Quotations and
Allusions in
C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study
(1947, second edition 1960)
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 and perhaps
provide some further help with regard to Miracles:
A Preliminary Study, second edition (1960).
The format of each
note is as follows; chapter & paragraph numbers are only given in case of a
new paragraph.
[cap. #/par. #] first words
of paragraph
words
or phrases from Lewis’s book
Note
text.
Quotation (if required).
Publication details about
Lewis’s essays, papers and sundry shorter writings are given at www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays.
Bible passages are quoted from the Authorized (King James) Version, unless
stated otherwise. Corrections and
additions are welcome, especially with regard to places marked with [...?]. A survey of Updates is given at the end.
Arend
Smilde
Utrecht, The Netherlands
December 2011
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Cecil
and Daphne Harwood
Cecil Harwood
(1898-1975) was a life-long friend of C. S. Lewis’s since they met through Owen
Barfield in 1919 as students in Oxford. Harwood and his wife Daphne Olivier
played a leading role in the dissemination of Anthroposophy and promotion of
Anthroposophic education in England. Lewis wrote about him in Surprised by Joy (1955), chapter 13; Harwood
wrote about Lewis and also about Anthroposophy in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, ed. James T. Como (1979,
republished 2005 as Remembering C. S.
Lewis). See also Walter Hooper’s short biographies of Harwood in C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide
(1996), pp. 675-679, and in Lewis’s Collected
Letters I, pp. 998-1000f.
Book’s motto
The poem appeared in Time and Tide on 7 December 1946, five months before Miracles was published. Time and Tide was a British political
and literary magazine founded in 1920. It began as a feminist and left-wing
weekly but gradually moved to a more right-wing and Christian position. Its
wide range of contributors over the years included G. B. Shaw, Nancy Astor,
Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, Robert Graves, Charlotte Haldane,
Naomi Mitchison, George Orwell and many others. Lewis contributed essays,
reviews and poetry for twenty years, beginning with the essay “The Necessity of
Chivalry” (as “Notes on the Way”) in August 1940.
Chapter 1: The Scope of this Book
[1/4] here is an example
In a popular commentary on the
Bible
Lewis is perhaps referring to a commentary which
he criticized in a somewhat similar way in a paper of 1959, “Modern Theology
and Biblical Critcism” (later published as “Fern-seed and Elephants”). He there
quotes from what he calls “already a very old commentary”. This was identified
by Walter Hooper as A New Commentary on
Holy Scripture, ed. Charles Gore et al. (S.P.C.K., London 1928), and more
specifically to Walter Lock’s essay on the Gospel of John which, in turn,
refers to James Drummond, An Inquiry into
the Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel (1903).
Chapter 2: The Naturalist and the Supernaturalist
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
roland
quizz , Giant-Land
Roland Quiz (not Quizz; the first edition of Miracles has the correct spelling) is
the pseudonym of Richard M. Howard Quittenton (1833-1914). His book Giant-land: or the Wonderful Adventures of
Tim Pippin was first published in 1874.
In a
letter of 28 March 1937 to his friend Arthur Greeves, Lewis mentioned a recent
new edition of Giant-land and said he
hoped to get hold of it one day. On 20 December 1943 he told Arthur he had
found it in an Oxford library and read it “while invigilating at an exam”. He
remembered from his childhood days a volume of Juvenile Rhymes and Little Stories by Quiz, and was interested to
find a sequel in the present book. It explained “certain mysterious allusions
to the Granite City and the Subterranean City which used to fascinate me” (Collected Letters III, pp. 213-214 and
594-595). Almost ten years later the episode of the quotation must have
inspired Lewis’s own subterranean scene in his fifth Narnian story, The Silver Chair (1953), chapter 12,
“The Queen of Underland”.
[2/3] i
begin by considering
I begin by considering the
following sentences.
The word “Nature” is the subject of the first and
longest chapter in Lewis’s Studies in
Words (1960), pp. 24-74 in the 1967 second edition.
[2/7] the difference between
naturalism
to produce at some stage a great
cosmic consciousness, an indwelling “God” arising from the whole process
See note to [4/10] an Emergent God.
Lewis
also mentioned the idea expressed here in his wartime essay “The
Funeral of a Great Myth” (a mock funeral oration for
evolutionism as a theory of universal progress). Believers in the myth, Lewis
submits, are apt to hold not only that our present level of reason, virtue, art
and civilization is the product of savage and indeed inorganic beginnings, but
that today’s reason, virtue etc. in their turn must be “the crude or embryonic
beginnings of far better things – perhaps Deity itself – in the remote future.”
the one original or
self-existent thing
The idea of “self-existence” is developed in
chapter 4, par. 6 (this question almost):
... what exists on its own must
have existed from all eternity; for if anything else could make it begin to
exist then it would not exist on its own but because of something else.
[2/12] in that sense there might
anything Mr. Pickwick says in Pickwick Papers to anything Mrs.
Gamp hears in Martin Chuzzlewit
The Pickwick Papers (1837) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) are novels by
the 19th-century British novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870).
Chapter 3: The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism
[CHAPTER title]
In
the first edition, this chapter’s title was “The Self-Contradiction of the
Naturalist”.
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
We cannot have it both ways, and no sneers
at the limitations of logic... amend the dilemma. – i. a. richards, Principles
of Literary Criticism, chap. xxv.
Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979), English literary
critic. His Principles of Literary
Criticism (1924) and Practical
Criticism (1929) represented much that Lewis disliked and rejected in the
modern theory and practice of literary criticism. Lewis polemized with Richards
in several places, notably in his essay “Christianity and Culture”
(1940), in A Preface to Paradise Lost
(1942), chapter 8, and in The Abolition
of Man (1943), chapter 2, note 2. In choosing this motto for his crucial
chapter 3 in Miracles, Lewis was
hoping to fortify his theist position with a testimony from the man he once
called the “great atheist critic”. He was often careful to point out specific
points which he appreciated in Richards’s work in spite of profound
differences. A 1939 letter to Richards is printed in Lewis’s Collected Letters III, p. 1536.
[3/1] IF NATURALISM IS
heel-tap
A small amount of alcoholic drink left at the bottom
of a glass after drinking.
[3/2] one threat against strict
One threat against strict
Naturalism has recently been launched
Lewis is referring early-20th-century developments
in physical science connected with the names of Max Planck (quantum physics)
and Alfred Einstein (theory of relativity). The meaning of these developments
as a possible “threat against strict Naturalism” was famously expounded in
Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World
(1925), mentioned in a note to chapter 13.
[3/4] it is
clear that everything
the Spanish Armada
The Armada
was the large fleet of warships sent by King Philip II of Spain against England
in 1588 to escort an invasion from the Continent. It sustained fatal blows
during combat in the English Channel and was further reduced by south-western
storms in the North Sea. A considerable remnant sailing round the British isles
escaped back home. Two further Armadas
were sent to Ireland in 1596 and 1597, both driven back by gales.
We infer Evolution from fossils
While this was still largely true at the time of
writing (ca. 1945), developments in science and technology from the 1950s on
have reduced the role of fossils to that of a mere “bonus” for evolution
biology; “the fossil record could be one big gap, and the evidence for
evolution would still be overwhelmingly strong” – Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale; A Pilgrimage to the
Dawn of Life (2004), “The General Prologue”.
[3/7] thus a strict materialism
Thus a strict materialism
refutes itself
From
this point onward – after the chapter’s first six paragraphs – the rest of
chapter 3 is a radical rewriting and expansion of the original text as
published in 1947 (see illustration below). The discarded part of the chapter
comprised 1,759 words in ten paragraphs; its replacement as published since
1960 comprises 3,698 words in twenty-five paragraphs. The revision was clearly
inspired, after more than a decade, by Lewis’s public debate with philosopher
Elizabeth Anscombe in the Oxford Socratic Club meeting of 2 February 1948. Much
has been written about this debate and its place in Lewis’s career; in 2011 the
Journal of
Inklings Studies devoted a special issue to the subject (Vol. I
nr. 2). A full survey of further differences between the 1947 and 1960 editions
is provided at www.lewisiana.nl/anscombe (click
“Appendices”).
Dustjacket
of Miracles, first edition, published on
12 May 1947
(click here for larger
image with jacket blurb)
Professor Haldane ... Possible Worlds
J. B. S. Haldane (1895-1964) was a British geneticist,
Professor of Genetics and then of Biometry at University College, London from
1933 to 1957, and a zealous populariser of science. Possible Worlds is a volume of essays published in 1927; the quote
comes from chapter XXIX, “When I Am Dead” (p. 220 in the U.S. edition of 1928).
Lewis also quoted these words from Haldane in a letter of 13 June 1946 to The Oxford Magazine (cf. Collected Letters II, p. 715).
In the years
around 1930, Haldane repeated the same reasoning in an essay called “Some
Consequences of Materialism”, published in The
Inequality of Man (1932):
I am not myself a
Materialist because, if Materialism is true, it seems to me that we cannot know
that it is true. If my opinions are the result of the chemical processes going
on in my brain, they are determined by the laws of chemistry, not those of
logic. ... To put the matter in another way, if a super-biochemist made a
working model of me, atom for atom, this robot would, on a Materialistic view,
have all my memories. This may be the case, but if so no knowledge is possible.
(pp. 157-158 in Pelican edition, 1937)
When this essay was reprinted as “Some Reflections on
Materialism” in the 1934 volume Fact and
Faith, Haldane added a footnote to this paragraph stating that
I do not now find this argument as convincing as I did
when I wrote it.
Undoubtedly the change of mind was one of those
alluded to in Haldane’s preface to the 1934 volume: he there points out that,
in addition to the state of science,
My philosophical
views have also changed and, unless my brain hardens prematurely, will go on
changing for some years to come. For one thing, the progress of physics, by
showing that matter does not possess various properties attributed to it by
metaphysicians, has rendered Materialism a good deal more plausible than seemed
likely even ten years ago. For another, I have begun to assimilate Dialectical
Materialism, a doctrine very different from the Mechanistic Materialism of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and to my mind far more plausible.
See also Richard Jeffery, “C. S. Lewis and the
Scientists” (The Chronicle of the Oxford
C. S. Lewis Society Vol. 2, Nr. 2, May 2005, pp. 15-19). For a broader
treatment of Haldane, see Mark B. Adams, “Last Judgment: The Visionary Biology
of J. B. S. Haldane”, Journal of the History of Biology Vol. 33, No. 3
(December 2000), 457–491.
[3/13] but
unfortunately the two
You say that because ... you are
a capitalist, a hypochondriac, etc.
Lewis was fond of exposing this faulty way to
refute criticism. He invented a name for it, “Bulverism”, which was the title
of a an essay published on 29 March 1941. It was also the subject of his next
publication: the first “Screwtape” letter, published on 2 May 1941.
[3/16] but it can be this
tinnitus
A affection of the hearing organ, often incurable,
producing the patient’s perception of some particular sound – a hissing,
beeping, rumbling, or whatever – without any external causes.
[3/18] it is agreed on all hands
“evolved” by natural selection
The theory of natural selection was not at first
intimately linked to any particular idea of evolution; it merely accounted for
the variety of life forms, including the great majority of them that is
extinct. Darwin’s Origin of Species
(1859) does not contain as single instance of the words “evolution” or
“evolve”, except for the book’s very last word, probably inspired by Herbert
Spencer.
[3/21] but if they did
there was a hot summer in 1959
Lewis was actually experiencing the heat of that
summer while he was revising Miracles
and rewriting the present chapter. He submitted the revised text to his
publisher on 8 August 1959; see Collected
Letters III, p. 1072.
[3/23] but the very attempt
If ... you put yourself outside
it, there is then no way, except by begging the question, of getting inside
again
Lewis used a partly inversed image of “inside” and
“outside” when arguing for the timeless reality of basic morality, as in his
essay “On Ethics” (in Christian Reflections):
Supposing we can enter the
vacuum and view all Ethical Systems from the outside, what sort of motives can
we then expect to find for entering any one of them? One thing is immediately
clear. We can have no ethical motives
for adopting any of these systems. It cannot, while we are in the vacuum, be
our duty to emerge from it. ... A man with no ethical allegiance can have no ethical
motive for adopting one. If he had, it would prove that he was not really in
the vacuum at all.
