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A to Z with C.S. Lewis: W is for War

by Lou Markos on May 9, 2013

purple heart

The eighteen-year-old C.S. Lewis was hardly what one would call an athletic young man.  He was a failure at sports and spent his school days avoiding the company of upper-class athletes.  And yet, in 1917, the bookish Lewis chose to enlist in the First World War.  I say chose because Lewis, as an Irish citizen (he grew up in Belfast), was not subjected to the draft.  Nevertheless, he served and fought in the trenches, returning to England a year later as a wounded veteran.

Though he was too old to fight in WWII, he supported the war effort in every way he could, including speaking over the BBC radio and giving live talks to the RAF.  In 1940, he even addressed a pacifist society in Oxford on the reasons why he (Lewis) was not a pacifist (his speech is anthologized in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses).

In his talk, Lewis respectfully reminds his audience that when Christ instructed his followers to turn the other cheek, he likely meant the command to refer to personal situations between people and their neighbors.  There is no indication that the command was meant to apply to all situations at all times.  Surely, Lewis argues, “turn the other cheek” does not forbid me from coming to the rescue of someone who is being chased down by a maniac with a knife!

Christ calls upon us not to harbor a spirit of self-righteous hatred and retaliation toward those who have injured us.  But that does not mean that magistrates, parents, teachers, and soldiers should suffer themselves to be struck by citizens, children, students, or enemy combatants.

Besides, Christ himself showered his greatest praise upon a Roman military officer (Luke 7:9).  Likewise, when John the Baptist was approached by soldiers in search of spiritual advice, he did not tell them to quit their jobs—he merely told them not to extort money or accuse people falsely (Luke 3:14).  Both Peter (1 Peter 2:14) and Paul (Romans 13:4) called upon the early church to obey magistrates, who do not bear the sword in vain.

In Mere Christianity (III.7), Lewis makes some of the same arguments, though this time he calls on his readers to examine their own hearts carefully.  All killing, Lewis insists, is not murder: a proper translation of the Ten Commandments would read “Thou shalt not murder,” not “Thou shalt not kill.”  Still, if we ourselves hear about the death of enemy soldiers or the execution of a criminal and rejoice in the loss of life, then we have fallen outside the high call of Christ.

“We may kill if necessary,” writes Lewis, “but we must not hate and enjoy hating.  We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it.  In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed.”

Yes, Lewis knew and felt that war was a dreadful thing.  No one who fought in the killing fields of WWI could doubt that.  Still, Lewis believed that if we could remove the hatred and resentment from our soul, if we could free ourselves from brooding on revenge, that war could be approached courageously with “a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness.”

Lewis was no fan of war, but he was unashamed to champion the beauty of the knight, of the medieval Crusader, of the “Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause.” 

A to Z with C.S. Lewis: V is for Virtue

by Lou Markos on May 2, 2013

Raphael [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

It is a sad thing that our modern world has redefined virtue in negative terms.  Rather than define a virtuous man as someone who actively practices the positive virtues of prudence, courage, justice, and temperance, we turn things on their head and celebrate the goodness of those who don’t succumb to folly, don’t betray an excessive amount of cowardice, don’t violate anyone’s rights, and don’t drink or smoke.

Such is the case with the four classical virtues, but it is even more so with the three theological ones.  We celebrate those who stay true to the course, who press on, who don’t give up, not those who have put their faith in an unseen Creator and their hope in his promises.  Even when we do praise faith and hope, it is generally a vague, non-creedal faith in humanity or fate or the universe and a hazy, content-less hope in, well, something or other.

As for love, Lewis was fond of critiquing his age for replacing the positive love (caritas, agape) of the Bible with a negative form of unselfishness.  Although the highest pagans (Aristotle) and the great Christian ethicists (Aquinas) taught that virtue is a habit gained by practicing virtuous actions, we of a more “enlightened” age have embraced a distinctly “hands off” ethos.

Rather than actively love our neighbor, we unselfishly allow him to live whatever way he wants to, even if his life choices are self-destructive.  Had Lewis lived today, I think he would have said that the reigning virtue is not unselfishness but tolerance—a pseudo-virtue that also manifests itself, not in active charity, but in a negative acquiescence to the “rights” of others.

