LEWISIANA.NL

 

Quotations and Allusions in

C. S. Lewis’s shorter writings

 

compiled by Arend Smilde (Utrecht, The Netherlands)

 

 

 

 

One hundred and twenty-one of C. S. Lewis’s essays and other short pieces are here annotated in varying degrees of detail.

The opening two-part  survey  should help you find particular essays, or essays from particular volumes:

– First comes a list of “Volumes used”: these are all the volumes from which any or all essays are annotated. Each volume title is preceded by an abbreviation, such as “Trp” for the volume called Transposition.

– The abbreviations are used in the second list, “Essays annotated”. The essay titles are here given in alphabetical order, each essay’s year of origin is mentioned, and references are given to the volume(s) in which each piece has been published.

For a survey of volumes with their tables of contents and further bibliographical information, see  www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays.

In 2000, nearly all of Lewis’s short prose writings were collected in one large volume called Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces, edited by Lesley Walmsley (HarperCollins, London). For a publication history see  www.lewisiana.nl/shorterwritings.

Please note that the present attempt at annotation does not pretend to have reached completion. A row of six dots ...... indicates those places where I hope to add details sooner or later. A double quotation mark in bold type (??) marks places where, so far, I can’t provide help but rather need it. Suggestions for ways to fill out these places are  welcome.

The notes are translated, adapted and developed from notes made to my Dutch translations of these essays, published and still being published in successive volumes from 2001 onward. Thanks are due to Paul Leopold (Stockholm, Sweden) for much help on many points ever since February 2004, when this website was one week old and he wrote me to send the first suggestion for improvement.

This page was first posted in August 2008.  Updates  are listed at the end. Last update: 20 August 2024.

 

SURVEY                                                                                                                                     number of essays 1.  Volumes used                                                                                       annotated here / contained in volume
Reh Trp   WLN AfP SPT OW SMRL CRf   SLE Und FSE GD WG TOW FST PC TH CRn CpR I&I	REHABILITATIONS, London 1939 TRANSPOSITION, London 1947    (USA: THE WEIGHT OF GLORY, New York 1947) THE WORLD’S LAST NIGHT, New York 1960 THEY ASKED FOR A PAPER, London 1962 SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST, London 1965 OF OTHER WORLDS, London 1966 STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE LITERATURE,    Cambridge 1966 CHRISTIAN REFLECTIONS, London & Grand Rapids 1967    (USA reprint, less one piece: THE SEEING EYE, New York 1986) SELECTED LITERARY ESSAYS, Cambridge 1969 GOD IN THE DOCK, Grand Rapids 1970    (UK: UNDECEPTIONS, London 1971) FERN-SEED AND ELEPHANTS, London 1975 GOD IN THE DOCK, London 1979 THE WEIGHT OF GLORY, New York 1980    (expanded edition of the 1947 volume) OF THIS AND OTHER WORLDS, London 1982 FIRST AND SECOND THINGS, London 1985 PRESENT CONCERNS, London 1986 TIMELESS AT HEART, London 1987 CHRISTIAN REUNION, London 1990 COMPELLING REASON, London 1996 IMAGE AND IMAGINATION, Cambride 2013	1   /  9     5   /   5     7   /   7     7   / 12     8   /   8     9   / 13     1   / 14   14   / 14     1   / 22   49   / 49     8   /   8   13   / 13     9   /   9   20   / 20   17   / 17   19   / 19   10   / 10   12   / 12   24   / 24     4   / 53

 

 

back to survey

 

THE HOBBIT

 

First published anonymously in The Times Literary Supplement, 2 October 1937; first reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, 1982.

Another review by Lewis, even shorter, appeared in The Times of 8 October 1937 and was reprinted in Image and Imagination (2013).

 

Alice, Flatland, Phantastes, The Wind in the Willows

– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871).

– Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, (1884).
– George Macdonald, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858).

– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908).

 

 

back to survey

 

LEARNING IN WAR-TIME

 

A sermon preached on Sunday 22 October 1939 at the invitation of the vicar of St Mary the Virgin, the Oxford University church. The Bible text which Lewis chose for his sermon was 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). A playful prefiguration of his message is found at the end of a letter he wrote to his brother three weeks earlier (2 October 1939; CL2, 280):

By the bye, did I tell you I’d found in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle the perfect summing up of my personal war aims − “During all this evil time Abbot Martin retained his abbacy”?

The sermon text was originally duplicated for students under the title “None Other Gods: Culture in Wartime” and then printed as “Culture in War-Time” in The Student Movement 42/6, March 1940. In late 1940 it appeared in a volume edited by Ashley Sampson, Famous English Sermons (Thomas Nelson, London 1940). Lewis’s first appearance as a Christian preacher thus got him admitted into a company that included Bede, Donne, Taylor, Baxter, John Wesley, Newman, and other luminuaries from the past (cf. CL2, 353). The present title was first used when Lewis included this text among the five addresses brought together in the 1949 volume Transposition (U.S.A.: The Weight of Glory, revised & expanded edition 1980).

    For a comprehensive discussion of the sermon See Joe Ricke, “An Unlikely Preacher: C. S. Lewis and the War-Time Sermon”, Sehnsucht 15 (2019), 55-100.

 

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).

 

make jokes on scaffolds

Very probably a reference to Sir Thomas More (1478-1535). Almost twenty years after his execution by order of king Henry VIII, More’s son-in-law William Roper wrote a Life of Sir Thomas More. Among several examples of the charity and good cheer with which he approached his death by behading, the biography includes the joke:

And so was he by Master Lieutenant brought out of the Tower, and from thence led towards the place of execution. Where, going up the scaffold, which was so weak that it was ready to fall, he said merrily to Master Lieutenant, “I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself.”

 

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.1.3

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.

See also Bacon’s Novum Organum, I.89 (translated from the Latin by Peter Urbach and John Gibson, 1994:

Others more cunningly surmise and reflect that if intermediate causes are unknown, everything can more readily be referred to the divine hand and wand, a matter, as they think, of great importance to religion; which is nothing other than “wishing to please God through a lie.”

The translaters of the latter passage added a reference to Job 13:7, “Will ye speak wickedly of God? and talk deceitfully for him?”

 

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. 10   that is the essential

 

the great cataract of nonsense

cf. Lord Macaulay’s essay, “Mr. Robert Montgomery’s Poems”, in Critical and Historical Essays (1843). This is a devastating critique of Montgomery’s 1830 poems “The Omnipresence of the Deity” and “Satan”, intended to illustrate Macaulay’s point that

the avenues to fame [are] blocked up by a swarm of noisy, pushing, elbowing pretenders, who, though they will not ultimately be able to make good their own entrance, hinder, in the mean time, those who have a right to enter.

Toward the end of the first poem discussed, there is

... the deathbed of a Christian made as ridiculous as false imagery and false English can make it. But this is not enough. The Day of Judgment is to be described, and a roaring cataract of nonsense is poured forth upon this tremendous subject.

Lewis quoted the same phrase less than three weeks later in a letter of 11 November 1939, referring to the exuberance of his friend Hugo Dyson (CL2, 288).

 

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)

Lewis was aware of Donne’s saying at least since 1924, when he was shown a new poem by his friend Cecil Harwood on the subject (cf. Lewis’s diary as published in All My Road Before Me, 21-24 June 1924, p. 339).

 

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, 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

 

First published in Theology, March 1940, 166-179; first reprinted in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids 1967), 12-36. In the Introduction to the 1967 volume, Hooper presents a list of the allegedly “entire controversy”. The list actually lacks the final instalment, published in February 1941 under the title “Mr. Lewis’s Peace Proposals” and consisting of two letters – one by George Every and the other by S. L. Bethell. A full facsimile text of the controversy, including two preceding essays by Every and Bethell, can be downloaded here (PDF).

   After Every’s final published contribution, Lewis wrote two further responses in letters of 28 January and 4 February 1941, published in Collected Letters II, 466-469.

 

 

par. 1   at an early age

 

the friends of culture seemed to me to be exaggerating

A passage at the end of The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939) by E. M. W. Tillyard and C. S. Lewis, published less than a year before the present essay, suggests that Lewis is here criticizing a former habit of his own. The book is a series of six essays, three by each author in alternation and written in the course of the 1930s. Lewis wrote the original version of the opening essay in 1930, the year of his conversion to Theism, and he became a Christian in September 1931. In a note appended to the 1939 book (pp. 147-150), he admitted that there was as discrepancy between his own view of poetry in the first essay and that in his last. In the first, as he now noticed, he had

assumed (i), what now seems to me very unlikely, that large groups of human individuals possess a common consciousness; and (ii) that if they do, this common consciousness would be so superior to that of the individuals that it might be called “angelic”. In fact, I have exaggerated.

 

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, 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

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. [Also referred to in Learning in War-time.]

 

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

John Milton (1608-1674), Areopagitica: a Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England (1644).

 

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. The term “storehouse of values” comes 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.

Lewis is perhaps using the term partly because it also appeared in the firtst paragraph of “The Necessity of Scrutiny”, i.e. the article by Brother Every which he was responding to. Every was in turn quoting the manifesto in which the editors of Scrutiny – Knights, Culver and the Leavises – had published their purpose when that journal was launched in 1932; they were quoting Richards.

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.

 

par. 38   if it is argued

 

“stock” … response

As with the earlier “Ricardian” term (see note to par. 34, above), Lewis may be referring not only to the term as it appears in Richards’s work but to Brother Every’s quoting it:

For the health of our Christianity we need sound and orthodox but sensitive and repsonsive theolology, a theology addressed to the “best minds in the class” … But we also need other kinds of criticism, and literary criticism more especially. … We need [to be] keen to detect stock responses and bogus reactions. Scrituiny needs and indeed demands a healthy theology, but Theology cannot do its work without Scrutiny.
(“The Nececcity of Scrutiny”, final paragraph, including final sentence)

 

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. ……

 

II

 

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.

 

… a very fine one.

Lewis’s “Peace Proposals for Brother Every and Mr Bethell” were followed by two further letters to the editor, one from Every and one from Bethell, published in the Theology issue of February 1941: “Mr. Lewis’s Peace Proposals”. This conclusion to the exchange is not listed in Walter Hooper’s preface to Christian Reflections.

 

 

back to survey

 

DANGERS OF NATIONAL REPENTANCE

 

This is the first article Lewis wrote for the Angical weekly  newspaper The Guardian, 15 March 1940. After two more contributions (“Two Ways with the Self” and “Meditation on the Third Commandment”) he began contributing his thirty-one weekly “Screwtape Letters” to this periodical in May 1941.

 

par. 2   if they are

 

ipso facto

(Latin) “by the fact itself”, i.e. necessarily, unavoidably.

 

par. 3   such an escape

 

Where passions have the privilege to work ...

William Wordsworth’s long poem The Prelude was published in 1850 but written in the years 1799-1805. Book XI is the last of three Books describing the author’s “residence in France” in 1792 and his “juvenile errors” (XI, 54) as an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution.

 

Colonel Blimp

A cartoon character in the London newspaper Evening Standard in the 1930s. He was the type of a pompous, irascible and reactionary army officer. See also Lewis’s brief 1944 essay “Blimpophobia” in Time and Tide, reprinted in Present Concerns (1986).

 

and the Russians

Lewis was delivering this paper in 1940, while the Soviet Union was still formally an ally of Germany.

 

we must forgive ... or we are damned

Matthew 6:14-15, 18:32-35; Mark 11:26.

 

the Fifth Commandment

“Honour thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12).

 

whom he hath not seen

cf. 1 John 4:20.

 

par. 4   it is not

 

to “hate” his mother for the Lord’s sake

Luke 14:26.

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

 

hard sayings of our Lord

John 6:60, the only place in the gospels where a saying of Jesus is described as a “hard saying” or “hard teaching”. The phrase has received a wider application for such sayings of Jesus as display a similar sort of hardness.

 

brother and child against parent

Cf. Matthew 10:21.

And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death.

(See also Matthew 10:35-36 and Luke 12:52-53.)

 

M. Mauriac’s Vie de Jésus ... “Pourquoi cette stupeur ... ”

François Mauriac (1885-1970) was a French writer and Nobel laureate for Literature 1952. As a Catholic he began adult life with Modernist leanings but never felt comfortable in that position. His Vie de Jésus (1936, translated as Life of Jesus in 1937) marked his final rejection of Modernism. In his preface to the second edition (also 1936) he added a specific attack on Alfred Loisy, a leading Modernist, and on the routinely preconceived denial of the supernatural. As a novelist Mauriac hoped with his biography of Jesus “to convince the reader that the Jesus of the Gospels is the very opposite of an artificial, composite being”. He had tried to sketch the portrait of a man who appeared to various people as “the same man under two aspects; one, yet different according to the heart which reflects him: worshipped by the poor [who overdo their respect for the divinity by ignoring the humanity of Jesus] and hated by the proud [who hate the pretenstions of divinity because they nly see the humanity] because of that which is divine in him, and precisely therefore misunderstood by both” (translated from the French first edition, pp. viii-ix, with inserted explanation from the preceding passage).

   Chapter 9, “Judas”, largely consists of sayings of Jesus, including the one from Matthew 10:21. Each saying is followed by an imagined silent comment from Judas, like the one quoted by Lewis.

   Almost two decades later, Lewis made the same reference in The Four Loves, chapter 6, fourth paragraph (“Judas ... laps it up easily”). As appears from Collected Letters II, 213, he read the French original in 1937; and six years later, after reading Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to be King in 1943, Lewis wrote to her that “since Mauriac’s Vie de Jésus nothing has moved me so much” (ibid., p. 577). Likely enough, more elements from Mauriac’s book found their way into Lewis’s work. Thus Mauriac, having quoted Matthew 10:37 at another point in the chapter on Judas, comes close to suggesting Lewis’s later “trilemma”, i.e. the idea that Jesus must have been either mad, or bad, or God. Also, the way Lewis began his book Miracles (1947) may have been partly inspired by the opening sentences of Mauriac’s preface:

De tous les historiens, l’exégète est le plu décevant. S’il appartient à l’espèce de ceux qui d’abord nient le surnaturel et qui en Jésus ne discernent pas le Dieu, nous sommes assuré qu’il n’entend rien à l’objet de son étude et pour nous toute sa science ne pèse un fétu.

[ Of all historians the most deceptive is the exegete. If he is one of those who start off by denying the supernatural and does not discern God in Jesus, then we can be sure he understands nothing of the object of his study and as far as we’re concerned, all his knowledge doesn’t weigh a straw. ]

 

 

back to survey

 

TWO WAYS WITH THE SELF

 

This is the second article Lewis wrote for The Guardian, a Church of England weekly newspaper, 3 May 1940. After one more contribution (“Meditation on the Third Commandment”) he began contributing his thirty-one weekly “Screwtape Letters” to this periodical in May 1941.

 

par. 1   self-renunciation is thought

 

St François de Sales ... avec des remonstrances douces et tranquilles

A two-page excerpt in translation containing this passage can be found on Paul Ford’s website. François de Sales (1567-1622) was bishop of Geneva and Annecy; his Introduction à la vie dévote appeared in 1609. Lewis referred to the same passage in his last book, Letters to Malcolm (1964), chapter 18.

 

Julian of Norwich

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

 

New Testament ... love my neighbour “as myself”

Matthew 19:19, 22:39; Mark 12:31.33; Romans 13:9; Galatians 5:14; James 2:8.

 

“hate his own life”

Luke 14:26; John 12:25.

 

par. 2   we must not

 

Shelley .. self-contempt as the source of cruelty

cf. Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam (1818) VIII.21.

Yes, it is Hate ...
Whom self-contempt arms with a mortal sting ...

See also Lewis’s essay “Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot”, dating from the 1930s, in Selected Literary Essays (1969), p. 198:

To a Christian, conviction of sin is a good thing because it is the necessary preliminary to repentance; to Shelley it is an extremely dangerous thing. It begets self-contempt, and self-contempt begets misanthropy and cruelty.

 

a later poet ... the man “who loathes his neighbour as himself”

??

 

“ideological taint”

Lewis used the same phrase in the first few paragraphs of his 1941 essay “Bulverism”.

 

David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus

A science-fiction novel published in 1920. Lewis read it in 1935 or 1936 and found himself inspired by it to make his own attempt at writing science-fiction.

 

“Richard loves Richard ...”

Shakespeare, Richard III, V.3, 184.

 

par. 3   now, the self

 

Macdonald ... “to be allowed a moment’s respite ...”

Cf. George Macdonald’s sermon on “Self-Denial” (Luke 9:23-24), Unspoken Sermons, second series, Nr. 11. Lewis is not quoting very accurately, yet without changing Macdonald’s sense. A fuller and correct quote including the present phrase is in Lewis’s George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946) as Nr. 158.

 

Tacitus, immitior quia toleravat

Tacitus (c. 56–c. 117 CE) was one of the great historians of ancient Rome. The correct reference is Book I, section 20; immitior is either a typo or an alternative form for inmitior. Tacitus is talking of Aufidienus Rufus,

long a private, then a centurion, and latterly a camp-marshal, [who] was seeking to reintroduce the iron discipline of the past, habituated as he was to work and toil, and all the more pitiless because he had endured.

(translation by John Jackson, Loeb 249, Tacitus Vol. II, p. 280).

 

 

back to survey

 

THE NECESSITY OF CHIVALRY

 

First published on 17 August 1940 in Time and Tide, a political and literary weekly review magazine founded in 1920. This was the first of a total of twenty-five contributions from Lewis to the magazine (essays, poems and book reviews) during the 1940s and 1950s. The present piece was first reprinted in October 1940 as “The Importance of an Ideal” in Living Age, an American monthly magazine which aimed “to  bring to readers, for their information, representative expressions of opinion throughout the world.”

 

The Necessity of Chivalry

The title might be a play on an article by George Every, “The Necessity of Scrutiny”, published in the joural Theology in March 1939. Lewis had written a lengthy response published in the same journal in March 1940 under the title “Christianity and Culture”.

 

“Thou wert the meekest man”, says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot

Le Morte Darthur, Book XXI, chapter 12. This is the last chapter of the great late-medieval collection of Arthurian legend, compiled by Thomas Malory and printed in 1485 by William Caxton. The telling and retelling of stories about the semi-legendary King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table was a tradition that spread from England to France during the twelfth century. The characteristic figures and features of these stories came to be collectively called “the matter of Britain”, distinguished from “the matter of France”, in which the historical Charlemagne was supposed to be the central figure. In France both traditions acquired a more and more “courtly” or chivalric flavour. The figure of Launcelot, the type of the ideal Arthurian knight, first emerged in the work of French author Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1135−c. 1183).

 

blood and iron

After the German locution Eisen und Blut (“iron and blood” − mostly quoted as Blut und Eisen), from an 1862 speech by the then new Prime Minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck.

 

“he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten”

Le Morte Darthur, Book XIX, chapter 5.

 

Homer’s Achilles

Achilles is the hero of the Iliad, one of the two long poems ascribed to the ancient Greek poet Homer (8th century B.C.). The “wrath” of Achilles is announced in the opening lines as the poem’s main theme. The climax comes near the end of Book XXII (330f) as Achilles triumphs over the Trojan prince and army commander Hector.

 

the Sagas … “stern to inflict … stubborn to endure”

The Sagas are semi-historic stories from 9th- and 10th-century Iceland, passed down orally until most of them were committed to writing during the 13th century. The quoted expressions are taken from an introductory poem on the barbarians of ancient Scandinavia by the English poet Robert Southey (1774-1843), in Icelandic Poetry (1797), a translation of the Poetic Edda.

 

Attila “had a custom of fiercely rolling his eyes …”

Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), chapter 34. Attila (c. 400-453) was king of the Huns during the last two decades of his life, the period of the Hun empire’s greatest power and extent; it collapsed after his death.

 

Dartmoor

England’s main prison for long-term convicts, in the southwestern region of the same name, in the county of Devon.

 

by a “modern invocation”

Shakespeare, King John III.4, 42 (Constance):

O that my tongue were in the thunder’s mouth!
Then with a passion would I shake the world,
And rouse from sleep that fell anatomy
Which cannot hear a lady’s feeble voice,
Which scorns a modern invocation.

In Shakespeare’s vocabulary, modern means “ordinary”, “everyday”. Lexicographer C. T. Onions (a colleague of Lewis’s at Magdalen College), notes in his 1911 Shakespeare Glossary that this is a “peculiarly Elizabethan” meaning and “the only Shakespearean sense”. Lewis appears to be slyly identifying this sense with post-Enlightenment meanings so as to enhance any negative connotations on both sides of the equation. Nevill Coghill, a friend of Lewis and a fellow scholar of English, later wrote in a commemorative essay that “it delighted him [Lewis] that he could find no use of the word modern in Shakespeare that did not carry its load of contempt.” (“The Approach to English”, in Light on C. S. Lewis, 1964, p. 60).

 

Kipling

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), English poet and novelist, exponent of British patriotism and advocate of British imperialism. Nobel Prize for Literature 1907.

 

Stalky, Nelson, Sidney

− Kipling wrote Stalky & Co. (1899), a volume of short stories about boarding-school boys; the figure of Stalky was modeled on Kipling’s own former schoolmate, the later general Lionel Charles Dunsterville (1865-1945).
− Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) was a famous British admiral.
− Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) was an English poet and soldier who acquired the reputation of embodying the type of the ideal aristocrat.

 

“escapism”

Lewis’s critique on lazily pejorative uses of this term was certainly inspired by his friend J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1938 lecture, “On Fairy Stories”, published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Oxford U.P., 1947), 38-89, esp. pp. 75ff; also found in the volume of Tolkien’s essays The Monsters and the Critics, ed. Frank Williamson and Christopher Tolkien (Allen & Unwin, London 1983), 109-161, esp. 147ff. Lewis’s readiness to adopt this criticism can already be sensed in his earliest published prose work, the Pilgrim’s Regress; see, for example, Book VI, last page of chapter 3 (Mr. Neo-Angular: “Do you take me for an escapist?”).

 

 

back to survey

 

WHY I AM NOT A PACIFIST

 

Paper read to a pacifist society in Oxford, 1940 (for a possible further specification of the date see note on “Terris Bay”). First published in 1980 in the enlarged edition of The Weight of Glory and other addresses, a volume of Lewis’s essays originally published as the American edition of Transposition (Geoffrey Bles, London 1949).

 

par. 2   but even in

 

“if it had power as it has right, would absolutely rule the world”

Joseph Butler (1692-1752), Fifteen Sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726), Sermon II, “Upon Human Nature” (p. 24 in the 1841 edition published by Thomas Tegg, London).

Thus, that principle by which we survey, and either approve or disapprove our own heart, temper, and actions, is not only to be considered as what is in its turn to have some influence; which may be said of every passion, of the lowest appetites; but likewise as being superior; as from its very nature manifestly claiming superiority over all others; insomuch that you cannot form a notion of this faculty, conscience, without taking in judgment, direction, superintendency. This is a constituent part of the idea, that is, of the faculty itself; and to preside and govern, from the very economy and constitution of man, belongs to it. Had it strength, as it has right; had it power, as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world.

 

par. 15   first as to

 

a Mediterranean world in which Carthaginian power succeeded Persian

Lewis was probably thinking of what G. K. Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man (1925), Part 1, chapters 6 and 7, e.g. in the following passage from ch. 7:

It is not for us to guess in what manner or moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of Rome.

 

par. 23   it may be

 

Eugenists

People advocating, developing or practicing a science-based improvement of humanity as a biological species. As an ideal, eugenics enjoyed wide support in the modern world, especially the United States, until the rise of Hitler in the 1930s.

 

Douglasites

Supporters of the Douglas Plan, an economic program proposed in the early 1920s by the British engineer C. H. Douglas (1879-1952), author of Social Credit (1924). He hoped to achieve a better balance or mutual adjustment in the developments of wage and price levels. Lewis learnt about the “Douglas scheme” in the early 1920s through his friend Owen Barfield, who for some time supported it (cf. Astrid Diener, The Role of Imagination in Culture and Society: Owen Barfield’s Early Work, 2002, pp. 168-170, referring to John L. Finlay, Social Credit: The Engligh Origin, 1972).

 

Federal Unionists

Members of the Federal Union, A pro-European British movement founded in November 1938 by Charles Kimber, Derek Rawnsley and Patrick Ransome.

 

par. 25   the special human

 

Arthur and Aelfred, Elizabeth and Cromwell, Walpole and Burke

A small selection of main figures of British history. Arthur is a semi-legendary Celtic hero who perhaps lived around 500 CE; as “King Arthur” he became a hero of European popular literature from the 12th century onward. Aelfred is the 9th-century Alfred the Great, King of the West Saxons, notable scholar, writer, and champion of learning. The long reign (1558-1603) of Queen Elizabeth I, England’s last Tudor monarch, was notable for commercial growth, maritime expansion, flourishing  arts, and much of Shakespeare’s life and work; Oliver Cromwell (1699-1658) was a leader of the parliamentary army during the mid-17th-century Civil War and acted as “Lord Protector of the Commonwealth” for the last five years of his life; Robert Walpole (1676-1745), father of the writer Horace Walpole, was a British statesman who effectively acted as the country’s Prime Minster before the position was explicitly recognized; Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was an Irish-born British statesman, orator and conservative political theorist.

 

my Beowulf, my Shakespeare, my Johnson or my Wordsworth

A selection of high points of English literary history. Beowulf is a heroic poem perhaps dating from the 6th century; Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616; Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was a poet, essayist and lexicographer immortalized by his conversation as recorded in the 1791 biography by James Boswell; William Wordsworth (1770-1850), author of The Prelude, was one of Lewis’s favourite English poets.

 

par. 26   so much for

 

Terris Bay

“Terris” may well be a typo or the result of a misreading at some stage: HMS Jervis Bay was a British convoy escort which was sunk by a German battleship in the Atlantic Ocean on 5 November 1940.

   Another plausible candidate for a ship to be mentioned here would the SS Athenia, the first British vessel (a passenger ship) sunk by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, on 3 September 1939, 400 km to the northwest of Ireland.

 

with Homer and Virgil, with Plato and Aristotle, with Zarathustra and the Bhagavad-Gita, with Cicero and Montaigne, with Iceland and with Egypt

Homer (8th century BC), Greek poet, author of the Iliad and Odyssey; Virgil (70-19 BC), Roman poet, author of the Aeneid; Plato (428-347 BC) and his pupil Aristotle (384-322 BC), Greek philosophers; Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, Persian prophet who probably lived long before 1000 BC; Bhagavad-Gita, a long poem and sacred text of Hinduism probably dating from around 200 BC. Iceland refers mainly to the Eddas (the Elder or Poetic Edda and Younger or Prose Edda), two Icelandic compilations of Norse myths both dating from the 13th century. “Egypt” likely refers to expressions of ancient Egyptian wisdom such as Lewis cited in the Appendix to The Abolition of Man (1943), notably the quote in section 8(a) from Pharaoh Senusert III:

To take no notice of a violent attack is to strengthen the heart of the enemy. Vigour is valiant, but cowardice is vile.

 

as Johnson replied to Goldsmith, ‘Nay Sir ...’

Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 7 May 1773, paragraph opening “I introduced the subject of toleration”; the occasion is a dinner party at the booksellers Dilly, with Goldsmith, Langton, Claxton, Mayo, Toplady, Temple, Johnson and Boswell present.

Goldsmith. “But how is a man to act, Sir? Though firmly convinced of the truth of his doctrine, may he not think it wrong to expose himself to persecution? (...) Is it not, as it were, committing voluntary suicide?”
Johnson. “Nay, Sir, if you will not take the universal opinion of mankind, I have nothing to say. If mankind cannot defend their own way of thinking, I cannot defend it. Sir, if a man is in doubt whether it would be better for him to expose himself to martyrdom or not, he should not do it. He must be convinced that he has a delegation from heaven.”

 

par. 27   i am aware

Hooker thought “the general and perpetual voice ...”

Richard Hooker (1554-1600), English theologian, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity I.8.3. This is a paraphrase of a much older Latin proverb, Vox populi, vox Dei (“voice of the people, voice of God”), which is of uncertain origin but certainly already old in the days of Charlemagne (8th-9th century); see Wikipedia article on this maxim.

 

supercession

Possibly a typo for supersession; both words are possible.

 

par. 29   i shall consider

 

securus judicat

Augustine, Contra epistolam Parmeniani, III.4, §24, in Migne, Patrologia Latina, Vol. XLIII, col. 101).

Securus judicat orbis terrarum bonos non esse qui se dividunt ab orbe terrarum in quâcunque parte orbis terrarum.
(“The entire world judges with security that they are not good who separate themselves from the entire world in whichever part of the entire world.”)

The phrase, securus judicat, played a crucial part in the conversion of John Henry Newman to Catholicism in 1845.

 

Thirty-Nine Articles

The “Articles of Religion”, a statement of the doctrines of the Church of England, dating from 1563 and later included in the Book of Common Prayer. In 1672 adherence was made a requirement for holding civic office; this ruling remained in force until 1824. Lewis is quoting the last sentence of Article 37.

 

Dissenters ... Presbyterians

In British history, Dissenters or Nonconformists were protestant Christians who refused to join the established, Anglican church. Within this category, a large sub-category were the Presbyterians, who adhered to a Calvinistic theology and mode of church government.

 

the ruling of Thomas Aquinas

Summa Theologica II.II, Q. 40, Art. 1. “Et sicut licite defendunt eam materiali gladio contra interiores quidem perturbatores, ... ita etiam gladio bellico ad eos pertinet rempublicam tueri ab exterioribus hostibus.”

 

Augustine, “If Christian discipleship ... ‘Do violence to no man’ ...”

The Bible passage is taken from Luke 3:14. Lewis appears to be loosely rendering a passage on the subject in Augustine’s Contra Faustum Manichaeum (Against Faustus the Manichaean) XXII.74:

... What is the evil in war? Is it the death of some who will soon die in any case, that others may live in peaceful subjection? This is mere cowardly dislike, not any religious feeling. The real evils in war are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power, and such like; and it is generally to punish these things, when force is required to inflict the punishment, that, in obedience to God or some lawful authority, good men undertake wars, when they find themselves in such a position as regards the conduct of human affairs, that right conduct requires them to act, or to make others act in this way. Otherwise John, when the soldiers who came to be baptized asked, What shall we do? would have replied, Throw away your arms; give up the service; never strike, or wound, or disable any one. But knowing that such actions in battle were not murderous but authorized by law, and that the soldiers did not thus avenge themselves, but defend the public safety, he replied, “Do violence to no man, accuse no man falsely, and be content with your wages.” But as the Manichæans are in the habit of speaking evil of John, let them hear the Lord Jesus Christ Himself ordering this money to be given to Cæsar, which John tells the soldiers to be content with. “Give,” He says, “to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.” For tribute-money is given on purpose to pay the soldiers for war. Again, in the case of the centurion who said, “I am a man under authority, and have soldiers under me: and I say to one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it,” Christ gave due praise to his faith; He did not tell him to leave the service. ...

(translation by Albert H. Newman, 1887; Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 4, pp. 515-516.)

 

par. 30   the whole christian

 

“Resist not evil ...”

Matthew 5:39.

 

given to all who ask him

Cf. Matthew 5:42, “Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.”

 

par. 31   there are three ways

 

in more logical language ... simpliciter ... secundum quid

The Latin phrase secundum quid literally means “according to something”. In a chapter on the word “Simple” in his book Studies in Words (1960; second edition 1967, pp. 168-169), Lewis mentions a “logical branch” as the first of three strands in the development of the word’s meaning. He notes that “for purely logical purposes it is best to use in English the Latin word” (i.e. to use simpliciter), and that “our older writers use simply in precisely this way”. Also, he quotes a passage from Thomas Aquinas (S.T. II.1, Q. 6, Art. 6) in which simpliciter is paired with secundum quid as its opposite. Lewis then defines simpliciter as

“in itself”, intrinsically, unconditionally, not in relation to special circumstances ... without qualification

and submits that

the opposites ... would be expressed by reservations: “in a way”, “in a sense”, ... “in the circumstances”.

Lewis’s example of the “homicidal maniac, attempting to murder a third party”, is perhaps unfortunate since the injury in question here is not the attempt at murder (which could be reckoned injurious simpliciter), but the attempt “to knock me out of the way” (which in different circumstances might be welcome or justified). Presumably it is only the latter and less sensational injury simpliciter which is to be borne patiently.

 

they may be then other motives

typo for “there may be then” etc.

 

par. 32   that is my

 

St John Baptist’s words to the soldiers

Luke 3:14.

 

a Roman centurion

Matthew 8:10, Luke 7:9.

 

too many historical Jesuses ... liberal, pneumatic, Barthian, Marxist

A year or so later Lewis developed the theme of the many “historical Jesuses” in The Screwtape Letters, chapter 23.

 

 

back to survey

 

MEDITATION ON THE THIRD COMMANDMENT

 

First published on 10 January 1941, this was the last of three articles Lewis wrote for The Guardian before he he began contributing his thirty-one weekly “Screwtape Letters” to this periodical in May 1941.

 

par. 1   from many letters

 

The Guardian

A weekly religious newspaper founded in 1846 to uphold High Church Tractarian principles within the Church of England. Lewis was a subscriber. The paper ceased publication in 1951. (Today’s British daily newspaper of the same name, founded in 1821, was published as The Manchester Guardian until 1959.)

 

M. Maritain’s Scholasticism and Politics

Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), French Catholic philosopher and major figure in the revival of Thomistic philosophy in the early 20th century. Scholasticism and Politics (Macmillan, New York and Geoffrey Bles, London, 1940) is a volume of nine lectures delivered in the United States in the fall of 1938. Although this is a translation (edited by M. J. Adler), the collection as such was never previously published in French. The originals of the last three essays – “Action and Contemplation”, “Catholic Action and Political Action” and “Christianity and Earthly Civilizations”, had been published in a French volume titled Questions de conscience (1938).

 

par. 3–5   what, then, will  [etc.]

 

Philarchus ... Stativus ... Spartacus

Fictitious types with pseudo-classical names suggesting their respective characters – Reactionary (“lover of old things”), Conservative (“steadfast”), Revolutionary (Spartacus was the leader of a slave uprising in the Roman Republic, 73-71 BC).

 

par. 7   it is not

 

late medieval pseudo-Crusaders

Expeditions to the Baltic region, north-eastern Europe, by 14th-century West European  knights in search of the supposed glory and adventure of the original crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries (undertaken to liberate Jerusalem and fight Islam). The pseudo-Crusaders’ nominal purpose was to convert or exterminate Europe’s last pagan tribes, notably the Prussians – whose name was eventually adopted by German conquerors of the region.

 

Covenanters

Protestant Christians of the Presbyterian persuasion in 16th- and 17th-century Scotland, who covenanted – i.e. took an oath – to stand firm for their faith.

 

Orangemen

Members of the Orange Order (or Orange Association, or Loyal Orange Institution), founded in 1795 to defend Protestant supremacy in Ireland. It was called after the Dutch-born king William of Orange, who had secured a major Protestant victory in 1690.

 

par. 9   m. maritain has hinted

 

Nonconformity

A generic label for the position of “dissenting” Protestants in British history, i.e. those who would not “conform” to the theology or church order of the Anglican Church.

 

the dove and the serpent

Matthew 10:16.

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

 

 

back to survey

 

EVIL AND GOD

 

The Spectator, 7 February 1941. In November 1942, the popular philosopher and prolific writer C. E. M. Joad (1891-1953) published a 363-page book under the title God and Evil which includes a response to Lewis’s present critique. For a general discussion of Joad and Lewis and their exchanges, see Joel Heck, “From Vocal Agnostic to Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis and C. E. M. Joad”, Sehnsucht Vol. 3 (2010), pp. 11-31; however, Heck’s essay does not explore the comparatively abundant material provided by Joad’s 1942 book, including a passage in which Joad explains why he has a high regard for “Mr. Lewis’s competence as an exponent of Christian doctrine”.

 

par.1   dr joad’s article

 

Zoroastrians

Adherents of the ancient Iranian religion which traced its origin to the prophet Zarathustra (or Zoroaster, from Greek Zoroastres), who probably lived long before 1000 B.C.

 

mechanism and emergent evolution

In Joad’s 1942 book, the two subjects are treated in the third and forth chapters respectively. In the 1920s Joad had himself been a believer in emergent evolution and an admirer of its most eloquent spokesman in Britain, Bernard Shaw.

 

emergent evolution

Emergent Evolution is the title of the Gifford Lectures for 1922-1923 by British psychologist and polymath C. Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936). Like the French philosopher Bergson (1859-1941), Lloyd Morgan addressed the problem that the Darwinian theory of evolution failed to explain many cases of development from “lower” to “higher”  organisms. Reason, consciousness and life itself were conspicuous examples. These and suchlike phenomena he called emergents.

 

using the word God to mean “whatever the universe happens to be going to do next”

Lewis is here perhaps mainly thinking of Space, Time and Deity (1920) by Samuel Alexander, a friend of Lloyd Morgan. Alexander’s work originated as the Gifford Lectures for 1916-1918.

 

Mellontolatry

Greek mellon = the future.

 

par. 2   we are left

 

Victorian philosophers

While it is hard to say if Lewis had any specific late-19th-century “philosophers” in mind, Joad in his 1942 reply to Lewis (God and Evil, p. 69) conceded the essential point – that the Victorian and Edwardian ages in England were abnormal; they constituted a wholly unrepresentative little pocket of security and decency in the immense desert of man’s beastliness and misery.

 

Boethius waiting in prison

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

 

Augustine meditating on the sack of Rome

The church father St Augustine (354-430) wrote his best-known apologetic work, The City of God (De civitate Dei) in response to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in the year 410.

 

it was the last century which was the abnormality

As noted, Joad later conceded the point about an alleged “new urgency” of the problem of evil; he quoted Lewis’s passage about Boethius and Augustine (God and Evil, p. 69). However, Joad maintained and developed at great length his own dualism as the most plausible view (chapter 3, “The Obtrusiveness of Evil”, pp. 68-111, esp. 92-98 and 108-111). In his last book, The Recovery of Belief (1952), chapter 3, “The Significance of Evil”, Joad finally gave up his dualism too. He there also talks of his own generation as “the generation of optimists that flourished before 1914” (Recovery, p. 81).

 

par. 7   good and evil

 

on all fours

An expression frequently used by Joad.

 

Ormuzd and Ahriman

In ancient Iranian religion, Ormuzd (or Ahura Mazda) is the god of light, and Ahriman (or Angra Mainyu) is the god of darkness.

 

“fell, incensed points”

Shakespeare, Hamlet V.2.62.

’Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.

 

those who are prepared to reinstate Ormuzd and Ahriman

i.e. those who, like Joad, propose to revive Dualism.

 

 

back to survey

 

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. – The theme of this piece is closely related to that of the first instalment of Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, which appeared elsewhere one month after “Bulverism” appeared in Time and Tide.

 

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. Lewis wrote about “ideological taint” as a phrase typically used by “the hard boiled economist” in his brief essay “Two Ways with the Self” of May 1940.

 

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. 6   i find the fruits

 

I can see early enough that some people

Here is a typo in the text as found in the 1970 volume God in the Dock published by Eerdmans. The original and correct text, found elsewhere, is “I can see easily enough” etc. The Eerdmans volume has been reprinted without corrections at least until well into the 2010s.

 

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.

 

 

back to survey

 

RELIGION: REALITY OR SUBSTITUTE?

 

First delivered as a sermon at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, at some point before 17 August 1941, when Lewis referred to it in a letter to Alec Vidler (CL2, 490). For World Dominion, in which the text was first published in September-October 1941, see introductory note to “Myth Became Fact”. Walter Hooper mentions some additions made “a few years later” but gives no details about the occasion. Possibly, Lewis preached this sermon once again in his local parish church at Headington Quarry on 29 March 1942.

 

par. 7   but enough of

 

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

Milton, Paradise Lost IV, 477-491.

 

Barfield … “vegetarian jazz”

Owen Barfield (1898-1997) was a lifelong friend of Lewis since both men’s first year in Oxford, 1919. Lewis is probably referring to Barfield’s 1930 essay “Death”, which appears to have much impressed Lewis at the time (Collected Letters I, 899 and III, 1519-20). It was never published until 2008 (in VII, vol. 25, pp. 45-60). Half-way through this essay Barfield writes,

…the higher power of understanding embraces the lower. The crowd outside the Palais de Danse looks on at the crowd outside the concert-hall with amusement and contempt. Who shall ever convince it that a Brandenburg Concerto is not a sort of bloodless, vegetarian, substitute for Swing − a “mock” Swing? Yet some day it will have to find this out for itself. So also must each man find out for himself … that the nothingness of the self (provided it is willed) is not Nothing, but Something.

 

par. 10   have we now

 

the American in the old story

From Dracula, a Gothic horror novel by Bram Stoker published in 1897. At the end of chapter 14, John Seward, the administrator of an insane asylum, describes a conversation with his mentor Professor Abraham Van Helsing. In an attempt to prepare Seward for the utterly odd and gruesome truth about his former patient Lucy, Van Helsing (a Dutchman who speaks broken English) mentions several phenomena which are hard to believe and yet evidently true. Seware then responds:

   “Professor, let me be your pet student again. Tell me the thesis, so that I may apply your knowledge as you go on. At present I am going in my mind from point to point as a mad man, and not a sane one, follows an idea. I feel like a novice lumbering through a bog in a mist, jumping from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort to move on without knowing where I am going.”

    “That is good image,” he said. “Well, I shall tell you. My thesis is this: I want you to believe.”

    “To believe what?”

    “To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard once of an American who so defined faith: ‘that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.’ For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.”

    “Then you want me not to let some previous conviction injure the receptivity of my mind with regard to some strange matter. Do I read your lesson aright?”

    “Ah, you are my favourite pupil still. It is worth to teach you. Now that you are willing to understand, you have taken the first step to understand.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE WEIGHT OF GLORY

 

A sermon preached at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on Sunday 8 June 1941. This was less than two months after Lewis had begun lecturing at Royal Air Force bases, one month after his Screwtape Letters began to be serialized in the church newspaper The Guardian, and two months before he gave his first BBC radio talk. The sermon was first published in Theology, November 1941, and it was his last contribution to this monthly magazine.

 

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]

 

 

back to survey

 

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. Lewis’s friend Charles Williams was a regular contributor from 1937 onward ujhtil his death in 1945 and Lewis himself contributed a total of twenty-five pieces (essays, reviews, poems) in the period 1940-1960, including reviews of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

 

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.

 

 

back to survey

 

MIRACLES

 

A sermon preached on Sunday, 27 September 1942 at St. Jude-on-the-Hill, a church in northern London, immediately after Lewis had delivered the second instalment in his third series of BBC radio talks. A short version of the sermon was first published on 2 October in The Guardian, the Anglican weekly which had serialized The Screwtape Letters in 1941. The fuller text appeared in Saint Jude’s Gazette nr. 73, October 1942. See Lewis’s letter of 28 September 1942 to Rosamund Rieu (Collected Letters III, 1545-6.

    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 which was later reprinted as “On the Reading of Old Books”. He points out there that “[Athanasius’s] approach to the Miracles is badly needed today”.

 

“Our Lord took a body like …”
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”)

 

some finite being such as Genius

Typo alert: the text as printed and reprinted in God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970) has “infinite being” instead of the correct “finite being”.

 

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

Typo alert: Some editions have misprinted spirituality as spiritually.

 

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

 

“ifs and ands”

The expression dates from the early 16th century, when “and” was frequently used to mean “if”. The phrase effectively means “ifs and ifs”. Lewis’s precise meaning here can be further gauged from the way he uses the same phrase in Miracles, chapter 11 (par. 9, “It will be agreed...”, p. 90 in the 1960 Fontana edition):

Laws give us only a universe of “Ifs and Ands”: not this universe which actually exists. What we know through lawas adn general principles is a series of connections. But in order for there to be a real univese the connections must be given something to connect; a torrent of opaque actualities must be fed into the pattern.

 

the act of generation

Typo alert: the text as printed and reprinted in God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970) has “generations” instead of the correct “generation”.

 

Julian of Norwich

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

 

 

back to survey

 

THE FOUNDING OF THE OXFORD SOCRATIC CLUB

 

The Socratic Digest was an irregularly published compilation of papers presented to the Oxford University Socratic Club during the Club’s first twelve years, when C. S. Lewis was its President. A total of five issues appeared (1943, 1944, 1945, 1948 and 1952); a complete reprint in one volume was published in 2012. A survey and discussion of the Club’s history of this period is offered in Walter Hooper’s essay “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter”, in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, edited by James T. Como (1979, new edition 1992, republished in 2005 as Remembering C. S. Lewis).

 

par. 1   like a quietly efficient

 

Byron’s Don Juan

Lord Byron’s long satirical poem Don Juan, first published in 1819-1824. Lewis is referring to the appearance of the Russian general Suvorov as described in Canto VII, stanza 46ff:

He flitted to and fro a dancing light,
Which all who saw it followed, wrong or right. (...)

’T is thus the spirit of a single mind
Makes that of multitudes take one direction,
As roll the waters to the breathing wind,
Or roams the herd beneath the bull’s protection;
Or as a little dog will lead the blind,
Or a bell-wether form the flock’s connection
By tinkling sounds, when they go forth to victual;
Such is the sway of your great men o’er little. (...)

There was not now a luggage boy but sought
Danger and spoil with ardour much increased;
And why? because a little – odd – old man,
Stripped to his shirt, was come to lead the van. (...)

But so it was; and every preparation
Was made with all alacrity: the first
Detachment of three columns took its station,
And waited but the signal’s voice to burst
Upon the foe: the second’s ordination
Was also in three columns, with a thirst
For Glory gaping o’er a sea of Slaughter:
The third, in columns two, attacked by water.

 

our Chairman

Stella Aldwinckle (1907-1990) studied theology in Oxford in the 1930s and joined the Oxford Pastorate in 1941.

 

meeting once a week

The first meeting took place on 26 January 1942 in Somerville College, Oxford, a women’s college where Stella Aldwinckle acted as an adviser to the students.

 

Socrates ... “follow the argument wherever it led them”

In Plato’s work, perhaps the one place where the maxim is found more or less as quoted by Lewis is the dialogue The Sophist, 224e. The speaker is not Socrates (who hardly figures in this text) but the budding young philosopher Theaetetus from Sounion in conversation with “a stranger from Elea”:

... I have to follow where the argument leads.

An echo of this, again from the mouth of Theaetetus, is found in 237b:

Assume my consent to anything you wish. Consider only the argument, how it may best be pursued; follow your own course, and take me along with you.

A similar idea is expressed in the dialogue Theaetetus, named after the same young man, now in conversation with Socrates. The relevant words are again not spoken by Socrates, but by a secondary character, the geometricion Theodorus (169c-d):

  socrates. ... many a Heracles and many a Thesus, strong men of words, have fallen in with me and belaboured me mightily, but still I do not desist, such a terrible love of this kind of exercise has taken hold on me. So, now that it is your turn, do not refuse to try a bout with me; it will be good for both of us.
  theodorus. I say no more. Lead on as you like. Most assuredly I must endure whatsoever fate you spin for me, and submit to interrogation. However, I shall not be able to leave myself in your hands beyond the point you propose.
  socrates. Even that is enough. And please be especially careful that we do not inadvertently give a playful turn to our argument and somebody reproach us agian for it.
    theodorus. Rest assured that I will try so far as in me lies.

An actually Socratic expression of the same idea is found later in the same dialogue. Socrates urges his conversation partners to persist in their joint attempt (after two failures) to define “knowledge”. Referring to a story of a man who is asked whether the water won’t be too deep, he goes on  (200e):

The man who was leading the way through the river, Theaetetus, said: “The result itself will show;” and so in this matter, if we go on with our search, perhaps the thing will turn up in our path and of itself reveal the object of our search; but if we stay still, we shall discover nothing.

(translations by H. N. Fowler, Loeb edition, 1921).

Further instances of Socrates expressing this or some similar idea are found in Crito 46b, in Phaedo 46b, 95b and 107b, and in Republic (Politeia) 394d:

I certainly don’t know yet; we must let our destination be decided by the winds of the discussion.

(translation by Robin Waterfield, Oxford U.P. 1994)

Lewis was using the expression at least as early as January 1924, when he began writing “a thesis for St John’s [College, Oxford]” as part of an attempt to apply for a fellowship. Having decided to write “an answer to Bertrand Russell’s ‘Worship of a Free Man’” and done some preparatory reading, he

sat down with paper in front of me and began to follow the argument where it would lead me, conscientiously avoiding the conclusions I desired to reach. It led me almost into impossible antimonies: but I got a lot of interesting stuff.

–– All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922-1927, ed. Watler Hooper (1996), 8 January 1924

 

par. 2   there had been 

 

sansculottisme

Sans culotte is French for “without knee-breeches”. During the French Revolution, revolutionaries of the poorer classes tended to wear pantaloons or trousers and so came to be called sans-culottes. The name later came to refer to revolutionary or left-wing extremists in general.

 

par. 5   others may have

 

too sacred to be talked of

cf. Lewis’s quote in “The Decline of Religion” (1946) from a passage in J. H. Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons II (1835), Nr. 15, “Self-Contemplation”.

 ... solemn truths, too sacred to be lightly mentioned ...

 

what a man does with his solitude

Alexander Whitehead, Religion in the Making (1926), Lecture I: “Religion is what the individual does with its own solitariness”. Also quoted in Lewis’s essays “Membership” (1945) and “The Decline of Religion” (1946).

 

 

back to survey

 

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. 10); in the revised edition of Miracles Lewis specified that he was only talking about “the policeman in the story” and put the phrase “will be used as evidence against Him” in quotation marks (the reason is spelled out in a letter of 18 February 1960 to his publisher; CL3, 1135).

   Lewis was in fact referring to an episode in a fantasy novel by James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (1912), chapter 14. In Surprised by Joy (1955), ch. VII, par. 17, recounting the year he spent at at Malvern College (school year 1913-14), Lewis mentions that he had “lately read [The Crock of Gold] for the first time with great excitement.” In a letter to Arthur Greeves of February 1917 he was already referring to “the humour both of the philosopher and the policemen” in this novel (Collected Letters I, 280); in his 1946 essay “Period Criticism”, par. 3, he mentions the scene as one of the “inexahustibly” comic effects in the writings of Stephens.

 

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 imaginations 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.

 

I should be suffocated in a universe that I could see to the end of

Cf. Lewis’s letter of 27 December 1929 to Arthur Greeves (Collected Letters I, 854):

Bacon says “The whole world cannot fill, much less distend the mind of man.” (By the way, that is the answer to those who argue that the universe cannot be spiritual because it is so vast and inhuman and alarming. On the contrary, nothing less would do for us. At our best, we can stand it, and could not stand anything smaller or snugger. Anything less than the terrifyingly big would, at some moments, be cramping and “homely” in the bad sense – as one speaks of a “homely” face. You can’t have elbow room for things like men except in endless time and space and staggering multiplicity.)

