270. How Did C. S. Lewis Fight for Living and Learning in Wartime?
Today it appears cooler heads have cancelled the apocalypse.[1. Photo by Emanuel Kypreos on Unsplash.] But were we ever really in that level of danger? This sense of dread feels new. But as C. S. Lewis once wrote, we must practice timeless wisdom when we’re living in an atomic age: “If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts.” Here and elsewhere, how does Lewis encourage us in the art of living and learning in wartime?
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Prologue
- Readers have an ongoing love/hate relationship with fictional wars.
- We know war is terrible in reality, but without conflict, we have no story.
- We’ll explore three ways people react to war, with Lewis’s clear responses.
1. We could retreat to pacifism.
- As a teen, I met my first “pacifist,” an avuncular young fellow at a seminary.
- Nice chap. Well-meant. Said he can’t defend his family against burglars.
- Many listeners may feel similarly, and I do want to respect their thinking.
- But it’s hard to respect someone’s “ethics” if they’re not from Scripture.
- I feel the same way about war-obsessives (see chapter 2) as about this.
- Yet we come to hear Lewis, like his essay “Why I Am Not a Pacifist” (video):
To call [war] useless because it did not also cure slums and unemployment is like coming up to a man who has just succeeded in defending himself from a man-eating tiger and saying, “It’s no good, old chap. This hasn’t really cured your rheumatism!” On the test of fact, then, I find the Pacifist position weak. It seems to me that history is full of useful wars as well as of useless wars.
