Speaker 0 00:00:00 In his screw tape letters. Lewis says that the more we rely on precautions, the more likely we will give into fear. True peace comes from trusting that even should the worst come to the worst, God will give me the strength to see it through.
Speaker 0 00:00:24 Welcome to the Catholic Theology Show, sponsored by Ave Maria University. I'm your host, Dr. Michael dne. And today we're going to be continuing our series on c s Lewis and titled into Narnia with CSS Lewis. Today we're gonna be focusing on the theme of courage. What is it about courage that Lewis thought was so necessary? Especially he thought that in many ways in the modern world, we'd kind of lost our way about courage and lost our way in handing on courage to one another and to the next generation. Specifically today, we're gonna be looking at his second Chronicle of Narnia, prince Caspian, as well as an essay he delivered, uh, called The Funeral of a Great Myth, uh, in which he counters, uh, the Myth of Progress. And actually right comes to bury the myth of progress as he puts it. To begin though, I wanna think a little bit about this question of courage.
Speaker 0 00:01:30 Um, Lewis thought that courage was probably the most important virtue because it was that courage. Basically, every virtue has a time in which it's difficult to practice, right? There's that moment when it's hard to be temperate. There's that moment when it's hard to be just, there's that moment when it's hard to, uh, you know, stand up to injustice. There's that moment when it's hard not to give in to rage against injustice. And so Lewis thought that in many ways, courage was kind of one of the highest of the virtues, because it was the one that allowed us to practice all the other ones, even our virtue of faith. Uh, Lewis would describe faith as the art of holding on to truths once delivered by reason, in spite of our changing moods. So right faith may recognize the truth about God, the truth about Jesus Christ, and the truth about ourselves.
Speaker 0 00:02:37 But how do we continue to live that faith, uh, when we experience feelings and moods, right, of darkness, of loss, of grief, right? And it's really courage that allows us to do that. So, to begin with, what are some, maybe we don't really use the word courage a lot these days. Lewis said that in his English of the, of his time, he thought maybe the word guts was closest to it. Toughness, right? What's the courage that allows an older person to suffer decline, uh, without giving up, right, without becoming embittered? And what's the courage that allows someone to face challenges and difficulties without giving up hope? What's the courage that allows someone to dare great things and right be willing to take the risks? Uh, I think maybe now we might use the word grit. I think it's been a, a fun word that's kind of come back into our vocabulary through some psychological studies and things like grit, you know, those who can kind of respond and withstand challenges.
Speaker 0 00:03:55 Maybe resilience is another word that I think kind of names this descriptive category. Now, talking a little bit about courage, to give us a little background on this, Aquinas uh, said that the passion of courage is actually most present in the young and the drunk, believe it or not. Uh, he says, because they, they overestimate their abilities and they have an inexperience of the obstacles of life. Right now, of course, this is just the emotion, the feeling of courage. The virtue of courage means that we have the willingness, even when we understand our own weaknesses, and we recognize how difficult life is, that we still are willing to will the good and to do the good no matter how difficult the situations are. Uh, I'm reminded by the way of a, a story from my own life. About five years ago, uh, my wife bought a horse.
Speaker 0 00:04:53 I had heard that you had to exercise the horse a few times a week, and I heard that cost money if you paid someone else to do it. So I quickly, uh, decided I would learn to ride a horse myself, so, uh, I could train the horse. And so I began to do so, and I began to try to ride and began to learn, got a couple lessons, began to try to ride, to learn faster, learn to try to jump, learn to try to do things. And for a long time, I thought I was very brave and very courageous, because I was willing to always try to ride a little faster, willing to try to do this stuff. Um, but I realized now in retrospect that a little bit like the young and the drunk in Aquinas's example, I simply had an overestimate. I overestimated my own abilities, and I had an inexperience of the obstacles of life.
