215: Learning in Wartime

Hello and welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know. This is a podcast about the classical world. We talk about books, we talk about art, we talk about old things, history, and we are trying to do that in a way that isn't awful and a total drudgery for everyone, like some of the classes you probably had in high school. Shots fired.

Did you have those classes? I know, but no, I loved every single one of my classes. What are you all talking about? This is not true.

I didn't know that. Anyway, I am here. My name is A.J. Hanenberg, and I'm here with Mr.

Grant Donaldson. Hello, and Mr. Thomas Fletcher-Maggie. Hi.

And that's the podcast. That's it. And today we're talking about, from his words, anything he wants to talk about. That is actually what I said the topic for today was.

That is not actually our topic for today. You don't want to hear about this? I hate this topic very much. I was under coercion when I'm talking about this.

Today I'm talking about a sermon, a message given by Mr. Clive Staples-Lewis. I guess we'll get into that in a little bit. So the origination of this topic and why I'm bringing it up now is that we have a Patreon where people support us, and as a part of that patronage, as a part of that support, we do monthly AMAs, which means ask me anything.

Someone asked us about our favorite essays of C.S. Lewis. I don't remember. They asked us for some of our favorite works by C.S.

Lewis. And I brought up one called, it's a speech he gave called Learning in Wartime, and I think you had mentioned that you had not read this speech before. No, never mind. AJ hadn't heard about it, and so I wanted to send the next hour teaching AJ.

Awesome. I'm in. Cool. All right, I'll catch you guys later.

Can we just tag ourselves out? Do we get substitutes when that happens? Oh, I know this stuff. Yeah, this is good.

That'll be like 80% of my episodes. Every time I'm like, oh, I want to talk about the Monkey Valley of the Prince. You're like, oh, yes, I remember this from college. I did a dissertation on this.

I studied this extensively. So thankfully, this speech is pretty short. If you were to look it up online, you'd find that it's about six pages long. So I will be quoting pretty freely from it so that we can kind of follow the argument.

Again, you two are smarter than me. I think that sometimes C.S. Lewis' speeches can be difficult to follow. It was my first year at Veritas, so many minutes ago, I sat in when AJ was teaching On the Weight of Glory.

This was back at the old campus. I remember you making the point to the students that The Weight of Glory and many other of Lewis' talks are a chronological argument, or there's probably a better phrase for it than that. But essentially, you have to follow each step of the argument that he's making, as opposed to what's the name of the structure, where essentially you say what your argument is, then you get three points backing up that argument. Rhetorical forming?

That would just be by strength of the point, I guess. But those kind of talks are usually easier to follow, because if you get lost, you're just hearing one of three arguments for a thesis statement you already heard, as opposed to with Lewis, where if you get lost at any point, you miss the rest of the speech. Right, and that's kind of the end of it. So it's probably less of an issue for Learning in War Time, because it is a shorter talk, but that's why I'll be quoting from it as much as I can.

All right, Learning in War Time, it comes out in 1939, that's when he gives this talk. What is happening in 1939? It's pretty quiet. It's a quiet year, and we couldn't find much to be going on.

It depends where you are, I think. This is also probably a true statement. What are some things that might be important that are going on in and around 1939? Hitler and Baseball.

Yeah, so we get this event that will eventually be called World War II. So yes, World War II is kicking off in 1939. There's no way to summarize World War II. It was a big war.

It happened. That's a great summary. That's literally in the names. I feel pretty good about that.

Everyone was involved. Yes, it's just part of the world war. This has been our best episode yet, I think. Anyway, so, and this topic of Learning in War Time, he's attempting to answer the question, I mean, you all know this, but C.S.

Lewis was, he was a writer, but also an educator. He worked in universities. And so the question is kind of like, what should people be doing during this time? During, while the world is going to war, you have these people that are still working at universities.

Should they be doing that? Is that a good use of their time? Is that a wise use of their time? Answer to, why are we studying this?

Why do I need to learn this? And that's part of why, yeah, it's helpful because if learning is worthwhile in the midst of World War II or in the start of World War II, then it's probably worthwhile at all times, right? That's kind of the point we'll get to eventually. What was the occasion?

He was asked to in... Was it a chapel or was it a USO tour? Yeah, was he like giving to the troops? Yep, he was the half-time act in this, yeah.

A sermon preached... Which is Nelly. Yeah, exactly. Nelly is beyond time.

A sermon preached in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, Autumn, 1939. So, it's a sermon that is preached in this church. And the message is given specifically to students, which you'll hear in the opening paragraph.

I probably don't need to belabor this point, but there was something of an open question as to whether there should still be students while the world is at war, right? Like, if you're thinking about the best use of one's time, you could pretty reasonably make the case that defeating the Nazis is like a pretty pressing issue, some might say. Bunch to the top of the list. Yeah, yes.

