LEWISIANA: Notes on Essays by C. S. Lewis

Quotations and Allusions in

C. S. Lewis’s shorter writings

compiled by Arend Smilde (Utrecht, The Netherlands)

As the distance grows between the lifetime of C. S. Lewis and the present day, more and more of the many quotations and allusions in his work are likely to be lost on his readers. The following notes are intended to remedy some of this problem with regard to a number of Lewis’s essays, addresses and sundry short prose writings.

The twenty-eight pieces covered here are presented in chronological order of their dates of origin. The opening survey should help you find particular essays, or essays from particular volumes. First comes a list of all the volumes from which some or all essays are annotated. Each volume title is preceded by the abbreviation used in the second list, where the essay titles are given in alphabetical order. The second list also features the year of origin of each essay, as well as references to the volume(s) in which each piece has been published. Volumes which are now no longer very likely to be available are in the right-hand column (“other volumes”).

In 2000, nearly all of Lewis’s short prose writings were collected in one large volume called Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley Walmsley (HarperCollins, London). For more bibliographical information on Lewis’s essays see www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays.

Please note that the present attempt at annotation does not pretend to have reached anything like completion. A row of six dots ...... indicates those places where I hope to add details sooner or later. Your suggestions for ways to fill out these places are welcome. Your help is especially welcome where the dots are followed by a question mark. This page was first posted in August 2008; updates are listed at the end.

SURVEY

number of essays

1. Volumes used annotated here / contained in volume

Rhb

Trp

WLN

AfP

SPT

CRf

SLE

FSE

GD/UK

WoG

FST

REHABILITATIONS and other essays, London 1939

TRANSPOSITION and other addresses, London 1947

(published in the U.S.A. as THE WEIGHT OF GLORY, New York 1947)

THE WORLD’S LAST NIGHT and other essays, New York 1960

THEY ASKED FOR A PAPER, London 1962

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TAST and other pieces, London 1965

CHRISTIAN REFLECTIONS, London & Grand Rapids 1967
(USA reprint, with one piece omitted: THE SEEING EYE, New York 1986)

GOD IN THE DOCK, Essays on Theology and Ethics, Grand Rapids 1970
(published in the UK as UNDECEPTIONS, London 1971)

SELECTED LITERARY ESSAYS, Cambridge 1969

FERN-SEED AND ELEPHANTS and other essays on Christianity, London 1975

GOD IN THE DOCK, Essays on Theology, London 1979

THE WEIGHT OF GLORY and other addresses, New York 1980
(expanded edition of the 1947 volume)

FIRST AND SECOND THINGS

1 / 9

5 / 5

6 / 7

6 / 12

8 / 8

14 / 14

30 / 49

1 / 22

8 / 8

13 / 13

8 / 9

17 / 17

2. Essays annotated – alphabetical order
year of origin or first publication	Essay click on title to go to the notes	first published in book form; excluding volumes in right-hand column						other volumes
		1960	1965	1967	1970	1975	1980
1961	Before we can communicate	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1941	Bulverism	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1940	Christianity and culture	-	-	CRf	-	-	-	-
1939	Christianity and literature	-	-	CRf	-	-	-	Rhb 1939
1946	The decline of religion	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1954	De descriptione temporum	-	-	-	-	-	-	AfP 1962, SLE 1969
?1943	De futilitate	-	-	CRf	-	-	-	-
1943	Dogma and the universe	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
1959	The efficacy of prayer	WLN	-	-	-	FSE	-	-
1959	Fern-seed and elephants*	-	-	CRf	-	FSE	-	-
1942	First and second things	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
?1944	The funeral of a great myth	-	-	CRf	-	-	-	-
1948	God in the dock	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
1959	Good work and good works	WLN	SPT	-	-	-	-	-
1945	The Grand Miracle	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
1950	Historicism	-	-	CRf		FSE	-	-
1944	“Horrid red things”	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1949	The humanitarian theory of punishment	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1944	The Inner Ring	-	SPT	-	-	-	WoG	Trp 1947, AfP 1962
1944	Is theology poetry?	-	SPT	-	-	-	WoG	AfP 1962
1960	The language of religion	-	-	CRf	-	-	-	-
1945	The laws of nature	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
1939	Learning in war-time	-	-	-	-	FSE	WoG	Trp 1947
?1946	Man or rabbit	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
1945	Meditation in a toolshed	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1945	Membership	-	-	-	-	FSE	WoG	Trp 1947
1942	Miracles	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
1947	Modern translations of the Bible	-	-	-	-	-	-	FST 1985
1963	Must our image of God go?	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
1944	Myth became fact	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
1949	On church music	-	-	CRf	-	-	-	-
?1942	On ethics	-	-	CRf	-	-	-	-
1955	On obstinacy in belief	WLN	SPT	-	-	-	-	AfP 1962
1944	On the reading of old books	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1946	On the transmission of Christianity	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1953	Petitionary prayer	-	-	CRf	-	-	-	-
1943	The poison of subjectivism	-	-	CRf	-	-	-	-
1948	Priestesses in the Church?	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
?1955	The Psalms	-	-	CRf	-	-	-	-
1958	Religion and rocketry	WLN	-	-	-	FSE	-	-
1945	Religion and science	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
1941	Religion: reality or substitute?	-	-	CRf	-	-	-	-
1958	Revival or decay?	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1959	Screwtape proposes a toast (including the 1960 Preface)	WLN	SPT	-	-	-	-	-
1963	The seeing eye	-	-	CRf	-	-	-	-
1945	The sermon and the lunch	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1956	A slip of the tongue	-	SPT	-	-	-	WoG	-
1948	Some thoughts	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1944	Transposition	-	SPT	-	-	-	WoG	Trp 1947, AfP 1962
1948	“The trouble with ‘X’...”	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
1945	Two lectures	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1947	Vivisection	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1963	We have no right to “happiness”	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
1941	The weight of glory	-	SPT	-	-	-	WoG	Trp 1947, AfP 1962
1950	What are we to make of Jesus Christ?	-	-	-	GD	-	-	GD/UK 1979
1945	Work and prayer	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
1951	The world’s last night	WLN	-	-	-	FSE	-	-
1954	Xmas and Christmas	-	-	-	GD	-	-	FST 1985
* original (1967) title: Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism

back to survey

LEARNING IN WAR-TIME

A sermon delivered on 22 October 1939 at the invitation of the vicar of St Mary’s, the Oxford University church. The text was originally duplicated for students under the title “None Other Gods: Culture in Wartime” and then reprinted in pamphlet form as The Christian in Danger (SCM, London 1939). Lewis chose as a text for his sermon Deuteronomy 26:5, “A Syrian ready to perish was my father” (“My father was a wandering Aramean” in the NIV and in Moffatt’s translation).

par. 4 this indeed is

Periclean Athens ... the Parthenon ... Funeral Oration

i.e. ancient Athens during its Golden Age, the period of Pericles (c. 495-427 BC). The Parthenon is the great temple for the goddess Athena Parthenos (“Virgin Athena”) on the Acropolis in Athens, built at the instigation of Pericles between 447 and 438 BC. His famous funeral oration (recorded by Thucydides in the History of the Peloponnesian War, II.34-45) was for Athenian soldiers killed during a military expedition in 440 BC. What Lewis wants to point out seems to be that the Parthenon was built in war-time.

mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities

Archimedes (“arch-measurer”, 287-212 BC), the greatest mathematician of ancient times, was killed during the Roman conquest of his hometown Syracuse while he was busy drawing circles on the floor of his home. The Roman proconsul Marcellus had given special orders to save the life of Archimedes, but in spite of that a soldier unknowingly killed him. The last words of Archimedes reputedly were noli turbare circulos meos, “Don’t make havoc of my circles!”

metaphysical arguments in condemned cells

This may be a reference to Boethius (480-524 ce), a Roman scholar and aristocrat after the fall of the Roman Empire. He held a high post in the government of the Ostrogoth king, Theoderic, but fell into disgrace, was imprisoned in Pavía, and cruelly executed for high treason. His book De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy) was reputedly written in prison. Actually, Lewis doubted the truth of this, as appears from his chapter on Boethius in The Discarded Image (1964): “This is not the language of the condemned cell” (p. 77).

discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec

This refers to an often repeated and embroidered anecdote about Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). British general James Wolfe is said to have recited this poem just before he gained victory – and was killed – in the Battle of Quebec (or Battle of the Plains of Abraham), 13 September 1759. The source appears to be a biography of John Robison (1739-1805), an Edinburgh professor of natural philosophy, written by his successor John Playfair and published in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. VII (1815), pp. 495ff. Robison had served in Canada in 1759 as tutor to the son of a British admiral. As Playfair wrote in 1815,

An anecdote which he [Robison] also used to tell deserves well to be remembered. He happened to be on duty in the boat in which General Wolfe went to visit some of his posts the night before the battle, which was expected to be decisive of the fate of the campaign. The evening was fine, and the scene, considering the work they were engaged in, and the morning to which they were looking forward, sufficiently impressive. As they rowed along, the general with much feeling repeated nearly the whole of Gray’s “Elegy” (which had appeared not long before, and was yet but little known) to an officer who sat with him in the stern of the boat; adding, as he concluded, that “he would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow”.

Thomas Gray lived until 1771, but none of his preserved letters suggests that the story ever came to his ears. See Edward E. Morris, “Wolfe and Gray’s ‘Elegy’”, English Historical Review vol. XV, No. 57 (January 1900), pp. 125-129.

comb their hair at Thermopylae

cf. Herodotus, Histories VII.208-209. During the Persian Wars of the early 5th century BC, King Xerxes sent a scout to find out the size of the Greek army encamped at Thermopylae. The few men seen by the scout happened to be some of the Spartan crack troops of King Leonidas; and they were “practising athletic exercises and some combing their long hair”. King Xerxes was astonished to hear this since he expected the Greeks to run before the much larger Persian army. He did not know, and refused to believe when someone told him, that these men had “a custom which is as follows; whenever they are about to put their lives in peril, then they attend to the arrangement of their hair.” The Spartans lived in the region called Laconia, which is how the word “laconical” has come to be used for some of their characteristic behaviour.

par. 7 it is for a very

“Whether ye eat or drink or whatsoever ye do...”

