Quotations and Allusions in
C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress
compiled
by Arend Smilde (Utrecht, The Netherlands)
Many books by C. S. Lewis are full of allusions to,
and quotations from, a great variety of sources, and many of these are
unspecified. The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis’s first prose work, probably
beats all the others on this score. He certainly wasn’t fully aware of how
often or how much or how literally or indeed whom he was quoting (cf.
third note to chapter V/4, below). Reading and writing appear to have been, for
him, much like breathing in and breathing out.
No list of references could ever be complete in these
circumstances. However, the present list would have been much further from
complete without the results of two earlier attempts, as published in
– Henry Noel, “A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress”, Bulletin
of the New York C. S. Lewis Society Vol. 2 No. 4 (February 1971), pp.
4–13
– Kathryn Lindskoog, Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C. S. Lewis’s
“Pilgrim’s Regress” (Cornerstone Press, Chicago 1995).
I am also grateful for much help received from
– Dr. John Bremer, director of the Philosophical Institute in Kensington,
Maryland, U.S.A. and a chief contributor to the C. S. Lewis
Encyclopedia (1998), who kindly sent me his nearly finished but unpublished
work on the epigraphs at the beginning of each of the ten “Books” in the Regress.
– Mr. Paul Leopold in Stockholm, Sweden, who has kindly and generously helped
me, and continues to do so, by answering what must by now have run into
hundreds of major and minor questions regarding C. S. Lewis – especially The
Pilgrim’s Regress.
Readers interested in the actual details and
chronology of Lewis’s philosophical development may profit from Norbert Feinendegen’s 2018 essay, “The Philosopher’s Progress: C. S. Lewis’ Intellectual Journey from
Atheism to Theism”.
Items for which I am still
unable to find the required details are marked by a double question mark in
bold type: ??. Additions, corrections and suggestions for new entries
are welcome.
Title
The Pilgrim’s Regress: an
Allegorical etc.
The main
title is of course a play on the title of John Bunyan’s famous allegory, The
Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–1684). Lewis’s idea to write his own story as an
allegory was, however, certainly more than simply an idea to take his cue from
Bunyan. At the time of writing his Regress, Lewis had been working for
several years on what was to become The Allegory of Love: A Study in
Medieval Tradition (1936). In chapter II.3 of that book, the rise of
allegory as a literary form in the ancient world of early Christian times is
described as resulting from a “change of moral experience” – an increased
awareness of “the divided will” or bellum intestinum
(“internal war”) within each human being – and a general tendency to
“explore the inner world”. “We cannot speak, perhaps we can hardly think, of an
‘inner conflict’ without a
metaphor; and every metaphor is an allegory in little” (Allegory, p.
60). In time, the best image to express this inner conflict proved to be not an
actual battle, but a journey. Thus “The Pilgrim’s Progress is a
better book than the Holy War
[another book by Bunyan]” (69). Towards the end of his chapter Lewis
makes, in passing, the further claim that allegory in the form of a journey is
allegory “in its best form” (110).
Dedication
Arthur Greeves :
Lifelong friend of C. S. Lewis’s from his birthplace Belfast. Greeves
lived from 1895 till 1966. Their friendship began in 1914 on the basis of a
shared delight in Norse mythology. By that time Lewis was already mostly living
in England. Their correspondence, which in the early years was both copious and
highly confidential, was edited by Walter Hooper and published in 1979 as They
Stand Together, and later included in Lewis’s Collected Letters (3
volumes, 2000–2007 ). Lewis wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress in Arthur
Greeves’s home in Belfast during a two-week holiday which he spent there in
September 1932. The poems included in the last parts of the book had been
written earlier.
Preface
to Third Edition
Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet :
Three English philosophers, Thomas H. Green (1836–1882), Francis H.
Bradley (1846–1924) and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923); major figures in the neo-Hegelian,
“Idealistic” school of philosophy that flourished during their lifetime.
the word “Romanticism” ... should be banished from our
vocabulary : The semantic analysis following here gives a taste of one kind of
scholarship taught and practiced by Lewis in Oxford and Cambridge. In his book Studies
in Words (1960) a few handfuls of words were treated in a similar, if more
comprehensive manner. But no chapter is devoted in that book to Romanticism or
romantic. One reason for this might have been that such analyses were
already available: in 1924 Arthur O. Lovejoy published an address for the
Modern Language Association, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” (reprinted
in Essays on the History of Ideas,
1946) in which he, too, suggested that it would be best to stop using the word
“Romanticism” altogether. A long and
excellent essay on “Four romantic words” was published by Logan Pearsall Smith in
1925.
Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright Shadow of Reality: C. S. Lewis and
the Feeling Intellect (1974), chapter 1, “Sehnsucht”, offers a
detailed discussion of Romanticism as “a genus which contains many
species”, with special reference to Lewis and the way his peculiar intense
longing will or won’t fit in.
Alexandre Dumas, etc. :
The amount of names “dropped” in the course of Lewis’s items
1 through 7 is too large for many further details to be provided here. I
have confined myself to making an alphabetical list of these names,
followed by years of birth and death and, occasionally, one or two other
details which might be found relevant in the present context. –
Ludovico Ariosto
(1454–1533), Italian poet, author of Orlando furioso. /
Charles Baudelaire
(1821–1867), French poet, author of Les fleurs du mal.
Matteo Boiardo (1434–1494),
Italian poet, author of Orlando innamorato.
George
Gordon, Lord Byron
(1788–1824), English poet, author of Don Juan.
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge
(1772–1834), English poet and philosopher, author of Christabel and
Biographia Literaria.
Pierre Corneille
(1606–1684), French dramatist, author of Le Cid.
Alexandre
Dumas
(1802–1870), French novelist, author of Les Trois Mousquetaires.
John Dryden
(1631–1700), English poet and dramatist.
E. R. Eddison (1882–1945), English fantasy writer,
author of The Worm Ouroboros.
Jacob Epstein (1880–1959), English sculptor who
made the memorial stone for Oscar Wilde’s grave in Paris.
Gustave Flaubert
(1821–1880), French novelist, author of Madame Bovary.
Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German writer and poet, author of Die Leiden des
jungen Werther and Faust.
Maurice
H. Hewlett
(1861–1923), English novelist and poet.
Homer (c. 800 b.c.), ancient
Greek poet, alleged author of Ilias and Odyssee.
John Keats (1795–1821), English poet.
D. H.
Lawrence
(1885–1930), English novelist and poet, author of Sons and Lovers.
Thomas Malory (c.
1400–1470), English writer and editor of a large collection of Arthurian
legends called Morte d’Arthur.
Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475–1564), Italian
poet, painter, sculptor and architect.
William Morris
(1834–1896), English poet and painter.
Alfred de
Musset
(1810–1857), French poet and dramatist.
Ossian, legendary Irish bard of the third century a.d.,
presented by James Macpherson (1736–1796) as the author of Fingal and Temora, pseudo-Celtic poems which Macpherson claimed
to have translated from Celtic originals.
Edgar
Allen Poe
(c. 1809–1849), American short-story writer.
Mario Praz (1896–1982), Italian essayist and literary critic, author of The Romantic Agony (La
carne, la morte e il diavolo nella literatura romantica, 1930).
Marcel Proust
(1871–1922), French writer, author
of À la recherche du temps perdu.
Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823),
English writer of “Gothic” novels, i.e. romantic thrillers fashionable in the
late 18th century.
Edmond Rostand
(1868–1918), French poet and dramatist, author of Cyrano de Bergerac.
Denis de Rougemont (1906–1985),
Swiss Francophone writer, author of L’Amour
et l’Occident (1939; translated as Passion and
Society, 1940).
Jean-Jacques
Rousseau
(1712–1778), French writer and philosopher.
Percy
Bysshe Shelley
(1792–1822), English poet, author of Prometheus Unbound and Ode to
the West Wind.
Sir Philip
Sidney, (1554-1586) English
diplomat, soldier, courtier, critic and poet, author of The Arcadia (1590), a prose romance.
Sophocles (c. 496–406 b.c.), ancient
Greek dramatist (tragedian).
Edmund Spenser (c.
1552–1599), English poet, author of The Faerie Queene.
James Stephens
(1882–1952), Irish writer and poet, author of The Crock of Gold.
Torquato Tasso
(1544–1595), Italian poet, author of La Gerusalemme
liberata.
Alfred de
Vigny
(1797–1863), French poet, novelist and dramatist.
Richard Wagner (1813–1883), German opera composer
whose Tristan und Isolde was first performed in 1865.
The Werther:
German sentimental short novel (1774) by Goethe (see above).
Walter Whitman (1819–1892), American
poet.
perilous seas and faerie lands forlorn :
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819).
Maeterlinck : Maurice Maeterlinck
(1862–1959), Belgian Francophone poet and dramatist of the “Symbolist” school
in literature; author of Pelléas et
Mélisande (which served as the basis of an opera by the French composer
Claude Debussy).
Yeats : William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Irish poet and
dramatist.
false Florimels : In The Faerie Queene (1596), the
unfinished long poem by Edmund Spenser, Florimell is
a modest and beautiful maiden who succeeds in keeping all men with dishonourable intentions at a distance. The mother of one
of these provides her son with a “false Florimell” –
who is an easy prey to him and others (see below, fourth epigraph for Book
Two). Later the real Florimell, now married to a
worthy lover, is at last brought face to face with the false Florimell who, as a result, “vanisht
into nought” (F.Q. V.3, 24 ff.). See also Lewis on Spenser in his History
of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 382 (“The false Florimell attracts by being like the true, the true Florimell by being like Beauty itself.”).