It might be a little more important than your English class, right? Like, you would understand if someone was like, hey, I can't make it today, and you go fight the Nazis. Maybe like a national dance. It's an excuse to absence.

Yeah, that's absolutely reasonable. One of the colleges... I don't totally understand how this works, you all will correct me, but there are colleges that are affiliated with... Oxford's made up of many colleges, maybe it's one way to say.

So I think that's what they call it here. But anyway, this was in 1938, so pre-the war, but obviously leading up to it, this is one of the English fellows who said, it would be advisable to ascertain if possible whether, in the event of an international emergency, university education would continue, and if so, on what basis? So that is posed to this kind of Oxford community, which then Lewis is responding to. And I'm greatly helped by...

It's literally cslewis.com, and this article is written by Dr. Joel Heck. Do you like that for a name? Dr.

Heck. Dr. Heck, it's a great name. Anyway, Dr.

Heck. Not at the teacher in middle school. He might get a couple jokes about that. I mean, you could give your kids all kinds of cool names.

Call them like, aw. Now, I had an English teacher name, because he was... It was Butts. He was Dr.

Butts. And poor guy. I don't know, I think that's one you could lean into. I had a teacher named Mr.

Bible. That's a pretty solid last name. Mr. Bible?

Oh, yeah. Oh, cool. He was great. Was he a Bible teacher?

No. Science. It was one of the best science classes I've ever had. He was great.

But he was literally a Bible man? Isn't that what that means? Mr. Bible, yeah.

But then people would find out, oh, we teach science with Bible men. And everyone was like, I'm not going to this closed-minded school. You love to embody that paradox. Another thing about Lewis, do you all know anything about Lewis and World War I?

He fought in it. He did fight in it. Do you know anything about his involvement in it? He was in the trenches.

I can't remember if he got hurt or not. But he also... So you have all the stories of the men coming back who were absolutely traumatized, and it was a horrible thing. And Lewis, at least, never really...

He said it was bad. But he never really intimated that it was this shattering experience like it was for a lot of the poets who come back. Like Sassoon, and all these people come back and write these poems about how the war destroyed idealism. He comes back and he's like, so that's what they wrote about in the Iliad.

I think this is a line that he says. But I think the important point is you're not going to hear this super pacifist. He's going to find that justified. So just in case he doesn't really go into it, but in case you're wondering where is that questioning of war.

He has other essays where he talks about war on that topic. So it's kind of outside the scope, just in case anyone's curious about it. And for listeners, he is a modern proponent of the just war theory. He sort of...

I don't know if he continued to make it popular, but he did a bunch of... So his writings on war really sort of were modern adaptations of Augustine's or Augustine's discussion on just war. So yeah, he did not serve for very long in World War I. He essentially went into combat, was wounded, and by the shell that wounded him killed two other men of his battalion group.

I don't know what the phrasing is. But anyway, so he is wounded. He's unable to go back into combat after that. So I want to say he's actually a part of the war for, I think it's nine months.

I think it's less than a year. But anyway, he served in World War I and then does come back. Like Graham was talking about, he's not... A broken man.

Yeah, but also not critical of war, qua war. Like he sees a place for war. And then, I guess I'll just start reading it. Again, I'll be able to quote a lot of it, because I think if you read it straight, it's like a 15-minute talk.

So we'll go and give comments as we go through it. So just so we can... Maybe the Graham's question of who this is to and the setting, I'll just read the opening. A university is a society for the pursuit of learning.

As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks, into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians. And at first sight, this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or, even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or military service, why should we, indeed how can we, continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance?

Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns? So give me a reaction to that first paragraph. Do you find this a compelling question he has raised? For sure.

I'm sure it was one that was being asked by the students in the colleges. How can I stay here and go about reading books when all of my friends are at the front? Shouldn't I be protecting my mother and family and protecting this very college? It's really hard to justify reading the Odyssey while that's happening.

Is this clerkdom that I'm undertaking a luxury? And it should be given up, like, how we need to also give up other luxuries to the state for the war effort. So there's a potential for selfishness in doing this uncomfortable while other people are fighting this war on my behalf. Like making shells or building tanks or even doing things at home.

The other thing I was contemplating is how Kevin Smith's movie Clerks is not about the same kind of clerks. Yeah, not really, really much at all, some might say. But you're recommending that movie? I've never watched it.

AJ wants to talk about all two of them, three of them? Are there multiple? I'm not a big Kevin Smith guy. But I do know that Silent Bob, I mean that's the reason he's silent, is because he's thinking about this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's going through this. Justify being a clerk in the face of such great gravity. It really, really reframes the whole movie. Something else, I don't know if this is to the argument Lewis will make or oppose to it.

