C. S. Lewis Was Wrong
(about the Coronavirus)
a guest meditation by Joe Martyn Ricke
There's some fake news floating around the web these days, all in good fun, but with a serious message. And a serious error in that serious message.
Seeking to connect our current crisis with the wisdom of C. S. Lewis, well-meaning folks -- fans of Lewis and friends of mine -- have been riffing on his 1948 essay "Living in an Atomic Age" in classrooms, on blogs, in videos, and in several conversations I have had with well-meaning colleagues. Those went something like, "well, you know . . . C. S. Lewis wrote something about this in . . . ."
Well, yes he did. But, no he didn't. Lewis wrote about a world almost paralyzed with fear over the possibility of atomic warfare just after World War 2. Full disclosure, I am old enough to remember atomic bomb drills in school in which all the students cocooned under their desks while gigantic Sister Mary Whatever stood up front with a cane in her hand to make sure we were fully cocooned to her specifications.
More memorable, although imaginary (isn't that just the way it is?), I had a recurring dream in my childhood in which I stood on my bed and looked out my window (it was a highly placed, wider than tall rectangle in my fashionable mid-century modern ranch style home). In the dream, I waited breathlessly until I saw one lone plane flying above. I recognized it by its one blinking red light. I knew it was a Russian bomber coming to drop the atomic bomb on my little hometown just a mile on the Texas side from the Mexican border. That either happened many times, or it happened once within a serious case of deja vu. I can't be sure which. But it's one of the most powerful memories of my childhood. Of my life.
So you see, dear reader, C. S. Lewis wrote to me although I wasn't born yet when he wrote the essay. And I guess, given my love of his work, you could say that he has been writing to me ever since.
Anyway(s), here is the section of his essay that has been much repeated and riffed on recently, sometimes with the subject actually changed, sometimes with instructions to the reader to do so:
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb (coronavirus). "How are we to live in an atomic (corona) age?" 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, and age or air raids, an age of railway accident, 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 atomic bomb (COVID-19) was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. . . .
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 an atomic bomb (the coronavirus), let that bomb (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 bombs (viruses). They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
As usual with C. S. Lewis, well said. Balanced, rational, yet with an emotional appeal for which he gets too little credit. The final paragraph, like so many passages to which Lewis builds up, is sublime. It lifts us. King Henry V addressing the troops at Agincourt.
But, this analogy bothered me from the start. Not the whimsical obviously parodic uses: "C. S. Lewis Predicts Coronavirus," as one friend posted on his Facebook page. But the encouragement on blog after blog (many of them having the word "Gospel" in their title) and then on Facebook post after Facebook post (usually linking to those Gospel blogs), and then in classrooms from what I could see on discussions within the online Lewis community, to take this wisdom to heart as a guide to the present crisis. "Just replace atomic bomb with coronavirus" was the interpretive key provided over and over again.
The most obvious problem of course is that there is no way in hell we should be in a crowded pub drinking a pint and playing darts instead of worrying about the coronavirus. In fact, doing so would be how to trigger an atomic attack not how to face one (analogically speaking). That would be stupid not sensible. Second, many (not all) of the other regular communal human activities, which Lewis encourages, are, again, more like collaboration with the enemy, more suicidal than faithful.
I imagine that if he were here Lewis would, instead, urge us to think of ourselves as a scout in a patrol, making sure not to endanger our comrades in arms. In other words, to be very careful even if that doesn't look very courageous. Why? Because foolhardiness, in battle and on Florida beaches, is a vice that only looks like courage (What do they teach in school these days? It's all in Aristotle.)
This is also why the "cheer up and just quit thinking about it" attitude in the piece is such a difficult concept to transfer to the present situation as well. Because, if we are doing the right thing, we are shutting ourselves up, many of us alone (or isolated with a small group of necessarily huddled sheep), with very little of our normal routine, the very thing Lewis prescribes to help us get our minds off of the danger. It's as of we are hospitalized for the plague, whether we have it or not. It is not, in fact, like going to our everyday job which he recommends. At least not in the usual way. At least not for most of us.
Many of the things he lists may be summed up as normal life, a good way, let's face it, to keep our minds occupied about something other than the bomb. But now our individual and communal destruction, which importantly is NOT inevitable if we do sensible things, are put at risk by the normal.
Obviously, I don't blame Lewis for being wrong about the coronovirus or for being, if not misquoted, misanalogized. My title was intended as a catchy way to combat the catchy titles suggesting an equivalence that isn't there. In fact, I think that Lewis would almost certainly ask us to "pull ourselves together" and STOP doing our regular routines if that is what it would take to defeat the enemy. Something he knew quite a lot about by 1948, fighting in one World War and living through a second with all of its personal sacrifices and "huddling together during bombing attacks."
And, of course, Lewis's ultimate point isn't really about either the coronovirus or the atomic bomb. It's a reminder that life has always been precarious, always dangerous, all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, Socrates will die, and so will we. Ben Camino's Ironic Isolation Meditation #2, The Fake New, deals with that at length. There, Ben, don't say that your editor never slipped you a promo.
And so will we all die, atomic bomb/coronavirus or not. We are always at war, as Lewis says in the magnificent sermon, "Learning in War-Time." Life is always lived on the knife's edge.
