In addition to his appearances before the British armed services and on the BBC, C.S. Lewis also gave a number of lay sermons during World War II. One of his most famous (among several that achieved real success) was one preached in December 1939 entitled “Learning in Wartime.” One witness, Erik Routley, remembered seeing the famous Lewis for the first time at this sermon. “I suppose I arrived about ten minutes before eight,” Routley wrote. “There was hardly a seat to be had. The one I got was right under the pulpit. I could see the preacher only when he was going up the steps. And I said to myself, ‘So that’s Lewis!’” Overall, Routley found Lewis impressive.

Lewis had a superbly unaffected delivery: a deep voice which went well with his cheerful and bucolic appearance (all pictures of him that I know are good ones). It was a voice that really did vindicate the saying that the medium is the message. No rhetorical tricks: he read every word. Yet the way he used the words as precision tools, the effortless rhythm of the sentences, the scholarship made friendly, the sternness made beautiful—these things all made it impossible for the listener to notice the passing of time.[1]

In it, Lewis addressed the nature of the ordinary in sacred life, ostensibly while looking at liberal learning during the crisis of war. Is chasing down Socrates in the middle of a war akin to “fiddling while Rome burns,” Lewis asked.[2] Could not, however, the same thing be asked about a student chasing Socrates when he should be thinking about eternity? “He must ask himself how it is right, or even psychologically possible,” Lewis continued, “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.”[3] Yet, Lewis noted, the Christian does not behave radically differently before and after his conversion. Life—with all of its complications—still goes on, and one must live it. “Before I became a Christian I do not think I fully realized that one’s life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before,” Lewis said, “one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things.”[4] As such, one must realize that wartime is simply aggravated reality and normal life. Yes, to be sure, death is more prominent in wartime, but death is, for all of us, inevitable.

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. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.[5]

Along the way, toward war, one should not lose sight of the fact that he is, first and foremost, a Christian. Thus, he cannot surrender himself to anything other than God.

A man may have to die for his country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God himself.[6]

Indeed, Lewis cautioned, surrendering one’s self completely to an entity besides God is essentially a proclamation that one can create heaven on earth, a grand impossibility if not an outright heresy. In the end, then, Lewis claimed, one must recognize that learning in normal time or wartime is honorable and good and should be directed to God. Sounding very much like Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Josemaria Escriva, Lewis proclaimed:

All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest: and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one: it is rather a new organization which exploits, to its own supernatural ends, these natural materials.[7]

Each man, though individual in talents, belongs to the one body of Christ, and he should submit all that he does—in normal life or in wartime—to God. Just as we may ask for our daily bread, so too, should we focus on our daily tasks.

A second, perhaps even more impressive, sermon was Lewis’s “Weight of Glory,” preached at St. Mary’s Oxford, on June 8, 1941.[8] Beauty and desire, Lewis proclaimed, are often markers toward that which is good. That is, beauty points the way toward the Good. In ways we never fully comprehend, such joys and beauties have been a part of us—an inconsolable secret—from the beginnings of our own awareness of the world. We think of them as longings, but they are really gifts to move us beyond the things of this world and toward the Divine. “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them,” Lewis said. “It was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.”[9]

A rather complex sermon in terms of its structure and argumentation, “The Weight of Glory” discussed the nature of nature, the nature of humanity and our desires, and the nature of grace. Nature, that is the earth, the solar system, and all their wonders, he argued, is simply a symbol and image of the Divine. Those of us destined for eternal glory—that is, those who have submitted themselves completely to the will of God—will outlive all things in nature. He will be pleased with them, as He sees Himself in them. “For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things,” Lewis said. “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”[10] Indeed, bearing the “Weight of Glory,” many women and men we see around ourselves today are eternal beings, and if we saw them as the Divine sees them—as goddesses and gods—we should be sorely tempted to worship them. If we saw those who are eternally damned—because they refused to submit to God’s grace—we would be horrified by their appearance. “There are no ordinary people,” Lewis believed. “You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.”[11] Yet, in one another, we can potentially see that which is eternal, itself always on the edge of every moment. “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses,” Lewis concluded. “If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself—is truly hidden.”[12]

What more can one add after such a beautiful claim?

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[1] In Search of C.S. Lewis, 98-99.

[2] CSL, “Learning in War-Time,” in C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, 579.

[3] CSL, “Learning in War-Time,” 580.

[4] CSL, “Learning in War-Time,” 581.

[5] CSL, “Learning in War-Time,” 586.

[6] CSL, “Learning in War-Time,” 582.

[7] CSL, “Learning in War-Time,” 582.

[8] In Search of C.S. Lewis, 98; and Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond, 97.

[9] CSL, “Weight of Glory,” in C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, 98.

[10] CSL, “Weight of Glory,” 103.

[11] CSL, “Weight of Glory,” 105-106.

[12] CSL, “Weight of Glory,” 106.

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