Think with Your Chest?

Yesterday my YouTube feed recommended a newly released music video by a band I’d never heard of, Gable Price and Friends. The song is titled “Think With Your Chest.” If the song had been titled “Think With Your Heart” I wouldn’t have given it a second glance, dismissing it as another variation on the wrong-headed (ha!) “follow your heart” cliché. But the use of the word “chest” intrigued me. Being me, I naturally wondered: Could the song be a response to The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis and its critique of a modern education system producing “men without chests”?

Alas, I don’t think Gable Price and Friends have read The Abolition of Man. If they had, and had been convinced by it, their song wouldn’t have so simplistically opposed the Chest to the Head, as if only one can win and the other must lose. Lewis argues the Head and the Chest must work together. To be sure, he believes the Head should lead, but he also says the Head will be ineffective or go astray without the Chest. And I think the reason that the song is stuck in this zero-sum binary is that it doesn’t consider an idea that has been around for two millennia: the tripartite soul.

In Lewis’s understanding of the human person, which he gets from Plato, there are not two but three parties jostling for control: the Head, the Chest, and the Belly. According to Plato, it’s this third, appetitive part of the soul that craves pleasure, and especially money to secure its pleasures. It’s to regulate the desires of the Belly that the Head and the Chest must work together.

In the song, the Head is associated with “surviving,” “the calculated outcome,” “the status quo,” and “thinking with me income.” Lewis and Plato would say that’s the Belly talking, not the Head. People who think with the Head are seeking to discern and live according to transcendent ideals. Contrary to what the song says, people who are living to make enough money to just get by and maintain their comforts might be using their brains—it takes some strategy to climb the corporate ladder or develop a strong portfolio—but ultimately they’re using their brains to serve their stomachs. The struggle described in the song is not really between the people who think with the Chest and those who think with the Head, but between the people who think with the Chest and Head and those who think with the Belly—and think with the Belly because they haven’t strengthened and harmonized the other two parts of the soul which should be in control.

The song is right that repressing the Chest in the name of a cold rationality is making people “depressed.” But ignoring the Head to follow the Chest is no solution. The song anticipates the objection that “the heart can be misleading,” and even validates that concern: “I can admit [my heart has] made some mistakes.” While I agree “I’d rather live with [the heart] than die so comfortably”—I’m reminded of what Lewis says elsewhere, in The Four Loves, about the necessary risks of loving others—how can a person think with the heart without falling into grave error? The song doesn’t offer a way out of that conundrum. 

Yes, we shouldn’t live for comfort, or as if we were computers or disembodied and soulless brains. But instead of living by the whims of unregulated emotions, which is just another way of thinking with the Belly, we need what Lewis calls the “trained emotions” and “stable sentiments” of the Chest. And training and stabilizing our feelings so that they accord with reality is only possible through exercising reason to discern reality.

P.S.: It’s ironic that, in the first few seconds of the music video, you can see a bust of young Anakin Skywalker, in his podracing helmet, sitting on the dashboard of a car. As Timothy Lawrence has convinced me, Star Wars is all about resolving the tension between reason and emotion by rightly ordering the tripartite soul.

That's Not Your Story

For years I’ve been reminding myself—or rather, God keeps graciously reminding me—of something Aslan tells Shasta and Aravis in The Horse and His Boy: “That’s not your story.”

Actually, that’s a misquotation. What Aslan tells Shasta in Chapter Eleven, in response to Shasta asking him why he attacked Aravis, is “I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own” (p. 165 in the 1994 HarperTrophy edition). And in Chapter Fourteen, Aslan tells Aravis, in response to her asking him about what will happen to the slave girl who was whipped when Aravis ran away from home, the same thing: “I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own” (p. 202).

But “That’s not your story” comes to the same thing, and I can’t say how many times those four words have resurfaced in my mind to  either convict or comfort me. 

