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Cars have windshields as well as rearview mirrors. So do civilizations. For the latter, however, windshields are often muddy, and drivers who can peer intelligently through the grime and obscurity are rare. We rightly call them prophets. C. S. Lewis was able to look both ways, forward and back. His imaginative gifts have given readers insight into the past, and at the same time, glimpses into the future.

How did this uniquely gifted writer sift and sort the past in order to preview the future?

First, Lewis was desperately critical of any so-called philosophy of history. Unlike the many historians who presumed to be able to isolate a “meaning” or “spirit” of a particular age, Lewis thought such attempts to be futile.

“I cannot convince myself that such ‘spirits’ or ‘meanings’ have much more reality than the pictures we see in the fire,” he wrote in the Oxford History. “The ‘canals’ on Mars vanished when we got stronger lenses.” To discern the meaning of history, Lewis argued, one would have to step outside of history, and this no man can do, just as a driver cannot at the same time study the details in the rearview mirror and read a textbook on the principles of reflected light. We simply cannot step out of history to give it an objective look; we cannot examine time and events in a laboratory.

Though Lewis rejected the “grand theories” approach to history, he did hold to certain beliefs about the past— about history and human nature—that make him a prophet worth hearing today.

In the last two centuries, most intellectuals have abandoned any notion of unchanging truth, especially in any description of the human person. Human nature is variable, they say, as variable in “spirit” as it is in “body,” responsive to the environment and largely determined by it.

Lewis affirmed that our accidental qualities (height, weight, color, etc.) may change through history, but our essence never changes. Modern man therefore continues to make the same essential mistakes, is subject to the same addictions, sins the same sins and reaps the same whirlwinds as his ancestors. The only changes in man’s essence were the Fall and the Redemption. No other development has or will change our nature. “When poisons become fashionable they do not cease to kill” was Lewis’s warning that we are not so much advanced or different from our predecessors. A moral link connects all people of all ages. On the first page of The Allegory of Love Lewis writes:

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations; being alive it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

And from Letter 146, written in 1931: “I find nothing obsolete. The silly things the great men said were as silly then as they are now; the wise ones are as wise now as they were then.”

Just as Lewis denied change in the essence of the human person, he also denied the popular belief in accidental change for the better, sometimes called Progressivism or Universal Evolutionism. It was simply a mistake, he taught, to believe that our century is spiritually superior to previous centuries.

The mistake was commonly made by comparing technology to people. In the current century, telephone service has improved and electricity has replaced steam power, but such technical progress does not mean that people are morally improved. Nor does it mean that old moral rules are by their mere age inferior. If water stands too long it stinks. To infer thence that whatever stands long must be unwholesome is to be the victim of metaphor. Space does not stink because it has preserved its three dimensions from the beginning. The square of the hypotenuse has not gone moldy by continuing to equal the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Love is not dishonored by constancy.

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