Quotations and Allusions in
C. S. Lewis, Letters to
Malcolm
compiled by Arend Smilde (Utrecht, The Netherlands)
C. S. Lewis’s last book, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer was
published posthumously in 1964. Like most of his books it contains a great
number of references – from the vaguest of allusions to literal quotations – to
a great variety of sources. While it is perhaps never vitally important to know
these sources, tracing them can be a rewarding enterprise. What follows is a
listing by chapter of many such words and phrases with brief notes on what I
have found to be their origins and, occasionally, on their relevance to the
context in which Lewis uses them. I have also included a few other items where
a short explanation may be useful to some readers.
The notes are intended for a possibly worldwide public of all educational
levels. Every user is therefore kindly invited to skip those details or
explanations which seem superfluous. Double question marks in bold type – ??
– indicate my failure to find the information I wanted to give. Corrections
and additions, including proposed new entries, are welcome. A survey of updates is given at
the end.
last update: 17 September 2024
1
1/1, i am all
the Republic
One of the main works of the Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 b.c.); its
theme may be very briefly described as Virtue and Justice. There is much
variation in the way the Greek title, Politeia, is rendered in different
languages and even within some single languages – or indeed between different
editions of the same translation. Thus in Dutch the book has been published as De
Staat, Constitutie, Het bestel
(i.e. ‘The System’) and also as Politeia.
1/5, but
every novelty
the Grail
In Arthurian legend, the Grail or Graal is a mysterious object of great
significance and infinite value, often conceived to be a bowl or chalice.
“’Tis mad
idolatry that makes the service greater than the god”
Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida II.2.
’Tis mad idolatry to make the service greater
than the god.
1/6, a
still worse
Feed my sheep
Gospel of John 21:15-17 (Christ speaking to Simon Peter).
1/7, thus my whole
habito dell’arte
“The practice of [one’s] art”. Dante, Paradiso XIII, 78.
Ma la natura la dà sempre la scema,
Similemente operando all’ artista,
Ch’ ha l’ abito dell’ arte e man che trema.
But nature always gives it defective,
working like the artist
who has the practice of his art and a hand that trembles.
Lewis’s habito is possibly a variant
spelling of abito, but more likely it is a
typo or writing error.
1/9, and that brings
The shepherds go off, “every one to his own way”
Cf. Isaiah 53:6.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every
one to his own way; and the Lord
hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
The swapping of roles between shepherds and sheep in Lewis’s reference is
no doubt intentional.
1/11, i think it
a new Book
i.e. a new manual of church services for the Church of England, replacing
the Book of Common Prayer which was introduced in 1662. The Alternative
Service Book (ASB) was introduced in 1982.
1/15, for
whom are
“truly and indifferently administer justice”
From the Book of Common Prayer, “The order for the administration of
the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion” (i.e. the Offertory); a prayer “for the
whole state of Christ’s Church militant here in earth”. “And grant unto her
[i.e. the Queen’s] whole Council, and to all that are put in authority under
her, that they may truly and indifferently administer justice, to the
punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of true religion, and
virtue.”
1/17, i know there
Cranmer
Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), principal author of the Book of Common
Prayer. As Archbishop of Canterbury he was a very loyal servant of Henry
VIII; after the accession of Mary Tudor he more than once recanted his
long-time support for the Reformation but in the end withdrew these
recantations and was burnt at the stake for heresy. “Like many figures of the
Reformation, Cranmer would seem to belong to history rather than literature.
But his influence was considerable and the majestic language of The Book of
Common Prayer is also an object lesson in precision and economy” (Michael
Stapleton, Cambridge Guide to English Literature, 1983).
1/18, yet we all
“Let your light so shine before men”
Matthew 5:16.
Let your
light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your
Father which is in heaven.
In the Book of Common Prayer, this is the first of a series of “Sentences” (i.e. Bible passages) in the
Offertory, to be read while “the Alms for the Poor, and other devotions of the
people” are received “in a decent bason to be provided by the Parish for that
purpose.”
that they may be seen by men
Matthew 6:5.
They [the hypocrites] love to pray standing in
the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of
men.” This passage in the Sermon on the Mount is preceded by similar
admonitions about alms-giving, and leads up to the Lord’s Prayer.
2
2/1, i can’t understand
the Imitation
i.e. The Imitation of Christ, or De imitatione
Christi, an early-15th-century devotional tract by Thomas à Kempis (c.
1380-1471). It is unclear which passage Lewis had in mind; he may have been
imperfectly remembering passages in Book I.10, De cavenda
superfluitate verborum, “Of avoiding
superfluity of words”, e.g. “We very willingly talk and think of such things as
we most love and desire, or which we imagine contrary to us ... If it be lawful
and expedient to speak, speak those things which may edify.” – ??
2/2, now about the
the Rose Macaulay Letters
Dame Emilie
Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), English novelist, essayist, biographer
and travel writer. When Lewis wrote Letters to Malcolm, two of three
volumes of her letters had recently been published, edited by Constance Babington-Smith: Letters to a Friend 1950-52 (1961) and Last Letters to a Friend
1952-1958 (1962). The one volume to follow was Letters to a Sister
(1964). See also note to 2/3, below.
objets d’art
(French) “objects of art”; any small man-made thing that is cherished for
its beauty.
2/3, but though, like
the luck to meet her
The occasion is mentioned in two 1956 letters found in Macaulay’s Last Letters to a Friend (mentioned above). The addressee is her cousin, the
Rev. John Hamilton Cowper Johnson, of the Society of St. John the Evangelist
(or the “Cowley Fathers”), then at the Monastery in Memorial Drive, Cambridge,
Massachusetts. In a letter of 14 October 1956, Macaulay writes:
Next Sunday [i.e. 21 October
1956] I discuss with C. S. Lewis (before the St Francis Society in Cambridge;
Fr Lothian Sumner is its head), with Dr [Owen] Chadwick in the chair, “Some
Difficulties which keep people out of the Christian Church.” I put the difficulties;
C.S.L., who is full of resource, supplies some answers. I have grabbed the
easier role, as he says; but I obviously couldn’t take the other. There will be
a discussion after it, in which the undergraduate audience takes part. Dr
Lewis says, “I can’t fight Logical Positivists, and that is what we shall get.”
So think of us on Sunday next, 21st, undergoing this from 4.30 to 5.30. I shall
have time too to call on my Conybeare cousins, and perhaps see E. M.
Forster ….
And in a letter of 14 November
1956:
It was quite interesting meeting C. S. Lewis at St Francis House. He is
very good and quick and witty in public speech, and I enjoyed him. It was my
part to stimulate him with questions and the evening went quite well. He is a
great influence among undergraduates.
2/5, all the same
Pascal,
“Error of Stoicism”
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensées, No. 350 (Brunschvicg edition).
2/8, writing
to you
Solomon said ... each man who prays knows “the plague of his own heart”
I Kings 8:38.
2/10, first, it keeps
“sound doctrine”
From Paul’s epistles to Timothy and to Titus, here especially II Tim. 4:3
and Titus 1:9.
“the faith once given”
Epistle of Jude, 3; see note to 22/2.
2/11, secondly, it reminds
“what things I ought to ask”
Lewis might have been thinking here of the phrase in Romans 8:26, “we know
not what we should pray for as we ought...”
