August 31, 2022

384. C.S. Lewis: Essayist

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While Europe was embroiled in World War II, brilliant essays flowed from the pen of C.S. Lewis. Today on our journey back through the archives, Dr. Stephen Nichols examines some of the other writings that came from the author of The Chronicles of Narnia.

Transcript

Hi, this is Steve Nichols, host of 5 Minutes in Church History. We’ve paused releasing new episodes of the podcast, but I’ve picked out some of my favorite episodes from over the years for you to listen to. We’ll be back with new episodes in January 2023. Make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast so you don’t miss out. I hope you enjoy this episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. 

C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland in 1898. He would die in 1963 and what a life he lived. He was known as Jack and as far as we can tell, that was because of one of his dog's names from his early childhood who was Jacksie and C.S. Lewis accepted that name and adopted that name for himself.

He was an Oxbridge scholar, which meant that he had a position at both Oxford University and Cambridge University. He's been hailed as a philosopher, an apologist, a theologian. Of course, he's probably best known for his Narnia Chronicles. His actual profession was as a professor, a chair of Medieval and Renaissance literature. Well, let's take a look at his life and let's bring one piece of that life to the surface and that is C.S. Lewis as essayist.

While he was baptized as a child into the Anglican church, as a teenager, he drifted into agnosticism and then at the ripe age of 15, he declared himself to be an atheist. As a teenager, he also loved Epic poetry. He was taken by Norse mythology and all of the Medieval literature. C.S. Lewis goes off to France. He saw the horrors of World War I, being involved in trench warfare. A shell exploded not too far from him taking the lives of two of his buddies and injuring him and then he was sent back to the UK to serve out the rest of the war on the home front.

He went on to his life of scholarship and eventually he would be influenced by George MacDonald who would lead him from atheism to a generic theism and a belief in God in general and then through his friendship with J.R. Tolkien and continued reading of McDonald and others, he was led from theism to Christianity. Tolkien would have much preferred that Lewis had joined him in the Catholic church, but Lewis went the way of Anglicanism and went back into his Anglican church.

Lewis like to call this Christianity, mere Christianity and of course that's the title of one of his books. Well, the thing I want to talk about, Lewis, is his work as an essayist and one essay in particular, it comes up from a time of 1941 to 1943. Once again, Europe is embroiled in a World War and World War II and during this time, C.S. Lewis is doing radio addresses during air raids over the BBC.

So if you can put that setting in your mind. These are some of the great essays that come from the pen of Lewis in this context. Some of these essays he preached as sermons in churches and some he prepared specifically for the radio and a number of them were published as books later.

The one in particular that I want to talk to you about is called The Weight of Glory. It's an essay and it's also a title of a book of essays. In it Lewis says that almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.

That's such a 20th century thing, such a modern thing to neglect God and push him out of our lives; to neglect the eternal and the transcendent and to be fixated on the horizon of the material. Well, Lewis says, "There is far more to ultimate reality than what we see and it is this weight of glory."

So he writes, "It may be possible for each to think too much of his own personal glory hereafter. It is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load or weight or burden of my neighbor's glory should be laid on my back. A load so heavy that only humility can carry it and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses. To remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature, which if you saw it now, you'd be strongly tempted to worship or else a whore, a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only and a nightmare." And he'll go on to say, "There are no ordinary people because we all have this weight of glory."

Well, that's C.S. Lewis, essayist and I'm Steve Nichols. Thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.

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