c. s. lewis & mindfulness

i’m feeling kind of iffy on even writing this not gonna lie. i have noticed an increasing amount of like secondhand lewisiana on audible for instance, podcasts, explainers, and what i have sampled is not good. also, trying to get your cs lewis fix by reading secondary sources on cs lewis is the very last thing cs lewis would have wanted. he wants you to read the books he read. and his literary criticism is the kind of literary criticism that actually enables its reader to tackle old/weird books that would have been otherwise inaccessible. so please, stop reading this essay instantly and go read a preface to paradise lost or an experiment in criticism¹ & then read or at least dip into the literature that he’s discussing.

but despite these reservations i still find that i have something to say, about something that i noticed while reading lewis, that surprised me, and which i haven’t seen other people talk about, so i’ll go ahead and talk about it. when c s lewis talks about the actual daily practice of virtue, there is a surprising amount of overlap w the practice of mindfulness.

an example from the screwtape letters, from letter 15:

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present — either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. […]To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too — just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. […] We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

(if you are unfamiliar with the conceit of this book, it’s a series of letters from one devil to another, so reverse the moral valence of all judgments)

this idea comes up a lot in his work—most noticeably it’s the major moral theme of perelandra, his paradise lost isekai. but it also comes upa lot when he’s talking about the practice of prayer. i’m worried that by saying that i will make you think that he is like daring or exciting in what he thinks you should do when you’re praying, which is not at all true; he’s very pro-kneeling, very in-favor of repeating prayers that you have learned, makes a little fun of coleridge’s (admittedly somewhat self-satisfied) first stanza of the pains of sleep. but he’s very much about managing your attention, and even ridding yourself of some of your dependence on concept, when you pray.

isn’t that a little unexpected, don’t you find yourself surprised? i did. it also made me reluctantly more interested in mindfulness. lewis has such a different metaphysics than most practitioners of contemporary secular mindfulness; if they can agree on the value of this sort of thing even across the metaphysical gap, i’m more confident in its value.

1. i won’t mention the allegory of love here only because i think if anything i say could convince you to read it then i already would have