What percent of adults had a college degree in 1939 when Lewis was writing this? Oh, it must have been pretty low. Give me an NSP. Seven.

So it's actually lower than both of your numbers. No, seven men. No, it's three. So Graham guessed seven percent, or seven men, I don't know, AJ guessed 20%.

The number, so the easiest number to find was for the U.S. population, 5.5% of men and 3.8% of women had a college degree. I tried looking up numbers for Britain also, and it seems to be the number was slightly lower than that. So slightly lower than 8?

Yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, you're more correct. Wait, you're both wrong, because you both went over.

I was seven. Right. You said it was slightly lower than 8, which was lower than 5. No, slightly lower than 5.

Lower than 5. Oh, woof. Sorry, yeah. So a much smaller proportion of the population was engaged in college as well.

Currently, it's roughly a third. So you overshot it by almost 100%. Yeah, yeah. But you were very close.

You were closer. I mean, zero dollars, Bob. Yes. So what I can't tell is, is that a justification?

It's such a small number of people, therefore, it matters less if they're convinced to go to war, or it's such a small number of people doing it anyway, they should just go to war. I don't think that the smallness or the largeness has anything to do with the question, right? If we're having tickle fights, I'm like, well, there's only a few of us, so we should continue having tickle fights, because it's, you know what I mean? Well, it's the activity that matters, right?

It's not the size of the group, right? If I've got a whole bunch of guys that are like, listen, we're having tickle fights, it's important in war. I'd be like, no, it's not. Go and do something good for the war.

Yes, that's a good point. Okay, let me keep going with this argument. I admit, tickle fights was a weird... This is why you were a summer question.

So again, he uses this comparison to fiddling while Rome burns to talk about the feeling one has of learning while the world around them is burning, but the tragedy that Lewis is pointing to, going back to Nero, the one who fiddled while Rome burns, but that's the story that goes, is that he was flippant in the face of an eternal destination of hell, right? Not that he was fiddling while the city burned. There's a greater thing happening than just him ignoring the city burning. I'll keep going unless someone has a comment there.

I think he's setting up the argument. So the moment that we take hell seriously, the moment we do so, we can see that every Christian who comes to a university must at all times face a question compared with which the questions raised by the war are relatively unimportant. He 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. If human culture can stand up to that, it can stand up to anything.

To admit that we can retain our interest in learning under the shadow of these eternal issues, but not under the shadow of a European war, would be to admit that our ears are closed to the voice of reason and are very wide open to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions. I mean, it's a good rhetorical move to sort of even amplify it more and say, well, in the face of eternal matters of the soul, heaven and hell, is education important for that? Because that's even more important than talking about the war. And of course, presumably the argument's going to be like, well, of course it is.

That's what we do during peacetime. But again, to my face at this point, looking at the activity itself and judging it as worthwhile, whether it's war that is being put up against or whether it's the eternal cosmos, the moral sort of fabric of the universe. Sure. Yeah, I agree.

So again, he's made it so that it's not only about this one issue of European war, like a question that must always be asked. Why am I doing this instead of something that could be more eternally significant against? Do you have thoughts on the response to this question, or is this a question that you think about yourselves? I mean, pick where your time goes, right?

Yeah, I remember having a conversation with somebody and not having a good response to the question, and it was, well, we have the Bible. Why should I read the classics? Why should I read Iliad, Odyssey? Why should I read any of these old books?

I should just be spending all of my time reading the Bible. And I remember not having a good answer to it. And it's kind of like the same question. We're just kind of getting at the same things.

Like, well, shouldn't I just focus on the quote-unquote spiritual things, the divine things, and leave aside the perishing things? Yeah, I mean, there are people that do that, right? I mean, you can go to a monastery, and that can be your entire life, right, of prayer and reading scripture and service, right? You're serving a local community.

Shoot, what are we doing podcasting, Thomas? This is our last episode. Anyway, I've done that a few times. Anyway, I promise Lewis will not reach that conclusion, but I guess we'll get there.

I'll keep going. This indeed is the case with most of us, certainly with me. For that reason, I think it is important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation.

It simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.

We are mistaken when we compare war with normal life. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the 19th century, turn out on closer inspection to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right.

But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but significantly the funeral oration. The insects have chosen a different line.

They have sought first material welfare and security of the hive and presumably they have their... reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments and condemn cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae.

This is not Anash. It is our nature. So what's he saying there? That we, that this is sort of, that, yeah, we're never, we're never normal, never at that position where we are safe and secure, and it's sort of human nature to, to be making art and to sort of continuing the, continuing the mission.

Yeah, almost no other situation in which we can make art or to make beautiful things, literature. So this means that, like, when we're able to justify this, especially his. Yeah, if you have to be totally secure and safe, you'll never be able to justify it. There's always, like, a better thing you could be doing, right?

