C. S. LEWIS, ST JEROME, AND THE BIBLICAL
CREATION STORY
The background of a recurring misattribution
by Arend Smilde
Journal of Inklings Studies Vol. 4, No. 2 (October 2014), 115-124.
ABSTRACT – C. S. Lewis frequently quoted a testimony,
supposed to be St Jerome’s, in which it is suggested that the biblical account
of Creation was ‘poetic’ or ‘mythical’. However, it seems Lewis had confused
his authors and was ascribing to St Jerome a passage actually by the
Renaissance humanist John Colet. At the same time, Lewis was certainly aware of
St Augustine’s similar – and perhaps more relevant – views on the subject;
indeed, along with one of his references to Jerome, Lewis briefly mentioned St
Augustine too. It remains to be seen precisely which (if any) early Christian
authors might have been cited to back up Lewis’s point.
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At the end of chapter 4 of his book Miracles (1947), talking about
the first two chapters of the Bible, C. S. Lewis briefly refers to
what seems to be a dictum of St. Jerome:
... the story in Genesis – as St. Jerome said long ago
– is told in the manner ‘of a popular poet,’ or as we should say, in the form
of a folk tale.1
Hieronymus of Stridon (c. 347-420), or St Jerome,
was perhaps the greatest scholar among the Latin Church Fathers. Living and
working in Bethlehem from 386 until his death, he made the Latin translation of
the Bible known as the Vulgate, which was the standard Bible text for Western
Christendom for the whole |116| medieval period and in some ways authoritative as
late as the 20th century. Surely if this mastermind of ancient Christianity
held such a view of the biblical creation story, that is a thing worth
recalling whenever it seems to be forgotten in modern discussions of the
subject. However, anyone who has ever tried to trace Lewis’s ‘popular poet’
quotation to a passage in Jerome’s works must have concluded that it isn’t
there. This is in itself perhaps a small matter. Having checked a great many
sources in Lewis’s works over the years, I have found him not impeccable, but
nevertheless fairly reliable as regards both letter and spirit of his
countless quotations and allusions. Seeing how much he wrote and how much he
quoted, and how uniquely successful he was in introducing modern readers to
pre-modern authors, it is reasonable to grant him the right to a handful of
blunders. It seems we must count this as one of them.
What makes it hard to leave the
matter there, however, is the fact that Lewis, over a period of about fifteen
years, repeated more or less the same assertion about Jerome in three more
publications as well as in a private letter which was later published. This
makes a total of five instances – in three of which he used the phrase ‘popular
poet’ with regard to the creation story in Genesis and ascribed that phrase
unambiguously to Jerome. I will list the relevant passages in what I suppose to
be the order in which Lewis wrote them (although I would certainly not argue
about the order of the first two).
1. Lewis’s largest
academic work, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama,
is described on the title page as ‘The Completion of The Clark Lectures,
Trinity College, Cambridge 1944’. The book did not appear until 1954; but since
Lewis began working on it in the mid-1930s it may be assumed that much of the
writing was at least in a draft stage and much of the reading for it had been
done by the time of the Clark Lectures. In the published work, a reference to
Jerome and Genesis appears three pages into Book II, chapter 1, on ‘Religious
controversy and |117| translation’, as Lewis is discussing the English
humanist scholar John Colet (1467-1519). My quotation must be long because, as
will appear, it contains the key to solving our problem:
Colet ... has an important place in the history of
Biblical studies ... he is one of those who helped to banish the old
allegorical methods of interpretation, at least as regards the New Testament,
and made some attempt to see the Pauline epistles in their real historical
setting. In the Epistolae ad Radulphum he himself
allegorizes freely on the opening chapters of Genesis, as St. Augustine
had done before him, but he is seeking a scientific or philosophical, rather
than a moral or spiritual sense. It is one among many attempts made in this
[i.e. 16th] century to reconcile the Mosaic account of the creation with the
cosmological ideas of the day. In this difference between Colet’s treatment
of St. Paul and his treatment of Genesis there is inherent the recognition
that the Bible contains books very different in kind. It was not exactly new –
St. Jerome had allowed what we should now call the ‘mythical’ element in
Genesis – but it was timely and useful.2
2. Lewis’s essay ‘Dogma
and the Universe’ was first published in two parts in March 1943 in The
Guardian, the Anglican weekly that had serialized The Screwtape Letters
in 1941. After a 1942 essay called ‘Miracles’, also in The Guardian,
the ‘Dogma’ piece was one of the earliest of what we may now identify as a
series of preparatory moves, or building blocks, for Miracles. Jerome
and Genesis appear in the ninth paragraph:
The first chapters of Genesis, no doubt, give the
story of creation in the form of a folk-tale – a fact recognised
as early as the time of St Jerome ...3 |118|
3. Lewis began
writing Miracles not long after this and he finished writing it in early
1945,4 but the book was not published until May 1947. The Jeromean passage, now including the phrase ‘popular
poet’, is quoted at the beginning of the present essay.
