That magnificent quote, from CS Lewis’ Sermon, “Learning in War-Time”, is a wonderful paradigm for our times, in this year, the year of the pandemic war.
It was preached at the invitation of Canon T R Milford at Evensong in the twelfth-century Oxford University Church of St. Mary the Virgin on 22 October 1939. As recounted by Walter Hooper, Lewis’ biographer, Milford had been troubled by unrest caused to Oxford undergraduates by World War II, and Lewis, an ex-soldier of WWI and Christian don at Magdalen College, was thought to be the right person to put things in perspective. Lewis was a month shy of 41 yrs old when he gave this sermon and brought a great crowd to St Mary’s. A mimeographed copy of the sermon bearing the title, “None Other Gods”: Culture in War-Time” was given to those present. Lewis took as his text for the sermon Deut. 26:5, ‘A Syrian ready to perish was my father‘.
And thou shalt answer and say before the LORD thy God, A Syrian ready to perish was my father, and he went down into Egypt, and sojourned there, few in number; and he became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous. (Deut. 26:5)
English Revised Version
I have never read CS Lewis even as young avid reader. When Narnia became a household name, and having watched the movie, it was really too late to return to the childhood allegories of the Chronicles.
But I spent some time reading his biography & life because of the tragic death of a friend’s spouse many years’ ago, which brought about a search for a source on the Christian’s grief response and finding closure. CS Lewis’ A Grief Observed was a classic and came highly recommended. Lewis had found love and marriage late in life (in his late 50’s) but his wife Joy Davidman died just after four years of marriage from cancer. He was devastated and wrote this book in pseudonym, as a private narrative of his journey of grief and spiritual consolation. He died at the age of 63, barely 3 years after his wife, the year he retired as Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge. A Grief Observed (1961) would be the true and personal test of a subject on the Christian’s response to grief, suffering and evil, examined by Lewis much earlier in The Problem of Pain (1940). His grief, as revealed in a recent discovery of personal letters written in his last days, persisted to the end, even if his beliefs held strong.
In the particular book of collected addresses first published in 1949, The Weight of Glory, from which the War-Time sermon is published (Harper Collins, 1976), Hooper, who had been his private secretary and literary assistant, and had lived with Lewis for several months in 1963, wrote an introduction which offered a private anecdotal glimpse at this giant of literature and Christian apologetic. He describes him as a ‘ruddy, six-foot, genial man,’ and wrote that one of the most attractive things about him was his uproarious sense of fun.
‘…it would take someone of Boswell’s talents to give the right idea to the completeness of this remarkable man, to show how naturally the humour blended into the more serious side, and indeed was one of the causes of his greatness, his large intellect, and the most open charity I have ever found in anyone. He was a man, many of us have come to see, of common instincts combined with very uncommon abilities…….I just knew – that no matter how long I lived, no matter who else I met, I should never be in the company of such a supremely good human being again.’
Hopper, Introduction, Weight of Glory (HarperCollins, 1976)
Hooper also wrote about Lewis’ many family troubles and difficulties that had to be settled during that time, “ I mentioned these things because it was then I observed something I had never seen in anyone else. Lewis had his share – some would say more than his share – of worries. But having done all in his power to solve them, he left the matter to God and got on with his work and pleasures.”
A retrospective assessment of CS Lewis’ academic career suggests that he was scorned for using his talents as a scholar in the works of Christian apologetics. This is not surprising, given his desire not to separate religious from secular life, as addressed in Learning in War-Time.
There, he viewed man’s goal in life be to fight the ultimate battle between heaven and hell, and to put such humankind events like the war and other disruptions in the right perspective, as has occurred repeatedly in history, If scholars stop their learning on account of these disruptions, mankind would not have progressed. He found to his surprise that the activities of living after conversion does not differentiate substantially from before, but that the spirit had (hopefully) change completely. Thus, he did not subscribe to a separation of sacred and secular life. He found in his personal WW1 experience, similar to the war stories of Tolstoy and Iliad, the closer one was to the frontline, the less preoccupied he was with the war, and the danger of not pursuing the intellectual and aesthetics would be to substitute for a lesser existence.
“I believe our cause to be, as human causes go, very righteous, and I therefore believe it to be a duty to participate in this war. And every duty is a religious duty, and our obligation to perform every duty is therefore absolute. Thus we may have a duty to rescue a drowning man, and perhaps, if we live on a dangerous coast, to learn lifesaving so as to be ready for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our own lives in saving him. But if anyone devoted himself to life-saving in the sense of giving it his total attention –so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone had learned to swim — he would be a monomaniac. The rescue of drowning men is, then a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for.”
Learning in War-Time, CS Lewis
He also explains that his contention was not one of intellectual snobbery, as “the work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly “as to the Lord”,” but to use our talent as appointed for us, whether as scholars or menial workers. “A mole must dig to the glory of God and a cock must crow“.
He thus expressed that the learned life, must be pursued, for “good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.” Here again we see the strong apologetic streak in Lewis and his drive to take the battle against the muddied intellect of ‘heathen mysticism’.
One is aptly reminded of the advent of the Age of Science as exemplified in the philosophy of Descartes, Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), as opposed to the pre-eminent omni-existence of God, I Am, long before mankind, science and the proof of knowledge.
Keeping our mind on what can and should be done for the moment, not worrying about the future, will stop us from straying to the impossible, the improbable or the inevitable. As Lewis ends, “the present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”
Lumix G85; M. Zuiko 40-150mm May 2020.
Excerpts from: C.S. Lewis. The Weight of Glory and other addresses. HarperCollins, 1949, C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd, 1976 revised,
Read also CS Lewis’ Conversion as he recalled it
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