Arthur Conan Doyle : English writer
(1959–1930), chiefly known for his detective stories featuring Sherlock Holmes.
After his son was killed in action during the First World War, he got
increasingly immersed in spiritualism. This resulted in books like A History
of Spiritualism (1926).
the Blue Flower : A symbol of romantic
longing in the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen
(1802) by the German writer Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801).
our America, our New-found-land :
John Donne (1572–1631), Elegy XX, “To His Mistress Going to Bed”.
The Well at the World’s End : Fantasy
story by William Morris, published posthumously in 1896.
Kubla Khan : Unfinished poem by
Coleridge, published in 1816 but allegedly written in 1797 after he composed
it, as Coleridge said, in his sleep. Having written fifty-four lines he was
interrupted for some business, after which the rest of the poem had vanished
from his memory and never came back.
the Siege Perilous : A chair at King
Arthur’s Round Table which was strictly reserved for the man who found “the
Grail”. The image returns in chapter VIII/10.
if nature
makes nothing in vain : In a letter of 29 April 1943 Lewis refers to this
maxim in Latin, Natura nil agit frustra,
calling it “a sound principle in philosophy” (Collected Letters II, p. 570). One very likely source is Thomas
Browne, Religio Medici (1642), First Part, section XV
(p. 17 in the Everyman edition of 1906):
Natura nihil agit frustra, is the only indisputed Axiome in Philosophy.
Walter Hooper mentions this
source in a note to the letter, translating the maxim as “Nature does nothing
in vain” – which is more accurate than Lewis’s “Nature makes” etc.
An almost equally likely source is
a passage in Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica,
second edition (1713), p. 357, as quoted by James Jeans in The Mysterious Universe (1930), chapter 4 (p. 83 in the Cambridge
U.P. edition of 1948). The passage in Newton’s work appears at the beginning of
Book III, where a set of “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy” is given. The
original Latin is quoted in English by Jeans as follows:
Rule I. We are to admit no more
causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain
their appearances. – To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does
nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased
with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.
“immortal longings” : See note on this
phrase in chapter V/4.
The Criterion : English literary
journal (1922–1939) edited by T. S. Eliot.
One of them described Romanticism as “spilled religion” :
A reference to the English poet, essayist and philosopher T. E. Hulme
(1883–1917) in his lecture “Romanticism and Classicism”, written around 1911 and published
posthumously in Speculations (1924, edited by Herbert Read; second
edition 1936; Routledge paperback reprint 1960). The words quoted are on page
118:
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.
Hulme, in this essay, was predicting and welcoming the
end of an era of romanticism in poetry – “I think that there is an increasing
proportion of people who simply can’t stand Swinburne. … I prophesy that a
period of dry, hard classical verse is coming” (p. 125, 133).
The volume’s opening essay, “Humanism and the
Religious Attitude”, seems to throw light on the image of “spilled” religion as
Hulme intended it. He attacks “humanism” as the modern world’s unhappy legacy
from the Renaissance and an inevitable course towards its own nadir:
romanticism. As a remedy he proposes a “religious attitude” defined by a
restored “assurance that values are in some way permanent”, a belief in
something like the Christian dogma of “original sin”, and the shedding of all
belief in human perfectibility. The great error of Humanism was to ignore the
“absolute gap” between the “regions of reality” (4) and to forget that “the divine is not life at its intensest” (8). As heirs of
humanism and romanticism, “we introduce
into human things the Perfection that properly belongs only to the divine, and thus
confuse both human and divine” (32). The human sphere is sullied by a religious
belief in “Progress” (35) and by the cult of “Personality, and all the bunkum
that follows from it” (33); the religious sphere by attempts to “explain”
religion and “derive ethical values out of essentially subjective things, like human
desires and feelings” (48-49). Again, in yet another essay he notes that “romanticism confuses both human and divine things by not clearly
separating them. The main thing with which it can be reproached is that it
blurs the clear outlines of human relations whether in political thought or in
the treatment of sex in literature, by introducing into them the Perfection
that properly belongs only to the non-human” (256).
A character perhaps representing Hulme appears as one
of Lewis’s “three pale men”; see first note to chapter VI/2, below.
Scaliger : Julius Caesar
Scaliger (1484–1558), Italian humanist and doctor of medicine, whose writings
include Poetices libri VII (“Seven
Books on Poetics”).
Maenad : i.e. through sensual
pleasures. “Maenad” is another word for Bacchante, a priestess of Bacchus
(Greek: Dionysus), the god of vine, wine and mystic ecstasy.
Mystagogue : i.e. through arousing
your curiosity about mysteries and your desire to be initiated in them. A
mystagogue (from Greek: μυσταγωγός “person who initiates into mysteries”) is a person
who initiates others into mystic beliefs.
“Drive out the bondmaid’s son” :
Genesis XXI.10, where Sarah suggests that Abraham should chase away his
Egyptian slave Hagar and her son.
“Quench not the smoking flax” : Isaiah XLII.3 and XLIII.17.
praeparatio evangelica : (Latin) “Preparation for the Gospel”; title
of a book of Christian apologetics by the early Christian author and church
historian Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 265–339 a.d.). Eusebius tried in this book
to show why the religion of the Jews was preferable to that of the Greeks. In
an unfinished work called Demonstratio evangelica he went on to explain why Christianity had
meanwhile supplanted the Jewish religion.
tearing each other to pieces on
the Don : Lewis is referring to the battle
of Stalingrad (August 1942–February 1943) and its aftermath, when the advance
of German armies in southern Russia began to turn into their slow and
devastating retreat. The Don is the great Russian river which, on the latitude
of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), is not very far to the west of that city.
“the heresies that men leave are hated most” :
Slightly misquoted from Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
II.2, 139–140, Lysander to Hermia: “...the heresies that men do leave / Are
hated most of those they did deceive”. In his later autobiographical book, Surprised
by Joy (1955), chapter XIV, Lewis used the same (mis)quotation, ascribing
it to John Donne.
Prohibition : The years 1920–1933
as a period in the history of the United States of America, when there was an
official ban on “the sale,
production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages” (18th
Amendment to the Constitution)
hearken to the over-wise or to the over-foolish giant :
John Keats (1795–1821), Hyperion: A Fragment (1820) II, 309–310:
“Or shall we listen to the over-wise, / Or to the over-foolish giant, Gods?”
at once rational and animal : A reference to the Latin phrase animal
rationale – a well-known definition of “a human” in some ancient and
medieval philosophers including Seneca and St Thomas Aquinas.
when
allegory is at its best, is approaches myth : cf. The
Allegory of Love, V.1, p. 221,
discussing the conclusion of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis:
We have here one of those rare passages in which
medieval allegory rises to myth, in which the symbols, though fashioned to
represent mere single concepts, take on new life and represent rather the
principles – not otherwise accessible – which unite whole classes of concepts.
All is shot through with meanings which the author may never have been aware
of; and, on this level, it does not matter whether he was or not.
and VI.6, p. 269, on Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of Man:
Nothing is easier or more vulgar than to make
allegories, if we are content with purely conceptual equivalences and do not
care whether the product will satisfy imagination as well.
[N.B. The above passage
on allegory appears in one whole paragraph that was omitted from the 1958 U.S.
edition published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. The omitted paragraph follows
immediately after the words “at once rational and animal”, and is followed by
the last paragraph “Three other cautions…”.]
Jakob Boehme or Behmen : 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, oder Von der Geburt und Bezeichnung aller Wesen,
published in 1621). From his more specific remarks, including some quotations,
it appears that the experience actually concerned a crucial stage that Lewis
was reaching around this time − admitting the distinction between God as
Creator and the universe as his creation (see Collected Letters vol. I, pp. 858-859). However, his early
enthusiasm appears to have cooled down pretty soon: Lewis was hardly ever to
mention Böhme again in any of his later books or letters.
in Trine-land one feels “in
tune with the infinite” : A reference to the American popular mystical
writer Ralph Waldo Trine (1866–1952) and his best-selling book In Tune with
the Infinite (1897).
Book One,
THE DATA
Epigraphs
Plato : The Republic (Politeia)
VI, 505e.
Boethius : The Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione
philosophiae) III.2/p, by the Roman philosopher
and statesman Ancius Manlius Torquatus Severinus
Boethius (480–526 a.d.)
Hooker : Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie
(1594) I (p. 205 in the Dent edition), by English theologian Richard Hooker
(1554–1600).
Chapter I/1, The Rules
pull up
the primroses by handfuls : Cf. George Macdonald in The Seaboard Parish, as quoted by Lewis in his Macdonald Anthology (1946), Nr. 285 (last lines):
... The
flower is not its loveliness, and its loveliness we must love, else we shall
only treat them as flower-greedy children, who gather and gather, and fill
hands and baskets from a mere desire of acquisition.
In his preface to the Anthology Lewis marked this item out as
“particularly admirable ... All romantics are vividly aware of mutability, but
most of them are content to bewail it: for Macdonald this nostalgia is merely
the starting point – he goes on and discovers what it was made for.”
Chapter
I/2, The Island
the other Law in his members :
From the New Testament, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans VII.23. “But I see another
law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into
captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.”
Oreads :
Generic name for mountain nymphs in ancient Greek popular belief.
Chapter
I/4, Leah for Rachel
Leah for Rachel (cf.
