Quotations and Allusions in
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
compiled by Arend Smilde
(Utrecht, The Netherlands)
Like most of C. S. Lewis’s books, The
Screwtape Letters (1942) contains many allusions to or quotations from
unspecified sources. Locating and checking these sources is perhaps never
vitally important, but often proves to be a rewarding enterprise.
What follows is a listing by chapter of many
such words and phrases with brief references to what I have found to be their
sources and, occasionally, notes suggesting their relevance to the context in
which Lewis uses them. I have also included a few other items where a short
explanation may be of use to some readers. The list is based on notes I made
for my Dutch translation of this book, published in 2002 as Brieven
uit de hel (fourth edition 2009) to replace a 1947
translation under the same title.
Double question marks in bold type – ?? –
follow items where I have not found the required information. Corrections and
additions including proposed new entries are welcome.
Dedication
To
J. R. R. Tolkien
»
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973), one of C. S. Lewis’s intimate friends
during the period 1930-1950. They were the key figures in the “Inklings”, a
small informal literary club with weekly meetings where writing work in
progress was read aloud and criticized. Much of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was first presented there, and Tolkien later
wrote that he thought Lewis’s encouragement had been vitally important for the
completion of that huge work. From 1936 onward Lewis dedicated many of his
books to fellow Inklings. See Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their
friends (George Allen & Unwin, London 1978; paperback edition
HarperCollins, London 1997).
Epigraphs
Martin
Luther (1483-1546) and Thomas More (1478-1535) were
enemies: Luther was the instigator of the Reformation in 1517 while More
developed into a prominent defender of the Catholic church and died for the
cause. Their continued status as heroes of Protestantism and Catholicism
respectively was confirmed in More’s case by his canonization as a Saint in
1935. The joint presentation here of very similar statements from these two men
is a statement on the part of C. S. Lewis. As a Christian writer Lewis took the
general line that he did best to disregard any church divisions and stick to
what he considered the very important stretches of “merely Christian” common
ground (cf. the beginning of Screwtape’s letter 25). Nevertheless Lewis
regarded the divisions of Christendom as a tragedy. He never wrote much on
Luther, but in a 1947 letter he compared Thomas More with another Protestant
adversary, William Tyndale:
All
the writings of the one and all the writings of the other I have lately read
right through. Both of them seem to me most saintly men and to have loved God
with their whole heart: I am not worthy to undo the shoes of either of them.
Nevertheless they disagree and (what racks and astounds me) their disagreement
seems to me to spring not from their vices nor from their ignorance but rather
from their virtues and the depths of their faith, so that the more they were at
their best the more they were at variance.
(Collected Letters II, 815; to Don Giovanni
Calabria, 25 November 1947)
Lewis
was reading all of More and Tyndale since he had been commissioned to write a
volume on the 16th century for the Oxford History of English Literature. That
book was published in 1954 as English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century. It has long passages on Thomas More
(pp. 165-181), with some references to Luther; and on William Tyndale (pp.
181-192), where Lewis points out “how tragically narrow is the boundary between
Tyndale and his opponents” and “what Tyndale is attacking is a mere travesty of
what his best opponents held; as what they attack is also a travesty of his own
view.”
Five years after The Screwtape Letters appeared, it was read in translation by an
Italian monk called Don Giovanni Calabria, who sensed a peculiar talent for
promoting Church reunion. He wrote a Latin letter of appreciation and a
correspondence followed – all in Latin – which lasted for years. (On a 1947
photograph of Lewis the Italian Screwtape,
or Lettere di Berlicche, can be seen to lie on his desk in the
foreground; this photo was used as a cover illustration for Walter Hoooper’s C. S.
Lewis: A Companion and Guide, 1994.) Lewis’s letters to Calabria were first
published in 1989 with parallel English translation by Martin Moynihan and are
now contained in Lewis’s Collected Letters,
vols. II and III. In both cases Calabria’s surviving letters to Lewis were
included. A much fuller Italian edition was published in 1995 as Una gioia insolita: Lettere tra un prete
cattolico e un laico anglicano. The passage quoted above is
from the letter of 25 November 1947.