 

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 ancient proponent of a materialist view of the universe.

 

the real cosmic wave

??

 

par. 15   for example, it

 

the Nicene Creed

See note to par. 5, above.

 

Harley Street

A street in central London famous for its large number of medical specialists’ consulting rooms.

 

A modern Christian philosopher ... a process lasting from the first creation of matter

cf. Lewis’s George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946), Nr. 138, “The Lower Forms” (a quote from Macdonald’s sermon “Life”, on John 10:10).

I trust that life in its lowest forms is on the way to thought and blessedness, is in the process of that separation, so to speak, from God, in which consists the creation of living souls.

 

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.

 

 

back to survey

 

THREE KINDS OF MEN

 

First published in The Sunday Times, 21 March 1943.

 

categorical imperative

Term introduced by Immanual Kant in his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), denoting a precept which a person must obey because he or she would wish all people to obey it. Such a precept is an unconditional moral obligation, binding in all circumstances and not dependent on a person’s inclination or purpose. Kant distinguished it from the “hypothetical imperative”, i.e. a precept that is binding only if some particular aim is to be achieved.

 

Paul … “to live is Christ”

Philippians 1:21 (NIV).

… to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labour for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.

 

Even on those terms

The words are almost identical to those found in Lewis’s account of his own conversion to belief in God in Surprised by Joy, chapter XIV, last paragraph:

That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. … I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.

 

 

back to survey

 

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.

 

 

back to survey

 

DE FUTILITATE

 

par. 1   when i was asked

 

Sir Henry Tizard

Sir Henry Thomas Tizard (1885-1959), a chemist; he was elected President of Magdalen College, Oxford, on 25 July 1942 and resigned in August 1946. His tenure was the shortest since the early 18th century, and he was succeeded by Thomas Boase, an art historian. Lewis, in a private letter of 15 October 1957, commented that “We have a change of President – for the better.” (Collected Letters 2, 808).

 

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 (1927) 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. 19   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. 25   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

 

First published in the U.S. Methodist journal Religion in Life: A Christian Quarterly of Opinion and Discussion, vol. 12 (Summer 1943), pp. 356-365; first reprinted in Christian Reflections, 1967.

    This was the first of Lews’s writings to be first published in the United States and only afterwards in Great Britain. Religion in Life later also published Lewis’s article that was later reprinted as “The World’s Last Night”. After 1980 the journal was continued as Quarterly Review.

 

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. 15   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. 16   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.

 

a mere chaos – though no outline… / a mere chaos – that no outline…

Typo alert: The word “though” in the 1967 U.S. edition of Christian Reflections (and many reprints) is an error. It should be read as “that”, as in all British editions since the first.

 

par. 17   the two grand

 

Pickwick

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

 

par. 18   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, 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. 19   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. 20   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. 21   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

 

EQUALITY

 

First published in The Spectator, 27 August 1943. This old English conservative weekly was founded in 1828. It published a total of twenty contributions by Lewis (seven poems, nine essays, and four letters to the editor), most of them in the years around 1945.

 

Aristotle … only fit to be slaves

See Book I of Aristotle’s Politics, 1253b-1256a, especially 1255a.

… if freemen were born as distinguished in body as are the statues of the gods, everyone would say that those who were inferior deserved to be these men’s slaves; and if this is true in the case of the body, there is far juster reason for this rule being laid down in the case of the soul, but beauty of soul is not so easy to see as beauty of body. It is manifest therefore that there are cases of people of whom some are freemen and the others slaves by nature, and for these slavery is an institution both expedient and just.

Aristotle goes on to note that there is some persistent and understandable disagreement, “even among the learned”, about the justness of at least some forms of slavery, and concludes (1255b):

It is clear therefore that there is some reason for this dispute, and that in some instances it is not the case that one set are slaves and the other freemen by nature; and also that in some instances such a distinction does exist, when slavery for the one and mastership for the other are advantageous, and it is just and proper for the one party to be governed and for the other to govern by the form of government for which they are by nature fitted, and therefore by the exercise of mastership, while to govern badly is to govern disadvantageously for both parties.

(translation by H. Rackham, Loeb edition, 1932)

 

“these troublesome disguises”

John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) IV, 740 − on Adam and Eve having said a prayer before spending their first night together:

This said unanimous, and other rites
Observing none, but adoration pure,
Which God likes best, into their inmost bower
Handed they went; and, eased the putting-off
These troublesome disguises which we wear,
Straight side by side were laid; nor turned, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused …

 

Naomi Mitchison [Hooper’s note]

The Home and a Changing Civilisation (1943), chapter 1, pp. 49-50.

 

The error here…

This short aside on friendship and other forms, while not perhaps very relevant in the present context, points forward to Lewis’s later book The Four Loves (1960). Presumably his thinking about various distinct “forms of affection” was partly inspired or stimulated by Denis de Rougemont’s book L’amour et l’occident (1939), of which Lewis had reviewed the English translation (Passion and Society) in 1940.

 

 

back to survey

 

MY FIRST SCHOOL

 

First published in Time and Tide, 4 September 1943.

 

preparatory school

A school (mostly boarding school) for pupils aged about 6−12. Lewis’s first school was Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire, north-west of London. He spent two years there, from September 1908 till July 1910, when the school was closed; see Lewis’s account in his autobiographical book Surprised by Joy, chapter 2, “Concentration Camp”. It was only after he had written this book, i.e. long after he wrote the present essay, that Lewis discovered that the school’s cruel headmaster and only teacher had been certified insane in 1911.

 

Vice Versa

Comic novel by F. Anstey (1856-1934), published in 1882. The subtitle is A Lesson to Fathers. Father and son magically swap their bodies and situations, enabling the father to experience the life of a boarding-school boy.

 

“Yes, Sir, and Oh, Sir, and Please, Sir brigade”

From Ian Hay, The Lighter Side of School Life (1914), chapter 6, in a passage on Rudyard Kipling and his novel Stalky & Co.

… in Stalky he brings out vividly some of the salient features of modern school life. … He depicts, too, very faithfully, the curious camaraderie which prevails nowadays between boys and masters, and pokes mordant fun at the sycophancy which this state of things breeds in a certain type of boy – the “Oh, sir! and No, sir! and Yes, sir! and Please, sir!” brigade – and deals faithfully with the master who takes advantage of out-of-school intimacy to be familiar and offensive in school …

 

Squeers

Wackford Squeers, headmaster of Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire, in the novel Nicholas Nickleby (1839) by Charles Dickens.

 

Bunyan … the Pilgrims

Passage a few pages before the end of the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), by John Bunyan.

 

heavily vanished

Shakespeare, The Tempest IV, stage direction after line 138. Heavily here means “slowly”. Likely enough Lewis was thinking of the famous subsequent comment by Prospero on the sudden disappearance of the dancing “Reapers” and Nymphs:

           These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
                      … the great globe itself
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

 

portions and parcels of the dreadful Past

From the fourth Choric Song in the “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832), a poem by Alfred Tennyson.

 

Present Things

Lewis’s capital letters might indicate a case of citation or allusion; if they do, then perhaps he was echoing the way this term is sometimes used by the 17th-century puritan theologian Richard Baxter. (Lewis began using Baxter’s term “mere Christianity” around the time of writing this essay, first in The Screwtape Letters, chapter 25.)

 

 

back to survey

 

IS ENGLISH DOOMED?

 

First published in The Spectator, 11 February 1944.

 

Norwood Report

In 1943 an advisory committee for the British minister of Education, presided by Sir Cyril Norwood, published Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools: Report of the Committee of the Secondary School Examinations Council Appointed by the President of the Board of Education in 1941.

 

Tripos in Cambridge ... Schools in Oxford

The two famous old English universities each have their own traditional word for “examination”. Both Tripos and Schools may also refer to the study leading up to the exam or to the syllabus describing the contents of that study.

 

“the spectator” … “time and existence”

Lewis appears to be combining two allusions: to the Specatator magazine for which he was writing, and to Plato’s Republic VI, 486a. English translations do not usually employ the word “spectator” to render Plato’s θεωρία (theōria), but it is actually found in Benjamin Jowett’s 1894 version:

“How can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all time and all existence, think much of human life?”

 

Phaenomenologie des Geistes

(German) “Phenomenology of the Spirit”. This is the title of the first major work, published in 1807, of the German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).

 

Launcelot, Baron Bradwardine, Mulvaney

− Launcelot is one of the knights of the Round Table in Arthurian romance from the late 12th century onwards.
− Baron Bradwardine is a personage (father of the hero’s eventual wife) in Walter Scott’s novel Waverley (1814).
− Terence Mulvaney is one of the soldiers in Rudyard Kipling’s Soldiers Three (1888), a volume of short stories.

 

Literae Humaniores

A course of academic study more or less specific to Oxford and informally called “Greats”. It combined the study of classical languages, literature and history with that of ancient and modern philosophy. Lewis completed this study in the years 1919-22. After this he also read English, completing this two-years course within a year. In 1925 he found a job as Fellow and Tutor of English at Magdalen College, Oxford, although initially he took philosophy students as well. His remark about having been a “teacher only” in History is somewhat mysterious: it would seem more accurate to say he had been a pupil only.

 

“liberal”

A term dating from antiquity, denoting subjects or studies which were considered to be only suitable or possible for “free” men, i.e. not for slaves, and not supposed to have any immediate practical application. Their purpose was rather the student’s own mental and spiritual development and the embellishment of life. See also Lewis’s 1957 essay “Is History Bunk?”, third paragraph.

 

Sidney’s Musidorus

In The Arcadia (1590), a prose romance by Sir Philip Sidney, Book 5. Musidorus is speaking words of comfort and encouragement to his cousin Pyrocles; both men are condemned to death.

We have lived, and have lived to be good to ourselves and others; our souls, which are put into the stirring earth of our bodies, have achieved the causes of their thither coming: they have known and honoured with knowledge the cause of their creation, and to many men, for in this time, place and fortune, it is lawful for us to speak gloriously, it hath been behoveful that we should live. Since then eternity is not to be had in this conjunction, what is to be lost by the separation, but time?

(p. 593 in the 1907 Routledge edition available at Archive.org)

 

what fruits that study has borne during its short existence

At the beginning of the 20th century, English language and literature was a rather new academic discipline, not yet taken quite seriously in all quarters. Lewis himself appears to have been sceptical even until 1925; he decided to study English mainly because it was “a rising subject” and thus, for him, an easy way to improve his prospects on the academic job market. In Oxford, it was only in 1899 that this study got official recognition as a “School” in its own right. The first chair was founded in 1904 and the English Faculty instituted in 1926.

 

Raleigh ... Ker ... Chambers

− Sir Walter Raleigh (1861-1922) was Oxford’s first Professor of English from 1904 onwards.
− W. P. Ker (1855-1923), literary historian and medievalist, was Professor of Poetry 1920-1923.
− R. W. Chambers (1874-1942), like Lewis a friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, was Professor of English at University College London.

 

Skeat, Furnivall, York Powell, Wright

− W. W. Skeat (1835-1912), Professor of Anglo-Saxon in Cambridge.
− Frederick James Furnivall (1825-1910), secretary of the Philological Society 1853-1910; second editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; founder of the Early English Text Society in 1864.
− Frederick York Powell (1850-1904), Regius Professor of Modern History in Oxford; specialist of old English history and old Norse literature.
− Joseph Wright (1855-1930), Professor of Comparative Philology in Oxford; editor of the English Dialect Dictionary.

 

we have … conducted an Examination for Englishmen now behind barbed wire in Germany

The “we” referred to here includes Lewis himself. On this part of his war work, never mentioned by any biographer of C. S. Lewis to date, see Bruce R. Johnson’s essay, “The Efforts of C. S. Lewis to Aid British Prisoners of War during World War II”, in Sehnsucht, Vol. 12 (2018), 41-76.

 

 

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 science fiction 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. A passage in Lewis’s letter to Dom Bede Griffiths of 17 January 1940 suggests that he had read this book recently, i.e. while he was writing The Problem of Pain, and that he was concerned about  good translation (Collected Letters II, 326):

Yes, I’ve also read the Scale of Perfection with much admiration. I think of sending the anonymous translator a list of passages that he might reconsider for the next edition.

 

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 II, 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 British literary magazine The Nineteenth Century was founded in 1877 and published until 1972, changing its name into The Nineteenth Century and After in 1901, and The Twentieth Century in 1951; Lewis wrote two articles for it during the 1950s. In the April 1943 issue, pp. 167-173, “Science and the B.B.C.” appears as an article by Douglas Dewar and Lewis Merson Davies.

   Dewar (1875-1957) was co-founder (1932) and first secretary of the Evolution Protest Movement; Davies (1882-1955) was the author of The Bible and Modern Science (1925, 4th ed. 1953). Their quotation from Watson is accurately reproduced by Lewis, but is itself a combination of two widely separated passages in Watson’s text. This original text is a 1929 address on “Adaptation” to the Zoology section of the British Association, delivered in Johannesburg on 2 August 1929; it was published in Nature, Vol. 3119, Nr. 124, 10 August 1929, pp. 231-234, and also in the 1930 Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (http://archive.org/details/reportofbritisha30adva), pp. 88-99. As stated by Dewar and Davies, they are quoting Watson from pp. 88 and 95 of the latter version. The brief part before the elision comes from Watson’s second paragraph (here quoted in full, with the words quoted underlined):

Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or is supported by logically coherent arguments, but because it does fit all the facts of taxonomy, of palæontology, and of geographical distribution, and because no alternative explanation is credible.

The bit from p. 95 is found in the following full paragraph (again with the quoted words underlined):

The extreme difficulty  of obtaining the necessary data for any quantitative estimation of the efficiency of natural selection makes it seem probable that this theory will be re-established, if it be so, by the collapse of alternative explanations which are more easily attacked by observation and experiment. If so, it will present a parallel to the theory of evolution itself, a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.

On Dewar and Davies, see Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists, expanded edition (Harvard U.P. 2006), pp. 166-170 and the rest of chapter 6, “Evangelicals and Evolution in Great Britain”, which also contains this book’s only reference to C. S. Lewis (p. 175). On Lewis and Evolutionism, see
– Michael L. Peterson, “C. S. Lewis on Evolution and Intelligent Design”, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Vol. 62 Nr. 4 (December 2010), pp. 253-266, also available online at http://biologos.org/blog/c-s-lewis-on-evolution-and-intelligent-design-part-1
– Larry Gilman, “Which side was he on? Enlisting C. S. Lewis in the Evolution wars”, blog posted on 5 February 2013 with sequels on 3 March and 17 July of that year: http://theotherjournal.com/s-word/2013/02/05/so-who-owns-lewis

 

“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

 

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS ON CHRISTIANITY

 

When Lewis proposed to his contactman at EMI that this meeting take the form of a “One Man Brains Trust”, he was referring to the popular BBC radio program Brains Trust. Launched on 1 January 1941, this program featured a small panel of famous intellectuals who gave impromptu answers to a variety of questions submitted by listeners. See Lewis’s letters of early March 1944 to J. S. A. Ensor in Collected Letters II, pp. 604-607, and the essay “C. S. Lewis and the BBC’s Brains Trust: A Study in Resiliency” by Bruce R. Johnson in Seven, Vol. 30 (2013), pp. 67-92. The title of the BBC program was likely inspired by “Brain Trust”, a name for the group of advisers which Franklin Roosevelt gathered around himself on taking office as President of the Unites States in 1933.

 

par. 1   lewis: i have

 

it tells you to feed the hungry

For injunctions in the Bible, see Isaiah 58:7, Matthew 25:35, Luke 3:11, Romans 12:20, James 2:16.

 

question 2

 

I don’t see how the problem would be different for a factory worker ...

Nevertheless, in his correspondence with Ensor, Lewis himself had originally proposed to talk on “How can religion be related to modern industry?” (Colleceted Letters II, 605).

 

question 4

 

Beecham’s Pills

A laxative developed in the mid-19th century and produced until the end of the 20th century.

 

question 6

 

milk-jug

Lewis used the same example in his Broadcast Talks (1942), p. 38, but omitted it from the final version of this text as published in Mere Christianity (1952), Book II, “What Christians Believe”. The idea is a simple version of Lewis’s so-called “argument from reason” (not his term) which he set forth in most detail in chapter 3 of Miracles (1947, 2nd edition 1960).

 

question 7

 

Thomas More

English scholar and statesman (1478-1535). He took the side of the Roman church against the schism that started with Luther’s actions from 1517 onward. Lewis provided his book The Screwtape Letters (1942) with two similar epigraphs, one quoted from Luther and the other from More.

 

the sixteenth century ... I only have my knowledge from reading books

Lewis presumably had an uncommon amount of detailed ready knowledge of 16th-century books at this very moment; a week later he was to begin a four-part course of lectures in Cambridge that formed the basis of his largest scholarly work, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954).

 

question 8

 

“Work out your own salvation ...”

Philippians 2:12-13.

 

question 14

 

and also from Quakers and Welsh dissenters

Mentioned here as examples of ultra-Protestant categories and thus contrasted with the “Jesuits, monks, nuns” on the Catholic side.

 

question 15

 

an angry letter to The Spectator about Church Parades in the Home Guard

Not included in the three-volume Collected Letters, but published (and now available online) in The Spectator of 19 November 1943.
   See also Lewis’s letters of 12 July 1942, 9 March 1944 and 28 June 1945 (Collected Letters II, pp. 524, 605-606 and 661), and his short story “A Dream” in The Spectator of 28 July 1944 (reprinted in Present Concerns, 1986, and Essay Collection, 2000. See also Stuart Barton Babbage, “To the Royal Air Force”, in C. S. Lewis: Speaker and Teacher, ed. Carolyn Keefe (1971); ). Lewis objected to Church Parades not only in the Home Guard but in the regular forces as well.
   For a full survey of Lewis’s presence in The Spectator see www.lewisiana.nl/spectator.

question 16

 

you are obliged to take the Sacrament

John 6:53-54.

Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh his blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE PARTHENON AND THE OPTATIVE

 

First published as “Notes on the Way” in Time and Tide, 11 March 1944.

 

par. 1   “the trouble with

 

Parthenon

The Parthenon, in Athens, was the large temple built in the years 447-438 B.C. and dedicated to the city’s patron goddess, Athena. The building has largely survived to the present day.

 

Optative

In the grammar of ancient Greek (and other languages) the optative “mood” is one of the specific ways of inflecting a verb so as to modify its function or meaning. Other moods are the indicative, subjunctive and imperative. The optative mood indicates a wish or hope.

 

par. 3   and yet, education

 

The Tempest

One of Shakespeare’s last plays, probably written in 1610-11. Along with some others of his late plays, The Tempest has gradually come to be recognized as filling a third category, “romances”, in addition to the tragedies and comedies.

 

par. 5   let us take

 

“the adventures of the soul among books”

Possibly a reference to Andrew Lang’s volume, Adventures among Books (1901). However, since this title lacks “of the soul”, Lewis may actually be quoting the French writer and literary critic Anatole France (1844-1924) in La vie littéraire, first series (1888), dedication to Adrien Hébrard:

Le bon critique est celui qui raconte les aventures de son âme au milieu des chefs-d’oeuvre.

A good critic is he who recounts the adventures of his soul among the masterpieces

and

Bénissons les livres, si la vie peut couler au milieu d’eux en une longue et douce enfance!

Let us bless books, if life could flow among them, in one long and sweet childhood!

 

par. 6   how easily such

 

Norwood-rapport

In 1943 an advisory committee for the British minister of Education, presided by Sir Cyril Norwood, published Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools: Report of the Committee of the Secondary School Examinations Council Appointed by the President of the Board of Education in 1941. See also Lewis’s 1944 essay “Is English Doomed?”

 

par. 7   something like examination

 

Leavis

F. R. Leavis (1895-1978), English literary critic, co-founder and permanent editor of the periodical Scrutiny (1932-1953); fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, 1931-1964.

 

pours out his personality – in pure non-factual Appreciation

misprint The text as printed in Of This and Other Worlds omits an essential fragment after the dash, concluded with another dash. In the original 1944 text as found in Time and Tide, the part of the sentence after the parentheses reads:

… pours out his personality – the Report says that lessons in English are specially bound up with the teacher’s personality – in pure non-factual Appreciation to his form.

 

W. P. Ker

W. P. Ker (1855-1923), literary historian and medievalist, was the first Quain Professor of English at University College London, 1889-1920. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1920-1923.

 

 

back to survey

 

DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION

 

First published in Time and Tide, 29 April 1944.

 

says Aristotle

Politics V.7.20-22 (1310a). Aristotle is certainly talking of democracies, but his observation is of a more general nature since he is at the same time speaking of oligarchies, i.e. of “constitutions” generally:

… to have been educated to suit the constitution does not mean to do the things that give pleasure to the adherents of oligarchy or to the supporters of democracy, but the things that will enable the former to govern oligarchically and the latter to govern themselves democratically.

(translation by H. Rackham, Loeb edition, 1932).

 

The caucus-race in Alice

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), chapter 3, “The Caucus-Race and a Long Tale”.

 

no nonsense about merit

Allusion to a famous dictum by Lord Melbourne, Prime Minister of Great Britain 1834-1841: “I like the Garter; there is no damned merit in it.” The Order of the Garter, founded in 1348 by King Edward III, is the highest order of British knighthood (though equivalent to the Scottish Order of the Thistle).

 

high-brow, up-stage ...

Various terms denoting a feeling that the people referred to are snobs or have a high opinion of themselves. Old school tie refers to the tie or scarf which such people wore as part of their school uniforms and which perhaps they are still touting and cherishing as a relic from their elite schools.

 

Porson

Richard Porson (1759-1808), English classical scholar who evinced exceptional intellectual powers at an early age, including a prodigious memory. The comparison is not a good one since Porson, after remarkable beginnings, became a less remarkable person as an adult.

 

 

back to survey

 

DIFFERENT TASTES IN LITERATURE

 

First published in two parts as “Notes on the Way” in Time and Tide, 25 May and 1 June 1946.

 

par. 1   i have been thinking

 

Ruby M. Ayres

(1881-1955), English popular romantic novelist. She wrote more than 135 novels.

 

par. 3   but i must first

 

The Niblung’s Ring, Marmion and Sullivan

– Der Ring des Nibelungen, a cycle of four operas by German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) .

– Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808), a historical romance in verse by Sir Walter Scott.

– Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), English composer, best known for the comic operas he wrote in collaboration with dramatist William Gilbert.

 

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

American poet (1850-1919).

 

par. 6   in all this

 

“the holy spectral shiver”

No source for this phrase seems traceable on the internet except Alfred Tennyson (1904), a biography of the poet by A. C. Benson. On page 201, a passage in Tennyson’s poem “The Passing of Arthur” is characterized as “the kind of writing that is pure magic, that sends a holy spectral shiver through the blood”.

   Lewis in his early years liked Benson’s books very much and in a 1917 letter to Arthur Greeves said he had read “5 or 6 Benson books” (Collected Letters I, 323).

 

the “wind musique” … Pepys … “really sick …”

From the entry for 27th February, 1668, in the Diary of Samuel Pepys

27th. With my wife to the King’s House to see The Virgin Martyr. the first time it hath been acted a great while: and it is mighty pleasant; not that the play is worth much, but it is finely acted by Beck Marshall. But that which did please me beyond any thing in the whole world, was the wind-musique when the angel comes down; which is so sweet that it ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife; that neither then, nor all the evening going home, and at home, I was able to think of any thing, but remained all night transported, so as I could not believe that ever any musique hath that real command over the soul of a man as this did upon me; and makes me resolve to practice wind-musique, and to make my wife do the like.

Very shortly after Lewis’s present two-part essay appeared in Time and Tide, he delivered a sermon in Mansfield College, Oxford, later published as “Transposition”. The same passage from Pepys served him there as a starting point.

 

par. 7   hence, one’s first

 

The Lays of Ancient Rome

A volume of four ballads about the early history of Rome, published in 1842, by the English poet Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859).

 

Sohrab and Rustum

A narrative poem published in 1853, by the English poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888).

 

enable you (like dragon’s blood) to  understand the speech of birds

In the second act of Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried, this is what happens to the hero after he has slain the dragon Fafner.

 

par. 10   i was suggesting

 

Forrest Reid

(1875-1947), Northern Irish novelist, literary critic and translator. Apostate appeared in 1926, and its sequel Private Road in 1940. Lewis knew Reid personally, from a distance, through their mutual Belfast friend Arthur Greeves. There are several references to Reid in Lewis’s Collected Letters.

 

Miss Marie Corelli’s Ardath

Marie Corelli (1855-1924), English popular novelist of the decades around 1900. Ardath (1889) was her fourth novel.

 

par. 14   if this is so

 

Berlioz … Bach … Shelley … Crashaw

– Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), French composer.

– Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), German composer.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), English poet.

– Richard Crashaw (c. 1613-1649), English poet.

 

par. 15   the criterion of

 

Parsifal

Last opera by the German composer Richard Wagner, first performed in 1882.

 

par. 16   some muddled people

 

The Monarch of the Glen

Painting of a red deer stag, completed in 1851 by the English painter and sculptor Sir Edward Landseer. Innumerable reproductions and the use of it in advertisement reduced its status to that of a cliché.

 

Tintoretto

Nickname universally used for the Italian “mannerist” painter Jacopo Robusti (1518-1594).

 

 

back to survey

 

TRANSPOSITION

 

A sermon delivered on Whit-Sunday (Pentecost), 9 June 1946, in the chapel of Mansfield College, Oxford. First published in Transposition and other Addresses (Geoffrey Bles, London 1949) and its U.S. equivalent The Weight of Glory and other Addresses (Macmillan, New York 1949). A considerable addition to the text first appeared in 1962 as the essay was first reprinted in the British volume They Aked for a Paper, in 1962. In the U.S., the enlarged text first appeared in 1980 in a revised and expanded edition of The Weight of Glory.

 

 

subtitle

 

preached on Whit-sunday

Walter Hooper in his introduction to the 1980 edition of The Weight of Glory first suggested the date which has since been commonly ascribed to “Transposition”: Whitsunday 28 May 1944. Almost certainly the correct date is Whitsunday 1946, which was 9 June. See Appendix to Arend Smilde, “C. S. Lewis’s ‘Transposition’: Text and Context”, Sehnsucht vol. 13 (2019), 54-56.

 

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. 6   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. 17   but who dares

 

as if the picture knew enough of the three-dimensional world …

in his 1955 paper “On Science Fiction”, Lewis describes one among several possible functions of his favourite kind of science fiction:

It may represent the intellect, almost completely free from emotion, at play. The purest specimen would be Abbott’s Flatland, though even here some emotion arises from the sense (which it inculcates) of our own limitations – the consciousness that our own human awareness of the world is arbitrary and contingent.

 

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

 

A DREAM

 

First published in The Spectator, 28 July 1944.

 

W.A.A.F.

Women’s Auxiliary Air Force − female branch of the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.

 

Drum Major

The phenomenon of “drum majorettes”, or “majorettes” for short, originated in the U.S.A. during the 1930s and soon began to cross the Atlantic. The word majorette appears to be absent from Lewis’s writings; but he was clearly correct in observing that this decorative figure was supposed to provide a female variant of the military functionary.

 

L.D.V.

The “Local Defence Volunteers” were an auxiliary army corps for men aged 17 to 65, established in May 1940 as a way to deal with parachutists in case of a German invasion. More than 1.5 million men had enlisted within a month, and the name was changed to “Home Guard” in December. Conscription began the next year. The Home Guard ceased to function in late 1944 and it was formally disbanded in 1945.

 

 

back to survey

 

BLIMPOPHOBIA

 

First published in Time and Tide, 9 September 1944.

 

Colonel Blimp

Cartoon character in the work of David Low in the London Evening Standard during the 1930s. He was the type of an irascible and muddle-headed reactionary.

 

Munich … Dunkirk

In Munich, the capital of Bavaria in southern Germany, an agreement was reached in September 1938 by which England, France and Italy allowed Nazi Germany to annex a large swathe of Czech territory. It was hoped that this would satisfy Hitler and so preserve the peace in Europe.

From the beach at Dunkirk, on the French Channel coast, more than 338,000 allied soldiers managed to escape to Britain at the end of May 1940 after the German victory on the European continent.

 

Chamberlain … Baldwin

Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947) was leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party 1923-37, and in that period served as Prime Minister for three separate periods, about seven years in total. In both functions he was succeeded by Neville Chamberlain in 1937. A year later, Chamberlain made his deal with Hitler in Munich and on coming home promised “peace in our time”.

 

Home Guard

The “Local Defence Volunteers” were an auxiliary army corps for men aged 17 to 65, established in May 1940 in view of the threat of a German airborne invasion. Within a month more than 1.5 million men had enlisted, and the name was changed to “Home Guard” in December. Conscription began in 1941. The Home Guard ceased to function in late 1944 and it was formally disbanded a year later.

 

Peterloo

On 16 August 1819, a large political protest meeting was organized in an area called St Peter’s Field in Manchester. Prematurely tough police actions against supposed cases of rowdyism resulted in six people being killed and hundreds injured. The label “Peterloo” expressed the widely shared perception of a shocking contrast between this low point in English history and the recent high point at Waterloo in 1815.

 

“sicklied o’er”

Shakespeare, Hamlet III.1, 85.

To be or not to be − that is the question;
 …
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE DEATH OF WORDS

 

First published in The Spectator, 22 September 1944; first reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, 1982.

 

“peasant slave”

This is the meaning of villain in its original Latin form, villanus – a meaning which to some extent survived into its earliest English uses. For a slightly more detailed discussion of this set of examples see Lewis’s chapter “On the Fringe of Language” at the end of his Studies in Words (1960).

 

“killed with kindness”

Perhaps an allusion to Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Act IV, last lines of scene 1, or to A Woman Killed with Kindess (1603), a tragedy by Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Heywood. The phrase “kill with kindness” is probably older than both, without an original application to wives or women.

 

 

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” (cf. Collected Letters II, 718).

    According to Walter Hooper, Lewis wrote and read this piece as a paper for the Socratic Club under the title “Reply to Mr. R.” (Collected Letters III, 1255, note 94). However, no obvious sign of such a paper is found either in Hooper’s list of papers and speakers for the Club (in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table) or in the Wade Center’s list of Socratic Club Speakers and Dates. In both lists, the first potential reference after September 1944 to an earlier paper on the subject is Austin Farrer’s paper of 28 May 1945, “Can Myth be Fact?” (reprinted in Socratic Digest, No. 3, 1945).

 

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

 

PRIVATE BATES

 

First published in The Spectator, 29 December 1944. Five weeks earlier, this weekly magazine had featured an article titled “What the Soldier Thinks”, by an anonymous army captain. The author argued that “the British soldier is fighting for the future of the world and does not believe in that future.” A series of responses followed, including letters to the editor, stray remarks in columns and a few further essays. The debate continued in the Spectator’s columns continuing until mid-January 1945. Lewis’s piece was one of many contribution.

 

our present Prime Minister

Winston Churchill.

 

Agincourt

The battle of Agincourt (1415), some 40 km south of Calais in northern France, was an major event in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. It was a great English victory, achieved against a numerically superior French army.

 

heartily wished the King could be left to get on with it by himself

Shakespeare, King Henry the Fifth IV.1, 112-122. Bates is talking to the (disguised) king himself, who is making an incognito round through the army camp in the night before the battle. Excepting two literal quotations, Lewis is rather loosely paraphrasing Shakespeare’s text. In the play, the king has not recently been delivering a propaganda speech or checking the effects of his propaganda; on the contrary, he has (incognito) just remarked to Bates and his comrades that the king “is but a man” so that he may well be really as desperate as his troops although he won’t make matters worse by showing it. The suggestion of deleted swearwords − “(blank)” − is part of Lewis’s modernizing paraphrase.

 

... cause was just and his quarrel honourable

King Henry the Fifth IV.1, 127. These are the incognito king’s own words.

 

That’s more than we know

Ibid., 128. This quotation and the previous (i.e. lines 127-128) are the only bits copied literally from Shakespeare’s text.

 

the supposedly “spacious” days

After the poem “A Dream of Fair Women” (1833) by Alfred Tennyson, second stanza:

    … those melodious bursts, that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still.

 

at least equally true of the Ellizabethan soldier

A 1927 letter of Lewis to his brother suggests one potential literary source for for idea about soldiers:

 … I have just read Smollett’s Roderick Random [1748] which, as you probbly know, is our chief literary document for the life of the navy in the 18th century. …His picture as a whole is much what I expected – infernal. The resiged but bottomless contempt of all ranks for their senior officers, the certainty that everything is being mismanaged, and that the staff are fools and cowards is especiaaly interesting: I suppose it is the normal state in all armies and navies.
(Collected Letters I, 705; 9 July 1927)

 

heroic and patriotic play about a “famous victory”

A Technicolor film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V was produced in 1944 with financial support from the British government.

 

“How differs it from the terrible patience of God!”

Robert Browning, The Ring and The Book XI, 1374-1378.

This self-possession to the uttermost,
How does it differ in aught, save degree,
From the terrible patience of 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)

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 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 ...

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.” Apparently he read it very soon after publication. In 1962 he included it as another item in the list mentioned in the note on Balfour, above.

 

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.
   Lewis first met Price on 4 March 1924, as recorded in a diary entry for that day. There are more references to Price as well as a short biographical note on him in All My Road Before Me (1991), a large selection from Lewis’s diary of the years 1922-27.

 

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, defining it as

an internal push that has carried life, by more and more complex forms, to higher and higher destinies.

(une poussée intérieure qui porterait la vie, par des formes de plus en plus complexes, à des destinées de plus en plus hautes).

(Creative Evolution, ch. 2)

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.

 

D. M. S. Watson

D. M. S. Watson (1886-1973), British palaeontologist, was Jodrell Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College, London from 1921 to 1951. For further details on this quotation see note to the parallel passage in Lewis’s essay “The Funeral of a Great Myth”

 

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.

 

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.

 

emergent evolution

Emergent Evolution is the title of the Gifford Lectures for 1922-23 by British psychologist and polymath C. Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936). Like Bergson (see note above)  Lloyd Morgan addressed the problem that the Darwinian theory of evolution fails to explain many cases of development from “lower” to “ higher”  organisms. The appearance of life, of consciousness and of reason were conspicuous examples. These and suchlike phenomena he called emergents.

 

par. 24   i was taught at school

 

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen ...

Cf. Plato’s Republic, 508b-509b, near the end of Book VI (Robin Waterfield’s translation, 1993):

... the eye’s ability to see has been bestowed upon it and channelled into it, as it were, by the sun. ... So the sun is not to be identified with sight, but is responsible for sight and is itself within the visible realm. ... The sun is the child of goodness ... It is a counterpart to its father, goodness. As goodness stands in the intelligible realm to intelligence and the things we know, so in the visible realm the sun stands to sight and the things we see. ... When [the mind’s] object is something which is lit up by truth and reality, then it has – and obviously has – intelligent awareness and knowledge. ... [I]t’s goodness which gives the things we know their truth and makes it possible for people to have knowledge. It is responsible for knowledge and truth, and you should think of it as being within the intelligible realm, but you shouldn’t identify [goodness] with knowledge and truth ... It is even more valuable. ... [I]t 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.

The immediate context if the quotation is the passage that begins at 504d or, a little further back, at 504c-d. The image of the Sun is the first of three attempts made by Socrates to describe goodness without having to define it; the second image is that of the Line (509d-511e). Book VII opens with the third and best-known image, the Cave; two further allusions to the Sun are found there in 516a-b and 517b. It is once more referred to in 532a (and again, briefly, in 533a), as Plato mentions Dialectic as the crowning part of the philosopher-king’s education:

[S]ight ... sets about looking at actual creatures, at the heavenly bodies, themselves, and finally at the sun itself. Just as, in this case, a person ends up at the supreme point of the visible realm, so the summit of the intelligible realm is reached when, by means of dialectic and without relying on anything perceptible, a person perseveres in using rational argument to approach the true reality of things until he has grapsed with his intellect the reality of goodness itself.

 

 

back to survey

 

CHRISTIAN REUNION

 

par. 4   and on the

 

pecca fortiter

“Sin boldly”. Luther in a letter to Philippus Melanchthon, 1 August 1521.

Esto peccator et pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo, qui victor est peccati, mortis et mundi ...
[“Be a sinner and sin boldly, but even more boldly believe and rejoice in Christ, who is the conqueror of sin, death, and the world ...”]

The Latin text is in Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, Briefwechsel, vol. 2 (1931), p. 372.

 

par. 6   to you the

 

depositum fidei

cf. the Latin phrases

– depositum custodi, “that which is committed to thy trust”, 1 Timothy 6:20 and 2 Timothy 1:14.

– semel tradita sanctis fides, “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints”, Jude v. 3.

 

credenda

(Latin) “things to believe” (cf. agenda “things to do”, addenda “things to add” etc.).

 

par. 7   i know no

 

“mere Christianity”

A phrase borrowed from the English theologian Richard Baxter (1615-1691), found in his Church-history of the Government of Bishops and their Councils (1680). For a full presentation of this source see www.lewisiana.nl/baxter. Lewis used the phrase in several places, including The Screwtape Letters, chapter 25, and most famously as the title for his book Mere Christianity (1952), a one-volume definitive edition of his BBC radio talks from the years 1941-1944.

 

ad clerum ... ad populum

(Latin) “to the clergy” ... “to the people”.

 

 

back to survey

 

RELIGION AND SCIENCE

 

First published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph, 3 January 1945. – This is the first of five articles written for this newspaper during the first seven months of 1945. Each of these pieces deals in semi-narrative or dialogue form with a theme Lewis discussed in more detail in Miracles or elsewhere. The other four of the series were “Two Lectures”, “The Laws of Nature”, “Work and Prayer”, and “Meditation in a Toolshed”.

 

Boethius

Roman statesman and philosopher (c. 480-524). As a prisoner of the Gothic king Theoderic awaiting execution he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae), one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages. Lewis wrote a fine and comparatively long section about him in chapter IV of The Discarded Image (1964), a book about the medieval world-picture as a background to its literature.

 

Ptolemy’s Almagest

Claudius Ptolemaeus, ancient mathematician, astronomer and geographer of the second century CE (c. 100-170). He was a Roman living in Alexandria, Egypt, and wrote in Greek; the title Almagest is derived from the 9th-century Arabic translation of his Μαθηματικὴ σύνταξις (Mathematikè syntaxis). Lewis often drew attention to this fact about medieval cosmology both in his apologetic and scholarly work – e.g. in The Problem of Pain (1940), chapter 1, and in his 1956 lecture “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages”. In The Discarded Image, Lewis only notes in passing (p. 22) that

Casual statements about pre-Copernican astronomy in modern scientists who are not historians are often unreliable.

 

There was a moment’s silence.– “Did they really ...”

British editions have the same phrase here as a few lines down, “There was another short silence.”

 

 

back to survey

 

TWO LECTURES

 

First published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph, 21 February 1945. – The second of five pieces written for this newspaper, this is a brief and popular treatment of themes from “Is Theology Poetry?”, a paper for the Oxford Socratic Club of November 1944, and “The Funeral of a Great Myth”, written in the same period.

 

par. 2   “we see it

 

The Rocket

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

 

par. 5   i dreamed that

 

prehistoric man adorned the wall of his cave

This view of prehistoric cave painting almost certainly goes back at least partly to G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925), chapter 1, “The Man in the Cave”; see Lewis’s comment on Chesterton in Surprised by Joy (1955), chapter 14.

 

par. 7   it appeared to me

 

Minoan cultures

i.e. the civilization on Crete, c. 2500-1100 BC, called after the half-legendary King Minos who may have lived around 1700 BC.

 

par. 9   that was a point

 

“Developmentalism”

Lewis seems to be avoiding the word Evolutionism in order to distinguish the scientific theory from unscientific belief in “progress” as a supposed law of nature. When using Evolutionism elsewhere in his work, he rarely does so without somehow indicating the difference – usually through an adjective such as popular or universal. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, development and its cognate Germanic words in other languages (German Entwicklung, Dutch ontwikkeling etc.) were in fact used interchangeably with evolution to describe the palaeontological process.
       Today, “development” in biology happens to organisms while “evolution” happens to species – as illustrated by the following sentece from a book by primatologist Frans de Waal: “Both developmentally and evolutionarily, advanced forms of empathy are preceded by and grow out of more elementary ones” (Primates and Philosophers, Princeton U.P. 2006, p. 23).

 

 

back to survey

 

CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS

 

par. 10   our business is

 

Thinker’s Library

A series of books by old and new authors including H. G. Wells, Charles Darwin and Thomas Paine, published by the Rationalist Press Association in the years 1929-1951 to facilitate a humanistic and rationalistic (re‑)education of the masses.

 

Beveridge Report

William H. Beveridge (1879-1963) was a British economist.

 

and talk about the coming of the Kingdom

The type envisaged here appears as the personage called Straik in Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength (1945), chapters 4.3, 6.3 and 8.3.

 

par. 12   our great danger

 

the Bantus

General name for a large number of ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa.

 

par. 20   [wordlist]

 

πνεῡμα

(Greek) pneuma “spirit”. See also Lewis’s Miracles (1947), Appendix A, “On the words ‘Spirit’ and ‘Spiritual’”.

 

par. 25   (1) “now that we

 

Ptolemy

Claudius Ptolemaeus, Greek mathematician, astronomer and geographer who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the second century CE.

 

par. 30   when we come

 

Aut deus aut malus homo

In a letter to Owen Barfield of August 1939 (Collected Letters II, 269) Lewis referred to this Latin maxim as an “old” one. The phrase may be of Lewis’s own making, but the idea expressed has a long track record. Lewis gave his own fullest exposition of it in Mere Christianity II.3.

 

Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man

Lewis read the book shortly after publication in 1925 and always reckoned it among the books which had influenced him most. The reference here is to part 2, chapter 3, “The Strangest Story in the World”.

 

par. 33   for my own part

 

Ethical Church

A secular religious movement taking formal shape in the United States in 1877 under the leadership of Felix Adler and still active today as American Ethical Union (www.aeu.org). It was also called Ethical Movement or Ethical Culture, with local Ethical Societies. In the early decades of the 20th century the movement also found considerable support in Great Britain.

 

Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition

Cf. Ephesians 2:13-14. “But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.”

 

par. 34   one last word

 

oremus pro invicem

A common Latin salutation used by clergymen in their correspondence. In his published writings, Lewis first used it in a letter to his friend Bede Griffiths of 10 May 1945 (a month after the present Carmarthen address). From then on he occasionally used it, mostly but not exclusively, in letters to Roman Catholic and/or clerical correspondents.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE LAWS OF NATURE

 

First published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph, 4 April 1945. – The third of five more or less consecutive pieces written for this newspaper. The subject of prayer, which is here merely an introductory move, does not serve this function in the parallel chapter 8 of Miracles, but is dealt with in more detail in that book’s Appendix on “Special Providence”.

 

last paragraph

 

Hamlet ... Ophelia

A scene at the end of Act 4 of Shakespeare’s play.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE GRAND MIRACLE

 

First published in The Guardian, 27 April 1945. – This is the last of Lewis’s preparatory essays for his book Miracles; like the first (“Miracles”, 1942), it originated as a sermon for St Jude’s Church in London. The book was finished in May 1945, although it was not published until two years later. The essay’s title there appears as the title of chapter 14, the longest chapter. What was used of the essay’s content, however, was divided over several chapters. For example, the brief reference to the Buddha appears in chapter 15, while chapter 13 is devoted to David Hume and the question of probability.

 

par. 1   one is very

 

miracles attributed to Gautama Buddha in some very late sources

Siddhārtha Gautama, or Gautama the Buddha (the “enlightened one”), the spiritual teacher of ancient India whose teachings were the basis of Buddhism, lived in the 6th or 5th century BC. It is impossible to say which documents and miracles Lewis may have had in mind. It seems broadly true, however, that the more fantastic stories (including miracles) about the Buddha date from the advent of Mahayana (“Great Vehicle”) Buddhism and the use of Sanskrit rather than Pali, around the turn of the Common Era. Also, it was not until then that more or less full biographies of the Buddha began to appear.
   Teachings from earlier Buddhism (which came to be called Hinayana, “Small Vehicle”), notably the Theravada school, came to be preserved in the Pali Canon. As regards the Buddha’s life and work, this large collection tends to be confined to isolated scenes explaining his spiritual experiences. The Pali Canon consists of three pitakas (“baskets”); the Sutta Pitaka (“Basket of Sayings”) contains, in the Digha Nikaya (“Collection of Long Discourses”), a saying of the Buddha in answer to a request for miracles: “I dislike, despise and detest them.” The appearance of this saying in an early document suggests that a firm rejection of miracles was already relevant in the early centuries of Buddhism.

 

modern journalistic legends

A few decades later Lewis might have used the term urban myth if only because “legend” is now often understood to refer to persons who have acquired legendary status. A journalistic legend is a famous journalist rather than a legend made up or disseminated by journalists.

 

Hume’s kind of probability

David Hume (1711-1776), Scottish philosopher and historian. Lewis is referring to the “Essay on Miracles” in Hume’s Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748).

 

par. 4   now, what is

 

they tell us we all recapitulate strange pre-human, sub-human forms of life

“Recapitulation” is actually a process which 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. 5   now, as soon

 

The Golden Bough

James George Frazer (1854-1941), The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (first published in two volumes in 1890; third edition in 12 volumes 1906-1915), a wide-ranging comparative study of myths and rituals all over the world.

 

par. 6   the principal actor

 

Well, that is almost inexplicable

British editions have “explicable” here, which is a typo.

 

par. 7   then another thing

 

Of the stars perhaps only one has planets

This suspicion seems to have become definitively obsolete in 1992, when the first “exoplanet” was discovered. By April 2018, a total of 3,767 exoplanets had been scientifically confirmed to exist, with thousands more detections awaiting confirmation. See www.exoplanet.eu.

 

par. 8   and with that

 

of vicariousness of one person etc.

Although no edition has a comma after “vicariousness”, it would almost certainly be in place.

 

par. 9   now i notice

 

Bergson ... died a Christian

Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher. His “nature religion” is expounded first and foremost in his Matière et mémoire (1896) and L’Évolution créatrice (1907). Lewis wrote this only a few years after Bergson’s death.

 

Mr Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish-English dramatist. He was still alive when Lewis wrote this; hence the prefix “Mr”, which is absent in the case of Bergson. Bergson’s notion of élan vital as “Life Force” was popularized in Shaw’s plays Man and Superman (1903) and Back to Methuselah (1921).
   Similar joint references to Bergson and Shaw (and sometimes H. G. Wells and/or D. H. Lawrence) abound in Lewis’s works, ranging from explanatory and rather respectful ones as his Note to chapter I.4 in Mere Christianity (1952) to more caustic remarks as in “The Weight of Glory” (1941, on Shaw’s “nonsense”), or in a private letter of 21 September 1960, where he writes about “all that Bergsonian-Shavian-pantheistic-biolatrous waffle” (Collected Letters III, 1186); the term biolatry with reference to Bergson also appears in An Experiment in Criticism (1960), chapter 11, p. 126. In the Discarded Image (1964), chapter 2, p. 17, Lewis points out that

Quasi-religious responses to the hypostatised abstraction Life are to be sought in Shaw or Wells or in a highly poetical philosopher such as Bergson, not in the papers and lectures of biologists.

 

those like Hinduism and Stoicism

At this point of his argument in Miracles, about halfway through chapter 14, Lewis refers to “Buddhism or higher Hinduism”.

 

par. 11   but here is

 

Browne

The same reference to Thomas Browne appears in Lewis’s Miracles, chapter 14 (penultimate paragraph) as well as near the end of his brief 1948 essay “Some Thoughts”, written for the memorial volume of an Irish hospital. He also mentioned it in a letter to Ruth Pitter of 12 February 1947 as a comment on her poem “Death’s filthy garment”.

 

somehow or other, infinitely good

cf. Lewis’ account of his first acquaintance with George Macdonald’s Phantastes:

... the whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death.

– George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946), Preface, p. 21.

 

par. 14   that is why

 

the first fruits

Greek άπαρχἡ (aparchè); cf. Romans 8:23, 11:16, 16:5; 1 Corinthians 15:20; James 1:18; Revelation 14:4.

 

those gods that we are described as being in Scripture

Presumably Lewis was thinking of Psalm 82:6 and the allusion to it in John 10:35.

 

high mid-summer pomps

Matthew Arnold (1822-88), Thyrsis, line 14.

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?
Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell ...

 

 

back to survey

 

WORK AND PRAYER

 

First published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph, 28 May 1945. – This piece, the fourth of five written for this newspaper in the first half of 1945, is Lewis’s first attempt to write about prayer. A paper on “Petitionary Prayer” followed in 1953. His book on the subject did not appear until after another decade and was his last: Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer (1964). Lewis used the quote from Juvenalis in each of the three cases; the one from Pascal in two of them.

 

par. 8   pascal says that

 

Pascal ... God “instituted prayer...”

Pascal, Pensées, nr. 513 (ed. Brunschvicg, 1897) or 930 (ed. Lafuma, 1962).

Pourquoi Dieu a établi la prière. 1°. pour communiquer à ses créatures la dignité de la causalité ...

 

par. 9   the two methods

 

laborare est orare (work is prayer)

This may not actually be an old maxim. It appears to be the more or less established inversion of the maxim ora et labora, “work and pray”, wrongly attributed since the 19th century to Benedict of Nursia (480-547), founder of the Benedictine order.

 

par. 10   you cannot be

 

Juvenal, “Enormous prayers ...”

Decimus Junius Juvenalis, Roman poet of the late first and early second century CE. His surviving work consists of sixteen “Satires”, which are satirical in an acerbic rather than a humorous way. Satire X deals with the vanity of human wishes, especially wishes for power and glory. Juvenal’s moral seriousness was appreciated during the Christian Middle Ages rather than in Roman times. The Latin original of the phrase quoted is numinibus vota exaudita malignis

 

 

back to survey

 

MEMBERSHIP

 

par. 1   no christian and

 

“What a man does with his solitude”

Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (1926), Lecture I, “Religion in History”.

Religion is what the individual does with its own solitariness.

 

par. 2   in our own age

 

in an age when collectivism is ruthlessly defeating the individual

Complaints and warnings about the rise of collectivism were expressed by writers and intellectuals of many different backgrounds in the 1940s, culminating in George Orwell’s novel 1984.

