To esteem or to sin

C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man comments that:

"Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it--believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt."

Lewis here is fighting the tendency to regard all emotions as subjective by modern thinkers. If I see a waterfall as big as Niagara cascading down a cliff with a thundrous roar that makes my own thoughts seem unable to voice their praise to its majesty, any thing I say about the cataract by modern esteem is labeled as subjective. There is no objective reaction to a merely "materialistic" waterfall. It is merely the process of gravity working on water, albeit on a larger scale. The "thing in itself", i.e. the naked physics of waterfalls, do not have anything to do with emotional responses in the creatures, those are provided only by the creature.

Lewis' view is that a waterfall that impressive "merits" our esteem. To not be moved by the roaring conduit of water is to sin against being human. It is a mark of sanity to be moved by what is moving, to love what is lovely, and to hate what is abhorrent. The "thing in itself" is not naked physics, but a panorama of God's creative glory on display. It has a being bigger than mere physics can expound, and for a person to not see the glory of God dancing on the water as it cascades over the spillway is to blind our eyes to what is our rightful response: worship not of waterfalls, but of God.

I think, though Lewis would disagree with many of their implications, this view is in complete accordance with the Puritans. They believed certain things merited the utmost love just by their own "being-ness". They believed Christianity was a religion of heightened affections over the glory of God revealed in nature and in Scripture, and to fail to let one's affections be raised by it would be tantamount to blasphemy, or profaning the glory of God by holding it as trifling and flimsy.

"For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived...For although they [men] knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened."

To not properly love what is lovely ruins mankind on many levels. Henry Scougal says, "love must needs be miserable, and full of trouble and disquietude, when there is not worth and excellency enough in the object to answer the vastness of its capacity."

To illustrate, if I refuse to pin my awe on that massive waterfall, and instead try to be fascinated by a mud puddle, I make for myself a level of misery as great as the waterfall is above the mud puddle. For whatever lesser object I set my approval on, I transgress against my created nature to behold that which is great. I don't choose whether or not to "esteem" the waterfall, I respond to its being by either praising or sinning. I do not grant God a measure of worship, I either worship with all my heart or sin with the level of my heart that does not rise up in praise.

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.

Francis Thompson "The Kingdom of God"