Quotations
and Allusions in
C.
S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
compiled by Arend Smilde
Like most of C. S. Lewis’s books, The Problem of Pain (1940) is full
of unreferenced allusions to an enormous range of writers and writings ancient
and modern. While it is perhaps never vitally important to identify and explore
Lewis’s sources, doing so often proves to be a rewarding enterprise. Listed
below are most of the book’s explicit references (usually quotations) and many
implicit ones (allusions ranging from the quite obvious to the fairly
mysterious), each followed by the fullest possible statement of the source in
question.
Many items also feature longer or
shorter notes highlighting the relevance of Lewis’s quotation or allusion for
the point at issue, and occasionally, as the case may be, questioning that
relevance.
In addition, notes are given on
some words, phrases and passages which are not quotations or allusions but
nevertheless seemed to call for similar treatment. These include echoes from
Lewis’s own earlier and later writings: usually later, since The Problem of Pain appeared early in
his writing career.
References to paragraphs in the
book appear in the format “VI·2” for “chapter VI, second paragraph”. References
to the three volumes of Lewis’s Collected
Letters, published in 2000-2006, appear as CL1, CL2 and CL3.
Double question marks in bold type – ??
– follow items for which I lack assurance that I can give relevant or
accurate information. Corrections and additions,
including proposals for new entries, are welcome. Updates are listed
at the end.
Utrecht, The Netherlands
August 2015
latest
update: March 4, 2024
Postscripts
– January 2018:
I posted a sequence of in-depth discussions of
assorted passages from The Problem of
Pain under the title “Something
Tremendously Real: How C. S. Lewis solved
‘the intellectual problem raised by suffering’”.
– January 2024:
My essay “The First and
Lowest Operation of Pain: C.S. Lewis and His Image of ‘God’s Megaphone’ for
Human Suffering” was published in Journal of Inklings Studies
vol. 13, Nr. 2, October 2023, pp. 225-247, with online appendices.
Dedication
The Inklings
» A circle of friends of C. S. Lewis. For most of the 1930s and 1940s they held weekly meetings in Lewis’s rooms in
Magdalen College, Oxford, to read and discuss writing work in progress. Most of
Lewis’s books published around 1940 were dedicated to individual members of the
group: Owen Barfield (The Allegory of
Love, 1936), Lewis’s brother Warnie (Out
of the Silent Planet, 1938), Hugo Dyson (Rehabilitations, 1939), J. R. R. Tolkien (The Screwtape Letters, 1942), and
Charles Williams (A Preface to Paradise
Lost, 1942).The present book is first mentioned in a letter of Lewis to his
brother of 11 November 1939 as he describes a meeting of the Inklings.
The bill
of fare ... consisted of a section of the new Hobbit book from Tolkien, a
nativity play from Williams ... and a chapter out of the book on the Problem of
Pain from me. It so happened ... that the subject matter of the three readings
formed almost a logical sequence, and produced a really first rate evening’s
talk of the usual wide-ranging kind ...
Epigraph
George Macdonald. Unspoken Sermons. First Series
» Lewis got to know and to revere the Scottish novelist and poet in 1916
through Phantastes (1858), the first
of Macdonald’s two fantasy novels, and later came to regard him as his chief
spiritual guide. George Macdonald (1824-1905)
was a Congregationalist minister for three years (1850-53) before he
took to literature. In addition to much else he published three series of Unspoken Sermons
(twelve each) in 1867, 1885 and 1889. After Lewis had become a popular
Christian writer and speaker during the Second World War, he edited an Anthology
from the works of Macdonald (1946) and in the Preface explicitly called him
“my master”. More than two-thirds of the extracts were taken from the Unspoken Sermons, of which Lewis
confessed
My own
debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly
all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has
given them great help – sometimes indispensable help towards the very
acceptance of the Christian faith.
The epigraph is taken from Series I, Nr. 2, “The Consuming Fire” on Hebrews
12:29.
Preface
Mr. Ashley Sampson
» Ashley
Sampson (1900-1947) owned the Centenary Press, a small publishing firm in
London that became part of another London publishing house, Geoffrey Bles,
around 1930. The names of both publishers appear on the title page of the first
edition of The Problem of Pain.
Lewis’s early book The Pilgrim’s Regress
(1933), along with his 1938 science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet,
had inspired Sampson to ask him to contribute a book to a series called
“Christian Challenge”, intended to introduce the Christian faith to people
outside the Church.
Two
other initiatives of Sampson’s around this time helped to spark off Lewis’s
career as Christian apologist and Bles’s career as publisher of Lewis’s
religious work and some of his fiction. First, Sampson included Lewis’s 1939
Oxford sermon “None Other Gods: Culture in War-Time” (later reprinted as
“Learning-in War-Time”) in a volume entitled Famous English Sermons (Thomas Nelson, London 1940); second, he advised Geoffrey Bles to buy the rights for Lewis’s Screwtape Letters soon after they began to be serialized in May
1941.
Walter Hilton
» A
14th-century Augustinian canon (d. 1396), spiritual writer, and head of the
Priory at Thurgarton, Nottinghamshire. His writings were popular in
15th-century England. Scala Perfectionis,
or The Ladder of Perfection, was his
most famous book and was first printed in 1494.
A passage in Lewis’s letter to Dom Bede Griffiths
of 17 January 1940 (CL2, 326) suggests that he had read this book very
recently, i.e. while he was writing The Problem of Pain.
“He jests at scars who never felt a wound”
»
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet II.2,
1.
Chapter I: Introductory
chapter motto
Pascal, Pensées, IV, 242, 243
» Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a French
philosopher and mathematician. His Pensées
(“Thoughts”) is a collection of long and short notes compiled and published
posthumously. Section IV is titled “Des moyens de croire” (“Of the means of
belief”). Lewis has culled passages from two consecutive items in the
Brunschvicg edition published in 1897; its numbers 242 and 243 correspond to
781 and 463 in the Lafuma edition (1962)
–
J’admire avec quelle hardiesse ces personnes
entreprennent de parler de Dieu. En adressant leurs discours aux impies, leur
premier chapitre est de prouver la Divinité par les ouvrages de la nature. ...
c’est leur donner sujet de croire que les preuves de notre religion sont bien
faibles. ... c’est une chose admirable que jamais auteur canonique ne s’est
servi de la nature pour prouver Dieu.
I·1 | not
many years
the scientists think it likely that very few of the suns of space ... have
any planets
» Lewis
relied for much of his knowledge of modern physics and cosmology on popular
works of the physicists Arthur Eddington (The
Nature of the Physical World, 1928) and James Jeans (The Mysterious Universe, 1931) and the mathematician-philosopher A.
N. Whitehead (Science and the Modern
World, 1925). The conjecture about “exoplanets” (as they are now called)
appears, for example, at the end of chapter 8 of Eddington’s 1928 book in a
section titled “Formation of Planetary
Systems”:
The solar system is not the
typical product of development of a star; it is not even a common variety of
development; it is a freak. ... The density of distribution of stars in space
has been compared to that of twenty tennis balls roaming the whole interior of
the earth. The accident that gave birth to the solar system may be compared to
the casual approach of two of these balls within a few yards of one another.
The data are too vague to give any definite estimate of the odds against this
occurrence, but I should judge that perhaps not one in a hundred millions of
stars can have undergone this experience in the right stage and conditions to
result in the formation of a system of planets.
The same
idea is alluded to in Lewis’s 1945 essay “The Grand Miracle” and in the
parallel chapter 14 of his book Miracles.
It has since been proved wrong. In 1992 the first “exoplanet” was discovered, twenty years later the existence
of more than 800 of them had been confirmed, and that number more than doubled
over the next three years. In March 2022, “the count of confirmed exoplanets ticked past the 5,000 mark.”
I·3 | it
would be
men of the Middle Ages thought the Earth flat, but ... Ptolemy ... one medieval popular text ...
» Ptolemy (Claudius
Ptolemaeus, c. 100-170 CE) was an ancient mathematician, astronomer and
geographer of the second century. He was a Roman who wrote in Greek and lived
in Alexandria, Egypt. His astronomical treatise – i.e. the book that bequeathed
the “Ptolemaic” cosmology to the Middle Ages – later became known under the
title of its 9th-century Arabic translation, Almagest.
Lewis in the course of his writing career repeatedly argued
more or less the same point, often with the same reference to Almagest (Book 5, chapter 1). Thus in The Pilgrim’s Regress II.1, where Mr.
Enlightenment tells John –
“... I dare say it would
be news to you to hear that the earth was round ... It is well known that everyone
in Puritania thinks the earth flat. It is not likely that I should be mistaken
on such a point. ...”
Further instances are Lewis’s 1945 essays “Religion and Science” and
“Christian Apologetics”; Miracles (1947)
ch. 7, par. 8; and the 1956 lecture “Imagination and thought in the Middle
Ages” –
That the
Earth is, by any cosmic scale, insignificant, is a truth that was forced on
every intelligent man as soon as serious astronomical observations began to
be made. ... Ptolemy’s compendium ... was accepted by the Middle Ages. It was
not merely accepted by scholars; it was re-echoed by moralists and poets again
and again. To judge from the texts, medieval man thought about the
insignificance of Earth more persistently, if anything, than his modern
descendants. We even find quite popular texts hammering the lesson home by
those methods which the scientific popularizer uses today.
(Essays in Medieval and Renaissance
Literature, 1967, p. 46)
From The Discarded Image (1964),
ch. 3, p. 22, and ch. 5, pp. 97-98, it appears that the “popular text” in
question was the South English Legendary,
a late-13th-century collection of lives of the saints.
I·5 | in all
developed
Professor Otto
» Rudolf
Otto (1869-1937), German theologian and scholar of comparative religion.
Lewis is referring to Otto’s book Das
Heilige (1917), translated John W. Harvey as The Idea of the Holy (1923). In chapter 2 Otto proposed to derive
his term “the numinous” from Latin numen
just as “ominous” is derived from omen;
the translator in his foreword notes that numen
is “the most general Latin word for supernatural divine power”.
Shakespeare ... “Under it my genius is rebuked”
» Macbeth III.1, 54 (Macbeth
speaking) –
There is none but he
[Banquo]
Whose being I do fear; and under him
My Genius is rebuk’d, as it is said
Mark Antony’s was by Caesar.
I·7 | a
modern example
The Wind in the Willows
»
Published in 1908, this animal story by Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) became a
classic of children’s literature.
I·9 | going
back about
Wordsworth ... that Passage in the first book of the Prelude
» The Prelude is a long poem by William
Wordsworth (1770-1850) in which he describes the influences that contributed to
his development as a poet. Written in the years 1799-1805, it was not published
until shortly after the poet’s death. Lewis is referring to a passage in Book I
beginning at line 356. While rowing on a lake the young poet experienced the
sight of how
a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned ...
...
after I had seen
That
spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Or sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly trough the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
Malory ... Galahad
» Thomas
Malory (1400?-1470), author of Morte
d’Arthur, a comprehensive prose
retelling in twenty-one books of legends about King Arthur and the Knights of
the Round Table. Galahad, son of Sir Lancelot du Lac, is the ideal type of a
knight.
fell at
the feet of the risen Christ “as one dead”
» cf.
Revelation 1:17 –
And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he
laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not: I am the first and the
last.
Ovid ...
numen inest
» Publius Ovidius Naso
(43 BC-18 CE), Roman poet. The Fasti (calender of feasts) is a collection of
legends and sundry historical folklore as connected with feast days. J. G.
Frazer’s 1931 translation (Loeb) renders numen here “a spirit”.
Virgil
» Publius Vergilius Maro
(70-19 BC), Roman poet. The Aeneid,
called after its hero Aeneas, is an epic poem written as a continuation of Homer’s Iliad and describing the preliminaries of the history of Rome as a
sequel to the history of Troy –
Tectum augustum, ingens, centum sublime columnis, urbe fuit summa, Laurentis regia Pici, horrendum silvis et religione parentum. |
Stately and vast, towering with a hundred columns, his house crowned the city, once the palace of
Laurentian Picus, awe-inspiring with its grove and the sanctity of
olden days. (Translation H. Rushton Fairclough 1918, Loeb
Classical Library) |
A Greek fragment ... Aeschylus ... “dread eye of their Master”
»
Aeschylus (525-455 BC) was the earliest of the three great Greek tragedians. Of
his total output of perhaps more than 90 plays only seven have survived in
their entirety, plus hundreds of fragments. An edition by the Oxford classical
scholar Arthur Sidgwick appeared in 1899, but more fragments have been coming
to light afterwards; a recent edition appeared in 2008. A translation by H. W.
Smith of the fragment quoted by Lewis is found in the volume Aeschylus II (1936) of the Loeb
series, pp. 506-507 –
Set God apart from mortal
men, and deem not that he, like them, is fashioned out of flesh. Thou knowest
him not; now he appeareth as fire, unapproachable in his onset, now as water,
now as gloom; and he, even himself, is dimly seen in the likeness of wild
beasts, of wind, of cloud, of lightning, thunder, and of rain. Ministers unto
him are sea, and rocks, and every spring, and gathered floods; before him
tremble mountains and earth and the vast
abyss of the sea and the lofty pinnacles of the mountains, whensoever the
flashing eye of their lord [gorgon omma despoton] looketh on them. For all power hath he; lo, this is the glory of the Most High God.