I Corinthians 10:31, just after Paul has told the Christians at Corinth they may go to dinner parties given by pagans and eat whatever is set before them.

par. 8 all our merely natural

having two [eyes], to be cast into Gehenna

Matthew 18:9. “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire” [kjv]. In Old Testament times, gê hinnom or ‘Valley of Hinnom’ was a ravine not far from Jerusalem where in the course of centuries a variety of gruesome scenes took place. By the time of the New Testament the place was perhaps used for dumping and burning rubbish while the name had acquired the meaning of “hell”; cf. several places in Matthew (such as 5:29, 10:28, 23:33) and a few in the other three gospels. Since Lewis, in the second paragraph of the present essay, insisted on using “the crude monosyllable”, it seems strange that, while quoting the Authorized Version, he should here be following the modern practice of not translating the name.

par. 9 we are now

Matthew Arnold ... spiritual in the sense of the German geistlich

Matthew Arnold (1822-88), English poet and critic. The sense intended appears to be sense 6 in the Oxford English Dictionary, “Of or pertaining to, emanating from, the intellect or higher faculties of the mind; intellectual”. However, OED quotes no instances from Arnold. Lewis made the same reference in an essay he was writing at the time of this sermon, “Christianity and Culture” (1939):

The present inordinate esteem of culture by the cultured began, I think, with Matthew Arnold – at least if I am right in supposing that he first popularized the use of the English word spiritual in the sense of German geistlich. This was nothing less than the identification of levels of life hitherto usually distinguished.

“as to the Lord”

Colossians 3:22-23. “Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh ... And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord; and not unto men.” See also Ephesians 6:5-7.

Bacon ... to offer the author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English statesman, philosopher and essayist; quoted from The Advancement of Learning, I.2

For certain it is that God worketh nothing in Nature but by second causes; and if they would have it otherwise believed, it is mere imposture, as it were in favour towards God, and nothing else but to offer to the Author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie.

Theologia Germanica

A mystical text dating from the mid-14th century, with guidelines for a Christ-like life that would lead to perfect union of God and man. The treatise was much commended by Martin Luther, who devised the title – Theologia Deutsch – to reflect the fact that it was written in German, not Latin. The further implication was that the book had all the advantages of plain language and simple devotion unencumbered by academic learning. As Luther wrote in his preface:

When one contemplates God’s wonders it is obvious that brilliant and pompous preachers are never chosen to spread his words. ... I wish to warn everyone who reads this book not to harm himself and become irritated by its simple German language or its unadorned and unassuming words, for this noble little book, poor and unadorned as it is in words and human wisdom, is the richer and more precious in art and divine wisdom. ... It is obvious that such matters as are contained in this book have not been discussed in our universities for a long time, with the result that the holy Word of God has not only been laid under the bench but has almost been destroyed by dust and filth.

par. 14 the third enemy

the streets of Warsaw

Lewis was talking less than a month after the beginning of the Second World War – the German campaign in Poland – which ended with the heavy bombing and surrender of Warsaw. In retrospect, the sermon can be seen as Lewis’s opening move in the peculiar kind of war work he was to take up, giving talks both on the air and for audiences of airforce men all over the country.

a permanent city

Hebrews 13:14. “For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.” [kjv]

back to survey

CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

par. 5 now the new testament

The Unjust Judge

Luke 18:1-8.

Donne points out that we are never told He laughed

John Donne (1572-1631), English poet, who was also a famous preacher. Lewis refers to Donne’s Lent sermon on I Timothy 3:16, preached before the king on 16 February 1620:

Be pleased to consider this great work of believing, in the matter, what it was that was to be believed: ... that from that man ... ingloriously executed as a Traytor, they should look for glory, and all glory, and everlasting glory? And from that melancholick man, who was never seen to laugh in all his life, and whose soul was heavy unto death; they should look for joy, and all joy, and everlasting joy ... ?

Donne seems to be describing impressions rather than facts about Jesus. From a Lent sermon on John 11:35 (Jesus weeping at the grave of Lazarus), preached on 28 February 1623, Donne appears indeed to be skeptical about an old influential document which described Jesus as one who was “never seen to laugh”

In that letter which Lentulus is said to have written to the Senate of Rome, in which he gives some Characters of Christ, he saies, That Christ was never seene to laugh, but to weep often. Now in what number he limits his often, or upon what testimony he grounds his number, we know not. We take knowledge that he wept thrice. He wept here, when he mourned with them that mourned for Lazarus; He wept againe, when he drew neare to Jerusalem, and looked upon that City; And he wept a third time in his Passion.

There is one more Donnean reflection on Christ and laughing, in a sermon of unknown date on I Thessalonians 5:16 (“Rejoyce evermore”). Commenting on a passage in Saint Basil, Donne points out that the “Woe unto you that laugh now!” (Luke 6:25) is

“cast upon a dissolute and undecent, and immoderate laughing, not upon true inward joy, howsoever outwardly expressed.”

He goes on to insist that

“Joy, and cheerfulnesse ... hath the nature of a commandment” and “Not to feele joy is an argument against religious tendernesse, not to show that joy, is an argument against thankfulnesse of the heart: that is a stupidity, this is a contempt. ... It mis-becomes not wisdome and gravity to laugh in Gods deliverances, nor to laugh to scorne those that would have blown up Gods Servants ...”

(Quoted from The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Potter & Simpson, 10 vols., 1953-1962)

par. 11 applying this principle

the Aristotelian doctrine of mimèsis

........

the Augustan doctrine about the imitation of Nature and the Ancients

......

par. 13 if you said

au moins je suis autre

“At least I am different.” Rousseau, Confessions, beginning of Book I.

St Augustine ... “a narrow house too narrow for Thee to enter...”

Confessiones I.5. “Angusta est domus animae meae quo venias ad eam: dilatetur abs te. Ruinosa est: refice eam.”

Wordsworth, the romantic who made a good end

......

par. 14 in this sense

he knows that in his flesh dwells no good thing

Romans 7:18. “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.” [kjv]

Thomas Aquinas, ipsa ratio hoc habet etc.

S.T. I-II, Q. 34 a. 1 ad 1. “Reason itself demands that the use of reason be interrupted at times” (Benziger Bros. edition, 1947).

...as we can eat, to the glory of God

I Corinthians 10:31.

Pater prepared for pleasure as if it were martyrdom

Walter Pater (1839-1894), English literary critic, central figure of an earnest aesthetic group in Oxford, and proponent of “art for art’s sake”. Lewis is probably referring, in particular, to what he called Pater’s “vaguely narrative essay” Marius the Epicurean (1885), discussed in Lewis’s letter to Arthur Greeves of 10 January 1932 (Collected Letters II, p. 33):

In Pater [the purely aesthetic attitude to life] seems almost to include the rest of the spiritual life ... Perhaps it is his patronage of great things which is so offensive – condescending to add the Christian religion to his nosegay of spiritual flowers because it has a colour or a scent that he thinks would just give a finishing touch to the rest. It is all balls anyway – because one sees at a glance that if he really added it it would break up the whole nosegay view of life. In fact that is the refutation of aestheticism: for perfect beauty you need to include things which will at once show that mere beauty is not the sole end of life. If you don’t include them, you have given up aestheticism: if you do, you must give it up Q.E.D.

par. 15 now that i see

Di sè medesmo rise

“He laughed at himself.” Dante, Paradiso XXVIII, 135.

back to survey

CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE

par. 2 the present inordinate

Matthew Arnold ... spiritual in the sense of German geistlich

Matthew Arnold (1822-88), English poet and critic. The sense intended appears to be sense 6 in the Oxford English Dictionary, “Of or pertaining to, emanating from, the intellect or higher faculties of the mind; intellectual”; but OED quotes no instances from Arnold. Lewis made the same reference in “Learning in War-time”, a sermon he had preached in the previous year (1939).

Croce

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), Italian idealist philosopher whose main work was in the field of aesthetics.

the poetics of I. A. Richards

Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979), English literary critic, Professor of English at Harvard University, 1944-1963.

the editors of Scrutiny

cf. Lewis’s Collected Letters II, p. 252, where Walter Hooper explains that

The editors of this periodical, which ran from 1932 to 1953, expressed a belief in a “a necessary relationship between the quality of the individual’s response to art and his general fitness for a humane existence”. Lewis was appalled to find this “ inordinate esteem” expressed in the pages of Theology.

Housman, Mr Charles Morgan, and Miss Sayers

– Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936), classical scholar and widely-read English poet (A Shropshire Lad, 1896).

– Charles Langbridge Morgan (1894-1958), English novelist, playwright and drama critic for The Times

– Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), English writer; she first became famous for her detective stories, but by the time of this controversy over Christianity and Culture she developing new reputations as playwright and Christian apologist.

Interestingly, when Sayers found one of her plays reviewed by Charles Morgan in 1946, she commented that “if highbrow ‘littery’ blokes like him are going to start taking me seriously, the world is coming to an end!” – The Letters of Dorothy Sayers, ed. Barbara Reynolds, vol. 3 (1998), p. 272.

par. 9 it might be important

Hooker has finally answered the contention that Scripture must contain everything important or even everything necessary.

Richard Hooker, (1554-1600), English (Anglican) theologian, author of The Four Books of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity and, as such, a founding father of the Anglican Church. The reference is to Book I, ch. 14, “The sufficiency of Scripture unto the end for which it was instituted”:

He that should take upon him to teach men how to be eloquent in pleading causes, must needs deliver unto them whatsoever precepts are requisite unto that end; otherwise he doth not [do] the thing which he taketh upon him. Seeing then no man can plead eloquently unless he be able first to speak, it followeth that ability of speech is in this case a thing most necessary. Notwithstanding every man would think it ridiculous, that he which undertaketh by writing to instruct an orator should therefore deliver all the precepts of grammar because his profession is to deliver precepts necessary unto eloquent speech...
In like sort, albeit Scripture do profess to contain in it all things that are necessary unto salvation; yet the meaning cannot be simply of all things which are necessary, but all things that are necessary in some certain kind of form; as all things which are necessary, and either could not at all or could not easily be known by the light of natural discourse; all things which are necessary to be known that we may be saved, but known with presupposal of knowledge concerning certain principles whereof it receiveth us already persuaded, and then instructeth us in all the residue that are necessary.

par. 11 st augustine regarded

dementia ... honestior et uberior

“Madness” ... “higher and richer”. The full Latin passage reads “Tali dementia honestiores et uberiores litterae putantur quam illae quibus legere et scribere didici.” – “Madness like this is thought a higher and a richer learning, than that by which I learned to read and write” (Augustine, Confessions I.13, transl. Edward B. Pusey).

miserabilis insania ... quid autem mirum cum infelix pecus etc.

“Miserable madness (...).What marvel that an unhappy sheep, straying from Thy flock, and impatient of Thy keeping, I became infected with a foul disease?” (Confessions III.2, Pusey’s translation). Recent Latin editions read mirabilis (“astonishing”) for miserabilis.

par. 12 st jerome, allegorizing

St Jerome ... cibus daemonum ...carmina poetarum etc.