When I am tempted to ask Person A for the details of Person B’s difficult situation: That’s not your story. When I am tempted to tell Person B what I know of Person A’s difficult situation: That’s not your story. When I want to know what is going on with Person C, who I thought was a Christian but has been living in a way inconsistent with the gospel and the cost of discipleship: That’s not your story. When I wonder why Person D seems to have it so easy compared to me: That’s not your story. 

When, like Asaph in Psalm 73, I am bothered by how the wicked prosper while the righteous suffer: That’s not your story. When, like Job’s friends I want to know why a believer is suffering so intensely: That’s not your story. When, like Peter at the end of the Gospel of John, I want to know what God may have in store for another believer: That’s not your story. I think also of what Jesus told Peter in that moment: “What is that to you? You follow me!” (John 21:22).

Of course, telling ourselves “That’s not your story” won’t do much to quell our confusion or envy or love of gossip if we don’t believe there is a Storyteller who is both sovereign and good. But if there is such a Storyteller, we can trust Him to bring our stories and every other person’s story to a fitting end. He is telling us our own stories, and no one else’s. Let’s follow Him.

Some More Dangerous Idealists

In my most recent post for the Jedi Archives, “Dangerous Idealists,” I wrote about how Obi-Wan, Mace Windu, and Count Dooku fall along a spectrum that illustrates how idealism can put someone on a dangerous path toward sacrificing people and principles for the supposed greater good. Two classic works of American literature that I read in the past few months also dramatize this temptation and its consequences.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), the narrator Miles Coverdale joins a nascent utopian community that is doomed from the start—but not, as the reader would expect, because of flaws in its own ideals or the failure of its members to live up to those ideals, though those are issues at Blithedale, too. Instead, the community is ruined chiefly because a prominent member is a more inflexible idealist than everyone else at Blithedale and his ideals are opposed to theirs. Mr. Hollingsworth is a philanthropist who came to Blithedale, it turns out, not because he believes in its vision but because he wants to seize its land for his own social-reform project. He is so convinced of the righteousness of his own cause, he either does not see or does not care about the unrighteousness of lying about his intentions and betraying other idealists. As more than one character realizes, Mr. Hollingsworth will abandon a friendship as soon as he realizes the friend cannot be made into a cog in the machine he would build. But the worst consequence of his zeal is not the communal and relational costs, but the cost to his own soul. As Coverdale summarizes at the end of the novel:

“The moral which presents itself to my reflections, as drawn from Hollingsworth’s character and errors, is simply this:—that, admitting what is called Philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is perilous to the individual, whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus becomes. It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart … I see in Hollingsworth an exemplification of the most awful truth in Bunyan’s book of such;—from the very gate of Heaven, there is a by-way to the pit!” (p. 243 in the 1983 Penguin edition). 

As the adage goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. In fact, Hawthorne’s novel warns that the greater the intentions, the greater the peril, since “the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism” (71). The word “egotism” is key. It isn’t actually true that Hollingsworth lives for his ideals, though he may have started that way. He lives for himself. To apply C. S. Lewis’s tripartite terminology in The Abolition of Man, when the idealist Head suppresses or cuts out the relational and principled Heart, the Head won’t be able to subdue the self-seeking Belly on its own.

The language of Head and Heart is a good segue to the other novel I have in mind, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). (I only just now realized this novel was published exactly a century after Hawthorne’s. Uncanny!) In fact, Ellison uses the terms “head” and “heart” frequently enough that I wonder if he had read The Abolition of Man, which came out a few years prior.* At one point, the unnamed narrator who calls himself “an invisible man” gives an impassioned impromptu speech about an elderly couple being evicted from their apartment. He says of the woman that “She’s let her religion go to her head, but we all know that religion is for the heart, not for the head” (p. 278 in the 1995 Vintage International edition). His speech draws the attention of a Socialist-type organization called the Brotherhood, who want to use his oratory to build inroads into the Black community in Harlem—although some in the Brotherhood are worried his speeches are too emotional, even anti-intellectual. One of the brothers says his debut rally speech “was the antithesis of the scientific approach. Ours is a reasonable point of view. … The audience isn’t thinking, it’s yelling its head off” (350, italics added).