A more useful thing? I'm waiting for AJ to disagree with you. I can see AJ's turn. I see it right now.

I mean, yeah, yeah, they are. Just to argue that this is something we do naturally is not a justification for the activity. There's all kinds of things we do naturally that are not good. So saying there's never a safe time to do this, and it's something we do naturally is, as of yet, still has not proven to me that this is a good thing.

I agree. Maybe to his point of discussing the war specifically, what he's trying to address is people who say, because there's a war, we can't pursue these other things. Well, actually, the war is not a thing that's changed our situation. We've always been on this precipice.

The war is just the newest. Yeah, I agree there. You're never going to find a time when all ills of the human race have been solved, and therefore now we can really do our business apart. I totally agree with that.

Well, like 1997. Was that, like, the best year? Y2K was coming, my man. I was reporting on the computers.

That's true. I don't think we did, though. Wasn't the whole point that nothing happened? Yeah, it was pretty much.

Who knew? You didn't know. You were too young, Thomas. In 2000?

I was 11 years old. 2007? 1997? I mean, 97, I was 8 years old.

In retrospect, I didn't party hard enough at Millennium. I didn't understand how significant it was. Yeah. I was like, this is going to come around again.

It won't. It will, but not for you. Yeah, not for me. Well, the one that's, this one, this is not important, but there's a time that's called UTC.

What's that? Hold on. That's, um, Coordinated Universal Times. This is the one, there's a time code that's tracking since January 1, 1970, and it's like the number of, if they just picked the date.

And so it counts up the number of seconds since 1970, but based on the length of the string, it only lasts until 2040. So that's, like, your next one, is if you can make it to 2040, that's the next time that a lot of clocks will have to, like, reset, because it'll run out of seconds. 2012 was supposed to be the end of the world. There was the Mayan calendar, the Mayans.

I figured they just said, why keep making more calendar? Yeah, yeah. This is before I was a little bit of a calendar. Yeah, and then our forefathers will, or our ancestors will continue the calendars.

Unfortunately not. All right, I'll keep going with this. So the current statement is, the war has not changed the fact that things are, uh, dangerous, that things are risky, and that to pursue something that might be called unnecessary has always been done in the face of danger, and even in the face of literal imminent death, this example of walking to the gallows, walking to die. It's not, we don't all, not all humans suddenly become, um, they don't lose their sense of humor at that point.

Gallows humor is a phrase for a reason, right? But since we are fallen creatures, the fact that this is now, our nature would not by itself prove that it is rational or right. Hey, let's go, Lewis. We have, do you pull up the, do you have it in front of you?

No, hold on, this is what I do. Oh, you thought I was cheating? Well, I always cheat when you all do episodes of the video. Really?

Yeah, oh, every time, yeah. Anyway, sorry, I assume you all did the same. No, no, no, I didn't have computer here. That's a good point.

That's, yeah. Uh, you have a cell phone? Sure, but I just look at my stocks. I just look at my crypto while you're talking.

No, I'm talking. I pulled up the quotes about why we can study the Greeks, even if we have the Bible. Yeah, we'll talk about that later. Okay, or we can do it for in-between if we don't get to it.

Well, I said you're neat. We see him better. That is true. We have to inquire whether there is really any legitimate place for the activities of a scholar in a world such as this.

That is, we have always answered the question, how can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think about anything but the salvation of human souls? And we have at the moment to answer the additional question, how can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think of anything but the war? Now, part of our answer will be the same for both questions. The one implies that our life can and ought to become exclusively and explicitly religious.

The other, that it can and ought to become exclusively rational. I believe that our whole life can and must become religious and a sense to be explained later. It has meant that all our activities are to be of the kind that can be recognized as sacred as opposed to secular. I won't go into these details here right now, but just in response to this question, how can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think about anything but the salvation of human souls?

And then related, how can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think of anything but the war? My, like, false equivalence alarm is going off, but I can't really phrase it. Is that a false equivalence by saying the war is like the eternal salvation question? And so if it's true for one, it can be true for the other.

I'm still trying to track exactly what's happening in that passage. If there are two questions that have to be answered. The first, how can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think about anything but the salvation of human souls? That's the question we were just addressing.

So how can you do any job other than be an evangelist? If eternity is real, if there's a heaven and hell. And then the second, that he was specifically open to this talking about, how can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think of anything but the war? So there's this huge pressing thing in front of people.

He says we have those two to answer, or does he say that they're essentially the same? He does not say that they're the same. He says there will be some similarities between the answers, but that they're not entirely the same question. If he says they're not completely the same, then I guess there's not a false equivalence there.

Yeah, I don't think so. There's some similarity in this answer, but I guess I'll keep going with it. Before I became a Christian, I do not think I fully realized that one's life after conversion would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before. One hopes in a new spirit, but still the same things.