A book called C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church (2003) by Joseph Pearce opens
with an observation about the two epigraphs of The Screwtape Letters:
Not only is
Luther a Protestant and More a Catholic, but these two men are also accounted
champions of their respective parties, each having fought fearlessly for his
own position. What is more, many of their fiercest confrontations were fought
against one another, often in scathing letters and treatises. ... The fact that
both voices recommend laughter at the absurdity of evil is a testament to a
conviction, seen elsewhere in Lewis’s works, that the Christian perspective of
comedy, in both the light-hearted and in the cosmic sense, will in the end win
out over the tragic divisions that have historically beset the Body of Christ
on earth.
“The
best way to drive out the devil ... is to jeer and flout him ...” – Luther
»
From Martin Luther’s Tischreden
(Table Talk). The oldest source for
this quote is Joannes Aurifaber’s
edition, first published in 1566 (facsimile reprint 1968), Chapter 25, “Vom Teufel und seinen Werken” (“Of the Devil and his Works”, Fol. 278-307). Lewis
used the first and the last sentence of a page-long section under the
sub-heading “Den Teufel kan man mit
Verachtung vnd lecherlichen Possen vertreiben” (“The Devil can be chased away by scorn and
crazy jokes”), Fol. 290. The last sentence is in Latin. The following excerpt
from this source – followed by a fairly literal translation – includes two
sentences immediately following the first. The words in italics are roughly those quoted by Lewis.
Doctor Luther sagte / wenn
er des Teufels mit der heiligen Schrifft vnd mit ernstlichen worten /
nicht hette können los werden / so hette er in offt mit spitzigen worten vnd lecherlichen
bossen vertrieben / Vnd
wenn er im sein Gewissen hette beschweren wollen / so
hette er offt zu im gesaget / Teufel ich hab auch in die Hosen geschissen / hastu es auch gerochen / vnd zu
den andern meinen Sünden in dein Register geschrieben. Item / Er hette zu im gesagt / Lieber
Teufel / ists nich gnug /
an dem Blut Christi / so fur meine Sünde vergossen
ist / so bitte ich dich / du wollest Gott fur mich
bitten. ... Quia est superbus Spiritus, & non potest ferre contemptum.
Doctor Luther
said that when he couldn’t get rid of the
devil with Holy Scripture and serious language, he had often expelled him by
tart remarks and crazy jokes. And when he [the devil] tried to burden his
[Luther’s] conscience, he would often tell him, “Devil, I’ve been doing it in
my pants, have you smelled it and added this to your list of all my sins?”
Again, he told him, “My dear Devil, should the Blood of Christ shed for my sins
not have been enough, please do pray to God for me.” ... For he is a proud spirit, and
cannot bear scorn.
Not
only does this longer excerpt give a fuller idea of Luther’s jokes; in calling
the Devil a “proud spirit” Luther is also showing all the more resemblance to
Thomas More. In the Weimarer Ausgabe, the
standard critical edition of Luther’s works, the passage is printed in volume 6
of the Tischreden
(=TR 6, 1921), pp. 210-211, Nr. 6817.
Lewis was perhaps quoting freely from a
biography of Luther by Jules Michelet (Mémoires de Luther, écrits par lui-même, 1835) in
the form of a compilation of original sayings, as translated from the French by
G. H. Smith (The Life of Luther, gathered
from his own writings, 1846), p. 78 (Book V, ch.
6):
The
best way to expel the devil, if he will not depart for texts from Holy
Scripture, is to jeer and flout him.
While
the phrase “to jeer and flout him” exactly matches the Screwtape epigraph, the final words “He cannot bear scorn” are
lacking both in Smith’s translation and in Michelet’s French text (Vol. 3, p.