For the rest of his time with them, the Invisible Man will be at odds with the organization because he is not willing to sacrifice the claims of the Heart for the agenda of the Head. The leader who recruited him, Brother Jack, believes that “There’s hope that our wild but effective speaker may be tamed”—hope that the Head can subdue the Heart—so “For the next few months our new brother is to undergo a period of intense study and indoctrination under the guidance of Brother Hambro” (351). Later, Brother Jack is even more explicit: “you were not hired to think. … you were hired to talk” (469-470). But the indoctrination fails. The Invisible Man cannot stop thinking in ways that run counter to a rigid ideology that has no real sympathy for his own people. Ultimately he realizes the Brotherhood does not care about him or the Black community at all except as pawns in a much larger game. Brother Hambro tells him at their last meeting that “there’s nothing to be done about [the violence in Harlem following the death of a Brotherhood member] that wouldn’t upset the larger plan. It’s unfortunate, Brother, but your members will have to be sacrificed” (501). Brother Hambro goes on to say, “We follow the laws of reality, so we make sacrifices” (502). To the Brotherhood, only the Head—or more specifically, the heads of the Brotherhood committee—has access to “the laws of reality” and the wisdom to know how to obey them. The Heart is expendable, as it was for Mr. Hollingsworth, and once again the result is not enlightenment and progress but manipulation and betrayal.

[*Here are two suspiciously Abolition of Man-like statements spoken by people in the Brotherhood: [1]  “You have to be pure in heart and you have to be disciplined in body and mind” (394). [2] “At the proper moment science will stop us. And of course we as individuals must sympathetically debunk ourselves” (505).]

They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait

Timothy Lawrence and I have wondered whether George Lucas had ever read C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and whether it influenced Star Wars. But now I’m also wondering whether he ever read Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and whether it influenced his contributions to Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

Initially this thought occurred to me because both the novel and the film have a group of villains, who, to help them take over the world, try to harness a higher power, even though this is at odds with their ideology. The anti-Christian N.I.C.E. wants to use Merlin for his magic, but magic is antithetical to their stated scientism, and Merlin, it turns out, is a Christian. The anti-Jewish Nazis want to use the Ark of the Covenant, which necessitates that they perform a “Jewish ritual.” In the violent finales of both the novel and the film, the cynical, impious villains are destroyed by the very power they sought.

But that last point of overlap led me to consider what may be a more important thematic connection between That Hideous Strength and Raiders. The fact is that neither Dr. Ransom and Co. nor Dr. Jones and Co. have to do almost anything to foil the N.I.C.E. or the Nazis. Dr. Ransom sends people to find Merlin before the N.I.C.E. do, but Merlin finds him. All Ransom does is instruct Merlin what to do and present him to the eldils so they give Merlin the power to destroy the N.I.C.E. And, as some plot-hole sleuths are quick to point out as if it were a weakness of the film, the outcome of Raiders would have been the same no matter what Indy did or didn’t do. He could have stayed home.

But to think that Raiders was supposed to be about Indy defeating the Nazis and instead he turns out to be useless is to entirely miss the point. The great revelation at the end is that the God of Israel does not need any man’s help to defeat His enemies. The point is that Indy moves from, as Tim puts it, “fram[ing] his search for the Ark in purely material, rational terms” to “at least [having] enough holy fear” to know to close his eyes when the Ark is opened. What if Indy is there, not to save the day, but to learn firsthand that our God is in the heavens and He does all that He pleases (Ps. 115:3)?

Ransom’s skeptic friend MacPhee would share Indy’s disdain for “superstitious hocus pocus,” and he’s also the kind of person who would make the above complaint about Raiders of the Lost Ark. In That Hideous Strength, he doesn’t understand why Ransom’s strategy for countering the N.I.C.E. is so passive, so deferential to the eldils (whom MacPhee does not believe in), and so much like just living ordinary lives. He says at one point, “It may have occurred to you to wonder, Mrs. Studdock, how any man in his senses thinks we’re going to defeat a powerful conspiracy by sitting here growing winter vegetables and training performing bears. [OK, that last part isn’t so ordinary.] It is a question I have propounded on more than one occasion. The answer is always the same; we’re waiting for orders” (p. 189 in the Scribner 2003 edition).

