There is a Tao of Narnia. It’s not an Eastern Tao. It’s not a Western Tao. The Tao of Narnia isn’t Northern or Southern. The ancient Chinese called it the greatest thing, but every rational being in every world can know it. For the Tao of Narnia is what C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man calls
the Way in which the universe goes on . . . the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. . . . This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. . . . It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.1
The Tao of Narnia is what philosophers and theologians call Natural Law. It is the notion that there are moral truths present in the natural world that can be known by all intelligent beings, whether human, dwarf, faun, centaur, or god. It doesn’t matter if you live in London, Cairo, Archenland, Tashbaan, or Cair Paravel. The Natural Law, the Tao, is always present to you.
The greatest expositor of Natural Law in the history of western philosophy is St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Aquinas states that Natural Law allows our minds to “discern what is good and what is evil,”2 that is, to perceive objective moral properties that are present in the world. The most fundamental principle of morality and the first precept of Natural Law knowable by us is that “good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided.”3 Aquinas also holds that Natural Law is the same in all people, primarily at the level of “common principles,” but that it can vary in application to specific situations. The truth of Natural Law is the same for all, but it isn’t necessarily known equally by all, because our rational abilities can be “perverted by passion, or evil habit, or an evil disposition of nature.”4 Lewis follows this classic understanding of Natural Law throughout the Chronicles.
Is it fair to call Natural Law in the sense elaborated by Aquinas, the Tao? What’s a nice Asian idea got to do with a medieval Catholic concept like Aquinas’s? The Tao of Narnia is not of course Taoism. Lewis wasn’t a Taoist, and neither is anyone in the Chronicles. Taoism (pronounced Dow-ism) is a Chinese philosophy or religion that sees Ultimate Reality (“the Tao”) as an infinite, inexpressible principle that underlies and flows through all things, and can only be felt or intuited rather than grasped through rational concepts. The Tao, as Lewis conceives it, is present in Taoism, but is not exclusive to it or to any other particular religion. The Tao is something to which even religious practices and creeds must conform. The term isn’t used simply for shorthand; it is used because of its inclusiveness. Natural Law is written on our hearts and is present at all times and places.
In the Appendix to The Abolition of Man, Lewis provides a mini-catalog of illustrations of the Tao to show the similarity of moral creeds in many different cultures and religions. For example, Lewis provides examples from Hindu, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Viking, and Native American traditions praising the good of kindness. Of course, these kinds of examples don’t prove that there are objective values, but they do show that the concept of objective value is present across culture, time, religion and race. I’ll be using some specific examples of Lewis’s illustrations of the Tao to show how the concept of objective value is a central idea throughout the Chronicles.
Totally Tao
Lewis doesn’t argue for the Tao in the Chronicles. He illustrates it. If his illustrations are sound, and there really are natural moral laws that apply to us readers and fans of the Chronicles, then there are only three possible responses we can have to the Tao: we can accept it as a whole, accept part of it and reject part of it, or reject it entirely. Lewis discusses these three responses in detail in The Abolition of Man, but the responses are also illustrated by various characters in the Chronicles.
The first option is to accept the Tao as a whole and to strive to live by it. The great Narnian heroes did just this: Peter, Lucy, Tirian, Emeth, Puddleglum, and Reepicheep to name a few. To accept the Tao involves three things: (1) a commitment to an objective moral order that is independent of what I or anyone else thinks, (2) an openness to moral development only within the Tao, and (3) a willingness to follow the Tao in all situations, not just those that are easy or convenient. Take Peter, for instance. From the beginning, with only a few minor lapses, the High King of Narnia did what was right because he saw it was right. Peter obeyed Aslan’s commands and was willing to learn how to be a good and righteous leader and person in every area of his life. As we learn at the conclusion of The Last Battle, this acceptance of the Tao leads to the possibility of a good life and allows one to be a good person for all eternity. The participation of the soul in the Tao makes that soul more suitable for life in the Real Narnia.
Tao and Again
Instead of following the Tao completely one might choose to accept some parts of the Tao and reject others. Shift and Miraz are good examples of this approach. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis calls these types of people “Innovators.” These are people who try to live as if there were objective values in only some areas of life, but not in others. The consequences of trying to do this are usually disastrous, as Shift and Miraz discover.