Before I went to the last war, I certainly expected that my life in the trenches would, in some mysterious sense, be all war. In fact, I found that the nearer you got to the front line, the less everyone spoke and thought of the ally cause and the progress of the campaign. And I'm pleased to find that Tolstoy, in the greatest war book ever written, records the same thing. And so in its own way does the Iliad.

Neither conversion nor enlistment in the army is really going to obliterate our human life. Christians and soldiers are all men. The infidel's idea of a religious life and the civilian's idea of active service are fantastic. If you attempted in either case to suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic activity, you would only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life for a better.

You are not, in fact, going to read nothing, either in the church or in the line. If you don't read good books, you will read bad ones. If you don't go on thinking rationally, you will think irrationally. If you reject aesthetic satisfactions, you will fall into sensual satisfactions.

So where's he going with this? That people want, in raising this question of how should my life be different during the war or how should my life be different in the face of there being an eternal destination for people, there's this like over-stilized version of it where we think the soldier is only dedicated to war when they're a part of the army. When he's not fighting, he's doing push-ups and polishing his gun. Yeah, but everything's directed toward war.

And in the same way, I don't think you'll use the term evangelist in here, but that's the thing I keep thinking. We think there's this class of people who are only involved in proclaiming the gospel so that people would make a choice about whatever. That people could be saved through these people going out and sharing their own. They don't have taxes and they don't change their oil.

They're going to a coffee shop. Yeah, I mean, just take the simple example of people in both situations are going to eat meals. They're going to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They are going to have downtime where they have to relax somehow because you're not working all the time.

Somebody's got to clean the shower. Someone has to clean the shower. Someone has to clean wherever they live. You don't have to eat meals today.

Sure, they have to eat something, though, or else they also don't have to clean the shower. But there are all these mundane parts of life that are still there, whether you are in pursuit of what one might consider a high goal or high purpose or whether you are not. But Lewis also has, he's coming out of the paradigm of what education in the college is for is an ennobling of the person. It is like turning someone into a virtuous person, the sort of classical way of thinking about it.

Whereas I can think that if I presented, and I know AJ does present this to as freshmen, when you present that idea to the students and their major paradigm that they live under is this is training skills in order for me to work. And then you put in front of them, you could die sooner than you want. But then the question of, well, why am I sitting in this class then? Well, once you've got the work, now what?

Yeah, yeah. Yes. So I can see that, like, if, you know, this lecture would be very interesting if you were presenting it at like a community college where people are there because they're wanting to do vocational training. Now, that's a necessary function of life.

But he's talking about this paradigm of, yeah, the education as the soul's ennobling. Yes. As the turning, yeah. But even in his most recent example right there of the everyone's going to read books, you either read good ones or bad ones, this education is not only for the people going to college that you're talking to.

Right? This ennobling that you're talking about is for anyone who wants to engage in the life of mine. Yeah. And you're going to be out there thinking and having to process the world.

Yeah. And if you don't do it, you're just going to do it badly. Yes. Or someone else is going to do it for you.

Yeah, and probably do it badly also, right? Yeah, you will still be... Or control you, right? Or do it, you know, some sort of...

Because he's been writing before propaganda. I mean, they had, like, I get the sense that after World War II, there was a big sort of academic looking at propaganda. It was like, how on earth did the Germans become like this or whatever? So he's...

I know Lewis talks about propaganda in lots of his essays. Later, not like after the war, he makes reference to it as a reason why one needs to be, you know, think for themselves and rational. But that plays in even better here. That's the great point of you will have to choose which way you're being developed.

And either you're directing that by picking good books or you're just taking whatever's around you. And that's where propaganda can have its influence, right? Oh, I just thought of a funny in-between question. All right.

Let's see it. Ram usually takes notes on paper plates and then raises those questions during in-between episodes. I don't see a paper plate right now. No, it's in brain.

The paper plate. You absolutely don't forget it. The paper plate of my mind. Wait.

Are you holding yourself right now? I don't think. It's open and willing to hold all sorts of things. No, you're also flimsy and easily thrown away.

That's true. What we need is like a strong tower of rigid orthodoxy. No, of unyielding, unyielding, rigid, iron strength. Listen, we've got a four-star review that made fun of Graham for...

Graham specifically. Everything's fine. Except for Graham, because it's rigid orthodoxy and apparently AJ and I have open minds. My stubborn high-camera voice.

Can everyone please leave a five-star review talking about how much you love Graham? I think that would make his day. All right. I'm going to keep going.

There is therefore this analogy between the claims of our religion and the claims of the war. Neither of them, for most of us, will simply cancel or remove from the slate the merely human life which we were leading before we entered them, but they will operate in this way for different reasons. 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. In order to avoid misunderstanding, I must hear...

