Today it appears cooler heads have cancelled the apocalypse.[1. Photo by Emanuel Kypreos on Unsplash .] But were we ever really in that level of danger? This sense of dread feels new. But as C. S. Lewis once wrote, we must practice timeless wisdom when we’re living in an atomic age: “If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb 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.” Here and elsewhere, how does Lewis encourage us in the art of living and learning in wartime? Episode sponsors Enclave Publishing: The Crier Stone by Lyndsey Lewellen Realm Makers Expo 2025 The Company: Kingdom Writers, World Changers Above the Circle of Earth by E. Stephen Burnett Mission update Lorehaven reviews: The Crier Stone , upcoming A Study of Shattered Spells Subscribe free to get updates and join the ever-growing Lorehaven Guild Prologue Readers have an ongoing love/hate relationship with fictional wars. We know war is terrible in reality, but without conflict, we have no story. We’ll explore three ways people react to war, with Lewis’s clear responses. 1. We could retreat to pacifism. As a teen, I met my first “pacifist,” an avuncular young fellow at a seminary. Nice chap. Well-meant. Said he can’t defend his family against burglars. Many listeners may feel similarly, and I do want to respect their thinking. But it’s hard to respect someone’s “ethics” if they’re not from Scripture. I feel the same way about war-obsessives (see chapter 2) as about this. Yet we come to hear Lewis, like his essay “Why I Am Not a Pacifist” (video) : To call [war] useless because it did not also cure slums and unemployment is like coming up to a man who has just succeeded in defending himself from a man-eating tiger and saying, “It’s no good, old chap. This hasn’t really cured your rheumatism!” On the test of fact, then, I find the Pacifist position weak. It seems to me that history is full of useful wars as well as of useless wars. Many have engaged Lewis’s points with select Scriptures and observations. One thoughtful critic said he felt Lewis must not have seen brave pacifists . Either way, it’s better to head to Scriptures like Leviticus and Romans 13. A close second: Lewis’s own fantasy in The Ransom Trilogy and Narnia. Prince Caspian and others reckon well with Martial imagery and wartime. Perelandra illustrates the limits of words and sends Ransom into real battle. Lewis well shows , more than tells , how just wars ought to look and feel. In his own war experience, and as an academic, he’s well-qualified here. Lewis also rebutted retreat in “ The Dangers of National Repentance (PDF) .” Here he takes a rather dim view of folks who “apologize” for their country. We don’t see this in his fiction, but we do see real folks with fake morals. I like better this Lewis essay, which isolates a particular sort of cowardice: All Christians know that they must forgive their enemies. But “my enemy” primarily means the man whom I am really tempted to hate and traduce. If you listen to young Christian intellectuals talking, you will soon find out who their real enemy is. He seems to have two names—Colonel Blimp and “the business-man”. I suspect that the latter usually means the speaker’s father, but that is speculation. What is certain is that in asking such people to forgive the Germans and Russians and to open their eyes to the sins of England, you are asking them, not to mortify, but to indulge, their ruling passion. I do not mean that what you are asking them is not right and necessary in itself; we must forgive all our enemies or be damned. But it is emphatically not the exhortation which your audience needs. The communal sins which they should be told to repent are those of their own age and class—its contempt for the uneducated, its readiness to suspect evil, its self-righteous provocations of public obloquy, its breaches of the Fifth Commandment. Of these sins I have heard nothing among them. Till I do, I must think their candour towards the national enemy a rather inexpensive virtue. If a man cannot forgive the Colonel Blimp next door whom he has seen, how shall he forgive the Dictators whom he hath not seen? Thus, in our zeal for peace or empathy, let’s not forget biblical justice. We must not blame victims who fight back and excuse evil offenders. Such behavior is against real justice and marks the sin of cowardice. 2. We might ruminate on violence. One popular modern talking point claims that “men don’t read fiction.” And one popular intense rebuttal says, “Yes, men jolly well do read.” Both are half-true; in my view, many men tend to read particular fiction. Most popular men’s sci-fi or historical fiction offers an emphasis on war. LitRPG, games, action and spy thrillers, and military sci-fi have that edge. As a man, I enjoy some of these genres, but not exclusiv
