The Rebirth of Christ

To most university students and their professors, C. S. Lewis is well known as a scholar and literary critic. His two books on medieval literature, his books on Milton and on sixteenthcentury literature, and his widely ranging essays, have firmly established his authority in the Academy. Such scholarly and critical work has its independent importance, of course, quite apart from his other writing; and, indeed, those students and professors who admire him in this aspect are very likely to be only marginally aware of him as he appears to the broad reading public: a phenomenally popular writer on religious subjects.

As a scholar, Lewis simply knew too much to remain a prisoner of the Spirit of the Age, to succumb to the appeal of the merely fashionable. He was completely liberated from chronological snobbery. He did not suppose a statement true because it had been made recently, or because people around him seemed to accept it. “I take a very low view of ‘climates of opinion,’ ” he wrote. “In his own subject every man knows that all discoveries are made and all errors corrected by those who ignore the ‘climate of opinion.’ ” And beyond this, Lewis learned, by studying earlier periods and examining their assumptions, to become aware of what Whitehead calls the “of courses” of culture— the things everyone assumes to have been proved, or to be self-evidently true, and therefore leaves unexamined. Lewis condemned “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also a ‘period,’ and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likely to lurk in those widespread assumptions that are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.”

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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To most university students and their professors, C. S. Lewis is well known as a scholar and literary critic. His two books on medieval literature, his books on Milton and on sixteenthcentury literature, and his widely ranging essays, have firmly established his authority in the Academy. Such scholarly and critical work has its independent importance, of course, quite apart from his other writing; and, indeed, those students and professors who admire him in this aspect are very likely to be only marginally aware of him as he appears to the broad reading public: a phenomenally popular writer on religious subjects.

As a scholar, Lewis simply knew too much to remain a prisoner of the Spirit of the Age, to succumb to the appeal of the merely fashionable. He was completely liberated from chronological snobbery. He did not suppose a statement true because it had been made recently, or because people around him seemed to accept it. “I take a very low view of ‘climates of opinion,’ ” he wrote. “In his own subject every man knows that all discoveries are made and all errors corrected by those who ignore the ‘climate of opinion.’ ” And beyond this, Lewis learned, by studying earlier periods and examining their assumptions, to become aware of what Whitehead calls the “of courses” of culture— the things everyone assumes to have been proved, or to be self-evidently true, and therefore leaves unexamined. Lewis condemned “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also a ‘period,’ and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likely to lurk in those widespread assumptions that are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.”