LEWISIANA: Notes on Essays by C. S. Lewis

Quotations and Allusions in

C. S. Lewis’s shorter writings

compiled by Arend Smilde (Utrecht, The Netherlands)

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

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

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

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

SURVEY

number of essays

1. Volumes used annotated here / contained in volume

Rhb

Trp

WLN

AfP

SPT

CRf

SLE

FSE

WoG

REHABILITATIONS and other essays, London 1939

TRANSPOSITION and other addresses, London 1947

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

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

THEY ASKED FOR A PAPER, London 1962

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST and other pieces, London 1965

CHRISTIAN REFLECTIONS, London & Grand Rapids 1967

SELECTED LITERARY ESSAYS, Cambridge 1969

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

THE WEIGHT OF GLORY and other addresses, New York 1980

(expanded edition of the 1947 volume)

1 / 9

5 / 5

6 / 7

6 / 12

8 / 8

14 / 14

1 / 22

8 / 8

8 / 9

2. Essays annotated – alphabetical order
year of origin or first publication	Essay : click on title to go to the notes	first published in book form; excluding volumes in right-hand column					other volumes
		1960	1965	1967	1975	1980
1940	Christianity and Culture	-	-	CRf	-	-	-
1939	Christianity and Literature	-	-	CRf	-	-	Rhb 1939
1954	De descriptione temporum	-	-	-	-	-	AfP 1962, SLE 1969
?1943	De Futilitate	-	-	CRf	-	-	-
1959	The Efficacy of Prayer	WLN	-	-	FSE	-	-
?1944	The Funeral of a Great Myth	-	-	CRf	-	-	-
1959	Good Work and Good Works	WLN	SPT	-	-	-	-
1950	Historicism	-	-	CRf	FSE	-	-
1944	The Inner Ring	-	SPT	-	-	WoG	Trp 1947, AfP 1962
1944	Is Theology Poetry?	-	SPT	-	-	WoG	AfP 1962
1960	The Language of Religion	-	-	CRf	-	-	-
1939	Learning in War-Time	-	-	-	FSE	WoG	Trp 1947
1945	Membership	-	-	-	FSE	WoG	Trp 1947
1959	Fern-seed and Elephants*	-	-	CRf	FSE	-	-
1949	On Church Music	-	-	CRf	-	-	-
?1942	On Ethics	-	-	CRf	-	-	-
1955	On Obstinacy in Belief	WLN	SPT	-	-	-	AfP 1962
1953	Petitionary Prayer: A Problem ...	-	-	CRf	-	-	-
1943	The Poison of Subjectivism	-	-	CRf	-	-	-
?1955	The Psalms	-	-	CRf	-	-	-
1958	Religion and Rocketry	WLN	-		FSE	-	-
1941	Religion: Reality or Substitute?	-	-	CRf	-	-	-
1959	Screwtape Proposes a Toast	WLN	SPT	-	-	-	-
1963	The Seeing Eye	-	-	CRf	-	-	-
1956	A Slip of the Tongue	-	SPT	-	-	WoG	-
1944	Transposition	-	SPT	-	-	WoG	Trp 1947, AfP 1962
1941	The Weight of Glory	-	SPT	-	-	WoG	Trp 1947, AfP 1962
1951	The World’s Last Night	WLN	-	-	FSE	-	-

* original (1967) title: Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism

back to survey

LEARNING IN WAR-TIME

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

par. 4 this indeed is

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

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

mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities

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

metaphysical arguments in condemned cells

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

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

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

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

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

comb their hair at Thermopylae

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

par. 7 it is for a very

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

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

par. 8 all our merely natural

having two [eyes], to be cast into Gehenna

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

par. 9 we are now

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

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

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

“as to the Lord”

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

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

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

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

Theologia Germanica

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

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

par. 14 the third enemy

the streets of Warsaw

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

a permanent city

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

back to survey

CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

par. 5 now the new testament

The Unjust Judge

Luke 18:1-8.

Donne points out that we are never told He laughed

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

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

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

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

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

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

He goes on to insist that

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

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

par. 11 applying this principle

the Aristotelian doctrine of mimèsis

........

the Augustan doctrine about the imitation of Nature and the Ancients

......

par. 13 if you said

au moins je suis autre

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

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

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

Wordsworth, the romantic who made a good end

......

par. 14 in this sense

he knows that in his flesh dwells no good thing

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

Thomas Aquinas, ipsa ratio hoc habet etc.

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

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

I Corinthians 10:31.

Pater prepared for pleasure as if it were martyrdom

Walter Pater (1839-1894), English literary critic. ......?

par. 15 now that i see

Di sè medesmo rise

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

back to survey

CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE

par. 2 the present inordinate

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

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

Croce

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

the poetics of I. A. Richards

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

the editors of Scrutiny

cf. Lewis’s Collected Letters II, p. 252 ......

Housman, Mr Charles Morgan, and Miss Sayers

......

par. 9 it might be important

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

......?

par. 11 st augustine regarded

dementia ... honestior et uberior

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

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

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

par. 12 st jerome, allegorizing

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

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

Webster’s White Devil

......

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

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

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

par. 15 thomas à kempis i take

Thomas à Kempis

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

par. 16 in the theologia germanica

Theologia Germanica

par. 18 i found the famous

Gregory ... our use of secular culture

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

par. 19 in milton i found

Milton ... Areopagitica

......

par. 21 whether because i am

chain of being

......

Newman ... “Liberal Knowledge its Own end”

......

par. 24 2. but is culture

“working the thing which is good”

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

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

par. 28 this view gives

Bentham ... the issue between pushpin and poetry

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

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

par. 29 4. it was noticed

“willing suspension of disbelief”

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

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

par. 30 (a) to the perfected

being learned in Gethsemane

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

Galahad is the son of Launcelot

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

par. 31 (b) the road described

The road described by Dante and Patmore

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

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

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

eunuchs for the Kingdom’s sake

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

romantic love also has proved a schoolmaster

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

par. 33 (e) the dangers of

(note) Sehnsucht as “spilled religion”

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

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

par. 34 i have dwelt chiefly

in Ricardian terms

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

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

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

par. 37 has it any part

the sweeping of the room in Herbert’s poem

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

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things Thee to see,

And what I do in anything,

To do it as for Thee. (...)

All may of Thee partake:

Nothing can be so mean

which with this tincture – For Thy sake –

will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause

Makes drudgery divine:

Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,

Makes that and th’ action fine.

Sidney’s poetics

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

Address

the Editor of Theology

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

par. 2 to mr carritt i reply

Mr Carritt

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

the fruition of God

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

Puritan, quotha!

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

III

par. 8 2. in theology, may, 1940

“sweet, sweet, sweet poison”

Shakespeare, King John I.1, 212.

par. 12 if any real disagreement

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

Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985), Swiss Francophone author. L’amour et l’Occident, Book VII, chapter 5: “Dès qu’il [l’Éros] cesse d’être un dieu, il cesse d’être un démon.”. Lewis reviewed this book’s English edition in Theology, June 1940. The translation was first published as Passion and Society, and later, revised and expanded, as Love in the Western World (1956).

back to survey

RELIGION: REALITY OR SUBSITUTE?

par. 7 but enough of

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

Milton, Paradise Lost IV, 477-491.

pons asinorum

......