II/5) : A reference to the Old Testament story of Jacob and his uncle
Laban, Genesis XXIX. Leah and Rachel are Laban’s two daughters; Rachel is the
younger one, and beautiful. Jacob loves her and he offers to “serve” Laban for
seven years in exchange for Rachel. After these seven years and after his first
night with his wife, Jacob finds that he has been given not Rachel but Leah.
brown girl : Roger Lancelyn Green, a friend and biographer
of C. S. Lewis, has suggested that the “brown girls” in this book might go back
to a dream which Lewis recorded in his diary on 26 April 1922 (C. S. Lewis
at the Breakfast Table and other reminiscences, ed. James Como, new
edition, p. 213). In the published selection from that diary, All My Road
Before Me (ed. Walter Hooper, 1991) this passage has not been included; nor
did Green give the correct date. The original entry for 26 August (not April) 1922
begins as follows:
“I dreamed that W[arnie] and I were being entertained in a palace which I
called ‘Malvern’ and some sort of old boy’s festival was in progress. At the
point at which I begin to remember things this had gone on already for a long
time and we were being ticked off for some misbehaviour
by a very stately woman who forbade us henceforth to speak to the boys. From
her I turned alone and went down a flight of steps into a bathroom – a beautiful
place with innumerable basins whose marble floor, green veined like the deep
sea, could be seen spread out from the top of the stairs. This led out into a
place on the banks of the Thames near Iffley where a sort of regatta was going
on. The next thing I remember was coming back from this to ‘Malvern’. On the
way up I met a big cart, driven by a girl who had no clothes on. She had very
light brown hair: but dark skin, pink brown, like sand. I smiled at her in the
confidential way you might smile at a girl when you’d seen a hole in her
stocking and she smiled back in just the same way, as much as to say ‘Yes I
know. Isn’t it a scream.’ Then I went up back to Malvern and woke up – having
seen the girl again, this time in the distance beyond the river, with other
people in the cart. W and I did most of our packing before breakfast...” (etc.,
as printed in All My Road Before Me).
Chapter
I/5, Ichabod
Ichabod (cf.
II/6) : (Hebrew) “The glory is departed’; from the Old Testament story
in I Samuel IV.21–22. The wife of Pinehas just turned widow calls her newborn child “Ichabod”
because the Ark of God – a portable sanctuary – has been taken by Israel’s
enemies and because her husband as well as her father in law have died.
Chapter
I/6, Quem quaeritis
in sepulchro? Non est hic
Quem quaeritis in sepulchro? Non est hic (cf.
II/7) : (Latin) “Whom do you seek in the grave? He is not here.” From the
Latin liturgy for Easter, based on Luke XXIV.5–6, Quid quaeritis
viventem cum mortuis? non est hic – “Why
seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here.”
Book
Two, THRILL
Epigraphs
Exodus : The second of the Ten Commandments, Exodus XX.4.
Plato : Second Epistle, 312e–313a; a letter addressed to Dionysius, the
ruler of Syracuse, who was puzzled by what Plato called the Idea of the Good.
Dante : Purgatory (Purgatorio,
second part of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia) XVIII, 38–39. Ma
non ciascun segno / È buono,
ancor che buona sia la cera, “But every seal is not a good one, even if
imprinted in good wax” (Robert Hollander’s translation). Lewis’s version is
probably his own, and in any case very free.
Spenser : The Faerie Queene III.8. For the background to this passage
see the note on “false Florimels” in the Preface,
above.
Chapter
II/1, Dixit insipiens
Dixit insipiens : (Latin) “The fool hath said...” Psalm XIV.1
and LIII.1. Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus, “The fool
hath said in his heart, There is no God.”
Going West, perhaps, young
man? : From a famous phrase – “go West, young man, go West!” – in the
writing of Horace Greeley (1811–1872). Greeley was an American journalist and
social reformer, and founder of the New York Tribune. He seems to have
borrowed the phrase from a fellow American journalist, John Soule (1815–1872)
of the Terre Haute Express (Indiana, 1851).
Mr. Enlightenment :
The chapter headline calls him a personification of “Nineteenth Century
Rationalism” although the Enlightenment in a strictly historical sense is the
name of an eighteenth-century movement. Apparently Lewis was thinking of
“enlightenment” in a slightly broader sense which includes its direct spiritual
heirs.
round as an orange :
Probably borrowed from E. Nesbit’s Five Children – and It (1902),
chapter I: “Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful
things, unless they have what they call proof. But children will believe almost
anything, and grown-ups know this. This is why they tell you that the earth is
round like an orange, when you see perfectly well that it is flat and lumpy.”
Lewis quoted this in a letter to his father of 30 October 1930 (Collected
Letters I, p. 680) as he was complaining about popular distortions of
Darwin’s theory of evolution: “The infants seem to be taught that ‘in the
beginning was the Ape’ from whom all other life developed...
Claptrap :
A word coined in the eighteenth century to denote fashionable nonsense,
contrived to elicit applause (as distinguished from nonsense in general).
Chapter
II/2, The Hill
Jehovah-Jirah :
(Hebrew) “The Lord will
provide”, Genesis XXII.14. Abraham was
“tempted” by God with a command to sacrifice his son Isaac. On their way to the
appointed place, Abraham tells Isaac that “God will provide himself a lamb for
a burnt offering.” Just in time “the angel of the Lord” intervenes and keeps Abraham from killing Isaac. Abraham then finds “a ram caught in a
thicket”, which he offers instead of his son; “and Abraham called the name of
that place Jehovah-jireh.”
Chapter
II/3, A Little Southward
To travel hopefully is better
than to arrive : Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus
Puerisque (1881), “El Dorado”; “...to travel
hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.” Lewis criticized this assertion in several places,
e.g. a letter of 28 August 1930 to Arthur Greeves (Collected Letters I,
p. 931). He also used it in The Great Divorce, chapter 5, where it is
put in the mouth of a very different character, the “Episcopal Ghost”.
Chapter
II/5, Leah for Rachel
they told you that the the Landlord’s castle was within you : cf.
Luke 17:21, “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kindgom of God is within you.”
What is truth? :
Gospel according to St John XVIII.38.
What the imagination seizes as
beauty must be truth : From a
letter of John Keats dated 22 November 1817.
Chapter
II/6, Ichabod
“But oh, alas! said he, “so long our bodies
why do we forbear?” etc. : John Donne, “The Exstasie”,
49ff and 68. “But O alas, so long, so farre, / Our
bodies why doe wee forbeare? / They’re ours, though they’are not wee, Wee are / Th’intelligences, they the spheare.
(...) So must pure lovers soules descend / T’affections, and to faculties, / That sense may reach and
apprehend, / Else a great Prince in prison lies.”
Chapter
II/7, Non est Hic
Eschropolis :
In an unpublished letter of 27 December 1943 Lewis to a Miss Barrett
Lewis explains the Greek name:
Eschropolis = Aischropolis from αισχρος ugly, and πολις a city.
Chapter
II/8, Great Promises
Atalanta : A
figure in ancient Greek mythology, daughter of a Boeotian king. She excelled in
foot races and would only marry the man who could outrun her. The man who
finally did so was Melanion, a favourite
of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
Book
Three, THROUGH DARKEST ZEITGEISTHEIM
Title
Through Darkest... : Titles, headings, captions etc. like this
perhaps got their currency in English after Sir Henry Stanley’s two African
travel books, Through the Dark Continent (1878) and In Darkest Africa
(1890) and after William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, had been the
first to respond to this with his own book called Through Darkest England
and How to Get Out (1890).
Zeitgeistheim :
A German word probably coined for this occasion. In the Preface, Lewis
translates it as “habitat of the Spirit of the Age” (Zeit = time, Geist
= spirit, Heim = home or abode).
Epigraphs
Thucydides : History of the Peloponnesian War (Historiae)
III.82–83 by the Greek historian Thucydides (c. 460–c. 395 b.c.) of
Athens.
Anon. : ?? Source not found.
These lines may be Lewis’s own translation of some Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse
poetry, of the same character as the Edda fragments in chapter VI/6 or as the
Guide’s directions at the beginning of chapter X/8. The most conspicuous formal
characteristic of this type of poetry is alliteration.
Shaw : “Apparent Anachronisms”, note to Caesar
and Cleopatra (1901) by George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), English
dramatist.
Chapter
III/1, Eschropolis
Silly Twenties (chapter
headline) : The tags in this and the next two chapter headlines – Silly,
Dirty and Lunatic Twenties – possibly had some currency when
Lewis wrote this, in the early 1930s; more likely they are inventions of his
own. Still in use is another phrase, Roaring Twenties; but this seems to
have exclusively American connotations and not to refer to artistic and
cultural trends in Europe.
Victoriana :
In a letter of 1945 (Collected Letters II, pp. 678–679) Lewis said
this figure was his parody of the English poet Edith Sitwell (1887–1964). He
was probably thinking primarily of Sitwell’s volume Façade (1922).
columbine :
Columbine is a stock figure in traditional English “pantomime”, a kind of
play performed at Christmas time; she is
the sweetheart of Harlequin. Since we know from Lewis that “Victoriana
was Edith Sitwell” (see previous note), the appearance of “a columbine” may be
taken as an allusion to Edith and Osbert Sitwell’s volume of poetry Twentieth-Century
Harlequinade (1915). In his 1945 letter Lewis also wrote that he had later
come to have a higher regard for Edith Sitwell.
an aspidistra in a pot :
The aspidistra became a very popular English houseplant in the late
nineteenth century because it was strong enough to survive the fumes from gas
lighting. The “cast-iron plant”, as it was called, became an almost invariable
item of lower middle and lower class English interiors and thus a symbol of the
kind of life that was supposed to be going on there.