An editorial note
says that “the Fragment was ascribed to Aeschylus in antiquity probably because
of its lofty conception of God” (508).
I·12 | the
numinous is
a famous psycho-analyst ... prehistoric parricide
» Sigmund
Freud (1856-1939) had died in London around the time Lewis began writing The Problem of Pain. Lewis is referring
to a famous passage in Freud’s Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the
Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913), ch. IV.5.
I·13 | the
moral experience
in Abraham ... all peoples shall be
blessed
» cf. Genesis 12:1-3 –
Now the
Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country ... I will bless them
that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all
families of the earth be blessed.
I·15 | to ask
whether
the long spiritual preparation of humanity
» Although Lewis never mentions G. K. Chesterton in this book, the first
chapter is perhaps the best illustration of the way Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925) provided him
with a complete and plausible “Christian outline of history” – as noted by
Lewis in Surprised by Joy, ch. 14.
Lewis main addition to Chesterton’s scheme is Otto’s concept of the Numinous.
I·16 | why
this assurance
regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off ...
» Lewis’s
fullest development of this line of thought is found in The Abolition of Man (1943).
the life-force
» The
French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) developed the concept of élan vital as a
solution to what he considered to be otherwise insoluble problems in the
Darwinian theory of evolution. In his once famous book Creative Evolution (Évolution
créatrice, 1907), chapter 2, he defined the term as
an internal push that
has carried life, by more and more complex forms, to higher and higher
destinies,
(une poussée
intérieure qui porterait la vie, par des formes de plus en plus complexes, à
des destinées de plus en plus hautes).
The
usual English rendering as “Life Force” got currency through the work of the
Irish-English dramatist George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). Shaw equated the terms
élan vital and “life force” in the preface
to his five-part play Back to Methuselah (1921).
Both Shaw and Bergson were Nobel laureates for literature in 1925 and 1927
respectively.
suspicious a priori lucidity of Pantheism
» Lewis’s other references to Pantheism in this book suggest that what he
meant by this lucidity must be its monistic
character,
i.e. the ultimate reduction of everything to a single thing, force, or
substance. Thus in chapter 10 –
Pantheism is a creed not so much
false as hopelessly behind the times. Once, before creation, it would have been
true to say that everything was God. But God created: He caused things to be
other than Himself ...
which
modern science is slowly teaching us
» For
Lewis’s chief published sources of information about modern science see first
note to this chapter, above.
Chapter II: Divine Omnipotence
chapter motto
Thomas Aquinas
»
(1225-1274), Italian Dominican friar, theologian and philosopher, Saint of the
Catholic Church since 1323. His Summa
Theologiae, written towards the end of his life and unfinished, was the
first attempt at a comprehensive theological system.
II·2 | omnipotence
means
“with God all things are possible”
» Matthew 19:24-26 –
“And
again I say unto you, It is easier for a came to go through the eye of a
needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” When his
disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, “Who then can be
saved?” But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, “With men this is
impossible; but with God all things are possible.”
the original meaning in Latin
» Lewis appears to be referring to the meaning of the original Latin noun
of which “omnipotence” is the English form, omnipotentia.
This is a late Latin word and not found in the Bible. Where the Latin Bible
(Vulgate) has omnipotens, the King James Bible of 1611 almost
invariably has “almighty” or “the Almighty”; in the New Testament it only
occurs in the Book of Revelation, and the Greek word is pantokratōr.
II·4 | “all
agents” here
all things are possible ... intrinsic impossibilities are not things
» See first note to II·2, above. Lewis’s observation is partly a pun based
on the English phrasing, and impossible if “all things” is read in the original
Greek, panta, or in Latin as omnia, or in Dutch and German as alles.
II·7
| there is no
reason
in contrast with an “other”
» Lewis first
developed this view in an early piece of dense philosophical writing of 1928
under the title Summae metaphysices
contra Anthroposophos libri II (“Two Books of the Outline of Metaphysics
against the Anthroposopists”), as part of a protracted debate with his friend
Owen Barfield which Lewis later dubbed their “Great War”.
See especially Summa I.5, “The plurality
of souls, the existence of any soul, and a world of matter are all mutually
involved”.
the Blessed Trinity ... something analogous to “society”
» See
also Lewis’s development of this idea in chapter 4 of Beyond Personality: The
Christian Idea of God (1944), which is the expanded text of his fourth
series of radio talks for the BBC. The first series of radio talks, in 1941,
followed on an invitation from a BBC official who had recognized Lewis’s talent
for popularization in The Problem of Pain.
A revised text of the four series was later published in one volume as Mere Christianity.
not merely ... the Platonic form of love, but ... concrete reciprocities of
love
» Plato
(427-347 BC), one of the founding fathers of Western philosophy, held that
there are three levels of reality. The highest level is the world of “forms” or
“ideas” (Gr. eidē) because it is
eternal; lowest is the world of concrete objects because it is fleeting; in
between are mathematical objects. Things on the lowest level are dim and ever
changing reflections of eternal, unchanging “ideas”. Lewis is not talking of
“Platonic love” as usually understood; he is pointing out that God’s love, in
addition to being the eternal “form” reflected in concrete loves, is also
itself concrete.
II·11 | society,
then, implies
“matter” (in the modern, not the scholastic sense)
» By the
scholastic sense of “matter” Lewis probably means matter as distinct from
“form” – matter as pure, undeveloped, formless potency. Scholastic thought
(which flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries) followed Aristotle in holding
that matter and form combine to result in “substance”, while substance and
“accidents” combine to result in objects.
Lewis
cannot have expected his modern readers even to know the premodern meaning of
“matter”. Presumably it was because he was using the word with reference to
angels that he considered this old meaning worth ruling out explicitly. The
modern sense of matter might be defined in distinction from spirit
rather than form but, although angels are spirits, this is not the
distinction he envisaged here. See www.saintaquinas.com/primer.html
In an unpublished note of unknown date,
preserved in the Bodleian Library (“Notebook V”, Dep.d.809, fol. 14), Lewis
wrote about “Matter in the scholastic sense, that is … pure potentiality”.
II·12 | but if
matter
“trees for his sake would crowd into a shade”
» cf.
Alexander Pope, Pastorals (1709) II,
“Summer”, 73-76 –
Where-e’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade,
Where-e’er you tread, the blushing flow’rs shall rise
And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.
II·15 | we can,
perhaps
these occasions would be extremely rare
» cf. the
closing paragraph of Lewis’s book Miracles
(1947): “God does not shake miracles into Nature at random as if from a
pepper-caster.”
Chapter III: Divine Goodness
chapter motto
Traherne, Centuries of Meditations
» Thomas
Traherne (1638?-1674),
English mystical writer and poet. He is chiefly known for his Centuries of
Meditations, a volume of
reflections on religion in poetical prose. “Century” in the title means
“collection of one hundred items”. The book was not published until 1908,
and consists of four “centuries” and the beginning of a fifth.
III·3 | on the
other hand
doctrine of Total Depravity
» If
Lewis was thinking here of any particular statement of the doctrine, it may
have been the one given by John Calvin (1509-1564) in the Institutes of the Christian Religion II.1.9 –
... all the parts of the soul
were possessed by sin, ever since Adam revolted from the fountain of
righteousness. For not only did the inferior appetites entice him, but
abominable impiety seized upon the very citadel of the mind, and pride
penetrated to his inmost heart (Rom. 7:12; Book 4, chap. 15, sec. 10–12)
... Paul himself leaves no room for
doubt, when he says, that corruption does not dwell in one part only, but that
no part is free from its deadly taint. For, speaking of corrupt nature, he not
only condemns the inordinate nature of the appetites, but, in particular,
declares that the understanding is subjected to blindness, and the heart to
depravity (Eph. 4:17, 18).
(Translation Henry Beveridge, 1845).
III·4 | the
escape from
When I came first to the University ... a set of young men
» This
could refer both to 1917, when Lewis joined an Officers’ Training Corps and the
army soon after arriving in Oxford, or to early 1919, when he had demobilized
and could begin his studies in earnest. If the latter, which seems most likely,
the “set of young men” must have included his lifelong friend Owen Barfield,
whom he first met later that year.
“as lords that are certainly expected”
»
Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
(1798) IV, explanatory note to stanzas 10-11
–
In his loneliness and fixedness he
[the ancient Mariner] yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that
still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to
them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own
natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected
and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.
III·7 | by the
goodness
“a good time was had by all”
» The
phrase gained popularity as the title of a 1937 volume of poetry by the English poet and novelist Stevie
Smith.
III·8 | i might, indeed
as in
Dante, “a lord of terrible aspect”
» Dante, La Vita Nuova III; signore
di pauroso aspetto, the figure of Love who
appears to Dante in a vision.
loving us, in the ... most inexorable sense
» Cf. Lewis’s Preface to his Macdonald
Anthology –
The title
“Inexorable Love” which I have given to several individual extracts would serve
for the whole collection. Inexorability – but never the inexorability of
anything less than love – runs through it all like a refrain ...
III·11 | another
type is
“we are his people and the sheep of his pasture”
» Psalm
100:3.
III·12 | a
nobler analogy
surrendering His will wholly to the paternal will
» cf. Matthew 26:39 and 42 – “… nevertheless not as I will, but as
thou wilt … if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it,
thy will be done.”
not even allowing Himself to be called “good” because
Good is the name of the Father
» cf.
Mark 10:18 and Luke 18:19; also Matthew 19:17.
III·13 | finally
we come
“... than are the tender horns of cockled snails”
»
Shakespeare, Love’s Labour Lost IV.3,
334.
III·14 | when christianity
says
the consuming fire Himself
» cf.
Hebrews 12:28-29 –
... receiving a kingdom which
cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with
reverence and godly fear: For our God is a consuming fire.
The book’s general epigraph is taken from a sermon on this Bible text; see
note to the Epigraph at the beginning of these notes.
a burden
of glory
» cf. 2
Corinthians 4:16-17 –
...
though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For
our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more
exceeding and eternal weight of glory.
See also Lewis’s sermon “The Weight of Glory”, delivered in Oxford in 1941
and published in 1949.
like the maidens in the old play, to deprecate the love of Zeus ...
Prometheus Vinctus
» Now
better known as Prometheus Bound,
this is one of the seven surviving tragedies by the ancient Greek playwright
Aeschylus (see note to I·9 above). Prometheus is bound to a crag on the
Scythian seashore as a punishment for his rebellion against Zeus for the
benefit of mankind. An unsuccessful attempt at mediation is made Oceanus, whose
daughters make up the choir of “maidens” in the play. Lewis refers to their
comment on hearing of Io’s lamentable fate as the mistress of Zeus –
Never, oh never, august Fates,
may ye behold me the partner of the bed of Zeus, and may I be wedded to no
bridegroom who descends to me from heaven. ... But to me, when marriage is on
equal terms, it is no cause of dread; and never may the love of the mightier
gods cast on me its irresistible glance. That were indeed a war against which
there is no warring, a source of resourceless misery; and I know not what would
be my fate, for I do not see how I could escape the designs of Zeus.
–
Translation by H. W. Smyth in the volume Aeschylus I (1922) of the
Loeb series, pp. 295-297.
The Impassible
» From
Latin impassibilis and Greek apathēs, “not susceptible to pain or
injury”; also “not having or revealing emotions”. The idea of God’s impassibility
entered Christian theology possibly through the work of Philo of Alexandria and
is a prime example of pagan Greek influence on early Christianity. The
theological meaning of the word has always shaded into “immutable” or, more
specifically, “not susceptible to change by external causes”.
III·15 | the
problem of reconciling
“well pleased”
» cf.
Matthew 3:17, the voice from heaven after Jesus is baptised –
“This is my beloved Son, in
whom I am well pleased.”
King Cophetua
» A legendary African king who was uninterested in
women until he fell in love with a beggar girl. A ballad on the subject was
included by Thomas Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765), II.6. The theme was taken up by Alfred Tennyson in his poem “The Beggar
Maid” –
... Barefooted came the beggar maid
Before the king Cophetua.
In robe and crown the king stept down,
To meet and greet her on her way ...
So sweet a face, such angel grace,
In all that land had never been:
Cophetua sware a royal oath:
“This beggar maid shall be my queen!”
III·17 | the
truth is
Viola
» Sister
to Sebastian in Shakespeare’s play Twelfth
Night.
A modern pantheistic philosopher ... “when the Absolute
falls into the sea it becomes a fish”
» Bernard
Bosanquet (1848-1923), Logic, or The Morphology of Knowledge (1911), vol. 2 (Book
II, ch. VIII.1.5), p. 257 –
When the Absolute tumbles into
the water it becomes a fish; so in asserting itself under this or that
condition of its own imposing it becomes Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones.
Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty
» Plato, Symposion 203b-e, Diotima speaking –
When Aphrodite was
born, the gods made a great feast, and among the company was Resource [Greek Poros] the son of Cunning [Mētis]. And when they had banqueted
there came Poverty [Penia] abegging,
as well she might in an hour of good cheer, and hung about the door. Now
Resource, grown tipsy with nectar – for wine as yet there
was none – went into the garden
of Zeus, and there, overcome with heaviness, slept. Then Poverty, being of
herself so resourceless, devised the scheme of having a child by Resource, and
lying down by his side she conceived Love [Erōs].