2/12, finally, they provide
Petrarch or Donne
The Italian poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374) and the English
poet John Donne (1573-1631) are both chiefly famed for their love poetry.
2/13, i fully agree
“the Wholly Other”
An ancient theological term of unknown origin (??). The original
Latin phrase is totaliter aliter and has been variously used to describe God as
well as Heaven or the afterlife in general. The great twentieth-century
champion of the idea of God’s total otherness was the Swiss theologian Karl
Barth (1886-1968), but it was also affirmed by Rudolf Bultmann (cf. note to
10/2, below).
However, Lewis may also have been thinking here of a
passage in Martin Buber’s I and Thou (part three, section four): “Of
course God is the ‘wholly Other’; but He is also the wholly Same, the wholly
Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows; but He is also
the mystery of the sef-evident, nearer to me than my I.”
But in so far as Lewis later on develops Buber’s view, he takes his cue from
his friends Owen Barfield and Charles Williams rather than from Buber (cf. note
to 14/6, below, “This also is Thou” etc.). All the same, it is interesting to
note that Buber’s original German reads “das ganz
Andere” not “der ganz Andere”, i.e. “something
different”, not “someone different”.
“I fell at His feet as one dead”
Revelation 1:17.
And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead.
And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not: I am the first
and the last.
2/14, i think the
“low” church milieu
i.e. those people within the Anglican Church who are the most explicitly
Protestant or Evangelical, and the least inclined to assimilate Roman Catholic
teachings or liturgical forms.
at ease in Sion
Amos 6:1 (AV/KJV), “Woe to you that are at ease in Sion.” The NIV text has complacent
for at ease.
In the Old Testament, Sion or Zion is often used
as an alternative name for Jerusalem; in the New Testament and afterwards it
came to function as a name for “the Heavenly Jerusalem” or, simply, Heaven.
the great apostles ... affected him [Dante] like mountains
Dante, Paradiso XXV.38.
...ond’ io
levai gli occhi ai monti,
Che gl’ incurvaron pria col troppo pondo.
Wherefore mine eyes I lifted to the hills,
Which bent them down before with too great weight.
(translation
by Longfellow)
Dante is thinking primarily of the three apostles Peter, James and John as
representatives of Faith (Canto XXIV), Hope (XXV) and Charity (XXVI)
respectively. In the present Canto it is thus the apostle James who is really
“starring”: his encouraging words in the preceding stanza (“Leva la testa” etc.) have caused Dante to lift his eyes.
The Italian phrase is very close to Psalm 121:1 in
Latin, Levavi oculos meos
in montes etc., “I will lift up mine eyes
unto the hills, from whence cometh my help”. However, the Medieval idea to
think of these mountains as apostles, or of the apostles as mountains, was
perhaps more readily drawn from places like Psalm 87:1 and Matthew 5:14.
3
3/1, oh for mercy’s
a Manichaean
Manichaeans were, originally, the followers of a third-century Persian
prophet called Mani. His teachings were based on the idea that the universe is
essentially composed of two equally strong and eternally competing elements,
Good and Evil.
3/1-2
the “holiness” of sex … the poor
Bishop of Woolwich
John A. T. Robinson (1919-1983), New Testament
scholar and Anglican bishop of Woolwich 1959-1969. Lewis is probably referring
to Robinson’s role in the trial following a 1960 lawsuit under the Obscene Publications Act brought against D. H.
Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1928). In the end the publisher, Penguin Books, was acquitted.
Robinson’s
testimony included the comment that, in his view, Lawrence had portrayed sex “as something
sacred, in a real sense as an act of Holy Communion” (The Trial of Lady Chatterley, edited by C. H. Rolph, 1961, p. 71). See also Lewis’s short 1962 essay “Sex in
Literature”.
3/2, i’m not saying
“whether we eat or drink”
cf. I Corinthians 10:31.
Aphrodite
The ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty; the Romans called her Venus.
3/4, the consoling thing
“With angels and archangels and all the company of heaven”
Hymn of Praise to conclude the “Proper Prefaces”, i.e. prayers immediately
preceding the Communion, in the Book of Common Prayer.
Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with
all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore
praising thee, and saying: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and
earth are full of thy glory: Glory be to thee, O Lord most High. Amen.
3/8, a man to whom
“work is prayer”
A common inversion of the Latin phrase, ora
et labora, “pray and work”. The latter maxim is
sometimes attributed to St. Benedict, founder of the Benedictine monastic
order; but its real origin may be a nineteenth-century popular book on
Benedictine life written by a German abbot called Maurus Wolter.
oratio
(Latin) prayer.
3/9, when one prays
Bless the body
cf. George Macdonald, “The God of the Living”,
in Unspoken Sermons, I (1867):
It is by the body that we come into contact with
Nature, with our fellow-men, with all their revelations to us. It is through
the body that we receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of love, of
beauty, of science. It is through the body that we are both trained outward
from ourselves, and driven inward into our deepest selves to find God. There is
glory and might in this vital evanescence, this slow glacier-like flow of
clothing and revealing matter, this ever uptossed
rainbow of tangible humanity. It is no less of God's making than the spirit
that is clothed therein.
The passage appears as Nr. 52, “The Body”, in
Lewis’s George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946).
4
4/2, The ideal opening
“making your requests known to God”
Philippians 4:6. “Let your request be made known to God.”
“for your heavenly Father knows you need all these things”
Matthew 6:31-32. “Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or,
What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (...) For your
heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all
these things.”
4/6, We are always
“freedom is willed necessity”
??
4/7, to put ourselves
it is by the Holy Spirit that we cry “Father”
Romans 8:15, Galatians 4:6.
4/8, but i
should
Buber
Martin Buber (1878-1965), German-Jewish philosopher of religion; author of Ich
und Du (1923), which was published in English as I and Thou in
1937. See note to 2/13 on “the Wholly Other”.
4/9, This talk of
“Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou”
cf. note to “This also is Thou” etc. in 14/6, below.
4/12, how important must
what old writers call our “frame”; that is, our “frame of mind”
The Oxford English Dictionary (i.v. Frame sb.
II.6) “Mental or emotional disposition or state (more explicitly, frame of
mind, soul etc.)” One example in the OED comes from Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe (1719), “In this thankful
frame I continued”. The word, or phrase, appears to have acquired this meaning
in the second half of the seventeenth century.
4/14, we all know
St. Augustine ... “ordinate loves”
The City of God XV.22. “So that it seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of
virtue to say, it is the order of love...” The original Latin runs “Unde mihi videtur, quod definitio brevis et vera virtutis ordo est
amoris”; thus the original phrase is ordo amoris. When Lewis used it twenty years earlier in The
Abolition of Man (ch. 1, note 11), he gave a
precise reference and indeed mentioned two other places in De civitate Dei (IX.5 and XI.28) where the same idea is
expressed.
5
5/5, and here can
Queen Victoria didn’t like “being talked to as if she were a public
meeting”
The British queen Victoria (r. 1831-1901) is reputed to have said this –
“he speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting” – with reference to her
conversations with William Gladstone, one of Great Britain’s famous prime
ministers during her reign. The alleged quotation appears in G. E. W. Russell’s
Collections and Recollections (1898), chapter XIV, where it is in fact
pointed out how unlikely it is that Gladstone should ever have behaved
uncivilly towards the Queen.
5/8, the peg for
“the same mind which was also in Christ”
Philippians 2:5.