 

When I first went to Oxford the typical undergraduate society...

i.e. around the end of the First World War. When Lewis began his studies in Oxford in January 1919, he soon joined “The Martlets”, a literary and debating society of the sort he must have in mind here. It was limited to twelve members, and he delivered his first Martlets paper in March 1919. The development toward the more collectivist type of society was almost certainly encouraged, unintendedly, by Lewis’s own activities as co-founder and president of the Socratic Club during “the war”, i.e. the Second World War.

 

Vaughan

Henry Vaughan (1622-1695), English poet, born in Wales, where he also settled as a physician. He wrote short meditative poems such as “The Retreat” and “Beyond the Veil”, published in Silex Scintillans (1650); also devout meditations in prose, published in Flores solitudinis (“Flowers of Solitude”) and The Mount of Olives.

 

Traherne

Thomas Traherne (1638?-1674), English mystical writer and poet. He is chiefly known for his Centuries of Meditations, a volume of reflections on religion in poetical prose, not published until 1908.

 

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.

 

Charlotte M. Yonge

English novelist (1823-1901) with ties to the Oxford Movement, a 19th-century “catholicizing” movement in the Anglican Church. Living all her life in the village where she was born, near Winchester in the South of England, she taught in the local Sunday school from age 7 till the end of her life. She became famous in 1853 with The Heir of Redclyffe, and wrote over a hundred books including many for young people but in fact for readers of all ages.

 

in a sense not intended by Scipio – never less alone than when alone

According to the Roman author and orator Cicero (106-43 BC), it was the Roman statesman Cato who spoke these words about Scipio: numquam ... minus solum, quam cum solus esset. Cicero adds that Scipio, in solitude, “would have conversations with himself”: in solitudine secum loqui solitus (Cicero, De officiis III.2).

 

par. 4   this feeling is just

 

to be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavour

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Nr. 68 (10 November 1750). “To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.”

 

par. 7   a dim perception

 

The Wind in the Willows

A classic of English children’s literature by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.

 

Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness

Characters in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), a novel by Charles Dickens.

 

Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller

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

 

par. 12   that i believe

 

Filmer

Sir Robert Filmer (1590?-1653?), Royalist political writer, defended the doctrine of the divine right of kings in its most extreme form. He considered the government of a family by the father as the original form of all government. His last and best-known work, Patriarcha, appeared in 1679.

 

Lord Acton ... “all power corrupts...”

John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834-1902), an English Roman Catholic, was a Liberal MP and historian. Most of his work was published posthumously. The exact phrasing of the famous quotation is “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” He wrote it in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton of 3 April 1887.

 

par. 14   do not misunderstand me

 

As St Paul writes, to have died for valuable men...

Romans 5:7-8. “For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” [kjv]

 

He certainly loved all to the death

Perhaps a conflation of John 13:1, “Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end”, and Philippians 2:8, “And being found in fashion like a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” [kjv].

 

par. 15   euqality is a quantitative

 

Chesterton ... we become taller when we bow

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), prolific English writer, poet, critic, and journalist. The reference is to Chesterton’s apologetic work The Everlasting Man (1925), Part I, chapter 5, fourth paragraph from the end, where he asserts that humanity has always “found it natural to worship”:

The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship would stunt and even maim him for ever.

 

par. 16   in this way then

 

“a pillar in the temple of God ... he shall go no more out”

Revelation 3:12. “Him that overcometh [i.e. triumphs, perseveres to the end] will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out.” [kjv]

 

par. 19   to say this is

 

Pelagian

i.e. according to the teachings of the British monk Pelagius (c. 360-420), who held that humans have a perfectly free will and no proclivity to evil. He considered humans capable by their own efforts to gain eternal happiness and wholly accountable for their deeds; they need no grace in the sense of forgiveness. His great theological adversary was Augustine, and the teachings of Pelagius were condemned by the church. Toned-down versions of Pelagianism have always continued to have wide currency, sometimes acquiring the name of ‘Semi-Pelagianism’ – the theory that humans can and should do part of what is needed for them to gain eternal happiness, but also need God’s grace.

 

 

back to survey

 

HEDONICS

 

First published in Time and Tide, 16 June 1945.

 

from Paddington to Harrow

Paddington is an underground station in the west of London which is also the terminal for Oxford-bound trains and coaches. In Lewis’s day, Harrow was a north-western suburb of London, ten miles from the City.

 

Swiss Cottage, Maida Vale

North-western districts of London, whose names Lewis presumably saw quite often during trips to London and back to Oxford.

 

Samarkand or Orgunjé

Ancient towns in Central Asia (present-day Uzbekistan) at the fringe of the known world for the Greeks and Romans. Orgunjé (today’s Khiva of Xiva) is mentioned in Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, a poem that Lewis was very fond of.

 

Winnipeg or Tobolsk

Towns in Canada and Siberia respectively.

 

Who damned suburbia? “I”, said Superbia

The word Suburbia was coined in the 19th century as a collective designation for everything supposed to characterise life in de suburbs. Superbia, “pride”, was classified as the first and greatest of the seven “deadly sins” in medieval Christian theology.

 

realism all round

Lewis’s example of the hills looking blue from a distance and his conclusion about the true meaning of “realism” reflect his own earlier development, in the early 1920s, of what was then called philosophical “realism” (an early stage of logical positivism) to “idealism”. In the essay’s last paragraph, this meaning of realism shades into a more literary one, opposed to romanticism rather than to idealism. The idea in either case is that of out-realisting the realists.

 

Proustian or Wordsworthian moments

− Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French writer, author of the seven-part novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).
− William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet; his long autobiographical poem The Prelude was published shortly after his death.

 

 

back to survey

 

MEDITATION IN A TOOLSHED

 

First published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph, 17 July 1945. – The last of five pieces for this newspaper. Its theme harks back to the first lines of “Bulverism” (1941/1944) and is resumed in chapter 6 of Miracles. It is also related to two philosophical episodes in Surprised by Joy: Lewis’ long debate with Owen Barfield  about “realism” and “idealism” (chapter 13, par. 17), and the “indispensable tool of thought” provided by philosopher Samuel Alexander (chapter 14, par. 8-9).

 

par. 5   as soon as

 

Nyonga

??

 

 

back to survey

 

THE SERMON AND THE LUNCH

 

First published in Church of England Newspaper, 21 September 1945.

 

par. 6   1. since the

 

The Samuel Butlers, The Gosses, The Shaws

i.e. the likes of English novelist Samuel Butler (1835-1902), author of The Way of All Flesh (1903), English poet and literary critic Edmund Gosse (1849-1928), author of Father and Son (1907); and Irish-English dramatist and social reformer George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), who in his early career helped to promote the work of Henryk Ibsen on the London stage.

 

abusus non tollit usum

A maxim from Roman law.

 

The author of the Imitation of Christ

Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380-1472), German Augustinian monk and member of the spiritual movement called “Modern Devotion” (Devotio moderna), is generally considered to be the author of De imitatione Christi (The Imitation of Christ). In the first decades following the invention of printing, it was the most widespread book after the Bible. It has remained one of the most widely read books of Christian devotion.

 

Charlotte M. Yonge

prolific and very popular English novelist (1823-1901), author of Abbeychurch, or Self-Control and Self-Deceit (her debut, 1844) and The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) and over 150 other books; longtime editor of the The Monthly Packet, a children’s magazine. Never married, she lived all her life in her native village Otterbourne, near Winchester, Hampshire, where she taught at the Sunday school for 71 years.

 

par. 9   4. how, then

 

“Christian, seek not yet repose”

A hymn written in 1836 by Charlotte Elliot (1789-1871). Trinity Hymnal Nr. 128, music by Willam H. Monk, 1868.

 

 

back to survey

 

SCRAPS

 

the Seraphim

According to a traditional Christian scheme dating from the 4th or 5th century, there are nine supernatural orders or “choirs” of angels. In this hierarchy the Seraphim are the highest in rank, and hence the nearest to God, followed by the Cherubim. See Lewis’s 1956 lecture “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages”, in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1967), pp. 41-63, especially pp. 53 and 58.

 

 

back to survey

 

AFTER PRIGGERY − WHAT?

 

First published in The Spectator, 7 December 1945.

 

Private vices ... are public benefits

After Bernard Mandeville’s book, The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714).

 

Cleon

Name of the successor of Pericles as political leader of Athens in the years 429-422 B.C.

 

absit omen

(Latin) “may (evil) omen be absent” i.e., “Let us hope this is not a sign of things to come”, or “May what is said not come true.”

 

non nobis

Latin opening words of Psalm 115 (=Ps. 113:9 or 113B:1 in the Vulgate version).

Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam

Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory.

 

“sanitary cordon”

After the French term cordon sanitaire, which means “isolating line” or “buffer zone”. The term was probably coined in 1919 by the French prime minister, Clemenceau, referring to the need for a string of buffer states between Western Europe and the newly formed Soviet Union.

 

 

back to survey

 

MODERN MAN AND HIS CATEGORIES OF THOUGHT

 

First published in Present Concerns (1986). Lewis wrote this in October 1946 at the invitation of the English missionary and bishop Stephen Neill, for the study department of the World Council of Churches which was in the process of formation

    A reference to the essay appears in the WCC’s Amsterdam Assembly Series, Man’s Disorder and God’s Design, volume II, The Curch’s Witness to God’s Design (London: SCM Press, 1948), in the opening section of Chapter III, “Some Axioms of the Modern Man”, p. 80:

At one of the preliminary meetings, Professor Emil Brunner of Zurich pointed out that man’s thinking is to a considerable out or clearly expressed, taking the form of Axioms of contemporary proverbial wisdom, and that part of the difficulty in evangelism to-day arises from the contradictions between most men’s Axioms and the general structure of biblical thought and ideas.
     Professor Brunner was asked to formulate a brief statement of some typical Axioms of the modern man; and his list of list Axioms is here printed, though he himself would not wish it to be regarded as final or exhaustive. A suggestive paper by Mr. circulated, and groups in various countries prepared lists of Axioms, a selection from which is here printed.

 

metuentes

Literally “fearers”, i.e. God-fearers. This is a variant Latin designation for the “proselytes” mentioned in the New Testament, Acts 2:11. They were gentiles converted to Judaism or inclined to conversion, or deemed “just” by the Jews. See also note to Lewis’s 1948 essay “God in the Dock”.

 

Epicureans

Followers of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.), who held that the world is a series of fortuitous combinations of atoms, and that the highest good is pleasure.

 

Virgilian ... Horatian

Readers and admirers of Virgil and Horace, two great Roman poets from the first century B.C.

 

Developmentalism

Lewis discusses this at greater length in his essay “The Funeral of a Great Myth”, dating from 1944 or ’45 and first published in Christian Reflections (1967). See also his “Two Lectures” in the volume God in the Dock (1970). In terms of intellectual history, Lewis usually insisted on seeing “developmentalism” as the historical context or condition of Darwinism rather than as its product. However, in terms of general cultural history, Darwin’s launching of his theory of natural selection in the Origin of Species in 1859, followed by his Descent of Man in 1871, certainly was of great causal significance.

 

an appeal of a much more emotional and also more “pneumatic” kind

Probably a reference to the four-week Westminster Central Hall Campaign “This is the Victory” in London in September 1945, led by Thomas B. Rees. The campaign’s schedule mentions Lewis’s participation as a speaker on Friday 21 September.

 

“foolishness of preaching”

1 Corinthians 1:21 (NIV).

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

 

 

back to survey

 

MAN OR RABBIT?

 

First published as a pamphlet by the Student Christian Movement in Schools, probably in 1946.

 

par. 3   now there are

 

increase the happiness of the majority

A phrase clearly alluding to the “utilitarian” thought of the English radical philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). His philosophy is often summarized with a maxim actually coined by Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson in 1725, “The greatest happiness of the greatest number”.

 

par. 5   the question before

 

Socrates

Ancient Greek philosopher (469-399 BC) living in Athens. He left no written works, but much of his thought and presumably many of his words were recorded in dialogues written by his pupil Plato; useful additional notes are found in the works of Aristotle and Xenophon.

 

Confucius

Chinese philosopher, teacher and politician (551-479 BC).

 

J. S. Mill

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), English philosopher, pupil of Jeremy Bentham.

 

par. 9   all right, christianity

 

which calls us to be gods

Presumably an allusion to Psalm 82:6 and John 10:35.

 

 

back to survey

 

MISERABLE OFFENDERS

 

par. 2   the lenten season

 

our Prayer Book

The Book of Common Prayer (1662) of the Church of England.

 

par. 7   supposing you are

 

prophets and wise men

cf. Matthew 23:34.

Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify ...

 

par. 10   does that sound

 

.. in the long run a lightening and relieveing process

cf. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, ch. 4, penultimate paragraph: “Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue”.

 

 

back to survey

 

TALKING ABOUT BICYCLES

 

First published in Resistance: A Social and Literary Magazine, October 1946. This was the only issue of Resistance ever published, edited by Derek Derek Stanford and David West. Stanford (1918-2008) wrote, among other things, The Freedom of Poetry: Studies in Contemporary Verse (1947) and Inside the Forties: Literary Memoirs, 1937-1957 (1977). “David West” was a pseudonym of the song writer and EMI record producer Norman Newell (1919-2004).

 

Unenchanted … Enchanted … Disenchanted … Re-Enchanted

The terms may here derive, mostly, from a passage in Platonism and the Spiritual Life (1927), chapter 12, by the American philosopher George Santayana.

The spirit is not a tale-bearer having a mock world of its own to substitute for the humble circumstances of this life; it is only the faculty – the disenchanting and re-enchanting faculty – of seeing this world in its simple truth. Therefore all the worldly hatred of spirit – and it is very fierce – can never remove the danger that, after a thousand persecutions and a long conspiracy of derision, a child of the spirit should be born in the bosom of the worldly family.

Lewis referred to this passage in 1927 in the course of his philosophical polemic with his friend Owen Barfield; see The ‘Great War’ of Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis: Philosophical Writings 1927-1930 (2015), pp. 95-96. Another possible source in Santayana’s work, if somewhat remoter, is a an essay on Goethe’s Faust, in Three Philosophical Poets (1910).

Every romantic ideal, once realized, disenchants. No matter what we attain, our dissatisfaction must be perpetual. …

… in the two earlier versions of Goethe’s Faust… [w]hat Mephistopheles says to the young student is only a clever expansion of what Faust had said in his first monologue about the vanity of science and of the learned professions. Mephistopheles, too, finds theory ashen, and the tree of life green and full of golden fruit; only, having more experience than Faust of the second disenchanting moment in the romantic dialectic, he foresees that this golden fruit also will turn to ashes in the mouth, as it did in the garden of Eden.

 

Most of our juniors

The First World War lasted just long enough for Lewis to reach the age at which he became eligible for military service. He arrived in the trenches on his 19th birthday, 29 November 1917, and was wounded during the German spring offensive in April 1918. Nearly all men younger than he, including the next crop of Oxford students, had lacked the front experience.

 

Rupert Brooke or Philip Sidney

English poets. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) stood out as a rather idealistic “war poet” of his generation. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) was an English courtier, diplomat, soldier, critic and poet, who acquired the reputation of embodying the type of the ideal aristocrat.

 

Siegfried Sassoon

(1886-1967), a First World War poet who was known for his anti-war poetry.

 

The Battle of Maldon

Old English poem about a Danish invasion in Essex in the year 991.

 

The Lays of Ancient Rome

Four ballads about the ancient history of Rome by the English poet and essayist Thomas Macaulay (1800-1859), published in 1842. These poems were inspired by a historian’s suggestion that Livy’s history of early Rome was probably based on traditional ballads. Macaulay’s first poem deals with Horatius Cocles and his defence of the Sublician Bridge against the Etruscans; the second with the Battle of Lake Regillus, c. 496 B.C., in which the Romans defeated the Latins.

 

Lepanto

Poem by G. K. Chesterton published in 1911, about the sea battle of Lepanto in 1571.

 

Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet; his long autobiographical poem The Prelude was published shortly after his death.

 

a whisper / Which memory will warehouse as a shout

From the unpublished poem “The Tower”, part V, by Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield. The same words are also quoted in the last chapter of Lewis’s last book, Letters to Malcolm (1964).
   Lewis was commenting on Barfield’s poem as early as March 1921 (Collected Letters I, 522) and June 1922 (diary, in All My Road Before Me, p. 53), and he came back to it with effusive yet well-considered praise in letters of October 1926 and September 1930 (Collected Letters III, pp. 1505-7 and 1508-9; the 1930 letter misdated 1927).

 

 

back to survey

 

RELIGION WITHOUT DOGMA?

 

As stated in Walter Hooper’s first note, Lewis’s paper was initially published in Phoenix Quarterly: A Journal directed towards the recovery of unity in religion, politics and art, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn 1946) and in the Socratic Digest Nr. 4 (1948) along with the paper by H. H. Price to which it was a reply. Although the Phoenix text was published first, it was actually a revised and somewhat shortened version of the Socratic text. Reprints as published from 1970 onwards give the revised Phoenix text but still include three paragraphs which until then had only appeared the Socratic version. British editions give these paragraphs in square brackets (par. 7, “The second assumption...”; par. 16, “I remember once...”; par. 23, “ I submit to...”).
     Price’s text was never reprinted after 1948 until it re-appeared as part of a one-volume complete reprint of the Socratic Digest in 2012. While Lewis’s paper was his direct and full reply to Price’s 1944 address, there had been rudiments of a reply in his three intervening “Socratic” papers of 1944 and 1945. Of these three, “Is Theology Poetry?” is the only surviving one. The debate with Price was continued, on Lewis’s part, in his later Socratic papers “Is Theism Important?” (1951) and “On Obstinacy in Belief” (originally “Faith and Evidence”, 1953).

 

par. 1   in his paper

 

Psychical Research

Now usually called “parapsychology”. The earlier term still lives on in the names of journals and societies, including the oldest: the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882. Lewis was fascinated by psychical research for some time in his late ’teens, as attested by a letter of 3 June 1917 (Collected Letters I, 313). His later aversion to it appears to have been closely linked to his scorn for the supposed value of mere “survival”, and the attitude may have been partly inspired by George Macdonald: in Lewis’s short novel The Great Divorce (1946), Macdonald appears as a character in the story telling about a man obsessed by “survival” who “began by being philosophical, but in the end he took up Psychical Research” (almost halfway through the section beginning “Where are ye going?”). In Lewis’s Macdonald Anthology, of the same year, “Psychical Research” is the title Lewis gave to an item on the same subject (Nr. 275).

 

par. 2   my disagreement with

 

Henry More

English philosopher (1614-1687), popular and influential writer of his time, and a key figure in the group of mid-17th-century theologians and philosophers known since the 19th century as the “Cambridge Platonists”.

 

at once most ethical and most numinous

Lewis discussed this idea in more detail in The Problem of Pain (1940), chapter 1.

 

bread cast upon the waters will be found after many days

cf. Ecclesiastes 11:1.

 

par. 3   from my own

… an object wholly good and wholly good for it.

Following this sentence, the 1948 Socratic Digest text has a sentence that is lacking from all other published versions:

There is more real religion in Aristotle’s statement that ἅπλως ἄγαθον is ἅπλως ἥδυ than in a whole library of ghost stories.

The Greek terms (haplōs agathon “the simply good” and haplōs hēdy “the simply pleasant”) seem to come from Aristotle’s chapter on Friendship in Ethics (VIII.3 / 1156b):

The perfect form of friendship is that between the good, and those who resemble each other in virtue. … All affection is based on good or on pleasure, either absolute or relative to the person who feels it, and is prompted by similarity of some sort; but this friendship possesses all these attributes in the friends themselves, for they are alike … in that way. Also the absolutely good is pleasant absolutely as well; but the absolutely good and pleasant are the chief objects of affection; therefore it is between good men that affection and friendship exist in their fullest and best form
(translation by H. Rackham, 1934)

 

par. 4   differing from professor

 

mythology ... a great many different views

Lewis gave a similar brief survey both in Miracles, chapter 15, note 1, and in his last Socratic paper, delivered in 1953 and published as “On Obstinacy in Belief”.

 

Euhemerus

Euhemerus of Messene (c. 340–c. 260 BC) described an imaginary voyage to a far island where he discovered the origin of the (Greek) gods. The gods were found to have simply been praiseworthy kings or heroes of past ages, deified after their deaths. Only fragments have survived of Euhemerus’s work, the Sacred Chronicle; but his kind of explanation for religion has since been called the “euhemeric critique of the gods”, or “euhemerism”.

 

priestly lies ... Enlightenment

The idea of priestly lying or “priestcraft” as the driving force behind popular religion got currency during the early Enlightenment through the Histoire des Oracles (1687) by the French philosopher Fontenelle (1657-1757); he depended heavily on a slightly earlier Latin work, Oraculis Ethnicorum (1683) by the Dutch physician Anthony van Dale (1638-1708). Their view was shared by British deists Matthew Tindal (Christianity as Old as the Creation, 1730) and John Toland (Adeisdaemon, 1709) and further propagated by later French philosophes such as Voltaire, Condillac, d’Alembert and Diderot. Lewis appears to be bracketing three critical views of “Myth” because Myth is his own focus of interest. In fact the focus differed from one critic of religion to another: thus the early Enlightenment focussed not on myths but on oracles. Nor were charges of “priestly lying” exclusive to the Enlightenment, as Lewis himself suggested in his novel Till We Have Faces (1956), set in an ancient barbarian kingdom on the fringes of the Greek world in the third century BC.

 

Frazer

James George Frazer (1854-1941), Scottish cultural anthropologist. His multi-volume work The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1890-1914) is a wide-ranging comparative study of myths and rituals all over the world. The recurrent idea of a dying god coming to life again was explained by Frazer as a reflection of the agrarian life cycle.

 

preparatio evangelica

(Latin) “Preparation for the Gospel”; Lewis also used the term in his 1943 Preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress. It is the title of a book of Christian apologetics by the early Christian author and church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 265-339 a.d.). Eusebius tried in this book to show why the religion of the Jews was preferable to that of the Greeks. In an unfinished work called Demonstratio evangelica he went on to explain why Christianity had supplanted the Jewish religion.

 

from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination

Cf. the last chapter of Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), where he mentions “[Owen] Barfield’s encouragement of a more respectful, if not more delighted, attitude to Pagan myth” as one of two elements making up the “real clue [which] had been put into my hand”.

 

a petitio

i.e. petitio principii, Latin for “begging the question”; a logical error which consists in setting out to prove something by argument and then quietly or unconsciously assuming it to be self-evident.

 

par. 7   the second assumption

 

Bradshaw

i.e. Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, published from 1839 to 1961. (Walter Hooper’s note is only found in American editions of this essay.)

 

If I thus hand over miracles ...

This entire paragraph appears only in the essay as published in the Socratic Digest in 1948, not in the Phoenix Quarterly of 1946. Walter Hooper’s note on this difference is only found in British reprints, beginning with Undeceptions, the 1971 British edition of God in the Dock (1970).

 

The Third Day

Arnold Lunn (1888-1974), author of The Harrovians (1913), converted to Christianity at age 45 and became a noted Catholic apologist. His book The Third Day (1945) is available online. For a brief account of Lunn’s religious development see Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts (1999), pp. 171-183.

 

Thinker’s Library

a series of books by old and new authors including H. G. Wells, Charles Darwin and Thomas Paine, published by the Rationalist Press Association in the years 1929-1951 to facilitate a humanistic and rationalistic (re‑)education of the masses.

 

par. 12   on the fully naturalistic

 

irrational

In chapter 3 of his book Miracles (1947), Lewis brought the same charge of “irrationality” against the naturalistic view of human thought. More than a decade after criticisms from Elizabeth Anscombe during a “Socratic” meeting in 1948, Lewis revised the book, notably chapter 3, replacing nearly all instances of “irrational” by “non-rational” or similar alternatives. See Arend Smilde, “What Lewis Really did to Miracles: A philosophical layman’s attempt to understand the Anscombe Affair”, Journal of Inklings Studies Vol. 1 Nr. 2 (October 2011), pp. 8-24, and James E. Taylor, “The Lewis-Anscombe Debate: A Philosophical Reformulation”, Sehnsucht Vol. 1 (2010), pp. 67-87.

 

par. 14   it would have

 

Bradley distinguished idea-event from idea-making, but …

Typo alert: The original text as printed in the Socratic Digest reads

Bradley distinguished “idea as event” from “idea as meaning”. But …

The reference to Henry Bradley given in Walter Hooper’s footnote is probably incorrect; Lewis is really referring to Francis Herbert Bradley’s Essays on Truth and Reality (1914), p. 153 (a section “on Professor James’s ‘radical empiricism’”):

[I]deas are what may may be called “symbolical”. While on the one side they are psychical events, on the other side they are self-transcendent and refer to a reality other than themselves.

 

par. 17   there is no

 

All other propositions must be fitted in as best they can round that primary claim

cf. Miracles (1947), chapter 3:

The validity of thought is central: all other things have to be fitted in round it as best they can.

The second edition (1960) has:

Reason is our starting point. ... [T]he thinking we are actually doing ... is the prime reality, on which the attribution of reality to anything else rests.”

 

par. 20   the first question

 

Akhenaten

Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty (14th century BC), who introduced a short-lived monotheistic worship of the Sun (Aten).

 

Julian the Apostate

Roman emperor (361-363) who tried to revive pagan religion in the Roman empire.

 

Lord Herbert of Cherbury

English poet and philosopher (1583-1648). As author of De Veritate he was a founding father of Deism, i.e. the belief in a God who keeps strictly aloof from the world after creating it and setting it in motion.

 

the late H. G. Wells

(1866-1946) English popular science writer and pioneer of science fiction. Lewis delivered this paper in May 1946; the reference to Wells’s death on 13 August 1946 must have been added when it was published that autumn.

 

par. 21   nor do i see

 

the model factory or the university common room.

The 1948 Socratic Digest text has “the Socratic Club” for “the university common room”.

 

par. 24   the minimal religion

 

… he will, I fancy, be content. / he will, I believe, leave us …

In the essay as printed in Undeceptions (1970), p. 110, and Timeless at Heart (1987), p. 99, some text after “he will” is missing. The full text is found both in God in the Dock (1971), p. 141, and Essay Collection (2000), p. 173 (with underlining of the text that is missing in the 1970 and 1987 editions):

… if they can thus get power and hope and discipline, he will, I fancy, be content. But the trouble is that if this minimal religion leaves Buddhists still Buddhists, and Nazis still Nazis, then it will, I believe, leave us – as Western, mechanised, democratic, secularised men – exactly where we were

 

Annie Besant

(1847-1933) English political activist, feminist and secularist; in later life she became a prominent member and President of the Theosophical Society.

 

Martin Tupper

(1810-1889) English popular writer, chiefly known for his Proverbial Philosophy, a collection of didactic meditations in pseudo-poetical prose.

 

par. 25   i am not

 

the fear of the Lord in which wisdom begins

Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 9:10.

 

that which binds us all, das Gemeine

The German word means “the vulgar”, in the mildly pejorative sense of “commonplace”. Lewis is citing the entire last line of stanza 4 from Goethe’s 1815 poem, Epilog zu Schillers Glocke (Epilogue to Schiller’s “The Bell”), an homage to the dead poet Schiller (1759-1806):

Denn er war unser. Mag das stolze Wort Den lauten Schmerz gewaltig übertönen. Er mochte sich bei uns im sichern Port, Nach wildem Sturm, zum Dauernden [  gewöhnen. Indessen schritt sein Geist gewaltig fort Ins Ewige des Guten, Wahren, Schönen; Und hinter ihm, in wesenlosem Scheine, Lag was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.

For he was ours. So let the note of pride Hush into silence all the mourner’s ruth; In our safe harbor he was fain to bide And build for aye, after the storm of youth.   We saw his mighty spirit onward stride To eternal realms of Beauty and of Truth; While far behind him lay phantasmally The vulgar things that fetter you and me. – translation Calvin Thomas, The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller (1901)

 

the song of the Maenads

A maenad or bacchante was a female participant in the orgiastic rites of the Greek god Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans). Euripides (480?-406 B.C.) was one of the great ancient Greek tragic playwrights. Lewis is quoting from the first stanza of the Bacchae’s first chorus. He had been reading the play as early as his public-school days in Malvern, and went to Gilbert Murray’s lectures on the subject in the first month of his regular studies in Oxford, January 1919 (cf. Collected Letters I, 426).

 

par. 26   almost, but not

 

the God not only of the philosophers

A phrase from the so-called Mémorial, a posthumously discovered manuscript in which the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) recorded a mystical experience in the year 1654.

Dieu d’Abraham, Dieu d’Isaac, Dieu de Jacob, non des philosophes et des savants.
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and learned men.

 

 

back to survey

 

ON THE TRANSMISSION OF CHRISTIANITY

 

First published as “Preface” in B. G. Sandhurst, How Heathen is Britain? (1946). – The author’s real name was Charles Henry Green; he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the British army. The young men whose views he described were cadets at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst; hence the pseudonym he used as author of this book. The full text of the book is available at www.lewisiana.nl/sandhurst.

 

par. 5   this very obvious

 

the beliefs of the Twenties ... a period of cynicism and disillusion

Lewis gave an allegorical account of this period in The Pilgrim’s Regress, book III, “Through Darkest Zeitgeistheim”.

 

“the godes boteler”

Chaucer, The Hous of Fame II, 592. Also written as “the goddys botiller”; said of the legendray Trojan prince Ganymedes.

 

par. 8   we are often

 

the rich Platonic or Virgilian penumbra

i.e. the spiritual legacy of Plato’s philosophy and Virgil’s poetry, conceived as proto-Christian philosophy and poetry. Penumbra is a Neo-Latin word for “half-shadow”. See Lewis’s similar reference to Plato and Virgil in “The Decline of Religion”, written in the same year.

 

par. 9   so at least

 

Rousseau ... Je ne connais rien de plus contraire...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762), IV.8, “De la religion civile” (The Social Contract, “Civil Religion”, available at http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm).

hardening the pupils’ hearts

An expression found in many places in both the Old and the New Testament, such as Psalm 95:8 (quoted in Hebrews 3:8) and Ephesians 4:18.

 

par. 11   i do not

 

worship the Life-Force

Lewis was certainly thinking of a literary and philosophical kind of worship as advocated or exemplified by French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), whose concept of élan vital was popularized in English by dramatist Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) as “Life Force”. Lewis may also have been thinking of novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930). In 1960 Lewis wrote scathingly (in a private letter) about what he viewed as a resurgence of “Bergsonian-Shavian-pantheistic-biolatrous waffle” in the work of the French theologian and biologist Pierre Teilhard  de Chardin (Collected Letters III, 1186).

 

 

back to survey

 

PERIOD CRITICISM

 

First published as “Notes on the Way” in Time and Tide, 9 November 1946; first reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, 1982.

 

par. 1   opening the listener

 

The Listener

Weekly magazine of the BBC, published in the period 1929-1991.

 

Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), English writer, poet, and journalist.

 

Euripides, Virgil, …

– Euripides (c. 480–c. 406 B.C.), ancient Greek tragedian.

– Virgil (70-19 B.C.), Roman poet, author of the Aeneid.

– Horace (65-8 B.C.), Roman poet.

– Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italian poet, author of the Divina Commedia.

– Chaucer (c. 1340-1400), English writer and poet, author of The Canterbury Tales.

– William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English poet and playwright.

– John Dryden (1731-1700), English poet and dramatist.

– Alexander Pope (1688-1744), English poet.

– Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), English poet.

 

Mr James Stephens

James Stephens (1882-1950), Irish fantasy writer and poet.

 

par. 2   it is very difficult

 

Lady Gregory, AE …

– Augusta, Lady Gregory (1852-1932), Irish dramatist and folklorist.

– AE (or A.E. or Æ) was the pseudonym used by the Irish writer, painter and theosophist George William Russell (1867-1935).

– William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet.

– Algernon Blackwood (1869-1961), English writer best known for his ghost stories.

 

The Crock of Gold

Published in 1912, this is the fantasy novel that established the author’s fame. Lewis was expressing his delight in the book as early as February 1917 and comparing it with George MacDonald’s Phantastes: “It is difficult to choose between two such perfect flowers” (to Arthur greeves, Collected Letters I, 281).

 

the Uglist Man

typo Read “the Ugliest Man”

 

par. 3   but though this

 

Boston … “Transcendentalism”

Transcendentalism was an American literary and philosophical movement that started around 1830. One of the movement’s chief figures, the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and from 1834 for the rest of his life lived in Concord, in the same state.

 

the arrest of the Philosopher

In The Crock of Gold, chapter 14. In his 1917 letter to Greeves (see not to par. 2, above) Lewis was referring to “the humour both of the philosopher and the policemen” (Collected Letters I, 281). He alluded to this scene also in Miracles (1947), chapter 7.

 

O’Brien and the threepenny bit

See “The Threepenny Piece”, a story in the volume Here Are Ladies (1913).

 

picaro … Patsy Mac Cann

See Stephens’s novel The Demi-Gods (1914).

 

the Ass

…??

 

the crow that said, “I’m the devil of a crow”

…??

 

par. 4   the truth is

 

as if age-groups were the proper classification of readers

It is hard to see why Lewis inserted this clause. His thought is probably similar to that found in his 1952 piece “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”:

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

In the present case he seems to be using the term “age-groups” in an unusual sense. In whichever sense he uses it, cutting out this clause about age-groups appears to result in more clarity, with no loss of meaning. If Lewis was trying to insert his usual objection to linking any book to a specific age-group of readers, it seems out of place.

 

Aristotle’s Ethics

Lewis may be alluding to several passages in Book V of the Ethics (1134a, 1135a, 1136a, 1137a), where Aristotle is distinguishing culpable from non-culpable modes of bad behaviour; or else perhaps to passages in Book VII, on akrasia or imperfect self-control:

[VII.8, 1151a] … that Imperfection of Self-Control is not Confirmed Viciousness is plain: and yet perhaps it is such in a way, because in one sense it is contrary to moral choice and in another the result of it: at all events, in respect of the actions, the case is much like what Demodocus said of the Miletians. “The people of Miletus are not fools, but they do just the kind of things that fools do;” and so they of Imperfect Self-Control are not unjust, but they do unjust acts.

[VII.10, 1152a] Nor is the man of Imperfect Self-Control like the man who both has and calls into exercise his knowledge, but like the man who, having it, is overpowered by sleep or wine. Again, he acts voluntarily (because he knows, in a certain sense, what he does and the result of it), but he is not a confirmed bad man, for his moral choice is good, so he is at all events only half bad.

(translation by D. P. Chase, Everyman edition, 1911)

 

par. 5   a man may be

 

Herbert

George Herbert (1593-1633), English clergyman and poet.

 

Homer … Dante … Froissart

– Homer (8th century B.C.), ancient Greek poet, presumed author of the Iliad and Odyssey; “Achaeans” (Ἀχαιοί) is one of the collective names used for the Greeks in the two great epic poems, while no specific region called Achaea (Ἀχαΐα) is ever mentioned.

– Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italian poet, author of the Divina Commedia; scholastic philosophy was the dominant school of thought in the Christian Middle Ages, reaching its high point around the time of Dante’s birth with the work of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

– Jean Froissart (c. 1337-c. 1405), Francophone writer and historian from the southern Low Countries; the feudal system was a combination of legal, economic, military and cultural customs that flourished in medieval Europe between the ninth and fifteenth centuries.

 

“Elizabethan” … Shakespeare

In English history, the Elizabethan period is defined by the reign (1558-1603) of queen Elizabeth I. More broadly the “Elizabethan era” became known as a golden age of international expansion and cultural flourishing, roughly coinciding with the lifetime of the greatest writer of the English language, William Shakespeare (1564-1616).

 

The Rape of the Lock … The Prelude … The Waste Land …

– The Rape of the Lock (1712), a mock-heroic narrative poem by Alexander Pope.

– The Prelude (1850), an autobiographical long poem by William Wordsworth.

– The Waste Land (1922), a poem by T. S. Eliot.

 

They are, of course, richly composed

misprint The text as found in Of This and Other Worlds and in the 2000 Essay Collection is defective. The full sentence as found in Time and Tide reads

They are, of course, richly redolent of the age in which they were composed.

 

Ballad of the White Horse

The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), epic poem by G. K. Chesterton about the exploits of the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great.

 

Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), English poet, essayist and historian.

 

New Arabian Nights

A collection of short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in magazines, 1877-1880, then in book form in 1882.

 

Ruth Pitter … All but divine and desperate hopes …

From “The Sparrow’s Skull: Memento Mori. Written at the Fall of France” (1940), published in The Bridge: Poems 1939-1944 (1945), line 2:

All save divine and desperate hopes go down, they are no more.

 

the fall of France

The military defeat of France against the Germans, June 1940.

 

par. 7   so in the stories

 

The Flying Inn

A novel by G. K. Chesterton, published in 1914.

 

The Man Who was Thursday

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908), novel by G. K. Chesterton.

 

Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883-1924), German writer.

 

par. 8   i will tell

 

Abbey Theatre

National theatre of Ireland, opened in 1904 in Dublin. In its early days it was a major centre of cultural and literary life, partly inspired by Irish nationalism. At the time of Lewis’s birth in Belfast, all of Ireland was still part of Great Britain.

 

Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet.

 

 

back to survey

 

A CHRISTMAS SERMON FOR PAGANS

 

First published in The Strand Magazine, Nr. 672, December 1946. This piece sank into total oblivion for many decades and was first reprinted in Seven, Vol. 34 (2017).

 

people keep on telling us that this country is relapsing into Paganism

Earlier in the year 1946 Lewis had written the preface for a book entitled How Heathen is Britain? by B. G. Sandhurst. This author was himself among the people who expressed such fears or complaints about reviving paganism. Lewis in his preface to the Sandhurst book did not raise the question whether “heathen” or “pagan” was a plausible word to characterize modern people, and he had never done so in previous years, or not in any surviving writings. But he did raise it on several later occasions. One is his poem (in the style of a satire by Juvenal), “A Cliché came out of its cage”, published in 1950:

You said “The world is going back to Paganism”. Oh bright
Vision! (…)
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears...
You said it. Did yo mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.

Or did yo mean another kind of heathenry?
(…) the end of man is to partake of [the gods’] defeat and die
His second, final death in good company. (…)
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;
You that have Vichy-water in your veins and worship the event,
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune.)

Another is the opening paragraph of his 1951 paper for the Socratic Club, “Is Theism Important?”:

… When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, “Would that she were.” For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Minsters leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering  for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin.

God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (1970), p. 172.

Perhaps the most notable instance of Lewis expressing this idea occurred in his 1954 Cambridge inaugural lecture (see next note). Possibly, therefore, the combined invitations by Sandhurst and by the Strand Magazine in 1946 triggered Lewis’s doubt about the suitability of this term in a modern Western context.

 

that is like thinking that a woman who has lost her husband is the same sort of person as an unmarried girl

As appears from the quotation in the previous comment, this “woman who has lost her husband” (or widow) was replaced by “a divorcée” in the 1951 paper. In a letter of 17 March 1953, though, Lewis reverted to the older metaphor, now talking of a “widow” and a “virgin” respectively. Two weeks later, in another letter, he re-developed this into “a woman who has deserted her husband” and “an unmarried girl” respectively (Collected Letters III, 307 and 318). His Cambridge inaugural lecture of 29 November 1954 featured what may be considered as the fully matured version:

A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce.

In neither of these later cases did Lewis use the image of “the ruined street and the unbuilt field” alongside that of the widowed or divorced woman.

    Before 1946, no such metaphor is found in Lewis’s writings at all. In his essay “Christianity and Literature”, dating from the late 1930s, he occasionally referred to modern non-Christians as “pagans”. As noted in the previous comment, Lewis still seemed to have no hesitation in seeing the word pagan or heathen used that way when he wrote his preface for How Heathen is Britain?. However, in his 1946 essay “Modern Man and his Categories of Thought” of October 1946 he wrote,

I sometimes wonder whether we shall not have to re-convert men to real Paganism as a preliminary to converting them to Christianity.

Presumably, Lewis wrote this less than half a year before the “Christmas Sermon for Pagans”. It seems possible that the invitation from The Strand Magazine in 1946 was what finally triggered his idea that post-Christians are not to be equated with the pagans of yore.

 

Diana … Vesta …

In Roman mythology, the goddess Diana was associated, among other things, with the Moon and with hunting; Vesta was the goddess of the domestic hearth.

 

Suppose she [Nature] is only a machine

This paragraph and the next could serve as a very brief summary of The Abolition of Man (1943).

 

 

back to survey

 

THE DECLINE OF RELIGION

 

First published in The Cherwell, 29 November 1946. – Apart from one poem in 1939, this was Lewis’s only piece written for The Cherwell, an independent student’s magazine founded in 1920.

 

par. 3   in every class

 

Meredith, Trollope and Thackeray

Three major English novelists of the 19th century: George Meredith (1828-1909), Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) and William Macepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)

 

Dickens’ Christmas Carol

A famous short novel by English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), published in 1843.

 

The Antiquary

A novel by Sir Walter Scott, published in 1812.

 

the fasts

As printed in the volume God in the Dock (1970), there is a typo here: the *facts.

 

par. 4   i am anxious

 

Plato and Virgil

cf. Lewis’s reference to the Greek philosopher Plato and the Roman poet Virgil in his 1946 essay published as “On the Transmission of Christianity”, where he talks of “the rich Platonic or Virgilian penumbra of the Faith”.

 

par. 5   thus the “decline

 

“morality tinged with emotion”

Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (1873), chapter 1.2, pp. 16-17 in the 1883 “Popular edition”.

Religion, if we follow the intention of human thought and human language in the use of the word, is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling; the passage from morality to religion is made when to morality is applied emotion. And the true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion. ... “By the dispensation of Providence to mankind”, says Quintilian, “goodness gives men most satisfaction”. That is morality. “The path of the just is as the shining light which shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” That is morality touched with emotion, or religion.

The shift from touched to tinged is not peculiar to Lewis but is often made in quotations of Arnold’s famous phrase.

 

“what a man does with his solitude”

Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (1926), Lecture I, “Religion in History”.

Religion is what the individual does with its own solitariness.

 

“the religion of all good men”

the title of a book, The Religion of All Good Men (1906), by H. W. Garrod.

 

par. 6   the decline of

 

“too sacred to be lightly mentioned”

John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons II (1835), Nr. 15, “Self-Contemplation”.

...solemn truths, too solemn to be lightly mentioned, but our hearty reception of which is scarcely ascertainable by a direct inspection of our feelings.

 

par. 7   the decline of

 

When the Round Table is broken

Lewis presumably means the breaking up or falling apart of the order of knights of the Round Table, in Arthurian legend. Galahad was the ideal type of a knight, Mordred was a traitor.

 

par. 8      so much for

 

the success ... of several explicitly and even violently Christian writers

Among these writers Lewis himself is certainly to be included. He must also have been thinking of Dorothy L. Sayers as author of The Mind of the Maker (1940) and the twelve-part series of BBC radio plays, The Man Born to Be King.

 

apparent popularity of lectures on theological subjects ... brisk atmosphere ... “the high-brow Christian racket”

Being himself a major example of all this, Lewis must have been thinking of the Oxford Socratic Club, which he helped to found in December 1941 and served as President and regular speaker during the years 1942-54. The Club’s papers as published in periodical collections were published in 2012 as Socratic Digest, edited by Joel D. Heck.

 

par. 12   this mutability is

 

sweet reasonableness

A term coined by Matthew Arnold and frequently used in his Literature and Dogma (1873). Thus in chapter III, “Religion new-given” (p. 66 in the 1883 Popular Edition):

Jesus Christ’s new and different way of putting things was the secret of his succeeding where the prophets failed. And this new way he had of putting things is what is indicated by the expression epieikeia, an expression best rendered, as I have elsewhere said, by the phrase “sweet reasonableness”.

Arnold is referring to his St. Paid and Protestantism, Preface, p. xix. Another example is chapter XII, “The True Greatness of Christianity” (p. 214):

... what the world will become by the thorough use of that which is really righteousness, the method and the secret and the sweet reasonableness of Jesus, we have as yet hardly any experience at all.

 

 

back to survey

 

A REPLY TO PROFESSOR HALDANE

 

First published in Of Other Worlds, 1966. J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) was a British biologist and popular writer on science.

 

par. 1   before attempting

 

Haldane … “Auld Hornie, F.R.S.”

In the autumn issue 1946 of The Modern Quarterly, a Marxist periodical. “Auld Hornie” is a Scottish epithet for the devil; “F.R.S.” is for Fellow of the Royal Society”.

   Haldane wrote a further critique of Lewis, “More Anti-Lewisite”, published in The Rationalist Annual, 1948. Both pieces were included in the volume Everything Has a History (1951), and are available online at www.lewisiana.nl/haldane. The first was again reprinted in Shadows of the Imagination: The Fantasies of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, edited by Mark R. Hillegas (1969).

 

most communists

Haldane became a supporter of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1937 and a full member in 1942. He left the party in 1950, but remained a Marxist.

 

Paley

William Paley (1743-1805), English theologian and philosopher, author of The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) and Natural Theology (1802). Lewis is alluding to the problem known as the Eutyphro dilemma: “Are things good because God commands them, or does God command them because they are good?” He considered Paley as a representative of the first position. See Lewis’s letter to John Beversluis, 3 July 1963, and Hooper’s footnote, in Collected Letters III, 1437.

 

Vichy

A town in central France. During most of the second world war, much of the south and east of France remained without German military occupation, having a French government under Marshal Philippe Pétain who collaborated with Nazi Germany. This government had its seat in Vichy.

 

par. 2   my chief criticism

 

That Hideous Strength … The Abolition of Man

– That Hideous Strength (1945) is the last volume in Lewis’s science fiction trilogy, preceded by Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Perelandra (1943).

– The Abolition of Man is the series of three “Riddell Memorial Lectures” which Lewis delivered at the University of Durham in February 1943 and published in early 1944.

 

par. 4   (1) my science is

 

Ptolemy’s Almagest

Claudius Ptolemaeus, ancient mathematician, astronomer and geographer of the second century C.E. (c. 100-170). He was a Roman living in Alexandria (Egypt), and wrote in Greek. The title Almagest is derived from the 9th-century Arabic translation of his Μαθηματικὴ σύνταξις (Mathematikē syntaxis).

   In G. J. Toomer’s English translation (Ptolemy’s Almagest, 1984), the chapter referred to is entitled “Earth negligibly small in relation to heavens”. The opening sentence is

Moreover, the earth has, to the senses, the ratio of a point to the distance of the sphere of the so-called fixed stars. A strong indication of this is the fact that the sizes and distances of the stars, at any given time, appear equal and the same from all parts of the earth everywhere, as observations of the same [celestial] objects from different latitudes are found to have not the least discrepancy from each other.

Lewis repeatedly mentioned this fact about medieval cosmology, both in his apologetic and his scholarly work – e.g. in The Problem of Pain (1940), chapter 1; in his 1945 newspaper article on “Religion and Science”; and in his 1956 lecture “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages”. In The Discarded Image (1964), Lewis only notes in passing (p. 22) that

Casual statements about pre-Copernican astronomy in modern scientists who are not historians are often unreliable.

The book-and-chapter number I.v, also stated elsewhere in Lewis’s writings, is correct as referring to the French edition he had consulted (ed. Halma 1813). However, in other editions the chapter number may be vi (6, ζ), with the preface counted as chapter i (1, α).

 

King Alfred

Alfred the Great (849-901), King of the West Saxons, did much to rescue English learning and literacy from total collapse after the period of destruction by Norse raiders. He translated, compiled and adapted several early Christian Latin writings, including Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and encouraged systematic work on what was to become the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, continued for well over two centuries after his death.

 

South English Legendary

A late-thirteenth-century collection of lives of the saints. See also The Discarded Image (1964), chapter 3, p. 22, and chapter 5, pp. 97-98.

 

Dante … views on gravitation and the rotundity of the Earth

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italian poet, author of the Divina Commedia. Lewis is referring to the Commedia’s first part, “Inferno”  (“Hell”), Canto XXXIV, 70-93. In a later essay he summarized the passage thus:

… Dante and Virgil come to the centre [of the earth] where they find Lucifer embedded and have to climb down his shaggy sides in order to continue their journey to the Antipodes; but Dante finds to his surprise that after they have passed his waist they have to climb up to his feet. For they have of course passed the centre of gravitation.

(“Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages”, first part, par. 17)

 

Vincent of Beauvais … Speculum Naturale (VII. vii.)

French Dominican friar, †1264. His Speculum Naturale (“Mirror of Nature”) is a compendium of the science and natural history available in Western Europe around the mid-thirteenth century.

   In a notebook which Lewis filled with various notes and sketches in the course of several years, a loose leaf is found with manuscript references to precisely those passages in Ptolemy, Dante and Vincent of Beauvais which are here adduced to answer Haldane’s case. From the place indicated in Vincent’s Speculum, Lewis quoted:

Quorsum iniectus lapis erit casurus si perforatus sit ei terre globus.
¶ Queris autem ulterius si perforatus sit terre globus ut ab uno celo in aliud pateat transitus, iniecta mole lapidis, quorsum futurus sit casus. … in medio vero loco quiescet.

(copied in “Notebook V”, Bodleian Library, Dep. d. 809, fol. 71)

 

“willing suspension of disbelief”

A phrase borrowed from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), chapter XIV:

In this idea originated 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. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

 

Romola

Historical novel set in 15th-century Florence, by the English novelist George Eliot (1819-1880). Published in 1863.

 

canals in Mars

Lewis’s novel Out of the Silent Planet is set on the planet Mars, called Malacandra. The landscape features an important distinction between harandra (highland) and handramit (lowland). The lowland takes the form of huge valleys or canyons matching some surface marks of the planet Mars that were interpreted as “canals” by late-nineteenth-century astronomers.

 

astrological character of the planets

The planets known since antiquity – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – have for many centuries been identified with gods, each with its own character and exerting its specific sort of influence on human affairs. Some of these associations survive along with their names in the meaning of their adjectival forms in modern languages – mercurial, venereal, martial, jovial and saturnian. In chapter 15 of That Hideous Strength, “The Descent of the Gods”, Lewis describes the successive visits of these gods to the Manor at St. Anne’s and the impact of each visit on those attending.

 

The poet, Sidney says …

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), English poet, soldier and diplomat, author of the prose romance The Arcadia. Lewis is referring to Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (1595, also published as An Apologie for Poetrie):

… of all writers under the Sunne, the Poet is the least lyer: and though he wold, as a Poet can scarecely be a lyer. … the Poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth: for as I take it, to lie, is to affirme that to bee true, which is false.

 

par. 5   (2) i think professor

 

thought it is much less common

typo For “thought” read though.

 

major premisses

In the type of logical argument called syllogism, the major premiss is the first, general proposition, which is followed by a specific proposition called the minor premiss. Having one term in common, the “middle term”, they produce a conclusion. The classic example, with “man” as middle term, is

major: All men are mortal.

minor: Socrates is a man

conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

 

Shaw’s Back to Methuselah

A five-part cycle of plays by George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah: a Metabiological Pentateuch (1921).