St Jerome, or Hieronymus (347-420 c.e.), Latin Church Father and Bible translator. The Epistle referred to is a letter to Pope Damasus I. The Latin words quoted mean “the food of demons ... songs of poets, worldly wisdom, the glittering verbosity of rhetoricians.”

Webster’s White Devil

John Webster (c. 1580-c. 1630), English dramatist. Lewis is referring to one of Webster’s two famous plays (the other being The Duchess of Malfi), first produced in 1608 – The White Divel: Or the Tragedy of Paolo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, With the Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona the famous Venetian Curtizan.

Keats’s phrase about negative capability or “love of good and evil”

English poet John Keats (1795-1821) in a letter to his brothers George and Tom, 21 December 1817.

It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

par. 15 thomas à kempis i take

Thomas à Kempis

Late medieval writer and mystic (c. 1380-1472), German Augustinian monk and member of the spiritual movement called “Modern Devotion” (Devotio moderna). He is generally considered to be the author of De imitatione Christi (The Imitation of Christ), which in the early years of printing was the most widespread book after the Bible and remained one of the most widely read books of Christian devotion.

par. 16 in the theologia germanica

Theologia Germanica

par. 18 i found the famous

Gregory ... our use of secular culture

Pope Gregory the Great (or Gregory I, c. 540-604) ......

par. 19 in milton i found

Milton ... Areopagitica

......

par. 21 whether because i am

chain of being

......

Newman ... “Liberal Knowledge its Own end”

......

par. 24 2. but is culture

“working the thing which is good”

Ephesians 4:28, as quoted in the previous paragraph.

Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.

par. 28 this view gives

Bentham ... the issue between pushpin and poetry

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), influential English writer on law, originator of Utilitarianism in philosophy. Lewis is referring to The Rationale of Reward (1825), Book III, chapter 1:

Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few. The game of push-pin is always innocent: it were well could the same be always asserted of poetry...

par. 29 4. it was noticed

“willing suspension of disbelief”

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), Chapter XIV, second paragraph:

...the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

par. 30 (a) to the perfected

being learned in Gethsemane

Matthew 26:36ff, and parallel places in Mark 14 and Luke 22.

Galahad is the son of Launcelot

In medieval legend, Launcelot or Sir Lancelot du Lac is one of the chief Knights of the Round Table at King Arthur’s court. As a representative of the ideal of knighthood he is far from perfect; but his natural son Galahad goes a lot further in that respect.

par. 31 (b) the road described

The road described by Dante and Patmore

Dante Alighieri 1265-1321), Italian poet. ......

Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), English poet, author of The Angel in the House, a poetic celebration of married love.

Charles Williams (1886-1945) ......

eunuchs for the Kingdom’s sake

cf. Matthew 19:12. “For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”

romantic love also has proved a schoolmaster

cf. Galatians 3:24. “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.”

par. 33 (e) the dangers of

(note) Sehnsucht as “spilled religion”

A reference to the English poet, essayist and philosopher T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) in his lecture “Romanticism and Classicism”, written c. 1911 and published in Speculations (1924, ed. Herbert Read).

You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. (...) The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion” (Speculations, p. 118).

par. 34 i have dwelt chiefly

in Ricardian terms

i.e. in terms borrowed from I. A. Richards, mentioned in the second paragraph of the present essay. Lewis is borrowing the term “storehouse of values” from Principles of Literary Criticism, p. 32:

The arts are our storehouse of recorded values. They spring from and perpetuate hours in the lives of exceptional people, when their control and command of experience is at its highest, hours when the varying possibilities of existence are most clearly seen and the different activities which may arise are most exquisitely reconciled, hours when habitual narrowness of interests or confused bewilderment are replaced by an intricately wrought composure.

N.B. “Ricardian” is printed as “Richardian” in the Essay Collection published in 2000.

par. 37 has it any part

the sweeping of the room in Herbert’s poem

George Herbert (1593-1648), English poet. The reference is to his poem “The Elixir”:

Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything,
To do it as for Thee. (...)

All may of Thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean
which with this tincture – For Thy sake –
will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th’ action fine.

Sidney’s poetics

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), English courtier, soldier, poet and critic; author of Apologie for Poetrie (1595), later called Defence of Poesie. ......

Address

the Editor of Theology

The editor since 1939 was Alec R. Vidler (1899-1991), English theologian and prolific writer.

par. 2 to mr carritt i reply

Mr Carritt

E. F. Carritt (1876-1964) had been Lewis’s philosophy tutor at Oxford during the years 1920-1922 as Fellow of University College. He was still active in that function in 1940. During the academic year 1924-1925 Lewis replaced him and so got his first experience as a lecturer.

the fruition of God

cf. Westminster Catechism, Q & A 1. “What is the chief end of man? – Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”

Puritan, quotha!

“Quotha” is an obsolete way to express mild sarcasm about someone’s using a particular word or expression. The original form is “Quoth he”, i.e. “Says he”.

III

par. 8 2. in theology, may, 1940

“sweet, sweet, sweet poison”

Shakespeare, King John I.1, 212.

par. 12 if any real disagreement

M. de Rougemont ... “ceases to be a devil only when it ceases to be a god”

Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985), Swiss Francophone author. L’amour et l’Occident, Book VII, chapter 5: “Dès qu’il [l’Éros] cesse d’être un dieu, il cesse d’être un démon.”. A translation of this book was first published as Passion and Society, and later, revised and expanded, as Love in the Western World (1956). Lewis reviewed it in Theology, June 1940. The review was never reprinted but is now available online at http://tjx.sagepub.com/content/40/240/459.full.pdf+html.

par. 15 i hope it is now

I enjoyed my breakfast this morning ... I think it was a good thing ... but I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it

cf. George Macdonald, The Princess and Curdie, chapter 3, quoted by Lewis in his Macdonald Anthology (1946), Nr. 342.

It is a good thing to eat your breakfast, but you don’t fancy it’s very good of you to do it. The thing is good – not you ... There are a great many more good things than bad things to do.

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BULVERISM

First published as “Notes on the Way”, Time and Tide, 29 March 1941; revised as “Bulverism”, a paper for the Oxford Socratic Club, 7 February 1944, and published, with additional notes by the Club’s secretary, in The Socratic Digest, vol. II, June 1944. – Time and Tide started as a left-wing political and literary weekly in 1920 and gradually moved to a more right-wing and more Christian position. The theme is Lewis’s piece closely related to that of the first instalment of his Screwtape Letters, which appeared a month later on 2 May 1941.

par. 1 it is a disastrous

Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American poet, essayist, and “Transcendentalist” philosopher. His two series of Essays appeared in 1841 and 1844 respectively. Lewis is referring to the second series, Nr. 2, “Experience”. About three-quarters through the essay, a paragraph begins:

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man.

The purport of the passage in Emerson is roughly the same as in Lewis.

for over two hundred years

Lewis is evidently thinking here of a philosophical turning point in the early 18th century. He may have been thinking of George Berkeley (1685-1753).

par. 2 we have recently

The Freudians

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had died in London less than two years before Lewis first published this piece.

The Marxians

a less usual form of “Marxists”, evidently chosen here to correspond with “Freudians”.

Elizabeth [I] a great queen

“ideologically tainted” at the source

not a piece of actual Marxist terminology, but a play on the term “psychologically tainted” as used in the Freudian critique, above.

par. 4 if they say

philosophical idealism

Lewis was writing in circumstances where this philosophical school, no less than Christian theology, was widely considered obsolete. Idealism had been the dominant philosophical school in Oxford quite recently, in the decades around 1900. After 1920 it had quickly ceded its position to Realism. This new school tried to emulate scientific method and certainty in philosophy and developed, via logical positivism, into the analytical philosophy of the mid-20th century. For a monograph on the position of Lewis and a few other thinkers with regard to this development see James Patrick, The Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901-1945 (Mercer University Press 1985).

par. 6 in other words

In the course of the last fifteen years

i.e. roughly since the mid-1920s; Lewis became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925.

par. 12 but our thoughts

reasons only, and no causes

This paragraph is perhaps the earliest instance of Lewis publicly formulating the idea which later came to be known as his “argument from Reason”. It is reiterated in the additional notes and immediately followed there, as on several later occasions, by a brief version of his “moral argument” (“The same argument applies to our values”, etc.). Both arguments also appear briefly in Lewis’s 1942 sermon “Miracles” and are presented in more detail in his book Miracles (1947), chapters 3 and 5.

par. 19 the relation between

created by an Imagination

In giving this turn to his “argument from Reason” and “moral argument”, Lewis is showing his continued allegiance to the Idealist school which by this time had almost vanished from the philosophical scene.

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RELIGION: REALITY OR SUBSTITUTE?

par. 7 but enough of

the part where Eve ... sees herself in a pool of water

Milton, Paradise Lost IV, 477-491.

pons asinorum

......

Barfield

Owen Barfield (1898-1997) ......

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THE WEIGHT OF GLORY

par. 1 if you asked

Kant

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German philosopher. His position as one source of the “notion” rejected here is more fully discussed by Lewis in The Problem of Pain (1940), chapter 6.

par. 5 in speaking of

inconsolable secret

This curious expression returns near the end of par. 11 of the present essay. It is evidently related to the only two other places in Lewis’s books where the word “inconsolable” appears at all: That Hideous Strength ch. 15.1 (“the inconsolable wound with which man is born”) and Surprised by Joy ch. 5 (“Joy” as an “inconsolable longing”).

Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet; the reference is to his autobiographical long poem, The Prelude. In 1962 Lewis mentioned this as one of the ten books which had influenced him most.

the nonsense that Mr. Shaw puts into the final speech of Lilith

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), English dramatist, Nobel laureate for Literature 1925, was still alive when Lewis wrote this; hence the “Mr.” which Bergson’s name must do without. The “final speech of Lilith” is the end of his play Back to Methuselah (1921):

Of Life only there is no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.

Lewis quoted the same passage almost literally in his science-fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938) as the end of Weston’s speech to Oyarsa, chapter 20.

Bergson

Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher, Nobel Prize for Literature 1927; author of Évolution Créatrice (“Creative Evolution”, the concept mentioned earlier in this paragraph). He developed the notion of an élan vital as a solution to what he considered to be otherwise insoluble problems in the Darwinian theory of evolution. The French expression was usually rendered as “Life Force” in English and in that form got currency through the work of Shaw (see note above).

par. 6 do what they will

“Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread”

Misquoted, but with no loss or change of meaning, from Matthew Arnold’s early dramatic poem Empedocles on Etna (1852), I.2:

Fools! That in man’s brief term
He cannot all things view,
Affords no ground to affirm
That there are Gods who do;
Nor does being weary prove that he has where to rest.

par. 10 when i began

Milton

John Milton (1608-1674), author of Paradise Lost. During the English Civil War of the mid-17th century he sided with the Puritans and held a post in Cromwell’s government.

