A Crisis of Virtue – The Good That We Need

Ancient Faith Ministries ^ | August 18, 2019 | Fr. Stephen Freeman

[Carpe Cerevisi]

C.S. Lewis once said that courage is the “form of every virtue at its testing point.” It is easy to forget that figures such as Lewis, Tolkien, and even Chesterton, did not write during a time of Christian ascendancy. Lewis was denied a chair (a full professorship) at Oxford for years precisely because of his embarrassingly public profession of faith. To the “learned” sceptics around him, it made him seem “less than serious.” Tolkien was a devout, practicing Catholic, but was never as public as Lewis. Lewis wrote popular books on the topic and gave radio addresses. All of that is a reminder that courage was a virtue in daily demand in their lives.

Universities have long been hot-beds of unbelief as well as places where mediocre men and women can do great damage to the careers of giants. We do not live in exceptional times in that regard. The same pettiness and meanness have found ways of trickling down into other parts of the culture, infecting Christians as well. Every virtue requires the practice of courage (another virtue) if it is to find expression.

It is interesting that the topic of virtue was the one matter on which Christians of the early Church and the educated pagans around them agreed. Indeed, the list of virtues that came to be a hallmark of ascetic writings in the Fathers was pretty much the same list found earlier in the works of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. In general, what constituted a “good man” was much the same whether seen from the point of view of a Christian or a pagan philosopher.

[Carpe Cerevisi]

Father Stephen Freeman ping!

[loveliberty2]

Thank you.

[Carpe Cerevisi]

Thank you.

You're very welcome!

[YogicCowboy]

The books of both Lewis and Tolkien were panned by many literary critics in the 1950s, most of whom were very leftist.

In fact, if not for the favorable reviews by his famous current friend, C. S. Lewis, and his famous former student, W. H. Auden, the trilogy might have never made paperback - which is what made it a sensation. Many other reviews were unfavorable.

The original printing of The Fellowship of the Ring was 500 copies - FIVE HUNDRED! Houghton and Mifflin were old family friends; they printed it as a courtesy, almost as a vanity publishing. They did not think anyone would want to buy and read it.

That is why the precursor, The Silmarillion, was never published at all while Tolkien lived.

I once came across an actual review of one of CSL’s books, That Hideous Strength (one of my favorites). It was sneeringly dismissive, referring to Lewis’s pathetic “formal apologetics” in his other writings, and calling his anti-socialist philosophy in this book “paranoid”.

Lewis commented on that, saying that the critic apparently did not understand what formal apologetics were, since Lewis was a layman writing essay and fiction.