4. On 5 October 1955,
Lewis wrote a letter to a woman named Janet Wise, who had written to tell him
she was troubled by other people’s disbelief in the authority of the Bible and
asked which books on the subject he recommended. In his reply, Lewis explained
his own position in some 600 words, in the course of which he noted that
Calvin left the historicity of Job an open question and,
from earlier, St Jerome said that the whole Mosaic account of creation was done
‘after the method of a popular poet’.5
Interestingly, the editor of Lewis’s letters, Walter Hooper, while stating
the source for the assertion about Calvin, has left the one about Jerome
unreferenced.
5. When Lewis presented
his Reflections on the Psalms in 1958, he pointed out in the
introductory chapter that this book was only an amateur’s attempt to ‘compare
notes’ with fellow Christians, and not another defence
of Christianity. However, in the last three chapters he is back in the role of
an apologist, arguing that Christians are really justified in seeing
specifically Christian meanings in the ancient Hebrew poetry. Jerome appears in
chapter XI, ‘Scripture’, second paragraph, as Lewis is distancing himself from
|119|
... a prior belief that every sentence of the Old
Testament has historical or scientific truth. ... [T]his I do not hold, any
more than St. Jerome did when he said that Moses described Creation ‘after the
manner of a popular poet’ (as we should say, mythically) or than Calvin did
when he doubted whether the story of Job were history or fiction.6
*****
So much for known expressions of Lewis’s belief that St. Jerome is an early
Christian authority for the ‘poetic’ reading of the creation story in Genesis.
We may note that this is not simply a case of persistence in an unwarranted
attribution. The subject at hand – the nature of the biblical account of
creation – is a weighty one, so that it will be worth our while to find out
what kind of error is involved here and how serious it is. Lewis may have
simply confused Jerome with another Church Father. If so, then even if Jerome
was the wrong name to drop, Lewis would still have been correct in a general
way in invoking an ancient authority: the mere antiquity of the cited authority
was surely half his point or more. It would be worse for Lewis, and perhaps for
his view of Genesis, if the remark about the ‘manner of a popular poet’ could
not be traced to any early Christian authority at all.
Now it seems in fact that it
cannot, at least as far as Latin sources are concerned. All of Jerome’s works
are contained both in the Online Library of Latin Texts and the Patrologia Latina Database: and no Latin phrase
translatable as ‘popular poet’ can be found anywhere in either of these.
Precisely such a phrase does
appear, however, in the Epistolae ad Radulphum, written some
1,100 years after Jerome by John Colet – the book Lewis was dealing with in
the course of his scholarly work when (as I think) he first envisaged Jerome as
a proponent |120| of the ‘poetic’ view of Genesis. Colet’s Latin
treatise is partly lost and, in its incomplete state, was first published in
1876, in Letters to Radulphus on the Mosaic
Account of Creation, together with other treatises, an English translation
followed by the Latin originals. The fourth letter breaks off in mid-sentence,
so that, since the letters broadly deal with one Creation Day each, it is quite
likely that what has come down to us is only about half of the original work.
In the second letter (p. 170) we read:
Firmamentum et celum primum factum fuit
in illo die quem [Moyses] vocat unum. Sed particulatim haec spectabiliora voluit deinceps attingere Moyses; et hoc, modo poetae
alicujus popularis; quo magis consolat spiritui simplicis rusticitatis; fingens successionem rerum, operum, et temporum; cujusmodi apud tantum opificem certe nulla esse potest.
– The firmament and heaven had been
made first of all, in the day which he [Moses] calls first. But it was the
design of Moses to touch on these more conspicuous objects afterwards in
detail. And he does this after the manner of some popular poet, that he may the
better study the spirit of simple-minded rustics; imagining a succession of
events, and works, and times, such as could by no means find place with so
great an Artificer.7
Colet does not mention Jerome here. Nor does he do so in connection with
two other references to the ‘poet-like’ ways of Moses (more poetae) – one at the end of the third letter, and one
in the fourth, just before the end of the treatise as we have it. Nevertheless
there are good reasons to suppose that it is the above passage from Colet that
Lewis mistook for, or misremembered as, a passage in Jerome.
At the beginning of Colet’s
first letter, Jerome is mentioned in conjunction with an earlier, Greek Church
Father, Origen, likewise a great Bible scholar. The two are praised, along with
‘all the most careful investigators of Holy Writ’, for their knowledge of
Hebrew |121| as an essential tool for understanding ‘the Mosaic
record’. This is the only place in Colet’s treatise where Jerome is mentioned.