In Screwtape Letters (#26), junior tempter Wormwood is counseled by his more experienced uncle to teach his human patient “to surrender benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing them.”   Though this strategy of replacing love with unselfishness may look the same on the outside, it has a very different effect on the soul of the one surrendering the benefits.  Far from moving out of himself toward the other (which is what love calls us to do), the practitioner of the negative virtue of unselfishness uses the other person as a way of bolstering his own sense of piety and self-righteousness.

Actually, if truth be told, love and unselfishness are also received in a radically different way by the object of the proffered charity.  In the former case, the recipient is assured that another human being cares deeply about him; in the latter, he feel manipulated and used.

G. K. Chesterton once defined a humanitarian as someone who loves humanity but hates human beings.  The person who is on the receiving end of unselfishness knows instinctively, to paraphrase a line from Letter 26, that he is being treated as a sort of lay figure upon which the would-be humanitarian exercises his petty, self-centered altruisms.

When the virtues are enacted in a positive, healthy spirit, they draw us closer to God and our neighbor.  But when they are turned back upon themselves as a method for bolstering our ego and self esteem, they ensnare and isolate us.  The false humanitarian ends up feeling contempt for his fellow man because he cannot move outside his own desperate need to feel good about himself.  But the virtuous man who practices true love comes to truly love the people he serves.

A to Z with C.S. Lewis: U is for Universalism

by Lou Markos on April 25, 2013

Near the end of The Last Battle, a noble Calormene soldier named Emeth dies and comes before Aslan, the Christ of Narnia.  Although Emeth hails from a distant land that worships a false god named Tash (rather than the true Aslan), and although Emeth has served Tash all his life, when he meets Aslan, he is welcomed by the Great Lion and invited into heaven.

Of all the passages in the voluminous writings of C. S. Lewis, none has caused more controversy and confusion than this suggestion by the orthodox Christian Lewis that salvation can be attained outside of Christ.  Indeed, when I speak about Lewis, the most common question that I am asked is whether or not the episode with Emeth reveals Lewis to be a Universalist in disguise: that is, someone who believes that all who practice their religion faithfully—whether they be Christians or Jews, Muslims or Hindus—will be saved.

It does not.  Had Emeth come before Aslan and requested directions to the Tash part of heaven, and had Aslan obliged, then Lewis would be a Universalist.  But that is not what happens in the episode.  Quite to the contrary, when Emeth stands before Aslan, he realizes and accepts that Tash is false and Aslan true, and that the deep spiritual desire he has followed all his life has found its fulfillment in Aslan.  He proves this by falling to his knees in worship.

Like the Magi of the Christmas story, he recognizes that Aslan (not Tash) is the end of his journey.  In response, Aslan assures him: “‘unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly.  For all find what they truly seek.’”

Now, it must be admitted that though this is not universalism, it does border on a concept that the vast majority of believers would reject (rightly) as unbiblical: post-mortem (“after death”) salvation.  Orthodox Christian teaching states that all decisions for or against Christ must be made before we die.  Once we pass to the other side, all bets are off.  Though many Protestants think that the Catholic belief in purgatory allows for a second chance at salvation, it does not.  In Catholicism, those who reach purgatory are already saved; they just need to be sanctified.

So is Lewis an advocate of post-mortem salvation?  This time I must be a bit more nuanced with my answer.  Yes, Emeth is technically dead when he accepts Aslan’s offer of salvation, but that does not mean he is being given a “second chance.”

As Lewis explains in a number of his works, God lives in eternity, not in time.  Too often, people think that eternity means time going on forever, when what it really means is that time itself does not exist.  The closest we come to a perception of eternity, Lewis writes, is our experience of the present moment.  For the present is the point where time touches eternity.

The moment Emeth dies is an eternal moment—and that eternal moment contains all the other moments of his life.  He accepts Aslan (Christ) in that eternal moment, because all of the other moments have been building up to that acceptance.  And once he does, all the other moments become reoriented around that moment of decision.  That is why, in The Great Divorce, Lewis says heaven and hell work backwards.  For those who accept Christ in that eternal moment, it will seem, not that they have just entered heaven, but that they have always been there.

