Orwell, Lewis, and Us: What Contemporaries Share Without Seeing

Why Our Fiercest Opponents Are Often Our Closest Relatives

In a 1944 issue of Tribune, George Orwell took a jab at C.S. Lewis. His target was Beyond Personality, the collected radio talks that would later become the final section of Mere Christianity. Orwell characterized Lewis as enjoying some “vogue at this moment,” which permitted him to offer “chummy little wireless talks” to a credulous public.

But Orwell saw something more sinister beneath the chumminess. Lewis was, he implied, a “reactionary,” and his apologetics amounted to “an outflanking movement in the big counter-attack against the Left.” It’s laughable, actually. But how and why Orwell misread Lewis is illustrative.

Orwell and Lewis.

Orwell was a socialist who had watched fascism ravage Europe, and he was quick to see it wherever he looked—including in an Oxford don’s radio lectures on Christian faith and practice. Lewis, for his part, was a medievalist and convert who thought modernity had talked itself into a series of incoherent positions and needed, above all, to recover more fruitful ways of thinking. Each could see the other as part of the problem.

What neither could easily see, however, was how much they shared. They were both Englishmen of the mid-twentieth century (Lewis was actually born in Ulster, Ireland, but worked his entire life in England), both products of the same educational tradition, both writing for audiences shaped by the same wars. They stood on different sides of the room, but shared the same floor beneath their feet.

The things they took for granted—about institutions, the value of plain English prose, the importance of ordinary decency, how arguments ought to be conducted, not to mention all the cultural scaffolding that upheld their lives and work—overlapped far more than what they disputed. Theirs was, in a sense, a family quarrel, conducted across common ground neither man had any particular reason to examine.

The Athanasius Principle

To his credit, Lewis understood this problem even if he couldn’t fully escape it in practice. Can any of us? That same year—1944—he wrote his famous introduction to Athanasius of Alexandria’s On the Incarnation, and the core argument was about exactly this kind of blindness.

“Every age has its own outlook,” Lewis wrote. “It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.” The trouble is that few experience these mistakes as mistakes, because everyone around them is making the same ones. The whole period shares “a great mass of common assumptions,” and these assumptions are invisible precisely because they’re universal.

Athanasius of Alexandria. Image: Walters Art Museum.

Lewis’s proposed remedy was old books but not because old books are reliably correct. People in the past were, he said, just as prone to follies and fumbles as we are. Helpfully, however, they were prone to different mistakes. Their thinking was conditioned by different presuppositions, different contexts, different anxieties. Reading old books doesn’t automatically give you the right answers, but it can disrupt the wrong ones you didn’t know you had.

“Two heads are better than one,” said Lewis, “not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.” Lewis would probably hate the term, but he was arguing for a sort of epistemological crowdsourcing, and the crowd has to include the dead because only centuries of distance guarantee a sufficiently different perspective. Lewis admitted that future books would be helpful too; they’re just harder to find on interlibrary loan.

“All contemporary writers,” said Lewis, “share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it.” He could have easily dropped Orwell’s name in there; he is, after all, an obvious case in point.

Orwell could see, or thought he could see, the reactionary premises behind Lewis’s talks; what he could not so easily see were the assumptions of his own moment—the wartime habit of reading moral and religious language through the lens of ideological conflict. But Lewis was no exception either, as he himself admits. Even those most opposed to the spirit of an age remain partly formed by it; it’s unavoidable.

Contemporary conservatives and progressives can, for instance, tangle over a hundred issues without recognizing they both share assumptions formed by liberal, individualist impulses inherited from their common western inheritance.

Catching Each Other’s Epidemics

Twenty years after his Athanasius introduction, Lewis hit the same challenge from a different angle in The Discarded Image, this time demonstrating how it played out across an entire civilization. As I recently detailed, The Discarded Image presents Lewis’s reconstruction of the medieval worldview, the whole mental model by which medieval people understood reality.

Two primary tributaries fed that model: Greco-Roman paganism and Christianity. The streams were distinct and sometimes bitterly opposed. But Lewis noticed something that complicated the usual story of conflict.

“In a prolonged war,” he said, “the troops on both sides may imitate one another’s methods and catch one another’s epidemics; they may even occasionally fraternise.” The pagans and the Christians fought, but “the influence of the one upon the other was very great.” Tying this back to the Athanasius Principle, Lewis goes further; the pagans and the Christians of late antiquity, he observes, “were in some ways far more like each other than either was like a modern man.”

The medieval Christian and the medieval pagan stood upon the same floor, a floor built from shared cosmological premises, shared assumptions about hierarchy and order, shared habits of mind inherited from centuries of inhaling the same intellectual air. Their fights happened within a frame neither side had built and neither could fully see. And, importantly, that frame differed from that shared by both their predecessors and their heirs.

What Lewis says here about pagans and Christians offers us a way to re-read Orwell’s complaint. As contemporaries, they were more alike than they realized. Their dispute took place within a shared midcentury English frame neither man had built and neither could fully inspect. In that sense, they resembled the antagonists Lewis describes: genuine opponents who nevertheless breathed much of the same intellectual air.

C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image.

The same is, of course, true in every era. Opponents in any serious dispute tend to share more presuppositions than they contest. They imitate each other’s methods; they catch each other’s epidemics; they fraternize. The fiercer the fight, the harder this is to recognize, because the emotional intensity of the disagreement obscures how much common intellectual and cultural ground makes the disagreement possible in the first place. You have to share the same floor to throw punches.

Lewis saw this across centuries of intellectual history. What makes his vision useful is that he also saw the remedy: Read outside your own period. Let “the clean sea breeze of the centuries” blow through your mind, as he said when introducing readers to On the Incarnation.

The trick is, as ever, awareness.

The Floor Beneath Our Fights

We have to inspect our own assumptions before we can challenge them. Orwell and Lewis each managed this easily with respect to other people’s assumptions—they were equally devastating in arguments—and sometimes with their own. We probably shouldn’t expect to do much better. But the floor always sits there, whether we look down or not.

Our political arguments, technological opinions, and moral frameworks all rest atop assumptions we share with the very people we’re arguing against. We can see a version of this playing out in (God help us) the endless woke/anti-woke debates. Both sides can be equally petty and vindictive, not realizing they’re behaving the same way. And, as Tom Holland argues in Dominion, many of the combatants are working from the same Christian cultural source code, even if they’re oblivious to it.

We can also see it in the arguments about AI, where both sides happily enjoy the varied fruits of automation and efficiency, rarely pausing to explore where they draw what line or what standard they apply when doing so, or why.

The truth is we can see it everywhere if we look, which is no surprise: The very ground we’re standing on to throw our punches is usually the part we don’t examine.

---

Postscript: With the Athanasius Principle in mind, Lewis invites us to go a little further down this track, and I’d love your help. What books from the past might be helpful in navigating the present? Given the nature of our various controversies, I like to think that Erasmus might be useful. Same with Montaigne and maybe Adam Smith. In my coming review of The Brothers Karamazov I’ll mention why I think Dostoevsky can help us too.

Who else? Please share your recommendations in the comments!

---

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please hit the ❤️ below and share it with your friends (or anyone else who enjoys Orwell and Lewis).

Not a subscriber? Take a moment and sign up. I’ll send you my top-fifteen quotes about books and reading. Thanks again!

Don’t Know Jack About the Other C.S. Lewis?

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Against the World

George Orwell: Terrific Writer, Terrible Husband