5/10, but more than
Lycidas
A poem of John Milton, on the early death of a friend who perished at sea
(1637).
5/13, and the joke
“Unless a seed die...”
John 12:24. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall
into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it
die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
5/14, i expect we
“things requisite and necessary as well for the body as for the soul”
Book of Common Prayer, “Morning Prayer”; opening address after the first
Sentences. “Dearly beloved brethren ... although we ought at all times humbly
to acknowledge our sins before God; yet ought we most chiefly so to do, when we
assemble and meet together to render thanks for the great benefits that we have
received at his hands, to set forth his most worthy praise, to hear his most
holy Word, and to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well
for the body as the soul...”
what Burnaby calls the naïf view of prayer … Our
Lord’s teaching
John Burnaby (1891-1978), Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and Regius
Professor Emeritus of Divinity, contributed an essay on “Christian Prayer” to
the 1962 volume Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding,
edited by Alec R. Vidler (see various notes on chapters 6, 7 and 11, below).
As summarized in the essay’s “Synopsis” (Soundings,
p. 220), Burnaby’s overall argument is that “a Christian theology of prayer
must be grounded not on metaphysical assumptions but on the nature of the
Gospel”: if we understand “God’s saving work as the work of love, taking effect
through men who are united to God by the Spirit of Christ”, then prayer is to
be seen as “affirmation of this union, not appeal for God’s action
conceived as separate from all that man can do.”
The notion of “naïveté” appears in the following
passage from sections II and III of the essay (pp. 223-4):
No doubt the life of Christ was (in the famous
phrase which Origen applied to the life of sainthood) “one great unbroken
prayer”. But his recorded teaching assumes that when we pray it is to ask God
for what we need. … All the evidence of the Acts and the Epistles goes to show
that prayer in the primitive Church was what we should expect it to have been – in St Paul’s words, the making of our requests known
to God, requests which there was no thought of confining to “spiritual” blessings (...). This at least was what the early Church meant by proseuché, though we can be sure that thanksgiving
and praise had their due place in its devotions. (...)
For the present
we need only note the complete simplicity or naïveté with which
the Apostolic Church did its praying. To make “in everything” our requests known to God was
for St Paul the cure for all worldly worry (...) and no more for Paul than for
Jesus himself was the belief that the Father knoweth
what things we have need of, before we ask, the least discouragement to prayer.
Passages in later chapters of Malcolm seem to confirm that Lewis is
in effect accepting Burnaby’s term, “naïveté” (see note to 11/5, below), as
well as Burnaby’s point (see note to 7/1, on Gethsemane).
5/16, i was never
Juvenal ...
numinibus vota exaudita malignis
From Satires X, 111, by the Roman
poet Juvenal (c. 60-140). Lewis quoted this same line in his essays
“Petitionary Prayer: A problem without an answer” (1953) and, in translation
only, in “Work and Prayer” (1945): “Enormous prayers which Heaven in anger
grants.” Juvenal was perhaps the best-published ancient Roman author during the
Middle Ages after Cicero, Vergil and Ovid. He wrote his sixteen Satires in the
character of an eloquent grumpy old man. Nr. 10 is about the vanity of human
wishes, especially desires for power, honour and wealth. In the fragment quoted
he is talking of Julius Caesar, Pompeius and Crassus:
What was it that overthrew the Crassi, and the
Pompeii, and him [i.e. Caesar] who brought the conquered Quirites
under his lash? What but lust for the highest place pursued by every kind of
means? What but ambitious prayers granted by unkindly Gods?
(Prose translation by G. G. Ramsay, 1918)
5/17,
i don’t often
de jure
(Latin) according to law, by right, legally.
de facto
(Latin) according to the deed, whether legally recognized or not.
“beauty so old and new”
Augustine, Confessions X.27 (38).
“light from behind the sun”
from “The Calling of Taliessin”,
a poem in The Region of the Summer Stars (1944) by Charles Williams. “In
a light that shone from behind the sun; the sun / was not so fierce as to
pierce where that light could”. Lewis quoted these lines as his motto for
chapter XIV, “The Grand Miracle”, in his book Miracles (1947).
6
6/2 about vidler
Vidler
Alec R. Vidler (1899-1991), Anglican theologian; warden of St Deiniol’s
Library, Hawarden 1939-48; editor of monthly journal Theology 1939-1964;
canon of St George’s Chapel, Windsor 1948-56; Dean of King’s College, Cambridge
1956-1966.
the programme which created all that scandal
A television programme on Sunday 4 November 1962, mentioned by John
A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich (see notes to 3/1-2) in the preface to
his book Honest to God (1963):
I believe, regretfully, that Dr Alec Vidler’s
conclusion in a recent broadcast, which was bitterly attacked, is only too
true: “We’ve got a very big leeway to make up, because there’s been so much
suppression of real, deep thought and intellectual alertness and integrity in
Church.”
Soundings
This volume, subtitled Essays concerning Christian understanding and edited by
Vidler (see notes above), was published in 1962. After four reprints a
paperback edition appeared in 1966. In the introduction Vidler placed the book
in an Anglican tradition that includes Essays and Reviews (1860), Lux
Mundi (1889), Foundations (1912) and Essays Catholic and Critical
(1926). He defined the task of the present group of authors as “to try to see
what the questions are that we ought to be facing in the nineteen-sixties.”
Soundings contains eleven essays by nine
Anglican theologians, most of them from Cambridge: John Burnaby (mentioned by
Lewis in 5/14 and 7/7), J. S. Habgood, G. W. H. Lampe, Hugh Montefiore, Howard Root, J.
N. Sanders, Ninian Smart, H. A. Williams, G. F. Woods and the editor.
Afterwards Vidler wrote about the backgrounds and effects of both Soundings,
Robinson’s Honest to God, and similar though technically unrelated
publications of the period in a little book published in 1965, 20th Century
Defenders of the Faith, chapter 5, “Christian Radicalism”, and in his
autobiography, Scenes from a Clerical Life (1977), 176-180.
Much of what
he quotes from F. D. Maurice and Bonhoeffer seems to me very good
Lewis is referring to Vidler’s essay, “Religion and the National Church”,
the final piece in Soundings (pp. 239-263). Vidler is quoting passages
from Maurice and Bonhoeffer where these authors are exposing “religion” as –
what Vidler calls – “man’s most subtle substitute for God’s own revelation of
himself”; Bonhoeffer actually proclaimed a “religionless
Christianity”.
John Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872), English
theologian and writer, was Professor of English history and literature at
King’s College, London from 1840 onwards and from 1846 that same college’s
first Professor of Theology as well, until he was dismissed on charges of
heterodoxy following the publication of his Theological Essays (1854).