Hence it is that Love from the beginning has been attendant and minister to
Aphrodite, since he was begotten on the day of her birth, and is, moreover, by
nature a lover bent on beauty since Aphrodite is beautiful. Now, as the son of
Resource and Poverty, Love is in a peculiar case. First, he is ever poor, and
far from tender or beautiful as most suppose him: rather is he hard and
parched, shoeless and homeless; on the bare ground always he lies with no bedding,
and takes his rest on doorsteps and waysides in the open air; true to his
mother’s nature, he ever
dwells with want. But he takes after his father in scheming for all that is
beautiful and good; for he is brave, strenuous and high-strung, a famous
hunter, always weaving some stratagem; desirous and competent of wisdom,
throughout life ensuing the truth; a master of jugglery, witchcraft, and artful
speech. By birth neither immortal nor mortal, in the selfsame day he is
flourishing and alive at the hour when he is abounding in resource; at another
he is dying, and then reviving again by force of his father’s nature: yet the resources that he gets will
ever be ebbing away; so that Love is at no time either resourceless or wealthy,
and furthermore, he stands midway betwixt wisdom and ignorance.
– translation H. N. Fowler (1925), in the Perseus Digital Library;
original Greek names inserted. In Benjamin Jowett’s
translation (1871), Poros
is translated as Plenty; the Dutch
translator Gerard Koolschijn renders it as Succes.
Thus Love is not just the son of Poverty (his mother) but also of its opposite
(his father).
Erscheinung
» It is
hard to guess what Lewis hoped to add or clarify by adding the German word for
“appearance”.
III·18 | the
first condition
“His glory’s diminution”
» John
Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671), 303.
The “human irreverence” here is not so much a refusal to worship as the
entertaining of doubts about God’s justice:
Yet more there be who doubt
his ways not just,
As to his own edicts found contradicting;
Then give the reins to wandering thought,
Regardless of his glory’s diminution,
Till, by their own perplexities involved,
They ravel more, still less resolved,
But never find self-satisfying solution.
Lewis
again refers to this line in VI·8.
fall on our faces
» cf. such Old Testament places as I Chronicles
21:16 and Ezekiel 1:28 and 44:4; from the New Testament, I Corinthians 14:25.
bidden to “put on Christ”
» Romans
13:12-14 –
The night is far spent, the day
is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on
the armour of light ... put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision
for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof.
The idea of “putting on Christ” also appears, though not as a command, in
Galatians 3:26‑27 –
For ye
are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus, For as many of you as
have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.
III·19 | yet
perhaps even
George Macdonald ... “You must be strong with my strength ...”
» From
Macdonald’s novel Annals of a Quiet
Neighbourhood (1867), chapter 30, “A Sermon to Myself”. The passage appears
in Lewis’s Macdonald
Anthology as Nr. 277, “On a chapter in Isaiah” (i.e. Isaiah 40):
The power of God is put side by
side with the weakness of men, not that He, the perfect, may glory over His
feeble children ... but that He may say thus: “Look, my children, you will
never be strong but with my strength.
I have no other to give you.”
Chapter IV: Human Wickedness
chapter motto
Law.
Serious Call
» William Law (1686-1761), English theologian. As
a non-juror he could not hold functions in the Church of England; as author of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
(1728) he became an important inspiration for Evangelical Christianity, notably
influencing the Wesley brothers.
IV·1 | the
examples given
the Pagan mysteries
»
“Mysteries” in the present context are secret religious ceremonies by which
people in the ancient Greek and Roman world hoped to attain liberation,
redemption, cleansing and a happy life after death.
Epicurean philosophy
»
Epicurus (341-270 BC) was a Greek philosopher who considered Pleasure as the supreme
good. One famous saying of Epicurus explains why he did not fear death: “When
we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not” – Letter to Menoeceus, in Diogenus Laertius, Lives of Eminent
Philosophers, Book X, 125; Loeb vol. 145, p. 651.
the
Gospel appeared as good news
» The
word “gospel” is derived from Old English gōd
spell, “good message”. This is a translation of Greek euaggelion, or Latin evangelium,
as found in many places in the New Testament, e.g. Mark 1:14 and Romans 1:1.
IV·2 | there
are two
“Humanitarianism”
» Like
“humanitarian”, this word dates from the 19th century and had various meanings.
The broadly philanthropic meaning, which is now the most current one, was often
used with contemptuous or hostile overtones referring to alleged exaggeration
(see Oxford English Dictionary).
IV·3 | the second
cause
the effect of Psycho-analysis on the public mind
» Cf. the
reference to “a famous psycho-analyst” (Sigmund Freud) in I·16.
the Trojans ... pulled the Horse into Troy
» Homer, Odyssey IV.271-273 and VIII.492ff;
Virgil, Aeneid II.
IV·4 | a
recovery of
the dying farmer who replied to the Vicar’s dissertation on repentance
» ... ??
IV·6 | when we merely
the “wrath” of God
... a mere corollary from God’s goodness
» Cf.
Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress X.3: “Men
say that his love and his wrath are one thing.” There is a possible allusion
here to George Macdonald, Unspoken Sermons
II.2, “The Cause of Spiritual Stupidity” (on Mark 8:21) –
The door must be opened by the
willing hand, ere the foot of Love will cross the threshold. He watches to see
the door move from within. Every tempest is but an assault in the siege of
Love. The terror of God is but the other side of His love; it is love outside,
that would be inside – love that knows the house is no house, only a place,
until it enter.
Lewis
quoted this passage as Nr. 84 in his Macdonald
Anthology. However, “wrath” is a word rarely used by Macdonald; and he
doesn’t use it here. One of many other possible inspirations is Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (see note to I·5,
above), ch. IV.3, p. 24, perhaps with reference to Jakob Böhme –
Love, says one of the mystics,
is nothing else than quenched Wrath.
IV·10 | 4. we
must guard
Quixotic
» i.e.
heroic and idealistic in impractical and often ridiculous ways – like Don
Quixote, hero of the early-17th century Spanish novel Don Quijote by Miguel de Cervantes.
pocket of
evil
» At the
time of writing this book, Lewis had already given fictional expression to this
idea in his space-travel novel Out of the
Silent Planet (1938). The “Silent Planet” here is the Earth as a pocket
evil and as such cut off from communication with the other planets.
Zarathustra,
Jeremiah, Socrates, Gotama, ... Marcus Aurelius
» Zarathustra, or Zoroaster was a Persian
prophet who probably lived long before 1000 BC; Jeremiah
is one of the major prophets of the Hebrew Bible; Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher (469-399 BC) whose teachings were recorded in
dialogues written by his pupil Plato; Gotama,
or Gautama
the Buddha (the “enlightened one”), was a spiritual teacher of ancient India
(6th-5th century BC) whose teachings were the basis of Buddhism; Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor
(161-180 CE) whose Meditations became
a classic of Stoic philosophy.
justice,
mercy, fortitude and temperance
» If prudence (or wisdom) is substituted for mercy,
the result is the set of four “Cardinal Virtues”
found in the work of ancient Greek, Roman and Christian authors (Plato, Cicero,
Augustine) and also in Lewis’s Mere
Christianity III.2. See, for example, Plato’s Phaedo, 68c-69b.
IV·12 | 6. perhaps
my harping
Plato ...
virtue is one
» Republic 445c (Jowett’s
translation) –
The argument seems to have reached a height from which, as from some tower of
speculation, a man may look down and see that virtue is one, but that the forms
of vice are innumerable ...
Or in
Robin Waterfield’s translation (1994)
... the impression I get from
the vantage-point we’ve reached at this point of our discussion is that while
there’s only one kind of goodness, there are countless types of badness ...
See also
Plato’s early dialogue on whether virtue is something teachable, Protagoras, 328d-334c.
IV·13 | 7. some
modern theologians
Some
modern theologians
» ... ??
The road to the promised land runs past Sinai
» As recounted in the book of Exodus, three months after making their
escape from Egypt the Israelites, led by Moses, arrived in the desert of Sinai
and “camped before the mount” (Ex. 19:3). Moses then climbs Mount Sinai, where
God tells him that “if you [i.e. the people] will obey my voice indeed, and
keep my covenant, then ye shall be a particular treasure unto me above all
people: for all the earth is mine.” During later encounters with Moses on Mount
Sinai, God issues the Ten Commandments – first in speaking, then on “two tables
of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God” (31:18).
IV·14 | 8. “let no man
the idealistic doctrine that it is merely a result of our being finite
» The reference
here may be, among other things, to Lewis’s own earlier position. “Idealism” in
this context is a philosophical school or tendency which was on the wane but
still dominant in Oxford when Lewis arrived there as a student in and after the
First World War. After an early phase of materialistic atheism developed in his
teens, Lewis became a philosophical idealist himself, a process completed by
the time he began writing his long poem Dymer in the spring of 1922.
Perhaps briefly before his conversion to Theism in mid-1930 he wrote, as part
of his polemic with Owen Barfield of those years, a short essay known as De Bono et Malo (“On Good and Evil”)
that seems to imply the “idealistic doctrine” mentioned here:
What tends towards the
recovery of our life as Spirit ... I call the Better: what tends in the
opposite direction I call the Worse. Good and Evil are the ideal terms of these
two directions; neither of which is revealed in human experience. ... Absolute good,
then, like absolute evil, is incompatible with soul life ...
(“De Bono
et Malo”, in The Great War of Owen
Barfield and C. S. Lewis: Philosophical Writings, 1927-1930, ed. Norbert
Feinendegen and Arend Smilde, Journal of Inklings Studies Supplements No. 1,
2015, p. 131-134.)
In his last book, Letters to Malcolm, ch. 8, Lewis mentioned the idea that “evil is
inherent in finitude” as one he associates with Reinhold Niebuhr (cf. note to
V·5, below).
the Pauline epistles
» i.e. the thirteen New Testament “books” after the Book of Acts that were
written as letters by the Apostle Paul to various Christian communities and
some individuals. In seven cases the authorship is disputed. Lewis is
presumably thinking of such (genuinely Pauline) passages as Romans 7:13-26 and
Galatians 5:17.
IV·15 | this
chapter will
Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue
» cf. Immanuel Kant in chapter I.1.3 from Critique of Practical Reason (as referred to in chapter VI, below):
Die
Achtung ist so wenig ein Gefühl der Lust,
daß man sich ihr in Ansehung eines Menschen nur ungern überläßt. ... Sogar
das moralische Gesetz selbst in seiner feierlichen
Majestät ist diesem Bestreben, sich der Achtung dagegen zu erwehren,
ausgesetzt. ... Gleichwohl ist darin doch auch wiederum so wenig Unlust, daß, wenn man einmal den
Eigendünkel abgelegt und jener Achtung praktischen Einfluß verstattet hat,
man sich wiederum an der Herrlichkeit dieses Gesetzes nicht sattsehen kann,
und die Seele sich in dem Maß selbst zu erheben glaubt, als sie das heilige
Gesetz über sich und ihre gebrechliche Natur erhaben sieht. (Vorländer p.
90-91) |
Respect
is so far from being a feeling of pleasure
that we only reluctantly give way to it as regards a man. ... Even the moral
law itself in its solemn majesty is
exposed to this endeavour to save oneself from yielding it respect. ...
Nevertheless .. so little is there pain in it that if once one has laid aside self-conceit and allowed
practical influence to that respect, he can never be satisfied with
contemplating the majesty of this law, and the soul believes itself elevated
in proportion as it sees the holy law elevated above it and its frail nature.
(par. 9; Abbot p. 170) |
the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware
» Cf. the
way Lewis expressed this insight in his 1945 novel That Hideous
Strength, ch. 10.4, where Dr Dimble looks back on his own recent
fit of “real anger”. Quoting the words “thus I shall always do, whenever You
leave me to myself” as part of Dimble’s musings, Lewis alludes to 17th-century
spiritual writer Nicolas Herman. In the latter’s work (mentioned in the one
footnote to ch. 7), the phrase illustrates his growing awareness that the nearer a man is to God, the more
this boon is offset by feelings of utter unworthiness
Chapter V: The Fall of Man
chapter motto
Montaigne
» Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592),
French writer. His main work, the Essais
(1588), is a large collection of tentative reflections on his reading and the
development of his own ideas. Lewis is quoting from the longest chapter
(II.12), “Apologie for Raimond de Sebonde”. The original French
phrase is
... l’obeyr est le
propre office d’une ame raisonnable ...
while the English
quotation appears to come from the Cotton/Hazlitt edition of 1877, Vol. 2, p. 206:
The first law that ever God gave to man was a law of
pure obedience: it was a commandment naked and simple, wherein man had nothing
to inquire after or to dispute, forasmuch as to obey is the proper office of a
rational soul, acknowledging a heavenly superior and benefactor. From obedience
and submission spring all other virtues, as all sin does from self-opinion.
