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Movie Prompt: First and Second Things
I’ve been thinking a good deal about Surprised by Oxford and Carolyn Drake’s disappointment at her abandonment by her father. I often see in movies the heart wrenching dilemma faced by a parent where a child is terrified by an event that just happened, be it illness, violence, or some other trauma. The parent, desperate to allay the child’s fear, looks the child in the eye and tells them, “I will…
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Until quite modern times — I think until the time of the Romantics — nobody ever suggested that literature and the arts were an end in themselves. They 'belonged to the ornamental part of life', they provided 'innocent diversion', or else they 'reinforced our manners' or 'incited us to virtue' or glorified the gods. The great music had been written for Masses, the great pictures painted to fill up a space on the wall of a noble patron's dining room or to kindle devotion in a church; the great tragedies were produced either by religious poets in honour of Dionysus or by commercial poets to entertain Londoners on half-holidays. It was only in the nineteenth century that we became aware of the full dignity of art. We began to 'take it seriously'… But the result seems to have been a dislocation of the aesthetic life in which little is left for us but high-minded works which fewer and fewer people want to read or hear or see, and the 'popular' works of which both those who make them and those who enjoy them are half ashamed… By valuing too highly a real, but subordinate good, we have come near to losing that good itself.
C.S. Lewis, First and Second Things
Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things.
C.S. Lewis, “First and Second Things,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 1994), p. 280.
Of course this law has been discovered before, but it will stand re-discovery. It may be stated as follows: every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small good or partial good for which the sacrifice was made.
CS Lewis