 

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 works, which include Last and First Men (1930), Odd John (1935), Star Maker (1937), and Sirius (1944).

 

Haldane’s “Last Judgement” … Venerites … “somewhere in between”

Haldane’s volume of essays Possible Worlds appeared in 1927. “The Last Judgment” is the last piece in it (but not included in the 1928 American edition of the book). Most of it takes the form of an account of the end of the planet Earth written forty million years hence. Available at Archive.org.

   Venerites are inhabitants of the planet Venus. In the Epilogue of “The Last Judgment”, Haldane writes:

I have pictured a human race on the earth absorbed in the pursuit of individual happiness; on Venus mere components of a monstrous ant-heap. My own ideal is naturally somewhere in between, and so is that of almost every other human being alive to-day.

See also Mark Adams, “Last Judgment: The Visionary Biology of J. B. S. Haldane”, Journal of the History of Biology vol. 33 (2000), 457-491.

 

Weston … “metabiological” heresy

Weston is one of the two villains in Out of the Silent Planet. At the end of the story he expresses ideas taken direct from Shaw’s “metabiological” Back to Methuselah (see note above).

 

par. 7   that hideous strength

 

that “it had something to do with science” (p. 83)

That Hideous Strength, chapter 3.4.

 

(p. 226) … neither scientific nor classical – merely “Modern”

That Hideous Strength,, chapter 9.2.

 

(p. 438) as philosophical, not scientific at all

That Hideous Strength, chapter 16.4.

 

Frost … Waddington

That Hideous Strength, chapter 14.1. C. H. Waddington (1905–1975), was an English embryologist and geneticist. Lewis attacked Waddington in a more direct way in The Abolition of Man, chapter 2, note 3.

 

par. 8   what, then, was

 

St. James … to be a friend of “the World” is to be an enemy of God

James 4:4 (NIV).

You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred towards God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

 

Haldane’s exaltation … Mammon from “a sixth of our planet’s surface”

See the final sentences of Haldane’s critique of Lewis. Haldane declares himself to

… believe that man can rise again by his own efforts. Those who hold the contrary view inevitably regard the reform of society as a dangerous dream, and natural science as unworthy of serious study. And they consequently end up by making friends with the mammon of unrighteousness. But this friendship, so far from qualifying them for an eternal habitation, may not even secure them a competence in this present world. For Mammon has been cleared off a sixth of our planet’s surface, and his realm is contracting in Europe today. It was men, not angels, who cast him out.

 

Aristotle said, “Men do not become tyrants in order to keep warm”

Politics II.4.8 (1267a).

… clearly the greatest transgressions spring from a desire for superfluities, not for bare necessaries (for example, men do not become tyrants in order to avoid shivering with cold, and accordingly high honours are awarded to one who kills a tyrant, but not to one who kills a thief) …

(translation by H. Rackham, Loeb edition, 1932/1959)

 

par. 9   (3) thirdly, was i attacking

 

a “fairy tale” and a “tall story”

The subtitle of That Hideous Strength is A fairy-tale for grown-ups. Lewis explains this in the Preface, and goes on to note that

This is a “tall story” about devilry, though it has behind it a serious “point” which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.

 

par. 11   i am a democrat

 

a passage in Out of the Silent Planet … the relations of one species to another

Two paragraphs before the end of his “Auld Hornie” paper, Haldane wrote,

Today a society is technically possible where every man and woman can have the leisure and culture needed to take a part in managing it. Democracy is in fact a possibility, but so far it has only worked rather spasmodically. Some of us want to make it a reality. Mr Lewis regards it as impossible. “There must be rule,” says an aged and learned Martian, “yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by men, men by angels, and angels by the creator”.

Haldane is referring to a passage shortly before the end of chapter 17 of Out of the Silent Planet.

 

par. 13   this false certainty

 

Aristotle’s canon

A rule proposed at the start of Aristotle’s Ethics, I.3 (1094b), and reiterated in I.7 (1098a), II.2 (1104a) and IX.2 (1165a).

 

par. 14   being a democrat

 

modus operandi

(Latin) “mode of working”, “method”, “procedure”.

 

the committee of public safety

Lewis is using the standard English name for the Comité de Salut Public, the French provisional government during the Reign of Terror (1793-94), a phase in the French Revolution. It was responsible for tens of thousands of executions. The term salut public in the French name would be better translated as “public well-being” or “common weal”.

 

Hardcastle … unless they got some kick out of it

That Hideous Strength, chapter 8.1.

 

par. 15   I must, of course

 

the Machiavellian Prince

The Prince (Il Principe), has always been the best-known book by Niccolò Machiavelli (1569-1527), Italian diplomat, philosopher and writer. It is a political treatise describing in neutral, realistic terms the immoral behaviour of autocrats their pursuit of power, glory and survival.

 

par. 17   the first of

 

appropriate to have no words for “my”, and “I”…

Cf. Haldane’s “Auld Hornie”, seventh paragraph from the end (p. 21 in Shadows of the Imagination):

Parenthetically, I should have thought the most striking character of a language used by sinless beings who loved their neighbours as themselves would have been the absence of any equivalent of the word “my” and very probably of the word “I,” and of other personal pronouns and inflexions.

 

Back to Methuselah

Lewis is referring to a passage in the first play, “In the Beginning”, about two-thirds through the first Act. He makes matters seem slightly worse than they are: Shaw’s Eve actually says “when I have made” rather than “as soon as I have made”. Also,
– Adam had in fact already suggested that he’d rather like to die someday than live on for ever;
– generation and death were among several things Adam and Eve were learning about after finding a dead fawn;
– Eve herself had, in conversation with the serpent, shown herself unconcerned at the prospect of dying.

   In the passage referred to, Eve is applying the serpent’s suggestion that “Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination …” The serpent is basing its teaching here on the story of the pre-Adamite lone arch-mother Lilith: she found “a way to renew herself” but then decided that “the burden of renewing life … was too much for one”. The idea that “life” has no higher end than its own continuation is therefore repeated in Lilith’s own monologue at the very end of the cycle’s last play. Lewis had quoted from that passage in the climactic scene toward the end of his own first science fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet, chapter 20.

 

 

back to survey

 

VIVISECTION

 

First published as a pamphlet by the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, 1947. – The view of vivisection as a stage in the growth of modern barbarism is also expressed in Lewis’s third and largest science fiction novel, That Hideous Strength (1945).

 

par. 9   the alarming thing

 

Lewis Carroll

Pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), who was an ordained Anglican clergyman but spent most of his working life as a mathematician and Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford. His books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) are among the most popular children’s stories ever published.

 

Dr Johnson – a man whose mind had as much iron in it as any man’s

cf. Psalm 105:17-18 in Coverdale’s version (a mistranslation):

                           ... Joseph, who was sold to be a bond-servant;
whose feet they hurt in the stocks: the iron entered into his soul ...

 

 

back to survey

 

MODERN TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE

 

First published as “Preface” in J. B. Phillips, Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles, 1947. – Phillips (1906-1982) was a London clergyman who had studied Classics and English in Cambridge. His translations of the New Testament epistles was recommended by Lewis to his publisher Geoffrey Bles. It sold very well, and Phillips translated the rest of the New Testament in three further instalments. The complete translation appeared in 1958 as The New Testament in Modern English. Phillips commented on theological controversies of the 1960s in The Ring of Truth: A Translator’s Testimony (1967, reprinted in 2004).

 

par. 2   there are several

 

“language such as men do use”

Ben Jonson, Every Man in his Humour (1598), Prologue.

 

“Basic” Greek

An allusion to “Basic English”, a simplified form of English for international use with a vocabulary of less than 1,000 words. It was designed by two British linguists, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards (Basic English and Its Uses, 1943). See also Lewis’s remarks on New Testament Greek in his letter of 17 Feb. 1961 to Eric Routley (Collected Letters III, 1241).

 

Authorized Version

Now perhaps more commonly known as “King James Bible” or “King James Version” outside Great Britain, this is the English translation of the Bible published in 1611.

 

par. 4   an finally, though

 

flogged ... mocked ... jeered

Lewis’s proposal had been carried out, in a way, only five years earlier by Dorothy Sayers. Her series of twelve radio plays The Man Born to Be King (1943) was a retelling of the gospel story in the form of twelve radio plays in relentlessly unceremonial language. Admired by many including Lewis, it also raised a storm of protest from some conservative Christian quarters against what was felt to be blasphemy.

 

 

back to survey

 

ON STORIES

First published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis (Oxford U.P. 1947); first reprinted in Of Other Worlds (1966). The title may have been chosen in combination with that of J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay in the same volume, “On Fairy Stories”. As Walter Hooper notes in his preface to Of This and Other Worlds (1982), Lewis’s essay “was originally read, in a slightly fuller form, to a Merton College undergraduate literary society on 14th November 1940 as ‘The Kappa Element in Romance’. ‘Kappa’ is taken from Greek κρυπτόν [krypton] and means the ‘hidden element’.”

 

par. 1   it is astonishing

 

Aristotle in the Poetics

In chapters XVIII and XIX.

 

Boccaccio and others … theory of Story

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) was an Italian writer best known for a collection of stories, the Decameron. He was also a scholar and literary critic and wrote a mythological handbook in Latin entitled Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (“Genealogy of the Pagan Gods”). The dual purpose of this work was (1) revealing the allegorical meaning of the stories told about the gods, and (2) defending the art of Poetry against its critics. It remained a standard work in its field for about two centuries.

 

Jung and his followers

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1962), Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, founder of analytical psychology.

 

par. 2   what finally convinced

 

Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), widely read American writer who also became very popular in Europe.

 

par. 3   to those who

 

King Solomon’s Mines

First novel (1885) by the English writer Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925). See also Lewis’s review published as “Haggard Rides Again” (1960).

 

par. 5   to put it

 

Tormance … Tellus

The fictional planet Tormance is the scene of David Lindsay’s science fiction novel Voyage to Arcturus (1920), further discussed at a later point in the present essay. Tellus is a Latin name for the planet Earth.

 

from Morna Moruna to Koshtra Belorn

Places in E. R. Eddison’s fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros (1922).

 

from Uplands to Utterbol

Places in William Morris’s fantasy novel The Well at the World’s End (1896). “Uplands” is actually “Upmeads” in Morris’s story; the mistake is also found in the text as originally published in 1947.

 

Hakluyt

Richard Hakluyt (1553?-1616), English compiler, editor and translator of writings about navigators, discoverers and the exploration of the globe. His main work was The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598).

 

Scamander and the Scaean Gate

The Scamander (now Karamenderes) is a river in Asia Minor on which ancient Troy was situated. The Scaean or Skaian Gate (Greek: Skaiai pulai, “western gate”) was thus designated in the 19th century by German archaeologist Schliemann, suggesting that this was the gate referred to in Homer’s Iliad, books 3, 6, 9, 16 and 22. However, it is now considered to be Troy’s Southern or Dardanian gate.

 

Toad Hall and the Wild Wood

Places in The Wind in the Willows (1908), an animal story and children’s classic by Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932).

 

Selenites

Inhabitants of the moon, living underground, in H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The First Men in the Moon (1901). Their name is derived from Selene, Greek goddess of the Moon.

 

Hrothgar

King of the Danes in the Old English epic poem Beowulf (10th century).

 

Vortigern

A British legendary king, or perhaps historical warlord, of the mid-fifth century.

 

The Three Musketeers

An eight-volume novel (Les trois mousquetaires, 1844) by French writer Alexandre Dumas (1802-70).

 

George Eliot

Pen name of the English novelist Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880). Her novels include The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1872).

 

Trollope

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), prolific English novelist, author of the Chronicles of Barsetshire.

 

par. 8   i can never

 

Jack the Giant-Killer

An English fairy tale and legend about a Cornish farmer’s son during the reign of King Arthur. It first appeared in print around 1711.

 

Mourne Mountains

A mountain range in the south-east of Northern Island, about thirty miles south of Belfast, where Lewis was born.

 

Gawain

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a 14th-century Middle English chivalric romance. Lewis is referring to section II.10, or stanza 31 in the continuous stanza numbering, or line 724 of the whole poem.

   In the previous stanza, the hero’s adventures had led him into “the realm of Logres” and on to northern Wales, the isle of Anglesey and Holyhead Hill. Then,

He climbed many a cliff in strange countries, far removed from his friends in foreign parts he fared, and at each waterway that he passed over he found a foe before him, and a wonder, I trow, so terrible in appearance that to fight him he was forced; and many a marvel among the mountains he found, that it would be too tedious to tell the tenth part of what he found. He fought with dragons and wolves, and sometimes with madmen that dwelt among the rocks, and at other times with bulls and bears and boars, and with monsters that attacked him from the high mountain; and had he not been stiff and strong and serving the Lord, doubtless he had been done to death ere this. Fighting troubled him not so much, but the wintry weather was worse; when the clouds shed down upon him cold clear water, freezing ere it reached the fallow earth. Almost slain by the cold sleet, he slept in his harness, more nights than enough amidst the naked rocks where the cold burn ran by clattering from the crest, and hanging high above his head in hard icicles. Thus in perils and many a painful plight this knight wended his way until Christmas Eve arrived.

   The knight that tide,
To Mary he cried,
   To show him where to ride
Till some shelter he spied.

(translation by Ernest J. B. Kirtlan, 1912)

The original text in the 1925 Tolkien & Gordon edition (rev. Davis 1967) is

And etaynez, þat hym anelede of þe heʒe felle

And giants which pursued him from the high precipitous rock

 

low breathings coming after him

William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850) I, 323.

    … I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.

Lewis could also have chosen the more famous passage starting some thirty lines further on (327, “One summer evening…” etc.).

 

par. 9   but let us

 

the Jolly Roger

An 18th-century name for the black pirate flag with the image of a skull and crossbones.

 

par. 10   consider, again, the

 

Poe’s “Premature Burial”

“The Premature Burial” (1844), short story by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe.

 

“Over me, around me”

H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901), chapter 19, “Mr. Bedford Alone”.

 

between Russian Poland and new Poland

It isn’t very clear why Lewis picks out this region for his comparison or why he described it in this way. He may have been thinking of some episode of the Second World War, but equally of the retreat of Napoleon’s army after the failed Russian campaign of 1812.

 

Pascal’s old fear

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French philosopher and mathematician, author of the Pensées (“Thoughts”), a volume 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.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

 

par. 12   i have sometimes

 

Wells … in the War of the Worlds

H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds (1898).

 

Piers Plowman

A 14th-century Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. Lewis is referring to the 1377 “B-text”, Book XX, “The Coming of Antichrist”, line 80:

Kynde Conscience tho herde, and cam out of the planetes,
And sente forth his forreyours – feveres and fluxes,
Coughes and cardiacles, crampes and toothaches,
Rewmes and radegundes and roynouse scalles …

Prose translation by J. F. Goodridge in the 1959 Penguin Classics edition:

Then Nature heard Conscience, and, coming out of the planets, he sent forth his foragers – fevers and fluxes, coughs and seizures, cramps, toothaches, catarrhs and cataracts, scabby skin-diseases …

As Goodrigde notes, “Diseases were supposed to be due to planetary influence.” See also Lewis’s The Discarded Image, V.b, p. 110, quoting C-text, line 80.

 

The Poet Laureate … Sard Harker

John Masefield (1878-1967), English novelist and poet. His novel Sard Harker was published in 1924. In the United Kingdom, “Poet Laureate” has been a royal office since the seventeenth century; it was held by John Masefield from 1930 till his death.

 

par. 13   it is here

 

Homer

Odyssee X, 277 and 197. The “peril” in question is the danger of being turned into swine by the sorceress Circe. The god is Hermes, who is regularly referred to as “the messenger”, “slayer of Argos”, and other epithets.

 

Mr de la Mare

Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), English poet, writer an novelist.

 

Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883-1924), German writer.

 

lived dialectic

The occurrence of this term is remarkable: the only other instance in Lewis’s writings is found in the 1943 preface to his early autobiographical allegory, The Pilgrim’s Regress, in a passage which is highly important for the story of his own conversion to Christianity. The same “dialectic” is referred to as the “dialectic of desire” both there and in Lewis spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, chapter 14, and in his essay on “William Morris” first published in 1939.

 

par. 14   notice here the

 

“He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies …”

Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 17 April 1778.

I said to him that it was certainly true, as my friend Dempster had observed in his letter to me upon the subject, that a great part of what was in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland had been in his mind before he left London. Johnson. “Why yes, Sir, the topicks were; and books of travels will be good in proportion to what a man has previously in his mind; his knowing what to observe; his power of contrasting one mode of life with another. As the Spanish proverb says, ‘He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.’ So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.” Boswell. “The proverb, I suppose, Sir, means, he must carry a large stock with him to trade with.” Johnson. “Yes, Sir.”

 

par. 15   good stories often

 

Dr. Johnson … children liked stories of the marvellous because …

…??

 

Grimm

The collection of German and other European folk tales first published in 1812-15 by the German brothers Jakob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm as Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales).

 

par. 16   does anyone believe

 

ultra-Jonsonian “humour”

Not “Johnsonian”, as some editions have it; Lewis is referring not to Samuel Johnson, but to the English playwright Ben Jonson (1572-1637). His 1598 play Every Man in His Humour popularized the “comedy of humours” as a genre. “Humour” in this context refers to a particular dominating trait in a person’s character but might also refer to the character thus dominated, or to the person having this character. Lewis seems to be using the latter meaning.

 

par. 17   but why should

 

“plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf”

The Wind in the Willows, chapter IV, “Mr. Badger”.

 

par. 20   another very large

 

the story of Oedipus

The classic version of this story, as outlined by Lewis, is the ancient Greek Tragedy by Sophocles, Oedipus tyrannos (King Oedipus), first performed around 429 B.C.

 

The Man Who Would Be King

A story by Rudyard Kipling, first published in The Phantom Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales (1888).

 

The Hobbit

A children’s fantasy novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, first published in 1937.

 

modus operandi

(Latin) “mode of working”, “procedure”, especially such as is characteristic of the agent.

 

par. 21   it will be

 

Märchen

(German) “tale” or “fairy-tale”. The word’s plural form is identical to the singluar, and it is a diminutive form of Mär, which can mean “message”, “narrative” and “saga”.

 

par. 22   mr roger lancelyn

 

Mr Roger Lancelyn Green in English

“The Romances of Rider Haggard”, English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 5, Issue 29, Summer 1945, 144-149, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/5.29.144.

 

par. 24 it is, of

 

Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy

– Thomas Malory (c. 1415-1471), compiler and editor of a large collection of Arthurian legends, Le Morte Darthur (1485).

– James Boswell (1740-1795), author of The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).

– Tristram Shandy (1767), a long and deliberately shapeless novel by Laurence Sterne (1713-1768).

 

par. 25 the re-reader is

 

Peacock

Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), English novelist. In a letter of 17 August 1940 (CL2, 436), Lewis mentions that he is reading a one-volume edition of three of Peacock’s novels. He is referring to Mr. Marmaduke Milestone, a character in Headlong Hall (1816), who is introduced in chapter 3 as “a picturesque landscape gardener of the first celebrity, who was not without hopes of persuading Squire Headlong to put his romantic pleasure-grounds under a process of improvement”. Chapter 4, “The Grounds”, has the following passage:

   “Allow me,” said Mr Gall. “I distinguish the picturesque and the beautiful, and I add to them, in the laying out of grounds, a third and distinct character, which I call unexpectedness.”
   “Pray, sir,” said Mr Milestone, “by what name do you distinguish this character, when a person walks round the grounds for the second time?”

 

peripeteia

(Greek περιπέτεια) “reversal”, “turning point”; cf. Aristotle, Poetics XI, 1452a.

A “reversal” is a change of the situation into the opposite, … this change being, moreover, as we are saying, probable or inevitable – like the man in the Oedipus who came to cheer Oedipus and rid him of his anxiety about his mother by revealing his parentage and changed the whole situation.

(translation by W. H. Fyfe, Loeb, 1932)

 

par. 26   i should like

 

Morris in The Well at the World’s End

William Morris (1834-1896), English poet and artist, in the 1896 fantasy novel already alluded to in par. 5 (“From Uplands to Utterbol”).

 

par. 27   but it does

 

E. R. Eddison

Eric Rücker Eddison (1882-1945) spent his professional life as a civil servant in the field of (international) trade; he retired 1939, aged 57, to spend more time on writing. The Worm Ouroboros appeared in 1922; Mistress of Mistresses (1933) was the first of a “Zimiamvian trilogy”, with further volumes appearing in 1941 and 1958.

 

Charles Williams … I do not mention his stories much here

Charles Williams (1885-1945), English poet, writer and critic, close friend of Lewis, fellow member of the Inklings. No doubt part of the reason why Lewis mentions Williams is that “On Stories” was written for the volume Essays Presented to Charles Williams.

 

the battle of Toad Hall … Badger

A place and a character in The Wind in the Willows (1908) Kenneth Grahame, mentioned in par. 5.

 

heimsökn … Njal

A reference to Brennu-Njál’s Saga, “The Story of the Burnt Njál”, a 13th-century Icelandic saga about blood feuds fought in defence of personal or familial honour. At the climax of the story, as Njál’s sons are attacked or “visited” (sókn) in his house (heim) by superior forces, Njál decides to share the fate of his sons as the house is put to fire.

 

 

back to survey

 

SOME THOUGHTS

 

First published in Ten Years of Work of the Medical Missionaries of Mary, Dublin 1948, pp. 91-94. – Written for the memorial volume of a religious order that ran the Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in its home town Drogheda, on the east coast of Ireland. Lewis’s brother Warren sometimes stayed there for convalescence after periodic fits of depression and dipsomania.

 

par. 3   but how if

 

contemptus mundi

(Latin) “contempt of the world”. The term was probably coined by, or got currency through, the 5th-century bishop Eucherius of Lyons.

 

par. 6   this attitude will

 

Keats’ Hyperion

The English poet John Keats (1795-1821) left two unfinished poems under this title. In Greek mythology, Hyperion is one of the twelve Titans, who are the offspring of Uranus (heaven) and Gaia (earth).

 

par. 7   and none of

 

less concerned than other people who go in for what is called Higher Thought

sloppy phrasing, to be rewritten as no more concerned than people who go in for etc.

 

we “are not high minded”

Lewis is quoting Coverdale’s version of Psalm 131:1, as found in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

 

weep at the grave of Lazarus

John 11:33.

 

“I am not so much afraid of death ...”

Lewis quoted the same passage from Thomas Browne toward the end of his essay “The Grand Miracle” and in chapter 14 of Miracles. He also mentioned it in a letter to Ruth Pitter of 12 February 1947, as a comment on her poem “Death’s filthy garment”.

 

 

back to survey

 

“THE TROUBLE WITH ‘X’ IS...”

 

First published in Bristol Diocesan Gazette, August 1948.

 

par. 1   i suppose i may

 

even in these days

Perhaps a reference to material hardship in post-war Britain.

 

par. 7   it is no good

 

“halitosis”

Smelly breath.

 

par. 10   we don’t like

 

rationing

Another reference to war and post-war conditions.

 

 

back to survey

 

PRIESTESSES IN THE CHURCH?

 

First published in Time and Tide, 14 August 1948. – Lewis is writing here about one of the issues discussed during the Lambeth Conference of 2 July–6 August 1948, a ten-yearly meeting of bishops of the world-wide Anglican Church. A Chinese woman, Florence Li Tim-Oi, had been ordained as a priest by the bishop of Victoria (Hong Kong) in January 1944 under pressure of wartime circumstances. The 1948 Conference decided not to ratify the ordination and thus to stop the ordination of women from becoming general practice.

 

par. 1   i should like

 

Jane Austen

Lewis used the same illustration to make his point (another point) in the essay “Myth became Fact” (1944).

 

par. 2   these remarks are

 

The Church of England was being advised

Lewis is probably referring to Lady Nunburnholme’s letter to the editor in Time and Tide, 10 July 1948, and the related Petition to the Lambeth Conference; see Walter Hooper’s note 8.

 

par.  10   the innovators are

 

Lady Nunburnholme

Marjorie Wynn-Carrington (1880-1968), married to Charles Wilson, second Baron Nunburnholme, since 1901. An excerpt from her letter in Time and Tide is printed in Lewis’s Collected Letters II, 860. Lewis’s first response had been to write to Dorothy L. Sayers on 13 July asking her to give a public reply; but she declined on the ground that she could find no “theological reason” to oppose the ordination of women.

 

par. 13   and this parallel

 

“a breath can make them as a breath has made”

Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774), “The Deserted Village”, l. 54.

Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade,
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

 

 

back to survey

 

GOD IN THE DOCK

 

First published as “Difficulties in Presenting the Christian Faith to Modern Unbelievers”, Lumen Vitae, III, September 1948. – This magazine, revue internationale de la formation religieuse, was published by a Catholic institute (of the same name) for religious education, founded in 1935 in Brussel by the Jesuit Order. Lewis’s article appeared along with a French translation.

 

par. 2   the first thing

 

Dissenters

Protestant Christians in Great Britain who are not Anglicans; also called Nonconformists.

 

par. 6   apart from this

 

Metuentes

Literally “fearers”, i.e. God-fearers; a variant Latin designation for the “proselytes” mentioned in Acts 2:11 – gentiles converted to Judaism or inclined to conversion, or deemed “just” by the Jews. One example is Cornelius the centurion, mentioned in Acts 10:2, 22. Many of the earliest converts to Christianity may have had this sort of background; see J. D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity (1991), pp. 125 and 163:

... there can be no disputing the fact that many Gentiles were attracted to Judaism and attached themselves to the local synagogues in varying degrees of adherence. ... [Josephus writes in The Jewish War II.462-463 and VII.45] that in Syria, of which Antioch was the capital, many Gentiles had “judaized” and become “mixed up” with the Jews during the first century. ... There always had been a degree of ambiguity in Jewish identity, with proselytes, resident aliens and God-fearers clouding any definition in simple ethnic terms.

 

 

back to survey

 

ON LIVING IN AN ATOMIC AGE

 

Informed Reading 6 (1948), 78-84. Details about this publication are hard to find. − ??

 

Bergson … Shaw

The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) in his widely read book L’évolution créatrice (1907) introduced the idea of an élan vital as a way to solve certain problems in evolutionary theory. In the book’s English translation, Creative Evolution (1911), élan vital was rendered as “vital impetus”. The Irish-English dramatist George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) popularized Bergson’s idea, introducing the term “Life Force” in the long preface to his five-part play Back to Methuselah (1921).

 

the behavioiur of your genes

Lewis’s choice for the word genes is remarkable. When he wrote this piece, the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick was still in the future (1951), and there is no evidence that Lewis took note of it even then. However, the word “gene” had been first used by a Danish scientist in 1909, four years after the word “genetics” had been launched by an English embryologist.

 

“Nature red in tooth and claw”

Famous words from stanza 56 in Alfred Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam A. H. H.” (1850).

 

Powers and Principalities

Ephesians 6:12 (Authorized Version).

… we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE NOVELS OF CHARLES WILLIAMS

 

Radio talk for the BBC, 11 February 1949; first published in Of This and Other Worlds, 1982.

 

par. 1   one of the

 

Leigh Hunt … Macaulay … Napier

James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was an English poet, essayist and critic. The English essayist, historian and statesman Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59) mentioned Hunt’s begging letter in a letter of 16 November 1842 to Scottish legal scholar Macvey Napier:

As to poor Leigh Hunt, I wish that I could say, with you, that I heard nothing from him. I have a letter from him on my table asking me to lend him money, and lamenting that my verses want the true poetical aroma which breathes from Spenser’s Faery Queen. I am much pleased with him for having the spirit to tell me, in a begging letter, how little he likes my poetry. If he had praised me, knowing his poetical creed as I do, I should have felt certain that his praises were insincere.

Macaualay’s Lays of Ancient Rome had appeared earlier that same year. See The Life and Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. G. O. Trevelyan, vol. 2 (1876).

 

par. 2   the complaint often

 

an older critical terminology

See, for example, Samuel  Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), s.v. Marvellous:

he marvellous is used, in works of criticism, to express any thing exceeding natural power, opposed to the probable.

 

Fielding

Henry Fielding (1707-1754), English novelist, author of Tom Jones.

 

Galswortthy

John Galsworthy (1867-1933), English novelist and dramatist, author of The Forsyte Saga.

 

The Wind in the Willows

A famous animal story for children by the British writer Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932), published in 1908.

 

Vathek

Vathek: An Arabian Tale (1786), a fantasy novel by the English novelist William Beckford (1760-1844).

 

The Princess of Babylon

A philosophical tale by the French writer and philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778), La Princesse de Babylone (1768).

 

par. 3   the formula is

 

Grimm

The brothers Jakob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm. Their collection of German and other European folk tales was first published in 1812-15 as Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales).

 

E. Nesbit

English writer and poet Edith Nesbit (1858-1924). Lewis seems to be loosely referring to the second and third volumes of her “Psammead series”, a fantasy trilogy consisting of Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1905).

 

Mr de la Mare

Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), English writer an novelist.

 

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, published in 1886, about the physician Dr. Jekyll who invents drugs to unfetter the evil side of his nature and to restrain it. In the end his evil self, who operates as Mr. Hyde, gets the upper hand.

 

F. Anstey

Pen name of Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934), English humorous novelist; author of Vice Versa, or A Lesson to Fathers (1882), the story of a man who exchanges bodies with his schoolboy son.

 

the Alice books

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), by Lewis Carroll.

 

the Gulliver books

Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a novel by Jonathan Swift. The plural “books” refers to the four parts or “Voyages”, beginning with the voyage to Lilliput, a land of dwarfs.

 

par. 7   some are experimenting

 

“thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls”

Shakespeare, Hamlet I.4, 56.

 

par. 8   now williams is

 

“washed with silver”

…??

 

par. 9   no doubt, the

 

Abelard and St Bernard

– Peter Abelard (Pierre Abélard or Petrus Abaelardus, c. 1079–1142), French scholastic philosopher.

– Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), French abbot and monastic reformer, founder of the Cistercian order; canonized in 1174; designated Doctor Ecclesiae (“Doctor of the Church”) in 1830 and described as mellifluus (“sweet as honey”) in a papal encyclical of 1953.

 

par. 11   that, indeed, is

 

Jeanie Deans

One of the main characters in Walter Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian (1818).

 

par. 16   but i am

 

St Paul … the schoolgates

See Galatians 3:24.

… Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.

 

par. 17   one little fact

 

honestade and cavalleria

“Honesty” and “chivalry”. In using the old Italian terms, Lewis was probably alluding to the poets Matteo Boiardo (1441-1494), author of Orlando furioso, and Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), author of Orlando innamorato. In the last chapter of The Allegory of Love, Lewis described them as important precursors of Edmund Spenser and The Faerie Queene.

 

Spinoza’s hilaritas

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Dutch philosopher. The term hilaritas appears in three places of his Ethica and is variously rendered as “mirth” and “merriment” in the translation by R. H. M. Elwes (1883):

(III.11) Porro affectum laetitiae ad mentem et corpus simul relatum titillationem vel hilaritatem voco; tristitiae autem dolorem vel melancholiam. Sed notandum, titillationem et dolorem ad hominem referri, quando una eius pars prae reliquis est affecta; hilaritatem autem et melancholiam, quando omnes pariter sunt affectae.	Further, the emotion of pleasure in reference to the body and mind together I shall call stimulation or merriment, the emotion of pain in the same relation I shall call suffering or melancholy. But we must bear in mind, that stimulation and suffering are attributed to man when one part of his nature is more affected than the rest; merriment and melancholy, when all parts are alike affected.
(IV.42) Hilaritas excessum habere nequit, sed semper bona est, et contra melancholia semper mala.	Mirth cannot be excessive, but is always good; contrariwise, Melancholy is always bad.
(IV.44) Hilaritas, quam bonam esse dixi, concipitur facilius, quam observatur.	Mirth, which I have stated to be good, can be conceived more easily than it can be observed.

 

at ease in Sion

Amos 6:1 (KJV).

Woe to them that are at ease in Zion, and trust in the mountain of Samaria, which are named chief of the nations, to whom the house of Israel came!

 

danced before the Ark

2 Samuel 6:14-15 (NIV). “David, wearing a linen ephod, danced before the Lord with all his might, while he and the entire house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouts and the sound of trumpets.”

 

 

back to survey

 

THE HUMANITARIAN THEORY OF PUNISHMENT

 

First published in 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, III (1949), Nr. 3; second part as “On Punishment: A Reply”, Res Judicatae, VI, August 1954, pp. 519-523. – The first part of this essay originally had a postscript:

One last word. You may ask why I send this to an Australian periodical. The reason is simple and perhaps worth recording: I can get no hearing for it in England.

Res Judicatae was another Australian journal. Lewis expressed the same view of punishment in chapter III.4 of his novel Thulcandra (1945).

 

par. 5   the distinction will

 

on the old view ... the Law of Nature

As a defender of “the old view”, Lewis specifically defended the notion of a Law of Nature, or Natural Law, in several places elsewhere in his work. See, for example, Mere Christianity (1952), chapter I.1, “The Law of Human Nature”, and The Abolition of Man (1943), chapter 2, “The Way”, where he used the Chinese term Tao (“the Way”):

This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements.

 

par. 7   it may be

 

hatched in a Viennese laboratory

“Viennese” may be an oblique allusion to Freud and to the “modern psychotherapy” just mentioned. However, since a “laboratory” is not the obvious location for psychotherapy, Lewis appears to be evoking a mixture of Frankenstein-like figures and practices.

 

eaten by the locust

Joel 2:25.

 

par. 11   in reality, however

 

eggs in moonshine

The Elizabethans are the people living under the reign (1558-1603) of the English Queen Elizabeth I. At the time of writing this, Lewis had almost finished work on his largest academic book, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), for which he read the entire literature of the period. He may therefore have been thinking of almost any author. The phrase is not in Shakespeare. Lewis used it in one of his own Narnia tales, Prince Caspian, chapter 7, where the dwarf Trumpkin expresses his complete disbelief in magic.

 

par. 12   the practical problem

 

one school of philosophy already regards religion as a neurosis

Lewis is referring to Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927) as discussed in Christianity after Freud: An Interpretation of the Christian Experience in the Light of Psycho-analytic Theory (1949) by B. G. Saunders. See Lewis’s letter of 23 February 1961, Collected Letters III, 1242.

 

tunica molesta

(Latin) “nasty shirt”; a mode of execution by burning alive in use among the ancient Romans, e.g. under the emperor Nero. The condemned man was wrapped and bound in tarry cloth, which was then lit.

 

par. 13   this is why

 

Shelley ... the distinction between mercy and justice was invented in the courts of tyrants

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), English poet, in his “Essay on Christianity”.

 

mercy and justice had met and kissed

cf. Psalm 85:10.

Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

 

“precious balms” which will “break our heads”

As usual when quoting from the Psalms, Lewis is referring to Coverdale’s version as found the Book of Common Prayer. Thus here Psalm 141:5-6.

Let the righteous rather smite me friendly : and reprove me.
But let not their precious balms break my head : yea, I will pray yet against their wickedness.

In suggesting that some balms do “break our heads”, Lewis is not just quoting but gives a difficult twist to an already obscure text. The NIV version (Psalm 141:5) has

Let a righteous man strike me – it is a kindness;
let him rebuke me – it is oil on my head. My head will not refuse it.
Yet my prayer is ever against the deeds of evildoers.

Thus Lewis suggests that while “rebukes” or “reproofs” are salutary when coming from “the righteous”, the flipside is that they will be simply disastrous when coming from the unrighteous – when “Mercy is detached from Justice”

 

Bunyan: “It came burning hot into my mind ...”

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis used this quotation as the epigraph for chapter III.

 

Be war or ye be wo ...

Be war = “be aware”, “beware”; ye be wo = “Woe to you”.

 

 

ON PUNISHMENT

 

par. 1   i have to thank

 

Smart

J. J. C. Smart (1920-2012) was born and educated in England, graduating with a B.Phil from Oxford in 1948. He emigrated to Australia in 1950, where he occupied the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide until 1972.

 

par. 2   professor smart makes

 

questions of the First and of the Second Order

The distinction made by Smart is strikingly similar to a key idea in The Place of Reason in Ethics (1950) by Stephen Toulmin; see especially §11.5, “The Two Kinds of Moral Reasoning”, pp. 150-152. Toulmin also uses the example of the borrowed book.

 

par. 6   those rules are

 

but only one clause in that Law

Lewis developed this idea in The Abolition of Man, chapter 2.

 

par. 11   but the real

 

Locke, Grotius, Hooker, Poynet, Aquinas, Justinian, the Stoics, and Aristotle

John Locke (1632-1704), English philosopher; Hugo de Groot (1583-1645), Dutch lawyer; Richard Hooker (1554-1600), English theologian; John Poynet (ca. 1514-1556), English bishop, author of A shorte Treatise of Politike Power; Justinian I (483-565), Byzantine emperor under whose reign a great mass of Roman laws were collected and codified.

 

par. 12   i write as the

 

the lifelong friend of another [lawyer]

Owen Barfield (1898-1997), a close friend of Lewis and important intellectual sparring partner since their student days in Oxford.

 

Mr Aldous Huxley and George Orwell

Aldous Huxley (1895-1963), author of Brave New World (1932); George Orwell (1903-1950), author of Nineteen Eighty Four (1949).

 

“necessity” ... “the tyrant’s plea”

John Milton, Paradise Lost IV, 393-394.

                             “... yet public reason just,
Honour and empire with revenge enlarged
By conquering this new world, compels me now
To do what else, though damned, I should abhor.”
So spake the Fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.

 

 

 

back to survey

 

ON CHURCH MUSIC

 

par. 1   i am a layman

 

laicus ... laicissimus

(Latin) “lay”, i.e. non-specialist; the suffix -issimus expresses the superlative, “utterly lay”.

 

par. 12   the right way

 

“the dragons and great deeps” ... the “frosts and snows”

As appears from Lewis’s letter to the Church Times of 15 July 1949 (Collected Letters III, 1590-1591), he is freely quoting fragments from the canticle “Benedicite, omnia opera” in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (first section, Morning Prayer) – or perhaps from its Latin original in the Vulgate version of the Bible. The original context is the so-called “Song of the Three Holy Children” in an apocryphal section of the Book of Daniel, chapter 3:24-90. The “children” are in fact the three men who survived the fiery furnace. The canticle is a translation of verses 57-88; verses 69-70 and 78-79 appear there as

O ye Frost and Cold, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever.
O ye Ice and Snow, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. ...
O ye Seas and Floods, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever.
O ye Whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever.

(The Latin original behind “Whale” is cetus, designating any kind of sea monster.)
  

 “Mine are the cattle upon a thousand hills” ... “If I am hungry...”

Psalm 50:10 and 12.

For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills ... If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE PAINS OF ANIMALS

 

First published in the Britsh review The Month, Vol. 189 (February 1950), and then in the American magazine The Atlantic Monthly, August 1950.

 

the inquiry by c. e. m. joad

 

Anatole France’s Penguin Island

L’Îsle des Pingouins (1908) by the French novelist Anatole France (1844-1924).

 

the redness of nature’s “tooth and claw”

Alfred Tennyson, “In Memoriam A.H.H.”, Canto LVI.

Man ...
Who trusted God was love indeed
   And love Creation’s final law –
   Tho’Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed.

 

Ichneumonidae

a frequently cited example of structural cruelty in nature; see also Lewis’s quotations from his unidentified “correspondent”.

 

probably 900 million

In God and Evil, p. 309, Joad mentioned a period of “something like 1,200 million years”. In The Recovery of Belief , p. 24, he writes “There has been life upon the planet, according to the biologists, for something like a thousand million years; human life for about a million.”

 

the reply by c. s. lewis

 

a slow change of mind not at all unlike that which Dr Joad himself has undergone ...

At this date, Joad had not yet published his last book, The Recovery of Belief (1952). He there described the final stage of his slow return to the Christian faith. The course of his inner development, however, had been evident at least since his 1942 book God and Evil, which in addition to a good deal of polemic against Lewis also features many ideas which are indistinguishable from Lewis’s.

 

“all manner of thing would be well”

Julian of Norwich (c. 1342–c. 1413) was an English mystic and anchoress. In her Revelations of Divine Love, locutions like “All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”, first spoken by Jesus in a vision, appear in several chapters from chapter 27 onward

 

“encouraged”

The Problem of Pain, ch. 9,  p. 123 in the first edition (paragraph beginning “It seems to me ...”).

In the same way, animality may have been encouraged to slip back into behaviour proper to vegetables.

 

The more Shelleyan, the more Promethean...

As early as 1924 Lewis wrote an essay on “The Promethean Fallacy in Ethics”; see his diary notes for 9 and 21 January and 5 March of that year, published in All My Road Before Me (1991). See also his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955) ch. 13, p. 193, where Lewis wrote about “Promethean or Hardyesque defiances”.

 

If there be such a God ...

Tennyson, “Despair” (1881), XIX. Lewis had made the same point in his wartime paper “De futilitate” using a line from A. E. Housman’s Last Poems (1922) – “Whatever brute or blackguard made the world”. In 1942 Joad published his book God and Evil, where he also used the line from Housman (chapter 2, “The Argument Against the Creation of the world by an Omnipotent, Benevolent Being”, p. 62).

 

 

back to survey

 

WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF JESUS CHRIST?

 

First published in Asking Them Questions, Third Series, ed. Ronald Selby Wright (1950), pp. 47-53. – Selby Wright (1908-1995) was a very active and versatile minister in the Church of Scotland. During the Second World War he was a chaplain in the British army and also – like Lewis – gave radio talks for the BBC. He edited three volumes of religious essays intended for teenagers under the title Asking Them Questions in 1936, 1939  and 1950. A selection from the three volumes followed in 1953.

 

par. 2   the other phenomenon

 

“I am the anointed, the Son of the uncreated God ...”

Not a literal quotation, but a paraphrase of Jesus’s reply when the high priest Caiaphas  asked whether He was the Messiah and the Son of God; see Matthew 26:63-64, Mark 14:61-62 and Luke 22:67-69.

 

I keep on sending you prophets and wise men”

cf. Matthew 23:34.

 

“No one need fast while I am here”

cf. Matthew 9:14-17, Mark 2:18-22, Luke 5:33-39.

 

“Before Abraham was, I am”

John 8:58.

 

par. 5   another point is

 

Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger

John 8:6.

 

par. 9   the things he

 

I am the Truth, and the Way, and the Life

John 14:6.

I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

 

Come to Me everyone who is carrying a heavy load

Matthew 11:28.

 

back to survey

 

HISTORICISM

 

motto

 

Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet and philosopher. Aids to Reflection (1825), “Aphorisms on that which is indeed Spiritual Religion”, comment on Aphorism II. “He that will fly without wings must fly in his dreams; and till he awakes, will not find out, that to fly in a dream is but to dream of flying.”

 

par. 3   when carlyle spoke

 

Carlyle ... “book of revelations”

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), British historian and essayist. The reference it to his philosophical and autobiographical essay Sartor Resartus II.8:

Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

 

Novalis ... “evangel”

Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801), German romantic poet; the reference is probably to a passage in his essay Die Christenheit oder Europa.

 

Hegel ... progressive self-manifestation of absolute spirit

......

 

Keats’s Hyperion ... Oceanus ... ’tis the eternal law...

Hyperion: A Fragment (1820), II, 228-229, by the English poet John Keats (1795-1821). The Titans have dethroned and castrated their father and set up Cronus as king, and are then challenged by the next generation of gods 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. Only the sea-god Oceanus argues for resignation in the face of the irresistible power of the next generation. Lewis used the same quotation in an essay he wrote slightly later, “The World’s Last Night” (1951). A much longer quotation from the speech of Oceanus appeared in his earlier paper “The Funeral of a Great Myth” (c. 1944). Keats also wrote another version of the poem, called The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, which was published in 1856.

 

par. 5   historicism exists on

 

Iliad A

......

 

Oedipus Tyrannus

i.e. King Oedipus, or (Latin) Oedipus Rex, one of the seven surviving tragedies of the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles (c. 496-406 BC).

 

par. 6   but subtler and

 

Fr Paul Henri ... Deneke lecture at Oxford

A lecture delivered in French at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford on 23 February 1950 by Paul Henry S.J. and published as ‘The Christian Philosophy of History’, Theological Studies XIII/2 (Sept. 1952), pp. 419-432. Paul Henry (1906-1984) was a Belgian Jesuit and a scholar of Plotinus and Neo-Platonism, then working at the Institut Catholique in Paris. The Deneke lectures were endowed by Philip Maurice Deneke (1842-1925), a London banker of German origin; he probably was the father of Margaret Deneke (see Lewis’s Collected Letters III, 1552, note 193).

 

par. 7   that history in

 

fas est et ab hoste doceri

(Latin) “It is right to be taught even by an enemy.” Ovid, Metamorphoses IV, 428.

 

Ragnarok

In Scandinavian mythology this word denotes what in German is called the Götterdämmerung, the “twilight of the gods”.

 

Wagners Wotan ... the Eddaic original

Wotan is a German form of the name Odin. By Wotan’s “Eddaic original” Lewis means the earliest written account of the god Odin’s character in the Elder Edda, a 12th-century Old Norse collection of mythological poems.

 

fata Jovis

(Latin) “Jove’s ordinances”. Aeneid IV, 614.

 

Tantae molis erat

“So vast was the effort” (viz. to found the Roman race. Aeneid I, 33. “Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.”

 

Dante ... De Monarchia

......

 

St Augustine ... The De Civitate

......

 

par. 9   what appears, on christian

 

in via ... in patria

(Latin) “on the way” ... “in the fatherland”.

 

par. 10   we must remind

 

Gibbon or Mommsen, or the Master of Trinity

– Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), English historian, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

– Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), German historian, Nobel laureate for Literature 1902, author of Römische Geschichte.

– George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962), English historian, was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1940 to 1951; author of History of England (1926) English Social History (1944). His work was widely read and praised for its happy combination of readability and exact scholarship.

 

par. 11   when men say

 

“esemplastic”

Coleridge (see note to this essay’s motto, above) coined this word from  the Greek words eis hen plattein “to make into one whole”. By “esemplastic power” he meant a human faculty that differs subtly from “imagination”. See his Biographia Literaria X (first part) and XIII.

 

par. 15   but even if

 

“the past as it really was”

After a famous saying of the German Historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), wie es eigentlich gewesen. He asserted that the historian’s task was not “die Vergangenheit zu richten” but “bloß zu zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen” (“not to judge the past, but merely to show how it really was”.

 

Ad nos vix tenuis famae pelabitur aura

“A mere breath of their fame reaches us.” Virgil, Aeneid VII, 646.

 

par. 25   this provides the

 

Whitehead or Jeans or Eddington

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), British mathematician and philosopher; James H. Jeans (18771946), British physicist and popular writer on science; Arthur S. Eddington (1882-1944), British physicist.

 

Caveas disputare de occultis Dei judiciis, etc.

Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi (The Imitation of Christ) III.58.

 

par. 26   it will, i hope

 

what MacDonald called “the holy present”

The Seaboard Parish, I.3. Cf. C. S. Lewis’s Macdonald Anthology (1946), Nrs. 74, 78 and 283.

 

 

back to survey

 

IS THEISM IMPORTANT?

 

Reply to a paper of the same title delivered by philosopher H. H. Price to the Oxford University Socratic Club, 23 April 1951. Both pieces were printed in the Socratic Digest Nr. 5 (1952) and hence reprinted in the 2012 complete re-issue of the Digest in one volume, edited by Joel D. Heck. Lewis’s reply was first reprinted in the volume God in the Dock (1970, USA) / Undeceptions (1971, UK).

    The Socratic Club meeting is not listed in a survey of the Club’s “papers and speakers” appended to Walter Hooper’s essay “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter”, in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, edited by James T. Como (1979). However, the date is found in the Wade Center’s list of Socratic Club Speakers and Dates, part of the Stella Aldwinckle Papers.

 

par. 1   i have lost

 

New Statesman

A left-wing political and cultural magazine, founded in 1913 by some prominent members of the Fabian Society with the support of Bernard Shaw. After a merger in 1931, the economist John Maynard Keynes got involved with the magazine, Kingsley Martin became its editor for three decades, and the name changed into The New Statesman and Nation until 1964.

 

par. 2   1. i think we

 

Descartes’ Ontological Proof

This philosophical argument can be briefly summarized as “God is perfect; one necessary attribute of perfection is existence; therefore God exists.” René Descartes (1596-1650), French philosopher and mathematician, propounded his ontological proof in his Discours de la Méthode (1637), part 4, and Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641; French version Médtitations métaphysiques published in 1647), meditations 3 and 5.

 

par. 6   this is not

 

Rudolf Otto

(1869-1937) German theologian and scholar of comparative religion. Price and Lewis were referring to his book Das Heilige (1917; translated as The Idea of the Holy, 1923), which Lewis held in high esteem.

 

merely an affair of “feeling”

If Lewis here meant to refer to Price’s paper, he was doing so somewhat loosely; cf. Price’s paper as printed in Socratic Digest, ed. Joel D. Heck (2012), p. 226:

I might have used Otto’s phrase, “sense of the numinous.” But I prefer not to, because it seems to me – unless I misunderstand him – that the experience he speaks of is defined in terms of emotion (in terms of a mixture of horror and fascination) and is not a cognitive experience, an awareness of some object.

 

par. 7   with otto and

 

experience of the Numinous developed into the Holy ...

Lewis appears to make the mistake he has just warned against, writing “the Holy” for “experience of the Holy”.

 

the Awful Mystery

Lewis was probably thinking of the term mysterium tremendum as used in Rudolf Otto’s book. In Otto’s view, the experience of “the holy” springs from an experienced fusion of mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans. Cf. Price’s phrase in the passage quoted above: “a mixture of horror and fascination”.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE EMPTY UNIVERSE

 

“Preface” in D. E. Harding, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe (Faber & Faber, London 1952). This piece got its present title from Walter Hooper when it was reprinted in Present Concerns (1986).

 

“not the sort of noun that can be used that way.”

Perhaps this is a summary of the sort of comment which Lewis would expect from modern philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976). Lewis knew Ryle at least since the mid-1920s when they were members of the same informal philosophical debating club for some time. In 1945 Ryle became Wykeham Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and as such a Fellow of Lewis’s college, Magdalen College in Oxford. Ryle’s book The Concept of Mind (1949) was attracting much attention in the early 1950s. Lewis’s apparent quotation is not found in that book, but certainly reflects Ryle’s thought and idiom.