Then, after Merlin has overthrown the N.I.C.E., MacPhee seems to wonder whether he, too, could have stayed home. He says, “I’d be greatly obliged if any one would tell me what we have done—always apart from feeding the pigs and raising some very decent vegetables.” To which Ransom replies, “You have done what was required of you … You have obeyed and waited” (368). Ransom’s response reminds me of the last line of Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness”: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Waiting on God and being ready to act at a moment’s notice is itself a form of action.

Besides, what MacPhee doesn’t see is that the communal life being cultivated at Ransom’s Manor at St. Anne’s is a valuable form of resistance to the cruel, manipulative culture of the N.I.C.E. HQ at Belbury. At Belbury, animals and people are tortured; at St. Anne’s, they are rehabilitated. At Belbury, people are used and turned on each other; at St. Anne’s, they are cared for and submit to one another in love and respect. I like Jake Meador’s recent observation at Mere Orthodoxy that the community at St. Anne’s is practicing something like the Benedict Option, which is say that Lewis puts the emphasis on spiritual formation within Christian community instead of on political action. 

It may seem like Indiana Jones is superfluous in his own story, or like the only characters that matter on the side of the good guys are Ransom and Merlin. Likewise, we may question what good it does to follow Paul’s command to lead quiet lives (1 Thess. 4:13) in a world of so much noise, when maybe we could try pulling the levers of political power to bring it down a few decibels. I say all this not to endorse quietism, but to ask whether we trust that God has the power to vindicate His justice in His own time and in His own way, and whether we are striving to first be faithful in the little things He entrusts to us, things as simple as growing winter vegetables.

Men with Chests

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis famously coined the phrase “men without chests” (p. 26 in the 2000 HarperOne edition). But what does it mean to be a man with a chest? What is the Chest?

Lewis is adapting Plato’s idea of the tripartite soul. In his Republic, Plato says the human soul has: [1] a rational, philosophic part (literally, the wisdom-loving part); [2] an appetitive part (the pleasure-loving part, though more specifically the money-loving part because money helps satisfy all the other appetites); and [3] a spirited part, which loves honor and victory (p. 251 in the 1992 Hackett edition). According to the Republic, the spirited part should submit to the rational part, and together the rational and spirited parts should rule over the appetitive part (117). And Lewis agrees with all this: “Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’” (24). Yet Lewis makes two significant changes. 

First, Lewis brings in an analogy between the soul and the body that Plato does not use: “The [rational] head rules the [appetitive] belly through the [spirited] chest” (24). More on that in moment. And second, he expands the range of functions encompassed by the concept of the spirited element. 

The index of my copy of Republic tells me the Greek word used for ‘spirit’—thumos—also means ‘anger’ (299). And in fact, Plato puts a lot of emphasis on how it is “the spirited part by which we get angry” (115; cf. 251). Those who live for honor or take honor the most seriously are proud, and the proud can be quite, well, touchy. Plato acknowledges that, at worst, the spirited part can be “hard and harsh” and marked by “savageness.” But, at best, if the spirited part is rightly channeled, the anger and pride that are aroused whenever honor is at stake can produce courage, one of Plato’s four cardinal virtues (87). 

Lewis also associates the spirited element or Chest with courage, using the example of a soldier in battle to show how, without having a courageous Chest, the soldier will not be able to fulfill his duty while under fire (24). But Lewis, being a Christian who knows Christ’s command to turn the other cheek and who has read Paul’s celebration of humility—and above all, has been soul-transformed by the gospel of grace—cannot give anger and pride the controlling interest in the Chest. Instead of associating the spirited element with anger, pride, and honor, Lewis associates it with the terms “trained emotions,” “Magnanimity,” and “Sentiment” (24-25). He says the Chest is “the seat … of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments” (24-25). In most people, anger is volatile, not stable. I think we can infer from Lewis that the person who follows his anger all the time is controlled by his appetitive part, not by his spirited part as Plato supposed. But if anger were reined in by reason and habit and if it was only heeded and acted on when the emotion corresponded with reality—if someone could be angry only about those things that rightly merit anger, and in the right degrees—then anger would be at home in the Chest. But it wouldn’t be the only emotion at home there. So what else is included in Lewis’s conception of the Chest?