188 in the 1835 edition). They do appear, however, in the translation by
William Hazlitt of the same book, also published in 1846 (The Life of Luther, written by himself), p. 332:
The best way
of getting rid of the devil, if you cannot do it with the words of the Holy
Scripture, is to rail at and mock him. He cannot bear scorn.
As
Hazlitt points out in his preface, he used a slightly later French work on
Luther, Audin’s Histoire de la vie, des ouvrages et de la doctrine de Luther (1841, 5th
edition 1845), to make additions to Michelet’s work. Hazlitt “paid especial
attention to the many extracts from the Tischreden”, comparing various translations, including the
earliest (1650) by Captain Bell. Lewis’s presentation as a single saying of
what is really the first and the last sentence of a page-long passage may thus
go back to Hazlitt or one of Hazlitt’s sources. A footnote to Lewis’s 1938
essay “Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century” suggests that
Hazlitt’s translation was indeed the one he used (Selected Literary Essays, p. 117, note 1).
“The devill ... the prowde spirite ...” – Thomas More
» Thomas More (see note above) was an English scholar
and statesman. The quotation is from his last work, A Dialoge of Comfort against Tribulacion (Book II, ch.
16), written in prison
while he awaited execution for
treason after refusing to swear an oath declaring King Henry VIII supreme head,
under God, of the Church of England.
The dialogue is between a young Hungarian, Vincent, and his aged uncle Antony,
and set between the battle of Mohács (1526) and the
siege of Vienna (1529), with divided Christendom badly failing to make a united
front against the Turkish onslaught. Antony counsels his nephew about ways to
endure the coming “tribulations” of conquest and domination by the Turks. As
they are talking about the temptation of “horrible thoughts” (including
thoughts of suicide), Antony explains that
the manner of the fight
against temptation must stand in three things: that is, in resisting, and in
contemning, and in the invocation of help.
His second point – contempt – is developed as
follows:
Some folk
have been clearly rid of such pestilent fancies with very full contempt of
them, making a cross upon their hearts and bidding the devil avaunt. And
sometimes they laugh him to scorn too, and then turn their mind unto some other
matter. And when the devil hath seen that they have set so little by him, after
certain essays, made in such times as he thought most fitting, he hath given
that temptation quite over. And this he doth not only because the proud spirit
cannot endure to be mocked, but also lest, with much tempting the man to the
sin to which he could not in conclusion bring him, he should much increase his
merit.
C.
S. Lewis, in his book on 16th-century English literature, has called More’s Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulations
“the noblest of all his vernacular writings”. Noting that “it was written in
the Tower while More waited for death (for all he knew, death by torture,
hanging, cutting down, alive, and disembowelling)” he saw “a fairly close
parallel” to Boethius’ Consolation of
Philosophy. Lewis concludes his reflections on the Dialogue with the remark that “I would not quote much from this
book; it is (or was) accessible in a cheap reprint and should be on everyone’s
shelves” (English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century, Book II, I.1, pp. 177-181).
Written in 1534, first published
anonymously in 1553 and reprinted with More’s Utopia in Everyman’s Library in 1910, the Dialogue was edited “with modifications to obsolete
language” by Monica Stevens in 1951. The above quotation is from
the Stevens edition, available online from Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17075; a
PDF is available at www.lewisiana.nl/screwtapequotes/More1534.pdf.
A good later edition is the one by Frank Manley (Yale University Press 1977),
with Lewis’s quote on page 158.
Preface
The
history of the European War
»
The Second World War formally started on 1 September 1939. In Great Britain,
the war was initially a matter mainly of mobilization, without much obvious
enemy action directly affecting the daily life of citizens. In the early summer
of 1940, when large parts of the European continent had been conquered and
occupied by Germany, the “Battle of Britain” began as German bombers began to
raid cities in England, notably London. The
Screwtape Letters were probably written during the second half of 1940.
They were originally published as a serial in a Church of England weekly
magazine called The Guardian, from
May till November 1941.