 

Max Müller … (Mythology is a disease of language)

Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900), Lectures on the Science of Language, Second Series (1864), VIII, “Metaphor”. The words in parentheses are not a literal quotation but they obviously go back to passages like these on pp. 347 and 358:

… There is as much mythology in our use of the word Nothing as in the most absurd portions of the mythological phraseology of India, Greece, and Rome: and if we ascribe the former to a disease of language, the causes of which we are able to explain, we shall have to admit that in the latter, language has reached to an almost delirious state, and has ceased to be what it was meant to be, the expression of the impressions received through the senses, or of the conceptions of a rational mind. …

… Whenever any word, that was at first used metaphorically, is used without a clear conception of the steps that led from its original to its metaphorical meaning, there is danger of mythology; whenever those steps are forgotten and artificial steps put in their places, we have mythology, or, if I may say so, we have diseased language, whether that language refers to religious or secular interests. …

See also the beginning of Lecture X “Jupiter, the Supreme Aryan God”, p. 413:

There are few mistakes so widely spread and so firmly established as that which makes us confound the religion and the mythology of the ancient nations of the world. How mythology arises, necessarily and naturally, I tried to explain in my former Lectures, and we saw that, as an affection or disorder of language, mythology may infect every part of the intellectual life of man. True it is that no ideas are more liable to mythological disease than religious ideas, because they transcend those regions of our experience within which language has its natural origin, and must therefore, according to their very nature, be satisfied with metaphorical expressions.

Likely enough Lewis was thinking of his friend Owen Barfield’s critique of Max Müller in Poetic Diction (1926), chapter 4.4.

 

“goddes privitee”

(Middle English) “God’s secrets”. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “The Miller’s Prologue”, line 3164.

 

sophisma per figuram dictionis

The Latin formula suggests a provenance (at some removes) from some late Scholastic philosopher, such as Agostino Nifo (1469-1538).

 

cold and strained, and ridiculous

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), I.4.7.

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

 

Richards would say, “belief feelings” are attached to it

I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), chapter 35, “Poetry and Beliefs”, five paragraphs before the end of this chapter and of the book.

The chief difficulty of all Revelation Doctrines has always been to discover what it is which is revealed. If these states of mind are knowledge it should be possible to state what it is that they know. It is often easy enough to find something which we can suppose to be what we know. Belief feelings, we have seen, are parasitic, and will attach themselves to all kinds of hosts.          

Lewis also referred to the term in the Epilogue of his book Miracles:

“Belief-feelings”, as Dr. Richards calls them, do not follow reason except by long training: they follow Nature, follow the grooves and ruts which already exist in the mind.

 

Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), French philosopher. In a letter of 13 February 1961 Lewis wrote,

I know the anti-religious school [of Existentialism] only through one work: Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme. I learned from it one important thing − that S. as an artist in French prose has a sort of wintry grandeur which partly explains his immense influence. I couldn’t see that he was a real philosopher: but he is a great rhetorician.

(Collected Letters III, 1238; to Mary Van Deusen)

 

Institutio

Institutio Christianæ Religionis (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1536, final edition published in 1559) is the main doctrinal work of the French theologian and church reformer John Calvin (1509-64).

 

Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), American poet, essayist and philosopher.

 

Ficino

Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), Italian (Florentine) humanist, philosopher, physician and priest, author of Theologia Platonica. See Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), chapter 1, pp. 8-12, for an account of Renaissance Platonism and the role played in it by Ficino and his younger fellow philosopher Pico della Mirandola.

It is a deliberate syncretism based on the conviction that all the sages of antiquity shared a common wisdom and that this wisdom can be reconciled with Christianity. … It is significant that Ficino hazarded the suggestion that the diversity of religions might have been ordained by God as conducive to “a certain beauty”, decorem quondam, assuming, as such men do, that the main difference between religions is in their ritual, ritus adorationis. … In their readiness to accept from whatever source all that seemed to them elevated, or spiritual, or even exciting, we sometimes seem to catch the first faint suggestion of what came, centuries later, to be called “higher thought”.

 

ipseitas:

(Latin) “selfhood”, “identity”.

 

Hesse’s Glasperlenspiel

Das Glasperlenspiel (1943; published in English as The Glass-Bead Game and as Magister Ludi), novel by the German writer Hermann Hesse.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE WORLD’S LAST NIGHT

 

First published in the U.S. journal Religion in Life: A Christian Quarterly of Opinion and Discussion Vol. XXI, No. 1 (U.S., Winter 1951-ʼ52) as the third of three articles published under the collective title “The Christian Hope – Its Meaning for Today”. The two preceding authors are historian Arnold Toynbee and New Testament scholar Amos N. Wilder. Toynbee’s contribution is introduced by the editor’s comment that “He writes on ‘the Christian Hope as a historian sees it’”; Wilder’s by “He discusses the New Testament hope in relation to historical dilemmas”; and Lewis’s by  “He sees ‘the Christian Hope’ as literally the Second Coming.”

      Four years later Lewis’s article was, without his knowledge, reprinted as “The World’s Last Night” in HIS: Magazine of campus Christian living, May 1955. This title was retained when the article was included in the volume The World’s Last Night and other essays (New York 1960) and then in Fern-seed and Elephants and other essays on Christianity (London 1975).

 

par. 1   there are many reasons

 

“This same Jesus,” said the angels in Acts, “shall so come in like manner ...”

Acts 1:11.

 

“Hereafter,” said our Lord himself ...“shall ye see the Son of Man ... coming in the clouds of heaven.”

Matthew 26:64.

 

the faith once given to the saints

Epistle of Jude, 3, “Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.”

 

par. 3   many are shy

 

Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), German polymath, here considered as author of his Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (1906; English: The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1910). This book itself marked a rejection of 19th-century attempts to reconstruct a “historical Jesus”. These had often resulted in presenting Jesus as a prophet or embodiment of sheer modern progressivism. Lewis and Schweitzer are in fact agreed that “apocalyptic” predictions and a modern mindset are incompatible.

 

William Miller

American Baptist preacher (1782-1849). In 1818 he concluded from passages in the Bible (especially Daniel 8:14) that the Second Coming of Christ was going to happen some 25 years from then. Miller found a large number of adherents for his views, and as the year 1843 approached he decided that the great day must come between 21 March 1843 and 21 March 1844. When this term had expired, new calculations resulted in a new, precise date: 22 October 1844. This day subsequently became known as the Great Disappointment, when many followers lost faith in Miller’s ideas. However, some stuck to his ideas in one form or another, and eventually founded a new Christian church communion, the Seventh-Day Adventists.

 

par 4   for my own part

 

Luther ... compared humanity to a drunkard

..... The passage is referred to by William Hazlitt in his Table-Talk (1821-22), Essay 25, “On Paradox and Common-place”:

as Luther complained long ago, “human reason is like a drunken man on horseback: set it up on one side, and it tumbles over on the other.”

 

par. 6   as an argument against

 

“for all time”

Cf. the passage in the previous paragraph, “Every great man is partly of his own age and partly for all time.” From Ben Jonson’s ode to Shakespeare in the first folio edition (1623), often reprinted in modern one-volume complete editions. “He was not of an age, but for all time!”

 

par. 11   a generation which has

 

The Lamb is slain

Revelation 13:8 (cf. Rev. 5:6 ff).

And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him [a beast with seven heads], whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

 

par. 15   the first thing

 

Oceanus ... ʼtis the eternal law...

John Keats (1795-1821), Hyperion: A Fragment, II, 228-229. The Titans have dethroned and castrated their father and set up Cronus as king, and are then challenged by the next generation of gods 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. Only the sea-god Oceanus argues for resignation in the face of the irresistible power of the next generation.

Lewis used the same quotation in his slightly earlier essay “Historicism” of 1950. A much longer quotation from the speech of Oceanus appeared in his paper “The funeral of a Great Myth”, c. 1944. Hyperion was published in 1820. Keats also wrote another version, called The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, published in 1856.

 

Wagner describes his tetralogy

i.e. the German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) describes his cycle of four operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen, in which Siegfried is part 3.

 

the attraction of Darwinism ... a pre-existing myth ... partly political

Darwin himself, while developing his theory of natural selection, not only feared violent condemnations from both religious and scientific quarters: he also feared being hailed for the wrong reasons and by the wrong sort of people. After his theory had been launched in 1859, among the many reactions there was indeed a loud welcome from those who took it as confirmation of radical and atheistic ideas which Darwin considered as dangerous irrelevancies – ideas which could only serve to discredit and distort the theory. Thus Karl Marx sent him an inscribed copy of Das Kapital in 1873 (from a “sincere admirer”) and Marx’s son-in-law, the libertarian Edward Aveling, suggested to Darwin in 1880 that the second volume of Das Kapital be dedicated to him.

   For a fuller discussion of the “pre-existing myth” see Lewis’s earlier essay “The Funeral of a Great Myth”.

 

par. 21   but we think thus

 

angels and archangels and all the company of heaven

From the Anglican Book of Common Prayer; Hymn of Praise at the end of the “Proper Prefaces”, i.e. prayers immediately preceding the Communion.

Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore praising thee, and saying: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory: Glory be to thee, O Lord most High. Amen.

 

that the Author will have something to say to each of us

This appears to be a reference to Revelation 2:17, “To him that overcometh will I give ... a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” See Lewis’s discussion of this in the last chapter of The Problem of Pain, which is clearly inspired by George Macdonald’s sermon on this text, “The New Name”, in Unspoken Sermons I (1867).

 

par. 26   not the therefore

 

the heavens roll up like a scroll

Isaiah 34:4.

And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree.

 

par. 27   of this folly

 

Of this folly George MacDonald has written well.

Unspoken Sermons II (1885), “The Words of Jesus on Prayer”, a sermon on Luke 18:1. The passage quoted is on pp. 225-226 in the Johannesen edition of 1997; Lewis has omitted a few sentences. Exactly the same passage appears as Nr. 86 in Lewis’s Macdonald Anthology.

 

Lo here or lo there are the signs of his coming

Matteüs 24:23, Jesus answering to his disciples’ question “what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?”:

Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. ... Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.

 

par. 28   sometimes this question

 

“What if this present were the world’s last night?”

John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIII, first line.

 

Perfect love casteth out fear

I John 4:18.

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

 

very undesirable ... that we should allow any inferior agent to cast out our fear

Lewis might again have referred the reader to George Macdonald. See Nr. 142 in the Macdonald Anthology, a passage from “The Fear of God” (Unspoken Sermons II.9):

Where it is possible that fear should exist, it is well it should exist, cause continual uneasiness, and be cast out by nothing less than love ... Until love, which is the truth towards God, is able to cast out fear, it is well that fear should hold ...

 

par. 36   i do not find

 

that sign in the clouds, those heavens rolled up like a scroll

Lewis is alluding to Matthew 24:30 and Isaiah 34:4.

 

 

back to survey

 

ON THREE WAYS OF WRITING FOR CHILDREN

 

Lecture for the Library Association, first published in the Proceedings, Papers and Summaries of Discussions at the Bournemouth Conference 29th April to 2nd May 1952; first reprinted in Of Other Worlds, 1966.

 

par. 4   the next way

 

Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, and Tolkien

– Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson, 1832-1898), author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871).

– Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932), author of the Wind in the Willows (1908).

– J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973), author of The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55).

 

par. 5   the third way

 

Arthur Mee

Arthur Henry Mee (1875-1943), English journalist, writer and educator; editor of The Children’s Encyclopaedia, founded in 1908, and of The Children’s Newspaper, founded in 1919.

 

par. 6   within the species

 

the sub-species which happened to suit me

Lewis used the same phrase four and a half years later in his short essay “On Juvenile Tastes”. As he writes there, Children reading books intended for their elders

select (you may say) that minority of ordinary books which happens to suit them, as a foreigner in England may select those English dishes which come nearest to suiting his alien palate.

 

E. Nesbit’s trilogy about the Bastable family

Edith Nesbit (1858-1924), English writer and poet. Her Bastable trilogy consists of The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899, Nesbit’s first children’s book), The Wouldbegoods (1901), and The New Treasure Seekers (1904). They were republished in one volume as The Complete History of the Bastable Family (1928), although this did not include four more Bastable stories that had been published in 1905.

 

one of her grown-up novels

Nesbit’s novel The Red House (1902).

 

Sir Michael Sadler

English historian and educationalist (1861-1943), a prominent adviser to the British government on educational policy (see DNB article). He became Master of University College in April 1923, just before Lewis finished his studies there. Sadler gave some assistance in Lewis’s subsequent efforts to find a job. After his retirement in 1934 he settled in Headington, the Oxford suburb where Lewis also had his home.

 

Oswald

one of the six Bastable children, Oswald is the narrator of the Bastable stories.

 

The Wind in the Willows

A famous animal story for children by Kenneth Grahame, already alluded to in par. 4.

 

par. 8   this canon seems

 

in his fifty-third year

Lewis’s age when he wrote this essay. Actually in most of 1952 he was in his fifty-fourth year, i.e. age 53.

 

par. 9   1. I reply with

 

tu quoque

(Latin) “You too”.

 

When I became a man I put away childish things

I Corinthians 13:11.

 

par. 10   2. the modern view

 

Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope

– Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian novelist.

– Jane Austen (1770-1816), English novelist

– Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), English novelist.

 

par. 11   3. the whole association

 

Tolkien’s essay on Fairy Tales

“On Fairy Stories”, in Essays presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis (Oxford U.P. 1947), 38-89. Reprinted with a lightly adapted introductory section in The Monsters and the Critics and other essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 109-161. In the opening sentence of the original publication Tolkien explains that the essay “was originally intended to be one of the Andrew Lang lectures at St. Andrews, and it was, in abbreviated form, delivered there in 1938.” Lewis is referring to the passage on pp. 58-59 (or 130 of the 1983 edition):

Actually, the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery”, as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of the children which decides this. Children as a class – except in a common lack of experience they are not one – neither like fairy-stories more, nor understand them better than adults do; and no more than they like many other things. They are young and growing, and normally have keen appetites, so the fairy-stories as a rule go down well enough. But in fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste for them; and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant. It is a taste, too, that would not appear, I think, very early in childhood without artificial stimulus; it is certainly one that does not decrease but increases with age, if it is innate.

 

par. 12   according to tolkien

 

not, as they love to say now, making a “comment upon life”

Cf. Lewis’s short essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories” (1956), penultimate paragraph.

The Fantastic or Mythical … can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of “commenting on life”, can add to it.

 

Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1962), Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, founder of analytical psychology. See his essay “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales” (“Zur Phänomenologie des Geistes im Märchen”, 1948), in Vol. 9/1 of Jung’s Collected Works.

 

par. 13   of course as

 

what a kind, but discerning critic called “the expository demon” in me

Possibly Chad Walsh, author of C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Sceptics (1949), although the term does not appear in that book. Walsh’s preference for Lewis the “myth-maker” over Lewis the “expositor” is clearly stated, for example, at the beginning of chapter 5.

 

par. 17   i do not mean

 

Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros

– Odyssey: one of the two ancient Greek epic poems, Iliad and Odyssey, ascribed to Homer and probably dating from the eighth century B.C.

– The Tempest: one of Shakespeare’s last plays.

– The Worm Ouroboros: a fantasy novel by E. R. Eddison, published in 1922.

 

par. 18   a far more serious

 

Giant insects … ghosts … I don’t know anything my parents could have done or left undone …

Cf. Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, chapter 1, par. 6.

My bad dreams were of two kinds, those about spectres and those about insects. The second were, beyond comparison, the worse … I am afraid the psychologists will not be content to explain my insect fears by what a simpler generation would diagnose as their cause – a certain detestable picture in one of my nursery books. … How a woman ordinarily so wise as my mother could have allowed this abomination into the nursery is difficult to understand.

 

Ogpu

Soviet Russian intelligence service and secret police in the years 1922-1934. ОГПУ is the Russian abbreviation for a name that means Joint State Political Directorate.

 

par. 19   the other fears

 

Chesterton … Albert Memorial

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), English writer, poet, and journalist.
…??

 

par. 20   i will even go

 

“faerie”

In addition to Edmund Spenser’s use of the name in The Faerie Queene, Lewis was probably alluding to Tolkien’s cautious words about “faërie” in his 1938 essay “On Fairy Stories”:

[F]airy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays … The definition of a fairy-story … does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country. … Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole. … [A] “fairy-story” is one which touches on or uses Faërie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy. Faërie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic – but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician.

– From Essays presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis (1947; paperback edition, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids 1966), pp. 42-43. Also in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and other essays, ed. F. R. Williamson and Christopher Tolkien (Allen & Unwin, London 1983), 113-114.

 

par. 21   but i have strayed

 

all things are possible

Matthew 19:26.

Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.”

 

 

back to survey

 

TOLKIEN’S THE LORD OF THE RINGS

 

First published in Time and Tide, 14 August 1954 (“The Gods Return to Earth”) and 22 October 1955 (“The Dethronement of Power”); reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds (1982) and, with three omitted sentences restored, in Image and Imagination (2013).

 

par. 1   this book is

 

This book

Tolkien’s great work appeared in three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954 and both The Two Towers and The Return of the King the next year. The first translation was the Dutch, appearing in 1956; translator Max Schuchart (1920-2005) also took on Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces, of which the Dutch version appeared in 1958. Schuchart revised both translation in the 1990s.

 

Songs of Innocence

William Blake (1757-1827), Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1798).

 

back the Odyssey and beyond

The two great ancient Greek epic poems ascribed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, probably date from the eighth century B.C.

 

par. 2   nothing quite like

 

Naomi Mitchison

“One Ring to Bind Them”, New Statesman and Nation, 18 September 1954. [Hooper’s note]

 

Morte d’Arthur

A large fifteenth-century collection of Arthurian legends, Le Morte Darthur, compiled and edited by Thomas Malory (c. 1415-1471) and first printed in 1485.

 

called “sub-creation”

In Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”, first published in the volume Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis (1947), pp. 38-89. The term is introduced in this passage from pp. 50-51:

When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power – upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane. We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such ‘fantasy’, as it is called, new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.

 

Boramit

typo This incorrect name appears in the text as published in Of This and Other Worlds; the correct name is Boromir.

 

par. 3   such a book

 

“those without”

perhaps an allusion to Mark 4:11.

And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables.

 

par. 4   first, we must

 

“in their true dimensions like themselves”

After Milton, Paradise Lost I, 793.

                                 But far within,
And in their own dimensions like themselves,
The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim
In close recess and secret conclave sat.

 

par. 7   that is why

 

Angria

An imaginary country about which the English novelist Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) and her brother Branwell wrote stories when they were in their teens and early twenties.

 

par. 8   nostalgia does indeed

 

the Furioso

Orlando furioso, epic poem by the Italian poet Matteo Boiardo (1441-1494).

 

The Water of the Wondrous Isles

A fantasy novel by William Morris, first published in 1897.

 

par. 12   there are two

 

… and grandeur of the tale. [paragraph end]

In the original text as printed in Time and Tide, a three-sentence paragraph follows here:

This main theme is not to be treated in those jocular, whimsical tones now generally used by reviewers of “juveniles”. It is entirely serious: the growing anguish, the drag of the Ring on the neck, the ineluctable conversion of hobbit into hero in conditions which exclude all hope of fame or fear of infamy. Without the relief offered by the more crowded and bustling Books it would be hardly tolerable.

This paragraph is lacking from the text as reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds (Fount Paperbacks, 1982). The later reprint in Image and Imagination (p. 106) has restored it. Subsequent paragraph numbers (from 13 onward) should accordingly be augmented in the full text.

 

par. 14   yet those books

 

the cock-crow at the Siege of Gondor

Book 5, chapter IV, last paragraph.

 

the war my generation knew

The First World War, 1914-18.

 

his taste for fairy tale was wakened … by active service

“On Fairy Stories”, p. 94:

A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war.

 

par. 15   how far treebeard

 

a “portrait of the artist”

Cf. James Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

 

“no more songs”

The Two Towers, Book 4, chapter X.

 

never-never land

The Never Never Land, a place in the play Peter Pan, or the boy who wouldn’t grow up (1904), by J. M. Barrie.

 

 

back to survey

 

PETITIONARY PRAYER: A PROBLEM WITHOUT AN ANSWER

 

par. 4   the A pattern is

 

Gethsemane ... “Nevertheless, not my will but thine”

Luke 22:42, and parallel places in Matthew 26 and Mark 14.

 

par. 8   and, once again

 

numinibus vota exaudita malignis

Juvenal (Roman poet, 60-140 CE), Satires IV.10, 111. “Enormous prayers which Heaven in anger grants”; this is the translation Lewis used in his 1945 essay “Work and Prayer”. He later used it again in Letters to Malcolm, chapter 5.

 

par. 19   and this at once

mèden diakrinomenos

(Greek) “with no doubting”; James 1:6.

 

par. 21   another attempted

 

quod nefas dicere

Apuleius (second century CE), Roman poet; Metamorphose (or The Golden Ass) II.8.

Quod nefas dicere, nec quod sit ullum huius rei tam dirum exemplum.

It’s wrong for me to say this unless I add an example of what I mean.

 

par. 25   one thing

 

I come to you … for guidance

Lewis mentioned the problem in a letter to his brother of 3 March 1940 (Collected Letters II, 361-2):

By the bye, …  how does one in practice (I don’t say, intellectually) – in the actual practice of prayer – combine the attitude “Thy will be done” with obedience to the exhortation that we should ask “believing that we shall receive”? seems to me almost impossible. One can choose the first: but surely in the very act of doing so one ipso facto abandons all confidence that one’s prayer is likely to have any causal efficacy in bringing about the event prayed for? I have never seen the question discussed anywhere nor got an answer from anyone whom I asked.

 

back to survey

 

DE DESCRIPTIONE TEMPORUM

 

Lewis delivered his inaugural lecture in Cambridge on his 56th birthday, 29 November 1954. It was first published in 1955 by Cambridge University Press and reprinted in the volumes They Asked for a Paper (1962) and Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (1969). In April 1955 Lewis read a slightly adapted version for the BBC radio under the title “The Great Divide”.

 

par. 2   what most attracted

 

Professor Seznec

Jean Seznec (1905-83) was a professor of French Literature and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, 1950-72. He was an authority on the survival of pagan religion into Medieval Christian religion and thought.

 

Thomas Wyat

English poet (1503-1542) who introduced French and Italian verse forms in English poetry.

 

par. 3   from the formula

 

Humanist propaganda

“Humanist” is to be understood here in the original 15th-century meaning: humanists were scholars who studied and edited the sources of ancient Greek, Roman and Christian civilization.

 

Richardson

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), English novelist.

 

Mrs Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), English novelist and literary critic; she devised her own stream-of-consciousness technique, with far more generally accessible results than James Joyce’s. The Waves appeared in 1931.

 

par. 4   the meaning of my

 

Isidore

St. Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636), encyclopaedist and archbishop; last of the Latin church fathers.

 

Professor Toynbee

Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975), English historian and philosopher of history, author of A Study of History (10 volumes, 1934-1954).

 

Spengler

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), German philosopher of history, author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 1918-1922).

 

par. 5   the first division

 

the Dark Ages

In European history, this is the period from the fall of the Roman Empire until the 11th century, i.e. roughly 450-1050 CE. It includes the time of Charlemagne and the Viking raids. While other languages will often label this period as “Early Middle Ages” or perhaps “Dark Middle Ages”, in English the term “Middle Ages” is often reserved for the five centuries following the Dark Ages.

 

Gibbon

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), English historian, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788). One novelty of this famous work, being a product of the Enlightenment, was that it described the advent of Christianity as an essential factor of decline and fall, not as a triumph of grace and truth.

 

par. 6   the partial loss

 

Virgil

Roman poet (70-19 BC); his main work, the epic poem Aeneid, describes the preliminaries of the history of Rome as a sequel to the history of Troy.

 

par. 7   2. to gibbon the

 

Beowulf

Old English (Anglo-Saxon) poem of the 7th or 8th century.

 

the Hildebrand

The Hildebrandslied (“Song of Hildebrand”), 8th-century heroic lay in old High German.

 

The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-British poet and literary critic, Nobel laureate for Literature 1948; The Waste Land was published in 1922.

 

Mr Jones

David Jones (1895-1974), English poet, painter and essayist; The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing was published in 1952. A useful brief discussion of his life and work can be found in Joseph Pearce’s book Literary Converts (1999), pp. 205-209 and 281-283.

Jones admitted that his publishers had been influenced by T. S. Eliot in their decision to publish the poem and that “they probably would not have taken The Anathemata without him”. ... Many found The Anathemata as baffling as The Waste Land and struggled with its meaning in the same way as the previous generation had struggled with Eliot’s meaning thirty years earlier. Aware of the danger of being misunderstood, Jones was at pains to explain himself in his Preface to the poem. (Pearce, 281)

 

the audience of Homer

i.e. the ancient Greeks from the ninth century BC onward. The actual existence of a historical figure called Homer who wrote the Iliad and Odyssey has been doubted since the ancient Greeks themselves. The two epic poems ascribed to Homer are now usually thought to date from around 800 BC in their written form.

 

par. 8   3. the christening of europe

 

Pausanias

Pausanias Periegetes (“the Guide”), ancient Greek geographer, historian and archaeologist, second century CE.

 

Professor Ryle

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), British analytical philosopher. From 1945 to 1967 he was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford – which C. S. Lewis was leaving as he gave the present lecture.

 

Thomas Browne

Thomas Browne (1605-1682), English physician and writer, famed for his ‘poetical’ prose; author of Religio Medici (1642).

 

Gregory the Great

Pope Gregory I (c. 540-604).

 

Seneca

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman philosopher (c. 4 BC-65 CE)

 

Dr Johnson

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), English writer, poet, literary critic and lexicographer.

 

Burton

Robert Burton (1577-1640), English scholar, writer, divine; author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).

 

par. 10   the next frontier

 

I have before now been accused of exaggerating it

The perceived exaggeration was contained in his book The Allegory of Love (1936), for example in chapter 1, “Courtly Love”. Discussing the new love poetry of the Troubadours and Chrétien de Troyes around the year 1100, Lewis calls the novelty of courtly love a “revolution” compared with which “the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature” (p. 4).

 

Chanson de Roland

Old French epic poem dating from around 1100 CE.

 

the Lancelot

Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart), a poem in Old French written by Chrétien de Troyes around the year 1180. Lewis described this work as “the flower of the courtly tradition in France, as it was in its early maturity” (Allegory of Love, 23).

 

par. 11   a third possible frontier

 

Copernicanism

......

 

Descartes

René Descartes (1596-1650), French philosopher and mathematician.

 

par. 12   it is by these steps

 

Jane Austen ... Persuasion

Jane Austen (1775-1817), English novelist. Persuasion was her last novel, published in 1816.

 

Walter Scott ... Waverley Novels

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Scottish novelist, poet literary critic, biographer. His first historical novel, Waverley, appeared anonymously in 1814; his subsequent books were published as “by the author of Waverley”.

 

par. 13   1. i begin with what

 

Punch

English magazine of humour and satire, 1841-1992.

 

par. 15   2. in the arts

 

Alexandrian poetry

An intellectualistic school of poetry in Alexandria, third century BC, including Apollonius of Rhodes and Callimachus of Cyrene.

 

Skaldic poetry ... kenningar

i.e. the poetry of the skalds, Icelandic and Scandinavian court poets of the 9th-13th centuries. Kenningar (sing. kenning) are a type of metaphor which was in regular use with the skalds.

 

Donne

John Donne (1572-1631), English poet and preacher.

 

Wordsworth ... Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet. Lyrical Ballads (1798) was a volume of poetry by him and his friend Coleridge, with a famous preface by Wordsworth.

 

Epic of Gilgamesh

Mesopotamian (Akkadian) epic poem dating from c. 2000 BC.

 

par. 16   3. thirdly, there is

 

those Jeremiahs ... who warn us that we are “relapsing into Paganism”

In spite of his slightly condescending tone, Lewis is implicitly recalling one author whose work he had recommended with a Preface in 1946 – How Heathen is Britain? by B. G. Sandhurst (Charles Henry Green). This preface was later reprinted as “On the Transmission of Christianity” in Undeceptions (1971), First and Second Things (1985) and Essay Collection (2000).
    It was probably in the course of 1946 that Lewis began to doubt the propriety of using the terms “Pagan” (or “Heathen”) and  “Paganism” to describe modern people and practices; see the first to notes on “A Christmas Sermon of Pagans”.

 

Westminster Hall

Oldest existing part of the Palace of Westminster in London, used for ceremonial functions.

 

par. 17   4. lastly, i play

 

Keats’s Hyperion and Wagner’s Ring are pre-Darwinian

Lewis made the same point using the same two examples in his essays “The Funeral of a Great Myth” (c. 1944) and “The World’s Last Night” (1951). John Keats’s poem Hyperion appeared in 1820. Richard Wagner’s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen was not actually published or performed before Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), but Wagner had been working on it since 1849.

 

par. 19   at any rate

 

when Waterloo was fought

The Battle of Waterloo, in present-day Belgium, 1815.

 

par. 21   first, for the reassurance

 

Dante read Virgil

In his Divina Commedia, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) described Virgil as his guide on part of the journey from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven.

 

par. 22   and now for the claim

 

Henry More

English philosopher (1614-1687) in the school of the Cambridge Platonists.

 

 

back to survey

 

XMAS AND CHRISTMAS

 

First published in Time and Tide, 4 December 1954. – Herodotus (c. 485–c. 425 BC) is the author of the oldest known large and research-based historical narrative. It is also the oldest Greek prose work that has survived in its entirety. The word “history” goes back to the Greek word historia, “research” or “wanting to know”; this is the first word of Herodotus’s work and derived its modern meaning from it. A suitable section to compare with Lewis’s pastiche is IV. 32-36, on the Hyperboreans (“Northereners”).

 

par. 1   and beyond this

 

Hecataeus

Hekataois of Milete (c. 550-475 BC) as a historian was a precursor of Herodotus, but only fragments of his work have survived the ages. Herodotus refers to Hecataeus on several occasions, often to correct him.

 

Cronos

In Greek mythology, Cronos was the youngest of the twelve Titans. His reign was thought to have been a golden age.

 

par. 7   such, then, are

 

a certain sacred story which I know but do not repeat

cf. Herodotus on Egypt, II.3 and II.65, (translation G. C. Macaulay):

... the men of Heliopolis are said to be the most learned in records of the Egyptians. Those of their narrations which I heard with regard to the gods I am not earnest to relate in full, but I shall name them only, because I consider that all men are equally ignorant of these matters: and whatever things of them I may record, I shall record only because I am compelled by the course of the story.

... But if I should say for what reasons the sacred animals have been thus dedicated, I should fall into discourse of matters pertaining to the gods, of which I most desire not to speak; and what I have actually said touching slightly upon them, I said because I was constrained by necessity.

 

 

back to survey

 

GEORGE ORWELL

 

First published in Time and Tide, 8 January 1955; first reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, 1982. George Orwell (1903-1950) was an English essayist and novelist.

 

Orwell’s 1984 on television

Broadcast by the BBC on 12 December 1954. The dystopian novel appeared in 1949, shortly before the author’s death.

 

Animal Farm

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story was published on 17 August 1945. The previous day, on 16 August, Lewis’s fantasy novel That Hideous Strength: A modern fairy-tale for grown-ups was published, simultaneously with George Orwell’s review in the Manchester Guardian. Oddly, the Dutch translation of Orwell’s novella was published with the subtitle Een sprookje voor grote mensen, “A fairy-tale for grown-ups”. Presumably, each of these correspondences was pure coincidence.

 

Callimachus

Callimachus of Cyrene (c. 310-c. 240 B.C.), Greek scholar and poet. The catchprase “Big book, big evil” (μέγα βιβλίον μέγα κακόν, mega biblion, mega kakon) is Fragment nr. 465 in Pfeiffer’s edition of Callimachus, vol. I (1949).

 

Lawrence … do dirt on sex

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist. The phrase is found in his essay “Pornography and Obscenity”, first published in This Quarter, vol. 2 Nr. 1, July-September 1929, then in Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. MacDonald (1936); also in the volume Sex, Literature and Censorship (1955), ed. Harry T. Moore.

“Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable. … it is amazing how strong is the will in ordinary, vulgar people, to do dirt on sex.”

 

Becky Sharp

Rebecca Sharp, a charming and utterly unscrupulous woman; central character in W. M. Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair (1848).

 

Regan and Goneril … Lear

King Lear’s two evil daughters in Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear.

 

as far as Glasgow

Largest city of Scotland. Lewis is no doubt reckoning the distance as from London, almost 400 miles (639 km).

 

 

back to survey

 

PRUDERY AND PHILOLOGY

 

The Spectator, Vol. 194, 21 January 1955.

 

a good deal of discussion lately

No doubt Lewis is partly referring to the columns of The Spectator. The complete archive of this weekly magazine, from 1848 to the present, is available online for subscribers at www.archive.spectator.co.uk.

 

segnius irritant

(Latin) “They [words] don’t stir so vividly”. Horace, Ars poetica, 180 (pp. 464-465 in the 1942 Loeb edition; translated by H. Rushton Fairclough)

 

ut pictura poesis

Horace, Ars poetica, 361.

 

Quintilian … Virgil

Quintilian was a famous Roman orator and teacher of eloquence (professor eloquentiae) in the first century C.E. Lewis is probably referring to Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria VIII.3, par. 44-47 (pp. 235-237 in the 1922 Loeb edition).

 

the girl in Shaw

Bernard Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah (1903), Part 4, “Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman”, shortly after the beginning of the first act : “Decency cannot be discussed without indecency.” The speaker is not the girl, but an old gentleman.

 

fabliau

Mediaeval French term for a comic short story − the genre of which Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are the most famous example in English.

Typo alert: the word is incorrectly spelled as fableau in some editions.

 

 

back to survey

 

LILIES THAT FESTER

 

The Twentieth Century, Vol. 157, Nr. 138, April 1955. This monthly magazine was founded in 1877 as The Nineteenth Century, and changed its name in 1901 to The Nineteenth Century and After; in 1951 it became The Twentieth Century. Lewis wrote two articles in it; this one is the first.

     The “Cambridge Number” of February 1955, mentioned in the opening sentence, is presented by the editor as “the first of what we hope will be a short series of special numbers reflecting trends of thought in England to-day”. This Number was “edited in Cambridge” (i.e. some Cambridge academics had acted as guest editors) and, as the editor continues, “in a sense it shows Cambridge looking at the world to-day”. An “Oxford number” (Nr. 140) followed in June 1955.
     The tone for the Cambridge Number is set by an introductory “Letter” from the famous novelist E. M. Forster (honorary fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, since 1946). Although this tone is by no means maintained throughout all the other contributions, it appears to have stamped the whole Number as a manifesto of “Cambridge Humanists” against what Forster called “the present rise of obscurantism” in Cambridge and elsewhere. The ensuing March issue carries two articles jointly titled “The Humanists Answered”; Lewis’s reply in the April issue focuses on passages in a student’s contribution and in Forster’s.
     One passage in the last paragraph of Forster’s “Letter” suggests that the fear of a “rise of obscurantism” had been nurtured by Lewis’s accession to the Cambridge chair of Medieval and Renaissance Letters in November 1954. As Forster notes,

Its stronghold [i.e. that of Humanism] in history, the Renaissance, is alleged not to have existed. Its conception of human nature, and its hopes for it are implicitly denied by emphasizing the arbitrary theory of Original Sin.

The first essay, titled “Old Western Man”, is a long appraisal by Graham Hough of Lewis’s inaugural Cambridge lecture (reprinted in Critical Essays on C. S. Lewis, ed. George Watson, Scolar Press, Aldershot 1992), and there are references to Lewis in some of the other articles too. However, Hough’s essay is far from hostile; and if any single Cambridge scholar is selected for head-on attack in the Cambridge Number, it is the historian Herbert Butterfield as author of Christianity and History. Meanwhile, Lewis was certainly aware of ways in which he might have helped to raise a spectre for humanists; see his letters of 5 March 1955 to Ruth Pitter (Collected Letters III, 577-578), and of 6 April to Dorothy L. Sayers (ibid., 593).

     Another reply to the “Cambridge Humanists” (a category actually created as it was being replied to) came in the form of a series of eight articles by “Cambridge Christians”, including Herbert Butterfield, in weekly magazine The Spectator, 29 April 1955, pp. 539-552; electronic facsimile pages of this series are available here.
    “Lilies that Fester” was revised before its 1960 republication in The Weight of Glory to account for a reply from Forster in the May issue of The Twentieth Century; see Lewis’s letter of 25 May 1959 to John H. McCallum in Collected Letters III, 1054, and firt note to par. 8, below. In its revised form the essay was reprinted in They Asked for a Paper (1962) and Christian Reunion (1990).

 

 

par. 1   in the “cambridge number”

 

Mr John Allen

In the “Cambridge Number” (p. 120), John Allen is simply described as “a student”. Under the title “In Defence of Uncertainty”, he contributed one of two pieces collectively titled “Two Student Protests”.

 

par. 5   now culture seems

 

Don Giovanni

Mozart’s opera, first performed in 1787.

 

the Oresteia

A trilogy of tragedies by the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Choephoroi (The Libation Bearers) and Eumenides.

 

Clytæmnestra crying, “Now you have named me aright”

Aeschylus, Agamemnon, in a passage about halfway between the dialogue of the Choir and Clytaemnestra after she has killed Agamemnon, before Aegisthos appears, and shortly before the end of the play; p. 131 in the 1926 Loeb edition, Aeschylus vol. II.

 

Howards End ... a girl listening to a symphony

Helen Schlegel in chapter 5 of Forster’s 1910 novel, listening to Beethoven’s Fifth:

... the music [of the third movement] started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world. After the interlude of elephants dancing, they returned and made the observation for the second time. Helen could not contradict them, for, once at all events, she had felt the same, and had seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right.
    Her brother raised his finger: it was the transitional passage on the drum.
    For, as if things were going too far, Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push, and they began to walk in major key instead of in a minor, and then – he blew with his mouth and they were scattered! Gusts of splendour, gods and demigods contending with vast swords, colour and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death! Oh, it all burst before the girl, and she even stretched out her gloved hands as if it was tangible. Any fate was titanic; any contest desirable; conqueror and conquered would alike be applauded by the angels of the utmost stars. [etc.]

(N.B. typo: The novel’s title is Howards End, not Howard’s End.)

 

par. 7   at this point

 

Goethe, Eckermann

...??

 

par. 8   so much for

 

So much for …

The text running from here up till and including the first five words of the fourth sentence sentence of par. 11 (“…embrace it for their sake. This would be to use…”) was substituted in 1960 for the text as published in 1955. Lewis made this change did to account for a self-correction offered by E. M. Forster in the May issue of Twentieth Century in response to Lewis’s essay:

Dear Sir – I must apologize to the twentieth century for contributing an under-punctuated sentence to its February number. Professor C. S. Lewis, in the April number, discusses the sentence in question at some length, but he can make little of it, and I could make nothing of him until I realized that it was all my fault. I had not put in enough commas. The sentence, as passed for press, states ‘My belief in the individual, and in his duty to create and to understand and to contact other individuals.’ Put in a comma after ‘create’ and another after ‘understand’, and a meaning will emerge which may be reprehensible but should be comprehensible. I am so sorry to have misled your readers – one of them a very eminent one – by my ambiguous drafting.
                                Yours, etc., E. M. Forster
kings’college, cambridge
April 1955

 

Horace ... “bards are a touchy lot”

Epistulae II.2 (“To Florus”), 102.

multa fero, ut placem genus irritabile vatum ...

Much do I endure, to soothe the fretful tribe of bards.

(translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb edition 1942, pp. 433-434)

 

par. 9   let us be

 

“stern to inflict” but not “stubborn to endure”

Quoted from the English poet Robert Southey (1774-1843), “To A. S. Cottle from Robert Southey”. This is an introductory poem in Amos Cottle’s translation of the Poetic Edda, Icelandic Poetry, or The Edda of Saemund (1797), lines 60-63 and 74-77, pp. xxxiv and xxxvi in the first edition:

       ... A strange and savage faith
of mightiest power! it fram’d the unfeeling soul
Stern to inflict and stubborn to endure,
That laug’d in death. ...
                      ... Wild the Runic faith
And wild the realms where Scandinavian Chiefs
And Scalds arose, and hence the Scaldic verse
Partook the savage wildness.

Lewis cited the same passage in his essays “The Necessity of Chivalry” (1940) and “Interim Report” (1956).

 

par. 10   if you doubt

 

the praise ... which Dr Johnson gave to the Irish

Boswell, Life of Johnson, February 1775.

The Irish are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by false representations of the merits of their countrymen. No, Sir; the Irish are a fair people; – they never speak well of one another.

 

par. 11   it is then

 

Ovid said that it “softened our manners”

Epistulae ex Ponto II.9, 47-48. The Latin phrase is emollit mores. The Roman poet Ovid (43 BC-18 CE) spent the last ten years of his life in exile in the ancient northern Thracian seaport of Tomi, on what is now the Black Sea coast (“Pontus”) – a barely civilized border region. In the second “Epistle from Pontus” he is addressing the Thracian King Cotys.

tibi ... pater ...  ... quam Marte ferox et vinci nescius armis,   tam numquam, facta pace, cruoris amans. adde quod ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes emollit mores nec sinit esse feros, ... ad vatem vates orantia brachia tendo, terra sit exiliis ut tua fida meis.

Thou hast for a father ...  ... one who though fierce in war and unacquainted with defeat in arms, was yet never fond of blood when peace was made. Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel. ... As bard to bard I extend my arms in prayer that thy land may be loyal to me in exile.

(translation by A. L. Wheeler, Loeb edition 1924, pp. 363-365; emphasis added.)

 

Mr Allen’s phrase ... “the faith in culture”

See next note.

 

par. 12   now a step

 

Mr Allen complained

Lewis is referring to the same passage that he quoted at the beginning, from Allen’s penultimate paragraph (pp. 126-127):

... the professional rain-makers are engaged in the valiant attempt to shore up their tottering position by persuading us that humanity has failed and the Church has not. ... The rain-makers have outlived their vocation, and if humanity has failed it had better try again, and if it wants a faith it had better have faith in itself ... I feel that there has been an unnecssary intellectual retreat from the faith in culture for instance. Why do so many people go to such lengths to prove to us that really they are not intellectuals at all and certainly not cultured, that they are wolves in sheep’s clothing with ‘foreheads villainous low’ and no brows at all, and that what they really enjoy is sitting in a cellar all day with a pink light on, drinking whisky and listening to the A F N while they read Hank Jansen [sic]. All these things are excellent in moderation, but I feel that doing them all day is a little excessive. Surely one can prove one’s virility in other ways.

 

AFN

Allen was probably referring to the American Forces Network, a radio service for the American armed forces in Europe established by the US War Department in 1942 as Armed Forces Radio Service. Along with Radio Luxemburg, this service offered the only access for British listeners to “low brow” American popular music.

 

Fantasy and Science Fiction

an American magazine that started as a quarterly in 1949 and became a monthly in 1952. Two of Lewis’s own SF stories where first published in it: “The Shoddy Lands” in 1956 and “Ministering Angels” in 1959.

 

The child whose love is here ...

William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book 5, “Books”, lines 345-346.

 

par. 13   i should not

 

Mr Forster feels anxious because he dreads theocracy

A reference to E. M. Forster’s opening “letter” In the “Cambridge Number”; see introductory comment, above. Forster did not use the word “theocracy”, but professed his “main disbelief” by stating, “I disbeleive in spritiual authority.” He went on to point out that

My attitude towards religion may seem … very foolish. I like, or anyhow tolerate, most religions so long as they are weak, and I find in their rites an acknowledgement of our smallness which is salutary. But I dread them all, without exception, as soon as they become powerful.

See also Lewis’s remark on Cambridge anti-clericalism in his “Interim Report”, published a year later in The Cambridge Review and reprinted in Present Concerns (1986).

If ever all this zeal could be directed against those who now really endanger our liberties, it would be of high value.

 

“all power corrupts”

Lord Acton (1834-1902) in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 3 April 1887. “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton (1904), vol. I, 372.

 

Renaissance doctrine of Divine Right

An allusion to the growing tendency of late medieval and early modern political theory to consider the King as having a position “above the law”; perhaps more particularly to the development of absolutist ideas by the 16th-century French lawyer Jean Bodin (1529-1596) as author of Six livres de la république. The concept of a “divine right of kings” did not come into its own until the 17th century.

 

Rousseau’s General Will

The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) introduced the concept of a volonté générale in his book Du Contrat Social (1762).

 

Hôtel de Rambouillet

A literary salon in 17th-century Paris, run by Catherine de Vivonne, marquise (“Madame”) de Rambouillet in the years 1620-1648.

 

the “Souls”

An informal but distinctive social group in England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It originated from a shared wish among some politicians and intellectuals to have an opportunity for social life where people could be trusted to avoid talking about Irish Home Rule. One of the initial “Souls” was Arthur James Balfour, the later Prime Minister and foreign secretary and author of Theism and Humanism (1915), a book which Lewis valued highly.

 

the “Apostles”

 i.e. the Cambridge Apostles, an intellectual (mostly undergraduate) society at the University of Cambridge, founded in 1820. E. M. Forster was a member.

 

par. 14   the old social

 

most men, as Aristotle observed, do not like to be merely equal with all other men

...??

 

the Managerial Class

The term perhaps got currency through a widely discussed American book of social and political analysis The Managerial Revolution (1941) by James Burnham.

 

par. 16   for one thing

 

long, long thoughts

from “My lost youth” by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Each of the poem’s ten stanzas ends with the lines “A boy’s will is the wind’s will, / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

 

a Traherne or a Wordsworth

Thomas Traherne (1638?-1674), English poet and mystic, author of Centuries of Meditations; William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet, author of The Prelude (quoted in par. 12).

 

par. 17   secondly, the nature

 

“practical criticism”

An allusion to Practical Criticism (1929) by the English literary critic I. A. Richards (1893-1979). Lewis’s own opposition to making literary criticism “practical” in the sense of a career event is thus made to shade into his general dislike of the “New Criticism” of his day, of which Richards was a founder. A passage in Owen Barfield’s 1951 preface to his book Poetic Diction (1928) may be taken to represent Lewis’s view:

... there may be an age of which the characteristic response is to deny the validity of imagination. ... If anyone were inclined to doubt that ours is such an age, the degree of acceptance which the admittedly able and informed critical writings of Dr. I. A. Richards have won for themselves should be enough to satisfy him to the contrary. For in The Principles of Literary Criticism, Coleridge on Imagination, and elsewhere Dr. Richards has sought no less than to define imagination in terms of a philosophy of Behaviourism when it is precisely the fact of imagination which makes Behaviourism at once untrue and dangerous. Behaviourism was an attempt to carry to its logical conclusion in psychology the scientism which natural science had come to take for granted, and which assumes that man is a detached observer of a world devoid of human spirit and “going on by itself”. Within such a framework imagination can be no more than a kind of pretending, and it is as such that it is presented.

 

par. 18   the thing would

 

a Mulcaster or Boyer

Richard Mulcaster (c. 1530-1611) was a headmaster who played an important role in the poet Edmund Spenser’s education; see Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), pp. 347-350. James Boyer (1736-1814) was Upper Master of Christ Hospital, a “public school” in West Sussex, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb and James Leigh Hunt where pupils.

 

par. 20   not only is

 

Essays in Criticism

a journal of literary criticism, founded in 1951 by F. W. Bateson (1901-1978). Lewis contributed a piece on Jane Austen in the journal’s next issue (October 1954).

 

par. 21   another advantage is

 

Chaucer ... Donne ... Coleridge

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400), John Donne (1572-1631), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poets.

 

par. 24   culture is a bad

 

a Tartuffe

Main character – an impostor – in the comedy Tartuffe (1664), by French playwright Molière.

 

par. 27   lastly i reach

 

“Lilies that fester ... ”

Shakespeare, Sonnet 94, last line.

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds:
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

 

moyen de parvenir

(French) “means to get through”, “way to get in”.

 

par. 28   as far as

 

“humanists”

By the “useful and wholly different meaning” of this word Lewis likely refers to its original meaning, dating from the 15th and 16th centuries. A “humanist” was a scholar engaged in what were then the modern kind of studies called the studia humaniora or “humanities” – Greek and Latin language and literature; these subjects were considered to be the best way to study humanity, or the way to study humanity at its best. The word humanism dates (like many ‑isms) from the 19th century, as the name of a more or less optimistic belief in humanity, often allied with non-belief in God, giving the word “humanist” its modern meaning.

 

 

back to survey

 

ON SCIENCE FICTION

 

A talk given to the Cambridge University English Club, 24 November 1955; first published in Of Other Worlds, 1966.

 

par. 1   sometimes a village

 

Trollope

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), English novelist; his works include the Chronicles of Barsetshire.

 

Wells

H. G. Wells (1866-1946), prolific and versatile English writer, pioneer of science fiction.

 

par. 2   of article i have

 

James

Henry James (1843-1916), American-English novelist.

 

Smollett

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771), Scottish novelist.

 

par. 3   moreover, most of

 

you must love it ere to you it will seem worthy of your love

Wordsworth, “A Poet’s Epitaph” (1800), tenth stanza.

 

par. 6   in this sub-species

 

Displaced Persons

a term dating from the Second World War, when the supreme command of the allied armies in north-western Europe devised a policy for dealing with civilians who were living away from home for war-related reasons.

 

John Collier in Tom’s A-Cold

See Lewis’s letter of 13 June 1933 to Arthur Greeves, in Collected Letters II, 111. As Lewis points out there, the fallen civilization is that of England a century after it has collapsed in some unspecified way.

 

“produced”, as Euclid would say

Euclid was an ancient Greek mathematician, active in Alexandria in the early third century B.C. “Produce” in the sense intended here may be taken as a synonym of “extend” or “lengthen”, said of a line in geometry. Lewis is describing a literary technique which he had been using in his own science fiction, as appears from his 1946 “Reply to Professor Haldane” (par. 16), in the figure of Professor Frost in That Hideous Strength:

No man at present is (probably) doing what I represent Frost as doing: but he is the ideal point at which certain lines of tendency already observable will meet if produced.

 

Brave New World

Dystopian novel by the English writer Aldous Huxley (1895-1963), published in 1932.

 

Nineteen-Eighty-Four

Dystopian novel by the English writer George Orwell (1903-1950), published in 1949.

 

The Waves

A novel by the English writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), published in 1931.

 

par. 8   having condemned that

 

Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Jules Verne (1828-1905), French writer, poet, playwright, and pioneer of science fiction.

 

Wells’s Land Ironclads

A story by H. G. Wells first published in 1903 in The Strand Magazine.

 

Arthur Clarke’s Prelude to Space

Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), English writer of science fiction and popular science. His science fiction novel Prelude to Space was first published in 1951.

 

Maldon

The Battle of Maldon, an incompletely surviving poem in Old English, probably written shortly after the described events. The battle was a failed attempt by the Anglo-Saxons to repulse a Viking (Danish) invasion in Essex in the year 991.

