History Commons^™

De Desciptione Temporum: Revisiting C. S. Lewis' Inaugural Lecture, Jean Bethge Elshtain

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A discussion of Lewis's lecture giving a "description of the times," published in C. S. Lewis, They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses (London, 1962). Excerpt: "The third and no doubt most salient point for our contemporary consideration is that the “christening of Europe,” deplored by some (like Gibbon, the “humanistic unbeliever”), seemed a unique, irreversible event. “But we have seen the opposite process,” Lewis writes. To be sure, “the un-christening of Europe in our time is not quite complete; neither was her christening in the Dark Ages,” but it proceeds apace. Consequently, while our “ancestors divided history into …