I
as
if you supposed that argument was the way
»
The opening theme of The Screwtape Letters is that of a column
(“Notes on the Way”) which Lewis wrote for the literary magazine Time and Tide, published on
29 March 1941; the first Screwtape letter followed on 2 May 1941 in The Guardian. Two years later Lewis was
to develop the Time and Tide piece
into a paper for the Oxford University Socratic Club: “Bulverism,
or The Foundation of Twentieth-Century Thought” (for publication details about
this paper see www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays).
II
“the
body of Christ”
»
1 Corinthians 12:27; Ephesians 4:12.
III
the elder brother in the Enemy’s
story
»
Luke 15:25ff, the parable of the Prodigal Son.
IV
Coleridge,
“with moving lips and bended knees”
»
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet and philosopher. The words
quoted are from “The Pains of Sleep” (1803, published 1816), a 52-line poem
which begins as follows:
Ere
on my bed my limbs I lay,
It
hath not been my use to pray
With
moving lips or bended knees;
But
silently, by slow degrees,
My
spirit I to Love compose,
In
humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With
reverential resignation,
No
wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only
a sense of supplication;
A
sense o’er all my soul imprest
That
I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since
in me, round me, every where
Eternal
Strength and Wisdom are.
“Not to what I think thou art but to
what thou knowest thyself to be”
» ?? [the
original may be in Latin, perhaps in Augustine or Anselm]
VIII
when
a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will ...
asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys
»
cf. Matthew 27:47, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
See
also George Macdonald, “The Eloi”, in Unspoken
Sermons Vol. I (1867), quoted by Lewis in his Macdonald
Anthology (1946), Nr. 38:
The highest
condition of the Human Will, as distinct, not as separated from God, is when,
not seeing God, not seeming to itself to grasp Him at all, it yet holds Him
fast.
XI
“No
passion is as serious as lust”
» ??
XII
“without whom Nothing is strong”
» Slightly
adapted (with a capital N for Nothing) from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer (Fourth Sunday
After Trinity, The Collect):
O God, the
protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is
holy: Increase and multiply upon us they mercy ...
The
pun perhaps goes back to Charles Williams, He Came Down From Heaven
(1938), last chapter, penultimate paragraph. Williams is paraphrasing fragments
from the Lord’s Prayer:
… but now is its grand terror, in a word as
short as any in the prayer, in the little monosyllable “as”. “Forgive us… as we forgive…’ in the
manner that… to the extent that… […] Forgive us as – and then the thing, as
if startled at its own daring and shocked at its own danger, rushes up into a
heavenly fear: “lead us not into temptation”, do not abandon us to such a trial: what is the nothingness that is we to
do there? deliver us, deliver us from evil, from the evil that man chose once
to know, the evil of split knowledge and the agony of the good turned against
itself, the evil therefore of the deprivation of good, of the loss of joy, the
illusion of love in the self and the monstrous duplicities that follow the
self: deliver us, deliver us. “Thou only art holy, thou only art the Lord”; “without thee Nothing is strong” – out of that Nothing deliver us, by ourselves
becoming nothing to ourselves, having no power to be except in the kingdom. “For
thine is the kingdom” …
XIII
Childe
Harold
»
Principal character in Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage: A Romaunt (1812), a poem in four
cantos by George Byron (1788-1824). The hero is a young man who disillusioned
with his empty pleasure-seeking existence and looks for distraction in far-away
places.
Werther
»
Principal character in Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther), the first novel published by Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive
ones are weakened
»
Joseph Butler (1692-1752), The Analogy of
Religion (1736), Part I, “Natural Religion”, chapter 5, “Of a State of Probation, as Intended for
Moral Discipline and Improvement”, section II.