[3/24] a
still humbler position
a Sputnik
The Russian Sputnik I, launched in October 1957, was the first operational spaceship. Miracles was first published ten years
earlier. While rewriting chapter 3 in 1959 Lewis introduced some recent
examples.
[3/25] but then, equally
discovered from practice
This is
very probably a typo:
the obvious reading is “divorced
from practice”. This is also suggested in Steven Jon James
Lovellʼs quotation of the passage in his Ph.D. thesis Philosophical Themes from C. S. Lewis (Univ. of Sheffield, 2003;
available online),
p. 159, and by Richard Purtillʼs quotation in C. S. Lewis and the Case for the Christian Faith (1985), p. 26.
[3/26] on these terms
from it [reason] the orderliness
of Nature, which alone enables us to know her, is derived.
While the derivation is here presented in its
purely theoretical aspect, Lewis must have been thinking also of the historical
side as sketched by Whitehead in Science
and the Modern World (1925). As Lewis points out toward the end of chapter
13, paraphrasing Whitehead:
Men became scientific because
they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they
believed in a Legislator.
Chapter 4: Nature and
Supernature
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
r. g.
collingwood, The Idea of Nature
Robin George
Collingwood (1889-1943), philosopher and historian, was Waynflete Professor of
metaphysics and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1935 till 1941. As a
thinker he was clearly congenial to Lewis, who occasionally quoted him
approvingly. According to Michael D. Aeschliman (The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism,
1983, p. 59), Lewis was always “attacking precisely those fallacies and that
scientific dogmatism that Collingwood abhorred”. For an example of this, see
note to [7/8] Ptolemy. Although they
were fellows of the same college, very few traces of personal contact between
the two men can be found in published sources. After Collingswood’s early
death, his Waynflete chair eventually went to Gilbert Ryle, whom Lewis regarded
as the very reverse of a congenial thinker.
It was while Miracles was in preparation that Collingswood’s Idea of Nature was published
posthumously in 1945. In the final section of his final chapter, Collingwood
rounds off what he calls an “interim report on the history of the idea of
nature”. Noting that we have “no guarantee that the spirit of natural science
will survive the attack which now, from so many sides, is being made upon the
life of human reason” he then asks: “Where do we go from here?” The opening sentence
of his answer is the sentence quoted by Lewis.
[4/1] if our argument
acts of reasoning are not...
the first edition, the chapter’s opening sentence
was
If our argument has been sound, rational thought
or Reason is not interlocked with the great interlocking system of irrational
events which we call Nature.
This
was immediately followed by “I am not maintaining that consciousness” etc., the
fourth sentence in the revised edition. The change reflects the radical
revision of chapter 3 (see note to [3/7] Thus
a strict materialism etc.).
between reason and the whole
mass of non-rational events
While revising Miracles
for the 1960 edition, Lewis changed the word “irrational” into “non-rational”
throughout chapters 4 and 5. The first instance of “irrational” in the old
chapter 4 was discarded along with most of the opening sentence (see previous
note); the next instance was the present one, which originally read “the whole
mass of irrational events”. There
were further small changes: for example, in the present fragment “reason” was
substituted for “Reason”.
[4/4] i am only too well aware
hankering for a universe which
is all of a piece
This idea is developed in chapter 9, “A Chapter
not strictly Necessary”.
Bacon warned us ... Novum Organum
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English statesman,
philosopher and essayist. His Novum
Organum (“New Instrument”) is a philosophical treatise in Latin, first
published in 1620 and later as the second part of his unfinished Instauratio Magna, whose first part is a
Latin enlargement of The Advancement of
Learning (1605). A systematic exposition of ideas from The Advancement, the Organum
offers a method of extending knowledge. The defects of the human mind are
described (in I.35) as four types of “idols” that have to be identified and
rejected: idols of the tribe, of the cave, of the market-place and of the
theatre. The passage quoted is from I.45, where Bacon starts his discussion of
the “idols of the tribe”, i.e. misconceptions that “arise from human nature as
such”.
Science itself has already made
reality appear less homogeneous
This has been explained in chapter 3, second
paragraph.
[4/5] if you can, even
self-existent Reason
“Self-existence” was first mentioned in chapter 2,
par. 7 (the difference between):
“The Supernaturalist ... believes that the one original or self-existent thing
is on a different level from, and more important than, all other things” and
par. 9: “...those who believed in many gods very seldom, in fact, regarded
their gods as ... self-existent.”
[4/6] this question almost
which neither slumbers nor
sleeps
cf. Psalm 121:4.
Behold, he that keepeth Israel
shall neither slumber nor sleep.
[4/7] some people may here raise
what Kant called “the I think”
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German philosopher, in the second edition
(1787) of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft,
I, “Transzendentale Elementarlehre”, §§16-18; or §§12-14 in the 1855
translation by Meiklejohn, Critique of
Pure Reason, I, “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements”:
Das: Ich denke, muß alle meine Vorstellungen
begleiten können; denn sonst würde etwas in mir vorgestellt werden, was gar
nicht gedacht werden könnte ...
– The “I think” must
accompany all my representations, for otherwise something would be represented
in me which could not be thought ...
[4/10] at this point it is tempting
an Emergent
God ... (Notice, Modern Reader ...)
Lewis was almost certainly alluding to the
philosophers Samuel Alexander (1859-1938), author of Space, Time and Deity
(1920), C. Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936), author of Emergent Evolution (1923), and perhaps also of the philosophy of A.
N. Whitehead (1861-1947): pantheistically-minded thinkers who were taking
account of recent developments in biology and the physical sciences.
Lloyd Morgan
and Alexander were lifelong friends and both works mentioned originated as
Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Glasgow. The concluding
sentences of Alexander’s large two-volume work are
In the hierarchy of qualities the next higher quality to the highest
attained is deity. God is the whole universe engaged in process towards the
emergence of this new quality, and religion is the sentiment in us that we are
drawn towards him, and caught in the movement of the world to a higher level of
existence.
While the term “Emergent God” does not actually appear
in Alexander’s book, he does point out in his preface to the 1927 new edition
that “the concept of deity ... is part of the whole conception of emergence
initiated by Mr. Lloyd Morgan”; later in the book he explains that he “use[d]
the word ‘emergent’ after the example of Mr Lloyd Morgan” (vol. 2, ch. 1, note
7).
For his part,
Morgan in his Emergent Evolution (§ II) summarizes Alexander:
As mental evolution runs its
course, there emerge, at the reflective stage of mind, the “tertiary qualities”
– ideals of truth, of beauty, and of the ethically right – having relations of
“value.” And beyond this, at or near the apex of the evolutionary pyramid of
which space-time is the base, the quality of deity – the highest of all –
emerges in us the latest products of evolution up to date.
Alexander in his 1927 preface stressed that
God as actually possessing deity does not exist,
but is an ideal, is always becoming: but God as the whole universe tending
towards deity does exist. Deity is a quality, and God a being. Actual God is
the forecast and, as it were, divining of ideal God.
Lewis dismissed Alexander’s thought briefly in a
letter of 4 January 1947 to Ruth Pitter (Collected
Letters II, p. 754):
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 ...
by that, as you will see later,
there hangs a tale
cf. Shakespeare, As You Like It II.7, 26, “...and thereby hangs a tale.”
[4/13] the relations which
a mahout visiting his own
elephant
“Mahout” is derived from the Hindi word mahāut, an elephant driver or keeper in India.
[4/14] to believe that nature
better solutions of the problem
of evil
Lewis’s own contribution was The Problem of Pain (1940), his debut as a Christian apologist.
[4/15] i do not maintain
the story in Genesis – as St.
Jerome said ... told in the manner “of a popular poet”
Hieronymus of Stridon (c. 347-420), or St. Jerome,
was perhaps the greatest scholar among the Latin Church Fathers. Living and
working in Bethlehem from 386 until his death, he made the Latin translation of
the Bible known as the Vulgate, which was the standard Bible text for Western
Christendom for the whole medieval period. – Lewis was certainly wrong in
attributing the assertion about Genesis to Jerome. The mistake appears to be
due to his misreading of a passage in the Letters to Radulphus on the Mosaic Account of
Creation by the English scholar John Colet
(1467-1519). For further details see www.lewisiana.nl/jerome .
Chapter 5: A Further Difficulty in Naturalism
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
r.
niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), American theologian.
The book quoted appeared in 1936. In a letter of 14 January 1940 Lewis wrote
that he was reading it as his “Sunday book” and found it “very disagreeable but
not unprofitable”; in 1958 he wrote that it was the only of Niebuhr’s books he
had ever read and “on the whole, reacted against it” (Collected Letters II, 324 and III, 979).
[5/1] some people regard
logical thinking as the deadest
and driest of our activities
Cf. the motto to chapter 3, on “sneers at the
limitations of logic” (I. A. Richards).
[5/6] such a doctrine
The Naturalist can, if he
chooses, brazen it out
This passage has a very strong resemblance to
chapter 2 in The Abolition of Man
(1943), the book in which Lewis gave his fullest treatment to the theme of/7
the present chapter in Miracles.
[5/7] but then they must stick
to it
Mr. H. G. Wells spent a
long life doing so with passionate eloquence and zeal
Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), novelist and
celebrated British pioneer of science fiction. An amusing picture of his zeal
is given in Julian Huxley’s Memories
(1970), chapter 12, describing their collaboration on The Science of Life, a encyclopaedic work on biology:
...returning from early discussions about the
machinery of collaboration, I could not help thinking: “What am I doing with
this little philistine?” But the next minute, recalling the compulsive
enthusiasm, the convincing certainty which one recognizes in men of great
achievements, I would say to myself: “Yes, but what genius he is!” (Lenin made
identical remarks when H.G. visited him in Russia.)
Wells had just died when Miracles appeared. During his last years, the Second World War and
the atomic bombs of 1945 made him increasingly pessimistic about humanity; his
last works was titled Mind at the End of
its Tether (1945).
Franco
Francisco Franco (1892-1975), Spanish general,
became dictator of Spain in 1939 after the reactionary right-wing Falangists
had emerged victorious from the Spanish Civil War.
Chapter 6: Answers to misgivings
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
aristotle,
Metaphysics, I (Brevior) i
The reference is perhaps wrong: Aristotle’s Metaphysics has no Brevior (“shorter”) version, and the passage can be found at the
beginning of Book II, section 1. In the traditional numbering it is section
993b.
[6/2] the rational and moral element
the boundaries of Cornwall and
Devonshire
The two counties that form the southwestern tip of
England; Devonshire is more commonly called Devon. The border, from Bude in the
north to Plymouth in the south along the winding river Tamar, dates from the
10th century and is indeed full of “dents” and “bulges” – though hardly more so
than many another old border in England or elsewhere.
[6/4] when you are looking at a garden
a story told about a Redskin
[6/5] all these instances show
the Sixteenth Century, when
Science was born ... to know Nature and to master her
In the last chapter of The Abolition of Man (1943), Lewis discussed the birth of Science at
slightly grater length. As a medievalist engaged in writing a standard work on
16th-century English literature, Lewis could claim some professional authority
for this statement. However, for his view of the birth of science and its role
in the modern world, he was almost certainly relying also on Alfred North
Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World.
He quotes this book in chapters 9 and 13, below; on a later occasion he called
it “a profound book” (English Literature
in the Sixteenth Century, Bibliography V.3, “Philosophy”, p. 618).
Chapter 7: A Chapter of Red Herrings
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
Thence came forth Maul, a giant ... bunyan
From John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part Two (1684),
an episode near the end of the Fifth Stage.
[7/5] the idea that the progress
St. Joseph discovered that his
fiancée was going to have a baby
Matthew 1:18-25. See note to [15/9] Virgin Birth.
[7/6] if the miracles were offered
man-eating ants and gryphons in
Scythia, etc.
Some of these examples come from the Histories of Herodotus, a Greek
traveller and writer of the fifth century BC; e.g. the man-eating (or in any
case very large and dangerous) ants are mentioned in Book III, 102-105, the
gryphons of Scythia in Book IV, 13 and 17.
“know not a man.”
Luke 1:34.
Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be,
seeing I know not a man?