He combined an ardent belief in social reform with adherence to the Church of
England and thus became an early Christian Socialist. Alec Vidler wrote three
books about him. For a short study of Maurice (along with Alexander John Scott)
as an important inspiration of Lewis’s “master”, George MacDonald (1824-1905),
see Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, “How shall we hen read? George MacDonald and the
beginnings of a discipline called ‘English Literature’”, in The Undiscovered
C. S. Lewis, ed. Bruce R. Johnson (2021), 88-111.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a German
theologian who spent the last few years of his life in prison and was executed
by the nazis. He was held in high esteem by many liberal theologians during the
second half of the twentieth century.
his own arguments for the Establishment
Vidler in Soundings, pp. 261-263:
As regards the Church of England’s relation to
the state (...) we may well prefer to maintain the status quo, and to be
satisfied with minor adjustments, until we are much clearer about what we want
to put in its place. (...) A national church (...) is a standing witness to the
fact that man, every man, is a twofold creature with a twofold allegiance,
whether he realizes it or not. (...) A man is not only a political creature,
but also a spiritual being (...). Then again, the constitutional conjunction of
church and state is a sign that the authority of the state is neither final nor
absolute. (...) Once more, the constitutional recognition of a national church,
whose ministry and services are available throughout the country, is a
practical acknowledgment that human beings need more than the state can ever do
for them (...).
6/3, at any rate
Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons
John Henry Newman (1801-1890), English theologian who entered the Roman
Catholic Church in 1845 and was made a cardinal in 1877. His Apologia pro
Vita Sua is one of the English classics of spiritual autobiography. The Parochial
and Plain Sermons were published in eight volumes in 1834-1843 and thus
date from his pre-Catholic days. The remark about Heaven as a church is in the
first volume’s first sermon, “Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness”.
6/5, religion, nevertheless, appears
Simone Weil
French philosopher (1909-1943), often considered to be one of the great
modern Christian mystics although she never formally joined any church or
religion. He writings did not become widely known until after her death.
6/6, none of them
“When the means are autonomous they are deadly”
Charles Williams, “Bors to Elaine: On the King’s Coins”, line 69, in Taliessin through Logres (1938). “When the
means are autonomous, they are deadly; / when words escape from verse they
hurry to rape souls; / when sensation slips from intellect, expect the
tyrant...”
6/7, i read in
Voilà l’ennemi
This French phrase got currency from its use by the French politician Léon
Gambetta in his speech before the National Assembly on 4 May 1877. He was
defending the newly founded secular French republic against the forces of
political and social conservatism as supported by the Catholic Church: Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi!
6/8, one must, however
D-Day ... Normandy
Metaphors derived from the Allied attack on nazi-occupied Western Europe in
June 1944.
6/9, but i
suspect
the “faith once given”
See note to 22/2.
6/10, well, he certainly
“outgrown”
or “survive chiefly as venerable archaisms of as fairy stories” ...
continued guidance of the Holy Spirit
Vidler in Soundings, 254-255:
Many of the religious elements in historic
Christianity and much that has gone under the name of religion may thus be
outgrown, or survive chiefly as venerable archaisms or as fairy stories for
children, and we cannot tell in advance how they will be replaced or which of
them will need to be replaced. We are at the beginning of a period in which we
must be willing to prove all things and to hold fast only to what is good. It
would be foolish to discard what is old until it is manifestly otiose, or to suppose
that new forms of Christian spirituality and community will develop and commend
themselves quickly. The qualities mainly called for are openness to the future,
a willingness to travel light or in the dark, patience and imagination in
experiment, a large toleration of variety and diversity based not on
indifference but on trust in the continued guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Vidler calls it “the fact”
See quotation of Vidler’s “arguments for the Establishment”, above.
6/12, many modern psychologists
malades imaginaires
(French) “imaginary patients”. From the play Le malade
imaginaire (1673) by the French playwright
Molière.
6/14, i don’t at all
St. John: “If our heart condemn us...”
I John 3:8.
6/17, if i
am right
Herbert, “Peace, prattler”
George Herbert (1593-1633), English poet and divine; the words quoted are
the beginning of his poem “Conscience”.
7
7/1, if you meant
the psalm: “Lord, I am not high minded”
Psalm 131:1 (Coverdale).
Our Lord in Gethsemsane made a petitionary prayer
Matthew 26:39, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”
Also in Mark 14:36 and Luke 22:42.
See note to 5/14, above, on the term “naïf” as
borrowed from Burnaby. A later passage in Burnaby’s 1962 essay “Christian
prayer” (Soundings, p. 234) could almost have been written by Lewis:
It would indeed reduce our theology of prayer to
an absurdity if it followed that the most instinctive and universal cry of the
troubled soul – “Lord, help me!” – could not, since charity seeketh
not her own, have the true character of Christian prayer. The disciple is not
above his master, and it should be enough to recall the prayer of Gethsemane.
7/3, the servant is
the servant is not greater … than the master
John 13:16, 15:20. “The servant is not greater than his lord.” Also quoted
in the next chapter.
7/7, another
argument
Another
argument, put up (but not accepted) by Burnaby in
Soundings … a predictable world … God must be in this respect un-free
On pp. 225-226 of Soundings, Burnaby writes,
The
thoughtful Christian … will have learnt to take for granted the observable
uniformities of the natural world, and to attribute the unpredictable character
of human history to the existence in men of a real power of deliberate choice
and effective action. He will regard human freedom and moral responsibility as
a necessary corollary of belief in a God whose relation to men is to be
conceived in the terms of Christ’s teaching and he will recognize that such
freedom could only have purposeful exercise in the stable environment of a
world whose processes are subject to an order that is discoverable. He will be
disposed to think that if God has given us both freedom and the means of
controlling our environment, he intends us to use both. Yet he will find in the
Church’s prayers what seems to be a disavowal of this freedom, and an appeal to
God to replace it by action of his own.
The conclusion mentioned by Lewis, that “Therefore … God must be in this
respect un-free”, is not mentioned by Burnaby; and the argument as “put up” by
Burnaby is not, as Lewis suggests, about a “predictable world”. Lewis’s
recognition that Burnaby doesn’t himself “accept” the argument actually reflects a similar wish in both men
to avoid a clear stance on Determinism as part of their present lines of
thought. However, these lines are altogether different, and Lewis appears to
give a little twist and extension to Burnaby’s non-accepted argument so as to
make it properly disputable, and a springboard for his own further thought.
Lewis is making a practical and philosophical point
about predictability; Burnaby makes a theological point about many of “the
Church’s prayers”. What Burnaby rejects is, in fact, the way these prayers
appear to “disavow” human freedom; he objects to their “thorough-going
Augustinianism”, which he thinks is bound to reduce the meaning of prayer to
its “reflexive” effect, that is, to the psychological effect of prayer on the
praying person themselves. Yet, as Burnaby reflects, “If we are to pray as
Christians, we must be able to pray for others, and to believe that our prayer
can help them” (226-7). See note to 5/14 on Burnaby for his summarized answer
to this problem.
7/11, later
in his
Later in his
essay Burnaby seems to suggest that human wills are the only radically
unpredictable factor in history … predictability of events … necessary to human
life
Lewis is probably referring to a passage on pp.
232-233 of Burnaby’s essay:
The Christian faith implies …: (a) that the kingdom of God is to
be promoted in human history by no other power than the power of love, and (b)
that the power of God’s love takes effect in human history in no other way than
through the wills and actions of men in whom that love has come to dwell.
As in the previous reference to Burnaby, Lewis
seems to subtly modify Burnaby’s point so as to include an overall
“predictability if events” and serve as a springboard for his own point.
Bradley
Francis H. Bradley (1846-1924), English philosopher, leading figure of the
Idealistic, neo-Hegelian school; Ethical Studies, one of his main works,
was published in 1876.
Arnold
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), English social, religious and literary critic
and poet. His works of religious criticism include St Paul and Protestantism
(1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1875)
and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877).