Chapter
III/6, Poisoning the Wells
and left
John in prison : As appears from two
passages in The Allegory of Love, a picture of the Zeitgeist
or Spirit of the Age as a sort of prison came quite naturally to Lewis. “If we
could be free, for a little, of our own Zeitgeist, we might confess
that...” (Allegory II.3, p. 61); “Surely to be indulgent to mere fashion
in other periods, and merciless to it in our own, is the first step we can make
out of the prison of the Zeitgeist?” (ibid. III.6, p. 89–90).
Chapter
III/8, Parrot Disease
imagine
eating any of her other secretions : cf. J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and
the Future, a paper read to The Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923:
“The chemical or physical inventor is always a
Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not
been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical
invention is a blaphemy, every biological invention
is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the
notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their
existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural. Consider so
simple and time-honored a process as the milking of a cow. The milk which
should have been an intimate and almost sacramental bond between mother and
child is elicited by the deft fingers of a milk-maid, and drunk, cooked, or
even allowed to rot into cheese. We have only to imagine ourselves as drinking
any of its other secretions, in order to realise the
radical indecency of our relation to the cow.”
As appears from Lewis’s
published diary of 20 February 1924, he read Daedalus on that day and
described it as “a diabolical little book, bloodless tho’
stained with blood. This must be read and digested – or vomited” (All My
Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922–1927, ed. Walter Hooper,
1991).
There
are two only generally necessary to damnation : Parody
on a passage in the Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer of the
Anglican Church. “Question. How
many Sacraments hath Christ ordained in his Church? Answer. Two only, as
generally necessary to salvation; that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of
the Lord.” (“Two only” implies a rejection of the Roman Catholic list of seven
Sacraments.)
Book
Four, BACK TO THE ROAD
Epigraph
Bacon : Essays, “Of Truth”, by the English statesman, philosopher
and essayist Francis Bacon (1561–1626); pp. 4–5 in the edition by Richard
Foster Jones: Essays, Advancement Of Learning, New Atlantis And Other Pieces
(Odyssey Press, New York 1937).
Chapter
IV/1, Let Grill be Grill
Let Grill be Grill :
Spenser, The Faerie Queene II.12.87 (conclusion of Book II). Sir
Guyon has destroyed the Bower of Bliss of the enchantress Acrasia
and liberates her captives, breaking the spell by which they had been turned
into beasts. One of them (called Grill) wants to remain a beast –
Saide Guyon: “See the mind of beastly man,
That hath so soon forgot the excellence
Of his creation, when his life began
That now he chooseth, with vile difference
To be a beast, and lacke intelligence:
Let Gryll be Gryll, and
have his hoggish mind;
But let us hence depart, whilest wether
serves and winde.”
No doubt Spenser borrowed the
name, Gryll, from an ancient story about one of
Odysseus’s sailors who, after
being liberated from Circe’s enchantment, preferred to remain a beast. One
notable retelling is by the Greek historian and biographer Plutarch (c. AD 46–120) in Book XII of his Moralia; this is a dialogue of
Odysseus, Circe and Gryllus under the title “Beasts are
Rational”. See Loeb Classical Library vol. 406, pp. 487-533.
psittacosis :
Scientific name for parrot fever or parrot disease, an infectious disease
of parrots that can be transmitted to humans, in whom it may produce pneumonia.
Chapter
IV/2, Archtype and Ectype
Archtype and Ectype (see also VIII/10) : “Original and copy”; concepts presumably borrowed
here from John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) II.30
(“Of Real and Fantastical ideas”) and II.31 (“Of Adequate and Inadequate
Ideas”). Greek ectypon means an impress from a
commemorative medal, seal or signet ring.
For Lewis’s orthography see a passage from his letter of 24 October 1940 to
Sister Penelope: “On archtypal or archetypal,
note as the first principle of textual criticism in dealing with me that all
odd spellings [have no] more interesting explanation than ignorance – now I
can’t spell!” (Collected Letters II, p. 451). Later editions have Archetype.
riddle about the copy and the
original : Lewis’s book The Allegory of Love (see note to Title,
above) has a long chapter on the thirteenth-century French Roman de la Rose.
As he points out in that chapter, the Roman’s inevitable “palinode” –
denunciation of erotic love after all that has been said in its favour – is put into the mouth of the lady Reason; and
Reason not only approaches the hero as a rival mistress but hints to an idea
expressed more fully in another part of the poem – “that courtly love is a mimesis
or a parody of which divine love is the archtype”
(see The Allegory of Love III.5, pp. 147 and 151).
Chapter
IV/3, Esse is percipi
Esse is percipi : (Latin) “To be = to be perceived”; statement
by the Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) in his Principles
of Human Knowledge, §3. “For as to what is said of the absolute
existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived,
that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percepi, nor is it possible they should have any existence
out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.”
Book
Five, THE GRAND CANYON
Epigraphs
Pindar : Pythian Ode X, 29–30, by the ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar (c.
520–c. 440 b.c.).
Cf. C. S. Lewis’s own poem of 1949, “Pindar Sang”, in Collected Poems
(1994), pp. 29–31.
Aeschylus : Prometheus Bound (Prometheus desmotès),
546–551, by the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus (524– 455 b.c.)
Milton : Paradise Regained (1671) IV, 309–311.
Chapter
V/2, Mother Kirk’s Story
Peccatum Adae : (Latin) “The
sin of Adam”; theological term derived from the New Testament, Paul’s Epistle
to the Romans V.12–14, and from St. Augustine’s discussion of the subject in The
City of God (De civitate Dei) XIV.11–13.
Chapter
V/3, The Self-Sufficiency of Vertue
I must be the captain of my
soul and the master of my fate : From the last stanza of the poem “Invictus”
by the English poet William Ernest Henley (1849–1903).
Chapter
V/4, Mr. Sensible
“the philosophy of all
sensible men” (chapter headline) : Perhaps adapted from the
American writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), who wrote “I see that
sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion” (Lectures
and Biographical Sketches: “the Preacher”). – Another possible source is
the novel Endymion, chapter LXXXI, by the British statesman Benjamin
Disraeli (1804–1881): “‘As for that,’ said Waldenshare,
‘sensible men are all of the same religion.’ ‘Pray, what is that?’ inquired the
Prince. ‘Sensible men never tell.’” There is also an echo here of The Religion of All Good Men (1906) by the
Oxford classical scholar H. W. Garrod (1878–1960), briefly referred to in
Lewis’s 1946 essay ‘The Decline of Religion’.
Hippocrene :
(Latin, from Greek) “Horse spring”; in ancient Greece, a spring on Mount
Helicon near the home of the Muses. Its water was thought to engender poetic
inspiration and to have gushed forth when the winged horse Pegasus touched his
hoof there.
Regum aequabit opes animis :
(Latin) “equal to a king in the riches of the spirit.” Virgil (70–19 b.c., Roman
poet), Georgics IV, 132. With regard not only to the following spate of
Latin and Greek quotations coming from Mr. Sensible, but also to Lewis’s own
writing habits, it may be useful for the reader to be reminded of a passage in
a letter from Lewis to Arthur Greeves, this book’s dedicatee, written after
Greeves had criticised the yet unpublished
manuscript. In that letter of 17 December 1932, Lewis began his reply as
follows:
1. Quotations. I hadn’t realised
that they were so numerous as you apparently found them. Mr
Sensible, as you rightly saw, is in a separate position; the shower of
quotations is part of the character and it wd. be a waste of time to translate
them, since the dialogue (I hope) makes it clear that his quotations were
always silly and he always missed the point of the authors he quoted. The other
ones may be too numerous, and perhaps can be reduced & translated. But not
beyond a certain point: for one of the contentions of the book is that the
decay of our old classical learning is a contributary cause of atheism (see the
chapter on Ignorantia). The quotations at the beginnings
of the Books are of course never looked at at all by
most readers, so I don’t think they matter much.
thou little knowest that
sentence is passed upon thee : ??
Omnes eodem
cogimur : (Latin) “We are all
being gathered to the same fold.” Horace (65–8 b.c., Roman poet), Odes (Carmina)
II.3, 25.
quo dives Tullus et Ancus :
(Latin) “whither rich Tullus and Ancus” –
i.e. the underworld, the land of the dead. Horace, Odes (Carmina)
IV.7, 15.
nullius addictus :
(Latin) “In no way bound”, i.e. not taking sides. Horace, Epistles
I.1, 14. Nullius addictus iurare
in verba magistri – “I
am not bound to swear by the statement of any authority.”
en déshabille :
(French) “in undress”, i.e. informally.
J’aime le jeu, l’amour ... et
la campagne – enfin, tout! :
“I like games, love, books, music, town and country – everything, in
fact!” Jean de la Fontaine (1621–1695, French poet), Les
amours de Psyché et de Cupidon I.2. Lewis described his enjoying
Fontaine’s “quatrain” in a letter of 24
October 1931 to his brother (Collected Letters II, 6).
n.b. some Regress editions have champagne for campagne.
haud equidem invideo :
(Latin) “I am not envious at all.” Virgil, Eclogues (Bucolica, “pastoral
poems”) I, 11. Non equidem invideo, miror magis – “I am
not envious but, rather, surprised.”
You do not insist on my
accompanying you? ... Why then I am very willing that your
should go! : Quoted almost literally from the opening paragraph of James
Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785): “When I was at
Ferney, in 1764, I mentioned our design to Voltaire. He looked at me, as if I
had talked of going to the North Pole, and said, ‘You do not insist on my
accompanying you?’ – ‘No, sir.’ – ‘Then I am very willing that
you should go.’”
