A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War by Joseph Loconte;

Author:Joseph Loconte; [Loconte, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Christian Publishing
Published: 2016-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

THE CRISIS OF FAITH

Thus the crisis of faith in postwar Europe was multilayered. There was an erosion of what might be called civilizational confidence, a widespread disillusionment with the West and its supposed cultural achievements. Liberal democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism, progressivism—all seemed in a state of near collapse. Wrote Gilbert Murray in The Ordeal of This Generation (1929): “The system which before the war was considered to be essential to civilization, at any rate if civilization was to advance, is now in peril of its life.”39 Since Christianity was considered integral to Europe’s political and economic system, the perceived failure of that system was a spiritual failure as well.

The disintegration of orthodox Christian belief among all classes of Europeans during the 1920s, though easy to overstate, was real enough. “A profound sense of spiritual crisis was the hallmark of that decade,” writes Modris Eksteins. “It affected rural laborers, large landowners, industrialists, factory workers, shop clerks and urban intellectuals.”40 There were numerous causes for the weakening of religious faith, but among the most important was the influence of Freudian psychology, which got an immense boost in the postwar years.

The experience of trench warfare produced many cases of mental disorders among soldiers and war veterans. It became known as shell shock: Well-bred men from upper-class or military families, who fought with distinction, who were decorated for valor, suddenly broke. They were neither cowardly nor insane.41

Mrs. Moore’s brother, “the Doc,” became stricken with the disorder, brought on by his combat experience. During one of his visits, he suffered repeated outbursts of extreme mental torture—he apparently believed he was going to hell—and was sent off to a hospital. Lewis spent many hours with him, trying to comfort him. “Nothing can wring the ghost of a smile from him,” Lewis wrote in his diary. “For painfulness I think this beats anything I’ve seen in my life.”42 The Doc soon died from heart failure. “Isn’t it a damned world,” Lewis wrote to a friend, “and we thought we could be happy with books and music!”43

Freud seemed to offer an honorable explanation for the condition. His methods of psychoanalysis appeared preferable to the brutal alternatives available for curing mental illness: medication, verbal bullying, or electric-shock therapy. “When the electric current was increased,” writes Paul Johnson, “men died under treatment, or committed suicide rather than face more, like victims of the Inquisition.”44

When Freud’s first psychiatric clinic opened in Berlin in 1920, it paved the way for his views about human nature, guilt, and God. Freud proved especially attractive to a generation struggling to find meaning in the war’s aftermath. Religious belief was seen as an attempt to protect against suffering, “a delusional remolding of reality.”45 With God discredited, meaning must be found “in life itself, in the act of living, in the vitality of the moment.”46 Thus, the new psychology legitimized a new hedonism. Within a decade, W. R. Matthews, the Dean of Exeter, complained of “the decay of institutional religion” because of the “incoherence of the Christian message and its apparent contradiction with modern knowledge.

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