And, on the contrary, the first temptation that by the devil was offered to
human nature, its first poison, insinuated itself by the promises that were
made to us of knowledge and wisdom : “Eritis sicut dii, scientes bonum et malum
[Genesis 3:5].”
Montaigne’s “apology”
is nominally a defence of a 15th-century work of natural theology by
the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond. He defends it first against anti-intellectual
attacks and then, at very much greater length, against intellectual ones; his
own position is one of staunch and happy allegiance to the Catholic Church as
the established religion on the one hand, and on the other, rather more
emphatically, a profound and wide-ranging scepticism about
human knowledge.
Though Lewis loved the
Essais he certainly did not
regard Montaigne as a spiritual guide, as illustrated by a remark in a
1955 letter to Dorothy Sayers: “I hope you love him! Love – I didn’t say
approve or esteem” (CL3, 635). In his own early book The Pilgrim’s Regress (ch.
V/4) the allegorical character called Mr. Sensible quotes Montaigne’s famous
motto Que sais-je? (“What do I know?”),
which is also found in the Apology for Raymond Sebond. In another letter,
referring to Mr. Sensible Lewis called Montaigne “the best specimen of that type” (CL3, 497).
The passage on obedience is also quoted in
chapter 11, “Hierarchy”, in A Preface
to Paradise Lost, where Lewis suggests that Shakespeare subscribed to the
same view.
V·1 | the
christian answer
we sinned “in Adam”
» The phrase “sinning in Adam” was used by some Church Fathers including
Ambrosius and Augustine on the basis of what St Paul wrote in Romans 5:12, but
it is not, as a phrase, actually found there
–
Wherefore,
as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed
upon all men, for that all have sinned ...
The word “by” here represents Greek dia;
more problematically, “for that” represents Greek eph ōi (with eph as a
form of epi). In modern translations this
is often rendered as “because”; but this is disputable, and the antecedent of ōi is uncertain. The only more or less
related “in Adam” phrase in the New Testament is in I Corinthians
15:22 –
For as in
Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
Here the preposition “in” represents Greek en.
See also note to V·4, below.
“immortal germ plasm”
» The germ-plasm theory was developed in the late 19th century by German biologist
August Weismann. It served to establish the modern insight that biological
heredity is not a matter of just any cell or organ as such potentially
acquiring useful characteristics, but of a special category of germ cells as
distinct from somatic cells (body cells). Weismann’s term Keimplasma is commonly rendered as “germ plasm”. Today, the
concept is usually expressed by terms like “genetic material”. The point to
note with regard to Lewis’s use is that Weismann’s theory brought out the
basically ineradicable nature of hereditary characteristics.
V·3 | in the developed
modern
anthropologists and missionaries
» Cf.
Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, ch.
4, “God and Comparative Religion”, par. 10 (p. 101 in 1947 Hodder &
Stoughton edition) –
Some of the very rudest savages, primitive in every sense in which
anthropologists use the word, ... are found to have a pure monotheism with a
high moral tone. A missionary was preaching to a very wild tribe of
polytheists, who had told him all their polytheistic tales, and telling them in
return of the existence of the one good God who is a spirit and judges men by
spiritual standards. And there was a
sudden buzz of excitement among these stolid barbarians, as at somebody who was
letting out a secret, and they cried to each other, “Atahocan! He is speaking
of Atahocan!”
V·4 | science, then, has
the
modern theologian ... N. P. Williams
» Published
in 1927, when the author became Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in Oxford,
the book cited here became a 20th-century classic in its field. Lewis read it
shortly before he wrote The Problem of
Pain, perhaps as a preparation. From a letter of 24 October 1940 to Sister
Penelope, it appears he was not much impressed by it (CL2, 450):
... to tell you the truth [I]
didn’t find [Williams] very helpful. The man who can dismiss “sinned in Adam” as an “idiom” and identify
virtue with the herd instinct is no use to me, despite his very great learning.
V·5 | this sin has
“the journey
homeward to habitual self”
» John
Keats, Endymion (1818) II, 276. After
exploring a “marble gallery” or “mimic temple” where he has acquainted himself
“with every mystery, and awe”, the hero sits down and then,
when new wonders ceas’d to float before,
And thoughts of self came on, how crude and sore
The journey homeward to habitual self!
“myth” in
the Socratic sense
» In addition
to Lewis’s footnote, see the article “Plato’s Myths”
by Cătălin Partenie in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu.
The following passage in section 2 (with a reference to the 1998 book Plato the Myth Maker by L. Brisson)
seems especially relevant.
The myths Plato invents, as well as the traditional myths he uses, are
narratives that are non-falsifiable, for they depict particular beings, deeds,
places or events that are beyond our experience: the gods, the daemons, the
heroes, the life of soul after death, the distant past, etc. Myths are also
fantastical, but they are not inherently irrational and they are not targeted
at the irrational parts of the soul. ... [I]n the Republic, Socrates
says that until philosophers take control of a city “the politeia whose story
we are telling in words (muthologein) will not achieve its fulfillment
in practice” (501e2–5). The construction of the ideal city may be called a
“myth” in the sense that it depicts an imaginary polis (cf. 420c2: “We imagine
the happy state”). In the Phaedrus (237a9, 241e8) the word muthos
is used to name “the rhetorical exercise which Socrates carries out” (Brisson,
144), but this seems to be a loose usage of the word.
Lewis himself explained
the concept much later in his review of a 1960 book on the poet Edmund Spenser:
Dr Ellrodt
holds it impossible that so Christian a poet as Spenser can really mean that
rational, human souls undergo reincarnation. … I admit that the poets sometimes
talk as if there were not a three-storied soul, but three distinct souls, in
man. But … We need not hold that Spenser “believed” this in the same sense that he believed his creed. He might well have
said, like Johnson, that what scripture teaches on such matters is certain, and
what “philosophy” teaches is probable; at least,
probable enough for poetry. … It is a permissible speculation. It is, as
Plato’s “myths” were to Plato himself, a not
unlikely tale.
––
“Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser” (1961), in Essays on Medieval and
Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (1966), p. 154.
Dr.
Niebuhr’s sense
(note)
»
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), American theologian. In a 1958 letter Lewis reports
that he had read “one book of Niebuhr’s – I can’t remember the title – and on
the whole reacted against it” (CL3, 979). In a letter of 14 January 1940 to his
brother he mentions his reading Niebuhr’s 1935 book An Interpretation of Christian Ethics and finding it “very
disagreeable but not unprofitable” (CL2, 324). Lewis may well have been
thinking of the following passage from Niebuhr’s first chapter (pp. 12-13):
It is the genius of true myth
to suggest the dimension of depth in reality and to point to a realm of essence
which transcends the surface of history, on which the cause-effect sequences,
discovered and analysed by science, occur. ... The religious myth ... points to
the ultimate ground of existence and its ultimate fulfillment. Therefore the
great religious myths deal with creation and redemption. But since myth cannot
speak of the trans-historical without using symbols and events in history as
its forms of expression, it invariably falsifies the facts of history, as seen
by science, to state its truth.
V·6 | for long centuries
brutes
sporting before Adam ... God came first in his love and in his thought, and
that without painful effort
» Several
elements of this speculative account of Paradisal man appear in Lewis’s fantasy
about the “Green Lady”, or Paradisal woman, in his second Ransom novel, Perelandra (1942), for example in the
second half of chapter 5.
V·9 | this act of
the
difficulty about the first sin
» Lewis’s
earliest published mention of Perelandra,
in a letter of 9 November 1941 to Sister Penelope, seems to refer to this same difficulty
of conceiving precisely what kind of creature and action were involved by the
Fall. Having just finished describing Ransom’s first conversation on Venus with
“the Eve of that world” (i.e. presumably chapter 5), he mused:
I may have embarked on the
impossible. This woman has got to combine characteristics which the Fall has
put poles apart – she’s got to be in some ways like a Pagan goddess and in
other ways like the Blessed Virgin.
V·10 | up to that moment
“Dust thou art,
and unto dust ... ”
» Genesis
3:19.
Hooker’s
conception of Law
» For
Hooker, see note to the motto of ch. VII, below. While that motto does refer to
“law”, it is less immediately relevant to Lewis’s present purpose than a
quotation found in the Appendix to The
Abolition of Man, VIII.B:
The soul then ought to conduct
the body, and the spirit of our minds the soul. This is therefore the first
Law, whereby the highest power of the mind requireth obedience at the hands of
all the rest. (Laws of Eccl. Polity
I.8.6)
The same
quotation is found in the helpful context of the section on Hooker in Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century,
p. 460. As he points out and argues, few systems or models of the universe “are
more filled – one might say, more drenched – with Deity” than Hooker’s (459).
Having established this, Lewis goes on to reflect that
[s]ometimes a suspicion
crosses our mind that the doctrine of the Fall did not loom quite large enough
in his universe. Logically, we must grant, it was pivotal: it is only because
Adam fell that supernatural laws have come in at all, replacing that natural
path to beatitude which is now lost. ... It is only because Adam fell that we
need “public regiment” ...
V·11 | god might have
not
necessary to suppose that they also have fallen
» When
Lewis wrote this, his first great imaginative development of this idea had
already been published as the science-fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938); the next was to follow in its
sequel Perelandra (1942).
V·13 | with this i have
“inter-inanimation”
» i.e.
“mutual inspiration”. The
related verb inter-inanimate seems to
have been coined by the English poet John Donne (1572-1631) in his poem “The
Ecstasy” (or “Exstasie”), 41-44:
When love with one another so
interinanimates two soules,
That abler soule, which thence doth flow,
Defects of lonelinesse controules.
The Oxford English Dictionary only has an
entry for “interanimate” (without the inserted -in-), quoting Donne’s line as the only source and dubbing the word
“rare”. Lewis may have been an uncommonly frequent user of the word since it
appears in at least five of his books – mostly as the variant with -in-. (As Helen Gardner notes in her 1965
edition of Donne’s poems, the great majority of old manuscript sources for this
poem have “interinanimates”, not “interanimates”, but the latter variety
is the one found in the first edition, 1633.)
excluded
by the whole tenor of our faith
» This
“whole tenor” seems to be briefly defined by Lewi’s own observation, in the
chapter on Divine Omnipotence (II·7), that
being Christians, we learn
from the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity that something analogous to “society”
exists within the Divine being from all eternity – that God is Love, not merely
in the sense of begin the Platonic form of love, but because, within him, the
concrete reciprocities of love exist before all worlds and are thence derived
to the creatures.
Chapter VI: Human Pain
chapter motto
Theologia
Germanica
» A mystical text in German dating from the mid-14th century, with guidelines for a
Christ-like life that would lead to perfect union of God and man. The treatise
was much commended by Martin Luther, who devised the title – Theologia Deutsch – to highlight the
fact that the text was not in Latin. The further implication was that the book
had all the advantages of plain language and simple devotion unencumbered by
academic learning.
VI·3 | now the proper
... the patters
which man was made to imitate ... [T]here ... is Heaven, and there the Holy
Ghost proceeds
» Lewis
appears to be suggesting a subtly reconciling position in an ancient and still
unresolved controversy within Christendom: the so-called Filioque issue. Latin Filioque
means “and the Son”, and the issue is whether the Holy Ghost, as the third Person
of the Trinity, proceeds “from the Father” or “from the Father and the Son”. The statement under
discussion is an article from the Nicene Creed:
Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum, et vivificantem: |
And I believe in
the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life, |
The
addition of Filioque here represents the
“Western” position, while the Eastern Church holds to the view that the Son and
the Ghost each “proceed” from the Father, as suggested by John 8:42 and 15:26
respectively.
Lewis gave a fuller statement of his view
in his fourth series of BBC radio talks, Beyond
Personality (1944), later reprinted as book IV of Mere Christianity (1952), ch. 4.
as Newman
said, rebels who must lay down our arms
» John
Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons III
(1836), Nr. 7, “Christian Repentance” (on Luke 15:18-19), p. 96 in the 1868 New
Edition:
The most noble repentance (if a fallen being can be noble
in his fall), the most decorous conduct in a conscious sinner, is an unconditional
surrender of himself to God ... He is a runaway offender; he must come
back, as a very first step, before anything can be determined about him, bad or
good; he is a rebel, and must lay down his arms.
Lewis
quotes the same phrase almost literally, but without reference, in Mere Christianity IV.4, “The Perfect
Penitent”.
the very
history of the word “Mortification”
» By
“history” Lewis may here simply mean the word’s etymology. Latin mortificare
literally means “to make dead” i.e. “to kill”, and Latin mortificatio is
the word for “killing” or “annihilation”; from mors or mortuus
“dead” and facere “make”.
VI·5 | the human spirit
error and
sin ... the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence
» Cf. Perelandra, ch. 17 –
“There is an ignorance of
evil that comes from being young: there is a darker ignorance that comes from
doing it, as men by sleeping lose the knowledge of sleep.”
Sadism
and Masochism
» Each
term is derived from the name of a novelist who described the practice in
question: Sadism is named after the French writer Marquis de Sade (1740-1814);
“Masochism”, a word coined in 1886 in a book on sexual psychopathology, refers
to the 19th-century Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
(1836–1895).
VI·6 | a perception of this
by so
doing they render all punishment unjust
» Lewis
developed this idea years later in his two-part essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (1949 & 1954).
