C. S. Lewis offered a moral and intellectual antidote to the totalitarian temptation: a return to ancient truths to help defeat the lies of his own day, and of ours.
I n the throes of the Second World War, Oxford University scholar C. S. Lewis published an essay called “On the Reading of Old Books.” One might assume from the title that the essay was written by an ivory tower academic comically out of touch with the crisis of the moment: the struggle between Western civilization and fascist barbarism.
In fact, Lewis offered a moral and intellectual antidote to the totalitarian temptation: a return to ancient truths to help defeat the lies of his own day, and of ours.
Every age has its own outlook, he wrote, its distinctive values and ideals. It may be successful at recognizing and upholding these ideas. But it is just as likely to be blind to the dangers of other ideas — such as white supremacy or the eugenics movement, for example — and to make tragic decisions as a result. “We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period,” he explained, “and that means the old books.”
As for the old books, Lewis was a scholar of classical, medieval, and Renaissance literature. The plays of Aeschylus, the poetry of Ovid, and the epic works of Homer and Virgil were lifelong companions. “The descent to the Underworld is easy,” wrote Virgil in the Aeneid. “Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air — there the struggle, there the labor lies.”
Virgil might have been describing the nightmare years of 1939–45, when the world descended into an abyss of grievances, falsehoods, propaganda, and state-sanctioned terror. The war on the battlefield had an ideological counterpart: a war of ideas that threatened to destroy the foundations of civilized life. The West had lost its moorings, and its modern books — often drenched in cynicism — lacked the one thing desperately needed: historical perspective, grounded in moral seriousness.
This is one of the qualities that Lewis treasured about the old books, which included the Christian literature that he absorbed during his student days at Oxford. Aquinas, Dante, Milton, Bunyan, Hooker, Pascal: Even when he was an atheist, Lewis explained, he found something solid, stirring, and “inexhaustible” about these authors. “They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one.”
It was a conviction that Lewis expressed repeatedly in his writings and lectures during the war. It appears, for example, in his Space Trilogy, a science fiction series about a cosmic struggle between good and evil. In the final novel of the series, That Hideous Strength (1945), the chief protagonist, Mark Gainsby Studdock, is lured into a totalitarian project to subvert a university community under the guise of egalitarian policies and “scientific” planning.
“It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging,” Lewis writes. “His education had been neither scientific nor classical — merely ‘Modern.’” Studdock was “a man of straw,” ignorant of the wisdom from ages past and thus unable to resist the present darkness.
The theme appears again in Lewis’s diabolical satire, The Screwtape Letters (1942), consisting of the imaginary correspondence between a senior demon and his apprentice in their efforts to lead a human soul into perdition. The idea for the book came into his mind after hearing a triumphant address by Adolf Hitler over the BBC.
As Screwtape, the senior devil, explains to Wormwood, they have successfully created an intellectual climate in which “only the learned read old books and we have now dealt with the learned that they are of all men least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so.” The reason, Screwtape explains, is that modern scholars are no longer interested in whether a work from an ancient author contains moral or spiritual truth; they care only about secondary questions, such as the course of academic criticism about it.
“To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge — to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior — this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded . . . it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.”
The classics were indispensable, Lewis believed, because they captured universal truths about the human condition. With the near death of the humanities in our colleges and universities, however, most Americans are no longer nourished — or chastened — by the ancient writers. It is naïve to imagine that this intellectual deficit plays no role in the brutal and propagandistic flavor of our politics. Lacking any historical perspective, we catastrophize the present.
Lewis might direct our minds back to Virgil: Next to the Bible, he considered the Aeneid one of the most important influences on his professional life. It is a story of courage and perseverance in the face of terror and hardship: about a reluctant hero, and his band of brothers, who submit their own desires to a noble quest. “These men are not fighting for their own land like Homeric heroes; they are men with a vocation, men on whom a burden is laid,” Lewis wrote in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). “No man who has once read it with full perception remains an adolescent.”
Whether in the realm of politics, education, or mass media, we seem to have entered a self-absorbed, adolescent age. Indeed, the absence of what the Romans called gravitas — denoting dignity and responsibility — may be the most distinguishing feature of our supposed leaders and “influencers.” Many Americans are thus adrift in what Lewis called “the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone” of our age.
Lewis was never taken in by it. In his essay, written in 1943, he cites the reputation of the fourth-century theologian, Athanasius — “Athanasius against the world” — to criticize those who abandon religious truths only to be swept along by the ravaging tides of their culture. “It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.”
The same may be said of C. S. Lewis. Even before the start of the Second World War, he assailed the ideologies — eugenics, Nazism, communism, and militant nationalism — that were deluding millions in the West. With the onset of war, this Oxford professor insisted that the renewal and ultimate survival of Western civilization depended upon the recovery of its classic texts. “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds,” he wrote, “and this can be done only by reading old books.”
The clean sea breeze of the centuries: If the modern American mind — conflicted, angry, anxious, disillusioned — is to find a measure of moral health, perhaps this is the place to begin.