Die before you Die:
The Language of Moral Injury and Healing According to
C.S. Lewis, Subaltern, British Army, World War I

Abstract

C.S. Lewis is popularly known as a Christian apologist. Less recognized is Lewis’s relationship with war, forged while he was an avowed atheist and preceding his body of Christian work. Lewis’s theological development is profoundly impacted by his combat experience, and the conceptual language of war a consistent modality in which he writes. Lewis provides a manner of thinking and talking about a specific facet of combat experience – what
today might be called “moral injury” – with far-reaching implications.

The first two sections explain the lens through which this project looks at Lewis’s work, taking moral injury and the lived experience of war in turn. The third section fits the lens to Lewis’s theological development, following Lewis’s use of the language of war and correspondingly throwing Lewis’s ideas about tripartite humanity into sharp relief. The fourth section looks through that lens into Lewis’s work to find what he has to say about moral healing.

This project is unprecedented for its treatment of Lewis’s wartime experience as one of relationship with war; careful attention to how Lewis’s use of language is shaped by combat; direct extension of Lewis’s war-time experience from his non-fiction, to his fiction; extrapolation of Lewis’s combat experience to his theological development; application of Lewis’s insights to modern questions of combat-related moral injury and healing; and suggestion that one of Lewis’s most beloved fictional characters is a direct representation of a fallen soldier close to Lewis. The
whole illuminates how moral injury and its effects are felt in significant ways from World War I, onward, and leverages Lewis to address a pressing challenge in the field today – that is, how to conceptualize and talk about the lived experience of moral injury and healing, making words and
imagery an aid to chaplaincy care.