 

Lepanto

Poem by G. K. Chesterton published in 1915. The battle of Lepanto (1571), in the Gulf of Patras (Greece), was a sea battle resulting in a major victory for the combined naval forces of several Catholic states against the fleet of the Ottoman empire.

 

the Arcadia

The Arcadia (1590) is a prose romance by the English diplomat, soldier, courtier, critic and poet, Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), who acquired the reputation of embodying the type of the ideal aristocrat.

 

par. 9   i think it useful

 

Hades

In ancient Greek religion, Hades was the underworld. It took its name from the god of the dead and the king of the underworld.

 

Homer sends Odysseus there

In Book X of the Odyssey.

 

Dante … Inferno

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italian poet. His [Divina] Commedia describes, in three Books, the author’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

 

Athanasius Kircher … Iter extaticum celeste

German jesuit and scholar (1602-1680). His Itinerarium exstaticum (1656) was revised and expanded as Iter extaticum coeleste (1660). It is a book on astronomy in the form of a fictional dialogue between the angel Cosmiel and the narrator, Theodidactus (“taught by God”) during a journey through the planets.

 

Wells’s First Men in the Moon … in its original and shorter form

The First Men in the Moon (1901), by H. G. Wells, was first serialized The Strand Magazine from December 1900 to August 1901.

 

par. 10   how anyone can

 

the Ancient Mariner

The narrator in most of The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (1798), a long poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

 

par. 11  of course, a given

 

Pope’s maxim about the proper study of mankind

Alexander Pope (1688-1744), English poet. The “maxim” is found in An Essay on Man (1733-34), II.1, first lines:

Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.

par. 13   my next sub-species

 

The Sleeper Awakes

Novel by H. G. Wells, published in book form in 1910; originally serialized and published in 1898-99 as When the Sleeper Wakes, later rewritten under the modified title.

 

Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men

Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), English philosopher and science fiction writer. His novel Last and First Men covers a period of two billion years and a succession of eighteen different species evolving from the “first men”, i.e. today’s humanity.

 

Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End

Childhood’s End (1953) was Clarke’s first successful novel. Lewis’s elated response to it is recorded in a letter of 22 December 1953 to his future wife Joy Davidman; see Collected Letters III, 390-392.

 

Geoffrey Dennis’s The End of the World (1930)

Geoffrey Dennis (1892-1963), English writer; The End of the World, a discourse on ways in which the world might end, won him the Hawthornden Prize 1930. Except for a short Wikipedia article, very little information on him is available on the internet. The online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction associates The End of the World with a mode of writing established by Camille Flammarion, French astronomer, science popularizer, prolific writer, and author of the “scientific romance” La fin du monde (1894) translated into English as Omega: The Last Days of the World.

   Lewis does not appear to have known Flammarion until a year after he wrote his 1955 paper on science fiction. A letter of 26 July 1956 suggests that he would have mentioned him if he had (Collected Letters III, 773):

I have now finished [Flammarion’s novel] Uranie [1889] which I return with many thanks. By Jove, what a book this would have been to have met at a certain age! I can well understand how it would have bowled me over. One does not often meet a real Astronomer who feels like that about the stars. It is also interesting historically. He has obviously read Anastatius [sic] Kircher’s Iter Exstaticum and helps to fill in the gap between it and H. G. Wells.

A film adaptation of Flammarion’s Fin du monde was released in 1931.

 

J. B. S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds … “The Last Judgment”

J. B. S. Haldane (1895-1964), eminent British geneticist and popular writer on science; his volume of essays Possible Worlds appeared in 1927. “The Last Judgment” is the last piece in it (but not included in the 1928 American edition of the book). Most of it takes the form of an account of the end of the planet Earth written forty million years hence. Available at Archive.org. See also Lewis’s “Reply to Professor Haldane” (1946).

 

par. 14   work of this

 

memento mori

(Latin) “Remember that you must die.”

 

that passage in E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster (1879-1970), English novelist. Lewis is referring to his novel A Passage to India (1924), chapter 10, first paragraph.

More noises came from a dusty tree, where brown birds creaked and floundered about looking for insects; another bird, the invisible coppersmith, had started his “ponk ponk.” It matters so little to the majority of living beings what the minority, that calls itself human, desires or decides. Most of the inhabitants of India do not mind how India is governed. Nor are the lower animals of England concerned about England, but in the tropics the indifference is more prominent, the inarticulate world is closer at hand and readier to resume control as soon as men are tired.

 

par. 15   i turn at last

 

Fantasy and Science Fiction

The first issue appeared in 1949 as The Magazine of Fantasy; the words and Science Fiction were added to the title from the second issue onward. From the outset the magazine distinguished itself by its quality and diversity. In 2009 it changed from monthly to bi-monthly issues (www.fandsf.com).

 

Grimm’s Märchen

Märchen is German for “Fairy-tale(s)”. The brothers Jakob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm first published their famous collection of German and other European folk tales in 1812-15 as Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales).

 

Beowulf … Nis þaet feor heonon Mil-gemearces

Beowulf is an Old English epic poem dating from the tenth century. Lewis is quoting lines 1361-62: “It is not far hence / by mile measure…”; or “not many miles from here” in the 1957 Penguin translation by David Wright, §20.

 

immram

Immrama were composed from the eighth century onwards. The voyage described was usually undertaken to reach a paradisal island in the west, and involved adventures on various islands visited before that end was achieved. Lewis was perhaps taking his cue from this scheme in The Voyage of the Dawn-Treader, third of his seven Narnian stories.

 

Chrétien

Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1135-c. 1183), French writer and pioneer of stories centring on King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. From France the genre spread over much of western Europe.

 

Huon of Bordeaux

A 13th-century French chanson de geste or epic poem, named after its hero. The dwarf and fairy king Oberon is Huon’s guardian during his exploits among the Saracens and in Babylon. Huon is the first text of its kind to feature the figure of Oberon (whose name is related to German “Alberich” and originally means “fairy-king”).

 

Spenser

Edmund Spenser (1552-99), English poet. The title of the volume in which “On Science Fiction” first appeared, Of Other Worlds (later Of This and Other Worlds), is probably derived From Spenser’s unfinished long poem The Faerie Queene, Book II, Prologue, third stanza, line 8:

Why then should witlesse man so much misweene
That nothing is, but that which he hath seene?
What if within the Moones faire shining spheare?
What if in every other starre unseene
Of other worldes he happily should heare?

 

Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), English poet, soldier and diplomat, author of the prose romance The Arcadia.

 

Paltock

Robert Paltock (1697-1767). English writer known for a single work, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man (1751).

 

Swift

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Irish-English writer, author of Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

 

Voltaire to America

Perhaps a reference to the quasi South American country of El Dorado in chapters 17 and 18 of the philosophical satire Candide ou de l’optimisme (1759), by the French writer and philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778).

 

Rider Haggard

Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925), English novelist. Many of his adventure stories, such as Allan Quatermain and She (both 1887) are set in African scenes; Ayesha (1905) is set in Tibet.

 

Bulwer-Lytton

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, 1st Baron Lytton (1803-73), English politician, prolific and highly popular writer of his day. Lewis is referring to Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Coming Race (1871), also published as Vril, the Power of the Coming Race.

 

She and Kôr

“She” is how the white queen Ayesha is referred to in Rider Haggard’s novels; Kôr is the name of a ruined ancient city near which She has her home.

 

groundnut schemes or Mau Mau

Lewis is referring to two major East African issues of the 1950s: the “Tanganyika groundnut scheme” of 1946-51 and the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, 1952-60.

 

par. 16   in this kind

 

a “machine” in the sense … for the Neo-Classical critics

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this sense as “a contrivance for the sake of effect; a supernatural agency or personage into a poem; the interposition of one of these.” Examples are given from critical writings of Dryden, Addison, Steele, Pope, Horace Walpole and Thomas Warton, and those from Pope include a passage from the preface to his translation of Homer’s Iliad (1715):

The Marvelous Fable includes whatever is supernatural, and especially the Machines of the Gods.

This use of the word originated in the theatre; hence Pope’s line in The Rape of the Lock (1712), 46:

A constant vapour o’er the palace flies;
Strange phantoms rising as the mists arise;
…
Now lakes of liquid gold, Elysian scenes,
and crystal domes, and angels in machines.

 

par. 17   the defence and

 

the subject still awaits its Aristotle

The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) never lost a chance to make distinctions. Also, he was a pioneering thinker in many fields of inquiry – notably in biology, but also in some areas of literary theory. For example, in his 1947 essay “On Stories” Lewis mentioned Aristotle as the first thinker to discuss “Story considered in itself”.

 

par. 18   it may represent

 

Abbott’s Flatland … the sense … of our own limitation

Edwin A. Abbott (“A Square”), Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). The narrator is a two-dimensional being, a square. At first he fails, in a dream, to convince the inhabitants of one-dimensional Lineland that there is a second dimension. Then, after meeting a sphere and getting convinced that three-dimensional Spaceland exists, he tries in vain to convince the sphere that there might be a fourth dimension, and then, again in vain, tries to convince his fellow Flatlanders of the existence of Spaceland.

   Lewis may well have been remembering the element of “emotion” here noted in the Square’s adventures when he delivered his 1946 sermon “Transposition”:

At the worst, we know enough of the spiritual to know that we have fallen short of it: as if the picture knew enough of the three-dimensional world to be aware that it was flat.

 

the story of a man who is enabled …

Lewis is probably referring to Robert A. Heinlein’s  story “By His Bootstraps”, in A Science Fiction Anthology (1961).

 

Charles Williams’s Many Dimensions

Charles Williams (1886-1945), English writer, literary critic, and friend of C. S. Lewis. His novel Many Dimensions appeared in 1931.

 

par. 19   Secondly, the impossible

 

F. Anstey’s Brass Bottle … Vice Versa

Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934), English humorous novelist, wrote under the name F. Anstey. His comedy novel The Brass Bottle appeared in 1900; Vice Versa, or A Lesson to Fathers (1882) is the story of a man who by the magic means of the Garuda Stone exchanges bodies with his schoolboy son.

 

par. 20   sometimes it is

 

Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

A novel by the English writer Robert Louis Stevenson, published in 1886, about the physician Dr. Jekyll who invents drugs to unfetter the evil side of his nature and to restrain it. In the end his evil self, who operates as Mr. Hyde, gets the upper hand.

 

Marc Brandel’s Cast the First Shadow

A short story first published in Cosmopolitan, May 1953, then in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1955, then in the 1961 anthology In the Dead of Night, ed. Michael Sissons. Marc Brandel was the pen name of Marcus Beresford (1919-94), son of the better known writer J. D. Beresford (1873-1947), who was an admirer of H. G. Wells.

 

par. 21   in all these

 

Baron Munchausen

Freiherr von Münchhausen, a German baron (1720-1797) whose tall stories about his own military career were used and further embroidered in a novel first published in 1785, in English, by a German scholar working in London.

 

Ariosto and Boiardo

The Italian poets Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), author of Orlando innamorato, and Matteo Boiardo (1441-1494), author of Orlando furioso.

 

Arabian Nights

One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during in the period from the eighth till the thirteenth century. The stories were first published in English in the early eighteenth century as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment.

 

Hymn to Aphrodite

One of the longer so-called “Homeric hymns”, a collection of ancient Greek poems dating from the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries B.C.

 

Kalevala

Finnish national epic, compiled from folk poetry by Elias Lönnroth in the years 1835-1849.

 

The Faerie Queene

See note on Spenser in par. 15, above.

 

Malory

Sir Thomas Malory (1400?–70), compiler and author of Le Morte Darthur (1485), a prose rendering in twenty-one books of the Arthurian legends made up from the French versions with additions of his own.

 

Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen

The unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), by the German romantic writer Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801). Lewis alluded to it in the first chapter (par. 14, last line) of his autobiography Surprised by Joy, which was published two months before he gave the present talk about science fiction:

… the Castlereagh Hills which we saw from the nursey windows … were not very far off but they were, to children, quite unattainable … They taught me longing – Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.

It was in Heinrich von Ofterdingen that “the blue flower” (die blaue Blume) was first developed into a symbol of romantic longing.

 

The Ancient Mariner and Christabel…

For “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” see note to par. 10, above.
“Christabel” is another long narrative poem, or ballad, by Coleridge.

 

Beckford’s Vathek

Vathek, an Arabian Tale (1786) is a fantasy novel by William Beckford (1759-1844).

 

Morris’s Jason … The Earthly Paradise

William Morris (1834-1896), English poet and artist. His epic poem The Life and Death of Jason (1867) is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of the hero Jason and his quest to find the Golden Fleece. The Earthly Paradise, conceived as another epic poem, is a Chaucer-inspired frame story, comprising a collection of retellings of various myths and legends from Greece and Scandinavia.

 

MacDonald’s Phantastes, Lilith and The Golden Key

George McDonald (1824-1905), Scottish writer, Christian minister, and a major source of inspiration for C. S. Lewis. Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895) are fantasy novels; “The Golden Key” is a fairy tale published in Dealings with the Fairies (1867).

 

Eddison’s Worm Ouroboros

The Worm Ouroboros (1922), a fantasy novel by the English writer E. R. Eddison.

 

Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

The world-famous fantasy novel was published in three-parts in 1954-1955. When C. S. Lewis as asked to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize for 1961, he recommended “Professor J. R. R. Tolkien of Oxford in recognition of his now celebrated romantic trilogy The Lord of the Rings”.

 

David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus

 A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), a philosophical fantasy and science fiction novel by Scottish writer  David Lindsay (1876-1945). In several places of his Collected Letters, Lewis refers to this book as an important inspiration for his own science fiction trilogy:

– “The real father of my planet books is David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus …” (to Charles A. Brady, 29 October 1944; CL2, 630)

– “From Lindsay I first learned what other planets in fiction are really good for: for spiritual adventures. Only they can satisfy the craving which sends our imaginations off the earth.” (to Ruth Pitter, 4 January 1947; CL2, 754)

– “Voyage to Arcturus … first suggested to me that the form of ‘science fiction’ could be filled by spiritual experiences.” (to William L. Kinter, 28 March 1953; CL3, 314)

 

Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan

Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) was an English writer, poet, an artist; Titus Groan (1946) is the first novel in what was to become the Gormenghast series. By the time of Lewis’s present paper, only the second volume had appeared yet, entitled Gormenghast (1950).

 

Ray Bradbury

American writer (1920-2012), author of the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953). After his death the New York Times obituary described him as “the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream.”

 

W. H. Hodgson’s The Night Land

The Night Land (1912), novel by the English writer W. H. Hodgson (1877-1918). There do not seem to be any further references to Hodgson in all of Lewis’s published writings.

 

 

back to survey

 

IMAGINATION AND THOUGHT IN THE MIDDLE AGES

 

First published in in Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge University Press 1966), 41-63. Two lectures for an audience of scientists at the Zoological Laboratory, Cambridge, 17-18 July 1956. Lewis had begun work as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English in Cambridge in January 1955. The following notes include (and sometimes improve or expand) the references given by Walter Hooper at the back of the 1966 volume.

     The lectures can be read as an early and/or popular short version of Lewis’s posthumous book, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964), which he described in the Preface as “based on a course of lectyures given more than once at Oxford”.

 

par. 2   here is an

 

Brut

Laӡamons Brut, or Chronicle of Britain: A poetical Semi-Saxon paraphrase of the Brut of Wace, ed. Frederick Madden (1847), 15774-15779. As Lewis noted elsewhere, Laӡamon’s Brut “was probably written before 1207” (“The Genesis of a Medieval Book” in Studies in Renaissance and Medieval Literature, ed. Walter Hooper, p. 20).

 

in vacuo

(Latin) “in a vacuum”, in isolation, without reference to facts or evidence.

 

par. 3   here is another

 

a French poem of the fourteenth century

The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, Englisht by John Lydgate, a.d. 1426, from the French of Guillaume de Deguileville, a.d. 1330, 1355. The text edited by F. J. Furnivall, with introduction, notes, glossary and indexes by Katharine B. Locock. Early English Text Society, Extra Series, 77, 83 and 92 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1899, 1901, 1904; reprint Millwood NY: Kraus, 1973), p. 91, 3414v.

And yiff ye lyst to lerne yt sone,
The cercle off the coldë moone,
Atwyxen yow & me for evere
The boundys trewly doth dysseuere,
And yiveth to euerych hys party …

Lewis discussed this poem, which he considered “unpleasant to read” in most respects, in The Allegory of Love, chapter VI.6, pp. 264f.

 

“on the whole” in the same way

Aristotle, De generatione animalium 778a, closing paragraphs of Book IV:

The moon is a first principle because of her connexion with the sun and her participation in his light, being as it were a second smaller sun, and therefore she contributes to all generation and development. … For it is reasonable that the periods of the less important should follow those of the more important. For in a sense a wind, too, has a life and birth and death.
    As for the revolutions of the sun and moon, they may perhaps depend on other principles. It is the aim, then, of Nature to measure the coming into being and the end of animals by the measure of these higher periods, but she does not bring this to pass accurately because matter cannot be easily brought under rule and because there are many principles which hinder generation and decay from being according to Nature, and often cause things to fall out contrary to Nature.

(translation by Arthur Platt, The Works of Aristotle, ed. Ross & Smith, vol. 5, 1912)

In Politics 1255b (Book I.2), Aristotle is talking of “our nobles” who take it for granted

… that just as from a man springs a man and from brutes a brute, so also from good parents comes a good son; but as a matter of fact nature frequently while intending to do this is unable to bring it about. It is clear therefore that there is some reason for this dispute, and that in some instances it is not the case that one set are slaves and the other freemen by nature ; and also that in some instances such a distinction does exist …

(translation by H. Rackham, Loeb 1932, pp. 25-27)

 

par. 6   characteristically, medieval man

 

a thing like Salisbury

i.e. Salisbury Cathedral, in the south of England.

 

par. 10   first, as regards

 

Aristoteles ... Metaphysics

Hooper’s reference to Metaphysics 1072b (XII.7) and to Dante’s Paradiso is wrong. The referenced passage in Dante is actually cited in the present essay’s penultimate paragraph (p. 62). The relevant passage in Aristotle is found in Metaphysics 1010a (IV.5):

… let us insist on this, that it is not the same thing to change in quantity and in quality. Grant that in quantity a thing is not constant; still it is in respect of its form that we know each thing. – And again, it would be fair to criticize those who hold this view for asserting about the whole material universe what they saw only in a minority even of sensible things. For only that region of the sensible world which immediately surrounds us is always in process of destruction and generation; but this is – so to speak – not even a fraction of the whole, so that it would have been juster to acquit this part of the world because of the other part, than to condemn the other because of this.

(translation by W. D. Ross, 1924)

 

par. 12   from that point

 

il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare

“Sinking in this sea is sweet to me.” Last line of the famous Italian poem “L’Infinito” (1819) by Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1937).

 

par. 14   you will be

 

that very special distance which we call “height”

Lewis was almost certainly thinking of Edwyn Bevan’s Gifford Lectures 1933-1934, Symbolism and Belief, published in 1938. Bevan, a scholar of ancient history and religion submits in the introductory chapter that

Not to get rid of anthropomorphism, which is impossible if man is going to have any idea of God at all, but to make the division between right and wrong anthropomorphism where it ought to be made – that is the main problem for all philosophy of religion.

Bevan then describes the subject of his lectures as

the relation of man’s symbolical conceptions to Reality … The first we shall take [i.e. the symbol discussed in the first two lectures] is the symbol of spatial height – the tendency of men everywhere to regard the chief Divine Power as living in the sky, to place Him as high up as is imaginable, which goes with the odd, but universal, association of distance from the earth’s surface with spiritual or moral worth, seen in such words as “superior,” “sublime.”

 

Wordsworth … “melancholy space and doleful time”

From William Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem the Prelude (1850), XI, 137.

 

Carlyle … “a sad sight”: …

…??

 

Primum Mobile

(Latin) “First Moving Thing”, the outermost transparent “sphere” (mentioned in par. 8), “which carries no light but merely imparts movement to those below it”.

 

par. 16   you see why

 

Milton ... Like one that had bin led astray ...

John Milton’s Il Penseroso dates from 1632. Lewis’s quotation of lines 69-70 might therefore seem an odd choice if the idea was to show that the “Newtonian” cosmos had captured the poetic imagination. Newton was born in 1642, and his Principia was published in 1687, more than a decade after Milton’s death. However, as appears from Lewis’s next Milton quote (par. 22, below), he clearly regarded Milton as a transitional figure in this respect. No doubt in his view the sense of “Newtonian” vastness and lack of symmetry of the universe predated Newton’s discoveries, as materialistic evolutionism predated Darwin.

 

par. 17   after the dimensions

 

one philosopher says

Vincent of Beauvais, French Dominican friar, †1264. His Speculum Naturale (“Mirror of Nature”) is a compendium of the science and natural history available in Western Europe around the mid-thirteenth century.

   In a notebook which Lewis filled with various notes and sketches in the course of several years, a loose leaf is found with references to passages in Ptolemy, Dante and Vincent of Beauvais (Bodleian Library, Dep. d. 809, fol. 71). From Speculum VII.7 Lewis copied the words

Quorsum iniectus lapis erit casurus si perforatus sit ei terre globus.
¶ Queris autem ulterius si perforatus sit terre globus ut ab uno celo in aliud pateat transitus, iniecta mole lapidis, quorsum futurus sit casus. … in medio vero loco quiescet.

 

in the Comedy, Dante and Virgil …

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), La Divina Commedia, “Inferno” XXXIV, 76-9.

And when we had come to where the huge thigh-bone
Rides in its socket at the haunch’s swell,
My guide, with labour and great exertion,

Turned head to where his feet had been, and fell
To hoisting himself up upon the hair,
So that I thought us mounting back to Hell

…

I raised my eyes, thinking to see the top
Of Lucifer, as I had left him last;
But only saw his great legs sticking up.

(translation by Dorothy L. Sayers, Penguin Classics, 1949)

Lewis used the same combined testimony from Vincent of Beauvais and Dante ten years later in his “Reply to Professor Haldane”.

 

when a modern man says that the stone fell “in obedience to the law of gravitation”

Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield in his first book, History in English Words (1926), chapter 8, pointed out that

There was formerly no half-way house in the imagination between actual dragging or pushing and forces emanating from a living being, such as love or hate, human or divine, or [the] ‘influences’ of the stars … A good illustrations of this (and one which takes us back again to the seventeenth century) is the word law. Later in the century law was used in the same sense, but it did not then mean quite what it does today. The “laws of Nature” were conceived of by those who first spoke of them as present commands of God. It is noticeable that we still speak of Nature “obeying” these laws, thought we really think of them now rather as abstract principles – logical deductions of our own which we have arrived at by observations and experiment.

See also Barfield’s See also See 1947 essay “Poetic Diction & Legal Fiction” (in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis, pp. 124 in the 1966 Eerdmans edition), where he suggests that the modern scientific meaning of the word “law” was perhaps created by Francis Bacon in a passage of Novum Organum (1620).

 

par. 19   the infinite, according

 

moves the Primum Mobile ... by love

Aristotle, Metaphysics 1072b.

That a final cause may exist among unchangeable entities is shown by the distinction of its meanings. For the final cause is (a) some being for whose good an action is done, and (b) something at which the action aims; and of these the latter exists among unchangeable entities though the former does not. The final cause, then, produces motion as being loved, but all other things move by being moved.

(translation by W. D. Ross, 1924/1928)

 

“the love that moves the sun and the other stars”

Last line of Dante’s Divina Commedia. “L’amor che muove il sole e l’ altre stelle.”

 

[Part II]

par. 20   in my last

 

Pascal ... “The silence of those eternal spaces …” … dew-drops

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French philosopher and mathematician. His best known work, the posthumously compiled Pensées (“Thoughts”) is a large collection of longer and shorter notes. Lewis is citing Nr. 206 in the Brunschvicg edition (1897), which corresponds to Nr. 201 in Lafuma’s edition (1962):

Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraye.

As Walter Hooper points out, “dew-drops” is a mistranslation (or else perhaps an “inspired misreading”) of French roseau, “reed”, which Lewis appears to have taken as rosée, “dew”.

 

par. 22   nor were those

 

Milton ... those happie climes

John Milton, Comus (1634), 976-978. See note to the Milton quote in par. 16, above.

 

par. 24   understand that the

 

hierarchy

While it may seem that Lewis is using “hierarchy” incorrectly, the present context actually provides the word with its original meaning, referring to each of the three triads of angelic choirs. That is, in the developed medieval conception of the angelic world  a “hierarchy” was any of the three groups into which the nine angelic choirs were arranged. These nine were, from top to bottom (Greek / Latin / English):

serapheim / seraphi[m] / Seraphim
cheroubin / cherubi[m] / Cherubim
thronoi / throni / Thrones

kuriotètes / dominationes / Dominions or Dominations
dunameis / virtutes / Virtues
exousiai / potestates / Powers

archai / principatus / Principalities
archaggeloi / archangeli / Archangels
aggeloi / angeli / Angels

Medieval authors differed in their presentations especially of the middle hierarchy. The above scheme is found in the work of Thomas Aquinas and Dante. In modern languages various names are used for the classes 3 (thronoi) through 7 (archai).

 

the Annunciation … Archangel, a member of the lowest class but one

Cf. Luke 1:26-38, where Gabriel is actually described as an “angel”, the lowest class. In the Bible, the title “archangel” only occurs in two places in the New Testament and is only given to Michael (Jude vs 9).

 

for Chaucer a cherub was a creature of fire

Cf. Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, 624:

A Somonour was ther with us in that place,
That hadde a fyr-red cherubynnes face
For saucefleem he was.

There was a Summoner with us in the place
Who had a fire-red cherubinny face,
for he had carbuncles.

(translation by Nevill Coghill, Penguin Classics, 1951, p. 42)

 

par. 25   but i must

 

Cyprus ... that accursed island

Cyprus is a large Mediterranean island south of Turkey with a majority Greek population and a Turkish minority. Lewis is perhaps alluding to the island’s serious political unrest and armed conflict in the mid-1950s, when Turkish leaders were advocating annexation by Turkey, the majority population pursued union with Greece, and the island was still under British authority.

 

par. 26   but of course

 

sapiens dominabitur astris

“A wise man shall rule the stars”: a saying ascribed to Ptolemy by Cognatus, and repeated in innumerable handbooks to astrology.

 

par. 28   i stress the parlallel

 

though I have made it elsewhere …

A reference to Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), chapter 1, pp. 13-14; but see also his 1948 paper for the Oxford Dante Society, “Imagery in the Last Eleven Cantos of Dante’s Comedy” (1948), in: Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966), 91.

 

Neither figure ... specially typical of the Middle Ages

The passage quoted by Walter Hooper from the end of The Abolition of Man provides an imperfect parallel, because Lewis there (inexplicably) fails to mention astrology.

 

par. 30   first: the air

 

Aristotle in the Metaphysics … “at random”

Metaphysics, 1075a

πρὸς μὲν γὰρ ἓν ἅπαντα συντέτακται, ἀλλ᾽ ὥσπερ ἐν οἰκίᾳ τοῖς ἐλευθέροις ἥκιστα ἔξεστιν ὅ τι ἔτυχε ποιεῖν, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἢ τὰ πλεῖστα τέτακται, τοῖς δὲ ἀνδραπόδοις καὶ τοῖς θηρίοις μικρὸν τὸ εἰς τὸ κοινόν, τὸ δὲ πολὺ ὅ τι ἔτυχεν:

For all are ordered together to one end, but it is as in a house, where the freemen are least at liberty to act at random, but all things or most things are already ordained for them, while the slaves and the animals do little for the common good, and for the most part live at random.

(translation by W. D. Ross, 1924/1928)

 

par. 31   Secondly, the mediation

 

Donne ... On man heavens ...

John Donne (1572-1631), English poet; “The Extasie”, 57-58.

 

par. 32   first, among the

 

Pseudo-Dionysius

Anonymous theological author (c. 500 C.E.) whose works include Περὶ τῆς οὐρανίου ἱεραρχίας (Latin De Coelesti Hierarchia, English The Celestial Hierarchy). He is known as Pseudo-Dionysius since his work was formerly attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, a man briefly mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (17:34).

 

par. 35   a thirteenth-century author

 

thirteenth-century author, Alanus … Magnanimity

Alanus ab Insulis or Alain de Lille (c. 1128-1202). Lewis briefly cites the same passage from De Planctu Naturae briefly in The Abolition of Man, shortly before the end of chapter 1.

The head rules the belly through the chest – the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.

 

par. 36   outside the wall

 

Mayfair

Affluent area in the West End of London since about 1800 and now one of the most expensive districts in the world.

  

the Intelligence of the Primum Mobile … a girl dancing and playing a tambourine

As appears from The Discarded Image, p. 119, Lewis is referring to Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods (1953), p. 139,  illustration nr. 53 – one of the so-called Mantegna Tarocchi, dating from the 15th century. For a high-resolution image see www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.51131.html.

     The tambourine is more like an blank circle or empty disk, and described by Seznec as a “globe” (p. 140, note 39), but otherwise the picture fits Lewis’s description perfectly. Indeed, Lewis himself in The Discarded Image writes,

You need not wonder that one old picture represents the Intelligence of the Primum Mobile as a girl dancing and playing with her sphere as with a ball.

One of the other prints in the series – not in reproduced in Seznec’s book – features the goddess Erato who holds a tambourine; if Lewis viewed the series somewhere else, the two may have got combined in his memory.

     Seznec’s book first appeared in French in 1940, but the English edition was less than two years old when Lewis quoted from it at the beginning of his Cambridge inaugural lecture in November 1954. Jean Seznec (1905-83) was a professor of French Literature and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, 1950-72. He was an authority on the survival of pagan religion into Medieval Christian religion and thought.

 

per. 40   aristotle had said

 

Aristotle … “Whatever is outside …”

Hooper’s reference to De Caelo (Περὶ οὐρανοῦ, On the Havens), 279a (II.13) seems to be inaccurate; a more likely place is De Caelo 238 (I.9).

It is therefore evident that there is also no place or void or time outside the heaven. For in every place body can be present; and void is said to be that in which the presence of body, though not actual, is possible; and time is the number of movement. But in the absence of natural body there is no movement, and outside the heaven, as we have shown, body neither exists nor can come to exist. It is clear then that there is neither place, nor void, nor time, outside the heaven. Hence whatever is there, is of such a nature as not to occupy any place, nor does time age it; nor is there any change in any of the things which lie beyond the outermost motion; they continue through their entire duration unalterable and unmodified, living the best and most self-sufficient of lives.

(translation by J. L. Stocks, 1930)

 

As one author says, all that heaven is Deo plenum

…??

 

Dante ... luce intellettual, piena d’amore

“Pure intellectual light, fulfilled with love”.

   Four Cantos from the end of the Divina Commedia, Dante reaches the Empyrean. His guide Beatrice explains:

  … We have won beyond the worlds, and move
Within that heaven which is pure light alone:

Pure intellectual light, fulfilled with love,
Love of the true Good, filled with all delight,
Transcending sweet delight, all sweets above.

                                 (translation by Barbara Reynolds, 1962)

 

par. 41   dante makes this

 

“look elsewhere for its leaves”

e negli altri le fronde, “and in the others [i.e. in the other heavens or spheres] the foliage”.

 

“Heaven and all nature hangs upon that point”

De quel punto / Depende il cielo, e tutta la natura.

 

It is what Aristotle says in so many words of the Unmoved Mover

See par. 19 above, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics 1072b.

 

 

back to survey

 

BEHIND THE SCENES

 

Time and Tide, 1 December 1956. This was one of Lewis’s last contributions to this periodical, for which he wrote a total of twenty-five pieces (poems, essays and reviews) in the period 1940-60.

 

par. 5   one wanted to

 

the Darlings’ nursery

A reference to J. M. Barrie’s famous play Peter Pan, or the Boy who wouldn’t grow up (1904), rewritten as a novel, Peter and Wendy (1911); Wendy is the eldest of the three Darling children and the only girl.

 

par. 6   it was best

 

Alice to the Kitten

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there (1871), chapter 1.

 

par. 15   we can call

 

Schopenhauer’s story of the two Japanese

The original German text is found in Parerga und Paralipomena (1851), Volume 2, Chapter XXXI, §384; also in Schopenhauer’s Sämtliche Werke, Volume 6 (second edition, 1947), p. 686.

Zwei Chinesen in Europa waren zum ersten Mal im Theater. Der eine beschäftigte sich damit, den Mechanismus der Maschinerien zu begreifen; welches ihm auch gelang. Der andere suchte, trotz seiner Unkunde der Sprache, den Sinn des Stückes zu enträthseln. – Jenem gleicht der Astronom, diesem der Philosoph.

 

 

back to survey

 

IS HISTORY BUNK?

 

The Cambridge Review: A journal of university life and thought, Volume 78, 1 June 1957.

 

Barbour’ Bruce

See Hooper’s footnote.

 

“liberal”

A term dating from antiquity, denoting subjects or studies which were considered to be only suitable or possible for “free” men, i.e. not for slaves, and not supposed to have any immediate practical application. Their purpose was rather the student’s own mental and spiritual development and the embellishment of life. See Lewis’s 1944 essay “Is English Doomed?”.

 

Aristotle

An alternative reference to the quotation from Metaphysics is Book I, Section 2.

 

Aristotele … Poetics 1451b

The passage may also be referenced as “beginning of Chapter IX”.

Indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history, whether written in metre or not. The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.

(translation by W. H. Fyfe at Perseus Digital Library.)

 

will pronounce History to be bunk”

The pronouncement “History is bunk” is commonly associated with Henry Ford (1863-1947), American pioneer of the car industry. The Chicago Tribune of 25 May 1916 featured an interview with Ford in which he is recorded to say, “History is more or less bunk”, and then: “We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam[n] is the history we make today.”

 

Mason … the study of what is valuable

Harold A. Mason (1911-1993), English literary critic; he was a regular contributor to the journal Scrutiny (1932-53), edited by F. R. Leavis. Lewis is quoting from Mason’s review of the Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (1956), in the Cambridge Review of 11 May 1957.

 

Newman

The English theologian and later Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was co-founder of Dublin Catholic University and its first rector, 1854-58. Lewis is probably alluding to The Idea of a University (1852); see, for example, the beginning of the third lecture.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE PSALMS

 

par. 2   how old the psalms

 

the Magnificat

Luke 1:46-55.

 

par. 3   in most moods

 

compared even with Xenophon

Xenophon (431–c. 355 BC), Greek general and historian; the allusion here is to his Cyropaedia, a didactic novel in which the Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, is portrayed as the ideal of a good ruler.

 

par. 6   a similar strangeness

 

when the hero, in Siegfried, forces the dwarf to confess that he is not his son

A scene in the first act of Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried, the third part of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

 

par. 9   i do not know

 

“smells to heaven”

Shakespeare, Hamlet III.3 (King Claudius):

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse uponʼt –
A brother’s murder!

 

the “insolence of office”

Shakespeare, Hamlet III.1, 74. From Hamlet’s famous speech “To be, or not to be”:

For who would bear the whips and scrons of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

 

par. 12   it is from this

that phrase in Revelation, “The wrath of the lamb”

cf. Revelation 6:16, where “the kings of the earth, and the great men” etc.

and hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.

 

par. 21   the day of judgement

as Julian of Norwich said, “All will be well and all manner of thing will be well.”

Julian of Norwich (c. 1342–c. 1413), English mystic and anchoress; the reference is to her Revelations of Divine Love, XXVII. The words quoted are not in the Bible, but in the vision described they are certainly what Lewis calls “Our Lord’s own words”.

 

par. 30   the experience is dark

“dark night of the soul”

The phrase comes from the Spanish, Noche oscura. This is the title of a poem, and of a treatise about that poem, by the 16th-century mystical writer Juan de la Cruz (John of the Cross, 1542-1591).

 

par. 33   1. a small, ugly

Malan

Daniel François Malan (1874-1959), Prime Minister of South Africa 1948-1954, founder of the politics of apartheid, or racial segregation.

Jean Seznec (1905-83) was a professor of French Literature and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, 1950-72. He was an authority on the survival of pagan religion into Medieval Christian religion and thought.

 

McCarthy

Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), US Senator who became notorious for the way he used a fear of Soviet spies in America to whip up an anti-communist hysteria in 1952-1954. Ruthlessly issuing false accusations and destroying innocent people’s reputations, he seemed to pursue and relish the demagoguery as an end in itself rather than as a means of uncovering Soviet agents. His own reputation was fatally damaged when a 36-hour public hearing was broadcast on TV: his extreme insolence was thus revealed to the nation.

 

Chaka

Shaka or Chaka (c. 1787-1828), Zulu chieftain in South-Africa.

 

par. 39   if one had

 

Coventry Patmore ... to live “in the high mountain air of public obloquy”

Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), British poet, The Unknown Eros (1877), Book I, XV, “Peace”; “...in the fine mountain-air of public obloquy.”

 

 

back to survey

 

ON OBSTINACY IN BELIEF

 

Paper read to the Oxford Socratic Club under the title “Faith and Evidence”, 30 April 1953; first published (under the present title) in the American literary magazine The Sewanee Review, Vol. 63, Fall 1955. First published in book form in The World’s Last Night, New York 1960; then in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, London 1965. This paper was the last which Lewis read for the Socratic Club. It might serve as a sequel to his 1944 Socratic paper “Is Theology Poetry?”: while the earlier piece deals with reasons for people to embrace the Christian faith, the present one deals with reasons to persist in it.

 

par. 1   papers have more

 

to proportion the strength of his belief exactly to the evidence

Lewis is almost literally quoting James Balfour’s Theism and Humanism (1915), p. 141, discussing Leslie Stephen’s work on this subject:

the empirical agnostic ... holds ... that the strength of our beliefs should be exactly proportioned to the evidence which “experience” can supply, and that everyone knows or can discover exactly what this evidence amounts to.

Stephen had been referring to a well-known aphorism of John Locke, also quoted by Balfour on the same page. Another classic formulation of the same idea is “Clifford’s Rule” (see note to par. 12, below).

 

“faith that has stood firm”

Although the phrase is given in quotation marks, it does not appear to be an literal quotation or at least not one from the New Testament.

 

par. 5   it may be asked

 

solipsism

Solipsism is the doctrine or conviction that the existence of things outside or independent from one’s own consciousness cannot be proved, so that we can never be certain that they really exist. De term is derived from the Latin phrase solus ipse, “only self”. See also next note.

 

as they now say ... category mistakes

The term “category mistake” got currency through the work of the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), a colleague of Lewis’s at Magdalen College during the years 1945-54. Ryle was greatly interested in clarifying concepts. One important way in which he proposed to do this was to identify “category mistakes” – statements that use words in meanings they simply cannot have (e.g. “This corner sounds blue”). In this way many philosophical questions would be unmasked as cases of sheer confusion. Ryle applied this method to questions on the relation between mind and body in his influential book The Concept of Mind (1949). It is in this context that he mentions “solipsism” as the unhappy outcome of “official”, traditional theories of self-knowledge (ch. II.10, VI.1). His own theory is then offered as the way to free the world, at last, of this old pseudo problem. See also the next place where Lewis mentions categroy mistakes in the present essay, two paragraphs further on.

 

par. 6   there is, of course

 

Dante ... fisici e metafisici argomenti

Paradiso XXIV, 134. Near the end of Dante’s Divina Commedia, this Canto and the next two deal with Faith, Hope and Charity respectively. Faith is the subject of a conversation with the apostle Peter, who asks the author what belief (or faith) is; whether Dante has it; whence it comes; what Dante believes; and once again, whence it comes. Dante’s  answer is

Io credo in uno Iddio
Solo ed eterno ...
Ed a tal creder non ho io pur prove
fisice e metafisice ...

i.e. “I believe in one God, sole and eternal ... And of such faith I do not only have physical and metaphysical proofs...” See also Paradiso XXVI, 25, where Dante answers the question how he knows that all Love is eventually aimed at the Good: Per filosofici argomenti, / E per autorità che quinci scende, “By philososphic arguments, and by authority that descends from them.”

 

par. 7   it is not the purpose

 

Capaneus in Statius ... primus in orbe deos fecit timor.

(Latin) “Fear first brought the gods into the world.” In ancient Greek mythology, Capaneus is one of seven legendary heroes from Argos who make war on the city of Thebes. The Greek tragedian Aeschylus wrote his Seven Against Thebes on the subject centuries before the Roman poet Statius wrote his epic Thebaid in the first century BC. Lewis refers the episode in Statius where Amphiaraus, a seer among the Seven, has consulted the gods and predicts that their campaign will end in disaster. Capaneus, enraged by what he regards as mere weak-heartedness, then declares that the whole idea of there being gods at all is a product of fear. His words (III.661) are loudly acclaimed; but in the end Amphiaraus is proved right.

 

Euhemerus

Euhemerus of Messene (c. 340–c. 260 BC) described an imaginary voyage to a far island where he discovered the origin of the (Greek) gods: they were found to have simply been praiseworthy kings or heroes of past ages who had been deified after their deaths. Only fragments have survived of Euhemerus’s work, the Sacred Chronicle; but his kind of explanation for religion has since been called the “euhemeric critique of the gods”, or “euhemerism”.

 

Tylor

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), British pioneer of Cultural Anthropology, author of Primitive Culture (1871). He regarded human civilizations as products of evolution in the Darwinian sense. Tylor coined the term ‘animism’ for what he considered to be the earliest stage of religion – when the phenomenon of dreaming leads people to think that all creatures and all things each have their own immaterial soul (anima).

 

Frazer

James George Frazer (1854-1941), Scottish cultural anthropologist from the evolutionary school of Tylor (see note above). His famous work The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1890-1914) is a wide-ranging comparative study of myths and rituals all over the world. The recurrent idea of a dying god coming to life again was explained by Frazer as a reflection of the agrarian life cycle.

 

par. 12   this can be done

 

Clifford’s Rule

Clifford’s Rule, a maxim of the English mathematician and philosopher William K. Clifford (1845-79) in his essay “The Ethics of Belief” (1877): “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

 

par. 13   now to accept

 

“to deceive if possible the very elect”

Matthew 24:24.

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

 

par. 15   now of course we see

 

“Dilly, dilly, come and be killed ”

From a nursery rhyme, “Mrs. Bond”:

“Oh, what have you got for dinner, Mrs. Bond?”
“There’s beef in the larder, and ducks in the pond.”
“Dilly, dilly, dilly, dilly, come to be killed,
For you must be stuffed, and my customers filled!”

 

Que chacun regagne sa place!

(French) “Everyone back to his seat!”

 

par. 17   the saying “blessed are

 

“Blessed are those that have not seen and have believed”

John 20:29.

 

par. 18   our opponents, then

 

Credere Deum esse ... Credere in Deum

(Latin) “To believe that God exists” – “To believe in God”. Cf. Augustine, Sermones ad populum CXLIV.2 (on John 16:8-11); In Evangelium Ioannis XXIX.6 (on John 7:17, referring to 6:29); and Enarrationes in Psalmos, on Psalm 78:8. Thomas Aquinas dealt with this distinction between ways of “credere” in Summa Theologiae IIa IIae, q. 2, art. 2.

 

 

back to survey

 

INTERIM REPORT

 

The Cambridge Review: A journal of university life and thought, Volume 77, 21 April 1956.

 

a small college in Oxford

University College, Oxford. Here Lewis studied Literae Humaniores (1919-22) and English (1922-1923).

 

with Aeson in the cauldron

In ancient Greek myths, the sorceress Medea administers a rejuvenating herb water to Aeson, her father in law. No cauldron comes in there; but in a different context Medea claims she is able to change an old ram into a young one by cutting it up and cooking it in her cauldron. As often in ancient myths, the themes and motifs come in different combinations as they are passed on in different traditions. Possibly Lewis knew some version in which Aeson actually had to go into Medea’s cauldron in order to recover his youth. See also, for example, Ovid’s Metamorphoses VII, 288.

 

last enchantments of the middle Ages

Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, First Series (1865), Preface – “the last enchantments of the Middle Age”.

 

The Republic and the Ethics

Politeia and Ēthika Nikomacheia, main works of the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle respectively. Lewis had himself graduated from University College, Oxford, with a first-class degree in Literae Humaniores. This study involved a thorough immersion in the Greek and Latin classics, and more particularly in these two works.

 

archdeacon

A high functionary in the Anglican Church, just below the bishop.
Lewis was presumably thinking of Archdeacon Grantly, a personage in Anthony Trollope’s novel Barchester Towers (1857). He had probably been mentioning Grantley in a sermon preached in Magdalene College Chapel, Cambridge on 29 January 1956 and later published in an enlarged version as “A Slip of the Tongue”.

 

Unitarian

Although the name “Unitarianism” dates from the 17th century, it denotes an early form of liberal Christianity that sprang up in the 16th century. Its originally defining feature was the rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity.

 

dissenter

During the 17th and 18th centuries, this was a name for English or British Protestants who were not members of the established Anglican Church.

 

Cromwellian

A follower of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), leader of the Puritan or republican party during the English Civil War of the mid-17th century.

 

Cartwright … Laud or Mary

See Hooper’s footnotes.

 

“stern to inflict and stubborn to endure”

From an introductory poem about the barbarians of ancient Scandinavia by the English poet Robert Southey (1774-1843), in Icelandic Poetry (1797), a translation of the Poetic Edda.

 

If ever all this zeal could be directed against those who now really endanger our liberties …

In mention this zeal, Lewis must have been thinking of the concerns expressed in February 1955 by novelist E. M. Forster about “the present rise of obscurantism among intellectuals”, in a “Cambridge Number” of the monthly magazine Twentieth Century. Forster was implicitly responding to Lewis’s Cambridge inaugural lecture of November 1954. In response to him and another contributor, Lewis had published his own essay “Lilies that Fester” in the April 1955 issue of Twentieth Century.

 

“aged and great” dons

…??

 

“humourists” (in the old sense)

Lewis probably means persons who are considered to represent some particular (possibly eccentric) type and who are perhaps cultivating this reputation.

 

quod quaeritis est hic

See Hooper’s footnote.

 

University Combination Room

In British universities such as those of Oxford and Cambridge, organized as a group of largely independent colleges, each college has its own “Common Rooms”, usually three: Junior, Middle and Senior. Students, graduates and tenured staff respectively are supposed to have their formal and informal meetings there. In Cambridge the term for these rooms is “Combination Room”, and in addition to them there is a Combination Room for the university as a whole.

 

Sir Compton Mackenzie

In Sinister Street (1913-14), a novel in two volumes by British novelist Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972).

 

Stevenson’s twelfth Fable

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), “The Citizen and the Traveller”, in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with other Fables (1896). The entire Fable consists of only a few lines. A stranger utters some critical remarks about a town in the presence of its proud inhabitants, and they kill him.

 

 

back to survey

 

A SLIP OF THE TONGUE

 

Sermon delivered in Magdalene College, Cambridge, on Sunday 29 January 1956. First published in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, London 1965.

 

par. 1   when a layman

 

comparing notes 

A term used by Lewis more than once in his later years to characterize his own work as a lay theologian; see Reflections on the Psalms ch. 1, par. 2; Letters to Malcolm ch. 12, par. 4; and a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne of 24 November 1960 (Collected Letters III, 1212).

 

par. 2   not long ago

 

the collect for the fourth Sunday after Trinity

A prayer in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1662):

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal.

 

par. 5   the root principle

 

Trollope’s Last Chronicle

Last of the six “Barchester” novels by Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). Lewis is referring to chapter 33, where the actual course of events is a little different. Dr Grantly wants to disinherit his son Henry and orders his wife to write a letter telling this to Henry. Mrs Grantley suggests it would be better first to let his anger cool down and to postpone further steps till the next day. Dr Grantley agrees, and

he went out, about his parish, intending to continue to think of his son’s iniquity, so that he might keep his anger hot, – red hot. Then he remembered that the evening would come, and that he would say his prayers; and he shook his head in regret, – in a regret of which he was only half conscious, though it was very keen, and which he did not attempt to analyse – as he reflected that his rage would hardly be able to survive that ordeal. How common with us it is to repine that the devil is not stronger over us than he is.

The next morning, Mrs Grantly deftly skirts her duty to write the letter.

 

par. 6   this is my endlessly

 

St. John of the Cross called God a sea

Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591), Spanish mystical writer, canonized in 1726. ......

 

par. 9   for of course that

 

“He must increase and I decrease”

John 3:30. John the Baptist is answering questions about his relationship to Christ.

 

par. 11   this is, i take it

 

Thomas More said, “If ye make indentures with God...”

A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulacon, III.14

And therefore if you devise as it were indentures between God and you, what thing you will do for him and what thing you will not do, as though he should hold him content with such service of yours as yourself list to appoint him – if you make, I say such indentures, you shall seal both the parts yourslef, and you get thereto none agreement of him.

(ed. Frank Manley, Yale U.P. 1977, p. 236)

St. Thomas More, English humanist scholar and statesman (1478-1535), author of Utopia. He was executed on a charge of high treason because of his opposition to King Henry VIII’s church policy, and he wrote the Dialogue in prison awaiting his execution. In 1935 he was canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic church.

 

Law ... Behmenite period

William Law (1686-1761), English theologian. As a non-juror he could not hold functions in the Church of England; as author of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) he became an important inspiration for Evangelical Christianity, notably influencing the Wesley brothers. Neither of the two quotations seems to be literal. The first goes back to a passage in chapter 3 of the Serious Call,

...we are plainly taught, that Religion is a state of labour and striving, and that many will fail of their salvation; not because they took no pains or care about it, but because they did not take pains and care enough; they only sought, but did not strive to enter in.

The second, “Behmenite” one appears to derive from An Appeal to All That Doubt and Disbelieve the Truth of Revelation (1740), chapter I.31 (par. 1-124 in the online version at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/law/doubt.i.ii.html):

During the time of this world, God may be considered as the good husbandman; he sows the seed, the end of the world is the harvest, the angels are the reapers; if you are wheat, you are to be gathered into the barn, if you are tares, it signifies nothing, whence, or how, or by what means you are become so; tares are to be rejected, because they are tares, and wheat is to be gathered by the angels, because it is wheat: this is the mercy, and goodness, and discretionary justice of God that you are to expect at the last day. If you are not wheat, that is, if the heavenly life, or the kingdom of God, is not grown up in you it signifies nothing what you have chosen in the stead of it, or why you have chosen it, you are not that, which alone can help you to a place in the divine granary.

Around 1735 Law developed an interest in the writings of the German mystic Jakob Böhme (1575-1624, also called Boehme or Behmen). Law’s own writings also became more mystical in character, with further titles such as The Spirit of Prayer, The Way to Divine Knowledge, and The Spirit of Love. All this served to alienate the Wesleys from him.