I don't really want to go into the distinctions, but just to say, the war is not a thing that is worth or even capable of being the only thing a person thinks about, even if you're at the war. Yes. Yes. The war will not consume 24 hours of your day because, as a human, you will have other interests, notices, concerns, any of those things.

What I find charming about the essay is that Lewis takes the intellectual life of everybody seriously. Like the Oxford academic, but also the person on the front lines who's not your Oxford intellectual, your common man, he too has an intellectual life that should be reckoned with. It should be flowering, and that person should be taking responsibility for. Anyway, so I just find it charming when Lewis looks at the world and looks at his fellow man, that's the care he thinks of.

He recognizes that they'll get into philosophical conversations about whether or not this is good and what will happen to your family when you're not here anymore. Is this quite worth it? And then the jokes that happen back and forth. It's nice for him to recognize that.

And I think we wouldn't buy it except that he was in the First World War. That he was willing to both risk his life, so take the role of being a soldier, but then also cared about intellectual pursuits. He does the thing that he's recommending these people to do. Is that what you're saying?

All right. This is one of the more famous images from this lecture. So he talks about the duties that people have. Some might have a religious duty.

Some might have a soldierly duty, if they sign up to be soldiers. Thus we may have a, and then by comparison, thus we may have a duty to rescue a drowning man. Then perhaps if we live on a dangerous coast to learn life savings, always to be ready for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our own life in saving him.

But if anyone devoted himself to life saving in the sense of giving his total attention so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone had learned to swim, he would be a monomaniac. The rescue of a drowning man is then a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for. It seems to me that all political duties, among which I include military duties, are of this kind. A man may have to die for our country, but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country.

He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation or party or class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God himself. Good one. Good one. So there are things that are worth doing and that people might be called to.

There are things that are worth dying for. Worth dying for, but not worth of voting oneself entirely to. Did I hear correctly he says everything in the political realm falls in that? Yeah.

And he would put anything that is like a temporal concern. What's the phrase that he uses here? Without reservation to the temporal claims as a nation, party, or class is rendering to Caesar that which doesn't belong to him. So I think, I mean, this is maybe the kind of pendulum swing you have to deal with of, yeah, there are like normal parts of your life that you have to live for, but you then can't make a job your entire identity or your entire personality, right?

Yes. Yeah. It's like the difference between when Churchill retires, he takes up painting and writing history versus a politician who has no sort of concept of what they would do outside of office or whatever. It just has no, yeah, verbal.

Yeah, that's a, yeah. You can substitute that for any job. Didn't Churchill write like 20 volumes? Yeah.

He wrote like a book also and just, yeah, very interesting life. Lewis has similar things to say about religious occupations. It's different in that in some sense religion occupies every second of a person's life, but in the other you, in some sense it must occupy the whole of life, but you don't give up these like earthly concerns. You still have to work.

Our Lord attends a wedding and provides miraculous wine under the ages of his church and in the most Christian ages learning and the arts flourish. So you still have both things happening. The solution of this paradox, of course, is well known to you. Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

So we don't just give out, give away these. So just because we should not fully submit ourselves to these temporal aims does not mean that we give them up entirely in the pursuit of a religious life. Unless you're among them. So maybe when you retire to your country estate after years of service, what is going to be your intellect?

What is like the book you were writing? You're writing a compendium of John Chrysostom. I'm not smart enough. I'll do a coloring book.

A coloring book. I'll do a classical coloring book. It's going to be the Iliad. It's going to be all the same lines of Tom Snaghy.

Do you do a coloring book about data science? Yeah, I'll do. No, no, this is the whole point. His life is not completely wrapped up in his career.

I'm asking, what's his coloring book on data science? I think you're right. Someone, I don't know who colors for us, but I'm very thankful to them. They bought us a set of four books that, I think I do love this.

So it's a set of four books of like such and such topic for babies. And it's data science for babies. It's coding for babies. Aerospace engineering for babies.

And physics for babies, I think there are the four. That's lovely. It makes me laugh every time I see that. So we're starting our kids early.

This doesn't mean I'm not classical because I'm talking to them about the survival arts. I'm a horrible father. He'll go on from here. I'll probably, again, I'll still be reading chunks, but I'll probably start skipping over more portions of this.

All are merely natural activities will be accepted if they're offered to God. Even the humblest of all of them, even the noblest, will be simple if they're not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one. It is rather a new organization which exploits to its own supernatural ends these natural materials.

He'll go on here. Well, thank you. to, I think Beethoven is an example, the work of Beethoven, the work of a charwoman becomes spiritual and precisely the same condition. That of being offered to God, being done humbly as to the Lord.

