C. S. Lewis Weighs In on the Coronavirus

Stores are emptied of hand sanitizer and toilet paper. Schools are closed. Events are canceled. Memes are made. Coronavirus is making the kind of history our great-grandchildren will read about in textbooks someday. 

I respect the warnings of our authorities and agree with taking precautions to protect the elderly and immunocompromised. But I also appreciate the balanced views Christians have been presenting, of quarantines providing quality family times, of God using this crisis to shake our view of normal into His view of normal.

Many years ago, C.S. Lewis wrote about living in uncertain days, and his words still hold truth for us--especially if his pint refers to a latte. I know this quote has been circulating recently, but I want to share it here in case you haven't seen it. 

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

— “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948)  

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