Shift, the ugly ape, knew that it was a good thing to have a ruler, especially if the ruler was him. But he rejected the basic principle of Natural Law that a ruler should have the interests of the people in mind when he or she rules. (Take a look at Plato’s Republic, Book 1, for a classic argument for this principle.) Shift demanded that people respect those in authority, and this seems to be a valid principle of traditional morality. But another concept that is present through the Natural Law is the concept of ruling fairly and justly. Shift thought he could pick the former principle as something that was true and valuable, but at the same time deny the latter. The problem with this moral selectivity is that it leads to a kind of arbitrariness that undermines the very possibility of there being any real objective value for any ethical judgments. One cannot consistently claim that honoring authority is a real value without at the same time maintaining that caring for one’s people is a real value. Shift had to learn the hard way with his rather objective encounter with Tash that we can’t pick and choose our morality.
In a similar way, Miraz denied that loyalty to Caspian, the rightful King, was a legitimate moral demand, yet insisted that his own men be loyal to him, which as he painfully discovered, they declined to do. In both cases, these characters denied the validity of a part of the Tao, while attempting to retain others. This tension couldn’t be held consistently, as each of them learned. One cannot pick which parts of the Tao to accept and which parts to reject, because all parts of the Law rest on the same self-evident moral axioms and any moral values the picker-and-chooser may appeal to have no authority outside the Tao as a whole.5
According to Lewis, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is a prime example of a moral “Innovator.” For Nietzsche, the Tao is something to be made up by those who have power, the masters like Miraz, Shift, and Jadis.
Nietzsche describes his paragon of morality, the noble or strong man. The strong man “conceives the root idea ‘good’ spontaneously and straight away, that is to say, out of himself, and from that material then creates for himself a concept of ‘bad!’”6 For Nietzsche, morality is fundamentally about power, not truth; values are invented, not discovered.
In Lewis’s essay “The Poison of Subjectivism,” which is a kind of summary of The Abolition of Man, Lewis points out the problem with Nietzsche’s ethics. He writes, “The Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morality as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgments at all.”7 The real problem with accepting a subjectivist morality, according to Lewis, is that one can’t non-subjectively ground one’s own morality. If, as Nietzsche claims, there are no moral truths, only personal preferences rooted in a universal “will to power,” then there are “no arche, no premises”8 to ground one’s moral judgments at all. All that remains is the clash of subjective preferences, with force the only arbiter.
The Tao? Curse You and Your Stupid Lion Too
The third option that characters in the Chronicles had with respect to the Tao was to reject it entirely and to create their own moral code from whole cloth. Uncle Andrew and Ginger the Cat illustrate this type of response. These people are what Lewis calls “Conditioners.”9 They want to get rid of the Tao entirely and create an artificial one based on their own subjective “values.” But since, on this view, there are no real values, the values on which their artificial Tao are based can be nothing but what these people prefer. It is their whim that drives them, and their whim means nothing other than their bodily desires. Thus, when one denies the objectivity of the Tao one has reduced morality to nothing more than bodily desires. In other words, being a person, a rational, intelligent being, has been entirely abolished.
Consider Ginger the Cat. Ginger denies all of the truth or reality behind Aslan and what he stands for. Ginger wants nothing but his own power and seeks it in league with Shift and the Calormene invaders. But notice what happens when Ginger takes seriously the denial of all natural moral laws. He comes face to face with his own abolition. He is undone as a Talking Beast, and is changed back into a dumb irrational animal:
“Aii—Aii—Aaow—Awah,” screamed the Cat. . . . Tirian felt quite certain (and so did the others) that the Cat was trying to say something: but nothing came out of its mouth except the ordinary, ugly cat-noises you might hear from any angry or frightened old Tom in a backyard in England. And the longer he caterwauled the less like a Talking Beast he looked.” (LB, Chapter 10, p. 727)
Poor Uncle Andrew encountered the same problem. He wanted to make up his own Tao and was willing to get it no matter what he had to do to guinea pigs or innocent children. After his failed attempt to invade and exploit Narnia, Uncle Andrew tries to talk to the Narnian Talking Animals, but the “beasts could not understand him any more than he could understand them. They didn’t hear any words: only a vague sizzling noise” (MN, Chapter 11, p. 77). Even the rational power of communication was lost to the old Magician, and it might have been lost for good if it he could have pursued his schemes indefinitely. For rationality itself, of which speech is a part, isn’t the kind of thing that can be whatever we want it to be. To make reason into our own tool to be used however we wish, is to abandon the very essence of reason and to surrender to the irrational in us. Like Ginger, Uncle Andrew was ultimately undone and functionally reduced to a non-Talking Animal. Fortunately, his end wasn’t as bad as Ginger’s. Though to the end of his days he continued to think of wicked Queen Jadis as a “dem fine woman,” he eventually “learned his lesson, and in his old age he became a nicer and less selfish old man than he had ever been before” (MN, Chapter 15, p. 106).