That seems like a thing that AJ would appreciate. I'm just trying to see, have we answered the question at this point? That there are things in life that are worth pursuing but not worth giving ourselves entirely to, and that's maybe one warning that a student needs to be wary of, but then on the other side, that they should be honoring God no matter what work that they are called to. There's not some hierarchy of the historians are more important than the English majors.

I don't think that we completely answered the question. I think there's still a hierarchy of things that you can do. If I have the option between teaching children literature and, I don't know, stacking sticks on each other, and I can offer both to God, but I have an option between the two, I should probably be choosing to teach literature to kids. Just as if I am in wartime and there are two options between things to do, like, you know, selling reams of paper and working at the front are probably different in terms of hierarchy.

Just by saying that I can offer all things to God doesn't obliterate the hierarchy of activities. He still has to prove that one activity is more worthwhile in wartime than another thing. Yes, I can give my entire life to war, absolutely, but the question remains, what else should I be giving my life to, and does that mean I don't have to give any of my life to war? I still don't think the question is an answer.

Let me try, then, this is where he'll get at that part specifically. Great. This is not, so he talks about this equal dignity between the, yeah, the work of Beethoven and other work. This does not, of course, mean that it is for anyone a near toss-up, whether he should sweep rooms or compose symphonies.

There we go, Lewis coming through the clutch. A mole must dig to the glory of God and the rooster must crow. We are members of one body, but differentiated members, each with his own vocation. A man's upbringing, his talents, his circumstances are usually a tolerable index of his vocation.

If our parents have sent us to Oxford, if our country allows us to remain there, that is evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead for the glory of God at present is the learned life. By leading that life to the glory of God, I do not, of course, mean any attempts to make our intellectual inquiries work out to edifying conclusions. He has a little aside, right? I'm just skipping over it because it's probably not important.

An appetite for these intellectual things exists in our human mind. God makes no appetite in vain. We can therefore pursue knowledge as such and beauty as such in the sure confidence that by so doing we are either advancing to the vision of God ourselves or indirectly helping others to do so. Does that get to your, that's the value of maybe connecting Graham and AJ's questions.

Why do we do this? Because you are passing on this knowledge that is for the benefit of others. And because it's an innate hunger built into man by God. He doesn't let any hunger exist unnaturally.

So, and the story of your life has brought you to this moment here. So while you're here, do it for the glory of God. And if your circumstances change, then do that. But that's where I think his argument breaks down, right?

Your circumstances, your context has brought you here, perhaps by accident. And if you decide... There's no accidents, AJ. There's no accidents.

Okay, fine. No accidents. So either way, an accident or no accident, you could tomorrow choose to go to the front. And now your context has changed.

You could make the exact same argument about being at the front. And I think there'd be no problem with if a student decided that they should go serve in the war, I don't think there'd be a problem there. But isn't that the question he's supposed to be addressing? Is how can we stay here if we could be going to the war?

Yeah, yeah. I think the question is like, you're talking to a room of 100 people, do all those 100 people need to right now drop out because they're doing an immoral thing by being in school? Or do they have a freedom to stay where they are or go to the war? But I think just saying your circumstances have plumped you here, therefore it's okay, is a poor argument, isn't it?

It says that the work that they're doing is worthwhile, but there's a human hunger that they're satisfying by this intellectual pursuit. It's not only for themselves, it is for themselves, but also for others. This work is worthwhile. Therefore, you can pursue this worthwhile work or this worthwhile work of fighting in the war.

Again, I think the question is one of hierarchy, especially in wartime. I have to know that this work, even if it is worthwhile, is more worthwhile than the work I could be doing at the front. That still has yet to be proven. You know, the intellectual work being more important than the vacuum salesman.

You think that? You think? I mean, both of those options suck. Hey!

I mean, maybe if you want to talk about the hierarchy between intellectual work and vacuums, fine. My point is that any activity in the face of the impending destruction of your country has to be weighed on the scales of, okay, can I do this activity and feel morally right about possibly risking many of my countrymen to subservience and perhaps death by my devoting myself to this instead? I think I use the example of vacuums because no one would rightfully say vacuums is noble enough to tear me away. But the point is that context is not a thing that determines it.

It should be a hierarchy of activities. And yes, the intellectual life is worthy, but I need to see that it's more worthy or at least as worthy as wartime work. Yeah. AJ, what was that like existentialist guy that we did an episode on where he was like, oh, maybe I'll stay and take care of my mom instead of go to war.

Oh, uh, that was existentialism by one of them. One of them. One of the Frenchie. It's always the French.

Yeah, Jean-Paul Sartre. So what was his argument there, do you remember? Because that was about the same kind of question, judging between two options. His two options were I can stay here and stay with my mother who has lost all her other sons and if she lost me she would be devastated, which is a worthy thing to stay and have my mother's love and protect her here.