Barfield

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

back to survey

THE WEIGHT OF GLORY

par. 1 if you asked

Kant

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

par. 5 in speaking of

inconsolable secret

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

Wordsworth

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

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

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

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

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

Bergson

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

par. 6 do what they will

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

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

Fools! That in man’s brief term

He cannot all things view,

Affords no ground to affirm

That there are Gods who do;

Nor does being weary prove that he has where to rest.

par. 10 when i began

Milton

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

Johnson

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

Thomas Aquinas

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

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

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

Prospero’s book

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

I’ll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I’ll drown my book.

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

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

par. 11 and now notice

“the journey homeward to habitual self”

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

“Nobody marks us”

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

par. 12 perhaps it seems

“I never knew you. Depart from Me.”

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

par. 13 and this brings

we are to be given the Morning Star

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

“beauty born of murmuring sound”

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

The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward round

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face.

par. 14 and in there

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

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

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

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

torrens voluptatis

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

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ON ETHICS

par. 17 what, then, shall we

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

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

par. 20 there are many people

a scientific Humanist

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

par. 26 in thus recalling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DE FUTILITATE

par. 1 when i was asked

Sir Henry Tizard

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

par. 3 this cosmic futility

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

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

par. 5 now it seems

Russell ... The Worship of a Free Man

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

the Wessex novels

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

the Shropshire Lad

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

Lucretius

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

par. 12 but the distinction

I am not a subjective idealist

......

par. 18 at first sight

Swinburne, Hardy and Shelley’s Prometheus

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

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

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

par. 24 i cannot and never

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

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

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THE POISON OF SUBJECTIVISM

par. 4 but when we turn

Hooker, Butler en Doctor Johnson

Richard Hooker (1554-1600), English theologian; his work Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie is a defence of the Church of England as a golden mean between Roman Catholicism and Protestant fixation on the Scriptures. / Joseph Butler (1692-1752), Anglican bishop, author of The Analogy of Religion, a defence of revealed religion against deistic attacks. / Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), English writer, poet, critic and lexicographer, immortalized in the biography (1791) by James Boswell.

par. 15 and yet it will

depositum fidei

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

From the Stoic and Confucian... etc.

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

as Aristotle said, no arche

......?

par. 16 and what of the second

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

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

par. 17 the two grand

Pickwick

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

par. 18 so far i have

“Humanism” and “liberalism” ... simply as terms of disapprobation

......

par. 19 as regards the fall

our practical reason as radically unsound

......

par. 21 at this point

sic volo, sic jubeo

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

ambulavi in mirabilibus supra me

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

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THE FUNERAL OF A GREAT MYTH

par. 2 such, at all events

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

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

par. 3 by this great myth

Bridges’ Testament of Beauty

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

the work of Wells

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

Professor Alexander

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

par. 6 we have, first

hints and germs of the theory in scientific circles before 1859

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

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

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

par. 7 the finest expression

Shaw

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

Olaf Stapledon

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

Oceanus, in Keats’s Hyperion

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

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

ʼtis the eternal law

That first in beauty should be first in might.

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

The Nibelung’s Ring

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

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

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

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

par. 8 is shaw’s back to methuselah

Back to Methuselah

See note to par. 7, above.

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

......

par. 9 that, then, is

“The prophetic soul of the big world”

Shakespeare, Sonnet 107.

par. 10 in the second place

Watson, quoted in Nineteenth Century

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

“special creation”

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

par. 11 in the science

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

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

“onwards and upwards”

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

par. 13 the drama proper

the Rheingold

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

the Volsungs

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

“wantons as in her prime”

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

now is come

Into the blissful field, through groves of myrrh,

And flowering odours, cassia, nard and balm,

A wilderness of sweets; for Nature here

Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will

Her virgin fancies, pouring forth more sweet,

Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.

the young Beowulf

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

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

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

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

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

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

par. 14 but these were only

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

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

Universal darkness covers all

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

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;

Light dies before they uncreating word;

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,

And universal darkness buries all.

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

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

What th’ insearchable dispose

Of Highest Wisdom brings about ...

His servants he, with new acquist

Of true experience from this great event,

With peace and consolation hath dismissed,

And calm of mind, all passion spent.

enden sah’ ich die Welt

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

par. 17 i have been speaking

the American “Humanists”

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

par. 18 the basic idea

the Rocket

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

par. 19 another source of

Mencken

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

par. 20 the myth also

as Keats’ gods transcended the Titans

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

Mima ... Stammenlied ... Nothung

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

par. 22 finally, modern politics

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

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

thou hast great allies;

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

back to survey

TRANSPOSITION

par. 2 the difficulty i feel

an intermittent “variety of religious experience”

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

Occam’s razor

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

par. 5 now it may be true

Pepys’s Diary

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

par. 16 everything is different

The spiritual man judges all things and is judged of none

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

par. 19 i believe that this doctrine

I believe that this doctrine of a Transposition...

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

par. 24 so with us

“We know not what we shall be”

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

par. 25 you can put it

flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom

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

illustrious with being

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

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

par. 27 1. i hope it is

Developmentalist

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

par. 28 2. i have found it

Docetism

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

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

Athanasian Creed, 35.

in mirabilibus supra me

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

back to survey

THE INNER RING

par. 3 and of course

the World, the Flesh and the Devil

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

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

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

par. 8 i must now make

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

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

par. 19 we are told

the house in Alice Through the Looking-Glass

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

back to survey

IS THEOLOGY POETRY?

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

par. 3 the other term

simple, sensuous and passionate

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

par. 5 considered as poetry

strictly Unitarian

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

“of a mingled yarn, good and ill together”

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

the Parthenon

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

the Orlando Furioso

......

par. 9 but i must beware

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Een van de bekendste blijspelen van William Shakespeare (Een midzomernachtsdroom), gepubliceerd in 1600.

Balfour in Theism and Humanism

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

par. 11 i am not of course

H. G. Wells ... “Wellsianity”

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

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

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

universal darkness covers all

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

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;

Light dies before they uncreating word;

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,

And universal darkness buries all.

par. 12 such a world-drama

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

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

Mr. Brown

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

professor Price

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

the Divine light ... “lighteneth every man”

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

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

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

par. 20 2. we are invited

Dr. I. A. Richards

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

par. 21 for all these reasons

the heart is deceitful

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

a fortnight ago

See the note on “Mr. Brown”, above.

the Bergsonian critique of orthodox Darwinism

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

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

......

D. M. S. Watson

special creation

Rocket

emergent evolution

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

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MEMBERSHIP

par. 1 no christian and

“What a man does with his solitude”

Alfred North Whitehead, Religon in the Making (1926), Lecture I, “Religion in History”. “Religion is what the individual does with its own solitariness.”

par. 2 in our own age

in an age when collectivism is ruthlessly defeating the individual

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

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

i.e. around the end of the First World War. When Lewis began his studies in Oxford in January 1919, he lost no time in joining “The Martlets”, a literary and debating society of the sort he must have in mind here. It was limited to twelve members, and he delivered his first Martlets paper in March 1919. The development toward the more collectivist type of society was almost certainly encouraged, unintendedly, by Lewis’s own activities as co-founder and president of the Socratic Club during “the war”, i.e. the Second World War.