Speaker 0 00:05:40 And I think it was in the summer of, it was Pentecost Sunday on, uh, in 2019, I was riding a horse and I was actually racing a mini horse in an arena, which is actually not advised. Uh, and, uh, anyway, all of a sudden, long story short, uh, there I am on the ground in front of the horse on my back, having flipped off the front so fast that I don't even remember what happened. Um, you know, my, uh, anyway, a month later, ribs healed. Um, life was good again. But then I realized what it meant to have courage, not simply bravado, because we right, you know, uh, because we think we can handle everything but courage when we have the willingness to try to do things, even when we know often that we can't, right? How do we discover in a way that life will often beat us down and still rise up to meet it every day?
Speaker 0 00:06:30 That's in a way where courage begins to come in. Now, there's a wonderful quote from Tolkien and, and this quote, ab uh, from Tolkien Tolkien, uh, Jr r Tolkien, who wrote Lord of the Rings, was a good friend of, uh, c s Lewis. He would say, uh, this, he said that it was kind of asked about his views of history. Does he think things are gonna get better? Or what do things? He says, actually, I'm a Christian and a Roman Catholic. So I do not expect history to be anything but a long defeat, though it contains, and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly some samples or glimpses of final victory. This is sometimes referred to Tolkien's view of history, right? As a long defeat. And I think we really have to take seriously that question, uh, right, do we take time to recognize that much of what we build up will fall apart?
Speaker 0 00:07:33 But I also want to put a little note that Tolkien's quote ends with final victory. So to really understand what Lewis and Tolkien, uh, taught about this kind of view of the world is both the idea of a long defeat and a final victory. I really can't talk about this with speaking of Tolkien without looking at a beautiful quote towards the end of the Lord of the Rings, uh, which was his fictional world, uh, his mythological world that he developed kind of in different ways, but somewhat parallel to Lewis's Chronicles and Narnia. But towards the end, uh, this one character, Sam Wise, Gaji basically is at the end of everything, the world is falling apart. His, he's falling apart, his master Frodo has fallen apart. But there's this one quote I wanna read you. He's in the dark, and he looks up and he sees a star there peeping among the cloud rack above a dark, but high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star, uh, sorry, white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart. He looked up out of the forsaken land and hope returned to him for like a shaft, clear and cold. The thought pierced him that in the end, the shadow was only a small and passing thing. There was light and high beauty forever, beyond its reach.
Speaker 0 00:09:16 Now, for a moment, his own fate and even his masters ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo's side, putting away all fear. He cast himself into a deep un troubled sleep. So what Lewis and Tolkien are doing in trying to remind us of the perennial difficulties of human life, our inability in a way to fix things and resolve problems, it's not calling us to hopelessness. It's not calling us to despair, but instead it's calling us to hope. And I think in many ways, Lewis and Tolkien would say that when we see in our modern society this kind of postmodern despair and hopelessness, that's a reaction to the overly hopeful and naive belief of modernity that thought it could solve all of human problems with human reason alone. So, uh, with this in mind, I'd like to take a look at some of the themes that come up in Prince Caspian.
Speaker 0 00:10:25 Now, prince Caspian is the second book in publication order. Uh, and I do think that even though Lewis one time late in his life wrote, he said, well, you could read the Chronicles in any order, even the order, the chronological one. Um, I think that was just a, a quick flippant answer that Lewis gave in a letter. And I think his best judgment came out in the order in which they appear, in which you meet Asline and lie in the witch in the wardrobe. And then the second book comes out as Prince Cassian. Uh, by the way, these podcasts, uh, do not in any way presuppose that you've read the books or that you have a deep familiarity. Uh, so for those who haven't read, don't worry at all. Uh, please continue. And, uh, in Prince Caspian though, what happens is Lewis does the shocking thing after the lying, the witch in the wardrobe in which the children have come into Narnia and have become kings and queens.
Speaker 0 00:11:17 And the witch has been vanquished by Aslan. He that says, let's consider the next book will be a thousand years in the future. And in a thousand years in the future, everything will have fallen apart. So he now has the same characters comeback to Narnia, and everything has fallen apart. The woods have grown wild, the orchards have grown wild, uh, in a way, right? The human beings and the animals have grown wild, uh, right? It's kind of a shocking thing that Lewis does to remind us that all earthly things will grow wild. Um, right in the very theme of the garden in Genesis, we see the order of the garden and the wildness of everything outside, right? A garden in the ancient world would have a wall around it to protect it, uh, paradise itself, that very language comes from a, um, an ancient word for a walled garden.