Origen, however, is mentioned in two other places. The second of these comes
just before the end (as we have it), where Colet once more propounds the notion
of Moses as a ‘poet’. And he ascribes it to Origen:
Sed more boni piique poetae, qualem illum [sc. Moysen] in libro quem contra Celsum scripsit, vocat Origenes, effingere aliquid voluit nonnihil indignum Deo, modo idem commodum
et utile hominibus esse possit.
– But, like a good and devout poet, as Origen in his treatise against Celsus calls him, Moses would invent something, even in a
certain degree unworthy of God, if only it might be of advantage and service to
man.8
Unfortunately, no reference to Moses as a poet (let alone a popular one)
can be found in Origen either – a fact already noted by Colet’s 19th-century
editor and translator J. H. Lupton.9 Lupton obligingly mentions a
passage in Origen’s Contra Celsum (I.19) which
Colet may have had in mind; but this does not solve our problem of finding an
early Christian source for the epithet ‘poet’ or ‘poetic’ actually applied to
Moses. And since the occurrence of particular words and phrases can no longer
be contentious in the age of electronic databases, we may now restate our
problem as whether something at all like the ‘poetic’ view of Moses can be
attested in any early Christian learned author (preferably Jerome).
While a definitive answer to
this question is beyond the scope of the present essay, it seems useful to note
here that Lupton, when talking about Colet’s sources and inspirations,
mentions Jerome only in passing.10 Lupton regards Origen as a much
more important source for Colet, even if this is largely a matter of a shared
direct dependence on Philo Judaeus, the Jewish-Greek
scholar from |122| Alexandria who was a contemporary of Jesus Christ.11
In the end, Lupton argues that no other writer – ancient or modern, Christian
or pagan – was a greater influence on Colet than was
… Augustine, both as regards the general spirit of
enquiry in which he enters on the subject of these Letters [viz. ‘the Mosaic
Account of Creation’], and the special line of interpretation which he follows.12
Lupton illustrates his point with several passages from Augustine’s Confessions,
Books XI and XII.
Thus Lewis’s allusion to
Augustine in the passage quoted from English Literature was relevant;
but about Jerome he appears to have doubled a mistake that was first made by
Colet about Origen.
Going back now to my list of
Lewis’s five misattributions over a period of some fifteen years, and assuming
that my chronology is roughly in order, we may note that the first two
statements – those from English
Literature and ‘Dogma and the Universe’ – do not include the phrase
‘popular poet’. What may have happened next, after Lewis wrote or conceived
these passages, is that, in consulting ‘Dogma and the Universe’ for use in Miracles,
he recovered among other things his own earlier reference to Jerome; remembered
its background in Colet along with the ‘popular poet’ phrase in the same
treatise; then perhaps carelessly and too quickly checked that source, thus
coming to attribute the phrase to Jerome; and went on to remember it, along
with its mistaken attribution, for the rest of his life.13 While
this reconstruction is certainly speculative, it would still seem to be the
best available explanation for Lewis’s mistake about St. Jerome and the
biblical creation story.
I am grateful to Professor Neil
Adkin (University of North Carolina), one of the world’s leading scholars on
Jerome, for |123| taking up my suggestion that this matter was worth
researching. He confirmed my suspicion – and not only mine, as witness some discussions
on the internet – that Colet was the clue; and what is more, this Jerome
scholar, in a presentation of his own findings, has provided the following
valuable comment:
A Jeromean ‘popular poet’
immediately strikes a student of Jerome as fishy: the very idea can in fact be
shown to be alien to him ... for Jerome it is only with the help of the grammaticus that ‘poets’ can be ‘understood’:
by definition they are not ‘popular’.14
But even barring the ‘popular’ element, Lewis must have been to some extent
aware of the incongruity. In his essay ‘Christianity and Culture’ (1940) he
listed Jerome among a number of Christian authorities on the value of
‘culture’. He found Jerome definitely suspicious of ‘culture’ and actually
equating carmina poetarum,
‘the songs of poets’, with cibus daemonum, ‘the food of demons’.15 It is
hard to see how, holding such a view, Jerome could have been content to
describe any major Bible writer as one who wrote in the manner of a ‘poet’,
popular or otherwise.
*****
As we saw, Lewis appears to have begun slipping into the error about Jerome
while discussing John Colet, partly led astray perhaps by Colet’s own dubious reference
to Origen. But we have also seen that Lewis, in the very same passage, briefly
alluded to yet another patristic parallel to Colet’s understanding of the
biblical creation |124| story – Augustine. As a literary historian writing
about Colet, Lewis was clearly hitting the mark here. Perhaps he would have
done better to develop this hunch about Augustine when he wanted to cite an
early Christian authority for the idea of a ‘mythical’ or folktale element in
Genesis, or of poet-like ways in Moses. Certainly he would have done better to
check his quotations. Presumably he would have done so had he realized that his
own authority and status among Christians was, before long, to eclipse that of
many an ancient church father. The importance of accuracy, however, is a lesson
to be drawn and remembered by all of us.