Attila
King of the Huns in the first half of the fifth century. He devastated
large parts of the Roman Empire.
8
8/2, not of course
Macbeth ...“He has no children”
Thus Macduff about Malcolm, when the latter suggests a silly remedy against
grief after Macduff has heard that his wife and children have been murdered;
Shakespeare, Macbeth IV.3, 216.
8/3, the
temptation is
G.P.
General Practitioner, a non-specialist physician or family doctor
8/8, at the end
an angel appeared “comforting” Him
Luke 22:43.
8/9, we all
try
the servant is not greater than the master
John 13:16, 15:20. “The servant is not greater than his lord.” Also quoted
in the previous chapter.
8/10, does not every
raison d’état
(French) reason of State, i.e. “political expediency” from a national
government’s point of view.
“Why hast thou forsaken me?”
Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34.
8/12, as for the last
It is saints ... who experience the “dark night”
The Spanish saint and mystic John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz,
1542-91) wrote a famous eight-stanza poem, , which title is usually rendered in
English as “Dark Night of the Soul”. Two of the saint’s prose works took the
form of (unifnished) commentaries on this poem; the
second of these has usually carried the same title as the poem.
one of the Seventeenth Century divines
Thomas Traherne (1637-74) in Centuries of Meditations, Second Century, Nr. 20.
Hence we may
know why God appeareth not in a visible manner, is
because He is invisible. Those who are angry with the Deity for not showing
Himself to their bodily eyes are not displeased with the manner of revelation,
but that He is such a God as He is. By pretending to be visible He would but
delude the World which as Plato learnedly observeth
is contrary to the nature of the Deity. But though He is invisible, yet say
they, He may assume a body, and make Himself visible therein. ...
“sensible consolation”
A term from Catholic mystical or pastoral theology; “sensible” here of
course means “(almost) palpable”.
tempering the wind to the shorn lamb
From Les Premices (Geneva 1594), a
collection of “epigrammatized proverbs, or proverbialized epigrams” by the
French scholar and publisher Henri Estienne (1531-98). This is No. 47, “Dieu mesure le vent à la brebis tondue”, famously quoted near the end of Lawrence Sterne’s Sentimental
Journey (1768) in the section called
“Maria”.
Niebühr
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), American Protestant theologian. (The umlaut
mark in Niebühr is wrong.)
evil is inherent in finitude
Niebuhr, ... ??
8/14, certainly we were
the ancient Persians
as described by Herodotus (??) – cf. Lewis’s
diary note for 20 October 1923, as published in All My Road Before Me (1991), p. 276.
9
9/3, surely there’s no
how astonished St. Augustine was...
See Augustine’s Confessions VI.3. Lewis also referred to this
passage many years before in The Allegory of Love, chapter 2, page 64:
“In such a passage one has the solemn privilege of being present at the birth
of a new world. Behind us is that almost unimaginable period, so relentlessly
objective that in it even ‘reading’ (in our sense) did not exist. (...) Before
us is (...) the world of (...) the solitary reader who is accustomed to pass
hours in the silent society of mental images evoked by written characters.”
9/6, the real problems
God, we believe, is impassible
From Latin impassibilis and Greek apathēs, “not susceptible to pain or injury”; also
“not having or revealing emotions”.
The idea of God’s impassibility is a prime example
of pagan Greek influence on early Christianity; it entered Christian theology
possibly through the work of Philo of Alexandria. The word’s theological
meaning has always shaded into “immutable” or, more specifically, “not
susceptible to change by external causes”, which is in fact what Lewis clearly
means in the present context. Why he chose the more ambiguous word “impassible”
rather than “immutable” is hard to see. The idea that God knows no pain or emotions
was abandoned in the course of the twentieth century by most Christians and
theologians – including Lewis, as appears from some remarks in chapter 17. His
somewhat apodictic statement, here, that “we believe” in God’s impassibility is
all the more curious since the word doesn’t appear in any obviously
authoritative creed – while the more relevant word “immutable” does appear in
the Westminster Confession of 1648.
See also Lewis’s book Miracles, second
half of chapter XI, from the paragraph starting “Why, then do the mystics
talk...”:
...the reason why God has no passions is that
passions imply passivity and intermission. The passion of love is something
that happens to us, as “getting wet” happens to a body: and God is exempt from
that “passion” in the same way that water is exempt from “getting wet”.
9/7, it is
quite
post hoc is not propter hoc
(Latin phrases) “after” is not “because of”.
9/11, one attempt to
“Work out your own salvation ... For it is God ...”
Philippians 2:12-13. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good
pleasure.”
Pelagianism ... Augustinianism
Pelagius (c. 360-c. 420), a British monk condemned for heresy
in 417, rejected the idea of original sin and taught that humans take their
first steps towards salvation by their own efforts without the help of divine
grace. His contemporary St. Augustine defended the opposing, orthodox view of
man.
9/12, in the end
“whereto serves Mercy but to confront the visage of offence?
Shakespeare, Hamlet III.3, 46-47.
10
10/1, i see your point
“Pure Act”
Translation of a medieval Latin theological term denoting the absolute
perfection of God. It specially referred to the absence, in Him, of any
distinction between “potentiality” and “actuality”, i.e. of possibilities and
their realization. God, as Actus purus, was
thought to be from eternity making all His potentiality into actuality. All
this goes back to Aristotle’s idea of a “Prime Mover”. In the Metaphysics
(XII) this Prime Mover is called “God”, causing movement by being an object of
desire and love; but in the Physics Aristotle conceives it as a mere
postulate from his theory of “four causes” and from his own distinction between
potentiality and actuality – an unmoved mover, knowing nothing outside itself,
which must have set the universe in eternal motion.
10/2, i suggest two
“de-mythologising” Christianity
From the German word Entmythologisierung;
a theological trend of the middle twentieth century championed and exemplified
by the New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976).
10/3, i agree that
Pascal’s magnificent dictum
Pensées 513.
“Pourquoi Dieu a établi la prière. 1º Pour communiquer à ses créatures
la dignité de la causalité. 2º Pour nous apprendre de qui nous tenons la
vertu. 3º Pour nous faire mériter les autres vertus par le travail. Mais,
pour se conserver la prééminence, il donne la prière à qui lui plaît.”
10/4, what we must
Pope’s maxim
Alexander Pope (1688-1744), An Essay on Man I.5, 145-146.
10/8, how should the
“To generalise is to be an idiot”, said Blake
The English poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827) wrote a lot of angry
marginal notes in the first volume of his copy of The Works of Sir Joshua
Reynolds, edited by Edmond Malone (1797). The present comment does not
concern a remark of Reynolds but one quoted from Edmund Burke in a note to the
1798 Supplement to Vol. I, second edition (p. lxxxiv; this is p. xcviii in the
edition Blake used). Burke says, “He [Reynolds] was a great generalizer, and
was fond of reducing every thing to one system, more
perhaps than the variety of principles which operate in the human mind and in
every human work, will properly endure. But this disposition to abstractions,
to generalizing and classification, is the great glory of the human mind, that
indeed which most distinguishes man from other animals; and is the source of every thing that can be called science. I believe, his
early acquaintance with Mr. Mudge of Exeter, a very
learned and thinking man, and much inclined to philosophize in the spirit of
the Platonists, disposed him to this habit.”. Blake commented: “To Generalize
is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit. General
Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess.” See Blake’s Complete
Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford U.P. 1972), p. 451.
infinite lucidity of this vision
The word “this” is probably a misprint
for “His”. Read “How should God sully the infinite lucidity of His vision with
such makeshifts?”
