LEWISIANA.NL

 

Quotations and Allusions in

C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

 

compiled by Arend Smilde

 

Like most of C. S. Lewis’s books, The Problem of Pain (1940) is full of unreferenced allusions to an enormous range of writers and writings ancient and modern. While it is perhaps never vitally important to identify and explore Lewis’s sources, doing so often proves to be a rewarding enterprise. Listed below are most of the book’s explicit references (usually quotations) and many implicit ones (allusions ranging from the quite obvious to the fairly mysterious), each followed by the fullest possible statement of the source in question.

       Many items also feature longer or shorter notes highlighting the relevance of Lewis’s quotation or allusion for the point at issue, and occasionally, as the case may be, questioning that relevance.

       In addition, notes are given on some words, phrases and passages which are not quotations or allusions but nevertheless seemed to call for similar treatment. These include echoes from Lewis’s own earlier and later writings: usually later, since The Problem of Pain appeared early in his writing career.

       References to paragraphs in the book appear in the format “VI·2” for “chapter VI, second paragraph”. References to the three volumes of Lewis’s Collected Letters, published in 2000-2006, appear as CL1, CL2 and CL3.

       Double question marks in bold type – ?? – follow items for which I lack assurance that I can give relevant or accurate information. Corrections and additions, including proposals for new entries, are welcome. Updates are listed at the end.

Utrecht, The Netherlands

August 2015

latest update: April 27, 2024

Postscripts

– January 2018:

I posted a sequence of in-depth discussions of assorted passages from The Problem of Pain under the title “Something Tremendously Real: How C. S. Lewis solved ‘the intellectual problem raised by suffering’”.

–  January 2024:
My essay “The First and Lowest Operation of Pain: C.S. Lewis and His Image of ‘God’s Megaphone’ for Human Suffering” was published in Journal of Inklings Studies vol. 13, Nr. 2, October 2023, pp. 225-247, with online appendices.

 

 

 

 

Dedication

 

The Inklings

» A circle of friends of C. S. Lewis. For most of the 1930s and 1940s  they held weekly meetings in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College, Oxford, to read and discuss writing work in progress. Most of Lewis’s books published around 1940 were dedicated to individual members of the group: Owen Barfield (The Allegory of Love, 1936), Lewis’s brother Warnie (Out of the Silent Planet, 1938), Hugo Dyson (Rehabilitations, 1939), J. R. R. Tolkien (The Screwtape Letters, 1942), and Charles Williams (A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942).The present book is first mentioned in a letter of Lewis to his brother of 11 November 1939 as he describes a meeting of the Inklings.

The bill of fare ... consisted of a section of the new Hobbit book from Tolkien, a nativity play from Williams ... and a chapter out of the book on the Problem of Pain from me. It so happened ... that the subject matter of the three readings formed almost a logical sequence, and produced a really first rate evening’s talk of the usual wide-ranging kind ...

 

 

 

Epigraph

 

George Macdonald. Unspoken Sermons. First Series

» Lewis got to know and to revere the Scottish novelist and poet in 1916 through Phan­tastes (1858), the first of Macdonald’s two fantasy novels, and later came to regard him as his chief spiritual guide. George Macdonald (1824-1905)  was a Congregationalist minister for three years (1850-53) before he took to literature. In addition to much else he published three series of Unspoken Sermons (twelve each) in 1867, 1885 and 1889. After Lewis had become a popular Christian writer and speaker during the Second World War, he edited an Anthology from the works of Macdonald (1946) and in the Preface explicitly called him “my master”. More than two-thirds of the extracts were taken from the Unspoken Sermons, of which Lewis confessed

My own debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has given them great help – sometimes indispensable help towards the very acceptance of the Christian faith.

The epigraph is taken from Series I, Nr. 2, “The Consuming Fire” on Hebrews 12:29.

 

 

 

Preface

 

Mr. Ashley Sampson

» Ashley Sampson (1900-1947) owned the Centenary Press, a small publishing firm in London that became part of another London publishing house, Geoffrey Bles, around 1930. The names of both publishers appear on the title page of the first edition of The Problem of Pain. Lewis’s early book The Pil­grim’s Regress (1933), along with his 1938 science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet, had inspired Sampson to ask him to contribute a book to a series called “Christian Challenge”, intended to introduce the Christian faith to people outside the Church.

     Two other initiatives of Sampson’s around this time helped to spark off Lewis’s career as Christian apologist and Bles’s career as publisher of Lewis’s religious work and some of his fiction. First, Sampson included Lewis’s 1939 Oxford sermon “None Other Gods: Culture in War-Time” (later reprinted as “Learning-in War-Time”) in a volume entitled Famous English Sermons (Thomas Nelson, London 1940); second, he advised Geoffrey Bles to buy the rights for Lewis’s Screwtape Letters soon after they began to be serialized in May 1941.

 

Walter Hilton

» A 14th-century Augustinian canon (d. 1396), spiritual writer, and head of the Priory at Thurgarton, Nottinghamshire. His writings were popular in 15th-century England. Scala Perfectionis, or The Ladder of Perfection, was his most famous book and was first printed in 1494.

      A passage in Lewis’s letter to Dom Bede Griffiths of 17 January 1940 (CL2, 326) suggests that he had read this book very recently, i.e. while he was writing The Problem of Pain.

 

“He jests at scars who never felt a wound”

» Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet II.2, 1.

 

 

 

Chapter I:  Introductory

 

chapter motto

Pascal, Pensées, IV, 242, 243

» Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a French philosopher and mathematician. His Pensées (“Thoughts”) is a collection of long and short notes compiled and published posthumously. Section IV is titled “Des moyens de croire” (“Of the means of belief”). Lewis has culled passages from two consecutive items in the Brunschvicg edition published in 1897; its numbers 242 and 243 correspond to 781 and 463 in the Lafuma edition (1962)  –

J’admire avec quelle hardiesse ces personnes entreprennent de parler de Dieu. En adressant leurs discours aux impies, leur premier chapitre est de prouver la Divinité par les ouvrages de la nature. ... c’est leur donner sujet de croire que les preuves de notre religion sont bien faibles. ... c’est une chose admirable que jamais auteur canonique ne s’est servi de la nature pour prouver Dieu.

 

I·1  |  not many years

the scientists think it likely that very few of the suns of space ... have any planets

» Lewis relied for much of his knowledge of modern physics and cosmology on popular works of the physicists Arthur Eddington (The Nature of the Physical World, 1928) and James Jeans (The Mysterious Universe, 1931) and the mathematician-philosopher A. N. Whitehead (Science and the Modern World, 1925). The conjecture about “exoplanets” (as they are now called) appears, for example, at the end of chapter 8 of Eddington’s 1928 book in a section titled “Formation  of Planetary Systems”:

The solar system is not the typical product of development of a star; it is not even a common variety of development; it is a freak. ... The density of distribution of stars in space has been compared to that of twenty tennis balls roaming the whole interior of the earth. The accident that gave birth to the solar system may be compared to the casual approach of two of these balls within a few yards of one another. The data are too vague to give any definite estimate of the odds against this occurrence, but I should judge that perhaps not one in a hundred millions of stars can have undergone this experience in the right stage and conditions to result in the formation of a system of planets.

The same idea is alluded to in Lewis’s 1945 essay “The Grand Miracle” and in the parallel chapter 14 of his book Miracles. It has since been proved wrong. In 1992 the first “exoplanet” was discovered, twenty years later the existence of more than 800 of them had been confirmed, and that number more than doubled over the next three years. In March 2022, “the count of confirmed exoplanets ticked past the 5,000 mark.”

 

I·3  |  it would be

men of the Middle Ages thought the Earth flat, but ... Ptolemy ... one medieval popular text ...

» Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus, c. 100-170 CE) was an ancient mathematician, astronomer and geographer of the second century. He was a Roman who wrote in Greek and lived in Alexandria, Egypt. His astronomical treatise – i.e. the book that bequeathed the “Ptolemaic” cosmology to the Middle Ages – later became known under the title of its 9th-century Arabic translation, Almagest.

      Lewis in the course of his writing career repeatedly argued more or less the same point, often with the same reference to Almagest (Book 5, chapter 1). Thus in The Pilgrim’s Regress II.1, where Mr. Enlightenment tells John  –

“... I dare say it would be news to you to hear that the earth was round ... It is well known that everyone in Puritania thinks the earth flat. It is not likely that I should be mistaken on such a point. ...”

Further instances are Lewis’s 1945 essays “Religion and Science” and “Christian Apologetics”; Miracles (1947) ch. 7, par. 8; and the 1956 lecture “Imagination and thought in the Middle Ages”  –

That the Earth is, by any cosmic scale, insignificant, is a truth that was forced on every intel­li­gent man as soon as serious astronomical observations began to be made. ... Ptolemy’s compendium ... was accepted by the Middle Ages. It was not merely accepted by scholars; it was re-echoed by moralists and poets again and again. To judge from the texts, medieval man thought about the insignificance of Earth more persistently, if anything, than his modern descendants. We even find quite popular texts hammering the lesson home by those methods which the scientific popularizer uses today.
(Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 1967, p. 46)

From The Discarded Image (1964), ch. 3, p. 22, and ch. 5, pp. 97-98, it appears that the “popular text” in question was the South English Legendary, a late-13th-century collection of lives of the saints.

 

I·5  |  in all developed

Professor Otto

» Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), German theologian and scholar of comparative religion. Lewis is referring to Otto’s book Das Heilige (1917), translated John W. Harvey as The Idea of the Holy (1923). In chapter 2 Otto proposed to derive his term “the numinous” from Latin numen just as “ominous” is derived from omen; the translator in his foreword notes that numen is “the most general Latin word for supernatural divine power”.

 

Shakespeare ... “Under it my genius is rebuked”

» Macbeth III.1, 54 (Macbeth speaking)  –

                      There is none but he [Banquo]
Whose being I do fear; and under him
My Genius is rebuk’d, as it is said
Mark Antony’s was by Caesar.

 

I·7  |  a modern example

The Wind in the Willows

» Published in 1908, this animal story by Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) became a classic of children’s literature.

 

I·9  |  going back about

Wordsworth ... that Passage in the first book of the Prelude

» The Prelude is a long poem by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) in which he describes the influences that contributed to his development as a poet. Written in the years 1799-1805, it was not published until shortly after the poet’s death. Lewis is referring to a passage in Book I beginning at line 356. While rowing on a lake the young poet experienced the sight of how

          a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned ...

                            ... after I had seen

That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Or sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly trough the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

Malory ... Galahad

» Thomas Malory (1400?-1470), author of Morte d’Arthur, a comprehensive prose retelling in twenty-one books of legends about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Galahad, son of Sir Lancelot du Lac, is the ideal type of a knight.

 

fell at the feet of the risen Christ “as one dead”

» cf. Revelation 1:17  –

And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not: I am the first and the last.

 

Ovid ... numen inest

» Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC-18 CE), Roman poet. The Fasti  (calender of feasts) is a collection of legends and sundry historical folklore as connected with feast days. J. G. Frazer’s 1931 translation (Loeb) renders numen here “a spirit”.