This is the inescapable logic of the Tao of Narnia. You can live within it and enjoy the good life and the possibility of eternal life, able to move ever “further up and further in” (MN, Chapter 15, p. 755) into God’s eternal kingdom. You can be a picker and a chooser and end up in a deadly, self-destructive contradiction. Or you can abolish Man and Beast, Naiad and Dryad, Centaur and Satyr, and every other Talking Person, by replacing objective values with personal preferences grounded in bodily desires. Lewis’s hope is that we will emulate Lucy, Peter, Tirian, and the other Narnian heroes who choose to embrace the Tao in its entirety.
The Tao of General Beneficence
Who meditates oppression, his dwelling is overturned.
—BABYLONIAN. Hymn to Samas10
The Tao shows up quite early in the Chronicles. Mr. Tumnus, the first Narnian we meet, sees that there is a law of general beneficence. He meets Lucy, a stranger, who is cold and alone. He brings her to his home, a place of safety and warmth. Mr. Tumnus has orders to turn this young Daughter of Eve over to the White Witch, and at first he intends to do so. But something happens to Mr. Tumnus. He sees that something is not quite right with what he is about to do. He sees that oppressing the innocent is morally wrong. He says, “I’ve pretended to be your friend and asked you to tea, and all the time I’ve been meaning to wait till you were asleep and then go and tell Her [the White Witch]” (LWW, Chapter 2, p. 118).
When Lucy asks Mr. Tumnus to let her go home, Mr. Tumnus says that he’s got to let her go. He now sees that he can’t hand her over to the White Witch. He knows that what he was about to do was wrong, objectively bad. He knows that letting Lucy go free is right, objectively good. How did he come to know this? Did Lucy give him an argument for it, demonstrating through rigorous logic that kidnapping little girls and handing them over to White Witches is morally bad? No! Mr. Tumnus looked at Lucy. He saw what it is to be an innocent stranger in need. He understood that treachery and deceit are wicked. He saw and decided to live by one of the truths of the Tao.
But there were still consequences for Mr. Tumnus. He was complicit in oppression. He had already joined with the White Witch, and as a result his house in Narnia was overturned. “The door had been wrenched off its hinges and broken to bits. . . . The crockery lay smashed on the floor and the picture of the Faun’s father had been slashed into shreds with a knife” (LWW, Chapter 6, p. 136). There are consequences, sometimes disastrous ones, for living in opposition to objective moral reality. And sometimes we pay a heavy price when we turn away from moral compromise in favor of the Tao. However, Mr. Tumnus’s decision to obey the Tao was ultimately rewarded in the New Narnia (LB, Chapter 15, p. 765).
The Tao of Special Beneficence
This first I rede thee: be blameless to thy kindred. Take no vengeance even though they do thee wrong.
—OLD NORSE. Sigrdrifumál11
The Calormenes, “a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people” (VDT, Chapter 4, p. 452), seem to have a different morality in the Chronicles. They dress differently, preferring robes to trousers, and scimitars to straight-edged swords. Their customs, poetry, and food are different. Even their gods are different. But the Tao applies to Tarkheenas as well as to English schoolchildren.
Aravis found this out first hand, or rather first back. It was on her back that Aslan applied his long claws. Why? Aravis tells us herself. When she first meets Shasta in The Horse and His Boy, Aravis tells the story of her escape to Narnia and the North. To get away from her forced marriage to an ugly and oppressive old man, she drugged a servant girl who was working for her evil stepmother. Shasta asks what happened to the servant girl who was drugged, and Aravis replies, “Doubtless she was beaten for sleeping late. . . . But she was a tool and spy of my stepmother’s. I am very glad they should beat her” (HHB, Chapter 3, p. 224).