To approach a clearer, fuller answer to that question, I’ve found it helpful to ask, first, Why does he use the word “Chest” and not “Heart”? Actually, he does use “heart” at least once in the text. He says: “The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it” (19). But within a few pages he has swapped out “Heart” for “Chest,” and he clearly prefers the latter term. Why? Is it just that for modern readers the heart has all kinds of mushy, sappy connotations that Lewis wants to avoid? Maybe, but I think there’s more to it. The image of the Chest is richer, more complex. Consider basic anatomy. The chest houses the heart, yes, but it also houses the lungs, and both are held in place and protected by bones: the spine and the rib cage. What if Lewis has all these parts of the physical chest in mind? The Chest encompasses the heart, which we popularly associate with emotions and conscience, but it can also encompass the lungs by which we breathe—and in the Bible, breath is linked to spirit—and it also recalls the English idiom we use to tell people to have courage: “show some backbone.” Thus, the Chest concept retains Plato’s emphasis on courage and honor while making room for other virtues and pointing to how we are ultimately spiritual beings, not just spirited ones. God breathed life into us so we could know and love Him. 

So what does it mean to be man (or woman!) with a chest? It means having strong bones, strong lungs, and a strong heart. It means having “the harder virtues” we need when the going gets tough and painful self-denial is called for (24). It means living in reliance on God just as we live by the breath he gives us moment-by-moment. And it means having an emotional life that is rightly ordered, meaning our feelings are appropriate and proportionate to the realities and situations that evoke them.

(An aside: Likening the parts of the soul to the physical body underlines why we must be led by the rational and spirited parts and not by the appetitive part. The human brain, just like the heart and lungs, is shielded by bones. The stomach is not. It is the most vulnerable of these essential organs. In the same way, the human soul is most vulnerable to falling into vice by way of the appetites.)

This post is indebted to recent conversations with Tim Lawrence about the tripartite soul, and to a Malcolm Guite lecture on Herbert’s poem “Prayer (I)” that I had the privilege of attending a few days ago. It was when Guite explained the line that prayer is “God’s breath in man returning to his birth” that he pointed out how in Scripture breath and spirit are inextricably linked; that was when I had the “Aha!” moment that resulted in this post.  

New Article: Reading with the Jedi

I have a new article, titled “The Dead Speak!: Reading with the Jedi,” that was published today over at the Mere Orthodoxy blog. It combines several of my favorite things: Star Wars, reading and reading ethics, and quoting from C. S. Lewis and Alan Jacobs. I am grateful to Tim Lawrence for his feedback on the early drafts, and to Jake Meador for publishing the article.

Love and Death in Pirates of the Caribbean

In my post yesterday, I sketched out a proposed chiastic structure for Dead Man’s Chest, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with what I identified as the turning point:

Scene X: The Kraken attacks ship #2; Elizabeth’s dress is blamed for the attack but it’s Will’s fault

The turning point should be a thematically significant moment if it is to be at the heart of a true ring composition. I didn’t think this one scene could carry that much weight. It’s a major action set-piece, but doesn’t have much going for it narratively. Later in the day I talked with Tim Lawrence about it, and he helped me identify that the turning point should actually be two scenes: this one, and the scene preceding it. So here’s a revised theory of the turning point:

Scene X’: Norrington learns how he can get a pardon from Becket; Elizabeth, using Jack’s compass, realizes she has an attraction for Jack

Scene X”: The Kraken attacks ship #2; Elizabeth’s dress is blamed for the attack but it’s Will’s fault

Adding Scene X’ fits with the patterns I’ve already traced. It brings in another key Norrington moment to complement Scenes B’ (arrest warrant) and B” (pardon); it sets up Jack and Elizabeth’s flirtation in Scene G” (which deepens Jack’s betrayal of Will in Scene G’); and it is also relevant to the ring because it involves Jack’s compass, complementing Scenes D’ (compass confused) and D” (compass clear).

