LEWISIANA.NL

 

Quotations and Allusions in

C. S. Lewis’s shorter writings

 

compiled by Arend Smilde (Utrecht, The Netherlands)

 

 

 

 

One hundred and twenty-one of C. S. Lewis’s essays and other short pieces are here annotated in varying degrees of detail.

The opening two-part  survey  should help you find particular essays, or essays from particular volumes:

– First comes a list of “Volumes used”: these are all the volumes from which any or all essays are annotated. Each volume title is preceded by an abbreviation, such as “Trp” for the volume called Transposition.

– The abbreviations are used in the second list, “Essays annotated”. The essay titles are here given in alphabetical order, each essay’s year of origin is mentioned, and references are given to the volume(s) in which each piece has been published.

For a survey of volumes with their tables of contents and further bibliographical information, see  www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays.

In 2000, nearly all of Lewis’s short prose writings were collected in one large volume called Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces, edited by Lesley Walmsley (HarperCollins, London). For a publication history see  www.lewisiana.nl/shorterwritings.

Please note that the present attempt at annotation does not pretend to have reached completion. A row of six dots ...... indicates those places where I hope to add details sooner or later. A double quotation mark in bold type (??) marks places where, so far, I can’t provide help but rather need it. Suggestions for ways to fill out these places are  welcome.

The notes are translated, adapted and developed from notes made to my Dutch translations of these essays, published and still being published in successive volumes from 2001 onward. Thanks are due to Paul Leopold (Stockholm, Sweden) for much help on many points ever since February 2004, when this website was one week old and he wrote me to send the first suggestion for improvement.

This page was first posted in August 2008. Significant Updates  are listed at the end. Last update: 6 November 2024.

 

SURVEY                                                                                                                                     number of essays 1.  Volumes used                                                                                       annotated here / contained in volume
Reh Trp   WLN AfP SPT OW SMRL CRf   SLE Und FSE GD WG TOW FST PC TH CRn CpR I&I	REHABILITATIONS, London 1939 TRANSPOSITION, London 1947    (USA: THE WEIGHT OF GLORY, New York 1947) THE WORLD’S LAST NIGHT, New York 1960 THEY ASKED FOR A PAPER, London 1962 SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST, London 1965 OF OTHER WORLDS, London 1966 STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE LITERATURE,    Cambridge 1966 CHRISTIAN REFLECTIONS, London & Grand Rapids 1967    (USA reprint, less one piece: THE SEEING EYE, New York 1986) SELECTED LITERARY ESSAYS, Cambridge 1969 GOD IN THE DOCK, Grand Rapids 1970    (UK: UNDECEPTIONS, London 1971) FERN-SEED AND ELEPHANTS, London 1975 GOD IN THE DOCK, London 1979 THE WEIGHT OF GLORY, New York 1980    (expanded edition of the 1947 volume) OF THIS AND OTHER WORLDS, London 1982 FIRST AND SECOND THINGS, London 1985 PRESENT CONCERNS, London 1986 TIMELESS AT HEART, London 1987 CHRISTIAN REUNION, London 1990 COMPELLING REASON, London 1996 IMAGE AND IMAGINATION, Cambride 2013	1   /  9     5   /   5     7   /   7     7   / 12     8   /   8     9   / 13     1   / 14   14   / 14     1   / 22   49   / 49     8   /   8   13   / 13     9   /   9   20   / 20   17   / 17   19   / 19   10   / 10   12   / 12   24   / 24     3   / 53

 

 

back to survey

 

THE HOBBIT

 

First published anonymously in The Times Literary Supplement, 2 October 1937; first reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, 1982. Another review by Lewis, even shorter, appeared in The Times of 8 October 1937 and was reprinted in Image and Imagination (2013).

 

Alice, Flatland, Phantastes, The Wind in the Willows

– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871).

– Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, (1884).
– George Macdonald, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858).

– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908).

 

 

back to survey

 

LEARNING IN WAR-TIME

 

A sermon preached on Sunday 22 October 1939 at the invitation of the vicar of St Mary the Virgin, the Oxford University church. The Bible text which Lewis chose for his sermon was Deuteronomy 26:5, “A Syrian ready to perish was my father” (“My father was a wandering Aramean” in the NIV and in Moffatt’s translation). A playful prefiguration of his message is found at the end of a letter he wrote to his brother three weeks earlier (2 October 1939; CL2, 280):

By the bye, did I tell you I’d found in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle the perfect summing up of my personal war aims − “During all this evil time Abbot Martin retained his abbacy”?

The sermon text was originally duplicated for students under the title “None Other Gods: Culture in Wartime” and then printed as “Culture in War-Time” in The Student Movement 42/6, March 1940. In late 1940 it appeared in a volume edited by Ashley Sampson, Famous English Sermons (Thomas Nelson, London 1940). Lewis’s first appearance as a Christian preacher thus got him admitted into a company that included Bede, Donne, Taylor, Baxter, John Wesley, Newman, and other luminuaries from the past (cf. CL2, 353). The present title was first used when Lewis included this text among the five addresses brought together in the 1949 volume Transposition (U.S.A.: The Weight of Glory, revised & expanded edition 1980).

    For a comprehensive discussion of the sermon See Joe Ricke, “An Unlikely Preacher: C. S. Lewis and the War-Time Sermon”, Sehnsucht 15 (2019), 55-100.

 

par. 4   this indeed is

 

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

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

 

mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities

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

 

metaphysical arguments in condemned cells

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

 

make jokes on scaffolds

Very probably a reference to Sir Thomas More (1478-1535). Almost twenty years after his execution by order of king Henry VIII, More’s son-in-law William Roper wrote a Life of Sir Thomas More. Among several examples of the charity and good cheer with which he approached his death by behading, the biography includes the joke:

And so was he by Master Lieutenant brought out of the Tower, and from thence led towards the place of execution. Where, going up the scaffold, which was so weak that it was ready to fall, he said merrily to Master Lieutenant, “I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself.”

 

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

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

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

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

 

comb their hair at Thermopylae

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

 

par. 7   it is for a very

 

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

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

 

par. 8   all our merely natural

 

having two [eyes], to be cast into Gehenna

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

 

par. 9   we are now

 

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

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

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

 

“as to the Lord”

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

 

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

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English statesman, philosopher and essayist; quoted from The Advancement of Learning, I.1.3

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

See also Bacon’s Novum Organum, I.89 (translated from the Latin by Peter Urbach and John Gibson, 1994:

Others more cunningly surmise and reflect that if intermediate causes are unknown, everything can more readily be referred to the divine hand and wand, a matter, as they think, of great importance to religion; which is nothing other than “wishing to please God through a lie.”

The translaters of the latter passage added a reference to Job 13:7, “Will ye speak wickedly of God? and talk deceitfully for him?”

 

Theologia Germanica

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

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

 

par. 10   that is the essential

 

the great cataract of nonsense

cf. Lord Macaulay’s essay, “Mr. Robert Montgomery’s Poems”, in Critical and Historical Essays (1843). This is a devastating critique of Montgomery’s 1830 poems “The Omnipresence of the Deity” and “Satan”, intended to illustrate Macaulay’s point that

the avenues to fame [are] blocked up by a swarm of noisy, pushing, elbowing pretenders, who, though they will not ultimately be able to make good their own entrance, hinder, in the mean time, those who have a right to enter.

Toward the end of the first poem discussed, there is

... the deathbed of a Christian made as ridiculous as false imagery and false English can make it. But this is not enough. The Day of Judgment is to be described, and a roaring cataract of nonsense is poured forth upon this tremendous subject.

