"War is Coming." So Why Waste Our Time With Literature?

The Chief of the Australian military recently warned that Australians must soon prepare for war on the mainland. Some days prior, the U.S. Defence Secretary declared that an escalation with China in the Indo-Pacific is almost ‘imminent’. Coupled with these concerns is a cost of living crisis that is making everyday life unaffordable, and an AI revolution that, it appears, won’t slow down until it has replaced my role entirely. Yet, I sit down at my desk to annotate a poem. I cannot help but ask: Is this not like fiddling while Rome burns?

‘St John Writing in the Book of Revelation’ - David Teniers the Younger

This is the same question that C.S. Lewis posed to the scholars and students of Oxford in the Autumn of 1939, just one month after Germany invaded Poland, starting WWII: ‘What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing?’ This sermon by Lewis, delivered from the pulpit of St. Mary the Virgin at Oxford, I believe can speak to our moment in a helpful way that justifies our creative work even amidst global crisis and uncertainty. Here is an excerpt from the sermon:

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?

Landscape with a village in the distance - Jacob Van Ruisdael.

Of course, it is worth stating that I myself am not faced with the immediate prospect of going to war in the next month as Lewis’s students were (and indeed as Lewis himself was when his undergraduate studies were interrupted by WW1). But I find it vital to get this message out to those of us who engage in creative and scholarly work at a time when there is frankly an intense amount of anxiety about where the world is headed (and indeed, where it already is, as in Ukraine or the Middle East). For those of us engaged in the learned life, there is not only the spectre of global war to consider, but also that of another war being waged upon the vocation of the clerk itself (to use the same term as Lewis). Advances in artificial intelligence threaten to utterly obliterate the vocation of scholar, poet, artist, and musician.

There is also in Australia, as in many other parts of the world, a cost of living crisis, where the daily necessities have become increasingly unaffordable, and housing availability is practically nonexistent. In consideration of this, we ask, ‘shouldn’t we put off these pursuits until the weather has cleared? Surely now is not the time for painting and poetry?’ Lewis presents this question with a piercing clearness, asking whether ‘human culture is an inexcusable frivolity on the part of creatures loaded with such awful responsibilities as we.’

A young C.S. Lewis

It was with relief, then, and even with a sense of pride and sudden conviction, that I heard Lewis defending the intellectual life not as an option that may be cast aside during times of uncertainty, but indeed as a vocation and a duty. The war veteran and scholar of classical literature reminds us that ‘If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun’:

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. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think the most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, 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.

When confronted with war and crisis, we humans long ago made the choice to disregard these reasons as cause to cease work in the liberal arts: ‘They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes.’ Some of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, crafted their work in the trenches of WWI. The ANZAC Book, published in 1916, was a collection of poems and stories written by the soldiers of the Gallipoli campaign, and it is worth remembering that Tolkien began writing his legendarium as shells and bullets rained down on the Western Front. ‘The insects have chosen a different line’, Lewis notes, as their main purpose is the ‘material welfare and security of the hive’. But humanity is different. We ‘propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells […] discuss the last new poem while advancing the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.’

Landscape at Sunset - Henri Joseph Harpignes

It is our nature.

And because the search for knowledge and beauty is in our nature, Lewis continues, it is therefore a duty of those tailored toward the intellectual life to keep the culture afloat and preserve aesthetic and academic standards. If we were to abandon our work as unimportant, Lewis contends that ‘you would only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life for a better.’ Humans ‘are not, in fact, going to read nothing […] if you don’t read good books you will read bad ones. If you don’t go on thinking rationally, you will think irrationally.’

The Mental Enemies of the Scholar:

Having considered (and hopefully accepted) that there is indeed a duty and a vocation for us amidst the clamour and roar of the world, Lewis acknowledges that there are nevertheless certain ‘nerves and emotions’ that arise, leading us ‘into thinking your present predicament more abnormal than it really is.’ Lewis offers us ‘three mental exercises which may serve as defences against the three enemies which war raises up against the scholar’. I will mention two here:

Colditz Castle - Ernst Ferdinand Oehme

The First Enemy is Excitement:

This is ‘the tendency to think and feel about the war when we had intended to think about our work’. This is a difficult enemy to subdue. It is important to note that Lewis is not recommending a zero-sum game where the scholar must bury his or her head in the sand and be closed off from current events. Certainly not. But it is to say that if we are annotating a poem, or composing a piece of music, or painting a landscape in watercolour—that is to say, acting dutifully in our vocations—then we had better not have news blaring in the background of the latest political blow-up in America, or of the recent progress of Iran in gaining a nuclear weapon, and so on. For some, this may sound like privilege, a convenient way to excuse ourselves from political moments that call for our active participation. It is not. It is simply the recognition that the search for knowledge and beauty will take place either way, and that we have something to contribute. If I am not to take part in this search, then someone else will, and possibly in a less inspired or rational way.

Finally, Lewis notes that ‘There are always plenty of rivals to our work’, but that these must not distract us from our vocation:

We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.

Evening landscape with two men - Caspar David Friedrich

The Second Enemy is Frustration:

This is ‘the feeling that we will not have time to finish’ what it is that we are working on. We do not have to think of this only in the immediate sense of not having time to finish a research project or a book, but in the broader sense of our not being able to become fully engaged in our vocations into the future. This underlying anxiety of wondering whether there will be a place for us is further exacerbated by the intrusion of AI into our creative and scholarly spaces. But Lewis reminds us that, in fact, ‘no one has time to finish, [and] that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of learning, a beginner.’ Attending to what we are able to do in the moment, and nothing more, can relieve us of the burdens of future expectation. Lewis speaks ‘of leaving futurity in God’s hands’, recalling from the Lord’s Prayer that ‘It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for.’ So let us not be frustrated about things we cannot control, but only attend to those that we can.

What if War Does Arrive?

Let us say that the ADF Chief, or Hegseth, or indeed the rising voices in Europe predicting WWIII, are correct. What then? Here, I defer to Lewis’s essay, On Living in an Atomic Age (1948), as he responds to the question of how to go on living under the threat of nuclear annihilation:

I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.” […] If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

The Feast of St. John - Jules-Adolphe-Aimé-Louis Breton

In Sum:

I hope that you have found these words to be encouraging, and that they have perhaps inspired you to place the anxieties attendant upon the intellectual life in a more helpful context. As scholars, students, and creatives in the modern world, we must be aware of global crisis’ and conflicts, of the threat of war and economic hardship in our homelands, and indeed critique the political systems that perpetuate these conditions. But Lewis reminds us that we must never give into the temptation to consider our work as trivial or worthless in comparison, or worse still to put off our work in expectation of more favourable conditions in the future. The future never arrives. And in any case, as Lewis concludes in his sermon, ‘All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centre in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration.’ Ultimately, as Tolkien wrote in his letters (letter 195), we must continue to fight ‘the long defeat’, knowing that all our best efforts will fall short in some way or another.

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Find C.S. Lewis’s Sermon here.

Find C.S. Lewis’s Essay On Living in an Atomic Age here.