[7/8] whatever its value may be
Ptolemy ... the whole earth ...
a point with no magnitude
Claudius Ptolemaeus, ancient mathematician,
astronomer and geographer of the second century AD. He was a Roman living in
Alexandria, Egypt, and wrote in Greek. The reference is to Almagest I.5. Lewis often drew attention to this fact about
medieval cosmology both in his apologetic and scholarly work – e.g. in The Problem of Pain (1940), chapter 1,
and in his 1956 lecture “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages”.
There is
a striking resemblance between such places and a passage in Collingwood’s The Idea of Nature, II.1, §3 (cf.
Lewis’s motto to chapter 4):
The philosophical significance
of this new astronomy [i.e. Copernicus’s work of on the solar system, in the
16th century] was profound, but it has often been misunderstood. It is commonly
said that its effect was to diminish the importance of the earth in the scheme
of things and to teach man that he is only a microscopic parasite on a small
speck of cool matter revolving round tone of the minor stars. This is an idea
both philosophically foolish and historically false. Philosophical foolish,
because no philosophical problem, whether connected with the universe, or with
man, or with the relation between them, is at all affected by considering the
relative amount of space they occupy: historically false, because the
littleness of man in the world has always been a familiar theme of reflection.
Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae,
which has been called the most widely read book of the Middle Ages, contains
the following words: “Thou hast learnt from astronomical proofs that the whole
earth compared with the universe is no greater than a point, that is, compared
with the sphere of the heavens, it may be thought of as having no size at all.
Then, of this tiny corner, it is only one-quarter that, according to Ptolemy,
is habitable to living things. Take away from this quarter the seas, mashes,
and other desert places, and the space left for man hardly even deserves the
name of infinitesimal.” (Book ii, Prosa vii.) Every educated European for a
thousand years before Copernicus knew that passage, and Copernicus had no need
to risk condemnation for heresy in order to repeat its substance.
The true significance of his
astronomical discoveries was far more important. It consisted not so much in
displacing the world’s centre from the earth to the sun as in implicitly
denying that the world has a centre at all.
Boethius, King Alfred, Dante,
and Chaucer
– Boethius,
Roman statesman and philosopher (480-524). As a prisoner of the Gothic king
Theoderic and awaiting a cruel execution he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy (De
consolatione philosophiae), one of the most widely read books of the Middle
Ages; see the Collingwood quote above.
– King
Alfred, or Alfred the Great (849-899), king of Wessex and overlord of England,
translated Boethius into English and greatly encouraged writing and learning in
English.
– Dante
Alighieri (1265-1321) , Italian poet, author of the Commedia (Divine Comedy).
– Geoffrey
Chaucer (c. 1340-1400), English poet,
author of the Canterbury Tales and
translator of French and Italian works.
Mr. H. G. Wells or Professor
Haldane
– Wells: see note to [5/7] Mr. H. G. Wells.
– Haldane: see note to [3/7] Professor Haldane. In 1946 Haldane published a critical review of Lewis’s “Space Trilogy”, after which Lewis wrote a
“Reply” that was not published until 1982. This reply is one of the other
places where Lewis mentioned Ptolemy’s view of the earth as a point with no
magnitude (see note to [7/8] Ptolemy).
[7/10] when the doctor at a post-mortem
Now the odd thing is that both
alternatives are equally used as objections
Lewis is repeating almost verbatim portions from his
essay “Dogma and the Universe”, published in two parts in The Guardian in March 1943. Half a year earlier he had contributed
the essay “Miracles”. The theme of the universe being either empty or full but
always telling against Christianity briefly surfaced again when Lewis wrote
about the Space Race of the late 1950s and early 1960s; see his essays
“Religion and Rocketry” (1958) and “The Seeing Eye” (1963).
“come down from heaven”
A
phrase from the Nicene Creed (325-381 AD), 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...
as the
policeman in the story ... whatever he does “will be used
in evidence against Him.”
cf. James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (1912), chapter 14.
In the
first edition of Miracles, the text reads:
We treat God as the police
treat a man when he is arrested; whatever He does will be used in evidence
against Him.
A letter of 18 February 1960 (CL3, 1135) suggests
that Lewis’s publisher, Jocelyn Gibb, had warned him that this might give
offence. Lewis then proposed the changes which are actually found in the
revised edition.
Lewis was
referring to “the humour both of the philosopher and the policemen” in this
fantasy story as early as February 1917
in a letter to Arthur Greeves (Collected
Letters I, 280). In his 1946 piece on “Period Criticism” he mentioned “the
arrest of the Philosopher” as one of the book’s “gigantic … comic effects”.
[7/16] we are inveterate poets
the silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French mathematician and philosopher. The reference is to Pensées,
Nr. 206 (Brunschvicg edition).
Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.
overcrow
our spirits
Shakespeare,
Hamlet V.2, 345.
O,
I die, Horatio!
The potent poison quite oʼer-crows my spirit.
In
some later editions overcrow has
become overcrowd. The parallel
passage in Lewis’s essay “Dogma and the Universe” has overcross. The correct reading is found both in the first edition
and early printings of the revised edition.
Chapter 8: Miracle and the Laws of Nature
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
... whatever Miss T. eats /
Turns into miss T. – w. de la mare
Walter John de la Mare (1873-1956), English poet;
his Complete Poems were published in 1969.
Lewis quotes the first four lines of a 14-line poem called “Miss T.”
[8/5] if the laws of nature
“like a thief in the night”
2 Peter 3:10 (cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:2).
But
the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night.
Peter and Paul were probably remembering or
quoting Jesus’s words as recorded in Matthew 24:42-43 and Luke 12:39.
[8/9]
THE RIGHTFUL DEMAND
… that the total events, if we
could grasp it …
The plural, events,
introduced in the 1960 revised edition is certainly a typo. The first edition has the
correct singular form, event.
Chapter 9: A Chapter not strictly Necessary
[9/2] one of the things
I wrote a poem in those days
about a sunrise
The poem does not appear to have survived.
[9/5] to say that god
Falstaff or Sam Weller
Falstaff is a character
in Shakespeare’s plays The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV (1 & 2), and Henry V . Sam Weller is a character in Charles Dickens’s novel The Pickwick Papers.
the “Correggiosity” of Correggio
Correggio (1494-1534) was an Italian painter
distinctive for the way he used perspective, foreshortening, contrasts of light
and shadow, and softness of outlines.
[9/6] nature is by human
Othello ... Perdita ... Lady
Macbeth
Like Falstaff [9/5], all these are characters in
various plays by Shakespeare: Othello in Othello,
Perdita in A Winter’s Tale (a
comedy), Lady Macbeth in Macbeth.
Chapter 10: “Horrid Red Things”
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
edwyn
bevan, Symbolism and
Belief
Edwyn Robert Bevan 1870-1943, English scholar of
ancient history and religion. Symbolism
and Belief originated as The Gifford Lectures for 1933-1934 and was first
published in 1938.
Already
in 1940 Lewis referred to Bevan’s book in his first work of Christian
apologetics, The Problem of Pain (ch.
8), and recommended it to his former pupil Mary Neylan (“a good many
misunderstandings are cleared away by [it]” – Collected Letters II, p. 375). In subsequent years, when Lewis
mentioned the book he almost invariably did so in strongly recommending terms.
Thus in a 1959 letter to Mary Van Deusen, “I think it helps more than any book
I know to keep one right on all ‘modernism’” – CL III, 1012). In the last year of his life, when asked “what Christian
writers have helped you?”, his answer included Symbolism and Belief (“Cross-examination”, 1963).
[10/2] the difficulties of the unbeliever
Jupiter or Odin
Jupiter was the supreme god of ancient Roman
mythology; Odin (Woden, Wotan) was the god of wisdom, poetry, agriculture, war
and the dead in ancient Germanic religion.
“Son” ... “come down from
Heaven”
See note to [7/10] “came down from heaven”.
[10/3] It is this impression
Thus, at any rate, I used to
think myself.
Lewis’s adolescent attitude to religion is
expressed in his early letters to Arthur Greeves, now available in Collected Letters I, and previously
published in They Stand Together: The
Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963), ed. Walter Hooper (1979).
the Golden Bough
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1890-1914), by Scottish anthropologist James George
Frazer (1854-1941), is a wide-ranging comparative study of myths and rituals
all over the world.
the very man who taught me to think
William T. Kirkpatrick (1848-1921), Lewis’s private teacher in 1914-1917,
described in chapter 9 of Lewis’s autobiography Suprised by Joy (1955).
Rationalist Press Association
An organization set up in 1899 to ensure
publication of literature which was too anti-religious to be welcome with
regular publishers. The RPA renamed itself “Rationalist Association” in 2002 and
publishes the New Humanist magazine,
which started as Wattsʼs Literary Guide
in 1885); see www.newhumanist.org.uk.
[10/6] in order to explain
Mr. Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction
Arthur Owen Barfield (1898-1997), English philosopher, writer, critic and
lawyer, was a friend of Lewis since their undergraduate days in Oxford. He
began writing Poetic Diction:
A Study In Meaning in
1921 as a B.Litt. thesis and it was published in 1928, with a dedication to C.
S. Lewis. See www.owenbarfield.org.
Mr. Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism and Belief
See note to this
chapter’s motto.
[10/9]
in these examples
you don’t find horrid red things
inside it
Cf. Lewis’s 1944 article for the Church of England Newspaper, “ʻHorrid
Red Thingsʼ” (1944).
[10/13] let us now apply this
Christ “came down from Heaven”
Another reference to this phrase from the Nicene
Creed; cf. note to chapters 7 and 10.
[10/15] as far, then, as the adult christian
“sat down at the right hand of
the Father”
Another phrase from the Nicene Creed; see note
above.
Alexandria
The capital of Egypt and a major centre of
learning in Ptolemaic and Roman times. Lewis made exactly the same kind of
reference to Alexandria in “Is Theology Poetry?”, a 1944 paper for the Oxford
Socratic Club. In that year he made the same point also in “‘Horrid Red Things’”
(see note to [10/7] you don’t find).
[10/16] even if it could be shown
The sect in the Egyptian desert
... is
condemned: the desert monk ... “muddleheaded.” ... Cassian quoted in
Gibbon, Senex mente confusus
The reference is to the six-volume The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789), chapter
XLVII, footnote 13 at the end of the chapter’s second section. The desert monk
in question was called Serapion, “one of the saints of the Nitrian desert”.
Cassian is Johannes Cassianus (c. 360-c. 435), a founding father
of early Christian monasticism, and Gibbon was quoting Cassian’s Collationes
Patrum, X.2, a collection of talks (probably fictitious) with Egyptian
hermits.
[10/19]
we are often told
Mr. Barfield
Another reference to Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction (1928); see note to
[10/6] Mr. Owen Barfield’s.
[10/18] the christian doctrines
Christ ... when he told us to
carry the cross
Gospel of Matthew 10:38, 16:24, and parallel
places in the Gospels of Mark and Luke.
Chapter 11: Christianity and “Religion”
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
thomas
erskine of linlathen
Scottish advocate and lay theologian (1788-1870). Lewis is quoting from Letters
of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, edited
by William Hanna and first published in two volumes by David Douglas, Edinburgh, in 1877.
The quotation is found in the one-volume second edition (1878),
chapter XX, “Reminiscences by Arthur P. Stanley, D.D., Dean of Westminster”, page 458.
This chapter motto appears to be the only published
reference Lewis ever made to Erskine or his writings. Lewis’s interest in him was
most likely raised by Erskine’s connections and friendship with George
Macdonald. For some account of this background see, for example, references to
Erskine in two early works on Macdonald: Joseph Johnson,
George MacDonald: A biographical and critical appreciation
(1906) and Greville MacDonald, George MacDonald
and His Wife (1924).
[11/3] in the first place it is usually
anthropomorphic attributes drop off one by one
A similar Lewisian thumbnail history, not of
religion but of philosophy, can be found in a preface he wrote in 1952 for a
book called The Hierarchy of Heaven and
Earth, by D. E. Harding. Lewis’s objection there is not that it is a
“fanciful” history, but that the process of “emptying” the universe defeats
itself. Recognizing that “the advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich
and genial universe [as experienced by primitive humanity] first of its gods,
then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself ...”
he points out that
the same method which has emptied the world now
proceeds to empty ourselves. ... We, who have personified all other things,
turn out to be ourselves mere personifications. Man is akin to the gods: that
is, he is no less phantasmal than they.