Johnson

Samuel Johnson (1709-1783), English poet, critic, lexicographer, renowned conversationalist, and the subject of James Boswell’s famous biography The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).

Thomas Aquinas

Italian Dominican monk and scholar (1225-1274), author of the Summa Theologiae. He was one of the major thinkers of the European Middle Ages and was canonized as a Saint of the Roman Catholic church in 1323.

the parable ... “Well done, thou good and faithful servant”

Matthew 25:21 and 23, parable of the Talents.

Prospero’s book

At the end of The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last finished play, the magician Prospero abjures his magic. The book is his book of spells which he throws into the sea to be rid of it (V.1, 50f):

I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.

“it is not for her to bandy compliments with her Sovereign”

After Boswells Life of Samuel Johnson, February 1767. The King having paid Johnson the compliment that he wrote “so well”, Johnson made no reply because, as he later explained, “When the King had said it, it was to be so. It was not for me to bandy civilities with my Sovereign.”

a weight or burden of glory

cf. 2 Corinthians 4:16-17.

... though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.

par. 11 and now notice

“the journey homeward to habitual self”

John Keats (1795-1821), Endymion II.276.

“Nobody marks us”

After Shakespeare, Much ado about nothing, I.1, 100 (Beatrice speaking). “I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick; nobody marks you.”

par. 12 perhaps it seems

“I never knew you. Depart from Me.”

Matthew 7:22-23, toward the end of the Sermon Mount. “Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” [kjv]. See also Luke 13:27.

par. 13 and this brings

we are to be given the Morning Star

cf. Revelation 2:28, from the message to the church in Thyatira, “I know thy works, and charity, and service ... I will put upon you none other burden. But that which ye have already hold fast till I come. And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works to the end, to him will I give power over the nations ... And I will give him the morning star.” [kjv]

“beauty born of murmuring sound”

From a poem without title by Wordsworth, “Three years she grew...” (1799), stanza 5:

The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.

par. 14 and in there

As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will “flow over” into the glorified body

A reference to Augustine’s Epistle CXVIII, to Dioscorus, par. 14:

Tam potenti enim natura Deus fecit animam, ut ex ejus plenissima beatitudine quae in fine temporum sanctis promittitur, redundet etiam in inferiorem naturam, quod est corpus, non beatitudo quae furentis et intelligentis est propria, sed plenitudo sanitatis, id est incorruptionis vigor.

For God has endowed the soul with a nature so powerful, that from that consummate fullness of joy which is promised to the saints in the end of time, some portion overflows also upon the lower part of our nature, the body – not the blessedness which is proper to the part which enjoys and understands, but the plenitude of health, that is, the vigour of incorruption.

torrens voluptatis

“Stream of delights”; from Psalm 36:8 (or 35:9) in the Vulgate version. “They have their fill of choice food in thy house, the stream of thy delights to drink.” [Moffatt’s translation, 1935]

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FIRST AND SECOND THINGS

First published in Time and Tide, 27 June 1942. – More than a year after “Bulverism”, this was Lewis’s next article for Time and Tide. He had become a bestselling author after The Screwtape Letters were published as a book in February 1942. The first collection of Lewis’s BBC radio talks were published a few weeks after this essay.

par. 1 when i read

Time and Tide

A political and literary weekly that began appearing in 1920 with a left-wing slant but gradually moved to a more right-wing and more Christian position.

one golden summer in adolescence

The summer of 1912, as later described by Lewis in Surprised by Joy (1955), chapter 5.

“Ride of the Valkyries” ... The Ring

Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung’s Ring) is a cycle of four operas by the German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) on themes and characters from Germanic mythology and the medieval German epic poem Nibelungenlied. The “Walkürenritt” (“Ride of the Valkyries”) is a famous episode in the second opera, Die Walküre.

par. 2 the mention of

people who call might right

The catchphrase Might is Right got currency as the title of a Social-Darwinist book published in Chicago in 1896. The author, using the pseudonym Ragnar Redbeard, has never been identified.

par. 6 the longer i looked

On cause mieux quand on ne dit pas Causons...

From the Mémoires du prince Eugène de Savoie, écrits par lui-même (Duprat-Duverger, Paris 1810), p. 183. The fact that Lewis quoted from a source like this is almost certainly due to the fact that his brother was an accomplished amateur historian of 17th-century France.

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MIRACLES

First published in a shorter version on 2 October 1942 in The Guardian, the Anglican weekly which had serialized The Screwtape Letters in 1941; then revised and expanded as a sermon for St Jude on the Hill, a church in northern London, and published in Saint Jude’s Gazette nr. 73, October 1942. – In January 1942 Lewis had become President of the newly founded Oxford Socratic Club, which he characterized as “an arena specially devoted to the conflict between Christian and unbeliever”. From that time on he regularly wrote essays which, in retrospect, clearly pointed toward his book Miracles (1947).

par. 3 the experience of

irrational physical processes

The passage is an early example of what was later called Lewis’s “Argument from Reason” (John Beversluis, 1985) and still later “Lewis’s Dangerous Idea” (Victor Reppert, 2003). A slightly earlier version is found in Lewis’s essay “Bulverism” (1941/1944); the most developed versions in his essays are those in “De futilitate” (1942-43) and “Religion without Dogma?” (1946). After the argument’s final and fullest presentation in chapter 3 of Miracles, Lewis’s use of the term “irrational” was one of several things criticized by philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe during a meeting of the Socratic Club (1948). In the book’s revised edition (1960) most instances of the word were therefore changed into “non-rational” or similar alternatives; see ww.lewisiana.nl/anscombe/appendices.pdf, Appendix C.

the concept of nature itself

Lewis’s thinking here is very similar to that of R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) as expressed in The Concept of Nature (1945). Collingwood died at age 53 only a few months after Lewis wrote this; he was an Oxford colleague of Lewis at Magdalen College and, philosophically, a fellow defender of the old “Idealist” school against the rising tide of analytical philosophy. See James Patrick, The Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901-1945 (Mercer U.P. 1985), chapter 4.

par. 4 if we frankly

rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation

Put this way, it might be hard to find actual examples of the position Lewis is here attacking. Most fighters for secularism in the name of science, including T. H. Huxley in the 19th century and Richard Dawkins in the 20th, have been keen to allow the theoretical possibility of a supernatural reality but insist that the supposition is too improbable to count for anything in practice.

Herodotus

a Greek traveller and writer of the fifth century BC. His Histories (“Investigations”) is the earliest Greek prose work to have survived in its entirety and is considered to be the beginning of evidence-based historical writing as distinct from legend and mythology uncritically repeated and developed through the ages.

par. 6 i have only recently

George Macdonald

The Scottish fantasy writer and novelist (1824-1905) was one of Lewis’s major spiritual guides. The point made here about miracles is expressed in passages Lewis included in his George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946) as items 26, 73, 99. See also Miracles, chapter 15, par. 12.

Athanasius ... in his little book On the Incarnation

i.e. De incarnatione Verbi by the 4th-century church father Athanasius of Alexandria. When a new English translation was published in 1944 as The Incarnation of the Word of God, Lewis wrote a preface later reprinted as “On the Reading of Old Books”. He there also points out that “[Athanasius’s] approach to the Miracles is badly needed today”. While the present rendering of this approach is given in quotation marks, it is in fact a paraphrase of the third chapter (§§14-18) in Athanasius’ work.

par. 9 when he fed

No miracle is in fact more significant

In Miracles, chapter 15, par. 10, this statement is improved as “In reality the miracle is no less, and no more, surprising than any others” and concludes the paragraph. Lewis then skips some 25 lines of the essay and starts the next paragraph with his comment on the “vulgar anti-God” paper, now described as “one of the most archaic of our anti-god papers”.

pre-human form which the embryo will recapitulate in the womb

“Recapitulation” is a process which actually has a small place in scientific embryology. The German Darwinian biologist Ernst Haeckel made much of it in his contributions to evolution theory – too much for later science. Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor’s Tale (2004) states that recapitulation theory “is now regarded as a small part of what is sometimes but not always true” (“Rendezvous 32: The Choanoflagellate’s Tale”)

par. 12 well, in one

contrary to the nature of things

There may be an allusion here to De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), a didactic poem teaching an ancient form of philosophical materialism by the Roman poet Lucretius (98-55 BC). In Lewis’s terms, since Lucretius is a pre-scientific ancestor, his picture of the universe was indeed a universal picture, not a story, and thus could not accommodate a winding-up process.

Humpty-Dumpty

As appears from Miracles, chapter 16, Lewis in this passage is taking his cue from The Nature of the Physical World by Sir Arthur Eddington (1928), chapter 4, “The Running-Down of the Universe”. Eddington makes the same use of the children’s rhyme about Humpty Dumpty.

par. 13 obviously, an event

pure negative spirituality

Some edition have a typo here, printing spiritually for spirituality.

Schrödinger wants seven dimensions

Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), Austrian physcist, Nobel laureate 1933. Lewis is probably referring to a quotation from Schrödinger as given and discussed in a book of popular science by James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (1931), chapter 5, “Into de Deep Waters”.

par. 14 my time is

impossible that we should even explain

All editions appear to have a typo here; even is almost certainly to be read as ever.

par. 15 to say this

Julian of Norwich

English mystic and anchoress (c. 1342-c. 1413).

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DOGMA AND THE UNIVERSE

First published in the Anglican weekly The Guardian, 19 and 26 March 1943; the second part was originally titled “Dogma and Science”. – Several passages from this essay were almost literally reproduced in Lewis’s Miracles (1947).

par. 3 in one respect

Riddell Lectures

A yearly academic course of lectures founded in 1928 at the University of Durham, intended to explore “the relation between religion and contemporary thought”. Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker (1873-1956) was an English mathematician in Cambridge, Dublin and Edinburgh. After Whittaker the next speaker to be invited had been C. S. Lewis; he delivered the 15th series of Riddell Lectures in February 1943 as The Abolition of Man.

par. 5 when the doctor

came down and was incarnate for us men and our salvation

from the Nicene Creed (325/381 A.D.).

Credo ... in unum Dominum Iesum Christum ... Qui propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem descendit de cælis.
Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto
ex Maria Virgine, et homo factus est.

