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 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 |
Front cover of revised edition as first issued
on 9 May 1960 [ + back cover ] |
Dedication
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
Among the hills a
meteorite
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]
The title of this chapter in the first edition 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.
[3/2] 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
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 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.
[7/11] 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.”
[8/6]
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.
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 ... is
recognised as “muddleheaded.” ... Cassian quoted in Gibbon
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
self-taught theologian (1788-1870). Lewis may be quoting from his Remarks on the Internal Evidence for
the Truth of Revealed Religion (1820) [...?]
[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 that got currency in its
French form – élan vital – through
the writings of French philosopher Émile Bergson (1859-1941). It was
popularized in England 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
– Erwin
Schrödinger (1887-1961), Austrian
physicist, Nobel laureate 1933.
– Democritus
is the ancient Greek philosopher mentioned in the note above.
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
mosaďque multicolores. Et nous reproduirons d’autant mieux les courbes et
les nuances du modčle 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 ŕ 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
déjŕ dessinée, déjŕ 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).
Chapter
13: On Probability
[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...
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 14: The Grand Miracle
[CHAPTER
MOTTO]
A light that
shone from behind the sun ... charles
williams
Lines from “The Calling of Taliessin”, a poem in The
Region of the Summer Stars (1944) by Charles Williams (1886-1945), an intimate
friend of Lewis. The first line is also quoted in Lewis’s last book, Letters to Malcolm (1963), as the last
words of chapter 5.
[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 incomplete. It is impossible 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.
[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.
[14/17] 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.
[14/24] 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] 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, ʼtis 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.
[15/6] 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.
[15/7] 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.
[15/8] 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.
[15/9] 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.
[15/10] 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).
[15/11] 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”.
[15/13] 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 Georg 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.
[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 (nefelč)
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 17: Epilogue
[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
above on prayers.
UPDATES since December 2011
5 Feb. 2012: expanded note to ch. 14, “I am not so
much afraid of death...”