Like his contemporary Winston Churchill, Lewis took to the airwaves during World War II to speak words of comfort and clarity to England under siege. In his series of BBC broadcasts, he recorded his messages in a context that may have looked something like this:
These recordings were later compiled into what we now know as Mere Christianity, which is arguably Lewis’ clearest and most compelling case for the Christian faith.
During WWII, Lewis also addressed students at Oxford and bluntly posed a question that students and colleagues alike were pondering: “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?”
He offers an answer to this question in his sermon “Learning in War-Time.” Among the many insightful claims he makes, these selections are worth noting:
“The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly ‘as to the Lord’. This does not, of course, mean that it is for anyone a mere toss-up whether he should sweep rooms or compose symphonies. A mole must dig to the glory of God and a cock 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, this is prima facie evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life. … The intellectual life is not the only road to God, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road for us.”
“We see unmistakable the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it. If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon. But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still.”
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