In the current pandemic, nothing is more evident than our diverse attitudes toward our vulnerability and the ephemeral quality of life in this world. The aversion to risk and the obsession with surviving at any cost have been thrown into very sharp relief.
In this context, I think that an essay by C.S. Lewis entitled On Living in an Atomic Age, first published in 1948, is incredibly relevant to the current hour.
To illustrate the point, I have adapted the essay to speak not about the atomic age, but about the age of COVID.
Music for the podcast has been provided through the generosity of Dennis Crommett. Check out his music over at DennisCrommett.com.
Resources:
The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis
Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays
On Living in a COVID Age
Oxymorons and the science of being human
9 Ways Catholics Should Respond to the Threat of COVID-19 Church Shutdowns
In the current pandemic, nothing is more evident than our diverse attitudes toward our vulnerability and the ephemeral quality of life in this world. The aversion to risk and the obsession with surviving at any cost have been thrown into very sharp relief.
In this context, I think that an essay by C.S. Lewis entitled On Living in an Atomic Age, first published in 1948, is incredibly relevant to the current hour.
To illustrate the point, I have adapted the essay to speak not about the atomic age, but about the age of COVID.
Music for the podcast has been provided through the generosity of Dennis Crommett. Check out his music over at DennisCrommett.com.
Resources:
The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis
Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays
On Living in a COVID Age
Oxymorons and the science of being human
9 Ways Catholics Should Respond to the Threat of COVID-19 Church Shutdowns
Hello and welcome to The Weight of Glory podcast. This is your host, Clayton Emmer.
The idea of this podcast is to explore the themes present in The Weight of Glory, an essay by C.S. Lewis, and also to explore some of his other essays.
In the near future, I'll be releasing episodes that I'm currently recording with an old friend of mine, Kale Zelden, as we engage in a close reading of a letter on the theme of hope which has many points of convergence with the work of C.S. Lewis.
But for today, I'm offering one more solo podcast highlighting one of the essays of C.S. Lewis
In the middle of The Weight of Glory, Lewis notes our uneasy relationship with the idea that our life in this world will end. Here's how he puts it:
"…Almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever….
Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy."
I submit that, in the current pandemic, nothing is more evident than our diverse attitudes toward our vulnerability and the ephemeral quality of our life in this world. The aversion for risk, and the fetish for surviving at any cost, have been thrown into very sharp relief.
In this context, I think that an essay by C.S. Lewis entitled On Living in an Atomic Age, first published in 1948, is incredibly relevant to the current hour.
To illustrate the point, I have adapted the essay to speak not about the atomic age, but about the age of COVID.
There are links in the show notes to the original essay by Lewis, and also to my adaptation of it, which you'll be hearing on the podcast today. With the exception of the occasional substitution of the word "atom bomb" for "coronavirus", the reflections you will hear are entirely those of C.S. Lewis.
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In one way we think a great deal too much of the coronavirus. 'How are we to live in the age of COVID-19?' I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.'
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the coronavirus appeared: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors –anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by a virus, let that virus when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about viruses. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
'But,' you reply, 'it is not death – not even painful and premature death – that we are bothering about. Of course the change of that is not new. What is new is that COVID-19 may finally and totally destroy civilization itself. The lights may be put out for ever.'
This brings us much nearer to the real point; but let me try to make clear exactly what I think that point is. What were your views about the ultimate future of civilization before the virus appeared on the scene? What did you think all this effort of humanity was to come to in the end? The real answer is known to almost everyone who has even a smattering of science; yet, oddly enough, it is hardly ever mentioned. And the real answer (almost beyond doubt) is that, with or without COVID-19, the whole story is going to end in NOTHING. The astronomers hold out no hope that this planet is going to be permanently inhabitable. The physicists hold out no hope that organic life is going to be a permanent possibility in any part of the material universe. Not only this earth, but the whole show, all the suns of space, are to run down. Nature is a sinking ship. Bergson talks about the élan vital, and Mr Shaw talks about the 'Life-force' as if they could surge on for ever and ever. But that comes of concentrating on biology and ignoring the other sciences. There is really no such hope. Nature does not, in the long run, favor life. If Nature is all that exists – in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature – then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without the possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker and there will be no one even to remember it. No doubt viruses may cut its duration on this present planet shorter than it might have been; but the whole thing, even if it lasted for billions of years, must be so infinitesimally short in relation to the oceans of dead time which precede and follow it that I cannot feel excited about its curtailment.
What the wars and the weather (are we in for another of those periodic ice ages?) and the coronavirus have really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before 1914, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities.
We see at once (when we have been waked) that the important question is not whether COVID-19 is going to obliterate 'civilization.' The important question is whether 'Nature' – the thing studied by the sciences – is the only thing in existence. Because if you answer yes to the second question, then the first question only amounts to asking whether the inevitable frustration of all human activities may be hurried on by our own action instead of coming at its natural time. That is, of course, a question that concerns us very much. Even on a ship which will certainly sink sooner or later, the news that the boiler might blow up now would not be heard with indifference by anyone. But those who knew that the ship was sinking in any case would not, I think, be quite so desperately excited as those who had forgotten this fact, and were vaguely imagining that it might arrive somewhere.
