C.S. Lewis and resilience as key to the cultivation of virtue and Christian identity

Abstract

The well-known Christian apologist and writer C.S. Lewis, born in 1898, was a contemporary of Romano Guardini, but unlike Guardini, Lewis did not speak much on the concept of Church as such. His main concern was the life of faith and the spiritual battle that the individual soul has to endure on this earth. Like many mystics before him, Lewis had a deeply Platonic understanding of this life – for him, life on earth is a battlefield that either prepares us for our Heavenly destiny, or completely disqualifies us from entering the Eternal Banquet. He considered our present experience to be the testing ground – we are Heavenly citizens in exile from our true homeland. We are in what Josef Pieper in his small but powerful treatise ‘On Hope’ calls a ‘status viatoris’ – which is a state of becoming. We are pilgrims on the way to attaining either eternal happiness or eternal misery. It remains to be seen whether we will become fully formed in our Christian identity or remain merely pale shadows of what God intended us to become.