Lewis quoted the same phrase less than three weeks later in a letter of 11 November 1939, referring to the exuberance of his friend Hugo Dyson (CL2, 288).

 

par. 14   the third enemy

 

the streets of Warsaw

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

 

a permanent city

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

 

 

back to survey

 

CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

 

par. 5   now the new testament

 

The Unjust Judge

Luke 18:1-8.

 

Donne points out that we are never told He laughed

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

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

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

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

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

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

He goes on to insist that

“Joy, and cheerfulnesse ... hath the nature of a commandment” and “Not to feele joy is an argument against religious tendernesse, not to show that joy, is an argument against thankfulnesse of the heart: that is a stupidity, this is a contempt. ... It mis-becomes not wisdome and gravity to laugh in Gods deliverances, nor to laugh to scorne those that would have blown up Gods Servants ...”
(Quoted from The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Potter & Simpson, 10 vols., 1953-1962)

Lewis was aware of Donne’s saying at least since 1924, when he was shown a new poem by his friend Cecil Harwood on the subject (cf. Lewis’s diary as published in All My Road Before Me, 21-24 June 1924, p. 339).

 

par. 11   applying this principle

 

the Aristotelian doctrine of mimèsis

........

 

the Augustan doctrine about the imitation of Nature and the Ancients

......

 

par. 13   if you said

 

au moins je suis autre

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

 

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

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

 

Wordsworth, the romantic who made a good end

......

 

par. 14   in this sense

 

he knows that in his flesh dwells no good thing

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

 

Thomas Aquinas, ipsa ratio hoc habet etc.

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

 

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

I Corinthians 10:31.

 

Pater prepared for pleasure as if it were martyrdom

Walter Pater (1839-1894), English literary critic, central figure of an earnest aesthetic group in Oxford, and proponent of “art for art’s sake”. Lewis is probably referring, in particular, to what he called Pater’s “vaguely narrative essay” Marius the Epicurean (1885), discussed in Lewis’s letter to Arthur Greeves of 10 January 1932 (Collected Letters II, 33):

In Pater [the purely aesthetic attitude to life] seems almost to include the rest of the spiritual life ... Perhaps it is his patronage of great things which is so offensive – condescending to add the Christian religion to his nosegay of spiritual flowers because it has a colour or a scent that he thinks would just give a finishing touch to the rest. It is all balls anyway – because one sees at a glance that if he really added it it would break up the whole nosegay view of life. In fact that is the refutation of aestheticism: for perfect beauty you need to include things which will at once show that mere beauty is not the sole end of life. If you don’t include them, you have given up aestheticism: if you do, you must give it up Q.E.D.

 

par. 15   now that i see

 

Di sè medesmo rise

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

 

 

back to survey

 

CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE

 

First published in Theology, March 1940, 166-179; first reprinted in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids 1967), 12-36. In the Introduction to the 1967 volume, Hooper presents a list of the allegedly “entire controversy”. The list actually lacks the final instalment, published in February 1941 under the title “Mr. Lewis’s Peace Proposals” and consisting of two letters – one by George Every and the other by S. L. Bethell. A full facsimile text of the controversy, including two preceding essays by Every and Bethell, can be downloaded here (PDF).

   After Every’s final published contribution, Lewis wrote two further responses in letters of 28 January and 4 February 1941, published in Collected Letters II, 466-469.

 

 

par. 1   at an early age

 

the friends of culture seemed to me to be exaggerating

A passage at the end of The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939) by E. M. W. Tillyard and C. S. Lewis, published less than a year before the present essay, suggests that Lewis is here criticizing a former habit of his own. The book is a series of six essays, three by each author in alternation and written in the course of the 1930s. Lewis wrote the original version of the opening essay in 1930, the year of his conversion to Theism, and he became a Christian in September 1931. In a note appended to the 1939 book (pp. 147-150), he admitted that there was as discrepancy between his own view of poetry in the first essay and that in his last. In the first, as he now noticed, he had

assumed (i), what now seems to me very unlikely, that large groups of human individuals possess a common consciousness; and (ii) that if they do, this common consciousness would be so superior to that of the individuals that it might be called “angelic”. In fact, I have exaggerated.

 

par. 2   the present inordinate

 

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

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

 

Croce

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

 

the poetics of I. A. Richards

Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979), English literary critic, Professor of English at Harvard University, 1944-1963.

 

the editors of Scrutiny

cf. Lewis’s Collected Letters II, 252, where Walter Hooper explains that

The editors of this periodical, which ran from 1932 to 1953, expressed a belief in a “a necessary relationship between the quality of the individual’s response to art and his general fitness for a humane existence”. Lewis was appalled to find this “ inordinate esteem”  expressed in the pages of Theology.

 

Housman, Mr Charles Morgan, and Miss Sayers

– Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936), classical scholar and widely-read English poet (A Shropshire Lad, 1896).

– Charles Langbridge Morgan (1894-1958), English novelist, playwright and drama critic for The Times

– Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), English writer; she first became famous for her detective stories, but by the time of this controversy over Christianity and Culture she developing new reputations as playwright and Christian apologist.

   Interestingly, when Sayers found one of her plays reviewed by Charles Morgan in 1946, she commented that “if highbrow ‘littery’ blokes like him are going to start taking me seriously, the world is coming to an end!” – The Letters of Dorothy Sayers, ed. Barbara Reynolds, vol. 3 (1998), p. 272.

 

par. 9   it might be important

 

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

Richard Hooker, (1554-1600), English (Anglican) theologian, author of The Four Books of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity and, as such, a founding father of the Anglican Church. The reference is to Book I, ch. 14, “The sufficiency of Scripture unto the end for which it was instituted”:

He that should take upon him to teach men how to be eloquent in pleading causes, must needs deliver unto them whatsoever precepts are requisite unto that end; otherwise he doth not [do] the thing which he taketh upon him.  Seeing then no man can plead eloquently unless he be able first to speak, it followeth that ability of speech is in this case a thing most necessary.  Notwithstanding every man would think it ridiculous, that he which undertaketh by writing to instruct an orator should therefore deliver all the precepts of grammar because his profession is to deliver precepts necessary unto eloquent speech...
     In like sort, albeit Scripture do profess to contain in it all things that are necessary unto salvation; yet the meaning cannot be simply of all things which are necessary, but all things that are necessary in some certain kind of form; as all things which are necessary, and either could not at all or could not easily be known by the light of natural discourse; all things which are necessary to be known that we may be saved, but known with presupposal of knowledge concerning certain principles whereof it receiveth us already persuaded, and then instructeth us in all the residue that are necessary.

 

par. 11   st augustine regarded

 

dementia ... honestior et uberior

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

 

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

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

 

par. 12   st jerome, allegorizing

 

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

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

 

Webster’s White Devil

John Webster (c. 1580–c. 1630), English dramatist. Lewis is referring to one of Webster’s two famous plays (the other being The Duchess of Malfi), first produced in 1608 – The White Divel: Or the Tragedy of Paolo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, With the Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona the famous Venetian Curtizan.

 

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

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

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

 

par. 15   thomas à kempis i take

 

Thomas à Kempis

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

 

par. 16   in the theologia germanica

 

Theologia Germanica

A mystical text dating from the mid-14th century, with guidelines for a Christ-like life that would lead to perfect union of God and man. The treatise was much commended by Martin Luther, who devised the title – Theologia Deutsch – to reflect the fact that it was written in German, not Latin. [Also referred to in Learning in War-time.]