This preface was later reprinted as “The Empty
Universe” in Present Concerns (1986)
and Essay Collection (2000).
[11/4] now this imagined history
the orenda of a savage tribe
Orenda
is an Iroquois word for a mysterious power in all sorts of natural objects.
A similar concept is that of mana
in Polynesian and Melanesion religion.
the Stoics
An ancient Greek school of philosophy, founded by
Zeno around 300 B.C. and lasting for about 500 years. Its pantheistic teachings
about a universal Logos (Reason) and
its presence in every individual thing or being as Logos spermatikos (Creative Reason) were largely a matter of its
early centuries. Later Stoicism took a more strictly practical and ethical turn
in Seneca, Epictetus and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. In the Bible the Stoics
are mentioned, along with the Epicureans, as the kind of people in Athens who
were happy to hear what the apostle Paul had to say and to have interesting
discussions with him (Acts 17:18).
Bruno and Spinoza
–
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Italian
philosopher and Dominican friar who on the basis of the new cosmology of
Copernicus developed a monistic an pantheistic philosophy. He was burnt at the
stake for heresy in Rome.
–
Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), Dutch philosopher who developed, much more
consistently than Bruno, a monistic philosophy and proposed to use “Nature” and
“God” as interchangeable terms denoting the totality of all that exists.
A good
brief discussion of Bruno and Spinoza, their pantheism and their relation to
the science of their days, is found in Collingwood’s The Idea of Nature (1945); cf. note to the motto of chapter 4,
above. According to a massively researched recent view, Spinoza’s monism was
not so much a return to ancient tendencies as the one true origin of the Enlightenment
and hence of the modern world (Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 2001; Enlightenment
Contested, 2006; Democratic
Enlightenment, 2011).
Hegel
... Wordsworth, Carlyle and Emerson
– Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), German philosopher.
– William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet.
– Thomas Carlyle
(1795-1881), Scottish essayist and historian.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. poet and essayist.
Theosophy
The term may refer in general to any system of
thought concerned with the relationship between God and creation and direct
experience of the divine; Lewis probably refers to the teachings of the
Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 in New York (but soon moving its
headquarters to India).
the worship of the life-force
“Worship” in a loose and informal sense. “Life
force” was a term of which the original French form – élan vital – got currency through the writings of French
philosopher Émile Bergson (1859-1941). In England it was popularized by the
prolific writer and dramatist Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). Lewis may have been
thinking also of the English novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), whose novels
glorify the beauty of nature and instinct, especially the sexual impulse.
[11/4,
note] a Minister of Education
Lewis may be referring to Ellen Wilkinson,
Minister of Education in the Labour Government under Clement Attlee until her
death on 6 February 1947.
[11/5] this native bent of the mind
Men believed in atoms
centuries
before...
The earliest forms of “atomism” in philosophy were
developed in the 5th century B.C. by the early Greek philosophers Leucippus and
Democritus, and later by the Roman poet Lucretius (98-55 B.C.) in his didactic
poem De rerum natura, Book I and II.
Schrödinger ... Democritus
Democritus is the ancient Greek philosopher
mentioned in the note above. Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) was an Austrian physicist
and Nobel laureate in 1933. Lewis is
slightly more explicit in his 1942 essay “Miracles” about one issue which he
thought Schrödinger “knew too much” about:
To
explain even an atom Schrödinger wants seven dimensions ...
Lewis may
have been remembering here a passage in a popular book on modern physics which
he certainly knew, The Mysterious
Universe (1931, 2nd ed. 1931) by Sir James Jeans (p. 106-107 in the
post-1933 Cambridge reprint with corrections):
... a
single electron isolated in space provides a perfectly eventless universe, the
simplest conceivable event occurring when two electrons meet one another. And
to describe, in its simplest terms, what happens when two electrons meet one
another, the wave-mechanics asks for a system of waves in an ether which has
seven dimensions; six are of space, and one is of time. ... Most physicists
would, I think, agree that the seven-dimensional space in which the
wave-mechanics pictures the meeting of two electrons in purely fictitious, in
which case the waves which accompany the electrons must also be regarded as
fictitious. Thus Professor Schrödinger, writing of the seven-dimensional space,
says that although it
has quite a definite physical
meaning, it cannot very well be said to “exist”; hence a wave-motion in this
space cannot be said to “exist” in the
ordinary sense of the word either. It is merely an adequate mathematical
description of what happens. It may be that also in the case of one single
[electron], the wave-motion must not be taken to “exist” in too literal a sense, although the
configuration-space happens to coincide with ordinary space in this particular
simple case.
While
this quote from Schrödinger (without source reference) in itself hardly
confirms Lewis’s idea that the physicist “knows” too much, it is Jeans who
adds,
Yet it is hard to see how we can
attribute a lower degree of reality to the one set of waves than to the other:
it is absurd to say that the waves of single electrons are real, while those of
pairs of electrons are fictitious. And the waves of single electrons are real
enough to record themselves on a photographic plate ...
St. Athanasius ... he also knows
too much
Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 295-373), Church Father, defender of orthodoxy as defined in the
Nicene Creed against the Arian heresy. His De
incarnatione Verbi is an exposition of the doctrine that Jesus Christ was
true God and true Man; his Orationes
contra gentes are a further exposition of the divinity of Christ. The claim
that Athanasius “knew” more than Shaw, while good as a piece of impish
rhetoric, is better developed in “Dogma and the Universe” (1943), one of
Lewis’s essays that led up to Miracles:
Wherever there is real progress in knowledge,
there is some knowledge that is not superseded. ... New bottles for new wine,
by all means: but not new palates, throats and stomachs, or it would not be,
for us, “wine” at all.... [T]he positive historical statements made by
Christianity have the power, elsewhere found chiefly in formal principles, of
receiving, without intrinsic change, the increasing complexity of meaning which
increasing knowledge puts into them.
See also chapter 14, below, penultimate paragraph:
The whole Miracle [i.e. the
Incarnation], far from denying what we already know of reality, writes the
comment which makes that crabbed text plain: or rather, proves itself to be the
text on which Nature was only the commentary.
Mr. Bernard Shaw
See note to [11/3] the worship of the life-force. The “Mr.” is noteworthy as a sign
that Shaw, born in 1856, was still alive when Miracles was published in 1947. The continued liveliness of his
mind was shown in that same year when Arthur C. Clarke sent him a new paper on
“The Challenge of the Spaceship”: Shaw responded by joining the British Interplanetary
Society for the remaining three years of his life (cf. Clarke, The Challenge of the Spaceship (1958),
1980 Pocket Book edition, p. 13, note).
[11/7] at every point christianity
“cold Christs and tangled
Trinities”
From a short poem by Rudyard Kipling in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888),
serving as the first tale’s motto:
Look, you have cast out Love!
What Gods are these
You bid me please?
The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so!
To my own Gods I
go.
It may be they shall give me greater ease
Than your cold Christ and tangles Trinities.
[11/10]
PROBABLY NO THINKING PERSON
Professor Whitehead ... paying God ill-judged
“metaphysical compliments”
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and
the Modern World (1925), last paragraph of chapter 12, “God”:
Among
medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious
significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying to Him
metaphysical compliments.
[11/11]
the error which i am
if we fully understood what God is we should see that there is no question whether He is
Lewis is here pretty close to the “ontological argument” for the
existence of God, formulated by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) in his Proslogion, cap. 2. Defining God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”
(aliquid, quo nihil maius cogitari possit),
Anselm argued that non-existence would surely make God smaller than that, so
that He must exist.
Cf. also
Lewis’s chapter 4, above, last paragraph: “In fact one seldom meets people who
have grasped the existence of a supernatural God and yet deny that He is the
Creator.”
[11/14] our own situation is
In St. Paul’s language
2 Corinthians 5:2-4 (NIV).
... we groan, longing to be clothed
with our heavenly dwelling ... we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed
with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.
only He who does the will of the
Father will ever know the true doctrine
John 7:17.
If any man will do his will, he
shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.
“Oh, taste and see!”
Psalm 34:8.
O taste and see that the Lord is good.
[11/15] “a spirit and a vision”
“A Spirit and a Vision,” said
Blake...
William Blake (1757-1827), English poet and
painter. He wrote A Descriptive Catalogue
of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions (1809) as a guide to an
exhibition of his own engravings, notably a series of illustrations for
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Blake was
often scathingly critical of contemporary conventions, values, tastes and
theories. The idea expressed here is one which Lewis seems to have used for his
own theological fantasy The Great Divorce
(1946), although he acknowledged the idea for that book to a sciencefiction
writer whose name he had forgotten.
[11/16] and here the subject of imagery
Old Testament picture of Jahweh
thundering and lightning
For example, in Exodus 19:16, the episode leading
up to the promulgation of the Ten Commandments. Jahweh (or JHWH) is one of the
names of God in the Hebrew Bible.
making mountains skip like rams
Psalm 114:4-6.
Spirit ... must be pictured ...
as something heavier than
matter.
This is what Lewis did in The Great Divorce (see note to [11/15] “A Spirit and a Vision”).
[11/18] again, we may find
the “still, small voice”
1 Kings 19:12.
And after the earthquake a fire: but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the
fire a still small voice.
The NIV has “... a gentle whisper”.
Chapter 12: The Propriety of Miracles
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
seeley,
Ecce Homo
John Robert Seeley (1834-1895), English historian
and essayist. Ecce Homo, published anonymously
in 1865, was a widely read and much discussed Life of Christ.
[12/3] now one often finds
over-punctilious and pedantic
... The classical critics were shocked at the “irregularity” or “licenses” of
Shakespeare
A “regular” playwright in the 17th century,
especially in France, was thought to be one who observed the rule of the “Three
Unities”: unity of Action, of Place, and of Time. William Shakespeare
(1564-1616) did not usually follow this rule at all. While Lewis may have been
thinking of French Shakespeare criticism, it is hardly true to say that English
critics, classical or otherwise, were ever actually “shocked” by Shakespeare’s
supposed failure. Major critics such as John Dryden (1631-1700) and Samuel
Johnson (1709-1784) when noting Shakespeare’s “licences” at all as licenses,
made sure to point out that he would certainly not have been a better writer if
he had cared to be more “regular”.
The
Winter’s Tale
A late play by Shakespeare, the last-but-one of
his comedies.
[12/4] in other words, there are
“work which God worketh from the
beginning to the end”
Ecclesiastes 3:11.
He hath made every thing beautiful in his time:
also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work
that God maketh from beginning to the end.
Modern
translation are quite different.
[12/5] for who can suppose
the best illustration of all is
Bergson’s
Henri Bergson (1859-1941); see note to [11/4] the worship of the life-force. Lewis is
referring to Bergson’s most famous work, Évolution
créatrice (1907, translated in 1911 as Creative
Evolution), chapter I, final section “L’élan
vital” (“The vital impetus”),
sixth paragraph:
Un
artiste de génie a peint une figure sur la toile. Nous pourrons imiter son
tableau avec des carreaux de mosaïque multicolores. Et nous reproduirons
d’autant mieux les courbes et les nuances du modèle que nos carreaux seront
plus petits, plus nombreux, plus variés de ton. Mais il faudrait une infinité
d’éléments infiniment petits, présentant une infinité de nuances, pour
obtenir l’exact équivalent de cette figure que l’artiste à conçue comme une
chose simple, qu’il a voulu transporter en bloc sur la toile, et qui est
d’autant plus achevée qu’elle apparaît mieux comme la projection d’une
intuition indivisible. |
An artist of genius has painted a figure on his
canvas. We can imitate his picture with many-colored squares of mosaic. And
we shall reproduce the curves and shades of the model so much the better as
our squares are smaller, more numerous and more varied in tone. But an
infinity of elements infinitely small, presenting an infinity of shades,
would be necessary to obtain the exact equivalent of the figure that the
artist has conceived as a simple thing, which he has wished to transport as
a whole to the canvas, and which is the more complete the more it strikes us
as the projection of an indivisible intuition. |
Bergson briefly returned to his example in the
book’s final section, “The Evolutionism of Spencer”:
... l’acte de dessiner et de peindre n’a aucun
rapport avec celui d’assembler les fragments d’une image déjà dessinée,
déjà peinte. |
...the act of
drawing and painting has nothing to do with that of putting together the
fragments of a picture already drawn and already painted. |
[12/6] how a miracle can be
Dorothy Sayers ... The Mind of the Maker
The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), appeared in 1941. Lewis is
referring to chapter 5, “Free Will and Miracle”, last paragraph:
The agents of the
miraculous which the novelist has at his command are, roughly speaking,
conversion and coincidence; either a character or a situation is abruptly changed,
not by anything developing out of the essentials of the story, but by the
personal divine intervention of the creator. Yet it will not altogether do to
say that neither conversion nor coincidence is ever permissible in a
story. ... [T]he will of the creator becomes a character in the story; just as,
theologically, all miracles depend on the assumption that God is a character in
history. But even so, it is necessary that God should act in conformity with
His own character. The study of our analogy will lead us perhaps to believe
that God will be chary of indulging in irrelevant miracle, and will use it only
when it is an integral part of the story.