Speaker 0 00:12:19 Now, by the way, we also remember Lewis well was a from Ireland, Northern Ireland, but he lived in many ways in England. So he remembered and understood that we were actually meant to live in a garden. We were not meant to live in the wild. Often, I think, uh, as Americans or, you know, we have kind of a, a love of the wilderness, the part of nature that's been untouched by humanity. But a garden is that part of the wilderness that has come under human tutelage, under kind of the guidance of human reason in which flowers, plants, right? All sorts of different things become more beautiful for what they can be by the guiding hand of human reason. Uh, Lewis at one time will say that the most natural animal is the animal that is under human kind of teaching. And of course, partly this is because the most natural human being is the human being that has come under divine teaching, right?
Speaker 0 00:13:21 We are not meant to be alone in the world. We are actually meant to be, um, right within an ordered cosmos, within an ordered whole. So anyway, so they come back to the story in Narnia, a thousand years in the future, and everything has fallen apart. And so, in a lot of ways, the question is, will the characters have the courage to face a Narnia that has fallen apart? What if you built something beautifully, uh, maybe, I don't know, a building a work of art, a family, a school, and you somehow came back 10 years later, 20 years later, and saw that it had fallen apart. How would you respond? Right? You would grieve, you would be sad. But the classical tradition that Lewis and Tolkien think says that we have a choice for how we respond to it. We have a choice for how we respond and for how we trust that God will respond in his screw.
Speaker 0 00:14:25 Tape letters. Letter 29, right towards the end, Lewis has writes the whole thing about courage and the courage. It's actually about cowardice and courage. And in there Lewis says that, how does he put it? He says, the more we rely on precautions, the more likely we will give into fear, because these precautions are our attempt to try to keep the worst for coming to the worst. Therefore, we stop trusting in God. And the courage that God gives true peace comes from trusting that even should the worst come to the worst, I will see it through, right? God will give me the strength to see it through. I am willing to accept any and all outcomes up to and including the collapse of my projects, the loss of my loved ones, maybe the betrayal of a friend. I am willing to accept any and all outcomes up to and including.
Speaker 0 00:15:25 So, courage is, is willingness to accept everything as it is, and still saying that I will still be able to somehow say, right with Genesis, right? It is good that there is goodness in the world, and there is goodness in God despite the severity of this passing shadow of evil and darkness, right? No matter how large it is. So what happens then? We also discover that not only have things fallen apart and grown wild, we begin to learn why they've grown wild in the story of Prince Caspian, right? Uh, there are new Nars, uh, there is King Mraz. Uh, the faithful king has been, uh, driven away. And so we recognize in a way that there is evil. Evil in the world often makes things worse. Yes, things fall apart on their own, but they especially fall apart because human beings are prone to, right?
Speaker 0 00:16:29 Uh, what Aquinas will call the double darkness of sin and ignorance, right? We often are very confused about what is right. And even when we know what is right, we often reject it. And there will be actors in history, agents in history who will want to exploit others in order to gain power, right? In some ways, all of us are subject to this fallen inclination. So King Mraz, we begin to discover has actually killed his brother. It's interesting in this story, uh, Lewis, almost retells parts of Hamlet, uh, insofar as you have, uh, right, the, um, you know, the, the, the brother kills the brother, uh, and then the uncle becomes the king, but the uncle is a usurper, and then the prince has to figure out what to do. So, right? This is where we begin to figure out, okay, not only have things fallen apart, but there's an evil agent who's trying to suppress the old Nars in this story.