 

par. 12   it is a remarkable

 

to count the cost

Long before this sermon, Lewis had highlighted the notion of “counting the cost” by making it the subject and the title of one of his last chapters in Beyond Personality (1944); this little book was reprinted as Book IV of Mere Christianity (1952). Lewis also used the expression as the title for Nr. 354 in his Macdonald Anthology (1946), a fragment from Macdonald’s What’s Mine’s Mine:

I am sometimes almost terrified at the scope of the demands made upon me, at the perfection of the self-abandonment required of me; het outside of such absoluteness can be no salvation. in God we live every commonplace as well as most exalted moment of our being. To trust in Him when no need is pressing, when things seem going right of themselves, may be harder than when things seem going wrong.

 

par. 13   and yet, i am not

 

un-Pelagian

The British monk Pelagius (c. 360-420) held that humans have a perfectly free will and have no proclivity to evil. He considered humans capable by their own efforts to gain eternal happiness, and wholly accountable for their deeds; no grace in the sense of forgiveness was needed at all. His great theological adversary was Augustine, and the teachings of Pelagius were condemned by the church. Toned-down versions of Pelagianism have always continued to have wide currency. Some variants acquired the name of “Semi-Pelagianism” – the theory that while humans can and should do part of what is needed for them to gain eternal happiness, they still do need God’s grace.

 

especially each morning, for it grows all over me like a new shell each night

cf. George Macdonald, Diary of an Old Soul (1880), October 10, as quoted in Lewis’s Macdonald Anthology (1946), Nr. 338:

With every morn my life afresh must break
The crust of self, gathered about me fresh.

 

the Imitation: Da hodie perfecte incipere – grant me to make...

Thomas à Kempis, De Imitatio Christi I.19.1.

... da mihi nunc hodie perfecte incipere, quia nihil est, quod hactenus feci.

 

 

back to survey

 

SOMETIMES FAIRY STORIES MAY SAY BEST WHAT’S TO BE SAID

 

First published in The New York Times Book Review, 18 November 1956; first reprinted in Of Other Worlds, 1966.

 

par. 1   in the sixteenth

 

“to please and instruct”

After the Roman poet Horace (65-8 B.C.), Ars poetica, 343-4.

Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci,
lectorem delectando pariterque monendo.

He wins every hand who mingles profit with pleasure,
by delighting and instructing the reader at the same time.

 

Tasso

Italian poet (1544-1595), author of Gerusalemme liberata; Lewis is probably referring to Tasso’s Discorsi del poema eroico, Book I, shortly after the quotation from Horace’s Ars Poetica, line 333, Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae:

… l’utile non si ricerca per se stesso, ma per altro: per questa cagione è men nobil fine del piacere, ed ha minor somiglianza con quello che è l’ultimo fine. Se ’l poeta dunque in quanto poeta ha questo fine, non errerà lontano da quel segno al quale egli dee dirizzare tutti i suoi pensieri, come arciero le saette; ma in quanto è uomo civile e parte de la città, o almeno in quanto la sua arte è sottordinata a quella ch’è regina de l’altre, si propone il giovamento, il quale è onesto più tosto che utile.

… the useful is pursued not for its own sake but for something else; therefore it is a less noble end than pleasure and is less similar to that which is the ultimate end. If the poet, then, as poet, has the latter end in view, he will not greatly miss the mark at which he ought to direct all thoughts, as the archer his arrows; … but insofar as he is a member of civil society – or at least subordinates his own art to that art which is queen of the others – his proper aim is improvement, a matter of honor rather than utility.

 

 

back to survey

 

WHAT CHRISTMAS MEANS TO ME

 

The Twentieth Century, Vol. 162 [no. 970??], December 1957.

 

par. 2  i mean of course

 

Pickwick ... Scrooge

Characters in the novel The Pickwick Papers (1837) and short novel A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens.

 

 

back to survey

 

DELINQUENTS IN THE SNOW

 

Time and Tide, 7 December 1957.

 

par. 3   it would be

 

Mr Pilgrim

A reference to Edward Pilgrim (1904-1954); see Wikipedia article.

 

par. 5   of course i must

 

Trasymachus

a Sophist who appears at the beginning of Plato’s Republic (338c)

 

par. 10   and the question

 

Dr Johnson ... Boswell

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), English poet, essayist and lexicographer immortalized by his conversations as recorded by his biographer James Boswell (1740-1795). Boswell’s Journal of their tour to the Hebrides was published in 1785. Johnson further explained that

[i]f the son of the murdered man should kill the murderer who got off merely by prescription, I would help him to make his escape; though, were I upon his jury, I would not acquit him. I would not advise him to commit such an act. On the contrary, I would bid him submit to the determination of society, because a man is bound to submit to the inconveniences of it, as he enjoys the good: but the young man, though politically wrong, would not be morally wrong.

 

par. 14   this may be

 

who say “Peace, peace” ... the blessings promised to the peacemakers

cf. Jeremiah 6:14 and Matthew 5:9.

 

pacificus

the Latin word (singular) for “peacemaker” used in the Vulgate version of Matthew 5:9; the Greek word (plural) is eirènopoioi.

 

the primrose path

Shakespeare, Hamlet I.3, 50 (Ophelia):

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven
Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine,
Himself the primsrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede.

 

 

back to survey

 

A PANEGYRIC FOR DOROTHY L. SAYERS

 

Memorial talk read – not by Lewis – during the memorial service for Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) at St Margaret’s Church, London, 15 January 1958. Sayers had died suddenly on 17 December of the previous year.

 

par. 2   there is in

 

“We authors, Ma’am”

Words ascribed to the British statesman and writer Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) as spoken to Queen Victoria. Her Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands had been published in 1868, and Disraeli was reassuring her about her talent for writing.

 

dandyisme

Although the word dandy has no specifically French origin or background, Lewis may have chosen the French term in recognition of a famous French essay on the subject of dandies and dandyism, Du dandysme et de George Brummell (1845) by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly.

 

Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, or Molière

– Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400), English writer and poet, author of The Canterbury Tales.

– Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), Spanish writer, author of Don Quixote.

– William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English poet and playwright.

– Molière (1622-1673), French playwright.

 

“One shows one’s greatness”, says Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French philosopher, mathematician and physicist. Lewis is quoting No. 353 of the posthumous Pensées in Brunschvicg’s edition of 1897 (section VI, “Les philosophes”)

On ne montre pas sa grandeur pour être à une extrémité, mais bien en touchant les deux à la fois, et remplissant tout l’entre-deux.

We do not display greatness by going to one extreme, but in touching both at once, and filling all the intervening space.

(translation by W. F. Trotter, 1931)

 

The Mind of the Maker

The book was published in 1941 both in Great Britain and the USA, and reviewed by Lewis in the journal Theology, vol. 41, 248-249. The review was reprinted in Lewis’s Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews (2013), edited by Walter Hooper, pp. 167-169.

 

par. 3   for a christian

 

The Zeal of Thy House

A play by Dorothy L. Sayers, written for the 1937 Canterbury Festival. The title is based on Psalm 69:9.

 

par. 4   as the detective

 

The Man Born to Be King

A twelve-part series of radio plays about the life of Jesus, written for the BBC, broadcast beginning in December 1941 and published in 1943.

 

par. 5   the architectonic qualities

 

not “addressed to their condition”

The phrase, in its original form “spoken to my condition,” seems to have entered the English language through the Journal of George Fox (1624-1691), founder of the Quaker movement:

... I left the separate preachers also, and those esteemed the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. ... I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition”; and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give Him all the glory ... I cried to the Lord, saying, “Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils?” and the Lord answered, “That it was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions!”

– George Fox: An Autobiography, ed. Rufus Jones (1908), Chapter 1, ‘Boyhood – A Seeker, 1624-1648’; further examples occur in chapters 4, 6 and 8.

 

par. 6   her later years

 

The last letter I ever wrote to her

A letter of 29 September 1957, found in Collected Letters III. The second and third volumes of Lewis’ Collected Letters contain a total of 62 letters to Sayers.

 

Song of Roland

Chanson de Roland, epic poem in Old French, dating from around the year 1100.

 

the paper on Dante she contributed

“‘…And Telling You a Story’: A Note on The Divine Comedy”, in the volume Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis (1947). [Hooper’s note]

 

par. 7   we must distinguish

 

Cary

The translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia by Henry Francis Cary was published in 1910 as The Vision: or Hell, Purgatory and Paradise of Dante Alighieri.

 

 

back to survey

 

A TRIBUTE TO E. R. EDDISON

 

Written some years before it was first published as blurb text for Eddison’s posthumously published novel The Menzentian Gate (1958); first reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, 1982.

 

E. R. Eddison

Eric Rücker Eddison (1882-1945) spent his professional life as a civil servant in the field of (international) trade. He retired 1939, aged 57, to spend more time on writing. He lived in Wiltshire, a county southeast of and adjacent to Oxfordshire.

    The correspondence between Lewis and Eddison is held by the Bodleian Library in Oxfod and Lewis’s eleven letters are found in Collected Letters II, along with some excerpts from Eddison’s letters. From Lewis’s opening move on 16 November 1942 in response to his reading The Worm Orouboros, these letters are mostly written in 16th-century English. Lewis in his first letter invited Eddision to meet him in Oxford. Eddison did so, and attended a meeting of the Inklings, on 17 February 1943. For more information on Eddison, and Lewis’s appreciation of him, see

– CL2, 560 and 562: two letters to Gerald Hayes, a professional cartographer who drew a map of Eddison’s fantasy world,

– CL2, 1025-1028: Biographical Appendix on Eddison,

– CL3, 117: letter of 17 May 1951 to George Rostrevor Hamilton.

 

 

back to survey

 

RELIGION AND ROCKETRY

 

First published as “Will We Lose God in Outer Space?”, in the English magazine Christian Herald, Vol. 81, April 1958; then as a pamphlet Shall We Lose God in Outer Space? by S.P.C.K., London 1959; under Lewis’s own title “Religion and Rocketry” first published in book form in The World’s Last Night, New York 1960; then in Fern-seed and Elephants, London 1975. – This piece may seem to have much in common with “The Seeing Eye” (1963), but there is in fact enough difference to justify the publication of both pieces. The present essay mainly deals with the salvation of humanity in a cosmic perspective, while the later piece discusses the question of God’s existence (answering a remark made by the Russian premier Nikita Krushchev about Yuri Gagarin); the salvation theme is there only mentioned briefly at the end.

 

par. 2   but then came

 

Fred Hoyle

English astronomer (1915-2001), director of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge; he also wrote science fiction. In the early 1950s, his theory of stellar nucleosynthesis lended support to what was to become known as the Anthropic Principle. This was the idea that any explanation for the universe should also explain how the universe has given rise to life and intelligence. Hoyle was a respected provider of controversial views in his field of study. When John Maddox retired as editor of Nature, he confessed that he had never thought it necessary to have Hoyle’s submissions peer-reviewed before publication.

 

par. 5   the supposed threat

 

“for us men and for our salvation...”

From the Nicene Creed (325 CE), as translated in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

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...

 

par. 7   2. supposing there was

 

“rational souls” ... spiritual animals”

In pre-modern times the term “rational soul” denoted the element by which humans are distinguished from animals. Lewis, assuming that the term still has some currency, is warning the reader that the modern meaning of “rational” is much narrower than the old meaning; see for a fuller explanation his book The Discarded Image (1964), VII B. The term “spiritual animals” might have had some temporary currency in the late 1950s; more generally Lewis is certainly referring to modern attempts to put a finger on the difference between humans and animals.

 

par. 10   3. if there are species

 

They that are whole need not the physician

Matthew 9:12.

 

par. 11   4. if all of them

 

Alice Meynell

English Roman Catholic poet and essayist (1847-1922). Her poem ‘Christ in the Universe’ first appeared in The Fortnightly Review October 1911 and then in her Collected Poems of 1913. Lewis is quoting the penultimate stanza.

           With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.

           But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How He administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.

           Of His earth-visiting feet
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,
Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.

           No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

           Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way,
Or His bestowals there be manifest.

           But, in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

           O be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

This must be the poem also referred to by Lewis in Miracles (1947), chapter 14:

I do not think it at all likely that there have been (as Alice Meynell suggested in an interesting poem) many Incarnations to redeem many different kinds of creature. One’s sense of style – of the divine idiom – rejects it.

 

par. 28   we know what

 

what our race does to strangers … the black man and the red man can tell

While Lewis may not be consciously alluding to Samuel Johnson’s comments on the slavery and slave trade of his day, there is a striking similarity here to Johnson’s life-long position, as summarized by George Birkbeck Hill:

The key to his feelings [towards his fellow-subjects in America] is found in his indig­nant cry, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” [23 September 1777]. He hated slavery as perhaps no man of his time hated it. … How deeply he felt for the wrongs done to helpless races is shown in his dread of discoverers. No man had a more eager curiosity, or more longed that the bounds of knowledge should be enlarged. Yet he wrote: – “I do not much wish well to discoveries, for I am always afraid they will end in conquest and robbery.” (Croker’s Boswell, p. 248.)
––Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, volume 2, 1887, Appendix B.

 

par. 28   what we believe

 

evidence that would deceive (if it were possible) the very elect

Cf. Matthew 24:24.

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

 

 

back to survey

 

REVIVAL OR DECAY?

 

First published in Punch, 9 July 1958. – The satirical magazine Punch was founded in 1841. Lewis contributed many poems in the period 1946-1954. The present essay was his only prose piece for Punch.

 

par. 2   it is not

 

The Maenads

“Raving women”, the word is related to mania, “frenzy”,  “fury”. In ancient Greece, the maenads were participants in festivities (orgia) in honour of the god Dionysos. In Latin they were called bacchantes after Bacchus, the Roman parallel to Bacchus.

 

Mutatis mutandis

(Latin) “with those things changed which need to be changed”.

 

par. 4   “and would you

 

Maritain, Bergson

Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), French philosopher who converted to Christianity and became a Roman Catholic in 1906; he was one of the main figures in the “Neo-Thomism” of is day, i.e. a revival of philosophical interest in the great medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was a French philosopher who influenced Maritain; toward the end of his life he was close to becoming a Christian and had his funeral led by a Roman Catholic priest, but in the circumstances of Nazi-occupied Europe would not repudiate his Jewish origins by a formal conversion.

 

par. 5   but i didn’t

 

the converted Intellectual is a characteristic figure of our times

A book-length study of this development is Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (1999), discussing writers from Oscar Wilde and Hilaire Belloc to Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge.

 

par. 7   we all winced

 

a corrugated iron hut used as an R.A.F. chapel

A first-hand account of Lewis talking to airforce men during the war is found in C. S. Lewis: Speaker and Teacher (1971), edited by Carolyn Keefe, chapter 3, “To the Royal Air Force”, by Stuart Barton Babbage (1916-2012).

 

Thou hast made us for Thyself and our heart has no rest ...”

Augustine, Confessions I.1.

 

par. 9   and only the

 

a lady told me that a girl to whom she had mentioned death

As appears from a 1963 interview, the lady was Lewis’s wife, Joy Davidman (“Cross-Examination”, in God in the Dock, 1970, p. 266 / Undeceptions, 1971, p. 221).

 

par. 10   these bits and

 

I had said something on the air about Natural Law

Lewis did so in the first few of his BBC radio talks in August 1941, published as Broadcast Talks (1942), Part I, “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe”, revised as Mere Christianity, Book I .

 

anima candida

Horace, Satire I.5, 41; said of the poet Virgil and some other men.

Postera lux oritur multo gratissima: namque
Plotius et Varius Sinuessae Vergiliusque
occurrunt, animae qualis neque candidiores
terra tulit neque quis me sit devinctior alter.

(“The next day arises, by much the most agreeable to all: for / Plotius, and Varius, and Virgil met us at Sinuessa; / souls more candid ones than / which the world never produced, nor is there a person in the world more bound to them than myself.” – Prose translation by Alois Buckley.)

 

a Home Guard patrol

Originally called the Local Defence Volunteers, the Home Guard was created as a branch of the British army in May 1940 as an extra defence against German invasion. Lewis recounted this incident on several occasions.

 

 

back to survey

 

WILLLING SLAVES OF THE WELFARE STATE

 

First published in the British Sunday weekly newspaper The Observer, 20 July 1958. This was Lewis’s contribution to a five-part series entitled “Is Progress Possible?” published by The Observer in July–August 1958. Lewis was the second of five authors, preceded by C. P. Snow. The series was concluded by Arnold Toynbee, who cited Lewis in his final sentence. Click here for a transcript of the full sequence, including three letters to the editor published after Lewis’s contribution.

    This piece was Lewis’s debut in The Observer. He wrote only two further pieces for this newspaper:

– a review of David Loth, The Erotic in Literature: “Eros on the Loose” (4 March 1962)

– a short comment on Robinson’s Honest to God: “Must Our Image of God Go?” (24 March 1963).

    The present essay was first reprinted as “Is Progress Possible? – Willing Slaves of the Welfare State” in the large American volume God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (1970). That volume’s British counterpart, Undeceptions (1971) reproduced it as “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”, i.e. withouth the series title.  

 

par. 1   progress means movement

 

Haldane, Possible Worlds

J. B. S. Haldane (1895-1964), eminent British geneticist and popular writer on science; his volume of essays Possible Worlds appeared in 1927. Lewis is referring to the last piece, called “The Last Judgment” (not included in the 1928 American edition of the book); most of this piece takes the form of an account of the end of the planet Earth written forty million years hence.

 

par. 2   i therefore go even

 

C. P. Snow ... H-bomb

Snow (1905-1980), physicist and novelist, was a scientific adviser to the British Government during the Second World War and Civil Service Commissioner from 1945 to 1960. Dangers and challenges of technological progress in the nuclear age were a theme of many of his novels.

 

par. 4   having removed what

 

Sir Charles

i.e. C. P. Snow; he had been knighted in the previous year, 1957.

 

Black and Tans

British volunteer army put into action against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1920.

 

Gestapo

German secret police (Geheime Staatspolizei, “secret state police”) in the National Socialist period, 1934-45.

 

Ogpu

Soviet Russian intelligence service and secret police in the years 1922-1934. Ogpu or ОГПУ is the abbreviation for a name that means Joint State Political Directorate.

 

GP

General Practitioner, family doctor.

 

Goneril

evil-minded eldest daughter of King Lear in Shakespeare’s play; cf. King Lear I.3, 17-19:

                      Idle old man
That still would manage those authorities
That he hath  given away!

 

par. 10   this would be

 

Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), German philosopher.

 

Marx

Karl Marx (1818-1883), German philosopher.

 

the linguistic analysts

Linguistic analysis, as a development of Logical Positivism,  the dominant school of philosophy in mid-20th-century Britain.

 

par. 14   i believe a man

 

the freeborn mind

Quoted from “Britannia” (1729) by Scottish poet James Thomson  (1700-1748).

Oh, let not then waste luxury impair
That manly soul of toil which strings your nerves,
And your own proper happiness creates!
Oh, let not the soft, penetrating plague
Creep on the freeborn mind! and working there,
With the sharp tooth of many a new-form’d want,
Endless, and idle all, eat out the heart
Of liberty.

– The Poetical Works of James Thomson, vol. 2 (William Pickering, London 1830), p. 71. (“Britannia” must not be confused with the same poet’s much better known “Rule, Britannia!”)

 

Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), French writer. In 1571 he began writing tentative reflections on his reading and the development of his own ideas, which resulted in his Essais (1588).

 

par. 16   thirdly, i do not

 

Bourbon

French royal dynasty that reigned from 1589 till the French Revolution. The long reign (1643-1715) of Louis XIV was the high point of the theory and practice of Absolutism, i.e. the political system in which state power is centralized to the maximum degree.

 

Bossuet’s Politique

The French bishop Bossuet (1627-1704), writer and orator, court preacher of Louis XIV; his posthumously publsihed work Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture Sainte (“Politics, drawn from Holy Scripture’s own words”) was written in the course of his work as teacher of the crown prince.

 

par. 17   on just the same

 

Stalin’s biology

i.e. the genetic theories of the Russian biologist and agronomist Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976), who adapted his scientific ideas to the requirements of socialist ideology. After the death of Stalin in 1953 scientific criticism of Lysenko’s work became gradually possible within the Soviet Union and he was finally disgraced in 1965.

 

par. 21   let us make

 

the Swedish sadness

Lewis is referring to a passage in C. P. Snow’s preceding opening contribution to the series:

We know what it is like to live among the shops, the cars, the radios, of Leicester and Orebro, and Des Moines. We know what it is like to ask the point of it all, and to feel the Swedish sad­­­ness or the American disappointment or the English Welfare State discontent. But the Chi­nese and Indians would like the chance of being well-fed enough to ask what is the point of it all. They are in search of what Leicester, Orebro and Des Moines take for granted, food, extra years of life, modest comforts. When they have got these things, they are wiling to put up with a dash of the Swedish sadness or American disappointment. And their determination to get these things is likely in the next thirty years to prove the strongest social force on earth.

Evidently the idea of Sweden as a prosperous but unhappy welfare state with a high suicide rate was already current by 1958. An influential American essay on the subject was “Sweden: Paradise with Problems” by Peter Wyden, published in the Saturday Evening Post, 19 December 1959 (the same issue that featured Lewis’s “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”). Wyden’s essay was implicitly cited by President Eisenhower during a table speech on 27 July 1960.

 

par. 22   all this threatens

 

power should not corrupt

The maxim alluded to is “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” See note to Lewis’s 1955 essay “Lilies that Fester”.

 

back to survey

 

 

ON JUVENILE TASTES

 

Frist published in Church Times, Children’s Books Supplement, 28 November 1958; first reprinted in Of Other Worlds, 1966.

 

par. 1   not long ago

 

“juveniles”

Lewis’s slightly disapproving quotation marks may be partly due to his sense that here was an American concept intruding into British English.

 

par. 2   this theory does

 

The Daisy Chain

An 1856 novel by Charlotte M. Yonge (1823-1901).

 

Trollope

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), English novelist.

 

par. 3   some like fantasies

 

Boiardo, Ariosto, Spenser

– Matteo Boiardo (1441-1494), Italian poet, author of Orlando furioso.

– Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), Italian poet, author of Orlando innamorato.

– Edmund Spenser (1552-99), English poet, author of The Faerie Queene.

 

Mervyn Peake

English writer, poet, an artist (1911-1968), author of three fantasy novels and a novella collectively known as the Ghormengast series.

 

Aesop

Ancient Greek storyteller (c. 620-564 B.C.) who is considered to be the author of many fables.

 

the Arabian Nights

One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during in the period from the eighth till the thirteenth century. The stories were first published in English in the early eighteenth century as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.

 

Gulliver

Gulliver’s Travels (1726), novel by the Irish-English writer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

 

Robinson Crusoe

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York Mariner (1719), novel by the English writer Daniel Defoe (1660?-1731).

 

Treasure Island

Adventure story for boys by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), first serialized in Young Folks and published as a book in 1883.

 

Peter Rabbit

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), children’s book by the English writer Beatrix Potter (1866-1943).

 

The Wind in the Willows

Animal story for children by Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932), published in 1908.

 

par. 5   it may be

 

The select … that minority of ordinary books which happens to suit them, as a foreigner in England … suiting his alien palate

The phrase “happen to suit” is exactly the one Lewis used four and a half years earlier in his paper “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” for his own experience as a writer:

Within the species “children’s story” the sub-species which happened to suit me is the fantasy or (in a loose sense of the word) the fairy tale.

 

par. 7   even the fairy

 

proprement dit

(French) “real”, “properly said”, i.e. originally carrying this label and/or actually deserving it.

 

the court of Louis XIV

Probably a reference to Charles Perrault (1628-1703), the French writer who published his “Mother Goose Tales” (Contes de ma mère l’Oye or Contes du temps passé) in 1697. He held several posts at the court of Louis XIV and was a protégé of Colbert.

 

As Professor Tolkien has pointed out

In his essay “On Fairy Stories”, in Essays presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis (Oxford U.P. 1947), 38-89; reprinted with a lightly adapted introductory section in The Monsters and the Critics and other essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 109-161. Lewis is referring to the passage on pp. 58-59 (or 130 of the 1983 edition):

Actually, the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery”, as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of the children which decides this. Children as a class – except in a common lack of experience they are not one – neither like fairy-stories more, nor understand them better than adults do; and no more than they like many other things. They are young and growing, and normally have keen appetites, so the fairy-stories as a rule go down well enough. But in fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste for them; and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant. It is a taste, too, that would not appear, I think, very early in childhood without artificial stimulus; it is certainly one that does not decrease but increases with age, if it is innate.

 

par. 8   it does not

 

a parallel between individual and species

In his earlier book Miracles (1947), chapter XV, and in the two preparatory essays “Miracles” and “The Grand Miracle”, Lewis does seems willing to accept the related idea of “recapitulation” in biology.

 

par. 11   the literary world

 

Miss Norton’s The Borrowers

Mary Norton (1903-1992), English writer of children’s books; The Borrowers (1952) was the first of a series of fantasy novels and won her the Carnegie Medal in the year of publication. See Lewis’s Collected Letters III, 700: reference in and note to a letter of 31 January 1956 to Ruth Pitter.

 

Mr White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose

A novel about the adventures of a ten-year-old girl, by Terence Hanbury White (1906-1964); see Lewis’s letter of 29 April 1947 to White in Collected Letters III, 1569.

 

 

back to survey

 

MODERN THEOLOGY AND BIBLICAL CRITICISM

(= FERN-SEED AND ELEPHANTS)

 

First published in Christian Reflections, 1967; then with changed title, and serving as title essay, in Fern-seed and Elephants, 1975. Later reprints of Christian Reflections adopted the essay’s changed title. Both titles were given by Walter Hooper, the editor of both volumes. – Lewis’s paper was approvingly cited, summarized and discussed by E. L. Mascall in Theology and the Gospel of Christ: An Essay in Reorientation (SPCK, London 1977), chapter 2, “History and the Gospels”, section 2, “Jugdment from Outside”, pp. 70-76.

 

par. 1   this paper arose

 

the Principal [of Westcott House, Cambridge]

Westcott House, Cambridge, was founded in 1881 as the Cambridge Clergy Training School by its first president, Brooke Foss Westcott, Regius Professor of Divinity. His aim to provide training in line with the spirit of Scripture, “opposed to all dogmatism and full of all application”. The institute got its founder’s name in 1905. It continues in its original function to the present day, preparing students for the diaconate and the priesthood in the Church of England. Kenneth Moir Carey (1908-1979) was Principal of Westcott House 1948-1961 and Bishop of Edinburgh 1961-1975.

 

woe to you if you do not evangelize

After I Corinthians 9:16, “Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!”

 

par. 2   there are two sorts

 

Loisy, Schweitzer, Bultmann, Tillich, Vidler

– Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), French Catholic “modernist” theologian. Professor of Hebrew and of Sacred Scripture  at the Institut catholique, Paris, he was excommunicated in 1908 and then became Professor of the History of Religions at the Collège de France.

– Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), German theologian, doctor and musician, author of Geschichte der Leben Jesu-Forschung (1906). ......

– Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), German theologian. ......

– Paul Tillich (1886-1965), German-American theologian. ......

– Alec Vidler (1899-1991), English theologian. ......

 

It will make him a Roman Catholic or an atheist

As Mascall commments on this passage, “If Lewis had been writing after the Second Vatican Council he might have been surprised at the extent to which many Roman Catholic Scholars, when released from the former tight grip of the Holy Office, have vied with their Anglican and Protestan brethren in stripping the supernatual elements from the Gospels” (Theology and the Gospel of Christ, p. 72).

 

par. 5   in what is already

 

a very old commentary ... [Hooper’s note:] Lock, in turn, is quoting from Drummond

Lock’s attribution of these comparisons to Drummond was in fact erroneous, as appears from an article by T. F. Glasson in Theology LXXI (1968), 267ff; see Mascall’s Theology and the Gospel of Christ, chapter 2, note 25.

 

Auerbach

Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), German philologist and critic of literature. The book mentioned in Hooper’s footnote was first published in German as Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländische Literatur (1946) but did not become widely known until the English translation appeared in 1953.

 

par. 6   here, from bultmann’s

 

Bultmann, “Observe in what unassimilated fashion...”

Rudolf Bultmann, Theologie des Neuen Testaments (1953),  § 4, “Die Frage nach dem messianischen Selbstbewußtsein Jesu”, p. 30.

Man beachte, wie unausgeglichen mit der Leidens- und Auferstehungsweissagung Mk 8, 31 auf sie die Parusieweissagung 8, 38 folgt.

Lewis is, of course, quoting the English translation published in 1952, as mentioned in Hooper’s footnote.

 

par. 7   finally, from the same

 

Bultmann, “The personality of Jesus has no importance for...”

Ibidem, § 5, ‘Das Problem des Verhältnisses der Verkündigung der Urgemeinde zur Verkündigung Jesu’, p. 36.

So hat ... für das Kerygma des Paulus wie des Johannes, wie überhaupt für das NT die Persönlichkeit Jesu keine Bedeutung; ja, die Tradition der Urgemeinde hat auch nicht etwa unbewußt ein Bild seiner Persönlichkeit bewahrt; jeder Versuch, es zu rekonstruieren, bleibt ein Spiel subjektiver Phantasie.

 

par. 8   so there is no

 

Bultmann contra mundum

cf. the phrase Athanasius contra mundum. ......?

 

Falstaff

A character in Shakespeare’s plays The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV (1 & 2), and Henry V (II.3, where his last hours are related by Mrs. Quickly).

 

Uncle Toby

A character in Tristram Shandy, a novel by Laurence Sterne (1713-1768).

 

Boswell’s Johnson

i.e. the great English writer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) as portrayed by James Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson, l.l.d. (1791). Lewis was prasing Boswell’s biographical art as early as 1925 in a lost paper read to the Oxford literary society “The Martlets”; as recorded in the society’s minutes, Lewis argued that

The merit of the ‘Life’ is that more than any other work, whether of fiction or of history, it produces the illusion of life.

(Walter Hooper, “To the Martlets”, in C. S. Lewis: Speaker & Teacher, ed. Carolyn Keefe, Hodder and Stoughton, London etc. 1971, p. 72)

 

Fanny Burney

Frances (or Fanny) Burney (1752-1840), English novelist and diarist. [connection with Johnson ......]

 

“We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten ...”

John 1:14, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

 

“which we have looked upon and our hands have handled.”

I John 1:1, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life...”

 

D.N.B.

Dictionary of National Biography.

 

par. 10   now for my second

 

The tradition of Jowett

Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) was Regius Professor of Greek at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was Master from 1870 onwards.

 

par. 12   all this sort

the herb moly

Homer, Odyssey X, 305; Odyssey relates how Hermes offered him a “herb of virtue” that will make him immune to Circe’s enchantments.

 

par. 14   until you come

 

currente calamo ...

(Latin) “as the pen runs”, i.e. “off the cuff”.

 

invita Minerva

(Latin) “Minerva not forthcoming”, i.e. “uninspired”. The phrase is likely borrowed from Horace, Ars poetica 335: Tu nihil invitâ dices faciesve Minerva, “You will neither say nor do anything in opposition to Minerva”. Minerva was the Roman goddess of the arts, among other things.

 

the one I really cared about ... was on William Morris

As a beginning student in Oxford in 1919 Lewis devoted his first talk to “The Martlets”, an undergraduate society, to William Morris. One of his last papers for this society, in 1937, also dealt with Morris and was published two years later in Rehabilitations; this was not really “very early” in Lewis’s career, as he says. The piece was later reprinted in Selected Literary Essays (1969).

 

par. 19   now this surely

 

reconstruct the history of Piers Plowman or The Faerie Queene...

Piers Plowman is a allegorical poem in Middle English by William Langland, or Langley, written in the second half of the 14th century. It has survived into modern times in three manuscripts, the shortest of which has 2567 lines and the longest 7375 lines. In 1908 the American scholar J. M. Manley asserted that this work had five authors. A controversy followed which resulted in a volume of contributions called The Piers Plowman Controversy (1910). In the end there was fairly general agreement again that Langland was the (only) author. Lewis’s pupil Frank Goodrige, who studied English in Oxford under him in the the years 1946-49 (and was the Socratic Club’s secretary 1947-48) produced a modern translation of Piers Plowman which was published in Penguin Classics in 1959.

   The Faerie Queene is a long and unfinished allegorical poem by Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). Of its twelve projected “Books”, the first three were published in 1590 and the next three in 1596. Part of the rest may have been destroyed when Irish rebels set fire to the author’s castle in Cork.

   Lewis had been something of a specialist in long allegorical poems during the early years of his scholarly career, as testified by his book The Allegory of Love (1936).

 

par. 24   you must face

 

multa renascentur quae jam cecidere

(Latin) “Many things which formerly fell will come to birth again.” Horace (Roman poet 65-8 BC), Ars poetica, 70. Lewis used this saying as the motto for his early scholarly work The Allegory of Love (1936).

 

par. 25   nor can a man

 

McTaggart, Green, Bosanquet, Bradley

J. E. McTaggart (1866-1925), T. H. Green (1836-1882), Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923), F. H. Bradley (1846-1924), English philosophers.

 

par. 27   you must not

 

Lachmann

Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann (1793-1851), Germanist, philologist and pioneer of scholarly editing. The method called after him involves the arrangement of manuscripts into families and genealogical trees so as to achieve the best available idea of the original text. As a New Testament scholar (he worked in several fields) he developed the theory of “two sources” as well as the idea that Mark’s gospel is not the youngest but the oldest of the three Synoptic gospels.

 

par. 29   such scepticism might

 

Tyrrell ... “earlier and inadequate expressions of the religious idea...”

George Tyrrell, “The Apocalyptic Vision of Christ”, in Christianity at the Cross-Roads (1909), p. 125.

 

par. 33   but the dog

 

“We know not – oh we know not”

From the hymn “Jerusalem the Golden”, Hymns Ancient and Modern Nr. 228: “I know not, oh, I know not / What joys await us there...” which is based on the12th-century Latin hymn Urbs Sion aurea by Bernard of Cluny.

 

par. 34   of course if

 

When I know as I am known

cf. I Corinthians 13:12, “But then shall I know even as also I am known.”

 

par. 35   such are the

 

the future history of the Church of England is likely to be short

cf. E. L. Mascall’s opening paragraph in his Foreword (“Trahison des Clercs”) to Theology and the Gospel of Christ (1977), p. 1:

[This book is] the outcome of a conviction, reached with reluctance and distress and after long and anxious thought, that the theological activity of the Anglican Churches is in a condition of extreme, though strangely complacent, confusion and that this is having a disastrously demoralizing effect upon the life and thought of the Church as a whole and of the pastoral clergy in particular.

 

 

back to survey

 

ON CRITICISM

 

First published in Of Other Worlds, 1966. Walter Hooper has stated the date of writing as “fairly late in the author’s life”. There is an evident connection with Lewis’s better-known 1959 piece “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” (first published in Christian Reflections, 1967, and later reprinted as “Fern-Seed and Elephants”).

 

par. 1   i want to talk

 

Pope … Make use of every friend …

An Essay on Criticism (1711), II, 14.

Pride where wit fails steps in to our defense,
And fills up all the mighty void of sense.
If once right reason drives that cloud away,
Truth breaks upon us with resistless day.
Trust not yourself, but your defects to know,
Make use of every friend – and every foe.

 

par. 5   if i exclude

 

suppressio veri and suggestio falsi

(Latin) “suppression of truth” and “false suggestion”

 

par. 8   now of course

 

Sidney Smith

Sydney Smith (1771-1845) was an English clergyman, humanitarian and writer. The quotation, probably inauthentic, is attributed to Smith in Hesketh Pearson’s 1934 biography, Smith of Smiths: Being The Life, Wit and Humour of Sydney Smith, chapter 3, p. 54.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices you so.

 

The Faerie Queene … Spenser

The Faerie Queene, by the English poet Edmund Spenser (1552-99), is one of the longest poems in English. Six Books were published in the author’s lifetime; another planned six Books were (partly) lost or perhaps never written, except for a single Canto.

 

Donne or Sterne or Hopkins

– John Donne (1572-1631), English poet.

– Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), English novelist.

– Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), English poet.

 

par. 9   it would be

 

Macaulay … the Blatant Beast

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), English historian, poet, essayist and statesman, in a review of Robert Southey’s edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, in The Edinburgh Review, December 1831.

One unpardonable fault, the fault of tediousness, pervades the whole of the Fairy Queen. … Of the persons who read the first canto, not one in ten reaches the end of the first book, and not one in a hundred perseveres to the end of the poem. Very few and weary are those who are in at the death of the Blatant Beast.

– Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays contributed to the Edinburgh Review (London: Longmans etc., 1883), p. 86.

 

Dryden … Chapman

John Dryden (1731-1700) in his “Account of the Poem”, prefatory to his Annus Mirabilils: The Year of Wonders, 1666 (1667); in the Works of John Dryden, ed. Hooker & Swedenberg, vol. I (1956), p. 51.

… And besides this, they [the French] write in Alexandrins, or Verses of six feet, such as amongst us is the old Translation of Homer, by Chapman; all which, by lengthning of their Chain, makes the sphere of their activity the larger.

 

“Thus far into the bowels of the land”

Shakespeare, King Richard the Third, V.2, 3.

Thus far into the bowels of the land
Have we march’d on with out impediment.

 

par. 12   1. nearly all

 

Piers Plowman

A 14th-century Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland (c. 1330-c. 1400).

 

Mutato nomine de me

After Horace, Satires, I.1, 69.

Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur.

What are you laughing at? Just change the name and the joke is on you.

 

par. 15   3. i now come to

 

currente calamo

(Latin) “as the pen runs”, i.e. “off the cuff”.

 

par. 16   the trouble is

 

Formal Cause … Efficient Cause

Two of the four “causes” or aitiai (“explanatory or responsible factors”) proposed by Aristotle in Physics II.3 and Metaphysics V.2.

– The formal cause of a thing is that part of the thing’s explanation which is provided by its “form” in the ancient Greek sense of “idea” – its design, definition, or identity.

– The efficient cause of a thing is that part of its explanation provided by its “agent”, i.e. those other things which interact so as to bring it about.

 

par. 18   here is an

 

one essay was written without conviction … [Hooper’s footnote] on William Morris

Lewis explicitly mentioned the piece on Morris in his essay “Fern-seed and Elephants”. The “critic” cited was perhaps Bernard Blackstone in Theology, July 1939. See Lewis’s letter to Alec Vidler, 23 March 1939 (Collected Letters II, 255).

 

par. 22   i would gladly

 

Invita Minerva

“Minerva not forthcoming”, i.e. “uninspired”. Minerva was the Roman goddess of the arts, among other things. The phrase is likely borrowed from Horace, Ars poetica 335.

Tu nihil invitâ dices faciesve Minerva.

You will neither say nor do anything in opposition to Minerva.

 

par. 24   i have said

 

Romance of the Rose

Le Roman de la Rose, a long allegorical poem in Old French, composed in two stages by two successive authors around the years 1230 and 1270. Lewis wrote at length about it in chapter 3 of The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936).

 

Hard Times … Macbeth … Waverley … Aeneid

– Hard Times (1854), novel by Charles Dickens.

– Macbeth (c. 1606), tragedy by William Shakespeare.

– Waverley (1814), novel by Sir Walter Scott.

– Aeneid, epic poem by the Roman poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.).

 

Twelfth Night, Wuthering Heights … The Brothers Karamazov

– Twelfth Night (c. 1602), comedy by William Shakespeare.

– Wuthering Heights (1847), novel by Emily Brontë.

– The Brothers Karamazov (1880), novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

 

Ovid … Parlement of Foules

– Ovid, or Publius Ovidius Naso, Roman poet (43 B.C.–18 C.E.).

– The Parlement of Foules, or Parliament of Fowls, poem by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400).

 

par. 26   where he seems

 

Stoic interpretations of primitive mythology … the Christian interpretations of the old Testament

Stoicism was a school of philosophy dating from the third century B.C. and flourishing in the Roman empire until the advent of Christianity. In chapter II.3 of The Allegory of Love, Lewis discussed “the fading of the gods and the apotheosis of abstractions”; the two tendencies “spring from the whole mental life” of the later Roman empire, encouraging “the allegorization of the pantheon” (56-58). Further,

the habit of applying allegorical interpretation to ancient texts naturally encouraged fresh allegorical constructions, and this method was freely practised by both pagans and Christians. … The Stoics, apart from their general doctrine of the gods as manifestations of the One, were always ready to explain particular myths by allegory. Saturn eating his children could be harmlessly interpreted as Time “bearing his sons away” … [T]he doctrine of the hidden senses of the Bible passes from Origen and the Alexandrians to the West and is handed down by such writers as Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose. (61-62)

 

the medieval interpretations of the classics

Examples are mentioned on the previous page: “readings of Aeneid as an allegory and Ovid as a moralist”.

 

 

back to survey

 

REJOINDER TO DR PITTENGER

 

The Christian Century, vol. 75, 26 November 1958.

 

par. 1   to one of

 

using the word “literally”

At the beginning of his “Critique of C. S. Lewis”, Pittenger mentions Mere Christianity (1952), where Lewis had deleted the challenged word “literally” from the original text as found in the 1942 Broadcast Talks. Pittenger also explains that, hoping to find the cause of his own dislike for Lewis’s books, he had studied them “with some care”. Lewis did not avail himself of this opportunity to question Pittenger’s care.

 

par. 2   i must alo admit

 

Apollinarianism

The position of Appollinarius of Laodicaea in the Christological debate of his time, 4th century CE. In his view, Christ was truly God, but did not have a truly or completely human mind.

 

a passage in my Problem of Pain

Pittenger did not mention any particular passage in Lewis’s works as a basis for the present accusation, but Lewis’s reference to the French footnote is a likely indicator.

 

in the French edition

Le problème de la souffrance (1950), p. 163; this is a note to a passage in chapter 9 after the word “Docetist” in the first paragraph following Question 2 (“the origin of animal suffering ...”, p. 122 in the British first edition). The French text reads,

Actuellement, je considère la conception de l’Incarnation impliquée dans ce paragraphe, comme grossière et due à l’ignorance.
[“Actually I consider the idea of Incarnation implicit in this paragraph to be rather crude and due to ignorance.”]

It seems Lewis was cured of what he calls his “ignorance” by a letter from Oliver Chase Quick, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford; see his reply of 18 January 1941 (CL2, 462).

 

 

par. 4   i turn next to

 

I use the word “Miracles”...

Miracles (1947), opening sentence of chapter 2 both in the first edition and in the revised edition of 1960.

 

par. 5   again, dr pittenger

 

Athanasius ... De Incarnatione

The 4th-century church father Athanasius of Alexandria, in his treatise De incarnatione verbi Dei (“On the Incarnation of the Word of God”). Lewis states an edition of the Greek text with chapter numbers that do not appear to correspond with those usually found in translations. He is certainly referring to sections 14-16 of Athanasius’s treatise, which are also referred to in his book Miracles (1947), chapter 15, and in his 1942 essay “Miracles”.

 

par. 7   i now turn to

 

 (which ought to be rewritten)

Lewis  rewrote the chapter in August 1959. A revised edition if the book was published in 1960, with chapter 3 rewritten and considerably expanded from the seventh paragraph onward. The chapter also got a new title. Very little was changed in the rest of the book. For a detailed survey of the all changes see www.lewisiana.nl/anscombe.

 

par. 8   i confess, however

 

Boswell’s Johnson

The biography of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) by James Boswell, published in 1791.

 

aut deus aut malus homo

In a letter to Owen Barfield of August 1939 (Collected Letters II, 269) Lewis referred to this Latin maxim as an “old” one. The phrase might be of Lewis’s own making, but the idea expressed has a long track record. Lewis gave his own fullest exposition of it in Mere Christianity II.3.

 

the Synoptics

i.e. the Synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke, the first three gospels in the New Testament. Synopsis is Greek for “survey”.

 

an impertinence (both in the old and in the modern sense)

The old sense of “impertinent” is “irrelevant, foolish”, i.e. the opposite of the modern sense of “pertinent”.

 

par. 10  i am accused of

 

Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism and Belief

Edwyn Robert Bevan 1870-1943, English scholar of ancient history and religion. Symbolism and Belief is the first of two books based on the Gifford Lectures for 1933-1934.

 

par. 12   where he really hurt

 

the charge of callousness to animals

Pittenger speaks of “the callous attitude toward the animal creation in The Problem of Pain, which outraged Evelyn Underhill”. Underhill (1875-1941), an English poetess, theologian and mystic writer, wrote to Lewis to submit her critique on the present point in a letter of 13 January 1941. Lewis replied after three days; see Collected Letters II, pp. 458-460 (with a long excerpt from Underhill’s letter).

 

par. 13   the statement that

 

tous exo

(Greek) “outsiders”.

 

from Islam ... “The Heaven and the Earth ...”

cf. the Quran’s sura 21:16, 38:27 and 44:38; also 3:191. (Verse numbers may slightly vary between editions and translations.)

 

par. 14   and this illustrates

 

in vacuo

(Latin) “in a void”.

 

ad populum ... ad clerum

(Latin) “to the people” ... “to the clergy”.

 

compared God to an unjust judge

Luke 18:1-8.

 

or Christ to a thief in the night

Matthew 24:43-44, Luke 12: 39-40, 1 Thessalonians 5:2, 2 Peter 3:10, Revelation 3:3 and 16:15.

 

par. 15   but let all

 

sub figuris vilium corporum

Lewis is quoting from Question 1 in the Summa’s First Part.

sicut docet dionysius, cap. II cael. Hier., magis est conveniens quod divina in Scripturis tradantur sub figuris vilium corporum, quam corporum nobilium.

[“As Dionysius teaches in chapter II of the Celestial Hierarchy, it is more convenient for divine things in Scripture to be conveyed under the figure of vile bodies than of noble bodies.”]

Aquinas was referring to The Celestial Hierarchy (originally Περὶ τῆς οὐρανίου ἱεραρχίας), a fifth-century tractate by a Greek author now commonly referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius. The reason advanced there for preferring “vile bodies” over “noble bodies” is that there is a danger of confusion if heavenly things are illustrated by noble earthly things.
    Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield referred to the same passage in his book Saving the Appearances (chapter XI, p. 75), which had been published in 1957.

Nothing is easier for us than to grasp a purely literal meaning (...). Before the scientific revolution (...) it was the concept of the “merely literal” that was difficult. And therefore the writer who is referred to as Dionysius the Areopagite, and Thomas Aquinas and others after him, emphasized the importance of using the humblest and most banal images, as symbols for purely spiritual truths or beings. For only in this way could a representation be safely polarized into symbol and symbolized, into literal and metaphorical.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER

 

First published in the American journal The Atlantic Monthly, January 1959. First published in book form in The World’s Last Night, New York 1960; then in Fern-seed and Elephants, London 1975. – Lewis wrote this a few years after an essay on “Petitionary Prayer” and some years before Letters to Malcolm, chiefly on Prayer, his last book. Although he did not generally avoid repeating himself from one piece to another, in the present case there are remarkably few repeats, certainly when it comes to drawing conclusions.

 

par. 7   there are, no doubt

 

In Getsemane ... that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.

The “cup” is mentioned in each of the three Synoptic Gospels. The words “It did not [pass]” may well be an echo from the poem “Gethsemane” (1918) by Rudyard Kipling, an English poet often quoted by Lewis. In it, a British soldier tells (posthumously?) about the trench war in northern France:

The officer sat on the chair,
The men lay on the grass,
And all the time we halted there
I prayed my cup might pass.
It didn’t pass – it didn’t pass –
It didn’t pass from me.
I drank it when we met the gas
Beyond Gethsemane!

 

par. 8   other things are proved

 

“You must not try experiments on God, your Master”

Matthew 4:7. “Jesus said unto him [the devil], It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

 

par. 10   the trouble is

 

“Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

Shakespeare, Hamlet III.3, last line. King Claudius, having murdered his own brother, at last realizes that “my offence is rank, it smells to heaven” and decides to

Try what repentance can. What can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
O wretched state! ...
                     Help, angels, make assay:
Bow, stubborn knees; and heart, with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe.
All may be well.

A little later he rises from his knees:

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

 

par. 17  petitionary prayer is

 

“God,” said Pascal, “instituted prayer ... the dignity of causality”

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French mathematician and philosopher, Pensées 513 (Brunschvicq edition):

Pourquoi Dieu a établi la prière. 1º Pour communiquer à ses créatures la dignité de la causalité. 2º Pour nous apprendre de qui nous tenons la vertu. 3º Pour nous faire mériter les autres vertus par le travail. Mais, pour se conserver la prééminence, il donne la prière à qui lui plaît.

English translation by W. F. Trotter (1904):

Why God has established prayer.
1. To communicate to His creatures the dignity of causality.
2. To teach us from whom our virtue comes.
3. To make us deserve other virtues by work.
(But to keep His own pre-eminence, He grants prayer to whom He pleases.)

 

par. 18   for he seems to do

 

“to wield our little tridents”

John Milton, Comus (1637), 27, describing how the sea-god Neptune has delegated authority over the islands to “his tributary gods”

And gives them leave to wear their sapphire crowns
and wield their little tridents.

(This quotation and the previous one, from Pascal, also appear in Letters to Malcolm, chapters 15 and 10 respectively.)

 

 

back to survey

 

GOOD WORKS AND GOOD WORK

 

First published in the American magazine The Catholic Art Quarterly, XXIII, Christmas 1959. First published in book form in The World’s Last Night, New York 1960; then in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, London 1965. The magazine’s name was changed to Good Work in 1959; Lewis’s piece appears to have been written to mark this change.

 

par. 1   “good works” in the plural

 

The apostle says every one must ... work to produce what is “good.”

Ephesians 4:28.

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.

Lewis also referred to this almost two decades earlier when writing about “Christianity and Culture” (1940).

 

par. 2   the idea of good work

 

Artists also talk of Good Work

At the end of the essay Lewis gets back to the art and artists, which was certainly what he was expected to do as a contributor to the magazine at hand .

 

par. 6   originally things are

 

(like Dogberry) “everything handsome about them”

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, end of IV.2. Dogberry is a constable.

I am a wise fellow; and, which is more, an officer; and, which is more, a householder ... and one that knows the law, go to; and a rich fellow enough, go to; and a fellow that hath had losses; and one that hath two gowns, and everything handsome about him.

 

par. 14   that such a state

 

the “space-race”

Space travel became possible in the course of the 1950s as German rocket technology from the Second World War was further developed in Russia (USSR) and America (USA), now in the service of physical geography and other allegedly peaceful ends. The Russian Sputnik I of October 1957, as the first operational spaceship, was initially felt to be a political rather than a scientific milestone: “the Russians” clearly had a technological lead over “the Free West”. In that same year the Russians sent an animal up into space (a dog, single trip) and in 1961 the first human being followed (return trip). The USA took up the challenge and triumphed in 1969 when Americans were the first human beings to walk on the Moon. The objectives of space-exploration have always remained a matter of balancing scientific usefulness and the allurements of power display.