 

par. 18   i found the famous

 

Gregory ... our use of secular culture

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

 

par. 19   in milton i found

 

Milton ... Areopagitica

John Milton (1608-1674), Areopagitica: a Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England (1644).

 

par. 21   whether because i am

 

chain of being

......

 

Newman ... “Liberal Knowledge its Own end”

......

 

par. 24   2. but is culture

 

“working the thing which is good”

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

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

 

par. 28   this view gives

 

Bentham ... the issue between pushpin and poetry

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

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

 

par. 29   4. it was noticed

 

“willing suspension of disbelief”

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

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

 

par. 30   (a) to the perfected

 

being learned in Gethsemane

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

 

Galahad is the son of Launcelot

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

 

par. 31   (b) the road described

 

The road described by Dante and Patmore

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

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

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

 

eunuchs for the Kingdom’s sake

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

 

romantic love also has proved a schoolmaster

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

 

par. 33   (e) the dangers of

 

(note) Sehnsucht as “spilled religion”

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

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

 

par. 34   i have dwelt chiefly

 

in Ricardian terms

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

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

Lewis is perhaps using the term partly because it also appeared in the firtst paragraph of “The Necessity of Scrutiny”, i.e. the article by Brother Every which he was responding to. Every was in turn quoting the manifesto in which the editors of Scrutiny – Knights, Culver and the Leavises – had published their purpose when that journal was launched in 1932; they were quoting Richards.

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

 

par. 37   has it any part

 

the sweeping of the room in Herbert’s poem

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

Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything,
To do it as for Thee. (...)

All may of Thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean
which with this tincture – For Thy sake –
will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th’ action fine.

 

par. 38   if it is argued

 

“stock” … response

As with the earlier “Ricardian” term (see note to par. 34, above), Lewis may be referring not only to the term as it appears in Richards’s work but to Brother Every’s quoting it:

For the health of our Christianity we need sound and orthodox but sensitive and repsonsive theolology, a theology addressed to the “best minds in the class” … But we also need other kinds of criticism, and literary criticism more especially. … We need [to be] keen to detect stock responses and bogus reactions. Scrituiny needs and indeed demands a healthy theology, but Theology cannot do its work without Scrutiny.
(“The Nececcity of Scrutiny”, final paragraph, including final sentence)

 

Sidney’s poetics

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

 

II

 

Address

 

the Editor of Theology

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

 

par. 2   to mr carritt i reply

 

Mr Carritt

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

 

the fruition of God

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

 

Puritan, quotha!

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

 

III

 

par. 8   2. in theology, may, 1940

 

“sweet, sweet, sweet poison”

Shakespeare, King John I.1, 212.

 

par. 12   if any real disagreement

 

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

Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985), Swiss Francophone author. L’amour et l’Occident, Book VII, chapter 5: “Dès qu’il [l’Éros] cesse d’être un dieu, il cesse d’être un démon.”. A translation of this book was first published as Passion and Society, and later, revised and expanded, as Love in the Western World (1956). Lewis reviewed it in Theology, June 1940. The review was never reprinted but is now available online at http://tjx.sagepub.com/content/40/240/459.full.pdf+html.

 

par. 15   i hope it is now

 

I enjoyed my breakfast this morning ... I think it was a good thing ... but I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it

cf. George Macdonald, The Princess and Curdie, chapter 3, quoted by Lewis in his Macdonald Anthology (1946), Nr. 342.

It is a good thing to eat your breakfast, but you don’t fancy it’s very good of you to do it. The thing is good – not you ... There are a great many more good things than bad things to do.

 

… a very fine one.

Lewis’s “Peace Proposals for Brother Every and Mr Bethell” were followed by two further letters to the editor, one from Every and one from Bethell, published in the Theology issue of February 1941: “Mr. Lewis’s Peace Proposals”. This conclusion to the exchange is not listed in Walter Hooper’s preface to Christian Reflections.

 

 

back to survey

 

DANGERS OF NATIONAL REPENTANCE

 

This is the first article Lewis wrote for the Angical weekly  newspaper The Guardian, 15 March 1940. After two more contributions (“Two Ways with the Self” and “Meditation on the Third Commandment”) he began contributing his thirty-one weekly “Screwtape Letters” to this periodical in May 1941.

 

par. 2   if they are

 

ipso facto

(Latin) “by the fact itself”, i.e. necessarily, unavoidably.

 

par. 3   such an escape

 

Where passions have the privilege to work ...

William Wordsworth’s long poem The Prelude was published in 1850 but written in the years 1799-1805. Book XI is the last of three Books describing the author’s “residence in France” in 1792 and his “juvenile errors” (XI, 54) as an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution.

 

Colonel Blimp

A cartoon character in the London newspaper Evening Standard in the 1930s. He was the type of a pompous, irascible and reactionary army officer. See also Lewis’s brief 1944 essay “Blimpophobia” in Time and Tide, reprinted in Present Concerns (1986).

 

and the Russians

Lewis was delivering this paper in 1940, while the Soviet Union was still formally an ally of Germany.

 

we must forgive ... or we are damned

Matthew 6:14-15, 18:32-35; Mark 11:26.

 

the Fifth Commandment

“Honour thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12).

 

whom he hath not seen

cf. 1 John 4:20.

 

par. 4   it is not

 

to “hate” his mother for the Lord’s sake

Luke 14:26.

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

 

hard sayings of our Lord

John 6:60, the only place in the gospels where a saying of Jesus is described as a “hard saying” or “hard teaching”. The phrase has received a wider application for such sayings of Jesus as display a similar sort of hardness.

 

brother and child against parent

Cf. Matthew 10:21.

And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death.

(See also Matthew 10:35-36 and Luke 12:52-53.)

 

M. Mauriac’s Vie de Jésus ... “Pourquoi cette stupeur ... ”

François Mauriac (1885-1970) was a French writer and Nobel laureate for Literature 1952. As a Catholic he began adult life with Modernist leanings but never felt comfortable in that position. His Vie de Jésus (1936, translated as Life of Jesus in 1937) marked his final rejection of Modernism. In his preface to the second edition (also 1936) he added a specific attack on Alfred Loisy, a leading Modernist, and on the routinely preconceived denial of the supernatural. As a novelist Mauriac hoped with his biography of Jesus “to convince the reader that the Jesus of the Gospels is the very opposite of an artificial, composite being”. He had tried to sketch the portrait of a man who appeared to various people as “the same man under two aspects; one, yet different according to the heart which reflects him: worshipped by the poor [who overdo their respect for the divinity by ignoring the humanity of Jesus] and hated by the proud [who hate the pretenstions of divinity because they nly see the humanity] because of that which is divine in him, and precisely therefore misunderstood by both” (translated from the French first edition, pp. viii-ix, with inserted explanation from the preceding passage).

   Chapter 9, “Judas”, largely consists of sayings of Jesus, including the one from Matthew 10:21. Each saying is followed by an imagined silent comment from Judas, like the one quoted by Lewis.

   Almost two decades later, Lewis made the same reference in The Four Loves, chapter 6, fourth paragraph (“Judas ... laps it up easily”). As appears from Collected Letters II, 213, he read the French original in 1937; and six years later, after reading Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to be King in 1943, Lewis wrote to her that “since Mauriac’s Vie de Jésus nothing has moved me so much” (ibid., p. 577). Likely enough, more elements from Mauriac’s book found their way into Lewis’s work. Thus Mauriac, having quoted Matthew 10:37 at another point in the chapter on Judas, comes close to suggesting Lewis’s later “trilemma”, i.e. the idea that Jesus must have been either mad, or bad, or God. Also, the way Lewis began his book Miracles (1947) may have been partly inspired by the opening sentences of Mauriac’s preface:

De tous les historiens, l’exégète est le plu décevant. S’il appartient à l’espèce de ceux qui d’abord nient le surnaturel et qui en Jésus ne discernent pas le Dieu, nous sommes assuré qu’il n’entend rien à l’objet de son étude et pour nous toute sa science ne pèse un fétu.