Vaughan

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

Traherne

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

Wordsworth

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

Charlotte M. Yonge

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

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

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

par. 4 this feeling is just

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

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

par. 7 a dim perception

The Wind in the Willows

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

Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness

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

Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller

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

par. 12 that i believe

Filmer

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

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

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

par. 14 do not misunderstand me

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

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

He certainly loved all to the death

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

par. 15 euqality is a quantitative

Chesterton ... we become taller when we bow

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

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

par. 16 in this way then

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

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

par. 19 to say this is

Pelagian

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

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ON CHURCH MUSIC

par. 1 i am a layman

laicus ... laicissimus

(Latin) “lay”, i.e. non-specialist; the suffix -issimus expresses the superlative, “utterly lay”.

par. 12 the right way

“the dragons and great deeps” ... the “frosts and snows”

Lewis appears to be freely quoting fragments from the canticle “Benedicite, omnia opera” in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (first section, Morning Prayer) – or perhaps from its Latin original in the Vulgate version of the Bible. The original context is the so-called “Song of the Three Holy Children” in an apocryphal section of the Book of Daniel, chapter 3:24-90. The “children” are in fact the three men who survived the fiery furnace. The canticle is a translation of verses 57-88; verses 69-70 and 78-79 appear there as

O ye Frost and Cold, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever.

O ye Ice and Snow, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. ...

O ye Seas and Floods, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever.

O ye Whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever.

(The Latin original behind “Whale” is cetus, designating any kind of sea monster.)

“Mine are the cattle upon a thousand hills” ... “If I am hungry...”

Psalm 50:10 and 12.

For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills ... If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof.

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HISTORICISM

motto

Colerigde

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet and philosopher. Aids to Reflection (1825), “Aphorisms on that which is indeed Spiritual Religion”, comment on Aphorism II. “He that will fly without wings must fly in his dreams; and till he awakes, will not find out, that to fly in a dream is but to dream of flying.”

par. 3 when carlyle spoke

Carlyle ... “book of revelations”

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), British historian and essayist. The reference it to his philosophical and autobiographical essay Sartor Resartus II.8:

Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

Novalis ... “evangel”

Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801), German romantic poet; the reference is probably to a passage in his essay Die Christenheit oder Europa.

Hegel ... progressive self-manifestation of absolute spirit

......

Keats’s Hyperion ... Oceanus ... ’tis the eternal law...

Hyperion: A Fragment (1820), II, 228-229, by the English poet John Keats (1795-1821). The Titans have dethroned and castrated their father and set up Cronus as king, and are then challenged by the next generation of gods in the person of Zeus, son of Cronus. In Keats’s version, the sun-god Hyperion is the only Titan still undeposed, and he is the hope of his fellow Titans. Only the sea-god Oceanus argues for resignation in the face of the irresistible power of the next generation.

Lewis used the same quotation in an essay he wrote slightly later, “The World’s Last Night” (1951). A much longer quotation from the speech of Oceanus appeared in his earlier paper “The Funeral of a Great Myth” (c. 1944). Keats also wrote another version of the poem, called The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, which was published in 1856.

par. 5 historicism exists on

Iliad A

......

Oedipus Tyrannus

i.e. King Oedipus, or (Latin) Oedipus Rex, one of the seven surviving tragedies of the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles (c. 496-406 BC).

par. 6 but subtler and

Fr Paul Henri ... Deneke lecture at Oxford

Paul Henri ......? The Deneke lectures were endowed by Philip Maurice Deneke (1842-1925), a London banker of German origin, who was probably the father of Margaret Deneke (see Lewis’s Collected Letters III, p. 1552, note 193).

par. 7 that history in

fas est et ab hoste doceri

(Latin) “It is right to be taught even by an enemy.” Ovid, Metamorphoses IV, 428.

Ragnarok

In Scandinavian mythology this word denotes what in German is called the Götterdämmerung, the “twilight of the gods”.

Wagners Wotan ... the Eddaic original

Wotan is a German form of the name Odin. By Wotan’s “Eddaic original” Lewis means the earliest written account of the god Odin’s character in the Elder Edda, a 12th-century Old Norse collection of mythological poems.

fata Jovis

(Latin) “Jove’s ordinances”. Aeneid IV, 614.

Tantae molis erat

“So vast was the effort” (viz. to found the Roman race. Aeneid I, 33. “Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.”

Dante ... De Monarchia

......

St Augustine ... The De Civitate

......

par. 9 what appears, on christian

in via ... in patria

(Latin) “on the way” ... “in the fatherland”.

par. 10 we must remind

Gibbon or Mommsen, or the Master of Trinity

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), English historian, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), German historian, Nobel laureate for Literature 1902, author of Römische Geschichte.

George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962), English historian, was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1940 to 1951; author of History of England (1926) English Social History (1944). His work was widely read and praised for its happy combination of readability and exact scholarship.

par. 11 when men say

“esemplastic”

Coleridge (see note to this essay’s motto, above) coined this word from the Greek words eis hen plattein “to make into one whole”. By “esemplastic power” he meant a human faculty that differs subtly from “imagination”. See his Biographia Literaria X (first part) and XIII.

par. 15 but even if

“the past as it really was”

After a famous saying of the German Historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), wie es eigentlich gewesen. He asserted that the historian’s task was not “die Vergangenheit zu richten” but “bloß zu zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen” (“not to judge the past, but merely to show how it really was”.

Ad nos vix tenuis famae pelabitur aura

“A mere breath of their fame reaches us.” Virgil, Aeneid VII, 646.

par. 25 this provides the

Whitehead or Jeans or Eddington

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), British mathematician and philosopher; James H. Jeans (18771946), British physicist and popular writer on science; Arthur S. Eddington (1882-1944), British physicist.

Caveas disputare de occultis Dei judiciis, etc.

Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi (The Imitation of Christ) III.58.

par. 26 it will, i hope

what MacDonald called “the holy present”

The Seaboard Parish, I.3. Cf. C. S. Lewis’s Macdonald Anthology, Nrs. 74, 78 and 283.

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THE WORLD’S LAST NIGHT

First published as “Christian Hope – Its meaning for today” in the Methodist journal Religion in Life XXI (U.S., Winter 1951-ʼ52). First published in book form in The World’s Last Night, New York 1960; then in Fern-seed and Elephants, London 1975.

par. 1 there are many reasons

“This same Jesus,” said the angels in Acts, “shall so come in like manner ...”

Acts 1:11.

“Hereafter,” said our Lord himself ...“shall ye see the Son of Man ... coming in the clouds of heaven.”

Matthew 26:64.

the faith once given to the saints

Epistle of Jude, 3, “Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.”

par. 3 many are shy

Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), German polymath, here considered as author of his Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (1906; English: The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1910). This book itself marked a rejection of 19th-century attempts to reconstruct a “historical Jesus”. These had often resulted in presenting Jesus as a prophet or embodiment of sheer modern progressivism. Lewis and Schweitzer are in fact agreed that “apocalyptic” predictions and a modern mindset are incompatible.

