What might C.S. Lewis say about the coronavirus?
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Excerpts from an essay by C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory. The essay, Learning in War-Time, was first given as a lecture to nervous Oxford undergraduates in 1939 just prior to WWII and later published in pamphlet form under the title The Christian in Danger. I have replaced the word “war” with the word “coronavirus.”
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Coronavirus creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself.
We are mistaken when we compare the coronavirus with “normal life.” Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies.
Do not let your nerves and emotions lead you into thinking your predicament more abnormal than it really is.
Perhaps it may be useful to mention the three mental exercises which may serve as defenses against the three enemies which the coronavirus raises up.
The first enemy is excitement – the tendency to think and feel about the coronavirus when we had intended to think about our work.
The best defense is a recognition that in this, as in everything else, the coronavirus has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one.
There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.
The second enemy is frustration – the feeling that we shall not have time to finish.
There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.
The second enemy is frustration – the feeling that we shall not have time to finish.
No one has time to finish. The longest human life leaves one, in any branch of life, a beginner.
You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether, of how many things, even in middle life, we have to say “No time for that,” “Too late now,” and “Not for me.”
A more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God’s hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not.
Never, when healthy or when infected with the coronavirus, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the one who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord.” The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
The third enemy is fear.
You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether, of how many things, even in middle life, we have to say “No time for that,” “Too late now,” and “Not for me.”
A more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God’s hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not.
Never, when healthy or when infected with the coronavirus, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the one who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord.” The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
The third enemy is fear.
The coronavirus threatens us with death and pain. No one – and specially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane – need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination.
There is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or of that – of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does the coronavirus do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear. Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering.
Yet the coronavirus does do something to death. It forces us to remember it.
The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. The coronavirus makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.
All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows. We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it.
If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building of a heaven on earth, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.
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So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal (II Corinthians 4:16-18).
There is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or of that – of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does the coronavirus do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear. Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering.
Yet the coronavirus does do something to death. It forces us to remember it.
The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. The coronavirus makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.
All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows. We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it.
If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building of a heaven on earth, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.
***
So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal (II Corinthians 4:16-18).
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