... in like manner as habits belonging to
the body are produced by external acts: so habits of the mind are produced by
the exertion of inward practical principles; i.e. by carrying them into
act, or acting upon them; the principles of obedience, of veracity, justice,
and charity. (...) But going over the theory of virtue in one’s thoughts,
talking well, and drawing fine pictures, of it; this is so far from necessarily
or certainly conducing to form a habit of it, in him who thus employs himself,
that it may harden the mind in a contrary course, and render it gradually more
insensible; i. e. form a habit of
insensibility to all moral considerations. For, from our very faculty of
habits, passive impressions, by being repeated, grow weaker. Thoughts, by often
passing through the mind, are felt less sensibly: being accustomed to danger,
begets intrepidity, i. e. lessens fear;
to distress, lessens the passion of pity; to instances of others’ mortality,
lessens the sensible apprehension of our own. And from these two observations
together; that practical habits are formed and strengthened by repeated acts,
and that passive impressions grow weaker by being repeated upon us; it must
follow, that active habits may be gradually forming and strengthening, by a
course of acting upon such and such motives and excitements, whilst these
motives and excitements themselves are, by proportionable degrees, growing less
sensible; i. e. are continually less
and less sensibly felt, even as the active habits strengthen.
XV
Creative
Evolution
»
A concept developed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1858-1941); his
book Évolution créatrice was
published in 1907 (English: Creative
Evolution, 1911) and won him the 1927 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Scientific
Humanism
»
The term does not designate any recognized school of thought, but has been used
since the 19th century by some
thinkers to specify and recommend their own variety of modern, secular
humanism. This variety more or less originated with the English biologist Thomas
Huxley (1825-1895). His grandson Julian Huxley advocated “a scientific Humanism,
global in extent and evolutionary in background” as guiding philosophy for the
newly formed United Nations shortly after the Second World War. In 2005, the
American biologist E. O. Wilson called scientific humanism “the only worldview
compatible with science’s growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of
nature” and the one most likely to lead to a better world.
This
is not straw splitting
» Typo alert
– From the 1955 Fontana edition of The
Screwtape Letters onward, many editions have the erroneous text “This is now straw splitting.”
XVI
Maritain
» Jacques
Maritain (1882-1973), French Roman-Catholic philosopher and essayist.
XVII
sole
Colbert
»
A fish dish; sole is a species of flatfish (Solea solea).
XVII
…
merely one more mode in which a stronger self preyed upon a weaker
» Typo alert
– On page 93 of the Fontana edition (1955), Fount Paperbacks edition (1977),
and reprints at least until the thirty-fourth impression (1982), stronger is
misprinted as stranger.
The
relevant paragraph from Letter XVIII as it first appeared in The
Guardian, 29 August 1941
XXII
“pleasures
for evermore”
»
Psalm 16:11 (KJV).
Thou
wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fullness of joy: at thy right
hand there are pleasures for evermore.
“the
regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is
silence”
»
From George Macdonald (1824-1905), Unspoken
Sermons I (1867), “The Hands of the Father”.
Nor shall we
ever know that repose in the Father’s hands, that rest of the Holy Sepulchre,
which the Lord knew when the agony of death was over, when the storm of the
world died away behind his retiring spirit, and he entered the regions where
there is only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence, (for all
noise comes of the conflict of Life and Death) – we shall never be able, I say,
to rest in the bosom of the Father, till the fatherhood is fully revealed to us
in the love of the brothers.
Part
of this passage is included as Nr. 41 in Lewis’s Macdonald
Anthology (1946).
Milton
»
John Milton (1608-1674), English poet. His chief work is the epic poem in
twelve “Books”, Paradise Lost (1667),
with Satan as one of the principal characters.
that
such changes of shape are a “punishment” imposed on us
»
See Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book X,
lines 494-585, especially 516 and 575.
Pshaw
» An
allusion to the Anglo-Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950; 1925
Nobel Prize for Literature). His ideas about a Life Force (a term related to
Henri Bergson’s élan vital), were
expressed in his play Man and Superman
(1903) and most notably in the preface and fifth part of Back to Methuselah (1921).
XXIII
the
World and the Flesh ... a third Power remains
»
Cf. the phrase from the Church of England’s Book
of Common Prayer, Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, The Collect:
Lord, we
beseech thee, grant thy people grace to withstand the temptations of the world,
the flesh, and the devil, and with pure hearts and minds to follow thee the
only God ...