It is, then, on the second question that we really need to make up our minds. And let us begin by supposing that Nature is all that exists. Let us suppose that nothing ever has existed or ever will exist except this meaningless play of atoms in space and time: that by a series of hundredth chances it has (regrettably) produced things like ourselves – conscious beings who now know that their own consciousness is an accidental result of the whole meaningless process and is therefore itself meaningless, though to us (alas!) it feels significant.
In this situation there are, I think, three things one might do:
I suppose that most of us, in fact, while we remain materialists, adopt a more or less uneasy alternation between the second and the third attitude. And although the third is incomparably the better (it is, for instance, much more likely to 'preserve civilization'), both really shipwreck on the same rock. That rock – the disharmony between our own hearts and Nature – is obvious in the second. The third seems to avoid the rock by accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it. But it will not really work. In it, you hold up our own human standards against the idiocy of the universe. That is, we talk as if our own standards were something outside the universe which can be contrasted with it; as if we could judge the universe by some standard borrowed from another source. But if (as we are supposing) Nature – the space-time-matter system – is the only thing in existence, then of course there can be no other source for our standards. They must, like everything else, be the unintended and meaningless outcome of blind forces. Far from being a light from beyond Nature whereby Nature can be judged, they are only the way in which anthropoids of our species feel when the atoms under our own skulls get into certain states – those states being produced by causes quite irrational, unhuman, and non-moral. Thus the very ground on which we defy Nature crumbles under our feet. The standard we are applying is tainted at the source. If our standards are derived from this meaningless universe they must be as meaningless as it.
For most modern people, I think, thoughts of this kind have to be gone through before the opposite view can get a fair hearing. All Naturalism leads us to this in the end – to a quite final and hopeless discord between what our minds claim to be and what they really must be if Naturalism is true. They claim to be spirit; that is, to be reason, perceiving universal intellectual principles and universal moral laws and possessing free will. But if Naturalism is true they must in reality be merely arrangements of atoms in skulls, coming about by irrational causation. We never think a thought because it is true, only because blind Nature forces us to think it. We never do an act because it is right, only because blind Nature forces us to do it. It is when one has faced this preposterous conclusion that one is at last ready to listen to the voice that whispers: 'But suppose we really are spirits? Suppose we are not the offspring of Nature …?'
For, really, the naturalistic conclusion is unbelievable. For one thing, it is only through trusting our own minds that we have come to know Nature herself. If Nature when fully known seems to teach us (that is, if the sciences teach us) that our own minds are chance arrangements of atoms, then there must have been some mistake; for if that were so, then the sciences themselves would be chance arrangements of atoms and we should have no reason for believing in them. There is only one way to avoid this deadlock. We must go back to a much earlier view. We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it. We are strangers here. We come from somewhere else. Nature is not the only thing that exists. There is 'another world', and that is where we come from. And that explains why we do not feel at home here. A fish feels at home in the water. If we 'belonged here' we should feel at home here. All that we say about 'Nature red in tooth and claw', about death and time and mutability, all our half-amused, half-bashful attitude to our own bodies, is quite inexplicable on the theory that we are simply natural creatures. If this world is the only world, how did we come to find its laws either so dreadful or so comic? If there is no straight line elsewhere, how did we discover that Nature's line is crooked?
But what, then, is Nature, and how do we come to be imprisoned in a system so alien to us? Oddly enough, the question becomes much less sinister the moment one realizes that Nature is not all. Mistaken for our mother, she is terrifying and even abominable. But if she is only our sister – if she and we have a common Creator – if she is our sparring partner – then the situation is quite tolerable. Perhaps we are not here as prisoners but as colonists: only consider what we have done already to the dog, the horse, or the daffodil. She is indeed a rough playfellow. There are elements of evil in her. To explain that would carry us far back: I should have to speak of Powers and Principalities and all that would seem to a modern reader most mythological. This is not the place, nor do these questions come first. It is enough to say here that Nature, like us but in her different way, is much alienated from her Creator, though in her, as in us, gleams of the old beauty remain. But they are there not to be worshipped but to be enjoyed. She has nothing to teach us. It is our business to live by our own law not by hers: to follow, in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem to be necessary to our survival. For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture or class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honorable and merciful means.
The sacrifice is not so great as it seems. Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilization are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved. Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love Man less than God do most for Man.
Adapted from an essay by C.S. Lewis entitled 'On Living in an Atomic Age'
which first appeared in the last issue of the annual magazine Informed Reading, volume VI (1948), pp. 78-84.
Reprinted in a collection entitled Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays.
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Thanks for joining me for this episode of The Weight of Glory podcast. The music in the introduction and very close of this podcast is provided by Dennis Crommett. Learn more about his music over at DennisCrommett.com or in the show notes.
Until next time, be well and God bless.