William Miller

American Baptist preacher (1782-1849). In 1818 he concluded from passages in the Bible (especially Daniel 8:14) that the Second Coming of Christ was going to happen some 25 years from then. Miller found a large number of adherents for his views, and as the year 1843 approached he decided that the great day must come between 21 March 1843 and 21 March 1844. When this term had expired, new calculations resulted in a new, precise date: 22 October 1844. This day subsequently became known as the Great Disappointment, when many followers lost faith in Miller’s ideas. However, some stuck to his ideas in one form or another, and eventually founded a new Christian church communion, the Seventh-Day Adventists.

par. 6 as an argument against

“for all time”

Cf. the passage in the previous paragraph, “Every great man is partly of his own age and partly for all time.” From Ben Jonson’s ode to Shakespeare in the first folio edition (1623), often reprinted in modern one-volume complete editions. “He was not of an age, but for all time!”

par. 11 a generation which has

The Lamb is slain

Revelation 13:8 (cf. Rev. 5:6 ff).

And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him [a beast with seven heads], whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

par. 15 the first thing

Oceanus ... ʼtis the eternal law...

John Keats (1795-1821), Hyperion: A Fragment, II, 228-229. The Titans have dethroned and castrated their father and set up Cronus as king, and are then challenged by the next generation of gods in the person of Zeus, son of Cronus. In Keats’s version, the sun-god Hyperion is the only Titan still undeposed, and he is the hope of his fellow Titans. Only the sea-god Oceanus argues for resignation in the face of the irresistible power of the next generation.

Lewis used the same quotation in his slightly earlier essay “Historicism” of 1950. A much longer quotation from the speech of Oceanus appeared in his paper “The funeral of a Great Myth”, c. 1944. Hyperion was published in 1820. Keats also wrote another version, called The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, published in 1856.

Wagner describes his tetralogy

i.e. the German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) describes his cycle of four operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen, in which Siegfried is part 3.

the attraction of Darwinism ... a pre-existing myth ... partly political

Darwin himself, while developing his theory of natural selection, not only feared violent condemnations from both religious and scientific quarters: he also feared being hailed for the wrong reasons and by the wrong sort of people. After his theory had been launched in 1859, among the many reactions there was indeed a loud welcome from those who took it as confirmation of radical and atheistic ideas which Darwin considered as dangerous irrelevancies – ideas which could only serve to discredit and distort the theory. Thus Karl Marx sent him an inscribed copy of Das Kapital in 1873 (from a “sincere admirer”) and Marx’s son-in-law, the libertarian Edward Aveling, suggested to Darwin in 1880 that the second volume of Das Kapital be dedicated to him.

For a fuller discussion of the “pre-existing myth” see Lewis’s earlier essay “The Funeral of a Great Myth”

par. 21 but we think thus

angels and archangels and all the company of heaven

From the Anglican Book of Common Prayer; Hymn of Praise at the end of the “Proper Prefaces”, i.e. prayers immediately preceding the Communion.

Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore praising thee, and saying: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory: Glory be to thee, O Lord most High. Amen.

that the Author will have something to say to each of us

This appears to be a reference to Revelation 2:17, “To him that overcometh will I give ... a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” See Lewis’s discussion of this in the last chapter of The Problem of Pain, which is clearly inspired by George Macdonald’s sermon on this text, “The New Name”, in Unspoken Sermons I (1867).

par. 26 not the therefore

the heavens roll up like a scroll

Isaiah 34:4.

And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree.

par. 27 of this folly

Of this folly George MacDonald has written well.

Unspoken Sermons II (1885), “The Words of Jesus on Prayer”, a sermon on Luke 18:1. The passage quoted is on pp. 225-226 in the Johannesen edition of 1997; Lewis has omitted a few sentences.

Lo here or lo there are the signs of his coming

Matteüs 24:23, Jesus answering to his disciples’ question “what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?”:

Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. ... Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.

par. 28 sometimes this question

“What if this present were the world’s last night?”

John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIII, first line.

Perfect love casteth out fear

I John 4:18.

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

par. 36 i do not find

that sign in the clouds, those heavens rolled up like a scroll

Lewis is alluding to Matthew 24:30 and Isaiah 34:4.

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PETITIONARY PRAYER: A PROBLEM WITHOUT AN ANSWER

par. 4 the A pattern is

Gethsemane ... “Nevertheless, not my will but thine”

Luke 22:42, and parallel places in Matthew 26 and Mark 14.

par. 8 and, once again

numinibus vota exaudita malignis

(Latin) “Vows granted by malicious divinities”. Juvenal (Roman poet, 60-140 CE), Satires X, 111.

par. 19 and this at once

mèden diakrinomenos

(Greek) “with no doubting”; James 1:6.

par. 21 another attempted

quod nefas dicere

Apuleius (second century CE), Roman poet; Metamorphose (or The Golden Ass) II.8. “Quod nefas dicere, nec quod sit ullum huius rei tam dirum exemplum” – “It’s wrong for me to say this unless I add an example of what I mean.”

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DE DESCRIPTIONE TEMPORUM

Lewis delivered his inaugural lecture in Cambridge on his 56th birthday, 29 November 1954. It was first published in 1955 by Cambridge University Press and reprinted in the volumes

They Asked for a Paper (1962) and Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (1969). In April 1955 Lewis read a slightly adapted version for the BBC radio under the title “The Great Divide”.

par. 2 what most attracted

Thomas Wyat

English poet (1503-1542) who introduced French and Italian verse forms in English poetry.

par. 3 from the formula

Humanist propaganda

“Humanist” is to be understood here in the original 15th-century meaning: humanists were scholars who studied and edited the sources of ancient Greek, Roman and Christian civilization.

Richardson

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), English novelist.

Mrs Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), English novelist and literary critic; she devised her own stream-of-consciousness technique, with far more generally accessible results than James Joyce’s. The Waves appeared in 1931.

par. 4 the meaning of my

Isidore

St. Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636), encyclopaedist and archbishop; last of the Latin church fathers.

Professor Toynbee

Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975), English historian and philosopher of history, author of A Study of History (10 volumes, 1934-1954).

Spengler

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), German philosopher of history, author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 1918-1922).

par. 5 the first division

the Dark Ages

In European history, this is the period from the fall of the Roman Empire until the 11th century, i.e. roughly 450-1050 CE. It includes the time of Charlemagne and the Viking raids. While other languages will often label this period as “Early Middle Ages” or perhaps “Dark Middle Ages”, in English the term “Middle Ages” is often reserved for the five centuries following the Dark Ages.

Gibbon

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), English historian, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788). One novelty of this famous work, being a product of the Enlightenment, was that it described the advent of Christianity as an essential factor of decline and fall, not as a triumph of grace and truth.

par. 6 the partial loss

Virgil

Roman poet (70-19 BC); his main work, the epic poem Aeneid, describes the preliminaries of the history of Rome as a sequel to the history of Troy.

par. 7 2. to gibbon the

Beowulf

Old English (Anglo-Saxon) poem of the 7th or 8th century.

the Hildebrand

The Hildebrandslied (“Song of Hildebrand”), 8th-century heroic lay in old High German.

The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-British poet and literary critic, Nobel laureate for Literature 1948; The Waste Land was published in 1922.

Mr Jones

David Jones (1895-1974), English poet, painter and essayist; The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing was published in 1952.

the audience of Homer

i.e. the ancient Greeks from the ninth century BC onward. The actual existence of a historical figure called Homer who wrote the Iliad and Odyssey has been doubted since the ancient Greeks themselves. The two epic poems ascribed to Homer are now usually thought to date from around 800 BC in their written form.

par. 8 3. the christening of europe

Pausanias

Pausanias Periegetes (“the Guide”), ancient Greek geographer, historian and archaeologist, second century CE.