Screwtape
hardly defines his “third Power” but obviously he reckons Religion to be a
great stimulus to diabolical attitudes. He comes back to this at the end of the
table speech which was published an appendix to The Screwtape Letters in 1961, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”. There
he describes “different types of Pharisees” in hell thus:
Some were all rules and relics and rosaries; others
were all drab clothes, long faces, and petty traditional abstinences from wine
or cards or the theatre. Both had in common their self-righteousness and the
almost infinite distance between their actual outlook and anything the Enemy
really is or commands. The wickedness of other religions was the really live
doctrine in the religion of each; slander was its gospel and denigration its
litany. How they hated each other up there where the sun shone! How much more
they hate each other now that they are forever conjoined but not reconciled.
Their astonishment, their resentment, at the combination, the festering of
their eternally impenitent spite, passing into our spiritual digestion, will
work like fire. Dark fire. All said and done, my friends, it will be an ill day
for us if what most humans mean by “religion” ever vanishes from the Earth. It
can still send us the truly delicious sins. The fine flower of unholiness can
grow only in the close neighbourhood of the Holy. Nowhere do we tempt so
successfully as on the very steps of the altar.
the
documents ... cannot be added to
»
This idea was actually proved false when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered
in the later 1940s, not many years after Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters. He briefly deals with this issue in his Reflections on the Psalms (1958),
chapter 3.
a crop of new Napoleons, new Shakespeares, new Swifts
» Biography has long been a popular branch of literature
in Great Britain. Old subjects keep attracting new biographers, and new
biographies are usually published with a pretence that some really new facts or
insights are being offered.
Lewis made the same combined
criticism of the modern “quest for the historical Jesus” and the biography
industry in his 1940 paper “Why I am not a Pacifist” (first published in the US
the 1980 edition of The Weight of Glory and other Addresses en in the UK in Timeless at Heart, 1987).
Sophists ... Socrates
»
In the decades around 400 B.C., Sophists were itinerant teachers in ancient
Greece, especially influential in Athens. Two famous early Sophists were
Protagoras and Gorgias; an extreme case was Callicles (in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias). Their sceptical and relativist
ideas were systematically refuted in the course of their debates with Socrates,
as described in Plato’s dialogues.
It should be added that Socrates was
really active on two fronts: he “found himself confronted both by moral conservatives using an incoherent moral vocabulary as
if they were sure of its meaning and
by sophists whose innovations he found equally suspect” – Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (2nd ed., 1998),
chapter 3, “The Sophists and Socrates”, p. 18 (italics added). An excellent
brief treatment of the antagonism, both in its historical and its timeless
aspects, can be found in an essay by Juan F. Frank, “The Platonic Inspiration of Pieper’s
Philosophy”, in: Bernard
N. Schumacher (ed.), A Cosmopolitan Hermit. Modernity and Tradition in the Philosophy of
Josef Pieper,
CUA Press, Washington
D.C. 2009, pp. 251-278.
a Christian writer ... recommends his own version of Christianity
on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and
the birth of new civilisations”
»
Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of
Christian Ethics (1935), chapter 1, “An Independent Christian Ethic”, p. 34
(chapter’s last paragraph):
A vital
Christian faith and life is thus under the necessity of perennially preserving
its health against the peril of diseases and corruptions arising out of its own
life; and of protecting itself against errors to which non-mythical religions
tempt it. Most of its own weaknesses arise when the mythical paradoxes of its
faith are resolved; most of the perils from the outside come from the pessimism
and dualism of mystical and rational religion. Only a vital Christian faith,
renewing its youth in its prophetic origin, is capable of dealing adequately
with the moral and social problems of our age; only such a faith can affirm the
significance of temporal and mundane existence without capitulating unduly to
the relativities of the temporal process. Such a faith alone can point to a
source of meaning which transcends all the little universes of value and
meaning which “have their day and cease to be” and yet not seek refuge in an
eternal world where all history ceases to be significant. Only such a faith
can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilizations,
and yet deal in terms of moral responsibility with the world in which cultures
and civilizations engage in struggles of death and life.