Hobbes’s
definition of Revengefulness
» Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), English philosopher. His fundamental proposition was that all
human action is ultimately based on self-interest. Lewis is quoting from one of
Hobbes’s main works, Leviathan, or the
Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Eccleciastical and Civil (1651).
VI·7 | when our ancestors
God’s “vengeance”
» Acts or
intentions of vengeance are frequently attributed to or claimed by God
throughout the Bible, as in Deuteronomy 32:35-36, Isaiah 35:4 (also including
“recompence”), Romans12:19 and Hebrews 10:30, though hardly in the four
Gospels.
Hardy and
Housman
» Thomas
Hardy (1840-1928), English novelist and poet; A. E. Housman (1859-1936), English poet.
Mr.
Huxley
» Aldous
Huxley (1895-1963), English novelist and essayist. Lewis is probably thinking
of Huxley’s then recent book Ends and
Means (1937), which is also alluded to later in this same chapter; see note
to VI·15, below.
VI·8 | if the first
St.
Augustine ... “God wants to give us something ...
» Lewis seems
to use the same reference in a letter of 31 March 1958 to Mary Willis Shelburne
(CL3, 930). In a footnote to that letter Walter Hooper suggests Lewis was
thinking of a passage in Augustine’s homily (or exposition) on Psalm 122, in
the section on the second half of verse 6 (Et
abundantia diligentibus te, “they shall prosper that love thee”):
... “And plenteousness,” he addeth, “for them that
love thee.” ... How have they become rich? Because they gave here what they
received from God for a season, and received there what God will afterwards pay
back for evermore. Here, my brethren, even rich men are poor. It is a good
thing for a rich man to acknowledge himself poor: for if he think himself full,
that is mere puffing, not plenteousness. Let him own himself empty, that he may
be filled.
(Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 8, p. 1184)
as if St.
Augustine wanted unbaptised infants to go to Hell
» See, for example, Augustine’s
– De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de
baptismo parvulorum ad Marcellinum, Book I, ch. 16 [21] (Migne, Patrologia Latina Vol. 44, col. 125). English: “A Treatise on the
Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, and on the Baptism of Infants”, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series
I, Vol. 5: “Unbaptised infants damned, but most lightly”.
– Enchiridion ad Laurentium, ch. 43, 46 and 93 (English in NPNF I.3).
– Sermones ad populum III (“De
Sanctis”), Nr. 294, De
baptismo parvulorum, contra Pelagianos, ch. 3 (Migne, PL 38, 1337).
– Contra Iulianum Pelagianum Book
5, ch. 11.44 (Migne, PL 44, 809).
He stoops
to conquer
» After
the title of Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy She
Stoops to Conquer (1773).
“unmindful of
His glory’s diminution”
» Cf.
note to III·17, above.
VI·11 | here we tread
Kant
thought that no action had moral value unless ... the moral law
»
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German philosopher. Lewis may be referring to Kant’s
Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788),
First Part, Book I, chapter 3, “Von den Triebfedern der reinen praktischen
Vernunft” (Critique of Practical Reason,
“Of the Motives of Pure
Practical Reason”). The chapter’s opening sentences are:
Das Wesentliche alles
sittlichen Werts der Handlungen kommt darauf an, daß das moralische Gesetz unmittelbar den Willen bestimme.
Geschieht die Willensbestimmung zwar gemäß dem moralischen Gesetze, aber
nur vermittelst eines Gefühls, welcher Art es auch sei, das vorausgesetzt
werden muß, damit jenes ein hinreichender Bestimmungsgrund des Willens
werde, mithin nicht um des Gesetzes willen,
so wird die Handlung zwar Legalität,
aber nicht Moralität enthalten. (ed. Karl Vorländer, 9th ed., Hamburg 1929, p. 84) |
What is essential in the moral worth of actions is that the moral law should directly
determine the will. If the determination of the will takes place in conformity
indeed to the moral law, but only by means of a feeling, no matter of what
kind, which has to be presupposed in order that the law may be sufficient
to determine the will, and therefore not for
the sake of the law, then the action will possess legality but not morality. (translation
Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, 4th ed., 1889, p. 164) |
Further
on, there is the statement (par. 16)
Plicht und
Schuldigkeit sind die Benennungen, die wir allein unserem Verhältnisse zum
moralischen Gesetze geben müssen. (Vorländer p. 96) |
Duty
and obligation are the only names that we must give to our relation to the
moral law. (Abbott p. 175) |
The same chapter
features a famous panegyric on “Duty” (par. 21):
Pflicht! du erhabener, großer Name, der du nichts
Beliebtes, was Einschmeichelung bei sich führt, in dir fassest, sondern
Unterwerfung verlangst, doch auch nichts drohest, was natürliche Abneigung
im Gemüthe erregte und schreckte, um den Willen zu bewegen, sondern blos
ein Gesetz aufstellst, welches von selbst im Gemüthe Eingang findet und doch
sich selbst wider Willen Verehrung (wenn gleich nicht immer Befolgung) erwirbt,
vor dem alle Neigungen verstummen, wenn sie gleich ingeheim ihm entgegen
wirken: welches ist der deiner würdige Ursprung, und wo findet man die
Wurzel deiner edlen Abkunft, welche alle Verwandtschaft mit Neigungen
stolz ausschlägt, und von welcher Wurzel abzustammen, die unnachlaßliche
Bedingung desjenigen Werths ist, den sich Menschen allein selbst geben können? (Vorländer
p. 101) |
Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name that dost embrace
nothing charming or insinuating, but requirest submission, and yet seekest
not to move the will by threatening aught that would arouse natural aversion
or terror, but merely holdest forth a law which of itself finds entrance into
the mind, and yet gains reluctant reverence (though not always obedience), a law
before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly
counter-work it; what origin is there worthy of thee, and where is to be
found the root of thy noble descent which proudly rejects all kindred with
the inclinations; a root to be derived from which is the indispensable condition
of the only worth which men can give themselves? (Abbott
p. 180) |
he has
been accused of a “morbid frame of mind”
» ... ??
against
Kant stands the obvious truth, noted by Aristotle ... as a Christian I suggest
the following solution
» Lewis’s
Christian solution to what he calls the “conflict between the ethics of duty
and the ethics of virtue” was perhaps partly inspired by the medieval English mystic
Julian of Norwich, as appears from a letter he wrote to Owen Barfield of 2 June
1940 (CL2, 418-419). In March of that year Lewis had read Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love, and in the
letter he noted that
[she] seems, in the Fifteenth
century, to have rivalled Thomas Aquinas’ reconciliation of Aristotle and
Christianity by nearly reconciling Christianity with Kant.
On the
other hand, in the first paragraph of his 1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory”
Lewis points out that
[i]f
there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and
earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this
notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian
faith.
Aristotle
... the more virtuous a man becomes the more he enjoys virtuous actions
» Cf.
Aristotle’s Ethics II.2 (1104b).
And for a test of the
formation of the habits we must take the pleasure or pain which succeeds the
acts; for he is perfected in Self-Mastery who not only abstains from the bodily
pleasures but is glad to do so; whereas he who abstains but is sorry to do it
has not Self-Mastery: he again is brave who stands up against danger, either
with positive pleasure or at least without any pain; whereas he who does it
with pain is not brave.
[translation by D. P. Chase, Everyman edition, 1911]
VI·12 | it has sometimes
whether
God commands certain things because they are right, or ...
» In
philosophical theology, the question has long been known as the “Euthyphro
dilemma”.
with Hooker,
and against Dr. Johnson … “they err who think that the will of God …”
» For Hooker, see note to the
motto of ch. VII, below. Lewis’s footnote contains an error: “I, i, 5” should
be “I, ii, 5”, i.e. he is referring not to chapter 1 in Book I of Hooker’s Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity, but
to chapter 2: “Of that law which God from before the beginning hath set
for himself to do all things by”. Lewis was to use exactly the same quote (with
the same defect to the reference) in chapter 1 of his later book English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954). p. 49:
We must not suppose that the medieval conception of
Natural Lew vanished overnight. … In the first book of Hooker we find that God
Himself, though the author, is also the voluntary subject, of law. “They err
who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides
his will” (I. i. 5). God does nothing except in pursuance of that “constant
Order and Law” of goodness which He has appointed to Himself. nowhere outside
the minds of devils and bad men is there a sic volo, sic jubeo.
» Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), one of the great
figures of English literary history, was a poet, essayist, biographer, novelist,
and lexicographer. He was also famous as a conversationalist, thanks to the
1791 biography by James Boswell, The Life
of Dr. Johnson. Lewis may have thought of a passage toward the end of the
section dealing with the year 1780, recording Johnson’s observation that “the
idea of a Creator must be such as
that He has a power to unmake or annihilate His creature”, and Boswell’s reply,
“Then it cannot be conceived that a creature can make laws for its Creator.” Boswell then adds in a
footnote,
His
profound admiration of the Great First Cause was such as to set him above that
“Philosophy and vain deceit” [Colossians, ii. 8] with which men of narrower
conceptions have been infected. I have heard him strongly maintain that “what
is right is not so from any natural fitness, but because God wills it to be right;” and it is
certainly so, because He has predisposed the relations of things so as that
which He wills must be right.
Paley
» William
Paley (1743-1805), English theologian. ... ??
VI·13 | we therefore agree
we agree
with Kant so far as to say that there is one right act ... which cannot be
willed to the height by fallen creatures unless it is unpleasant
»
Obviously Lewis does not mean that Kant made a similar statement about the
self-surrender of fallen creatures; he means that this crucial aspect of a
Christian “solution” accords with Kant’s view of morality as a necessarily
unpleasant affair. However, Lewis has so far only suggested that this view of
morality is something Kant was “accused of” (VI·11). Thus Lewis appears to have
been in two minds as to whether the accusation was true. At the same time, he
has just distinguished “obedience” from “the content of our obedience”, and the
distinction appears to allow him to be slightly more Kantian than Kant on the
unpleasantness of morality. Some actually Kantian passages on that subject are
found in the chapter from Kant’s Critique
of Practical Reason (I.1.3) cited above :
Denn alle Neigung und jeder sinnliche Antrieb ist auf Gefühl gegründet,
und die negative Wirkung aufs Gefühl (durch den Abbruch, der den Neigungen
geschieht) ist selbst Gefühl. Folglich können wir a priori einsehen, daß das
moraliscshe Gesetz als Bestimmungsgrund des Willens, dadurch daß es allen
unseren Neigungen Eintrag tut, ein Gefühl bewirken müsse, welches Schmerz
genannt werden kann, und hier haben wir nun den ersten, vielleicht auch
einzigen Fall, da wir aus Begriffen a priori das Verhältnis einer Erkenntnis
(hier ist es einer reinen praktischen Vernunft) zum Gefühl der Lust oder
Unlust bestimmen konnten. (Vorländer p. 85) Das Bewußtsein einer freien
Unterwerfung des Willens unter das Gesetz, doch als mit einem unvermeidlichen
Zwange, der allen Neigungen, aber nur durch eigene Vernunft angetan wird,
verbunden, ist nun die Achtung fürs Gesetz. ... Die Handlung, die nach diesem
Gesetze .. objektiv praktisch ist, heiß Pflicht,
welche .. in ihrem Begriffe praktische Nötigung
.. enthält. Das Gefühl, das aus dem Bewußtsein dieser Nötigung entspringt,
ist .. allein praktisch ... Es enthält also, als Unterwerfung unter ein
Gesetz, .. keine Lust, sondern sofern vielmehr Unlust an der Handlung in
sich. Dagegen aber, da dieser Zwang bloß durch Gesetzxgebung der eigenen Vernunft
ausgeübt wird, enthält es auch Erhebung ... (Vorländer, p. 94) Könnte .. ein vernünftig Geschöpf jemals dahin kommen, alle moralischen
Gesetze völlig gerne zu tun, so
würde das soviel bedeuten als: es fände sich in ihm auch nicht einmal die
Möglichkeit einer Begierde, die ihn zur Abweichung von ihnen reizte; denn
die Überwindung einer solchen kosten dem Subjekt immer Aufopferung,
bedarf also Selbstzwang, d.i. innere Nötigung zu dem, was man nicht ganz gern
tut. Zu dieser Stufe der moralischen Gesinnung aber kann es ein Geschöpf
niemals bringen. (Vorländer p. 97-98) |
For all inclination and every sensible impulse is founded on feeling,
and the negative effect produced on feeling (by the check on the inclinations)
is itself feeling; consequently, we can see à priori that the moral law, as a determining principle of the
will, must by thwarting all our inclinations produce a feeling which may be
called pain; and in this we have the first, perhaps the only, instance in
which we are able from à priori considerations
to determine the relation of a cognition (in this case of pure practical
reason) to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure. (par. 3, Abbot p.