Speaker 0 00:17:31 Now, I wanna just look at courage in a few characters to see how this is developed. There's a character in the story. Lucy, one of the great heroes of the Chronicles of Narnia. Now, Lucy, in this story, all of them are back in Narnia. And, uh, Lucy and Susan, her sister, and Peter and Edmund, uh, her brothers Lucy being the youngest, when all the rest are kind of lost in the woods, and they're trying to, um, go on their journey. She sees Lyn and no one else can. And she says, let's go follow Lyn. I think he's asking us to, and they make a decision, and Edmund votes with her, but the rest of them vote against her, and they end up going away. So she goes along with 'em, and she's sad and everything, and, and then a couple days later, uh, she sees Lyn again, and he calls her to him.
Speaker 0 00:18:25 Lyn is the great lion in the Chronicles of Narnia, the incarnate Lord of the imagined world of Narnia. And here, Aslan says to her, why didn't you follow me? And she's like, well, I couldn't have followed you. I, how could I have followed you? The older people wouldn't have let me. And he says, well, what if you had tried? And she goes, well, what would've happened? And there's this great line where Lyn says to know what would have happened. Child said, Lyn, no, nobody is ever told that. Oh dear, said Lucy, but anyone can find out what will happen, said ly, there may be many opportunities in which we've actually given into cowardice or, you know, cowardice and, uh, failed to do what the good that we ought to have done. Um, and we won't know what good would've been achieved, but we can find out the good that will happen simply by doing it.
Speaker 0 00:19:28 She eventually talks more with Lyn, and she recognizes now what she needs to do. She finally summons up her courage. She buries her face in Aslan's great mane, smells his strength, feels him breathe on her, right? Uh, right. Obviously this image of Christ breathing his breath, his spirit on the apostles on us. This is what Aslan says in the story. Now you are a lioness, and now all Narnia will be renewed, but come, we have no time to lose. I will wait here, you, Lucy, go and wake the others and tell them to follow. If they will not, then you at least must follow me, right? This great thing, lion, right, is the bravest, the most courageous. And, but Aslan is a lion shares his lions with the characters. So Lucy, the smallest, the weakest, in theory, the least brave of all the characters now becomes Als.
Speaker 0 00:20:44 And it's through her that all Narnia will be renewed. You know, of course, reading this as Christians, we can't, but think of a young woman similar to Lucy, a little older, married or betrothed named Mary, right? Who said yes, despite all of the chaos and the promises of even difficulty. So, so this sense of really wanting to recover, and we do know Lu by the way, Lucy does go and wake them all up at night. Uh, they are all too grumpy to be woken up in the middle of the night, but she does. And she simply says she's going to go. And lo and behold, they follow her. And then because they begin to follow her, they begin to see Lyn. Uh, later, there's a time when Susan, uh, her older sister meets Lyn, and she has actually told Lucy that all a while she believed that Lucy was telling the truth, but she was simply sick of going in the woods.
Speaker 0 00:21:40 She was tired of it. In a way, you can think about this almost like the spiritual vice of SLO or Achaia, which is not so much laziness, but it's just an, an unwillingness to make the effort to do spiritual things, because they're sometimes difficult and not immediately pleasant. But I think we also have to realize that this is often us, right? Lucy is the great hero, but she also failed. At first, Susan fails, but then she meets Lyn, and after a law, awful pause, the deep voice said, Susan, Susan made no answer, but the others thought she was crying. You have listened to fears. Child said, Asline, come, let me breathe on you. Forget them. Are you brave Again, a little Asline said, Susan. So when we come back, we're gonna look a little bit more at some of the other instances of courage. We're gonna look at the theme of grace, and then we're gonna take a look at Lewis's essay on the funeral of a great myth and see how he sees this kind of perennial theme of the need for courage as particularly acute in our age.
