C.S. Lewis’ “Old Western Men”

On November 29, 1954, C.S. Lewis offered his inaugural address at Cambridge, one of his finest writings or speeches in his professional career, “De Descriptione Temporum.”[1] In the speech, probably somewhat jarring to his listeners, Lewis claimed that one could divide the history of Europe into three periods: the pre-Christian; the Christian; and the post-Christian. No time period, though, is absolute, Lewis acknowledged, and whereas paganism often foreshadowed Christianity, Christianity never completely baptized the pagan.  The same, he suggested, is true of the modern, or post-Christian period, in which modernity has overcome much of Christianity, but not completely. Still, Lewis believed, pagans and Christians had more in common with each other than either had with post-Christians, thus suggesting—as many Christian humanists, ranging from Romano Guardini to Christopher Dawson to Flannery O’Connor had done—that modernity really did usher something new into the world. “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not.”[2]

The truly great division in Western civilization, then, came not between the ancient and the medieval worlds or between the medieval and the Renaissance worlds, but it came, instead, somewhere between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the romantic period and the rise of the machine in the late-nineteenth century. It began, Lewis lamented, somewhere after Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott. “The dating of such things must of course be rather hazy and indefinite,” he admitted, and “No one could point to a year or a decade in which the change indisputably began, and it has probably not yet reached its peak. But somewhere between us and the Waverly Novels, somewhere between us and Persuasion, the chasm runs.”[3] Further, Lewis contended, it is ridiculous to complain about a “revival” of paganism in the modern world. If only, Lewis said.

It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are ‘relapsing into Paganism.’ It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity ‘by the same door as in she went’ and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.[4]

One might try to find something different between the Pharoahs of Egypt and the first of the English kings, Alfred, but, truly, Lewis thought, the real division came between Austen and our present day with the “birth of the machines.” This, after all, he believed,

lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered. For this is parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history. This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy. It alters Man’s place in nature.[5]

The machine, thus, fundamentally altered man’s understanding of himself in the scheme of the cosmos, much as the loss of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe had done. Man, as such, sees his life in the modern world as pilgrimage from one technology to another.

But I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image. It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy. And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival in the minds of the uneducated. For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children, the very milestones of life are technical advances. From the old push-bike to the motor-bike and thence to the little car; from the gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage.[6]

Yet, as Lewis had argued about previous eras, one bleeds into another, and no era is utterly cutoff and pristine from the previous or the future era. As much as modernity has conquered, it has not conquered completely. And, those who love Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott—the Old Western Men—still haunt modernity, though probably not for much longer. Interrogate and understand them while you can, was Lewis’ message.

It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature. And because this is the judgement of a native, I claim that, even defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.[7]

Though Lewis never specifies others who might be “Old Western Men,” it seems, in hindsight, that he was speaking of many, if not most, of the Inklings as well. Certainly, Owen Barfield and J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, whatever their eccentricities and particular tastes, could also be regarded as Old Western Men. Clyde Kilby, the evangelical English professor from Wheaton College, who helped Tolkien organize The Silmarillion in the summer of 1966, confirms that Tolkien, too, was an Old Western Man. “Tolkien was an Old Western Man who was staggered at the present direction of civilization,” Kilby recorded after a summer of conversations with Tolkien. “Even our much vaunted talk of equality he felt debased by our attempts to ‘mechanize and formalize it.’”[8] As Tolkien put it, no so diplomatically: “I am not a ‘democrat’ only because ‘humility’ and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power–and then we get and are getting slavery,” Tolkien had claimed, echoing a number of critics of democracy from Plato in the Republic to Tocqueville in Democracy in America.⁶⁰

Bureaucrats especially targeted language, Tolkien’s speciality, and to the author, the spice of real life. “In modern England the usage has become disastrously confused by the maleficent interference of the Government with the usual object of governments: uniformity.”⁵⁷

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[1] London Times, December 7, 1954, pg. 10; and London Times, February 16, 1955, page 9.

[2] Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” in Walter Hooper, ed., Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge, ENG: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 5.

[3] Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” 7.

[4] Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” 10.

[5] Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” 10.

[6] Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” 11.

[7] Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” 14.

[8]Kilby, “Tolkien the Man” from TOLKIEN AND THE SILMARILLION, unpublished parts of chapter, “Woodland Prisoner,” pg. 13 in Wheaton College Wade Collection, Kilby Files, 3-8.

            ⁶⁰Carpenter, ed., Letters, 246.

            ⁵⁷Tolkien, “English and Welsh,” 182.

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