Notes from Learning in War-Time

By C.S. Lewis in 1939, Learning in Wartime is a sermon contained in his “Weight of Glory” collection. I received a print of this from a mentor in college and just dug it up again recently. After working for a while it has taken on new meaning, especially as I transition to a new job and search for my purpose in it.

Lewis struggled with being an academic in a time of war; I struggle with being a mere designer even in a time of peace (well, peace for me at least). His point that we should be always considering ourselves in urgent times is well-suited for our situation today.

> [Every Christian] must ask himself how it is right or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology.

And we worry about whether a _war_ should stop us from learning, when much more important matters have not?

> We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life’. Life has never been normal.

Reminds me of the argument to do things “when we have time”. We will never “have” time; we have to _make_ it.

> The war will fail to absorb our whole attention because it is a finite object, and therefore intrinsically unfitted to support the whole attention of a human soul…He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a part, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

Or to the claims of a job? The last sentence sounds like Tom Peters: “You are your calendar”.

> The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly “as to the Lord”.

Offer whatever work you do to God and it becomes worship; but best when you do it to your intended vocation and your utmost.

> Humility, no less than the appetite, encourages us to concentrate simply on the knowledge or the beauty, not to much concerning ourselves with their ultimate relevance to the vision of God.

Autotelic worship?

> If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work. The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived.

Hmm, so autotelism isn’t the end goal, but rather keeping God as the focus.

> Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord”. It is only our _daily_ bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done, or any grace received.

More ammunition against planning and future-focus. God works in the _present_.

> But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still.

Yay!