I believe ... in one Lord Jesus Christ
... Who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven,
and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost
of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

as the police treat a man when he is arrested

This is one of the passages literally reproduced in the first edition of Miracles (chapter 7, par. 9). In the revised edition Lewis specified that he was only talking about “the policeman in the story”. He was in fact referring to an episode in a fantasy novel by James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (1912), chapter 14.

par. 7 we are inveterate

We are inveterate poets

In the text as published in the American volume God in the Dock (1970), one sentence is lacking after this. The complete text is as follows:

We are inveterate poets. When a quantity is very great, we cease to regard it as mere quantity. Our imginations awake. [etc.]

the sublime

In Lewis’s English, the concept of “the sublime” resonated with Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).

Pascal, Pensées, No. 206

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French philosopher and mathematician. His Pensées (“Thoughts”) is a large collection of long and short notes compiled and published posthumously. Nr. 206 in the Brunschvicg edition (1897) corresponds to Nr. 201 in Lafuma’s edition (1962):

Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraye.

overcross our spirits

A typo: for overcross read overcrow. Lewis is alluding to Shakespeare, Hamlet V.2, 435.

O, I die, Horatio!
The potent poison quite oʼer-crows my spirit.

Also quoted in Miracles (chapter 7, par. 16), overcrow was changed into overcrowd in later printings of that book’s 1960 revision.

par. 8 and this drives

that hint furnished by the greatness of the material universe

Lewis expressed the same idea in a very different and highly imaginative way in the “Great Dance” episode at the close of his fantasy novel Perelandra (=Voyage to Venus), published one month after the present essay.

par. 10 i hope you do

a fact recognized as early as the time of St Jerome

Hieronymus of Stridon (c. 347-420), the learned Church Father who translated the Bible into Latin. Although Lewis referred to St Jerome on several occasions in support for this view of the first two chapters of the Bible (e.g. Reflections on the Psalms, chapter 9), no relevant passages in Jerome can be found. Almost certainly, Lewis had misattributed to him some remarks found in a late 15th-century treatise by the English humanist John Colet, where Jerome is also briefly mentioned.

In St Paul, the powers of the skies

Ephesians 2:2.

par. 12 no. it is not

the creative evolutionist, the Bergsonian or Shavian

French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was the author of L’Évolution créatrice (1907), published in English as Creative Evolution (1911). “Shavian” was a word used for the specific ideas associated with the playwright Bernard Shaw (1856-1950); he popularized Bergson’s notion of élan vital as “Life Force” in his plays Man and Superman (1903) and Back to Methuselah (1921). Both Shaw and Bergson were Noble laureates for Literature, in 1925 and 1927 respectively.

nature of things

The phrase appears in the same context in Lewis’s slightly earlier essay “Miracles”, par. 12. There might be an intended allusion to De rerum natura by the Roman poet Lucretius (see note to par. 17, below), an early proponent of a materialist view of the universe.

the real cosmic wave

par. 16 for example, it

the Nicene Creed

See note to par. 5, above.

par. 17 does this mean

Professor Whitehead’s philosophy

i.e. the “process philosophy” or “process metaphysics” elaborated especially in Whitehead’s book Process and Reality (1929), where he attempted to substitute a dynamic ontology for the classical ontology of substances. Whitehead’s thought had a theological offshoot in the “process theology” developed by Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000). Lewis knew his Science and the Modern World (1925) and sometimes quoted from it or mentioned it approvingly.

Eadem sunt omnia semper

Lucretius (c. 95-55 BC), De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) III, 949.

the first and great commandment

cf. Matthew 22:38.

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ON ETHICS

par. 17 what, then, shall we

I could point to ... the Egyptian Book of the Dead, etc.

This and the following examples also appear among Lewis’s “Illustrations of the Tao”, a list of 119 items added as an Appendix to The Abolition of Man (1943). In that list, these five variants of the maxim that humanity ought to be preserved all appear under the first heading, “The Law of General Beneficence”. (See also Walter Hooper’s note to par. 7.)

par. 20 there are many people

a scientific Humanist

“Scientific humanism” is a term used since the 19th century by some thinkers to specify and recommend their own variety of modern, secular humanism. This variety more or less originated with the English biologist Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). His grandson Julian Huxley advocated “a scientific Humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background” as guiding philosophy for the newly formed United Nations shortly after the Second World War. In 2005 the American biologist E. O. Wilson called scientific humanism “the only worldview compatible with science’s growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature” and the one most likely to lead to a better world.

par. 26 in thus recalling

Sartre ... rejects the conception of general moral rules on the ground that, etc.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), French philosopher, key thinker of 20th-century Existentialism. Lewis seems to be referring to Sartre’s tract L’exstentialisme est un humanisme (1946), par. 14, beginning “ Pour vous donner qui permette de mieux comprendre le délaissement...”):

Si les valeurs sont vagues, et si elles sont toujours trop vastes pour le cas précis et concret que nous considérons, il ne nous reste qu’à nous fier à nos instincts.

If values are uncertain, if they are still too abstract to determine the particular, concrete case under consideration, nothing remains but to trust in our instincts.

(English translation by Philip Mairet as published on www.marxists.org; paragraph starting “As an example by which you may the better understand this state of abandonment...”).

N.B. Walter Hooper has suggested that Lewis wrote this essay before 1943; but if Lewis is indeed referring to this passage in Sartre, that date can hardly be put before 1946.

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DE FUTILITATE

par. 1 when i was asked

Sir Henry Tizard

Sir Henry Thomas Tizard (1885-1959), a chemist; he was President of Magdalen College, Oxford, in the years 1942-1946.

par. 3 this cosmic futility

J. B. S. Haldane ... progress is the exception and degeneration the rule

Lewis is obviously thinking of the passage in Haldane’s Possible Worlds (1928) referred to in his essay “The Funeral of a Great Myth”, par. 11.

par. 5 now it seems

Russell ... The Worship of a Free Man

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), English philosopher and prolific writer; Nobel laureate for Literature 1950. His essay A Free Man’s Worship was first published in 1903.

the Wessex novels

i.e. most of the novels written by the British writer and poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). “Wessex” was the name Hardy took from ancient British history to designate a vaguely defined region in south-western England.

the Shropshire Lad

A Shropshire Lad (1896), a poem by the English poet A. E. Housman (1859-1936).

Lucretius

Roman poet (c. 98-55 BC), author of De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things).

par. 12 but the distinction

I am not a subjective idealist

......

par. 18 at first sight

Swinburne, Hardy and Shelley’s Prometheus

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), English poet. Thomas Hardy was mentioned above, par. 5. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), English poet; his verse play Prometheus Unbound (1820) was inspired by Prometheus Bound, the ancient Greek play by Aeschylus.

Housman ... “Whatever brute and blackguard made the world”

Housman was mentioned above, par. 5, as author of A Shropshire Lad. The present quotation is from his Last Poems (1922), IX, “The chestnut casts his flambeaux”.

par. 24 i cannot and never

the atheism of a Shelley ... the theism of a Paley

Shelley was mentioned above, par. 18. The English theologian William Paley (1743-1805), wrote some works that were hugely popular and influential in his day and until some time after. His Natural Theology (1802) was an early influence on Charles Darwin.

back to survey

THE POISON OF SUBJECTIVISM

par. 4 but when we turn

Hooker, Butler and Doctor Johnson

– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), English theologian; his work Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie is a defence of the Church of England as a golden mean between Roman Catholicism and Protestant fixation on the Scriptures.

– Joseph Butler (1692-1752), Anglican bishop, author of The Analogy of Religion, a defence of revealed religion against deistic attacks.

– Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), English writer, poet, critic and lexicographer, immortalized in James Boswell’s biography (1791).

par. 8 this whole attempt

unum necessarium

(Latin) “the one thing needful”; a reference to Luke 10:42.

And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.

The Latin expression comes from the Vulgate version of the Bible. It got some currency after the Czech writer and educator John Amos Comenius (1592-1670) used it as the title for his last book, Unum necessarium. Scire quid sibi sit necessarium, in Vita & Morte, & post Mortem – “The One Thing Needful: Knowing what is needful for us in life and death, and after death”.

par. 13 and yet it will

depositum fidei

Latin for “deposit of faith”, i.e. the Christian faith considered as a thing entrusted to one’s care, with an obligation to keep it unchanged; the term is derived from I Timothy 6:20 and II Timothy 1:14.

From the Stoic and Confucian... etc.

The passage beginning here and ending with “bricks and centipedes instead” in the same paragraph was inserted in the American edition of The Abolition of Man in 1946. It appears there in Chapter 2, immediately after the first sentence of par. 18, “In the same way, the Tao admits development from within.” The rest of par. 18 in the first British edition (“Those who understand its spirit” etc.) became par. 19 in the American. To the best of my knowledge, this improvement in The Abolition of Man has never found its way to any British edition.

as Aristotle said, no arche

The Greek word is ἀρχή. There is a parallel passage in The Abolition of Man (chapter II, the paragraph beginning “In the same way...” or, in other editions, the one beginning “Those who understand its spirit...”) where Lewis adds a note mentioning Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics I.4 (1095b), VI.5 (1140b) and VII.8 (1151a).

par. 14 and what of the second

Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics ... triumphantly monotonous denunciations...

As in his essay “On Ethics”, par. 7 and par. 17, Lewis is referring to the material he brought together in the Appendix, “Illustrations of the Tao” of The Abolition of Man. The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics is a 13-volume work edited by James Hastings, published by T & T Clark, Edinburgh in 1908-1923, and by Scribner’s, New York in 1928.

par. 15 the two grand

Pickwick

The Pickwick Papers (1837), novel by Charles Dickens.

par. 16 so far i have

...objections from Christians too. “Humanism” and “liberalism” ... as terms of disapprobation

Cf. a passage in Lewis’s letter of 18 February 1940 to his brother (Collected Letters II, pp. 350-351):

...a most distressing discovery I have been making these last two terms as I have been getting to know more and more of the Christian element in Oxford. Did you fondly believe – I did – that where you got among Christians, there, at least, you would escape (as behind a wall from a keen wind) from the horrible ferocity and grimness of modern thought? Not a bit of it. I blundered into it all, imagining that I was the upholder of the old, stern doctrines against modern quasi-Christian slush: only to find that my ‘sternness’ was their ‘slush’. They’ve all been reading a dreadful man called Karl Barth,who seems the right opposite number to Karl Marx. ‘Under judgement’ is their great expression. They all talk like Covenanters or Old Testament prophets. They don’t think human reason or human conscience of any value at all: they maintain, as stoutly as Calvin, that there’s no reason why God’s dealings should appear just (let alone, merciful) to us: and they maintain the doctrine that all our righteousness is filthy rags’ with a fierceness and sincerity which is like a blow in the face. ...