 

par. 15   it is something even

 

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem...”

Psalm 137:5.

 

 

back to survey

 

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

 

First published in the American magazine The Saturday Evening Post, CCXXXII, 19 December 1959, pp. 36ff. First published in book form in The World’s Last Night (New York 1960), then in The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast (London 1961, New York 1962); then in a volume of essays prepared by Lewis shortly before his death, Screwtape Proposes a Toast and other pieces (1965). Lewis wrote a long preface, dated “May 18, 1960”, for the expanded Screwtape edition of 1961. In the 1965 volume of essays, only the last three paragraphs (24–26) of this 1960 preface were included as a preface to the Toast. Notes on the full 1960 Preface are provided along with those on The Screwtape Letters.

 

preface, par. 1   i was often asked

 

Swift’s big and little men

i.e. the inhabitants of the imaginary countries Brobdingnag and Lilliput respectively, in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a novel by Jonathan Swift.

 

the medical and ethical philosophy of Erewhon

Erewhon (“Nowhere” spelled reversely) is a satirical novel by Samuel Butler published anonymously in 1872. It tells of a country where crimes are dealt with by surgical or hospital treatment.

 

Anstey’s Garuda Stone

In Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers, a school story by F. Anstey published in 1882, a father is magically transformed into his son and vice versa. The Garuda Stone is the magical device by which father and son swap roles.

 

preface, par. 2   i had, moreover,

 

“answerable style”

Milton, Paradise Lost IX, 20. Milton is musing on the sadness of the task ahead in Book IX, which is to describe the actual Fall of Man:

                 foul distrust, and breach
Disloyal on the part of man, revolt
And disobedience

but then reflects that the subject is really “not less but more heroic” than the things traditionally considered to be heroic – on one condition:

If answerable style I can obtain
Of my celestial patroness.

Thus while Lewis doubts his own ability to deal with spiritual heights, Milton hesitates before taking a plunge down.

 

Traherne

Thomas Traherne (1637–1674), Anglican divine; author of Centuries of Meditations, first published in 1908. The book is a collection of five hundred short reflections on religion, each of the five chapters containing one hundred of them and hence called “Centuries”. Traherne’s prose is generally regarded as exquisitely poetical and better than his poetry. Lewis too, when he was re-reading the book in 1941, thought it “almost the most beautiful book (in prose, I mean, excluding poets) in English” (CL II, 505, to Arthur Greeves).

 

the canon of “functionalism”

??

 

preface, par. 3   then, as years

 

Saturday Post

The Saturday Evening Post, one of the most widely read American weekly magazines in the mid-twentieth century. “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” was first published here on 19 December 1959. Subsequently the “Toast” was published as an appendix to new editions of The Screwtape Letters (London, Geoffrey Bles 1961; Macmillan, New York 1962). Deze combinatie verscheen in 1961 en heeft in de Brits-Engelse wereld weinig opgang gemaakt. De ‘Toast’ (met een sterk ingekort voorwoord) verscheen vanaf 1965 samen met zeven andere stukken in de bundel Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces (uitg. Collins/Fontana). In 2000 werd het opgenomen in de omvangrijke Essay Collection (ed. Lesley Walmsley, uitg. HarperCollins), die in 2002 in twee paperback-delen verscheen.

 

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

 

par. 5   oh to get one’s

 

Farinata

Farinata degli Uberti, a Ghibelline faction leader in 13th-century Italy, chiefly remembered as a Hell-dweller in Dante’s Divina Commedia, Inferno VI and X. (N.B. typo: The name is misprinted as Farinara in the British edition of 1965.)

 

Henry VIIII

King of England in the years 1509-1547, Henry VIII repudiated the authority of the pope by declaring his first marriage invalid, marrying another lady, and setting himself up as supreme head of the Church in England. His second wife was executed after three years and four more marriages followed.

 

par. 6   instead of this

 

Messalina

Valeria Messalina (c. 25-48 CE), third wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, notorious for her cruelty and lewdness. When she actually married one of her lovers in her husband’s absence, she was put to death and a damnatio memoriae was pronounced over her.

 

Casanova

Giovanni Jacopo Casanova (1725-1798), Italian adventurer. His Mémoires (or Histoire de ma vie, not published integrally until 1963), give a vivid account of his sexual adventures and contemporary society.

 

par. 13   the sort of souls

 

Cerberus and the hell-hounds

In Greek and Roman mythology, Cerberus is in fact the hell-hound – a three-headed dog keeping watch at the entrance of the underworld.

 

par 29   but that is

 

one of the Greek dictators

...??

 

par. 34   of course this would

 

Middle Class ... privately educated

Screwtape is talking of a characteristically British institution dating from the mid-19th century – prestigious single-sex boarding schools funded by tuition fees. Paradoxically, they became known as “Public Schools”.

 

As an English politician remarked ... “A democracy does not want great men.”

…??

 

par. 38   one democracy was

 

Russia had got ahead of it in science

In 1957 the Soviet Union scored a technological triumph in being the first to launch a space-ship, the Sputnik I.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION

 

par. 2   i begin with three

 

Ah! Bitter chill it was, etc.

John Keats, “The Eve of St Agnes” (1820), first lines.

 

par. 3   the superiority of

 

Bacon ... “operation”

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher. Lewis refers to operation in the sense of “effect” or “influence” or “effective intervention”, which was its usual sense in Bacon’s work. One example is his New Atlantis, par. 69:

These divers heats we use, as the nature of the operation, which we intend, requireth.

 

par. 5   we must not

 

Eliot with his “hollow valley” and “multi-foliate rose”

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-English poet and critic; “The Hollow Men” (1925), IV.

 

par. 6   [in order to] discharge

 

Shakespeare’s Troilus

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida III.2.

I am giddy; expectation whirls me round.
Th’ imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense ...

 

par. 7   but the really

 

Burns ... a woman is like a red, red rose

Robert Burns (1759-1796), Scottish poet; “A Red, Red, Rose” (1794).

 

Wordsworth ... like a violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet; “She dwelt among the untrodden ways”.

 

Wyatt

Thomas Wyatt (c. 1503-1542), English poet.

 

par. 8   finally we have

 

Prometheus Unbound ... “My soul is an enchanted boat”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), English poet; Prometheus Unbound (1819), II.5, 72.

 

par. 9   this is the most

 

Wordsworth ... near the end of Prelude XIII

The Prelude (1850) is a long autobiographical poem. Lewis refers to the place where Wordsworth describes some visions of ancient British times experienced during a walk on Salisbury Plain. Wordsworth explains the occurrence of these visions from “the Genius of the Poet” –  “Heaven’s gift, a sense that fits him to perceive objects unseen before” (XIII, 304-305), the organ that enables him to perceive in very common objects “an image, and a character, by books not hitherto reflected” (359-360).

 

“the visionary dreariness”

The Prelude XII, 253ff, about a rough scenery:

                                  It was, in truth,
an ordinary sight; but I should need
Colours and words that are unknown to man,
o paint the visionary dreariness
Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,
Invested moorland waste, and naked pool ...

 

Marvell’s “green thought in a green shade”

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), English poet; “The Garden“, 48.

 

Pope’s “die of a rose in aromatic pain”

Alexander Pope (1688-1744), An Essay on Man I, 200.

 

par. 10   it must be remembered

 

Plato’s jibe that the poets are liars

......?

 

par. 11   my long, and perhaps

 

as Mr. Young on weirs

Rev. Andrew John Young (1885-1971), Scottish poet and clergyman. See also Lewis’s letter of 18 May 1951, thanking him for his poems and quoting from “The Slow Race”, iv, 2 (Collected Letters III, 118):

Every weir I see in this town of rivers now “combs the river’s silver hair”.

A brief biography of Andrew Young is found in CL3, 1735.

 

Beowulf about the dragon sniffing along the path

Beowulf, 2287 ff., transl. Francis B. Gummere (1910):

O’er the stone he snuffed. The stark-heart found
foot-print of foe...

 

Robert Conquest

Dr. George Robert Acworth Conquest (1917–   ), British historian and poet.

 

par. 12   but i must not

 

Credo ut intelligam

“I believe in order to understand.” Anselmus of Canterbury (1033-1109); Proslogion, end of chapter 1.

 

par. 14    and this is one

 

Hamlet’s speech to Horatio

Shakespeare, Hamlet III.2:

Horatio, thou art e’en as just a man
As e’er my conversation cop’d withal.

 

par. 23   if i have made

 

Professor Ryle

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), British analytical philosopher; from 1945 to 1967 he was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford, where C. S. Lewis worked from 1925 to 1954.

 

par. 24   something like this

 

Wells’s Country of the Blind

H. G. Wells (1866-1946), English writer and pioneer of science fiction; The Country of the Blind (1904).

 

category mistakes

A important term in the vocabulary of Gilbert Ryle, the philosopher mentioned in the previous paragraph.

 

Job’s words “But now mine eye hath seen thee...”

Job 42:5-6.

 

Ontological Argument

......

 

 

back to survey

 

IT ALL BEGAN WITH A PICTURE…

 

First published in Radio Times, 15 July 1960; first reprinted in Of Other Worlds, 1966.

 

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Lewis’s first fantasy story for children about the land of Narnia, published in 1950 and followed by a further volume in each of the six subsequent years.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE MYTHOPOEIC GIFT OF RIDER HAGGARD

 

Review of Morton N. Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Work (1960). First published under the title “Haggard Rides Again” in Time and Tide, 3 September 1960; first reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, 1982.

 

par. 1   i hope mr morton

 

Haggard

Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) after a short career in the colonial government of Natal, South Africa, returned to England in 1882, settled as a barrister in London, and began writing novels. When his novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885) proved a success, he became a fulltime writer.

 

Ouida … Oliphant …Weyman … Pemberton

– Louise de la Ramée (1839-1908), English novelist writing under the pseudonym Ouida.

– Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897), Scottish novelist and biographer.

– Stanley Weyman (1855-1928), English novelist.

– Sir Max Pemberton (1863-1950), English novelist.

 

the Rudyards cease from kipling …

J. K. Stephen, “To R. K.”, in Lapsus Calami (1891), a collection of satirical poems. Lewis quotes the last two lines of the poem’s two eight-line verses. The initials “R. K.” evidently stand for the poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), an exponent of British patriotism and advocate of Imperialism.
error   In the 2013 reprint of this review in Image and Imagination (p. 321), the phrase “the Haggards ride no more” is inaccurately rendered as “the Haggards are no more”.

 

par. 2   the significant fact

 

a Stevenson, a Tolkien, or a William Golding

– Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), English poet, novelist and essayist.

– J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973), English fantasy writer and scholar of language and literature.

– William Golding (1911-1993), English novelist.

 

par. 7   here lies the  

 

as when in She Allan Quatermain neither succumbs …

typo The original 1960 text in Time and Tide reads, “as when in She and Allan, Quatermain neither succumbs…”. The reprint in Image and Imagination  has not corrected the mistake (but added the misprint “Quartermain” for Quatermain). See Lewis’s unpublished letter to Morton Cohen of 7 September 1960, where he explains that this is the printer’s error and that the editor of Time and Tide had not sent him a printing proof.

   Quatermain and Ayesha (=“She”) indeed have their first and only meeting in She and Allan (1921), one of Rider Haggard’s last novels.

 

Her thought … “Higher”

Lewis offered another striking comparison with “Higher Thought” in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954) p. 11, on the Florentine Platonists of the late 15th century:

In their readiness to accept from whatever source all that seemed to them elevated, or spiritual, or even exciting, we sometimes seem to catch the first faint suggestion of what came, centuries later, to be called “higher thought”.’

In his autobiography Surprised by Joy (155), chapter 4, Lewis mentioned his own being influenced by “Higher Thought” through a school mistress when he was about age thirteen:

… Nor would I deny that in all her “Higher Thought,” disastrous though its main effect on me was, there were elements of real and disinterested spirituality by which I benefited. Unfortunately, once her presence was withdrawn, the good effects withered and the bad ones remained.

   Higher Thought is a (mainly British) alternative term for the spiritual movement which developed in 19th-century America as “New Thought”. The International Metaphysical League founded in Boston in 1900 organized its first International New Thought Convention in Chicago in 1903, and changed its name into International New Thought Alliance in 1908. For a short characteristic of its ideology see the chapter “What is Higher Thought?” in The Hidden Power (1921) by Thomas Troward (1847-1916), one of the movement’s English spokesmen.

 

par. 9   what keeps us|

 

The Ancient Mariner, Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or The Lord of the Rings

– The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (1798), a long narrative poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

– Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), novella by Robert Louis Stevenson.

– The Lord of the Rings (1954), three-part fantasy novel by J. R. R. Tolkien.

 

par. 10   this gift, when

 

Aristotle said of metaphor

Poetics, XXII

It is a great matter to observe propriety in these several modes of expression, as also in compound words, strange (or rare) words, and so forth. But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

(translation by. S. H. Butcher, 1895)

 

what Kipling called “the daemon”

In Something of Myself (1935), mostly in chapter 8, “Working-Tools”.

My Daemon was with me in the Jungle Books, Kim, and both Puck books, and good care I took to walk delicately, lest he should withdraw. I know that he did not, because when those books were finished they said so themselves with, almost, the water-hammer click of a tap turned off. One of the clauses in our contract was that I should never follow up “a success,” for by this sin fell Napoleon and a few others. Note here. When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.

 

par. 11   the mythical status

 

Jung … the embodyment of an archetype

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1962), Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, founder of analytical psychology.

   See, for example, his essay “Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept” (“Über den Archetypus mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Animabegriffes”, in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins,1954), in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works, vol. 9/1, 1959, second edition 1968), pp. 54-72, here p. 70:

The anima … has not escaped the attentions of the poets. There are excellent descriptions of here, which at the same time tell us about the symbolic context in which the archetype is usually embedded. I give first place to Rider Haggard’s novels She, The Return of She, and Wisdom’s Daughter, and Benoît’s L’Atlantide. Benoît was accused of plagiarizing Rider Haggard, because the two accounts are disconcertingly alike. But it seems he was able to acquit himself of this charge.

A summary of the essay offers this definition of “anima”:

The anima is the feminine aspect of the archetypal male/female duality whose projections in the external world can be traced through myth, philosophy and religious doctrine.

 

par. 12   the story of

 

Morris’s Well at the World’s End

William Morris’s fantasy novel, The Well at the World’s End (1896).

 

par. 14   haggard will last

 

Gigadibs

In Robert Browning’s poem “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” (1855), Gigadibs is the name of a high-minded atheistic literary squibbler who has been having a private interview-cum-dinner with a bishop who is an unbeliever. The poem is the bishop’s monologue addressed to Gigadibs after the actual interview. The bishop assumes that Gigadibs is going to write a devastating and contemptuous article about him.

 

Gorboduc … Tamburlaine

Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex (1561), generally reckoned to be the first English tragedy; Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great (1590).

 

“with a perfect hatred”

Psalm 139:21-22 (KJV)

Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?
I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.

 

par. 15   this hatred comes

 

“left not a wrack behind”

Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV.1, 157.

Our revels now are ended. …
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

 

 

back to survey

 

LETTERS

 

A selection of C. S. Lewis’s letters to the editors of various magazines and newspapers, 1939-1961. The choice was made by Walter Hooper for the final section of God in the Dock, a large volume of Lewis’s essays published in the U.S.A. in 1970. The British equivalent of this volume appeared in 1971 under the title Undeceptions. The “Letters” section was reprinted in 1987 in the smaller volume Timeless at Heart (containing ten pieces from from the 1970 volume), and reprinted once more in the near-comprehensive Essay Collection published in 2000 (re-issued in two paperback volumes in 2002). In the years 2000-2006 Lewis’s Collected Letters were published in three volumes; volumes 2 and 3 include most of the items from the 1970 selection. The items not included in the Collected Letters are Nr. 2 (“The Conflict in Anglican Theology”) and Nr. 7 (“The Church’s Liturgy, Invocation, and Invocation of Saints”).

 

1. the conditions for a just war

 

Mr Mascall

Eric L. Mascall (1905-1993), English theologian. From 1945 onward he was a more or less regular speaker in the Oxford University Socratic Club

 

determining what wars are just

E.g. Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, II. IIæ, xl. ii. (This reference was added to the original 1939 publication of this letter in Theology.)

 

pagan world

It is to be noted that Lewis in his later years might have avoided to designate modern post-Christian society or humanity as “pagan”; see his 1954 inaugural address in Cambridge, “De descriptione temporum”.

 

martyr (in the etymological sense of the word)

Greek martyros means “witness”. In early Christian history it acquired the special sense of one who witnesses for the truth and supreme importance of his or her convictions by suffering and dying rather than giving them up.

 

chivalry

Lewis discussed the modern relevance of the medieval ideal in his 1940 essay “The Necessity of Chivalry”, written while Nazi Germany began bombing England’s big cities and seemed to be planning an invasion.

 

3. miracles

 

arbitrary and meaningless

The same phrase, in the same context, appears in the penultimate paragraph of Lewis’s 1944 essay published as “On the Reading of Old Books”.

 

4. mr c. s. lewis on christianity

 

no use to say “Lord, Lord”

Matthew 7:21.

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.

 

6. correspondence with an anglican who dislikes hymns

 

Dear Mr. Routley

In Lewis’s Collected Letters II, 719, this letter has a  long footnote by Walter Hooper.

 

7 (b). the church’s liturgy

 

the avenger of blood ...

??

 

Absit omen

(Latin) “May this not come true!”

 

7 (h). invocation of saints

 

Jewel ... Laud ... Taylor

John Jewel (1522-1571), William Laud (1573-1646) and Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), prominent early theologians of the Anglican Church.

 

8. the holy name

 

division among brethren

cf. Romans 16:17, 1 Corinthians 1:10.

 

9. mere christianity

 

Four Last Things

Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell – a traditional foursome in Christian doctrine and education. Books or treatises on the subject include those by Dionysius the Carthusian (1487), Thomas More (1522) and Johann Quistorp (1629).

 

ubique et ab omnibus

After a well-known passage in Commonitorium, cap. II, §6 by the fifth-century monk Vincent of Lérins.

In ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnopere curandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.

[“Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all.” – translation by Charles A. Heurtley, 1894, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers, second series, vol. 11, p. 306]

 

Baxter’s “mere Christians”

Richard Baxter (1615-1691) was an English theologian. Full details about the source of the phrase quoted are given at www.lewisiana.nl/baxter. By the time Lewis wrote this letter he had been using the term for at least a decade (cf. the Screwtape Letters, chapter 25). The next year, in 1952, he used it as the title for a revised and amplified edition of his radio talks of the years 1941-1944: Mere Christianity.

 

10. canonization

 

in viâ

(Latin) “on the way”; cf. Lewis’s letter (in Latin) to Don Giovanni Calabria, 5 January 1953 (Collected Letters III, pp. 276-277):

Haec sola, dum in via sumus, conversatio: liceat nobis, precor, olim in Patria facie ad faciem congredi.

[“While we are in the Way, this is our only intercourse: be it granted to us, I pray, hgereafter, to meet in our True Country face to face.”]

See also Lewis’s 1950 essay “Historicism” (1950):

The question is not what could be done under conditions never vouchsafed us in via, nor even (so far as I can remember) in patria, but what can be done now under the real condions.

 

the Imitation of Christ

De Imitatione Christi, dating from the 14th century; one of the most widely read books of Christian devotion for several centuries after it was written, probably by Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380-1472).

 

12. capital punishment and death penalty

 

My Prayer Book includes an exhortation to those under sentence of death

The old Irish edition (1666) of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer has a section with “Prayers for Persons under Sentence &c.”.

 

Demosthenes

 “Against Evergus and Mnesibulus”, sections 1155-1161.

... we advise you not to make proclamation against anyone by name, but in general against the perpetrators and the murderers; and again not to institute suit before the king. For that course is not open to you under the law, since the woman is not a relative of yours nor yet a servant, according to your own statement; and it is to relatives or to masters that the law appoints the duty of prosecuting. ... For the law, men of the jury, ordains that prosecution shall be by relatives within the degree of children of cousins; and that in the oath inquiry shall be made as to what the relationship is, even if the victim be a servant; and it is from these persons that criminal actions shall proceed. But the woman was in no way related to me by blood, she had only been my nurse; nor again was she a servant; for she had been set free by my father, and she lived in a separate house, and had taken a husband. ”

(Translation by A.T. Murray in Loeb’s Classical Library vol. 346, Demosthenes vol. V: Private Orations XLI-XLIX, pp. 309-323, esp. 311 and 321-323. The introduction to this speech points out [p. 271] that according to most critics it cannot be a work of Demosthenes.)

 

 

back to survey

 

BEFORE WE CAN COMMUNICATE

 

First published in Breakthrough, Nr. 8, October 1961. – This was Lewis’s first and last contribution to Breakthrough, a magazine published by the Student Christian Movement of Great Britain and Ireland during a period almost exactly coinciding with Lewis’s life.

 

par. 13   what we need

 

the vogue-words, the incantatory words

Lewis may have hesitated to include communication among his examples out of courtesy for his inquirer. A well-known discussion of such terminology is George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946). There are no indications that Lewis ever read that essay, but he was certainly impressed by Orwell’s views of language as expressed in the latter’s appendix on “Newspeak” in Nineteen Eighty Four.

 

 

back to survey

 

SEX IN LITERATURE

 

The Sunday Telegraph, 30 September 1962.

 

Hobbes … “that men perform their covenants”

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), beginning of chapter 15 (“Of other Laws of Nature”).

From that law of Nature, by which we are obliged to transferre to another, such Rights, as being retained, hinder the peace of Mankind, there followeth a Third; which is this, That Men Performe Their Covenants Made: without which, Covenants are in vain, and but Empty words; and the Right of all men to all things remaining, wee are still in the condition of Warre.

 

the Lady Chatterley case

A lawsuit brought against the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) by D. H. Lawrence in 1960 under the Obscene Publications Act. In the end the publisher, Penguin Books, was aquitted from the charges brought against it. A transcript of the proceedings was published in 1961 as The Trial of Lady Chatterley, edited by C. H. Rolph.

 

the Bishop of Woolwich

This bishop at the time was John A. T. Robinson (1919-1983), a New Testament scholar. His comment on the adulterous sexual relation described in Lady Chatterley’s Lover was that Lawrence, in his view, had portrayed sex “as something sacred, in a real sense as an act of Holy Communion” (The Trial of Lady Chatterley, p. 71).

 

twelve good men and true

A 17th-century term for the twelve-head jury involved in criminal court cases. The phrase was borrowed from Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing III.3

 

 

back to survey

 

THE SEEING EYE

 

par. 1  the russians

 

The Russian pilot and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968) was the first human being to travel to outer space, April 1961. In the early 1960s he was sometimes reported to have said he had “flown into space, but didn’t see God” (летал в космос, а Бога не видел). In fact, as reported by Gagarin’s old friend Valentin Petrov in a 2006 interview, it was the Russian premier Nikita Krushchev who said this about Gagarin during a meeting of the Central Committe of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. See Wikipedia article on Yuri Gagarin, par. 3.1, “Vostok 1”, and the Petrov interview at http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=interview&div=24

 

par. 34   the first is merely

 

Artemis, Diana, the silver planet

......

 

par. 39   it was in part

 

my own small contributions to science fiction

Lewis contributed three books to the genre. They form the so-called Ransom Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945).

 

par. 41   the third thing

 

The third thing is this...

The reflections in this final passage are more fully developed in an essay Lewis wrote five years earlier when the so-called Space Race had just begun – “Religion and Rocketry” (published in Fern-seed and Elephants and other essays on Christianity, 1975)

 

 

back to survey

 

UNREAL ESTATES

 

Transcribed tape recording of a conversation between C. S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalene College, Cambridge, on 4 December 1962; first published as “The Establishment must die and rot…” in the first issue of Science Fiction Horizons, Spring 1964; then reprinted as “Unreal Estates” in Encounter, March 1965; subsequently first reprinted in Of Other Worlds, 1966.

– Kingsley Amis (1925-1995) was an English writer and father of Martin Amis (b. 1949).

– Brian Aldiss (1925-2017) was a science-fiction writer and co-founder of SF Horizons, a magazine of which only two issues appeared.

 

stories published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

The first issue of The Magazine of Fantasy appeared in 1949; the words and Science Fiction were added to the title from the second issue onward. In 2009 it changed from monthly to bi-monthly issues (www.fandsf.com). Lewis had his stories “The Shoddy Lands” and “Ministering Angels” published in February 1956 and January 1958 respectively; they were reprinted, along with some other stories, in Of Other Worlds (1966), in The Dark Tower (1977) and in Essay Collection (2000). The same magazine also published Lewis’s poem “An Expostulation (against too many writers of science fiction)”, June 1959, reprinted in Poems (1964), in The Collected Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (1994), and in The Collected Poems: A Critical Edition, ed. Don W. King (2015).

 

Swift

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Irish-English writer, author of Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

 

Peter Wilkins

(1697-1767), The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man (1751).

 

Keplers somnium

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), German astronomer, mathematician and astrologer. His posthumously published Somnium (“The Dream”, 1634) describes a trip to the Moon. It is one of the earliest instances of science fiction.

 

Groff Conklin

Edward Groff Conklin (1904-1968), American science fiction anthologist.

 

Cordwiner Smith … James Blish

Cordwainer (not Cordwiner) Smith was the pen name used by the American scholar and army officer Paul M. A. Linebarger (1913-1966) for his SF work. James Blish (1921-1975) was an American SF and fantasy writer; his novel The Star Dwellers appeared in 1961.

 

Gulliver … big and little men

cf. Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, 24 March 1775.

I wondered to hear him say of Gulliver’s Travels, “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.”

 

Fielding’s parody of Richardson … Joseph Andrews

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), English writer, author of the long epistolary novels Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (174), Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1748), and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753).

   By the time Henry Fielding (1707-1754) wrote his first novel Joseph Andrews (1742) as a parody of Richardson’s work, he had already published a more specific, shorter satire on Pamela under the title Shamela (1741).

 

David Lindsay, in Voyage to Arcturus

David Lindsay (1876-1945), Scottish writer; his philosophical fantasy and science fiction novel A Voyage to Arcturus was published by Methuen, London, in 1920.

 

Victor Gollancz

1896-1967, English publisher.

 

Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), a science fiction novel by the American writer Walter M. Miller Jr. (1923-1996).

 

James Blish’s novel A Case of Conscience

Published in 1958, this is the story of a Jesuit who investigates, on the planet Lithia, an alien race that has no concept of God, an afterlife, or sin.

 

Since 1926

Aldiss is no doubt referring to the American magazine Amazing Stories, launched in April 1926 as the first magazine exclusively devoted to science fiction. See www.amazingstories.com.

 

Arthur Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), English writer of science fiction and popular science.

 

the Sheckley story … written about ’49

…??

Robert Sheckley (1928-2005), American writer whose work includes science fiction.

 

Philip Wylie in The Disappearance

 Philip Gordon Wylie (1902-71), American writer.

 

Golding

William Golding (1911-1993), English novelist, Nobel laureate for Literature 1983. Lord of the Flies was published in 1954, The Inheritors in 1955, Pincher Martin in 1956.

 

Poul Anderson

1926-2001, American writer of fantasy and science fiction.

 

Abbott’s Flatland

Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). The narrator is a two-dimensional being, a square. At first he fails, in a dream, to convince the inhabitants of one-dimensional Lineland that there is a second dimension. Then, after meeting a sphere and getting convinced that three-dimensional Spaceland exists, he tries in vain to convince the sphere that there might be a fourth dimension, and then, again in vain, tries to convince his fellow Flatlanders of the existence of Spaceland.

 

Dante … Fanny Burney … Jane Austen … Marlowe

– Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italian poet. His [Divina] Commedia describes, in three Books, the author’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

– Fanny Burney (1752-1840), English novelist and diarist.

– Jane Austen (1770-1816), English novelist, author of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and four other novels.

– Christopher Marlowe (1564--1593), English dramatist and poet.

 

Matthew Arnold … prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion

“The Study of Poetry” (1880), in Essays in Criticism, Second Series (1888), second paragraph.

More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

 

the third sex we all know

Homosexuals.

 

Clifford Simak

Clifford Donald Simak (1904-1988), American science fiction writer.

 

You wrote a farce … indictment of Redbrick

Lewis is referring to Amis’s novel Lord Jim (1954).

 

Spenser

Edmund Spenser (1552-99), English poet, author of The Faerie Queene.

 

Leavis

F. R. Leavis (1895-1978), English literary critic, co-founder and permanent editor of the periodical Scrutiny (1932-1953), fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, 1931-1964.

 

the ungodly who borroweth and payeth not again

Psalm 37:21 (Coverdale).

 

By A. Square

The narrator of Abbott’s “romance of many dimensions” is a Square (i.e. a two-dimensional being), whose name originally appeared on the book’s title page as “A Square”.

 

square hadn’t the same sense then

In jazz slang a “square” is a person who is incapable of responding duly to the spirit of that kind of music – who is, in the same slang, not “hip.” “Square” was widely known and used beyond the world of jazz in the 1950s, sometimes just to mean unsophisticated, literal-minded, lacking in liveliness of apprehension. Perhaps it was originally a short form of “square-headed.”

 

Francis Thompson

English poet (1859-1907); Aldiss is playing on a few lines (but not the last) of Thompson’s poem “Daisy”:

She gave me tokens three:
A look, a word of her winsome mouth,
And a wild raspberry.

In British English, “to blow a raspberry” is to jeer at someone with insulting noises.

 

female Bottom

Bottom is a character in Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

 

 

back to survey

 

MUST OUR IMAGE OF GOD GO?

 

First published in The Observer, the weekly Sunday edition of The Guardian, 24 March 1963.
    The title was originally that of a collection of replies by four ecclesiastic and two academic luminaries to J. A. T. Robinson’s article “Our Image of God Must Go” published in the previous Sunday’s Observer. Robinson was a New Testament scholar and Bishop of Woolwich. The authors of these replies were

– Edwin Morris, Archbishop of Wales

– E. L. Mascall, Professor of Historical Theology at London University

– Edward Carpenter, Canon of Westminster

– C. S. Lewis, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, Cambridge University

– Antony Flew, Professor of Philosophy, University of Keele

– T. R. Milford, Master of the Temple.

Of the six invited pieces (three longer and then three shorter ones), Lewis’s was the shortest. The same issue of The Observer carried seven letters to the editor and a satricial column on Robinson by Michael Frayn on the subject. The heading “Must Our Image of God Go?” was once again used on 7 April for eleven further letters to the editor.

    Robinson’s article was a summary of, and appetizer for, his book Honest to God. The book appeared on 19 March as a five-shilling paperback and was an instant bestseller. A large collection of responses to Robinson was published later in 1963 as The Honest to God Debate, edited by David L. Edwards (SCM Press, London 1963). From the six Observer pieces of 24 March, it included those by C. S. Lewis and by E. L. Mascall.

    For further reading: “How ‘The Honest to God debate’ began” – a compilation of all Robinson-related articles, letters and essays published in The Guardian & The Observer in March and April 1963.

    Some further allusions on Robinson (i.e. “the bishop of Woolwich”) are found in chapters 3, 6 and 14 of Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm, a book he wrote in March-April 1963.

 

par. 1   the bishop of

 

The Bishop of Woolwich …

The text as first published in The Observer begins with “I think the Bishop of Woolwich…” The first words were omitted in The Honest to God Debate, from which Walter Hooper obviously took this text.

 

something about this in Gibbon

Lewis is certainly thinking of the passage he quoted in Miracles, chapter X, par. 16, note 1. See note at www.lewisiana.nl/miraclesquotes.

 

not only “in” and “above”, but ...

Typo alert: As printed in the American volume God in the Dock (1970), p. 184, this passage reads:

not only “in” “above”, but ...

In its British sister volume Undeceptions (1971), p. 149, and daughter volume God in the Dock (London 1979), p. 85, it reads

not only “in”, “above, but ...

The correct reading is found in the original reprint in The Honest to God Debate (1963), p. 91:

not only “in” and “above”, but ...

This correct reading is also found in the Essay Collection published in 2000.

 

depth of ground

Typo alert: The original text as found in The Observer has “depth or ground”. The incorrect “of” was introduced in the 1963 reprint in The Honest to God Debate.

 

par. 3   thus, though sometimes

 

primarily a literary failure … but, perhaps, it is now time…

Typo alerts: In the original text as found in The Observer,

– “literary” is printed in italics,

– “perhaps” is printed without the commas on either side.

 

His heart ... is in the right place

Robinson’s later work as a New Testament scholar took a remarkable turn in his Redating the New Testament (1976), as noted by E. L. Mascall in Theology and the Gospel of Christ (1977), p. 117:

... in spite of respectful tributes with which [the book] is not very thickly sprinkled, it amounts to a violent revolt, from withih the citadel of New Testament study itself, against the conduct of New Testament study during most of the present century. ... Almost all the traditional authorships are defended and so too – which is much more important – is the substantial historical reliability of the narratives. From now on, when the dogmatic theologian or the parish priest or the educated layman is told that he must abandon his most cherished beliefs because “all modern scholars agree ...” or because of the “the assured results of modern criticism”, he will know exactly what to think.

 

 

back to survey

 

CROSS-EXAMINATION

 

First published in two parts in Decision, September and October 1963. Decision was the monthly magazine of the Billy Graham Association.

 

Balaam’s ass

Numbers 22:28-30.

 

Honest to God, by John Robinson

John A. T. Robinson (1919-1983) was a New Testament scholar and bishop of Woolwich. His book Honest to God was published on 19 March 1963, less than two months before this interview. On 24 March Lewis published a brief response in The Observer under the title “Must Our Image of God Go?”; this piece was reprinted, along with many other responses, in The Honest to God Debate, edited by David L. Edwards (SCM Press, London 1963), pp. 91-92, and later included in God in the Dock (1970). More reflections on Robinson can be found in Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm, chapters 3, 6 and 14.

 

Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), prolific English writer, poet and journalist. His Everlasting Man was published in 1925. Lewis read it soon afterwards and described the experience in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, chapter 14.

 

Edwyn Bevan’s book, Symbolism and Belief

Edwyn Robert Bevan 1870-1943, English scholar of ancient history and religion. Symbolism and Belief (1938) is the first of two books based on the Gifford Lectures for 1933-1934. Within two years after Bevan’s book appeared, Lewis was referring to it in The Problem of Pain (ch. 8) and recommending it to his former pupil Mary Neylan (Collected Letters II, 375: “a good many misunderstandings are cleared away by [it]”). In subsequent years, when Lewis mentioned the book he almost invariably did so in strongly recommending terms. Two indications of how Bevan “helped” Lewis can be found in Miracles, chapter 10 (which has a motto from Symbolism and Belief), and in a passage about the transcendence of God in his “Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger” (1958).

 

Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy

Otto (1869-1937) was German theologian and scholar of comparative religion. The Idea of the Holy was published in 1923 and is the translation of his 1917 book Das Heilige. One important example of how Otto “helped” Lewis can be found in The Problem of Pain, chapter 1.

 

the plays of Dorothy Sayers

Some of Lewis’s early responses to The Man Born to be King can be found in his Collected Letters II. On 30? May 1943 he wrote to Sayers, “I shed real tears (hot ones) in places ... I expect to read it times without number again” (p. 577). In November 1947, “I’m re-reading the Man Born to be King. It wears excellently” (p. 811). In October 1949, to another correspondent, “I think D. Sayers Man Born to be King has edified us in this country more than anything for a long time” (p. 989).

 

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

Lewis is quoting inaccurately, but without changing the meaning, from Empedocles on Etna: A Dramatic Poem, by the English poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), I.2. “Nor does being weary prove that he has where to rest.”

 

Charles Williams ... The altar ...

Lewis used the same (free) quotation in his last book, Letters to Malcolm, at the end of the penultimate chapter; he had written Malcolm in the two months preceding this interview, March-April 1963.

 

God is the Father of Lights

James 1:17.

 

Dewey Beegle

Dewey M. Beegle (1919-1995), Old Testament scholar, whose books include God’s Word into English (1960), The Inspiration of Scripture (1963), Scripture, Tradition and Infallibility (1973).

 

the Isaac Watts hymn, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”

Isaac Watts (1674-1748), English hymn writer. The hymn referred to is Nr. 108 in Hymns Ancient and Modern.

 

Bryan Green

(1901-1993) Chaplain of the Oxford Pastorate, 1931-1934; Vicar of Holy Trinity, Brompton, 1938-1948; Rector of Birmingham, 1948-1970.

 

 

back to survey

 

WE HAVE NO “RIGHT TO HAPPINESS”

 

First published in The Saturday Evening Post, 21-28 December 1963. – In 1959 this well-known American weekly had published Lewis’s sequel to The Screwtape Letters, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”. The present piece is the last text Lewis wrote for publication and was published a month after his death.

 

par. 5   i went away

 

the concept of a “right to happiness”

The term also appears in the last chapter of G. K. Chesterton’s Autobiography, which was published in the year of his death. Chesterton there expounds an idea “which I hope it is not pompous to call the chief idea of my life ... the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted.” Referring to a passage in the 1898 “Penny Catechism” (Q. 179, “What are the sins against Hope? – The sins against Hope are despair and presumption”), Chesterton notes that the modern world during his lifetime (1874-1936) had been going from bad to worse – from Despair in the late nineteenth century to Presumption in the twentieth:

And it seemed to me at the beginning, as it seems to me now in the end, that the pessimists and optimists of the modern world have alike missed and muddled this matter; through leaving out the ancient conception of humility and the thanks of the unworthy. ... [I]t was by following this thin thread, of a fancy about thankfulness, ... that I did arrive eventually at an opinion which is more than an opinion. ... Since the time of which I speak, the world has in this respect grown even worse. A whole generation has been taught to talk nonsense at the top of its voice about having “a right to life” and “a right to experience” and “a right to happiness”.

 

par. 6   at first this

 

one school of moralists

??

 

par. 8  but of course

 

Thomas Aquinas, Grotius, Hooker and Locke

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Italian Dominican friar, major theologian and philosopher of the European Middle Ages, author of the Summa Theologiae; Hugo de Groot (1583-1645), Dutch jurist and statesman, foundational thinker on international law, author of De jure belli ac pacis; Richard Hooker (1554-1600), English theologian, author of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; John Locke (1632-1704), English philosopher, whose writings include An Essay concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises on Government.

 

Natural Law

Lewis’s own chief exposition of the concept of Natural Law is found in The Abolition of Man (1943), chapter 2, “The Way”. In a more popular way he discussed it in the early chapters of Mere Christianity (1952), which were first delivered as BBC radio talks in 1941.

 

par. 10   the ancestry of

 

the pursuit of happiness

one of the three “inalienable rights” of every human being specified in the famous opening passage of the Declaration of Independence (1776) of the United States of America (i.e. the “august declaration” Lewis mentions in the next line):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

 

Reform Bills

A succession of three British laws enacted in 1832, 1867 and 1884, extending voting rights to ever larger parts of the population.

 

par. 18   clare, in fact

 

for the last 40-odd years ... When I was a youngster

Writing in 1963, Lewis is obviously perceiving the 1920s as a turning point in sexual mores. He was referring to the same period when he talked in 1941 of “Bulverism” as a thing of “the last fifteen years”. An imaginative general picture of the 1920s as a sordid period riddled by Freudian thought is found in Lewis’s early book The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), Book III, “Through Darkest Zeitgeistheim”.

 

“four bare legs in a bed”

John Heywood (c. 1497–c. 1580), A Dialogue containing the Number of Proverbs (1546), I.8, 42.

In house to kepe houshold, whan folks wyll wed,
Mo thyngs belong, than foure bare legs in a bed.
I reckned my weddyng a suger sweet spice,
But reckners without their host must recken twice.
And all though it were sweete for a weeke or twayne,
Swete meate wil haue sowre sauce, I se now playne’

(from John Heywood’s A Dialogue of Proverbs, ed. Rudolph E. Habenicht, Univ. of California Press 1963, p. 110). Heywood is exclusively talking of the awkward financial or economic predicament of a married man. Quotations from this are often in fact edited versions of the line about “four bare legs”,  such as “More things belong to marriage than four bare legs in a bed.”

 

carte blanche

(French) “blank paper”, unlimited license.

 

 

back to survey

 

UPDATES after August 2009

 

5 September 2009

– notes on Darwin and Darwinism in “The Funeral of a Great Myth” and “The World’s Last Night”.

 

16 March 2010

– note on Alice Meynell in “Religion and Rocketry”

– note on Paul Henri (i.e. Henry) in “Historicism”

– note on invita Minerva and When I know as …, in “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism”

– several minor corrections

 

28 November 2010

– note on I believe in Christianity …, in “Is Theology Poetry?”

 

3 December 2010

– note on especially each morning …, in “A Slip of the Tongue”

 

11 December 2010

– expanded note on to count the cost, in “A Slip of the Tongue”

– note on  I enjoyed my breakfast, in “Christianity and Culture”

 

3 January 2011

– expanded note on Walter Pater, in “Christianity and Literature”

– note on “Dilly, dilly”, in “On Obstinacy in Belief”

 

25 January 2011

– note on those Jeremiahs …, in “De descriptione temporum”

 

7 February 2011

– notes on five issues in “The Poison of Subjectivism”:

unum necessarium

as Aristotle said, no arche

if once we admit, etc.

are these things right because, etc.

it lies, as Plato said, etc.

 

25 May 2011

– note on very undesirable ..., in “The World’s Last Night”

 

29 July 2011

– expanded note on Mr Jones, in “De descriptione temporum”

 

29 September 2011

– expanded notes on the editors of Scrutiny, on Housman, Mr Charles Morgan etc. and on Hooker has finally answered, in “Christianity and Culture”

 

12 March 2013

– MAJOR ADDITION: Notes on thirty essays from God in the Dock / Undeceptions (US 1970 / UK 1971) later reprinted in the smaller volumes God in the Dock (UK 1979) and First and Second Things (UK 1985).

 

21 May 2013

– added note on the Russians, in “The Seeing Eye”; with thanks to Larry Gilman.

 

13 June 2013

– added note on a lady told me, in “Revival or Decay?”

 

28 July 2013

– expanded note on Law ... Behmenite period, in “A Slip of the Tongue”; with thanks to Swedish translator Felix Larsson

– expanded note on Watson, quoted in Nineteenth Century, in “The Funeral of a Great Myth”; with thanks to Larry Gilman, who was writing a multipart blog on the issue of Lewis and Evolution; see http://theotherjournal.com/category/blogs/s-word

 

19 August 2013

– added note on A modern Christian phiosopher, in “Dogma and the Universe”

 

21 October 2013

– several references to Mascall’s Theology and the Gospel of Christ (1977), in “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism”/“Fern-seed and Elephants”

– reference to J. B. Phillips’s Ring of Truth (1967) added to introductory note on “Modern Translations and the Bible”

– added note on His heart is in the right place, in “Must our Image of God Go?”

 

17 January 2014

– added reference to Lewis’s 1949 letter in the note on “the dragons and great deeps”, in “On Church Music”

 

19 September 2014

– added note on “ifs and ands”, in “Miracles”

 

14 October 2014

– MAJOR ADDITION: Notes on each of the twenty-two remaining pieces found in Timeless at Heart (1987) and Christian Reunion (1990), previously collected in God in the Dock / Undeceptions and later reprinted in the 2000 Essay Collection; cf. 12 March 2013.

 

7 January 2015

– added note on from a delighted interest in etc., in “Religion without Dogma?”

 

10 February 2015

– expanded note on sub figuris vilium corporum, in “Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger”

– added note on Schopenhauer’s story of the two Japanese, in “Behind the Scenes”

The latter with thanks to Norbert Feinendegen.

 

19 May 2015

– added note on the great cataract of nonsense, in “Learning in War-Time”

 

28 July 2015

– added note on in the long run..., in “Miserable Offenders”

 

26 September 2015

– expanded note on  I believe in Christianity, final sentence of “Is Theology Poetry?”

 

6 November 2015

– expanded note on Socrates ... “follow the argument ...”, in “The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club”

 

15 November 2015

– improved note on an angry letter to The Spectator, in “Answers to Questions on Christianity”

 

30 November 2015

– added information on The Twentieth Century in introductory note on “Lilies that Fester” and in some related notes on John Allen.

 

4 February 2016

– added note on Boswell’s Johnson, in “Fern-seed and Elephants”

 

7 May 2016

– improved note on “Terris Bay” corrected with a reference to “Jervis Bay”

With thanks to Tim Nelson.

 

21 May 2016

– added note on the friends of culture …, in “Christianity and Culture”

With thanks to Stephen Thorson as author of Joy and Poetic Imagination: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s “Great War” with Owen Barfield and its Significance for Lewis’s Conversion and Writings (2015), pp. 145 and 148.

 

26 July 2016

– added note on missing text after  he will, in “Religion without Dogma?”

 

17 September 2016

– added note on the “Souls”, in “Lilies that Fester”

 

6 December 2016

– added introductory note to “The Poison of Subjectivism”

With thanks to Mark A. Noll.

 

17 March 2017

– two typos noted in the Preface to “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”,

Wth thanks to Paul Leopold.

 

18 March 2018

– corrected note to Bradley distinguished…, in “Religion without Dogma?”

With thanks to Norbert Feinendegen as author of Denk-Weg zu Christus (2008), p. 148, note 101.

 

29 April 2018

– updated note to Of the stars perhaps only one has planets, in “The Grand Miracle”

 

24 July 2018

– added note on Christianity really breaks down, in “Christian Apologetics”

 

10 November 2018

− added introductory note and note on Barfield’s vegetarian jazz to “Religion: Reality or Substitute?”

− added introductory note to “Learning in War-time”

− expanded introductory note on “Miracles”

The latter two with thanks to Greg M. Anderson as author of the essay “The Sermons of C. S. Lewis”, in C. S. Lewis: Life, Works and Legacy, ed. Bruce L. Edwards, vol. 3: Apologist, Philosopher, and Theologian (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), pp. 75-105.

 

11 November 2018

− added introductory note to “The Weight of Glory”

− expanded introductory note to “The Poison of Subjectivism”

 

22 November 2018

− expanded introductory note to “The World’s Last Night”

 

11 January 2019

− added typo alert on finite being, in “Miracles”

 

6 February 2019

− expanded note to Mr. Forster feels anxious etc., in “Lilies that Fester”

 

25 February 2019

− New item added: notes on “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans”

 

6 March 2019

– MAJOR ADDITION: Notes on each of the the nineteen essays in Present Concerns (1986).

 

11 March 2019

− Improved note on A woman who has lost etc., in “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans”

 

4 April 2019

− Improved and enlarged introductory notes for “Myth became Fact” and “Is Theism Important?”

− Improved first two notes on “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans”

 

12 May 2019

− Further addition to first notes on “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans”

 

6 June 2019

− Expanded note on those Jeremiahs…, in “De descriptione temporum”

 

23 September 2019

− Added note on the herb moly, in “Fern-seed and elephants”
– Expanded note on reconstruct the history of Piers Plowman, in the same essay

 

2 January 2020

– Expanded note on Bacon ... to offer the author of truth …, in “Learning in War-time”

 

1 April 2020

– Expanded note on in the French edition, in “Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger”

 

13 April 2020

– Expanded note on as the police treat a man, in “Dogma and the Universe”

 

26 April 2020

– Added note on make jokes on scaffolds, in “Learning in War-time” ; with thanks to Emanuel Contac

 

21 May 2020

– Expanded note on Thomas More said, “If ye make indentures with God...”, in “A Slip of the Tongue”

 

8 June 2020

– Added introductory note and note on the subtitle of “Transposition”.

 

7 July 2020

– Added note on as if the picture knew enough, in “Transposition”

 

21 July 2020

– Added note on the American in the old story, in “Religion: Reality or Substitue?”,  with thanks to Everett Bishop

 

23 July 2020

– MAJOR ADDITION: Notes on each of the twenty essays in Of This and Other Worlds (1982) and on “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages” (1956) from Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966)

 

31 August 2020
With thanks to Everett Bishop:
– Added note on categorical imperative, in “Three Kinds of Men”
– Added note on Harley Street, in “Dogma and the Universe”

5 October 2020

     – Added note on I should be suffocated, in “Dogma and the Universe”

 

9 November 2020
– Expanded note on in Ricardian terms and added note on “stock” … response, in “Christianity and Culture”, as well as an added final note to that essay.

 

28 December 2020

– Added three typo alerts in “Must Our Image of God Go?”

 

16 January 2021

– Added note in “in their true dimensions like themselves”, in “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”, with thanks to Brad Holden

 

23 February 2021

– Expanded note on Bradley distinguished …,  in “Religion without Dogma”, with thanks to Norbert Feinendegen

 

11 March 2021

– Expanded introductory note on “Must Our Image of God Go?”

 

28 April 2021

– Expanded note on Socrates ... “follow the argument wherever it led them”, in “The Founding of the Socratic Club”

 

26 November 2021

– Added introductory note on “The Pains of Animals”

 

11 March 2022

– Added note on the title of “The Necessity of Chivarly”

 

20 June 2022

– Improved introductory note and note on the Intelligence of the Primum Mobile in “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages”

 

15 September 2022

– Expanded note on The Scale of Perfection, in “Learning in War-Time”
– Added note on I come to you … for guidance, in “Petitionary Prayer”

 

6 October 2022

­– Expanded note on Sir Henry Tizard, in “De Futilitate”

– Added introductory note & document to “Christianity and Culture”

 

7 November 2022

– Expanded note on E. R. Eddison, in “A Tribute to E. R. Eddison”

 

27 February 2023
– Expanded note on Sir Henry Tizard, in “De Futilitate”

 

13 March 2023
– Added note to what our race does to strangers, in “Religion and Rocketry”

 

9 May 2023
– Added notes on … an object wholly good and wholly good for it and on the model factory etc., in “Religion without Dogma?”

 

11 September 2023
– Added note on So much for the indivudual, in “Lilies That Fester”

 

26 December 2023
Several changes to “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”:
– revised intro
– added transcript of the full series “Is Progress Possible?”
– revised note on the Swedish sadness

 

11 January 2024
– expanded intro to “Modern Man and his Categories of Thought”

 

27 February 2024
– added note on at least equally true of the Ellizabethan soldier, in “Private Bates”

 

25 May 2924
– corrected note on Mr Pilgrim in “Delinquents in the Snow”

 

14 June 2024
– expanded note on an angry letter to the Spectator in “Answers to Questions on Christianity”

 

20 August 2024

     – added typo alert on a mere chaos – though no outline in “The Poison of Subjectivism”