[ Of all historians the most deceptive is the exegete. If he is one of those who start off by denying the supernatural and does not discern God in Jesus, then we can be sure he understands nothing of the object of his study and as far as we’re concerned, all his knowledge doesn’t weigh a straw. ]

 

 

back to survey

 

TWO WAYS WITH THE SELF

 

This is the second article Lewis wrote for The Guardian, a Church of England weekly newspaper, 3 May 1940. After one more contribution (“Meditation on the Third Commandment”) he began contributing his thirty-one weekly “Screwtape Letters” to this periodical in May 1941.

 

par. 1   self-renunciation is thought

 

St François de Sales ... avec des remonstrances douces et tranquilles

A two-page excerpt in translation containing this passage can be found on Paul Ford’s website. François de Sales (1567-1622) was bishop of Geneva and Annecy; his Introduction à la vie dévote appeared in 1609. Lewis referred to the same passage in his last book, Letters to Malcolm (1964), chapter 18.

 

Julian of Norwich

English mystic and anchoress (c. 1342–c. 1413).

 

New Testament ... love my neighbour “as myself”

Matthew 19:19, 22:39; Mark 12:31.33; Romans 13:9; Galatians 5:14; James 2:8.

 

“hate his own life”

Luke 14:26; John 12:25.

 

par. 2   we must not

 

Shelley .. self-contempt as the source of cruelty

cf. Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam (1818) VIII.21.

Yes, it is Hate ...
Whom self-contempt arms with a mortal sting ...

See also Lewis’s essay “Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot”, dating from the 1930s, in Selected Literary Essays (1969), p. 198:

To a Christian, conviction of sin is a good thing because it is the necessary preliminary to repentance; to Shelley it is an extremely dangerous thing. It begets self-contempt, and self-contempt begets misanthropy and cruelty.

 

a later poet ... the man “who loathes his neighbour as himself”

??

 

“ideological taint”

Lewis used the same phrase in the first few paragraphs of his 1941 essay “Bulverism”.

 

David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus

A science-fiction novel published in 1920. Lewis read it in 1935 or 1936 and found himself inspired by it to make his own attempt at writing science-fiction.

 

“Richard loves Richard ...”

Shakespeare, Richard III, V.3, 184.

 

par. 3   now, the self

 

Macdonald ... “to be allowed a moment’s respite ...”

Cf. George Macdonald’s sermon on “Self-Denial” (Luke 9:23-24), Unspoken Sermons, second series, Nr. 11. Lewis is not quoting very accurately, yet without changing Macdonald’s sense. A fuller and correct quote including the present phrase is in Lewis’s George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946) as Nr. 158.

 

Tacitus, immitior quia toleravat

Tacitus (c. 56–c. 117 CE) was one of the great historians of ancient Rome. The correct reference is Book I, section 20; immitior is either a typo or an alternative form for inmitior. Tacitus is talking of Aufidienus Rufus,

long a private, then a centurion, and latterly a camp-marshal, [who] was seeking to reintroduce the iron discipline of the past, habituated as he was to work and toil, and all the more pitiless because he had endured.

(translation by John Jackson, Loeb 249, Tacitus Vol. II, p. 280).

 

 

back to survey

 

THE NECESSITY OF CHIVALRY

 

First published on 17 August 1940 in Time and Tide, a political and literary weekly review magazine founded in 1920. This was the first of a total of twenty-five contributions from Lewis to the magazine (essays, poems and book reviews) during the 1940s and 1950s. The present piece was first reprinted in October 1940 as “The Importance of an Ideal” in Living Age, an American monthly magazine which aimed “to  bring to readers, for their information, representative expressions of opinion throughout the world.”

 

The Necessity of Chivalry

The title might be a play on an article by George Every, “The Necessity of Scrutiny”, published in the joural Theology in March 1939. Lewis had written a lengthy response published in the same journal in March 1940 under the title “Christianity and Culture”.

 

“Thou wert the meekest man”, says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot

Le Morte Darthur, Book XXI, chapter 12. This is the last chapter of the great late-medieval collection of Arthurian legend, compiled by Thomas Malory and printed in 1485 by William Caxton. The telling and retelling of stories about the semi-legendary King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table was a tradition that spread from England to France during the twelfth century. The characteristic figures and features of these stories came to be collectively called “the matter of Britain”, distinguished from “the matter of France”, in which the historical Charlemagne was supposed to be the central figure. In France both traditions acquired a more and more “courtly” or chivalric flavour. The figure of Launcelot, the type of the ideal Arthurian knight, first emerged in the work of French author Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1135−c. 1183).

 

blood and iron

After the German locution Eisen und Blut (“iron and blood” − mostly quoted as Blut und Eisen), from an 1862 speech by the then new Prime Minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck.

 

“he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten”

Le Morte Darthur, Book XIX, chapter 5.

 

Homer’s Achilles

Achilles is the hero of the Iliad, one of the two long poems ascribed to the ancient Greek poet Homer (8th century B.C.). The “wrath” of Achilles is announced in the opening lines as the poem’s main theme. The climax comes near the end of Book XXII (330f) as Achilles triumphs over the Trojan prince and army commander Hector.

 

the Sagas … “stern to inflict … stubborn to endure”

The Sagas are semi-historic stories from 9th- and 10th-century Iceland, passed down orally until most of them were committed to writing during the 13th century. The quoted expressions are taken from an introductory poem on the barbarians of ancient Scandinavia by the English poet Robert Southey (1774-1843), in Icelandic Poetry (1797), a translation of the Poetic Edda.

 

Attila “had a custom of fiercely rolling his eyes …”

Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), chapter 34. Attila (c. 400-453) was king of the Huns during the last two decades of his life, the period of the Hun empire’s greatest power and extent; it collapsed after his death.

 

Dartmoor

England’s main prison for long-term convicts, in the southwestern region of the same name, in the county of Devon.

 

by a “modern invocation”

Shakespeare, King John III.4, 42 (Constance):

O that my tongue were in the thunder’s mouth!
Then with a passion would I shake the world,
And rouse from sleep that fell anatomy
Which cannot hear a lady’s feeble voice,
Which scorns a modern invocation.

In Shakespeare’s vocabulary, modern means “ordinary”, “everyday”. Lexicographer C. T. Onions (a colleague of Lewis’s at Magdalen College), notes in his 1911 Shakespeare Glossary that this is a “peculiarly Elizabethan” meaning and “the only Shakespearean sense”. Lewis appears to be slyly identifying this sense with post-Enlightenment meanings so as to enhance any negative connotations on both sides of the equation. Nevill Coghill, a friend of Lewis and a fellow scholar of English, later wrote in a commemorative essay that “it delighted him [Lewis] that he could find no use of the word modern in Shakespeare that did not carry its load of contempt.” (“The Approach to English”, in Light on C. S. Lewis, 1964, p. 60).

 

Kipling

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), English poet and novelist, exponent of British patriotism and advocate of British imperialism. Nobel Prize for Literature 1907.

 

Stalky, Nelson, Sidney

− Kipling wrote Stalky & Co. (1899), a volume of short stories about boarding-school boys; the figure of Stalky was modeled on Kipling’s own former schoolmate, the later general Lionel Charles Dunsterville (1865-1945).
− Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) was a famous British admiral.
− Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) was an English poet and soldier who acquired the reputation of embodying the type of the ideal aristocrat.

