C.S. Lewis made the case for moral absolutes in his 1946 essay “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans.” “A better moral code can only mean one which comes nearer to some real or absolute code,” he observed. “One map of New York can be better than another only if there is a real New York for it to be truer to.”
The insight is as true for comparisons of feeling as of fact. Lewis argued that emotions must be trained. In “The Abolition of Man,” he wrote that the head rules the belly through the chest. The heart mediates between will and appetite and directs human action toward goodness.
Last winter I saw how even the most personal feelings function best when ordered to reality. It happened in my kitchen, during a mother’s attempt to deploy that most subjective of therapeutic tools: the pain scale.
My son Jack, then 12, had returned from basketball practice complaining of pain in his chest. Trying to discern whether it was run-of-the-mill or more serious, Devin, my wife, asked him to quantify the pain: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is it? Is it a 6?”
Jack was incredulous. “No, it’s nothing like that. More like a 1½.” Devin shrugged her shoulders but then thought to ask a critical follow-up question: “Just so I know, what’s a 6 to you?”