A to Z with C.S. Lewis: T is for Tao

by Lou Markos on April 18, 2013

Laozi and Kong Fuzi

Mere Christianity is Lewis’s best known and most complete work of apologetics.  In it he begins with a general argument for theism (the existence of God) and then expands that argument into a specific defense of the Christian gospel.  From there, he goes on to explain and support the central moral and theological principles of Christianity.

Although Lewis believed firmly in the authority of scripture, he knew that many of his modern readers did not share his belief.  Accordingly, Lewis carefully builds his apologetical arguments on common ground: on facts and observations about our world and ourselves that all people, regardless of their religious beliefs, can see, understand, and acknowledge.

That is why he begins Mere Christianity with an unexpected statement that seems, on the surface, to have little to do with a defense of the Christian faith.  Did you ever notice, Lewis writes, that when two people disagree about something, they argue about it rather than fight?  Though most of us likely did not notice this phenomenon before, the moment we read Lewis’s statement, the truth of it becomes apparent. Of course we argue instead of fight!

And that’s when Lewis hooks us.  Whether we realize it or not, two people cannot argue about something unless they agree (often unconsciously) to a fixed standard that transcends them both.  When we argue, we take that standard for granted and then make a case (sometimes rationally, sometimes irrationally) that our side of the argument better approximates that standard.

In a case where two former business partners are suing each other for fraud, neither party says: “yes, I swindled my partner, and I was right to do so.”  If he did, he would not be sent to jail; he would be sent to an asylum.  Now, one party might partially confess to fraud, but then he would follow the confession by offering mitigating circumstances to show that the “fraud” was actually justified.  In other words, he still holds to the accepted standard that fraud is wrong.

On the basis of our shared experience of such ethical debates, Lewis posits that a universal, cross-cultural moral code exists and is binding.  In The Abolition of Man, he gives that law code a name: the Tao.  Many Christians are confused by this: why should Lewis borrow a word from Taoism (a branch of Buddhism) to bolster his case for the Christian faith?  The answer is simple: to show that all people (east and west) recognize the Tao, even though they continually break it.

Many relativists will balk against Lewis’s assertion of the Tao, claiming that morality veers wildly from culture to culture and is a man-made (rather than a divinely-given) thing that alters from age to age.  But those same so-called relativists will quickly change their tune if someone robs them.  “It was wrong of you to do that,” they will say, and if the person who robbed them says, “in my culture it is OK for me to steal,” the relativist will not accept the excuse.

The fact is everyone knows the Tao exists, for whatever our own personal ideology, we expect other people to treat us in accordance with the Tao.  Indeed, if there were no Tao, then no court could have tried the Nazis or Saddam Hussein or the perpetrators of apartheid.  The Tao does exist, but if it exists, then it makes necessary a director of the Tao who transcends all times and cultures.  It requires, in short, a super-natural Creator who inscribed the Tao into our conscience.

A to Z with C.S. Lewis: S is for The Sexes

by Lou Markos on April 11, 2013

 

Venus and Mars

Young people are taught many damaging things in our great secular universities.  From Marxism to Freudianism, moral relativism to postmodern deconstruction, their heads are filled with insidious, anti-humanistic theories that, when carried out to their logical conclusion, cause chaos, confusion, and despair on both the social and personal level.

And yet, I would argue that the most damaging thing they are taught slips under the radar of most attentive parents.  In thousands of sociology and psychology classrooms across our nation, students are taught that there is no such thing as masculinity and femininity.  That our sexual natures are not innate and God-given.  That the only reason boys and girls are different is that we give boys trucks to play with and girls dolls to play with.

Though any free-thinking, open-minded parent who has raised a boy and a girl knows that this is patent nonsense—that boys and girls manifest their inborn, hard-wired masculinity and femininity from a very early age—this absurd and poisonous theory of the sexes is taught as gospel truth throughout the western world.  Indeed, as a way of adv
ancing their false view of the sexes, feminists insisted on doing away altogether with the word “sexes.”

Rather than speak, as people have spoken for centuries, about the male and female sex, they have forced academia and the media to speak of the male and female gender.  They don’t like the word “sex” because it connotes an essential link between the masculine/feminine body and the masculine/feminine soul—and that is a reality they are desperate to obscure.  Gender carries with it no such connotation.  Gender is not something we were created with but a social construct that is reinforced by cultural mores and behavioral expectations.