 

“escapism”

Lewis’s critique on lazily pejorative uses of this term was certainly inspired by his friend J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1938 lecture, “On Fairy Stories”, published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Oxford U.P., 1947), 38-89, esp. pp. 75ff; also found in the volume of Tolkien’s essays The Monsters and the Critics, ed. Frank Williamson and Christopher Tolkien (Allen & Unwin, London 1983), 109-161, esp. 147ff. Lewis’s readiness to adopt this criticism can already be sensed in his earliest published prose work, the Pilgrim’s Regress; see, for example, Book VI, last page of chapter 3 (Mr. Neo-Angular: “Do you take me for an escapist?”).

 

 

back to survey

 

WHY I AM NOT A PACIFIST

 

Paper read to a pacifist society in Oxford, 1940 (for a possible further specification of the date see note on “Terris Bay”). First published in 1980 in the enlarged edition of The Weight of Glory and other addresses, a volume of Lewis’s essays originally published as the American edition of Transposition (Geoffrey Bles, London 1949).

 

par. 2   but even in

 

“if it had power as it has right, would absolutely rule the world”

Joseph Butler (1692-1752), Fifteen Sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726), Sermon II, “Upon Human Nature” (p. 24 in the 1841 edition published by Thomas Tegg, London).

Thus, that principle by which we survey, and either approve or disapprove our own heart, temper, and actions, is not only to be considered as what is in its turn to have some influence; which may be said of every passion, of the lowest appetites; but likewise as being superior; as from its very nature manifestly claiming superiority over all others; insomuch that you cannot form a notion of this faculty, conscience, without taking in judgment, direction, superintendency. This is a constituent part of the idea, that is, of the faculty itself; and to preside and govern, from the very economy and constitution of man, belongs to it. Had it strength, as it has right; had it power, as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world.

 

par. 15   first as to

 

a Mediterranean world in which Carthaginian power succeeded Persian

Lewis was probably thinking of what G. K. Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man (1925), Part 1, chapters 6 and 7, e.g. in the following passage from ch. 7:

It is not for us to guess in what manner or moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of Rome.

 

par. 23   it may be

 

Eugenists

People advocating, developing or practicing a science-based improvement of humanity as a biological species. As an ideal, eugenics enjoyed wide support in the modern world, especially the United States, until the rise of Hitler in the 1930s.

 

Douglasites

Supporters of the Douglas Plan, an economic program proposed in the early 1920s by the British engineer C. H. Douglas (1879-1952), author of Social Credit (1924). He hoped to achieve a better balance or mutual adjustment in the developments of wage and price levels. Lewis learnt about the “Douglas scheme” in the early 1920s through his friend Owen Barfield, who for some time supported it (cf. Astrid Diener, The Role of Imagination in Culture and Society: Owen Barfield’s Early Work, 2002, pp. 168-170, referring to John L. Finlay, Social Credit: The Engligh Origin, 1972).

 

Federal Unionists

Members of the Federal Union, A pro-European British movement founded in November 1938 by Charles Kimber, Derek Rawnsley and Patrick Ransome.

 

par. 25   the special human

 

Arthur and Aelfred, Elizabeth and Cromwell, Walpole and Burke

A small selection of main figures of British history. Arthur is a semi-legendary Celtic hero who perhaps lived around 500 CE; as “King Arthur” he became a hero of European popular literature from the 12th century onward. Aelfred is the 9th-century Alfred the Great, King of the West Saxons, notable scholar, writer, and champion of learning. The long reign (1558-1603) of Queen Elizabeth I, England’s last Tudor monarch, was notable for commercial growth, maritime expansion, flourishing  arts, and much of Shakespeare’s life and work; Oliver Cromwell (1699-1658) was a leader of the parliamentary army during the mid-17th-century Civil War and acted as “Lord Protector of the Commonwealth” for the last five years of his life; Robert Walpole (1676-1745), father of the writer Horace Walpole, was a British statesman who effectively acted as the country’s Prime Minster before the position was explicitly recognized; Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was an Irish-born British statesman, orator and conservative political theorist.

 

my Beowulf, my Shakespeare, my Johnson or my Wordsworth

A selection of high points of English literary history. Beowulf is a heroic poem perhaps dating from the 6th century; Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616; Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was a poet, essayist and lexicographer immortalized by his conversation as recorded in the 1791 biography by James Boswell; William Wordsworth (1770-1850), author of The Prelude, was one of Lewis’s favourite English poets.

 

par. 26   so much for

 

Terris Bay

“Terris” may well be a typo or the result of a misreading at some stage: HMS Jervis Bay was a British convoy escort which was sunk by a German battleship in the Atlantic Ocean on 5 November 1940.

   Another plausible candidate for a ship to be mentioned here would the SS Athenia, the first British vessel (a passenger ship) sunk by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, on 3 September 1939, 400 km to the northwest of Ireland.

 

with Homer and Virgil, with Plato and Aristotle, with Zarathustra and the Bhagavad-Gita, with Cicero and Montaigne, with Iceland and with Egypt

Homer (8th century BC), Greek poet, author of the Iliad and Odyssey; Virgil (70-19 BC), Roman poet, author of the Aeneid; Plato (428-347 BC) and his pupil Aristotle (384-322 BC), Greek philosophers; Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, Persian prophet who probably lived long before 1000 BC; Bhagavad-Gita, a long poem and sacred text of Hinduism probably dating from around 200 BC. Iceland refers mainly to the Eddas (the Elder or Poetic Edda and Younger or Prose Edda), two Icelandic compilations of Norse myths both dating from the 13th century. “Egypt” likely refers to expressions of ancient Egyptian wisdom such as Lewis cited in the Appendix to The Abolition of Man (1943), notably the quote in section 8(a) from Pharaoh Senusert III:

To take no notice of a violent attack is to strengthen the heart of the enemy. Vigour is valiant, but cowardice is vile.

 

as Johnson replied to Goldsmith, ‘Nay Sir ...’

Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 7 May 1773, paragraph opening “I introduced the subject of toleration”; the occasion is a dinner party at the booksellers Dilly, with Goldsmith, Langton, Claxton, Mayo, Toplady, Temple, Johnson and Boswell present.

Goldsmith. “But how is a man to act, Sir? Though firmly convinced of the truth of his doctrine, may he not think it wrong to expose himself to persecution? (...) Is it not, as it were, committing voluntary suicide?”
Johnson. “Nay, Sir, if you will not take the universal opinion of mankind, I have nothing to say. If mankind cannot defend their own way of thinking, I cannot defend it. Sir, if a man is in doubt whether it would be better for him to expose himself to martyrdom or not, he should not do it. He must be convinced that he has a delegation from heaven.”

 

par. 27   i am aware

Hooker thought “the general and perpetual voice ...”

Richard Hooker (1554-1600), English theologian, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity I.8.3. This is a paraphrase of a much older Latin proverb, Vox populi, vox Dei (“voice of the people, voice of God”), which is of uncertain origin but certainly already old in the days of Charlemagne (8th-9th century); see Wikipedia article on this maxim.

 

supercession

Possibly a typo for supersession; both words are possible.

 

par. 29   i shall consider

 

securus judicat

Augustine, Contra epistolam Parmeniani, III.4, §24, in Migne, Patrologia Latina, Vol. XLIII, col. 101).

Securus judicat orbis terrarum bonos non esse qui se dividunt ab orbe terrarum in quâcunque parte orbis terrarum.
(“The entire world judges with security that they are not good who separate themselves from the entire world in whichever part of the entire world.”)