Lewis’s debt to Sayers
in writing Miracles was perhaps larger than appears from this one
reference. In a letter to Lewis of 13 May 1943 she complained that “there
aren’t any up-to-date books about Miracles”, and on 17 May he replied telling
her “I’m starting a book on Miracles.” Walter Hooper thinks it likely that
Sayers provided “exactly the encouragement Lewis needed to write his own book
on the subject” (Collected Letters II, p. 573).
[12/7]
THE READER MAY
A friend of mine wrote a play
One instance of a similar story being told to
Lewis is recounted in his diary for 29 May 1922, as published in All My Road Before Me (1992), p. 42.
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
hume,
Treatise of Human Nature, I,
III, vi.
David Hume (1711-1776), Scottish philosopher and
historian, and a major proponent of atheism. A Treatise of Human Nature
(1739-1740) was his first published work.
[13/6] ever since hume’s famous essay
Hume’s famous Essay
i.e. Hume’s essay Of Miracles, first published in 1758 as section X of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.
This book was an enlarged edition of the one published in 1748 as Philosophical Essays concerning Human
Understanding. The section Of
Miracles has often been reprinted as a separate publication, e.g. as the
60-page Open Court Classics edition (1985) introduced and annotated by Antony
Flew.
The two
phrases quoted from Hume, “firm and unalterable experience” and “uniform
experience”, appear toward the end of the essay’s first part, or the Enquiry’s sub-sections 89 and 90.
[13/14] but i am convinced
“In science,” said the late Sir
Arthur Eddington ...
the fitness of things
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944), British
astronomer and popular writer on science. The quotation, with a small ellipsis,
is from the The Nature of the Physical World
(1928, Gifford Lectures 1927), last chapter (XV), “Science and Mysticism”, near
the end of the section called “Conviction”:
In science we sometimes have
convictions as to the right solution of a problem which we cherish... [etc.]
[13/17] the sciences logically require
Professor Whitehead points out
... Science and the Modern World
The footnote is wrong: Lewis is in fact referring
to chapter I of Whitehead’s book, not chapter II. The epithet “our greatest
natural philosopher” may partly go back to Collingwood’s Idea of Nature (see first note to chapter 4, above). On page 79 of
that book, Collingwood notes that Whitehead’s judgement of Plato’s Timaeus
deserves the utmost respect as that of one of the
greatest living philosophers and perhaps the greatest living writer on
cosmology. In Whitehead’s opinion the Timaeus
comes nearer than any other book to providing the philosophical setting
required by the ideas of modern physical science.
[13/20] if in giving such weight
Mother Egarée Louise
The name seems to be an invention of Lewis; égarer is French for “getting lost”,
“going astray”; St Anthony is a saint traditionally invoked as Patron Saint of
lost things and people.
the “rosy pudency”
Shakespeare, Cymbeline
II.5, 11. Posthumus talking about his wife:
Me of my lawful pleasure she
restrain’d
And pray’d me oft forbearance; did it with
A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on’t
Might well have warm’d old Saturn; that I thought her
As chaste as unsunn’d snow.
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
A light that shone from behind the sun ... charles williams
Lines 307-308 from
“The Calling of Taliessin”, the second section in The Region of the Summer
Stars (1944), an Arthurian long poem by Charles Williams. An intimate friend
of Lewis, Williams died around the time when Lewis finished writing Miracles. The first line is also quoted
in Lewis’s last book, Letters to Malcolm
(1963), as the last words of chapter 5.
In The
Four Loves (1960), chapter 6, par. 21, Lewis cites another phrase from The Region of the Summer Stars: “the land of the Trinity”, which he
considered to be closely related to the image of “light from behind the sun”
(cf. Williams & Lewis, Arthurian
Torso [1948], p. 103).
[14/2] the fitness or credibility
we are asked to regard all the
theological elements as later accretions
Lewis developed this particular objection to
mid-20th-century modern theology notably in his 1959 essay “Modern Theology and
Biblical Criticism”, later published as “Fern-seed and Elephants” in Christian Reflections.
the whole thing began with
vegetation myths and mystery religions
Vegetation myths are stories about gods who
somehow undergo death and rebirth, like Osiris in ancient Egyptian religion.
Mystery religions were popular in the Roman empire during the early Christian
centuries, purporting to initiate believers into secrets and rituals that
remain closed to other people. Lewis is referring to the “evolutionary” thought
pattern current around the turn of the 20th century, envisaging all things as
complex and civilized products of simple and primitive beginnings. For the
study of religion this was exemplified by Frazer’s Golden Bough (see note to [10/3] the Golden Bough). Lewis’s critique of this approach is further
developed later on in the present chapter and in his papers “Is Theology
Poetry?” and “The Funeral of a Great Myth”, both written while he was working
on Miracles.
[14/3] since the incarnation
We believe that the sun is in
the sky at midday [etc.]
cf. the last sentence of “Is Theology Poetry?”
(see previous note):
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the
Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything
else.
[14/4] the first difficulty that
understanding that there must be
a still unobserved planet beyond Uranus
This planet beyond Uranus is Neptune, discovered almost
simultaneously by two astronomers, John Adams in England and Le Verrier in
France, in the summer of 1845. Uranus had been discovered by Sir William
Herschel in 1781 as the first planet beyond the five (barring Earth) known to
humanity since time immemorial. Curiously, the two discoverers of Neptune each
had an incorrect idea of the distant planet’s course around the sun and
nevertheless had a correct idea of its position at the moment of their
telescopic searchings. Pluto, no longer counted as a planet today, was not
discovered until 1930.
in a very minor key
Lewis’s understanding of musical theory appears to
be imperfect. It is not possible for a minor or major key to be “very” minor or
major. The key of any passage or movement is simply either major or minor.
Montaigne became kittenish with
his kitten but she never talked philosophy to him
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), French writer,
originator of the “essay” as a literary genre. The first full collection of his
Essais was published in 1588. The Apologie
de Raimond Sebond (Book II, nr. 12) is the longest essay of all (almost
80,000 words in English translation). Purportedly a defence of a 14th-century
Spanish work of natural theology and, more generally, of traditional
Christianity and the established Church, the “Apology” is in effect a major
early-modern manifesto of philosophical scepticism.
Lewis
is interpreting and critiquing Montaigne’s observation rather than just citing
it. In
the passage referred to (at about 9 percent of the total length from the
essay’s beginning) Montaigne is inquiring “upon what foundation [man] hath built those great advantages and ods he
supposeth to have over other creatures”, arguing that this foundation is very
weak indeed:
Presumption is our naturall
and originall infirmitie. Of all creatures man is the most miserable and
fraile, and therewithall the proudest and disdainfullest. ... It is through the vanitie of the same
imagination that he dare equall himself to God, that he ascribeth divine
conditions unto himself, that he selecteth and separateth himselfe from out the
ranke of other creatures ... How knoweth he by the vertue of his understanding
the inward and secret motions of beasts? By what comparison from them to us
doth he conclude the brutishnesse he ascribeth unto them? When I am playing
with my cat, who knowes whether she have more sport in dallying with me than I
have in gaming with her?
–– John Florio’s translation (1603)
The original French of the last sentence is
Quand
je me jouë à ma chatte, qui sçait si elle passe son temps de moy plus que je ne
fay d’elle?
A little further on Montaigne notes,
The defect which hindreth the
communication betweene them and us, why may it not as well be in us as in them?
It is a matter of divination to guesse in whom the fault is that we understand
not one another. For we understand them no more than they us. By the same
reason, may they as well esteeme us beasts as we them.
Again, after dozens of pages with observations on animal behaviour, he
concludes that
it appeareth that it is not
long of [=due to] a true discourse, but of a foolish hardinesse and
selfe-perfuming obstinacie, we prefer ourselves before other creatures, and
sequester our selves from their condition and societie.
Lewis’s point is precisely opposed to Montaigne’s:
the distinction between “higher” and “lower” powers (as exemplified by man and
beast respectively) is what Lewis affirms against Montaigne’s denial.
[14/7] the doctrine of the incarnation
Adonis, Osiris, or another
Adonis was a deity in ancient Greek mythology; as
the handsome lover both of Aphrodite and of Persephone, he was ordered by Zeus
to live with the former on earth during the spring and summer, and with the
latter in the underworld during the other two seasons. From early times the
Adonis myth was felt to symbolize the death and rebirth of nature. Osiris, a
major god in ancient Egyptian religion, was the god of the dead, the
underworld, and resurrection.
[14/10] the records, in fact
Sir Launcelot
Launcelot or Lancelot du lac (“of the Lake”) is
one of the Knights of the Round Table in Arthurian legends. He is always
represented as the model of chivalry, bravery and fidelity although he was the
lover of Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife.
[14/11] there is, however
glad Creator
Elsewhere Lewis used the same phrase, in quotation
marks, on two occasions with reference to the poet Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)
and perhaps quoting from him (Spenser’s
Images of Life [1967], last paragraph; “Neoplatonism in the Poetry of
Spenser” [1961], in Studies in Medieval
and Renaissance Literature [1966], p. 162). The phrase is also quoted by
George Macdonald in a passage quoted in turn by Lewis in his Macdonald Anthology (1946), nr. 215. The
precise origin remains uncertain. – [...?]
Bacchus, Venus, Ceres
Ancient Roman god and goddesses of Wine, Love and
Corn (“cereals”) respectively.
[14/14] now if there is such a God
The Hebrews ... headed off from
the worship of
Nature-gods
e.g. when Moses destroyed the golden calf which
the people had asked Aaron to make for them to worship, as recounted in Exodus
32. God tells Moses on Mount Sinai that the people
have turned aside quickly out of the way which I
commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it ...
Now let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may
consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.
Moses succeeds in assuaging God’s anger but when
he goes down and sees the calf and the people dancing and singing before it,
his own anger “waxes hot”
And he took the calf which they had made, and
burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water,
and made the children of Israel drink of it.
[14/15] The mention of that nation
one man from the whole earth (Abraham)
is picked out
cf. Genesis 12:1-3.
some die in the desert, some
remain behind in Babylon
The ancient Hebrews having left Egypt after more
than four centuries (Exodus 12:31-42), they struggled to survive forty years of
life in the desert before they reached the Promised Land. Babylonia is where
the Hebrews lived in captivity for several decades in the mid-6th century BC.
When the new Persian king Cyrus allowed them to go home in 537 BC, part of the
people preferred to stay there.
a Jewish girl at her prayers.
i.e. Mary at the moment of the Annunciation; cf.
Luke 1:28.
[14/16]
SUCH A
PROCESS IS
Of all the stars, perhaps very few … have planets
This suspicion seems to have become definitively
obsolete in 1992, when the first “exoplanet” was discovered. By April 2018, a
total of 3,767 exoplanets had been scientifically confirmed to exist, with
thousands more detections awaiting confirmation. For the latest developments
see www.exoplanet.eu.
[14/17] at this point we come
the argument of Butler’s famous
Analogy
i.e. The
Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of
Nature (1736) by the Anglican theologian and bishop Joseph Butler
(1692-1752). Butler argues that the problems posed by “natural” religion are as
hard to solve as those posed by “revealed” religion, but hardly succeeds in
making a positive case for revealed religion.
