Why C.S. Lewis Helps Me

C. S. Lewis has become to me—as is likely the case for many—an expected source of wisdom. He helps me to see things I’ve not seen before, and in ways I’ve not yet imagined.
John Piper expresses his appreciation for Lewis in this way:

It’s this combination of experiencing the stab of God-shaped joy and defending objective, absolute Truth, because of the absolute Reality of God, that sets Lewis apart as unparalleled in the modern world. To my knowledge, there is simply no one else who puts these two things together the way Lewis does.

It’s Lewis’s ability, I think, to transform the imagination through that combination of “God-shaped joy” and defense of “objective, absolute Truth” that keeps readers coming back, again and again. Lewis can make one think and feel at a level wider, deeper, broader, higher than before.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, to be struck so at the insight Lewis provides in his essay, “Learning in War-Time.”
It’s an essay that, the introduction to the book tells the reader, was originally a sermon—a sermon preached in 1939, as England was in the middle of fighting in what would become a world war. Could Lewis shed light on why students should study, say, physics and Plato while their fellow students—and their kin—were battling Hitler?
Indeed, he could—for he recognized a war raging stronger, hotter, bloodier, wilder, older than the one against the Third Reich. The Christian, he said,

must ask himself how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are at 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.

The students shouldn’t wait for the commencement of “normal life” before they continue their studies, Lewis urges. “Life has never been normal,” he says.
The Scriptures, Lewis notes, never call us to forsake all “natural activities” when we come to Christ. Instead, coming to Christ transforms the day-to-day.

[I]t is clear that Christianity does not exclude any of the ordinary human activities. St. Paul tells people to get on with their jobs. He even assumes that Christians may go to dinner parties, and, what is more, dinner parties given by pagans. Our Lord attends a wedding and provides miraculous wine. Under the aegis of His Church, and in the most Christian ages, learning and the arts flourish. The solution of this paradox is, of course, well known to you. “Whether you eat or drink or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.”

Given his speaking primarily to students, Lewis provides an able defense for pursuing knowledge, for learning, at a time of war—or at any time. But “[t]he solution of this paradox” is for all. Whether you’re a nurse, a repairman, a cab driver, a pastor, a student, a mom, a pilot—whatever it is you do—the gospel of the kingdom doesn’t necessarily call us to forsake these things when we come to Christ. Instead, the gospel of the kingdom transforms these things when we come to Christ, for the glory of Christ.
Lewis concludes his essay by pointing out “the three enemies which war raises up against the scholar”—excitement, frustration, and fear. And though, again, he is speaking primarily to students, the advice may be well-received by those laboring outside the classroom.
We will all die, Lewis notes. Nothing, short of the return of Christ, will alter the end which awaits us all. This should not discourage, nor incite fear. Instead, it must be that the Christian pursues learning in the present for a greater enjoyment of the future.

If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon. But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still.

So keep after it—in whatever you’re doing. There’s glory in working as unto the Lord. There’s glory to behold in the mundane. There’s reason to learn in war time. There’s reason, in everything, to follow after Christ.
by Robert SagersJustin Taylor