Sterling Terrell

smart ideas from books

The Permanent Human Situation

The Permanent Human Situation

This is C.S. Lewis’s answer to the question: What use is there for academic studies in a time of war?

That “permanent human situation” here, I think, being pain, suffering, and death.

How should we act differently in the face of these realities?!

Uh – yeah – these are always our realities…

As Lewis has said before, it is not evident that (in fear) you should alter your life in any major way.

His answer, in brief, is that such studies have the same use, and the same uselessness, in time of war as in time of peace, because “the war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.”

-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)

Who Were The Umanistas?

Who Were The Umanistas?

Umanistas is the term from which we get the word “humanist.”

Derived from 15th-century Italian universities – it was slang for one that advocated for teaching the humanities.

Teachers of law (jurisprudence) were known as “juristas” – so this began naturally.

It’s a study of the classics that focuses on grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and – of course – moral pilosophy.

The umanistas were doing something unprecedented in keying the search for wisdom—including specifically Christian wisdom—to the study of literature.

-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)

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