[14/18] for when we look
Abraham is told that “in his
seed” [etc.]
Genesis 22:18.
And in thy seed shall all the
nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.
“man of sorrows”
Isaiah 53:3.
He is despised and rejected of
men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our
faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
[14/20] at this point it may
the worship of Dionysus
The ancient Greek god of wine, known to the Romans
as Bacchus.
Life-force worship
See note to [11/4] the worship of the life-force.
“development”
“Development” and its cognate words in other
languages (e.g. German Entwicklung,
Dutch ontwikkeling) were sometimes
used as a synonym for “evolution” in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Heroes,” “Supermen”
Lewis is probably alluding to Thomas Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worship (1841) and to
Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch
(“Superman”) presented in Also sprach
Zarathustra (1883; Thus Spake
Zarathustra). The term “Superman” was introduced in the English language by
G. B. Shaw in his play Man and Superman
(1903) along with the idea of a Life-force.
“the same all the way up”
A variant of the phrase in humorous accounts of
primitive views of the universe, in which a flat Earth is thought to be resting
on a huge elephant, or turtle. When asked what the elephant or turtle is
standing on, the holder of this view is said to answer, “It’s elephants/turtles
all the way down!” Cf. Wikipedia on “Turtles all
the way down”.
Nature is being lit up by a
light from beyond Nature
cf. the Charles Williams quotation serving as this
chapter’s epitaph, above. Lewis expressed a similar idea as a matter of
personal experience in his autobiography, Surprised
by Joy (1955), chapter 11, describing his first reading of George
Macdonald, Phantastes:
Up till now each visitation of
Joy had left the common world momentarily a desert ... But now I saw the bright
shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there,
transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged.
[14/21] throughout this doctrine
“the whole creation” is in
travail
Paul’s epistle to the Romans 8:22.
For we know that the whole
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
[14/22] in the first place
“without form and void”
Genesis 1:2.
And the earth was without form,
and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
the widespread Naturalism ... as
this error is corrected
Cf. Lewis’s chapters 2 through 5, above.
Maginot Line
A line of fortifications built by France in the
1930s to defend its border with Germany, called after the French minister of
war at the time when the construction work began, André Maginot. The image is
either unhappily or impishly chosen since the Maginot Line proved ineffective
when Germany invaded France in 1940.
[14/23]
THE SIN, BOTH OF
a deeper happiness and a fuller
splend
In using the phrase “a fuller splendour” Lewis
must have been aware of borrowing it from the Idealist philosopher Francis H.
Bradley, whose Principles of Logic
(1883) he read as a student of philosophy, probably in early 1922. Lewis also
referred to the passage in question in The Pilgrim’s Regress, VII/9.
[14/24] another question that arises
Jack
the Giant-Killer
An English fairy-tale
about a Cornish farmer’s son slaying several giants, set in the days of King
Arthur. The first printed version appeared in the early 18th century. Jack is a
strong lad, but it is usually by his cleverness that he scores his successes
against the giants.
those who have never fallen will thus bless Adam’s fall
Lewis is alluding to a passage in the Exsultet,
an ancient Easter hymn from the Roman Catholic liturgy:
O certe necessarium Adae
peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est!
O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!
– O truly necessary sin of Adam, which the death of
Christ has blotted out!
O happy fault, that merited such and so great a Redeemer!
[14/26] this
doctrine of a universal
When spring comes it “leaves no corner of the land
untouched”
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), The
Prelude, Book VI, 359:
Among sequestered villages we walked
And found benevolence and blessedness
Spread like a fragrance everywhere, when spring
Hath left no corner of the land untouched ...
“Which of them was the
greatest?”
Luke 9:46.
Then there arose a reasoning among them, which of
them should be greatest.
Nothing is “merely a by-product”
of anything else
The most memorable expression Lewis gave to this
idea is in the long prose hymn at the end of his novel Perelandra, where the universe is celebrated as a “Great Dance”:
“Each grain is at the centre. The Dust is at
the centre. The Worlds are at the centre. The beasts are at the centre. The
ancient peoples are there. The race that sinned is there. ... The gods are
there also. Blessed be He!”
“Each thing ... is the end and the final
cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes
to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!”
“In the plan of the Great Dance plans
without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking
into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed. Thus each
is equally at the centre and none are there by being equals, but some by giving
place and some by receiving it, the small things by their smallness and the
great by their greatness, and all the patterns linked and looped together by
the unions of a kneeling with a sceptred love. Blessed be He!”
“All that is made seems planless to the
darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for. ... Set your
eyes on one movement and it will lead you through all patterns and it will seem
to you the master movement. But the seeming will be true. Let no mouth open to
gainsay it. There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre
because it is all centre. Blessed be He!”
the inter-inanimations of
reality
“Inter-inanimation” is “mutual inspiration”. The verb form of the word
was apparently coined by the English poet John Donne (1572–1631) in his poem
“The Ecstasy” (or “Exstasie”), 41–44.
When love with one another so
interinanimates two soules,
That abler soule, which thence doth flow,
Defects of lonelinesse controules.
As noted in Helen Gardner’s 1965 edition of Donne’s poems, the great
majority of old manuscript sources for this poem have “interinanimates”,
not “interanimates”. Yet the latter variety is the one found in the first
edition (1633). This may well be why the Oxford English Dictionary only
has an entry for “interanimate”, quoting this line of Donne’s as its only
source and dubbing the word “rare”. C. S. Lewis may have been an uncommonly
frequent user of the word. He used it in at least five of his books , always
choosing the -in- variety except in Letters
to Malcolm (ch. 14, par. 26). The other places
are The Problem of Pain (ch. 5, penultimate paragraph); Perelandra
(ch. 17, the long paragraph after the “Great Dance” text, describing the visual
experience); and Studies in Words (“Simple” IV, par. 1, and “At the
fringe of language” par. 2).
[14/28]
FOR THIS REASON
Alice Meynell … in an
interesting poem
Lewis referred to this same poem, “Christ in the
Universe”, in his 1958 essay “Religion and
Rocketry”. Of the poem’s seven stanzas, the last is
O be prepared, my
soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.
[14/28] it ought to be noticed
the lofty view ... among the
Stoics, that Death “doesn’t matter”
See note to [11/4] the Stoics.
Ancient philosophical expressions of “apathy” towards death were not
exclusively Stoic – nor, perhaps, invariably lofty. One famous expression came
from Epicurus (341–270 b.c.),
founder of the Epicurean school, who considered physical pleasure as the
ultimate goal of life: “Where death is, I am not, and where I am, death is not”
(Letter to Menoeceus).
“kind nature’s signal for
retreat”
Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), final passage.
Yet when the sense of sacred
presence fires,
And strong devotion to the skies aspires,
Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind,
Obedient passions, and a will resign’d; ...
For faith, that panting for a happier seat,
Counts death kind Nature’s signal for retreat ...
Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), English political
philosopher, author of Leviathan. In
effect a materialist and atheist, he considered self-interest as the ultimate
basis of all human action and hence argued for the need of restraint by a
strong hand of authority.
[14/29] to penetrate the whole
the mystical slaying of the Lamb
“before the
foundation of the world”
Revelation 13:8.
And all that dwell upon the
earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the
Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
[14/32] almost the whole of Christian
a chapter in Rabelais ... the
Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
– François Rabelais (c. 1494-1553), French writer, author of Gargantua et Pantagruel (1534).
– Edgar
Allan Poe (1809-1849), U.S. writer, poet and critic, author of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
(1840).
The joint
mention of the two writers reflects the “two facts” mentioned in the
paragraph’s first sentence: Rabelais represents the “coarse jokes”, Poe the
“uncanniness” of the dead.
[14/35] and one can see
“In the day ye eat of that fruit
ye shall die”
Genesis 2:16-17.[
And the Lord[ God commanded the
man, saying, Of every tree, of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the
tree of the knowledge of good an evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day
that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Martha says to Christ
John 11:39.
Jesus said, take ye away the
stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this
time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.
“I am not so much afraid of
death as ashamed of it,” said Sir Thomas Browne
Religio
Medici (1642), I.40 (p. 45 in the Everyman edition):
... yet I
have one part of modesty, which I have seldom discovered in another, that is
(to speak truely), I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof. ʼTis the
very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure
us, that our nearest friends, Wife, and Children, stand afraid, and start at
us: the Birds and Beasts of the field, that before in a natural fear obeyed us,
forgetting all allegiance, begin to prey upon us.
The same quotation appears in Lewis’s essays “The
Grand Miracle” (1945), which is an earlier version of the present chapter, and
“Some Thoughts” (1948), as well as in a letter to Ruth Pitter of 12 February
1947 (Collected Letters II, 763). The
passage in Browne may well have resonated with Lewis’s own early experience
when his mother died in 1908. As he described in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), chapter 1:
I was taken into the bedroom
where my mother lay dead; as they said, “to see her”, in reality, as I at once
knew, ʻ
to see it”. There was nothing that a grown-up would call disfigurement – except
for that total disfigurement which is death itself. Grief was overwhelmed in
terror. To this day I do not know what they mean when they call dead bodies
beautiful. The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the
loveliest of the dead.
“The readiness is all”
Shakespeare, Hamlet,
V.2
If it be now, ’tis not to come;
if it be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all.
nightmare civilisations
In using this term Lewis was almost certainly
thinking of Chesterton’s book The
Everlasting Man (1925) – a book that made him see “the whole Christian
outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense” (Surprised by Joy, ch. 14). In chapter 6,
“The Demons and the Philosophers”, Chesterton discusses pre-Christian
spirituality in four broad categories.
The third category (“The Demons”) is described through brief sketches of the
Aztec empire, of ancient Carthage, and of Carthage’s Phoenician parent
civilization – examples of a “nightmare” type of mythology that was defeated by
the “daydream” type before civilisation could enter the stage of Christendom:
... the idea of being worthy of the demons ...
Sooner or later a man deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing
he can think of. ... This is the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the
world. ... as a matter of fact some of the very highest civilisations of the
world were the very places where the horns of Satan were exalted, not only to
the stars but in the face of the sun. ... a South American idol was made as
ugly as possible, as a Greek image was made as beautiful as possible.
Chapter 15: Miracles of the Old Creation
[15/1] if we open such books
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
A collection of German fairy tales collected,
retold and published in 1812-1822 as Kinder-
und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) by the brothers Jacob
(1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm, German philologists and folklorists.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
A large, loosely
unified collection of mostly Greek legends, by the ancient Roman poet Publius
Ovidius Naso (43 BC–c. 17 AD). Many of the stories involve some sort of “metamorphosis”
or transformation.
the Italian epics
The great works of the Italian Renaissance poets
Boiardo (1434-94; Orlando innamorato,
1487), Ariosto (1474-1533; Orlando
Furioso, 1516), and Tasso (1544-95; Gerusalemme
liberata, 1581). Lewis wrote in glowing terms about these poets in The Allegory of Love (1936), in the
opening section of the great final chapter on Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
[15/2] it is this which
as Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dion
Cassius relate, Vespasian performed two cures
Vespasian was Roman Emperor, 69-79 AD, the first
of the three “Flavian” emperors, followed by his sons Titus and Domitian
respectively.
The first
two writers mentioned lived under and after his short dynasty, were loyal to
it, and critical of previous emperors. Tacitus (c. 55-c. 120) was a great
Roman historian; and Suetonius (c.
70- after 130) was the author of colourful biographies of all the Roman
emperors down to Domitian (81-96), The
Twelve Caesars (De vita Caesarum).
Dion Cassius, or Cassius Dio (c. 155-c. 235), a Roman writing in Greek,
produced an 80-volume history of Rome from the earliest days until 229 AD on
the basis of a fairly critical use of his sources.
Lewis is
referring to the account of how Vespasian healed two persons in Alexandria,
Egypt; one was blind and the other was lame (in Suetonius) or had a withered
hand (in Tacitus and Cassius Dio). See Tacitus, Histories IV, 81; Suetonius, Life
of Vespasian VII; Cassius Dio, Roman
History LXV, 8.
miracles are (in late documents,
I believe) recorded of the Buddha
Siddhārtha Gautama, or Gautama the Buddha (the “enlightened one”), the
spiritual teacher of ancient India whose teachings were the basis of Buddhism,
lived in the 6th or 5th century BC. It is impossible to say which documents and
miracles Lewis may have had in mind. It seems broadly true, however, that the
more fantastic stories (including miracles) about the Buddha date from the
advent of Mahayana (“Great Vehicle”) Buddhism and the use of Sanskrit rather
than Pali, around the turn of the Common Era. Also, it was not until then that
more or less full biographies of the Buddha began to appear.