Professor Ryle

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), British analytical philosopher. From 1945 to 1967 he was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford – which C. S. Lewis was leaving as he gave the present lecture.

Thomas Browne

Thomas Browne (1605-1682), English physician and writer, famed for his ‘poetical’ prose; author of Religio Medici (1642).

Gregory the Great

Pope Gregory I (c. 540-604).

Seneca

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman philosopher (c. 4 BC-65 CE)

Dr Johnson

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), English writer, poet, literary critic and lexicographer.

Burton

Robert Burton (1577-1640), English scholar, writer, divine; author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).

par. 10 the next frontier

I have before now been accused of exaggerating it

The perceived exaggeration was contained in his book The Allegory of Love (1936), for example in chapter 1, “Courtly Love”. Discussing the new love poetry of the Troubadours and Chrétien de Troyes around the year 1100, Lewis calls the novelty of courtly love a “revolution” compared with which “the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature” (p. 4).

Chanson de Roland

Old French epic poem dating from around 1100 CE.

the Lancelot

Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart), a poem in Old French written by Chrétien de Troyes around the year 1180. Lewis described this work as “the flower of the courtly tradition in France, as it was in its early maturity” (Allegory of Love, 23).

par. 11 a third possible frontier

Copernicanism

......

Descartes

René Descartes (1596-1650), French philosopher and mathematician.

par. 12 it is by these steps

Jane Austen ... Persuasion

Jane Austen (1775-1817), English novelist. Persuasion was her last novel, published in 1816.

Walter Scott ... Waverley Novels

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Scottish novelist, poet literary critic, biographer. His first historical novel, Waverley, appeared anonymously in 1814; his subsequent books were published as “by the author of Waverley”.

par. 13 1. i begin with what

Punch

English magazine of humour and satire, 1841-1992.

par. 15 2. in the arts

Alexandrian poetry

An intellectualistic school of poetry in Alexandria, third century BC, including Apollonius of Rhodes and Callimachus of Cyrene.

Skaldic poetry ... kenningar

i.e. the poetry of the skalds, Icelandic and Scandinavian court poets of the 9th-13th centuries. Kenningar (sing. kenning) are a type of metaphor which was in regular use with the skalds.

Donne

John Donne (1572-1631), English poet and preacher.

Wordsworth ... Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet. Lyrical Ballads (1798) was a volume of poetry by him and his friend Coleridge, with a famous preface by Wordsworth.

Epic of Gilgamesh

Mesopotamian (Akkadian) epic poem dating from c. 2000 BC.

par. 16 3. thirdly, there is

Westminster Hall

Oldest existing part of the Palace of Westminster in London, used for ceremonial functions.

par. 17 4. lastly, i play

Keats’s Hyperion and Wagner’s Ring are pre-Darwinian

Lewis made the same point using the same two examples in his essays “The Funeral of a Great Myth” (c. 1944) and “The World’s Last Night” (1951). John Keats’s poem Hyperion appeared in 1820. Richard Wagner’s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen was not actually published or performed before Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), but Wagner had been working on it since 1849.

par. 19 at any rate

when Waterloo was fought

The Battle of Waterloo, in present-day Belgium, 1815.

par. 21 first, for the reassurance

Dante read Virgil

In his Divina Commedia, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) described Virgil as his guide on part of the journey from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven.

par. 22 and now for the claim

Henry More

English philosopher (1614-1687) in the school of the Cambridge Platonists.

back to survey

THE PSALMS

par. 2 how old the psalms

the Magnificat

Luke 1:46-55.

par. 3 in most moods

compared even with Xenophon

Xenophon (431–c. 355 BC), Greek general and historian; the allusion here is to his Cyropaedia, a didactic novel in which the Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, is portrayed as the ideal of a good ruler.

par. 6 a similar strangeness

when the hero, in Siegfried, forces the dwarf to confess that he is not his son

A scene in the first act of Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried, the third part of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

par. 9 i do not know

“smells to heaven”

Shakespeare, Hamlet III.3 (King Claudius):

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;

It hath the primal eldest curse uponʼt –

A brother’s murder!

the “insolence of office”

Shakespeare, Hamlet III.1, 74. From Hamlet’s famous speech “To be, or not to be”:

For who would bear the whips and scrons of time,

Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin?

par. 12 it is from this

that phrase in Revelation, “The wrath of the lamb”

cf. Revelation 6:16, where “the kings of the earth, and the great men” etc.

and hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.

par. 21 the day of judgement

as Julian of Norwich said, “All will be well and all manner of thing will be well.”

Julian of Norwich (c. 1342–c. 1413), English mystic and anchoress; the reference is to her Revelations of Divine Love, XXVII. The words quoted are not in the Bible, but in the vision described they are certainly what Lewis calls “Our Lord’s own words”.

par. 30 the experience is dark

“dark night of the soul”

The phrase comes from the Spanish, Noche oscura. This is the title of a poem, and of a treatise about that poem, by the 16th-century mystical writer Juan de la Cruz (John of the Cross, 1542-1591).

par. 33 1. a small, ugly

Malan

Daniel François Malan (1874-1959), Prime Minister of South Africa 1948-1954, founder of the politics of apartheid, or racial segregation.

McCarthy

Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), US Senator who became notorious for the way he used a fear of Soviet spies in America to whip up an anti-communist hysteria in 1952-1954. Ruthlessly issuing false accusations and destroying innocent people’s reputations, he seemed to pursue and relish the demagoguery as an end in itself rather than as a means of uncovering Soviet agents. His own reputation was fatally damaged when a 36-hour public hearing was broadcast on TV: his extreme insolence was thus revealed to the nation.

Chaka

Shaka or Chaka (c. 1787-1828), Zulu chieftain in South-Africa.

par. 39 if one had

Coventry Patmore ... to live “in the high mountain air of public obloquy”

Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), British poet, The Unknown Eros (1877), Book I, XV, “Peace”; “...in the fine mountain-air of public obloquy.”

back to survey

ON OBSTINACY IN BELIEF

Paper read to the Oxford Socratic Club under the title “Faith and Evidence”, 30 April 1953; first published (under the present title) in the American literary magazine The Sewanee Review, Vol. 63, Fall 1955. First published in book form in The World’s Last Night, New York 1960; then in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, London 1965. This paper was the last which Lewis read for the Socratic Club. It might serve as a sequel to his 1944 Socratic paper “Is Theology Poetry?”: while the earlier piece deals with reasons for people to embrace the Christian faith, the present one deals with reasons to persist in it.

par. 1 papers have more

to proportion the strength of his belief exactly to the evidence

Lewis is almost literally quoting James Balfour’s Theism and Humanism (1915), p. 141, discussing Leslie Stephen’s work on this subject:

the empirical agnostic ... holds ... that the strength of our beliefs should be exactly proportioned to the evidence which “experience” can supply, and that everyone knows or can discover exactly what this evidence amounts to.

Stephen had been referring to a well-known aphorism of John Locke, also quoted by Balfour on the same page. Another classic formulation of the same idea is “Clifford’s Rule” (see note to par. 12, below).