Postscript
After this essay was written, one more Lewisian reference to Jerome came to
light in a newly published collection of essays and reviews, Image and
Imagination, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 68-
69. In his review of a book by Werner Schwarz, Principles and Problems of
Biblical Translation (1955), Lewis notes the author’s distinction between
the ‘philological’ and the ‘inspirational’ approaches to Biblical translation
and how Jerome is described as representing the former and Augustine the
latter. Further on, John Colet is also mentioned. While neither the phrase
‘popular poet’ nor any references whatever to Moses or the creation story
appear in this review, it is nevertheless worth reading for anyone wishing to
further explore my theme.
Postscript
2 (November 2017; not in Journal of Inklings Studies 2014)
While taking stock of Lewis’s
published letters and letter fragments not included in the three-volume Collected Letters of 2000-2006, I found
yet another reference to Jerome and Genesis. In a letter of 28 February 1952 to a
‘Mr. Canfield’, Lewis wrote,
I’m
not a fundamentalist in the direct sense: one who starts out by saying,
‘Everything we read is literal fact.’ The presence of an allegorical or
mystical element in Genesis was recognized
by St. Jerome. Origen held Job to be
a moral fable not a history. There is nothing new about such interpretation.16
Quite possibly, ‘mystical’ is a misrendering of ‘mythical’. In any case, the passage
clearly deserves a place in my survey and goes some way toward filling the gap
between 1945 and 1955. So far, it is the only case of Lewis citing Origen as an
early Christian authority for his own view of Scripture. However, this
reference concerns Job rather than Genesis. In John Colet’s Letters to Radulphus,
the Book of Job is rarely mentioned and Origen is never cited as commenting on
Job. My speculation that Lewis was “partly
led astray perhaps by Colet’s own dubious reference to Origen” is thus neither
refuted nor confirmed. The remarkable thing is that Lewis in his two subsequent
observations, as listed above (1955 and 1958), substituted Calvin’s doubt about
the historicity of the Book of Job for Origen’s positive assertion (if and
wherever he made it) about that book’s true character.
Notes
1. C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London:
Geoffrey Bles, 1947), p. 42; or p. 37 in the revised edition (London: Collins /
Fontana Books, 1960).
2. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth
Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954, reprinted as Poetry
and Prose in the Sixteenth Century in 1997), pp. 159-160.
3. C. S. Lewis, ‘Dogma and the Universe’, in God in
the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans 1970), pp. 38-47, quotation on p. 42. The essay ‘Miracles’ is in the
same volume. Both were reprinted in a smaller British collection also titled God
in the Dock (London: Fount Paperbacks 1979), and in an American collection The
Grand Miracle (New York: Ballantine, 1982). They were reprinted again in
the large Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley Walmsley
(London: HarperCollins, 2000), where the quotation appears on p. 122.
4. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters II, ed. Walter Hooper (London:
HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 591 and 640.
5. C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters III, ed. Walter Hooper (London:
HarperCollins, 2006), pp. 652-653 including note 284.
6. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (London: Geoffrey Bles,
1958), p. 109.
7. John Colet, Letters
to Radulphus on the Mosaic Account
of Creation, together with other treatises, ed. J. H. Lupton (London: G.
Bell, 1876), pp. 9 (English) and 170 (Latin).
8. Colet, Letters, pp. 27 (English) and 182
(Latin).
9. Ibid., p. 27, note 2.
10. Ibid., p. xvii,
note 3.
11. Ibid., pp. xvi-xvii, cf. p. 9,
note 2.
12. Ibid., pp. xvii-xix.
13. That he consulted the essay for the book is in itself
certain. Miracles contains several passages that are more or less
literally taken from previously written essays, including ‘Dogma and the Universe’.
14. Neil Adkin, ‘C. S. Lewis and St. Jerome’s “Popular
Poet”’, Studi e rassegne
su antico, tardoantico e medioevo (= Orpheus I), ed. C. Crimi et al. (Rome: Bonanno,
2013), pp. 9-12.
15. C. S. Lewis, ‘Christianity and Culture’, in Christian Reflections,
ed. Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), p. 16
in the Eerdmans edition; p. 31 in the 1981 British reprint as Fount paperback;
p. 74 in the Essay Collection (2000) mentioned in note 3.
16. Richard Purtill, C. S.
Lewis’s Case for the Christian Faith (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 83.