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Speaker 0 00:23:27 In Prince Cassian, we find another great instance of courage in Peter and Edmond. And what ends up happening is actually right, a hand to hand combat. The narens, the old narens are actually outnumbered, uh, by King Mraz and his soldiers, uh, the new nars. And, uh, so Peter Edmund actually presents this request, right? That, uh, you'll have King Mraz battle fight, hand to hand combat against, uh, Peter and in there, right? As that's going forward, uh, at one time, uh, we have, uh, Peter steps out. They take a little break, and he says to Edmund, uh, basically, um, he says that King Raz is, is is better than I am, and I don't know that I'm going to be able to beat him in this battle. Uh, and he says this, finally he looks at Edmund and he says, give my love to everyone at home Ed if he gets me, and especially right to Trumpian.
Speaker 0 00:24:37 And then he says, this, Edmund couldn't speak. He walked back to the lines, sick to his stomach. Lewis is not unaware that often our fears and sorrows will overwhelm us so much so that we can't speak. There's even a line from Romans where it says that the Holy Spirit will pray for us in the midst of our groans, right? Um, we sometimes think human beings are so powerful and rational that we can always articulate exactly what's most important, but sometimes in life, uh, we can moan right when we're really sick, when we're really grieving, when we're really fearful. But even then, the Holy Spirit can pray through us. But here we see Peter is willing to die. He shows his willingness to die for the good of the old Nars. And Edmund shows his courage by letting it happen, knowing that that is the best.
Speaker 0 00:25:41 In that circumstance, we have kind of this beautiful, almost like a, like a scenic calvary, right? Christ offering himself, Mary, watching him offer himself Christ. Yes, Mary's, yes, Peter's yes, Edmond's, yes. But in a way, all Peter does there is say, I don't know what's going to happen. Now, it's interesting again, if you remember Hamlet, and by the way, Lewis loved Hamlet, uh, by Shakespeare, and he wrote an essay on Hamlet. And in this essay, he says, the world of Hamlet is a world obsessed with death. Um, it's a world in which almost all the characters are either dying or are so afraid of dying, that death is omnipresent. He says, it's a world filled with anxiety in which every character is kind of looking over his or her shoulder at another character, always conniving, always trying to manipulate, always trying in a way to outsmart death.
Speaker 0 00:26:45 And as Lewis said earlier, when everything is focused on our precautions, fear increases. So when we give into anxiety and fear, anxiety and fears increase. So it's in actually the middle of Hamlet in Act three that Hamlet says his famous thing, right to be or not to be. That is the question. Well, in many ways, of course, that's the wrong question. The question is not to be or not to be. The question is how to be how to live. Uh, but Lewis said, it was kind of the beginning of him saying that you know what to be or not to. It's better to be, we first have that question, right? Is existence worth it at all? And then it's later in Act five, when Hamlet actually goes into his hand-to-hand combat, uh, which will res result, result, um, in, in, in death that he, Hamlet says this, he says, the readiness is all he refuses in a way to try to like have any divine, any sense of trying to control the outcome or right, or try to know what's going to happen.
Speaker 0 00:27:55 He says, the readiness is all, whatever happens will happen according to God will, and God will bring good out of whatever happens. And Lewis, in his essay on Hamlet, says, at that moment, Hamlet found himself right? The characters are lost when they try to navigate life on their own, and they find themselves, Hamlet finds himself when he recovers divine providence. And in many ways, right? That's what you see in Prince Caspian. It's the characters trusting that they have to act, but that the outcomes of their actions are beyond their abilities. And the good that they seek is in God's hands alone. Now, one of the other great things then we begin to see are these characters that have to practice courage by exercising faith and action. But the whole story of Prince Caspian is that all their efforts are not enough. There aren't enough old Nars and there aren't enough soldiers, and they would be overrun.
Speaker 0 00:28:56 And the very treachery within King Maraz, king Maraz ends up being killed by two of his associates. And, um, they then would overrun the, uh, old Ians. But interestingly, what happens is Ashlyn comes on the scene, he wakes the trees, the trees come and crush the new Nars. They crush King Mraz and set about the restoration of Narnia. Now, what's interesting here is that there's a very clear sense in which then the restoration that we need, the restoration that we long for, is beyond our ability to bring about, right? It requires grace in the world of Lewis and Tolkien. Uh, it's a couple times where they love to send the trees back into battle and to kind of recover creation in a way, recovering itself under God's order, in part because humanity no longer orders creation to God, but orders creation merely to its own belly, in a way to its own, uh, attempts at subjugating one another.
