C.S. Lewis on War

City Club’s Notes From The Underground lunch series is the start of a great club tradition to share snippets of our reading. 

Since the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have been weighing on me, as if I were carrying a heavy cross, I decided to write about the inevitability of war and the successful navigation of its consequences. My research revealed an enlightening sermon by C.S. Lewis, titled “Learning In War-Time,” delivered at the University Church in Oxford in 1939, just as Britain had been engaged in the war with Nazi Germany. Far be it for me to top Lewis, I decided instead to simply share his thoughts on the matter: 

May we find inner peace, and intellectually grow during these turbulent times.

— Sina

I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.