“faith that has stood firm”

Although the phrase is given in quotation marks, it does not appear to be an literal quotation or at least not one from the New Testament.

par. 5 it may be asked

solipsism

Solipsism is the doctrine or conviction that the existence of things outside or independent from one’s own consciousness cannot be proved, so that we can never be certain that they really exist. De term is derived from the Latin phrase solus ipse, “only self”. See also next note.

as they now say ... category mistakes

The term “category mistake” got currency through the work of the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), a colleague of Lewis’s at Magdalen College during the years 1945-54. Ryle was greatly interested in clarifying concepts. One important way in which he proposed to do this was to identify “category mistakes” – statements that use words in meanings they simply cannot have (e.g. “This corner sounds blue”). In this way many philosophical questions would be unmasked as cases of sheer confusion. Ryle applied this method to questions on the relation between mind and body in his influential book The Concept of Mind (1949). It is in this context that he mentions “solipsism” as the unhappy outcome of “official”, traditional theories of self-knowledge (ch. II.10, VI.1). His own theory is then offered as the way to free the world, at last, of this old pseudo problem. See also the next place where Lewis mentions categroy mistakes in the present essay, two paragraphs further on.

par. 6 there is, of course

Dante ... fisici e metafisici argomenti

Paradiso XXIV, 134. Near the end of Dante’s Divina Commedia, this Canto and the next two deal with Faith, Hope and Charity respectively. Faith is the subject of a conversation with the apostle Peter, who asks the author what belief (or faith) is; whether Dante has it; whence it comes; what Dante believes; and once again, whence it comes. Dante’s answer is

Io credo in uno Iddio

Solo ed eterno ...

Ed a tal creder non ho io pur prove

fisice e metafisice ...

i.e. “I believe in one God, sole and eternal ... And of such faith I do not only have physical and metaphysical proofs...” See also Paradiso XXVI, 25, where Dante answers the question how he knows that all Love is eventually aimed at the Good: Per filosofici argomenti, / E per autorità che quinci scende, “By philososphic arguments, and by authority that descends from them.”

par. 7 it is not the purpose

Capaneus in Statius ... primus in orbe deos fecit timor.

(Latin) “Fear first brought the gods into the world.” In ancient Greek mythology, Capaneus is one of seven legendary heroes from Argos who make war on the city of Thebes. The Greek tragedian Aeschylus wrote his Seven Against Thebes on the subject centuries before the Roman poet Statius wrote his epic Thebaid in the first century BC. Lewis refers the episode in Statius where Amphiaraus, a seer among the Seven, has consulted the gods and predicts that their campaign will end in disaster. Capaneus, enraged by what he regards as mere weak-heartedness, then declares that the whole idea of there being gods at all is a product of fear. His words (III.661) are loudly acclaimed; but in the end Amphiaraus is proved right.

Euhemerus

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

Tylor

Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), British pioneer of Cultural Anthropology, author of Primitive Culture (1871). He regarded human civilizations as products of evolution in the Darwinian sense. Tylor coined the term ‘animism’ for what he considered to be the earliest stage of religion – when the phenomenon of dreaming leads people to think that all creatures and all things each have their own immaterial soul (anima).

Frazer

James George Frazer (1854-1941), Scottish cultural anthropologist from the evolutionary school of Tylor (see note above). His famous work The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1890-1914) is a wide-ranging comparative study of myths and rituals all over the world.

De overal terugkerende voorstelling van een stervende en weer tot leven komende god verklaarde Frazer als weerspiegeling van de cyclus van het agrarische bestaan.

par. 12 this can be done

Clifford’s Rule

Clifford’s Rule, a maxim of the English mathematician and philosopher William K. Clifford (1845-79) in his essay “The Ethics of Belief” (1879): “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

par. 13 now to accept

“to deceive if possible the very elect”

Matthew 24:24.

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

par. 15 now of course we see

Que chacun regagne sa place!

(French) “Everyone back to his seat!”

par. 17 the saying “blessed are

“Blessed are those that have not seen and have believed”

John 20:29.

par. 18 our opponents, then

Credere Deum esse ... Credere in Deum

(Latin) “To believe that God exists” – “To believe in God”. Cf. Augustine, Sermones ad populum CXLIV.2 (on John 16:8-11); In Evangelium Ioannis XXIX.6 (on John 7:17, referring to 6:29); and Enarrationes in Psalmos, on Psalm 78:8. Thomas Aquinas dealt with this distinction between ways of “credere” in Summa Theologiae IIa IIae, q. 2, art. 2.

back to survey

A SLIP OF THE TONGUE

Sermon delivered in Magdalene College, Cambridge, on Sunday 29 January 1956. First published in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, London 1965.

par. 1 when a layman

comparing notes

A term used by Lewis more than once in his later years to characterize his own work as a lay theologian; see Reflections on the Psalms ch. 1, par. 2; Letters to Malcolm ch. 12, par. 4; and a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne of 24 November 1960 (Collected Letters III, p. 1212).

par. 2 not long ago

the collect for the fourth Sunday after Trinity

A prayer in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1662):

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal.

par. 5 the root principle

Trollope’s Last Chronicle

Last of the six “Barchester” novels by Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). Lewis is referring to chapter 33, where the actual course of events is a little different. Dr Grantly wants to disinherit his son Henry and orders his wife to write a letter telling this to Henry. Mrs Grantley suggests it would be better first to let his anger cool down and to postpone further steps till the next day. Dr Grantley agrees, and

he went out, about his parish, intending to continue to think of his son’s iniquity, so that he might keep his anger hot, – red hot. Then he remembered that the evening would come, and that he would say his prayers; and he shook his head in regret, – in a regret of which he was only half conscious, though it was very keen, and which he did not attempt to analyse – as he reflected that his rage would hardly be able to survive that ordeal. How common with us it is to repine that the devil is not stronger over us than he is.

The next morning, Mrs Grantly deftly skirts her duty to write the letter.

par. 6 this is my endlessly

St. John of the Cross called God a sea

Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591), Spanish mystical writer, canonized in 1726. ......

par. 9 for of course that

“He must increase and I decrease”

John 3:30. John the Baptist is answering questions about his relationship to Christ.

par. 11 this is, i take it

Thomas More said, “If ye make indentures with God...”

St. Thomas More, English humanist scholar and statesman (1478-1535), author of Utopia. He was executed on a charge of high treason because of his opposition to King Henry VIII’s church policy; in 1935 he was canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic church. ......?

Law ... Behmenite period

William Law (1686-1761), English theologian. As a non-juror he could not hold functions in the Church of England; as author of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) he became an important inspiration for Evangelical Christianity, notably influencing the Wesley brothers. Neither of the two quotations seems to be literal. The first goes back to a passage in chapter 3 of the Serious Call,

...we are plainly taught, that Religion is a state of labour and striving, and that many will fail of their salvation; not because they took no pains or care about it, but because they did not take pains and care enough; they only sought, but did not strive to enter in.’

Around 1735 Law developed an interest in the writings of the German mystic Jakob Böhme (1575-1624, also called Boehme or Behmen). Law’s own writings also became more mystical in character, with titles such as The Spirit of Prayer, The Way to Divine Knowledge, and The Spirit of Love. All this served to alienate the Wesleys from him.

The source of the second, “Behmenite” saying has proved harder to trace. ......?

par. 12 it is a remarkable

to count the cost

Long before this sermon, Lewis had highlighted this notion of “counting the cost” by making it the subject and the title of one of his last chapters in Beyond Personality (1944), a little book which was reprinted as Book IV of Mere Christianity (1952).

par. 13 and yet, i am not

un-Pelagian

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

the Imitation: Da hodie perfecte incipere – grant me to make...