Caelum non animum
mutamus : (Latin) “[Crossing
the sea] we change the scenery, not ourselves.” After Horace, Epistles
I.11, 27. Caelum non animum
mutant qui trans mare currunt.
immortal longings :
After Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra V.2, 283.
who has not stretched out his hands for the ulterior shore? :
Cf. Virgil, Aeneid VI, 313-314.
Stabant orantes primi transmittere
cursum,
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.
There all
stood begging to be first across
And reached out longing hands to the far shore.
Et ego in Arcadia : (Latin) “I too [have been] in Arcadia.”
Correctly phrased Et in Arcadia Ego, this saying of uncertain provenance
is found on numerous tombs and also on paintings in which tombs are seen. Art
historian Erwin Panovsky has traced its origins back to a painting by Guercino
(1591–1666) where it has the grammatically proper meaning, “even in Arcadia am
I [=Death]”, through its history of misunderstanding in art and literature as
“I too have been in Arcadia [a lovely place of fabled peace and innocence;
therefore I also am an idealist]”. Lewis has shuffled the word order so that it
can properly have the latter meaning, which is Mr Sensible’s.
monochronos hèdonè :
(Greek) “fleeting pleasure”.
the proper study of mankind is man : Alexander Pope
(1688–1744), An Essay on Man II, 2.
Eadem sunt omnia semper :
(Latin) “Everything is always the same”. Lucretius (Roman poet and philosopher, c. 95–55 b.c.), De rerum
natura III, 949.
the unchanging heart beneath
the shifting disguises : Cf. Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost
(1943) IX, “The Doctrine of the Unchanging Human Heart”, where he argues that
in reading the literature of other times and places, we will not grow in
wisdom as long as we are chiefly interested in what is the same everywhere in
humanity.
the reasonableness which I
commend : “Reasonableness” is a characteristic item in the vocabulary of the
English poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), especially in the
collocation “sweet reasonableness”.
le bon sens :
(French) “common sense”.
bridewell :
“jail” (from a London prison called Bridewell).
Auream quisquis : (Latin)
A scrap from Horace, Odes (Carmina) II.10, 5. Auream
quisquis mediocritatem diligit – “The man who cherishes the golden mean.”
the doctrine of the Mean :
See Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics II.6 and II.8 (1107a, 1108b).
No triangle is mentioned there; but this example could be the way this doctrine
used to be explained in Lewis’s/Vertue’s school days. A virtue (says Aristotle)
is like a point at equal distances from two opposed vices: e.g. courage is a
point exactly between cowardice and recklessness. But cowards will call
courageous people reckless, and reckless people will call them cowards. Whoever
wants to practice virtue ought therefore not just to seek this middle point but
to try and get even further away from both vicious extremes. This is (says
Vertue) as if you start from a middle point on such a line but then decide to
treat them as two corners of a triangle where you seek the third, hoping that
it will be further away from the other two corners than they are from each
other.
Do manus! :
(Latin) “I give up!”
Philosophy
should be our mistress : In a
letter of 28 June 1936 to Owen Barfield (Collected
Letters II, 198-199), Lewis confessed himself unable to continue their
philosophical debates of the 1920s because, as he notes,
When a truth has ceased to be a mistress for pleasure
and become a wife for fruit it is almost unnatural to go back to the dialectic ardours of the wooing.
Lewis was obviously alluding
here to a passage in Francis Bacon’s Advancement
of Learning (1605), Book 1, ch. V/11.
Neither
is my meaning, as was spoken of Socrates, to call philosophy down from heaven to converse upon the earth – that is,
to leave natural philosophy aside, and
to apply knowledge only to manners and policy. But as both heaven and earth do conspire and
contribute to the use and benefit of man, so
the end ought to be, from both philosophies
to separate and reject vain speculations, and whatsoever is empty and void, and to preserve and augment whatsoever is solid and fruitful; that knowledge may not be as a
courtesan, for pleasure and vanity only, or
as a bond-woman, to acquire and gain to her master’s use; but as a spouse, for
generation, fruit, and comfort.
Lewis explicitly referred to
this passage in The Abolition of Man (1943),
chapter 3, commenting that
... Bacon condemns those who value knowledge as an end
in itself: this, for him, is to use as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be
a spouse for fruit.
the bit about
thinking mortal thoughts : See Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics X.7
(1177b, just before 1178a; referring to Euripides and Pindar).
We must not follow those who advise us, being men, to
think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as
we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance
with the best thing in us.
(translation W. D. Ross, 1925)
that the most useless of
studies was the noblest : Perhaps another reference
to Nicomachean Ethics, 1177b, just before the previous quotation.
So if among virtuous actions
political and military actions are distinguished by nobility and greatness, and
these are unleisurely and aim at an end and are not
desirable for their own sake, but the activity of reason, which is
contemplative, seems both to be superior in serious worth and to aim at no end
beyond itself, and to have its pleasure proper to itself … it follows that this
will be the complete happiness of man, if it be allowed a complete term of life
… But such a life would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is
man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him;
and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature is its activity
superior to that which is the exercise of the other kind of virtue.
que sais-je? :
(French) “What do I know?” Motto of the French writer Michel de Montaigne
(1533–1592), engraved on his personal seal.
brown charm :
“brown” as in “brown study”; reverie, mood of deep absorption or
thoughtfulness.
Chapter
V/5, Table Talk
“the religion of all sensible
men” (chapter headline) : See first note to previous chapter.
Dapibus mensas onerabit
inemptis : (Latin) “He loaded his
table with delicacies not bought at the store.” Virgil, Georgics IV, 133
(this line immediately follows the one quoted in the previous chapter, Regum aequabit
etc.).
“His
humble sauce a radish or an egg” : William Cowper (1731–1800), The Task
IV, 168.
Epicurus :
Greek philosopher (341–270 b.c.). In his ethical system, Pleasure was the
supreme good; the way to reach it was not frenetic search or wild abandon but,
on the contrary, wisdom, self-control and careful choice of pleasures.
Horace : Roman lyrical poet (65–8 b.c.). He was
presented as a great master of classical Latin to many generations of European
schoolboys, including Lewis’s.
Montaigne :
The French 16th-century writer mentioned above (V/4, que sais-je?). In his work, with three volumes of Essais (1588) as its chief part, he shows a lively
interest in his own person and a resulting awareness of the dangers both of
reason and of imagination.
Rabelais :
François Rabelais (c. 1494–1553), French writer, author of the
mock-heroic romances Gargantua (1532), Pantagruel (1534), and
three sequels.
Athanatous men prota Theous nomoi hos diakeitai – Tima : (Greek) “The most important thing is to honour the gods as is required by law.” First line of the Golden
Verses, ascribed to the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras (6th
century b.c.).
Cras ingens
iterabimus [aequor] :
(Latin) “Tomorrow we will take up our course again over the huge [sea]”.
Horace, Odes (Carmina) I.7, 32. The full passage is Nunc vino pellite curas; cras ingens iterabimus
aequor, where the first half means “With wine now
drive away care...”
Pellite cras ingens
tum-tum, nomoi hos diakeitai : A drunken mixture of the previous two
quotations; “Push off tomorrow on the huge... pom-pom, as is required.”
Chapter
V/6, Drudge
Chorègia :
(Greek) Defray of expenses; support; subsidy.
untie two
pieces of string with which he had confined his trousers beneath his knees : A sign
that Drudge is drifting towards “sans-culottism”, i.e.
revolutionary extremism. Sans culotte is French for
“without knee-breeches”. During the French Revolution, revolutionaries of the
poorer classes tended to wear pantaloons or trousers and so came to be called sans-culottes. In Book VI, chapter 6, it
turns out that Drudge went north “to join the red dwarfs”.
Chapter
V/7, The Gaucherie of Vertue
autarkeia :
(Greek) Economic self-sufficiency.
Vive la bagatelle : “Hurray for
nonsense!” Laurence Sterne (1713–1768, English novelist), A Sentimental Journey, “The Letter”.
Thelema : Greek word for “will” in the sense of
volition. In the novel Gargantua by the French author François Rabelais
(c. 1494–1553), Thélème is the abbey of a
highly exceptional kind of religious order – in fact, an anti-order in an
anti-abbey – led by Frère Jean des Entommeurs; see Gargantua
(= Book I in Gargantua et Pantagruel) LII et seq.
Do what you will :
Supreme rule of the monastic life at Thélème: Fay
ce que vouldras; see Gargantua
LVII.
Book
Six, NORTHWARD ALONG THE CANYON
Epigraphs
Aristotle : Nicomachean Ethics, 1124b
Milton : Paradise Regained VI, 313–314. The passage follows almost
immediately on the Milton epigraph for Book V, above.
Pascal : Pensées (1670), No. 353 in the Brunschvicg-edition of 1897
(section VI, “Les philosophes”), by the French philosopher, mathematician and
physicist Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Je n’admire point l’excès d’une vertu, comme de la
valeur, si je ne vois en même temps l’excès de la vertu opposée...
I. A. Richards : Practical Criticism (1929), Poem III, by the English
literary critic and linguist Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893–1979).
Chapter
VI/2, Three Pale Men
Neo-Angular, Neo-Classical,
Humanist : Chad Walsh (1914–1991), an American poet and critic and one of
the earliest authoritative writers about C. S. Lewis, considers the three
types presented here “transparent disguises” of T. S. Eliot (1888–1965),
Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) and George Santayana (1863–1952) respectively; see
Walsh, The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (1979), pp. 67–68.
Another writer on Lewis sees
Humanist, Neo-Angular and Neo-Classical
as “thin disguises for aspects of Irving Babbitt, Eliot, and perhaps T.