 

Virgil

» Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BC), Roman poet. The Aeneid, called after its hero Aeneas, is an epic poem written as a continuation of Homer’s Iliad and describing the preliminaries of the history of Rome as a sequel to the history of Troy –

 

A Greek fragment ... Aeschylus ... “dread eye of their Master”

» Aeschylus (525-455 BC) was the earliest of the three great Greek tragedians. Of his total output of perhaps more than 90 plays only seven have survived in their entirety, plus hundreds of fragments. An edition by the Oxford classical scholar Arthur Sidgwick appeared in 1899, but more fragments have been coming to light afterwards; a recent edition appeared in 2008. A translation by H. W. Smith of the fragment quoted by Lewis is found in the volume Aeschylus II (1936) of the Loeb series, pp. 506-507  –

Set God apart from mortal men, and deem not that he, like them, is fashioned out of flesh. Thou knowest him not; now he appeareth as fire, unapproachable in his onset, now as water, now as gloom; and he, even himself, is dimly seen in the likeness of wild beasts, of wind, of cloud, of lightning, thunder, and of rain. Ministers unto him are sea, and rocks, and every spring, and gathered floods; before him tremble mountains and earth and the vast abyss of the sea and the lofty pinnacles of the mountains, whensoever the flashing eye of their lord [gorgon omma despoton] looketh on them. For all power hath he; lo, this is the glory of the Most High God.

An editorial note says that “the Fragment was ascribed to Aeschylus in antiquity probably because of its lofty conception of God” (508).

 

I·12  |  the numinous is

a famous psycho-analyst ... prehistoric parricide

» Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had died in London around the time Lewis began writing The Problem of Pain. Lewis is referring to a famous passage in Freud’s Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913), ch. IV.5.

 

I·13  |  the moral experience

in Abraham  ... all peoples shall be blessed

» cf. Genesis 12:1-3  –

Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country ... I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

 

I·15  |  to ask whether

the long spiritual preparation of humanity

» Although Lewis never mentions G. K. Chesterton in this book, the first chapter is perhaps the best illustration of the way Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925) provided him with a complete and plausible “Christian outline of history” – as noted by Lewis in Surprised by Joy, ch. 14. Lewis main addition to Chesterton’s scheme is Otto’s concept of the Numinous.

 

I·16  |  why this assurance

regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off ...

» Lewis’s fullest development of this line of thought is found in The Abolition of Man (1943).

 

the life-force

» The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) developed the concept of élan vital as a solution to what he considered to be otherwise insoluble problems in the Darwinian theory of evolution. In his once famous book Creative Evolution (Évolution créatrice, 1907), chapter 2, he defined the term 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).

The usual English rendering as “Life Force” got currency through the work of the Irish-English dramatist George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). Shaw equated the terms élan vital and “life force” in the preface to his five-part play Back to Methuselah (1921). Both Shaw and Bergson were Nobel laureates for literature in 1925 and 1927 respectively.

 

suspicious a priori lucidity of Pantheism

» Lewis’s other references to Pantheism in this book suggest that what he meant by this lucidity must be its monistic character, i.e. the ultimate reduction of everything to a single thing, force, or substance. Thus in chapter 10  –

Pantheism is a creed not so much false as hopelessly behind the times. Once, before creation, it would have been true to say that everything was God. But God created: He caused things to be other than Himself ...

 

which modern science is slowly teaching us

» For Lewis’s chief published sources of information about modern science see first note to this chapter, above.

 

 

 

Chapter II:  Divine Omnipotence

 

chapter motto

Thomas Aquinas

» (1225-1274), Italian Dominican friar, theologian and philosopher, Saint of the Catholic Church since 1323. His Summa Theologiae, written towards the end of his life and unfinished, was the first attempt at a comprehensive theological system.

 

II·2  |  omnipotence means

“with God all things are possible”

» Matthew 19:24-26  –

“And again I say unto you, It is easier for a came to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, “Who then can be saved?” But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.”

 

the original meaning in Latin

» Lewis appears to be referring to the meaning of the original Latin noun of which “omnipotence” is the English form, omnipotentia. This is a late Latin word and not found in the Bible. Where the Latin Bible (Vulgate) has omnipotens,  the King James Bible of 1611 almost invariably has “almighty” or “the Almighty”; in the New Testament it only occurs in the Book of Revelation, and the Greek word is pantokratōr.

 

II·4  |  “all agents” here

all things are possible ... intrinsic impossibilities are not things

» See first note to II·2, above. Lewis’s observation is partly a pun based on the English phrasing, and impossible if “all things” is read in the original Greek, panta, or in Latin as omnia, or in Dutch and German as alles.

 

II·7  |  there is no reason

in contrast with an “other”

» Lewis first developed this view in an early piece of dense philosophical writing of 1928 under the title Summae metaphysices contra Anthroposophos libri II (“Two Books of the Outline of Metaphysics against the Anthroposopists”), as part of a protracted debate with his friend Owen Barfield which Lewis later dubbed their “Great War”. See especially Summa I.5, “The plurality of souls, the existence of any soul, and a world of matter are all mutually involved”.

 

the Blessed Trinity ... something analogous to “society”

» See also Lewis’s development of this idea in chapter 4 of Beyond Personality:  The Christian Idea of God (1944), which is the expanded text of his fourth series of radio talks for the BBC. The first series of radio talks, in 1941, followed on an invitation from a BBC official who had recognized Lewis’s talent for popularization in The Problem of Pain. A revised text of the four series was later published in one volume as Mere Christianity.

 

not merely ... the Platonic form of love, but ... concrete reciprocities of love

» Plato (427-347 BC), one of the founding fathers of Western philosophy, held that there are three levels of reality. The highest level is the world of “forms” or “ideas” (Gr. eidē) because it is eternal; lowest is the world of concrete objects because it is fleeting; in between are mathematical objects. Things on the lowest level are dim and ever changing reflections of eternal, unchanging “ideas”. Lewis is not talking of “Platonic love” as usually understood; he is pointing out that God’s love, in addition to being the eternal “form” reflected in concrete loves, is also itself concrete.

 

II·11  |  society, then, implies

“matter” (in the modern, not the scholastic sense)

» By the scholastic sense of “matter” Lewis probably means matter as distinct from “form” – matter as pure, undeveloped, formless potency. Scholastic thought (which flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries) followed Aristotle in holding that matter and form combine to result in “substance”, while substance and “accidents” combine to result in objects.

    Lewis cannot have expected his modern readers even to know the premodern meaning of “matter”. Presumably it was because he was using the word with reference to angels that he considered this old meaning worth ruling out explicitly. The modern sense of matter might be defined in distinction from spirit rather than form but, although angels are spirits, this is not the distinction he envisaged here. See www.saintaquinas.com/primer.html

      In an unpublished note of unknown date, preserved in the Bodleian Library (“Notebook V”, Dep.d.809, fol. 14), Lewis wrote about “Matter in the scholastic sense, that is … pure potentiality”.

 

II·12  |  but if matter

“trees for his sake would crowd into a shade”

» cf. Alexander Pope, Pastorals (1709) II, “Summer”, 73-76  –

Where-e’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade,
Where-e’er you tread, the blushing flow’rs shall rise
And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.

 

II·15  |  we can, perhaps

these occasions would be extremely rare

» cf. the closing paragraph of Lewis’s book Miracles (1947): “God does not shake miracles into Nature at random as if from a pepper-caster.”

 

 

 

Chapter III:  Divine Goodness

 

chapter motto

Traherne, Centuries of Meditations

» 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. “Century” in the title means “collection of one hundred items”. The book was not published until 1908, and consists of four “centuries” and the beginning of a fifth.

 

III·3  |  on the other hand

doctrine of Total Depravity

» If Lewis was thinking here of any particular statement of the doctrine, it may have been the one given by John Calvin (1509-1564) in the Institutes of the Christian Religion II.1.9  –

... all the parts of the soul were possessed by sin, ever since Adam revolted from the fountain of righteousness. For not only did the inferior appetites entice him, but abominable impiety seized upon the very citadel of the mind, and pride penetrated to his inmost heart (Rom. 7:12; Book 4, chap. 15, sec. 10–12) ...  Paul himself leaves no room for doubt, when he says, that corruption does not dwell in one part only, but that no part is free from its deadly taint. For, speaking of corrupt nature, he not only condemns the inordinate nature of the appetites, but, in particular, declares that the understanding is subjected to blindness, and the heart to depravity (Eph. 4:17, 18).

(Translation Henry Beveridge, 1845).

 

III·4  |  the escape from

When I came first to the University ... a set of young men

» This could refer both to 1917, when Lewis joined an Officers’ Training Corps and the army soon after arriving in Oxford, or to early 1919, when he had demobilized and could begin his studies in earnest. If the latter, which seems most likely, the “set of young men” must have included his lifelong friend Owen Barfield, whom he first met later that year.

 

“as lords that are certainly expected”

» Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) IV, explanatory note to stanzas 10-11  –

In his loneliness and fixed­ness he [the ancient Mariner] yearneth to­wards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky be­longs to them, and is their appoin­ted rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter un­an­nounced, as lords that are certainly ex­pec­ted and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

 

III·7  |  by the goodness

“a good time was had by all”

» The phrase gained popularity as the title of a 1937 volume of poetry by the English poet and novelist Stevie Smith.

 

III·8  |  i might, indeed

as in Dante, “a lord of terrible aspect”

» Dante, La Vita Nuova III; signore di pauroso aspetto, the figure of Love who appears to Dante in a vision.

 

loving us, in the ... most inexorable sense

» Cf. Lewis’s Preface to his Macdonald Anthology  –

The title “Inexorable Love” which I have given to several individual extracts would serve for the whole collection. Inexorability – but never the inexorability of anything less than love – runs through it all like a refrain ...

 

III·11  |  another type is

“we are his people and the sheep of his pasture”

» Psalm 100:3.

 

III·12  |  a nobler analogy

surrendering His will wholly to the paternal will

» cf. Matthew 26:39 and 42 – “… nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt … if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.”

 

not even allowing Himself to be called “good” because Good is the name of the Father

» cf. Mark 10:18 and Luke 18:19; also Matthew 19:17.

 

III·13  |  finally we come

“... than are the tender horns of cockled snails”

» Shakespeare, Love’s Labour Lost IV.3, 334.

 

III·14  |  when christianity says

the consuming fire Himself

» cf. Hebrews 12:28-29  –

... receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: For our God is a consuming fire.

The book’s general epigraph is taken from a sermon on this Bible text; see note to the Epigraph at the beginning of these notes.

 

a 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.

See also Lewis’s sermon “The Weight of Glory”, delivered in Oxford in 1941 and published in 1949.

 

like the maidens in the old play, to deprecate the love of Zeus ... Prometheus Vinctus

» Now better known as Prometheus Bound, this is one of the seven surviving tragedies by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus (see note to I·9 above). Prometheus is bound to a crag on the Scythian seashore as a punishment for his rebellion against Zeus for the benefit of mankind. An unsuccessful attempt at mediation is made Oceanus, whose daughters make up the choir of “maidens” in the play. Lewis refers to their comment on hearing of Io’s lamentable fate as the mistress of Zeus  –

Never, oh never, august Fates, may ye behold me the partner of the bed of Zeus, and may I be wedded to no bridegroom who descends to me from heaven. ... But to me, when marriage is on equal terms, it is no cause of dread; and never may the love of the mightier gods cast on me its irresistible glance. That were indeed a war against which there is no warring, a source of resourceless misery; and I know not what would be my fate, for I do not see how I could escape the designs of Zeus.

– Translation by H. W. Smyth in the volume Aeschylus I (1922) of the Loeb series, pp. 295-297.

 

The Impassible

» From Latin impassibilis and Greek apathēs, “not susceptible to pain or injury”; also “not having or revealing emotions”. The idea of God’s impassibility entered Christian theology possibly through the work of Philo of Alexandria and is a prime example of pagan Greek influence on early Christianity. The theological meaning of the word has always shaded into “immutable” or, more specifically, “not susceptible to change by external causes”.