Although Lewis is talking of a “discovery”, the experience can’t have been a total surprise. Nor, surely, was he only thinking of 20th-century Neo-Protestantism as represented by Swiss theologian Karl Barth. Lewis was criticizing the same type of “fierceness and sincerity” in his allegorical autobiography, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), chapter VI.2, “Three Pale Men”. One of these Pale Men is called Neo-Angular and probably represents T. S. Eliot. In a letter of 4 April 1934 to Bede Griffiths (Collected Letters II, p. 134), Lewis noted that

an influential school of thought in both your church and mine [i.e. Roman Catholic and Anglican] were very antagonistic to Idealism, and in fact were availing themselves of a general secular reaction against 19th century thought, to run something which they call Neo-Scholasticism as the cure for all our evils. The people I mean are led by Maritain on your side and by T. S. Eliot on ours.

par. 17 as regards the fall

If we once admit that what God means by “goodness” is sheerly different...

cf. George Macdonald, Wilfred Cumbermede, chapter 42:

However goodness may change its forms ... it must still be goodness; only if we are to adore it, we must see something of what it is – of itself. And the goodness we cannot see, the eternal goodness, high above us as the heavens are above the earth, must still be a goodness that includes, absorbs, elevates, purifies all our goodness, not tramples upon it and calls it wickedness. For if not such, then we have nothing in common with God, and what we call goodness is not of God. He has not even ordered it; or, if he has, he has ordered it only to order the contrary afterwards; and there is, in reality, no real goodness – at least in him; and, if not in him, of whom we spring – where then? – and what becomes of ours, poor as it is?

par. 18 the other objection

Are these things right because God commands them or does God command them because they are right?

The question, in one form or another, has for many centuries been known as the “Euthyphro Dilemma” (see Wikipedia article) because it is discussed in Plato’s dialogue of that name.

par. 19 at this point

sic volo, sic jubeo

(Latin) “This I will, this I command.” Juvenal, Satire VI (against women), line 223. The full saying is Sic volo, sic iubeo; sit pro ratione voluntas: “This I will, this I command: let [my] will takes Reason’s place.” Lewis used the same phrase in The Abolition of Man, chapter 3.

ambulavi in mirabilibus supra me

“I do exercise myself in great matters, in things too high for me.” After Psalm 131:1 in Latin (Neque ambulavi in magnis, neque in mirabilibus super me): “Neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me”.

it lies, as Plato said, on the other side of existence

Plato, Republic, Book VI (509c), in Jowett’s translation (1894; Dover Thrift Editions 2000, p. 174):

...the good may be said to be not only the author of knowledge to all things known, but of their being and essence, and yet the good is not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power.

In Robin Waterfield’s translation (World’s Classics, Oxford U.P. 1993, p. 236):

...it isn’t only the known-ness of the things we know which is conferred upon them by goodness, but also their reality and their being, although goodness isn’t actually the state of being, but surpasses being in majesty and might.

back to survey

ON THE READING OF OLD BOOKS

First published as Lewis’s “Introduction” in Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word of God, translated by a Religious of C.S.M.V. (1944). – The book was a new English version of De incarnatione verbi, by Athanasius of Alexandria (285-373). The translator was Sister Penelope (Ruth Lawson, 1890-1977) of the Anglican convent at Wantage, 20 km south-east of Oxford. She had been a pen friend of Lewis since 1939 when she wrote to thank him for his first sciencefiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet; its sequel Perelandra (1943) was dedicated “to some ladies at Wantage”.

par. 3 now this seems

“mere Christianity” as Baxter called it

Richard Baxter (1615-1691), English theologian, in Church-history of the Government of Bishops and their Councils (1680). The passage is found on the penultimate page of the introductory chapter called “What History is Credible, and what not”:

... but you know not what Party I am of, nor what to call me; I am sorrier for you in this than for my self; if you know not, I will tell you, I am a CHRISTIAN, a MEER CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian Religion and Church hath been visible...

For a full presentation of this source see http://www.lewisiana.nl/baxter.

par. 5 i myself was first

George MacDonald I had found for myself

as described in Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), chapter 11. George Macdonald (1824-1905) was a Scottish writer of fantasy tales and novels. Lewis reckoned Macdonald among his chief spiritual guides and published a selection of 365 brief fragments from his writings as George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946), with a long preface.

The supposed “Paganism” of the Elizabethans

Lewis discussed this in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), pp. 342 (Philip Sidney’s Arcadia) and 386-387 (Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare).

par. 6 the present book

The Scale of Perfection

Walter Hilton’s work is more commonly known as The Ladder of Perfection. Lewis also quoted from it at the beginning of The Problem of Pain and the end of Surprised by Joy.

par. 7 this is a good

the “Athanasian Creed”

A creed much referred to during many centuries of the Western church; also known as the Quicunque vult from its opening words, “Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith.”),

Athanasius contra mundum

Arius

His theology was a major cause of division in the early church, and Athanasius was his chief opponent. The Council of Nicea (325) was convened largely in order to settle the disputes, and the promulgation of the Nicene Creed was a triumph for Athanasius.

par. 8 when i first opened

Xenophon

Greek writer (428-354 BC) from Athens, often praised for his plain and clear style.

His approach to the Miracles

Lewis mentioned Athanasius along with George Macdonald for their teachings on this point in his essay “Miracles” (1942), par. 6.

“arbitrary and meaningless violations of the laws of Nature”

Lewis is probably quoting from a letter to the editor in The Guardian, 16 October 1942, written by a Mr. Peter May in reply to his essay “Miracles”; see Lewis’s Collected Letters vol. II (2004), p. 532.

borrow death from others

Probably a reference to chapter 4, §21, in Athanasius’s work:

... because He was Himself Word and Life and Power, His body was made strong, and because the death had to be accomplished, He took the occasion of perfecting His sacrifice not from Himself, but from others..

par. 9 the translator knows

The translator knows ...

This final paragraph is lacking in British reprints of the essay.

The translator knows so much more Christian Greek than I that it would be out of place for me to praise her version. But it seems to me to be in the right tradition of English translation. I do not think the reader will find here any of that sawdusty quality which is so common in modern renderings from the ancient languages. That is as much as the English reader will note; those who compare the version with the original will be able to estimate how much wit and talent is presupposed in such a choice, for example, as ‘those wiseacres’ on the very first page.

back to survey

THE FUNERAL OF A GREAT MYTH

par. 2 such, at all events

I come to bury ... but also to praise it

cf. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar III.2, 74. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones; so let it be with Caesar.”

par. 3 by this great myth

Bridges’ Testament of Beauty

Robert Bridges (1844-1930), English poet. His long poem The Testament of Beauty was published in 1929.

the work of Wells

H. G. Wells (1866-1946), English pioneer of science fiction.

Professor Alexander

Samuel Alexander (1850-1938), Australian-born philosopher who first taught at Oxford and then became Professor of Moral Philosophy in Manchester. His two-volume main work Space, Time and Deity (1920) resulted from his Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow in 1916-1918. Lewis dismissed the main thrust of Alexander’s thought in a letter of 4 January 1947 to Ruth Pitter: “By ‘Deity’ he means ‘whatever Nature is going to do next.’ Deity was an organism in the pre-organic period, and was mammals in the saurian period, and was man among the apes and now is the super man. It’s all nonsense ...”

par. 6 we have, first

hints and germs of the theory in scientific circles before 1859

The best known “hint” attracting serious scientific attention before 1859 was perhaps the one provided by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the early 19th century (Philosophie zoologique, 1809). Another one, slightly earlier and no less certainly influencing Charles Darwin, was his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life (1794–96). Scientifically less responsible but all the more widely read in England was Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation, anonymously published in 1844. A major 18th-century move toward evolutionary science was made in France by Georges Buffon (Histoire naturelle, 1749–89; thirty-nine volumes including Époques de la nature, 1779).

From a Darwinian point of view, what kept all the earlier attempts from getting it right was a tendency either to reject the idea that species can change (“transmutation”), or to cling to the idea of some form of purposefulness (“teleology”) in nature, or both. Darwin combined the idea that species do change with the idea that these changes are absolutely random. He long hesitated to publicize this novelty, but was at last prodded into action when he found that another biologist, Alfred Russell Wallace, was on the point of launching exactly the same theory. While the theory thus seemed to be “in the air” and had been long and variously hinted at, it was felt by friend and foe 1to be a real and important novelty.

For a brief history of evolutionary theory see the article by Thomas A. Goudge on “Evolutionism” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973–1974).

par. 7 the finest expression

Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish-English dramatist, Nobel laureate for Literature 1925. The first time he presented the idea of a Life Force which guides evolution was in his long play Man and Superman (1903). He further developed it in his “Metabiological Pentateuch”, Back to Methuselah (1921) – both in the long introductory essay called “The Infidel Half Century” and in the last (fifth) part, “As Far as Thought Can Reach: A.D. 31,920”. Lewis used the last lines of Methuselah in his science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938), chapter 20, as an expression of what he considered to be the height of absurdity in the “Great Myth”.

Olaf Stapledon

English writer and philosopher (1886-1950). Denying that religion and a belief in immortality were of any use, he postulated a sort of god-in-development. His philosophical works include A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929), Philosophy and Living (1939) and Beyond the ‘Isms’ (1942). Much like C. S. Lewis, he would deliberately blend his view of life into his science fiction books, which include Last and First Men (1930), Odd John (1935), Star Maker (1937), and Sirius (1944).

Oceanus, in Keats’s Hyperion

Hyperion: A Fragment (1820), II, 206-215, by the English poet John Keats (1795-1821). “Heaven and Earth” might be read as Uranus and Gaea, parents of the twelve gods called the Titans in ancient Greek mythology. The Titans, having dethroned and castrated their father and set up Cronus as their king, are then challenged by the next generation in the person of Zeus, son of Cronus. In Keats’s version, the sun-god Hyperion is the only Titan still undeposed, and he is the hope of his fellow Titans. The sea-god Oceanus is the only one among them who argues for resignation in the face of the irresistible power of the next generation – “born of us”, he says, as they had themselves been born of Uranus and Gaea. In the end the Titans are defeated and their reign is succeeded by that of Apollo.

In two other essays (“Historicism” of 1950 and “the World’s Last Night” of 1951) Lewis used, for similar purposes, a much briefer quotation from the speech of Oceanus (II.231):

ʼtis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might.

Keats also wrote another version of the poem, called The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, which was published in 1856.

The Nibelung’s Ring

Der Ring des Nibelungen, cycle of four operas by the German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883); written in the years 1848-1874 and first performed in 1876.

letter to August Rockel ... “The progress of the whole drama...”