XXV
merely
Christian ... mere Christianity
»
“Mere Christianity” is an expression borrowed from a passage in Church-history of the Government of Bishops
and their Councils (1680) by the English Puritan theologian and church
leader Richard Baxter (1615-1691). On
the book’s title page Baxter calls himself “a hater of false history”. On the
penultimate unnumbered page [xv] of an introductory passage, “What History is
Credible, and what not”, he writes:
... but you know
not what Party I am of, nor what to call me; I am sorrier for you in this than
for my self; if you know not, I will tell you, I am a
CHRISTIAN, a MEER CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of
is the Christian Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian
Religion and Church hath been visible: But must you know what Sect or Party I
am of? I am against all Sects and dividing parties: But if any will call Meer Christians by the name of a Party, because they take up with meer Christianity, Creed, and Scripture, and
will not be of any dividing or contentious Sect, I am of that Party which is so
against Parties: If the Name CHRISTIAN be not enough, call me a CATHOLICK
CHRISTIAN; not as that word signifieth an
hereticating majority of Bishops, but as it signifieth
one that hath no Religion, but that which by Christ and the Apostles was left
to the Catholick Church, or the Body of Jesus Christ
on Earth.
Lewis
made the same reference to Baxter in the title for his collected and revised
radio talks of the years 1941-1944: Mere
Christianity. He explained this choice in his Preface to that book,
published in 1952. Earlier that same year he used Baxter’s term in a letter to
the editor of the Church Times (8
Feb. 1952; Collected Letters vol. III,
p. 164).
Byronic
»
i.e. in the manner of Lord Byron, the Romantic poet whose Childe Harold was referred to in chapter XIII, above.
whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or
tyrants
»
Lewis probably intended this as a brief diagnosis of modern society’s most
virulent disease at the time of writing, i.e. the 1940s. This same diagnosis
found famous expression in F. A. Hayek’s the
Road to Serfdom (1944) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
XXVI
the
negative unselfishness
»
The manners described here may be typically British rather than generally
human.
“If people knew how much ill-feeling Unselfishness occasions, it would not
be so often recommended from the pulpit”
» ??
“She’s
the sort of woman who lives for others – you can always tell the others by
their hunted expression”
» ??
– Lewis may well be quoting
himself here.
… that “love” is not enough, that charity is
needed …
Perhaps an allusion to William Morris’s poem, Love
is Enough, which Lewis later quoted in the opening line of the last
chapter, “Charity”, of his book The Four Loves.
XXVII
“praise
and communion with God is the true prayer”
» ??
Boethius
» Anicius Manlius Severinus Boetius,
Roman statesman and philosopher (480-524). As a prisoner of the Gothic king Theoderic he wrote The
Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae).
Screwtape is referring to this book’s last, fifth part. Boethius as a thinker
about the problem of freedom is discussed in C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image (1964), chapter IV/D (“I cannot help thinking
that Boethius has here expounded a Platonic conception more luminously than
Plato ever did himself”).
Only
the learned read old books
»
In a piece written in 1944 Lewis explained the importance of not confining
one’s reading to contemporary authors:
We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the
twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask; “But how could they have thought
that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about
which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt ... None of us can fully escape this
blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it,
if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths
which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error
with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the
clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be
done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about
the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many
mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the
errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and
palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because
either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same
direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a
corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.
Originally
the preface to a translation of St. Athanasius (The Incarnation of the Word of God), this piece was later published
as “On the Reading of Old Books”; for bibliographical details see www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays.
bunk
»
A reference to the assertion “History is more or less bunk”, made by Henry Ford
(1863-1947), pioneer and captain of car industry, during an interview published
in the Chicago Tribune of 25 May
1916. The saying got wings in the briefer form “History is bunk”. During a
lawsuit brought by Ford against the Chicago
Tribune in 1919, his own astounding lack of historical knowledge was
revealed when he guessed 1812 as the year of the American Revolution. When
reminded of his notorious maxim, he backed out by explaining that he “did not
say it was bunk. It was bunk to me [...] but I did not need it very bad.”