 

III·15  |  the problem of reconciling

“well pleased”

» cf. Matthew 3:17, the voice from heaven after Jesus is baptised  –

“This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

 

King Cophetua

» A legendary African king who was uninterested in women until he fell in love with a beggar girl. A ballad on the subject was included by Thomas Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), II.6. The theme was taken up by Alfred Tennyson in his poem “The Beggar Maid”  –

... Barefooted came the beggar maid
Before the king Cophetua.
In robe and crown the king stept down,
To meet and greet her on her way ...

So sweet a face, such angel grace,
In all that land had never been:
Cophetua sware a royal oath:
“This beggar maid shall be my queen!”

 

III·17  |  the truth is

Viola

» Sister to Sebastian in Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night.

 

A modern pantheistic philosopher ... “when the Absolute falls into the sea it becomes a fish”

» Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923), Logic, or The Morphology of Knowledge (1911), vol. 2 (Book II, ch. VIII.1.5), p. 257  –

When the Absolute tumbles into the water it becomes a fish; so in asserting itself under this or that condition of its own imposing it becomes Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones.

 

Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty

» Plato, Symposion 203b-e, Diotima speaking  –

When Aphrodite was born, the gods made a great feast, and among the company was Resource [Greek Poros] the son of Cunning [Mētis]. And when they had banqueted there came Poverty [Penia] abegging, as well she might in an hour of good cheer, and hung about the door. Now Resource, grown tipsy with nectar – for wine as yet there was none – went into the garden of Zeus, and there, overcome with heaviness, slept. Then Poverty, being of herself so resourceless, devised the scheme of having a child by Resource, and lying down by his side she conceived Love [Erōs]. Hence it is that Love from the beginning has been attendant and minister to Aphrodite, since he was begotten on the day of her birth, and is, moreover, by nature a lover bent on beauty since Aphrodite is beautiful. Now, as the son of Resource and Poverty, Love is in a peculiar case. First, he is ever poor, and far from tender or beautiful as most suppose him: rather is he hard and parched, shoeless and homeless; on the bare ground always he lies with no bedding, and takes his rest on doorsteps and waysides in the open air; true to his mother’s nature, he ever dwells with want. But he takes after his father in scheming for all that is beautiful and good; for he is brave, strenuous and high-strung, a famous hunter, always weaving some stratagem; desirous and competent of wisdom, throughout life ensuing the truth; a master of jugglery, witchcraft, and artful speech. By birth neither immortal nor mortal, in the selfsame day he is flourishing and alive at the hour when he is abounding in resource; at another he is dying, and then reviving again by force of his father’s nature: yet the resources that he gets will ever be ebbing away; so that Love is at no time either resourceless or wealthy, and furthermore, he stands midway betwixt wisdom and ignorance.

– translation H. N. Fowler (1925), in the Perseus Digital Library; original Greek names inserted. In Benjamin Jowett’s translation (1871), Poros is translated as Plenty; the Dutch translator Gerard Koolschijn renders it as Succes. Thus Love is not just the son of Poverty (his mother) but also of its opposite (his father).

 

Erscheinung

» It is hard to guess what Lewis hoped to add or clarify by adding the German word for “appearance”.

 

III·18  |  the first condition

“His glory’s diminution”

» John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671), 303. The “human irreverence” here is not so much a refusal to worship as the entertaining of doubts about God’s justice:

Yet more there be who doubt his ways not just,
As to his own edicts found contradicting;
Then give the reins to wandering thought,
Regardless of his glory’s diminution,
Till, by their own perplexities involved,
They ravel more, still less resolved,
But never find self-satisfying solution.

Lewis again refers to this line in VI·8.

 

fall on our faces

» cf. such Old Testament places as I Chronicles 21:16 and Ezekiel 1:28 and 44:4; from the New Testament, I Corinthians 14:25.

 

bidden to “put on Christ”

» Romans 13:12-14  –

The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light ... put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof.

The idea of “putting on Christ” also appears, though not as a command, in Galatians 3:26‑27  –

For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus, For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

 

III·19  |  yet perhaps even

George Macdonald ... “You must be strong with my strength ...”

» From Macdonald’s novel Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867), chapter 30, “A Sermon to Myself”. The passage appears in Lewis’s Macdonald Anthology as Nr. 277, “On a chapter in Isaiah” (i.e. Isaiah 40):

The power of God is put side by side with the weakness of men, not that He, the perfect, may glory over His feeble children ... but that He may say thus: “Look, my children, you will never be strong but with my strength. I have no other to give you.”

 

 

 

Chapter IV:  Human Wickedness

 

chapter motto

Law. Serious Call

» 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.

 

IV·1  |  the examples given

the Pagan mysteries

» “Mysteries” in the present context are secret religious ceremonies by which people in the ancient Greek and Roman world hoped to attain liberation, redemption, cleansing and a happy life after death.

 

Epicurean philosophy

» Epicurus (341-270 BC) was a Greek philosopher who considered Pleasure as the supreme good. One famous saying of Epicurus explains why he did not fear death: “When we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not”  – Letter to Menoeceus, in Diogenus Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book X, 125; Loeb vol. 145, p. 651.

 

the Gospel appeared as good news

» The word “gospel” is derived from Old English gōd spell, “good message”. This is a translation of Greek euaggelion, or Latin evangelium, as found in many places in the New Testament, e.g. Mark 1:14 and Romans 1:1.

 

IV·2  |  there are two

“Humanitarianism”

» Like “humanitarian”, this word dates from the 19th century and had various meanings. The broadly philanthropic meaning, which is now the most current one, was often used with contemptuous or hostile overtones referring to alleged exaggeration (see Oxford English Dictionary).

 

IV·3  |  the second cause

the effect of Psycho-analysis on the public mind

» Cf. the reference to “a famous psycho-analyst” (Sigmund Freud) in I·16.

 

the Trojans ... pulled the Horse into Troy

» Homer, Odyssey IV.271-273 and VIII.492ff; Virgil, Aeneid II.

 

IV·4  |  a recovery of

the dying farmer who replied to the Vicar’s dissertation on repentance

» ... ??

 

IV·6  |  when we merely

the “wrath” of God ... a mere corollary from God’s goodness

» Cf. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress X.3: “Men say that his love and his wrath are one thing.” There is a possible allusion here to George Macdonald, Unspoken Sermons II.2, “The Cause of Spiritual Stupidity” (on Mark 8:21)  –

The door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of Love will cross the threshold. He watches to see the door move from within. Every tempest is but an assault in the siege of Love. The terror of God is but the other side of His love; it is love outside, that would be inside – love that knows the house is no house, only a place, until it enter.

Lewis quoted this passage as Nr. 84 in his Macdonald Anthology. However, “wrath” is a word rarely used by Macdonald; and he doesn’t use it here. One of many other possible inspirations is Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (see note to I·5, above), ch. IV.3, p. 24, perhaps with reference to Jakob Böhme  –

Love, says one of the mystics, is nothing else than quenched Wrath.

 

IV·10  |  4. we must guard

Quixotic

» i.e. heroic and idealistic in impractical and often ridiculous ways – like Don Quixote, hero of the early-17th century Spanish novel Don Quijote by Miguel de Cervantes.

 

pocket of evil

» At the time of writing this book, Lewis had already given fictional expression to this idea in his space-travel novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938). The “Silent Planet” here is the Earth as a pocket evil and as such cut off from communication with the other planets.

 

Zarathustra, Jeremiah, Socrates, Gotama, ... Marcus Aurelius

» Zarathustra, or Zoroaster was a Persian prophet who probably lived long before 1000 BC; Jeremiah is one of the major prophets of the Hebrew Bible; Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher (469-399 BC) whose teachings were recorded in dialogues written by his pupil Plato; Gotama, or Gautama the Buddha (the “enlightened one”), was a spiritual teacher of ancient India (6th-5th century BC) whose teachings were the basis of Buddhism; Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor (161-180 CE) whose Meditations became a classic of Stoic philosophy.

 

justice, mercy, fortitude and temperance

» If prudence (or wisdom) is substituted for mercy, the result is the set of four “Cardinal Virtues” found in the work of ancient Greek, Roman and Christian authors (Plato, Cicero, Augustine) and also in Lewis’s Mere Christianity III.2. See, for example, Plato’s Phaedo, 68c-69b.

 

IV·12  |  6. perhaps my harping

Plato ... virtue is one

» Republic 445c (Jowett’s translation)  –

The argument seems to have reached a height from which, as from some tower of speculation, a man may look down and see that virtue is one, but that the forms of vice are innumerable ...

Or in Robin Waterfield’s translation (1994)

... the impression I get from the vantage-point we’ve reached at this point of our discussion is that while there’s only one kind of goodness, there are countless types of badness ...

See also Plato’s early dialogue on whether virtue is something teachable, Protagoras, 328d-334c.

 

IV·13  |  7. some modern theologians

Some modern theologians

» ... ??

 

The road to the promised land runs past Sinai

» As recounted in the book of Exodus, three months after making their escape from Egypt the Israelites, led by Moses, arrived in the desert of Sinai and “camped before the mount” (Ex. 19:3). Moses then climbs Mount Sinai, where God tells him that “if you [i.e. the people] will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a particular treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine.” During later encounters with Moses on Mount Sinai, God issues the Ten Commandments – first in speaking, then on “two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God” (31:18).

 

IV·14  |  8. “let no man

the idealistic doctrine that it is merely a result of our being finite

» The reference here may be, among other things, to Lewis’s own earlier position. “Idealism” in this context is a philosophical school or tendency which was on the wane but still dominant in Oxford when Lewis arrived there as a student in and after the First World War. After an early phase of materialistic atheism developed in his teens, Lewis became a philosophical idealist himself, a process completed by the time he began writing his long poem Dymer in the spring of 1922. Perhaps briefly before his conversion to Theism in mid-1930 he wrote, as part of his polemic with Owen Barfield of those years, a short essay known as De Bono et Malo (“On Good and Evil”) that seems to imply the “idealistic doctrine” mentioned here:

What tends towards the recovery of our life as Spirit ... I call the Better: what tends in the opposite direction I call the Worse. Good and Evil are the ideal terms of these two directions; neither of which is revealed in human experience. ... Absolute good, then, like absolute evil, is incompatible with soul life ...

(“De Bono et Malo”, in The Great War of Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis: Philosophical Writings, 1927-1930, ed. Norbert Feinendegen and Arend Smilde, Journal of Inklings Studies Supplements No. 1, 2015, p. 131-134.)

      In his last book, Letters to Malcolm, ch. 8, Lewis mentioned the idea that “evil is inherent in finitude” as one he associates with Reinhold Niebuhr (cf. note to V·5, below).

 

the Pauline epistles

» i.e. the thirteen New Testament “books” after the Book of Acts that were written as letters by the Apostle Paul to various Christian communities and some individuals. In seven cases the authorship is disputed. Lewis is presumably thinking of such (genuinely Pauline) passages as Romans 7:13-26 and Galatians 5:17.

