“There Are Not Going to Be Many More Dinosaurs”
C.S. Lewis on the rise of a post-Christian culture
This lecture, entitled “De Descriptione Temporum” and delivered in 1954 as the inaugural lecture of the chair of medieval and Renaissance studies at Cambridge University, is one of C.S. Lewis’s finest moments of cultural analysis. It is regrettable, then, that it is so rarely referenced or even read. Recognizing that, I have extracted my favorite portions of the lecture here in hopes of bringing it to the attention of more readers. My encouragement to my students when they read these words is always the same: “Be a dinosaur. Know your way around the works of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and Irenaeus and Tertullian—and ultimately the Scriptures—far better than you know your way around your phone or your remote control.” This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t engage with current issues, but we can refuse to engage them on the terms of the latest political polarities and talk-show pundits. Yes, we contextualize our engagement, but ultimately we engage with the world around us as those who seem like dinosaurs, drawing from the rich and diverse thought bequeathed to us by believers long past.
“The christening of Europe seemed to all our ancestors, whether they welcomed it themselves as Christians, or, like [Edward] Gibbon, deplored it as humanistic unbelievers, a unique, irreversible event. But we have seen the opposite process. Of course the un-christening of Europe in our time is not quite complete; neither was her christening in the Dark Ages. But roughly speaking we may say that whereas all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian, and two only, for us it falls into three—the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian. This surely must make a momentous difference. I am not here considering either the christening or the un-christening from a theological point of view. I am considering them simply as cultural changes. When I do that, it appears to me that the second change is even more radical than the first. …
“Wide as the chasm is, those who are native to different sides of it can still meet; are meeting in this room. … And here comes the rub. I myself belong far more to that Old Western order than to yours. I am going to claim that this, which in one way is a disqualification for my task, is yet in another a qualification. The disqualification is obvious. You don’t want to be lectured on Neanderthal Man by a Neanderthaler, still less on dinosaurs by a dinosaur. And yet, is that the whole story? If a live dinosaur dragged its slow length into the laboratory, would we not all look back as we fled? What a chance to know at last how it really moved and looked and smelled and what noises it made! And if the Neanderthaler could talk, then, though his lecturing technique might leave much to be desired, should we not almost certainly learn from him some things about him which the best modem anthropologist could never have told us? He would tell us without knowing he was telling.
“One thing I know: I would give a great deal to hear any ancient Athenian, even a stupid one, talking about Greek tragedy. He would know in his bones so much that we seek in vain. At any moment some chance phrase might, unknown to him, show us where modem scholarship had been on the wrong track for years.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you somewhat as that Athenian might stand. I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners. You see why I said that the claim was not really arrogant; who can be proud of speaking fluently his mother tongue or knowing his way about his father’s house? It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature. And because this is the judgement of a native, I claim that, even if the defense of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen.
“I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.”
He was such a great writer / speaker. I'd love to share a pint with that dinosaur.