E. Hulme”; see Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright
Shadow of Reality: C. S. Lewis and the Feeling Intellect (1974), pp.
129-130. Babbitt thus appears to be a candidate for identification with both
Humanist and Neo-Classical. For Hulme as an anti-romanticist, see note on his
dictum about “spilt religion” quoted in the Preface, above.
Yet another published attempt at
identification follows Carnell without the reservation about Hulme, while
adding two more candidates for “Humanist”, namely Paul Elmer More (1864-1937)
and Norman Foerster (1887-1972); see James Patrick’s The Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and
Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901-1945) (1985), pp. 112-113, as referred to in
Doris T. Myers, C. S. Lewis in Context
(1994), p. 19, note 25.
Virtutes paganorum
splendida vitia :
(Latin) “The virtues of the pagans are splendid vices.” ?? Source not found, but probably either in
Augustine (as “virtutes gentium” etc., not “paganorum”)
or in Tertullian, De carne Christi.
Epichaerecacia :
(Greek) gloating, malicious pleasure, spiteful joy at another’s
misfortune.
Euphuia :
(Greek) shapeliness; goodness of disposition; quickness of understanding.
The male form of this name is (perhaps not very relevantly here) the name of
the principal character in a sixteenth-century prose romance, John Lyly’s Euphues (1578–1580); the word euphuism
was afterwards coined for that book’s widely imitated style – its “unremitting
use” (as Lewis wrote elsewhere) of antithesis, alliteration and allusion.
Chapter
VI/6,
Furthest North
Marxomanni :
In addition to the obvious reference to Marxists, there might be a
word-play here on Marcomanni, the name of a Germanic people in
the first centuries of the Christian era. The Marcomanni did not, however, live
in Northern Europe but in Bohemia, in the area of the present-day Czech
Republic.
Wind age, wolf age, etc. : Passages from “The
Prophecy of the Volva” (Voluspá), which is part of
the Edda, a collection of mythological Old Norse poems made in the 12th
century a.d.
The same two fragments, slightly longer, were quoted by J. B. S. Haldane in his
essay “The Last Judgment”, the final piece in Possible Worlds (1927).
Haldane said he preferred the Old Norse picture of the end of the world – Ragnarök
or “Doom of the Reigners” – over the Book of
Revelation.
lots of sub-species besides
the Marxomanni – Mussolimini,
Swastici... : Lewis was writing this
less than two months after the astonishing electoral success of both Nazis and
Communists in the German general elections of 31 July 1932. The two parties
between them won more than half of the seats in parliament.
Heroism, or Master-Morality,
or Violence : Key concepts in the thought of three respective writers of the
19th century whose work later came to be associated with fascist and
national-socialist aggression in the 20th century – English historian Thomas
Carlyle (1795–1881), author of On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in
History (1841); German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900),
author of Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886) and Genealogie der Moral (, 1887), where he
introduced the twin concepts of “master morality”, and “slave morality”; French
writer Georges Sorel (1847–1922), author of Réflexions sur la violence (1908),
spiritual father of anarcho-syndicalism but also an unintentional source of
inspiration for Italian fascism.
the last
even of the last men : Cf. Nietzsche, Also
sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
1885), “Zarathustra’s Vorrede”, §5, where a sketch is
given of der letzte Mensch, “the last man”, as the opposite of the Übermensch, “Superman”.
Chapter VI/7,
Fools’ Paradise
intelligence ... moves nothing :
Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI.2 (1139a). “Operation of the
intellect by itself moves nothing” (transl. D. P. Chase, Everyman ed.
1911).
Book
Seven, SOUTHWARD ALONG THE CANYON
Epigraphs
Virgil : Aeneid V, 626–635. Spoken by Iris, who, sent by Juno, is
trying to talk the wives of the Troyans into burning
their ships and so putting an end to the Troyans’
quest for Italy.
Dante : Inferno IV, 40–42. Per tai difetti, non per altro rio, /
Semo perduti, e sol di tanto offesi, / Che senza speme vivemo in disio.
Bunyan : The Pilgrim’s Progress II (1684), Mr
Great-heart speaking to the heroine, Christiana, during their passage through
the Valley of Humiliation.
Chapter
VII/1, Vertue is Sick
clouds and wind without rain :
Proverbs XXV.14, “Whoso boasteth himself of a false
gift is like clouds and wind without rain.”
Chapter
VII/2, John Leading
“Sick, wearied out with
contrarieties, he yields up moral questions in despair” (chapter
headline) : William Wordsworth (1770–1850), The Prelude XI,
304–305 (or X, 899–900 in the 1805 edition).
Chapter
VII/5, Tea on the Lawn
wildflowers (chapter
headline) : Cf. the first lines of “Auguries of Innocence”, a poem of
William Blake (1757–1827). “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in
a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an
hour.”
Martha :
Cf. the figure of Martha in the Gospel of St Luke X.38–42. While Jesus
visited her home, Martha was “cumbered about much serving” and thought her
sister Maria was wrong to sit listening to Him and failing to come and help
her.
the language of the heart :
Perhaps after Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, or Prologue
to the Satires, 388. “Language of the heart” there is not opposed to
orthodoxy but to academic learning.
When I
became a man, I put away childish things : I Corinthians
XIII.11.
The
heaven and the heaven of heavens, etc. :
From the prayer of King Salomo at the dedication of the Temple, I Kings
VIII.27. “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heaven and the
heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much the less this house that I have
builded?”
Chapter
VII/8, This Side by Sunlight
the Valley of Humiliation :
An episode in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678-84), the book
that provided Lewis with the title and part of the general idea for The Pilgrim’s
Regress. Lewis was quoting from the same episode in the third Epigraph to
the present Book.
Chapter VII/9, Wisdom – Exoteric
I am old and
full of tears : Cf. the end of Yeats’s two-stanza poem “Down by the Salley Gardens”
(in Poems, 1895).
…
But I was young and foolish,
and now am full of tears.
the manna turned to worms : Exodus XVI.20.
as one of my sons has said, that leaves the world more glorious yet : A reference to a passage in The Principles
of Logic (1883) by the English Idealistic
philosopher Francis Bradley (mentioned before with Green and Bosanquet in the
Preface, second paragraph). “That the
glory of this world (...) is appearance leaves the world more glorious, if we
feel it is a show of some fuller splendour; but the
sensuous curtain is a deception (...) if it hides some colourless
movement of atoms, some (...) unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.”
Chapter
VII/10, Wisdom – Esoteric
hawthorn :
A reference to the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and
his short story “Young Goodman Brown”. The
hero of this story goes into a wood by night to attend a Black Mass and is
shocked to meet various people there whom he knew as respectable citizens.
Hawthorne also wrote a story called “The Celestial Railroad” which is a parody on
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
Marx, Spencer, etc.
(author’s footnotes) : Karl Marx (1818–1883), German philosopher;
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), English philosopher who attempted to a
theory of evolution (not quite Darwin’s) to all phenomena; Baruch Spinoza
(1632–1677), Jewish Dutch philosopher; Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925),
Austrian social philosopher and founder of Anthroposophy; Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804), German philosopher; Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), British
Idealistic philosopher.
Chapter
VII/12, More Wisdom
all this choir of heaven and
furniture of earth are imaginations : From the Principles of
Human Knowledge, §6, by George Berkeley (1685–1753), the Irish bishop and
philosopher who became chiefly known for his “subjective-idealistic” theory of
knowledge. Cf. note to IV/3 above, on “Esse is percipi”.
I am the
Imaginer: I am one of his imaginations : See note to VIII/1 on “I am the doubter and
the doubt”, below.
evangelium eternum :
(Latin) “Eternal Gospel”, i.e. Pantheism.
Book
Eight, AT BAY
Epigraphs
Hesiod : Works and Days (Erga kai hèmerai), 293–297, by the ancient Greek didactical poet
Hesiod (8th century b.c.).
Hazlitt : The Round Table (1817) I.26, “On Classical Education”, by
the English critic and essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830).
Chapter
VIII/1, Two Kinds of Monist
Monist :
Monism is the doctrine that
everything in the universe derives from a single thing or principle, e.g. from spirit
or from matter, so that no essential distinction can be made between God and
Nature. It is the philosophical counterpart of Pantheism.
That the glory of this world
in the end is appearance, leaves the world more glorious yet : Another reference to Bradley’s Principles
of Logic; see note to VII/9 above, as one of my sons has said etc.
in the
Absolute, every flame even of carnal
passion burns on : Bradley, Appearance and Reality (1893), Book II, ch. 15, p. 172: “every flame of passion, chaste or carnal, would still
burn in the Absolute, unquenched and unabridged.”
The
flesh is but a living corruption : After Genesis VI.12,
“And God looked upon the earth and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had
corrupted his way upon the earth.”
I am the doubter and the doubt :
From the sonnet “Brahma” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (cf. note to V/4 above). “They reckon ill who
leave me out; / When me they fly, I am the wings; / I am the doubter and the
doubt, / I am the hymn the Brahmin sings.”
filthy rags :
A reference to Isaiah LXIV.6, where a more literal reading would be
“dirty sanitary towels”. “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags...”
Chapter
VIII/3, John Forgets Himself
sensuous curtain :
See the quotation from Bradley in the second note to VII/9 above.
Chapter
VIII/4, John Finds his Voice
Pheidian fancies :
From Pheidias or Phidias, famous Greek sculptor of the 5th century b.c.; no
extant original can be surely ascribed to him.