Speaker 0 00:30:10 So, right, this theme of grace, that behind the evils, even the evils, that though we must use courage and stand up in, stand up to, uh, we know our efforts won't, won't be enough, but our efforts aren't alone, right? If we can recognize ourselves within the created order, we can recognize God as the source of the created order, and that he will bring about the created order to its end and to its completion. And we have evidence that this will be done because we've seen it done in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have humanity restored and renewed, right? And the faith of Christians is that that restoration and that renewal beginning in Jesus Christ will eventually spread to all of those who are in Christ. So we can think about this then as a kind of what Tolkien and Lewis would call this UK catastrophe, this good catastrophe when all of the sudden not everything falls apart, but all of the sudden when everything falls together, because God does something great.
Speaker 0 00:31:29 And again, going back to the Tolkien would say that the resurrection itself is the greatest u catastrophe, right at the end of the loss of all earthly hope, the loss of Israel's hope, the loss in a way of the hope of humanity, God became man and man killed him, right? Nonetheless, right? Christ rises from the dead. And so the greatest evil done in the history of the world becomes the occasion, uh, of the greatest good. Uh, so there's a poem that I love, uh, to quote, uh, especially when teaching this material to students by Robert Browning called, uh, prosperous. But he, this is one little part, he says, for sudden, the worst turns the best to the brave. So in so far as we are willing to be brave, to be courageous, then the worst may suddenly turn to the best. Sometimes this will happen in our life, but God willing, we believe that this will happen right at the end of our lives.
Speaker 0 00:32:38 So let's then take a look a little at this essay, the funeral of a great Myth and what Lewis was trying to teach in it. So, what he says in this essay is he says that he comes to bury the great myth of modernity, and he describes the great myth of modernity as the myth of progress. That the myth of temporal and earthly progress, that things over time get better animals, become more, uh, plants turn into animals, animals turn into rational animals, right? That over time we move from being less civilized to more civilized, uh, we move from ignorance into wisdom. We move from darkness into enlightenment. It's interesting that Lewis writes this essay in the fifties, and he already cites Walt Disney as an example of this kind of earthly myth of progress. Uh, for those of you who have may or perhaps have visited, uh, Disney World, there is a place called the Epcot Center, E P C O T.
Speaker 0 00:33:47 What's the Epcot Center? Well, it's the environmental prototypical community of tomorrow. Why would you wanna live in a community of tomorrow? Well, because we presuppose that tomorrow's gonna be better than yesterday, right? We think we're getting better, and that there's a order of progress that is happening, and there's of course, just ultimately this is just untrue, right? Tomorrow may be better, tomorrow may be worse. Uh, the technological progress of today may help us to eliminate, or not to eliminate, but to treat certain illnesses or to create, you know, kind of wonderful devices for disabled people to live a little bit more full life. Uh, but it also may create right? Great weapons of destruction. Uh, Pope Benedict would quote a donno to say that progress is the movement from the slingshot to the Adam bomb. Uh, that this sense that human beings will always be struggling against, uh, sin and death, right against evil.
Speaker 0 00:34:59 We are not gonna be able to outsmart evil. We're not gonna be able to outsmart death. Uh, one of my, um, mentors, uh, father Matthew Lamb would often say that even in great enlightenment societies, two places still tend to be rather populated prisons and hospitals. Uh, we don't actually eliminate, uh, the problems of sin and death of crime and disease merely by our increased efforts. So that's the first theme, uh, that myth of progress. And we have to recognize that this has kind of impacted our, the way we think about the world. Secondly, though, and this he says is the irony or the ambivalence of the myth of progress, is it's a myth of progress in a way to nowhere. There's no real ultimate purpose in the myth of modernity. We're simply kind of accidentally moving from disorder to order from, uh, from chaos to complexity.
