'Do you really think there are no sins of intellect?'
'There are indeed, Dick. There is hide-bound prejudice, and intellectual dishonesty, and timidity, and stagnation. But honest opinions fearlessly followed--they are not sins.'
'I know we used to talk that way. I did it too until the end of my life when I became what you call narrow. It all turns on what are honest opinions.'
'Mine certainly were. They were not only honest but heroic. I asserted them fearlessly. When the doctrine of the Resurrection ceased to commend itself to the critical faculties which God had given me, I openly rejected it. I preached my famous sermon. I defied the whole chapter. I took every risk.'
'What risk? What was at all likely to come of it except what actually came--popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric?'...
'Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment's real resistance to the loss of our faith?'
--from The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis (Chapter 5)
While reading this passage last night, I was struck by how timeless this lesson is. It clearly crystallizes something that we all fall victim to quite frequently, at least I do--intellectual hubris. How often do we see someone stand up and proclaim their bravery for speaking truth to power, standing up to The Man, or shunning society's bourgeois norms when in fact they are simply doing what every one else around them is doing? You see it in the people ranting about censorship in the pages of from our most respected periodicals. I see it in my neighbors who think they are brave for wearing their Kerry or Obama pins as if they were in danger of suffering the kind of looks and snarls they quickly give me for wearing my Bush pins.
But one cannot look only to others without becoming guilty of it as well. It is not just smug Marxists, class warriors, diversity mongers, and atheistic zealots who fall victim to intellectual pride. It is just as easy for a Christian to fall in love not with their Faith, but with their Faith in comparison to those around them. It is just easy for an academic traditionalist with his aversion to po-mo fads to look down disdainfully on his omphaloskeptic colleagues. How much pride we take in being different!
But are we, at base, really different? How much of our heterodoxy stems from true reflection and how much of it stems from the vanity of thinking ourselves different and thus better than those around us? Personally, when I ask myself this question, I’m not always pleased with the answer.
