Last semester I taught a course on C. S. Lewis through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Oklahoma. In it we approached Lewis’s most popular works by genre. Next semester I will be offering another class on C. S. Lewis, this time approaching his works thematically. This will allow me to spend more time drawing on some of his lesser known writings. Here is the course description:

Inklings of Things Deeper: Exploring Life’s Perennial Questions with C. S. Lewis

Is there a God? Is beauty merely in the eye of the beholder? What is truth? What is love? These are some of the questions that have intrigued humans for millennia. C. S. Lewis, one of the greatest Christian authors in the 20th century, was well versed in the literature of our Western intellectual tradition, and devoted much thought and ink to these questions. He had an exceptional ability to weave together his own insights with those of the great thinkers of the past, and to impart those insights with clarity, simplicity, and wit. This course is a tour through the writings of C. S. Lewis, organized around these questions which seem to persist through the centuries.

We shall begin with a biographical overview of Lewis’s life, learning details about his life and times that help bring him to life in the 21st century. We shall then proceed thematically, studying Lewis’s views on: the nature of God; truth, goodness, and beauty—what they are and how they relate to each other; the power and function of myth; the nature of love, and more.

Click here to go to the course page.

Patriotism has, then, many faces. Those who would reject it entirely do not seem to have considered what will certainly step–has already begun to step–into its place. For a long time yet, or perhaps forever, nations will live in danger. Rulers must somehow nerve their subjects to defend them or at least to prepare for their defence. Where the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only be presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for “their country” they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice, or civilisation, or humanity. This is a step down, not up. . . . Good men needed to to be convinced that their country’s cause was just; but it was still their country’s cause, not the cause of justice as such. . . . . If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. A false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.

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The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1988), 29.

Nature “dies” on those who try to live for a love of nature. Coleridge ended by being insensible to her; Wordsworth, by lamenting that the glory had passed away. Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be overshelmed and, after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you.

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The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1988), 22.

Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. I do not see how the “fear” of God could have ever meant to me anything but the lowest prudential efforts to be safe, if I had never seen certain ominous ravines and unapproachable crags. And if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the “love” of God would never, so far as I can see, have existed.

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The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1988), 20.

If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lessons you had already decided to learn; this is only another way of saying that nature does not teach. The tendency to take her as a teacher is obviously very easily grafted on to the experience we call “love of nature.” But it is only a graft. While we are actually subjected to them, the “moods” and “spirits” of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, “Look. Listen. Attend.”

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The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1988), 19.

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen -

[...]

I know all the different ways in which it gets one: wild hopes, bitter nostalgia for lost happiness, mere physical terror turning one sick, agonised pity and self-pity. In fact, Gethsemane. I had one (paradoxical) support which you lack — that of being in severe pain myself. Apart from that what helped Joy and me through it was 1. That she was always told the whole truth about her own state. There was no miserable pretence [sic]. That means that both can face it side-by-side, instead of becoming something like adversaries in a battle-of-wits. 2. Take it day by day and hour by hour (as we took the front line). It is quite astonishing how many happy– even gay–moments we had together when there was no hope. 3. Don’t think of it as something sent by God. Death and disease are the work of the Devil. It is permitted by God: i.e. our General has put you in a fort exposed to enemy fire. 4. Remember other sufferers. It’s fatal to start thinking ‘Why should this happen to us when everyone else is so happy’. You are (I was and may be again) one of a huge company. Of course we shall pray for you all we know how. God bless you both,

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

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“Letter to Mary Van Deusen, 10 April 1959,” Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Vol. III, 1038-9.

I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the universe. Certainly if he goes on his present course much further man can not be trusted with knowledge.

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“Letter to Arthur C. Clarke, 7 Dec. 1943,” The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. II (2004), 594.