11
11/3, how is this
fait accompli
(French) an “accomplished” fact, i.e. an unalterable fact or irreversible
deed.
“That which they greatly feared has come upon them”
Job 3:25.
11/5, it is easy
about “crudely” or “naïvely”
petitionary prayer
See note on what Burnaby calls the naïf view of prayer in 5/14,
above. While the quotations marks may indicate a certain reluctance on Lewis’s
part to use the terms, likely enough in using naïvely he was still
remembering Burnaby’s use and, again, accepting it (see note to 5/14). See also
Lewis’s remark a little further on in the present chapter: “we had better not
talk about the view of prayer embodied in Mark XI, 24 as ‘naïf’ or
‘elementary’.”
11/7, shall we then
Vidler’s principles ... “venerable archaisms”
Another reference to the passage from Soundings already quoted in
the note to 6/10, “outgrown...”. For Vidler, see notes to 6/2. A more
general statement of his principles may be found on page 121 of his little book
20th Century Defenders of the Faith (1965).
What makes
me tick or keeps me going as a Christian is ... the
whole Christian movement in history of which I am thankful to be an inheritor,
into which I am grateful to have been received, which I want to see continuing,
however much it needs to be further developed and enlarged, reformed or
refined.
Incidentally, this little book by Vidler makes, in spite of its title, no
mention at all of C. S. Lewis.
“Tekkies”
Detective stories.
11/8, before going any
Huck Finn
Huckleberry Finn, hero of Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884). Lewis is referring to the beginning of chapter 3,
with further ruminations on the subject shortly after the beginning of chapter
8. The lady in question is not in fact Widow Douglas but her sister, Miss
Watson.
11/10, it seems to me
“Help thou my unbelief”
Mark 9:24. “And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said
with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”
11/11, how or why
“evidence” ... of things not seen
Hebrews 11:1. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence
of things not seen.”
12
12/1, my experience is
Rose Macaulay
See second notes to 2/2 and 2/3.
the Imitation
i.e. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (cf. note to 2/1).
Lewis may be referring to several passages in Book I.20, “Of the love of
solitude and silence”.
“not addressed to my condition”
Lewis uses the same expression in the previous 11/8 as well as in 16/6. The
phrase, in its original form “spoken to my condition,” seems to have entered
the English language through the Journal
of George Fox (1624-1691), founder of the Quaker movement:
... I left the separate preachers also, and those esteemed the most
experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to
my condition. ... I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus,
that can speak to thy condition”; and when I heard it my heart did leap for
joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could
speak to my condition, namely, that I might give Him all the glory ... I
cried to the Lord, saying, “Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted
to commit those evils?” and the Lord answered, “That it was needful I should
have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions!”
–– George Fox:
An Autobiography, ed. Rufus Jones (1908), Chapter 1, ‘Boyhood –
A Seeker, 1624-1648’; further examples occur in chapters 4, 6 and 8.
12/3, i have only just
our Vicar
The Rev. Ronald Edwin Head (1919-1991), who became the curate of Lewis’s
church in Headington Quarry, Oxford in 1952, and its Vicar in 1956. See his
contribution, “C. S. Lewis as a Parishioner”, in C. S. Lewis and His Circle, edited by Roger White, Judith Wolfe and
Brendan Wolfe (Oxford U.P. 2015), pp. 184:
Letters to
Malcolm, number 12, reports on an
actual conversation on prayer with me.
12/6, the
second is
Mystics (it
is said) …
Since Lewis certainly read John Burnaby’s 1962
essay on “Christian Prayer” in Soundings (see note to 5/14, above)
shortly before he wrote Malcom, he may be here echoing a passage from
that essay’s opening section (pp. 221-222):
“The divine” may be
approached as an infinite sea, in which the solitary being of the individual
can be embraced or even absorbed … The astonishing similarity in the language
with which experts in this kind of prayer, belonging to religious traditions which
appear to have little else in common, have described their experience, has
encouraged the belief that “mystical” religion is the only one that can aspire
to universality. Moreover, the fact that mysticism can flourish with little or
no dependence upon particular dogmatic or doctrinal systems has seemed to give
it an immunity from sceptical criticism such as none
of the (so-called) “positive” religions can claim.
And when he hath the kernel eate...
Last two lines of John Donne’s poem “Community”.
12/7, i am doubtful
Plotinus
Greek/Roman Neoplatonist philosopher (205-270) with mystical leanings. His
works were posthumously edited under the title Enneads.
Lady Julian
Julian of Norwich (c. 1342-1413), English anchoress. Her Revelations
of Divine Love is a series of meditations on sixteen mystical experiences
she had in May 1373, written twenty years after the event.
St. John of the Cross
Juan de la Cruz (1542-91), Spanish Carmelite monk, poet and mystic.
It may be that the gulfs will wash them down
Tennyson, “Ulysses” (1842), 62-63.
12/8, i do not at all
Davy Jones’s locker
A euphemism meaning the bottom of the ocean, a sailor’s grave.
12/10, you may wonder
a mortal glimpse of death’s immortal rose”
“The Imagination’s Pride”, line 27, in The Veil and other poems
(1921) by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956).
12/11, there can be
in St.
Paul’s sense, “flesh” and not “spirit”
cf. for example Paul’s epistle to the Romans, chapter 8; or to the
Galatians, chapter 5 from verse 16 onward.
“cross-fodder”
a play on the term “cannon-fodder”, used for soldiers who are very likely
to be soon killed by enemy fire while their superiors hardly care.
12/12, turning now to
And the other is like unto it.
Cf. Matthew 22:37-39 (KJV)
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is
the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself.
13
13/1, i’ve just found
They tell me, Lord...
In a letter to Bede Griffiths of 4 April 1934, Lewis copied this poem in a
slightly different version and said he wrote it “over a year ago”. See Collected
Letters II, p. 137.
13/2, Dream makes it
If the Holy Spirit speaks in the man...
Probably a reference to Romans 8:26-27.
13/3, you remember the
Owen [Barfield], Saving the Appearances
Owen Barfield (1898-1997) was C. S. Lewis’s chief intellectual
sparring partner in the 1920s and an intimate
friend for the rest of his life. Barfield’s book Saving the Appearances,
about “the evolution of consciousness”, was published in 1957. Lewis is
referring to the beginning of that book’s chapter XXIII, “Religion” (pp.
156-158).
Arnold ... “enisled” from one another in “the sea of life”
From the first line of Matthew Arnold’s poem “To Marguerite: Continued”
(1852; also called “Isolation” II). “Yes! In the sea of life enisled, / With
echoing straits between us thrown, / Dotting the shoreless watery wild, / We
mortal millions live alone.”
13/4, a question at one
Actus purus
See note to 10/1, Pure Act.
13/5, we must, no
“Whither shall I go then from thy presence?...”
Psalm 139:7. “Whither shall I flee from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee
from thy presence?” Lewis is quoting Coverdale’s translation of the Psalms
(139:6) as included in the Book of Common Prayer.
13/7, where
there is
fiat
(Latin) “Let there be...”, as in Genesis 1, Fiat lux, “Let there be
light” and Fiat firmamentum, “Let there be a
firmament”.