Chapter
VIII/7, The Hermit
Stoics, Manichees,
Spartiates : Stoics in
ancient Greece were members of the school of philosophy founded by Zeno of
Citium (c. 335–c. 265 b.c.), holding that virtue and happiness can be
attained only by submission to destiny and the natural law; hence the wider
meaning of “stoicism” as indifference or the attempt at indifference to
pleasure and pain. – Manichees were followers
of the Persian prophet Mani (mid-third century a.d.), who supposed good and evil
to be equally original and equally strong powers in the universe, good being
related to spirit and light, and evil to matter and darkness. – Spartiates are Spartans, the ruling class in the
ancient Greek city state of Sparta; they were famous for their discipline and
military prowess and austere way of life.
better
bread than is made of wheat : A fixed
expression for “the best as the enemy of the good”; perhaps originating from
the Spanish through a passage in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, chapter VII,
where the hero is asked by a niece why he won’t simply stay at home rather than
always going into the world in quest of “better bread than ever is made of
wheat.”
a fox
without a tail : From one of the Fables ascribed to the
semi-legendary Greek author Aesop (6th century b.c.). A fox lost his tail in a
poacher’s trap. When all the other animals laughed at him he tried to persuade
his fellow foxes that they had better all cut off their tails since life was
better that way.
Chapter VIII/8, History’s Words
seen that
Island dozens of times in those pictures : i.e. in “pictures” such as those of the
Hesperides in Classical mythology, or of Avalon in Arthurian legend.
if the feet have been put right the hands and the head
will come right : Free interpretation of an obscure or at least
ambiguous passage in the Gospel of St John, XIII.10. Thirty years after he
wrote this, Lewis further explained his view of this passage in letter which has remained unpublished and
only partly available in transcript online:
I have always thought the words to Peter (if the feet are washed, the whole man is clean)
meant that if the will, the faculty
of conduct, is cleansed, all else will come right.
Nomos : Greek for “(the) Law”.
Chapter
VIII/9, Matter of Fact
Medium Aevum :
(Latin) Middle Ages.
he sent them ... a picture of
a Lady! Nobody had ever had the idea
of a Lady before : A reference to the rise of “courtly love”,
i.e. the earliest, medieval variety of romantic love, as described by C. S.
Lewis in The Allegory of Love, chapter I.1. For the claim that “nobody had
ever had the idea of a Lady before”, see Allegory, pp. 4–12 (“There can
be no mistake about the novelty of romantic love: our only difficulty is to
imagine in all its bareness the mental world that existed before its coming”
etc.).
[Dante] had carried this new form of the desire right up
to its natural conclusion : This “natural
conclusion” is what Lewis in The Allegory of Love called the “noble
fusion of sexual and religious experience” as achieved by Dante in his Commedia,
i.e. The Divine Comedy: “there, at least, the quarrel between
Christianity and the love religion was made up” (Allegory, pp. 21 and
23).
like something ever more about to be : Cf. Wordsworth, The Prelude VI, 608:
Imagination – here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say –
“I recognize thy glory”: in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And
something evermore about to be.
Homer in
Pagus ridiculing some of the story pictures... :
??
Clopinel / Jean de Meung :
Jean de Meung (1250–c.1305), author of
the second, by far the largest part of the Roman de la Rose. He had a
strong bent of cynical and satirical remarks about women and erotic love. Cf.
second note to IV/2 above and The Allegory of Love, pp. 144ff. His
nickname Clopinel or Chopinel
means “cripple”.
Chapter
VIII/10, Archtype and Ectype
the perilous siege in which
only One can sit : See note on Siege Perilous in the
Preface, above.
“out of the soul’s bliss,” he said, “there shall be a
flowing over into the flesh” : a reference to St
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. |
Manna kept, is worms : See
first note to VII/9 above.
the
hermit ...doing and saying his holy things : cf. Spenser, The Faerie Queene I.1.43.
A little lowly Hermitage it was,
Downe in a dale, hard by a forests side,
Far from resort of people, that did pass,
In travell to and froe : a
little wyde
There was an holy Chappell edifyde,
Wherein the Hermite dewly wont to say
His holy things each morne and eventyde
...
Lazarus :
See Gospel of John XI.1–44.
the heaven, moved moth-like by
thy beauty, etc. : This is an expression of the ancient
cosmological idea of a “prime mover” or “unmoved mover” which puts and keeps in
motion the outermost, largest celestial sphere (or “heaven”); this in its turn
moved the next, etc., down to the last and smallest sphere revolving around the
Earth. In medieval Christian and Muslim thought, this prime mover was
identified with God, and the moving force accordingly redefined, in
Christianity, as love or beauty.
Book
Nine, ACROSS THE CANYON
Epigraphs
Langland : Piers the Plowman XIII, 181–185 (C text), a long
allegorical poem ascribed to William Langland (c. 1331–c. 1399).
Quoted with some slight variations in spelling.
George Macdonald : Lilith (1895) XL, “The House of Death”, by the Scottish
poet, novelist and preacher George Macdonald (1824–1905).
Chapter
IX/3, This Side by Darkness
prophesied soft things : After
Isaiah XXX.9–10, “This is a rebellious people (...) which say to the seers, See
not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us
smooth things, prophesy deceits.”
I am no negation : Personified Death is here denying a famous
assertion by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 b.c.), in his Letter to Menoeceus, explaining why he did not fear death : “Where
death is, I am not, and where I am, death is not.”
Chapter
IX/4, Securus Te Projice
Securus te
projice : (Latin) “Throw
thyself without fear [onto Him; He will hold and will cure thee].” St Augustine, Confessions
VIII.11.27. Proice te securus!
excipiet et sanabit te.
deep silence for about half an hour : Possibly an allusion to
Revelation 8:1.
When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in
heaven for about half an hour.
you must dive into this water :
“Must” as an inevitability, as appears from George Macdonald: An
Anthology, edited by C. S. Lewis (1946), No. 279: “That is the way ... You must
throw yourself in. There is no other way.”
Chapter
IX/5, Across the Canyon
that you might see My face and
live : cf. Exodus 33:20 (God speaking to Moses), “Thou
canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.”
Semele :
Greek mythological figure, a princess from Thebes. The supreme god Zeus
in the shape of a human begot Dionysius by Semele. She wished to see him also
in his full divine power and majesty. This was granted, but she did not survive
the experience.
Chapter
IX/6, Nella sua Voluntade
Nella sua
voluntade : (Italian) “In His
will [is our peace].” Dante, Paradiso III, 85. E la sua volontate è nostra pace –
“And His will is our peace.”
While Lewis’s volun- for volon- is perhaps a Latin-inspired
inaccuracy, both -tade and Nella seem
in different ways to go back to an accepted alternative reading: E ’n la sua volontade etc.
(“And in His will…”).
Slikisteinsauga :
(Old Norse, or perhaps pseudo-Old Norse of Lewis’s invention) “Sleekstone eyes”. When the now obsolete word “sleekstone” was still in use, it meant a smooth stone used
to make something else smooth, i.e. sleek, by rubbing or polishing it. However,
Lewis appears to mean a whetstone rather than a sleekstone
(if the two are indeed distinct instruments) : “whetstone-eyes” would serve to
sharpen other people’s eyesight in addition to having sharpness themselves.
Book
Ten, THE REGRESS
Epigraphs
Plato : The Republic (Politeia) VII, 516e–517a.
Bernardus Silvestris : De mundi universitate
sive Megacosmus et Microcosmus II.4, 31ff, by Bernardus Silvestris or
Sylvestris, a twelfth-century Platonist poet and philosopher and leader of the
“school of Chartres” (he has also been called Bernard de Chartres). Lewis
quoted these same lines in a different translation, with the Latin original in
a footnote, in The Allegory of Love (see note to Title, above) III.6, p.
95. The words are spoken by Urania, one of two figures whose help is invoked by
Natura when the latter, having successfully created the World, finds that
creating Man is too much for her alone. Urania, the heaven-spirit, has to
supply some “immediate divinity”. On being summoned for the task, Urania
“prophesies the high destinies of Man, whose soul, before birth, is to be made
acquainted with all the influences of the heaven to which some day she will
return”. In The Allegory, the quotation has two extra lines. The
full (translated) quotation there is:
With me through all the expanse of heaven must go
Man’s soul, and I will make her know
The laws of Fate allowing no repeal
And Fortnue’s alterable wheel
(...)
Her godlike essence when her body dies
Will seek again those kindred skies.
Law : A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) XI, by the
British Anglican divine William Law (1686–1761).
Chapter
X/1, The Same yet Different
You all know that security is
mortals’ greatest enemy :
Shakespeare, Macbeth III.5, 32–33. “And you all know security / Is
mortals’ chiefest enemy”.
tenth hierarch :
The spirit coming after and being outside the nine celestial choirs of
angels.
Wormwood :
Yet another synonym for Satan, borrowed from Revelation VIII.10–11. “And
there fell a great star from heaven ... and the name of the star is called
Wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died
of the waters, because they were made bitter.”
Ahriman :
In Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion founded around 600 B.C.,
Ahriman is the supreme spirit of evil and darkness. Ahriman tempted Zoroaster
but was defeated by him; he brought death to the world by slaying the
prototypes of man and the animals. Lewis’s idea to use this name as a synonym
for Satan may well have reached Lewis through his friend Owen Barfield from
Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. Steiner explained the Fall of Man
as a result of attacks by both “Ahrimanic” and “Luciferic” beings on humanity’s
spiritual awareness and social awareness respectively.