Is it good to be glad that a member of one’s household has been beaten? Even if the punishment is deserved, should we be happy about it? Lewis doesn’t seem to think so. He thinks that repaying evil for evil is wrong. But how do we know this? How did Aravis come to know it?
In this case, Aslan had to point it out to her. He says, “The scratches on your back, tear for tear, throb for throb, blood for blood, were equal to the stripes laid on the back of your stepmother’s slave because of the drugged sleep you cast upon her. You needed to know what it felt like” (HHB, Chapter 14, p. 299.) Now Aravis knows. She sees that her cruel treatment of her servant was wrong. She understands the pain of an unjust beating. She felt it. Aslan didn’t argue with her. He didn’t take her through a whole semester of Ethics 101. He simply showed her. This showing is something different from proving. Proof is accomplished through reasons and arguments. But Aslan offers no reasons or arguments to show Aravis that what she did was wrong. He simply shows her that it is wrong.
There are some things that must be known without proof. This doesn’t make them irrational. In fact, unless some things can be known without proof, nothing can be proved at all. Unless one can see that it is wrong to take pleasure in the sufferings one has caused, one can make no progress in moral growth at all. This is one of the lessons of the Tao of Narnia.
The Tao of Good Faith and Veracity
The Master said, Be of unwavering good faith.
—ANCIENT CHINESE. CONFUCIUS, Analects12
What’s with the dwarfs? They seem generally like a good bunch. Good food. Good artwork. Good smokes. But some of them just never seem to get it with respect to certain crucial parts of the Tao. In Prince Caspian, Nikabrik, a black dwarf, provides a good illustration of bad faith when he treacherously betrays both Aslan and his rightful leader, Prince Caspian.
Nikabrik doubts the old stories about Aslan. He doubts the old traditions of the proper rule of the Kings and Queens in Narnia. He questions whether there should be any constraints on what should be done for the sake of expediency. Nikabrik is a pragmatist, a believer in Realpolitik. Moral truth is what works. Aslan and the great kings haven’t worked. Miraz has nearly defeated the Narnian rebels, and now Nikabrik proposes a plan that will work. The White Witch is to be conjured up from the dead. Fidelity to tradition is to be swept aside. Faithfulness to the laws and offices that have always been a part of the moral fabric of Narnia are to be sacrificed for the sake of winning the war. Nikabrik winds up dead, slain by the rightful leaders of Narnia (PC, Chapter 12, p. 395). His plan to jettison tradition and proper rule in favor of an expedient morality is defeated. Nikabrik fails to see that the Tao is not just one morality among many. It is the only morality—Aslan’s Owner’s Manual for true success and fulfillment, for Humans and Talking Beasts alike.
The Tao of Magnanimity
Nature and Reason command that nothing uncomely . . . be done or thought.
—ROMAN. CICERO, The Offices13
Even Queen Lucy the Valiant, the principal heroine of the Chronicles, with her simple, childlike faith in Aslan, had to learn to live within the Tao. In The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” when she is examining the Magician’s book, seeking a spell to cure the invisibility of the Dufflepuds, Lucy is greatly tempted. First, she is tempted to utter the spell that will make her beautiful, even more beautiful than her big sister Susan. (Think of the Brady Bunch. Lucy feels about Susan much as Jan did about Marsha). Lucy doesn’t give in, of course, but Lewis makes it clear that she was severely tempted.
This doesn’t mean Lucy is perfect. She, like the rest of us, might have been able to avoid something huge, like choosing to become the most beautiful person in the world for vain or selfish reasons. But it’s often the little things that are the hardest to be good at. Just about anyone can say, “Yeah, I’m a good person . . . I ain’t never killed nobody.”
Lucy did give in on one of the little things. When she utters the spell in the Magician’s Book “which would let you know what your friends thought about you” (VDT, Chapter 10, p. 496), she hears her friend Marjorie saying that she really didn’t like Lucy after all. This upsets her, and she vindictively calls her friend a “two-faced little beast” (VDT, Chapter 10, p. 496).