XXVIII
“Experience is the mother of illusion”
»
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781;
transl. Meiklejohn 1855) I: Transcendental Doctrine of Elements, 2.2.1,
“Of the Conceptions of Pure Reason”, Section 1, “Of ideas in general”, par. 7.
For as regards nature, experience presents us
with rules and is the source of truth, but in relation to ethical laws
experience is the parent of illusion, and it is in the highest degree
reprehensible to limit or to deduce the laws which dictate what I ought to do,
from what is done.
In the original German (Kritik
der reinen Vernunft, I. Transzendentale Elementarlehre, 2.2.1, ʻVon den Begriffen der reinen Vernunftʼ,
erster Abschnitt, ʻVon den Ideen überhauptʼ):
Denn in Betracht der Natur gibt uns Erfahrung die Regel an die Hand und ist
der Quell der Wahrheit; in Ansehung der sittlichen Gesetze aber ist Erfahrung
(leider!) die Mutter des Scheins, und es ist höchst verwerflich, die Gesetze
über das, was ich tun soll, von demjenigen herzunehmen, oder dadurch
einschränken zu wollen, was getan wird.
The
majority of the human race dies in infancy
» Cf.
Lewis’s letter of 18 June 1945 to Miss Gladding (Collected Letters II,
660):
If we accept Xtianity
at all and then also take into account the enormous infant mortality of the
human race as a whole (in a 17th century family 12 children of whom 4 grew up
seems to be about normal) we must, I think, believe that the fact of
becoming an animal organism and undergoing bodily death is an essential element
in being a risen immortal soul in Christ.
XXIX
Attila
»
King of the Huns in the first half of the 5th century C.E.
Shylock
» One
of the protagonists in Shakespeare’s play The
Merchant of Venice.
courage
is ... the form of every virtue at the testing point
»
cf. Plato, Republic 429c-430b
(translation by Robin Waterfield, 1994):
...
courage is a sort of retention ... I mean the retention of the notion, which
has been inculcated by law through the agency of education, about what things
and what kinds of things are to be feared. And by its retention “under all
circumstances” I meant keeping it intact and not losing it whether one is under
the influence of pain or pleasure, desire or aversion. ... So this ability to
retain under all circumstances a true and lawful notion about what is and is
not to be feared is what I’m calling courage.
XXX
…
have had efficient tempters
» Typo alert
– The 1955 Fontana edition, the 1977 Fount Paperbacks edition, and its reprints
at least until 1982 have the erroneous text “efficient tempers.”
This
web page was published on 29 October 2010
UPDATES:
31
December 2010
– added note to as if you supposed..., Letter I
13
May 2011
– added note to when a human..., letter VIII
20-25
July 2011
–
added notes on the epigraphs (quotes from Luther and Thomas More); with thanks
to Emanuel Contac, Bucharest, Romania, for research on the Luther quote
12
December 2011
–
added info on Josef Pieper in note on Sophists,
letter XXIV
23
March 2012
–
improved and expanded note on merely
Christian, letter XXV
4
May 2012
– added note on active habits are strengthened..., letter XIII
27
May 2013
– expanded note on a crop of new Napoleons..., letter XXIII
– expanded note on the second epigraph (quote
from Thomas More)
20 May 2015
–
added note on a Christian writer ...
recommends..., letter XXIII
25
September 2015
–
added note on courage, letter XXIX
17
March 2017
–
added “Typo alerts”, letters XV and XXX
17 May 2019
− last
sentence (about Hazlitt’s translation) added to second note on Epigraphs.
27 June 2020
– added
typo alert, letter XVIII, and added note on that “love” is not enough,
letter XXVI
22 October 2020
– added
note on The majority of the human race, letter XXVIII
14 May 2021
–
expanded note on without whom Nothing is strong, letter XII