Teachings from earlier Buddhism
(which came to be called Hinayana, “Small Vehicle”), notably the Theravada
school, came to be preserved in the Pali Canon. As regards the Buddha’s life
and work, this large collection tends to be confined to isolated scenes
explaining his spiritual experiences. The Pali Canon consists of three pitakas (“baskets”); the Sutta Pitaka (“Basket of Sayings”)
contains, in the Digha Nikaya
(“Collection of Long Discourses”), a saying of the Buddha in answer to a
request for miracles:
I dislike,
despise and detest them.
In light of Lewis’s remarks, it is interesting to note that the
appearance of this saying in an early document suggests that a firm rejection
of miracles was already relevant in the early centuries of Buddhism.
[15/2, Note] a consideration of
Euhemerus
Euhemerus
of Messene (c. 340-c. 260 BC), a Greek writer, 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. This kind of explanation for
religion has since been called the “euhemeric critique of the gods”, or
“euhemerism”. Only fragments have survived of Euhemerus’s work, the Sacred Chronicle.
diabolical illusion ... some of
the Fathers
The view that non-Christian religions were
elaborate systems of delusion designed and deployed by devils for use on
humans, and that the pagans gods were actually demons, was notably expounded by
the early Christian apologist Justin Martyr (103-165), in his First Apology. Later Church Fathers,
including church historian Eusebius (c.
263-c. 340), expressed similar ideas,
which in fact lived on in Christianity for many centuries until the idea was
secularized in the Enlightenement (see next note).
priestly lying ... philosophers
of the Enlightenment
The idea of priestly lying or “priestcraft” as the
driving force behind popular religion got currency during the early
Enlightenment through the Histoire des
Oracles (1687) by the French philosopher Fontenelle (1657-1757); he
depended heavily on a slightly earlier Latin work, Oraculis Ethnicorum (1683) by the Dutch physician Anthony van Dale
(1638-1708). Their view was shared by British deists Matthew Tindal (Christianity as Old as the Creation,
1730) and John Toland (Adeisdaemon,
1709) and further propagated by later French philosophes such as Voltaire, Condillac, d’Alembert and Diderot.
Lewis
appears to be bracketing three critical views of “Myth” because Myth is his own
focus of interest. In fact the focus differed from one critic of religion to another:
thus the early Enlightenment focussed on oracles. Nor were charges of “priestly
lying” exclusive to the Enlightenment, as Lewis has himself suggested in his
novel Till We Have Faces (1956), set
in an ancient barbarian kingdom on the fringes of the Greek world in the third
century BC.
[15/7] let us return to our
wedding feast in Cana
Gospel of John 2:1-11.
Bacchus
The ancient Roman god of wine, known to the Greeks
as Dionysus.
to gladden the heart of man
cf. Psalm 104:15.
And
wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make hsi face to shine, and
bread which strengtheneth man’s heart.
[15/8] other miracles that fall
multiplication of a little bread
and a little fish
Gospel of Matthew 14:13-21 and 15:32-39, and
parallel places in the Gospels of Mark and Luke.
“The Son does nothing except
what He sees the Father do”
Gospel of John 5:19. It is the motto of this
chapter.
[15/9] that same day he also
“thronging the seas with spawn
innumerable”
John Milton, Comus
(1634), line 713.
Wherefore did Nature pour her
bounties forth
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand,
Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks,
Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable,
But all to please and sate the curious taste?
a god called Genius
In his scholarly work Lewis discussed this deity
as it appeared in several medieval writers and, notably, in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene; see Lewis’s essay “Genius
and Genius” of 1936 in Studies in Medieval
Renaissance Literature (1966), pp. 169-174; also The Allegory of Love (1936), Appendix, pp. 361-363.
[15/10] with this we stand
Virgin Birth
i.e. the birth of Jesus Christ from his virgin
mother Mary; see second note on chapter 7, above. Cf. Matthew 1:24-25.
...
and [Joseph] took unto him his wife: and knew her not till she had brought
forth her firstborn son: and he called his name Jesus.
[15/11] perhaps the best way
one of the most archaic of our
anti-god papers
The reference is perhaps to Watts’s Literary Guide, precursor of today’s New Humanist. This journal was founded in 1885 by Charles A. Watts
(1858-1946). See note to [10/3] Rationalist
Press Association.
Zeus lay with Alcmena
In Greek mythology, Alcmena was visited by Zeus in
the guise of her husband Amphytrion. Zeus made the night three times its normal
length for additional pleasure, gave a banquet, and fathered Alcmene’s son
Herakles (Hercules).
[15/12] in a normal act of generation
recapitulate in the womb
“Recapitulation” is actually a process which has a
small place in scientific embryology. The German Darwinian biologist Ernst
Haeckel made much of it in his contributions to evolution theory – too much for
later science. Richard Dawkins in The
Ancestor’s Tale (2004) states that recapitulation theory “is now regarded
as a small part of what is sometimes but not always true” (“Rendezvous 32: The
Choanoflagellate’s Tale”).
small and close
The phrase returns twice in what follows – the
second time in the next chapter. In his 1942 essay “Miracles”, Lewis explicitly
stated that he found this idea “first in George MacDonald and then later in St
Athanasius.” Lewis’s George Macdonald
Anthology (1946) has three items illustrating the point, each
taken from Macdonald’s Unspoken Sermons;
cf. Nr. 26, 73, 99.
For
Athanasius see note to [11/5] St. Athanasius. The relevant passages is in
his book De Incarnatione Verbi Dei (The Incarnation of the Word of God),
chapter 3 (“The Divine Dilemma and its Solution in the Incarnation
[continued]”), §§14-16, summarized by Lewis in his 1942 essay as thus:
Our
Lord took a body like to ours and lived as a man in order that those who had
refused to recognize Him in His superintendence and captaincy of the whole
universe might come to recognize from the works He did here below in the body
that what dwelled in this body was the Word of God.
Lewis wrote a preface for a new translation of De Incarnatione in 1944; this preface was later reprinted as an
independent essay, “On the Reading of Old Books”.
[15/14] without deciding in detail
vis
medicatrix naturae
(Latin) “Nature’s
healing power”. A phrase describing the medical philosophy of the ancient Greek
physician Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 370 BC).
[15/16]
the miracles of reversal
the dead are raised ... one or
two instances in the Gospels
– the widow’s dead son at
Nain, Luke 7:11-16.
– the daughter of Jairus,
Luke 8:40-56 and parallel places in Matthew and Mark (Jesus makes no haste in
coming to cure the girl and when the people say she has died, he denies it and
raises her from what he says is only sleep.)
– Lazarus, John 11:1-44.
the Transfiguration, the
Resurrection, and the Ascension
– Transfiguration: Matthew 17:1-13, Mark
9:2-13 and Luke 9: 28-36
– Resurrection: Matthew 28:1-10, Mark 16:1-8,
Luke 24:1-12 and John 20:1-18.
– Ascension: Luke 24:50-53 and Acts 1:9-10.
“spring comes slowly up this
way”
Coleridge, Christabel
(1817) I, 22.
The night is chill,
the cloud is gray:
’T is a month before the month of May,
And the Spring comes slowly up this way.
Chapter 16: Miracles of the New Creation
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
c.
patmore, The Victories of Love
Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), English poet. The Victories of Love was published in
1862 as the fourth and final instalment of a long poem which as a whole was
published as The Angel in the House
(1863). The work is a celebration and idealization of married love as the poet
enjoyed it for fifteen years with his wife Emily; she died in 1862 and he
remarried twice.
The 1863 publication was a two-part poem in
four “Books”, with The Victories of Love as
Part II, Book II (the latter title was used for the whole of Part II in later
editions). The whole of Part II is in the form of letters exchanged between a
small number of characters. The one exception is the last and longest item of The Victories and of the whole work,
“The Wedding Sermon”, with section 10, line 63ff as the source of Lewis’s
quotation (p. 215 in the 1863 edition).
[16/6] I do not mean, of course
Nephesh
The Hebrew word for “soul” has a wide range of
usage but normally refers to the life force of living creatures. One instance
of its use in the Old Testament is Proverbs 21:10,
The soul of the wicked desireth evil,
another in Psalm 86:4,
Rejoice the soul of thy servant:
for unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.
Sheol ... where none called upon
Jehovah any more
The word was often translated as “hell” in the
KJV/Authorized Version of the Bible (e.g. Job 11:8 and Proverbs 15:24), later more usually as
“grave” (which also occurs in KJV, e.g. I Kings 2:6).
“Jehovah” is an old form of
Old Testament proper name of God, usually translated as “the Lord”: JHWH or YHWH (יהוה). The Hebrew
alphabet has no vowels; the addition of “vowel points” to Hebrew words as a help
to pronunciation was a late development, while God’s name was not supposed to
be pronounced at all. No single vocalization of JHVH can be absolutely
authoritative; elsewhere in this book and in this same paragraph Lewis writes
“Jahweh”. The modern practice is to transcribe the name without the vowels.
the Hades of the Greeks
Originally the name of the Greek god of the underworld, in the
Hellenistic period Hades came
to signify the underworld itself, more and more conceived as a place of
torture. In the Greek version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, hades is the world for sheol (see note above). In New Testament
translation, hades is rendered as inferno in Latin and hell in English.
the Niflheim of the Norsemen
In Scandinavian mythology Niflheim, “mist-home”,
was the perpetually cold and dark abode of the dead who had not been slain in battle.
It was ruled over by the goddess Hel, after which it was also named. Slain
warriors entered Valhalla.
the Witch of Endor
cf. I Samuel 28:7-15 – “an excellent example of
the concept of Sheol in Israel’s Monarchic period” (Jim West in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, ed.
D. N. Freedman, 2000, p. 1207).
Psychical Researchers
“Psychical Research” was the kind of pursuit now usually called
“parapsychology”. The change in terminology happened gradually during Lewis’s
lifetime. The term still lives on in the name of journals and societies,
including the oldest one, the Society for Psychical Research founded in London in
1882.
Lewis was fascinated by
psychical research for some time in his early years, as attested by a letter of
3 June 1917 (Collected Letters I, p.
313). His later aversion to it appears to have been closely linked, as here in Miracles, to his scorn for the supposed
value of mere “survival”. The attitude may have been partly inspired by George
Macdonald: in Lewis’s short novel The
Great Divorce (1946), chapter 9, Macdonald appears as a character in the
story telling about a man obsessed by “survival” who “began by being
philosophical, but in the end he took up Psychical Research”. In Lewis’s Macdonald Anthology, of the same year,
“Psychical Research” is the title Lewis gave to an item on the same subject.
Also in 1946, Lewis read a paper
called “Religion without Dogma?” to the Oxford Socratic Club in reply to the
Oxford philosopher H. H. Price. Price had argued for an agnostic type of “minimal
religion”, hopefully buttressed by the findings of psychical research. Lewis
replied:
The minimal religion will, in my
opinion, leave us all doing what we were doing before. Now it, in itself, will
not be an objection from Professor Price’s point of view. He was not working
for unity, but for some spiritual dynamism to see us through the black night of
civilization. If Psychical Research has the effect of enabling people to
continue, or to return to, all the diverse religions which naturalism has threatened,
and if they can thus get power and hope and discipline, he will, I fancy, be
content. But the trouble is that if this minimal religion leaves Buddhists
still Buddhists, and Nazis still Nazis, then it will, I believe, leave us – as
Western, mechanised, democratic, secularised men – exactly where we were. In
what way will a belief in the immortality vouched for by Psychical Research,
and in an unknown God, restore to us the virtue and energy of our ancestors? It
seems to me that both beliefs, unless reinforced by something else, will be to
modern man very shadowy and inoperative.
