Things Worth Remembering: C.S. Lewis on Keeping Calm in Chaos

[Valin]

The Free Press

In his 1939 sermon at Oxford, ‘Learning in Wartime,’ C.S. Lewis reminded his audience that by forging ahead in the worst of times, we can touch the divine.

Douglas Murray

March 10, 2024

Great oratory chimes across the centuries. I don’t just mean that it rings true to us many years later, but that it gives off resonances and harmonics of speeches that have gone before. 

If anyone carried a knowledge not just of the human heart but human history, it was C.S. Lewis. Born in Belfast in 1898, Lewis was educated in England, served in World War I, took a double degree at Oxford, and then stayed on to become a fellow at my old college, Magdalen.

There he became part of the famous “Inklings” circle, which included another World War I veteran and expert in English language and history, J.R.R. Tolkien. 

When I was at Oxford, I met the actor Robert Hardy, who told me that, as an undergraduate, he was fortunate enough to have had Tolkien as his tutor in Anglo-Saxon literature and C.S. Lewis as his tutor in Medieval English.

Both men became most famous for creating their own fantasy worlds—Tolkien with the Middle Earth of The Lord of the Rings, and Lewis with his Chronicles of Narnia series, which are often thought of as children’s books, but which are much more than that. 

Indeed, rereading the Narnia series as an adult, one gets a clearer view not just of the Christian allegory that runs through it but also the tradition of ancient Greece that Lewis knew equally well. In the last book of the series, The Last Battle, as Lewis describes his vision of the apocalypse, one of the children marvels that in the new world they are in, everything is more itself. Narnia is more itself. The people around them are all more like themselves. The great Christ figure—Aslan—is also more himself.

“Of course it is different,” their companion friend explains. “As different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. . . . It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?”

(Snip)

[Valin]

Quote

Human life, he notes, was always filled with distractions, alarms, panics, and tragedy.

Turn on The News, Open your Local Rag, and There It Is. AND Its on Both Sides!  You listen to (Say) Lawrence O'Donnell or Mark Levin. Same message Doom Doom Doom! This Horrible thing has happened, That Horrible thing has happened.