C.S. Lewis- the Sacred and the Secular (Part III)

According to C.S. Lewis, a healthy love for country is also one that is mindful of the country's view of itself. If idealists within become the policy makers, their attempt to remake the world can become dangerous. Ideology itself once it overtakes a nation leads many to embrace a "false transcendence" of what is earthly and what is heavenly. Note the similar analysis to Eric Voegelin's claim that moderns always seek to immanentize the eschaton.

Lewis begins by establishing a more realistic role for a country to fight for. In the Screwtape Letters, Screwtape urges Wormwood to tempt the young man into making "the world an end and faith a means." With this accomplished, "it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing." With this in mind, war makes little difference in the normal human condition Lewis writes in "Learning in Wartime," "The war crates no absolutely new situations; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it." In the Four Loves, Lewis distinguishes between fighting for the cause of one's country versus the cause of justice or any other attribute as a whole. When wars become abstracted they become less justifiable for men to die for.

In "Why I am not a Pacifist" Lewis criticizes those who believe that "the greatest permanent miseries in human life must be curable if only we find the right cure." Hence the fanaticism of many systematizers for men such as Marx, Darwin, Hitler, and Stalin all claimed to have the right answers. Rather than claim all the answers, Lewis encourages us to "work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace." Attacking the "immediate evils" is far better than claims for "universal peace" which can never occur one earth.

Lewis cautions against the willingness to die for any cause a nation enters into. Again in "Learning in Wartime," Lewis reminds his readers that those who "surrender... without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation" risk surrendering the things that only belong to God. In the Screwtape Letters, Screwtape urges Wormwood to encourage the young man into a position where"Meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity..." When man attempts to claim the things of God, Lewis writes in "Learning in Wartime" that man looks for a heaven on earth that will "turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man."

In the Four Loves, Lewis claims that when ones particular country's cause becomes the "cause of God," wars will eventually become "wars of annihilation." Continues Lewis, "A false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world." A unhealthy nationalistic spirit attempts to "borrow" the things of the heavenly society and use them in the earthly society to justify "the most abominable actions." This unhealthy mixing of the sacred and the secular is a violation of the Augustinian City of God/City of Man dichotomy.

The consequences of this way of thinking leads to potentially interesting consequences regarding the mixing of religion and patriotism. Such thoughts I continue to wrestle with as I learn how to love correctly my own country.