Thomas à Kempis, De Imitatio Christi I.19.1, “...da mihi nunc hodie perfecte incipere, quia nihil est, quod hactenus feci.”

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RELIGION AND ROCKETRY

First published as “Will We Lose God in Outer Space?”, in the English magazine Christian Herald, Vol. 81, April 1958; then as a pamphlet Shall We Lose God in Outer Space? by S.P.C.K., London 1959; under Lewis’s own title “Religion and Rocketry” first published in book form in The World’s Last Night, New York 1960; then in Fern-seed and Elephants, London 1975.

This piece may seem to have much in common with “The Seeing Eye” (1963), but there is in fact enough difference to justify the publication of both pieces. The present essay mainly deals with the salvation of humanity in a cosmic perspective, while the later piece discusses the question of God’s existence, answering a remark made by a Russian astronaut in 1963; the salvation theme is there only mentioned briefly at the end.

par. 2 but then came

Fred Hoyle

Englsih astronomer (1915-2001), director of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge; he also wrote science fiction. In the early 1950s, his theory of stellar nucleosynthesis lended support to what was to become known as the Anthropic Principle. This was the idea that any explanation for the universe should also explain how the universe has given rise to life and intelligence. Hoyle was a respected provider of controversial views in his field of study. When John Maddox retired as editor of Nature, he confessed that he had never thought it necessary to have Hoyle’s submissions peer-reviewed before publication.

par. 5 the supposed threat

“for us men and for our salvation...”

From the Nicene Creed (325 CE), as translated in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

Who for us men, and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man...

par. 7 2. supposing there was

“rational souls” ... spiritual animals”

In pre-modern times the term “rational soul” denoted the element by which humans are distinguished from animals. Lewis, assuming that the term still has some currency, is warning the reader that the modern meaning of “rational” is much narrower than the old meaning; see for a fuller explanation his book The Discarded Image (1964), VII B. The term “spiritual animals” might have had some temporary currency in the late 1950s; more generally Lewis is certainly referring to modern attempts to put a finger on the difference between humans and animals.

par. 10 3. if there are species

They that are whole need not the physician

Matthew 9:12.

par. 11 4. if all of them

Alice Meynell

English Roman Catholic poet and essayist (1847-1922).

par. 28 what we believe

evidence that would deceive (if it were possible) the very elect

Cf. Matthew 24:24.

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

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MODERN THEOLOGY AND BIBLICAL CRITICISM

(= FERN-SEED AND ELEPHANTS)

First published in Christian Reflections, 1967; then with changed title, and serving as title essay, in Fern-seed and Elephants, 1975. Later reprints of Christian Reflections adopted the essay’s changed title. Both titles were given by Walter Hooper, the editor of both volumes.

par. 1 this paper arose

the Principal [of Westcott House, Cambridge]

Westcott House, Cambridge, was founded in 1881 as the Cambridge Clergy Training School by its first president, Brooke Foss Westcott, Regius Professor of Divinity. His aim to provide training in line with the spirit of Scripture, “opposed to all dogmatism and full of all application”. The institute got its founder’s name in 1905. It continues in its original function to the present day, preparing students for the diaconate and the priesthood in the Church of England. Kenneth Moir Carey (1908-1979) was Principal of Westcott House 1948-1961 and Bishop of Edinburgh 1961-1975.

woe to you if you do not evangelize

After I Corinthians 9:16, “Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!”

par. 2 there are two sorts

Loisy, Schweitzer, Bultmann, Tillich, Vidler

– Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), French Catholic “modernist” theologian. Professor of Hebrew and of Sacred Scripture at the Institut catholique, Paris, he was excommunicated in 1908 and then became Professor of the History of Religions at the Collège de France.

– Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), German theologian, doctor and musician, author of Geschichte der Leben Jesu-Forschung (1906). ......

– Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), German theologian. ......

– Paul Tillich (1886-1965), German-American theologian. ......

– Alec Vidler (1899-1991), English theologian. ......

par. 5 in what is already

Auerbach

Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), German philologist and critic of literature. The book mentioned in Hooper’s footnote was first published in German as Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländische Literatur (1946) but did not become widely known until the English translation appeared in 1953.

par. 6 here, from bultmann’s

Bultmann, “Observe in what unassimilated fashion...”

Rudolf Bultmann, Theologie des Neuen Testaments (1953), § 4, “Die Frage nach dem messianischen Selbstbewußtsein Jesu”, p. 30.

Man beachte, wie unausgeglichen mit der Leidens- und Auferstehungsweissagung Mk 8, 31 auf sie die Parusieweissagung 8, 38 folgt.

Lewis is, of course, quoting the English translation published in 1952, as mentioned in Hooper’s footnote.

par. 7 finally, from the same

Bultmann, “The personality of Jesus has no importance for...”

Ibidem, § 5, ‘Das Problem des Verhältnisses der Verkündigung der Urgemeinde zur Verkündigung Jesu’, p. 36.

So hat ... für das Kerygma des Paulus wie des Johannes, wie überhaupt für das NT die Persönlichkeit Jesu keine Bedeutung; ja, die Tradition der Urgemeinde hat auch nicht etwa unbewußt ein Bild seiner Persönlichkeit bewahrt; jeder Versuch, es zu rekonstruieren, bleibt ein Spiel subjektiver Phantasie.

par. 8 so there is no

Bultmann contra mundum

cf. the phrase Athanasius contra mundum. ......?

Falstaff

A character in Shakespeare’s plays The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV (1 & 2), and Henry V (II.3, where his last hours are related by Mrs. Quickly).

Uncle Toby

A character in Tristram Shandy, a novel by Laurence Sterne (1713-1768).

Fanny Burney

Frances (or Fanny) Burney (1752-1840), English novelist and diarist. [connection with Johnson ......]

“We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten ...”

John 1:14, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

“which we have looked upon and our hands have handled.”

I John 1:1, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life...”

D.N.B.

Dictionary of National Biography.

par. 10 now for my second

The tradition of Jowett

Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) was Regius Professor of Greek at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was Master from 1870 onwards.

par. 14 until you come

currente calamo ... invita Minerva

(Latin) “as the pen runs” (i.e. “off the cuff”) – “Minerva not forthcoming”.

the one I really cared about ... was on William Morris

As a beginning student in Oxford in 1919 Lewis devoted his first talk to “The Martlets”, an undergraduate society, to William Morris. One of his last papers for this society, in 1937, also dealt with Morris and was published two years later in Rehabilitations; this was not really “very early” in Lewis’s career, as he says. The piece was later reprinted in Selected Literary Essays (1969).

par. 19 now this surely

reconstruct the history of Piers Plowman or The Faerie Queene...

Piers Plowman is a allegorical poem in Middle English by William Langland, or Langley, written in the second half of the 14th century. It has survived into modern times in three manuscripts, the shortest of which has 2567 lines and the longest 7375 lines. In 1908 the American scholar J. M. Manley asserted that this work had five authors. A controversy followed which resulted in a volume of contributions called The Piers Plowman Controversy (1910). In the end there was fairly general agreement again that Langland was the (only) author.

