“All over the world men and women will meet on December 25th to do what is a very old-fashioned and, if you like, a very Pagan thing—to sing and feast because a God has been born. You are uncertain whether it is more than a myth. Well, if it is, then our last hope is gone. But is the opposite explanation not worth trying?”
World War I burnt all illusions of “La Belle Époque” and its blind trust‒half posing as a positivistic sophistication, half being simply silly‒in what Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) labelled “le magnifiche sorti e progressive” (“the magnificent and progressive destiny” of humanity) in his poem La ginestra o il fiore del deserto (written in 1836 and published posthumously in 1845), which popularized an expression he borrowed from his less famous cousin Terenzo Mamiani Della Rovere’s (1799–1885) Inni sacri. That bubble cost millions and millions of lives, opened an unprecedented abyss in human conscience, killed what remained of innocence, destroyed much of the old order of the West, and demolished what was left of the Sacred Roman Empire in the Habsburg House, or a different, Christian, Catholic order of the things, moral and political.
Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) was among those who were startled by the demonic path taken by the world. The literary magazine The Criterion, that he founded and directed in London, can be considered also a way to respond to the earthly hell of human displacement and devastation that the interwar generation lived. Eliot summoned all contributors that, at some extent and conditions, seemed to represent one or another sort of spiritual reaction to that desolation. His was a study in, or an attempt at, moral imagination. Heterogeneous as the magazine was, maybe even limited or confused, The Criterion played anyway an important role as a clarion call. Significantly, the first issue of the magazine, published in October 1922, featured Eliot’s matchless The Waste Land.
Then The Criterion continued for years as a quarterly (and a monthly only for a short period of time) to end in January 1939. Eliot somewhat felt that the magazine’s experience was concluded, maybe even exhausted. It is notably that his next endeavor was a series of lectures questioning the foundation of a proper human environment that eventually became the book The Idea of a Christian Society.
Eliot had converted to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, during The Criterion’s experience, and those post-The Criterion lectures were delivered in that crucial year 1939. The book collecting the lectures was published later that 1939 as well. And World War II broke out, with the German invasion of Poland, few weeks after that book hit the shelves in early December 1939. It was like Eliot felt that the only real and accomplished answer to the profound spiritual crises that he had in a way sought to address through The Criterion was the reconstruction of a Christian commonwealth. Yet, once again, the chasm that a catastrophic war is able to open in the soul of men postponed that aspiration. Potentially, it even wiped it out.
After World War II, the same spiritual bleakness and aridity that had swamped the post-World War I generation returned again to haunt humanity as another horrible ghost‒even more dreadful, since it also magnified the unsolved pre-war drama. It was then that C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) came in.
A timely sermon
In December 1946, English journalist Douglas Edward Macdonald Hastings (1909–1982) had been the editor of The Strand Magazine for a little more than two years. The Strand was as English as the Earl Grey. Founded in 1891, it popularized Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859–1930) Sherlock Holmes and its pages were always crowded by excellencies of the English-speaking world of letters, both quick and dead: H.G. Wells (1866–1946), Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), Agatha Christie (1890–1976), D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930), Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) who gave us She-who-must-be-obeyed and Allan Quatermain, Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957), Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), and no less that Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965) and even Queen Victoria (1819–1901), who contributed a sketch she drew. At that point, Macdonald Hastings also wanted the best-sellers of the moment and engaged both John Steinbeck (1902–1968) and Lewis; to the latter he asked a meditation on the 25th of December.
Lewis enthusiastically accepted, producing a text whose title is curious as its content is provocative: A Christmas Sermon for Pagans, printed with a gorgeous layout that renowned English artist and cartoonist Ronald Searle (1920–2011) decorated with beautiful drawings of little angels and devils. It is so interesting to realize how much they resemble the drawings of Italian journalist and writer Giovannino Guareschi (1908–1968), the creator of Don Camillo.
Lewis’ A Christmas Sermon for Pagans has a story, or is a story in itself. For years it remined just on The Strand, forgotten. For some obscure reasons, it was neither republished not collected in books. Then it was rediscovered. Twice. In 2013, Stephanie L. Derrick found it out of the blue in Edimburgh’s National Library of Scotland while doing research for her Ph.D. at the University of Sterling on the international reception of Lewis, that later helped her writing The Fame of C.S. Lewis: A Controversialist’s Reception in Britain and America, published in 2018. Dr. Derrick told the story of her discovery in Christianity Today on December 2017. Then, independently, Mr. Christopher Mersch came across that lost text while looking online for Lewis’ first editions in 2014. Realizing the uniqueness of that finding, he involved Dr. Joel Heck at Concordia University Texas, Austin, and together they wrote an introduction to the transcript of Lewis’s sermon. Both the sermon and the introduction appeared in the 2017 issue of the prestigious magazine VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois.