The phrase, securus judicat, played a crucial part in the conversion of John Henry Newman to Catholicism in 1845.

 

Thirty-Nine Articles

The “Articles of Religion”, a statement of the doctrines of the Church of England, dating from 1563 and later included in the Book of Common Prayer. In 1672 adherence was made a requirement for holding civic office; this ruling remained in force until 1824. Lewis is quoting the last sentence of Article 37.

 

Dissenters ... Presbyterians

In British history, Dissenters or Nonconformists were protestant Christians who refused to join the established, Anglican church. Within this category, a large sub-category were the Presbyterians, who adhered to a Calvinistic theology and mode of church government.

 

the ruling of Thomas Aquinas

Summa Theologica II.II, Q. 40, Art. 1. “Et sicut licite defendunt eam materiali gladio contra interiores quidem perturbatores, ... ita etiam gladio bellico ad eos pertinet rempublicam tueri ab exterioribus hostibus.”

 

Augustine, “If Christian discipleship ... ‘Do violence to no man’ ...”

The Bible passage is taken from Luke 3:14. Lewis appears to be loosely rendering a passage on the subject in Augustine’s Contra Faustum Manichaeum (Against Faustus the Manichaean) XXII.74:

... What is the evil in war? Is it the death of some who will soon die in any case, that others may live in peaceful subjection? This is mere cowardly dislike, not any religious feeling. The real evils in war are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power, and such like; and it is generally to punish these things, when force is required to inflict the punishment, that, in obedience to God or some lawful authority, good men undertake wars, when they find themselves in such a position as regards the conduct of human affairs, that right conduct requires them to act, or to make others act in this way. Otherwise John, when the soldiers who came to be baptized asked, What shall we do? would have replied, Throw away your arms; give up the service; never strike, or wound, or disable any one. But knowing that such actions in battle were not murderous but authorized by law, and that the soldiers did not thus avenge themselves, but defend the public safety, he replied, “Do violence to no man, accuse no man falsely, and be content with your wages.” But as the Manichæans are in the habit of speaking evil of John, let them hear the Lord Jesus Christ Himself ordering this money to be given to Cæsar, which John tells the soldiers to be content with. “Give,” He says, “to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.” For tribute-money is given on purpose to pay the soldiers for war. Again, in the case of the centurion who said, “I am a man under authority, and have soldiers under me: and I say to one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it,” Christ gave due praise to his faith; He did not tell him to leave the service. ...

(translation by Albert H. Newman, 1887; Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 4, pp. 515-516.)

 

par. 30   the whole christian

 

“Resist not evil ...”

Matthew 5:39.

 

given to all who ask him

Cf. Matthew 5:42, “Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.”

 

par. 31   there are three ways

 

in more logical language ... simpliciter ... secundum quid

The Latin phrase secundum quid literally means “according to something”. In a chapter on the word “Simple” in his book Studies in Words (1960; second edition 1967, pp. 168-169), Lewis mentions a “logical branch” as the first of three strands in the development of the word’s meaning. He notes that “for purely logical purposes it is best to use in English the Latin word” (i.e. to use simpliciter), and that “our older writers use simply in precisely this way”. Also, he quotes a passage from Thomas Aquinas (S.T. II.1, Q. 6, Art. 6) in which simpliciter is paired with secundum quid as its opposite. Lewis then defines simpliciter as

“in itself”, intrinsically, unconditionally, not in relation to special circumstances ... without qualification

and submits that

the opposites ... would be expressed by reservations: “in a way”, “in a sense”, ... “in the circumstances”.

Lewis’s example of the “homicidal maniac, attempting to murder a third party”, is perhaps unfortunate since the injury in question here is not the attempt at murder (which could be reckoned injurious simpliciter), but the attempt “to knock me out of the way” (which in different circumstances might be welcome or justified). Presumably it is only the latter and less sensational injury simpliciter which is to be borne patiently.

 

they may be then other motives

typo for “there may be then” etc.

 

par. 32   that is my

 

St John Baptist’s words to the soldiers

Luke 3:14.

 

a Roman centurion

Matthew 8:10, Luke 7:9.

 

too many historical Jesuses ... liberal, pneumatic, Barthian, Marxist

A year or so later Lewis developed the theme of the many “historical Jesuses” in The Screwtape Letters, chapter 23.

 

 

back to survey

 

MEDITATION ON THE THIRD COMMANDMENT

 

First published on 10 January 1941, this was the last of three articles Lewis wrote for The Guardian before he he began contributing his thirty-one weekly “Screwtape Letters” to this periodical in May 1941.

 

par. 1   from many letters

 

The Guardian

A weekly religious newspaper founded in 1846 to uphold High Church Tractarian principles within the Church of England. Lewis was a subscriber. The paper ceased publication in 1951. (Today’s British daily newspaper of the same name, founded in 1821, was published as The Manchester Guardian until 1959.)

 

M. Maritain’s Scholasticism and Politics

Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), French Catholic philosopher and major figure in the revival of Thomistic philosophy in the early 20th century. Scholasticism and Politics (Macmillan, New York and Geoffrey Bles, London, 1940) is a volume of nine lectures delivered in the United States in the fall of 1938. Although this is a translation (edited by M. J. Adler), the collection as such was never previously published in French. The originals of the last three essays – “Action and Contemplation”, “Catholic Action and Political Action” and “Christianity and Earthly Civilizations”, had been published in a French volume titled Questions de conscience (1938).

 

par. 3–5   what, then, will  [etc.]

 

Philarchus ... Stativus ... Spartacus

Fictitious types with pseudo-classical names suggesting their respective characters – Reactionary (“lover of old things”), Conservative (“steadfast”), Revolutionary (Spartacus was the leader of a slave uprising in the Roman Republic, 73-71 BC).

 

par. 7   it is not

 

late medieval pseudo-Crusaders

Expeditions to the Baltic region, north-eastern Europe, by 14th-century West European  knights in search of the supposed glory and adventure of the original crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries (undertaken to liberate Jerusalem and fight Islam). The pseudo-Crusaders’ nominal purpose was to convert or exterminate Europe’s last pagan tribes, notably the Prussians – whose name was eventually adopted by German conquerors of the region.

 

Covenanters

Protestant Christians of the Presbyterian persuasion in 16th- and 17th-century Scotland, who covenanted – i.e. took an oath – to stand firm for their faith.

 

Orangemen

Members of the Orange Order (or Orange Association, or Loyal Orange Institution), founded in 1795 to defend Protestant supremacy in Ireland. It was called after the Dutch-born king William of Orange, who had secured a major Protestant victory in 1690.

 

par. 9   m. maritain has hinted

 

Nonconformity

A generic label for the position of “dissenting” Protestants in British history, i.e. those who would not “conform” to the theology or church order of the Anglican Church.

 

the dove and the serpent

Matthew 10:16.

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

 

 

back to survey

 

EVIL AND GOD

 

The Spectator, 7 February 1941. In November 1942, the popular philosopher and prolific writer C. E. M. Joad (1891-1953) published a 363-page book under the title God and Evil which includes a response to Lewis’s present critique. For a general discussion of Joad and Lewis and their exchanges, see Joel Heck, “From Vocal Agnostic to Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis and C. E. M. Joad”, Sehnsucht Vol. 3 (2010), pp. 11-31; however, Heck’s essay does not explore the comparatively abundant material provided by Joad’s 1942 book, including a passage in which Joad explains why he has a high regard for “Mr. Lewis’s competence as an exponent of Christian doctrine”.