 

IV·15  |  this chapter will

Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue

» cf. Immanuel Kant in chapter I.1.3 from Critique of Practical Reason (as referred to in chapter VI, below):

 

the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware

» Cf. the way Lewis expressed this insight in his 1945 novel That Hideous Strength, ch. 10.4, where Dr Dimble looks back on his own recent fit of “real anger”. Quoting the words “thus I shall always do, whenever You leave me to myself” as part of Dimble’s musings, Lewis alludes to 17th-century spiritual writer Nicolas Herman. In the latter’s work (mentioned in the one footnote to ch. 7), the phrase illustrates his growing awareness that the nearer a man is to God, the more this boon is offset by feelings of utter unworthiness

 

 

 

Chapter V:  The Fall of Man

 

chapter motto

Montaigne

» Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), French writer. His main work, the Essais (1588), is a large collection of tentative reflec­tions on his reading and the develop­ment of his own ideas. Lewis is quoting from the longest chapter (II.12), “Apologie for Raimond de Sebonde”. The original French phrase is

... l’obeyr est le propre office d’une ame raisonnable ...

while the English quotation appears to come from the Cotton/Hazlitt edition of 1877, Vol. 2, p. 206:

The first law that ever God gave to man was a law of pure obedience: it was a commandment naked and simple, wherein man had nothing to inquire after or to dispute, forasmuch as to obey is the proper office of a rational soul, acknowledging a heavenly superior and benefactor. From obedience and submission spring all other virtues, as all sin does from self-opinion. And, on the contrary, the first temptation that by the devil was offered to human nature, its first poison, insinuated itself by the promises that were made to us of knowledge and wisdom : “Eritis sicut dii, scientes bonum et malum [Genesis 3:5].”

Montaigne’s “apology” is nominally a defence of a 15th-century work of natural theology by the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond. He defends it first against anti-intellectual attacks and then, at very much greater length, against intellectual ones; his own position is one of staunch and happy allegiance to the Catholic Church as the established religion on the one hand, and on the other, rather more emphatically, a profound and wide-ranging scepticism about human knowledge.

      Though Lewis loved the Essais he certainly did not regard Montaigne as a spiritual guide, as illustrated by a remark in a 1955 letter to Dorothy Sayers: “I hope you love him! Love – I didn’t say approve or esteem” (CL3, 635). In his own early book The Pilgrim’s Regress (ch. V/4) the allegorical character called Mr. Sensible quotes Montaigne’s famous motto Que sais-je? (“What do I know?”), which is also found in the Apology for Raymond Sebond. In another letter, referring to Mr. Sensible Lewis called Montaigne “the best specimen of that type” (CL3, 497).

      The passage on obedience is also quoted in chapter 11, “Hierarchy”, in A Preface to Paradise Lost, where Lewis suggests that Shakespeare subscribed to the same view.

 

V·1  |  the christian answer

we sinned “in Adam”

» The phrase “sinning in Adam” was used by some Church Fathers including Ambrosius and Augustine on the basis of what St Paul wrote in Romans 5:12, but it is not, as a phrase, actually found there  –

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned ...

The word “by” here represents Greek dia; more problematically, “for that” represents Greek eph ōi (with eph as a form of epi). In modern translations this is often rendered as “because”; but this is disputable, and the antecedent of ōi is uncertain. The only more or less related “in Adam” phrase in the New Testament is in I Corinthians 15:22  –

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

Here the preposition “in” represents Greek en.

      See also note to V·4, below.

 

“immortal germ plasm”

» The germ-plasm theory was developed in the late 19th century by German biologist August Weismann. It served to establish the modern insight that biological heredity is not a matter of just any cell or organ as such potentially acquiring useful characteristics, but of a special category of germ cells as distinct from somatic cells (body cells). Weismann’s term Keimplasma is com­monly rendered as “germ plasm”. Today, the concept is usually expressed by terms like “genetic material”. The point to note with regard to Lewis’s use is that Weismann’s theory brought out the basically ineradicable nature of hereditary characteristics.

 

V·3  |  in the developed

modern anthropologists and missionaries

» Cf. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, ch. 4, “God and Comparative Religion”, par. 10 (p. 101 in 1947 Hodder & Stoughton edition)  –

Some of the very rudest savages, primitive in every sense in which anthropologists use the word, ... are found to have a pure monotheism with a high moral tone. A missionary was preaching to a very wild tribe of polytheists, who had told him all their polytheistic tales, and telling them in return of the existence of the one good God who is a spirit and judges men by spiritual standards. And there was a sudden buzz of excitement among these stolid barbarians, as at somebody who was letting out a secret, and they cried to each other, “Atahocan! He is speaking of Atahocan!”

 

V·4  |  science, then, has

the modern theologian ... N. P. Williams

» Published in 1927, when the author became Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in Oxford, the book cited here became a 20th-century classic in its field. Lewis read it shortly before he wrote The Problem of Pain, perhaps as a preparation. From a letter of 24 October 1940 to Sister Penelope, it appears he was not much impressed by it (CL2, 450):

... to tell you the truth [I] didn’t find [Williams] very helpful. The man who can dismiss “sinned in Adam” as an “idiom” and identify virtue with the herd instinct is no use to me, despite his very great learning.

 

V·5  |  this sin has

“the journey homeward to habitual self”

» John Keats, Endymion (1818) II, 276. After exploring a “marble gallery” or “mimic temple” where he has acquainted himself “with every mystery, and awe”, the hero sits down and then,

        when new wonders ceas’d to float before,
And thoughts of self came on, how crude and sore
The journey homeward to habitual self!

 

“myth” in the Socratic sense

» In addition to Lewis’s footnote, see the article “Plato’s Myths” by Cătălin Partenie in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu. The following passage in section 2 (with a reference to the 1998 book Plato the Myth Maker by L. Brisson) seems especially relevant.

The myths Plato invents, as well as the traditional myths he uses, are narratives that are non-falsifiable, for they depict particular beings, deeds, places or events that are beyond our experience: the gods, the daemons, the heroes, the life of soul after death, the distant past, etc. Myths are also fantastical, but they are not inherently irrational and they are not targeted at the irrational parts of the soul. ... [I]n the Republic, Socrates says that until philosophers take control of a city “the politeia whose story we are telling in words (muthologein) will not achieve its fulfillment in practice” (501e2–5). The con­struction of the ideal city may be called a “myth” in the sense that it depicts an imaginary polis (cf. 420c2: “We imagine the happy state”). In the Phaedrus (237a9, 241e8) the word muthos is used to name “the rhetorical exercise which Socrates carries out” (Brisson, 144), but this seems to be a loose usage of the word.

Lewis himself explained the concept much later in his review of a 1960 book on the poet Edmund Spenser:

Dr Ellrodt holds it impossible that so Christian a poet as Spenser can really mean that rational, human souls undergo reincarnation. … I admit that the poets sometimes talk as if there were not a three-storied soul, but three distinct souls, in man. But … We need not hold that Spenser “be­lieved” this in the same sense that he believed his creed. He might well have said, like Johnson, that what scripture teaches on such matters is certain, and what “philosophy” teaches is probable; at least, probable enough for poetry. … It is a permissible specula­tion. It is, as Plato’s “myths” were to Plato himself, a not unlikely tale.

–– “Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser” (1961), in Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (1966), p. 154.

 

Dr. Niebuhr’s sense  (note)

» Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), American theologian. In a 1958 letter Lewis reports that he had read “one book of Niebuhr’s – I can’t remember the title – and on the whole reacted against it” (CL3, 979). In a letter of 14 January 1940 to his brother he men­tions his reading Niebuhr’s 1935 book An Interpretation of Christian Ethics and finding it “very disagreeable but not unprofitable” (CL2, 324). Lewis may well have been thinking of the following passage from Niebuhr’s first chapter (pp. 12-13):

It is the genius of true myth to suggest the dimension of depth in reality and to point to a realm of essence which transcends the surface of history, on which the cause-effect sequences, discovered and analysed by science, occur. ... The religious myth ... points to the ultimate ground of existence and its ultimate fulfillment. Therefore the great religious myths deal with creation and redemption. But since myth cannot speak of the trans-historical without using symbols and events in history as its forms of expression, it invariably falsifies the facts of history, as seen by science, to state its truth.

 

V·6  |  for long centuries

brutes sporting before Adam ... God came first in his love and in his thought, and that without painful effort

» Several elements of this speculative account of Paradisal man appear in Lewis’s fantasy about the “Green Lady”, or Paradisal woman, in his second Ransom novel, Perelandra (1942), for example in the second half of chapter 5.

 

V·9  |  this act of

the difficulty about the first sin

» Lewis’s earliest published mention of Perelandra, in a letter of 9 November 1941 to Sister Penelope, seems to refer to this same difficulty of conceiving precisely what kind of creature and action were in­volved by the Fall. Having just finished describing Ransom’s first conversation on Venus with “the Eve of that world” (i.e. presumably chapter 5), he mused:

I may have embarked on the impossible. This woman has got to combine characteristics which the Fall has put poles apart – she’s got to be in some ways like a Pagan goddess and in other ways like the Blessed Virgin.

 

V·10  |  up to that moment

“Dust thou art, and unto dust ... ”

» Genesis 3:19.

 

Hooker’s conception of Law

» For Hooker, see note to the motto of ch. VII, below. While that motto does refer to “law”, it is less immediately relevant to Lewis’s present purpose than a quotation found in the Appendix to The Abolition of Man, VIII.B:

The soul then ought to conduct the body, and the spirit of our minds the soul. This is therefore the first Law, whereby the highest power of the mind requireth obedience at the hands of all the rest. (Laws of Eccl. Polity I.8.6)

The same quotation is found in the helpful context of the section on Hooker in Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 460. As he points out and argues, few systems or models of the universe “are more filled – one might say, more drenched – with Deity” than Hooker’s (459). Having established this, Lewis goes on to reflect that

[s]ometimes a suspicion crosses our mind that the doctrine of the Fall did not loom quite large enough in his universe. Logically, we must grant, it was pivotal: it is only because Adam fell that supernatural laws have come in at all, replacing that natural path to beatitude which is now lost. ... It is only because Adam fell that we need “public regiment” ...

 

V·11  |  god might have

not necessary to suppose that they also have fallen

» When Lewis wrote this, his first great imaginative development of this idea had already been published as the science-fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938); the next was to follow in its sequel Perelandra (1942).

 

V·13  |  with this i have

“inter-inanimation”

» i.e. “mutual inspiration”. The related verb inter-inanimate seems to have been coined by the English poet John Donne (1572-1631) in his poem “The Ecstasy” (or “Exstasie”), 41-44:

When love with one another so
interinanimates two soules,
That abler soule, which thence doth flow,
Defects of lonelinesse controules.

The Oxford English Dictionary only has an entry for “interanimate” (without the extra prefix, -in-), quoting Donne’s line as the only source and dubbing the word “rare”. Lewis may have been an uncommonly frequent user of the word since it appears in at least five of his books – mostly as the variant with -in-. (As Helen Gardner notes in her 1965 edition of Donne’s poems, the great majority of old manuscript sources for this poem have “interinanimates”, not “interanimates”, but the latter variety is the one found in the first edition, 1633.)

 

excluded by the whole tenor of our faith

» This “whole tenor” seems to be briefly defined by Lewi’s own observation, in the chapter on Divine Omnipotence (II·7), that

being Christians, we learn from the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity that something analogous to “society” exists within the Divine being from all eternity – that God is Love, not merely in the sense of begin the Platonic form of love, but because, within him, the concrete reciprocities of love exist before all worlds and are thence derived to the creatures.

 

 

 

Chapter VI:  Human Pain

 

chapter motto

Theologia Germanica

» A mystical text in German 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 highlight the fact that the text was not in Latin. The further implication was that the book had all the advantages of plain language and simple devotion unencumbered by academic learning.