The sermon is fascinating‒and totally Lewisian. In face of the gigantic sea of spiritual troubles upon which the world was going adrift in the wake of the still smoking horrors of World War II, an age of hollow men (to echo a famous 1925 Eliot poem) roaming hopelessly with no point of reference, Lewis call for a strong return to moral standards. But it is not yet another moralistic paean of the kind which we often hear these days, where the amount words is inversely proportional to the profundity of meaning. It is a direct invitation for humanity to make its examination of conscience.
Men of our age, Lewis writes, lost the sense of sin. They don’t know what sin is, so they don’t perceive themselves as sinners. They ask how they came to this dead-end and they “immediately reply, ‘the social system,’ or ‘our allies,’ or ‘education’.” It doesn’t occur to modern man “that he himself might be one of the things that” is “wrong with the world.” Modern man thinks that “it is up to God (if, after all, He should happen to exist), or to Government, or to Education, to give us what we want. They are the shop, we are the customers: and ‘the customer is always right’.” Yet that jukebox-god, which should perform at the order of a nickel, rapidly wither and disappear.
Lewis’ lines on nature are penetrating:
Suppose she is only a machine and that we are free to master her at our pleasure. Have you not begun to see that Man’s conquest of Nature is really Man’s conquest of Man? That every power wrested from Nature is used by some men over other men? Men are the victims, not the conquerors in this struggle: each new victory “over Nature” yields new means of propaganda to enslave them, new weapons to kill them, new power for the State and new weakness for the citizen, new contraceptives to keep men from being born at all.
The death of the West
The terrible loss of moral standards and the spiritual desert that Lewis saw in December 1946, possibly predicting the death of our civilization, has a name: de-Christianization. Losing Christ, the true God, human beings lost themselves. It is here that A Christmas Sermon for Pagans unfolds all its powerful meaning.
People have the habit of calling “pagans” the men and women of this new brave and wretched world, but, Lewis says, one wishes they were. “To say that modem people who have drifted away from Christianity are Pagans,” he observes, “is to suggest that a post-Christian man is the same as a pre-Christian man. And that is like thinking that a woman who has lost her husband is the same sort of person as an unmarried girl: or that a street where the houses have been knocked down is the same as a field where no house has yet been built.”
The huge difference between pre-Christian and post-Christian man lays, for Lewis, in two fundamental things. As to the pre-Christian man, “[f]irstly, he was religious.” Its limitations were serious, his wrongdoings several, yet “[h]e was full of reverence.” And “secondly, he believed in what we now call an ‘Objective’ Right or Wrong. That is, he thought the distinction between pious and impious acts was something which existed independently of human opinions.” To be sure, “by Christian standards, his list of ‘Right’ or ‘Wrong’ acts was rather a muddled one. He thought (and the Christians agreed) that the gods would punish him for setting the dogs on a beggar who came to his door or for striking his father: but he also thought they would punish him for turning his face to the wrong point of the compass when he began ploughing. But though his code included some fantastic sins and duties, it got in most of the real ones.”
Instead, “the post-Christian view which is gradually coming into existence‒it is complete already in some people and still incomplete in others‒is quite different.” Today, “[t]here is no objective Right or Wrong: each race or class can invent its own code or ‘ideology’ just as it pleases.” Here Lewis is prophetic in the true sense of the world: not magically foreseeing the future‒as the term “prophet” never meant‒but being able to read the signs of his times carefully and precisely to publicly announce what will logically came next, if nothing intervenes to change the course of events. One may think of 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France and his truly prophetic author, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), who, as early as Summer 1789, was able to detect the whole horrendous and blasphemous development of the next 10 years of the French Revolution and beyond: the regicide, the Terror, and even “the man on the horse” at last.
Lewis fully denounced the tyranny of relativism, creeping in with its immorality and crimes, in December 1946: what should have he said, had Lewis lived in our days of total confusion, cancel culture, wokeism? In 1969, Belgian Catholic philosopher Marcel De Corte (1905–1994) published a key book by the title L’intelligence en péril de mort (“Intelligence in mortal danger”): we live today in an age where intelligence is dead and buried, the age, as Lewis calles it, of “the new invented Wrongs and Rights.” Yet Lewis wonder: “does no one see the catch?”