165) The consciousness of a free
submission of the will to the law, yet combined with an inevitable constraint
put upon all inclinations, though only by our own reason, is respect for
the [moral] law. ... An action which is objectively practical according to
this law .. is duty, and this ..
includes in its concept practical obligation
... The feeling that arises from the consciousness of this obligation is ..
practical only ... As submission
to the law .. it contains in it no pleasure, but on the contrary, so far,
pain in the action. On the other hand, however, ... it also contains
something elevating ... (par. 12, Abbott p. 173) [I]f a rational creature could ever reach this point, that he thoroughly
likes to do all moral laws, this
would mean that there does not exist in him even the possibility of a desire
that would tempt him to deviate from them; for to overcome such a desire
always costs the subject some sacrifice and therefore requires self-compulsion,
that is, inward constraint to something that one does not quite like to do;
and no creature can ever reach this stage of moral disposition. (par. 17; Abbott p. 176) |
Abraham’s
“trial”
» As
recounted in Genesis 22.
VI·14 | if pain sometimes
“strength, which,
if Heaven gave it, may be called his own”
» Milton,
Comus, 419; on Chastity. Cf. Charles
Williams’s Oxford lecture, Feb. 1940.
he that
loses his soul shall find it
» cf.
Matthew 16:24-25 (and parallel places Mark 8:35 and Luke 9:24); Jesus speaking
to his disciples.
If any
man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow
me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his
life for my sake shall find it.
“backward
mutters of dissevering powers”
» Milton,
Comus, 817.
uncreative
spell
» Compare
IX·6, where Lewis uses the word “uncreating” rather than “uncreative”. The
latter form seems to be the more appropriate in each case; it offer the best
parallel to the phrase just quoted from Milton.
Christ on
Calvary ... surrender to God does not falter though God “forsakes” it
» cf.
Matthew 27:46,
And about
the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?
The
“forsaking” comes in a Hebrew line quoted from the beginning of Psalm 22:2.
Lewis,
in thus describing the martyrdom or “accepted Death” as “the supreme enacting
and perfection of Christianity”, was almost certainly remembering George
Macdonald’s meditations on the subject. For some relevant passages see Lewis’s George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946), items 31-39, taken
from Macdonald’s Unspoken Sermons,
Series I, Nr. 8, “The Eloi”.
There are similar allusions to Macdonald
in Lewis’s Screwtape
Letters (1942), letter VIII.
VI·15 | the doctrine of death
the
Mysteries
» See
note to IV·1, above.
Mr.
Huxley ... “non-attachment”
» cf. the
reference to Aldous Huxley in VI·7, above. Huxley presented the concept of
non-attachment in chapter 1 of his book Ends
and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods employed
for their Realisation (1937), pp. 2-4:
Among
[the] bewildering multiplicity of ideals which shall we choose? The answer is that we shall choose none. ...
[A]ll the ideals of human behaviour formulated by those who have been most
successful in freeing themselves from the prejudices of their time and place
are singularly alike. ... The enslaved have held up for admiration now this
model of a man, not that; but at all times and in all places, the free have
spoken with only one voice. It is difficult to find a single word that will
adequately describe the ideal man of the free philosophers, the mystics, the
founders of religions. “Non-attached” is perhaps the best. The ideal man is the
non-attached man. ... Non-attachment to self and to what are called “the things
of this world” has always been associated in the teachings of the philosophers
and the founders of religions with attachment to an ultimate reality greater
and more significant than the self. Greater and more significant than even the
best things that this world has to offer.
an “eternal
gospel”
» While
the term may ultimately derive from Revelation 14:6, Lewis had himself
previously used the Latin form, evangelium
eternum, to describe his own pre-Christian brand of pantheism as expounded
by the allegorical figure of Mr. Wisdom in The
Pilgrim’s Regress, Book VII, ch. 12:
...so far as I am at all, I am
Spirit, and only by being Spirit maintain my short vitality as soul. See how
life subsists by death and each becomes the other: for Spirit lives by dying
perpetually into such things as we, and we also attain our truest life by dying
to our mortal nature ... for this is the final meaning of all moral precepts,
and the goodness of temperance and justice and of love itself is that they
plunge the red heat of our separate and individual passions back in the ice
brook of the Spirit ... What I tell you is the evangelium eternum.
Much less
directly, though plausibly in view of the preceding reference to Aldous Huxley,
there might be a connection with Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. However, that book was not
published until 1945, and its focus is on personal enlightenment rather than on
any doctrine of death. The originally Latin term, philosophia perennis,
originated in 16th-century Neo-Platonism.
the Light
that lighteneth every man
» cf.
John 1:7-9.
[John the
Baptist] came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through
him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that
Light. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the
world.
our
script need only be a copy
» Cf. the
book’s general motto, taken from Macdonald’s Unspoken Sermons I.2: “The Son of God suffered ... that their
sufferings might be like His.”
no
quarrel, like Plato, with the body as such
» In
Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, Socrates
explains why, as a philosopher, he should be happy and actually is happy
to die that same day. Death is the moment of the soul’s release from the body as
from a “prison” (62b, 82e), and such a release is in many ways precisely what a
philosopher has always been striving for:
The
lovers of knowledge are conscious that the soul was simply fastened and glued
to the body – until philosophy received her, she could only view real existence
through the bars of a prison, not in and through herself; she was wallowing in
the mire of every sort of ignorance; and by reason of lust had become the
principal accomplice in her own captivity. This was her original state; and
then, as I was saying, and as the lovers of knowledge are well aware,
philosophy, seeing how terrible was her confinement, of which she was to
herself the cause, received and gently comforted her and sought to release her,
pointing out that the eye and the ear and the other senses are full of
deception, and persuading her to retire from them, and abstain from all but the
necessary use of them, and be gathered up and collected into herself, bidding
her trust in herself and her own pure apprehension of pure existence, and to
mistrust whatever comes to her through other channels and is subject to
variation; for such things are visible and tangible, but what she sees in her
own nature is intelligible and invisible. ... [E]ach pleasure and pain is a
sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, until she becomes
like the body, and believes that to be true which the body affirms to be true;
and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to
have the same habits and haunts, and is not likely ever to be pure at her
departure to the world below, but is always infected by the body; and so she sinks
into another body and there germinates and grows, and has therefore no part in
the communion of the divine and pure and simple.
–– Phaedo 82e-83d, translated by
Benjamin Jowett
In so far
as Lewis ever recognized a similar sort of quarrel, he considered soul and body
as being tarred with the same brush:
Bless the body. Mine has led
me into many scrapes, but I have led it into far more.
–– Letters to Malcolm (1964), ch. 3.
“You are
always dragging me down,” said I to my Body. “Dragging you down!” replied my Body. “Well I like that! Who taught me to
like tobacco and alcohol? ... That’s Soul all over; you give me orders and then
blame me for carrying them out.”
–– “Scraps” (1945), in God in the Dock
(1970), p. 216-217; see also Lewis’s Letters
to Malcolm, ch. 3.
nothing
to distinguish them from ... “sweet reasonableness”
» The term was coined by Matthew Arnold, who
frequently used it in his Literature and
Dogma (1873). Thus in chapter III, “Religion new-given” (p. 66 in the
1883 Popular Edition):
Jesus Christ’s
new and different way of putting things was the secret of his succeeding where
the prophets failed. And this new way he had of putting things is what is
indicated by the expression epieikeia,
an expression best rendered ... by the phrase “sweet reasonableness”.
In
equating his own “ideal of urbanity and sweet reasonableness” with “the
spiritual life as conceived by Christianity”, as Lewis suspected he did (Studies
in Words, ch. 9.vii, p. 242),
Arnold was ignoring that this reasonableness was only the sweet variant of an
ideal that might take very bitter forms.
VI·16 | all arguments in
“quite
o’ercrows my spirit”
» Shakespeare, Hamlet V.2, 435.
O,
I die, Horatio!
The potent poison quite oʼer-crows my spirit.
VI·17 | in estimating the
the
beneficence of fear ... the present war. My own experience ...
» Lewis describes
the experience, with regard to the approach and onset of the war, in several
letters of the time to Owen Barfield; see CL2, 231-232 (12 Sept. 1938), 266-268
(August 1939) and 418-419 (2 June 1940).
VI·18 | in the second
C.C.S.
»
Casualty Clearing Station
Johnson
and Cowper
» Samuel
Johnson (1709-1784), see note to VI·12, above. William Cowper (1731-1800),
English poet.
“vale of soul
making”
» The phrase was coined by the poet John Keats in
a letter written in 1819 to his brother and sister:
In how lamentable a case do we see the great body of
the people (...) The whole appears to resolve into this – that man is
originally “a poor forked creature” subject to the same mischances as the
beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or
other. (...) The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and
superstitious is “a vale of tears” from which we are to be redeemed by a
certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven – What a little
circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please “the vale of soul-making”. Then you
will find out the use of the world (...) I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children
to read – I will call the human heart
the horn book used in that school –
and I will call the child able to read,
the soul made from that school and its horn book. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and
troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the
heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! (...) As various as the
lives of men are – so various become their souls, and thus does God make
individual beings, souls, identical souls of the sparks of his own essence. –
This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does not
affront our reason and humanity – I am convinced that many difficulties which
Christians labour under would vanish before it. (...) Seriously I think it
probable that this system of soul-making may have been the parent of all the
more palpable and personal schemes of redemption, among the Zoroastrians, the
Christians and the Hindoos.
–– The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821,
ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (two volumes, Harvard U.P. 1958), vol. 2, 101-103;
spelling and interpunction normalized in the present quotation. The full
1,250-word passage on this topic, written as part of a larger section on 21
April 1819, is available here (two-page PDF) in the original orthography.
The same
phrase and same idea play a key role in Evil
and the God of Love (1966) by the English theologian John Hick (cf. chapter
13, section 3, “The ‘Vale of Soul-Making’ Theodicy” (with a reference to Keats
in a note on p. 295; or chapter 12, p. 259 in the second edition, 1977).
Although elsewhere in the book Hick makes two references to The Problem of Pain and one
reference to Lewis’s A Grief Observed, he never notes the
affinity between his own overall thesis and this key passage in Lewis’s 1940
book.
Lewis’s use of the “vale” phrase may partly
go back to a book he mentions in chapter 8: Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism and Belief
(1938). In his second lecture on “Time”, Bevan talks of
Time, in so far as it is the
necessary condition of soul-making by moral volitions
and
further notes that
It would be nonsense to say
his [i.e. a human spirit’s] perfected state in eternity was just as much before his earthly experience as after it, that, if it is reached through
the process of soul-making in this earthly vale, the individual’s existence in
the eternal state after his earthly experience was no different from his
existence before he had his earthly
experience.
(pp. 113
and 116 in the 1938 edition, or pp. 100 and 103 in the 1962 Fontana edition)
Of
poverty ...
» While the
previous sentence, with the quote from Keats, seems a suitable closing sentence
for this chapter, the rest of this final paragraph rather belongs under the
first “proposition” discussed in the next chapter.
Christ’s statement that poverty is blessed
» Or rather, that the poor are blessed: “Blessed are
you who are poor” (Luke 6:20). Lewis’s reference to this is more accurate at
the beginning of VII·2 in the next chapter.
“ judgement” (i.e., social justice)
» As, for exemple, in Isaiah 1:17 and Luke 11:42.
For relevant passages in the Psalms see Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms (1958),
ch. 2, par. 5:
In Psalm 9 we are told that God will “minister true
judgement” (8), and that is because He “forgetteth not the complaint of
the poor” (12). He “defendeth the cause” (that is, the “case”) “of the
widows” (68, 5). The good king in Psalm 72, 2, will “judge” the
people rightly; that is, he will “defend the poor”. When God “arises to
judgement” he will “help all the meek upon earth” (76, 9), all the
timid, helpless people whose wrongs have never been righted yet. When God
accuses earthly judges of “wrong judgement”, He follows it up by telling them
to see that the poor “have right” (82, 2, 3).
“opiate of the
people”
» After a
much-quoted statement by the German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883),
“Religion is the opium of the people” (or “opiate of the masses”). The
original German phrase – “Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes” – appears
in a text published in 1844 in Marx’s journal Deutsch-Französische Jarhbücher, and written as the introduction to
a planned book on Hegel which Marx never wrote. For more context and some
earlier uses of the metaphor, see Wikipedia article “Opium of the people”.
Chapter VII: Human Pain, continued
chapter motto
Hooker
» Richard
Hooker (1554-1600), English theologian. Of his main work, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, the first four volumes
appeared in 1593, and most of the other four were published posthumously. In a
1944 essay later republished as “On the Reading
of Old Books” Lewis mentions Hooker among a handful of “Christian
classics” which he “was first led into reading, almost accidentally, as a result
of my English studies” and “because they are themselves great English writers”.
A diary entry for 4 June 1926 (All My
road Before Me, p. 406) shows that he enjoyed Hooker as soon as he began
reading him, which he did in preparation for a course of lectures he gave later
that year.
VII·2 | 1. there is a
offences
must come, but woe to those …
» cf.
Luke 17:1.
It is
impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they
come!
sins do
cause grace to abound
» cf.
Paul’s letter to the Romans, 5:20-21.
... the
law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did
much more abound. That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace
reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.
Marlowe’s
lunatic Tamberlaine
»
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), English dramatist and poet. His first play was
Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts,
1587-88), about the power-drunk and cruel Tatar conqueror Timur the Lame. The
protagonist is happy to call himself, and be called, “the scourge of God” – as
in Part One, Act IV, scene 2, when he is brutalizing and humiliating the
captive Emperor of the Turks:
Now clear the triple region of the air,
And let the Majesty of Heaven behold
Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.