The letter was Wagner’s only one to Röckel [not Rockel] in 1854. Lewis quoted almost exactly the same passage in his essay “The World’s Last Night”, where the German original is given in a footnote:

Der Fortgang des ganzen Gedichtes zeigt die Nothwendigkeit, den Wechsel, die Mannigfaltigkeit, die Vielheit, die ewige Neuheit der Wirklichkeit und des Lebens anzuerkennen und ihr zu weichen. Wotan schwingt sich bis zu der tragischen Höhe, seinen Untergang – zu wollen. Diess ist alles, was wir aus der Geschichte der Menschheit zu lernen haben: das Nothwendige zu wollen und selbst zu vollbringen.

par. 8 is shaw’s back to methuselah

Back to Methuselah

See note to par. 7, above.

the Lucian or the Snorri ... its Aeschylus or its Elder Edda

......

par. 9 that, then, is

“The prophetic soul of the big world”

Shakespeare, Sonnet 107.

par. 10 in the second place

Watson, quoted in Nineteenth Century

D. M. S. Watson (1886-1973), British palaeontologist, was Jodrell Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College, London from 1921 to 1951. The source quoted was a British literary magazine founded in 1877 as The Nineteenth Century; its name was changed into The Nineteenth Century and After in 1901.

“special creation”

The adjective special in this phrase has a uniquely direct relation to the noun, species. “Special creation” is not a special way of creating as opposed to normal ways. It is the creating (or the being created) of species, as opposed to their being “naturally selected”. In the end, it is to be distinguished as finality from causality.

par. 11 in the science

J. B. S. Haldane ... progress ... is the exception

Haldane (1895-1964), British geneticist, was Professor of Genetics and then of Biometry at University College, London from 1933 to 1957; as such he was a colleague of D. M. S. Watson. Haldane’s Possible Worlds is a volume of essays published in 1927. The American edition came out in 1928 and has a slightly different page numbering: the passage quoted here is on page 30 instead of 28. Also, the American edition does not contain “Last Judgment”, an influential piece of science fiction mentioned by Lewis in some other places.

“onwards and upwards”

The same two words, in reverse order but again in quotation marks, appear in the next paragraph. ......

par. 13 the drama proper

the Rheingold

Das Rheingold, first of the four operas in Richard Wagner’s cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. In English the title is sometimes rendered as The Rhinegold.

the Volsungs

i.e. the Volsung family, whose story is told in the Icelandic Volsunga Saga and in the medieval German Nibelungenlied.

“wantons as in her prime”

Milton, Paradise Lost V, 295; Adam being in danger, the archangel Raphael comes to warn him and, having entered Eden,

now is come
Into the blissful field, through groves of myrrh,
And flowering odours, cassia, nard and balm,
A wilderness of sweets; for Nature here
Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will
Her virgin fancies, pouring forth more sweet,
Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.

the young Beowulf

Hero of the Old English epic poem named after him, dating from the 7th or 8th century CE.

dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I do not exactly know why)

Cf. G. K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man (1925), chapter I.1, “The Man in the Cave”, pointing out that “the more we really look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one,” and that the Cave-Man of popular imagination is an improbably savage creature:

So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as “rough stuff”. I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor ... have I ever been able to see the probability of it ... [T]hese details of the domestic life of the cave puzzle me upon either the evolutionary or the static hypothesis ...

Chesterton then points out that one of the very few pieces of evidence far what cave-men actually did in their caves are cave-paintings. These do not exclude any savagery, but then neither do they suggest it; they do testify “the impulse to paint in water-colours” and “to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze”. Thus “so far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane.”

Lewis wrote in his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955), chapter 14, that Chesterton’s Everlasting Man made him see for the first time “the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense.” He apparently read it very soon after publication.

par. 14 but these were only

Arthur, Siegfried, Roland died ... we have forgotten Mordred, Hagen, Ganilon

Arthur is the hero of the class of medieval legends often called after him, Arthurian legend; Siegfried (or Sigurd) is a hero of the old Icelandic Volsunga Saga and the German Nibelungenlied; Roland is the hero of the medieval French Chanson de Roland. Mordred, Hagen and Ganilon are their respective adversaries.

Universal darkness covers all

Last line of The Dunciad, a satiric work by the English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) about the King of Dunces extending his empire of Emptiness and Dullness over all arts and sciences.

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before they uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,
And universal darkness buries all.

we are dismissed “in calm of mind, all passion spent”

John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671), last line. This “Dramatic Poem” deals with the last days of the Old Testament hero Samson, who “judged Israel twenty years”, as told in Judges 16:21-31. As a blinded captive of the Philistines in Gaza, Samson killed himself and many of his enemies by pushing away two pillars of the large building where he was brought to provide entertainment with his fabulous muscular power. His father, on hearing about the way his son died, is satisfied that “Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail / Or knock the breast ... nothing but well and fair, / And what may quiet us in a death so noble.” Finally the choir sings a song of resignation to

What th’ insearchable dispose
Of Highest Wisdom brings about ...
His servants he, with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event,
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind, all passion spent.

enden sah’ ich die Welt

(German) “I saw the world ending”. The line comes from an alternative version for Brünnhilde’s song at the end of Götterdämmerung, the last opera in the cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, written and composed by Richard Wagner. This alternative text is sometimes called the “Schopenhauer ending” since Wagner wrote it in a pessimistic mood inspired by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In the end he decided not to use it. If he had used it, the line quoted would have been the end of the whole Ring cycle.

par. 17 i have been speaking

the American “Humanists”

A movement, sometimes called “the New Humanism”, chiefly associated with Irving Babbitt (1865-1933).

par. 18 the basic idea

the Rocket

One of the first steam locomotives, designed by George Stephenson and introduced as prize-winning model in the line Manchester-Liverpool in1830. During its first journey an accident happened, with one casualty.

par. 19 another source of

Mencken

Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), American writer and journalist.

par. 20 the myth also

as Keats’ gods transcended the Titans

See note to par. 7, above, on Hyperion. The “gods” are Zeus and Apollo.

Mima ... Stammenlied ... Nothung

Lewis is referring to Act I of Siegfried, the third opera in Richard Wagner’s Ring der Nibelungen. (N.B. Mima is properly written Mime; Stammenlied has been incorrectly printed as stamenlied in some early editions.)

par. 22 finally, modern politics

It has great allies, Its friends are propaganda, party cries, etc.

A pastiche on the last lines of William Wordsworth’s sonnet “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” (1802):

thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

back to survey

TRANSPOSITION

par. 2 the difficulty i feel

an intermittent “variety of religious experience”

A reference to The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) by the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1843-1912).

Occam’s razor

The common name for a philosophical maxim which has come to be associated with William of Occam, a 14th-century English philosopher. If there are several explanations possible for a given phenomenon, then the one which requires the smallest number of assumptions is always to regarded as the most probably correct one.

par. 5 now it may be true

Pepys’s Diary

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) held various government posts in London. During the years 1660-1669 he wrote, in a cypher or shorthand, an uncommonly detailed and self-revealing diary. It was first converted to readable text and published, with excisions, in 1825. Fuller editions have followed.

par. 16 everything is different

The spiritual man judges all things and is judged of none

I Corinthians 2:15. “But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.” [kjv]

par. 19 i believe that this doctrine

I believe that this doctrine of a Transposition...

The section from here to the end of par. 25 (ending in “...too flimsy, too phantasmal”) was absent from the essay as first published in 1949; it was inserted when Lewis included the essay in the volume called They Asked for a Paper, in 1962.

par. 24 so with us

“We know not what we shall be”

I John 3:2. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” [kjv]

par. 25 you can put it

flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom

I Corinthians 15:50. “Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.” [kjv]

illustrious with being

Charles Williams, All Hallow’s Eve (1914), chapter 7.

The grey October weather held nothing of the painting's glory, yet his [Richard’s] eyes were so bedazzled with the glory that for a moment, however unillumined the houses were, their very mass was a kind of illumination. They were illustrious with being. (...) The world he could see from the window gaily mocked him with a promise of being an image of the painting, or of being the original of which the painting was but a painting.

par. 27 1. i hope it is

Developmentalist

Probably Lewis means something slightly different from “Evolutionst”. In the half century or so after Darwin launched his theory of evolution in 1859, it was normal in at least some languages to use the common word for “development” (German Entwicklung, Dutch ontwikkeling) interchangeably with “evolution”. Under these circumstances a Developmentalist would be the same as an Evolutionist. However, the former word may have been deliberately chosen here to express a wider meaning than “Evolutionist”. As Lewis liked to point out, evolutionism itself seemed to him a development from an older and wider movement in European thought. By a Developmentalist he may thus have meant someone who represents this wider movement. It is also to be noted that the Developmentalist is here implicitly described as believing in developments not only from natural to spiritual, but also reversely, from spiritual to natural. A “conversion of the Godhead into flesh” as mentioned in the Athanasian creed (cf. second note to par. 28, below) might thus be accounted for in Developmentalist terms. But Athanasius mentioned it only to refute it; nor is it what Lewis means by Transposition. He may have been specifically thinking here of philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950).

par. 28 2. i have found it

Docetism

An old theory or current in Christian theology which holds that the human shape in which Christ walked the earth (i.e. the Incarnation) was merely an appearance. The word derives from Greek dokeo, “to seem”. The heyday of Docetism was the second century C.E.

“not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh...”

Athanasian Creed, 35.

in mirabilibus supra me

“in things too high for me” – Psalm 131:1. “Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty; neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.”

back to survey

MYTH BECAME FACT

First published in World Dominion, vol. XXII, September.-October 1944. – World Dominion was a periodical or yearbook of an interdenominational missionary organisation of the same name, founded by Roland Allen in 1917. This was Lewis’s second and last article for World Dominion; the first was “Religion: Reality or Substitute?” (1941). He was invited to address a World Dominion rally in London in the summer of 1946, but he declined on the ground that he was “an arguer not an exhorter and my target is the frankly irreligious audience” (cd. Collected Letters vol. 2, p. 718).

par. 7 the real answer

where times move. They move away

Lewis used the same pun in his 1944 introduction to Athanasius, reprinted as the essay “On the Reading of Old Books”.

the deism of Voltaire

Deism is the belief that God created the universe in such a way that it could and did develop without His taking any further action about. Voltaire (1694-1878) was one of the major French writers of the 18th century and acquired the reputation of chief spokesman of the Enlightenment.

the dogmatic materialism of the great Victorians

Lewis may well use “Victorians” in a general way so as to include any prominent materialist thinker in 19th-century Europe. If so, the list would have to include Karl Marx as the most influential case and several other Germans as great names in their own day, such as Karl Vogt, Jakob Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner and Ernst Haeckel. See Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century, chapter 7, “Science and Religion”.

par 9 of this tragic

myth

Lewis wrote more about myth in his prefaces to The Pilgrim’s Regress, revised edition (1943) and George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946).

you were not knowing, but tasting

The distinction, essential for Lewis’s idea of myth, is fairly close to that between Contemplation and Enjoyment. He later described the latter distinction as an “indispensable tool of thought” (Surprised by Joy, chapter 14, par. 9-10) which he found in the work of the philosopher Samuel Alexander in 1924. Lewis developed his ideas on enjoyment, contemplation and myth during his long debate with Owen Barfield which he described as their “Great War” (Surprised by Joy, chapter 13, par. 16).