 

par.1   dr joad’s article

 

Zoroastrians

Adherents of the ancient Iranian religion which traced its origin to the prophet Zarathustra (or Zoroaster, from Greek Zoroastres), who probably lived long before 1000 B.C.

 

mechanism and emergent evolution

In Joad’s 1942 book, the two subjects are treated in the third and forth chapters respectively. In the 1920s Joad had himself been a believer in emergent evolution and an admirer of its most eloquent spokesman in Britain, Bernard Shaw.

 

emergent evolution

Emergent Evolution is the title of the Gifford Lectures for 1922-1923 by British psychologist and polymath C. Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936). Like the French philosopher Bergson (1859-1941), Lloyd Morgan addressed the problem that the Darwinian theory of evolution failed to explain many cases of development from “lower” to “higher”  organisms. Reason, consciousness and life itself were conspicuous examples. These and suchlike phenomena he called emergents.

 

using the word God to mean “whatever the universe happens to be going to do next”

Lewis is here perhaps mainly thinking of Space, Time and Deity (1920) by Samuel Alexander, a friend of Lloyd Morgan. Alexander’s work originated as the Gifford Lectures for 1916-1918.

 

Mellontolatry

Greek mellon = the future.

 

par. 2   we are left

 

Victorian philosophers

While it is hard to say if Lewis had any specific late-19th-century “philosophers” in mind, Joad in his 1942 reply to Lewis (God and Evil, p. 69) conceded the essential point – that the Victorian and Edwardian ages in England were abnormal; they constituted a wholly unrepresentative little pocket of security and decency in the immense desert of man’s beastliness and misery.

 

Boethius waiting in prison

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

 

Augustine meditating on the sack of Rome

The church father St Augustine (354-430) wrote his best-known apologetic work, The City of God (De civitate Dei) in response to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in the year 410.

 

it was the last century which was the abnormality

As noted, Joad later conceded the point about an alleged “new urgency” of the problem of evil; he quoted Lewis’s passage about Boethius and Augustine (God and Evil, p. 69). However, Joad maintained and developed at great length his own dualism as the most plausible view (chapter 3, “The Obtrusiveness of Evil”, pp. 68-111, esp. 92-98 and 108-111). In his last book, The Recovery of Belief (1952), chapter 3, “The Significance of Evil”, Joad finally gave up his dualism too. He there also talks of his own generation as “the generation of optimists that flourished before 1914” (Recovery, p. 81).

 

par. 7   good and evil

 

on all fours

An expression frequently used by Joad.

 

Ormuzd and Ahriman

In ancient Iranian religion, Ormuzd (or Ahura Mazda) is the god of light, and Ahriman (or Angra Mainyu) is the god of darkness.

 

“fell, incensed points”

Shakespeare, Hamlet V.2.62.

’Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.

 

those who are prepared to reinstate Ormuzd and Ahriman

i.e. those who, like Joad, propose to revive Dualism.

 

 

back to survey

 

BULVERISM

 

First published as “Notes on the Way”, Time and Tide, 29 March 1941; revised as “Bulverism”, a paper for the Oxford Socratic Club, 7 February 1944, and published, with additional notes by the Club’s secretary, in The Socratic Digest, vol. II, June 1944. – The theme of this piece is closely related to that of the first instalment of Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, which appeared elsewhere one month after “Bulverism” appeared in Time and Tide.

 

par. 1   it is a disastrous

 

Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American poet, essayist, and “Transcendentalist” philosopher. His two series of Essays appeared in 1841 and 1844 respectively. Lewis is referring to the second series, Nr. 2, “Experience”. About three-quarters through the essay, a paragraph begins:

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man.

The purport of the passage in Emerson is roughly the same as in Lewis.

 

for over two hundred years

Lewis is evidently thinking here of a philosophical turning point in the early 18th century. He may have been thinking of George Berkeley (1685-1753).

 

par. 2   we have recently

 

The Freudians

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had died in London less than two years before Lewis first published this piece.

 

The Marxians

a less usual form of “Marxists”, evidently chosen here to correspond with “Freudians”.

 

Elizabeth [I] a great queen

??

 

“ideologically tainted” at the source

not a piece of actual Marxist terminology, but a play on the term “psychologically tainted” as used in the Freudian critique, above. Lewis wrote about “ideological taint” as a phrase typically used by “the hard boiled economist” in his brief essay “Two Ways with the Self” of May 1940.

 

par. 4   if they say

 

philosophical idealism

Lewis was writing in circumstances where this philosophical school, no less than Christian theology, was widely considered obsolete. Idealism had been the dominant philosophical school in Oxford quite recently, in the decades around 1900. After 1920 it had quickly ceded its position to Realism. This new school tried to emulate scientific method and certainty in philosophy and developed, via logical positivism, into the analytical philosophy of the mid-20th century. For a monograph on the position of Lewis and a few other thinkers with regard to this development see James Patrick, The Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901-1945 (Mercer University Press 1985).

 

par. 6   in other words

 

In the course of the last fifteen years

i.e. roughly since the mid-1920s; Lewis became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925.

 

par. 6   i find the fruits

 

I can see early enough that some people

Here is a typo in the text as found in the 1970 volume God in the Dock published by Eerdmans. The original and correct text, found elsewhere, is “I can see easily enough” etc. The Eerdmans volume has been reprinted without corrections at least until well into the 2010s.

 

par. 12   but our thoughts

 

reasons only, and no causes

This paragraph is perhaps the earliest instance of Lewis publicly formulating the idea which later came to be known as his “argument from Reason”. It is reiterated in the additional notes and immediately followed there, as on several later occasions, by a brief version of his “moral argument” (“The same argument applies to our values”, etc.). Both arguments also appear briefly in Lewis’s 1942 sermon “Miracles” and are presented in more detail in his book Miracles (1947), chapters 3 and 5.

 

par. 19   the relation between

 

created by an Imagination

In giving this turn to his “argument from Reason” and “moral argument”, Lewis is showing his continued allegiance to the Idealist school which by this time had almost vanished from the philosophical scene.

 

 

back to survey

 

RELIGION: REALITY OR SUBSTITUTE?

 

First delivered as a sermon at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, at some point before 17 August 1941, when Lewis referred to it in a letter to Alec Vidler (CL2, 490). For World Dominion, in which the text was first published in September-October 1941, see introductory note to “Myth Became Fact”. Walter Hooper mentions some additions made “a few years later” but gives no details about the occasion. Possibly, Lewis preached this sermon once again in his local parish church at Headington Quarry on 29 March 1942.

 

par. 7   but enough of

 

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

Milton, Paradise Lost IV, 477-491.

 

Barfield … “vegetarian jazz”

Owen Barfield (1898-1997) was a lifelong friend of Lewis since both men’s first year in Oxford, 1919. Lewis is probably referring to Barfield’s 1930 essay “Death”, which appears to have much impressed Lewis at the time (Collected Letters I, 899 and III, 1519-20). It was never published until 2008 (in VII, vol. 25, pp. 45-60). Half-way through this essay Barfield writes,

…the higher power of understanding embraces the lower. The crowd outside the Palais de Danse looks on at the crowd outside the concert-hall with amusement and contempt. Who shall ever convince it that a Brandenburg Concerto is not a sort of bloodless, vegetarian, substitute for Swing − a “mock” Swing? Yet some day it will have to find this out for itself. So also must each man find out for himself … that the nothingness of the self (provided it is willed) is not Nothing, but Something.