As a Christian who not only believed the clear and simple teachings of the Bible (namely, that God created us male and female) but who possessed an intimate understanding of human nature, C. S. Lewis never succumbed to the feminist attack on masculinity and femininity.  He knew and celebrated the essential differences between the sexes: a celebration that is beautifully expressed in Prince Caspian.  Narnia, held captive by the “post-Christian” Telmarines, cannot be rescued and renewed until Peter and Edmund exercise their masculine gifts to defeat the Telmarine army while Susan and Lucy exercise their feminine gifts to wake up the trees from their deep slumber.

However, Lewis’s crowning statement of the distinct but complementary natures of masculinity and femininity comes in Perelandra.  Near the end of the novel, Lewis allows us to gaze on the angelic guardians of Perelandra (Venus) and Malacandra (Mars).  In keeping with the ancient association of Venus with the female principle and Mars with the male, Lewis discovers in them a masculinity and femininity that reaches deeper than society or biology or language can fathom.

Although the two angels are not physically male and female, they embody the essence of masculinity and femininity.  Thus, whereas Malacandra has “the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance,” Perelandra’s eyes open “inward, as if they were the curtained gateway to a world of waves and murmurings and wandering airs.”  For, Lewis both forms of seeing are necessary; together, they bring wholeness.

A to Z with C.S. Lewis: R is for Reason

by Lou Markos on April 4, 2013

Faith and Reason United

John Paul II’s papal encyclical, “On the Relationship between Faith and Reason” (Fides et Ratio) is an important work that should be read by all thinking Catholics and Protestants who care about the life of the mind.  And yet, though I am a great proponent of the encyclical, I feel a great sadness that it had to be written in the first place!

In the centuries before the Enlightenment seized control of our wisest and best educated scholars, no one would have been surprised to see the words “faith” and “reason” placed side by side.  After all, the Catholic Church invented the university, and the Christian worldview shaped some of the finest minds in history: Augustine, Dante, Aquinas, Luther, and Pascal, to name but a few.  Likewise, the scientific achievements of such men as Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, Francis Bacon, Kepler, and Newton were all underwritten by their faith in a super-natural Creator.

Had C. S. Lewis grown up in the medieval or renaissance periods, his training in logic and rhetoric would have been carried out in direct conversation with the doctrines of Christianity.  As a citizen of the modern world, he was trained instead by an atheistic tutor named Kirkpatrick who used reason to inoculate Lewis’s mind against religious “superstitions.”

But life has its little ironies.  When Lewis became a Christian, he did not forget Kirkpatrick’s teachings.  Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, Lewis marshaled the full weight of logic and reason to defend the faith from its modern detractors.  With great boldness, Lewis restored a great truth that had been forgotten: namely, that reason is on the side of the angels.

In Miracles, for example, Lewis argues that naturalism (the belief that nature is all that there is and that nothing super-natural exists) is self-refuting.  If we are merely products of evolutionary forces guided (or “un-guided”) by time and chance, then we have no reason to trust our senses or our powers of logic to arrive at the truth.  In fact, if naturalism is true, then truth itself becomes impossible—for truth stands outside nature, but the naturalist says nothing stands outside nature.

The modern naturalist too often overlooks the fact that the laws of naturalism rest on abstract principles that lie outside the supposedly closed system of nature.  To formulate such principles we must step outside the flow of nature to achieve a perspective that is, quite literally, super-natural.  But if naturalism is true, then we cannot do that.  If the naturalists are right and nature is a vast, impersonal, unguided mechanism, then how can we have any knowledge of that mechanism?  Surely an objective judge who is not pre-committed to a naturalistic worldview would conclude that our knowledge and understanding of nature cannot be a part of nature.

So Lewis explains it in Miracles, but it is in his Screwtape Letters that he drives the message home with a bracing wit that is not soon forgotten.  Again and again, senior devil Screwtape advises his nephew to do whatever he can to prevent his patient from engaging his reason.

The job of the devil is not to make us think but to fuddle our minds—to keep us endlessly fixed on the daily stream of life.  God, in contrast, would fix our attention on things we cannot see, on laws and theorems and principles that transcend the stream.  It was God, Screwtape concedes, who created reason and logic; against it, the devils can only offer propaganda, jargon, and spin.

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