 

VI·3  |  now the proper

... the patters which man was made to imitate ... [T]here ... is Heaven, and there the Holy Ghost proceeds

» Lewis appears to be suggesting a subtly reconciling position in an ancient and still unresolved controversy within Christendom: the so-called Filioque issue. Latin Filioque means “and the Son”, and the issue is whether the Holy Ghost, as the third Person of the Trinity, proceeds “from the Father” or “from the Father and the Son”. The statement under discussion is an article from the Nicene Creed:

The addition of Filioque here represents the “Western” position, while the Eastern Church holds to the view that the Son and the Ghost each “proceed” from the Father, as suggested by John 8:42 and 15:26 respectively.

      Lewis gave a fuller statement of his view in his fourth series of BBC radio talks, Beyond Personality (1944), later reprinted as book IV of Mere Christianity (1952), ch. 4.

 

as Newman said, rebels who must lay down our arms

» John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons III (1836), Nr. 7, “Christian Repentance” (on Luke 15:18-19), p. 96 in the 1868 New Edition:

The most noble repentance (if a fallen being can be noble in his fall), the most decorous conduct in a conscious sinner, is an unconditional surrender of himself to God ... He is a runaway offender; he must come back, as a very first step, before anything can be determined about him, bad or good; he is a rebel, and must lay down his arms.

Lewis quotes the same phrase almost literally, but without reference, in Mere Christianity IV.4, “The Perfect Penitent”.

 

the very history of the word “Mortification”

» By “history” Lewis may here simply mean the word’s etymology. Latin mortificare literally means “to make dead” i.e. “to kill”, and Latin mortificatio is the word for “killing” or “annihilation”; from mors or mortuus “dead” and facere “make”.

 

VI·5  |  the human spirit

error and sin ... the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence

» Cf. Perelandra, ch. 17  –

“There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young: there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the knowledge of sleep.”

 

Sadism and Masochism

» Each term is derived from the name of a novelist who described the practice in question: Sadism is named after the French writer Marquis de Sade (1740-1814); “Masochism”, a word coined in 1886 in a book on sexual psychopathology, refers to the 19th-century Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895).

 

VI·6  |  a perception of this

by so doing they render all punishment unjust

» Lewis developed this idea years later in his two-part essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (1949 & 1954).

 

Hobbes’s definition of Revengefulness

» Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), English philosopher. His fundamental proposition was that all human action is ultimately based on self-interest. Lewis is quoting from one of Hobbes’s main works, Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Eccleciastical and Civil (1651).

 

VI·7  |  when our ancestors

God’s “vengeance”

» Acts or intentions of vengeance are frequently attributed to or claimed by God throughout the Bible, as in Deuteronomy 32:35-36, Isaiah 35:4 (also including “recompence”), Romans12:19 and Hebrews 10:30, though hardly in the four Gospels.

 

Hardy and Housman

» Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), English novelist and poet; A. E. Housman (1859-1936), English poet.

 

Mr. Huxley

» Aldous Huxley (1895-1963), English novelist and essayist. Lewis is probably thinking of Huxley’s then recent book Ends and Means (1937), which is also alluded to later in this same chapter; see note to VI·15, below.

 

VI·8  |  if the first

St. Augustine ... “God wants to give us something ...

» Lewis seems to use the same reference in a letter of 31 March 1958 to Mary Willis Shelburne (CL3, 930). In a footnote to that letter Walter Hooper suggests Lewis was thinking of a passage in Augustine’s homily (or exposition) on Psalm 122, in the section on the second half of verse 6 (Et abundantia diligentibus te, “they shall prosper that love thee”):

... “And plenteousness,” he addeth, “for them that love thee.” ... How have they become rich? Because they gave here what they received from God for a season, and received there what God will afterwards pay back for evermore. Here, my brethren, even rich men are poor. It is a good thing for a rich man to acknowledge himself poor: for if he think himself full, that is mere puffing, not plenteousness. Let him own himself empty, that he may be filled.

(Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 8, p. 1184)

 

as if St. Augustine wanted unbaptised infants to go to Hell

» See, for example, Augustine’s
– De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo parvulorum ad Marcellinum, Book I, ch. 16 [21] (Migne, Patrologia Latina Vol. 44, col. 125). English: “A Treatise on the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, and on the Baptism of Infants”, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 5: “Unbaptised infants damned, but most lightly”.

– Enchiridion ad Laurentium, ch. 43, 46 and 93 (English in NPNF I.3).
– Sermones ad populum III (“De Sanctis”), Nr. 294, De baptismo parvulorum, contra Pelagianos, ch. 3 (Migne, PL 38, 1337).

– Contra Iulianum  Pelagianum Book 5, ch. 11.44 (Migne, PL 44, 809).

 

He stoops to conquer

» After the title of Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy She Stoops to Conquer (1773).

 

“unmindful of His glory’s diminution”

» Cf. note to III·17, above.

 

VI·11  |  here we tread

Kant thought that no action had moral value unless ... the moral law

» Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German philosopher. Lewis may be referring to Kant’s Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), First Part, Book I, chapter 3, “Von den Triebfedern der reinen praktischen Vernunft” (Critique of Practical Reason, “Of the Motives of Pure Practical Reason”). The chapter’s opening sentences are:

Further on, there is the statement (par. 16)

The same chapter features a famous panegyric on “Duty” (par. 21):

 

he has been accused of a “morbid frame of mind”

» ... ??

 

against Kant stands the obvious truth, noted by Aristotle ... as a Christian I suggest the following solution

» Lewis’s Christian solution to what he calls the “conflict between the ethics of duty and the ethics of virtue” was perhaps partly inspired by the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich, as appears from a letter he wrote to Owen Barfield of 2 June 1940 (CL2, 418-419). In March of that year Lewis had read Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love, and in the letter he noted that

[she] seems, in the Fifteenth century, to have rivalled Thomas Aquinas’ reconciliation of Aristotle and Christianity by nearly reconciling Christianity with Kant.

On the other hand, in the first paragraph of his 1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory” Lewis points out that

[i]f there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.

 

Aristotle ... the more virtuous a man becomes the more he enjoys virtuous actions

» Cf. Aristotle’s Ethics II.2 (1104b).

And for a test of the formation of the habits we must take the pleasure or pain which succeeds the acts; for he is perfected in Self-Mastery who not only abstains from the bodily pleasures but is glad to do so; whereas he who abstains but is sorry to do it has not Self-Mastery: he again is brave who stands up against danger, either with positive pleasure or at least without any pain; whereas he who does it with pain is not brave.

[translation by D. P. Chase, Everyman edition, 1911]

 

VI·12  |  it has sometimes

whether God commands certain things because they are right, or ...

» In philosophical theology, the question has long been known as the “Euthyphro dilemma”.

 

with Hooker, and against Dr. Johnson … “they err who think that the will of God …”

» For Hooker, see note to the motto of ch. VII, below. Lewis’s footnote contains an error: “I, i, 5” should be “I, ii, 5”, i.e. he is referring not to chapter 1 in Book I of Hooker’s Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity, but to chapter 2: “Of that law which God from before the beginning hath set for himself to do all things by”. Lewis was to use exactly the same quote (with the same defect to the reference) in chapter 1 of his later book English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954). p. 49:

We must not suppose that the medieval conception of Natural Lew vanished overnight. … In the first book of Hooker we find that God Himself, though the author, is also the voluntary subject, of law. “They err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides his will” (I. i. 5). God does nothing except in pursuance of that “constant Order and Law” of goodness which He has appointed to Himself. nowhere outside the minds of devils and bad men is there a sic volo, sic jubeo.

» Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), one of the great figures of English literary history, was a poet, essayist, biographer, novelist, and lexicographer. He was also famous as a con­ver­sationalist, thanks to the 1791 biography by James Boswell, The Life of Dr. Johnson. Lewis may have thought of a passage toward the end of the section deal­ing with the year 1780, recording Johnson’s observation that “the idea of a Creator must be such as that He has a power to unmake or annihilate His creature”, and Boswell’s reply, “Then it cannot be conceived that a creature can make laws for its Creator.” Boswell then adds in a footnote,

His profound admiration of the Great First Cause was such as to set him above that “Philosophy and vain deceit” [Colossians, ii. 8] with which men of narrower conceptions have been infected. I have heard him strongly maintain that “what is right is not so from any natural fitness, but because God wills it to be right;” and it is certainly so, because He has predisposed the relations of things so as that which He wills must be right.

 

Paley

» William Paley (1743-1805), English theologian. ... ??

 

VI·13  |  we therefore agree

we agree with Kant so far as to say that there is one right act ... which cannot be willed to the height by fallen creatures unless it is unpleasant

» Obviously Lewis does not mean that Kant made a similar statement about the self-surrender of fallen creatures; he means that this crucial aspect of a Christian “solution” accords with Kant’s view of morality as a necessarily unpleasant affair. However, Lewis has so far only suggested that this view of morality is something Kant was “accused of” (VI·11). Thus Lewis appears to have been in two minds as to whether the accusation was true. At the same time, he has just distinguished “obedience” from “the content of our obedience”, and the distinction appears to allow him to be slightly more Kantian than Kant on the unpleasantness of morality. Some actually Kantian passages on that subject are found in the chapter from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (I.1.3) cited above :

 

the untying of the old, hard knot

» cf. Lewis’s letter to Sister Penelope, 24 October 1940 (CL2, 451):

…I have never read Irenaeus, and got the idea of the knot from the otherwise dull med. Latin poem Architrenius …

In The Allegory of Love (1936), Lewis had discussed Johannes de Altavilla’s poem Architrenius (12th century) as his last specimen of the “the Nature-poets of the school of Chartres”, quoting one passage as standing out from the rest:

… A universal human longing is expressed, and, but for the language, the lines might have been written in any age:

This must I do – go exil’d through the world
And seek for Nature till far hence I find
Her secret dwelling-place; there drag to light
The hidden cause of quarrel, and reknit,
Haply reknit, the long-divided Love.

Since no other references to knots or knitting are found in the Problem of Pain, it seems that Lewis had used the idea somewhat creatively, developing the notion of “re-knitting” into that of “untying the knot”.

 

Abraham’s “trial”

» As recounted in Genesis 22.

 

VI·14  |  if pain sometimes

“strength, which, if Heaven gave it, may be called his own”

» Milton, Comus, 419; on Chastity. Cf. Charles Williams’s Oxford lecture, Feb. 1940.

 

he that loses his soul shall find it

» cf. Matthew 16:24-25 (and parallel places Mark 8:35 and Luke 9:24); Jesus speaking to his disciples.

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

 

“backward mutters of dissevering powers”

» Milton, Comus, 817.

 

uncreative spell

» Compare IX·6, where Lewis uses the word “uncreating” rather than “uncreative”. The latter form seems to be the more appropriate in each case; it offer the best parallel to the phrase just quoted from Milton.

 

Christ on Calvary ... surrender to God does not falter though God “forsakes” it

» cf. Matthew 27:46,

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

The “forsaking” comes in a Hebrew line quoted from the beginning of Psalm 22:2.

      Lewis, in thus describing the martyrdom or “accepted Death” as “the supreme enacting and perfection of Christianity”, was almost certainly remembering George Macdonald’s meditations on the subject. For some relevant passages see Lewis’s George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946), items 31-39, taken from Macdonald’s Unspoken Sermons, Series I, Nr. 8, “The Eloi”.

      There are similar allusions to Macdonald in Lewis’s Screwtape Letters (1942), letter VIII.

VI·15  |  the doctrine of death

the Mysteries

» See note to IV·1, above.