 

par. 10   have we now

 

the American in the old story

From Dracula, a Gothic horror novel by Bram Stoker published in 1897. At the end of chapter 14, John Seward, the administrator of an insane asylum, describes a conversation with his mentor Professor Abraham Van Helsing. In an attempt to prepare Seward for the utterly odd and gruesome truth about his former patient Lucy, Van Helsing (a Dutchman who speaks broken English) mentions several phenomena which are hard to believe and yet evidently true. Seware then responds:

   “Professor, let me be your pet student again. Tell me the thesis, so that I may apply your knowledge as you go on. At present I am going in my mind from point to point as a mad man, and not a sane one, follows an idea. I feel like a novice lumbering through a bog in a mist, jumping from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort to move on without knowing where I am going.”

    “That is good image,” he said. “Well, I shall tell you. My thesis is this: I want you to believe.”

    “To believe what?”

    “To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard once of an American who so defined faith: ‘that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.’ For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.”

    “Then you want me not to let some previous conviction injure the receptivity of my mind with regard to some strange matter. Do I read your lesson aright?”

    “Ah, you are my favourite pupil still. It is worth to teach you. Now that you are willing to understand, you have taken the first step to understand.

 

 

back to survey

 

THE WEIGHT OF GLORY

 

A sermon preached at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on Sunday 8 June 1941. This was less than two months after Lewis had begun lecturing at Royal Air Force bases, one month after his Screwtape Letters began to be serialized in the church newspaper The Guardian, and two months before he gave his first BBC radio talk. The sermon was first published in Theology, November 1941, and it was his last contribution to this monthly magazine.

 

par. 1   if you asked

 

Kant

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

 

par. 5   in speaking of

 

inconsolable secret

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

 

Wordsworth

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Bergson

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

 

par. 6   do what they will

 

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

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

Fools! That in man’s brief term
He cannot all things view,
Affords no ground to affirm
That there are Gods who do;
Nor does being weary prove that he has where to rest.

 

par. 10   when i began

 

Milton

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

 

Johnson

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

 

Thomas Aquinas

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

 

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

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

 

Prospero’s book

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

                                  I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.

 

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

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

 

a weight or 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.

 

par. 11   and now notice

 

“the journey homeward to habitual self”

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

 

“Nobody marks us”

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

 

par. 12   perhaps it seems

 

“I never knew you. Depart from Me.”

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

 

par. 13   and this brings

 

we are to be given the Morning Star

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

 

“beauty born of murmuring sound”

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

The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.

 

par. 14   and in there

 

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

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

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

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

 

torrens voluptatis

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

 

 

back to survey

 

FIRST AND SECOND THINGS

 

First published in Time and Tide, 27 June 1942. – More than a year after “Bulverism”, this was Lewis’s next article for Time and Tide. He had become a bestselling author after The Screwtape Letters were published as a book in February 1942. The first collection of Lewis’s BBC radio talks were published a few weeks after this essay.

 

par. 1   when i read

 

Time and Tide

A political and literary weekly that began appearing in 1920 with a left-wing slant but gradually moved to a more right-wing and more Christian position. Lewis’s friend Charles Williams was a regular contributor from 1937 onward ujhtil his death in 1945 and Lewis himself contributed a total of twenty-five pieces (essays, reviews, poems) in the period 1940-1960, including reviews of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

 

one golden summer in adolescence

The summer of 1912, as later described by Lewis in Surprised by Joy (1955), chapter 5.

 

“Ride of the Valkyries” ... The Ring

Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung’s Ring) is a cycle of four operas by the German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) on themes and characters from Germanic mythology and the medieval German epic poem Nibelungenlied. The “Walkürenritt” (“Ride of the Valkyries”) is a famous episode in the second opera, Die Walküre.

 

par. 2   the mention of

 

people who call might right

The catchphrase Might is Right got currency as the title of a Social-Darwinist book published in Chicago in 1896. The author, using the pseudonym Ragnar Redbeard, has never been identified.

 

par. 6   the longer i looked

 

On cause mieux quand on ne dit pas Causons...

From the Mémoires du prince Eugène de Savoie, écrits par lui-même (Duprat-Duverger, Paris 1810), p. 183. The fact that Lewis quoted from a source like this is almost certainly due to the fact that his brother was an accomplished amateur historian of 17th-century France.

 

 

back to survey

 

MIRACLES

 

A sermon preached on Sunday, 27 September 1942 at St. Jude-on-the-Hill, a church in northern London, immediately after Lewis had delivered the second instalment in his third series of BBC radio talks. A short version of the sermon was first published on 2 October in The Guardian, the Anglican weekly which had serialized The Screwtape Letters in 1941. The fuller text appeared in Saint Jude’s Gazette nr. 73, October 1942. See Lewis’s letter of 28 September 1942 to Rosamund Rieu (Collected Letters III, 1545-6.

    In January 1942 Lewis had become President of the newly founded Oxford Socratic Club, which he characterized as “an arena specially devoted to the conflict between Christian and unbeliever”. From that time on he regularly wrote essays which, in retrospect, clearly pointed toward his book Miracles (1947).

 

par. 3   the experience of

 

irrational physical processes

The passage is an early example of what was later called Lewis’s “Argument from Reason” (John Beversluis, 1985) and still later “Lewis’s Dangerous Idea” (Victor Reppert, 2003). A slightly earlier version is found in Lewis’s essay “Bulverism” (1941/1944); the most developed versions in his essays are those in “De futilitate” (1942-43) and “Religion without Dogma?” (1946). After the argument’s final and fullest presentation in chapter 3 of Miracles, Lewis’s use of the term “irrational” was one of several things criticized by philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe during a meeting of the Socratic Club (1948). In the book’s revised edition (1960) most instances of the word were therefore changed into “non-rational” or similar alternatives; see ww.lewisiana.nl/anscombe/appendices.pdf, Appendix C.

 

the concept of nature itself

Lewis’s thinking here is very similar to that of R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) as expressed in The Concept of Nature (1945). Collingwood died at age 53 only a few months after Lewis wrote this; he was an Oxford colleague of Lewis at Magdalen College and, philosophically, a fellow defender of the old “Idealist” school against the rising tide of analytical philosophy. See James Patrick, The Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901-1945 (Mercer U.P. 1985), chapter 4.

 

par. 4   if we frankly

 

rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation

Put this way, it might be hard to find actual examples of the position Lewis is here attacking. Most fighters for secularism in the name of science, including T. H. Huxley in the 19th century and Richard Dawkins in the 20th, have been keen to allow the theoretical possibility of a supernatural reality but insist that the supposition is too improbable to count for anything in practice.

 

Herodotus

a Greek traveller and writer of the fifth century BC. His Histories (“Investigations”) is the earliest Greek prose work to have survived in its entirety and is considered to be the beginning of evidence-based historical writing as distinct from legend and mythology uncritically repeated and developed through the ages.

 

par. 6   i have only recently

 

George Macdonald

The Scottish fantasy writer and novelist (1824-1905) was one of Lewis’s major spiritual guides. The point made here about miracles is expressed in passages Lewis included in his George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946) as items 26, 73, 99. See also Miracles, chapter 15, par. 12.

 

Athanasius ... in his little book On the Incarnation

i.e. De incarnatione Verbi by the 4th-century church father Athanasius of Alexandria. When a new English translation was published in 1944 as The Incarnation of the Word of God, Lewis wrote a preface which was later reprinted as “On the Reading of Old Books”. He points out there that “[Athanasius’s] approach to the Miracles is badly needed today”.

 

“Our Lord took a body like …”
While the present rendering of this approach is given in quotation marks, it is in fact a paraphrase of the third chapter (§§14-18) in Athanasius’ work.