The End of Human Life

One of C.S. Lewis's least known works is a short piece called "Our English Syllabus", which was published in Rehabilitations and Other Essays in 1939 and which, because of its somewhat esoteric subject matter (the role of the "English School" at Oxford), has not to my knowledge been republished since. To read this essay, I had to make the journey to the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, surely the most beautiful library in the world, although the neighbouring Duke Humfrey's Library (used in the Harry Potter films) was Lewis's preferred place for reading.



As always, Lewis has some interesting things to say, coming at an issue from a different direction from how most people would do so. After all, he was no technocrat, no "expert" on education. His vision took in the whole wood, rather than the individual trees that were strewn across the paths. Nor was he of the temperament to succumb to despair and conceive of anything – least of all education – as an impenetrable forest or a trackless waste.

As with many of the great writers and thinkers, some of the best nuggets are to be picked up en passant, when he's taken you off on an apparent detour. In a passage in which he takes a position against religious education – as, for example, today, in Islamic schools – he encapsulates in two sentences his thinking in respect of both our natural life and our supernatural life.

"Human life means to me the life of beings for whom the leisured activities of thought, art, literature, conversation are the end, and the preservation and propagation of life merely the means."

To which he adds as a footnote:

"The natural end. It would have been out of place here to say what I believe about Man's supernatural end or to explain why I think the natural end should be pursued although, in isolation from the supernatural, it cannot be fully realized." (emphasis added)

Seventy years on, and religious fundamentalists – Christians included – will look to C.S. Lewis for support for their views in vain.