But why does the turning point need to include both X’ and X”? It’s because X’ complements A’, and X” complements A”:

Scene A’: A wedding without a groom (teacups filled with rain)

Scene A”: A wake without a body (mugs filled with grog)

The film opens with Will and Elizabeth’s wedding being cancelled because Becket arrests them for treason. Then, in Scene X’, we realize that Jack is another threat to Will and Elizabeth’s ability to marry. Immediately following this, Scene X” gives a preview of how the Kraken will finally destroy the Black Pearl and consume Jack. Then, the final scene of the film shows the survivors grieving that event, a fate they fought throughout the film to avoid. So Scenes X’ and X” really are the twinned turning point scenes of the film because they are also twinned with the film’s bookends.

More than that, this ring composition makes sense for the film—it’s not something I’m imposing on the film arbitrarily—because the whole story, at heart, is about characters who try to avoid marriage, death, or both. The beginning, middle, and end points of the ring only reinforce this. 

The film begins with a wedding without a groom. Something comes in between a man and his commitment to a woman, and all that this commitment would entail: fidelity, stability, fatherhood. In Will’s case, the hindrance was unwanted. But Davy Jones cut his own heart out so he could forsake his beloved, and although Bootstrap Bill stuck around long enough to father Will, he did not stay behind to raise him. Jones and Bootstrap chose the supposed freedom represented by the sea and by piracy over the responsibility of the hearth. In the turning point of the film, Elizabeth realizes she is likewise tempted to bail on her own wedding. For a moment, the desire to be with a pirate (and thus become a pirate herself) is more compelling.

The film ends with a funeral without a body. Yet just as no one can really miss their own wedding, no one can really miss their own funeral. In the film, people keep trying to forestall the inevitable, with disastrous results. Dying sailors sign on to join Davy Jones’ crew so they can delay Judgment Day by one hundred years—and proceed to experience one hundred years of hell on earth. Jack keeps scheming after ways to not have to die in exchange for the extra thirteen years Jones gave him—and how many sailors have to die for his folly before he finally runs out of schemes? The turning point scene in which Will watches the Kraken take down a merchant ship gives Will ideas for how to stop the Kraken from taking down the Black Pearl, but those strategies can only buy Jack a little more time. The Kraken that swallowed Jack’s hat is like the crocodile that swallowed Captain Hook’s clock: a living reminder of the shortness of time and the certainty of death.

But how do these two themes—marriage and death—relate? What’s the connection between the wedding and the funeral, and between Elizabeth’s choice between two men and Jack’s looming appointment with the Kraken? Here’s my theory: marriage is one way of dying to self to serve the good of another, and thus avoid a different and far worse kind of death. Jones, Bootstrap, and Jack each refuse sacrificial love so they can live to serve themselves, and the end result for each of them is death, not just physical but spiritual. A man could skip his wedding, but if that is a harbinger of a life-long pattern of living for himself, the result won’t be a funeral without a body, but a funeral without mourners, and worse, an eternity alone. 

Fortunately for Jack, in the eleventh hour he realizes he cannot abandon his friends and crew, and he willingly risks his own life to save them. This doesn’t keep the Kraken at bay, but it does mean Jack is mourned as “a good man.” In contrast, the heart of Davy Jones locked away in a chest—a refusal of death by love—reminds me of this passage from C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves (HarperOne, 2017): 

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and you heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell” (155-156, italics added).

The choice facing all these characters is the same one facing all of us: Death being inevitable, when and how do we want to die? We can either submit ourselves to small daily deaths now, or we can die eternally later.