SUMMER 2013
unselfishness uses the other person as a way of bolstering his own sense of piety and self-righteousness. Actually, if truth be told, love and unselfishness are also received in a radically different way by the object of the proffered charity. In the former case, the recipient is assured that another human being cares deeply about him; in the latter, he feel manipulated and used. G.K. Chesterton once defined a humanitarian as someone who loves humanity but hates human beings. The person who is on the receiving end of unselfishness knows instinctively, to paraphrase a line from Letter 26, that he is being treated as a sort of lay figure upon which the would-be humanitarian exercises his petty, selfcentered altruisms. When the virtues are enacted in a positive, healthy spirit, they draw us closer to God and our neighbor. But when they are turned back upon themselves as a method for bolstering our ego and self esteem, they ensnare and isolate us. The false humanitarian ends up feeling contempt for his fellow man because he cannot move outside his own desperate need to feel good about himself. But the virtuous man who practices true love comes to truly love the people he serves.
W
is for War. The eighteen-year-old C. S. Lewis was hardly what one would call an athletic young man. He was a failure at sports and spent his school days avoiding the company of upper-class athletes. And yet, in 1917, the bookish Lewis chose to enlist in the First World War. I say chose because Lewis, as an Irish citizen (he grew up in Belfast), was not subjected to the draft. Nevertheless, he served and fought in the trenches, returning to England a year later as a wounded veteran. Though he was too old to fight in WWII, he supported the war effort in every way he could, including speaking over the BBC radio and giving live talks to the RAF. In 1940, he even addressed a pacifist society in Oxford on the reasons why he was not a pacifist (his speech is anthologized in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses). In his talk, Lewis respectfully reminds his audience that when Christ instructed his followers to turn the other cheek, he likely meant the command to refer to personal situations between people and their neighbors. There is no indication that the command was meant to apply to all situations at all times. Surely, Lewis argues, 71