Smile, stars that reign’d at my nativity ...
At the end of Part Two, as he lies dying, he counsels
his son to “reign, ... scourge and control those slaves”; and his last words
are
Farewell, my boys! my
dearest friends, farewell!
My body feels, my soul doth weep to see
Your sweet desires depriv’d my company,
For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die.
VII·3 | the problem about
“only God can mortify”
» ??
Brother
Lawrence (note)
» Nicolas Herman (1614–1691), born in Lorraine,
entered the Carmelite Order in Paris as a lay brother in 1640 and took the name
Lawrence of the Resurrection. When Brother Lawrence had died, his abbot
compiled two little books from his notes and letters and from reminiscences of
conversations with him. The two books together came to be known under the title
La pratique de la présence de Dieu (The Practice of the Presence of
God; a new critical edition was published in 1991 and a new English
translation in 1994).
VII·4 | it would be
the
fullest parabolic picture … active beneficence
»
Presumably a reference to Matthew 25:31-46.
Chapter VIII: Hell
chapter
motto
W. de la Mare
» Walter de la Mare (1873-1956),
English poet.
Shakespeare
» King Richard the Third, V.3, 183. Also
quoted in Lewis’s brief 1940 essay “Two Ways with the Self”.
VIII·2 | the dominical utterances
The
Dominical utterances
» i.e.
sayings of the Lord Jesus (Latin dominus
= “lord”) such as in Matthew 5:22,
Whosoever
is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment
... but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.
VIII·5 | first, there is
the noble
motions of his victims
»
“Motions” is a misprint for emotions,
introduced in the book’s seventh British edition, June 1942. The same
misprint seems to have found its way into most or all of the American editions
(Macmillan, New York), which began to appear in February 1943.
The
first six British editions, with the correct word, all appeared within a year
(October 1940–October 1941). The seventh, appearing eight months after the
sixth, was the first to appear after the publication of The Screwtape
Letters in book form (May 1942), and the first of another quick succession
of six reprints of The Problem of Pain.
Thomas
Aquinas said of suffering
» See
note to the motto of chapter II, above. In the translation of the Summa Theologica available at Newadvent.org
the relevant passage reads
A thing may be good or evil
in two ways: first considered simply and in itself; and thus all sorrow is an
evil, because the mere fact of a man’s appetite being uneasy about a present
evil, is itself an evil, because it hinders the response of the appetite in
good. Secondly, a thing is said to be good or evil, on the supposition of
something else: thus shame is said to be good, on the supposition of a shameful
deed done, as stated in Ethic. iv, 9. Accordingly, supposing the presence of
something saddening or painful, it is a sign of goodness if a man is in sorrow
or pain on account of this present evil. For if he were not to be in sorrow or
pain, this could only be either because he feels it not, or because he does not
reckon it as something unbecoming, both of which are manifest evils.
Consequently it is a condition of goodness, that, supposing an evil to be
present, sorrow or pain should ensue.
as
Aristotle said of shame
» As
appears from the above note, the passage in Thomas Aquinas from which Lewis
quotes includes the reference to Aristotle’s Ethics IV.9 (1128b):
Shame should not be described as a virtue; for it is more like a feeling
than a state of character. ... [S]hame may be said to be conditionally a good
thing; if a good man does such actions,
he will feel disgraced; but the virtues are not subject to such a
qualification.
[translation by W. D. Ross, in
The Works of Aristotle, vol. 9,
Oxford 1925]
VIII·7 | i have begun
“their
rejection of everything that is not simply themselves”... Von Hügel
» Here and
in VIII·9, Lewis appears to be quoting this author from memory. Friedrich von
Hügel (1852-1925), influential Roman Catholic thinker of his day, was an
English theologian of Austrian/Scottish descent. His Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion were published
in two volumes (or Series) in 1921 and 1926. The address “What do we mean by
Heaven? And what do we mean by Hell?” (Vol. 1, pp. 195-224)
was delivered to the Religious Thought Society of London in February
1917. Lewis is referring to a paragraph in the concluding section (pp.
216-217):
The lost spirits will persist,
according to the degree of their permanent self-willed defection from their
supernatural call, in the varyingly all but complete self-centredness and
subjectivity of their self-elected earthly life. But now they will feel, far
more fully than they ever felt on earth, the stuntedness, the self-mutilation,
the imprisonment involved in this their endless self-occupation and jealous
evasion of all reality not simply their own selves.
VIII·9 | a third objection
Von Hügel
... warns us not to confuse the doctrine itself with the imagery
» From
the essay mentioned in the note to VIII·7, above; the third of four concluding
“general reflexions as to Hell” (221):
And as to the essentials of
Hell, I like to remember what a cultivated, experienced Roman Catholic cleric
insisted upon to me, namely, the importance of the distinction between the
essence of the doctrine of Hell and the various images and interpretations
given to this essence: that the essence lies assuredly, above all, in the
unendingness. Hence even the most terrible of the descriptions in Dante’s Inferno could be held literally, and
yet, if the sufferings there described were considered eventually to cease
altogether, Hell would thereby be denied in its very root. (...)
Von
Hügel’s focus is on the interpretations rather than (as Lewis suggests) on the
images. His further focus on “unendingness” is in line with a point made in
conclusion of the first reflexion (220):
... if we walk ... in the
footsteps of definite and sensitive Theists [rather than pantheists] we shall
find that the doctrine of Abiding Consequences can, at the least, not be
treated lightly – the possibility of its substantial truth will persistently demand
a serious, pensive consideration.
The theme
of Abiding Consequences is a central one in Von Hügel’s essay and highlighted
in his Preface, where he notes (xi) that
... it may be of use to some
readers to have clearly before them the formidable – I myself believe, the
hopeless – task which confronts those who would retain the spiritual teaching
of Jesus, as indeed still the standard and ideal of our outlook, and who yet
would reject all Abiding Consequences
As
compared with Von Hügel’s view, Lewis’s brief discussion in this paragraph of
the symbols under which “Our Lord speaks of Hell”, the theme of everlastingness
is conspicuous by absence.
the
saying that “hell is hell, not from its own point of view …” etc.
» ??
VIII·10 | a fourth objection
Edwyn
Bevan ... Symbolism and Belief
» Edwyn Robert Bevan 1870-1943,
English scholar of ancient history and religion. Symbolism and Belief (1938) is the first
of two books based on the Gifford Lectures for 1933-1934. Lewis recommended the book in a letter of 26 March 1940 to a
former pupil, noting that “a good many misunderstandings are cleared away by
[it]” (CL2, 375). In subsequent years, when Lewis mentioned the book he almost
invariably did so in strongly recommending terms.
The passage referred to is the end of the first of two lectures
on “Time” (in the 1962 Fontana paperback edition this is the end of the first
section of the chapter “Time”, pp. 89-90). After arguing against
“the doctrine ... that all events are present to God in a Nunc Stans [‘Steady Now’], without any successiveness all”, Bevan
finally notes:
[p. 100] These considerations suggest incidentally
that the controversy which has gone on between those who have maintained that
the ultimate fate of lost souls is to be annihilated and those who have
maintained that their punishment is eternal, may be a controversy about
expressions which stand for no essential difference. If a painful experience
becomes a Nunc Stans which is never
followed by a re-beginning of time, that is for the sufferer precisely the same
as if, after his last moment of experience, he were annihilated. The difference
would be only for others, [p. 101] whose experience was still successive in
time. Any other spirit who could enter into the experience of the lost soul at
intervals, say, of a thousand years, would always find the experience there the
same as it had been a thousand years before, but for the lost soul itself there
would be no protraction of its experience through periods of time; it would all
be shrunk up into one moment with nothing afterwards. I do not at all mean to imply
that there seems to me any good ground for believing that this will actually be
the case with any human soul. I merely point out that when we argue about the
state of persons beyond death, there may be possibilities in a different
apprehension of time which we cannot know, and which may make all our arguments
wide of the mark. But if this is the best conception we can get of what a Nunc Stans would be, it would seem an
inappropriate conception for the eternal life of the blessed (...).
“the darkness
outside”
» From
three sayings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew. In 22:13 and 25:30
the phrase “outer darkness” appears in the conclusion of a parable. In 8:12 it
is found in a declaration made after a Roman centurion has confessed his belief
in Jesus’s power and authority:
I have not found so great
faith, no, not in Israel ... [M]any shall come from the east and west, and
shall sit down with Abraham ... But the children of the kingdom shall be cast
out into outer darkness ...
VIII·12 | in the long run
They will
not be forgiven
»
Evidently, will not be is here to be
understood as are unwilling to be
Lewis is referring back to several earlier passages in this chapter:
– “How if
they will not give in?” (VIII·1)
–
“Supposing he will not be converted
…” (VIII·5)
– “But
forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete”.
(VIII·6)
– “… they
certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages …” (VIII·11)
An
allusion to “shall not be forgiven” (Matthew 12:31, Luke 12:10) is hence
implausible.
Chapter
IX: Animal Pain
General notes
» A critique of this chapter by the popular
philosopher C. E. M. Joad, followed by Lewis’s reply, was published in The Month, February 1950. The two
pieces were reprinted as a single item under the title “The Pains of Animals: A
Problem in Theology” in the posthumous volume of Lewis’s essays called God in the Dock (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids
1970), then in the smaller volume Timeless
at Heart (1987), and then again in the comprehensive Essay Collection published in 2000. See www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays
and www.lewisiana.nl/essayquotes#pains
» “Any theological consideration of pain
always leads one into the knotty problem of animal pain and from this problem
to the question of animal salvation. Macdonald grapples with this question in
several of his books, attempting to justify some sort of immortality for
animals, an immortality which will be achieved through the salvation of men.
Man has, therefore, a redemptive duty to perform in the animal world and that
is why he has been given dominion
over it. … Possibly at the prompting of Macdonald, C. S. Lewis devotes a
considerable portion of The Problem of Pain to the subject of animal
salvation.”
–– Paul Robert Dettman,
George
Macdonald and C. S. Lewis: Master and Disciple
(MA thesis, Oberlin College, 1952), 31-32
» “In ch. 1 of Leaves from the Trees [by ‘A Member of
CSMV’], entitled ‘Consider the Dog: A Study in Right Relationship’, Sister Penelope
wrote: ‘The object of this essay is to consider, not the frequent failure of
men in their stewardship, but what we ourselves may learn from the humanized
animal, to whom we are as God, about the relationship that ought to exist
between God and us’ (p. 1). This chapter almost certainly served as the
inspiration for Lewis’s similar treatment of the subject in The Problem of
Pain.”
–– Walter
Hooper in CL2, 265, note 80.
IX·1 | thus far of
“a plaint of
guiltless hurt doth pierce the sky”
» From Arcadia, a pastoral romance in verse and prose by Sir
Philip Sidney (1554-1586). In its original context, a strong element of human
guilt for animal suffering is implied which seems to be absent from Lewis’s
meaning at this point. The line quoted is found in the penultimate stanza in
one of the Eclogues sung for King Basilius at the end of Book I of the 1590
edition; in the 1593 and later editions this song is found in the second half
of Book III. The song, “As I my little flocke on Ister banke”, tells
the story of a time before there were men, and the beasts asked Jove for a king.
After warnings from Jove, and from the owl, they are given part of Jove’s
“heavenly fire” as a basis for making themselves their king. The result is Man,
who gradually develops into a tyrant, maltreating “guiltlesse earth” (by mining
and ploughing) and the beasts. The story closes with this complaint:
But yet o man, rage not beyond
thy neede:
Deeme it no gloire to swell in tyrannie.
Thou art of blood; ioy not to see things bleede:
Thou fearest death; thinke they are loth to die.
A plaint of guiltlesse hurt doth pierce
the skie.
And you poore beastes, in patience bide your hell,
Or know your strengths, and then you shall do well.
IX·2 | we may begin
Wordsworth believed that every flower “enjoyed the air
it breathes” : See Wordsworth’s “Lines written in Early
Spring” (1798), third stanza.
Through Primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’t is my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
IX·4 | in the long run
the
distinction ... has great authority ... “a succession of perceptions” ...
“a perception of succession”
» Lewis
is giving a popular exposition of Kant’s concept of a “transcendental unity of
self-consciousness”. This concept is introduced in the Critique of Pure Reason, §12 of the long section called
“Transcendental Analytic” (in Meiklejohn’s
1855 translation) or §16 of the
Kritik der reinen Vernunft,
second edition (1787).
IX·6 | 2. the origin of
the
uncreating rebellion
» See
note to “uncreative spell” in VI·14, above.
a certain
sacred story ... implied in several Dominical, Pauline, and Johannine
utterances
» While
Lewis obviously keeps his distance from this “sacred story”, he was extremely
well-read in medieval literature. It is therefore perhaps impossible to find
out precisely which New Testament passages he knew to have been interpreted
this way. The Dominical utterances may include Matthew 25:41 (“everlasting
fire, prepared for the devil and his angels”), Luke 10:18 (“I beheld Satan as
lightning fall from heaven”), and John 8:44 (“He [the devil] was a murderer
from the beginning”). The Johannine could be 1 John 3:8 (“the devil sinneth
from the beginning”). Relevant Pauline passages are hard to find.
and become a Docetist
» In the
French edition of this book, Lewis added a note after these words (Le problème de la souffrance, 1950, p.