Lucy, like so many others in the Chronicles, has to be confronted with what she did wrong. When Aslan is made visible to her, he reminds her that eavesdropping is wrong. It’s wrong if you do it on the telephone; it’s wrong if you do it outside someone’s office; it’s wrong if you do it with a magic spell. It’s disrespectful of people’s privacy and has long-term effects on human relationships. Aslan says as much to Lucy. She won’t be able to forget what she overheard her friend say (VDT, Chapter 10, p. 498).
Lewis, through Aslan, doesn’t offer an argument for the immorality of eavesdropping. He simply shows Lucy that it is wrong. The “showing” that Aslan does throughout the Chronicles is not the kind of showing that one sees with one’s eyes. It is the kind of seeing that is done with one’s mind. Seeing that eavesdropping or kidnapping or treachery is wrong is a rational insight that one has or one doesn’t have. Of course, one can sometimes be blind to what is right or wrong. I can be tone-deaf or color blind, but this doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as a C-note or the color green.
How do you prove what it’s like to see red? You can’t prove it. You can’t argue someone into being aware of redness. You might give them advice on how they can come to see red. For example, you might point out that seeing red is highly likely if one looks directly at a box of strawberries or a stop sign. But seeing red can’t be argued for. It has to be experienced. It’s the same with the Tao.
The Tao of Humility
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty sprit before a fall.
—ANCIENT HEBREW. Proverbs 16:18
Like Lucy, Jill Pole had a lesson to learn. In The Silver Chair, when she and Eustace are drawn into Narnia, they nearly fall off a massive cliff. When Eustace tries to pull Jill back, and is terrified, Jill scorns Eustace’s fear. As Jill edges closer to the edge, not heeding Eustace’s warning, Eustace tries to pull her back again, but he falls over the edge instead and has to be rescued by Aslan.
When Jill is confronted by Aslan about Eustace’s fall, she admits that she was showing off. Aslan responds, “That is a very good answer, Human Child. Do so no more” (SC, Chapter 2, p. 558). Pride and haughtiness (thinkin’ you’re hot stuff when you ain’t) are inconsistent with the Tao and wrong. In this case it’s obvious: Pride goeth before a fall!
How Now Thou Tao?
I think that Lewis wrote the Chronicles with a heavy dose of the Tao in response to all the moral nonsense he saw being taught to kids in school. In The Abolition of Man, he wrote that contemporary educators teach our kids that there are no objective moral truths. In our society a similar situation prevails, as illustrated by the fact that you can’t post the Ten Commandments in any public classroom today. As in Lewis’s day, it is often taken for granted that morality is subjective or a matter of personal preference, not a matter of real knowledge. We rip the moral eyes right out of our kids’ heads and then expect them to see moral truths. Lewis puts this point even more vividly and memorably: “We remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”14
The various characters we’ve looked at in the Chronicles show us the way to stop the horror of moral castration in contemporary intellectual life. Can we see the point they make for us? It depends. It depends on whether we are willing to look. It depends on whether we will open our eyes and our minds to see the kind of thing the universe is, and the kinds of beings we are. Philosophy is one of the tools that can be used for just such a task. It is a task that is much needed in our post-Columbine and post-9/11 world. Perhaps we should begin where the Chronicles end, with Lord Digory’s still pertinent question, “[B]less me, what do they teach them at these schools?” (LB, Chapter. 15, p. 759)
1 New York: Macmillan, 1955 [1947], pp. 28–29.
2 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I–II, Question 91, Art. 2.
3 Ibid., I–II, Question 94, Art. 2.
4 Ibid., I–II, Question 94, Art. 4.
5 Lewis, The Abolition of Man, pp. 52–59.
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Essay 1, Section 11, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: Random House, 1954), p. 650.
7 C.S. Lewis, “The Poison of Subjectivism” (1943), reprinted in Christian Reflections, edited by Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), p. 77.
8 Ibid.
9 Lewis, Abolition of Man, p. 74.
10 Ibid., p. 98. This is one of many illustrations of the Tao that Lewis presents in the Appendix to The Abolition of Man. This one and the ones listed below are taken from a variety of cultural and religious contexts in order to show the universality of Natural Law.
11 Ibid., p. 88.
12 Ibid., p. 112.
13 Ibid., p. 119.
14 Ibid., p. 35.