“the day of Jahweh”
For example, see Amos 5:18-20, perhaps the
earliest of a total of 16 precise references in the Old Testament:
Woe
unto you that desire the day of the Lord!
to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord
is darkness, and not light. [etc.]
or
Isaiah 13:6,
Howl ye; for the day of the Lord is at hand; it shall come as a destruction
from the Almighty ... the day of the Lord
cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and
he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.
However, both Israel and “the nations” may look
forward to much better things too, as in Isaiah 19: 24,
In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt
and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land; whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying,
blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine
inheritance.
There are also references in Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
The shorter books of Joel and Zephaniah are wholly devoted to proclaiming the
Day of the Lord.
[16/10] the body, which lives
“He was caught up into the sky (ouranos),” says St. Mark [etc.]
Mark.
16:19, assumptus est in caelum.
So then after the Lord had
spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of
God.
“He was lifted up,” says the author
of Acts [etc.]
Acts of the Apostles 9:1, videntibus illis, elevatus est.
And when he had spoken these
things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of
their sight.
[16/12] the records represent
“to prepare a place for us”
Gospel of John 14:3.
And if I go and prepare a place
for you, I will come again, and receive you
unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
[16/13] and yet the very way
The Law before the Gospel
In the New Testament, “the Law” is often used as
shorthand for the Jewish religion, including its animal sacrifices, which
Christ had come to “fulfil” by his one universal sacrifice. “The Gospel” is the
good news about this fulfilment. The epistles of Paul, especially those to the
Romans and the Galatians, are full of reflections on the Law and the important
ways in which it had become outdated, e.g. Romans 7:6,
But now we are delivered from
the law, that being dead wherein we were held: that we should serve in newness
of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.
Or Galatians 3:24,
... the law was our schoolmaster
to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
the Baptist before the Messiah
i.e. John the Baptist; cf. Matthew 3:1-11.
In those days came John the
Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea. And saying, Repent ye: for the
kingdom of heaven is at hand. ... I indeed baptize you with water unto
repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I ... he shall baptize
you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.
[16/14] in the walking on the water
the Walking on the Water
Matthew 14:25, Mark 6:48, John 6:19; Jesus coming
to the disciples while they are fishing on the Sea of Galilee in rough weather
by night. – Matthew:
And when the disciples saw him
walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried
out for fear. But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer;
it is I; be not afraid.
[16/15] the raising of lazarus
The raising of Lazarus
John 11:1-44.
[16/16] but the miracle of lazarus
“Shuffling,” said Professor
Eddington, is the thing Nature never undoes.
For Eddington see note to [13/14] Eddington. Lewis is again quoting The Nature
of the Physical World (1928), now from chapter IV, “The Running-Down of the
Universe”. The first section of the chapter is about Shuffling.
... There is a ghost of a chance that some day a thoroughly shuffled pack
will be found to have come back to the original order. That is because of the
comparatively small number of cards in the pack. In our applications the units
are so numerous that this kind of contingency can be disregarded.
We shall put forward the contention
that:
Whenever anything happens which cannot be undone, it is always reducible
to the introduction of a random element analogous to that introduced by
shuffling.
Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo. When Humpty Dumpty
had a great fall –
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again.
Lewis quoted another passage from the same chapter
and section of Eddington’s book in A
Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) as the epigraph for chapter XVIII, “The
Fall”.
[16/17] but entropy by its very
“Humpty Dumpty is falling”
As appears from the previous quotation, Lewis borrowed the Humpty-Dumpty
image from Eddington. The first two lines of the four-line nursery rhyme are
“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, /
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.”
[16/18] the transfiguration or “metamorphosis”
Transfiguration
Matthew 17:1-13, Mark 9:2-13, Luke 9:28-36.
a similar whiteness ...
Revelation
Revelation 1:14.
His head and his hairs were
white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire.
[16/19] it must indeed be emphasised
as our cortex now does
Lewis may not be referring to some particular
insight from the brain science of his day, but rather to his own argument, in
chapter 3 of this book, that “the act of knowing” is determined by what it
knows. Such determining is not a matter of sheer inescapable causation and
hence, in a way, a supernatural meddling with the natural.
I think Kant is at the root of
it
See note to [4/7] what Kant called [...?]
[16/22] to accept the idea
The statement in St. Mark
i.e. in this Gospel’s last verse but one, Mark
16:19, quoted above (“He was caught up”).
[16/23] what troubles us here
a vague luminosity (that is what
“cloud” presumably means here .. the Transfiguration)
cf. Acts 1:9, quoted above (“He was lifted up”). The Greek word for cloud (nefelè) appears in Matthew’s account (17:5) of the Transfiguration:
... a bright cloud overshadowed them.
as well as in Mark 9:7 and Luke 9:34.
[16/30] the remark so often made
like St. Paul, not to be
unclothed but to be re-clothed
2 Corinthians 5:4, also quoted in chapter 11,
above.
[16/32] the thought at the back
the glad Creator
See note to [14/11] on the same phrase.
[CHAPTER MOTTO]
g. k. chesterton,
Orthodoxy
Orthodoxy
(1908), chapter 7, “The Eternal Revolution”, par. 25 (“We have remarked
that...”).
[17/1] my work ends here
Moffat
James Moffatt (1870-1944) was a British theologian
who made a complete Bible translation, first published as a whole in 1926 and
revised in 1935.
Monsignor Knox
Ronald A. Knox (1888-1957) was an English Catholic
theologian and writer. He made an English translation of the Latin Vulgate “in
the Light of the Hebrew and Greek Originals”; his New Testament translation
appeared in 1945. The Old Testament followed in 1950, after the first edition
of Miracles. Obvious mistranslations
in the Vulgate were relegated to footnotes and corrected in the text.
Quixotic
i.e. highly unrealistic and impractical, taking
romantic ideals for reality and fighting imaginary enemies; in the manner of Don Quixote, hero of the
early modern Spanish novel, Don Quijote
de la Mancha (1605-1615) by Miguel de Cervantes.
[17/2] in using the books
Monism
The German biologist
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who did much to bring Darwinism to the
German-speaking world, explicitly used this term for the world view he
propagated. Jonathan Israel, today’s greatest scholar of naturalism and monism
as a historical force, usually talks of “one-substance thinking” (cf. note to
chapter 11, above, Bruno and Spinoza).
One of the moderns ...
“incorrigibly plural”
From the poem “Snow” by the Irish Louis MacNeice
(1907-1963):
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural.
As a young Oxford don Lewis met
MacNeice in John Betjeman’s rooms in St Aldate’s College. His diary note of the
experience confirms the air of aloofness in the phrase “one of the moderns”.
Lewis found himself “pitchforked into a galaxy of super-undergraduates” and
described McNeice as “an astonishingly ugly figure” and the conversation as
vapid and effeminate.
the natural philosophy of a
totalitarian mass-producing, conscripted age
Lewis appears to be contradicting earlier
assertions: in chapter 2 (par. 8) he has it that
Supernaturalism is the characteristic philosophy
of a monarchical age and Naturalism of a democratic ...
and in chapter 4 (par. 4):
I know that the hankering for a universe which is
all of a piece, and in which everything is the same sort of thing as everything
else – a continuity, a seamless web, a democratic universe – is very
deep-seated in the modern heart: in mine, no less than in yours.
[17/3] and yet... and yet...
as Arnold says, “Miracles don’t
happen.”
Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (1873), last sentence of the preface to the
1883 edition.
Christianity is immortal; it has eternal truth,
inexhaustible value, a boundless future. But our popular religion at present
conceives the birth, ministry, and death of Christ, as altogether steeped in
prodigy, brimful of miracle; and miracles
do not happen.
“Belief-feelings,” as Dr.
Richards calls them
For Richards see note to the motto of chapter 3,
above. Lewis perhaps remembered another passage in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), chapter 35, “Poetry and
Beliefs”:
Very often the whole state
of mind in which we are left by a poem, or by music, or, more rarely perhaps,
by other forms of art, is of a kind which it is natural to describe as a
belief. ... This belief, which is a consequence not a cause of the experience,
is the chief source of the confusion upon which Revelation Doctrines depend.
If we ask what in such
cases it is which is believed, we are likely to receive, and to offer, answers
both varied and vague. For strong belief-feelings, as is well known and as is
shown by certain doses of alcohol or hashish, and pre-eminently of nitrous
oxide, will readily attach themselves to almost any reference, distorting it to
suit their purpose.
[17/5] the second thing is this
“Nothing almost sees miracles
but misery”
Shakespeare, King
Lear II.2, 160-161.
Appendix A: On the words “Spirit” and “Spiritual”
[aA/4] when devotional writers talk
when I myself, in another book,
talked of Zoë
In Beyond
Personality, his fourth and final series of radio talks for the BBC during
the second world war. It was published in 1944 and later reprinted as part IV
of Mere Christianity (1952).
[aa/8] 3. “spiritual” is often used
nothing specially fine about the
mere fact of immateriality
cf. Perelandra, chapter 7.
“Didn’t we
agree that God is a spirit? Don’t you worship Him because He is pure spirit?”
“Good heavens, no! We worship Him
because He is wise and good. There’s nothing specially fine about simply being
a spirit. The Devil is a spirit.”
Appendix B: On “Special Providences”
[aB/1] in this book the reader
our army at Dunkirk
After the military victory of Germany over France in
May 1940, the British expeditionary forces managed to avoid being destroyed or
captured and to get back home from the port and beaches at the coastal town of
Dunkirk.
[ab/2] i find it very difficult
how is it “specially” providential?
Cf. George Macdonald in Annals of
a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867), chapter 1, partly quoted in Lewis’s Macdonald Anthology, Nr. 268:
People talk about special providences. I believe in the
providences, but not in the specialty. I do not believe that God lets the
thread of my affairs go for six days, and on the seventh evening takes it up
for a moment. The so-called special providences are no exception to the rule –
they are common to all men at all moments. But it is a fact that God’s care is
more evident in some instances of it than in others to the dim and often
bewildered vision of humanity. Upon such instances men seize and call them
providences. It is well that they can; but it would be gloriously better if
they could believe that the whole matter is one grand providence.
[ab/3] it seems to me, therefore
“not one sparrow falls to the
ground”
cf. Luke 12:6 (or parallel place in Matthew
10:29).
Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and
not one of them is forgotten before God?
[ab/14] it will be seen that if the black line
prayers
The subject discussed here is broadly that of a
paper by Lewis on “Petitionary Prayer”, delivered in 1953. He was at that time
attempting to write a book on prayer but did not succeed. Another essay
followed and was published in 1959 as “The Efficacy of Prayer”. Only half a
year before his death he suddenly and very quickly wrote the book, in he form
of a series of fictitious letters. It was published posthumously as Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
(1964). The problem of petitionary prayers is there discussed in chapters 7, 8
and 9.
[ab/17] 1. people often ask
In the play, Hamlet, Ophelia
climbs out on a branch
As recounted by Queen Gertrude at the end of Act
IV. Shakespeare scholar A. L. Rowse described Ophelia as “driven to real
madness ... – the most touching victim in all Shakespeare” (Shakespeare’s Characters: A complete guide,
1984, p. 114).
[ab/18] 2.when we are praying
“before all worlds”
From the second article in the Nicene Creed, the
statement about God the Son:
And [I believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God,
Begotten of his Father before all worlds,
God of God, Light of Light ...
This is the translation in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1662). The Latin
phrase, ante omnia saecula, has been
rendered as “eternally” or “before all ages” in some other versions.
[ab/20] one more consequence
The efficacy of prayer
Cf. Lewis’s 1959 essay mentioned in the note on prayers, above [AB/14].
UPDATES since December 2011
5 Feb. 2012: expanded note on “I am not so much afraid of death...” [14/35]
29 Feb. 2012: expanded note on Schrödinger ... Democritus [11/5]
13
June 2014: added note on A friend of mine
... [12/7]
24
July 2015: added note on Montaigne became kittenish
[14/4]
10 May 2018: added note on ...that the total events etc. [8/9]
3
December 2018: added notes on Of all the
stars… [14/16], on Alice Meynell
[14/27], and on a deeper
happiness and a fuller splendour [14/23]
13
April 2020: revised note on the policeman in the story [7/10]
1
March 2021: added note on heel-tap [3/1]
12
April 2021: expanded note on THOMAS ERSKINE [11/motto]; with thanks to
Andrew Corrales