But I have an ultimate point myself that isn't about either the atomic bomb or the coronavirus. What was the source of this "rush to analogize" the coronovirus with something in Lewis's works? Did we somehow need C. S. Lewis to shed a guiding light on the current crisis? Lewis helps us with so much. His work often rises to the level not only of sublime rhetoric but to wisdom literature. Unfortunately, our appeals to his authority sometime lead to some silly things, like all the misquotes (intentional and otherwise) in memes on the internet. Ooooh, that sounds so good. Must be C. S. Lewis. No, actually, it's Rumi.
Misquotation, though, is not the only or even most problematic way this urge to appropriate Lewis takes shape. Even when the words are really his, our need to appeal to his authority leads us sometimes to use him as a proof-text even when our textual exegesis is rather sloppy, as in the example before us I think. We probably are not well served by taking "verses" from Lewis out of context to prove our points. And we are definitely not well served when we make false analogies from his work to another situation. Yes, he puts George MacDonald as his guide in heaven, but he doesn't mean necessarily that we all need a Scottish guide. Although I do have a few friends from St. Andrews who might disagree with that.
I say this, perhaps surprisingly, as the Director of the Center for the Study of C. S. Lewis & Friends, friends. I love C. S. Lewis, even though I sometimes resist and even criticize his words and ideas, just as some (all?) of his best friends did. Indeed, I truly believe that Lewis can help us think about the coronavirus. That it would be as easy as substituting one word for another . . . should give us pause.
Finally. Oops. I know, I know, it's a violation of the Ben Camino Manual of Style to have a finally after an ultimate. But in the hopes that Ben is busy watching NBA re-runs, and since I'm his editor anyway, I'm going for it. So, finally I say: I would also like to criticize, gently, Lewis's take on how to face the atomic bomb and attempt to show, by analogy, that it may, in fact, pose a problem for how we face the current crisis.
Lewis was obviously not a pacifist; see his essay, "Why I Am Not a Pacifist (1940)." Still, his advice for facing atomic destruction strikes me as rather . . . passive-ist. Clearly, the same person who might play tennis, study, pray, and have a pint with his friends, might also, for example, work for nuclear disarmament given what the result of nuclear war would probably be. Or, perhaps, she could organize to get out the vote for the party she feels least likely to lead the world into nuclear war. Or, even . . . build a bomb shelter. I'm not that invested in the bomb shelter idea, but certainly a lot of other people were. I know, of course, that people felt pretty helpless about stopping the atomic threat. That's why six year old's stood on their beds in nightmares and saw Russian bombers improbably flying over Mercedes, Texas.
But here, I think (although I will wait to hear from Edwin Woodruff Tait before I am absolutely sure) we do have an analogy that works. Yes, we are all going to die. And I may even hear the costly call of discipleship to come and die (Bonhoeffer) or the call to suffering from Our Lord. But a simple rule of Christian ethics is that although I may very well need to accept suffering and death (take up your cross), I should do all I can to make sure my neighbor is not crucified or, as Lewis thought about even animals, not treated inhumanely. Even Bonhoeffer who knew the cost of discipleship might be suffering came to realize that the call of his neighbor might mean doing all he could to stop the powers of evil. Obviously, Lewis knows this as well. But seems to gloss over it in his atomic bomb essay.
Perhaps we could miss a few pints and few matches of tennis and think about our children or even our children's children. Or, using another analogy, when the slave masters come and find the runaway slaves, their suffering will, from one perspective, just be a small part of the total reality summed up in the statement that all humans suffer and die, "and quite a high percentage of us are going to die in unpleasant ways." But I hope that we will not blame them for huddling together like frightened sheep when the storm troopers or the slave catchers or the bomb deliverers come. And I hope that we will have thought long and hard about what we could do to work against these specific examples of suffering and death, despite its ultimate inevitability. Life, death, and discipleship are not equations figured by the sum total. They are existential matters.
By analogy, although a rather convoluted one, since one of our primary weapons now against the contagion is a kind of passive resistance, we must consider what we can do to stop the suffering. And shrugging our shoulders and saying, "well I came to party with my friends because, hey, we are all going to die and besides it's spring break in Florida," looks satanic from our perspective now.
Time for bed. Just this: I appreciate Lewis's point about our mortality and our human practices that must go on and will help us go on in the face of the inevitable. As far as it goes. This part of his essay, unlike the simple analogy in the "just substitute coronavirus" trope which cannot, can teach us something about our present situation. However, as I am sure he would say if he could, we need a new "normal" in our coronavirus age, for the good of ourselves, our neighbors, and the many potential gods and goddesses he writes so profoundly about in "The Weight of Glory."
Like the words of C. S. Lewis, the words of logic's first syllogism about the inevitability of death and the words of Jesus about the call to the cross, are texts that need careful interpretation. Neither should be, but both sometimes are taken to be, reasons to cancel our "normal" human precautions, worry, and even united, militant action against evil when necessary. Life is a good gift. Worth protecting. The best way to prepare for a good death is to live a good life. One of the ways of living a good life (as well as tennis, pubs, and gardening) is fighting for it with all the wisdom and strength we can muster.
Be safe everyone. Pray for me. And Ben Camino who will probably be back soon after he sees this.
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