 

Mr. Huxley ... “non-attachment”

» cf. the reference to Aldous Huxley in VI·7, above. Huxley presented the concept of non-attachment in chapter 1 of his book Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods employed for their Realisation (1937), pp. 2-4:

Among [the] bewildering multiplicity of ideals which shall we choose?  The answer is that we shall choose none. ... [A]ll the ideals of human behaviour formulated by those who have been most successful in freeing themselves from the prejudices of their time and place are singularly alike. ... The enslaved have held up for admiration now this model of a man, not that; but at all times and in all places, the free have spoken with only one voice. It is difficult to find a single word that will adequately describe the ideal man of the free philosophers, the mystics, the founders of religions. “Non-attached” is perhaps the best. The ideal man is the non-attached man. ... Non-attachment to self and to what are called “the things of this world” has always been associated in the teachings of the philosophers and the founders of religions with attachment to an ultimate reality greater and more significant than the self. Greater and more significant than even the best things that this world has to offer.

 

an “eternal gospel”

» While the term may ultimately derive from Revelation 14:6, Lewis had himself previously used the Latin form, evangelium eternum, to describe his own pre-Christian brand of pantheism as expounded by the allegorical figure of Mr. Wisdom in The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book VII, ch. 12:

...so far as I am at all, I am Spirit, and only by being Spirit maintain my short vitality as soul. See how life subsists by death and each becomes the other: for Spirit lives by dying perpetually into such things as we, and we also attain our truest life by dying to our mortal nature ... for this is the final meaning of all moral precepts, and the goodness of temperance and justice and of love itself is that they plunge the red heat of our separate and individual passions back in the ice brook of the Spirit ... What I tell you is the evangelium eternum.

Much less directly, though plausibly in view of the preceding reference to Aldous Huxley, there might be a connection with Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. However, that book was not published until 1945, and its focus is on personal enlightenment rather than on any doctrine of death. The originally Latin term, philosophia perennis, originated in 16th-century Neo-Platonism.

 

the Light that lighteneth every man

» cf. John 1:7-9.

[John the Baptist] came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

 

our script need only be a copy

» Cf. the book’s general motto, taken from Macdonald’s Unspoken Sermons I.2: “The Son of God suffered ... that their sufferings might be like His.”

 

no quarrel, like Plato, with the body as such

» In Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, Socrates explains why, as a philosopher, he should be happy and actually is happy to die that same day. Death is the moment of the soul’s release from the body as from a “prison” (62b, 82e), and such a release is in many ways precisely what a philosopher has always been striving for:

The lovers of knowledge are conscious that the soul was simply fastened and glued to the body – until philosophy received her, she could only view real existence through the bars of a prison, not in and through herself; she was wallowing in the mire of every sort of ignorance; and by reason of lust had become the principal accomplice in her own captivity. This was her original state; and then, as I was saying, and as the lovers of knowledge are well aware, philosophy, seeing how terrible was her confinement, of which she was to herself the cause, received and gently comforted her and sought to release her, pointing out that the eye and the ear and the other senses are full of deception, and persuading her to retire from them, and abstain from all but the necessary use of them, and be gathered up and collected into herself, bidding her trust in herself and her own pure apprehension of pure existence, and to mistrust whatever comes to her through other channels and is subject to variation; for such things are visible and tangible, but what she sees in her own nature is intelligible and invisible. ... [E]ach pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, until she becomes like the body, and believes that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and haunts, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure to the world below, but is always infected by the body; and so she sinks into another body and there germinates and grows, and has therefore no part in the communion of the divine and pure and simple.
–– Phaedo 82e-83d, translated by Benjamin Jowett

In so far as Lewis ever recognized a similar sort of quarrel, he considered soul and body as being tarred with the same brush:

Bless the body. Mine has led me into many scrapes, but I have led it into far more.
–– Letters to Malcolm (1964), ch. 3.

“You are always dragging me down,” said I to my Body. “Dragging you down!” replied my Body. “Well I like that! Who taught me to like tobacco and alcohol? ... That’s Soul all over; you give me orders and then blame me for carrying them out.”
–– “Scraps” (1945), in God in the Dock (1970), p. 216-217; see also Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm, ch. 3.

 

nothing to distinguish them from ... “sweet reasonableness”

» The term was coined by Matthew Arnold, who frequently used it 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 ... by the phrase “sweet reasonableness”.

In equating his own “ideal of urbanity and sweet reasonableness” with “the spiritual life as conceived by Christianity”, as Lewis suspected he did  (Studies in Words, ch. 9.vii, p. 242), Arnold was ignoring that this reasonableness was only the sweet variant of an ideal that might take very bitter forms.

 

VI·16  |  all arguments in

“quite o’ercrows my spirit”

» Shakespeare, Hamlet V.2, 435.

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

 

VI·17  |  in estimating the

the beneficence of fear ... the present war. My own experience ...

» Lewis describes the experience, with regard to the approach and onset of the war, in several letters of the time to Owen Barfield; see CL2, 231-232 (12 Sept. 1938), 266-268 (August 1939) and 418-419 (2 June 1940).

 

VI·18  |  in the second

C.C.S.

» Casualty Clearing Station

 

Johnson and Cowper

» Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), see note to VI·12, above. William Cowper (1731-1800), English poet.

 

“vale of soul making”

» The phrase was coined by the poet John Keats in a letter written in 1819 to his brother and sister:

In how lamentable a case do we see the great body of the people (...) The whole appears to resolve into this – that man is originally “a poor forked creature” subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. (...) The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is “a vale of tears” from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven – What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please “the vale of soul-making”. Then you will find out the use of the world (...) I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read – I will call the human heart the horn book used in that school – and I will call the child able to read, the soul made from that school and its horn book. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! (...) As various as the lives of men are – so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, souls, identical souls of the sparks of his own essence. – This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity – I am convinced that many difficulties which Christians labour under would vanish before it. (...) Seriously I think it probable that this system of soul-making may have been the parent of all the more palpable and personal schemes of redemption, among the Zoroastrians, the Christians and the Hindoos.
–– The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (two volumes, Harvard U.P. 1958), vol. 2, 101-103; spelling and interpunction normalized in the present quotation. The full 1,250-word passage on this topic, written as part of a larger section on 21 April 1819, is available here (two-page PDF) in the original orthography.

The same phrase and same idea play a key role in Evil and the God of Love (1966) by the English theologian John Hick (cf. chapter 13, section 3, “The ‘Vale of Soul-Making’ Theodicy” (with a reference to Keats in a note on p. 295; or chapter 12, p. 259 in the second edition, 1977). Although elsewhere in the book Hick makes two references to The Problem of Pain and one reference  to Lewis’s A Grief Observed, he never notes the affinity between his own overall thesis and this key passage in Lewis’s 1940 book.

      Lewis’s use of the “vale” phrase may partly go back to a book he mentions in chapter 8: Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism and Belief (1938). In his second lecture on “Time”, Bevan talks of

Time, in so far as it is the necessary condition of soul-making by moral volitions

and further notes that

It would be nonsense to say his [i.e. a human spirit’s] perfected state in eternity was just as much before his earthly experience as after it, that, if it is reached through the process of soul-making in this earthly vale, the individual’s existence in the eternal state after his earthly experience was no different from his existence before he had his earthly experience.

(pp. 113 and 116 in the 1938 edition, or pp. 100 and 103 in the 1962 Fontana edition)

 

Of poverty ...

» While the previous sentence, with the quote from Keats, seems a suitable closing sentence for this chapter, the rest of this final paragraph rather belongs under the first “proposition” discussed in the next chapter.

 

Christ’s statement that poverty is blessed

» Or rather, that the poor are blessed: “Blessed are you who are poor” (Luke 6:20). Lewis’s reference to this is more accurate at the beginning of VII·2 in the next chapter.

 

“ judgement” (i.e., social justice)

» As, for exemple, in Isaiah 1:17 and Luke 11:42. For relevant passages in the Psalms see Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms (1958), ch. 2, par. 5:

In Psalm 9 we are told that God will “minister true judgement” (8), and that is because He “forgetteth not the complaint of the poor” (12). He “defendeth the cause” (that is, the “case”) “of the widows” (68, 5). The good king in Psalm 72, 2, will “judge” the people rightly; that is, he will “defend the poor”. When God “arises to judgement” he will “help all the meek upon earth” (76, 9), all the timid, helpless people whose wrongs have never been righted yet. When God accuses earthly judges of “wrong judgement”, He follows it up by telling them to see that the poor “have right” (82, 2, 3).

“opiate of the people”

» After a much-quoted statement by the German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883), “Religion is the opium of the people” (or “opiate of the masses”). The original German phrase – “Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes” – appears in a text published in 1844 in Marx’s journal Deutsch-Französische Jarhbücher, and written as the introduction to a planned book on Hegel which Marx never wrote. For more context and some earlier uses of the metaphor, see Wikipedia article “Opium of the people”.

 

 

 

Chapter VII: Human Pain, continued

 

chapter motto

Hooker

» Richard Hooker (1554-1600), English theologian. Of his main work, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, the first four volumes appeared in 1593, and most of the other four were published posthumously. In a 1944 essay later republished as “On the Reading of Old Books” Lewis mentions Hooker among a handful of “Christian classics” which he “was first led into reading, almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies” and “because they are themselves great English writers”. A diary entry for 4 June 1926 (All My road Before Me, p. 406) shows that he enjoyed Hooker as soon as he began reading him, which he did in preparation for a course of lectures he gave later that year.

 

VII·2  |  1. there is a

offences must come, but woe to those …

» cf. Luke 17:1.

It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!

 

sins do cause grace to abound

» cf. Paul’s letter to the Romans, 5:20-21.

... the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

Marlowe’s lunatic Tamberlaine

» Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), English dramatist and poet. His first play was Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts, 1587-88), about the power-drunk and cruel Tatar conqueror Timur the Lame. The protagonist is happy to call himself, and be called, “the scourge of God” – as in Part One, Act IV, scene 2, when he is brutalizing and humiliating the captive Emperor of the Turks:

Now clear the triple region of the air,
And let the Majesty of Heaven behold
Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.
Smile, stars that reign’d at my nativity ...

At the end of Part Two, as he lies dying, he counsels his son to “reign, ... scourge and control those slaves”; and his last words are

Farewell, my boys! my dearest friends, farewell!
My body feels, my soul doth weep to see
Your sweet desires depriv’d my company,
For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die.

 

VII·3  |  the problem about

 

“only God can mortify”

» ??

 

Brother Lawrence (note)

» Nicolas Herman (1614–1691), born in Lorraine, entered the Carmelite Order in Paris as a lay brother in 1640 and took the name Lawrence of the Resurrection. When Brother Lawrence had died, his abbot compiled two little books from his notes and letters and from reminiscences of conversations with him. The two books together came to be known under the title La pratique de la présence de Dieu (The Practice of the Presence of God; a new critical edition was published in 1991 and a new English translation in 1994).

 

VII·4  |  it would be

 

the fullest parabolic picture … active beneficence

» Presumably a reference to Matthew 25:31-46.

 

 

Chapter VIII:  Hell

 

chapter motto

W. de la Mare

» Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), English poet.

 

Shakespeare

» King Richard the Third, V.3, 183. Also quoted in Lewis’s brief 1940 essay “Two Ways with the Self”.

 

VIII·2  |  the dominical utterances

The Dominical utterances

» i.e. sayings of the Lord Jesus (Latin dominus = “lord”) such as in Matthew 5:22,

Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment ... but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

 

VIII·5  |  first, there is

the noble motions of his victims

» “Motions” is a misprint for emotions, introduced in the book’s seventh British edition, June 1942. The same misprint seems to have found its way into most or all of the American editions (Macmillan, New York), which began to appear in February 1943.

