"The intellectual baggage of artists today, regardless of nationality, is more or less the same everywhere," Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz writes. "All are 'children of the age' and, consciously or unconsciously, all pay homage to the nihilistic canon of the day." For an anatomy of, and antidote to, this pervasive and profound nihilism in art and life, there is no one better than C.S. Lewis, and perhaps this is one reason for his extraordinary popularity, which spans the world of children and adults, scholars and the unlettered. Large numbers of people who might not even understand an esoteric-seeming word such as 'nihilism' nevertheless experience the phenomenon that it denotes, the strange and pervasive "disease" of modern life, its anxiety and "weightlessness," its relativism, frequent meaninglessness, and recurrent horror, both personal and historical. In Lewis they find something beyond it.
Not only a scholar - though one of the greatest of our century - Lewis was also an artist, one with astonishing insight into the origin, nature, and meaning of that nihilism and sense of absurdity so characteristic of most modern art, whether visual, as in Beuys, Bacon, and Warhol, or literary, as in Beckett and Plath; and not of modern art only, but also of modern thought generally, from Monod through Skinner, and of much modern social life, from the organized tyrannical horrors of communist "scientific socialism" and militaristic autocracies, to the disorganized, fitful but intense rapacity and egotistical nihilism of our own free societies.
Lewis as Educator
Lewis brought a unique combination of talents to bear in his career as writer and sage, in his illumination of current confusions and in his prescription of a remedy. He was a writer of eloquence and felicity, whether in nonfiction analytical or apologetic writing or in narrative and fictional modes. He wore his learning lightly and focused it in prose with an enormous density of meaning and extraordinary clarity. Thus, his classic The Abolition of Man contains in less than 100 pages a profound introduction not only to philosophy, religion, and ethics, but also to literary criticism and educational theory. Of this volume, Secretary of Education William Bennett recently wrote, "If I could only assign one essay on education, this would be it."
Lewis is still a great educator in many ways, as millions of children and parents attest from their reading of the Narnia Chronicles, and as students of literature attest from his books and essays on literature, which, almost uniquely, succeed in being literature themselves. His lucid apologetic, theological, and philosophical writing has spoken to those who are put off by nauseatingly simplistic or self-serving evangelists or trendy, endlessly liberalizing theological servants of the secular "spirit of the age." His science fiction is widely read, although critically undervalued in the academy, where profitable literary industries are built on the elegant fantasies and fatuities of feckless prophets such as Yeats, Pound, and Joyce.
It is perhaps in the science-fiction space trilogy, and especially in the final volume, That Hideous Strength, that Lewis gives his finest and most accessible anatomy, analysis, and antidote to modern absurdism and nihilism, which Nietzsche both prophesied and helped promote, and which many of our most sensitive American observers have identified and struggled against, from
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