes “a jug of creamy milk,” a “great big lump of deep yellow butter,” a “great and gloriously sticky marmalade roll, steaming hot,” and “a huge jug of beer” for Mr. Beaver (LWW, Chapter 7, pp. 143–44). Lewis’s philosophy requires not only a proper philosophy of work but also a proper stance towards these good, ordinary pleasures—namely, one of enjoyment but not enslavement. On a recent CD, ultra-hip Canadian folksinger Bruce Cockburn has a song titled “Don’t Forget about Delight,” a point Lewis makes over and over in The Chronicles of Narnia.
Lewis explores the same point about pleasure in his book The Screwtape Letters. There the devil Screwtape tells his nephew:
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. . . . All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden.15
And so we have come full circle. We began by saying that for Lewis life must be about more than just self-centered pleasures, but we finish with just two of the scenes of pleasure that occur over and over in the Chronicles. And here we might return once more to Aristotle and his famous claim in the Nicomachean Ethics that “virtue . . . is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean.”16 Aristotle goes on to develop his famous principle of the golden mean, which is often restated in a somewhat simplified form as “moderation in all things.”
If Aristotle found virtue in the golden means, we could say that in a sense Lewis’s philosophy of work, vocation, and the good life in The Chronicles of Narnia advocates the golden extremes. If you are going to romp and celebrate, then really romp and celebrate. If it is your task to save Narnia from the White Witch, then don’t be moderate, give it your all. Keep first things first by always thinking of the greater good ahead of the lesser good, and never forget that Aslan, who created Narnia with his Voice, is “at the back of all the stories” (HHB, Chapter 4, p. 302) and indeed all true callings.
1 Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, eighth edition, edited by Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson (New York: Harcourt, 1999), p. 301.
2 C.S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” reprinted in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966), p. 27.
3 Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus” translated by Russel M. Greer, reprinted in Philosophical Classics, third edition, Volume 1, edited by Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2000), p. 467.
4 Apparently Twain agreed. Consider his famous quip, “I never let school interfere with my education.”
5 At his request, Bentham’s embalmed body is kept on display at the University of London, which he helped found. Apparently, he believed that more people would take pleasure at the sight of his corpse than the reverse. Maybe not, but students get a kick out of it when they hear this story.
6 Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Chapter 1, Section I.
7 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863), Chapter 2.
8 Ibid.
9 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, reprinted in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume 1 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1930), p. 89.
10 Book X, 1176b.
11 Adriano Tilgher, Work: What It Has Meant to Men Through the Ages (New York: Arno, 1977), p. 5.
12 C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), p. 10.
13 Though not in the socialist sense intended by Marx. Like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis wasn’t a fan of big government or officious “busybodies and interferers” (LWW, Chapter 17, p. 194). In fact, this is the very thing Lewis is criticizing in The Last Battle when the Ape says, “It’s all been arranged. And all for your good” (LB, Chapter 3, p. 685).
14 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine, 2001 [1954], p. 328.
15 C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 2001 [1942]), p. 44.
16 Nicomachean Ethics, 1107a.