13/9, in pantheism god
“all in all”
I Corinthians 15:28. “And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall
the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that
God may be all in all.”
13/10, one must be
“He came
down from Heaven” can almost be transposed into “Heaven drew earth
up into it”
From the Nicene Creed (325 a.d.), fourth article.
Qui propter
nos homines et propter nostram salutem descendit de cælis.
Who for us
men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven.
Lewis’s
words have a striking affinity with what he had recently written in a passage
added to his 1946 sermon “Transposition”
as reissued in 1962:
You can put it which ever
way you please. You can say that by Transposition our humanity, senses and all,
can be made the vehicle of beatitude. Or you can say that the heavenly bounties
by Transposition are embodied during this life in our temporal experience. But
the second way is the better.
–– They Asked for a Paper (1962), p. 179
14
14/1, i won’t admit
to create is defined as “to make out of nothing,” ex nihilo
??
14/2, nor am i
suggesting
a theory of “emanations”
i.e. a philosophical idea on how every stage or level of reality
necessarily produces the next. “Emanation” is, in this context, the word
specifically used for the way this process was conceived in the Neoplatonist
philosophy of Plotinus (see note to 12/7, above).
14/4, now the very
the parable of the sheep and the goats
Matthew 25:32ff.
14/5, meanwhile, i
stick
Owen’s view
i.e. Owen Barfield’s view, already referred to in 13/3.
14/6, therefore of each
“This also is Thou: neither is this Thou”
Lewis makes further use of this saying in chapters 4 and 17. In using it he
was following Charles Williams; see, for example, Williams’s theological study He Came Down
From Heaven (1938), chapter 2, par. 17 (as quoted at 21/16, below);
also that book’s penultimate paragraph. The saying also occurs in Williams’s
1937 play, Seed of Adam,
in his 1943 literary study The Figure of
Beatrice, and elsewhere. In the preface to The Descent
of the Dove: A short history of the Holy Spirit in the Church (1939),
Williams notes that
A motto
which might have been set on the title-page but has been, less ostentatiously,
put here instead, is a phrase which I once supposed to come from Augustine, but
I am informed by experts that it is not so, and otherwise I am ignorant of its
source. The phrase is: “This also is Thou; neither is this Thou.” As a maxim
for living it is invaluable, and it – or its reversal –summarizes the history
of the Christian Church.
If Augustine is an unlikely source, a likelier one may be Gregory of
Nazianzus, a Greek Church Father of the third century. His “Dogmatic Poems”
include a Humnos eis Theon, “Hymn
to God”. Lines 12-14 of this sixteen-line Greek poem contain the idea if not
perhaps an exact original for Williams’s phrasing:
Καὶ πάντων τέλος ἐσσὶ, καὶ εἷς, καὶ πάντα, καὶ οὐδεὶς,
Οὺχ ἓν ἑὼν, οὐ πάντα·
πανώνυμε, τῶς σε καλἐσσω,
Τὸν μόνον ἀκλήῖστον;
Latin translation in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, Vol. XXXVII (1857),
col. 507-508:
En
omnium finis es, et unus, et omnia,
et nihil horum,
Non unum es, non omnia ; qui omnia
habes nomina, qui te appelabo
Qui solus appellari nequis ?
English
by Olivier
Clément, 1993):
Thou art the purpose of every
creature. Thou art unique. Thou art each one and art not any.
Thou art not a single creature nor
art thou the sum of creatures; All names are thine; how shall I address thee,
Who alone cannot be named?
Lewis was using the quotation (or paraphrase) at least as early as 1942 in
letter to Daphne Harwood (CL II, 512).
In 1948 he included a short account of Williams’s use of it in Arthurian
Torso, p. 151:
Two
spiritual maxims were constantly present to the mind of Charles Williams: “This
also is Thou” and “Neither is this Thou”. Holding the first we see that every
created thing is, in its degree, an image of God, and the ordinate and faithful
appreciation of that thing a clue which, truly followed, will lead back to Him.
Holding the second we see that every created thing, the highest devotion to
moral duty, the purest conjugal love, the saint and the seraph, is no more than
an image, that every one of them, followed for its own sake and isolated from
its source, becomes an idol whose service is damnation. The first maxim is the
formula of the Romantic Way, the “affirmation of images”: the second is that of
the Ascetic Way, the “rejection of images”. Every soul must in some sense
follow both. The Ascetic must honour marriage and poetry and wine and the face
of nature even while he rejects them; the Romantic must remember even in his Beatrician moment “Neither is this Thou”.
14/7, one is always
Deists
Deism is belief in the existence of God or a Divine Being without a belief
in His ability or readiness to reveal himself or to act in whatever way beyond
the act of creating the universe and setting it in motion.
Woolwich
A reference to Honest to God, a popular book of theology by the
Bishop of Woolwich, John A. T. Robinson (cf. note to 3/1-2, above). It was
published on 19 March 1963 as a cheap paperback and was an instant bestseller.
Two days earlier, Robinson had published a summarizing article entitled “Our
Image of God Must Go” in The Observer, the weekly Sunday edition of The
Guardian. A week later, on 24 March, Lewis was among six invited
ecclesiastic and academic luminaries responding to the article and/or the book.
These responses appeared, under the collective title “Must Our
Image of God Go?”
Later that year, Lewis’s piece, along with one of the
other five, was included in a large collection of responses to Robinson’s book
published as The Honest to God Debate, edited by David L. Edwards.
Lewis’s piece was later reprinted (under the title originally covering the six
responses) in God in the Dock, edited by Walter Hooper (1970), and in
some later collections.
14/8, it is much
“and wield their little tridents”
John Milton, Comus (1634), 27.
14/9, it is well
Burning Bush
Exodus 3:2.
“religion”
Cf. 6/2 on Vidler’s quotes from Maurice and Bonhoeffer regarding
“religion”.
14/10, boehme advises us
Boehme
German mystical writer (1575-1624); variant spellings of his name also
include Böhm or (now usual) Böhme. In a letter of 5 January 1930,
Lewis mentioned what seemed to him at the time a momentous experience while
reading Böhme’s book The Signature of All Things (i.e. an English
translation of De signatura rerum, published
in 1621). His early enthusiasm appears to have cooled down pretty soon; the
present letter-to-Malcolm is one of the rare places in all his subsequent
writings where he mentions Böhme.
Lewis is probably referring to a passage in Böhme’s
two dialogues Of the Supersensual Life, translated by John Ellistone and published in the same 1912 Everyman volume
with Signature. On page 233 of that volume, almost halfway through the
first dialogue, the Master answers the Scholar,
If thou doest once every hour throw thyself by faith beyond all
creatures, beyond and above all sensual perception and apprehension, yea, above
discourse and reasoning, into the abyssal mercy of God, into the sufferings of
our Lord, and into the fellowship of his interceding, and yieldest
thyself fully and absolutely thereinto; then thou shalt receive power from
above to rule over death, and the devil, and to subdue hell and the world under
thee: And then thou mayest subsist in all temptations, and be the brighter for
them.
And on the next page:
… If it were that thy will, O thou of little
courage, could break off itself for one hour, or even but for one half hour,
from all creatures, and plunge itself into that where no creature is, or can
be; presently it would be penetrated and clothed upon with the supreme
splendour of the divine glory, … [etc.]
