Learning in War Time
Aronsyne, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
C.S. Lewis spoke to university students as war was breaking out and threatening to bring their school days to an end. His essay, Learning in War Time, is pertinent for our times.
The Question
Lewis asks “how can we continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance?” How can we make time for education when the world around us seems to be falling apart?
The Context that Changes the Question
Instead of answering rhe question as posed, Lewis makes it harder to answer. Students “must ask …how it is right…for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology.”
Two Sides of the Question
Now we have two questions to answer: “How can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think about anything but the salvation of human souls?” and “How can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think of anything but the war?” Whatever the current crisis is, it is akin to the war faced by Lewis and his students - a hot, immediate, dangerous reality that looms large in the field of vision.
Two Answers in Tension
Two things call for our attention. When religion claims to have precedence over all the minutiae and dailyness of normal human life, it goes too far. When a hot crisis frightens us into a narrow focus on That Problem, we, likewise, have obliterated all the little details and activities of normal human life. As Lewis puts it: “Neither conversion nor enlistment in the army is really going to obliterate our human life. Christians and soldiers are still men: the infidel’s idea of a religious life, and the civilians idea of active service, are fantastic. If you attempted, in either case, to suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic activity, you would only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life for a better. “
The war, or the current crisis, is not fit to occupy our whole attention, “because it is a finite object…unfitted to support the whole attention of a human soul.” Religion must occupy us wholly, but not to the exclusion of all our natural acitivities. “There is no question of a compromise between the claims of God and the claims of culture, or politics, or anything else. God’s claim is infinite and inexorable. You can refuse it; or you can begin to try to grant it. There is no middle way.”
Vocation of Intellectual Work
Lewis avoids defending our studies on the basis of a snobbish association of ‘intellectual work,’ or ‘culture’ with ‘spirituality.’. “I reject at once an idea which lingers in the mind of some modern people that cultural activities are in their own right spiritual and meritorious - as though scholars and poets were intrinsically more pleasing to God than scavengers and bootblacks. Instead, he takes St. Paul’s teaching as the basis for affirmation of the human activity of learning, even in war time.
“Whether ye eat or drink or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.”
“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’.” Leading the intellectual life to the glory of God means “the pursuit of knowledge and beauty, in a sense, for their own sake, but in a sense which does not exclude their being for God’s sake. An appetite for these things exists in the human mind, and God makes no appetite in vain.”
Our studies correspond to our design. Additionally, they are meant to help our fellow man out of ignorance. “To be ignorant and simple now - not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground - would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defens but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”
Enemies at War Against the Scholar
Lewis offers three “mental exercises which may serve as defenses against the three enemies which war raises up against the scholar. The first enemy is excitement. …If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
“The second enemy is frustration - the feeling that we shall not have time to finish.” “A more Christian attitude…is that of leaving futurity in God’s hands. …Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment ‘as to the Lord.”
“The third enemy is fear.. …War makes death real to us; and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past.” Rather than fear the dangerous realities that loom over us, take from them the courage to face the fact that our life in space-time is transient, fleeting, merely a predicate to eternal life.
“If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the sould of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment to soon. But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereaftr, we can think so still.”
And thus ends one of the most rousing speeches ever made to Christian students!