Chapter
X/2, The Synthetic Man
synthetic man :
Cf. C. S. Lewis’s Collected Letters I, p. 909, letter of 22 June
1930 to Arthur Greeves. “Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home
must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce
of the same few miles of country for six generations (...).We (...) who live on
a standardised international diet (you may have had
Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian
wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in
sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted.
a man of
shreds and patches : Shakespeare, Hamlet III.4, 102. “A
king of shreds and patches”.
Rabelais, “Do what you will”,
Thelemites : See note to V/7 above.
Habe caritatem et fac quod vis : (Latin) “Have charity and do what you will.”
From St Augustine’s seventh sermon on the First Epistle of John, cap. VIII: Dilige, et quod vis fac.
This saying is often ascribed to Augustine slightly modified, Ama et fac quod vis. In this form its meaning is easily construed
as “Fall in love and do what you will.” Lewis modifies the original in a
different way, which according to Walter Hooper was inspired by a sermon of St
Thomas Aquinas on the Beatitudes; cf. Lewis’s Collected Letters II, p.
194, note 50.
“On
these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” :
Matthew XXII.40. When asked by the Pharisees, “Master, which is the great
commandment in the law?”, Jesus answers, “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. On these two commandments hang all
the law and the prophets.”
Chapter
X/3, Limbo
in desire without hope :
Dante, Inferno IV, 42. “Che senza speme vivemo in disio.” See also
second epigraph for Book VII above.
Men say
that his love and his wrath are one thing : ?? Lewis
may have been thinking of George Macdonald in passages like the one in Unspoken
Sermons II.3, quoted as No. 84 in Lewis’s Macdonald Anthology (see
second note to IX/4): “The terror of God is but the other side of His love.”
God in His mercy made / The fixèd pains of Hell : This idea of God as
Hell’s maker very likely goes at least partly back to Dante’s Inferno
III, second stanza, “Giustizia mosse
il mio alto Fattore” etc., “Justice moved my august
Maker...”
Chapter
X/4, The Black Hole
Nearly they stood who fall /
fell who stand : Cf. I Corinthians X.12,
“…let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he
fall.”
Siren’s land : In
early Greek popular belief, Sirens were thought to be two or three female
demons on the south coast of Italy, who with their sweet song lured sailors to
destruction on the rocks.
Chapter
X/5, Superbia
Superbia :
(Latin) “Pride”, one of the “seven deadly sins” as defined in medieval
theology. The others were Avaritia (Avarice or
Covetousness), Luxuria (Lust), Invidia
(Envy), Gula (Gluttony), Ira (Wrath), Accidia (Sloth).
Superbia along with yet another sin, Ignorantia, was
already mentioned by Father History (VIII/7) in connection with the “strange
customs” they were always imposing on the smaller tenants in the North.
Unwindowed monad :
“Monad” is a mathematical and/or philosophical name for an undivisible smallest material or spiritual constituent. The
word got currency above all through the philosophical system of German
philosopher G. W. Leibniz (1646–1716; Monadologie
1714). Leibniz posited the “unwindowed” nature of monads, arguing that these
smallest constituents of reality could have no causal interaction
“When
thou tookest upon thee to deliver man” :
From Te Deum Laudamus,
widely known as the Ambrosian Hymn since it got wrongly attributed to St
Ambrose. Tu ad liberandum suscepturus
hominem non horruisti virginis
uterum.
when she
said that He had regarded the lowliness of His hand-maiden :
From the Maginificat, the hymn of the
Virgin Mary after Elisabeth has told her “blessed art thou among women, and
blessed is the fruit of thy womb”, Luke I.48.
Narcissus :
In acient Greek mythologicy,
a beautiful young man who fell in love with his own reflection in a pond, and
pined away for grief because this object of his passion was unattainable.
Chapter
X/7, Luxuria
Luxuria :
(Latin) “Lust”; cf. note to X/5, Superbia.
a
fountain of writhing and reptilian life : The scene must have
been inspired by Dante’s Inferno, Book XXV.
Lilith :
In Babylonian mythology, Lilith was a female spirit, childless and with
poisonous breasts with which she tried to kill babies. In the Bible there is a
single mention of her in Isaiah XXXIV.14, as “the satyr” (AV) or “night
creatures” (NIV); in medieval Jewish mythology she became the malicious “first
wife of Adam”. For C. S. Lewis the figure of Lilith personified what he
regarded as a specifically feminine vice – the craving to be desirable rather
than beautiful. See also his novel That Hideous Strength III.3, where
Jane Studdock is reminded of the difference between Eve and Lilith. A different
and probably earlier version of this poem is to be found as a postscript of
Lewis’s letter to Arthur Greeves of 29 April 1930 (Collected Letters I,
pp. 895–896).
cloud is rolled / Always above
yet no rain falls to the ground : Cf. note to VII/1, clouds
and wind without rain.
Chapter
X/8, The Northern Dragon
serpens nisi serpentem comederit : (Latin) “If a snake won’t eat snakes...” The
full phrase, “Serpens, nisi serpentem comederit, non fit draco” means what the Dragon is going to sing in the next
poem, third stanza, line 2, “...worm grows not to dragon till he eat worm.”
This Latin saying was used, for example, in the early 17th century by Francis
Bacon in his Essay No. 40, “Of Fortune”. A century earlier, Erasmus included a
slightly different version in his Adagia
(III.3.61), “Serpens ni edat
serpentem, draco non fiet”. Erasmus mentions no source, but he does quote what
must be a more original version in post-classical Greek, from a
fifteenth-century collection of Greek proverbs edited by Michael Apostolius (No. XIII.79 in Paroimiai,
published in 1619).
druery :
Love-making.
Chapter
X/9, The Southern Dragon
Behemoth :
An animal mentioned in the Old Testament, Job XL.10, perhaps a
hippopotamus but certainly very large and strong.
Pan :
In Greek mythology, the lustful god of pastures, forests, flocks and
herds, and the symbol of fecundity.
Leviathan :
A huge aquatic animal mentioned in several places of the Old Testament:
Job XLI.1, Psalms LXXIV.14 and CIV.26, and Isaiah XXVII.1.
resurgam : (Latin) “I shall rise again.”
Io Paean :
Paean was the physician to the gods of ancient Greece, while Io
was an exclamation often expressing suffering and invoking help; it later came
to be used as a shout of praise or thankgsgiving, a
cry of triumph or exultation, as Vertue uses it here.
Chapter
X/10, The Brook
Osirian :
From Osiris, Egyptian god of the lower world and judge of the dead.
antediluvian :
Dating from before the biblical Flood (Latin diluvium = flood; ante
= before).
Substantial form :
The word “substantial” already appeared in the previous song, line 9, “As
Thou hast made substantially, thou wilt unmake...” The relevant meaning of
“substance” was earlier alluded to with the words “interior Form” in the
hermit’s song at the end of Book VIII. It is a concept from Aristotle’s
philosophy, more particularly his theory of Categories. “Substance” is there
the word for any self-existent, unchanging and irreducible form that can be
distinguished, irrespective of its precise content or properties. The Greek
word is ousia – “essence”, “nature”. It
certainly does not mean “matter” or “material” but rather the opposite.
above the cone / Of the circling night : Perhaps an echo from
a passage in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (IV, 444–445), where The Earth
says “I spin beneath my pyramid of night / Which points into the heavens
dreaming delight...” The reference in both cases appears to be to an idea
developed in the ninth century by the Muslim astronomer Alfraganus; he calculated that the shadow of
earth, in the form of a cone, reaches its point in the third of the nine
heavens. Above or beyond that, there is thus no shadow ever to make for “more
or lesser light”.
Last
updates
13 April
2008: added note on III/3, imagine eating
any etc.
2 February 2012: added note on Preface, if
nature makes nothing in vain
8 May
2008: expanded note on VI/6, “Wind age,
wolf age” etc.
6 June & 24 July 2011: added note on I/1, pull up the primroses
2 March 2012: improved note on IX/6, Slikisteinsauga
5 August 2012: expanded note on VI/2, Neo-Angular
etc.
16 August 2012: expanded note on Preface, the word “Romanticism”
12 April 2015: added notes on
– V/2, untie two pieces of string
– V/4, Philosophy should be our
mistress
– V/4, the bit about thinking mortal
thoughts
– VIII/1, In the Absolute, every flame ...
25 April 2015: expanded note on VI/1, Let
Grill be Grill
7 May 2015:
– added note on VIII/10, the hermit ...
doing and saying his holy things
– removed note on VI/6, ploughing the
sand
18 May 2016:
– added note on Preface, when allegory is at its best
23 July 2017:
– added note on X/4, Nearly they stood who fall
22 September 2017:
– improved note on II/7, Eschropolis
8 January 2019
− expanded note on Preface, One
of them described Romanticism as “spilled
religion”
− expanded note on Preface, Jakob Boehme
26 November 2019
– expanded note on V/4, the bit
about thinking mortal thoughts
and, with thanks to Bill Hollett:
– added note on V/4, that the most useless of
studies was the noblest
– expanded note on VIII/7, Manichees
– expanded note on VIII/8, if the
feet have been put right
– expanded note on VIII/10, the heaven, moved moth-like
– added note on IX/5, that you might see My face and live
– expanded note on IX/6, Nella sua voluntade
– improved note on X/1, Ahriman
30 December 2020
Two added notes, both with thanks to Joseph Porter:
– on V/4, who has not stretched out his hands etc.
– on VII/9, I am old and full of tears
16 January 2021
– Added note on IX/4, deep silence
for about half an hour; with thanks to Joseph Porter
10 May 2023
– Added note on VIII/9, like something ever more about to be