If there is no real Wrong and Right, nothing good or bad in itself, none of these ideologies can be better or worse than another. For a better moral code can only mean one which comes nearer to some real or absolute code. One map of New York can be better than another only if there is a real New York for it to be truer to. If there is no objective standard, then our choice between one ideology and another becomes a matter of arbitrary taste.
At this point, Lewis casts in a line that our world horrifies at hearing its truth:
Our battle for democratic ideals against Nazi ideals has been a waste of time, because the one is no better than the other. Nor can there ever be any real improvement or deterioration: if there is no real goal you can’t get either nearer to it or farther from it. In fact, there is no real reason for doing anything at all.
Lewis was not any crypto-fascist or Hitler sympathizer. He just had the courage to put his finger into the wound: the patient suffers, but this leads to clarity‒and to Lewis’ challenge. “It looks to me, neighbours,” he continues, “as though we shall have to set about becoming true Pagans if only as a preliminary to becoming Christians. I don’t mean that we should begin leaving little bits of bread under the tree at the end of the garden as an offering to the Dryad. I don’t mean that we should dance to Dionysus across Hampstead Heath.” What then did he mean?
The only cure
The grand finale of his 1946 sermon re-offers concepts that Lewis had already penned in his 1944 short essay Myth Became Fact, later collected by Walter Hooper (1931–2020) in Lewis’ 1970 book God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. There Lewis stated:
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens — at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.
Lewis’s conversion to Christianity had passed through the power of myth itself. He perused and plumbed myth for his whole career as a sublime professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge. He had always loved myth, but at first he judged it to be only an empty box, esthetically nice indeed, as all religious creeds. It was then chiefly J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) who convinced him of the intimate truth of myth‒myth that eventually becomes historically real at the Incarnation of Jesus. All this slowly led Lewis to converting to theism in 1929 and to Christianity in 1931, as well as Tolkien to write, in his 1936 essay On Fairy-Stories:
The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable Eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the Eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the Eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits.
Tolkien’s concept-term “Eucatastrophe” conveys the idea of the unexpected, sudden overturning of a story that makes Good triumph. In that same essay, he addresses “the Great Eucatastrophe” as “[t]he Christian joy, the Gloria,” caused and brought by the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Jesus, the Logos, and Myth, made flesh, commenting: “this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.”
Now, Lewis’ pre-Christians are those whose myths and tales can be called an immense “literature of Advent,” a Wait and an Expectation that was always present yet constantly unconscious and only rarely glimpsed for ages before the Birth. It substantiates what Rumanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) and Belgian anthropologist of religion, later a Cardinal, Julien Ries (1920–2013) called and described as Homo religiosus. You need to have eyes to see and ears to hear, otherwise you won’t even recognize the only true God when He comes. This is the drama of the gay nihilism of our world.
“Perhaps,” Lewis powerfully concludes his 1946 sermon for all our endangered times, “what I do mean is best put like this.”
If the modern post-Christian view is wrong—and every day I find it harder to think it right—then there are three kinds of people in the world. (1) Those who are sick and don’t know it (the post-Christians). (2) Those who are sick and know it (Pagans). (3) Those who have found the cure. And if you start in the first class you must go through the second to reach the third. For (in a sense) all that Christianity adds to Paganism is the cure. It confirms the old belief that in this universe we are up against Living Power: that there is a real Right and that we have failed to obey it: that existence is beautiful and terrifying. It adds a wonder of which Paganism had not distinctly heard—that the Mighty One has come down to help us, to remove our guilt, to reconcile us.
All over the world (even in Japan, even in Russia) men and women will meet on December 25th to do what is a very old-fashioned and, if you like, a very Pagan thing—to sing and feast because a God has been born. You are uncertain whether it is more than a myth. Well, if it is, then our last hope is gone. But is the opposite explanation not worth trying?
Who knows but that here, and here alone, lies your way back not only to Heaven, but to Earth too, and to the great human family whose oldest hopes are confirmed by this story that does not die?”
Like Gandalf: never too early, never too late, but always at the right moment, Lewis’ fantastic lost sermon came back to us‒and God was born. Pre-Christian Greeks called it kairos, the supreme precise and apt moment when the deity acts. In Christian liturgy, it is where time meets the timeless. Christmas.
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The featured image is “Ceiling painting ‘Saint Vitus is brought to safety from his pagan father by an angel’ by Josef Mariano Kitschker (1907 – 1909), Chapel on the Michaelsberg, Untergrombach, Germany. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
