By Chris Armstrong, reprinted from Humanism as a Way of Life.
Second of a series.
Third, Lewis’s young adult years coincided with the First World War – in which he served and was injured – and the years of his maturing thought and theological writings—after the period covered in Surprised by Joy—were interrupted by the Second World War. Culturally, these wars destroyed the former Western consensus that expected the world would always progress and get better and better. Now came a pervasive cultural anxiety. Europe in the wartime and post-war years was a place where questions related to human flourishing were fraught.
We hear this influence, for instance, in a talk Lewis gave in 1942, just before the end of that second war, with the “lively” title “De Futilitate” – that is, “On Futility.” Here Lewis assessed the culture of his time in these words:
“The [religious] hopes which supported our more remote, and Christian ancestors, and the secular hopes which supported the Revolutionaries or even the Liberals of the last century, have both rather faded out. There is . . . a widespread question as to what all this hustling and crowded life is about, or whether indeed it is about anything.”
Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper: Great Britain: Fount, 1981, p. 80
Fourth, the wartime cultural upheaval spurred an urgent social experimentation that took many forms.
For example, traditional moral conventions on sexuality and marriage that had once anchored the Western understanding of the flourishing life were increasingly challenged from the 1920s on. Lewis reflected frequently on sex and marriage – for example in the wartime radio addresses that were to become Mere Christianity, in the last book of his Ransom trilogy, That Hideous Strength, and later on in his mature theological work The Four Loves as well as his personal memoir of the death of his wife Joy Davidman, A Grief Observed.
Thinking again of Lewis’s insistence that we need to focus on the moment and take what happiness God provides, when he provides it, one is reminded of the many, many war-time cases of young people who entered premarital sexual relationships out of the conviction that they lived in something like “the last night of the world,” and must grab happiness while they could. In fact, we now know that Lewis’s friend, the great Christian writer Dorothy L Sayers, was one of those, and had a child out of wedlock as a result.
There were many reasons happiness seemed fragile and fleeting in those days – something to be grabbed and treasured “in the moment.” And Lewis showed sympathy with the impulse, though not condoning the damage it sometimes caused.
But the war did not push everyone to live in the moment. Others were led to an obsessive orientation to the future. Some, to Lewis’s mind, fell so deeply into anxiously planning for their families’ futures that they could never accept and enjoy the gifts of flourishing God had for them right now, in the moments of their real and present days. Others sold their souls to utopian schemes to construct a secular hope for the future – the utilitarian visions of the technocrats, the self-appointed “guardians of civilization.”
Lewis had his senior devil Screwtape say this,
“We want a man hag-ridden by the Future — haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth — ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other — dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. . . . It is better for your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope (it doesn’t much matter which) about this war than for him to be living in the present.”
A fifth factor in Lewis’s focus on flourishing in his writings was this: He knew that modern Europeans saw flourishing through the lens of philosophical materialism.
That is, while many of them shared Lewis’s urgency about flourishing, they sometimes tended to see material comforts, gained through scientific, technological progress, as the only kind of flourishing that mattered.
So if he were to make the case for Christianity to such people, Lewis knew he would have to start with material flourishing, but he would then need to bring another kind of flourishing – the heavenly kind – to his readers’ attention.
Sixth, and closely related, was the fact that as Lewis tested the world to see where it rang truest, he found certain experiences of joy—that is, of flourishing—that were triggered by natural and cultural pleasures but also caused in him a strong spiritual longing.
Seventh, Lewis was no doubt encouraged to reflect on the relationship between material and spiritual flourishing by his love for literature. For example, there were his beloved 19th-century romantics—not just George MacDonald, who he said “baptized his imagination,” but also William Morris and William Wordsworth and the German romantics. These writers typically looked to nature and human experience to find the divine or the Real just under the surface – to proceed inductively from lower to higher.
Eighth and last, we find in Lewis’s personal history a preoccupation with the relationship between faith and earthly flourishing that came, oddly, from some very negative early spiritual models in his life.
Gary Selby of Milligan College in Tennessee explored this facet of Lewis’s life in two recent books: The first titled Pursuing an Earthy Spirituality: C. S. Lewis and Incarnational Faith, and the second, The Everyday Mysticism of CS Lewis.
These books, which are all about Lewis and the relationship between earthly and heavenly flourishing, show us that Lewis’s childhood spiritual experience was kind of split into two parts.
That is, as a boy he experienced, on the one hand, a vibrant and sustaining imaginative life that yielded many delights, and, on the other, a religion that seemed to pit God and his laws against human desire and earthly flourishing. As Lewis later said, we modern Western folk, when we think in terms of such words as “holy” or “pure” or “spiritual,” actually “feel, if we do not say, that the vision of God will come not to fulfill but to destroy our nature.” This unfortunate division between earthly and humanly flourishing he identified as a “bleak fantasy” that is really hard for modern people to get over. (Two versions of Lewis’s “Transposition” sermon are in print; Selby drew this passage from the expanded version published in his collection They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962), p. 177).
Selby shows how Lewis himself picked up this “negative spirituality” as a child, and that it was one of the main reasons he became an atheist as a young man. “For much of his early life,” says Selby, “Lewis saw God as harsh and exacting, as an impediment in his quest for the good life [that is, for his flourishing]. The tug-of-war he experienced between joy and religion owed much to that view of God.”
We find hints of this tug-of-war even in Surprised by Joy, where Lewis said that he “earnestly desired not to meet God,” and that he thought of him as “the divine interferer,” such that when he eventually came to Christ, he was “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.”