    The first six British editions, with the correct word, all appeared within a year (October 1940–October 1941). The seventh, appearing eight months after the sixth, was the first to appear after the publication of The Screwtape Letters in book form (May 1942), and the first of another quick succession of six reprints of The Problem of Pain.

 

Thomas Aquinas said of suffering

» See note to the motto of chapter II, above. In the translation of the Summa Theologica available at Newadvent.org the relevant passage reads

A thing may be good or evil in two ways: first considered simply and in itself; and thus all sorrow is an evil, be­cause the mere fact of a man’s appetite being uneasy about a present evil, is itself an evil, because it hinders the response of the appetite in good. Secondly, a thing is said to be good or evil, on the supposition of something else: thus shame is said to be good, on the supposition of a shameful deed done, as stated in Ethic. iv, 9. Accordingly, supposing the presence of something saddening or painful, it is a sign of goodness if a man is in sorrow or pain on account of this present evil. For if he were not to be in sorrow or pain, this could only be either because he feels it not, or because he does not reckon it as something unbecoming, both of which are manifest evils. Consequently it is a condition of goodness, that, supposing an evil to be present, sorrow or pain should ensue.

 

as Aristotle said of shame

» As appears from the above note, the passage in Thomas Aquinas from which Lewis quotes includes the reference to Aristotle’s Ethics IV.9 (1128b):

Shame should not be described as a virtue; for it is more like a feeling than a state of character. ... [S]hame may be said to be conditionally a good thing; if a good man does such actions, he will feel disgraced; but the virtues are not subject to such a qualification.

[translation by W. D. Ross, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 9, Oxford 1925]

 

VIII·7  |  i have begun

“their rejection of everything that is not simply themselves”... Von Hügel

» Here and in VIII·9, Lewis appears to be quoting this author from memory. Friedrich von Hügel (1852-1925), influential Roman Catholic thinker of his day, was an English theologian of Austrian/Scottish descent. His Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion were published in two volumes (or Series) in 1921 and 1926. The address “What do we mean by Heaven? And what do we mean by Hell?” (Vol. 1, pp. 195-224)  was delivered to the Religious Thought Society of London in February 1917. Lewis is referring to a paragraph in the concluding section (pp. 216-217):

The lost spirits will persist, according to the degree of their permanent self-willed defection from their supernatural call, in the varyingly all but complete self-centredness and subjectivity of their self-elected earthly life. But now they will feel, far more fully than they ever felt on earth, the stuntedness, the self-mutilation, the imprisonment involved in this their endless self-occupation and jealous evasion of all reality not simply their own selves.

 

VIII·9  |  a third objection

Von Hügel ... warns us not to confuse the doctrine itself with the imagery

» From the essay mentioned in the note to VIII·7, above; the third of four concluding “general reflexions as to Hell” (221):

And as to the essentials of Hell, I like to remember what a cultivated, experienced Roman Catholic cleric insisted upon to me, namely, the importance of the distinction between the essence of the doctrine of Hell and the various images and interpretations given to this essence: that the essence lies assuredly, above all, in the unendingness. Hence even the most terrible of the descriptions in Dante’s Inferno could be held literally, and yet, if the sufferings there described were considered eventually to cease altogether, Hell would thereby be denied in its very root. (...)

Von Hügel’s focus is on the interpretations rather than (as Lewis suggests) on the images. His further focus on “unendingness” is in line with a point made in conclusion of the first reflexion (220):

... if we walk ... in the footsteps of definite and sensitive Theists [rather than pantheists] we shall find that the doctrine of Abiding Consequences can, at the least, not be treated lightly – the possibility of its substantial truth will persistently demand a serious, pensive consideration.

The theme of Abiding Consequences is a central one in Von Hügel’s essay and highlighted in his Preface, where he notes (xi) that

... it may be of use to some readers to have clearly before them the formidable – I myself believe, the hopeless – task which confronts those who would retain the spiritual teaching of Jesus, as indeed still the standard and ideal of our outlook, and who yet would reject all Abiding Consequences

As compared with Von Hügel’s view, Lewis’s brief discussion in this paragraph of the symbols under which “Our Lord speaks of Hell”, the theme of everlastingness is conspicuous by absence.

 

the saying that “hell is hell, not from its own point of view …” etc.

» ??

 

VIII·10  |  a fourth objection

Edwyn Bevan ... 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. Lewis recommended the book in a letter of 26 March 1940 to a former pupil, noting that “a good many mis­under­standings are cleared away by [it]” (CL2, 375). In subsequent years, when Lewis mentioned the book he almost invariably did so in strongly recommending terms.

      The passage referred to is the end of the first of two lectures on “Time” (in the 1962 Fontana paperback edition this is the end of the first section of the chapter “Time”, pp. 89-90). After arguing against “the doctrine ... that all events are present to God in a Nunc Stans [‘Steady Now’], without any successiveness all”, Bevan finally notes:

[p. 100] These considerations suggest incidentally that the controversy which has gone on between those who have maintained that the ultimate fate of lost souls is to be annihilated and those who have maintained that their punishment is eternal, may be a controversy about expressions which stand for no essential difference. If a painful experience becomes a Nunc Stans which is never followed by a re-beginning of time, that is for the sufferer precisely the same as if, after his last moment of experience, he were annihilated. The difference would be only for others, [p. 101] whose experience was still successive in time. Any other spirit who could enter into the experience of the lost soul at intervals, say, of a thousand years, would always find the experience there the same as it had been a thousand years before, but for the lost soul itself there would be no protraction of its experience through periods of time; it would all be shrunk up into one moment with nothing afterwards. I do not at all mean to imply that there seems to me any good ground for believing that this will actually be the case with any human soul. I merely point out that when we argue about the state of persons beyond death, there may be possibilities in a different apprehension of time which we cannot know, and which may make all our arguments wide of the mark. But if this is the best conception we can get of what a Nunc Stans would be, it would seem an inappropriate conception for the eternal life of the blessed (...).

 

“the darkness outside”

» From three sayings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew. In 22:13 and 25:30 the phrase “outer darkness” appears in the conclusion of a parable. In 8:12 it is found in a declaration made after a Roman centurion has confessed his belief in Jesus’s power and authority:

I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel ... [M]any shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham ... But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness ...

 

VIII·12  |  in the long run

They will not be forgiven

» Evidently, will not be is here to be under­stood as are unwilling to be Lewis is referring back to several earlier passages in this chapter:

– “How if they will not give in?” (VIII·1)

– “Supposing he will not be converted …” (VIII·5)

– “But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete”. (VIII·6)

– “… they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages …” (VIII·11)

An allusion to “shall not be forgiven” (Matthew 12:31, Luke 12:10) is hence implausible.

 

 

 

Chapter IX:  Animal Pain

 

General notes

   » A critique of this chapter by the popular philosopher C. E. M. Joad, followed by Lewis’s reply, was published in The Month, February 1950. The two pieces were reprinted as a single item under the title “The Pains of Animals: A Problem in Theology” in the posthumous volume of Lewis’s essays called God in the Dock (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids 1970), then in the smaller volume Timeless at Heart (1987), and then again in the comprehensive Essay Collection published in 2000. See www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays and www.lewisiana.nl/essayquotes#pains

   » “Any theological consideration of pain always leads one into the knotty problem of animal pain and from this problem to the question of animal salvation. Macdonald grapples with this question in several of his books, attempting to justify some sort of immortality for animals, an immortality which will be achieved through the salvation of men. Man has, therefore, a redemptive duty to perform in the animal world and that is why he has been given dominion over it. … Possibly at the prompting of Macdonald, C. S. Lewis devotes a considerable portion of The Problem of Pain to the subject of animal salvation.”

–– Paul Robert Dettman,
George Macdonald and C. S. Lewis: Master and Disciple
(MA thesis, Oberlin College, 1952), 31-32

   » “In ch. 1 of Leaves from the Trees [by ‘A Member of CSMV’], entitled ‘Consider the Dog: A Study in Right Relationship’, Sister Penelope wrote: ‘The object of this essay is to consider, not the frequent failure of men in their stewardship, but what we ourselves may learn from the humanized animal, to whom we are as God, about the relationship that ought to exist between God and us’ (p. 1). This chapter almost certainly served as the inspiration for Lewis’s similar treatment of the subject in The Problem of Pain.”

–– Walter Hooper in CL2, 265, note 80.

 

 

IX·1  |  thus far of

“a plaint of guiltless hurt doth pierce the sky”

» From Arcadia, a pastoral romance in verse and prose by Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586). In its original context, a strong element of human guilt for animal suffering is implied which seems to be absent from Lewis’s meaning at this point. The line quoted is found in the penultimate stanza in one of the Eclogues sung for King Basilius at the end of Book I of the 1590 edition; in the 1593 and later editions this song is found in the second half of Book III. The song, “As I my little flocke on Ister banke”, tells the story of a time before there were men, and the beasts asked Jove for a king. After warnings from Jove, and from the owl, they are given part of Jove’s “heavenly fire” as a basis for making themselves their king. The result is Man, who gradually develops into a tyrant, maltreating “guiltlesse earth” (by mining and ploughing) and the beasts. The story closes with this complaint:

But yet o man, rage not beyond thy neede:
Deeme it no gloire to swell in tyrannie.
Thou art of blood; ioy not to see things bleede:
Thou fearest death; thinke they are loth to die.
A plaint of guiltlesse hurt doth pierce the skie.
    And you poore beastes, in patience bide your hell,
    Or know your strengths, and then you shall do well.

 

IX·2  |  we may begin

Wordsworth believed that every flower “enjoyed the air it breathes” : See Wordsworth’s “Lines written in Early Spring” (1798), third stanza.

Through Primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’t is my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

 

IX·4  |  in the long run

the distinction ... has great authority ... “a succession of perceptions” ... “a perception of succession”

» Lewis is giving a popular exposition of Kant’s concept of a “transcendental unity of self-consciousness”. This concept is introduced in the Critique of Pure Reason, §12 of the long section called “Transcendental Analytic” (in Meiklejohn’s 1855 translation) or §16 of the  Kritik der reinen Vernunft, second edition (1787).

 

IX·6  |  2. the origin of

the uncreating rebellion

» See note to “uncreative spell” in VI·14, above.

 

a certain sacred story ... implied in several Dominical, Pauline, and Johannine utterances

» While Lewis obviously keeps his distance from this “sacred story”, he was extremely well-read in medieval literature. It is therefore perhaps impossible to find out precisely which New Testament passages he knew to have been interpreted this way. The Dominical utterances may include Matthew 25:41 (“everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels”), Luke 10:18 (“I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven”), and John 8:44 (“He [the devil] was a murderer from the beginning”). The Johannine could be 1 John 3:8 (“the devil sinneth from the beginning”). Relevant Pauline passages are hard to find.

 

and become a Docetist

» In the French edition of this book, Lewis added a note after these words (Le problème de la souffrance, 1950, p. 163):

Actuellement, je considère la conception de l’Incarnation impliquée dans de paragraphe, comme grossière et due à l’ignorance.

I actually consider the idea of Incarnation implied by this paragraph as crude and due to ignorance.

Docetists (Gr. Dokētai, from the verb dokein, “seem”), in the early centuries of the Christian church, was a general term for those Christians who held that Christ, since He was true God, could not have been true man; therefore His human nature must have been mere appearance.
     The reason Lewis apologizes for “ignorance” seems to be that he had found himself corrected on this point in a letter from Oliver Chase Quick, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. See Lewis’s reply of 18 January 1941 in CL3, 462. Many years later he once more referred to his own earlier “crude conception of the Incarnation”: see “Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger” (1958), in God in the Dock (1971), 177.