Speaker 0 00:36:02 There's no real, there's no end towards which we are going. There's no God from which we came. We're merely accidental, uh, agents, accidental cosmos that. So he says, you have this strange thing. On the one hand, we think we're always progressing, and on the other hand, we're progressing to nowhere. Uh, now when we think about this, because in a way, with the only kind of progress we can think about as material and technological progress, which we seem to be making for a little bit of time, but Lewis, of course, knowing a little bit more about history, uh, would remember that in the Roman times, uh, the world was much more technologically progressed than it was a thousand years later, right? The Roman roads in some places are still available today, but Roman technology up to say 400 was better than the, than in Italy and in, in, you know, in, in many times anyway later.
Speaker 0 00:37:03 So this deep sense of which there's no reason to think that in 500 years we're gonna be more technologically advanced. I think it's interesting to see that in many TV shows and stories. Now, we're moving from utopian visions of a good future, which you used to get maybe in Star Trek or something, to now dystopian futures in which in the future everything falls apart. Only a few people are left and they live like savages. But I think Lewis would say this is again, very typical, uh, the myth of modernity. The myth of progress is so extreme and so unrealizable that we begin to then despair, and now we think that everything is falling apart, which of course, we have no reason to believe that tomorrow's going to be worse than today, right? We simply don't know, right? Jesus makes it very clear in Matthew six, who of you can add an inch to your height?
Speaker 0 00:37:54 Then why do you worry about tomorrow, today has enough trouble of its own as he puts it. So you can think then, in a way of, Lewis says that the new secular west, and this is a provocative claim, he says it's actually suppressing the old Christian, west Lewis saw himself as a living dinosaur, a representative of that old Christian West that he thought that we should do well to listen to, 'cause we would learn things that may be soon forgotten. In Prince Caspian, uh, it's actually, uh, the Prince Caspian's nurse who tells him the stories of the old nars, but they're considered fairytales as King Mraz puts it, you know, fit for babies. Of course, the irony is that King Mraz knows they're true, but he's trying to suppress them. And then you end up in Prince Caspian, also the Tudor, the Greek Tudor who comes along and tells him that some of these old stories are true.
Speaker 0 00:38:57 And in that, you can see kind of what Lewis thought is he himself was that old nurse telling these stories to children, these fairytales to remind us of the old Christian West. And he's the tutor, the teacher, not only the fictional writer, but the scholar, the professor, the essayist, who reminds us that there actually is an older order, uh, that part of the reason why we think that things grow from being less complex to more complex is because we see acorns grow into trees, babies turn into adults. Uh, we see machines getting more complicated and more developed over time. But Lewis reminds us that you see the acorn develop into the tree because the acorn fell from the tree. You see the baby grow into the adult because the baby came from the adult. You see machines getting more complicated over time because the machines are falling from the higher order, the infinitely higher order of the mind of the human person.
Speaker 0 00:40:02 So he says, when we do look across history in the cosmos, we often do see a lot of complexification, a certain kind of progress. But this is because it came from a creator, right? The order that we discern in the universe comes from the ordering principle of the creator, right? And in many ways, the fact that we expect tomorrow to be better, Lewis says, is kind of, we rest out the Christian promise of eternal life, and we take it out of its context, and we stick it into the future. Instead of the future of the, our future life with God that is promised to us, in which every tear will be wiped away. In modernity, we began to believe that we could have every tear wiped away on earth. And I think you can see this in some ways, right? In the, uh, probably most famously in the Marxist promise of a utopian society, that once we destroy this society, a new society that will be born, uh, it's not accidental that, uh, Marx, uh, came from a long line of like, of rabbis and, uh, this, uh, Jewish heritage, uh, where they saw in a way the prophets that would preach about the coming kingdom of God.
