C. S. Lewis "The World's Last Night"

I have been posting my reflections on Lewis as we read selections for Peter Meilaender's C.S. Lewis webinar. Thus far:

• "Weight of Glory" in the volume of the same name.
• Books I and II of Mere Christianity
• Surprised by Joy
• "Transposition" in the Weight of Glory volume

This week we read The Last Battle and the essay, "The World's Last Night" (1952). The key theme in both is eschatology, the first with heaven and the second with the second coming. This post is on the essay, "The World's Last Night.

1. Lewis suggests two basic categories for why some moderns find the idea of the second coming of Christ embarrassing. The first group involves theoretical objections, the second practical.

The first theoretical objection has to do with the fact that Jesus' teaching on the second coming sits against the backdrop of Jewish apocalyptic. A harsh critic might say, "Jesus was really the same sort of crank or charlatan as all the other writers of apocalyptic" (101). In other words, that Jesus was a lunatic.

Lewis has a number of objections to this line of thinking. First, the fact that there have been apocalyptic whackos would not negate legitimate apocalypticism. William Miller who founded the Adventist movement is mentioned. Lewis counters, "A thing does not vanish--it is not even discredited--because someone has spoke of it with exaggeration" (101). 

There's a Latin expression here, abusus non tolit usum--"Abuse is no excuse." You can't automatically disqualify an idea because someone abuses it. 

2. A softer push back would say, "Every great man is partly of his own age and partly for all time. What matters in his work is always that which transcends his age, not that which he shared with a thousand forgotten contemporaries" (102). Lewis rightly notes that in this view, "we are assuming that the thought of our age is correct."

Let me leave Jesus out of it for a moment and say that I do believe that there are items of progress in which we do have a better understanding--or at least more useful one--than in ages past. The laptop I am typing on is better than anything anyone from Lewis back to Adam ever had. Obviously our understanding of science is superior--or at least our constructs are far more useful--than any place or time before in history. It is simply the case.

I am/we are not smarter than the people of the past, but how could we not be at a great collective advantage to be able to stand on the shoulders of the smartest people from all over the world throughout all of history? How could not the average understanding not be more likely to be more insightful, over time, when we have everything from the past to start from?

That's assuming we listen. No generation is smarter than the previous ones. It may only be a remnant at any time that benefits--the majority may drive us all to perdition at any time. The twisted may blow us all to a nuclear Armaggedon at any time. But the "insightful remnant" at any time should in theory stand on ever higher heights in any field that affords a collective wisdom. 

There will be fits and starts, regress and progress. But I continue to believe that this insightful remnant reached a new level of historical consciousness in the late 1800s. The current generation sees plenty of regress, but there is an intellectual remnant.

So I reserve the right to critique Jewish apocalypticism. For example, the world is not flat. The dead are not in a cave with four hollows in a mountain somewhere. Heaven is not a series of skies straight up to God. I am not smarter than the author of 1 Enoch, but I am right and he was wrong on many things. My understanding has progressed from 1 Enoch's apocalyptic worldview.

3. With regard to Jesus and the earliest generations, Lewis says some curious things. Lewis says that Jesus got it wrong in Mark 13:30 and 9:1--"This generation will not pass until all these things come to pass." Moreover, "they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime" (104).

He considers this a great sign of the authenticity of the Gospels, on the one hand. He also points to Jesus claims to be "ignorant" in Mark 13:32. His bluntness is a little jarring. I don't like using the word ignorant in relation to Jesus. 

However, he expresses a position that I often have in a more tactful way: "The God-Man was omniscient as God and ignorant as Man" (106). Jesus was unconscious when he slept. He did not read Plato as an infant. And Lewis says he was "merely organic life in His mother's womb." Lewis says we must "asquience in mystery." "It would be difficult... repellent, to suppose that Jesus never asked a genuine question" (107). 

4. He continues to rail against a progressive view of history. He and his generation lost this view after WW1 smashed it to bits. "The modern conception of Progress or Evolution... is simply a myth" (108). He is not talking about biological evolution--"I am not in the least concerned to refute Darwinism as a theorem in biology" (108).

He does note, however, that the myth of evolution preceded the biological theory (109). Nor does biological evolution have a straightforward sense of progress. I have described it as "survival of the flukest." Most importantly, even if evolution did imply inevitable biological progress, it would not suggest "any law of progress in ethical, cultural, and social history" (111).

I do not disagree with Lewis here. However, I do believe that egalitarian culture is morally superior to the colonialist world he grew up with. The values of a contemporary American public school is morally superior to the "concentration camp" school so typical of England in his childhood (see Surprised by Joy). 

He makes a snide remark against "the great campaign against White Slavery" (120). I squarely reject comments he makes in more than one place as if to say we shouldn't worry about trying to make the world a more just and equitable place. I'm a Wesleyan, after all.

5. There are some good warnings here though. We should not assume we know where we are in God's story. "How can the characters in a play guess the plot?" (112). "We do not and cannot know when the world drama will end" (113). "We do not know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who the minor characters. The Author knows."

6. We should not fear the second coming. But "at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question, 'What if this present were the world's last night?'" (117). At the same time, while perfect love casts out fear, "so do several other things--ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity."

God's judgment "will be infallible judgment" (121).