 

IX·7  |  it seems to me

that some mighty created power had already been at work

» Lewis’s own attempt to develop such a supposition is found in Out of the Silent Planet, his first science-fiction novel, which he wrote about two years before The Problem of Pain.

 

“life-force”

» See note to I·16, above.

 

IX·9  |  3. finally, there is

also with Wesley

» John Wesley (1703-1791), English clergyman and founder of Methodism. Lewis seems to be referring to Wesley’s sermon on Romans 8:19-22. Both the number and the title of this sermon as cited by Lewis are different from those found at the Wesley Center Online: Nr. 60, “The General Deliverance”. See especially the paragraphs III.6 and III.9:

May I be permitted to mention here a conjecture concerning the brute creation? What, if it should then please the all-wise, the all-gracious Creator to raise them higher in the scale of beings? What, if it should please him, when he makes us “equal to angels,” to make them what we are now, – creatures capable of God; capable of knowing and loving and enjoying the Author of their being? ...

May it not ... furnish  a full answer to a plausible objection against the justice of God, in suffering numberless creatures that never had sinned to be so severely punished. They could not sin, for they were not moral agents. Yet how severely do they suffer! – yea, many of them, beasts of burden in particular, almost the whole time of their abode on earth; So that they can have no retribution here below. But the objection vanishes away, if we consider that something better remains after death for these poor creatures also; that these, likewise, shall one day be delivered from this bondage of corruption, and shall then receive an ample amends for all their present sufferings.

 

système de la nature

» (French) “System of Nature”; title of a philosophical book written by the French radical materialist Baron d’Holbach in collaboration with Diderot, published in 1770.

 

IX·11  |  if, nevertheless, the

Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts

» Genesis 1:28,

...and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

On the purpose of this dominion see IX·8, and Lewis’s previous speculation on the subject in V·6.

 

IX·14  |  when we are speaking

the lion and the lamb lying down together

» Cf. Isaiah 11:6 (leopard & young goat) and 65:25 (wolf & lamb).

 

Saturnalia of topsy-turvydom

» In ancient Rome, the saturnalia were a very old festival in honour of the god Saturn. In a hellenized form it was revived by the government in 217 BC as a sort of mid-winter carnival evoking the supposedly golden age when Saturn reigned on earth. A key feature was the temporary suspension of social class distinctions, which enabled slaves to take otherwise impossible liberties with their masters.

 

“Let him roar again”

» Shakespeare,  A Midsummer Nights’s Dream I.2, 65 (Bottom speaking):

Let me play the lion too. I will roar that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me; I will roar that I will make the Duke say “Let him roar again, let him roar again.”

 

 

Chapter X:  Heaven

 

chapter motto

Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale

» The quote is from the last scene of Shakespeare’s comedy The Winter’s Tale, one of his last plays (V.3, 94-97). With these words, and after an off-stage dénouement that would have been perfectly adequate as a conventional happy ending, the noble widow Paulina introduces “more amazement” for King Leontes – the statue of his queen, the supposedly long-dead Hermione, comes alive. Paulina then proceeds (98ff):

                                 Music, awake her, strike.
’Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;
Strike all that look upon with marvel.
  (...)
Start not; her actions shall be holy as
You hear my spell is lawful. (...)

                 [Leon.] O, she’s warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.

The insistence on “lawfulness” is strong. On first suggesting that she’ll “make the statue move” (88), Paulina immediately expressed a fear that

                                then you’ll think –
which I protest against – I am assisted
By wicked powers.

 

Cowper out of Madame Guion

» Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon(1648-1717) was a French mystic. The Poems translated from the French of Madame de la Mothe Guion by William Cowper (see note to VI·18) were first published in 1801. Lewis is quoting from the first stanza of “The Acquiescence of pure Love” (identified by Cowper as “Vol. 2, Cantique 135”).

Love! if they destined sacrifice am I,
    come slay thy victim, and prepare thy fires;
Plunged in thy depths of mercy, let me die
    the death which every soul that lives desires.

 

X·1  |  “i reckon”, said

“pie in the sky”

» The phrase comes from the chorus of a five-verse song, “The Preacher and the Slave” dating from 1911. It was written by the American Labor activist Joe Hill (1879-1915) as a parody of the Christian hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By” (1868).

Verse 1:

Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer in voices so sweet

Chorus [varied after the last verse]:

You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die

 

tell the pure in heart that they shall see God

» cf. Matthew 5:8, a passage in the Sermon on the Mount.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

 

X·3  |  this signature on

Brocken spectre “looked to every man like his first love”

» “Brocken spectre” is the name for an optical effect caused by the observer’s own shadow on clouds moving along mountain sides; it is named after the Brocken, a peak in the Harz mountains, Germany, where it was first described in 1780. It is unclear whether Lewis is using a literal quotation (??), but there seems to be a relation to the opening scene of Act IV in Goethe’s tragedy Faust, Second Part (1832). Perhaps Lewis is citing a comment on this passage:

Another possible reference could be Coleridge’s poem “Constancy to an Ideal Object”. It evokes the vision of a beloved woman to make his home with, only to compare the unreality of it all with the experience of the “woodman” who

                        winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!

However, there is no notion of this love being a “first love”, and Coleridge is not suggesting that the “shadow” is like the beloved, but rather that the beloved is like that shadow. See also J. Matthew Melton’s note at quora.com.

 

X·5  |  this may seem

the pearl of great price

» From the short parable in Matthew 13:45-46.

 

X·7  |  the thing you

the seed dies to live

» John 12:24.

Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

 

cast His bread upon the waters

» cf. Ecclesiastes 11:1.

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.

 

he that loses his soul will save it

» Cf. Matthew 10:39 (also Mark 8:35, Luke 17:33, John 12:25). Lewis substitutes “soul” for “life”.

He that loses his life for my sake shall find it.

 

Theologia Germanica (note)

» See note on the motto for chapter VI, above.

 

“and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth ...” ... what shall we take this secrecy to mean?

» The question is answered in a way that reflects George Macdonald’s sermon “The New Name”, on Revelation 2:17 (Unspoken Sermons I.5). For some extracts from that sermon see Lewis’s Macdonald Anthology, nrs. 14-21.

 

X·9  |  but the eternal

pains in heaven

» As Lewis’s chapter on Hell has two references to Von Hügel’s essay on Heaven and Hell  (see notes to VIII·7 and VIII·9, above), another passage in the same text may have helped to shape some of Lewis’s thought on the present theme:

... it is not difficult to find ... operative causes for the continuance in Heaven itself of the essentials [of suffering and pain] in the nobility furnished by devoted suffering and self-sacrifice here below. ... Hence, even in Heaven, there remains, for the saved soul, room and the need to transcend itself, to lose itself, that it may truly find itself. ... even in Heaven there is a certain analogue to the genuine cost in the real gain traceable within the deepest acts of the human soul whilst here on earth.

(Von Hügel 1921, p. 219-219)

 

X·10  |  for in self-giving

“did that in the wild weather of his outlying provinces ...” ... George Macdonald

» The quotation is a shortened version of a passage in the sermon titled “The Creation in Christ”, on John 1:3-4. Lewis included the same passage in his Macdonald Anthology as part of nr. 173.

 

From before the foundation of the world

» Lewis is adapting Macdonald’s next sentence after the one just quoted:

From the infinite beginning – for here I can speak only by contradictions – he completed and held fast the eternal circle of his existence in saying, “Thy will, not mine, be done!”

The notion of a historical sacrifice of the Eternal Word is reflected in the “Deeper Magic from before the Dawn of time” in chapter 15 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Lewis’s first Narnia tale.

 

X·11  |  the golden apple

The golden apple of selfhood ... became an apple of discord

» “Golden apples” appear in various roles and in various myths and legends of various nations. Lewis seems to be using elements from the “Judgement of Paris”, a story from ancient Greek mythology: Eris, goddess of discord, threw a golden apple as a prize of beauty among the guests at a wedding feast of the gods.

 

“makes heaven drowsy with the harmony”

» Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost IV.3, 341.

And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.

 

thrones and powers

» Names for two of the nine orders of angels in a hierarchy of Angels that was established in the early 6th century by a Christian author known as Pseudo-Dionysius. Four of the names used in his scheme appear in Colossians 1:16.

For by him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.

 

indwelling Comforter

» Cf. John 14:16-17 and 26.

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: buy ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. ... But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

Also Romans 8:9.

But ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.

 

“maketh from the beginning to the end”

» Ecclesiates 3:10-13.

I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it. He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life.

 

they cover their eyes

» i.e. the angels, including their highest order, the Seraphim, as described in Isaiah 6:1-3.

... I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims; each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.

 

X·11  |  the golden apple

was and is and shall be

» Cf. Revelation 4:8.

And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him: and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.

 

which has no opposite.

» In letter of 12 September 1933 to his friend Arthur Greeves (CL2, 121), Lewis responded to a “question about God and evil” and began by submitting

…the idea which someone had in the Middle Ages who defined God as “That which has no opposite” i.e. we live in a world of clashes, good and evil, true and false, pleasant and painful, body and spirit, time and eternity etc, but God is not simply (so to speak) one of the two clashes but the ultimate thing beyond them all … just as space is neither bigness or smallness but that in which the distinctions of big and small arise.

 

 

 

UPDATES

11 August 2016
expanded note on VIII.12, They will not be forgiven

3 November 2016
added note on VIII.5, misprint “motives”
* with thanks to Larry Gilman

22 January 2018
revised introduction, with PS adding a link to www.lewisiana.nl/christianthinker 

12 November 2018
expanded note on Preface, Mr. Ashley Sampson

28 August 2019
added note on VI.3, the very history of the word “Mortification”
* with thanks to Michael Blakeley

6 November 2019
expanded note on VI.12, with Hooker…;with thanks to Bill Hollett

25 November 2019
* with thanks to Richard Johnson:
– added note on II.11, “matter” (in the modern, not the scholastic sense);

* with thanks also to Michael Blakeley:
– expanded note on VI.12, with Hooker, and against Dr. Johnson
– improved note VIII.5, misprint “motions”
– added note on IX.2, Wordsworth believed etc.
– expanded note on X.3, Brocken spectre

1 April 2020
– expanded note on IX.6, and become a Docetist
* with thanks to Norbert Feinendegen

11 May 2020
– added note on VI.11, Aristotle ... the more virtuous a man becomes

22 May 2020
– expanded note on II.11, “matter” (in the modern, not the scholastic sense)

25 October 2020
– added note on VII.3, the fullest parabolic picture

29 April 2021
– expanded note on V.5, “myth” in the Socratic sense

22 March 2022
– updated note on I.1, the scientists think it likely …

3 July 2022
– added note on X.11, which has no opposite

12 July 2022
– added General Note (quotation from Dettman 1952) to chapter IX

15 September 2022
– expanded note on Preface, Walter Hilton

30 November 2022
– corrected note on the idealistic doctrine etc. (IV·14): Lewis’s move from materialistic atheism to Idealism now dated to “the spring of 1922”

9 January 2024
– added Biblical references for III·12, surrendering His will wholly, and III·18, fall on our faces
* with thanks to Todd May

4 March 2024

– added notes on Christ’s statement etc. and “ judgement” (i.e., social justice) (VI·18); on offences must come (VII·2); on the pearl of great price and the seed dies to live (X·9); was and is and shall be (X·11)
* most of these kindly submitted by Todd May

27 April 2024

– added note on the untying of the old, hard knot (VI·13)