163):
Actuellement, je considère la
conception de l’Incarnation impliquée dans de paragraphe, comme grossière et
due à l’ignorance.
I actually consider the idea
of Incarnation implied by this paragraph as crude and due to ignorance.
Docetists
(Gr. Dokētai, from the verb dokein, “seem”), in the early centuries of
the Christian church, was a general term for those Christians who held that
Christ, since He was true God, could not have been true man; therefore His
human nature must have been mere appearance.
The reason Lewis apologizes for “ignorance” seems
to be that he had found himself corrected on this point in a letter from Oliver
Chase Quick, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. See Lewis’s reply of 18
January 1941 in CL3, 462. Many years later he once more referred to his own
earlier “crude conception of the Incarnation”: see “Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger”
(1958), in God in the Dock (1971), 177.
IX·7 | it seems to me
that some
mighty created power had already been at work
» Lewis’s
own attempt to develop such a supposition is found in Out of the Silent Planet, his first science-fiction novel, which he
wrote about two years before The Problem
of Pain.
“life-force”
» See
note to I·16, above.
IX·9 | 3. finally, there is
also with
Wesley
» John Wesley
(1703-1791), English clergyman and founder of Methodism. Lewis seems to be
referring to Wesley’s sermon on Romans 8:19-22. Both the number and the title
of this sermon as cited by Lewis are different from those found at the Wesley
Center Online: Nr. 60, “The General Deliverance”. See especially the
paragraphs III.6 and III.9:
May I be
permitted to mention here a conjecture concerning the brute creation? What, if
it should then please the all-wise, the all-gracious Creator to raise them
higher in the scale of beings? What, if it should please him, when he makes us
“equal to angels,” to make them what we are now, – creatures capable of God;
capable of knowing and loving and enjoying the Author of their being? ...
May it not ... furnish
a full answer to a plausible objection against the justice of God, in
suffering numberless creatures that never had sinned to be so severely
punished. They could not sin, for they were not moral agents. Yet how severely
do they suffer! – yea, many of them, beasts of burden in particular, almost the
whole time of their abode on earth; So that they can have no retribution here
below. But the objection vanishes away, if we consider that something better
remains after death for these poor creatures also; that these, likewise, shall
one day be delivered from this bondage of corruption, and shall then receive an
ample amends for all their present sufferings.
système
de la nature
»
(French) “System of Nature”; title of a philosophical book written by the
French radical materialist Baron d’Holbach in collaboration with Diderot,
published in 1770.
IX·11 | if, nevertheless, the
Man was
appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts
» Genesis
1:28,
...and have dominion over the
fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that
moveth upon the earth.
On the
purpose of this dominion see IX·8, and Lewis’s previous speculation on the
subject in V·6.
IX·14 | when we are speaking
the lion
and the lamb lying down together
» Cf.
Isaiah 11:6 (leopard & young goat) and 65:25 (wolf & lamb).
Saturnalia
of topsy-turvydom
» In ancient
Rome, the saturnalia were a very old
festival in honour of the god Saturn. In a hellenized form it was revived by
the government in 217 BC as a sort of mid-winter carnival evoking the
supposedly golden age when Saturn reigned on earth. A key feature was the
temporary suspension of social class distinctions, which enabled slaves to take
otherwise impossible liberties with their masters.
“Let him roar
again”
»
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights’s Dream I.2, 65 (Bottom
speaking):
Let me play
the lion too. I will roar that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me; I
will roar that I will make the Duke say “Let him roar again, let him roar
again.”
Chapter X: Heaven
chapter motto
Shakespeare,
Winter’s Tale
» The
quote is from the last scene of Shakespeare’s comedy The Winter’s Tale, one of his last plays (V.3, 94-97). With these
words, and after an off-stage dénouement that would have been perfectly
adequate as a conventional happy ending, the noble widow Paulina introduces
“more amazement” for King Leontes – the statue of his queen, the supposedly
long-dead Hermione, comes alive. Paulina then proceeds (98ff):
Music,
awake her, strike.
’Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;
Strike all that look upon with marvel.
(...)
Start not; her actions shall be holy as
You hear my spell is lawful. (...)
[Leon.] O, she’s warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.
The
insistence on “lawfulness” is strong. On first suggesting that she’ll “make the
statue move” (88), Paulina immediately expressed a fear that
then
you’ll think –
which I protest against – I am assisted
By wicked powers.
Cowper
out of Madame Guion
» Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon(1648-1717) was a French
mystic. The Poems translated
from the French of Madame de la Mothe Guion by William Cowper
(see note to VI·18) were first published in 1801. Lewis is quoting from the first
stanza of “The Acquiescence of pure Love” (identified by Cowper as “Vol. 2, Cantique 135”).
Love! if
they destined sacrifice am I,
come slay thy victim, and prepare thy fires;
Plunged in thy depths of mercy, let me die
the death which every soul that lives desires.
X·1 | “i reckon”, said
“pie in the
sky”
» The
phrase comes from the chorus of a five-verse song, “The Preacher and the Slave” dating from 1911. It was written
by the American Labor activist Joe Hill (1879-1915) as a parody of the
Christian hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By” (1868).
Verse 1:
Long-haired
preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer in voices so sweet
Chorus [varied
after the last verse]:
You will
eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
tell the
pure in heart that they shall see God
» cf.
Matthew 5:8, a passage in the Sermon on the Mount.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
X·3 | this signature on
Brocken
spectre “looked to every man like his first love”
» “Brocken
spectre” is the name for an optical effect caused by the observer’s own shadow
on clouds moving along mountain sides; it is named after the Brocken, a peak in
the Harz mountains, Germany, where it was first described in 1780. It is unclear whether Lewis is using a literal quotation
(??), but there seems to be a relation
to the opening scene of Act IV in Goethe’s tragedy Faust, Second Part (1832). Perhaps Lewis is citing a comment on
this passage:
Täuscht
mich ein entzückend Bild, |
What? See I that most lovely
form, (translation Archer Gurney, 1842) |
Another possible reference could be Coleridge’s poem
“Constancy to an Ideal Object”. It evokes the vision of a
beloved woman to make his home with, only to compare the unreality of it all
with the experience of the “woodman” who
winding
westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!
However, there is no notion of this love being a
“first love”, and Coleridge is not suggesting that the “shadow” is like the
beloved, but rather that the beloved is like that shadow. See also J. Matthew
Melton’s note at quora.com.
X·5 | this
may seem
the pearl of great price
» From the short parable in Matthew 13:45-46.
X·7 | the thing you
the seed
dies to live
» John 12:24.
Unless a grain of wheat falls
to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it
produces many seeds.
cast His
bread upon the waters
» cf.
Ecclesiastes 11:1.
Cast thy
bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.
he that
loses his soul will save it
» Cf. Matthew 10:39 (also
Mark 8:35, Luke 17:33, John 12:25). Lewis substitutes “soul” for “life”.
He that loses his life
for my sake shall find it.
Theologia
Germanica (note)
» See note
on the motto for chapter VI, above.
“and in
the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth ...” ... what shall we take
this secrecy to mean?
» The
question is answered in a way that reflects George Macdonald’s sermon “The New
Name”, on Revelation 2:17 (Unspoken Sermons I.5). For some extracts from that sermon
see Lewis’s Macdonald
Anthology, nrs. 14-21.
X·9 | but the eternal
pains in
heaven
» As
Lewis’s chapter on Hell has two references to Von Hügel’s essay on Heaven and
Hell (see notes to VIII·7 and VIII·9, above),
another passage in the same text may have helped to shape some of Lewis’s
thought on the present theme:
... it is not difficult to find
... operative causes for the continuance in Heaven itself of the essentials [of
suffering and pain] in the nobility furnished by devoted suffering and
self-sacrifice here below. ... Hence, even in Heaven, there remains, for the
saved soul, room and the need to transcend itself, to lose itself, that it may
truly find itself. ... even in Heaven there is a certain analogue to the
genuine cost in the real gain traceable within the deepest acts of the human
soul whilst here on earth.
(Von Hügel 1921, p. 219-219)
X·10 | for in self-giving
“did that in
the wild weather of his outlying provinces ...” ... George Macdonald
» The
quotation is a shortened version of a passage in the sermon titled “The
Creation in Christ”, on John 1:3-4. Lewis included the same passage in his Macdonald
Anthology as part of nr. 173.
From
before the foundation of the world
» Lewis
is adapting Macdonald’s next sentence after the one just quoted:
From the infinite beginning –
for here I can speak only by contradictions – he completed and held fast the
eternal circle of his existence in saying, “Thy will, not mine, be done!”
The
notion of a historical sacrifice of the Eternal Word is reflected in the
“Deeper Magic from before the Dawn of time” in chapter 15 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
(1950), Lewis’s first Narnia tale.
X·11 | the golden apple
The golden
apple of selfhood ... became an apple of discord
» “Golden
apples” appear in various roles and in various myths and legends of various
nations. Lewis seems to be using elements from the “Judgement of Paris”, a
story from ancient Greek mythology: Eris, goddess of discord, threw a golden
apple as a prize of beauty among the guests at a wedding feast of the gods.
“makes heaven
drowsy with the harmony”
»
Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost
IV.3, 341.
And when
Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
thrones
and powers
» Names
for two of the nine orders of angels in a hierarchy of Angels that was
established in the early 6th century by a Christian author known as
Pseudo-Dionysius. Four of the names used in his scheme appear in Colossians
1:16.
For by him were all things
created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible,
whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things
were created by him, and for him.
indwelling
Comforter
» Cf.
John 14:16-17 and 26.
And I will pray the Father,
and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever;
even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him
not, neither knoweth him: buy ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall
be in you. ... But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will
send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your
remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.
Also
Romans 8:9.
But ye
are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell
in you.
“maketh
from the beginning to the end”
»
Ecclesiates 3:10-13.
I have
seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in
it. He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world
in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the
beginning to the end. I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to
rejoice, and to do good in his life.
they cover their eyes
» i.e. the angels, including their highest order, the Seraphim, as
described in Isaiah 6:1-3.
... I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his
train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims; each one had six wings;
with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with
twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy is the
Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full
of his glory.
X·11 | the
golden apple
was and is and shall be
» Cf. Revelation 4:8.
And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him: and they were
full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy,
Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.
which has no opposite.
» In letter of 12 September 1933 to his friend Arthur Greeves (CL2, 121), Lewis
responded to a “question about God and evil” and began by submitting
…the idea
which someone had in the Middle Ages who defined God as “That which has no
opposite” i.e. we live in a world of clashes, good and evil, true and
false, pleasant and painful, body and spirit, time and eternity etc, but God is
not simply (so to speak) one of the two clashes but the ultimate thing
beyond them all … just as space is neither bigness or smallness but that in
which the distinctions of big and small arise.
11 August 2016
expanded note on VIII.12, They will not
be forgiven
3 November 2016
added note on VIII.5, misprint “motives”
* with thanks to Larry Gilman
22 January 2018
revised
introduction, with PS adding a link to www.lewisiana.nl/christianthinker
12 November
2018
expanded note on Preface, Mr. Ashley Sampson
28 August 2019
added note on VI.3, the very
history of the word “Mortification”
* with thanks to Michael Blakeley
6 November 2019
expanded note on VI.12, with
Hooker…;with thanks to Bill Hollett
25 November 2019
* with thanks to Richard Johnson:
– added note on II.11, “matter” (in the modern, not the scholastic sense);
* with thanks also to Michael Blakeley:
– expanded note on VI.12, with Hooker, and against Dr. Johnson
– improved note VIII.5, misprint “motions”
– added note on IX.2, Wordsworth believed
etc.
– expanded note on X.3, Brocken spectre
1 April 2020
–
expanded note on IX.6, and become a Docetist
* with thanks to Norbert Feinendegen
11 May 2020
– added note on VI.11, Aristotle
... the more virtuous a man becomes
22 May 2020
– expanded note on II.11, “matter” (in the modern, not the scholastic sense)
25 October 2020
– added note on VII.3, the
fullest parabolic picture
29 April 2021
– expanded note on V.5, “myth” in the Socratic sense
22 March 2022
– updated note on I.1, the scientists think it likely …
3 July 2022
– added note on X.11, which has no opposite
12 July 2022
– added General Note (quotation from Dettman 1952) to chapter IX
15 September 2022
– expanded note on Preface, Walter
Hilton
30 November 2022
– corrected note on the idealistic doctrine etc. (IV·14):
Lewis’s move from materialistic atheism to Idealism now dated to “the spring of
1922”
9 January 2024
– added Biblical references for III·12, surrendering
His will wholly, and III·18, fall on
our faces
* with thanks to Todd May
4 March 2024
– added notes on Christ’s
statement etc. and “ judgement” (i.e., social justice)
(VI·18); on offences must come (VII·2); on the pearl of great price and the
seed dies to live (X·9); was and is and shall be (X·11)
* most of these kindly submitted by Todd May