Speaker 0 00:41:20 But he saw it as a temporal thing, not the coming kingdom of God with God in heaven. So in closing, I wanna think a little bit about maybe two key ways of reading this final quote by Tolkien, right? As I said at the beginning, it was actually, I'm a Christian, a Roman Catholic, and so I do not expect history to be anything but a long defeat. And though it contains, and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly some samples or glimpses of final victory, right? We begin with that idea that history is a long defeat. Um, we will always live on the verge of death, our societies, our families, our individual lives, right? Death and sin betrayal. Uh, these are part of the fabric of human existence. Lewis will say that we've always lived in a certain sense at the precipice, but he also says that civilizations in a way that are worthy of the name find ways to still do noble things, to do art, to make music, to tell stories, to study the stars, to study philosophy, right, to receive and remember the old stories in a way of Christianity, the old stories of Israel, and pass those along and recognize the wisdom that it can give.
Speaker 0 00:42:46 But I think I want to maybe consider this question that I often find when I teach this, that students will ask, which is, does this lead to a kind of quiet or maybe a kind of a despairing view of life? If we remember that everything's going to fall apart, uh, doesn't in a way that take away the kind of, I don't know, the joy of living and the, uh, hopes. Well, what I would say is kind of go back to my own story with, uh, riding horses. It was more fun to ride horses when I thought I was invincible. I just turned out to be false, right? Uh, I was very ible. My ribs are very ible. Um, and they were convinced, uh, right <laugh>, uh, I learned how difficult it is to sleep in a bed with a, um, uh, bruised, uh, uh, ribs.
Speaker 0 00:43:35 Uh, so yes, that's a kind of fun daring and optimism that we can have. It just turns out it doesn't last over a lifetime. A truer courage is when we recognize the evils and difficulties of life, the sufferings that will come. And we still say yes. We still say, we will show, we will show up. Lewis uh, gave a talk to workers in his day, and he said this, there are two things that we should do with respect to kind of the conditions of the world, maybe the economic problem. He says, number one, well, we should try to make them as good as possible. We should reform them. But it's very interesting. Lewis says this, which I don't think we say enough. He says, secondly, Christianity fortifies you against the evils of the world, insofar as they remain bad.
Speaker 0 00:44:31 No matter how many efforts we make to improve ourselves, to improve others, to improve our loved ones, ultimately things will remain bad <laugh>, they will remain broken, wounded, right? The good that we need is only the good that ultimately, right, Jesus Christ can bring about. No amount of our efforts can bring back life to the dead. No amount of our efforts can bring back innocence to those who have suffered, you know, violence and betrayal. Uh, that is something, right, that only God can give. Now, I wanna close with this last image of Lewis. Lewis writes during, uh, well, he fights during World War I, but he's writing a lot during World War ii. So this horrible sense we're back in a world war, just in the same gen, basically in the same generation. He knew in a way that wars will continue, uh, that this war may not end well, but nonetheless, right?
Speaker 0 00:45:38 The imperfect ability of life and the resulting need for courage ought not lead us to quiets, but instead ought to inspire us to greater boldness leaving the results in God's hands. Lewis himself, during the war, would give countless talks. He would write many books, countless essays. He, during the war, right, started the addresses mere Christianity, and they became on the b b C address, all the while without any confidence that his books would really ever stick around to be read, right? That the German national socialist wouldn't take over England. But he didn't, that didn't let him bother him, right? He simply showed up. He used his talents for the glory of God to help others, even without any confidence in a way that they would have effect in a way. He did what he could and he put all the results in God's hands. So as we close, I think, let us ask ourselves how much we have fallen into this myth of earthly and material progress.
Speaker 0 00:46:42 But let us also ask ourselves, right, what might we do today to practice courage and daring to accept with peace and serenity the difficult things of our life that we cannot change, but also what might we do kind of boldly and daringly for God, leaving all the results, all our intended desires, right? In God's hands, right in the hands ultimately of Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, who promises that he will come back and not right? Not that all Narnia will be renewed, but that all of the heavens and the earth right will be renewed and be with God forever in heaven. Thank you.
Speaker 2 00:47:35 Thank you so much for joining us for this podcast. If you like this episode, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast app to help others find the show. And if you want to take the next step, please consider joining our Annunciation Circle so we can continue to bring you more free content. We'll see you next time on the Catholic Theology Show.