14/11, oddly enough, what
“prevent us in all our doings”
Book of Common Prayer, fourth Collect after the Offertory. “Prevent
us, O Lord, in all our doings with thy most gracious favour, and further us
with thy continual help...”
15
15/1, i won’t admit
The Silent Woman
Probably a reference to Ben Jonson’s play Epicoene,
or The Silent Woman (1609), where the hero marries Epicoene
because he thinks her quiet enough for him. After the wedding she turns out to
be neither silent nor a woman.
Mullingar
Town in the centre of Ireland, about 100 km east of Dublin, Co. Westmeath.
15/4, st. françois de sales
St. François de Sales begins every meditation
St Francis of Sales (1567-1622), bishop of Geneva during the last twenty
years of his life, founder of the Order of the Visitation. Lewis is referring
to his book Introduction à la vie dévote
(1609, “Introduction to a Devout Life”), Part I, chapters 9 through 18. Each of
these ten consecutive chapters is called a “Meditation” and begins with a
“Preparation” usually consisting of two instructions; the second of these
varies while the first is, invariably, mettes-vous en presence de Dieu (or occasionally devant Dieu); in the same book see also Part
V, chapter 3, on examining one’s own progress in devotion.
Mettez-vous en la présence de Dieu
“Place yourself in the presence of God.” Again quoted in par. 15/10, below,
15/5, what
happens to me
the bright blur
Lewis never used the term “bright blur” except here and in the next two chapters.
He may have borrowed it from Charles Williams, as suggested by a passage in Lewis’s
Arthurian Torso (1948), p. 197:
he [Williams] complained that the word glory in English tended to
mean a “mazy bright blur” whereas “the maze should be exact and the brightness
should be that of a geometrical pattern”.
Lewis is quoting Williams from He Came Down from Heaven (1938), chapter 3, paragraph beginning “It is this law…”
15/10, and
only now
leaps forth from God’s naked hand
The idea of creation being an act of God’s “naked” hand might have been
inspired by a line from Chrétien de Troyes as quoted and translated by Lewis in
The Allegory of Love, II.2 (p. 25): “A! Wher
was so gret beautee maked? / – God wrought hir with His hond
al naked.” (“Don fust
si granz biautez venue? Ja la fist Deus de sa main nue.”)
Verbum supernum prodiens
First line (and title) of a sacramental hymn by St Thomas Aquinas.
15/13, or put it
A stage set is not a dream nor a nonentity
Lewis discussed the subject more or less in the same way in his 1956 essay
“Behind the Scenes” (published in God in
the Dock, 1970 / Undeceptions,
1971 and Essay Collection, 2000).
15/17, of course this
at such a
moment ... Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology: “It reminds me of
straw”
St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1226-74) is reported to have had
increasingly frequent mystical experiences toward the end of his life. One of
these came while he was celebrating Mass on 6 December 1273, after which he
stopped working on his Summa Theologiae. When
urged by his friend Reginald of Piperno to go on he refused, saying “such
things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so
much straw. Now, I await the end of my life after that of my works.” He died
three months later. – While this is certainly the story Lewis is referring to,
it may be doubted whether he had any particular source in mind. I have not
myself seen any unambiguously reliable source.
16
16/4, but i
think that
what has been called “Jesus-worship”
??
16/6. st. ignatius loyola
St. Ignatius Loyola
Spanish ecclesiastic (1491-1556), founder and first general of the Society
of Jesus. His Spiritual Exercises (1548) remained the basic manual for
the training of Jesuits.
compositio loci
(Latin) “composition of place”, or “putting together the scene”. The term
is indeed to be found in Ignatius Loyola’s Exercises, in the “Preludes”
to several meditations.
One of his English followers
??
16/7, the second reason
“Imagination” in the higher sense
This higher sense was famously developed by the poet Samuel Coleridge in
his Biographia Literaria (1817), chapter XIII,
“On the imagination, or esemplastic power”. Coleridge’s definitions were very
briefly repeated by Lewis in Surprised by Joy, chapter 13 (par. 10).
16/11, yet mental images
Blake
For Blake see note to 10/8, To generalize is to be an idiot. Lewis
is referring to a four-line poem called “Eternity”, Nr. 43 in Blake’s
“Note-book” written about 1793.
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
Plato elevated abstract nouns ... into the supreme realities – the Forms
Plato believed that the world as we experience it cannot possibly be the
ultimate reality; everything we meet here must be a mere shadow or reflection
of some unchanging “Idea” (eidos) which can only be grasped by the
intellect. “Forms” is another word for these Ideas.
16/12, i
know very well
in logic God is a “substance”
Lewis is probably thinking primarily of Aristotle’s Categories, i.e.
his classification of all reality. In that context, to be in the category of a
“substance” (ousia) is to have a separate
existence; to have any more features than that is to belong in more categories
as well. In other words, to be a thing is in itself not enough to have any
quality or relation. Cf. note to 19/5, “substance”, below.
“We give thanks to thee for thy great glory”
From the Book of Common Prayer, after the Communion, “Glory be to
God on high,” etc., which is an English rendering of the “Gloria” section in
the Latin Mass. The original Latin behind the words quoted is “Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam.”
16/13, the wave of
“interanimating”
“Mutually inspiring”. This verb was apparently coined by the English poet
John Donne (1572-1631) in his poem “The Ecstasy” (or “Exstasie”),
41-44:
When love
with one another so
interinanimates two soules,
That abler soule, which thence doth flow,
Defects of lonelinesse controules”.
As Helen Gardner notes in her 1965 edition of Donne’s poems, the great
majority of old manuscript sources for this poem have “interinanimates”,
not “interanimates”. Yet the latter variety is the one found in the first
edition (1633). This may well be why the Oxford English Dictionary only
has an entry for “interanimate”, quoting this line of Donne’s as its only
source and dubbing the word “rare”.
C. S. Lewis may have been an uncommonly frequent
user of the word as he used it in at least five of his books – always choosing
the -in- variety, except here in Malcolm. The other books are The
Problem of Pain (ch. 5, penultimate paragraph); Perelandra
(ch. 17, last paragraph of the “Great Dance”
episode); Miracles (ch. 14, par. 26); and Studies
in Words (“Simple” IV, par. 1, and “At the fringe of language” par. 2).
“The higher does not stand without
the lower”
Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ II.10.4. “Summum non stat
sine infimo.”
17
17/1, it’s comical that
Forest of Dean
Scenic area in western England, between the Severn estuary and the southern
tip of the Welsh border; designated as a National Forest Park in 1938.
17/2-3, you first taught
“all the blessings of this life” ...
“the means of grace and the hope of glory”
Phrases from “A General Thanksgiving” in the Book of Common Prayer.
“We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this
life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world
by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.”
You turned to the brook, etc.
cf. George Macdonald, “The Truth”, in Unspoken
Sermons, Series III (1889):
Let him who would know the love of the maker, become sorely athirst,
and drink of the brook by the way – then lift up his heart – not at that moment
to the maker of oxygen and hydrogen, but to the inventor and mediator of thirst
and water, that man might foresee a little of what his soul may find in God.
A longer passage containing this fragment was
selected by Lewis for his George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946) as No.
188, “Water” (where Lewis added capitals for “maker”, “inventor” and “
mediator”, and changed “love” into “ truth”).