In hac valle abstractionis | In this valley of separation

Lewis is adapting a line from Psalm 84:6 in Latin, i.e. Psalm 83:7 in the Vulgate version: in valle lacrymarum, “in this valley of tears” (different Bible translations have very different renderings of this phrase). Hooper’s footnote translating abstractionis as ‘of separation’ is strange: the most plausible word in English would seem to be simply “abstraction”.

par. 13 those who do

“parallels” and “Pagan Christs”

This theme is developed in “Is Theology Poetry?”, a paper Lewis delivered to the Socratic Club in November 1944

back to survey

“HORRID RED THINGS”

First published in Church of England Newspaper, 6 October 1944. – Lewis used both the title and much of the substance of this article for chapter 10 of his book Miracles (1947), on the relation between thought and imagination. In the book, he notes that the subject “has an importance quite apart from our present purpose and of which everyone who wishes to think clearly should make himself master as soon as he possibly can.” The chapter is more than twice as long as the essay.

par. 1 many theologians and

nineteenth-century “conflict between science and religion”

Two very influential 19th-century accounts of the supposed conflict are John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) en Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).

par. 2 the ordinary man

gathers from the Creed that God has a “Son” ... “came down” from “Heaven”

From the Nicene Creed, the statement of Christian doctrine accepted by the Council of Nicea in 325, and with additions by the first Council of Constantinople in 381.

Et in unum Dominum Iesum Christum,
Filium Dei unigenitum, ... Qui propter
nos homines et propter nostram salutem
descendit de cœlis ... et ascendit in
cælum, sedet ad dexteram Patris ...

I believe ... in one Lord Jesus Christ,
only-begotten Son of God, ... Who for
us men, and for our salvation,
came down from heaven ... and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father ...

The original Nicene version did not include the mention of Heaven as the place Jesus came down from, nor of the “right hand of the Father” as the place where He sat after ascending.
Lewis also mentions, among the ordinary man’s ideas, “some land of the dead situated beneath the earth’s surface”. This is briefly mentioned in the Apostle’s Creed, dating from the second century:

... crucifixus, mortuus, et sepultus,
descendit ad inferos ...

... was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell ...

The Anglican “Articles of Religion” or “Thirty-Nine Articles”, dating from 1562 and included in the Book of Common Prayer, also have one brief article (Nr. 3) to this effect:

As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed, that he went down into Hell.

par. 4 i think there are

theosophist

Theosophy is a type of intuition-based religiosity that sprang up in the later 19th century. More specifically, it is the system of beliefs accepted by members of the Theosophical Society which was founded in New York in 1875 but soon moved its headquarters to India. Theosophical beliefs in a spiritual world did not include the belief in a personal God and was claimed, or felt, to derive from the ancient sacred writings of India. In The Discarded Image, chapter VII.C (p. 156), Lewis notes that the old Platonic idea of the soul’s “pre-existence” was revived by the Theosophists as “wisdom of the East”.

par. 8 in the same way

God has no body, parts, or passions

From the Westminster Confession (1646), II.1.

par. 9 the critic may

Man’s reason is in such deep insolvency to sense

Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty (1929) I, 57.

par. 10 where, then, do

the line between explaining and “explaining away”

cf. Miracles, chapter 10:

Events on the historical level are the sort of things we can talk about literally. If they occurred, they were perceived by the senses of men. Legitimate “explanation” degenerates into muddled or dishonest “explaining away” as soon as we start applying to these events the metaphorical interpretation which we rightly apply to the statements about God.

back to survey

THE INNER RING

par. 3 and of course

the World, the Flesh and the Devil

A phrase in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, in the section called the Litany, or General Supplication: “From fornication, and all other deadly sin; and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us.”

The Devil ... the association between him and me in the public mind

An allusion to the fact that Lewis had in recent years become widely known as author of The Screwtape Letters (1942). The book is a series of letters of advice and warning from a senior devil called Screwtape to his nephew, Wormwood, about the art of bringing humans on the path of damnation.

par. 8 i must now make

Byron ... Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet...

Lord Byron (1788-1824), English poet; Don Juan, Canto I, stanza 125.

par. 19 we are told

the house in Alice Through the Looking-Glass

Through the Looking-Glass (1871) is the sequel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. On several occasions Alice finds that she will attain some ends or conditions only by not trying to.

back to survey

IS THEOLOGY POETRY?

Paper read to the Oxford University Socratic Club, 6 November 1944, and published in the “Socratic Digest” Nr. 2 (1944). First published in book form in The World’s Last Night, New York 1960; then in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, London 1965. The Socratic Club was founded in 1941 by Stella Aldwinckle, who began working for the Oxford Pastorate in that year after taking her MA in Theology. The Club was intended to provide an “open forum for the discussion of the intellectual difficulties connected with religion and with Christianity in particular.” Regular meetings of the Club featured a first speaker reading a Paper, a second speaker providing a Reply, and then a general discussion. Lewis was the Club’s President until 1954, when he became a professor in Cambridge. He gave a total of eleven papers for the Socratic Club, of which the present one was the sixth. This piece may be regarded as a more explicitly Christian variety or development of his essay “The Funeral of a Great Myth”, and was presumably written in the same period. Some passages in the two pieces are almost identical, and so are some of the following notes.

par. 3 the other term

simple, sensuous and passionate

John Milton, Of Education (1644), par. 6.

par. 5 considered as poetry

strictly Unitarian

Unitarian theology involves the doctrine that God is a singe Person, not three. It is thus opposed to Trinitarian theology, i.e. the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which holds that God comprises three Persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

“of a mingled yarn, good and ill together”

Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, IV.3 “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.”

the Parthenon

Temple for the goddess Athena Parthenos (“Virgin Athena”) on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, built at the instigation of Pericles between 447 and 438 BC.

the Orlando Furioso

i.e. The Madness of Roland, more literally “Mad Orlando”; a romantic and humoristic long epic poem first published in 1516, main work of Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533). In The Allegory of Love, pp. 202-203, Lewis praised Ariosto for the matchless ‘fertility of his fancy’ and for the ‘brilliance and harmony and sheer technical supremacy’ of his work.

par. 9 but i must beware

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

One of Shakespeare’s best-known comedies, published in 1600.

Balfour in Theism and Humanism

Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), English statesman and philosopher. Theism and Humanism contains his Gifford Lectures for 1913-14, which he followed up with Theism and Thought in 1922-23. The section referred to, on “The Aesthetic of History”, is the last part of Lecture III. Lewis rarely mentioned or quoted from this book in his published work, but the parallels to some of his key philosophical ideas are evident from many of Balfour’s pages. In 1962 Lewis included Theism and Humanism in a list of ten works which had influenced him most.

par. 11 i am not of course

H. G. Wells ... “Wellsianity”

H. G. Wells (1866-1946), English author, pioneer of science fiction.

dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I never could quite make out why)

So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as “rough stuff”. I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I don not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor ... have I ever been able to see the probability of it ... [T]hese details of the domestic life of the cave puzzle me upon either the evolutionary or the static hypothesis ...

universal darkness covers all

Last line of The Dunciad, a satiric work by the English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) about the King of Dunces extending his empire of Emptiness and Dullness over all arts and sciences.

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before they uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,
And universal darkness buries all.

par. 12 such a world-drama

Nibelung’s Ring (Enden sah ich die Welt!)

A reference to the end of Götterdämmerung, the last part of Richard Wagner’s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. However, the German line quoted – “I saw the world ending” – is not to be found in the text usually published and performed. It is the last line of Brünnhilde’s song in an alternative version sometimes called the “Schopenhauer ending”. Wagner wrote this while in a pessimistic mood inspired by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In the end he did not use it. If he had done so, this would have been the concluding line of the whole Ring cycle.

Mr. Brown

“Mr Brown” must have been one of the Socratic Club’s members or regular visitors. The meeting of 23 October 1944 featured the philosopher H. H. Price (see next note) as first speaker, reading a paper on “The Grounds of Modern Agnosticism”.

professor Price

H. H. Price (1899-1984) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford 1935-59, and President of the Aristotelian Society 1943-44. During the years 1944-51 he read three papers for the Socratic Club. He and Lewis also provided replies to each other’s papers on several occasions.

the Divine light ... “lighteneth every man”

John 1:9. “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

the first lesson ... the second lesson ...

Lewis is alluding to the old rule for services of the Church of England and other churches to have a first “lesson” (i.e. Bible passage read aloud) from the Old Testament and then a second lesson from the New Testament.

par. 20 2. we are invited

Dr. I. A. Richards

Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979), English literary critic and rhetorician.

par. 21 for all these reasons

the heart is deceitful

Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

a fortnight ago

See the note on “Mr. Brown”, above.

the Bergsonian critique of orthodox Darwinism

Lewis means the kind of critique mentioned briefly in his essay “The World’s Last Night”, par. 14 – that “what Darwin really accounted for was not the origin, but the elimination, of species”. Many scientists around 1900 were strongly critical of Darwin’s original (“orthodox”) evolution theory. One of the most eloquent spokesmen for these critical views was the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941, Nobel laureate for Literature, 1927) in his Évolution créatrice (1907, published in English as Creative Evolution in 1911). Bergson claimed that biologists could not explain the emergence of – what is nowadays called – new genetic information. It remained a mystery how Natural Selection could give rise to highly complex organisms, since these can only develop through large numbers of simultaneous changes. They cannot result from any gradual development, however long in duration. Also, increasing complexity from a certain degree onward means decreasing fitness for survival. Many species would on Darwin’s theory seem to be too complex to have survived, and yet actually have survived. Bergson therefore postulated a “life force” or élan vital analogous to forces like gravitation or electromagnetism. This solution never made much headway towards acceptance in scientific circles; yet no real and final scientific solution for the problem has been found so far.

the scientific cosmology as being, in principle, a myth [+note on Keats etc.]