Or I could be going to protect my brethren and my countrymen on the front. Is that not the same equivalent as I could be staying here and going to school and continuing the great tradition of human inquiry or I could be fighting alongside my brethren on the front. I think Sartre was trying to give two level and equal options that would both be morally positive, right? I don't want to devastate my mother and I don't want to risk my brothers.

You know, both are. And I think he tried to keep as level as possible. You see a much clearer distinction between those two options. Between reading the Odyssey and fighting a world-destroying evil, yes.

I mean, like, I'm going to have to see that those are at least equal before I make my decision. I'm just saying he hasn't proven it. Yeah, but is he sort of saying that he's opening the door for the person to be able to think about their particular context? I don't know.

No, he's justified it via the context. Your context has put you here, therefore you are okay. And I'm saying that is not enough of a justification. Let's see if some of this will answer.

Safe and Thomas. I won't. The learned life then is for some a duty. At the moment it looks as if it were your duty, these people sitting in the room.

I'm well aware that there may seem to be an almost comic discrepancy between the high issues we've been considering, like the war, and the immediate task you may be set down to, such as Anglo-Saxon sound laws or chemical formula. But there is a similar shock awaiting us in every vocation. A young priest finds himself involved in choir treats in a young subaltern and counting for pots of jam. It is well that it should be so.

It weeds out the vain, windy people, and keeps in those who are both humble and tough. On that kind of difficulty, we need ways to know sympathy, but the peculiar difficulty imposed on you by the war is another matter. In other words, I would again repeat what I have been saying in one form or another ever since I started. Do not let your nerves and emotions lead you into thinking your predicament more abnormal than it really is.

Perhaps it may be useful to mention some exercises which might help their service defenses against us. So I think you're asking him to elevate everything to the same level and say why these are cosmically significant, equivalently, the intellectual pursuit in the war. The war clearly has the significance of if the Nazis win, that's way back. Game over, man.

And he takes it the other way, to say that there's actually like a common lowness to all positions. I'm like, at some point we're just doing mundane tasks, and that not everything is like the important, significant work we give it. And so that's the equivalent between them all, is that yes, there are many soldiers who will fight in important battles that turn the tide of war, but not all of them do. Some of them protect, you know, outposts that are never attacked, right?

Like not everyone who's a part of the war is fighting off the Nazis in a way that we might heighten it to. Same for the people in a religious vocation, they're not all preaching the gospel and saving souls. Sometimes they're just doing taxes for people before. So I think that's his way of getting to that question.

Do you find this interesting? Well, I still don't find it satisfying. I mean, to say that there are mundane tasks that contribute to both activities don't escape that one activity, like the mundane tasks of one will contribute to a greater good than perhaps the mundane tasks of another. Or the potentiality, like if you fight in the war, like think of if you got put into the best situation in that war for you to bring about goodness.

Combat medic. So like you go in there and you have Hitler in your crosshairs and you take him out. And you're at the same time like saving someone else from death. And then in like alternate universe where you decide to stay at Oxford, where like alternate universe you're shooting Hitler, you are like discovering a new Dead Sea scroll.

It's like, okay, well, which one is more important? Is that kind of like what I just get in that? Yeah, that's kind of what I'm pointing out. He has sort of tried to dodge it by calling both a duty, but I would say that there are even hierarchies of duty, right?

It's my duty to take out the trash. It's my duty to raise my children. One of those, I think, I mean, granted, if I don't take out the trash, it would be a problem really fast, but I think that anyone would recognize that one of those duties is more important than the other. Yeah, but we still do both, right?

The lower duty of taking out the trash, which I think you're implying is the lower duty. It was unclear from your example, that the trash still has to be taken out even though I need to raise my children. But I can read books at the front. Yeah, and then the point is like, well, where do these books come from?

Someone has to create these works. Someone has to become a, in his example of a critic, it's like you are trained to do that. So someone has to do that work to then ennoble the soldiers in this example. But no one has to do it now.

Like, there are plenty of books to read the front without critics doing their job. And then that's his earlier point of there's always some reason to say we're on the precipice of destruction, we might all die, therefore we should push off this work to later. And at that point, the later never comes. There's always some threat that we have.

But again, it seems like he's dodging several sliding scales here, and there's a sliding scale of, okay, is the world going to be perfect to a point where I'm completely safe always to do this work? No, but there are certain dangers that require immediate attention. If my house is on fire, should I be pursuing painting in the basement? Probably not.

And so I don't know that he's proven it yet. I don't disagree with him. I really do think that that pursuing art and studies in the midst of war is a worthy human pursuit. I just don't think his arguments have necessarily proven that.

Is that fair? I didn't see why you disagreed with something he would look like. Fair, fair enough. I'll read the wrap up of it.