The Faerie Queene is a long and unfinished allegorical poem by Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). Of its twelve projected “Books”, the first three were published in 1590 and the next three in 1596. Part of the rest may have been destroyed when Irish rebels set fire to the author’s castle in Cork.

Lewis had been something of a specialist in long allegorical poems during the early years of his scholarly career, as testified by his book The Allegory of Love (1936).

par. 24 you must face

multa renascentur quae jam cecidere

(Latin) “Many things which formerly fell will come to birth again.” Horace (Roman poet 65-8 BC), Ars poetica, 70. Lewis used this saying as the motto for his early scholarly work The Allegory of Love (1936).

par. 25 nor can a man

McTaggart, Green, Bosanquet, Bradley

J. E. McTaggart (1866-1925), T. H. Green (1836-1882), Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923), F. H. Bradley (1846-1924), English philosophers.

par. 27 you must not

Lachmann

Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann (1793-1851), Germanist, philologist and pioneer of scholarly editing. The method called after him involves the arrangement of manuscripts into families and genealogical trees so as to achieve the best available idea of the original text. As a New Testament scholar (he worked in several fields) he developed the theory of “two sources” as well as the idea that Mark’s gospel is not the youngest but the oldest of the three Synoptic gospels.

par. 29 such scepticism might

Tyrrell ... “earlier and inadequte expressions of the religious idea...”

George Tyrrell, “The Apocalyptic Vision of Christ”, in Christianity at the Cross-Roads (1909), p. 125.

“We know not – oh we know not”

From the hymn “Jerusalem the Golden”, Hymns Ancient and Modern Nr. 228: “I know not, oh, I know not / What joys await us there...” which is based on the12th-century Latin hymn Urbs Sion aurea by Bernard of Cluny.

back to survey

THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER

First published in the American journal The Atlantic Monthly, January 1959. First published in book form in The World’s Last Night, New York 1960; then in Fern-seed and Elephants, London 1975.

Lewis wrote this a few years after an essay on “Petitionary Prayer” and some years before Letters to Malcolm, chiefly on Prayer, his last book. Although he did not generally avoid repeating himself from one piece to another, in the present case there are remarkably few repeats, certainly when it comes to drawing conclusions.

par. 7 there are, no doubt

In Getsemane ... that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.

The “cup” is mentioned in each of the three Synoptic Gospels. The words “It did not [pass]” may well be an echo from the poem “Gethsemane” (1918) by Rudyard Kipling, an English poet often quoted by Lewis. In it, a British soldier tells (posthumously?) about the trench war in northern France:

The officer sat on the chair,

The men lay on the grass,

And all the time we halted there

I prayed my cup might pass.

It didn’t pass – it didn’t pass –

It didn’t pass from me.

I drank it when we met the gas

Beyond Gethsemane!

par. 8 other things are proved

“You must not try experiments on God, your Master”

Matthew 4:7. “Jesus said unto him [the devil], It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

par. 10 the trouble is

“Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

Shakespeare, Hamlet III.3, last line. King Claudius, having murdered his own brother, at last realizes that “my offence is rank, it smells to heaven” and decides to

Try what repentance can. What can it not?

Yet what can it when one can not repent?

O wretched state! ...

Help, angels, make assay:

Bow, stubborn knees; and heart, with strings of steel,

Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe.

All may be well.

A little later he rises from his knees:

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

par. 17 petitionary prayer is

“God,” said Pascal, “instituted prayer ... the dignity of causality”

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French mathematician and philosopher, Pensées 513 (Brunschvicq edition):

Pourquoi Dieu a établi la prière. 1º Pour communiquer à ses créatures la dignité de la causalité. 2º Pour nous apprendre de qui nous tenons la vertu. 3º Pour nous faire mériter les autres vertus par le travail. Mais, pour se conserver la prééminence, il donne la prière à qui lui plaît.

English translation by W. F. Trotter (1904):

Why God has established prayer.

1. To communicate to His creatures the dignity of causality.

2. To teach us from whom our virtue comes.

3. To make us deserve other virtues by work.

(But to keep His own pre-eminence, He grants prayer to whom He pleases.)

par. 18 for he seems to do

“to wield our little tridents”

John Milton, Comus (1637), 27, describing how the sea-god Neptune has delegated authority over the islands to “his tributary gods”

And gives them leave to wear their sapphire crowns

and wield their little tridents.

(This quotation and the previous one, from Pascal, also appear in Letters to Malcolm, chapters 15 and 10 respectively.)

back to survey

GOOD WORKS AND GOOD WORK

First published in the American magazine The Catholic Art Quarterly, XXIII, Christmas 1959. First published in book form in The World’s Last Night, New York 1960; then in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, London 1965. The magazine’s name was changed to Good Work in 1959; Lewis’s piece appears to have been written to mark this change.

par. 1 “good works” in the plural

The apostle says every one must ... work to produce what is “good.”

Ephesians 4:28.

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

Lewis also referred to this almost two decades earlier when writing about “Christianity and Culture” (1940).

par. 2 the idea of good work

Artists also talk of Good Work

At the end of the essay Lewis gets back to the art and artists, which was certainly what he was expected to do as a contributor to the magazine at hand .

par. 6 originally things are

(like Dogberry) “everything handsome about them”

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, end of IV.2. Dogberry is a constable.

I am a wise fellow; and, which is more, an officer; and, which is more, a householder ... and one that knows the law, go to; and a rich fellow enough, go to; and a fellow that hath had losses; and one that hath two gowns, and everything handsome about him.

par. 14 that such a state

the “space-race”

Space travel became possible in the course of the 1950s as German rocket technology from the Second World War was further developed in Russia (USSR) and America (USA), now in the service of physical geography and other allegedly peaceful ends. The Russian Sputnik I of October 1957, as the first operational spaceship, was initially felt to be a political rather than a scientific milestone: “the Russians” clearly had a technological lead over “the Free West”. In that same year the Russians sent an animal up into space (a dog, single trip) and in 1961 the first human being followed (return trip). The U.S.A. took up the challenge and triumphed in 1969 when Americans were the first human beings to walk on the Moon. The objectives of space-exploration have always remained a matter of balancing scientific usefulness and the allurements of power display.

par. 15 it is something even

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem...”

Psalm 137:5.

back to survey

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

First published in the American magazine The Saturday Evening Post, CCXXXII, 19 December 1959, 3-10. First published in book form in The World’s Last Night (New York 1960), then in The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast (London 1961, New York 1962); then in a volume prepared by Lewis shortly before his death, Screwtape Proposes a Toast and other pieces (1965). In 1961 Lewis wrote a preface for the new, expanded Screwtape edition. The last three paragraphs of this preface were included in the 1965 volume as a preface to the Toast, and this shortened version is covered by the notes.

preface par. 1 i was often asked

Swift’s big and little men

i.e. the inhabitants of the imaginary countries Brobdingnag and Lilliput respectively, in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a novel by Jonathan Swift.

the medical and ethical philosophy of “Erewhon”

Erewhon (“Nowhere” spelled reversely) is a satirical novel by Samuel Butler published anonymously in 1872. It tells of a country where crimes are dealt with by surgical or hospital treatment.

Anstey’s Garuda Stone

In Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers, a school story by F. Anstey published in 1882, a father is magically transformed into his son and vice versa. The Garuda Stone is the magical device by which father and son swap roles.

preface par. 2 i had, moreover